~}§{~
On my way out of building three, I spotted a work crew of blues who seemed to be repairing a cam station. It was situated on the main walkway leading in and out of the Block, and at least two of the modules were down. I watched them work, remembering what Meighen had said about my being a blue.
“The young man in the dress shirt! Stop where you are!”
I froze at once at the crackling voice. I’d looked a little too closely at the repairs. A pair of security specialists had been overseeing the work, and one of them was headed my way.
My voice nearly cracked as I hollered “Yes sir!” and then stood perfectly still. If he asked me for my Stigma or my resident ID, the interaction would go on my permanent file. I did not need that on the day of my occupation assignment.
His fast-marching boots reached me. I kept my eyes on those boots. I’d seen people get the wrong end of a nightstick for the way they looked at a security specialist’s helmet visor, but never for looking at his boots wrong.
“Are you a resident of this block?”
Off to a bad start. “Yes, sir.” I tried to keep my thoughts on anything other than the bottle of contraband Mr. Meighen was hiding in his apartment.
“What do you know about what happened to this camera station?”
I shook my head, but still gave him an answer. “It went around the Block a while back, someone threw something off a balcony? Hit a cam?”
Helen had drilled this into me like it was my multiplication tables. “The best thing for specialists is to always give as much information as you can about the last incident you heard about in that area, at least a month old. You want to appear earnest, helpful, and stupid.”
As always, Helen’s advice served me well. The Specialist turned to wave an ‘all clear’ to his partner, before turning back to me. “Where are you headed?”
“Occupational Assignment, sir.”
His dark helmet turned towards the folder of paperwork under my arm. “Understandable justification for staring at a blue collar outfit as they work. Do yourself a favor and mind your own business next time. Move along.”
He had turned and left before I finished getting out my “Yes sir”s and my “thank you sir”s. My heart pounded in my chest, and I turned to leave as quick as possible without looking suspicious. Security specialists had discretion to rough up a resident for any potential or perceived threat to public safety. I needed to be more careful.
-)&(-
Now, we weren’t the only ones who’d heard her, who’d had her answer back, and in time, within a month or so of that incident with the counselor, everyone knew. Various governments and organizations tried their best to keep her existence secret for a while, but they all eventually released official statements.
She was called Melette, a disembodied voice who seemed to be everywhere at once, and she wouldn’t say much. She spoke every human language, had virtually zero emotion or inflection in her voice at all times, and would answer only specific questions when they were repeated.
If you asked twice, she’d answer in a voice only you could hear, like she was in your head. If you asked three times, anyone nearby would be able to hear her in the air.
The questions she answered were the weirdest thing. Even though everyone around the world was experimenting with her, seeing if they could make her say something new, she only seemed to hear three questions.
First, if you asked her who she was, she’d simply give you her name. Second, if you asked what you were, she would answer with whatever phrase you’d heard on the day of the Skæbnevindue disaster.
This phrase, we were slowly discovering, was seemingly unique to each individual. Even before we knew its significance, we started calling it names. A few got passed around for a while, but in time, the UN settled on “The Stigma.”
Amidst all of this mystery, the most ominous thing was the third question. I’m not sure how we discovered it. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who’d had dreams? But the third answer was the same for everyone.
If you asked Melette “How long now, how long now, how long now?” she would respond with a kind of countdown.
In December of 2062, on my 13th birthday, her answer was “409 days.”
This countdown went down by one day, every day, and no matter how hard we tried, we could never get Melette to tell us what would happen when she reached zero.
When I say “We,” I’m really talking about humanity in general. That December, I was distressed by a more impending fate: becoming a Canadian.
~}§{~
“Ey! How about you get out of my way, moron?”
With a jolt, I realized there was a white van behind me on the road. The driver’s head stuck out his window, glaring at me and the small crowd of other pedestrians who also hadn’t noticed him.
“Sorry, sir!” I yelled, dashing for the sidewalk. There was a rush as we all moved to get out of his way, his horn blaring as he rumbled past. I felt dumb, but it was understandable. Unless the security specialists showed up, you’d never see a car in Delwood.
