Empty Space

& make the moves. That bitch comes up fast but she will never be as fast as me. I call out my warning, they don’t want to hear that, so I kill them again. I can’t hear the language they talk between themselves. Do you know what it is to be like me, your condition is unnameable. It is relieved of all previous contexts. This freedom! My goodness when you’re like me even your piss is inhuman . . .

Anna Waterman could watch the soap slip off the edge of the bath one night in 1999.

A white figure knelt in the cooling bathwater, while another figure curled round it from behind. Laughter. The water splashed about and the bath made vigorous but mournful sounds.

Unused to skulking around her own life like this, Anna found its details surprising: not so much in themselves but in that they existed at all. It was exciting, in a way, to see your own naked body walking away from you, or hear yourself say with a laugh, ‘Now, what can we eat?’ But everything had the false clarity you get with a certain kind of photograph. Every surface proved to be microscopically available to her new vantage point; yet they were without meaning. The facts were often different too. The man in the bath, for instance, who she had always remembered as Michael, turned out to be Tim. How embarrassing. Everything was the same but, in the end, quite different. You could count the varieties of toothpaste in the bathroom, which a memory of sex doesn’t normally encourage. She could view every aspect of that event, and of the events surrounding it, and of every other event in her life. A generation later, water poured its yeasty bulk over the Brownlow weir; ponies ran about in a field as if suddenly released; skylarks rose and fell over the South Downs like busy lifts: at exactly the same time, Anna could watch herself, peacefully becalmed in what she had learned to call the Noughties, rapping upon her kitchen window.

‘Marnie,’ she was calling, ‘you annoying child! Leave the hose alone!’

Marnie at six years old. Anna tidying up for Tim. Anna, alone with her life at last, staring out across the field in the June twilight, drinking her fourth glass of Pinot Noir. She called the cat home, ‘James, you old fool. What have you found now?’ She saw herself undress beneath the willows, hide her shoes, wade into the river in the moonlight. But, as bright and precise as if she was viewing them through optical glass, these scenes only reminded her of her present predicament. As she watched herself go up and down the garden — a neat, doll-like, slightly speeded-up figure seen day after day under mixed lighting conditions, moving inevitably towards its own fall — she began to think how the situation might be retrieved. She could connect with any of those moments. She could have a voice in her own past.

Everything that was wrong stemmed from the summerhouse.

What if Anna didn’t fall?

. . . She is always trying to say her name, how she fell out of love with her parents quite early in life, ‘They humiliated me in some way before I was five.’ She was a small, friendly, nervous girl who liked being up early and late. Too anxious on her own, too anxious in company. I was happiest with one other person. I’ve seen things here you would not believe: men with cocks two feet long . . .

All over the Halo, sometimes stealthily, sometimes with an expenditure of energy amounting almost to fanfare, the Quarantine orbits had begun to empty themselves out. Reports conflicted. The situation was confused.

Two hundred miles above Mas d’Elies, showers of shortlived exotic vacuum events were detected, nesting inside the usual quantum froth like pearls in a handful of black lace. Such subtle fireworks, originating deep in the graininess of the universe itself, were normally associated with only the most alien of engines —

Twenty-five fuck-tourists from Keks-Varley III claimed to have seen ‘a wheel of fire’ crossing the nightside sky of Funene. Visible to the naked eye for three hours, it broke up into a series of aurora-like pulses then fell below the horizon. During this period no activity was observed in the quarantine orbit; though shortly afterwards it became invisible to instruments —

Laid out under stark light like dirty ice rings round a methane giant, the vast orbit at Mycenae had been for years a destination in itself, drawing tourists from as far away as Bell Laboratories and Anais Anais. The biggest collection of dead people in the universe, it broke up across a day, only to reassemble not long afterwards just outside the system’s heliosheath; flowing away from there into interstellar space, a broad slow river. The K-ships, darting in and out of it like kingfishers, caught nothing: what they saw was not what they got —

