white sands

He slid on the charm, which was a set of rules he'd written up a few years ago. He could feel the Thai Stick slowing him down. The entrance to the convenience store was, he calculated, precisely 47.3 steps away. Or twenty. Depending on how he walked. He giggled silently to himself and simultaneously cursed his dealer. He felt the charm take hold, freshening his expression, tamping down his hair, draining the extra blood from his eyeballs. He stood up straighter, walked more purposefully, and felt the shunt as the charm gave him autonomous--but not direct--control over his body.

It was rather like operating a large, bipedal robot, and it cleared his high marvelously.

Into the convenience store he strode, to all appearances perfectly sober and unimpeachably well-groomed. He scanned for his usual Nehi, but opted for a Grape Fanta instead, and--on second thought, some Combos as well, and maybe those peanuts too--turned around, paid, and walked out. As he left, he marveled at the genius. He had full control, but his every action was mediated by the charm, which hovered somewhere to the back and right inside his head. It censored anything inappropriately intoxicated.

He waited until he was home to disengage, pulling and shifting levers to operate his voice, muttering the khon to himself. One thing he had built into what he called his Macro was the inability to censor its own cancellation; he congratulated himself again on his brilliance.

Man, he was so high.

He slumped into his favorite armchair and turned the TV on. Some Discovery Channel bullshit, about some reef off Japan. He stared at the TV, feeling the smooth velvet of the gorgeously high-definition images passing across his brain as he mindlessly gorged on his Combos, Fanta, and peanuts.

The phone rang.

"Man," he said.

The phone rang.

"What the hell?" he said.

Prying himself out of his chair, he checked the caller ID. His mother. "Fuck," he said. He ran through the khon again, but was interrupted when the phone rang a third time.

His hand grabbed the thing and lifted it to his ear, where his head cocked itself.

"Hi, Mom," his tongue flapped. "What's up?" it continued, nonchalant as all hell. He congratulated himself for the tight control of his larynx.

He manipulated himself jerkily through the conversation, which had something to do with a cat and some old lady his mother had struck up an unlikely friendship with. "That's cool. Listen, I'm gonna run, okay?" he said finally. "I have to go to the Post Office and get my address changed and stuff."

After he hung up, he blew out a very precise breath and sank down very precisely in his recliner. Inside his head, he pressed the buttons and pulled the levers to begin the canceling khon, but nothing came out of his mouth.

What? he thought to himself, and tried again--this lever here, that button there, then these three toggles, that last lever, and--

Nothing.

He turned to look at the charm, this amorphous blob of gray cotton which had attached itself to the back of his mind.

He slapped his metaphysical forehead with his metaphysical hand. He'd broken off just before the binding! The charm would judge the canceling incantation to be stoner-speak, and would therefore refuse to allow the instructions' execution.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

Okay. Think. Can I clever my way out of this?

A memory sprang to mind, unbidden. He was in his old house's backyard, six years old, brightly-colored tent and a clown in the background, surrounded by balloons. A birthday party. His birthday party. There was a cake in front of him, of the cookie-cutter rectangular style that came from the grocery store and was the get of a card with strategically-placed blanks where names were supposed to go. He had seen his mother get a similar cake for his little brother.

The little brother. Carl. He died a few days later, killed by a rock as he jumped into the ditch behind their house. It had taken him three hours to find his brother, and when it finally happened, the shock that went through his system first felt like a flush of warm water, then as though his entire skin had just finished sucking on a Wint-O-Green. He squalled for their mother, who came and screamed and ran and called the police, and they took Carl away, and he went to bed that night and thought about the feeling he'd gotten. Dark flickering in the space just behind his eyes told him something had happened, but he wasn't sure what.

Fuck. He was stoned. Jesus. Why bring that up now?

Think. He could feel the haze parting, and he knew all about the wadded-up mass welded to his insides like a spider's egg sack. It was vulnerable, but how?

Without warning, the levers and buttons and switches in front of him began dancing. As he watched through his eyes, his body stood up and walked to the front door--then paused by the keyholder hanging thingy--must find out what that's called--and looked in the mirror mounted on top of it.

