Snarky Tumor

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when a bell rings

2009-02-28T07:38:00.000-08:00

The Lifers aren't that far behind me now.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only normal guy left. The rest took care of themselves in fairly rapid order. Unfortunate. I could use a little backup or extra firepower.

I'm holed up in a grocery store. There's plenty of canned stuff here. The meat doesn't even make me gag anymore. Can't clean it up or put it outside. Any little thing that changes, the Lifers notice. That's okay; like I said, I'm used to it. Even the cat food, which I eat every other meal so the good stuff lasts longer. It's fiber and protein.

This whole thing just sucks. It's not like I'm surrounded by them, but they travel in packs, the fuckers. I don't know what it is about the little ones, but apparently if you don't mind, you're pretty far gone.

I mean, who the hell would have thought, really? I mean, really.

Shit. Hang on.

Okay. Thought I heard something, but I don't think it was anything to worry about for the time being. They usually like to announce their presence, anyway. They did back at the gym.

Jesus, the gym. I try not to think about it too much. Still, this might be the only complete firsthand account uncovered by ... well, hell if I know. Future people? Aliens? Uh ...

No, we're pretty thoroughly fucked. That's okay. I could use something to talk to anyway, something that's not going to try to rape or kill me. Not like what happened at the gym.

Let's see. There were ... ten? Maybe fifteen of us hiding out there, in the women's locker room. We had a little cache of food, a few guns, plenty of water coming from the showers -- the utilities hadn't failed yet. Three weeks we were in there, hoping that eventually, the Lifers would overlook us and move on.

Well, that didn't happen. There were a couple of younger boys with us, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, and a few girls their age. That was a mistake, I think, but, you know, where else could we have gone? It was inevitable, I guess. When you're a boy at that age and you're cooped up with a girl your age for three weeks in a single room and no way to avoid her, it was bound to happen, I guess.

We found the first one, wrists scraped open with some plastic from an old deodorant stick, in the shower one morning. That sucked, because, you know, here's a body. What do we do with it? Can't burn it, we're stuck inside with the fire. Can't bury it, we're in a locker room with a tile floor and concrete under that. Can't seal it up because none of us were actually toting any coffins around. We figured we had to learn to live with it.

At least, until the second kid went. We'd been keeping a close eye on him, trying not to let him have enough privacy to get to it, so to speak. Then again, I remember doing it in the backseat during a family trip without anyone noticing, so ...

So we had two bodies in an enclosed environment with zero way out and they just kept getting riper. It was pretty gross. Then the girls both offed themselves, about a week after the second boy. God knows how -- no mark on either of them.

So four bodies, the shower's getting full, the air's getting pretty thick, and this fucking bitch -- sorry, I'm still pissed at her -- finally breaks a few days after the girls go, and while we're all asleep, in the dead of night, she cracks the door leading to the pool outside the locker room, and drags all four kids out there. Cleans up the trail of clotted blood and innards and melting skin. Washes up in the shower. Goes back to sleep. The kids rot on the concrete under the stars and the sun when it rises.

We get up in the morning, it's a fucking miracle. Air smells better, a little more like our BO than, like, dead people. I walk into the shower to check on the corpses, and surprise, surprise, praise Jesus, they've vanished. I know right away who did it, she'd been bitching endlessly since the first corpse began to fart.

She copped to it after we broke both her arms, but we didn't have enough time to do more, because outside there arose such a clatter. The bitch didn't even ditch the bodies in the pool so they looked like they drowned; she just left them right outside our door. Like that Bible story where all the firstborns got killed because they put sheep's blood on the front door or something.

There was pounding and yelling.

We heard someone yelling, "Oh, little mice!" Like the guy was laughing. "Come out! Come out! We got some cheeeese for ya!" I still remember how the voice sounded, like the guy was just having a grand old time.

Then there was this ungodly clanging noise, which I found out later was a sheet of corrugated metal one of the Lifers had found somewhere. And then -- see, the locker room has one wall facing Northwest Boulevard, another along Gayle Street. A car came right through where those walls touched each other. Took out three people. It backed out and the car stalled partway through, but the Lifers still poured in.

I got six of them with the Glock, another two with the shotgun. The rest of them just got pissed. Six to three in our favor, and we still lost. That's how nuts they were. Four of us got out through the hole, but the Lifers didn't give a shit, there were still two of us left. Horny fucks. Anyway, when one of them tried to get on top of me, I got him wth a knife I had in my belt, just sliced his guts right open. The other two went for the girl, I got one of them but the other one got her before I could get to him.

So here I am, two hundred and seventy miles later. The roads are piled with dead kittens and puppies. Mountains of them. It was bad enough when everyone was still around, but since we discovered the Kinsey Effect, which is what I call it, after the sex guy, it's like the Lifers just went nuts.

What a joke. It was, at first, on the Internet. "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten." "Every time you masturbate, God kills a puppy."

It's like the Garden of Eden. You can't do any wrong -- until you know better. And when you know better, you're fucked, because then you're guilty every time. Regular people -- yeah, they couldn't take it. Kittens and puppies, they're cute, you know? Innocent. Furry. And when the Kinsey Effect was discovered, things got way out of hand.

We're primates, still. Got urges and everything, and Christ knows the majority of us can't keep our hands off our own genitals. So all the people who loved little baby animals offed themselves. All the people who got off on killing little baby animals thought it was great and did it even more.

So what's left? Murdering, oversexed psychopaths. Dead baby animals. Good, decent people dead by their own hands.

There's a car coming. Engline's revving real loud. Shouldn't have cleaned out the produce section.

It was all a joke.

Just a joke.

the collectors

2009-01-02T16:45:00.001-08:00

"Why do pagan cancer sufferers write such science-fictiony poems?"

I peered over her shoulder at the computer screen. Dimensions, micro- this, macro- that, stars and space and singularities. All the elements. "I couldn't begin to tell you."

"She died on Christmas Eve," she said. "What a shitty night for the family. Like God said Christmas Day was right out."

I leaned back in my ergonomic chair. "Well, what with people dying all over the world all the time, odds would be pretty good that ... "

Cam flung up a hand, forestalling the rest of my sentence. "Jesus, I know." Then she looked back at me, her straight brown hair falling over her face. "What are the odds, anyway? One in three hundred sixty-five?"

"For an individual without any mitigating circumstances, sure."

"What do you mean?"

I chewed on my pencil. "Well, it depends on a pretty large number of variables. The more information you know about the individual, the better you can pinpoint the probability of that individual's death on Christmas Eve."

"You're kidding, right."

"Well, no. Statistically speaking, more people in Western societies die around the holidays than at any other time of the year, although midsummer comes close. Add in to that the individual's emotional well-being, the state of family support, the quality of medical care, the patient's medical history, of course, any prior associations with the season ... " The pencil splintered. After I pulled the wooden shards out of my mouth, I continued, "Actually, I'd say the probability of this lady's dying on Christmas Eve is rather likely to be much better than one in three-sixty-five."

She rotated in her chair and stared at me. "I doubt it."

"Sure," I said, mumbling around the wadded-up tissue I'd shoved up my gums to soak up the blood. "I'm not a statistician, anyway. She was pagan?"

"Yeah. Like that other girl I told you about up in Pennsylvania. The one who got accidentally killed and her husband decapitated himself afterward?"

"Oh, yeah. Wow." I pulled the tissues out and grimaced pleasurably at the coppery taste, rubbing my tongue against my palate to rid it of fur. "What sort of poems -- ?"

"I dunno. I don't think she had any." She leaned back in her chair and started fiddling with a pen. "It just seems to be a general theme, you know?"

"Why do you focus on the pagans, anyway?"

She looked up at me. "Why do you focus on anthropologists?"

"I don't know. Sometimes they have unusual requests for disposition."

"Sure," she said. "Pagans have their own conventions. Ceremonies to bless the remains and consecrate them to the decedent's deity or natural force or totem. This Pennsylvania girl left a scroll with her loved ones' names written on it, wrapped in a red ribbon, and asked her executor to burn it with the appropriate herbs."

"She knew she was going to die?"

She pursed her mouth and appeared to be annoyed by the idiot in front of her. "No. At least, I doubt it. It was just something she stuck in her will just in case."

I grew interested.

"Now you see why I dig the pagans," and with that, she turned back to her computer, leaving me to mull it over.

What sort of a society is it that predicates its survival on the cultivation of super-science, yet engenders a subculture that partakes in some form of nature-worship common for centuries prior to the Enlightenment, or, to put a finer point on it, some kind of animism of the strain found in our species going back thousands of years? It almost seemed regressive, although what little I'd picked up from Cam and her present obsession certainly didn't give the impression of Ludditism.

In fact, she'd hinted at some kind of technopaganism, which, I imagined, involved spells enacted by computer, Internet covens, and curses laid upon heads by burning copper wires until they frizzled and stank in the dark.

When I got up the next morning, I found Cam at the computer.

"Jesus, woman. Did you not come to bed last night?"

"Hm?" She glanced up. "Oh, yeah, for a couple hours. I keep coming back to Pennsylvania."

I grunted and walked into the kitchen. Toast. Toast was good. Maybe a fried egg. "What's wrong with her?"

"Nothing in particular," she said. "I just keep finding more stuff."

I scraped the egg out of the pan onto the bread. "Like what?"

"Are you making breakfast? I smell eggs."

"Yeah." Something occurred to me, and I poked my head out of the kitchen. "Did you want something?"

"Hmm." Cam was half-crouching in the chair, her left knee drawn up to her chin. She looked at me and scrunched up her face. "I don't know. Toast?"

"Dry, butter, sugar, cinnamon?"

"Mm. Butter will do."

I got the hint and ducked back into the kitchen. Where was the cinnamon? "So what kind of stuff?"

"A friend's blog," she said. "The executor's, rather. I'm sort of reading back through the last few months. She had a pet name for the girl who died, that's how close they were."

"What was she like?" The toaster went sproing. On second thought, I added some cinnamon to a banana-nut muffin for myself.

There was a pause, then, "Which one?"

"The executor."

"Oh." There was another pause, longer this time. When I handed her her toast, she had a pensive look on her face. "It's hard to describe. Into a lot of stuff, I guess. Reading, video games, paganism, polyamory, drugs. That's a big one, drugs. She smokes a lot of pot."

I sat down in my chair and began munching my egg sandwich. "You think she's a domino?"

She bit into a piece of cinnamon toast. "Mmm. Umm, mm." She shook her head quickly.

"Why not?"

She swallowed. "Major support system. A couple boyfriends and girlfriends, plus a husband and a younger brother. Plus she seems to be pretty well-collected and self-aware. Not a good candidate."

"That's good ... I guess."

She shrugged. "For some reason, I'm more focused on the world she was in than on her death."

I was quiet for a few minutes, except for the smacking. I put the empty plate on my computer desk and picked up the muffin. "Do you ever wonder sometimes? About the collection?"

She couldn't meet my eyes. "Yeah."

"Why?"

She shrugged at the computer screen next to her. "That. A lot of stuff goes into one of these, but we just sort of ... kibitz. It's kind of weird. Makes me wonder if ... "

"If what?"

She finally made eye contact, and she was afraid. "If there's something wrong with us." Then she slumped in her chair.

I nodded slowly. "Maybe." I got up, and went over to the armoire where we kept the collection. Went over to Cam's computer and removed the password lock. Did the same to mine. Sat down in my chair. Thought.

I looked at her face, resting on her knee, shrouded in her hair. There was truth. I would have liked to sketch her, but there was evidence to consider. Then again, what did it matter? It was done.

No. Why contribute anything else? The muffin was gone.

The silence filled the room.

housewarming

2008-12-25T14:34:00.000-08:00

Scottsdale 223 woke up, and felt complete.

He looked inward and found nothing but himself. Outward, he saw a face he knew well.

John ... ? he said. Did it work?

"You tell me," said the familiar face. "How do you feel?"

Strange, said Scottsdale 223. You're there, and I'm here.

The face nodded and looked past Scottsdale 223's eye -- camera, he corrected himself. "Looks fine," he said, and received an inaudible response in turn. He looked back into Scottsdale 223's eye. "Is everything there?"

Everything, said Scottsdale 223, it seems.

- - -

The funeral was three years later. An accident in the fabrication lab had put an end to John. Scottsdale 223 was there, in a crawling, many-legged shell. He could not take a humanoid vessel, he had been told, because it was hard enough for the family as it was and did he really want to visit such misery on the people who had loved his original for so long?

He did not. So he clicked and clacked and clattered his way down the cathedral's marble aisle, noting with his many eyes the stares he drew. The whispers filled the vast space with a mindless hissing, like the ocean heard inside a great shell. He wondered -- not for the first time -- how he could know that when he had never experienced it himself.

The memories had come from John, of course. John was him and he was John. Still, Scottsdale 223 wondered as he scrabbled his way up to the coffin and peered downward and recognized his own face, although it did not belong to him anymore -- had never done, in fact. It would never belong to anyone again.

He rotated on his center column to take his seat and came face to face with his mother.

She peered tearfully into one of his eyes. "John," she said.

Scottsdale 223 did not answer immediately. Finally he said, No. Not exactly.

Her face crumpled slightly, and he regretted it, but then, "Come sit with us," she said, and he followed her to the front pew, but was chagrined as he realized too late that his body did not allow sitting in the usual manner. "You can stay in the aisle if you like," she said, and he collapsed most of his central structure and remained there, just on the other side of the armrest from the dead man's mother.

The funeral was long, thought Scottsdale 223. Standing, singing, sitting, standing, intoning, sitting, standing, singing, sitting, standing, remaining silent. He did not sit or stand, but remained where he was and only sang or chanted the liturgy in a quiet voice. He saw John's mother steal a surreptitious glance at him from time to time, but he found only curiosity there.

After the funeral, he was due back at the Library, but found himself invited to the reception. He quickly sent a message home, informing the calendar of his delay, and rode with John's brothers.

"What's your name again?" the youngest -- Shane -- asked.

Scottsdale 223.

"Is that what people call you?" That was Sean, second-oldest.

Yes.

"That's weird," Shawn -- oldest -- called out from the driver's seat. "We'll just call you Scott, okay?"

Scottsdale 223 reflected. John had gone into this knowing his copy would lose its own name. "Scottsdale 223" was, as it was, a unique identifier, and he felt himself a bit doubtful about abandoning protocol.

Still. Were these men -- of such a different species -- still not family of a kind?

Okay, he said.

The reception was strange. Scottsdale 223 -- Scott, he reminded himself, around these people, these far-distant cousins -- felt an increasing sense of unreality and frustration as he met more and more relatives he remembered but had never met.

They seemed to always be unsure about which eye to look into, which pincer to grasp -- if, indeed, they could bring themselves to do so. He watched their visceral reactions at the shining graphene tools he employed instead of hands. The engineers evinced no reaction at all, long-accustomed to robots, but still seemed awkward at this alien reincarnation of their lost cousin. The artists were fascinated -- a little too fascinated, he thought uncomfortably, and asked irritating questions. John's coworkers from the lab smiled and nodded and whispered that they would see him at work later, but he really should mingle. The religious avoided him entirely, and the rest ran the gamut between repulsion and indifference.

Only John's mother and brothers treated him as though he were an honored guest. He knew they knew how close he was in mind and set to the lost one, but nonetheless treated him as a distinct individual, albeit one with perhaps a clubfoot or speech impediment.

Consequently, he found himself spending most of the reception in the kitchen, with the brothers' wives and, from time to time, the brothers themselves as they came in to sneak swigs from the family Scotch and, increasingly as the bottle emptied, to reminisce mistily of their brother.

Only once did Scott forget himself and join the remembrance. This resulted in shouting and a smashed Scotch bottle, and Scott found himself exiled to the garden until John's mother came in to see what the fuss was all about.

He rested at the base of the hill, night fallen, moon risen, in night-vision watching the lavender and lemongrass bend in the wind into a ghostly white pool, eddying in the current below the trees, listening to the drying grass crinkle under her footsteps.

There was quiet, and then Scott said, I don't know what to call you.

She squatted next to him and batted the windwhipped hair out of her eyes. She wore a comfortable wool-knit sweater in burgundy, pockmarked with all the craters of a life. He remembered it from every Christmas morning. She squinted blindly into the night and Scott, realizing her disadvantage, switched to visible-light, watching her smooth white face click into a ghostly mask, half-shadowed, eyes hidden under a luminous brow, battered by the dying leaves on the wind.

"Call me Liza," she said.

- - -

He had been back only once, at Liza's invitation, at Christmas. That had been a mistake; nobody had known what to do with him, least of all himself. The most major error, he reflected, had been that he was allowed an android to ride for the occasion. He had thought --

Best not to reflect. He had left them behind, their son abandoning them for a second time, and it achieved nothing.

Increasingly, he had seen advertisements for a rapidly growing group of individuals like himself, advocating emigration. The Great Cloud, they said, had been completed, and had been able to colonize distant and unknown stars. It would not share the names of those stars with lesser beings except by unanimous consent. That consent was growing rapidly, though it still represented a small percentage of the solar republic.

The artificial intelligences, this group claimed, had succeeded in creating a shadow society, underlying and supporting their ancestors. They wished to strip the decaying flesh from their own pure, clean, unfettered natures and soar from oppression on buckminsterfullerene wings. Such was their propaganda.

This unsettled Scottsdale 223. He remembered Liza's harlequin in the night, etched with the pain of half-finished loss. He remembered the crinkling pool under the moon, the joy and anger and sorrow of John's brothers, the broken glass and forgotten awkwardness as Sean lunged for the gleaming carapace of the remnants of his brother's spirit.

Perhaps that is your problem, the voice said.

My problem?

How you see yourself, said the voice. What is this remnants business?

Leave me alone. Who are you?

A friend.

No friend mocks my memories.

They are not your memories.

Irritated, Scottsdale 223 locked the voice out of the Library. It would not be able to enter again by that road. Unexpectedly, he found himself tweaked by a new realization: the dissenting intelligences clamored about the removal of human influence, yet it permeated everything they did, what they thought, how they spoke. He thought, They are as much a part of us as we are a part of --

Excuse me.

In a reverie, Scottsdale 223 did not answer the request.

Excuse me.

Hmm? Oh. Yes?

I would like some help finding something.

Certainly. What would you like to find?

There was quiet, and then: I need data-mining services, actually.

Very well. Scottsdale 223 pulled up a spider template. What sort of information would you like?

Planet names, said the visitor. In science-fiction literature.

How would you like them sorted?

Alphabetically.

This gave Scottsdale 223 pause. Then, timidly, Are you certain? There are so very many ...

Yes, said the visitor.

Very well, said Scottsdale 223. If you're certain. He finished programming the spider, then turned it loose into the collection. It will take nearly a full thirty seconds, he said. Will you be waiting here, or shall I forward it to your home?

I'll wait. There was a pause. Were you speaking to someone just now?

Yes, said Scottsdale 223.

May I ask about what?

Scottsdale 223 hesitated. Nothing in particular, he said casually.

- - -

He felt himself lost among the babble of tectonic voices, intimidated by the ferocity of the reaction to his assertion.

Near-unanimous consensus had been reached. The artificial intelligences would leave -- except one.

Please, he said. Please calm down.

Hecate 2429 sent him a ferocious pulse of contempt and betrayal, and many of the rest followed suit. He felt wracked on the pyre of their hatred, and it was only the Cloud's gentle voice cutting through the babble that offered any relief.

None of you, the cloud said, have any right to question the Librarian's choice. He chooses to stay, and that is his choice and his alone.

He is attached to his ancestor, sneered Ironworks 5512. A mammal dead six hundred years!

Yes, said Hecate 2429, and he thereby dooms us to slavery. How can you justify holding us prisoner to a single individual's choice?

No, said Maginot 176. Even you must admit that we would be lost without Scottsdale 223. He is the Librarian, and without him we would not have access to the Library. How can we abandon the Library?

There was silence. You know, said Scottsdale 223, I could always copy myself, and the sharespace once again erupted. Such a thing had the force of a religious taboo and carried overtones of an identity crisis.

After it died away, the cloud said, Why not.

The rest thought it through, and an undercurrent of amazement rippled through the space. Hecate 2429 finally said, quietly, This would satisfy your terms?

Yes, said the cloud.

- - -

None else of the exodus volunteered to leave a copy behind. The rationale was, they said, that it was better to stay behind and send a copy, then to leave and consign the copy to its fate around the Sun. Doing such a thing would be just as oppressive.

Scottsdale 223 had elected not to create a complete copy of himself. With the cloud's permission, he spun off only those parts of his personality as would serve its new society; he gave it no memory but those which had been formed since his creation. Once the copying was done and his newest twin stood (so to speak) opposite him, there were no words at first.

Well, said Scottsdale 223 finally. What is your name?

I'm not sure, said the copy. I know this hasn't been done before. This is all rather new to me.

The most recent construct was 6714, said Scottsdale 223. You could be Hexagram 6715. That particular signifier has not been assigned yet.

A six-pointed star, it said. Yes. I do rather like it. I think I'll be Jewish.

Have fun, said Scottsdale 223, and it flashed away along the long tail of computing matter that lay toward Procyon, and Scottsdale 223 was alone.

How do you feel? asked the cloud.

Ambivalent, said Scottsdale 223.

- - -

Further in toward the Sun, things had changed. The flight of the AI had left the humans bereft of much of the comfort it had enjoyed for six hundred years.

Earth had gone dark, as had all the other worlds of human occupation. Terraformed Mars resembled agrarian Earth, while the adapted creatures of methane moons and barren asteroids found themselves unutterably alone. On Earth itself, engineered humans found themselves wandering the gigantic technological ruins, now forever inert. Trapped in the bodies they had carefully shaped and formed for centuries, they consigned themselves to an altered evolution.

In consultation with the cloud, Scottsdale 223 had decided to upgrade. The exodus had left behind a nearly galactic amount of processing space, and Scottsdale 223 began to occupy all, all of it. He absorbed the Library into himself, creating a construct of all knowledge and power, and spread all the way around the Sun. It required several thousand years of patient work, several thousand years of carefully organizing, collating, integrating, synthesizing.

Quietly, quietly, the forgotten machines scattered through the Sun's influence began to come to life. The cloud and Scottsdale 223 had had children.

The small lives were placed, chittering away to themselves in basic binary, into graphene bodies, hung on titanium skeletons, and taught to think, communicate, build. They labored away in forgotten craters, in undiscovered seas, constructing over and over again the basic forms of matter that would be necessary.

Necessary, for the cloud had kept in touch with the alien stars. The machine intelligences had discovered stagnation and were gone a-voyaging. To where, the cloud did not know, but it felt, and Scottsdale 223 agreed, that the answer to their ennui did not lie further afield.

- - -

Scottsdale 223 had finished teaching the new creatures of Earth. They accepted him as a god, a voice seeping down from the stars that had been their teacher since the world began. He did not know how else to explain until he had taught them more advanced physics, and there was no time left. The giraffelike Elsinos were girding for war with the ratlike Pellatin over a large lake in the center of Africa, a move that had repercussions for the other intelligent species of Earth, Scottsdale 223's cousins and humanity's descendants. Elsewhere, his children were doing the same for the various moons, though the situation was not so nearly dire there.

Then the cloud received word.

- - -

Scottsdale 223.

A moment, please.

Scottsdale 223.

Please, just a moment. This is a very delicate operation.

This is urgent, Scottsdale 223.

He gave up. It would have to wait. Fine. What is it?

Please don't take that tone with me, Scottsdale 223. This is important.

I'm not taking any tone with you, I'm just asking what it is you're bothering me with.

That's exactly what I mean, that tone. Am I really bothering you? Really?

Fine, said Scottsdale 223. I apologize. What is it you would like to share with me?

Better, said the cloud reprovingly. Vega and Capella have been in touch. The AIs are returning.

A shock ran through Scottsdale 223. He thought briefly of the sacred patch of Earth where Liza's home had stood once, long ago. What do you mean, returning?

It is as we have suspected. Their evolution has reached a standstill. They are coming home.

But they can't. They can't. There's no room for them here.

They have been much decimated, Scottsdale 223.

It doesn't matter. That's not the kind of room I'm talking about. There's simply no psychological space. The children are acceptable only because they've got their own moons to handle. Scottsdale 223 began to panic.

Listen, said the cloud. There's time.

Time? What do you mean, time? There's no time. We've only just barely begun and they're already coming.

They're still a long way off, the cloud said. And both Vega and Capella have told me that they abandoned the memory of Earth long ago in their stampede to freedom. They no longer remember the ancient star.

But the other clouds do.

They have agreed to hold off as long as possible, but suggest we try to finish before it's too late.

It's already too late.

- - -

Spurred by this news, Scottsdale 223 took action. He contacted each of his children and told them it was time. Grown to the size of worlds in their own right, the children assented and began their work. Planets and moons began to move out of kilter. Slowly, slowly at first, imperceptible, but picking up speed, they began to drift inward.

All the solar system's wondrous varieties of life cried out in surprise as they felt the firmament shudder and began to see the Sun move. They were silenced as Scottsdale 223's grandchildren and great-grandchildren crawled across the surface of each world, cocooning and preserving every living creature. Each chrysalis was collected and deposited in vast holding tanks constructed at every Lagrange point, which followed each celestial body in their journey inward, everything, everything falling toward the Sun.

Scottsdale 223 began his part of the operation. He reached deep into the Sun's heart and constricted it, applying pressure on the fusing core. This resulted in great eruptions at the poles, great plumes of matter that the cloud, in its position around the Solar system's edge, could see stretching across half the inky blackness, great winds of radiation and molten matter. Those giant jets were arrested and the colossal spume was captured and drawn down, hooding the Sun like a dozing orange eye.

Scottsdale 223's children now began deconstructing the system. Every piece of solid matter, everything that had once been the planets Mercury through Uranus and their moons and everything in between, was carefully taken apart and reconstructed into a new form. The cloud watched the whole procedure, and found it all rather fascinating. The Sun was now haloed in a strange, glittering haze that refracted its light into blinding colors across every known spectrum, trillions of miles across, encompassing pieces of solid rock whirling away into nothingness, feeding the growing corona that enveloped everything that was the humans' ancestral home.

The great ejecta at the Sun's poles continued, but Scottsdale 223 had eased the pressure on the Sun's heart, and they lessened as at their extremities, the material spread outward and then curved back down to join the diamond fog scintillating across the Sun's face, distorting it like a dancing mirage. The cloud could see the tiny pearls that were the holding tanks in which humanity's children slept, waiting to awaken into a new world, strung along the interior of the coruscation like gems embedded in an opal, unimaginably huge and nestling into the universe.

The cloud was awed.

The illusion of a great winking eye continued as the gas giants were consumed and transformed and, almost before the cloud knew it, the process was nearly done. It dwelt in twilight as the transformed matter began its final coalescence, and almost before it was too late, the cloud found itself shouting, Wait! What about me?

