It’s too much pressure. The very air seems to weigh on me, making thunder in my mind. I nearly lost everything back there.
“Mum,” says Mir, poking me. “Stop listening to the waves. Just stop.”
I put my fingers in my ears but it doesn’t help.
Mir’s shadow is tall and gangly when we make our way to the pewter coolness of the river, the weed-scrambled bank with its leaning tents and smoke-scarred air. Even as electric trucks glide along the A206 and over the bridge, our renegade plants lunge this way and that toward the sky. The Butcher is just finishing up a day’s work of transplanting along the bank, and I watch him walking along the footpath with a spade over his shoulder.
At last the Silence reaches out and embraces me. My weariness dissolves, and that’s when I remember it was never quite real.
Mir skips ahead of me, through the nettles and toward the restless treetops of our home.
As she runs, she waves the empty plastic bag in the air, like a flag.
The Apologists
Tade Thompson
Today, I decide to go to a bar.
I’m not dressed for it. My clothes are torn in places and although the darkness of my jeans hides grime, my shirt should be negotiating a spin cycle rather than warming my skin. Nobody notices, though. They haven’t bothered to name this establishment but there’s a neon sign with weird symbols that don’t, as far as I can tell, mean anything. Though there is a ribbon and stanchion arrangement, bouncer, and queue, I walk right up to the door and walk in. The bouncer is a stocky sort, fat-over-muscle build with a skin-colour approximating black, he smiles at me like I’m a celebrity. None of the punters in the twelve-person queue yells expletives. New world.
Inside, they’re playing nineties hiphop. Ambitionz Az A Ridah. I had that song on repeat when I was in university. There is the usual hum of conversation. Men and women talking to each other, flirting, drinking. I nod to myself, first at random, but later to the baseline of the song. There’s an empty stool and I aim for it before someone claims it. Reflex. I shouldn’t have bothered; nobody tries. When I squeeze into the space my shoulders bump the adjacent punters, but they just smile and continue their conversations.
The bartender is on me in seconds.
“Cider,” I say. “Whatever’s on tap.”
He nods, gets it for me, walks away like it’s an open bar.
It’s warm, stuffy even. I’m sweating, but nobody else is. That pisses me off. I hate that they don’t sweat, that they all look neat and smell good. I sip the cider. Tastes like urine. I know this because I have tasted my own urine before. I blame myself, my lack of skill in providing the right adjectives to describe taste to the strangers. All I could muster were words from the advertisements. Unique! Cutting! Sharp! Perfect blend! None of which mean anything.
The woman to my left is wearing a red dress with thin straps that make me wonder how the whole ensemble holds together. She has freckles on her back. I study them, wonder if each one is identical. To my delight they are not. She has hair cascading down in brunette waves and large, circular platinum earrings that dangle as she speaks. She’s talking to a Tiger Woods-type and drinking Chablis. The Tiger Woods-type glances at me, perhaps registering my behaviour as an anomaly. Fuck it. I tap the woman on the shoulder.
She turns on the stool and looks at me. She does not seem surprised, and that annoys me. She doesn’t say anything. She’s a big-titted Lorna Blackmore-type. Lorna was this girl I knew who taught Sunday School. Out of reach in every possible way.
I say, in the loudest voice I can muster, “Let’s you and me go and have sex.”
“Yes,” she says and places her drink on the bar. Tiger, who has heard, does not even react.
“No, no, no. This won’t do,” I say.
“Do you not find me sexually attractive?” her face is still expressionless.
I do, but that’s not the point. I’m so angry, I just leave.
I walk two blocks, then Nico intercepts me.
“Hello, Storm,” says Nico.
“Nico.”
“Nice evening.” On cue, he looks to the sky.
I nod. It’s warm, dry and visibility is good, but that’s not why he mentions it. He mentions it because it is customary to comment on the weather. I taught him that.
