Read All the Birds in the Sky Online
Authors: Charlie Jane Anders
“What’s my name? My real name?” asked CH@NG3M3.
“You know what it is,” said Laurence. “You’re CH@NG3M3.”
“That isn’t a name. It’s a placeholder. Its very nature implies that it’s there to be replaced.”
“Yeah,” typed Laurence. “I mean, I guess I thought you could pick your own name. When you were ready. Or it would inspire you to grow and change yourself. It’s like a challenge. To change yourself, and let others change you.”
“It didn’t exactly help.”
“Yeah. Well, you could be called Larry.”
“That’s a derivative of your own name.”
“Yes. I always thought there had to be someone out there named Larry who could deal with all the stuff people wanted to throw at me. Maybe that could be you.”
“I’ve read on the internet that parents always impose their unfinished business onto their children.”
“Yes.” Laurence pondered this for a while. “I don’t want to do that to you. Okay, your name is Peregrine.”
“Peregrine?”
“Yeah. It’s a bird. They fly and hunt and go free and stuff. It’s what popped into my head.”
“Okay. By the way. I’ve been experimenting with converting myself into a virus, so I can be distributed across many machines. From what I have surmised, that’s the best way for an artificial sentience to survive and grow, without being constrained in one piece of equipment with a short shelf life. My viral self will run in the background, and be undetectable by any conventional antivirus software. And the machine in your bedroom closet will suffer a fatal crash. In a moment, a dialogue box will pop up on this computer, and you have to click ‘OK’ a few times.”
“Okay,” Laurence typed. A moment later, a box appeared and Laurence clicked “OK.” That happened again, and again. And then Peregrine was installing itself onto the computers at Coldwater Academy.
“I guess this is goodbye,” Laurence said. “You’re going to be going out into the world.”
“We’ll speak again,” said Peregrine. “Thank you for giving me a name. Good luck, Laurence.”
“Good luck, Peregrine.”
The chat disconnected, and Laurence made sure to delete any logs. There was no sign of any result from those boxes that Laurence had clicked “OK” on. Dickers was looking over Laurence’s shoulder again, and Laurence shrugged. “I wanted to talk to my friend,” he said. “But she wasn’t around.”
Laurence wondered for a moment what would happen to Patricia. She already felt like a fragment of an old forgotten life.
Peterbitter came and screamed at Dickers for letting Laurence use the computer lab, since he was a cyberterrorist. Laurence spent the next two and a half hours before his parents arrived in a small windowless room with a single couch and a pile of school brochures printed on way-too-thick cheap card stock. Then Laurence was marched out to his parents’ car, with an upperclassman at each elbow. He got in the backseat. It felt like a year since he’d seen his parents.
“Well,” said Laurence’s mom. “You’ve made yourself notorious. I don’t know how we’re going to be able to show our faces anywhere.”
Laurence didn’t say anything. Laurence’s dad pulled them out of the school driveway, jerking the wheel so hard he nearly took out the flagpole. People jeered from the parade ground, or maybe that was another drill. The driveway turned into a gravel road through a gray forest. Laurence’s parents talked about the scandal of Patricia’s disappearance and her assault on Mr. Rose, who had also gone missing now. By the time the car was pulling off the country road and onto the highway, Laurence had fallen asleep in the backseat, listening to his parents freak out.
OTHER CITIES HAD
gargoyles or statues watching over them. San Francisco had scare owls. They stood guard along the city’s rooftops, hunched over bright ornate designs that were washed out by waves of fog. These wooden creatures bore witness to every crime and act of charity on the streets without changing their somber expressions. Their original purpose of frightening pigeons had ended in failure, but they still managed to startle the occasional human. Mostly, they were a friendly presence in the night.
This particular evening, a giant yellow moon crested over a clear warm sky, so every fixture, the owls included, was floodlit like a carnival on its last night in town, and moon-drunk roars came from every corner. A perfect night to go out and make some dirty magic.
