The Machine

No damn way.

Oh, yes.

I never said—I never thought—

What? What did you never think? …Please, don’t sigh like that.

I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know.

I told you what would happen, though. I did.

A DOCUMENTATION OF SOME OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE WORLD

[The Swords] Great, towering shards of glass and titanium were thrust through the earth and into the sky. Their layers had molted off a long time ago, and an intricate, scarlet patterning had half-emerged—sometimes it was scarlet. Other times it was carmine, or a watery olive color, or dried blood. I only ever paid half attention. Eventually time passed everyplace and ivy crept up the titanium, and it rusted, corroded away, into an old kind of monument, which is what it is for now. 

There’s been speculation as to what these shards are. Elio thought it was alien weaponry. I was first taught, by some river-fishermen who were from the same place as I, that they were swords wielded by gods who wanted to punish us for the way we stopped our worship as soon as we felt we didn’t need them. If that's the truth, it worked. We love the gods now.

[The Shield] I know of four generators total: one in the north, two in the east, another around here, fifty minutes south-east at most. I’ve only visited the close one: a small, boxy structure that generated a massive amount of energy, which, to my surprise, not a single family stole power from. Its incessant hum was a brainkiller, hypnotic. I tried touching the generate beam and my index fingerprint was burnt off. 

I’ve wondered what the generators were really for. Why do we need them? Who are they protecting us from? Not that there was anything any of us could do if I, or if we, knew.

[The Pen] It sits there. Dirt covers some of it, sometimes; other times it’s sparkling because it’s so clean. All the time it’s in that exact place. Nobody disturbs it. It’s tucked into the soft weeds and grass, or it’s laying on the driest of desert plateaus, or it’s bobbing gently in place in a polluted salt lake. In some places it’s a fountain pen, other places a diamond writer. But, I've heard, in every place it’s always at the same coordinates.

[Peonies] There was a new growth in the clearings, when I was a little younger. Corn sprouted up and made the air sweaty, and then peonies grew underneath the corn stalks.

I love flowers. They’re sweet-smelling, beautiful, and they bring a lightness to my life. Oftentimes places become wildly colorful, sticky with honey and yellowy sunlight, flushed in rivers with glass sand beds; but it’s not quite the same. It’s not a simple, natural beauty. Not to me. Where I was born, there was a flower field on the opposite bank from the old wheelhouse—the ship it sat on drowned in mud—on the shore. Peonies bloomed yellow and pink there, and my little chubby limbs sank so deep into them I almost disappeared sometimes.

You know, Elio loved those colorful kinds of places and times. He loved the peonies, too: so many layers, so many varieties. He liked peeling off their petals and drying them and pinning them to his leather-backed leather-papered journal, the one he wrote and wrote in. It’s not so strange, but—that new growth of peonies was a darker red than I’d ever seen them.

[People] I have seen my father three times my whole life. The first time he was holding me in his arms—I was small enough to be held easily that way—and smiling down at me. He kissed my forehead. He said, “Darling Selene, I love you.” 

The other two times, we caught sight of each other in the same place for a second or two, and then things were shaken again and we stumbled backwards and after we blinked, the landscape was turned over and he was gone. I remember his brown hair and his brown skin, and nothing much else.

Something I’ve learned is that people are the most inconstant thing there is. Elio always told me that people hated to stay in one place for too long. That’s why the world kept changing; that’s why I was so unbearably lonely, because I couldn’t accept or understand that. I admit there’s some truth to his words. I can’t stop people from leaving. Mostly they can hardly stop themselves.

And I think that’s why he left soon after—he hated to stay in place so much. I should’ve known. Oh, Elio. I should say something about him, too. We met in the spring, I think. I was drawn to him for the same reason a lot of people our age were: because he was magnetic, enigmatic, like he had an eye looking into one of the other worlds all the time. Everybody—not everybody, I mean, people like me—clamored for his attention, but he held himself away at a carefully measured distance. I think we weren’t even really friends until we were both stranded away by the side effects of a place-shift. He knew how to build a fire, but he didn’t even know how to fish. I taught him. We stood in the river with our pant cuffs scrunched up to around our knees and lunged for the slippery fish. When I caught one, it jumped into his arms, its tail slapping my face while it wriggled in the air.

He laughed, but then it wriggled out of his arms, too. “You dropped it,” I said, as he looked open-mouthed at the fish swimming fast downstream. We shared a laugh for maybe the first time. 

Eventually we caught a fish and turned it over the fire. Its texture was like river mud, and the fish had no salt, not much flavor. But I blushed at the heat of fire and the fish’s taste, hot and melting.

