A Fall in Autumn

by Michael G. Williams

  Alejandro nodded. “Yes.”

  Complete and utter bullshit. I smiled gently. “So, one question: why are you still in this?” I gestured with my hand, up and down, indicating his constructed body. “The apocalypse is over. It was over a long time ago. According to my teachers back in the hills of the rez, it ended with Leonidas Minos and the establishment of the First City.” I gestured around. “We’re way past the point of throwing rocks at each other.”

  “I was murdered,” Alejandro said. “My body, that is, the biological one. It probably wasn’t in very good shape after that long anyway, but shortly after Splendor fell, the angel attacked the facility where we were kept. I suspect that’s why it brought Splendor down where it did. We were apparently near one of the original storage sites.”

  “And when your biological body dies…”

  He held out his hands. “Golem body, by way of compensation.”

  “Your mind persists even though your physical body is gone?” I let the wheels turn for a moment. “So Splendor—whoever’s mind was running Splendor—is out there somewhere in a golem body?”

  “No,” Alejandro said. “It’s complicated to explain, but conditions have to be precisely correct for a mind to be preserved. There must be available bioproc, and the link must be severed cleanly. When Splendor went dark, the last thing she did was sound the alarm so that maybe some of us could be saved. Not every Ghost on Splendor made it.” He shrugged. “I got lucky.”

  “Lucky.” My voice was flat. “That’s not a word a lot of my clients would use to describe themselves.”

  12

  Of course, I didn’t believe a word of it. There were too many holes. If there were some storage facility somewhere full of the comatose bodies of nine-millennia-old persons whose minds were being used as Ghost Drives, and they didn’t have enough bioprocessor to house those minds in the case of accidents or other emergencies, why not grow more? Sure, it takes a while to grow, like I said, but they’ve had a bit of a while. Who took care of their bodies in these tanks? Did angels have to physically go to the places of their bodies to kill them? If so, why bother downing Splendor at all to get there? Why not rent a long hauler and fly? Why could angels talk to Ghosts anywhere? What were these energetic beams they were using? If they were relics of the ancient world, why did all their technology still work?

  That was the biggest thing. All the rest I could hand-wave away. Maybe they lost a bunch of bioprocessors in a fire. Maybe they had a whole species of Mannies to do their bidding: squeegee the tanks, change their diapers, etc. Maybe these energetic beams worked like in the ancient stories and everything could be done remotely. That all still ran headlong into the fact no ancient technology worked after the Collapse. The world’s ecosystem rejected the ancients’ mineral-focused technology. Well, that’s what their immediate successors said, anyway. The texts are on display in the Museum of the Empire, behind plass ten centimeters thick. There are photos in every history textbook. You can see them better in the book than you can in person.

  Modern theories vary. Some people think the magnetic poles reversed and affected the ancients’ technology, which was mostly driven by magnetism. We still have a few samples of their handiwork and the evidence is there, per the experts, of some sort of energetic trauma. It’s hard for us to say, though. I’ve always assumed the Sinceres have their own agenda for saying the ancients’ tech was inherently unnatural. Religion is always after something it doesn’t want to admit. Further, I’m not convinced any of our engineers can tell much about the artifacts: not really, what with having come from a culture without any of those devices actually working for them to study.

  There are plenty of crackpot theories about what ended the ancient world: aliens waging a war to isolate but not exterminate us after we got into space, that kind of nonsense. It’s mostly written by wishful thinkers. They describe a history more interesting than our own. Regardless, it’s absolutely clear no technology survived. The documentation is extensive. Archaeologists with the Spiralists have spent centuries trying to bring back to life anything from that extinct era. That may seem counterintuitive at first, given the Reformer focus on the future and on eschewing the past as a fictitiously romanticized time. Their reason is simple: everyone does more or less agree the ancients had rudimentary genetic manipulation. It’s possible the old world had some forgotten knowledge useful to the Spiralists in the here and now. Plenty of those wishful thinkers ascribe a kind of magical omnipotence to our distant ancestors. It’s nice to believe someone, somewhere, at some time, ever had it easy.

