Make Shift

by Gideon Lichfield

  The contact pointed at a giant, still kneeling with dignity, not disrepair. Newly arrived at the yard.

  Brishti’s breath hitched. She didn’t have to check the serial number tattooed on the giant’s arm. This body, given of god, once had a heart that had sat behind those open ribs, a heart who became her father, and christened her the soul. It was her body kneeling there in the rain. A retired mekha belonged to no one. She had as much right to it as salvagers and recyclers. Was it fixable? She would take that chance.

  Her contact held up two gloved fingers as a reminder. Two goats for a lead on one dead giant. Fair. Brishti nodded, tethering her horse to the broken limb of another mekha. She climbed into the giant’s ribs. Into the dank, dark chest. Her body remembered, traced the neural pathways of her father’s movements across the broken console. She could feel wind whistling through the giant’s body. Breath. Rain pattered on the broken glass of its chest. Of their chest. Brishti remembered her father’s heartbeat as she leaned her head on his chest, after he saved her. Her dear father, who had sacrificed his body for her, the body of his god. This body was no longer his. She understood that now, even if it had taken her a while.

  But her father had taught her well. The giant had a new heartbeat now.

  “Let me save you this time,” Brishti said.

  11

  Vaccine Season

  Hannu Rajaniemi

  THE SMALL AUTONOMOUS BOAT SKIPPED OVER THE GRAY WAVES. THE ENGINE howled in mid-air with each jump. Every jarring landing made Torsti taste the protein bar he’d had for breakfast. The overpowering fish smell in the boat didn’t help.

  For the thousandth time, he imagined what would happen when he arrived at his destination. He would jump out of the boat and run down the pier. His grandfather’s lanky form would reach down and embrace him. One shared breath and it would be done. Torsti would never have to be afraid of losing him again.

  A cold spray on his face brought him back to the bucking boat. Jungfruholmen Island lay up ahead.

  It was early autumn. From a distance, the blazing leaves of the trees made it seem like the island was on fire. The boat sped past the granite wave-breakers that guarded it, toward wave-polished coral-hued cliffs crowned with twisted birch and pine. A familiar pier jutted out of the stony half-moon of a beach.

  In a few minutes, the boat bumped against the pier gently and came to a halt. Torsti climbed out carefully and secured his loaned vessel to a metal ring with a length of rope. There was no sign of Grandfather. The windows of the squat sauna building by the pier were dark. What if I am already too late? he thought. What if he is already dead?

  A path covered in rotting leaves and pine needles wound into a patch of trees, up the cliff and toward Grandfather’s cottage. Torsti followed it, shivering in the wind.

  The hiisi’s churn was just past the trees, in the middle of a large hollow. It was a gaping hole in the rock, fifteen feet in diameter. After a ten-foot drop, bottomless dark water lapped at the spiral-grooved walls. A stream of meltwater from a glacier had drilled it into the granite by rotating gravel, millions of years ago.

  Torsti’s stomach tied itself into a cold knot. He had been five years old when he first came to the island with his parents to celebrate vaccine season. On a summer evening, with the red smear of the sun on the horizon, Grandfather had brought him to see the churn. In hushed tones, the old man had told him that the churn was actually an ancient portal to the stars. If you threw a rock into the spiraling grooves in just the right way, alien machines activated and opened a wormhole to wherever in space and time you wanted to go. He had closed Torsti’s fingers around a stone and told him to try.

  Torsti had taken an eager step forward and looked into the churn. The vast depths had looked back, like the entire island was a monstrous eye and the churn its pupil, inhuman and black and fathomless, like Death itself. The stone had fallen from his hand and he had run away in tears. Even now, seven years later, he remembered the shame of it.

  And I remember you, the churn seemed to say. I haven’t changed. I am the past. I am the future. I’ll get you in the end.

  “No, you won’t,” Torsti muttered under his breath.

  Branches rustled, and his heart jumped. A tall figure loomed on the other side of the churn. It wore dark overalls, gloves, and some kind of helmet. In the shadows, its face looked skull-like.

