by Liza Olson
Lying there beside Clare when they were through, Bella got a puzzling sense of jamais vu, like she’d not only been here before but that, also, she’d forgotten the moment, or maybe it’d happened in another life, it wasn’t clear, but what was crystal was this sex-as-revelation, this exiting the self to settle somewhere in an upper corner of the room, to have HUD out of view and latency at zero but still to feel like this was a simulation somewhere, set up on a quantum rig that Bella herself might build near the end of her life, or someone else would at the end of the universe.
“I feel like an algorithm scribbled in someone’s notepad somewhere. I’m a cobbled-together TXT file.”
Clare could only smile. That, and say:
“If you’re a text file, then I’m an error message you can’t click out of.”
“Maybe we just need a good Alt-F4 to shake things up.”
“I’m thinking a compiling, personally. Iron all the bugs out.”
“I love you.”
The words came out before Bella could stop them. Silence for a few pregnant moments and blood like pounding rain in Bella’s ears, on her cheeks. She saw herself, suddenly, in a butcher shop offworld somewhere, a piece of meat hanging on a hook. She wanted a drink of water, needed to pee.
“I’m sorry, I–”
“You’re good.”
“I don’t know where that came from.”
Clare had to move the hair out of her eyes to see Bella better. She laughed away the last few strands.
“I’m not laughing at you. I laugh when I’m nervous. Anyway…”
Bella could see herself in the butcher’s clearer now. Hanging not on a hook but on words. Clare found hers:
“Let’s just see where it all takes us, yeah?”
Bella remembered to breathe.
“Yeah. Yes. Sounds great.”
A few hours later they were still on that bed, Bella now pulling up videos she’d saved on her pad. After the first salvo of the Corp DDoS Wars led to the first megasites going down for days, then weeks, then altogether, Bella downloaded petabytes of content, thinking some or all of it might disappear someday. She started by snagging her favorites, and somewhere along the way she developed a taste for archivism. She handwrote the script for the web crawler bots that later saved the internet from going down entirely. To this day, megasites are shells of their former selves. Bella wrote to a few of them, offering her backups, but she never got a response. After the Corp Wars ended in court, their data acquisition methods were put under the microscope, and data from third-party sources (even altruistic ones like Bella) was strictly forbidden. Bella herself would be sued into oblivion if she posted any of it online, and with VPNs outlawed and peer-to-peer downloads a thing of the past, she had to settle with the knowledge that she was sitting on a wealth of content that almost no one else would ever see again. Digital archiving was reduced to a collection of backup islands, more of them blinking out of existence as the years went by and devices failed or cloud subscription money ran out. Clare was staring blankly at Bella.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to give you an entire history lesson before watching some silly avant-garde shit.”
Clare stopped herself from laughing.
“No, I love it to be honest. It’s your special interest. It’s cool.”
Bella watched the way Clare’s smile opened up, incisors clearing bottom lip, and Bella had to turn away to stop the pain in her heart, the pre-emptive understanding that this was too perfect, the assumption that it’d soon be taken away from her, that she’d fuck things up and push Clare inextricably away some day. She looked at the pad instead, this little container of plastic and metal that housed years of other people’s work, strivings, dreams, inner achings, enough content to play out for several lifetimes start to finish, but beyond that it was the obsession for Bella, the insistence that she have a way to stop entropy, contain decay, slow that inexorable march toward death, and worse: final forgetting.
So she smiled along with Clare and pulled up a video from more than 100 years ago: Klaus Nomi backed by an orchestra, wearing full baroque attire, deep red, with a period-appropriate collar to hide the sarcoma on his neck. One of the first in the arts community to die of AIDS, he knew his time was almost up, but no one in the audience knew. Even through the fuzziness of late-twentieth century recording quality, Nomi shone through: arms outstretched to the crowd, bone-white hands and face, stylized widow’s peak like Dracula from space, black lip to complete the picture. It was called “The Cold Song,” and it was in large part an adaptation of a section from King Arthur, operatic brilliance as Nomi implored the crowd to let him freeze again to death, ending in rapturous applause, finality in instrumentation, and Klaus descending white steps toward the crowd, Nomi and the tape finally fading to black.
Neither could speak for some time, could only look at the black screen the timeless specter had come from. Clare spoke first: “I wonder how it feels to create something that will last forever. To be at the height of your powers, to create with the full extent of your heart and soul, and to be remembered for it.”
Bella wouldn’t tell Clare then, wouldn’t tell her for some years to come, but that moment would remain etched in her memory till her dying days–then her undying ones–like burn-in from an antique screen that refused to fade no matter how many cycles you put it through. Again and again she’d replay those words, think them, speak them out loud to no one at all, recite them as she created the very thing she herself would forever be known for.
Liza Olson is the author of the novels Here’s Waldo, The Brother We Share, and Afterglow. A Best of the Net nominee, Best Small Fictions nominee, finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and 2021 Wigleaf longlister in and from Chicagoland, she’s been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Cleaver, Pithead Chapel, and other fine places. One of her proudest achievements was getting to run (mac)ro(mic) for four incredible years. Find her online at lizaolsonbooks.com or on Twitter @lizaolsonbooks.
