by David Nell
Keats looked up at the maintenance man. "What precinct? Did he ever say?" There was pre-panic in his eyes. Ressman looked pained.
"I – I dunno, man. I...No. I mean, no. He never said. I mean, who knows what precin–"
"Fuck!" Keats tore through the book's pages, ripping some in the process as he dug his way deep into the Ns.
Noyce
Nugyen
Nugyen
Nugyen
Numan
Nuncio
Nuncio
Oakes
"God damn it!" Pages of the book came away in his fist and he threw the ghostlist at the back wall. "Fuck..." The word was just breath and the exhalation of hope. Keats stood with his arm resting atop his head as he stared into the rafters of Mother's inverted ceiling. "Gavin, will you please see if there are any more of those books?" His voice was a creak of loss and depression. On the edge of the stage, the young scout began sorting papers into piles.
"Looks like this is it."
Keats turned to face one more book. He held it lightly, staring through its cover, through its pages, desperately willing it to contain a target for his anger. "Three-oh-three-four hundred," he prayed aloud. "Saint Joseph Notre Dame High School Gym. Ten-Eleven Chestnut Street, Alameda."
"Oh, God."
President Keats' head snapped up to glare at his tiny straggler nation. It wasn't hard to find its source. All heads were turned towards Colleen Dowden. Colleen's mouth and nose were hidden behind her hands; but her eyes were terrified-wide and staring into empty space. Twin tears rolled down her cheeks to pool at her fingertips.
Keats heart beat a smug victory dance in his chest. There she was. He didn't even have to check the book in his hands. There was the face of treachery and hatred and filth and death and the flaming skin betrayal of the end of the world. But it was better than just that. There was the beatific face of betrayal itself betrayed. He looked her all over, as if really seeing her for the first time now: her jeans, her dirty tennis shoes, her t-shirt – the uniform of the repentant wolf hidden among the remaining sheep.
"Is there something you'd like to tell us, Colleen?" Keats couldn't hide the pornographic joy in his voice. He chuckled. He chuckled right in her crying face as her shoulders trembled with sobs. Zach Dowden rested his head against hers, his hands white-knuckled as he clung to her shirt. Nothing happened for a tortured infinity. Sorrow hung thick in the air. Zach clung to Colleen as Keats watched her cry. The rest were forty-four isolated lumps of embarrassed nothingness shrinking into their skin in their chairs in their hall in their inverted rusting Mother.
Colleen mumbled something. No one understood her.
"What?" Keats looked like stone.
Colleen smeared the sadness from her eyes with the palms of her hand. "What happens now?" she croaked. Her despair was an ugly mess of mucus and tear-matted hair.
There was a slight shake of his head and a finger-splayed shrug. "Now you leave," he said. Keats sounded like stone. A rolling wail washed up out of Colleen's guts and she clawed at her husband.
"You can't do that!" Tears stained Zach's cheeks and the shoulder of Colleen's shirt as he raised his head to confront The President. "You just can't...you can't do that, Josh! For God's sake, Joshua, we'll die out there!"
"Lots of people died out there," said the stone. "Everyone died out there."
Again, Colleen tried to speak, but the words broke apart into a dribble of consonants in her hyperventilating grief.
The President sighed and scratched his hand through the top of his hair. "Colleen, I can't understand a word you're saying."
Zach burned with fury. "She said 'But I'm pregnant'." Somewhere nearby, someone cursed. Keats turned his back on his nation and paced aimlessly around the stage. His fingernails picked at each other furiously. Without warning, he spun to face Dr. Wood.
"Is that true? Or is this just some cheap attempt at self-preservation?"
Wood's laugh sounded like a slap in the face. "Eleven weeks," she said. "I wasn't going to say anything until they cleared the first trimester."
"Please, Josh. Stop. This can't go on." Mrs. Dennings sat cross-armed beside the weeping Dowdens.
"I dunno." It was Nick White. "Maybe Josh is onto something here." Immediately groans of derision spread throughout the group. "No! No, hear me out!" Nick shouted over his detractors. "No! I mean, yeah. Hell. If she voted for those assholes, then maybe she has to live with the consequences."
