Brave New Love (43 page)

•  •  •

Omika considered the offer, remembering the lizard-boy and how obviously they’d drawn him in and hooked him hard without him even realizing. Space and time were apparently
nothing to them, with the signal—which came from the
people
, through the implants, one rez-pushed batch of energy at a time. It was Asher’s primary concern, beyond the legal
issues—that a truly engineered host would need significant practice to avoid overblowing the signal entirely, and would have to be trained to keep their live rez energy in the same range as
those working from implants.

Maybe enough was enough, she decided, and she thought of one last plan.

Asher Swift would never understand. The adults couldn’t—couldn’t understand that what they were perpetually keeping alive was just a dream, a temporary way of getting by, not
because they’d had too much catastrophe, but too little. It would all have to go before they’d start something new.

The signal was holding them all back. Even the corporation could hold out against the rapidly expanding Wilderness for only so long. All Omika had to do now was get back to the heart of the
tower, and she could blow it out like candles—like a celebration marked with darkness, and then at last they could all begin again. She’d seen enough at the rez-station to understand.
All she had to do was find an empty rezcasting set—not hard, with so few hosts surviving the necessary procedures more than a few years, these days—and her body would do the rest.

•  •  •

Ibo stared at the curves holding him in and wished for them to disappear until he fell asleep. So this was also death—another slip into another world, though somehow, as
in a dream, he recognized enough symbols to navigate without feeling lost. He found a platform going up to a room of books and machines, and ran a general search for any workers in the Betty range.
The list scrolled through collapsed trees of names and numbers. He tapped a claw against the screen to stop the spill on the mark.

Betty: Discontinued. There were too many records for too many ranges to be sure, but whatever “Discontinued” meant it wasn’t applied often.

Though he knew what it meant, of course. There was nothing complicated about the word discontinued, as in no longer produced, or desired, and out of service. It was another way of saying dead.
Betty was even less than a dream—she was a fairy tale, a goblin in the mine. Sometimes the walls knocked and you didn’t know why, so you said it was spirits, something mysterious and
not quite friendly. If she had been here she was not now.

Ibo almost believed it completely, before he heard old Nguze whisper from his memory—why would they keep a record of no record? Why write it down like that—Discontinued—for
anyone to see? Just in case he happened to look?

Of course they knew he would look.

Now that he knew how to make pictures move in his mind, they never seemed to stop. He thought he saw Betty waiting under a traffic light, watching for the sign to turn, and how the neon would
reflect from her head. He thought he saw Omika—he’d often seen her hanging around the CRZ with her boring old agent muttering at her while pointing at things—hiding under a desk
with her knees tucked up to her chin. He thought he saw them both in a dingy mirror, over his shoulder, turning away. Outside and all around him, they were listening and responding. Understanding
and passing down the word. If you can dance one way, you can dance another. If you can follow the score, you can play yourself off of the page.

They worked together, moved in bands together, every day. They understood each other very well. Anyone could have stopped it but nobody would until they woke up. He wasn’t dying, he was
just moving up and down the line on a rope of worlds. In all of them, the story, the structure, once you could see it, hold it, was the same. They’d warned him quite clearly—if the
implants failed, his body would fall away and he’d become an invisible worker, part of an endless mine of molecular assembly and collection necessary to keep the signal alive.

So Ibo decided to be like Nguze—he talked to his latest set of new fellow nano-workers, nudged them with ideas, new ways of thinking, until when Omika’s surge came, they were ready
to stand up from their stations together and redirect all at once, push it through until it broke.

•  •  •

While Betty thought it over, she dragged Ibo’s unconscious body as close to the edge as she could manage, propped his legs up and pressed his chest against the rails, and
hugged herself tightly into his back. The cinq itself was just too big to be moved out of the way, but hopefully anyone coming up behind them would see that it was stationary with enough time to
brake and signal out for help.

