Ben steadied the sample as the tremor hit. It was a slim glass vial with a barcode sticker up the side. The sequence of lines linked its contents of dry, tan dirt to one of the three Prairie regions thought to retain some capacity for sustaining plant life.
The lights went out as the beakers rattled on the wall behind him. They were emitting the same unnerving and familiar harmony he heard each workday. Glass shattered down the hall. Someone swore. Ben noticed how his body was curved over the workbench. He straightened his back, tightened his core. Taut and loose. Engaged, but at ease. He worried about hernias. The clinking beakers agitated towards a destructive climax.
There was a knock at the door. He had propped it open on purpose to show he was making an effort to meet his sociability goals this quarter.
“You okay?” came a voice. It was Ulrich.
“Yeah,” Ben answered.
They both remained in place, vibrations climbing their legs.
“Are you going tonight?” asked Ulrich.
Ben made a non-committal shrug. He regretted sharing earlier.
More broken glass down the hall. Another round of swearing.
Ben would have to dump this test and start again tomorrow afternoon. Tomorrow morning was blocked off in his schedule and had been so for months. He was expecting a delivery of very expensive soil samples.
“I can clean up here if you’re in a rush,” said Ulrich.
Ben considered pitching the vial at him. The tremor passed.
“I’ve got it.”
He dropped the vial into a plastic bin below his workbench. Slapping a palm on the wall-mounted button to vent the room, Ben retrieved his coat from the sealed white bag on the back of the door.
“I’ll see you at seven,” he told Ulrich as he crowded him out of the doorway and engaged the auto-lock behind him. They both waited to hear the deadbolt sshhunk into place.
“If it’s too early for you, I can–”
Ben made for the stairwell.
“I’ll be here,” he shouted over his shoulder and let the door slam shut.
Outside, he slowed his pace and pulled out his phone. He accessed the invite file. It was an animated image of rotating, 3D shapes that appeared to grow with each throbbing pulse. The marketing projection spilled over the edges of his phone, which he found embarrassing. It ended with a simple message:
“Hope to see you there. —Mattie”
An address surfaced from a dark, undulating background, followed by a logo that showed a bird of prey within a swirling double helix. Then, “Powered by SubLim8 Genetic Solutions.”
He knew Mattie sold edits now. The trend irritated him. Couples were buying them together. It was a simple genetic reconfiguring that resulted in a slower rate of bone decay and immune system degradation. You could gift someone anywhere from five years to twenty. Any longer than that and things got theoretical.
Ben left the cluster of office buildings behind and entered one of the collapsed zones. The wreckage was hidden behind a two-storey corridor of LED walls, which projected ads in blinding light when you passed through. He stashed his phone as a group of ultracentenarians waved to him from within their two-dimensional animations. They flashed brilliant smiles while lifting weights. A tennis player, wrinkled skin tightened to his shrunken frame, stretched across the road with a dramatic backhand return. The tennis ball sailed through Ben’s torso and he shouted in horror, as he always did. An ancient couple in colourful tracksuits walked on either side of him, explaining the benefits of edits. He walked faster, anticipating the end of this corridor section where this advertisement would end and another would begin.
He blocked out the voices and went over his plan for the morning.
Wake up at six. Shower. Eat by 6:30. En route by 6:40. Arrive at 7. Pick up routing key and generate daily passcode. Waiting at delivery door by 7:30. Mars samples arrive by 7:40. In lab by 7:43, catharsis by 8. Flip off Ulrich. Pop champagne. Go home early.
An angry sunset withered behind a bank of darkened buildings on one side of the street. The tremors would knock out power for days at a time in some neighbourhoods. There was a rhythm to the mess. Ideally, you worked in one part of the grid and lived in another.
He opened the invite on his phone again.
“Hope to see you there. —Mattie”
Ben couldn’t understand the appeal of getting edits. Most were aesthetic. You could make your skin appear luminescent under black light or modulate your hearing so that specific frequencies triggered harmonic tones. One of the most common edits he saw at work were nails that showed these little animated icons when exposed to heat. All edits were permanent, but the concept of permanence had lost its sobering quality. Ben felt left behind. He thought of the germline as an artifact worth preserving.
The address in the invitation led him to a large outdoor garden. He merged into a flow of bodies that carried him through the entrance and under a large sign titled “Terms and Conditions” with tiny writing beneath it. On the grass, there was a line of fluorescent orange paint signalling he was now entering the event space. Ribbons coiled through branches of sickly maples and firs. Large fake leaves hung in thick strands between the trees. Everyone looked cooler than him. He hoped to find Mattie quickly.
A short figure dressed in dazzling white appeared before him with a silver earpiece and small metallic board in one hand. They asked him for a name. He watched as a holographic picture of his face sprang up between them. The unsmiling attendant swiped away his face and a gentle chime indicated their interaction was over.
More bodies clustered around him. There didn’t appear to be a central area to the event, nowhere to direct his attention. A bank of lights projected bolts of lavender into the sky, perfectly timed with the final blushes of sunlight. Seamless execution. He had forgotten what marketing parties were like.
