The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

I did just that. As he slurped at the water, spilling some of it down his front in the rush, I watched him twitch and tremble, turn pale with the slowed effects of actual shock. As he licked his red fingers and continued his strange rehydration ritual, I could not help but see Ursula, licking juices as they rolled down my arm.

  Shut up.

  I pressed my thumbs into my eyes. When I opened them, the waitress was standing there with the tray, lobbing items at the boy as if he was offensive.

  “Still mooing. You want me to round up a few virgins too?”

  He glared at her. “Doubt you could find ‘em in this shit hole.”

  She crossed her arms. I expected her to make a not-so-smart retort, but she seemed to be reevaluating him. She surveyed the scattered wreckage of the salt and sugar, took in the water pitcher, now half-empty, and peeked at Jinx’s stomach and the mess of napkins, before her over-plucked eyebrows lifted yet again. Then she looked at me, and I knew she understood.

  “You’re right.” She untucked a rag from her apron and set it on the table. “We don’t wash the tables, so it’s clean-ish. You want the first aid kit? It’s about the only sterile thing in this place.”

  He snatched the rag, stuffed it into the wound, and then ripped into the steak with a vigor I’d never seen, even at the espresso bar down the street from the hotel. “Does it have pixie dust in it?”

  “No, but I could probably get some if you wanted it. About all there is to do here, and it’d take the pain away.” She leaned on the table. As she did, I spotted the barbed-wire tattoo on her upper arm.

  I pinched my mouth down around my grin. “I think he meant the magical kind.”

  “Nope,” she sighed. “Sorry. Don’t die, okay?”

  Jinx glanced up, raw meat dangling out of his mouth. “Twyin no choo.”

  “Uh huh.” She turned and sauntered back to the cash register, where she took up residence on a stool and began to paint her nails neon pink. The phone remained on the hook, though she clearly knew he’d been injured.

  “She really knows how to earn a tip.”

  He ignored me. The dripping flank with its metallic aura was far more interesting. He didn’t even bother cutting it, just picked it up and ripped through its barely seared crust with abandon. When he’d finished, he grabbed the fork and tucked into the beans, then gulped down the soup as if still starving. By the time he reached the biscuit, I was sure he had to be full, but he began sopping up the meat juice and swallowing the pieces whole.

  It was thoroughly off-putting. Like the doughnuts, it made me never want to eat again. All I could see was the similarity between his gel-clot and the cow’s horrible fate. Was that all we were made of, all we were, meat or meat-eating machines?

  “You want another?”

  He tipped back, still chewing, his face a shade of rosy pink and smeared with sauces. I could feel the heat radiating off him as muscle burned and turned nutrients into flesh in record time. He surprised me again with a contented smile.

  “Naw. I’m good, but I wouldn’t turn down an ice cream sundae. Need some saturated fats.”

  “You got it, but only because I love you.” I chuckled. I watched as he pulled the cloth away from his abdomen and revealed a thin, white scar. “Well done.”

  “I’m getting better at it,” he murmured. “First time it took a couple days. They buried me. If not for my ability to calculate soil densities I’d be there still. Though we were three or four deep in those days. Made it easier.”

  “Um...lucky?”

  While I flagged the girl down, he shed his denim jacket and bloody shirt, wadded the torn things around the washcloth and placed the bundle atop the plate. By the time the girl got to the table, he was sporting BIG MEAT and sighing happily after chocolate fudge.

  “Much changed,” she said, in ostensible shock.

  He shrugged. “I told you it wasn’t mine. Extra cherries, please.”

  She walked back to the kitchen, frowning, the tray of cruor lopsided on her hip.

  “You freaked her out.” I chuckled again.

  “Eh, can’t be helped.” He reached for my coffee and slid it across the dingy divide. “Gaffled.”

  I surrendered. “Tell me you’re fine now.”

  “I’m fine now.”

