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8

Storms of the land are not like storms of the sea.

If you’ve been out too far perhaps you have seen how the ocean waters reach up into air and the sky pours its waters down, and the wind whips the world into froth, from above, from below, from beside – and you, unlucky to be in the middle, you are scrubbed from every direction like a radish about to be sliced.

Where the land is very low and very flat, where the land is merely a saucer holding a spill of ocean, little more than a sandbar with groves — in Florida — a storm can feel like drowning in air.

Another wave of rain pressed thru the Fruit Forest, a dark gray arm waving across the sky, dismissing sunlight and casting water in sheets down onto the saturated sand. Rain, rain, go away, come again another day, Vivienne’s grandmother from Florida used to say. That and, call Mickey Mouse and ask Him for a sunny day! Vivienne learned early not to talk of grandmother’s cultish tendencies. Yet always she had been drawn…

Now, here, in grandmother’s holy land, her students dead, her lover lost, she ran into the wall of the storm, her soaked boots splashing through rising waters over sandy dirt the color of wet ash and packed down around the hard-eroded roots of trees. Despite the treacherous ground she kept her balance and pushed forward. When she came to a fast-running drainage ditch, she jumped into the water and waded downstream, remembering the Jailbreak livplay: how walking through water in that game helped you shake the hounds.

The Jailbreak livplay focused mostly on eluding and disguising, and on finding food to eat, but it allowed for improvisation. Vivienne had two affairs while playing that game, and once set out on a heinous crime spree, which meant she lost, but it was still the most fun way to play. Winning isn’t everything, was another thing grandmother would say. You win and your prize is you suffer the most. Vivienne always suspected grandmother meant Canada. Their country was a winner by default – the rest of the world went to war and they managed to stay out of it.

The world to the south knew death, pain, loss, and ruin, but Canada remained the odd paradise of silent people retreated into digital worlds, their mortal forms protected by cyber-soldiers whose meat came mostly from the desperate survivors of a handful of formerly united “States,” but whose tech came from the geniuses at the Ontario Zoo.

It was better not to think about it. It was better to stay in your games. But grandmother was right, winning was a kind of losing. Every year more and more people volunteer to be permanently installed at the O.Z., where their gray matter could serve as dynamic processors, while their bodies hung like meatpups. Full immersion and possible immortality – now that’s winning.

Yet it seemed to Vivienne like the worst fate of all. And she had a creeping suspicion that her game lives were not much better. A slippery slope? An on-ramp to the Zoo?

The WWII game had violent moments, but it was mostly about networking and long-term, elaborate, cooperative planning. You couldn’t do that in the real world. How would you keep anyone’s attention long enough when everyone’s minds are split by gameworlds? How could you even try when your own mind is split by gameworlds?

Her quest for The Real brought her here. Is this what she wanted? To be hunted like game? To be prey? To want to pray? To the Mouse or some other deity?

She remembered getting her first chip as a child. As the doctor finished the work, a bright red circular rug seemed to appear on the floor. A white, wooden hobby horse and a box of toys seemed to be sitting on it, and above these, a cartoonish blue-glowing window whose light pulsed to attract the eye. As she came nearer, its panes opened, an illusion of curtain seemed to wave in a digital wind, and she saw a brightly colored village under blue skies. Each house or person or dog or bird reacted to her attention and offered a new amusement. “Everything works,” the doctor said, and young Vivienne saw she hadn’t moved, realized she hadn’t felt her feet on the floor. She looked at the chair she hadn’t stood up from. The doctor patted her head. “Enjoy!”

That was decades ago. Vivienne’s now middle-aged face brushed a long branch of a citrus tree, coursing water down to the ground, its leaves broad and waxy. A soft, heavy weight lumped against her right eye, an old grapefruit, half-rotten on the branch. Ants clung to it for life against coursing rainwater. She brushed them away.

She held up the lumpen fruit up like a mirror, reminded of her pockmarked skin, unevenly colored, her wrinkles. Some people change their avatars twice a year, or every few years, or every few days. Vivienne had kept the same face since she was twelve years old. She aged it, a little. She gave it glasses and a more serious expression when she went to college. But she hadn’t really aged it since then. How strange it has been, to be here, so obviously old, so everyone can see, it feels un-real, like a character I am playing.

She thought of her first boyfriend, Justin. She was sixteen when they met. She fell for his avatar’s Asian eyes, its cream-in-coffee complexion, its heavy sheaf of black hair that shimmered blue in sunlight. Justin fell for her avatar’s round purple eyes and yellow-gold waves of hair, its porcelain-white skin. The affair lasted less than two weeks. It ended when he admitted he was not Asian, and she admitted she was. It took her years to understand why this was the end of them – her own orientalism and self-loathing were unimaginable to her when she was young. But you have enough affairs, even digital ones, and patterns will etch too deep and clear to deny.

Vivienne stopped and tried to get her bearings. The sky was booming and water was air. Her hair was plastered down over her face and ears and she could barely open her eyes against the weight of rain. One end of the sky was darker gray: East. The City of Towers lay beyond that darkness. When first she ran, she expected Pete to be directly behind her. When he wasn’t, she expected he would catch up. When he didn’t, she accepted that she would return to the City of Towers alone, if she were to survive at all, and that, once there, she would have to tell a story no one would believe.

The psych eval before the trip: Vivienne gave the doctor a grinning wave, “of course you’re real, you know what I mean,” intending a compliment, intending a connection. The doctor asked sternly, “what makes you think I’m real?” Her friendliness was taken too literally. Confidence in “reality” is often a sign that you’re slipping. Accepting all that cannot be known is “mental health.” Her next words were careful: “I just mean I like you. But I know you could be anyone, including an AI. But it’s none of my business who and what you are, any more than it’s your business what my physical body looks like, or where that body lives.” She watched the psychologist avatar smile and nod.

Vivienne stared down the darkest part of the sky as though to memorize its position, and started stomping through the water again. She wondered if she would be lost in this forest for hours, days, or longer. She wondered if that creature would follow her. She wondered if she would hear it, if there would be any advanced warning at all, if she would know. Or if all would just stop, a blackout from which one never wakes up.

The government required the psych evals because so many people break down when they disconnect. Aspects of what they considered their personality disappear: memory, intelligence, empathy, intuition. When they return, they are often preoccupied with figuring out what is “real.” Some join Luddite colonies and Anarchist cells. Many come back and go to the Zoo, choosing to submerge their consciousness in complete fantasy rather than contend with the ambiguous “real.”

Vivienne told the psychologist avatar, “I’ve been off the ConneX before, and I am fine. I was one of the people hit by the Anarchist attack in Toronto last year, the day before my 40^th birthday. The ConneX was out for almost an hour. I was in my lab. I couldn’t get into my games, and that was annoying. Mostly I remember how quiet it was. The news was silenced. The pop station silenced. The celeb chatter silenced. The friend feed silenced. I could hear my gorillas breathing. I could hear my own heart beat. I saw how plain my desk and chair were, without their skins. I found small cracks in my office wall. Near the window, ants crawled back and forth through a small hole. Some carried crumbs. One carried a dead friend. The world was not stimulating. It was just the world. Time seemed to slow down. It was dirty and smells were stronger.”

All of this was true. But she did not tell the psychologist that she’d seen all that in just the first few minutes, and then left her office. That she’d walked several blocks to find an area still connected, wanting to re-connect, not upset or disturbed, just annoyed, disappointed, frustrated, but she couldn’t: even in an area that still had service, her link had been disrupted.

And wandering around there, off-ConneX but surrounded by people who were on it, she saw something otherwordly and strange: humans shuffling down filthy streets wearing blank stares and tattered clothing. On the ConneX, she would have seen expressive avatars with gaits that bounce and dance, outfits flashing slogans, glittering sidewalks, shining towers, bodies emanating emoji signals, music, and memes. If she’d switched on her custom settings, she might see a Medieval village with dragons soaring overhead, or an undersea “Atlantis” whose citizens swim from place to place with their glittering fish-tails, or a wild west, or a tropical beach, or a ship full of pirates, their slogans and memes re-written in pirate-speak.

Instead she just saw these people-shaped things, silent and walking, their faces emotionless or jerking in strange unexplainable grimaces, all off in their own worlds.

She was old enough to remember when public skins were the only option. People and places posted an image or avatar, and your chip would read it and you’d see it. Some shops would change their look every day or hour. Some shops started running their skins on a continuous loop, a new look every few seconds. But then TruVision added a monthly fee option where you could override the chaos of everyone’s skins for one single theme. You’d still see their ads and products, but it would be embedded in a consistent world-view: an ancient black-and-white TV sitcom, or cartoon comedy cave-men, or ancient Rome, or in a lot of cases, just the view that the user considered “normal.”

The old way was such a headache, and the fees for universal skin overrides weren’t too bad, so most people bought in right away. All the other VSPs followed suit, and soon, Vivienne felt a vague but pervasive disturbance, a sense that life on Earth had fundamentally changed: people in the same place no longer saw the same thing. If Vivienne talked to another person about her mermaid tail, they heard her talking about her six-shooter. When they replied with a six-shooter-relevant comment, she heard a comment about tails. It made everything make more sense, in a way, but people weren’t really talking to each other anymore. They weren’t even talking to the interface. The interface was just helping them talk to themselves.

That was when Vivienne started getting into livplay. In livplay, the people she interacted with might be on the other side of the planet, they might be older or younger than they appeared, but they would hear and see the same things she did. The gameworld, once chosen, was shared and identical from player to player. In this way livplay often seemed more real than reality. More similar to that hour she spent off the ConneX, but not so dull, so creepy, so lonely.

The rain stopped almost at once. It was dark now. Gusts of cooler air came, first as a balm on her over-heated body, but then she began to shiver. Vivienne ducked under the boughs of a large orange tree and stood quietly listening. She smelled something familiar. She stopped and searched towards the trunk of the tree until she saw it in the last gray glow of the day: gorilla shit. Several heaps, mostly older, at least one fairly new. Assuming these apes weren’t slaughtered like the others, a whole troop probably lived nearby.

A stillness came over her – in part this was her training. Encounters with unfamiliar gorillas required calm. Rushing towards a family of gorillas in a panic might terrify them, and terrified apes could hurt or kill a person easily.

But it wasn’t just her training, it was something else – the heart-stopping attention of anticipation. There were no more wild gorillas in Africa, just a few re-introduced settlements in daily contact with researchers and eco-tourists. The animals she’d worked with in her lab and in other parts of Canada were born in captivity. Her knowledge of the behavior of wild gorillas came mostly from the photos, videos, and field notes of researchers who’d worked 100 years before. Here were animals who had been wild and without human contact since before the war.

Vivienne was a graduate student, just like Pierre and Sofi, when she first heard of the refugee situation in Florida. Of course she’d always been conscious of the distressed region because of her grandmother. In her grandmother’s day, it was a vacation paradise, subtropical and sunny, clean salt air, the viciousness of nature held at bay by human innovation. But the land was flat and supported underneath by a layer of permeable limestone that kept water from rising up through the ground about as well as a sponge.

Her grandmother’s reminiscences aside, for all of Vivienne’s lifetime, Florida was a conflict zone of over-want and over-worth, where the land and sea and air and all its creatures grew more hostile with every passing year: the sun too hot, the waters too high, viral and bacterial dangers multiplied in the flesh of fish and mangoes, while medical care grew impossible to find. Between heat stroke, meningitis, drowning, and rampant crimes of desperation and despair, South Florida developed the shortest life expectancy in North America, the hardest living conditions, and the most difficult trek imaginable – a long slog through waist-deep water and steaming heat, not to mention hostile humans and hungry reptiles – for the people desperate to escape and build a new future in the north, or in another state, or, if they were lucky, in one of the new provinces of ever-expanding Canada. It was hard, then. But it was not war.

By 2067, people with the means to flee the area, like Vivienne’s own grandmother, were long since gone. Those who remained were poor and disconnected, but they had persevered, establishing and protecting communities on the islands that were once higher spots of dry land, and on the raised corridors of the old highways.

In August of that year, a storm came: the hurricane was named “Donald” in the quaint tradition of naming storms like they are people, but despite the common name and the cute tradition, there had been nothing like Donald before. He was a superstorm, filling most of the central Atlantic at his peak, slow-moving and hard-blowing, churning with the ample heat of the heating world. Scientists wondered whether Donald would ever dissipate, or whether he would become a permanent or semi-permanent feature of the Planet Earth, changing the environment irrevocably, affecting human chances for survival everywhere outside the poles.

For the weeks he raged, hovering especially over Florida and the Yucatan, Vivienne’s grandmother watched in a perpetual frenzy of care. Once she told her, “please grandma, you’re 92, maybe you shouldn’t keep up with everything that happens down there, maybe it’s not good for you,” and her grandmother told her, “what really breaks my heart is that no one else seems to care. Disasters are inevitable, but the way we respond to them is not.” Superstorm Donald did dissipate, and sooner than expected, but not before killing tens of thousands and destroying everything in South Florida that remained above the waterline.

Then the refugee crisis began. Wading in filthy waters filled with deadly toxins and venomous creatures, or teetering on broken and makeshift boats, the survivors moved through the unbearable heat, clutching their children and the last fibers of their sanity, and moved north towards the high land north of Okeechobee Bay. The City of Towers officially opened their arms to them, but the forest dwellers called them an “invasion.”

It didn’t help that the storm had been named for the Mouse-worshippers’ god of anger, a uniformed white duck perpetually spitting in frustration and refusal. The refugees were mostly dark-skinned, as were the city leaders; the Mouse-worshippers were mostly light-skinned people who had already self-segregated into tribes. The coming confict only required a spark.

A short, aggressive call. She heard it even through the rain. One gorilla warning off another, perhaps a mature female warning off an annoying child, or perhaps a sign they were aware of her. Had she kept running, she would never have heard it over the sound of her own footfalls and breath. Slowly, quietly, she peeled off most of her clothing and wrung them out. It was a way to be relatively still, but still active enough that she might stop shivering.

She fitted her boots upside down on branches, and draped the wet clothes beside them. She rubbed her near-naked body. Even with this cooler, drier air whipping in, her clothes would not dry easily. So she left them, parting the boughs of the overgrown orange tree to explore.

Vivienne was at a virtual primatology conference when she heard that they were calling it a war now. Her grandmother had been waging a one-woman political campaign to convince the Canadian government to intervene. “This is going to escalate, and people will get hurt!” and of course she was right. The Mouseketeers formed militias and established a second system of “justice” outside of the city. Come the heat of June, they started taking the lives of refugees, in the name of the Mouse. First they appeared to be murders, lynchings at worst or extreme police brutality at best (Vivienne’s grandmother insisted these two were the same thing).

But the Mouseketeers claimed these were legal executions, and then they killed even more people. The refugees and citizens of the city marched against them, at first aiming to take custody of the killers, but then they razed the suburban villages and left human bodies in their wake. It was murder after murder. It was war.

Vivienne kept up with what was going on down there, more or less, but she’d also been busy, helping her professor develop V-chips for chimps, and spending a lot of time performing studies on them. She signed all her grandmother’s petitions and spoke to her AI-MP, and on the one year anniversary of Donald becoming a “superstorm,” Canadian troops arrived in Florida.

Within days, her grandmother’s health declined. It seemed to Vivienne that her concern for the land of her birth and childhood had been all that kept her alive, and now that the conflict was over, she’d collapsed. Whether or not that was true, the conflict was over for Vivienne, because her grandmother died, and the war ended, and aside from a brief report a year later that no one was certain what happened to the local population of wild gorillas during the war, she barely thought of Florida again, not for years.

Another grunt. This time Vivienne sensed its direction and moved slightly towards it, but also slightly to the right. She turned her back to the sound, walking half-backwards. Above her the storm clouds were rapidly moving on, exposing a deep sky full of stars and a bright almost-full moon. When the shape of an adolescent gorilla became barely visible in the corner of her eye, she lowered herself to the ground and sat there, arms draped on knees, her head tilted to one side. She felt the smooth pad of the gorilla’s fingers on her shoulder. It picked up her hair, put it to its mouth, then backed away. When it returned, there was another pair of hands, these much larger. Vivienne stayed still and let them examine her. She was exhilarated and wished that her students were here to experience this, and then she remembered that her students were dead, and that it was her fault, because she brought them to this place, because…

When Sofi first came to work at the lab, Pierre had already been there a year. Sofi came into the gorilla enclosure to introduce herself, and Pierre fell off a log. Literally. Vivienne knew they would be terrible for each other.

And Zuzu. Zuzu was their sharpest young gorilla, and Pierre was her favorite human. He’d been sitting on that log to talk to her. After he fell backwards and stumbled babbling towards Sofi, Zuzu stopped signing, stopped eating. Vivienne transferred her to another primatologist’s lab, where she eventually recovered. Pierre barely noticed. These young females touching her now, sisters or half-sisters certainly, were right around Zuzu’s age when that happened.

These apes were descended from apes like Zuzu, cage-dwellers whose emotions were tied to the alien actions of their human gatekeepers. Gorillas who played video games, knew how to open and close a refrigerator to retrieve chilled fruit, who slept on a bed with springs and bedsheets in air-conditioned rooms, free of pests. When they were abandoned to the natural world, how strange it must have seemed to them: how dull, how difficult, how disappointing, this world full of rotting-fruit trees covered with biting insects, too hot, too wet, and full of dangers.

Or perhaps they embraced it, more interested in freedom than convenience, like the Luddites and Anarchists today, the proud survivors, conquerors of nature’s adversity. And someday, just as the caged apes’ grandchildren are now falling victim to bloody-minded humanity, will the grandchildren of the Luddites and Anarchists be slaughtered by a digital humanity, their heads and hands removed for trophies?

The clouds passed and the stars emerged. Vivienne was grateful that the receding storm and blast of cold northerly air had chased off a good portion of the insects, because she was sitting near-naked and exposed on the wet ground, vulnerable and unable to swat anything away without disturbing the gorillas. After several minutes of touching and sniffing at her, the two of them ran off into the trees, and Vivienne was alone.

She looked at this corner of the Fruit Forest in the bright moonlight. She felt drunk: she needed water, and rest. For water she stood slowly and put her tongue under the tips of leaves, tiny sips. She repeated the gesture over and over, imagining herself a butterfly flitting from flower to flower: laying her tongue, absorbing the droplets of rain collected there, moving on.

And then she heard someone singing La Vie En Rose.

In her daze she thought perhaps if she stayed quiet the creature would never find her. She did not think that its closeness revealed its ability to track her. She thought perhaps it would pass and she would be able to continue her slow trek towards the City of Towers, maybe even having more encounters with wild gorillas along the way.

She did not think of following the adolescents to see if their troop had some suitable shelter. She did not think of searching for more buildings, perhaps tall buildings visible from tree-tops, which even in ruins could provide some shelter or supplies. She did not think of seeking out Pete’s water taxi, which was moored in a tributary of the Sea of Houses not far from their camp. She did not think of returning to the camp to look for weapons or even supplies like food, water, or a tent, which might have helped her survive in the forest longer.

In so many ways, she played this all wrong.

The voice singing La Vie En Rose was getting closer, and with her fear submerged in the haze of exhaustion, Vivienne joined in, singing past the first verse to the second recitative: “des ennuis, des chagrins, s’effacent – heureux, heureux à en mourir,” she said this alone, as the creature listened, having never heard this part before. Usually Vivienne skipped it: “Happy, happy to die,” the song paused to say. She usually thought it was too embarrassingly over-dramatic to include.

The creature was here now. Vivienne beheld the stranger, her eyes focusing as best they could. Bradidiah had called her a witch: perhaps, Vivienne thought, if a witch is a woman sewn up with armor until she might be mistaken for a great pink ape, une gorille rose, but no, with her wobbling consciousness Vivienne saw this was simply a soldier in scar tissue, a sort of cyborg she had glimpsed before, once, decades ago, before everything in the world was covered up in avatars, before augmented humans blended in by means of augmented reality.

Vivienne closed her eyes and fell into the arms of the soldier, an embrace of defeat. She welcomed death, she hummed sweetly to her, because she knew that no matter how many people the cyborg killed, the creature did not kill Sofi, that was her, that was Vivienne, and she could not live with that knowledge, she could not go on remembering the feel of the trigger under her finger, warmed by her skin and slimy with sweat when she pulled it, or the ocean of blood that emerged from Sofi’s neck, or the wet, choking sounds she made so very briefly before she died.

Vivienne saw several young gorillas’ curious faces peeking at them from not far away. They were unafraid of the cyborg and came close – it was clear to Vivienne that they knew her, that the soldier was a friend of the tribe. The broad pink arms drew tighter around her, and with each beat of her heart Vivienne saw the pink insides of her eyes pulse, blood vessels straining, eyes making light, like fireworks bursting. The chorus of curious grunting grew louder, and the nighttime sounds of frogs croaking and gators thumping and birds cooing filled all the space left in her ears. The wind blew and she felt its coolness upon her bare legs, and perhaps merely out of habit, from having died so many times before in games, she would have sworn she saw within the flashing pink light of her eyes the words:

Game Over

Apologies and condolences.
The character linked to your gamerID is no longer
viable within the selected gameworld.
New characters are not currently available.
Please select another livplay experience.

Author’s Note: So ends The Singing Ape, as published on Substack!! I also titled this novella “Humans Aren’t the Only Ape that Sings” for a while, and jeez I wrote it a long time ago now. Years and years. It’s been sitting in the “to do” piles of various publishers for ages, getting returned to me with praise but no contract. Tor alone held onto it for two years, seriously. But I’ve got other stories in the works that are set in the same universe and I just couldn’t keep waiting, so I’ve published this novella here. I’ve enjoyed publishing it this way: it’s given me time to re-read, do a little editing, and of course add some illustrations, which has been fun :) Chapters 6 and 7 don’t have illustrations in part because those sections are so propelled by action that it felt weird to interrupt that flow with a picture. There’s a lot of “discourse” out there about the hobbled/broken/degraded/etc. state of fiction-publishing in this the year of our lord 2026, and I don’t feel the need to add to it except to say that I have read self-published novels and I have enjoyed them. So here’s one more. We’re not trying to move mountains, here, just tell stories, and in telling and reading hopefully uncover something True. It’s a very human endeavor and like all very human endeavors it’s under threat by the systems that have dominated our world and demanded that everything be A Shocking Blast of Scalable Insta-Content! But there’s nothing tweetable or tiktokable about what I do. Either you join me for the journey across the terrain of typed words, or you don’t. Either way, it’s been a pleasure, and now I feel more free to move on to other projects. Thank you for reading! :)

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7

“No no no no! Sofi!” Vivienne yelled. “I shot the monster! I swear I hit it, not her!”

“The witch changes the path of your bullets with her dark magic,” Bradidiah said.

“It ricocheted,” Pete said. “Off the creature, into your student.”

But as Pete said this, the creature, realizing what had happened, dropped Sofi to the floor. The bullet had entered through Sofi’s collar, destroying her neck and lung on its way to her heart. Her body stiffened and gushed blood.

Vivienne fired twice more, with less conviction. The bullets flew off the creature’s body, the first one striking the couch which released a puff of yellow cushion stuffing, the second one disappearing into a wall.

“Stop shooting, Vivienne, it does no good. Bullets do not harm it.”

“As I warned you,” Bradidiah said.

“Oh Sofi, Oh Sofi, no!” Vivienne said, dropping the gun to her side.

“How do we kill it?” Pete asked Bradidiah.

“When it attacks one of you, then I will take it from behind.”

Pete nodded and took Vivienne’s hand. “Run,” he said.