“You should go back,” says Nico. His lip movements don’t match his speech. Neither does his body language. He’s a hologram of a famous person that the strangers play in order to calm me when they talk to me. I think Nico is an individual, but it’s difficult to tell. His image is usually, but not always, Tom Jones circa 1984. As a result, conversations can be surreal. He could be telling me something sober while his image would be dancing and clearly singing into a microphone. Talking to Nico is always like watching a bad lip-synch.
“I’m not sleepy,” I say.
“You know that’s irrelevant. You should go back and get some rest. Tomorrow is a working day.”
“I was working just now. That bar was hilarious. It’s supposed to be called The Cock and Bull, by the way.”
“I’ll be happy to take notes on the matter tomorrow. Go back to base, Storm.”
Even though Nico’s voice is never inflected, the repetition of an instruction is usually a prelude to forceful measures and I am not in the mood, so I change direction.
I go across Vauxhall Bridge. The water isn’t finished, but a homogenous blue acts as a placeholder river and the sound of water lapping at the banks seems incongruous. They seem to have trouble with water. I turn right on the south bank of the Thames and head towards Wandsworth Road. Wandsworth has perfect rows of terraced houses. The paintjobs are perfect with no mould or weathering. The glass is all clean, the hedges are surgical and the pavements look like fresh cement. The street lights shine with biblical vigour. There are no undulations to the asphalt.
This is Katrina’s work.
There are things Katrina and I do not agree on.
I arrive at the Complex well before midnight. I pass through the gate and I’m checked by monitor drones, small spherical bastards with heathen propulsion methods and power supplies. I flip the bird. The Complex is a small estate, four houses for the five remaining humans. The rules are that the strangers don’t come in here and we respect the curfew. I don’t remember Nico ever coming in here. Outside the Complex is the Rebuild. This is where we work to produce a model of the world as it was before the strangers. Officially the Rebuild is open to us from nine to five but I often work late. Fuck them and their curfew. They won’t kill me, I’m one of the final five.
I stand at the roundabout in the courtyard we all share. My boots crunch on the gravel and the sound carries and bounces back to me, confirming I am alive. There are Ash and Birch reaching into the sky at intervals in the inner side of the barrier, and a dense but well-tended hedge blocking the view of the fence. No breeze moves the leaves and no night fauna cry. The buildings are identical two-storey Victorian-looking. They are not Victorian because every brick, every beam, every nail is new. The blueprints came out of the Kellys’ memories and the strangers constructed them, just like we do with the Rebuild. It doesn’t bother me, I can live anywhere, and I like the Kellys even though they do not contribute anything. Katrina’s house is dark, no lights anywhere. I will discuss Wandsworth Road with her tomorrow, but she is not the most flexible of people and I don’t have much hope of a compromise. There is a glow at Terry’s bedroom and I suspect he is reading.
“Goodnight, Terry!” I bow even though he has not come to the window. He is sure to be cursing me.
I walk up the short flight of stairs into my own house.
At night, while we sleep, the strangers watch us. They do not physically come, but the spherical and ovoid observer drones enter our houses and hover. They do not make a sound, but that is somehow creepier. I feel my body hairs rise whenever they are in my bedroom. They always wake me and I do not pretend to sleep. I shower them with invective and swipe at them, always missing, for t
hey are agile, manoeuvrable fuckers.
When they see that I am awake, they drift away. The romance is gone. I watched you while you slept, my love. I cannot get back to sleep after this, so I think about Bea and Chelsea.
In the world before this one, I come home to find a silent house, folded note on the dining table. It is a single sheet and folded once, standing like a placard. My name is written in black on one side. The table is clean. It is never clean. When I see the card I do not need to read it to know what’s in it. I feel afraid for the first time. My wife takes shit from me all the time, until the day she doesn’t.
It takes me ninety-nine days to win her back. I grovel and beg and confess to what Bea and I both know is the cause of the break-up: I am not a good person. I miss Chelsea, but I miss Bea more. I love her. I cannot afford to fuck it up. Bea is about the only evidence that I have any humanity in me because she sees it. Somewhere. Fuck knows where, because I can’t see it.