Quite independently, his hand spidered up and smoothed down a single stray hair. His arm fell back to his side, and his body stayed where it was. He stared at himself in the mirror and realized he was wearing an expectant expression. There was no other movement. Belatedly, he realized the spell was encouraging him to take over. Immediately, he began pulling levers and pushing buttons, and his body spun around on his heel, preparing to go back to the recliner--but kept spinning. He jammed the lever for his right foot nearly against the floor, but it refused to come down.

Finally, he sighed and turned the steering wheel back the other way. The charmed body immediately came to a rest and nearly keeled over, saved from serious injury only by the spell's intervention. The message was clear: out the door.

He cadged himself outside and onto the sidewalk leading down to the street, trying to turn right in direct opposition to his legs. He sat back in his captain's chair.

"Why bother letting me do anything at all?" he said aloud. The charm-mass remained silent, like a computer with a malignant eye.

So, then. What was it made to do? He ran through the Ten Points of Successful Closet Stonerhood: hair, eyes, voice, posture, gait, impulse, hearing, motion, clothes, and diction.

His hair was smooth, his eyes bright, his voice well-modulated, his posture ruler-straight, his gait an unhurried amble that nonetheless suggested purpose, his movement betraying a reasonably lengthy attention span not given to whimsy, his hearing clear and undistorted, his every motion falling along a calculated best-fit line that curved gently through space with undeviating certainty, his clothes unrumpled and well-laundered, his diction--well, he hadn't had much to say, but he was sure it was within acceptable parameters.

Those parameters had been set up in a construct resembling a sing-songy poem that nevertheless contained significant khon, words of power, that ordered reality within a prescribed area to fall neatly within these constraints. The binding corollary, which prevented the charm from censoring anything that might be one of those words, had been tacked onto the tail end.

He was still stoned. None of this was making much sense. Without much prompting, another memory turned up. He was thirteen, in his bedroom, the streetlights outside filtering through the blinds and striping his face and chest. He had just discovered his first khon, one that interacted with temperature--an unfortunate one, as his textbook had naturally gone up in smoke. Now, the fog cleared and the water poured and the parents calmed, he stood in the dark.

Carl? Really?

He knew that khon could be both very, very general and very, very specific. He had opted for specificity in this particular charm, but what was the key that would unlock his body?

He was briefly distracted when his body fell over. The enchantment had, for whatever reason, abdicated control again. He grabbed the levers in front of him, and briefly, wildly considered trying to chant the cancellation. As he began jamming the blinking buttons in front of him, he could already tell his efforts were fruitless. Nothing was coming out.

Okay, fine. He'd play its game for the moment. He began jabbing out at random, knocking levers over and flipping switches. Nothing much happened, except his body made a large, slow circle approximately six feet wide before setting off in a new direction.

He'd gone three blocks before he realized where he was being driven. He'd told his mother he needed to go to the Post Office, after all. Literal. As the body walked, he began playing at random again, and the gait grew jerky. Encouraged, he began to give conflicting instructions, and watched as the lurching grew more and more irregular. He gave out a slow, drawling chuckle. Meltdown City, he was certain.

The body shambled past a park, and he noticed briefly that he seemed to be drawing some attention. The screams registered only dimly, and he dismissed them as the cries of children at play.

Memory! As he grappled with the machinery before him, he felt himself dissolving into a summer day at the park, with young Carl and a neighborhood kid called Jason? John? Jimmy? Jack? Jordan. Jordan was a little black boy, the son of the middle school principal and the latest heir to a multigenerational physician's practice. He briefly remembered Jordan's future, All-Star football in high school, starting in West Virginia, his eventual return as the town's newest family doctor. Why, he briefly wondered, had he not turned out as successfully?

Then he remembered Carl, and the gift bestowed by his dying body. Fuck it. He was staggering around like a zombie, skin gone all gray, eyes all hollow, and he saw himself in the Post Office's reflective glass facade. Shock penetrated numbly as he assessed his appearance and realized his struggles against the spell had manifested themselves outward.

Shrieking started to come across--a siren. Several. Getting louder. He jerked himself around, barely noticed how his body looked like a broken marionette, and caught a face full of cop. As he went down, he realized he had just been tackled, and was now on his back on the ground, and was the focal center of a circle of police officers with their guns drawn.

Man, he said to himself. What a buzzkill.

Abruptly, he realized he was no longer high, the charm came undone, and he dropped to the ground, suddenly normal.

a good death

"So what in the world is that boy of yours up to now?" Charlotte asked brightly.

