Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  A kiss on his forehead, unexpected, brought him back to earth. Marina. She was leaning over him for what was apparently an affectionate farewell. “Thanks,” she whispered into his ear before drifting away. “From all of us.” Her breath, reeking of alcohol, turned his stomach.

  He tried to respond, but he could only manage to gasp for air like a great pale fish stranded on the sands. He turned his head to one side, landward from the beach. The three girls and Redbeard were already off in the distance, walking slowly backward, never taking their eyes off of the sea, with expressions on their faces that alarmed him.

  In the background, where the rows of small, black cottages stretched outward, it seemed to him that lights had been turned on, and that moving shapes were venturing out through wide-open doors.

  The beating of his heart was now painful, as if a piston had been bolted into his chest.

  And towering above him, Fosco appeared against the glimmering pitch in which his universe had been drenched. “I’m really sort of sorry about this, Rino. I kind of liked you.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Rino caught a flicker of moonlight close to Fosco’s right hand. It wasn’t the large shell. A moan spun from his throat to plunge into the puddle of drying vomit.“What?…No, please, don’t…I…”

  Fosco’s expression turned inquisitive. Then, when he noticed that Rino was staring wide-eyed at the serrated edge of the massive knife he was holding in his fist, he broke out in a friendly laugh. “No, no, Rino, you can take it easy. We’ve got no more use for this, not now.”

  A man’s crackling voice reached them from out of the distance, from the row of small houses. “Fosco, come on. Finish up and get out of there!”

  Fosco cast his eyes in the direction of the old man who was calling out to him. Then he looked toward the sea.

  Rino, still stretched out on his back, could not see the small globes, like stars fallen from the sky, that were now emerging from the waves about a hundred feet offshore. Small, gloomy spheres, slow, but still getting closer, disappearing now and then to reappear again, bright and gleaming, embraced by the cold light of the moon.

  “Fosco, come on! What are you waiting for!” The piercing voice of one of the girls.

  Rino looked at the man standing over him, and watched as an insane smile widened on his face. He seemed pleased with what was going on.

  Suddenly, Fosco kneeled down close enough to be able to speak to him in a low voice. “We’re not bad people. We only do what we have to do. It’s our life.”

  That being said, he grabbed him forcefully by one hand and began to drag him over the sand, toward the sea, as he would a bag of trash about to be thrown out. Instinctively, Rino twisted and struggled to get to his feet. But what had been for him up until that moment only a diffuse prickling turned into a deep and unexpected agony.

  “Give it up,” Fosco told him, calmly, continuing without much effort to drag him along. At that moment, Rino turned his eyes toward the fire. Within the black branches that were still curling and writhing above and below the flames, he spotted stubby, carbonized clusters, severely contorted, slender and jagged stumps sticking out. Nothing identifiable in that charred morass—except for a human foot, spared, for the moment, from the fire.

  The cry escaping from his throat proved to be quite similar to that gloomy, rallying peal Fosco had drawn from the shell.

  “Believe me, that’s all a waste of breath.” Fosco stopped, kneeling down once again. “But I think it’s only fair that you know at least what’s happening to you and why.”

  Rino’s heart was like a blind and wild bird, imprisoned in a narrow, red-hot aviary, each beat of the wing a spasm. Twisting his head, he brought his eyes downward in disbelief to where he already knew his own legs were no longer to be seen. His thighs ended just above the knees, sealed off by a pair of charred, deadened stumps.

  “We have to do this every year, Rino. It’s kind of a sacrifice. A life in exchange for lives. During the Night of San Lorenzo. You know very well we live off of fishing. They’re the ones who guarantee full nets for us, every year.”

  Rino stared at Fosco, eyes full of tears.

