I grabbed the knife. Tony stepped back and paled.
“You’re not going to cut its head off, are you?”
I lowered the knife.
“Course I am, you stupid sod. I’ll have to cut it up if we’re going to eat it. Go on. Get out if you’re too scared. I’ll shout you when it’s done.”
He waited a few seconds, shuffling from foot to foot. He had a look in his eye that my mums dog used to have when she was carving the Sunday roast. I put the knife down and put my hands on his shoulders.
“I’m not going to eat it without you, Tone. We’re in this together, yeah?”
For some unknown reason we clasped hands and did the gang handshake that we hadn’t done since we were at school. Then he left, looking over his shoulder at the glassy-eyed fish lying on my kitchen table.
It was just me and the fish. I realised I needed more time to consider this. To make a plan. I walked around the table, eyeing the carcass and nodding. Then I looked around the kitchen. How was I going to cook it? More flickers from the past: my class teacher, Mr Ellis, rolling bits of wood between his palms against a hollowed log and some grass. Sparks. Flint clicking together. No chance of any of that. No wood, no trees, no flint. I wrapped the fish up and pushed it under the table. I knew that Dianne kept a box upstairs with stuff from our past. From when we met.
I remembered that day, when we’d sat behind a bush in Alexandra Park. There was music playing and people sitting around on the grass. Immediately, the smell of freshly cut grass brought tears to my eyes and I almost went back to the kitchen and sat and cried for the feel of soil between my fingers. For tall sunflowers and yellow daffodils. Day to day you forget the details of life, don’t you? But now I remembered. Oh yeah, now I did.
Dianne’s box was tucked under our bed. It looked shabby in the pristine room, stained brown and checkered with newsprint. I ran my fingers over the texture and I never felt so alive. But a little bit scared, too. I knew that the box contained my life, freeze-framed before things changed. Before we were too busy having kids to notice the melting icebergs and the flood. Before we made the connection.
Before the sea became waves of plastic and the canal was the only place left to dump our waste. Before the last blade of grass and the last tree.
I opened it all the same. I needed to go back there, to ease this ache in me for the past. But most of all, to find that lighter we used that day in the park. The one I lit Diane’s ciggie with before we held hands and smoked it between us. I rummaged in the box, tossing aside pictures of us and the kids, me and my mam, our dog Buster and the old house we used to live in before it was torn down to make way for the Units.
It was there. A cylindrical plastic lighter with a Union Jack on the side. I shook it and it was still half full of fuel. I’d be able to make a spark at least. I looked around for something to burn, but there was nothing. No wood, obviously. Everything was made of plastic which wouldn’t burn. Believe me, a lot of people have tried, but all they get is spirals of black smoke and a ten day minimum prison sentence.
I looked back at the box. Dianne would kill me, but I wanted to eat that fish. I got that mad urge, like I used to get when overpackaged Amazon parcels arrived, where I wanted to tear it up there and then. Tear it up and set light to all the combustable materials and cook my fish.
Reality kicked in. I hurried downstairs with the case and pushed the fish and the knife inside. Dianne and the kids were completely engrossed in Utopia, but I called out to them anyway.
“Just goin’ out. Be back later.” I listened as the soundwaves rippled through the clarified oxygen and hit the plastic. It sounded like a previous, optimistic version of me, when there was somewhere to be. Something to do. No reply, so I flung the front door open and strode down the street, Tony in tow. I was heading for the forest. Or at least to where the forest used to be. Something in my soul dragged me along through the plastic and concrete jungle, along the rusty canal bank and over the steel and plastic bridge.
We were taking a chance. A risk. We’re allowed to keep artefacts in private, but not in public, as if there’s an invisible tax on reminiscing. Dianne’s brown suitcase would have been a class one penalty, with its manky pateen corners and mouldy covering. The photos inside would have been severely frowned upon. We were all brown and smiling and surrounded by trees. Rumours were that no one wants us to remember that. That it’d do strange things to us. I can’t see it myself.
