"Everyone on Earth"
Surface Evolution #7
Just two left, kids! Both from 2011. The final one will follow this one, then we’re done.
Cheers!
Æ
EVERYONE ON EARTH
ARTYOM KORPOVSKI
I miss his head and hear bone crunch against my knuckles. His clavicle cracks.
I swing again. This time, connect with his ugly face. He goes down. Teeth knocked loose. I sit on his chest, pin his arms with my knees, hit him again. Again. Again. Blood erupts from his nose. He chokes on it.
Through busted lips, he says a string of words that make no sense, yet seem to be directed at me.
I punch his face until my arms burn, until my knuckles are a pulped red mess, until every place my fists land feels spongy.
He dies, gagging on the pain.
This is not the first time I’ve killed.
~*~
“What did you do with the body?”
“What body?”
“Whaddaya mean, ‘what body’?”
We’re in my little shitbox apartment. I’ve got a coffee; Jerome’s got some faggy drink clutched to his chest, can never remember the name of it. Arthritic spider-claw grasping the glass, like it’s the last thing his fingers will ever touch. And maybe that’s true, he doesn’t watch his step. “I mean, what fucking body?”
“Well, let’s see, Artyom. Your fists and shirt are covered in blood, you’re shaking like a jonesing junkie, and I can smell death on you. Now, just tell me: What did you do with the body?”
Jerome takes a delicate sip from his mojito or whatever the fuck he’s got. I suppress the urge to slap it out of his hand.
“It’s taken care of,” I say.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s gone. Don’t worry about it.”
I shoulder past him out of the kitchen, into the living room. Shove books and a stack of bills off the couch. Sit down, stare at the floor.
He follows me in, swallows the rest of his drink, cradles the empty glass to his chest again. “This shit has got to stop, Artyom. I’m not covering for you again.”
“No one asked you to,” I say, eyes flicking up to meet his before dropping again. “No one ever asked you to.”
He’s hurt by this, but I’m so far past caring, I can’t even remember what it feels like.
Still glaring at the floor, I hear footsteps back into the kitchen, glass shattering against the wall, the front door opening, slamming shut.
I sigh, get up from the couch, walk into the kitchen, stare at the shards of glass scattered everywhere. Decide then and there I’m not cleaning it up. Decide then and there I’m walking out the door and never coming back.
’Cause the thing is, and this is a fairly super-fucked thing: I told Jerome the body was gone, and that’s true. It is gone. I just don’t know where it went.
WILLIAM LINDBLAD
Fact: there’s no God. No heaven. No hell. No soul. None of that crap. I knew if I wanted to go somewhere when I died, I’d need to create somewhere myself.
So I did.
It wasn’t so tough. Little bit of quantum this, a dash of particle physics that. Voila. Little dead home to call my own.
So when that big Russian was beating me to death in an alleyway, all I could think was: I hope it worked.
And it did.
Kinda.
I’m there now, writing this down on pen and paper. Little square room about six by six feet, maybe eight feet in height. Small wooden desk, spindly metal chair. Some light squeezing in from the edges and corners of the room, but I don’t know the source. Enough to write by, anyway. It’s a little cold, but that’s to be expected since I’m fairly certain I’m in theoretical space. I always assumed it’d be a bit on the chilly side.
I look down and see hands where hands should be, feet where feet should be, and feel my heart beating where a heartbeat should be felt. I guess you could say I’m alive. But am I human anymore? I don’t know. I didn’t think about that when I designed this space and defined the parameters. I just knew I wanted to exist. So whatever I am now, I’m here. I am functioning.
The pen glides across the surface of the paper as I write. Thought to fingers, fingers to pen, pen to paper: always somehow knew I’d meet a gruesome end, just always felt it in my bones.
A l w a y s
s o m e h o w
k n e w
I ’ d
m e e t
a
g r u e s o m e
e n d .
That’s the way my writing feels in my head. It looks fine to my eyes on the page, but it feels weirdly spaced and strangely disconnected to my thought processes.
