3
Never to the Night City. The phrase had a rhythm that pleased me, so it lodged itself in my head. I thought of it often in my first weeks on the job, because the job was terminally boring. The hotel had retro pretensions, so I wore a suit cut in an antique style and a peculiarly shaped hat called a fedora. I walked the halls and stood watch in the lobby. I paid attention to everyone and everything, as instructed. I’ve always enjoyed watching other people, but people in hotels turned out to be surprisingly boring. They checked in and checked out. They appeared in the lobby at odd hours, asking for coffee. They were drunk, or they weren’t. They were businesspeople, or they were with their families on vacation. They were tired and frazzled from their journeys. People tried to sneak in dogs. In the first six months I had to summon the police only once, when I heard a woman scream in a hotel room, and even then I wasn’t the one who did the calling; I called the night manager, who called the police for me. I wasn’t there when the woman was carried out by paramedics.
The job was quiet. My mind wandered. Never to the Night City. What had Talia’s life been like there? Not great, obviously, any idiot could see that. Some families are better than others. When her family moved out of the Olive Llewellyn house, some other family moved in, but I found I couldn’t remember this other family beyond a general impression of dereliction. At the hotel I saw Talia only occasionally, passing through the lobby on her way home from work.
In those days I lived in a bland little apartment in a block of other bland little apartments on the far edge of Colony One, close enough to the Periphery that the dome barely cleared the roof of the apartment complex. Sometimes on dark nights I liked to cross the street to the Periphery, to look through the composite glass at Colony Two glittering in the distance. My life in those days was as bland and limited as my apartment. I tried not to think about my mother too much. I slept through the days. My cat always woke me in the late afternoons. Around sunset I ate a meal that could reasonably be called either dinner or breakfast, put on my uniform, and went to the hotel to stare at people for seven hours.
I’d been at the hotel for about six months when my sister turned thirty-seven. Zoey was a physicist at the university, and her area of expertise had something to do with quantum blockchain technology, which I was never able to understand although she’d made several good-faith efforts to explain it to me. I called to wish her a happy birthday, and realized in the beat before she picked up that I hadn’t congratulated her on receiving tenure. Which was when, a month ago? I felt a familiar variety of guilt.
“Happy Birthday,” I said. “And also congratulations.”
“Thank you, Gaspery.” She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.
“What’s it like?”
“Being thirty-seven?” She sounded tired.
“No, being tenured. Does it feel different?”
“It feels like stability,” she said.
“So what are your birthday plans?”
She was quiet for a moment. “Gaspery,” she said, “is there any way you could come to my office this evening?”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course.”
When had she ever asked me to her office? Just once, years ago, when she first started there. The university wasn’t that far away from my apartment, but also it was fundamentally a different universe. When had I even seen her last? It had been a few months, I realized.
I called in sick to work and then lay on the sofa for a while to bask in my sudden freedom. Marvin, my cat, climbed heavily onto my chest, where he stretched out his legs and fell asleep purring. The night extended before me, all those magnificently empty hours shining with possibility. I dislodged Marvin, showered and put on nice clothes, stopped by a bakery for four cupcakes—red velvet, which I hoped was still Zoey’s favorite—and by seven p.m. the sun was setting in a wash of oranges and pinks on the far side of the dome. I’d lived for a year in Colony One and the dome lighting still looked like theater to me. Were cupcakes enough? Should I buy flowers? I bought a bouquet of something unflashy and yellow, and was at the Time Institute gate by seven thirty. I took off my dark glasses for the iris scan and was still holding the glasses awkwardly in my hand six iris scans later, when I found Zoey pacing in her office. She didn’t look like a woman celebrating a birthday. She took my flowers with a distracted air, and I could tell from the way she set them on her desk that she’d forgotten about them by the time they left her hand. I wondered if someone had just broken up with her, but Zoey’s romantic life had always been a forbidden topic.
“Oh, thank god,” she said, when I held out a cupcake. “I completely forgot dinner.”
“You seem agitated.”
“Can I show you something?”
“Sure.”
