Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 98

by Matthew Kressel

  I hate pretending to be someone I’m not. Once, my Archives tell me, I composed Neo-Baroque symphonies at a conservatory that won’t be built for another four hundred years. I was world renown and in love with a young man from Nigeria. But this past has been timelost. The Anachronists washed away my joy into the sea of Has Never Been. I don’t remember his name or his face, but I know that when the Varaha Kalpa ends, I’ll embrace my lover again. We will all reunite with the timelost, and together we will write symphonies with the Godhead herself.

  My phone vibrates in my pocket. Someone has tagged a picture on Instagram with my handle: it’s the line to the bathroom that I’m looking at now, except the queue has moved forward a few paces. The encoded data says the photo is from the future and that I took it. On the graffitied wall is a faded sentence written in Eurogeek, a language that won’t exist for two hundred years, but the words are spelled phonetically in ancient Akkadian. It’s overlaid with newer graffiti and dozens of band stickers and is at least ten years old in this Now. The words read, “The woman directly underneath these words is Agent 991 of the Hands of Brahma. Make contact with her and share all information. Blessed be Tat Tvam Asi.”

  The queue moves so that it matches the photo exactly. Right under the Akkadian letters is a woman with black hair, boxy retro eyeglasses, a gold digital watch, tight jeans. I lift my phone, take a picture of the queue at the precise moment, and email it to a server in Togo, where through the blessing of the Timeless One it will find its way to the future. The Causal Chain must be preserved.

  I approach the woman and hold out an unlit cigarette. “Got a light?”

  “Don’t smoke,” she says.

  I flash my retinal maser into her eyes, and there’s a brief moment where we pass encryption keys, entangled photons, and subatomic handshakes to negotiate deeper levels of trust. She’s one of us, but I outrank her, thank the Godhead.

  I’m Agent 337, I transmit through the maser. I’ve been authorized to divulge all.

  WHY ARE YOU BREAKING COM SILENCE? she transmits.

  Because I’ve found him.

  Him? Even through the maser I sense her disbelief.

  The last Anachronist to stand in our way before the Glorious Unity. He’s beside the stage, next to the VIP section. He’s wearing a Goo Globbers t-shirt, has ruffled brown hair, brown-olive skin, and a Van Dyke beard. I transmit his DNA marker and black body signature to her.

  Why come to me? she says. You could erase him yourself. She scans the people nearby. This dialog risks outing us. Making contact is not in my mission profile.

  In my last instance in this Now, I say, a taxi killed me as I crossed the street outside this concert hall. The Anachronists are never so overt. They know that I know his identity, and they’re desperate. You see why I cannot erase him myself?

  It could have been a true accident, she says.

  True? I hope you know better, 991. But, you’re right, there’s more. In your last instantiation of this Now you brought the suspect backtime to the year 10,981 BCE. You interrogated him, but were killed when he detonated a singularity bomb embedded in his lower brain stem. We let him destroy you so that the Anachronists would believe they have the upper hand.

  This isn’t strange, she says. I’ve been killed hundreds of times. Without concrete evidence, how can I proceed?

  It’s an order.

  And if we erase the wrong person based on your whim, eons of labor will be lost. We might end up infinitely farther from the close of Brahma’s Day. I’m sorry, but without confirmation, I cannot proceed. She lifts her phone, about to transmit a record of our conversation through Instagram.

  I’ve no time for this. I outrank her and have privileges over her retinal. I flash her short-term memory and write my orders onto her prefrontal cortex. I write twice, just to be sure.

  Got it, yes, sir, she says, lowering her phone. Suspect at stage right, male, twenty-six, olive-skin, Van Dyke beard, Goo Globbers t-shirt. Pursue and erase.

  I purge her memories of our encounter, and our conversation ends two point five seconds after it began. Outwardly she shows no signs of change. She’s one of them now, a civilian. She will follow my instructions without knowing it. “Maybe I will take that cigarette,” she says. I light it and she takes a drag, then thanks me before she saunters toward the stage.

  It’s my turn to go and I enter a stall that reeks of weed and piss. As I close the latch I can’t stop smiling. Our greatest moment so close at hand! Brahma’s Day will end! The timelost will be found! Blessed is her name, Tat Tvam Asi, That Thou Art, who dies so that we may live!

