by John Scalzi
He looked at the two kids before him, with their packs piled high, and remembered the time before the rivalry, when he and Wil had climbed for the sheer joy of it. He didn’t know how to put it into words without sounding like a doddering old fool. He didn’t try.
“You know, you can’t climb up there loaded up like that. The heat will cause you to pass out.”
“Aw no, man. We don’t have to worry about that. See?” He pointed to a small hole on the side of his neck. Once it was pointed out to him, John saw similar holes all around the kid’s body. “Personal air conditioning units. Imbedded in the skin. This way, we can walk around all day without the heat getting to us. You still need to drink water to keep hydrated, but you don’t have to worry about heat stroke.”
“And you thought the flying kitty was cheating?”
“Hey, look at you, man. You did that whole genetic enhancement thing. I’m not saying you can’t improve yourself; I’m just saying you better actually climb to the peak, or it doesn’t count.” He looked off at Vintarini, his eyes getting lost in his future glory. “I’m going to be the first.”
“We said we’d draw straws once we got to the top,” the other one said from behind him.
“Well, yeah. But once we get to the top,” he said.
They’d tear each other apart. Assuming those implants didn’t overheat and leak Freon underneath their skin. Physical alterations had a way of malfunctioning. Soon after his battle with Wil, John’s knees started going weak. The genetics company claimed that his regenerated toes proved that the enhancements functioned properly. It must be something psychological, they said, and that wasn’t covered under the warranty. It wasn’t psychological. John knew it, and he knew the Warranty Agent knew it. It wasn’t worth the fight, though; the only thing John couldn’t do was climb, and he didn’t have the desire to do that anymore.
Thankfully, the pain didn’t get worse.
It was a small price to pay for aging; especially when compared to Wil’s current condition. John hadn’t seen him in person since the trial, and the patient in the hospital barely resembled his old rival. His face had sunken in to the point of being skeletal. An oxygen tube burrowed into his nose. IVs protruded from his arms. Monitors bleep-bleeped in the background.
Wil’s mind was slipping; at first, he didn’t recognize John. His eyes slid past John’s face without even the slightest flinch. John sat there, watching his old friend and rival look around the room through the haze of delirium. A soccer game on TV. A gaze out the window. Back to John’s face.
Wil’s eyes squinted down. His jaw tightened. He was back in the present. When he spoke, it was the raspy equivalent of wet sand between your toes.
“I’m sorry.”
Wil’s hand made a grasping motion, but he didn’t have the strength to move his arm. He needed a hand to hold. John gave him his, and the grasping stopped.
“I made it…to the peak. I was…the first,” he continued. “The only one…to make it. Not you…not anyone.”
“The photo was fake,” John said. It might have been the delirium talking, but John didn’t think so.
“Yes. I dropped the camera…in the lava…when I was coming down…the flow changed…a new eruption. I faked a replacement…needed to show the world…didn’t think anyone would notice. I needed the world to see…to see that I’d conquered it.”
Something shifted inside of John as he heard these words. That deteriorating shell of a man left him feeling empty, wondering why he’d ever cared.
He watched the two kids hiking off towards Vintarini, pursuing the hollow goal of being the first to reach the peak of a mound of rock that had existed before any of them, and would continue to exist long after they were gone. A goal that didn’t benefit anyone but themselves.
They wouldn’t be the first, but he didn’t care. Let them have the record.
He leaned back, and admired the view, lost in the awe-inspiring beauty that nature provided.
This Is the Way the World Ends
Catherynne Valente
Prophecies are serious business. That’s the problem. In order to maintain their lifestyles, prophets must never for a moment be ridiculed or disbelieved. If they did not foretell grand events, epic battles, noble sacrifices, lightning and heroes at the end of the world, who would pay for their monthly shipments of absinthe, their personal masseuses—so necessary to soothe the psychic musculature—their first class tickets to various inspiring locales? And a prophet without such things could hardly be trusted to predict his own lunch. If he was any good, his customers would happily resurface his foyer with Italian marble and fill his hot tubs with champagne. Who would not, to know the future?
