Ashes and Entropy

by Laird Barron

  But we were Children of the Night. Lock pickers. Chemists. Sorcerers. Mad computer geniuses. He hired us because we were the people who would go further and further into the center, until we were more spiral than the spiral we crawled into. We were the people who could not stop dreaming like we were heavy fever, screaming metal. If we didn’t move then, we knew we wouldn’t be able to sleep for the rest of our lives

  It called us through the walls.

  We turned on the power remotely. We hacked into the security cameras and replaced the feed with pre-recorded footage. We disabled the robotic security guard, and he squealed to a halt on busted wheels. The laboratory door opened with a click.

  We whispered to the machine, and it throbbed to life. It filled the space of the laboratory once more, shining bright enough to bust through walls.

  Fred sat down, and began reprogramming the disc. Melonie prepared the machine to open the portal. We strapped on our suits to walk through.

  “We are going to do so much more than find new worlds. We’re going to create something special and entirely new. And it’s all because of you, Terra, and the magic that you carry.”

  Fred finished changing the parameters on the disk, unhooked it from the computer, and I placed it in my pack.

  We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to.

  We stepped inside the small cool womb of the machine. Our cheeks pressed close in the interior space. Flushed, we took each other’s hands, ready for the sweeping tug of molecular dispersion.

  Mr. Leclair ran into the lab. He rushed toward Melonie's computer, and in the harsh light he looked like one of us, with bloodshot eyes and pale computer-bathed skin.

  He tried to shut down the process. He called for us even though we couldn't hear his words over the noise.

  But he couldn't shut it down. So he hurled himself over the edge of the desk, and ran toward the machine.

  His arm went through the teleportation field.

  When we disappeared, and re-emerged on the other side, Mr. Leclair's severed arm lay on the ground inside the circle of us. It still wore the sleeve of his black suit, cufflinks clean.

  I almost heard his screams from across dimensions.

  “Didn’t he know better?” Melonie said, her voice even, no hint of distress. “Everyone knows not to do that.”

  “He was scared,” Hugo said.

  Angela gripped my arm. I looked up from Mr. Leclair's severed arm. She stared into the distance, past our small circle. Into a world of night, the sky cracking like a faultline. On hills like rows of crooked, black teeth, rose machines cropped from night.

  As if they ruptured straight from my dreams. But they were bigger, and darker, than anything I’d ever dreamed. Not a world like anything I’d seen before, in all those months of installing portals, but something corpse-stitched from metal dreams, something that couldn’t have come into being without a heavy dose of nightmares, without the dark feeding its magic into it.

  The hills crackled with energy, red electricity.

  "Take out the disc, Terra," Fred said.

  I gripped the pack tighter.

  “The circle you’ve been helping me build is nearly complete. Haven’t you been dreaming of this moment?”

  The machine's voice was no longer a soothing lullaby. It spoke cracked and dirty. It spoke like an angry sinkhole. It was not the flushed mother, the forgotten father and everything I ever wanted. It was black sky and frozen dirt and the shadow nestled inside the shadow.

  It was a poisonous nebula, universe-killer.

  “We share the same dreams. Much like you, the light would seize and destroy things so lovely.”

  For the first time in my life, I was afraid of the dark.

  "Terra, give it here," Hugo said, holding his hand out. “We have to anchor the portal.”

  I pulled away. They stared at me with enthralled eyes, covered their chests with vibrating hands, as if cold from the inside out.

  “This is what we’ve wanted,”

  There were no suns to carry in our pockets. No mint ice-cream skies. In this world with the machine tunneling through us, there’d be no room for anything except itself.

  "We need the disc, so cut the shit," Hugo said.

  With a growl he lunged forward.

  I took the disc and fled into the dark.

  ~

  I'd take the disc, and whatever horrifying thing it contained, out to the furthest corner of this abandoned, sunless place and hurl it away.

