by IGMS
Water spread over the low land and rose up the sides of the hills, pushing everything before it. I felt drunk with the strength and wildness of it; never had I felt water as strong and scary as this.
And then the wave crested, slowed, and stopped. The water retreated. I held my boys as the water flowed away from us. We dropped down to a surface that had been scraped clean down to the dirt, and then I let go of myself and pulled back into human form.
Harrison and Gavin collapsed onto the ground, gasping, coughing, choking. Water. I had forgotten some people needed to breathe air. I knelt by my brother as he coughed up water.
Gavin turned over and threw up.
They were both alive.
Harrison gripped my hand.
"Thanks," he whispered.
"Thanks," I whispered back. I stroked his face, his hair. I had held him the way water holds you, tight and close, but it wasn't the same as being able to touch him with my hands. I turned to Gavin, ran my hand down his back. I had held him close too. There were others I hadn't held. I had been so selfish.
The water had been so huge.
Dad had told us more than once: just because we had power, that didn't make us gods. I had done what I could.
"What happened?" Gavin asked hoarsely. He tried to roll onto his back, and gave up.
Harrison's cheek heated under my hand. He was calling on his element to strengthen him. A moment later he sat up and took off his T-shirt. "Here, Edona." Until then I hadn't realized that I crouched beside them naked. I turned my back on them -- Gavin was still face down and hadn't really looked at me -- this was so small a matter in the face of the disaster, why was I even worried? -- I put on my brother's shirt and woke up to the world.
We had come to rest on the high school football field, half a mile inland, away from everywhere I usually went. I only knew where we were because the scoreboard and the goalposts still stood, though one leaned drunkenly. All around the playing field I could see fallen forest and scattered pieces of what used to be Guthrie. A VW bug sat upside down not ten feet from us. The school buildings were flattened piles of debris. Puddles lay everywhere. I sent my senses out to touch them; water still wetted everything and told me more than I could understand about what lay around us. Broken pieces of what used to be things, mostly, and ground salted and scraped.
I whimpered and hugged Harrison, frightened. What about Dad, Mama, the kids? Were they okay? Was there someone in the overturned car nearby? Water still seeped out of the almost-closed windows. Water --
I stood, went to look inside. Empty of everything but water. But farther down the field, I saw what might be a person, tangled in downed powerlines. He didn't move.
Harrison stood, stooped to help Gavin to his feet. "Oh, God," said Gavin. He staggered and almost fell until Harrison propped him up again. "What happened?"
"We had a tsunami," said Harrison. "We went through a tsunami."
I sniffled and rubbed my eyes. "Mama," I said.
"They're all right, Ee. You know they are. Dad's with them."
What could fire do against water? Well, Dad had a lot of oomph, and maybe they had gotten far enough away. Worse came to worst, he could have flown them out of there somehow, and Leila and Kala could help. We were so much better off than normal people.
Normal people. "Gavin," I said.
He looked at me, drowned caramel eyes and wet hair, bruises on his pale face from I didn't know what or when or where. Hadn't I held him safe? Not safe enough.
I said, "I couldn't help your folks or your sister. There wasn't time." My throat felt tight.
"Help?" he said. He shook his head and looked around. "Where -- what -- Mom . . ."
"He doesn't know, Ee," Harrison murmured to me, "and you don't need to tell him. Let's find some other people, get some news." He turned his head, stared ahead and behind. Every direction we looked, there was destruction. Where were we supposed to go?
"Inland," I said.
We went to what had been a road. Asphalt remained, littered with broken branches and the bones of houses, patio furniture, trash, long shiny leaves of yellow-brown kelp, kelp here where seawater shouldn't have come. All trash now. We walked around everything. I had no shoes. Harrison carried me when we encountered broken glass. After about five hundred feet we came to the high tide mark the wave had left. It was strange. Everything beyond looked just as it had earlier that morning. Trees still stood. The road lay warm and dry in the cool sunlight. Breeze whispered through the grass.
