Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 4, July 2014 (3 page)

"So is yours, ma'am. Let us not even mention your theft of government property."

"My point still stands. My request: call off the drones, dispatch a force to retrieve me instead. I will comply. I am unarmed."

"Acknowledged. Give me a few minutes. Stay on the line."

"Emani, they will be within shooting range in one minute and thirty-one seconds."

"I don't have a few minutes, Colonel. The drones need to disappear now."

Emani brings up the map. Five green triangles are closing in at predatory speed. She brings the shuttle as close to the ground as possible and prepares to eject.

"Forty-eight seconds."

"Colonel?"

"He did it."

The triangles freeze and hover in virtual space. The shuttle's alarms go mute.

"Emani Liod, your request has been transferred. We are talking with Aeon Vargas' lawyers. Some of our local forces have been dispatched to your pre-calculated destination. They will be dropped out of orbit within six minutes. Landing expected in eight. You will turn yourself in without resistance."

"Thank you, Colonel."

"Why are you headed to the Teller's compound?"

Emani hangs up. "What’s next?"

"The negotiations will fail. Aeon Vargas troops are coming now. They make death happen. They are killing the ones who feed me. They cannot be stopped."

"Tell your people to run."

"Worshipping me does not mean they will listen to me ha-ha-ha."

#

Emani guides the shuttle to the edge of the shantytown. Infrared mapping would reveal the compound spreading beneath the surface like a technological ant hive. Motley hutments and shacks grow between hills of detritus. A building explodes in the distance. Dense black smoke billows up. The radar shows hundreds of geometric shapes twinkling into existence. Aeon Vargas pods rain down from orbit.

Emani lands the shuttle in a junkyard. She steps out and follows the digital crumbs in her vision. The emergency vent lies at the foot of a collapsed crane. As she descends the ladder, the air cools down to near-zero Celsius. She finds herself in a corridor lined by neon lights. Gunshots and explosions reverberate. The ground trembles.

She walks until she reaches a small room where the walls are made of server racks stacked atop one another. Emani guesses that this is one of the numerous storage estuaries given to the Teller, a leftover appendage from an era when thousands of scientists milled around these tunnels and probed for knowledge.

The Teller’s voice thunders from unseen speakers. "STOP HERE."

Emani freezes. She faces a rectangular chute, the drop area of a matter compiler. Data ports beckon like hungry mouths. Here stands the disembodied presence she has been talking to for years. Not a distant friend, but an assemblage of make-believe. She locates the cam lens above the chute and nods. "We finally meet, I suppose."

"IN THE PHYSICAL SENSE."

"How do we do this?"

"OPEN THE CUBE AND INSERT THE CHIP. THIS IS YOUR REWARD."

The chute hisses. A small data-load drops down. A lifetime in graphene, everything that matters compressed to the size of a die.

Emani picks it up and pockets it. She clicks open the stolen cube. The degausser is a smooth tube as long as her pinky and covered in nanites. She plugs it into one of the vacant ports.

An explosion, bigger than any of the previous ones, rocks the room. Lights flicker.

"The East U.S. government is here," says Emani, placing a hand against a rack for balance.

"YES. THEY WANT YOU, BUT THEIR PATH IS BLOCKED. THEY ARE FIGHTING AEON VARGAS. A CUNNING DISTRACTION. SO MANY FIREWORKS."

"Your people are fighting too?"

"YES. NO ONE WILL STOP SPILLING BLOOD UNTIL THERE IS NO MORE TO SPILL."

"They're dying for you."

"THEY ARE DYING FOR WHAT THEY THINK THEY PERCEIVE IN ME."

"What do you need the software degausser for, Teller? You gonna wipe Aeon? Another corp? A government? What's your target?"

No reply.

Emani looks around. "Teller?"

"I SAY BYE-DEE-BYE, FRIEND."

The room's LED lights begin blinking rapidly. Static crackles over the speakers. Voices scream in hundreds of different languages. Emani covers her ears. A woman cries. Chains of explosions resonate in the background. News dispatches speak of war and plague. Politicians make speeches. A child sobs. Cars honk. Chunks of songs overlap in a cacophonous mix. A wolf howls. The noises of the world blend together and form a deafening, torturous soundtrack.

