Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“Not really. And there’s not a magical way to hide and transfer knowledge; otherwise I would be able to show you that you should try therapy, like, even once. Funny that you mention magic, though. I’ve recently been delving into the dark arts, mostly to see if there’s anything that’ll help pull me out of this time loop but also because I was trying to help Nina with her ghost problem.”

I wondered what recently meant to Bonnie. “You know about that? Oh, I forgot again. You know about everything. Did it work?”

“No,” she said simply and sadly. “It is such an unfortunate truth that shit doesn’t happen to you based on what you can deal with.”

“Poor Nina,” I said. God, Bonnie really had changed! How many times had I had this thought today? And yet I couldn’t stop thinking it, when everything she said and did kept revealing her newness, and each time in a new way. I checked the time and flinched. “Oh, it’s about to be midnight,” I said, feeling robotic with dread. “I’m just going to distract myself from ontological terror and tell you that next time, please figure out a way to prove it to me from the get-go, and then give me some money so I can stop going to my job and have a nice whole week of fun. What do you say?”

“I could do that, and I have. It’s futile, though.”

“Wow, I’m not used to this dark-sided goth of a Bonnie. I’ll miss her and yet I also totally won’t .” It was hard to talk. My teeth were chattering.

It was about to be midnight.

One more second.

She whispered into everyone’s ears, setting off tiny explosions of shock and awe and gasp, but when she reached me, I just said, “Don’t.” I didn’t want to know what she knew about me already, whatever I told her even though it wasn’t me who told her. (Yes it was no it wasn’t.)

“No need,” I said. “I believe it.”

Bonnie nodded and sat down again. All of us were rapt. “I’m in a sharing mood this time,” Bonnie said. “Please, anyone, feel free to ask me whatever you like.”

Here are a few of the questions I can still remember. We had a lot.

Q: How do you remember so much stuff if you can’t take anything with you?

A: Good question! This has all been hugely taxing for my memory. I learned the method of loci from Rhetorica ad Herennium , and other texts. The first thing I do when I wake up is type as much as I can remember. Like, in a total frenzy. Good thing you’ve only heard me banging on that keyboard once! Ha ha. Another thing I do upon waking is order a bunch of books and stuff so I can have it all shipped to me as soon as possible.

Q: Have you ever tried to kill yourself?

A: No. Before my optimism died, I had always held out hope that I’d be able to escape the time loop eventually. I didn’t want to jeopardize that by killing myself, and I was scared. Then I died by accident, so that answered that. But I would never do it on purpose. I hate the dark in-betweens. They last longer when I’ve died.

Q: What are some of your favorite memories?

A: So many! This is going to sound cheesy. Becoming closer with many of you. You don’t remember but we got close , like wearing each other’s hair in our lockets close. You are all such incredible people. Even you have your moments, Scott. The dark magic cult that formed about me, I’m not going to say it’s a favorite memory—it was more interesting , but very, very, very interesting. Oh, and I had so much amazing sex. That is, I had an enormous amount of sex and so much of it was amazing, but of course a whole lot was mediocre and embarrassing and some of it was terrible. I’m not a god or anything. Sometimes I can’t know when a bad thing will happen, or I won’t be able to stop it, and though my body gets reset my mind does not.

Q: Do you want it to stop?

A: Yes.

Q: Why do you want it to stop?

A: First of all, I’m sick of it. In some incalculable, untrackable way, I am old as fuck. Second, and this is the selfish reason, there’s a limit to how much I can improve all by myself. I mean, just because you live the same week over and over again doesn’t mean you’ll be that great or smart. I’m proud of how awesome I got, but I think I’m hitting a wall. Third, I have lately [we wondered what “lately” meant to Bonnie] been troubled by the feeling that this span of time is being used up somehow. That it is degrading and fraying in some intangible way and there will be devastating consequence. Like it’s going to just poop out. Can’t you feel it? The way everything feels so tired and busted and sad, and it’ll lurch forever but it also can’t go on like this forever? [We all nodded.] I’m scared.

Q: Whoa. I thought I’d just been depressed.

A: Yes. You are also that. I am concerned that whatever is happening to me is coming to an end, but not the end I sought. I’m worried there won’t be any future. And I really wanted the future to happen, more than anybody—[“Please, Bonnie,” we said]—okay, fine, I want it as much as anyone else does, and to think that I won’t get to see it, that none of us will—

This was around when Bonnie stopped talking. She had a look like someone who had run full force into a glass door, like: Aaaaah ! And like: OUCH . And like: Well, of course. I did know that door was there.

She got up to leave, telling us that this week was going to be very busy, and it was important to get it just right, so please don’t do stupid shit expecting it to be undone. Please. When we tried to ask her one last thing, she blew right out of there, leaving the question to twist in the air and plummet to the floor in a crumpled ball.

The question was: Why you, Bonnie?

We never stopped wondering and we never found out.

Bonnie decided to throw a giant party at our place. It would be on Tuesday night, the last night of the week, because everything in Bonnie’s week took place on the exact wrong day. “People will come,” she said. “I know how to get them here. And I deserve a real birthday party! In a sense, I’m like a million years old.” I asked her if she kept count and she shook her head, saying she was bad at keeping numbers in her mind, but that had to be a lie.

Such terrible things happened this week. Huge startling ones and small boring ones. But in other ways we had a wonderful week. We remember it still.

Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that fucking major?

At the party, which everyone did attend—not that we doubted Bonnie more than just a little bit—I spotted the man I knew at my last job. The Man. But not really The Man , not really deserving of capitals, because there had been a few in my life but this one only happened to be the most recent and I was maddest at him. Most recent also meant that I had thought I’d become old enough to respect myself and to be able to foresee every future event (was I expecting too much?) so that I wouldn’t keep saying yes to a man when I wanted to say no and thus pave the way for me to say no to that man and have him still do what he wanted and leave me totally confused, knowing that something was very, very wrong. Thus when all of that nevertheless came to pass I got really mad at myself and additionally mad at him for making me mad at myself, and, of course I was mad at myself for being mad at myself.

My fingertips sizzled.

The time was after midnight. Bonnie wasn’t here anymore. I felt it, like she told me we would. She said she had had a sudden flash of insight, or maybe not so sudden because she had been thinking over it for years, and now she knew what she had to do. It had taken her so long because it was a weird solution and one that made her quite unhappy. “Only at first. I feel much better about it now. Nobody should be sad for me,” she said. When the time came, Bonnie was going to allow the future to move ahead. The way it would move ahead was if she stayed in the past. It wasn’t too hard to do, more a matter of intention and perspective than anything else. You didn’t even need dark magic. Well, some helped. “I wish I could be there. To see it,” she had said. “But I love you all and I’m sick of you all and I’m sick of power and power is sick of having me.”