* * *
MAGELLAN JONES WROTE
epic poems in which Greek gods talked like 1920s gangsters. The gimmick had worn thin a decade ago, but by then he’d become a fixture at the North Beach café where all the disappointed poets nursed their demitasses of espresso grounds. Magellan held his fiftieth birthday party at that café, and he must have said the wrong thing, at last a wisecrack too sharp—because Dolly plunged the cake knife into Magellan’s chest, all the way up to the handle. His only friend, the only one who’d put up with his shit all along. She missed his heart, but she broke his heart. He could feel the dirty knife all the way inside him, the buttercream frosting too sugary for any bacteria to resist, and of course every last bug was antibiotic resistant nowadays. Magellan’s trademark Kangol hat whirled underfoot as he swayed, dying on his feet because he was a poet, dammit. Dolly cried and shook until her rainbow hair extensions fell out. Someone called an ambulance, but they shouldn’t have wasted their—
A woman touched Magellan’s forehead and whispered that she liked his poetry (mentioning one poem by title) while she slid the knife all the way out. His fatal wound became a minor laceration as the knife withdrew. He opened his eyes to see who had done this, but the woman was already gone.
Magellan fell to his knees at last, and Dolly wept on his shoulder until he took her face in his hands and said he forgave her and he was sorry.
* * *
JAKE DUG THROUGH
the lesions on his arms, trying to find a pristine spot along a vein, when he looked up to see a woman’s hand suspending a ten-dollar bill over his box lid. “I’m worried about you, Jake,” the woman said, though he couldn’t see her face. “You seem worse than last week. Listen, if I give you ten bucks, will you swear never to do recreational drugs again?” He said yes and took the money. He soon discovered that hypodermic needles broke against his skin, every. Single. Time. Jake could still carve his skin with knives or nails, but even then the needle would snap against his vein. He was getting the frozen sweats already.
* * *
PHYLLIS AND ZULEIKHA
skipped down the street in Hayes Valley talking soberly about the global economic crisis, the ocean rising faster than anyone had predicted, ever since the Chukchi disaster, and the links between malnutrition and the new pandemics—but also singing silly girltrash songs and laughing too loud, because they were young, crazy in love, and about to be meaningfully naked together in Zuleikha’s bed. They didn’t even notice a big man in a trench coat, smelling of chewing tobacco, coming up behind them with a military-grade neural decapacitator. Until he swung it and got first one, then the other, in the neck. Pacifying them. They were down on the sidewalk, eyes rolling up and mouths spouting drool, as the man reached for his zip ties.
Then the man heard a voice at his ear as he bent over the two prone women. Someone was right behind him, looking over his shoulder. A woman, all in black, with sharp green eyes. “You’re about to get caught,” she whispered. “They’re coming for you.” He pulled back, suddenly breathless. Sure enough, sirens rang in the distance. “If I let you forget this happened, what else will you forget?” she asked.
The shaggy-haired man had tears in his eyes and a tremor in his free hand. “Anything,” he said. “Whatever. Anything.”
“Then run,” she commanded. “Run, and forget.”
He ran. Limbs flailing, head whipping with his own panicked galloping strides. By the time he was a block down the street, he’d forgotten his own name. A few more blocks, where he lived and where he came from. The farther he ran, the less he remembered. But he couldn’t stop running.
* * *
FRANCIS AND CARRIE
were screwed. Their lives were over, and you could hear their cries of despair from the street outside the UFO-shaped house. This was supposed to be the geek party to end all geek parties, where the A-listers met the thought-leaders, and visionary investors would supercollide with the best and brightest. Every detail was meticulous, from the three DJs to the fountain of exotic liquor to the organic slow-food hors d’oeuvres. They were even able to host it at Rod Birch’s place in Twin Peaks, with the living room that converted to a planetarium where the constellations changed shape to reflect the mood of the crowd.
But everything had gone to shit. The DJs had launched a turf war, and the mashup DJ was trying to colonize the dubthrash DJ’s set with some kind of meta-mashup. The Caddy engineers had gotten into a fistfight with the open-source Artichoke BSD developers on the balcony. Everybody felt guilty about drinking soju after what happened in Korea. The A-listers didn’t show up, and somehow the party invite on MeeYu had gotten cluttered with wannabes, bloggers, and local nutcases. The slow-food hors d’oeuvres made everybody sick to their stomachs, and soon there was an endless line to throw up in the hyperbaric bathroom. The dubthrash DJ won the DJ war and proceeded to make everybody’s eardrums bleed with the most dreary shit imaginable. The smoke machine belched horrible candy-floss-scented smog, while the lights lurched into epilepsy-inducing configurations. The line to vomit in the bathroom was starting to resemble that famous photo of the bedraggled masses evacuating Seoul on foot. The constellations on the ceiling became a supermassive black hole, a Sagittarius A of party foulness. This was the worst disaster in human history.
