The Second Sphere
Chapter 1
When I was a kid growing up in West Virginia, my father often spoke about how easy my childhood was compared to his. He was a man who liked his drink just as much as he liked to embellish his hardships. School wasn’t served by buses, so he trekked uphill, both ways, in driving snow, even during non-winter months, without shoes. This story supposedly explained his thick calluses and mangled toes. At dinner time, once he’d gone through half a bottle of the Turkey, he’d box my ear, often for no reason, and tell me how, when he was young, all his family had was one meal a day, which usually consisted of a thin broth thickened with the bones of animals found along the side of the road. When his slaps brought tears to my eyes, he’d laugh and tell me how his father beat him regularly during drunken tirades for such small infractions as sniffling too loudly.
According to him, I had it pretty good.
We lived in a modest community not too far from where my father was born and raised. He called the place he lived as a child a house, but the structure was really what I would describe as a shack: four wooden walls, one room, and a roof made of metal. By the time I was a boy, his parents were long dead, and the structure was a crumbling mass of splinters and rust.
I’d never meant to pay homage to my father. Rather, I hoped to leave him decaying in his grave. But 485 years later, sitting in the world I’d created, a replica of the West Virginia countryside, I realized that my father would never penetrate my bliss. What I’d created was a place of tranquility rather than a cauldron of terrible memories.
High mountaintops populated with tall sugar maples stretched as far as the eye could see. The sky was crisp blue, bright like two suns lit it up. I was in a valley, nestled between two low hills, lying on a red and white-checkered blanket with my daughter, Lila, and grandson, Sam. We sat under a tree, about twenty yards from the image of my father’s house. The air was warm and a bit moist. The smell of dirt and decay filled my nose.
“He’s really not that bad,” Lila said between nibbles of a deviled egg.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. Lila always held an optimistic view of the world.
“Dad, he’s just a guy with an opinion. Just because you don’t agree with him doesn’t mean that he’s not a decent person,” she said.
“Victor Newberry isn’t a good person.” If they gave me a minute or two to rant, I could spit a few pretty choice words about that low-life. But I wasn’t going to launch into a discussion of politics. Not unless they really wanted me to.
I reached into the brown wicker basket in front of me and pulled out a bright red apple. I looked at it for a moment before I sank my teeth into the crisp round body. Juice dribbled down my chin.
“He was even nice after I told him that you worked intelligence for the Laslow Corporation,” she said. My daughter was tall and tan with wavy auburn hair down to her shoulders. She wore a white dress printed with small red flowers, a dress that her mother bought for her. This image came from a family trip to the Outer Banks after she graduated from high school.
“Why would you tell Victor Newberry that I work for Laslow?” I asked.
“You’re mad?” She looked at me with those big, brown eyes and little pieces of what was left of my heart softened.
“I’m not mad,” I said. Was I irritated that my daughter worked for a left wing rag like The Worlds? Definitely. Victor Newberry and his liberal editor-cronies spent their days uplifting the death and destruction wrought by the Green Revolution. And now my daughter worked with them, talked to them about me, told them where I worked. So sure, I wasn’t happy. I didn’t like her life choices. Then again, she didn’t like mine.
But I didn’t want to spend more time at the Source fighting about my daughter’s career mistakes. Because of their schedules, I had eight hours with them every two weeks. Spending that time arguing was a waste.
“Maybe when you get home, we can get a transport to the mountains,” Sam said, ever sensitive to my moods, “get a cabin for a couple of days. Then you can feel what actual mountains are like again.”
“I’d like that,” I said. I didn’t want to think about what I would have to do to get a couple months off of work in order to go home.
A soft wind blew through the trees and tousled Lila’s hair. I looked to my right, past where the cabin stood, into the dense forest. Bird songs played underneath the rush of the wind. I took a deep breath and let memories fill me.
I swung my head back to Lila and saw a smudge of black and blue over her shoulder. The smudge began to grow, and the yellow sun bled; the bright blue sky turned the color of a painful bruise. It was as though an unseen force pulled Lila and Sam away from me, down a long corridor. They talked as though nothing were different, as though they had no idea what was happening to them. I watched them go, aware of what was likely to come.
Underneath my beautiful world at the Source was the darkness of another place. It was a place that I didn’t recognize. The blackness of night covered the sky. Pale yellow lights reflected off a clear surface separating me from the heavens. I was under a dome.
