by Nino Cipri
***
He wasn’t sure when he fell asleep, or when exactly he woke up, coaxed back into consciousness with Joe’s body pressed against him, Joe’s mouth. Such a change from waking up with the sharp pressure of metal teeth against the back of his tongue. It felt good to be disoriented this way, to not know who had started kissing whom. Maybe that’s what he could tell Finn about bottoming: it would push buttons you didn’t know you had, sure, but it could also be such an easy, sweet release.
Although now that he was listening for it, he could hear noises from the direction of Mari’s bedroom, raised in unselfconscious pleasure. He wasn’t going to speculate on what they were doing in there, but he hoped they felt as good as he did.
There was a pinging sound. “Sorry,” Joe said, as he broke away and fumbled for his phone. But the noise was coming from Clay’s phone, and he recognized the sound of the alert: a Flock passenger asking for a ride.
“That’s me,” he said. The pain in his throat had settled to a burning ache, but flared when he spoke. Clay pulled the app up on his phone, ready to reject it and sign off, when he saw the name and the picture: a woman with long dark hair, smiling in soft, warm light, sunglasses covering her face. Natasha.
“I should take this,” he whispered, though the words felt like splinters in his throat.
“What is that?” Joe said. Clay showed him the phone, and the look of half-asleep desire dropped from Joe’s face. “Tasha?”
He took Clay’s phone from him, and the light illuminated his face, the planes and curves of it. Clay wondered how he hadn’t seen it before, the resemblance between the two of them. She wasn’t a wraith; she was Joe’s haunting.
“She wanted to talk to you tonight,” Joe said.
Clay nodded. “Do you want to come?”
Joe shook his head. “It’s so hard, just hearing her voice. I don’t know if I can.”
“It’s all right,” Clay said, though he wasn’t convinced that was true.
“Tell her I’m sorry,” Joe said, giving Clay back the phone. “Tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.”
Clay pulled on his jacket, scarf, and boots. He contemplated kissing Joe again before he left, but Joe had turned toward the wall, phone clenched in his hand.
The field and abandoned construction site were empty. Down by the holes where the foundations would never be poured, a single, solitary figure was waiting. Clay stood silently, watching her, until the phone in his hand pinged again. He still hadn’t accepted the ride request.
He did so, and as he was shoving his phone into his pocket, the balcony door opened. Joe came out, coat open, boots untied. He grabbed Clay’s hand and held it until they got to the car.
Ride number five.
Clay drove out to where he’d picked up Natasha that morning and honked once, apologetically, but she didn’t move. There were no fences, so Clay turned and drove directly onto the field itself, hoping the muddy ground had frozen over.
Natasha no longer wore the sunglasses, scarf, or hat, but Clay found himself unable to look directly at her face; his gaze fell, instead, to the rusty stains along the hem and sleeves of her coat, the frayed knot of her dark hair.
Finally, abandoning her contemplation of the pit, the moon, or whatever she’d been looking at, Natasha came over to the car. Her limp was not as pronounced, and she didn’t move with the same slowness and caution as she had before. She reached for the passenger-side door, but stopped when she saw Joe. She left a handprint on the window, a smear that could have been dirt or blood, and got into the backseat.
They waited for her to speak, and eventually she did.
“When it happened,” she said. “When they took my skin, they left my eyes. I can’t look away. I see all of it. I see what I am, and what I used to be, and how everything has changed.”
“I’m sorry,” Joe said. She scoffed. The sound was wet, choked, bloody. Clay flinched and saw that Joe didn’t; he must have been used to this.
Her voice dragged down to a hoarse whisper. “Do you have the key?”
Blood was pooling at the bottom of her eyelids, gathering on her lashes. The car was filling with the smell of rust, metal, salt, blood. The key he’d nearly choked on that afternoon was still in his pocket. Clay patted it to be sure.
“We’ll need it,” Natasha said.
“Where are we going?” Joe asked.
“Nowhere just yet,” she said. “We need to wait for them.”
