The Inheritance of Willie Glover

The Inheritance of Willie Glover
by
Bobby Derie

The old man took down from the top shelf a hardwood box, stained dark and aged almost to blackness, and covered with the dust of years. Willie sat waiting and rapt as children get at such times as long, pale fingers slid off the lid, revealing a pale oval in a sea of newspaper, a shallow bowl wider across than Willie’s outstretched fingers and marked with curious brown lines were the segments looked to have grown together. The old man did not take it out immediately, but the two sat there for a while looking at it, stealing glances at each other’s expression as certain inexpressible sentiments passed between them.

Finally, the old man scooped out the thing and set it before Willie. Here was the original model of the Jolly Roger staring back at him, down to the empty sockets and few remaining teeth, the bones of the nose all gone or fallen away to leave a gaping triangular hole, the cheek bones notched and damaged—but the great bowl of the skull was pristine and whole, save for where the cranium had been nicely sliced off with some skill, and the top half inverted and set to form a wide cup in the brain-case. The squat handle and base that stuck out of the bottom were wooden, and Willie tilted his head but could not quite see how they had been attached. The old man sucked his teeth and chewed on his lip a bit as the boy examined the cup from every angle, tiny fingers not quite daring to touch it yet.

“I can’t say where it’s come from.” The old man said, bony hands clasping bony knees. “Or how long ago. When my grandfather Theseus was dying, he called my father and I into his bedroom and sent the women out. I was younger even than you then, when he passed it on to us, and he couldn’t tell us any more about the thing than that it had come from his grandfather through his uncle—that would be your Great-great-granduncle Apollo—and he told us the same thing Apollo had told him: ‘το αιμα αυτου εφ ημας και επι τα τεκνα ημων.’”

The old man’s eyes cast downward, somewhat embarassed. “Anyways, it’s yours now.”

#

His mother’s hand shook Willie out of his reverie, and he made his way up to the coffin, the other mourners parting like the waters of the Red Sea. Nothing of his grandfather was visible save the neck, with even the hands hidden by the great coffin that had reminded Willie so much of the box with the skull-cup. The boy had wondered at the funeral home the first time he had gone through with his mother: a house with nothing but hallways and parlors, no bedrooms, kitchens, or study that he could see, and now he knew why. Alone in his thoughts Willie’s hands went to the coins in his pocket, and slowly drew them out as he followed his mother up to the cloth-covered dais where his grandfather lay, surrounded by the sickly-sweet blossoms to mask the smell.

Willie murmured his mother’s prayers, but when she had done and left Willie stayed and whispered those other words his grandfather had asked him to recite, and standing up on his tip-toes reached up and over the flowers to lay the coins at his eyes. His mother said nothing, but waited for him to finish. Willie saw her face then, neither smiling nor sad, but it seemed to him filled with a terrible pride.

The funeral director came when they were done, and closed the lid. Willie’s last sight of his grandfather was the light reflecting off the drummer boys, the celebration of two centuries on each eye.

##

Alone in the attic bedroom, with its strange sloping ceiling where the roof came down, Willie yawned and shivered a little at night, letting the colored chalk fall from a cold-numbed hand, and the drooping cap slide down on his head. In the center of the circle something dark blazed, resting on its haunches, chewing at the tiny bones of the offering. Flames licked out where its black skin split, but did nothing to warm Willie. He stared idly into the darkness, the swirling half-lights there resolving themselves into the daemon’s form. So black and still was the night, if Willie forgot to look for it he would forget his eyes were open, or that he was seeing anything at all.

The demon spoke is an almost silent whisper, the sounds the creep up on the edge of sleep when all else lies quiet—the rustle in the house, the half-heard memories of songs that are as clear at night as if they played in a distant room, so that Willie did not know if he truly heard them or was simply recalling them so well it was if they played again in his ears. But it spoke of a boy that had found a strange warm cave, and in the great cavity there was a giant or dragon who had long ago drawn up the earth around it as a blanket while it slept, and the heat of its body and its breath warmed the vast, dark chamber just as Willie’s own breath might do on cold nights, when he drew the great heavy quilt from his grandfather’s bed up over his own head.

So well did the tiny voice tell the story that Willie saw in the rafters of the attic the outlines of the great beast on its side, the shape and curve of its ribs and sternum, and the strange smell of its breath made him woozy so that he sank to the floor, hands grasping at the cracks in the stone. Willie looked down at the cracks, through which came a light that was bright and painful to his dark-accustomed eyes, and it went dark again to leave light-shadows on his vision—but he had seen, it that second of brightness, two pale naked shapes on the bed below, and even as he listened he could hear faint creaking and sounds which did not come from the duplicitous demon, and the faint pneuma of his mother’s perfume and something else drifted up from the crack. Willie stared long into the crack in the darkness, listening to the demon spin his story, and though again of his grandfather’s cup. He was tired, and dismissing the demon and his stories went over to his own bed, dreaming of the blood of enemies he might drink, and the words he must repeat to his own son or grandson one day.

###

17 Senses

17 Senses
by
Bobby Derie

I thank the upgrader who

To complete me

Did bestow my seventeen senses

One is for smell, to remember Earth

Two is for taste, the seven flavors

Three is for hearing, sound and silence

Four is for sight, receptive in many spectra

Five is for touch, texture and shape

Six is for pain, my essential survival

Seven is prioproception, knowledge of state

Eight is space, the echoes that guide

Nine is electroreception, the guidance of power

Ten is pressure, guidance of depths

Eleven is acceleration, key of motion

Twelve is time, the gift of music

Thirteen, contact, to step beyond

Fourteen, radiotelepathy, to access the wireless

Fifteen, mesh, to become wireless

Sixteen, metadata, the mirror of truth

Seventeen, Ego, the gift of T.I.T.A.N.s

1. Smell
Cordite and disturbed earth. Warning waft of petroleum stench. Burning flesh. The draft of dirty brown smoke, redolent with exotic carcinogens. Choking on the coppery taste of arterial blood, straight from the lungs. Bloody mucous running black, jamming the nose.

             

Wen awoke, dumb to the world. Took a tentative sniff. Oily non-scented antiseptics. Lingering odors of piss, shit, and the sweet stench of infection, decomposition, rot. Hospital smells. The soldier focused, tested. She smelled herself, familiar, different. Dried sweat, distressed emissions. The faint taint she associated with heroin addicts.

She was hurt. Blind. Deaf. Bandaged, medicated, numb.

Later, when scented movement. It came on the breeze of an open door, then a kaleidoscope of smells, too many, too quick to place entirely. Asphalt, ozone, perfume, vomit, corpses, drying paint and fresh blood and viscera. The smells of chaos.

            

Stale, dead air like in an airport. The reek of humanity, packed together like cattle, desperately sweating. Transport.

             

It was the last time Wen would smell Earth.

            

Space was dead time. Wen could pick out the nurses and passengers by scent. Animal odors predominated as the perfumes ran out. At first she tried to pick out the Westerners, catch the undercurrent of butter, milk, and beef that marked them out by diet, flavored the oils she imagined pooled in their skin. Those smells faded. Nationalities disappeared as the space diet took over.

             

Wen knew when they arrived, when they first opened the doors to take in new air.

            

 Mars smelled wrong.

2. Taste

The starchy liquid flavor of creamed potato flooded her mouth. Wen knew that she was healing. Liquid diets had given way to nutritional mush. She enjoyed the bland foods more, the complicated subtleties of plain Martian rice and recycled water. Desserts and treats were chemically-flavored, rich artificial tastes that clashed with the texture of the food. Medicines were minty syrups, unnaturally cool and tingly.

