Upside Down

by Jaym Gates

  I felt a shiver run through us. We had not worshipped a false God.

  “And yet you live in perpetual darkness,” she said. “Your lives are short and nasty, with each generation killing itself off to make room for the next, and your planet is a foul, stinking mess.”

  “Most of your country people have accepted the myth of progress. By gradually rising from the ocean and improving themselves, they hope to usher in another age of Machine Democracy. But you, my followers, know that will not happen. The cheap energy locked in the earth’s waters is almost gone. The sun’s energy is fully utilized. The iron and gold one would need to construct more Machine Minds are instead being used to domicile more and more of the ocean’s transient souls. This is all there is and ever will be. It is the last efflorescence of humankind before we are lost forever.”

  She took a deep breath. We were transfixed. One man stood and left, but the rest were not ... well, I at least was not frightened or scandalized. No. I was excited. I no longer had to be anxious. Now I knew. The Earth was doomed, and there was nothing left to do. I looked at Sanua. Did he understand what this meant for him? We could finally join ourselves together.

  But her next words destroyed my sense of peace.

  “And yet there is hope,” she said. “At this moment in time, the will and the capacity for space travel still exist. In the past, the time was not right: the human race was too afraid of death. But now you have forgotten what it meant to live forever. And that means you can still act. All you need is for all hope of safety and progress to be stripped from you.”

  My limbs felt heavy and sore. What fresh burden was Jont about to place upon us?

  “And that is why you must destroy the towers.”

  She paused. A huge bubble rose from the waves beyond her shoulder, and then it popped, releasing a cloud of sweet-smelling gas that drifted down over us. I do not like to come to the ocean, because even though I was born above-ground there is something within me that yearns to sink down under the waves.

  “The towers must fall,” she said. “And you must bring them down. Go home and tear up whatever it is that protects you from the sun. Disrupt the elevators. Massacre men in the promenades. Make them afraid. Become the cancer within the marrow of human society. Run amok and let the fear spread and spread until everything comes to a halt. Then and only then will mankind finally be motivated to leave.

  “If you heed my call, your neighbors will revile you, and, in their stories, you will be turned into the madmen and monsters who drove them from their homes. But they will tell those stories on a trillion planets in a million galaxies. Because of you, humankind will be safe forever.

  “Whereas if you ignore me — if you go home and forget — then you will lead peaceful and prosperous lives. As will your children, and their children, and on and on for a hundred steadily-dwindling generations, until mankind finally sinks down beneath the waves forever. Because this is truly the one and only moment. Even one generation in the past, it would’ve been too soon, and one generation from now, it will be too late. If the collapse comes now, we will escape it. If it comes in ten thousand years, humanity will die.”

  That last word hung in the air as her image dissipated, and we looked at each other, unsure of what to say and what to do, until the silence was finally interrupted by Sanua’s laughter.

  #

  Afterward, some few of us — the archivists and the scientists and the historians — rushed to examine the recording for clues as to the whereabouts of Jont’s other caches.

  But Sanua and I headed west to his home tower: a squat oval that lay half-submerged by the sea.

  When we entered, the hip of his bodysuit expanded and created a hollow space into which he put a few of his knick-knacks. The apartment was clean, still, and bare. Through the window, I could see human shapes lying beneath the still waves. It was their hands that stood out — the forest of hands, fluttering bonelessly in response to the slight current. Growing up with such a sight, it was no wonder that Sanua felt such compassion for them.

  I said, “You don’t want to talk about —”

  “One minute,” he said.

  He was going through his burial alcoves, picking up his ancestor stones and putting them in the pouch at his hip.

  “Is that what we came for?” I said.

  “I want to be near them.”

  “Sanua, you have to listen. I can’t promise you that we will be together tomorrow, much less a hundred years from now.”

  “You shouldn’t worry so much,” he said. “I won’t give up the apartment until you agree with me that it’s the right thing to do.”

  I imagined detonating a bomb that would rip Sanua to pieces and destroy this entire tower, and I knew then that I was capable of it — capable of enacting Jont’s plan — because the fantasy did not fill me with disgust or horror. This was my purpose — the reason I’d been left behind and denied the stars.

  “They will eventually authenticate her recording,” I said.

  “Hmm,” Sanua said. One of his ancestor stones was large, gnarled, and green. “Do you know who this is?”

  “Your uncle, on your father’s side. I’ve seen him before.”

  “Should I put him next to your mother, do you think?”

  I caught Sanua’s arm. “Please, this is not a good idea. Leave these here.”

  He turned and very slowly pressed his faceplate against my bare face, so that I felt a moment of disorientation, and then a pair of lips popping through the viscous medium.

