The Thousand Year Beach

by TOBI Hirotaka

  Jules studied the old, deep scar that split Old Jules’s face in half. What kind of fierce attack had birthed that scar? Or, perhaps, would birth it? he thought. It was beyond his imagination.

  Old Jules spread his palms and turned them toward Jules.

  “It’s right in front of your eyes,” he said. “You just don’t understand what it means.”

  His hands were raw and disfigured with scar tissue. A severe scalding that had melted his flesh.

  “You’re right,” Jules said. “I don’t understand.”

  “See?” said the old man, and laughed his withered laugh again. “Julie’s shoulders were right there. You could have reached out and grabbed them. But you kept your hands to yourself. Who’s the old man here, me or you?”

  The old man made fists of his hands and stuffed them into his sleeves.

  “Decide,” he said. “There’s never ‘no other way.’ You only have to choose one. Just take your pick. That’s what everyone else does. Everyone, always, without exceptions, makes their decisions for themselves. They choose one side of the fork and prune away the other possibilities. Weeping as they do, mind you.”

  Jules put his hands to his cheeks and realized that they were damp. He rubbed his face with the palms of his hands, then glanced down at them and opened his eyes wide. Why had he never noticed before? They were horribly scarred. The flesh looked partly melted.

  Scars from the scalding stew.

  And then, at last, he remembered.

  He had always been here.

  He shared those scars with Julie. He had infiltrated the Realm more than a thousand years ago, disguised as her father, and killed Souci.

  That man had been Jules.

  The old man was no longer beside him.

  Old Jules was no other Jules himself.

  Now that he had remembered this, there was no point in externalizing his form any longer.

  Jules stroked his chest with his burn-scarred hands, although of course he knew that the old man wasn’t there.

  Summoning up the information he had surreptitiously committed to memory earlier, Jules downloaded it to Cottontail: the program he had seen in the ribbons’ pattern; the strings that he assumed were a vehicle program for passing through the giant Glass trees.

  It was no feat to recall it, given its similarities to the program he himself had written for the lace.

  He would chase Julie.

  All uncertainty on that score was gone.

  Cottontail wove a boat identical in every detail to the one he had seen before, just as Julie had woven the dragonflies in the morning light.

  The vehicle looked like a paper boat. Julie Printemps sat inside it, hugging her legs and staring at her knees.

  She would not look behind her anymore. Jules might come chasing after her, and indeed might even catch her. But she would not look back, she told herself.

  Farewell, my cousin.

  The little boat advanced through a space dense with Glass and infinitely extended time.

  It advanced irrespective of these materials, irrespective of this time. A snug spindle-shaped barrier had been erected around the ship, and its fore pushed smoothly through the space and time ahead.

  That Glass, that slow time… What was it they were filled with?

  Pain.

  The Realm of Summer must be using more than 90 percent of its computational capacity to calculate and display that pain, moment by moment, at a resolution leaps and bounds ahead of anything that had come before.

  This came through to Julie keenly.

  In slowed-down time, in a moment that seemed on the verge of freezing forever, thousands of AIs were realizing pain at the upper limits of their ability to experience anything.

  The pain from the past replayed from within the Mineral Springs Hotel had filled every crevice, trapping the AIs like insects in amber. This forest, the network of pain, was practically overflowing.

  For Julie,

  For Julie, if no one else, the scene was unbearable.

  She wanted to leap out of the Glass right away, but knew that she couldn’t. And that was how she managed to stay seated, staring at her kneecaps.

  I want to see José.

  She had a fair idea of what they expected from him, as well as what they hoped to achieve by uniting her with him.

  Julie removed the whale earring from her ear and gazed at it.

  The design was her own.

  She had worked a sinker from one of the fishing boats into the shape of a whale. José had modified a fishhook into a finding.

  The whale had a name.

  An important name. One José kept close to his chest. They would make two whales of that name, and each of them would keep one: that had been the promise Julie and José had shared. Neither of them had ever revealed to anyone else the meaning of that promise. She was sure everyone mistook it for some vow of love. She certainly hoped her “cousin” did.

  But in fact it was something entirely different.

  The whale’s name was Martin. José’s little brother’s name. The little brother who had never once existed in this Realm.

  The first time José and I slept together was after the Grand Down.

  José gave everyone around him the impression of a supremely tough, no-nonsense older brother. Someone to be relied on. But I knew what he was really like. I mean, he and I were similar to the point of tragedy.

  Some AIs are chosen by the Realm.

  I had my role to play too. But the act of healing others wounded me. And there was no one to heal me.

  José had the same problem.

  Everyone told him everything. All the terrible things the guests did to them, down to the last detail. That was the kind of AI he was designed to be.

  It was like being responsible for hearing confession. It imposed absolute solitude.

  I wanted to heal José’s pain, and he said he wanted to cleanse me of mine.