When we got back to the place we’d come from, things were different. Our new friendship was one of the differences; but I mostly mean that the settlement had thinned a little, probably the same way we’d gotten stranded. The archives had been converted into a food warehouse, since the warehouse had collapsed. When I asked the people I knew who hadn’t been torn from the place, they said the archives had been empty for a long time anyway. I swore that wasn’t true—I still do. Elio agreed. He said that maybe we were in a different place than our own after all.

Anyway people generally were either like my father or like Elio. Either they wanted to stay, but couldn’t; or they wanted to leave, but couldn’t, yet.

[The Machine] The thing that stands out the most on the Machine is its interface. Clean, simple, elegant…it would be unremarkable if not for its shocking contrast to the ugliness and the mushy, gut-y nature of the rest of the Machine—wires like intestines, dirt clotting around them like muscle and fat. It extends for miles and miles, a wasteland, a constant I think I’ve resigned myself to love only because it is constant when nothing else is.

People take pilgrimages to the Machine sometimes. They journey in bands of ten or twenty, and they take a compass to navigate the land even as it shifts. When I was still young, my father taught me how to use the Machine. He never told me how he learned. People mostly don’t seem to know, which is strange, because it’s so simple. But it’s probably for the better that they don’t. I’ve only known one person who ever used the Machine, and the consequences were awful.

You’re back.

I’m not back. I’m passing through. I didn’t mean to come here. You know how little control we’ve got over where we go. 

So you never would’ve come back? If you had a choice?

I didn’t say that.

That’s what you meant. How did you get back here, anyway?

Some kind of luck.

LETTERS TO FUTURE VISITORS

Dear Aliens,

Selene told me that you came to old Earth and messed it up, and that’s why we’re here on new Earth now. She said that somebody would come to new Earth and mess it up, too, and then we’d have to go to Earth 3. Her dad said there’s already an Earth 3, but that we weren’t invited ’cause we messed up this planet too much already. Also because our atoms and fermions and stuff don’t mix with everything else in space. He says it’s not our real space, that we’re from somewhere else. I asked Mr. Herndon and he said I’m from one place, and Selene’s from another place but her dad’s from another-another place—and apparently it’s one of the first variations! Isn’t that cool?

Dear Aliens,

Yesterday I hiked to the Machine for the first time. I don’t know what I was thinking—maybe that I could find the place I’m supposed to be in and things would be better. But I couldn’t even figure out how to turn the damn thing on. It’s crazy. It looks so out of place, and out of time, and yet…I asked some grandparents and they said the Machine had been there longer than they had, or their grandparents had. I bet when you guys get here, we’ll all be gone and dead but the Machine’ll still be standing, and then maybe you’ll get displaced just like all of us and never be able to return to where you’re supposed to be at. You’ll get knocked out of your home forever. 

Sorry. It’s pretty cool that we’ve got access to infinite variations of this planet. If you don’t like it, you can always go somewhere else—as long as you’re not an idiot like me, and can figure out how to get the Machine to work. Maybe that’s why so few people actually do go somewhere else. Maybe everybody’s an idiot like me…except Selene. I think she knows how the Machine works, she just doesn’t want to use it. She never quite told me in those exact words, but we were floating over the salt lakes and I was telling her that I was going to see the Machine on a kind of pilgrimage. I said, “You wanna come? I don’t think one more person’s gonna break the group.”

She looked at me with a kind of amusement, and a smile fighting at the corners of her mouth. “You never know,” she said. “It might.”

“Come on,” I said. “Come on with us.”

The smile died a little. She shook her head. Selene spread her arms out totally over the surface on the salt lake and she told me, “You’re going. I would, but I can’t. The Machine’s not quite right. I used to…” she fell silent. I thought about asking what she was going to say, but she close her eyes and seemed…sad. Melancholic, maybe. She was missing somebody. 

We drifted closer together. I took her hand. She didn’t react, really, but she curled her fingers gently around mine.

I’ve always gotten the sense that she didn’t like the Machine. Maybe it’s all because of her dad. Maybe she just wants to stay for as long as she can, before places shift places and she has to leave. And I can’t quite understand that since I'd love to go somewhere new. But I have to understand: what if she doesn’t want to go with me?

To the aliens:

The peonies died this season. It’s not even like they shriveled up after a day of bloom. The growth never happened. The fields just stayed a dark, dull green all spring. We tried to make a calendar the year before, and I think this was a sign we shouldn’t try. Time doesn’t pass right, sure, but it’s good enough. We still age. We still grow, we still bloom, and then we shrivel up and die, the way it should be, right? We’re going to burn the calendars tonight. It’ll be a big bonfire.