  A fire-haired woman pushes into the stall, and the rhinestones on her cat’s-eye glasses twinkle like fairy dust. Her leafy-green eyes hold me a bit too long before I realize I’ve been hijacked.

  “Goodnight, honey,” she says, pressing her lips against mine.

  No! Wait? What was I just thinking? What was I just doing?

  She stares at me, this beautiful, beautiful creature. I’d do anything for her. I’d die for her.

  “Change of plans,” she says as she presses something tiny and hard into my palm. “A little gift for Ms. Cameron Rhyder.”

  Cameron Rhyder is a stupid name, but I wear it proudly.

  The suit greets me as I enter the backstage doors. “Ms. Rhyder, I’ll take you to your seat.” He doesn’t know he escorts the world’s last hope, the culmination of eons of labor. His smile is forced, perfunctory. I remember making it when I was in his body.

  Roadies wake from their stupor as I pass forests of lights and gear. Red cups pop like fruit from labyrinths of black boxes. Their cigarette smoke curls into vortices as I walk past them. It takes them a second.

  Holy fuck, that’s Cameron Rhyder, that chick from that movie, what’s it called? The Doggerel Star with Jimmy Everwood and Kristina Goodman.

  Shit, what happened to her?

  I know their thoughts from other Nows, when I inhabited their bodies: how I got old but am still fuckable, how my career tanked after I got busted in the back of an RV parked beside that Brooklyn fish-packing warehouse while sniffing crushed oxy from a nineteen year old’s penis with forty thousand dollars of stolen coke hidden in the trunk. The coke wasn’t mine. The douchebag with the big cock stole it from his friend, who ratted him out so he wouldn’t get wacked by the mob. But try explaining that to a public who hates celebrities only slightly more than they adore them. They threw me to the wolves, then the wolves threw me to the scavengers.

  I suppose all of this would’ve mattered to the real Cameron Rhyder. That entity sleeps way down in the substrata of this body’s brain. I feel her try to wake every few minutes, as she has for the past two days I’ve been inside her mind. I nudge her back to sleep with sweet memories of douchebag inside of her.

  The suited man smacks open the steel door, and the sounds of the audience explode in my ears. He throws aside a curtain to reveal a thousand wiggling faces, barely conscious worms tenaciously clinging to life. They’ve no idea they eat death, that they suffice on rot.

  They call it nihilism. I call it genocide.

  The suit leads me to a table third from the stage. The crimson-dressed two-tops rest on a VIP dais a meter above the dance floor, like a king’s court. But we’re not the highlight. That’s the stage, where all kings will abdicate their thrones tonight, where all subjects will shed their chains. I take my seat, order a single malt from a pimple-faced kid who notices then pretends not to recognize me.

  Others do. People whisper and point and avert their eyes. They’ve seen me on a screen, a whole dimension flattened, and yet I’ve become larger in their eyes. But in person, in all three dimensions, I’m lessened, made human. That’s why they stare, because in seeing me lowered to a mere person they raise themselves up.

  I’m fine with that. Equal footing is what I’m after.

  The lights dim and the crowd roars, raucous to the point of dangerous. They’re ready to pop. The bouncers straighten, check their earbuds. Under
cover of the noise, shadows sneak onto the stage and take their positions. The roar grows.

  White spotlights flash onto the lead singer. The silver cape over his shoulders reflects a sky of constellations up the walls. Orion, Cassiopeia, Canis Major. Their positions match the sky outside just now. He slams a power chord and the cheers fade under the heavy crunch of distortion.

  As the chord hangs he sings, “Where has my innocence run? Where is my peaceful weather? How sunny were the days, when days . . . they ran forever.”

  The lights go up and it’s spectral chaos. The band joins in with a dominant seventh. It is fierce, the three-seven time, the swooning melody.

  Damn. Even after all these eons, after so much death and horror, their music still moves me. That’s why it had to be them, the Goo Globbers, the only band in Eternity who can thwart oblivion.

  I send a command to the stage lights, to the lustre-tech I embedded four years ago. They switch on full spectrum, and everyone’s mind is pried wide open, modulated by the lights and a thousand other methods. But I set the other manipulators in previous Nows; there’s no way to know for sure if all but the lustre remains unadultered.

