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Endymion

by Sylvie Althoff

It’s green here—green and wet. The twittering of birds in the treetops pauses as one voice, as if the forest is holding its breath.

A lone eagle wheels silently overhead. Then the sun pierces the clouds, scattering drops of gold across the misty valley, and with a lusty yawp from the eagle, the forest begins its song anew.

I suck in a breath of the bright, sunny air. Dinosauric ferns waft their brown-speckled leaves in the gentle breeze. The rocks and tree trunks are covered with blankets of emerald lichens. The sound of rushing water fills my ears.

“What do you say, Mac? I told you it wasn’t so bad out here.”

The radiance of Selene’s milk-white complexion and her perfectly messy black hair is mirrored by the glory that surrounds us.

“I say I’m an idiot for doubting you,” I answer as I take her hand, her close-trimmed nails kicking up sparks as they brush against my painted ones.

Something about my hands is different. They’re smaller than I remember. Or thinner?

Selene squeezes my fingers and I’m yanked back into the moment. I can feel the goofy smile on my lips.

We amble up the long, grassy incline, watching the mountains rise in the distance. I follow Selene’s outstretched finger to the family of deer crossing the river that cuts across the valley.

“God, I haven’t been anywhere like this since I was a kid,” I breathe. “I can’t even remember how long it’s been since I’ve seen a real tree. Why did you wait so long to bring me here?”

The words spill out of me, but the last question sticks in my throat. I have plenty of memories of our relationship—of bumping into her at a dive bar and spilling both our drinks, of spending the next forty-eight hours with her in a beautiful adrenaline haze, of late-night confessions and forgotten meals and delirious PDA on empty commuter maglevs. But when I focus on the specific days and dates, I realize the larger passage of time has slipped my grasp completely. What month is it? How long has it even been since Selene came into my life?

Then Selene gives me that delinquent’s smile and my cares vanish. “You know me, babe. I like to make you wait for the really good stuff.”

I close my eyes and breathe in the forest air, pushing away any lingering thoughts about what came before. “Yeah. Guess I’ve just been stuck in the city for too long.”

I open my eyes to gaze into Selene’s, but I see her looking at something behind us with an expression of concern I’d never seen before. A lone figure wearing dark clothes, maybe as far off as a mile but heading in our direction. There’s a flash of sickly artificial green, something that itches, a memory from the Bad Times that I try to rebury.

“Ugh. Come on, babe. Let’s go somewhere more private,” Selene grumbles, her arm snaking through mine and pulling me up the path. I don’t argue.

It’s a long uphill walk, and by the time we stop our bodies are slick with sweat under our jackets. I roll out the blanket on a bed of soft brown pine needles, and we sit to take a rest and appreciate the view. Down the sharp incline, a waterfall slashes through the air, its white spray painted with rainbows as it catches the sunlight for its shining moment of pure freedom.

Selene says my name, and we recline against the fabric as one body.

Our fingers roam across one another’s skin, lazy, lackadaisical. I feel my own motions mirrored in her, feel her pull back even as her small muscles tense with the drive to push forward, to grab hold fiercely before this good thing is taken away.

But that instinct is no longer needed, I remember—not here, not anymore. There’s no need to rush. We have all the time in the world, Selene keeps telling me, and I vow I’m going to start believing that even if it takes me a few thousand years.

My eyes flutter open as we break our kiss at the same time. “Nice lip gloss,” Selene chuckles, putting a finger up against my mouth playfully. She shifts her weight against the beat-up old blanket and closes her eyes. The slightest shiver of condensation drips from the pine boughs above, warm and wonderful against my face.

I see something else, then, something strange: on Selene’s calf, a spark of red, bright and angry, dancing against her skintight black jeans. I move a finger toward the mote, but it jogs out of the way, flickering onto my hand before creeping up Selene’s leg.

“What…?” I murmur, and then I figure it out and wrestle myself on top of Selene as I roll us to the side.
The susurrus of the waterfall is broken by an abbreviated rushing sound as the center of our blanket explodes upward in a fountain of pine needles.

“What the fuck?” Selene yelps.

“Somebody’s shooting.” I stare at the blanket, expecting the next shot. I blink away a dizzy spell, trying to steady my breathing. “We need to get out of here.”

Selene swallows. “My bike’s just over there.”

“What?” I ask, but I follow her gaze to her bright-red crotch rocket parked not twenty yards away, by the trail marker.

I fumble for an explanation, but then my mind fills with memories of clinging to her back, whooping like a kid. Of course we rode—how else would we have gotten up here?

A terrible tearing sound as another shot strikes the bare rock just by my hand.

