scenes from a cyberpunk road story, new year's edition

Happy New Year. Here's something.

I'm fading fast in the passenger seat, watching the snow quietly bury the New England countryside, when Morgan pulls the car to the side of the road. We're somewhere in the middle of nowhere and I have no idea why we've stopped, but the change in momentum has me awake for once.

"Hey, Nora," she says. "You awake?"

"Yeah."

"It's almost midnight."

It takes me a minute to realize that's supposed to mean something. It's almost midnight on the thirty-first day of December. We've finally made it to next year.

"I didn't want to just . . . be driving," she says. "You know?" She opens the door. "I'm going to step outside, walk around. If you want to join me . . . ?"

I unfasten my seat belt and step out of the car as well. We're miles away from the nearest town, and nobody else is crazy enough to be out driving in this weather. But here we are, alone together in the woods. Once we're both outside it seems like the only light is coming from the snow, like it's glowing. Other than that it's perfectly dark, the only sound the wind blowing through the trees.

"We made it," she says. "I did not expect to survive this year."

"Yeah," I tell her.

"That's what I like about the new year. You know? It's like a finish line. All you have to do is make it to the end of December and you're done. You survived. And that's . . . sometimes that's a lot. For me, anyway. But I survived. I'm here with you. We made it."

"We made it," I tell her.

The snow keeps falling around us, and she's staring up into it like maybe she'll be able to see the moon or the stars through the clouds--or maybe she's staring at something else, something only she can see. All the ghosts and regrets from the past year.I hand her the thermos I filled at the last rest area, full of shitty coffee, and she gives me something like a smile. "I'm glad you're here," she tells me.

"Me, too," I tell her.

We pass the coffee back and forth for a while. There's something magical about drinking something hot when it's cold out, when the snow is gathering on your jacket and melting on your nose and the wind cuts right through your clothes. The new year is supposed to be cold. The cold reminds you that you're alive, that sometimes you have to keep moving to survive even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

Then she quietly counts us down to midnight, because it's hard to break the stillness by raising your voice, and we whisper "happy new year" to each other, and after a moment she sings Auld Lang Syne, softly at first and then louder, more confident. And then when she's done the silence reclaims this desolate stretch of road and, with conviction, she says, "We should do this again next year.'

"You're on," I tell her.

Eventually we get back in the car--without saying anything we both agree I'll take over driving again and let her get some rest. The snow isn't letting up any time soon but it doesn't matter. Even if it takes a while, even if we can't take the direct route there, we're getting closer to where we're going, mile after weary mile.

courage

The Spire sits at the heart of what, I am told, was the greatest achievement that mankind has ever achieved, a geomantic network which harnessed the power of the very earth to make everyone's lives better, so long as they lived close enough to one of our nodes. When it still worked properly, they said, it made the crops more bountiful, it calmed the earth and the sky--and those were, I'm told, just incidental benefits.

It doesn't do that anymore.

You can make it work. It takes time and work and dedication and it doesn't usher in the promised utopia, but it does mean you'll probably have enough food to survive the winter, and the monsters seem to stay away.

Oh right. Did I mention there are monsters? There are monsters. And the nodes that, I am told, once made us so great, seem to corrupt the land rather than blessing it, blighting crops and calling storms on a good year. Sometimes it kills: a slow plague sometimes, a sudden poisoning others. And sometimes it seems to work its way into the mind of someone who lives too close and it just . . . makes them their worse self. And everywhere, throughout the world, this is happening, because once, forever ago, we thought we could get away with it.

I've been studying it for a while now, since every time we talk about it, every time it comes up that this is our fault, that people are dying, that the earth is dying because of us, they deflect. "There's nothing we can do but try to improve things now," they say, every time. And, sure, we help a village here or there. But the blight is spreading faster than that.

And there is something else we can do.

I've been talking to this stranger who seems to know more about the system than the sages who still tend to it--or, perhaps, the sages hope nobody figures out the truth. Because all we have to do is rip the stone from the heartroom of the Spire, and the system will collapse, well and truly. The corruption will stop because it's the Spire that is corrupting everything. The city will be destroyed, of course, but the world will be free at last.

The princess tried to convince her father that we needed to do this, and he refused. She's been locked up in the palace, and they won't even let me visit. They're worried she might somehow convince me to do what we had already decided I'd do if her plan failed.

I'm in the heartroom now, along with the stranger. (I begged the stranger to leave but they wouldn't. They said this was what they had lived their entire lives for. Which seemed odd, but I'm not here to argue.) The sages were nowhere to be found, almost as if they knew what was coming, so together, the stranger's hand on top of mine, we wrest the stone from its socket.

And the world is swallowed in light.

wisdom

The omens say the destroyer is nigh, that I am the one who will save us from ruin, but the omens, they tell me, have said that dozens of times in the past and no destroyer has come. The people have started to see them as omens of an era of peace and prosperity, and I suppose to them I'm a symbol of that. They love me, because they know that with me as their princess they will want for nothing. Which is to say: it's not me they love at all.

The empire I am due to inherit spans the entire continent, and is build on the backs of hundreds of nations, nations who starve so that my people will never know hunger. The songs I have learned that will save this empire from disaster were written because once we were a beacon of hope, a shelter against the darkness. Now we are a symbol of decadence and of oppression and of needless cruelty, and those songs . . . these people had no love for heroes, and anyone who saved them would not be a hero.

When I first met the destroyer, I knew them immediately, the same way that you know your father immediately. But they did not come with an army, and they did not come with the intent to destroy us, and when we became friends at first I doubted that they were the destroyer at all. Then, one day, at the top of my tower, I said to them, "The world would be a better place if this empire fell."