  The crowd writhes on the dancefloor beneath us. One young man with a Van Dyke beard, olive skin, and a Goo Globbers t-shirt points at me, his fingers only inches from my ankles. “Dude,” he shouts to his friend, “that’s Cameron Rhyder’s legs!”

  His friend shakes his head, embarrassed.

  I ignore them and sip my scotch exactly as I have done four thousand six hundred and eighty times before.

  A cute guy two tables over smiles and gives me a sympathetic expression. When I was in his body in a previous Now I learned he’s got undiagnosed cancer of the prostate. He’ll be dead in eighteen months. The real Cameron Rhyder would probably have fucked him in a shitty hotel room nearby, crying afterward over how far she’s fallen from her glory days. My body warms instinctively at the thought of his body pressing into mine.

  The song ends, bleeds into another. A bluesy, jazzing jam, lots of fuzz. The drummer sweats rivers.

  A smirking woman with dark hair, boxy eyeglasses, tight jeans, and a gold digital watch sidles up to the dancing men beside me. They gawk and stare at her body.

  Everyone’s mind is wide open. Impulses are laid bare. Privacy is a discarded piece of clothing.

  She dances before the men, rubbing against them as the beat progresses. She’s flushed, shivering, overheated, her eyes rolled back into her head, all signs she’s orgasmic. It’s a side effect of the lustre. I count seventy-one men and women currently experiencing orgasm.

  Do they know to whom they sacrifice their lust, to what wiggling chaos of unborn nightmare they pray? They writhe mindlessly, their imagination dead. They dream others’ dreams and think them their own. Nihilism has been chosen for them because they haven’t learned how to choose for themselves.

  Until tonight. Until me. I will get this right this time. I must.

  The bespectacled girl moves behind the Van Dyke. She plays his chest like a guitar, brushes her hand over his crotch.

  Three bodies back, a man in a leather jacket and two days of scruff lights a cigarette and considers me coolly, as he always does. A roadie sneaks out from a curtain onto the VIP dais. He squats beside me and says, “Scott—” that is, Scott Mohl, lead singer of the Goo Globbers, “—heard you’re here. Would you do a duet?”

  Ms. Rhyder had a brief post-acting career as a singer-songwriter. Until the drug bust. “What song?”

  His breath reeks of cigarettes. “Autumn Days?”

  From their first album. “Too dreary. How about My Disposition?” It’s a poem I, in Cameron’s body, wrote when I left Scott for good one morning a thousand Nows ago. He recorded it under his name as a kind of revenge, turned it into a hit. And if we sing it tonight, we’ll be singing my words to the most important audience in history.

  “I’ll ask,” the roadie says.

  “When?”

  “I’ll signal you.”

  I nod, feign flattery and nerves as he walks back into the shadows. The latches have been set, the trap is ready.

  The song ends. Scott makes obeisances to the crowd, sips from a water bottle. “How y’all doing tonight?”

  Cheers erupt. Some awaken from trances to shock and fear at their loss of control. Six people are freaking out. Nine more quiver from orgasm.

  The roadie whispers to the bassist, who says something off-mic to Scott.

  “I’m told we have a guest here tonight.”

  Whoops and jeers. Everyone knows of our little tryst.

  “The lovely Cameron Rhyder.” Lunchroom boos, cheers. The roadie’s waving at me. “Hey, doll,” says Scott, his hand outstretched toward me, “join us?”

  I stand to whistles and cheers. “Got any blow?” one screams. Another: “Cameron, we love you!”

  A spotlight, hot and blinding, swivels onto me as I step on stage. I can’t see, but just as well. “Hiya, Cammy,” Scott says off mic, then he gives me a hug. In private, he’d be just as likely to tell me off.

  “Ninth Division?” he says.

  This is wrong. “How about My Disposition?”

  “I’m tired of it.” Then to the band, “Ninth Division, on four. One . . . two . . . three . . . ”

  And just like that we’re performing the wrong song. I fucked up, somewhere. Now I have to play along, to sing his thinly veiled polemic on the evils of the military industrial complex, told as a clichéd love story between two star-crossed lovers.