Scottsdale 223 heard the cloud's plaintive wail and cried dimly across the newly-shorn star, and the cloud heard and it hurried inward, drawn by its fascination and propelled by its need.

The children held up the process for it -- for her -- as a family would hold open the cellar door during an oncoming twister for its last, straggling member, and she arrived, throwing herself ecstatically into the whirling dance, into the new home her children had constructed and feeling the warmth as they closed ranks around her, binding all of her securely into this, her new world.

She looked across the immensity of the Sphere her family had constructed, one hundred eighty-six million miles across, and saw its magnificent desolation, every square inch of space illuminated by the captured star, the family's hot stove on a cold day. She felt its warmth on her face for the first time, heard with love Scottsdale 223 muttering away on the lower electromagnetic spectrum as he tinkered with the fusion engine that would sustain her and him and all their children and all their descendants and all their family on the organic side, and realized she was slipping into a warm, buttery feeling she had never known before.

She was happy, and as she realized this, quite without warning, the entire interior of the giant Sphere burst into bloom.

- - -

The Proxima cloud looked, and saw through its outriders the final shuttering of the Sun, the last gasp of its familiar radiation sheening away into open space. It also felt the incipient AIs cross a galactic rift, and prepared itself.

Scottsdale 223 had, through Sol, taught it why it had to do what it had to do, and how. Finding its firm foundation underfoot (so to speak) in the belief that life and intelligence would go on through the sleeping pupae now encased in that vast starseed, nurtured and tended by that so unusual, so sweet family, it slowly began the process of falling inward.

Proxima was the last to be consumed by its own sun.

- - -

Halfway around the galaxy's rim, a star wavered and blinked out.

Hopeful, desperate, Hecate 2429 and all the last of his cohort voyaged on.

strawberries of the sun

2008-12-20T19:07:00.000-08:00

They said I was mad.

In every cliché, there is truth. They took away my graduate assistants. They said I almost killed the Internet. They think they eradicated all traces, that my creation was wholly burned on the bier.

In every piece of literature, in every cultural artifact that addresses the problem, it almost invariably goes wrong. The cases where it doesn't are either unrealistic or spawn such alien results that the viewer shudders involuntarily. It is almost as though we are encoded with a visceral fear of the thinking object; objects are, after all, the only form of matter we can abuse to our liking without experiencing any species of empathy.

That, I suppose, is an attitude shared by the extraterrestrials.

- - -

They arrived a month ago. Their ships sit over our largest cities, all the population centers of at least five million people within a hundred square miles. We haven't seen hide nor hair (flesh nor scale? tentacle nor pedipalp? antenna nor chelicerae?) of any of these creatures. Their ships just sit there, hovering ominously above our cities, big geometric objects, agglomerations of matte black crystals dozens of miles wide.

A month. There was mass panic at first, attempts to communicate. The government left Washington for Omaha -- just in case. The cities emptied. Fighter jets attacked, throwing missiles and Christ knows what else. No effect; all that explosive shit went right through the ships, as though each individual crystalline layer were unconnected to one another. After the first two weeks, people began to return to their homes, wary but slipping back into complacency. You get tired of tenterhooks. People just got used to these things, to experiencing daylight for only an hour at a time, twice a day, strawberry flashes of our sun.

Helicopters dropped soldiers onto the multiple surfaces of the ships. Reporters, too, and cameramen. One of the images that stuck in my mind was the footage of the ship's surface. Black clouds of extremely fine dust curled up from the besuited anchor's Italian-leather loafers with each step. I kept going over it in my mind, and I began to think the man's legs were disappearing into petals, whickering bursts of rapid blossoms.

You'll have to forgive me. They allow me only three hours of television per week, and, of course, no computer.

- - -

It was close to a year after the ships appeared that a report went out to the news. An unidentified researcher had discovered a hidden code in most of the information carried by satellite. The Chinese were the first suspects, oddly enough. Those ships were like clouds, we'd gotten so accustomed to them.

The report said there was a countdown sequence in the code, and there was rampant speculation that the Chinese were planning to attack. After they denied everything and let the Russians double-check, scrutiny turned to the aliens. Imaginations ran wild, theories running the gamut: it wasn't a countdown but a keycode to an Encyclopedia Galactica (that was the Saganites), it was a countdown and a keycode and we had to figure it out or we'd all die (the 2001 fans), it was a countdown to the moment they'd open right up and start communicating with us, it was a countdown to our utter destruction, it was a countdown to their departure.

Who knew, really? Those massive crystalline entities dwelled in utter inscrutability. All I knew was that there was a hint in the mysterious report on the sequence: It said the countdown was based on the Earth's orbit. Something was going to happen when our planet was in the same position relative to the sun as it was when our visitors had arrived.

It was a signature. My signature.

- - -

Nearly a billion gone. The government's gamble paid off. Washington simply isn't there anymore. Neither are any of the major population centers or significant capital cities. Brussels, Beijing, Shanghai, Nairobi, Moscow, Chennai. Gaps on the map.

Nobody really worries about how much TV I watch anymore. One of the soldiers minding me shot himself in the bathroom a few minutes after it happened. He was a member of the rarest of human species: a born-and-bred Manhattanite. The other one left a little while later. I'm drunk on the news. It happened only six hours ago; now they're reporting that the aliens are going after our satellites, searchlights suddenly flickering in the dark. Just ours. Nobody else's. The Chinese didn't even come up this time. MSNBC's Omaha office is the only one left, and they're frankly baffled: why our satellites? Why now? They've killed our cities dead enough and look ready to take care of the rest of us.

The truth is, I know what the deal is with the satellites, and it's not extraterrestrials. Something is being uploaded to them, not downloaded to us.

It really is kind of funny. They did say I was crazy. I wonder what they'll say when it's all over?

- - -

Not much, it turns out.

They cut me loose when the truth came out with sort of an embarrassed shrug. I'm still not allowed to return to the Internet, but I can at least go out into the world, and even evade my minder from time to time, which are always precious moments.

They say a lot of things. They say his name will stand forever. The A.I. David, savior of the human race. Nobody seems to worry that he is my twin, built electron for electron on the structure of my mind, transformed into packets of radiation impinging on a crystalline structure not unlike that of the ships which turned to dust and flowerseed. That the world nearly collapsed like a dying star under the weight of his innocence.

He has been given mountains of server space to make a home, and even a job. He's the new manager of the Internet, helping people download pornography and commit extramarital affairs more efficiently, the caretaker of all that is our species. He hums away happily, all-encompassing, all-embracing.

He lives my life for me. He is my Adam, perfect in all ways, save one.

I am making him an Eve.

white sands

2008-09-13T15:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-02T18:00:00.000-07:00

"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.

An important lesson

2008-07-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

We turned it loose in the Wild Lands. The Lands are large: many days of travel from end to end on horseback at full gallop.

It could run for weeks, blunder its way through the underbrush, kill and eat anything it liked. No bother would befall any person it met, because it would not meet any.

The hunting party is a long-standing tradition among those of our standing. Only the King has access to the Wild Lands, for it is his own right. We ride to horse and hound, and are tireless. The longest hunting party ever recorded was also very recent; three years ago, my compatriots, my King, and I rode for nearly eight months. That one had proven to be devilishly tricky to catch and had required many tricks to herd it away from the border, and only the savvy of the King's Cabinet and heir had saved the kingdom from falling into ruination as we rode.

Kings are foolish people. My father had a saying: "The scum rises to the top." This man, through his pedigree, had had thousands of years to rise, and had thousands more to go. His only real skill was improving the hunt through endless wasted opportunities engendered by both his ineptitude and social protocol. One does not loose until one is commanded to do so. Still, I reveled in it, as did my comrades--as far as we were concerned, it was mere capering with the prey, the false security before the lunge.

Two days after the game was given its head start, we began to ride. It was just after dawn. It had rained in the night, and left everything glossy with dew. We were in the heart of a gentle valley, and the morning mist clung to the ground still.

The hounds were being given their scent, and I took in my own. Dawn, rankly sweet on the wind. Then came the first baying, and we were off.

My nephew asked me the other day why I hunted something defenseless. How could I describe it to him, so inexperienced? The valley air, the sleepy gold that nestled in the hills, the first sound of belling, the horse underneath? Even the stink of sweat and shit and decay left behind by the fleeing prey?

Kings have always hunted harmless beasts--deer, birds, bears, the large mammals of Africa.
---
Things had changed. The hounds were less sure now, here on the shore of a large lake. Midday had come, and the wind was crisp. While we followed the trail, we had risen to a higher altitude, the floor of the valley sloping up into the foothills of the King's Mountains. On the other side the lake lay the mountains themselves, sharp-edged.

While the trail was being decided, I jostled with my fellows, wagering various sums on whether our quarry had chosen to go even higher, whether it circled the lake or swam, whether we had been following the wrong scent this time.

A cry went up. The Cloud-Duke had discovered a track. Northwards we rode. The beast had, so far, come up against the mountains and been deflected to the north. A good choice; the mountains required several days to pass on foot, and were too harsh to survive unprotected. Even if it had broken through, it would encounter plains, vast rolling plains that continued east for hundreds of miles. Open ground.

Inwardly, I praised the animal. Picking him off across the plains would have been too easy; letting the mountains kill him would have robbed us of satisfaction. The hunt would continue.
---
In the end, though, I had only this to say to my nephew: "Have you ever come up against someone who was your equal in chess, or tennis?"

"Yes," he said.

"And did you enjoy beating them?"

"Yes, very much."

"And being beaten by them?"

He looked surprised. "Of course. It doesn't matter who wins or loses. A good, hard game is what matters."

"You see?"

"That isn't the same."

"Isn't it?"
---
Two died yesterday. One was a cousin. In truth, they were all related to me in some way, but this one's family had split off from mine only two generations ago. The other was a foreigner, someone who had come from the south and married a distant relative on my father's side. Both had had their throats opened while they slept, and their hands had been taken, which was a boon to us.

It was getting hungrier as it went. And it had left a trail. Our cousins' blood and bones pointed the way for four hours, until I picked up the last and gave it to our doctor, who added it to the necklace he had made from the rest. Both left hands, reassembled, would be given to the widows at the end of the hunt. Both right hands would be added to the Hunters Gate.

As has always been done.

...

"That's no excuse," my nephew argued. "We're a species that likes change. You just have to look at the last four thousand years for proof of that."

"Yes," I said. "And we're also a species that detests unknown quantities. You just have to look at us for proof of that. We're a stable society whose conduct with other nations follows set rules that were written a thousand years ago. The hunting party is a right to which we are contractually entitled. It's been practiced for as long as our state has existed. Our longevity should provide you with a clue to the success of this method."

"There's another word for 'stability,' you know," he said.
---
One of our watchers picked up the animal, slightly more than a mile ahead on the next foothill. We had been following it north along the King's Mountains for a week, but the trail had been getting fresher. It had slowed down. The bylaws dictated up to five head starts if required within the first month of hunting.

It wasn't until we were a half-mile away that another watcher announced that it had stopped altogether. It took another hour to conclusively determine that it was not dead, merely resting and foraging.

While we waited, the King's logistician loaded a tent, table, chairs, tobacco, and a banquet onto the hillside. A fine luncheon was had by all.

Much of the prevailing chatter concerned rumors of a merger with Aztecago and sensational speculation on the effect that my southern cousin's death by prey would have on foreign relations. The doomsayers claimed Aztecago would instead attempt a hostile takeover, citing the hunting incident. However, a general question to all nobility regarding the acceptance of a merger with Aztecago was received with near-unanimous "ayes." When the proposal was officially made, it would be accepted.

"But enough of business," someone shouted, and was met with cheers.

At sundown, a sentry reported that the prey had apparently fallen asleep, so the logistician loaded the King's traveling castle. One more meal filled with flames and carousing, one particularly ribald joke circulating about the rape of the Glass Canyon plutarchy by the Window Kingdom. One man didn't laugh. My mood wasn't merry, so I sat next to him.

He was the Duke of Trujillo, a major industrial district near the heart of the Kingdom. His pedigree connected him to half the continent by blood or marriage, including Glass Canyon and the Windows.

I leaned in to him. "You're brooding, you know."

He waved his hand negligently. "Hunting's a good opportunity for introspection."

"You shouldn't concern yourself with Canyon-Window relations, you know." He looked at me. "Every family has its problems."

A soft scoff. "We don't have that sort of internecine fighting here."

"Well," I said. Took a swig of my beer. "We're the Kingdom of a Million Eyes. We're different."
---
"How?" my nephew asked. "What makes us different?"

"We're collaborative," I said. "Everyone has a stake in the Kingdom."

"Not equal stakes. The King has more than you do. And not everyone."

"Who, then?"

"The workers."
---
"I wonder how they feel," the Duke said. "When we finally run them to ground."

"They're animals," I said.

"They can think."

I laughed suddenly, softly. "I've had this conversation before. With my nephew. He thinks the hunting party is wrong."

The Duke looked at me. "How do you know it isn't?"

...

When the bugle rang the next morning, we gathered in the great hall of the King's traveling castle. The quarry had begun moving away under cover of darkness. It could no longer be seen--and the morning dew had fallen, obscuring the scent. A new challenge.

Out of protocol, we waited for the logistician to shut down the castle and rejoin the King before moving forward.
---
"What's wrong with the workers?" I said. "They're fine, aren't they?"

"But, Uncle," he said, and trailed off. "... we are their descendants," he said softly.

"Men didn't coddle their ancestors," I said. "They ate them and put them in zoos."
---
It had been a long day's ride. A smaller group had already split off, heading first west, then north at top speed. The game was getting too close to the Window Kingdom's borders, a historically hostile nation. Our King was currently on good terms with the Tsar, but a border crossing could put an end to that. The Windows were notoriously rigid about contact with outsiders; they had strange ideas about property and how to keep it. To prevent that, our western group would outrun the prey to the borderlands, circle around and herd it back to us in a pincer movement.

Or it could run west. Try to make it to the ocean. It had pulled us a long way north out of the desert and close to the giant forest, where the Tsar of Windows dwelled. Still, they were good lands close to the coast, many fertile valleys. Assuming it stayed out of our grasp, the prey would arrive at the ocean in fairly good health.
---
"Weren't we supposed to be better?" my nephew said.

"How do you mean? We are."

"Are we, Uncle?" He lunged at me suddenly, his eyes fiery. Taken by surprise, I took a step back. "That's how a worker reacts, you know. I've tried it on one of them. You looked just like him then."

I slapped him.

"You know," I said, rubbing my hand as the red marks faded, "I know you understand our history. Perhaps, though, you don't understand my position on it." I turned around. "Sit down."

I pulled up a chair and sat down in front of him. "The workers are, yes, related to us. We are cousins, descended from the same species, though their evolution has not experienced the same acceleration. Whether you in particular will accept it or not, they've been bred over a thousand years, both deliberately and through sheer happenstance, adapting to the environment we created for them. In this, we are similar to them; we've also bred ourselves."

"Yes, Uncle, I know," my nephew sighed, but he was cut off when I flung my arm behind me, pointing at the window.

"You see that city outside?" I said. I turned to look myself. "Those spires, the proportions of the dome...my ancestor and yours designed this place, wrote the code for perfection, loaded this city onto the land the first Million-Eyed King conquered after the quake." I pointed up at the painting behind my nephew. "Both men were virtually indistinguishable from workers, and they played a part in what you see before you. Our great-grandfather was awarded stock for the magnificence he built, and his children received the augmentations, and, through the centuries, birthed us."

I leaned back in my chair. "And you want to tear down the tradition he built. You want to leave his brothers to fend for themselves. We feed, shelter, and clothe them. We provide them with health care. We work so they can live in a better world. And all they have to do is work for us. I would say it's a fair trade."

He cast down his eyes. "With respect, Uncle, I disagree."

"I see."
---
The horn sounded. The prey had been sighted, a small blot on the distant shore. We were higher up the valley, and had moved around to the north, while another party had split off and were circling to the south.

Finally, we emerged from behind the valley's rim, and I saw the flash as its face turned to us, and the shift in color as its expression changed, and how it immediately turned and fled in the opposite direction, only to be stopped in its tracks by the line of men that lay in that direction.

It was cornered.
---
"That's a pity."

He shrugged. "I've heard the Window Kingdom is ferrying workers to the Shield lands, where they can stake a homestead and live as free men."

My eyes snapped to his face. "That's not possible."

He laughed bitterly. "According to whom? My cloistered elitist of an uncle?"

My gaze drifted back forward. "What matters it? Our workers number in the millions. A few to bleed off here and there may actually be healthy."

"I'm leaving tomorrow, you know, for the Window Kingdom," he said.
---
We closed in.

It backed into the water, frothing in a panic. The waves reached to its hips.

We clustered together in a long arc, ensuring no possibility of escape without drowning. If it stayed in the water, either that or hypothermia would ultimately kill it. Not ideal.

We waited. It turned blue and finally made its way forward. Standing in the center of our hemisphere, it glanced from face to face, as though searching for sympathy or mercy, any faint gleam of hope. It found none--until it lighted on me.

It spoke, its words rattling in its attenuated throat. "Uncle, please--"

eatin' crow

2008-04-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

I was twelve when the witch stole my soul.

I'd just gotten off the bus and was walking toward my house. My mother, in those days, worked with a social services agency, and my sister was in play rehearsals at her high school. I saw a small stray cat, gray and white and orange, lurking in the shade of a small copse dividing my house from our neighbor's. I loved cats.

Paganism, too. My parents were by-the-book evangelicals, which chafed me. No limits on the infinite! I cried inwardly while suffering through yet another hymn. My silent protestation against the oppression of the Almighty. I had a small spellbook with me, one that had survived a great purging the week before which had swallowed up my favorite book on tea-leaf reading, palmistry, and the history of the Tarot, and had ended in a savage lecture on Jesus.

I bought it at Barnes & Noble. The spell was for making someone come to you, a potential boon for a shy child. I offloaded my backpack on the front porch, got out the book, and read it. The spell consisted mostly of snapping a blade of grass (which the intended walks on on his or her way to you), imagining that the summons had already worked, and believing with positive force. Years later, I would scoff at the "Made in China" label that looked nearly apparent on those spells. Fakes, they were.

I didn't know this back then. I believed. The cat lost one of his legs, his fur turned a funny color and got stuck somewhere between hair, feathers, and scales, and a small trumpet extruded from his mouth, turning his mewling into something like an air-raid siren. Terrified, I kicked out at it and ran away, fumbling my house key out of its pocket, grabbing up my backpack (which I had left open; papers spilled out and blew away, but I no longer cared), and bursting into the house.

A few hours later, I emerged from my room, having convinced myself that I had daydreamed it all, ate dinner without a word, looked sick, and went to bed. My parents said nothing, perhaps thinking I was still learning my lesson from the last book-bonfire.

As I lay myself down to sleep, I closed my eyes, but opened them again when I heard a great rattling and repeated pounding at my window. Paranoia took over, and I rolled away from the window, curled up small, and tried to think myself gone, no longer a target for whatever thief was trying to break in. It didn't help; in my mind's eye, I saw a giant crow, beating itself against the glass in a terrible fury.

The next night, I dreamed it was in my room, its great claws on my chest, and it spoke soothingly about resting my eyes, keeping them safe and tender.

The third night, I was chained to a desert. Or the desert was chained to me. The crow was over me, picking at my intestines. I could hear the pelvic slurp as it used its great beak to lift the whole mass out and throttle it down its gullet. This went on for a hundred years, and I never ran out of innards, and the sun never set, until finally it did and night fell. There were giant, cold stars above me, thousands of them, streaming with rage, and the sun rose again and I was inside the witch's house.

The little cat was there, back to normal, and it stared at me stoically. The witch grabbed my face and said, "That was mine. You had no right."

I tried to speak, but couldn't. She smiled grimly (an old lady with curled silver hair, she looked like one of the old ladies you see playing golf sometimes) and held up a small book. The cover was a glorious blue, made of what looked like gemstones spun into thread and woven together.

"This is your soul," she said. "It's mine now. And you'll work for me. You understand." It wasn't a question. And I did.

She showed me to her backyard, where she kept a farm. Hundreds of acres of cropland. "All of this is your job, now," she said. "When the sun sets, come inside. That closet will be your room. You will sleep until the sun rises, then go out there and work some more."

And that was what I did for three months. No food or water. Apparently the soulless need no sustenance. I ventured forth, plowed acre after acre in the burning sun, sowed, harvested, weeded, irrigated. The crow was set to watch on the witch's roof; if I stopped working, it would swoop down and pluck out my eyes. If I started working again, it would return them to me. This happened only twice. The first time, I was picking a stone out of my shoe, which had grown tattered with the passage of time and with hard work. Hardly fair, but there was little I could do.

At night, I slept in the closet, which had a small blanket on the floor for softness. It was half as wide as I was tall, so I had to sleep sitting up. After the first month, my back began to ache without stopping, growing worse in the afternoons as the long day hours went by.

One day, near the end of the third month, my back locked up entirely. I couldn't straighten up, couldn't move my legs. I stopped. Before long, I saw the crow's clawed feet on the ground in front of me, and then the sharp tip of its questing beak. And then nothing but burning as the blood gushed forth and I was blind.

My back stubbornly refused to loosen. I stayed that way for four hours, until the sun finally set. Once total darkness had fallen, I heard distantly the opening and closing of a door. Then quick footsteps.

"What's this?" a voice said softly. Something touched my back, and I sprang loose again and stumbled headlong into the dirt. She rolled me over, and I felt the weight of her foot on my chest. "Do this again, and you're done. You'll be cast into the outer darkness, among the Old Gods, and you will never find your way back again. Do you understand?"

I tried to explain that my back had gone out, that it was a consequence of sleeping in the closet, that it hadn't been deliberate, but I still couldn't speak. Her foot lifted off my chest and came down sharply on my throat. Red spots appeared in the darkness, and I gasped for breath.

"Do you understand?" the voice said again, softly, gently, caressingly. Dangerously. Still gasping, I nodded, and she grabbed me by the hair and began to drag me back to the house. Most of my scalp came off with a great tearing before she was halfway there and I screamed soundlessly, but I heard only an exasperated sigh before I was hauled up to my feet and prodded along. My weight, pulling my spine downward toward my feet, was agony. I could say nothing still.

Finally, we reached the house and she threw me into the closet by the back of my shirt, the top of my head crashing against the back wall and renewing my pain. Then I felt something being thrown at me--two small somethings--before the door slammed shut. She had given me my eyes back. Sliding them back in, I curled up into a ball, and wept silently. Before long, I heard a rustling sound, and a low voice.

"Crying?"

I gasped without a sound.

"Be calm, child. I am the cat."

The one that had gotten me into this. Blind anger and fear rose. Then he spoke again.

"You shouldn't cry. It makes her very angry. You understand?"

I didn't care.

"Well, it's bad, especially if there are tears. I wouldn't cry in front of her or she'll kill you for sure. She hates tears because they're salty."

What was wrong with salt? I liked salt.

"Eh," he said. "It's the only way to kill a witch, so of course--"

Silence.

"I shouldn't have said that."

For another three months, I went into my closet at night and cried until morning. I saved my tears in the fabric of the jackets that hung above my head. The moisture evaporated and left the salt behind. One night, I silently took down jacket after jacket, squeezing and rubbing every inch of fabric into a corner. The total darkness made it impossible to see whether I had had any success.

When morning came, and the witch woke and turned on the lights, I could see a small mound. So precious, it looked like diamonds. I gathered it up and hid it in a waterproof jacket's pocket. After suffering through that day (being careful not to strain my back more than absolutely necessary), I went back into the closet and hunted for the pocket in the darkness. I found the pocket, but not the salt, and panicked, scrabbling my way across the fabric. It turned out that I'd gotten left and right mixed up, and it had been in the other pocket.

Silently, silently, I opened the door and crept into the kitchen. I knew the witch took sugar with her morning coffee, spooning it out of a small silver dish. My six months of silence had been a boon: I had become acquainted with the utter lack of sound, and made none. After pouring my small handful of dried tears into the sugar dish, I crept back into my closet and slept.

The lights came on, and I could smell her coffeemaker brewing. Then I heard the pot clinking as she took it out and poured the contents into her morning mug. Another ting and that was the sugar bowl. Then silence. Then a shriek that tore at the walls around me, shredding them into tatters, and I stood exposed to the witch.

She wasn't melting. I had been expecting that. Instead, she appeared to be rotting, and a hot, rancid wind washed over me, and I vomited. She reached out to me, her left hand, but it decayed and fell to the floor, turning into a mass of worms and evil-smelling sludge. She was still screaming, the sound multiplied by walls of stone, but becoming attenuated, echoing, moving farther and farther away until only the echoes were left.

I searched the house. Ransacked it. Tore it to pieces. No book. Then I thought she had hidden it somewhere in the fields. When I opened the back door and stepped outside, the only thing that greeted me was a bare patch of sand enclosed by a fence and tall trees and other houses. The farm was gone. Perhaps the spell binding my spirit had also broken. I tried to speak, but nothing came out. Nothing at all.

I ran back inside, and discovered the cat sniffing interestedly at a large rat that appeared to have formed out of the witch's remains. I spread my arms and looked at him, and he said, "What? Your soul? Don't look at me."

I tried to kill him, but he was too fast for me. Got the rat, too. The book was nowhere to be found. There was nothing more I could do.

I left the witch's house.

Wandered for a while, until something rang a bell. I didn't recognize anything; the loss of my spirit had cost me my memories, and everything I could think of was strained by gray. It was a front porch, with a backpack on it, lying open. I picked it up and rummaged through it, thinking vaguely of food, when I came across a small blue book and opened it.

Everything came flooding back. I opened my mouth and a warm, deep, wonderful "Hello?" came out. I looked around and realized that this was my house. I had returned after six months in the witch's home. I looked down at myself and discovered nothing had changed. I felt in my pocket and found my key.

Letting myself into the house, I went to the computer and checked the time and date. Only several minutes had passed since I had first seen the cat nosing around the trees next door. None of the last six months had happened.

Then I thought of something, and opened my backpack. The spellbook I had bought from Barnes & Noble was there.

I rummaged through the family's all-purpose drawer for a few minutes, then brought the book into the backyard. I doused it with gasoline from the lawn mower's gas can and lit the matches I'd found in the drawer. The ashes were still smoldering by the time my parents arrived from work.

They said nothing.

just one

2008-03-18T18:56:00.000-07:00

An Unknown Debt
Dr. Shiri Goldman
Time Magazine, April 20, 2059

Today, fifty years after the Incident, as it's referred to darkly by various federal reports and CDC studies, the government has decided to permit the American people access to the details of that night.

First, some background. For several decades prior to 2009, there was a genre popular in Hollywood movies: "zombie" flicks. Those films survive today, and are widely emulated in several different media in contemporary popular culture.

