Wanting Sid was a second skeleton, a sharp hard permanent-feeling foreign presence in my body. Stupid, stupid to have fallen in love with yet another straight boy, especially one I worked with, and therefore couldn’t play my only straight-boy-conquest card, which was to get us both super drunk and make a pass and ignore the person forever if it failed. We drove the six hours to Albany and I felt it growing inside me, the need making my throat hurt and my limbs heavy, our windows rolled up as we passed through patches of wet weather, the smell of him filling up the cab of the truck as the day got hotter.
And at the end of it all was Albany, which meant no relief, just the god-awful sunset lonely feel of a big sprawling nothing city, smelling like river muck and tar and cherry-flavored cigarette smoke. We came to a stop in the shadow of those tall fancy empty buildings that fill up state capitals, where municipal employees once worked, before all their tasks got sourced to bots and freelancers. They made me shiver, the shadows they cast and the wind that whistled through them after being in that hot man-stinking truck for so long.
“You’re welcome,” he said, when he put the big truck in park. “I timed this expertly. Got us in late enough that we can’t start working but early enough that we get some time to relax.”
Sid’s not a handsome guy. His mouth has a weird shape to it, and he wears clothes that are way too big, and without a beard his face looks fat. But he does have the sense to let the beard grow out, mostly. And something about his deep voice and ancient baseball cap and sad easy laugh made me lose my fucking mind. He’s only five years older than me, but somewhere in those five years he got a surveillance engineering degree, one of the first classes to graduate with it, and that’s why he was my supervisor, driving us all over upstate New York to install phone cloners on every corner. Our truck held nine hundred of them.
“You hungry?” he asked. “I could go for a burger.”
“No, I need to stretch my legs. Gonna go for a walk.”
“Cool,” he said. “Call me if you want to meet up after.”
“Sure,” I said.
Men watched us from sagging plastic seats at the edge of the parking lot. Sour-faced in that way only the unemployed or the forcibly freelanced were.
“We should turn in around ten,” he said.
“Sure.”
At night we sleep in the truck. Company rules; the privatized police forces didn’t want any unnecessary hotel expenses. The back of the cab had a space for sleeping. Long after midnight I’d wake up to find that he’d scooched his sleeping bag closer to mine and had spooned in behind me. It’d be the same way when the nights were hot and we both slept above the sleeping bags, but that was much worse because then I could feel his hard-on pressing against my backside and he’d whimper sweetly in his sleep and I would know for certain that the universe was a cruel and vicious fucking thing, mocking me with a nightmare pastiche of what I wanted most.
So of course I had to stretch my legs. Of course I had to get as far from Sid as possible. Of course I had to find a safe sexual outlet, even if there was really no such thing.
But as soon as I walked away from him, I felt the fear. Sid kept me safe. His manliness was obvious to absolutely everyone. He oozed heterosexuality, spread it like a protective bubble around the both of us. On my own, walking the streets of a strange city, following the slope that would take me to the riverside, I felt a hundred pairs of eyes on me. A hundred fiendish plans forming.
I’d checked the stats before we came to town. I always did. Albany had had eighteen homophobic hate killings in the previous calendar year. Better than Buffalo, but, then again, Buffalo had a 57 percent unemployment rate.
Butch up, I told myself, making my spine straighten and my shoulders roll back, aping Sid’s effortless swagger, the one that implied, I am weighed down by the terrific amount of testosterone contained in my testicles.
My phone stutter-sighed. Visual-overlay alerts. They were everywhere, built by braver souls than me, elaborate digital landscapes that brought forward buried history or highlighted secret spaces. I knew all about them. Maps of the homes of militia leaders and queer cruising grounds and memorials for martyrs we were forbidden to mourn or even mention. How to find everything I wanted from this world—but I was too afraid to use the overlays. Most people who accessed them did a factory reboot immediately, but some municipal networks were programmed to respond to reboots by doing a quick clone cap and sending it to the grid.
Signs said: CLEAN ALBANY. A statement and a command. Signs like that were in every city we went to. CLEAN BINGHAMTON. CLEAN CANAJOHARIE.
I walked beneath the southbound exit ramp of I-787. Splotches of paint where tag drones had covered up graffiti. I could still smell the turpentine stink of that toxic background-matching paint. Most were unrecognizable, but one looked like the outline of some massive vertical corpse. They’d left other glyphs, equally illegal but politically more palatable to the good people of Albany: the black cross superimposed over a red R, emblem of the Revival. Ominous ’88s. Tall triangles with two circles for eyes at the bottom. Visual overlays for my enemies.
