The Kimota Anthology (46 page)

“And what makes it wrong?”  She brought the gun up, waving it in the real world hoping it would distract the attention of the bodies that were being used.  It did.  Regardless of the location of the actual brains, the bodies were not keen on getting shot.  Interesting, if she could make use of it.

The leader stepped forward.

“They mutilate themselves!  Then run away to grub like savages in the dirt, and you want to help them?  We can see inside you, you agree with us. We can help them…” He smiled, another heftier attack came, the interface faded down to almost alphanumerics and then came back again. 

~ouch [dry humour, overlayed with concern, big concern] I can’t fend off many more like that, they'll sequestrate me too, unless we take them off line.  If you have a plan… now would be a good time to implement it

“See,” the leader said.  “You can’t fight us – join…” he held out a virtual hand – floating before it was a processing matrix – a little something to help convince her, she was sure.

“Sorry.” 

In an instant she dumped an idea to the ship, who started talking quietly to her father.

“We won’t let you leave you know - the mind must protect itself…”

She walked down into the docking bay, the gun swinging up under its own power and firing - four of the bodies exploded under the attack.  A roar came up from the Consensus and then snapped off – she was alone again, the ship had cut off their links.  Normally this would wipe out a person inducing severe shock, but for her it was no different to a jump.  She looked at the refugees.

“Run!  Onto the ship!”  They moved quickly whilst the Consensus group were trying to come to a decision.  She was almost back onboard when they acted, moving forward as a mass – her gun fired again, as did her fathers but the bodies kept coming, jerking along under external control.

~we're out of here

She virtually fell backwards over the edge of the docking lip as the whole structure shuddered.  Hands lunged for her, taking hold and for a moment she was caught between the grasp of the refugees in the hold and the zombie like hands beyond.  Then the doors closed and the ship wrenched itself away from the dock.

Novie discarded the gun, running for the bridge.

Her grandfather was on the bridge, but vacated the seat as she approached.  She dropped into the chair, slipping her hands into the control gloves and closing her eyes.

~You alright?

~been better [damage diagramatic of hull] picked up a few knocks, they didn't want us to go…

~I noticed… Show me those ships… 

~[navigation diagrams, overlaid converging vectors] they're not close but some of them are trying…

~Keep plotting an FTL track for Haven and keep us moving…

~about that FTL… [jump status – probability of success 82%]

~Fine… anymore good news?

~none that I can think of…

The ship went back to its own business and Novie slipped herself back to the bridge.  She turned the seat, looking at her family.  Her grandfather was perched on one of the flat ledges running around the chamber.  His, and the eyes of the rest of her family were on a display showing the Earthring.  The structure was collapsing inwards, the diamond losing its sheen and turning dull.  They swept across the terminator showing the night of Earth. Normally the entire planet would be long daisy chains of light, the cities glowing, road and skyways brilliant strings.  Instead of all that, the light of a million fires burnt on the surface.

“It’s starting,” Novie’s grandfather remarked.

The Earthring gave a shudder, then tilted by an impossible degree.  Below it a ribbon of fire was racing through the night, one of the orbital towers had been released and was falling, burning, into the ocean.

Novie turned her face away from them and the screen, not wanting them to see tears in her eyes.

“There’s a signal coming in – a ship’s appeared from L5 under massive acceleration…” Novie accessed the vector diagram.

Vance.

His ship was a courier, designed for speed and agility in comparison to her severely overloaded freighter.  

Her cargo was fragile too - the ship’s crewed compartments, such as they were, could be shielded from the effects of inertia and acceleration but not so the rest of the ship.  Any serious manoeuvring would kill the refugees.

She slipped into the control seat and opened a channel to his ship.

Vance was alone.  The ship slipped their minds into synch, allowing her to seem to appear on his bridge.  He smiled and stood in greeting, a display on one wall of the cramped compartment showing the distance until her ship was in range of his weapons.  He looked perfectly normal, as if nothing was happening. Only if you looked closely and thought about it, was it apparent that there was the tiniest of delays before he acted or spoke, as if his body was being manipulated from afar.

Novie recognised body swapping, she had even indulged herself once or twice, but there was something chilling about this.  Something she could not put her finger on, but it was somehow wrong.

“Novie, why are you running?” he asked.

“I’m not running, I’m taking my family to Haven – they asked me, I take them.  It’s my job, remember, I pilot a freighter.”

“Piloted,” he remarked.  “We don’t need ships where we’re going.”