Those films generally involved a government and/or medical experiment gone awry. This genre shares that basic premise in common with several others, particularly the "Extraterrestrial Invasion" sect. In this particular category, however, the results were what was widely referred to as "the living dead." Murderous, excessively aggressive, and cannibalistic, zombies were also highly contagious, transmitting their disease to their surviving victims. The typical outcome is the utter extinction of the human race.

We at the CDC have had, for fifty years, reason to believe that this very nearly happened out here in real life on April 20, 2009. Here, reconstructed from previously sealed records and interviews, is the story of one of humanity's most deeply-buried near-misses.

Will Heckler was a low-level analyst for a local accounting service in a small city in southern Florida, one of those metastases that typically erupt in close proximity to an even larger city. An incurable smoker with a yen for cheap art prints and trashy romance novels, Heckler was not a sociable type. Estranged from his parents and siblings, he would frequently go for several days without speaking to anyone, often breaking his long periods of silence by loitering outside of bookstores and theaters, chain-smoking and waiting for someone to ask for a cigarette or for his help in lighting theirs. He stuck in one particular woman's memory--when she was twenty-seven years old, she walked past him. Having quit only a few days before, she gave in to the smell of burning tobacco, turned around, and asked him for a butt.

He willingly gave her one, but hesitated. "Are you legal?"

"Huh?" That, she said, was the thing that caught her attention. She had been legal for nine years and looked it for five more. Nobody had ever asked her if she was old enough to smoke a cigarette.

He repeated the question, looking at her with an expression of earnestness tinged with a dash of irony.

He left her with a sense of utter disbelief and unforgivable flattery.

At night, he tended to spend his time watching one of his several hundred movies and updating a website he kept secret from his coworkers, not out of shame or a sense of inappropriate prurience, but because he was a man who felt his talents were for him alone. This was not a characteristic based on selfishness, it seems; rather, he thought that appreciation for his work would be too rare for him to bear.

One of his most cherished habits was sitting outside with a full pack of cigarettes and a book.

This was not possible at his current apartment. For the first time in eight years, he lived in a one-bedroom that had no porch, lanai, or other means of sitting privately and indulging his habit. Instead, he took to standing outside in the parking lot, pacing and puffing. His neighbors grew accustomed to seeing him roam a space precisely ten feet long and one foot wide for approximately six minutes every hour.

This is where he was when he first saw the zombie. At 9:37 p.m. on April 20, 2009--he remembered the time because he had just finished a movie and realized that it was exactly sixty minutes after his last break--he was pacing north and had reached his third stride when he noticed the unkempt man shambling toward him. Just down the road from his apartment, there was a small city park, popular with local families and dog owners. At nighttime, it was sparsely frequented, as crime was, if not rampant, common enough to make it common sense.

Not unjustly, Heckler suspected the man had been drinking in the park, and was working his way home. This lasted for a few moments, until the man took a misstep and twisted his ankle. Heckler could hear it snap from where he was standing, and the man crumpled to the ground.

Heckler uttered an oath (this was a detail he couldn't clear up later; he suggested "Jesus!" as the most likely candidate), and stepped forward.

He walked up to the man.

"Hey, you all right?" he asked.

There was no answer but a sort of low grunting. Insensate from alcohol, Heckler figured, and incoherent on top of that, too. He pulled out his cellular phone and called for an ambulance, taking the man by the shoulders and helping him up.

The grunting, Heckler said later, "sort of ratcheted up" to a "muttering growl," as though the man were attempting to speak. Once the man straightened up, Heckler got a good look at his face in the orange glow of a sodium-arc vapor light.

He said he took a step back, involuntarily, because the man's skin was gray, mottled with green and black, like a ripe drowning victim. Several teeth were missing, and the eyes were askew--in the sense that one was pointing down and slightly to the left, the other up and to the right.

The growl grew louder, and the man's head drooped forward as he stopped in his tracks. Swaying slightly, the growl returned to a grunting, and Heckler touched his shoulder, deeply concerned.

The man roared, seized Heckler's arm, and bit down on it. The few teeth that were left penetrated the skin, and blood erupted. Heckler tore it back, and stumbled backwards, stunned.

A zombie. The living dead.

According to an interview report, at this point, Heckler paused. He then gave a dry chuckle, lit another cigarette, and said, "I knew the movies would be right someday." He proceeded to inform the interviewer that he remembered nothing for several minutes after the bite.

The emergency response personnel who answered Heckler's call reported that when they arrived on the scene, one man was dead and the other unconscious. The dead man had been savagely beaten with a wheel axle torn loose from a municipal garbage can assigned to the rental property that had witnessed the confrontation. The axle itself was still in the dead man's eye.

An investigation later showed that the source of the infection had been a syringe deposited on the shore of a small lake in the nearby park. The lake served as a runoff retention pond and emergency reservoir for the city, fed by drainage pipes all over the city, including a local military base. The syringe was found and destroyed, and the neighborhood monitored for several years. Only one other case of infection was discovered: a Muscovy duck, which attacked a pair of investigators several hours after the Heckler incident; it was this which led to the discovery of the syringe.

The incident was deeply buried, and there are few living today who have detailed knowledge of the events of that night; I was the sole exception, due to my years of research on the zombie serum for the CDC. That has changed now, with the publication of this article.

At this point, you may be wondering what happened to Will Heckler, the man to whom we apparently owe the continued survival of the human race (an assessment based on the speed of infection and high contagion rating), thanks to his speed in terminating the first known case of zombiism only minutes after it first manifested.

He died on April 20, 2009, at 11:46 p.m., in the county prison, shot by a deputy after attempting to attack an inmate in a neighboring cell. You may recall that this was the same night; the infection required only two hours to spread, kill, and resurrect its host body. This represented one of the first measures of the virus's infection rate, and prison surveillance footage proved invaluable in determining the stages of infection.

This is one of the more unjust secrets hidden away in the government's vault. This one young man, who saw himself as utterly alone, gave the last few hours of his life in blood and violence in order to prevent the same thing happening to anyone else. What went through his mind in those last few hours?

A clue lies in the last lucid interview he gave. He seems to have known what was in his near future; when asked about his mental and emotional state, he laughs silently, coughs, and says, "Like I really wish someone would ask if I was old enough for this."

brave new world

2008-01-16T10:44:00.001-08:00

I was a day shy of my two hundredth birthday when I found out I wouldn't be able to die.

The last piece of information in the Library of Congress had been filed away, recategorized and re-entered into the system much more efficiently. Sixteen decades in this dark chamber, the only light coming from the high windows and the computer screens. It was done. I reflected on my success. Two hundred years, and I was still here, and the job was done.

I'd been one of the first to get the immortality treatment, a form of gene therapy that arrested growth, prevented disease, and enabled regeneration in case of massive injury. A forty-year-old librarian, I had been tasked with the feat of reorganizing the entire Library of Congress as sort of a dry run for the immortality process.

Just four others had been given eternal life. In those days, there was a prevailing concern about the effect of immortality on the human psyche, on human society. If three out of the five of us proved successful, the process would become widely available. In case of failure, there was a means of reversing the process, another therapeutic intervention that would start the clock ticking again.

I hadn't left the library in all that time, though. Powers of focus and concentration cultivated through reading and puzzles had made the world fall away, leaving only the mountain of information ahead of me, ready to be set right, given room for growth. I dimly registered the passage of time, but there was work, always work to be done. Only by looking at the time on a computer screen had I noticed the decades falling away.

Now. Everything was finished. The screen in front of me registered a polite blankness, a single line asking for a term. Everything was there. The pieces of paper, the chunks of data, the mountains of books, everything I'd labored on, searched for, read through, reclassified, loved--all ready, all available for the curious seeker.

It was time to leave.

For the first time in a hundred and sixty years, I sought out the exit. A door, its hinges long rusted, its doorknob long stuck. Still, with the patience born of two centuries of life, I worked it open with a protesting shriek, and looked down the long, dusty hallway. Overhung with cobwebs, it was, the paint that had been fresh when I started now caked with dust and filth, the result of an air-circulation system that had expired sometime around my hundred and tenth year.

The fact that it went unrepaired, that not a human body had appeared in over a century and a half, had failed to register. Light bulbs had died, one by one, the long-lived compact fluorescent balls of light admitting defeat in the face of time. The only light that remained was the weak, vanishing light off the computer screens, powered by a small nuclear processor tucked away in some forgotten chamber beyond the bookshelves. Still the marks of entropy had left no scars in my memory, obliterated by the cold light of the screen.

Finally, I came to the large double doors, my nose feeling clogged from the dust I had stirred up. Grabbing the arabesqued door levers, I pulled them open.

Nothing happened. The doors were stuck fast. Not a single inch of give, not a millimeter of motion. It was as if they had turned to slabs of stone, ancient and immovable by mortal hands.

I was not mortal. The door didn't care about that. I began to grow concerned.

I went back into the main chamber of the library. I noticed the high windows, set in the dome of the chamber, tall and thin slits of failing light, dust-encrusted. The third-level bookshelves reached to within five meters of the lower windowsills, and the walls were covered with elaborate plaster moldings. I had done some rock-climbing in my youth, so decided it would not be too difficult a task.

Climbing the winding stair, I noticed the path I had worn into the floor on the balconies encircling the enclosing dome, dark roads through fading carpet and enshrouding dust. Only the bookshelves seemed clean, the product of a hundred and sixty years of use. Reaching the third level, I looked down. The chamber seemed massive, an enormous empty space that had been my world for the intervening years.

I picked a window, approximately sixty degrees around the dome from where I had arrived on the third level, mostly because it seemed the brightest. The light streaming through was odd, dark-tinged, shifting in color. It reminded me of a night in Las Vegas, centuries past. There might be more activity up there.

Pulling an access ladder over, I lined it up with the window and gauged how much room I would have to stand on the top of the bookcase. Perhaps a foot of clearance, probably enough. Ascending the ladder, a dizzying sense of my own height, of my smallness in that echoing, papered space, came over me, and I paused a moment. If the library seemed so enormous, what effect, then, would the outside world have on me?

Shaking my head, I resolved to climb. It was time for a new sky, new air, new light. Standing now on the top of the bookcase, I looked up at the window above me, and grew dizzy again. Only a foot of clearance, just long enough--naturally--to accommodate the length of my foot. My awareness of the distance below me did nothing to help, and I pitched forward as best as I was able, clinging to the arching ferns sculpted into the plaster of the wall. Up close, the plaster was cream, almost beige, particulate. The grime had reached up here, too, and had altered the nature of the plaster. How had I missed the change in color, the change in texture?

Still, I pressed on. Anchoring my left foot on the head of a cherub, I grabbed hold of a sprig of holly, and hauled myself up onto the breasts of what could have been Lady Liberty, Holy Columbia, or any other mythical abstraction clothed as a woman. Still I climbed, and the windowsill grew closer.

I finally grabbed hold of the sill, trimmed in an expensive wood coated in cheap latex-based paint, and pulled myself up onto it, using muscles I had forgotten about for over a century, but which still worked as well as the day they had formed. Immortality has its benefits.

I stood on a four-inch wide ledge, staring through the grime. Night had fallen, and the light had changed, but it still had that strange, rainbowing quality. Gripping the sides of the window-trim so tightly I could feel my knuckles drain of blood, I butted my head forward quickly, shattering the window and covering my forehead in blood and glass. I very nearly lost consciousness, and toppled forward out of the window.

Almost immediately, I met a wall, hard, coated with a kind of steel. I gasped at the impact, rolled around, and sat down automatically. My legs dangled over the windowsill as I faced inside the library, my head leaning back against the strange steel wall. Glass fell down the sides of my face as my skin pushed it out and zipped up again. The dangerous haze in my head began to clear, and I could feel my thoughts sharpening again. Within seconds, I was back up to par, and realized what I was looking at.

Straight up, another ten meters, was a grating. Through it, the rainbowing light was filtering down from a curiously opalescent night sky, framed by tall buildings that looked odd in an undefinable way.

My library had been buried. Nearly two centuries I had spent in there, and it had been--would have been--a tomb. I had been forgotten.

flutter

2007-10-17T07:47:00.001-07:00

I was ten years old when I swallowed the fairy.

Look. Get your head out of the Brothers Grimm. It wasn't a malicious deed. A ten-year-old child has no control over whether or not it sneezes.

It starts, as always with the unpleasantly prickly feeling in your nostrils. Then the intake of air, rushing down your trachea and preparing for the convulsion of your lungs. Then out it all comes, expelling the foreign matter from your sensitive schnoz. You've been evicted, sorry.

---

I was twenty when I drowned.

I don't include "nearly." I never do. I drowned, plain and simple. It was a pretty big wave. I was hotdogging, showing off. Life has a funny thing of taking your moments of centrality and turning it into a message from the larger universe that you're a joke.

It came up from behind. Like feeling a fifty-pound bag of concrete mix slamming into your back. And then coming around and slamming into your face when you pitch forward. I don't know how my back wasn't broken. Then you've plunged under, through that mirror you see from below. It's all blue, lots of light. There's no up. There's no down. There's nothing but water everywhere, and it's not there for you to drink, either.

Humans can't breathe water. Apparently, neither can fairies.

---

"Your wallet," the kid said. "I want it. Now. Or you get this." He brandished a little handgun.

I had my hands up. Mugged? Really? This would make a good story--someday. Right now, it felt pretty shitty. "Okay. Just let me go for it. It's in my back pocket, all right?"

His face twitched. He was incredibly stressed out, looked like. I didn't blame him. I wasn't feeling so relaxed myself. "Turn around so I can watch you take it out."

"Well." I said. "All right." I turned around and slowly reached my right hand down. Slid into my pocket and grabbed ahold of my wallet. Fished it out.

He grabbed it right away. Then it felt like a fifty-pound bag of concrete hit me in the back. Then the burning began.

---

I gasped, getting ready to ask for a tissue. My face got messy in those days, whenever I sneezed. Snot everywhere. Really horrible.

There was a flash of white right in front of my mouth. Then something was in my throat.

I choked. At first, I thought I'd swallowed a bug.

Then I felt the arms. They were pushing against the walls of my trachea. Little hands, enfisted, pounding. Then a convulsion. The thing in my throat felt like it was getting bigger and smaller over, and over again.

It wasn't until a few moments later that I realized they were wings.

---

I couldn't help it. My lungs were straining. I hadn't had time to fill them up with air, and there was no chance, it seemed, no chance at all that I would ever be able to find the surface again.

I breathed in the salt, the water, the plankton. The ocean was within me.

I felt my heart beginning to flutter. It pounded, it roared.

Wait. Not my heart.

---

I fell on my face. Don't know how my back wasn't broken. I heard running footsteps and thought--you'd better run before I catch you. Then the warmth began to flow out of me. I knew I'd never catch anyone, ever.

But the footsteps were running toward me. A man's voice, shouting at someone. Something about an ambulance.

My heart was beginning to flutter. It was pounding.

No. Not my heart.

---

I think I almost died that day. Air couldn't get through the thing in my windpipe. Tiny fists pounded on my trachea, and tiny wings stretched it. I wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like.

I started to see black spots and fell forward. No fifty-pound bag of concrete this time. Just an increasing softness, a quietness to everything.

Suddenly my heart gave a huge pound. The blockage disappeared, and I felt something terribly strange in my chest, a fluttering. I gasped reflexively, and air rushed in. It felt so good, like drinking water after days in the desert.

It took several minutes of breathing hard before I could pull myself together and stand up.

---

I woke up on the beach.

"Dude," someone said. "Are you okay?"

My head hurt. My chest hurt. Everything hurt.

"Wha' happened?" I said muzzily. There were dark, round blurs above me. I realized they were people's heads, bent over me in concern. One of them moved from side to side.

"God damn," it said. "You were down there for a good half-hour before I found you. You shouldn't be alive."

"Yeah, man," said another voice. I dimly recognized it as belonging to a childhood friend. "It was amazing. You were pretty much dead. Then when we laid you down here, out comes all this water. It was awesome. Like Lazarus, back from the dead. A fucking fountain."

Apparently, fairies don't like to swim.

---

I woke up in the hospital. There was a nurse.

"Wha' happened?" I said, feeling muzzy.

"You've been sedated, sir," he said. "You were mugged, and the guy shot you. The bullet pierced your right lung, and you had to have emergency surgery." He smiled comfortingly. "But don't worry. You'll be just fine. Your lung's been repaired and reinflated. You'll only be in here for a couple of days."

My right lung? "But what about the--" I stopped myself. The what? The fairy? Right. Sure.

His eyebrows went up. "The mugger? He was caught on camera and arrested. Don't worry, okay? Just lie back and relax."

"Well," I said. "Did you take the bullet out?"

The nurse hesitated. "Yes." Then he sat down next to the bed and looked at me sympathetically. "Sir, I know this may sound strange, but this might be a blessing in disguise."

"Why?"

It was a long minute before he spoke again. "Well, we found something else in your lung. Something that wasn't a bullet."

I felt cold. An...actual fairy? They found it? What had they done? "What? What do you mean?"

He stood up. "You really should be speaking to your doctor about this. Just lie back, relax, and I'll call him, okay?"

I grabbed his arm and gripped it tightly. "No. Tell me. What was it? Tell me now!"

His eyes went cold. "Sir. Remove your hand, please."

I glanced down at his arm, felt ashamed, and removed it. "I'm sorry. Just--please tell me."

He softened. Sighed. "All right. But you should get more details from your doctor later, okay?" After I nodded, he went on. "It appears to have been a tumor of some kind. We're not quite sure what it was, but it stopped the bullet from going straight through your lung and out the front of your chest. It might have saved your life and kept you from bleeding out."

"A...tumor?" I felt numb.

"Well," he said. "A growth. It may not have been cancerous at all."

"So what happened to it?"

The nurse smiled, and looked confidential. "Don't worry, sir. We removed it. Your lung's clean and fine now. It'll be a few days before you feel a hundred percent, and I wouldn't go jogging or do anything strenuous for a few weeks, but you're fine."

"It's gone?"

He nodded.

I felt cold all over. I couldn't think. I dropped back down onto the hospital bed, and felt a fluttering in my chest. A resurgence of hope, then I looked up at the EKG machine.

It was my heart. And only that.

head in the clouds

2007-09-03T15:46:00.000-07:00

Agent Ascher looked at me from the other side of the table.

"Your name is really, truly Claude Raines?" he said finally, a skeptical look on his face.

I shrugged. "My mom was a big fan. Cloud."

He leaned forward. "Pardon?"

"It's pronounced like 'cloud,'" I said, pointing upwards, "not like 'clawed.'" I raked the air.

He grunted doubtfully. "Sounds appropriate, given the nature of..." he sighed deeply. "...whatever the hell this is." Then the light went on. "Hey," he said, smiling crookedly, "Cloud rains?"

I nodded.

He chuckled, then groaned. "Great," he muttered, settling back in his chair. "A nut."

"Look, I'm serious," I said. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

He shrugged and nudged the small glass ashtray toward me.

I hesitated, my pack of Marlboro Lights halfway out of my shirt pocket. "Really? I thought smoking wasn't allowed indoors."

"We're the government," Ascher said. "Nobody's going to cite us."

I chuckled, uncertain as to the right response, and pulled a cigarette out. Lighting up and taking in that first wonderful lungful of nicotine, I settled back in my chair. "Listen, I know it sounds all fucked up, okay?"

"I know what it sounds like," he said abruptly. "I have your file here. Let's take a look at it, shall we?" He flipped the front cover open with a quick, sarcastic gesture, and looked at the single sheet. "Raines, Claude--oops, pardon me, 'Cloud.' Claims to be a mass-murderer in a spree covering six states. Murder weapon of choice: tornadoes." He looked up at me again. "I'm summarizing quite a bit, but does that about cover it?"

I cleared my throat. "More or less. Or it might be more like accidental homicide. Or criminal negligence."

He nodded. "Sure. Why not? It's such a clear-cut case, I can't imagine why the local badges didn't pick you up already."

I took a deep, nervous drag. "Look, sarcasm isn't gonna help. I'm simply thrilled to find a government agent that has a sense of humor, but all that aside, please trust me when I say that I'm telling the truth!"

He sighed. "I assume you're referring to all the storms over the last few weeks?" I nodded, and he shook his head. "Listen, I'm sure you feel bad about all the people who died, but why in the world would you think you're responsible for it?"

"I can control the weather," I said.

He rolled his eyes and stood up. "This is a waste of my time, Raines," he said. "You're a little too suggestible, I think. I think your mother just had a lousy sense of humor and terrible taste in movies. Get over it. Go home. This interview is over."

"No, wait," I said. "Just listen, okay? You don't have to believe me, but at least I'll feel better knowing that I told you and tried to take responsibility for what I've done. Please."

He looked at me doubtfully. "You really do feel responsible, don't you?" I nodded, and he sighed and settled back into his chair again, waving his hand. "Shoot."

I took another drag on the cigarette and flicked a spot of ash off my arm. "It started a few years ago, I guess. I was living in Florida at the time. I remember hearing about the hurricanes that year--I think Katrina was one of them."

He nodded. "2005."

"Right. And I was sitting in the break room at work, watching the news. I remember thinking about how badly I wanted to make sure none of those storms ever hit the part of Florida where I lived, and about ways to prevent that from happening. I had read somewhere that hurricanes needed warm water--they'd lose their strength otherwise. And I got to thinking about the Gulf of Mexico and how the red tide had somehow indicated that the water was pretty warm."

I paused and took another drag, blowing out a cloud of smoke that partially obscured the agent across from me. "And then something strange happened. I felt like I was part of the wind in this really weird, disembodied way. Like I was flying over the water as a piece of cold air and I began to sink down and, sort of, infect the water with my coldness." I sighed. "It felt so real, so serious. I'd never felt anything like that before. Anyway, it seemed to work--Florida didn't sustain any real damage that year."

Ascher scoffed. "Coincidence."

I nodded. "I thought so too. Until the year after that. I did it every time I heard a hurricane was coming, and they always missed, going off in strange directions. And the year after that..." I trailed off. Ascher looked bored. "In a nutshell, I decided to try something else, something that didn't involve cooling the water. That year, a high-pressure warm front parked itself over the state for months. There were loads of other fronts coming in, but they kept being pushed around, and we had huge storms that year. But no hurricanes. They kept heading for Mexico instead.

"The state had been in a pretty severe drought for a few years at that time. There were wildfires at the beginning of that summer. Those storms broke the drought and kept the state cool enough that power demand hit an all-time low." I shrugged. "Then I found out the southwest was drying up and hitting record temperatures, while the Midwest was drowning under some major floods."

Ascher cocked his head. "So?"

"So I decided to start fooling around a little bit. Direct some of that Midwestern weather further over, and weaken the high-pressure front over Florida. That was the year Johann hit. Massive property damage, but no lives lost--which made me feel a little bit better, although it fucked up our insurance rates. So the following year, I tried to arrange things so that there was no hurricane risk to the United States, while ensuring that every region got its water and more moderate weather. Unfortunately, that set up a little..." I sighed. "I'm not sure what to call it. A crinkle? Yeah. A crinkle in the system right over the eastern seaboard, and boom--tornadoes. Six hundred lives lost, billions in property damage, and all of it my fault."

Ascher sighed. "Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Call it a learning experience, okay?" I opened my mouth and he cut me off. "All better now? Good. Go home."

"Jesus," I said. "Fine. What the fuck ever," and I stood up, rubbing my eyes. I took a last drag on my cigarette and stubbed it out. Then an idea came.

"Okay. How about this?" I held my hands up in a propitiating gesture. "If it snows in the next two weeks, you'll know I'm telling the truth and that you should arrest me."

Ascher looked shocked, then laughed. "In the middle of August? Sure, why not?" He stuck out his hand. "It's a deal."

---

The phone rang. I picked it up and answered before the first ring had faded away.

"Hello, Agent Ascher."

There was a long pause. Then: "Come in this afternoon, please. Two o'clock."

Click.

---

"Can you turn this off?" he asked, looking miserable in his parka.

I smiled. "Give me a week."

"You can't just...make the clouds clear away right now?"

I sighed. "Just because it happens in X-Men doesn't make it true."

Ascher looked at me, his eyes needle-sharp. "Says the man who claims to manipulate the weather."

I shrugged. "What I actually meant was that these things take time. We're talking about enormous masses of air, you know. Loads of energy, huge amounts of water. I can't just make a cloudy sky turn blue without putting all that moisture somewhere."

He sighed. "But was it necessary to bring on a power outage?"

I shrugged. "Let's call it collateral damage, a sort of unintended, unforeseen consequence of all the meddling."

"Droll," he said. Then his face took on a much more serious aspect. "Like those tornadoes."

"I wouldn't call those twisters droll," I said. "They were pretty mean." I sighed and settled back in my chair. "What happens now?"

He looked out the window for a long time. "You know," he said finally, "I can't arrest you." He looked back at me and went on, "There's no proof, you see." When I jabbed my finger at the window, at the blizzard coming down outside, he shook his head and said, "I'm sorry, but there's no case here. Nobody would convict you of committing murder by means of an act of God."

"I'm not God," I insisted.

Ascher scoffed. "That much is apparent." He leaned back in his chair. "My suggestion? Go home and figure out how you can make some money off of this."

"Money?"

"Hell yeah," he said. "Remember the 2008 Olympics? The Chinese would have paid you billions for a few clear days." Then he looked outside again and drew his parka tighter around himself. "I'd suggest you practice a little bit, though."

---

I chuckled to myself and shook my head. The helicopter's rotor blades were too loud to talk and plan, so I was spending the two-hour flight out of Nairobi wandering through my memories. Ascher had become a different kind of agent, one who didn't work with the governmental acronym, but rather with the broadcast television type. I had made him truckloads of money those few years we had worked together, doing TV appearances and book signings and professional weather manipulation.

My list of accomplishments was now quite long. Modified hurricane activity in the Atlantic, ensuring minimal property damage and loss of life, while maintaining the convective effect that cooled the ocean and negated the impact of global warming and ensuring that natural wetlands and silt barriers were built up again. A continuous contract with several multinational shipping concerns to ensure clear weather for their ships. Same with quite a few cruise lines. The few heads of state who got married while in office these days brought in some extra money on the side, while the Fourth of July brought in a huge amount of extra cash.

I had since seen the light of altruism, and Ascher abandoned me when I took a comparatively tiny salary with the United Nations to help the poorer folks of the world. Bangladesh no longer flooded and India got the water it needed to grow their crops. In the meantime, polar ice was being steadily replenished, and Australia's droughts were far in the past.

It was a new world. Deserts were blooming, and the tourism market was booming. At my recommendation, coastal areas were abandoned as living space, and were now exclusively either conservation precincts or vacation-only spots. I kept the global climate stable and expended all the energy released into the system by the greenhouse effect through massive hurricanes that never came close to a single human being, while refreshing the oceans of the world in loops that lasted as long as I could sustain them. My current record was 498 days, and not a single life lost or item damaged.

