by Anthology
“You weren’t kidding. These are amazing.”
He had left his gun on his stool. It looked a lot like a label maker: featureless grey plastic with a heavy handle to hold the magazine. He jammed the clip into the gun’s butt and pulled back the charging handle.
“Ready for your shot?”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only your pride.”
Tom pressed the gun against Jake’s shoulder and pulled the trigger. It emitted a little puff of air. Jake grunted.
“Welcome to the workforce,” he announced and tossed the can of synthfat over to Jake. “Get those clothes off. Time to grease up.”
Jake smiled. “Yessir.” He pulled his pants off, rolled them tightly, and stuffed them into his waterproof bag.
“Underwear, too,” Tom told him. “You don’t want your dick to freeze off.”
Jake started to turn around to strip, hesitated, then turned back and took off his briefs.
“Okay. Take a handful and slap it on. Work it in like sunblock. When you think you’ve finished, blow on it. If you feel anything other than just a light pressure, put some more Crisco on,” Tom said.
“Wait,” Jake said. “Like the stuff for cookies?”
“Nah. It’s some kind of synthetic fat,” Tom answered. “We just have a sense of humor. Haha. For all I know, it’s partially hydrogenated polar bear blubber, but the stuff works. Get greasy, kid.”
Jake opened the tin. “Jesus, it stinks. I thought that reek was just you.”
“You wish.”
While Jake starting greasing up, Tom stretched, working the kinks out of his back. His last job had been a week ago, and he was still sore. The client was a nightmare: a forty-five-year-old dumpy advertising executive who’d put his life savings up his nose. The man was desperate and offered him half his contract pay, five times the usual commission. It was clear weather but very windy, with big swells. From the moment they entered the water, the man complained. Eventually, he gave up completely and Tom had to drag him. That’s when the Labor Police caught up, darted them, and landed them on the boat.
His client was delirious, babbling about how he didn’t want to be here, and how did it come to this. After the anesthetic wore off, Tom made a deal with the patrol. He’d get them their trophy, just not today. He had too much money riding on this whale. Give him a week, and he’d give them their prize.
Patrols were easy to bribe that way.
It was too bad, though, because Tom’d taken a real dislike to the asshole. Jake, on the other hand, seemed like a pretty decent guy.
He opened up his bright yellow dry-bag, pulled out a pair of Speedos and a well-worn orange-covered book. He put on the swimsuit, rolled his clothes, and put them into the bag. Out on the sea, the lights from the ships were getting brighter and closer together. Closing in…edging…right up to the territorial waters.
He looked over at Jake rubbing the synthfat on his chest; great rolling globs of grease trapped in frozen waves.
“You gotta work it in. Smooth it out,” Tom instructed. “That shit ain’t cheap.”
Jake looked at him, squinting. “I thought the chinks dropped cases of it in the water for us to find.”
“Easy with that language,” Tom warned him. “Those chinks of yours are about to pay your fucking bills.”
Jake looked down and continued greasing himself, taking smaller scoops of synthfat and slapping them on his naked body, wattle and daub.
“That’s right. Nice and even. It’s a second skin.” He went over to Jake and stuck his pinky against the man’s chest. It made a squishy sound. He lifted it to Jake’s face. “See how it’s about halfway up the nail? That’s the right amount.”
Jake looked at it, then proceeded to smooth out the rest of his body.
Tom opened the book with a little flip of his wrist. Its pages were stained with grease.
“What’s that?” Jake asked.
“Eldridge.” He checked his watch. Seven forty-five. Shit.
Jake shook his head. “What’s Eldridge?”
“Tide book. If we leave as the tide begins to ebb, we can ride it out and double our speed. Hit a current right and we’re barely doing any work at all.”
“You still use books for that? Why?”
“Same reason you can’t take anything but a rowboat out: without that passport from Homeland Security to bypass the EMP generators at the bottom of the bay, any electronics will stop working the minute you hit the high-water mark.”
