But I saw right away that I was the only one left. The others had been brittle; they had broken. Rocky the teddy bear had gone the way of Rowan. I couldn’t see the plastic half barn owl at all.
The worst part was the secret the gnomes had taught me: the fact of eternal life. It horrified me to think that the shards of my friends might still have consciousness, trapped in whatever powerless form they had left. The thought of Irma tormented me. She’d been melted into a shapeless blob of plastic with no eyes, no ears, no limbs, no mouth to scream. And then I’d buried her.
The gnomes’ behavior didn’t make any sense, in light of their ability to re-form and keep on going. If they knew that these forms we now inhabited were deathless, then why had they tried to kill us? I could only hope that they really had been divinely animated, and that my friends and family wouldn’t be. But in order to believe in that I had to believe in god, and those days were long, long behind me.
It took me a damn long time, broken as I was. First I had to gather the things I’d need, and they were hard to find in the wasteland the property had become. Then I needed to dig up my Irma. The gnome’s shovel was still where we’d dropped it, but it was hell to wield it without any hands. In the end I gave up and dug with my pathetic wings, one scraping millimeter at a time. But what did I have but time? I didn’t need to stop for food or sleep; I didn’t have muscles to fatigue. So I didn’t rest until I’d uncovered my love.
She was at the bottom of a shallow hole, a dingy pink puddle of plastic with two metal legs still sticking out at odd angles. God, I hoped she wasn’t in there. But if she was, it was where I wanted to be. I dropped my own mangled body on top of hers, then doused us both with the little bottle of lighter fluid I’d found.
“I’m coming, Irma,” I said.
And then I lit a match.
***published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 79, April 2013
Story notes:
Garden gnomes have been following me since I wrote this story in 2013.
It was originally written for an anthology I was asked to submit to called Yard Gnomes of the Apocalypse, a prompt that I clearly took very literally. The story poured out of me in just a couple days, in a frenzy of sacrilege and giggling, and when I ran it past my writing group they told me it deserved to be published in a market with a larger readership, so I sent it to Clarkesworld.
But I still wanted to submit something to the anthology, so I wrote another creepy gnome story. My writing group started to make fun of me, so I swore I would write gnome more forever.
(The anthology never ended up being published, and that second story still hasn’t seen the light of day. It wasn’t as good as this one.)
But in 2014, I took a job as editor of a Norwegian newspaper, and guess who its mascot was? Nils Anders Wik, a century-old nisse who’d been enchanted by an evil cabinet-maker. He was a mostly benign sort of gnome. Mostly.
Diary of a Pod Person
The first body to slide out on one of Lab-14-H’s morgue slabs was a chimp, and seeing its slack and frozen face startled me more than anything had since the accident. I jumped, and my new heart dropped a beat like a person stumbling off a curb. It was a giddily familiar sensation, so as soon as the shock wore off I smiled with genuine happiness—I’d been scared, physically scared. I acknowledged the feeling with joy.
I pushed the chimp back into the fridge, and opened the next drawer more gingerly. After a few more chimps—failed Kokos, I assumed—I found the corpse I was looking for.
If you’ve never looked at your own dead body on a slab, nothing I say about it can fully convey the feeling. I looked at the body for a long time without moving, without thinking, without feeling. I refused to think of it as my body.
The woman in the drawer had suffered a trauma; that much was obvious. Her long black hair was matted on the left against a skull dented out of round. Blood had been cleaned out of the abrasions and lacerations on her face, and they hung whitely open like dead mouths. But it wasn’t just the violence that rendered the woman’s countenance eerie.
“There’s identical, and then there’s identical,” one of the other techs had told me on my first day at ExtraLives. “So we make chimps, and they look like Koko, right? But all chimps look the same, pretty much, anyway. So how can we tell?”
