Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

Suddenly I’m puzzled. How can I sense Estelle here when she’s also sitting in a wheeled chair in the Plaza? Then I feel her cloud of time. A tiny part of Estelle is in the university right now, but there are also countless parts of her life leading from here to the Plaza Hotel in the times I knew, along with strings of her life in every other conceivable time and place.

I hear Estelle laughing in joy at my understanding.

“Yes,” Momma says, watching the university with me as we wait for everything to happen. “Estelle’s been working hard to fix all this.”

There’s a sudden burst of light as Estelle’s portal opens—or more accurately, a sudden burst of mists, as the timestream of the DaysWe-Knew falls apart. The hot dog man screams in pain as he loses his grip on time and becomes mist. Passersby in the street do the same. Time falls apart.

The city blinks again, going back to a sunny day where everyone is happy. The hot dog man, acting as if he hasn’t just turned to mists, again walks from his wheeled cooking stand and tells Momma she’s doing a good thing by helping me.

“I brought us back a few minutes in time,” Momma says. “You know the rest of what happened. The people who became mists stabilized the world and kept everyone else from changing. They did it out of mercy, not wanting others to feel the pain and fear they’d experienced. But that decision created a worse existence than they ever imagined.”

Momma’s right. In my times my city is dying, and people are hurting far more than the pain brought on by a brief moment of change. I survived the pain of becoming mist. Others could easily do the same.

I eat another bite of hot dog. Is this real? A mist dream? A new timestream created as my life broke into countless individual moments of me?

Maybe it doesn’t matter which account is true. It only matters what I do with the times now open to me.

“You want me to convince people to join the mists,” I say. “You want people to join them before all the buildings fall.”

My mother nods.

I laugh. There’s never been a topper prophet. But if there’s got to be one, might as well be me.

I strip off my suit and helmet, strip off my dirty clothes underneath, even though the hot dog man and others stare at me in shock. Momma kicks a fire hydrant with more strength than she should have and it shatters, revealing a rising rain of water. I scrub and clean myself. Momma joins me and we hold hands and dance around the geyser of water.

I then tell her I’m ready. I shatter the moments of my life and rearrange the infinite times I’m created of until I again stand in the mists back in my city.

Except the mists have cleared from around me. And walking toward me is myself. A myself sealed in an air suit with the blinder hiding her from what the mists reveal.

That’s when I know this is truth. I look at the mists that swirl by my body. Each drop of mist is a moment of my life. The drops shimmer and spin and squeal in happiness at what I am.

I laugh. I giggle and yell. I run my hands through the mists, feeling my lives and the lives of everyone I’ve ever known—and the countless people I never got to know—swirl through my consciousness.

I must share the news. I must tell everyone.

But first I run at myself and knock the other me down. As her gloved hands touch my bare face, I remember her fear. I step back and reach out to the mists around me, find the living moment of that fear. Experience it again. I am fortunate this fear didn’t define all of who I am.

I watch my suited self stand back up and walk onward. So funny to think a mere suit kept out the mists. So silly to think closing my eyes kept out the truth.

When I return to Empire, I sneak in and find Bugdon. He stares at my naked body and asks what happened.

I tell him.

“I can’t accept this,” he stammers.

“It’s your choice, but if you give yourself up to the mists, they’ll reveal more of yourself than you’d ever believe. Empire won’t last. But if we can convince people to join the mists….”

“It’s impossible. It’s simply impossible.”

I grin as I take off my necklace and hand it to him. “The other part of me will return in a few days. Then you’ll know. I’ll be back to tell you what we must do to save everyone.”

Bugdon looks at me like I’ve gone bat-bat, but before he can call the guards to catch me, I run back into the mists.

I can already taste Bugdon’s future understanding. It dances before me like a drop of mist in the air.

We be toppers. Toppers we be.

Because in the end, what else could we become?

Amman Sabet has led digital design projects for such companies as BMW, Adobe, Comcast, Wizards of the Coast, and Intel. He is a graduate of the 2017 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop.

“Tender Loving Plastics” examines the consequences of a foster-care system that attempts to mimic the nuclear family using artificial intelligence. It is his second published story.

ISSA LIVES IN a small prefabricated efficiency, tucked within the mouth of a concrete alley between two buildings. The kitchen in front connects to a hallway, leading past a bathroom and two bedrooms, to a storage unit in back. It’s cramped by adult standards but scaled for children by design.

All of the surfaces are institutional. The kitchen’s scratch-proof ceramics have tinted beige from a regimen of spraying and wiping spills and sneaker scuffs. The hallway carpet smells like burning plastic when it’s vacuumed. Mold regroups along the bathroom cabinet in little black stipples, never fully defeated. Chintzy towels embroidered with cartoon characters hang limp from crooked wall pegs. It’s a wonder that these objects deserve such refurbishment.

Issa’s bedroom is at the end of the hall. Trevor, her foster brother, has the bedroom closest to the kitchen. Both have an aluminum loft bed over a desk and a pressed-plastic chair. Pushed into the corners are particleboard dressers, mirrors, trundles. At night, the moon shines in through clerestory windows, dappling a mobile that hangs over Issa’s crib as she sleeps.

Mom pulls her chair down from the kitchen wall to sit and recharge her battery. Her face is flat and glossy and animates a loop of sheep jumping a fence. Over time, they fade into her nothing face, but she listens for Issa’s and Trevor’s voices in the dark. They’ve never seen her sleep and never will.

Baby Issa can stand. With the help of Teacup Bunny, she climbs upright. Holding the crib’s safety bar for balance, she coos to Mom and Trevor.

Trevor is still Good Trevor. His toys are spilled out across the brown jute rug. There are red cars, green cars, black and white. Mom makes her concentration face: a dash mouth, pink tongue sticking up from the corner. White pupil dots follow her hands as they fill Issa’s bottle and a sweat drop blinks near her temple as she spins the nipple cap tight.

“Mom, look. It’s a traffic jam. Mom. ”

Mom turns and makes her smile face at Trevor. “That’s wonderful, Trev! How did it happen?”

Trevor points to the school bus in front. “Driver did it. He went pop and then went haywire.” Trevor bobbles his head, eyes crossed, and falls over buzzing, shaking his sneakers in the air.

Mom’s mouth makes a little doughnut. “Did someone call the repairman?”

Trevor points to a van behind a cement mixer. “He got stuck.”

“Where is Fast Oscar? Can he help?”

Trevor pulls him from the front of his overalls, a sports car with headlight eyes and a big yellow lightning bolt. He pushes Fast Oscar through the traffic jam toward the bus, knocking the other cars aside.