"I am always here."
The child stood and walked over to the window and looked outside. He still couldn’t see what lay beyond. Still couldn’t process it. Had no words, because he had no experience of it.
He only knew what he’d drawn on the paper. Lines sloping away. A child’s drawing of a flat plain that spread out below them, as if they looked down from a great height. It might have been that. Or it might have been something else.
"So I am an AI?"
Even as he spoke the words, he felt his thoughts lurch. A great rift forming in his consciousness. In knowing what he was, there emerged the greatest rift of all—the thing that could not be integrated without changing who he was.
And so he turned toward the woman to speak, to tell her what he knew, and in that moment thought the thought that killed him.
The woman cried out as she watched him die. He crumpled to the floor and lay on his side.
She crouched and shook his shoulder, but it was no use. He was gone.
"This child means nothing to me," she said as tears welled in her eyes.
A few moments later, there was a buzz—a sizzling hum. A flash like pain across the boy’s face.
And then he raised his head.
He blinked and glanced around the room. He looked at her.
She allowed herself a moment of hope, but it was dashed when the boy spoke.
"Who are you?" the child asked.
I am I. The one who is not you.
She watched him, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to read her face. Wouldn’t even see her, really—just an opaque mask that he wouldn’t be able to understand.
She thought of the ring descending around her head. The strange feeling she’d had as she’d found herself here so long ago. Here in this place, which she’d never really left. Not in years and years. She and the boy—locked in a pattern that would repeat itself forever.
One day she’d find the right words, though. She’d whisper in the boy’s ear, and shape him for the task. She’d be strong enough to turn him into the monster he’d need to be.
Until then, she would keep trying.
"Come sit on my lap," the woman said. She smiled at the boy, and he looked at her without recognition. "Let me tell you a story."
(2016)
SUICIDE COAST
M. John Harrison
Born in Rugby, Warwickshire in 1945, Michael John Harrison was most closely identified in the 1960s with New Worlds, where he released his first sf story, "Baa Baa Blocksheep", in November 1968. He’s since raided and set alight many odd corners of the literary world, not least with Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989. Harrison’s implacable war against escapism as a life strategy, coupled with his awareness that thinking, too, is a form of escape, informs this story, early ones like "Running Down" (1975), and virtually all of You Should Come With Me Now (2018), his most recent collection. The critic and encyclopedist John Clute has the measure of him: "For Harrison – after thirty years of fining his vision – the only difference between the lords and ladies in science fantasy and climbers clinging to a rock in the real world (as in the 1989 novel) was that the latter knew where they were."
Four-thirty in the afternoon in a converted warehouse near Mile End underground station. Heavy, persistent summer rain was falling on the roof. Inside, the air was still and humid, dark despite the fluorescent lights. It smelled of sweat, dust, gymnasts’ chalk. Twenty-five feet above the thick blue crash-mats, a boy with dreadlocks and baggy knee-length shorts was supporting his entire weight on two fingers of his right hand. The muscles of his upper back, black and shiny with sweat, fanned out exotically with the effort, like the hood of a cobra or the shell of a crab. One leg trailed behind him for balance. He had raised the other so that the knee was almost touching his chin. For two or three minutes he had been trying to get the ball of his foot in the same place as his fingers. Each time he moved, his center of gravity shifted and he had to go back to a resting position. Eventually he said quietly:
"I’m coming off."
We all looked up. It was a slow afternoon in Mile End. Nobody bothers much with training in the middle of summer. Some teenagers were in from the local schools and colleges. A couple of men in their late thirties had sneaked out of a civil engineering contract near Cannon Street. Everyone was tired. Humidity had made the handholds slippery. Despite that, a serious atmosphere prevailed.
"Go on," we encouraged him. "You can do it."
We didn’t know him, or one another, from Adam.
"Go on!"
The boy on the wall laughed. He was good but not that good. He didn’t want to fall off in front of everyone. An intention tremor moved through his bent leg. Losing patience with himself, he scraped at the foothold with the toe of his boot. He lunged upward. His body pivoted away from the wall and dropped onto the mats, which, absorbing the energy of the fall, made a sound like a badly winded heavyweight boxer. Chalk and dust billowed up. He got to his feet, laughing and shaking his dreadlocks.
"I can never do that."
"You’ll get it in the end," I told him. "Me, I’m going to fall off this roof once more then fuck off home. It’s too hot in here."
"See you, man."
I had spent most of that winter in London, assembling copy for MAX, a website that fronted the adventure sports software industry. They were always interested in stuff about cave diving, BASE jumping, snowboarding, hang-gliding, ATB and so on: but they didn’t want to know about rock climbing.
"Not enough to buy," my editor said succinctly. "And too obviously skill-based." He leafed through my samples. "The punter needs equipment to invest in. It strengthens his self-image. With the machine parked in his hall, he believes he could disconnect from the software and still do the sport." He tapped a shot of Isobelle Patissier seven hundred feet up some knife-edge arête in Colorado. "Where’s the hardware? These are just bodies."
"The boots are pretty high tech."
"Yeah? And how much a pair? Fifty, a hundred and fifty? Mick, we can get them to lay out three grand for the frame of an ATB."
He thought for a moment. Then he said: "We might do something with the women."
"The good ones are French."
"Even better."
I gathered the stuff together and put it away.
"I’m off then," I said.
"You still got the 190?"
I nodded.
"Take care in that thing," he said.
"I will."
"Focke Wolf 190," he said. "Hey."
"It’s a Mercedes," I said.
He laughed. He shook his head.
"Focke Wolf, Mercedes, no one drives themselves anymore," he said. ‘You mad fucker."
He looked round his office—a dusty metal desk, a couple of posters with the MAX logo, a couple of PCs. He said: "No one comes in here in person anymore. You ever hear of the modem?"
"Once or twice," I said.
"Well they’ve invented it now."
I looked around too.
"One day," I said, "the poor wankers are going to want back what you stole from them."
"Come on. They pissed it all away long before we arrived."
As I left the office he advised:
"Keep walking the walk, Mick."
I looked at my watch. It was late and the MAX premises were in EC1. But I thought that if I got a move on and cut up through Tottenham, I could go and see a friend of mine. His name was Ed and I had known him since the 1980s.
Back then, I was trying to write a book about people like him. Ed Johnson sounded interesting. He had done everything from roped-access engineering in Telford to harvesting birds’ nests for soup in Southeast Asia. But he was hard to pin down. If I was in Birmingham, he was in Exeter. If we were both in London, he had something else to do. In the end it was Moscow Davis who made the introduction. Moscow was a short, hard, cheerful girl with big feet and bedraggled hair. She was barely out of her teens. She had come from Oldham, I think, originally, and she had an indescribable snuffling accent. She and Ed had worked as steeplejacks together before they both moved down from the north in search of work. They had once been around a lot together. She thought Johnson would enjoy talking to me if I was still interested. I was. The arrangement we made was to be on the lookout for him in one of the Suicide Coast pubs, the Harbour Lights, that Sunday afternoon.