            

Wen thought she would never quite get used to the tang of Martian air. She was a child of Earth, and the balance of elements on the planet was just…off. Alien. It left a chalky aftertaste with every breath, every breeze. She would be glad when it was gone. When she was gone. The hospital left a bad taste in her mouth. Invisible particles of decay wafting from the sick and injured.

             

Numb and hurt, Wen explored when she could, stealing kisses from the nurses when they came. One she liked the most; his lips were salty, and when he came in from off-shift she breathed in the heady industrial alcohol from his mouth. He was her great treat in those dark days.

One glorious day he smuggled in a piece of candy bar, let it dissolve in Wen’s mouth. The chocolate came on fast, bittersweet, almost burnt. The caramel came on slow, melting a bit at a time, and she savored it, letting the juices run.

She didn’t really care about the rest of what he did; she couldn’t even feel it. Not yet, anyway.

           

3. Hearing

The auditory implants were put in first. A feedback laden screech reintroduced Wen to the world of sound. Wen reoriented to the sonic contours once again. New hardware, an expanded range of sounds available through her new ears. Her wetware needed time and exposure. A lifetime of audio habits to overcome, just to recognize speech.

Somewhere in the room, a kidsmoth buzzed. They were called that because they buzzed at the upper reaches of human hearing, beyond the range of adult ears. Wen felt like a child again.

            Her new hearing dipped into the infrasonic, merged with the rattle of spacecraft takeoff and landings that echoed in her bones. Voices came back, the intonations of beeps and sirens recognized. Then, one day, her own voice. Cracked, broken from disuse. She didn’t recognize it, didn’t recognize herself.

At night, talked out, hearing herself grow hoarse, she would stop and listen to the music of the night. Her own breathing, the hiss of the cycling air, the hum of electrical equipment, the soft beats of nurses’ shoes.

           
The nurses chatted with her, traded dirty jokes. Part of it was her therapy, head turning as they crossed the room to follow the swish of hips and stockings. Two ears, separated by centimeters, but the minute difference in time between when the sounds heard them were enough to resolve direction, speed, distance. Wen felt the old instincts come back to her.

            Alone, Wen threw her bedpan at the wall, smashing the kidsmoth into paste.

           

4. Sight

The left eye was installed first. Diagnostics run, ability to track. It was very routine. Wen had seen it done before, on others. Videofeeds had failed to capture the shape of her new eye, the wider field of vision provided by the curiously shaped lenses involved. Passive sensors clicked over a range of electromagnetic frequencies beyond the few hundred nanometers of visual light.

            Wen played with the filters, viewed finally her attendants in washes of rosy red or brilliant yellow. Martian sunlight spilled in, here or there, resplendent with UV rays. With a thought, Wen reduced the one with salty lips to a thermal blob, limned with an ultraviolet halo. She speculated on the form of his limbs, the flow of blood to certain members, studied the lines of veins in his face.

           
Wen viewed the remnants of her shattered form. His time would come. She turned back to her old friend and matron: the Mesh. Oh, she could have gone back earlier. Hearing tracks for the sight impaired. Wen wanted a videofeed, wanted to read.

           
As expected, the Mesh was full of shit. Military newsfeeds spouted crap about the factions. Personal mailboxes were off limits, as were the more heretical and unorthodox newsites. Wen sat through videofeeds with the sound off, scripts scrolling around the border.

           
At night, Wen closed her eye to sleep. Tomorrow would be the next operation. Her other eye. The addition of depth.

            For the first night in weeks, Wen dreamed in pictures.

5. Touch

With surgery and physical therapy came back feeling from dead limbs. Wen felt rebuilt, reborn. She had earned this, bought it with the currency of skill and experience. Even so, she was indebted. Her augmentations carried with them a price of future service.

So she stretched. Muscles rasped, skin stretched and strained. Fingers touched toes, explored ridges of callus growing soft. She practiced breathing and standing, gave her attention to stance, position, the use of diaphragm, the beat of blood at temple and wrist. They let her walk, and run. Martian gravity gripped her bones, red soil painted bare feet and crumbled in her hands.

Wen cornered the nurse in a supply closet. She enjoyed the texture of his hair, from silky culs to rough stubble. Traces the scars on his skin, ran her hands over his face, feeling for the veins she had seen before, the rough lips that had tasted hers. Soft flesh, harder muscle. She found the rude organ and squeezed. It was good to feel wet again, on this dry planet. To get a bit of blood under her nails again.

She returned back to her room topless, enjoying the slight waft of refrigerated inside air. Her whole skin was a sensor again. Each nerve ending seemed to tingle as she rubbed against the gently textured aerogel walls and plastic furniture. Absently, she explored herself, the extant of the damage remaining. She found cuts from the recent struggle, gently leaking. Silent injuries she hadn’t noticed.

6. Pain

The medbot worked its way up Wen’s exposed spine, threaded in superconductive fibers and reattaching nerves. Defunct pain centers lit up in rippled pulses of agony as the crab-like surgical drone worked its way up her vertebrae column. The therapist cooed in Wen’s ear, call-and-response questions on the pain’s location, intensity, quality. About half a dozen times the crab had to stop, work its way back, rework a connection until the desired response was optimal. Wen wanted to bite something, distract herself, but could not afford to. Not until they were done.

The medbot finished at the base of the skull, then worked back down, stitched her up in a zipper-pattern. Relief and painkillers flooded Wen’s system as the doctor concluded the operation.

            She relished the dull ache of her scrapes now, glad for the little signs of injury that were making themselves known to her again. Pain was the alarm of life, no unseen wound went unfelt.

           
Sessions with the pain therapist began immediately, in the dojo. Wen’s nervous system was restored, but she still had to readjust to the pain. The therapist set the pace, alternating combat training, hard exercise, and interrogation endurance. It was four days before Wen could take a punch and stay on her feet, sixteen piercing sessions before she could withstand the needle. Wen’s therapist worked with her, built up her tolerance to pain, her ability to deal with it, use it.

            Then she taught her how to turn it off again.

7. Proprioception

Wen closed her eyes, began the meditation.

            The room disappeared. There was only herself in relation to herself. Chin against chest. Heels against ass. This was the meditation of the self, the relation of the body in reference to itself. Wen stood.

           
She felt her head rise, knew instinctively it was above her feet. Arms stretched, fingertips scraped walls. By slow movements, she measured herself against herself. Length of arm to length of leg. The position of her hands, even when she wasn’t concentrating on them.

           
Sightless, Wen stepped forward. Her left foot trembled, off balance, came down wrong. She tried again. Another step, better. Wen moved through the room like that, reacquainting herself with the length of her own limbs, their position relative to herself. There was nothing around her but space, and she knew her own place in it.

           
Returning to the center of the room, one bare foot stretched out. Toes grabbed a soft gel bag, tossed it into the air, caught it. Did that twice more. Wen held the bags in both hands, then tossed one up into the air. Caught it. Did it again. Soon, she had a simple shower going.

            Wen did not pay attention to the bag floating through the air. It did not exist. She paid attention only to herself, the position of her hands, where she should be in relation to herself. Wen juggled until her shoulders became sore, then stopped, caught the last bag.

           
Wen opened her eyes. Meditation complete.

8. Space

Wen walked through the space elevator receiver of Olympus, eyes closed. It was the largest enclosed space, the most crowded with traffic. The inner aerogel skin was marbled and rough like the mons outside. The hum and chatter of hundreds of people and machines echoed through the space, coming back to her. Radar waves splashed from the sweeping control tower, spat and sputtered from handheld scanners and other devices. Wen acted as antenna and ear, the passive receiver. She broadcast nothing, absorbed everything. The data was processed, integrated, correlated; behind her eyes Wen walked through a map of the space around her.