“Who?”
She pointed out the window. After a moment, the lights of the dead surged upward, more numerous than Clay had ever seen or imagined, rising up out of the ground like clumsy, hungry birds.
BEFORE WE DISPERSE LIKESTAR STUFF
Part One: Damian
Are we rolling? ShouldI...yeah, okay. My name is Damian Flores. I’m an activist with a degree in environmental archeology, which is basically the study of how prehistoric humans interacted with and related to their environments. I left academia because, well. If you study how humans have dealt with changing climates in the past, you start getting a little concerned about the future, right? Or like, a lot concerned. I lose a lot of sleep thinking about the next hundred years.
This activism is what...well, I guess we’ll talk about that more in depth later, right? So should I just...launch into the spiel?
Okay, here is what we know. Sometime in the late Pliocene era—
Sorry, what? Sure, that makes sense. From the top?
Here is what we know. Or theorize, I should probably say theorize. You think? Ray and Min would say...
Okay, here is what we know. Around three and a half million years ago, there was a species of weasels, Megalictis ossicarminis, that looked like a cross between river otters and wolverines. They had human-level intelligence and a complex social organization. They lived together, they caught and shared food, they used tools, they even collected shiny rocks.
In simpler terms: they were people. Before humans were people. People before being a person was cool.
And they left behind messages.
Was that okay? I can probably make it sound more...Yeah, let’s shoot it again.
***
The elevator doors closed behind him, and in their mirrored shine, Damian saw two things: a hot guy, well-dressed in a suit tailored to his short frame, and a fucking sellout.
He grinned, trying the expression out, then clamped his mouth shut in a grimace. He’d gotten his teeth whitened for this meeting, and they looked too bright. It was strangely close to the dysphoria he’d had before he transitioned, a sense of searching his reflection for something that didn’t feel weird and off-putting. And sure, his shoes were made of recycled materials, from a company that did one-to-one donations; the underwear he wore was fair-trade organic cotton; and his tie was made by an upstart genderqueer fashionista making a living off their Etsy. Under his shirt, the ugly-ass pendant that his mother had made hung between his mirrored mastectomy scars, and below that a tattooed line of poetry his grandfather had written as a teenager in Havana.
But all of the insignia of Damian’s complicated self were beneath the surface. He looked like a sellout.
“Get it together,” he told his reflection. His reflection nodded back. We’re on the same side, bro, it seemed to say. Damian wasn’t convinced.
The door opened on the twenty-second floor, and Damian hung a right, past the wall of windows looking out on Lower Manhattan, and then onward to his agent’s office. Amelia was waiting for him in her Power Suit regalia, corporate-femme mode fully activated.
“Nice,” she said, giving him the once-over. “You clean up well.”
“Likewise,” he said. “I feel like a...” He trailed off because he wasn’t sure he could actually articulate how he felt to Amelia, who wore her outfit like glorious armor. His felt like a heavy costume, constricting and burdensome.
“Don’t worry about how you feel in it,” she said. “Worry about the impression you make. That’s all these meetings are: i
mpressions.”
They had four meetings, more or less back-to-back, with different production companies who all wanted to option the book. Amelia did most of the talking. Damian’s role was to keep quiet, nod thoughtfully, and maybe ask a few pointed questions.
The first three studios basically pitched him different versions of the same story—his story: an intrepid activist/scientist discovers a cave full of the fossilized remains of an ancient non-human society. (“We’re in talks with the team that did Avatar. The effects are gonna be...just, wow.”) The cave is in danger of being destroyed by an Evil Corporation. (“Tommy Lee Jones has expressed an interest in playing the villainous CEO.”) The intrepid activist/scientist and his team come up with a daring plan to save the cave and the land around it, nearly fail when they realize the Evil Corporation is even more evil than previously assumed, but at the last possible second, pull it off. Huzzah!
