by Neil Clarke
Rokri reaches out and grabs her shirt, yanking her back onto solid ground. She kneels and splutters, coughing, trying to catch her breath.
“Cornered.” Rokri says.
She looks up and despairs.
At least twenty machines are encroaching, flanked by swarms. The swarms taunt them, gathering into facsimiles of her and Rokri.
“There!” Sephine yells, pointing. To the left, behind two small single-passenger craft, stands a Leseum ship. A symbol on its fuselage tells them it’s ‘fold-capable. Their escape.
Sephine doesn’t think; she just fires. One, two shots, each at the forelegs of the two ships between them and the advancing Fractured. The ships’ noses burst into blue fire and tip forward, crumpling against each other with a cacophonous groan. A few Fractured machines underneath are crushed. But the swarms just glide through the flaming wrecks unfettered.
“Come on!” Rokri pulls her to her feet, and yet again they are running. More explosions, closer this time, in quick succession.
“It’s trying to stall us, destroying every ship. Faster!”
They pass under a dormant Fractured craft and emerge into open space. The Leseum ship is just ahead of them now, barely ten meters away.
Sephine runs towards the ship first, faster than she’s ever run, and just as she reaches its access ramp, she hears Rokri cry out.
She darts up the ramp, slams her fist into the entrance pad, and turns as the aperture opens.
Rokri is down, screaming. A spatter of blood paints the floor by his right arm. Behind him, Fractured drones are advancing, firing into any ship within range.
“Get up!” she screams at him. “Rokri, get up!”
He looks up at her, dazed. His right arm is gone up to the elbow. The Fractured fire at the floor around him.
He rolls onto his back, fires at the Fractured. He begins to scramble backward, instinctively putting out his right arm for support, but collapses onto the stump. His scream is almost as loud as the explosions.
“Get up and run!”
And he does, but he’s going too slowly, and Sephine can’t help but feel that all is lost. A shot hits the ship, sending fizzing sparks and tongues of flame fanning from the point of impact. She shrieks and dives forward, rolling clumsily down the ramp, and then she’s up and suddenly her brother is in her arms, and one of them yells, “Enlink!” and she doesn’t have time to wonder if it was she who said it or him, but she feels a connection, their neurowebs linking together, and everything goes silent.
When she opens her eyes, head still resting on her brother’s shoulder, Sephine finds herself in a room she vaguely remembers.
The room is spacious and semicircular. The straight far wall is a floor-to-floor window. Beyond it an ocean fades into the distance. Overlooking the glittering water is a city, tumbling down a steep incline to a bay, riven by a snaking, waterfall-fed river, the waterfall cascading from a cliff some way above the city’s highest crest.
Leseum Blue. But not, too: in the corner of her eye, perfectly in focus but impossible to look at directly, the word LINKED flashes in violet.
She becomes aware of a dull, regular thunk. Behind her brother, a hunched, vague figure is beating a solid metal box with its bare fists. The figure pounds and pounds. Its hands are pulped and bloody, fingers bent and cracked and broken around a glut of gristle and bone. And yet it goes on punching, uttering occasional grunts as if the pain were just an itch.
It’s almost a man, almost a ghost. Almost formless, almost solid.
The windows open but no breeze follows.
Sephine and Rokri look at each other but say nothing. Looking down, she sees his right arm is completely intact.
A collared dove flutters in from the city, swoops around the room, and comes to perch on the figure’s shoulders, riding the troughs and peaks of its punches.
— You’re a bit late, the dove says. Its beak doesn’t move.
“Del?” Sephine says, taking a step towards the box, the man, the bird.
— Yes, it’s me. Sort of. Well! Look at you two, eh?
The Vierendelen flaps its wings.
— All grown up and that. Not much better looking though. Must’ve got that from your father. Not that I ever met him.
Rokri speaks. “What is this?” He points to the figure, still occupied with its box. “And what’s that?”