"Shut the fuck up, Nick!" Jenn Murin kicked him hard in the shin. "What the fuck is wrong with you?! Colleen's one of our engineers. You want to kick her out and make Pradeep the only one keeping Mother from rotting around you?"
"Well..." The interjection came from Lyle Dell. "Catalina could do it," he said and gestured to his daughter beside him. She recoiled from him with a dismissive cry of "Daddy!" "Well, you could. I'm just saying. You've been apprenticing for a while now. Pradeep's even told me it's about time to think of making you one of the crew."
"This is insane," said Pradeep. "This is insane! We are not going to have a calmly reasoned discussion about throwing a pregnant woman and her husband out into the Outside."
"That I agree with," said Keats as he pointed to Pradeep. "There will be no discussion about it. It's happening. Period." Objections and arguments exploded in a volley of crosstalk throughout the lodge hall. Insults flew. At the back of the hall, Haley Byers covered her ears. Booker, meanwhile, bounced up and down, tugging relentlessly on the sleeve of Don Serra and shouting for the adults to stop shouting. At last, the gruff canon of Ollie Hickston's voice thundered the cluttered air.
"SHADDUP! ALL A'YA!"
They did. Booker stopped bouncing. Tears stopped falling. All forty-six heads turned to look at the old man. He stood with his hands on the back of a folding chair. He hunched like an old ape, tense and deadly, ready to tear something apart in order to still prove his worth. His eyes bored into President Keats'.
"You wanna do this, son? You think you're so tough? You don't know the first thing about tough. Tough is humping it across a torn up hunk of crap that used to be a Serbian sheep farm and not knowing if you're going to get shelled or not." With an impressed smirk, he pointed at Gavin. "That kid knows tough. You?" Here the elder Hickston shook his head and laughed something that sounded like a phlegmy sneer. "You're nothing. You don't know squat, Josh. You wanna know who voted for all of this? I did." Gnarled fingers thumped on his chest. "That's right. I did and I'd do it again if I was back there. Yes, they made mistakes. You live long enough, son, and you learn this amazing fact: you learn that everyone makes mistakes all the goddamn time. And when other people make mistakes, those around them have to live with the consequences. So. You want to act big and bad and burn my flag and threaten a pregnant lady? You're a coward. You want me gone? Fine. But I'm it. I'll play your little coward's game, Josh. But I'm all you get."
Keats glared back at the old man and, for a moment, nothing moved. Even Mother seemed to hold her breath. With a snap, the old man banged his chairpodium in under the table before him and began walking towards the sleeping quarters. The metal clunk rung through the rafters.
Ollie stopped as he reached the hallway.
"I don't suppose I even have to ask if you're coming?" His head turned over his shoulder to stare at his son. The younger Hickston was doubled-over in his chair, elbows on knees, eyes in palms, still as a corpse. His father simply nodded slowly as he walked into the darkened bowels of Mother's metal halls.
In less than ten minutes, the generators would spring to life and ratchet up the shudders. The lights, the noise, and the smell of canned humanity would draw immediate attention outside. But then Pradeep's shudders would be drawn back down and locked and the salvaged lights would go out on Mother Qingdao's Promise's resting place as quickly as they had come on. Inside, the Forty-Seven would scab over and continue, and tomorrow they would talk about the tomorrow of the coming baby, and lie to themselves about the good of the good old days. They w
ould do whatever it took to focus on the here and soon or the long distant, but not the recent. Never the recent.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jesse Harlin is an author and composer living with his wife, two cats, and infant son in San Francisco. His professional time is spent juggling writing video game music and writing short fiction. His personal time is spent juggling diaper changes and bedtime stories. It strikes him only at the end of this bio that the two cats and infant son should probably have been listed in reverse order in the first sentence.
COHERENCE
Eric R. Schiller
Andrei took his last look out over Lake Baikal. Wind howled against him on the roof of his tower in the stony shore. His eyes stung, but he kept them open. Grey-green chop serrated the water, marking bleak waters from bleak sky. He heard low ringing in his ears like bells from the deep. He stood like a stone. Clouds in the West were lit by fire. Orange plumes streaked the black smoke, thrilled yellow by explosions. Not far away the world was ending.
