Silverwood

by Betsy Streeter

  Somewhere in another time and place, a screen lights up with the news that this Tromindox has been lost and its portal confiscated. There will be angry words and perhaps a fist slammed down on the console, but there will also be many more Tromindox where that one came from.

  Kate Silverwood checks her watch, feels the side of her face to establish that she’s not bleeding, moves her jaw back and forth a couple of times, and heads up the stairs to find some more coffee. Time to go check on the kids.

  It is not a good feeling to be extinct, I can tell you that with absolute certainty.

  Extinction feels as if the world is saying to you, “I no longer have any use for your kind. Thanks for playing, you simply did not make the cut.” The ultimate insult.

  We, the Tromindox, know what that feels like, because we have been extinct. We did not like it.

  We went extinct because we made a strategic error. Our species had existed for millions and millions of years, occupying this Earth for as long as the sharks. The sharks showed up even before the dinosaurs did, so you know that is a very long time. You would think that we would be better at avoiding extinction with such a long and distinguished history behind us.

  Nature, it would seem, had different ideas.

  Every predator has their own special variety of prey. Different meals for different creatures, right? Diversity is the rule. We all fill our niche in the natural world.

  The Tromindox feed on brain activity. Brain waves. Mental energy. Brains generate a great deal of energy, you may know. They are quite similar to batteries. So, that is what we feed on. No, we are not zombies. We do not go around scooping brains out of people’s heads and eating them. That is stupid.

  It is a particularly complicated process to consume brain activity; you have to keep the battery running for a while to get the energy out of it, and it tends to be in use by some other animal. The other animal obviously does not wish to share it, any more than a gazelle wants to share its meat with a hyena.

  We Tromindox are shape shifters and mimics, like an octopus. We bend and twist our bodies and alter our coloring to match our surroundings. In one situation it may suit us to blend into the crowd on a city street, taking on a human appearance. At other times we might retreat into a crevice so as not to be seen at all. This is how we move amongst our prey.

  We use venom to immobilize our target, dissolve the body and consume the energy. It can take a long time, like a python consuming an antelope. If you are a human reading this, maybe that is not so pleasant to think about. But consider some of the unimpressive things you people eat. Fast food, for example. Don’t point fingers.

  I said that we had made an error. Perhaps that is too strong a word. We only adapted to the best prey available to us. It just turned out that this evolutionary adaptation presented some significant problems.

  We had gone along for millions of years feeding off animals that were, to be honest, not very smart. You’re not going to derive a lot of mental energy from a dinosaur, such as those enormous ones that stand around staring straight ahead and chewing leaves. Those creatures did not have a lot going on in the thinking department, no dinosaur was going to study physics or write a symphony. So they were not very efficient as a food source. It also took a lot of venom to paralyze one of those huge things, let me tell you. What a mess.

  Smarter dinosaurs came along, and that was an improvement. The velociraptors and other creatures like them had a lot more happening upstairs, and their brains generated a great deal more energy. So we adapted to this higher-quality prey. We developed the ability to shape parts of our bodies into claws and spikes, since these smarter animals were also a lot meaner, and faster. And so much more violent.

  Which brings us to the humans.

  When the human-like animals came along, it seemed an obvious choice to begin hunting them. Here were animals that did not possess big claws or teeth or tough hides like the velociraptors, yet the brains of these animals—these were some very powerful sources of energy. One kill, and you could be taken care of for weeks. It made perfect sense.

  So, the Tromindox species evolved, and after a few millennia humans had become our exclusive diet. No more dumb dinosaurs, no more squirrels or tiny-brained meals. We developed skills shifting our shape to look like, well, a pretty beat-up human, but acceptable. Humans are difficult to mimic, they come in such a vast number of variations. But we needed to move around amongst them without attracting attention. So we worked on our camouflage.

  What we did not count on, was that the humans would turn out to be so much more violent than those velociraptors, even without any claws. The humans invented weapons—a wide variety of weapons, in every shape and size. Humans talked to each other and made plans. In short, humans were very, very creative about how to kill things.

  Humans violently confront anything that they perceive as a threat. Take the example of wolves. Wolves have been shot almost out of existence because the farmers do not want wolves coming near their flocks of sheep. This is the humans’ response: to destroy enemies, utterly and completely. They even make sport out of it.

  We Tromindox thought we had discovered fleshy creatures with big brains that were honestly pretty easy to pick off. But there was so much more to them than that.

  When a gazelle disappears or dies, the rest of the herd moves on before too long. But when something happens to a human, it can seem as if the whole species gets involved and doesn’t stop until whatever or whoever is responsible has been wiped from the face of the Earth.

  This is even (or especially) true of humans when they are threatened by other humans.

  We thoroughly, tragically, underestimated the willingness of human beings to hunt down and kill things.

  And they kept getting better and better at it, too. They used their weapons on their own prey, and on each other; they really got to be pros at killing everything. And the Tromindox of course were a prime target, being the only species that eats humans. Except for polar bears.

  I guess we should be happy that humans did not start making soup out of us, like they did with the sharks.

