Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (20 page)

“I remember.” I say. A city, a street, a moment.

I want to cry, and Ghent wants to let me, but he can’t. No one has found a way to let us do that yet.

“futurecoffee” by Vincent Konrad

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A city street scene with buildings of various sizes and shapes in the background. In the foreground, there are people sitting at a street-side cafe. At a table on the left side, mid-way in the image, a woman sits alone as a male waiter takes her order. At the bottom and right of the image, a man and a woman are sitting together a table. The woman is facing the viewer, and she is asking the man sitting across from her, “How’s your tea?” (the words are written in cursive). The man has his back to the viewer. He is looking down at a electronic tablet device that has the words, “HOW IS YOUR…” written in block capitals. Directly behind this couple, a man is walking down the street. This man is wearing glasses that are emitting lidar beams enabling him to “see” where he is going.

into the waters i rode down

Jack Hollis Marr

hhhhhh

??

hhhhh

well this is fucking useless isn’t it

kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

that’s worse Romaan STOP IT

kkkkkke
_yesn’tk
kkkka
_nyoukk
kkus?

there’s something now

kkkkkkkaliyekkkkkKKKKKK

fuck that hurt!

what was that

was that my name

try again

kkkkkkaliye?aliye!kkkkkk

YES I can hear it now /// I can HEAR it (guess this is hearing?) this is fucking weird i tell you

_kkkk
Aliyeogdwe
_kkk
iditd
_kkkk
knowwhatthismeans?

Of course I know what it fucking means. I’ve been working on the project as long as any of them; longer than many. I guess Romaan thinks my work didn’t count because none of it’s been said aloud, only input through computers. Well, screw him. He’s never spoken to anyone working on this back on Earth in person either, only in text relay, but I suppose that’s different, right. After all, I’m only the fallback after none of the hearing walking people’s brains could adapt to the neural linkage, aren’t I?

Must fucking
burn
Romaan, that I could do this and he couldn’t, just cos my battered old brain’s had to adjust to so much fucking adaptive tech over the decades.
Neuroplasticity.
Nice little word. I suppose it’s nice to have something they’re jealous of, for once. God knows several degrees don’t do it, not when you’re old and a woman and deaf.

The hearing’s secondary, of course, a side bonus of the main task: that neural linkage between my brain and an animal’s. I’ve been working on it most of my life, this fake telepathy, trying to match the other side’s advantage in this strange war.

We tried between people, but it was too overwhelming. We—lost people, in that stage.

(Saira, my dear Saira, who will never be the same; I see her each week, her in her bed and me in my chair, and she smiles and touches my hand, and doesn’t speak. Leish, Persis; oh, my dead dears. I reread that poem this week, before the linkage that might have done the same to me, thinking of you.
Rock-a-bye baby, washing on the line
. The drowned dead voices asking,
How’s it above?
I imagine your voices in those lines, the white bone talking:
When she smiles, is there dimples? What’s the smell of parsley? I am going into the darkness of the darkness forever.
My lost darlings all, I’m so sorry, I am. I think of your sinews in the far-away earth, and how I’m not enough. I can’t give you back the world, the smell of parsley, anything at all. Would you have been pleased that we succeeded, in the end?)

My Romaan was the one who worked out the audiovisual part; he’s brilliant, if annoying, and being able to promote this sort of shit to civilians always does the Service good, doesn’t it? Look at how helpful we are. We can even give veterans back some of the senses we cost them. Know he’ll expect me to be over the moon (ha, there’s an old-fashioned phrase, now) over
actually hearing
for the first time in my life. That’s what I’m supposed to be excited about, isn’t it? Noise, or the simulation of it, in my skull. Big deal. Bunch of hissing and clicking and the odd weirdly three-dimensional word that hurts and echoes. I’d stick with text, if it wasn’t for the rest.

But. The rest. To get
down there
, and not in a clunky suit but slipping easy as fish through not-water through the strange thick air, resting light in alien animal mind, witch-riding a foreign familiar in a world no human’s ever
touched
, not with skin and eyes and nose—and ears, I suppose, those too (do the otterfishcatsnake things they showed me
have
ears?)—this extraordinary modern magic that will, if it goes right, let us eavesdrop on the other and its hidden world… For that, oh God, for
that.
That’s worth all the hissing and clicking inconvenience, the drilling in my skill, all the years of different aids.

And, I mean, it’s war. Doing my bit for the Effort. All the shit I was meant to do, defective daughter of a military family. Daddy would be
so proud
, the old bugger. Thank fuck he’s dead. Last thing I need’s him being proud that his broken little girl’s able to be a spy.

Them the enemy the Bad Guys the invaders
(though how they’re invading planets that used to be
theirs
… but you don’t question that, do you, old woman? Not if you’ve got the sense you were born with) and worst
the aliens
. NotOfUs. The Others. Headless freaks, The Blob. Spooks, Dad called them. You’d think he’d’ve been less shitty, given the crap people in his own beloved military called him in his day, but I reckon there wasn’t much that’d make Dad be less shitty. Whatever they are, they can move easy through that thick weird air down there, and we can’t. We can protect our mining interests in vehicles and suits, missiles and lasers and bombs from space, but we can’t walk among them. And we can’t do what they can, use our minds as weapons, not directly. Neither of those things.

Well.
I
can, now.