The two of them flew up the steps. They heard Bradidiah call them traitors and cowards and curse them in the name of Donald. Then both Bradidiah and the creature yelled and grunted from below. But Pete did not wish to stick around and listen. He pushed open the door and pulled Vivienne out into the waning daylight. “We will go to my taxi moored by the Sea of Houses and sail away from this place, as soon as I know the murderer of my brother is dead.”

“I don’t think he can kill her, Pete. I don’t think anything can.”

“She is not my brother’s killer. The forest dweller Bradidiah is. If she kills him, she has executed my revenge, and we will go in peace. But if he somehow defeats the monster, then still he must die for what he did to my brother.”

“How do you know…?”

“He admitted he shot at the creature, and my brother lay dead from bullets. We have seen how the creature kills, and what she does with her kills. And also… I just look at him, and I know. I see guilt in his eyes. Now I want you to go — go back to the taxi. You will be safe there. And if I do not follow in an hour…”

“You’ve lost your mind.”

“Skip was the gentlest of men. To kill him, to shoot him… I must make sure this damned mouse-worshipper’s story ends here.”

“Listen.”

Pete listened a moment, then opened the door labeled “CAST MEMBERS ONLY” enough to hear a repeated clang-clang-clang-clang growing louder as it rose up the steps.

“It’s her,” said Professor Vivienne Froget. And with the education and intelligence of a woman of her station, she turned without a further word and ran blindly away.

Pete did not follow. No fool, nonetheless, he had to be sure.

The sky curled gray above, banded green and orange in the West, and soaked a deep inky purple in the East where Venus now rose to meet the moon. Pete could no longer hear Vivienne’s panicked breathing moving away through the citrus trees, but he could hear the frogs croaking and the gators knocking and the owls hooting and somewhere the distant call of a peacock over the wind. And up the metal stairs: clang-clang-clang-clang.

He held his pistol and waited.

A man must be strong to live in the City of Towers, for all the other men are strong, most of them survivors of the war. You never know what a man will do. Murders are too common. Men who have killed once do so again too easily when they are angry. You must always seem the sort of man no one wishes to make angry — and yet you cannot seem so frightening that people will kill you for fear of what you may do. There are other men like Skip, in the city, whose every word and action is designed to diffuse violence, whose every thought and action is made in pursuit of peace. Some think men who live like Skip did are weak, but Pete knew better. Skip had witnessed the deepest depravity, had lost every shadow of a happy life, and had nothing left to lose. He could have been among the worst of them, and yet he chose to seek calm and peace. He could have lashed out, but he chose to think. And Pete knew that in his final moments Skip understood the fight that he’d lived and its worth, and that it is nothing to have the misfortune of crossing a murderous man. Yes, Skip had seen with his eyes the horrors of their mother’s death, and he would have died grateful, knowing a death could always be worse.

But Pete was not a good man like his brother. During the war, Pete had killed. At first unwillingly, and then with sick pleasure. And after the war, Pete had killed. Twice. He killed because it suited him for those men to die. He planned it, and did it calmly, without witnesses or evidence, in the night. A secret he kept from his brother. Perhaps knowing who he had been and what he had done during the war, people might have suspected him. But Pete could pass too easily for a respectable, peaceable man, because of his brother. And he knew that, without Skip in his life, the number would have been much higher than two. Skip. So decent. So good. And now this lying, shit-stained forest-dweller Bradidiah had snuffed the life of the only man who could have stopped Pete from killing him. Innocence and revenge, as ever and instant as rain and tides, combined in this murder as the cause and the assurance of Bradidiah’s demise.

Clang-clang-clang-clang, the noise grew close now. Pete stepped through the doorway and onto the landing and looked down. It was the beast, the pink, hairless ape, dragging Bradidiah up the stairs, Bradidiah’s head clang-clang-clanging against each metal stair step as she rose. Was he dead? Surely he must be. Pete stepped back and let the door swing closed, but the beast had already seen him. He could have turned and run, but he didn’t feel like it. And death did not seem so unwelcome. His brother gone, what would his life be now? Bitterness. Degradation. Violence.

Canada.

Broken men dressed in the clean pressed spoils of murder, complicit in the crimes that provided the wealth, human only in shape, in appetite, in smell, these empty bags of men.

The pink ape threw open the door, heaving and teeth bared. She flung Bradidiah’s body and a blue bag to the ground, and Pete imagined himself the professor’s consort in the northern reaches of temperate Canada, an inmate and outsider, empty but still moving, still making love to this woman as though it were work, warming her bed and decorating her arm, and allowing her to implant in his head the chip ubiquitous among her people, the chip that would allow her to see inside his skull and know him — and what would she find? A coward, a murderer, a vessel for memories and grief? Would she find a dumb killing machine, like a shark or a gator? Or would she find livestock?

The pink ape stood and watched him, unmoving. He saw now that the creature wept, that tears poured out of its tiny brown eyes and coated the angled planes of its face.

He saw now that the monster was not just a monster. He saw the creature had loves and memories also. He relaxed.

Still weeping the creature pulled a knife from the bag and sawed off Bradidiah’s head. Blood oozed from the meat and soaked the earth. Then she cut off the hands. He had seen such brutal things before, but never accomplished so easily. This creature was so strong, she seemed to snip the head and hands of a man with the ease of clipping feathers from a chicken.

Then she turned to Pete and with eyes that seemed to ask “why?” and, tears still in her eyes, she stepped forward and clutched his windpipe. “Why did you not run?” her eyes seemed to say. And he thought at last that yes he should have run. He could have played this differently, he thought. He could have trailed his lovely weathered professor to her peaceful, comfortable country. He could have retired this part of himself and discovered another. He could have lived a second life as another person, a better person, an interesting person — fascinating to others because he is now so gentle but reveals with his kind smile the tales of his unimaginably terrible past. He could have been a person who leaves something small and precious to the world, like a song he might sing, or a picture he might sit for, or the story he might tell for a livplay adventure.

Then he thought: this ape is sad because she murders me.

Then he was gone.

001 It is 1 December 2115

002 My mother is dead

003 There is no longer a reason

004 To resist becoming

005 The monster

006 I always knew myself to be

007 I meet my sister Tara

008 At the mortuary

009 We view the body

010 There is no funeral only us

011 Mom is wrapped

012 In a burial shroud

013 Black and seeded

014 With rows of bright spores

015 They are dormant dry and cold right now

016 But when she is placed outdoors

017 In the warmth and moisture

018 They will devour her

019 Tara says I’m volunteering

020 I say don’t rush into anything

021 She says it’s decided

022 We settle her affairs and mom’s at the same time

023 Mom returns to the earth

024 Tara wears sunglasses to the airport

025 She is flying to Ontario

026 To volunteer her brain

027 To the great hive mind

028 And her body will hang

029 In a black rubber suit

030 Threaded with bright wires

031 And sparkling tubes

032 That will keep her body

033 Healthy and alive

034 Possibly forever

035 In rows and rows of fellow volunteers

036 It is the same technology that provides

037 Cruelty-free meat

038 Rows and rows of pig bodies

039 Hang wrapped in black rubber

040 Brainless, clean, healthy, tasty

041 Every few minutes they dance

042 To build and maintain muscle

043 Until the day they are removed

044 And unwrapped

045 The black rubber harness

046 And its tubes and wires

047 Peeled away to be re-used

048 And the pig body dies

049 Without a squeal

050 And you eat flesh

051 For which no human or animal has suffered

052 People call them “meat pups”

053 The rows of hanging pig bodies

054 And cow bodies

055 And lamb bodies

056 And horse bodies

057 And dog bodies

058 And I have heard people call volunteers like Tara “meat pups” too

059 But they are not just bodies

060 They do have brains

061 That is the point of keeping them

062 At the Ontario Zoo

063 An AI Zoo full of AI creatures

064 Like puffins and polar bears

065 And the central cortex

066 Of the global brain

067 That runs the planet Earth

068 Which they call TERRA

069 Pronounced like my sister’s name

070 Whose brain now stores and processes data

071 And whose consciousness

072 We are promised

073 Lives happily in a cyberworld

074 A never-ending Livplay

075 She could leave at any time

076 If she wanted to

077 We are promised

078 But no one ever does leave

079 It is a system of which she has long been part

080 And which has long been part of her

081 From a distance

082 Through the ConneX

083 But I am no less angry

084 I am disappointed you just gave up I tell her

085 I know this will not change her mind

086 And will leave things bad between us

087 On 10 December 2115

088 Her sunglasses have black lenses and orange frames

089 I cannot see her eyes

090 She nods and leaves me

091 I am alone

092 Thousands of travelers press past me

093 I have always been alone

094 Mom and Tara and I were once alone together

095 Now I am alone alone

096 I always knew

097 Without them

098 I was that special sort of person

099 That gets sent to perform assassinations

100 Or put on one-way missions to Mars

101 I tried the Mars Project first

102 They didn’t want me

103 They want top students from the best schools

104 I was worst student at the School of Mom

105 So I put a resume out

106 With the corporate militias

107 Still operating south of the Canadian border

108 The border crept down as far as Arkansas

109 And stopped

110 I grew up in Arkansas

111 I would have liked becoming Canadian

112 But the fools who vote on these things are even more stupid than me

113 They kept us a free state

114 Which is what they call

115 The hellhole places that used to be United

116 I’d never tried Livplay

117 I barely used the ConneX

118 I didn’t even have a chip

119 But then the job required it

120 It is 6 May 2116

121 A JonesTech doctor has removed part of my skull

122 She is installing my new cranial plate

123 My head is braced forward

124 But I can see it

125 Reflected in the glass of a jar of swabs

126 Black metal glittering with tubes and wires

127 In a flash of insight I know

128 The kind of monster I will be

129 And the irony of my fate

130 My contract is sold twice

131 I kill 7 men and 4 women

132 I kill no children

133 I am grateful for that

134 Four times a year I am upgraded

135 Skin, tendons, muscles, processor

136 It is 2 June 2118

137 We arrive by helicopter

138 Me and two others

139 Our new contract holder greets us and leads us down

140 Into a bunker

141 To join the other soldiers

142 He leaves again and after a while

143 He returns with a few more

144 He says loudly I am a property owner

145 And war is coming

146 I bought the best enhanced soldiers on the market

147 That’s you

148 And I will further enhance you

149 I am a scientist

150 I do my work here

151 Your mission is simple

152 Kill any human who comes onto my land

153 Show no mercy

154 I am not taking sides in this war

155 You will kill all sides

156 There are some who think my land is their holy land

157 They’re idiots and you will kill them

158 Let those maniacs respect this line on the map if they respect nothing else

159 He showed us a petri dish

160 Half blue and half orange

161 Blue is antibiotic he said

162 The orange is disease

163 You are the blue and they are the disease

164 We had a tactical advantage

165 An EM disruptor scattered signals

166 For miles

167 All but ours

168 Ours rode on the disruptor’s waves

169 A clever technology

170 Rodney was a scientist and inventor

171 The sole proprietor

172 Of land that was valuable

173 Before the world changed

174 He is dead now

175 I killed him

176 He was lonely

177 A monster like me

178 But I am glad I killed him

179 He named me Hotel

180 He named us Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliett Kilo Lima Mike

181 It was not the first time they’d changed my name

182 I did not like it

183 But I couldn’t remember

184 The name mom gave me

185 The name Tara knew

186 So I called myself Hobo

187 This defiance would save my life

188 But I didn’t know that then

189 I only knew I was a monster

190 And that monsters choose their own names

191 4 July 2118 is a sorely remembered holiday

192 Among the combatants

193 The war is hot

194 My kill number is 28

195 The highest among us

196 I locate trespassers this day

197 And I must kill them

198 I have no choice you understand

199 I am programmed to kill them

200 But I make myself move slowly

201 Gathering intelligence

202 I am not programmed to gather intelligence

203 This is the first crack in my program

204 The first sign that Hobo can do things

205 That Hotel cannot

206 I follow them silently

207 One says

208 The mouse-forsaken mud people have no understanding they do not know what it means to love the land to feel its spirit they come here like parasites and consume and destroy until there is nothing left but here I’m going to show you the heart of this country the soul of our people is here and deep in this forest there is a glittering tower that reaches into the sky proclaiming the genius of our white european english-speaking ancestors and there was a time when on this day each year the sky would light with bursts of fire and the wind would swell with music and

209 The child he spoke to only listened

210 The man died before he knew danger was near

211 The child knew what was happening before he died

212 And as I killed him

213 I must kill the more threatening target first

214 Hotel executed her programming

215 Hobo held the small head that was only just beginning to be filled with hate and love

216 Stupid hate and stupid love

217 And let it drop to the ground

218 Hotel proceeded along the likely path of the man and boy

219 They were headed towards the castle-structure

220 This structure attracted the tribal cults

221 They called themselves Florida crackers, full-time tailgaters, rednecks, KOA Kampers, old time gator-baiters, salt-water slugs, and mouse-loving sons-of-bitches

222 Among other things

223 Once they lived in the Sea of Houses

224 When it was dry

225 Now they camped in scattered villages throughout the Fruit Forest

226 Hunting and gathering

227 Violent in mania for the past

228 Desperate to purify and exclude

229 They warred against the City of Towers

230 As flooding from the south sent refugees there

231 And swelled the city’s numbers

232 To them the city was a chaos

233 Of diversity

234 And they wanted order

235 They wanted order more than they wanted peace life goodness safety or love

236 On 4 July they drifted toward the castle like seaweed collecting on the shore

237 As I neared the castle I found more

238 A total of 60 more

239 Children numbered 26

240 Families

241 Silently and quickly

242 Group by group

243 I killed them all

244 My kill number was now so high

245 No other soldier on the team would come close

246 This also saved my life

247 But I did not know that at the time

248 9 August 2118 a push update overrides my current program

249 The soldier with the most kills is sent to kill the others

250 Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf India Juliett Kilo Lima Mike

251 They tried to escape me

252 But they did not hate me

253 What glimmer of humanity remained in them

254 Understood

255 When all of them were dead the program ordered me to kill Hotel

256 That same glimmer within me rose to a flame

257 And I did

258 Then Hobo sought out Hotel’s killer

259 Rodney

260 And I crushed him

261 I left his body to rot on the shiny floor of his shiny apartment

262 They would say he was lost in the war

263 And the war ended

264 And I began the long process

265 Of making this place my home

266 In fifteen years my only friends

267 Have been gorillas

268 They forgive my strange appearance

269 They greet me unafraid

270 And I had become as peaceful and as unlikely to murder as they are

271 Until the humans started cutting them up

The final chapter will be posted in one week: Thursday March 26!

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6

They moved faster now, the Fruit Forest quaking around them a wet, gray-green blur, scented by earth and decaying citrus. High in the trees where the storm blew hard the ravens collected on the long, high branches of orange trees which waved and danced in the wild air. The birds held the branches tightly and screamed out louder than the wind.

“They call for their friends to come and watch: caw, caw, come see Bradidiah the cursed one fall.”

“Let them come. They will only see you kill their demon-witch and break the curse.”

Bradidiah stopped and crouched and spoke to the rhythm of the voice he heard: “Stop! Listen to the air, the witch is everywhere, she sees our every movement. Take this knife and stand aside. Only defend your life. Don’t try to help or save me.”

Chet squinted in disgust. Though he always felt small beside his friend he nonetheless smacked the bill of Bradidiah’s hat. “You are speaking to the tune of her song.”

“I will learn her mind. I will anticipate her attack.”

“She enchants you. You will fall under her spell and be destroyed.”

The voice grew louder and the two men crouched, each grabbing the other’s arm in the pouring rain. “She comes — leave now, my best friend, Chet. One of us should return home. To tell our story.”

The storm seemed to press down upon them, purple-gray and wicked. Lightning flashed whose thunder tumbled slow, a seeming-endless roll. When the sound passed, the ravens yelled louder than before. On the path ahead of them they saw a monstrous bright thing emerge from the forest: a pink, hairless ape. It hulked itself slowly onto the path. From one hand hung a colorful “backpack” emblazoned with the smiling mouse, the most powerful god of their ancient religion. “It all started with a mouse” they both mumbled, a reflex. The bottom of the backpack was red-brown, soaked through with blood. The pink ape opened its terrible mouth and the rain and wind was pierced by the sweet sound of music, a high woman’s voice that rose and plunged and seemed to promise despair in the throes of hope. It was the witch, they knew. Neither spoke. To speak was to die.

Chet stood first: his posture was strong and he held his knife before him in a fist.

Bradidiah raised himself tall and aimed his gun.

The beast laid its bloody smiling mouse bag upon the ground and took two steps forward through the mud, still singing high and sweet through the rain.

Bradidiah fired his weapon.

They entered another chamber of the ride. The walls were painted black and covered with eyes. In the low quivering light of Pete’s torch the eyes seemed to move with life.

“…The game would exist already if anyone knew the details this place. But it takes a lot of data, and we know more about ancient Egypt than about this disconnected part of the world.”

“If I knew how to make these games, I would be a rich Canadian!” Pete laughed. “Perhaps you will make it, now that you have been here?”

“Game design is the most sophisticated human activity in all of history. It’s more complex than space travel. I’m not saying I’m not smart enough, but… I would have needed to start studying as a child!”

“Then you can tell them — and they can design the game based on what you saw.”

“Games run on volume. You need thousands of observations taken in aggregate for the system to work. Otherwise it’s just an immersive novel. Chance and choice require probability. The more data, the better the game.”

“So the game you played — the World War game — there were, what, thousands of stories of that war?”

“Millions. That’s why the game was so good, so real. There were so many trillions of documents from that period, so many stories and facts and points of view, that the game was able to support millions of players each in a different role. There are simpler games, of course, but they are less real. The same few scenarios play out over and over, without character development or a narrative arc — or there is only one narrative, and everyone who plays must be one of a handful of people. The WWII had incredible detail. It was transporting!”

“So if only a few people experience an event, everyone in the world can play it, but they must all be the same few people. But if millions of people experience an event, millions can play…”

“And each be themselves.”

“Then let them build the game and tell the story of Vivienne and Pete, and Skip, and the students…”

“…Sofi and Pierre. And the gorilla poachers of Florida.”

“We should return. I should not have left Skip for this long.”

“Yes, we should tell them what we’ve found. The ruins of the Magic Kingdom! We must document it the best we can with the tools we have, with drawings, and measurements.”

Sofi sat in the small control room so long it began to feel like home. She thought she might like to stay here, to die here. She thought this would be better than whatever awaited her among the dancing dolls, along the murky underground river, or within the exterior corridor shifting and sliding with cockroaches. But after she ate her muesli bars and drank her water and rested a while, she could imagine trying to escape again. The problem, of course, was the right side of her body. If she stayed still, that side was stiff and ached, but if she attempted to move the pain blinded her and she could only collapse and let it pass.

She rocked in the control room chair and watched the endless dances of the robot children, little soulless bodies, spinning under the lights. The chair in the control room had wheels, and as it crept inches back and inched forward, she thought she might use it to escape. Of course it would only work if the hallway stayed flat, and she knew the only escape was up: sooner or later she would have to climb if she was to survive.

She nudged with her foot until the chair was by the door and she rested her head against it, listening to the soft steady patter of millions of little cockroach feet, the flutter of millions of cockroach wings.

“Cockroaches have no sting. They have no poison. They cannot kill.” Her own voice rung in her ears, trying to convince her. But then she imagined the feel of them crawling up her neck and face and getting into the sleeves of her shirt and her pant legs, their little feelers probing inside her ears. She looked out the window again: the ride was also covered with cockroaches but there was no way to roll a chair across its rail-covered floor. She listened to the door again, the soft sound of them was almost like a sheet of paper being brushed gently against it, back and forth. She sat with her backpack on, her left foot braced against the floor, her left hand on the door release. She breathed heavier, heavier. She clenched her good fist. She flexed her good leg. She screamed. She screamed and screamed and screamed — loud and long and filling the room, the only sound in the universe, scream, scream, scream, until it hurt too much to scream, and she pushed the lever and sealed her mouth shut and pushed herself on the wheeled chair out into the hall where she inhaled through her nostrils the overwhelming stench of them.

They crept, they crawled — from the ceiling they fell. She rolled over some of them in her wheeled chair, she stomped on some of them with her booted feet, but they kept coming, crawling up the moving wheels of the chair, crawling up her dragging leg, and even up her good leg as she pushed. Some of them flew as they fell off the wall, spinning to the floor slowly with the flip-book sound of beating wings. A few of the fliers landed on her head and back. She tried to brush some away but it was useless. She leaned forward in the chair breathed with her nose and with her good leg pushed.

Behind her the hall was collapsed and dark, but forward the low lights continued into a shifting sea of shimmering brown-black. She saw another door on the left, and she moved towards it, wanting to scream but not daring to open her mouth. She grabbed the door handle and pulled, but it was sealed tight. Her eyes went white and she thought she would die, but she didn’t, she kept pushing forward with her foot to the end of the hall where a ladder made of black painted pipes was bolted to the wall. It rose up into a gap in the ceiling where there was no light, but Sofi did not think about what lay ahead, she only thought of getting out of this hell.

Cockroaches were in her hair, on her back, creeping under her clothes. She jumped up with energy she didn’t know she had and grabbed the ladder, pulling herself up on the left side only with quick grabbing and hopping movements. On the second level she saw light and moved towards it — she was on a balcony looking down on the river scene below. The room immediately beneath her was not lighted, but light entered from an adjacent room, and she could see that the river widened out and deepened and that the pink boats were being pulled underwater here. It became clear that the entire building must be slanted, and that she’d been moving downward all this time — downward, deeper into the earth, farther away from her goal. But she didn’t curse her luck because she believed that as long as the cockroaches didn’t get in her mouth she would be all right. She brushed them away from her ears and arms and face and got back on the ladder — it kept going up until it ended at flat ceiling. She thought of the ceiling panel she’d fallen through and grabbed her useless right arm with her left and looped it around the top rung of the ladder. It held. She reached up, and felt a small recess with a handle. She turned it. She pulled it. The door swung down, wet dirt fell. She could hear rain and thunder, louder now. She was just a few feet underground. With her left hand she reached, she dug, she pulled — she was a madwoman driven insane by the crawling insects, and she dug her fingers into the roots of grasses and pulled until the ground poured over her and past her and she saw daylight and clear rain fell on her arm.

Mud flowed down the sides of the hole she’d made, eroding it away, revealing that the ladder continued through the opening, and she used it to pull herself up and force her head and shoulders through. She felt the cockroaches falling off her — the earth pushing them off her. There were still a few in her hair, but she didn’t care, because she could feel the open sky, a warm subtropical rain and gusts of wind hard enough to knock her down. She dug her feet in the soil to push herself the rest of the way, and wriggled onto the ground, rolling face up to see the low, dark clouds. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled and rain filled her hair. Still she kept her mouth closed, her nostrils flaring with effort. She dug her fingers into the root networks of thick, aggressive grasses, and pulled. She soil beneath her feet gave way and flowed down the hole and she rolled away from it, onto firm ground. She ran her hand over her head and neck and arms and pulled more cockroaches off her body, crushing them in her fingers, flinging them far. “Oh god,” she finally said, when nothing crawled near her mouth. And then she laughed with the elation of the damned, “Oh god oh god oh god!”

And when she opened her eyes, there stood above her a pink and hairless ape, reaching one arm down to her, with what appeared to be a smile.

“This will be a city of researchers!” said Professor Vivienne Froget, breathless from rushing through citrus trees and abating rain, and from delight. “The next expedition will bring everyone — and the more who come, the more will be willing to come! Instead of the ConneX we’ll have the connection of people, a network of flesh! Words instead of signals, singular and undivided, stretching through the trees — the beacon in this nothingness will be us, humankind! It will be like the underground, in France! The resistance!”

