The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  He swung open the door to reveal a spacious, three-story apartment with polished mahogany floors and a twisting spiral staircase that rose up into a cut-glass chandeliered ceiling. The floors were lined with the plush oriental rugs Paul had always preferred, the walls lined with neat brass filing cabinets packed tight with forms.

  Paul stepped towards the great black desk in the room’s center, an altar to forms. That wooden desk held everything he’d ever wanted – a green ink-blotter, a rich leather deskpad, a brass lamp.

  Payne reached into his breast pocket pulled out a small bouquet of four jet-black fountain pens. “No more Bic pens for you, my friend.”

  Paul twirled in circles to take it all in – three stories of beauty for him to collate, fill, and organize.

  “Here’s the best part,” Payne said.

  He nudged an electronic pad with his elbow. The smooth, rhythmic tones of Snoop Dogg pulsed throughout the place, Paul’s favorite music, the easy flow of his teenaged years thrumming through the carpets.

  “With our ’mancy, it’s easy to look up your favorite iTunes tracks,” Payne told him.

  “This – this…” Paul trailed off, gaping at the wonder.

  Aliyah gave it the cursory inspection of a bored kid wandering through a museum. “It’s pretty, Daddy,” she allowed. She looked up at the single bed, placed artfully high up for privacy. “But where do I sleep?”

  “Oh, we have a special place for you, little Hotplate! And you, Alex.” Valentine shrugged sullenly. “If you two will come next door? You both have similar ’mancies – why, you’re almost sisters! So I figure I can show you both at once.”

  Aliyah darted out of the room, bouncing with excitement. Valentine shrugged, her body rippling with uneasy black tentacles, and followed. They all walked over to the next room, and Payne produced another golden key.

  “Now this – this, I think, should be enough to win any videogamemancer’s heart.”

  He pushed the door in to reveal another three-story apartment – yet where Paul’s library had been all golden lamplight, Aliyah’s room was lit a bright and welcoming game-store white. The walls were decorated with colorful Pokemon mosaics, formed from bright plastic pixel tiles.

  Huge flat-screen televisions dominated every story – each with a comfortable couch and a library of games, still in their original packaging, lined up neatly on shelves. Periodic snack food stations were slotted into the walls – a Slurpee machine, a Dunkin’ Donuts rack, a popcorn cart.

  But the rows of game cartridges dominated all.

  “There’s a space for every video game system we could find, from Vectrex to the PlayStation 4,” Payne explained, leading in Aliyah, who muffled a squee with both hands. “We cobbled together as complete a library as we could muster in a day – we’ll get more, of course.”

  Aliyah ran over to the Nintendo DS section, which had every game on her Amazon wishlist. She took them off the shelves, comparing them to each other – then pulled them all down, a waterfall of cartridges tumbling to the ground. Aliyah scooped them up, clutched them to her chest.

  “This is Hotplate’s room, so the games are rated appropriately for her age,” Payne said. “Yet if you’ll allow me to escort you to your room, Ms Mercer, the selection is – “

  Valentine stood in horror, her arms flopping black pseudopods.

  “You...” Her face rippled in distress. “You think I can do ’mancy in this corporate shithole?”

  Twenty

  Schisms and Spasms

  Aliyah dropped the cartridges, concerned, then ran over to take Valentine’s hand – and kept it there, even though Valentine’s hand was a squamous mass of cilia.

  “Aunt Valentine, this is everything we need.” She looked terribly hurt.

  “Oh, bullshit. Look, I...” Her face drooped into her old Valentine self. “I can’t talk to you guys when I’m shapeshifting.”

  “Ms Mercer, if anyone sees you–”

  “Can it, G-Man,” Valentine said, whirling on Payne. “This is between me, Paul, and the kid. Not you.”

  Payne held up his hands. “Then I’ll leave you to discuss this amongst yourselves.” He exited the room, Rainbird trailing reluctantly behind him, closing the door.

