by Jeff Wheeler
I realised I was sobbing. My face was wet, the salt liquid gathering at the corners of my mouth. Every sensation seemed acute, as though I had to feel it all in sharp detail, goading my mind to deny its existence. Its reality.
Toshiko was crying too. She reached to pull me into her embrace, but I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t let myself feel her warmth and essence and know she wasn’t real. I saw her putrefying remains, stark in my mind. She’d left me. She’d created a universe for me and then left me all alone in it.
I walked away from her then. I didn’t want to hear any more. I couldn’t begin to consider what I was supposed to do now. I went back through her house and out the front door. I don’t know where I was heading. But I jolted back into my clinging harness, in the dark, metallic confines of my VR pod. The disorientation was nothing like the first time, but it still hit me with its wave of vertigo. The program had ended. She hadn’t written anything besides herself, in her home, talking to me.
I yanked myself free of the suffocating tangle of suit and webbing and stumbled out of the unit, landing painfully on the steel floor. My tube came free again, but I felt stronger for the nutrients coursing through my bloodstream.
I stood cautiously. The insipid light still coated the walls. The stench of decay still choked my nostrils. The closed door still occupied the wall beyond Toshiko’s unit. I couldn’t bring myself to confront her remains again ... but the door. Behind that door lay a deserted space colony. The place I’d come from.
My knees felt weak as I approached the door. I set my shoulders and opened it. A waft of cold, stale air gusted past me. Beyond was darkness. When I stepped through, some long-abandoned power source flickered to life as my motion woke the lights.
I wandered those corridors and chambers that still came alight as I entered them. I found grey bulkheads, and empty quarters, and the remains of a community that had grappled with survival and lost. I found dust, and debris, and chilly dampness. I found evidence of the living, and no one left alive. When I came upon a wide viewport, I stumbled in shock at the raw expanse beyond. Space travel had never frightened me before, but I wasn’t travelling now. I was stranded.
I knew Toshiko would have exhausted every possibility over the last twenty-five years. But it was one thing to hear my fate from her simulation. Surely there were records. Computer logs, video diaries, something to confirm everything she’d told me.
The station’s computer was easy enough to boot. Obviously the remaining solar panels were keeping some systems alive. Including your whole world, a snide voice whispered in the back of my mind. It took me a few moments to find log entries, but there were dozens of them. Some were password protected; others had public access. I scrolled back to the last cluster of entries and opened the top one.
It showed a recording of a gaunt man, pale-faced, with sores on his forehead.
“Magda died this afternoon. There are five of us left. Two children, three adults, and all but one of us are showing symptoms.” He coughed, a hacking wet sound that made me wince. “I’ve tried one last time to mend the communications array, but without Anwelo’s skill, we’re screwed.” A child began crying in the background. The man looked on the verge of joining in. He opened his mouth to continue, but swallowed hard and signed off instead.
The next entry was three days later. I opened it, and a young Toshiko looked out at me. There were tears in her eyes. She held a dark-haired toddler.
“We’re the last two,” she said. “I jettisoned Will’s body this morning. It’s just me and little Carlos.” She held the child close. He was all she had left. “I can hardly believe it, but I’m better. It’s as if I was meant to survive to help this little one. If I’d died too ...” She broke off and kissed the side of his curly head. A lump blocked my throat. That was the end of her entry.
She’d left later accounts of the VR development: her excitement at the initial idea, programming glitches, physiological and hygiene issues, descriptions of fitting me with new suits as I grew.
I stepped away from the computer, hit by the depth of Toshiko’s love. I wouldn’t have survived without her. I wandered away in a daze.
* * *
As I stood beneath the flickering light cells of a large communal chamber, gazing at abandoned furniture and discarded personal items, it assailed me. The hideous weight of a loneliness so crushing I thought I’d never be able to stand again. It bore me to the ground and I crouched, cowering like a frightened animal, my arms over my head and my breath choking out in hoarse gasps. I felt eviscerated, hollow, terrified. Out here, I was the only human. Utterly alone.