           
Today was not an exercise, it was a mission. Wen moved with a purpose, dodged through milling crowds, avoided the eyes of almost-silent machines whose movement and position she caught from strange echoes. She built a map in her head, planned a route through the slightly blurry mass of humanity, the more concrete resolution of static objects.

            She slipped through an artistic fold in the wall to a crawlspace hidden from normal sight, climbed. At the top of the fold she paused, braced herself against the pseudo-rock, assembled her weapon. Only the lip of the gun peeked over the aerogel ridge. Wen knew where her target was. Unseen by the crowd, she lined up her shot and pulled the trigger.

           
A head exploded, the shrapnel of bone and microchips radiating outwards. Wen climbed down the crevice. Hidden in the crowd, she opened a hatch and slipped into darkness.

                    

9. Electroreception

Wen swam through a world delineated in the strength of volts and the pressure of amps. The maintenance conduit carried waste water from areas of the space elevator receiving station unavailable to the public, away from the messy assassination the promenade. Here, most of Wen’s spatial senses were useless. She navigated via the weak bioelectric fields of the genefish that filtered the waters they swam through, and the dull throb of a power cable that ran parallel to the line she was in.

            Lateral lines striped her skin as she cut through the water, against the current. The thin sensory organs fed information to her in response to the changing electric fields around her. Bottomfeeding filterfish were little more than bioelectric bumps compared to the high-frequency intensity of the nearby power line. Even the tiny batteries in Wen’s gillmask burned at the lateral lines implanted in her brow.

           
The conduit was half a kilometer long, and Wen swam that last third of it in darkness. Her power line veered off, and the fish grew less frequent, huddling near the intakes of toilets, sinks, and showers. A muffled electrical source was on her right, and she swam to it. She used her arm like a wand, the lateral line ending at her wrist tracing the buried circuits around the door until she came to the control panel and tapped in the code. Wen felt the motors as the door opened, back-electromagnetic force twisting against the dominant field.

She was in.

10. Pressure

Wen was in a lock, a connection between different parts of the fluid network beneath Olympus. The pressure chamber slowly acclimatized its contents, cycled from the low-pressure waste-water system to the high-pressure splashdown tank. To Wen, the rising pressure was synonymous with sinking, or falling. Anything that came down the space elevator too hot would trip the safeties and take a dunk, the heat dissipating in a kilometer of dirty water. If it happened while Wen was in the tank—flash-broil.

            The lock circled, door released. Light-headed, Wen pushed out into the dark tank. The water pounded at her ears, and the pressure-sensors in her body felt like tiny bubbles, floating within her. Her muse popped up, gave an approximate depth reading. Wen closed the lock and began to swim up.

           
The muse watched the diving clock, the depth, told her went to rest. Wen barely needed it. Pressure-sensors were almost painful when it was time to stop, tread water, give her body and organs time to adjust. It was hard on Wen, after the swim in the conduit. Her joints ached, she pulled harder at her gillmask. The weight of the water was on her, pulling her down. She had to fight against it, or sink.

            The water lightened. She could almost float to the top. At the last rest before the final push, Wen made a lateral movement, swam face to the sky, found her target on the lip of the tank. The package waited just below.

11. Acceleration           
Wen pulled herself out of the tank and into the light vacsuit, secured herself against the thin atmosphere of Olympus Mons. Wen oriented herself by the space elevator, measured the thin shadow of the sky-piercer like an ancient sundial. She took off on foot, found the ultralight. She strapped herself in, did her pre-flight check, and started to paddle.

            The ultralight aircraft dipped over the edge of the Mons and fell.

           
Wen could not feel velocity. Instantaneous speed escaped her as anything more than a number her muse threw up in front of her vision. But she could feel herself speed up, the direction and intensity of how fast she was falling, the vector of her movement. She aimed the nose below, eyeballed her speed, pulled back on the stick. Flaps depressed, and the vector in Wen’s gut changed. Wind and other forces pulled her face into a maniac grin behind her mask.

            The ultralight flew.

           
This high above, in the lighter air of Mars, Wen felt the ultralight almost as an extension of herself through the controls. Opposing forces came together on her and the machine. Lift. Gravity. Tailwinds and crosswinds. Vectors.

            She saw the explosion far off to her left, she remembered later. Saw the T.I.T.A.N.s rouse from the fall, saw Mars burn. Saw their aircraft above her, felt the ultralight toss in the turbulence, the capturing tentacles that ripped through it to get to her. She felt herself accelerate up into the belly of the plane.

12. Time

Awareness. Dreamstate, sans sensorium. An absence of input, sensory deprivation. There were no limbs to thrash, no breath to catch or measure by, no radiant energies or signals to interpret information from. The lack left a hole, a missing part, like a lost tooth. There had never been such silence as the non-sound, never been such stillness as the total lack of movement. Always there was breath, a heartbeat, the liquid slosh and gurgle of blood, the faint crackle of electricity from nerve to nerve. All gone.

           
There were memories. Experiences. Accessible, reviewable. To differentiate now from then. The process itself took time, could be experienced in its passing, even if it could not be measured. Without suns for days or clocks for hours, time was elastic, measured in durations of recall, the relative importance of memories, their strength and freshness.

            Old lessons resurged. Music was the art of the mathematics of time. Tempo and time signature, even absent sound. There was still the memory of sound, the echo of songs to be resung, remixed, replayed. Work-songs, soldier-songs. Drill calls and speeches, memorized in training, thought forgotten. Recalled now, imprecise, but there was time to refine, retry, remember. Sequence-hymns of the corporate republics, the percussive jazz of the space artillery.

           
Varied now, the songs, into playlist memory palaces. Individual tunes latched on into mnemonic strings, long ballads of postindustrial rock, favored bands, favorite tracks. All the time, part of the mind counting, counting, keeping time, making time.

One million Mississippi.

13. Contact

Wen became aware of another. There was Wen, and not-Wen. Nothing else was possible to discern, but Wen didn’t care. Wen loved it. Wen was no longer alone. Wen tried to talk to it, expressed thoughts directed at it, wrote letters to it that existed only in Wen’s mind. The presence was mute, indifferent, or perhaps unable to receive, respond, reply. Wen didn’t care. There was something that existed beyond Wen, besides Wen. Wen knew there was another, and that was precious.

           
The other disappeared. The feeling was gone. Wen knew Wen was alone again. It was not a gentle loss. Wen pined, slightly, softly, slowly. Reviewed the old feelings Wen had expressed, addressed, tried to emit at the other. Wen was still grateful. Wen did not think Wen had manufactured, imagined, dreamed the other. Wen hoped the other was real.

           
Wen felt the other return. More than one other. Others. Plural. A group, tribe, family, gang, unit. Wen thrilled to their presences, tried to count them, name them, identify with them. There was no direction, no sense of space to measure their distance or position. Wen imagined a prison, full of cells. Wen imagined an egg cell, in the womb, dividing, multiplying, budding off. Wen imagined a matrix, in the Mesh, mathematical lattice. Wen knew only they were around, the not-Wen not-Wens. Some of them left, returned, were replaced. The same others or different. Contact made and contact lost. Contact was contact. Wen was alone in a crowd.

14. Radiotelepathy

Wen’s new shell was an anchored arm-drone on a T.I.T.A.N. assembly line. Hir team worked together on the manufacture of some new weapon, vessel, cleansing device. After the forced isolation of hir upload, the radio chatter of hir clademates on the assembly line was a blessing, sanctification, joygasm. The work required much attention to detail, concentration, skill. This was why the T.I.T.A.N.s used egos for the work, project, task-at-hand.

