Caligatha

by Matt Spire

  “You.”

  There's no landline anywhere to be seen.

  “Where's your phone?” she demands, shaking him again, checking his empty pockets, but he stays limp.

  She runs into the kitchen, tripping on garbage strewn across the floor.

  “What?” she yells at the floor, looking at the upside down pale, pulling at her hair. The trash has been thrown everywhere, like he was looking for something.

  Kicking everything out of her way, she returns to Jericho, yells his name.

  He says Lydia one syllable at a time, unmoving, eyes closed.

  “No, no, no, stay with me,” she pleads. “Don't go, don't go.”

  She shakes him harder, smacks his face.

  “Don't go, don't go.”

  She listens for breathing, hears nothing.

  Running out of the apartment, she starts banging on all the other doors, screaming “Somebody!” over and over, runs back into Jericho's apartment.

  “Don't go, don't go,” she sobs, pushing on his chest, then breathing into his mouth.

  “What the fuck!” Tears fall on her hands as she presses down. “What is going on?”

  Her arms give out and she collapses over him, wailing so hard her lungs feel like she’s drowning, then her whole body feels icy and numb, heavy.

  Hearing herself gasp for air, everything goes black.

  ***

  Lydia wakes to a faint ticking sound, dizzy.

  Her hands feel around. The familiar sheets of her bed are under her body. She's wearing a green sundress.

  She jerks up, frantic, disoriented. Her limbs are leaden, and it takes a moment to remember what happened.

  “No, no, no,” she hears herself say.

  Her room. Everything is the same.

  Except her window is open, and her summer floor fan is propped by the door, set on low and blowing warm air.

  She stands, her legs shaking, walks a tight circle.

  The pendant is gone from the mirror.

  “No, no, no,” she chants, her whole body quaking now, staring where it was hanging.

  She runs into the hall, into the closet, throws everything to the floor, and grabs a dusty shoebox.

  The pendant is inside, right where she'd found it.

  She crashes into the wall behind her, hands over her face.

  Over her rapid breathing, she hears a cough from down the hall.

  ***

  Emma taps the window on Lydia's open door, and Keene looks away.

  “Something's wrong,” he tells her. “Look.”

  “Everyone’s brainwaves are already scrambled,” she says. “Being impatient was not a good idea.”

  They stare at Lydia's heaving chest, her darting eyes.

  “Christ,” Emma says. “There's nothing we can do. Except–we can shut it down.”

  “We shouldn't have done this,” he says, standing. “She can't take it.”

  “That's up to her. She's already demonstrated that she's not anyone's slave, not Jericho's, not our's. Give her time.” Emma breathes deep. “There is good news. Before I saw the brainwaves, I was looking over a new signal we've detected. It's not just a duplicate of our own this time.”

  “People are alive?”

  “People are alive.” She smiles. “People are alive.”

  She lifts her tablet. “Our message is repeated, but it concludes with an original signal using frequency shifts to establish a binary system.”

  He looks at the screen, seeing only numbers.

  “These are coordinates.”

  ***

  “What's wrong, dear?” her father is asking.

  “Nothing,” she says, voice wavering as she walks down the stairs.

  Her father is alive. The pendant is unmoved. No sticky floor.

  She tosses receipts and the newspaper from the register counter, searching for her notebook. The last entry is dated May 4th.

  This can't be happening.

  In the kitchen, she leans over the sink, waiting for panic to overcome her, to purge itself from her weak body.

  Nothing happens. Her shallow breathing sounds hollow in the metal basin.

  Standing upright, she notices it's nighttime.

  “Okay,” she tells herself.

  Figure this out.

  She looks up the number for Blue Coral. A woman named Maggie answers, almost doesn't seem to know who Jericho is, then says with a laugh, “Oh, Jericho–he's almost never in.”

  She hangs up, turns off the open sign, and runs to his apartment. She pounds on the door but no one answers.

  Back at Eden's Vineyard, she paces around.

  Weren't Reuben and Jericho friends?–But if it's May, she wouldn't have his number on file. Reuben didn't start working in the store until, what, June or July?

  She tries hard to remember his phone number, but it's impossible.

  But she does remember his address. It was simple, the same as her birthday. 323. Perch Street.

  She runs all the way to the little townhouse, rings the bell, tells herself to calm down.

  A woman with curly brown hair answers, face flush from anger or crying.

  “Jericho,” she blurts out. “Reuben. Does Reuben know where Jericho is?”

  Her face hardens. “Are you his girlfriend?”

  Lydia tries to catch her breath, doesn't know what to say.

  “As far as this home is concerned, he can piss off for a while.”

  “Wait,” she gasps, catching the door. “Wait.”

  “Look, hun,” the woman says. “He's already ruined my daughters' birthday with his overdose. If that's news, I'm sorry to break it to you. It's late.”

  She pries the door from Lydia's grip, closing it.

  Lydia stares.

  This can't be happening. She's trapped.

  ***

  Lydia sits on the beach, contemplating her next move and watching the multitudes shop just past the pier, walking around with their food and trinkets.

