Tripping the Tale Fantastic

by Christopher Jon Heuer

  “Fence. I want to be around all people who sign English like me.”

  That was a common enough option for those from a one-method country who were too terrified of the concept of a multi-method country. “All right. Next week we’re making a field trip to the capital for your emigration papers.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “We can expedite the process by informing them of your diagnosis. Normally it can take months, but with a diagnosis, it’s a few weeks. That will be enough time for you to finish out your classes.”

  We went to the capital, Clarke, the next week, a short trip away via a maglev train. I escorted him to the Emigration Building and informed the official of his AVA diagnosis, providing a copy of the paperwork signed by Dr. Truzone. She sent us to the window on the end, where Bryant received a tablet with the forms he had to fill out.

  After entering all the information with the attached stylus, he returned it and the woman told him, “You will receive your card and train ticket in a few weeks. Be prepared to depart.” As part of the emigration policies for their “failures,” the Milan government paid for their departure tickets.

  Bryant returned to the university with me. In my office, he signed, “What will I do when I get there?”

  “I have contacts in Fence. One of my former students there can provide you with a room until you go away to university. Did you look up universities like I asked you to?”

  “I applied to some as a transfer student.”

  “Very good. Next week we’ll discuss transferring with the dean here.”

  Bryant gulped, his face pale.

  “Don’t worry. He won’t swallow you whole.” I gave him a reassuring smile.

  He smiled back shakily.

  We met again a week later and talked to the dean. He seemed happy to get Bryant out of his school and told him, “Personally, I think professors should respect their students’ needs more, but I didn’t design this country’s mindset. I’m sorry you had a difficult time with us, young man.”

  Bryant blinked, taken aback. “Oh, uh, thank you.”

  “So you’re transferring to Port Arthur?”

  “Yes. They offered me a scholarship.”

  “Good people there. We’ve had previous students transfer there as well. I wish you the best of luck.”

  They shook hands, and the dean finalized Bryant’s paperwork on his screen. I had already contacted Michal, who Bryant would be staying with in Fence. Michal confirmed that he would be there at the train station in Fence to pick him up.

  At our final meeting, I asked Bryant, “What about your parents? Aren’t they concerned that you’re leaving?”

  “My mom knows I struggle with understanding. My dad isn’t too happy. He thinks I need to learn how to adapt better, but he doesn’t get it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I promised my mom I’d write her letters. Will you see me off?”

  “Certainly.” I smiled. “When do you depart?”

  “December thirtieth, from the station in Glenmoor at noon.”

  We hugged, then he departed my office for the last time.

  From what I heard, he did well on his finals, despite his professors’ efforts. The only one he struggled with was the one with the professor who refused to give him a notetaker, but he scraped by with a middling grade.

  On December thirtieth, I took a car to the station at Glenmoor. I walked up the steps to the platform shortly before noon and saw that many people were there. No doubt all were emigrants. Some were families, with crying children, and some were young adults like Bryant, who I saw standing with his trunk full of his worldly possessions. I went over to him and signed, “Hello!”

  He flinched. “Shouldn’t you speak here?”

  “No, it’s fine. You need to learn how to sign out in the open,” I told him. “Your world will soon expand from my office to a whole country! You need to adjust.”

  Bryant had to smile at that. “Yeah, I will. I talked to Michal a bit through this Fence messaging program—they call it Rapier over there, not Telfono. He seems great.”

  “He is. I taught him the same things I taught you, and he’s done very well. You’ll do great there, Bryant.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Natasha. I think I will.”

  “Don’t think. Do!”

  The sleek maglev train, bright red against the bleak gray December sky, pulled up. Bryant looked from the train to me. “Here I go.”

  I watched him show the ticket to the conductor and wave to me from the window before the train took off.

  He would do very well in the years to come. I heard about him through Michal for a while, then nothing after graduating. Many years later he wrote me a letter. “I can’t imagine my life anywhere else but here,” he told me. “I love my wife, our children, what I’m doing right now. If I was still in Milan, I’d be miserable. Thank you.”

  ***

  ONLINE DATING

  Daniel Crosby

  In the center of the table, there was a large bouquet that obscured our view of each other. We both reached for it, but Leonardo got there first. I let him move the mass of silk flowers to the side. When I saw his face again, I remembered how much I had lucked out—he was even hotter in person than in his profile. A few years younger than me, but that was okay.

  I smiled at him. I signed.

  He smiled back.

 

  Still smiling, Leo stared off into the distance. Figuring he was gathering his thoughts, I waited a few moments for Leo to say something. But he didn’t.

 

  he said, puzzled.

 

  he said.

  Indeed I did. Everyone did, even hearing people. Whenever someone else said something, your glasses captured every aspect of that event: the words themselves, the person’s pupil dilation, their respiration, their perspiration, their body temperature, and other minutiae. The glasses then crunched all that data and scrolled real-time analysis of the conversation across the bottom of your vision.

  But I didn’t care about all that just now.

  I replied.