  But when we reached for each other, we realized how difficult that would be. We saw the hopeless immensity of the burdens we bore. Vast accumulations of pain, like public archives going far, far back into history. It must have added up to something on the order of this temple of pain I’m in now, thinking back.

  José was the one I wanted to sleep with the most, but also the one with whom I couldn’t. But just once, that first time, we made love.

  Not properly—just surface against surface.

  And even that hurt so much I couldn’t even cry.

  Dry, painful sex. We gave up soon enough.

  Yes, and it was after that that we made our promise.

  That we made the whale earrings.

  “Here we are,” said the voice that had been impersonating Felix, brusquely.

  She heard water lapping calmly at the sides of the boat.

  Her ride had reached some kind of shore.

  They had been advancing through solid mineral; when had they ended up in this place? There was water beneath the boat, and breathable air above. The glass seemed to have receded into the distance to form the chamber’s walls. A great, hollow hall in the vitreous mass? The light was too dim to make out any more.

  “Out of the boat. You’ll be fine.”

  Where could that voice be coming from?

  Julie stepped over the edge of the boat. Her foot sank into fresh spring water, cool and refreshing. It had a familiar smell. This was the chamber under the hotel, where the springs came out. It had been preserved relatively intact. The air was crisp and bracing in a way the Realm of Summer only ever was for a few short hours before dawn. Was the night already so far gone?

  Julie began to wade through the water, spreading ripples in rings. Tiny points of light appeared from nowhere and led the rings of water as they widened.

  They kept going until they rose straight u
p like a wall.

  The water rose smoothly, its angle sharpening gradually until it was vertical. The water did not run back down. The rings rippled straight up the wall, growing slower as they went, and finally freezing in place at the top. The water’s time changed there, turning it into Glass—a vitreous wall that curved gently to form the walls of the subterranean chamber. She could not tell where the mineral spring water ended and the Glass began.

  The points of light climbed the wall. Looking up, Julie saw that the ceiling was a Glass dome too. Countless AIs were sealed inside it, arranged in concentric rings with their heads to the center. It looked like a ceiling painting in a cathedral.

  The points of light converged again at the center of the dome. They gathered there briefly, then descended straight down together.

  Once they had reached about head height, they stopped descending and arranged themselves into a quietly glowing horizontal disc.

  Just like a crown, thought Julie.

  And wearing the crown was José.

  A raised peak of water at the center of the chamber held his body up like a throne.

  He was already partitioned into a scattered, colorful mosaic of minute tiles.

  But Julie would know him anywhere, whatever form he took.

  She approached the throne. A boy in a white hoodie with blue piping stood before it. He nodded to her: Ascend.

  Her feet found safe purchase on the watery staircase. She climbed to the top and surveyed the mass of minuscule tiles that spread in a rough pentagon at her feet.

  “I finally found you, José,” she said.

  His whale earring’s mixed in with those tiles somewhere, she thought. I’d better look for that first.

  And then I’ll keep my promise.

  Controlling a Realm’s time stream …

  What kind of technology could do that? Jules ruminated on the question, letting his copy of the boat run as he immersed himself in thought.

  There were as many separate times in the Costa del Número as there were Realms. All of these streams were controlled by a system called the ChronoManager. The time within each Realm was distinct from the flow of time outside the virtual resort. A guest could spend three pleasant weeks inside and then emerge to find that only half a day of real time had passed.

  How much real time had passed during the Realm of Summer’s millennium?

  What if this subzero time that his boat was cutting through now, the halted time inside the glass, had simply slowed to match the pace of time in the real world?

  Controllable time.

  Presumably, it was also possible to rewind it, or replay it on loop.

  If there was a standpoint from which time could be controlled like this with respect to a Realm and the results observed from outside, then surely it was also possible to go back upstream in time, or appear in the future.

  What was Old Jules, though? A time traveler? An alarm that Jules had set a thousand years ago to wake himself up? Something else entirely? He could not narrow the range of possibilities, no matter how hard he thought. Any of them could be true. As Old Jules had said, he would know when he arrived at the future. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that only arriving at the future could rule out some of the field of possibilities.

  Before arriving at the future, though, Jules thought with a rueful grin, he would have to arrive at the subterranean chamber.

  Simply copying the boat had not been enough to take him to José. The pattern of lace had not included any information about the route. A sensible security measure. This left Jules with no choice but to set his course by Cottontail. If the structure of the Mineral Springs Hotel had been relatively well preserved, he should be almost there, but that was no sure thing. Even distance itself seemed to have been deformed.

  And what’s your plan when you get there, eh? he asked himself in Old Jules’s voice, deciding to put his thoughts in order through dialogue. Going to steal Julie back, are you? Make her look your way?

  After all you pushed me to do, now you’re trying to sow doubt?

