“So what are you doing working in a midwestern chain diner?” Dot asked. “What with your special powers and everything?”
The coffeepot in Carina’s hand was cold. She placed her other palm against the glass and microwaved it until the liquid bubbled. Certainly there was something uncanny about her—especially around the eyes, which were slightly luminous pale blue dots—but this was the kind of job where everyone minded their own business. The kitchen staff avoided immigration checks, the manager would rather not attract IRS attention, everyone dodging debt collectors, child support, or ex-con ex-boyfriends.
Carina’s body was a slate black-grey, a skin of exotic material to limit the dangerous effects of her inner radiation, gravity, and nuclear forces on the people around her. Dot was pink as bubblegum and called all her customers “Sugar.”
“I can spawn and destroy entire worlds, watch eons pass and rewind causality,” Carina said, “but what purpose does life serve? I thought perhaps it’s a matter of scale. Maybe I was living too far removed to understand. So I came here, got a job, got a cat, started a garden.”
Dot said, “Cosmic being becomes mortal to learn why humans cry. Seen that movie again and again. Well, Sugar, some of us work because we have to.”
“Why?”
“To eat, for one.”
“No, why this job? If you have to eat, you can learn to fish, or trap squirrels, or dumpster dive, or join an agricultural commune. Many alternate choices would leave you free.”
Dot took her lunch breaks on a park bench and Carina would sit beside her, watching children run through the jungle gym. “Do you even need to eat?” Dot asked.
Carina held a hamburger in both hands. It vanished.
“I can take matter or energy into myself but it eventually needs to be extruded, to balance the thermodynamics.” Her hands filled again, this time with a ball of mercury. “I can change one element to another, by adding or subtracting protons.” The mercury melted through her fingers.
“Um,” Dot said through a mouthful of fries, “that’s gonna, like, poison the environment.”
Carina stirred the puddle with her toe. It turned to water.
“So you can do alchemy?”
“It’s only stellar nucleosynthesis.”
“You can just make things, like magically? You could solve the world’s energy problems, turn garbage into gold!”
“What would that accomplish besides empowering humans to make more humans?”
“Okay, then bring it back down to scale, like you said.” Dot pointed to a homeless man digging around in a trash can. “Give just one person something. Why don’t you make his life easier?”
After a second’s examination: “Why don’t you?”
Dot looked down at the hamburger in her hands.
A car pulled up to the curb. Dot nudged Carina. “Your parole officer is here.”
“He’s not my —”
“Okay, your AA sponsor, or whatever. I recognize the type. Looks like a narc.”
Carina crumpled up her trash and turned it into nitrogen—about as environmentally neutral as she could get.
The car was something Detroit-made and had a hood the size of a ping-pong table. The driver’s name was Orel, and he was Carina’s point of contact at the unnamed government agency. First time they’d met he’d said, “State your name for the record.”
“Carina Sagittarius.”
“What is that, Greek?”
“It’s where I’m from.”
“Greece?”
And she said, “How’d you find me?”
“LIGO,” he said. “Yeah—barely a register in all the years it was running, but it picked up your alterations to local spacetime right away. We triangulated with other observatories. Fortunately, you chose a pretty small town so it wasn’t hard to narrow it down.”
He usually drove her to mini-golf, mall food courts, roller rinks, and the like—an adolescent’s Americana. She couldn’t tell his age and even when she tried measuring his decay rate it came back inconclusive.
Orel’s agency had a prepared list of questions to ask a superintelligence if they ever had the opportunity: much concern about the Drake equation and signal propagation of hydroxyl wavelengths. To Carina, the answers were simple arithmetic but he barely seemed to listen. Carina always got the sense that she wasn’t the strangest—or most worrying—thing on Orel’s mind at any one time. “So you’re some kinda alien.”
“I’m a locally bounded pocket universe.” A person-shaped cutout in spacetime.
He looked, as Dot often put it, like a trench coat on a wire hanger, standing there in the bowling alley. Gave her an appraising look. “A whole universe in there, you say?”
“I’m bigger on the inside.”
“What is the mechanism of your cognition? How do you think?”
Carina said, “I developed organic life as a way for my cosmos to know myself. How do you think?”
He had no answer for that. “Okay,” he said, “why do you look human?”
Dot had asked a similar question, except she’d added, “And hot?”
Carina lifted an 18-pound ball. “I am the average of averages. I express the most common traits of my sentiences. To significantly change my appearance or behavior would require planetary genocide. Eliminating entire species to change my ‘average.'”
