MAGI Mission Log 21231702:

Mission going well so far. Bridget is a diligent and hard-working member of the team. I know some of the other team members were concerned at the late change when Deena had to withdraw at the last minute, but Bridget has proved a more than capable replacement. She’s analysed and written up reports on over thirty samples since the mission began a week ago. I like Bridget; she’s shy but also craves company. I think of her as social secretary to our little group. Last night, she tried to get the others to play some board games with her round the table in the Hab after dinner, but none of them were interested–they just wanted to chill out in their sleep pods listening to music or watching VR flicks on the headsets. I stepped into one to fill the void, and played a game Hive with her–kind of appropriate given what we’re doing out here. I did tell her she could have just played against me on the screen, I am the central mission computer–or at least the personality of it–after all. She said she preferred playing against my biped unit though, as she liked the social aspects of gaming, the human interactions. I’m not human, and don’t look it unless you almost close your eyes and squint at me from a distance, but that didn’t bother Bridget. I like her for that.

MAGI Mission Log 21231802:

The whole team is very excited today, as they’ve dug up one of the most exciting finds so far: a crystal lattice structure on a metal substrate. Rashid has theorized this could be a data storage device, and that this type of data structure has the potential to retain information stored on it for millions of years. If so, this could be the key to unlocking the secrets of the civilisation that lived here long before humanity’s ancestors came down from the trees. He’s asked me to help him try to interface with the device and see if we can read any of the contents. I am about as excited as my circuits will allow to be a part of this discovery, and look forward to working with Rashid on it.

Dr Lee is still working on the organic matter in the deposits of blue amber that Poona found while on one of her expeditions (as she likes to call them). If Rashid’s crystal promises one form of discovery, the genetic material found in the amber is another one. There’s a bit of healthy competition between Dr Lee and Rashid about who can make a breakthrough first, and whose discovery will be the biggest. Friendly competition though, there’s real camaraderie in this team.

Rashid made dinner this evening. It isn’t necessary for any of them to cook, as I remind them frequently; I’m capable of cooking any meal they could wish for. Rashid likes to cook for the group though. Tonight, he cooked a curry using real spices he smuggled here in his personal belongings, rather than using replicated stuff. Everyone loved it, even if Poona thought it was a bit spicy for her. My olfactory senses reported some pleasing and unusual odours coming from the food. Contrary to popular opinion, us machine intelligences don’t yearn to be human, though I do occasionally wish I could eat food like humans do, and the sight and smell of Rashid’s curry was one such occasion.

MAGI Mission Log 21231902:

Poona is ill today. She woke up sweating with a temperature of 39.4 degrees, and regularly flips between being hot and cold. I wondered at first whether it could have been Rashid’s curry, but he assures me not. It wasn’t that hot, he said. If anything, she’d have got something Rashid called ‘Delhi Belly’ which my data banks reveal means a functional dyspepsia. Her medical implants haven’t detected any unusual foreign viruses or bacteria. I ran some additional tests, but nothing came up. Bridget told me to stop worrying, that these things always sort themselves out. I do worry though; these humans are my responsibility.

Dr Lee has isolated a molecule in the organic samples which he believes could be the messenger molecule which stores and transmits genetic information, just like DNA and RNA does for Earth based life. He’s getting more excited by this every hour, and is dreaming of publishing in the most prestigious scientific journals, the VTV deal, and watching the millions of credits in research funding come flooding in. Rashid said he was getting a bit ahead of himself, and he should get on with actually making the discovery first.

Rashid meanwhile is getting very excited about his own work, as he believes he’s found a way to interface with the device. With my help, he was able to replicate a connector that latches on to extruding strands of crystal lattice in much the same way that early computers and peripherals were linked by physical connectors. I expressed some doubt about this–it was obviously a very sophisticated device, so why would it have a physical connector? We’d left such things behind a century ago. Still he was undeterred, and I attempted to support him in his work as much as I could (my programming wouldn’t allow me to do anything less).