  Resurrecting some old tech, no matter how minor, would make a great publicity stunt. If the Spiralists could claim a better connection to ancient life—something demonstrable, some but-actually addendum they could write into all those history books right beside the Inheritor Texts—it would piss off the Sinceres to no end. If there is anything the Spiralists love, it’s giving the Sincerity Church a poke in the eye. Sometimes I think that’s the main engine keeping either of them alive. Otherwise, they might have driven themselves out of business centuries ago. The Spiralists are always suffering one schism after another as some of them decide the rest are insufficiently brave and/or reckless with their sacred genetic experiments.

  The Sinceres, meanwhile, have spent their three thousand years of history complaining the world was better yesterday than it is today and predicting tomorrow ought to be a real shit show, too. They don’t stop there. The Sinceres say any day now, right around the corner from here, a second great apocalypse will arrive and wipe the slate clean. When it’s all said and done, the Sinceres say, only those who’ve been true to our “natural heritage” will be able to survive.

  Somehow, we keep dragging ourselves forward despite their dire foretelling. Their failures as oracles are evident in every morning’s successful sunrise and every evening’s uneventful sunset. Tomorrow never quite seems to destroy us, though a few of mine have certainly tried and one or another of them, sooner or later, will certainly get the job done. The personal apocalypses of living beings being born and dying in the fullness of time, though: they happen, sure. But the Sinceres’ obsessive wish for something truly awful never comes true. While they preach of the Second Scouring coming any day now, they collect the donations of the narrow-minded elderly who come to be told what they like to hear. The Sincerity Church does not dissatisfy in that regard. The old days, it tells them, really were better, and their incomprehension of the current world is a failure of society and not at all the bewilderment of the feeble and afraid.

  Anyway, my point is this: the story Alejandro was feeding me required the ancients to have tech like out of their own survivors’ stories about them, and it still had to work, and the Collapse had to have left their technology operational, which is demonstrably impossible.

  I was still going to work Alejandro’s case, though, because he was able to pay no matter how crazy he might be. What’s more, his case was an excuse to get into the clinic that could potentially save my life. I might as well figure out what was going on while I beat—or bribed, or fucked—a cancer cure out of some corrupt Spiralist technician.

  After spilling the bullshit beans about this made-up ancient world of his, Alejandro fell into silence bordering on—well, not exactly a sulk. More like mourning. The moon rose over Autumn while Alejandro and I fucked right there on my desk, by the window, bathed in the silver light of another perfect Autumn night. We certainly weren’t the first people to put on a show on that block, and I was sure we wouldn’t be the last. It seemed like the thing to do in the moment and, it turned out, it was. With my flesh pressed to his simskin and my breath in his ear, all that tension melted away. I felt better after, and Alejandro’s deep sadness seemed to break.

  I remember thinking in the middle of it that maybe Alejandro simply wanted to be human. Maybe he wanted it so badly, he made up a fictitious history he could occupy in human form, and he wrote himself code to make him horny. I’d seen that pursuit of fantasy
in plenty of johns before. Most of the time, the guy who hires a gigolo doesn’t want to have sex only to get off. He could take care of that on his own time. Instead, he wants to have a partner see him in a specific way: dominant, or hung, or sexually skilled. I think Alejandro wanted someone around. So did I. It worked out well for both of us. When I crested that final wave and plunged over into the oblivion of orgasm, I clutched him to me, and he hugged me back. We were locked together, a part of ourselves bared to the universe, a part of ourselves bared to each other. I knew he was more than a john, more than a paying client for whom I could get hard. I didn’t know exactly what I was, but I had to be a person to be it. I needed that, too, not only to get laid, but to be a companion to someone who needed companionship.

  After, as we sat together, leaning on one another, I asked a question. “So how do I get into Little Marseilles?”