  Then it stumbled on a pebble and set off a small avalanche into the depths of the churn. It let out a muffled curse in a familiar voice.

  “Perkele,” Grandfather swore. He was wearing a battered face shield over a cloth mask, but his bushy eyebrows were unmistakable.

  This is it, Torsti thought. He tried to will his legs to move, but the terror of the churn still held him in its grip.

  Grandfather raised a hand. “Don’t try to come any closer, boy,” he said. “I mean it.”

  Torsti stared at him helplessly. The old man huffed and adjusted his mask. This wasn’t going to work, he realized. The vaccine replicating in Torsti’s upper airways was engineered to be infectious, but just like the old Pandemic One virus it was based on, it still needed close contact to spread, especially outdoors.

  Very slowly, Torsti took half a step forward.

  “Stop right there,” Grandfather said, “or I’m going to run.” His voice was thin. It was hard to see his expression behind the mask and the plastic face shield, but his eyes were wide. He is afraid, Torsti thought. He has never been afraid of anything.

  “I’m going to rest here for just a moment,” Grandfather said. “You stay right there.” He sat down on a boulder and massaged his leg, not taking his eyes off Torsti. “Did your mother send you?”

  “No!” Torsti said. “Why are you dressed like that?”

  “Well, I think it should be obvious. I don’t want to catch your damn vaccine, that’s why.”

  “Why not?” That was the question that had been haunting Torsti for two years, ever since his mother had told him that they wouldn’t be visiting Grandfather during vaccine season anymore. He was surprised by how fierce his voice sounded. “Why did you stop talking to us? What did we do to you?”

  Grandfather ignored him and took a phone from his pocket. He tapped at the screen laboriously—typically, he hadn’t had the opto interface infection either, and had to use all his devices by hand.

  “Doesn’t look like you are shedding that much,” he muttered. “Thank goodness for kids’ immune systems.” Then he looked up, narrowing his eyes. “If your mother didn’t send you,” he said suspiciously, “then how did you get here?”

  This wasn’t the Grandfather Torsti remembered from the vaccine seasons past, the one who had played hide and seek with him and built a castle from sticks and pine cones in the secret grove on the eastern tip of the island. This was someone else.

  “I skipped school,” he said, swallowing back tears. “Then I took a train to Hanko. There was a fisherwoman Rnought introduced me to. She lent me her boat.”

  “Why on earth would somebody do that? Who the hell is this Rnought?”

  “It came out last year. It’s a serendipity AI to speed up vaccine spread. If you already caught the vaccine, it matches you up with people who want to be immunized and can help you with something, or the other way around.”

  One of the benefits of living in Helsinki was catching every new vaccine days or even weeks earlier than the rest of the country, and Torsti had gone to the big launch party at the Senate Square with his parents. And the new vaccine was so popular that the fisherwoman had jumped at the chance of helping Torsti get to Jungfruholmen, in exchange for a verified transmission.

  “Sending a twelve-year-old out to the sea on his own, just like that.” Grandfather said, shaking his head. “Everyone has gone mad. When I was your age, we couldn’t always trust the machines to save you. That’s what’s wrong with this world, it’s too safe.”

  “No, it’s not,” Torsti said. “It’s not safe. People still get old. People can still die.”


  “Unless they get this bloody vaccine, is that it? A vaccine against death?”

  It wasn’t a fix for death, not really. Torsti knew as much. But it was the next best thing. It was the last in the long series of vaccines the Global Immunity Foundation had been releasing for decades. Backed by a group of billionaires, they had invented transmissible vaccines to stop Pandemic One—a controversial move at the time, but necessary when more than half of Americans and countless others around the world had refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19. After an initial uproar, the Foundation had been hailed as heroes after they stopped Pandemic Two in its tracks, saving countless lives. In the two decades since, the Foundation’s vaccine releases had been coming out on a regular basis: first, updates against emerging coronaviruses, flu, dengue, pre-pandemic zoonotics. And eventually, protection from the big ones, non-transmissible diseases—heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.