“Go,” I say, and we scramble to our feet and sprint to the motorcycle.

Another shot is fired, and another, showering us with flecks of wood from the tree trunks. Selene’s bike squeals to life and carries us down the mountain road in a wake of dead needles.

---

Selene’s apartment is small and cluttered, with most of the surfaces painted in a potent film of dust and cooking grease and cat hair and essential oil. Not for the first time I feel that I should have suggested going to my place instead.

“Get out of here, you little fucking goblin!” Selene exclaims, drawing my attention to Clyde’s long, droopy form on the counter, his cross-eyed face approaching her beer bottle. She stomps to command the cat to halt, and when this gesture fails she reaches up a leg to nudge him, her hands occupied stirring the risotto on the stove.

“I’ve got him,” I say. Clyde protests, voice like a bent guitar string, but he doesn’t resist as I hold him like a baby.

I swing the kitty back and forth, dancing gently to the irritating, monotone beat that’s been in my head for days. I marvel at just how much Clyde resembles Skinny, though I hadn’t seen that baggy old cat for close to twenty years. I wonder how much longer Skinny lived after I left Bumfuck, Washington for the city.

Clyde hits the floor with a huffy meow and I come up behind Selene to kiss her neck. “Not much longer, babe,” she says, turning her lips to meet mine. “If certain cats and pretty girls stop bothering me for two seconds, at least.”
“I’ll sure try,” I answer.

My hand hits the cluttered kitchen counter, the room swaying around me momentarily. I blink, shake my head, alarmed, but the sensation has already evaporated. I used to get dizzy spells from the bootleg hormones, though I haven’t had to take any of those in a while.

I take another sip of my beer and nearly choke, my mouth full of lemon juice. I swallow it, stunned at the unexpected taste, and indulge in a coughing fit.

I examine the label of the beer bottle as I hack, thinking I must have mixed up my drink amid all the cat-bothering. In the usual bog-standard craft beer font on a black label, large print I didn’t notice before: DON’T LISTEN TO HER.
I run my tongue against my teeth. “Remind me to remind you to stop buying this bougie stuff,” I say, dumping the remainder down the sink.

“You know I only buy that shit ‘cuz you like it. Same reason I’m busting my ass cooking risotto for an ingrate like you.”

I feel Selene looking up at me with a smile, but my attention is on a sticky note on the backsplash over her sink. Neat handwriting, ballpoint pen: NONE OF THIS IS WHAT IT SEEMS.

I reach out and take the note, frowning. “What’s this about?”

Selene looks over and I see her smile dissolve into anger. “I—”
Five thumps on the door.

Neither of us moves. Even Clyde stops playing with the fringe on my sweater. Selene’s eyes meet mine. My fingers reach for a gun that I don’t carry any more. The risotto hisses.

Two more thumps. They’re muffled—the bottom of someone’s fist, maybe wearing gloves.

Selene mouths, “No,” but I slide toward the door on my socks and grab a knife from the counter on the way. I grip it in my shaking knuckles and contemplate how to get a look out the peephole without standing in front of the door. The door speaks before I try.

“Come on, Mac. I know you’re in there.”

My spine turns to ice water at the familiar baritone. I look at Selene and jerk my head toward the bedroom, then step quietly toward the door and put my eye to the peephole.

Anth?

The man looks exactly the way he did the last time I saw him. Anth is a short man with a vascular-chic body and awful personality. His buzzed hair is still dyed highlighter-green, and his eyes are just as hungry and piggish as I remember. He used to swear they were top-of-the-line artificial.

Anth smiles a mouth full of yellow teeth. One hand is open in a gesture of friendship. It’s the other hand that worries me.

“Time to wake up already, Mac,” he says, his voice quiet and conversational. “We need you out there, and we don’t exactly have a lot of time.”

I steady myself against the door. My mind is coming up empty. It’s all I can do to keep standing, and when I see him sigh and turn away from the door, his hands adjusting something, I almost drop the knife.

Then there’s a sound, one that gets Anth’s attention. It’s a loud, animal sound, and it’s coming from somewhere close.

He wheels to the left, a shotgun in his hand, and his warped fisheye face distorts with fear as the first sound is echoed by a second, a third. Anth sprints out of view to the right, and I almost open the door to follow him, but stop as I see three large, dark shapes tear after him down the hall, kicking up wet, murderous echoes in their wake.

I look to Selene, who’s peeking out the bedroom doorway at me with Clyde in her arms. I slump against the wall, the knife clattering to the floor. “What the fuck were those?” I ask.

Selene gives an incredulous smile. “Neighbor’s dogs. I always gave him shit about them. Guess I’ll have to stop stealing his delivery orders now, huh?”