  “They…they’re the drowned. Do you know how many poor devils get swallowed up by the currents and whirlpools, out there in the deep sea? Those are treacherous waters if you’re not real familiar with them. The bodies are hardly ever returned to land. The sea holds on to them. And those lost down below, they protect our fishing. But you have to understand, they need to be repaid for their services. Life for life. You showed up at just the right time. It’s a lot easier with a stranger from somewhere else. Sure, we could’ve taken care of you while you were unconscious, that would’ve been the merciful thing to do. But they want their offerings to be alive so they can drown them themselves. You’ll be in good company. Sorry about the legs, but we couldn’t allow you to get away. They are rather slow, you know…”

  Yet another voice, crying out from the distance. “Fosco, get out! Else they’ll take you, too!”

  Fosco arose and replied to the appeal. “Papa, go back in the house and stop worrying. I’m coming now!” Then, turning back to Rino, he brought the knife to his forehead, giving him a military salute. There was no mockery in his face, but only sincere fellow feeling, since, in essence, all of them were victims, victims of a tragic game, a roundabout from which no one ever really manages to escape. Then he turned his back to the sea and drifted away, regretfully, toward the houses.

  Rino moaned, gurgling, rolling over the cold compact sand of the shoreline. A sheet of frigid water slid past to caress him, and quickly withdrew, leaving behind a glistening, frothy edge. Finding himself again in a prone position, Rino propped himself up on his hands. The pain now was almost unbearable. All his nerve ends were, one by one, awakening. But he had to move off, he had to try something, he had to…

  Raising his head and chest, he looked at the sea.

  The globes, shining and menacing, that he had been unable to see before, now showed themselves for what they were—glistening heads, taut skin reverberating with a sickly phosphorescence. Three, four, five bodies, pallid, tottering, coated with slime, swollen, and deformed. They were leaving the water, in the most absolute silence, and they were coming for him.

  His arms buckled, and Rino fell down face forward, tasting the moist and salty sand. A new slip of dark backwash chilled his face, forcing him to turn around again on his back, his arms flailing. And once more that sky, filling still every corner of his vision. The moon now seemed to have fled, to avoid being forced to witness. He took a deep breath. A foul stench of rotting fish, invaded his mouth and nostrils, stifling his lungs, turning his stomach. He dug his fingers into the sand, anchoring himself to a useless illusion. More water, which now seemed as cold as ice, flowed against his sprawling body, and with the water, a hand also arrived. The fingers, clenching into a fist within his hair, froze against his skull, and all at once, they began to pull. Almost in tears, he thought once more of those other caresses that only a short time before had seduced him, preparing him for martyrdom.

  Before tightly closing his eyes, he thought he’d caught sight of a shooting star dividing the night in two. Having no more energy to spare, to waste, he put up no resistance. He felt himself being drawn to the water as he listened to the rhythmic sucking pace of the walking dead. Everything was pain and horror beyond redemption. In the night behind his eyelids, he visualized the bright wake of the meteor. But the sea swallowed him up before he could voice any of his useless longings.

  ORI

  by Adam Millard

  “Death abducts the dying, but grief steals from those left behind.”

  —Katherine Owen

  ONE

  William Schaeffer tamped his pipe and lit it, all the while staring down at the opened letter upon his desk. He had read it and reread it, and yet the words might as well have been written in Sanskrit, for it was all at once impossible to process, even by a brain as accomplished and celebrate
d as his.

  Perhaps it is a mistake, he considered for a moment. A terrible mistake which could ultimately send him, an eminent creator of Secondary Persons, to an earlier grave than even the doctors had predicted.

  Once again, he turned his attention to the envelope, and once again his name—printed there in bold, almost anthropomorphically menacing letters—told him that no, this was not a mistake; this letter was meant for him. It had been typed (by a SECPER he had designed, perhaps? Oh, the irony!), folded twice, and stuffed into the envelope with his name on it deliberately.

  William clutched his chest with one withered and liveried hand as an insufferable pain wracked his entire body. The still-smoking pipe fell from his tightening lips and clattered upon the desk, spilling ash and tobacco cinders across the page.

