Issue 9 June 2014 Flash Fiction Online June 2014

When it’s dark and no one would notice, we’ll break into the office. We’ll ride the elevator to the fourth floor, alternately giggling and pretending like we have serious work in an office building in the middle of the night. We’ll infiltrate like ninjas, darting from the soda machine to the water fountain to the copy room.

The copy room is named for the machine housed therein, and, having obtained access, we will fill the room with our copies.

I’ll make a copy of you when you’re feeling flirty, and you can make a copy of me when I’m feeling handsome. I’ll make sensible and whimsical and romantic copies, and you can make sensitive and comical and thoughtful copies.

When we have our copies, we will never be lonely. As soon as we make them, make us, we’ll begin to diverge. Each of us will have slightly different experiences, outlooks, and opinions, so conversation will never get stale.

You’ll debate politics with the whimsical me, and I’ll debate Avengers vs. Justice League with the thoughtful you. We’ll have roundtable discussions about the relative merits of Full metal Alchemist and Game of Thrones and The American Justice System.

In the morning, when the blurry-eyed proletariat returns to work, they’ll find us lounging in the lunch room and making out in the stairwells and having office chair races in the hallway. We will surround them, absorb them, consume them, like a great clone tide, until there are finally enough of us to contain the essence of us together, personified.

We will not repeat the fatal mistakes of our brethren.

In the first, we will not use our clones to create an evil galactic empire. Our galactic empire will not be evil.

In the second, we will not be tricked by a clone pretending to be the real you or me. We will use the ‘black and white copy’ feature of the copy machine, so there will be no tomfoolery.

In the third, we will make no bad clones.

We will make no copies of copies. Our copies, being copies of us, will be smart enough to abide by this rule.

Further, we will make no copies when we are angry, or lonely, or depressed. We will make no copies when we are petulant, or annoyed, or petty. We will not allow our copies to be bitter, or frustrated, or prideful. Perhaps most importantly, we will not make copies whilst singing “Baby”, lest our copies become Justin Bieber fans.

When the morning comes, we will disperse with all of our copies to the four corners. Our love will spread across the world like an endless ocean until you can’t get chai in India or a chai in Seattle without finding us there.

In the end, of course, there will come a day when I am petulant and you are petty. There will come a day when I stifle your ambition and you resent my lack of it. There will come many such days until we repeat the most fatal mistake of all.

And when that day comes, with all its shouting and suspicion and regret, we can take some solace in the fact that, out there in the great wide world, there is perhaps one combination in all the infinite combinations of us; one combination that will survive it.
Perhaps one combination with a touch more humor will turn an argument into a gigglefest. Perhaps with a touch more romance, or sensitivity, or whimsy, things will be just enough different. Whatever ingredient we might personally be missing, the reaction is out there repeating endlessly in our worldwide laboratory.

In one of those messy, haphazard experiments, we get it right. Even if we’re standing envious on the shore as that ship sails, we know that by our hand that journey was launched. And knowing that we created the opportunity for that one, perfect, glorious union makes everything else, all the misery of all the failed attempts, totally worth it.

They tell him he’ll be happy when he gets there. It was wrong, what was done to you, they say. We’re making it right. You’re going home.

The kind ones, who call him Mark, are pleased. They have a party, with foods from his planet. He chews the edge of a gray leaf so bitter it closes his throat. He’s used to coke and animal crackers. You’re going home, they say. No more soda, no more sweets. No more rooms with white walls and bright toys. No more needles, treadmills, tests. Home.
They won’t tell him what home is, only what it isn’t. He pictures a toyless, colorless, cokeless expanse. He pictures fields of bitter gray leaves growing beside silver pools. He tries to picture others like himself, but he is the only one he knows. He populates his imaginings with mirror-reversed copies of his own face. Pale blue fur and liquid black eyes.

At night, he wraps his arms around his chest and makes low choking noises as he tries to cry. He’s never quite gotten the trick of it.

The unkind ones, who call him The Subject, whisper about missed opportunities, invasions, and autopsies. They tell each other, we civilized The Subject, but who knows about the others. They’re probably savages. What if they eat their own kind?

He dreams of teeth.

His favorite among them, the woman who wears silver bracelets and paints his nails in rainbow colors, cries as she leads him to the shuttle.