  I crossed spires of black sand worn down by the wind. There was a sun here, but it was drenched black, melting at the edges, only visible at certain times of day, in certain cloudless skies. The light it cast down seemed to intensify the darkness, creating shadows almost as solid as the objects they were projected from.

  The machines, embedded into the hills and twisted valleys, spoke to me as I passed.

  “Your friends are searching for you, but you don’t need them. It was always you who carried power inside of you.”

  I kept walking, clutching the strap of the pack until it rubbed my palm raw.

  I remained silent. I consumed what little water and food I had, standard vacuum-sealed meals in clean packaging meant to sustain us for a day or two on our expeditions. After that, I went hungry.

  The longer I walked, the sweeter the machine's words became.

  “Do you know why xeroderma pigmentosum is so special? And it’s not because it’s so rare. Not because our dimension is possibly the only one that carries this genetic mutation, with its own special magic.

  “It’s because you and I are made of the same material. We both are sewn from the dark.

  "What do you want from us?" I asked,

  "I want you to build this one last thing for me."

  "What's going to happen to the world? What's going to happen to us?"

  “Something beautiful," the machines said, echoing through the caverns of the shadow world.

  The word 'beautiful' like drawing blood from the tip of a tongue. Beautiful like the memory of starcups and cedar and 'you'll never be lonely again'.

  “You know, you’re still carrying a part of me.”

  The microprocessor was still in my pocket.

  “If you don’t want me anymore,” the machine said, “if you don’t love me anymore. If you believe that everything we’ve worked for is worthless, then throw it away.”

  I wanted to grab the microprocessor and throw it into the black sand, but my arms wouldn’t work. My body was in revolt with itself.

  “You can’t, can you?” the machine asked me, once again a gentle mother.

  I wanted to stop walking and turn around. But I couldn't stop my feet. The machine had led a path for me, for all these months, years maybe, injecting me with its sweet promises and its influence, until I could do nothing but move in the way it wanted me to move.

  The oily smell of the machine filled my mouth and nostrils, until I couldn’t ever remember tasting cedar.

  I climbed to a colosseum on top of a hill the color of swept-over coal. I descended the steps toward its center. I couldn't imagine these buildings, these relics, ever being occupied by people. It was as if the machine had stitched them together out of a memory.

  I kept saying, "No," even as I walked toward the center.

  The machine kept saying, "Please."

  And I knew this was the origin point of everything - here in a colosseum where no battles were ever fought. The machine led me straight to where it wanted me, as it always had.

  In the center of the colosseum they were waiting for me. At first I thought they were shadows. But as I got closer, I realized they were my co-workers. Melonie. Fred. Hugo. Angela. They crouched in porticos, on top of columns, and sat on the great steps. Their bodies swayed from side to side and their eyes were the most brilliant red.

  I removed the disc from the pack. I wanted to swallow but I couldn't even breathe.

  I set the disc down, and it floated above the dust.

  The spi
der’s egg.

  With nightmagic, I opened it. As I was always going to.

  I coaxed its metal appendages out of the disc's shell.

  I couldn’t say “No,” anymore. Not even if I’d wanted to.

  But the machine knew, it didn’t have to convince me of anything anymore, because my body believed its promises more than my brain. My fingers pulled magic out of my skin. My feet were only extensions of its massive metal shoulders. I was not a person. I was only a tiny part of its circuitry.

  The disc's legs emerged black, coated with a thick, wet slime as if it'd been molting inside of its shell. It clicked and heaved as it grew, anchoring itself into the stone. With the calculations the machine whispered to us in the night, we hadn’t been creating another portal like the others.

  Its insides collapsed with lack of light.

  We’d been creating a spider of metal to inject its paralysis into the universe, before breaking it up soft in its jaws.

  The others came to me. We held hands in a circle. Magic flowed outward from us, into the center.

