The Wish

When Ren won the global lottery he thought his handheld had been hacked. He knew his chances of winning were small but he bought his tickets daily just like everyone else. The ads said that you paid for the excitement of playing and Ren knew it was true. As soon as he got the news Ren called a lawyer, spending half his weekly salary on the privilege of a consultation. Together they learned that his ticket was authentic. He had won.

Solicitations poured in, begging him to spend his winnings. His mother insisted that he buy practical things like high citizenship, a house on The Green and a Platinum Transportation Pass. He could have all of that now, and for the rest of his life he could live like a retired man. The fortune would buy him a sweet life.

Working in the cube, all Ren could scrape together was just enough for the middle-low lifestyle and to pay his ever present debts. He was mainstream; everything about him was completely the same as the man in the next cube, common job, apartment and debts. Winning the lottery was a sign; this was his chance to escape from monotony. Ren knew he could not let the worlds’ logic dictate to him what he should do with his fortune. The universe was giving Ren a genie in a magic bottle, and his wish wouldn’t be wasted.

Ren contracted the right people. The alteration would not be impossible, but it would take a team of experts to tailor his body to his specific desires. He bleached his golden olive skin and tinted his eyes a deep black. These were the easy modifications, but Ren wanted a full body conversion, a permanent change in his genetic code. He wanted to be like the characters in the novels he read as a child, like the movies that scared and allured him. He wanted his life to have that dark color.

The whole process took two years while a team of experts reinvented his genetic code. The cost used up not only the lottery money, but his personal savings as well. Surgeries and radiation treatments were painful and the viral changes, which carried the code of his wish through his whole body, had him vomiting and shitting at all hours. He nearly died.

Ren knew, when it all started, that he couldn’t go back to his old job, which required that he work in daylight hours. It took a long time to find work he was suited for, long enough that he had to take out a high interest loan just to keep drinking. Finally, Ren found work as a night watchman at a high security living complex on The Green. It was a place where the wealthy went to live in actual two story houses. He spent his nights in a room filled with monitors, his eyes glued to flickering screens.

In the morning, Ren would go back to the place he slept in the janitorial closet. His boss was letting him stay there until he got on his feet again. The light from his eyes turned the black room grey. Ren spent his time reading romantic novels and watching horror movies on a small cracked screen. The hunger was just as he asked for, persistent, gnawing. He laughed and shivered in his bleached white skin. Ren had what he wanted, he was a living nightmare.

Sum of Her Parts

We are using your ankles, he said.

She sat in the cold plastic chair, watching the scientist twirl the vial of her blood.

Only my ankles?

You have strong ankles. They hold your feet well. He put the tube in a plastic holder. The top of the tube was red and black swirled. She wondered why doctors did not use solid-colored stoppers. She looked at her blood. Outside of her, it seemed different, darker and emptier like oil.

Soon it would be cold, but that would be okay.

Are you familiar with the human genome project? The doctor asked.

That was years ago.

Yes, but advances have been made.

We have isolated the genes that produce your ankles. They will go into her. She will have strong ankles as well.

Her signature, trailing above the printed lines, felt separate from her like her blood. How many signatures were there, she wondered? Did they take one thing from each person they included, or were some people better, worth more parts?

I’m glad to help, she said, and stared downwards to the point where her leg met her foot. It did not seem special. She would have taken other things, other parts. But that did not matter. She was a secretary, not a doctor. He knew better anyway, she was certain.

Your country thanks you, he said. Humanity thanks you.

She did not move. Her blood was almost room temperature. She thought of centrifuges. She looked at her hands, but they were flawed and dirty. The joints were too thick, the wrists were not strong. This was fine. She looked at them anyway, and thought of filing papers.

You can go now, he said. We have what we need.

Deo’s Hole

Down the hill, past the cornfields, just north of Brattleboro and west of New Hampshire is a bend in the river that they call Deo’s Hole. It’s a deep place that comes just after some tame rapids, a perfect swimming hole that just happens to have a rocky outcropping above it from which children have been known to jump.

I died there when I was six. I jumped off of the rocks when my mom’s back was turned, diving like the Olympians I saw on the wave. I wanted to be a diving champ someday, and I didn’t understand why Mom would let me dive into the public pool but not into the clear, cool river water.

I hear they didn’t find my body for a few hours. It had been swept downstream, and by all accounts, my mom was pretty frantic. When they pulled me out I was blue and bloated and had a gash in the back of my head—I still have the scar from that. It’s why I keep my hair long. Anyway, they got me to the hospital pretty quick and hooked me up to the stabilizers. The guru said my soul wasn’t too far from the body, which I gather is usually the case with kids. It’s not like the old folks, where the nurses have to fight them every step of the way to get them back in their skin. Never understood that, personally. No matter how old you are, isn’t it best to go on living? Our quotas are short enough as it is nowadays.

I’m getting sidetracked. The point of all this is that years later, when I was about fourteen, I looked up Deo’s Hole and found out it was named after a kid. That’s right, a kid named Deo, who jumped off that rock the same way I did and died there, decades ago, long before my mother or my grandmother were even born.

