by Kathy Kachelries | Dec 23, 2005 | Story
The picture made the cover of the Tzarin colony newsletter: a petite, blond-haired girl kneeling in the center of a flock of hibernating escravo, her arms wrapped around her skinny stomach and her face contorted by sobs. It was a powerful image, this preteen runaway surrounded by the sprawled and angular bodies of the plantation’s livestock, and it was made even more powerful by the subsequent photographs of her tearful reunion with her family. Adolescent psychologists were quick to speculate about the long-term effects of 18 months spent living with animals, but after a rocky readjustment period, Elena was deemed healthy enough to re-enter the colony’s schooling system.
“I thought they were dead,” she said in a televised interview. “I didn’t know about the photo…photo…(“synthesis,” her mother finished). All I knew was that it started to get dark, and everyone I lived with fell down.”
“Everything,” her psychologist prodded.
“Everything.”
Elena was no longer permitted to play in the fields with the escravo, but during a press conference, the governor presented her with an authentic Earth puppy that breathed and barked and did several other tricks that the mouthless, photosynthetic plantation beasts couldn’t compete with. After two nightfalls, the incident was completely forgotten.
At the height of the third sun-season, the Finnegan’s storage tank ignited.
It was an unfortunate but not uncommon setback. Glass-ceilinged working spaces were necessary to permit the escravo to live indoors, and in the hottest sun-cycle temperatures inside the storage tank often reached over 150 degrees. The financial loss was great but no one was hurt, and a veterinarian was called in to determine how many of the damaged livestock could be saved.
The plantation owners borrowed some beasts from their neighbors to haul the bodies, living and dead, into a nearby field so that they could be sorted. The veterinarian made his way slowly among the rows of blue-green bodies, dividing the responsive from the nonresponsive and the nonresponsive from the dead. He preferred working with the colony’s livestock; unlike Earth animals, the escravo had no mouths and were incapable of producing screams. In fact, science had speculated that the native Tzarin animals had more in common with vegetation than Terran creatures, so it was likely that they could feel nothing at all.
The veterinarian paused beside a young colt which rested in a crumpled heap, its front tendrils drawn up around its torso like arms and its eyelids firmly locked shut. The waxy skin across its back and stomach was badly damaged, blistering and peeling away to reveal the milky whiteness of dead photosynthetic cells. The animal’s eyes opened slowly when the veterinarian sprinkled water across its body to test the rate of absorption, but it made no other movement. Dire case. He labeled it unlikely and moved on.
Two thin, bony vines wrapped around his leg and he stopped.
The creature was motionless aside from the tendrils, which retained their vicelike grasp. The veterinarian unpeeled them but the animal grabbed again, and he reached into his medical back to get his scalpel. The vine quickly withdrew and dropped to the ground. The veterinarian watched the green shape scrape at the soil, and he had almost turned away before he read:
help.
The creature was treated at the university medical facility, which used high-powered solar lamps to feed sunlight into the undamaged cells. It continued to trace words onto the walls and floor: help, stop, hurt, bad. A press statement was released saying that an escravo had developed language ability, then, at the command of the council, another was released saying that it had been a prank. The council scientists took the escravo to a research facility once it had healed enough for transportation, and there, it was put through dozens of tests.
“It has a vocabulary of over 500 words,” the technician said, “but we’re certain that it must be parroting. The escravo brain doesn’t have the capacity for communication. No evidence of language, through text or gesture, has ever been observed in the wild.”
Elena, the escravo stroked into the wall.
“Parroting,” the technician repeated. “No further study is required.”
“What do you suggest be done with it?” the colony administrator asked.
“Well, our society was founded on efficiency. We can’t have people wasting time training their livestock to be circus animals.”
“So it should remain in captivity.”
“We have an underground holding chamber used to contain those awaiting trial,” the researcher suggested. “It’s not inhumane at all. Rather peaceful and secluded.”
“And dark,” the administrator pointed out.