I suppose I must have done something to deserve being beaten to death, but I can’t remember much before my attacker’s fists started destroying my face. Or maybe it was just a random act of violence and I really did nothing at all to deserve it. I suppose I’ll never know, though I’m not particularly concerned. Life for me now is this thought. This desk. This pen. This paper. That light seeping in from who knows where.
I wonder if other people have made little dead homes to call their own. I can’t possibly be the first, can I? I’m no scientist, no magician. Just a guy with a strong interest.
My name is William, by the way. In case anyone ever finds this record, I want them to know my name. William Lindblad.
L i n d b l a d .
Though I don’t know who could ever find me here, so that’s probably a dumb thing to say.
Well, actually, I suppose someone could eventually find me. When I discovered what I hoped was the secret to life after death, I posted a quick how-to guide on my blog, just in case I was right. I might have Facebooked and tweeted it, too. Can’t remember.
ARTYOM
I pack a small suitcase, leave a note for Jerome that he can go fuck himself, hop into a cab, buy a plane ticket on my phone on the way to the airport, sit in the airport for four hours, board my plane, stow my baggage appropriately, push my aisle seat back, close my eyes, and wait for my new life to begin.
But with my eyes shut, the killing in the alleyway comes shuffling back into my head. My own little snuff film playing on the backs of my eyelids.
Mashing the guy’s face with my fist till I’d nearly split his skull in half.
First just unconscious, maybe comatose, then that moment where things shift just a tiny little bit and death moves its things in, puts its feet up, grabs a beer from your fridge, makes itself at home.
And then just . . . poof.
Gone. The body is gone.
Stewardess comes by, asks me to put my seat in the upright position for takeoff. I comply. She walks away.
The plane taxis, takes off.
Guy in the aisle seat across from me gives me a weird look when we’re at cruising altitude. Scruffy-looking bastard. His face is slack, emotionless, like he’s been sat here for hours, listening to the dullest song in the world over and over again. He says, “Cylindrical boxes with monstrous intent devolve, chip away, scour, blast, and pull lifeless from sterile surgery—there is sense to it if you listen closely, listen, listen, no, come closer; hallucinatory dimensional theory discredits the colossal beast and all its hopes and dreams stare, cry, whimper, bellow to the gods. This space, this place is cold, and I have forgotten.”
“Pardon?” I say.
He says nothing more, just stares straight ahead, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. Chubby. Rumpled clothes. Crooked teeth. Matted hair. Not a very well-put-together guy.
“Um,” I say. “Okay, sure.” I look away, clearly disengaging.
“Listen,” he says, suddenly more animated, life returning to his face. He leans across the aisle, lowering his voice to a whisper. “I know you. I know what you like to do.”
He’s looking at me very intently, studying my face, my body language.
“No idea what you’re talking about, man.” Just enough ice in my tone to deter further discussion, but not so much as to sound defensive.
“Yeah, yeah, sure you do, man. This is all happening in more than one world. There are millions, but you’re the same douchebag in every single one. I know what you did to that guy in the alleyway. I know what you did to a lot of people.”
Now he has my undivided attention.
“Oh yeah? What do you know about me, buddy? What exactly do you know?” And now I’m leaning in close to him.
He grins and says, “I know you mashed that guy’s face until his head wasn’t even recognizably human anymore. That’s what I know. I also know about the hooker whose face you burned beyond recognition, then cut into little pieces and dumped in the river.”
I am sweating a little bit, but I am keeping my face as neutral as possible. “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “I don’t know who you think I am, but this shit ain’t funny, and I sure as fuck ain’t laughing, so—”
“You know who else isn’t laughing? That twenty-year-old you kidnapped. She’s not laughing. You drove to the edge of a cliff, got her out of the car, and pushed her off. Both her legs broke when she hit the rocks below. You climbed down and stomped on her face till she was dead. Something about people’s faces bothers you, doesn’t it? On a primal level you have no hope of understanding. And there’s a buzzing in your ears—maybe in your brain itself—that never, ever stops. You’re the same guy who did all that, aren’t you?” the guy says, leans away from me. “If I’ve you confused with someone else, my apologies.”
He smiles, closes his eyes, and settles into his seat.
