by Peter Watts
• • •
THERE WAS A BANSHEE RAGING through the foothills. It writhed with tornados; Anne and I had watched the whirling black tentacles tearing at the horizon before we’d fled underground. Tornados were impossible during the winter, we’d been assured just a year before. Yet here we were, huddling together as the world shook, and all our reinforcements might as well have been made of paper if one of those figments came calling.
Sex is instinctive at times like those. Jeopardy reduces us to automata; there is no room for love when the genes reassert themselves. Even pleasure is irrelevant. We were just another pair of mammals, trying to maximize our fitness before the other shoe dropped.
Afterwards, at least, we were still allowed to feel. We clung together, blind and invisible in the darkness, almost crushing each other with the weight of our own desperation. We couldn’t stop crying. I gave silent thanks that Jess had been trapped at daycare when the front came through. I wouldn’t have stood the strain of a brave facade that night.
After a while, Anne stopped shaking. She lay in my arms, sniffling quietly. Dim floaters of virtual light swarmed maddeningly at the edge of my vison.
“The gods have come back,” she said at last.
“Gods?” Anne was usually so bloody empirical.
“The old ones,” she said. “The Old Testament gods. The Greek pantheon. Thunderbolts and fire and brimstone. We thought we’d outgrown them, you know? We thought…” I felt a deep, trembling breath.
“I thought,” she continued. “I thought we didn’t need them any more. But we did. We fucked up so horribly on our own. There was nobody to keep us in line, and we trampled everything…”
I stroked her back. “Old news, Annie. You know we’ve cleaned things up. Hardly any cities allow gasoline any more, extinctions have levelled off. I even heard the other day that rainforest biomass increased last year.”
“That’s not us.” A sigh whispered across my cheek. “We’re no better than we ever were. We’re just afraid of a spanking. Like spoiled kids caught drawing naughty pictures on the walls.”
“Anne, we still don’t know for sure if the clouds are really alive. Even if they are, that doesn’t make them intelligent. Some people still say this is all just a weird side-effect of chemicals in the atmosphere.”
“We’re begging for mercy, Jon. That’s all we’re doing.”
We breathed against dark, distant roaring for a few moments.
“At least we’re doing something.” I said at last. “Maybe we’re not doing it for all the enlightened reasons we should be, but at least we’re cleaning up. That’s something.”
“Not enough,” she said. “We threw shit at something for centuries. How can a few prayers and sacrifices make it just go away and leave us alone? If it even exists. And if it does have any more brains than a flatworm. I guess you get the gods you deserve.”
I tried to think of something to say, some twig of false reassurance. But, as usual, I wasn’t fast enough. Anne picked herself up first:
“At least we’ve learned a little humility. And who knows? Maybe the gods will answer our prayers before Jess grows up…”
• • •
THEY DIDN’T. The experts tell us now that our supplications are on indefinite hold. We’re praying to something that shrouds the whole planet, after all. It takes time for such a huge system to assimilate new information, more time to react. The clouds don’t live by human clocks. We swarm like bacteria to them, doubling our numbers in an instant. How fast the response, from our microbial perspective? How long before the knee jerks? The experts mumble jargon among themselves and guess: decades. Maybe fifty years. This monster advancing on us now is answering a summons from the last century.
The sky screams down to fight with ghosts. It doesn’t see me. If it sees anything at all, it is only the afterimage of some insulting sore, decades old, that needs to be disinfected. I lean against the wind. Murky chaos sweeps across something I used to call property. The house recedes behind me. I don’t dare look but I know it must be kilometers away, and somehow I’m paralysed. This blind seething medusa claws its way towards me and its face covers the whole sky; how can I not look?
“Jessica…”
I can see her from the corner of my eye. With enormous effort, I move my head a little and she comes into focus. She is looking at the heavens, but her expression is not terrified or awed or even curious.
