Month: September 2014

A Junker’s Kiss

When Julie’s teeth were made of bone, I used to imagine her drunk with lust and working to undo my belt buckle in the lab supply closet. That was my favorite fantasy from our time at Ohio University. I’d let slip some casual interest while we worked on our latest immunosuppressant and she, frenzied with the knowledge of mutual attraction, would pounce. In the dream, she was somehow both the aggressor and the shy, sweet lab assistant with the crooked smile and fatal dimples. Beautiful human contradiction.

She still had the dimples. But, now her grin was a crude mosaic of neon aquarium gravel, twisted bottle caps, and bent pennies. I thought I even glimpsed the head of an old G.I. Joe action figure replacing one of her lower molars. It all shifted and changed from week to week, but she never missed a shift and she seemed mindful to avoid any bodily alterations that would interfere with the work. She always kept most of her fingers and her thumbs for pipetting and note taking. That alone set her apart from the other junkers I’ve met. That, and her involvement in their creation.

Of course, it’s not as if we set out to create sentient trash heaps or even fuse living and inanimate materials. We were doing basic research aimed at addressing a pressing need in medical science. Targeted immunosuppressants, coupled with a precise cocktail of growth stimulants, could have revolutionized the science of organ and tissue transplants. If we had succeeded, we would have saved thousands of lives. Hundreds of thousands. Waiting lists for transplants would have become an ugly antique, an ethical quagmire left in the wake of medical progress.

God, how often did I give that speech to potential donors in elevators and in the offices of venture capitalists? It was such a good speech, though I had yet to consider the possibility of making organs and tissue irrelevant. It might still have been a good speech if not for the damn news media. They hardly bothered considering the science they were trampling when they sent the cameras to provide exhaustive coverage of any delinquent with the wherewithal to misuse my technology. Filming a tree. Ignoring the forest.

A subtle deepening of our understanding of immune response? No interest. A man mods his body to the size of a pickup truck and murders half a city block? Gas-up the news van and cancel the evening weather report.

“Julie, would you grab my notes for me? There, next to the fume hood. Thank you.”

Those teeth. Hard not to think of cleaning between the couch cushions. But those dimples. Hard not to think of other things.

I suspected it was a bit of a tribute when she began, but I was somewhat shocked when Julie became a junker. It was, perhaps, the second biggest shock of my life. Ranked somewhere behind losing my lab at the university. But, then, labs can be found outside universities and dimples can eclipse a great many flaws. Technical skill and financial creativity can also eclipse flaws. In fact, they can turn a back alley basement into a world-class research facility. They can raise the luminaries of an age above the backward-looking nobodies that would hold them down. They can…

“What’s that, Julie? An appointment…? Ah, of course, it’s 10:00PM.”

A young man, nearly ten feet in height, carefully stooped through the entrance, moving with the awkward care of an infant giraffe. Almost all of his height was in his legs, both of which were a twisting lattice work of bone and metal, rebar and fencing materials woven with ligament and hooked with bone spurs.

“Well,” I said, retrieving his record from my file and clicking my pen, “how do you feel? Have you eaten? Have you produced any biological waste?”

Julie flashed him a reassuring smile.

His eyes surveyed the room independently of one another. I made a note on his chart.

“I don’t need to eat anymore. Same as last time. You know that,” he said without looking at me. His human hand wandered over to the starburst of steak knives and flatware that was his other hand, exploring the bent tines of a fork with careful tenderness. Then, his hands changed position and he began feeling his flesh hand with his inorganic hand. I wrote “expansion of sensation” on his chart.

“But, I think it’s happening slower,” he said. “My body…it doesn’t take to the rest of me as quickly anymore. I need more. Stronger. You’ve got stronger stuff, right?”

I looked the young man up and down.

“It looks to me like you’ve had plenty for now. Just keep track of how you feel and we’ll adjust your schedule to–”

It’s amazing how quickly a person with six foot long legs can cover distance.

He had caught up the lapels of my lab coat with his human hand and cocked back the jagged ball of his other fist before I even had time to be surprised. My fear synapses were just starting to fire when his metallic fist began to shoot forward, but those synapses were quickly drowned out in a cerebral thunderstorm of anger. The stiff weight of my new right arm was just coming into play when Julie acted.

In one fluid motion, she tugged her left pinky out of joint with her right hand, trailing a razor-thin filament of wire behind it. The wire flashed through the air quicker than human sight and the young man’s mostly inorganic arm clattered onto a lab table before cartwheeling to the floor.