The body I was in now was printed from the same blueprint as this woman’s, using the same DNA. But there’s identical and there’s identical. The blueprint was more of a sketch, with the details left to the builder. I’d noticed it immediately, of course. My new muscles hadn’t been jogging for twenty years, so though the incubator had toned them to almost the right level, these legs tripped just walking down the hall. This body hadn’t indulged in sea-salt potato chips a little too often; it was skinny. The lines on these fingers weren’t the same as hers, were in fact barely lines at all, and these new retinas held divergent patterns. I’d had to convince a passing colleague to let me into this room, since the security door no longer recognized those signatures. Even our irises looked different: the color was the same, but the specific interplay of dark and light varied.
I spent what felt like hours with the other body, measuring and comparing and tallying up the differences. Some were quantifiable, like a half-inch difference in our heights, and my almost freakishly long pinky toes. Most were more subjective: both faces looked uncanny to me, the new and the old. But I knew enough about perception and mirror images to let that go.
There’s identical, and then there’s identical.
There was also the disturbing fact of the other woman’s injuries. In addition to the skull fracture there was a broken leg, a shoulder that would never again fit into its socket, and a number of smaller wounds. One bruise, on her back, looked almost like a handprint. It was hard to tell through the pooled blood under her skin. Overall she appeared as though she’d tumbled down a rocky slope, or fallen under a bus.
Or been pushed.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’d been murdered. But the thought held no terror, not even anger. If I felt anything it was relief that the other me was actually dead. I didn’t want two of us running around, and though I acknowledged that she had the better claim on our life, my loyalty was to me.
I am still not sure how to feel about that. I’m pretty sure the old me would be horrified.
My personal effects were in a pouch in the back of the drawer. The clothes were trash, but my shoes were okay and my purse was just as I remembered it. Keys, credit cards, sunglasses. Phone, with seven voice messages, thirty-one texts, and eighty-eight emails. Obviously ExtraLives hadn’t told my family anything. They must be frantic with worry.
I tried to slip on the shoes, but they didn’t fit anymore. My new feet were bigger in every dimension.
The only other thing was the necklace I’d been wearing, a plastic pendant with a tiny dried flower inside. A gift from Lucy. It felt smooth in my fingers; I would have recognized the object, even with these new fingers and their new lines, by touch alone. I tied it around my neck and the pendant hung in the same place against my sternum, and I remembered that my fingers used to find their way here all the time, an unconscious gesture that I supposed must have given me comfort. But it didn’t anymore. I dropped my fingers and they hung at my side, purposeless.
#
A few months back, my Wellness Director had told me I’d smother Lucy if I didn’t go back to work. I’d laughed, a little too fast, and joked about the situation. “You mean metaphorically, right?” I’d clutched the pendant that I always wore, a tiny pressed flower in plastic resin that Lucy had made in arts and crafts group.
I remember joking. I even remember what I felt then: anxiety and frustration and a kind of aimlessness that, if I’d been a word lover, I might have described as ennui.
The woman had scads of pictures up on her walls. Two children, two parents, dozens of perfect white smiles so huge they seemed unreal. White-water rafting trips and tropical vistas and artistic famil
y portraits. Each one looked normal enough, but their sheer volume pointed toward some inner madness. I believed her without hesitation.
But I’d cashed in my workforce rotation when I had Lucy, and there was a long wait list for work. Even under Wellness Director’s orders, and with my degree in animal behavior, my hopes were slim. You couldn’t even volunteer at a soup kitchen more than once a week without using up your work vouchers, and I couldn’t chance losing benefits.
I was watching Lucy run like a crazy monkey around a playground when ExtraLives called me. My daughter wore star-shaped sunglasses even though it was cloudy, and her hair was a tangled mess, and with every step I was sure she’d trip and there’d be blood and tears. Despite everything I know about cognitive development and learned helplessness my fingers twitched toward her all the time. I wanted to keep her safe. I wanted to hold her to me, and comfort her and ohmygod, I was going to smother her. I remember that.