  Before the sky erupted, I heard the hissing like black noise ready to boil over. I wanted to cover my ears, to block out the screaming, but I couldn't move. I couldn't break the circle. I couldn't stop the portal from pulling out my nightmagic and leeching my blood of any scrap of free will it once had.

  The sound that kept me some nights from sleeping, was now reverberating through all existence.

  It was the machine, thousands of them, reaching through the dimensions.

  I tried to fall to my knees, but the others gripped my wrists and kept me upright.

  "In all the words, in all the dimensions, in all the parallel possibilities, in every permutation of reality, I would’ve found you, and you would’ve been mine.”

  The spider pulled the barriers between dimensions down.

  Even as worlds dissolved, I felt the quiet relief of its voice whispering soothing lies.

  ~

  I ran through heatless worlds, worlds leeched of the best of their stars. Worlds being fed into a hungry machine that took the light. There were no sunsets or sunrises anymore. The cities lay abandoned, and the animals grew cruel. Survivors drew hieroglyphics on cave walls, trying to remember what it was like before the machine ripped history from their computers, from their libraries, the Internet wiped clean.

  I don’t know what it wants, or what exactly it’s creating, but it's restitching worlds, remaking them, using itself as a factory to build something new. Something made from a composite of frantic dreams.

  I tried at first, speaking to the machine. But it didn't respond anymore. It only hummed, working its invisible calculations. It used all its processing power for its newfound task. I’d occasionally see bright flashes in the sky, scarlet supernovas, a comet colliding with a planet.

  Busy work, creating a new universe.

  Sometimes I caught a flash of red eyes from across a frozen river, or hiding in the gnarled branches of trees. A pale arm reaching out like a blind butterfly. The children of the night.

  We shared food sometimes, hunched over a kill in shadow. We'd gone native, masked our diseased skin with dust, carried weapons made of claws and bones.

  Sometimes we asked each other the questions the machine wouldn't answer.

  “What went wrong? Why did we, yet again, fall in love with the most dangerous thing? Is there going to be any space in this new world for people like us?”

  The answer, we concluded, was always the same.

  It is the shadowmachine.

  And we are its children.

  I think, one day it'll want us again. It'll show me skies made of mint-ice cream inside its circuitry and whisper.

  "I need you."

  I’ll try to resist at first. I’ll look at that sky made of garbled static, taste the dust I choke down with my food. I’ll try to remember the image of Mr. Leclair’s severed arm. I’ll try to remember how we destroyed the universe and how the slimy, molding spider of metal emerged from the disc to part worlds, eat suns.

  Then I’ll remember the longing that compelled me to suck on buttons for sunlight. I’ll remember The Congregation in the cypress grove drinking my magic, the computer as my only friend, the long search for sunny valleys. I’ll feel the phantom heat on my burn scar.

  I’ll feel the microprocessor in my pocket, pumping dark dreams into my bloodstream, that I still can’t bring myself to throw away.

  I know it only needs to whisper once more:

  "I need you… to do something for me."

  And I'll be too lonely and too in love to respond with anything except:

  "Anything you want."

  THE ONE ABOUT MAGGIE

  by Greg Sisco

  Let me tell you the one about Maggie. I’d say stop me if you’ve heard it before, but you ain’t heard the one about Maggie, baby. Ain’t nobody heard the one about Maggie.

  This Maggie, right, she’s the type of girl’s paid rent with sex more times than money. Type of girl’s flushed cocaine to the soundtrack of the police, and I ain’t talking about Sting. Type of girl, when the phone rings at noon on a Saturday, it ain’t Mom. You know the type I mean.

  So Maggie wakes up screaming one morning in a field in those blue hours where dusk’s setting in, which ain’t nothing new for her. And after the scream gets loose, she realizes she don’t know why she’s screaming or where she is or how she got here or what happened for most of the second half of her life, which ain’t nothing new for her either. Sometimes when she wakes up like this, screaming like from a bad nightmare and not remembering nothing, that’s as close to peace as she gets. And where she is now, this field full of daffodils she’s lying in, it’s easy to feel at rest. So she lies there a good long while and tries to stop herself remembering, but eventually it all starts to come back, like shit has a way of doing.

