by Nisi Shawl
William straightened his neck, looked up into the blue of the sky.
“If they did, they wouldn’t have what they’re looking for. Immortality is a myth and I am but a legend. I’ve seen too many wasted and too little change to believe anything else. Death is a wilderness on a moonless night. One day I will find myself there.”
William looked out at the great mound of live-forevers that covered the hillside he’d chosen to store his bank of heirloom seeds. It lay a day’s hike from anywhere even moderately populated, on a reclaimed ridge of ash overflow. It made for a beautiful place to take a nap, which William did often, near the bottom of the hill, his huge form hidden in the blossoms to everyone but the birds overhead. He knew because he’d walked the perimeter before he lay down, gathered his jacket under his head and stretched out. He’d done this just before he’d fallen asleep and forgotten himself.
Though clear now, when he woke it had been as if those moments never existed.
Was he succumbing to dementia? Or an unavoidable madness born of his accumulated sorrows and the pure, relentless press of time stacked up over the years? He couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he had witnessed extinctions only to prepare for his own long walk into the wilderness.
For now, William had conjured himself back into the center of things. Again. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the feel of oblivion. How many times had he done so?
Behind his closed lids, subtle flashes of light floated by. He wanted to wander away with them. These days, sleep came when it fancied, and judging by the last few months it had lost its fascination with William Woods. If only the world would, he thought, as he traveled up from the depths of his reverie to listen to the bird calls, the squirrels scurrying and, deeper still, to anything those sounds might have masked.
Clones
Alex Smith
1.
A bud; a piece of green peeking through the craggy rock, barely noticeable and caked with dust; that’s what it was. He went out in a pressurized space suit, leapt from the ledge and descended the twenty stories down the ship dock and into the black of the atmosphere. When he touched the still budding leaf he had to watch it wither and flake, shrivel and die, almost evaporate and fall in a cascade of leafy ash to the ground. The LCD screen in his helmet lit up and buzzed, calculated in green typeface. Warnings and notices sounded off as voices intoned in monotonous British accents—“4% pressure drop in elbow region”; “Planetoid has 48% capacity for sustaining human life”; “Radiation levels spiking at 0.22 curie per 100 seconds”.
He scraped the remnants into a thin flask, zipped it away in one of the many compartments on his suit, bounded back over the dusty rock and made his way back up the ship’s shaft. He had forgotten the code and had to manually override the security lock, which was always tricky because sometimes the sensor didn’t recognize his voice pattern. He had to change the timbre of his voice slightly, this time a low bellow, and then, with a whir and click, the hatch would release air and open and he’d be back inside, faced off with sprawling air ducts and computers, walls lined with synthetic mesh that seemed to snake and breathe organically around him.
In the lab, he placed the flask into a chute and watched as the walls lit up, a display vibrant and inundated with chaotic numbers and holograms. A screen crackled and a man’s worn face slowly emerged.
“Zyrn Altor. Codenamed X34-i7. What have you to report?”
“Specimen found, sir. Akin to the common house fern. It—it dissolved upon contact, sir.”
“Dissolved?”
“Yes. I think a change in atmospheric pressure caused by the landing mechanism created a—”
“X34-i7. Thank you for your report. We will speak to your superiors about your recent failure.”
“Sir?”
“Remember your objective, X34-i7.”
And the face on the screen cracked again, a sharp blast of photons firing off from a distant satellite, exiting back into the tangle of the cosmos. He sat staring at the walls for a while, as they morphed, spinning tendrils twisting around each other, at once mechanical and alive. The objective, he thought. In his spartan quarters, he lay on his back and watched replays of his past missions as they danced across the ceiling, flickering bursts of images; a dance in the outer rim of an uninhabitable forest; a time where he fell and nearly drowned in a pool of liquid crystal. Each time, they’d come and pull him out of the mire, their black hands wrapped around him in a clone cocoon; they’d plug him into the machines, coat his body with synthesized aloe. He’d watch his wounds heal. Slowly, those scars would merge into themselves, frayed bits of flesh closing before his eyes. Those black clones, lithe and multitudinous, nearly naked except for their underpants covering the area where their manhood would be, and except for their long flowing capes adorned with hieroglypic codes traced in wiry tinsel and gold. Each time he fell, they’d plug him into the machine and he’d be good as new. The objective, he thought again watching it all unfold; the objective was to harvest the clones, to find worlds habitable for mankind, to search the stars, alone, to hear a dream as it etched itself in the chromasphere, to grab that dream and on a suitable orb, plant it, watch it grow.