Tension filled the room as those nearby who knew sucked in their breaths and waited for the answer.

"Suicide," Hanna said softly.

Charlotte's face fell for a split second as she recovered her composure admirably. "I see. And where is he these days?"

Hannah couldn't say anything more, so Gerry took over. "Sean's in Laos," he said proudly. "Minesweeping."

---

On the day he signed up for the Suicide Corps, he stood in the recruiter's office.

"The first five years, we own your ass," the recruiter said. Good-looking healthy blonde fellow, around Sean's age. Corn-fed All-American, and the desk job said he'd never once thought about ending it all. "If you're still alive at the end, you have the option to re-up for another five. Ten-year limit, though. Past that point, it's pretty obvious your instinct for self-preservation's too strong to be useful. But, you know," and he leaned over confidentially and snickered, "in twenty years, we've never had anyone make it to six."

---

Twenty people who wanted to be dead were instead sitting in a small, airless room, cooled only by a single slow fan. The sun roared through the windows, and the humidity sucked at his lungs.

The sergeant was built like an old public mailbox, and her voice sounded like its unoiled door. She had spent the last hour explaining American bombing campaigns and mortality statistics for Laotians who had encountered the ancient, rusting mines that had been left behind by the North Vietnamese. His head was dissolving into an unpleasant buzz, overwhelmed by all that was happening to and around him. In the end, the sergeant said, their job was to go for a nice, long walk.

---

No basic training, so not much camaraderie to begin with. They all knew why they were there. They had seen a TV commercial just as the blade touched the skin, the pills landed in their palm, they gave their home the long, last look before heading for the roof. They had seen the billboards by the interstate while timing eighteen-wheelers, listened to a convincing cop during the hostage stand-off, seen the poster as they wound the rope around their throat.

Controversial when first established, the Suicide Corps was rapidly becoming a laudable and essential part of the United States' GDP. They saved money for corporations and governments who needed people to kill themselves while doing something useful. Suicides looked for bombs, infiltrated and detonated terrorists' hidden warrens, fought dictators on behalf of those who couldn't, tunneled through the Earth, mapped the Amazon and studied the Arctic, colonized the Moon.

Sean had seen the change as he grew up. His best friend's older brother had been an early volunteer. His disappearance had been explained away as enlistment into the military, though everyone actually knew that nobody volunteered for the army anymore, and defense department dollars had been shifted elsewhere after the forced-conscription riots. When the best friend had signed up for the Suicides two months before Sean showed up at the recruiter's office, though, he had heard him spoken of by his mother with a sense of perverse pride. He might want to kill himself, the tone of her voice seemed to be saying, but at least he's doing some good while he's at it.

The Suicide Corps took the abnormal need to self-terminate and perverted it for a good cause.

---

They shat in open fields and pissed in stagnant puddles. They walked for twenty hours a day. Of the original twenty, thirteen were left. Of the seven gone, only two had actually encountered mines. The others, ground down by the punishing schedule and impatient for that last unlucky step, had taken care of themselves quickly and quietly. The last three had been considerate enough to dig their own graves, not wishing to subject the still-living to the drudgery of excavation.

Food was rice. Drink was puddle-water. Sean wondered constantly why he was living through this, and pushed himself to wait. He had dialed the number; now he just had to wait for the other guy to pick up the phone.

Gorsky was the talkative type. As they trudged, he kept up a constant stream of chatter, mostly about inconsequential things. He was that rarest of Suicides: a blithe spirit. Most Suicides wore their hearts on their sleeves, a bunch of brooders who were only marking time until that last moment when they couldn't take it any longer or it was taken from them.

"So I was thinking," Gorsky said. "We should, like, make book or something."

"Book?"

"Yeah, you know," Gorsky said. He looked around and spread his hands as though the idea were obvious. "Book. We could bet on who's the next to go, when, how many people are going to survive this, stuff like that. Winner-take-all, you know?"

Lyssa groaned behind him. "Don't be an asshole."

Gorsky looked shocked as he turned around to face her, walking backward. "What? C'mon, you know we're all walking corpses here."

She grunted. "Yeah, I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about the winner-take-all thing. Lame."

Gorsky faced forward again, scoffing. "You're just jealous you didn't think of it first."

