Yet a compression of time, and distances travelled, passing through flux lines of force and maybe back again, had brought distortions, and loops, and wiped the cortexes nearly clean, to lose coherency of the other world along the convoluted way.
Mountains of his father’s fractured recollections were here, traces of them at least, their figments looming over the shadows of this haptic, joining memories of stars, from the first sailor Crospinal had met, in the sky station, and soft shards from other lives, all floating down, gleaned from the sailors tethered to the gates above, passed among them. Remnants of their world lurked in the bones of latent genealogies. Combined, they gathered momentum.
When a passenger woke, over the years of this or the years of that, they brought with them from their dream cabinet a tenuous network of recollections, memoirs so far out of context, so arcane and isolated, that only faint spheres of fragile logic could rail against the chaos. Even then, not for long. His own father had been fortunate and desperate enough to find, or maybe call into existence, the pen, connecting to a gate there, and raising his children. But Crospinal’s father, in his solitude, could never rationalize nor arrange the ruins of his past into any form of tribute, just as much as he never really understood where it was that he had returned to life, or for what reason, not even within the information from the banks flooding into the back of his head.
But sailors were just men, ultimately, and men get sick and die, and the ethos they try so hard to build and sustain dies with them. Sons get older, and they wander off, bearing memories of their own, and echoes of their fathers’.
Fringes of the massive haptic lapped at his bare skin, sinking tendrils, hooklike, right into his scars. Crospinal already knew the impending immersion—without a functional uniform, or his dad to project him—would be nothing like entering the bland escapes from his childhood. Simple messages and haptic lessons he had taken part in as a boy had been succinct, and—from the sole source of his father’s perspective—relatively cohesive. Where multiple spheres of shaky logic and viewpoints were brought together, memories of the lost world were cast down, to mingle, and a coherence had begun, a bastion, bringing the passenger’s old world closer: this haptic would engulf Crospinal entirely.
He did not hesitate, stepping around and between consoles, around the entranced crew, faces hidden by visors, as if he, too, were an apparition. Walking was as slow as it had been at the bottom of the viscous water. The fabric of visions and recollections and ancient desires, woven together, more dense than any single passenger could relay, slowed Crospinal’s progress, distorted time and pulled him irrevocably into an embrace he could never deny: here, at last, was human contact.
The floor before him was littered with concrete ephemera. Fragments, small metal tools, obscure forms: he kicked them as he stepped forward. Other artifacts fell from the ceiling, clanking as he passed.
He arched his spine, to shed his self, surprised by how readily he wanted to release his persona, shake it off, though flashes of identity persisted, like flakes of static composite, almost impossible to lose, each flash retaining a facet of his cognizance.
He knew he was walking through an area crammed with devices and consoles. He knew he might have died, several times over, and had been brought back to life. He knew there were fathers above him, and that they were linked together. He had facilitated the link, by entering.
Toward the end of the cockpit, in the haptic, lesser apparitions passed through him while the delirious fathers rustled overhead—
Elsewhere, a girl in full uniform and rare blue helmet called his name, the name his father had given him, shouting it in clear warning.
But he was dispersing as he went, like a cloud of polymers, helping to make up the walls and floors and furniture. Deeper in the mnemonic fray, his last thought was of being locked inside a dream cabinet, as it drained of chilly liquid, taking him from one algorithm to another. Or was he standing in the pen, in front of his father’s throne, while colours and characters capered about like simple-minded fools—
There was, abruptly, an isthmus, upon which Crospinal stood. Hands behind his back.
Then, in the backyard of a small house, where he sat at a patio table, mug of whiskey between cold hands, looking up through the branches of a delicate oak at a dark sky, seeing breathtaking arrays of stars. The night was chilly and clear. He stared, unable to be moved by such sights. He’d be there soon, among them—
Wind pushed hair from his eyes. Standing on a strip of beach at night, the lights out to sea looking almost like another land, an intriguing and beckoning country he could never discern during the day. The beach was at the end of his street, between rows of buildings. More like a strip of debris and junk than a beach. There was a mattress before him, and foam on the rocks. An idle man, sitting there, in the dark. He looked at the lights again, out to sea, thinking of the family next door, in the apartment adjacent to his, who moved about frequently, always shuffling, moving, regardless of the hour. He heard the occasional brief shout, as if they somehow managed to surprise each other shuffling in the hallways of the tiny place. Never did he hear voices. Never the tones of talking, not from anyone in the family, not even the kid, who lived there, with his parents.
The boy.
Who seemed happy enough when they passed each other on the stairs.
Crospinal’s meager contribution had woven in: ways to kill time; living with pain; apparitions as friends. Drifting past the crew now—their arms in holes, shuddering slightly, as if aware of his passage, and perhaps even who he was—past the last of the consoles, a thousand phantasms unravelling his fibres, picking him clean; he closed his eyes and was gone.
Nudged from one body, one scene, to another.
Once again he was walking, this time among a group of people in strange, inert garb, midway between the world of flux he had lived in and the lost world, lingering beyond.