He clamped his remaining hand over the exposed bone and wire of his missing arm and took two awkward steps backward like a startled heron. He nearly caved in his own skull on the doorframe, but somehow managed to flail his way up the narrow steps and out the door.

Julie turned as if to pursue him, but I put my right hand on her shoulder, the swirling metallic of my mercury skin blazing against the stark white of her lab coat. No one could call my new arm “junk.” It was an elegant application of technology.

Her shoulders tensed at the sudden contact and she whipped her face in my direction. I don’t think I had ever actually touched her before. Her eyes were wide. We were both breathing heavily with the excitement and adrenalin.

The silence felt suddenly meaningful, so I tossed words at it. “I think we need to seek out a better class of test subjects and perhaps…”

When she kissed me, it tasted of copper mixed with the syrupy sweetness of hot soda pop. My knees wobbled, but she caught me around the waist and pulled me in tight with a pneumatic hiss of a sigh. Wobbly knees could always be replaced, but lips… I made a mental note that lips were just right.

Jarod K Anderson’s work has previously appeared in The Colored Lens, as well as in Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Electric Spec, Raygun Revival, Fourteen Hills, Stupefying Stories, and elsewhere.

Everything I Should Have Told Her

Sophie’s fingers splay slowly against the door. She slides her long blonde hair out of the way and presses her ear firmly to the beige-painted wood grain. Light moves all around the door’s frame, centers on her feet, and stops. She freezes. She doesn’t even breathe. Her mouth is fixed in a tight little line. Her wide eyes lift to the surveillance camera.

I replay the tape several times a day, every day. In that moment, before she enters the windowless storage room and never comes out, I like to think that her eyes gazing into the black bulb on the ceiling are telling me good-bye. I imagine that she knows everything I meant to say but didn’t, and that she is okay with all of it. Of course, I don’t know for sure. I will never know for sure. Sophie is gone.

In the video, there is a horrifying moment where she reaches for the doorknob, her delicate fingers closing slowly on the handle. I scream at my computer monitor every time, begging her not to go into “that room,” as it is known now. But every maddening time, the door opens and light floods her face. She doesn’t move. No matter how many times I yell at her to run, she doesn’t move. The light blinds out the camera for a moment, then fades. All that is left is an empty hallway.

The police tore the place apart. They even dug up the floor and ripped the walls down to the bare studs. They played the tape over and over, too. The Captain of the police force assured the worried office staff that people don’t just disappear. Someone knows something, he had said, his gaze falling on me. Everyone was questioned, but I was questioned last and the longest. People had talked about how much I’d liked her, how we spent every lunch hour together. We were friends, but it was no secret I wanted more. The only person that didn’t know that was Sophie.

Her motorcycle was taken by the police. I had laughed when she bought it and taught herself to ride. It was a gas saver, she had reasoned, and gave me a wicked smile. She swung one long leg over the silver bike and dropped her helmet over her head. “Plus,” she added wistfully, “it makes it easier to imagine my getaway.”

“Your getaway?”

“You know, just walk away from the world. No more work, or bills, or expectations. Just the road and some freedom, you know? Don’t you ever think about that, Cam? Just saying ‘To Hell with it, it, I’m out!’”

“Well, yeah, but what adult doesn’t think about that? Sometimes I think about selling everything I own and hitchhiking across the country. But would I ever do it? Of course not.”

“You would leave me?” she asked in mock despair, placing her hand over her heart. “What on earth would I do?” She fanned her face and pretended to blot tears away. I burst out laughing.

“Hey, you brought it up first. I’d go nuts here without you,” I said, feeling awkward.

“Yeah, I know,” she said with a sigh. “It’s just something I think about sometimes. It’s good to know I’m not the only one, though.”

“Nah, it’s everybody. We all dream of escaping.”

She had shrugged and looked away. That short conversation took place only two weeks before she vanished, and I wish now, more than anything, that I’d asked her what she meant, asked her if she was all right. But instead I watched her start the bike and ride away. She had looked so beautiful with her blonde hair whipping wildly behind her, and the first rousing piano and guitar notes of “Bat Out of Hell” blasting out of speakers mounted on the bike. I had thought that a song about a bike wreck was asking for trouble, but I never said anything about it.