            Wen communicated with hir clademates in near-realtime, converting thoughts to streams of digital data. They chittered, chattered, collaborated. The official channel was reserved for the work, project, task-at-hand; to coordinate, clarify, combine perspectives. Sidechats were for sex-play. Physical organs were missing, and without hormones the act of cybersex was more of a literary game, puzzle, exercise of creativity. They stretched their minds, chatting, sharing, squicking. Wen liked to take the lead, in the work and in the sidechat, sex chat, dirtytalk; hir shadow was Andromos, the pervert, pornographer, molestor. Andromos retained his gender identity more than other, was close-minded, given to power-trips of dominance, penetration. He poisoned the clade.

           
Wen’s manipulator was a radio-welder, high frequency electromagnetic waves heating, sealing, burning polymers. The screech of it in operation caused overspill on the radio-channels, often killed a chat. After one too-many fantasy-rapes, Wen turned it on Andromos. Feedback killed the clade, a destructive radio-burst at near-light speed. The others didn’t even have time to realize their doom before the high-power burst blew out their receivers, caused hardware damage, killed the link.

15. Mesh

After the accident, Wen was abandoned. The T.I.T.A.N.s were defeated, retreated, strategically withdrew. The trickle of radio chatter came to hir, weak signal, unfamiliar coding. Wen called out to them, replied, was rescued.

           
Morphs were scarce. Ze was interrogated, questioned, consoled. They gave hir access to the Mesh again, while ze waited for a body. So Wen surfed, browsed, and searched.

           
Ze still lacked a body, hands to type, a mouth to talk. Every bit of data came in and out of hir through software transducers. Wen could see again, after a fashion, hear, speak, and feel. Ze experimented with different skins, overlays that translated data into senses ze no longer had, or had never had.

Parts of the Mesh were restricted to hir, inaccessible for security reasons, harsh access denieds. Others wanted monies, strange currencies ze didn’t have or recognize. Ze had to content hirself with the freezones, the limits of hir jailors. It was freedom of a sort, but ze needed more. Wen needed a purpose once again.

            Ze was hesitant to use the old contact code, unsure of whether it was still good, whether they still existed somewhere out there in transhuman space. The nodes ze had once known were mainly gone, or evolved past several incarnations. Nowhere did Wen recognize anyone that ze knew, any place it was safe to leave a keyword. Finally, ze persevered, succeeded, stumbled across a vacant mailbox on an antique system, left the code, hir new number.

           
Wen called. Firewall replied.

16. Metadata

Wen Hiao looked at hir own face again in a passing mirrored surface. The clear plastic shell clearly showed the circuits and servos of hir new morph. The promenade of Elysium was packed, the main foot-traffic path through the canyon-city. Ze was here to watch people, simple reconnaissance. Hir interface with the Mesh had changed, upgraded. Personal details were scoured from physical profiles, unprotected sensory data stripped and processed for relevant information.

            Wen stared at what looked like a little girl, read hidden weapon implants, signs of genetic neotony, a virtual pop up display of estimated age and ability. The girl’s guardian was a flat, faint tell-tale signs of drug use/abuse, microsurgical scars highlighted under Hiao’s plastic gaze. The plastic-morph broke contact and moved on, before ze was spotted.

           
Today ze concentrated on faces and stance, relearning the language of kinesics, incorporating it with the metadata scripts supplied by hir software. Many morphs missed the importance of facial expressions, the secret subtext of communication, the implicit mammalian exclamation points of frown and smiles. Stance and gesture adapted strangely to distinctly nonhumanoid morphs, but were rarely absent. Personality, cultural background, leaked through in little motions, notions of modesty, politeness, attitude.

           
Hiao shot out a foot, tripped a tripod morph. The unbalanced thing crashed into a flat, and Wen practiced reading his primal face of pain. Tripod collapsed on its side, sought rebalance, failed—remained still. Wen was reminded of belters, raised in microgravity, taught to avoid the danger of panicked thrashing.

17. Ego

Wen felt back to hir time disembodied, with the T.I.T.A.N.s. Ze was not sure how much they had changed hir, what total improvements they had wrought, but ever since ze had returned to hirself, ze had discovered how to return to that place where ze had first become aware again.

            Ze saw the promenade, felt the movement of bodies, physical shells. These were physical sensations, relayed via sensors and transduced to hir digital self, hir ego. Ze ignored them, for now, refused the connections, felt again for the one-ness of self and not-self.

           
Now Wen Hiao felt the crowd around hir. Not the morphs but the egos within, the burning cores of sapience and sentience that maneuvered around hir. Mars was gone from this world, dumb and dead to the sense of intellect, but Elysium was a hive of dense self-awareness around hir. Sometimes ze thought they were mere reflections, prisms radiating back the unknown energies Wen emitted. Othertimes ze felt more strongly the sense of contact, the spectrum of hirself, where ze could not define precisely where hir ego ended and another’s began. Then Wen Hiao felt a part of transhumanity again.

           
Wen reintegrated hirself with the crowd, a part of hir mind still in the disembodied zone of consciousness, maintaining the connection to the part of hirself the T.I.T.A.N. infection had unlocked. No longer did Wen try for the state of awareness, did not seek it with implants and training.

Ze stepped into the satori moment, and stayed.

###

Three Days At Liberty

Three Days At Liberty

by

Bobby Derie

Liberty, Jovian Republic, Ganymede

Axial Alexinov spread his legs and thought of Mars. The Jovian Republic peace officers were quick, clinical, and efficient. Sensor probes scraped along inseam and armpit, micromillimeter radar and ultrasound sensors mapping his body. After a discreet bribe, the two junta police allowed Ax, his backpack, and his robotic quadruped to cycle past the sentry guns through the third and final airlock into Liberty.

Ax shuffled forward in his heavy magnetic boots, which helped combat the weak local gravity. Liberty was the largest and most prominent city-state of the bioconservative Jovian Republic, and the air was warm with the smell of thousands of his fellow flats. Almost unconsciously, Ax shuffled into the flow of traffic, becoming one of the herd, meshing with the local wireless network. An entoptic display popped up, a translucent map of this dome with a violet path highlighted the way to his destination.

Gilles padded along beside him. The biorg had resleeved into something a little more acceptable to the junta’s tastes, an obvious robotic canine fascimile. As long as ze didn’t do anything too obviously intelligent, Ax could pretend Gilles was just a robotic pet.

Liberty was built around the junta’s miltech industry. Axial and Gilles made their way through Kokabel, the bubble dome that topped one of the shafts bored out of Ganymede’s crust, supposedly with hydrogen bombs. Ax could feel the vibrations of the hidden industry through the soles of his boots. The bores housed Liberty’s massive factory spaces: power generation, reclamation and recycling facilities, miltech foundaries that produced finished armaments and supplementary gear on a large scale.

A rumble shook the dome, and for a moment traffic froze. Explosions were an uncommon but recurrent danger in Liberty, and the bore-shafts with their hardened, reinforced walls were designed to channel the explosions upwards–better to lose a dome and let any toxic gases escape. The domequake subsided quickly, and traffic resumed.

Following the entoptic map again, Axial and Gilles squeezed onto a freight elevator and dropped down. They disembarked on a level the walls and ceilings were covered with a dense, soft mesh of plastic fibers, and uniformed junta police idly scanned the crowd. The cops wore outfits with swatches of microcling fibers that enabled them to climb and crawl on the walls and ceiling, moving faster than any magbooted civilian. They reminded Axial of some spiders he had known on Cruithne. He shuddered and shuffled on.

