Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

  And it felt…familiar. Murder wasn’t meth, not exactly, but it brought back the old buried joy, the bliss when I’d scored enough to last me through the whole weekend, the ecstasy before the first hit, when my head was still full of perfect scenarios, the thousands of sexual partners and the endless dance floor hours and the loud howling down late-night residential streets. I looked at Aarav and I felt alive in a way I’d spent years trying not to feel. Except that now there was no reason not to. No Trevor telling me to stop. No police waiting to arrest me for possession or prostitution.

  Because what else did I have? After all I’d lost, here, at last, was something I could do. Something I could control.

  What are the odds, I thought, but I knew the odds, could do them in my head, math had always been my strong suit, back when math mattered—two thirds of the city’s population made it out alive, half of them ended up in a camp, and there were four possible camps. So, approximately an 8.33% chance that we’d both survive, both have nowhere else to go because our nearest relatives lived too far away for the perilous land trek, and he would end up in the same camp as me.

  Shouts, from a corner of the tent. Kids fighting over the radio. Music came and went, replaced by a tired-sounding woman reading bad news. Beside me, a bandaged man read a newspaper whose front page sported a particularly gnarly spider woman kaiju.

  I thought of hiding from Aarav. Keep my distance, bide my time while I concocted some spectacular revenge.

  But why should I hide? He didn’t know that I knew. That I’d seen. The next morning, over coffee and complaints of hangovers, he and Trevor certainly hadn’t said anything about it.

  And neither had I. Not that day, and not the next. I waited. Heart and mind breaking from the stress of wondering when it would happen, when Trevor would tell me it was over, he’d found someone new, he was tired of my weakness and my damage.

  Five days later, when it was clear that he wouldn’t be bringing it up, I resolved to bring it up myself. My nerve failed at dinner, that night, but the next day, surely—

  The next day Trevor died in the ring of radioactive fire that took out a third of us.

  So: I would not hide. I moved closer. Aarav’s arms, like mine, were taut and muscular from running the hand-cranked generators that powered the radio, the medical equipment, batteries for approved non-networkable electronic devices.

  Somebody ate the bacon off his plate, and I saw that Aarav was blind.

  The first kaiju assault was an accident. A faulty German software update rolled out in select markets; conflicting code in a bloated proprietary phone manufacturer operating system; aggregative commands accidentally exploiting field-control backdoors to cause polymer to seek out polymer. No shape, no animating intelligence, just an ever-increasing plasticine blob of horror that bored through walls, crushed buildings, leveled streets until it had assimilated every shred of shape-memory polymer animated by the same operating system and come to a sated stop. At which point forty German cities were mostly gone.

  After that, everything happened so fast. Four hundred million tons of styrene polymers in active use worldwide. The software update in question was easy to copy, change, twist.

  “Aarav!” I said, standing over him, enjoying several milliseconds of him smiling and looking confused and ashamed.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, gesturing to his sunglasses. “I’m—”

  “Otto!” I said, and took his hand. “Otto Trask? You stayed—”

  “Otto!” He cried, his mouth a trembling crooked rhombus of happiness, his face darkening like he was about to cry. No flicker of shame, no hint of guilt. He stood and hugged me, hard. “Is Trevor…”

  “No,” I said. “Probably the same blast that took your eyesight.”

  Aarav hugged me harder. He smelled good. I hated him worse for it.

  “And Vashti?”

  It took him so long to answer me. “Gone too. Where were you, when it happened?”

  “Home. Writing.” In the room where you fucked my boyfriend.

  Leaves had piled up at our feet. The forest smelled sharp and smoky. I smiled for what felt like the first time. When Trevor died, all my anger at him turned on myself. I’d been such a bad boyfriend. I’d been so hungry. He’d been smart enough to see it. My fault, that he’d fucked Aarav. My hunger.