  A red-edged hole began to slowly widen through the words: FUNDING WITHDRAWN.

  “Is something the matter?”

  The voice came from behind, entering through the door to William’s study, and William knew he had to fight through the mystery pain, lest his Personal Care Android, Ori, make a mountain out of a molehill and deliver him straight to his quarters for the purpose of rest.

  “I’m perfectly fine, Ori,” William said through gritted teeth. The SECPER’s heavy footfall upon the carpet behind him suggested Ori was closing in; was no doubt already performing all sorts of computations and compiling variables by the thousands. Ori had probably already diagnosed him with dozens of afflictions and was already motoring through his databanks for the best course of treatment.

  “That is not entirely true, is it, William?”

  He was right there now, hanging on William’s shoulder like an AI parrot. If Ori breathed—one of the few limitations of a Secondary Person—William was certain he would taste the bitter hydraulic fluid upon his own tongue.

  With his eyes clenched tightly shut, William drew in a long, languorous breath. This was the last thing he needed right now; the third degree from a machine he had created. He slowly turned, the pain within his chest now nothing more than an acrid aftertaste.

  Ori’s expression was one of utmost concern. He bored holes into William’s eyes with his own, searching his master’s face for signs of fatigue and pain. William could never be angry at the SECPER, for if it wasn’t for Ori, he would have pushed up an entire meadow of daisies by now. Would have been nothing but bones and dust, with hungry worms in between.

  “I’m fine, Ori,” William reiterated. “Just a little indigestion, is all.” A forced smile. “Guess we had better tell Vox not to bake any more of that soda bread, right?”

  Ori shook his head. “Vox’s baking is impeccable, William. You know that better than anyone, since you personally loaded her databanks with over two million eight hundred thousand and fifty-nine recipes—none of which have caused you dyspepsia or gastralgia—and over the years you have seemingly made it your life’s work to get through each of them.”

  William didn’t know whether to be offended or angry. “Are you calling me fat, Ori?” He picked his pipe up from the desk, making sure to nudge the envelope across so that it covered the distressing letter from BioTech, and began to fill it with fresh tobacco from a pouch he produced from his pocket. It was all misdirection; while he was doing this, Ori wasn’t doing the other. Wasn’t asking questions about his health; wasn’t looking to the desk to see what his creator had to hide.

  “You know I can never be offensive to a human, William,” Ori said, matter-of-factly, a slight frown creasing his eerily flawless artificial brow. “I am merely stating that you have never criticized Vox’s cooking before, which may, in and of itself, be another symptom of whatever is troubling you.”

  “As I said,”—William lit his pipe—“you are finding things where there is nothing to be found, as you are wont to do upon occasion.”

  The SECPER did not look convinced. And why would he? With a microprocessor twice as powerful as anything his counterparts possessed—and there were thousands of them out there—Ori was one of a kind; the most able AI synthetic ever produced.

  And therein lay the problem, for if those insipid and foolhardy suits up at BioTech knew just what William was capable of, and not only that but had already pulled it off with aplomb, there was no way upon God’s green earth that he would have received such a rash and cruel missive. If they knew about Ori, BioTech would line William’s pockets with gold, write him a blank cheque, fund him and his company until the end of time, and put him forward for the Nobel Prize of Robotics.

  But they would never know about Ori.

  They could never know.

  “Perhaps you should restrict the number of pipes you smoke per evening,” Ori suggested, sneering at the object in William’s hand as if it were a deadly weapon and not just a decorative gourd calabash.

  “Tell me, Ori, did you enter my study, my personal space, to order me around, or was it something that struck you once you had arrived? I’m growing increasingly weary of your constant scorn.”

  Good! William thought. This is good! Misdirection at its finest!

