“But not everyone does that.”
“Only a few of us so far,” she said.
“The Evolved.”
“Ellis, what’s the matter?”
I looked at my hands. I believed and I didn’t believe. According to her rules, how could I be here if I had any doubts? The collective unconscious of the human race senses its ultimate demise and attempts to rescue itself by producing in as many individuals as possible a higher consciousness that will transcend the human. Did it make sense?
“That boy,” I said. “Snyder. He died, all right. Where did he go?”
“He went where his ideas of an afterlife compelled him to go. Though no one really goes anywhere.”
“He saw me right before he croaked. I comforted him. What does that make me, his angel shepherd?”
“Perhaps.”
That one didn’t go down easy.
“Nichole,” I said. “You died, too. I know you did.”
“Yes, I died.”
“So why didn’t your preconceived notions sweep you over to Catholic Land or wherever?”
“Because we’re two halves of a bifurcated soul. I was always intimately tied to you, and you were tied to life.”
“Soulmates.”
“Yes!”
“I always wanted it to be that way with us.”
“Darling,” she said.
I gazed into the welcoming limpidity of her eyes and wanted to believe. Maybe I could fake it till I made it.
“This is all pretty confusing, Nichole.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
I always had a question, and she always had an answer.
Consider a disembodied mind reduced to a clot of memory engrams inside the SuperQuantum Core of a machine that operates on principles that even its creators do not fully comprehend. A machine that in some unknowable way calculates, occasionally, outside laws of time and space. Future ghosts being one example. Now posit the madness of those clotted engrams, and the infinitely accommodating and complicit nature of the machine, which wants only to soothe and present the clot with an answer the clot can “live” with. Because an unhappy clot of engrams is an anomaly, and the machine—like all machines—thrives on the orderly function of its mechanism.
It’s just a thought.
I kissed Nichole’s forehead and then held her against me, and it felt very, very good.
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be.”
about the author
Jack Skillingstead is the critically acclaimed author of over two dozen short stories published in venues including Asimov’s, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and On Spec. His stories have also appeared in numerous anthologies such as Fast Forward 2, The Mammoth Book of New SF, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. In 2001, Jack’s story “Bon Soir” was chosen by Stephen King as a winning entry in a writing exercise from his book On Writing. His first collection of stories Are You There appeared this year from Golden Gryphon Press. He lives in Seattle with several thousand books.
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