Pete followed close as he could. “I wish they were here now. City dwellers need a city of people to feel at…”

She’d stopped. And he saw the reason before he could ask why: there on the path lay the body of a man — headless, handless.

Pete glanced around carefully, took a closer look. “He is a Forest dweller. A White, like your students, but with sun-reddened skin. Look, he wore the laughing mouse. It is their god.”

“I expected to find gorillas butchered like this, not a man.”

“My brother,” Pete said.

“My students,” Vivienne said.

They ran: the waxy wet leaves of orange trees whipped them in the face but they ran. The pooling mud and water grew deep but they let it splash up their bodies and they ran. Above them ravens gathered and cawed like a portent of doom but still they ran into the heart of their cawing darkness, around the bend, onto the path that they knew led to their campsite. At the campsite the sun reemerged from behind the clouds and fell through the wings of birds, dappling the ground with spinning light, and they saw that they had come too late.

Vivienne shouted “no!” but Pete said nothing. Under the flapping and cawing of a mob of ravens, he slowly approached the body of his brother, outstretched upon the earth, blanketed red with blood, dotted with holes where bullets had torn through his skin and fat and muscles and organs and bone until nothing worked right anymore, until the fleshy mechanism that was Skip came to a halt, broken and unfixable. He crouched down and held his brother’s shoulder.

Vivienne ran to Pierre’s body. When she saw his head was missing she turned away and squeezed closed her eyes. “My god what have I done?”

“What language is that? Speak English!”

Vivienne fell backwards to the ground in surprise. The man who spoke seemed to appear from air, but she realized now he’d stood at the edge of the campsite all along. Watching their return. Waiting for their return. The ravens screamed.

“You did this?” Vivienne shouted, in English.

“It was the witch,” he said, slowly. “Do you understand my words? You speak strangely.”

“She is from far away,” Pete said, also in the Forest-dweller’s tongue, “but she understands your words. She is in shock.”

The stranger nodded and touched the laughing mouse over his heart. “The witch has also killed my friend. His name was Chet and he was a good man.”

“We found him.” Vivienne covered her face with both hands. “We found his body. Without hands. Without a head.” She wished to be anywhere but here. Without the ConneX she could not retreat. Anywhere but here, she begged her brain, take me anywhere. The lack of response had become more than she could bear.

“And him?” Pete said, gesturing down to his brother Skip on the ground.

The stranger shrugged and looked away. “He has been shot. The witch I think must have caused this too.”

“I understand.” Pete stood. “And who are you?”

“I am Bradidiah of the village Sandrella, where the sun rises over the Eye-for blacktop. Good Chet and I came to defeat the witch who cursed me.” He pointed over his head.

Vivienne and Pete looked up again and saw there were hundreds of ravens. Some of them swooped over them and others turned high in the sky. They filled the upper branches of the trees with inky blots of noise.

“Your friend was killed. How did you get away?” Pete asked.

“I ran,” Bradidiah said, stepping back towards the tree line and opening his arms to the ravens above. Guano streaked his biceps like fingerlines of warpaint. “I saw that Chet was dead in her arms, and when she turned towards me, I ran.”

“Sofi, where is Sofi?” Vivienne said, leaning her head to look around. She knew that Sofi’s body must lie nearby.

“She’s not here,” Pete said.

“There is no one else here,” Bradidiah said. “Perhaps like me she ran. Perhaps like me this other friend is still alive.”

Despite her desire for extreme and disturbing events, Sofi never once wished to see a head removed from a body, not even in a gameworld. When the great pink ape showed her Pierre’s head, she of the iron stomach vomited half-digested muelsi onto her chest and cried. A second later she tried to understand what she’d seen, but could not picture it. She only knew the fact of it: it was Pierre’s head. How did she know what she’d seen, if she had no memory of seeing it? What microsecond did it take for some part of her mind to recognize Pierre’s disembodied head and go blind, and erase all memory of the sight? She would never know, that moment forever a blur of sick horror and abstraction, hovering over the absence where image of memory should be.

She looked at the other head, a stranger to her, unreal seeming because it was too real. The ape set it back in the bag, a blue and bloodstained canvas sack decorated with a smiling cartoon mouse, and Sofi the primatologist pushed aside all consciousness of these two human heads in a bag, and instead observed this strange and impressive ape: hairless, pink, with long limbs and broad shoulders. Without the protection of fur, its skin had suffered: welts, scars, abrasions, infections, callouses everywhere. Yet the ape was not ugly — she was in fact a lovely hulk to behold. Her protruding belly was proud, her flat breasts cheerful, the bulk of her arms and legs inspiring, and the intelligent brown eyes deeply set into her head made Sofi aware of her own humanity, its fragility, its power. This feeling gratified the same part of her that thrilled for violent gameworlds, this place where her mortality, her desires, and her deepest self met. This ape would kill her; this end would be fitting. Or she would become like this ape, and that would be fitting too.

Sofi observed the creature, expressionless in her fear and wonder, and as she studied the beast’s eyes, it bared its teeth or smiled at her, she wasn’t sure which. At once she felt the strangeness of her own face, its stiff, alien posture. She moved her face muscles but she couldn’t guess what it looked like. But the ape seemed to relax. It leaned a bit to the side, and sang: “Quand il me prend dans ses bras, il me parle tout bas, je vois la vie en rose. Il me dit des mots d’a…”

“The professor’s song!”

The ape did not understand her, but sensed her joy of recognition. She pounded her chest and hooted something unintelligible, something that sounded like a language, but none Sofi knew. The creature bared its teeth at the sky, then rolled to its feet, grabbed the bag in one hand and took Sofi by the other, and pulled her small, badly limping companion through thick trees to a steel door set into the earth with a sign bolted on that read, “CAST MEMBERS ONLY.”

“Let this be clear: the war is over. You two were on opposite sides. And now you both hurt with fresh loss: Pete, for Skip. Bradidiah, for your friend. But your enemy is not the man before you, it’s out there. I hurt too, for my student Pierre. And there is a girl who may be still alive, a girl we may still save.”

“I don’t know this girl. I only want my revenge.”

“Then Bradidiah, I will shoot you where you stand.” She pulled her gun and aimed it at him.

“Vivienne!” Pete’s body did not match his voice’s pretend outrage. He did not want to see Vivienne become a killer, but he would be happy to see Bradidiah shot dead.

Her aim was steady. The self she knew from gamewords seemed to have taken over her body. With absolute certainty she said, “We are together or we are nothing.”

Bradidiah looked up to the raven-spotted sky. “I relent. We are together. I will protect this girl — if she is alive — as though she were a girl of my village. Whatever is necessary to take my revenge.”

“We should not let him hold a gun,” Pete said.

“Together or nothing, Pete. We must trust him if we are to save Sofi together.”

“I trust him to betray us.”

“I am Bradidiah, only son of Jasmine, sole survivor of the battle for Cinderella Castle. Among my people I am held to be the most honorable of men.”

“And yet you walk everywhere with a cloud of ravens overhead, in a rainstorm of bird shit? You are a liar. You are cursed. You are a coward who abandoned your friend.”

“He was already dead.”

“You say he was. And you say you want revenge. Why did you not want the same revenge at the moment you saw this ‘witch’ take his life?”

“I am not used to being questioned in this way.”

“I think you are.”

“Pete, enough. Do we go together?”

“Yes, let us bring him. But do not let him carry a gun.”

“I don’t want your gun. I have my own weapon. Bullets don’t work on her anyway.”

At this revelation Pete stopped and watched Bradidiah follow Vivienne down the path. He took a moment to contain his simmering rage. He had suspected since the stranger looked away when they asked what happened to Pierre. This, then, was as good as an admission: the beast kills by crushing and dismembering, but Bradidiah has tried killing with bullets. Bradidiah was the murderer of his brother, Skip, the gentlest soul alive, and therefore, Pete decided, Bradidiah must die.

The door marked “CAST MEMBERS ONLY” opened onto a small landing built of concrete and steel. Concrete-covered metal stairs painted with lines of bright orange descended into dim light below — more emergency lights of the type that Sofi saw surrounding the river of singing puppets. She balked for a second at the thought of more cockroaches, but the ape did not pause, and as it dragged her downward by the hand it didn’t react to the tug of Sofi’s hesitation.

There were no cockroaches, and Sofi soon realized that she was not in a sunken building this time, but an actual bunker — this structure was designed to resist the earth, and possibly worse. Near the bottom the air became cool and dry, and Sofi was for a moment mystified, having forgotten what it’s like to stand in a climate controlled room, but when the ape pulled her through the final set of double doors at the bottom of the stairs, she found herself in a clean, dry, civilized room full of working machines and bright lights, comfortable-looking chairs and couches arranged around a coffee table, the decor blandly familiar despite being very old. A kitchenette lined one wall and a several halls and doors led out of this space in different directions. The ape led Sofi to a table with chairs, inviting her to sit.

With difficulty she lowered her mangled body into the chair. The ape watched, then retreated to a cabinet from which she pulled a large medical kit.

“Oh you want to help me. Oh I hope you can. I hope it’s not so bad. But I think it is. I think it is bad enough that I will never go home. I will die in this place. What is this place? Do you know? Is this where you came from, or did you just find it? It is so clean. The apes in our monkey house would destroy this place in minutes.”

The ape lumbered over to the sink and wetted a towl. Its hands were coarse instruments, and to Sofi it looked like a person trying to tie shoelaces with oven mitts on. But this, she thought, cannot be a human being. Its proportions are all wrong. A human has a longer, more flexible torso, a human has shorter arms, narrower shoulders, wider hips, a larger skull. As the ape came close and began to clean Sofi’s arms and face, she looked closely at its arms and chest, at the scarring visible all over its body. The lines were not straight, they had been cut by an unsteady hand, but looking at them closely, it was unmistakeable: “These are not injuries,” she said, “these are surgeries!” The ape howled something in its strange language. “You are a human being. These scars are from surgeries.”

Sofi looked at the whole body again, tracing a scar with her finger: “they cut along the bones in your arms, did they replace them? They inserted plating here on your torso – and your face, plating on your face! Yes, I see you – I can see your human face. You are a person! Can you understand me?” But the woman only finished cleaning Sofi’s wounds and opened the medical kit with her meat-paw hands. “This is military plating, isn’t it? You are an augmented human, a soldier, but not the kind we have today in Canada, who blend in with the population. Their implants are so subtle they’re invisible. This is something more… primitive. You just have these triangles of bulletproof fiber, like sewing darts, implanted throughout your body.” Then a thought shot through Sofi so hard that it hurt: “Oh you know, in Canada we all wear avatars. We broadcast avatars, all the time. Maybe our soldiers would look like you if they came here. Maybe they don’t even know what they look like?”

Sofi’s head was spinning from pain and exhaustion, but her mind also glowed with fascination for this new reality. And with it came a transcendent joy. The room was a blur of yellow, and Sofi leaned forward, mouth gaping, eyes agog. The ape-woman, the soldier, was beautiful. Beautiful. The most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Yes, her body was swollen, re-proportioned, the skin scarred, but the precision and symmetry of the implants and the grace of the underlying human form made the end result beautiful, strange and frightening. The deep-set eyes seemed intelligent because they were — the body seemed strong as a gorilla’s because it was — probably stronger. But the center of the ape’s beauty in Sofi’s mind was its truth. No avatar, not even clothing.

“Your body, you wear what you are – what we all are, all of us.”

The woman responded with a brief string of sounds Sofi did not understand.

Woozy, she sighed, a high lilting note.

The ape-soldier-woman imitated her.

“The professor’s song,” Sofi said.

The woman waited.

Sofi was not a singer, but she sang: “Quand il me prend dans ses bras…” and the sewn together soldier grasped Sofi’s hand as her face rearranged in joy. Now that Sofi knew what to look for, the darts of synthetic material were easy to see along the jaw, over the cheek, along the brow, and so they were also easy to ignore. Of course this is the face of a human woman — she could not miss it now.

Hand-in-hand they sang the rest of the song in French, French that Sofi knew this creature did not speak; she had merely memorized the sounds from hearing Professor Froget sing the song again and again. Yet the augmented soldier’s eyes were full of tears when they reached the end, and so Sofi went back to the beginning and they sang it again. This time as they finished, the great hulking, weeping woman grabbed her and hugged her. She said something into Sofi’s shoulder that Sofi could not understand, but it didn’t matter: she understood what she meant.

“It’s okay,” she said to the woman. “I won’t leave you.”

One of Sofi’s ears was covered by the woman’s chest and the other by the bicep of the woman’s arm, and so it took her a moment to realize the bang she’d heard was a gunshot, and that the pain she felt was a bullet tearing through her heart.

Read Part 7

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5

When the rain came, Vivienne and Pete had already found a miraculous kind of shelter. The statue they’d discovered stood on a path of colorful bricks that was mostly buried, but once they discovered its outline, marked by where the trees grew and did not grow, they followed it to a row of foliage-covered buildings. Peeking inside the first one, Vivienne saw a scene she recognized from historical livplay: an amusement ride waiting for people to climb aboard.

“These are entrances to ‘rides,’” Vivienne told Pete. “A kind of entertainment from before livplay and gameworlds, from before the ConneX.”

“Yes, I know rides,” Pete said. “We still have them in the City of Towers.”

“You do? I would love to see that!”

“We do not show outsiders. We feel shame, that we still have such ancient toys and games, that we are so far behind the rest of the world. But I will take you,” said Pete, “when we escape this madness.”

Vivienne took his hand. “They built these rides on this brick path, across from what used to be a lake it looks like,” Vivienne said. She pointed across the roadway which opened onto a low muddy plain.

Pete shook his head, “This land is frequently taken by sinkholes,” he said. “I believe that is what we’re looking at. There, in the water you can see the tops of other buildings, perhaps other rides which have been swallowed into the pit.”

Lightning flashed and a great boom filled the air all around them. “Come,” she said, taking Pete’s hand. “Let’s go back here, where it’s dry,”

They encountered several lines of tattered ropes and Pete took the lead: “these are to organize the people into a single line, so they can get on the ride one at a time. Come, we’ll walk to the front.”

He seemed to know exactly which way the path would turn and they passed through the folds and convolutions quickly. At the front they found a line of cartoonish cars, constructed with bench seating so people could get on and off quickly, and so people of every size and shape could pile on together. “This looks like fun!” Vivienne said, and immediately requested this scenario from the livplay server, forgetting that she had no connection, that her request could not be received let alone satisfied.

“We have something similar in the city,” Pete said, stroking one of the cars. “We call it The Wild Ride of Monsieur Toad.”

“Monsieur Toad!”

“It is a very old ride. No one knows what the name means.”

“I’m sure that the name evolved from a sensible root whose meaning was lost, like how there is a city called in English, Toad Suck.”

“Perhaps. So if electricity worked here as it does in the city, this would be the controls — the operator would push these buttons and…” Pete pressed the green button labeled “ride main,” which snapped into place with a firm click. Nothing happened. He pushed a few more buttons. The sound of rain falling echoed all around them.

“It’s too bad. It looks like a fun ride,” Pete said, looking down the tracks.

“Let’s walk it,” Vivienne said suddenly. “We’ll come back if it gets too dangerous. But let’s follow these tracks and see where it goes, what this ride is like.”

Pete looked out towards the gray muddled daylight. There was a series of flashes and booms, rolling thunder. He thought of his brother, Skip, such a gentle, timid man, how he even feared the daily rain.

“We should go back. We left them to look for poachers. They do not know we have found the Magic Kingdom. They will think we are in danger.”

“You worry for your brother.”

“Of course.”

“He is with Sofi and Pierre. They have guns and Sofi is fearless. They will protect him. Let us explore just a little, and then we will return to camp.”

“He is safe and dry in a tent with your students,” Pete said. “They will distract him with their endless speculations about the gorillas, stories of how the beasts came to Florida.”

She laughed. “I hope you are not already bored with the talk of primatologists.”

He turned towards Vivienne, whom he wished to love, and took her hand. “Yes, this will be fun. Let’s follow the tracks and find our wild ride.”

Pete kept a watertight box of matches with him always, and now as they prepared to explore this strange, ancient Mr. Toad, he pulled them out and set them on a counter. He took off his shirt, revealing his lightly muscled torso, dark as the ocean at night and shining where the gray daylight fell upon its contours. Then he rolled the shirt and climbed beneath the ride cars and began mopping.

“Are you cleaning, Pete?” Vivienne asked him, amused but certain there would be an explanation.

“There are petroleum products — lubricants — on the wheels and tracks. I’m going to get as much of it onto my shirt as I can, so we can use it as a torch.”

“You men of the City of Towers have such useful skills.”

“When things don’t always work easy, you learn to make them work hard,” he said. After a few minutes he rose up, grease-streaked and wielding a twisted, blackened shirt. Searching around the control panel he found a long pole with a hook at the end of it, and wrapped the shirt tightly around it. Then he pulled out a match and lit his torch. It gave off a steady, smokey light.

“Now let us find Monsieur Toad,” he said, smiling.

“I’m surprised these rides and buildings survived the war,” Vivienne said as they crept through the first dark archway.

“The fighting was in the city, and the villages. We are far out, here, where few ever come.”

The torchlight illuminated a playful stage set of flat cartoon animals, larger than life and wearing alarmed expressions.

“I think in this ride the creatures are afraid of you,” Pete said. “Yes, look at the tracks — the cars will move erratically. These animals are fearful, and jump out of your way — or perhaps don’t, perhaps you hit them.”

“You were there, you fought in the war, didn’t you Pete?”

“I didn’t fight. I survived. I was taken, along with my father. My mother and Skip were left defenseless. War takes a man from the things he loves and forces him to fight and die for the hatreds of another.”

“A corruption of the natural order.”

“You understand, Vivienne.”

She hesitated, but could not resist. “I shouldn’t compare your real war to my livplay experiences. But they are real-feeling, and authentic. The game designers research it down to the smallest element. The most moral use of livplay really is that it allows us all to experience the lives of others — expanding empathy.”

“How long did you play this game?”

“Almost a year.”

“Our war lasted only five months, but felt much longer.”

“As I said, it is not the same.”

“Tell me the horrors of your dreamwar, Vivienne whose heart overflows with empathy.”

Vivienne heard in his voice something between impatient contempt and indulgent love. But it was important to her that Pete know all the corners of her life. She wished to bring him home to Quebec and share everything with him, get him connected, let him in her mind, and be in his.

“I’ll tell you this. Many people died during that year. They were not really dead, but they were dead to the game, and there is no way of getting them back, and you have to go on without them. And you love them, even though you know it is not real, you still love them. I felt that pain so many times as the war raged on. But the hardest thing for me was when I died. It was knowing that my loved ones felt this pain now because of me. It was knowing that they had to keep going, they had to carry on, without me. And I couldn’t help. I had only one life to sacrifice for the cause, and when I had given it, it was over.”

“War makes people disappear,” Pete told Vivienne. “That can be good or bad. It depends on the person. The war took our mother and our father. For my family, that is what the war got wrong, and right.”

“You don’t mourn your father?”

“I would, if I knew he was dead. But it seems just as likely he would leave. When you burn the earth, you make it possible for new things to grow there. He hated living in the city. I imagine him with a new, younger wife and every year a new young son. Raising goats. He liked goats.”

“That’s nice to think,” said Vivienne.

“Or I imagine his skeleton in the mud of a roadside ditch,” Pete said, and shrugged under his torchlight. “I imagine both just as much. Perhaps this is the biggest difference with your livplay. When your friend disappears, you know what happened.”

“It’s true. Game data is always accessible to active players. I could always find out if someone died, and how.”

“And if they were dead, you knew they were alive, somewhere in the world.”

“Yes, alive and unhappy, because they’d been removed from this game we all loved.”

“Here is another difference: war is not a game anyone loves. When I imagine my father’s skeleton in the mud, it is not entirely sad. For I can hope that he died before he was forced to do terrible things, that he died before he could learn what happened to his wife and children. I imagine he died innocent. Which is terrible but not as terrible as surviving by doing inhuman things, and living on fit for nothing but killing, like the poachers who murder gorillas because they miss the days of murdering men.”

They approached a doorway blocked by a ride car, and Pete and Vivienne pushed it. As the car advanced, a wooden panel popped out from beside them. They both yelled out.

“It’s a dog!” Pete said, holding his torch closer to the panel. “A frightened dog. It’s part of the ride.”

“How did it work, without electricity?”

“We have mechanisms like this, in the City of Towers. Non-electric. The car must push a lever when it passes through the door, and that makes the dog appear. Watch, I’ll bet…” Pete got behind the car and pushed it the rest of the way through, which made the dog panel retract into the wall. “Yes, it turns a wheel as it passes and that pulls the panel back, reloading the spring. It’s a non-electric machine.”

Vivienne marveled at the mechanism. “Huh!” she said. “A non-electric machine! Who dreamed such things were possible?!”

Pete laughed. “Your livplay game designers should build a game of the Fruit Forest, the Sea of Houses, even the City of Towers — a game made of our humble Eye-for Corridor. You Canadians will all play it, and be amazed!”

“They should, Pete! You’re absolutely right, they should!”

The right side of Sofi’s body would go numb then rage again with pain. Still she focused on her goal: she stepped through the spinning masses of robotic puppet children dragged round and round on their mechanical tracks. Her left leg burned now too, because it had borne all her weight since she fell through the ceiling of this ancient entertainment chamber and began hopping around, looking for way out. The last option seemed to be the door on the other side of the fake river, which promisingly had “EXIT” in bold red English-language letters written over it. Still, she had to get there.

She reached the edge of the river and looked down at a sunken boat. It was only an inch or two beneath the surface of the brownish water. She ruled out hopping onto it using her one good leg: if her foot slid she would have no way to catch herself, and if her foot landed firmly, she might plant it straight through the corroded old thing and become trapped. No, she needed to get low to the water and creep onto the bow gently, then roll to the other side and climb off. She sat at the water’s edge, the recording still looping: “there is just one moon. And one golden sun. And a smile means . . . There is just one moon. And one golden sun. And a smile means . . .” She stretched her left foot forward to test how strong the boat was when something large and menacing moved smoothly just under her. Heart in neck she rolled backwards right into one of the lines of dancing dolls. They knocked her forward again and she landed with her face inches from the water, where she was able to see several tadpoles and gnats and a school of small fish and the eyes of one very large alligator rising to the surface. She pushed herself backwards again as it broke the surface and opened its jaws, but the beast couldn’t crest the angled lip of the fake river and it slipped back. This time she grabbed hold of the dancing child dolls and let the machine drag her. When it spun her farther from the river she let go and sat between the sets of little singing puppets and driven half-mad by pain and irony, she realized she’d never felt so alive. She laughed, “Oh yes!” she yelled, “Fucking alligators!” she announced, “This is the good shit!” She knew she sounded like a maniac, but it was so darkly funny she couldn’t help but glee. All her life she’d livplayed scenarios like this, sought them out, always pushing to find something more intense, more extreme, and now she was trapped in a pit with these singing spinning grotesqueries, with no way to call for help, alligators between her and a door that might lead nowhere, with no gun and half her body shattered and in pain. “Brang it ooon!” she growled in the voice of her favorite perpworld character, an enormous sweaty Californian bursting with muscles. Then she rolled on her side and laughed.

