Maybe it’s madness after all. But it doesn’t matter. What you believe about all of this doesn’t matter. They only thing you need to care about is that the Convergence has a ton of money and that the boy is valuable to them. This might be our last chance, so if any of this bothers you, remind yourself that the ground has started moving beneath us. Remind yourself that the streets might be impassable soon, and any chance that has ever been within our reach will be gone.
NOW, LISTEN. Something unbelievable has happened in the secret paradise of Cape Victory. Monsters do exist—the things moving in the mists out on the cape cannot be called anything other than monsters. I mean, you could see that they were basically built from scratch. Put together by humans. You could clearly see parts of drones: a leg, an arm, a laughing face. But they had something else—a complexity that I’ve never seen before. Thousands of cables and wires and plastic, steel, and oil created an impenetrable organic mass, and these things weren’t just randomly put together but had clearly been built with purpose, and underneath the unfathomable surface some heaving movement could be seen, almost like breathing.
I was scared. But I also felt something else when that thing stepped out of the mist in front of our car. I can’t think of a better word than awe. I was impressed. Like when you suddenly become aware that you’ve walked into the wrong part of the woods and come face-to-face with a gigantic wild animal. Beyond the grotesque, there was also something else—something majestic. And in its wake, the citizens of Point Linden, hundreds of people linked together, their neurocasters connected to the oily god in the mist, floated across the ground in front of the car, and they looked almost happy. Calm and peaceful, they moved past the car and formed a single group again behind us, and soon disappeared into the mist again.
APART FROM THAT, the streets of Point Linden were completely abandoned. I tried to decipher the microscopic map in the Realtor’s folder as we slowly rolled down the street between the suburban yards. Alder Road, Jefferson Road, Chestnut Street, Oakwood Avenue, Hamilton Lane—typical names for typical streets that stretched between typical houses that had once been populated by typical families.
Most of the lawns were unkempt, overgrown. How long had this been going on? In some yards, even more incomprehensible shapes rose straight out of the grass: restless, twisted giant fetuses, eager to be born.
I have to say: they were fantastic. Something inside me wanted to stop the car and get out, to walk up to them and touch them and closely examine every single one of these strange growths. In another reality I would have loved this. I would have calmly walked these streets, fascinated—certainly with a degree of disgust, but rapturous, pleasant disgust. In the real world, everything was backward now. We were the fascinating growth, the insane—the only sick souls in a healthy world. There was no safe everyday life behind us, no normal zone to return to, and the only way out was forward.
What we’re doing isn’t civilized, I know that. But I know it must have happened to you too. Like me, you must have woken up one day and suddenly realized the inevitable: we no longer live in civilized times.
You’re almost upon them, Walter. It is almost over.
WE ARRIVED at 2139 Mill Road late at night on May 11, 1997, six months after Skip picked me up in Soest, and now it’s about time I tell you about my brother.
Christopher was born when I was four, on October 12, 1982. My mother always said that Christopher didn’t have a father, so I guess he’s my half brother. I remember a doctor, a man with blue gloves and a military uniform. He was holding a little baby in his arms, wrapped in a blanket. He said, This is your brother, Michelle. Something was wrong with him, they knew that right away; something about his brain, and before he was three he had gone through more than thirty surgeries. When I was about seven my mother was fired from the air force and the assistants went away, and it was my grandfather who had to teach me how to change Christopher’s diapers and dress him and what he should eat and how I should feed him. It was my grandfather who started calling him Skip.
Another memory: I was nine, and we lived in our mother’s RV in a boneyard somewhere in northern Libertaria. My mother was in the RV with her pocket knife, emptying cables of neurite. Skip was five. We played among the wrecked ships, and I found a Kid Kosmo toy, a small action figure. Skip loved Kid Kosmo, he had seen every single episode, and when we played, Skip was always Kid Kosmo and I was his sidekick, Sir Astor the space cat. At night when our mother was away with one of the men who gave her money, I would hold Skip and make up stories about Kid Kosmo and Sir Astor, and I would lie there and whisper about their courageous journeys out in the galaxy until Skip fell asleep. I had given him that toy, and he carried it with him everywhere. About a year later, maybe more, I found my mother unconscious on the floor of the RV. I walked three miles along the highway holding Skip’s hand until we found help. She died a year later, at the hospital in Hobbes. Social services took Skip away, and I ended up at my grandfather’s in Kingston.