But certainly, as a clever reader, you will have spotted the conflict of interest. No one wishes to pay for preposterous predestinations. No one wants to believe the future a silly sort of universe. And so prophets, to protect their estates, their diamond faucet fixtures and platinum dinner bells, cloak their every if/then scenario in gravity, in grandeur, in melodrama of the highest degree. Of course, they must also be correct, so complex systems of symbology were developed by the guild in order that they should be the prophets and also the judges of prophecies.
•••
No, no, the guild says, Rolandiran was not incorrect when he said the black albatross would descend upon the lion in the autumn of 2017, and lo, all would cry out in agony. The black albatross symbolized the British Prime Minister, the lion, the unfortunate MP so-and-so, 2017 was an allegory for 2021, and the agony was a highly piquant metaphor for the parties held all over Wales when the MP resigned. You see, he was right all along!
But what they see, what they truly see—these are great secrets.
This sort of thing has been going on more or less since prophecy was invented. Truthfully, no prophecy anywhere along the line can be wholly trusted. I am here to pull the curtain away, to reveal the trick, to tell you how the world ends.
They said Ragnarok. They meant a particularly nasty tantrum thrown by an atomic blast.
They said Fenrir. They meant a genetically altered science fiction writer, pumped with steroids, chlorophyll, and Coke Zero.
They said Sleipnir, the Eight-Legged Steed. They meant a sentient Mattel-brand UniPegaKitten, Patent 674561A9, part of the RealPalz line, which once belonged to one Madison Suzanne Keller of Dayton, Ohio, Age 9.
They said Odin, His Breastplate Gleaming, Wielding the Great Spear Ygg. They meant Wil Wheaton. In a clown sweater. But, in fairness, he did wield a spear.
The world can’t end and keep its game face on at the same time. Things start to slip. The center cannot hold. Chaos isn’t the word, really. Chaos is a serious word. A prophetic word. It’s more like sense of any kind giving up and heading to its country house. I’m going to tell you how it happens. You won’t believe me, but you’ll have to pay my fee anyway—guild rules. And then we can talk about my foyer.
You see, kids, there used to be this thing called television. It was an electrified box that received broadcast signals. People used it for many things, but mainly they were a kind of hearth, a light around which the family gathered. On the box stories were projected, and actors were people who pretended to be characters in those stories. They dressed in strange clothes, said strange words, and were beautiful—that was important, more important than you might think. People treated actors like angels, because they told all the stories that made life feel real and possible, and angels have to be beautiful. Sometimes the stories took place in the past, sometimes they took place in the future.
•••
Wil Wheaton was in one of the stories that took place in the future when he was young. I remember it—but only barely, and only because I am very old. Anyway, Wil Wheaton was so beautiful and his stories so strange that after he and television both expired messily in the first skirmishes of the Mommy Wars, a portion of his cells were saved, in hopes that those electrified stories might one day be allowed under law once more.
&n
bsp; All this, perhaps, you know. It is history. The rest is prophecy.
A science fiction writer, known only as the Scalzi, will live to see the second great conflict of the age—though he will be a very old man when that war begins. Being old and decrepit, he will quickly lose all four limbs in the Battle of Silicon Valley, but will have them all replaced so that he may continue to fight the good fight against the Mainframe. Eventually, his head will be changed out in similar fashion, and his new body fueled with the fell substances I have already mentioned, along with methamphetamines and most especially the sickly brown chemical made illegal during the Mommy Wars.
•••
Those horrid fluids will warp and pickle his visage, turning the Scalzi green, his ears long, his muscles enormous. And though he will be but a grotesque pea-soup colored shadow of a human, the Scalzi will remain a good man, and resurrect Wil Wheaton along with several other actors, a few football players, and one heavy metal guitarist in a captured Mainframe laboratory. The Scalzi will not be able to help that our generation did not preserve great strategists or warriors.
