The healing spell doesn’t feel at all how I… expected? Was it me who expected anything about it? Maybe it wasn’t. I remember someone else who read they want us to die and strangers they can love to move in behind our faces and scoffed. It seemed stupid. It seemed stupid to them. It doesn’t seem stupid to me. I am a stranger that other people can love; I am a stranger even to myself, with no idea what my favorite foods are, no idea what hobbies I would like to have, no feelings at all for any of the people who wanted me, a stranger they can love, to move in behind this face.
I open my eyes and—I think I can only see because the spell is decent at patching agnosias. I don’t know how, but I don’t need to; colors and shapes exist, alien and incomprehensible, and I have strange sourceless-seeming hunches about what’s in front of my face.
This is not something just anyone can afford. But me, I’m a talented dancer—that’s not true. I want to claim credit but there’s something fundamentally alien in those memories. I know deep down that I am not in them. I’m not a talented dancer; I’m a fungus growing on a corpse, I’m a changeling, I’m a cuckoo come suddenly into my adult plumage. I’m the heir to a talented dancer who was killed to make way for me, who earned enough to afford even just one casting of a spell this powerful.
They wanted to leave. They wanted to take the rest of the proceeds from their own performances and run away with a friend. They wanted to never see anyone from their old life again. They were right to want that. And now, well, now I’ll have to—
—There’s a strange sensation, a sensation of someone standing beside me shoulder to shoulder, a sensation a bit like being used as part of a distributed computer. Some of the thoughts in my mind cease to be mine to direct.
What, thinks the dancer, the actual fuck is going on here?
And I don’t know how to answer that but I do burst into tears because at least they’re not dead.
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We make it out. What, were you expecting this part of the story to be the exciting part? No. We stick some cash and jewelry in a backpack and we and one of their old friends go for a hike to another town. We pass some zombies but those always leave my headmate alone—it is specific to my headmate, who can run after them begging them to come back and only succeed in chasing them away. I would never do this and they come after me when I’m in front, like the world’s worst cats.
Anyway, my headmate and I make it out and crash with our friend Jay for a while, then move into our own studio apartment. We come up with names for each other, since the legal name isn’t disambiguating; they go by Alex and I go by Artemis. We dance less-comprehensive healing and we dance stability for buildings and we dance peace and safety (insofar as you can manage that at all with magic, which is not very much). We get paid. We go to college and consider what else we can do with ourselves.
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So the main thing that everyone else thinks about, a cause that’s not even slightly neglected and that no one else has a handle on, is the plague of cursed children. Like Alex was, once. Blind and mostly deaf, and—well, people argue about whether it’s caused by growing up like that, or caused directly by the curse, or even just stereotypes and slander, but there’s supposed to be a personality type. Robotic, distant, precise, cold. Alex, who wishes we could’ve been an accountant, always thought it was mostly the first with a bit of the third for flavor. But me, I’m different. So it seems pretty clear, now, that it’s the second thing.
Everyone else worries about this cause area a lot, even though it’s not neglected. I guess it wouldn’t make any sense for everyone to worry about a cause area that was neglected, huh. But it’s a big deal. It started happening a few decades ago, to tiny toddlers whose parents swear they weren’t like that to start with. Some people think the incidence keeps increasing, that soon everyone born after a certain year will be cursed. You might think this would be really easy to measure, since it’s so obvious and distinctive a syndrome, but actually its first appearance coincided with the zombie apocalypse and a UFO flyby and a lot of the first cohort died and, well, look, it was a mess.
Anyway, society’s fine now, with more zombies but still fine, and now we have a reasonable attempt at epidemiological data. And people are freaked out, but it’s not clear what there is to do about it. About one in ten families can afford to get their child cured, and that’s with subsidies and crowdfunding and everything we can throw at the problem. There’s been talk of having the government pick up the tab but the government can’t afford that now and if the prevalence is rising it’ll only get less able to afford it.
Not that dealing with not curing the cursed is cheap, either, but you can fund one cure or twenty years of disability or unemployment benefits and the cursed usually scream and resist healing magic powerful enough to touch their curse and while the employment rate among adults is shy of fifty percent it’s not very shy of it. Once you figure in the kids who don’t grow up for whatever reason, well over fifty percent of the cursed don’t go on to be unemployed adults. So for a forty-year career, it doesn’t save the government any money to cure people.