  “Let’s walk along the sunshroud before we go home,” Sanua said.

  And that’s what we did.

  The air was so thin that it left me gasping, and when we finally got home, I collapsed, blue and sick, into the rejuvenation vat.

  When I awoke, Sanua’s ancestors were paired with mine on the alcoves. At first my burial places looked strange and overfull, but over the coming months I got used to them.

  #

  The years passed, and one day Sanua said, apropos of nothing, “Who was recording her?”

  “What?”

  “When Jont was creating her messages, who operated the holographic recording device?” he said. “Would she have trusted anyone with her messages ahead of time?”

  I hadn’t thought about Jont in ages. Somewhere in my messages, I still had the report produced by the Jontian society: they’d decided, after considerable study, that her final message had been real, and they were now in the process of forming a committee to discuss its implications.

  Why had I abandoned the idea of enacting her plan? It wasn’t the violence or the mayhem that had dissuaded me. I shook my head. It was something else. Perhaps just inertia.

  “Maybe she operated the camera herself,” I said.

  He snorted. “Well, if so, her stage presence was shockingly good. How many times did she re-record each message, do you think? And did she do any post-production editing?”

  At the time I cut him off with a frustrated hiss, but I was actually quite amused. For a few minutes I played through a mental image of Jont watching her own speech on the holographic recorder, and then shaking her head and thinking, no no no, I need to train myself to look at the empty air right above the stone benches, because that’s where their eyes will be.

  The Origin of Terror

  Sunil Patel

  Channel 12 News Report, March 21, 2036

  [Smoke fills the screen. It wafts away to reveal a Chinese woman in her early fifties, holding a microphone. Behind her is an ornate cathedral. The sounds of people screaming can be heard.]

  Marjorie Huang: This is Marjorie Huang, International Correspondent reporting live for Channel 12. It was only thirty-five minutes ago that Terror appeared in Prague, but she has wasted no time in her destruction. You can see her trademark steam everywhere throughout the city, though we cannot determine how much she is varying the temperature.

  [A dark cloud bursts from behind the woman and engulfs her, obscuring our view. After
a few seconds, it clears. The woman coughs and shivers.]

  MH: Terror is currently unleashing ice cold vapor upon the city. We know in the past she has been able to freeze pipes and expand cracks in the structural support of buildings in order to —

  [The building behind the woman topples, the rubble kicking up dirt to create a rival dust cloud.]

  MH: The St. Vitus Cathedral has fallen. I repeat, the St. Vitus Cathedral has fallen. Terror is now making an announcement. She is saying, “Do you not see how easily you fall? How complacent you have become, ensured of your own safety? You are not safe, and you will never be safe, as long as Terror reigns!”

  [The woman puts her hand to her ear.]

  MH: I am getting word that we have exclusively in the studio Bonnie Baker and Cliff Curtis, better known to the world as Ignite and Chill, superhero parents of the supervillain Terror. We now take you —

  [From the top of the frame descends a woman riding a puff of steam. She is Caucasian, in her mid-twenties. As she lands, she looks sharply at the reporter, who fiercely stands her ground. Terror raises her hands to the camera and shoots a steady stream of steam until nothing is visible. The feed cuts out and cuts to a live feed of the news studio. An African-American man in a suit sits behind the desk. At an adjoining desk are a couple in their mid-fifties, the man with salt-and-pepper hair and the woman full grey. They wear jeans, work shirts, and boots.]

  Keith Stanton: Marjorie? Marjorie? We seem to have lost Marjorie, but we’ll check back in on her. I’m Keith Stanton, and we have here in the studio Bonnie Baker and Cliff Curtis. You might know them as Ignite and Chill. Thanks for coming in.

  Bonnie Baker: Thank you for having us, Mr. Stanton.

  KS: Please, call me Keith. Now, Ms. Baker, Mr. Curtis, have you seen the footage coming out of Prague?

  BB: Oh, yes, it’s just awful.

  Cliff Curtis: It’s some bad business there. No denying that.

  BB: Our hearts go out to the city.

  KS: Is there anything you would like to say to Terror?

  CC: Are they still calling her that?

  BB: They’re still calling her that, dear.

  CC: She was such a good girl. Do they know that?

  BB: Such a good girl.

  KS: My apologies. Would you like to say anything to Tera?

  BB: Call home, pumpkin!

  CC: Just a short phone call, a little hi, a little hello, your mother’s worried sick about you.

