I finally made it to the station. The place was full of people, but they were all dead. The realization struck me as soon as I hit the entrance. I had no idea how to survive the stench long enough to reach the gate. The bodies were rotting and maggot-infested and so foul that even the rats let them be. I peeled off my T-shirt and wrapped it around my face. And then I ran. I ran over those bodies, their mushy mouldy pulp exploding under me. I slipped and fell, and my hands pushed against slimy intestines, exposing terrible bone. I gagged and cried as I slid, pulling myself forward through the gory slush.
When I reached the gate, I shut my eyes for that brief moment. Stinging tears, brought on by the stench, burned down my cheeks.
Sting Ray Barb had told me I’d land back with Mother and my children and that we’d all live happily ever after. That my lives would be united and that the circle of time would close.
But that meant one thing. That this post-sanitized world, this disgusting, unhygienic, filthy, disgusting mess was my future and the future world of my hapless children. Three and a half months from now, this would be all of our worlds.
No. I couldn’t live like this. And I couldn’t let my children live like this either. There was only one solution. I had to go back and kill them. Kill Mother and Bax and Sophie and then kill myself. Because nothing was worse than this revolting world. Nothing. I had never been so certain of anything in my life.
I held my wrist out. The gates opened, and through I went.
But when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in my house. I was in the rage room. “O Fortuna” was pounding, and sweat was dripping into my eyes. I smelled oil, plastic, and diesel. I held a hammer, and I was poised, mid-swing.
This was all wrong. I was supposed to be back in my house, back in the clean world where I’d be in control. What was going on?
I stood still, cold, oily sweat running down my body, which was odd since I didn’t remember even hitting anything or working up a sweat. I was filled with panic and claustrophobia. This was all wrong.
The music shut off abruptly, and I shrank against a wall, just to feel the reassuring solid support behind my back. My heart pounded in my ears and my breathing was shallow. Why was I here? I dropped the hammer, jumping at the sound as it hit the floor.
Hissing static and broken bits of audio stuttered into the room, and pixels flashed, forming a shimmering wall of light like a dying video card. Then, wham, a screen popped up in front of my face. But the technology wasn’t supposed to be working anymore. I reached out to touch the screen, and my hand shot through it as if I’d stuck my hand through a light projection. I pulled back, and Janaelle’s face appeared, wide-screen. My Janaelle! My heart leapt. She was back! But wait, she wasn’t real and besides, she’d fucked me over just like everyone else. I glared at her.
“Ah, Sharps,” she said, and she sounded sad. “The others didn’t think you deserved to know why you’re in this room, but I did. They thought you should be left here alone with the torment of confusion as your friend.”
“Yeah, I can hear Mother saying that,” I said, leaning in, just glad to see my Janaelle.
“But I just wanted to see you, so they let me have this time.”
“You aren’t real,” I said weakly.
“I’m as real as anything in your life, Sharps. Whatever we believe constitutes our reality. And our avatar selves, our online personas, they’re real, right? You were SmashingSablink007, and you really experienced all those things, didn’t you?”
It was true. I had real memories and emotions of those digital adventures. “But you were my invention,” I said. “You never chose Janaelle. You got that from me.”
“I did, yes. But I’ve been forty-eight other avatars with forty-eight other subjects and I never felt like any of them fit, or that I wanted to be with the subject. And I did fit with you. But you couldn’t love me as Noelle. And yet, of course, I still loved you. I fell in love with you the minute I saw you.”
My whole body was aching to hold the woman on the screen, avatar or not.
“I did love you,” she said. “I still love you. The others weren’t happy when I fell for you, but they said as long as it didn’t interfere with our bigger plans, that I could screw you until the cows came home. Look,” she said, and held up her wrist. “Your name tattooed onto me. I saw the man you could have been, should have been, maybe like that woman who married Ted Bundy or all those women who marry men on death row. Maybe I, like them, can’t handle anything except those kinds of relationships. And, if you need me to be Janaelle when I’m with you, then I’m okay with that. I mean, what’s really real anyway?”
But I wasn’t interested in her sob stories or pontifications. She was safe and sound while I was stuck in a box in outer space.
“Why am I here?” I asked. “Is this like Alterna Inferma? Do I need to reset the gadget?”