“And just where is that?” she asked, trying to think of a way out.  His ship out-gunned hers and always had.  Vance looked distant for an even longer period than usual, then looked straight at her.

“Let me show you,” and he took her hand…

Instinctively she flinched backwards, but it was too late, she felt a whole series of instructions zinging straight through the protective barriers her ship had erected, peeling her mind open.

It was…

Novie could always remember the difference between the Consensus and normal time – like a deep mission a long way out from Consensus space at the wrong end of a low bandwidth link – joining this was a similar feeling.  It was as if everything she had previously experienced had been just a shadow of what this existence actually was.

Her normal senses were next to useless, the usual reference of your body or avatar irrelevant, just the shear bulk of knowledge and people and the recognition that everything that went before was a trial run.  Everything was converging, a part of her sensing the routines being woven which would once and for all remove the corporeal needs of the masses, fusing everyone together into… 

Her mind could not grasp the concepts even now, but she knew that as time progressed she was becoming more intelligent, her mind amplified by those around her.

That was, after all, the point of the singularity.  Even at this stage of her involvement, trying to comprehend it would be like explaining a starship to a goldfish.  She stopped then; there was a last nagging doubt.  Vance was with her, his consciousness drawing her further in.  But she sensed something wrong.

Something holding her back.

~give it up Novie, let go – we can download you now… we have you… it’s safe…

She looked at him, or rather his representation and tried to make sense of the people around her – this was wrong.  Her duty was to her ship and the passengers she carried.  Without her enhancements it was improbable her family and the ship alone could make the journey.

She started to pull back, perceiving the cabins of both her ship, Vance’s, the space around them and, of course, the information space of the Unified Consensus.  Images impinged on her as she moved backwards: Vance looking saddened but oddly disinterested - his body collapsing like a discarded wrapper onto the deck of his bridge - then dissolving under the attack of a host of atom-sized nanobots, feeding on him and transmitting the information into the consensus. Her family crowded around her on the ship, watching - the incredible light suffusing the whole of Consensus grid, getting brighter seemingly every instant.

It was happening.

Right now, this instant.

The light kept increasing in brightness, only she knew it was not light, it was just the way her mind was handling the information.

Then nothing.

The whole grid of the Consensus was empty, black and cold as the depths of space.  Shut down forever.

Novie teetered on the brink, feeling like she had stepped into the lift shaft only to find the lift missing.  In a blink, she could tumble forward and lose herself forever in the infinite darkness.

The voices in her head were all silent now.  Everybody else had left, and she, like the Neanderthals in the cargo bays, had been left behind…

She felt herself start to fall and with a shudder allowed it, her avatar tumbling silently into the deep information space, sobs tearing her body.  The dreadful sense of loss too much to bear.

An indefinable amount of time later, Novie sat on a beach under a warm orange sun watching the surf break around the legs of her shuttle.  The air was crisp with the tang of ozone, and bird-analogues wheeled in the skies above her head.

Haven.

The name said it all really.  The planet was a huge distance away from virtually everywhere, a lone main sequence star orbiting at the very edge of the galactic arm – the night sky burning with the ribbon of the Milky Way.  A low axial tilt gave it little in the way of seasons and the single huge continent was tectonically stable.

It was a paradise.

They had only just made it.  By the time Novie had returned to them, waking in the ship’s sick bay surrounded by anxious family members, the ship was out beyond Mars.  They had limped onwards to Haven, arriving, life support barely functioning, Novie herself only keeping her head clear with a filter mask permanently attached to her face. 

What other refugee ships there had been had arrived weeks ahead of them, but in an effort not to tax the ship they had proceeded in small stages, crawling a few dozen light years at a time, it had taken longer but at least they made it.

It was only now.  Now, that all the passengers were unloaded and being found homes on Haven that she had to decide her future.  As far as she knew she was the only person left alive in the conventional sense, to have refused godhood.  She had made her peace with her family, and left with the intention of… well, even now, with the shuttle before her she was unsure.  It was too late to join the others, that much she knew, it was also hard to think about leaving this island of humanity.

The sand behind her shifted and she sensed a presence.  She didn’t have to look around, instead choosing to take a look through the camera on the nose of the shuttle.  Ken Terrel was a man of medium height, grey hair, his skin tanned almost to the colour of hers.  For several years he had been the defacto leader of Haven.  A post, she soon discovered, he only filled with reluctance.

“I came to find out what your plans were,” he said, dropping to the sand next to her.  Her fingers grubbed around, found a pebble and tossed it into the water.  It vanished into a white-topped breaker.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

Terrel nodded, and found a stone himself, pitching it towards the waves.