They both heard her snort. "Fine, then. Twenty bucks says I'm the next to go just so I don't have to hear you going on and on and on and--"

The shock wave hit Sean and propelled him forward, dumping him on his face twenty feet away from the crater where Lyssa had been. Stunned, he lay there for a moment, nearly deaf. As his hearing returned, a whimpering became audible, and he turned in its direction to see Gorsky's back. He was on his side, shaking, his arms crossed and hands tightly holding on to his sides.

A wash of pity came over Sean and he crawled over to Gorsky. Patting him on the shoulder, he said, "Dude, you okay? You know that's what we're here for..." He trailed off as Gorsky rolled over and he saw his face.

Gorsky was giggling. "I-I-I'm brilliant," he chortled, gasping. "N-no way s-she can collect on th-that one!"

---

Gorsky didn't make it out of Laos. Sean had found him swinging from a rafter in the transfer barracks. He figured Gorsky had been hoping he'd be one of the first to go. Instead, he had wound up as one of three survivors. Two, now.

Sparks was packing both of his books. He took those books everywhere with him. A Nancy Drew mystery, one of those who showed the statuesque blonde stumbling down a dark path away from a creepy house with one lit window. The other was an anthology of Flannery O'Connor. Sean had read a few of them, but had found them too bloody for his taste.

Neither of them knew where they were going next. Word around the Shanghai Camp was Mars. The Camp was the nexus for East Asian operations for the Corps, so the rumors were coming fast and furious. There were transfers in from the Middle East, who swore they'd seen a popper being prepped at the Dubai spaceport. The Arctics were mumbling about weird fossils, while the South Americans were swearing up and down that riot control would be up next on the roster. The Mideasters, though, were taken more at their word; they were former conscripts who had voluntarily stayed on, and you believed everything an old soldier told you.

---

Sean got his orders on his sixteenth day in Shanghai. He had been working on a toxic-waste spill at a nearby dump and was furiously scrubbing the acid off his fingers. The Shanghai Camp was situated on several hundred acres of reclaimed industrial property, apparently designed as a quasi-living organism that used the thousands of Suicides passing through every week to rejuvenate the lot. The Camp would eventually move on, leaving behind fertile soil and prime real estate.

A lou walked up and handed him an envelope. As Sean dried his hands in order to take it, the lou sized him up and sneered.

"You shouldn't bother washing up," he said. "The toxins are already in your system." Before Sean could respond, the lou turned smartly on his heel and marched off.

He waited until he was safely inside his barracks before tearing open the envelope. As he did so, Sparks walked in, his face pale.

"They're sending me to the diamond mines," he said, as Sean read the single sheet of paper. "In Africa."

Feeling as though he were ripping his eyes away, Sean looked at Sparks. "Congratulations. The mortality rate's pretty good."

Sparks sat across from him. "I know. I've just never really liked...dark, enclosed places."

Sean was quiet a moment. Then--"Well, at least there won't be any more rigmarole about burial, then."

Sparks chuckled. "What about you?"

"Mars. They're sending me to Mars."

---

They had three days' leave in Dubai after the weeklong training course. The popper was still being prepped. The Mideasters were trustworthy, after all.

Matty was with him. They'd grown up together and he felt a kinship with him. Like a brother. He had decided to join up because of Matty. They were alike, he thought, because they both wanted to die. As they wandered through urban Dubai, he kept his eyes firmly focused on the pavement. He'd discovered something disturbing; every time he looked upwards, at the soaring, glittering towers presided over by the gleaming Burj, he felt a stirring where none had ever been before.

---

A popper was a self-contained habitat payload. In its current form, it was an almond forty feet long and ten across at its widest point. There was a hollow space at its core for the Suicides, ten of whom would be going. It would be launched into space as part of a long-haul vehicle, pointy bit pointing upward, supported by a ten-foot-diameter sphere at its base, which would in turn be attached to the vehicle itself. The habitat was inflatable, designed to explode outward in a burst of oxygen-nitrogen upon contact wth the surface in a four-lobed design resembling a kernel of popcorn--hence the name "popper." The sphere contained essential supplies, and would be delivered nearby.

