Anne swears and pounds her fists on the kitchen table. She closes her eyes, then slowly reaches across the kitchen table and takes your right hand. Her skin is cold. “If this doesn’t… If you don’t get better—can I bring you back?”
“What do you mean?”
“I know this is hard, this is so fucked up and impossible to ask, but after you… After!”
“After I’m dead?”
“Yes, after. Only if you say yes right now, I can go to the Complex, we still have hundreds of viable blanks, and—you know what I can do. I can bring you back.”
“With all that’s happening, you’re actually asking this?”
“I am. I—I don’t want to be without you. Please.”
“I want you to say it.”
“______, please.”
“You have to say it.”
“Let me bring you back. I don’t want to be alone, be without you. I—”
“You have to say the word, Anne.”
“Let me clone you. Please, let me do it. I want you to let me bring you back.”
You are crying. The Anne sitting across from you is blurry and begins to look like the younger Anne you remember. “I don’t want to come back. It wouldn’t be me you’re bringing back.”
“But listen, think about all the—”
“Anne—”
“Amazing success we’ve had with augmenting our patients’ cellular memory, directly uploading information and images, and the exercises and therapy—”
“Anne! It wouldn’t be me.” You look at your hands and wonder whose hands they are.
“I would make them into you. They would be you.”
You repeat, “It wouldn’t be me.” What you mean to say, but in these final moments, you can’t summon the courage, is: It never was me.
“If you say no, I won’t clone you. I promise you. And I know it’s crazy, it’s fucking horrible and crazy, but I’m asking you. Please. Will you let me?”
“No. I’m sorry, Anne. No. You can’t. It won’t be me.”
Anne wipes her eyes, sighs, bends to the kitchen floor, and retrieves the notebook. She angrily scribbles some notes and throws the pen across the table.
She says, “Thank you,” but it’s perfunctory and she says it through gritted teeth and without looking at you.
You ask, “How many of us have there been?” You are breathing erratically and your voice is little more than a scratching sound.
“Too many.”
“We helped build our house.” You are desperate to feel a kinship with the rest of you who spent all those years with Anne. You are desperate to feel something that is yours, something other than emptiness.
“You did.”
“We all had this conversation.”
“Yes.”
“How many of us said yes?”
“None of you. Not a single fucking one of you.”
Anne explodes out of her chair and stalks to the kitchen counter, grunting and yelling in obvious frustration. She stops pacing and then quickly replaces your IV bag even though the old one is only three-quarters empty. Your hand and arm go warm this time.
She closes her eyes and sighs. She says, “There aren’t very many left of you to say yes.”
She rubs the back of your head. Your eyelids go heavy and you try to speak but you cannot. You feel yourself melting away, your consciousness receding toward a singularity.
Anne whispers, “I didn’t lie to you, ______.”
001
Your room is dark. You cannot see anything. You are lying in a bed. A sheet covers your body. You wiggle your fingers and toes, and the loud rasp of skin rubbing against the sheets is startling. With the slight movements there is pain. Your muscles and joints hum with it.
You’ve been awake and not-awake for days, maybe weeks, perhaps longer. You do not know where you were then, or before then. You are here now. A significant amount of time has passed, but from what beginning, you do not know. You consider the origin of this time during which you’ve been awake and not-awake and conclude it is, for the moment, unknowable.
A NOTE FROM THE CURATOR OF THE FORWARD COLLECTION
A year and a half ago, my partner and I were driving across the Rocky Mountains, not far from where I live. The aspens had just begun to turn, and the air was redolent with all the smells I associate with falclass="underline" incense, dirt, the start of decay. As we drove, we were debating some emerging technology I’d read about in Scientific American and circling around the larger topic of growing up in the bubble of rapid change and technological advancement. While a lot of it has been amazing, some of the change has come with effects we’d rather roll back.
How does anyone know at the moment of discovery where their work will ultimately lead?
Should we let that uncertainty stop forward momentum, or do we roll the dice and let the chips fall where they may?
How does it feel to change the world?
These questions intrigued me, so much so that I wrote a story about it. But my obsession didn’t stop there—I also wanted to know what other writers would write when posed with the same questions.
And so this collection was born and filled with writers whose minds work in ways that fascinate me.
N. K. Jemisin (the Broken Earth trilogy) is writing fantasy and speculative fiction like you’ve never even fathomed. Paul Tremblay is the greatest horror novelist working today, and his novel A Head Full of Ghosts still gives me nightmares. Veronica Roth created an unforgettable world and populated it with amazing characters in her iconic Divergent trilogy. Andy Weir captured the imagination of the world and scienced the shit out of his already-a-classic The Martian. And Amor Towles, with A Gentleman in Moscow, has simply written one of the best novels I’ve ever read. I recommend it every day.
I asked these writers to be a part of a collection that explores the resounding effects of a pivotal technological moment, and to my great delight, they said yes. I knew they’d deliver the goods when it came time to write their stories, but I was not prepared for what an abundance of riches this collection would turn out to be.
I hope, once you’ve read these six mind-bending stories, that you’ll agree.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Tremblay is the author of the Bram Stoker Award–winning novels The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts, as well as the novel Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. His short fiction collection Growing Things and Other Stories was published in July 2019. Paul is also on the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards.
Copyright
Text copyright © 2019 by Paul Tremblay
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.