“There’s room for you here, I wanted to emphasise that.”  Novie stopped, turning to look at him.

“But is there anything for me here?”

He flinched from her gaze and looked away.  She would have to be careful of that; people found her penetrating stare hard to cope with now.  Her father had remarked that even her eyes seemed strange.

She averted them, instantly feeling sorry.

“I must be honest and say probably not.  You came back from the edge of the singularity – in terms of consciousness I doubt if you could share your experience nor really relate to us,” he stopped, then smiled, “that’s being brutally honest of course.”

Novie laughed.

“I have another suggestion though,” he looked at her face again, this time ready for it, he met her stare.

“Which is?”

“Find out if we are alone.”  He glanced up at the sky.  “Somewhere out there, there are others who didn’t join in.  Maybe even some like yourself.”

“It’s unlikely,” she said quickly.

“True, but it’s a chance.  Alternatively it’s a life here.”  He looked across at her shuttle and then upwards, meaningfully.  “But, I would have to insist on the destruction of the ship – we can’t go back out there, we must come to terms with life here…”

Novie had known this and for a moment considered his words carefully, blending it with her own needs.  Then she got to her feet, flexing her toes, feeling the sand scrunching through them, the air on her face, and above all her need to fly again.

“I’ll call,” she told him, throwing her shoes over her shoulder and brushing sand from her bare legs.

“Good luck,” he said simply.

She half turned, opened her mouth to say something but instead just nodded, then tramped out into the water and her waiting shuttle.

[Originally published in Kimota 11, Autumn 1999]

ALWAYS THE PAST

by Paul Edwards

I resigned from my post as a recruitment officer in an employment agency, bored and disillusioned with the fast and useless pace of office life.

Instead, I spent time writing down by the brook or the park or the churchyard. Locksley’s a small but thriving town on the periphery of the city. The council are planning major renovations to boost commerce in the area. They want to drain the brook and bulldoze some woodland to make way for houses and construction sites. I devoted afternoons picketing with concerned members of the community, staging a peaceful demonstration near East Knell. But the businessmen and property developers will have the renovators in before the year is out. The centre of the city is a depressing place at the best of times. The roads are dirty and over-used. There are rows of derelict houses and slatted windows, vandalised churches and ugly car parks encircled with razor-wire. It’s sad to think Locksley will probably go the same way in five, ten years time.

My dole helps pay the rent on my apartment. I live above a dusty antique shop. The old man who owns it is friendly and quiet but is having extensive treatment for bone cancer, so he is in and out of hospital. I don't know what will happen to me once he dies. The back window overlooks the rear of Locksley Church and the cemetery. It is quite eerie at night to look out of the window and see gravestones projecting out of the darkness.

It was in the churchyard that I saw Kieran for the first time. He was wading through the wild nettles and creepers, a camera hanging from a cord around his neck. I pressed close to the window. The long, fine hairline crack in the glass distorted his body as he wove between the slate tombstones jutting at angles from the earth. He seemed to be captivated by a memorial sculpture of an angel, which stood beneath the twisted limbs of some long dead willow trees. He’d touch her face, tracing his fingers across the smooth, cold marble. The angel stared at the ground with infinitely sad eyes. From the window she appeared to gleam faintly behind the tangle of wild growth and rotting clapboard fencing.

Kieran fascinated me for days. During early evening, just as the sun began to melt behind the sullen church, I’d watch him from the window. Without fail he’d be there, standing in the foliage, encircled by pale memorials and tombstones.

Then one evening he caught me watching him.

My heart skipped a beat. I froze. He stared long and hard at me, then shrugged his shoulders and kicked his way through the creepers. I watched him disappear behind the church. I breathed easy again and shrunk into the long shadows of the room.

That night I dreamed I was at a party in somebody’s flat. I thought I recognised the flat at the time, but when I woke I knew I’d never been there before. Loud hip-hop crackled and spat from invisible speakers. I could hear couples laughing as they danced and groped in the living room and in the kitchen. When I looked up all I could see were their knotted and tangled shadows flickering over the walls. I walked to the kitchen to search for alcohol but somebody was standing in the doorway, blocking the way. He was short and strange-looking with pointed ears and the blackest eyes. I wondered whether those eyes reflected everything, or absolutely nothing at all. He was wearing thick red lipstick and mascara. He grinned at me.

“I know you,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. I tried to squeeze past him but his pale hand was on my shoulder.

“Yes, yes I do. We’ve met before.”