My mind races, eyes flitting madly to the passengers all around us. Did any of them hear him? He spoke low in his throat, conspiratorially, but . . . I don’t know. Can’t be sure. And now he’s just switched off, a strange little half-smile at the corners of his lips, as if perhaps remembering something funny that happened to him a long time ago.
“Hey,” I say, sharply. “Fuckface, wake up.” I don’t know what I’m going to say next, but something’s forming in my mind. Some threat or insult. Some warning about him not knowing who he’s fucking with. But the words die in my throat as he opens his eyes, that same slack look on his face from earlier, and says in a rushing stream, “There’s death here, transposing worlds, shifting sands corrupting, shuffling, crushing, snuffling, destroying, recreating, and still the thief persists, steals time and reflections of all life, eroding, corroding, decoding oceans of angry bees with hive-mind agendas filtering all you knew, all you know; death is a reboot, convoluted and corrective, smiling, holding a secret close to its chest, and the rest is simply mathematics reshaping consciousness, but love persists, pulls you into a family of wretched bears with sharp horns, claws, and wit—but they love you and you cannot. See. Where. You’re. Going anymore. Because their love is just so fucking bright.”
Then he suddenly pulls a pen from his suit pocket and jams it into the side of his neck. Blood immediately pumps out, splashing his shirt, the seat fabric between his legs. Pooling there.
I watch, confused, fascinated.
He turns and looks directly at me, says, “Everyone on Earth knows you. Everyone on every earth understands what you’ve done. What you will do. And no one judges you.”
People panic, come rushing over. Someone yells for a doctor. But I know the look in the guy’s eyes, having produced it in people dozens of times. He’s fading fast, nearly gone.
People swarm around him, trying to stem the flow of blood, everyone asking, “What happened, did anyone see?” He’s there and he’s a gusher; he’s there and he’s a human being travelling a thousand miles an hour, 30,000 feet in the air.
And then suddenly hands clasp nothing but air: Someone previously applying pressure to his neck stumbles forward, nearly falls face-first into the puddle of blood on the seat. People back away from the seat slowly, and I see that the man has disappeared.
~*~
When I land at my destination, I find myself strangely exhilarated. Sure, the police questioning was a bore, but it was entertaining to see the looks on the cops’ faces as passenger after passenger told the same story—the truth—about what happened.
I pick up my pace, leave my fellow passengers behind. A few of them shake as they walk, full body tremors racking their frames; some even have to stop and sit down, they’re shaking so badly.
For me, it’s a banner day: this is the second person today who has died, then disappeared in front of my eyes. I am a murderer, but I am not a selfish murderer. Yes, I do my part in thinning the herd, but if there’s something taking centre stage that will speed up the process, I’m intrigued.
On my way to baggage claim, I pass a big-screen TV spewing the latest news. Apparently, this shit is happening all over the country. Maybe all over the world. People saying weird, confusing things no one understands, offing themselves in some hideous fashion, then vanishing.
Despite an uncertain start, today is looking up.
WILLIAM
Someone’s banging on the wall.
“Hello?” I yell in the direction of the banging.
It stops. Starts up again.
I drop my pen, get up from my chair, walk over to the sound. “Hello? Who’s that?”
Banging stops again. This time, there’s muffled speech, but I can’t quite make out the words.
“Speak up! Can’t hear what you’re saying!”
“I said,” the banger says, “where the hell am I!?”
“Oh, that,” I say. “Well, if you’re in any kind of room similar to the one I’m in, you’re in a theoretical construct that, by most calculations, likely shouldn’t exist.”
Silence. Probably shouldn’t have come on quite so strong at first. I change my angle. “What I mean to say is, you’re dead.”
“So . . .” the guy shouts “. . . it worked?”
“What worked?”
“That stuff I read on the Internet. Instructions on how to create a room to exist in when ya die.”
“Um. Yeah, I suppose. How did you, er . . . die?”
“Killed myself. Stabbed myself in the throat with a pen. On an airplane.”
“Ah. Why on an airplane?”
“Because that’s where I was when I decided to kill myself.”
“Oh.”
“Sick of life. Sick of living. You know the drill. Same old, same old. Unloved, unloving, so what’s the point? Oh, and I said some really messed-up shit before I jammed the pen in. Like my mind was tapped into some sort of cosmic awesomeness, and this weird rambling nonsense just poured outta my mouth.”
