Plasma Frequency Magazine: Issue 14 (4 page)

Sitting in her wicker chair, Renate frowns. “Nobody wants change.”

The bear's fur looks fiery in the golden sunset. “But things are changing whether our citizens want them to or not. Soon,
very soon
, it'll get worse for everybody.”

Renate massages her brow. “I know, I know, but try to convince the masses, Dasein. You can't.”

“Which is why I need your help. The Mathematics Kingdom would be able to turn the tide if you go public with your thoughts. People respect your opinions, and not just because you’re a Superuser. They like you. You might sway someone.”

She sighs. “This is a delicate matter. Just because they respect me doesn’t mean they’ll listen.”

The sun sets, taking the bear's flaming aura with it.

Just as Renate materializes a bowl of sliced apples to offer her guests, a thought arrives from Mathilde to Bertrand. He experiences it, then stares wide-eyed at Dasein and the mathematician. “Gotta go.”

Out of there and into no man's land, before her portal. It's open this time, but he can't cross it, try as he might an invisible force blocks him. In her garden of light, Mathilde stands very still, looking at the ground, her eyestalks hanging limp like vines.

“Don't do this,” he says. “Please, don't.”

He tries his Superuser powers to break through the blockage. Her space remains impenetrable. “You're just sick. Wait it out. Reason out of it. Please.”

No reaction.

He sends: <>

She smiles at the thought. “Don’t you get it, you poor bastard? They couldn’t care less about us.”

“You don’t believe that,” he says, on the verge of tears. “It’s the disease talking.”

Only her mouth moves. “Thousands of citizens, poison to the rest of the races. They can’t kill us, but they can’t let us keep living the same way and remain a hothouse for memetic abominations either. Freeing us, if possible, would be a huge risk. So what do they do? What would you do in their place, Bertrand?”

“They will help us…Please…”

“No, Bertrand. They will lie to us. Tell us we can be fixed, we can be reconnected with everyone else. But we won’t be. We’ll be kept happy, oblivious and quarantined. Just like before.”

Tears roll down his cheeks. “Don’t say that. That’s not true.”

“It’s funny how the only one who somehow managed to escape this madhouse is now inadvertently helping make sure such a thing never happens again.” She shakes her head slightly, closes all her eyes. “Goodbye,” she says, standing frozen, all marble-like, as if preserved in the amber light of her garden, and Bertrand knows that she's gone forever.

~

“Stop glowering, kiddo, we won.”

Bertrand's lying on a stack of hay in his hut, hands behind his head. “You came to tell me that? Good, now leave me alone.”

Dasein scratches his polar fur, not suitable for the nightmarish heat in Bertrand's private-space.

“I'm sorry for your friend,” says the bear, approaching. “I really am. But things are only going to get better now.”

“Whoop-de-doo.” He straightens up, leaning on his elbows. “Leave me alone.”

A bear paw weighing down on Bertrand's shoulder. “Quit blaming yourself. It's not your fault.”

Bertrand brushes him off.

Dasein clears his throat. “I came here because I need something,” he says. “You remember the bureaucrats' demands, right? I need your SU powers, Bertrand. I already gave up mine.”

Bertrand leans back in the hay, turns away from the bear. Mathilde’s last words go through his mind for the hundredth time. Could she be onto something? Her position seems reasonable enough, despite coming from such a fragile and emotional place. Perhaps he should investigate further, raise the question with the other Superusers, look into the evidence, and remove the shackles, at last freeing himself and the citizens—

“Of course.” Reaching into the City's config to modify his permissions file, relinquishing his powers.

Then again, he thinks, he’s probably catching the disease himself, mistaking delusional plague-induced blabbering for reason.

“Thank you,” says Dasein.

He heads toward the straw door. Just before stepping out he turns and says, “She helped us win, kiddo. People got scared they might be next and went out to vote in droves. She didn't die in vain.”

~

The planks creak under his weight as he walks down the pier with a fishing rod over his shoulder, a bucket of worms in his hand. Morning sun beating down on the azure sea. Seagulls in the distance, somewhere behind the coconut groves.

Bertrand sits at the edge of the pier, the water's surface tickling his feet. He takes a worm from the bucket, attaches it to the hook. He reels in the fishing line, then flicks the rod over his shoulder toward the endless blue. Ripples in the gilded surface break the symmetry with the sapphire sky.

Grains of white sand twinkle on the beaches. The sea flattens, a still mirror.

The sun swings like a pendulum from one end of the heavens to the other, throwing Bertrand’s shadow across the old pier. He barely moves a muscle the entire day. He catches no fish.