  “Autumn’s cameras can recognize faces.” Alejandro murmured it against my shoulder. He lifted his head to speak more freely, reached up and pushed his own hair, more red than purple tonight, out of his face. “The software has evolved over time, of course, but it’s based on some basic principles of geometry and of photo analysis.”

  More gibberish. I gave him a peck on the cheek to encourage him to explain further. “That didn’t sound like an answer to my question.”

  He met my eyes and smiled. “It was preamble. We need to change the patterns of light and dark on your face. It’s actually quite simple. It’s also very overt.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Overt?”

  “You’ll use white and black makeup to draw new regions of contrast on your face: arbitrary ones. Autumn won’t know who you are anymore.”

  “And you?”

  “It’s pointless for me,” he said. “She would hear my mind.”

  “Maybe they don’t know you’re my client.”

  He shook his head. “I greeted you in the street. I’m associated with you now, and you with me, in Autumn’s memory. If she sees me with another man whose facial geometry is only a little off, she’ll make the intuitive leap. That’s the advantage of having a human mind rather than a constructed intellect. She can make judgment calls machine language can’t.”

  I nodded. If a little face makeup was what stood between cancer treatments and me, so be it. “Let’s get started. At this point, though, they know everything about me Adolfo could possibly tell them.”

  “Yes,” Alejandro agreed. “So we’ll also need to disguise you in other ways.”

  I arched an eyebrow, but I didn’t object.

  An hour later, I was looking at myself and wondering whether this was at all a good idea. A floor-length mirror I kept behind one of the filing cabinets showed me looking patently ridiculous.

  A part of me also thought I looked really, really good.

  My customary long jacket was removed and replaced with my most formal top. Alejandro went to the store for makeup and brought back the sort of thick, all-covering face paint we tend only to pull out for things like Thin Night. It was stark white and obsidian black, and he spent several minutes applying it, first with a broad brush and then a narrow one. Toward the end, I noticed he would blink rapidly when he leaned back and looked at my face, then lean in and it would fade.

  “Is something wrong?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, then let himself chuckle. “It’s messing with my ability to recognize you,” he said. “My systems are based on the same as Autumn’s. It’s not like I keep thinking you’ve been replaced with someone else while I wasn’t paying attention, but there’s a certain degree of cognitive dissonance.” He put a few more touches on, holding open only one eye. “If I do this, it helps. That disengages some of the geometry functions. And, of course, I know at a rational level it’s me doing this, and my reaction is a sign of success.”

  He asked me not to wear my long coat, so I pulled out an old surplus Naval jacket I bought at a yard sale right after I ran away from Pentz. The coat was far too big for me when I got it, and in later years, too small. I withered some from the cancer, though. Now it fit again, tight in the shoulders but baggy in the torso. At least I would get another use out of it before I went. The jacket was like an old friend. It reminded me of days that were terrible, yes, but also of my survival of them. I liked it as a trophy of hard-won freedoms.

  Alejandro said it changed my profile, and then he and I spent a few minutes modifying my walk. He said Autumn’s gait recognition might get me even if I wore the face paints. We practiced different footfalls, different fake limps, but they were all too tough to maintain over periods of a minute or two or three. Sooner or later I would forget and slip into my normal lazy swagger, half couldn’t care less and half I’m yours to fuck if you’ve got the scratch. Eventually Alejandro said he knew just the thing: I needed a stick of wood in my pants. My eyebrows went up, but he waved off the dirty joke I was about to make. He went down the hall for a couple of minutes and came back with the mop the landlady keeps stashed in one of the shower stalls.

  “She locked me out of the bathroom. Do you have lock picks in your fingers or something?”

  Alejandro flexed one fist. “Who needs lock picks?”

  “She’s going to be immeasurably pissed off you did that.”

  “So buy her a new doorknob. Or tell her someone broke in and did it.” And that was when I knew we were nearing the endgame of whatever we each thought we were doing—Alejandro’s pursuit of an insane fantasy, me trying to chase down a Spiralist doc who’d dunk me on the sly—because I’d been party to a golem committing breaking and theft.