“And why come to Earth?”
“Similar evolutionary pressures. Humans are close enough to what I’m used to that observing you should be useful. I contain 100 million spacefaring civilizations, but they haven’t articulated any coherent purpose. Just primates climbing the branches of a technology tree without any plan for when they reach the top.”
“Like Alexander, weeping for no more lands to conquer.”
“What is there to conquer? I am 99.99% void. My sentience is essentially a virus—my sense of a narrative ‘I’ is an illusion brought on by the law of large numbers. Just as illusory as yours.”
He didn’t want to think about that. “But there’s a hierarchy of needs. Humans exist for more than just eating and reproducing, consuming and excreting. There’s also self-actualization, the capability for a person to strive toward a goal. ‘What a man can be, he must be.'”
He bowled. Six pins fell over. He missed the spare. His shoes were all wrong. He also appeared to still be wearing an ID badge or name tag clipped to his lapel, but it was completely blank—no picture, no name, no government department sigil.
It was disco bowling night. UV starlight, mirror ball. Carina looked dusted in glitter. “What’s at the top of the hierarchy?”
Orel swung another ball down the lane and hit the number one pin on the nose. “Enlightenment. Being one with the universe.”
“Then a person’s purpose is to have a purpose, until they realize that there is no purpose. Existence and awareness is inconsequential in a universe of such size. Your actions and decisions matter not to celestial clockwork and quantum uncertainty.”
While she spoke, she pressed the bowling ball between her palms and compressed it down to the size of a marble, added particles and turned it into an object with atomic properties never before seen on Earth. Orel’s government agency would have loved to get hands on it.
But Carina dropped it on the floor. She’d done something to its stability that caused it to melt almost immediately and sink through the waxed floorboards. Orel looked at the hole in the ground where the marble had been. The dosimeter badge on his lapel was glowing green. “Don’t know about you, but I’m going to have to leave this area.”
They walked instead along the arcadeway outside with barkers beckoning them toward ring toss, test-your-strength, guess-your-age. “Any more aliens out there?”
“Every collapsar contains within it a complete universe, and trillions of stars in every universe undergo collapse. So, quite a few sentients like me.”
“All nested within each other, right? Turtles all the way down?”
“And all the way up.”
“Up?”
“Certainly. Isn’t that another saying you have? ‘As above, so below’?”
“But… you are a universe nested within mine.”
“Correct.”
“And you are able to look beyond the borders of your own reality. So it is possible for humans to do the same.”
She smiled. “Theoretically. I feel like we’re asking each other the same questions, and neither of us has an answer.”
Orel was an excellent marksman. He won her an enormous stuffed pink bunny from a shooting gallery. She ate it. Saving it for later.
Orel asked, “Is there a god?”
“God is a superorganism,” she answered, “comprised of all the particles of the universe.”
“Oh. Isn’t there anything more you can give us—information, weapons—to defend ourselves?”
“Against what?”
“Well if God ever shows up, we’d like to meet him on equal footing.”
Dot and Carina were closing down the diner one night, alone, just the two of them framed in the neon windows, wiping down tables. Two people—ski masks and guns—came through the back doorway. Dot shrieked, “There’s nothing to steal! All the money’s gone.”
The robbers looked at them, and then both shot Carina in the chest. She tumbled over backwards.
Dot screamed again and threw the carafe at their faces. The last of the hot coffee boiled their eyeballs. While they reeled around, a black shadow rose up behind them. The starscape that was Carina was lit with black hole lightning, nebulae fire, and x-ray storms.
She wrapped herself around the men, disappearing them without further noise. Dot covered her mouth with her hands and looked at Carina standing there in her uniform and apron. Like it never happened. “Oh my god,” she said through her fingers. “You’re bulletproof.” Dot poked a knuckle through one of the holes in Carina’s blouse. Could pass them off as cigarette burns. There was no blood to clean up, only broken glass and coffee stains. “You fell over right enough, though.”
“I only did what was expected of me.”
“Still, someone once said, ‘The meaning of life is that it ends.’ If you just keep living on and on, what are you living for?”
“I’m not really immortal,” Carina insisted. “I’ll eventually die of heat death, just like everything else.”
“Until then, we oughta find you—” Dot waved her hands at the tumbledown diner like shooing away the pigeons in its eaves. At its peeling paint, greasy windows, blithely ignored fire damage, the floors needing washing, the toilets needing disinfecting, rat traps needing emptying. “A little more fulfilling job.”