(“Whatever reason” isn’t just a euphemism for murder. The cursed have a tendency to run off into the wild even from a young age and are usually extremely precocious at opening childproof locks or even regular locks. They’re not usually extremely precocious at avoiding rivers. But also, yes, it’s partly a euphemism for murder.)
There’s not great data on those who are cured, but mostly they’re cured very young, and mostly they act like normal people, and mostly they don’t talk about having alter egos who are still cursed.
(Did you imagine that Alex wasn’t cursed anymore? They still are. When they come to front the first thing they do is close our eyes and whine that the light hurts. They won’t listen to music of any kind and hate talking out loud. You can explain to them that it’s not safe to run into zombie-infested wilderness even if the zombies in question run away from you but they find it very hard to care.)
So we’re not totally sure that curing people isn’t… murder, somehow, of the people they could have grown into. But then, maybe the curse is also murder, of the other people they could have grown into. So even if it seemed like a tractable, neglected problem, we aren’t super eager to cure cursed children. Or to let them continue to be cursed. But we’re not keen on preventing them from being cursed, either, because we’re not really sure how population ethics works.
Instead we fund efforts to eradicate poverty and speculative research into why the dead rise and whether it’s preventable. Yes, we split our donations. Yes, we’re obviously philistines with no comprehension of the fact that an ideal lives-saved-maximizer would be indifferent between a 50% chance of a million dollars and a 100% chance of half a million dollars with utility perfectly linear in lives saved and would therefore give only to the best charity. We’re so unaware of it, in fact, that neither of us even has a linear mapping of lives saved to utility at all, like uneducated losers or something.
Anyway, our story picks up a little after we graduate college and get a job researching zombies.
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But I’m not about to tell you that part! I’m going to back up and tell you something else first. Something about Alex’s childhood.
They were loved, once. Not in the way you love a performer, not in the way you love a useful resource, but loved as you love a child. I’m jealous, thinking of it. The way their aunt would play with them and shower them in gifts and take them places. The way their grandparents would touch them, always gentle and never grabbing or hugging if they weren’t invited to. Even their mother, back then, made a real try at genuine human connection.
And then they turned out to be good enough at magic dance that you could turn a profit keeping them around, already, at age seven. The only mercy there is that magic dance isn’t really for or about an audience; they didn’t become a celebrity, not really, although they were sort of well-known within their specific subfield within a few years and by now a lot of people have heard our legal name.
Well, so they were useful. And they could be pushed to do more of that, and other aspects of their education left by the wayside, and that made Alex’s aunt very angry and their grandparents very disappointed. So their mother (their father wasn’t in the picture by now; their mother said later that he left because he didn’t want to deal with a disabled child) backed off, a bit, and scheduled some fun activities and tried to send them to summer camp. And it seemed okay, for a while.
The prophecy came when Alex was nine and already making as much as their own mother. Prophecies aren’t super rare, but only maybe one in a hundred fifty people is the subject of one. Prophecies aren’t usually particularly useful, either. A lot of them go something like “this person will dance in the rain” and get fulfilled one day while they’re listening to music in the yard and don’t feel like going inside as it starts drizzling. Alex’s is “this child is special; this child will gain the power to wake the sleepers.”
But by then Alex had already managed to wake people up who were asleep, so the prophecy couldn’t be about that; clearly they didn’t need to gain that power. And much as any family might think their child is special no matter what, prophecies usually don’t agree.
We’ve talked about whether it could mean Alex will gain the power to do to everyone what happened to us, if there’s a me in every cursed child. We’re not really sure. On the one hand, that’s a lot of people who might exist and might be sleeping. On the other hand, that doesn’t seem special enough; healing magic isn’t that rare and expensive.
But Alex’s mother took it as a reason to cut ties with anyone who’d question her parenting and use Alex relentlessly, nurturing their magical talent and profiting off it. She could’ve had them cured, and she didn’t, even with enough cash on hand that Alex could steal it and get themself sort-of-cured-ish. Alex thinks it was because being disabled made them less able to say no to her or go off alone. I think it was probably more reasonable than that, but it doesn’t matter. Alex left. We aren’t in contact with her. And that’s fine.
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So here’s the part where it gets exciting: fresh out of college, we get a remote job in zombie research, and something clicks for Alex and Alex explains it to me and then something clicks for me and we realize something.
