The ball was important, that much she knew, but the how and the why of it she couldn’t quite grasp. And what had driven her to leave the safety of their shelter in the caverns? She had lived there all her life and never felt the need to see the festering, ruined surface world.
A misstep sent a jolt through her brain, and her vision exploded with silver-white sparks. Somehow, she managed to hang on to consciousness, head spinning, until the pain faded and her vision cleared, and then she stumbled to a seat on the steps of a ruined hut near a hissing stream which stank of burning hair. A yellowing skull rested against some stunted lumber which had fallen into the waters, and she wondered briefly who its owner had been, whether she would meet the same fate.
The pressure of the ball against the muscles of her hand was a throbbing counterpoint to the thudding in her head. She glanced down at it, away from the skull and the stream. What was it? She had a vague idea that it was what was wrong, somehow. But all it showed was a picture of her, with her eyes scrunched up tight against the brightness of the surface sky, and with several layers of fabric around her face to stop the poisoned air from choking her.
She wondered if she’d been out too long. If the vapors were making her paranoid.
But no. There was something out of place. Something she couldn’t spot, yet which was as persistent as the throbbing in her temples and palms.
Fatima lay back and closed her eyes, hiding the sun’s bloated orb behind the crook of one arm. She needed to rest. She needed to remember.
Jen shivered as the woman on screen drifted into a fitful sleep.
If the local environment was any indicator of the average global condition, most of the planet was an irradiated waste. And all this in only two hundred years, she thought with a glance to the door. What in the hell are they planning?
Jen had always known, intellectually speaking, that the military wasn’t exactly going to use the panoptic shards to make the world a happy place. She’d tried to tell herself that even if they used it to kill people, the technologies she could develop would serve the greater good in the longer term. That she needed the funding. That the ends justified the means.
But this was too much. She pushed her chair back from the console and pressed her fingers against her eyelids until she saw spots, then let out a long, slow breath. She thought of her generation’s children, working so hard for what they believed in. They deserved better than this, and the woman and man she’d seen on screen did, too. Everybody did.
She licked her lips, gave the door another nervous glance, and—before she could change her mind—severed the shard’s connection.
It was warm in the café, but the kind of warm that was tempered just enough by breezes from the nearby ocean to be pleasant instead of stifling.
Driss sat at a table with Fatima near one glittering window, breathing in fragrant steam from a cerami-steel cup of boiling hot tea.
The panoptic shard with its recording device lay nestled in the center of the table. Fatima had attached a jamming device and nanocarbon tether, then opened a virt-screen from the terminal on her wrist. As Driss looked on, she scrolled through reams and reams of data.
“It’s astounding,” she said, pausing to take a hasty sip of her tea. “We’ve known about the shards for decades now, but this is the first we’ve retrieved that definitively acts as a transmitter.”
Driss nodded. “Makes you wonder if they’ve figured out we know how it works.”
“Mm.”
He couldn’t tell if she meant it in agreement or if she’d found something interesting, but her pupils had that half-dilated look of a woman focused one hundred percent on her virt-screen, and he knew better than to interrupt Fatima when she got like that. Instead of saying anything more, he went to the counter and ordered a bowl of olives. When he returned, Fatima had moved from reading to writing, her fingers a blur across a projected keyboard.
“Sending them a message?” Driss asked.
“Not quite. Take a look.” She flipped the screen his way.
Driss popped an olive in his mouth as he skimmed what she had typed—line after line of equations, algorithms, and other, more arcane code. “All I see,” he had to admit after a few seconds, “is a bunch of stuff I don’t understand.”
Fatima rolled her eyes and unflipped the screen. “You ought to apply yourself more,” she said as she resumed typing. “They offer free classes in all sorts of things at Cadi Ayyad. Even poetry, if you’re not into the sciences.”
Driss spat out a seed and fished another olive from the bowl. “Maybe I’ll check it out sometime. But, come on, don’t taunt me! What’s on the screen?”
“Okay, okay. Given where the shards originate, I highly doubt the senders’ intentions are good. They’re probably trying to get an edge in one of those unsuccessful 21st-century genocides. There’s a signature in their programming which matches what we know about recon and intel work in—”
Driss waved his hands. “Spare me the tech-speak. I won’t understand it anyway.”
She grinned. “Basically, they’re trying to use images of us to change our reality by altering the actions they take against us. So I’m giving them an image. Just . . . not the kind they’re expecting. And after that, well . . .” She made a few final keystrokes and flipped the screen his way again. “Look.”
Driss glanced at what she’d done and let out a low whistle.
Jen flinched as the door slammed open and Hog stormed in, then she went back to pretending she was hard at work trying to regain the connection. In reality, she’d used the time since her act of sabotage to copy all her research onto a secured solid-state drive that now nestled in her coat pocket.
“Get it back,” Hog growled. “Now.”
“I’m trying, sir. So far as our system is concerned, we haven’t even lost the connection. It insists we’re getting images broadcast like before. I don’t know what . . .”