“No.” My head was swimming with music and empty, dark shapes. I threw off his hand and slipped past him into the kitchen.

I found a bottle of vodka on a table and I unscrewed the top. I breathed in its sharp fumes, then raised the bottle to my lips.

The strange-looking man was standing behind me. He put a hand on my hip. His breath was hot on my neck.

“You must remember me.”

“Who are you?” I whispered.

“We know each other
inside out
.”

His long, wet tongue was in my ear. I pushed him away. He stood frozen against the wall, a monstrous, painted grin over his face. I realised we were alone. All the couples had gone.

“Hi,” I said. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me. The sky was bleached and shot with black cloud.

“Hi. Are you the person who lives over there? I thought I saw you in the window yesterday.”

“Yes. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be nosy.”

“That’s okay. You don’t mind me traipsing around here?”

“No. No, of course not. Why should I mind?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps you’ve got somebody buried here, a relation, a friend perhaps.”

“No.”

“Some people don’t take too kindly to others trampling across graveyards, taking photographs.” He laughed. “My name’s Kieran.”

“I’m Alice.”

He extended a hand. I shook it. I noticed his eyes were like fine black glass. I pushed a strand of hair behind my ear. The wind moaned through the cemetery, sweeping dead leaves between tombstones.

“I guess it is kind of disrespectful.”

“Disrespectful?” I was miles away.

“Walking over graves. Taking photographs.
Disturbing the dead
.” He spoke in a mock Bela Lugosi accent. We both laughed.

“So... why do you?”

“I don’t know, to tell you the truth.”

He edged towards the angel under the willows. He raised the camera and took a photograph.

“I guess I’m fascinated by death. God, you must think I’m morbid. Well you’re right, I suppose. I am.”

“Are you a professional photographer?”

“No. I do this because
I
want to.”

He lined up another picture, squatting in the tall reeds and purple nettles.

“She’s beautiful.” I nodded to the angel. Then Kieran said a very strange thing. I thought he was joking, but there was a peculiar light in his eyes that convinced me otherwise.

“She’s alive,” he whispered. The wind rattled the trees. “I really believe she’s alive.” Just as he took the photograph, and as the flash danced on her body, I noticed some stone flake away from the statue.

Kieran didn’t have a job. He lived in a bedsit in Wickham, close to the multi-complex cinema and TGI Friday. He earned money busking in the shopping precinct. He played popular songs to shoppers with a beat-up acoustic guitar. Occasionally he modelled for sixth-form art students at Wickham College. He caught buses to different suburbs in the city, taking pictures of cemeteries and churches, sometimes dead birds and road-kills decomposing in the asphalt of major roads.

I guess I kind of latched onto him. There was nothing else to do. I scanned
The Locksley Chronicle
and read the council was already pulling down trees on East Knell common. Everything that mattered seemed to be dissolving around me. I didn’t even like my apartment. There was nothing between the damp, rotting walls except my own languishing impression. My writing deteriorated. It was as if words no longer made sense. I read and re-read my poems and stories but found them meaningless, so I tore them to shreds. Kieran didn’t mind me hanging around. I’d wait until the evening, then sit in the cemetery. He’d arrive just as the chocolate sun melted behind the old church spires.

One night I dreamt I was in a room I vaguely recognised. The night built up like a wall around me. Outside the window, the streetlights gleamed and the moon grinned between houses like a cracked skull. I knew somebody was in the room with me. I could hear breathing. I sat up and for a second saw the form of a man in the corner of the room struggling to tear a plastic bag from off his face. He was thrashing his limbs but the bag just sucked in tighter and I knew he was going to suffocate. I wanted to do something, but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was under water.

The strange-looking man was standing at the end of the bed. He smiled at me. His eyes were smudged with make-up and his lips were dark, dark crimson.

“Do something,” I said.

The strange-looking man laughed. It sounded like a pig squealing.

“You are mine,” he said. “I made you. You belong to me. You always will belong to me.”

One dreary morning Kieran and I met in a café.

We sat in the corner, under a print of Van Gogh’s
Café Terrace at Arles
. Like all of Van Gogh’s work, it burned with feverish, otherworldly life. When we weren’t talking, the violent hiss of the rain filled the void.

“Why do you take all these weird pictures?” I asked.

Kieran stared at me, then stirred his coffee with a plastic spoon.

“Alice,” he whispered across the table, “some people can’t face the darker things in life. They pretend that bad things don’t exist. They shut them out.”

He discerned the puzzled look on my face. He gazed at me with his black glass eyes.

“Come with me,” he said.

