Community of Magic Pens

by Community of Magic Pens (epub)

  But Rachel never got Erin to admit it was magic. “It’s got to do with quantum entanglement,” Erin said. “They’ve done experiments with subatomic particles. This is like that, only bigger.” She sent Rachel links to articles full of phrases like relative simultaneity and spatiotemporal nonlocality, which Rachel ignored. As far as she was concerned, magic was magic, and you don’t look a gift unicorn in the mouth.

  The mystery message arrives in early March of their fifth-grade year. Rachel can’t get it off her mind. One night soon after, she pulls out that scrap of butcher paper and writes down the current time and date. She leaves the cap off the pen for the rest of the night, even though she knows it’ll mean fully flushing the nib the next day.

  During some gray predawn hour, she wakes from vague nightmares to see—still no further words added to the scrap of paper. On impulse, she opens a spiral notebook and writes, “Hey, Erin, what time is it when YOU are?” Within minutes, her pen transmits an answer: “Five thirty, what are you even doing up? Go back to bed.”

  One night when Rachel is sixteen, she parks her mother’s car in the half-deserted lot of a dive bar on a highway known for beautiful views and not much else. Inside, two men are playing darts; the dart boards occupy the brightest spot in the whole dim place. The bartender stares absently at a football game on the TV. The only other person Rachel can see is a college-aged guy sitting alone at one of the tables placed haphazardly across the much-abused wood floor. He looks over at her briefly as she comes in, then goes back to glaring in the direction of the restrooms.

  The moment Rachel enters the ladies’, she can hear Erin sobbing. “Erin? I’m here. I’m sorry it took so long—I left the house as soon as I got your script.” Erin doesn’t immediately come out of the stall, but Rachel hears her unlock it, so she goes in. She finds Erin perched like a bird on the toilet seat, hugging her knees to her chest and shaking.

  Rachel hugs her. “You OK, hon?”

  “Asshole stole my cell phone,” Erin whispers. “No, don’t try to get it back. Just take me home.”

  As Erin gets to her feet, Rachel sees the message Erin wrote on the unfinished wood wall above the toilet paper dispenser: HE’S SCARING ME PLEASE COME—ROLLING ROCK BAR HWY 93. Rachel reaches out a finger to touch the big block letters. The ink smudges. She looks down at the stain and then up at Erin in shock. Rachel’s pen received the message fully forty minutes ago.

  The hint of a smile crosses Erin’s tear-streaked face. “Yeah,” she says. “It worked.” She does not explain further.

  When she gets home, Rachel pulls out the old scrap of butcher paper with the two messages on it. Now there are three. The third says, “How about now?” It’s in the same handwriting as the first, both of which resemble Erin’s. Rachel remembers Erin admiring the handwriting; she also remembers she never gave Erin the message to take home and practice from.

  “It’s the night I rescued you from that creep,” Rachel writes. “And your first experiment with temporal nonlocal whatsis, I guess.”

  She puts down the pen and nearly screams when it leaps right back up again. “Not first experiment,” it scripts. “First success.”

  “Well, thank goodness for THAT,” Rachel writes back with a shaking hand. She underlines THAT several times.

  She leaves the cap off and keeps half an eye on the pen for the rest of the night, but nothing else appears to be forthcoming.

  Rachel stays in town for college. She takes classes in journalism and creative writing. She self-publishes chapbooks of poetry. She falls in and out of love with a series of what her mother calls “nice enough boys.” The fourth one she winds up marrying. He’s got a stable job in residential real estate and a fondness for board games which Rachel almost comes to share.

  Erin attends one prestigious STEM university after another, collecting degrees like some people collect stamps. She studies particle physics and quantum mechanics. “And it’s all thanks to you and your quantum-entangled pens,” she scripts Rachel, who’s congratulating her on winning yet another award. “One day the world will know the truth behind the singularity, and your name and mine will be legend.”

  “That and five bucks will buy me a latte,” Rachel scripts back.