There are a lot of zombie attacks, and sometimes they’re fatal. Cursed people should be the same fraction of those killed by zombies as they are of the general population, unless something interesting is happening. Well, there have been a few anecdotal reports of attacks; on a forum Alex likes, for cursed people and their families, they’ve read a few posts that said a zombie shambled toward someone cursed. But there’s never been a single cursed person who died of zombie-inflicted wounds. There’ve been a couple who died in the process of fleeing—not, usually, under their own power, but being carried away by a guardian who trips and falls into a ditch or something—but never any who were eaten.
So far so niche-but-not-novel. There are bloggers who’ll tell you this is because the cursed are an attempt to protect us from the zombies, and bloggers who’ll tell you this is because the cursed are so foul even zombies avoid them.
The cursed tend to be drawn to the wild. That’s famous. Except—Alex isn’t. Alex is drawn to zombies, who exist in the wild and get cleared out of cities. None of Alex’s cursed forum friends are afraid of zombies; attitudes range from fascinated to obscurely pitying. Evidence for the protection-from-zombies theory? Well, sure. But there’s more.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Zombies don’t rot all that much, past a certain point. This is very interesting, and has potential applications if we can replicate it with other things we want to preserve. Which is why Alex’s lab dissects some and why Alex learns that their brains are weirdly well preserved, slowly being replaced with a strange nonfunctional material that preserves all the information we know how to get out of a freshly dead brain. If you had the tech to do full brain emulation, you could dissect a zombie and get the information you needed to bring back whoever they had been.
So: zombies. Not information-theoretically dead. The cursed could—we have to posit an intelligence behind this but that’s not weird—somehow be drawn to them because they’re aware that that information is in there, because they want it for something. That’s what Alex comes up with, and they run it by me for a sanity check, and I say, oh, you want to wake the sleepers.
Alex says shit fuck goddamn, you’re right, I do. I feel like it’s what I was made for.
And they breathe a little easier, all of a sudden, as if they know where they belong, as if they’re comfortable with who they are.
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It’s not, of course, as easy as poking one. I try it, with one that the lab captured—I interviewed; I show up to our voicechat meetings, when Alex isn’t just pretending our webcam is broken. They work remote and almost everything they have to interact with is text that their refreshable braille display handles fine, but they don’t want to explain themself. Neither of us really wants too many people to know. On the very rare occasion when it makes any sense for one of us to visit in person, I’m the one who goes.
I touch a zombie. It doesn’t do anything. I tell Alex, look, this is the chance we have, and I close our eyes and wait for them.
Alex touches the zombie. It does… something, or at least it feels like something. But it’s not completely intuitively obvious exactly what to do, and also there are sounds, and also there’s light getting in through our eyelids, so Alex hides.
I wash our hands.
Good work, team, I think. We’ll figure this out yet.
I can feel Alex metaphorically, mentally, vibrating with excitement.
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So the thing to do is obviously to study zombies until Alex knows enough to wake them. Alex cares about that more than almost anything else. They get up and eat breakfast because it will fuel them to study and they study and they pause for exercise because it will keep them healthy for studying and they study more and they eat dinner because it will fuel them for studying and they sleep because it’s necessary to keep our brain in good condition for studying and they get up and they spend another entire day like this.
On the third day I claw through the fog and distraction to remind them that I am supposed to get to go for a walk and check my email every day and that today is my day of the week to watch a movie.
Sorry, it’s just—you can have however much time you want after I’m done but this is really important, Alex answers. You have to understand that, don’t you?
It’s important, I agree, but I’m not saying you shouldn’t work on it. I’m saying you should keep our agreement.
Yeah, absolutely, Alex thinks. In a minute.
I wait and watch over their shoulder. Well, “watch” might not be the right word. Alex has the lights off, the curtains closed, and a sleepmask on. I read braille nearly as well as they do, though, and I can sometimes read some of their thoughts, so I have a good idea of what’s happening, no matter how claustrophobic and lost it makes me feel not to be able to see. I have a good idea of how much time passes, too, and it’s more than a minute.
I... don’t literally clear our throat, although I sure make an attempt. The attempt by itself communicates plenty.
Yeah, soon, Alex says, and goes on working.
You’re not even supposed to work this much overtime! I say.
I’m not. See? And I do see, or at least perceive, as Alex draws our attention to some memories. They have, technically, not been working this whole time. The’ve just spent all of their leisure time reading research in related fields.
I am unamused. I make Alex aware of this.