She trailed off, jaw slackening, as the monitors that lined the walls flickered on, each showing images of ruined buildings and poisonous landscapes. The console was alive with data, reporting hundreds of activated shards. “All of them?” she muttered, tapping away at the keyboard. “But we only have one transmitter. Unless they somehow figured out how to—”
“Oh my dear sweet Jesus.”
Jen’s heart skipped at the whispered reverence in Hog’s voice. Then she looked again at the images on the monitor. A satellite image of Florida, barely visible beneath a frothing Atlantic. The Eiffel Tower, half-collapsed across a ruined city barely recognizable as Paris. The Vatican afire, bodies strewn from windows and across its many steps.
“What did you do?” Hog asked.
Jen shook her head, but before she could respond—before she could repeat that she had no idea, that this shouldn’t even be possible—the screens all flickered off and on again. Only this time, the screens all showed a single image: a timer, set to twenty minutes and counting down.
Hog looked her way, eyes wide. “Turn it off,” he said, his voice hoarse.
Jen swallowed. The console was still streaming with data. Hands shaking, she entered the de-activation sequence—and was not much surprised when it failed to work. “I’m locked out,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Hog didn’t say a word. He just turned away and walked through the door, pale and insubstantial as a ghost.
As soon as he was gone, Jen grabbed her coat and ran. It wasn’t until she got outside and halfway to the Metro station that the adrenaline poured out of her in one big rush that left her shaky and weak; she had to stagger to a bench before she fell.
She sat back, eyes closed, breathing in the crispness of the early spring day, listening to people’s murmured conversations as they dined on the patio of a nearby bar, to the swish of cars and buses driving past. The city smelled of rain, with a hint of the Japanese cherries that dotted the park
across the street from where she’d stopped.
In her mind, she kept playing back that final image: those numbers counting slowly, irreversibly down. She wanted to scream, to yell, to run through the city like a mad prophet, warning of the coming destruction. But what would be the point? They couldn’t stop it—not now.
A muffled cheer rang out from inside, and Jen opened her eyes. She could just make out some sort of sports game on the TV above the bar. Still shaky, she let out a long, ragged breath. Maybe, she thought, there would still be time to have a drink or two before it happened.
She stood to go inside, then froze when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a telltale glint of a panoptic shard in the sky above the park.
A shard. Not a weapon!
Had she misunderstood the message? It didn’t seem likely, with the images the future people had sent. But even just the tiniest hope of it made her heart beat fast and her shakiness vanish. She dashed across the street, dodging traffic, keeping one eye on the tiny mirrored ball as it drifted below the tree line and came to rest in the fronds of a sumac bush.
She picked it out and activated it, and her mouth went dry. Pages and pages and pages of text describing fantastical technologies scrolled past, complete with diagrams and instructions on how to construct them. One was a machine that, as near as she could figure, would establish a real-time audiovisual link between the future and the present.
And there were more, some of which she couldn’t even understand. She was standing there, stunned, wondering how they’d targeted her so precisely, when there was a gentle bump on the top of her head. She reached up and retrieved a second shard, which she opened with shaking hands to find an identical payload.
Heart hammering, she looked out across the city. Hundreds more of the bubble-like objects were drifting westward, some landing on empty tables in street-side cafés while others made it into open windows or the upstretched hands of pedestrians.
They hadn’t targeted her. Of course they hadn’t: They didn’t even know she existed. Instead, they’d delivered an instant revolution to everyone around the world. Hog and his ilk wouldn’t know what hit them; they’d be so busy dealing with the consequences of this that they’d never get around to wasting resources on some hypothetical future reality.
She set one of the shards on the path, where it would be easily found, and headed off for home, laughing for the sheer joy of it. Above her, the skies streamed with glimmering secrets, coming down to earth from somewhere far away.
Möbius
written by
Christoph Weber
illustrated by
TALIA SPENCER
* * *
About the author
In 2014, after spending years on novels too big for him, Christoph Weber wrote his first short story—a little piece titled “Möbius.” The electric rush of short form had him hooked, and he penned more than a dozen stories over the next year, one of which appeared in the journal Nature.
Christoph atones for his habit of writing on dead trees by working on live ones, as a certified arborist and tree climber. Prior to that, he was a firefighter on two U.S. federal hotshot crews, and before that, a tour guide in China, while at Peking University.
He enjoys shooting (and occasionally making) traditional bows, botany, foraging, and serving on the University of Nevada Arboretum Board. Though lately all is taking a back seat to finishing The Descent of Man, his adventure novel depicting what happens to humans in a world without bees.
Christoph is fairly certain that he holds the distinction of being the only winner to answer his finalist notification call impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger. In his defense, he thought the call was from a telemarketer.
about the illustrator
Talia Spencer was born in 1994 and raised in Burbank, California. There she spent her childhood dedicated to the practice of making imaginary worlds real.
At the age of twelve, she lost her single mother to an undiagnosed disease which ate away her brain. Watching her mother become a vegetable was a wake-up call that catalyzed an intensified passion to create and succeed.
Her passion is inspiring love and the acceptance of pain through her art and storytelling.
She currently attends Art Center College of Design where she majors in entertainment design.
