The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  “You think you’re losing your mind,” Dana said while Fumiko tore off another chunk of rock with her pick. “But you’re not scared.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because it will happen regardless.” She rested the pick on her shoulder. Smiled at her. “And because I don’t mind it.”

  She did not fight the transformations. She let them come, and slipped through these concrete memories as she plowed through the crater, stopping only sometimes to enjoy the visions. The cherry blossom trees that sprouted through the walls of the staircase, coating the steps with their pink petals. The SeaTram windows that appeared along the carbon-steel corridors, affording glimpses into the Pacific waters of Old Earth, and the cities swallowed by its tide, while in her seat, a young girl took advantage of her mother’s absence and doodled the bucket beak and splayed wings of a pelican in her Handheld. The closer she got to the YonSefs, the more vivid and frequent the fractures became, until it was rare that she saw the base at all, and the last real things in her life were the tunnel, the taste of her meals, and the weight of the pick in her hand as the metal tooth tanged off the rock.

  * * *

  —

  The work was slow, but thorough. With the databanks they extracted from Stopwatch, the Umbai Company created a map of where Fumiko had perched her loyal birds. Vaila had access to their progress. She read up on which of the loyalists had been killed that day, and if she knew them. Many of the names she did not recognize, and she felt only a numbing weariness as the number climbed into the hundreds. These were not the deaths that weighed on her mind.

  When the Kerrigan Fleet Command informed her that Nia Imani had survived the encounter with the Euphrates, she smiled, thinking it was just like her former captain not to die. She paid the Kerrigan Command a small fortune to care for Nia and Sartoris, who were both at the time still locked inside their comas, adrift in their reconstitution pods aboard the Joplin, the fleet’s main cruiser; the two of them unaware that she, with her power as Custodian-Aerie, had their records absolved of any associations with Nakajima. In the bedroom of her hotel suite Vaila prayed on her ladeum beads, reciting the prayer of sustenance and health in their honor, aware that these small acts were only cotton balls for the gaping wound she had created, but not knowing what else to do with the guilt. These days of prayer were interspersed with her continued scramlining of the Joplin, checking in with the doctor to ask about the progress of their healing. But when the day came that they informed her of Nia’s awakening, she never called again, because they had asked her if she wanted to speak to the former captain, and Vaila was afraid that she would give in to temptation and say yes. There was no walking back what she had done.

  It was on that day that she stepped out onto the hotel balcony, and stood on the platform under the bright City Planet sun. She observed the perfect day—the vines that curled in pleasing loops along the railing, the tour ship that cut the emerald sky with its white contrail—and she knew there would be no better image to leave by. She stepped up to the railing.

  And she jumped.

  The drones caught her before she hit the ground, but still, it was nice to pretend for a few wind-rushing moments that it would end here, the ground so close before their suspension cables ensnared her, dislocating her arms. A bright, happy pain shot through her and made her gasp with laughter as the drones floated her back to the building proper, to the medics who waited in the lobby, the gurney already prepared, a placid smile on her lips while they brought her to the mental moderator, who, in an office designed so bland it was uncanny, told her that what she was feeling was normal, and that one could not simply erase years of Nakajima’s indoctrination. It was nothing they had not already told her before. She puttered around the curvaceous spaces of the clinic where the company suggested she should recuperate, dressed in a feather-soft evening robe and nothing on her feet, the polished floors warm enough to render slippers unnecessary. She did not speak to the other residents, her mind preoccupied by the salvager’s description of the Debby’s wreckage. The story of their final days was easy to piece together with the clues available; the funeral that must’ve occurred for Sonja and Em before their bodies were pushed out into space, and the long stretch of weeks as the doctor and the captain waited out the dwindling oxygen. Royvan’s corpse in the medica. The needle in his arm. And Nia, in the boy’s room, cloaked in his blanket, surrounded by his instruments and his music; a vision of Vaila’s own creation that she whipped herself with in the dark of her clinic bedroom as she prayed on her beads for the chance to take back the pain.

  And as she prayed, Fumiko suffered her own haunts. She was on her way up the stairs, headed for the kitchen to prepare lunch, when she felt the cold Icelandic winds blow through the door on Level 32. She opened it, and a chill crawled down her spine as she witnessed through the portal the last day she ever saw Dana.