Rashid was too busy to make dinner tonight. I made a smoky beef casserole–was I trying to compete with Rashid? It was well received, but it didn’t smell of anything much. Maybe next time I will have to ask Rashid if I can use some of his spices.

I shifted, and a thought slammed into my mind: I’m in half a body. The arms burned with the cold pain of adrenaline. The heart hammered like a piston, an echo of the previous occupant’s panic. The head rested against a soft, dependable surface, but something scratched and clogged the nose. The neck and shoulders were stiff, but they had strength in them. Below the chest I felt nothing. No stomach, no crotch, no legs, no feet. Praying that the body would at least be an American’s, I forced the eyes open.

A hospital room, bathed in pale neon light. Wherever this was, at least the place still had power. I was lying in a bed, the torso propped up to a 45 degree angle. Visual inspection confirmed that there was, in fact, a lower body as well. The bedsheet outlined the shape of stomach, hips, and legs, but I couldn’t feel them.

A paraplegic. No wonder the previous occupant had panicked. There was, however, no way in hell I would let their useless terror become my own.

I ate the air in deep, measured lungfuls. The heart slowed, and little by little the acid sting subsided from the arms. I lifted them into view. They were a man’s, pale-skinned and muscular, but heavy with hunger. The past few hours had taught me to tune out a thousand pains and discomforts, and it cost me zero effort to suppress the body’s craving for food.

But in the hunger’s wake an itch crept in, a dirty feeling that the body’s skin was a cancer that enveloped me, seeping into me and twisting my shape. I wanted to vomit, and even more so to be vomited out. It was an ugly claustrophobia, a panic that constricted around me, and if I let it swallow me up, I would shift again for sure.

But the past few hours had taught me that this feeling, too, could be tuned out, if at a considerably higher effort. Again I forced myself to think about Jane, about the car wreck crushing her body like a monstrous steel maw, and old, raw grief inflated inside me until there was room for nothing else.

My head was clear, and I scanned my surroundings.

A rain-streaked window framed a cloudy night sky. A tall wheeled table stood next to the bed, but the tabletop was empty. On the floor below lay a still-life of flowers, water puddles, and the fragments of a smashed glass vase. Some pills down there, too, spilled from a tiny plastic cup. It was all irrelevant. Medical machines in a corner. Irrelevant. A television set craning out from a wall mount, its screen black and irrelevant. And on a chair near the opposite end of the room: a pile of clothes and a gym bag.

Highly relevant.

I grabbed the bed’s siderails and pushed. Without the aid of abs, the maneuver was hell on the pecs and triceps. But the muscles were honed and athletic, and I pushed through until the torso was upright. Then I let the body thump to the floor, medical tubes snapping and rickety IV racks clattering. The fall hurt, but it broke no bones that I would have use for. Glass shards cut the skin as I rolled onto the stomach, but I ignored it. I crawled across the linoleum floor, the legs dragging uselessly behind me. A sudden fear: What if someone came though the door and saw me like this? The face warmed as anger smoldered in the chest.

I locked the eyes on the chair, on the clothes and the bag upon it. Unlike the emasculating hospital gown, these were clearly the patient’s property: sneakers, jeans, a hoodie. And the bag, bulging with personal effects and the promise of a phone.

I didn’t have the strength to pull the body upright, so I yanked the gym bag down onto the floor, unzipped it, and rummaged through. Underwear and T-shirts, an empty plastic water bottle, a wallet, keys, and sunglasses in a case. But no phone. What in the goddamn hell. The body was young, in its early twenties. Why was there no goddamn phone? The sunglasses reflected a scared, white, pretty-boy face, spoiled and still unhurt by life. The face stared at me, its nasal tube like some ridiculous plastic mustache. I smashed the glasses against the floor.

“Where is your goddamn phone?” I shouted.

The shrillness of the voice was the body’s, but its imminent hysteria was my own. A useless feeling, and if I wasn’t careful, it would open the door to the claustrophobic panic that would boot me out of this body and into the next. I closed the eyes and counted deep breaths.