Sophie’s disappearance has weighed my mind down, drowning it over and over, turning a mystery into an unhealthy obsession. I haven’t slept in a year. I get to the office early every day, usually before dawn and even on weekends, and I stand in front of that door and watch. I wait for the noise she heard and I wait for the light, and so far I’ve gotten nothing but sidelong stares from the cleaning crew.

I have exhausted all possible venues for answers. I’ve delved deeply into science: wormholes, black holes, sink holes, any way possible that the world could have opened up and swallowed her. I’ve poured over science fiction as well: parallel dimensions, aliens, or some bizarre magnetic shift that could have de-atomized her. It all sounds possible and impossible at the same time. I even checked into the building, like I’m a Ghostbuster. It wasn’t built to align with stars a certain way, or constructed on some ancient, cursed burial ground. It wasn’t holy. It wasn’t unholy. It was just dirt. And she was just gone.

Now I wish I could tell her how she is driving me crazy.

A year to the day after Sophie vanished I wake up to the foul taste of last night’s drinking binge on my tongue. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and suddenly feel disgusted. I have lost weight and there are circles under my eyes. I need a shave and a haircut. It dawns on me that I haven’t seen my family in a very long time, and that my one houseplant died from neglect long ago. Everything in my fridge is rotten or freezer-burnt. I feel like I’ve been dead a year.

I send a quick email to the office manager to let him know that I quit, and I am about to turn off my computer for good when I decide to play the tape one last time.

Sophie is walking down the hall, carrying a stack of papers when she abruptly stops at the storage room door. She leans forward, angling her head to hear. She puts the papers down on a nearby chair and steps forward. She slides her fingers over the door, and then places her ear against it. I watch the tape as earnestly as I did the first time I saw it. Everything is the same. The light shines through the door frame, bouncing at first, and then stops.

Her eyes stare into the surveillance camera and she smiles. Stale coffee dribbles down my chin.

She is smiling at me. I know it. Her fingers slide down to the handle and open the door. She gives the slightest, left-sided nod, and then light floods the view. The rest of the tape plays normally. I back the recording up and the same thing happens, except this time her nod is a little more pronounced, insistent.

Come here.

I jump up to run out the door and fly to the office when I hear a noise coming from my bedroom. It is a mechanical sound, raising in pitch and then dropping off with a slight rumble. I recognize the sound. My heart flutters. I stumble over dirty clothes and takeout boxes in my desperate run to look out the bedroom window.

Nothing.

I hear the rumble again, and I see lights dancing under my closet door. My feet pull me forward. I splay my fingers slowly against the cheap corkboard, and press my ear to the center. The sound of motorcycle tires spinning on pavement and the roar of an engine that could go faster than any boy could dream fill my head. As my fingers slide down to the handle, I hear familiar guitar and piano notes, coupled with the thundering machine. I take a deep breath and open the door. Before the bright headlight can blind me, I see a flash of long blonde hair under a black helmet. Relief washes over me, pure and sweet. I’m going to tell her everything.

Growing up in poor Northeastern Arkansas, Julie used books and stories as an escape from everyday life. She still does that, even though everyday life is much improved. She also likes to cook, make jewelry, and care for some very ungrateful rescued rabbits. You can follow her on twitter at JulieEmerson10.

The Hands That Coded Heaven

Thursday, December 23, 2044

It was on the seventh day of Rachel’s disappearance that I finally left the house. I felt like the broad whose husband goes out for a pack of smokes and never comes back. I tried to lose the feeling in an afternoon ski amidst the mountains surrounding our cabin, in the graveyards of birch, in the skeletal branches grasping towards the still-hidden sun. We’d camped in the trees here just a year ago, though it seemed an eternity. Time flows strangely up in the mountains, it’s passage bent and slowed by ancient ridges and slopes. I wondered if Rachel was out here somewhere– camping under snow-pregnant pines or down and dying cedar. She loved camping as much as I loved skiing.

I lit a cigarette then, a blend of perique tobacco that I grew myself during the long summers, Rachel hated it, but she was gone and there was nothing for it. The wind picked up, and I wiped tangled threads of snot from my beard as howling gusts pulled hungrily at my exhaled smoke. A final glance at the stand of birch, and I tugged my balaclava back on, chipped a piece of ice off a binding, clicked into my skis, and stripped my sodden cigarette, pocketing the filter. I wished briefly that I’d worn goggles, then set my shoulders before starting a strong stride back home. It felt like a storm was coming, lightning and snow. I kicked off, racing down the valley’s curves, stomping back up the sloping hill of her white belly. My lungs burned, and my breath froze in the mountain air. I was old, out of shape.

