The Chronotope and Other Speculative Fictions

by Michael Hemmingson

  Do we?

  I don’t want to. I know we have to at some point. But I don’t want to right now.

  Where are you children? you asked.

  Inside, taking a nap, it’s nap time, she said.

  May I see them?

  What?

  I would like to see these children, you said.

  All right, she said.

  She took you inside the house on the hill; the government escorts waited outside by the government car with the black tinted windows. Fiona led you upstairs and to a bedroom, a children’s room, where two little human males, ages three and four, slept in separate beds.

  They look…peaceful, you said.

  They are my angels, she said.

  Do you remember when we talked of having children? you said, accessing those Ellis memories and feeling sad.

  Please, don’t, Fiona said.

  Something odd took you over: the incredible Ellis emotions, and the Ellis memories, the recall of Fiona’s body next to the Ellis body. It was as if Ellis was back in his body and taking over: you reached out for Fiona and kissed her on the lips.

  Gently, she pushed you away.

  Please, don’t, she said.

  Fiona, you said.

  I still love you, she said softly, but I have these children, and I have a husband who loves me, he’s alive and he loves me.

  One of the small boys woke up and looked at them.

  Mommy, said the boy, pointing at you, who is that?

  A very old friend, Fiona said.

  A new emotion from Ellis’ memories filled your body: anger, and jealousy, and more anger.

  I must leave, you said, shaking.

  That might be best, she said.

  May I come back?

  Yes, she said, and: We do have things to talk about, eventually.

  VIII.

  From San Francisco, you were flown by government transport down to Los Angeles. That evening, you were on another news talk show, but you did not want to be there.

  That night, you were in a hotel room in Beverly Hills, provided by the talk show producers. You could not get the Ellis body to rest; the body—and yourself—were still feeling the variety of emotions associated with Fiona.

  There was a knock on the door. You opened the door and a woman with long black hair and many gold necklaces walked in. In her hand, she held a small animal, what was called a “toy box terrier.” This woman wore high heels and a short silver dress and sunglasses, even though it was night, indoors, and the room was semi-dark.

  Wow, you are real, she said.

  May I help you?

  You sure can. Let’s get to bed, baby!

  She dropped the small dog to the floor and grabbed you, kissed you.

  Gently, you pushed her away, the same way Fiona did to you.

  Don’t you know who I am? she said.

  No, you said.

  Oh yeah, you been gone and ten years ago I was nine and not so famous.

  Who are you?

  I’m Wendy Talman, man, she said, and: Duhh, my daddy is Miles Talman, the third richest movie producer in town.

  I’m sorry, you said.

  Look, I paid a fortune to bribe your handlers and get in here.

  Why?

  Why? she said, and laughed, and said: What woman doesn’t want to fuck the spaceman hero? Duhhh!

  More memories and feelings: sex. You accessed Ellis’ sexual experiences, the dozen women he’d gone to bed with, including Fiona. Desire filled your inner core. Again, it was as if Ellis had reclaimed his body and you were not in control: you grabbed this woman, kissed her, removed her dress, pushed her onto the hotel bed.…

  IX.

  Wendy Talman slept soundly, after two hours of sexual intercourse. You paced about the room. The small dog followed you, barking at you. You picked the dog up. The creature was so fragile. You touched its body. So fragile. You grabbed its neck and twisted. The bones broke so easily; the animal’s body went limp.

  Ellis’ voice in your mind: How could she? Doesn’t she still love me? How could she marry another man and have children with him? The whore!

  You and Ellis knew what to do.

  X.

  You woke up the government escorts, who were in the next room, and told them that you had to return to San Francisco immediately. They were not pleased about this, at one in the morning, and said San Francisco was not on the schedule, you were due to be in New York the next day. Ellis knew what to do: from your mouth came threatening words, that you would inform their superiors that they took bribe money from Wendy Talman to gain access to his room. This motivated the two men.

  Within an hour, you were aboard the transport and in the sky. It only took an hour to get to San Francisco. The escorts drove you to Fiona’s house, and even though it was four in the morning, and the sun was not in the sky yet, the escorts did not question your actions.

  By this time, Ellis’ emotions and memories were in complete control, moved by feelings of betrayal, jealousy, and hate.

  XI.

  Ellis was well-trained in hand-to-hand combat from his previous job in the military, before he joined the space program; accessing this quality, combined with the Ellis body strength and the emotions, you overtook both the escorts once you had arrived to the big house on the hill in San Francisco.

  The two male humans were not expecting such a thing from you, and they were exhausted from lack of sleep. You easily knocked them both out with strategic blows to the back of their necks. You then removed the weapons each had: hand guns that shot twelve bullets.

  You knocked on the door and activated the “buzzer,” knowing that Fiona and her husband would be asleep at this hour in the morning. It had been raining all night, so the world was wet and cold. These elements enhanced the feelings of anger from Ellis’ deepest pit of emotional turmoil.