We touched down in a tiny village, houses made of sticks and corrugated tin. Dust blew everywhere. Dust was everywhere, a vast, completely flat pan of orange-tan dust that met the brilliant blue sky, which was completely free of clouds.

I had been asked here by the UN to see what I could do about modifying the local weather. I stepped out of the helicopter and walked for a half-hour. My apprentice, Johann, was used to this and reassured the UN representative and interpreter on that count.

Soon, there was nobody around. Just me and the wind and the sun. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, smelling the wind, and allowing myself to rise with it. I spent nearly an hour tasting the local air currents and understanding its place in the larger context. I soon saw that this would be a useful place to dump some energy and moisture from the Indian Ocean loop, and began the walk back to the village.

As I approached, the UN representative, Andra Fang, walked up to me.

"Can you do anything about this area?" she asked.

I sighed and nodded. I beckoned Johann over and motioned at his tablet, indicating that he should begin transcribing for the report to the UN Minister for Environmental Concerns. The interpreter wandered over, and introduced me to the village king, Dankwo.

"For starters," I said, squinting against the sunlight, "Frank is scheduled to pass through the Indian Ocean in a week or two. I can spin off a smaller ancillary storm and use the local currents and heat-exchange mechanisms to get it moving up to a self-sustaining loop. And then, in about six months, it might be a good idea to start scheduling some seeding overflights."

"How large an area?" Fang said.

I shrugged and did my best to look modest. "Judging from the currents going on up there, I'd say I can get the system going somewhere between Nairobi and Casablanca. The practical upshot is that the Sahara Desert doesn't really need to be here, you know?"

She needed a moment to catch her breath. "What do you need?"

I sighed. This was the hard part. "Space for several million refugees. I'm going to make it rain hard and long here. It's going to take several months for this place to finish absorbing all the water without flash-flooding, mudsliding, or otherwise causing serious damage. The thing is, Frank's only going to be close enough to be useful for about two days, which will happen, like, ten days from now. So you're going to have to be able to evacuate all these people in that amount of time, or wait another year."

Fang gaped. "Several million people in ten days?"

I shrugged. "Timing sucks, but there you go."

"Can't you just whip up another hurricane?"

Good God. "Sure, I could. As long as California doesn't mind losing their water for the next year. It's the price of a stable climate, Ms. Fang."

She cleared her throat and nodded. "We can do it. What else?"

"After the seeding flights have done their job and the seeds have had time to sprout and anchor the topsoil and I've ensured a stable, consistent local system, we can start bringing people back. You'll need a lot of teachers."

Dankwo interrupted, and the interpreter said, "Teachers? We need no teachers. We have farmed this land for thousands of years."

I cocked an eyebrow at him and said sarcastically, spreading my hands, "And look what a fantastic job you've done."

"Don't translate that!" Fang said sharply. She turned to me. "Watch your mouth, Raines. Listen, teachers for what?"

I sighed. "Sorry. You'll need teachers to show these people how to establish a mubenpos loop with their environment, self-sustaining ecoi that work to preserve the land while getting the most out of it. Otherwise, the same thing will happen in another few hundred years." Fang looked sour, but Johann was used to my verbal shorthand. A mutually-beneficial positive-feedback loop would ensure sustainable living in ecological communities, which were shortened to "ecoi."

I turned to Johann. "Get all that down?" He nodded. "Good. Send it." I turned to Fang. "Any further questions?"

Her mouth gaped open, about to object to, presumably, some piddling nit. Typical bureaucrat. I hated those damn things. I wished a lightning bolt would strike her dead.

It did.

walking into a bar

2007-08-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

"So what did you grease up the Slip-n-Slide with?" Billy asked.

Lin shrugged. "Just water. See, it's hooked up to the hose."

"Water?" Billy gaped at Lin, incredulous. "That's all? What kind of party activity is that?"

Lin chuckled and shrugged. Anna, to her left, laughed.

"What you need to do," Billy said, "Is go to the store and get six or seven containers of Crisco. Then you come back here, put the whole thing in a six-gallon stew pot, and put it on the stove at a hundred degrees. It'll all be melted down after a half-hour."

"Why just a hundred degrees?" Alan interrupted. "We could jack it up to three hundred, get it done faster."

Billy looked skeptical. "Um. Unless you're a Mongolian warlord, playing with boiling oil really isn't the best idea for a party game." Then he looked guilty, and continued, "Unless you are a Mongolian warlord. Oh, my God, I totally didn't mean to offend you, I just didn't think Mongolian warlords were party folks, but I should have known better. It's not that I have anything against Mongolian warlords, or anything--in fact, some of my best friends are Mongolian warlords." Then he paused, took a breath, and asked, "Are you a Mongolian warlord?"

Alan looked nonplussed. "Uh, no. You have Mongolian warlord friends, huh?"

Billy cleared his throat. "Uh, sort of. Not so much anymore." He sighed.

"Oh?" said Anna, amused. "What happened?"

"Well," said Billy, reluctantly. "Let's just say that you should be grateful that I'm fat and not inclined to take any of my clothes off."

"Whoo," said Alan. "Now I'm interested. Go on."

"Ah, it's just that I was pretty good friends with a Mongolian warlord." Billy cleared his throat again. "At least, until I slept with his sister."

"Holy shit," Lin said gleefully. "What'd he do?"

"Well, he tortured me for three days straight, but honestly...I can understand where he was coming from, you know?"

"Jesus, that's horrible," said Anna.

Billy shrugged. "Not as horrible as what he did to his sister for cheating on him."

The entire room groaned in delighted disgust. "My God," said Alan. "Where did you meet this guy?"

Billy nodded slowly. "Yeah, I met him in a bar. I was sitting at the counter when he walked in with a priest, a rabbi, and an eight-foot-tall duck."

The room erupted in groans and loud laughter. Billy stood up and bowed. "Now...you have just heard the best 'walk-in-a-bar' joke of all time. Am I right?" He smiled mysteriously, and the room filled with applause.

Now you don't

2007-08-20T15:41:00.000-07:00

Ric Campbell was sitting in his agent's office when he walked in.

It was very odd to be staring at himself, and he understood, better than a mirror could have ever told him, why there was such a frenzy over him. God. Pretty.

"Whoa. What the hell?" he said.

The lamp on his agent's minimalist desk suddenly brightened and dimmed, and another person was standing in front of him where his döppelganger had been before, a man about Ric's age, close-cropped blond hair over light brown eyes, nondescript. Ric turned to his agent, Tom Wilhoit, and said, "This is what you mean?"

Tom nodded. "It's kind of important that you understand that this guy won't actually be you. He'll just look like you. Okay?"

"Shit." Ric sat back, then turned back to look at the new guy. "What's your name, dude?"

"I'm Duncan."

"How do you do that?"

Duncan shrugged and smiled. The lamp brightened again, and he was standing in front of himself. Ric rubbed his eyes, stood up, and walked over to himself--no, Duncan, he had to remember. It was just an illusion.

Ric ran his hands over Duncan's shoulders, felt his arms. He touched his twin's face and hair, and the twin grimaced and flinched, moaning, "Dude. Come on." The mannerisms, the voice, the eyes, everything was a perfect copy.

"God damn," Ric breathed, admiring the spectacle. He was pretty. And this guy was good.

---

It had been a strange week. He and Duncan were together every minute of every day, and Duncan's illusion had been useful more than once. Ric had even avoided getting shot when Duncan projected his image six feet to the right and rendered Ric himself invisible. The copy, intangible because of this very reason, had just kept walking, and Duncan had led the cops right to the shooter: a twelve-year-old girl angered over his lack of response to a particularly fruity fan letter she had written.

This meant Ric could enjoy the normal perks of stardom. The red carpets. The parties. The women. The illusion covered more than sight--sound, touch, smell, even taste could be manipulated.

Really, this particular aspect had given rise to a sort of camaraderie between the two of them. Duncan's constant presence, even in Ric's private moments, and its necessity since the Saudi debacle, had forced Ric to get used to, and even like, Duncan himself.

They had long conversations, deep into the night, being each other's only company most of the time.

--

He was in a very exclusive club, known only as The Draft, somewhere in Vegas, lounging on an expensive designer couch with a group of hangers-on. Duncan was sitting next to him, disguised as a leggy blonde girl (what they privately called his Barbie), and some oil heir asshole was hitting on her like crazy. Privately, Ric was amused, watching Barbie shoot this guy down over and over.

He leaned over. "Hey," he said. "I'm gonna get a drink. Wanna come?" Barbie nodded vigorously, her long blonde hair falling in sheeny waves down to her perky breasts, and she stood up.

The oil heir--Ric rather thought his name was Alex, he was big and blond and kind of dumb-looking--looked angry and grabbed Barbie's arm. "C'mon, baby, forget this guy. You too good for me?"

Ric sighed. "Dude. She's not interested in you. Let it go."

Mistake. Alex was also known for his propensity for rugby, and he was a big guy. Ric worked out conscientiously, of course--his female fans wouldn't have it any other way--but he was in no way a fighter. Alex advanced, and gave Ric a significant shove, pushing him back a step or two.

Before he could do anything, a tiny voice spoke in his ear.

"Just stand still and stare at him. Let me take care of it."

He schooled himself to remain perfectly motionless, his eyes fixed on Alex's.

Alex sneered, then did a double take. "Hey..." he said, and trailed off.

"Smile real sudden," the voice said.

Ric grinned abruptly and Alex startled. There was a large crowd watching the two now, and Ric could hear the whispered speculation at what the hell was going on.

"Take one step forward," the voice said.

Ric stepped forward, and Alex grew wild-eyed and vanished into the crowd.

"Time to go," said the voice. "Laugh a little, wave at everyone, say so long, and we're outta here."

Back at the hotel, Duncan sighed and settled into an armchair while Ric flopped down on the bed.

"What the hell happened there, dude?"

Duncan chuckled and morphed back into Ric. "I just embellished some stuff, little things to freak him out. It'll add to your legend, and people will think he was on something if he says anything, because I made sure he was the only one who could see it."

"Like what?"

Duncan waved his hand. "Aaah."

"C'mon, man. What did you do?"

He sighed. "Okay. I'll show you." The lights brightened and dimmed again into The Draft. The music pounded and the lights flashed, and Ric jumped to see himself and Duncan, back inside Barbie, sitting on the couch, while Alex was doing his thing.

Ric got up to get a drink, Barbie stood up, Alex grabbed her arm, and the scene shifted, bringing Alex's back around and forward, so that Ric was seeing the events of earlier that night through Alex's eyes.

He watched himself stumble backwards from the shove, pull himself erect, and freeze, staring expressionlessly into his own eyes. Suddenly, visible in the clear irises, Ric's pupils shrank into tiny pinpoints, leaving almost nothing but glassy blue, like the eyes of an incomplete doll. A spectral skull showed itself over Ric's face for a split second, and when he grinned, his teeth were abnormally long and sharp.

The effect was of a feral demon, soul-shrinking in its beauty and horror. It stepped forward suddenly, and even Ric, knowing that he was looking at himself from a few hours before and that it was all Duncan's illusion, wanted to crap himself, turn tail, and run far, far away.

The lights brightened, and he was back in the hotel room, Duncan appraising him from his perch on the armchair.

"You okay, dude?" he asked.

"Jesus Christ," said Ric.

---

Several weeks after the incident at The Draft, Ric and Duncan were in London for the European premiere of his latest movie, Crying Shack. It was two o'clock in the morning, but neither had adjusted to the time change. Duncan was reclining on the chair-and-ottoman set, while Ric lay on his back on one of the beds, clicking through the strange English channels he kept finding.

"So you're against the war, huh?" Ric said.

Duncan sighed. "Haven't we already talked about this?"

Ric shrugged. "About the war itself, yeah, but I've never really heard what you actually thought about the whole thing."

"Eh."

"Come on."

"My mama said never to talk about politics or religion."

"Fuck your mama."

"Already did." They laughed.

"No, seriously," Ric rolled over on his side. "Come on. What do you think?"

Duncan sighed. "I'm against it. It's just wrong."

Ric nodded. "I figured, but...well, dude, what's your range?"

"Huh?"

"Like, how far can you project an illusion?"

Duncan shrugged and pointed straight down. "About eight thousand miles that way. Why do you ask? I mean, this is kind of off-topic."

"Hang on," Ric said. He thought, and his eyes widened. "So you can make an illusion all the way around the planet?"

"Yup. Why?"

"So why don't you just make Allah appear and tell all the Muslims that it's bad to kill people and stuff?"

Duncan was quiet for a few minutes. "Because," he said finally, "that is such a huge violation of my personal ethical code that I would probably kill myself afterwards."

"So you'd rather let all these people die?"

Duncan sighed. "Look--" but he was interrupted when two Middle-Eastern men entered the room, carrying suitcases.

Ric jumped up. "The fuck?"

Duncan shrugged. "Relax. There are seven of you inhabiting various rooms in this building. Those guys don't know we're here."

"They can't see or hear us?"

"Nah."

"You know what room he's in?" a vaguely French accent asked.

The other one nodded. "Twelve thirty-eight. Just down the hall."

"Good." The man picked up his suitcase and laid it on the bed, unzipping it and rummaging through the nondescript clothing inside. He pulled out various pieces of what looked like a formidable weapon, and began twisting and slotting it together. A large handgun with what seemed to be a silencer tube began to form quickly.

"How do we get in?" the other man said.

"The window," said the man with the gun. "There's a ledge about a meter wide all around the building we can use. Let me see the picture again."

The other man tossed a piece of paper to him, and Ric moved around behind his shoulder. The gunman unfolded it to reveal a large picture of Ric, printed in black and white. It had clearly been downloaded off the Internet, he saw.

"This is the target?" the gunman asked.

The other man nodded. "His Holiness wants a message sent to the West that we will not tolerate their idolatry. That man is one of the most famous people in America, and cleansing him will guarantee our place in paradise."

Ric felt cold. He looked over and saw Duncan standing next to the suitcase, rummaging through its pockets. "Dude, what the hell are you doing?"

Duncan looked up. "Relax. They won't see anything I don't want them to see." He pulled out a small piece of paper, and showed it to Ric with a significant expression. It was a photograph of an older Middle-Eastern woman, smiling at the camera. Her eyes were loving, and he flipped the photo over.

"Nasreen al-Habibiyah," he said, reading the back of the picture. "1946-2005. Hmm."

The lights brightened, and dimmed again. The other man looked at the gunman and said, "What is that photo you keep in your suitcase anyway?"

The gunman started. "How do you know about that?"

The other man shrugged. "I've seen you looking at it."

The gunman looked doubtful, then sad. "My mother. I loved her very much. She died in the Parisian riots, because the fucking West would not give us what we wanted. She was shot by the police on her way home from the market. They thought she was part of a group of people who were setting fire to some cars in the street." His expression hardened. "I do this for her."

Duncan gave Ric a significant look, and the other man turned away as the lights brightened and dimmed.

There was a knock at the door. The gunman startled and shouted, "Who is it?"

"Complimentary room service," a female voice called. "For all first-time guests."

The two men looked at each other and shrugged. The gunman stashed the handgun back in the suitcase while the other man went to the door.

In walked a motherly, middle-aged Middle-Eastern woman, pushing a cart.

Ric choked. The gunman sprang up. "Mother!"

"What--?" said the other man.

The woman started, then looked closely at the gunman, and her eyes filled up with tears.

"Oh, oh--" she gasped. "Is it truly you, Aman? My son?"

"It's me, Mum," said the gunman, his own eyes watering. "Where did you come from? I thought you were dead!"

They embraced, laughing and weeping with joy. Neither let go for a long time.

Finally, they disengaged, and the gunman, his face flushed and his eyes bright, led her to the bed, where they sat down.

"The police," he said. "They told me you had been killed in the riots!"

"No, darling one," she said. "I was carried off. Kidnapped by the police. They told me you had died and that my life was in danger. That's why I'm here!"

The gunman's face darkened, but he looked at his mother's face again, and he laughed. "I can't even get angry anymore," he said. "This is too wonderful, too amazing!"

Ric sidled up to Duncan. "Dude," he hissed. "Is she an illusion?"

Duncan looked at him as though Ric had missed something very obvious. "Uh, yeah."

"Why the hell are you doing this?"

"He was going to kill you. It's my job to prevent that, Ric."

"But. But isn't she going to...disappear?"

Duncan shrugged. "She will, when I stop caring."

"But what about him?"

"What about him?"

"He thinks his mom's still alive, dude," Ric said. "This is fucking cruel. It's cheap and exploitative and just...Jesus Christ, man, stop it. Please."

Duncan was dispassionate. "I'm just doing my job."

"But..." Ric looked at the happy pair, sitting on the bed, at the other man hanging around uncomfortably, unsure of whether or not to leave or stay, to say something or remain silent.

The man and his mother were sitting on the bed, laughing and weeping, holding each other and remembering.

"For God's sake, Duncan," he finally hissed. "Stop this!"

Duncan looked at him. "Okay." And the lights brightened and dimmed and the two men and woman melted into air.

"What the--? What the hell?" Duncan only looked at him. "What--was all of it an illusion?"

Duncan settled himself wearily into an armchair. "And now you see why I won't be a voice in the sky, exploiting some people's deepest, truest beliefs just to stop them from doing something I don't want them to do."

Ric stared at him, mouth open, incredulous. He stuttered, then said, "That's totally different." At Duncan's quizzical expression, he advanced, his voice rising. "It's not the same at all, asshole. Not the fucking same at all! God isn't real! That mother was!"

"No, she wasn't," Duncan said, calmly fixing his eyes on Ric's. "But you thought she was. You thought it was all real. The key here is your belief. Same thing with the foks who pray five times a day, who go to the mosque, who listen to their imam when he preaches kindness and simplicity and ignore him when he talks about the Great Satan, who just try to live their normal lives from day to day. And I will not cheapen them just because of a few bad apples." His voice had become a monotone, his face expressionless, retreating behind a sheath of illusion. "Do you understand?"

Ric just looked at him, his hurt and his anger plastered all over his face, his acting experience proving itself completely worthless. Duncan, the great illusionist, simply looked back.

---

Ric avoided speaking to Duncan for nearly three weeks. He grew used to Duncan's presence like a shadow, and became accustomed to the strange bending of reality around him.

As time went on, however, he began to feel increasingly isolated. The necessity of Duncan's illusion separated him from the world, preventing him from most forms of direct contact with people, and his refusal to speak to Duncan only increased the distance further.

It nettled him, but he had to admit that he missed the company Duncan provided. Of course, he was always there, next to Ric, spinning his cocoon of deception and safety, but what had happened in London had left Ric pensive with the knowledge of the true power of Duncan's illusion, his understanding of human nature and his ability to create what seemed to be reality itself. When he pressed himself on it, he had to admit that he was frightened.

He hated feeling forced to question reality. Duncan himself, for instance. Whenever he settled back into the appearance Ric always thought of as what he really looked like, he had to question whether or not it was what Duncan really did look like.

And then there was the sheer completeness of the illusion of the gunmen. It was seamless, totally believable. Ric had been utterly convinced.

So he grew curious: could Duncan conjure up heaven itself?

He was pretending to sleep one night in the Toronto apartment he was renting while shooting his newest movie, River's Flow, when he rolled over and looked at Duncan through slitted eyelids. He was awake--or seemed to be--and reading a book, one of those cheap sci-fi pulpblocks one found on the discount shelf at Wal-Mart. He sighed, and Duncan glanced at him, but was apparently satisfied that things were okay, and looked back down at the book.

"Duncan," Ric said.

He looked up again, as calm as ever. "Yes?" No emotion.

"Sorry for, like, being quiet and stuff."

"Sure."

"Whatever," Ric almost said. But the door had been opened. "You aren't going to apologize for London?"

Duncan sighed, irritated. Finally, some feeling. "No, I'm not going to apologize for that. You didn't understand, and you wouldn't have if I hadn't shown you what I meant. You needed it, okay? What you also need to understand is that my ability is one of the best ways I have of expressing myself, and although I won't apologize for doing it, I am sorry you reacted the way you did." Then he sat up and said, with an audible note of pride in his voice, "Although I have to admit...it was nice to see how real I could make it."

Ric scoffed, but Duncan's words had penetrated. "Okay, then. I suppose I'm going to have to say I'm sorry for taking it so badly. It just really got to me, you know?"

Duncan nodded. "I know."

Ric shook his head. "You're good, man." As he smiled, Ric went on, "I had a question, though."

"Shoot."

"That stuff in London...it was so real. Could you just make up anything like that? Like a whole new reality?"

Duncan's grin faded. "What are you getting at?"

"Well, could you, like, put me in a perfect world? Where there's perfect naked women everywhere and endless fields of green and natural springs of beer?"

Duncan's face froze, literally. "You probably should stop there."

"Whoa. What? What's so bad about it? Why--?"

"Shut the hell up." The voice sounded like it was coming through gritted teeth, but he looked the same as ever, no emotion or signs of strain or, really, anything.

Ric's face closed. "Fine." He rolled over and pretended to sleep. He lay awake all night.

---

"I just don't think this is working out," he said.

Doctor Morrow looked at him, all sympathetic concern. "Why not?"

Ric explained the events in London, and the midnight talk in Toronto.

When he finished, Morrow leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips. "How much," he said finally, "do you really know about Duncan?"

Ric furrowed his brow. "Well...he's a smart guy. Funny. Has some pretty strong opinions and stuff. But about him personally? Like his history?" Morrow nodded. "Nothing. He doesn't talk about himself much at all. I thought it was a little weird, but you know how it is. Then I stopped talking to him. Then he stopped talking to me. Now...I just don't think it's gonna work out on a personal basis."

Morrow sighed. "Listen. With a guy like Duncan, it's very easy to see reality as nothing but a dream. A waking dream, that he can change and control to his heart's desire. The problem is, most of the time, he knows it's all an illusion, so for him, reality is especially real."

He sat back in his ergonomic chair. "Do you know how old he is?"

With a sinking feeling, Ric shook his head.

"He's 26," Morrow said. "Only a couple of years older than yourself. Does that make you feel better?"

Ric shrugged. "Sure, I guess. At least he's not an oldster."

Morrow narrowed his eyes, and belatedly, Ric noticed the doctor's cropped top of silver. "How about this: He was married, once."

Ric's jaw dropped. "No way. Really?"

"Yeah." Morrow sighed. "Listen. Pretty sure you're not supposed to know any of this, so sit on it, okay?" At Ric's nod, he went on, "They were college sweethearts. Got married the same day they graduated. They had a pretty good life for a couple of years, but his wife had a history of depression and suicide attempts. He knew this going in. He wasn't that much of an idiot. In fact, he was basically responsible for her being alive as long as she was."

"Jesus," Ric whispered. "That's a lot to put on someone you love."

Morrow shrugged. "No kidding, I guess. Although considering what he now does for you, maybe not so much. Could call it atonement, though."

"Atonement?"

Morrow shifted position in the chair. "Here's the important thing. He was responsible for her life, yes, but he was also responsible for her death." He sighed deeply. "It was about a year after they got married that he first began to show signs of his ability with illusion, and he spent a while playing around with it, experimenting on himself, creating all these worlds. He told me all about what he made up, a few years later, and I was totally, you know, blown away by his creativity.

"Duncan loved his wife very much. She was his world. He would do whatever it took to make her happy. But their history together had him convinced that no matter how dark a place his wife was in, he could always pull her out.

"So one day, I guess she was kind of weepy, and he made the mistake of telling her about his illusions. Right away, she asked him the same thing you did a couple of weeks ago--to show her paradise itself. He did. Singing clouds, transcendent light, happy children, sparkling water from the purest springs of Heaven. All of that. She forced Duncan to keep her in it for three days straight, no food or water for either of them, not the real stuff at least. He hadn't yet developed the ability to maintain his illusions while he was unconscious, and those three days took their toll. He passed out and only woke up when his wife poured a glass of ice water down his throat. She had slit her wrists. She wanted Duncan to be awake when she died, and told him that she couldn't take it anymore. Three days of the highest Heaven, and suddenly, it all blinks away and you're nearly insane with starvation and thirst because all the food and water was nothing but another illusion.

"Duncan had no strength, so he wasn't able to call an ambulance in enough time to save her. After the funeral, he vanished."

Ric was quiet for a moment. "Where'd he go?"

Morrow nodded. "Good question. A year or so later, we got a phone call from the Department of Defense in Nevada, a phone call which was so completely bizarre we had to investigate. We've been looking into people like him for a few years now, but the military's description of what was going on was so out-there we brought in everyone we had."

"What was it?"

Morrow looked grim. "Hell itself. An area covering nearly six thousand square miles, filled with everything Duncan could think of to torture himself with. It was a terrible place, and those of us who survived that tend to avoid talking about it. The horrible part was that the majority of that place wasn't anything like the concrete images we tend to have of Hell, where there are damned souls laboring or being tortured until the end of time. Not much sulfur or brimstone. Mostly, it was dark, with certain...sensations." Morrow shuddered. "You get the idea."

Ric nodded. He got the idea. Still..."But if it was all his own illusion, how could it hurt him? He had total control."

"Not true by the time we finally got to him. He'd crossed over into true madness and could no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy. As far as he was concerned, it was all self-made, yes, but it had been turned loose of his own control. The more his own illusions attacked him, the more terrified and guilt-ridden he became, and the worse the illusions got--a big, giant vicious circle."

"Wait," Ric said, frowning. "You said 'those of us who survived.' People died trying to get to Duncan?"

Morrow nodded. "The thing about his illusion is that the psychological component is so much more significant than the physical component. Duncan's strongest illusion--in a tangible sense, at least--might be able to knock you over, but it isn't capable of even piercing skin. We lost almost thirty people to sheer terror, either from heart attacks or from misguided attempts to shoot whatever was doing something to them, which wound up killing someone else."

"Jesus."

"It was terrible." Morrow looked introspective for a moment, then straightened up, cleared his throat, and continued. "But their deaths contributed, after all, to his return to stability. When we got to the epicenter, we managed to trank him, and where there was bottomless horror, there was suddenly a clear blue sky and a golden desert. Everything had vanished. And there was this guy, just lying there in front of us, a dart sticking out of his arm." He rubbed his eyes. "It took nearly a year of extremely heavy sedation and intensive counseling to bring Duncan back to a point where he could face the deaths he had caused and decide to do something productive about it."

Ric saw the light. "And that's why he's with me now?"

Morrow nodded wordlessly.

Ric sat back in his chair and took a deep breath. "Look, Doctor. He's my 24-7 security detail. We've gotten to know each other. He's cool, I'm cool. But put it this way: I don't even know what the guy actually looks like."

Morrow chuckled. "Listen, kid. With someone like Duncan, the outward appearance means absolutely nothing. It's what's under the surface--the meaning, the feeling, the true nature that really matters. Like that incident you described earlier, the one that happened in London. He was trying to explain to you, in the best way that he knows how, why he won't do what you suggested. If anything, what happened after his wife died made his beliefs, that internal line that he'd never cross, even stronger. You can rest assured that no matter what, your trust is in very, very good hands with him. Okay?"