Slowly, smooth as an oiled machine, she lowers her eyes to earth and switches off the receiver. It hardly matters any more. The thunder is continuous, the wind is an incessant roar, the first hailstones are pelting down on us. If we stay out here we’ll be dead in two hours. Doesn’t she know it? Is this some sort of test, am I supposed to prove my love for her by facing down God like this?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe now’s the time. Maybe—
Jessica puts her hand on my knee. “Come on,” she says, like a parent. “Let’s go inside.”
• • •
I AM REMEMBERING THE LAST TIME I saw Anne. I have no choice; the moment traps me when I’m not looking, embeds me in a crosssection of time stopped dead when the lightning hit ten meters behind her:
The world is a flat mosaic in blinding black-and white, strobelit, motionless. Sheets of grey water are suspended in the act of slamming the earth. Anne is just out of reach, head down, her determination as clear as a kodalith snapshot in perfect focus: she is damn well going to make it to safety and she doesn’t care what gets in her way. And then the lightning implodes into darkness, the world jerks back into motion with a sound like Hiroshima and the stench of burning electricity, but my eyes are shut tight, still fixed on that receding instant. There is sudden pain, small fingernails gouging the flesh of my palm, and I know that Jessica has not closed her eyes, that she knows more of this moment than I can bear to. I pray, for the only time in my life I pray to the sky please let me be mistaken take someone else take me take the whole fucking city only please give her back I’m sorry I didn’t believe…
Forty or fifty years from now, according to some, it might hear that. Too late for Anne. Too late even for me.
• • •
IT’S STILL OUT THERE. Just passing through, it drums its fingers on the ground and all our reinforced talismans can barely keep it out.
Even here, in this underground sanctum, the walls are shaking.
It doesn’t scare me any more.
There was another time, long ago, when I wasn’t afraid. Back then the shapes in the sky were friendly; snow-covered mountains, magical kingdoms, once I even saw Anne up there. But now I only see something malign and hideous, ancient, something slow to anger and impossible to appease. In the thousands of years we spent watching the clouds, after all the visions and portents we read there, never once did we see the thing that was really looking back.
We see it now.
I wonder which epitaphs they’ll be reading tomorrow. What city is about to be shattered by impossible tornados, how many will die in this fresh onslaught of hailstones and broken glass? I don’t know. I don’t even care. That surprises me. Just a few days ago, I think it would have mattered. Now, even the realization that we are spared barely moves me to indifference.
Jess, how can you sleep through this? The wind tries to uproot us, bits of God’s brain bash themselves against our shelter, and somehow you can just curl up in the corner and block it out. You’re so much older than I am, Jess; you learned not to care years ago. Barely any of you shines out any more. Even the glimpses I catch only seem like old photographs, vague reminders of what you used to be. Do I really love you as much as I tell myself?
Maybe all I love is my own nostalgia.
I gave you a start, at least. I gave you a few soft years before things fell apart. But then the world split in two, and the part I can live in keeps shrinking. You slip so easily between both worlds; your whole generation is amphibious. Not mine. There’s nothing left I can offer you, you don’t need me at all. Before
long I’d have dragged you down with me.
I won’t let that happen. You’re half Anne, after all.
The maelstrom covers the sound of my final ascent. I wonder what Anne would think of me now. She’d disapprove, I guess. She was too much of a fighter to ever give up. I don’t think she had a suicidal thought in her whole life.
And suddenly, climbing the stairs, I realize that I can ask her right now if I want to. Anne is watching me from a far dark corner of the room, through weathered adolescent eyes opened to mere slits. Is she going to call me back? Is she going to berate me for giving in, say that she loves me? I hesitate. I open my mouth.
But she closes her eyes without a word. ■
Repeating the Past
WHAT YOU DID TO YOUR uncle’s grave was unforgivable. Your mother blamed herself, as always. You didn’t know what you were doing, she said. I could accept that when you traded the shofar I gave you for that eMotiv headset, perhaps, or even when you befriended those young toughs with the shaved heads and the filthy mouths. I would never have forgiven the swastika on your game pod but you are my daughter’s son, not mine. Maybe it was only adolescent rebellion. How could you know, after all? How could any child really know, here in 2017? Genocide is far too monstrous a thing for history books and grainy old photographs to convey. You were not there; you could never understand.
