by Ian Redman
Her voice carried me to a sincerity that reminded me of the world I lost so long ago. The passionate gestures, angular jawline, body that had never been worked, and hair cut so ambiguously that I could hardly distinguish her masculine features from the feminine combined into this one ethereal being, refreshing us all of the sounds, imagery, and mystery that our lives once were, but never could be again. My mates and I stood on, peering into her ever bearing soul underneath that spotlight, envious of her freedom yet grateful all the same. When her lips met for that final time and only the fading instrumentation remained, we felt the shadows of reality creeping back into our peripherals.
We were on leave for the cycle, and knew the only way to spend it was at “The Brain”, which wasn’t the name of the venue, but the slang name of the metropolis that we frequented whenever we had the chance. We worked anytime else, in our respective positions on a military base that was busying itself with the construction of new and “innovative” signal shifters bound for a sector none of us had ever heard of. Tonight though, we were working on recapturing a time like the youthful days prior to our integration into the Cycle System.
This world was no longer such a pretty place for us. If it wasn’t the ever consuming urban filth of the metropolis, then it was the sprawling desertification and canyon wasteland that we used to roam under the canopy of trees. Once you are placed in the Institution of Progression though, your life is always clocked and monitored in the middle of the “badlands”. You can easily tell us “i-progs” from everyone else. We are larger, dress blandly, act with a reserved demeanour, and speak of time in measures of cycles as opposed to days or weeks. A cycle was 48 hours, and we would break that into quarters and halves. Our work was done in quarter cycles, or 12 hours, then a resting period for an eighth cycle, 6 hours, and then we repeat until completion of the assigned cycles. Ordinarily, we work 4-6 cycles in a row before receiving a cycle’s worth of leave.
The girl of our attention left the stage and disappeared into the backroom. Tonight was different for me. She saw to that. Many of the brainy girls dress in bizarre attire, which always reminds me of the fluttering insects that I used to capture as a young boy. I never touched them with my bare hands though, the girls or the insects. I have never been too keen on touching any sort of strange creature. In either case, the girl on stage dressed like the people I used to see in my grandmother’s fashion booklets, before the times of self-updating holo-tabs that the brainy women use to seek their ever changing directions of achieving an appealing appearance. The men of the city were strange when stood next to me as well. Most of them seemed twice as old, half the height, and a quarter of the muscle mass. I was told that growing up in cities stunt your growth, but I never really believed it until I began venturing to this particular metropolis during my leave cycles. They spoke almost entirely of money and women, and had no concern for scientific breakthroughs, communications, space, or warfare. Though, I suppose unlike most i-progs, I didn’t find much interest in those subjects either. Right now, the only subject that I can think of as interesting is that girl, and her song.
Advertisements filled the silence in-between the news or performances. There were several screens splattered throughout the bar, all with different images, but with a universal message. I didn’t see them all that often, so I sort of liked looking at the variety of them all. No, no. Tonight, I wasn’t to be distracted by such trivial things as conversation with the locals, advertisements, or games of any sort. I felt something that I hadn’t felt for a very long time when that girl was on stage. Leave cycles were always filled with some relief, but only because I wasn’t working, not because I ever really felt anything significant.
My mates mingled into a crowd of rather repulsive brain girls, wearing so much make-up and body glitter that I was challenged to discern their skin colour in the dim lights. My girl though, the one I was searching for, was void of any such things other than perhaps some darkening around the eyes, which I didn’t mind. I slowly made my way to the door that she disappeared into, leaning against the wall between the threshold and a smaller screen with only a company name running across it. “Saldrin Nation!!!” What the hell is that? Sometimes a topic, generally a product, would flash across the screens with generic upbeat music and you were supposed to talk about it. I would never partake, but enjoyed observing the absurdity of it all.
A sliver or two of a cycle had gone by, and I had ascertained by casual conversation with employees and eavesdropping that her name was Sara. Sara Q. She was young, probably around 24 or so. I was 24 when I first started working for the space communications department of the military. Her life has so much more potential than mine did at that age. I’m only 29 now, but as any i-prog will tell you, once you’re in the system, you will never escape. You will, like the technology, only progress a little more within your own dimensions, or become outdated and discarded.
