She runs backward. Cocky. But the summer is in her lungs and her blood and drying on her skin. The promise of it. A whole three months without school. “Stop yelling! It’s not like anybody’s going to molest me in broad daylight.” She turns and jogs forward. “That only happens to the girls people actually want.”
For a moment, Tae-kyung looks like she’s slapped him. But he keeps running. His stride is so graceful he manages to trip her up without even breaking his rhythm. He just pushes forward and kicks back, landing a foot on her shin and bringing her toppling to the street. She feels the concrete biting into the heels of her palms. She looks up and he’s still running, back straight, knees high. He is not pleased.
<<Idiot!>> he calls in his first language, and now she knows just how very angry he is. << Never say something stupid like that again. You’re in just as much danger as all the girls in this town. The animals on this rig don’t give a shit what you look like.>>
“Stop.” Hwa’s face hurt. Her throat hurt. “Please stop.”
The image shifted. The crystal grew hot. She tried to let it go. Drop it. But it was fused to her hands. It was melting into her flesh. She felt the skin of her fingers webbing together. In the crystal, there was fire. And in her ears
The alarm is howling an endless banshee wail. She is standing in the green level above the school. It’s a farm day. Gather the eggs, monitor the bees, deadhead some blossoms. Dessicated flowers fall from her hands as she runs to a window with open louvers. Even this far away, the heat is so intense the windows are throwing up warning sigils. The rig is on fire. Smoke plumes from it thick and black and wide, so wide there is no longer any blue, no sky or sea, just billowing black and licking orange. Her teacher’s hands are on her shoulders, pulling her back, but Hwa can’t leave, has to stay there, right there, watching, because oh Jesus, oh Christ, Tae-kyung is in there, on fire, burning—
“This isn’t the future.” It took everything she had to make the words and push them out. “Show me the future.”
She is standing at the prow of a boat. They are behind schedule, and making up the time with speed. Spray in her face. Breeze on her skin. Her hands curl around the railing and they’re stronger than they’ve ever been. She looks down at them, at her strong new hands, and the left hand is still clean, still clear, and the arm is stainless, and when she turns and sees herself in the porthole, the stain is still gone—
The crystal dropped from her hands. It dropped only a few inches, because she was kneeling. She was crying. Weeping. Silently. From her good eye. She had a moment to feel shame before anger boiled up from her belly to replace it. It surged up into her face, and she felt the pulse of her blood in the skin of her cheeks like she’d been running for hours. When she looked up, Lynch was smiling.
“What the fuck was that?” Hwa pushed herself to her feet. She thought seriously about stomping on Lynch’s little crystal ball. Or maybe just lobbing it through one of the mirrors and out into the ocean. She pointed at it, instead, without looking at it. “What the hell is that thing?”
“It’s an artifact from beyond the Singularity,” Lynch said. “I received it the day Joel was born. I believe it contains high-resolution digitized memories. Raw files from our uploaded future. And every time I look into it, Joel dies.”
Hwa blinked. “What?”
“Every year, on his birthday, I receive one of these.” From his other pocket, Lynch withdrew an empty fist. He opened it. As he did, something glowed. A small white square. Not white like the colour, but white like brightness itself. Like light. Like lightning. Hwa smelled ozone as it crackled into being. Something hummed in her teeth, and there it was: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOEL. YOU HAVE ONE MORE YEAR TO LIVE.
“That’s from his last birthday,” Lynch said, and pocketed the … whatever it was. “His birthday is in June. If I do not act, his final year of secondary school will also be his final year of life.”
Hwa swallowed. She wanted desperately to sit down. Or throw up. She took deep gulping breaths instead. In: two, three, four. Hold: two, three, four. Exhale. And again. And again. How had the thing accessed her memories like that? How had it played them back so accurately? It was like her memories were already squirrelled away somewhere, for other people to watch.
“Beyond the Singularity?” she asked.
“Yes. I believe that these artifacts have been engineered to appear here and now by an artificial superintelligence, or group of superintelligences, to tell me about Joel’s death.”
Hwa wished she’d eaten something. Then she’d have something to vomit all over Lynch’s shoes. That would have been nice.
“You believe that?” Hwa asked. “You really, truly believe that some…” There was no proper hand gesture to communicate the enormity of what Lynch was suggesting. “Some … god-like AI is trying to warn you about your son’s death?”
“Yes. I believe that there is a conspiracy of sentient artificial superintelligences to kill my son.”