I looked at my wrist, at the visible rice-grain-sized lump and Janaelle laughed. “No, Sharps. The gadget was nothing more than a placebo to help you understand, or think you understand, how time travel worked.”
I sat down on the floor. “Then explain it to me,” I said. “C’mon, spill the rest of the beans. I don’t even think you can shock me anymore.”
She bit her lip. “I’ve thought about this so many times, how to tell you the truth. It’s all got to do with the deconstruction and reconstruction of atoms. You, me, everybody, everything, we’re all just atoms. So time travel is basically deconstruction at one point and reconstruction at another point, all determined by data.”
“I literally disintegrated. Oh my god.” Of course. It made perfect sense. “The pain, the nausea, the disorientation. The reconstruction. Oh my god! That’s why I saw my foot dissolving that time! Sting Ray Barb told me my head always had to go first, that I had to lean forward slightly, but I forgot and I stuck my foot out in front of me and I saw it pixelate and dissolve! I totally forgot about it until now.”
“You didn’t forget; we wiped you clean. But I felt you should know the truth so I reloaded that memory into your data.”
I jumped to my feet and punched her. At least, I tried to punch her. I swung at the air and knocked myself off balance.
“You bitch!” I yelled. “Who the fuck do you think you are, taking memories away or putting them back? How do I even know this conversation is real? Or anything? Maybe none of this happened. Maybe my whole fucking life never happened.”
“I’d be angry too,” she said, and she sounded like a Comfort Centre EmoBot, reciting scripted dialogue.
“Oh don’t insult me with your fake empathy,” I yelled. “You ripped me apart. You disintegrated me! You didn’t send me back the way I thought you were.” I took a deep breath. “I thought I was just going back in a straight line meanwhile you created a parallel universe with a different timeline.”
“Wrong. It’s all the same timeline, just different iterations. When you were sent back, a new timeline was created and when you returned, the timelines converged. Changes in the past reflect onto your present reality. So actually, the loop doesn’t need to be closed; it’s a closed loop to begin with. We just told you that to get you to this place, to make you do a final jump. There really is only ever one timeline.
“We’re all just information, Sharps. Atoms that make up information that make up our worlds. Our entire existence comes down to three things: data transfer, data storage, and data retrieval. Well, that’s in Queen Minnie’s world anyway. Talk about complete control. We were just her pawns. But, no more, we’re taking it all back, going back to the land and reclaiming our individuality. No more interconnectivity or shit like that. We went too far, Sharps. We were morphing into a single AI creature, just like The Vatican. You know it was starting to turn on Minnie? Her own creation started plotting her demise. We could see it ‘thinking’ of ways to knock her off her throne, and she couldn’t shut it down. It was only a matter of time before Th
e Vatican ruled the world. Minnie had lost control, although she’d never admit that. Which is also why we needed to shut it down and thanks to all our years of planning, we could succeed where she couldn’t. We had to shut down all the AIs, Sharps. They let us think we controlled them, but we didn’t!”
Her voice had a slightly hysterical edge to it and I needed her to focus.
“Yeah, great. So you get world peace, love, and the integrity of every individual fellow man—sorry, fellow woman—and all good things. Sayonara AI, we’re kicking your asses, it’s time to get organic. I get it. So you go back to the land, but what’s the plan for me?”
She looked down as if studying something fascinating on her fingers. “You’re where you need to be,” she said, which was what I had expected her to say, although I had been hoping for charity.
Something occurred to me. “Subjects one to forty-nine. Something I meant to clarify. All men, huh? We’re nothing more to you than disposable fuel and data, right?”
“We’ve lived with the consequences of your patriarchal bullshit all our lives, Sharps. Now it’s our time, and if there are a few male casualties along the way, well, c’est la vie—you earned it.”
“Janaelle,” I asked urgently, and I moved closer to the screen and looked as genuinely earnest as I felt, “you have to get me out of here. I know you can. You’ve got access to the data. You just told me you did.” And she’d told me she loved me. She had to set me free. After all, she was weak. What kind of woman would be willing to live as an avatar for a man she loved? The kind who’d help me escape, that’s who.
“Maybe. But it’s not up to me.” She looked away. “Have you ever had a boss who scared the shit out of you, Sharps?”
“Yeah. Ava, remember?”