  One week after Germany, Ukrainian resistance fighters gave six hundred thousand dollars to the nineteen-year-old kid who came in third on the second season of Polymer Kaiju Prime, a crowd favorite with a twelve-foot-tall version of a certain famous Japanese movie monster. He gave them a flash drive with his monster’s schematics on it. Then they pegged it to a more aggressive form of the aggregative software and added in a remote control. The next day the residents of Russia’s two largest cities found that something was compelling their polymers to move on their own, heading straight for the nearest storm drain or toilet. Breaking through whatever they used to try to contain them. That evening, two four-hundred-foot-tall clear Godzillas rose out of the Moskva and Neva Rivers. They couldn’t breathe fire, back then, but they didn’t really need to. Helicopters dropped bombs on one of them, and they did almost as much damage as the monster did. The monster’s polymer fragments re-assembled and she continued on her merry way.

  “What’s your plan?” Aarav asked, his hand holding mine, with no lust or lewdness this time, just fear and hunger and loneliness and need, and I smiled, at it, at his weakness, at the knowledge of how I could use it to destroy him.

  “Watch my money dwindle. Pick up odd jobs where I can.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”

  Dogs barked. So many people in the camp had dogs. A gunshot in the distance: upstate boys hunting deer, like this was any other autumn, which for them it pretty much was. Girls in leather and camouflage swapped packages. Black marketeers, officially tolerated because they filled in the gaps that the under-resourced camp administration couldn’t.

  Corporations, governments, out-of-power political parties, local militias—everybody started building their own monsters. People stockpiled polymer. Nations took steps to ban or destroy it. When the mayor of Quezon City ordered wholesale surrender from his own citizens, the subsequent stockpile was stolen by—or possibly sold to—a street gang, who made a handful of mid-sized monsters and used them to break their members out of several prisons.

  Old hierarchies of power were inverted. Mighty nations were powerless to stop the rogue kaiju of terror cells and coder collectives. But we were being melodramatic, when we called it an apocalypse. Only a few big cities had been hit. Most kaiju dust-ups took place in geopolitical hot spots, contested spaces where conventional violence had been powerless to rupture the status quo: Kashmir, Tibet, Chiapas, the Northwest Passage, the Diaoyu Islands, Jerusalem. The North Cali/South Cali border. Easy to see them as monsters, to look in their eyes and see a malevolent intelligence, but they were still just machines, masterpieces of programming, doing what humans had programmed them to do.

  “You have people who know you’re here?”

  He shrugged. “Supposedly they keep people informed. But most of my people are in big cities, and who the fuck knows what’s really going on there?”

  Every day now was chillier than the one before. New York fell in late March, and we’d been blessed with warm weather ever since. Almost October, now, and I felt it in my tightening testicles: the fear of winter, the stripped-down human animal whimpering in the wind.

  I shut my eyes and I could see it, as it had been in the thousands of photos that people had taken and shared in the instants before they died. A three-headed white wolf, forty stories tall. Flames spiraling in the ruins at its feet. Stomach aglow in the dusk, burning brighter as its auto-generated nuclear reactor went critical.

  “You know what I miss most?” he said. “About New York?”

  “Getting stuck behind slow people on the subway escalator?”

  He chuckled. “No. Worse.”

  “The thoroughly-reasona
ble rents?”

  “Shake Shack.”

  “Fucking tourist.”

  “I know!” he said, and laughed. “I’m sorry, I love a milkshake. It was my guilty pleasure. I’d only go late at night, when I was by myself, so no one would know.”

  “It’s a damn shame,” I said. “You became a New Yorker just in time to lose the city forever.”

  His laughing lowered, and wobbled, and somewhere along the way it became crying.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve just been so lonely. You can’t imagine.”

  “I think I can,” I said.

  “It’s so good to find you again.”

  “Likewise,” I said, and meant it, my smile sincere, because here, finally, was something I could do, even if that something was murder.

  I hugged him. He hugged me back, hard, grateful; blind, as Trevor had never been, to the wickedness inside my head.

  I took in the scene around us, assessing my options. Looking for ways to make it look like an accident. Forest brightening with fall. The high cliffs above the Mohawk River.

  Those. Those would do.

  “Now you wouldn’t happen to have a stash of real coffee squirreled away somewhere, would you?”