  A few hundred years ago, the humans pushed us to extinction. Our entire species had collapsed until it consisted of only a single female. She had taken refuge in an underground cave, and was waiting to die. When there is only one of your kind left, as any biology teacher will inform you, your days as part of the natural world are numbered.

  But then, something miraculous occurred. Our one remaining ancestor pulled herself out of the ground, and out of time and space, and out of extinction. The details remain elusive, but we do know that with the aid of objects called portals, she learned that the future held an absolutely enormous population of humans—billions and billions of them. She knew that if the Tromindox could get there, we had a chance.

  That is all anyone wants, right? A chance at a future?

  This ingenious ancestor of ours acquired some Tromindox DNA and got to work. Soon she had a small group of hunters cloned up. And she set them loose in the future.

  In the present day our population remains rather small, but we have learned our lesson. We must be a great deal more subtle in our human-hunting methods. No more dramatic killings out in the open for us, no sir. You will never see Tromindox on any nature special. We get in, make a kill, get out. It is best if most humans are unaware that we still exist at all.

  Some humans, using their sizable brains, have caught on to our little time-traveling scheme (to be fair, this is probably in part because rumor has it our ancestor stole the portals from humans to begin with). So these days we Tromindox have to be vigilant—always on the lookout for human agents and bounty hunters. They have become skilled in spotting us, and, to their credit, they don’t raise the alarm so as not to panic the entire human population. But as long as we can stay one step ahead of the humans, we will survive and even thrive. The worst they can do is unplug us from our portals and send us through time, back to where we came from. But if they get too goo
d at it and we can’t get to our prey, we will find ourselves starving out of existence somewhere in the distant past. Again. So we track the humans and their agents and bounty hunters, they track us. Cat and mouse. Human and Tromindox.

  And now, we continue to rebuild our race from scratch. Maybe we are as creative as those humans. Time will tell.

  “Helen?” Henry says.

  He waits.

  His sister sits in one of the lawn chairs, hunched over a thick science fiction paperback with her long, straight hair forming a curtain on either side of the pages. The dingy, fourth-floor apartment resembles a miniature model of a city made from cardboard boxes surrounding a central park of lawn chairs serving as living room furniture. Most of these boxes will stay where they are until it is time to move again. Soda cans and wrappers lie around her on the floor, mixed in with bits of wire, lightbulbs, and what is left of a toaster.

  “Helen?”

  “What, Henry.”

  “I’m done with my homework.” Henry pushes his mop of white-blond hair—the same color has his mother’s, and the opposite of his sister’s—off his forehead.

  “Right… oh, right. Okay.” Helen folds down a page and shuts her book. She sets it on the box/coffee table in front of her and looks up.

  “You said we could see what that thingy does. When I’m done. Which, I’m done. Now. So can we do that… now?” Henry says.

  When you are nine years old, there is now, and then there is not now. And things are supposed to happen now. Henry shuffles his feet.

  There’s a box in the bedroom, not cardboard like the others, but a black box with a metal handle and substantial hinges on it. It’s heavy, the kind of thing you would use to carry equipment for a rock band or maybe a stash of weapons. This is where they found the thingy to which Henry is referring.

  “Okay,” Helen says. “Let’s do this.”

  Henry runs to the bedroom, jumping over Clarence, the useless retriever dog parked in the doorway, and Helen can hear the latches popping open on the black box. He returns a moment later, thingy in hand. Henry holds the fascinating item out in front of him, head tilted, turning it this way and that.

  The thingy is a small square device, about the size of a palm, with a screen on one side, a single button and a single slot. It’s beat up, like it’s made out of cheap plastic and it’s been banging around in somebody’s pocket. Probably their mom’s pocket. But she and her pocket are not here, she’s at work, and that presents the opportunity to find out what the thingy does.

  “Henry, you have to give it here,” Helen says.

  “I want to do it.”

  “You can’t. What if it does something… bad. Or, weird. Besides, I have the other piece, remember? The piece we found last time? Give it to me.”

  Reluctantly, Henry hands over the device. Helen reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small coin with a hole in the middle and a few symbols stamped into it. She holds it up, and peers through the hole at her brother.

  “Okay,” Henry says, hopping back and forth, his eyes shifting anxiously from coin to device and back again.

  Helen takes the coin and slides it part way into the slot in the side of the device to see if it fits. She’s reluctant to push too hard, in case the coin gets stuck and they can’t get it back out. This might be a completely useless experiment; the coin might not go with the thingy at all. But it’s worth a try.

  The coin does fit the slot. Helen pushes it in halfway, and then she hears a click. She turns the device over in her hands. Its corners, the button, everything about it encode themselves in her mind.

  Henry can no longer contain himself. He grabs the device and shoves the coin the rest of the way in. The screen on the device lights up.

  “Henry!” Helen yells.

  They forget to argue, though, when the screen comes to life—first with static, and then with rows of characters and numbers, and then some more static, and then what looks like a map—it begins beeping, and some lines and circles appear on top of the map. It stops beeping.

  Henry takes a finger and touches the screen. The map moves a little bit. He moves the map a little more. “This is our building,” he says.

  Helen leans over to see. “Yeah, and that’s the building across the street. I wonder what those lines are.”

