Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 168

by Neil Clarke

  You look over to Lomas and realize he is on his knees. He stays down for a while, small and unmoving. Then he staggers to his feet and speaks to the Director in low tones. The Director ponders whatever was said and then turns back to the computer. He makes the ocean on screen disappear, replacing it with white numbers once more. He also waves his hand at Celine, who scrambles at her own desk and types fervently.

  She enters a command and the screen blushes with calm, pink skies, where you can soon make out sand, hear the sound of wind rushing through trees and waves lapping on shore. Eventually you see the body. It is mercifully in the distance, far enough away to obscure the inevitable mess, and instead it looks like Theo is sleeping.

  You look at Lomas, suddenly nervous. He says something to the Director, who looks at him curiously. Together they study the Director’s computer, and the Director traces a stretch of numbers with his finger. Lomas touches them too, grazing them softly while the Director tears out a scrap from a spare notebook and hands it to him with a pen.

  A seagull caws somewhere, musical and distant. Lomas’ hand closes over the pen, his silhouette arching over as he starts to write.

  “You know,” Lomas says, back in his office, still looking at you looking at the book, “It’s not like he can’t make another one. It’s a souvenir, just like the coordinates.”

  You can’t tear your eyes away from Theo’s book. “But you can’t—?”

  “Nope. I don’t want to, either. Sentimental purposes only.”

  “Oh.” You crease your brow, memories of that weekend still flooding in, flashes of her. “Would . . . you go back there, sir? To use the machine again, maybe see the future this time.”

  Lomas looks amused. “You’re that worried about your future, huh?” You shrug, not bothering to correct him. He looks at you thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think I would. Of course there are events I’d be curious to see. But I think I’m done meddling with the order of things. Besides,” he adds, “I doubt I’ll ever get the opportunity. I don’t think either one of us will visit that basement ever again.”

  You mull over this for a while and then Lomas reaches over to clap your shoulder. “You’ll figure something out. Doesn’t have to be today, though. Enjoy your day off, kid.”

  You give him an appreciative smile as you go, looking back a final time when you reach the doorway. “I’m glad you found him, Lomas.”

  “Me too,” he says, and then you leave.

  You can’t sleep. Back at the residencies, you toss and turn in your bed and stare at the cracked ceiling, the day’s events engraving themselves into your memory like a vinyl plate. The ocean you witnessed only a few hours ago rushes to devour you, a violent, familiar weightlessness overtaking your body, and in the murky darkness all you can make out are boats and scrolls and white numbers.

  At some point you can’t take it anymore. You swing your legs off the bed, move past the takeout boxes you had half-heartedly accepted earlier that evening, and exit the room. Outside, the sky is the clearest it’s been all weekend, and the moon hangs low, milky and nearly full. You walk toward the desolate parking lot and stop just short of it, taking a seat on a nearby bench that basks in the glow of yellow lamp light. You think about what she’s doing: if there’s a chance she could be up at this hour, too.

  A rustling on your left interrupts your train of thought. You hold your breath as you scrutinize the source of the sound, anticipating a buffalo, maybe. Eventually a human-sized figure emerges instead, shuffling along the gravel path. You strain your eyes and realize a little too late that it’s the Director. He spots you around the same time and waves, gesturing you over. Your heart sinks.

  “Can’t sleep either?” he asks you once you trudge over. You shrug and mumble something agreeable. The Director’s eyes glint golden, reflecting the lamps. “I like to walk this path during my bouts of insomnia. There’s a lake nearby, good for thinking. I can show you.”

  You follow him along the path, passing through clusters of pine trees. Soon, reeds sprout in fistfuls from the earth and water comes into view, still like glass. The Director descends through the soft grass of the bank and stands at a small dock at the edge of the lake. You hover a few feet behind him.

  He glances back. “You know, Jules, you’re the only one who didn’t need to be here this weekend.” You say nothing. His tone irks you, but you cannot deny the statement is true. He continues: “But, well, you’re here. And if you have questions, you might as well ask them.”