It’s the most important thing in the world! Alex thinks frantically, almost desperately.
More important than being someone who keeps their promises? You made me, Alex. You owe me a life that doesn’t make me curse you for it.
Alex doesn’t particularly think that’s true; they never meant to, and it’s possible I existed, dormant, for their whole life. But they relent and leave me the body.
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Alex chills, a little. I take what time I can, and when I get the body I hold onto it for hours over their protests. After a couple weeks of our schedule falling apart, Alex is so offended by the mess we’re making that they shape up. And once Alex has shaped up and I’ve had time to do other things, I take a look at some of their work and offer them a new perspective on some of it. It goes faster that way. We learn a lot. Everyone learns a lot, of course; it’s not like we’re working on this alone.
But, eventually, things quiet down a bit. Alex hits diminishing returns on how many new insights they can get from their technically-not-overtime. They and their coworkers scare up all the interesting correlations they can find in the data they have and it’s not Alex’s job to go hunt zombies or buy tissue samples. I go to a few meetings, one of them in person, and Alex writes up a critique of the lab’s methodology and acts as a soundboard for a coworker drafting a grant proposal, and I get my walks and my email and my movies and Alex even finds time to do things besides work.
And while Alex is solving a rubik’s cube one evening, it occurs to them to come at the problem from the other direction, by researching the cursed.
You might imagine this should’ve occurred to them sooner, but in fact the research on the topic is mostly worthless. Studies ask whether it correlates with prenatal exposure to estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, plastics, teflon, animal food products, artificial dyes, healing magic, pest-control hexes, or divination; but the studies in question can’t tell if it does, because some of those correlate with higher or lower odds of death specifically for cursed children relative to other children. Studies look into whether the prevalence is different depending on zodiac sign; it doesn’t seem to be, but at least they manage to rule something out. Some particularly useful studies report data from biopsies and autopsies and brain scans and eye exams. We’re already pretty familiar with that, and as disappointing as the state of the research is we jointly only have twenty-four hours in a day and can’t do all the research anyone should be doing anywhere in the world.
But either the cursed all have the same instinctive sense of what they’re meant to do with zombies, or there’s variance. And if there’s variance, then maybe all of them together have enough information. Which means, actually, the most useful data is psychological. So Alex starts another research binge in an area with terrible study quality and a tendency to focus on what Alex will unapologetically call the wrong questions. By far the closest they get to useful sources are off-topic arguments about zombies on the cursed forum they like to read.
Two hours in I remind them that I exist.
I’m not going to make the same mistake again, Alex says. And they mostly don’t.
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There comes a point when the next step has to be to get in touch with a researcher and talk about funding the studies we want.
Alex emails one, a prominent one with a name that nags at our memory as if we heard it somewhere once before. Doctor Evelyn Glen, an old woman with a lot of irons in the fire, doesn’t answer her own email—at least, doesn’t answer this email—but her assistant or whoever it is sends us what reads like a form response, listing some organizations that fund studies in the field and linking to their websites.
Alex goes ahead and follows the links, in case they have anything useful to say. Most studies are funded by a national public health organization whose research priorities are prevention and bringing a cure down into most people’s price range; they’re the ones behind all that research on prevalence by zodiac sign and prenatal hormone exposure. Three studies published so far, and apparently two more that’ve been preregistered, have been funded by a self-advocacy organization whose focus is on restructuring society in light of its apparently inevitable demographic takeover by the cursed. (What they actually fund isn’t that radical; it’s just educational inclusivity and online accessibility. So far.)
Should we get in touch with them? Alex wonders. If what they do is self-advocacy then they’re cursed themselves and they’ll want to wake the sleepers too.
I answer, but will they really? They’re not prophesied to.
We don’t know no one else is, Alex thinks. Anyway, if that’s not what the cursed are for, it’d be good to know that, too.
Okay, but you’re going to sound like a kook if you just say that out of the blue.
And since I’m right, Alex writes an email to the self-advocacy org that sounds much less kooky, explaining that they’re a researcher in a related field interested in the interactions between zombies and the cursed.
We receive a helpful list of publications to look at. Something breaking down zombie victims by demographic, which we’re already familiar with. Something about the engagement of the cursed with the media, including zombie documentaries, which is new to us. A qualitative analysis of themes and motifs in forum postings by the cursed about zombies, which is also new to us.
