Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

“You ever opened your suit’s blinder while inside the mists?” Estelle asks.

“I’m not a deader,” I mutter nervously, wondering if she suspects. Not only is it taboo to see the mists’ lies; the mists’ sights often drive people bat-bat. While Estelle seems nice, she’s still a Super and could have me tossed to the mists.

“I won’t harm you,” she says. “You’re free to return to Empire. But if you saw something in the mists, I need to know.”

I want to tell her what I saw, but I’ve never known a life where discussing the mists wasn’t taboo. I glance nervously at Estelle’s people standing outside the room. Will they throw me off the roof? Or maybe this old hotel will collapse like that nearby building. I wonder how many people lived in that building.

Estelle’s wrinkled hand gently takes my own and squeezes tight. “You must stop being so afraid, Hanger.”

I slap her hand away in fury. How dare this old fool reassure me? She didn’t grow up with precious little food or water. She hasn’t spent her whole life doing dangerous jobs. She hasn’t learned to keep her mouth shut because the alternative is to have your slug cut or be thrown to your death.

The people outside the door step toward us, worried I might hurt their Super. Estelle waves them off.

“It’s a simple choice,” Estelle says calmly. “Join the mists or stay apart. All your life you’ve heard why you should stay apart. But you know so little about why you should join.”

As Estelle says this, the mists whisper our names in voices sounding like the sizzle of pigeon eggs on good breakfast days. Like the hopeful taste of fresh air replacing bad.

From the window I see the mists rising. The people outside the room flee for higher floors but I can’t leave Estelle. I grab her wheeled chair and push but the wheels won’t turn. Estelle grips them tight, refusing to budge.

“Don’t fight it,” she says as the mists flow into the room.

As the mists rise, I wonder what it will feel like to die. Will the mists speak in Momma’s voice as they take me?

But instead, the mists ease around us without touching our bodies. I stand beside Estelle’s chair as the mists rise to the ceiling. They croon my name but I can’t see anything—merely a white wall of everything and nothing.

Afraid, I lean toward Estelle, but a slice of mist stabs between us. It rises over Estelle until I can’t see her. I scream her name. The mists whisper for me not to worry, speaking calmly like Estelle did moments before.

The mists seem to surround me forever, the hours in my mind merging to days and years before falling back to mere seconds. I find myself reliving a moment from several days ago, when I woke in my slug and greeted the mists below. I also see my life from years in the past, when Momma kissed me on the cheek before jumping off Empire.

Then as quickly as the mists rose, they flow away, falling through cracks in the floor and walls until they again rest a few feet below the windows.

Estelle smiles at me from her chair.

“Why didn’t the mists kill us?” I ask.

“When you’re in the mists, does it ever seem like time plays tricks with you?”

I nod, remembering how I felt a few moments before. Or how I’ve walked the mists in a suit and almost believed that if I lost focus, I’d become stuck between one moment and the next. “I once mentioned that feeling to Bugdon,” I mutter. “He said the lack of vision in a mist suit squirrels with people’s minds.”

“I’m sure it does. But this isn’t sensory deprivation—the mists actually play with time. Most people can’t sense it. But I can. And so can you.”

Estelle’s words ring a memory in me. I remember Momma— right before she dived off Empire—telling me her time had come. But while those were the words she’d spoken, I’d also felt more. A sense that Momma was playing a role she’d already played many times before in her life, ever since she’d opened her suit’s blinder to the mists while pregnant with me.

For a moment, my life folds in on itself. As if I’m a forever loop of time stretching from before my birth to this very moment and returning to when Momma was pregnant with me.

I stagger and, to keep from passing out, sit down hard next to Estelle’s wheeled chair. She gently pats my shoulder.

“I felt the same way when the mists first exposed me to their truths,” she says. “I worked at Rockefeller University back in the Days-We-Knew. We were attempting to open tiny doorways through time. Instead, we… changed something. Ever since I’ve heard the mists speaking. Perhaps some similar event in your life gave you the same ability.”

Momma, I think. Pregnant with me when she became lost in her mist suit and opened her blinder to find her way home. But I don’t tell Estelle. That’s too personal to share.

Instead, I ask, “You gave us the mists?”

“Accidentally,” she whispers with a grin. “Few others know—wouldn’t be safe to tell too many people, would it?”

Estelle speaks the truth. Even though she’s a Super, most toppers would toss her from a roof if they knew.

“It happened unexpectedly,” she says. “I was staring at my experimental portal when suddenly the world blinked. Or more accurately, the city blinked, taken from the Days-We-Knew to this… place. Or time. Or place without time.”

I nod. Everyone knew our city had been taken, even if they didn’t know why or how it happened. That’s why Old Man Douger and the other oldies still prayed for the people back in the Days-We-Knew to find a way to save us.

“What are the mists?” I ask, excited to finally ask such a taboo question of someone who can answer.

“The mists are time itself, or at least time as it exists here. Does that make sense?”

I remember Old Man Douger’s stories about those fearful first hours. Where before the city had been firmly entrenched in the Days-We-Knew, suddenly endless empty horizons surrounded the city. Time flickered and failed and reappeared, as this place was unsure if one moment should still pass into the next. People found themselves living one moment in the past, the next in the future, and the next spread across an eternity of their own life.

And through it all flowed the mists, devouring each person they touched. They flung peoples’ lives into the air so everyone around them tasted their births and loves and happiness and sads before those lives exploded into a new cloud of mists.

Eventually time returned to a semblance of normal. Lives were again lived from beginning to end. But many oldies like Douger questioned this normality, saying the mists were merely giving us a brief reprieve while they plotted to kill us all.

“What do the mists want?” I ask.

“They don’t have desires like you and I. The mists exist both in our timestream and outside it. It’s hard to explain. Imagine if each moment of your life could come alive and exist alongside who you are right now. That’s essentially what the mists are—countless moments from the lives of millions of people.”

I grin, happy to understand a little more about the mists. I tell Estelle what happened to me in the mists. How a person not wearing a breathing suit ran into me. How I opened my blinder and saw long-gone Central Park. How the mists saved me. How my momma cheered me on. I even tell her how I talk with the mists like she does.

Estelle listens without speaking, smiling occasionally as if she already knows what I’m going to say. When I finish, she sits silently for a few moments before reaching into her pocket and pulling out a necklace. The necklace is a series of small glass globes strung one after the other on a golden wire. Each globe has a curl of mist rising and falling inside.