  You look up at him carefully, unsure if he’s serious. His eyes tell you that he is. You swallow, thinking about everything that’s happened today, the new world order to which you have become privy. You think about all the things you could ask him, like what your life will look like, how it will end. How it will all end. But then it occurs to you that even if you did ask all of those questions, you’re not sure you’d want to hear the answer.

  So instead you ask something else. “Alright. I have a question about your big problem, or whatever you call it. Why people think and feel the way they do.” The Director inspects the rocks at his feet as you knit your thoughts together carefully. “If the machine knows everything that will happen, it knows whether you solve your problem. So can’t you just check? If you succeed, you get the answer from the future. And if you don’t, well . . . you don’t.”

  The Director skips a stone across the lake’s surface, and the water ripples out like fireworks. “You’re smarter than you look, Jules,” he says quietly.

  You frown and decide not to respond to that.

  He looks up at you and grins. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone, okay? I do come to an answer. I’ve checked. Of course I’ve checked. But for whatever reason, I—I keep it in my head. Never write it down or speak it out loud. Can you believe that?” He chuckles and shakes his head at the stars, as if chiding some cheeky celestial force. “The one secret I have to know, left in the one safe I cannot unlock.”

  He lets out a theatrical yawn and drops his rocks, brushing by you as he walks up the bank. When you look up he looms tall on the path’s elevated plane. His face, moments ago expressive and almost tender, now reminds you of a mask. “I’ll be on my way back to the lab, then. Good night, Jules.”

  You give a slight nod and watch him disappear. Invisible crickets chirp softly around you, cradled within the reeds. You walk up the bank and start in the opposite direction, a tingling exhaustion finally washing over your limbs; you make your way toward the residences, toward sleep, and toward morning.

  This morning, the package arrives. When the bell rings, you open the door and look to your feet. You can’t recall ordering anything recently, but the box is unassuming enough to pick up, and you turn it over carefully in your hands, inspecting each blank side. Perhaps you were written a new back pain prescription, you wonder, or your nephew had sent you a gift from abroad. But then you bring the box into the kitchen and slice it open; the flaps unfold to reveal another sleek white box, which when shimmied apart reveals the small, silver chip, and you realize this isn’t a regular delivery at all.

  On the third day, your Iris wakes you up a quarter before eight. Celine said she’d be there on the hour and arrives exactly on time, just as you are cramming the last of your clothes into your bag. You step outside and morning fog creeps in from the edges of the horizon, thick enough to obscure the surrounding forest and swallow the path to the lake that you visited mere hours ago.

  You ride to the main parking lot, everyone sleepily silent. Upon arrival you notice the Director is nowhere in sight. Celine gives Lomas an apologetic look as she takes the keys out of the vehicle.

  “He must have overslept. It was an exhausting weekend.”

  If Lomas can sense the generosity in her statement, he doesn’t seem to care. He acknowledges her words with a dazed shrug and then gets into the driver’s seat of the car, not bothering to glance behind him.

  You are left to load bags in the trunk with Celine. Y
ou move your luggage with your heart in your throat, knowing your time is running out. Celine closes the trunk with a thud, and then you turn to face her squarely.

  “Come with us.”

  She stares at you. “What?”

  “Come with us. Leave the lab, leave everything, and make a new life in Boston. You don’t have to be controlled by the machine or the Director anymore.”

  She looks at you sadly. “Jules, I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.” Your voice trembles with urgency, startling both of you. “We can get you a job at the university. You’re smart enough, you’re definitely qualified enough. You’d be happy there. You can visit the ocean every day.”

  She searches your face, and you can tell your proposal is getting through, that she is imagining your proposed future. For a suspended moment you stare at each other, and you truly believe that you have convinced her.

  But then she breaks your gaze, and you know her answer before she can even say anything. “You don’t have to rescue me, Jules,” she says gently. “I can take care of myself.” She watches your expression deflate and reaches out to rest her hand on your wrist. “The lab is where I belong. It always has been.” Her words hold no malice, no speculation, no bite. She says them so simply that it leaves you no doubt that they are just true.