  They don’t script so much. Texting is more convenient. Rachel’s smartphone is content to beep once when a message arrives and then shut the heck up. It doesn’t go on buzzing in her purse like a trapped housefly. It never needs its nib cleaned or its converter refilled. But sometimes Rachel scripts anyway, just to remind herself that the magic still works.

  Of course it works. Erin’s making a name for herself from trying to figure out how it works. Not that she says as much to the national papers and scientific journals. Rachel reads each article faithfully; they’re full of terms like relative simultaneity and spatiotemporal nonlocality which she understands little better than when she was ten. But she knows that Erin’s drive to unlock the secrets of the universe is fueled by a miracle they share and can repeat any time they want.

  Sometimes Rachel pulls out that aging scrap of butcher paper and adds to its contents. “You’re forty-three and you just won yet another award named after some dead scientist,” she writes.

  This time, she gets a reply. “I know exactly when you mean. Keep in touch.”

  Rachel is sixty-three. The funeral is over. It was too soon, far too soon, and she’s sick of hearing everyone say it. She’s locked herself in her study, having escaped her husband’s mostly abstract concern, and now she’s paging through the scrapbook. Articles in national newspapers and scientific journals. Relative simultaneity and spatiotemporal nonlocality. Scraps of paper covered in fountain pen ink, the words written in two distinct hands. A poem or two. Rachel can’t bear reading them now.

  Finally she reaches the pocket in the back cover of the scrapbook and pulls out a ragged piece of butcher paper nearly covered in short sentences. She lays it carefully on the desk with her fountain pen across it, uncapped. Minutes pass. The pen doesn’t move. Why should it? There’s no more Future Erin to script her. Maybe there never was.

  In a sudden rage Rachel snatches up the pen and writes, “You died last week. Your funeral was today. What the fuck time is it for YOU now?” Then she throws down the pen, heedless of the nib’s point or of the ink spattering everything in a five-foot radius. It’s orange today. The bottle says “Paleolithic Amber.” That is one of many details that just don’t matter anymore. Rachel puts her head down on her arms on the desk.

  After a minute, the pen slowly rolls back toward the paper. Two inches in front of Rachel’s nose, it rises upright, then hesitates as if deliberating over a choice of words. “I’m not sure that’s a question that makes sense anymore.”

  “ . . . Go on,” Rachel says, as though the pen could hear her.

  “Time is a place. Each moment is a room. It’s like when we passed notes in school; we don’t have to be in the same moment-room to script each other.” The pen runs right off the edge of the paper and onto the desk. Rachel reaches for more paper to slide under the nib. “There are other rooms I can visit. There is a room where I have a stroke and die. There is a room where I beg you to come save me from an attempted kidnapping, or worse. And there is a room where I give you a special offer on a second-hand pen: two for the price of one.” The pen pauses again while Rachel tries to tell herself she doesn’t believe what it just wrote. “I took very good care of it, Rache. Thank you for taking such good care of me.”

  Rachel snatches up the pen again and writes, half on the new page and half on the desk itself, “That was you? In the store with the second pen?” She can’t remember the lady’s face anymore. Grown-up strangers were all anonymous when she was ten.

  “Just one pen. Just one story, and two people writing it.”

  The words blur as Rachel’s tears fall anew. She won’t be able to bear to look at the paper again for hours. Just glancing in its direction will blind her with fresh sobs. But eventually she will remember that fount
ain pens don’t care who died recently, they want to be capped and set upright in their pen holders when not in use, and just as an artist doesn’t let grief get in the way of cleaning her brushes, a poet takes care of her pens. And she will come back to the page, and she will see one more sentence in her friend’s hand, waiting for her—

  “What makes you think we’re done writing, Rache?”

  —and suddenly all the details will matter again.

