by J L Aarne
Aarom shakes his head and the smartpaper motion sensors catch it. Before Chief of Police Marion Flowers can begin bellowing again about his stance against prophets and his promise to hunt them all down, Aarom moves on. He is not the first official to publicly condemn prophets as murderers and he will not be the last. He will not find them and even if he did, he would not catch them. He can say his words and make his promises, but he will do nothing because all a prophet has to do is lay a bare hand on him and they become the bridge to his doom. He can try to root them out, swoop down with his taskforce of enforcement officers and corral them, Aarom supposes, but he’s never heard of such a thing actually happening.
Aarom’s mother is in her front yard when he gets there. He stands in a copse of trees just off the sidewalk near a park across the street from her house and watches her refill the birdfeeder. She spills seeds in the grass and sparrows hop to the ground without any fear of her to peck them up. His mother has always liked sparrows and finches the best. Not the goldfinches or the flashy, bright colored tanagers, but the small black, grey and brown ones.
“They’re smarter,” she used to tell him. “Just look at their clever faces.”
He has no idea if it’s true.
Her hair has gone grey and she has let it. She wears her age with dignity and pride. She is not ashamed of the silver of her hair or the creases around her mouth and eyes. It is a privilege and an honor to grow old. She never told him that, but he imagines that she would if they still spoke, though by new world standards when the average life expectancy is 120 years, she is still a young woman.
He rubs the scar on the back of his hand where his chip was removed ten years ago. He died that night, no matter how one looks at it.
His mother cups a hand over her eyes to shade them and looks across the street. Her view is distorted by the sun’s glare on a thousand silver tinted windshields of passing cars. When traffic clears enough for her to see clearly again, the shadow she thinks she saw standing there is gone.
2.
Aarom’s apartment is in the middle of the sprawl. Twenty years earlier, the city had started to rapidly expand, but the restrictions on the height of buildings in the inner city prevented upward growth. The solution had been to erect such towering structures just outside of the restricted area across the river. The result is a city shaped like a bowl with the sprawl, the old city proper now inhabited by the social outcasts—the drudges, the undesirables, the freaks, the shiners, the den addicts and spikers and the outlaws—at its heart, a shining wall of privilege, beauty, power and industry circling it like a gilded rim. Aarom lives in a dark, anonymous part of the sprawl at the very bottom of the bowl. Living side by side with the denizens of the underworld, he can disappear completely.
His place is an open loft apartment on the fifteenth floor of a building that hasn’t had a working security system, chip or retinal scanner, elevator or rolling staircase as long as he’s been there. The kid who sits at the desk is supposed to keep an eye on the place, register new tenants and log rent credits when they’re due, but he mostly spends his shift between 11:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. watching porn. His name is Kevin and he knows Aarom as Mr. Marvin Jinn. He doesn’t even look up from the crystal monitor when Aarom passes the desk and says hello. His wave could be either a greeting or a brush-off.
Sonja is waiting for Aarom in one of the well-worn faux red leather armchairs in the lobby near the out-of-order elevator platforms. She’s reading a newspaper. It’s muted, but he sees Marion Flowers’s charming face above an article before she folds it and tosses it down on the table in front of her.
“You’re late,” she says.
Sonja Fletcher-Marks is an imposing figure. She is striking and intimidating in both appearance and attitude and Aarom has known her long enough to be nearly certain it is not a persona: she really is a disagreeable bitch.
“I did not have a scheduled meeting with you,” he says. He walks right by her and starts up the unmoving stairs.
She has no choice but to follow him. She is wearing precariously tall high heels and has to take two strides for every one of Aarom’s when they are walking together on flat ground, so he could lose her rather easily if he wanted to and for a moment he considers it. Then he slows his pace and takes the stairs one at a time so she can keep up and waits for her to state her business.
“I can’t find Sabra anywhere and he won’t answer his phone or his com,” she says. “I’ve been trying all morning.”
Prophets do not have official leaders or an organized system per se, they operate more by traditional means than mandated ones, but if they had a leader in their sector it would be Sabra Lamar. Others look up to him, look to him for advice when they don’t know what to do, go to him for help when they are in trouble and he lets them, takes care of them and asks for nothing in return. He was the one to answer the summons for most of them when they had themselves been supplicants.
“What makes you think I know where he is?” Aarom asks.
Sonja makes a disbelieving snorting sound. “Please,” she says. “I’m not a fool, but even if I were a great fool, everyone knows.”
Aarom glances at her over his shoulder. “Knows what exactly?”
“That you fuck him. Or that he fucks you; the particulars don’t matter,” she says. “What matters is that you’re close to him. So where is he?”
“I don’t know,” Aarom says. “I just got home. I’ve been out all night and half the morning.”
“Perhaps you were meeting with him and that’s why I can’t get in touch,” she says snidely.
“Perhaps not,” Aarom says.