We walked toward the intact world. The road was warm under my feet. I held Harrison's hand; he had his arm around Gavin's shoulders. Gavin kept stumbling even though there was no longer anything to trip over. He veered, pulling us with him, this way and that across the dotted yellow center line of the road.
A police car came toward us, lights lit and whirling, sirens silent. It stopped. A man got out and asked us questions. I didn't answer, and neither did Gavin. I let his shock enter me. It seemed much easier to check out.
We sat side by side in the back of the police car, Harrison in the front, talking to the officer while he drove us away from Guthrie, asking questions, asking if the officer had seen our family, not explaining when the man asked why we had separated from them. I kept my hand on Gavin's knee, listened to the tides of his blood under his surface, closed my eyes and leaned back. I sensed the stutter of his systems, how shock pinched them, slowed the movement of things to where they could help. I didn't know how to talk to the water in him so it would help. I was afraid to try.
The ocean's joy in escaping its usual limits woke inside me, its absolute uncaring about what it killed. It surged through me. I sat with it. I let it wash out of me again. It came back.
I sat with that. This was a power of water, to overflow, to flood, to smash or carry everything before it. I had known the powers of touch, seep, flow, support, and drown. Now I knew more.
The officer spoke into his radio, talked to Harrison, who turned back and told me, "They're all right."
I let out a long sigh. Half of the chill in my heart thawed. I took Gavin's freezing hand and squeezed it, even though he didn't return the pressure. My family was all right, and that mattered more to me than Gavin's family, even though I thought it shouldn't.
They were all right, and I was full of memories of hunger and delight in destruction, and Gavin was deep in shock. When he woke up from it, if he ever did, his life would be a nightmare.
I glanced back through the rear window. We had gone around a bend in the road. Behind us, everything looked normal.
Inside me, everything had changed.
Nanoparticle Jive
by Tomas L. Martin
Artwork by Scott Altmann
The bouncer looked at me appraisingly as I reached the front of the club's queue. He scanned me with a handheld PDA, reading my social network information from the RFID in my earlobe. I prayed I'd got my reputation high enough to get in. This was my last chance to get my music heard.
The bouncer shook his head, and my heart sank.
"Sorry mate," he said, "one in one out."
I nodded glumly and retreated to the collection of clubbers who'd also been deemed unworthy of admittance. The club wasn't full. I just didn't have a high enough rep to be worthy.
I was still standing in the queue when Rachel walked straight in. I'd saved weeks of carbon credits to stand a chance of getting in to the best nightclub in town, and she swooped right in, as usual. I'd hate her, if she wasn't so gorgeous. Some people are popular for a reason.
Her reputation hovered around 94, wavering a few points as jealous and admiring members of the queue sent her positive and negative rep. One of only three girls in my university making the national charts, Rachel was the highest ranked person I knew. The bouncer ushered her in. I wondered if she'd remember me.
"Rachel!" I called.
Her hair flicked to one side as she looked at me and the rest of the poor saps waiting to get in. Then she flashed me a sm
ile and disappeared inside. I watched as my social network stats scrolled down the side of my sunglasses. My rep had spiked, gaining 5 points in a matter of moments as people stared at me incredulously. Why was Rachel smiling at me? Whatever the reason, the added respect boosted me past 70 for the first time in my life. The bouncer scanned down the queue and pointed me out.
"You," he said, pulling aside the rope. "Come on."
I sauntered into the club, watching my rep waver on the threshold and just holding as jealous people neg-repped me for getting in. Shrugging my coat off into the hands of the wardrobe girl, I skipped down the steps three at a time and swung onto the dance floor. It felt good to be away from the dreary laboratory where I spent my days, back to the world of music.
I'd made my rep, which even before Rachel's smile wasn't that bad, as a peer-to-peer DJ, in the hopes of getting attention for some of the music I made when I wasn't studying. But getting your songs into even the online charts was a Catch 22 - your rep had to be enough to get people to listen, but if they didn't listen, your rep stayed low. Hence my infiltration of the club scene. I needed to get enough people to like my DJing, so I could start throwing in my own songs. At this point any rep was good rep.