“Hard to imagine any endeavor undertaken in exchange for currency would satisfy the need for fulfillment. What good is accumulation to the dead?”
“Okay, well, life is about the experience, not any end goal.” Dot almost said it like she believed it.
“What experiences? Most of you pursue sedentary lifestyles and ingest substances specifically with the goal of avoiding experiencing your immediate surroundings. When you’re unhappy, you alter your biochemistry until you think you’re happy. I could do that, or bring myself into an alignment that feels like progress toward a goal. A machine, satisfied with its function. Deluded clockwork, content to be grinding away in the service of some larger, ineffable motion. Stand up. You want experience?”
Carina took Dot’s hand, and they were away.
First, they went somewhere sunny. Hovering just outside the corona, Dot was safe so long as she was in Carina’s arms. They watched plasma arcs twist from the sun’s surface. The Earth wasn’t even visible.
Then they were away.
Next they floated, side-by-side and hand-in-hand like a raft of otters, in the middle layers of Saturn’s clouds. Orange and white strata swirled together, bands of scattered pink and blue, lit by Carina’s own Hawking radiation. “I feel like I’m in a lava lamp,” Dot said. The sun wasn’t even visible.
They drifted through the eye of a planet-sized hexagonal storm, where lightning turned atmosphere methane to soot, and the carbon drifted down toward their upturned faces. Something glistening tapped Dot’s forehead. “Rain?” She brushed at it.
They were deep enough down that the air turned falling graphite into—”Diamond rain?” A thousand-ton cloudburst of it washed over the two women, and they were away.
Carina took her lastly to a galaxy far beyond the sight of any human telescope, a fossil galaxy so old that its few remaining stars burned dim and brown, and all the others were white dwarfs that had very nearly reached the ends of their lives. Carina brought them to the surface of one. Its atoms had compressed into a perfect lattice. Crystalized. “They’re all like this,” Carina said. “Touch it.”
Dot put one finger to it. A movement deep in the heart of the crystal sun sent vibrations outward, which she heard through her bones as the low tolling of glass bells. The harmony of the spheres.
“Ninety percent of white dwarfs turn into this. Eventually, this whole universe will be filled with nothing but crystal ornaments, singing to each other. One day, I will be filled with them, and I will need to be cautious in my movements, selective in how I am touched, to avoid crushing the delicate glassware in my chest.”
“Is it okay to hug you?”
Carina said, “For now.”
They wrapped arms around each other, and they were back.
Orel waited until Dot was alone. “Hey,” he said. “Give you a ride?”
Otherwise, it was a two-mile walk. She got in.
“We’re going to have to do something about our friend.”
Dot didn’t say, “Who?” She said, “What?” and “Why?”
“I’m worried about her—aren’t you? She’s a power imbalance, could wipe us out at any second.”
“What’re you going to do about it? You can’t fight her.”
“I don’t want to fight her.” He laughed, looked up through the windshield at the sky nervously. “But she’s like a person standing above an anthill. She likely doesn’t even recognize us as individual beings with interior lives. We need to get her attention.” He side-glanced her. “Teach her some basic emotions. You know, humanize us, for whatever that’s worth.”
“Why would I collaborate with a narc?”
“I could tell you it’s for the good of all mankind, or,” he held up a file folder, “I could give you exactly what you want.”
Carina opened her front door. Dot stood on the porch, bedraggled. It was raining. “Oh, hello, come in.”
Dot had been crying. “I feel like I’ve been dealing with the Devil.”
The differences between one human belief system and another were largely incomprehensible to Carina, but she was getting better at recognizing expressions. “You are upset. Come with me.”
“You have more stuff than I’d expected.” Paperbacks and knickknacks, enough furniture to comfortably seat six, art prints on the walls.
“I accumulated what was expected of me.”
“Don’t you have a cat?”
“He ran away.” She led Dot to her dark bedroom and laid down starfished atop the covers. “I want to show you something that often brings me comfort.” Her clothes parted and fell off.
Dot gasped. “Oh, I think you have the wrong idea —”
Carina’s skin parted and fell off, leaving behind only the humanoid void. A galaxy swirled within her navel; indigo nebulae dense as sand dunes drifted past; a blue-green marbled planet orbited from her eyes to her chest cavity. It grew larger, or closer, until all of Carina’s form was a field of grass. Carin’s resonant voice: “Fall into me.” When Dot hesitated: “Trust me.”