He sits in the evening's pink pastel until the sun's gone, the sky darkens, and the first stars flicker to life like candles.

He tilts his head back toward the night, his feet out of the cold water, and imagines the grand network of Cities up above. He smiles at the million worlds orbiting a million stars, all within reach, all a mere thought away.

Everyone else, a mere thought away.

He gets up, fishing rod over his shoulder, the bucket of worms in his hand, and heads to his hammock to get a good night's sleep under a dome of stars blinking like eyes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Damien Krsteski is an SF author and software developer from Skopje, Macedonia. His stories have appeared in The Colored Lens, Perihelion Science Fiction, Fiction Vortex, Way of the Buffalo podcast, and others. He can be found at 
http://monochromewish.blogspot.com
.

Jigsaw Pieces

By Jamie Lackey

Betty sorted through her mother's belongings, separating and stacking a lifetime's worth of accumulated crap.  Clothes and acrylic yarn and expired canned goods, books and an army of ceramic chickens and years and years of Christmas cards. 

She heard her mother's irritated sigh every time something landed in the trash can. 

She drove a carload to the local Goodwill, and the clerk scanned her offerings.  "We only take complete jigsaw puzzles," he said.  "Can you verify that these don't have pieces missing?" 

Betty glanced at the stack.  Her mother had really taken to puzzles, at the end.  There had to be at least a hundred of them.  "I'm sure they're fine." 

"I'm sorry, miss, but that's not good enough." 

"They were my mother's puzzles.  I don't even know if she finished all of them." 

He picked up the top box.  "Take this one home, complete it, take a picture, and bring it back.  If it has all its pieces, we'll take them all.  If not, you take them back home or they go in the trash." 

Betty clutched the box to her chest.  She imagined the look on her mother's face if she'd seen her puzzles in the trash.  "Fine." 

~

She sat at her mother's dining room table and spread the puzzle pieces out in front of her.  The box showed a spring landscape, complete with a pond and songbirds.  Betty rubbed her forehead.  "At least it's not Thomas Kinkaid." 

She put on one of her mother's Brahms records and opened a bottle of wine that she'd given as a Mother's Day present.  She started with the top edge, piece upon piece of bright blue sky.  The feel of cardboard pieces clicking together soothed her aching heart. 

The wine helped, too. 

She finished the puzzle, but there was a piece missing.  "I can't believe this," she muttered.  She searched under the table and in the box.  She glanced at the oddly-shaped gap in the middle of the scene.  She ran her fingers over its edges. 

The missing piece had to be somewhere in this house. 

She left her glass, took the bottle, and started searching.  She scoured the rooms that she's already been through, then the basement, then finally she pulled the ladder down and scrambled up to the attic. 

The bare bulb flickered overhead, casting long shadows across the plywood floor, and she sneezed at the smell of dust and forgotten memories.  The ceiling was too low to stand, so she crawled along, still clutching the now-empty bottle, feeling for cardboard with her empty hand. 

"Come on, Mom," she whispered.  "I know you didn't throw it away.  You never threw anything away." 

Her fingers touched a flat plane of cardboard, and she pulled it into the light. 

Pieces from a hundred different puzzles fit together like they were made to.  Their edges formed perfect seams, and the bits of sky and grass and feathered wing and castle wall came together to paint her mother's face.  Not as she was at the end, but the way she'd been when Betty was growing up.  Strong and beautiful and smiling, with a strong jaw and piercing eyes.   

The familiar eyes blinked. 

"There you are," the puzzle said.  "I was starting to worry that you'd never make it to the attic." 

"I've always hated it up here," Betty whispered. 

"I know, dear." 

"This can't be real." 

"I wanted to let you know that I love you, Betty.  That I appreciate all the things you did for me, that even when I didn't recognize you, I still knew that I loved you." 

Tears slid down Betty's face and plopped on the bright surface. 

"There, there, sweetie.  I wish I could hug you." 

The resentment of the past months, along with the stress and the heartbreak and the anger, all eased their grip.  She looked into her mother's clear eyes.  "I love you, too." 

"It's okay to let go," her mother said.  "You can throw out anything that you don't want to keep, and I really won't mind." 

Betty sniffled and wiped her eyes.  "Thanks." 

She felt warm fingers on her cheek, then the puzzle was nothing but a confusing mishmash of colors. 

She took the puzzle apart, piece by piece.  Then she put the last piece from the spring puzzle in its place and took a picture.  "Goodbye, Mom."  She looked around the empty room, then slid the pieces into the box and closed the lid.  "Goodbye." 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jamie Lackey lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and cat. Her fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the Stoker Award-winning After Death... She's a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her short story collection, OneRevolution, is available on 
Amazon.com
. Find her online at 
www.jamielackey.com
.