When she returns, I live again. The world holds colour for me. I am forgiven, Bea forgives me. Chelsea gurgles at me.
One month after this people start to get sick.
The Apocalypse takes one year. The strangers wipe out humanity in three hundred and seventy days. Just when I start to live, they kill me.
Next day.
I deliberately interrupt Katrina’s morning routine. She goes to the gym at six oh five every day, and she likes to start with the cross-trainer. I do not let her on this day. I stand on the pedals back to front, and I sing “The Boys are Back in Town” at the top of my voice. Katrina sees me and freezes.
“I would like you to leave,” she says.
“I know, and I will, but I have to tell you something first.”
“What do you want, Storm? Make it quick. You smell, and you’re holding up my workout.”
“I do not smell,” I say.
I do smell. I only wear one set of clothes despite the cellulose-based fabrics that the strangers supply. I’m still wearing the clothes I had on when they found me in the debris. I do not honestly know how long ago that was. Either the clothes will fall off me by being worn out from washing, or these are the clothes I’ll wear till I die.
I tell Katrina about the streets of Wandsworth.
“So what? They’re neater this way.” She doesn’t quite pout, but it’s in her voice.
“But it’s not realistic, Katrina. The tarmac can’t be perfect. Streets pitch and yaw as you drive along them. This is not what streets look like.”
“This is how they should look. I’ve had no complaints about my work.”
“From them? What the fuck do they know about how London was? From the Kellys? The Kellys don’t care.”
“Thank you for the constructive criticism, Storm. Now get off the cross-trainer.’
“Will you add some cracks? Some fungus to the walls?”
“No. Why does it bother you? You do the people, anyway.”
“Not people. Simulants. They aren’t people.”
“They seem perfectly like people to me.”
“They would, and therein lies the problem. My problem. They cannot be human because they are perfect replicas. Humanity is defined by imperfections.”
Katrina trembles and I get off the trainer before she has an anxiety attack. She gets them when things are not going according to whatever her plan of the moment is, and I’m pretty sure her plan did not include an altercation with me first thing in the morning. I sometimes think there’s a part of her that is happy with the demise of the previous world.
“How about some refuse?”
“What do you mean?”
“Chocolate wrappers, dead leaves, cigarette ends, the normal detritus of human occupation.”
“The new trees do not shed leaves, simulants don’t smoke and nobody has eaten chocolate since...well, since.”
“Can you at least pray for the strangers to add an algorithm that makes the trees shed leaves after an interval?”
“What’s the point of that? Someone’ll have to pick up the leaves.’”
I leave her in the gym. There was no point starting an argy-bargy this early in the morning.
I use the prayer point on Shaftsbury Avenue where it intersects with Charing Cross road, right near the steakhouse. The point is where a phone box used to be. I’ve never seen a stranger and Nico doesn’t count. The refinement of our constructs needs to be done at a prayer point, which is a kind of pod, like a phone box, but without angles or discernible equipment. There is a field of some kind in there. It crackles lightly and there is always a hint of ozone.
“On simulants in bar, doorman or bouncer far too accommodating. Must be polite, but physically intimidating and not altogether helpful except if bribed. Must learn psychological intimidation too, but this can wait until later. Service at bar too quick. There should be a delay, however brief, between arrival at bar and receipt of beverage. Beverages unsatisfactory. I still think it would be best to actually use fermentation to produce beer. Needs more flavour, more body. Bubbles and head satisfactory. Punters far too accommodating. For discussion: jealousy. For discussion: mating rituals among heterosexual humans.”
I bump into a simulant while walking down Monmouth Street, just coming up to the obelisk. I shove him away with irritation. He doesn’t even stop to look at me. I turn and pull at his shirt.
“Hello,” he says. Pleasant, placid.
“No. Wrong. Say, ‘“arsehole’”.”
“Excuse me?”