The door began to open; it was her! She was small, smaller than she appeared to be on stage. Her hair was more combed down to one side than it was the other, obscuring much of her face. That tiny body produced such a powerful, gentle voice. What could I say to her? What did I want to say to her?
“Excuse me, miss?”
She didn’t hear me, and started for the exit. I followed until were we outside. Fear crept up inside of me. The city was looming and dark, the neon lights lining the streets offered only a blurred confusion instead of any sense of direction. Sara moved from block to block as a shadow does over obstacles along the ground, leaving me in a struggle to keep pace.
I realized that I had been following her for quite a while now and hoped she hadn’t noticed. Just as I considered speaking up she stopped, but I continued in her direction, my body in auto-pilot.
“What do you want?”
She said as she turned around in a completely dazzling manner, stopping me a few feet from her.
“Um… I just saw your performance.”
She looked on towards me with a sort of impatience, but softened as I attempted to avoid eye contact.
“Do you want me to pay you for having to listen to such noise?”
I immediately turned to her and took another step.
“No! No. I was levelled by it. Really, I was.”
Levelled by it? Luckily, a treize (which was a new type of public transportation that hovered over the neon lights) rushed by near us, and caused us to stand in silence for several seconds, her apparently amused at my ridiculous statement.
“Did you want to get my signature for something?”
Music and movies didn’t really play as much a part in people’s lives as they used to, and it is no longer a common occurrence to seek autographs from “famous” people anymore, but it might flatter her.
“Would you really sign something for me?”
She grinned slyly,
“Is it a petition, or are you trying to suck me into joining a service of some kind?”
I saw what she was doing, and contorted my mouth back,
“If it gets me your name, then I don’t care what it is.”
That sounded better in my head. Damn it.
“Well,”
She came nearer to me,
“I don’t have a pen or holo-tab on me, so I’m afraid I can do no such thing.”
She was playing along with me. Or was I playing along with her?
“That’s okay, I think just meeting you is enough.”
Her smile. Those times that her voice reminded me of; her smile surely allowed me to relive.
“What’s your name? I like to get to know my fans a little.”
Off my guard, I stumbled as she playfully pushed on my chest.
“I’m Emery Marabar.”
She stood up straight as she could, as if raising her ears.
“I’m Sara. I can’t tell you my last name for legal reasons.”
I laughed slightly as she grinned; making sure she
was joking first.
“I know the last initial is a ‘Q’ anyway.”
She gave me a playful look,
“Are you a fan, or a stalker?”
“Is one more flattering than the other?”
She smiled once more.
We walked together down the rest of the street until we came to a tunnel leading to the under district of the city. I’d never been there before. The under district is called that not because it is poverty stricken or further south, it’s because it is literally situated on the inside of a mountain side lying along the edge of the city and canyon-filled wastelands that I spent most of my life living and now working in. She lived in the under district, and seemed to be inviting me back to her residence. Houses did not exist in the cities, and apartments were not called apartments in the under district. If you lived in the under district, you lived in a “burrow”.
The under district had a constant rumbling echo that could be felt all throughout your body, and I swear that it occasionally knocked your heart out of rhythm. You could not see the ceiling, only structures stretching into the darkness. Still, I retained the i-prog demeanour and walked upright with an assured stride. Sara moved at a quicker pace to compensate her shorter legs, and I almost felt like we were children with our differing walks. I was the boy trying to act mature while she was a girl avoiding cracks on the sidewalk. Whenever I think of my childhood, I always assume that I romanticize it a little bit. But if instances like this flood memories back to me, how much can possibly be exaggerated?
“This is it. This is my mole-hole.”
We stopped at a small earthen pathway that leads to a door built into the side of the mountain itself. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but even this was rather strange to me.
“What do you think?”
I pause for a moment, noticing the air is rich with soil.
“Looks as cosy as any other home I suppose.”
She walked to the door, made of a light but durable metal, and entered a code into the keypad that was fitted into a slot within the door itself. The door rose up and disappeared into the threshold.
“The doors at the base slide to the right. I sort of like that yours goes into the ceiling.”
I followed her in as she tilted her head slightly, looking back to me,
“What is it that you do there?”
We hadn’t really talked in-depth about what I do for a living. We mainly discussed our childhood and hardly touched on our current lives at all.
“I work in the communications department in the military.”
I strayed off at that, noticing the interior of the room. It was exactly that; a large room that had two doors on opposite sides of the bed, presumably a closet and bathroom. The floor creaked as I took a step. Wooden floors, a novelty.