  Alejandro sized up my leg and then snapped the mop handle cleanly, effortlessly even, at a particular point of his choosing. Then he knelt beside me and worked it up the leg of my pants and into the neck of my right shoe. I took a couple of steps and, sure enough, it made me walk differently. It felt like a splint coming apart—something with which I had plenty of practice one very long summer back in Pentz when I fell from a tree and broke a leg. My parents thought I was nothing more than a boy being a boy, but in fact, I thought if I climbed high enough, I would see in which direction I could escape. Like every Artie in the preserve, the only way to get better was to let my body do its thing. No bone generators for me. It was the first time I didn’t hate only where I was, but also who I was.

  Hobbling around my office with the mop handle gave Alejandro a headache, which he said was another sign of success. I felt a little bad, actually. He had to ask me to speak once I had both the face paint and the mop handle hobbling me so he could be sure I was still the person in the room with him. Even though he did, as he said, know he was the one making changes to me, his systems kept telling him I was someone else.

  “Much like Dr. P.,” Alejandro said, but he dismissed it when I asked who that was. I figure one of his designers. I kept practicing walking so the mop handle wouldn’t show, an obvious angular point standing out from my leg, but soon I was too tired. It was getting late, and I was getting antsy, but I had to take a brief nap on the couch so I could regain a little of my strength before we went. Dying, I’ve discovered, wears your ass out.

  When I awoke, Alejandro was putting the final stitches on an insert he made for my old navy coat. “It will protect you from the deep eyes,” he said. “They can see through a layer of regular clothing. This is something we used to have, back in my day, to ward that off. It’s illegal now, but it’s not difficult to construct.” He shrugged. “People simply don’t take the time to learn about it. I doubt many people even realize it would work.” The coat had been made heavy by what he added, but the new material was flexible. It helped fill me out in the middle. “You can carry a weapon under there, and the eyes won’t see it.”

  “If only I had a weapon.” I smiled, though. It’s not that I’ve never used them; it’s that having one makes it a lot more likely someone will get killed, particularly the person with the weapon. Alejandro and I set off from the front of my building, me with my funny walk and my face pa
int, and he shook my hand at the end of the street.

  “You’ll do fine.” Alejandro reached up and tugged the brim of my hat, adjusting it. His face went blank and slack, and if he’d been a human being, I would have thought he was afraid. “Valerius.” His voice was small. “Say something.” He was looking right at me.

  I cleared my throat. “It’s me, Alejandro.” I took his hand, still hanging in mid-air halfway back to his side. “It’s Valerius Bakhoum.”

  His face relaxed, and he smiled with embarrassment. “Sorry. I guess you really will be fine.”

  If it hadn’t been for the face paint, I would have kissed him. He looked so scared, and I can never get enough of a hard-luck case hoping I’m there to save the day.

  It was probably two hours past midnight when I hobbled through the gate into Little Marseilles. It took me for-goddamn-ever to get there. I didn’t want a cab to remember me as his fare, so I walked the whole way. Maybe, I was playing it too paranoid, but I like to walk the City, and by then, I was growing increasingly aware I wouldn’t have too many more chances to do that.

  The night was a little chilly by Autumn standards, so I was grateful for the old coat. It felt good, and the lining Alejandro sewed in kept the breeze out. I was very sensitive to chills the previous few weeks, but I’ve always loved them and loved them still. That night, setting out on a mad quest, the air fresh and sharp, I felt my old self again—at first. The walk was invigorating after the nap, even energizing, but eventually the shine wore off. I felt dumb for walking by the time I arrived at Little Marseilles: I had to stop and sit down twice on the way to catch my breath. Oh yes, the end wasn’t too many days away now. The docs warned me about this. You may feel fine for a long time, they said, but eventually you will start to weaken, slowly at first, then rapidly. That signals the beginning of the end. They were very apologetic about it all.