They reach the fourth floor landing and he immediately takes a turn and starts ascending the next flight of stairs. Sonja keeps pace with him. What they do requires them to walk a lot, miles and miles every night, so fifteen flights of stairs is nothing much. Still, Aarom has been out all night and he is exhausted, so he begins to slow a little.
“Then where did you go?” Sonja demands. “Not to the dens. Not yet. You’re usually home between six and seven in the morning. It’s half past nine.”
“None of your business,” Aarom says.
“If you are being a stupid, sentimental idiot again and putting us all at risk with—”
“I went to see my mother.”
Her indrawn breath of outrage at this announcement is not a surprise. Sonja dissolved all of her relationships when she became a prophet. She had been married, had children and a grandchild, but she walked away from them all after Sabra laid his hands on her and she did not die. It was relatively easy for most of them to do this because they had already made up their minds to die. Aarom wonders if it is harder for him because he hadn’t completely made up his mind when he put his flag up. Some part of him had still been afraid to die.
“You’re only torturing yourself,” Sonja finally says.
“It makes me feel better,” Aarom says.
“But then you feel worse. Then in a couple of days, you go hide yourself in the dens, bury yourself in your fantasies. You are the only reason you still suffer, Aarom.”
Aarom turns on her as they reach the next landing and Sonja takes an involuntary step back and catches herself with a hand on the wall. She is tall and pale, hair the snow white of an aged blonde, eyes the pale, inhuman lavender color that had been trendy fifteen years before, and he has looked at her before and privately thought that if she had been the one standing over him the night he became a prophet, he would have been terrified. Now she looks a little scared of him and it makes him laugh.
“My suffering is my business,” he says. “Don’t pretend you give a shit. What I do and where I go is not your concern. Who I fuck is none of your business. I have put no one in danger. I’m careful. And I have already said I don’t know where he is, so unless you intend to follow me the last eight flights just to bark at me like a dog, go away. I’m tired.”
He leaves her there on the stairs and climbs the rest of the way up to his
floor. He was already tired when he arrived at his building, but visits with Sonja always take a little extra out of him.
Aarom is not very surprised when he enters his apartment and finds Sabra reclined on the sofa. He is stretched out on his back, one arm over his eyes, sleeping or faking it well.
“I gave you the door code for emergencies,” Aarom says. He sits on the sofa by Sabra’s feet, falling onto the cushion with a huff. “Sonja’s looking for you.”
“I am in dire need of uninterrupted rest, so I consider it to be an emergency, if only a little one,” Sabra says, not sitting up or taking his arm away from his face. “Did she say what she wants?”
“Why would she do that?”
“Why indeed? Contrary woman. I’ll speak with her later. Where have you been?”
“Nowhere.”
“Ah. How is your dear mother?”
Aarom smiles and lets his head rest back on the sofa cushion behind him. “She was feeding the birds. She might have seen me.”
Sabra shrugs. “You were her only child. She probably imagines she sees you every day.”
“I wish—” Aarom cuts himself off and doesn’t say aloud what he wishes. He wishes many things could be different, but they’re not.
“I know,” Sabra says.
“Do you want to stay here today?” Aarom asks.
Sabra lifts his arm and looks at him from beneath it. His eyes are a light golden hazel that is incredibly beautiful in his brown face. He paid a doctor a lot of credits for them a long time ago. The previous owner had been a nobody, so the retinal scanners allow him to move more freely than most prophets dare in public and in daylight.
“I thought I already said that,” he says.
“Oh,” Aarom says. “Right.”
Sabra sits up and leans toward him. “You’re very tired,” he says. “I understand. Let’s go to bed.”
Aarom smiles and slants his eyes to the side to find Sabra smiling, too. He is not as melancholy when he’s with Sabra and he can feel himself relaxing in his presence. He has thought many times before that if he didn’t already love Jonathan he might love Sabra. Even if he can’t quite love him, he can touch him without worrying that he will die in his arms.
The bed hasn’t been made, the VR window on the wall and the ceiling has been set to show soothing old-world blue sky and cottony white cumulous clouds and Aarom hasn’t changed it in more than a week. Sabra pauses inside the door and switches it to desert scenery and a night sky filled with stars like diamonds scattered over a tabletop. Aarom sits on the bed to take off his shirt and change into loose trousers to sleep in, but he looks up when Sabra’s shadow falls over him and stops with his fingers still on the buttons. Sabra smiles and leans down to kiss him and Aarom leans back to compensate until he’s reclining back on the bed and Sabra climbs onto it with him.
Sabra tastes like honey ginger mints. Aarom has never liked the candy much, but he enjoys the faint trace of their flavor in Sabra’s mouth. Aarom yields into his hands with a sigh and feels the night’s tension and despair wash away. They’re both tired and preoccupied and Aarom can’t help thinking that Sabra’s distracting himself as much as Aarom. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t offend him, there aren’t any expectations here beyond the touch and the moment. They both use each other; that more than anything is the nature of their relationship. He wonders if this time it has anything to do with Sabra ignoring Sonja’s calls.