Dot lined up at the foot of the bed. She could smell the pollen, feel the sun, hear the breeze. Tilted forward onto the bed —
— landing face-first in the soft grass. A pair of hands helped her to her feet. Dot blinked in the bright sunlight. “Where are we?”
“My favorite place.”
“But… if we’re inside you, then how are you also here?”
As Dot was falling toward her, Carina had made slight manipulations to her gut fauna, generations quick-breeding until they produced a form and face that resembled Carina’s. A sock puppet momentarily filled with her own microcosm.
“And what happens to her when you leave?”
A melting body returning to the clay, same as what happens to any living thing except, perhaps, a little quicker. “Come.” Down the hill, to a little village in the shadow of a ruined castle. “This is my favorite place. Look at what my people have built, all on their own!” Defensive moats being used for irrigation, curtain stone walls serving as lattices for hanging gardens, and watchtowers that were now astronomy observatories.
“It’s lovely.” Only the noise of muscle-driven industry. Simple—uncomplicated.
Carina picked an odd fruit from a vine, broke open its thick rind. The inside was filled with worms, which were, Carina insisted, the best part, and so they ate the worms one-by-one and then the fresh flesh down to three stone pits. Dot spat the seeds into her palm and put them in her pocket.
“Thanks. I really do feel better now.”
“Of course.” Carina folded a corner of the sky down. Dot stepped through it back into the bedroom. Carina sat up and got dressed. “They’re much like my children, I suppose.”
“Ever consider love? As a motivation, I mean.”
“I’m teeming with hormone-driven biological life. I’ve seen, heard, and tasted every possible love story you can imagine, plus all the ones you cannot. It doesn’t seem to be much of an incentive; the majority of them prefer murder and war. These, for example.” Carina reached through the event horizon of her own chest and took out two solar systems. Held them in separate hands, one red-shifted, one blue. “These entire populations hate each other. Always have.”
“There you go. Work toward making them love, or at least tolerate, each other. Stack a lot of short-term goals together and suddenly you realize one day that you have a tower of purpose.”
When Carina showed up for her next shift at the diner, Dot dropped a plate of eggs in shock. “What is happening to you? Are you sick?” Dot hurried Carina into the storeroom.
Carina’s face looked longer and thinner, and there was a different kind of fire in her eyes than before. “Things… have… not been going well. Love sick.”
“Oh, Sugar, you’re in love? Here, tell me all about it. Who is he? Or she? Or… well, you’re kind of a unique case—what are you into, anyway?”
“I’m not… in love,” Carina said through clenched teeth. “I tried to create love inside me. Like you said.” She gasped, and her hair changed. “I thought the main obstacle was distance, that cross-pollination would lead to familiarity, and that would cascade intimate connections through their systems. Ow.”
“What did you do?”
“I folded myself inside, to facilitate faster-than-light travel. It condensed generations of technological development. But instead of making it conducive for them to love, it merely brought them close enough for easier war.”
“Did you get shorter?”
“I am… diminished, yes. The warfare has flared up throughout my universe, resulting in mass die-off. The average of my demographics has changed and, consequently, so has my appearance.”
“Will it stop? Is it like a disease? What can I do?”
“I need to go outside.” Carina held up her hands, which were on fire. Dot screamed, couldn’t remember where the extinguisher was. Carina barrelled through the emergency door and stumbled through the parking lot. Her feet left molten prints in the asphalt.
Across the lot, Orel stood against his car, watching the show. An unmarked tractor-trailer idled alongside. A plasma rope from Carina’s body exploded a row of parked cars. A pulsar jet flashed from her chest and lit a tree on fire.
“Do something!” Dot screamed at Orel. Carina’s steps slowed and the blaze in her eyes dimmed. Orel watched dispassionately until she collapsed, curled up, and extinguished.
Men in khakis climbed out of the truck. They picked up Carina’s husk and loaded her into the trailer. Orel got in his car and drove off.
Time passed, the way it does so quickly when every hour is calculated in wage, each day is a workday, every week has no weekends, the first of the month is rent due, and the end of the year is a tax reckoning of exactly how little has accrued. Dot worked her shifts like clockwork, as expected, until the day that there was panic on the TV, emergency broadcast signals on the radio, and air raid sirens on the streets—when everyone discovered that their skeletons glowed in the dark.
