Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 120

by Neil Clarke

  Aman Thien was always calm and collected, their gaze sharp, their voice level. They trained me, back when we were all telling ourselves we were civilians. I loved the public nets, the giant swirls and eddies of information and consciousness. I knew that far off, beyond the far reaches, there were even greater nets, planetary nets, vast systems merging magic and technology—but I also knew I would never go there. The Old Empire had scattered the galaxy with humanoid creatures, but then it collapsed, and our ancestors were stranded on our planet without a convenient jump point back to Imperial space. I could feel those towering structures of light in the far, far distance—but they were beyond our reach. Too far, in regions too different. Solar radiation sometimes influences magic in the most inconvenient ways.

  When I told Aman Thien about the luminous towers, they nodded, looked away, into the distance—and for the first time, I saw something other than the crisp clarity of focused action on their angular face. They were also neuroatypical, but in a different way, even more bound to their place by duty and obligation. At this point, what bound me had been mostly invisible, and I could still tell myself I was acting of my own volition.

  Thinking of Aman Thien held me together even at miserable times like this, when I was chewing inedible rations and hiding in the giant rolling coffin of the transporter, huddled together with Liicha in the cold.

  I shake my head to clear it out of the reverie of sleeplessness, micro-sleep segments breaking up overlong stretches of the wakeful state. I swallow, reach for my canteen filled with stale water.

  “What do you think,” I begin, beyond caring for surveillance, speaking straight at Liicha, “how could I have joined to maintain the public nets of my own free will, when there was so little else I could’ve done?”

  He peers sideways at me, too tired to be scandalized. “What do you mean?” he finally offers, and I’m not sure he’s understood a word of what I’ve just said.

  I grimace and look away, avoiding his gaze. There is little else to look at. “I have such an excess of magic, always had. What could I have done with it? It was burning me up alive.”

  I actually remember little of what happened before I walked into the center to sign up. Life fades into dream fades into incoherence. But Liicha doesn’t need to know that, he pities me enough as it is.

  He murmurs something about choices and sacrifice, the people and solidarity. Not “your people,” not this time. Then he swears, his neck craning abruptly, looking at an invisible readout. I jump up—did they catch us out? Did someone hear?

  But the disruption does not come from an overeager censor; it comes from an incoming missile, hitting the transporter, filling my field of view with white-hot pain, and for a moment, all I can feel is the finality of relief.

  “ . . . waste of effort.”

  Words floating past.

  My chest feels crushed. My legs—I don’t feel my legs. There is a wall of pain, edging into something the nervous system can’t quite assimilate. I don’t know what I’m feeling.

  “Orders, orders. They say you scrape, you scrape.”

  “ . . . think there is anything left here to scrape?”

  I try to open my eyes, can’t quite see. I shouldn’t be as calm as I am.

  “They say if we find the head, we bring the head . . . they only need the head.”

  My right arm is pinned under something. I try to move my left arm, try to reconstruct the contours of my body. I touch sharp objects.

  Then there is a giant wrenching, as steel is bent further out of shape, away from me. There is light, and an abrupt stream of cussing. Then nothing, at all.

  The hospital is all too bright, all too white, too well-lit. But it is silent, and calm.

  I am resting. It is, by all means and measures, over. My part in the war is done.

  They are fitting me with new legs, my original ones severed cleanly by a bulkhead that fell on me, which also kept me from bleeding out. They have already fit me with a right arm, and I practice, try to get the nerves to adjust. I raise my arm, point with my index finger at a target, point, point, point again. The hard plastic of the target makes a tock-tock-tocking sound as the soft plastic of my index finger hits it. My arm isn’t covered with skin replica yet, but I have full sensation, and my brain readily accepts the arm as its own, robotic as it looks in slate-gray, its forms airbrushed to softness. I am better and better at pointing, and at a variety of other fine-motor tasks.

  I wish I could see Aman Thien or Liicha. I periodically ask for them, but the hospital people know nothing; aren’t allowed to pass on anything.

  I would like new legs, but it is taking long. I don’t know if it’s the narcotics or the fact that I escaped from hell, but I am not impatient. Tock-tock-tock; I work my way through the most mind-numbing physical therapy exercises with a divine tranquility.

  It doesn’t last.

  My visitor, a tall, broad-chested, dark-skinned man, is wearing a spotless dress uniform showing high rank; all too high to have anything to do with me.

  “We are taking the patient,” he informs the bedside nurse, who starts to protest before he is quickly overruled. The two men glare at each other. The military always wins. Our military always wins. As if.

  “For the war effort,” my visitor says, ignoring me. I drop my right hand into my lap, and it hits harder than I would’ve liked it to; I wince.

  The nurse starts another round of protest. He is a tall, brusque man not used to resistance. My visitor yanks the sheet covering my lower body, then steps back, stricken by the sight of my unfinished legs, not fully attached, tubes of various materials snaking in and out of them. When the nurse refuses to disconnect the tubes, the military man sets to the task himself, working step by step with practiced expertise; then he lifts me up and cradles me in his arms, the unfinished legs dangling at an impossible angle, not quite part of my body—and he carries me outside, into the bitterly cold nighttime air.

