Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

You have never spoken to any of the children about your life before the bunker and the Sharing Place. None of them have ever asked. They are politely attentive now. You know they’ll start to lose focus soon.

“So, my father’s grandfather’s axe had neither the head nor handle of his grandfather’s axe. His grandfather had never seen or touched a single atom of that axe. I asked my dad how the heck the axe was his grandfather’s axe, and he gave me sort of a weird look. ‘Because it is.’ I explained about the atoms, about how the axe only has two parts, and both had been replaced, and so it wasn’t the same thing anymore. Dad was a physics professor. He’d worked at Oak Ridge Atomic Research Center, and he replied: ‘You know that thing people say, about your body having all new cells every seven years? That’s basically poppycock: Some cells are replaced very quickly, like the lining of your stomach, which is shed weekly. Others very rarely are replaced, like neurons. But atoms are swapped in and out constantly by your metabolic processes; from one year to the next almost every single atom in your body will be replaced. Since birth you’ve been a whole new girl over again more than two dozen times—but you’re still my little girl. If I’d saved all the hair from your haircuts growing up—the very atoms that had been you—and introduced it as ‘my daughter, the famous child psychologist,’ people would think I was nuts. The material is just dead stuff. If you’re going to be like that, then we’re all stars, because that’s where all our atoms started out. What counts isn’t the material, it’s the pattern . You aren’t your skin or hair or clothes or diplomas or New York Times bestseller; you are the pattern in your cells that causes those cells to keep gobbling up atoms and organizing them to be you.’

“That sticks in my head, because my dad died in his garage, and some of his blood and stuff splattered on that axe and handle. This was after the government realized that the Event had already started, when the National Guard was dynamiting radio stations so people couldn’t accidentally hear the Bad Song, but before people got really careful and started snipping the speakers out of their electronics. This was before the first deaf person ‘heard’ the Bad Song in the rhythmic buzz of a cellphone set on ‘vibrate,’ and long before people started smashing anything with a speaker in it.”

This was likewise long before the Advent, but you don’t mention the Advent, because the children don’t know about the Advent—don’t even know the word; they came to the shelter before the Advent—but also because you don’t really know anything concrete about the Advent: All you really know is that something has arrived. And, in stark contrast to everything you learned from your dad’s favorite movies, it isn’t going anywhere.

“This was before regular people got careful, but already the police wouldn’t answer the phone or use radio dispatch. You had to text them. So I texted them, staring at the blood spattered on the axe handle so I wouldn’t have to stare at Dad.”

You are no longer worried about the children getting impatient with your story. This is what they’ve been hungry to hear about, the things the “responsible adults” don’t talk about—as though it’s the children who need to be sheltered.

“When I’d come by after work, Dad hadn’t been expecting me. He was in the garage. He had the spigot on, running a trickle across the concrete to the floor drain. He’d do that when he was dressing out a deer in the fall, so the concrete would be easy to rinse off when he was done. But this was the early spring, not deer season. And there was no deer. He was standing over the drain, holding his pistol. A revolver.

“‘Oh,’ he said when I walked into the garage, ‘Jeez, Janey; you scared me. I didn’t think you were coming by.’

“I’d texted him, but he hadn’t noticed—he was ahead of the curve, and had already snipped out his cellphone’s speaker and vibrating motor.

“‘Listen,’ he said—and even then, so soon after we knew there’d been the Event, that word was already starting to get scary: Listen . Because what if someone had heard the Bad Song, just a little, and was about to hum it to you? The way you do when you have a jingle in your head and you say, ‘Hey, listen to this; what’s this stupid tune I’ve got stuck in my head?’ And then you hum a few bars.

“‘Listen, sweetie,’ Dad had said, ‘this isn’t your fault. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be separated from you,’”—you feel yourself smirk, noting the passive voice—“‘but I heard that song, and it’s in my head, and I know it’s changing my Pattern. It’s making me something new. Not just new atoms, but a new Pattern. I’m not the man I used to be.’

“As he said this, he unbuttoned the cuff of his right sleeve with his free hand. His right hand held the pistol, and his finger never left the trigger. He pulled up his sleeve, revealing a scatter-plot row of weeping boils that had sprouted up his forearm. Nestled in each boil was a small, wide eye. There were five of these eyes, bright as a baby’s. Each looked like his eyes, like mine, but each tracked independently, like five separate eyes in five separate darling baby faces. As I watched, they blinked in series, like a shiver of gooseflesh.”

The children do not react to this, and that’s good; their Resilience is all they’ll have, soon enough.

“My father said: ‘I’m scared about what happens next.’ He was crying then with his own eyes, his forearm eyes still looking around like fascinated toddlers. ‘I used to get anxious,’ he told me. ‘It was this constant feeling, like something awful was always just about to happen. Now the feeling has changed. I feel like something awful has already happened. And it’s me. I don’t want to do this, but the song… I thought it was Mick Jones singing “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” but now I realize it’s Sid Vicious covering Sinatra’s “My Way.” I can take a hint.’

“And then he put the gun in his mouth. And then he pulled it out with a grimace, and instead placed the barrel beneath the shelf of his chin. And he pulled the trigger twice. That impressed me. It still does: he’d done the job fine with the first bullet—the proof got all over his grandfather’s axe—but he so badly wanted to make sure the job was done right and final that he had the presence of will to keep pulling, even though he was already dead. That’s something. That was my dad, in a nutshell: he really did the job right and full.”

You take a breath, and you finish:

“My father committed suicide because he’d listened to the Bad Song on the radio—back before anyone even knew anything like the Event could happen—and the song had started to change him. He was insufficiently resilient and adaptive. This is a problem for adults: he could not cope with What Has Happened. To his mind, when your Pattern is gone, you’re gone: the head and handle aren’t just not the old head and handle; they aren’t heads or handles at all. He could not accept this, and so he was Rejected.”

You pause, and then say:

“I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place.”

“You can’t,” Vanessa Z. gasps. Denial .

You ask if there’s a rule that you can’t. The children clearly don’t know. But you do, and there is not. No one ever conceived of the possibility that an adult might try to leave the “safety” of a federal continuity-of-operations shelter. No one older than fifteen is known to have survived outside any shelter, and everyone knows it.

“Bitch,” Bennie mutters under his breath, his eyes accusatory coals. Anger.