Lightspeed: Year One

In the nightmare, she stands alone on the crumbling bank of a sluggish, muddy river washed red as blood by the setting sun. She doesn’t know the name of the city rising up around her, and suspects that it has no name. Only dark and empty windows, skyscrapers like broken teeth, the ruins of bridges that long ago carried the city’s vanished inhabitants from one side of the wide red river to the other.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us, and isn’t that what Matthew Arnold wrote, or T. S. Eliot, or Maharshi Ramakrishna, or some other long dead man? Sylvia takes a step nearer the river, and a handful of earth tumbles into the water. The ripples spread out from the shore, until the current pulls them apart.

Behind her, something has begun to growl—a low and threatful sound, the sound of something that might tear her apart in an instant. She glances over her shoulder, but there’s only the buckled, abandoned street behind her and then the entrance to an alleyway. It’s already midnight in the alley, and she knows that the growling thing is waiting for her there, where it has always waited for her. She turns back to the river, because the thing in the alley is patient, and the swollen crimson sun is still clinging stubbornly to the western horizon.

And now she sees that it’s not the sunset painting the river red, but the blood of the dead and dying creatures drowning in the rising waters. The river devours their integrity, wedding one to the other, flesh to flesh, bone to bone. In another moment, there’s only a single strangling organism, though a thousand pairs of eyes stare back at her in agony and horror, and two thousand hearts bleed themselves dry through a million ruptured veins.

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

Countless talons and fingers, flippers and fins, tear futilely at the mud and soft earth along the river’s edge, but all are swept away. And when the sun has gone, Sylvia turns to face the alley, and the growling thing that is her life, and wakes to the full moon outside the skipjet’s window.

“You can’t expect more of them,” Fera says, “Not more than you expect of the straights, not just because they’re going through the same thing you are.”

“None of us are going through the same thing,” Sylvia replies, not caring whether or not Fera hears the bitterness in her voice. “We’re all going through this alone. Every one of us is alone, just like White said in his book. Every one of us is a species of one.”

“I think you expect too much,” Fera says, and then the elevator has reached the twenty-third floor, and the hidden bell rings, and the doors slide silently open. Sylvia steps out into the hall.

“Please promise me you won’t spend the whole weekend locked in your room,” Fera says. “At least come back down for Circe Seventeen’s panel at eight, and—”

“Yeah,” Sylvia says as the doors slide shut again. “Sure. I’ll see you there,” and she follows the hallway back to her room.

Sylvia is standing in front of the long bathroom mirror, her skin tinted a pale and sickly green by the buzzing fluorescent light. She’s naked, except for the gauze bandages and flesh-tone dermapad patches on her belly and thighs. The hot water is running, and the steam has begun to fog the mirror. She leans forward and wipes away some of the condensation.

“There’s always a risk of rejection,” Dr. Collier said, and that was more than three weeks ago now, her third trip to the Lycaon Clinic. “You understood that before we began. There’s always the risk of a violate retrovirus, especially when the transcription in question involves non-amniote DNA.”

And, of course, she’d understood. He’d told her everything, all the risks and qualifying factors explained in detail long before her first treatment. Everyone always understands, until they’re the one unlucky fuck in a thousand.

No one ever lied to me, she thinks, but there’s no consolation whatsoever in the thought.

In places, the bandages are stained and stiff with the discharge of her infections. Sylvia dries her hands on a clean white wash cloth, then begins to slowly remove the dermapad just below her navel. The adhesive strips around the edges come away with bits of dead skin and dried blood still attached.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” Dr. Collier said, the first time they met. “Even now, with all we know and everything that we’ve been able to accomplish in the last fifty years, what you want is very, very dangerous. And if something does go wrong, there’s very little hope of turning back.” And then she signed all the documents stating that he’d told her these things, and that she understood the perils and uncertainty, and that she was submitting to the procedures of her own free will.

She takes a deep breath and stares back at herself from the mirror, the sweat on her face to match the steam on the glass, and drops the dermapad into the sink. It stains the water a dark reddish-brown. And her mother, and all the faces from the bar—Maxwell White and Alex Singleton and all the rest—seem to hover somewhere just behind her. They smirk and shake their heads, just in case she’s forgotten that the rest of the world always knew she was weak and that, in the end, she’d get exactly what she’s always had coming to her.

I know all about those people. They’re filth, you understand? All of them. Every single, goddamned one.

The rubbery violet flesh beneath her navel is swollen and marbled with pustules and open sores. The tip of a stillborn tentacle, no longer than her index finger, hangs lifeless from her belly. Dr. Collier wanted to amputate it, but she wouldn’t let him.

“I hate like hell to say it, but he’s right,” Fera Delacroix told her, after the scene in the hotel bar, while they were waiting for an elevator. “You can’t keep it a secret forever, Syl. What you’re doing —what everyone here this weekend is doing—it’s about finally being honest about ourselves. I know that doesn’t necessarily make it easy, but it’s the truth.”

“No,” Sylvia says, gently touching the dead tentacle. “This is the truth.” She presses her finger into one of the tiny, stalked suckers, teasing the sharp hook at the center. “I think this is all the truth I need.”

She cleans the cancerous flesh and covers it with a fresh dermapad, then peels off one of the patches on her left thigh and repeats the process. It takes her more than an hour to wash and dress all the lesions, and when she’s done, when all those dying parts of her that are no longer precisely human have been hidden behind their sterile masks, she shuts off the water and gets dressed. She still has time for a light dinner before Circe Seventeen’s talk on the link between shamanism and the origins of parahumanism, and Sylvia knows that if she isn’t there, Fera Delacroix will come looking for her.

HWANG’S BILLION BRILLIANT DAUGHTERS Alice Sola Kim

When Hwang finds a time that he likes, he tries to stay awake. The longest he has ever stayed awake is three days. The longest someone has ever stayed awake is eleven days. If Hwang sleeps enough times, he will eventually reach a time in which people do not have to sleep. Unfortunately, this can only come about through expensive gene therapy that has to be done long before one is born. Thus, it is the rich who do not have to sleep. They stay awake all night and bound across their useless beds, shedding crumbs and drops of sauce as they eat everyone else’s food.

Whenever Hwang goes to sleep, he jumps forward in time. This is a problem. This is not a problem that is going to solve itself.

Sometimes Hwang wakes to find that he’s only jumped forward a few days. The most Hwang has ever jumped is one hundred seventy years.

After a while, his daughters stop looking exactly Asian. His genes—previously distilled from a population in a small section of East Asia for thousands of years—have mixed with genes from other populations and continued to do so while Hwang slept. In fact, it all started with Hwang and his ex-wife. Hwang’s daughters are a crowd of beautiful, muddled, vigorous hybrids, with the occasional recessive trait exploding like fireworks—squash-colored hair, gray eyes, albinism.

Backward, fool, backward! You were supposed to take me backward! He wishes he could find Grishkov and scream at him, but Grishkov is dead, of course. He died sometime that night, the first night Hwang slept and jumped through days, years, decades.

Later, Hwang awakes in a world with no men. Reproduction occurs through parthenogenesis. Scientists discovered that the genes of the father are the ones that shorten human lifespan; scientists decided to do