“Right. Sorry. Stupid question,” Jake said, sheepishly. “I guess I’m a bit nervous.”
“Relax. Worry about staying warm and staying as low in the water as you can. It’s pretty calm today, so we won’t have much chop—that makes us easier to spot. And the warm water attracts wildlife.”
“What…like sharks?” Jake asked.
“Patriots. They’re too lazy to go out when the weather is shit, but if it’s a calm, warm night, who doesn’t like a little cruise around New York Harbor: see the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, the new pylons being driven into the bay for the Manhattan Bypass Bridge.”
“So if the weather is lousy, we have to worry about the cops and if the weather is nice we have to worry about vigilantes?”
“Career office didn’t tell you about this, eh?”
“Can’t say that they did.” Jake stood up, admiring the job he’d done putting on the grease. “This look okay?”
“You’re an Adonis. Put on your fucking swimsuit.”
He did.
The two men stared out into the ocean for a while. The ship lights came closer and closer together, now a pale necklace dotting dark skin. A few broke ranks and started moving, independently and quickly, toward the shore. He could see Jake craning his head to figure out what they were.
“Just trawlers,” Tom said, “coming in for the night.”
“They ever take people out?”
“No. Those passports are hard to come by and are passed down, like heirlooms. If they got caught, they’d screw their entire family, kids, grandkids, out of a livelihood. Not worth the risk.”
Jake relaxed and sat back down.
Tom added, “You won’t see the trouble until it’s on top of you.”
“Right” Jake said, incredulous. “Their boats are invisible.”
“Not exactly. But they don’t use running lights. It’s all infrared.”
“So how do you know if they’re on to you?”
“Look for emptiness. Blankness on the horizon. Stars and other lights blotted out by some kind of wandering darkness. When the lights go out, that’s when you worry.”
“What do they do to you?”
“They’ll either arrest you or kill you. Either way, they’ll start by throwing a halogen cannon on you, then dart you with a paralytic. The light is hot enough to blister your skin if you let it sit on you long enough. That’s the drawback of the Crisco: acts like a lens. Saw one guy, his back burned right off. Third-degree, blisters and shit. They just cooked him up with those bright lights, then dumped him on the beach, a few blocks down the shore. They aren’t legally allowed to kill you, but…you’re paralyzed, floating in the sea…easy enough to have an accident.”
“Fuck me,” Jake said, quietly.
“Funny thing is that when you get hit with the light and the dart, it’s an incredible feeling. You’re four miles out. Cold. Delirious. Suddenly that warm blush hits your spine and shoulders, like the sun rising, and you think, ‘Maybe now is a good time to take a little break, just lie here for a bit, warm the old bones and muscles.’ You’re warm and numb and exhausted. It’s paradise. Until you smell your flesh burning.”
“What’d you do with the guy’s body?” Jake asked.
“Dunno. Ask Alice,” he said, as seriously as he could manage. “We told her to take care of it.”
“It’s funny what passes for squid these days,” Ari shouted from his stall.
Laughter came roaring in from the guys drinking at the meat st
all next door. Jake blushed.
“More crap from you,” Jake said, smiling. “Do you even know how to swim?”
“You’ll find out soon. Still hungry?” Tom asked. “Need something else?”
“I don’t think so.” He stood and looked up and down his own body. “I guess I’m ready.”
Tom nodded. He grabbed two bungee harnesses from under his stool and threw one to Jake.
“Over the shoulders and around the waist, then attach your dry-bag. You’ll want about six feet behind you.”
He put his own on and clamped a carabiner to the metal ring of his yellow bag, which he lifted above his head.
“Hold it up like this, until we get into the water.”
Jake fumbled a little with his straps, and Tom had to help him out. He saw the young man’s hand shaking, palsied, from fear.
“Too early to get cold, kid,” he said, with a short laugh. “Wait a couple hours. Here.”
Tom unfouled the lines and adjusted the belt.
“Good?”
“I guess so.”
“Follow me.”