  Now each vaccine release was a global event, a cause for celebration. At Senate Square, this one had rained down on a cheering, dancing crowd from dispersal drones amidst a bioluminescent fireworks display. Pre-infected choirs had sung it onto onlookers from the steps of the Helsinki Cathedral. The new vaccine was a senolytic: it trained your immune system to kill the zombie cells that accumulated in your body with aging. You wouldn’t live forever, but you would stay healthy much longer—no one knew how long. There were still mice alive from the first experiments, decades ago.

  Torsti had clinked glasses with Mom and Dad when their phone sequencers confirmed their infections—champagne for his parents, Pommac for him—and then hugged and kissed passersby, all in vaccine season masks—feathers, crowns, and horns, but always leaving the mouth and nose uncovered. And then, all of a sudden it was as if he was watching the revelers from behind a pane of glass, cold and distant. How could they celebrate when there were those who would be left behind?

  Like Grandfather.

  “Is that what this is about, Torsti? You don’t want me to die?” Grandfather asked.

  Torsti stared at him. Grandfather really didn’t understand. But maybe it was unfair to expect him to. Unlike Torsti, he hadn’t grown up with Mom coming home and talking about her job at the Long Reflection Committee. Over and over, she had explained what a special time this was in the human history. Things no longer hung in balance, existential threats—pandemics, bioterror, rogue AIs—had been overcome. It was time to look toward the deep future and decide humanity’s destiny.

  Torsti had loved it, and had devoured everything the Committee published that Mom let him read. He had even started contributing ideas to the Committee’s open simulations that mapped out possible futures, millions of years ahead. He had spent countless hours wandering through the virtual worlds, until his parents disabled his opto. And even then, his imagination kept going, conjuring images of things to come.

  GRANDFATHER DIDN’T REALIZE THAT THE VACCINE WAS JUST THE FIRST STEP. THE Committee scenarios were clear. If you extended your life by just a decade or two, the next set of longevity technologies would come along—not just to prevent aging but to restore youth—and so on. Longevity escape velocity, it was called. If you made it just a little bit further, you could travel to the stars, live as long as the universe itself.

  Grandfather was letting all that go, because he was mad at Mom, for some reason Torsti could not understand. And that made Torsti angry, angry enough to do desperate things.

  He opened his mouth to explain, but there were so many words that they just sat heavy in his chest, all jumbled up and stuck together, like a pile of twisted iron nails.

  “No,” he said, finally. “I want you to live.”

  “Well, that’s very touching,” Grandfather said, not understanding the difference. “But as you get older, you’ll understand that there are some decisions people have to make on their own. I have made mine, and I have to live—and die with them.” His voice broke, just for a moment. Then he continued in a harsher tone. “I don’t need a silly little boy coming here to take that away from me, just because he doesn’t understand how the world works.

  “Now, I’m going to send a message to your mother.” Grandfather tapped at his phone laboriously. “We have our differences, but I don’t want her worrying herself sick. I’ll take you back to the mainland in the morning. With two boats it should be safe. You can sleep in the guest bed in the sauna, I already set it up—I’ll disinfect it all afterwards. And here’s a bunch of surgical masks.” He set a small pile of flat blue objects on the rock next to him. “I want you to wear them.”

  He stood and started back up the path. “Come now. Since you’re here, you can help me chop some firewood. It gets cold at night.”

  “You knew I was coming,” Torsti said. “How?” He had left his phone at home, and the ubiquitous surveillance of the old days had been banned at the start of the Reflection.

  Grandfather shrugged.

  “You have to be prepared,” he said. “Your Mom messaged me and told me you had gone missing. We don’t talk much, but some things you always share with family. I called an old friend at the Foundation, asked for transmission data. They barcode the viruses, you know. They don’t talk about it, but you can actually trace the contacts with the phone sequencers. It is still so early in the season that you left a pretty clear trail.”

  He knew, Torsti thought. He didn’t have to let me come this far, he could have told Mom much earlier. He wanted me to come.

  He followed Grandfather up the path toward the main house, keeping a respectful distance. Fallen leaves whispered beneath his feet, and he breathed in their earthy smell.

  There was still hope.

