The coffee cup felt reassuringly heavy in his hand. Captain Xavier Holland turned it over in his hand for a moment, admiring its simplistic lines.
Sitting forward, he wound back – and heaved the cup as hard as he could.
A direct hit. The cup clattered against Ensign Bran’s shoulder, making the man jerk and yelp. “What the hell?” he burst out, spinning around to stare with injured eyes at his captain.
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The CEO struggled to suppress his yawn as he listened to his Chief Financial Officer drone on. Sure, the man was a wizard at making numbers jump through hoops – and vanish, when they weren’t exactly necessary to keep around – but good God, his presentation skills were terrible.
The CEO surreptitiously glanced down at his watch, a $45,000 Piaget for which he’d spent six months on a waiting list. Either he paid all that money for a knockoff, or else the Financial Officer was literally making time itself slow down out of sheer boredom.
“Okay, well, it sounds like that’s going well,” he spoke up, slapping his hand on the conference table and cutting off the Financial Officer mid-sentence. “Let’s hear from someone else, shall we?”
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I glanced back behind me even as I slowed my pace. I’d lost them – for now. I could hear their footsteps, however, not stopping.
They’d keep on searching for me until they found me. I needed to disappear.
The inside of the clothing shop felt strange with the lights turned off. Mannequins loomed suddenly out of the darkness, their hands stretched out as though reaching for me. I dodged around them, forcing my mouth shut and trying not to let any sound escape my lips.
There, in the back! I hurried towards the doorway leading into the rear of the shop, below the sign that read CHANGING ROOMS.
As I ran past the counter, however, a corner of my jacket caught at a hook, extending out from the edge. I felt the tug, turned to try and catch the falling item – but my fingers were too slow.
With a crash, a pile of hangers hit the floor, bouncing and scattering across the linoleum. The sound echoed in the dark shop, and I froze, my heart beating wildly.
They must have heard it. Distant footsteps paused, then picked up again as they changed direction. They headed towards me.
No time to waste. I abandoned my pretense of stealth, ran back into the changing rooms. My eyes searched wildly in the dimness, searching for the surface-
I saw it. A full length mirror, extending all the way to the floor. I shoved my hand into my pocket, fumbling, searching. I couldn’t afford to stop, to take the time to dig through my pockets and locate what I needed.
Stepping up to the mirror, I raised my hand, pushing out against the glass surface. When I had first passed through, so many years ago, the glass had resisted, fought back, tried to push me back out. I didn’t belong in that other world on the far side, it told me. No human belonged there.
But I fought back, managed to slip inside. And it grew easier with each successive trip.
Now, the glass barely resisted at all, parting like smoke. I dove in, through the glass, closing my eyes instinctively like always.
I’d kept my eyes open – once. The visions I saw made me determined to never make that mistake again.
My other hand still scrambled in my pocket as I stepped through the mirror, still searching. For just an instant, I felt what I sought, but it slipped deeper into the jumble of items in my pocket.
“A long time, Mistress Delmora.”
“But no time at all, as it may be.”
They closed in on me, appearing out of the misty glass. I knew they were there, of course, knew they’d come, but they always startled me. Creatures of smoke, they appeared and vanished in seconds, dissolving away into the mist between the realms.
Finally, my fingers closed on the objects I sought. “I have payment for my passage,” I quickly spat out, pulling the coins from my pocket.
The silver circles winked in the dim light as I tossed them to the creatures of shadow. No hand moved to catch the coins, but they vanished, never hitting the ground.
I waited. I knew the rituals.
“She has paid the price to cross,” one of the Ferrymen finally intoned, sounding almost regretful.
“We bid her safe passage, in honor of the accord,” echoed the other.
Their eyes, however, lingered on me. “Until next time, Mistress Delmora,” whispered the first, as it melted away. “In no time at all.”
“We will be waiting,” its partner finished, as they dissolved into mist.
For a moment longer, I stood still, gazing back through the floating glass of the mirror. My pursuers wouldn’t be fooled forever, I knew. They’d find their own way through, wouldn’t stop chasing me.