That last one has some of what we’re looking for and what it doesn’t have we can at least organize into a small number of simple, concrete questions. For Alex, it clicks. For me, I make a flowchart, and then it makes sense.
Alex writes back asking outright, Have you ever thought about whether we could revive zombies?
The response we get is just “all the time” and a link to a website. The site belongs to a highly speculative nonprofit that humanely detains zombies without destroying them, in case they can be revived someday. There’s a donation page. Alex gives them about as much as the cost of a bus ticket, on a whim, and makes a note to consider them when we’re thinking about our charitable donations later in the year, if it still makes sense then.
Alex writes back to thank them for the link, and then writes to the zombie warehouse people with my flowchart.
The zombie warehouse people don’t write back. Of course.
Alex eventually tries sending that to the self-advocates, too, and gets enthusiastically encouraged to write the zombie warehouse about it and asked if we have a project we need funding for.
Alex facepalms and waits for a reply that never comes. After a few days, they write up a list of questions, without any of the context that makes them sound like a crackpot, and send it to Doctor Glen.
Doctor Glen answers. She answers at length and in detail, though not, unfortunately, completely. By the end of the email we have two questions left and Doctor Glen has invited us to meet for coffee soon.
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I meet her for coffee. Doctor Glen frowns at me curiously and then, tentatively, addresses me by Alex’s deadname.
“…I don’t go by that name anymore,” I say. “I got it legally charged halfway through college. Where do I know you from?”
“I had a cursed grandchild,” says Doctor Glen. “An amazingly talented magic dancer whose mother didn’t want me keeping in touch.”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s where I’ve heard ‘Evelyn Glen’ before.” My hands idly form her sign name, the one I remember much better because Alex used to actually use it regularly, years and years ago. I don’t want to be the one having this conversation.
“Yes. I got into the field because if it was ever useful it would be a gift she couldn’t keep away. But it looks like it… isn’t helpful in the way I expected.” She’s still frowning. This doesn’t feel right, for a loving grandmother finally reunited with her long-lost grandchild. There’s something wistful and sad in her tone that there shouldn’t be. “What became of the prophecy?”
“…You know, don’t you? You know why the cursed are so jumpy about healing.”
There. She can’t quite suppress a flinch. “Is that who the sleepers are? I had hoped they were the dead.”
“They might be both. Alex isn’t dead—Alex changed their name too, but they’re not dead. Just not the one piloting right now.”
“Oh,” she says. “I see now. Alex Artemis, and I can call you Artemis. Pronouns they/them. Are either of you even nonbinary or is it the plural ‘they’?”
“Alex is nonbinary.”
“And they didn’t fight. They weren’t afraid. When you were healed, I mean. Is that right?”
“Yes. How can you tell?”
“It’s fighting the healing that kills them, I think. Or puts them to sleep—they might be the sleepers…”
“We wondered about that but we’re really confident we’re one small breakthrough away from figuring out how to bring zombies back to life with a touch—well, Alex is. I just do the in-person meetings because Alex is cursed.”
Invite her home, says Alex.
“They can still come out, then. Good. I don’t think you can wake the sleepers.”
“I know. You can come over and meet them in person some time. But for this meeting, I just need to know—okay, I have this flowchart, see?” I show it to her.
Doctor Glen studies it for a long time, smiling. “I would love to visit. Well, you’ve made a lot of progress, and I think…”
She launches into an explanation of the last couple of answers we need. It takes the better part of ten minutes. I take notes, but it doesn’t matter; Alex listens over my shoulder and won’t forget. It’s what they were made for.
We’re just setting up a time for Doctor Glen to visit and meet Alex when the sirens start blaring and the riot bars come down over the windows. There’s a zombie attack. They don’t usually come into civilization but there’s a nice big park nearby and occasionally they do.
When the sirens pause, the proprietor starts speaking almost loudly enough that I’d call it shouting, but not quite. “Okay, everyone! This is a great place to wait out an attack. They can’t get in, we have food and drink and facilities and comfortable seating, and you’re all welcome to stay as long as you need to. Please don’t open the door without me there to guard it as you leave. Everyone still here when they give the all-clear will get a coupon good for one free drink or pastry.”
I can feel Alex trying to turn toward the windows to look for zombies between the bars. Idiot, I think at them, I need to go ask them to cover our escape and then be in front to draw the zombies.
And I feel Alex’s grin tug at my face.