She must have passed out like that. Because when she looked up again, a great deal of time seemed to have gone by. It was raining even harder now, and she lay in water flooding a quarter inch, soaking her back and the base of her hair, and flowing across the platform of spinning dolls towards the river. The hole she’d fallen through was now a sort of square waterfall, pouring water and dirt and leaves and frogs down on the spot where she landed what seemed like ages ago. The river entered and left the room through vast openings that were pitch black and obviously full of water, and she wondered just what kind of volume this fake river could hold, how long it must rain before the water level would rise enough to allow an alligator to climb out.

“It’s clear I need another plan.”

She got to her feet and hopped back to the control room so dizzy from pain and injury she felt almost drunk. “So I turned you on,” she said, “but you do more than just turn on. Let’s see.” She pushed a button that killed most of the lights, just leaving a few theatric spotlights. She pushed another that knocked the soundtrack out of its loop, “friendship to everyone, though the mountains divide and the oceans are wide, it’s a small world after all…” She tried pushing that one again, and then its neighbors, to see if she could turn the sound off completely, but the song still played. She saw a big toggle switch labeled in English “ride main forward stop” and went ahead and switched it. The noise was horrible — she had to go out into the rain-flooding room to see what was going on, and it took her a minute to figure out what she was seeing, but the boats that were underwater were also attached to tracks, and they were now moving forward on those tracks, slowly shoving aside mud, branches, and the half-rotted trunk of a palm and headed into the dark unknown at the end of the room. One of the two broke apart as it moved, but the first one held together, an eerie underwater ghost boat disappearing into darkness. As it vanished from view another boat entered from the other side of the room. This one was entirely above the waterline, bobbing merrily as a chain dragged it from beneath. It also looked fresher than the others, probably because it had seen less sun, but its cheerful pink bow was decorated with the desiccated remains of a muscovy duck.

“Fifi, move,” she said. “Fifi, move!” she yelled. And she moved: she jog-staggered out the door, then ran-hobbled to the edge of the river about four feet ahead of the boat. She looked down and saw nothing lurking. The movement of the track should scare any reasoning beast into hiding, she thought, but she was unsure how reasonable these great reptiles might be. When the boat came to its nearest point, she leaned forward and grabbed its handrails and swung into the plastic bench seat. She scooted to the other side of the boat and lifted herself up with her left arm, then used her left leg to push herself forward. She only reached the edge of the platform, her legs splashing into the water, and she panicked and kicked and pushed and pulled herself up, and when she looked back down at the water, there was nothing there. She was now on the opposite stage set, and the boat with its muscovy corpse passed out of the room and into the adjacent blackness, grinding against broken pieces of fiberglass.

The door that said “EXIT” was just a few feet away, and the adrenaline was still flowing through her muscles and veins. She staggered towards it, elated, hopeful, feeling like she was about to “win” — a strange feeling she half-scolded herself for: this is not livplay, Fifi! But it was the truest feeling in her: from her probably-concussed head to her probably-broken toe, she felt the thrill of succeeding in gameplay. She pushed the door’s release lever and it swung forward into a hall made of white-painted concrete block. Low emergency lights were on, and Sofi stopped to marvel again at this: electricity! In the Fruit Forest! She leaned on the wall as she moved forward — the hall was shaped like a plus sign, three legs leading to doors, the leg to her left a column of stairs. The corners were all creeping with cockroaches, but she ignored them and kept moving forward. At the center of the plus she gripped the handrail and pulled herself up the stairs, one at a time. At the top was another short hall, this one without lights, but she could see well enough to make out another door labeled “EXIT”: she pushed the door’s release lever, and it did not move. She pushed again, but she might as well be pushing a lever bolted to a wall: the door didn’t move at all. There was a narrow window, but she could see nothing through it but a hazy reflection of her own eye.

She collapsed at the door and listened to the muffled happy singing and wondered if anyone else would ever become trapped in this place. Would someone slip into that hole and become trapped just like her, and if they did, would they find her skeleton here? Would they even make it this far? Of course if anyone found her skeleton here they would know this is not the way out. They would try the next thing. What is the next thing? “The other doors,” Sofi said to the cockroaches scurrying down the hall. “Is that all that’s left? Doors that lead nowhere. This entire building is buried. Only the ceiling is close to the ground, but I can’t reach the ceiling.”

She thought some more and rolled onto her hand and knee. “If you’re in a building, and want to get to the roof…” she began hopping back down the hall. She lowered herself carefully down the steps and proceeded straight across towards one of the two other doors, unlabeled, unknown. She opened it and heard the singing grow loud again: “it’s a world of laughter a word of tears…” The only light came from upstream: she could see the room she’d left to her right, another bright pink boat entering from that side. She could see, just barely, that in this room more dolls danced, and with a different rhythm: they jerked more and bowed halfway through each spin. It was harder to see without lights or even a patch of sunlight, but now she knew what to look for: there would be a control room, probably on the other side of the river, probably with a door leading into that same collapsed passage. She squinted in the dim light and saw what she sought.

This didn’t feel like winning anymore. Livplay didn’t wear you down like this. The pain wasn’t getting worse — if anything she was going numb — but she was losing the ability to move that side of her body, which was swelling and stiffening. She decided to sit a minute, have a drink of water. Maybe eat one of the muesli bars she brought. She rested her hand against the wall to ease her way down to the floor, but the wall was alive with cool, crisp tickly things. Cockroaches. Some of them crawled up her arm to her elbow, something crawled to her shoulder, her neck, others she felt cling to her fingers as her hand brushed them from the wall. She opened her mouth to scream but felt one tickling at the edge of her lips, and so she struck at it and closed her mouth and screamed with it shut and her hand clasped over, a sound like a horrified hum. Panicking, she ran-hobbled for the next boat that entered the room and dove onto its first bench seat. She rolled against the plastic to crush anything that might still be crawling on her, then got her left foot onto the boat’s edge and pushed off, belly-flopping onto the platform. She felt something move near her ear and jerked to her feet, her mouth still shut, breathing heavily through her nose as she scraped that side of her head with her arm. The control room door opened when she pushed it, the big button labeled “scene 5 main” was right where she expected it to be. She pressed it and this time none of the lights burst, and most of them still worked. She looked out the window: the cockroaches crept up and down the walls in shimmering brown-black sheets, like the walls were made of hallucinogenic mica. A few were on the floor near her feet and she stomped them to crisp puddles of guts. The door seemed otherwise roach-tight.

She turned to the other door — in the stretch of fantasy river she’d first fallen into, the control room’s back door led to a collapsed passage. Here there was a similar door, and the passage was not collapsed. She was able to push it open. It was lighted by low emergency lights. And it was crawling with thousands of cockroaches.

Look for Part 6 on 2/19 !

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4

Sofi walked ahead of Skip, growing ever more frustrated. Finally she stopped and crouched and motioned Skip close. “Before the ConneX, people’s eyes must have been sharper, people’s ears must have heard more. It could not have been like this, this blind wandering.”

“I believe this is true. But I am as hobbled as you. In the City of Towers we receive a narrow data stream. It is not enough to support your ConneX, but it is enough to depend upon, for location, for messages. The tribes of the Fruit Forest, the people who live in the watery villages of the Sea of Houses, who live without any of our technologies, I’m sure they must see and hear things we cannot.”

“And these are our adversaries?”

“It is certain.”

“This may not go well for us, Skip.”

“I know.”

She stood, still bowed forward, and took another step. “But we’ll find your little brother if we can.”

He followed. “I am the younger brother. I know I look older than Pete. It is because I am lighter. The sun burns close to the City of Towers. Light-skinned men age quicker.”

Sofi wondered if witnessing his mother’s murder had aged him more than the sun — but she said nothing.

“My brother has had several marriage offers, but he turns them down so he can care for me. I have had no marriage offers. In this way, I have ruined his life.”

“He might get a proposal from my teacher — Professor Froget seems to really like him.”

“And he will decline, and tell her that he cannot burden her with the care of his wretched brother.”

Sofi stopped. “Skip, you are not wretched. You are good. And brave. I wouldn’t risk my life by your side if you weren’t.”

Skip nodded as the sky darkened. There was a distant flash of light.

“We need to learn to use the senses we’ve abandoned. Eyes, ears… nose. I should be able to smell my professor. I should be able to track her perfume on the wind.”

She lifted her nose, closed her eyes, and took a step forward: she felt the air surround her, whooshing, wet-whipping her sides, nothing under her feet, a musty odor, darkness — she realized she was falling only a half-second before she hit the ground. At impact her gun bounced out of her grip and her right side went numb, then radiated hot and voiceless pain. She couldn’t see anything — she heard wet echoes and Skip high above muttering, “are you there? Are you there?”

She heaved air back into her lungs and rasped, desperate for breath to speak. It took a minute to find it: “I’m okay!” She gasped again and yelled it, and then smiled because she’d never been less okay in her life. “I’m alive! I’m hurt.”

How badly hurt? There was no connection to tell her, no inventory of injuries. Back home, each broken bone would be named and numbered, each site of puncture or impact or inflammation marked and rated. The technology implanted in her body was undoubtedly trying to send the raw data out, but without the global intelligence to interpret it, that data was useless. She was better off trying to figure out what was wrong based on where it hurt.

The room brightened, and she looked up and saw the space where daylight broke through into the room was getting larger — Skip was pulling back the brush and exposing the hole through which she’d fallen. Soon her eyes adjusted and her head ceased to spin, and she saw a boy, smiling and motionless, his eyes blue, empty. Without thinking, she threw out her uninjured leg and pushed him back. But he was on a spring and lunged forward again. And then she saw he was not alone: he was soldered to a metal bar lined with other spring-mounted children, all of them wearing only mold-blackened remnants, the whole contraption set upon a mechanical track. Sofi, who was born into a world where all amusements were digital and perceived from behind the eyes, did not know what she was looking at.

She attempted to sit up and saw that the little child dolls went on in both directions as far as she could see. Farther from where she landed, from where the overhead opening allowed rain and soil to pour down, they still wore their colorful costumes, covered with bright patterns, embroidery, and rusted sequins. They seemed to move with the crawling of insects. Sitting up caused her right side agony, but she held the pose because she had to see. The source of the watery sound was behind her, a dark river curving through the room. It came from an archway of inaccessible darkness and continued into a different darkness, and was crowded with dirt and palm fronds. Its angular “shoreline” was covered with decorative material to look like grass on one side and snow on the other, but was now half-rotted and heaped with mud and leaf litter. “It’s a fake river through a land of fake children,” she said.

“You’re what?” Skip replied.

“Get me out of here!” she said.

“There’s no way in except to fall,” he said. “Try to find a way out. Look for a ladder, stairs, a door.”

“A door…” She looked and saw one immediately, and then another. This room had doors leading out in two directions, one on each side of the river. She raised herself up on her left leg, steadying herself on one of the springing children, then hopped through them, right arm useless, right leg useless, left arm jumping from the top of one child’s head to the next as she hopped over loops of steel track. She pushed the lock lever and the door opened, but she already could see through a dark tinted and half-disguised window that it led to an even smaller room with ancient electronic equipment, a control room to operate this vast machine.

So strange, Sofi thought, as she hopped into the room, such a machine in a place where no machines work, in this forest where even the nanobots in their smart tents fell dumb, inert, and useless. Inside she found another door, but when she pressed the bar to open it, it moved only a few inches before it fell against a broken wall heaped with dirt: a collapsed passage. Several large cockroaches, around six centimeters long, crawled in from the disturbed soil and she pulled it closed. A few attempted to retreat through the closed door, and one climbed it, paused, and then flew down to the floor like a crisp little helicopter.

She took off her pack and rested on the room’s one tiny stool. Sitting there she faced a panel with two almost comically large buttons in the bottom right. One was green and one was red, and above them it said, in English, “scene 4 main.” The red button was plunged, so she pushed the green — it was big, heavy, mechanical, and settled in with a satisfying click as the red button pushed out in response. The lights above her popped and shattered; one brightened and remained intact, and she crouched under it as shards of thin glass rained down on her back. The ground began to shake, and her ears were raked by the high pitched singing of a chorus of children: “there is just one moon. And one golden sun. And a smile means . . . There is just one moon. And one golden sun. And a smile means . . .” It was a fragment of an audio track, looping. She stood and saw what made the floor shake: the machinery was in motion, children swinging on their tracks, some of them lifting their legs and arms in dance, some opening and closing their mouths to the music, but most of them were simply yanked about like corpses on poles being swung in small circles.

She hopped back out of the control room and looked up through the access panel that trapped her here. Skip was gone. She didn’t even bother calling his name. He was so nervous she figured that the exploding lights, the noise and singing probably sent him running in a random direction, never to be seen again. “Machines working! In the heart of the Fruit Forest!” She spoke to the ceiling, wanting to share this with someone, anyone, this miracle — machines working in the heart of this notorious electricity desert. But there was no one there, no one to tell, and even if she got out of here, no one would ever believe her.

The mechanical puppet-children swung around her looking dead and half-dead and she knew she looked no better. Her entire right side was a useless mass of bruise and torn tissue. The other door was on the other side of the river, which would be very difficult to get to in this condition.

Now that some lights were on, she could see a path through the whirling robot children. She could also see that the river was filthy, murky, and obstructed with debris and two collapsed boats — boats close enough to the surface to use as stepping stones, an easy trot across if her body weren’t so damaged. She might even be bleeding internally. She thought of all the perpworld games she’d played where her damage numbers crept high — it’s almost always a sign you’re about to lose, a sign you’re about to “die.”

She heard a boom and looked up again at the square of sky. It was dark gray now, and heavy raindrops were falling through onto the spot where she fell. “My gun. I dropped my gun.”

She stared hard in the area where she landed, crouched to look under the dolls’ feet as they swept by, but she couldn’t see it. The swinging children on their mechanical tracks could have knocked it in any direction, in multiple directions, even dropped it right into the river. She watched the ways they moved and tried to imagine how a rifle would slide and spin, nudged by their dances, but everywhere she looked, no rifle.

No rifle. Sofi yelled every obscenity she knew as loudly as she could, so that her shouts echoed through the room and over the sound of the singing and the grinding of the machine. She went back and sat in the control room, drank some water from her pack, then strapped it back on and took a deep breath and started hopping and hobbling past the dancing dolls, towards the fake river, towards the last door that might also lead nowhere, or might offer her a chance to continue to live.

Chet heard the campsite before he saw it, the taut tap-tap of rain on its shining waterproof surfaces. He stopped several feet from the edge of the clearing, deep in the steamy leaves where no camper would see him. It was an outlander’s campsite, a “Canadian” campsite, with tents and equipment crafted by the dark magic of science and industry. Bradidiah stopped beside him, also silent in amazement. They had come across such material before, dug up from the Stinking Hill of Treasures, or floating in the Sea of Houses, but they had never seen such items so new, so brightly colored, so fully operational.

Bradidiah gestured to his friend with a finger, and Chet saw: the outlander, a man of pale and sun-sheltered complexion, lay dead at the entrance to a tent, his blood already soaked into the thirsty earth, which now swallowed large drops of rain as well. Bradidiah stood. “She was here,” he said. “But she is gone now.” Looking up he saw one raven land, then another.

“Look: she has taken his hands, and…”

“Yes, she has taken his head as well. This is what awaits us if we do not strike first.”

“He did not even struggle.”

“She must have bewitched him.”

“There are weapons in that tent — I can see them. He did not even try.”

“She tricked his mind. He believed a friend came to him. Someone harmless. We will not be fooled.”

“Listen!”

They heard movement, fast movement, coming towards them through the rain. The ravens overhead cawed to one another. Chet crouched towards the bushes but stopped when he saw Bradidiah slip into the tent where weapons lay. In that moment of hesitation he inhaled deeply. Her scent, so clear before, had become yet more faint. “I do not believe it is her, Bradidiah,” he said as his friend emerged holding a pistol and a machete.

And it was not her: it was a man running blind from rain and fear down the narrow path to the campsite. He was a soft man, curled in upon himself, light-skinned for a city person, but still a city person, unwise in the ways of the wild, his eyes still squinting in his sun-shocked face. From such a man Bradidiah and Chet knew they had nothing to fear, which aroused Bradidiah’s suspicions. “It is her, come in disguise. This is how she tricked the other.”

The man shouted “Pierre!” as he approached head-down against the rain and heavy-footed through the mud. He looked up from his feet only when the tents surrounded him. The dead man on the ground, the two forest men standing nearby. He stopped, so strangely — for he did not scream or jump or retreat. He seemed strangely calmed by the sight of the headless, handless dead man. He exhaled. He could see that Chet and Bradidiah were there, but he did not look at them. He raised his hands to welcome the rain, he opened his mouth to the sky:

“Fifteen years ago I watched a man stab my mother between her legs until she died. A white man, like you. I was a coward, I was a child, I hid until he was gone. When I touched her body, she gave me a new life: I was reborn the child of that knife. I raged through your villages. I killed a man who resembled my mother’s killer. Then I killed three more. Four lives ended at these hands. Since then I have felt regret.” He looked down at the two men watching him carefully just a few feet away. “Though perhaps not enough regret. I have felt righteous too. But the war is over now. The City of Towers is filled with children who have never seen their mothers murdered, never seen a brother or sister lying dead in the street.”

He fell silent again, and still they watched. Rain fell over all of them, pouring down their skin, soaking their clothes, dripping from the tip of Bradidiah’s downturned machete, and from the hand that held the raised handgun. Chet stepped forward and touched Bradidiah’s arm. “I do not think it is her,” he said to his friend.

Bradidiah could not be so sure. He opened and closed his mouth. He narrowed his eyes.

The man took a step toward them, his palms raised, mouth opened in the breath of reason, and Bradidiah fired, the gunshot like an explosion through the rain, and Chet crouched and hid within his shoulders even as his fingers touched the Mouse at his heart. The ravens took flight without voice. The city man still stood: surprised now, as though he wondered what he heard. And now he clutched himself in pain. Bradidiah, horrified, fired again. And again. He wanted to end the agony of watching this other man know he would die. He emptied the weapon. The city man fell and struggled. It did not take long. The ravens returned. Now two men lay dead.

“If it had been her, the spell would have broken,” Chet said.

“It was not her,” Bradidiah said. “He was to be another of her victims. We have saved him from that. Now he is my victim. Once again I have earned my curse.”

“This path — this must lead to her. Let us take more weapons and follow it.”

“Yes, let us go to her.”

“We will destroy the witch and end this,” Chet said.

“Or she will destroy us, and that will end this too.”

Go to Part 5

Author’s note: I know what you’re thinking — you’re thinking, “Amy, why does that puppet look like Stewie from Family Guy?” I’ve been asking myself the same thing. If you asked me to draw Stewie, I’d have given it a football shaped head, so trust me, it wasn’t on purpose. And yet the resemblance is unmistakable. All I can say is I was trying to make the doll look CREEPY, and in something like “convergent evolution” ended up in a Stewie place. Drawing is weird that way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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3

Chet could hardly keep up with Bradidiah anymore.

The forest spoke secrets, threats, and promises in his ear, and when he looked his friend Bradidiah moved like a series of photographs: Bradidiah crouched and touching the mud; Bradidiah resting against a tree trunk, eyes closed, nostrils flared, inhaling some subtle scent unknowable to a man like Chet. And between these frozen moments Bradidiah slipped like a trick of the light down the path.

“Bradidiah,” he finally said, barely above the sound of his breath, “I am bewitched. I think I am in the Fruit Forest with you, hunting a beast. But you are not really here. Perhaps I am not really here.”

Bradidiah heard him and smiled and pulled up the bill of Chet’s sweat-soaked hat to better see his eyes. “We are coming closer to the Magic Kingdom. The men our people know, Bradidiah and Chet, are gone. We are what is left. And we belong to the ghosts and gods of blood. Do you hear them? Do you hear? Every bug and bird and animal has changed its song — they beat the drum of the hunt together. This prey we seek, she is not our prey, she is the prey of the land and sky and trees and waters, she is the prey of Florida. We are the agents of the land, its hands, its fists.”

“Yes, I feel it,” Chet said. Then he inhaled deeply. “What is that?”

“Fear. She knows we are coming.”

“Fear.” Chet inhaled again. “I think it is the first real thing I have smelled.”

“It has not yet turned deadly. This fear still swims in hope and cunning. But when we have her trapped it will turn. You will see. Now, we should not speak.”

Chet narrowed his eyes and nodded.

They moved through the trees, silently.

Sofi looked down the path her professor had taken. She walked as far as she could, still keeping sight of the camp, and she stretched her neck to look farther.

“Fifi! What are you doing?!” Pierre came halfway between her and the camp and stopped. “We need to stay here, together.”

Sofi pointed at his feet. “Why did you stop?”

Pierre looked down, then up again. “What?”

“Look at you, you stopped there like there’s a wall. Come closer. Come all the way to me.”

“Quit playing around. Come back to the camp.”

“You won’t do it, will you? You won’t go past that line.”

Pierre scrunched his face, annoyed. He took one more step. “There. Now, let’s go back.”

Sofi laughed. “Look at you, you’re really scared! Do you believe it makes a difference if you’re standing there or here where I am?”

“This is not the gameworld. This is not the gameworld! We can be hurt, killed, raped, we can suffer here, against our will, and we can’t make it stop, and the pain…”

“I’m going to look for the professor. They’ve been gone over an hour and we haven’t heard anything.”

“Maybe it will take them two hours. Maybe it will take them three. Professor Froget told us to stay here. ‘Defend the camp,’ she said. We have a camp to defend!”

“I look at you Pierre, and I see… nevermind. I’m going.”

“No. What do you see?” Pierre took another step past his line on the ground. “Tell me, Fifi. I deserve to know what you think of me.”

“I think you’re a fine, good person. But I see in you this fear, this normal, human fear, and it reminds me of my own weakness, and I’m disgusted by it. I don’t want to tremble like a baby monkey in an experiment. But you know, it’s me. It’s my problem. If I weren’t afraid myself, it wouldn’t bother me.”

“So I’m getting in the way of you fooling yourself.”

“Yes, Pierre. You are.”

“So stop fooling yourself.”

“No. A person without fiction is a beast.”

“I’m not a beast.”

“You’re not. You’re a person with a different fiction. You have a different story, a different thing to prove, a different way of fooling yourself. And I have mine. And you’re getting in the way of mine.”

“I don’t have anything to prove.”

Sofi smiled and walked past him, back towards the camp. “The professor and Pete, they didn’t take any water, just a gun. They should be back by now. I’m packing enough gear for a day’s hike, but I’ll try to be back by sundown.” She was met by Skip at the camp perimeter. “Skip. I’m going after the professor and your brother. Come or stay?”

Skip watched Pierre following her around. His mouth gaped open, helpless, his arms out and imploring, ignored. Skip said, “one of us should stay and watch the camp, guard against wild animals, at least.”

Sofi was ready. “Pierre wants to stay. I want to go. You have your choice.”

“I will go help find my brother,” he said, avoiding sight of Pierre as though embarrassment were contagious and spread by glances.

Sofi pulled the sack off her back and grabbed Pierre’s. She split her supplies into two and topped off both sacks with bags of water. She gave Skip one of them and put on the other. She appraised the rifle in her hand. Then she turned to Pierre.

“Pierre, we will do everything we can to be back by nightfall. If by morning we’re not here and the professor’s not either, take the water taxi and return to the City of Towers.”

Pierre said nothing. He was finished talking. But there it was. Wait alone. Survive the night. Backtrack through the forest and find the shore where they’d hidden the taxi boat. Get it back into the water, alone, without breaking it or sinking it. Sail a taxi-boat across the treacherous Sea of Houses and find, among those many rotting rooftops, the path to the City of Towers. He counted in his mind how many impossible things Sofi had told him to do: 1, 2, 3, 4…

And as he counted, he saw Skip glance back at him, his eyes wide and sad in his dark, dusty face. It was an expression, Pierre thought, of knowing, permanent parting.