They became more common the closer you got to the city center, meaning me and the rest of the crowd had outed ourselves as being from the blocks.
Ah, well. Better to look dumb than be late. I hurried my pace, even though I’d triple-checked the travel time and left with enough time to be early.
With the van having moved on, the day’s foot traffic quickly ambled back in to fill the roadway. Security specialists watched from the sidewalks, walking in pairs and trios. I saw their black helmets in my peripheral, and fought not to look.
They’d perked up a little when the van’s path had been blocked, but seemed to have calmed down. I hoped that, if their cameras had been rolling, my apology had been loud enough to be picked up by the mic. Obstructing traffic carried heavy fines.
It made me shake my head, as I remembered that when I’d first come to live here, we’d actually had two cars. Hell, I’d flown in on a plane!
It was like remembering I’d lived in a different time period.
-)&(-
She burst into tears the moment she saw me.
I remember the quick click of her shoes on the airport tile as she rushed me, and the shock as she wrapped me in a tight embrace.
The social worker accompanying me made no move to stop her, and I realized it was because the woman holding me was my father’s little sister.
When she finally pulled away to look at me, I got a look at her. She was only 22 years old then, and in that moment I thought I’d never seen any woman more beautiful, besides my mother.
Long hair fell to her shoulders, and it couldn’t seem to decide if it was blonde or brown. Her face, red with tears, was softer than Dad’s, less hard edges and angles. But she had his eyes. Brown with green. My eyes.
Through the tears she was smiling, and her eyes were full of pity and pride. “Hello, Castor. I’m your Aunt Helen.”
Helen fussed and worried over me while her husband talked in a low voice with the social worker. He was tall, lean, and moved with slow grace. Compared to his more expressive wife, my Uncle Sanguk was impressively stoic. He might’ve been just 24, but he carried himself like a proud and weary old man.
When he finally reached out to give me a firm handshake and a nod, I thought his blank stare meant he must not like me very much. The next moment, he pulled me into a hug that nearly knocked the wind out of me.
The Parks had met three years earlier, when Helen had been a language teacher in Korea. Ever since the end of the Unification War, there had been a shortage of translators; so many English speaking countries wanted to help the North recover and join the new unified Republic, but the language barrier made humanitarian aid difficult.
Sanguk had been managing the training of more translators at the time. The two of them worked together for a year and a half before he asked her out. They’d been dating two weeks before he asked her to marry him.
They didn’t tell me all of this at the airport, I would hear the whole story later. Just like I would learn that about a year ago Sanguk had received an offer from the University of Alberta to work as an assistant in the linguistics department.
This was how my aunt and uncle had ended up in Edmonton, and ultimately how I ended up a Canadian.
My parents had been proud Americans who had raised me to be a proud American, and even spent a sizable sum on travel to ensure I had been born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, not in a frozen tundra in the middle of the ocean.
Meanwhile, the hospital where I’d been held under observation, Ochre Pit Memorial, was located in the Newfoundland city of St. John’s.
My first five months in Canada hadn’t exactly left a favorable impression. I’d been anxious to leave it behind, escape to my birth country. Instead, Edmonton was now my home.
Aunt Helen sat in the backseat with me as we drove back from the airport. For a while she didn’t say anything, just held my hand as I looked out the window. It was January, and frost glistened on every surface, reflected by the night lights of the city.
Uniformed police officers in ballistic vests patrolled the streets. My uncle watched them with narrowed eyes.
Finally my aunt softly said to me that she wasn’t sure where we’d have room to put all my things, seeing as I had a backpack and two big suitcases. I looked at her, but didn’t say anything.
She smiled, and looked into the trunk of the car. “What’s in that black one?”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“I don’t know,” I confessed, looking at my feet embarrassed.
“Aw, did they pack for you, love?”
Her sweet and innocent misunderstanding finally broke me down. I told them everything.
I explained that I didn’t know what was in the suitcases, because all the clothes and belongings inside had been bought just two days ago. The staff at Ochre Pit had decided that if I showed up with nothing, it would appear as if I hadn’t been cared for.
