“Something’s wrong, Doc, something’s messed up, something’s…”
I slam Quarble’s dim mental presence aside as my fingers of perception fly over the screen trying this, trying that, performing all the emergency procedures in my long experience. NOTHING! The damn sequence has fizzled. Those slimy, slimy-miniscule-air-sucking-dirty-LITTLE Life units have somehow ABORTED my firing sequence.
“Oh, so we want to play games, do we?” I said, gritting the words out as I moved perceptions faster than I had in tens of billions of years.
“Here go,” I said, “HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of simultaneous supernovae!”
Yes, it would kill the patient, but it would end THIS Life infestation, that’s for sure.
WHAM! Incredible pain coursed through my body and, judging by his screams, Quarble’s as well.
We had failed… incredibly we had failed… and Life had struck back in a blow that left me weak and reeling and Quarble whimpering.
Time for desperate tactics! “You’re going in, Quarble!” I said.
“NO!” he yelled in protest. “Not ‘throw the dwarf again!”
Despite all the heat of the moment, I could not help but smile—even Life units found throwing dwarves funny for some unknown reason. Well, let’s see just how FUNNY they would find another galaxy ava-lanching through their own and destroying all stars, planets, and Life units in its path.
With a mighty PUSH, I launched the terrified and screaming Quarble on his way. Good-bye, Milky Way. Hello, milkshake!
Yet, my own horror suddenly grew as I saw Quarble being batted back toward me. It took all my strength to divert his hurtling body, sending it off in a safe tangent away from me. But while I was managing that, a cascade of energy hits me, my defenses are weakened, my body is being invaded!
In sheer desperation I called out for help to my fellow physicians.
Perhaps had I been nicer to them in the past and a bit less arrogant? They make no effort to save me. The quarantine walls go up quickly.
Inside, I feel the first stirrings of Life.
YOU
by Anonymous (aka Stephen Leigh)
YOU WONDER ABOUT the title, but you start to read.
You also grimace a bit at the use of second person, thinking it both a bit awkward and pretentious, and you wonder if the author is trying to make you think you are the protagonist of the story, that this paragraph is referring to you personally.
It is.
Now, you read those words and you grimace again and give a little half-exasperated huff of air. Almost, you start to argue back to the page, denying it, and then you stop. And there’s just the faintest, the tiniest bit of wonder, of something akin to hope—after all, you think, that would be interesting. That would be unusual. You can almost hear Rod Serling intoning the introduction for The Twilight Zone. You’ve always wanted something like that to happen to you, haven’t you?
Well, you’re right. These words are directed to you. Truly.
You’re not quite certain how that could be. After all, there are thousands of copies of this book out there circulating and how could the story know that it’s really you and not that overweight, balding programmer with a graying beard in the paper-stuffed apartment in Queens who’s also currently reading this at the moment. But it is you, not him. Why would it be him? He’s a loser. He hasn’t had more than one date with a woman for three years, and even those single dates have been rare. He goes out to bars once a month or so hoping to get lucky, but his social skills, never very good, have atrophied even further since his job doesn’t require him to actually hold a conversation with anyone, and so he usually ends wandering from circle to circle being ignored until closing time, and then going back to his room and popping one of his pornogrpahic DVDs into the player.
You’re not him. In fact, he stopped reading at the porn reference, tossing the book across the room in angry and futile denial.
You think that’s a rather harsh and brutal characterization (since you’ve known a few people who could fit that description) and you’re somewhat annoyed at it, but though the description is rather on the cold side, it is accurate and besides, you didn’t write it, so you don’t need to feel responsible. Even Bob the programmer (hi, Bob—don’t you love it when you see your name in print?), in those self-flagellating moments when he’s alone in his apartment with only the blue light of his laptop’s monitor illuminating the stacks of paperback books on his desk, would admit the truth in what you just read. It may soothe you to know that he’ll pick up this story again, an hour from now. This time he’ll finish it, wondering if he’ll see himself again and perhaps a little envious that the story’s for you, not him.
This story is for you.
You pause a moment, confused, because you’re not used to a story interfering quite so directly. After all, this is genre fiction. Popular fiction, not some postmodern mainstream story. This is that “crazy sci-fi stuff.” You read this type of anthology for escape and for that lovely “sense of wonder,” not for pretension and experimentation. Over the years, you’ve slipped a thousand times between covers with sleek spaceships and square-jawed heroes, scantily-clad women and grotesque aliens slithering across a two-mooned landscape. You’ve lost yourself in a thousand worlds and glimpsed myriad universes painted in words garish or subtle, poetic or plain. You’ve allowed yourself to be the protagonist—any age, gender, or race—and you’ve bled and loved, triumphed or died everywhere from the medieval past to distant galaxies. You have the gift of imagination yourself—and that’s why this story’s for you. You can become.
You’ve read the books and watched the movies since you were a kid, and sometimes you’ve wondered how it would be if lights descended from the sky in front of you one night, whirling down to the lonely county road as you step from your car, drawn by mingled fear and curiosity, and then the side of the ship melts and there, in a rectangle of blinding light, it appears, the Other. You’ve wanted it to happen.
It’s not going to, though. At least not that way. You know that; you realized long ago that any life that’s out there is going to be so profoundly different from you that it may not even be recognizable. Even if it were, the Other’s interests and values aren’t going to be yours.
That’s you, right? The one reading this?
You’re still not convinced, though. Fine. So convince me, you think, even though at the same time the deeper skeptical part of you insists that it’s not possible. And it’s not. Not totally. This story could tell you that you lost someone close to you not all that long ago, and that you’ve kept a memento of them because it brings back the memories. That’s the case, of course, and your eyes narrow again because the words have struck too close to home. You also know that it’s exactly the kind of vague statement a supposed psychic would use in a cold reading, but…
You shiver, as if cold fingers just brushed your spine. You wonder, as you have before, just who’s having this one-sided conversation with you, and why. So tell me, you think, nearly saying the words aloud.
Fine. Here’s why.
Elephants.
You almost laugh at that. But it’s true. Remember that old elementary school ‘mind trick’ where someone says: “Think of anything you want, but just don’t think of elephants.” And as soon as they say that, you instantly can’t think of anything but elephants. An entire herd of them go rampaging through your forebrain, trumpeting and ear-flapping, raising the dust from your cerebellum.