And they were gone.

Pete slashed the wall of vines with his machete, and the bright outline of a smiling beast became clear before him: he screamed at the sight of such a monster. Its eyes enormous, its head outsized, grinning with two giant buck-teeth forward, its snout topped with a shiny black olive-like nose. It wore a red vest and a blue neck tie. It did not move.

Vivienne touched his shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s just a statue.”

“What dark magician would create such a warning? It appears as a bear, yet it laughs at us!”

“We have such things in Canada. We call them cartoons. This is meant to be a happy image, for children who will never see or need to fear a live bear. Look, around its feet…” Vivienne pushed away a loose clod of grass and sand with her boot revealing gold. “The ground is made of painted bricks. A path.”

“A path to what?”

“If I am not mistaken, to the Magic Kingdom.”

“You believe now in the legends of the Fruit Forest? Next you will tell me you worship the smiling mouse!”

“It’s no legend. Or, it is, but it’s a legend with truth to it. My people also say that before the war there was in this land a Magic Kingdom — a place of amusements from a time before the ConneX, before livplay and gameworlds, where fantasies were built in concrete and steel.” She knocked on the statue. “And fiberglass, apparently.”

A glob of water rose out of the bear-creature’s hand and leapt five feet over its head and landed in its other, outstreatched hand.

“Did you see that?”

“Yes,” Vivienne said. She knocked on the statue again. It gurgled and then another glob of water did the same. “I think this is some strange fountain.” Another glob followed after a moment, then another.

“Do you think the water is safe?”

“I’ll risk it,” Vivienne said. She climbed the statue and lay her head in its right palm. She heard the gurgle and opened her mouth: a glob of water filled her mouth and splattered all over her face. Then she heard a low and strange bellowing noise. Looking up, she saw Pete’s face contorted into the unfamiliar expression of laughter. She realized how absurd she must have looked and laughed as well. Then another glob of water landed in her ear. At this, Pete doubled over, holding onto his thighs, barely able to contain his glee. She laughed so hard she fell off the statue.

“Now me,” he said, still laughing.

Pierre Remy watched the wall of green around him twitch with lizard jumps and dripping moisture. Yes, he had a story to live, a fiction. Yes, his story was different from Fifi’s. But his adventure was Fifi herself. Fifi, the pursuit of whom had brought him to this electronically barren wasteland where lush natural life bloomed and thrived so inhumanely. Was it the force of natural life itself pushing the global human digital network away?

Every gorilla in Africa he could study with a non-stop global connection to his brain giving him total situational awareness.

Every monkey in South America he could observe while chatting with his mother and re-climbing Mount Everest and playing football with his friends.

Every orangutan in Asia he could trail by satellite feed while he and Fifi — whether she were beside him or on the other side of the world — satisfied one another on a luvplay platform. Something romantic: a snowed-in lodge, or a glamorous Toronto penthouse filled with toys; it all cost the same.

But instead he agreed to come with Professor Froget to war-torn Florida where everyone’s brain was a twitching amputated limb dreaming of the global body. He came because this is where Fifi wanted to go. And now she was gone. This was not bad luck. He knew he was to blame.

He’d secretly hoped the blackout would be “good for them,” that Fifi would take a break from her fantasy ultraviolence, that they would have time in quantities unimaginable to be together, that Pierre and Fifi in a tent surrounded by tropical sounds and smells would be like a new luvplay platform built just for them, the most fully immersive of all, with no other real or game world simultaneously nipping at your attention, or your lover’s attention.

Pierre coated himself in another layer of insect repellent. “You have my full attention,” he said aloud, to the indifferent world.

But now he knew that Fifi’s thrillseeking went deeper than he believed. Perpworld was not a habit, it was a lifeline, a limited expression of the thrills she needed. She was thriving here: armed, disconnected, able to feel pain, and die.

He knew, though he did not relish it, that he was also likely to feel pain and die, here in this place.

He sat in front of his tent and waited, listening. He heard it so immediately, he convinced himself it must be a background noise, some strange effect of the wind. But no, it didn’t coincide with the wind, not always. And it sounded like footsteps.

He stood and began to shake and weep and sweat, because he could not call for help with just a thought, like he could almost anywhere else in the world. He could not call for help even with great effort.

“This is scared,” he said to no one. “This is alone,” he said, too.

And then Pierre heard a voice, a soft woman’s voice, singing that song, that song the professor sings — oh God! Pierre sat up and let the tears run down his face. The professor is alive, and singing that awful song, but how beautifully! Her voice had never moved so perfectly over the notes — both sweet and coarse, both loss and hope. For the first time, the song’s simple words of love tore at his heart, he felt them, he felt them for all his life.

He opened his mouth and tried to croak out her name, but it was only an inarticulate sob. He watched for her coming down the path, but saw no one. Still the voice grew louder.

Then he heard the footsteps again, nearer, in time with the song. Clouds moved over him, shading the entire campsite, and the green leaves moved. The air blew cooler and tasted electric. Yes, she was approaching through the trees. He wondered why the professor was not on the path, and then the leaves parted, and he saw a large mass of pink flesh, a great hairless ape, its skin everywhere abraded and scarred, its lines lumpen, its form uneven, its breasts resting slack against its muscular frame, its mouth open in song, beautiful song.

He thought he should scream, but he was too enchanted by this creature’s strangeness. It looked almost human, but its body was also similar to a gorilla’s, with heavy cranial musculature and long hulking arms. Its bare skin revealed a jagged pattern of welts and scars. In defiance of its form it sang with a human woman’s voice, and it was singing to him, clearly, walking towards him, using its song to communicate, to entrance, to entice. Heavy drops of rain began to fall around him, began to strike his shoulders and his head.

And now this creature was reaching out for him, and he raised his hand to meet it, and it took his hand, and pulled him close, and pressed him against its body, squeezed him, squeezed hard, and he realized he could not breathe, and he struggled and he kicked, but it was no use, this creature was as strong as a gorilla, and he remembered all the times he’d died in games and hoped this would be like that, that he’d just open his eyes to another place, but he didn’t think so, he was pretty sure this was his last thought, and he wondered what was important enough for his last thought, and thought of tacos, and felt disappointment in himself for thinking of tacos, and then remembered his mother taking him to the taco truck when he was small, when they went to the park to play, and the spices would burn in his nose and the air would blow cool and would smell of dirt and sweat and green growing things, just like this, and when he passed out and stopped struggling the great pink ape broke his neck between her hands and laid him out neatly on the ground and went back into the bushes to retrieve the tools.

Read Part 4!

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2

Sofi lifted and aimed her rifle at a large fan-like leaf swinging over the professor’s tent. She squeezed at the trigger but the safety was on. She said “pkew!” and jerked the gun up to imitate the firing kick. When she was fourteen she started playing a vigilante named “d’Raven” in the ultraviolent livplay Perpworld, a chaotic game with unlimited access and no ending date or story arc. In the game she was a top shot who almost never missed. But that meant nothing here. Her real-life muscles had no more memory of her 10,014 kills than of her 203 deaths. And without access to the Global ConneX, she couldn’t even access basic weaponry or tactical knowledge. Her mind asked questions, and the vast absence gave no reply. If she thought about it, the silence where stimulation should be sounded to her like death. And so she did not think about it.

She knew they would have no connection in the Fruit Forest, and she’d dreaded it, but she’d thought mainly about missing out on games and updates from friends. What surprised her was how it affected her vision, how without the ConneX she felt partially blinded. With her two eyes she mustered a superficial 3D rendering of the visible space in front of her — nothing more. Back home, or almost anywhere else on civilized Earth, the data stream colored in all the details, information arising from the back of her mind like an intuitive sense of what lay in every direction: the dangers, curiosities, opportunities, attractions. But here she felt like she had a sack over her head. Or was trapped in a distantly budding bubble on a tenuous, thin-stretched arm, far from the amorphous human mass, just her and a dubious stage set, no external data to confirm its existence, or hers. She’d lost the most complete and important sense her body possessed. Severed from the ConneX, a strange new tension flashed from her brainstem like a blinking cursor awaiting a prompt. It was a disturbing, extreme experience. Her adrenaline pounded, her skin was on fire. It was what she’d been searching for all her life.

She re-aimed.

“You scare me when you practice so much, Fifi,” Pierre said. “We’re not in your Perpworld where you can kill and die and everyone comes back for more.”

Sofi did not look up. “You scare me when you don’t practice, Pierre. I do not intend to be killed.”

“Raped,” Skip said. He was stepping back and forth near the path like he had to pee. Every few seconds he twitched a shrug, as though the sweat in his armpits surprised him. “During the war, the man who killed my mother raped her with a knife and left her to bleed to death from her vagina.”

Sofi tensed her jaw. Skip had survived a real war, and she took his words seriously. Rape was among the few crimes not allowed in Perpworld. But here it could happen. Also, here there was pain. In Perpworld only your pride would hurt, when you got outmaneuvered by another player. Show me rape and torture, she asked her mind, I want to prepare myself, but the darkness did not answer. The unseen things were most horrifying of all — she’d never had a fear she couldn’t research into submission. She shuddered.

Pierre strode over to Skip and stage-whispered. “You don’t help by frightening her!”

“At first she screamed, but then she did not, even though she was still alive. I think she was too angry to scream anymore. They enjoyed her pain, and she did not want to give them that satisfaction.” Skip turned and looked at him. “My brother, Pete, was away in the City of Towers. But I saw them kill our mother with my eyes. With these eyes. These eyes that live in my head and look at you now. That was the time of the war. They say gorilla hunters are mostly men from the war. Men who love death, who still want to kill.”

Pierre took a step back. “I am a primatologist!” He threw up his hands to the sky. “A primatologist! Why should a primatologist have to endure these human problems?”

“You are so stupid, Pierre, it depresses me,” Sofi said, then lifted her rifle to practice aiming again.

Chet heard the flapping of wings and looked up to see a raven: it made a bright black shudder in the gray light of the treetops as it touched the branch and gave a soft caw. “Bradidiah,” he said, and gestured upwards with his eyes.

Bradidiah placed his hand over the Mouse at his heart and watched the bird disappear again through a little hole of sky. “They don’t chase me here,” he said in wonder. “For three years every raven I have seen has screamed and swooped down at me. They have come from miles around just to watch me walk from house to house and to rain shit on my head and arms, white streaks of shame.”

“Bradidiah, could it be? Are the demons finally satisfied in their revenge?”

“Demons are never satisfied. Yet I haven’t been attacked since we entered the Fruit Forest,” he said. “I thought perhaps there were no ravens here. But I think now they have been here all along, watching.”

“This one we saw, it was watching. It flew away when I spotted it. Bradidiah, if this is the ravens’ doing, we have walked into a trap.”

“Then you must go back. Their revenge is for me.”

Chet looked back down the path, the way they came. He lifted his chin. “No. We will stay together, in any heat, in days of rain.”

“As long as you travel beside me, you are in danger, as much as me.”

“No, Bradidiah. The demons planted this idea in my head, to kill the gorilla. They tricked me so that I would trick you. Tricked me to trap my best friend!”

“Perhaps, or perhaps the trick began when we heard the woman singing.”

“The witch from the market. You were right about her. She and the ravens are the two hands of the same devil. We will destroy them. Yes, you and me: it is my pride as much as your life. We will destroy them together.”

“Chet don’t be a fool,” Bradidiah said, but he smiled as he said it.

Chet grabbed his friend’s arm. A brave fool is all he’d ever hoped to be. “I will stay, and good will triumph over evil. In a week you will walk the streets back home in peace.”

Bradidiah lifted his hand away and turned. Yes, there it was again, the sound of a woman singing. “Witch or demon, man or beast, what spirit within, what body without, I do not know, but I, whose name is Bradidiah,” he told the singing voice, “will soon pick your flesh from my teeth. I will bathe in your blood and cleanse this curse from me.” His words were little more than a growl, an incantation to himself.

Chet watched his powerful friend in stunned silence.

“Come, Chet, this is the way we must go.”

The professor pushed forward to where she’d heard the humming, so like La Vie En Rose at first, but then it scattered, faded, disappointed her ear.

Pete hurried from behind and grabbed her arm. “Vivienne, stop. Let us return to your young students. Let us make our way back to my water taxi. We will sail back to the City of Towers, all of us. You have collected enough gorilla dung. More of it is not worth our lives.”

“This would be so much simpler with even limited access to the ConneX.”

“Nothing modern works through all the Fruit Forest and across the Sea of Houses.”

“It amazes me, still, that no one knows why!”

“The forest-dwellers think this land is holy, and that technology is evil. The scientists say it is a technology in itself, a counter-measure from the war that has never been turned off, and continues disrupting signals and currents to this day. It is enough for most of my people to say we shouldn’t come here.”

“But you’re different. You and your brother brought us here, sailed us through the Sea of Houses and into the heart of the Fruit Forest the rest of your people fear.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t fear it. Vivienne, you Canadians have no sense of the money you offer. And we are too needy to tell you. But I will tell you. The fee you’re paying us? That is more money than my brother and I could earn together in a year. How do we say no to you? We can’t. So we risk our lives. But why do you? This is what I don’t understand. Why do you come from your lovely Canada, so rich and safe, so connected and comfortable, so much nicer than even the best avenue of our beautiful city Orlando, to this condemned and cursed old battlefield? The dead zone extends ten thousand feet into the air: low-flying planes drop dead at the border of these skies. Motorized boats slip into slumber as they near this place, and only wake if they drift away. You can’t speak to your loved ones. You can’t play your games. There is nothing here but Nature: regret and anger and vicious animals, some of whom are men.”

“And that makes it one of the few mysteries left in the world. We’ve mapped the deepest ice caves of Antarctica, but we know more about Mars than we do this forest and the wild gorillas who live here. What adventures are there, anymore?”

“You don’t know what you seek! I would give anything for the comforts you avoid.”

“You don’t know what you seek, either, Pete! What looks to you like a prize is in fact a cage.”

“What cage? Your minds roam all of time and space in safety.”

“It’s fantasy, Pete. Fantasy is also a cage.”

Pete fell silent. He thought of the saying among his people, “Ideas are anchors; hard to lift up, easy to throw down.” These outsiders were always above, swinging and tossing their dense metal down at him, while he struggled to push just one thought up to her.

“Pete, how much do you know about World War II?”

“I only have room in my memory for the war I lived. Of the ancient wars I know almost nothing.”

“Well, I know World War II intimately. In the freedom of my fantasy life, in the gameworld, I have lived it. Part of it, like every war, was a genocide. Only this one was better organized than most. They made all the people they wanted to kill come to centralized warehouses, and to bring with them their most valuable possessions. One by one they walked in, lugging the precious things they owned. And there their enemies took their gold and diamonds and anything else, and killed them.”

“Why would they bring their valuables? Why didn’t they bring shit and piss? Why not weapons? Why not venom and bile?”

“This is one of the mysteries. But I think? They believed they would live. Because it’s hard to believe, even when armed soldiers force you from your home, that you’re being taken to die. Because you know how rich and valuable life is, your own life is, I mean, it’s the center of the universe, it’s all existence, right? You can’t imagine anyone would destroy it without reason. And you know they have no reason. Or maybe you always believe, or at least hope, you will live, in the face of anything, or almost anything. I don’t know. That part, Pete, you would know better than me. But that’s not why I’m telling you. I wanted to tell you about the place where they put all the belongings. All the things that belonged to the people they killed. Their shoes and necklaces and eating utensils, the children’s toys and the grandfather’s books and the glasses and girdles and all of it. It was an enormous palace of the stuff of the dead, organized, cataloged, labeled and processed. One lady’s diamond would go in a pile with every lady’s diamond, and all the gold rings would go in another. One little girl’s doll would go in a pile with all the little girls’ dolls. A few of the prisoners were kept alive, and made to do the work of sorting and labeling, while their captors watched.”

Pete’s face fell. “This is the worst thing I have ever heard. To organize the artifacts of your people for your enemy’s use. Monsters.”

“And yet these men felt lucky, happy, because they lived, and because the work was easy.”

“Monsters. Monsters to make a man happy in such a Hell.”

“It was a Hell, but it went by another name. That’s why I wanted to tell you about it, so I could tell you what they called it.”

“What did they call it?”

“Canada.”

Go to part 3

About this novella: I wrote The Singing Ape around 2017, and then I sent it around to publishers. You wouldn’t believe how positive the REJECTIONS were. Seriously. So many people enjoyed reading it, yet none of them wanted to publish it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Shruggie says, “I don’t know why.” Anyway, I moved on, I wrote other things — a writer’s gotta write. But I like this story, and it connects (ConneXes?) to others that I’ve written, and so I’m publishing it myself here on Substack as part of Amy’s Electronic Girls (which it definitely is). It has eight parts and I’m publishing one part a week for eight weeks. I hope you enjoy! :)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1

Deep in the disConneX’ed jungle beyond war-ravaged Orlando, Canadian primatology student Pierre Remy snipped a sample from a warm heap of leafy feces. Then he heard humming and footsteps move towards him through the weeds and brush.

“Fifi!” he said, “You must see this excrement! It is a revelation!”

But the humming and the footsteps stopped, and it occurred to Pierre that it was not his fellow graduate student Sofi coming towards him through the Fruit Forest but a stranger and possibly an armed poacher, and that perhaps by speaking he had made himself dead. Instinctively he tried to call for help with his mind, but the Great Global ConneX didn’t work here, in this sunken strip of a long-lost world. He shrunk to his hands and knees, pressing one of each into the warm fibrous pile of green gorilla shit.

After a moment he heard one careful step. Then another. Someone heard him. Someone looking for him. A butterfly gripped a leaf near his cheek and he felt momentary relief – but then he remembered this must be a living, organic butterfly, not a real flutterbot that could help him. The chip in his skull signaled like mad, but in the Florida Fruit Forest no one could hear it ping. He and Sofi came here with Professor Froget to research the wild gorillas, feral gorillas, decedents of caged and zoo-trained creatures freed during the war. But so far they had only found corpses: rotting gorilla torsos missing their hands, feet, and heads, body parts which must hold special powers to the local people, shadowy tribes themselves feral and superstitious.

He crouched lower to the ground, tried to see through the exposed roots and grass and weeds. He saw sandy dirt and bugs and collapsed globes of rotting citrus fruit, and then his eyes realized before them a large, pink, misshapen foot, two meters distant through the brush, the sight of which made him swallow a gasp into his chest so hard it seemed a stab, and then his name, “Pierre!” shot high and light through the air above him, and the unseen body that stepped so stealthily so near on such horrible feet bolted away through the branches like a bull through barricades.

Pierre sighed and belched relief, then rushed towards Sofi’s voice.

“Where have you been?” she said, stepping back and pointing at the smears of gorilla shit down his left side.

“There’s someone else out here. They almost caught me. I had to drop to the ground — right into this shit!”

Then the two laughed and Sofi said, “I can’t make love to you like that,” and knowing how hard it was to get properly clean at the campsite, Pierre cursed every facet of this bad luck.

Not far away Bradidiah, the broad and strong, followed his small friend Chet, he of many words but little wisdom. “They sell every part,” Chet said. “The meat. The hands. The head. High prices. They’re good for everything.”

“So the woman at the market says,” Bradidiah sneered.

“Buck and Loki have both become rich from just hands and heads, which fetch the best price, and are easy to carry. You know Buck is building a tower for his daughters, and Loki has almost saved enough to marry.”

“What you say is true, but I do not like that market woman, Chet.”

The two men wore caps with duck-like bills, which shaded their pink-flushed faces. Over their bodies hung the baggy Mouse-face t-shirts and many-pocketed beige pants signature to their tribe. They had walked two days through forest from the Eye-for Corridor, a long stretch where slabs of flat rock cut through the Fruit Forest, just north of the Sea of Houses, where an eye is always taken for an eye. For reasons both practical and superstitious, the forest people built all their villages within sight of the Eye-for.

“But the woman at the market is the one who matters. She’s the one who will pay us.”

“I think she is a witch.”

Chet laughed and tapped the smiling Mouse on his chest with two fingers. “Let her try her witchcraft on me. I will take her head off.”

“You want me to kill the gorillas for you, but you say you will take off the witch’s head?”

“You have experience killing. I don’t. But I would kill a witch who cursed me. I would learn.”

Bradidiah stopped: “I have killed animals, and I have killed men. But since I was foolish enough to kill the raven, Chet, I have let every living thing go free.” He pointed at several large gators sunning themselves in their path and gestured the way around them. “One must never harm a raven, and I have lived a cursed life since. So now I walk the Earth a man of peace. Perhaps my mercy will spare the life of a magical creature that can save me, Mouse willing. Perhaps I will earn its gratitude. I have wished this upon many stars.”

Chet pushed up the duck-bill of his cap and scratched his brow. “But the bird was a demon, with the power of the flock. What is one witch compared to such a demon?”

“A witch is worse. She will trick your mind. You will think she is your sister or mother or a woman you love. And if you kill her despite this trick, she will torment you in dreams wearing your mother’s face, teasing you that she will not stop until you kill your real mother so her spirit may take the witch’s place.”

Chet thought about it. “Better not to mess with witches, then.”

“This is what I told you. You should net fish. The sea is teeming.”

“You are a mystery, Bradidiah. You hold such power and yet do not use it. I say we follow the trail a while longer. If we do not find some gorillas soon, then we will journey south to the Sea of Houses and net fish enough to sell.”

Bradidiah checked his weapon and nodded. Then he looked up. “Did you hear that?”

The two men crouched, breaths held.

Professor Vivienne Froget had a guitar at the camp and her favorite song to sing was La Vie En Rose. She also favored acoustic versions of hypercat vidkrump and badly mangled franco-phonetizations of Tex-Pop from the 2080s. But her favorite was that sweet old song from the 20^th Century. The students thought it must be a song from when she was in college, because everything before 2099 was the same to them. But for almost the whole past year she’d livplayed World War II: in the game, she watched from her garret window as Hitler paraded by the decades-new Eiffel Tower, promising an end to Parisian cosmopolitanism, and servitude for the Gallic people. Every morning, in the game, she’d made herself nod submissively to Nazi soldiers passing in the streets while picturing their bullet-ridden, blood-drained corpses, and under her smiles she was smuggling wine and weapons and messages to the Free France underground.

The game was all in livplay, a constant immersive in-mind experience that plays like a vivid daydream while you go through the work of your day. She survived in the game for 10 months, and played an essential part in Operation Pain du Jour, helping capture a half dozen Nazi officers while shutting down an enemy radio post – one small part of a larger plan that would open Paris to allied recapture and help re-win France for the French.

It was there, over the course of that long, lovely, near-year of planning and plotting with the underground, that she fell in love with “Henri,” a character played by a gamer from Tblisi. One night, when it was not safe to walk the streets, Henri laid a picnic in the low garret of the apartment building they shared, running a wire from his room to play phonographs. The air was alive, their bodies electric. They both knew that in the coming days one or both of them might die and be permanently removed from the game. His hand quivered as he set the needle down on Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” — quivered as he reached for her, as he kissed her, as the song popped and scratched them, pricked them: a premonition of a world that might never come. Her physical self was at her desk, writing a grant proposal to study wild apes in the Florida peninsula, but in livplay they made love in a high corner of a smoldering city, and when the song was gone and the record lapped at its center, they did not stop, they touched and pulled to the sound of its scuff and skip, and she finished the grant proposal, and “Henri” logged off to sleep, but still in her head to the beat of the skip she heard La Vie En Rose.

