She liked best the fact that the day started over after about ten hours. Incomplete reality, incomplete time. She’d stayed awake to watch the rollover numerous times, but for a phenomenon that should’ve been a string theorist’s wet dream, it was singularly unimpressive. Like watching a security camera video loop: dull scene, flicker, resume dull scene. Though once the flicker passed, there was grilled fish and stale milk in her fridge again, and her alarm clock buzzed to declare that 7:00 a.m. had returned. Only her mind remained the same.
She usually went to bed a few hours after the second alarm. That gave her time to print out the latest novella making the rounds in cyberspace, read it in the bath, and maybe work on her own would-be masterpieces. It didn’t bother her that the poems she wrote erased themselves every rollover. If she wanted to keep them, she posted them online, where the mingling of so many minds kept time linear. But doing that exposed the fragile words to the scrutiny of others, and sometimes it was better to just let them vanish.
She decided to post the latest one to share with her friends. The new boy wasn’t a friend, not yet, but maybe he had friend-potential.
BLOGSTER login: Welcome, Marguille!
[Sunday, 5 Marguille’sMonth, 2 years A.P., 2 a.m.]
I agree with Twen; specthredding is evil. But I can’t help it; been reading the Bumwankers stuff (I know, I know). my vote has always been for the government theory. $87 bil. for an “emergency fund”? Shyeah. Probly only took half that to build some knd of new super-weapon, or hotwire a particle acelerator. “I know! Let’s shoot some protons at the terrorists! Yeah! Oops, we bro,ke the universe!”
But seriously … I keep thinking that somewhere out there, normal reality still exists. no, scratch that—I know it exists, because it’s possible. Fun with quantum thery! ’Course, that means oblivion exists too. (This is what we get for letting that guy Shroedinger experiment on his cat. Should’ve sicked PETA on him.)
SappJuice, don’t feel bad about your studio. Hel’s Japanese apartment’s probably half the size of yours. (What do you call half a studio? A closet? ::ducks rotten tomatoes from Japan::) Anyway, it’s not like the rest of us are so much better off. What difference does a few square feet make when they’re the same square feet every damn day?
She got the email just before she would’ve gone to bed. The ding from her computer surprised her. Blogs worked, as did other forms of social media. Direct, private contact was impossible. Individual-to-individual relays—instant messaging, email—worked, but were always iffy. Most people just didn’t bother to try; too disappointing. And then there were the rumors.
But she read the email anyway.
“To: Hel
From: SapphoJuice
Subject: Hi
Helen (seems so weird to say your full name),
Hope you get this. I read the poem you posted in your blog. I just wanted to say … it wasn’t beautiful, but it did move me. Made me remember the way things used to be, and made me realize I don’t really mind that the old world is gone. I got put in a garbage can by football players *every day* during my freshman year. My mom always used to tell me I’d never amount to anything. How could I miss that? Anyway.
I guess the only thing that bothers me now is the silence. And sometimes I don’t even mind that, but sometimes the snow just gets to me. Why the hell couldn’t my pocket universe have formed around an *interesting* environment? I could dig an endless beach, maybe an endless forest. No, I get snow. It’s so quiet. It never stops falling. I can’t go out far without losing the apartment in the haze. Sometimes I want to just keep walking into the white, who cares? Then I read your poem.
Sappy (yeah, I know)”
She sat at her computer savoring the newness of the moment.
BLOGSTER login: Welcome, KT!
[Ohwhocares? Someday, somewhen]
Mr. Hissyfit got out. I tried to catch him but he just ran straight away into the grass. I keep going out to call for him, but he must be too far away to hear me.
Stupid cat. Stupid goddamn cat. I can’t stop crying.
She emailed SapphoJuice back and told him that she had only feared the silence once. That had been right after the prolif, when she’d still been adjusting. She’d started running and hadn’t stopped; just put her head down and cranked her arms like pistons and hauled ass as fast as her legs would take her, as far as her lungs could fuel. When she’d looked around, the apartment was gone, swallowed into the cracked-earth landscape. Instant panic. The apartment was only a fragment of reality, but it was her fragment of reality, her only connection to the other incomplete miniverses that now made up existence. Even before the prolif, she had been happiest there.
She could admit that, now, to him. But back on the day she’d run too far, she’d been in a panic, her grip on sanity slipping by cogs. It had taken the threat of true isolation, of wandering lost through endless wastelands until thirst or exposure killed her, to make her see the apartment as haven and not prison. So half-blinded by tears she had run back, thanking God that her shoes were cheap. One of them had an uneven sole, which scuffed a little crescent-shaped mark into the dusty soil. The moon had led her home.
BLOGSTER login: Welcome Conty!
