Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

The other shelters ceased communicating weeks ago—their computer networks don’t even “reply to pings,” whatever that means. You don’t imagine this is because they’ve somehow found a way to eliminate Rejection.

“Who will help us work through our issues, Dr. Mikkelson?” Vanessa L. asks, slyly.

Bargaining.

You tell them that Dr. Bowersox is an excellent clinician, because she is. They will all be ready to leave sooner or later, you explain. They all have the capacity to be Resilient, Functional, and Adaptive. They are young, and it is still their world. They just need to trust in the therapeutic protocol and in themselves.

You do not say that we—the adults “protecting” you—won’t survive here. Small children are never Rejected; they can accept What Has Happened . These older children can process their grief and likely avoid Rejection, too. But what are the rest of us, the “responsible adults,” doing? Living like moles, breeding more children in order to steadily traumatize them in the sunless continuity of operations bunkers, only to someday send them out the Waiting Room Door, where they’ll sink or swim on their own—and all the while cutting our own rations further and further. What’s the point of that? What the hell are we clinging to?

You realize you are Bargaining with yourself, and you smile.

“I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place,” you repeat. “I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

The final rule is that when you leave the Children’s Sharing Place, you must leave through the Waiting Room.

As soon as the session begins, you stand. “I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place,” you repeat.

The group is silent. They do not Bargain because they are now in Depression .

But you’re past all that, and so you leave.

The Waiting Room Door snicks shut behind you, and you are finally in the Waiting Room, where the potted plant nods in the corner like the quiet old woman whispering, “Hush.”

The Waiting Room is small but not stuffy.

You wait. Nothing happens. And so you leave through the EXIT.

There is a shock of clear light and a distant dinging. The heavy EXIT door thunks shut behind you. Your eyes clear, and you discover that the door exits directly into a large parking lot: cracked, oil-stained asphalt full of weeds, a few cars parked indiscriminately around the blacktop. One car has its driver’s side door hanging open. That’s the source of the ding: the keys have been forgotten in the ignition.

Something bothers you about that dinging, but you can’t focus on what that might be.

You turn to look at the building that you came out of, and see that it’s a low-slung strip of little cinderblock office units skirted with ragged hedges, situated on the outskirts of a giant parking lot, which surrounds a distant shopping mall. There are more cars at the mall, but the parking is no more orderly. You’d originally been brought (note the passive voice) to a different building elsewhere in this office park, a warehouse with a loading dock. This was back when we thought we could hide long enough for What Has Happened to blow over. Back then the big concern was keeping the kids “developmentally on track” while they lived in the shelter, “so they’d be ready to kickstart the global economy.” The soldiers who brought you had spoken of critical infrastructure protection and continuity of operations planning . “The children are our future,” one had told you earnestly as she helped you down out of the truck, “our most precious natural resource.”

You had agreed, but you were still in Denial. Everyone was. Well, everyone older than fifteen.

You are absolutely terrified, standing out in the open in the parking lot.

But the day is beautiful—especially after so many months spent in tunnels and bunkers and shelters and conference rooms and gymnasia. It is sunny and clear, the breeze fresh and clean. It smells of hot tar and the tall sweetgrass left to grow undisturbed in the fields beyond the parking lot. There is no distant drone of traffic. There are no airplanes in the sky, nor the contrails that show their passing. Birds flit and swoop in enormous flocks.

You look down and see a child’s fingernail—a perfect ellipse of robin’s egg blue—crusted into the center of one of the “oil stains” that is not an oil stain. A scream gathers in your throat and you look away.

Tilly climbs out of the dinging car and stretches languidly, like a cat. She has a big, daffy grin.

“Oh, hey, Dr. Mikkelson!” she says. “How are you? Long time, no see.”

You tell her you’re scared. A coyote pads out of the tall grass at the edge of the parking lot. You startle and draw back, stepping toward the safety of the EXIT. Now you’re more than scared. You are terrified, bordering on petrified.

Two more coyotes come, trotting silently into the parking lot. You scurry back to the building and find that there is no knob on the exterior of the EXIT.

“It’s okay,” Tilly says, smile sparkling. She’s hardly herself at all. “It’s all good,” she says. “It’s all good from now on.” She isn’t herself at all.

The coyotes are mellow as old collies, their tongues lolling like friendly pups. One lazily laps Tilly’s hand as it trots past. The lolling tongue is not a tongue; it is a tentacle, the suckers cupping wide, curious eyes, some hazel, others blue.

High in the sky there is something beyond the clouds. At first you think it’s the Moon. But it’s too big, too close, too pink. You note that there are several of these not-moons, pale red, with wavering edges. One rotates slowly, like a curious bird, revealing an enormous three-lobed eye that blinks like a baby’s nursing mouth, pursing and relaxing.

Your heart pounds and pounds in your chest, sending shocked vibrations down your limbs, as if you are uselessly hammering a concrete floor with a hard steel axe.

“Dr. Mikkelson,” Tilly says, “it’s all good; just Listen .”

Tilly is quiet, beaming at you with her daffy smile. You listen to the car dinging, and it doesn’t sound quite right. It’s a little ragged and uneven—but more importantly: it’s been months since you were taken down into the bunker. That car’s battery must be entirely dead by now.

You abruptly remember something Dad showed you once. You’d been washing up after dinner, and had asked him why your guitar amp picked up AM when you had it cranked up with the cable plugged in, but no guitar. He explained that it was because AM transmission was powerful and simple and could infiltrate the amp—and since the amp would amplify any analog signal, it amplified that just the same as your guitar. The place he’d lived in college was near an AM station, he explained, and his toaster would pick up the broadcast on some nights. The appliance’s whisker-thin heating elements vibrated with the power of the AM transmission, singing in tinny harmony. Even unpowered items—unplugged stereos, radiators, people’s dental fillings—have been known to pick up high-output AM.

“AM’s powerful stuff,” he’d said, drying a plate. “If you’ve got the wattage, you can make just about anything sing your song.”

You imagine that this is precisely what the things up in the sky are doing, bathing us in their electromagnetic transmissions, suffusing our highly wired, intricately interconnected world with their perplexing, invasive song. And what is a song, if not a Pattern of signal and silence? God knows that a song can get “stuck in your head”—tricking your brain into reproducing it, over and over, the same as a virus tricks a cell into reproducing it until the cell bursts with those li’l hijackers. Was it so beyond imagining that there might be a song that was so catchy, it didn’t just seduce your brain into reproducing its Pattern, but also into fundamentally changing yours?