  I don’t know if I can call her a nurse. The person on duty is a young woman in angry combat fatigues. She hooks my port up to a line, administers more GS-10, and an extra dose of VPR-56, designed to enhance neuroplasticity, allow the brain to more readily rewire itself. I never got this much of it, not even in the hospital where they were trying to get me to adjust to my new limbs.

  I point it out. She outright ignores me at first, then grudgingly says, “Orders from higher up. We will need you online most of your waking hours. You’ll need to adjust.”

  Waking hours blur into more waking hours. Do I sleep? I order troops around, larger and larger clusters of them, command entire armies on the behest of the chiefs of staff conveying their wishes to me.

  My body is outside somewhere, in some kind of bed that seems specially designed for the purpose. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be aware of it. My orders arrive electronically, from my first-time visitor, and it is up to me how I implement them in detail. Outside, my body is handled with precision, but in an entirely inhuman fashion, like an imperfect, fragile object. Never a simple caring gesture, never an empathic touch. I deduce that I’m probably not supposed to be aware of my body.

  My visitor is the only one who seems to understand this.

  Sometimes he disconnects me before sleep, heaves me into a wheelchair, rolls me outside. He whispers a song between his teeth. And we shall soar, to the stars above, to the space beyond . . .

  He never talks to me.

  Eventually I am the only one left. There are no replacements.

  I am in a room with the chiefs of staff. There’s five of them, I think, and my visitor, who seems to be in charge of me.

  There is a pale-skinned, thin woman, one of the five, who makes remarks about my appearance. My visitor doesn’t stand up to her; he says nothing, but he grips the handles on my wheelchair with renewed force, and I can feel the sudden jerky motion throughout my body.

  I know I am not supposed to hear these remarks. I know nothing about my appearance. Through her comments, I understand
my mouth is slightly open, drool snaking out. I can’t close my mouth; I have no command of my body. Only the armies outside. And eventually, not even that, for there are no more armies, no more combat drones, there is nothing left.

  After a while, I am back in a hospital; a different hospital, far beyond the front lines.

  I understand the nation has capitulated. Unconditional surrender.

  I cannot cry; I have no control of my face.

  They stop giving me the drugs, and I don’t miss the GS-10. But without the VPR-56, my brain is stuck in this new configuration, unable to readjust to the new set of sensory input, unable to compensate for the lack of information from the tactical and strategic systems. I can’t find my way back to my body, and I can’t explain—I can’t explain that if only they continued giving me the VPR-56, my nervous system would eventually find a new balance. Without the additional plasticity, the hurdle is simply too high for my body to jump.

  So I cannot speak, can barely move, while obedient nurses and orderlies drag me around, civilians everywhere. They know nothing about what they did to us in the military, and the people who know seem to have forgotten about me. These civilians are sad, pitying even. They make remarks I am not supposed to hear. They feel sorry for me.

  What little resources I have, inside my head, are dedicated to finding a way out. Building tactical maps from scraps of information: conversations between the staff, the way sound echoes in corridors, the way people give directions to visitors. Preparing for the day when I can escape—wheel my way to the roof, unprotected, no forcefield. Preparing for the day when I can gather all my remaining strength and jump.

  There is another continuity, another set of memories, and I don’t know which is more correct.

  In this one I am in a military hospital again; that much never changes. They scrape me together again. But in this one, they gave up on the command network, they gave up on everything beyond raw power, a long time ago.

  In this continuity, I am a supernova.

  Barely moving, unable to stand, I am loaded into small, nimble transporters darting through battlefields. Transporters that open to the night sky above. We shall reach beyond the veil of night, to our final destination . . .

  I hear Liicha’s voice, his singing, but I can’t see him. I am chained to my berth. The world expresses itself only in the passive voice.

  I am dragged to my feet; I waver, but I am held in a firm grip. It is not Liicha; he is not here, except in my thoughts. I am sure he died in the explosion. Or was that a different continuity? What happened to my legs?

  Most regulatory processes of my body can be overridden externally. I was being trained to—the public networks—I was a civilian, or was I? It all seems so impossible. They installed those systems in me to help me manage my power, to impose an external balance when an internal one couldn’t suffice—but now they impose an altogether different pattern.

  Why can’t they let me talk to Aman Thien? Someone snarls Aman Thien was a traitor, then the override kicks in, and the same raw power that was supposed to undergird the networks rushes through my spine, exits the cabin in a giant burst of magic tearing up the skies.

  And again. And again. This is the extent of my usefulness to the military, this is my service, my contribution. I explode, I explode, I explode.

  Aman Thien explained the process of connecting to the public networks. They said, we need constant high throughput—the power can go on the upswing of an exponential, but eventually a limiting factor will be hit; and the goal is to approximate the logistic curve, asymptoting at a high level, approaching a horizontal line.

  I lose vocabulary even in my thoughts. I can only imagine the graphs, hold on to them.

  Here I am all exponential, and after I hit the limiting factor, I crash hard, body sagging against restraints, mind spinning away into unconsciousness.