And then I knew. The destroyer, the person I was born to oppose, had come to help me. Had come to make the world a better place.

All empires fall, they explained, but the songs, for as long as other princesses before me have learned them, have kept mine alive and festering, an engine of ceaseless suffering. All I had to do is flee, abandon this people, and it would all finally fall apart.

*** 

The world burned slowly. It was not the great cataclysm from the prophecies, not the cleansing collapse that I had hoped for, but as the years went by the destroyer was clearly right about one thing, at least: all empires fall. Some die quickly. Some, like mine, bleed out slowly, painfully. I found a village in the mountains to wait out an end that seemed both inevitable and impossibly distant. It was peaceful, in its own way, to simply live, not as the embodiment of peace or hope or decadent, but just as a person.

The people hate me, of course, as much as they used to love me. But here in the valley the tax collectors haven't come, and the commissars haven't conscripted any new young people into the empire's armies. Maybe that's enough.

power

I don't know how many lives I've spent fighting her: her, her armies, her champion. Because every time I wake up and find myself in this world again, occupying another mind and another body for another lifetime, I am filled with this single purpose. She is my enemy, and her city must be destroyed.

She doesn't remember the countless lives we've fought, but she always knows me, somehow. Sometimes they know I am coming, from reading the signs and portents, others she seems to simply know at a glance that I am her foe, but no matter how cunning I am, she's ready. And however close I come, she prevails in the end. Her legend grows, and my defeat becomes just another song for her people to sing.

It's the same city every time, but the lands and the people are different. Sometimes even the languages change. And though I remember a hundred lives fighting--a thousand--ten thousand--I over the time the specifics fade. Only the defeat, the sting of the hero's blade, the burn of her magic. Those I will always carry with me.

I've arrived in her city and it is thriving, and for a moment the old feeling comes back: this is what I was made for. This city must burn. But this time something else has arrived with that feeling: the weariness of it all. After how many lifetimes fighting her, is it worth spending one more, only to fall in the end? Can I honestly convince myself that this is the time I finally win?

(A memory: one time I find her city but she isn't there. Or her heroes. The city burns so bright and beautiful, the smoke painting the sky in such beautiful shades at twilight, and even then an assassin's knife finds my back. Perhaps I set her back some, but even unopposed I still fail.)

I've been around for so long. I could be so much more than the would-be conqueror who fails time and time again. I could impart some of the wisdom of the ages to these people. If this city will stand anyway, I could make it a city worth standing.

***

Years pass. My wisdom draws her attention at long last, and she invites me to the palace, with her champion at her side, and she asks me if I would join her council. "The seers tell me that the destroyer's return is nigh," she says. "And if they do return, I will need your wisdom to fight them."

Some small part of me whispers, "This is our chance. We can betray her. We can destroy her. We can crush her champion. We can burn this city to ash." But it is so small, so quiet, I can almost not hear it over the stirring of pride in my heart. There is so much more we can do.

There is a chamber in the heart of the palace which will not suffer any of evil intent to enter, and she takes me there--the final initiation for all of her advisers. And though I am afraid, I am willing to take this risk--either I will be discovered, and I will die and return in another lifetime, or I will not, and I will be able to help her build.

Nothing happens when I enter. A priest anoints me with holy water and I become the princess's adviser.

***

We are both very old, now. The destroyer is past due now, they say. "Perhaps they are not coming," I suggest.

"Perhaps," she agrees. We have done so much together. Her city has become the shining heart of an empire, the most prosperous that ever existed.

"If the destroyer saw this city," I say, "even they would not wish it destroyed. It is too beautiful."

"Surely that would be a reason to wish it destroyed?"

"Perhaps," I tell her. "But I think it is so beautiful, so perfect, that no being, good or ill, could wish it harm. We have done the impossible."

The fear of the destroyer--the fear of me--inspired her to such great heights. And that legacy, I am certain, will continue for years. For centuries. This empire will never fall, certainly not to the likes of me. Not while its princess is so motivated.

And suddenly I understand what I must do to destroy her, and her kingdom.

I try to put the thought from my mind, but it refuses to leave. It stays until I am on my deathbed, and even then my last thoughts, after all I have built, are of the city burning, and how beautiful that will be.

cracks

I hadn't thought of you for years when I started having these dreams, like little glimpses into a timeline where I hadn't disappeared, where I'd go to parties and meet your friends and laugh and have a good time and when I finally went home I didn't feel exhausted or anxious or broken. I just felt alive. Like a person. Every morning I wake up and feel so much worse than I can describe, because that's not me. But the person in the dreams--it wasn't watching someone else, like so many of my dreams. It was me.

I didn't realize they were about you at first. Of course on some level you've always been there, haven't you? But as the dreams kept coming, and I'd wake with that strangely empty wistfulness, I could just make out your shape as my mind tried to piece together what had happened (and what hadn't). And then, finally, last night, you were there in the flesh. So to speak.

This one was different. It had been years, just like the real world, but you called. You were in town, you wanted to meet. So we met at a place which could have been anywhere, and I cannot tell you how happy I was. I should never have run away.

Then time passed, as it does in dreams, and I started to see the cracks. There were reasons I disappeared, reasons you never looked for me. We can forgive, perhaps, but neither of us were ever very good at forgetting.

When the morning came I was unsure if I wanted to wake up or stay asleep. Fortunately, I suppose, the real world rarely offers us a choice, and even rarer still offers us a chance to do things over again.

I hope you're well. I've lost so much since we last spoke.