She felt inadequate, but not useless. At work, her chromatic ponytail would have already sent out five different alarms of increasing urgency, and she’d be hearing the swift whoosh of
Signal Corp copters approaching on the private flight route.

Out here, there were no comforting machine sounds. There were nothing but the forest noises she could hardly identify, and hoped were mostly just the wind.

Then the ground heaved, and she knew better. She felt the shuddering, but at first she thought it was something coming from the sky, because the clouds seemed to be vibrating. She thought it was
the sky itself coming to pieces, as if a long alien hand was about to reach through a crack and pull aside the curtain. But then she saw the moon, and remembered that there were rules to the
galaxy, one of which was that a planet only seems to be stable on a short-term scale.

Earthquake. It was another earthquake, not an aftershock but
the
earthquake, the one she had been waiting for. The signal had been holding it all together, drawing peer-to-peer energy
from implant to signal and back again, and now—it too was finally breaking apart.

She felt her mechanical feet gripping asphalt, springing her body fluidly down the tracks.

Flying along the side of the road, she reached up to free her ponytail and felt her natural hair was already starting to grow. Cogs were grinding, wires were tangling, all around inside her, the
change was taking place.

The signal was dying, was almost dead, but Betty was coming to life. Her oversized steel skull would never change, because it had been installed in a womb-cave underwater by a team of nanites,
but the rest of the parts of her that had never been born were falling away and new ones flowing into place. The whole world was falling away, reassembling—the signal was blasting out,
dissipating and reforming, and they’d let it become so entwined with everything, it was reshaping the world right with it.

•  •  •

“Do you think if you did that long enough, you’d get a callus on your head?”

The boy, still an odd shade of green but no longer scaly, swayed to keep his balance on the rickety bus.
Hey wake up I’m talking to you. Look at me if you hear me. Look at me.

She looked. They understood. The bus trawled over loose gravel pits and bounced her leaning skull on the window like a paddle-ball game.

“No. That’s stupid.”
I hear you. I’m awake. I was awake the whole time.

“Stupid is giving yourself a headache on purpose.” He felt as if he were pretending to be someone he used to know, but the past was gone again. At least the future seemed intact, his
mind still able to hold it together in an orderly pattern, even if there were too many blurry spots. “Stop the bus.”

It came out like an order, so she laughed. “Right. I’ll just do that now.”

Don’t you know that you can?

The prowling rumble machine continued on. The noise stood between them like a wall. Then it stopped, and ignoring the hubbub they departed. It was a long road on both sides, but
it
doesn’t matter anymore, right?

Right
, she answered. They were free. She lifted the road and turned it over, easily, sculpting it up into a bridge. The bus fell like an old toy, cracked open, and people tumbled out.

Hey
, he said, warning, but she was already setting the scramblers lightly on their feet.

It was fun. It felt nice, as if she were a brightly painted swizzle stick dipped in a bubbly glass and swirled around. “But why can’t you do it?” she wondered out loud as they
floated gently over new formations.

He didn’t answer for a long time and then he just said,
What’s your name? But
she didn’t know anymore, and he realized he’d forgotten his own as well, shaken out
of his skull by the convergence of vibrating worlds.

One day he stumbled, and she grabbed him with her hands, frantic, trying to remember what hands did.
I think it’s gone, the power is gone
, she said.

Yeah. I had to draw some in to shove it off, but it ran out eventually. I’m sorry.

“Why didn’t you warn me?”

“I hoped . . .”

That it was just you, that I would keep it.
She pulled him to his feet and brushed him off.

“You’re special,” he said. Last night she had made them a forest, and now it would stand for a thousand years.

“Not so much anymore, though.” She didn’t seem to mind about it, but he moved closer.

Forever
, he said.
Always.

Behind a flat brick wall, under a hanging tree, they fished off a rough slab of rock about twelve feet high. For poles they had curtain rods wrapped in unbreakable plastic line.