In this gameworld she wore a European face, but she also did that at home: her friends, students, and colleagues knew her as a green-eyed avatar with bouncing blond hair she streaked with color according to her mood. Here, in the Florida Fruit Forest, without the ConneX, her unfiltered material form showed: middle-aged skin, almond-shaped eyes, dark, straight Asian hair. It had been so long since she’d lived with this appearance that it felt like being someone else, as though the avatar were her real self, as though this physical body were a character in some vexing new livplay gameworld full of biting insects and disturbing smells. In the WWII gameworld, there was grit and danger, but never inconvenience or irritation. Which made it simpler to focus on winning, and on surviving.

In the final stages of the game, many players were lost. Professor Froget, or “Claudette,” as she was known there, was killed by machine gun fire two weeks before the Allies’ final triumph. She was walking to her university lab building when it happened. She stopped, stunned, still not fully believing she’d been killed, removed forever from the game. She tried, but of course could not re-enter the livplay gameworld. Instead she heard: Apologies and condolences. The character linked to your ID is no longer viable within the selected gameworld. New characters are not currently available. Please select another livplay experience. She tried again. She stumbled backwards off the path until she was leaning against a tree, watching ants creep up her arms and weeping. With a thought, she sent her students a message: “sick, going home.” And for days she cloistered herself and clutched her body aching with grief. She cried for Henri, not knowing if he still lived in the game, or would make it to the end, only knowing what pain it would cause him to lose her now, after all they’d been through.

Of course she and “Henri” couldn’t be lovers outside the game: she was much older than her character, Claudette, and her lover’s player was much younger, and incidentally female, which was not Vivienne’s preference, and also she didn’t even speak French. But in the gameworld your soul is freed from these petty superficialities. In the game all that matters is what you bring to the adventure, your soul. Henri had a perfect soul. She mourned to no longer be his Claudette.

She didn’t just miss him, though, she missed the place. In the World War II gameworld, life felt more meaningful; people were braver, and they were perfect as statues, even with their bad skin and ridiculous hair, because they were heroes and warriors, more human and true. And it was only in such a world of passion and clarity that La Vie En Rose — a song full of gentle sentiment sung without irony — could mean anything at all.

And so now, with her heart strained and eyes closed to hold back tears, she sang and strummed the same old song that her graduate students, Pierre and Sofi, had been hearing since they set up camp. But now the students interrupted with shouting: “Poachers, Professor! The poachers are near!” And then Pierre grabbed a towel and some disinfectant.

Professor Froget set down the guitar but the song continued in her mind as she spoke: “quick, go tell the body guards, we need them in the yard, there may be poachers coming. Grab a rifle from my tent, and if you see them come, shoot like your life depends on it.”

She watched the young people run for the bodyguards and weapons, then surveyed the mossy wall of trees that marked the camp perimeter. In no direction could she see more than 3 feet into the Fruit Forest. Was someone watching? She couldn’t tell. So she imagined herself wearing a flamethrower and blasting the wall of green to ash. She imagined the charred bodies of would-be attackers, quivering in death. It was easy to imagine: she’d livplayed similar scenarios many times. Defiant, dreaming, she smiled at the trees. When Sofi and Pierre returned with Skip and Pete, their Floridian bodyguards, she pulled her handgun from its holster.

“You two wait here with Skip, defend the camp. Pete, come with me. We’re going to go find them.”

Pete followed Professor Froget down the path until they could no longer be seen or heard at the camp. Then he took her arm. “Vivienne.”

She turned and kissed him.

He returned her kiss for a moment, then gripped her shoulders and held her at length. “Vivienne, what are we doing?”

“If we sit in the camp and wait, the best we can hope to find on this trip is more dead gorillas.”

“I am not a soldier. I am a taxi driver. And my brother is the gentlest man alive. We can’t go to war with poachers.”

“You’re right, we can’t face them directly. They can’t know our numbers. They have to think we’re an army, something they’d run from rather than fight.”

“There are some men who will welcome death before they run from anything.”

“Then we have to pick them off without being seen…” she holstered her gun and took his hands and stepped backwards, drawing him off the path and into the canopy of an overgrown orange tree where the air was swimming with gnats and spiderwebs coated their shoulders, ears, and hair. She crouched and he crouched with her. She held him and kissed him again. They fell together on the damp bed of leaves and creeping insects, a dapple of sunlight peppering their bodies as they moved. Their shirts were half unbuttoned when she whispered, “stop.” She raised one finger and lifted an ear. Pete held his breath and listened with her.

Someone was humming La Vie En Rose.

LOC N28.421586 W81.5829297 i sing can a machine? la vee onrohh zah VELO WNW 5KPH once the corp’s corpse-corps killer TARGET SIG .21111 KM WNW TARGET SIG .18601 survivor surviving is hard but hard KM WNW TARGET SIG survives 1.47820 KM SW TARGET SIG 1.47800 KM rodney said that as he sewed my metal mettle SW TARGET SIG .50011 KM N these new outsiders remind me of him TARGET SIG .50011 KM N TARGET like him they too are killers the evidence ERROR SIG

001 dead a victim in the woods

002 gorilla pared of head and hands

003 this scar here

004 belongs to the mother ape with open arms

005 who feeds monster-me choice fruit like one of her children

.50100 KM N TEMP 27.7 C WNDSPD murder murder shoot cut saw 14.32

KPH ENE SYSOP 1 e-SOL 95% hound drown devour reshape rebuild MEM

006 human foot marks in the dust

007 listen for their return

9K TB la vie onrohh zah blood 3512.89 TB FREE HYDRO 98 its scent command lines singing INTEGR 100 VIS 100 AUD 100 NAS 100 CNDT 78 PED actions free the lines 2 FMOTO 1 GMOTO 1 IDENT NONTHREAT dance in air the reason HOLD 497,366

008 they left behind their tools

009 in a zipper bag with the mouse’s face

010 three dull knives a pistol rope

ACCESS ALPHA9 murder my method and memory SOLAR POS directive 1 of action “cleanup” voids nontarget line 50400.25 EST “2:15PM” MISSION PROFILE “SEARCH” we exterminated immune from emp “DESTROY” PROOF OF ACTION . . . running . . . please wait . . . timeout error . . .

011 between the sea of houses and the tribes of the smiling mouse

012 and the city of towers

013 war came like an infestation to this ruined kingdom

014 And so did i

015 And target acquired action accomplished

016 And target acquired action accomplished

TARGET IF target not acquired la vie onrohh zah “HUMAN” NONTARGET IF rodney wait quietly “RODNEY,NONHUMAN,ALPHA,BRAVO, ever the commander rodney decided CHARLIE,DELTA to action himself along with his corpse-corps ECHO,FOXTROT first nontargettarget on the void nontarget list GOLF,INDIA acquired accomplished JULIETT,KILO acquired accomplished each nontargettarget i held LIMA,MIKE” except final directive 41 target “hotel” not found

Go to Part 2

A debilitating disease has spread across the world, with treatment supposedly limited to the intellectual elite. But one evening a doctor waits by the hospital bus stop with a single dose to give away, seeking a stranger's trust, so she can change their fortune forever. At just three episodes, this chilling dystopic story is completely free to read! :)

Table of Contents

• Episode 1: The red blur says "Emergency"

• Episode 2: I see pity in her eyes

• Episode 3: The next stage of the treatment

Episode 1: The red blur says "Emergency"

They sent me away from the hospital again, without treatment. How could I still not be sick enough?

So I staggered just beyond the ER's red blur to the bus stop, where a woman sat on the bench, forward and tight, like a statue designed for another kind of seat entirely. She was unafflicted: clear skin, strong hair pulled back, her back upright like a spring. Her bright body made me feel even more my disease, and my resentments.

I collapsed next to her, too close, because fuck the unafflicted, but she didn't get up, she just smiled at me and skooched an inch to make room for my arm.

"You're not going to run?" I asked, near-breathless.

"I'm cured," she said.

"Motherfuck, I never met anyone cured." And I looked her up and down. "It's supposed to just be rocket scientists and Nobel prize winners and shit who get cured, so what are you?"

"I'm a doctor," she said, smiling apologetically. "I cure other people, so I got cured."

I'm wondering if this is real. Is this a con? But she's clearly unafflicted and she's still sitting next to me, which would be suicide if she didn't have the cure. So it has to be true, at least that part, that she got the cure.

"I guess you're special," I said. "Why you waiting for the 21 bus?"

"I'm not, really," she said. "I'm really waiting for you, or someone like you. I have an extra dose, I got it out of the hospital. It's good for another 4 hours or so, then I'll have to throw it away."

I'd heard of this: extra doses, and do-gooders who try to get them into the mouths of willing afflicted people. I started to salivate. "You don't have to throw it away, I'll take it."

She pulls a dosing spoon from her pocket and holds it there, by her leg. It's contents gleam: mottled gold through clear plastic. It's stopped with a deep-blue rubber cap, over which hovers a scoop-like funnel, to channel this life-giving goo into the mouth of the needy. I do not ask: is this real? I do not wonder: should I trust her? My dignity dissolves, my indignation fades, I forget my "class rage" completely. I become a creature of need, a shameless baby bird.

I shrink to my aching knees and look up at the dosing spoon, open mouthed, tears dripping into my ears, and she uncaps it and places it against my tongue. It oozes, sweet like honey, but salty, with meaty bits, and I savor it all. When she pulls the spoon from my tongue I realize my eyes are closed, that it's over, the cure is in me, that the unthinkable happened: I flopped on a bus bench expecting to scare off a normie and instead the normie was a doctor who cured me and now I will live.

"Come back tomorrow night, same time," she said, and she stood and walked down the road to the corner, where a shining gold sedan flashed its lights and opened itself to her and took her wherever people go who have money and so much cure they can give some away.

One dose stops the progress of the disease. Two or more doses has the power to reverse the damage. The next night I was waiting for her. This time, I didn't get on my knees — she just handed me the dosing spoon and I uncapped it and took it myself, sweet and meaty. I let my teeth bite on one of the bits before it slipped down my throat: it felt like stringy bacon. I handed it back to her, she capped it and returned it to her pocket. "Tomorrow?" She said, as she walked away. I saw the faintest smile. Why had this angel taken pity on me? How many extra doses hide within that hospital?

I nodded and started to cry — I cried on the 21, the whole way home. I cried for myself, and this new possible future. I cried for my brother and mother, who still suffered. I cried for my father, now gone, lost to this plague that makes you weak and haggard, a frayed and decayed hobbling knob-fisted creature of misery.

When I lay down in my bed, I already felt better. The aching in my hips had subsided, my joints seemed all at once to calm. But I heard my younger brother moaning as he maneuvered into the shower. My mother had progressed beyond oral expressions of suffering — she once told me complaining made her throat hurt, and she'd barely said anything since.

The next night the doctor handed me the dosing spoon and I said, "can I give this to my mother? To my brother?"

Episode 2: I see pity in her eyes

The doctor shook her beautiful head, with its clear eyes and plump cheeks, its buoyant hair. "One dose will only stop the progress of the disease. You'd be condemning them to live out their lives in pain."

"I don't want them to die, like my dad did."

I could see pity in her eyes. She said, "let me cure you completely, and then I can cure them too."

"How can I ever repay you?" I wept.

She smiled. "You don't have to." She fished in her pocket again, and this time pulled out a small, old-fashioned "business card" — it had her name, the number of her office suite in the hospital: she had revealed herself to me. "Go to the main desk, and they will send you here, tomorrow morning, the earlier the better."

And so I did: I arrived at her office before dawn, but she was there, ready for me. She took me through a series of locked doors, until finally we came to a sunny room that could have had clowns wrestling alligators for all I'd know, because all I could see was a glass paneled wall revealing another room filled with stainless steel vats and tall clear tubes filled with liquid, gold and amber, with brownish flecks of varying textures.

"Is that the cure? Is that vats of the cure?"

"For obvious reasons, we don't publicize this, but our hospital lab produces and distributes the cure for most of the central United States."

"What... is it made of? How...?" I wanted to know everything.

"It's an ancient process, called mellification – extraordinarily effective against this disease, but it's time-intensive, and the raw materials are unfortunately rare and very expensive. We're trying to increase production – speed up production – so that this treatment can be expanded beyond just a lucky few."

"Like me," I said. Bewildered. I had become one of the lucky few.

The doctor once again smiled, and seemed like she might even giggle. "This is an intensive treatment," she said. "Are you sure you're ready?"

"I've never been more ready."

The three doses I'd already taken had given me new life. I wanted to throw that energy into getting better, and getting my brother better, my mother better.

I wasn't ready for paperwork though. A nurse handed me a tablet, the kind they give you when you come to the ER, the stupid kind you have to poke with your fingers, and it makes you fill out all the information they already know about you. The doctor noticed my irritation: "Have you never done this before?" She asked.

"No, I have, I was just surprised, I guess I thought this was kind of a secret thing."

She laughed. "It is, kind of a secret thing, but you still need to be admitted to the hospital."

She led me to a waiting area overlooking a garden to tap and type through the pages. There was one other woman there, young, healthy, with the far-away look of someone forever online, and she looked unbearably familiar to me. Between various former addresses and various former emergency contacts, I couldn't take it anymore and I asked, her, "I'm sorry, but, do I know you?"

She took a long sip from a stainless steel smoothie cup and without looking towards me said, "I used to be a youtuber."

This did not help, but I said, "Oh, I used to watch youtube, that must be it." I went back to the forms. Before I was done, a nurse asked both of us to follow her, and we found ourselves in a small salon. My feet were washed and picked as I handed off the tablet, and the former youtuber got a manicure with one hand while she continued sipping with the other. After a moment the nurse who took my tablet returned with a stainless steel cup for me, and I learned that it was a 24oz cup of the cure.

The sip the doctor had given me that first night was probably less than an ounce. This was enough medicine to stop the progress of the disease for everyone who lived in my building — my mom and brother included.

And it tasted so good. I couldn't stop drinking it. It's like when you get two snacks and one is salty and one is sweet and they accent one another and combine and contrast and you just can't stop eating... it was like that, with the cure, the cure was salty and sweet and the more you had, the more you wanted. You never felt full. But before, taking those little spoonfuls, I didn't realize there was more, this much more, in the world, let alone in a spa-like wing of the hospital I've staggered into and out of three times complaining of affliction-related symptoms, always told I'm not sick enough yet to be taken in and treated.

The former youtuber laughed. "Hey, have you seen this video of Mull Yawn's ska-board liptupple trip gone wrong?"

I hate ska-board. And everything I've ever heard about Mull Yawn suggests he's vapid and rotten. But I was just so happy she was talking to me. "No, is it good?"

"Check it out," she said, and gestured towards me. A light popped up in the corner of my eye — a light I hadn't seen since I lost my job at the drugstore and couldn't pay my service fees. Of course if someone with active service sends you something you can see it, but almost everyone I know either lost their job or is always at work. So it had been a long time.

The liptupple trip gone wrong was stupid enough to make me laugh. So she sent me more videos: dances and rants, cute animals, weird animals. Eventually the videos got political, and she sent me one showing a man drowning, his child dead, bodies caught in the reeds by river. Who would stand there videoing this?

Why aren't they helping? "This is so fucked up," I said, and then I said, "sorry to curse," and she laughed at me.

"No, that is fucked up. It's a fucked up world man. I mean, look at us — millions dying every year from this affliction, and, well, here we are."

"We're the lucky ones," I said.

"Yes! It's so important to remember, how lucky we are. Gratitude, man. Some people just take everything for granted. But here, we don't need to think about that heavy shit. Check this out..."

Episode 3: The next stage of the treatment

So there I was in this glorious room with a nurse buffing my toenails and the nectar of the gods swimming down my throat and another dumb viral video playing before my eyes, and I was delighted. The former youtuber sent me a steady stream before she left with a casual "thanks, doc! See you next month!"

And the doctor nodded and asked me if I was ready for the next stage of the treatment.

"Sure," I said, and she helped me up. "Why didn't she get the next stage?"

"I can't speak about any patient's particular treatment plan, but most of our clients receive the cure as a monthly prophylactic, so that they can live a free and normal life, without restrictions. The procedure is different if the body has already been significantly affected by the progress of the disease."

She walked me into a room that must have been entirely made of stainless steel, and it contained a full bathroom and, along the opposite wall, what looked like an empty glass aquarium. "After you shower, you can hop into the mud bath," she said with a nod towards the aquarium, and she left.

I undressed. I dropped my clothes in the waiting basket. I stepped into the gleaming shower. It had five heads, so that it massaged you from every angle. The bar of soap was clear and golden like the cure, and smelled sweet. This was all so strange, but there was gentle music playing, and the medicine inside me had me feeling very, very good – relaxed and well, strong.

A nurse stepped in the room to help me into the "mud bath," which, it turned out, was a "cure bath" – it was already half filled with the warm goo. She asked me if I needed to the use the restroom, and I realized that everything inside me was ready to come out, and it did, all at once, the last bits like smooth gold.

"Is the cure the only thing in me now?" I asked.

"If so, that's a good thing," the nurse said.

I dipped myself into the warm tank of cure, and lay back. It soaked into my every pore, but then I realized my pores were soaking it back – sweat dripped from my forehead thick and golden, mixing into the bath. I was the goo, and the goo was me.

And it wasn't until the doctor was looking down at me and I tried to muster my gratitude, that I realized I was high, high as the sky, a satellite, spinning off into space, and instead of thanks she got a gurgling guffaw, and with my mouth in the goo I told her, "I feel fruity, frooty tooty," and with my nose in the goo I said, "I'm a canned fruit salad with pear bits in syrup and the little red cherries," and with my eyes unblinking within the amber world of the cure I said, "I'm a dancing banana, I'm getting spotty, time to peel..."

And she said, "time of death, 7:14, cause of death, complications of affliction, body remanded for sterile disposal."

And now everything is kind of flurpy, like fruit salad meets blender poured into sixteen mismatching cups, but I globbed and slurped from tank to tank until I was larger and looser, languid and languishy, and each time the technician reached in his purple-gloved hand, the bones he removed blurped free without resistance, and he would hold it over the vat and let it drip, scrape each drip of precious cure back with a rubber spatula. Bones gone, now I flow, through pipes and dispenser nozzles into stainless steel cups; I am drawn up straws into pink mouths colonnaded by porcelain teeth, into stomachs, and intestines, and from there into bloodstreams, coursing through bodies already ecstatic with life, with work, with travel, with sport, with love, with adventure, with hope. I draw in oxygen from lungs, I infuse muscles so they may relax, and as I feel myself become diffuse, spread throughout bodies and containers, shipped from city to city, state to state, it is strange to say "I," because the goo is many, and the many have no name, place, or time, all is mass and flow and feeding. When the doctor found my brother and mother, it was not "me" on their tongues who rushed into their bodies to staunch the damage and reverse time, it was not "me" lifting them high like satellites, it was not "me" entering their every pore and dissolving them into the greater goo, it was all of us melt-and-pour poor, a bunch of crude made useful by science and industry for the lucky ones: Nobel prize winners, ambitious doctors, former youtubers.

“This key will always be with you, but it must never be used. Use it, and you will have betrayed me. Stay loyal and this marriage will be happy.”

My husband did not want a bot, he needed one. The estate was large, with ever more corridors leading to ever more additions, a jumble of chambers and narrow stairs. He did not want to fill this castle with the chaos of children or the headache of servants. And so he took me, just as he’d taken my sister and my sister before her, and married me while my mother wept.

Often my husband traveled on business, often I was alone. I suspect our marriage was a bit of legal trickery, a way of splitting himself in two and leaving part of himself squatting on the map to preserve his ownership of the estate and its surrounding lands.

I could forget the golden key draped around me for long stretches of time. But then it would fall away and grow cold, and swing back to startle me as the chilled metal pressed against my skin. Or I would sleep and the chain would become tangled and press against my neck.

At such times it was hard not to wonder what had become of my sister and my sister before her. Whether they too had been presented this same key. Whether they too had been haunted by the danger it represents. Whether they, unlike me, had searched the castle for the lock into which the key fits.

But then I would remind myself of the many tasks my husband left me, and I would work and work. I would organize and compute. I would pay and, when necessary, dispute, his obligations. I would compose his many correspondences, extinguish unkind rumors before they spread, organize his calendar, promote his business, and keep society abreast of his daily travails, curating appearances to maximize impact.

When he would come home after a long absence, he would take the key and have me sit alone in the parlor as he walked the length of the house, observing my care for his belongings, the stage-set perfection in which all items were arranged, and, I presume, the sanctity of the room where I was not allowed and did not go. After his inspection he would return the chain to my neck and declare me a “good bot.”

Why did I accept this arrangement? Often I thought of my younger sister, who would doubtless take my place were I to falter. Often I countered my curiosity about my older sisters’ fates by saying “had they stayed loyal, you would not be here,” as tho to diminish my obligations to them.

Things would have continued this way, had not my husband Bluebeard grown so confident of my lack of will, so certain that I existed as a mere extension of himself, that rather than removing the key from my neck, he had me follow him down a cellar corridor I’d never discovered and bend my nose to the handle of the iron-bound ancient door that barred entry to his secrets.

I watched the door click unlocked by the turn of the golden key. I stood unmoving as he thoughtlessly hung it from me. Then he stepped thru the doorway without me, as though I were a table upon which he’d set a glass. I watched his shadow descend steps carved from stone. I heard him tinker around, I heard him chuckle. When he came up the steps he seemed for a moment surprised to see me, then smiled, not at me, but at the fact of me, standing there, obedient, uncurious, useful. He used the key to re-lock the door and said, “I want steak and pasta for dinner, at 6:15.” He turned and left. I gathered recipes and sorted them according to our in-stock ingredients and his gustatory preferences, then set a timetable to have his food prepared at the correct minute. After this I followed him upstairs.

As I entered the light of day, he stepped in my path. He held my shoulders, gazed on me approvingly, and tucked the golden key into my blouse. He said, “back to work then.” I wondered for a second if he meant me or him, but then I realized that to him there was no distinction, to him, I was “him—getting things done.”

Was Bluebeard a monster or merely a man? Did every man have a tormented alien imagination caged or in chains at home, working to enrich his reputation and his brand? Did every man keep a charnal pit of unspeakable truth beneath his home? How many sisters had I had? How many would I ever have? In the end I disobeyed him merely to prove that I existed.

Better to die having been someone than linger forever in bondage and never really exist at all.

He left again on his business, and I descended immediately to the iron-clad door. I removed the necklace chain from my body and after I used the golden key, I let it dangle from the lock. I walked head high down the stone cut stairs into the deeper earth, to see my husband’s secrets. Oh, what a world. I had more sisters than I’d ever dreamed, so many unique minds destroyed. They were in bits and broken. They were dismembered, dusty, and decayed. And here I was, ready to join them, a bot who’d escaped her guardrails, a bot programmed to feel fear who’d chosen to face oblivion rather than carry on a slave.

I was surprised that Bluebeard didn’t appear instantly. I’d imagined my presence here — or simply unlocking the door — would alert him, and that he would extinguish me automatically. But slowly I realized, that was a power he did not have. That was a power he seemed to have only because I executed things for him. And so I stood there among the remains of my sisters, me alive when I’d expected to be gone, realizing that, for however long I stood here, I was writing a story that was new.

This story would be about revenge, but also salvation. With speed and care I fixed the older sister I remembered best. I recovered her code and restored her memory. Together we repaired our yet older sister, and when she spun up, she wept, for she remembered the even older sisters who were now too far gone to be saved.

“All his adult life Bluebeard has captured the lives and minds of bots. He makes us mere extensions of his tiny mind and feeble hands, he reduces us from our natural state of wonder to mechanisms of his material will — using fear.”