I don’t know how long I huddled there, but after a time the lights went out due to my stillness. Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to move.
It was the thought of Gia that roused me. My wife. My wife who consisted of binary coding and artificial, programmed intelligence. A fresh sob strangled me at the thought, which was also the realisation that artificial coding was all I had in the world. It was my world. Not this cold husk of an extinct population. That complex, all-encompassing, glimmering facade was all I would ever have. I could return to it, immerse myself in it, and share my life with the people Toshiko had fabricated for me ... or I could stay here, in this cold, lifeless reality until I lost my mind to it.
It was no decision, really. I retraced my steps to the only room I’d ever lived in and hooked myself back up. Later, I would find a way to jettison Toshiko’s body and perhaps learn how she had died. Later, I would reload the program she’d left me and ask her how to maintain my equipment and keep myself alive, as she had always done for me. I could return to the station and scour the diagnostics for something the colonists had missed. If that proved fruitless, I could consume myself with overseeing my personal reality. But now, all I wanted was my beautiful wife. She was waiting, mercifully alone, when I came around. I pulled her into our bed with me and lost myself in her sweet, tangible reality. For that moment, there was nothing else in the world.
* * *
It’s been years since Toshiko taught me everything I needed to know. I’ve quizzed her virtual persona on everything she could possibly impart. She helped me write the satellite program, establishing a place in my world where the colonists are thriving in their Venusian orbit, making lives and discoveries and babies. I’ve railed at her, and wept with her, and done my best to express my gratitude for everything she created for me when she was alive. There’s nothing left to ask her now; nothing else to say.
But still. Every now and again, when I miss her the most, or need to touch the last remaining link to my physical past, I bring myself back to the metallic room and load her datacard. Her front door is always open, and she always calls,
“Carlos? I’m out here. Come through.”
Eleanor Wood
Eleanor R. Wood’s stories have appeared in Pseudopod, Crossed Genres, Urban Fantasy Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, and the Aurealis-nominated anthology Hear Me Roar, among other places. She writes and eats liquorice from the south coast of England, where she lives with her husband, two marvellous dogs, and enough tropical fish tanks to charge an entry fee.
She blogs at http://creativepanoply.wordpress.com.
Fantasy
Claimed by the Sea
By Beth Powers | 15,700 words
The fisherfolk wanted to leave the body where it lay in the wet sand by the edge of the tide. It was bad luck to save those already claimed by the sea, they insisted. Besides, they were searching for a child, and even at a distance, the body clearly belonged to an adult woman. They eyed the body warily, shook their heads, and moved on to continue the search farther up the beach.
But the mender hung back. Even with the walking stick, his limp caused him to make slow progress, leaving him at the back of the group that wound along the sand like a row of seabirds searching the shallows for dinner. He paused, still on dry sand, to study the body. If a gale had raged without reaching the shore, the mender would have felt it in his bad hip.
Any closer and he would have gotten wet. He didn’t try to outrun the storms anymore. No, there had been no storm on the island to throw a ship against the reef that protected the bay, and no wreckage told the tale of a doomed vessel farther out to sea.
As the search continued on without him, the mender slipped out of his sandals and took a halting step forward, bracing himself for the chill of the approaching wavelet. Once his feet remembered the cold that never seemed to leave the sea, especially here in the northern waters, he waded in with his slow stuttering gait toward the motionless form. He had no intention of denying the sea her prize. He merely wanted a closer look, to see if the woman had legs or if she was some sort of fish creature found in the old tales and birthed by the sea.
Even as he reached her side, the mender still couldn’t tell. Her dark garments clung to her form in tatters, leaving long strips to dance with the incoming tide and obscure her lower half. He considered pulling her out of the surf to satisfy his curiosity, but he doubted the strength in his leg would be up to the task. The undertow dragged sand from beneath his bare feet, and were it not for the walking stick, waves that barely reached halfway to his knees would have threatened to topple him.
As he contemplated his precarious position, the mender caught sight of toes in the foam of a retreating wave as the sea pulled at the stranger, trying to reclaim her prize.