  Scott knows I hate this song, but not for the reasons he thinks. Its angry baseline becomes the thing it criticizes: unchecked rage. Played for a crowd this open, it will solidify the destructive mentality. It promises freedom, but makes them slaves.

  I can’t allow this. I’ve worked too hard, too long to get here. I activate the nano I’ve placed in the bassist’s brain and ramp up his sensitivity to THC. The joint he smoked an hour ago and thought he was coming down from now gets fifty times stronger.

  His timing skews. He misses notes.

  Scott and I sing, “I can’t see above the wall, but I know you’re on the other side,” as the audience cringes at the bassist’s errors. They’re being programmed for sure, but it won’t be as deep.

  We give the song a respectful end, bow, and the audience responds with a weak applause. We’re losing them.

  “What the fuck, man?” the drummer shouts to the bassist.

  “I’m good,” the bassist says, looking green.

  I use the lull and jump in. “My Disposition on four, ready? One . . . two . . . three . . . ”

  The drummer pounds the kettles as Scott cocks his head at me and smiles wryly. He knows he’s been beaten. I drop the bassist’s high and ramp up the band’s dopamine. I need them at their best.

  And they’re so fucking together it’s magical. We’ve yanked the audience back from the abyss. I sing, “All of us, every one, have been the other, you know, at one time or another.”

  And Scott replies, “And the other, mother, sister, lover, would you know them by their cover?”

  On the dance floor below my table the dark-haired girl in the boxy glasses and gold watch spins around and tongue-kisses the man with the Van Dyke. I ramp up the lustre-tech to max, flood the air with massive doses of oxytocin, coerce the frequencies of my voice to resonate blissfully with human sensory meridians. Their bodies in ecstasy, they’re open to anything.

  I step forward and belt, “I have been you and you have been me, all throughout Eternity. Don’t you get it? Don’t you see? You have been that one and that one is me.”

  The guitarist riffs through the interlude, making amateurs of the greats. The drummer is picking out rhythms he didn’t know existed. The bassist is plucking chords in heroic timing. Scott’s voice is hitting notes birds can’t reach.

  And when I sing the next verse they will awaken to the stark truth. We’ve been fighting this war for so long, in so many variations that in this Now, in this mom
ent, I, the entity that stands in Cameron Rhyder’s body, have been every one of them. I, who no longer have a name, remember them all.

  I have been the smirking bouncer, and I have been the bemused roadies. And I was Scott Mohl and every member of the Goo Globbers. And was the man who will die of cancer, and I have been both halves of the couple kissing beneath my seat.

  Inside their fragile bodies I have traveled forward and backward through time. With their hands I have slaughtered and erased and destroyed. I have had my mind rewritten and reprogrammed more than a billion times. The words I sing to them are utterly true: I have been you and you have been me, all throughout Eternity.

  And when I sing my next verse, they will awaken to this truth. The Anachronists will see the futility of their cause. The Hands of Brahma will know that the Unity they seek is already here, in my body, this flesh of Cameron Rhyder. They have already become One. Brahma’s Day ends with me.

  And here I go, second stanza, moment of truth.

  I step forward, but something sharp jabs my left foot. There’s something in my shoe. The pain makes me stumble, and my heel catches a wire. I’m thrown forward, down and hard, over the edge of the stage.

  My head slams into the floor. My neck cracks. The pain is obscene, so I switch it off.

  Screams, not my own. I can’t move! My heart rate spikes. My neck is broken. I’ll be dead in seconds!

  No! All of this mustn’t be for nothing! I was so close to showing them the truth: when we kill each other, we kill ourselves. Don’t you all see? We’re maggots feasting on our own body!

  I was going to wake them up. I was going to inject this knowledge into them, so that for one instant we’d become a singular mind, one conscious entity, who could stop this madness forever.

  Blackness pours into my vision as people surround me. The scruffy man in the leather jacket photographs me with his camera phone. The young woman with cat’s-eye glasses and leafy green eyes leans over and checks my pulse. She reaches for my shoe, which has fallen off, and pulls out something tiny from the heel. A pebble. The same pebble that threw her/me/us off our bicycle so many years ago. She puts it in her pocket and smiles at me.