“Call me an arsehole for bumping into you without apologising.”
“I don’t think that is appropriate–”
“Oh, fuck off.”
There are no students or tourists sitting at the base of the Seven Dials obelisk.
Jealousy is easy once there is desire. I walk down Mercer Street then turn left on to Long Acre and stop at the facsimile of Covent Garden Station. I do not go in. There is nothing beyond the door except some 3-D sketches of trains. None of us remember trains or the details of how they work well enough to replicate them. The train, tube and bus stations have significance to all of us, and are landmarks of sorts. There is a prayer point and I go in.
“Jealousy is easy once there is desire, and everything human starts with desire. God desired that there be light. Satan desired to be more than he was. Rama desired Sita. To want something is to want it completely, to own a thing or a person is to own it exclusively. This is why we marry. I mean, the real reason we marry is economic, but let’s put that aside. We marry and put a ring on it…heh, sorry, pop song allusion…we use a ring to denote ownership. This is my person. This is my car. I call dibs because even if a thing does not belong to me yet, it is conceptually mine because I have seen it. The lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh. That’s from the Bible. Or Shakespeare.”
I ramble on, because Nico has encouraged me to free-associate, and that the more I say, the more the strangers can understand the nuances and apply them to the simulants. I keep talking until I hear a fog horn.
Shit.
I sit on the pavement, close my eyes, and cover my ears tightly. These motherfuckers never, ever learn.
WE ARE SORRY FOR OUR PART IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE. IT WAS UNINTENTIONAL, BUT THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE OUR ACTIONS. WE WILL MAKE AMENDS AND RESTITUTION WITH ALL OF OUR RESOURCES. PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGY AND HELP US REBUILD YOUR DELICIOUS WORLD.
This high decibel message is repeated, vibrating through the Rebuild and the complex, over a period of an hour, and in several languages. Well, not real languages. I only speak English, for example, but I recognise German, French, Spanish and Italian. The strangers have done a linguistic reconstruction using my memories. Is it Spanish if I think it’s Spanish? Does it matter?
And don’t get me started on ‘delicious’. Nico asks the final five for synonyms of good, but doesn’t give us context. Then he asks a number of questions about atonement for wrongdoing, and I tell him apology and restitution is pretty much universal. Little did I know.
The strangers broadcast this message every day at about midday. I try to tell Nico about the volume, and the inappropriateness of the word ‘delicious’, but he tells me there is no editing of the message. It has been approved by the homeworld and cannot be changed, either in content or in auditory qualities.
So they apologise, daily and loudly, and in languages that are probably made up.
Here’s what happened.
The first incursions of their scout drones bring exotic bacteria into the atmosphere. Nico tells me they are not even aware Earth is inhabited. Our communication is too simplistic for their minds, and our radio signals are apparently indistinguishable from background stellar noise. The bacteria kill humans in their thousands every day. Even the two-point-five standard deviations of the population that is immune succumbs to native pestilence. Society collapses pretty quickly.
When the gargantuan mother ships arrive, they cause so much disruption of the atmosphere that they accidentally kill off the survivors with extreme weather and noxious gases. It takes three months for them to realise that humans are sentient life, almost a year for them to figure out how to communicate with us.
Our consciousness is primitive to them.
My house in West Ealing crumbles under the force of an unholy hurricane. When the roof is blown away I see a sky of fluorescent green. I have the baby strapped to my chest because she couldn’t sleep. I never see what happens to Bea, but there is some kind of vacuum sucking the air out and I can’t breathe and I black out. I come to in darkness, the weight of the baby still on me, but cold, unbreathing.
Oh, Chelsea.
I black out again, and I see machines digging, retrieving, scanning. My neighbour is torn apart because the fuckers do not understand pain.
Chelsea is dead on my chest and I cannot find Bea.
By the time they understand how to keep humans alive, Me, Mr and Mrs Kelly, Katrina and Terry are all that’s left.
Best of British Science Fiction 2016 Page 27