  [The feed flickers and cuts back to the scene in Prague, where Marjorie Huang stands, completely scalded from head to toe, covered in blisters. The microphone falls from her hand, and then she collapses to the ground. The feed cuts to the studio.]

  BB: We love you, dear.

  #

  Raw Footage from The Huang Interview, June 9, 2039

  [A tall white woman with long black hair sits in a cell behind glowing green bars. Red light bathes the cell, making the true color of her prison uniform indeterminate. In front of the bars sits a Chinese woman holding a notepad.]

  Cynthia Huang: Tera Baker-Curtis, a.k.a. Terror, has perpetrated some of the most monstrous crimes of our generation. The San Francisco Incident. The Obscurity of Prague. 8/14. But she has finally been brought to justice, and in a few short hours, she will be executed. I have been granted exclusive access to record a final interview with the woman TIME magazine called “The Villain to End All Villains.”

  Tera Baker-Curtis: There will be villains after me. I am not the end.

  CH: Let’s start at the end, then. With your capture.

  TBC: It is fitting that it was Twindian. He has a bright future. A television special, perhaps.

  CH: It’s airing next week.

  TBC: A pity I will not be able to view it myself. What will he say about his great victory, capturing the arch villain Terror? What would he have done, were I not here to be caught?

  CH: Interesting questions, but I’d like to focus on you. You’re facing the end of your life. It’s certainly been a memorable one. A deadly one.

  TBC: I believe my body count is in the high tens of thousands.

  CH: 87,126.

  TBC: I only hope it was enough.

  CH: Enough for what?

  TBC: To change the world, of course. Do you think I mean to leave this life without having affected it?

  CH: There’s no question you have affected countless lives, if only by ending them.

  TBC: A callous use of cleverness, Ms. Huang.

  CH: One of those lives you ended was my mother’s.

  TBC: I wonder what number she was. 50,005? 63,487? I lose track. You must know. So clever.

  CH: We’re not here to talk about me.

  TBC: You brought your mother up, not I, Ms. Huang.

  CH: Moving on. I’d like to discuss what many consider to be your most heinous domestic attack.

  TBC: Do enlighten me as to the hierarchy of my heinousness.

  CH: Every American knows where they were on 8/14.

  TBC: Of course, of course. I was experimenting then, to be honest. I did not know the range of temperature I could work with. People are so obsessed with the power of steam, with “steampunk,” machines powered by the pressure of steam, but few consider the heat. In its gaseous state, it can become a far more powerful conduit for heat than a liquid, infiltrating cracks in buildings. Seeping into the skin. I didn’t think it would be so effective, if we’re being frank, and I think we are.

  CH: Do you regret your experiments?

  TBC: I foresee a repetition of this question, so allow me to answer in the negative so we may concentrate on the more salacious details I am sure your viewers desire.

  CH: Do you regret the Obscurity? That was no experiment.

  TBC: Truly, the Obscurity fills me with deep remorse. If I could bring all of those men and women back to life, I would, I assure you.

  CH: It heartens me to hear you say that. Finally, some words of … dammit, Tim, edit this bit out.

  TBC: You are quite gullible. This will be fun. Continue.

  CH: Your childhood. Your parents. What our viewers want to know is: where did Terror come from?

  #

  Channel 12 News Report, July 6, 2011

  [Paul Taylor stands in a hospital room, microphone in hand. On the bed lies Bonnie with a bundled blanket in her arms. Cliff stands on the other side of the bed.]

  Paul Taylor: It’s an event as momentous as the birth of the Royal Baby: popular superheroes Ignite and Chill have had a child, and the world is watching! I’m here with the proud mother. Now, Ignite —

  Bonnie Baker: Oh, please call me Bonnie.

  [Bonnie pulls back the blanket to reveal the newborn’s head.]

  BB: And this … this is Tera.

  PT: Tera, what a beautiful name. It’s a girl, folks!

  Cliff Curtis: Most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Next to Bonnie, of course.

  PT: What does this mean for you two? Will you be settling down, retiring from a life of saving people from burning buildings and chasing down teleporting monkeys?

  CC: Ha, those monkeys, that was a trip, I tell you.

  BB: We haven’t quite decided yet. I don’t think our work is done, but right now we have a more important job.

  PT: Has she exhibited any powers?

  CC: She’s a good crier. Real good crier.

  BB: It’s too soon to tell, but I’ll say this now so it’s on public record for her to know forever: Tera, we will love you, no matter what, powers or no powers.

  CC: Would love her to carry on the family business, though. Teach her the ways of us heroes.

  BB: There’s no question she’ll be a hero, Cliff. Our little superhero.

  #

  International Superhuman Database Entry, Cached February 4, 2038