How is it for all you aliens? I still remember that girl Selene, from some other place, what her dad used to say: Earth 3’s already out there. Maybe you’re not even aliens. Maybe you’re people—humans!—just like us, except luckier. Do you have a calendar, and functioning time, and functioning space? Or do people disappear—do buildings, and forests? Do places change suddenly sometimes, for no apparent reason at all? 

I know they don’t. But there’s something in me that hopes the whole rest of universe isn’t really that static.

Aliens and extraterrestrial people:

The whole countryside’s colorful again. But I’m moving. I can’t stay. There’s an energy in my blood that won’t let me.

It was Selene that taught me how to use the Machine. I begged her to tell me how it worked, but I didn’t really think she would. You know I remember her now like she was a moon nymph, wise and gorgeous and rooted to the land. She wouldn’t go anywhere. I asked her to come with me when I was planning to leave, and she asked me, “How would I?”

“The Machine,” I said. “How do you think?”

And she looked at me so sorrowfully. Do you think she regretted teaching me about the Machine? Because to her it was like there was no worse trespass than using it. She told me I shouldn’t touch the Machine, that it would be wrong. She said she thought I’d finally want to stay, but I thought she’d known I had to go. Why didn’t she understand me? We understood everything else about each other, but missed this one enormous thing. That was our great difference. 

I guess this isn’t relevant to you all. I’ve got a tendency to get off track—Selene always said so. Ah. Maybe it’s not really off track, but an all-roads-lead-to-Rome kind of thing. All roads lead to Selene. Except this one I’m on now.

Even if I had known, I still would’ve. I couldn’t have been that selfless. So I am sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry.

I just…. Elio, this land has always been disfigured. It never deserved it, but I know there’s nothing to be done about that. Why did you have to make it worse for all of us, though? Just because you wanted what the land had so badly—that impermanence, that ever-shifting quality nailed into its nature. You’re so selfish. I just…when I say sorry, I mean I’m sorry for you.

All that really happened. I always thought it was a warning to scare children into behaving.

You knew it wasn't. 

And so, because of those consequences, the ones to the land, to the place…do you really think it was that selfish? For me to leave?

I think—I think you could’ve just waited.

I’d waited ten years already. 

And I guess that was such a long time to you.

Not because of you. But maybe I shouldn’t have. I don’t know. I regret it sometimes.

You know I wish I could blame the land for your leaving.

PRAYERS 

1.

O Fate who knows who we are;

O goddess who measures out our suffering.

O wayward wind who blows us into nothingness

dust in the void

sunlight cast over the darkness.

I entreat you, sisters three:

let me find my place in the world.

give to me some control of my destiny—

and so bless my journey, sisters—

I ask only for safe passage this hour.

And bless this Machine to send me the place I want to be.

[I don’t like that prayer. 

- Why not?

The sisters shouldn’t help people who try to leave.]

2.

I beg of you, gods,

bring me back to where I was.

Grant me just an hour.

Shift places again if you have to;

I'll sacrifice a lamb or a liver.

I'll never ask you a thing again.

[ - Do you like that one?

No.

- What’s the matter this time?

The matter’s the same. You know what happened when Elio left.

- Nothing that bad happened. It was just a place-shift.]

3.

Protect me from the abandoned people:

They throw their fears onto the rest of all of us.

Protect me from the ambitious people:

Even those who just want one thing; they are never fulfilled.

Protect me from the lonely people:

Their pain cannot be allayed by my hand.

Protect me from the people out of this world:

The extraterrestrials, whether alien or as human as we are; 

they left this world to rot, decay, and collapse.

[It was an unnatural place-shift.

- Maybe. But it would’ve happened eventually anyway..

But you have to agree he shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t have left.

- People are strange. Maybe he really did have to. Maybe it would’ve been worse if he’d stayed.

He shouldn’t have used the Machine!

- He's not the only one who's wanted to.

Wanting isn't the same as doing.]

We used to be friends, right?

Yes.

We used to be…

Does it matter?

Yes. I didn’t mean to do anything badly. I didn’t mean for the trees to turn into dirt or for the lakes to dry up. I wish I could lie to you and say that I’m sorry for leaving. I’m sorry for what happened, the consequences…you never…but you have to know I would’ve stabbed our friendship to death, at the very least just out of resentment. If I stayed, I think I would’ve died. I would’ve collapsed, just like that.

I don’t—I don’t care. That was a rhetorical question. It doesn’t matter; the answer is no.

Selene…I always missed you.

I’m not glad you came back. You shouldn’t have.

I’ll go, then. I can go and leave now.

Go.

…you know I asked you to come with me, back then. You said no.