We told ourselves you were a good boy at heart, that it was ancient history to you, abstract and unreal. Both of us doctors, familiar with the sad stereo type of the self-loathing Jew, we talked ourselves into treating you like some kind of victim. And then the police brought you back from the cemetery and you looked at us with those dull, indifferent eyes, and I stopped making excuses. It wasn’t just your uncle’s grave. You were spitting on six million others, and you knew, and it meant nothing.
Your mother cried for hours. Hadn’t she shown you the old albums, the online archives, the family tree with so many branches hacked off mid-century? Hadn’t we both tried to tell you the stories? I tried to comfort her. An impossible task, I said, explaining Never Again to someone whose only knowledge of murder is the score he racks up playing Zombie Hunter all day …
And that was when I knew what to do.
I waited. A week, two, long enough to let you think I’d excused and forgiven as I always have. But I knew your weak spot. Nothing happens fast enough for you. These miraculous toys of yours— electrodes that read the emotions, take orders directly from the subconscious — they bore you now. You’ve seen the ads for Improved RealityTM: sensation planted directly into the brain! Throw away the goggles and earphones and the gloves, throw away the keys! Feel the breezes of fantasy worlds against your skin, smell the smoke of battle, taste the blood of your toy monsters, so easily killed! Immerse all your senses in the slaughter!
You were tired of playing with cartoons, and the new model wouldn’t be out for so very long. You jumped at my third option. You know, your mother’s working on something like that. It’s medical, of course, but it works the same way. She might even have some sensory samplers loaded for testing purposes.
Maybe, if you promise not to tell, we could sneak you in …
Retired, yes, but I never gave up my privileges. Almost two decades since I closed my practice but I still spend time in your mother’s lab, lend a hand now and then. I still marvel at her passion to know how the mind works, how it keeps breaking. She got that from me. I got it from Treblinka, when I was only half your age. I, too, grew up driven to fix broken souls — but the psychiatrist’s tools were such blunt things back then. Scalpels to open flesh, words and drugs to open minds. Our techniques had all the precision of a drunkard stomping on the floor, trying to move glasses on the bar with the vibrations of his boot.
These machines your mother has, though! Transcranial superconductors, deep-focus microwave emitters, Szpindel resonators! Specific pathways targeted, rewritten, erased completely! Their very names sound like incantations!
I cannot use them as she can. I know only the basics. I can’t implant sights or sounds, can’t create actual memories.
Not declarative ones, anyway.
But procedural memory? That I can do. The right frontal lobe, the hippocampus, basic fear and anxiety responses. The reptile is easily awakened. And you didn’t need the details. No need to remember my baby sister face-down like a pile of sticks in the mud. No need for the colour of the sky that day, as I stood frozen and fearful of some real monster’s notice should I go to her.
You didn’t need the actual lesson.
The moral would do.
Afterwards you sat up, confused, then disappointed, then resentful. “That was nothing! It didn’t even work!” I needed no machines to see into your head then. Senile old fart, doesn’t know half as much as he thinks. And as one day went by, and another, I began to fear you were right.
But then came the retching sounds from behind the bathroom door. All those hours hidden away in your room, your game pod abandoned in the living room. And then your mother came to me, eyes brimming with worry: never seen you like this, she said. Jumping at shadows. Not sleeping at night. This morning she found you throwing clothes into your back-pack — they’re coming, they’re coming, we gotta run — and when she asked who they were, you couldn’t tell her.
So here we are. You huddle in the corner, your eyes black begging holes that can’t stop moving, that see horrors in every shadow. Your fists bleed, nails gouging the palms. I remember, when I was your age. I cut myself to feel alive. Sometimes I still do. It never really stops.