The teams from the studios threw in various subplots. All of them featured a straight love interest. (One of them had read enough to mention Min by name, though casually mentioned that they’d be trying to find an actress “as close to Emma Stone as possible.”) There was also a mother-with-cancer subplot, a gay coming-out subplot— which intrigued Damian until he realized that they wanted to play it for laughs—and his personal favorite: the non-human society was still alive, living in sewers beneath major American cities, conspiring to take back the planet.
After Amelia gently shooed out the last set, the two of them regarded each other across the conference table.
“I work with activists who start meetings with guided meditations so everyone can open their heart chakras,” Damian said. “And that’s still less bullshit than what we just sat through.”
“Damian,” Amelia said.
“I feel dirty”. He flapped his hands, as if he could peel the feeling from his skin and flick it off. “Did any of them even read the book?”
“Of course they didn’t,” Amelia snapped. “They read a plot synopsis that their assistants typed up for them. They’re not book people, they’re movie people.”
“I’m pretty sure they were goddamn lizard people,” Damian said. There was a knock at the door. He looked at Amelia—was there another meeting? But she looked as surprised as he did. The door opened and...
Damian’s first impression was the guy from Ancient Aliens, the one who had been turned into a meme. Tall with unruly hair, an ill-fitting tweed suit, and a pair of narrow, steel-rimmed glasses perched on the end of a nose as severe as a Roman senator’s. The second impression was, okay, maybe that guy’s sister? Cousin? Co-author?
The woman settled herself into one of the chairs, pulled out half a dozen manila folders and three separate notebooks, and started talking in the sort of uninterrupted flow that spoke to either a healthy cocaine habit or an unhealthy amount of enthusiasm.
“I’ve got to say, it’s an honor to meet you, Mister Flores. I’ve been dreaming about this meeting. Literally dreaming about it. Usually it’s an anxiety dream and I’m naked or my teeth are falling out.” She actually looked down at herself, apparently for reassurance.
“Hi?” Damian said. He looked to Amelia for help, and she stepped in.
“I’m sorry, I seem to have...” She pawed through her notes. “Would you mind telling me your name again?”
“Annika Wagner-Smith. From the Smithsonian network?”
That got Damian’s attention. “The Smithsonian?”
Annika nodded, and her swoop of ashy hair bobbed as she did so. “I know that we left things open after our email exchange, Ms. Fontaine, but I’ve been working on the proposal, and I don’t mind telling you that there’s been a lot of executive interest about this documentary.”
“A documentary,” Damian said. “Not a movie?”
“Movies,” Annika scoffed. “We’re not interested in regurgitating tired old narratives. The discovery of Megalictis ossicarminis forced us to radically reconsider sapience, evolution, and civilization. Our network wants to delve into not just the nitty-gritty of their discovery, but what this means for us, as humans.”
She slapped a glossy printout onto the table and slid it over to them. “Holy shit,” Damian said. He’d seen artists’ renderings of ossicarminis before. Hell, he’d looked over a dozen when the publisher was putting together his book. But there was something about these images that gave them, for lack of a better term, life. They didn’t look like chubby weasels with a shiny rock and a bone. They looked... well, they looked badass. And maybe it was bad science, but it was really cool to see a prehistoric weasel the size of mountain lion dressed like a minor character in He-Man.
“Why does it say Space Weasels across the top?” Amelia said.
“It’s a working title,” Annika shrugged.
Damian and Amelia looked at each other. “Ossicarminis wasn’t—”
“It’s a theory that one of the executive producers is interested in investigating,” Annika said smoothly. She slid another printout toward them. This one had ossicarminis at the helm of, god help them all, what looked like the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Several other ossicarminis were pointing excitedly toward a planet. “It’s not going to be the focus of the documentary, but our audiences are going to wonder why we’d be leaving out this particular theory.”
“Theory that...ossicarminis went to space?” Damian asked.
Annika shrugged again. “Our audiences like space.”
***
“You can’t be serious,” Amelia said, once they were safely ensconced at a tapas place an hour later. Damian had decided to wait until their second round of drinks before telling Amelia that he wanted Annika to have the movie rights.