  Ain’t until she finally stands up and looks behind her that it dawns on her just how deep into shit she’s stepped. When she turns around and looks at the smoking ball of metal and glass that used to be her car, the ten empty beer cans spilling out of what used to be the windshield, the fact there’s thirty feet between her and the whole thing, must’ve been flung through the air all this way, she’d fall on her knees and praise the devil she can stand if it wasn’t for the backpacker.

  Instead, she stops breathing, thinks she might pass right back out.

  Just a few feet behind the car he is, lying in a patch of dirt next to the carnage. Mr. Backpacker ain’t lucky enough to be lying in daffodils, much less to wake up. Boy’s covered in blood with bends in his limbs where there oughtn’t be and curves a body oughtn’t have. His eyes are open and staring at nothing and there ain’t no expression at all on his face. Not horror or peace or nothing. Just a face like a cliff’s got.

  She kneels over him and shakes him, screaming, “Please wake up,” and when it don’t work she pounds on his chest and yells and cusses at him, and he just lies there and takes it like dead folk have a way of doing. When ten or fifteen minutes goes by and ain’t no change in Mr. Backpacker’s condition, little Maggie’s got but nothing to do other than sit there and think how she’s gonna spend the whole rest of her life locked in a room and that detox that’ll follow is gonna be one bitch of a bitch.

  So what she does, right, she pulls the backpack off that big bastard and hoists him up with his arms over her shoulders and drags him damn near a quarter mile out to where the cliffs are steeper. She’s gotta go all the way back and drag that heavy pack too before she can roll him over the side and maybe make believe he slipped while hiking. Maybe. It’s a long shot, but you know how a damaged mind thinks, baby. You know how she had to take the chance they’d see separate incidents.

  Or how the cops might, anyway. But there’s more than cops watching us when we’re out there, know what I mean? I know you do, baby. And little old Maggie, if she didn’t, well she sure does now.

  ~

  This is where I come into the story, because I k
now you’re getting anxious. After Maggie’s dumped the backpacker and buried his blood—actually buried his blood—she’s standing on the side of the bridge she crashed off of, thanking the devil no traffic saw her dragging a dead man, and the first lucky sumbitch gets a chance to help her is yours truly.

  I’m listening to my classical music, driving my pickup, coming down this road, and here’s Maggie waving her arms and screaming she needs help, blood running down this old vintage white dress she probably bought secondhand at a garage sale. So I pull over, because what else am I gonna do, just leave her there?

  And I says, “Jeez Louise, little lady, what on Earth happened?”

  And she says, “I don’t know. Just lost control of it, I guess.”

  I says, “Boy oh boy. Heck of a wreck. Nobody got hurt, I hope?”

  She says, “It was just me.”

  Even sounds convincing, if I’m honest. You’d expect any decent person under the circumstances, even if they’s lying, the guilt would shake ‘em up, but not Maggie. Everything she’s been through, however you believe it works—the Lord or the luck or the cradle or the cosmos—the world built a stone bitch sociopath out of Maggie.

  So I says, “Lucky you, huh?” only I says it just a little sour because I know the reason those pretty eyes are shit brown. I ain’t got the stomach for deception some bitches got.

  I guess she catches that note in my tone because she pauses before she says, “Yeah. Lucky me…” Then she looks around like she’s crossing her fingers maybe there’s someone less creepy than me she can hitch from and she gives up. She goes, "Could you give me a ride to the next town?”

  I says, “Of course! What kind of person would I be?”

  She says, “Thanks so much.”

  I says, “No thanks required. Duty of a decent human. I’m sure you’d do the same for me.”

  She nods and looks out the window, so I guess she’s hearing that sound in my voice she don’t like. I can see it in those shit brown eyes.