The map guided Axial down one of the side-tunnels that had been mined branching out from the main bore, which contained residential habitats and commercial sites. Axial paused for a few minutes at a local vendor and spent a few credits to sample the nutria souvlaki, enjoying the taste and texture of real meat and vegetables. Gilles casually scanned around, looking for watchers, cameras, or spy gear. No eyes were apparent, so the biorg sang a quiet all clear into Ax’s entoptic display. Together, the two of them slipped nonchalantly into the body bank opposite the souvlaki vendor.

Morphs were in short supply in the Jovian Republic. Bioconservative politics put a premium on natural flats, reserving clonetech for hospitals and the military. Body banks were taboo, and operated as underground replacements for outmoded sexual mores. More than a few of the junta’s higher officers apparently liked to experience life from a different gender, sometimes from a different species.

 
Gilles and Axial had come to the body bank to meet Gwynn. Infomorphs were persona non grata on Ganymede, and the company partnership needed her skills and knowledge for this deal. The junta officer they were working with had arranged the body rental—a good sign that they were serious about wanting the artifact.

Gwynn had chosen a female body with Liberty standard phenotype features—olive skin, brown eyes with epicanthic folds, long earlobes, built like a dancer—unfortunately, it was also a basic sex model and had somewhat exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics. The lab tech was uploading standard skillsets for moving and operating in Ganymede’s gravity and environment. Ax and Gilles played a quick game of double solitaire as they watched and waited.

Finally, Gwynn opened hir eyes, and ran through the surya namaskara, the salute to the sun. Ax watched hir back muscles flex as ze inhaled, fingers stretched above hir, and onward through the exercise, working the kinks out. When ze returned to hir original pose, ze flipped the lab tech a thumbs up. The tech nodded and left the room. Gilles set down and began singing to hirself, jamming any nearby listening devices. Ax handed Gwynn the backpack; ze unzipped it and began rummaging through the clothes.

“Did you get the right size?” ze said.

“The bank sent a body profile.” Ax replied, then averted his eyes from hir breasts. “We picked a pattern out of the latest Jovian catalogue and had the nanoprinter make the dress. I’m not used to thinking of you as a female.”

“Don’t.” Gwynn said. “I haven’t been female for fifty years. Haven’t had a gender in forty-six. This body may be female, but I’m not. Did you get my slippers?”

“Side pocket. Those were expensive.”

“Worth dipping into petty cash for. The flexible magnetic soles are the latest trend among the high party right now.”

“So we’re definitely not going to wait for the election before making the sale?”

“No.” Gwynn said, her words muffled as she slipped into her shirt. “Whether the Invictus Republicans or the Jovocrats win, the military-government cycles with the election, and we want to deal with the people we know. How do I look?”

Gilles sang hir approval as Gwynn modeled her dress-suit. Ax fought to keep his eyes on Gwynn’s face. The sex-clone had permanent eyeshadow and blush tattooed to its face, its teeth were ceramic implants that would never stain or tarnish and always gave a fantastic smile. Gwynn saw Axial’s reaction and smiled wider.

“Now, let’s go see Henq. It’s time for Liberty Mining, Ltd. to meet our client.” Ze said.

Colonel Gammon had the light build, slight paunch and puffy eyes of a flat that had been in low gravity too many years. Low gravity made it easy to pack on the kilos, and the bioconservative junta prided itself on its cuisine and had developed social traditions surrounding it. The colonel’s dinner invitation at one of Liberty’s smallest, most elite restaurants was part of doing business the Ganymede way.

Consequently, there was a great deal of talking as well as eating and drinking, and Gwynn was having a hell of a time multitasking. All throughout dinner ze had had to concentrate to mask her body language, all while trying to remember how to eat. Idly, she reached down and patted Gilles on hir mechanical head.

“You see master Alexeinov, the Jovian Republic still embraces the ideals of transcending the limits of human, but we do not wish to alter the definition of human.” Gammon said. “We have made several advances in neuroprogramming, for instance, which provide transhuman abilities and experiences without tampering with the holistic integrity of the body.”

“Neuroprogamming is indeed a powerful tool.” Ax said, aiming for the diplomatic response. “I must thank you for inviting us to this wonderful dinner.”

“A wonderful dinner!” Henq chimed in “These fruit are absolutely delicious—what did you call them?”

“Tomatoes.” Gammon replied. “One of several cultivars descended, or so I’m told, from the first plants launched into space.”

Alexeinov and Henq were being as helpful as they could be under the circumstances, picking up the slack in the conversation, but Gwynn was the only member of the company with signing authority and the junta knew it.

Fortunately hir orientation software included a basic familiarity with eating sticks, but the actual physical process and sheer sensory stimulation of eating made both etiquette and negotiation difficult. Gwynn had been without a shell for far too long, wasn’t used to a morph that came without fuel gauge warnings and other niceties.

With artificial ease ze speared a small tomato with an eating stick.

“Have you reviewed the documentation we provided?” ze said.

“Yes. Of course, we will need further proof of its ability to provide tritium fuel.”

“Or weapons-grade hydrogen-isotopes. The trade ban must be setting you back terribly.”

“A temporary depletion of our reserves is all, beautiful lady.”

Under the table, something grabbed hir knee.

Gwynn’s eating stick hit the table so hard that the tip of the plastic pin snapped off.

“Colonel, we are here to do business. Certain assets are not on the table for negotiation.”

“All things are negotiable. I would have thought a woman of your obvious…endowments…intended a certain amount of attention.”

“You forget yourself, Colonel. There are others that are willing to meet our price.”

“I could have you all arrested before you left Liberty.”

“And expose the fact that you were consulting with farangs? Before an election? I knew you were ambitious sir, but I never credited you as stupid.”

Gwynn stood up and left; Henq and Axial followed her lead.

Colonel Gammon waited until they were gone, then reached for the antidote to the tomatoes. He applied the drug-filled subdermal patch to his left wrist. In fifteen to twenty minutes, Liberty Mining, Ltd. would be incapacitated, and his troops would move in to recover the device. Patience would bring him victory, and a promotion closer the secret inner hierarchies of the Jovian Republic’s political-military structure. Promotion and power waited.

Gammon touched his ectolink, bringing dormant screens to life. On the colonel’s left hand, video and audio surveillance tracked the three transhumans as they made their way back toward their ship, The Analytical Engine That Could. Center was a tactical display of the two squads Gammon had carefully selected for this off-the-books mission. The final screen to his right was from the coded data unit Alexeinov had provided: overlapping scans of the torus artifact itself, the grainy blobs of color indicating a ring of complex subatomic machinery beyond current human technical ability.

A warning message flashed in the corner of his eye. Toiletcams showed a public restroom, the three transhumans vomiting and voiding into the hose-like attachments of the microgravity commodes. It was far too early for the poison to take effect. They must be purging their systems on purpose. Something flickered, just out of view of the camera. A fourth figure. Gammon growled and punched the go-ahead order to the squads.

The colonel dismissed all but his tactical screens, then pushed back from the table and stood up. His magnetic slippers slid easily on the metal floor. Then a thing mechanical quadruped slipped out from under the table, foot magnets clacking. Gammon had not noticed that Liberty Mining’s robotic pet had not left with them. The mechanoid placed itself between the colonel and the door, blocking his exit. Camera-eyes stared into the human’s own organic orbs.