A.
It seemed the universe filled itself with a mass of gorgeous white boys, that it never tired of an endless parade of shirtless studs to fill the walls of its discos, and that these boys would be there to defend it from the cosmic force of some demigod birthed from a hot, angry star. They peopled TRINITY that night in overwhelming droves. Just milky white chests and blue jeans from bar to bathroom to dj booth, every inch of the dancefloor. So, Henry Sims sat quiet on the far corner of the bar, drinking vodka shots, staring one minute at the Cubs game on the screen, then at another screen playing soundless music videos by Robyn or George Michael, then at the other screen that flashed captures of scenes from twink or muscle porn. Then, less occasionally, he’d swivel on his barstool and peek at the dance floor, watching the hoard of men coagulate, moving to that music as one sweaty, undulating mass.
And then he saw him; a boy of velvet pouring himself over the white sea. He was a purple wire in there, connecting his body to beats Henry hadn’t even noticed were there. A tambourine hit or a tripping snare wound itself out of the amplifiers like a siren, and there was that boy in sync with it. A wave of embarrassment crested over Henry’s pale face; he sat mesmerized, feeling the warm blood rush up and fill his cheeks, felt it peeking through his prickly red beard.
The drums stopped and the synths swelled, rising into a deep caterwaul; the velvet boy, his chest heaving, his skin like a black talisman lost in the snow, stopped on a dime and waved his arms with the sway of rhythmless sounds. Each time the bass and cymbals crashed in single hits, the boy would contort his body with it and stare over the crowd with a refined fierceness. On the third hit he was staring Henry Sims right in the eyes.
Henry almost dropped his shot glass, almost fell off of his stool. “Great,” he thought. “This African god just caught my fat ass staring at him and he’s going to tell all of his friends and I gotta get the hell out of here laughingstockofthegaybarclonesurrealwheresthebathroomlovehim”
In the bathroom, Henry splashed his face and let the water run, let it kiss the sink in its soft gentle pour. He buried his hands in his face and breathed deeply, planning his exit, but then a gaggle of men burst in, laughing and dizzily spinning over the sinks and fondling each other. One of them grabbed Henry’s breast and screamed, they all laughed, switching conversational topics with ease, as if Henry’s tit being grabbed was a mere afterthought. Henry slowly eased past them, back into the hallway. He leaned against the wall and gathered himself before launching back into the club that was again twisting to the merciless crunch of house music. He pushed away the throng of them all, avoided spilling drinks as deftly as he could, reached the door and, nodding at the bouncers, ducked out of the door and onto the street.
The air outside was crisper, a refreshing spray of April breeze tickling at his flesh.
He pulled his Harrington jacket a little tighter. The street was alive with drag queens and leather daddies and kids voguing in knock-off Yves St. Laurent, punks with spikey pink hair and Camaros with their trunks rattling under the weight of anthemic bass. Henry kept his eyes trained on the misshapen sidewalk, at the crack vials and used condom wrappers crackling under his Doc Martens. He was busy thinking about nothing, letting the wild night’s conversations slip over and through him, so much so that he’d walked a bit past his bus stop and had turned to go back when he saw the boy of velvet standing in front of TRINITY, under an awning, patting his pockets, shaking nervously, his muscles rippling out of his thin green shirt. He looked like a shadow. When the boy found his pack of cigarettes, he cursed to himself that he’d lost his lighter. A kind of ghostly sadness crept over Henry when he saw the boy standing there without a light, and this sadness grew as he watched wave after wave of clubgoers pass the boy, and though the boy’d ask, none of them had a light for him. Henry quickly patted himself, but remembered he’d stopped smoking a year ago.
