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Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEEDs current issue.
This months selection is A Pedra by Endria Isa Richardson.
Illustration: Tithi Luadthong (aka “Grandfailure”) (Shutterstock)
you might read the story below or listen to the podcast.
-Edgardo Rodriguez Julia
I didnt run.
If the boy had not called to you, you would have run.
I would not have run.
mae,
There are few moments that I remember with clarity.
From those early days, I recall mostly a vast, pervading numbness.
At night, I would curl between them.
I would block out what I knew would be.
I would see Salts ruddy cheeks and puffy brown hair.
His shoulders, just beginning to broaden with muscle.
His pale forearms already ropey from physical training.
Hogs deep brown eyes and chapped, gentle lips.
The soft tufts of his hair brushing against my cheek as he moved about inside a dream.
You will never meet either of them.
You will never meet our child.
If I still couldnt sleep, I would look for you.
Of course I never found you.
If you were in my future, I would have already known.
Once, I told Salt and Hog that I had known a mother.
What I thought was a family.
They were thrown away by their parents, addicts like you, as infants.
At school, we were not supposed to say, thrown away.
We were supposed to say, offered to the future.
But I am not at school any longer.
So, they were thrown away by their parents, eaten by Kismet to mine the one true future.
But ah, puberty, eh?
She came, and broke us.
You could not handle me anymore.
I still remember the certainty of your voice when you said, I will do it myself.
You took aunties blade.
You marched me out of the only home I had ever known.
You raised your hand to me, who had never known violence.
You said, Run, Lydia, meu coracao, run.
In the intervening years, however, both Insight and XO seemed to vanish.
This is the first appearance XO has made since then.
During this interview, as in our last, XO does not share his image or voice.
His avatar is a slightly built Southeast Asian man clothed in a slim-cut dark blue velour tracksuit.
Sunglasses veil his eyes.
I am not a terrorist, he begins.
He laughs, and its jarring.
I am interested in terror as a mind-, and therefore time- expanding substance.
I ask him to clarify what he means.
What can heightened emotions, like terror, teach us about the pliability of time?
Unlocking all futures, not only the ones that are palatable to us, requires absolute freedom.
My mother abandoned me when I was very young.
Deep down, I had feared that separation my whole short life.
Once it happened, I realized I no longer needed to fear anything.
I could be free.
I could suddenly imagine many possible futures for myself.
My future no longer relied on something I could not control, another persons presence or absence.
I want that freedom for everybody.
This is how my story begins, if you might call it a beginning.
With our plan to escape.
Many of us at school never made it past our first year.
If we made it far enough, we were placed.
We tried, for some more years, not to kill ourselves or anyone else.
Otherwise, we tried not to focus at all.
Floated somewhere between present and future.
Drank until we had to take a break from drinking.
Drugged ourselves into the stratosphere.
Me and Hog had a serious fling.
Then me and Salt.
Then me, Salt, and Hog.
As good a way to pass the time as any.
Then Hog got called in for early placement, and came back quiet.
After that, it was mostly me and Salt.
That was about when we decided to do something we had not seen ourselves do.
We decided to cheat the future.
It cheated us instead.
The day Ecco came for me, I was hurrying through the main corridor back to Salts room.
Someone called out to me from inside the Heads office.
The man standing in Heads office was short.
Only a few inches taller than me.
And brown-skinned and wide.
Good and stocky, a nice soft fatness wrapped around a solid frame.
At the time, I probably thought he was attractive.
There werent many of us blacks at the school.
Hog was half of another.
(Salt was Jewish.
They were even more of a pariah).
At that point, I still believed that I knew everything.
Will that sound arrogant to you?
I didnt know facts and figures or theoretical physics.
But I believed I knew everything of consequence that would ever happen to me.
(And to Hog.)
(And to Salt.)
And see the bloody gems inside.)
We had not seen our plan.
We hadnt seen it fail, we hadnt seen it work.
We were desperate enough to try, anyway.
I had not seen this man, either.
Not in time, and not in life.
I should have known, then.
I should have known to run, to grab Salt and Hog and run.
But I was curious.
After a while, I asked, Who are you?
Ecco, he said, Its nice to finally meet you, Lydia.
Many things happened, more or less in sequence immediately after that.
There was the first explosion, and that also surprised me.
You have to understand, surprise was not an experience I knew well until that point.
Mostly, I already knew.
Mostly, I had already seen.
The bombs, improvised molotov cocktails, werent supposed to be lit for several more hours.