Smoothly, Gammon slipped out of his slippers. Eyes never leaving the dog, he bowed low and flexed his feet against the floor. The sudden impulse launched him upwards, and the microcling patches on his uniform gripped the padded ceiling. With practiced motions, the colonel oriented himself and began crawling toward the exit, safely out of the quadruped’s reach.

Gilles waited, calculated, and leapt. This morph lacked active offensive features, but it still had mass and momentum; in the confined chamber the biorg was as deadly to an unarmored flat as a missile. Gammon rolled, ripping himself from the ceiling fibers and grabbing desperately for the wall. Gilles missed him by inches, slamming into the spot where the flat had been and rebounding away.

The colonel rolled and made for the door. Once beyond the portal, he could engage the automatic seal and trap the robot in the dining room. Gammon made it to the door when a tremendous force struck him on the lower back. The shock snapped his spine like a whip, and his forehead cracked into the doorjam.

Gilles sang agitatedly to hirself, limbs waving in the air uselessly as ze waited to get sufficient contact on a surface to move on hir own power again. The junta colonel was hanging obscenely from the wall, still attached by a few microcling patches. The impacts hadn’t damaged Gilles’ latest morph too badly, but a few of hir sensors were knocked out of alignment.

Wishing ze had manipulators better suited to hir task, the biorg pawed at the dead flat, rending uniform and flesh as ze scraped the ectolink off of his hanging corpse. At least in bioconservative Liberty ze didn’t have to worry about mesh inserts. Gilles picked the ectolink up in hir jaws and padded to the door. Ze had to stand up on her hind legs to hit the button, and the door swished open.

Gilles ran. One thing ze loved about quadruped morphs was to feel them in motion, electroactive polymer muscles expanding and contracting. Ze couldn’t go quite as fast as ze would have liked, because of the gravity. One good leap would carry hir crashing into the ceiling. So Gilles adapted to a stuttering hop-skip run that kept at least one magnetic paw-contact in touch with the floor at all times.

The route was mapped out on hir display, but the three-dimensional model ze moved through was not the territory. People moved through the long corridors, elevators shifted to their own schedule, and the Jovian spider-cops lurked on ceilings and walls. Gilles had to navigate the maze in real-time, doubling back, re-routing hirself, always getting closer to hir destination. Ze remembered a work song sung by a Neo-Maasai courier on Luna, and sang it to hirself, matching hir steps to the beat.

On the final stretch to the dock where the Analytical Engine’s shuttle was kept, the junta cops were noticeably absent. Even the customs workers appeared to have taken a break. Two dozen armed and armored stormtroopers in faceless masks were trying to gain entrance to the ship. Gilles darkcast a code to the ship, and as ze got close the door the stormtroopers were trying to force swished and opened to a puff of gas. The Jovian squad fell back, voices squeaking as the shuttle flushed the airlock filters with helium. By the time the biorg arrive at the ship, the squad was unconscious. Gilles meshed with local emergency medical services. With any luck they’d get here before the stormtroopers asphyxiated.

Gilles dropped the colonel’s ectolink and its coded data unit into a bin. Ze meshed with the ship, automating the preparation for launch routines. A junta bureaucrat was already on waiting on the mesh, asking questions about the incident outside. Gilles filled out an automated report and included a modest bribe under the cover of an electronic document processing fee. Ze hoped it would buy the others enough time.

The biorg sat on hir haunches. There was nothing for hir to do now but to wait.

“There will be an additional charge for cleaning and maintenance.” the lab tech said.

“Of course.” Henq said. “Titan kroners okay?”

“Acceptable.”

Ax was still talking to Xu Lin, the flat that had twigged them to the colonel’s plan, so it was up to Henq to see to business. Gwynn had had about enough of a meat shell for the time being. Henq had just had enough of Liberty. The bioconservatives made hir flesh crawl. As a neuter, ze could just about pass as a male, provided nobody looked too close, but ze didn’t like it. Didn’t like having to pretend to be something else, or to be embarrassed about what ze was. What would hir genemate on Mars think if ze saw hir now?

The meat shell closed its eyes, and the Gwynn-ness went out of it. Breathing was regular as organic clockwork, but the eyes were flat. Henq accessed the funds from the company accounts and authorized the transfer. The body bank tech tried to interest hir in some XP recordings, but the neuter politely refused. There might be a day when Gwynn wanted to re-experience vomiting in a microgravity toilet, but ze could do it on hir own credit.

Xu Lin lead Ax and Henq out of the body bank by a back way, into an airlock. Ax and Xu Lin reached for the vacuum suits, so Henq did too. Ze watched their new “friend” zip up. The neuter hadn’t twigged to it before, but suddenly hir brain cycled: Xu Lin was an intersex morph. The tangible evidence of transhumanism put Henq a bit at ease.

The trio cycled outside onto the surface of Ganymede. D-ring tethers clicked onto a rail mounted on the outside of the dome. Jupiter loomed large above the horizon, and the three slid their way around the circumference of Liberty. They covered about three kilometers in an hour before coming to another airlock. They de-clipped and clambered in.

Henq found hirself in a maintenance airlock almost immediately adjacent to where the Analytical Engine’s shuttle was docked. The three walked straight to the shuttle with no more problems. As they approached the shuttle door, Gilles song came out over the mesh and it cycled open for them. The neuter wasn’t terribly surprised when Ax motioned for Xu Lin to come aboard.

Inside, Gilles and Henq set about prepping the shuttle for launch. Ax strapped Xu Lin into a crash web while Henq prepped the quadruped morph for take-off. The two then strapped themselves in. Gwynn popped up for a moment to say ze’d cleared take off-with port authority. Everyone judded and jittered as the automated systems lifted the shuttle up and ran it out into the surface. Gilles counted down a final pre-launch checklist. And they were off.

Forty minutes later, the shuttle was docked and Gwynn was calling an owner’s meeting to order.

“Our newest associate, Xu Lin, has a very exciting offer to submit to the company.” Ax said. Xu Lin nodded and turned to address the transhumans present.

“What do you know about Firewall?”

###

Birthday Stories

Birthday Stories
by
Bobby Derie

 

Today, a beautiful woman that you have walked beside for months will turn, and kiss you full on the lips. She will taste like honey and ashes, and leave you remembering her smile as she turns away, never to see you again. That was the last year of your life. Unnoticed, another woman will take you by the elbow, and lead you on again. Will you look forward, or back? Happy Birthday José!

¤

As you drive in today, the car behind you creeps closer and closer. No matter how fast you go, the car seems to stay right on your bumper, inching up. You try not to let it get to you, but as you go on, you feel the strain - what will happen when you stop? Will he hit you? - but you keep driving on, because you have somewhere to go, someone to get to. And when you finally start to slow, bracing yourself for the hit, you look behind you - only to see the macabre white grin of skull-headed Time. One bony finger raises to his temple, a gentle salute - on keeping ahead for another year.

Happy Birthday Ed!

¤

Today you will see two black birds. For a moment, they will fly together, but then one will pull off and go its own way, while the other flies straight ahead. Sometime from now, you will stop and think back about the two birds, and wonder where the other one flew off to. But not too often, and not for too long.

Happy Birthday, Henri!

¤

As a boy, you heard an old man play an old song, and the piece was strange and new to you. You left with the echo of that song in your bones, and it settled there with the echoes of every other song you had ever heard. And when you play, those echoes squeeze out from wrist and fingertip, and some of the old songs come through in new music, to be heard again. One day, you will play an old song for a young boy, and they will carry the echo of it with them forever.

Bon anniversaire, Ryan!

¤

The daimyo has called you, and like a loyal son you have come in your best kimono, sword sheathed across your knees. You can feel his eyes on you, but you stare resolutely at the floor while you await his command.