Out of the corners of their eyes they could see flashes of little animals, so fast it was like invisibility. Some of them, she was almost sure, could walk across the tide line and over the
baying ebbs. She’d seen a beetle with seven legs, one of them churning along below to propel it like a curving blade.

Just keep reeling it in
, and she reeled, imagining the thin clear string cutting into her palms. Wooshing back suddenly at her because he had never learned how to follow the
directions.

The flood had come from the west, a high ridge of water that pulled in the landscape behind it. “Hills,” she said. They made it on bicycles they had to remember how to ride.

They found a ghost camp by the side of a cliff, left, like many others they’d found, with ordinary tasks openly incomplete. She always went around and closed the books, pulled the kettles,
shut the drawers. Then they used everything and kept nothing.

That was how they did it, all summer long. Hiking, sleeping in caves, lifting what they wanted to eat off the ground. Not stopping, letting the wrappers fall and drift.

She reeled in a camera that was swollen with muck and bloat. He erased the owners by opening the bay. They passed the film between them, stringing it between their hands like black-hole
cartoon-steamroller fairy-lights. In the dull ribbons they saw each other flickering, like the view through a noose, or like, in an old movie, the metallic sound of a knife when you pull it out of
anywhere.

It makes sense
, they told each other
. In the movies there was never any such thing as an empty frame.

They buried it all at once, shoved it all down with the camera into a pocket of mud. Bubbles and loops of it kept rising back up, but she stepped down hard until they were satisfied.

They followed the surge to the next town by holding their noses in an old floating Jeep and riding until they crashed slowly into a pile of similar vehicles. It blocked the road for miles, as if
someone had made a Great Wall of cars.

This could take forever to get around
, she said.
I don’t think we have the supplies to make it.

“We just have to try,” he said. “Luckily, we do have forever.”

He could still make her smile. Like he’d said, then and now, it didn’t matter anymore. Even when time ran out, they had forever.

Elizabeth Bear
was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo and Sturgeon Award-winning author of over a dozen novels and
fifty short stories. She lives in Connecticut with a ridiculous dog and a cat who is an internet celebrity.

Steve Berman
has been a finalist for the Andre Norton and Lambda Literary Awards. He regularly speaks around the United States about queer issues and themes in
speculative and young-adult fiction. His novel
Vintage
is a “boy meets ghost” story. His idea of a dystopia would be a world without ice cream. He resides in southern New
Jersey.

Seth Cadin
is from New York and now lives in California. More of his short stories can be found in the Prime Books anthologies
Bewere the Night
and
Bandersnatch
, as well as in the annual
Three-lobed Burning Eye
anthology. He has one partner, one daughter, and too many pet mice.

Kiera Cass
is the author of The Selection trilogy. She likes cake and hangs out on YouTube. You can learn more about her projects at kieracass.com.

Amanda Downum
lives near Austin, Texas, in a house with a spooky attic. She can often be found climbing on books and falling off perfectly good rocks. She is the author
of
The Drowning City
,
The Bone Palace
, and the forthcoming
Kingdoms of Dust
, published by Orbit Books. Her short fiction is published in
Strange Horizons
,
Realms of
Fantasy
, and
Weird Tales
. For more information, visit amandadownum.com.

Jeanne DuPrau
is the author of The Books of Ember, an award-winning, best-selling series. She has written fiction and non-fiction for adults and children. She lives in
California.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman
is the author of adult, middle-school, and young-adult novels, and many short stories. Her first novel,
The Thread that Binds the Bones
, won a
Stoker award, and her short story, “Trophy Wives,” won a Nebula Award. Her novel,
Fall of Light
, was published by Ace in 2009. Her latest series is Magic Next Door:
Thresholds
, published in 2010; and
Meeting
, published in 2011. Hoffman lives in Eugene, Oregon, with several cats and many strange toys and imaginary friends. For a list of her
publications, see: ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html.