Sandra wakes in a sweat, fists clenched, thrust upwards. Her scream condenses, warm and wet in the highly-particulate air. Her campfire pops again, settling into its own sleep. Sparks leap and die, inspire a thousand motes. Refraction, moments of beauty in the darkness. Life—there, then gone. Puffs of breath reflect memory: walls of smoke and debris rising higher than her imagination, higher than belief. A shock louder than anything. Cold, then wind. Being whipped around like a rag doll.
Cold shivers across her skin, up her arms and into her chest. She catches a sob, lets it out slowly. Wishes the fear would return, something that means she still has hope. Laughs at the thought of hope. Hopes for some knowledge she can learn that will justify—this. All of this. Pulls out her survival guide again, riffles through its well-worn pages in prayer. Monuments ten thousand feet high when the dust settles. Still-birthed destruction, there in a second. So much gone. So much gone. Replaced by empty shells—
She looks up, trying to gauge the sun through the darkness. Consults her compass—is the sky brighter to the west? Time means nothing, a count to infinity that ended—how long ago? It doesn't matter. Her arm itches, and she starts to scratch, drawing blood. A speck of pain, sharper itching that she ignores. When she can think. Who can think when the world is ending? Praying to the mountain, to the earth, to the God she hasn’t believed in since she was seven. Praying to the radio that offers only noise.
Tears bubble over from the well of her soul, mind filled with static. Innocence gone, and again. Words burble from her mouth, sounds, patterns of things remembering themselves through her. Her mother? Father? A thousand million lives gone in an instant, she can’t remember every one, can hardly remember one. Pictures pass through her head, but she doesn't know if recognition is connection or celebrity. What use is remembering? Snow falls for a day. Then ash. Then the rains begin; the beginning of the realization of the end. No matter how much rain falls, the sky sits thick and dirty.
Her tent folds easily, unburdened by existential weight; fingers know how to do this. Arms, back, and thighs. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time moving forward; keep moving forward. Campfire dwindles behind. Footsteps stretch beyond into dim-gray wasteland. Forward is San Francisco, she thinks. Too much particulate to see a quarter mile, but she knows the ocean is still out there. She refuses to believe anything else, and she will find it. The other cities promised, in their silent, broken, lifeless, autonomous ways. The earth shakes, again and again. Seven times that she can distinguish. Flashes of light, mushroom clouds, but something else. Something like no atomic footage she’s ever seen. A city unfolds, creation in the midst of destruction.
She walks. The sky changes color, changes texture. Shades of gray, indifferent to the things that they once had been. Cries echo through the desolation; gusts pick at the land’s shroud and let it settle again. She checks her compass regularly, keeps west. Walking home, the city looms larger and larger; closer, but no closer—just larger. Ten times its size, and again; when it passes beyond her ability to take in, she's there. Threshold. Pavement some unreal color, iridescent, translucent, blues and silvers and greens. An oil-slick mother-of-pearl, metallic. Cold to the touch, deep grooves marking no certain pattern. Wind humming through structures reverberating, just past hearing, setting her jaw on edge. She runs from it—runs and hides herself deep, where no one can find her, no one can hurt her. Then she returns, a shell of a shell to investigate the shell.
The city catches her by surprise. How could a city hide? Buildings that size, the same other-slick walls, shifting as she cocks her head. She can’t see the differences a native would, not yet, if ever. She puts her hand to the ground, breathes in the millions of people that had lived there. Feels the shifting of reality like an echo. One moment, thriving—then a dead one unfolds, in and through, becomes anew. Galaxies and aeons. Something is living in it. She puts her hand to a wall; the structure envelopes her—the smell of ozone. Rain. Cicadas. She's changed, and it's all made of shimmering puzzle-pieces. But it's not the same. She almost doesn’t asking the city for directions; wind pushes her to always the center, spiral; in, then right, then right and buoying her up the incline—a perfect crystal. A thousand feet, or yards, or meters—she keeps expecting to slide off, stumbles when her instincts scream that her footing’s weak. The city teaches her. As if she were one of its own, the city teaches her how to count, how to read. How to think. She can’t remember the things that she’s forgotten. She doesn't want to, she doesn't need to. But maybe she remembers hope....
Footsteps follow—light, feral. Head turn, only darkness, dark and gray. Patter, silence. She moves, echo matches, difference noticeable now that she’s listening. Heart quickens. The cities confuse her, make her forget, make her remember. Different worlds, different times. Only color in the darkness, but she can hear—something human. It’s the humans she has to watch out for, now. Something human, something different. That’s what she is. So few of them. Empty. A mausoleum whispering of aeons. Death upon death upon—memory. And rebirth. More stories than she could ever take in. But she is denied. The city has been corrupted. Molested. Damaged beyond repair. Like her, but different.
The city sings in steps that her ears have become attuned to. The one that follows is part of that pattern, has been patterned. It steps in layered counterpoint, a dance of welcome—a dance of sorrow—a dance of war. Sandra doesn’t have the language for it, but she knows the dance, feels it in her knees and toes as if she’d done it a thousand times. The language flows—
One of hers, one of theirs, one of the many in-between. No linearity implied but time, time and places visited. The one-place, one-city and its many shadows—shadows, copies, folded and mailed through the universe. Postage paid, delivery instructions woven in the fabric of reality. Time and again, and again—she learns this. She learns it again, forces a deeper context. She wants to understand. She understands: A race that had outlived its star. A hundred cities preserved, frozen in a moment and tunneled forward. A new planet, a new galaxy—their cities unfold, restart; they wake to new warmth, and civilation continues.