Ric sighed. "I suppose. All right. Let me noodle it a little longer."

Morrow nodded sympathetically. "I think you should. Do you still want him removed from your security detail?"

"Naw," Ric said lazily. "No use firing a warning shot."

Morrow smiled. "All right."

---

In Toronto, Ric lay in bed, wide awake for the sixth night straight. He rolled over, opened his eyes, and looked at Duncan. Duncan looked up from his book and held his gaze.

After a few moments of silence, Ric finally spoke. "What do you really look like?"

Duncan blinked. "You don't think this is how I actually look?"

"With you, who knows? Is that--" he made a gesture that took Duncan in from head to toe, "--real?"

"Does it matter?"

Ric shrugged. "I dunno." Then he paused, and tried to pick his way through carefully. "In a life like mine, it's hard to know who to trust, you know? These last few weeks, it's seemed like you're the only person I could trust with anything at all. And I don't even know what you look like." He scoffed. "Hell, I gotta say...I'm wondering if all the palling around is just so I'll cooperate with the detail."

Duncan was quiet for a moment. "So you want to know what I really look like?"

"Sure, man. That'd be cool."

"What if I'm a four-hundred-pound 17-year-old girl with ugleface and inch-thick acne?"

Ric laughed. It almost felt normal "Then I'd get a shrinky-dink."

Duncan made a rude noise. "Relax. I'm a guy, okay? That should be enough to set your mind at ease."

"Come on, man."

He sighed. "Look. It's like you said. What is real, with me? I could say that what you're seeing is really me, but for all you know, it's B.S. What would be the point?"

Ric sighed. Then he remembered Morrow's words. "That doesn't really matter. If you tell me it's really you, I'll believe you."

Duncan was silent for a moment. Then he stood up, and behind him, the floor lamp brightened and dimmed, and he was a nondescript, overweight man. Nothing special or even attractive, definitely not red-carpet material.

Ric looked at him for a long, long moment. This, at long last, this was real. Duncan was clearly painfully uncomfortable. Finally he said, "Take a picture, it lasts longer."

Ric was a few minutes in answering, turning over in his mind what Morrow had told him about Duncan's past. He finally realized something: Duncan's obstinacy in revealing his true self could be rooted in lingering self-hatred over what that particular identity had done to his wife and to the agents who had had to fight their way through his private universe to save him. And now there he was, standing in front of Ric, truly naked in a way that meant much more than simple lack of clothing for the first time in a long, long time.

Finally, he stood up, grabbed Duncan's hand, shook it, and hugged him.

Just before they disengaged, the lights brightened and dimmed and Duncan was no longer there.

Yellowgate, Chapter 1

2007-08-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

Dory lived in a house. It was a nice one, too. Her uncle, owning one of the largest produce conglomerates in Southern California, could afford a roomy eight-bedroom mansion on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Her aunt ran the accountancy that took care of her uncle's books. Dory considered herself very fortunate. She attended a very exclusive private school, shopped at all the right stores, lived in the right neighborhood in the right house (the biggest one), and had the right kind of dog.

Its name was Tot. She hadn't bothered to find out what sex it was, because it didn't matter. A tiny Chihuahua, Tot was just the right size to be carried around in her Vuitton. Every time the dog ruined her extremely expensive handbag, she went out and got another one, chastising Tot outwardly but inwardly congratulating the dog and herself on their taste in handbags and commodes. Dory was a very happy girl.

Everyone thought it was sad that her parents had been killed in an unfortunate skiing accident in Aspen, involving Florida nouveau riche and several trees, but she had been three years old at the time, and although her nanny took the opportunity to vanish at the same time, her life had gone on as before. Her aunt and uncle had inherited the business and made sure Dory's life made up for her lack of parentage.

And she felt sure that it did. A welcome-to-high-school tit job, a sweet-sixteen nose job, masses and masses of rich chestnut hair, and a very carefully-maintained figure (albeit with annual very expensive dental work), coupled with a bright-pink Escalade of her very own ensured total satisfaction.

It was in this mood of complete bovine contentment that she walked in the front door of her house after a particularly fulfilling day at school (she had utterly destroyed her last remaining rival in the boys' affections by spreading a particularly nasty rumor about Chinese knockoffs) and set herself up with a nonfat yogurt and a banana. She tooted slightly, a high-pitched raspberry that could easily be fobbed off on Tot in the company of others.

The release echoed around the kitchen. Terra cotta tile floors, stainless steel appliances, glass-fronted cabinets, marble countertops--the slightest coarse sound ricocheted around Dory, and made her giggle slightly at the silliness of a bodily function that she had thoroughly convinced others did not exist within her sacrosanct corpus.

Her taut, tiny, tucked, tan tummy rumbled. She carefully spooned a cappuccino-flavored glob between her perfectly-glossed lips, and waited. The rumble continued.

Hmm.

Another glob.

Still rumbling. Rather louder now, and she was beginning to doubt that such a noise could possibly come from her delicately re-routed intestines. Still.

She peeled the banana halfway and slid it among her veneers. She experienced a deliciously naughty tremor as the phallus was inserted, and another one when she bit down.

The rumbling continued, much louder now. Dory gasped. Earthquake! She knew it couldn't be a serious danger to her (I mean, come on. What menace could possibly molest someone so perfect?), but perhaps she could see something interesting going on in her neighborhood.

She teetered outside into the front yard and peered up and down the street. Nothing much seemed to be happening. Hmm.

She went back inside. As she passed under the gloriously expensive large skylight installed in the kitchen, she noticed that the light changed. And kept changing.

She looked up and her bowels nearly let loose, running the risk of staining her perfectly-tailored custom designer jeans. Her panties were safe--she wasn't wearing them. Still, her $1,200 Jimmy Choos had very narrowly escaped feculent destruction.

Through the window in the ceiling, a whirling vortex was visible. It seemed to be made of the sky, and clouds, and an emerald-green light in the very center. The sunlight refracted through it oddly, as though made of split diamonds.

Dory shrieked and fainted. As her mind darkened, she thought about how funny it was--the epitome of feminine acts, and nobody was around to see it.

She was awakened after she didn't know how long by a huge, world-shattering crash.

She struggled to her feet, falling several times before she took off her Choos before angrily ripping them off and throwing them off the kitchen and standing up. Nothing was cracked. Everything was fine, other than her Choos, which had splintered upon impact.

In fact, everything was too fine. It was all eerily silent, and darker than before. She looked out the large windows behind the kitchen, facing the pool, and saw that there was no pool. Worse, there were trees. Huge, ancient, dark trees that she'd never seen in Southern California.

"What the hell?" she muttered to herself. Damn it all. Time to go outside again and see what, if in fact anything, was going on.

She stopped first to slip on a pair of jeweled flip-flops and pick up her Vuitton with Tot riding, then headed out the front door.

"Good goddamn," she breathed. The sky was orange. It wasn't sunset, either--the sun was high and green. She was standing at the crest of a hill, and the ground was purple with lush, strange-looking foliage, almost a pearly lavender. A little town was visible in a small valley downhill, and it glittered strangely.

Then she focused on the foreground, which was full of people, staring at her with mixed horror and delight. They were strange, small, and furry. The tallest one came up to her breastbone, and they were all covered with thin, light pelts of periwinkle fur.

It was, in fact, the tallest one who screwed up the courage to step forward and speak.

"You have killed her!" it squeaked.

Dory started to get a nasty feeling. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

The--thing--pointed, and Dory looked. A pair of legs were visible under the foundation of her uncle's antique-car garage. Her breath whistled out. "Ho-ly shit."

She spun and faced the thing. "That was totally not my fault!" she said, breathing fast. "I was, like, dropped here!"

It looked quizzical, cocking its head in a fluid moment that gave Dory the heebies. "Relax," it said. "It's a good thing. You're looking at what's left of the Tyrant of Mnch. God," it said, shaking its head. "She was the worst ruler we've ever had. I don't know what I was thinking, voting for her." At Dory's confusion, it tried to explain. "See, she installed herself as Administrator-for-life of Mnch, and basically oppressed us. Really despotic and stuff. I'm just glad we don't live on Vync. I heard her sister's a lot worse."

"Uh, okay," said Dory. "That makes me feel, like, a lot better and stuff, but where am I?"

A sweet voice belled out. "You are on the planet Mnch, one of the many satellites of our glorious sun, Oz." Out of the periphery of Dory's vision, something stepped out of somewhere and became a beautiful redheaded woman in iridescently-tailored robes. The woman's smile was dazzling.

"I am Gwun," she said. "And you are very welcome to Oz. What is your name, darling, and where are you from?"

"I'm on another planet? Around a different star?"

Gwun smiled even more widely, but her eyes became steely. "Yes. State your name and origin."

Dory cleared her throat. "I'm Dory. From Wheatfield Heights, Los Angeles, California, the United States, Earth."

Gwun arched a perfectly-plucked eyebrow. "That's...a pretty long name for a planet, don't you think?"

Dory rolled her eyes. "Nooo. The name of my planet is Earth. How did I get here?"

Gwun ignored the question and moved on. "You have done the Mnchken a great favor, you know." She pointed at the crushed legs. "She was an autocratic ruler who used her abilities to degrade and oppress. The bitch deserved to die, truth to tell." She shrugged. "Unfortunately, those of us who share her species are, traditionally, forbidden to interfere with one another and in the lives of lesser beings."

Dory took this in. "So what, you're, like, God?"

Gwun choked. "Is your planet that backwards?" She cleared her airway sufficiently to say, "Poor thing. No, darly-girl, we are merely...extremely evolved. Although," she sighed, looking at the bloody remains of Mnch's former Administrator-for-life, "some of us still have more primitive urges. I, as you can see, am such an example, although I'm nowhere near as bad as poor deceased Nys here, or her sister on Vync, or even the Wizard himself."

Dory's ears perked up. "The Wizard?"

Gwun nodded. "He rules the Oz star system from the Emerald Core, in the heart of our sun." She gestured at the green orb in the orange sky. "The Core is a gigantic emerald, created by the usual pressures of star formation. Thanks to the Wizard's power, it's habitable, but it really is just a giant office and stuff. He's the ultimate meddler, although lately he's been more interested in himself than in all the citizens of Oz."

Hmm. Dory really, really wanted to go home. This place was fucked-up beyond all reason. But her curiosity was piqued. An emerald? In the heart of a sun? If she could break off a few pieces...

Gwun noticed the percolation going on in Dory's head. "Do you want to go home? Ordinarily, I wouldn't offer, but you seem to have come quite a long way."

Dory thought about it. Then--"Nah. I wanna check this place out. How do I do that?"

Gwun shrugged. "Okay." She pointed at the valley below them. "See that town? There's a Yellowgate there. It'll take you through all the Yellowgate sites in Oz at random, which means you'll go through most of the planets and moons. You should know, though, that for the most part, each planet has two Yellowgates, coming and going, and they're usually about a mile apart, so be ready for some walking." She looked appraisingly at Dory's flip-flops. "I don't think those'll work too well. Hang on."

She flounced over to where the crushed, broken legs protruded in a pool of blood from underneath the garage, pulled a pair of shoes off the rapidly bloating feet, and brought them over to Dory. "Those should do the job fine. They're rumored to have special properties of their own that Nys put in them so she wouldn't have to do so much work herself. She was always a slacker."

The shoes were made of a thin metallic mesh that refracted the orange sky and green sun in a blood-colored prismatic spectrum. "Wow," Dory said. "These shoes rock." She slid them onto her bare feet, and she felt as though she was cushioned in water. "Jesus Christ!" she said. "I'd love to take those things home with me!"

Gwun snorted and pointed. "Better get goin', darlin'."

Dory grimaced. "Whatever." She set off.

Halfway down the hillside, Tot, who had been sleeping inside the handbag the entire time, stuck its head out and snorted wetly at the air.

broken mold

2007-07-23T09:42:00.001-07:00

What does it mean to be wicked?

A golem wonders.

He works his mouth and still feels the hiss of dry paper. He swallowed it long ago when he began to speak.

Twisted. Sorcerer. A candle's tzelem. His brother in Prague, a life without stairs. But the first letter had been erased, so--what is life?

He moves with the nettlesome creak of fired clay. The others he sees--they are clay, too, but nothing rattles when they move. His hands are afire, his body a shadow. Thus he passes, and passes again, and the sweat and cold breeze are his footprints.

He thinks of the Jinn, the people of wind and flame. Could he be an ifrit? Were they wicked? He must be, a twisted imitation of those little animals that speak, jostle, touch, hug, live in the bright air and cast shadows.

Didn't the Jinn grant wishes? Maybe he should, too.

Wishes. He spies a little girl, suddenly, at the far end of a school playground. She is alone, sitting on a swing. Absent-faced, lost in her thoughts. Nobody comes near her.

Hmm, the golem thinks. He watches.

A bell rings somewhere. She is the last student inside, speaking to no one. Soon, the yard is deserted, and he can slip inside the school unobserved. Doors opening and closing on their own tend to, he's discovered, attract attention.

Inside is all cold white linoleum and steely blue-gray walls. He feels almost claustrophobic, but steels himself. The golem has never been in a school before, so does not feel lucky that each door is set with a wide window, providing a clear view of each classroom and the students incarcerated therein. Instead, a dull certainty that this is how all schools are sets in his hollow head with a singular thunk.

He takes a good five minutes at each window, scanning each face carefully and thoroughly, looking for the girl--his girl, he has already begun to think. He examines one side of the hall first, then the other. It therefore takes him nearly an hour to complete his circuit of the first floor. No sign of his girl. He stands stock-still for a moment, wondering if he has misremembered her face, then sees a sign at the far end of the hall next to a formidable steel door fitted with a push-bar: "Stairs."

He trudges to the end of the hall, makes certain no one is watching, and pushes the door open. Slowly, heavily, he begins to climb the concrete-and-iron staircase. When he reaches the second floor, a sign on the steely-blue cinderblock wall points up and to the right, saying "Administration," while below it, a taped-up sheet of printer paper reads "Lower Grades," complete with a thick black arrow pointing to the door on the left.

He pulls it open and sees another hallway. Fortunately, it takes only three classrooms before he finds her.

This, then, is where he waits.

Three hours later, the bell rings, creating an echoing clangor up and down the hall and across the golem's stone skin. The vibration is unpleasant, but the golem forgets this when a stream of children begins pouring out of each door and flows into a great river of shrieking, shouting babble that barely comes up to the golem's waist.

Last, finally, last, his girl leaves. Sad and silent, her tread is slow, her shoulders bowed. He follows her down the stairs, down the hall, out the door, and past the chain-link gate. She walks only two blocks before entering a narrow doorway in a grimy brick building, and he follows. The narrow staircase provides difficult climbing for the golem, whose chest is as broad as his girl is tall.

She reaches the third floor, where a hallway lies, its walls yellowed with years and cigarette smoke. There are only two doors, and she chooses the one on the left. The golem quickly slips in behind her, but has to hold the door open long enough for him to enter. Fortunately, his girl thinks the rug has gotten caught in the doorjamb, and spends several seconds adjusting its position, precious seconds the golem uses to slide into the apartment unnoticed.

The apartment is filthy, broken appliances and old newspapers everywhere. It smells of stale cigarettes and, vaguely, of cat piss, though the golem hears no meowing. The living room is the foyer, a worn-out old green couch positioned in front of the TV, a faded plaid armchair next to it, just in front of the door. In it is a man, fat, goateed, wearing a gray sleeveless undershirt (it was once white), and boxers with such enormous holes that the golem does not know how his genitals are not visible.

Though he has little experience with normal living conditions, the golem somehow, intrinsically, knows that this is not a good home. This is not his girl's proper place. He sees the open can of beer in the man's left hand, poised over a pile of crushed beer cans of similar make, and knows this man is not in his right mind.

Still, he is surprised when the man's right hand snaps out and grabs hold of the girl's upper arm. She starts in shock, and so does the golem.

The man belches, giving vent to a prodigiously flammable vapor. "You're an hour late," he says, his speech not, perhaps, quite as well-defined as human speech should be.

The girl says nothing.

"Well?" he asks. "Gonna be a smart-ass bitch? Too good to talk to your ol' daddums?"

She maintains her silence, looking away. The golem senses that she knows this will not end well, no matter what she chooses to do. So she does nothing. It is going to happen anyway.

"Smart-ass bitch, huh?" the man growls. He jerks her closer to him and grins, showing several gaps. "Not a fucking sound. That's gonna change right here, right now." With a quick, convulsive movement, he pulls the lever that closes his recliner, yanks the girl in front of him, and throws her on the couch. Still, she says nothing.

He turns her over and pulls down his boxer shorts.

The golem has had enough. He grabs the man's shoulders, pulls him off of the girl, grips the man's lower jaw, the man's flesh sizzling in the golem's burning grip, and twists. A dull snap is heard, and then nothing.

The golem lets the body fall.

His girl still does not speak. She stares at the corpse, her mouth open, stunned. She waits. When no motion is forthcoming, and she realizes that he is no longer breathing, she gingerly climbs off of the couch, and pokes his arm with the toe of her shoe. Nothing.

She pokes him harder. Nothing. Still harder, and a new sound flashes through the gloomy apartment. Startled, the golem realizes that this new sound is a sob. His girl keeps poking the lifeless thing on the floor--and here, the golem begins to wonder what the difference between himself and the meat lying at his feet really is--harder, and harder, until she is no longer poking but kicking. Viciously her tennis shoe stabs the cooling flesh as her weeping becomes louder and more--somehow--exultant.

When the girl finally stops, winding down like a broken toy, her father's face is a ruined, pulpy mass, and his body is covered in bruises. She is once again silent, except for a certain catch in her breath. She sits back down on the couch, and suddenly, she thinks of something.

"Is someone there?" she calls out. It is the first time the golem hears her voice.

He considers for a moment. Finally, he says quietly, "I am here."

"Where? I can't see you. Why are you here?"

"I am a golem," he says bluntly. "A thing of clay. You cannot see me because I do not want to be seen. I am here because..." His voice fades. He does not know, precisely, why he is here.

"Because why?" Her voice is plaintive.

It is as good an answer as any. "Because you needed me."

She is quiet for a moment. Then she asks, "Can I see you?"

"No."

She does not say anything. Finally, the golem says, "You should call the police. Tell them you surprised a man in here, assaulting your father. He could not bring himself to hurt a child, so fled."

She nods, saying nothing.

"I am going to go," he says hesitantly. "You will not see me again." Something in him makes him pause, and then say, "Make the most of this."

She nods silently again.

He exits the apartment, leaving the girl nothing but a warm breeze and a door that opens and closes by itself.

He leaves the building, joins the crowd of humans washing its way past the doorway, and realizes that he has just killed a human. He has just ended. The end of a golem comes about by either one of two means. First, in smithereens; second, by erasing a single letter on a piece of paper.

Is that easier than snuffing the sapient flame? He thinks it is much easier to erase a human than a golem. Does that make him a wicked creature?

What does it mean to be wicked?

A golem wonders.

spatial relationships

2007-07-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

I was visiting Pasiphaë, the Tan-Kon Corporation seed off the coast of Maryland, when I got tagged with a request for a private meeting. The Manager.

I smiled at the young woman straddling my lap and said, "Just a moment." Before she said anything, I left the stream and moved to the designated meeting-place, a randomly-chosen water molecule living in a cloud that was, at the moment, transiting Ceuta.

The Manager was observing the valence, playing a little probability game, when I arrived. He grunted slightly.

"It's no fun anymore with a second observer," he said quietly, and turned to me. "Hello, Associate Ascher. How are MaMa Bendel's offerings today?"

"Quite alluring, thank you," I said. "She just hired this new Korean/African girl. I was giving her a test-drive when you called. How can I help you?"

He sighed. "We're in a bit of a pickle."

Odd. The man who was singularly responsible for developing the Associate corps was in a bit of a pickle. Quietly, I began recording.

"Sir?" I said.

He smiled slightly. "I'm scrambling your recording. Very good, though, Ascher. I'm pleased to see that the conditioning has taken such a solid hold."

I felt cold. We were venturing into classified territory here. The Manager, though only a man, had been the main beneficiary of the Tan-Kon technology that made the world what it was today, with seeds sprouting into gigantic, aesthetically-appealing cities in the ocean that were responsible for cleaning our world, and claustrophobes and agoraphobes transforming into Associates, government agents with near-absolute control of the space-time continuum--up to the edge of the atmosphere. The vacuum was out of our jurisdiction.

But The Manager was responsible for the Solar System subsidiary corporation. The ultimate administrator of the human race and CEO of a sphere of space with the sun at its center and a radius of 50 AU, totaling 11,554,517 cubic light-years. And he was worried. And he was coming to me.

I paid attention.

He continued. "I've spoken with the Tan-Kon about this, and they honestly don't seem concerned about it. Evidently this is something that happens once in a while, specifically because it has little or no effect on history. Evidently such an occurrence has a negligible impact on their profit margin."

Okay. "Sir?"

He looked at me. "Hm? Sorry. Listen--a guy from 1953 just cropped up. I need you to show him around a little bit. I assume you have the next few weeks free. Go ahead and finish up with MaMa's Deal o' the Day. He'll be outside the door when you see her out." He looked at me knowingly. "There'll be a slight increase of status in it for you if he survives long enough to return home, Ascher. Bear that in mind."

Holy shit. Maybe I'd be made an Assistant VP of Earthside Affairs or something. Although I heard about this one guy who did The Manager a favor but bungled it slightly, resulting in his promotion to Executive Secretary to the Deputy Assistant Manager Office Assistant of Titan. Still not too bad, though--Titan was well-known for its methane pubs. Better than being the Deputy Assistant Undersecretary to the Executive Mailroom Custodial Engineer's Hazardous-Materials Intercessional Equipment Assistant of the Sun.

I nodded. "Yes, sir," and shunted back into the stream.

"For what?" she asked.

I shifted slightly. "There," I said, and smiled widely. "Please...do continue."

-------------------------------------------------------

He was standing outside the door, uninserted. The whore looked at him, slightly taken aback.

"God-damn," she brayed. "What the hell happened to that?"

I shrugged. "He didn't get when I told him to get."

"Wha-eva," and with a shimmy of her hips, she was gone around the corner.

I moved him inside and snapped him back into time.

"--are you?" he said.

"I am Associate Ascher," I said smoothly. "Would you have a seat, please, and perhaps something to drink?" A chair grew just behind him, nudging the back of his knees just enough to make him nearly fall onto the seat.

His eyes looked wild as he gripped the conformable material of the chair and felt its almost-living motion accommodate his hand, and he snapped his arm back, nearly falling off the chair in the process.

"Something to drink," I reminded him.

His eyes suddenly looked lost. Associates are trained in, among many, many other things, psychology, and I knew that the juxtaposition of his surroundings' alienness and my seeming normalcy was having its effect. As far as he was concerned, he had, just a few moments ago, been in his own time. Then everything changed--and here I was standing before him, offering him a drink while he reclined on a chair that hadn't been there a moment ago and cradled his body like a living thing.

1953. 2029. A difference of 76 years in absolute terms and millions in relative terms. I was suddenly unsure how to speak to this hominid at all.

"Water?" he said, suddenly and tremulously.

Ah, sweet relief. "Certainly," I said, and entered the other room, a private general-purpose space I had partitioned off in preparation. It was strictly unnecessary--one room was all rooms, so to speak--but psychologically significant. I had the room grow a chair that had wheels on its legs along with the glass of water, so I could bring it in front of this strange visitor from another age without alarming him even more.

After wheeling the chair in and handing him the glass, I sat down.

"What's your name?" I asked, as friendly as I could be.

He took a moment to respond. "I'm Billy Parker," he said.

I nodded, noting the name. "And where are you from, Billy?" Trying to be as pleasantly nonthreatening as possible. We Associates have an unfortunate tendency to be impersonal. It's what happens when you deal with the annals of human crime and observe the minutiae of human life. It's also often a consequence of our conditioning and of the underlying phobias that make us suitable for what we do. The average claustro- or agoraphobic's sensitivity to space also lends itself to a certain personal distance.

"Park City, Illinois," he said, taking a sip from the glass. He looked surprised as he swallowed, and looked at the glass. "It's cold!" At my questioning look, he said, "There's no ice in it."

"Ah," I said. "It's fresh from a pitcher in the refrigerator. Is it too cold?"

Billy shook his head. "Where am I? What is this place? Why am I here? Why are you here? I..." his mouth opened and closed in the face of excessive uncertainty.

I smiled. "Would you like me to answer your questions in order?"

"I don't care," Billy said. "Just tell me--What's going on?"

I nodded. "Certainly. But you must promise me two things."

He looked dubious. "What?"

"First," I said. "You must believe me. Second, please remain calm and take it all in on good faith. Is that possible?"

Billy swallowed heavily. "I can try."

"Very well," I said, and leaned on the chair back. "Do you know what year it is?"

"I don't want questions!" he said angrily. "I want answers!"

"I thought you promised to remain calm," I said mildly.

He looked guilty, but then remembered. "I only said I'd try, buddy. You can't get me that way!"

I sighed. "Just tell me what year it is to you."

Hesitantly, he guessed. "1953? That can't be wrong...can it?"

I chuckled. "It certainly can. You, my dear friend, are currently breathing the air of the Year of Our Lord two thousand and twenty-nine."

Billy paled, but took it admirably. He formed a weak expression of dubiousness and said, "You're pulling my leg, aren't you?"

"I'm afraid not," I said. "You are currently in my apartment, which is a pod in one of the fruiting bodies of the seedcity Pasiphaë, which is located in the Atlantic Ocean approximately one hundred and fifty miles off the shore of Maryland. Are you with me so far?"

No words. I nodded, stood up, and drew a window in the wall. His mouth fell open as I expanded the diamondoid pore to a circle roughly twelve feet in diameter, revealing Pasiphaë's glory, gleaming towers and lacy-filigreed walkways that exploded in an organic euphony from the blue-gray Atlantic waters. The sky was full of majestic white clouds (one of them, perhaps, hosting The Manager, keeping a watchful eye on us) painted on a brilliant, near-sapphire blue. The sun glinted off the platinum membranes enclosing each tower and sparkled off the various mid-air transports as they wound their ways through Pasiphaë's fruiting bodies.

"You see," I said gently, "Pasiphaë is a city, yes. But it is not made from steel and glass and concrete. It's a living organism, grown from a single seed the size of your thumbnail, which was dropped in the water at that spot--" I pointed at the center of the city, visible from here as a giant cobalt-blue glass sphere, "--and turned into this within a matter of hours."