Rows of dream cabinets, either side, open, and empty. They were called stats. Stats would soon be filled, and sealed.
The other men talked, but quietly, among themselves. They never talked to Crospinal, bringing up the rear, one glove resting on the rail of the dolly, maintaining its height. Talking sounds were a drone, the sounds most men made, pointless and dull, of no consequence, background to the thoughts that flitted like silver minnows in the dying pools of his brain.
He had not been sleeping well. His hands had started to shake. He felt as though he would never fill his lungs to capacity again.
He had a wife, and he would return to her after struggling through each day—trying to stay intact—often entering their apartment to a different kind of tension, one that was like tiny needles pushing against his skin. These days, the air inside his home passed right through his pores, through the holes that the tiny needles made in his flesh.
He and his wife would eat together, in silence. She never asked about his tremors or his day or showed any concern. Whenever he looked at his hands, flat on the table, he could not really discern the trembling either, yet he was convinced the shaking would soon break him apart. Incongruence between what he felt and what he saw was in no way comforting, serving only to add to his disconcertion and general state of discomfort.
“Boarding starts tomorrow.” His voice sounded like blocks, falling. Wooden blocks. His tongue was wooden.
Clarissa. That was his wife’s name. He recalled this now, like a sharp knock. The recollection brought her image into clearer focus. Nevertheless, Clarissa did not respond, nor even look up. Her hair was thinning. A whorl of flesh visible where the roots were grey. Flakes of psoriasis poised there.
Dinner this evening was a form of stew. Clarissa remained bent over her plate, and he watched her jaw moving, thinking of insects with mandibles, dissolving prey with their gastric fluid.
Or maybe Clarissa had already left by this point. Maybe he was alone in the apartment, sitting at the table, by himself. His bones were so
re.
He tried again: “The stats are ready. The hub is full. Cortexes are beginning to think. Contract’s almost up.”
Nothing. A hiss of static. No, not static: next door, they were creaking about again. He heard the floorboards, the shuffling, and one of those rare shouts. Clarissa flinched but still did not look up. He watched his hands, inert either side of his bowl. He felt the shaking intensify but they appeared perfectly still.
Clarissa might have been crying.
Sometimes he would lay awake in the middle of the night, listening to the family. All hours, day or night. They had no routine. The boy was seven or eight, but Crospinal didn’t know much about children, except that no child was going into a stat. The youngest passenger, other than the batches, was twenty four. A woman from Nairobi. He’d seen her at one of the conferences. She smiled a lot, in a nervous way. Her hands were very steady.
The oldest heading out was two hundred and seventy four.
Part of his job now was to guide the dolly, like he was doing. A cell in the palm of his glove adjusted the hover and equilibrium.
Concern gave him night sweats.
Startled, he looked suddenly about for his wife, his apartment—seeking the uneaten stew and red melamine table—but they had vanished.
Stats lined either side. Open stats.
The men in front of him were talking.
This load was fresh strings of polymers and scales of allotrope mesh. One of the last to the development area, in the north of the site, where they would be bombarded with instructions of light. Or rather, bombarded with a latency to understand instructions.
Dollies could almost guide themselves, like most low-functionals, but laden with raw materials, which sometimes developed ideas of their own. Even before composites were imprinted, they needed watching.
His foreman was a short, bald man who showed too many teeth too often, and who called what they did with dollies chaperoning.
Chaperoning, he would say, staring with his little eyes, was a job for dumbasses.
When he first brought up the tremors, and the sleeplessness, and the other unsettling sensations that were taking over, he was told simply by his foreman, go home. So he explained very carefully how he had been watching the pulses of instructions for so long now that he was able to decipher them, and that he could see individual polymers in the air, and he signed several forms, and reported to medical. He did not look in the development area again, keeping his eyes downcast. Though the light called to him on occasion and the other workers laughed at his fear. There’s visors for that shit, health and fucking safety. Why did they have to work with such retards anyway?
Once, he had excelled at school, a good student, eager. Made it as far as second year of his Masters and, from there, getting cherry-picked for a pretty great job. There was a girl from childhood, and parents that seemed to love him.
Then he heard stories about the transponders, latent under the skin of the batches. He couldn’t stop thinking about them. Ten thousand embryos, all tampered with. He felt there were beasts, searching for him. Was he supposed to know as much as he did? While looking for his inlays, he ended up in hospital, bandaged to the elbow, with a nurse at the door. The tremors started then. They were difficult to hide, though at first he politely feigned belief when people told him they couldn’t see the shakes. He asked so carefully, an impromptu poll, thin smile on his face, trying not to draw too much attention. Holding his hand out, asking.
“Shaking? No.”
The problem was connected to the wires in his arms. He would have to get them out discretely. He didn’t ask anyone about them, not the doctors, who clearly knew, and not his mother, when she visited, who did a pretty good job portraying concern.
The second time he tried to remove the inserts, the hospital put him on suicide watch, and he was kept in a ward for a month, sedated.