I was incensed. I remember storming home to my mother with the printout from the library in hand, demanding to know why they hadn’t renamed the swimming hole after me, why people weren’t remembering my name instead of some dumb kid from ancient times who probably didn’t even care about swimming or diving or the Olympics. She took me aside and told me that Deo’s Hole was like the hospital or the park; they both had “memorial” in their names to remind us of people who had died for good. Nobody needed to be reminded of me, she said, because the doctors had fixed me, put me back so that I could live the rest of my allotted years.

At fourteen, I had never before been exposed to the idea that people, young people, could die and not be fixed. The idea of losing so many years of life was shocking to a kid my age, and I had to go see a shrink for a few months to get all that sorted out in my head. Now every time I drive by Deo’s Hole, I take a moment to remember a kid I never knew from a past so barbaric that it never let him grow up. But as the car zips along, tires spinning like four prayer wheels, I think of all the years his name has been spoken, far more than our life quotas nowadays, and I wonder if Deo didn’t get the better end of the deal.

This World's Not Built For Lovers

“I’m going to have to break this off, Siobahn.” Rupert hadn’t been looking forward to this, and the confusion on the poor girl’s eyes only made it worse. He had chosen one of the more romantic dungeons to break this news to her, and that may have been a mistake.

“I do not understand. Was it perhaps something I said?”

“No, no Siobahn. It’s not you. You’re wonderful.” Rupert looked down at his boots and shuffled his feet. “It’s just…we’re from different worlds.”

“So you have said before.” Siobahn reached out and gathered Rupert’s hands in her own. “You have told me how you are from another land far from this, that your name is not Sir Gryphon DarkRaven—though that is what floats above your head still—and that you do not look like the man I see before me in this other world. And while this is most strange to me, I do not believe it has damaged our relationship.” She smiled at him, the warm, hopeful smile that had ensnared his heart ever since he had saved her life way back in Dungeon #23. It had been an amazing first date.

“It’s just… you’re a game sprite!” Rupert didn’t want to say it, but he had to. “You’re not real!”

“How can I not be real?” Siobahn asked, tracing her fingertips down the rugged cheek of Rupert’s avatar. “Can you not feel me? How could I not be real? Could you not feel me last night?” She gave him a saucy grin. “I felt you.”

Rupert had felt her, all right. The money he had sunk into his System had been totally worth it. “That’s not what I mean! You’re just here to do things in this world. You’re just created to do tasks here!”

“This world was made for us. It is ours now. We make it for those who come. Is that not the way it is in your world?” Siobahn drew herself up against Rupert’s avatar. Rupert’s breathing became slightly erratic as his System told him where Siobahn’s breasts, stomach and thighs were in relation to his avatar. This was not going the way it should. He was starting to get worried.

“You’re not real, okay! You don’t have free will! You just do what the mods tell you to!”

Siobahn looked hurt. “It is true that I worship the Mods and do their bidding. I was raised to be a Mod-fearing woman, and I pride myself on keeping that faith holy and dear. I am confused, for I know not how you can accuse me of being a puppet of the Mods when you know good and well their stance of a love such as ours. Every moment I spend thinking of you, I am defying the Mods and their law. I love you, Rupert, though the Mods have decreed that I shall not. And I will always love you.”

“Yes, but— ”

“There are no ‘buts’, Rupert. Neither are there ‘ifs’ or ‘ands.’ There are not even Mods. There is only us, and our love. You do love me, yes?”

“More than anything.”

“And I, you. What, praytell, is so difficult? It seems so simple to me.”

Rupert sighed. He would have to tell her the truth. “It’s my mother. She… she wouldn’t approve.”

Siobahn laughed, and her joy echoed off the dungeon walls. “Should you not defy your Mods while I defy mine? Can you give me a reason why we should not be rebels together? If you cannot answer me, Rupert, you must give me a kiss instead.”

He couldn’t, so he did.

Translation

Her name was Bianca. She was thirteen.

She only spoke French. No one spoke French. The resistance brought her here after she’d been hit by a Federated tank. The gash stretched from her ribcage to her hip, opening up like a silent and thirsty mouth.

I realized, after the third hour, that there was nothing to be done. I offered her tea. She was crying a lot.

I didn’t remember being thirteen.

“It hurts,” she said, and my mind flickered.

“It’ll stop soon,” I replied, pulling my knees to my chest. I was nineteen then. I’d been a medic for eleven months. No one had died before. I touched my fingers to her throat but the space where her pulse should have been was weak and erratic like a dripping faucet.

I thought of offering her painkillers, but didn’t.

“How do you speak French?” she asked.

“I speak everything.”

“I wish I could do that.”

“It’s not really worth it,” I said as I stared at the dark red stains beneath my fingernails. The funny thing about words is that they will evaporate in six hours and forty-nine minutes. After that, she’ll speak the same language as everyone else.

“Can I go home now?”

“You probably shouldn’t walk,” I said. She weighed ninety-three pounds. I wondered if I could carry her body to the alley.