Where was I going? How did I know where to find it, when I refused to look at the map? Some primal instinct; the gay boy’s internal dowsing rod. My nose never failed to point me in the direction of the spot where men went for discreet dangerous intimate encounters.
The day got darker the closer I came to the river. The smell of muck grew stronger. A huge chunk of downtown Albany was below the new waterline, which meant that at high tide the streets were semi-submerged and mostly deserted. I climbed up onto the median strip and kept on going. Eyes were on me, even if I couldn’t see them. Human eyes, and camera eyes. And camera eyes with human eyes watching through them, waiting for someone this stupid.
Above me, a gorgeously fat woman pushed a shopping cart along the abandoned portion of 787. She stopped to stare. Was I that obvious, that doomed?
Stupid. Stupid to have come here. To be unable to stop.
There were apps for this. I could have gone to the McDonald’s and bought a cup of coffee and trolled for random hookups in safer places. Except that I of all people knew not to fuck with the phone cloners, or any of the other weird invasive ubiquitous tech that could access your phone effortlessly thanks to the state-mandated backdoor Bluetooth channel. I knew, because I got paid minimum wage to help install that tech. The odds were on your side, in the short term—they wouldn’t catch you right away—but in the long term the house always won.
And then I was at the river’s edge, between tall cement pillars holding up the highway. And it was almost all the way dark. The sun was gone from the sky, but the river surface still reflected light. Cigarette smoke hung in the close wet air. Someone whistled tunelessly. My heart pistoned against its new double rib cage.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. This is how you get yourself killed.
“Hey,” a gruff voice said, from the shadows at my feet. A shadow in the shape of a man. Then it sucked air into a cigarette, whose invigorated glow lit up a striking bearded face, and my knees weakened. I squatted and leapt down from the median strip into the ankle-deep water.
The man chuckled at my wetness. I could smell him now: musky and mammalian beneath the cigarette smoke. Something off too, like the cool mildew air from a basement.
“Hey,” I said, when he didn’t say anything.
“Hey,” he said. He sounded smug, and that sounded sexy.
“I’m Caul,” I said, because I’d always been bad at this.
“Tom,” he said. “Tom Minniq.”
And something about that set me at ease—his last name, so out of place in the perfunctory preflight social checklist of the anonymous fuck. I stepped closer. I put my hand on his hip.
“You a cocksucker?” he asked, raising one bushy eyebrow, and alarm bells went off, dimly and at a great distance, Oh no, you made a mistake, you misread him, now he’s going to kill you….
“I’d suck yours,” I said, feeling like my heart was about to burst through both rib cages.
“Be my guest,” he said, but didn’t budge. Icy, impassive, demanding, but how did he know that that’s exactly what I wanted? What weird low-frequency psychic bond unites gay men as the act of coupling unfolds? I dropped to my knees, feeling filthy water soak me even further, thinking: A decade ago this would all have been dry, and we’d have been able to meet in hotel rooms and apartments without fear of snitch software reporting our every move to the morality militias.
And then I wasn’t thinking anything. I was in the act, my body abandoned, agency abdicated, pushed and pulled by the massive man muttering sweet obscenities above me, an empty vessel for him to fill, which was my most fervent hope, my most dangerous desire.
“Drop your pants,” he hissed. “Cum if you want to.” And I did, not caring how wet my clothes got. By this point he had me pinned against the pillar. Rough cement scratched at my back. I stared up at him in awe and gratitude. And fear. His clenched face shone with sweat, and something else: part angel, and part monster.
Five strokes and I could feel orgasm approaching already. The world dimmed. That’s how good the sex is, I told myself in the moment—and that’s how long it had been since the last time I’d gotten any. Since the last time I’d jerked off, even, because when we were out on the road I had precious little alone time.
“Take it,” he howled, his voice barely halfway human, buried to the hilt in me, pubic hair tickling my nose, and as he came, so did I, my eyes shutting tight as black stars bloomed all around me, thinking, This is the most intense orgasm I ever—
I opened my eyes to the same blue-black dark, but something was off. The shadows that rose around me were different. Twisted and organic, instead of rectilinear. A carrion smell in the air, and something noxious burning. No sign of Tom.
“Hello?” I hollered, dizzy, disoriented. Laughter began, in the distance, a chilling hyena-sound that I quickly realized was actually something midway between laughter and screaming.