“And dark.”
by Kathy Kachelries | Dec 20, 2005 | Story
It’s tough to tell when someone disappears. You always just figure they’re busy at work, or studying for finals, or on vacation, or something of the sort, so none of us thought anything was strange when we didn’t see Nodek for a while. Actually, to be brutally honest, none of us even noticed. I mean, he was kind of quiet to begin with, and only piped up when he had something to say. Half the time, you’d have to check the room list to know that he was even there. So I don’t know how long it took us. Maybe a week. Maybe two. But then, one day, this troll shows up and says something like:
NoobLOL42: star wars is for fagz!!!
We don’t get trolls very often, but Nodek was some kind of film geek, so he’d always rip them a new one in words that none of us understood. It was pretty funny to watch, actually, and it became kind of a running joke. So Jil says:
AdminJil4984: nodek? u hungry?
and there was no reply.
NoobLOL42: whos nodek?
AdminJil4984: whos nodek?!?!?!?!?!?
The last one to see him had been 3jane, who said she was in PM with him a few weeks ago, but when we tried to check the logs we got a server error. We weren’t freaked, though. Like I said, people come and go. We shot off a few PMs, but since we figured he was just on vacation or something, it took another week or so before we tried it oldschool with email. Mailerdaemoned.
At least a month had passed. A month. This is Nodek we’re talking about.
Admin3jane: does ne1 know his real name?
AdminJil4984: i got his mstracker number
Admin3jane: ??
AdminJil4984: 55772.0619.086/okl
We ran it. Nothing. Not just disconnected, either. It was like the hardware had never been MSregged. 3jane tried the chatlogs again, though, and this time, the request went through.
Admin3jane: its not here
AdminKack1: what?
Admin3jane: hes not in the logs. theres no profile either.
I checked. She was right. His profile was gone. When I went back over some of the logs, it seemed like he’d never been there. I remembered every conversation, but the lines I could have sworn he posted belonged to 3jane and Jil. Some of his stuff even ended up under my name. The funny thing was, I couldn’t be sure I’d never said it. After a few hours in a chat room every day for a year, you start to forget who belongs to what.
AdminJil4984: it must be a bug
Admin3jane: but were not missing ne conversations
AdminKack1: were missing a person!!
AdminJil4984: kack do u rememer nething he said? liek specifically?
AdminKack1: he said a lot of stuff. he liked books. he liked music. wtf? he was nodek. we all remember the stuff he said.
Admin3jane: well we need something exact to search
AdminKack1: thats why we keep logs in the 1st place!
I don’t know why it got to me so much. Like I said, people come and go. People change their names. But Google turned up nothing. AOL turned up nothing. It was like he’d never existed.
Time passed. Weeks, months. I mean, how long? How long do you wait for something like that?
AdminKack1: maybe hes dead
AdminJil4984: nodek?
AdminKack1: yeah. maybe he died and his family erased everything so they wouldn’t be reminded or something.
AdminJil4984: once he said he was going to join the army i think
Admin3jane: and they unregged his old pc? come on.
AdminKack1: maybe hes in the secret service
NoobSharick: who r u talking about?
AdminKack1: nodek
NoobSharick: ??
AdminKack1: he hasnt been around in a while, sharick
NoobSharick: ive been here months and i never saw him
AdminJil4984: this was before your time
Admin3jane: kack, jil, let it go. hes not in the logs
NoobSharick: ur making this up
AdminKack1: why the hell would i make this up
NoobSharick: maybe he never existed at all
AdminKack1: stfu noob, this is none of ur business
NoobSharick: im just sayin
AdminJil4984: he was here. we remember him
NoobSharick: but i dont
AdminJil4984: well have a cookie asshole
**NoobSharick HAS BEEN BANNED FROM THIS CHANNEL**
Admin3jane: wtf?
AdminJil4984: 3j, he was one of us even if hes dead or in the secret service or w/e.
Admin3jane: maybe he just had better stuff to do than sit online all goddamn day. maybe he erased himself.
AdminKack1: nodek wouldn’t do that.
Admin3jane: w/e. who knows. hes gone now and thats what matters.
AdminKack1: hes not gone, 3j. hes out there somewhere. people dont just disappear.