The club was known as "Emission," and for good reason. Whilst most of its competitors had had to tone down their lasers and sub-woofers, Emission relied on carbon credit donations from its party-goers to be as wasteful as things got before the crash. It was decadent and wasteful and borderline illegal, but that was mostly why people loved it so much.
I slipped between the dancers and flicked the DJ software in my clothing onto full. Two lists of songs scrolled down the inside of my glasses, one with the songs available to play, the other with the peer voting results of what to play next. There were different channels people could listen to in their earbuds, but no one did. It was all about what was cool enough to play on the main floor.
The club was in an old skool rock frame of mind, finishing up an old Kinks record as I came in, then slipping into the swirling guitars of "Love Spreads" by the Stone Roses. I scanned the list of upcoming tracks, impressed. This wasn't your usual group of predictable or non-cohesive peer DJs. In this club, people knew what they were talking about.
It still lacked a little ingenuity though. I specialised in setting up unexpected transitions, throwing in songs that work perfectly, but only my weird mind could make the connection. I loved the surprised delight on the faces of the dancers when I pulled it off. I flicked the cursor that was nestled on the ball of my thumb and threw a couple of songs onto the submissions pile. They immediately started leaping up the chart, sending rep my way. I'd need a lot more to risk putting my own tunes out there.
I smoothed the list to one side of my glasses and looked around the dance floor. This scene was pumping. It looked like any other club, bodies gyrating, conversations spilling out from the bar, sweat running down the walls and clusters of ravers throwing out their moves. My rep of 73 was one of the lowest here, despite being higher than pretty much everyone I knew.
The profiles above the heads of the partygoers on my sunglass screens listed a young person's guide to the stars. Football players with Premiership scholarships, makeup models, singers and DJs high on the local mp5 charts, a couple of Banksy-imitation graffiti artists making virtual murals inside the social network. The next track was one of my selections. The stacking crescendos of drums, synths and piano signalled the start of one of the new kickass tracks from ZeroCarbon.
The crowd started going wild. I grinned, and pinged a drinks order towards the bar, flipped another couple of songs onto the stack and wandered over to get my drink.
"You're a bit of a mysterious one, aren't you?" Rachel said, coming up behind me as I dunked the imported Southern Comfort down my throat. The expensive bourbon stuck in my throat as her hand rested on my shoulder. I hadn't spoken to her since fresher's-week three years ago, seven glorious days of partying when all reps had been equal and you could talk to anyone without worrying about whether you were cool enough.
"H-hi. I didn't think you remembered me," I said. In the corner of my vision I watched with excitement as my reputation climb another 2 points as people tried to make up for the huge gap between my and her numbers.
"Cute kid from freshers," she said, "Good taste in music, nice face. To be honest, I was disappointed I hadn't seen you in the scene till now."
I could feel myself reddening.
"Yeah . . ." I said. In front of her advances I felt claustrophobic, like the wall was going to fall in on me. Possibly laughing at me as it did so. "I was busy doing other things."
I didn't think she'd want to know that those things involved quantum physics, so I tried to look mysterious.
"So what's the deal, Brendan?" she asked me. "I mean, your DJ stuff is pretty cool, but your profile is practically empty."
"Well, it worked didn't it?" I said. "No one likes a tell-all."
I didn't tell her the reasons for my omissions - that whilst I wasn't failing uni I was stone broke, that my dad lost everything in the depression and now worked on a local produce farm in rented accommodation. That unless my grades improved massively, if I wanted company sponsorship I'd need to get their attention by reaching a social rep of 80. That I'd be kicked out and have to work on the farms like most of the rest of the country. That if I left uni my music would never get played. I just smiled and let those things go unsaid.