The Scalzi will raise the infant Wil Wheaton as his own, and using his own foul chemicals along with the livers of the other actors, accelerate Wil Wheaton’s growth until he becomes a man. For awhile, all will be well, as the football players stand proud and strong, and the guitarist composes the great ballads of the war, which would be immortal if this were not the end of the world I am predicting. The Mainframe will detonate some time after that, and for a time the land will know peace.
What happened next will be the kitten’s fault.
Mattel’s RealPalz line of toys will be introduced just before the outbreak of the war—life-sized, whimsical mechanical animals with huggable real fur, brushable cornsilk tails, and a Mainframe Brand neural network programmed to love, teach, and rear your child just like a real parent, with the added benefit of horns, hooves, wings, scales, detachable lasers, and many other exciting options. Madison Suzanne Keller of Dayton, Ohio, will own a UniPegaKitten by the name of Donut.
The RealPalz will form a terrifying calvary line during the war—that guitarist will sing the lays of Muffin the Griffin, Stinks the Dragon, and Cocoa the Bearasaur. In the aftermath of the struggle, herds of RealPalz will roam the American wasteland, howling at the moon and hunting human survivors. Woe to him who encounters Donut the UniPegaKitten at night in the Ohio Burn Zone!
And yet, just such a thing will Wil Wheaton suffer. Donut will pounce on him out of the shadows.
“Play with me!” Donut will plead, her synapses crying out with unfulfilled directives. All through the war she will have suffered alone without her human owner. “Cuddle me! Come on, Madison, don’t you miss your friend?”
And Wil Wheaton will take pity on the creature. He will roll about with the kitten, scratching behind her ears and rubbing her huge tummy. Every night while the Scalzi smokes the pipe of the satisfied veteran on his porch, Wil Wheaton will go out into the Burn Zone to meet his friend, who will believe with all her solar-powered heart that he is a 9 year old girl with blonde hair, a preference for magenta, and a weakness for cupcakes.
“Madison,” Donut will whisper one night, planting the seed of the end of all, “let’s be together forever. Someday you will grow up, and go to college, and not want to play with me anymore. But I can merge my neural network with your adorable pink brain, and you can be part of me, and we can live forever.”
And Wil Wheaton will be tempted, because he will have already died once and will not want to do it again. “I don’t think my clone-father, the Scalzi, would approve,” he will say, to be polite.
But Donut’s dark depths will grow angry and full of hate. Every night she will say to Wil Wheaton: “Madison, soon you will be grown up, and you will throw me away. Please stay with me. I love you. With my wiring installed in you, you will be able to grow your own unicorn horn, or even wings. We will move to Canada, where there is still water, and hide until everything is better again and you can be in your electrified stories once more.”
And finally, because he will fear dying, and because he will want to live long enough to be a beautiful angel of stories again, and because all sons balk against their fathers, and because he will truly love Donut, who did not care that he used to be on television, only that he was her wuddly-bear, Wil Wheaton will let the UniPegaKitten perform surgery on him with her claws, and he will only bleed a little.
When he wakes, Wil Wheaton will know only hunger. For destruction, for flesh. Donut will not understand why—but her wartime programming will underlie all her hardware, and overwhelm Wil Wheaton’s meager cloned brain. To make him happy, Donut will play along.
“If you truly want to attack the Scalzi’s homestead, I will be your steed, Madison,” she will say.
“If it will make you smile to wage war on the wetware swarm,” she will purr.
“If it will be a quality bonding activity to incinerate Ohio,” she will whinny, “I have a Mattel Brand Xtreme Atom SuperCore.”
And all Wil Wheaton will say will be: “I have no armor.” And he will growl it, his eyes blazing green with Mainframe status lights.
Donut will smile. Donut will have exterminated all of Madison Suzanne Keller’s other toys already, and kept scalps. She will give him the face of Scribbles the Clown to wear emblazoned on his chest, and the spear of Daisy, Madison’s Elfigator RealPal, and together they will go forth to the house of his father.