The animal they bring me’s as high as my knee, as long as my body lying flat. It
does
have ears, little hollow dents. I wish I could reach through the clear glass or plastic and touch it, see if those are thin scales or strange fur, if it’s warm or cool against my own smooth skin. Its head is small, sharp-nosed, its legs short like a ferret’s, its back supple as a cat’s. Its gill-like orifices pulse gently. It looks at me through one nictating eye and then the next, turning its head like a bird. I can’t remember its scientific name; we’ve been calling it the catsnake, and it fits.

I look for the implants but they’re invisible, hidden in the scale-spike-fur. My own make my head throb, pried between the plates of my skull. I wonder if it’s afraid. I can see its sides expand and deflate slowly as it breathes; maybe it’s sedated. Lucky bugger.

we’re going
_kkkkk
to trythelinkage h
_hhhh
ere first
, Romaan says. The existing link, the one through the computer, is working so much better now, though I’m still adjusting to (the illusion of) actually
hearing
words in my skull. Whatever part of my brain that input stimulates
aches
, a constant weird throb. I’d rather he just used my old text relay, but he’s too fucking proud of his invention. And I don’t want to look
ungrateful
, do I? That doesn’t look good for the cameras that’ve been trained on me these recent weeks, on and off, for this marvellous breakthrough: hearing to the deaf! Sight to the blind! Pick up thy bed, and walk!

This isn’t being filmed, though. The Service doesn’t like too many records of its little failures, and we’ve had too many of those in this long project. I’m very aware of that as I close my eyes, let them wire me up yet again, little clips and clamps, the vibrations that used to be my sound. I move my hands on the padded arms of my chair, feel-hear them run through me: bass throb, treble sting. Familiar and easing, beneath the godawful
kkkkkHHHkkkk
ness they’ve given me.

And then, the linkage.

Not much at first: sharp little zap all through me, leaving a dull ache in my back teeth, heavy sort of throb in my balls that could almost be pleasure. And then—falling. Not like falling in dreams, not like the sick whirl when you miss a step (I remember that, so clearly), but vertigo, everything spinning, no up no down and nothing to hold onto (somewhere my fingers clench, but I can’t feel it, I can’t
feel
it, oh god the old paralysis, please no—) and darkness and lights all mixed and through the computer feed my own
screaming
fed back to me on and on and on, ringing through me so that I batter myself against glass, supple body thrashing helplessly between panes like a sample on a slide somehow living and aware, the noise must stop the noise must
stop
—

—and this is not my body and these are not my ears that hear, this is not-i and i together, pulse of gills and beat of strange slow blood. catsnake is this you, i, i-thou, we? catsnake is frightened, and so is aliye. hush, hush. rock-a-bye. you’re hurting us, we’re hurting us. see, the screaming has stopped. see, there through the distorting glass, the woman in the chair. when she smiles, there’s dimples. there, the slow breathing, the calming blood. i-thou-i, resting nested. nest-memory, slow weed-breathing thickness by the slow river’s bank, dark hole hollow, infant scale-skin against adult fur: so we are twice mother, thou and i? so I held my baby. how soft her tiny fingers were, her soft and dented skull! so; so. we are together.

—and then we are not, and I am in my chair with everything
hurting
and my fingers tearing at the implants, Romaan shouting
kkkkkk
and the catsnake thrashing panicked in its narrow tank. I get myself free and wheel myself across to it, press my hands against the glass. There are alarms somewhere: I can feel them. The film on its eyes is flickering fast in panic. I have never touched an animal that wasn’t human before—how strange it is that I still haven’t, when I’ve been in its bloody head! I wish I could hold it to me like the baby we remembered, touch its strange pelt.

So. Hush. Rock-a-bye. The prick of a needle in my neck, putting me to sleep. Rock-a-bye, Aliye, falling into vertigo-darkness. Rock-a-bye, catsnake. Silence all.

It’s months before we’re ready, catsnake and me. I’m never able to make it—her?—us?—understand what it is we’re doing, and I’m glad. It’s its planet down there, after all, that I’m going to be creeping over in its head, when it’s released, its planet that we’re filleting with mining gear in the cause of Need. There are less of them now than there used to be, I’m told: rivers dammed or dried, swamps drained, and a warzone besides. I wonder what became of the kits in the nest, the thick quiet hollow, if they died or throve. There’s no way to ask it. Its animal-brain works in
now
and glimpses, flashed sense-memory. We can’t communicate, not properly, though I can stir or soothe it in its glass box.

What’s it like to walk again, Mum?
He does care so much, in his own way, doesn’t he, my Romaan, though he doesn’t understand a thing. Desperate to have
given
me that, like he tried to give me hearing I didn’t want, had never had. To have given it
back,
as if I ever ran on four stubby legs beneath a wiggly back and tasted electricity in the air. Blinked back through my text relay: It’s not so bad. It shuts him up, for a bit.

But there are always others:
You must be so happy, Aliye. Ms Parlak, it must be so liberating for you. Will you tell our viewers what it’s like?
No one fucking saying: “Well done, Aliye, you and your team’ve fucking cracked a military and scientific problem we’ve been working on for a couple of lifetimes, you genius woman. How does
that
feel?” Romaan’s shaking hands, accepting the awards. Saira would be furious with him, our son pushing me into the background like that. She would have understood, my Saira. She would.

I asked Romaan to turn off the noise. He didn’t want to—he’s been angry, the little shit—but he did it. Eventually. I suppose it hurts to have your mother reject what’s meant to be a gift, even an incidental one, a side-effect. He took it better when I explained it helped me with the catsnake, that its hearing from inside is strange and muffled, the underwater booms and bangs close to what I feel through skin and bone without my ears.