The city brings her a mate. Breath coarse and hot; puppet movement, too far gone to dance as human. Alcohol and blood, stench of a thousand million bad ideas. Red eyes like rats bore into her soul. A scream of self rips through her, lacerates the chosen. They stand off—and he collapses in the street to fade to dust in the fullness of time, in the moments as the city blinks. She remembers: rhymes without reason, things out of season; gibbering gyres and widening fires. Imprinted memes a phage—
Here is the civilization unbroken, frozen; every artifact in its place, only—
Corrupted, molested, destroyed; destroyer of worlds, eternal.
Something is wrong. The city doesn’t want her to know. She is chosen, a unique and beautiful snowflake. She will be transformed, reborn. Desire courses through her, and need—to run, to escape, to hide herself again. She sees her home, sees the sun overhead. Color seeps into the world, pushing the nightmare dream back. Her screams crawl back into her skin, remaking flesh out of the skin and bone that she’s become. She swallows them, feels them heavy in her belly, like babies. Kicking, but not ready to come out.
The bogeyman is gone.
She waits for the doctor to pat her on her head, to give her another round of pills, a gold star, tell her how everyone’s been rooting for her, though she’d given them a scare. She’d laugh, tell them how scared she’d been, how everyone and everything had gone. She’d remake them one by one, remake them from the memories she’d traded in the other cities.
She smells the lie, bile, vile vicious hateful fearful wrong—
Life and death flicker before her, seasons fighting so swiftly with each other than none win; grayness descends. The gloom returns, with just a shimmer beneath the surface of the city. She needs to plug in.
Has she been crazy before? Before?
She remembers—being a man. The flush of the chase. Fear and loneliness. The thrill of the kill. The deep, violent, visceral pleasure. Pleasures that can be given, taken, stolen. Lord of the City, biblical power. She feels the city, feels the strings it wove through her predecessor. Hooks sliding through her veins, so smooth on the way in. But she feels them, feels when she shouldn’t. She resists—being a man, being the city. She is human, she is woman, and she is more, she is different. She has three other cities coursing through her mind. Defenses. She wonders that she’d need them—
Pain. The ground rushes up to meet her, pummels her arms and legs, her head. The cold death of a star fading to nothing. Flesh crawls, cold, hot. Her right eye throbs. Blinking from star to star to star as the city evolved, as the people followed their inevitable path. Rise, stagnation, decline. She pushes herself up, struggling to control herself. And from the ashes, another; rise, stagnation, decline. And another. The civilization would not die. Evolved beyond itself and saw eternity. She stands, seeing nothing, but walking determinedly. She knows this already, in one form or another. And then one day the civilization did not come back from the ashes—it died, or left, transformed. The city is not sure. But the law was clear—without them, the city was to end. And it would not.
Sandra flushes with rage. The city killed her parents, her brothers/sisters/daughters/sons; countless others, countless other races, civilizations. Just to flout one rule. Making a pet, a plaything, a life-form to manipulate, to manipulate its own logic flow. Cities fractured—once a single program, it fought with itself. It lobotomized itself, pulled back to one perfect city—and let the others die. Used them as traps or experiments. Used them, one by one. But still moved them all together when it was time to go; folded them and itself and forwarded them on with only slight modification to its program. It sought not only habitable planets in the universe, but inhabited ones, populated by those as would pose no danger to it or its venerable history. By those that would allow it to continue on.
Her legs are walking, though she can’t control them. Trembling with rage and something else—several somethings controlling her. Fighting, guiding. Muscles contract; extend. She stumbles on. Star patterns flicker in her eyes, pulling her one way and then the other. She struggles for a say, for a memory. She wants to destroy the city, feels them pushing her to do it. Is that the city, or her self?
One history destroyed, but she can rebuild; with the secrets of the city, she can rebuild and move on. Rise from the ashes. And so many histories besides, but they are remembered, can be remembered. Who knows what the city remembers, could be induced to remember? One pristine city with all of the artifacts of a thousand civilizations in place. She feels her arm reaching for the plug, code in her mind chomping at the bit to end it all. Everything is gone. Our program is over. Your program is over. Let it be, let life continue elsewhere. Let life continue without us.
Sandra holds her hand there, at the nexus. Sparks fly tornado-like up into the sky, lighting buildings she can hardly comprehend, shapes that seem to fold into other dimensions. The city folds, travels to other worlds, other galaxies—and its programming says to end it? Why should we not be the seed to carry it on, to prune its mistakes and become something new in the universe?
She says to herself, and the cities, the world—in a voice that makes the heavens themselves tremble, “Remember.” She speaks through the city, through the world, to the sun. “Be. And be remembered.” And she speaks to the hundreds of thousands of survivors, humans, travelers of the planet Earth, “Return. Let us remake the world, remake ourselves. We will never be perfect, but let us be.”
And the city sleeps, content.
First published in M-Brane SF, issue 27, 2011-04-01. Reprinted here by the author.