I told them about how the doctors had argued with the people sent to collect me, that I needed to be kept for further study. I could potentially be a danger, a “contaminant.” Since Ochre Pit had then failed to produce any evidence of this, they’d had no choice but to relinquish me.
I told my aunt and uncle about the visitors, the suits with snacks who shouted questions for hours without taking breaks. I told them about the doctors and their needles and the burning and the lights.
My aunt was unable to listen without the occasional horrified noise escaping her. She kept her eyes locked on me, a hand over her mouth. My uncle never reacted, or at least that’s what I thought. I missed the way his knuckles turned pale gripping the steering wheel, his jaw muscles tensing and pulsing.
In less than an hour we’d made it to McConachie, the suburb where they lived… where we lived. Their apartment was spacious and there were a lot of rooms. Helen and Sanguk were planning for children.
With my bags forgotten by the door, they brought me into their living room to explain everything that had been kept from me.
. . .
The day everything had gone wrong in Greenland was now known as the Horizon Window. On August 23rd, the First Contact Initiative had activated their Skæbnevindue site, a machine the size of a city, and something had gone horribly wrong.
Since its inception, the First Contact Initiative had promised it would unlock the power of our sister dimension. They had always been extremely secretive about how and when they would do this, but the FCI had never hidden this goal.
Whatever prototypes or research they had shown the governments of the world, it had been enough to secure enormous funding from the member nations of the UN for almost nineteen years.
Then everything had blown up in their face.
And the explosion, comparable in scale to a nuclear detonation, literally tore a rift in the fabric of space and time.
From this rift, a corruption had begun to spread that distorted the land it came into contact with. Everything: terrain, plants, animal life, it all warped and changed in the dimensional decay.
Within a month, the entire island of Greenland had become like some alien planet, inhospitable for humans even with advanced protective gear.
In close proximity to the rift, the warp transformed humans into mindless versions of themselves, animals that ran on all fours and devoured anything they could catch raw. They didn’t speak, couldn’t be reasoned with. There was no cure.
Aerial reconnaisance was spotty at best, but indicated that there were no rational survivors at Skæbnevindue.
Over 50,000 people, every single FCI site worker, had either died in an enormous explosion, turned into rabid monsters, or been torn apart and eaten by coworkers.
Absolute best case scenario, my parents had been vaporized in the initial blast.
I was grateful to them for telling me. For finally giving me the truth.
I was more grateful to them for taking me into their young family.
~}§{~
With thirteen minutes to spare, I’d arrived.
I stared up at the signboard over the doors, as if staring into the mouth of a chasm.
CANADIAN RIFT AUTHORITY
CENTRAL OCCUPATIONAL OFFICE, PROVINCE 5.
Feeling very small all of a sudden, I murmured to myself. “Melette, what am I?”
A murmur came back, gentle and quiet, unheard by those bustling on the street around me. “The Crow in Dust.”
I shook my head and pushed into the building. “Maybe today I’ll find out what that means.”
-)&(-
Growing up in Edmonton should have been pretty uneventful. My aunt, my uncle and I slowly fell into the rhythm of life as a happy family. It took some learning, but we all wanted it to work.
School was rough at first, but I had to stick with it; my attendance was legally mandated. Every child’s attendance was. Being around other kids was nice, but everything else about it seemed off.
The classes were not how I remembered school, back at the private FCI facility in Jakobshavn. Those lessons had been about natural laws and ideas, about the way things interacted with the world.
Classes at Edmonton Regional Middle were more about how something ought to make me feel, how I made others feel. Even math was like this, which seemed a little silly to me, but I figured school was just different in Canada.
In the end, there was only one thing anyone at school really wanted to learn about: the rift, and more importantly, the warp. In the first year after the Horizon Window disaster, the dimensional warp had spread from Greenland across the sea to Ellesmere Island, consuming it almost entirely.
The wildlife on Greenland had been mostly confined to the landmass. Ellesmere was different. Much more connected. There were stories, rumors of entire communities of Inuit and Yupik people being slaughtered by warped arctic wolves, who ranged beyond the borders of the warp to menace humans living off-grid.