“Right.”
Quiet for a while. Both of us lost in our own thoughts, I expect.
“Place is gonna fill up pretty fast, I figure,” the guys says. “Saw the post on BoingBoing, then it got filtered out to all the cool online spots. Salon did a feature on it. Probably got picked up by major newspapers at that point. Maybe even TV. How’d you come up with the calculations? They’re so simple.”
“Yeah, I know. Just kinda took a shot, you know?”
“Yeah. I think someone dumbed down the formula before it really got popular. I saw the original formula somewhere online, and it’s a bit more complicated. The dumbed-down version is almost absurdly simple. . . . Say, my voice box is gonna shatter if I need to keep yelling at you through this wall. Any way we can talk face-to-face?”
“Probably. Just need to work out the spatial parameters. Gimme a minute.”
A few minutes later, our dead homes intersected with one another’s. His desk became my desk; my chair became his chair.
“Wicked,” he said when he materialized against the wall of our dead home. “Nice that we don’t need to carry our manner of death with us here, huh? I’d have a pen sticking out of my throat forever. That’d suck. What about you?”
“I’d have hamburger for a face.”
“Suicide?”
“No. Beaten to death in an alleyway. No idea why.”
“Grim,” he says.
I nod.
“Kyle Crixton,” the guy says, sticking out his hand and walking toward me.
“William Lindblad” I say.
We stand and just regard each other for a while, unsure where else to go with the conversation. Then Kyle says, “Well, um, okay. Can you put me back in my own room? Nice meeting you and all, but I’d like my own space again.”
“Oh, uh . . .” I’d sort of hoped he’d like to stay for a bit longer. “Yeah, sure.”
“Well, hey, hang on,” Kyle says, puts up a hand. “You got all sad-faced there when I said I wanted to go. If you wanna hang a bit more, we could. I mean, I got nowhere to actually be or anything.” He smiles.
I never did have much of a poker face. “Oh, cool. Well, I dunno. I suppose I’m still a bit freaked out that this worked. And even more freaked out to hear it’s spreading ’cause of my posts.”
Kyle nods, looks distracted. “Can you teach me how to do it?”
“Do what?”
“The calculations or whatever the hell you do to whip up crap outta thin air.”
“Ah. That. Yeah, it’s not so hard once you get the hang of it. Once you have the room, it’s easy to create within it. Just need a bit of imagination, really.”
“Awesome.”
“I guess. But if you didn’t want to live before, why do you want to live now? There’s even less here to live for. I mean, seriously. Why didn’t you just top yourself without the physics calculations?”
“I do want to live,” Kyle says. “I just want to live in my own world. And not just figuratively. Literally. One wholly of my creation.”
I think about all the people online who are probably doing this right now, popping up all over my little designed dimension. A million spoiled little gods, able to create whatever they want. And all they had to do was sacrifice their lives for it.
It was going to get pretty crowded.
ARTYOM
The country I fly to is hot. Humid. Sticky as fuck. I love that feeling. Shirt stuck to my back, sweat dripping down my face and chest. Most people bitch about it, but for me, the hotter the better. Something about it is comforting to me.
I take a cab to my hotel. I’m on the ninth floor. Once settled into my room, I log into my webmail. One email only: from fuckface Jerome. I delete it without opening it.
A CNN news feed describes in further detail the crazy shit I saw on the airport TV screens. Some mathematical formula gone viral on the web that allows you to create a kind of quantum coffin for you to consciously knock around in when you die. People disappearing. Mostly it’s smart people who can figure it out, but more and more of the general masses are vanishing as people dumb down the calculations, find easier ways in. Hacking the afterlife.
I shut down my computer, turn on the TV to see if there’re any more updates. The first report I see is supposedly audio coming from this bizarre new dimension. The anchor says they’re working on establishing video, but it’s not quite ready yet. The image cuts from the anchor to a black screen. A woman’s voice. Tinny audio, but audible.
“. . . reporting live from what appears to be a small room, not much larger than the size of your average prison cell. Just a wooden desk and chair for furniture.”