  How unpleasant it is to be human, you mused.

  After several minutes of repeated knocking and buzzing, Fiona’s husband—a man called Steve Aaronson—opened the door, wearing a robe. His hair was shaggy and curly.

  What the hell is the meaning of this? he said.

  You raised the handgun and fired. The first projectile went into the other man’s chest; you fired two more into his face. Half of his face was destroyed. Blood, bone, and cranial matter splattered everywhere, including onto you.

  You tasted his blood in your mouth.

  How unpleasant, you mused again.

  Fiona came down the stairs, screaming.

  She stopped. Tears emerged from her eyes and rolled down her face.

  What have you done? she said.

  These words came out of your mouth, not yours and belonging to Ellis: How could you, Fiona? How could you leave me for dead? How could you marry another man? I’m your goddamn husband, you bitch.

  She looked at the bloody carnage that was her second husband and said again: What have you done, Greg?

  Remember what I said? What I told you?

  This was the memory: once, after a marital fight, Gregory Ellis said to Fiona Ellis, quite seriously: If you ever cheat on me, if you ever leave me or sleep with another man, I will kill you both. I will kill him first and make you watch, and then I will kill you, and then I will kill myself.

  Oh my God, Fiona said, and: I knew there was something wrong, I knew you’d changed. It’s in your eyes. Those are not your eyes. What happened to you in space? Why have you done this? Do you know what you’ve done to our lives?

  You raised the gun.

  Please let my children live, she said.

  You injected her with five projectiles, until her face and chest were nothing but meaty pulp and slippery blood.

  You walked up the stairs.

  The door of the children’s room was closed. You heard them crying inside.

  You opened the door.

  The two children were huddled in a corner, holding each other. They were afraid.

  Ellis: They must die too.

  You: They are innocent
s.

  Ellis: No one is innocent.

  You raised both weapons.

  You were on the floor before you could fire. The weapons were taken out of your hands. You were hit in the face by human fists. The two escorts—they were conscious, and with their bodies they held you down.

  You gave no resistance. You could have prevented them from doing this. The experience was so unpleasant that you could no longer sustain Ellis’ memories and emotions. You slipped out of the Ellis body and returned home, the realm of the ethereal.

  If anyone had watched closely, they would have seen you leave the body, via the eyes: that small bright white light at the center of the pupil that was the essence of the Guest. The light dimmed, and all there was left was darkness.

  XII.

  The Ellis body lived without the Guest. It was an automaton now, moving by instinct. It could not speak or reason. It did as it was told, an empty husk going through the motions of life.

  There was a publicized trial. Millions watched it on their screens. The jury found Ellis guilty of first-degree murder and Ellis was sentenced to death. After the trial, several jurors told the news media that when they looked at Ellis, it was like looking at “pure evil.”

  I look at him and there’s no life in his eyes, said one juror.

  Something horrible must have happened to him in space, another said.

  —July, 2009

  Los Angeles

  TRANQUILITY

  I.

  The end of the five-year sentence is soon to come to a close and you are anxious for the government to return what they removed from you: your other half, of who you are, that criminal who has been denied a right to life in society, detained in some mainframe hell where all the five-to-tens go. Two more weeks: in two weeks you will be whole in real time, and you will know what heinous act of malfeasance you committed.

  Your wife, Anna, knows, but by law she cannot tell you; no one in your family, at work, friends or foes are permitted to say what it was that you did, otherwise the final phase of the punishment would be moot: that real time moment when your missing half is downloaded back.

  You have been going about your life the past four years, eleven months and two weeks as half a person, and it was not easy. Sometimes the curiosity and torment of not knowing can get to a person, make a person go mad; sometimes when reunification happens, and the horrible crime is realized, a person wants to die and self-terminate. This is why some decide not to go whole again. You had that option.

  But you had to know.

  Anna disagreed. “I think we’ll both be better off if you didn’t,” she said several times in those last days.

  Of course, you wanted to ask her why why why; what did you do, why would it be bad to remember?

  “Things might not be nice anymore,” she said.

  Home life was generally tranquil and you liked that. So did Anna. Tranquility was the best avenue for all families, especially one like yours: man and wife, late twenties, and one small child, age three.

  Tranquility, as the government liked to remind everyone on the billboards and screens, keeps society productive.

  And: Love makes for a happy home.

  And: A happy home makes for a tranquil world.

  “We have a happy home,” Anna said; “would you want it any other way?”

  II.

  In the second year of the incarceration, you went underground, and paid considerable money to find a mind-cracker to fish around your skull for residual remnants. The cracker was a teenage speed addict, but you were told he was the best. You met him in an abandoned building, an apartment where people once lived and loved, and he sat you down and connected various contact wires to your skull, which connected to a small, no-brand-name tablet in his hand.