“Are you an operator?”
I circled around, taking in the ceiling, raw and uncovered earth with pipes running underneath it and thin metal beams running across, but only for lights, not support. This room was a death trap.
“No, I work on the signal shifters that we launch into space.”
“What do they do, exactly?”
I sighed, realizing how embarrassed I was to admit it to her.
“Well, the miners and few other people living on the outposts and stations in the further reaches of the solar system do not have the luxury of television there. The shifters that I build are used to better transmit our broadcasts directly to them. They serve no other purpose, and it is the most lucrative business in the military.”
She didn’t make it clear that she was disappointed, but all the same, I felt embarrassed.
“They do not improve tele-conversing capabilities or anything like that, too?”
I lowered my head,
“No.”
She shrugged,
“I guess if you broadcast adverts there, they won’t need to talk to anyone anyway.”
She sat down at a table in the centre of the room. The chairs had no back support, but had a comfortable padding. I joined across from her.
“Is performing your only profession?”
Sara sighed and made a circle with her finger on the table,
“No. It’s actually not a paying thing that I do. It’s just a hobby.”
My eyes widened.
“You don’t get paid?”
She got up and turned to the kitchen section of the room.
“No. Would you like some tea?”
“That would be lovely. Why don’t you sing professionally?”
She ran some water into a container and plugged it into the wall to begin boiling.
“Oh come on. Nobody gets paid to perform anymore. Unless they are advert tunes.”
I lowered my head down on the table. It smelled of chemically cleaned plastic.
“What do you do for money then?”
She was preparing the tea into cups.
“I’m a communications operator, myself. The Civil Helpline. It’s the most personal job left I think.”
Civil helplines were exactly like they sounded. Whenever a city dweller had a question or problem that was city related, they would call the Civil Helpline.
“Oh I see. What do you mean by ‘personal’?”
She served me the tea and sat to my left, as opposed to across from me.
“It’s a human interaction thing, you know? I want to actually talk with and help people.”
This tea is terrible, but it tastes fresh. Fresh terrible is better than preserved mediocrity I think.
“Forgive my saying, but you seem very old.”
She peered at me through the tea vapours that were being lead towards her nose as if I had said something profound.
“You’re one for compliments, aren’t you?”
She knew what I meant. I made a look to reflect that.
“You’re right, though. I pride myself to be.”
I stare into her and her into me.
“Sara?”
She was sipping her tea.
“The last song that you performed tonight… why choose that one?”
She sat her cup down and glanced into the swirling contents.
“Like I said, I want to help people.”
I watched the corner of her eye, waiting for her to look up at me.
“Help them what?”
Her eyes were still on the tea.
“Feel something. Not just anything, but something that they’ve felt before, something from the past.”
We sat in silence for a few moments until she finally finished her tea. I did the same, feeling as if I had to keep up with her in every way possible.
The couch was big and didn’t really match anything else. There was a pile of books near it and a table in front, also with books crammed underneath it. Looking over the titles, there doesn’t appear to be a single service manual, engineering guide, or anything of that sort. There are a lot of foreign names that I cannot particularly pronounce. Ah! ‘Forster’. That much I can make out. I turned to Sara with a slight grin of satisfaction, but she was peering intently into one of the four walls. The first wall that the front door is in, along with the two sides, are all quite similar to the walls at the base; white with a grey border. The fourth wall is just the rock wall of the mountain. I noticed a screen had been unmounted from the side-wall that she was fixated on, and placed in the corner.
“Is your screen broken? I’m pretty good with technical and mechanical things, I could take a look at it if you’d like.”
She shook her head,
“No. I took it down for a reason. I got tired of watching nothing but adverts and com-coms. It influences you to just talk about meaningless things.”
It was true; television had become so filled with advertisements and commercials that they replaced real programming. Now, instead of sit-coms, you had com-coms (commercial comedies)
that were essentially extended commercials with a very loose plot based around a particular product.
“There’s something special in recapturing the past for me.”
Sara was still staring into the wall as she spoke,
“Something that makes me feel again.”
She turned to me as if she had said some sort of taboo.
“Feel what?”