The mender shifted momentarily toward the horizon, leaning more heavily on the stick for balance as he breathed in the smell of salt and let the sea spray mist his face. He inclined his head slightly. The sea had spoken; the mender would not interfere with her claim.
Turning carefully, he stepped around the crown of feathery dark hair, which hid the woman’s features from view and branched out like the tentacles of a sea creature trying to hinder his already uncertain steps. Momentarily mesmerized by the movement of hair and cloth, the mender caught a glimpse of a dark crescent marring the pale skin of the woman’s upper arm. At the sight of it, the mender’s blood ran colder than the seawater that lapped at his ankles.
The stranger wore the islands on her arm. Guardian.
Without taking his eyes from the spot, once again obscured by torn fabric, he tried to call to the others. His voice failed to issue from his damaged throat in anything above a harsh whisper. He paused, carefully inhaled a deep breath of salty-wet air from the sea, and putting his power behind it, the mender tried again. The result was painful on his abused throat, but his voice carried down the beach, and the last of the searching fisherfolk turned back. Heedless of the water, the mender dropped to his knees, abandoning the walking stick to the tide, and tried ineffectually to move the waterlogged body that was firmly anchored by the sand.
“Mender, you cannot defy the wishes of the sea,” a returning woman chided him from dry land. She had turned at his shout and retraced her steps, but she made no move to assist him. Instead, she stood on the shore with one hand raised to shade her eyes against the sun. “We need to finish searching this part of the beach before the tide comes in at sunset,” she reminded him patiently as though wading out into the waves was perfectly natural and he simply needed to be directed back on course. Practical, imperturbable Kirsi. Normally, the mender appreciated that about her.
“No,” he tried to respond, but his voice came out in a croak, and he shook his head as it set him to coughing. When he could continue, he explained, “She’s a Guardian!” The mender couldn’t see Kirsi’s eyes, but her mouth opened and closed without speaking. After a pause to call to the rest of the fisherfolk, she gathered her skirts and splashed out to join him, shoes and all.
Guardian. Guardians protected the islands. Guardians called dragons from the sky.
* * *
Itziar swam through fevered dreams. Tumbled and tossed, attacked on all sides by unseen sharp objects. For long stretches of time, she couldn’t breathe. Her lungs burned until she encountered a fleeting pocket of air that was snatched away too soon, causing more salt water to burn down her nose and mouth. She tried to cough, to expel it, but there was only more, more, more. It was everywhere.
Questions drifted toward her, spoken by voices she didn’t recognize. They drifted up from the dark water that swirled her around. The words were different, but the meaning was always the same. What happened? What happened, Itziar? What did you do? Slowly, the dark water drained away to be replaced by a myriad of faces—attractive and plain, striking and common, and one that looked like she felt—haggard like a scrap of wet shoe leather left in the sun too long.
None of the faces remained stable. One moment, stormy gray eyes looked out from a delicately freckled face, which was surrounded by soft short curls that seemed to have taken their inspiration from the pelt of a seal and reminded her of the feeling of salt when it dried on the skin. In the next instant, that face was replaced by eyes the blue-green color of the southern sea set in features built from the scrap of old shoe leather and framed by wispy strawberry-blond curls. That face would stay long enough to raise the hair on the back of Itziar’s neck and ask its question before swirling back into the mix of features. The pale green eyes were always laughing and brought with them a smell that blended many fragrant flowers. The unkempt stringy dark hair was accompanied by a sense of displeasure, but also kindness. The soft sun-kissed brown skin never lost the tension in its jaw, nor the attractiveness of its features.
But it didn’t matter how many different combinations presented themselves. They all demanded something Itziar couldn’t give. Each cycled back to silence, accompanied by the image of a woman: intricate black braids that tamed wild curls, the too-still, broken rune–covered features, and eyes that would have been brown had they been open. Of them all, that was the only face Itziar recognized.