  All of a sudden a red band appears across the screen with the word: UNAUTHORIZED.

  “Woops,” Henry says. “I guess we need a password or something.”

  “Well, that’s not very exciting, is it?” Helen says. “Is that all it does? It’s a map? Maybe it does more than that. If I could get this back panel off… ” She runs her thumbnail along the back of the device, looking for somewhere to open it up.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Henry says. “You know you won’t get it put back together before mom gets home.”

  “You’re right,” Helen says. Too bad.

  “I found something else,” Henry says. He holds up a clear piece of plastic, the size and shape of a credit card. He grins.

  “Wow Henry, that’s really exciting. I bet you can see through it.” Helen doesn’t mean to discourage her brother, but this isn’t much to look at.

  “Nah,” Henry says. “Watch this.”

  He crosses the few feet from the living room to the kitchen and slaps the piece of plastic onto the front of the refrigerator. The card lights up and its surface fills with information: the make, the model, height, width, weight, and the contents of the appliance, which aren’t much, mainly some soda and frozen dinners and a hunk of really stinky cheese. The card doesn’t mention the cheese is stinky, but they know it is.

  Helen stands there, dumbfounded. “Wow,” she says. “That could be really useful.”

  “I know, check this out,” Henry says. He peels the card off the fridge and sticks it onto the toaster. Same thing happens. Make, model, how old the toaster is. Not much else, since a toaster doesn’t have a very interesting life.

  “Let me see that,” Helen says. Henry peels it off and hands it to her. She places it on the front cover of her science fiction book.

  The card lights up again and the book’s text scrolls across it. Helen pokes at the words and the card displays the author, the publisher, and other books the author has written. As Helen reads her hand comes to rest on the book. As if in response the card flashes window after window of information, now whizzing by so fast that she can no longer make out any words. Faster and faster. Helen lifts her hand off and the pictures and words slow down again.

  “Whoa,” Helen says.

  “Yeah,” Henry says. They sit opposite each other, staring down at the card between them. What sort of job requires this equipment? Is their mother a spy?

  Their heads shoot up at the sound of a deadbolt, and they to spring into action. Henry runs into the adjoining bedroom and dives under his covers, where he placed his pajamas earlier for the quickest possible access. Helen scoops up the wrappers and soda cans, and in one move she throws them away, hurdles over Clarence, tosses the card and the device back into the black box, closes it, hurdles back over Clarence, and heads for the lawn chair to assume a casual pose.

  With horror, Helen realizes they left the coin in the thingy. Dead giveaway. A second deadbolt opens—good thing there are so many. She hurdles the dog again, grabs the device, and tries to shake the coin out. It doesn’t budge. The third deadbolt slides open. Helen pushes the button on the side of the device, and miraculously the coin pops out. She stuffs it back into her pocket, puts the device back in the box, leaps over the dog one more time, and slides across the floor to land in the lawn chair which almost tips over as the door opens.

  When her mom comes in, Helen has her feet up on a box and is reading. She sticks in a bookmark and calmly rests the book on her lap.

  Kate slumps down in the chair opposite her daughter, swinging her feet up to rest on the box/building/footrest. She looks tired. She has a nasty bruise running along her jawline.

  “Hey mom,” Helen say
s.

  “Hi kid. Did you eat?” Kate asks her daughter.

  “Yeah mom, a couple hours ago. You?”

  “I had something on the way home. Is Henry in bed?”

  “He’s probably not asleep yet, if you want to say goodnight to him.” Helen assumes Henry has gotten himself put together in there.

  Kate pulls herself up out of the lawn chair and goes into the next room for a moment. Helen can hear their hushed voices and the sound of covers being rearranged and tucked in. When Kate returns she straightens the lawn chair before sitting back down. She leans forward and plucks a pile of unopened mail from the box/footrest, flips through it, sets it back down and leans back.

  “Henry says he drew me a picture and he’ll show me tomorrow.”

  “It’s pretty cool. He’s really good, you know.”

  “I know,” Kate says. “He’s a talented kid.”

  “He’s perceptive, too, mom. He doesn’t miss anything.”

  Kate pauses a moment. “No, I suppose he doesn’t.”

  “Mom… ”

  Kate takes a long breath. She knows her kids, how they are the same and different at once like branches of a tree. Helen is a natural adventurer, always finding the edges and venturing outside the lines, much the way her mother does. Kate and her daughter have always understood this about each other and their bond is strong but malleable. They are cut from the same cloth, with the same needs to maneuver and find their own way. Helen can sometimes display explosive emotions that remind Kate of Helen’s father. But Helen is also fiercely loyal and protective—particularly of Henry. She’s a rare mix of explorer and protector.

  Henry, on the other hand, Kate knows she’s cheating him. As the smallest, for a while he was along for the ride. An animated piece of luggage, like babies often are. But now, he’s nine. And he’s wicked smart. And talented. Kate looks at what Henry puts down on paper, and she knows that she’s dealing with a child with a powerful vision. He takes in a thousand times more information than anyone else does, and sometimes she can see it overwhelming him in waves. Moving their family around all the time, and making vague excuses about why, just isn’t going to work any more. Especially for Henry.