She brought her legs up to the couch and rotated her entire body to face me. She began slipping off her jacket as she put on an unreadable expression. I continue to watch her for a sign of what to do as she allowed the jacket to slip off her back. She’s wearing a black and white horizontal striped shirt that looked almost too tight for her. The sleeves stop just past her shoulders, collar wrapping around her neck. She crosses her arms and clutches the bottom, pulling it slowly over her head. Her stomach twists slightly as she wiggles her arms and completely removes the shirt. Her bra is white, as is the pale flesh of her breasts. But my attention is suddenly locked closer to the right side of her collarbone and shoulder area. There’s a metallic shape, a sort of square with the right line not connecting the shape, but instead slanting towards each other like one half of an ‘x’. It was like a curved bracket.
“It’s a tag.”
Her expression remained unchanged. It was like admitting to something that you were scared to, but knew it was only inevitable.
“What kind of tag?”
She took a deep breath. I couldn’t help but notice her breasts swell, and glanced down to the left to hide my shame. There were more ‘tags’ running in horizontal rows down her right side. They were longer, thinner, and just straight.
“Touch them.”
She raised both of her arms directly up into the air. I hesitated, her eyes looking down at her ‘tags’, as were mine. I rest my hands on both of her sides. She didn’t seem to mind as I gently ran my fingers down the row of metal, there were six of them, then came back halfway and rested my palm against them, a finger on each of the grooves of skin in between the tags. She lowered her arms down, and squeezed my hands into her sides, rotating her shoulders so that my hands rubbed her skin in a circle.
“Can you feel the difference?”
I was confused, but didn’t want to lose the moment. Her right side felt colder, but that was probably only because of the metal.
“Here; just brush my skin lightly.”
She released my hands from her arms, and I lightly ran my finger tips up and down both of her sides. That’s it. There is a difference.
“Your right side is completely hairless.”
There wasn’t a single hair, not even the “peach fuzz” as my father would refer to my facial hair during puberty.
“That’s right.”
She gripped my left hand and manipulated it into a claw shape. I was limp, but she drove my nails into her and dragged me a short distance near her tags before I flattened my palm and retracted.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s okay. You didn’t even leave a mark, and I hardly felt anything.”
I look at the area and she was right. There should have been clear marks, but there was nothing. Come to think of it, her skin felt almost sponge-like while she was dragging my nails across her.
“What is it?”
She was rubbing the area with her left hand,
“It’s artificial. So is the skin on my right shoulder, back, and part of my chest.”
My hands were off of her now. She looked up at me from a lower angle, eyes like a wounded animal. Her right leg was bent up against the couch, so I stretch it out between the couch and my body as I laid her down on her back, lowering myself closer to her. Her eyes were such a deep green, with a light brown trim. Her right eye differed from the left in hue and cut of the iris.
“It’s artificial too, my right eye.”
I could see the lens-like pupil refocusing itself onto me. I moved my face to the left, past her right eye and to her ear and neck. I kissed her lightly,
“What about your jawline?”
I could feel her cheeks tighten into a smile.
“Natural.”
I exhaled a slight laugh,
“Are you sure?”
Her hands ran up my back, pulling my shirt along with it.
Her bed smelled damp, almost like rotting… something… familiar. I could tell the sheets hadn’t been changed for quite a while and the spring mattress sank, pulling our weight into it. Newspapers! That’s what the scent of the bed reminded me of. It wasn’t at all unpleasant though, for more reasons than simply having such a significant and beautiful girl underneath me. Our bodies were vulnerable under the cover, her tags cold against my warmth. I ran my fingers through her hair as I kissed her forehead, and felt yet another tag on the back of her head, but paid it no attention.
The morning came, but I only knew it was morning due to my fine-tuned internal clock. An advantage of working in the cycle system I suppose. Her home had no windows, nor any clocks that I could see from bed. She lay in the crease of my right arm, her right hand resting upon my chest. I couldn’t see her face, but I could smell her hair. Slightly burned, I think. But not from heat, sometimes hair just smells that way if it’s become dirty. My leave cycle was nearly over, but did she know that?
I felt her body tense up, as if awakening. I positioned myself in a way that I thought she would be more comfortable. She raised her head to my chest, and watched her own finger as she traced a circle around my torso.
“Your body is perfect; neither a scar nor blemish anywhere.”