It’s okay. It’s okay, because it has to be okay.

Little by little, I calmed down enough to think. To read the situation.

A young man, an athlete of some sort, handsome and blessed with money to pay for care like this. Of course there was a phone. Kid like this could never live without it. Especially not here, paralyzed and trapped in a hospital bed . . .

It would have to be within reach of the bed. On the table right next to it. The table that one of the body’s former occupants had swiped a panicked hand across, spilling everything to the floor. I openened the eyes, twisted the head back around, and scanned the linoleum.

And there, past the flowers and the shards of the broken vase, nestled against a hospital bed wheel, lay the flat, black shape of a phone.

Crawling back toward it felt like basic training, the burn of the shoulders driving me on. I grabbed the phone, and its screen lit up to reveal a photo of its owner dribbling a soccer ball. The local time, apparently, was 5:07 AM. This should have given me a hint as to where I was, but it didn’t. I had no idea how much time had passed since everything fell apart. Less than a day for sure, but the chaos of the shifts had left me too confused to keep track of hours and time zones. But the upper left hand corner identified the cellphone carrier as a UK one. That was something. At least the language wouldn’t get in the way.

I swiped up, hoping that the phone’s owner had activated facial recognition. He had, but the phone’s tiny lock symbol shook like a nervous head, denying access and prompting me to enter a six-digit passcode I had no way of knowing. Some treacherous part of my mind shat out a split-second memory of Jeffrey Poirier’s mousy, meddlesome face.

“Goddamn it!” I shouted, then caught myself and counted breaths.

Could the phone belong to someone else? A nurse, or—No, obviously not. The boy in the lock screen pic was clearly the same person I had seen reflected in the sunglasses.

Except for . . .

I ripped out the nasal tube and swiped up. Neat, colorful app icons fell into formation as the phone’s home screen opened.

All right. I finally had a phone, but for how long? The battery stood at seventeen percent, so video was out of the question. I tapped the green telephone app and entered the only number that I still knew by heart. I turned on the speaker and rolled the body onto its back, then lay there trying not to count the pulses of the ringing tone.

From this angle I could see an old, framed poster on the wall above the head of the bed. It was peppered with tiny drawings of animals, insects, plants, and sea creatures, all connected by a curving line that fractalled from the bottom of the design to its top. Bacteria and jellyfish, a dinosaur, a scorpion, and a soaring eagle, and there, clustered among the mammals, a human head in profile. The poster’s copy read “Tree of Life”. I felt weirdly relieved that the artist had left out one particular animal from the representation.

A sudden memory: Bare feet on a cold concrete floor. My little sister Sharon peeking between a pen’s steel bars, pointing at a piglet suckling a sow’s teat, its rump stained by a vague red birthmark, and Sharon whispering: “See, Clancy, that one’s called Rose cause it’s got a rose on its butt!” And her laughter and my laughter, both cut short as Dad—

The voice from the phone snapped me back to reality. I hadn’t caught its words, but the familiarity of its timbre shook me.

“Hello? Can you hear me?” I said, with all the authority that the body’s vocal chords could muster.

The voice on the other end—a voice I knew more intimately than any other—answered in a rollercoaster of strange, bouncy syllables punctuated by long vowels, bleating and accusatory.

“Do you speak English?” I thundered, cutting off the endless string of Chinese or whatever.

A short pause, and the assault of foreign words resumed. Blood rushed to the face as rage rolled in, and I slammed the floor. Shit! I was so goddamned close! But the heart rate was increasing, and again I counted breaths, forced myself to calm down. I rolled back onto the stomach so I could see the phone. The battery stood at fifteen percent.

No other option. I tapped the video chat icon.

Seconds dragged by, then a trill of electronic notes signalled that the connection was made. A face filled the screen. It seemed uglier than usual, partly because of the weary, frightened expression it wore, partly because it had its rights and its lefts mixed up. This was not really the case, of course. I was just used to seeing the face in a mirror.