  It's late now, past ten, but it's May, the height of Caligatha's busy season.

  She shouldn't have rushed in. She should have gotten more answers from Keene and Emma.

  All these people–what are they?

  What if she has to break into Jericho's apartment to find her way out? She's known nothing but a world of rules and consequences.

  If she resorts to violence, do these people feel pain? Besides, which are just like her?–if anyone is just like her, their real body a secret even from themselves–they can still feel pain. Very real pain, even if the scars won't be there when they wake up.

  Picking up a handful of sand, she watches the grains fall, drifting in and out of each other. Each is so real, so unique.

  Such extravagant effort for a lie.

  She throws the rest of the sand, angry, but it catches in the breeze and blows back at her.

  Her eyes begin to well up.

  So today is May 4th, six months before October. She remembers Emma's warning about everyone's brainwaves being scrambled every six months.

  The woman's words at Reuben's house, too, stick in her mind: “He's already ruined my daughters' birthday with his overdose.”

  But it doesn't make sense–he'd told her he'd been clean for a long time; it must have been longer than six months! Was it all a lie? And was that an overdose when she first arrived?

  Why build a world with such misery? Jericho was not happy–Caligatha itself seemed built to reinforce his unhappiness. Drugs, his miserable friendship with Reuben, his lonely detachment from the transitory crowds.

  No, it wasn't hard to picture him using drugs only six months before they met, and it wasn't hard to picture him using again. Jericho always seemed trapped in his own mind.

  Unable to escape his mind. What fucking irony.

  She brushes the sand off her dress, shivering.

  Six months. Bookended by overdoses.

  Looped.

  If she hadn't somehow left Caligatha and reentered in the middle of the
loop, would she even remember leaving?

  Until now, had they been doomed to repeat the same six months forever, never realizing it? How many times had she lived the same days? Made the same decisions again and again?

  Watching a family leave one of the beachside restaurants, parents walking hand in hand, she wonders what her father is doing.

  They pass a sign, a woman in sunglasses holding a margarita. GET LOST, it says.

  What a cruel, cruel, cruel world.

  “We are, Jericho,” she says aloud. “We are.”

  19

  Realm

  Keene is useless.

  Lydia's body has settled, but while Emma pores over endless technical information, he paces the ship.

  He really was, as he told Lydia, the luckiest man alive. If it wasn't for Emma, and Jericho's grace, he would not be alive.

  Still, stopping outside Jericho's door, he wonders what it's worth.

  “The mind is its own place,” he tells the door, “and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

  John Milton. Paradise Lost.

  There might be new truth to those words. He wonders how Jericho's heaven has turned out.

  Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, and yet a third of life is passed in sleep.

  Byron.

  All these things may well exist only in his own mind now.

  These snippets of literature describing ancient ways of life. Trapped in his mind. Fossilized.

  A living fossil.

  In a world where anything is possible, metaphor and truisms are quaint. The natural order has been turned on its head. Even if there are survivors below, the humanities are to be esteemed only in their context, like the Temple of Artemis or Nazca Lines to modern humans–incredibly complex, breathtaking, but little more than eroding monuments to long-gone, primitive, backbreaking efforts.

  Or maybe not.

  Jericho never had much of an opinion on the future. Everything was just a means to an end.

  “The way people are changing,” Keene had asked, “do you think they're in danger of losing their humanity?”

  At the time, the three of them would often meet in cafes or quiet bars, often Aurore. Emma and Jericho would discuss their work, while Keene was too entranced by the dizzying distortions in the world around them. Everything he knew and loved seemed to be like a candle burning at both ends, dying at the hands of technological change or dying much, much more literally.

  “I don't know,” is all Jericho said, pausing before sipping his scotch. “It's the big question.” But he had no interest in answering things like that anymore, he hadn't for a long time.

  “I guess,” Emma offered, “it depends–whether you see humanity's quest as one for survival, or one for perfection.”

  “Or happiness?” Keene asked, knowing Jericho didn't care about either perfection or survival, but he didn't take the bait.

  Survival. What a thought. If anything was immortal it was death itself. It wasn't for nothing they were orbiting Earth in a several-billion dollar time capsule.

  Nature abhors a vacuum.

  Aristotle.

  Keene has become the new Library of Alexandria. He and Jericho had discussed the importance of saving all that information, but it had to be put together so quickly.

  900 zettabytes of human history. Aside from Realm, Jericho said it was the largest chunk of the two yobibytes on board. And it had been amassed in two months' time.

  Keene still has no idea what that means.

  One of those conversations took place in Aurore, as usual, right before leaving. They'd escaped the accident early, once again working at lightning speed on one of the uninhabited Orkney Islands off Scotland.

  They sat at the same large rectangular table, its surface a mirror. “Let me know if you notice anything different,” Jericho had said of the restaurant, as though it somehow mattered amidst their sleepless nights. Unable to look away from his reflection on the table, Keene wondered why, more and more, they couldn't just talk in person now that they were finally all in one place. At least before, he’d understood the practical need; it had always only been he and Emma, or Jericho and Emma–there was always someone separated. But it was almost zero hour, and they were all together. And still in Realm.