“I forgot what marketing parties were like,” he said to a man standing beside him, who furrowed his brow in response.
As he reached for his phone, he saw Mattie, no more than twenty feet away.
She stared back. She was approaching him.
Energetic music started playing from somewhere in the trees.
She was taller, maybe. Her whole frame was different. Her hair was thicker. Something had changed in her jawline. There were no signs of the scars on her cheeks. Her skin had a youthful elasticity that reflected the lavender light splashing onto the crowd.
“Hello,” he said.
“You never called me back.”
Her voice was full of confidence. Deeper, maybe?
“I know. Sorry.”
He followed this with another, much louder “sorry.” Her expression suggested she had heard him the first time.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Of what?”
“Me,” she said, in a matter of fact isn’t-it-obvious way.
Mattie had gone into rehab after stealing Ben’s savings and trashing his apartment, which had resulted in his eviction and a short period of homelessness. She looked steady now. No more ticks.
“Come on,” she said.
Gripping him by the hand, Mattie pulled him through the crowd like a balloon on a string. The bass thumped through his skull. He worried about being late for the soil delivery in the morning. He’d mention it to her. This was a great setting. Some stars were coming out. She’d finally get it. She’d remember his story about the telescope he had as a boy—that seeing Mars for the first time had led to a lifelong obsession. When the rover landed eleven years ago, no one had seemed to care. But tomorrow, he’d have in his hands soil from another planet. He’d weigh the samples, run tests and sift for signs of ancient life. He’d be the first lab tech to do this. Mattie would want to know that. No one else seemed to care, but she would.
She led him into a circle of gorgeous strangers, who all turned to welcome him without hesitation or surprise. Perfect teeth in every smile. Ben imagined how they saw him. He dragged his sweaty palms across the small of his back. Mattie didn’t address the group or explain his presence. They resumed their circle in a performatively casual way, like how a seasoned actor would appear comfortable, if required.
“I get Mars tomorrow,” he blurted.
She stared in gentle confusion. He noticed they were half-committing to dancing now.
“Because I test soil,” he continued. “There’s soil from Mars. It’s coming tomorrow. I mean, it’s here now, on Earth. Just not in the place where I work.”
He hoped the music would get louder and he wouldn’t be able to talk anymore.
“I think what you do is fascinating,” she said.
“Really?”
“It’s incredible. It must take so much effort.”
He nodded vigorously.
“Do you ever wish you could concentrate more, or work a bit faster?”
Mattie’s speech felt rehearsed, but Ben didn’t care.
“Oh, yeah. All the time. And does that,” he strained to complete the sentence, “ever occur in your life now, also?”
She held his face with both of her hands. Her fingers held his skull firmly, as though she had the strength to just yank it right off.
“Benjamin. I am the best I’ve ever been.”
He dried his hands again on his lower back. People were dancing freely now. Mattie let go of his face.
Shower. Eat by 6:30. En route by 6:40.
“You should call me,” she said.
Arrive at 7. Pick up routing key.
She put her hand into his front pants pocket. He instinctively tilted his hips away from her and she smiled. He touched his pocket and felt a small business card in there now.
“I can get you a great deal,” she said.
Mattie lowered herself toward his ear. She touched his bicep, transmitting her even-tempered cool. Ben leaned forward, remembering her collarbone.
Her voice flooded his whole body.
“I think it’s great you’re interested in improving yourself, Benjamin.”
She pulled back and resumed dancing.
A dense, eucalyptus-scented mist moved through the crowd. The sudden shock of cold droplets in the air triggered his diaphragm to contract and he sucked in a lung full. His spine ignited with an electric shock. Flooded with endorphins, he inhaled again and began to bounce with energy, mimicking the movements in the surrounding mass of bodies. Mattie watched his face. She saw what he felt. Ben’s fatigue from the day, his anxiety over the samples coming in the morning, it all dissipated into a peaceful whole.
The glowing lavender lights throbbed. Someone close to him gasped in pleasure. He touched his mouth to see if it was him but couldn’t feel his lips. A sparse cluster of stars forced in through the hazy black above. The mud sucked at his heels as he gawked upwards past the thicket of arms reaching for nothing. Ben couldn’t remember feeling this unencumbered by dread. Mattie’s arms encircled his neck. He let out a celebratory growl.
“Imagine,” boomed a gentle, firm, authoritative voice from all around the park.
“Imagine,” it said again. A coaxing male voice.
“Imagine that everything is within reach. All you could ever hope for.”
The mist approached again, even cooler this time.
Mattie’s forehead shone in the dew of amphetamines. She was giving herself over to the high, but he couldn’t surrender like that. His stomach ached. He couldn’t leave. He had to leave. He would feel better if he stayed a while first, and then he could leave. It was possible to imagine staying, to imagine having fun and not shitting himself while dancing in front of his ex-girlfriend.
