Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82 Read online

  “Don’t,” he said. He was trembling.

  I tucked them into the collar of my shirt instead. “Okay. Let’s get you lying down and then you can talk me through why not.”

  Helping him into his bunk was difficult. His legs dangled, dead weight. He drank the water I gave him, though I had to help him sit up. Lying down again, he seemed to recover a little. He seemed even younger than he was.

  “Your Grandpa’s talking again,” he said.

  I fished the glasses from my collar, but Hadil stopped me again.

  “I’ll have to eventually,” I said, as gently as I could. Without the glasses, I had no way to interact with Makemake Station. No computation, no communications, no medical telemetry, no helpful wiki. “Is it the flicker?”

  He stared at me, unblinking, sweating freely. “My head hurts.”

  Strobe lights at some frequencies could induce seizures—or I thought so, at least, without the wiki I couldn’t be sure. I suggested this theory to Hadil but he shook his head, and then winced.

  “I feel drunk,” he said. He was speaking with exaggerated care now, slow and deliberate. “Your Grandpa’s still talking,” he said, then pointed at his head. No glasses, no little speakers tucked behind the ear.

  “What’s he saying?” Stupid question. Was I feeding a delusion? I was really starting to miss the wiki.

  “Gibberish,” Hadil said. He closed his eyes.

  “Just get some rest,” I babbled. My basic medical training hadn’t covered anything like this. It didn’t need to: Earth could provide emergency support within a day. “I’ll call Da Nang, we’ll get help.”

  “They figured it out,” Hadil muttered, too quickly as if he was trying to get the words out. “Figured us out.”

  “Who?”

  “The aliens, Dike,” Hadil said. His eyes were still closed, as if unwilling to face his own words.

  “The aliens who sent the signal?”

  “They are the signal.” Hadil said. “The human brain is a computational substrate. They’ve adapted to our architecture.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, automatically, then winced. “How would they even—”

  “Listen,” Hadil said. He opened his eyes. His pupils were very wide, frightened. I realized I was holding his hand. “They hacked me. I can feel it. It’s jumbling up my—”

  He paused for a moment, as if expecting me to interrupt again, but I didn’t. When I touched his temple he didn’t react. The vein was pulsing violently.

  “Don’t look into the glasses,” Hadil said, finally. “They must hack the brain through the eye. The visual cortex. It’s transmitting some sort of compressed signal, that’s got to be why the displays are flickering.”

  “Without the glasses, I can’t call for medical assistance,” I said. I tried to put motherly reassurance in my voice, tried to remember what Mom had sounded like when I was young and broke my arm falling out of a tree. Make a plan. “I need to be able to run the diagnostics on you, I need to update Da Nang that something weird is going on—at least that we may have been infected with a virus from the Cây Cúc— “

  “It’s not a virus,” Hadil said. He sounded very tired. “Not infection. Invasion.” I squeezed his hand and listened to him breathe, but he didn’t say anything more.

  When he died it was sudden. He wheezed twice, horribly, and then he was gone. I closed his eyes, my hands trembling and cold.

  My head was too full of ghosts.

  When I was an undergrad at Nha Trang, before I came up with the plan, I’d drive down to Ba Ho once every few weeks. Early in the morning before the tourists came, I’d climb the rocks beside the waterfall and then leap off with my eyes closed, nothing but the wind in my face and the hammering of my heart. Blind, terrified, exhilarated. I felt like that now.

  Don’t put on the glasses, Hadil said.

  I didn’t want to look at his body. I went back to the workroom and sat in his chair instead of mine. Glass crunched under my shoes.

  The other pair of glasses still sat on the shelf. If I put them on, I would see all the screens and displays that filled this empty room. The ghost of my grandfather, standing in the corner, perhaps still talking about the wife and child he left behind.

  The telemetry would tell me that one of Makemake’s operators was dead. There would be data on his death. I could find out what had really happened. Explain his hallucinations, if that’s what they were. A stroke? A seizure?