Some day, your mother says, her machines will exorcise my demons. Doesn’t she understand what a terrible mistake that would be? Doesn’t history, once forgotten, repeat? Didn’t even the worst president in history admit that memories belong to everyone?
I say nothing to you. We know each other now, so much deeper than words.
I have made you wise, grandson. I have shown you the world.
Now I will help you to live with it. ■
Mayfly
“I HATE YOU.”
A four-year-old girl. A room as barren as a fishbowl.
“I hate you.”
Little fists, clenching: one of the cameras, set to motion-cap, zoomed on them automatically. Two others watched the adults, mother, father on opposite sides of the room. The machines watched the players: half a world away, Stavros watched the machines.
“I hate you I hate you I HATE you!”
The girl was screaming now, her face contorted in anger and anguish. There were tears at the edge of her eyes but they stayed there, never falling. Her parents shifted like nervous animals, scared of the anger, used to the outbursts but far from comfortable with them.
At least this time she was using words. Usually she just howled.
She leaned against the blanked window, fists pounding. The window took her assault like hard white rubber, denting slightly, then rebounding. One of the few things in the room that bounced back when she struck out; one less thing to break.
“Jeannie, hush….” Her mother reached out a hand. Her father, as usual, stood back, a mixture of anger and resentment and confusion on his face.
Stavros frowned. A veritable pillar of paralysis, that man. And then: They don’t deserve her.
The screaming child didn’t turn, her back a defiant slap at Kim and Andrew Goravec. Stavros had a better view: Jeannie’s face was just a few centimeters away from the southeast pickup. For all the pain it showed, for all the pain Jeannie had felt in the four short years of her physical life, those few tiny drops that never fell were the closest she ever came to crying.
“Make it clear,” she demanded, segueing abruptly from anger to petulance.
Kim Goravec shook her head. “Honey, we’d love to show you outside. Remember before, how much you liked it? But you have to promise not to scream at it all the time. You didn’t used to, honey, you—”
“Now!” Back to rage, the pure, white-hot anger of a small child.
The
pads on the wall panel were greasy from Jeannie’s repeated, sticky-fingered attempts to use them herself. Andrew flashed a begging look at his wife: Please, let’s just give her what she wants.
His wife was stronger. “Jeannie, we know it’s difficult —”
Jeannie turned to face the enemy. The north pickup got it all: the right hand rising to the mouth, the index finger going in. The defiant glare in those glistening, focused eyes.
Kim took a step forward. “Jean, honey, no!”
They were baby teeth, still, but sharp. They’d bitten to the bone before Mommy even got within touching distance. A red stain blossomed from Jeannie’s mouth, flowed down her chin like some perverted re-enactment of mealtime messes as a baby, and covered the lower half of her face in an instant. Above the gore, bright angry eyes said gotcha.
Without a sound Jeannie Goravec collapsed, eyes rolling back in her head as she pitched forward. Kim caught her just before her head hit the floor. “Oh God, Andy, she’s fainted, she’s in shock, she—”
Andrew didn’t move. One hand was buried in the pocket of his blazer, fiddling with something.
Stavros felt his mouth twitch. Is that a remote control in your pocket or are you just glad to—
Kim had the tube of liquid skin out, sprayed it onto Jeannie’s hand while cradling the child’s head in her lap. The bleeding slowed. After a moment Kim looked back at her husband, who was standing motionless and unhelpful against the wall. He had that look on his face, that giveaway look that Stavros was seeing so often these days.
“You turned her off,” Kim said, her voice rising. “After everything we’d agreed on, you still turned her off?!”
Andrew shrugged helplessly. “Kim…”
Kim refused to look at him. She rocked back and forth, tuneless breath whistling between her teeth, Jeannie’s head still in her lap. Kim and Andrew Goravec with their bundle of joy. Between them, the cable connecting Jeannie’s head to the server shivered on the floor like a disputed boundary.