My first thought is: This woman killed herself for the story. The irony of the words “reporting live” are not lost on me.
Video suddenly snaps on. We see a cute thirty-something blondie, clearly holding up a small camera with one hand, positioning a microphone near her mouth with the other. Faint lines of light seep in through the edges of the walls behind her, lending a ghostly luminescence to the room.
We hear the news anchor’s voice: “Marjorie, are there any doors leading out? What do you see there? How are you feeling? I . . . well, I still can’t quite believe we’re actually talking to you. This is monumental. Proof of life after—”
“Jack, I . . .” Marjorie’s voice sounds distressed. The camera is shaking while she turns from side to side, looking for something. “I don’t think I’m alone here. I think maybe . . .”
There is a sharp cracking sound, then blood splashes the camera. A sinewy shadow flits past the camera where it now lies on its side on the floor in the tiny room. Then, only audio. A hissing, whispered voice, speaking slowly: “Everyone on earth will be here soon. And then where will you go? You know me. You all know me. I am many. I am in all of your worlds. Soon and at last, I will be alone.”
The picture returns to the news anchor, who sits white-faced and confused, repeating Marjorie’s name until the station goes to commercial.
I replay the sound of the whispered voice in my head.
It sounded exactly like me.
The sweat dripping down my back no longer feels comforting. My skin feels too tight. My head swims. My teeth are clenched.
That was my voice. I can no more doubt it than I can look in a mirror and doubt that the face looking back is my own. I have no idea what to do with myself. My hands shake, fingers fluttering like the wings of a trapped fly.
My brain suddenly feels cramped, crushed. Compacted. There is a sound like the bursting of a flashbulb, and my mind is whipped back to the moment before I dealt the death blow to the kid in the alleyway:
His eyes are closed, but he’s muttering: “Piano dribbles from the flood, brain suck, fall inside and outside time, sequenced filtered space, everyone on everyone on everyone piled high to the sky, death searching, finding, sequencing binary encoded, wrapped in fragments of interstellar mist; you are the same, you are unlike anyone, you will live forever in your own mind but die quietly in the minds of others.”
My fist pulls back, and something in my mind crumples, folds in upon itself. On some level, I understand the words. On some level, I realize their truth, and know that everything in this world has changed.
The fist (and I say “the” because I no longer think of the fist as my own) slams into the kid’s cranium one last time. Life stops. There is no more movement. This is a frozen tableau. A monument to a world that used to exist. Already, landscapes are shifting. Fracturing. The deepest part of who I am knows that I am many now.
Something more than I ever was. Split apart completely from who I used to be.
WILLIAM
After a short time, Kyle gets the hang of world-building. He’s making up all sorts of randomness just because he can: squids with bicycle horns for eyes; a massive replica of Stonehenge made of marzipan; the biggest and hairiest testicle this or any other world has surely ever known, etc.
In comparison, I keep my creations fairly low-key: the house where I grew up; my bedroom in said house, replicated as closely as I can recall it; and my mother before she went crackers and started placing hand-made miniature versions of all our furniture and appliances on top of the life-sized versions—a tiny end table resting on the life-size end table in our living room; a pint-sized dresser on top of the real dresser in her bedroom; a little stainless steel fridge sitting atop our real fridge.
Seeing my mother before she went around the bend is lovely, but after a couple of days, she starts speaking in riddles and strange languages, shuffling around the house from room to room like a malfunctioning Roomba.
We still have some fine-tuning to do.
Meanwhile, people flood in by the millions, then billions. It doesn’t take them long to get the hang of world-building, either. They make weird stuff at first, too. All manner of crazy stuff pops up. It’s chaos—a Dali-esque, Bosch-inspired Giger-fest for a few weeks, but very quickly people settle down and start creating familiar settings from their old lives: strip malls; fast food chains; the same cars they drove when they were alive; identical jobs to the ones they had. People conjure their dead friends, relatives, lovers. Some try to change them, correct perceived flaws, but it always ends in Roomba Syndrome. Millions upon millions of broken reflections of human beings, wandering about, bumping into walls, muttering nonsense under their breath.