She touched a discreet console on her office wall, and a projection filled half the room. There was a man on a stage, surrounded by bulky antique machines of some kind, inscrutable instruments. Above his head was an old-fashioned screen, a rectangle of white floating there in the dim light. It seemed to me that the scene we were looking at was quite old.
“A friend sent this to me,” Zoey said. “She works in the art history department.”
“Who is he? The guy in the projection.”
“Paul James Smith. Twenty-first-century composer and video artist.”
She pressed play, and the room filled with three-hundred-year-old music in a vague, shifting genre. Ambient, I supposed. I didn’t know much about music, but found this guy’s composition faintly annoying.
“Okay,” she said, “now pay attention to the white screen above him.”
“What am I looking for? It’s blank.”
“Watch.”
The screen came to life. The video had been shot in a forest on Earth. The quality was a little jerky; the videographer had been walking on a forest path, toward an enormous leafy tree, some Earth species that didn’t grow in the colonies. The music stopped, and the man looked up at the screen above him. The screen went dark. There was a strange cacophony of noise—notes of a violin, the indistinct murmur of a crowd, the hydraulic whoosh of an airship taking off—and then it was over, the forest was back, and for a moment the image was dizzying, as if the videographer had forgotten that they were holding a camera. The forest faded out, but the music continued.
“Listen carefully,” Zoey said. “Listen to the way the music’s changed. You hear how the violin notes from the video are there in Smith’s music? That same motif, that five-note pattern?”
I couldn’t hear it, and then I could. “Yes. Why is that important?”
“Because it means that…that weirdness, that glitch, whatever it was, it was part of the performance. It’s not a technical problem.” She stopped the recording. She looked troubled in a way I didn’t understand. “It goes on,” she said, “but the rest of the performance is uninteresting.”
“You brought me here to show me that,” I said, just checking.
“I need to talk this through with someone I trust.” She picked up her device, and I heard my own device chime with an incoming document.
She’d sent me a book: Marienbad, by Olive Llewellyn.
“Mom’s favorite novel,” I said. I was thinking of our mother, reading on the porch at twilight.
“Have you read it, Gaspery?”
“I’ve never been much of a reader.”
“Just jump to the highlighted passage and tell me if you notice anything.”
It was disorienting, leaping into the middle of a book I’d never read. I started a few paragraphs before the passage she’d highlighted:
We knew it was coming.
We knew it was coming and we prepared accordingly, or at least that’s what we told our children—and ourselves—in the decades that followed.
We knew it was coming but we didn’t quite believe it, so we prepared in low-key, unobtrusive ways—“Why do we have a whole shelf of canned fish?” Willis asked his husband, who said something vague about emergency preparedness—
—Because of that ancient horror, too embarrassingly irrational to be articulated aloud: if you say the name of the thing you fear, might you attract that thing’s attention? This is difficult to admit, but in those early weeks we were vague about our fears because saying the word pandemic might bend the pandemic toward us.
We knew it was coming and we were breezy about it. We deflected the fear with careless bravado. On the day reports broke of a cluster in Vancouver, which was three days after the British prime minister announced that the initial outbreak in London was fully contained, Willis and Dov went to work as usual, their sons Isaac and Sam went to school, and then they all met up for dinner at their favorite restaurant, which was crowded that night. (Bit of a horror movie in retrospect: imagine clouds of invisible pathogens drifting through the air, floating from table to table, swirling in the wake of passing servers.) “If it’s in Vancouver it’s obviously here,” Dov said to Willis, who said, “I’d bet money on it,” and refilled Dov’s water glass.
“If what’s in Vancouver?” Isaac asked. He was nine.
“Nothing,” they said in unison, and felt no guilt at all because it didn’t feel like a lie. Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.
Dov, practicing his lines in front of the bedroom mirror after the community theater closed: “Is this the promised end?”
We knew it was coming but we behaved inconsistently. We stocked up on supplies—just in case—but sent our children to school, because how do you get any work done with the kids at home?
(We were still thinking in terms of getting work done. The most shocking thing in retrospect was the degree to which all of us completely missed the point.)
“God,” Willis said, a few days before the schools closed, but after the news headlines had started, “this all seems so retro.”