Möbius
Detective Elizabeth Arus surveyed the illegal laboratory through her nightsight monocular. Boarded up, she noted. But not abandoned.
“So what should we expect to find inside?” Musk asked. He flexed his trigger finger, as if to warm up for the coming raid. A patch reading GCTA: Enforcement stood stark on his black uniform. The acronym for GeneCrime Termination Authority was, by no accident, comprised of the four nucleobase letters in the human genome. The original genome. Before gene-tweakers synthesized six more letters.
“Could be cloning, genhancements, maybe even some good old-fashioned organ harvesting. Maybe we’ll find someone crossing cats with spiders. I might even let that one slide,” Liz lied. In her career with GeneCrime, Liz had never let off a gene-tweaker.
“You’re the detective—shouldn’t you know what’s inside before you send my boys in?”
“We haven’t seen anyone come or go, and we have no sources,” Liz said. “Whoever’s running it is careful.”
Musk studied the derelict warehouse, its roof sagging under the weight of age. “And why doesn’t that just tell you it’s empty?”
“I found this place by scanning energy records. It’s sucking the grid dry, and the listed owner is a company that doesn’t exist. It’s a black lab, all right.”
Musk’s radio crackled to life. “In place at the rear exit, boss. But it’s boarded up. I don’t think anyone’s getting out this way.”
“Just post up there, Wallace. Call if you see anything. We’re moving in.”
“Copy that.”
Liz and Musk activated the vacuums on their BioPro suits; the thin protective layers molded to their bodies like second skins, allowing maximum mobility. Along with two of Musk’s enforcers, they made their way to the warehouse entrance, where they pried away the old boards. A locked steel door greeted them.
“Someone’s hiding something,” Musk said. “Rogers, kick it.”
Rogers placed an adhesive charge on the lock and directed everyone to stand aside. The charge bloomed in a hissing flower of white-hot slag. Rogers kicked the door. It mocked him with a thudding snort.
This place is better secured than the average lab, Liz thought. She glanced at the men with her. I should have requested more.
“You trying to let them know we’re here?” Musk hissed at his man. “Blow the door down!”
Rogers placed four more charges. Light drove back the night. Liz turned around, her ears ringing, to find the steel door twisted on smoking hinges. She followed the men inside, shielding her eyes from the concentrated overhead lighting.
Two Enforcers raced ahead to clear the compound while Musk covered Liz, allowing her to begin her detective duties. He rapped his knuckles on one of the spotless steel vats lining each wall. The ring echoed down the hallway. “Blast door, good lighting, sterile equipment . . . this isn’t our run-of-the-mill lab.”
That’s what makes me nervous, Liz silently agreed. Most labs, forced underground by GeneCrime’s relentless enforcement, operated in the city’s darkest, dirtiest holes. Some argued for regulation of gene-tweaking rather than complete termination, on the premise that there would always be gene-tweakers, whether it was legal or not. Those people insisted that forcing labs underground only made them operate in squalid conditions, unsafe for patients.
Liz was not one of those people.
Rogers’ voice burst over the radio. “Next room’s clear, one stiff.”
Liz photographed the vats and followed Musk into the next room, which contained three steel slab tables. A
top the middle slab, a white sheet half-covered a corpse. Fat oozed like hollandaise from sores and growths over the man’s torso. Another victim of gene-tweaking.
Liz began documenting the scene: she photographed the corpse, the tube leading from his arm to the bag of red fluid suspended above the table, the sores and growths—
The growths, Liz remembered with a shudder.
When Liz was five, her mother was killed after a lab mate inadvertently released a virus he’d been gene-tweaking in secret. Liz had only two vague memories of her: one of her at the helm of a tandem solarcycle, pushing her hair behind her ear as she turned to smile at Liz. The other was of her mother on her deathbed, covered in cancerous growths caused by her lab mate’s illegal virus. That memory was the fuel that powered Liz on her relentless quest to hunt down every gene-tweaker in the city.
Rogers’ voice came over Musk’s radio, “Compound’s all clear. But there’s something you should see.”
“Copy that.” Musk turned to Liz. “You okay on your own for a bit?”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
Musk snorted and paced out.
Liz opened the room’s coolbox. Bingo. Inside was a glass cube. Inside the cube, several dozen vials of red fluid, same color as the solution the corpse had been receiving. Stamped atop the cube was a symbol: a loop of red ribbon with a half twist. Liz recognized it at once. A Möbius strip.
She took a Quarantainer from her bag and pulled the tough silver fabric over the cube, ensuring that the side coated with incendiary powder faced inward. On the Quarantainer’s screen, she entered her thumbprint and four-letter passcode. The nanovacuum sealed, airtight and impermeable. Three attempts to open the Quarantainer without Liz’s print and passcode would ignite the incendiary powdercoat, destroying the contents.
Finding nothing more of much interest, Liz walked back to the corpse for another look.
Am I losing it, or did he just breathe?
Liz put the sound-permeable earfilm of her suit to the corpse’s mouth, listening for breath while feeling for pulse and watching for the subtle chest rise she thought she’d seen.