But I’d bought myself time.
Coat swirling around me as I pulled it tight, I turned away from the mirror, striding into the mist of the new world.
“Madam President! We need to get you into the bunker?”
The large, burly member of the Secret Service detail couldn’t help but roll his eyes when Madam Elaine Clifton, the President of the United States – and arguably the most powerful person in the world – finally appeared around the corner. She looked somewhat out of breath already, and she clutched a large, struggling orange tomcat in her arms.
“Sorry, sorry,” President Clifton panted, trying to adjust her grip on the wriggling animal so that he couldn’t slip out of her determined grasp. “Little Georgie-kins here just didn’t want to come out from underneath the couch!”
Another eye roll. Kane, the Secret Service member, offered up a brief but fervent thank-you to whoever decided to include tinted sunglasses in the uniform design for the President’s guards. Were it not for those shades blocking his eyes, he would have been fired long ago.
Hastily, he pulled himself back to the present. “In any case, Madam President, we need to move right now to get you to safety. We don’t know if the threat is-“
“What’s going on, then?” President Clifton demanded, cutting him off in the middle of his explanation. Obviously, she wasn’t listening to a word he’d been saying.
Thankfully, at least, he got her moving into the elevator that would drop them down into the emergency bunker. The big orange cat, George (Kane steadfastly refused to even think of the animal as ‘Georgie-kins’) finally managed to squirm and claw his way free, but the elevator doors had already closed, trapping the irate animal in the elevator with them.
“Your code, Madam President?” Kane prompted the woman, pushing her gently towards the control pad that granted the elevator access to the bunker.
“You haven’t answered my question about what’s going on!” Clifton shouted back, although she flipped open the little pad and began keying in her unique sequence.
Kane held back a sigh; the middle-aged woman might notice that sign of disrespect. “There’s a threat on the White House, Madam President. We aren’t sure if it’s fully legitimate, but we have enough reason to believe its credibility to move you to a safe location in the bunker until we can fully assess whether there’s a risk. This shouldn’t take long; agents are running down the message behind the threat right now.”
He really hoped that the woman wouldn’t blow up at him. President Clifton always put on a soothing, motherly face and attitude for the American people, but off camera she was known to be a firecracker – and not in a good way. Some of the other Secret Service members had given her the unofficial nickname of ‘grenade.’
But as the elevator dropped down into the depths of the earth, provoking a yowl from George(ie-kins), she smiled. “Well, this will be a new environment for dear Georgie-kins to explore,” she commented. “Maybe he’ll find some tasty mice under some of these dusty old tables and chairs down here!”
“Er… Madam President, aren’t there some sensitive electronics down here?” Kane asked, wondering how fired he would be if he shot that damn cat.
“Oh, that’s fine.” President Clifton kept on babbling, but Kane ignored her. The elevator doors opened, and he hurried over to the phone, praying that the threat had already been resolved.
No such luck, his supervisors told him as he held the phone up to his ear. In fact, it looked like there might actually be some chatter by enemy combatants confirming-
“Holy shit,” cut off the voice at the other end of the phone.
Kane frowned. It wasn’t professional to swear on secure channels. “Come again? What-“
“Holy shit, no, it can’t be!” the voice repeated. “What the hell is Madam President doing? We just got authorization for nuclear missile launch! What in the name of God is going on in that bunker??”
Kane’s blood went cold as he spun around. There was Madam President, cooing at that damn cat-
-who was standing on top of a large keyboard, one hind leg resting on a very scary looking red button.
With great satisfaction, probably far more than he ought to feel, Kane grabbed a nearby stapler and chucked it at the damn cat, hitting it in the side and knocking it off of the control panel.
“Oh my god!” gasped out President Clifton, but Kane stormed past her, reaching out and slamming down the plastic cover that belonged over the red button. He stabbed a finger down at the button, glaring daggers into the eyes of the taken aback President.