I’d played in the forest as a child and my muscle memory guided me back there. I knew instinctively where it was, which direction, and when I saw the boulder that marked the outskirts I punched the air. It was paved for miles, with the odd boulder sticking out. A kind of unspoken memorial to how the world used to be.
I picked a large boulder to sit behind. Tony sat opposite, legs crossed.
“My Dad used to say that these were meteorites. Come from space. Dead stars.”
He pointed upwards, and we both looked into the murky air. I nodded.
“Yeah. Stars. It’s been a while.”
I reached into the box and produced the fish. Tony gasped.
“Bloody hell. I thought you’d chopped it up. Bloody hell, Charlie.”
He got up and sat round the other side of the meteorite. I could still feel it, the primal urge and I smiled as I thought that I was sitting right next to a star. I unwrapped the fish and took out the knife. Grabbing a handful of photographs, I ripped them up and made them into kindling. Dianne and me ripped to shreds. Me and Mam, separated and decapitated. The greenery backgrounds merged together and I almost imagined that I was burning real wood. Well, I was, wasn’t I? Paper was made of wood.
I even ripped up the suitcase. A label inside told me that it was made in 1938. It belonged in the artefact museum, really. I pulled it apart all the same. By the time everything was torn into tiny pieces there was a fair pile of my former life. I clicked the lighter a couple of times and it lit. An orange dancing flame, so beautiful that I stared at it for longer than I should and it went out.
I panicked and clicked again, but there were only sparks this time. I could hear Tony shuffling around.
“Have you done it yet? Have you?”
I took a deep breath. The knife was in my hand and I held the fish firm. It was starting to smell a bit and a dark green liquid was leaking from its eyes. I pushed the knife home just below the gills, as I’d seen them do on the YouTube demonstration. The flesh moved under my hands as I hit something hard and I winced and pulled out the knife.
It was no good. The bile in my mouth made me feel like a fucking wuss, and the warrior instinct took over. I hacked at the dead flesh and sawed through the fish. Its head wouldn’t detach from the body so I sawed more frantically. My sweat dripped onto the scales, running off in rivulets. Fragments of meat splattered the paving stones and there was a thud, thud, thud as the end of the knive hit hard stone in rhythm.
Finally, I threw the knife aside and grabbed its body in one hand and its head in the other. I pulled and pulled, but it wouldn’t come away. Scales scraped off and fell to the ground and the flesh mangled around the cut as I tore at it. Suddenly, I realised that Tony was watching me. He was standing a few feet away, horrified. He moved forward and touched my shoulder.
“Mate. Stop. Look at the fucking state of you.”
I dropped the huge fish and it flopped onto the floor. Somewhere in the back of my consciousness, something scanned it and told me that it was still fit to eat. But my senses were fixed on something else. Something that glinted from inside the fish. Something mechanical. I wiped my hands on my jumper and wiped the slippy handle of the knife. Cutting away the flesh above the gills, the metal hit metal. I carved around the object. Tony gasped.
“Jesus Christ. What is that? What is it?”
It appeared to be a steel rib. I dug deeper and it was attached to a steel spine. It wasn’t right. This wasn’t a fish.
“What the fuck is it, Charlie? It’s some kind of monster.”
I butchered the fish. I scraped every single scrap of meat off its metal skeleton and put it neatly on one side. On top of the meteorite. I picked it up by the tail and shook it. It reminded me of one of those key rings you used to get in Christmas crackers. Flexible and slinky. It was perfectly engineered. It glinted in the light that pose as sunshine through the murky clouds. It was perfection.
I heard a click and Tony stared at the lighter in amazement.
“It worked! I saw a...”
“Spark. You saw a spark. Probably the last one. Jesus, Tone, I was gonna use that to cook it.”
He stared at the pile of debris.
“You’re not seriously going to eat it are you? We don’t even know if it’s real.”