  Aliyah pressed a spanking new Nintendo DS into Valentine’s hands. “Aunt Valentine, this has all the videogames we ever need! We can play whatever we want! And you and I, we can…” She looked shamed for reasons she didn’t quite understand. “We can sit on a comfortable couch, like at Mommy’s house, and play in a clean place…”

  “Oh, no. No no no. You…” She swallowed, raising the new Nintendo DS. “This is a door prize. Some rich asshole gave it to us. It cost us nothing and it means nothing.” She reached over to pluck Aliyah’s old Nintendo DS from her hands. “This, Aliyah – this, I saved up for weeks to get, working a minimum-wage job, putting away my money, sneaking into GameStop to play snippets on my lunchbreak. This was four months of labor and longing, brought into this world like a child, and when I finally got my hands on one, well, you bet your ass I treasured it.”

  “But you gave it to me.”

  “Yeah.” Valentine knelt, getting down on eye level with Aliyah. “When I saw a burned little girl in a hospital, I gave her my best toy ever, because that kid needed some love.” She clutched the Nintendo DS, touching it to Aliyah’s forehead as if trying to bestow a blessing. “This is love, Aliyah.”

  She took the new Nintendo, cocked her arm back, and pitched it like a fastball into a Squirtle tile decoration. “That,” she said, “is marketing.”

  Aliyah flushed with anger. “You broke that! That was mine!”

  “Who the hell cares? Hang on a sec.” Valentine flung open the door. “Hey, Flameface! Our Nintendo DS is broken! Can you req us another one?”

  Rainbird did a double-take. “Of course. I’ll–”

  She slammed the door on him. “You see, Aliyah? It means nothing to him. So how can it mean something to you?”

  Paul felt like he should interrupt, just to reassert his status as a parent, but as usual he wasn’t sure how to disturb the flow of Aliyah and Valentine’s relationship.

  Aliyah swept her hand out, encompassing the three stories’ worth of games, the television sets, the hammock of plushie Pikachus. “Aunt Valentine, we don’t have to play the same game over and over again. We can try anything.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” She clutched Aliyah’s shoulders. “When I grew up, all we had was one cartridge. It’s all my parents could afford. That’s how I found the magic in it – I played it over and over again. We’re not playing the same game because we can’t afford it – we’re playing it because you only find the awesome secrets when you keep investigating the old things.”

  “Well, I get bored!” Aliyah said, huffing behind her mask.

  Valentine clenched her fist between her breasts, as if Aliyah had struck her.

  I introduced her to gaming, Paul remembered Valentine saying. But she’s developed her own tastes.

  “Valentine,” Paul said. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

  Valentine held Aliyah’s gaze, but neither broke. They both seemed to expect some sort of apology. Then Valentine sniffed haughtily, and walked away with Paul.

  “Look, Valentine…” Paul stopped. The space he’d ushered her to had a blinding spotlight shining down and a 60” television blaring Dragonball Z cartoons in their face. “Hang on, let me shut this off–”

  Valentine snapped her fingers; all the electronics in the area sizzled and went black, giving them a shadowy respite. Aliyah had curled up in a Spongebob Squarepants chair, pointedly playing a new game.

  “You didn’t short out Aliyah’s–”

  “I’m not gonna fuck up her room any more. I just pulled the plug. And take off that fucking luchador mask, Paul. This is close enough to a Mexican soap opera as it is.”

  Paul tugged it off, feeling blissfully cool air prickle his scalp. “OK, look. I know this isn’t your comfort zone–” />
  “You can say that again.”

  “But you know, this is just what Payne thought you wanted. If you want to buy your own stuff, well, great, do that. You never have enough space in your closets, so… why not customize this big space until you’re happy?”

  She dangled Paul’s mask in front of him. “And when I bring some new guy home to fuck, what am I going to tell him? Mexican wrestlers are my kink?”

  Paul sagged. “…oh.”

  “Maybe the other ’mancers here have abandoned their earthly pleasures, Paul, but me? I’ve got a few itches I need scratched. Not that the swing clubs are any place to find a boyfriend, but I… even if I can’t have a lover in case I kill the fucker – again – I need something more than a Hitachi. I need warm flesh. I need to feel needed.”