Rational thought had no place here. I did not wonder what had happened. Where I was. Was I dreaming. I shivered in the cold wet. I heard myself whimper.
Splashing, from behind me. I turned to see something coming nearer, on all fours, sloshing through the water. Impossible to see clearly—giving only a general sense of hair (fur?) and muscle (and claws?) and feral hunger.
I screamed. I screamed as hard as I could, trying to wake myself up from the nightmare I already knew was not in fact a nightmare.
And then I was back in the stinking dark beneath I-787. Sitting in the standing water, against the pillar. Pants down; soaking wet. Sperm floating in the water around me. Tom Minniq nowhere to be found.
I’d heard of people who passed out after orgasm. Maybe mine was so intense, I passed out—and dreamed, briefly? That must have been it, I told myself, standing, pulling up my pants, looking around to see who might have seen me. But the tide had risen, and that wide stretch of Albany was abandoned.
Something tingled in me, the whole long walk back to the truck. Something exhilarating. Something feral.
Sid was playing video games. Happy, drunk.
“What the hell?” he said, laughing, holding his nose.
“Fell in some nasty water,” I said. My jaw ached exquisitely. “Town’s a shithole.”
“Go to the Dunkin’ Donuts,” he said. “I already talked to the lady who works there; she said we could use their bathroom. Wash up, then burn those clothes.”
“Yeah,” I said, standing there, still shivering from the strangeness of it all, the excellence of my orgasm, the terror still lodged in my chest from whatever the hell had happened back there with Tom. It wasn’t fading, the way nightmares did. And on the walk to Dunkin’ Donuts I still caught snatches of stench on the wind: the distant smell of something rancid on fire.
“Oh no,” Sid whispered an hour later, and handed me his phone.
“No,” I said, and shut my eyes. And breathed.
Prince had just been added to the Filter, the official government list of artists who could not be listened to. They’d spent six months going back and forth about Prince. A hundred times we’d heard the arguments, in the pods and on the feeds. All along I’d known what the end decision would be. His music was all sex, all rebellion. Until you couldn’t tell the difference.
“Fuuuuck,” Sid said, and called up “Little Red Corvette,” and pressed PLAY. “We’ve got till midnight to listen to it legally.”
Prince was pretty much the only music Sid and I adored equally. Prince and Sade, but she’d been Filtered for years, along with every other female singer.
Prince sang about bodies that ought to be in jail, pockets packed with condoms.
I cried. Sid cried too. We didn’t let each other see, but we knew.
Saturday didn’t mean no work, but it did mean a shorter day. Sid prepped the mapping software, planned out the first stage of the deployment. I armed the scanners. Six hours later my fingers and knees and neck were sore, and my eyes hurt from the dim light in the back of the truck. At least we’d had Sid’s music to keep us alert: loud fast stripped-down punk, legal only because it was so old, blasting through the truck’s speakers.
And then the sun was setting and I felt the same old Saturday-night loneliness, like I was all by myself on a faraway planet, or the only living man in a world full of hostile ghosts, and loneliness bled into horniness, the kind so sharp and bleak you’d risk anything to make it go away.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said, and he looked sad, because he’d been in the middle of talking about the rumors coming down from Canada about animal-rights activists blowing up the homes of agri-executives, and I could tell that kind of stuff made him super happy but it just made me sick, like the scanners that surrounded us would send our words to the local cops or militia outposts and they’d show up with pitchforks and torches. Or, more likely, just guns and nooses.
Stupid Sid. He still believed we would be saved. Still thought righteous outsiders or local revolutionaries would fill the streets, storm the halls of power. Was still waiting for the truth to set us free, the manifest injustice of it all to cause the Revived Republic to crumble under the weight of its own hypocrisy. Still wanted to Talk Politics with people.
I was stupid, but I was smart enough to see that this would never happen. That the best we could hope for was to keep our heads down and find escape wherever we could. Risky sex; drunkenness. He had his way out and I had mine.
I stole his cigarettes. When I put one between my lips, I knew it was as close as I’d come to him.
I smoked them all, in the night gloom beneath the highway, along the river, while I hunted. For Tom. But three hours went by like that, with no sign of another human besides the rattle of an overburdened shopping cart on the off-ramp above my head, and the sound of a woman singing…and, eventually, the distorted echoing laughter of a group of young men, which was my signal that it was finally time to go.