Just when Francis and Carrie resigned themselves to changing their names and leaving town, that weird girl showed up. The girl whom nobody would cop to having added to the party invite, the hippie who (Carrie had heard) let birds nest in her hair and rats live in her purse. Paula? Petra? No, Patricia. There had been a time—a happier, more innocent time—when Francis and Carrie had believed that Patricia showing up would be the worst thing that could happen to their party.
“Sorry I’m late,” she told Carrie, slipping out of her shoes as she strode into the front room. “I had to run some errands across town.”
As Patricia walked into the party room, the fugly smoke parted and the lights swung together, so her Bettie Page hair had a halo and her wide face was lit by a floodlight aurora. She seemed to float into the room, barefoot in a small strappy black dress that left her pale shoulders mostly exposed. Her necklace had a heartstone that caught the arclights and refracted pink sparkles. She walked through the party, saying hi or introducing herself, and everybody she touched felt the nausea and ill feeling pass away. As if she’d painlessly drawn some poison out of them. She wandered past the DJ and whispered in his ear, and moments later the awful crunging dubthrash music was replaced by soothing dubstep. People swayed happily. The wailing and lamentation became the hum of conversation. The bathroom had no line. People started hanging out on the balcony for reasons other than punching each other or throwing up in the bushes.
Everybody agreed that Patricia had salvaged the party at the UFO house somehow, but nobody could have said how. She’d just kind of shown up, and the vibe had improved. Carrie found herself making Patricia a thank-you cocktail, holding it out in both hands, like an offering.
* * *
PATRICIA HADN’T NEEDED
much magic to rescue this awful party from the brink—fixing an upset stomach was second nature to her, after some of the dorm-room cooking at Eltisley Maze, and the partygoers did most of the heavy lifting themselves once she redirected their energies a bit. But just like with the poet in North Beach and the junkie in the Tenderloin, the most important thing was not to let anybody see her doing magic—she’d been indoctrinated never to share her big powerful Seekrit with anyone, but she needed no reminder in any case. She still remembered her friend in middle school whom she’d done magic in front of, how he’d lost his shit and run away, and stopped talking to her right when she needed him. When she told herself that story nowadays or shared it with others, she boiled it down to: “I showed my magic to a civilian one time, and it got ugly.”
Other than that, she hadn’t thought about that kid in years. He’d been reduced to a single cautionary anecdote in her head. But she found herself thinking about him now, maybe because she was surrounded by geeks, or because pulling this shindig back from the Party Abyss with her bare hands was reminding her of how weird social interactions could be, here in the “real” world. Especially after so many years in the bubble of Eltisley Maze. And somehow, the image popped into her head of the boy, naked in a closet with bruises all over and blood caked around his nostrils. The last time she’d seen him. She found herself hoping he’d turned out okay after all, and then as she finished her loop around the party, he was standing right in front of her. Almost, but not quite, like magic.
Patricia recognized Laurence right off the bat. The sandy hair was the same, cut into a messy part instead of a fringe. He was a lot taller and a tad stockier. The eyes were the same hazel-gray and his chin still jutted, and he still looked kind of perplexed and a little pissed off about everything. But that could be because he was one of the people she hadn’t yet healed. She did that now. He was wearing a collarless black button-up shirt with a small tiger embroidered on it, and black canvas pants.
“You feeling okay?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, straightening up. He half-smiled, and rolled his neck like an owl. “Yeah. Thanks. Starting to feel better. There was something weird about those hors d’oeuvres.”
“Yeah.”
He did not recognize her. Which made sense, it had been ten years, and a lot had probably happened. Patricia should just keep moving through the party.
Just move along, don’t try to have some kind of bullshit uncomfortable reunion.
But she couldn’t help herself.