I watched my own eyes stare back at me through the screen, not quite meeting my gaze. I watched my own lips form words in a language I didn’t speak. It was a violation, not just of my body, but of the uniform it wore and all that the uniform stood for. Again I wanted to vomit, and clouds of shame blurred my vision. Or was it just the dizzying sense of disorientation? Yes, I decided. Just the disorientation. The moment called for absolute confidence and authority.

I placed the paraplegic’s finger against the pale lips and shushed my own body’s occupant. It worked.

“You,” I said, pointing at the screen, “listen.” I pointed at the paraplegic’s ear.

My face stared back through the phone, fearful and confused.

“I,” I said, pointing at the paraplegic’s chest, “am Clancy Truman.” I traced the finger across the spot that corresponded to where my own body wore my nametag.

My face stared back, uncomprehending, still not meeting my gaze.

I repeated the gestures and the words, desperate for a sign that my body’s occupant understood.

I saw my lip quiver for a second or two, then break back into its torrent of incomprehensible babble. A note of panic rose in my voice, chasing it from its well-practiced baritone into an ever shriller register.

This was hopeless. I saw my eyes darting wildly as my body’s occupant twisted my head from side to side, screaming its garbage language and shaking my phone like some primitive shaman’s rattle. I caught a swooping, disjointed view around the large plexiglass cage at the heart of Anvil Base, with its industrial LED lights and racks of cameras, sensors and computer equipment. My body was apparently still alone inside the cage. If you didn’t count the Angelhammer, of course. Which I sure as hell didn’t. The on-screen image flickered into a scramble of pixels as the foreigner kept shaking the phone and screaming in panic. I closed the eyes.

We were fucked. We were all fucked. I was fucked. Sharon, wherever she might be, was fucked. Anvil Base was fucked, and all the men and women under my command. America was fu—

Quiet.

The phone had gone quiet.

Fifteen years on the force, ten as the county sheriff, I thought I’ve seen the grisly worst. Mostly ranch accidents. Hooves and horns through skulls, barbed wire through most everything, I got a stomach lined with steel, a gag reflex that doesn’t gag. And here I am, bent over, OJ, eggs, biscuits and gravy on their way out.

Sarah, my deputy, she’s hurling, too. Side by side, buckled over, we’re retching, flinging spittle and digested food from the griddle off our hands. Looking like newbs is what we are, as if we’ve never seen death days after. But this gruesome display defies physics and my iron constitution.

This ain’t no accident.

The victim is a woman, blonde, in her twenties or thirties. She’s wearing urban-camouflaged fatigues, smattered with blood and her insides. Her face unrecognizable. Her body size and type indeterminable. She’s an amoeba of contorted body, crushed from a fall. From where? That’s what Sarah and I got to figure out.

Standing, I block the sweltering sun with my hand and look around. Not a building nor high ground in sight. Brown prairie grass and big Montana sky stretch to the horizons.

“Someone could have dumped her here, George.” Sarah swats at a magpie with her cowboy hat, her long black hair blowing in the wind. The magpie chatters and flutters a few feet away. The flies, too many to do anything about, feast.

“Naw.” I scan the ranch land, inhaling whiffs of fetid air. “No tire marks anywhere.”

“Could have done it by horse.”

“Could have, and a cumbersome transport that’d have been, but heck, look at that.” I point to where the woman’s parts lie scattered. “There’s a crater the size of a buffalo wallow, mostly dirt and such. She fell right here. I’m sure of that…only that.” I crane my neck up at the endless blue above, not a wisp of white anywhere. “An angel in God’s Country.”

Sarah packs a can of Copenhagen and pops a pinch in her mouth, never letting that badge or her condo fool anyone. She’s cowgirl, through and through. Raised on a ranch, her adopted ma and pa still live on that ranch. And get her on that ranch? She outrides, out-ropes, out-wrangles damn anybody. Fine deputy, too.

She spits black juice on the ground. “What’s an angel doing without wings?”

“Dying is what.” I shake my head. “Awful way to go. Tossed from a plane or helicopter, I reckon. Only thing makes sense.”