  The two continuities are exclusionary; both cannot be true at the same time, and yet they are. I am drained dry, of resources, of life, just in different aspects. Back in civilian life, I could do both—process data, provide power. What is needed this time is always something different. Technology versus magic.

  After months—years?—of painstaking effort, I can get into my wheelchair unassisted. And after all that time, I roll myself toward the elevator, outside to the roof: flat and pebble-grained and only encircled by a slight, low railing.

  I try to lever myself across it, fail and slump against the bottom of the railing on my first try.

  I remain there for a long time, too exhausted to weep. But then I sense the approach, the commotion below. People looking for me. Visitors? The new-formed, reformed military?

  Some things never change.

  With renewed strength, I pull myself up with my arms, my useless legs flopping. I hoist myself over the fence, then tumble down on the other side.

  I fall, fall for what seems like millennia.

  I reconceptualize my direction: not falling downward, but falling upward, skyward, to the eternal darkness that is not death, but liberation. Toward the luminous towers thought to be forever beyond reach. Against the grain of the universe, the inevitable law that human must strike against human, bodies must grind each other down until only the tiniest specks of pain are all that is left. Against the notion that ever more advanced forms of magic and technology can only be used to wage war.

  Against existence, my existence, my lack of place in this reality; toward a reality assumed to be unreachable simply because there wasn’t thought to be enough desperation in our world to fuel a jump.

  I am streaming skyward while people scatter and rush looking for me below, and I know that once I am gone, I will be—like the luminous towers—forever beyond their reach.

  About the Author

  Bogi Takács is a disabled and neuroatypical Hungarian Jewish author currently living in the US. E writes both speculative fiction and poetry, and eir work has been published in a variety of venues like Lightspeed, Apex, and Strange Horizons. You can also find em on Twitter as @bogiperson.

  The House of Half Mirrors

  Thoraiya Dyer

  My house is full of half mirrors.

  Mam tells the tale like it’s an amusing anecdote: that time she brought a fiddler home from the Anchor, and he wasn’t a man but a fomoiri, and all the mirrors from the wardrobe doors to the polarized sunglasses on the sideboard cracked neatly into perfect halves.

  At least, she used to tell it. Before cancer took her.

  Who believed in fomoiri in 2042? At the time, I bit my tongue and charitably assumed it was her oblique warning about violent partners and the end of days. When fuel ran out, everyone who didn’t raise their own food relocated inside ration delivery zones. She moved in with me, bringing as many of the half mirrors as she could fit in a wagon hitched to the back of her pushbike.

  Me old Mam, cycling sixty kilometers from Cahersiveen. Happy days.

  She did always go on about the better halves of human nature, about seeing the good in things. Since Da was a useless tool, I’d tell her that when I looked in the half mirrors I could only see the half of me that came from her.

  Mam’s half mirrors match what’s technically only half a house. Since she died, a young single mother got allocated the upstairs. That interloper’s two children thump around like live basketballs and she hogs the washing line down the side, but I’ve got a sunroom at the back with the windows all smashed where I hang my laundry to dry.

  In a corner of that wrecked sunroom are three heavy, soil-filled pots with dead trees. Sad stick skeletons with the morning sun on them. I should be tossing them, but I can’t, any more than I can toss the half mirrors.

  Mam dug up three hazel saplings and brought them inside when the next-door house collapsed on our garden. She loved those little trees, just like she loved the oak woodland by Lough Leane. I can’t even keep a plant alive. Lucky I never became a parent.

  And now I’ve mooned about, gazing guiltily at them, for so long that I’m lat
e for the lock-in. Can’t even be on time to save our besieged final scrap of wild.

  Haven’t even called the hospital to let them know I won’t be at work today.

  Sliding in my socks across the solid oak floorboards—they’re the only indestructible part of the whole shitty, falling-down house—I dump my tea dregs in the kitchen sink. It’s not backed up because of the mouse in the dried-up u-bend addicted to tea leaves.

  The plumbing doesn’t work.

  It hasn’t worked for fifty years, which is how I got the house so cheap. Which is fine, since these days the village tap water’s poison. It’s as deadly as all those lush meadows and sweeping fields that kill stone dead any escaped stock that graze on them.

  Bottled gallons come as part of the weekly ration.

  Mam used to do a dowsing course for tourists back in Cahersiveen. When she came here, she promised she’d find me my own source of spring water. Carrying her daft twig through the house, she’d stopped in the middle of the sunroom and said it was under the boards.

  I told her I wasn’t pulling up the boards. They’re the only indestructible part of the whole shitty, falling-down house.

  When I pick up the phone, it doesn’t work any better than the taps do.

  Which is new.

  But it was only a matter of time. We live in a shitty, falling-down world.

  The lock-in is exactly what it sounds like.

  A gaggle of fools, me included, crowd the grass outside the towering gates, dodging Clydesdale manure piles and patting one another on the back for putting the woodland ahead of our own hungry families.

  Except I’ve got no family left. It’s not that much of a battle for me, so.

  We’re going to lock ourselves onto the gates of the walled-in woodland. There, the lakeside forest, still emerald green, hides ruined abbeys and harp-haunted hill forts.