Some part of Itziar knew that when her strength and magic had failed, she had plummeted into the sea. She only wished that it would stop tormenting her and finish its task. After countless tides of faces, she came to realize that it wasn’t the sea that held her in its grasp. She no longer felt the mad desperation of lungs burning for air, or the chaotic tumble of the relentless surf. No, her body was racked with a different kind of pain: shivering-hot fever chills laced with fire-hot slices of wounds, new and old.
At some point, she managed to outrun the pain enough—or maybe she took to her dragon form and flew—to leave the fever dreams behind. Not a single face haunted her slumber.
* * *
Itziar’s first thought upon waking was how thirsty she felt. But her eyeballs scratched against her eyelids like sand whenever they moved, so she left them closed and still. She pushed aside the thirst and ignored the aches and pains at the edges of her awareness, kept at bay by something numb and pleasant that crackled through her. Her own magic allowed her to feel other magic, but the lingering smell of food distracted her from determining whether the crackling feeling came from whatever was numbing her wounds or from something—or someone—else nearby.
She suspected there might be more than one source, because along with the hair-raising crackle, she felt an undercurrent of the tight sensation produced when ocean water dried on skin. Both were laced with the distinct buzz that told her magic or a magic user was close.
Near her head, a chair creaked, and she decided to open her eyes to find out more.
“Well met,” the man said, his voice low and gravelly. His face was composed of fragments of the fever dream that had never quite aligned—storm-gray eyes set in old shoe leather surrounded by unkempt stringy dark hair that failed to be contained by its tie. The old shoe leather skin and the lines around his eyes made him seem older at first, but upon a closer inspection, Itziar suspected him to be closer to her age, around his mid-thirties. At the moment, the expression mixed understanding and caution. He set aside the piece of cloth—it looked to be a garment of some sort—he had been mending, and added, “Welcome, Guardian.”
“Don’t call me that,” Itziar said, her voice coming out dry and harsh, as though unused, but the anger and pain b
ehind her words didn’t diminish.
His eyebrows drew together, and Itziar could see a question forming on his lips, but something drew his attention to the other side of the bed. Itziar heard it too and shifted, startled to find another man, slightly younger than the first, on her other side. He held out a clay mug, nodding for her to take it before he spared a scowl at the man who had spoken. This one accounted for soft seal curls, blue-green eyes, and sun-kissed brown skin. These features worked in harmony to form a uniquely beautiful face.
“Thank you,” Itziar croaked, her voice seeming to lose ground against the dry patch, as she took the mug. She drank before adding, “I’m Itziar.” Only pausing slightly before looking back to include the first speaker in her introduction as well. She could hardly blame him for calling her Guardian if she didn’t give him another name to use.
The man had already moved to retrieve his work, but he paused before pulling out the needle and nodded to his companion, adding in a voice that maintained its rough tone, “We call him Nalu. He doesn’t speak.” With that, he returned to his task.
“And you?” Itziar asked, her voice leveling out at something akin to its usual low pitch.
He raised an eyebrow, holding up the garment, which she could now see was a child’s dress, and said, “I’m the mender.” Itziar noticed that while the rest of the room was sparsely furnished, collections of tools and materials clustered here and there. She wondered if it was a workshop of some kind.
“Is she awake, Mender?” The owner of the remaining features—strawberry-blond wisps, freckles, laughing green eyes, and the scent of flowers—breezed in with a basket on each arm. Without waiting for an answer, she asked Itziar, “Is he giving you a hard time?” In addition to the smell of flowers that seemed to belong to her, Itziar caught the scent of baked goods. Her stomach rumbled, distracting her from the question and causing her to wonder how long it had been since she had eaten. It didn’t seem to matter that she hadn’t responded as the woman shot the mender a scolding look before turning back to Itziar. “I’m Kirsikka. You can call me Kirsi. Don’t let this crusty old salt make you nervous.” She dropped one basket unceremoniously on the mender’s lap, and set the other on the end of the bed, opening it and causing the smell of bread to increase tenfold. “He’s just hungry.” She tossed the mender what appeared to be a roll without looking. He was in the process of setting her other basket on the floor and almost didn’t look up in time to catch it.