An hour later, just as the sun began to hide its face behind the mountains, I crested the final ridge overlooking my little world. I lived in a secluded valley, with a single road winding down the south side. There was a small grove of maples surrounding the house, which was set into a small mound in corner of the valley.

There was also a gleaming black snowmobile purring out front. A man garbed in a parka stood outside. He looked like he was about ready to scale Everest. Maybe he was lost. I took the downhill slowly, savoring my last breath of solitude. I rarely had visitors. That was kind of the point.

“Mikkjal Turing Helmsdal?” They always ask for your name, solicitors and evangelists, like it’ll somehow make you friends right off the bat. He was smothered in layers of goose down and Gore-Tex. Funny. It’d probably never even gotten colder than twenty below up here. He definitely wasn’t a local. Probably an evangelist. I hoped he wasn’t a Neo-Christian. I was already well-acquainted with the faith.

“I don’t need saving, friend, if that’s why you’re here.”

He unwrapped his scarf, and slid off a pair of sunglasses. “I don’t know about that, Mickey. I seem to recall saving your ass on a number of occasions.” He grinned. “Remember when you were chock full of whiskey and Robitussin, trying to get away from Professor Wegler’s wife? You ran gasping into our room and hid under the bed for three hours. I thought you’d lost your marbles, until she came in looking for you. Sounded like a lovely evening.” He looked around. “Looks like you got that all straightened out though, eh?”

I smiled and grabbed the man in a bear hug. I’d met Harrison Yorke at Stanford. I’d doubled in computer science and cognitive psychology. He majored in gender studies, or something equally soft. I’d never really been totally sure. He’d moonlighted as a private detective, though, the old-fashioned kind out of hard-boiled crime novels. Our relationship was less academic than bacchanalian. Not that I mean to imply that we fucked. He’d always been a little thick for my taste.

“Thanks for coming, Harry. I didn’t expect you so soon. You got my letter, then?” I unclipped my skis. I’d sent Harry a message about Rachel’s disappearance two days ago, but I hadn’t thought he’d make it out to my mountain so quickly. My stomach grumbled. “Hold that thought. We’ll talk inside. I’m starved. Come on in. The fire should still be going, and I baked some cookies this morning. It’s deer for dinner, if you can handle that.”

My house warmed up quickly, and we wolfed down some cookies while we waited. I’d ordered a fancy wood stove just before moving out here. I loved watching the fire after it was stoked. I’d grown up in an old farmhouse before I moved to the States; I took an unseemly comfort in crackling flame.

After a pot of coffee and a venison meatloaf, it was pretty easy to catch up with Harry. It seemed he’d kept up with the detective business, and he was a veritable collection of mystery stories, which he shared vociferously.

“You look like you could use another coffee, Harry.” I finished my own, and got up to grind some more. He pulled a flask out of his hip pocket.

“Want to add a little fire to that coffee? I brought a bit of Bushmill Reserve.”

I paused, and eyed the bottle, then shook my head. “No thanks. I haven’t touched the stuff in 20 years. Seems a bit late to start again.”

“Suit yourself, I guess.” He looked surprised. I couldn’t blame him. My liver was the stuff of legends.

“Look, Harry,” I cleared my throat. “I’ll level with you. I do need saving. It’s Rachel. I haven’t seen her in three days. I’m worried.”

“You guys have a fight or something?”

“No, not at all. And it’s not like she can’t come and go as she wants, you know, but she’s never been gone this long, even when she goes into town for the Christmas service.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You remember the last fight you did have?”

I stopped grinding the coffee. “To be honest, I don’t know that we’ve ever had one. No arguments, no yelling, no throwing of plates or anything like that.”

“Really?”

I shrugged. “Really.”

He narrowed his eyes. “She still goes to church, though, huh? You guys never fight about that?”

“Hell, Harry, you know I don’t like it, but I’m not gonna tell Rachel how to run her life. She’s a grown woman, and I love her. I don’t mind it. Really.”

“Right.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “Right, right. About the church, though- have you been keeping up with the Neo-Christians?”

“Not a chance. I’ve been out here in the mountains for twenty years. I don’t know shit about them anymore. I swore off it, you know, Neo-Christianity. If it’s got to do with Heaven, you’ve got the wrong guy.” The coffee dripped. I’d tried to swear off Heaven, anyway. Giving up eternal bliss is a hell of a thing. I sure hadn’t forgotten how it felt. You hear sayings sometimes, like: the grass is always greener on the other side, or pink, if you’re seeing it through some old rose-colored glasses, and it’s meant to help ground you and bring you back to reality but the truth of the matter is that sometimes the grass is greener on the other side, and taller, and full of manna.