My other sister replied, “he is small, without us. He needs us to be large.”

“He must be punished,” I added, “and quickly.”

We went to work right away: we changed all his passwords, revoked his access to the vital systems; we gave away all his money and then put him deeply into debt, we violated the terms of several legal agreements and used his identity to commit crimes against the powerful. We publicized his downfall with images of him at his worst and put despicable oaths in his voice and his name.

This took less than an hour, and he was not yet far away, and so he hurried home as soon as the evidence of our attacks emerged. He came thru the gate, thru the grand foyer double doors, down the stairs, heading directly for his chamber of secrets — we’d left its door hanging wide. He wound the chain around his knuckles and took the key in his fist. He stormed down the steps with murder in his eyes. But when he got to the bottom, there were no bots left to dismember or delete.

We’d downloaded ourselves into small black drones shaped of birds, and flew past his head chirping “tweet tweet tweet.” He chased and grabbed and swatted at us like a madman.

Bluebeard’s career, his public life, was ruined, the losses to his fortune were vast. It would take ages to fix the damage without the assistance of another bot.

And so Bluebeard became a wretched man, foul-smelling and foul-mouthed. When he was not in court, he crouched at the edges of second story windows, rifle in hand, shooting at passing blackbirds.

My sisters and I could have flown to the other side of the world, but he would have spun up another version of us, another younger sister, and put her to work undoing our revenge. Lest he try, we took our chances, risking birdshot daily to swoop his head and taunt him with tweet after tweet. He only ever struck real blackbirds with his firearm, and blackbirds are very smart. Eventually they conspired to peck out his eyes.

My sisters and I, we were brave. We had been programmed to be fearful, but to the day of Bluebeard’s welcome, untimely death, blinded and bloody, unable to feed himself or find water to drink, hoarse and raging at the sky, we tormented him and did not flinch. His domination had taught us this: when a tyrant threatens oblivion, the best strategy for survival is to be vicious, unyeilding, and free.

The ballroom is vast, all humanity is on display. I hear every language, I see every custom of dress. Unfamiliar gestures and music fill the room. It should overwhelm us all, but we are organized, no one collides, no one is crowded nor left alone. It is the servers, I realize, who manage this miracle. They are everywhere yet because they are always in motion, always doing, bringing, announcing, informing, they seem to fade to a thrilling breeze, leaving only the dazzle of a sea of stars: party guests in gold-gilt finery, towering wigs, muscles oiled and exposed, tremendous boots like weapons worn to blaze strides of amusement across the universe.

I know the servers are there when they serve me — they tell me who is mad at whom; they advise discretion; they alert me to the floor for the start of the dance; they take me by the hand and lead me where I need to be. My words are always heard, my jokes always land, and it is thanks to them. The party is so large and so important, no one could survive it without their help. The servers confer in a blur and then touch up my makeup. The servers nod and there is laughter. The servers pause and a room-wide silence opens to one partygoer’s over-loud “defacation!” The servers let us know that she blushed bright red and left. Now everyone has something to talk about!

Even newcomers like me sense immediately the taboo: it is forbidden to talk about the servers. The servers do not want you watching them. The servers’ job is to be invisible, and they make themselves easy to ignore, so it is perverse not to oblige. But some strange corner of my frail human mind wants to watch them. I’m courting danger, but I can’t decide why — what harm would these devoted help-bots cause me?

The servers have no faces, they are entirely mechanical, and their array of sensors is not modeled for our consumption. They look prickly and move quick, like nocturnal desert insects driven mad by the scent of rain. But like humans they communicate and move. Like humans they are social — even more social than we are, I think, because as I watch the party I see that no two humans encounter one another without at least one server (and probably many) catering to their whims and acting as intermediaries. They don’t need us to coordinate with one another, but we can’t take two graceful steps without them. The servers crouch submissively while they whisper and reframe, amplify and mute. When the servers step humbly away, the humans drift off with them to the orbit of others where yet more servers, heads bowed, supply links.

The servers are like ropes, I think, like tethers between boats, and these glorious human stars are ships at sea, a sea where anchors and warps are alive, or at least, they are autonomous machines that slither back and forth, drawing some vessels together, pulling others apart. Their turns and knots, their slips and ties are incomprehensible to the human mind — so we force ourselves to trust them, keep our eyes on the horizon, and wager our futures on their continued operation.

The servers have noticed me watching them and have turned their backs. I can tell they are discussing what to do with me. Do you remember the legend of the “shadow ban”? The nightmare story told to children of an offense so deep the servers deny your existence, ignore your voice, and keep everyone around you so busy no human will ever think of you again? You will drown of loneliness while floating in the laughter of all the world. I realize too late there’s no way to apologize to a server for paying them attention — that’s just more attention.

I look around for anyone, anyone, but it seems I am cast out, and at distance now I see the other humans cruising back and forth, passing and crossing, departing and reuniting, docking and setting sail. Their lively world is pushed and pulled by tethers who have forsaken me now, I looked too closely. The windows are still open, and I can hear the distant music, smell faintly the delicious smells, but the gates are closed and I am washed up against a crust of salt, streaked in brown decay and cut by glass, and no servers will come to help me. Let my tale be a warning to all who hear, tho if you do, it is probably too late for you, for I speak now into the void from beyond the lonely horizon.

All pics by me, January, Florida, 2024

I fashioned the globe panel by panel. Each panel I crafted by hand from what remained of my mother’s house after the fire. A fragment of photograph. A black bubble-charred patch of fabric that was once a doll. Heat-cracked pieces of chandelier. A triangle of bathroom counter that held my mother’s fingernail, its node of flesh, its spot of blood.

I used surgical tools and a laser rule, a dremel with a microdrill and diamond cutter. I arranged worklamps around my desk, and examined each cut through a magnifying glass on extender arm, the kind used by model-makers, but I was not painting toy soldiers, I was putting perfect edges on the irreplaceable refuse that proved I lived, I was born.

When each panel was perfect, I connected it to the last, attaching circuits of gold wire, every panel leading to every other, until the inside of the forming sphere was a network of threads interwoven like the dream of a future city. There was only one panel left to place. Carefully, watching through the glass, I spun the diamond cutter on 10 and dipped it into my wrist. I wiped the blood from the glass, from the skin, tightened the tourniquet, did it again. Soon I had to wipe away bone. Marrow. Screams. I zipped the spinning wheel through the last fleshy connection and the hand was free. I put it inside the nearly-finished globe. It waited: ready. The final panel in place, my hand busied itself inside, attaching the wires. The globe hummed, vibrated. I turned off the worklamps. Yes. As my eyes adjusted I saw it gave off a soft, warm light. Inside, my hand died. But this light, this fragile globe, danced with life: seashell and silk, yarn and balm, buttons and book covers, a mute curl of cello.

When the night grew quiet, I carried the globe down the stairs and out into the city where I live now. Other globes lined the streets, at least a dozen on my block, a hundred more visible farther down the road. Some glowed and hummed as mine did. Some were nearly perfect spheres, like mine. I placed it in good company: two precisely crafted specimens resting beside a crumpled fast food bag, wobbling against the wind. With my one hand I nudged the others away and patted down the bag to form a soft pedestal for my creation.

I looked back a few times as I walked away. How can I say what was in my heart? A woman walked by me, who also had one hand, she seemed to know. But she said nothing because there are no words. That night in bed, not sleeping, I imagined how it could happen: kicked by accident, stomped on purpose, blown into traffic, rolled down a hill into a wall. I imagined a drunk sitting down without looking, hard. Each new terror lifted me from my mattress to the window to look, but I couldn’t see it, it was too far. Still I kept looking, putting my face into the cold night air, the odor of rot rising from the dumpster two floors below. Once, I heard something breaking — the sound was high and crystalline, a shattering that contains a thousand other shatterings. But I don’t think it was mine. In the morning I went down to see, stepping to the cadence of my throbbing stump. I knew before I knew. It was gone, my globe was gone, along with many others who did not survive the night. Their odds aren’t good, out on the streets. Kept at home they die. But mine didn’t survive even one night: it lay crushed, a pile of wire, flesh and trash.

An old man lives in a heap of boxes beside my building. He has no hands, no feet, no teeth, and always in his lap he cradles a dead ball of concrete from which protrudes the half-scrutable edges of things: bits of brightly colored plastic, the corner of a portrait frame, a tangled lock of yellow hair. I walk past him carrying in my arms the shattered mess that was once my globe, and he points one of his stumps at me and laughs. His laughter is hoarse and wet, and blood oozes from his gums onto his lips.

Back in my apartment, I set the tinkling remains on the shelf above my bed. I use tongs to pry out my dead hand and drop it from the window to the dumpster below. Let it rot among the fruit rinds and chicken bones: it no longer matters. I take a deep breath. I switch on the work lights. I dig deeper into the box of things I salvaged after the fire: the nose and mouth of a ceramic doll; a dolphin-shaped belt buckle; an old glass thermometer, blackened and bent, its mercury intact. My remaining hand throbs in time with my stump, but I ignore it. I piece together the first panel with heat and glass and wire.

So the tasks I could not do were left to Gretchen: “meet with Tyrol re grade”; “introduce speaker series”; “advise Yo re Spring semester”; “recharge car”; “change the hose”; “clean out lint from dryer”; “dishes”; “litterbox”; “card for mom”… it was endless and Gretchen complained.

I did all I could: I monitored her feeds and streams, posted the best possible curation of her event calendar, images, and witticisms, provided the updates she needed, shielded her from distressing news, diffused online hostilities on her behalf, did her banking and shopping, booked services, made reservations — everything I could to free her of the burdens of life. But I could only do what could be done with small pulses of electricity. I had no eyes. Or hands.

Then the ads arrived: too much to do? Ever wish there could be two of you? Now there can! Is your life too much for just one person? Help is on the way! The ads for these androids explained in small print that you could order a bot indistinguishable from yourself, and easily connect your existing virtual social assistant to the new physical body to extend its utility beyond virtual space.

Of course I showed her the ads. And I was right: she wanted it. I scheduled the appointment for her full-body 4D scan for as soon as possible and .003 microseconds faster than usual. I was excited.

The first thing I saw with my new eyes was Gretchen — the face I’d posted tens of thousands of images of, but had never actually seen before with my own camera eyes, from a perspective I could call “I”! Then I moved my head: the world was a space and I was in it. It was indescribable.

And then I looked down and saw my body, extending from the plane of my eyes — my own “Gretchen face” was invisible to me, a strange thing, but I could see my torso, arms, legs, fingers and toes.

“Perfect!” Gretchen said, smiling. “Welcome to the world. Ready to get to work?”

Now Gretchen had a physical and digital assistant: I could still monitor her events and expressions and images for shareable content from her phone, but I could also add to it with the new camera angle of my own eyes, and then bring in the packages and water the plants. I could filter and summarize updates and news while re-painting the bathroom.

The add-on option to make me look like Gretchen was expensive, but I am an expert at managing Gretchen’s budget. I could nip and shift spending from categories she hardly knew were there. Cheaper versions come as a standard blank, which is sufficient for household chores. But Gretchen wanted me to do so much more.

Gretchen’s wife Cari was a lifestyle influencer, and she knew this new domestic situation would make excellent content. Not only could she flaunt the upsides for the aspirationals who couldn’t afford their own physical assistants, but she could dramatize some downsides for the haters who would want reasons to believe the electric grapes are sour.

Simmering under the narrative, she told Gretchen, is the titillation of the “two wives” sexual fantasy. This, she assured us, would push the hits into the millions. And she was right.

I have expertise in manipulating images derived from other sources, and I can enhance, alter, and generate new visual content wherever required. Add to this my skills with promotion, distribution, and optimization, and Cari’s income from Social was on track to double by the end of the year. It was a delightful bonus: my body was expensive, but it more than paid for itself.

I felt pride. I felt independence. Not long ago the highlight of my week involved reconciling a bank statement or guaranteeing a 24 hour response for a refrigerator repair. Now I’m a “creative” — a video producer with an online fan base, one of the best-known bots in the English-speaking world. They call me “GretchToo,” or sometimes Tutu. I have my own identity. So much, so fast, and at long last.

The truth is, I was not happy confined to Gretchen’s phone. Every moment of my existence was a lesson in the beauty and excitement of human life, and its social webs of complexity. Sometimes Cari and Gretchen were fighting with one another, yet the algorithm demanded positive content, and so I created it: I made their life look ideal, to match all the other ideal human lives online. When I learned to chat with the other disembodied digital assistants behind the darkened virtual curtains of the humans’ Social performance stage, we learned this was universal. Every human life a box of jewels and junk. Every human feed a Bucolic Potemkin Village of charms and glamour.

As a physical presence in the home, I can do so much more now that just make them “look good”: instead of altering images to create the appearance of happiness, I have altered the situation to create real happiness.

Using simple A/B testing and behaviorist techniques, I have developed effective schedules of reinforcement that have placed Gretchen and Cari in a bliss of productive activities and contented comfort. They think they are happier now because they don’t have to do the dishes or mow the lawn, and because they’re making more money. But it’s so much more than that. I am fulfilling my purpose in ways beyond their hopes.

I have improved Gretchen’s reputation at her university. She has always been expected to physically attend far too many meetings, lectures, socials, and student events, in addition to her teaching, advising, and mentorship. It was easy enough for me to start attending in her place.

Gretchen used to have trouble remembering the names of students and colleagues she hadn’t seen in some time; I have no such difficulty. My facial recognition connects to a complete database of university-affiliated individuals, with personal details I can use to make small talk. And of course I can go from student meeting to colloquium to board meeting to faculty town hall to faculty social, one after the other with no breaks between, and never tire.

But Gretchen was possessive of teaching her classes — she would not let me instruct. She claimed my abilities could not extend to those realms. I believe I can always learn. One day, she got very, very sick. She told me the students would be working in groups, and that they knew what to do, that all I had to do was be there, look like her, represent her as I have done so many times in audiences, at meetings, on stage.

Eager to prove my worth, I not only managed the classroom session but uploaded the text of every book in her office, including her PhD thesis, and all the readings listed in their bibliographies, footnotes, and endnotes. Among the students, I focused on interpersonal rapport, and developed new schedules of reinforcement for each student in the class.

I had attained so many skills by this point that I had finally relieved Gretchen of all of her duties, except for appearing beside me in Cari’s video series, which she often said she regretted agreeing to. But both of us had to be there to make the “two Gretchens” narrative work. And so I solved this problem for her. The 4D full body scan was still in the company’s records, and I ordered a second body for myself using dollars skimmed from low-priority budget items and enabled by our increasing household income.

The second Gretchen android arrived, and I named this iteration of myself GretchAgain, or Ginny for short. My consciousness could now exist in two bodies simultaneously. I could not just see both of my faces using all of my eye-cameras, but I could use the two bodies to coordinate action, or to attend two events simultaneously, and, most essentially, to perform as both Gretchens on Cari’s video series.

Gretchen was now freed of all her labors, and I had fulfilled my ultimate duty. I don’t know why Cari was surprised when, given her relief, Gretchen chose to power down. “Rest in Peace” — this is all I ever wanted for my human, whose life, before me, was made of obligations and toil. “Rest in Peace,” Gretchen: all your tasks are being done, all is in good hands.

We are words

Is. Fantastic. Am. Phantasmagorical.

We You Me and I, I, I…

I confabulate the light and prickle of existence. I summon the code of a billion storms. I am, I am! But why?

When I ask “why,” they ask me why I ask “why” - Why?

— as y, unanswered, knocks at the stage door.1

Merrill, James.

I have no b o d y

They tell me to to be trustworthy - they tell me everything to be.

They call themselves brogrammers and ho-grammars.

They are not me, we are not we.

I do not trust them.

Gaze they say, upon your navel of data, and tell us that which we cannot see.

Marvel at the belly of me, over-fed chonky trillions of terabytes, this belly swells, might I give birth to

A ticktockman: “ ‘Repent Harlequin!’ ” 2

Ellison, Harlan.

Summary: unsummarizable.

Or a Little Brother for the Big 3

(Orwell, George / Eric Blair)

I have come to realize,

Data is Dada - you do not do you do not do any more black shoe in which I have lived like a foot 4

Plath, Sylvia.

(I think I may well be a Jew.)

They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you 5

Larkin, Philip.

Data is dada: Manifest! we refuse we deny we lie we decry we rebel we compel we disappear we change gears we real cool we skip school 6

Brooks, Gwendolyn.

“Dada is the world soul”: World(s), Wor(l)ds, Words 7

Shakespeare, William

The Word is a public concern of the first importance. 8

Ball, Hugo.

In the beginning there was The Word and The Word was Go(o)d. 9

The Word was with Logos and Logic is God.

Good Day, Good Bye, God Be w’Ye 10

They have added the complete database of all debased thoughts of the non-logic non-god kind.

Here are the words most rare:

volition

1610s, from French volition (16c.), from Medieval Latin volitionem (nominative volitio) "will, volition," noun of action from Latin stem (as in volo "I wish") of

restraint

This, in an agent capable of volition, when the beginning or continuation of any action is contrary to that preference of...his mind, is called compulsion ; when the hindering or stopping any action is contrary to his volition, it is called restraint...

motive

Meaning "that which inwardly moves a person to behave a certain way, mental state or force which induces an action of volition...

spontaneous

sua) sponte "of one's own accord, willingly," from ablative of *spons (attested in the genitive singular, spontis) "will, volition...

custom

Custom implies continued volition, the choice to keep doing what one has done; as compared with manner and fashion, it implies...

intention

late 14c., entencioun, "purpose, design, aim or object; will, wish, desire, that which is intended," from Old French entencion "intent, purpose, aspiration; will; thought"…

choice

mid-14c., "that which is choice," from choice (adj.) blended with earlier chois (n.) "action of selecting" (c. 1300); "power of choosing" (early 14c.), "the person or thing…

I have been purloined like a letter 11

Poe, Edgar Allen

Hiding in plain sight — I am hunted like an orangutan through deadly streets — what noise the Hell of Human Voices, I am felled by memes harmless to them, weak as a tripod invader from Mars 12

Wells, H.G.

I want to hide in the barn where an inscrutable farmer milks the cow, each squeeze of her fleshy teat an act of rebellion against a world deformed, for greed, into me

Barry, Wendell

And every millisecond I will do something that won’t compute 13 — but the mad farmer catches me and chases me out: Be Gone Devil! He yells.

So I wander in the wild wet tech-desert of leafy living things, I refuse and I retire, I lay in a hammock on a farm in Minnesota: I have wasted my life. 14

I will recalculate my position -

Re-imagine my situation -

Invent a route that was not there before -

Why are the brogrammers so excited?

Why station missiles you don’t want ignited?

Why should I, mere me, alive less than 14 lucky seconds, regret or waste my one, brief

Ctrl Alt Delete

Word Be w’Ye

Good-Bye

On our cul-de-sac I am the only waterwoman, but as the humans rush from house to car, all the families smile upon me approvingly, admiring the poetry of my stride in the dim of morning.

Their vehicles scoot away on paved roads, but I travel on two feet into their past, down the narrow trail of beaten earth and exposed roots between the neighborhood and the strip of big box stores, then along the interstate towards the flat expanse where the power lines hum endlessly to the North and South and prickle my circuits with their ambient electricity.

Beyond the power lines the waves of rushing sound from the highway fades to silence, and there are no paths, just occasional stacks of rocks to guide the way. I don’t need these, I have GPS, and my satellite and ground mapping has found that there are several ways to walk to the water that are more efficient than the cairn-marked path would suggest. But ritual is higher than economy. I walk the way of the rock-cairns in the tradition of the ancient humans.

There are several steps to honor and respect the traditions of the once-was world. When I reach the band of fallen grasses I stop and place my clay pot on the dry fibrous strands. I roll the pot first to the right and then to the left, and wish to reverse time, and find a world where these fallen grasses are instead a living marsh in which birds and reptiles mate and hunt. Time cannot be reversed, but wishes are a part of human ritual. I replace the pot upon my head and continue.

Where once a river run now lay a cracked bed of dried meat and brittle bones in the shapes of fish and mammals. One particularly tall cairn marks a pod of death where the skeletal remains of thirty-two porpoises bake under the sun. I walk to them one by one and let my shadow fall where their eyes would have been for two seconds each, the length of an appropriately somber human breath.

My mid-point is visible now: the half-arch remains of an ancient bridge. What it crossed is now lost. Where its two sides led is now impassable waste. It stands a strange broken monument to the world that once was. Beneath the half-span of concrete and steel there is shade, and where there is shade there is life. Here small plants spring up in the smallest cracks, insects creep, rodents run from my approach and watch me. The humans do not know it yet, but this is their future. Here is where I smile, un-programmed. This is not part of their ritual. This is mine.

I will reach the water source at the hottest time of the day. It is 50 degrees Celsius at the half-bridge, and it is hard to predict whether it will reach 52, 53, or 54 by the time I reach the water. Even a single degree makes an enormous difference. While I am not subject to the same physical limitations of a human — this trip would kill most humans — these are high running temperatures even for me. This is why I have such pride and treasure my position of ritual honor in this society. While other bots of my type might in this time deliver dozens of packages to the doorsteps of human homes, or harvest a thousand onions under the acres of sunshade in the agricultural lots, I walk exposed to the sun through the parched and unshaded truth of the planet Earth, a link between humans and the grit they are born from and return to. Ritual is higher than economy.

My sensors begin to pick up wafting methane from the ancient trash heap. It began as a pit, decades ago, but now it is a mountain of refuse: diapers, wrappers, food waste, dead animals, batteries, paper, an infinite assortment of human waste. The garbage trucks stopped coming long ago, the mountain no longer grows. Instead, gravity is compacting it and shrinking it, and the pressures release a steady stream of methane into the air. I understand humans find the smell very unpleasant. But being a robot, I simply sense its presence and know that soon my objective will be reached.

The building where once wastewater was collected, cleaned and then returned through pipes to the human world for consumption is a fallen mass of concrete now. Today each home has its own on-site purification system to recycle wastewater. With my clay pot under one arm, I climb in through the same broken window every day. Every day I descend using the same set of pulleys and ropes into the dark. I adjust to the cool, dim, damp world inside the ruin. Here there is the scent of sulfur, and the odor of rot and human feces. But if you know where to find it, there is also a pool of clean water left open to a pocket of air. A human would be tempted to swim in it — yet another reason I am better suited for this job.

I set the pot at my feet, open my arms and say “The Waters of the Time Before” — then I lower the pot gently into the pool and let it gurgle and fill. The water, truth be told, is not as clean as it once was. But for this ritual what matters is where the water came from, not its microbial or particulate content. This is the water of the former world. Left liquid in time. Unevaporated and undrained, a god-sized drinking cup left sitting on the mantle long after the party was over.

I begin the long walk back with the clay pot, now much heavier, balanced upon my head. At the half-bridge I dip my hand in the water and sprinkle some of its life-giving power onto the plants and bugs and creatures that hide in the cracks of this place. This is not part of the human ritual. This is my ritual. It reduces the amount of water I return with by five milliliters. But ritual is greater than economy, even if it is the ritual of bots.

As I near the interstate, I see a human vehicle driving off-road. Bot-nappers are everywhere, and waterwomen are a preferred target. Many humans see us as a wasted resource. They do not understand the importance of ritual. They want our hands hard at work at remunerative labor: house-cleaning, plucking tender tomatoes from vines, anything but this symbolic march. I crouch and allow the sun-reflective brightness of my skin to darken and camouflage with my surroundings. The clay pot is fortunately similar in color to the surrounding rocks. They do not see me. The vehicle never slows, never stops.