Between classes, often even during lessons, kids were trying to scare each other with tales of a warped polar bear ripping houses down, or interrupting their teacher’s lesson by making Melette share their stigma with the entire class. Middle school kids are easily entertained, and our hallways rang with that soothing voice proclaiming things like “A Ream of Amber.” or, “A Type of Question.”
I had casual friends, but didn’t move with one group so much as just was polite to everyone and skated by. Helen didn’t like the idea of me as an outsider, but Sanguk just nodded without looking up from his laptop. “Good. Kids are stupid. Stay out of trouble, and you’ll be happier.”
The Parks didn’t like my generation’s obsession with the rift, either. I think they worried it would bring back painful memories. Whenever I was home, they never talked about it or brought it up. At least, that’s how things were for a little while.
On February 3rd, 2064, it happened. Melette’s countdown reached zero.
The second rift opened.
~}§{~
There was a bundle of nerves in the center of my chest as I waited in line, swaying left and right without really meaning to. The reception room around me was full of people, but oddly hushed, as if we were in a doctor’s office.
“86: Thompson, Mary.”
The girl in front of me in the queue stepped through the open door, which closed behind her with finality. I took a step forward, took her spot. No one left ahead of me. I was next. It was finally happening.
I’d been told there were some job interview-style questions, and I’d rehearsed some answers in the mirror that morning before breakfast. I looked down at my shoes, mouthing the words to myself. “I believe it is the responsibility of the brave and able, to serve the state and further rift science-”
“88: Beck, Harold.”
I looked up in confusion, as a young man sheepishly stepped out from behind me and went through the door. I spoke up, my voice softer than I really meant it to be. “Uh, excuse me? I think I was-”
The officer who’d called Harold Beck inside closed the door behind him. Had he not heard me? Was I being ignored? I stood around for a moment like a dunce, wondering how I would explain to Aunt Helen that I hadn’t kept my appointment because it’d never existed.
“Norstrand, Castor? Over here, please.”
I turned to the voice, seeing a female officer with an impatient look on her face. The office she’d come from did not say Employment over the door, it said Security. There was a shiver up and down by arms as I half-jogged over to her. “Hi, that’s me, is there someth-?”
“Papers, please.”
Her interruption made me feel slow, as if I were wasting her time. I handed over the sheaf of forms I’d filled out in preparation for this day, some of them months ago. Her eyes scanned the top page, then she ripped off the scheduling ticket stapled to it. “Number 87. Follow me please.”
That was the third time she’d said please to me. It seemed to get more venomous each time.
I followed her through the door down a long hallway. We passed rooms that looked uncomfortably like interrogation cells, complete with one-sided mirrors, and tables that came with their own handcuffs.
Something about government offices made me want to escape. They reminded me too much of Ochre Pit Memorial: buildings of stainless steel and glass with as little furnishing as possible, almost glaringly empty.
The officer I was following only made that feeling worse. There was something familiar about her walk, her gait, the way she slammed her heels down on the linoleum.
Every time I’d pulled something slick and stupid in high school, this was how my teachers had always walked me down to the corrective office. Smug confidence that the provost was about to hand me my own ass. Satisfaction knowing they’d get to watch.
My interrogation room just seemed to be some guy’s office. He didn’t stand or speak as we came in, just waved a huge hand to the one empty chair facing his desk. I sat, and the scary lady closed the door before standing against the wall behind me. I could hear the fan in his desktop computer, every quiet breath any of us took.
I said nothing.
-)&(-
The second rift opened less than 20 miles from the Chinese city of Baishan, which was situated close to the northern Korean border. Unlike Greenland or Ellesmere Island, this area was densely populated. The immediate death toll was catastrophic.
Canada still had access to the old internet in those days, and we had a broadcast of aerial footage from news helicopters and on-the-ground reporters going for over four hours when it happened. Nearly all of it was in Korean or Chinese, so I didn’t understand it. I didn’t have to.
