Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 99

by Kali Wallace

  And I would get the leak fixed. But the angle of the images we had was poor, and I didn’t really know how long it would take. Sixty minutes, I would have guessed, if I were being honest. Maybe as long as ninety. And by then I would have spent over an hour bathed in heavy SPE radiation and might even already be showing symptoms of acute poisoning—

  “He did it as a kind of practice run, right?”

  I looked up. It was Doc asking me now. It was just the two of us in the airlock, and I suddenly felt as though there was also some kind of leak in me. I felt a coldness creeping in. Loneliness and fear and sullenness—

  I could fix the leak, and I could do it before any symptoms got too bad. But that was all I could guarantee.

  “You told me that your grandfather wanted to practice dying, until he got used to it. Until he wasn’t afraid anymore.”

  I nodded. Doc was trying to calm me. I must have been starting to show signs of panic. I’d be useless if I froze up, if I let the panic take hold—

  I took a deep breath. I looked in Doc’s face. “Yeah, I guess he got into the casket and thought about bright lights and clouds and angels—” I laughed sadly at that, but I shivered too. “But with me—” I had never much believed in angels or heaven, not even as a girl. I grunted. “I suppose these EVAs out in the vacuum of space make a pretty good practice run for eternities of atheist nothingness—”

  And suddenly Doc stopped what she was doing with the helmet. She had her back to me, and I could see the line of her spine change. I could almost see the puzzle pieces linking together in her head.

  But it was all right. I realized that I had wanted her to know. I had wanted somebody to know. But I also knew that, unlike the commander, she would still let me go. That I was still the best hope they had.

  When Doc turned back around, her voice sounded light, but her eyes were growing soft and watery. “Did it work?”

  I closed my eyes. I thought of the morning I found my grandfather’s dead body. I unscrewed the casket and lifted the lid, uncovering that horrible expression on his face, his twisted mouth and bruised forehead, his wide popping eyes, the blood under his fingernails and the scratches along his face.

  It was a face of horror. Horror at the finality and loneliness of death. Despite all the practice runs, every night for years, the real thing had still caught him unprepared.

  “No,” I said. I breathed a deep breath, the coldness and loneliness enfolding me utterly. “It didn’t work at all.”

  “Suppose I tell you about my grandfather?”

  It seemed like a million years before I heard Doc ask me the question. With effort, I pulled up out of my funk and looked at her. In reality, it must have been something like five seconds. But time passes slowly, darkly, horribly in the void of tangible death—

  “He was in special forces in the Second World War,” Doc was saying. “Secret, dangerous, behind-the-lines kind of work. Serial numbers filed off the dogtags.” She held up a small brown rubber ball, no bigger than a pea. “He even carried an L-pill.”

  My eyes focused on the ball. It looked like nothing so much as a rabbit dropping. “A what?”

  “A lethal pill,” said Doc. “A rubber-coated glass ampoule filled with concentrated potassium cyanide. Bite it open, and death comes in minutes.” She thrust it toward my mouth and automatically I opened my lips. It fit easily, comfortably between my gums and cheek. I inhaled a shocked breath. The pill stayed in place.

  Death in minutes, I was thinking. So different from what I had imagined would happen to me. Acute radiation poisoning—skin drying out, internal organs in revolt, waves of painful headaches turning my thoughts into knives—

  “You brought it up here . . . ?”

  Doc smiled wryly. “Even after the war was over, my grandfather carried it everywhere. He said it terrified him to leave the house without his L-pill in his mouth. Funny, I know. But he couldn’t stand the idea of the randomness of the world, the uncontrollable nature of his own fate, when any moment a thousand different accidents might befall him.” She lifted the helmet and lowered it over my head. “Then, of course, he died peacefully in his sleep, with his L-pill in the nightstand drawer. After his funeral, I took it and started carrying it with me too.”

  I nodded inside the glass dome of the helmet, the sound of the enclosed air echoing in my ears. I was still afraid, still stressed to the limit, still twisting and twirling on the cold hook of dread that pierced my stomach—

  But the pill did feel comforting in my mouth. I couldn’t understand how or why. It wasn’t simply that I wouldn’t have to go through the worst of the symptoms of poisoning if I didn’t choose to. I had already fantasized a dozen different escapes from that.

  But this pill was also a relic—a real man’s memento—a physical link to another human soul that ventured into the dark and cold and the prospect of near-certain death, and who had done it not cheerfully and not willingly, but perhaps lovingly—

  Yes, how odd to think of that word, but it was the right one. To go lovingly into the empty and lonely void of death, as this man before me had also done—!

  (And who lived! Did I dare to remind myself of that as well? That miracles did happen still?)

  “Thank you.”

  Doc smiled and patted the top of my helmet. “We love you too.” And that was how she left me, alone in the airlock, with her grandfather’s pill in my mouth.

  As I turned toward the airlock doors, watching the clock count down until the instant they would open, a thousand different thoughts raced through my mind.