RED ALERT
[Day 975 (yeah right I actually keep count in my head)]
KT no more kidding. Fight it. Don’t think about the damn cat. Go out and run—you can go pretty far from your house in the grass, can’t you? Eat something. Hell, eat everything; it’s not like it won’t come back at rollover.
Talk to us.
The emails she sent didn’t always go through. More than once she had to send them again when they bounced or, more often, simply never got a response. She saw the bounce histories in his attachments and knew that he’d had to send his multiple times, too. Just another day post-prolif.
She did not tell the others about the private correspondence, and neither did he. She knew what her friends would have said. It became something special, secret, a little titillating. As the days passed, her dreams changed. Now the man creeping about her room had a face and a much less sinister demeanor. Now he looked like a skinny, geeky teenager, whose shy smile was for her alone.
BLOGSTER login: Welcome, Marguille!
[Jan. 37 errordate errortime 12:5g0k p.m.]
SILENCE.
You guys want to chat? I need some facetime. I think KT’s gone.
Over the exchanges, she shared her life story with him. Growing up less than middle-class, trying to act less than upper-class. The teasing in elementary school because she “talked proper” and couldn’t dance. Her first boyfriend, a white boy—she’d been too guilt-ridden to bring him home to meet her parents, and they’d broken up because of her shame. Her next boyfriend, the one she’d almost married until she found out he was cheating on her. Graduating college and feeling the isolation grow in her life. Few friends, none of them local. No lovers. She’d always been an only child, a lonely child; she was used to it. The prospect of a couple of years in Japan hadn’t seemed all that daunting because what difference did it make, after all?
He told her about himself. Second-generation American-born Chinese, too free-spirited for the rigidly traditional family into which he’d been born, too shy to face the world without the shield of a book. No girlfriends; the girls he’d liked had been more interested in jocks and red-blooded rich boys. Never brave enough to venture far from home, the internet had become his realm, and in it he thrived. He was a Big Name Fan in certain circles, known for his biting wit and brutal honesty. The prolif had barely slowed him down.
She worried about what might happen as the clandestine exchanges continued, but never mentioned her fears to him. She’d begun to enjoy herself too much; the “incoming mail” chime was enough to make her heart race with excitement. She had to force herself out for her daily runs.
It helped that the more they talked, the more reliable the relaying became. Pretty soon messages were going through after only two or three tries, and
not bouncing at all.
IRC session start: Sun? MarEMBJune datetime error
*** marguille sets mode: +o TwenWen Conty Helen sappjuice
> Log set and active! TwenWen logging!
* Conty sighs.
* Helen observes a moment of silence.
* Conty groans.
* Helen sighs.
* TwenWen waits for Marguille’s spec … and waits … and waits.
* Helen wishes she had a nickel for every egghead spec … but where would she put them all?
*** sappjuice changes topic to “The Egghead Pyramid Scheme!”
* TwenWen giggles.
* TwenWen says, “DEcoherence. And I can use other big words, like ‘marmalade’.”
* marguille is typing.
*** Conty has been disconnected.
* Helen agrees.
* marguille sighs and waves.
*** marguille has logged off.
*** TwenWen has stopped logging.
*** TwenWen has logged off.
*** Helen has logged off.
*** sappjuice has logged off.
Session Close: Mon? Time? Deeeeeeeechgkl#@ ^^^^
Just spec, she told herself over the next few days. Too many people had expected a more dramatic apocalypse; now they cried wolf at every shadow. Some of their theories sounded right, but most were cockamamie—like Guille’s implication that friendship, family, love, could be the reason that some people just disappeared. That would mean the only people still alive across the proliferated realities were those whose ties to the world had been weak from the beginning.
Those who’d lived alone. Those who’d been socially isolated. Not the completely disconnected ones; people without ’net access would’ve gone stark raving within days after the prolif. But the loosely connected ones, who interacted with others only when they had to, or through a screen. Those who’d maintained just enough connection to keep them sane, then. Just enough connection to keep them alive, now.
Just spec, she thought again as the alarm clock buzzed. She hadn’t slept in two rollovers. Not me.
New habit. She sat up and reached over to her laptop, which rested on a low table beside the futon, and tapped its touchpad to wake it up. It chimed as the screen lit; she had mail.
“Helen,
I know this is risky, stupid, cheesy, whatever. But I can’t help myself. I’ve never met you and never will, but … some things you can feel no matter what. They used to say this was all just pheromones, but that’s crap. I’ve never smelled you and I only have my imagination to tell me what you look like. But I have to say this because it’s true.
I love you.
I wish oh shit I didn’t believe it but it’s true”
No sig. Not even a period at the end of the last sentence. He’d had enough time to send, but not to finish first.