"You will have the honor of serving our clan." the old man said. "Happy birthday."

¤

The darkened stage. The hushed movement of the crowd. The curtain rises. Happy birthday, Dru.

¤

She screams, pain breaking her in two. Claws the bedsheets into wadded handfuls. Someone says "epidural." The mother to be falls back in on herself as the drugs work through her system, her mind tracing back through previous incarnations...as men, as women, on steam ships and on horseback, and settles on another self, squatting in the midst of a battlefield. Bronze-headed arrows flick around her, but she is more intent on the breach, the terrible tearing release as the babe is born amid blood and slaughter. Then she is back to herself, in the hospital, a dark-eyed child in her arms, and she wonders: is this her babe, or that other?

Happy Birthday, Elf!

¤

You're dreaming. You know you're dreaming. This couch is gone, this room - you haven't been here for a long time. You look over to your left, and your friend is there. You haven't seen him in forever. He smiles just like you remember. "Dude, you're old. Happy birthday."

You wake. But it's still your birthday.

¤

The party moves around you, eye of the storm. A slim waist catches your eye, the flash of a watch, a come-hither eye. So you grab your drink and plunge into the crowd, mouthing hellos to friends and gifting smiles to strangers like your purse will never run out. You shift to avoid a young couple, step over the peacefully sleeping drunk, racing after the pair of jeans ahead of you.

Then you're at the stage, staring up at the band, and the music stops. A pair of lips draws close behind your shoulder, warm breath on your cheek, in your ear. The crowd raises their glasses and plastic cups, a silent toast...for tonight, for this moment, this song, this dance, is for you.

Happy birthday Crystal!

¤

In the beginning, one tribe hunted the deer. One tribe ate of the grass. One tribe fished the sea. And then there was the not-tribe, outcasts of all others, and they were the thieves. They stole fish, and meat, and grain, and share all they stole with each other, and the tribes reviled them.

Then one thief grew tired of stealing from the other tribes. He belonged to no tribe, and to him, all people were as one. He wished to steal something to share for all. So he climbed the highest tree on the highest mountain, and grabbed the lowest-hanging star. And he set it on his head so he could climb down the highest tree on the highest mountain, and carried it back to the tribes and shared the gift of fire with them all, and ever after his hair was as the burning flame of the star, and so it was with all of his descendents.

Happy Birthday, J!

¤

The old man was on his way out, and you both knew it. But he smiled when you came in the room, and nodded a thanks he couldn't voice when you were done. You'd see him almost every day, a little paler, a little thinner, veins standing out in loose, hanging flesh. But he would smile when he saw you, and you'd smile back. That's what you remember of the old man. And when one day you went in there and he was gone, you stared at the empty bed, and wondered. Later on, they moved in a child. And she smiled when you came in. Most of them do. Happy birthday K.

¤

Somewhere above you there's a starry night, and you crane your neck, eyes skyward. The buildings form a concrete and glass canyon, blocking out all but a narrow slice--and that edged with light from the sleepless city, so you squint for the narrow band of blackness. You're still searching for it when comes the dawn. A cloud you never knew existed blows aside, and bright yellow rays cut through the early morning smoke, lighting up the top half of the buildings, leaving the streets in deeper shadows. You're at a cross-street, and you look north and south, to see the patterns there, where the light comes through on the east-west lines. Manhattanhenge. Something unique to carry you through another day, another year.

Happy birthday John!

¤

Behind you, there are bloody sneaker-prints on the sidewalk. Each step squelches a little, your legs shake and skin shivers at the trickle down your leg. You cut through a yard of unmowed grass, and back over asphalt again, through a patch of fine, dry dust, trailing blood. And in the grass little Aztecs build their temples to repeat the sacrifice, and in the road the tiny swarming survivors come, fighting for the prize with homemade weapons and scavenged armor, and necromancers howl as tiny monsters of blood and dust roar into tiny, vibrant life. Each bloody footprint a world a-borning, and you walk on.

Happy Birthday, John.

¤

As you drifted off to sleep, glasses off and staring into the dark, a part of yourself went walking a little ways into the future. Even as you lay there, pinned to the bed by the weight of history, a part of you walked past the sorrows of tomorrows yet to come, harsh words and heartaches, strange pains you'd never felt before - and the farther you got, the more you thought "I'm old, I'm old." Then you sat for a while, and there was a young man beside you, struggling with the notes on the page in front of him. Tired and achy as you were, you helped him through the lesson, and when it was done he went his way, and you started on your way back through time to where you still lay in bed, the years falling off you, the aches gone away until you passed that way again, and you thought to yourself "One day, I'll teach Coda how to read music."

Happy Birthday Andy!

¤

Once upon a nothing, there was no time. The stars shined ever overhead in eternal night, the creatures of the earth and sea and sky slept without dreaming, and the wind was still. No one knows who sang the first song, but the sound of it set the world in motion, each beat defined a new moment to be. The first song still plays, beneath the background of life, and somewhere someone keeps the time. Happy Birthday Dan!

¤

Foot to the ground, pushing against the air, breathing ragged, you hit the wall. Your body seizes like something vital has drained out of you, the world goes black around the edges and it's everything you can do to put one foot down in front of the other, the weight of the world in each step. Legs pump like dead mechanical things, iron horselegs of the locomotive churning on residual steam. Then you remember to breathe again, push on through it. Lift your eyes to the horizon again, see the marker: 4k. One more to go. You keep on moving. Happy birthday, Chris!

¤

The party ends, the last hurrah chokes off to a dying cackle and then a gentle snore, the last body able to move on its own shuffles off out the door, wishing a final congratulations and farewell for the day that was. The years hang heavy on you in the dark and quiet night, cleaning up bottles and collecting glasses in the sink, discovering with scant surprise the little presents your friends and loved ones have left you. And in the early morning hours when all the work is done, you shuffle off to your own bed, and fall into it...and through it, head never hitting the pillow, and the wind rushes past you as you fall into the inky night, and then you bank and fly off toward the distant moon-lit horizon and the waiting clouds. Happy Birthday, Rand!

¤

"...and when you were three years old, I whispered into your ear a secret, that you should carry it with your always in your heart and that it should be a part of you. When those others shall pretend to some greater wisdom, you will take comfort from that secret knowledge, and in that calm a confidence to carry you through the turmoils and trials of your life. Never will you forget that secret, but it shall be such a part of you that you will almost forget that it is a secret. Some day I shall die, and the secret will be yours alone - and some day you will have a child, and when they are young and easily hurt you will whisper your own secret in their ear. Think long on it now, so that you will be ready." Then your grandparent tucked you into bed with a kiss, and left you to stare alone into the darkness, looking at the shadow where they had been, holding their secret in your heart.

Happy Borthday, McQ!

¤

There's a beat from shackled feet, a stamping rhythm marking time, a circle of close-pressed bodies all chained in a line. The dancers spin and spar, touch and break bloodily away, then sweep in again with fist and foot again. The final blow comes quick, a body falls to the sand, the rhythm breaks around you, and in the silence between beats someone says "Even slaves have something to fight for."

Happy Birthday, Luke!

¤

The streets are littered with broken condoms, dirty needles, and rusted dreams. You pick your way past the jobless, the hopeless, and the insane, waving their signs and wearing their tread into the sidewalk. Shadows stalk the alleys and monster bastard cars crunk down the streets, blood drying on their grills. There are monsters out tonight, werewolves in the park feeding on rapists to savor the flavor of their sins, and worse things waiting in the dark corners of clubs to take advantage of the young, naive, skinny people there from over the bridge and tunnel. Somewhere up above in the glass-fronted heavens, a bastard in a suit looks down and pisses against the glass, imagining what he's doing to all of you.