— Oh, this is nothing fancy. Just a virtual environment. Your basic sandbox simulation, written into a tiny substrate deep, deep in your neurowebs. Each of your webs possesses half the code. And I’m just a part of it, so, sadly, I’m not the real Vierendelen—just a construct imbibed with its good looks and incomparable wit.
Another flutter of iridescent wings.
“And that thing?” Sephine nods at the figure.
— That thing, is the Fractured. Hey, it hasn’t been badmouthing me has it?
Sephine and Rokri exchange glances.
— Because if it has . . . well. Never mind. Look at it. It’s been doing that since it shot me.
The embodied Fractured ignores them. In fact, it doesn’t seem remotely aware that they’re even here. Then Sephine remembers—she’s dreamt of this place before.
“The coordinates,” she says. “They’re in the box?”
— Of course they are. We’re here to make a copy and extract them.
“Are we dead?”
— What? Sephine, is he always this dim?
Sephine just looks bemused.
— Of course not, you silly thing. The Fractured aren’t stupid enough to kill you. Outside this environment, in the real, barely a millisecond has passed. I’m not sure exactly, but certainly no more than that. So no, you’re not dead, but either way it’s probably best if we just get that box open sharpish. Oh, you should also know the Leseum ship you’re about to embark has linked up with the Commanders’ access codes sent to it by triggering this simulation, and is powering up its engines. It’s just awaiting a course, which it will receive the moment we open the box.
“Will we make it?”
— What, home? That depends. You should do. The ship’s got a pretty good ‘fold-capable engine, so the moment you get out of the planet’s gravity well you should be home and dry. I also recommend you destroy the Leviathan before you make your escape. One shot to the base engine should be enough to do it—the ship’s firepower is formidable for its size. Hang on . . . oh! Would you look at that. It’s got needleheads!
“What about the others?” Rokri asks.
— Ah. That’s a bit of a gamble I’m afraid. There’s a chance the Fractured will just leave them be, but it’s not likely. Therefore, I suggest one of you stays behind. When you exit the Leviathan, one of you can use the escape pod in the ship’s rear and fly it back to the Vierendelen, to New Leseum. The logic here is that, as we’re merely extracting a copy of the coordinates, meaning another remains in your neurowebs, the Fractured still won’t risk killing one of you. If it does, the box will disappear, along with the coordinates. The code maintaining this simulation will be corrupt and incomplete. Don’t want all this here muggin’s work to go to waste, do we?
As if in response, the Fractured goes on pounding.
— But you can battle that one out amongst yourselves. Best if we just get this box open.
Sephine stifles a laugh; the Vierendelen hops on its scrawny legs and turns, cocks its head, and gives the Fractured a sharp peck on the head. The Fractured—mid-swing, arm up, ruined fist clenched—stops dead. The box whirrs, and opens.
Inside the box, on a low shelf, sits a pebble.
— Us ships, the Vierendelen says, almost ruefully.—We have, ironically, a rather limited imagination, don’t you think? A pebble. How quaint. Well, go on; take it, quickly. I can’t hold him off for long.
Sephine walks over to the Fractured, which is now a bizarre tableau of desperation. She reaches into the box, and looks up at its face. She can’t quite focus on it. It occurs to her that it is indescribable, except for th
e eyes: silver-in-silver and whorled, following her hand as she takes the coordinates. She wonders for a moment if it wants a face, but that its very nature repels individuality; a symptom of hive-mindedness.
The moment she plucks the pebble from the box, the box slams shut.
— Right. Bye then.
“Wait—!”
But the room is already dissolving, effervescing, dividing into strips of matter that disperse into ciphers and code. The window and the view beyond fades into white, and the Fractured’s fist swoops down and slams into the box with a brand new anger, a determined fury, and just before she finds herself back in the Leviathan, Sephine hears the Vierendelen say,—And if you call her that one more time . . .