Sometimes, years later, I still Google him. I still email him. It’s always bounced, though. Absolutely nothing. But he has to be out there somewhere. People don’t just disappear.
by Kathy Kachelries | Dec 14, 2005 | Story |
I think I was about eight years old when I decided I was going to be a scientist.
When you’re eight, this sounds like the perfect career. I could see myself in a starched white lab coat surrounded by petri dishes and beakers as I looked into an antique microscope all day, and then, at night, charting the courses of stars. One wall of my laboratory would be made up of test tubes and jars, elements carefully isolated and waiting to be combined to dazzling effect. Another would be made of large cages, where impossibly white guinea-rats ran through complicated mazes as their brains sparked with the static of miniature electrodes. The third wall would be for very thick and very heavy books. Actual books, made out of paper and whatever the covers of books were made out of. I had read them a hundred times each. I had even memorized a few. Then, the last wall, my favorite because it had won me three Nobel prizes, was nothing but a green chalkboard covered with equations so complicated that I was the only one who could ever understand them.
This is what a great scientist I was when I was eight: the lab had four walls, and I hadn’t bothered to leave room for the door. Hopefully, one of those Nobel prizes was for a teleporter.
My father encouraged this insanity, and gave me this purple holographic projector that hung the same edufeed over my room every night, over and over. “Sally Stardust’s Cosmic Celebration,” it was called, and Sally Stardust was this bouncy cartoon girl who talked you through the feed with outdated slang and jokes about shopping. Fortunately, there was an option to do away with Sally, so I deleted her, junked the “stellar jewelry kit!!” and stuck her bioluminescent star stickers above my brother’s crib. Without Sally, the air beneath my ceiling flickered with suns and planets, and the facts were read in a hypnotic monotone by some lonely old man.
So I suppose the whole thing was that guy’s fault. Or maybe Hasbro’s fault, for hiring him to do the voice-over on what was really an ill-conceived toy to begin with, but either way, without that grape-colored contraption and its apathetic barrage of facts I might have never realized, on my ninth birthday, that my ninth birthday couldn’t possibly exist.
Here’s how it works: the Earth is revolving around the Sun, and our year is based on where we are in that orbit. So people have this idea that if you stand in a certain spot at a certain time on a certain day for two years in a row, you’re cosmically standing in the same place both times. This is wrong. Really, the sun’s moving around something too, and that something is moving around something and everything is rushing outwards, faster than cars, faster than airplanes, faster than rockets. I was millions of miles away from the place I was born in, but my mother apparently hadn’t heard Sally Stardust’s opinion on the matter, and after a relatively pointless screaming match I ran into my room and slammed my door shut. I wrote a bunch of random letters and pluses and minuses signs on a sheet of paper and pretended that I had worked out the secret of the universe, but after an hour or so I got tired of that. I gave the paper to my mother and told her that I had discovered a new equation that proved her right.
I think I was ten when I figured out that you have to be good at math to do science. After that, I painted Sally Stardust’s Cosmic Celebration a dark shade of blue and gave it to my brother. He was about four, I think. Age doesn’t mean much once you realize that you’re counting an imaginary thing.
by Kathy Kachelries | Dec 8, 2005 | Story
The glass beads were black and white: tiny flattened circles that made a loud clattering sound when he emptied the bag onto the glowing white floor. Most of the 1,394 settled within a few feet of his legs, although a few rolled to the outer reaches of the room.
“The problem here is that you don’t understand the potential,” Sudoku told her without lifting his attention from the beads. “You use this thing to play games and watch stimvids. You’ve never even opened the console.”
“And this is the console.”
“This is what the console looks like today.”
From her position on the floor across from him, Ery glanced around the room, then snorted. “Nice. Well, now that that’s over with, I’m going to go finish my coffee.”
“This room isn’t actually empty,” he said when the edges of her body started to shimmer with logout. She recondensed with a sigh that was slightly louder than necessary.
“I know an empty room when I see one.”
“There’s me. And you.”
“And stimvid pickup lines, apparently. But there’s coffee back in your apartment, and it’s winning.”