  There would be a clock to tell me how much time was left until I could send a message back to Da Nang Mission Control. It would take five hours for my message to reach them, and Earth would spin Da Nang into line of sight within—how long? An hour? Two? The Update from the Cây Cúc would be already queued for automatic forwarding. I could hold that back and send a call for help instead.

  Unless Hadil was right, and then if I put the glasses on, I would die like he did.

  Was Rais still undead and unaging? Were they all dead on the Cây Cúc? If the aliens could infect the human brain—many of the colonists could have been wearing a slightly older version of the augmented reality glasses. If the vulnerability was in the visual cortex then any kind of display might do. Any screen, physical or virtual. A book, a phone, a photo. Like the one that Rais always had in his hand.

  But Rais was still alive when he sent the message, and many people would have been exposed by then, but there was no indication anyone had died. Maybe their hardware was just too slow. Despite us sending them tech schematics every year and them using the ship’s fabricators, they couldn’t keep up with time-dilated technological change. A lot of the hardware on the ship was eighty years out of date.

  Your Grandma hated him for leaving, Mom said. But we don’t need fathers, you and me.

  Rais would send another message tomorrow, but that wouldn’t arrive at Makemake Station for a couple of months.

  I hope you have kids someday, Rais said.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. My own voice was shockingly loud in the silence.

  Hadil said it wasn’t a virus. More than a virus. Something smart, something that could explore and experiment. Find new territories, expand into them, adjust the terrain to their liking.

  Informational life. Ghosts. Like infectious ideas that echoed in our heads until we could not think of anything else, until we forgot how to move, how to beat our hearts, how to breathe. Did they know they were killing us? Did they even know we existed? That there was a whole plane of physical reality that lay beneath theirs?

  Rais could have stayed behind, said Grandma Abena. He could have turned down the adventure. He was selfish.

  They must have made him go, said Mom. Maybe they threatened to kill us if he stayed.

  “You’re both dead, give it a rest,” I said. “He was barely a grown man. He ran, that was all.” Just leaped into the unknown, eyes closed and heart hammering.

  Was that what it was like to be a ghost? Jumping off the ledge, not knowing if it was water or rock at the bottom, terrified and laughing? Were they conscious? They could only be conscious when they had something to haunt. Crossing light-years as signals, riding pulsars across the galaxy—

  There couldn’t be more than an hour left before Makemake Station automatically forwarded the last Update to Earth. I needed to switch that off.

  I don’t want you to tell me about him, Mom said. I don’t need to know.

  Mom had insisted on that, when I finally told her my plan for contacting Rais. I waited until the last moment to tell her, just before I left for Makemake Station. That was only a year before she died. “It was Grandma who would have really wanted to know,” I said.

  You don’t know what I wanted, said Grandma Abena. You were just a child.

  When I got your first message, Rais said, I knew it couldn’t be, but I thought you were Abena. You look just like her. Only older.

  Maybe the ghosts were mayflies. Maybe generations passed in the twenty minutes it took them to kill Hadil. His coffee wasn’t even cold yet
.

  “I know you’re in me already,” I said. “My ghosts aren’t usually this literal.”

  I put the glasses on. Decisions made in haste. Look, grandfather, we have something in common after all.

  We were going to the colony as a family, Rais said. That was the plan. I’m so sorry it didn’t work out that way.

  I didn’t notice the flickering anymore, or perhaps it had stopped. My head was pounding.

  He was afraid, Grandma Abena said. The stars are wonderful, but if you lower your eyes to ground level you’ll see the men with guns in the night.

  The clock said I had ten minutes left to the automated Update to Earth. Less than I had thought.

  After I grew up, Mom said, I didn’t waste any more time thinking about that man. I got on with my life, and so should you.

  I disabled the scheduled transmission, reoriented the magnetic horns away from Earth, told them to always point out into empty space. To stop tracking their targets, to forget. Such a simple thing, but my hands were slick with sweat and trembling when I was done.