Reality folds open like petals of fire. Barely a second has passed. Sephine is immediately aware of the surrounding chaos, as if she’s merely blinked, hadn’t experienced the simulation at all.
Fractured machines all over the hangar busy themselves destroying ships and a clutch of them are still advancing on Sephine and Rokri. The air is acrid and becoming thick with smoke.
She shoves Rokri up the ramp hard. His face is ashen. He looks dazed. What’s left of his right arm hangs limply at his side.
And Sephine, amid the chaos, tries to decide what to do. Folding to Leseum space would get Rokri there almost instantly. But would he make it to Leseum Blue once there? Or would he bleed out?
He needs help fast. New Leseum’s infirmary, oddly, seems even further away than Leseum Blue.
There’s no time to think just yet.
Sephine shoves Rokri into the ship, slams the entrance pad by the aperture, and fires blindly into the oncoming machines. The ramp retracts too quickly for them. The door irises shut. The fervor outside becomes dull.
Sephine makes her decision.
When the Fractured see the ship rise from the hangar floor, most are unsure about how to proceed. Directive dictates the targets must not be killed. They must be contained. But destroying the ship will surely eliminate them. The Fractured are confused by their failure. They are not used to it.
The ship rises above the smoke and pivots, surveying the smashed machines below like a scavenger bird. As if realizing it is not under fire, it heads lazily towards the center of the hangar. The Fractured clamor beneath it, helpless, none brave enough to fire.
The ship is not so hesitant.
Projectiles scream from the barrels of weapons embossing its fuselage. The first shot turns a clutch of Fractured into smoking slag. The second—a much more powerful weapon—fizzes through the air and collides with the inner shell of the Leviathan itself, the blossoming explosion leaving a huge, jagged tear, admitting a burst of sunlight from outside. The entire Leviathan shakes, sending surviving Fractured falling over each other, ships losing their balance and crashing to the hangar floor. The air pressure drops violently, conjuring a mini-hurricane—drone-swarms swirl around it in metal dust-devils.
The third weapon is a needlehead. Deployed as the ship tears toward the rip in the Leviathan’s skin, it drops like a shadow; a black, roiling pin that blurs the air it as it descends furiously toward the engine at the hangar’s base.
Before the needlehead meets the engine, the ship has slipped through the hole and out.
The needlehead plays havoc with the quantum. The Leviathan’s engine shudders, its shine fades and bursts like a strobe light. The bowl in which it sits begins to glow.
The hangar floor buckles first, pulled down to the base as the gravitational engine collapses. Ships tumble like small toys into the raging hub of energy.
The outer surface buckles next. The black towers and dishes of the city that is no city snap as they meet each other, and soon the surface is as bowled as the great machine’s underside.
By the time the engine reaches critical mass, engulfing the Leviathan in a colorless blast of fission, the tiny Leseum ship is long gone, hurtling low over the desert floor, westwards, towards the wreckage of the warship the Vierendelen.
As it nears the city, the ship appears to give birth.
A tiny pod bleeds smoke as it separates from the main body. Parachutes deploy. Back-thrusters erupt into life. It bobbles down to the half-city of New Leseum as, above, the ship pitches, groans, belches fire, and goes up, and up.
The sky darkens. Gravity ebbs.
The course is plotted.
The pilot sits in the cockpit, breathing deeply, dazed, face pale, and looks at a rear-view screen. The cross-hatched pattern of New Leseum is fading. The Vierendelen casts a sharp shadow over four little dots, dots housing fifty thousand souls. Souls they saved.
A retina scanner on a mechanical arm sweeps down and awaits input, blinking softly.
The ship says—in a voice completely unlike the Vierendelen’s—that it is safe to slip into the ‘fold.
The engines crackle.
Space outside pulses, the ship wobbles, and the pilot thinks, just for a moment, that this is what it must feel like to have wings.