At Twenty-Two Hundred Hours

By Sylvia Anna Hivén

I whisper the same summons into the microphone every night. It's a silly thing, that whisper, but Tinder won’t show without it. She's too fond of the ritual—to old fashioned, too romantic.

“Girl in the moon, come on down.”

I imagine the words transmitting into the blackness of space outside Exterra, slicing through the icy dark, bouncing against starlight, embraced by the black hole where they'll tumble and twist through time and space before bursting out into another solar system and find its way to Tinder.

The summons always works. In my dim quarters, fractured only by razor-thin shards of moonlight that cuts through the triple-paned window, the girl from the other side of space flickers to life.

“Hi, Tinder,” I say.

“Hi back,” Tinder says.

Even though Tinder's holographic self is just an illusion of light and the real her is as far away as some of the stars twinkling outside the space station, I feel like it's actually she who looks straight at me. There's a sharpness to her blue eyes, a magnetic draw in her gaze.

“How’s your side of the universe?” I ask.

“Rainy. I cross-bred a few new seeds, but it was too wet to plant anything. How about you?”

“Good. I checked EmiSix’s course. It's ahead of schedule and will be here in just twenty-eight days. So, I'll see you in four weeks.”

“Four weeks to you. Four years to me.” Tinder pouts, tiny crinkles lining her forehead. “It's not fair that I have to wait and you don't.”

She looks so child-like: she keeps her hair in twisty pony tails and beneath her bright dresses she always sports dirt smudges on her bare knees. Because on Luna they still have dirt, flowers, grass. Her beauty is earthen: rounded, warm features, tanned skin, Caribbean-blue eyes. She looks like a poster child for Earth, but she hasn't even seen the place.

Me, I'm the one twirling inside a steel city above the broken planet, and I'm the one still referring to myself as an earthling. Not so much because it fits me—I'm a pasty, skinny twig of a guy, and I've never seen anything sprout out of the ground—but because I have no other home to claim.

“Be glad we're close enough to reach each other at all,” I say. “Or perhaps you wanna revisit the plan and find the love of your life over there, in Alpha Centauri?”

“Never on your life, Cory! You're stuck with your moon girl.”

“I can think of worse things to be stuck with.”

It's been a year since our voices tangled into each other. I came across the trails of Tinder's transmission crackling out of a wormhole. She had found it by accident. She hadn't known where it would lead—if it lead anywhere at all—but when I answered her and she realized I was on Exterra, the questions tumbled out of her. After all, it wasn't every night you came across a voice from another solar system that distance didn't make into a mere echo.

Nights turned to weeks; weeks have turned to months. Now tangled voices have become tangled lives.

“I wish I could come to you,” Tinder says. “To see Earth, the place my ancestors came from. That would be something special.”

“Trust me, there’s nothing to see.”

“There’s
you
."

The holographic image stretches its hand out. I return the gesture, and my fingertips graze the surface of her projection. It shimmers and brightens, but there's no sensation of touch. There never is. Which always maddens me.

“I can't wait to touch you,” I say.

“I made you something you can touch. It's coming through the printer now.”

I turn to my printer. I gave Tinder the password a long time ago, and she's been sending me small gifts ever since. I scanned my face for her once, but Tinder's printer is so old, I apparently came across as a wrinkled mess. So I'm the one who gets all the gifts—scanned crystals, shiny green jungle leaves, copies of her favorite fruits. Not real enough to break open and eat, of course, but they still make me ache for that wonderful world she lives on, where things are alive and green rather than steel-gray and cold.

This time she sends a flower. When I pick it up from the printer box, it spreads open to reveal a luscious orange center. It reminds me of Tinder—thin and frail, the petals spotted blue like her eyes.

“Oh, the scent of Luna plastic,” I say, taking the flower to my nose. “You're such a romantic.”

“Don't be a jerk. It took me two hours to scan that thing.”

I mean to tell her I would much rather have a scan of her lips, or face, or any other body part, but then the door chimes.

“That's Artie,” I sigh. “I'm late for class.”

“Go on, go learn. And don't cheat off your sister.”

“Will you come back when class is over? At twenty-two hundred hours my time?”

“On the dot.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

She smiles and flickers out, leaving my quarters dark again, her light sucked through the darkness outside, passing scatterings of stars, yanked back to her home, twenty-nine days removed and trillions of miles away.