  She lets go of your arm and you straighten up, clear your throat. Lomas turns on the engine, the car breathing to life, and you struggle to find words to leave her with.

  “I hope our paths cross again someday.” She smiles at you ruefully. The way her face looks as you leave her is already searing into your mind.

  “Yes,” she says. “I hope so, too.”

  The weekend is ending. You wonder if you should just pause and exit right here, with Celine still standing so close to you. But you let yourself get into the car, feel the ground rumble beneath you, her figure receding to nothing in the side view mirror. You wind through the forest, down gravel roads, toward civilization. And then finally you leave your body in the past and open your eyes in the present.

  You sit at your kitchen table, back in your apartment, right where you started. In its absence, the vividness of the past startles you; now, the present feels dull, colorless. Your window curtains stir, leaking darkness. How long have you been sitting here? Everything had happened so quickly; mechanically, you had brushed back the hair behind your left ear, inserted the silver chip into the thin slot in your head, and waited for the click, just as you’ve done for countless other Iris updates over the years. When the interface launched, you dragged your finger in the air, sliding the playhead back to the beginning and taking the course of your life with it.

  If you had the power to go anywhere, at any time, where would you go? Why has the answer always been that weekend? You breathe quietly, memories freshly unraveled in front of you, dead emotions sprung to life again. You close your eyes, stuck in a different kind of past. You have never escaped her. Her smiling at you, brushing your hand with hers, touching your wrist. Her expression as you left the lab’s campus, that quiet resignation and dignity etched onto her face. Her standing alone at the very bottom of the machine room, the years slipping through her fingers, breezing through her hair, until she had become what she had once so despised. In the moments between that weekend you have seen how it all connects, and yet you still find yourself with no further answers, just remembered questions and renewed pain.

  Your eyes flutter open again, and they drift across the dim room to the white box. You hold your gaze, struck by a moment of steadying clarity. You had become so preoccupied by what this chip had shown you that you had forgotten to ask why? And by whom? But now they beat in your head like a drum, echoed by your thumping heartbeat. An answer flutters to your mind, and it feels unreal.

  You reach across the table. The delicate layers of the box peel back easily, your hands moving through the thin tissue paper and light styrofoam like water. It takes some time, some shifting and tilting, but finally the slip of paper clunks against the lip of the box. Your breath catches in your chest as you pick it up. It’s neatly creased in half, and you take a second to hold it lightly in your fingers, savoring its potential. It is everything it could be: a world unto itself, that neither you nor anyone else can decipher yet or even describe. Maybe not even her.

  About the Author

  Isabel Lee is a writer, artist, and creative technologist from Chicago, Illinois. Her interests include exploring the intersections between code, art, and fiction. She also enjoys painting and watching Korean thriller movies. Isabel is currently a senior at Yale University, and this is her first publication in a major literary magazine.

  Ask the Fireflies

  R. P. Sand

  They say the universe was created when a Giant lit a matchstick. That her great sigh fanned the flames that danced and wept into stars and constellations. They say some seas are blue and Slugs are naturally submissive. They also say that I cannot exist. But what do they know? These are truths or untruths contorted through generations, whispers leaping from ear to ear, unrecognizable from their original form. They are irrelevant to me.

  The only truth I know, the only truth I care about is that Alshea is not “as good as dead.” Those in mint jumpsuits with low, measured voices that bounce off scarcely used eardrums—always an odd sensation, that—do not know what they are talking about.

  No, Alshea is not as good as dead, how could she be? Proof is in how she is perched at the garden table, cheeks flushed despite the little bruise above her brow, eyes sparkling alertness, propped up on the soft feather pillow Norai sewed because the wrought iron chair is not high enough for her. Proof is in how vivaciously she regales her version of the Old Earth tale “The Little Wizard Who Lived” to her stuffed unicorn and me, pouring caramel tea in our periwinkle cups. Proof is in how the colors of a setting star soak rainbows into her dark hair and skin, how the breeze catches any loose strands and hair ribbons, how she blooms like the red valerian spangled in our garden, so sharp and so vibrant. So alive.