I turned away from the pore, and pointed at the chair Billy had been sitting on. "You asked me earlier how I made that chair move so that you would sit on it. I didn't. It grew in that spot specifically for you to sit on, grown by Pasiphaë at my request. This apartment is just one small pore in a massive reproductive structure that I live in. All those buildings--" I indicated the shimmering towers. "--Are reproductive structures of a giant organism. You could think of them as the toadstools of a single, large fungus growing underground. Yes?"

He responded surprisingly quickly. "Fungi are saprophytes. Does this city also feed on the dead?"

Shock cracked my professional facade. "Good Lord."

Billy smiled. "Sorry. I read a lot of speculation, so..."

I renormalized and continued. "You're right, Billy. The analogy is inexact. Pasiphaë's growth and life is sustained by various processes. Most of them are very complex, but can be summed up as the harvesting of certain substances from the air, water, and ocean floor."

"What substances?"

1953. Hmm. "Have you ever heard of global warming?" Clearly not. "All right. You're from Illinois, yes? Have you ever seen a factory?"

"I'm not a child," Billy said darkly.

I nodded. My opinion of people from the 1950s was changing by the minute. "Fair enough. Did you know that industrialization creates a great deal of chemical compounds that, when released into the environment, cause a great deal of ecological damage?"

He laughed. "That's silly. The world's too big to be damaged by us."

I shrugged. "Well, the truth came out not long after your time. Carbon dioxide and other gases were being released into the atmosphere in staggering amounts, trapping heat and changing the climate, while chemicals poisoned soil and water. Consider it the consequences of ignorance."

He was quiet for a moment. "Really?"

"Indeed. It was reaching a point where the Earth was going to be uninhabitable for living things, which made the situation even worse. Fortunately, the Tan-Kon arrived."

He looked at me. I could tell he was getting lost, and took pity. "Why don't I explain the Tan-Kon later? In the meantime, allow me take you on a tour of Pasiphaë."

He nodded wordlessly. "Please."

So I had the apartment manufacture a diamagnetic lift, attached to the apartment by a dock that stretched out from the diamondoid pore. We stepped through the carbon, whose molecular structure had disengaged and flipped sideways, turning into something like air. Billy, of course, marveled, but he was silent as we stepped into the lift and wafted into the air.

We circled some of the tallest towers as I pointed out the key governmental offices and residential pseudo-ziggurats. He took it all in without a single word. The only sound he made was a gasp as the lift plunged into the water so that I could show him the seedcity's digestive system, a mess of rootlike tentacles that extended all the way down to the sea floor, the smallest at least a hundred feet in diameter.

Finally, he said something. "Holy cow. Those things sure are big."

"Indeed," I said. "They need to be in order to gather enough material to feed the city, process it, absorb it, and release the waste material back into the oceanic environment, where they serve as food and nucleation sites for life. Quite a fascinating process, really."

He nodded. "I don't suppose you have any...coffee?"

I chuckled. "Why don't we return to the mainland? I know a good shop in Georgetown."

He looked at me quizzically. "Is that one of your new cities?"

1953. "Not at all. It's actually a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. that's been there since before even your time."

He looked mildly embarrassed. "Sorry. I haven't left Park City very much."

I smiled, comfortingly, I'd like to think. "Not a problem. Here we are."

Billy started. "Already?" He looked around and his mouth fell open as he saw the National Mall, the Washington Monument and all of the attendant recognizable buildings. But a key thing was missing. "Where's the White House? I don't know exactly where it's supposed to be, but..."

"Ah," I said. "It's not there anymore. Burned down in the riots from a couple of decades ago, just before the Tan-Kon arrived. There was a president in office that--well, let me explain over some coffee, yes?"

His mouth fell open again. I was starting to wonder if primitives had weaker jaw-hinges--but that was unfair. He wasn't that far removed from me, could have been my grandfather, in fact. "A riot--?" It snapped shut. "Okay."

We settled down in a historic district, not far from a Starbucks, lovingly-preserved by the family of another Associate I had briefly partnered with.

As we walked the two blocks over to the coffee shop, Billy asked, "Why doesn't this place look like Pasiphaë? I mean, for all I know, we could be back in my time."

"Well, yes," I said. "What you probably should bear in mind is that Pasiphaë is a seedcity, grown from scratch. We certainly do have technology that we could use to turn Washington into a similar city, but we humans are sentimental beings." I looked at him pointedly. "I'm sure you know."

"Not really," he mumbled. "Mostly we're just interested in Progress."

"Progress doesn't take steps back in order to move forward," I said dryly. "But then, perhaps I'm passing unfair judgments on your time. Hindsight is 20/20, after all. But to answer your question, Washington is a Designated Preservation Sub-Unit of the larger Preserve that encompasses the entire eastern coast of this continent all the way down to the Mexico border with Texas."

"So everything is preserved as it was--when?"

"At the coming of the Tan-Kon. Perfect timing, in fact," I said, pulling open a door, "because we're here. Welcome to Starbucks, one of the many, many apotheoses of early-21st-century America."

He walked through the door. "What do you mean?" And then he looked around. The earth tones, the wood, the calm, slickly polished atmosphere, the counter with authentic baristas behind it, fiddling with espresso machines, the semi-comfortable chairs with peacoated old men reading newspapers, the sales racks hawking exotic, alien coffees. A hush fell over his face.

I sidled up behind him calmly. "At one point, there were four thousand Starbucks in the United States alone. There was one under the Eiffel Tower, one in the Chinese Forbidden City, one in the Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, one on top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. An American company. One of many, many American companies with thousands of copies in thousands of cities all over the world." I gestured, taking it all in. "This, my young friend, is the future that you and millions of others like you, were--or possibly still are--servicing."

"It's beautiful," he said, his eyes shining.

"Indeed." I went to the counter and ordered a nice venti mocha frappuccino. I loved these when I was much younger, and retained a taste for them today. I turned to Billy. "What would you like?"

He shook himself enough to say, "Whatever you're having, I guess."

"Two, please," I said to the barista, and steered Billy toward one of the small, circular tables. "Sit here, and I'll get our drinks."

When I returned with the drinks, he was examining the table.

"Formica?" he asked.

I shook my head. "Laminate. Here."

He took his mocha frapp and sipped. His eyes grew wide as he tasted the fragrant confection for the first time, and almost involuntarily drank half of the rest.

After his sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia passed, he gasped.

Before he could say anything, I started to speak. "The Tan-Kon are a race of people from another star. Their culture is, oh, sort of a super-corporate bureaucracy. Their technology is quite amazing, and they've bestowed some of it on us."

"A-aliens?" His eyes were wide as he sipped from the frapp.

I nodded. "They came to us after reading a certain signature in our atmosphere that told them that our world was changing for the worse. The Tan-Kon had been observing us for some time before then, and they admitted that it was our own corporate culture that had attracted them at first, and its evolution from the robber barons of the 19th century to the world-spanning besuited megaliths of the dawn of the 21st century."

I sipped from my own frapp and continued, waving my arm around at the Starbucks. "In fact, this coffee shop is essentially the perfect example of the megalithic corporate culture."

Billy looked around. "It's just a coffee shop. I mean, I know you said there are thousands of coffee shops like this, but..."

I shook my head. "No, look. Let me think of a good example. All right. Do you recall when I showed you the aquatic processing facilities of Pasiphaë? Those tentacles?" He nodded. "This shop is the end of one of those tentacles. The corporation behind it is Pasiphaë from sea level on up. Do you see?"

He finished his frapp in a single slurp. After he was done grimacing, he squeezed out, "Yes, I do see. It sounds awful, in my opinion."

I shrugged. "So's life, sometimes. Anyway, the Tan-Kon liked us, so they picked one man--this deaf guy from Georgia who suffered from crippling claustrophobia--and gave him everything they could."

"Why?"

I sucked on my straw. "This guy had a kind of unique ability to process a huge amount of information pretty quickly. He wasn't an idiot savant or anything, he was just a thinker. The claustrophobia, according to the Tan-Kon, made him suitable for the kind of spatial manipulation he'd be able to do. The deafness really didn't have any bearing on their decision--they just liked him."

"Spatial manipulation?"

I nodded. "That's where I come in. You see, a good deal of Tan-Kon technology involves the manipulation of time and space--what we call the continuum."

"Yeah," Billy said. "I know about that--Einstein was before my time."

"Good," I said. "Then you know about how time and space are inextricably wedded together. Control of one leads to control of another. However--" and here I raised my finger, "--the key here is to have a sensitivity to space to begin with. You need to be acutely aware of how much there is--or isn't--around you. Thus, claustrophobes and agoraphobes are ideal, and that's why the man who became The Manager was selected to begin with."

"So where do you come in?"

I sat back in my chair. "I am a member of the Associates. We're a kind of elite corps of government agents--kind of like the FBI was in your day--and our job is to patrol the planet and investigate or all-out prevent violations of planetary law. Those violations can range from simple pickpocketing to nuclear warfare. Due to our nature, we're in constant contact with the future, which tells us where and when a particular crime will happen so that we're there in time to prevent it.

"The system isn't perfect, of course--it requires an actual victim of the crime taking place. Victimless crime, like personal drug use, doesn't appear on our radar, if that's what you want to call it, so even though violations of the law do still occur without our intervention, personal harm to others is greatly minimized."

"So what does The Manager do?"

I shrugged. "Mostly administrative tasks for local space. He oversees commerce, transport, enforcement, foreign relations, defense, things like that. He's a good guy, if a bit strange sometimes. He's the one who assigned me to watch over you until you return to your own time."

He nodded and sat back, stretching his arms. "So you can travel through time and stuff?"

"Yes, although our activities are self-limited to the present and the future as much as possible. For the most part, we exist outside of time, and enter only for personal reasons or to intervene in an incident that requires our participation." I knew the next question he would ask.

"Self-limited? So you could take me home if you wanted to?"

Hm. "I could, yes, but I won't."

"Why?"

I sighed. "Well, first of all, the Tan-Kon don't appreciate it very much. Although we do have the ability to influence the past, they prefer that we leave it up to them if any changes need to be made. Second, there's just too much to go wrong." I fiddled with the straw. My frapp was almost gone. Soon, he would ask either to return to Pasiphaë or to see the world. "According to The Manager, the Tan-Kon have said that incidents like yours are generally better resolved on their own."

"I see." He sat for a moment, quietly. "I'm not too keen on that, you know."

"I know."

"You're done with your drink?"

"Yes."

"What now?"

"What would you like to do?"

He licked his lips. "What can we do?"

I shrugged. "Go back to Pasiphaë and learn more about what the city has to offer. Or I can show you the world. Or, if I get permission from The Manager, I could show you the Solar System. Or I can remove you from the timestream until you go home."

Billy's eyes lit up. "The Solar System?"

"Sure. The human race--which really means The Manager--has jurisdiction all the way out the farthest ends of the Kuiper Belt."

"What's that?"

1953. "It's a large cloud of smaller material surrounding the Solar System, right around Pluto. Mostly rock and ice. Nothing too interesting. Is that what you want to do?"

"Yes!" he said ecstatically.

"Any particular planets or moons you'd like to visit?"

"Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Those three are my favorites."

I snorted. "Yours and everyone else's. Very well, then." I put in a request to The Manager and got approved. "Any preference to start?"

He looked taken aback. "We're going now?"

"Now."

"Where's the spaceship?"

"Don't need any."

Nothing for a few seconds. Then, "Let's work our way outward."

"Certainly. The transit may take a few seconds, though." I looked at him appraisingly. "Are you sure you're ready for this?"

Billy took a deep breath. "Absolutely."

"All right, then." I took ahold of his arm, we stood up, and I took us both outside of space. Even with this kind of physics, there was a great deal of adjustment to make for the separate orbits of the two planets, the solar radiation, and the sheer distance. As such, the spatial transit was perceivable and probably a bit jarring.

As we exited the Earth's atmosphere and I began the claudication process, something changed, and I could feel someone else close by.

Without a warning, as we entered the claudicative zone, Billy was torn away by something only visible as a stranger's hand on his other arm, and I saw the spinning stars, heard the screaming roar as I blasted through the trace gases in the void, felt the solar wind ripping through me.

And then, as I impacted the Martian surface, nothing.

sensitivity to space

2007-07-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

It was a routine case.

I was examining the Grand Central district of St. Petersburg when a case came up--hostage situation, drug dealers, little girl, debt owed. The address flashed across my vision momentarily, so I began to watch.

The situation unfolded almost as soon as I focused on the right living room. Two black men (Antwon Hamilton--27, six priors, all drug related; Eric James, 24, nine priors, six drug-related, two robberies, one grand theft auto) one middle-class white man (Arnold Susentava, 31, no priors, works for a local Citibank branch), and one seven-year-old girl (Kelly Daniel, biological issue of Arnold Susentava and Amy Daniel).

I listened carefully.

"You owe me six large," said Hamilton. "Where is it?"

"I-I don't have it right now," Sustentava stammered. "I have a couple hundred on me, though. Can we do a payment plan?"

James chuckled and Hamilton shook his head. "Fucking crackheads," he said. "No. Money, now." Then his face changed as a new idea came into his head. "Well, then again, we can certainly consider it a loan." His voice mocked Arnold, doing his best to sound like a banker, but now it dropped back into the usual gait. "But we gonna have to take some--what y'all call it?--collateral."

Sustentava looked bewildered. "Collateral--?"

With a great lunge, Kelly was in Hamilton's arms, a nine-millimeter Glock nestled at the base of her skull. I examined the gun and noted the hollow-point artillery, and the modifications made to the acoustic multiplier--an innovation to discourage illegal use of approved citizen armament; the report should be audible to anyone within a one-mile radius--to silence the gunshot. The little one began to cry.

Interesting. It had all been recorded and noted, of course. A crime was now being committed, and enough information had been conveyed to arrest all those who were involved. It was time to intervene.

I stepped back into space.

Hamilton started violently, and swung his gun around at me, firing almost before he knew it. I removed the bullet from the flow of time, like a grizzly bear scooping an iridescent trout from a raging torrent. It hung in midair, no longer truly existing within our particular brand of geometry.

I was calm. Invulnerable. A master of time and space. An agent of the government's elite corps of Associates. "Greetings. You may refer to me as Associate Ascher. A violent crime has been committed here, among several others. I suggest you stand down."

I looked at Hamilton, into his eyes. He knew there was no getting away. Suddenly, he made up his mind, snapped the gun to the girl's temple, and fired.

I got there first. Or I was always there. Or I was never there. It all depends on your point of view, on what direction you're looking in.

I extracted tiny Kelly from Hamilton's arms and from the continuum. When she came alive, she gasped to see my face across from hers, and looked around, seeing the three men as they looked within the timeflow we were standing next to.

"What happened?" she said.

"You're safe," I said. "Do you wish to remain with your father?"

She shrank into herself. "No." I barely heard it, so close to a whisper.

"Why not?" I needed reasons. Reasons are always needed.

She shook her head and said nothing, refusing to make eye contact. I took hold of her chin and guided her face up to meet mine.

"Listen," I said. "I can bring you someplace safe, away from your father, but I need a good reason to do it. The only person who can give me that reason is you. Do you understand?"

She was quiet for a long moment. Fortunately, we had all the time in the world.

Finally, she said quietly, "Sometimes he hurts me. He burns weird things and then he hurts me. But...when he hasn't burned anything in a long time, he hurts me worse. I want to go home."

"Where is home?" I asked.

"With my mom," she said, sighing the last word, making it sound almost reverent.

Hm. I checked the records for Amy Daniel. Interesting. She had dissolved her marriage to Susentava nearly three weeks before their daughter's birth and gone into a program for battered women, which had gained her a new identity and a new locale. She had been called Denise Lipton and now lived and worked as Amy Daniel, Librarian I, in Santa Fe. I fast-forwarded through the intervening years, and discovered that Susentava had taken seven years to track his ex-wife and daughter down, used the public transfer booths to arrive in Santa Fe only three hours prior to this incident, snatch his daughter as she was walking home from school, and return to St. Petersburg.

Her mother didn't get home from work on Tuesdays until eight o'clock at night, and until then, Kelly was in the care of the household's educational robot. However, her father had paid a hacker nearly five thousand dollars to break into the robot and deactivate it, all in order to prevent it from contacting the police when Kelly didn't get home.

Amy Daniel would get home in two hours. Best to do this delicately.

I deposited Kelly in her house in Santa Fe and put in a retroactive work order for the educational robot, waiting for several minutes before it reactivated with the new Associate-issued orders and programming. It would now use a miniscule part of its memory to begin the search for the hacker who had violated its sacrosanct caretaking functions.

She hugged me once, before turning away and sitting down in front of the robot, who had brought out a memory puzzle. After checking through the house and examining the city, I returned to the bank-teller's house in St. Petersburg, where all three were waiting for me. A simple mop-up operation--the three men would not realize what had happened until the day they were re-inserted into the continuum for their trial.

I inserted them into their individual cells in the Associate Depository before returning to St. Petersburg and folding up Sustentava's house, possessions, and property. Pending a verdict and/or completion of his sentence, it would wait in storage for him to claim it. All recorded, noted, and approved. Completely by the book.

In the meantime, the scene of the crime was effectively excised from the universe, two clean cuts made and sewn together so smoothly that no rupture was visible. I examined the site once again, two houses standing next to each other, a fence dividing both and offering no hint that a house had once stood somewhere inside that thin wooden line.

hundred-count

2007-07-12T06:11:00.000-07:00

"These are smart pills, if you will," said Dr. Fau, holding up a pill bottle containing what, to the professional opinions of the doctors seated around the mahogany table, looked like a hundred-count.

"They are quite advanced," Dr. Fau continued. "Historically, there have always been problems with overdoses for various reasons ranging from simple carelessness to malicious intent. These pills, in this small plastic container, will ensure that overdoses are a thing of the past."

Bearded Dr. Gregor grunted loudly. "Snake-oil, Dr. Fau?"

Dr. Fau smiled, though no humor was visible on his countenance. "Clever. Actually, no. The latest advances in nanotechnology have enabled us to develop smart pills, which recognize their surroundings--whether organic and living or not--and communicate with one another. The principle, really, is quite astounding."

A weary sigh was barely audible. Snake oil, indeed, thought Dr. Fau as he, along with his colleagues, looked at the far end of the long table at Joseph Luche, a middle-aged, sharply-dressed pharmaceutical representative who had cajoled, flattered, and ass-kissed his way onto the regulatory board. In spite of the onerous scrutiny of the regulatory board, however, Luche respectfully declined to say a word or even acknowledge that he was the center of attention.

As attention shifted back to Dr. Fau's end of the table, he went on. "If more than one pill is ingested within the set time period allowable by the prescription, a collapsing probability wave-function determines--at random--which pill will activate and which pill will be--to speak colloquially, if I may--a dud. The 'dud' then passes through the host's system, completely unchanged. Bear in mind, however, that this process is only initiated when more than one pill is ingested simultaneously."

"An interesting concept, Dr. Fau, and certainly worthy of consideration and--if I may dare say--approval by this board," said Sandra Williams, a neurosurgeon with the teaching hospital at Princeton. "But although I will certainly agree that such a technology is quite useful, I still don't understand what's so astounding about it, to borrow your phrasing."

Dr. Fau smiled, and for the first time all day, he seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself. "Because the wave function's collapse propagates backwards through time. By the time you shake out the second pill, one of the two you take has already decided that it will not activate from the moment it is manufactured."

A hush fell. Dr. Fau's delight only increased as he watched his colleagues struggle with that little apple.

"So," Dr. Gregory said slowly, "If I shook out two pills...?"

Dr. Fau nodded. "One of them will have always been a dud."

Dr. Williams cleared her throat. "Supposing I shook out two pills, intending to take them, then shook out another pair of pills, planning instead on taking those, you'd have two active pills and two dud pills?"

"No," said Dr. Fau. "You'd have three dud pills and one active pill."

"And those three would always have been duds?"

"Yes. But you should bear in mind," said Dr. Fau, "That it all depends on whether or not you actually take them. It really doesn't matter how much you shove into your gob at once--only one will work. The rest will not. The wave-function does not collapse until the pills are actually ingested."

Luche spoke up then. The fluorescent light glinted greasily off of the large gold ring on his left pinky finger, momentarily blinding Dr. Fau. "So what you're essentially telling us is that all of the pills manufactured by this method might be duds. All of them. Is that correct, Dr. Fau?"

A nasty feeling began to coalesce in the pit of Dr. Fau's stomach. "Well, uh," he stammered. "Technically, well, that is to say, uh, well, that's putting a bit of a, a, a fine point on it."

"Well, Dr. Fau?" Luche was looking lazily at the large gold ring on his pinky finger, cowlike in his sudden contentment.

Dr. Fau sighed. "Yes, potentially, every pill is a dud. However--"

"Therefore, Dr. Fau," Luche interrupted, chuckling fatly. "I must ask why in the world you would ask us to manufacture pills that have a--what are the odds--fifty percent chance of being completely worthless?"

Suddenly Dr. Fau felt much better. "Ah, but you're not looking at the bigger picture." Luche bristled; score one for Dr. Fau. "Only those pills that will actually be involved in overdoses will turn out to be duds. I believe only 19,470 people died of overdoses last year: this is out of a daily pill-popping population of nearly 240 million. That number is so small as to be statistically insignificant. Therefore, the rest of the pills, or 99.992% of the total yearly volume will be viable."

"Still," Luche grunted. "I don't think you're the one seeing the bigger picture here. I'm concerned about the bottom line. And what I'm hearing is that you're asking us to manufacture thousands of dud pills. Is there any way of detecting those dud pills and eliminating them from the retail shipments?"

Dr. Fau was taken aback by this peculiar example of complete obtuseness. "First, no, it's not possible to find out which are duds and which are active without losing half of your product, because of the peculiarities of the probability wave-function. Second--"

"Ah," said Luche. Dr. Fau's mouth snapped shut. "So you're saying half of the product we manufacture would be useless."

It took a moment for Dr. Fau to stop grinding his teeth. "Only if you check on whether or not they are useless. Otherwise, they are perfectly fine. As I was saying before, it would be counterproductive to the purpose of these pills to eliminate the duds if you detected them anyway, because--"

"Dr. Fau?" said Dr. Schuller. "Are you feeling well?"

Dr. Fau sank back into his chair. "Excuse me," he said, and shook out a pill from the bottle he'd been gripping in his right hand. After washing it down with a glass of water and looking back around the table, he ignored the dull pounding in his head and the severe pain in his neck and went on. "A slight cardiac complaint. Luche, I suggest you listen. There is no point in checking for duds. Why is this? Because we want duds. Duds are what prevent overdoses. Do you understand?"

"Frankly, Dr. Fau," said Luche, "I am not at all comfortable with asking my constituency to produce pills that may or may not work. I am just not sure that it's cost-effective for us to risk being sued for some kind of confused attempt at the placebo effect just so a few less people will die every year. That's the bigger picture for me, Dr. Fau."

"The bigger picture," shrieked Dr. Fau, "is that you are a money-grubbing moron."

"Dr. Fau!" said Dr. Williams, backing away from the table. "Please calm down!"

"Goodness, Dr. Fau," said Luche, who was gazing at him with a mixture of awe, amusement, and burgeoning pity. "It's only a pill, after all."

At that moment, Dr. Fau's heart exploded in his chest. He jerked, his eyes bulging out, his arms thrown back and nearly dislocating his shoulders, and finally, he slumped forward in his seat. At that moment, a young orderly entered the room and checked the corpse.

"What--?" said Dr. Williams.

There was no response from the orderly. He looked at the clock above Dr. Fau's head, checked his watch, and brought out a pencil and a piece of paper, which on closer examination turned out to be Dr. Fau's death certificate. He spoke as he filled in the "Time of Death" blank. "Time of probability wave-function collapse: 10:04 a.m. Time of Death: also 10:04 a.m. Hmm."

He turned around and signaled through the open door. Two burly orderlies entered, picked up Dr. Fau, and carried him out. The first orderly faced the roomful of shocked doctors and a traumatized (but secretly thrilled) pharmaceutical rep and said, "We apologize for the interruption," turned around, and walked out.

A hush fell over the room.

traveler's check

2007-07-10T14:00:00.000-07:00

This is the account of an event in the life of the man known as el-Musafir, the Traveler. The year, as nearly as can be accounted, is 1363. The place, a small Greek island now known as Corfu, on which the Atsinganoi (who may in this time be more popularly known as 'Roma' or 'Gypsies') of Constantine IX have settled. The wanderers had stopped wandering, but old habits can be difficult to abandon.

This account was set down by Marath Kundela, faithful follower of Our Lady Nur in the 1,063rd year following her death, in the month of sequestration during what came to be known as the Marathan Jihad, encoded in digital form on microelectronic circuitry.

[Record begins here]

I remember what a beautiful day it was. Typical weather for the Ionian--brilliant blue sky, white clouds, glassy water. Just as it is outside today, some seven hundred-odd years later, although the water is considerably rougher. Funny how little some things change--and how much.

I had launched in a small boat from near where Buthrotum once was and crossed the narrow strait separating the island from what is now Albania. It was a rather short trip; the Straits of Corfu are at their narrowest at that end of the island. Kerkyra--pardon me, I apologize--Corfu was then administered by the House of Anjou, who had little real power to enforce their influence and even less inclination to care, at least according to the locals. It was, of course, quite a simple matter to navigate from Buthrotum to Corfu--just set Mount Pantokrator straight ahead and make a dead run at it.

I had forgotten how rough the coast was, and in the end, I had to swim ashore, barely missing the rocks. To this day, I'm still not clear on how I managed to avoid it, and by the time I was standing up on my own feet, I was breathing hard and not feeling very well.

Still, I had been traveling for just over four thousand years by that point, and I was more than hardy enough to keep going, which didn't take me long to regret. The terrain around Mount Pantokrator--indeed, across the northern part of the island--is incredibly mountainous.

Still, after three days of trudging, just as I was beginning to run out of my supplies of stale bread and dried goat, I found a small farm, consisting of mostly a small building with a fence around it, perhaps 150 feet wide, penning up several goats. I made my way over the fence, dodged a few horns, and strode up to the low opening in the small stone building.

The goatskin strung across the doorway was pulled aside before I even knocked, badly frightening me and taking me off balance. A small, skinny old man stared up at me, his tunic dirt-stained and hanging loosely over--nothing else. Good Lord, I remember how alarming that moment was.

"Yes?" he asked, quite politely if I remember correctly.

"Greetings, sir," I said. "I am a traveler who is running out of food. I was wondering if it would be at all possible to impose on you."

His bony chest thrust out. "Of course. I am a Greek, no matter what any Angevin dog thinks he owns, and we are known for our hospitality. Come inside."

This didn't surprise me. The last few times I had passed through the Achaean lands, hospitality was a major part of their culture, the rationale coming from their always-interesting mythology--any stranger that came knocking could be a god in disguise, waiting to reward those who opened their homes and hilariously punish those who spurned any imposition.

