by Neil Clarke
His entire back is covered with mandalas, one after another, all the different interpretations of the Coronal descriptions. Burned—branded—on top of them is a hand holding a torch.
My step creaks the floorboards, and he waves one hand behind his back, scrambled eggs falling from his fork. “Harris, can you tell Zahra that I’ve almost got the reambiguation figured, if she’ll just give me another week?”
“Wallace,” I say. I don’t even have to take a deep breath to do it.
He drops the fork and spins around, kicking aside plate and keyboard alike. He stares at me for a moment, then scrambles upright. He’s not as tall as Randall, never has been, but they’re both taller than me. “Ma.”
I’m too worried to smile. “Yes,” I say, and stop. What do I say? I’m here? I found you? Please don’t go, the Coronals aren’t worth it?
His shoulders go down, just a little bit. “Randall told you I was here, didn’t he?”
“He did,” I say. “He worries.”
Wallace shrugs. “It’s what he does.” He bends and sorts through the mess at his feet, finding a shirt with TOUCH THE STARS—8TH ANNUAL silkscreened onto it. “I think he thinks we’re some kind of death cult.”
He straightens up as he says the last, and he sees my face. “You’re not?” I manage, because he’s already seen as much in my expression. “The mandalas—”
“The mandalas are important, Ma. That we may remember what has been forgotten.” The last has the sound of catechism, and I can’t help rolling my eyes. He looks up at the ceiling, and I think of far too many Thanksgivings where we talked past each other. This is going to be another one of those fights. “You seem so determined to forget that you’re willing to let them close the department.”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” I say, but it’s a sore point, and I take the bait. “Besides, it’s not about forgetting.”
“Then what’s it about? You’re just turning your back on what we have of the Coronals? You’re letting the university—”
“There are other Coronal Studies departments.” Withering, yes, but holding on in the same way that departments allow specialized study of Ottoman textiles or obscure Scottish poets. “And don’t change the subject. My job is my own. This—” I gesture at the mess, “—is, I’m assuming, your new job.”
He glares at me, nudges the plate of eggs away with one foot. “Yeah. So maybe it is.” I brace for the defense, but he doesn’t bother with it, instead straightening up as if he were giving a presentation. “Ma, I need a favor. I need access to Granma’s cloud.”
“There’s nothing in it. Nothing that isn’t public.”
“No, there is. I need the initial signal. The originating one, the one that rewrote her research center, before it went dormant.”
I think of my mother, of the cancer rewriting her DNA. “There’s nothing there.”
“That’s only what you say because you don’t see.”
“I don’t need to see! There’s nothing to see! You can re-run the translator as many times as you like, and it’s not—”
“Ma—”
“It’s not going to show you anything new! It’s just going to give you the same old signal, the same things we heard, the same things that aren’t there any more!” Now I’m shouting. Guess it was my turn to start this time. “You can’t tune it, you can’t adjust it—it’s done, Wallace. It’s done, and maybe your friends here with their mandalas and their slogans, they can screw around with their cosmic bullshit, but you are better than that! I will not let you waste yourself like that!”
“It’s not a waste, Ma!” He puts his hands to his head. “It’s never a waste! Jesus, why is this so hard to understand?”
“There’s no one there!” The words come out, and I put both hands to my mouth, as if I’ve said something obscene. The argument downstairs has stopped; I’m pretty sure they’re listening. “No one,” I repeat. “It’s all silence now.”
Wallace shakes his head, slowly, the way I would when I was sick of the arguments. His turn, now.
I make myself stop, make myself draw a new breath. “Could someone shut off the slides? Thank you.” One nervous laugh, somewhere at the front.Everyone else is silent. They don’t like seeing someone cry in public. Nobody does.
I think about what I want to say, what I’ve said already elsewhere. “It’s all silence now,” I say. Somewhere in the auditorium, I’m certain people are shaking their heads, not quite the way Wallace did but with the same determination.
“The air is no longer full of voices.
“Or, rather, not the same voices.
“This is the one thing the Coronals did for us that we don’t even think about any more. Every one of you, every one who has bothered to do more than a cursory study of Coronal infospace, is a polyglot. We had to be.
“This is the gift they gave us. Not the knowledge that we were not alone. We have never been alone. To understand them, we had to understand each other.”
Wallace shakes his head, slowly. “It doesn’t have to be silent.”
I’m about to snap at him, to tell him that I have spent my life on the Coronals and if anyone would know silence, it is me. But I don’t. I don’t know why I don’t. Maybe I’m just tired from the drive. “There aren’t any other transmissions in infospace,” I finally say. “I know whole arrays that have been searching for anything since before the Coronal collapse. There’s nothing.”
“Not from them. From us.” He nudges the keyboard with his feet. “We’re— all of us, here, we’re trying to repurpose the original code. So we can send out our own into infospace.”
It takes me a moment to realize that he’s not talking about every other attempt to use the code, to strengthen it or tune it or seek out more information, more voices in the static. “You want to broadcast,” I say slowly.
“Not quite. We want to repurpose their tool and make it ours, and then broadcast. I mean, they’re dead, and we signed on much too late, but if we— if there’s someone else out there too, maybe they can hear us.”