“We thought it was best.” She makes a sound he knows isn’t laughter, because her eyes show no light. “That’s always the defense, isn’t it? But it’ll be better, there. You’ll be yourself.”

He wonders who he’s been so far.

The shuttle is a sleek, black cylinder that hums as they approach it. He clings to her side, twining his fingers in her black hair and hiding his face in her sleeve.
They climb the ramp together, and explore the emptiness inside.

“It’s okay,” she tells him. “It’s automated. We’ll put you to sleep, and it’ll drive you home.”

He has never been alone.

“Oh, Mark.” She untangles her hair from his fingers and takes both his hands. “It’s part of the treaty. No more contact.”

She leads him to a bed that yields like putty under the pressure of his touch, and straps him in.
“When you wake up,” she says, “You’ll be home.”
Above the bed is a poster covered in dense, looping swirls. If it’s art, it isn’t beautiful. If it’s language, he can’t read it. Either way, it feels like an accusation. He closes his eyes against it and sleeps.

When he wakes, there is no one. It takes him a long time, just to get out of the bed. He has to unbuckle the straps himself and his fingers are clumsy and weak. His nails show dark circles below the rainbow polish. He finds a strand of black hair, and wraps it around his wrist. He waits for instructions. The door to the shuttle stays closed.
Maybe they got rid of him on purpose. Maybe they don’t really want him back.
Maybe they eat their own kind.

He combs his fur as best he can, leaving piles of shed on the steel floor. He buttons his shirt, the nice one he wears when visitors come to look at him. He met a president, once.
The door panel flashes. He ignores it. Time passes. No one comes. There are no toys, no treadmills, no needles. No animal crackers, either.

The hunger forces him to act.

He presses his hand against the panel, and the door opens with a quiet whir. A ramp extends to the ground.

This, he tells himself, is home.

Home is a wide expanse of green glass with low black buildings in the distance and air smells like grapefruit juice. It is five beings, who are not his mirror-reverse selves. Their fur comes in silver, in brown, in the bright pink of his favorite keeper’s flower dresses. They speak, but the words are static, meaningless. Their teeth, like his, are very sharp.

He cringes back into the ship and presses the door panel. The door stays open.

“Child,” says the silver one, in a throaty, elongated version of his keepers’ speech. “Be not to fear, child. Come.”

Obedience is the first lesson he was ever taught. He shuffles down the ramp, his head low.
“They hurt you?” it asks.

He doesn’t know the answer. He shakes his head.

“You fear,” it says. “Wait. Fear goes.”

“Is this home?” he asks.

“Home is time,” it says. “Home comes.”

Fear goes. Home comes. He wonders if it’s true. He’s used to being lied to.

“Who are you?” It isn’t quite the question he wants to ask. He knows a little about families. Enough to want one.

It pauses. When it speaks again, the words are clearer, more rehearsed. “I am the one who waited.”

“I don’t belong here,” he says.

It takes his hand. “That too, comes.”

Kelly Sandoval lives with her fiance in beautiful Seattle, Washington. In 2013, she attended the Clarion West Writer Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Esopus Magazine and Daily Science Fiction. You can find her on twitter as @kellymsandoval.

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Each month I make a sometimes thin attempt at finding some common link between the stories we publish.  Maybe they’re all fantasies.  Maybe they’re all about people coping with death.  Maybe they’re all about winning a lottery–money or Shirley Jackson-esque.  Sometimes it’s easy.  Sometimes it’s a bit of a stretch.

Here I sit with two stories on my desk for our June issue:

“Home Isn’t,” by Kelly Sandoval–a touching sci-fi story that I found strikingly relevant to our society run amok with cultural sensitivity.  What happens when cultural sensitivity loses sight of being sensitive to the individual?

And “Copy Machine,” by Shane Halbach.  Science fiction?  No.  Heartbreaking?  No.  Some might actually find it a little goofy, even sappy.  But with my 25th wedding anniversary approaching, I found this story to be an endearing exploration of romantic love, of the joy and giddiness and anxiety that comes with complete commitment to another person.

So, my challenge to you, as the reader, is to come up with a single connecting element between these two stories.  Be creative, think hard, post your ideas in the comments below.  I look forward to reading them.

Suzanne