  Leo tapped his right frontal lobe and, for the first time, I noticed a centimeter-length scar just underneath his hairline.

  I grimaced.

  he said.

  Call me old-fashioned, but the truth is that I just didn’t trust the things. I liked Clear Channel’s glasses, but the introduction of their Chips had added a wrinkle. The surgical implant allowed the user to react to the stream of data emanating from their conversational partner by mentally visualizing a pre-defined icon. It was a laughably narrow range—you could only express emotions such as “like,” “love,” and “laughing.” Your reactions were then uploaded publicly to Clearnet so that anyone, including, say, your date could see them. Well, anyone with a Chip, anyway.

  Neither of us said anything for a while.

  he said The way Leo signed ‘like’ made it clear that he meant that he had ‘liked’ the post on Clearnet.

  I said. Unable to stop myself, I snarked,

  Leo blinked, confused. Then it dawned on him.

  I sighed. Now I felt old.

  Leo said.

  We both looked down at the tablecloth. The composite plastic and silicon material displayed shimmering images of tasty-looking food next to numbers. I tapped on my usual order—number 76—and it blinked to let me know that the kitchen had received my order.

  When I looked up, Leo was still looking at the menu. He spent a considerable amount of time pausing at each image before movi
ng on to the next.

  I lightly tapped the table to get his attention. When he looked up, I said

  Leo pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  I said.

  Leo looked at that image.

  I buried my face in my hands. This was going to be a long night.

  ***

  TOMMY GOES TO COLLEGE

  Christopher Jon Heuer

  Like all the kids, Tommy too begged his parents for a double amputation so he could print his own legs.

  “All the guys have amputations now!” he said, sliding the flashcast of the most recent Sports Illustrated across the table toward Dad. “Look at these prosthetics! You can get the same designs the NFL has!”

  “Yeah, if I sell the house!” Dad said. He wanted nothing more in the world than to help his son get his legs amputated, hell, even both arms! But the surgery alone—per limb!—was a small fortune, and it was either an amputation or a car. And that didn’t even begin to cover all these newfangled specialized designs the kids were ordering. Sure, once you slipped them on you might fly with the fastest halfbacks in football history. But what good was an NFL contract if 20 years into your career you were still paying off the design you purchased to win Homecoming?

  “But we’ve already got the printer, Dad!”

  “And we’re very happy to print your pads and cleats and everything else!”

  “None of that stuff is going to help me though!”

  Grandfather spoke up from his wheelchair at the end of the table. He was Old School, and saw this whole thing as ghastly. “Football’s in here,” he said, tapping his arthritic sternum with a gnarled knuckle. “And up here.” The knuckle raised almost enough to tap his forehead but he couldn’t get it up quite that high anymore.

  “Grandfather, please.” Tommy turned to Dad. “What if I sell my car? We can get just the right one amputated. There’d even be enough left over for one of those Joe Fricke designs!” Joe Fricke was the current quarterback of the UW-Madison Badgers. His time for a 40-yard dash held steady at 3.83 seconds, and once he got up to speed, he could easily average 34 miles per hour. Of course, Joe Fricke probably hadn’t designed his legs but he sure did make a pretty penny off UW-Madison’s use of his name for the marketing. And once you had an NFL contract, your name could be up there too! On even better designs!

  “How are you going to get to work?” Dad asked.

  “I’ll run!”

  Dad sighed, counted silently to five. “Okay. How are you going to pick up Becky for dates?”

  That was a tougher question. Becky was one of the primary reasons Tommy enjoyed his car so much.

  “I’m never going to get to college,” he moaned.

  Grandfather shook his head at the end of the table. “Ghastly. Ghastly,” he muttered.

  Dad rested his hand on his son’s neck, patting it. “Just do your best.” He decided to make a poor joke. “Look. You could always get tackled. Break your legs that way.” He thought better of that statement though, when Tommy perked up.

  “And don’t crash your car either!” Dad added.

  Hustisford High School. Home of the Hustisford Falcons. The pep rally for the game against Juneau sucked majorly, and not just because the cheerleaders would have nothing to do with him. They would only carry around the Captains anyway. It was tradition to break your old legs at the rally during final period. It was against the rules to replace anything during the game, so everyone waited until the last second to print their new ones. You wanted the best equipment going onto the field … hot off the presses, so to speak.

  It was a show of team spirit for the other students to break the team’s old stuff. The cheerleaders usually led the assault. Plenty of them had prosthetic legs too. There was no other way they could carry Tank McCannen; even on stumps he outweighed half of them combined.

  Drumrolls thundered and the smashing began. Tommy watched, outwardly smiling and clapping along with the others, but inwardly he felt nothing but shame. Thank God for jeans. Anything to cover his muscles.