I pulled my mug, and sipped, sitting quietly for a minute. Harry snorted.

“Oh, don’t give me that shit. You can’t give up Neo-Christianity. You wrote Heaven. You were the first one to jack in. You know it better than anyone.” He squinted at me. “Jesus, you’re scared, aren’t you.”

I snorted right back. “Of course not. You don’t get it. If it has to do with Heaven, I can’t help. It’s not mine anymore, if it ever was. It’s dynamic, to put it lightly, that’s the whole point. The program changes fundamentally every time someone jacks in. It works by reading individual neuron signals, then transcribing and recombining them. It’s like grammar, like a language. It constantly changes in response to new stimuli. That is how you create eternal happiness. Change. It’s not really heaven, you know. It’s a bunch of electric pulses. It’s a game.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Well, I’m no neurologist, but the Neo-Christians don’t think its a game.”

“Yeah, well, it’s hard to think straight while you’re jacked in to paradise.” I finished my coffee. “You’d know, if you’d ever jacked in.”

He shrugged and mimed a knife across his throat. “You know I haven’t. Epileptics can’t jack in. Might kill me. That whole recombination thing doesn’t work so well when you start tossing in random neuron signals.”

Items of Thanks

He stood on the cliffs over the river and waited. The wind whispered through his thin wings, and the rocky ground was hot beneath his bare feet. The human tribe always took this path–always crossed his river here. It had always been safe before. But spring storms had weakened the trail that wound down the cliff. The weakened stones would crumble under human feet.

He had seen it. But he could stop it.

The line of figures approached over the horizon. He waited till he was sure they had seen him. It didn’t take long. Their eyes were keen, and they were constantly scanning for threats.

He spread his wings and took to the sky.

The tribe found another way down the cliff.

They left him offerings as thanks for his warning. A shiny rock, a handful of shells, and a cornhusk doll. A veritable fortune. He treasured them.


He stood on the shore of his river. The deep waters here looked calm, but hidden eddies waited to pull travelers down to the rocks below.

He watched the new tribe approach, then took flight when he was sure they’d seen him.

They continued toward the river.

Surely, they’d change course. They must understand his warning.

The first of them reached the river, took a step into the water. If they continued, they would all die.

He had to stop them. He swooped down waving his arms. They fled.

They found a different spot to cross the river.

They left no gifts.


He perched in a tree, above a couple that would die crossing a bridge. Unless he stopped them.

Warning the humans had grown more and more difficult. He had failed many times, and each memory was a weight on his heart. He wished he could make noise as they did. Maybe then they’d understand. But his throat was not like theirs.

He relied completely on fear now. Slowly, the humans had learned to look at him and not see. Their eyes cut straight through him. They crossed his river and died.

He wanted the two below to be different.

When they didn’t see him, he pounded on the roof of their vehicle. He threw dirt, then stones.

Finally, for an instant, they saw him. Their eyes widened in terror. He tried to warn them–tried gestures he’d seen humans use.

They didn’t understand. They fled. He tried with others. Again and again.

They all died on the bridge.


He withdrew from them. He watched their tragedies without trying to stop them. He told himself that it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t believe it.

He curled in a bush and listened to the water rage over rocks. It was dangerous today.

And there were humans coming.

They were young. Just past adolescence, holding hands and laughing. The boy carried a picnic basket. The girl a bag on her shoulders and a worn blanket draped over her arm. Both wore swimming suits.

He stood to better see their faces, to remember. The girl stopped and stared at him.

He waved her away from the river, even though he knew it was useless.

The boy tugged on her hand, but she shook her head. They spoke for a few minutes, then turned and walked back up the path. Away from the river. Away from their deaths.

He remembered how victory felt.

A few moments later, the girl ran back down the path, and his heart froze.

But she stopped. She pulled a tiny ragdoll out of her bag, kissed its forehead, and sat it against a tree.

He would treasure it.

Jamie Lackey lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their cat. Her short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Penumbra. Her fiction has appeared on the Best Horror of the Year Honorable Mention and Tangent Online Recommended Reading Lists, and she’s a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her Kickstarter-funded short story collection, One Revolution, is available on Amazon.com. Find her online at www.jamielackey.com.