“Everyone else wanted to turn this into a shitty Spielberg blockbuster. It’s not that kind of story.”
“How is Indiana Jones and the Underground Weasel Society worse that Weasels from Space?”
“Indiana Jones is Orientalist garbage. Weasels from space is at least different.”
Amelia pursed her lips. “Different is a very, very kind interpretation. Would Ray and Min agree to it?”
Damian took a long, measured sip of his margarita. He had managed to avoid thinking about Ray Walker and Min-ji Hong— the two people who technically co-discovered ossicarminis with him—for the entire meeting, and honestly, for most of the last year and a half, while he’d been touring the book and lecturing (incidentally, not anywhere that came within fifty miles of either of them).
Amelia leaned forward. “If you do go the documentary route, you’ll need both of them on board. And it’s going to be up to you to convince them, not the Smithsonian.”
He didn’t ask why they needed to be there: the three of them had co-authored the definitive paper about ossicarminis before...well, before he’d signed a contract to write The Oracle Bones: What an Inhuman Society Can Tell Us about Being Human by himself. “Why is that up to me?” he asked.
“Because they deserve to hear it from you, not some fluffy-haired wingnut with fursona art of space weasels.”
“I liked the art!” Damian said. Amelia stared him down, and he shrank into the booth. “Okay, I get your point.”
***
I got called to the site by a Midwest anti-fracking coalition. The thing is, protected land that’s owned by the government isn’t really protected; the government can basically sell it off to the highest bidder, unless they’ve got a really pressing reason not to. The Nebraska Energy and Oil Commission were getting ready to hand over a few thousand acres in the Pine Ridge area, and a local community coalition called me in to see if there were fossils—something they could use to get the public riled up about protecting the land from development.
There were fossils, mostly from the Pliocene, but it was all fish and ferns. People only really get excited about human remains and dinosaurs. Blame Jurassic Park and our innate self-centeredness.
It’s pure accident that I found the cave. I literally fell into it. It had been covered at some point by silts
tone, probably from millenia of floods, and something had weakened the ground enough that I just fell through.
I wasn’t immediately sure what I was seeing. The skeletons were half-buried in more siltstone, bones sticking out at odd angles. I could see they were big, but not human. But then I caught sight of the oracles. There’s no way to mistake that for anything but writing. Symbols carved into bones, darkened with walnut dye. They looked older than anything I’d ever seen. I called Min in right away, the same day, I think, once I got out of the cave. I thought I’d hit the jackpot, because that was evidence of human activity, right? And it was!
We can’t know for certain, but yeah, I think that the ossicarminis skeletons were buried with purpose, rather than died in that position.
The arrangement of the two bodies, the placement of the stones and the oracles, none of that was accidental.
Ah. Ah, yeah. Yeah, that—I guess you could call that a controversy. But like—
Ray said that, huh? I think “disturbing the dead” is, uh, some very... particular language. Oh fuck, did I really say that? Gross. Don’t print that. Let me try again.
***
Everyone had assured Damian that selling movie rights practically guaranteed that nothing would happen soon, but that was not the way Annika Wagner-Smith worked. She wanted to start shooting immediately.
Damian decided to go see Min in Chicago, but only after five emails, seven texts, and three calls went unanswered. The Smithsonian agreed to pick up the bill, with Annika and her crew out there to do some preliminary shooting. The actual oracle bones were kept at the University of Chicago, and if Min agreed, they’d want some shots of her examining them, plus pickups of the campus and the city. Annika also said she had an idea for an opening sequence.
Three more texts and one phone call later, Damian dropped in on her advisor to see if Min was still alive. “She’s revising her dissertation, so, for a given value of alive...” said Professor Rinaldi. (Fucking academics, Damian thought.) Rinaldi gave Damian her address and advised him to bring her coffee and food. Damian picked up some iced coffee and noodles at the Korean place down the street from Min’s, then knocked gingerly at her door.