  “Up, Podder! Prep the table for dinner.” Norai’s feathery voice dissipates my reverie. My whiskers twitch at the scent of warm butter; she wheels the dinner cart down the cobblestone path from the manor house. The purple cats at our feet stir at the promise of food. Tiers of perfectly creased cloth napkins, white dishes with painted lilies, unicorn cookies, buttered rolls, and: do I smell Norai’s hot chocolate? Her cinnamon-tulsi-peppermint blend is why Tedna, the gardener, sometimes stays for dinner, and locals like the baker and candlestick maker deliver themselves rather than send shop runners.

  When I eye the chocolate pot longingly, but reach instead for the dishes, Norai suppresses a smile under half-moon spectacles, and her gray-mauve lips and rice paper wings of the same color flutter amusedly. The wings are small on her round, petite frame but she can hover a few feet off the ground, though she hardly ever does.

  I prep the table in a way that meets the approval of Norai’s precise eye, and she lays the food, appropriately punctuating Alshea’s continuous string of commentary and tale-bits with “oh really”s and “how lovely”s. She allows a few crumbs to drop to the grass, which the cats love.

  “And he who cannot be named got hiccups so he couldn’t swallow his tea,” Alshea is saying when a sudden chill erupts through her. I immediately extend my paws but Norai drapes her yellow-fringed shawl across Alshea’s thin shoulders first.

  “Giant save me, it’s chilly tonight, isn’t it?” Norai says. “Lucky I’ve got just the remedy for that.”

  “I’ll pour?” I say waving to the pot, and once Norai nods, it is not long before Alshea clutches a steaming mug between her palms.

  The star streaks crimson and ultramarine behind Alshea as it settles behind the horizon, and little flickers of light emerge from the moss-covered trellises. It is Alshea’s favorite part of the day, the changing of the sky and the emergence of the fireflies. They drift toward us, drawn to our heat. Some break away down a path that cuts through lilac
bushes, pooling around Tedna after another day of him tending the grounds of our Manor Flammel. Tedna: brown hair combed to one side, shirt moderately unbuttoned under a pale cardigan, a loosened bow tie, trousers patched with dirt, and shovel slung over a shoulder.

  Fireflies and lilacs. Trousers and bow ties. Things Alshea taught me about, elements pieced together from the holobooks she spent much of her young life immersed in, recreated tales from Old Earth, like “Beauty and the Frog King” and “The Wheel of the Shire” and “The Man of Iron and His White Wolf.” She spent hour after hour in the holodecks, hours that would arguably be better spent studying or playing or interacting with parents. But options were limited when you were the only child on the MarkX21 mining station and your father was Station Commander and your mother was a holofilm star who was more often than not away for work.

  Cats and stuffed unicorns. Cobblestone paths and manors. The Archipelago—a planetary assortment with New New Earth as its nucleus, framed by secondary planets and their mining moons, like MarkX21—did not harbor such things. A pity, really, because they are beautiful. We are lucky to have them here.

  Tedna ruffles Alshea’s hair with his characteristic, “How do, little neighbor?” and reaches for a roll, his hands stained with dirt.

  “The nerve! Get yourself sanitized, you sneak,” Norai says, lightly rapping his knuckles with a spoon handle. “And you might as well collect that blazer you always switch into from the mud room—leave the cardigan behind, I’ll wash it—and fetch Alshea’s riding hood.”

  “And Podder’s scarf!” Alshea pipes in.

  A short while later the four of us are seated, Tedna appropriately clean and blazered, Alshea in her riding hood, red as nasturtiums, and Norai draped once again in her yellow-fringed shawl. I wear my simple black robe and striped scarf, though only because Alshea likes how it looks around my neck; my fur is enough to protect me from temperature fluctuations.