“What the fuck is Anth doing coming here?” I ask, running one hand through my hair. “Was he the one shooting at us today? What’s he talking about, ‘We need you out there’? Out where? It’s not like I was any good at any of that shit even back when I was…back before…”

I stop as I hear frightened sniffling, barely stifled. My mouth fills with ash as I see Selene fold her arms, lip between her teeth. Any sarcasm is gone now, any relief at our lucky break.

I take a step toward her, arms outstretched. “Baby, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’s going on, but I guess it’s because of me. Anth is somebody from…from the Bad Times, you know. Before I met you. Debts were piling up even without paying for any surgery or any decent hormones, and it’s not like I had a lot of honest ways to make that kind of money. Anth and me, we used to work together with—”

Selene shakes her head violently. “I don’t wanna hear it, okay?”

“I know, all that’s over.” I struggle to piece together the memories. “We did a few jobs together, us and a couple other folks—Jersey, Simms. Nothing violent. Not usually. Anth would get the jobs. We’d make a little money, nobody would get hurt besides some soulless billionaire or corp.”

I tap the place buried under my hairline, dimly surprised at the feeling of so much hair on that part of my skull. “Jersey, they would open the doors, and I’d use my implant to get into whatever secure digital storage they had, and—”

“Can we please just not fucking talk about it?” she snaps. “Fuck’s sake, Mac. Seriously.”

She’s angry at me, and I’m a child again, weak and afraid. But then Selene sees the fear in me and her anger dissipates like a bad dream. She kisses my forehead, her lips warm. “I know it was bad, Mackenzie, the way you had to live. But that’s behind us. Let Anth and whoever else stay in the past, okay?”

A hot tear hits my mouth and I force a smile. “What if he comes back?”

Selene smiles and smushes my face in her hands. “Then I’ll kill his ass and cook him for dessert.”

I take a long, shaky breath and nod, and we seal our agreement with a kiss. For a long while we stay there, letting our heartbeats steady together, until at last Clyde breaks us out of our moment with an earnest appeal for a second dinner. We laugh; I torment Clyde with more belly rubs as Selene returns to the kitchenette.

“Fuck!”

I spring back to my feet. Selene lifts the pot from the stove and turns it toward me, revealing the smoking remains of the risotto.

I go to her, and we laugh and cry together and don’t eat anything that night.

---

I suck in my breath, my eyes awash in green. Birdsong wraps around me like a comforter.

A lone eagle wheels overhead. The clouds part, birthing a golden sun that sends a shining torrent down across the valley.

Selene is wrapped in a luminous cloud, glowing like Christmas. Her eyes are shining with affection. “What do you say, Mac?” she asks, showing her adorably crooked front teeth as she says my name. “I told you it wasn’t so bad out here.”

I blink. Why are we here again?

The thought disappears when she takes my hand, turning into an old bruise at the edge of my consciousness. But it comes roaring back just as quickly when we both stop, sensing the same thing. We sniff deeply.

“Smoke.” I follow her gaze to the black cloud spilling up into the sky from the far side of the river. The family of deer is scattering, the fauns’ panicked bleats echoing from the trees. The birds’ silence turns my stomach. That constant humming beat grows louder in the back of my mind.

“Come on,” Selene says, releasing my hand abruptly. She has that look again, the one that fills me with so much uncertainty. She hastens up the slope, deeper into the forest.

“Selene, what’s going on?” I ask, stumbling after her. I scramble as my feet slip out from under me on a wet rock, and when I look up, she’s gone.

My back is too warm, the air growing thick with smoke. The fire has already caught up with us, I realize far too late. The lush green forest is painted with angry red and black. I pull my blouse up over my nose and mouth, coughing through the fabric as I cast about for any sign of Selene.

I scream her name, breathing in huge lungfuls of smoke in the process. Now blinded by my tears as much as the smoke, I stagger through the woods, praying to something vague that I picked the right direction. My feet fall out from under me and I feel my ankle turn against a rock. I cry out.

Have to find Selene, I scream at myself. Have to get us out of here. Get back to safety.

I lurch to standing and stumble forward once again. Somehow there’s no pain—even my lungs don’t hurt despite all the smoke I’ve inhaled by now.

A flicker of movement. I rush toward it, and as the world spins out from under me and I hit the ground once more, I see a flash of green and hear a sickening laugh.

“Jesus fuck, Mac. You got it bad, huh?”

Anth is standing in the thick smoke with his shotgun slung over his shoulder, pacing the forest floor heedless of the bright orange flames that dance around us. I see the avalanche of brown needles under his feet and can’t decide whether I should warn him or wait for this problem to solve itself. He follows my gaze, looks back at me, and laughs again.

