Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  Then the “LIVE” sign flickered on beside the studio door.

  And the music began.

  * * *

  It started, as always, with just Urchin’s voice. A wordless tone, like a bell tolling up from a bottomless echoing well. One pure note, ringing. Soon joined by another, blending richly in unison. Then another in harmony, looping over the others and holding to form a mystical chorus of one.

  This was how the Midnight Miracle Hour always started. A hypnotic wall of sound that tore down emotional barriers, spoke to the buried heart within. It was what he’d heard that first night, and every night since.

  Then came the drums, in heart-syncopating pulse. Deepening the trance, engaging the body with a primal rhythm that tickled, thrummed, and swayed. Susurrating through his bloodstream. Resonating in his metal bones.

  The keyboards that followed were ripples of dreams, chordal grace notes from the music of the spheres. Not quite melodies, but ghostly hints and flickers of every gorgeous melody there had ever been.

  And only then did Urchin’s voice lift up anew, with soaring unbridled power. The soul, with nothing held back. Every fear, every joy, every passion and hope unleashed with such fiery conviction that the whole rotten world melted away in that moment. Burned to shame, and beyond.

  As always, he felt unburdened, almost outside himself. Transported from his own deep well of pain and sorrow.

  It was the miracle that defined the hour. And even though it wasn’t midnight, this time, it entirely didn’t matter.

  It was always midnight here.

  But then came the thing he could not have expected. The thing that took him over the threshold he didn’t even know he had.

  The baby cooed.

  Such a tiny sound. But swathed in reverb and doused in glory, it pierced him like a saber carved from sunlight.

  It was the sound of innocence.

  It looped over and over again until it folded into the fabric of the music. The sound changed. Brightened. Like before Urchin had been playing behind a thick curtain and someone had finally peeled it away to reveal its full glory.

  The sound surged over the speakers. Jax heard it both inside and outside the house.

  Jax saw himself at twelve years old, naked and weeping, covered in blood. Back when he still thought tears mattered. Back before the war, and the bombs, tore the world apart.

  They’d made him kill his friend Tucker. All the children in the squad had spent the last four days running, sparring, being kept awake until they started to hallucinate. Given barely any food or water. Jax was always in the front of the line. The fastest. The strongest. The one able to endure with the least water. Tucker was one of the worst. So they decided to cull him, and gave Jax the honors.

  It wasn’t the cruelty of the memory that bothered Jax. There had been worse memories before and after.

  It bothered him that Tucker hadn’t screamed when Jax put his hands around his throat.

  He just whispered, “I’m sorry,” before he closed his eyes and let death take him. Like Tucker knew he was the lucky one.

  A monster had been waiting inside all of them, and the genetic modifications that became popular in the last half-century just made it easier for that monster to come out. Jax’s nanny had told him the world had been less cruel once, before technology made the rich immortal, and superintelligent machines designed algorithms to keep everyone else in poverty forever.

  Girls with cherub cheeks could grow into old women with permanent smiles. Little boys could become men who didn’t have to either permanently augment themselves for one of the perpetual wars or spiral into homelessness with no way to escape.

  But Jax had trouble believing that.

  Urchin’s music dipped into Jax’s memory, and it touched the weeping boy. He opened his eyes and met the eyes of present Jax. The boy’s eyes were blue and flecked with gold, before the injections made them black; and he looked around wildly, searching for the source of the music. But soon the rhythm took him and he climbed to his feet.

  Inside his head, a little boy covered in blood was dancing to an impossible music.

  In the living room, Delta screamed.

  Jax broke away from the image of the little boy and came back to reality. He grabbed one of the knives from his belt and rushed down the kitchen hallway into the room.

  Delta lay on the living room floor, next to one of the boarded-up windows. He peeked through one of the slats and saw nothing but the barrier. He glanced over at one of the television feeds TechX had installed on the wall and saw people gathering by the river, as they always did during the Midnight Miracle Hour.