“I know,” Dov said. They were both in their forties, which is to say they were old enough to remember Ebola X, but those sixty-four weeks of lockdown had faded to the hazy province of childhood memory, a span of time that was neither awful nor pleasant, months populated by cartoons and imaginary friends. You couldn’t call it a lost year, because it did have nice moments. Their parents were competent enough at parenting to shield them from the horror, which meant it was lonely but not unbearable. There was a lot of ice cream and extra screen time. They’d been glad when it was over, but after a few years had passed they didn’t think of it much.
“What does retro mean?” Sam asked.
As Willis glanced at his younger son, he did have the thought—he clung to this later—that perhaps school wasn’t such a great idea. Nonetheless, the old world hadn’t slipped away just yet, so in the morning he packed Sam’s and Isaac’s lunches and dropped them off at the academy, stepped back out into the bright sunlight and caught a transporter to the airship terminal. Just an ordinary morning under a harmless blue sky.
In the terminal he stopped to listen to a musician, a violinist playing for spare change in one of the cavernous entry corridors. The violinist was an old man who played with his eyes closed, coins accumulating in a hat by his feet. He played an ancient-looking violin—it looked like it was made of real wood—and Willis was by no means an expert in acoustics, but it seemed to him that there was a kind of warmth in the sound. Willis was listening to the music, to the way it rose up over the susurration of the morning commuter crowd, but then—
—a flash of darkness, weird sudden light—
—a fleeting hallucination of forest, fresh air, trees rising around him, a summer’s day—
—and then he was back in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal, in the cool white of the west entry corridor, blinking and disoriented. Something just came over me, he found himself thinking, but this was inadequate as an explanation, because what had just come over him? That flash of darkness, then the forest rising around him, what was that?
It hit him all at once: an afterlife.
The darkness was death, he told himself. The forest was the after.
Willis didn’t believe in an actual afterlife, but he did believe in the subconscious, he believed in knowing without consciously knowing, and almost without thought he was walking away in the wrong direction, away from his commute. He didn’t know where he was going until he found himself on the doorstep of his sons’ school.
“But why are you pulling your boys out of school?” the principal asked. “I’ve been following the news closely, Willis, and there’s just that tiny cluster of cases in Vancouver.”
I closed the file and put my device in my pocket, unsettled in a way I couldn’t explain.
“Do you see it?” Zoey asked. “The way the video mirrors the passage in the book?”
I did see it. A person in a forest in the twenty-first century sees a flash of darkness and hears noises from an airship terminal two centuries later. A person in an airship terminal in the twenty-third century sees a flash of darkness and is struck by the overwhelming sensation that he’s standing in a forest.
“She could have seen the video,” I suggested. “Olive Llewellyn, I mean. She could’ve seen it and worked it into her fiction.” I was pleased with myself for this suggestion.
“I thought of that,” Zoey said. Of course you did, I didn’t say aloud. That was a major difference between us: Zoey always thought of everything. “There’s something else, though. My team’s spent the last month researching the region where the composer grew up, and this afternoon we found a letter.” She was scrolling through files on her projection, but it was set to privacy mode, so it appeared from my angle that she was moving her hand through clouds. “Here,” she said.
A projection snapped into place in the air between us. It was a handwritten document in a foreign alphabet.
“What is this?”
“I think it might be supporting evidence. It’s a letter,” she said. “From 1912.”
“What alphabet’s this?” I asked.
“Seriously?”
“What, should I be able to read it?” I peered closer, and recognized a word. No, two. It was almost English, but warped and slanted; there was a certain beauty to it, but the letters were misformed. Some kind of proto-English?
“Gaspery, that’s cursive,” she said.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Right,” she said, with that maddening patience I’d come to expect from her. “Let me switch to audio.”
She toggled something in the clouds, and a man’s voice filled the room.
Bert,
Thank you for your kind letter of 25th April, which made its way across the Atlantic and across Canada at a snail’s pace and arrived in my hands only this evening.
How am I, you ask? The honest answer, brother, is that I’m unsure. This comes to you from a candlelit room in Victoria—you’ll forgive, I hope, the dash of melodrama, but I feel that I’ve earned it—where I’ve taken up lodging in a pleasant boardinghouse. I have given up all thought of establishing myself in business and wish only to return home, but this is a comfortable exile and my remittance provides for my day-to-day necessities.