About the Author
Jack Schouten was born in Kristiansand, Norway, and was brought up in Surrey. He read Journalism and Creative Writing at Middlesex University London, specializing in science fiction, and his work has appeared in Jupiter Magazine, the North London Literary Gazette, and Shoreline of Infinity. He lives and works in London, and can be reached on Twitter at @JackSchouten.
Against the Stream
A Que
1
The illness came so suddenly nothing could be done. When he woke it was yesterday.
At first he thought the problem was with his phone’s display, but then everything that happened had happened the day before.
His boss yelled at him because he hadn’t finished his reports. Sentence for sentence, word for word the same. That night he went home to an empty house, confused. Feeling tired, he got into bed and fell asleep. When he woke, time had moved back another day.
He didn’t finish the reports this time, either.
It was then that he finally understood. While the world continued to move along with the flow of time, he had turned and gone against the stream. Day-by-day, he was entering the backflow of time.
It was hard to get used to at first. His life had been painful, so the thought of a second time through was unpleasant. Over and over again he tried to stay up all night, tried to change course. Despite his best efforts, he found himself powerless to resist the undertow of exhaustion.
Walking into the office one day, he beat his boss bloody, trying to alter the timeline. After being sent to jail he woke up at home. When he got to work his boss was still sitting in the office waiting for him, uncaring—his beating wasn’t until tomorrow.
2
Eventually he got used to days like this, and life and work went back to normal. It was around then that Xiao Wei left him to live with the other man. Although he had thought it would hurt, it wasn’t all that bad. Having been through it before, he just felt numb. No matter how deeply his memories might hurt, it was always all better when he woke.
Six months later—or, six mother earlier—a new person appeared in his house. “I think we should get divorced,” he heard himself say to his wife. Only thirty-two, her face was marked with wrinkles and she was beginning to slouch. She stared at him blankly, and then nodded like she had the first time.
While his wife packed her things he stood by her side, watching. Six months had passed and she looked more like a stranger or an old friend than his wife. He didn’t think he would ever see her again, but thanks to the back flow of time they’d been reunited for their separation.
In the end, his wife left with her things. He stood on the stairs, watching the shrinking shape of her back in the slanting light of late afternoon, moving ever further away until it disappeared completely into the crowd. He’d watched her leave then too, thinking that was the end. But now he knew they’d be seeing each other again.
As expected, he woke to the smell of breakfast the next day.
“I’m goin
g to market,” she said, standing in the doorway with her back to him. “Go ahead without me. You should be getting to work.”
He nodded before realizing something was out of place. His wife often came home empty handed, without telling him where she’d gone. After she left he snuck over to the peephole. Instead of going out, she walked toward the staircase down the hall.
Tiptoeing after, he followed her all the way up to the roof.
He heard a soft sobbing—a familiar sound after so many years together.
So, he thought to himself, she knew about Xiao Wei all along.
3
He spent the day in a daze, wondering how she had found out. Just before getting off work, Xiao Wei sent him a text message: “Stay, don’t go.”
Staring at the screen, he wondered how many secrets were hidden in this tiny rectangle. Scalding hot in his hand, he felt the echo of the bomb that he’d set off the day before.
He started to delete their texts, their videos, their photos—until he realized it was pointless. He was going back to yesterday. In time his wife would forget the secret she had uncovered.
He shrugged his shoulders and put the phone back into his pocket.
One by one his co-workers left until he and Xiao Wei were the only ones still in the office.
Soon, the lights went dark row by row. She walked over in the dim light, leaning over to whisper things that made him blush.
That was Xiao Wei—charming and fearless, bringing light into even the darkest corners. He’d fallen for her so easily, surrendering himself so completely to desire he thought it was love—the second time he’d fallen in love.
But now, looking into her pretty face, his mind was filled not with lust or pleasure, but the memory of her abandonment into the arms of another man six months from now. He stood and looked down at her. Outside, cars drove past, sending flashes of light through the windows to catch across his glasses.