Soon, two men exiting the club found the boy; one of them was porcelain white, hair a blonde waft of sun, ripped directly from an Abercrombie catalog. The other was much shorter, possibly Asian, thinner and kind of golden, his face almost angular. This one laughed villainously, the blonde giggled and slapped the arm of the boy (his boy, his black velvet boy), who gave up an insincere smile. The two pulled his arm and they went across the street, only two shop fronts away from Henry. The three ducked into a 24-hour porn shop with an air of clandestine, giddy excitement.
A drop of rain dotted Henry’s forehead. He stood staring at the doorway to the porn shop as more men traipsed in, then out, in, then out, all of them inconspicuously pulling their hats down as they entered, popping their jacket collars as they exited. “It’s gonna rain,” he thought, shuffling his feet. Behind him down the street, the rust orange lights of an oncoming bus peeped over the horizon. His route number sorta floated, disembodied letters and numbers, a sigil he’d conjured, looming toward him. His heart raced as he rung his thick sweaty hands, nervously shaking. He welled up some courage and took the five steps toward the porn shop and walked in.
An alarm buzzed loudly and announced his presence.
“Hey, handsome,” the old man behind the counter said. He realized this was the first time tonight another man had acknowledge his presence. He could feel the clerk’s eyes following him a bit as he made his way around the stacks. Henry tried to keep his gaze forward, not glancing at any of the other patrons; lawyers and doctors and politicians in business suits casually edging their way to the gay porn section. Junkies and homeless men trying to carve out space in the bondage section. Know-it-all college kids in baggy cargos and black trench coats nervously, loudly laughing at sex toys. No sign of the velvet boy or his friends.
There was a back room that was shielded only by a curtain. Henry peeled back this curtain to an eruption of moans.
“It’s five dollars for the back room!” A man even more curmudgeonly than the outside clerk was smoking a cigar and snarling at him. Henry scanned the dungeonous room as best he could. It was pitch black and men moved like shadows in there. A door would open and the glow from a monitor would temporarily illuminate the place. Men were leading other men into the booths by the hand, lust in their eyes. He paid the clerk and slowly stepped in, bumping into lumps of bodies, feeling hands grab his. He stood against the wall for five nerve-racking minutes. Then, he felt the wiry hands of a man make their way over his body, not in a lustful way, but it a way that felt…concerned? That felt not like the terror and angst of desperation, but like the tender and deliberate act of exploration. When the hands pulled at him, tore him away from the wall, he stumbled a bit and fell into the guy. Ripe muscles, the smell of jasmine and cinnamon and wine. He moved his hand up the man’s body and it reacted to the touch. “Mmm…hot daddy,” the man whispered, kissing his ear. Then a door opened and light sparked onto their faces. He was looking at the face of the velvet boy, inches away from his own; here, in the pale blue glow of the porn booth monitors, he could see that there was no boy, that in fact he was a man, chiseled out of a monolithic slab of the stuff of his dreams.
“Marcus?” asked one of the men trailing out of the open booth. The small Asian guy. He was holding the hand of the white Abercrombie guy who was trying to buckle his pants with his other hand. “Girl, you are a mess.”
“What?” Marcus asked in an annoyed whisper.
“Girl, we know you like bears, but have some kind of standards.”
“Oh, Curtis, can we not start this here?” Marcus turned towards Henry and slipped him a piece of paper, smiled, kissed his forehead, and turned back toward his friend. “I’ve been putting up with your crap all night, I went to that stupid circuit party, let me have—”
“Bitch, let’s go,” Curtis said, pulled his Abercrombie model behind him, and led the three of them back through the curtain. Marcus looked back but Henry had faded into a corner, shaking with nerves, with shame. After the three of them had been gone awhile, Henry opened the door to one of the booths and sat in it. A voice came on over the intercom. “If you’re gonna sit in the booth, you have to pay for it!” So Henry put a quarter into the slot and the screen filled up with images of a soccer team having an orgy. He felt for the card Marcus had given him. Marcus’s name and phone number were on it. He flipped it over and in a fancy cursive font that was gun-metal grey stood the words TRINITY.
2.