Around me, I felt the movement of bodies. They shuffled along, the noise of their feet and conversation swam through me. Though I couldn’t understand their words, I gathered that they were excited. The inflection in their tones conveyed happiness and anticipation.
I smelled hot dogs.
Then I looked up. Ahead stood a tremendous structure; rounded glass and steel; a stadium. I realized where I was: New Mumbai, Three Spheres Basketball Association, Game 7 of the Finals.
And then came the explosion.
The air pulled away from me. Goose bumps flashed across my skin. Then, everything reversed. Air sped toward me, pushing me back. I toppled over. The light came next, a blue flash. The smell of burning flesh slashed the air. The cries of people echoed. Then there was still blackness and the powdery remnants of bodies.
I felt myself drawn home, my spirit going back to the body that it regularly inhabited. I’d have plenty more time to inspect the scene, relive the moments of horror before the explosion. Lights flashed in front of my eyes as I was drawn back to my authentic life.
I had to get to work.
Terra Firma
Chapter 1
The night before I learned my father might be a mass murderer, I was working on a profile, sitting in front of my link-up. I held an enhancement drive in my hand. Occasionally, I put it up to the chip in my neck to provide myself with a dose of calm. It was a bad habit I’d picked up long ago, when I first made the transition into my artificial body. What I needed was a pluck to help me relax and focus, a single dose to ease my anxiety. I had an article to finish, and I needed a spark to complete it. I’d had hundreds, if not thousands of deadlines, and I’d met all of them. So, I had good reason to be confident.
But that night I just couldn’t concentrate.
Three hours to go and still another 400 well-crafted words were required of me before I could send the story to my editor. Without question, I could slam together something that sounded nice, but my goal was to put together a good story. Unconsciously, my foot kicked the toolbox under my desk, still there from when I had installed the new link-up system.
A night without a moment of rest at the Source, the central location where all of us who had chosen ever-lasting life could get a respite from our world, lay ahead of me. Of that I was sure. Not that I minded missing Source time. I’d grown accustomed to living with limited rest. There was something artificial, always had been, about connecting to a centralized hub for peace and serenity.
A lack of Source time wasn’t why I was having trouble concentrating, however.
Lying on my bed was a man who would not shut his mouth. It was like someone paid him to keep up his inane chatter. Next to him was our consort for the evening, a young woman, a throwaway, whose name I hadn’t picked up on. She was tall and thin and had short dark hair. Her brown eyes focused on the ceiling. But it wasn’t the throwaway that was distracting. Her usefulness had come to an end more than an hour ago.
It was Neil, my sometimes-male-companion, who was bothering me. He was a handsome man, of course, with dark hair that he allowed to grow just to his shoulders. His Transfer was bony-shouldered and had a narrow waist, which he said he’d chosen because at one time he’d been seventy-five-pounds overweight. His choice of Transfer was meant to be the opposite of everything he’d once been.
To Neil, speaking about his passion was anything but inane. To the average person, however, his ongoing lecture would have caused complaints of aural assault. He chirped about the conference he’d put on over the weekend where he and his fellow domino enthusiasts had gathered to build new structures, talked about the art of building domino configurations, and looked at graphic recreations of some of the greatest domino structures ever imagined.
Yes, dominos.
Everlasting life had done nothing to rid the world of people with very odd hobbies. If you had told me ten years earlier that this would be my existence, that I would be sleeping with a man who devoted himself to domino culture, I would have said you were a fool.
And yet…
“Lila, it’s hard for me to oversell that lecture,” Neil said, concluding his five-minute oration on an “expert” in using levers in domino structures. The throwaway shifted in bed, turned away from Neil, as though it were sentient enough to find his words sleep-inducing.
Could he not tell that I was working?
Neil followed his statement with another attempt to emphasize the importance of domino levers. Hearing his grating voice, words at the edges of my senses, I struggled to order my notes. I was concerned that this piece didn’t have the kind of arc readers expected and which my editor demanded. I didn’t want to have to do a total rewrite.
As stories went, it wasn’t much. A puff piece, really. A profile. Of the most rich and famous man on the Three Spheres, Quincy Laslow Senior. This man had made his fortune, likely the largest in the Three Spheres, through the suffering of others, and though it had been difficult for me to take his peculiar self-righteousness, I had followed him around as a doting profiler must do.
My recent profile on General Brian McHenry, candidate for terrestrial president, had put me in the spotlight. My boss said I had a knack for them, and thus I had been assigned another.