  With a sigh of relief, I finally let the tension drain away into the vinyl, where it joined the detritus of every other occupant that had ever sat there. “Have you seen the movie Poltergeist?”

  He nodded. We were both thinking of Petula, and we were both thinking the same thing.

  “I was going to suggest The Omen, but totally.”

  I tapped the table idly. “You going to explain to me why you stabbed the two of us?” I hoped I looked disapproving, like his mother, and that some long-untouched but integral sense of remorse would pull an answer from him.

  He rolled his eyes as if I had made a joke in poor taste. “You’re not stuck on that are you? It wasn’t a serious wound and you healed. It’s in the past.”

  “Yes, but you kinda ruined our little peace pact with Petula or don’t you care that they can see you?” I grabbed his coffee and tried to steal it from him as punishment. “I know I certainly care. Where would I be without my sidekick?”

  “Sidekick?” His grip on the cup was vice-like. “Don’t worry about Petula. You’ll see. Check back in a few hours, and I guarantee she’ll be gone. We compromised her, just by being there, and it will be obvious she betrayed them.”

  I let go of the cup and crossed my arms, glaring. “Why stab me?”

  “Knives don’t generally stop cutting because you want them to.”

  “So it was unintentional?”

  “I was taking her out. All that blood….”

  No matter how incomplete an answer that was, he would never go any further into it. I had an entire list of speculations as to why he had done it; either he needed to do something to me, or he needed to do something to her. Both of these thoughts unsettled me.

  “What did she mean, ‘there’s never enough time’? It seemed to bother you.”

  He kept his dark eyes glued to the dark contents of the steaming cup and created silence by sucking at it.

  “There’s always enough time for us, isn’t there?” I pressed; after all, that’s what Ananda had said. However, it did seem plausible that they meant entirely separate things, given their entirely separate contexts.

  His red spikes gave a tiny, nonplussed shake. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  I sat up. Was he about to reveal something? “No.”

  “She did.”

  “So I gathered.” I tipped the plate of lemons into my reclaimed water glass and refilled it. “So who are you? Someone important?”

  He smiled, eyes focused on the space d between us. “Not anymore. And when someone references your own personal myth...well...point is, there wasn’t enough time. I had a name, a face, a reputation. I was a human, then, but no more. Now I’m a ghost, waiting for humans to solve the problems I could have solved for them, if only there had been enough time.”

  Confused, I could feel my body settling as the carefully controlled adrenalin dissolved away. “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  At that moment, he truly seemed to look his age, all one hundred and seventy-eight years of it. In spite of the bright hair, the piercings, the hallmarks of a very different time, I could see the refinement of another era’s manners in his smile. I began to wonder about him, what he’d been like before the Age of Geek. Had he been obsessed with trends and culture even then, had he been on the vanguard, or had he been more subdued?

  “I summed Riemann zeta two years ago.”

  I blinked. I wasn’t a mathematician, but even I knew that the Riemann sum was a big deal: a supposedly unsolvable math problem with a million dollar price tag. I stared at him, impressed.

  “I’m stoked but still not with you.”

  “It makes me an awesome foe to any encryption, but,” he fluffed his spikes and looked arou
nd, “I can’t turn it in, claim the prize, because I don’t exist. I know you think it’s all Highlander, that we can just move between lives like it’s no big deal, but really, people notice. We are forced into the shadows. And even if we somehow manage to remain free of suspicion, seeing so much repetition, ages of man coming and going, we eventually turn into shadows.”

  “I’m beginning to know what that feels like.”

  “There are ways, people I can farm my ideas out to, but what’s the point in that? It slows things down too much, and the go-betweens get greedy.”

  “And you really do want the credit.”

  “There’s that. I mean it’s the most amazing thing…,” he shook his head, blushing a little darker, “humanity could gain a lot.”

  “I thought you math-types were unsociable, and here you want to solve humanity’s problems?”

  The waitress was returning with the sundaes. She reached through the gathering tension and put the bowls down.