She glanced up to me with that youthful smile. I noticed for the first time the specks of scarring along the right of her face, her brow refusing to grow in small spots along the top of the eye. It wasn’t noticeable until I saw her close, at this angle, after knowing about her other injuries. It made her all the more captivating.
“Is it rude to ask what happened to you?”
She lowered her head back down on my chest, stopping the pattern that her finger was tracing.
“No. It would have been before, but it’s okay now.”
I wrapped one arm around her and pressed her closer to me, so that I could feel the tag on her chest.
“I was young, and it was the first time that a doctor had ever touched me before.”
I felt her eyelashes brush my skin as they closed, going back to the experience.
“Until then, I had always stepped into the body scanner, and if an injection were necessary, it would do it for you. The only human contact ever made was scheduling an appointment, or filling a prescription.”
She sighed, and burrowed herself closer into me.
“After the incident though, there were so many doctors and surgeons that felt me, cut me, and stitched me. Nurses too would occasionally offer me some form of comfort. I could never talk to them, or stay conscious long enough to think about anything other than the immense pain, but I knew they looked out for me.”
She was telling this story as if a child were telling you about falling off a bicycle.
“When I woke for the last time, there were so many people standing over me. They all looked at me curiously, anxiously, and I looked back to them and started to cry, but not because it hurt. They all cheered and shook one another’s hands. I didn’t know any of their names until I read an article about the ordeal years later. I never knew how important it all was. I was the first successful patient to use this skin. It completely eliminated graft-versus-host disease. My eye was hailed as a technological breakthrough, though older models did exist, mine was much more stable and detected the full colour spectrum. The tags that are left in me are so other doctors, should the need ever arise, can scan them and know exactly how my body works now. They had to completely re-work many of my internal organs. Even my ribcage, spine, and back of my skull are scientifically engineered.”
She was getting
wrapped up, but all at once she collapsed into me. There was a long silence.
“They told me that I would never be human again.”
There was another long silence.
“What happened to you?”
I regretted asking instantly.
“You understand why I am the way I am don’t you?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant, and felt ashamed.
“What do you mean?”
She wriggled slightly,
“Why I dress the way I do. Why I don’t use a screen in my home. Why I sing the songs that I do for free. Why I work to help people. Why I want them to remember the past.”
I loosened my hold on her as she propped herself up next to me, gazing into my face for an answer.
“Because you want to make people feel a certain way. At least, that’s what I got from your performance. I felt like a child again, I felt something that I hadn’t in a very long time. You care.”
Her expression seemed to have found what it was looking for and turned to relief.
“I want people to be human again.”
“Like you?”
I felt her body tense at the question.
“Yeah… like me.”
We would lay the rest of the morning together, in a dozing sort of silence. I knew that I had to catch a shuttle back into the desert, back to base, but I didn’t want to leave. There was something to Sara that I wanted to keep forever. Her glances lay fragments of her being into me that fester such feelings that I seldom ever felt. How lucky was I to happen into that bar, that night, at that time and see her? Hear her. Feel her.
She stirred and sat up on the bed, letting the sheets drop, exposing herself.
“Emy. I know that you probably have to go back sometime soon, right?”
“Yeah. It’s life in the cycle.”
She frowned and looked around for her clothing.
‘Emy’ she called me. I’d never been called that before, not even as a child. We both got dressed and she began to put some lunch together. I sat at the table, eyes locked on the back of her head, thinking about her skull and how she never actually told me what happened to her. I was still thinking about it while we ate.
As she was walking with me out of the under district, I made a note to look up to the ceiling now that it was day. I still couldn’t penetrate all the way up to the roof of the mountain.
“You know, there used to be lights that resembled stars up there with a large screen that projected the positions of the moon and sun to create the effect of a sky. But when they introduced the treize tram lines, they redirected all ‘unnecessary’ power to that project.”
I could feel the disappointment in her voice. We walked for several more blocks, out into the open sun again. It was blinding, but Sara could still see perfectly and guided me along. We were already nearing the station just as I could completely focus again.
“Sara? You know that I’ll be back in a few cycles, right?”
She clutched onto my arm,
“I know that.”
I was burning to ask her. I had to know about her injury.
“Sara…”
“Look at that.”
Sara pulled my on arm and pointed off into the distance through a clearing of buildings in the direction of the base. A signal shifter had just been launched.
The Ghost Writer
Steve McGarrity