  “When they erase part of you, they can never really erase it all,” the cracker said. “A shadow is there, hiding in the murky gray matter, bits and pieces and sometimes even a whole. They shove it all back in redundant packs into the medulla oblongata.”

  “Lovely,” you said.

  “Now, before we do this, I am not responsible for any ugliness you might find out—you know, whoever you were when you were whole.”

  “I’m paying you.”

  “I find nothing, no refund.”

  You don’t know what happened. He gave you something in liquid form to relax and go into REM-sleep mode, then next thing: your body shaking violently and blood flowing out of your nose.

  “Goddamn it all to shiznet,” the cracker grumbled, pulling the contacts and nodes off.

  Weakly, you: “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. It’s what they did: put a block on all residual. Whatever you did, it must have been pretty bad, dude.”

  “Try again.”

  “No way.”

  “Try again!”

  The cracker was stubborn. “You’ll die, and I’m not going down for that, half-head!”

  “I want a refund then.”

  “I said—”

  “You found something, not nothing, and you say it’ll kill me…that’s not what I paid for.”

  The cracker threw up his hands. “I’ll give you 25% back, just ’cause I feel sorry for you, half-head.”

  You didn’t argue with him.

  You knew you had been a bad person; that was enough.

  III.

  After the first year, it was easy to spot those in your shoes: the criminals who were walking around as “half-heads.” The hollowness of the eyes, the confusion of what did I do wrong on their faces…even the way they walked, because they walked like you: slowly and carefully, and something told you that there was a time you strolled through society with a lighter step.

  You watched debates, read sociological reports, and listened to the speeches of pundits who were against this sort of punishment.

  “Does removing the criminal from the mind of the body also remove the spirit of the criminal from the body?”

  “This is cruel and unusual. The removed memories and personality are tortured in some cyber prison, a data dump kept secret, and when reunified with the body, the results are unpredictable.”

  “We have tens of thousands of people suffering and they don’t know why they are suffering. How can we, in a country that promotes tranquility and love, call that fair and just?”

  IV.

  The day before reunification, Anna cries and cries; weeping like a widow at a funeral.

  “What’s wrong?” you ask. “Tomorrow I’ll be the man you knew, always knew.…”

  She just cries.

  V.

  They come: the two government agents come in their gray smocks and their machines (a small metal box with blinking lights that you know your other half is stored in), hooking up the contacts and electrodes and putting the helmet and visors over you. They do this right in your home, sitting you down in the living room. They are quick and efficient and seem genuinely concerned for your well-being.

  “It might hurt a bit,” one says.

  “I’m ready.”

  “We mean after,” says the other.

  VI.

  …and when it is done, when I am a whole, when I am with you and you are with me and there are no more secrets: then comes the pain.

  The pain of five years inside the mainframe.

  Five years of digital anguish.

  Five years without a body, and reliving certain memories over and over in virtual hell.

  Memories of my alleged crime.

  “No,” I say, pulling the helmet and wires off my head. “For that? Just for that, I was made to suffer?”

  “Law is the law, pal,” one of the agents says.

  “Fives years,” I say, “because of that?” I say this to Anna, my wife, my darling loving wife. She is standing behind me. I turn to her. She is crying again.

  “Anna,” I ask, “you condemned me for that? Because I didn’t want to stay, I didn’t want a child, I didn’t want to be a married man and tied down to this life?” I s
ay to her.

  I rise.

  She backs away.…

  One of the agents grabs my arm. “Easy, buddy.”

  “You filed a criminal complaint because I didn’t love you,” I say to her, resigned now to the pain, the exile, the truth.

  “You were going to leave me, alone and childless!” she whimpers, her back against the wall.

  “It was a choice I made,” with great emptiness. “A choice.”

  “Free will doesn’t make a tranquil society,” one agent says, “you know that.”

  “Happy home, happy family,” says the other. “It works.”

  “We lived in peace and bliss,” says my wife. “For five years.…”

  “There was never any love because I didn’t love you,” I tell her. “Maybe I acted that way, when I wasn’t whole, because I knew no other way. But that means it was all a lie. Don’t you see? I was half a person, I was.…”

  “They said you’d be better!” Anna cries. “You were supposed to have learned!”

  “Ma’am,” one agent says to Anna, “you can file an extension on your complaint. Looks like five years in censorship wasn’t long enough for him to get it.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, hands up. “No, all is fine. I’ve learned.” I smile as best as I can, hoping there is a twinkle in my eye.

  “Do you want to be downloaded back, buddy?” says an agent, gesturing to the metal case with the memory cell. “Return to a half-head life?”

  “No,” I say softly. “No.”

  “You going to be happy?”

  Nod. Smile. “Happy as a clam in the ocean.”

  “Then go hug your wife.”

  I move to Anna. I hold out my arms. I smile.

  “Tell her all is fine.”

  “Anna…I didn’t know what I was saying. I was…I.…”

  “The shock of re-unification does that sometimes,” says an agent.