by Jaym Gates
Even my own autonomy.
I grab the edges of the mirror and shake it until it breaks. I scream into the shards but he doesn’t hear. He doesn’t care. His voice is the cold sheen of a blade.
Like he’s doing me a favor. Like I’ve got a choice.
—
The Bund, he says, is where he’s meeting the girl. Where she’ll help him resleeve without erasure and I can go on my merry way. Because he’s not one-hundred-percent positive he’s plugged all the digital holes that will tell his bosses where he is and who he is.
Who I am. Which is vulnerable and hijacked.
I’m not one-hundred-percent convinced he can extract his ego and leave mine intact.
I’m not convinced I want my head cut open again.
You know who says things like that? War-mongers and priests.
I try not to think because he can sense it. Can’t he?
[Yes,] my muse says, answering some question I never asked. Maybe he did.
I wear a dark gray jacket with the sleeves pushed up and the hood pulled low. It fits tight around my torso and obscures my face. I’m tall enough to see over the heads of traffic, possibly as tall as he’d been in his discarded biomorph. Face forward, looking for something. But nothing that the crowded souks or the compression of population can provide.
We travel like blood cells from one dome to the next, going to his love in the Bund. The name originates from Persia, a locale so exotic as to be alien in this modern day on another planet, where humanity has become the freaks in the night of their own imaginings, the things our ancient selves made stories about as warnings and portents.
A tail flicks here, a hiss of a forked tongue there. A latticework of light glows beneath skin. Everybody a carnival unto themselves.
There’s a checkpoint between domes. There’s some nervous shivering at the back of my mind that the knock on my ID will reveal him hunkered down in my hemispheres, frightened of discovery. This is another reason he hacked my brain. My face in the patrol’s databanks is nondescript enough. Average citizens can float from one place to the other, but he’s not an average citizen. In the clog of corridor traffic, hands in my pockets, I watch the people ahead of me slowly pass over the border one at a time, in six different streams. There’s no visible scan, it’s all in the head, the division of domes separated by uniforms and guns.
I’ve done this a dozen times and for those moments, as I step up, the buzzing in the back of my head goes silent.
The knock to my muse rings back a confirmation code. I’m not some illegal morph meant for the mines. I’ve been here all my life, beneath society’s heel.
The patrol waves me on and with eyes to the ground, I go.
I don’t answer. Soon the river glistens on my right, the buildings along its bank like giant dollhouses lit from within. Almost incandescent in the night and just as untouchable as any light source in the vacuum of space. I’ve never set foot in those edifices, the mock-ups of what we once had back on Earth—when the world took its own beauty for granted, just like all beautiful things tend to do.
Chames and I used to come here just to sit on the riverbank and gaze at the glow captured in the water. We pretended it was a portal to a better world, as if such a thing existed even in imagination. Dive in and you’d be caught in all of that light, be able to swim through the Gothic windows to some palatial interior fit for a faerie court. Half neon and half damask. On the streets in this other world, instead of corporate billboards, there’d be art deco declarations of poetry. Clean lines of inspiration about the human soul, possibly from Shakespeare but we’d settle for Dickinson. Plath, even. We wouldn’t get too romantic.
Everything at our fingertips if we just reached down and trailed our hands in the river.
Just here? Beneath a lamp post and in sight of a clock tower that nobody looks at because we’ve all got the time stamped into our brains. The light above me diffuses down in a mist of white and I take a step to the side so it can no longer touch me. Better to be embraced by darkness.
People stroll here, a different kind from what I know on the other side of my Shanghai. Families, tourists, jobbing individuals all moving past my sight, making the sound of crickets at high decibel. Those girls with their arms linked, that child skipping behind its parents with a light lance, bisecting the shadows with amber and radiation green. The umbrellas carried by maidens and men the size of mastiffs act as fashion, not necessity. It’s not raining here.
One white umbrella twirls as the person moves by, obscuring everything from the waist up. All I see are narrow legs in blood-red stockings and flat shoes of the same color.
She spins to me in a half-step, like she’s in a dance all by herself, and I see the halo of her vermilion hair and the glow of her quartz purple eyes.
I let him propel me forward. I want to go anyway. This beauty with all of her love intact, the way he remembers it.
We move toward each other like opposing charges in the same atom. All of Mars becomes hidden behind the white circumference of her umbrella. Everything crackles: her eyes, the ends of her hair, the sound of my hands pulling from my pockets. The voice at the back of my skull calling her name, ready to be re-united, turned on by the prospect of connection.
I snap her neck easily between my hands and continue the motion of it, sending her into the river.
The umbrella dances into the air. I catch the stem of it and twirl it at my back, striding away.
The roar in my head.
The roar.
It does not stop.
—
He keeps asking why I did it. This incessant why, why, why. Like there’s been some egregious misstep when he was the one that stepped into me.
It’s raining again in Little Shanghai, on my stroll, the water rolling down walls and guttering at the edges. I don’t mind the false rain even if it turns the corners ragged and makes stain on my ceiling, like some god somewhere is pissing in defiance of gravity.
On this mattress, in this room years ago, I cradled Chames’s bleeding head. He got between me and an angry man, and I couldn’t shut up. I did it.
Life’s cheap now, or maybe it always has been if you’re a never-had. What’s the meaning of life anymore? Mobility? Sentience? Some narrow definition of intelligence? Reproduction no longer counts when you can ditto yourself into oblivion and cut out the parts that don’t matter anymore. When fifty-percent of you is made up of artificial components and the other fifty is negotiable, transient, or worse yet, out of date, what does one life matter?