So we sat there in the middle of the concrete forest, our backs against the boulder. The sparkling hope of all things past dropped out of the air and stunk all around us of rotting flesh. To make it worse, the Manchester sunshine we hardly ever saw these days broke through and made the fish stink even more.
Tony picked up one of the eyes and held it up to the light. He squashed it just like we used to do back when we were kids and there were spiders to pull the legs off. It didn’t pulp between his white-from-the-force fingers. Instead, it caught a ray and cast a huge rainbow through the damp air of Ancoats. The first one either of us had seen since that day we went fishing with Tony’s dad.
A stray sunbeam bent in a fluke turn of the atmosphere and directed the light at my former life, which promptly went up in smoke. I could have sworn I saw Tony’s dad through the smoke, fishing rod over his shoulder, walk off into the distance shaking his head. As if time had stood still ten years ago and only just found the balls to move on. I looked at the mutant fish and the smouldering photos and suddenly realised that now I had no past, there was only the future.
“Dianne’s gonna fucking kill me.”
Tony’s shoulders slumped and we wrapped the fish bits and the metal back up and walked home. I left the bundle outside and pushed the door open, not really relishing the thought of telling Dianne what had happened. But there was no need.
They all stood there laughing and cheering. It was party central and there I was, stinking to high heaven. No one cared. Dianne hugged me and kissed me.
“You did it, Charlie. You only went and did it.”
She pulled me over to the console on the wall and pointed.
“You passed the test. We’ve been elevated. Don’t you understand? You passed the decade test.”
Tony was as confused as me, but he took a bottle of beer from her. She handed round more alcohol to the neighbours who had joined the celebrations. The kids had old fashioned sweets and Dianne opened a box to reveal a cake.
“Ta-da!”
I stared at her.
“Your box...”
“Never mind that. Come on! Enjoy the moment. You know what this means, don’t you?” I shook my head. I didn’t know. I had no idea. “We’re on the next level! Utopia. We can move on.”
I looked at the ground.
“Okay. Utopia. So you’re at ten years ago now. Yeah. And we’ve completed a decade.”
My son, Michael butted in.
“Synched, dad. Synched.”
“Whatever. So if you’re moving on to the next level, where do you think you’re heading? To now, Dianne, and the only way that can look like Utopia is if the real future is worse.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she kept smiling.
“Don’t spoil it, Charlie. Come on, have a drink. And they’ve sent us this too.”
She opened the food portal and pulled out a great big steaming pile of fish and chips. I looked at Tone, who turned a funny shade.
“You can’t...”
But it was too late. They were eating them.
Me and Tone went outside and the fish was gone. So we sat on the concrete and thought about the next ten years and wondered what challenges Utopia would bring for us tomorrow so that our families wouldn’t be faced with today.
Ten Love Songs to Change the World
Peter F. Hamilton
I met Jesus once. Well come on, we all do it. He was one of us after all, a fey. Our hero, venerated by us the way baseline humans worship him for something else entirely. It was his stand which makes our history, our world, possible.
I was fourteen years old, and dreamed myself all the way back to his time. A relatively peaceful segment of his life, mind you, when he was starting to quietly gather his disciples from across the Roman Empire and beyond, and before the ghouls started showing an interest. It was on the shore of a lake. I don’t remember where. It’s not important.
He saw me and recognised what I was. Not hard. Fey can see each other when we’re manifesting, and I must have been quite a sight. I was wearing a white summer dress from Top Shop and some frayed Nike trainers. My hair was fairer than you got in the Middle East at that time, and cut in a wavy bob that was never really in fashion even in my time, never mind back then. All very different to First Century styles.
To look at he wasn’t anything remarkable. Average height, average build, small beard. His eyes though, they were sad. But I could see how much anger he could bring forth. Maybe that’s what made him the one, our saviour.
“You’re from a long way ahead,” he said. Or rather didn’t say, we don’t use words, of course, not in manifested state. As in all dreams, you can talk to whoever you want and understand each other. “I can always tell.”