  It was the year she was to leave on the Umbai Ark. Like Hart, she wanted to find some measure of reconciliation with Dana before the long sleep, but whatever words she planned to say were stopped in her throat when she arrived in Reykjavik and saw the ripe swell of Dana’s belly under the duffel coat. What she saw now was their meeting in the city park; the two of them seated on the lip of a stone fountain, watching a street dancer twirl on his head to the pulsing remix of Haydn scales, looking only at him and not at each other. Dana’s hand on the bump of her coat as she asked Fumiko, hesitantly, if there were any more seats on the Ark—if she could find it in her to use her influence with the company to procure three tickets. One for her, one for her wife, and one for the baby that would be arriving any day now. Watching them from the stairwell door, Fumiko’s hand gripped the handle tightly, remembering the impotence she had felt that day, the vague promise she had made to the only woman she had ever loved; how she didn’t even fight Umbai when they told her no, that Dana’s wife had affiliations with certain protest groups they found undesirable, and because of this, both Dana and her prospective child were compromised. She could have convinced them otherwise, wielded her influence like a sword and cut out a path, but she did not. She only nodded in assent and later told Dana she had tried, and listened over the Handheld as the woman with purple eyes was silent, for a minute, maybe two, before she thanked her anyway. Spelled by this memory, Fumiko did not move from the doorway until the other Dana appeared and guided her back to the substrata—her last chance to make amends.

  Vaila spent her days in the clinic by the windows that looked out into the courtyard, where an old prince massaged his grief into holographic sculptures on the verdant lawn. She felt a kinship with him as she observed his process; the intricate creations that he would delete just before the piece was finished, the hours of progress gone with a sad smile as he went back inside for his meal. She knew the immense catharsis of sweeping one’s hand across the table and destroying all that progress, for no reason greater, or lesser, than to stick a thumb in the eye of the one she loved—a shout so loud Fumiko would have no choice but to sit up and pay attention. But now she saw that the shout was in vain, and that there would be no response. Nothing to her name but a title, and a catalogue of regrets written in bold on the floors she walked, with no way to undo the deletion. She stayed in the clinic for a month before she decided there would be no peace gained there. On their last session together, she told the mental moderator what he wished to hear: that she knew that one day she would be fine with how the pieces had fallen. He smiled and told her that he believed she was on the verge of a breakthrough. By then the rumor had begun to spread—the labs had decoded the Acquisition’s properties, and would be presenting a prototype of the new technology in the coming year. A firestorm of anticipation on the Feed that she could not share in, the news only underlining for her the boy’s fate. She crawled into bed, the only place she could ever think to go, and with the aid of some meds, passed out—asleep, when Fumiko brought down
her pick, and finally, after all these months, completed the tunnel, and broke through the rock.

  She had expected more fanfare, for the reality distortions to reach their climax and present her with an orgy of spectacular visions as the people of her past congratulated her on a job well done. But there was only the small whistle of wind escaping into the hole she had made, and the stillness of the tunnel that stretched behind her. She attacked the opening with her pick until it was large enough to climb through, and she stumbled forth, leaning into the crevasse, lighting up the darkness with a torch. Nestled within this small pocket was the YonSef. It was of spare construction: a silver orb, with a port connected by wire to a briefcase terminal. She scrambled inside, the soles of her shoes cut on the sharp rock, and cradled the explosive device in her lap, stroking its smooth surface with her callused fingers.

  “You did it,” Dana said.

  “I did it,” she said, exhausted.

  It was a days-long process to siphon its volatile energies and route the jellied paste from the YonSef’s nut into the generator’s combustion vat; days of holding her breath, afraid that her hands would slip and blow away the progress before her success at week’s end—the heating elements in the floor vibrating again, the lights switching on, level by level, and power returning to the sole working console in the amphitheater, which booted up with a trill of piano keys.

  Stopwatch was awake.

  She entered the amphitheater, which to her spelled eyes was now the meeting room in Cybelus Chicago. It was the long table populated by coworkers and interns that she walked past, to the head of the room, where Hart waited by the console, pulling out a chair for her to sit. The room hushed, the eyes watching her as she accessed the public Feed; planetary news and gossip, and billions of multimedia entertainments, and, with the aid of the many back doors she had installed over the millennia that Umbai had never found, she learned of the death of her birds. She read aloud each of the names as her coworkers performed her emotions, the room flooded by their weeping. Their shouts to the ceiling of apology. And as they wept, Hart asked her quietly, “Do none still live?” and the weeping was stilled by fury when she discovered that only one did: Vaila Jenssen, promoted to Custodian-Aerie. Her hands went rictus while the coworkers brandished their chairs and attacked the walls and cracked the windows, the fluorescent lights above them flashing red from the betrayal—the anger curbed when she accessed the messenger log of Vaila’s neural and learned of the woman’s many rebuffed requests to visit this hijacked moon, and the plan materialized. The people quieted and sobered as, with some hours’ effort, she penetrated the new encryption systems and dove into the neural-network Friendly Messenger System. Sent out her clarion call.

  Message +1

  Vaila was still half-asleep, groaning as her left eyelid blinked blue, her neural flashing her an emergency update.

  Message +1

  She shifted. Winced the muscles around her eye to shut off the notification, cursing the assistant who messaged her about details she did not care about. She shunted the message aside, but it persisted, poking her until she deigned to lift the fold. Scowling in the dark, she sat up and stretched her neck—a pop—and opened it.

  She is alive.

  That was all the message said.