  “That all?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  She set the ticket down and went about her business, not so elegantly trying to overhear our conversation,. I couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t every day that a bloody punk and a woman dressed like a stylish ninja walked in and demanded raw meat and table sugar.

  “I’ve been working on a project.... It’s why I’ve been so upset.”

  I watched him shovel a few spoonfuls of sticky into his mouth before I pressed the issue. “So, you...don’t hate me?”

  “I told you, no.”

  “I know, but….” I thought back to Eva, to the separation that began in a few unspoken plans, evolving into one that could never be bridged. Was Arthur right? Was I filling in gaps, trying hard to cling to the people I thought needed me, for fear of losing them? “Eva, she….”

  One of his small hands reached for mine. It was covered in dried blood, saliva, fudge, but I didn’t care. Strangely, it reminded me of Halloween with Eva, of corn syrup and food coloring. Perhaps it was fake all along. Except that she should have been the one sitting before me holding my hand, and she wasn’t. I looked at the traces of pink around his nails, the flecks that still stuck to him.

  Mental note: keep lots of steak in freezer.

  “I don’t hate you, Lily,” he said in a gentle voice. “I’m just edgy. I’ve been running this tech gig since the Internet sat up and begged, and finally, finally, I feel like there’s a way. I almost had everything where I wanted it, then you appeared, and it turned out you were exactly what I was waiting for.”

  “Uh, thanks?”

  “Too bad I found that out after you burned my house down and had to start the entire operation all over.”

  I took a deep breath, trying not to feel responsible. “Operation?”

  “Yeah. I’m sort of calling it the New World Order as a kind of joke. See, it’s all in how you think about it. We have the power of anonymity. I want to turn our curse into a blessing.”

  I squeezed his hand. “What do you mean?”

  He leaned in toward me, a wicked glint in his eye. “First the world was a huge place it was easy to hide in so long as you could travel long distances. We could create whatever story we wanted. Then there was this revolution, technology full-force, and the world got smaller. I can text China. I can take a visual tour of Sri Lanka on my friggin’ phone. The world shrank from a macrocosm to a microcosm, and our stories are checked with facial recognition software and bar codes. The Sangha is beginning to feel claustrophobic, but it turns out that is a good thing in the end.”

  “Why?” I thought of all the possibilities that were slowly drying up. Where did I fit in this micro-macrocosm? I still had a name and a history to occupy. Did that mean anything anymore, or should I give it up?

  “I’ve finally figured out how to do it,” he continued. “I mean, open-source always was the way of the future, but what about open-source reality? Me and the Wikipedia guy had the exact same idea; unfortunately he’s not an immortal with my resources. I’m setting up a web page.”

  “A math blog.”

  “More than that, but yes.” He grinned. “Every problem I find, every complicated issue that gets published, I post my research, my math.” He let go of me and braved a headache for another several spoonfuls of ice cream. “Basically, I solve problems, and no one knows who it is. You want a more efficient solar panel, no prob. You want a better program to model protein folding in DNA, sure thing. You want the next metamaterial, I’m your guy. Soon, all tech advancement gets funneled through me and whoever I choose to be on my team, because no one is willing to pay for it when it’s free. I will control everything, and everything will move at my pace instead of industry’s pace, because no one will invest in corporate technology when they know mine is always cutting edge. No one buys a new computer when they know that their neighbor builds something in his garage that’s twice as sexy and twice as smart, or better yet, when they have the schematics and can do it themselves.”

  “Nice,” I tilted my head. “Pretty soon you’ll be just like that kid from Ender’s Game, and I’ll like, be able to say I knew you when.”

  “Epic, right?” he nodded happily. “Think of it like the technological equivalent of the app store. Third-world countries could get assistance with building green power plants, thereby shifting the economy; the CDC could develop vaccines like the wind; material scientists would communicate in a way that circumnavigates intellectual property law and federal regulation, thereby changing the physical substrate of our lives. Next comes open-source history, as written by the people who lived it: us. We can keep our records there for people to see; we could control history! Imagine what it would be like if Arthur were to write out all he had seen, imagine the perspectives that could be gained!”