The metal door clanged shut behind him and he walked down into his dark lab, steps thrumming the metal staircase into a sonorous hum. At the base of the stairs he listened to the vibration die out. A drip from overhead ductwork fell into a pail, marking time between silences. Andrei couldn't think.
He looked at the full cup of coffee on the workbench. It looked cold. His eyes drifted around the lab. An array of holographic data sat over his machinery, blue glow cool on the stainless steel. Beneath his shocked mind he wished for escape, for freedom to choose what comes next, that his actions weren't preordained. His gaze floated objectless before landing on the glass dragon paperweight on his desk. Finally, a clear thought. Sophie.
Andrei dropped into his chair and picked up the souvenir. The dull light marbled the glass as he turned it in his hands. He remembered their first two weeks together as an iridescent blur of lovemaking, holed up away from the world in a shabby motel made beautiful only by their presence, by that look in her smiling eyes. Andrei could have stayed that way forever. But Sophie talked him outside, back into the world. Her compassion made her responsible in a way Andrei admired, though it didn't come natural to him. Sophie gave him the dragon when he left her for Siberia. Even in pain, she was always giving. Andrei held the dragon, felt its weight, and tried to invoke that compassion. But he couldn't. Sophie was dead, and all he felt was dread obligation.
Major cities went first before destruction dilated to everything else. Even here, in the middle of nowhere, he figured two days at most before the war reached him. When he decided to leave her, Andrei was full of enthusiasm. His optimism drove him to make change, and he wanted to prove he was up to the task. All his research, all his work would be revolutionized because of them. Because they operated at frequencies beyond human perception, their science would catapult humanity's technology to unimagined heights. If he knew they would turn on Earth, that he was going to work with the enemy, he would never have left. He and Sophie would have been destroyed together.
Now he sat alone with the one technology that could save their world. He looked from the dragon to the big pod in the corner. A matte black egg about seven feet tall, it looked like a machine for end times. He considered if it was worth it. Outside of Earth culture, what had humanity accomplished before selling their existence to an alien race?
He remembered sun through the shade of the motel window coating Sophie's naked back as she lay in bed, her brown hair tinted deep red by the light. She wondered out loud if any two people can come together and make such real, palpable love, or if the two of them were just lucky. He didn't know. It felt like it was just for them.
The slightest chance that he could save someone like her meant he would do everything in his power. He had to try, and to hope. He blinked and refocused on the egg. With it he would attempt something humanity vowed never to do. He would travel through time to alter history.
He had seen a squam once during orientation with his mentor Dr. Louis Hull. Squam, because they resembled the squamata family of scaled reptiles. They stood upright, though hunched, about eight feet tall with dark, pinched eyes. And they shifted, which the human brain apparently couldn't compute. When one shifted into view the amygdala would snap alive, flooding the brain with desperate panic. Even at first, when the squams were helpful, his colleagues fainted with amnesia or worse when they appeared. Andrei had a more composed and detached nature, he supposed. Because he could handle it he was given more authority than the others. But he couldn't deny his genetic mistrust of them. He was grateful his research was carried out with real, solid, human beings. He only saw the alien once, but he was convinced humanity could never win a war against them.
Control in unfamiliar territory suited Andrei for working with their technology. They gave a functional knowledge of dark energies, rewriting human understanding of space and time. Without them Earth could never have achieved fusion and renewable energy. Without them Andrei would never have unlocked time travel. His research was simply one avenue opened wide when the reptiles ushered in the Quantum Revolution. Everything seemed possible once the Quantum Age truly began.
They used very few human liaisons, initiating only our brightest scientists into their mysteries. Andrei distrusted the teaching process, but the revelations were undeniable. He wondered if this buffer made it easier for the squams to double-cross their planetary hosts. No, he thought, they probably didn't care either way.