In silhouette, they looked like a pair of oversized fetuses, looking to reenter the womb.
Tom stared at the break as he waded out. The sea was surprisingly warm. That didn’t matter. In two hours he’d be shivering so hard his ribs would bruise and he’d be turning back to shore after delivering the kid to the patrol boat. Or maybe they’d forget about the deal. That could happen. Maybe they were just playing a mind game with him. Maybe they wanted to recruit him for full-time work.
The answer was just a few miles offshore.
Something pinched at his foot. He looked down. A tiny crab, scuttling sideways, snipped at him angrily and scuttled off. He smiled and looked back at Jake.
“Time to pick your lucky star,” he said.
“How can I choose?” Jake said. “It’s just one big streak of light out there.”
Tom looked back toward the sea. Jake was right. The factory ships had come in even closer and the lights were now a continuous band straight across the water. A bobbing, burning, solid white fence. A noose. A cage.
A collar.
He walked farther into the surf.
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll go for that one,” he said, not bothering to point anywhere.
Dandelion(Short story)
by Leo Vladimirsky
Boing Boing
She broke the silence, "Jared went in last week."
"Where?" I knew, but I was being difficult.
"You know where: the clinic."
"Oh."
Our living room was always small, but today it felt particularly cramped. We sat on opposite sides of the white microfiber couch. I stared at the TV.
"Is he good?" I asked.
"Yup. Got the dose yesterday. He's recovering at home."
When we got tested, I watched them take her blood. She was calm; I was a fucking wreck. The one thing our species wants and it comes down to a genetic lottery: if your mitochondria objects, get in line for the grave; if not, you've got a lot of living to do.
"Good. I hope that he and Gail have a long, happy life together," I said.
She ignored my joke, leaned over the side of the couch, and fished her purse off the dark wooden floor. It rattled. "Turn off the TV. I want to talk to you about something," she said.
I did as commanded. With the light gone from the screen, the room became dark and silent. There was a loud rushing in my ears.
She turned on a little lamp, and started looking through her bag. Even with the light, the room was small and cold and the faint marbling in the walls made it even more tomblike. The rushing grew louder.
"I went to the hospice—to the clinic," she corrected herself, "the other day, for my session with the counselor." She pulled a small orange bottle from her purse.
"The hospice is a fucking waste of time…something we don't have too much of, remember?" I spat the words.
She ignored my tantrum. "Look. We have as much time as we always had, just like before. It's no one's fault other people have more."
"More is addition. More is multiplication. More is a few extra years. They don't have more. They don't have finite or infinite. They have a number divided by zero. It's impossible for us to understand. Time doesn't exist for them anymore. We're the ones with time. Don't you see?"
I realized how loud I was. Every time she tried to help, I'd go off. "So the counselor?" I asked, softly.
She rattled the bottle. "The counselor gave me this prescription. It's for both of us."
"No. I'm not doing that." I was shouting again. "I may not outlive the universe, but I'm not gonna-"
"It's not that. That's only if you take too many. At small doses, it's the opposite. It's an in. He said it slowed things down. Time times two. Time times twenty."
"I don't fucking want time times twenty. I want time forever."
She slammed the pills on the coffee table. "And my great desire is to sit here and watch everyone else stay young and stay perfect, while the two of us get old and broken and fat and diseased and wrinkled, incontinent, blind and fucking useless. You think that's my choice, you selfish shit?"
We sat in silence. The rushing, gone during our argument, roared back. Between the fake marble walls, the thundering quiet, and the overwhelming closeness and whiteness, the room felt more tomblike than ever. I moved to turn on the TV.
She spoke, calmly. "We can't have time forever. At least we can have this…" She grabbed my hand. "We can manage. Together."
Life. Terminal, but manageable. I stared at the marbling, imagining the veins pulse. She continued to stare at me, holding my limp hand.
"So the drugs?" I asked, giving her hand a little shake, and pulling mine away.
"The counselor said that you can either take them daily, or you can take them when you start getting…when you start feeling it's all…slipping away."