Not me, her mind whispered, and not him. Please, not him.
And as the walls of her tiny apartment began to warp and the barren landscape beyond her window vanished, she had time to click on the bookmark for her blog’s “update” form and type a single line.
“The way out, or the end? Sapp’s gone to see. I’m going too.”
She hit “post” as reality folded into silence.
The You Train
Hey, girl. Yeah, I know; I’m sorry. Just haven’t been feeling all that social lately. How are you? That’s good, that’s good. How’s the little mister? Oh, that’s hilarious. That boy’s a mess. Me? Well, you know.
Hey. Did you know the B train doesn’t run at night?
I found out a couple of weekends ago. I was coming home from a date, one of those Fun dot com deals, Friday night at about eleven. Not so fun after all, kind of boring really. Anyway, I was standing there on the platform, might’ve been Thirty-Fourth Street, and the place was dead empty. I think I saw a homeless dude on the other platform, but that was it. The sign said the train ran weekdays. Right, me too, Monday through Friday, right? No, it means weekdays. After nine o’clock it’s like Cinderella after the ball. I know, huh?
So anyway, there I was waiting. An F train came and I ignored it. Doesn’t go to my stop. Then a D. Then a V. It was so quiet in there between trains, I could hear my own heart beat. I don’t like being in there when it’s that empty, sometimes it’s not safe, but you know, a cab would’ve cost thirty dollars and I don’t get paid ’til next week. But finally someone comes in, this woman, and she looks at me like I’m crazy and tells me the B doesn’t run at night. Like I should’ve known from that sign. Weekdays. Whatever.
You ever look down the tunnels when you’re waiting? Sometimes you can see trains moving around in there, passing by on their way to other stations or heading for other platforms. You can’t really see much besides the sign, just that glowing colored circle with a letter or a number at the center, floating in the dark like a beady little eye. Sometimes it feels like the trains are curled up in burrows down there. They come out into the light when people gather on the platform and call out to them in just the right way …
Okay, Ms. Thing. I’ll be sure to heckle you at the next open mic night.
But y’know, I could’ve sworn I saw a B on one of them.
Yeah, girl, rough day. There was this meeting at work. Everybody in my office wants to get their two cents in, make themselves look good, right? I just want the meeting over so I can get back to work. So they’re going ’round and ’round, everybody trying to outdo everybody else with cool ideas, and nothing’s getting done. So I finally clear my throat and suggest maybe we should move on to the next agenda item.
They looked at me like I was shit on the bottom of their shoes, girl. One of them, this prissy blonde from Marketing, she says, “If you don’t want to be a part of the team, at least don’t ruin it for the rest of us.” Right there,
in front of everybody. I didn’t say a word for the rest of the meeting. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt like … hell, I don’t know. Like kicking her ass. Like crying. It was the most … I hate these people.
And you know what? When the meeting ended, still nothing had been done. Three hours wasted. I swear.
Then on the way home, I got off at the wrong stop, one of those endless Something-th Street stations above Columbus Circle, can’t remember which, there’s so many anyway. I was on the platform forever waiting for the 1. I was worried because a lot of those stops, they get skipped during rush hour, and I couldn’t find a map. Finally the train came along, and I was about to step in when I realized there was nobody on it. Middle of rush hour, every seat empty. So I looked up to see if there was an “out of service” sign, and I saw it was the 9, not the 1. So then I—
I said the 9.
Yes, I’m sure it was the 9.
Really? Oh, yeah, I remember reading something about that one getting shut down. But I’m pretty sure it was a 9. Maybe they break them out of mothballs during rush hour, I don’t know. Maybe the conductor just rolled up an old sign. Anyway, I didn’t get on it, but that meant I had to sit another half hour before a 1 finally came along. Pain in the ass, and for what? Nothing got done.
Yeah, I quit Dull Date dot com. The only people who were emailing me lately were these old guys having midlife crises, looking for somebody to make their ex-wives jealous. And too many of the guys my age have problems. I never did tell you about the last date, did I? He kept talking about his ex-girlfriend, and how she only broke up with him because she was going through a hard time. Then he started crying.
No, I didn’t leave. He wasn’t an ass about it; he was just lonely and needed somebody to talk to, so I let him talk. Hell, I know how he feels.
I can’t say if I’m over Nick yet. I don’t miss him anymore. Nick the Dick, I’d’ve killed him if I’d married him, you know that. But … sometimes I wonder if that was my one chance, you know? Maybe you’re not supposed to squander love when it comes along, even if he’s a dick. Maybe I should’ve tried …
How Long 'Til Black Future Month? Page 32