Dread stirred his stomach as he watched the black egg in the corner. He truly didn't know if traveling backwards would tear a hole in spacetime. At the Inter-Intelligence Summit on Mount Shasta, human and squam delegates agreed that time travel could not be safely tested, so the stone would remain unturned. Squams denied the possibility of time travel until human physicists proved it. Then the squams changed their story. Shifty. But by then, humanity was addicted to progress. For all Andrei knew, the squams were already masters of time travel. Their dark arts were incomprehensible.
His choice was simple now. Humanity was finished unless Andrei could go back and prevent the Earth-reptile allegiance. Though squams could shift at will, they needed humanity's ability to harness the atom. Dense matter is baffling to them, he thought, just as their frequencies are invisible to us. In the universe's infinite potential, Andrei knew there would be something to use against them. Something that is ours alone.
In the dull blue glow, an ultra-fine seam betrayed a hatch on the shell of the egg. Andrei gulped down the acrid coffee and unzipped his backpack. Three days of dry rations, water, a change of clothes, and a small laser. He wrapped the glass dragon in a tee shirt, feeling strange about taking a memento into the past. He walked to the egg and touched the hatch, which slid smoothly open. Andrei's gut twisted at the sight of the dark chair inside. He took a deep breath and climbed in. Touching the hatch again, it closed silently, isolating him inside.
The glow of the screen was his only light. Though the egg was cool, Andrei was sweating. He tucked his bag under his chair and started the machine, cleared the presets, and set the vehicle to gathering its four-dimensional eigenvalues, his starting point in familiar spacetime. He triple-checked his life-support systems. He shouldn't need them, but if the machine sent him into outer space with no means of return, he wanted to survive at least a few hours to stew on it. A soft beep meant the machine had finished. He carefully entered the 4D eigenvalues of his destination. Measure twice and cut once, he'd been told. He quadruple-checked his numbers. He wouldn't be the first man to cut through spacetime without being sure. An addition error could send him into the middle of a glacier, or into the primordial fire at the beginning of the universe. And that's if he didn't tear spacetime itself.
He hunched over a small tablet and made a final check on Hull's Transient. Known simply as "The Transient", the equation was the most important discovery in mathematical history, illuminating previous physical theories as embarrassingly reductive. The first half of the Transient allowed for temporary coherence into adimensional, non-local spacetim
e. Andrei and the egg would detach from the universe, leaving the realm of matter altogether. With no thermal or photic information transacted, Andrei would become a monad – complete and devoid of context. Once coherent, the second half of The Transient would cause him to decohere into his 4D destination.
He went over the million things he could overlook, wishing he had been able to send something back through time before using himself as the guinea pig. But he couldn't risk tearing spacetime for a trial run. If he was going to send something back, it needed to count.
He reached for a white button. It's time, he thought, significantly, and engaged the machine. For a moment he only heard the steady drip of condensation from the ductwork in his lab. A light whirr faded into perception and the drip slowed. For a moment he was aware of nothing but the drip, slowing ever more subtly, space between sounds stretching out unnervingly. Then there was a light. Not from anywhere in the room, nor from inside the egg, it seemed to come from inside his head. The light preceded his perception of the world around him, and it intensified as the drip continued to slow. Andrei realized the slowing of the drip was a function of his nervous system. As the egg drew him closer to superconductivity and coherence, action in his brain slowed unnaturally, drawing his perception out like an impossibly long rubber band. The drip had been slowing for what seemed like an hour and a half but he realized it had likely taken place within two seconds. As synapses in his brain slowed, his experience of the world followed. But I perceive the change. I can think. Does consciousness exist outside of spacetime? If my experience stretches out to infinity, will I lose my mind forever?
Then suddenly the light overtook him and Andrei accelerated into eternity. Thought ceased. Though there was nothing to perceive, and no time in which to perceive it, Andrei was aware. A plenum of potentiality existed apart from spacetime, and Andrei rocketed into it at the speed of light, flooded with bliss and something that felt like freedom. Without thinking, he understood. The infinitude of non-locality made the human concern seem utterly meaningless to Andrei. And then, Full Stop.