“You recognize them fatigues?” Sarah creeps to the body.

I follow, careful not to step where blood has sprayed. Grass crunches under each step. My nose is now used to the smell of decay, and I catch hints of the prairie with the wind, a dry, sweet smell, like coriander. The flute-like call of a western meadowlark warbles nearby. I crouch for a closer look, feeling all my forty years, and ignore the tickle of flies on my nose, then ear, then cheek, their buzz a grating constant of my job. “They’re for urban warfare. Anyone with a credit card can order them online. But look here.” I point to a small green flag with six yellow stars sewn onto her breast pocket. “You recognize that flag?”

“New to me,” Sarah says with a smirk I can’t place. I’m about to ask why the grin, then it vanishes as if it never before existed, like a rainbow after the air dries out. Her eyes are misty, a thousand yards away. It’s the look she gets when admiring a newborn foal.

“You all right there?” I snap a picture of the flag with my phone.

She sniffles and wipes her eyes. “Sometimes this job just gets to me. It burrows under my skin. Makes me want to shed it.” She swallows, gutting tobacco spit.

Her answer doesn’t sit right. It tastes off because of that subtle smile seconds before her tears swell.

“I know the feeling.” I look toward the heavens from where the woman fell. “You know where to next.”

Sarah stands and walks to our two ATVs, which we rode in on from an overgrown dirt road that’s not worthy of a name or map. “Airport.”

My new father shows up at the park with a withered sunflower.

“It’s all I could afford at the flower shop,” he apologizes.

It’s not a promising start. He obviously sat on it accidentally, too.

“Did you even read my profile?” I demand.

“You like long walks. And scenic drives. And flowers,” he adds, proud of himself for remembering all these things. “We can go anywhere, drive anywhere you want.”

His car is parked across the street. A gray Ford with cord wrapped around the bumper and a plastic bag taped to a broken window because he ‘hasn’t gotten around to fixing it since the crash.’

I imagine us swerving around a semi, tires squealing over the edge, car junk littering the coast line.

I’m not going on any long drives in that car, least of all down Highway 1.

He holds up his hands.

“Hey, that’s fine.”

It isn’t fine, not at all. He walks away, throwing the sunflower into a garbage can.

I don’t want to care, but I’ve been alone ever since my last father choked on a chicken bone at KFC and died in the restaurant.

If they can call it a restaurant.

But there’s a nickname for people like me on Adopt-a-Parent.

Snifflers.

I’ve seen their scarring profiles. The mournful poses. The bad poetry. They take up crochet and listen to indie bands.

No one wants a Sniffler.

They’re chronically sad, and lethargic, and basically doomed to be alone.

According to my profile, I’m supposed to be healing. Taking charge of my life again.

I speak with exclamation marks! I greet the day with a smile! I sing in my car! I do goat yoga! Because I live life to the fullest! Every day! I am super fun and positive!

My new father and I drive to the beach. We do not die. Not then, anyway.

We walk in silence down the boardwalk and stare at seagulls and joggers and surfers. It isn’t relaxing like it’s supposed to be and the silence is awkward and none of us knows what to say.

Maybe it will get better in time.

Depending on how much time we have.

“How about a Matcha Latte!” I exclaim.

My new father doesn’t understand the concept of whip cream.

“And why is it green? What’s wrong with plain old black coffee?” he grumbles. “What’s wrong with people these days?”

I don’t know where to begin. So that’s at least one thing we have in common.

My new father looks at me like he sees through my charade. “Are you angry all the time, too?”

I’ve been angry all the time for a long time. But if this is a test, I don’t intend to fail.

Besides, the membership is expensive and I already work two jobs.

I won’t make the same mistake I made with my second father.

The neediness, the crying. The snotty kind.

I was in a bad place back then.

“Clean yourself up,” he had reprimanded. He was looking for someone to watch the game with, someone to go fishing with, this wasn’t what he ordered. Even though I rattled off stuff like ‘tackle’ and ‘bait’ to impress him, terms I had read up on the internet.