He was even more careful after that.
Though he was no longer consulted on matters of construction, he kept his job, and his option to take up a stat.
The tremors were getting worse.
He worked for a short while, then took more time off when the situation had not improved. He could not abide being alone. By this point, Clarissa was certainly gone. Guiding dollies, and checking optics in the massive compartments, seeing what was growing or not, and knowing that the other men were laughing at him, was still better than staying at home, listening to the floorboards creak next door and imagining the boy walking about.
Curtains of light would fall, like sparks, onto the tubes and buckies and complex grilles. Ozone made his head ache.
Once, a long time ago, when he himself was a boy, his hands had been so steady he could hold a brimming glass of cold water at arm’s length, never spilling a drop.
He never did talk much, even back then. He had a dog. A white bitch, chosen out of sympathy, because she sat in the back corner of the kennel while the others in the litter approached and stood leaping against the mesh for the touch of his mother’s fingers.
His father, when they brought the puppy home in a cardboard box, cowering in torn-up newspaper, would not acknowledge the dog. From his chair, with his glasses on his head, he scowled at the fuss. When his wife got down on her hands and knees with their son to encourage the unnamed pup out of the box, he told her to get up.
Don’t be so miserable, she said.
His father did not reply, just glared, until they were seated around the table at dinner. (Canned corn; boiled potatoes; frying steak in a tepid pool of brown water.) The dog remained in its box on the mat by the back door, watching them, trembling. Though they had cut a flap in the cardboard, like a drawbridge for the pup to leave from, she remained inside.
The thing’s sleeping in the basement. It’s not allowed upstairs in the daybeds. And if it pees on the carpets, it’ll live outside. I don’t want to hear it barking, or whining. And don’t expect me to walk it.
Much later, old enough to go to university on a scholarship to study at Tech Greene, he realized his father had been jealous of the attention the pup received, and despised it for that reason.
The dog led a miserable life, afflicted with hip problems, unsocialized, kicked once in a while by his father (who seemed, as years went by, to also lead an increasingly miserable existence).
Even in the hospital, when he spent most of his time in bed, dredging up memories, he couldn’t remember what they had called the dog.
Not long after he took the job, he felt his life unravelling: his wife leaving him, the boy next door, walking the floorboards, the job itself going from lead, to staff, to chaperone—he thought about his dog more and more, unable to stop, until sometimes it seemed there were dozens of the poor creatures cowering inside him.
Clarissa wiped her mouth and looked up at him with cold eyes. He was surprised to see her but made no remark, in case she vanished again. His mouth hung open and he could not close it. Tremors shook him from inside. Clarissa didn’t want to hear about the stats, or about how he was poisoned, or about the thousands of children frozen in the banks. She didn’t want to hear about him floating off soon, into dreamland.
Like breathing for the first time, Crospinal gasped into a different moment of lucidity. Within the sailor’s haptic, there were other people, standing, nearly touching. He was the only one in such a dishevelled state. He had this one instant to look up, and see the fathers, suspended above him, webbed to each other, before another wave of memories, another life, brought him under again.
Dieback began when charlara fraxina made the leap from trees of the genus fraxinas to other deciduous species. Perhaps the Latin name for the blight should have been reconsidered once fraxinas was no longer the sole victim, but priorities shift, and gaggles of scientists didn’t have time anymore to sit around large tables classifying flora and fauna in a dead language. There were other issues to contend with. More pressing issues. Broad-leafed trees, in e
very country that could grow broad-leafed trees, had begun to sicken.
Ensconced within years of empirical accumulation, science mostly, dendrology toward the end, and memories of fieldtrips as a young, shy woman, to the taiga, and to the shrinking rainforest, mingled with a few paltry recollections of awkward relationships that didn’t last very long. Such promise as a child, they would say. Award ceremonies, a published paper or two, followed by solitude, mostly, as an adult.
Passing through a forest of unreal proportions, trunks bigger than her torso, whipping past. The sky, when she looked up, like a semaphore of white flags flickering through the leaves. Ash, she thought, and motion slowed. Names were keys, connections to draw elements forth. Names brought souls and gave memories and dreams a dusting of true form. Names like Crospinal, and Luella, and Richardson, who had a daughter he loved so much he sometimes wished she had never been born.
He saw a flashed image, the capture of his hand, reaching, thin, naked arm rising up into the light.
Moisture made it colder still. In winter, even the air froze, glazing the rocks and benches and grass with a coat of ice. Everything was grey. Kids wouldn’t visit. Weather was too bad. That’s what they’d say. Roads were icy.
Behind her, some confounded smart machine or other approached, no doubt sent by the administrators to coax her back indoors. She could hear the annoying attempts to be heard, the equivalent to a throat being cleared, had a person been sent. All these machines were able to move soundlessly, and the imitation of life, the false flaw they often tried to expose to a human to demonstrate a hollow concept of empathy, was most of the reason why she despised elementals.
She refused to look into the red eyes.
There would come a point in human history, she knew, when reproducing would be a bad idea.
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