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

Six weeks ago I came home and found her sitting on the couch, with the two letters in her hands. The sight of those envelopes, bright white against her olive skin, made me feel like I was going to shit myself. She had suggested that I open hers, and she open mine. I said that all men die alone and took my fate from her hands.

I didn’t want to see her letter in case both of us didn’t have the same results. I tore mine open before she had a chance to open hers. I didn’t have to read the whole thing. The first two words said it all.

We’re sorry…

I felt…nothing. All my fear and uncertainty disappeared and my bowels stopped gurgling. I felt exactly like I had, moments earlier, before I opened the door and saw what was in her lap. Nothing had changed. I managed a quiet "Damn."

I saw her face as she looked at me after opening hers. I knew what it said. Nature duck-duck-goosed right past both of us in the game of immortality.

The anger came later.

"Of course it’s unfair," she’d said. "Life is unfair. It’s always been unfair and it will continue being unfair long after we’ve rotted away back to starstuff and the people on the street are thirty million years old."

It was the first time I’d heard her be bitter about anything. She was always so level. I guess even the steadiest of people have their limits.

We didn’t talk much that night. Just sat on the white couch, eyes on the wall, watching TV.

I thought about what she’d said last night, about her sympathy for the immortals. They had their future. They’d scatter like dandelion puffs across the universe. They’d be subject to rules she and I would never have to deal with. New forms of government. New ethics. New aesthetics. And there’s very little that the right mitochondria can do for you if your colony ship plunges into a sun. Their certainty was one of uncertainty.

I had a certainty. I will die. That gave me time. The immortals didn’t have time; they had a coordinate for locating things in the past and the future. I…we…had a finite resource. And we could use it however we wanted. Who’s going to tell a dying man what to do, where to go, what to eat, what to read, think, or feel? Our time was freedom.

For a little while at least.

I finally understood why I’d felt nothing when I opened my letter. I had felt nothing, because nothing had changed.

I was still the same man I was the moment before I opened that letter, with exactly as much time left. My life was still my life.

I was wasting it being selfish.

Time to live, to share the life we’d dreamed of, been excited about, before. We’d experience life, aging, dying, and death, together. Almost nobody else would have that. I wasn’t dead. She wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. Let’s make the sun chase us.

I looked out the window. The sun was coming up. I hadn’t realized it, but the trees were bare, and there was a trace of snow on the sidewalk. When had it become winter? All down the street, in the little apartment windows, lights were coming on. A car drove by, illuminating the small snow drifts that were blowing about. It looked cheery and cold outside. I liked that.

I turned on the lights. She’d be up soon. For the first time in months I was excited.

There was a bottle of champagne in the fridge. We were meant to take it over to Jared and Gail’s to celebrate, but this seemed much more important. I popped it open, and poured into two small stemless glasses. I sipped mine. It tasted mineral and sharp: perfect for the morning. I shook two pills out of the bottle and placed them beside each glass.

Time for a grand gesture. Something poetic and symbolic and beautiful to toast the rest of our lives.

I went over to the bookshelf and started scanning. The poem was her favorite, but I could never stand the damn thing. She could consider this a peace offering. My finger stopped. Andrew Marvell. The book was well-thumbed enough that I opened straight to it. Sometimes you need to hear words aloud.

" Had we but world enough, and time… " I said to the empty living room.

A letter slipped from the back pages of the book, landing on the floor. It had the letterhead that almost everyone on the planet loved. I didn’t have to read the whole thing. The first two words said it all.

We’re happy…

What was it the counselor said? Time times two. Time times twenty.

I think if I take the whole bottle, I can give her time forever.

Fantasy Scroll Magazine, Issue #8

The nanoprocessor points lit up, flashing blue in each corner of the wall of windows in my daughter Miell’s swanky apartment. A bigger than life vid appeared, the date showing on the lower right. I advanced it until I found the memory I wanted: Hayes’ sixth birthday.

What was I expecting?

A joyful birthday party. Messy and loud. Cake. Balloons. This glamorous skyrise full of giddy children. My grandson Hayes excited, happy, grinning from ear-to-ear.

But a very different scene played out—all from his own eyes and ears. No internal emotions recorded, of course. No smells or tastes. Nevertheless, I was in his head, experiencing the world through him.

Hayes, like many children these days, had been implanted just after birth with a ReMemory slot behind his right ear.

Just another example of technology that’s passed me by.

Years ago, I was a professional tech junkie, constantly at some kind of interface—anything other than the real life kind. Before my kids were born, I swore it off and moved to the country.

It felt weird—invasive—to be in his head.

He sat at their gleaming cocobolo dining table that held a mountain of professionally-wrapped presents. The room was quiet. Hayes looked down at the present he’d just unwrapped.

“Mom?” he said, his voice projecting. “Thank you. It’s the game I wanted.”

No reply.

He sighed and I felt my own echoing breath rise up and fall. The sensation was similar to inhabiting an avatar on an MMORPG, but more intense.

He got down and walked toward the living room.

I heard an animal sound. But there were no pets here.

“Mom?” Hayes came around the corner. My tall, lean Miell knelt on the floor, forehead to the ground, her hands in loose fists clawing at her temples. The high-pitched moans came from her.

My heart sped up.

“Hold on…Hayes,” she said, her voice muffled. “Gimme a sec.”

He just watched her. She seemed to be in pain, but he didn’t run over to help or ask her what was wrong.

As if he’s used to this kind of scene.

After a while he said, “What about v-linking the other kids in for the party? Weren’t we going to do that?”

She didn’t respond.

Hayes looked back at the presents on the table. Then he walked past them into the kitchen and opened the fridge. A cake sat on a lower shelf, beautifully decorated with IncrediBlaster—a heroic game character he loved and often pretended to be. He leaned in, scooped a finger full of icing off the back corner, and put his finger in his mouth.

Some link in my brain caused my salivary glands to respond.

Hayes returned to the dining room and opened another gift, this one a bright red and yellow IncrediBlaster costume. In the background I now heard Miell talking to someone in a desperate voice, but it was too far away to understand the words. Or maybe Hayes didn’t want to hear.

What a lousy party. What a lousy memory.

Miell and I fought when she was a teenager and young adult. She stopped routine contact, which meant that I’d seen Hayes exactly twice before this visit. When she called me three weeks ago, saying that she had to go on an extended business trip and wondered if I might like to stay with my grandson, I jumped at the chance and asked few questions.