  Could the ghosts reset this? Could they manipulate the system, move the horns back? They could, but why would they understand the universe of ships and stations and worlds? Could they even find Earth again? I invoked superuser access, deleted the memory of Earth’s path from Makemake Station. Would it be enough?

  Maybe they wouldn’t care. Maybe even if they managed to get the transmissions working again, they would be happy to spill out endlessly into the dark, neutrinos passing intangibly through rock and vacuum alike. Maybe that was how they got into the signal that the Cây Cúc picked up in the first place. Someone else, somewhere, impotent and desperate as me.

  I couldn’t feel my legs anymore.

  My arms shook as I lowered myself to the floor. Something cut my hand painfully when I rested my weight on it. A shard from Hadil’s broken glasses. I wanted to go sit with Hadil in his room, but I didn’t think I could get that far. My chest felt hollow.

  One more thing, Hadil reminded.

  With Makemake silent, Da Nang would send a team within a day. As soon as they entered the station, their glasses or helmets would connect with Makemake’s network and open themselves to invasion. They’d probably re-establish communications with Earth before they realized something was wrong.

  I started an imago recording of myself, looping it to display everywhere in the station. I’d have to keep it short. It was getting hard to breathe, and the first responders would not have much time before they died.

  It’s just like the waterfall, but with your pockets full of stones when you jump.

  “If you’re seeing this, you’re already dead,” I began, and made myself a ghost.

  About the Author

  Vajra Chandrasekera lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apex Magazine, Ideomancer and Through the Gate, and has been nominated for a Rhysling Award. He’s @_vajra on Twitter, where he flouts all social convention by not talking very much.

  I Tell Thee All, I Can No More

  Sunny Moraine

  Here’s what you’re going to do. It’s almost like a script you can follow. You don’t have to think too much about it.

  Just let it in. Let it watch you at night. Tell it everything it wants to know. These are the things it wants, and you’ll let it have those things to keep it around. Hovering over your bed, all sleek chrome and black angles that defer the gaze of radar. It’s a cultural amalgamation of one hundred years of surveillance. There’s safety in its vagueness. It resists definition. This is a huge part of its power. This is a huge part of its appeal.

  Fucking a drone isn’t like what you’d think. It’s warm. It probes, gently. It knows where to touch me. I can lie back and let it do its thing. It’s only been one date but a drone isn’t going to worry about whether I’m an easy lay. A drone isn’t tied to the conventions of gendered sexual norms. A drone has no gender and, if it comes down to it, no sex. Just because it can do it doesn’t mean it’s a thing that it has.

  We made a kind of conversation, before, at dinner. I did most of the talking, which I expected.

  The drone hums as it fucks me. We—the dronesexual, the recently defined, though we only call ourselves this name to ourselves and only ever with the deepest irony—we’re never sure whether the humming is pleasure or whether it’s a form of transmission, but we also don’t really care. We gave up caring what other people, people we probably won’t ever meet, think of us. We talk about this on message boards, in the comments sections of blogs, in all the other places we congregate, though we don’t usually meet face to face. There are no dronesexual support groups. We don’t have conferences. There is no established discourse around who we are and what we do. No one writes about us but us, not yet.

  The drones probably don’t do any writing. But we know they talk.

  Drones don’t come, not as far as we can tell, but they must get satisfaction out of it. They must get something. I have a couple of orgasms, in the laziest kind of fashion, and the vibration of the maybe-transmission humming tugs me through them. I rub my hands all over that smooth conceptual hardware and croon.

  There was no singular point in time at which the drones started fucking us. We didn’t plan it, and maybe it wasn’t even a thing we consciously wanted until it started happening. Sometimes a supply creates a demand.