  In the attachment was a series of UCS coordinates. The message had come from a scrambled address. When she replied, requesting their identity, there was no response. It was once she input the coordinates in the schooner’s console, and learned that the numbers led to a remote moon beyond the boundaries of Allied Space, that her suspicions, her hope, were confirmed, and with trembling hands she prepared for her mission of redemption.

  Her plan was this: find Fumiko and, together, save the boy, thus earning her former captain’s forgiveness, or at the very least her begrudging neutrality. Re-create what she had destroyed. Rediscover a good night’s sleep. An unlikely outcome, but she needed to try anyway, because however unlikely it was, it was the only plan she had, and if there was anyone who could accomplish the impossible, it was Fumiko Nakajima. With steps light and urgent Vaila procured rations for the three-week fold and armed herself with the pistol that had taken Em’s life, should Fumiko prove resistant to listening to her. And then she visited a configurations shop. Had her hair cut short and dyed blond, and her irises sugared into purple confections, for when she met Fumiko again, and explained her actions, the reasons of the heart, she needed Fumiko to see it on her body: the mask that had warped her.

  She folded out of the system. For those three weeks of travel down the Gallant Current, she was understudy to her future self, practicing the speech of contempt and reconciliation she would deliver to Fumiko, at gun barrel’s end if need be. Fumiko, submissive for once in her life as Vaila would explain to her, in detail, the agony of being abandoned by her.

  Three weeks of rehearsal that were a year for Fumiko, which she spent unearthing the last of the YonSefs, a task made easier by the restored power, and the working drill that cleaved quickly through the rock.

  The isolation of the schooner sharpened Vaila’s mad resolve. She practiced her speech on the empty pilot’s chair, holding up her ladeum beads for emphasis when she told the empty chair how every prayer was for her, had always been for her. She shaped the cadence, the emphasis of choice words, like “betrayed” and “broken.” And when she was certain the speech was the rhetorical bullet she hoped it would be, she whispered the lines to herself as she ate her meals and sat on the cot with eyes focused on nothing, the words her new prayer as she thumbed each of the ladeum beads in turn.

  “What will you say to her?” Dana asked Fumiko.

  “Nothing,” she said, cradling the last of the YonSefs. “There is nothing left to say.”

  There were five orbs in total. It was enough to evaporate an ocean. She placed them into a stasis bag, and for the remaining months she had left, spent her time on the terrace, which was now a café. She sat with Dana at the table by the window and lived there, in her favorite of all the memories, when it was only the two of them, sheltered from the rain.

  That perfect week, years ago, which shaped Vaila in ways too numerous to account for—that was where she lived during that journey. That week she was Fumiko’s consort, and the joy she felt when Fumiko told her she was perfect, and the weightless quality of the Canopy Deck as they danced, twirling like flowers thrown from a balcony, only the two of them in that dome in the stars, as if Pelican had been built for them, and only them. And between the rehearsals of her speeches, she sat in her pilot’s chair and wondered if there would be another day like that.

  “Did any of them look like me?” Dana asked. “Your consorts?”

  “They resembled you. But none of them were you.”

  “But you still used them.” Dana shut her eyes. “She loved you, and you used her.”

  “I know,” Fumiko said quietly.

  “And you’re still going to go through with it?”

  Fumiko nodded. “It’s the safest option.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  And then the year was up. The schooner unfolded. With hands in the cat’s cradle Vaila guided the ship through the blue moon’s atmosphere, fire licking the viewport, her heart palpitating as she made her descent on the landing pad along the western rim of the crater. Fumiko sighed as she watched the landing through the screen of her console. The schooner’s feet thumped onto the pad. Beyond the viewport Vaila could hear the buffeting winds, and saw the frost that bloomed on the glass. Fumiko sprinted up the steps of the base, bounding over the roots of the cherry blossom trees. Vaila bundled herself in a thick coat and stepped down the schooner’s ramp, her teeth chattering, shivering from the cold, and the anticipation. Level ten, level nine, the numbers flying past Fumiko as she ascended. Blond hair whipped by the gale as Vaila sprinted for the elevator doors, and then, after the button let out an empty cl
ick, to the stairwell doors across the pad. Level three, level two. Vaila dragged the door open, was greeted by the backdraft of warm air—grinning now, her nerves alive with sparks—and she pulled her torch from her belt to light the darkened stairwell but had no time to click it on, for by then, the bullet had blown out the back of her head.

  * * *

  —

  Fumiko lowered the gun. She ran up the stairs and stepped into the wind, crouching over the body to make sure the woman was dead. She brushed aside her bangs, revealing the hole in the forehead. The false freckles. The eyes still open, the iris an unnatural shade of purple. With her thumb she rubbed the purple dye until it was gone, and saw that the truth was chestnut.

  “You were right,” Dana said. “She didn’t look like me at all.” She sighed. “She was much more beautiful.”