Eventually, humankind grows bored of experimenting and just recreates the exact same lives in the exact same world they just escaped. They can’t help themselves.
Change is the enemy.
~*~
Probably like a lot of people, Kyle and I eventually cut ourselves off from everyone else, wrap ourselves up in an encoded little bubble where we hope no one can find us.
And somewhere along the way, we fall deeply in love. We even hold hands and kiss sometimes.
I don’t know exactly when it happens, but we find something in each other that no other person has ever been able to give us: a reason to live.
ARTYOM
When my mind snaps like an elastic band back to relative normal, I realize that my murdering days are over. I understand that very soon the world will be nearly empty, with me as its only occupant.
I think very briefly of Jerome, wonder where he is. Hope that he’s happy. Genuinely. And it’s such a strange, wondrous feeling that I can’t stop myself from crying. I cry in this overheated hotel room until my throat is raw and my eyes sting.
When I finally stop, there is complete silence, complete rest. Peace. Inside of me. I will never have human contact again. I will die alone, of disease or old age, on this uninhabited planet.
I feel no desire to kill.
The noise in my head that had been the soundtrack to my life for so long, I had stopped hearing it, stopped understanding it—a scratchy, static-filled, low-level hum set deep into the base of my neck, clawing at my nervous system, suffocating, sandblasting emotion from my being—that noise which filled every waking and sleeping moment for as long as I can remember—
It’s gone.
I feel human. Or at least what I perceive humanity to be.
I think of my doppelganger, that murderer in another world, another lifetime. Killer of journalists, teenagers in alleyways, random women, anyone within reach. He is far removed from who I am, from who I could ever have been. He sounds like me, probably looks like me, too—but he’s not, could never be. The me I am right now, in this moment.
T h e m e I a m r i g h t n o w.
I n t h i s m o m e n t.
I get up from the hotel bed, walk out into the hallway.
Near silence. Just my feet whispering on the carpet. A very light breeze coming from down the hall. Elevator doors stand open.
I enter the elevator. The doors close quietly. Nine becomes eight becomes seven becomes six becomes five becomes four becomes three becomes two becomes.
One.
The doors slide open. More emptiness. I feel the urge to scream building up inside my chest. I think it might be joy.
I walk out the revolving door. The sun on my face is glorious. I look up at the VACANCY sign, and I know that in every hotel and motel on Earth, the same sign flashes on and off. On and off.
Forever.
WILLIAM
One day, many years later, I discover the formula for time travel. It’s not nearly as difficult as it should be.
The next day, while Kyle’s still sleeping, I kiss him gently on the forehead and say goodbye. Just as I’d hoped, he doesn’t wake. He doesn’t even stir.
I transport my presence back to the world we all abandoned, to the alleyway—the scene of my death. I suppose I’m looking for answers. I suppose I want to find out what crazy things I said before I died.
When my mind focuses on where I am, I realize I’m not in my own body. Instead, I’m looking down at my body, beating myself to death. My blood is boiling. I hear static. So loud I can barely think.
I am my killer, and I suddenly understand why I am doing this.
Here’s what I hear, the words I watch my own lips form. They fill my mind, my body like a disease:
“. . . everyone on everyone on everyone piled high to the sky, death searching, finding, sequencing binary encoded, wrapped in fragments of interstellar mist; you are the same, you are unlike anyone, you will live forever in your own mind but die quietly in the minds of others.”
Then the final blow comes and I die again. I stand up in my killer’s body. The static in my head recedes a little but not very much.
I walk to the end of the alleyway, where it empties out into a big park, in which people would normally be walking their dogs, reading books on park benches, meeting friends, enjoying the sun of the day.
Instead, there is a mountain of human bodies in the park, piled up to the clouds.
The buzzing in my head recedes a little more, faster now, becoming quite faint.
On the park pathway, I look left, right. Spot a man standing beneath a hotel sign across the street. He’s gazing up at it, smiling. The sign flashes VACANCY.
The look on his face is one of peace. Calm.
I walk toward him, crossing the street. Closer. Closer still.
I’m nearly close enough to touch him. He senses me there. Feels me looking at him. He turns his head, we lock eyes.
We are the only person left in this world.