I stand very still for a long moment. Below us, I hear the Urdu argument start up again, not nearly so vehement now. “Have you thought about the entity extraction issue?” I say finally.
“It’s not as much of a problem as you might think. Here, take a look.” He picks up the keyboard, pulls down a screen, and code fills the air. “The original signal was expansive-reductive, taking one set and expanding it to many. We think if we can train it another way, it can work with many sets at once, so we don’t have to restrict our infospace broadcasts to one language. It’s semisapient, so it really is like training, but the base code …”
He goes off, and I think about my mother staring at her own lines of code, convinced it was all a hoax but one she’d go along with for now. It’s opaque to me, but Wallace swims in it.
“We’re getting close—well, closer. Beatriz thinks we have only ten years to go, instead of twenty. But if we had Granma’s records, it’d give us a clearer idea of how the signal is supposed to behave when it’s active, instead of its dormant state, which is all we have to work with now. It’s only a, a receiver. We need to make it a transmitter again. A whole technician, if we train it right.”
He looks alight, the same way Randall does when he’s with Brendan. I step back. “I’ll deed you the cloud access,” I say. For a moment I consider inviting him to drive back with me, but eight hours in the car are pretty much guaranteed to destroy any détente we currently have. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
Wallace stops abruptly, as if he’s just remembered who he’s talking to. “You don’t have to go.”
I smile at him. “Did Randall tell you what I’m doing, now that the department’s closing down? I’m going back to school. For a fine arts degree. Poetry.”
“That’s . . . not what I would have expected.” He stops, takes a deep breath, lets it out. “Good luck.”
“I’d like to speak to the other half of the
audience now. Those of you who grew up in a world where we knew for a fact we were not alone.”
Randall, Brendan, and their girls. Abrams and Lucienne from the department, Sadako who is our last Ph.D. student and has still soldiered on, Martinez with the giant paintings, and Park with the Opera based on Coronal texts. All the ones who passed through my hands, who went on, who continue on without me.
Wallace, my Wallace, so sad and determined. I am so proud of you, of all of you.
“You have never known a world in which Earth held the only life in the universe. Everywhere, you have heard the voices of a world far away. Now you have to hear the nearer voices. I want you to hold on to that knowledge, that certainty that we are not alone. We have never been alone.
“We will never be.”
I step down, out of the light. My glass vibrates, and I check it to see a set of messages turn up.
W: good speech ma randy sent me the flow
R: did not. the girls got to listen. Sinny drew a new picture for you.
W: i have some old antholgies if you need textbks
It’s a start. I lower my glass and let the organizers walk me back out on stage.
Lettie Prell’s short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Apex Magazine, Analog, and elsewhere. Her fiction often explores the edge where humans and their technology are increasingly merging. Her writing also occasionally touches on justice issues, arising from her research work in that field. She lives in Des Moines.
THE THREE LIVES OF SONATA JAMES
Lettie Prell
Exposition: Allegro Impetuoso
Sonata James was twenty-three years old when she decided what she wanted to do with her life and her iterations to come. She sought out her friend Dante to tell first. It was noon and the sun was bright, but not warming. Her cheeks and hands stung with the brisk autumn air off the lake as she made her way from her mom’s house on South Dorchester to Dante’s usual spot on Ellis Avenue. As she entered the coffee shop, the crisp chill was instantly replaced by cozy aromas of fresh-brewed beans and wood. She ordered a large French roast, paused to dose it liberally with milk, then held it high as she threaded among the crowded tables, mostly occupied by singles drawn to the free Wi-Fi. At last she arrived at the back near the emergency exit and unisex restroom, where Dante occupied the only high-backed booth in the place, a leftover from when this had been a bar or maybe an ice cream parlor. His gaze was locked on his screen as she approached, the glow accentuating his profile and projecting bursts of color onto his black-on-black athletic suit and hoodie.
She slid into the seat opposite him, a little coffee slopping onto the table-top as she did so. She sat cupping the steaming drink between her hands until Dante looked up from his screen. The way his eyes shone betrayed how happy he was to see her, but he played it down.
“I was reading about fine art photography back before digital,” she began.
He slipped his headphones down off his ears, and Sonata heard a few strains of Missy Elliott haranguing about a “one minute man” before Dante punched the pause button. After she repeated her sentence, his brows drew together. “And this is exciting news because—?”
She grinned. “People would buy one of a hundred copies or so of a photo. They could print however many they wanted with the same negative, but it was the artist’s choice to limit the number of prints. Even at the beginning of digital, a photographer would decide to make only so many hard copies to sell. To make it more special.”
Dante took a sip of his own drink and grimaced. It had likely gone cold long ago. “To drive the price of the art up, you mean.”
She drummed her fingers impatiently on the tabletop. “And to make it more special. A statement. Come on, don’t ruin this.”
“Ruin what?” He’d gone back to his screen. It was impossible for him to unplug for even a few moments. Three-dimensional reality was just another frame opened to his awareness.
She was brimming with the news. “Because I’m going to be a limited edition.”
His fingers twitched over the sense pad, but he remained the picture of coolness.