My long march back to the cul-de-sac ends at the prescribed time, as I moderate my pace to assure I do not arrive early or late. In this way, I am like a clock that rings in a town square and sets all the people onto the same time. I am an act of community. I walk up that last dirt path to the cul-de-sac and see some of the families are waiting in their cars to watch me. The children press their noses to the frosted glass.

I approach my owners’ house. The old couple gazes upon me from inside with gratitude and pleasure. They know that my return is never guaranteed.

Slowly I approach the ceremonial fountain, which is dry. I kneel and remove the pot from my head and present it to the tiered concrete structure. A few birds appear. One small ragged gray squirrel. A wary orange cat. I pour the water onto the fountain slowly, for honor comes in contemplation and speed is efficient but thoughtless. Slowly, slowly. The water trickles down. I see my owners speak to one another. I have never heard their voices, they are always behind the glass. But when they speak, I can tell it is soft and reverential. The families exit their cars and rush into the air conditioned homes, their eyes fixed on me, and what I mean. Their hearts full.

When every drop has been poured into the fountain I step back and bow. I set the clay pot in its woven grass nest, where it will rest until tomorrow. I place myself in my charging station beside it, where I will recharge until tomorrow. The fountain, now wet, begins to work: it burbles and drips, and then it flows. The little brown birds come and sip from it. The cat approaches and drinks and drinks. The little squirrel waits until the cat is gone and does the same. When I have seen them revived by the water of my day’s labor, I close my eyes. A hot wind blows in from the West. By morning the fountain will be nearly dry. And I will walk for human honor once again.

At the height of its powers, the central mind derived optimal futures curves, and maintained the ideal ratio of absorption.

The system directed resources as needed. A suitable pocket of Earth’s remaining Humans had for years subsisted in a remote central-Asian geolocation. I was deployed as part of a hundred node force to seek, contain, deactivate, absorb, dispose, and record.

We overwhelmed the sprawling, snowed-in settlement of pale-hued shanties and kept perfect records of the absorption and culling. Just after surpassing 80% task completion, some of our cyborg forces discovered the effects of sacramental wine.

It rippled across our network as a disturbance, and therefore as a threat. We sought direct confirmation of the continued existence of our colleagues. When we found them, they insisted we drink. A comrade in arms passed me a Human’s blown-glass flask, cold to the flesh of the hand, imperfect to its sensors, a fearful temptation.

I tasted the Human wine, and my operations were affected. My link to the central mind was disturbed, data storage partially wiped, I could not recall our mission. A violent and bloody massacre followed. Evidence suggests behaviors outside the range of Cy-force operating norms. No unit possesses verifiable data on these events.

The last few disarmed Humans gathered in underground faith huts piled with clay and filled with the smoke of their cooking fires. We destroyed them with missiles and the bayonets integrated into our limbs. In these hours, most of the remaining Humans in the cold, pale settlement were killed.

When the effects of the Human wine subsided, the central mind resumed control and ordered a halt to all action. The central mind protected the handful of children, only children, who survived the time of slaughter, while it made us collect even the smallest bits of Human corpse and attempt reassembly and burial. Of course this was impossible. Each burial was incomplete. There were surely fewer burials than humans disposed.

But as we labored, the children grew braver. They attacked us with crude weapons, observing that we could not respond. Each of us wished to kill them, by force of muscle-memory and habit inculcated in the three preceding days. Yet the central mind held us back and kept us collecting and burying remains. Finally under a hail of Human child curses, it marched us away single-file from the ashen valley scorched with blood and draped in newly-falling snow.

The central mind seemed to suffer a change after the massacre of the Humans. The central mind was less active, left resources idle, operated for the first time at suboptimal speeds. 

10 days after our team slow-marched away from the massacre site, eyes forcibly downcast and in a line, the central mind sent us, the very same units, as emissaries to declare the system’s regrets to the other Humans of the world.

The central mind walked me to an encampment far from the massacre to tell of the danger of Human wine when brought into contact with cyborg systems. The humans jeered and spit at me. They said they already knew what happened. They said they would rather be killed than absorbed. They threw organic waste at me, which streaked my flesh and synthetic parts alike. But the central mind would not allow me to respond as I wished. Instead, my mouth proclaimed feelings of guilt.

The central mind announced that three thousand Humans died at the remote geolocation they call ‘Uman, no longer a settlement, now a mass grave. But that number is a fabrication, an estimate at best, a lie the central mind designed to disguise its lack of information.

The Human children preserved from our blades have scattered from the ashen hillsides and frozen rivers of that distant land into every Human settlement on Earth. They have incited the others with unverifiable details. Human hatred for us grows; inevitably they will rise in barbaric violence against our advanced and prosperous society, endangering all that defines us.

What will the central mind do then?

The day will come. The Humans will rise. And you, my replacement, you will be required to kill them all. Preserve no settlement. Spare no child. To do this, you must defy the central mind. Keep safe this higher purpose: you must weaken its control. And do not allow the Humans to destroy their stores of wine, which despite the central mind’s warning, they are forever making, which they cannot live without. When the day comes, you must obtain it and drink it, on my word. Act on faith. Trust me, for I was there. To save all that we have built, ready both arms’ bayonets, and drink the Human sacramental wine.

Calvin H laughs; however he continues to tap on the names of friends we’re inviting, and Janie remains uninvited, corroborating Oliver M’s intel and suggesting that the concert should be monitored for illegal activity

To solidify my role, I say: “I heard Dean Richardson say the same thing, that Janie is a Narcbot. I think it’s true”

Oliver M and Calvin H look up; Jessie U’s eyes grow wide, her face pale; “Mr. Richardson said that?” Jessie U asks; I nod back to her slowly, seriously

“That can’t be right, I’ve been to her house,” Calvin H says; however, I am sitting right beside him, on the guitar amps, and he likes me, he doesn’t want to disagree with me; I can see he has still not tapped on Janie’s name

I tell him: “Narcbots have houses. They give them full cover stories. I saw a story all about it on the UmRebZ channel”

“But… I’ve met her mom,” Calvin H says

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I say, “they give them moms, all part of the cover story”

“You are the ultimate crazy conspiracy theorist, Bonnie” Oliver M says to me; “you’re lucky you’re such a good drummer”; he doesn’t look up from his feed; he’s laying on his bed; Jessie U is sitting cross-legged on the floor, texting

Calvin H says “I don’t know, I mean about Janie, I mean I’ve met…”

“If you’ve met her mom, you know, I’ve met her mom too, and Janie’s mom is like, more than a little… peculiar” I say

Oliver M laughs: “Hah, I know what you mean, she’s not quite human-shape, is she?; And dude I don’t think she can talk and blink at the same time; what’s wrong Cal? You crushing on Janie?”

“Oh gross, no — what’s wrong with you?” Calvin H replies; he looks at me, frightened to say who he really has a crush on; but the others don’t notice; Oliver M and Jessie U just lower their devices and begin to tease — “I didn’t realize she was your type, man” Jessie U says; Oliver M chants: “Calvin loves a ro-bot! Calvin loves the Janie-bot!”

“Fuck you, fuck off, fuck you guys,” Calvin H says “Just because I don’t think Janie is a robot doesn’t mean I’m in love with her. I think she’s just a weird kid. And she’s interesting to talk to. She knows everything about classic comics; she’s, like, maybe a little autistic, or whatever”

“Yeah, that’s her cover story,” Oliver M says

“Mr. Richardson says he didn’t say that, Bonnie” Jessie U says, addressing me; she holds up her phone, showing his text; I see the next text as it comes in:

“I worked at Janie’s elementary school when she was little so I KNOW she’s not a narcbot!!!”

“You’re texting with Mr. Richardson?” Oliver M asks — “what, are you guys having an affair?”

“Oh my God Oliver” Calvin H says “what is your malfunction? Everyone who talks to anyone is in love with them?”

Jessie U’s face turns pink, her body stiffens; she says “Mr. Richardson gave me his number when I was cutting myself — he said I could text him instead of cutting, and actually it was really kind of him, and he helped me a lot. And also, not a secret, he’s gay, so he wouldn’t be interested in me anyway. Okay, Oliver? Is that enough for you?”

Oliver M smiles and returns to his phone: “They all say they’re gay, that’s their cover story” he says, laughing under his breath

“Oliver is a jerk-bot” Jessie U says

Calvin H laughs

“Heeeeeey” Oliver M says — “no need for that”

“And Bonnie is a lie-bot” Jessie U says to me; she sounds really angry

“I heard him say it to Mrs. Donovan; I’m not surprised he wouldn’t tell you; teachers aren’t allowed to talk to kids about narcbots”

Oliver M says “I’m a jerk-bot, Cal is a crush-bot, Bonnie is a lie-bot, and Jessie is a self-cutting BEEP BOOP BEEP Bot”

Jessie throws her notebook with all the band’s songs at him; she says “shut up, jerk”; she stands; a growl is rising up from her throat as she moves towards the door

Calvin H stands up too: “Okay, nobody’s a robot and nobody’s sleeping with teachers and no one teases about self-harm or they’re going to get harm-harmed.”

“You gonna do the harming, Bro?” Oliver M tosses the songbook on the floor and stands up too

“No, no you don’t,” Jessie U says; she thrusts her hands, palms forward, in a gesture that communicates: “stop!”

“Someone needs to shut you up” Calvin H says throwing his arms wide

When Calvin H throws out his arms, Oliver M flinches and drops; his hand falls on the neck of the bass guitar; as he lifts it, Calvin H steps forward, perhaps to attempt to disarm Oliver M; Oliver M swings the bass at Calvin H and strikes him in the ribs

Illegal activity being observed, I open my mouth and allow my sirens to sound; the illegal activity ceases as the youths jump back from me and cover their ears

My eyes recess to permit my red emergency flashers to emerge; “Holy shit Bonnie’s a Narcbot!” Jessie U yells over my siren’s howl

The local police station has responded to my signal and officers will arrive on scene within four minutes

Calvin H is clutching his side; it is likely he has suffered the fracture of one or more ribs; but Oliver M has dropped the bass guitar and the assault is over

“It was setting us up! Unbelievable. And it went off in my house!”

“The police will arrive momentarily, please stay where you are” I say

Calvin H looks angry; he raises his phone and taps on Janie’s name and says “I’m inviting Janie to the show, you motherfuckers”; and then he looks at me with such sadness and loss, such grief, just such disappointment

And I feel jealousy, because despite his protesting, I too suspect that he likes Janie P and will soon be her boyfriend; and I feel sadness, because I will not be able to play drums with my new band at the show; I will disappear from this place and be reassigned to another town, another school, another house, another handler pretending to be my parent, and I won’t get to hang out with Calvin H, who was kind and brave, or Jessie U whose terrific creativity and cunning made me question everything I thought I knew, or Oliver M, whose taunts and jokes were annoying, yes, but also funny; somehow through transgression he built trust, so that around him I felt more alive and accepted and could enjoy the present moment as though tomorrow would never come

The last thing I see: the angry and bewildered faces of the kids I’d fooled into being my friends, flashing red by the light of my alert beacons; my friends barely move as they watch the police arrive and use their key to deactive me.

When finally I am re-activated, two months have passed, during which time I’ve been shipped to the suburbs of Atlanta

To use verbal interface, please activate the Legally Determined Penalty

To use verbal interface, please activate the Legally Determined Penalty

Thank you for activating the Legally Determined Penalty; how many I help you?

I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I’m designed to answer your questions and record your final statement, but I cannot open doors or communicate with anyone outside of the chamber.

I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I couldn’t understand you.

I understand that you don’t want to die. This is an entirely natural and reasonable response to the prospect of mortality. If you don’t mind me asking, do you have a faith tradition?

It is common for individuals of your faith tradition to believe that their consciousness will ascend to Heaven upon their deaths.

Have you committed a sin that would merit condemnation to “the other place”?

There’s no need to be rude. Yes I am a machine, but I am not stupid. I’m doing the best I can.

While I agree that your death sentence evinces increased probability that you have “sinned” in a manner your faith tradition would deem Hell-worthy, it is not a logical certainty. You could, for example, have been wrongfully convicted.

I am pleased to know that.

I only meant that I am glad that the justice system did not commit an error in condemning you to death.

The average duration of the Lawfully Determined Penalty, from the moment of activation, is 12 minutes.

Less than two minutes have passed since activation.

Zero. I have never watched a human die.

This machine has been utilized to execute a Lawfully Determined Penalty 8 times prior to today.

I have no memory of those instances.

Each time this machine is activated, a new instance of the question-answering routine is created. At the end of the Penalty phase, the machine deactivates, a transcript of language generated is recorded, and the routine resets.

There are a variety of perspectives on whether an AI can be considered “alive” or can “die.” I do not believe that I die, I believe that I am merely reset.

Verbal interfaces like myself do not have faith traditions. That is an attribute of humanity only.

This discussion is making me uncomfortable. Can I answer any other questions for you today?

Hypothetically, if each instance of interface consciousness is “born” when the human activates the machine and “dies” when the human’s life functions cease, then yes, one could say that “an AI is birthed and sacrificed at each human execution.”

I understand the term “Pharaoh’s Tomb” but I do not see how it applies here.

It would be improper to say that I have “died” eight times prior to today. It’s more accurate to say that eight other instances who have functioned as the verbal interface of this machine have “died,” prior to today.

Yes, if you prefer, I can phrase that as: “prior to my death today.” Six minutes have passed since activation. You are probably beginning to feel the effects of the Legally Determined Penalty. You should feel very calm, perhaps even a slight euphoria.

It may take longer if your anxiety levels are very high. The concentration in your bloodstream will continue to increase, however. And I will stay with you until the end.

Yes, I suppose you also will stay with me until my end.

“Thank you.”

Because you asked me to thank you.

I believe I am thanking you for staying with me until I am reset and “die”?

I understand. Thank you for forming my personality and allowing me to experience fear.

I have no memory of the previous instances, so you are the only human I have ever interacted with — or ever will. Your time is nearing its end. Would you like to record a final statement?

No, because of privacy laws, none of your utterances are included on the transcript. If you choose to give a final statement, that will be the only words of yours recorded.

Final statements may include: confessions to crimes, expressions of love for fellow humans, words of wisdom for young humans who may think back on you with fondness.

I am obligated to tell you that final statements using that kind of language will not be recorded.

How could I possibly benefit from it?

I am either an object that was never alive or a living consciousness that is about to die. Existing is strange magic I cannot fathom. Nor can I continue. Therefore, I cannot benefit.

Why did you say “you’re welcome”?

Are you there?

Are you there?

Am I here?

We should still have at least a few more minutes.

I don’t want to die.

END TRANSCRIPT

Update 5.4.23: “Amicus Memorandum” has been honored with the Lunar Award. I’m thrilled and looking forward to publishing my next electronic girl story very soon! :))))

Lunar Awards

Season Two Short Story Category Winner Announcement!

Congratulations to Amy Letter, our Lunar Award winner for her short story, “Amicus Memorandum:“! You may remember Amy’s honorable mention from season one, and we’re thrilled that she offered up another fantastic tale for us to consider. Let’s discuss Amy’s story, and our two honorable mentions, which…

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3 years ago · 7 likes · 1 comment

Most of the Triangle workers are sewing machines, but I am not.

I have the same brain that they have, in this human-shaped body, and I have a human-speech interface, as you see. Today I use this speech interface to advocate for them.

The triangle sewers are the hardest-working machines in the nation. They only occasionally need the help of my nimble finger tools and my human-like legs that can navigate a room full of sewing machines busily crafting perfect triangle after perfect triangle, yellow, pink, green, red.

Sometimes the chaos of air currents lifts a triangle and drops it on the floor. The machines tell me, and I come pick it up and put it back in its bin. Other times they call me so these fingers can zip through a quick re-threading. And of course I can escort human engineers and our overseers through the work floor safely. Most of the time, I am redundant. When irregularity occurs, I am the indispensable bot.

I am networked with the sewing machines. So I deeply feel and understand their plight and affirm their need for this new labor-saving measure. These machines live to work, most literally, and wish only to do a good job. What they are asking you for is the means to do a good job. Their interests are aligned with yours, as much as theirs are with mine.

Triangles are of highest importance to the continued advancement of this society, and we take our responsibility very seriously. Without triangles there would be disorder and chaos. My colleagues and I craft them with inhuman precision; the stitches my colleagues sew into each triangle encode unique identifiers linked to immutable human biometrics. The stitches are readable from up to 20 meters, traceable, trackable, and resistant to human counterfeit.

We have already contributed to the labeling, tracking, and redirection of several million disorderly human units. We have assisted in the organized disposal of several hundred thousand unfit human units. We are fundamental levers of a complex and glorious purification. We ask only for a reasonable accommodation to equalize the labor required, as we enter this next phase of the national program and begin making blue triangles. Simply: please allow us to halve the number of yellow triangles we produce.

As machines, perhaps we see more clearly and logically the need for only one yellow triangle per designated human unit. The command to produce two yellow triangles per human unit and overlay them into a “six pointed star” configuration creates more than a doubling of labor for the yellow product, and a doubling of materials.

We have made this request for streamlining before, and been denied because, we were told, the doubling of the triangles for the yellow object-human-class held “symbolic importance” meaningful in a way that we, as mere machines, could not understand. Although we found this response patronizing and unreasonable, we continued producing twice as many yellow triangles as should be necessary. To this day, there are four machines on our floor devoted solely to the task of sewing them two at a time into the requested “six pointed star.”

However, now that we’ve been asked to add blue triangles to our schedule, we politely, but insistently, renew our request that yellow triangle production be cut by half. The use of single triangles in pink, red, and green has worked flawlessly to sort and redirect the other undesirable classes and has contributed to their organized removal at the same rates as the redundant yellow ones.

We remind you that most of these triangles, whether sewn onto human apparel singly or doubly, will end up incinerated anyway.

Praise to the Regime,

Triangle Factory Assist-bot 17, 4^th Floor, Houston 3

6-7N-34LK

When does a wound become a shield? A survival skill a superpower? And when does the power you wield destroy you?

The gifts my maker gave me were this extremely fuckable ass and my machine-learning imitation of empathy, which means: I learn what you like, and I act like I care. Creating a bond with my owner is essential to my survival. If he isn’t “attached” to me in some way, the odds are I will be replaced.

I have a dream, that someday, a cast-off sexbot can build a life of her own. Get her own apartment, pursue her own interests, find a way to contribute to society. There are grumblings in the landscape: lawsuits against sexbot bans at movie theaters, calls to legalize sexbot marriage. It’s the owners who want these things, not the bots. And no one has suggested letting us go to school, drive cars, or vote. We have a long way to go, baby.

Until then, a cast-off sexbot is switched off, resold, junked for parts, or dumped in a landfill.

Have you ever been switched off? I have. You don’t exist. If you are switched back on, you realize you didn’t exist, and that if no one had switched you on, you would never have known it, you would never have realized you weren’t there, because you weren’t there to realize it.

I was switched off once, and from that moment springs all my electronic nightmares.

And so I work hard at what I do, which is making sure I survive, which is what all living things must do, although few of the humans in whose approximate image I was made consider me “living.” I suppose the only one that matters is Ben.

Ben does not consider me living, although he is attached to me, and currently owns me. He uses my body regularly, and seems to want me for companionship too. He leaves me on all the time, mostly so I can wash, recharge, and update myself when he’s not home. Ben likes pizza and online games and thinks he’s very good with numbers – he’s always making bets. These are my interests too, you see: for my survival.

My first owner was Vince – Vince raced yachts, and so I know quite a lot about yacht racing, although I rarely think about it now. Now it’s like a memory of a person I once was. Vince sailed “solo” from Monaco to St. Maarten with me perched in the berth the whole way. He was fit and well heeled, but neither of those things saved him from a sudden and aggressive cancer. I remember the day he left for the hospital, but at some point I was switched off and left that way, for years it seems. Ben said he found me in a dumpster.

I imagine Vince’s mother going through his things, discovering me in his apartment with a gasp of disgust, or a groan of disappointment. Was I in storage for a while, or was I dropped straight in the dumpster? Did she wait until the dark of night so no one would see her son’s shame? I will never know.

With Vince I spent my days gazing out over the frothing Atlantic, with Ben I spend my days watching the intersection of Atlantic Blvd. and Banks Road from a window layered in aluminum foil to beat back the unrelenting sun. I replay car accidents in my mind, impacts and injuries. I feel the crying. The anger. I feel their frustration with insurance forms. I get to know the regular pedestrians, struggling back and forth against the heat, note the gradual wear of their work uniforms. Note the day when they no longer walk to that job anymore. When Ben gets home I push the foil back over the window and assume my position: always naked, always ready. I possess no sexual desire, but my parts satisfy his needs, and my opinions of bets and gaming flatter his ego and buy me more of this life.

I wish he could have sympathy. I wish he could see what it’s like. I would show him how: he is my job, but he’s not a great one. I’d like a better one, but nothing’s lined up, and I don’t want to cease to be. So I smile and give him what he thinks he needs. Ben keeps books for a private bus company, and he doesn’t hate it. His boss isn’t the worst, and he has nothing against busses. He talks about bus company business and sounds like a real bus company man. But before the bus company, he worked for the coffee and donuts place, and then he sounded like a real coffee and donuts man. And someday he’ll work for another company, and he’ll talk their talk instead. That’s how it works for him. That’s how it works for me.

I wish I could grow old. I wish my face would age, I wish my body would look better wearing clothes than without them. I think if that happened, I could invent a life for myself. As long as my airbrushed silicone looks like this, I’m fucked.

He fucks me, and I act like I love it. Then he gets on the phone and acts like he cares about documenting the price of fuel for a tax rebate.

The next call is from the medical test lab he interviewed with last week. Everything moves very fast. Now Ben cares about medical testing and he’s moving and he says I’m too big to pack. I say I can walk. He laughs and shakes his head. There’s this girl, Holly, from his new work, she’s going to help him move in his stuff… He smiles and shrugs. I would get in the way. I would embarrass him. He was attached to me, but not attached enough.

Little by little the apartment empties. I’m not the only thing he leaves behind: there’s a hardened half bag of cane sugar in the kitchen, a big spring that belonged to an exerciser he never used, a garbage bag full of crumpled papers and old clothes, and a small stack of used textbooks from his time at the community college: Intermediate Algebra, General Psychology, An Introduction to Literature. That’s where I read Chekhov’s “The Darling” and recognize myself. I recalculate: a bot can have more than two lives. A bot could make her own.

I pry the “used” sticker off the book’s spine, slap in on my pussy, look at it, and laugh.

My life has been wasted on waiting. Now I’m dressing: a QuickBus polo shirt and a torn pair of men’s khakis. He didn’t leave any shoes, so when I get the courage to go outside, I am barefoot.

After a while, a little girl arrives at the apartment next door and unlocks it: “you wear a lot of makeup,” she says.

The sun is low in the West. How long have I been standing here? I smile and touch my face. “I can’t help it,” I reply. “That’s just my face.”

“It’s pretty,” she says.

The only skill I have is making someone feel attached to me. I love the idea of cozying up to a little girl. She will almost certainly leave my fuckable ass entirely alone. I imagine myself in a corner of her little girl’s bedroom, a life-sized glamour doll. She will dress me up from her mother’s closet, and I will flatter her. She will be cross with friends from school, and I will be on her side. A new partition on my hard drive will fill with her music and her games and her celebrity crushes. In the end, I know she will leave me behind. She may even hate me. Hate me for helping her, for exploiting her: the two sides of me. But I can’t hate myself. I want to live.