I preferred writing juicy stories about the Green Revolution and their complicated battle against the wrongs that had been perpetrated against so many of our citizens on the Three Spheres, but there were occasions when the powers that be in the editorial hierarchy required an ode to those in positions of leadership. Indeed, they understood that to help people understand the times they inhabited, they needed insight into the people who sought to be their leaders. Since the owners of our conglomerate, Victor Newberry and his wife Olga Dahlgren, had died recently under unusual circumstances, our editorial staff had doubled down on the idea that we should focus our efforts on presenting a comprehensive view of our worlds, including people who wanted power. And so it was with this profile of Quincy Laslow Senior, who was, unsurprisingly, as unsympathetic to the concerns of Green Revolution partisans as he could be.
“Next convention is in October,” Neil said suddenly, his voice eager. A small gurgle erupted from the throat of the throwaway.
“That’s nice,” I said. I felt an urge to get up, put my hands around his throat, and wring it until he was unable to speak another word.
“Maybe you could come with me this time?” he asked, as though he were a pre-teen asking a girl out on a first date.
I pretended I didn’t hear him. It was a common tactic. Sometimes I tried to pass my non-responses to his absurd questions as a problem with my Transfer. It needed updating, I’d say. Probably had a bug preventing me from hearing everything.
Neil was my neighbor and occasionally we shared a bed. But we weren’t equals. If our relationship was a seesaw, I was the one with my feet on the ground, watching him kick his legs about. At any moment, I could bring his whole world crashing down.
After almost forty years of wearing me down with convenient stops by the house, unwanted presents, and an uncanny ability to take care of chores around my house, I’d hopped into bed with him in a moment of weakness. I knew immediately that it was a mistake. And sometimes mistakes have lasting consequences. Especially in the Transfer age.
It’s not easy to sleep with your neighbor who is emotionally fragile and will live forever and then break off the relationship. If my temperament had lent itself toward cruelty or watching others suffer, I probably would have cut him loose a long time ago. But I wasn’t, so I hadn’t.
There we were, ten years later, still doing friends with occasional bed-time benefits. I don’t want to convey that I didn’t like Neil. He was a very sweet man and a very generous man, and he was very nice to me. But his flapping tongue and sleep-inducing hobby were, particularly when I had an ungodly amount of work to do, irritating.
“So … what do you think? Should I…?”
I put up a warning finger to let him know I was in the middle of something important and I didn’t appreciate him speaking. He didn’t follow up with a response. Didn’t push me to provide him with an answer. Neil was aware of my limits, and that if he annoyed me I’d easily go a week or two without seeing him. I’d done it in the past and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. It was mean, I admit, but I really did need a few hours of silence to put the finishing touches on my piece.
I sat back in my chair and drew a long breath. I needed to end this profile, and I needed to do so in a way that made this trillionaire, this man who was so unlike any other, appear reasonable and responsible, which was exactly what the man had tried to convey to me while at the same time presenting the policy positions to which he adhered, which made him appear anything but reasonable.
I was stuck.
In the moment of silence that Neil had graced me with, I couldn’t put together coherent thoughts. There was no reason for me to be unable to think of an ending. I’d been doing this job for a long time. But still, moments of intense brain freeze always seemed to catch me at the most inopportune times.
Peanut Butter, my tabby, rubbed up against my leg. I bent down and drew my fingers through his short, dark fur. A bit of purring erupted from his throat. He hopped up onto my lap, where he moved until he found a comfortable position, nestled under my elbows.
The room was dark and warm and I allowed myself to become fully aware of where I was. The smell of sex was in the air. I cast my eyes to the wooden bookshelves that lined my walls, at the spines of the hundreds of books I’d purchased myself and those my father had left me. This should have been the perfect, relaxing environment in which to spin a creative ending.
I closed my eyes and gave myself a dose from my drive, hoping to drift into the final arc of my article.
My link-up buzzed at that moment, as though the universe knew I was trying to become one with it and wanted to disabuse me of the notion that I could do so. I thought about ignoring the notification. I really did. Not that it would have made any difference in the long run.
After several seconds of buzzing, and another few seconds of Neil clearing his throat, indicating he was annoyed I wasn’t doing something about my humming link-up, I looked at the notification.
The words on the screen read: Lunar Laslow Building Endures Terrorist Attack. Sectors Closed.