SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The body is nothing. Its image, everything.

Brigitte pulls me away. She leads me through the city’s red streets, the ten winds of its body dying down. I think Brigitte is speaking to me. I think she says:

"Let’s look for the indestructible drop at the heart."

We are descending. She is walking in front of me, showing me the way. The nacre on her skin seems brighter than ever. I dare touch it for the first time—I reach out and brush my fingers against the back of her neck, tracing the nacre down her spine. I didn’t expect it to be so hard. "You are indestructible," I mutter, or I think I do, and she turns around and smiles.

We are at Massacre Market. It has changed since the first time I saw it; it seems even more crowded now, the walls of photographs fuller, covered once, and then covered again by more pictures, and more on top of those, layer upon gory layer, corpse upon corpse, body part upon body part. The desiccated corpses seem more real now, almost alive, absurd. Brigitte tells me something I don’t hear; her voice drowns in the screams and static spilling from the loudspeakers.

One of the photographs on the wall next to me catches my eye. I walk closer—it’s grainy, black and white, but I can still see the girl: she is laid out in a field next to others, dozens of others. Her top is removed, her chest slashed open. "Foreign slut" is written on her bare belly. She looks like a younger version of myself. This is me , I think, this is me, years ago. Why don’t I remember this? I put my palm on the photograph—what did I want to do? Cover her up, I suppose—and I notice a patch of nacre spreading between my fingers. I pull my hand back as if the photo suddenly burnt me and I watch the nacre spread. I feel it cover my entire body, and I’m calcified, my skin adorned and indestructible. "I feel like an instrument," I shout to Brigitte over the sound of massacre, "like an accordion, or a concertina." Play me like a flute, O Lord , I think.

Brigitte tries to tell me something, but I can’t make it out. I struggle to read her lips. "…it disappoints…" I hear, but the rest is stifled by static, and she’s far away. I see her pointing at my arms from afar. I look down and see the nacre growing dull and flaking, then my skin peeling and falling off, the fat exposed, the muscle, the bone, and I know, I know then, this city is a skin, no blood anywhere in sight, all surface, all shine and the slightest glimpse of nacre here and there—is it real? Is it not? Does it make a difference?

>>>END OF FILE

I have precious little time left. So I will not say much. One never has the skin that befits her.

I know I’ll never finish this article—I still haven’t even decided on the title, or what this story is really about. What do you think? I might have called it:

Massacre Market

or

The Mechanical Reproduction of Violence: Truth, Massacre, History

or even

Android Whores Can’t Cry: Under the Surface of Death Meditation

Either way, I know that, if I did finish it, I would dedicate it

"To my B., my pearl, who taught me this:

The skin always disappoints."

>>>END OF FILE

>>>END OF RECORD. 14 OF 14 FILES RECOVERED.

This is all the material I managed to retrieve from Aliki’s hard drives. I wait for the reporter sitting across from me in Dick’s living room to go through them.

"You realize your memory files provide conflicting information about what happened to both my colleague Aliki Karyotakis and her informant Richard Phillips," he says.

I am silent. Is that true?

I recall the last time I saw Aliki.

She is lurching at Dick, pushing him away from me during one of his violent playacts. He falls back and hits his head. He is very still. We are all very still.

She is also standing by the city pillar with me, in a crowd of people I haven’t quite registered. I look at the sky. The sun is shining through the smog. When I look down again, she’s gone.

She is also looking at me as a tall man leads her onto a platform and places a hood over her head. Then a noose. Then the platform gives.

She was also never here. I never met her.

And Dick? Dick is always either dead or missing.

"Have you tinkered with your memory?" the reporter asks.

"It is possible," I say. "But I have no memory of that, as I am sure you are aware."

"Of course." He shuffles in his chair. "OK, let’s take the first version. Can you tell me what happened?"

He already knows this. Why does he ask?

"She pushed him. He died. Humans break easily like that."

"And then?"

"She turned herself in."

"Wasn’t she terminated?" That’s when I notice the nacre on his underarm. Ah.

"I think the human term is sentenced to death and executed, " I correct him. He should know this. I’m sure he does.

"Did you watch? The execution, I mean."

I watch him. He is serious, eyes cold. A reporter reports.

"A hammer is what a hammer does," I whisper.

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing," I say. "A reflex. Yes. Yes, I think I watched." I sense the nacre spread on my face, my surface irreparably hardened. It reflects the light so brightly it almost hurts my eyes.

"Are you going to cry?" he asks, hoping, I bet, for a good twist in his story.

The programming takes over, like gears shifting inside me, and I can’t stop it I can’t stop it I can’t.

"Android whores can’t cry," I say. "Who wants to fuck a whiny bitch?"

This puzzles him. He focuses on my lips, and he’s about to say something, but he stops. I know he stops because of what he sees. He looks disappointed.

I feel the nacre cover my lips and I realize this was the last time I spoke. This shouldn’t be happening so fast. I think of freedoms and failings. I am not sure which is which. It doesn’t matter. I am the oyster and the pearl. I am a shell that doesn’t speak.

I wonder what really happened to her, what happened to Dick. I know I’ll never know—and this somehow strikes me as appropriate. The truth has seeped through the pores on the skin of the city. Aliki is in its bloodstream now. So is Dick. So is the core of this story.

I remain.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue No. 95, August 2014

On the left-hand side of the coffee table were stacked three Michael Chabon novels, one each by T.C. Boyle and Tim O’Brien, and a volume of Nathanael West’s collected works. On the right were five guides to maximizing fertility, and two novels by Tessa Dare. In between were two stemless wine glasses.

The table itself was a clear polymer which, were it not encumbered with the remains of its owners’ outmoded bibliomania, would reveal itself as a fully operational touchscreen. It was designed, however, to require replacement as soon as it received a hard thwack: The sort of urbane furnishing that only a childless couple would have purchased.

An advantage of this table, from the perspective of those charged with maintaining homeland security, is that its voice-activated features kept it in a continual state of attentive listening. If the owner kept it in its default, continuously connected networking mode—as 99% of purchasers of these models did—then every word spoken in its vicinity would fall under the expanded electronic surveillance authorization established by a certain executive order signed twenty years ago whose existence would be neither confirmed nor denied by anyone with legal authorization to know of it. That the owners happened to be Robert and Eileen Wexler, mid-level operatives in the DC office of the Cuomo 2024 re-election campaign, did not change the functioning of the table or of those analysts in Prince Georges County charged with making sense of its data-feed and hundreds of thousands more.