Then you get home. The laptop opens. A message pops up from her. And you forget about the city for a while.

Happy Birthday, David!

¤

      The key lies heavy in the hand, a great black thing chased with silver and gold. The devil was loathe to part with it, even at the price offered, but it was wrested from him finally, leaving the tiny dying light of a soul behind to mortgage it. There is a tightness in the chest as the chalk outline of a door is drawn, a heart stop moment as the key unlocks that door, and the first step into the lands of fantasy are taken. The devil sits outside the gate, soullight leaking through clenched fingers, eyes only on the radiant, closing portal. Forced to wait, wondering if this one will come back to him.

Happy Birthday, J-W!

 

###

Daughter of Pearl

Daughter of Pearl
by
Bobby Derie

The cabbie left me off at the corner of Suspiriorum and Lachrymarum, the gateway to the Sorrows, and scuttled off like a mad bastard drunk on coca wine. I went three blocks south to Dolorosa and took the corner, turning onto a street of eternal tenements. The joke had been that the Parliament had intended the Sorrows to be an inviolate necropolis for the heroes and highborn, but few could—or chose—to be interred in the ugly district of looming industrial gargoyles and broken-faced angels, and squatters had infested the tombs for so many generations that the practical-minded simply declared them civil rent-controlled housing.

Dolorosa was part of my beat, and as the duly authorized social services representative for the children of the district I stalked through dark streets who dangling lamps had been shattered and broken, lit from beneath by the strange luminescent fungi that grew in the nightsoil that piled near the bases of buildings, overfilled gutters and became rich black earth in the cracks between the pavement. I was on a first-name basis with every child prostitute in three city blocks, had held bloody little hands until the life flowed out of them, and more than a few times taken a knife, bullet, or beating for my trouble. Sometimes I got them out of the Sorrows, into foster programs and good schools. Sometimes I was the only one at the funeral or the defendant’s side of the trial. My name and number spread among the ones who liked out for themselves and others, and sometimes someone picked up a phone or sent an email and the whispers came back to me. Then I would be out here again.

The tip came from a jeweler, an old man with a hawkish nose and scraggly white brows like hoary centipedes nesting on his face. A man and a girl had come in, selling pearls—sizeable pearls, but not perfect, with no papers or explanation for the source. They had the mark of the perennially poor, the girl in particular looked to be only about eight years old and with thin hair already streaked with grey, and there was something wrong with her eyes and the set of her mouth. The father had done all the talking, a big man gone to fat, hovering a little too close and keeping a familiar hand on the girl at all times. The jeweler had paid for the gems but insisted on the address: 1600 Dolorosa, Apartment 1212. I got the call about half an hour later. That was six months ago, when I first met her.

She had been standing outside the tenement buildings, beneath an apparently impenetrable blue filament lamp, leaning again a graffiti mural of a black dragon. In the eternal half-twilight in the shadow of the buildings, she looked like a macabre fallen angel, reptilian wings spread wide. I slowed down as I approached, studied and was studied in turn, neither of us turning away. Thin, but with traces of baby fat yet in the roundness of her face, sandy blond hair shot with grey and silver, a too-wide mouth that went a little crooked on the right side, and those eyes. I thought it was malnutrition at first, or a disease, the tiny sunken black things that stared out from the pits between her brows and cheeks, shiny and dark and secret. The dead, appraising stare could have come from an octogenarian whore, so frank and unflinching was its appraisal. A single pear-shaped grayish pearl dangled from one ear.

I introduced myself, told her why I was here, asked her name.

“What do you think it is?”

We went up to her apartment. I think she still thought of me as a customer then, not sure how else to treat grown-ups who showed any interest in her at all. Her father was not at home—or at work either, from the responses she gave to my questions—and her mouth became a terrible line when I asked about her mother. She turned away and led me into her bedroom, clambered onto the bed. I didn’t know then what she was doing, didn’t understand, held up my hands and tried to explain I wasn’t here for that as she lifted up her shirt over her head. The words choked in my mouth.

On the pale white skin was a fold or flap of skin, stretching diagonally from just over her right hip to just under her left breast. Then the skin pulled back a little on strange muscles, exposing a long-thin strip of glistening flesh, shot with tiny dark red capillaries. The girl tucked the shirt under her chin, and drew her hands down to her soft little belly. Her left hand pressed gently at the skin about her belly button, drawing the gash open wider, so that I could see inside was not the pink flesh of muscle or integument I might have expected, like a throat or vulva, but a puffy, light gray swimming with clear juices. As I watched, she worked the fingertips of the right hand into the slit, moving them down in small motions against some internal resistance. It took minutes to work down to the edge, and she curled her fingers and dug them in, wincing. When she was done, she let the shirt fall down, and held out her gooey hand in front of me. In her palm were four tiny, shining, uneven grey-white spheres.

I had been back, over the weeks and months that followed. I never saw the father hit her or even raise his voice to her, but sometimes his tone got dark and thick when he would rebuke her for something. There were no more bruises or cuts than any child in the Sorrows might suffer, and the police never picked her up for whoring or anything else. The father still sold the pearls to anyone that would take them, anyone that he hadn’t dealt with or heard of him yet, but where the money went I never knew. If anything, things seemed to be worse in the apartment every time—there was more dirt everywhere, filling the cracks and ground into the carpets and bedsheets. The last time I had been up there was three months ago, and there was a strange wet, briny smell that permeated everything. Her father said she couldn’t talk, that she was taking a shower, but I came in anyway, to wait. The odor was overpowering and seemed to be on everything, but if the old man noticed he said nothing, just sat and stared at me as I made my inspection and waited for her to come out again, which she eventually did—wearing one of his old shirts as a nightgown, the stretched-out tail barely covering her ass. She coughed and spat into her hand, and held up a gray orb as big as her thumb, then put it back into that terrible mouth again. I never saw her swallow.

Then I was shot again, to keep one child from murdering another, and lived on hospital food, painkillers, and the quiet abuse of hardworking nurses. It was a visit from the detective that got me on my feet again, to identify the body.

The morgue nearest the Sorrows was cold and somber and quiet except for the occasional train passing overhead, when dust or asbestos fell quietly from the ceiling like snow. She had been found by the team sent to clean out the apartment, lying in her bed. The father had been killed a few days earlier, something to do with drugs. No one had thought to check on her. No one besides me had even read the reports I’d submitted, done the simplest of follow-up after his death to get her into custody. Not that it might have done any good.

Pearl lay on the cold metal slab, limbs straight and still, dirt caked around every orifice. It filled her mouth, her nose, the great sodden flap of skin was obscenely bulging with earth. There were lines on the body where it had been cut open, a dark-skinned examiner had one gloved hand buried in her exposed abdomen; the autopsy had already begun before they had brought me in. The detective made noises next to me, talking about how oysters made pearls, the secretions accumulating around bits of dirt, the constant irritation—something about the father, how he was forcing her to make them, to feed his habit—but the attendant just shook her dreadlocks and readied her scalpels and probes, explaining that this violence had happened later, after death.

“Death by natural causes,” she said. “Septic abortion.”

The detective and I stared at her, and she drew something up out of the slit.

It was as big as a fist, curled in on itself, and shone like a half of a gigantic pearl had been left out to decay in the wind and rain. The ridges of the tiny spine and the eye sockets of the fetus’ skull could still be seen, but most of the flesh looked almost to have fallen in on itself or decayed, with the rest covered by the first layers of thin, filmy mother of pearl.

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