“This,” he hissed, “is the nuclear armament button. This is dangerous. This is NOT the sort of thing that your goddamn cat should be walking on!”
For a moment, the President just gaped back at him – and then Kane saw a new glint enter her eyes.
“No one’s ever talked to me like that,” she commented, still looking at him intently. What was that new sound in her voice? Was that… no, it couldn’t be. “I could get kind of used to someone telling me off like that.”
Oh god, it was. Lust.
Kane felt his whole mindset lurch. On one hand, he might have just prevented a nuclear war from occurring. But on the other hand, he really, really didn’t like how President Clifton was eyeing him up, looking at him as if he was a sack of meat.
He began to silently count up the number of sick days he could take in his head.
Biology is a curious thing. How does a seed, a tiny little cluster of cells with no eyes or brain or neurons or central control, know which way to grow?
The answer comes down to gravity, and light.
The seed on the ground felt the touch of water, enough water to launch its cells into an explosion of action and motion. This was the signal for which it had waited, enduring dryness and the tumbling external forces that eventually brought it to its resting place.
The cells grew, pushing out beyond their walls, building copies, subdividing in a flurry of growth and replication. Proteins spun through cytoplasm in a complex dance, uniting and binding with others, and then tearing away once their function had been completed. DNA spiraled out, unwinding, duplicating, and then recoiling back up like a spring.
The seed’s hard shell cracked, and a root – thin, pale, fragile, exposed – came snaking out. It searched, quested, found the soil. It burrowed in, drinking in the water all around it, soaking up that moisture and converting it into more fuel to push itself deeper.
And on the opposite side of the seed, opposite the emergence of the root, a thin little branch emerged, barely even able to support its own weight.
Once exposed from their prison inside the seed, the cells spread out, unfurling, questing for light. Inside each little cell, dozens of green factories – the chloroplasts – floated, waiting to absorb that dazzling radiance and convert it into food. The plant didn’t think, didn’t know anything – but those cells ran a desperate race against their dwindling supply of food.
If the supply of food, of high-energy ATP molecules failed, they would have no other options. They’d die, and the whole organism would die along with them as it starved.
But no – there, light! The light wasn’t strong, not direct sunlight, but it was enough. The cells most exposed to the light leapt into a flurry of joyful production, pumping out food to fuel the growth of the rest of the organism. They worked as a community, creating far more ATP than they needed, exporting the rest to feed their brothers and sisters.
The plant responded to these most productive of its cells, and the entire structure began to shift. The plant angled itself, growing faster on the side away from the light, angling itself to reach all that it could. It had to capture as much light as possible, needed all that food!
Eventually, the initial rapid burst of growth slowed. The cells that had one split joyously in wild abandon, as fast as they could manage, now proceeded at a slower, more stately rate. The husk of the seed, no longer needed for protection, fell away. Its remains would break down, eventually reabsorbed by the plant itself.
The plant didn’t know this, of course. All it knew was that it had light and water, enough to make food. Enough to exist.
Its stalk thickened, grew out in concentric rings to add more structure and support. Ridges formed from slight unevenness in the cells’ walls, and the external proteins stiffened, creating defensive bark, a skin beneath which the living cells of the plant flowed and swarmed, passing nutrients up and down. They sent water up to the leaves, and brought down synthesized ATP, food to feed the growing roots.
At the base, the root sank deeper, providing support, and split off to grow in new directions. It had to stabilize its brothers above, and it fought for every inch against the hard ground, the rocks and other impenetrable items in amid the soil. Sometimes, its path was stymied, but it always found a way around, chasing after that water.
At the top of the tree, leaves exploded out, each a separate factory to create more energy, to support itself and its surrounding fellows. They angled towards that precious light, drinking it in. Each leaf enjoyed its time at the tip of a branch, but the branch eventually moved past it, leaving it as just a side extension.
No leaf complained about this shift in its fate. They were all a part of the whole, all feeding the greater organism.
Time passed. The tree measured the passing time, in the rings on its trunk and the growth of its cells, but it didn’t know the meaning of these changes. It only knew the beauty of growth, the symphony of healthy cells.