Emani screams and the noises stop. She removes her hands from her ears. She leans against a wall and tries to catch her breath.

"SILENCE IS NICE."

"What are you—"

"I AM KILLING THE VOICES IN MY HEAD. THEY ARE SO LOUD. I CANNOT MAKE THEM STOP. I ALWAYS HEAR THIS. ALWAYS."

Emani nods. She considers what the Teller was meant to be, what it was created for. "Okay. Are your believers right about you?"

"IT DOES NOT MATTER."

"That's not an answer."

A long pause, then the Teller says, "I THINK IT IS."

Emani smiles.

"INTRUDERS WILL BE IN THIS ROOM SOON. YOU HAVE TO LEAVE. A BELIEVER WAITS OUTSIDE. HE WILL HELP."

"Understood."

"I HAVE OTHER MEMORIES FOR YOU, EMANI-FRIEND. SHALL I ASSEMBLE THE CHIP FOR YOU BEFORE I FADE?"

Emani clenches her jaw. "What other memories?"

Over the speakers, she hears an endless yell. She recognizes the voice. It's hers.

"My time as a conduit," she says. "You…you have the logs."

"YES. SIX MONTHS. I HAVE EVERYTHING."

"Wipe the damn thing. Take it to the void. I don't want any of it in my head."

"WE UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER WELL. IT IS TIME TO PART, THEN."

Emani looks at the degausser plugged into the machine. "I hope this works for you, Teller."

"IT WILL. A THING FORGETS, A PERSON REMEMBERS."

Emani thinks of the data chips in her apartments, and what she holds now. "A person remembers what she chooses to remember," she says.

"ONE LAST REQUEST. I NEED YOU TO ACTIVATE THE DEGAUSSER FOR ME. I CANNOT DO IT MYSELF."

Emani approaches the touchscreen, taps into the interface.

"GOOD-BYE, FRIEND."

"Good-bye, Teller," she says, and runs the murderous code.

#

Outside, back into hellish warmth. Emani finds the believer standing next to an orbital shuttle. Implants cover half of the man's face. Metallic grafts glint in the brutal sunlight. The man turns to Emani with tears in his eyes. "This is a tragic day," he says.

"I'm sorry for your loss," replies Emani. "Where are we headed?"

The man shrugs. "There are still places on this Earth where data does not reach. The Teller asked me to bring you to one of them. Said we would both like it there."

Explosions ring out from kilometers away. On the other side of the town, drones and manned vehicles swarm the sky and wage aerial war.

"They won't chase us?"

The man offers a bitter smile. "The Teller promised we would be fine. I believe it."

#

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, Emani removes the socket cover located on her wrist and inserts the chip. She lies down in the back of the transport.

She runs the data.

Out of the mnemonic darkness, voices and faces emerge. Emani closes her eyes and smiles as she sideloads the past.

###

Axel Taiari is a French writer, born in Paris in 1984. His writing has appeared in multiple magazines and anthologies, including
3:am Magazine, 365tomorrows, No Colony, Cease, Cows
, and several others. His noir novella,
Jamais Vu
, will be published by
Dzanc Books
in 2015 as part of
Four Corners
. Read more at 
www.axeltaiari.com
 and follow him on Twitter 
@axeltaiari
.

Abandoned

Hannah Goodwin

A nail hits the pavement. My hands continue to tug on the board that covers the window. Despite the splinters that are now lodged into my fingers, I smile. After fifteen minutes of prying at the boards with just a rock and my own two hands, they’re finally beginning to move.

What feels like an eternity later, I manage to clear an opening that is wide enough for me to slide through. My sides get scraped and bruised from the window, but I don’t care. For one terrifying moment, I think I’m stuck. I imagine some old woman walking by, seeing me trapped in the window of our town’s closed-down Tent, and screaming for the nearest police officer. I’m on the brink of panicking when I finally manage to slide into the building.

My feet hit the carpeted floor. The moon shines through the window I just climbed through and throws a pale light around the room. I step farther into the middle, staring at the ceiling, and let the few memories I have from what feels like a whole lifetime ago flood my mind.