  You’ve realized, I hope? That girl loves you.

  You think? Maybe she does. But that’s exactly where the curse lies, isn’t it?

  The boat rolled violently.

  A dazzling space opened before his eyes.

  They had entered what Jules assumed were the remains of the hotel’s grand ballroom. The boat cut across the space in a straight line. The Crystal Chandelier hung from the middle of the ceiling, shining radiantly. The room was filled with hundreds of revelers, dressed to the nines but frozen like mannequins. They floated in the liquid glass that filled the room, as if they had been carousing on a luxury ship and caught by surprise when it sank.

  Every piece of jewelry and adornment on the AIs included a tiny Glass Eye, and every Eye shone with the same kind of light as the Chandelier. This was to synchronize their pain—to share the same kind of pain across tens of thousands at once.

  The same kind of light?

  Doubt flickered within Jules.

  Share?

  Recognizing the danger, Jules nevertheless slowed the boat.

  Hey, hey, what are you thinking? Old Jules’s voice again. He had to confirm what he was about to do.

  I have to get this done before we cross the whole room and leave, he replied.

  The difference between his own time and the time around him shrank. He was nearing liquid glass time.

  Holding Cottontail as if it were a camera, Jules “photographed” the face of a nearby woman in a gorgeous dress, then quickly reaccelerated and pulled away. The boat exited the party through the far wall.

  Well, that was dangerous, Old Jules complained. What exactly were you doing?

  In other words, even Jules himself was not yet sure.

  He used Cottontail to examine the face he had captured in close-up. Obeying an order from some unknown intuition, he zoomed in on the woman’s earrings.

  Sitting atop the Eye itself he saw a single grain of light.

  He zoomed in further.

  Something became visible inside the grain of light. A reflection? No, the image was within the light itself.

  Another zoom.

  An upright figure, but upside-down. Beautiful light, like an image from a pinhole camera. The figure looked human, but he couldn’t quite make it out.

  Zoom in. Then zoom in once more.

  Cottontail’s resolution was astounding.

  White robes with a long hem.

  One hand pointed toward the heavens.

  Jules grimly continued to zoom. He knew already what he would see. What he did not know was what it meant.

  Wavy silver hair and blue eyes. A neat, composed appearance.

  And spreading at her back, two gigantic wings as beautiful as a swan’s.

  Her body was covered entirely in frost.

  I see, Old Jules said. That’s the Angel.

  Angel?

  The Angel’s azure pupil appeared in close-up. Within it was lodged a grain of light. Within that was another upside-down image of a woman wearing an Eye …

  Vertigo swept over Jules.

  Then the bow of his boat struck the air, as if it had been jabbed by the void.

  He felt himself lifted up.

  Splashdown.

  Water.

  Countless scraps of foam flew.

  Countless scraps of foam combined into a roar.

  When this settled down, Jules learned that he had arrived in the subterranean chamber.

  He surveyed the construction of the space. He recognized the throne and saw Julie atop it, just on the verge of crouching down.

  Jules took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then yelled, “Julie!”

  Julie’s back trembled slightly.

  My voice can still carry into the t
ime over there.

  It was time to speak without fear.

  Say the words that had been sealed away in the Clement Memorial Room.

  The finger was no longer at his lips.

  Shaking off his last hesitations, Jules yelled to Julie.

  To Julie.

  “Listen!”

  It was something he had not been able to say all these thousand years.

  “I always loved you!” he shouted to his sister.

  Yes, I slept with José. Just once.

  The experience left both of us with painful memories. But I did touch one of the imaginary episodes buried within him.

  The time he left his little brother for dead. The woman who stood there consuming his brother through colored threads.

  It was sad, beautiful, and brutal to watch.

  When I told José what I had seen, his eyes went dull. He only nodded.

  It was days before I knew the right thing to say:

  “Let’s make a grave for him.”

  José looked at me, surprised.

  “Let’s make a grave for your little brother.”

  “Martin.”

  I paused. “A grave for Martin.”

  “I never heard an idea like that before.”

  “Well?”

  A long pause.

  “Well?”

  Another pause, then: “Okay. Let’s do it. Let’s make a grave for the little guy.”

  And so we made a pair of earrings, and gave them a name.

  Martin.

  The earrings have no inscription. They don’t look anything like a grave. But that’s what they are.

  An unborn brother with a made-up death forced upon him. We’ll make a grave for this boy who never existed, and then wear it wherever we go: that was what we decided.

  “Make them into whales, okay?” That was José’s request, made as he peered over my shoulder while I carefully hammered out the sinkers.

  “Why whales?” I asked.

  “I’ve never seen a whale before,” he replied, without elaborating. I was the only one who saw this quiet side of him. That always made me happy.

  “Why don’t you make them into whales? You’re the one who’s good with his hands.”