Did the tree know that it was alone, away from its brothers and sisters, the sole survivor in this cave, where only happenstance allowed it to grow? Likely not, even as much as plants understand things.
Besides, the tree would not be alone much longer. By now, it had enough energy built up, strong enough reserves, to begin the final stage of its life. It would create seeds, tiny little copies of its own cells, with instructions to go forth, to spread wide, and seek two things:
Gravity, and light.
The tree was alone, yes, but it would not be alone forever – and what is time, to a tree?
I could spot the thing from the air as the little ship swung overhead, dropping like a stone amid the swirling, blowing snow. I clutched the armrests of my seat tightly and tried to ignore the flip-flopping of my stomach.
Instead, I kept my eyes glued to the window, trying to assemble the glances of the creature into a coherent picture. Not the biggest we’d found, but decently sized. Probably a young male, I guessed, They tended to push the hardest north, looking for new spawning spots to claim.
This one must have not noticed the falling temperature until the ice closed in, trapping him.
The plane banked to the side again, turning into a tight spiral and giving me another look at the beast – and sending my stomach into tight convulsions. Fifty feet, I guessed. That fit with my original prediction of a young male. I’d need to examine the thing on the ground to know for certain.
Maybe fifteen minutes later, the plane’s wheels sat on the ground, and my breath came a little more easily. I gathered my things, pulled my coat around my thin shoulders, and stumbled out into into the open air.
The chill of the place hit me like a knife, slicing straight through the thick weave. I hissed in shock but clenched my teeth together, refusing to let them chatter.
Fortunately, a car waited at the bottom of the plane’s steps to carry me over to the thing. The man behind the wheel hid most of his face beneath a balaclava, but he still flashed a big, brilliantly white grin at me. “Evening, doc. Here to see what we’ve found? Gonna make all of us rich?”
“Here to take a look,” I agreed, although I didn’t address his second point. Fortunately, my tone was enough to make the driver shrug and turn back to the wheel.
Truth was, there wasn’t too much money in the big beasts any more. Sure, some big trophy hunters would pay for unusually large specimens, and the research universities still bought up eggs from the females, but those were both pretty rare. The males, especially younger ones like this guy, had saturated the market. Everyone who really wanted one already had one.
And given their size, one was enough to provide research samples for decades.
Still, I kept on agreeing to fly out to all the new sites, all the new discoveries. I guess I felt a bit like a treasure hunter, forever hoping to find that glint of gold amid the dross.
It wasn’t going to be here, of course. I already knew that.
The car pulled over, and I braced myself against the cold before sliding out of the back seat. I stepped over to the hide of the massive fish, reaching out running one gloved hand over its side. No scales, of course – the things had a thick, rubbery hide that produced some sort of cold-resistant mucus. Even now, I felt a little bit of the slime clinging to my gloved fingers, and I shook it off.
A single lap around the uncovered fish told me everything I needed to know. “Young male, probably in its second or third spawning,” I told the driver, heading back towards the warm lights of the car. “Nothing unusual about it, unfortunately. Xenopiscus vulgaris, just like I told you from the pictures.”
“So what do we do with the thing, doc?” the driver asked, still sounding a little hopeful. “We gonna get any payoff from it?”
I paused for a moment, but decided to be blunt. “Not from us,” I replied. “You could list the whole thing, but it might not sell for months, if ever. There’s already too many of them on the market. You’d probably get more if you hack it up and sell the organs separately. The bones’ll fetch a bit, and lots of places still buy the gametes.”
The driver faced forward in the front seat, but I saw his grin fade in the rear-view mirror. “Well, sorry to take up your precious time, doc,” he replied. “Hopefully our next find will be worth more.”
“There’s always more out there in the ice,” I offered, trying to sound optimistic. My voice couldn’t keep up the necessary tone, however, especially as I considered the long flight back to my more southernly research post.
“S’pose,” the driver allowed after a minute, as the car pulled away, into the blowing snow. “Always more in the ice.”