  THEY WALKED AROUND THE MAIN HOUSE TO THE FIREWOOD SHED. GRANDFATHER hauled out an armful of logs to the chopping block, and then his phone rang. He twisted awkwardly, trying to get it out of his pocket. Torsti moved forward to help, then remembered himself. The old man let the wood clatter to the ground, swearing, and pulled the device out.

  “It’s your mother,” he said, frowning. He tapped it and held it up toward Torsti. “I think she just needs to see you are all right.”

  Mom and Dad peeked at Torsti from the tiny screen. Mom’s eyes were tired, and her chestnut hair clung to her head, unwashed. Dad had an arm around her shoulders, tugging at his braided beard as he always did when he was anxious.

  “Torsti,” Mom said. “I know I said you should have more adventures, but this is not what I meant.” She looked so small, so far away on the screen, so different from the full-sized opto projections he was used to.

  “I’m fine, Mom. I’m coming back tomorrow.” He glanced at Grandfather, who was holding the phone. The old man’s eyes were squeezed shut as he listened.

  “Tell . . . tell your grandfather thank you for me,” Mom said.

  “I will.”

  “Bring back some of that islander bread,” Dad said, a fake cheer in his voice. “We’ll see you soon.”

  “Can I talk to your grandfather a bit?” Mom said.

  Torsti nodded and waved.

  Grandfather walked away, holding the phone to his ear.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “No, it’s no trouble. Of course. You both take care now.”

  Grandfather ended the call, wiped the screen surface with a small alcohol pad and pocketed it. His face shield was clouded with steam. Sniffing, he swept his shirtsleeve across it.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s chop some firewood.”

  In practice, what it meant was that Torsti chopped the firewood, at Grandfather’s amused direction. The handle of the axe stung his hands with every blow, and more than once he ended up having a log stuck to the axe blade and then bashing it against the block, lifting the whole thing like a giant, clumsy hammer.

  “No, no, no,” the old man said. “There’s a trick to it.”

  “What is it?” Torsti asked, huffing. There was a painful blister in the middle of his left palm. The surgical mask he now wore was moist with his breath.

 
“You have to catch the edge,” Grandfather said. “You go with the grain of the wood. It’s pointless to fight against it. It should feel like the wood wants to split. Come on. Try again.”

  Torsti carefully positioned the birch log on the block and swung the axe. This time, he hit it just right, with the tip of the axe blade, and the log flew apart in two pieces effortlessly. He looked at it, surprised.

  “See?” Grandfather said. “That’s the problem with everybody, these days. They don’t know the tricks anymore.”

  Torsti looked at him. It felt strange to talk to someone wearing a mask that completely hid everything except the eyes. In a way, it felt more distant than seeing Mom on a screen. What is your trick, Grandfather? he wondered. Which way does your grain go?

  “Where did you learn that?” he asked carefully.

  “Well, now. It would have been in the time of Big Corona, back when your mother was little,” he said. “Not the virus, of course, not Pandemic One. The Coronal Mass Ejection Event, the solar flare. Nothing but wood to keep the heating going, back then. Had to learn quickly how to chop it.”

  “What was it like?” Torsti asked, starting to gather the split logs into a pile. He knew the facts, of course. A massive blast of charged particles from the Sun had slammed into the Earth’s magnetic field, frying every electric circuit. But it felt like this was something Grandfather wanted to talk about.

  The old man’s eyes were distant.

  “Oh, it was a mess. You had satellites falling from the sky. No Internet. No electricity for six months. It was worse than the Pandemics. At least then we had ways of talking to each other. The Big Corona really isolated everybody. It was in the middle of the winter, too. People hoarded firewood. Even now, I keep too much of it around. Not good for my carbon credits, but once you go through something like that, your habits change.”

  “I was in my forties. But it was only then that I learned how to be a grown-up. There is something about protecting your family that changes things. Not that anyone understands that, these days. After it was over, I made sure I prepared. Learned first aid, bought this place here, made sure we had canned food for years. Maybe I overdid the protecting with your mother a little bit, that’s why she grew up so wild. But you do what you have to do.”