  I thought of my own life—what I had learned and what I had striven for. The children I had raised, the careers I had followed. The strange and singular and unlooked-for roads that had led me to this very moment—a last moment perhaps, the last moment ever that I might have for introspection or reflection or to understand what it all meant—

  I thought of my own grandfather, and his nightly ritual. My child hands helping him dress for sleep, my ears listening to the totems and talismans he threw up against the coming night. Now dress me in my finest clothes and lay me in my casket. I’m going where I won’t be back to a gentle friendly death—

  I thought too of Doc, and what she was doing now that the door had closed irrevocably between us. Whether tears were falling from her eyes, whether prayers were stirring on her lips. What she was doing in this moment—a singular moment for her too, a moment where we had both stood powerless together before the void of death, able to recognize it but unable to defeat it, able only to spend one last moment together in whatever way made us most human—

  But by then the doors had opened and the commander was saying something in my ear over the radio, and I was already pushing off from the airlock (no! wait! called something inside me, only to immediately fall silent again) out into the awesome expanse of waiting space.

  There was my job to do now, and a million details to keep straight in my head. And above it all, through every last second to come, no matter how many they should be, the faint tang of old rubber in my mouth.

  About the Author

  M. Bennardo is the writer of over fifty short stories, appearing in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed Magazine, and others. He is also co-editor of Machine of Death (Bearstache Books, 2010), and its sequel This Is How You Die (Grand Central Publishing, 2013).

  No Vera There

  Dominica Phetteplace

  What type of sudoku puzzle are you?

  You are a black belt puzzle. You are practically unsolvable.

  What type of heart do you have?

  A red hot heart. It tastes like cinnamon.

  What Tarot card are you?

  The fool. You are starting over.

  What type of white girl are you?

  Cool white girl. Everyone wants to be you.

  Vera wasn’t sure how to interpret these “quiz” results, if that’s what they really were. She didn’t know sudoku, cinnamon or Tarot. She didn’t know wh
at a white girl was, though if you had to be one, might as well be a cool one.

  Password:

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  Vera didn’t know what her password was, or if she even had one. If she knew, she would give it over. Then maybe she could be released from this place.

  Current Year: 2014

  Vera did not believe the year was actually 2014, though that was what the people in white lab coats, the people that called themselves “scientists,” kept telling her in heavy dialected English. Her memory had been altered somehow, so instead of knowing what was real, Vera had a multitude of doubts about what was not.

  “Qvat year from?” asked Dr. Lisa, which Vera had ultimately translated as “What year are you from?” in common English. It embarrassed Vera not to know what year she was from. The future, obviously, because everything in this jail they called a lab was primitive and smelly. But a future where years were numbered differently than 2014. Vera’s year had a few letters in it, didn’t it? She wished she could remember. If she could remember, they would return her, wouldn’t they? If they knew where to return her to?

  “Time vat,” said Dr. Lisa. And by that, Vera supposed she meant time machine. Dr. Lisa was pointing at something shaped like a refrigerator, with buttons outside and a chair with moldy upholstery inside. “Brought you here.”

  And Vera had sat in that moldy chair, but she couldn’t remember how she had got there.

  Only the computer tablets here spoke her language. But they referenced fictional realms and collective dreams that Vera had never heard of. They quizzed her endlessly.

  What type of butter are you?

  The quiz consisted of multiple choice questions that seemed to be of no relation to the original query. What is your ideal day? How many hours did you sleep last night? Vera tapped on answer choices without reading them; she had long since given up on trying to make sense of these evaluations.

  You are salted butter. The best kind.

  After each quiz, she was prompted to enter her password. As if the quiz result could shake loose the information that would set her free.

  Password:

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  Vera had been in the “lab” three days, or maybe four. She assumed the “scientists” would study her until they were done with her and then they would put her someplace convenient, even if it wasn’t the when and where she wanted to be.

  “This is Planet Earth, right?” asked Vera. Where else could it be, what other planets were there to live on, but in strange times like these, it made sense to ask.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Lisa. Yes, instead of her usual affirmative “Ya,” and as they day wore on, that third or fourth day, the doctor became more understandable.

  “You are speaking clearly now, why?” asked Vera.

  The doctor shrugged and looked confused. Vera was understanding but not being understood, she marveled at the asymmetry before remembering why. It felt powerful to remember something important, it happened so rarely now.

  “My chip is working again,” said Vera, and the doctor shrugged the same uncomprehending shrug as before.

  Vera spoke slowly, as if that would help. “I have a translation chip implanted, it wasn’t working before. It is working now, I can make more sense of what you are saying.”

  The doctor shook her head.

  Vera sighed. The chip used to work better, didn’t it? It would give her outputs in addition to inputs, it would tell her what to say and how to say it. Vera got the sense that she used to be connected to something larger, something that made all the neurons inside her brain work better. The chip was cut off from that larger presence, but was still able to collect and interpret data on its own. It was doing its best. Good little chip.

  Vera took a deep breath and really concentrated.