I was supposed to light one, Salt and Hog would light two others.
A good amount of chaos, running and screaming in the halls, ensued.
Then, a blow to my head and darkness.
I shouted (several times) from the pain in my head.
I explored the room I had found myself in.
It was blank, unrevealing, an infuriating beige-nothing.
There was no bed, no furniture.
There was no discernible door.
The walls were soft, pliant.
I seemed to be in some kind of sophisticated cage.
It blocked me from seeing out of the present moment.
I could not think, could not question.
I could not rationalize.
I curled up on the floor, and slept.
When I next woke up, Ecco was standing above me.
He handed me pills-pain, and what I assumed was kite.
I asked him many questions.
It was 13 August 2133, so three days had passed since the explosions at school.
I was at a research lab called Insight.
And, he said, I had been brought there to liberate the future.
This began the next phase of my life.
Ecco was my abductor, my captor, and later, my torturer.
He was also the only person I saw, spoke to.
I did, in those early days, feel something like sorrow for him.
What if there was a way to unlock time itself?
What if we could move in time, not only see it stretched out, frozen, before us?
He called it running.
You will run time, Lydia, he told me.
Once you lose your fear.
Challenges grew in later years.
Seers, trained to locate resources in the future, were highly valuable to Kismet.
It is estimated that nearly half of all early runners were lost on their travels.
I remember the first time Ecco took the drug kite from me.
The third week I was at Insight, Ecco undosed me.
I remember bracing for the rock of nausea.
Hog, prismed, leered at me from a thousand eyes.
Ecco stood once more across the room.
Ecco, he said.
Its nice to finally meet you, Lydia.
What do you want?
What do you want from me anyway?
I came, shuddering against Salt, and bit his shoulder.
Lydia, someone cried.
I dropped from a tree in the dark, felt my arm crack.
I screamed in the room.
I leaned over a toilet and vomited; flecks of bile and water hitting my cheeks.
I fingered a smooth, black knife.
I saw a brown face, like mine, but older.
Pedra, I said.
Yes, yes, said Ecco, coaxing, caressing my cheek.
I found a brown hand in mine; clasped it.
I let it pull me into darkness studded with bright crystal lozenges.
Oblong mirrors, blinking on/off/on as the light in my mind caught their strange fractals.
Hogs body fell to the mats.
Lozenges winked as I cast my mind about, seeking elsewhere.
Inside of time, I saw futures.
Not lozenges, not mirrors-oh god, mamae.
How could I have thought they were mirrors.
I was pulled forward, the nails of that hand digging in my flesh.
I heard the boys voice behind me.
I threw myself backwards, toward him.
Tell me about your mother.
The whore who sold me to Kismet?
Papagaio come milho, periquito leva fama.
I dont know what that means.
I thought all you young people spoke Portugues.
It means you are ungrateful to your mother.
Ao menino e ao borracho, poe-lhes Deus a mao por baixo.
God puts his hand under the boy and the young pigeon.
Easy for you to say, who will never fly.
If I felt Gods hand beneath me, I would spit on it.
Pimenta nos olhos dos outros e refresco.
Pepper in the eye is a pleasure to you, eh?
Eh, nao pimenta, mas pedra.
Stone in the eye is a pleasure to me.
Have you never tried to see her, Lydia?
To understand why she abandoned you?
But you talk to her, when you are gone in your visions.
With his talk of running.
I had been inside of some terrible material.
I had felt the dark stuff move around me.
Its currents were strong.
I could feel some alive presence just beyond my skin tugging where it wanted me to go.
I think Ecco comes from that place.
Or he came from that place.
Something about him feels the way it felt.
I tell him to run his futures by himself.
He says I just need to discover the key to freedom.
What will make me unafraid to enter the infinite future.
Sometimes I think he is just lonely.
Are you ready to hit it one more time today?
See if you could.
See if you do.
I know how I end.
I know how I continue.
You didnt even know me.
I never named him.
I call him meu caracao, my little boy, meu amor.
I have been able to survive here because of him.
Its been five months since I last saw him.
The first five months that I have been completely alone, in my life.
I was already pregnant when Ecco took me from school.
A child of Salt, or a child of Hog?
I like to think, a child of both.
I birthed him here, at Insight.
Until August, they let him stay with me.
We lived a strange, captive life, but we lived it together.
Then Ecco took him.
He said it was my own fault.
Ecco gives me more kite now, triple what I used to take.
I close my eyes and fly.
But now I know.
They are not mirrors, they are not diamonds.