I was halfway back to the truck when I heard a sweet gruff voice say, “Hey,” like the smell of sex made into sound.
“Hey,” I said, and stopped beside the phone booth where Tom Minniq waited. But he didn’t say anything else.
“What the hell happened last night?” I asked.
He shrugged. Grabbed his crotch with one massive hand. “You hungry?”
“Something happened to me,” I said. “I…I don’t know, passed out. Did you…do something? Drug me?”
Tom laughed, an incongruous sound that reminded me more of the gibbering hyena-noise I’d heard in that other place than the handsome masculine brute who stood before me.
“I didn’t drug you, Fenn,” he said, and while the details of our first encounter were blurry, I knew for a fact that I had told him my real name, not the secret nickname my first secret boyfriend had called me by.
“What happened?” I asked again.
He grabbed me by the arm, pulled me into the booth. Our faces were inches apart. His musk made my head spin. “You went somewhere,” he whispered.
“Where?”
“Do you want to go again?”
“No,” I said.
One eyebrow rose.
“Yes,” I said.
He pushed me to my knees.
“I think that it’s—” I said, and then found myself physically incapable of forming any further words.
This wasn’t like the night before, hidden away from the world beneath a shattered highway. We were on the street, out in the open. Looking up, past his perfect snarl, I saw dents and holes in the side of the phone booth that could only have come from bullets. Militia activity, certainly. I should have been smarter. I shouldn’t be doing this. But it was Saturday night, and what monstrous crimes could not be explained away with that rationale? Who could fail to understand the way Saturday twilight made the dumbest ideas seem sound, delicious? Old songs flashed through my mind, Prince’s voice echoing, as Tom pummeled me toward orgasm—
—and continued echoing into…wherever that was.
Dripping red darkness. Wind in pine trees over my head. Not-laughter again, this sound closer to sobbing. Phone-booth walls were trees now. Things scuttled up the sides of them. Lights throbbed in the sky above, bigger than stars but more numerous than moons.
I shut my eyes, breathed five breaths. Opened them again. Still not Albany. Still not anywhere. But the air was alive with something like electricity, and I could feel it leaching into my arms.
A shape stood in front of me. Vaguely humanoid darkness. Bipedal, but barely. Feral. It asked me:
“Are you afraid?”
I nodded. A crack opened up in what must have been its face: a grin, jagged and wet.
“Fear is sweet,” it gurgled.
Something about its hunger startled me. Woke me up. What was I, if not hungry? I’d been afraid of hunger for so long. Hunger makes something dangerous, maybe, but it also makes it weak. I was hungry, but that wasn’t all I was.
I watched my right arm rise, almost on its own. Shivering with ecstasy. I pushed my hand into the shadow-shape, and it scattered in a windblown shriek.
Albany again. I was alone. Evidence of orgasm all around me. The hand I had pushed into that thing dripped with thick yellowy liquid, like a sick man’s phlegm.
But the metal sides of the phone booth were smooth and unblemished where the bullet holes had been. The real-world air smelled less rancid than it had before. And my arms still throbbed, from all the things they could accomplish.
Sid was out when I got home. He came back drunk, stinking of lonely hours in a bar. Throat raspy from heated idle political debate. He’d found a dive across the street from a shut-down union hall, still popular with the men and women who’d been members back before it was illegal. Sid never failed to find spots like that, and at most of them there’d be a couple of similarly cynical, similarly naïve young women, but so far Albany was proving unproductive. His dreams were loud and lonely, and three times I woke up with a gasp because he was holding me too tightly.
Monday, we moved through the city installing scanners. Sid talked. Sports, politics, punk rock. Women. I liked it when he talked. I felt like I was fulfilling an important function for him. Providing some kind of validation. Something he needed; something he’d be grateful for. He never expected me to say much back. The day was hot and we were in the sun for most of it. I didn’t mind. It was better when the work was hard. Kept my mind clear. Sometimes, from up high on the posts that used to hold streetlights, where we had to screw the phone cloners so no one could mess with them, I’d see a white militia van prowling past and be intensely grateful for the bright-orange vests that identified us as Important, Hardworking, Beyond Reproach.
No sign of Tom again that night. I trolled the darkness for an hour, walking between the pillars that held up the dead highway. The shopping-cart woman watched me with a smile on her face. Drones buzzed by. Automated; unlikely to even be recording. Dozens of them would be making randomized sweeps of the city at any given moment.