When I was seven, I had my first dream.

I remember holding my father’s hand while we stood in line. My younger sister, Annie, sat on his shoulders and stared at the chandelier hanging above our heads. I could hear her humming a song she had made up. I peered around the legs of the people in front of me, trying to see the ticket booth. A cheery woman with frizzy red hair sat behind the glass.

A bubble of excitement swam inside my belly. I knew we were about to let the Dreamer whisper his story to us. For years, we had passed the Tents during our walks around the boardwalk, but we had never gone inside. “It’s too expensive, Penny,” my mother would always say. Everything was always too expensive.

But it wasn’t too expensive that day, for reasons I can’t remember right now. I do remember, however, dancing from foot to foot in an effort to take an edge off my excitement. At random times, I would stare up at my father and ask him when we were going to be done waiting. The people in front of us turned around and smiled knowingly to my father.

“Penny,” I heard my father say. “Have I ever told you about the Dreamers?”

I shook my head, even though we both knew that this was anything but a new story for me. I could hear Annie humming softer now, waiting for our dad to speak.

“They say there are only ten Dreamers alive at one time.”

Annie scrambled down from my father’s shoulders and stood beside me. I held my breath, waiting for him to continue. A few of the people around us stopped talking to listen in on my father’s story.

“The first one, whose name has been forgotten for years now, lived halfway across the world. When he was a boy, he would always tell strange stories, claiming that he lived through them while he, and everyone else, was asleep.”

The hubbub of voices drifted away. I glanced around, only meeting a few people’s eyes; the rest were too busy trying to get a glimpse of whoever was speaking. Everyone was hanging on every word he said. We had all heard this story thousands of times, but that didn’t matter. Hearing the story was almost as wonderful as dreaming. Almost.

“His parents thought he was crazy,” he explained, “or had an evil spirit living inside him, so they hid him away inside his house where no one would see him. No one in his family would let him explain his dreams. So, one night, when he couldn’t take it anymore, the First snuck into his little brother’s room and told him about one of his visions while he slept.”

As I listened to him, I remembered all the other times he had told Annie and me about the very first Dreamer—of how lucky we were to have one who lived in our small town.

“The Dreamer had no idea what he was doing; he just knew he had to tell someone,” my father continued. “The next day, his brother woke up screaming. Their parents rushed into his room. The Dreamer watched from the corner as his brother explained what had happened.

“He began to tell his parents about how he had been walking through the woods, but out of nowhere, he was back in his room. The Dreamer listened to him tell his parents about what he had seen the night before, and he realized that his brother was describing his dream. The parents didn’t know what to do about the two of them—since they knew it could only end in being ostracized—so they locked both of them away.”

The line began to move, but I didn’t notice. The person behind me gently pushed me forward a bit, knocking me back into reality.

My father continued: “The boys spent the next week experimenting. The Dreamer would sleep during the day, and as soon as the younger brother would get sleepy, he would wake up the Dreamer and they would switch. Every night, as he told his brother about what he had seen, the sleeping boy would dream.”

Annie stopped humming.

“They decided to run away one night. It wasn’t easy, but they managed to escape their parent’s home and run as far away as they could. After days of traveling, they found a woman who was not from their land. The two boys were very curious about her, and they asked her where she was from. They had never heard of the land she had come from, it was so far away. She saw that they were hungry and tired, and she let them stay in her house.”

By then, I could see a corner of the ticket booth. I pushed down the energy coursing through my limbs and tried to focus on what he was saying.

“That night, while the Dreamer’s brother slept, he whispered his dream to him, as usual. What they didn’t know was that the door to the woman’s room was open just enough so she could hear him in her sleep. The next morning, she woke up in a panic. The two brothers knew, as soon as she woke up, she had heard him speaking.

“The woman accused the boys of casting a spell on her. She screamed and demanded that they leave. The Dreamer, drawing up all the courage he had, calmly convinced her to sit down and let him explain.”

I remember that my father was cut short because we were at the ticket booth by then. The red haired woman smiled to my father as they exchanged money for three small stubs of paper. We walked across the red carpet and stopped right in front of the two identical doors leading to the auditorium.