  Paul rubbed his temples. “Hoo boy.”

  “‘Hoo boy’ as in you think I shouldn’t do that?”

  “‘Hoo boy’ as in, ‘I think you of all people shouldn’t have to live as a nun.’”

  She closed her eyes, gave Paul a pained smile. “Thank you, Paul.”

  “But it’s past eleven, and it’d be a two-hour ride back to our apartment, and you’re always a little crabby after you’ve fought a battle for your life.”

  She held up a finger to interrupt him. “I would have clobbered that soot-streaked asshole, Paul. That’s what I do. You need some firepower to back up your management skills, and I? Am your firepower.”

  She trembled with pride. Though Valentine was a pain in the ass, her protective belligerence sprang straight from her love for them both – and her insistence that Paul needed so much protection filled Paul with an uneasy mixture of love and helplessness.

  He hugged her. She patted him on the back, stiffly; she’d once likened Paul’s hugs to being slowly encased by a mantis.

  “All right, Tsabo, break it up, break it up,” she muttered, pushing him away.

  “Just… let’s give it two weeks here. Can you go two weeks without sex?”

  “I can go two weeks without food, Paul. Doesn’t mean I want to.”

  “I know. But… did you see how happy she looked? Playing with the other ’mancers?”

  Valentine looked over her shoulder at Aliyah, half asleep in the chair, refusing to stop playing her Nintendo even though she kept nodding off between changing game cartridges. A reluctant grin crooked across Valentine’s mouth. “…yeah.”

  “And you know she’d be heartbroken if you left, right?”

  Valentine winked her good eye at Aliyah. Aliyah hmpfed and turned away, but it was proof Aliyah hadn’t been paying nearly as much attention to the game as she’d have liked Valentine to believe.

  “All right, you silver-tongued bastard. Two weeks.”

  “Who knows? Maybe you’ll find love here.”

  Valentine shivered. “If that plushiemancer makes a move on me, I’ll teleport his ass into a game of Resident Evil.”

  “Thanks.” Paul squeezed her shoulder, then went over to Aliyah, who thrashed to protest that she hadn’t been sleeping. “Hey, sweetie. I think it’s time I tucked you in.”

  “OK.” Aliyah got up, shambled towards the door, dragging the Nintendo DS with her.

  “Wait. You don’t want to sleep in your new room?”

  She rubbed sleep from her eyes. “I don’t like sleeping away from you.”

  Paul almost lectured her on how his room was right next door if she needed him… But the days when Aliyah still wanted to cuddle up with him were coming to an end.

  He stood, transfixed by that bittersweet realization that one day she would not need him, and – maybe within the year, at the rate she was progressing through the rebellion of her prematurely-accelerated adolescence – one day she’d retch when he tried to accompany her in public.

  And it was their first night here, he mused. Safer to stick together.

  “Come on, sweetie.” And though it always hurt his stump to pick up Aliyah’s weight, he scooped her up in his arms and teetered over to his new and glorious apartment, ready to curl up next to his precious little girl.

  Twenty-One

  What The Fire Knows

  Rainbird’s room is three stories of slotted metal catwalks, each crisscrossed over an industrial cauldron of molten iron. Breathing the superheated air here cooks Rainbird’s tongue into brown hamburger, but his body draws strength from the heat and heals into living flesh again. He spends hours examining his fingers as he dips them into a sluice of processed lava, watching his fingernails sizzle and peel back…

  He sits on a throne of red-hot rebar, and watches what burns on the brick fireplace before him. Sometimes it’s wood. Mostly, he straps his wriggling fuel into place before he ignites it.

  The door opens.

  Aliyah enters.

  She stands on the catwalks, wearing a tiny suit of power armor, all curves and shiny orange plating: the Varia suit from Metroid. Underneath, she still wears the pajamas she wore when she used ’mancy to put her dad to sleep and sneak away.

  Slowly, she removes her helmet and shakes her dreadlocked hair out.

  There are a thousand ways to protect yourself from lava in videogames; Aliyah could have taken the form of Charizard or written “snowstorm” in Scribblenauts or extinguished this room in a variety of ways.