“Imagine someone a thousand times more scary than Ava. More vicious. Ruthless. That’s what we report to. We’re just a Level Two Quad-Tentacle Team—me, Jaxen, Sting Ray Barb, and Mother. One tiny quad-tentacle among millions of others worldwide. OctoOne knows everything we do. They said I could have half an hour with you.” She looked at her watch. “And we’re nearly out of time. It’s all so much bigger than you think. We’re just pawns. Goodbye, Sharps, and know this, I will always love you.”
“Wait! Will you come back? Are you going to leave me here? Janaelle? Noelle? Don’t leave me here. I loved you too. You know I did. I would have given up everything for you. Don’t leave me here!”
I tried to read her expression, but she wasn’t giving me anything.
Her face flickered, and the hiss of static returned. I could see Janaelle talking and I thought she said something about checking in on me as soon as she could, but I couldn’t hear her clearly, and then her image exploded into a thousand tiny pixel pieces and flew away like the confetti moth shards of my teeth.
Subject Forty Nine. I looked over at the mirrored glass. So what now?
But I knew the answer to that question. I sank to my haunches. “So here you are, buddy,” I said out loud in one of the many one-to-one conversations I knew I’d be having all by my lonesome in the future. “You really managed this well, didn’t you?”
I looked around. A thought occurred to me, and I jumped to my feet and grabbed a hammer. I swung at an old TV and froze, hammer aloft. A TV? They weren’t allowed. Screen-based materials are forbidden in the rage room. Glass cannot be utilized or destroyed in the rage room. We always consider your safety first! Because we care about you! All in accordance with Docket102.V, Health and Safety Code 0009: By Order of the Sacred Board, Gloria in Excelsis Deo.
Where was the robo-voice now, and why wasn’t it sounding all kinds of alarms? The sick feeling in my gut radiated outwards, and once again sweat, my closet friend, ha ha, drenched my clothes. “Dollars to doughnuts,” I said out loud, “if I smash the TV, it won’t stay broken. And even if glass flies, I will be fine—uncut, unscathed, and unscarred. I’m invincible. I’m the superhero of my own worst nightmares!” I yelled the last and swung at the TV with all my might, hoping I was wrong.
Glass shattered. Blood flew as puzzle pieces lacerated my face and my skin, and it hurt like hell. “Mother of god!” I shrieked, and I dropped like a stone. But the pain receded and just as I had suspected, pieces of glass flew from my body and went back to form a beautiful, unsullied screen, and my wounds healed as if by magic.
I was stuck in lost time in a rage room. “Living the dream,” I whispered weakly. “Got what you love the most, time in a rage room. Well done, buddy, well fucking done.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Such grateful thanks to Inanna Publications for always making my most important dreams come true and this year, even more than ever. What conditions…. All I can say is thank you for this book in a time of Covid-19. Thank you, dear Luciana Ricciutelli for your wonderful editing and your constant faith in me. Endless thanks to Renée Knapp, Inanna’s tireless and talented publicist.
Thanks to my lovely Bradford Dunlop for your eternal patience and support, and much love to my family, always.
Immeasurable thanks to Colin Frings for helping me map out the technology and the time travel.
Thanks to Lora Grady for introducing me to rage rooms, to Jason Abrams for a pivotal discussion about teeth, and to Joanna Wood for reading the early manuscripts and giving me invaluable advice.
Huge thanks to the early readers for supporting this book: David Albertyn, Melodie Campbell, Catherine Dunphy, Terry Fallis, Amy Jones, Shirley McDaniel, Evan Munday, Lorna Poplak, Kelly S. Thompson, and Suzana Tratnik.
Much love to my comrades in arms, the Mesdames of Mayhem.
And, to you Dear Reader, I hope you enjoyed this adventure as much as I loved writing it.
Photo: Bradford Dunlop
Lisa de Nikolits is the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of nine novels: The Hungry Mirror; West of Wawa; A Glittering Chaos; The Witchdoctor’s Bones; Between The Cracks She Fell; The Nearly Girl; No Fury Like That; Rotten Peaches; and The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist’s Solution. No Fury Like That was also published in Italian in 2019 by Edizione le Assassine, under the title Una furia dell’altro mondo. Her short fiction and poetry have also been published in various anthologies and journals. She is a member of the Mesdames of Mayhem, Sisters in Crime, and the International Thriller Writers. Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits came to Canada in 2000. She lives and writes in Toronto.
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