  I laughed. “I wish.”

  I didn’t do it just then. I could have. If I asked him, “Wanna go for a stroll,” promised him a blowjob or a cask of Amontillado, he’d have taken my hand and followed me anywhere. But I wasn’t ready. Had to plan. Write my lines. Rehearse.

  And besides. We were in the crowded dining tent. People had seen us. Security in the camps was minimal, practically non-existent, but in the remote chance that his water-logged body turned up not far from here, was traced back to the camp, and someone came looking, I didn’t want to be the last person seen with him.

  That’s what I told myself, anyway. That I was being smart. Not weak. Not hesitant. Not waiting for a way to talk myself out of it.

  Not wrestling with myself over how badly I still wanted him.

  “I gotta go,” I said. “It’s my shift at the hand-cranks.”

  “Okay,” he said, looking crestfallen.

  “Shift ends when the sun sets,” I said, squeezing his shoulder.

  “I’m in Tent 57!” he called, and I heard him, and I did not respond.

  I didn’t have a hand-crank shift. I scouted the location, the bluff where I’d bring him. I practiced what I would say.

  I didn’t think about Trevor.

  Every day, I thought about Trevor. Too-good-for-me Trevor. Comforting myself with the knowledge that I never did a single one of the awful things he’d always been expecting me to do.

  I found the spot. I mapped out our steps. I waited until everyone had gone to dinner, and Aarav remained, alone in Tent 57, waiting for my return, like I knew he’d be.

  “Wanna go for a stroll?” I asked, and watched him brighten.

  Is this me? I wondered, while we strolled. Am I capable of this?

  We walked between the trees. Leaves fell all around. None struck us. He was not as sexy as he’d been that night. He’d lost heft, and confidence. But I could feel his heat when we walked together. Smell his body. Feel myself stiffen.

  And why shouldn’t I have him? Before I murdered him? I had denied myself this pleasure, before, for love, for stability, for the sake of my happy home, and look where that had gotten me. I had been so good.

  When we got to the cliff, when we stood at its edge and only I could see how close he was to doom, I grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him into a kiss.

  It lasted a long time. But it didn’t last long enough. Because when it was over he said, “Why didn’t you say anything?”—and I knew, from the tremble in his voice, exactly what he was talking about, but of course I had to say:

  “Say anything about what?”

  “About what you saw. That night. Me and Trevor.”

  “You knew?” I said, and the rage was back, grown to kaiju proportions, and my grip tightened on his shoulders, slid down to take hold of his biceps and squeezed to stop my arms from shaking. River wind roared up hungrily from far below.

  “Trevor heard you. Behind us. He told me later.”

  “Trevor? He…?”

  “He knew. Of course he knew.”

  He knew. Of course he knew.

  “I’m sorry,” Aarav said. “I can’t believe I did that. There’s no excuse. I’d had a lot to drink that night, and I woke up to him kissing me, and—”

  “Don’t,” I whispered. The wind stood still. The river went silent.

  “Shit,” he said. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  We were so close to the edge. The most effortless pivot of my hips was all it would take. So why couldn’t I move?

  “I called you,” he said. “The next day.”

  I said “Liar,” but wasn’t sure if any sound came out at all.

  “I did. On your cell. Trevor answered. That’s how I know he knew you knew.”

  It wouldn’t have been the first time Trevor had taken a call meant for me and told them to go to hell, and purged the call from my cell phone log. Dealers, usually, but sometimes exes who he feared would pull me back into the life. And sometimes friends. “Aren’t you the chivalrous adulterer, making the gallant gesture of rubbing my nose in how you’d fucked—”

  “Otto, no,” he said, and there was a realness in his voice, a gravity, and I knew that he was going to tell me the truth, a truth I didn’t want to hear but could not escape. “I called to tell you that you deserved better. Better than Trevor.”

  “Stop,” I said, again. The wind was back, strong, screaming. My grip relaxed. Tears gathered.