"What do you mean 'slipping away'?"
"Like when you're having a good day, and suddenly you realize that the day has just…gone. If you take it while you're having a good time, it slows everything down. Makes you more aware. Makes you more in-the-now."
I ought to be grateful that both of us didn't check out. At least the immortals made our lives comfortable. A pension; an apartment. Bribes to make us feel better until old age, decrepitude, and decay stole our teeth, our bones, our skin, our minds. We'd get older and older. They wouldn't. A small gift to those of us with numbered days, from the host who'd see the sun explode in fifty million of what I still called a lifetime.
I tore my eyes off the marble walls and looked at her. She was still watching me.
"This is a now I wish I was less in." I said. "I want to be in everybody else's now,"
"No one said life would be easy."
"Fuck easy. This is unfair."
She sighed. "No one said it'd be fair either."
"You know why can't I live forever? Two billion years ago, some fucking bacteria crawled into my great-great-whatever-grandmother. He became my mitochondria. That little bastard can't take the dose. If it had been the bug right next to him, I'd be through the gates of paradise right now. Instead of here."
"You think maybe they made a mistake, that your letter was wrong?" she said, in a patronizing way. "You want to try your luck and take the dose anyway? Go down to Canal. That's where all the counterfeit shit is. You'll have your shot in ten minutes. It might be a needle full of saline, gasoline, or amphetamine. Or it might be the real deal. But you better hope that letter was wrong. Otherwise you won't even get the time you do have left.
"You know what else that little bastard of yours gave you? He sealed your place in history. You know who you are? You're one of the last men. We're it. We're the ancients now! We'll be the heroes of their new stories. There's your eternity. We'll be myths."
"I don't want to be a fucking myth." I slammed my fist on the couch arm. The impact raised a tiny puff of dust. "I want to be a god."
&nb
sp; We sat in silence for a while. She stared at the wall above the TV. The bottle of pills glowed from the cheap lamp light , turning it into a sickly orange star. I picked it up. The label was covered with a half-dozen warning stickers.
She broke the quiet. "You know, it's not going to be easy for them. Think about how quickly they're going to fill up the planet? Where will we put them all?"
"They're already building colony ships. They'll see other worlds. They'll see all the worlds the universe has. I'll see only this one, until the day I die.”
"So what? A forever, floating through emptiness, hoping to find somewhere to land? Some of them will be out there for millions of years. You can't understand that. No one can. I hope they're ready for it."
Her sympathy jarred me. Just because our bodies can handle infinity, doesn't mean our minds can. Still, it'd be a nice trouble to have.
"Champagne problems," I said, with mock disdain, waving my hand. "Besides, the journey is more important than the destination, right?"
I laughed. She laughed too. This was a moment worth having. As soon as I thought it, the moment slipped away.
"This is what those pills were made for, right?"
"Yup. Capture time. Slow it down. Get every detail."
"Time times two." I said, wondering.
"Time times twenty." She smiled, dropped my hand, and turned on the TV.
I looked at her, imagining her growing old, hair greying, skin mottling, eyes dulling. I wondered which of us would die first and what saying goodbye would be like. That letter was a constant reminder of our mortality. If you checked out, and got the dose, you had to surrender it. But despite that bureaucratic certificate assuring me of my own doom, I still thought of the moment like a scene out of a movie…unreal.
"Come here," she commanded. I obeyed and put my head in her lap. The TV kept playing, but all I thought about were her warm, soft thighs. The rushing in my head was gone. I was calm.
When I woke, my legs were so stiff that it was clear I'd been asleep for a long time. Another reminder of my impending collapse. She'd gone off to the bedroom. The TV and lamp were off. I filled the kettle and, next to the jar of loose tea, found the orange bottle of pills. She knew where to leave them so they'd be the first thing I saw when I woke up. Very clever. The clock above the range told me it was a little before seven. I sat back down on the couch, in the darkness, with my cup. There was no way I'd get back to sleep now. Time to start another day.