It was easy to find Orel. Dot simply circled town, visiting every spot Carina said he took her to, finding his big stupid car outside Frigid Bridget’s ice cream parlor. Saw Orel coming out, sipping a milkshake and slipping into sunglasses. Dot roared up to him in her battered Beetle. Cut off his escape. “You rotten bastard!”
Orel lowered his shades. “Oh. You.”
“You did this! What is happening to us?”
He shrugged. “Listen, I didn’t do anything. You’re the one who caused her to change.”
“Me? All I did was try to be her friend. So I could see my daughter, like you promised.” Her hands clenched up. “You promised you’d get my custody restored.”
“And like I said, I’ll look into it. Honestly, though, Dorothy—we have more worrisome issues on the horizon, and if I don’t focus on those, it soon won’t matter what’s happened to your friend.” He sucked on his straw. “Or your daughter.”
The fight went out of her. “Is she dead?”
“No, of course not. She’s living in a comfortable home.” He saw her face. “Oh, you mean the space woman. Well, then, also no. Her sentient population dropped too low to sustain self-expression, or so I gather. She’s… in a coma, you could say.”
“You planned that?”
“Well, bullets didn’t work, so I had to try something else.”
“A miracle like her, and all you could do was destroy her. She wasn’t a threat.”
“She was a being of incredible power, and the only thing a creature like that wants is conquest and more power.”
“Why would she want to rule our dinky little planet? She was a whole universe!”
He shrugged. “What’s done is done. And right now, some foreign threat actors have instantiated a China Syndrome that’s going to turn this city into a smoking hole in about an hour, so I’m a little busy.”
“Are we evacuating?”
“Impossible to get everyone out in time. By the time the Cherenkov radiation convinced people there was actually a problem, it was too late.”
“Carina could help. She could fix anything.”
“Yeah, well, our outer space friend is still unconscious, and we don’t know how to wake her. She isn’t Sleeping Beauty, kisses ain’t gonna do it.”
“Please tell me you didn’t try that.” A brace of military jets screamed overhead, followed by a much slower, but even louder, black helicopter.
The helicopter landed in a nearby vacant lot. “That’s my ride,” he said. “It’s taking the body out of here to a secure facility. Hopefully we can use it to develop some countermeasures.”
“Wait.” Dot gripped his arm. “Let me see her, please. One last time.”
The helicopter was a tandem-rotor Chinook and its large cargo bay had been turned into an isolation unit where Carina lay on a gurney. Dot went through the plastic curtains to her friend’s side. Put her hands in her apron pocket and felt three hard objects there. They could exist outside of Carina for a short time, like virtual particles, but eventually needed to return.
Dot pushed one of the seeds into Carina’s belly. The impenetrable flesh parted like dark soil, creating a little navel divot up to Dot’s finger. She scratched and pulled at the surface, digging away Carina’s covering until there was only a person-shaped hole, like a grave, and Dot climbed in, vanishing into the loam.
Moments later, Carina Sagittarius woke up.
She found the exit ramp and stumbled out into daylight. Carina didn’t waste any stupid questions. Her senses briefly extended to take it all in before she pulled herself back down to human-scale. “You look different,” Orel said. “How are you—I mean, you’re looking well. More like your usual self. How are you up and about?”
“Dot.”
“What, did she sacrifice her life for yours?”
“No, she lived a long life in a place that she loved. But that’s not a story you deserve to hear.”
She could actually kill him with a look, so he avoided her eyes. “In any case, no need to bother yourself. Everything’s under control here. I mean, there’s a slug of exotic corium the size of a bus tunneling towards us and we have no way to stop it. A normal meltdown would slow down on its own, but this stuff isn’t anywhere on the periodic table—I think they detected you and thought they’d discovered a secret weapons program. Used your presence to fill in some theoretical gaps and launched a preemptive strike.”
“From the other side of the planet?”
He brightened. “Impressive, isn’t it? Obviously not from an antipodean point because it wouldn’t be able to pass through the core, but from anywhere else the corium could carve out a hypocycloidical path like a gravity train. If the meltdown origin location is at a much higher elevation, then the corium might be able to break through the surface here but even if it doesn’t, the radiation is already approaching lethal levels, and when it hits the water table this whole state will explode in radioactive steam.” He snapped his fingers as if suddenly remembering something. “You could stop it, right?”
Carina crossed her arms and rolled her eyes in the direction of the helicopter. “Really.”
“Okay, I admit—I’m sorry for any mistreatment. But think about your friend Dot —”
“She’s gone,” Carina said frostily.