  “What you two had, that wasn’t healthy. He was awf—”

  I dropped to my knees because it was the only thing I could think of. To stop him talking, to silence the wailing inside my head. I expertly unbuckled his belt. Because he was right, about Trevor, and I’d always known it, and I’d told myself I was wrong, that it was my weakness talking, my wickedness.

  “Up,” Aarav said, gruff and tender, pulling me off my knees. “Stand up.”

  Moments later I was up against a tree, arms embracing it, the bark rough and good against my face, his hips grinding against my backside. I felt him fatten, expand, and I had a ridiculous and irrational flashback: Vashti’s purple-flecked polymer. The little dance it did. How harmless it seemed. How small. How secure we all felt, in that too-warm living room.

  They add up, the tiny harmless things we harbor, the little guilts and baby sins, the crimes we think we only commit against ourselves. The indignities we suffer. The stories we tell ourselves about how wicked we are. Or how helpless. They can crush cities, raise seas.

  “You want it?” he asked, poised to enter.

  “I want it,” I said, because I did, I wanted, because all I was was wanting, was hunger. But hunger is no crime. And I was no monster.

  A low rumble shook the air. I turned my head, looked up. The moon was full, illuminating the winter cloud cover. But something was up there: silent, immense, jet black, like a wound in the bright sky. Something flew. High; so high. Far to the west of us. A manta ray kaiju; a flying polymer as big as the George Washington Bridge. Massive fin-wings propelled it through the sky with slow majestic strokes.

  “What is it?” Aarav asked, his breath hot in my ear.

  “Nothing,” I said, staring into the sky. The monster flew, free as any animal could ever be, and my heart soared with it. What was it doing? Where was it going? I watched it diminish into the distance, moving leisurely for all its speed, like a lifted burden leaving me behind.

  UNCANNY VALLEY

  GREG EGAN

  1

  In a pause in the flow of images, it came to him that he’d been dreaming for a fathomless time and that he wished to stop. But when he tried to picture the scene that would greet him upon waking, his mind grabbed the question and ran with it, not so much changing the subject as summoning out of the darkness answers that he was sure had
long ago ceased to be correct. He remembered the bunk beds he and his brother had slept in until he was nine, with pieces of broken springs hanging down above him like tiny gray stalactites. The shade of his bedside reading lamp had been ringed with small, diamond-shaped holes; he would place his fingers over them and stare at the red light emerging through his flesh, until the heat from the globe became too much to bear.

  Later, in a room of his own, his bed had come with hollow metal posts whose plastic caps were easily removed, allowing him to toss in chewed pencil stubs, pins that had held newly bought school shirts elaborately folded around cardboard packaging, tacks that he’d bent out of shape with misaligned hammer blows while trying to form pictures in zinc on lumps of firewood, pieces of gravel that had made their way into his shoes, dried snot scraped from his handkerchief, and tiny, balled-up scraps of paper, each bearing a four- or five-word account of whatever seemed important at the time, building up a record of his life like a core sample slicing through geological strata, a find for future archaeologists far more exciting than any diary.

  But he could also recall a bleary-eyed, low-angle view of clothes strewn on the floor, in a bedsit apartment with no bed as such, just a foldout couch. That felt as remote as his childhood, but something pushed him to keep fleshing out the details of the room. There was a typewriter on a table. He could smell the ribbon, and he saw the box in which it had come, sitting on a shelf in a corner of a stationers, with white letters on a blue background, but the words they spelled out eluded him. He’d always hunted down the fully black ribbons, though most stores had only stocked black-and-red. Who could possibly need to type anything in red?

  Wiping his ink-stained fingers on a discarded page after a ribbon change, he knew the whole scene was an anachronism, and he tried to follow that insight up to the surface, like a diver pursuing a glimpse of the distant sun. But something weighed him down, anchoring him to the cold wooden chair in that unheated room, with a stack of blank paper to his right, a pile of finished sheets to his left, a wastebasket under the table. He urgently needed to think about the way the loop in the “e” became solid black sometimes, prompting him to clean all the typebars with an old T-shirt dampened with methylated spirits. If he didn’t think about it now, he was afraid that he might never have the chance to think of it again.