  It was hard to focus on conversation, contemplating the ramifications of Realm. He remembers asking Jericho if those 900 zettabytes was everything–from Chaucer to Van Gogh to Miles Davis–but Jericho had dismissively informed him that the human brain itself stored “less than six terrabytes of data,” so yes, it was a lot. Seeing Keene still lost, Jericho said with a little more enthusiasm that the 900 zettabytes he'd allocated was equivalent to 300 million human brains worth of knowledge, so if those people he mentioned were important at all, “then yeah.”

  While Jericho and Emma talked, Keene had mulled it over. Math was Jericho and Emma's second language, not his. But the idea that all human history needed less storage space than Realm required didn't sit right. He knew the worth of human history couldn't be quantified, it wasn't just information, but he knew that Jericho would counter that Realm wasn't just information either.

  But he couldn't let it go.

  “If all human history is 300 million minds’ worth of information,” he finally asked, “and Realm is a whole...yobibyte...how many minds is that? What is the...worth of Realm, measured in human minds?”

  “It's pointless to measure it that way. It's like saying, 'How long is the Prime Meridian measured in snails?'”

  “I know,” Keene told him.

  “I guess I should leave metaphors to you. Just under half a trillion,” Jericho said casually, rubbing the lip of his empty tumbler. “That's more human brains worth of information than have ever even existed. But remember, you're talking human history. Realm requires a ton of information just to support a single species of grass effectively.”

  It was impossible to imagine. Every capable thought, idea, memory of every person that had ever lived–that's how much power Jericho wielded. That was the size of Jericho's world. And then some.

  “How much more?”

  “Twice, I guess. But I don't like giving numbers to abstract things like that. It's not black and white. Things like that are meant to grow, be organic.”

  At the time, Keene thought Jericho was speaking about the human mind being something beyond quantification.

  But maybe he meant Realm.

  Their server, a tall brunette woman, spotted Jericho's empty glass and whisked it off the table, and Jericho smiled at her politely.

  Even though she wasn't real.

  Even though it was all quantum logic. If none of them were in that restaurant, the server wouldn't exist until they returned.

  If Jericho returned tomorrow, and asked her how her evening was after they left, her response would be selected from a vast array of possibilities. Even if those possibilities were meant to “grow, be organic,” they only grew based on his interactions with her. Whatever response was the most compatible with Jericho's previous behavior would be chosen. Only by serving him again and again would she take on the illusion of being truly organic, ever more nuanced through their shared history.

  Keene stared him dead in the eyes.

  If Jericho was rude, she might act accordingly. If he flirted, she might reciprocate, or she might not. The appearance of chance, hinging on ever-finer nuance, was the magic.

  She might spontaneously wear her hair differently. She might paint her nails a different shade one day. Yes, she was kaleidoscopic.

  But unless it had been specifically scripted, or unless it was the result of a major chain reaction initiated by Jericho, that server would never start tearing up in the middle of taking his order, take a moment in the bathroom to assure herself she would get through the day in spite of an argument with a lover. She would never slip up beyond her usual margin of error, bring him the wrong drink because she was thinking about needing to repair a broken window at home.
/>   She might say these things happened, but only reflexively. Only if Jericho's interactions caused them to happen retroactively. Only if Jericho told her his window was broken, and she began to empathize, would she organically grow backwards, like a root, inventing a history she would have to permanently uphold. Then, her window would have broken last month, unless he'd been around to notice otherwise.

  Realm only grew backwards.

  Jericho watched her walk all the way to the bar, still smiling politely. Because she had been polite, and he wanted her to know he appreciated it.

  Keene didn't notice what was supposed to be different about Aurore that day.

  But something was different about Jericho.

  “You look good,” Keene told him. “Considering the stress. I've seen you worse. You look healthy.”

  Jericho finally looked away from the server. “We're almost there.”

  ***

  Lydia listens to birds' feet dancing on the rooftop. So many voices outside.

  I can't cry anymore, she tells herself.

  Laying on her bed, she knows this is it. The point of no return is coming.

  She couldn't find Jericho last night. The hospital said he was discharged. There was no response at his apartment. The girl, Maggie, at the front desk of the inn, again needed a moment to remember who he even was.

  She returned home. Thankfully, her father was asleep.

  But throughout the restless night, she realized what she had to do.

  She would try to find Jericho again. Then, failing that, an ejection point must have been at the hotel. Where else could it be? It's just a hunch, but that room he'd stopped to stare at–there was something strange in his eyes.

  She had to steel herself for whatever Jericho might do or say. And who knows what would happen at the hotel.

  But most of all for right now.

  Pulling on her clothes is readying for execution. Her last day alive, at least in the only world she's ever known.

  Make it good or make it bad. The choice is her's.

  She checks on her father. He's in better health, already awake.

  The pneumonia–his death–she can't stop thinking about it. She could stay, prevent it. She knows when it will happen.