~

Artie is the only one who knows I intend to take the shuttle to Alpha Centauri. On the way to class I break the news to her that I finally have a departure date.

“Wow,” my sister says as we hurry down the hallways, our steps clacking against the steel grates. “Dad's going to be so angry. I can hear his speech now, how you're abandoning the Marbella family legacy.”

“Please. I'm sure he'll not have a problem with giving it all to you, Artie. You're the smart one.”

“I'm a botanist, not a space station commander.”

“So build some hydroponic gardens, make this place beautiful. The station will be better for it. You can send me pictures to make me kick myself for leaving, even.”

Artie's ghost-white face looks pitiful. “So I guess you're not gonna come back.”

“One way ticket, sis.”

“Luna II is supposed to be pretty dull. Nothing like the first Luna colony.”

“Tinder loves it. And I'm sure that a live planet like Luna II is better than one that was pulverized by an asteroid, like the first Luna. And better than living inside a steel box like we are, too.”

“You're positive this girl is worth moving out of the solar system for?”

“She's amazing. You met her.”

“Once. For five minutes. She dresses funny.”

Artie tries to sound aggressive but she only sounds sad. I grasp her arm and stop her. Her eyes shimmer wetly in the fluorescent hallway light.

“Artie, don't think I won't miss you or that it won't be hard to leave. It will. I will miss you a lot. But funny dresses or not, Tinder is worth it.”

Artie manages a crooked, defeated smile. “Guess we can talk through your wormhole. You can be
my
man in the moon.”

“Every day, if that's what you want.”

“Every day?” She grimaces and walks toward the classroom doors. “Let's not get out of hand, brother.”

The door to class swooshes open, revealing rows of seats, each occupied by pale-faced earthlings just like myself and my sister. We take our places. I always sit in the back.

Class has always seemed useless to me. I might dedicate myself more if my path wasn't already marked out thanks to my father. It never matters if I pass math or history or astrophysics—all that matters is whose last name I have. With the future being so set, not in stone but confined in steel and chrome and cold bulkheads, I don't pay much attention to the instructors. But today my ears perk up as the topic turns to the first emigrants: those who became the Venusians, the Martians, and the Lunarians when Earth became uninhabitable. When Luna II comes up in the lecture, I pay attention to the images that the instructor projects on the holo-dais.

It's Tinder's home, and what will become mine, too. She has told me about the rice fields that stretch for miles, the springs that lick down the craggy mountain-sides, the cool jungle mud that seeps between your toes. She has told me of colors that don't exist here—umbria and martruse and darinette—and how all the flowers that take those unknown hues cling to the facade of her house.

But the planet surface that’s projected in front of me doesn't look like what Tinder has described. The holographic city looks clinical: the habi-modules are round and white, one identical to the next. The buildings are huddled together in a grainy desert. There are no places to grow flowers or plants, skin knees and elbows, get grass stains on your clothes.

I raise my hand, frowning. “Is this right?” I ask. “I hear Luna is a beautiful place.”

“Beauty's in the eye of the beholder, I guess, Mr Marbella,” the instructor says. “I'm sure it's beautiful to those who enjoy deserts.”

I hold up Tinder's flower. “So how could this flower grow on Luna if it's mostly desert?”

The instructor steps closer, his mouth a thin, impatient line. He looks at my flower and his mouth softens. He even licks his lips. “That's Lillium Lunarum, the Luna lily.”

“So if it can grow on Luna, it can't be a desert planet.”

“That flower doesn't exist on Luna II. It existed on Luna I, before the first colony planet was destroyed eighty years ago. Beautiful replica, Marbella. Did you design it?”

I look at the flower, numb. “I didn't design it. The girl in the moon did.”

The instructor stares at me. "Any artist from Luna would be long since dead, Marbella. But it's a beautiful echo of a lost colony. You keep that flower safe."

He walks back to the front of the classroom. The ghost faces of the other students turn away, too, leaving me un-observed to clutch the flower in my hand.

How arrogant of us to not be suspicious of the miracle of communication through space, but through time. Her ancient printer. Her weird dresses.

For the remainder of class, I don't pay attention. I just sit at my desk, the plastic flower cutting into my palm, me clutching it harder, and it cutting me more in turn. Tears threaten, hot and angry, and I want to cry for myself and for my lost future—my girl, my new planet, my life in jungles, beneath rain. But this isn't just about me. So I blink my grief into submission and swallow the thick dread in my throat, and begin to wonder what I should tell a ghost at twenty-two hundred hours.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sylvia Anna Hivén lives and writes in Atlanta, Georgia. Her fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, EscapePod and others.