WHEN SKIP CAME to get me in Soest, the city was falling apart. I had just seen Miss Styles in the house across the road get dragged out and shot in the street by a group of armed men. Ted had been down on the riverbank for a week. Amanda was long gone, and my black heart lay broken and discarded somewhere on Soest’s desolate streets.
I hadn’t eaten in days. Not that there wasn’t any food—the pantry was full of canned food and old pasta—but I think I had decided to die. I can’t really remember, but I do believe that’s what I’d planned to do.
I don’t know how Skip found the Kid Kosmo drone, or me for that matter, but when that yellow robot stood there on the driveway with the toy cradled in its arms—the same toy I had given my brother nine years earlier—I understood immediately. Skip, is that you? I said, and the yellow robot nodded.
That’s a kickass Kid Kosmo you’ve found.
Then I sat down on the driveway and wept. Like I said, Ted had been down on the riverbank for a week. He was sprawled beneath a beach umbrella, and when we left Soest in his old Corolla the vultures had already eaten most of his body, but below the horn of the neurocaster his mouth was still moving like he was dreaming.
SOMETHING SHOOK THE HOUSE with a series of deep, hollow concussions. The floor vibrated under my feet, and without thinking I threw myself down and embraced the emaciated boy in the bed. Something massive was moving around out there, and flakes of paint and plaster rained down over us. I closed my eyes and waited for the roof to cave in. One final, massive shock wave crashed through the house, and something made of glass shattered against the floor somewhere; then the house was quiet. I lay there with the boy in my arms, and the only sound was the soft whir from the fans in his neurocaster.
Finally I raised my head and looked at the boy. I turned his head gently, and there, behind his ear and just below the edge of the caster, I found it: the long, shining scar from the surgery. I sat there for a while and just held his hand.
Skip was six years old when I saw him leave Kingston in the backseat of the social-services car, and he was fourteen when I lifted him out of the bed at 2139 Mill Road in Point Linden. I don’t have the slightest idea about what he’d been through in between. His body weighed almost nothing; it felt like the neurocaster was the heaviest part. I guess he should have been dead, but there was no way to tell how long he had been lying there. I carried him to the bathroom and washed off the worst of the filth with a towel, and then I sat for a long time with my hand against his cheek and felt his pulse against my fingers.
Something rattled, and I groped for the gun before I realized he was still controlling the yellow robot and that it was walking around out there in the kitchen. It walked into the bathroom to stand in front of us. It carried cans of fruit in its arms.
WE’RE IN AN ABANDONED convenience store in Point Linden. I’ve fed Skip some canned food, and he managed to drink some mineral water. I got him new clothes and new sneakers from the sporting goods store across the street.
I still
haven’t removed his neurocaster. He’s eating and keeps his food down, but I haven’t found the courage to do it. Not yet. I can’t stop thinking about Birgitte and how she collapsed on the couch as soon as Ted removed her caster. Sooner or later I’ll have to do it. The kayak can hold only two people, and the robot will break down and then I don’t know what I’ll do. No. Soon we have to go down to the beach, and then it has to be done. It will have to be tomorrow morning. I’ll do it then.
THE SEA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SIMON STÅLENHAG is the internationally lauded artist and author of Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood, narrative art books that stunned the world with a vision of an alternate Scandinavia in the 1980s and ’90s where technology has invaded the tranquil landscapes to form an entirely new universe of the eerie and the nostalgic. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden.
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ALSO BY SIMON STÅLENHAG
Tales from the Loop
Things from the Flood
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Copyright © 2017 by Simon Stålenhag and Free League Publishing
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Originally published in Sweden in 2017 by Fria Ligan AB
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Cover illustrations by Simon Stålenhag
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-5011-8141-2
ISBN 978-1-5011-8143-6 (ebook)
The Electric State Page 4