  It was strange to see them in daylight, though. It made the nanites in Jax’s blood tick with the waiting. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

  But the music was still playing, both through the internal and external speakers, and the young child inside of him continued to dance.

  Jax glanced back down at Delta and saw that she was smiling. The corner of her lips upturned, mouth twitching to the rhythm of the music.

  It wasn’t a scream. It had been a laugh. With Delta, they just mostly sounded the same.

  Jax dropped his knife and picked her up. She was soft in his arms, and when he brought her close to him she placed her hands on his shoulders. Like he had seen ladies do in the old television programs. It was difficult to think of her as anything that had ever been human, but something in her eyes had changed. A streak of blue softening the edges of the black. A little crinkle of the nose.

  He danced with her across the floor. A clumsy waltz from a man who had never danced in his life, and a monstrous woman without legs. They moved across the dust and scattered bits of trash, down hallways with busted walls and broken mirrors. Once back in the living room he spun her around until she laughed again. She pretended to bite his neck with her huge fangs, which made Jax laugh too.

  As the dance continued Jax dipped her low, another kind of thing he’d only seen on television. He lowered her head almost to the ground, her legless waist pressed into his. Her hair would’ve swept the floor if she hadn’t burnt it all off long ago.

  She had a look on her face like he’d dipped her head up into the stars.

  Her eyes rolled up in her head. She spasmed in his arms as the music of the Miracle Hour swirled around them. He didn’t realize she was dying until she went still and became an odd heaviness in his arms.

  He kissed her on the forehead and laid her gently on the couch with her arms crossed across her chest.

  TechX watched him from the hallway. She had her packs strapped around her waist and one of her little combat drones following close behind. She walked over to Delta and pressed her fingers against her pulse, just to make sure she was dead

  “I need to go get formula,” she said. “I’ll bury her when I come back.”

  Jax thought he might see the person that TechX used to be, like he had seen with Delta and inside of himself. But when TechX turned toward him he only saw her. Her fanned-out limbs and shining eyes set in a hard face.

  “You’re not an ‘it,’” Jax said.

  TechX looked at him like a question.

  “You’re not like the rest of us. You’ve convinced yourself you’re a monster, but you’re exactly who you’re supposed to be.”

  The little boy inside of Jax reached out for TechX. And he did too. The music spiraled out from his fingertips. It moved like sparks across his skin to hers. He’d never allowed himself to dream of touching her like this, hands against her cheek.

  In the first six months after they found each other out in the wastelands, they’d slept facing each other, always about ten feet apart. Jax kept a weapon in an extended arm and one of TechX’s killing arms was held out toward him. Sometimes they’d hear a noise out in the dark, and they’d bolt awake. Jax’s weapon extended. TechX’s arm out, blade whirring. Then they’d realize they weren’t trying to kill each other, lower their weapons, and go back to sleep with a joke or uneasy laughter.r />
  They fit well together. Maybe in another lifetime they’d have met on a dating app or accidentally bumped into each other on the hyperloop. Leaned across the empty seat respectfully dividing them during a movie and kissed. Moved into a cramped room together they could barely afford and joked about how one day they’d have to pay rent to look at the sky.

  But they had never been able to bridge the gap they first created. Even when they stopped pointing weapons at each other, they hadn’t dared.

  Jax had come close enough to TechX to see a golden metallic honeycomb pattern shone underneath the surface of her skin. He’d never noticed that before. And he’d never noticed that the little notches that went down her collarbone, the place where cords used to plug in before the skin resealed over them, looked like the centers of flowers.

  When their eyes met, and the music flowed in between them, he saw her as a child affixed in his mind’s eye. Even before all the modifications, she had a sharp face and the scowl of an older woman. Her name used to be Emma, which she hated, because it reminded her of tart apples and washcloth rags. Before she could walk she despised the way her body seemed to confine her. How she only had two arms and two legs, and all of it so fragile. Nothing like the powerful war drones that roared across her family’s tiny shack, or the delivery androids with indestructible limbs and smooth faces like terrible angels.

