Mother frowned.
Fleur stood, taking it all in, then remembered her own passengers. She released her clenched first and threw the three silver projectors into the air, where they sparked to life, emitting Hank, Whistler, and Nine in perfect emulation.
Whistler flattened the front of his robe. “Mother, what is this?”
Nine walked to Fleur’s side, his cold projected hand engulfing hers, fingers looping through fingers. She smiled, but not before catching the icy gaze of the five-year-old in the beanbag chair.
“Gary is a vessel. Where are we going?”
Hank took in his surroundings with his trademark scowl, reached into his pocket and was pleased to find that Mother had been kind enough to emulate a pack of smokes for him. He pulled one out and found in that dreamlike sense of hazy possibility that was the new life of the recently-uploaded that the cigarette was already burning. All he had to do was place it to his lips and inhale.
A bubble of nonspace erupted around Hank’s hand and the cigarette was gone, along with a large portion of the hand itself. Hank frowned silently, retrieved his projector from his pocket with his remaining hand, shook it a few times. A new hand faded into place with a little burst of static.
“This is gonna be a long flight without no smokes, Mother. Where we goin’?”
Nine and Fleur sat on the loveseat beside Mother, and Hank and Whistler plopped unceremoniously down on beanbags of their own. The television flickered to life, displaying a field of stars.
Mother glared up at the voice from nowhere.
“She’s the Exile.” Fleur looked down at Mother with sad eyes. “They hurt her. And now she’s going to use us to hurt them. Not just a war or a jihad. Not just an extinction.”
“She’s going to use us to destroy Heaven.”
The pleasure displayed on the child’s face was unmistakeable.
Whistler cleared his throat. “Shouldn’t we wait until Gary is *ahem*
Mother rolled her eyes.
With Gary distracted with the takeoff procedures, Hank lit a cigarette. Whistler fanned the smoke away, pulled his collar up around his neck and cheeks, his eyes darting toward the child. Fleur huddled closer to Nine, her dark curls tickling his neck and chin and cheek as he bent, kissed the top of her head, inhaled her scent, dreamed those dreams that he could never live for his lack of body and soul and future.
Mother was practically bursting with excitement. Her face radiated joy at the impending departure, her smile wide, dimples marking flushed cheeks, her entire body rocking back and forth in the ridiculous beanbag chair, ridiculous for its blatant anachronism in a universe now devoid of romper rooms and hepcats.
[we’ll bring it to them. an end of sorts, but more…so much more.]
Gary began to resonate with the shiver of a million phase drives. Fleur closed her eyes, sick to her soul with the realization of what they were about to do.
They left.
THE STILLNESS BETWEEN
She knew very little, but she knew beyond a doubt that she loved chocolate milk.
She drank as much chocolate milk as she could, which really wasn’t that much, but she knew that chocolate milk brought her almost as much if not more happiness as anything in the sterile world that had been her home for her entire life. The angels disapproved of her mass-consumption of that silken chocolaty goodness, but they really couldn’t do anything to stop her. Nan would voice her disapproval in that tugging, lecturing way, but she would just smile sweetly and ask for more. Always more chocolate milk. In her little world, there was an unending supply of anything that she desired. The angels had to do exactly as she ordered, a fact that she was just now beginning to take advantage of on a regular basis. Some would call her spoiled. She preferred to think of herself as a child of privilege. Chocolate milk? We’ve got oceans.
“Lily, dear?”
She looked up from the tabletop where her gaze had been transfixed on the colloidal action of millions of brown chocolate flecks interspersed throughout her glass of white near-milk. The silver spoon with which she had thoughtfully stirred the chocolate powder into her beloved drink stopped its revolution, came to rest.
“I don’t want to.”
Nan pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. She tousled Lily’s dark curls, pushed one wayward spiral back behind the little girl’s ear. “I know, dear. But you have to go outside. Just for a while, okay? Then you can come back in.”
“Can I have some more?” She indicated the half-empty (half-full?) glass before her, even though she knew the answer already. She could always have more. She could not, however, persuade Nan to let her stay inside today. Or any day.
“Of course, dear. Let’s go.” Nan’s face was as warm and kind as a first-generation projection could muster. If Lily squinted her eyes just enough, she could see the flicker. If she reached out far enough with her mind, she could feel the cool surface of the silver projector sphere at the center of Nan’s being. Sometimes, she resented being ordered outside for this daily ritual by a loose collection of photons revolving around that marble-sized machine.
Lily slid down out of her chair, walked toward the door, her hand on the doorknob before she felt Nan’s motherly touch, draping her coat around her shoulders. She turned the knob and went outside for her daily ration of reality, all-too-aware that her every move was being recorded by a veritable universe of machines.
A typical summer day, cold wind blowing over dead tree limbs, weak sunlight falling on her face, not warming but simply illuminating. That clatter of sound from above always chilled her to the bone even more so than the wind or the air or the growing realization of her isolation. She walked the avenue alone…Well, not entirely alone. Nan walked behind her, watching. She was always being watched. Even the suffocating trees above seemed to watch her with their interwoven cemetery embrace.
Lily sat down on the bench at the end of the lane, as she always did. Nan stopped several hundred paces behind her, as she always did. The bench was at the center of what had once been a beautifully-landscaped