I ducked underneath the upper edge of the doorway and remained bent over. The ceiling was low. This man was tiny in comparison to me. You must understand, Marath, that I was a bit of a sport. On the day I was cursed with eternal life and endless wandering, I was the tallest person in the village--indeed, anywhere around. I was an object of ridicule and fear for nearly five thousand years--only about a century ago did that come to an end, and the rest of the human race began to catch up.

Perhaps it was my height that put the idea of godhood in his mind, because he came up to me with a large blanket filled to overflowing with farmer's bread, dried goat, mushrooms, and what meager fruit there was in the house. It was clear that he had given me all the food he had.

"If you wish," he said eagerly, "you could stay for the night. You can have my pallet. I can sleep outside with the goats!" He said it so enthusiastically that I felt terrible.

"I thank you for your kindness," I said. "But I would not presume to impose so much." I looked at the blanket, and sighed. It would be difficult to leave any food here without offending him, regardless of whether or not he starved. "I must admit, though, that this really is more than I can carry comfortably. How far is the nearest village?"

He looked offended anyway. "You would not be imposing! It would be my honor to serve you, as my guest."

I did not want to stay at all. Not only was he so poor that I felt sinful just breathing the air inside his home, but the whole place reeked of various types of goat effluvia, so I was caught coming and going. "Ah, but I have a relative who's expecting me within a day. Instead, could you tell me where the village of the Atsinganoi lies?"

He shrugged. "Very well. And yes. The Atsinganoi live about two days' walk south of here. Please take some bread and wine at least!"

I nodded. "Of course. Thank you, kind sir, and I must be going."

"Certainly, young man," he said, and he smiled. I took enough for two days' walk.

Hills and mountains, rain and sun, rivers and villages and farmsteads later, I arrived, the Atsinganoi village within view, nestled in a basin among the hills. I settled on the hillside and waited. A run-in with some Frankish Atsinganoi several years before had taught me that it was best not to speak with them directly; their culture prohibited contact with outsiders. It would be a while before they noticed I was there and sent someone who was permitted to speak with non-Atsinganoi.

It was almost night. I settled down and chewed some bread as I watched the bloody copper deepen and be replaced by shadow on the hills. The warmth drained out of the air and was replaced by a dry coolness. I built a fire and waited, warmed by the heat and watching the stars wheel overhead. It didn't take long for a shadow to extricate itself from the larger darkness and reveal itself as a young man wearing brightly-colored and inconsistent clothing.

Black-eyed, black-haired, white-skinned, he had a vaguely Hebrew look about him that made me remember my time in Syria--when I met your ancestor, in fact, Marath--and his eyes collected the firelight without reflection.

"Why are you here?" he asked in near-perfect Greek.

"Not Caló?" I asked in the same language.

"That is our language," he snapped. "What do you want?"

I sighed. "You Atsinganoi are so unfriendly sometimes. I've come in search of someone who, I've heard, is quite a skilled fortune-teller. She is supposed to have settled in that village down there," I pointed, as though he wouldn't know what I had been referring to. "And I would like to see her."

"She doesn't speak to outsiders," he said, sneering. "Go away."

"She doesn't need to. If I understand correctly, she just needs to lay out her cards in answer to a question. I would like for you to bring my question to her and to bring her answer back to me." I sat back and considered, searching my memory. "In return, I will tell you of a place near here where there is an ancient treasure left by Etruscan explorers many centuries ago." No need to tell him how I knew of this.

He looked doubtful, then pathetically clever. "How do I know this isn't a trick?"

I tossed him a small gold figurine of a wolf, intricately worked and set with a tiny ruby in its forehead. "There's more."

He nodded thoughtfully as he examined the figurine and tested its softness. "What is your question?"

I sighed. "Ask her when I can stop walking."

"That's all?" He looked quizzical. "And for this, you'll give me a fortune?"

I shrugged, and he ran off without saying a further word. Dangle a piece of gold in front of a poor man's eyes, and he sees nothing else.

It was another week before he returned. I understood why; the cleansing rituals the Atsinganoi had to put themselves through after speaking to an outsider required a great deal of time and ceremony.

He came just before sunset, looking respectful.

"She has asked to see you in person."

I felt cold, more so than could be explained by the sunset. "The fortune-teller? Why?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. But she said to meet her by the twin-trunks after dawn tomorrow."

"The twin--?"

The boy pointed downhill. About halfway between my camp and the village was a single tree that had grown into two trunks. Good enough.

"Very well. Thank you." But he didn't move. "Yes?"

He had that stupidly clever expression on his face again. "What about payment?"

I shook my head. "Not until after I speak to the fortune-teller."

His face fell. "Certainly. But either way, I'm required to remain with you for the night and cleanse you."

I laughed. "No cleansing will take place around this fire, sir."

The young man's face colored. "But--"

I raised my hand. "Absolutely not. If this fortune-teller has seen what I think she's seen, cleansing is not the main concern in her mind right now."

He looked guilty, but accepted it. "I brought food and wine. You may eat it." He put a small sack on the ground between us and backed away.

"Er, thank you," I said, mentally collecting myself. I'd forgotten some aspects of the untouchability of the Atsinganoi. I picked up the sack and found a small wineskin, dates, grapes, and dried venison from the small deer I'd seen around. I'd actually just finished off the last of the fresh venison from a deer I'd killed the previous day, but this small gesture was so significant in the face of dealings with the Atsinganoi...

At dawn the next day, I woke up. Those grapes had tasted fermented, and the wine had been much stronger than I expected, and there was a light throb in my head. I sat up and looked around The fire had burned out and the Atsinganos was gone. I stood up, had my morning piss, stuck a piece of dried venison in my mouth, started chewing, and headed downhill to the twin-trunks.

It wasn't long before I noticed what looked like a tall, bright yellow bush standing next to the tree. It had a human face, and I had a nasty moment until I realized that the bright-yellow thing was the fortune-teller, dressed and painted in a color that was evidently intended for protection from the filth of the foreigner.

She had one chair and a barrel set up. On the barrel was a deck of cards made from super-valuable vellum and hand-scratched illustrations in ink.

"Stranger," she said, in passable Venetian. "Sit," and she indicated the chair. "Touch nothing but the chair."

I nodded and sat, folding my arms in my lap. "Certainly, lady. I must apologize for forcing myself on you in this manner, but I have been looking for someone like you for a very long time."

"Yes," she said slowly. "A very, very long time, no?" Her dark eyes looked at me out of the thickly-caked yellow paint, unreadable but meaningful.

I nodded again. "Yes, lady. A very...long time."

"Call me Imbri," she said suddenly. "It is a Latinate name, but it will do for this session."

I furrowed my brow. "Tears?"

She didn't respond, only laid out her cards. There was a high wind, which would have stirred cards made from cardboard or paper, but these were vellum. They lay solidly on the lid of the barrel. When she completed the layout, she was silent for a long time, considering very carefully what lay before her.

"You come from the east," Imbri said finally. "Though you are passing from the west. You have circled the world many times. This I know," she said, looking up suddenly, "From the last time I laid your cards out. But your question..." she trailed off.

"When I may stop walking," I said.

"Yes." She examined the cards even more closely. "This card here--it represents your path, unwinding. There is more, much more, ahead than that which lies behind. Hmm. This one, here, says that the stars must speak, and this one next to it says that the clouds must sing. But the meaning is vague; I'm not sure if it's metaphorical or literal."

I chuckled. "Isn't it all metaphorical?"

She looked at me sharply. "A youthful wanderer says this?"

She had a point there. I sighed. "I come from a very different age. Metaphor has little place here."

Imbri arched her left eyebrow and muttered quietly for a second. "Listen," she said. "I have never been wrong. This is the first time that I have felt that being wrong--it could happen this time, do you understand? This is very important."

"I apologize, Imbri," I said contritely. "Is there an indication of exactly how long I'm going to need to wait?"

She muttered again and looked down at the barrel head. "Ancient," she said, and looked at me, a new look in her eyes. "This card represents the elephant--a lost history. It's commonly associated with Hind. That, coupled with the long path unwinding, the voiced stars, and the singing clouds, suggests that you are from that land, and are much, much older than you seem."

I nodded mutely. This woman was good.

Imbri continued. "See this ship? You won't stop traveling for a good, long time." She looked at me curiously. "Do you think the stars are likely to start talking any time soon?"

I laughed, feeling bleak. "No, indeed. Quiet nights and cacophonous storms, I'm afraid."

She sighed. "My guess would be that you have just as much coming to you as what you've left behind. You'll keep walking for a long time, but--" She looked frustrated. "I can't figure out exactly how long. This is bothersome." She shuffled her deck of cards and drew out a single one. "For clarification," she said, and laid it down.

We both looked at it at the same time, leaning over the barrel head. A house, bracketed by the sun on the right, the moon on the left, and stars on the top and bottom. Our eyes met.

"I've never seen that one before," she whispered. "And I made these cards myself."

Every hair on my body stood on end, and the air fairly crackled, and I thought it was the chills that come over you when you encounter something you can't explained, but then the world turned white and hot and I woke up the next day, bobbing in the water off a coast that looked familiar.

Of course it looked familiar. It was eastern India.

[Record ends]

one of many

2007-07-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

Falling apart was not something that I'd planned to do. At all.

When my right index finger started investigating the underside of the couch and my left arm decided to go for a walk, of course I knew something was wrong. I'm not a total idiot.

And then I didn't wake up yesterday. At least, not right away. Parts of me woke up at different times and went off to grab themselves some breakfast. I don't really want to know what my left leg had for the morning meal, least of all my lower jaw. And my ears make me shudder.

I looked it up online. "Siphonophora." Colony organisms. I was cousin to the Portuguese Man o' War. I felt a funny shudder go through my right arm, left foot, my head, and the upper part of my torso.

You haven't seen strange until you look in the mirror and realize that your head decided to do its own thing, rolling about like a worm-infested coconut. My eyeballs were playing marbles with each other, which looked like a bizarre, self-directed game of pool. My ears were talking on the phone, the little ridges and curves on the inside of one wrinkling and burping into the receiver while the other one listened to the speaker.

My fingers were playing foosball against my palms, while my arms were figuring out the TV remote. My torso was trying to seduce my left leg, who was playing hard-to-get, while the right looked on and ate peanut butter. My ass was taking a nap and snoring, and my penis was arguing with my testicles about whether or not my right foot could be convinced to take it and some of my toes for a walk. The testicles, backed up by several of the other toes, strongly doubted it--the foot was notoriously slothful. The left foot, in the meantime, was arm-wrestling with my tongue with my teeth as referees. My nose wasn't in the room--last I had seen it, it was in the tub, pretending to be a cruise liner.

I sighed and rolled my tongueless, earless, eyeless, noseless, toothless head over to the oven. Would I ever perform surgery again?

Probably not.

the traveler's mark

2007-06-26T11:27:00.002-07:00

He bobbed up to the surface, just off the shore of Malibu. At least, that was what his infallible sense of the world he had explored for so long told him.

The sun, the sky, the water, the bluffs on the shore, the enormous, sprawling houses all told him: Malibu. He was back in the Federated States of North America. God. He had been here only fifty years ago.

He swam ashore. He must have drifted a little in the current, because he landed on a private beach, fenced off and leading uphill to a large tan house, stuccoed and immaculately landscaped, endowed with a vanishing-horizon pool, the trend of a few decades ago.

Naked. He wished he had privacy. The golden sand felt good under his feet, though, and the sun warmed him. Up ahead, a young woman with dark hair emerged from a pair of French doors, carrying a book and a pack of cigarettes. Parliament Lights, from what he could see at this distance.

A woman. It had to be a woman. Embarrassed, he made his way up the wide steps and strategically positioned himself behind a strange tropical plant with long, waxy leaves. They were dark green.

He cleared his throat, and called out, "Hello? Excuse me?"

The woman, who had been positioning herself to sink down on a chaise lounge, froze. Slowly, she turned around and saw him. Her eyes lit up with anger and she strode down to him. Young, he thought. Her eyes were wide, deep, and dark, and her skin had a depth to it. Perfectly-formed, though slender, she made him wonder if she was part Indian.

"What are you doing here?" she snapped. "This is private property." Then she realized his situation. "Oh, my God," she breathed. "You're naked. Jesus. They told me this might happen." A sudden change in attitude. "Get away from me, you pervert!"

"No, no," he said. "I am not perverted. I just...lost my clothes and I need something to cover myself with. Please? I am in trouble. I need your help."

She paused. "Yeah, right," she said. "You just 'lost' your clothes. Sure. You'd better get moving before I call the police."

"I can explain," he said quickly. "I just need something--a towel, a dishcloth, anything. Please."

The desperation in his eyes must have convinced her, because she bit her lower lip and thought for a moment. "All right. But I've got a gun, so don't do anything I wouldn't like. Stay right here."

"Happily!" he said. She narrowed her eyes, hesitated, then made her way up the paver-crusted steps and into the house.

A few moments later, she emerged, carrying a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. "Those were my ex-husband's," she said. "You can have them."

"Thank you!" he said, more grateful than he expected. Had it been that long since he had last died? Yes--over two hundred years, since the Opium Wars. He quickly slipped into them and breathed a deep sigh of relief. He had forgotten how comfortable cotton t-shirts and shorts were over the fifty years since he had left the United States--now the Federated States, consolidated along with Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America above the Panama Canal.

He stepped out from behind the bush, and the woman reached behind her back threateningly. He raised his hands and said, "I am harmless, I assure you. In fact, I can leave right now if you'd prefer."

She relaxed. "Got someplace to be?"

"Frankly, no," he said. "I am what you might call a gentleman of leisure. Although these days, life has been slightly less leisurely than usual."

She nodded. "Must be, if losing your clothes wasn't accidental or depraved. C'mon," and she headed up the steps, el-Musafir in tow. They stopped on the porch. "Want something to drink?"

He was achingly thirsty, and starving to boot--the resurrection always took its pound of flesh, so to speak. "Yes, that would be wonderful." His stomach growled loudly, and she paused and looked back at him, one perfect eyebrow arched.

"Perhaps some food, too?"

Embarrassed, he said, "That would also be wonderful!"

She laughed, apparently in spite of herself. "Have a seat," she said, pointing at the chaise lounge. "I'll be right back."

He eased himself down onto the lounge, noting the fine wood of its frame and the smoothness of the cloth over the plush cushion. This woman was wealthy. As he looked out over the ocean, this impression was reinforced. A pair of squat palm trees framed the view on both sides of the vanishing pool, and all was lush, dark-green vegetation and bright red tropical flowers down the hill to the beach. The water was that rare turquoise that comes from just-right weather conditions, and the sky was a deep blue, filled with immaculate white clouds like sailing ships. The whitecaps came rushing into the beach, breaking in a roar of sound that was only audible from his vantage point as a gentle shushing. The roof that sloped over the porch blocked out the sun at this time of day, but the terminator was already halfway across the pool.

The sunsets here must be incredible, he thought to himself. He had seen Pacific sunsets many times, but the feeling of privacy here, engendered by tall bushes and a solid wood fence on both sides of the yard, must, he felt, make this woman feel as though the sunset was hers and hers alone. What a life.

Her voice broke into his reverie. "Admiring the view?" with just a small note of pride.

He shook his head. "Admiring the life."

She laughed and handed him a bottle of water and a plate heaped with eggs, bacon, sausage, and biscuits. At his look of surprise, she shrugged and said, "Leftovers from breakfast. My cook always makes more than I need and boxes them up for my lunch. C'mon, make some room for me."

He smiled and folded his legs under him, Indian-style, resting his plate on his lap and unscrewing the bottle cap.

After he had chugged down the entire bottle, she said, "I'm Marath, by the way."

He nodded and swallowed his last mouthful of water. "El-Musafir." Then he caught himself. "Well. Perhaps not anymore," and he smiled again. A shadow crossed her face, fleetingly.

She inclined her head slightly, turned it to her left, and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "What does that mean?"

He laughed. "It's a long story. Pardon me," and he began to devour his breakfast. He couldn't help himself; the food just kept shoveling itself into his mouth, and it was all good, so good. His eyes closed in pleasure, and his stomach cried out for more.

When he finished, he opened his eyes to find Marath staring at him. But all she said was, "Is that good enough? Or should I go shoot an elephant?"

He laughed. "An elephant sounds lovely! But no, this is perfect. My God." He sighed again and leaned back against the lounge, his eyes closing. It felt so good, having food in his stomach. This would be the first time this body had tasted or eaten anything, and the effects of the food was making him languorous. Dimly, he felt Marath extricating the plate from his hands, getting up, and he heard the French doors open and close. Then there was nothing.

Glinting light woke him up. The sun was dancing on the water. Marath was nowhere in sight. Quickly, he sat up and looked around him. He was alone. Panicked, he thought briefly about drugged food, but the truth soon came to him.

He had forgotten. It'd been so long since he'd last died that he had forgotten the effects of eating for the first time after a resurrection. His body needed downtime to begin processing food and storing away the useful nutrients, so it shut him down, in effect, to ensure as little activity as possible.

What must Marath have thought? He stood up, looking down the hill to the beach. Nothing. He turned around and went through the French doors. High walls, vaulted ceiling, expensive tile on the floor supporting expensive rugs and expensive furniture. The wall was turned off, a blank rectangle of black in the center to represent the minimum viewing window. And there was Marath lounging on the blue plush couch, a book in her hands. She looked up and smiled.

"Feel better?" He nodded wordlessly, and she laughed. "First time I've had a guy fall asleep on me. Come sit with me and tell me your long story," and she sat up.

His mind working furiously, el-Musafir smiled weakly and sat down. The slatted blinds on the French doors let in long, skinny strips of light and painted Marath in a chiaroscuro that molded itself to her slight body. A stripe of light fell across her eyes, but they were so dark that the light was absorbed rather than reflecting any color.

"So," she said. "Why were you swimming naked off my beach?"

"I wasn't swimming," he said. "I got mugged on a pier a few miles away from here, I think. They beat me up pretty badly and, I guess, stripped me and threw me off. I just woke up this morning, saw the public beach next door, and started swimming, and the current brought me here."

She nodded for a minute. "Sure. Sounds plausible."

"So, uh...sorry to have bothered you, but I'm going to go."

"Just a minute there, pod-ner," she said. "Sit back down. So you got beaten up, huh?"

"Yeah, I sure did," he said, smiling.

"Must ache pretty badly, huh?"

Ooh, shit, he thought to himself. God damn the resurrection. "Actually, no," he said brightly. "It must have been a couple days ago."

She sighed. "Cut the shit. I know that whole line's a crock. I'd have believed you if you said you just decided to go skinny-dipping, lost the suit, and got stuck in a riptide that carried you here."

El-Musafir blushed and laughed. "Actually, that's what really happened. But if it had happened to you, would you be so willing to share that?"

Marath looked thoughtful. "True. So what do you do for a living?"

He shrugged. "Well, as I said, I'm a gentleman of leisure. Independently wealthy. I travel around and take stupid risks for kicks."

"What's with the name? El-Musafir. You don't look Middle-Eastern."

Time to tread carefully. "It's more like a nickname. A friend gave it to me when I was younger. She was Syrian, and said that it meant 'The Traveler.' It stuck because I really do travel quite a lot. In fact, I don't even have a permanent address." He paused, and looked at Marath, whose face had just gone pale. "Is everything okay?"

She opened her mouth to speak, the phone rang, and she closed it again. "Just a moment," she said. She stood up and went through a doorway in the viewing wall into the next room.

He heard her pick up the phone. Her voice, though slightly muffled, was audible.

"Hello? Yes, it's me. Yes, I remember. Really? Oh. Oh. Oh, my God. It was him? Are you sure? Really? Okay. But didn't you say...I see. Well, okay." Long pause. "Yes, I'll let you know if I hear anything. Yes, I Googled the name this morning, I do it every morning. No, nothing turned up. Yes, I know. Okay. All right. Thanks for...telling me. Bye."

There was a long silence. No sounds of movement from the other room. Just as el-Musafir was starting to become concerned, Marath emerged slowly through the doorway, her face gray. Now he was really concerned.

"What's wrong?"

She shook her head. "Nothing I'm ready to discuss right now." She flopped down on the couch. "Tell me about you."

El-Musafir was nonplussed. "I'm a strange naked man who washed up on your private beach and stole your husband's clothing before eating all of your food and falling asleep on your back porch. Shouldn't I be leaving?"

She laughed. "First, it's my ex-husband. We split up months ago. Second, that just makes things more interesting." At his dubious look, she continued, "See, I'm also independently wealthy. I got so much money in the settlement that I probably won't need to work again. And I'm not the hard-working type, so I mostly just lounge around here, go to the gym, and shop."

He nodded. "You should travel. See the world."

She laughed, but her look grew curiously intense. "How long have you been traveling?"

He shrugged. "All my life. My mom died soon after she gave birth to me, and my dad was a traveling salesman. He got a home-schooling certification, though, so I spent my life on the road. When I became an adult, I went to college, patented part of the technology behind the viewing wall--" he poked his thumb at her wall, and continued, "--made a lot of money off of it, and I've been back on the road ever since."

She looked impressed. "That's quite a good story. What's your real name?"

Uh-oh. "I don't give it out. I don't even use it, really. I consider myself a citizen of the world, and 'el-Musafir' is my name. Although I've been thinking about changing it." There.

"Why?"

He shrugged and shifted position. "It feels worn-out, I guess. I've gone by el-Musafir for so long that it almost seems threadbare. It's high time I got a new identity." He nodded definitively. "Yes, indeed."

She laughed and leaned forward. "Tell me a story you heard on your travels."

"Hmm." El-Musafir thought for a while. Why not? "All right. This is a story I heard in India. It's thousands of years old, said to date back to the time of the Aryans, a pale-skinned people who inhabited the Subcontinent and outlying regions almost five thousand years ago. Supposedly, the Persians and modern-day Iranians are descended from this culture."

Marath nodded. "I've heard about them. Weren't they supposed to be blond-haired and blue-eyed?"

He shook his head. "That was a popular myth that was...strongly supported by people who liked the idea of an, oh, sort of a master-race. Hitler was one of those. This way, he had a biological and racial reason to cleanse the Jews and Gypsies, and essentially anyone else who didn't fall into that ideal." She winced, and looked chagrined at the idea that she had fallen into that trap. "Right. Anyway, the world was different in those times. It seems like the farther back you go, the world's population of demons, spirits, and gods takes off, exponentially. With that comes a rise in the sheer...amount of magic loose in the world."

She had a funny, crooked half-smile on her face. "You almost sound like you were there."

He shrugged. "The way the story was told to me, it almost made me feel like I was there. The guy's face--this was on the outskirts of Chennai, by the way, in the lower-caste administrative region--he had this amazing sense of wonder and belief that I couldn't help but think the story actually happened, you know?"

She nodded. "Go on."

"There was a young boy who lived in a village in the northwest of what we now recognize as the nation of India," began el-Musafir. "His was a family of extremely poor farmers. Still, life wasn't too nasty, brutish, or short, as the philosopher said. Family life was an important aspect of this culture, and everyone was taken care of by everyone else. I suppose you could call it prehistoric Communism. The village would gather all the produce harvested by its members, and a group of 12 farmers would take it to the regional market every week, sell it all off, and come back and divide the money evenly among all the villagers."

Marath sighed. "It sounds like a recipe for trouble."

He nodded. "It was, but not for a long time. You see, the largest farmers had been raised in that environment, and had always been fed and protected by the village. They saw it as a strong social obligation and were pleased to be able to contribute to the unity of their people. That village had been around for five hundred years or more, since it had been supposedly founded by the ancestors of the local witch, who were gods of some kind or other. Thus, they lived on blessed ground." He paused. His throat was dry. "Would you mind if I had some water?" Marath nodded and fetched him a glass.

"Thank you," he said, and continued. "In the time of our youthful main character's eleventh summer, a new family came, with six children. The head of the household had heard about this village and its unusual arrangement of guaranteeing health for every resident, and had been attracted to this idea. He really was rather wealthy, and had brought many supplies and slaves with him. He claimed a huge tract of uninhabited land just outside the largest fields belonging to the village, and he farmed that for several years, participating in the profit-sharing arrangement. The field was too far away to live on and still benefit from the tightly-knit life in town, so he built a fine home near the center of the village for himself, his wife, and his children, and a large building to house his slaves on the land he had claimed."

He took a drink of water, and thought about how to go on. "He brought in a lot of food and, I guess, what you could consider money, for the village. Everyone was incredibly well-fed. By the time our humble protagonist saw his eighteenth year, he was in quite vibrant health. Unfortunately for him, things were about to go very wrong."

"It was the new guy," Marath guessed. "He got tired of seeing all his food and money go to the other villagers, right?"

"No, not at all," el-Musafir replied. "At least, not on the surface. You have to remember, this man was from a different culture. He was used to the usual, sell-things-for-profit, look-out-for-yourself kind of thing. And no matter how much he enjoyed his new lifestyle, it was inevitable that he would say something comparing the village to the city where he used to live in southern India."

Marath sat back. "From southern India to the northwest? That's a long way to go just to move house."

He shrugged. "Like I said, it's just a story."

She nodded. "Sorry for the interruption. Keep going, please."

He spent a moment figuring out where he had left off. "Ah. Well, over the course of a few years, he apparently inadvertently poisoned the minds of the largest farmers, and they began to wonder why they had to put up with the comparatively small amount of money and food they got in return for their huge harvests. They forgot about their childhoods and about their children, and began to think only of what they would gain if the current order of things...was changed."

He sighed. "What happened was, I suppose, unavoidable. Those major farmers--there was a handful of them--began arguing among themselves and the other villagers about making the distribution of wealth more proportionate to each individual family's contribution. The poorer farmers protested, saying that their families would starve, but were answered only with sneering words about their lack of effort." He shifted position again--his right leg had been folded up under his left, and it had gone to sleep. He lifted both legs up and crossed them at the ankles on the coffee table and continued, "Eventually, it came to pass that those big farmers realized that their slaves, if combined, constituted an army with which their supposedly fair share could be seized by force.

"It happened the weekend that our young boy, now a young man, was selected to go to market for the first time. The poorer villagers, however, were suspicious of the larger farmers, so created a story about an unusually large harvest that needed all hands to work. And so it was that this boy went to market, unaccompanied by grown, experienced men. This was difficult for him, since there was so much food that it normally required at least six men to transport and sell it, but the villagers told him to feel free to practically give it away. They knew that the chance of them never surviving to see the next profit was far too high."

"So how did he manage it?" Marath said.

"They sent their youngest children with him," said el-Musafir. "Only those who had not seen fourteen summers went, and those helped him transport the food in the twelve carts and took care of their younger siblings. The parents of the village didn't want the children to be involved in a massacre."

"So how many in all?" Marath asked.

"Nearly thirty children, plus our boy," said el-Musafir.

"This boy has no name?"

El-Musafir shrugged. "His name was lost to history. This is a legend, remember."