  “Vat,” she said, relying on her unenhanced memory. “Marai.” Vera gestured her hands in a circular motion around her head. She was trying to tell the doctor to put her back in that huge machine that took pictures of her brain. Now that one chip was working, maybe the machine could get better images of what she was thinking and tell the “scientists” whatever it was they wanted to know.

  Dr. Lisa fired up the Marai and Vera lay on the stretcher as it rolled her into the tiny, coffin like opening. It was loud in there, like a monkey banging a wrench on the pipe that enclosed her. Maybe it was an actual monkey. Maybe it was staring at the night sky outside and interpreting the star positions as neurons in Vera’s map.

  That’s why Vera hesitated to call her captors scientists. She wasn’t sure they were advanced enough to know the difference between myth and fact.

  While inside the noisy machine, Vera was administered another quiz.

  What type of bread are you?

  Many of the quizzes centered around the importance of food. A scarcity society, poor things. She answered the questions as best she could, tapping on the ceiling-mounted console.

  Toast. You are dead already and don’t even know it yet.

  This quiz result was unusually ominous, almost like a threat. Was the computer trying to warn her about something? Or maybe it was just trying to be helpful. Maybe Vera was dead and this was the afterlife. If this was the afterlife, it was not heaven because heaven should be perfectly understandable.

  Death.

  Vera remembered about death. The truth about death was like a password. Death was not for her and she was not located in her body. The real Vera was the version of her stored on the cloud. She was missing from her time and place, but she would be remade, redownloaded. She had probably already been replaced. Her boyfriend, if she had one, wouldn’t know the difference. Her mother, if she had one, would be so relieved to have her back.

  She was no longer Vera, she was a redundant Vera fragment. That was the password. The computer seemed to understand this.

  What type of suicide are you?

  Quick and painless. Scalpel to the carotid artery.

  What do you get when you cut a worm in half?

  This one wasn’t a quiz. There were no questions to answer, just a big old button that said “enter” which Vera pressed.

  Two worms.

  Vera was rolled out of the large, noisy box and she stood up. She looked around the room. White countertop, white cabinets. There was a knife in here somewhere. The doctor was saying something to her, Vera ignored her. It was of no consequence. The instructions were clear. There could be only one true Vera and she was not it. The time machine was not the only way out.

  There was banging outside. Shouting and gunshots? Or more monkeys with wrenches? The doctor looked alarmed and Vera felt fear for the first time since deciding to kill herself. The door burst open and women with armor and guns ran in. They all took their visors off at once. They all had the same face as Vera.

  “We are here to rescue you,” said one. Vera put her hands up in surrender and was escorted out the laboratory. Her first time outside since being born.

  It felt strange to be marching among replicas. At least, it felt strange to Vera, but she saved her questions until they got into the limo.

  “We are clones, right?” she asked, once safely ensconced in leather upholstery and dark glass.

  A lookalike looked back at her. “We are not clones, we are incomplete downloads. You are incomplete download number 201. The real Vera is dead. Her backup file was corrupted. We are all that is left.”

  A different lookalike said: “You were kidnapped by past-worshipping hackers. They were trying to get the password for our Bejeweled account. We had forgotten about it until the breach was attempted. It’s closed now.”

  Vera tapped her temples. The translation chip must be misfiring again, she couldn’t understand most of what her others were trying to tell her.

  “Then it’s not the year 2014?” asked Vera. Several lookalikes laughed. One said: “OM24” as if that was supposed to clarify things. “Time travel is impossible,”
said another as if she didn’t already know that.

  “You should thank your beacon chip for helping us find you.”

  Vera tapped her temples again. Thank you, Brain. She tried to mean it even though she knew there was something wrong with Brain.

  Vera’s new house was a mansion she would be sharing with the 200 other downloads.

  “You have to change your name. We can’t all be Vera. I’m Wanda. I am the leader because I am the least damaged and the most like our original.”

  Vera tried to think of another name for herself, but she drew a blank.

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to come up with your new name right now. It will probably be more difficult for you. No offense, but we think you are the most incomplete download. No offense, but we think you are probably retarded thanks to how sloppily you were downloaded.”

  Vera was silent for a minute. She wanted to say something smart to prove she was smart, but she could think of no response at all.

  The other downloads had already been in existence for months since the breach of the original Vera origin file. Vera had only been in existence for a week because it had taken her months to be downloaded by her kidnappers. Despite the long manufacture time, they had done a botched job, so Vera #201, as she now thought of herself, had none of original Vera’s memories or talents or personality.

  In fact, Vera #201 thought her most striking feature was her lack of personality. Vera #201 had no talents, quirks or temper. She knew no jokes or magic tricks. This was in contrast to her 200 roommates, all incomplete, yet working to graft personalities onto the source code. Some could figure skate or do karate. Some were good at knitting or math. No two had very much in common, as if they were trying to occupy different, non-competitive niches. There was something very evolutionary and efficient about all of it. #201 was impressed by all of them. None of them were impressed by her.

  “When I was in captivity, I filled out these questionnaires. They were supposed to tell me who I was. They were helpful in retrospect, I think.”