  She wants Rainbird to see her face.

  Rainbird doesn’t get up.

  “You burned,” he tells her. “You almost died in your father’s apartment. The smoke blistered your lungs.”

  “Yes.” Her burn-scarred face is determined, not showing any fear – or, at least, not any fear of him.

  “You dream of fire every night.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know he can’t protect you.”

  “I have to protect him,” Aliyah says, a note of childish – petulance? urgency? – in her voice. “Anathema would have cut him open if I hadn’t stopped her. Then, the police had him on the ground. Tied up. Nerve gassed. Almost dead. And if I hadn’t come when I did…”

  She shakes her head, trying to clear the image. That is what Aliyah dreams of – fire, dead fathers, mothers with husbands who want to kill her, and no one in the world strong enough but her.

  Maybe we do need to kill them, her father had told her. The question is, do you want to be the person who does that?

  Someone has to be.

  She squeezes her eyes shut, locking the tears tight. And when she opens them, Rainbird stands next to her. He keeps a respectful distance. She watches the flesh on his ribs burn away, opening up a latticed glimpse into the blackened cinder of Rainbird’s beating heart.

  Tiny glowing faces peek out, grimacing with each heartbeat, shrieking silently before going quiet again – all the men and women Rainbird has burned alive. He pulls his ribs open, affording her a better look.

  Though Aliyah shudders at the sight, she refuses to look away from the tiny souls trapped in that ashen heart.

  Rainbird nods, sympathetically. “You want to be strong.”

  “I killed only one person. And I... I think about her all the time. She cried when I killed her. I took away everything from her. And if I feel sorry for some murdering buh-b-word who was going to... she was stabbing my father with a spear! And even then, if I had to do it again, I don’t know if... if I…” Aliyah swallows. “So I can’t be sorry, can I?”

  Rainbird pulls flesh down over his ribs as though tugging a shirt over himself. When he grins, the nerves in his teeth are glowing filaments. “No. Of course you can’t.”

  “But Dad, and Valentine, they... they keep trying to stop me, and if I listen then who’s going to protect them?”

  Rainbird smiles as though he understands completely. “They’re afraid of what you could be, Aliyah. Whereas I think people should be like fire. They should consume everything they can grasp to grow strong. And never you fear, Aliyah, for I know fire’s most cherished secret…”

  Aliyah gazes up at him, trembling with relief. The door closes, pushed shut by a
waft of burning gas.

  “…I’ll teach you how to regret nothing.”

  Part II

  Suburban Robots to Monitor Reality

  Twenty-Two

  Tikka Masala

  Paul hated the way he always felt nervous whenever he had a lunch date with Imani. She was his ex-wife, for God’s sake. Whatever they’d had, it was over. They only got together to discuss issues like Aliyah – which, of course, was precisely what they would be discussing today.

  So why did he feel like he had to impress her?

  He’d chosen a nice little Indian restaurant that had opened last week to good Yelp reviews – not someplace well known yet. Imani liked fine dining, but more than that, she liked the thrill of discovery, and in that Paul had always been happy to indulge her. And the place was well kept, trimmed with fresh green plants and the gaudy red and gold wallpaper that Paul was never sure was actual Indian tradition or just what New Yorkers expected of an Indian restaurant.

  Then Imani came in.

  Paul forgot all about the restaurant.

  She dressed stylishly as always, shrugging off her long tan coat, revealing an Egyptian goddess clad in a gold and tan sheath dress that showed off her long legs.

  She paused in the doorway, troubled, looking for all the world like a dame in some 1950s detective novel about to hire a private investigator. Which was ridiculous, he reminded himself: she was a corporate lawyer, working ten-hour days, had squeezed the space out of her schedule for a lunchtime talk.

  Then she smiled as she saw Paul, striding towards him with both arms open, as though his presence had chased her fears away.

  He hated hugging her. Not only was it awkward standing up with his prosthetic leg, not only did he worry about smearing blood on her fine dress with his ever-bleeding left arm, but that flash of casual intimacy always reminded him of the tenderness they no longer shared.