  Emma knew she would not be like her friends who ended up selling their bodies on streets or in darkened underground parlors until their newness and the money ran out. She would not go to die on reality television or marry a man who expected her to become less than she already was, scrape pieces of herself away until she was a speck. Less than a ghost.

  Because she knew her true self. She was an emanate goddess, and wouldn’t stop working until she saw it emerge from her weak skin. Until Emma became TechX.

  Jax saw all of this. And he also saw that at some point between transforming her body and when the bombs fell, she had forgotten and told herself she was only a monster.

  Suddenly TechX whispered, “I’m sorry,” to Jax. And he knew that she saw the blood-spattered child inside him, just as he saw the child inside her.

  They kissed. Her multi-tooled limbs enfolded him. One of TechX’s combat drones raised its weapon and its dog-like ears perked up, but TechX waved it away and it sat down on the floor.

  Jax never knew what it’d be like to be kissed and held by a killing machine, how gentle it could be to be enfolded by metal and wires and sharpened blades. She was both flushed cool and warm at the same time, and her heartbeat, slower than a human’s, felt like it was melting into him.

  The little boy covered in blood and the girl with a sharp face danced together at the shimmering center of the music.

  The baby laughed through the speakers. The sound sent warm shockwaves through them.

  “Okay,” Jax said. “Maybe we can keep the baby.”

  TechX smiled, then laughed herself, and her eyes got that dreamy look of sudden inspiration. She took Jax’s hand and led him down the hallway. They passed the recording studio. The “LIVE” sign was still on, and through the gaps in the locked door emanated a strange blue light.

  They entered one of the empty rooms that might have once been a kitchenette or an office. It was empty except for trash that littered the floor.

  “Do you see it?” TechX asked, and at first he saw only the gray walls and dirty baseboards. But then TechX took his face in her hands and told him to look into her eyes.

  He saw her dream, as he’d seen her past. They could make the room into a nursery. Paint the gray walls with pink and blue stripes. Build a little crib and stuff it full of stitched rags to create a blanket. Maybe even create a mobile with rusty pipes and old lightbulbs and magazine cutouts on strings.

  For the first time since that night he’d been forced to kill Tucker, Jax began to cry. He bawled so hard that he had to sit down on the floor and it cracked underneath the force of him. TechX knelt beside him with a look of concern.

  He didn’t know how to explain that he wasn’t sad for himself. He was sad that their dreams had become so small.

  Still crying, with huge red globs of snot like blood coming down his face, he took TechX’s hands and showed her more.

  He showed her a window so that light poured through the room. Replaced the gray concrete floor with soft carpet. He made the crib bigger, set it into the nest of a tiny wooden ship like the baby was sailing out to sea. He painted constellations on the ceiling. Scattered well-loved books and toys everywhere.

  It had been a long time since he’d used his imagination, so most of what he saw was scraped together from magazines and television. But when TechX saw what he was doing, she understood. Her face brightened and she wiped the red snot from Jax’s face.

  In her mind’s eye she showed Jax they could do even more than that. They could renovate the entire house. Bring light into every room. Clear away the trash. Paint and restore everything until it shone. They could fill the kitchen full of food from their garden, and start working on an archive—not only a history of where they’d been and where they were going, but of every Midnight Miracle Hour that was to come.

  It was Jax’s turn. He showed her the kitchen not only full of food, but full of people. Him and TechX, Urchin and the baby. Other monsters like themselves. Cooking food and drinking wine, dancing and listening to music. All their weapons piled in a corner, forgotten. Every room bustling with laughter and stories. Every empty bedroom filled with furniture, well-loved clothes, stories.

  TechX climbed into Jax’s huge lap, and pressed her hands across his face. They went back and forth like that for a while. Each of them adding onto the vision. Creating new pieces of their shared dream.

  The music went on and on, a child’s laugh threading itself into their blood. They laughed, and then cried, and laughed some more.