"Well," she said as the Underworld classic I'd lined up came cracking up over the speakers. "I guess you can pick your tunes, so that'll have to do. Hardly anyone around here has any taste. "
The floor was slick with sweat - you could pull off some great moonwalks and slides if you got into the mood and that fitted your profile. She led me into the central space where confident 85s danced with hungry 78s, a nuanced dance of class-based courtship like Cinderella's ball on acid.
The crowd parted for Rachel, and I followed in her wake, eyes flicking with amazement to my rep in the corner of my glasses as it clicked steadily upward. After eighteen months of university, working two part-time jobs and lurking on the outskirts of the social chart like that obscure indie band too esoteric to love, I'd made it. I was in.
Rachel beckoned over a nervous looking girl with a rep barely high enough to avoid being kicked out. Obviously living off people's favours, like me. The girl reached into her patchwork recycled jacket and brought out a pair of tablets and a nervous smile. Rachel grabbed the drugs, gave the girl a fake-enthusiastic kiss and turned away.
Her hands were cool, pressing one of the tablets into my palm. She tossed the other into her mouth and swallowed, eyes glistening with excitement.
"Do you like to get high, Brendan?" she asked me. Her hand brushed dangerously close to my thigh. I made a conscious decision and moved in to kiss her. The rest of the night was lost in a blur.
I awoke to the kind of headache usually reserved for aging rock stars, but it came with a grin on my face that no migraine could dispel. Luckily my fridge had noticed the many RFID-chipped bottles of beer disappearing from it during the course of the evening and chilled a can of Coke-Hangover for me. I stumbled around the kitchen, letting the paracetamol and stomach medicine in the Coke trickle down my throat. A kick of caffeine allowed me to concentrate on my glasses when I pulled them on.
The first surprise when I activated my social networking was the plethora of messages awaiting me. I scrolled through them, most asking to be friended or for me to go to some party or event. A couple asked if they could check out some of my tracks, which gave me a pretty good buzz. I replied with a message forwarding them to my last.fm page and made the link more prominent on my homepage.
The second surprise was a message from Rachel. It had no text, only a link to her phone's GPS and an animated gif of a sundial with the hour numbers removed. A red line was drawn some hours away from where the sun's shadow told the time. I smiled. Not just a pretty face. I grabbed a primer on sundials from the web and overlaid
the results onto the picture, working out that she wanted me to meet at 2.30, presumably wherever her GPS said she was at the time.
My social rating gave me a third surprise. Overnight my antics had shot me up into the mid-eighties and there they had stabilised like shares in a company with better than expected earnings. Pageviews on my music portfolio had shot up. Twenty people listened to one of my tracks as I watched. Had I finally made it?
My alarm clanged in my ears, filling the display overlaying my vision with a multitude of mechs from Japanese manga, shooting everything in sight. I dimly recalled hearing it more than once and counted the number of mechs. I was late for the other part of my double life.
I swore and grabbed my bag, pulled on the clothes piled in a corner by the fridge, nearly tripping as I pulled the shoes over my heels. I broke into a run towards campus, promising myself for the thousandth time to stop burning the candle at both ends.
I darted down the sidestreets, trying to avoid the streams of other students heading for class. Being seen rushing was not cool. My earpiece rang as I dashed along analleyway. I groaned.
"Mum," I said. "I can't really talk right now."
"Brendan, you always say that." Her voice was kind but softly reproaching. I knew I'd been neglecting my parents. Their farm just felt so far away.
"I'm sorry," I said, "I've just got a lot on. My final project, you know."
"How's it going?" she said. "Have you made any decisions about what you're going to do when you finish university?"
Not this again. Every conversation, the prospect of my future employment was front and centre.
"Mum, I really can't talk now, I'm late for class. I'll phone you later."
I hung up on her, feeling guilty for my rudeness. By the time I reached the security doors of the lab, thirty mechs were dancing on my glasses and my body was coated in sweat. I punched in the door code - the favourite physical constant of the department head - and darted into the Dynamic Holographic Assembler room before anyone could see me.