  But when something is around that much, when it knows that much, it’s hard to keep your mind from wandering in that direction. I wonder what that would feel like inside me. One kind of intimacy bleeds into another. Maybe the drones made the first move. Maybe we did. Either way, we were certainly receptive. Receptive, because no one penetrates drones. They fuck men and women with equal willingness, and the split between men and women in our little collectivity is, as far as anyone has ever been able to tell, roughly fifty-fifty. Some trans people, some genderfluid, and all permutations of sexual preference represented by at least one or two members. The desire to fuck a drone seems to cross boundaries with wild abandon. Drones themselves are incredibly mobile and have never respected borders.

  Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re not going to get too attached. This isn’t something you’ll have to work to keep from doing, because it’s hard to attach to a drone. But on some level there is a kind of attachment, because the kind of closeness you experience with a drone isn’t like anything else. It’s not like a person. They come into you; they know you. You couldn’t fight them off even if you wanted to. Which you never do. Not really.

  We fight, not because we have anything in particular to fight over, but because it sort of seems like the thing to do.

  No one has ever come out and admitted to trying to have a relationship with the drone that’s fucking them, but of course everyone knows it’s happened. There are no success stories, which should say something in itself, and people who aren’t in our circle will make faces and say things like you can’t have a relationship with a machine no matter how many times it makes you come but a drone isn’t a dildo. It’s more than that.

  So of course people have tried. How could you not?

  This isn’t a relationship, but the drone stayed the night after fucking me, humming in the air right over my bed as I slept, and it was there when I woke up. I asked it what it wanted and it drifted toward the kitchen, so I made us some eggs which of course only I could eat.

  It was something about the way it was looking at me. I just started yelling, throwing things.

  Fighting with a drone is like fucking a drone in reverse. It’s all me. The drone just dodges, occasionally catches projectiles at an angle that bounces them back at me, and this might amount to throwing. All drones carry two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, neatly resized as needed, because all drones are collections of every assumption we’ve ever made about them, but a drone has never fired a missile at anyone they were fucking.

  This is no-stakes fighting. I’m not even sure what I’m yelling about. After a while the drone drif
ts out the window. I cry and scream for it to call me. I order a pizza and spend the rest of the day in bed.

  Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re not going to ask too many questions. You’re just going to let it happen. You’ll never know whose eyes are behind the blank no-eyes that see everything. There might not be any anymore; drones regularly display what we perceive as autonomy. In all our concepts of droneness there is hardly ever a human being on the other end. So there’s really no one to direct the questions to.

  Anyway, what the hell would you ask? What are we doing, why are we this way? Since when have those ever been answers you could get about this kind of thing?

  This is really sort of a problem. In that I’m focusing too much on a serial number and a specific heat signature that only my skin can know. In that I asked the thing to call me at all. I knew people tried things like this but it never occurred to me that it might happen without trying.

  It does call me. I talk for a while. I say things I’ve never told anyone else. It’s hard to hang up. That night while I’m trying to sleep I stare up at the ceiling and the dark space between me and it feels so empty.

  I pass them out on the street, humming through the air. They avoid me with characteristic deftness but after a while it occurs to me that I’m steering myself into them, hoping to make contact. They all look the same but I know they aren’t the same at all. I’m looking for that heat signature. I want to turn them over so I can find that serial number, nestled in between the twin missiles, over the drone dick that I’ve never actually seen.

  Everyone around me might be a normal person who doesn’t fuck a drone and doesn’t want to and doesn’t talk to them on the phone and usually doesn’t take them to dinner. Or every one of them could be like that.

  At some point we all stopped talking to each other.

  Here’s what you’re going to do. Here’s what you’re not going to do. Here’s a list to make it easy for you.

  You’re not going to spend the evening staring out the window. You’re not going to toy endlessly with your phone. You’re not going to masturbate furiously and not be able to come. You’re not going to throw the things you threw at nothing at all. You’re not going to stay up all night looking at images and video that you can only find on a few niche paysites. You’re not going to wonder if you need to go back into therapy because you don’t need therapy. You’re not going to wonder if maybe you and people like you might be the most natural people in the entire world, given the way the world is now. You’re not going to wonder if there was ever such a thing as natural.