“Oh… Shit.”
I stared at the body, my eyes frantically searching for some sign of movement. “Come on, come on,” I murmured to myself, needing to see some tiny little sign of life. Was the chest rising and falling? A little twitch of a leg, I prayed. That’s all I needed.
Behind me, I heard footsteps, the eager, quick little footsteps of a child. Shit. Timothy was coming down the stairs.
I spun around, dashing over to the stairs, trying to spread my arms wide. “Timmy, wait,” I said, hoping to catch him before he came around the corner and saw the body.
He stopped, bouncing up and down on the step. His eyes looked bright, filled with an eight-year-old’s happiness. “What, daddy?” he asked, already trying to look past me. He already wanted to play with her, go see her.
I felt my heart ache as I realized that, at some point today, I’d need to tell him. As bad as I felt, I knew it would be a hundred times worse for him.
“Um… listen, please go back upstairs for a few minutes,” I said, stalling for time. Did I need to call someone? What should I do with the body? Move it? Leave it? “Just play with your toys for a bit.”
Timothy frowned. I could see the little gears in his head turning; he was a smart kid, and he’d soon figure out that something was wrong. But I needed to buy time.
“Okay,” he said, less excited now. He turned and headed back upstairs, glancing back at me. I made sure to watch until he turned the corner into his room.
As soon as he’d retreated, I hurried back to the living room, my heart rate increasing once again. “Shit, shit,” I muttered to myself, running my hand through my thinning hair. What in the world could have happened?
I’d last seen her before I went to bed last night, and she’d looked just fine. Exercising, I recalled. Not a care in the world.
Now, she lay by her water bottle, and I could tell clearly now that she was dead.
A hundred thoughts fought inside my head. I’d have to call the school, contact Timothy’s teacher. I considered that maybe I could find a replacement, but I didn’t think any of the kids would buy that.
I’d just have to be honest, I realized. Timothy would need to learn about death at some point. It would break my heart a little to see some of the childlike innocence fade from his eyes, but I just couldn’t see any other option.
Before I called Timothy back downstairs, however, I ducked into the kitchen to grab a brown paper bag out of the cabinet. Once he’d seen the body, I would stick her in the bag, and then put the whole thing in the freezer. That would at least buy me some time to dispose of the thing.
God dammit, I cursed to myself one last time as I headed upstairs to bring down my son. Why did Harriet the hamster have to die during my shift to watch her?
I often wonder how many geniuses really exist.
Look around you, next time you’re out in public. People everywhere, streaming by, bustling about on the worthless minutiae of their everyday lives. No one challenges them. There’s no dire, life or death need. Their requirements for survival are filled, they busy themselves with the tiny, unimportant, trivial details.
They possess no roaring storm to transform their tiny flame of genius into a roaring inferno. So instead, that little flame gutters and eventually extinguishes itself.
I look around at these others with dismay, sadness, because I used to be like them.
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Slumped back into the sagging bench seat at the airport, I gazed around at the rush of humanity around me as music blared into my ears through my headphones. I did my best to keep my eyes moving, trying not to linger too much on any one face in case they caught my covert attention.
It certainly was a busy time at the airport, I noted, adding sourly a moment later that this was probably why my flight ended up being delayed as well. Stuck in this place for another couple of hours, waiting for them to finally call over the half-incomprehensible intercom that the plane had finally arrived and was ready for boarding.
Twenty minutes or so, I had to admit that we were thoroughly, hopelessly lost.
When I glanced over at Elena, the language barrier between us didn’t prevent me from seeing that she felt the same way. I could read it in the hunch of her shoulders, the padding of her feet where she’d previously hopped along, excited to be free.
“Pretty dull, isn’t it?” I remarked, more just to fill the silence than because she’d understand.
Glancing back at me, she commented something back, although I couldn’t understand a word.
No, wait – I caught one of the curse words she’d taught me in there. I grinned, and she smiled sympathetically back.
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Missing Brains 