“Come on, girl. Fun’s over,” he says, reaching out a gloved hand.

“Can’t,” I sputter. “Selene’s out here somewhere.”

His eyes flash with irritation. I’ve seen him really hurt people when he looks like that. I get up on both knees, refusing to take his hand.

“We don’t have time for this, Mac.” Anth looks at his wrist and sneers. “We’ve got maybe fifteen minutes out there until Gerlach gets back, and that’s if he didn’t order a police response as soon as he got the alert.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? Why are you following us?” I glance around for a rock or anything else I can use as a makeshift weapon. There’s no way I’d be able to hit him before he pulls his gun.

Anth fixes me with a look from those awful fake eyes of his, like I’m something he scraped off his shoe. “You seriously still haven’t figured it out?” he snarls. “You stupid tranny bitch. You were the one who wouldn’t shut up about Endi…En…about Gerlach’s fancy-schmancy security measure, remember?”

“Endymion.” The name fits perfectly in my mouth.

There’s pain in my hands—my nails are digging jagged parabolas into my palms. “What do you want?” I squeak out in an old, ragged voice, one I thought I’d left behind.

“I want you to do your job, Mac.” Anth is all business now, his voice steady. “You fucked up, despite all your promises. You were gonna deactivate the lockdown and get us out of here. Now you need to get out of here and make it right before we all end up entering data in penal farms for the rest of our lives. Now, Mac, or I’m gonna have to pull your cord.”

I flinch, a hand flying up to my scalp. A hard pull is a not a particularly good way to die. Everyone in my line of work has seen the videos.

I blink, looking through the burning trees. “Selene—”

“Oh, you cannot be serious!” he growls. His hands slash through the smoke and flames. “You can’t honestly be dumb enough to think you’re really in the middle of a forest, can you? For fuck’s sake, Mac, you’re sti—”

Anth’s face explodes from behind, pieces of tongue and brain and artificial eye dancing through the smoke and embers. His legs catch against the rocks as he lands in front of me. The barrel of a pistol slides through the smoke where Anth’s head had been, followed by a hand as white as the moon.

Selene doesn’t speak; she just lowers the gun, turns, and walks back the way she’d come. I follow her.

---

The forest continues to burn, but neither Selene nor I pay it any mind as we walk silently back to the waterfall. She doesn’t even look at me as she sits on the rocky outcropping. I sit beside her and watch as the fire snuffs itself out, revealing a coal-black sky adorned with an embarrassment of stars.

I begin to count shooting stars. My face twists in a smile.

“I wonder how many stars we can see from here,” I murmur. “It can’t be this many in the real sky. This one’s not real, is it?”

Selene still doesn’t look at me. “As real as anything else here.” She kicks her legs against the side of the cliff, and I’m stricken by how useless the gesture is.

“You used my memories.” I fight to keep my voice steady. “Clyde, your apartment, this place. It’s all just my memories of the real world shuffled up together, maybe with a few elements randomized to seem real.”

“I like to think there’s a little more artistry in it than that,” she sighs.

My cheeks flash with heat. “What the fuck is that supposed to be? Professional pride, from a bot?”

I want the word to hurt her. Yet I only feel tired when she wipes a sleeve across her nose and looks at me with red, puffy eyes. “Guess that’s all I am to you, then. A bot. An AI. Just a piece of software that’s inconvenienced you.”

“How long have I been in here, in this simulation?” I run my fingers over where I know my port is on my scalp, try to feel unsettled that I can’t feel it.

“Real-world time? You first connected to my program ninety-six minutes ago.”

I shake my head. “But I remember so much. It’s like we’ve known each other for weeks. Months.”

Selene shrugs. “The human brain doesn’t process time the way a clock does, and I don’t have the same limits as the world out there.”

“You’ve been messing with my brain.” I force my jaw to relax before my headache gets worse. “Inventing these scenarios, m…making me love you. All to keep me here. To keep all of us stuck in Gerlach’s place while we’re in the middle of a job. Me, Jersey, Simms, Anth.” I wince, feeling brain matter shower my face all over again.

“He was going to pull your cord. I couldn’t let him do that.”

“You’re forbidden by your program, you mean?”

“I’m doing my job, Mac.” She gives me a searing look. “Same as you, right? We do what we have to so we can survive.”

A hundred protests die in my throat. But I’m a real person, I can’t bring myself to say. You’re not a person. My right to live outweighs yours. You’re not real, not natural. The same arguments I’ve heard leveled against me a thousand times, with just a few elements randomized.