The Scalzi will hear them coming. He will strap on his old war armor—only a little tight, after all these years. He will take up his trusted shield, his noble axe, and knowing the laws of narrative as he will, the Scalzi will realize that it is his son on the horizon, for fathers and sons very often end thus. He will be sorry. But he will see the enemy light in his son’s eyes and know it can be no other way.
Once, twice, three times the two will tilt, but neither shall have the advantage, for the Scalzi’s limbs will still sizzle with his hideous morphogenic cocktail. Finally, Wil Wheaton will activate the Xtreme Atom SuperCore in Donut’s heart, the madness of foreign software blazing in him.
“I love you, Wil,” Donut will say, her eyes brimming with Mattel Brand TruTears, sanity returning to her mind for one terrible instant. But he will not hear her.
As they clash, the steroids, Coke Zero, and certain highly classified strains of methamphetamines that would burn through steel, will react extremely poorly with Donut’s heart, and when the blast hits the caustic, poisonous earth of the Ohio Burn Zone, it will not only obliterate the American Midwest, part of the Rockies, and the Atlantic Seaboard, but will begin a series of reactions that will ultimately boil the seas and crack the earth along the prime meridian.
The world will not end with a bang or a whimper, but a meow. I told you you wouldn’t believe me. But if you stiff me on my fee the guild will audit your finances, garnish your wages, and take it out in fingers and toes. As I said, prophecy is serious business. But I have given you the genuine future, stripped of the insistence on gravitas and glory, told plain, told simply, and told true. Thank me or don’t—you have to have a thick skin in this business. By the time you know I’m right, it won’t really matter.
The complex identity of the archetypal hero, a fictional treatise with unicorn pegasus kittens
Rachel Swirsky
At dawn, the volcano spat a stream of ash into the sky. Black haze drifted across the plain, battering Wil’s face as he tried to sleep, insinuating between his eyelashes and coating his tongue.
Beside him, the unicorn pegasus kitten stirred, beating its ash-covered wings furiously. More black clouds whooshed into the air.
The hellscape was thick with heat and sulfur. Lava hissed and bubbled. Basalt formations cast weird, sinister shadows.
Squinting through the grit, Wil ascended his mount and urged the beast into the air. They swung upward, circling above the plain. Amid the geological chaos, Wil couldn’t hope to spot his enemy. Still, he soothed his impatience—i
f there was one thing he knew about the Scalzi, it was that he couldn’t remain quiet for long.
•••
Before setting down on this fiery planet, Wil had attended one last appointment with his analyst.
She sat on her sterile, grey chair, in her sterile, grey office. The asymmetrical, plunging neckline of her turquoise dress showcased her cleavage magnificently. Black curls cascaded across her back, contrasting with her pale skin and wide, dark eyes.
“I don’t know who I am today,” Wil said by way of greeting. She gestured him to sit.
“Heroes never do.” Her alien accent was a soothing blend of Israel and Eastern Europe. “Identities are fraught. They blend together—the people we are, the roles we play, the men we wish to become. Who’s to say any of us know our true natures? But heroes confront their existential uncertainty, bringing their chosen identities into battle like talismans.”
She’d settled into a comfortable rapport with Campbell and Jung these days, ever since her vocabulary had extended past flirtation and fainting fits. She’d get a real uniform soon if she could avoid any more plots about nudity at weddings.
“I feel like things are always in flux,” Wil said. “My first kiss was with this girl, you know, just a normal teenager. Then she turns into a bear. A literal bear. ‘I’m a shape-shifter,’ she says. Where does that leave me? Where’s my sense of permanence?”
The analyst shifted—position, not shape—and widened her limpid eyes. “Who do you want to be?”
Wil shrugged. “More than some dumb kid.”
“Do you think you’re a dumb kid?”
“People say I am.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
Wil frowned. “Aren’t you supposed to be able to read my emotions?”
Sighing, the analyst shook her head. Black curls rippled. “People who know nothing about psychology think a therapist’s job is to intuit other people’s emotions. But the point of analysis isn’t to give people answers. It’s to help people find answers for themselves.”