Later, lying on top of the sheets watching the turn of the stars above them, Aarom says, “How did we get here?”
Without asking, Sabra knows he does not mean the two of them naked in the bed. He shrugs. “I don’t know. But this is where we are.”
“Do you ever wonder what’s going to happen to us?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, most of them—those we reap—were born before the machine was turned on or have strong ties to family who were. What happens when the only ones left never knew there was anything else? Don’t you think prophets might become obsolete?”
Sabra smiles and shakes his head. His eyes are closed and he’s almost asleep. “I don’t believe that will ever happen,” he says. “People will always have that unexplainable emptiness in their souls. That overwhelming sense of hopeless existential confusion. They always have. They need to have the ability to make a choice even if they never decide to choose.”
“So, you think even if the reason changes, they’ll still need us?” Aarom asks.
“As long as they can’t do it themselves. The machine hasn’t taken away the need for death, only the ability to find it for yourself,” Sabra says. “Look at us. We know everything and it has not made us happy. Life can sometimes be a terrible thing to happen to a person.”
Aarom is quiet, thinking about it, looking at the stars and their constellations, feeling his skin grow cold as the sweat on his body cools until it pebbles with goosebumps. Sabra is probably right; he usually is about such things.
There is a problem with his reasoning though. A prophet is made when a supplicant seeks their own death only to discover that they are one of the precious few who would have survived the end of the world. The discovery sets them free, but it also imbues them with the power to see truth beyond the machine-made world and act as a link between them. Without survivors, there will be no prophets, so when the time comes that there are no people anywhere on earth still living that were alive before the invention of the machine, there will be no one to offer them the choice no matter how much they might need it.
Sabra has probably thought of this, too.
Their whole existence rides upon the back of an ontological paradox. The universe and the machine are perfect opposites; the machine’s sole function is to ensure the survival of the human race above all things while the universe does not care whether people—individually or as a species—live or die. The universe abhors a paradox and will find a way to fix the problem and, when all is said and done, the machine is just a machine. They are, all of them, living on borrowed time. The question is not if but when it will run out.
So thinking, Aarom rolls onto his side and falls asleep with his head on Sabra’s shoulder.
3.
Some nights, there are no flags. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Aarom walks the streets until early morning, ducks into the shadowed alcoves behind hibernating sentinels when patrols pass him until they’re gone before walking on. When the sky begins to lighten, he starts back toward the inner city, not toward home but to the den district.
Dens are the modern equivalent of opium dens, but now they sell fantasies, adventures and dreams created by programmers in the form of virtual reality. People go there to live out their darkest desires, their perversions, their urges, but most people, Aarom has heard, want to kill somebody or die without their chip interfering. Because it is virtual reality, they can commit suicide every single night of the year without the machine trying to stop them, and some people do. The dens are not technically illegal, but in order to go really deep, to have the best dreams, the most realistic experience, you have to take a dose of sunshine to get there and the shine is a schedule one narcotic and highly illegal.
Aarom takes his business these days to a place called Iniquity. It’s owned by a talented hacker and programmer named Delilah Rosewood. She is the best. Given the right details and enough incentive, she can program the perfect fantasy; one so real it’s easy to forget it isn’t.
Delilah is a sleek, beautiful, professional woman who dresses well, talks with a faint European accent that may or may not be genuine, and looks and behaves nothing like one expects a woman in her profession to be. Aarom has been to other dens and their proprietors more closely resemble whorehouse madams and pimps, but Delilah’s customers run the gamut from outlaws like himself to city and state government officials. She has worked hard to cultivate such influential relationships. Iniquity is almost never raided. It’s another reason why Aarom goes there.
Before he sees Deli
lah though, he has to pay the door fee and be cleared by Norman and his reprogrammed sentinel guard dog. Just like smartpaper posters end up stolen and repurposed in the sprawl, most anthrobotic sentinels end up reprogrammed to either serve as security enforcers for businesses like Iniquity or to smash each other to pieces in the pit fights. Norman’s sentinel is an older model robot, but he keeps it shiny and in working order and Aarom wouldn’t want to see if it really can smash his head. He believes it could.
The sentinel has the name Rodney engraved into its chest plate and Aarom wonders if it answers to its name, but he has never asked. Norman is a disagreeable little man who communicates mostly in grunts with a variety of inflections. Aarom pays him with a credit chip and Norman watches him pass through the doorway with suspiciously narrowed eyes. He has seen Aarom at least twice a month for more than five years, but he could be a total stranger up to no good for all the goodwill that buys him from the man.
“Aarom, darling!” Delilah says, greeting him with open arms and a practiced, friendly smile.
Aarom waits for her to hug him, but she doesn’t at the last moment, remembering herself. “Hello, Del.”
“I haven’t seen you this month at all,” she says. “You’re not taking your business to someone else?”
“Of course not. You’re the best,” he says. He’s rewarded with her pleased smile.