Finally, I found a man. Fiftysomething, haggard, his brilliantly blue eyes somehow horrifying, like a mocking vestige of the beautiful young thing he had been so very long ago. All it took was a split second’s eye contact for him to be on his knees and scrabbling at my belt buckle. Topping does precious little for me—I’m much happier sucking than being sucked—but I was exhausted and I felt sorry for the broken old thing before me. I even called him a few filthy names for good measure. He’d groan greedily, gratefully, every time I did.
And then I was cumming.
And then I was: there.
Something massive moved through the night above me. A cloud, I thought, but it was moving against a heavy wind—and, while I watched, it unfurled, unfolded, reached out long arms like tentacles, vanished into the sky with a spray of black cloud. Lights swung in the air like massive lanterns hanging from nothing.
When I pointed to one, it grew. When I pushed my hand in its direction, it rocketed away.
I could do things here.
In the distance, I heard the man I’d been fucking mere seconds ago. Moaning in terror. Wherever we were, however we’d gotten there, we’d ended up physically far apart.
A rusty screech from the gloom behind me. I turned to see the massive metal skeleton of something like airplane wreckage angled crazily over me. Perched on a wing or arm was the same thing that had confronted me the last time. I made myself look now, in the shifting shadows from a swinging light. A man’s body—and a beautiful one—but the arms were too long, the legs curved and angled strangely, the head oversized and lupine, like a man wearing the head of a wolf atop his own.
“Are you afraid?” it gurgled, and then answered its own question. “You’re afraid,” it said, and it was right, I was afraid, but I was not as afraid as I had been. The tingling in my arms from the previous visits was throbbing through my whole body now.
I touched my hand to the scaffolding of metal wreckage. It throbbed too, in perfect rhythm with my own.
The things of this world are mine to command, I thought, and imagined a new shape for this debris.
Soundlessly, swiftly, like ink dripped into a glass of water, the wreckage unfurled into the shape in my mind. Its perch gone, the squatting wolf-thing fell into the ankle-deep water with a splash.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“We have always been here,” it said, sinking into a crouch. Shrinking, almost. My lack of terror disappointed it. Diminished it. “You have been trying your hardest not to come here.”
“What is this place?”
It grinned. There were no eyes in its wolf head.
And then I was back.
“What the fuck, dude,” said the man at my feet, panting. “What the hell just happened?”
“You went somewhere,” I half-asked.
He nodded. “What did you do to me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Somebody did it to me.”
“Will I— Will this—”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how any of this works. All I know is…you shouldn’t be afraid.”
He laughed, a yipping sound that was mostly a scream. “How the fuck am I not supposed to be afraid when you sent me to fucking hell?”
“It’s not hell,” I said, pulling up my pants. “It’s something else. The flip side of where we are now. A place where what we do matters.”
“What we do here matters,” he said. And he was right, but he was getting hysterical and there was nothing further I could tell him, so I buckled my belt and hurried off. Something was different. The air had changed. It took me a while to realize what it was.
Traffic. The horns and brakes and engines of late rush-hour traffic. I-787 was alive above me. It had never not been.
Absurd as it was, I couldn’t help but think: I did that.
“I fucked it up,” Sid said when I got back to the truck. “I made a pass at Annie and I got shot down.”
“Bummer,” I said, slouching down to join him on the floor. “Is it over?”
“She says it’s not, but I’m pretty sure it is.”
He stunk. Like cherry hand soap and body odor. Like disappointment; like rage.
“Tell me about her,” I said, leaning back. He leaned back as well. His shoulder slid into place beside mine.
“She’s just really smart and really well connected. Knows all kinds of people who are working on resistance stuff. And I had to go fuck it up with her. Sex is the fucking worst.”
“I know, right?”
When I said it, I could see that I no longer believed it. I thought about the place I went to, the place Tom took me. The place I took that random stranger to.
“She says I’m a tool of the state.”
“Well, you kind of are, though.”
I wanted to tell Sid that I’d spent my whole life thinking sex was an escape, or something shameful and sordid, an exemplification of all that was awful in me, but now I saw that this wasn’t the case.
My arms tingled with the same feral tingle as on the other side. Words came out of my mouth easily, as effortlessly as I had reshaped the reality of that metal wreckage.
“You should tell her that a tool of the state can be used against the state,” I said.
Sid turned to look at me, and then took a long sip of beer. And then nodded.
I wanted to tell him that desire was not a distraction. Not something separate from the way we want freedom. I wanted to tell him that I had been to a place where anything was possible, and that the only thing more frightening than powerlessness was power.