So I didn’t hesitate when ExtraLives offered me an interview and then a position. I didn’t even ask what ExtraLives did. I just called my mother and Lucy’s father and my best friend and my brother and arranged a care schedule for Lucy. I just dusted off my old lab coat and went to work.
Not wanting to seem crazy, I decorated my desk with only one photograph of Lucy, a shot of her splashing her big red boots in gentle ocean waves. Against a backdrop of water and seagulls she peers intently into the foam, poised with one foot ready to stomp.
#
On my first day at ExtraLives, after signing about a million documents I barely skimmed, I met Koko. Koko was a chimpanzee named by someone who was both uncreative and apparently unaware that the original Koko had been a gorilla. Like the original, though, Koko was a whiz at American Sign Language. Better than I was. Since Lucy had learned to speak I’d been letting my ASL rust, and when I met Koko I told her so, haltingly. “You talk okay,” she told me, and we shook hands. I longed to bring Lucy in to meet Koko; I wondered what they’d talk about and how they’d play. I could just imagine the two of them signing back and forth, both in star-shaped sunglasses. My hand fluttered to the pendant at my throat. I still remember it all.
Koko lived in a lab that looked like a nursery, along with her pet cat, a big black tomcat with white paws that Koko had named Feet. Koko was mellow for a chimp, but I was warned not to mess with Feet, not even to touch him if possible, lest I incur her wrath. The place smelled a little like cat and monkey, and two entire walls were one-way mirror, but overall it was a homey room, filled with toys and gadgets for Koko to play with.
There were many more like it, furnished but empty of primate and feline life.
After introducing me to Koko, my supervisor, Caleb, took me down a long dark hallway lined with nondescript doors. Each had a stenciled-on number and a door lock with a keypad, thumbprint sensor, and retinal scanner. My credentials had been established that morning, in a baffling ordeal of scans and medical procedures. But before Caleb let me try them out on Lab 14-C he stopped me. He was grinning like a new dad on Christmas morning, like someone who’s in on a fabulous secret.
“Are you ready to see what’s behind the curtain? Are you ready for the red pill? And also do you remember that you signed an NDA?”
“Which one was the red pill?” I asked, as Caleb stepped aside.
I punched in my code, pressed my thumb to the plate above the keypad, and, pushing my glasses up into my hair, ducked down slightly to stare into the retinal scanner. A red flash stunned my left eye and then the door clicked and I hurried to paw the handle. I’d always been bad at opening those hotel doors with the credit-card-type keys, but this door swung right open, revealing a room full of machinery and tubes and vats and computer screens. In the center of the space was a raised platform with what looked like a large but shallow aquarium. It was empty now, and I could see that the sides were made to come apart and fold down. It also had a lid that could be lowered onto it but which currently hung suspended from the ceiling. All the tubes and wires and hoses terminated in that lid.
Caleb was right beside me, watching my confusion. I guess I wasn’t seeing the lab’s potential, because his face fell. I admit, I was slow. My first thought had been to wonder what they were doing to fish.
“I guess you really do have to see it in action to understand. Come on, I’ll show you on one of our smaller models.”
He led me down the hall to Lab 6-A, where the whole setup was repeated with an aquarium the size of a shoebox on a counter-height table. He went to a console and keyed in a series of commands too quick to follow. The machines whirred to life, LED lights blinking on and off. Coiled tubes jumped as something flowed through them into the little glass box. Soon it was filled with a thick clear liquid, and then I watched in awe as needles inside the box started moving like the jets of a printer and structures appeared.
It was a skeleton. A rodent, by the looks of it, and I guessed rat.
When its skull was only half built another set of tiny fingers went to work laying down brain and eyes seemingly one cell at a time. This part took longer than any other step.
And then the skeleton was obscured by muscle and tendon and blood vessels and a thin layer of fat and then skin. It was definitely a rat, hairless and motionless, floating in the tank’s goop.
“You made a rat,” I said, intelligently.