  Then something new entered their shared mindspace. Something that did not come from either Jax or TechX. It was like a beam of light, transmuting everything it touched. It shot through the space in their minds, leaving behind a searing path for them to follow.

  Jax and TechX saw the outside of the studio. The little garden expanded. The single, sad little tree became upright, as if its broken spine had healed. And that one tree became many. A gazebo was built, and people came from all over and filled it with their wares, with whatever they had to offer. The sick and hungry came to feast, and be tended by medics or nursebots, and then they lay in the grass until their cold bodies became warm.

  They were listening to the infinite music. The music that danced in their bloodstream and up into the sky. Stretch the space in-between, wavicles that never touched but never ended. The music that made them realize everything, even themselves, could be healed.

  The Midnight Miracle Hour that went on forever.

  At some point TechX and Jax went hand in hand and walked through the house, seeing both reality and the dream transposed on top of each other. Jax knew it was a dream, could still see the trash and spiderwebs, the cracks in the wall like hairline fractures.

  Jax stopped and stared at a broken chair in the corner. One he’d tried to sit on and that had collapsed underneath him. The dream began to shimmer at the edges, disappearing, because for a moment he remembered he was just a monster. A big, hulking terror that had never made anything beautiful in his life.

  But then TechX squeezed his hand.

  “You’re not a monster,” she said. “You’re my friend.”

  Together, they went outside.

  At least a hundred people stood underneath the balcony, and the cameras showed there were more on the other sides of the house. He expected to hear shouting, the whir of combat drones, boots slapping into the mud, weapons being pulled from sheaths. Jax’s vision turned red and his blood roared before he realized they were just quietly standing there, listening to the Midnight Miracle Hour through the speakers.

  Several people came up to the balcony carrying packages, and Ja
x realized they’d left a pile at the bottom of the steps that kept growing larger. Powdered baby formula. Cloth diapers. Even a little black-skinned doll, missing one dark eye. They had heard the child inside the music. And had come to help.

  The music continued, and so did the dream inside it. And TechX and Jax weren’t just sharing the dream between them. The people below were, too. Everyone adding their own piece. Everyone showing each other what the world could be if it was infused with light.

  They saw the world beyond the studio, the barren plains transformed into rich valleys full of food and flowers. The hunter’s tents replaced by a city that sparkled white like ice. Dark priests swept out of the temples, sacrifices released from their crucifixes. The gods wiping blood from their mouths and asking repentance. Hospitals built instead of corpse pits. Homes for orphaned children instead of military training schools. War drones reassembled into teachers, officers, delivery drivers. The craters in the land created by bombs filled with water and fish. The sky cleared of pollution so that the sun touched them again.

  It wasn’t real yet, but they knew it could be. Motion, and color, and light returning to a world gone gray.

  TechX wrapped her arm around Jax’s shoulder. And although they’d never touched each other like that before, it felt right. It felt… comfortable.

  And that was how the monsters found God.

  D.R.G. Sugawara

  In these quantum states

  We live and die in exile

  Unobserved by time

  And dream of new worlds

  Writing our own tomorrows

  In the ash of now

  Walls can never hold

  All these past and future lives

  That pass unnoticed

  Boxes break open

  With all we have ever been

  And all we will be

  Our self-made castles

  Will endure beyond their ruin

  Unobserved by time

  WITH love and gratitude to my family, who never tired of guiding me out of the ruins. A huge debt of gratitude to George Sandison and the team at Titan—their enthusiasm for diversity (in all its forms) and openness to new ideas is a rarity among publishers. Thank you to Clive Barker for his grace, imagination, and enduring passion—a lighthouse ablaze in the fog-shrouded shoals. As all books are the sum of their source materials, this owes everything to the writers herein, along with Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Ursula LeGuin, Michael Moorcock, and M. John Harrison. And to Yoshika Nagata and Natasha—the artists behind the images in Out of the Ruins—their work continues to astound and inspire.