Both were dropped rather unceremoniously from orbit, and, in truth, the design itself was remarkably unconcerned with human life. Full success would entail the survival of at least two or three Suicides to prep the habitat for the next wave of explorers and yet more Suicides, who would begin the arduous task of establishing ever-larger habitats for colonists and terraformers.

Sean's team was the second to go. The first had failed completely, the popper missing its target floodplain by several miles and landing rather unceremoniously on its side, cracking open like an oyster and exposing the pulverized innards. The Sinai-Levant Corporation had been pleased, though--they had proven that they could make it as far as the planet itself.

Sean himself--and his nine compatriots, with whom he would be sharing a dark, windowless, coffinlike space for eight months--were the next stage in the grand experiment.

---

Sean woke up. His head hurt. His eyes blurred into white and pink and brown. A rancid smell registered. He sat up--and groaned, his back aflame. Rubbing his eyes, he looked around and found himself surrounded by the liquefied remains of his teammates--and Matty.

He was in a spacious dome, white but for dried blood and sundry flesh. The popper had deployed but good, and he had to clean up. But he remembered his training: supplies first.

He found the suits and slipped on the one marked with his name. He didn't bother checking for leaks.

He stepped out of the airlock and heard the wind whistling thinly. The sky was a muddy pink, the world an orangy red, the sun a distant star. He saw great pillars of red rock in the distance. His heart soared.

---

The next party arrived nearly two years later. No explanation was offered, none requested. He had no words. He was ready to go home.

---

They sent him to the diamond mines. In the winding dark deep beneath the ground, he remembered Dubai and Mars. The further he got from the sky, the more he dreamed of it.

The new Suicides he'd been tapped to lead were callow. They saw the Corps as something romantic, people bravely--and deliberately--giving their lives to further the cause. Suicides alone were responsible for accelerating the course of human evolution. The living Camps had already transformed the world's great cities, and mortality rates around the world had plunged while that of the Corps had taken off. Few made it past their third year, now.

Sean was nearly done with his sixth. When he re-upped, it had been before a grim-faced hatchet of a woman who had demanded strenuously for hours that he explain the drain on their resources if he didn't plan on dying any time soon. His only answer was that he still wanted to die and would prefer to continue exercising his right to do so. The hatchet couldn't refuse him his renewal on that basis.

Now he was blasting his way along, six miles below the surface, breathing in diamond dust. Three of his kids had had their heads blown off and their bodies abandoned as their former companions worked their way ever deeper. They whispered about him when they should have been asleep, he knew--the Suicide who wasn't. Misguided, they said, mistaken. He had to laugh; how was it possible for a suicidal person to be considered flawed because they weren't dead?

---

He spent his eighth and ninth years on Io, surveying the Knife Cliffs and mapping volcanic outflows. He was still in the Corps on sufferance; the brass didn't appreciate his seeming refusal to die and were doing their damnedest to kill him, going so far as to dump him alone on Io, the only passenger on a year-and-a-half voyage at skin-tearing acceleration. They didn't understand that he was still waiting for the other guy to pick up the phone.

When he rested and stared up at Jupiter, the fantastical gaseous storms raging on its surface, sky-spanning, the hitherto-unbelievable thought entered his mind, feeling natural: I'd be just fine if nobody answered.

Shuddering, he went recklessly back to work, hoping for an accident.

---

The Suicide Corps XO stared at him. "Ten years," he said.

Sean didn't answer. He felt something inside him, which had grown and grown over the long decade of suffering and horror, and which now filled him like a glittering butterfly in its chrysalis.

"Ten years," the XO said again. "You're the only one in thirty years to make it past six years in the Corps, much less serve a full two terms." He shot to his feet, paced behind his desk for a few minutes, and finally snapped, "What have you got to say for yourself?"

Sean opened his mouth, and then shut it. The ludicrous image of a fish gasping for air on the table next to its fishbowl sprang up unbidden, and he found its comparison to himself--a fishy suicide!--inexplicably funny. He exploded in gales of giggles.

"Get out," the XO said disgustedly.

---

He sat alone in his apartment. Six months since he had left the Corps. His family steadfastly ignored his calls. He had been crucified in the press. He couldn't find a job, and the Corps wouldn't take him back.

The rent was due in two days, and he had already had to spend his survival stipend. He was broke and faced eviction.

Nobody wanted a failed Suicide.

There was now only one way out.