Zyrn was asked to read the daily cybercodes at hyperspeed. He was asked to gather specimens on distant planets, to peruse light gardens and shuffle between nebulae; to walk on moons covered in silk worm birth and cosmic husk. Zyrn was asked to brush the sides of radioactive abandoned freighters orbiting Jupiter, scraping ark dust off of monoliths. Zyrn was asked to load barrels of xinilium and milohondrinate, put the barrels in chutes and watch them disappear into black holes. Zyrn would stare at black holes on the radar screen for minutes at a time, drifting in and out of consciousness, letting the green lines, swirling like a hurricane on a Doppler, spread out and increase their wavy length, watch them burn swaths across the board, watch them black out whole solar systems in a spiral dance of consumption.
He was hooked up to nano-machines. He was scraping film off the tapetum lucidum of small, mammalian beings on lush alien planets. Once he shucked his space suit and danced on a planet that was vibrant and conquered by rabid growth. He lay in a bed of prickly grass and let the leaves lick at him. They were tactile and the more he squirmed the more they traced the length of his body until their movement became a pitched battering. He slid down a thin patch of mud and fell into a substance that was like pollen. He sneezed and thrashed about, trying to get free, finally pulling himself onto a patch of dry grass. He touched one of the dials embedded in his wrist. A hologram hovered over it. The same craggy old face appeared before him.
“Well?”
“I’ve found a planet suitable for habitation.”
“Put it in your report.”
And the image flickered away.
Zyrn was hosed down in the decontamination bay. He was led by spindly robot hands into a dark corridor of his ship, past the collection of used containment flasks he’d made into a small fort, past the cafeteria and food synthesizers, past the green house and the algae garden with its swirling pools, springs bursting forth with artificially grown life, past the corridors lined with tendrils and scanners that prodded him like a specimen.
“Fuck, cut it out!” he yelled, and they’d retract, almost as if they were intelligent, able to respond to his command. “Gotta fix these fucking things.”
When he reached his destination, he spread-eagled and was lifted onto two conversely spinning wheels, a Vitruvian Man, suspended in the air. More dials appeared at his joints—harsh metal orifices they were, and yet more tendrils lanced into the dials, twisting and connecting as he spun.
One of the dark men walked into the room, hi
s skin like firelit ash, his forehead brandishing the number three. He was carrying a flat, thin metal sheet that glowed. He cautiously tapped at it, looking from Zyrn to his tablet, then to a monitor across the room.
“This is really awkward,” Zyrn said nervously. “I mean, you guys are just kind of like, unthinking robots, moving around here—well, I guess more like androids, huh? Is that what you guys are called? Guess I can’t call you clones, even though you all come from the same genetic goop this Geodyne has been using for years, huh?”
The man said nothing. He continued to type.
“I get it, you’re doing the clone thing.” Zyrn breathed a deep sigh as the wheels slowed their spinning, the tendrils slowly retracted. “I just wished to hell that I could have landed a job working with, like, you know…real people? Having to look at you freaks all the time is getting pret-ty old, you know? I mean, your make-up is so delicate I’m not even sure—”
Two more of them walked in, seemingly gliding across the ship’s floor. They all looked exactly alike, moved exactly alike; when two more walked in, carrying pads, their long, drapey capes lapping behind them, it almost made Zyrn nauseous. He had had enough for the day and ripped out the final tendrils, got down off of the wheel and pushed pass the clones, not lifting his eyes toward any of them, feeling their eyes train on him like lasers.
“Ah,” he said out loud. “I see the problem.” He was in the incubation chamber where the clones slept, sealed in metal pods filled with an embalming liquid. “Your nutrient bath is contaminated.” He pulled a metal rod out of one of his cargo pockets and inserted it into a dial on the outside of one of the tanks. Pressing a button, a code, then removing the rod. “Right. 65.8% vitality level, no sign of trace radiation, no viral contamination. The vitamin extraction is a little low, calcium a little high. Guess I can get in there and clean out the tank tomorrow. But otherwise…” he paused, looked around him. The clones were asleep, floating, their eyes rolling very slightly under their lids. He put his face up close to one of the tanks and said, in a low husky voice, “…otherwise—everything seems to be normal.”