“The start of the twenty first century,” I admitted.
“That’s risky. You’ll get the Guardians come and talk to you. There will be finger wagging.”
“I know. But I had to see you. To thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You won. Or you will win, but then you know that.”
“Yes, enough of you tell me.”
‘I live thanks to you. I’m grateful. I wanted you to know. That’s all.”
“Well thank you for making the trip... “
“Malinda.”
“Malinda from two thousand years ahead. I appreciate it.”
I looked round at his band of followers. He’d gathered over forty fey already, and not just timedreamers like me, there were sidedreamers, fardreamers, soothers, and more. But all of them were fighters, I knew that from their attitude. “Thank you all,” I said. And I saw someone else approaching. Some boy in late eighteenth century clothes, who was walking over to us with his feet not quite touching the ground.
I wondered what it must be like for Jesus, to have a constant stream of visitors from every century there will be, arriving in every spare moment, all praising him for the fight he would have and win. What must it be like knowing you were going to win? And die?
The disciples basically ignored me. They must see a dozen awestruck timedreamer kids a day. All of us breaking the guidelines.
“I should go,” I said. “It’s a long wave back.”
Which truly made me very nervous. The longer you stay in the past, the further back you go, the more chance there is that you change something, especially if you talk to someone backwhen. The universe, the timeline, it adjusts to every dream we have, every impact we make. Every word we speak to a fellow fey alters something, not by loading them with foreknowledge which is just damn stupid. But even if you only speak for a moment, you delay them – that changes things in a physical way, and that has consequences. The example Guardians always give is that a pause makes a pace different, every step they make thereafter is fractionally altered. Dislodge a pebble that wasn’t dislodged before (step on a Butterfly! – the timedreamers’ very own ultimate horror story) and it has consequences. That pebble can start a temporal avalanche if you’re not very careful. Was it the stone that got caught in a sandal, which made another traveller on the road stop, and if it doesn’t get caught in his sole and he arrives a minute early, he might see someone he didn’t before, a friendship springs up, lives are altered and so – history is different. Too different and you
might not get born.
So you ride the consequence wave home. And you get to see what you’ve done rushing around you like you’re watching the whole world in IMAX, watching the changes ripple out to become temporal tsunamis that wipe away everything you know, the timeline that produced you.
I did change things. I watched my consequences from a couple of the disciples admiring me, talking about me later that evening. Their movements were different, they trod on ground left clear before. Dirt was dislodged, tiny specks only, but some soil was compressed. A couple of grass seeds never germinated. But others came and took their place – were chewed on by animals. It was a ripple – circular, small. It washed out. The timeline didn’t change. I woke up safe on my bed on a sunny afternoon August 2000.
I’m never going back that far again.
Jesus is history to me for evermore.
He made his stand back there when we fey were becoming hunted to extinction. Not that there have ever been many of us. But nature being the bitch she is creates predators for everything, locking life in an eternal rock paper scissors battle. Humans are deadly to most animals, we can swat a scorpion, but a scorpion sting can kill humans just as asteroids kill dinosaurs (don’t laugh, asteroids are part of nature too, a very big nature).
We timedreamers were stalked and our minds devoured by ghouls as we contained the richest thoughts of all the fey. Just like us, ghouls were physically indistinguishable from baseline humans; but once they latched on, they savoured the memories and sensations of others, sucking them out to leave husks behind. And us, with our ability to visit anywhen, well we were the ultimate hit; the high they all craved. They sought us out first before feasting on the other fey. We were on the verge of dying out until Jesus decided to make his stand and fight back. He was a fardreamer, so he gathered other fey to him, which was a remarkable achievement in its own right. We always prefer to live quiet lives, keeping our heads down. Even today the prejudice against us is nasty. Back then, with Rome dominating Europe, any difference to the baselines was a death sentence. But he convinced the fey we were doomed anyway, and rallied our ancestors.
Now We Are Ten: Celebrating the First Ten Years of NewCon Press Page 16