  Nicole J. LeBoeuf (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana. Accordingly, she’s a die-hard Saints fan, and she feels most at home when humidity levels are above eighty percent. Her first professional publication was the short story “First Breath” in the vampirism anthology Blood and Other Cravings. Since then, her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including Daily Science Fiction, Cast of Wonders, and Tales to Terrify, and her poetry in Sycorax Journal, Eternal Haunted Summer, and The Macabre Museum. She and her husband currently live in Colorado, where she skates roller derby with the Boulder County Bombers under the name “Fleur de Beast,” and persists in her possibly futile attempts to grow mirlitons and okra. Her favorite fountain pen is the sadly discontinued Sheaffer Agio. She blogs at NicoleJLeBoeuf.com.

  The Oneiric Archive

  Lorraine Schein

  Each morning, I transcribe my dreams

  with a silver stylus

  to a memory stick

  for my dream database.

  The Webmaster of Sleep

  takes it from my pillow

  and copies my digitized entries

  for her web archive

  then translates the images

  from my sleeping brain

  by optical character recognition

  onto her server

  to make them downloadable

  and searchable online

  dragged into folders

  by their repeating themes:

  dreams of flying, falling, public nudity,

  and recurring nightmares.

  Lorraine Schein is a New York writer whose work has appeared in VICE Terraform, New Letters, Witches & Pagans, Little Blue Marble, Strange Horizons and in the anthologies Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath, and forthcoming in Eighteen (Underland Press). The Futurist’s Mistress, her poetry book, is available from mayapplepress.com. She likes writing with purple pens and believes in precognitive dreams.

  Writ Large

  Holly Schofield

  What happened that day in the Ottawa boardroom, well, it’s never been public knowledge. I think the story needs to be told today. For context. For truth. And because of what I’m about to do before I leave the podium tonight.

  On that world-altering day ten years ago, I’d stood up and walked to the end of the boardroom table. The Sollid Neurotech Research Ltd. board members stared at me every step I took. I really hate demonstrating stuff. What I can accomplish perfectly when I’m alone, I always screw up in front of an audience. But I had no choice back then, not if I wanted to keep the project going and keep my job.

  I started off really badly. Hey, I was young back then. Young and naïve. I thought an apology would help. I said, “I’m sorry about the incomplete report. I was working on something else last night. But I’ve licked the problem of the tinnitus and the headaches. Well, mostly. Can I just tell you about the MindScribe instead? Um, I can write out different sizes of smileys? And I can—”

  “Smileys? That’s the complexity you’ve achieved? After four months of effort? Our clients need a serious communication neuroprosthesis, not some gimmick. If we can’t patent it and supply it to them, how do you think we make any profit here?” Don Anderson, CEO of Sollid, flicked a fingernail at his tablet like it was my nose. “I hereby make a motion to cancel the whole project. Who’ll second it? Jonathan?” He turned to the copycat dude-in-a-suit at his elbow, one of the ten board members he knew he could count on.

  “Seconded.” No hesitation, no inflection, no actual thinking needed. I swear, Jonathan would lick Anderson’s boots. Even after he’d walked through cow manure.

  Sollid had been a good company until Anderson got appointed. He was such a snake, ruling the company by cronyism, backstabbing, rumour-mongering—if a management technique was manipulative, he was doing it. Now, he was glaring at me from beneath his rusty gray curls. “Our twenty-four-year-old hotshot may come through with something viable at some point, but this is not the outcome nor the timeline we’ve been hoping for. Tennan is good, but not that good.”

  “Tennan is very good,” Olive said flatly. “When you give them a chance.” She was a lowly admin assistant but she never hesitated to speak her mind.

  I remember thinking: neither should I. And that’s what decided me. I was going to do it! I’d take the risk of presenting the prototype even though it didn’t work right yet. I jammed the MindScribe headset on and squeezed my brain cells hard. At least, that’s how I think of it, even now. Like trying to force out a burp, only in your head.

  Symbol-based communication has existed for years: pointing at boards by whatever means the person is capable of—a finger, a stick held in the mouth, an eye movement. Concepts—yes, no, want, don’t want, good, finished—can be conveyed really easily. Well, really easily if the person can move some part of their body. But if you can’t, you live without self-expression of any kind. Our clients, MedFelicity, were a medical conglomerate out of British Columbia, interested in thought-to-text solely because of their paraplegic patients.