He wiped the beads into a small pile, then swept them onto his palm before spilling them over the floor again. “What’s a stimvid, Ery?”
“I’m not going to justify that with an answer.”
“It’s a program that shows you exactly what you want to see, right?”
“Right.”
“Because the program is written to pick up on your unique desires. Imagine what kind of engine something like that would have to run on. And don’t even ask about the hardware.”
She sighed. Although he didn’t look up, Sudoku recognized the expression on her face.
“Go touch the wall,” he told her.
Ery stood up and stepped around the pile of beads with uncharacteristic care. Beneath her fingers, the wall was smooth and glossy, reflective. She followed it to the corner as she searched for imperfections. None.
“What does it feel like?” he asked.
“Plastic.”
“Because that’s what you expect.”
As her fingers dragged along the surface, it became rougher, softer. In a brief flicker, she saw warm patterns of woven fiber, plush reds and yellows swirling together only to disappear into blank whiteness an instant later. Ery stopped. “What was that?”
“It’s a Persian rug. You’ve probably never seen one.”
“I know what they are. But-”
“It’s just a matter of deciding what you want to see, then seeing it. You’re doing it right now, but you don’t realize it.”
Ery pulled her hand away and squinted at the featureless blank. When it yielded nothing to her scrutiny, she returned to her place opposite him. “What am I changing?” she asked.
“Me.” Sudoku emptied the bag again. This time, most of the escaping beads were deflected by Ery’s seated body and settled back in the space between them.
She frowned, and waited.
“This isn’t what I actually look like.”
“I’ve seen you thousands of times.”
“Exactly. You’ve seen me thousands of times.” Neglecting the beads, Sudoku met her eyes. “Right now, I’m the person you picture when you think about Sudoku. I’m not the person I see when I look in the mirror. Likewise, you appear the way I see you.”
“What do I look like?”
Sudoku chuckled. He began gathering the beads again. “I told you. You look exactly like you look on the outside. To me, I mean. You look the way I see you.”
“So if you can change the things in this room just by thinking about them in the right way, why do you do the bead thing? If you created them with your mind, don’t you already know how many there are?”
“It’s not the counting,” Sudoku said as he scattered them for a third time. They lay around his legs, disregarded, waiting to be numbered. He bit his lip and stood up as he searched for phrases. Language had never been one of his strong points. “I don’t even think about the counting. My mind does that on it’s own. It’s more about the pattern when they fall out. I just can’t deal with these rooms. Everything is so…” he took a few steps, facing the wall, “so easily controlled, I guess. But if I create enough beads the mainframe has to take over and control them as they fall. The more I watch it, the more I understand the mainframe.” He turned to face her.
“So what happens then?”
Sudoku smiled for four seconds before closing his eyes to log off. As his image flickered away the uncounted beads dissolved into ether, but Ery hesitated, wondering what would remain after she left.
by Kathy Kachelries | Dec 3, 2005 | Story |
Subject 643-M, age eight, sits cross-legged on the floor. Before him, a wide array of screens flicker rapidly, some with pictures, some words, some numbers. Thick tubes connect from the ceiling to a horizontal row of ports on his back.
He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t have to. Time is meaningless to a Scryer.
The boy’s fingers hover over a small black control box. He touches it sometimes, and images flicker more rapidly, or pause, or rewind. He rarely rewinds. The boy never misses anything.
When he sleeps, he sleeps in front of the screens. He likes the patterns, and he needs the ports. Sleep is a symptom of increased elusidol tolerance, so his dosage is increased to match.
Soon, the boy will be disconnected. The man worries about this. There are 12 others, but this one is the most talented. The man is concerned, but he knows he can get a few more years. He hopes the war is over by then.
The boy speeds through another segment, selecting words and pictures. No numbers this time. It’s not the boy’s responsibility to break the code, merely to locate it. The man hits record, and the pattern vanishes from the screens.
The boy doesn’t remember it. The next feed begins, and he touches the controller, upping the pace. The man closes the door behind him when he goes to check on the other children.