Instead, I made a move. Sid was super drunk and I was not much more sober, and the whole thing proceeded along predictable lines, the same for every straight boy who finds, to his great disappointment, that not even society’s strictest rules are stronger than his own desire for a blowjob—all What are you doing, bro? and then Come on, man, nah and then Fucking do it.
When we got back from the other side, he pretended he was asleep. And then he was asleep. Probably in the morning would assume whatever horrors he had witnessed were all a dream.
We lay together. Through cheap speakers, a long-dead man lamented his inability to resist the allure of dangerous sex. His high voice excused himself, blamed everything on it being Saturday night.
The next day was our last in Albany. We hung cloners along the final central corridor. The day was hot. He didn’t hate me. I watched how he worked, how he seemed to take longer placing every piece on its post, inspecting the machinery more closely than he had before. He even let me hang a couple, which usually was a privilege he kept for himself.
From atop the lampposts I could see into Albany’s cramped debris-strewn backyards, all the people smoking cigarettes or reading books or swinging on swing sets and imagining themselves invisible, and I thought about how much difference it made, how much more you could see when you’re standing in a different place.
“Well, shit!” Sid said, driving from one block to the next. He held up his phone, which said ANNIE.
I listened to his end of the conversation. “Hey!” “Yes!” “Is that cool?” “Awesome!” “I will.”
“We should call it quits for the day,” he said. “I don’t like the looks of that sky.”
The noon sky over Albany was brilliant uninterrupted blue. I said, “Yeah, definitely looks like storms coming.”
I was happy for him. I hoped he’d get lucky.
I wasn’t in love with him. I had thought I was, but that often happened with prolonged intense unrequited lust. I wondered what had snapped me out of it—blowing him, or the weirder bigger epiphany that was percolating, about the place of sex in a broader strategy of political resistance.
Where had these words come from? They were Sid Words. Was it osmosis, so many hours sitting next to him while he used college expository-writing terms? I rarely understood him when he talked like that, but maybe eventually I’d started to make sense of it all. Or maybe I had contracted something from him. Just like he, presumably, contracted something from me.
“Can’t work in the rain,” he said. “I’ll file a weather interruption.”
This was new. Sid talked tough, but he never broke the rules.
When he was gone, I debated going back to the underpass. Seeing what I could see. Who else I could fuck; what else I could change.
Instead, I went back to our narrow boy-stinking room and masturbated, with my face buried in a pair of Sid’s socks. Nothing happened when I came. No explosions; no transdimensional leaps; no monsters. Whatever it was, it didn’t work when you were alone.
Sid banged on the side of the truck, startling me out of a nap. A dream of dirty cities, happy people. Fallen statues.
I joined him in the cab. Militiamen tramped past the truck. Their all-white outfits turned their pale skin several shades of pink. Sid smelled like smoke and strawberries.
“What happened?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything, but after a couple seconds he couldn’t keep his face from breaking into a grin.
“Well, all right!” I said, clapping him on the back.
He started up the truck. “Let’s get the hell out of this shitty town.”
“But we still have eighty cloners to install,” I said. “What with the rain delay today…”
“Fuck it,” he said.
“Whoa,” I said.
We drove. Exiting the city, we took 787. I wondered if Sid remembered that it had been shut down, before. Or if only I could remember the old reality.
“Did anything weird happen? When you two…”
“Weird? No,” he said, but he said it too fast, and he looked at me for a long time.
“So you won’t see her again,” I said. “Annie.”
“We’ll be in touch.” He turned up the radio, slowly and meaningfully. “Her boyfriend is a coding expert. I gave them one of the cloners. Reported it irreparably damaged and recycled.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
We rumbled on toward Schenectady. I read through the long line of cities ahead of us: Amsterdam, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, a half dozen more before we arrived at Niagara Falls. Planting the seeds of our own oppression, helplessly helping our enemies observe and entrap us, but spreading other seeds as well.
SAM J. MILLER is a writer and a community organizer. His debut novel, The Art of Starving, was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017 and was the winner of the Andre Norton Award. His latest novel, Blackfish City, was an Entertainment Weekly “Must Read” and was called “an action-packed science fiction thriller” and “surprisingly heartwarming” by The Washington Post. His stories have appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, Nightmare, Uncanny, and Clarkesworld and in more than a dozen Year’s Best anthologies. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City and at samjmiller.com.