All that mattered was how hard my uncle Sanguk took it. In that huge McConachie apartment, I saw him sitting on the floor of our living room with his eyes fixed on the screen of his laptop. Helen practically sat in his lap, her arms around his neck, head buried in his shoulder, whispering to him.
I couldn’t hear a word she said, but years later I knew. She’d been begging him, just this once, to let himself fall apart, to unravel and to mourn. Wracked with grief, he held his wife, and watched as his homeland, the country he had fought to liberate and reunite as a soldier in war, was burned and leveled by a horde of ugly beasts from nowhere.
Years after being freed from one nightmare, the people of Northern Korea were thrust headlong into another, more ghoulish and bloodthirsty. And the world realized that the rifts would keep opening, and could seemingly appear anywhere.
However, while the death toll was horrid, the proximity of the second rift to civilization also meant that humanity was learning about the phenomenon at a faster rate than ever before.
We began to realize we’d known close to nothing.
Material that had been permanently corrupted by dimensional warp had the potential to reinforce and augment human beings, if sufficiently diluted. In proximity to a rift, the corruption was too great, but at a distance, it was a different story.
Exposure to raw materials could cause minimal temporary benefits. When harvested, and refined in a concentrated state, the boon was not only permanent, but transformative.
Just a month after the second rift opened, an army of volunteer warriors, from Southern and Northern regions alike, charged together into the dimensional decay. Their bodies were resistant to the warp’s poison, and their strength was not that of ordinary men. They were changed. They were superhuman.
After that battle, there was no more talk of “formerly Southern” or “Northern region”. There were only Koreans. Hope was alive again. For my uncle, and the world.
~}§{~
Finally, there was a kind of puffing sigh from the man as his thick fingers typed something into his system. “Castor Norstrand, age 18, graduated from Balwin High this year.”
He hadn’t asked a question, so I didn’t say anything. Silence, and then an impatient noise from the lady behind me. The big man just looked at me, without turning to face me.
I realized he was waiting for my response. “Yes sir, that’s right.”
“Hmm.” He turned back to his screen, and began reading again. He scrolled quickly as he did so, making it obvious that he was skipping quite a bit of material. “From Delwood, formerly Ozerna, formerly McConachie… it seems your family has moved quite a bit.”
This wasn’t a question either, but he’d paused again, and I’d learned my lesson. “Yeah, in the reorganization. My aunt and uncle wanted lots of room for a family, but others needed the space more.”
He nodded a bit at my answer, then turned to the screen again. “It says here you don’t have any siblings… pardon, cousins.”
The tense ball of nerves moved from my chest to my stomach, writhing. “....No, no I don’t. Sir.”
The look he gave me was expectant, as if he was waiting for more. “Well? I thought they wanted a family?”
I was trying to keep my face neutral. Honest to God, I was trying. “Yes, they do. My aunt has had some… complicating circumstances.”
He kept looking at me. I tried to picture my uncle. Calm, steely, composed. I tried again. “Some private complicating circumstances.”
A laugh died crawling out of the ugly throat of the woman behind me, and I had a very vivid image in my head, of whirling on her and asking what exactly she found so funny-
“Ah, is that a fact? Let’s see here…”
The man had finished typing before he spoke, and now he reclined his bulk in his chair, as he read in a sing-song voice. “Helen Park, age 28, primary unexplained infertility, five years of medical consultation, no diagnosis or progress, possible fibroids or PCOS… hm, no funding approved for further treatment, discontinue care… yes I’d say that’s fairly complicating, Mr. Norstrand.”
I could feel my entire future balancing on this man’s opinion of me. I wanted so badly to smash his screen with my chair, to demand he tell me what gave him the right to access my aunt’s clinical file.
I’m not sure if it was my self-control or my disbelief at his behavior, but I said nothing. When he didn’t get a reaction out of me, he began typing again. “Well, let’s set aside your family’s circumstances for the moment.”
Anger was sitting in my throat, the words I had left unsaid. Why the theatrics? What was the point of this? And why… me.
Ah. It began to click for me as he looked up from his screen again.
“Mr. Norstrand, is there anything you’d like to tell me about the Horizon Window?”
. . .