The lid pulled away from the tank with a loud unclamping sound, and cables pulled it out of the way. Caleb stepped toward the tank and pulled the naked rodent out. He wore thick rubbery gloves, the type my mother had once worn to do dishes. And he was grinning from ear to ear. “Copied a rat, actually. Her name is Stella, and if this has gone right she’s an exact copy of the original Stella, complete with the memories up to her last upload.”
I remember the physical sensations of my stunned reaction. My pulse felt loud, my mouth went dry.
The rat hadn’t so much as twitched a whisker. Or rather, twitched its nose. It had only the barest of stubble for whiskers. Caleb took it over to a small incubator box, where it was swaddled in circuit-printed canvas. “Is it alive?” I asked. My mind was boggling already, working out the implications and designing mazes to run Stella through.
“Sort of,” he responded, setting some dials on the incubator and closing the door.
#
ExtraLives already had hundreds of clients who had signed up for immortal life. I could understand the appeal. To have a backup, to know that I’d always be around to love my Lucy; that was a powerful pull.
Caleb told me that the company had perfected the upload process. It was simple, non-intrusive, and accurate: an implant no bigger than the RFID chips in everyone’s pets and children. Whenever the chip neared its base station, a tiny device that most people kept under their pillows, it sent the data to ExtraLives’ storage facility. Clients uploaded themselves every night, in case they died in their sleep.
Of course, if they did die in their sleep that night, they were probably going to stay dead. The process of putting a person into his or her shiny new body hadn’t been tested. The memory files couldn’t even be verified; without a brain to read them the data were meaningless.
“Obviously human trials are a legal issue,” Caleb said, eyes flicking in the general direction of a bowling trophy he kept on his desk. “The process hasn’t yet been tested on anything more human-like than a cat.” But that was where I came in.
I spent a few weeks getting to know Koko. Dr. Kim, the trainer I was replacing, had exhaustively catalogued Koko’s vocabulary. There were endless hours of video documenting conversations they’d had and every other aspect of Koko’s life: how she played with her toys, the way she petted Feet, how she laughed when tickled, when and where she usually slept.
Dr. Kim had also kept a kind of journal, which I was only partially able to decipher. It seemed to cover experiments she’d overseen, but parts of it were in a shorthand that reminded me of one of those vowel-hating Eastern European languages. More than once I wished I could call her
up and ask about it, but Caleb made it clear she was not going to return. I couldn’t even contact her on my own; her name was too common to google.
Copying Koko felt anti-climactic after all the buildup. We printed her in the first lab I’d visited, then she was swaddled by a large incubator for a few days while it toned her muscles, and then she was deposited, stubbly and a bit dazed, into one of the identical Koko habitats.
My job was to determine, in my expert opinion, whether the new Koko was identical to the first.
She was different in some trivial aspects: her hair and claws were still growing in, and her teeth were bright white. At first she was clumsy, but that wore off within the first week.
She was the same in more ways than I could count. When introduced to her quarters she gave everything a solid sniffing but otherwise reacted to it with familiarity. She knew my name. I tested her over the following weeks and found that her vocabulary was intact, and seemingly so were her memories. I pestered her with questions about her life until she grew bored with me, and she knew the answer to every one. When she tired of these sessions, she puffed out her lips and lolled her head just like the first Koko had done.
This was good enough for Caleb and the rest of ExtraLives’ executives. By the time Koko2’s fur had fully grown in, they were uncorking champagne. No one but me was troubled by the fact that the new Koko hadn’t so much as asked about Feet the cat. Curious what would happen, I snuck him away from Koko1 while she slept and brought him into Koko2’s enclosure. She groomed him and stroked his head once, twice, just the same as the other Koko. Feet sniffed her in return, and then seemed to decide that all was well. Koko2 turned away and poked listlessly at the goofy felt teeth of a stuffed shark, and at Koko1’s insistence I returned Feet to her room. She snuggled him for an hour straight, him purring all the while. Koko2 didn’t seem to mind his absence. Certainly, there was no wrath.
Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas Page 2