  One boy had held back from the carnage. He was standing on the very top row of bleachers. Tommy saw him but didn’t recognize him, though he did note just the barest hint of a purple t-shirt. An odd color, to be sure, especially in a gymnasium decked out in red and white. In fact the longer he looked the surer Tommy became that he had never seen the kid before. Nobody else was looking at him either, not until the boy took a blast horn out of his pocket and pressed the stud. It emitted a shriek that drowned out even the drums. People grabbed their ears, flinching. Then everyone turned to look.

  The boy opened his jacket—too late Tommy remembered purple and white were Juneau’s school colors—and pulled a nanopulse bomb from an inside pocket. Electromagnetic. One of the smart models. They gave off no physical blast, but the pulse was designed to take out phones and car batteries as well as power grids and the internal circuity of prosthetic limbs. Tommy recognized the design from Sports Illustrated. People were always trying to sneak them past stadium security. They were a real headache for the Packers. Bears fans were bitter.

  “Juneau … Trojans … RULE!” the boy screamed into the shocked silence as he heaved the bomb into the air.

  The overhead lights immediately flared and died, plunging the gymnasium into darkness. Startled shrieks filled the air, followed by clattering sounds as the cheerleaders toppled over, their prosthetics no longer stabilized now that the pulse had disrupted their built-in equilibrium sensors. The ones holding Tank hit especially hard. Tommy could have sworn he heard several bones break. Some people had all the luck.

  Now people were screaming in earnest. A couple of lighters flickered on throughout the crowd. Those who could walk and grasp things moved to the doors and opened them. Pale sunlight spilled in from the hallway windows beyond.

  Bedlam. Half the gym was crawling for the exits. Poor Brian Grady, the quarterback, was dragging himself along on one arm; that being the only limb he had left. Even Coach was on his ass, a place Coach would probably rather die than admit he was capable of visiting.

  “EVERYBODY OUT OF THE GYM!” someone roared. “ASSEMBLE ON THE FRONT LAWN!”

  But nothing could be done. The boy who had triggered the nanopulse bomb was long gone. Power throughout the whole town was out. It didn’t matter if a building was still hooked up to the grid or if it had those new Smartglass windows. Everything was dead. Flashcasters. Tablets.

  The school’s 3-D sports equipment printer.

  A hasty team meeting was assembled then and there.

  “Someone must have a phone!” Tank yelled. He propped himself up against a tree and nearly lost his balance when it turned out nobody had one that worked. After that he didn’t slam his fist on the ground anymore.

  “All right,” Brian said. “That bomb was a P-40. You can get them on eBay. Ten-mile range. Someone’s gotta live outside of ten miles from here.”

  They all looked at Tommy.

  “We have one printer!” Tommy snapped, more than a bit defensively. “And it’s half-empty. We’ll get like one leg!”

  Coach spat on the grass. He was laying on his side so the gob didn’t fly very far. “Anybody else?”

  Several players did, along with a couple of the students within earshot. But ten miles was still ten miles, with no car to make the first leg of the trip. And only two hours until game time.

  “Damn,” said Coach. “We can’t forfeit.”

  Nobody asked why. They knew. Equipment malfunction was not a legitimate excuse for forfeiture if enough players were mobile. And they had enough. Tommy. Half the second string. Almost all of the third. Players who hadn’t deemed themselves good enough to even bother with amputations.

  “Shit,” Tank sobbed.

  The Juneau Trojans rolled in an hour later, their bus the only moving vehicle
anyone saw for a while. But slowly more of the townspeople began to trickle in, and then a bunch of other cars started to arrive. There would still be some sun for an hour or so, but some genius with a few replacement parts nonetheless got the field lights working by hooking them up to the functional cars. Someone asked if car batteries could run the school printer. Every Trojan supporter there was sure this wouldn’t work.

  Tommy led the warm-up. Coached bumped him up from halfback to quarterback. Brian promised to send him play signals but because he was seated Tommy could barely see him and soon stopped looking. Dad and Grandfather showed up. Grandfather’s wheelchair was parked right at the end of the bleachers where the benched players sat, gripping tightly at the seats so they wouldn’t topple over.

  “Ghastly,” Grandfather muttered over and over. He made sure Tommy heard this, too.

  The first half was awful. All the Trojans’ stuff worked fine. The second string Hustisford Falcon linemen, on the other hand, went flying in all directions. But Tommy didn’t have to build up as much momentum to dodge the Trojans as they did to get at him, so after a while they started barreling right past, and Tommy started completing passes.

  During halftime the Hustisford Math Club constructed their own nanopulse bomb, and detonated it at the fifty yard line during the start of the third quarter (with Hustisford trailing 63-6). This was a makeshift job, cobbled together from the shielded stuff in the Science lab. The range didn’t extend much further than the field and parking lot, but it did the trick. With no car batteries left to run the field lights both teams were forced to forfeit, falling slightly yet equally in the overall sectional rankings.

  Tommy still made out. His stats went up considerably, and his dodging impressed one of the recruiters. That summer he had a state-of-the-art double amputation, paid for by the UW-Madison Badgers. Upon recovery he played football, reprinted his legs time and time again, just as he always dreamed of doing, and made a lot of money.