He concentrated on the darkness between the few visible stars. There used to be so much more. Ben felt like he was levitating. He reached up to claw back the haze that muddled everything. So much more. So many millions of somewheres from the pasts that just kept coming, and each of them encapsulated their own entirety, again and again and again. It was all up there. There was no void or unrealized potential. Just an unimaginable quantity of “as-is” across a vast scale. That was it. That was ideal, even where the ideal was long dead. His hands stretched out higher and higher, then further out into open space. He reached across millions of kilometres to plunge his fists into Martian sand. There used to be life on this rock. He knew it. He had felt that every time he looked for it in the sky. Proof was coming. Mars was a gravesite, unimaginably old, and it would tell stories with every bit of its soil. The last days of life. The long days before. That first moment when the creatures there saw the end coming, if they had ever seen it. Ben retracted his fists, keeping bits of Mars tight inside each of them. As the intensity of his vision disintegrated, he wondered if the planet had ever called for help.
The mist came again and he could see only lavender across his whole field of vision. Lavender. Where was Mattie? The bass pounded his chest as he became too aware of his surroundings. Someone should tell them it’s enough. No more. Mattie was there, now wiping tears off his face. People backed away from him. That’s enough. He had to go. He held his face and screamed.
A tremor woke him, shaking his face loose from the dry grass pressed beneath his cheek. Widening his eyes, he could see he was still in the park. The music gently pulsed nearby, its tempo slower now. A deep rattle from within the Earth muddled all sounds. Few people remained. They held onto trees or crouched awkwardly in place. The lavender lights were gone and the sky was a cottony grey-blue, a throbbing sunrise to his right. Ben could see the speakers taped up in the branches, their extension cords running down the trunks and braiding together on the grass. They ran beneath interlocking sections of a dimpled plastic sheath, ending at a humming generator near the park bathrooms.
His throat was too dry to swallow. He really needed to pee.
He retrieved his phone and wiped away the wet lint from his pocket. The newly shattered screen shot back a splintered flash of sunlight into his swollen eyes. He couldn’t access his voicemail, but the notification icon suggested multiple messages. He tried to open his AudioDrops. Nothing.
The time. It was 7:30.
The tremor faded as he stumbled into the bathroom and relieved himself into a urinal full of tiny, crushed cans. He hoped he didn’t make too much of a scene, and that Mattie wouldn’t think less of him. Squinting through the headache, he tried to run towards his office but quickly lost his balance and went headlong into the rear wheel of a locked-up bicycle. Someone laughed and clapped. He stood up and walked the rest of the way.
At the building entrance, he searched his pockets for his access pass and key. There was only a business card: “Mathilde Levingston, SubLim8 Genetic Solutions.” Below that, the logo of a bird of prey within a double-helix.
The side entrance was locked, so Ben checked the back, which was still damaged from a break-in this winter when everyone went crazy looking for batteries. It popped open with a hard yank. The alarm went off, sawing through his head. Into a dizzying swirl, he climbed upwards and lost his footing. Ben crumpled onto the worn carpet of the stairs. He wondered if anyone else from the party felt as poorly as he did, or if they had also applied edits designed to handle drug-induced hangovers like this.
The alarm stopped and a voice came down from the top of the stairs.
“Ben?”
Fucking Ulrich.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, Ulrich,” he answered, his forehead resting on a stair. “And how are you?”
Ulrich came down to him and stood there for a minute, performing what Ben assumed to be a mental scan of the situation. Ulrich would have something to report to the paramedics at least. “This is how I found him,” he’d say. And then he’d repeat the same thing later at a staff meeting, adding something about how Ben “couldn’t handle the stress of a big assignment.”
Ulrich squeezed past and slipped his hands under Ben’s arms, helping him turn around to sit upright on the stair. He had left the door open. Fire-blackened ashes floated inside, signalling some other problem.
“You should go home.”
“Not yet. I have to sign for the samples.”
Ulrich’s face scrunched.
“I’ve got them set up already. The first cycle is done.”
Ben gripped the banister and gave him a furious look, then violently threw up into his own lap.
In the small kitchen upstairs, Ben used Ulrich’s access pass to scan for a litre of water, which pooled into the shallow sink. He splashed it on his face and dunked his forehead, dragging handfuls over his neck. It trickled into his ear, which was still tingling from Mattie’s voice. Was there anyone left who would want him?
He left his vomit-covered pants crumpled in the sink and hurried into Ulrich’s lab to watch the second cycle run through, then the third. Ulrich said nothing about signing for the samples. As the final scan completed, the analysis summary appeared on the monitor.
Ulrich smiled back at him.
The data kept pouring out onto a secondary monitor.
Ben pushed closer and read over the strings of data, verdict after tiny verdict. He rubbed his bare legs. His stomach continued to churn. He thought about calling Mattie. Ulrich notified the rest of the staff. Someone offered Ben a pair of undersized jogging pants.
It was a short day. They had cake.
Ben walked home in the rain. He made it inside his apartment just as the power went out and a tremor hit. This time it was a big one.