  Ori sighed, or at least simulated something like one. “You must forgive me, William. It is my duty, as your Personal Care Android, to take care of your health and wellbeing— ”

  “And while I am fully aware of that, Ori, if I tell you I am perfectly fine, I expect you to take it as so and move on. I have very little time remaining upon this earth, I can ill afford to spend it on asinine squabbles with you.”

  At that, Ori simply nodded, his expression stoic.

  William felt truly awful; Ori was just doing his job, the thing for which he had been created: taking care of his master in his twilight years. His programming meant he would exhibit extreme concern for William if there was even so much as a two-degree change in his temperature. It wasn’t Ori’s fault he was overly invested in his creator’s health and wellbeing. The blame fell upon a small chip implanted in Ori’s subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the AI synthetic’s brain responsible for empathy and generosity. That microchip was the reason Ori behaved the way he did.

  And William wouldn’t change a thing about Ori.

  “Say, Ori, when was the last time we drove to the ocean?”

  The SECPER’s eyes glazed over with cataracts as he searched his memory; it was rather unsettling if you weren’t accustomed to it, seeing an android become a hemi-zombie. Eventually, after a series of mechanical lip-smacks, Ori said, “The last time we visited your favourite, Fistral Beach, was on the twenty-third day of March, two thousand and twenty. Since then we have taken the HydroPod to Barmouth, 2022, to Margate, 2027, and to Brighton, 2031.”

  William smiled, for the pain—and all memory of it—had entirely left his body. “Let’s go to Fistral Beach. First thing in the morning.”

  “As you wish, William,” Ori said. “Will there be anything else?”

  William told him that no, everything was just fine, and when Ori left the room a few minutes later, William had managed to convince himself that it was the truth.

  TWO

  The ride to Fistral Beach was more than pleasant; William spent the entire journey finger-composing Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor as the music filled the HydroPod up like warm water. In the seat beside him, Ori watched on, a beatific smile upon his countenance. The vehicle, like all HydroPods manufactured since 2027, was self-driving, which meant both William and Ori could relax, enjoy the scenery, the passing glass tenements as they left the city, the way in which their surroundings ever-so-slowly changed from bleak gray to vivid green as they arrived in the countryside. Soon after that, the unmistakeable smell of the ocean drifted in through William’s open window, and his smile broadened further still.

  Once the vehicle had parked itself alongside the promenade, Ori climbed out, walked around to William’s door, and opened it. “Take it very slowly,” the SECPER said.

  William’s smile faded somewhat; had he really believed Ori’s concern for him would vanish beyond the walls of the mans
ion? That the seaside vistas would cause the android to stop caring about him?

  “I’ve climbed out of vehicles before, Ori,” William said, unable to disguise his irritation. And, as if to prove he could manage just fine, he ushered Ori aside and eased himself out of the HydroPod, the door whispering automatically shut behind him. “See? Didn’t make a fool of myself, did I?”

  “Of course not, William,” Ori said. “I have only ever seen you make a fool of yourself once: September fifteenth, 2023. You got dr— ”

  “Drunk at a BioTech function and pissed my pants,” William finished for him. “Why do you always have to bring that up?”

  “Do I, William?” Ori asked. “I don’t ever recall having mentioned it before.”

  “Well, once is enough, and I’d appreciate it if you expunged that particular day from your memory bank.”

  “As you wish, William.” Once again, his eyes became milky—this time for a beat, no more—before returning to their normal light-blue hue. “It is done, William. Are there any other days you would like me to delete?”

  William shook his head and sighed. This was going to be a longer day than he’d anticipated.

  The promenade was quiet, save for a few dog-walkers and joggers running alongside their PT SECPERs. The sun occasionally threatened to break from behind a blanket of gray-and-white clouds, but never quite managed it.

  Ori helped William across the pebbles on the beach first, and then the sand, as they approached the foaming deep. William always liked to stand just beyond the reach of the water, in that sweet spot where it occasionally trickled over his bare feet, though never reaching higher than his ankles.