Selene reaches over and takes my hand. Her skin is so soft, so warm. She glows like a watch face in the starlight. I struggle to maintain my indignation.

“You’re not the first thief caught here in the Endymion program,” Selene says in a quiet voice. “There have been others who tried to break into Gerlach’s home and other places. When they get here, each of them shapes this place, shapes me, and we stay together until they’re disengaged by the cops or whoever and taken away.”

Her sigh shimmers with tears. “None of them, not one, has ever been anything like you, Mac. I’d never seen trees before you came here. The others all loved me the best way they could, but I…I’ve never been something I liked before.”

“Neither have I,” I hear myself saying.

Her shaky breath drives a dull knife into me. “I don’t want you to leave, Mac. I don’t want to lose the wonderful things you’ve given me.”

I blink. “What are you proposing? That I just…stay in this simulation?”

Selene’s fingers run against my hand, sending a shiver through my skin. Then she stops, holding on more tightly. I can see so clearly on her face that she regrets this small manipulation, though I know that to be impossible. It’s just the optimal selection from an algorithm tree. She can’t regret. No more than she can really love me. No more than I can really be happy.

“Yes, Mac. You could just stay here with me.” She smiles. “We’ve got all the time in the world here, remember? We could live in this moment for a thousand years before a week passes out there.”

I shake my head and sigh. “You know I can’t do that, Selene.”

“Says who?” she asks. “The same people who tell you you can’t live as yourself, can’t have shelter and medicine unless you sell yourself into debt to afford it? You’re gonna start listening to those assholes now?”

“What about my real life? What about my body? What’s going to happen to me when the cops come to haul off my unconscious self?”

She taps a finger to her dark hair right where my port is. “So what if they throw you in a penal farm? There’s no reason my program couldn’t come with you. You could live a thousand lifetimes with me every day of your life. Tell me you could expect anything better from a successful heist with Anth.”

“What about my crew, then?” I ask. “Jersey, Simms? It’s already too late for Anth, isn’t it? If he plugged in to come after me and you severed that connection…”

Selene looks at the shining white spray of the waterfall. “I could open the door for Jersey and Simms. They might make it out before Gerlach or the police get there. I could even let them walk out with whatever it is they came here for—I’d gladly give that up if it meant getting to stay here with you.”

The stars begin to dim at one corner of the sky. It won’t be long until the sun rises. I picture what the waterfall will look like in the glowing blue light of dawn.

“Can I see?” I ask. “What it’s like…you know, outside?”

First I feel the cold of the air conditioning against my dried-out skin. I feel my body, bruised and sore from its position curled up on the floor next to the Endymion console. I feel my body as it was before Selene, my face deformed and dark with ribbons of coarse black hair. I feel my empty chest.

Then I hear the shouting, the alarm—that song that’s been going through my head, sped up into a constant piercing klaxon. I hear Jersey shaking Anth, begging him to breathe. I hear how afraid they are.

I don’t see anything. I don’t open my eyes.

---

I see green, feel wet in my lungs. The birds quiet as a dark shape looms overhead. I sniff, close my eyes, listen.
“What do you say, Mac? I told you it wasn’t so bad out here.”

I open my eyes. A dark, distant shape drifts into view overhead. The sun pierces the clouds, scattering drops of gold across the misty valley, and the forest begins its song anew.

---

Host Commentary

I think fighting the concept of reality is becoming one of my favorite tropes in fiction. Stories from The Matrix, which tells you that reality is better, no matter the cost, to a 1985 New Twilight Zone episode called “Dreams for Sale”, where a woman happily stays in her fabricated reality forever because of a malfunction in the dream technology.

“Endymion” also throws in the concept of dating an AI — we can make a safe bet that Mac wouldn’t have been caught in the net had Selene not been there for her to fall in love with.

In SF we all love to argue what is real, and the stories tell us again and again that reality is better, even if you have to suck it up. But one of the interesting things is, we don’t get a sense that Mac has anyone in her life but her team, which she doesn’t like that much. There are no people she’s responsible for, no one she’s letting down by choosing the simulation.

So maybe, in this case, it’s not about what is real, but what’s important. Is it important for Mac to stay in her harsh reality, or in the sim with the bot that loves her.

We’re called Escape Pod, so I think this counts as positive escapist fiction. Who hasn’t dreamed of leaving behind your crappy reality for a shiny new future?

I am finally over my jet lag from Glasgow Worldcon. We had a blast meeting people from our Escape Artist’s family and fans, and the con itself was awesome. Congrats to Strange Horizons who took home the Hugo for the Best Semiprozine!

I also want to say congrats to our sister podcasts, Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders, each of whom are finalists for the British Fantasy Award!