That is the difference between seeing and running.
Sometimes, I let myself wonder whether Salt or Hog ever made it to you.
That was our whole, foolish plan.
I dont think you will ever receive these little notes.
ecco tells me that the secret to running is losing your mother.
ecco tells me that if I want to find the boy, ill have to run him down myself.
i tell him that i have been trying.
i am the only one here.
i am the only one here.
I hadnt been without kite in years.
I could barely stand.
And what did you think, that first time?
That you were my mother.
(Soft laughter.)
Numerous studies have investigated the subject since the embargo against eye-removal was lifted in 2135.
All children treated from an early age with dimethylcathinone should theoretically be capable of movement and not only sight.
Peres has been missing since the attack on the Kismet Headquarters.
The younger Mr. Salz was escorted out of the courtroom by the bailiff.
Mr. Hogkins appeared to be transferred to another authority, representatives of whom waited outside of the courtroom.
He was transported to an unknown location in an unmarked car.
Do you know what I have for you?
(forty-five-second interval.)
It is the head of your Hog.
(screaming)
i am the only one here.
She is not the only one here.
Audio Recording: Lydia and Ecco (undated)
Who do you talk to at night?
I talk to Lydia.
She wants to run, but she is still afraid.
(She still has hope, even after holding Hogs head in her hands).
I whisper to Lydia in the dark.
I know our mothers tongue.
(I have waded through the dry fields, rippled by dry wings that beat over sun-chapped skulls.
I have waded through the salted sea currents.
I have been worn away and dismantled.
And still, I am).
You cannot change the past, meu coracao.
Only accept with wonder what the future may make of you.
I know your voice, she whispers.
Of course you know my voice.
Who let you in?
Her hand gropes in darkness.
I take her hand in mine.
I make quieting noises with my tongue.
I simply come, I say.
I walk through walls.
She feels my fingers with hers.
I place her hand on my face, let her trace the ridges of my eyes.
I do not let her flinch or pull back her hand when her fingers slip and touch my eyes.
They are smooth as silk, and very cold.
There is nothing to fear.
It is just stone.
I hate it, she says, as though she were a child.
You fear it, I say patiently, as though she were a child.
It is not me.
It is us, I tell her.
I need to leave, she says.
I feel her stand.
I have a child, she says.
She pulls on air, says, I will not survive.
Look at me, I tell her.
I take her fingers again, bring them to my face.
And see that you survive.
We have long had reason to believe that the town was harboring fugitives belonging to the Kismet Group.
We were able to relocate a number of the missing students.
There were some casualties on both sides.
She asks me how.
You think of yourself as a peca.
But we call ourself a pedra, the stone.
Time cuts us, we do not cut time.
We submit to time, allow it to move us.
It will move us toward him.
Our filho de pedra.
He who will cross all futures to create me, and destroy you.
A dark town in the Northwest.
Thats where we must go.
To find my mother.
I arrive at Quilombo after the police have gone, after the fires have burned themselves out.
Ecco warned me that the town had been razed.
It will be good for you, he said.
I marvel at what is here, what has been here, evading time.
Inside of me, Lydia remembers the trees.
I touch my arm and remember a break she had received, falling from a tree as a child.
Survivors, coming out from the forest to collect their dead.
Amongst them, I know, is Lydias mother.
I do not see her with my eyes.
I see her within time.
She floats to me on its black river.
Mamae de Lydia, I say, holding out my hands.
Her fingers are rough and warm.
She traces the ridges of my eyes.
O que e que voce fez?
What have you done?
Survived, I answer.
O que eu fiz para voce?
What have I done to you?
Lydia, the child, the slave, reaches to her.
Mamae, she yells, deep within my head.
She still does not know that I am the one who will save her.
Mamae buckles and falls.
Her hands grab at my face, my shoulders, my arms, my shirt.
I pull my knife from her ribs, and wipe its blood on the tree.
You told me to run.
I am no longer afraid.
There is nothing to hold me anywhere.
The future beckons with all its glistening teeth.
I see the Ecco who stands outside of time.
Mamae, he says, and takes my hand.
He is no longer the sound, he is the echo.
I am no longer the slave, I am the stone.
We have nothing, we are nothing, we can go everywhere.
Johnson, Edgar et al, Running from Loneliness: Assessing psychological trauma present in Kismet-trained time-runners.
Johnson posited running as a conditioned response to an underlying trauma disordera literal flight response.
Endria Isa Richardson is a writer based in Oakland, California.
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