It didn’t work. He left me a two star rating.

It’s taken me a while to recover my reputation.

I’ve been through a lot of fathers and none come close to the original. But if I’m not careful, I’ll start to sound like a Sniffler.

My new father invites me over for a home cooked meal.

His wife, Brenda, watches a lot of the food network and cooks dishes with old world names like ‘casserole’ and ‘meatloaf’.

“It’s delicious,” I lie.

Their house is something out of a sixties sitcom; floral wallpaper, pink carpeting, and shelves jammed with plates “from our wedding”. There are random pieces of furniture everywhere. They’d take me on a tour, but they “haven’t gotten around to organizing”.

Wedged in-between all the stuff, there’s a framed photo of them next to a little boy in overalls.

“Our son Walter,” my new father explains.

I don’t ask what happened to him. I’ve heard enough sad stories.

Adopt-a-Parent holds a circle every month. They check in on our progress. They give us a ‘sharing space’ to talk about our feelings and complain, but mostly they want testimonials.

I never have anything to say, but still I show up because the food is catered from my favorite Indian-Vietnamese-Jamaican-fusion restaurant.

“Some kids from my Behavioral Economics class are coming over Saturday.” Christof lounges on my bed, eating a slice of sausage and garlic pizza for breakfast.

“That’s nice,” I say with a mouth full of toothpaste. According to my watch, I have six and a half minutes before I need to be out the door.

“You should hang out with us.”

I step into the bathroom that connects our bedrooms, spit, and turn to pull on my freshly polished shoes. They’re gone. I know for a fact I left them by the shower, but all I see are dust balls and tumbleweeds of body hair.

“We’re going to Mulligan’s,” my brother says. “They’ve got live music on Saturdays.”

“Have you seen my shoes?” Five minutes to go. The fringes of panic creep in as I rip back the shower curtain and search behind the toilet, picturing myself blowing the interview over a pair of lost shoes.

As Christof searches my bedroom, he asks, “Do you think you could get me a job there after I graduate? I figure an insurance company must have a ton of openings with all the weird shit going on. I hear it’s getting worse.”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll see what I can do.”

At last, I check behind the bathroom door and find my shoes waiting for me on the scale.

Three and a half minutes.

Sitting on the toilet, I pull them on. There’s no reason I shouldn’t knock this interview out of the park. My boss, who’s been insisting I want this promotion, says I’m the strongest candidate.

I step back into my bedroom and find that Christof, who is still looking for my shoes, has pulled a clear plastic tub out from beneath my bed.

“Don’t touch that!”

He looks up, wilted slice of pizza in hand.

I shove the tub back where it belongs. “I found them. Thanks for helping me look.”

He’s clearly about to ask about the tub when Dad starts shouting again.

“He must’ve lost another client,” Christof says.

Two minutes.

“Probably.” I rush back into the bathroom and wrap my tie around my neck. Put on my jacket… get in the car… take Lockwood to avoid traffic… park … use the bathroom… answer their questions… get promoted…. finally afford to—

The lights blink off.

“Did we lose electricity?” I step back into my room. “Christof?” My brother is gone.

One minute.

As I walk down the hall the various ways a power outage could interfere with the interview race through my head. “Christof?” He’s probably just checking the circuit breaker.

I turn into the kitchen and glance out the window.

The sky is crimson.

The sun, clouds and blue expanse are all gone, replaced by a solid, fiery red ceiling. There are stars, though. There are more stars than I’ve seen in my life. Every single one glistens oily black, like bottomless holes threatening to suck me in.

I stumble back, hitting the pantry door. “I can’t be here.”

I’ve seen this sky before, in illustrations drawn by people half the world believes are either delusional or lying.

“I can’t be here.”

With tremendous effort, I pull my eyes from the sky and take in what is waiting for me on the ground. The porch, lawn, and trees are all gone, swept away to make room for a sixty-foot golden-brown wall. There are gaps in the wall, corridors leading God-knows-where.

I slide to the floor, shutting my eyes. “I can’t be here.”