He took me to his bedsit. It was a five-minute walk to Wickham. We cut across the old disused railway bridge and the rain-swept park. As he struggled with the key in the lock, I turned and caught a black cat watching me from underneath a gutted Escort. Overhead, in the direction of the multi-complex cinema, came the low rumble of thunder. The rain made hypnotic circles in puddles. He pushed open the door, turned, and smiled at me.

“Come in. It’s not much, but it’s home.”

The room was bare and so dark, furnished only by a couple of chairs placed close to the sink. There was no television, no ornaments, no books, no table. The walls were dirty and yellow. I noticed apparatus for developing photographs in the corner. Photographs hung from pegs on a clothesline that stretched across the length of the room; I identified pictures of tombstones and memorial sculptures from Locksley Cemetery. There were photographs of half-lit streets and ancient, shuttered houses. A dead bird. A long distance photograph of a child crying. I recognised the places but Kieran had created a mood through lighting and detail to make them
different
somehow.

“They’re brilliant,” I whispered. “You
should
be professional.”

“It’s something I want to do for
me
. Nobody else.”

“But that’s such a waste.”

“It’s the way I want it to be.”

“Do you have a job? Friends? Family?”

“No. I’ve never worked. I’m not close to anybody really. I can’t fit in. Out there.”

“Why?”

I pushed a strand of hair behind my ear. Perhaps I was being silly and immature; perhaps I was a sixteen-year old girl again, but it felt as if I had found a soul mate. Someone who thought and felt like me.

“I’m not sure. I like to be on the outside of things. To live
around
what we see and know. It’s not that I don’t want to connect with society. It’s just that I can’t. I can’t do it.”

He stared out of the window. The rain obscured his reflection. I walked to the furthest corner of the room. There were hundreds of photographs of Locksley Cemetery. It didn’t look like the same place. The otherworldly lighting made me think of spirit planes and places I had only walked in dreams.

Kieran opened a bottle of wine.

“Why are you so intrigued by me, Alice?” he asked.

“You’re interesting, I guess. Different. I think I’d like to know you better.”

“I’m not interesting.” He took two glasses from the sideboard. “There’s nothing profound about me.” He laughed and leaned back against the wall. “People need anchors in life. Just to keep them sane. People need truth and certainty to give their lives happiness…and stability. I can’t offer any of those things, Alice. I can’t believe in anything that I see around me so I kind of create my own worlds.”

I wondered what had made him this way.

“Why are you so fascinated by death?” I looked back at his photographs. “Is this a way of confronting your demons?”

He looked uncomfortable. He stared down at his hands. I felt embarrassed, and frightened that I’d grieved him with my question.

“I don’t know,” he replied with a slow shrug of his shoulders. “Perhaps someday you’ll be able to tell me. What frightens you, Alice?”

“The Spook,” I answered. He narrowed his eyes.

“Who?”

“He’s this strange-looking guy who appears in my dreams. I call him The Spook. I think he knows everything about me.”

“Everything?”

“It’s like he can open up my soul just by looking at me. I think he knows more about me than I’ll ever know about myself.”

We were silent. There was just the rain.

After we’d finished his bottle of wine, we made love in his bed.

That night I was wandering a street that I almost recognised. I climbed an iron-cast staircase and disappeared into the shadows of a building that smelt of long lost days and dead things. There was a mirror on a wall and I caught my own petrified reflection floating in the darkness. I could hear laughing. It sounded like a pig squealing.

Somebody flicked a switch and a lurid crimson light illuminated the room. The bulb flickered and hissed above me. I noticed that somebody was bound to a chair in the corner of the room. He had a plastic bag stretched over his head. Gnarled tree limbs scratched against a windowpane, but I couldn’t remember there being trees outside. The squealing was louder now, and I could hear metal scraping against the dried-up old bones of the building. The plastic bag was clotted with thick dark blood and vomit.

I woke in the morning to find Kieran had gone. I got dressed and watched the rain sweep across the common. It felt like I’d been alone all along. The thought of returning to my apartment overwhelmed me with dread. Kieran had left a note tacked to the door. It read:
Alice, see you soon. Kieran.

We were reunited that evening, in the cemetery.

Kieran stood staring at the angel under the willows. I leaned against some railings and wondered why I felt so jealous. He took several pictures of her, then hung his camera around his neck and walked away.

I pulled away a curtain of sharp branches and gazed into her eyes. Her face seemed different somehow; the lines of her features less defined. I pressed my hand to her face. Slowly, softly, some more stone flaked away beneath my fingertips.