“—Okay, think about her friends. Or family? Surely there must be someone worth saving.”
“I’ll clean up your mess.” She jabbed a finger. “But not doing it for you.”
Orel patted his pockets for cigarettes. “Well enough. Long as the job’s done.”
Carina slipped beneath the ground and was gone just long enough for Orel to have a smoke. She came back up with a glowing ball cupped between her hands, slowly pressing in on it to compress it smaller and smaller. The size of a bowling ball, of a baseball, of a marble, gone.
“Hey, nicely done. Radiation levels are down, though there’s no telling how much damage was done. We’ll monitor mutation cases in the area for the next several generations.”
“Yes,” she said, “curious to see what this will do to your projected image of God.” It was a lot to swallow. She was sweating diamonds.
“Did you happen to save any of that material? I’d love to run some tests, develop some defenses. Imagine if they try that same attack vector on Washington next time. Or if the corium passes through the mantle, it could be ejected by convection currents, emerge anywhere on the globe! Wait, where are you going?”
Carina was fading away. “I’ll deal with you later. There’s someone who actually needs to hear what I have to say.”
Carina sat on a park bench, watching a clutch of school children tumble around the lawn. One little girl came within range. Carina said, “Hey, kid, want to see a trick?” And when, curious, the child nodded and stepped closer, Carina coughed up a giant stuffed pink bunny. “Ta da! Pretty good, right?” She sat the bunny on the bench. “It’s yours if you want it.”
The girl played with its ear. Carina understood now why Dot had always chosen this bench.
“Is that your daddy?” Carina asked, pointing toward the nearest cluster of adults. “Does he teach you about God?”
She whispered, “He says God is always watching. Even in the bathroom.”
“Let me teach you about my friend, instead. She wanted to help people. She found a lot of them suffering not far away from here—they were hungry, and hurt, and homeless, because a terrible war had torn through all their worlds. My friend gave them food from her pockets—ketchup and sugar packets, mints, saltines, creamer cups, little pats of butter and grape jelly. Not much, but not nothing. She planted trees and gardens and stacked the stones from broken towers so that they could live in a new village built around the bones of the old one. They had been at war for so long that none of these people had ever before seen a stranger help.”
Normally, a history lesson wouldn’t hold the attention of any child, but the scenario that Carina described played out beneath her skin, so the girl could watch like looking down through a hole in the sky.
“And while she helped, she told them about the nature of their nature. God’s existence depended on their behavior. God was as sick and wounded as they were. If they killed each other off, then God would become just a black void in an infinite expanse of black voids. But if they worked together to rebuild and repopulate, then God would be awake and healthy. Stack small acts together—not much, but not nothing—until they suddenly have a tower of traits expressed through a sentient superorganism.”
Carina let the lights fade and her skin return to normal for the end of the story: “In the compressed time within that event horizon, Dot died of old age long before the little village became a city, but the folded structure of God’s body that had allowed everyone to war on such a large scale now worked in reverse—my friend’s idea of the universe spread from planet to planet in only a few thousand generations. Wherever her theory of beneficial mutualism went, the people filled her cold empty spaces with life and civilization. And God woke up.”
The little girl chewed on it for a few minutes. “Do you miss your friend?”
“Yes, very much. But I feel her every time I get a hug.”
Automatically, the girl gave Carina a hug. Head-to-chest, she heard chiming bells. “What’s that noise?”
“Those are dying parts of me. There are many things that shape me, good dead things and bad living ones, but I try only to let the best parts show through.”
“Are you my mommy?”
Carina smiled glowteeth. “No, child. But being here together, we have the same parent universe, so I am your sister. I think our mother is still asleep. Do you remember what I taught you, how to wake her up?”
“Mutual beneficialism.”
“And what’s that mean?”
“Help each other.”
“That’s right. That’s how you shape the things around you. There’s a man I know who needs to learn that lesson. Want to help me teach it to him?”
“Okay.” The girl gathered up her stuffed bunny. Her playmates called to her. Carina scattered a human body’s worth of carbon in the form of diamonds, took the girl’s hand, and they were away. The children played with the pretty pebbles in the grass for a while. Then, bored, went back to their games, forgetting completely that they were missing one of their number.
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Josh Pearce has published more than 200 stories, reviews, and poems in a wide variety of magazines, including Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots, Kaleidotrope, Locus, Strange Horizons, On Spec, Weird Horror, and elsewhere. Find more of his writing at fictionaljosh.com. |