“Careful with that,” Sydney yells at the hulk of a delta bot lifting up her coffee table by one end. “It’s an antique.”
The bot’s oblong head lolls to the side, then its mono-eye flashes neon green in affirmation. It proceeds slowly through the doorway, its simple brain rechecking the spatial parameters of the long narrow hallway and steep stairs. Another bot hefts up her couch, and the third is outside loading her television into the double-parked moving van.
There’s six of them altogether, three men and three bots. They’ve been here a total of ten minutes, and her apartment is nearly empty already. Sydney’s going to miss this place. It’s not much, but it’s decent—concrete floors easy to bleach blood off of, thick plaster walls, and the only window looks out onto the side of a brick building. And then there’s the trash chute at the end of the hallway, just big enough to dump pieces of body into without the hassle of hauling them down all those stairs and to the Dumpster out back. But it’s been three days, and even though it’s cool out, Mr. Gnoto is bound to be getting ripe down there. Then there was Paulo yesterday afternoon—the thief she’d fed images of a brimming jewelry box and a key under her doormat. And last night Mitchell Adams had caught her eye, some punk kid who’d cut in front of her at the movie theater. Oh, the shrillness of his screams! Sydney licks her lips. His was a special kind of fear, not clouded by guilt or shame or vice, but rich and delicate like a small piece of dark chocolate. A morsel unpolluted by sin. A virgin, too. She’d forgotten how sweet they were.
But don’t think her to be a complete monster. She’d spent the whole of the morning cleaning up her apartment, spick-and-span, even dusted the floorboards and moldings, taking pride in leaving her apartment in better condition than she’d found it. Not to mention the new crisp white ceiling. Her landlady will be pleased, maybe even so much as to refund part of her deposit.
The delta bot takes the last of the boxes out to the moving truck, and all at once, her apartment is nothing more than bare walls, a slick, waxed floor, and some plastic drop cloths crammed into one corner. Yes, she’ll miss this place, nostalgia already taking hold. It was here that she’d found a believer, after all, the seed of hope that she’ll regain her godhood, if all is going to plan. Up until now, she’s had no way of knowing. Paulo and Mitchell had been tasty treats, but fear is fleeting. But the great thing about fear is that it breeds like dik-diks. Put two scared people in a room, and each feeds off the other’s anxiety. Three people quickly push the bounds of hysterics, and that’s when the real fun begins.
The three men stand like terrified statues in their movers’ overalls, all lined up against the back wall of her apartment. Slowly, Sydney locks the door and lingers so their minds go to all those dark places. Anticipation is the worst kind of torture.
They get a good glimpse as her atrophied back muscles flex and she yawns out sleek wings, a deep, blood red. Oh, it’s been too long. Their strands have tangled together, so she takes a moment to preen, then gives her wings a vigorous flap.
She inhales the stench of the men’s fear as she approaches. Kirk, reads the name tag stitched into the first man’s overalls. He’s forty and balding, spineless—the kind of guy who would push his own mother into the mouth of a lion if it meant he could get away unscathed. He cowers, even in his paralysis. Then there’s Gilbert, tall and wiry, with cheap tattoos creeping from the neckline of his undershirt. Sydney had seen the extent of his work ethic, sitting out on the loading deck of the truck, reading titty magazines as the bots did all the work. And finally there’s Orion, a hundred and ten kilos and none of it muscle. Just a kid really, eyes following Sydney’s movements in their doughy sockets. He loves his mama, draws her hot baths and paints her toenails for her now that arthritis has set in. Sweet. Sydney makes a mental note to send her a coupon for her salon, then runs her finger down the bridge of Orion’s nose. “I think I’ll save you for last,” she whispers.
With a flick of her finger, she rolls out the drop cloth and wills Gilbert over it. No way she’s cleaning this place all over again. He dangles midair, fear doubling, tripling. After a few slits of vital arteries, she’s fed enough to conjure the smallest peephole into the plane of transcendence. The dik-dik virus is spreading already. The lab tech had passed it on to her entire extended family, thirty people so far, and this second generation has nearly incubated long enough to pass it along again. In a mere few weeks, nearly half the population will have two very inconsequential gene sequences augmented. They don’t determine eye color or skin color or intelligence or foot size, or any of a million other variables that scientists have brought under their control.
They’re found on mitochondrial DNA, in fact, passed down from mother to child for generations upon generations from a time where demigods ruled the earth. Mr. Tau had told her the story when she was a girl, half a millennium ago. Even back then, visions of power danced before her eyes, and Mr. Tau had filled her head so full of flights of fancy she began to believe the stars themselves were within her reach. She remembers how proud she planned to make her baba. She remembers the thrill of learning there were others like herself. She remembers Mr. Tau’s smooth voice tickling her ear as she curled up in his lap. She remembers it all like it was yesterday.
Mr. Tau had said:
When the earth was still young, I was birthed from her fiery womb, and for centuries I floated contentedly on patches of her charred crust across seas of lava lapping at my skin like slow, hot kisses. I knew neither loneliness nor want until I had a dream of six trees standing in a line on a riverbank. I’d never seen such beauty—branches twisting up seductively from knotty trunks, foliage such an inviting shade of green. I wanted them in the worst way. When I opened my eyes, there was only a bloody, scabby darkness stretching into eternity. So I closed my palms together and willed with my very life force to create a sun, but then all that I could see was that I was truly alone.
It made me weep. I cried for countless days, years, decades, until I found myself drowning in a river of my own tears. I splashed against the surface and screamed for help, but there was no one. The scorched earth was no more, and instead there was a shore bearing six trees, roots drinking from the river’s water. I wished for their branches to reach a little lower. A breeze came, and the branches swayed closer, but I still could not reach them.