REVERSE BIRTH: Notes From the Gnarling Nowhere

14

The freak came home early from Rabbits Galore on the day the fossil died. She'd finally fixed a bio-feedback response that hadn't been progressing the way it was supposed to with return visitors. She wanted Escape Womb 2 to be slightly different every time a user went in, and she wanted the changes to be based on their previous experience. She'd been working on the problem with the RG technicians and the fossil's virtual coders for two weeks, and she'd been afraid they'd have to postpone the launch, but they'd cracked it with half a day to spare. The release would go ahead as planned and the freak was ready to celebrate. She was going to jostle the fossil, shake him up and force him to have some fun.

But when she got to the apartment, there was a police car and an ambulance out front. She immediately felt that some catastrophe had occurred. When the elevator door opened on her apartment, there was a police officer and two paramedics, already wheeling a body bag out of the bedroom on a gurney. They stopped and looked at her.

The cop asked the freak her name and she answered. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Karl Huber died this afternoon." The cop said. 'Karl Huber' was the alias that the fossil had used to buy the apartment. "He called an ambulance at 1:15. The paramedics were let in by the building manager and they found Mr. Huber's body."

"What happened? What did he die of?" She asked.

"There's no apparent cause of death. Nothing violent or anything like that. Of course, there will have to be an autopsy. Were you and Mr. Huber married?"

"No." She said.

"I understand this is difficult, but as a formality, I have to ask you to identify the body. Can you do that for me?"

"Yes." The freak said. She suddenly thought the whole thing might be a mistake. That's why the cop wanted her to identify the body, because there was a possibility that it was not the fossil.

One of the paramedics unzipped the body bag and used a rubber-gloved hand to peel back the edge and reveal the fossil's face. He doesn't look bad, the freak thought, like he's sleeping or something. She'd seen him look worse when he'd been up all night. She wanted to ask the paramedics if they were absolutely sure he was dead, but she knew it was a stupid question.

"It's him." She said.

They zipped up the bag and rolled the body onto the elevator. The cop handed her a crisis management card with phone numbers for various help-lines and then he left too.

And just like that, she was alone.

The freak stood there dazed. It was as if the last year of her life had been a dream: she'd met this man, started working with him, started sleeping with him, moved in with him, and now he was dead and she was all alone again. There was no way to step back through the portal, her life was completely different now. She looked different, felt different, and probably walked, talked, and acted different than when she'd met him. She'd been a wannabe writer with mental health problems, living in a halfway house. Now what was she? Her life had something it hadn't had back then, and as she stood there alone in the entryway of the giant apartment, she realized what it was: a future.

Did she still have a future?

She wandered into the bedroom and looked at the unmade bed where the fossil had died. The room still smelled like him. She sat on the edge of the bed and cried, not for him, but for herself. She was jealous of him. He gets to be nothing, she thought, and I have to go on being a human being.

She tried to remember if there had been any sign that he hadn't been feeling well. They'd been down in Venice that morning, tweaking the if-then language that sent return visitors down different branches of their Reality. It had been a pretty typical day. A user was pulled out of one of the systems by cops, but the fossil had been gone by then. Or was that when he'd been talking with that guy? Someone had come to the office asking for Charlie Reid, the alias that the fossil used for anything to do with Collected Time business.