In the cold and dark over New Venusport, the hulks blinked out one by one. Last to go: the tiny cockleshell containing Bobby and Martha, along with the outbreak of rogue code known as Bella. The little boy, who didn’t remember much, assumed his present condition was a phase everyone went through. Life, enticing and inexplicable by turns, had already demonstrated its weirdness. One thing was certain, Bobby thought: you were out the other side of most things in a year. The women knew better. Since the events in her room Bella had been, in a sense, all three of them. Long before that, she had given up on the idea of knowledge: to her, the sarcophagus was as puzzling as the hallway of a house. Martha, meanwhile, alternating between panic and acceptance, awaited resolution.

. . . Two feet long and not quite rigid, you had no faith a thing like that could penetrate anyone. It was more of a flag than a cock, something to wave at the world. Jet Tone, Justine, Pantopon Rose, The Kleptopastic Fantastic, Avtomat, the little girl who could crack anything. Frankie Machine and Murder Incorporated. The Markov Property. I get fish, the other says. Don’t go in the summerhouse! I can do something with my mind but for all things catch fire & flowers spring up, nothing else happens. You can keep a cock like that I wouldn’t want it near me. I like their legs better. Little boys, they like my stink but they’re afraid. ‘Is that what you want, hon?’ . . .

As in all bad dreams, there were physical states forbidden to the assistant: in this case anything she had previously understood as movement.

At the same time, generous degrees of freedom opened up in other directions. Through the physics of VF14/2b, her ‘life’ — whatever that had been — now lay open to her at all points and along all axes. She soon found herself looping easily and repeatedly into her own past —

Saudade City on a wet Friday night. In the basement of the old SiteCrime building at the corner of Uniment & Poe, two agents and a wire jockey were servicing a client in the basement. The assistant watched her earlier self leaning in at the basement doorway, attracted by the energy and warmth of the interrogation, experiencing the nearest thing a person like her could feel to a companionable emotion. ‘Boys,’ she heard herself tease the interrogation team, ‘we must do this again!’

She waited for herself to leave and then stepped into the room. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘my name is Pearlant —’ They stared at her puzzledly, their mouths falling open.

South Hemisphere, New Venusport. She tracked herself down to the circus ground, where the empty motels shone with light rain in an offshore wind. There was no hurry, but as soon as she heard her prior self call out that way, the seagull cry of ‘Wait!’, that was the moment. Jump up out of the sand. Reach in through the doped protein meshes around the brainstem. Squeeze. Step away. Let those Kv12.2 expression issues do the work — seizure sites propagating across the cortex in cascades, autonomic functions going down one by one. It was supposed to keep her immobile long enough to talk. ‘Listen, honey, listen to me: don’t jump!’ She tried to get her own attention, instead she triggered a built-in EMC shutdown; someone was going to feel some shame over that in the morning.

It was the same wherever she went —

Toni Reno gaped and sweated as she came at him from out of time — Toni thought he was state of the art, but he proved to be wrong about that. Poor George the gene tailor in his little shop, both attracted and terrified by the engineered kairomones in her sweat, overcame his fear at last, clutched gratefully at her tits and dropped dead at her feet in the dark. Only a week or two before that, tissue had burst out of Enka Mercury’s armpit like dirty kapok. The assistant just had no luck with these people, and, in a way, even less with herself. She was present in the past: she had a real presence there. But as a communications strategy, communication could never work: not for a person like her. She just wasn’t built for it. No one seemed to understand that she was there to speak to them, that she really had something to say. She couldn’t control her anger at the people who had built her, she couldn’t control her anger at what Gaines had done to her, she couldn’t control her anger at herself. Her victims, meanwhile, couldn’t control their fear. It was a toxic mixture. To these soft targets — ambushed with a thorough, deft, cat-like thoughtlessness then left dismembered, eviscerated, dangling in the tailored but chaotic spacetime eddies of VF14/2b — she brought only the lifetime frustration of the manufactured thing. She was trying to warn