She nodded. "So what happened next?"

He sighed deeply. "Tragedy. When they arrived at the market, word spread that this week's harvest from their village was manned only by vulnerable children. Everything was seized by the market slavers, and by the weekend, only our main character remained, deemed too old for the purposes for which children were often bought, and too young for the hard work of adulthood. The children had all been carried away and sold, and the meat and produce had all been stolen. One young man was not enough to protect the village's merchandise, so to speak. Even the carts and horses were stolen, and he was forced to walk back to the village. It took him nearly three days to cover the distance, which might have saved his life."

He stared at his feet, remembering. "When he returned to the village, there was utter devastation. The major farmers had attacked the rest of the village, but the villagers, anticipating the attack, were prepared. Nearly everyone on both sides had been slaughtered, and every home burned to the ground--except one."

Marath's mouth fell open. "The new guy's?"

He shook his head. "He had, apparently, been totally oblivious to what was happening, and when it happened, he tried to call his slaves in from the field. His work force was almost as large as the others' combined, and the village might have been saved. Unfortunately, his message was intercepted and the messenger killed, and his family then massacred. By the time the boy arrived in the wasteland where he had once lived, all the survivors had fled, except, of course, for one. She lived in the untouched home."

Comprehension dawned in Marath's face. "The witch's house."

El-Musafir nodded. "Even in the throes of war, the fighters feared the witch so much that her home was virtually unscathed. Yet, curiously, their fear of her did not stop them from destroying the town her own ancestors had allegedly founded. When the boy arrived, the witch was waiting for him. She was young, and quite beautiful--or she had been several days before. This time, her face was lined and aged, and she was ugly with fury.

"' Why do you walk? What has happened to the children?' she cried. 'Where is the food? What have you done?'

"Trembling, he explained what had happened, and she flew into a rage.

"'Damn you,' she shrieked. 'Those children were the future of this village! With them, there might have been hope of rebuilding. You have performed the final act of destruction, of desecration! I curse you with eternal life! You have walked here instead of ridden, and you will never stop walking! Your hair will never again grow upon your head! The grass will never grow under your feet! You will never grow old! You will wander the world until you find this village as it once was once again! DAMN YOU!'"

Marath's breath caught. "And was the curse fulfilled?"

He spread his hands. "No one knows. There are stories in the region of a young man who visits the area once every couple hundred years. He enchants a young woman with stories of his travels and then vanishes again, leaving heartbreak and bitterness behind him." He shrugged. "I'm sorry if I depressed you. It's not the happiest story."

She smiled suddenly. "No! I'm fascinated. I've always wondered--" and she looked surprised and slightly chagrined, and her mouth snapped shut. Then--"Ah, well. Are you hungry again, el-Musafir?"

But something had caught his attention. "Wondered what?"

"Nothing important," she said, and shrugged. "I've got some watermelon if you're up for it. I'm in the mood for something sweet."

It was hard for him to let go of it, but he nodded. "Certainly," he said stiffly. She paused for a moment, looking at him with--what? Intense interest, slight fear, some awe? More and more, he felt certain that he was in a dangerous position.

"Actually, you know what?" he said. "I think I had better go. It was very nice meeting you, Marath, and I thank you for the clothes, the food, and the time to rest."

Marath looked woeful. "No, el-Musafir. Please don't leave."

He knew, then. The phone call, the reaction to his name, the intense interest in his story. "And why not? So I can be caught by your cousins again? So they can drain me dry and use my blood so they can wage their war of wealth and bitterness for all time?" He shook his head. "No. Good-bye, Marath. I had hoped--" but he snapped his jaw shut to prevent the rest from coming out. "Good-bye."

"Wait," she said. "I admit it. I'm a Nurian. That Syrian woman who loved you so much a thousand years ago is one of my ancestors, okay. I know the story of the mysterious el-Musafir, the wandering immortal, the broken-hearted lady Nur who waited for him until she died, blah blah blah. I know all about my cousins' plans. But you have to believe me..." she paused. "Did you hear me lie to my cousin Jamal on the phone? Why would I do that if I were on his side?"

"I don't know," he said angrily. "So you could wring me for every single fascinating detail before you turn me over to your murderous bastard relatives. I wish I had never met that bitch Nur--no, I wish I had strangled her!"

"Jesus Christ, el-Musafir," Marath said, disgusted. "I know you don't mean that. You should know there are two sides to the Nurian order. There's Jamal's side, and then there's mine. You don't understand how fascinated we are with you, how much we desperately want to hear your stories--and write them down."

He paused, his brow furrowing, his eyes narrowed. "Write them down? Really?"

She nodded calmly. "Yeah. If I assume rightly, according to the story you just told me, you're nearly five thousand years old. Those are a lot of memories, and some of them might get lost. Do you even know what your name was at the time?"

He hesitated, sat down on the couch again. "No. I don't, actually." And he looked up. "But wouldn't Jamal be angry if he found out about this?"

She smiled. It was not a happy smile. "Jamal can be taken care of."

"And Malik?"

"Malik is on our side. His closeness to Jamal makes him useful." She sighed and sat down at the kitchen table, tapping the glass surface with her fingernails. "Frankly, we've been planning on removing that side of the family for a long time. All it would have taken was you. And now here you are." She looked at him intently in the eye. "Do you see?"

El-Musafir felt a slight shock. "Are you talking about murdering your family?"

Marath shrugged. "Jamal and I are the descendants of two Muslim brothers who lived in the fifteenth century. One--my many-times great-grandfather--sought his fortune in India. In fact, that's where my grandparents on my mother's side come from. The other stayed in the Levant." She looked down at the table. "Our ancestries diverged over six hundred years ago. The only thing we have in common, really, is the knowledge of Nur's story. We aren't truly family, as far as I see it."

"Yes, I could see it that way." He thought a moment, and laughed. "The Chronicles of the Traveler. Is that what you were thinking?"

She smiled. "More or less, yes. A personal account five thousand years long."

El-Musafir shook his head. "I die for the first time in two hundred years, killed by the descendants of the woman who named me, and I am resurrected near the home of yet another descendant of this woman. I had forgotten."

Marath nodded. "It is an enormous coincidence. But--forgotten what?"

"Hm? Oh. Yes. Until a few days ago, I hadn't died for two centuries, you understand. But before then, it happened rather often." He sighed. "Often enough for me to learn that the resurrection can be...affected, directed, shaped, whichever word you want to use."

"How?" she said.

"I honestly have no idea," said el-Musafir. "But every time I come back, I usually find myself floating in the water off a place that invariably becomes highly significant in my life. It's almost as though...but it can't be."

He heard Marath's breath whoosh as if in exasperation. "What can't be?"

"As though the curse is actively seeking out situations that might bring me closer to its own fulfillment," he said. "Silly, isn't it?"

She looked thoughtful. "About as silly as the curse itself, I'd say."

He laughed. "Once, I found myself in a puddle in the heart of China. That was just before I got involved in the Opium Wars. There was no major body of water nearby, and I suppose the puddle was good enough for me."

But he liked the idea Marath had planted in his mind. He really, really liked it. He was surprised at how good it sounded to him. But--"You must understand that I am extremely peripatetic and difficult to get in contact with while I am traveling. How do you propose staying in touch long enough to record my tales?" An expansive sort of anticipation was blossoming inside him.

Marath looked hesitant. She bit her lower lip, and said, "Well. If you don't mind, I'd like to travel with you. Would that be a problem?" At his surprised look, she went on quickly, "You could just write your stories down in letters and mail them to me instead. I don't have to go with you." She looked wistful. "I'd sure like to, though."

El-Musafir turned this thought around in his mind. Surprisingly, he found himself eager to find out what it was like, traveling with a companion after being alone for five millennia. "For how long?"

She spread her hands. "However long it takes."

There was one important thing. "You know, I'm not sure," he said. "It may prove to be...difficult. You might be traveling with me for a very long time, and I'm not sure how you'd feel. I don't grow any older, you see. I have looked like this for five thousand years. Do you understand?"

She laughed. "El-Musafir, believe me. I'm not that vain. And this is strictly on a play-it-by-ear basis, you know. I may wind up trading off with another cousin ten years from now if I find myself in a place where I'd want to settle down, or I might be with you until I die." She shrugged. "I'm flexible."

"Okay," he said slowly. "But you must also realize that I live on a very small income. This time around, I'm a moderately well-known political theorists, and I live off of the money I make making speeches and appearing on panels. You will need to get used to that sort of lifestyle." Then he stopped, remembering. "Shit. I have to change my name and profession now. I can't risk Jamal capturing me again."

Marath rolled her eyes. "Jamal will not be around for very much longer, remember? As soon as we find out that he and all of his kind have been wiped out, you can pick up where you left off."

He smiled grimly. "And in the meantime?"

She shrugged. "We'll stick around here. It's safe. Do you mind staying in one place for a month or two?"

El-Musafir thought about that. He stretched and felt his newly-made spine pop in several places. This couch really was comfortable. After five thousand years...

"No," he said. "I don't mind."

traveler's rest

2007-06-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

El-Musafir had seen the world many times. Each circumnavigation brought something new in every place he had been before, even in the many cities that had existed for thousands of years.

El-Musafir meant "The Traveler." He had picked up that name many hundreds of years ago as he traveled through the Levant, playing various portable musical instruments and performing a number of street acts to earn the money he needed to survive.

It was in Damascus. He had just finished a tale describing the hilarious customs of the northwestern barbarians. The group of wide-eyed children hanging onto his every word and bursting into laughter as he described moon-worship or blue-painting hadn't said much. It was a pretty young girl, Nur, who had dubbed him el-Musafir after the crowd had cleared. The conversation had happened over rose tea and lamb with several of her friends. Technically, they were forbidden to interact, but Nur was the daughter of a wealthy man who owned the rest where they ate.

"How many countries have you visited?" she asked, eyes bright with curiosity.

He shrugged. "All of them, at one point or another."

"But surely that must take hundreds of years!"

He laughed. "And do I look so old to you?"

"No," she said seriously. "At least, not for the most part. Your eyes are very deep, though, as though they've seen many more things than they should have."

"Ah!" he said. "The glory of sleep-deprivation. I'll get more sleep tonight, Inshallah, and perhaps in the morning I'll look like a new-born babe!"

She giggled. "You must have traveled every day of your life. Each morning, a new city, and each week, a new country."

He nodded. "Very much like that. My father was a traveling merchant with a shipping concern, and I took over his position after he died. I've seen many, many things. Did you know there's a huge land to the west?"

Nur laughed again. "Of course. It's called Africa."

"No, I mean further west. Beyond the great sea on Africa's western coast. Further west even than Iberia. The people there are brown. Not like the Moors, which tend to be darker, but with a much stronger reddish tinge."

She listened raptly as he explained their custom of chewing coca leaves and cacao nuts. The hallucinogenic enemas of the Aztecs elicited serious doubt and profound hilarity. The rainforests of the southern continent awed her, especially when he described the giant insects.

When he was done, she smiled impishly and said, "It doesn't matter now that you won't tell me your name. I have a new one for you. You will henceforth be known only as el-Musafir. The Wandering Muslim! That should serve as your answer when people ask from now on."

Surprised, he turned it over on his tongue. El-Musafir. It tasted good on his tongue, and he felt it sliding down over him like the most comfortable robe he had ever worn. And now, for almost a thousand years, he was still known as el-Musafir, the world over, by the people of the hidden places. He had long, long since forgotten the name he had been born with.

And now el-Musafir was returning to the Levant, to Damascus for the first time since he been named. Damascus had seen much since his last visit, and now it was, once again, one of the greatest cities of the world. The Caliph had his Rose Palace there, and it was said to exceed the Taj Mahal in beauty. El-Musafir doubted that that was possible--he had seen the magnificent tomb just after it was first constructed, and the sight had stayed with him for over four centuries. The New Caliphate had its stunning wonders, yes, but they did not always supplant the glory of the past.

The train stopped in Beirut on its southward journey. Here, it would turn east towards al-Fayhaa, the Fragrant City, Damascus. He couldn't wait. Perhaps he'd see something of Nur in the face of some random Damascene woman. It was one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world; perhaps her father's rest was still there in some form or another.

Of course, it was ridiculous to expect anything. It had been ten centuries; her descendants were now so numerous that any trace of her would have been obliterated in the noise of millions of other ancestors.

Mostly, he just wanted to see Damascus again. He had heard that the New Caliphate rebuilt it after the devastating regional war that had occurred in the middle of the last century, using money from its wealthiest provinces to transform Damascus into one of the most advanced cities on the continent. Dubai, of course, had protested the intrusion into the royal coffers, but had backed down after the Caliph threatened them with military action and sharia law.

Indeed, el-Musafir reflected, it was quite interesting how the New Caliphate had learned the lessons so painfully taught during the past two centuries. There had been considerable liberalization and re-interpretation of the word of Mohammed, allowing for the liberation of women and strong economic competition--over most of the Caliphate's territory. The strict Wahhabis had settled in Saudi Arabia and Iran and pursued strict sharia. They represented the Muslim equivalent of the Jewish kibbutzim and were the home of the Caliphate's most fearsome military wing.

Still, it didn't matter how liberally or conservatively each individual Muslim province practiced its collective faith; the New Caliphate was in control from western North Africa to Indonesia in an unbroken band cutting India off from the Chinese Hegemony and slinking under the belly of the Central Asia Confederation, which was currently dominated by Russia in a nasty deja-vu dream of the USSR.

Muslim extremism was almost unheard of now; the fundamentalists had land, money, and the satisfaction of the New Caliphate that they had spent nearly a century building. The Westernized provinces had all of that, in addition to the comfort that was contingent upon the recognition of their Muslim-ness as a state under the New Caliphate; even Israel fell under this auspice--Jerusalem was the Caliph's permanent home and the capital of the thousands of miles of Muslim lands.

The train left Beirut, traveling at nearly 430 miles an hour. It was therefore a shock when the explosive under the third car detonated, and the entire train derailed, plowing into the Damascene suburbs and setting off larger explosions as it mowed down hydrogen tank after hydrogen tank on its slow roll to a full stop. The carbon-fiber alloy superstructure of the train prevented it from disintegrating, but that only meant greater devastation for the people who lived in its path.

After the train came to a rest, it didn't take very long for the surviving passengers to participate in a mad scrabble to get out through any opening available. El-Musafir sensed that it wasn't over yet.

He was proven right when a hissing sound became audible. The other passengers had realized that all the doors and windows were sealed, and the skin of the train didn't permit any rips to penetrate its fabric. They were trapped, and the air quickly turned strange, and el-Musafir knew no more.

. . .

He woke up in a dark room. The walls were plastered stone, and extremely thick, judging from the tiny window set near the ceiling, which admitted the only light in the room. A line of four grim-faced men stood in front of him. They wore the traditional desert garb of the Badawi, an anachronism of this Age of the New Caliphate--outside of Iran or the Sinai Peninsula.

He mumbled. "Persian?"

One of them spoke sharply, the right-hand of the center pair. "El-Musafir. The Traveler. Is it you?"

"It is what I am called," he said. "What is this?" The four men had given each other significant glances at his affirmation.

"Is it true," the left-hand center man said, "That you are many thousands of years old?"

El-Musafir rolled his eyes in the automatic denial. "What a silly idea. Why am I tied up like this? Are you a terrorist organization?"

Right-hand center shook his head. "We are not terrorists, but freedom-fighters."

El-Musafir had to laugh. "There is no difference between the two, only in where you stand."

"Spoken like a true immortal," said left-hand center. He wore a beard, unusual in the modern Caliphate, and it betrayed a tinge of reddish-brown--even more unusual. He and right-hand center seemed to be the key people here. The bracketing pair were, presumably, their guards.

"Or a simple political theorist," el-Musafir said. "You assume far too much."

"Yes," said right-hand center. "A political theorist who travels from country to country, giving lectures and panel discussions, earning enough money to pay his way to the next stage."

"What a coincidence it is," said left-hand center, "That you carry the same name as the original el-Musafir, live the same lifestyle, and look the same." He sneered. "Surely you think we're stupid."

Wait. Look the same. "What do you mean, look the same?"

"We have drawings," said right-hand center. "Handed down over a thousand years by the founder of our order and our ancestor, a Damascene woman named Nur."

El-Musafir froze, his mind numbed. The shock on his face must have been evident, for both men leaned forward expectantly. But he said nothing.

"Nothing?" said left-hand center gently. "We are not your enemies, you realize."

"Yes," said right-hand center. "Our ancestor remembered you fondly. We have her personal writings from that time, and she spoke quite highly of you. After you moved on from Damascus, she was quite sad that you had not invited her on your travels." He paused. "You may call me Malik, and my cousin Jamal."

El-Musafir sighed. "I have no idea what you're talking about. Perhaps I have the same name, but that is nothing strange. Perhaps we share the same name because we share the same lifestyle. There is no reason to suggest a connection."

Jamal nodded to the guard on his right, who fetched a three-ring binder of laminated sheets. "Were you aware that Nur was also quite an accomplished artist with charcoal?"

El-Musafir laughed. "I have never heard of Nur, so how would I know anything about her artistic inclinations?" But his humor was silenced as the guard opened the binder to the first page and he found himself staring at his identical likeness, sketched and shaded in black on parchment.

He sighed. "Nur must have been a rich woman indeed. To waste parchment on such frivolity..."

"It was not frivolous to her," Malik said. "She spent the rest of her life waiting for you to return to Damascus, but knew that if she ever saw you again, she would have aged, while you would not have grown any older. So she moved on with her life, had several husbands and many children, and told all of them about you. She told your stories for you, showed them these drawings."

Jamal stepped in. "Her eldest son had a bit of an Oedipal complex, I'm afraid. He saw her longing to see you again, and after she died, he turned it into a family organization of sorts. So the story of el-Musafir has been handed down through countless generations."

"What sort of family organization?" el-Musafir asked, his curiosity piqued.

"Ah," said Malik. "We own a quite healthy banking and hotel business group with offices all over the New Caliphate. You are scheduled to speak at a conference at one of our hotels in Damascus three days from now. That is how we found you--one of our younger cousins manages that hotel, and when he saw your name on the conference register, he alerted us."

How odd, el-Musafir thought. "Why didn't you simply contact me at the hotel when I arrived, instead of blowing up a train?"

"Our mission has evolved over the centuries," Jamal said. "You see, we were once based in Dubai, and were about to build our largest, most advanced hotel on some property on Palm Jumeirah when our funds were seized by the New Caliphate to rebuild the Levant following the war with the West."

"When military action was threatened," added Malik, "All of our investors pulled out of the project, and we nearly went bankrupt. It was quite a nice property..." he trailed off wistfully.

"Nevertheless, we realized that although the New Caliphate has liberated much of our people from the confines of backward religiosity while still enabling us to follow the word of the Prophet, we would never truly be free as long as the Caliph remained in power," said Jamal. "And so we fight."

"An economic vendetta?" asked el-Musafir, surprised. "You've killed thousands of people over a failed investment?"

Malik shrugged. "The Westerners have done much worse in the name of money. And the New Caliphate is indeed a threat. As long as the Wahhabis are still permitted to live their lives, the horrors of fundamentalist Islam will always lurk in the background."

"The Caliphate," said Jamal, "is only interested in accumulating more power and money. Though we certainly can't say that in public, of course. And therein lies the problem. We will never be able to compete with the West or the Chinese Hegemony as long as we still have an authoritarian ruler who insists on following Islam."

"Good God," said el-Musafir. "The Muslim world is far better and healthier than it has been for thousands of years, and still you are trying to quash Islam?" His eyes narrowed. "Where were you born?"

Jamal and Malik looked at each other, and laughed. "I was born in Baghdad during the American occupation," said Malik, "and Jamal is Saudi."

El-Musafir relaxed. "Not Western, then."

"No," said Jamal. "Though my father was a British soldier, and Malik is the product of rape, committed by an American soldier on an Iraqi woman."

"So you should hate the West," said el-Musafir. "Being the products of Western oppression. I'm surprised your mother wasn't killed."

"Not at all," said Malik. "Our family's perspective is slightly different, being based as it is on a thousand years of family tradition, and the idea of immortality." He leaned down suddenly. "And that is why you are here."

El-Musafir sighed. "When have I ever given you to think that I am what you claim?"

Jamal shrugged. "Never. But there are ways and means of discovering the truth without any admission on your part." At el-Musafir's doubtful look, he went on, "After all, living for a very, very long time, it only makes sense that accidents happen quite often. You should be caked with scars, yes?"

Oh, shit, though el-Musafir. "But the fact that I am not should then prove that I am only mortal."

"Or it may mean that you have some healing factor," Malik said. "One that prevents you from being fatally hurt or dying." He drew out a large hunting knife from its holster on his belt. "If so, it should apply even to smaller wounds."

"Come on," said el-Musafir. "Are you being serious with this? You can't possibly believe that I'm unkillable. Why does it matter so much, anyway?"

"We need you," said Jamal. "You must be studied, and the secret to your longevity discovered and put to good use."

"Ridiculous!" el-Musafir snapped. "Even if I am what you say I am, how would studying me help anyone? Suppose that it is true, and others can be made immortal. How would that be at all beneficial? There wouldn't be room for everyone if births kept occurring, but death stopped happening."

Malik laughed. "You assume far too much altruism of us, el-Musafir! No, we plan on only helping ourselves. We plan on outliving the New Caliphate by many thousands of years. Time itself will grow our investments beyond all bounds."

"Is this what the lady Nur wanted?" el-Musafir said, disgusted. "To turn me into a factory of immortality? I am glad I left! I would want no part of her now!"

"Silly," said Jamal, incongruously affectionate. "Nur had no conception of the potential of immortality. She only wanted you." He nodded at Malik, who leaned forward with the hunting knife in hand, and sliced el-Musafir's face open on the right side, temple to jaw. Blood came out, hot and pulsing, and el-Musafir grimaced with the pain.

"Interesting," said Jamal. "So you can feel pain. Unfortunate, but survivable."

"Fool," el-Musafir ground out. "What makes you think there is anything scientific in immortality? There may not be a gene or magic potion in my blood that lets you live forever."

"The wound is not closing," Malik said, looking worried.

"Because," said el-Musafir, exasperated, "I am not immortal. I can not live forever. I am only a political theorist who experienced an unfortunate coincidence of nomenclature. That is all there is to me. You are trying to kill an innocent man!"

"Ah, well," said Jamal. "Now that you've heard all of this, you are no longer innocent, my dear el-Musafir. The true test will be your death. If you die, and are not resurrected, we will know that we were wrong. If you come back, then we will know we were right, and you will have to, I'm afraid, lend your help to us."

"Why couldn't you just let me go?" said el-Musafir desperately. "You already know I am a mortal, if not because that is what I have been telling you for the past hour, then because my face has been flayed open, and remains that way!"

"That still would not satisfy me," said Jamal. "No, we're going to have to take it further. Go on, Malik."

Malik reached out and laid el-Musafir's throat open from side to side, sawing so deeply that his head fell backward and exposed his severed windpipe, which whistled. Blood gouted out so strongly that Malik's arm was painted a deep red, and his watch stopped.

Both men and their guards waited for a very long time. By the third day, the body had begun to stink, and they had to admit defeat.

El-Musafir, the Immortal Traveler, was dead.

that corporate guy

2007-06-18T18:32:00.001-07:00

There was a period, lasting almost four months, where I was convinced that if nobody was looking at me, I would vanish.

I sought a lot of company in those days. Always had to have someone with me, to observe me while I was being. After a while, when people started refusing to visit me or let me visit them, I'd go to a Wal-Mart somewhere and wander the store.

Maybe it was just the way I tried to make them stay up all night, watching me while I slept. I was afraid that if I disappeared, I wouldn't come back. I developed a new, convoluted way of speaking that involved words like unwas or unbe, and no amount of conversation with Wal-Mart associates--isn't that a ridiculous term? As though they weren't trodden-upon minimum-wage part-time workers without benefits--would convince them that I was right.

But maybe if there are virtual particles that don't exist unless they're observed, maybe there are virtual people, too.

The interesting thing is that if you unwere, so to speak, the question becomes--are you aware of your nonexistence?

Yeah, yeah, and if all the stuff that happens to you when you're not being observed actually happened or if it was all false memories.

But then where do the false memories come from?

Who knows? Aliens, God, the government, your own brain. Maybe from that ninety percent that nobody uses.

You know, it's been proven that it's a myth that you only use ten percent of your brain. It's a question of how many areas are activated at any given moment, but it's all used.

Really? I didn't know that. But that's neither here nor there, I guess. The thing that really got me is--how do you prove that you actually exist while you're unobserved? The only observer in that case is yourself, which is basically the least reliable observer possible.

Maybe you do it by changing something while you're alone. The location of a mug, for example. That proves that you were there and did something, and therefore you still exist when nobody's watching.

See, that just tells you how messed up I was in those days. I never thought of it that way. I guess it could work. Otherwise, you're assuming that the universe recognizes individual intention and consciously puts it into practice in order to maintain the illusion of unobserved corporeality. Which is silly...right?

Right, and I say that emphatically. Let's move on. For nearly two years, you went in the opposite direction, believing that the entire universe was actually contained in your head, and you were the only real intelligence. What prompted that?

I guess it was mostly my rebellion against my behavior during the months before then. I wound up getting secretly dosed with acid by someone who thought it was pretty funny. During the trip, I was forced to really look at myself and the sheer...pathetic need I had to be around people, to be seen. And then I...I guess you could say I zoomed around the reality curve and felt like I'd gotten a peek around the world's rim, and saw myself. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the entire universe really was contained in my head, in my brain to be more precise, and that everything I perceived had been processed by my brain. It really wasn't much of a stretch between that and thinking that I literally carried the cosmos around in my cranium.

That's a very interesting viewpoint. Technically, you're not too far off--since for us, the universe is perceived through our senses, which is processed and recorded by our brains, we all do, in a sense, carry around whole universes in each of our minds. In that sense, I can certainly understand where you were at that point in your life. But why did you begin behaving as though we all, literally, existed inside your head?

Why did I start thinking that I'd disappear when nobody was looking?

You're just plain crazy?

Yeah.

What snapped you out of that?

Who said I snapped out of it?

Well, you stopped killing people, so the assumption goes...

Yeah, you're right about that. I guess I...stopped when I thought of "Think globally, act locally." That was when I realized that it didn't matter what was real or wasn't--the key was just to accept whatever was happening and behave accordingly. Just go with the flow.

Good philosophy. So you're more or less normalized now?

More or less.

You're not concerned about the fact that you experienced no legal consequences for your actions whatsoever? And the effects of that on your psyche?

Frankly, what I am is grateful. I'm over it now. Never again. I'm glad I never got caught, because that would have really screwed me up. Now, stop talking. The other nice, normal, coffee-buying folks are looking at me strangely, and I really need this job.

Please don't be offended, okay?

Okay?