  I got excited just thinking about it. Consider people with locked-in-syndrome. A pen for your brain, a pencil for your mind: a real neural translator would be a life-changer. Not just for simply telling a caregiver, “I’m thirsty,” but for the sheer human connection that a person desperately needs. Like my Aunt Fran and her four-year coma-that-wasn’t. Because of her, I got into disability tech. I was hanging around all the new machines at her bedside and learning about EEGs, fMRIs, and electrocorticography even back then in high school.

  I started into my presentation slowly, just a gentle squeeze in the ol’ prefontal cortex. A yellow smiley appeared on the big screen that ran the length of the boardroom wall and also on everyone’s tablet. I overlaid it with the toothier version of the emoji so it seemed like an animation breaking into a huge grin. Anderson jumped and I grinned.

  “Thought-to-symbol has been possible for years.” Anderson blew out his lips.

  I tried not to sound as ticked off as I felt. Had Anderson even read the summary of the project’s targeted goal? “Yes, Don, but only with a lot of terminals implanted under the skull, usually using ones already put there for treatment of epilepsy.” Did he have any idea how lives could be improved if I could get this to work right? I drew in a long slow breath and recentred myself by recalling Aunt Fran’s multi-nuanced “!!!” when she could finally communicate in symbols after years of silence.

  Next, I concentrated on that frothy feeling in my forehead and squeezed harder. Making words was much slipperier than symbols, but I’d “canned” some of them into the software, as if they were PowerPoint slides. With just a little effort, words appeared on all the screens.

  NOT JUST EMOJIS

  It came up purple Comic Sans, because I was a twenty-four-year-old snot.

  “Text? I assume it’s stored in the software. Still, drawing on it is impressive.” Hugh glanced at Anderson uneasily. Unlike the Chair, Hugh had a degree or two in some non-neuroscience or other. He wasn’t all bad. He even brought donuts to the employee lounge once in a while. But it was a shame he rarely strayed outside of his role of corporate stooge.

  “Displaying stored text is a mediocre outcome with limited functionality. Let’s redirect the budget to something that will increase our bottom line.” Anderson frowned. I swear, the man’s posterior superior temporal lobes have dollars where his neurons should be.

  My head began to ache. Any minute now, he’d call for a vote. And I’d be out the door, on the cold Ottawa streets, jobless, and homeless too. Most
of my stuff was in a storage locker back in Kitchener. I still hadn’t gotten around to renting an apartment here, working all hours and unrolling a sleeping bag whenever I needed a nap.

  Hugh caught my eye. “Can you do something unscripted?”

  “Um . . . ” I probably could. More likely, though, it would fail spectacularly. And that would only support Anderson’s argument for cancellation.

  Anderson crossed his arms. “Gentlemen, it’s time to vote. Let’s repurpose these funds.”

  I suppressed the fuzzy tickles I could feel between my ears, like a quill pen scratching on my brain. Maybe if I just tried talking to Don? I mean, talking had worked for thousands of years, right?

  I tugged down my Sarek T-shirt, wishing I’d gone full blazer. “Folks, I know it’s nowhere near launch-ready. The decoding-to-text needs a lot of work. And we need hardware that isn’t so uncomfortable.” I scratched where the electrodes had rubbed bald spots on my temples. “But the product is viable. I just need more time.”

  Olive spoke up. “It’s true, Mr. Anderson. Tennan can do it. I believe in them. Our mission is to be responsible to the shareholders, right? The MindScribe would benefit so many people, it’s sure to make a profit! And you don’t want Tennan going to the competition, do you?” She gave one of her patented fake smiles.

  “I’ll remind everyone that we’ve all signed an NDA. And that the intellectual property belongs to SNR, Ms. Ng.” He didn’t even bother to look at Olive but caught the eyes of the board members instead. “Does anyone have anything of real value to add?”