Maybe she’s somewhere saved but I won’t go looking. I know he’ll never stop. We all need our missions, some purpose to survive. Maybe that’s all life is now when betterment gets you nowhere.
Every day now, on the stroll, I feel his impatience like a mote. The blockade lets him speak but he’s tied down by grief. No amount of training prepared him for this. Love is the ultimate weapon. He endures the kind I get when they walk up on my lean. When he can see the way eyes partition me like his psychosurgeon partitioned us, and together we roll into rooms and unfold our bodies to the greed.
But that doesn’t matter.
But it never does.
Because to them there’s always a way. Some technology, a backup, some answer written in the mesh, so much meaning in something intangible.
Maybe we’ve always put our faith in things we can’t touch, and they ruin us. Traded one savior for another.
The only difference is
one bled for us—and now we just bleed each other.
Authors
Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty books from Angry Robot Books and the forthcoming novel Company Town from Tor Books. She has also developed science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, the Atlantic Council, and others. You can find her at madelineashby.com or on Twitter @MadelineAshby.
Rob Boyle is a tabletop game developer, editor, and writer, best known for his award-winning work on Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase. He has held a life-long interest in anarchism, anti-fascism, and hacktivism, and is particularly interested in how they intersect with science fiction, transhumanism, and the future of our species. He can be found playing dodgeball, DJing industrial music, training in modern arnis, and posting as @infomorph on Twitter.
Davidson Cole is a writer and film-maker currently residing in Los Angeles. His films have played prestigious film festivals worldwide, including Sundance and Revelation Perth. He is the co-creator of the tabletop card game Verminopolis. Find him on the web: davidsoncole.com, lampcofilms.com, and hwoodmotionpic.com
Nathaniel Dean is a lifelong sci-fi and fantasy reader with a late-blooming love of existential horror. Hopefully radical life extension will give him the chance to confront his interests personally, but until then he explores them through his writing and work on game development for Eclipse Phase and Clockwork: Dominion. This is all encouraged by his incredible wife, Sarah, and wholly unacknowledged by his two cats, Artemis and The Senator.
Jaym Gates is an editor, author, and communications person, with past clients ranging from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to Uplift Aeronautics. Her anthologies include War Stories, Upside Down, Broken Time Blues, Geek Love, and tie-in anthologies for Exalted and Vampire: the Masquerade. Her fiction can be found in Kaiju Rising, Heroes!, and Triumph After Tragedy. For more information, please see jaymgates.com, or follow her on Twitter as @JaymGates.
Jack Grahamis a writer, UX designer, and unlicensed futurist. An alumnus of the Clarion West writer’s workshop (2010), he writes science fiction stories about some or all of the following: artificial intelligence, consciousness, memes, politics, relationships, sex, and societal evolution. He tweets at @jackgraham and @FakeTSR
Georgina Kamsika is a speculative fiction writer born in England to Anglo-Indian parents. She has spent most of her life explaining her English first name, Polish surname, and South Asian features. When she's not busy writing or walking her dogs, she can be found lurking on Twitter as @thessilian.
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award.
Ken's debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Karin Low was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her books, beginning with her first novel, Warchild, have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have appeared in anthologies edited by Ann VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, and John Joseph Adams. Follow her on Twitter @karinlow.
When Kim May isn’t writing she’s cursing the fact that singing vampires can only find work in German musical theater. Kim is also the event coordinator for an independent bookstore in Salem, Oregon. You can find out more about her and her writing at ninjakeyboard.blogspot.com and on The Fictorians.
Steven Mohan, Jr. has sold stories to Interzone, Polyphony, Paradox, On Spec, and several DAW and Fiction River original anthologies. His short fiction has also won honorable mention in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and he's a past nominee for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Colorado.
Andrew Penn Romine is a veteran VFX and animation artist who enjoys finding great places to eat and drink. He does not recommend dining at the restaurant featured in his story. For other recommendations and occasional cocktail philosophies, you can find him at andrewpennromine.com or @inkgorilla on Twitter.
Editor-in-chief at Paizo Inc. and co-creator of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, F. Wesley Schneider is the author of dozens of creepy Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons adventures and accessories. His novel, Pathfinder Tales: Bloodbound, and novella, Guilty Blood, are both available now. You can find more from him on Twitter at @FWesSchneider and at wesschneider.com.
Tiffany Trent is the award-winning author of the YA steampunk novels The Unnaturalists and The Tinker King (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) and the dark fantasy historical Hallowmere series (Mirrorstone). She has published numerous short stories in Corsets & Clockwork, Subterranean, and Wicked Impropriety, among others. She also writes nonfiction essays and articles about science and the environment. Find her at tiffanytrent.com, @tiffanytrent on Twitter, or Facebook.
Fran Wilde can tie the sailors’ knot board, set gemstones, and program digital minions. Her first novel, Updraft, debuted from Tor/Macmillan in 2015. Her stories have appeared in publications including Asimov's, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, and Tor.com. Her interview series Cooking the Books—about the intersection between food and fiction—has appeared at Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and on her blog at franwilde.net. You can find her on Twitter @fran_wilde and Facebook.
Credits
Editor: Jaym Gates
Eclipse Phase Continuity: Rob Boyle & Jack Graham
Production: Adam Jury
Cover Art: Stephan Martiniere
Posthuman Studios is: Rob Boyle, Brian Cross, Jack Graham, and Adam Jury.
Version 1.0 (January 2016), by Posthuman Studios
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