I’ve had a very strange time here. No, that’s not quite it. I’ve had a somewhat dull time here—my fault, not Canada’s—except for a strange interlude in the wilderness, which I shall attempt to recount. I had travelled north from Victoria with Niall’s old friend from school, Thomas Maillot, whose surname I’m possibly misspelling. For two or three days we moved north up the coast on a tidy little steamboat, weighed down with provisions, until at last we arrived at Caiette, a village consisting of a church, a pier, a one-room schoolhouse, and a handful of houses. Thomas continued on to a logging camp, a short distance up the coast. I elected to remain for the moment in the boardinghouse in Caiette, for the sake of enjoying the beauty of that place.
One morning in early September, I ventured into the forest, for reasons too tedious to relate, and a few paces in, I came upon a maple tree. I stopped there a moment, to catch my breath, and then there occurred an incident that struck me at the time as some kind of supernatural event, but seems to me in retrospect to have been perhaps some kind of fit.
I was standing there in the forest in the sunlight, and then all at once there was darkness, as abruptly as a candle snuffed out in a room, and in the darkness I heard the notes of a violin, an inscrutable noise, and with this a strange impression of being somehow fleetingly indoors, in some echoing cavernous space like a train station. Then it was over and I stood in the forest. It was as though nothing had happened. I staggered back out to the beach and was violently sick on the rocks. The following morning, concerned for my well-being and determined to quit that place and return to some semblance of civilization, I began the return journey to the little city of Victoria, where I remain.
I have a perfectly adequate room at a boardinghouse by the harbour, and amuse myself with walks, books, chess, and the occasional bit of watercolour painting. As you know, I’ve always adored gardens, and there’s a public garden here in which I’ve found great solace. Not to trouble anyone, but I did consult a doctor, who is confident in his diagnosis of migraine. Seems a peculiar sort of migraine that doesn’t involve any pain in one’s head, but I suppose I’ll accept it in lieu of an alternate explanation. I cannot forget it, however, and the memory unsettles me.
I hope you are well, Bert. Please convey my affection and respect to Mother and Father as well.
Yours,
Edwin
The audio stopped. Zoey swiped the projection into the wall and came to sit with me. There was a heaviness about her that I’d never seen before.
“Zoey,” I said, “you seem more upset than…I’m not sure I completely understand.”
“Which operating system do you use on your device?”
“Zephyr,” I said.
“Same. You remember that weird Zephyr bug a couple years ago, this only lasted a day or two, but sometimes you’d open a text file on your device and you’d hear whatever music you’d been listening to last?”
“Sure. That was annoying.” I only vaguely remembered it.
“It was file corruption.”
I sensed something vast and terrible, swimming just outside of my grasp.
“You’re saying…”
Zoey’s elbows were on the table, and as she spoke, she rested her forehead in her hands.
“If moments from different centuries are bleeding into one another, then, well, one way you could think of those moments, Gaspery, is you could think of them as corrupted files.”
“How is a moment the same as a file?”
She was very still. “Just imagine that they are.”
I tried. A series of corrupted files; a series of corrupted moments; a series of discrete things bleeding into one another when they shouldn’t.
“But if moments are files…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. The room we were in seemed much less real than it had only a moment ago. The desk is real, I told myself. The wilted flowers on the desk are real. The blue paint on the walls. Zoey’s hair. My hands. The carpet.
“You see why I didn’t go out to celebrate my birthday,” she said.
“It’s just…Look, I agree that it’s weird, but we’re talking about Mom’s thing, aren’t we? The simulation thing?”
She sighed. “Believe me, the thought’s occurred to me. It’s very possible that my thinking is clouded. You know she’s the reason I became a scientist.”
I nodded.
“And look,” she continued, “I know it’s all circumstantial, I’m not crazy. It’s just a series of descriptions of some kind of bizarre experience. But the coincidence, Gaspery, the way these moments seem to bleed into one another, I can’t help but see it as some kind of evidence.”