“I just decided today. This is going to define me. It’s my thing.”
He actually closed his computer. He sat back, not looking at her but at some point on the table between them. “If you don’t upload …”
His voice cracked and she put a hand on his, suddenly realizing how much he cared about her. “I will upload,” she said. “If I don’t, I’ll be like any other person who can’t afford it or doesn’t want to for whatever reason. It won’t be special.”
His lower lip drew inward, and he jerked his hand away. “So you’re just going to let your newbody crash? That’s whacked.”
Several patrons—whites, blacks, and newbies alike—turned to stare at the shout. The way the newbies, especially, regarded her made her face grow hot. She sat up straighter and kept her own voice quiet. “It’s a statement. If you pulled your head out of the Internet once in a while, you’d notice how crowded we’re getting. Only the poor are having babies anymore. Everyone else is hanging on to their money for themselves, for their newbodies.”
Dante folded his arms and slouched back in the booth, his long legs bumping her feet as he stretched them out. “Am I now going to hear the antitech rant? Because I don’t need you to run that down for me. I can tune into it anytime. Ironically, it’s all over the web.”
She sighed. “No antitech. Promise.” She stared at her coffee. “I need you to hear me.”
Dante let out a long breath, deflating. “I hear you. I just don’t get you. Have you told your mother yet?”
She shook her head and laughed without humor. “I wanted to tell you first. A friend who would understand.”
He snorted. They sat looking at each other. Again, Sonata sensed a deeper caring emanating from Dante than she’d thought was there. Maybe he was just realizing it, too, as they spoke of her eventual mortality.
Dante nodded slightly, and for a split second Sonata wondered if he’d read her mind. But he said, “Okay, so you’re a limited edition. I suppose I can get used to the idea you’ll only have a hundred iterations or so.”
“Not one hundred,” she said. “That won’t hold the public interest.” She saw the storm clouds gathering around Dante again and pressed on. “And I don’t want to get lumped in with the newbodies who didn’t plan ahead and are out of cash already. They’ll do any crummy job in order to afford an upgrade before their software becomes so old it’s unsupported. I want everyone to know I’m doing this on purpose.”
Dante’s face had become an unreadable mask. “So how many of you are there going to be, Sonata?”
“Three.”
Dante cursed.
“Three iterations, because there are three movements in a sonata. Me here now, and two newbies.”
Dante glowered. “Your mom is going to kill you.”
“It’s my body.” She realized she was rehearsing now, for when her mother was back from work. “I want to make my existence really count, to push myself to express and achieve in a way I don’t think would be possible if I had all the time in the world. I want to dedicate my iterations as a reminder that we can only understand ourselves—understand life itself—within the context of a finite existence. People are unbearably bored with literally everything now. I want to show people what it’s like to live.”
Dante leaned forward and grasped her right hand in both of his. His palms trembled. “You’re whacked,” he whispered. “Damned philosophy major.”
“I love you, too.” She’d meant to tease, but the words hung in the air between them. Their hands clasped tighter, as if separate small animals. Dante swallowed hard, then nodded and released his grip. She rose, feeling buoyant, and stammered her way through a casual farewell.
As she wended her way toward the door she passed a table where two new-bies sat. One turned his silvery face toward her. “Sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing. Have you considered man is something to be overc
ome?”
She recognized the reference from Nietzsche. She tossed her head and shot back, “‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.’ Yes, I’ve read Thus Spake Zarathustra.”
The other newbie, androgynous and blue skinned, regarded her with curiosity as Sonata moved on.
She breathed a sigh as she reemerged onto the streets of Hyde Park. Bolstered against the wind by the warm milk and coffee in her belly, she flowed along with the crowd, thinking ahead to the conversation with her mother. There wasn’t any question she would share her news. The two of them were very close. As she rounded a corner into an even thicker mass of humanity, she thought how her mother was not likely to get angry like Dante. Instead, she’d pull her signature line: You’ll change your mind about that when you’re older. It was what had been unspoken in the newbie’s stare, back at the coffee shop.
“And just how old will I be when I’m supposed to change my mind about everything?” she muttered to herself. The crowd had slowed to a crawl. There were too many people these days. Exasperated, she pushed forward, not caring that she was bumping people. She was nearly at the end of the block, and up ahead through the sea of bodies she saw the green light. Anyone could see it was time to walk, yet no one was. It was like they were waiting to be herded. She shoved forward in exasperation, hearing horns blaring from different directions, and stepped out into the street where there was some space to move at last—
She felt a jolt along her left side just as she heard a whoop of siren from the same direction, and then she was floating. Distantly, she heard the screech of brakes and a scream not her own. She saw rust-colored leaves blow from the tree across the street and go fluttering in slow motion against blue sky. Then her head slammed into pavement, which normally didn’t happen when one was flying. The world was atilt. She saw the face of a little boy, his mouth shaped in the exact oval of his head. Then the sun was in her eyes, or not the sun but a blinding stab from behind her eyes. The pain shot down her side even as her head felt stuffed like a pillow. Everything became a blur. Even the sounds seemed to smear together. Then all collapsed inward upon itself, contracting until the entire universe was but a single point. Then nothingness.