  “Assuming he’d write them,” I murmured. Something like his blog could be a powerhouse, an international revolution if people who understood could openly discuss the equations and facts in a forum, with Jinx as moderator. It would also get him sued, but only if they could catch him. Only if they’d want to.

  “Do you know what this means?”

  I stirred my sundae. It looked so good, the way they’d always looked, but I felt no hunger, no need for it, no desire. It was just pretty. I was wholly discouraged. All my simple pleasures, gone.

  “No.”

  “It’s leveling the playing field yet again. We had them for a long time, then they had us, now no one owns anyone. We, us, the immortal race, could change the world, sculpt it as we like. It means we can eventually come out! We won’t be forced out, but can step out on our own terms!”

  I dropped my spoon, but, really, it just sort of gained a mind of its own and leaped away. The hovering waitress seemed at the ready and appeared like Lurch to hand a fresh one off before she sulked away to the end of the bar.

  I dropped my voice. “What are you talking about? Come out? Half of the immortals are batshit! You can’t really think that’s a good idea?”

  He picked a cherry and began tying its stem with his tongue.

  “Jinx, seriously. What are you talking about?”

  “You.”

  I dropped the new spoon in the bowl. “What about me?” For a moment, I was almost overwhelmed by tiny things that had, in the moment, seemed out of place. They ganged up on me now, when I was vulnerable, recovering from the near loss of one of my dearest friends.

  And in the silence, I heard his words before he said them.

  “I was wrong, Lily,” he whispered, “about you. You are the cure.”

  I was already shaking my head, “I don’t know how I changed you, Jinx! Who’s to say it wasn’t you? Maybe you did it to yourself.”

  He shook his head adamantly. “I’m not talking about me. I mean I am, but remember I’m the one who sees patterns, and I’m seeing one now.”

  I crossed my arms in a final defense against his reckless sincerity. If there was one thing I didn’t feel capable of taking responsibility for, it was the entire fucking r
ace. “What pattern, what are you talking about?”

  He greeted my standoffishness with a long-suffering sigh. “Never mind; I’ll point it out when it’s important, I guess. I have a lot of stuff to check on anyway.”

  All of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was strangling. I swallowed…hard. “Does this have something to do with my talent for acquiring abilities?”

  “Partly.” He looked around at the dingy restaurant. “But don’t think about it. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing, but can I rely on you to help me make this happen? We are the new race, Lily. We’re the ones who will take humanity forward! So...will you help me figure out where forward is?”

  I let out a dubious sigh. “You’re serious.”

  “I know it’s a lot of pressure, but Lily, you’re a new thing! We have to incorporate your originality into the collective consciousness.”

  I pushed the sundae away, disgusted. “Now you sound like the Borg.”

  He slid out of the booth and leaned over me. “Lily, you know I love you.”

  It was the first time he’d ever said anything like that to me. I looked up into his eyes, happily surprised. He smiled back at me crookedly.

  “I was wrong before when I said you should try to fight your transformation. I don’t think you’re like them at all, or ever will be. I think you should own it.” He pointed toward a dark hallway; the waitress nodded. “I’m going to clean up. You think about it.”

  I swept hands over my face and stared around, wondering what the hell that meant. I was a grown woman, or had been. I had a family, a home, a history, and, now that all those things were gone, I found that I still existed, and existing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  Get a new life.

  But what life? It was a crazy thing, to chase a random dream.

  The first time it had happened, I sleep-walked through it; but this time, I was fully aware and apparently as big a failure as before. If not for Jinx, the strange girl from my vision would surely already have pitched herself off a building.

  The waitress was perched on a bar stool, watching me not-too-surreptitiously. I caught her eye, and she hopped off.