The Web Between Life and Death
Three soldiers stood in a row in front of a metal desk. The woman behind the desk was middle-aged, with her dark hair pulled into a tight bun and badges pinned to her uniform. She studied them, looking proud and a little bit sad. Commander Anya Pavlov had been like a force of nature in the careers of the operatives she had picked for this mission. Now, she was sending them somewhere that she couldn't follow.
"Out of all our field agents, you have been selected for this… unconventional task because you are adaptable and persistent."
"You'll be sent to a place outside of time, where time comes from. It will be dangerous. You'll have all the equipment we can give you to prepare for whatever situation you may find yourself in. Your most recent mission was to assassinate the President of Cyrristan. The mission was a complete success, and that in itself is a failure. We've been able to predict an incredibly high chance that humanity destroys itself because of the President's death."
"Your mission is to find a way to undo the assassination and save the world. I don't deny that it will be dangerous, and we would have sent a full squadron if we could. To send you outside of time, we'll need to use a particular blend of chemicals to keep your bodies here in a very specific state, and we only have enough for three people." She shifted her weight in the chair, uneasy.
"If you are successful, none of this will have happened. We won't be standing here right now, trying to change the past. Cyrristan will have its president back, but the future will be safer. The fate of our world rests on your shoulders."
They signed the papers on her desk without hesitation. A soldier handed them heavy backpacks, headlamps, and body armor. Commander Pavlov followed them out of the room as they were led into a clean room and sat down awkwardly on hospital beds. She watched as a doctor administered them IVs connected to unlabeled bags of clear fluid. They all went unconscious at once.
"They're in," reported the doctor.
Commander Pavlov rubbed her hands together, fidgeting with the gloves of her clean room gear. She wished that she could have told them they weren't coming back.
Pain. Darkness. A horrible sensation of being unable to breathe. Connie struggled mightily against something sticky and stretchy that pressed in all around her. There was a ripping sound, and whatever it was that she had been trapped in gave way, disgorging her head first onto a hard floor. She groaned, opened her eyes, and sat up to assess the situation.
As far as she could see, she was on the floor of a vast, dimly lit cave. Mike spilled out onto the floor in front of her. He stood up and looked around, yelled, "Jonah!" and ran over to a struggling bundle, roughly the size and shape of her co-worker. He was wrapped in that same sticky stuff and suspended from the ceiling.
It was funny. She remembered accepting a dangerous mission and sitting on a hospital bed wearing an unwieldy backpack, but she couldn't tell whether that was something that was happening now, or something from her past, or something that would happen at some unspecified point in the future. She rubbed her head and wondered whether or not she had a concussion.
Jonah cursed loudly. His headlamp illuminated one wall of the cave. She switched on her own lamp and stared up at the things they had been trapped in.
Cocoons. Empty human-sized cocoons, like the ones bagworms make, suspended in midair by long white ropes. Above the ropes, attached to the ceiling, was an enormous spiderweb, built from strands the thickness of her wrist. It ran along the ceiling of the cave like a river of white goop. The cocoons swayed gently like three morbid wind chimes.
"Giant spiderwebs." Mike's voice was higher than normal; the light from Connie's headlamp was reflected off of his sweaty face.
Jonah rubbed his bruised backside. "How big is this place, anyway? I expected some sort of endless void, or maybe that we'd meet knockoff Gandalf…"
"I'm more worried about how big the spider is," said Mike. He switched his headlamp on to peer down the tunnel in either direction.
Connie studied the walls. She could hear a faint dripping sound coming from somewhere in the distance. "So, we're supposed to set up camp here? Scope out the area, find out how to hit 'undo' on our most recent mission?" Was it their most recent mission? Her perception of time was all wrong in this place.
Jonah began hammering away at a metal tent peg, trying to drive it into the floor of the cavern. The crash of metal on metal echoed around the cave, louder and louder. It made her ears ring. Mike clapped his hands to the sides of his head and kicked Jonah in the shin. "Sorry," said Jonah. "The floor's nothing but rocks and dust."
Mike picked up a rope and tied it around a stalagmite. Connie stood up to help. They had both tents set up within a few minutes.
"This is where time is made?" asked Jonah, walking down the tunnel by a few steps. Mike shrugged. "We should look around, at least," said Jonah. "I'll go this way, you and Connie go that way, and we'll meet back here in about an hour."
Something appeared in mid-air and fell into Connie's lap. It was a slip of paper, slightly singed around the edges. She picked it up to read it.
We said we didn't know where you were going. We lied. We know a little bit about the place you are in right now. It is, among other things, the place where things go just before they are completely destroyed. We have milliseconds of footage from pulverized cameras, and we've talked to people just before their deaths, trying to get eyewitness accounts. There have been programs like this one in our agency's past, but they were all aborted after just a few days. That proves that the programs worked - that they were able to undo whatever event they were trying to stop, and, consequently, the events never happened and there was no need for the program anymore. The fluid we gave you to send you here wasn't some sort of limited-supply transportation serum, it was a special blend of poisons designed to keep you on the edge of death for as long as possible. I burnt this note to send it to you. My contract stipulated that I wasn't supposed to tell you any of this, but you deserve to know the truth. Please forgive me for what I've done. Please complete the mission. Anya Pavlov
Connie sat down again. The note crumbled to dust.
"They… killed us. They were trying to kill us. We spent our whole lives working for these people and they're killing us right now."
"What?"
"There was this slip of paper, it was a note from the Commander, she said that this is a place things go when they're destroyed, that they had to kill us to send us here, they're killing us really slowly right now!"
"Okay," said Mike slowly. "That's… a lot. Really awful of her not to tell us until we were in here."
Jonah picked at his fingernails. "This mission was to save humanity. Aren't our lives less important than the lives of eight billion other people?"
"That's the problem! I've always been willing to die for my country. To save every human ever, that's a no-brainer! I would have chosen this if they had just told us the truth!"
"Did she say anything about the mission?"
"She mentioned something about finishing it. That we still needed to do it."
"What are we waiting for?" said Mike, flicking his headlamp back on. "We can't change anything about the… past? the real world? Either way, there's nothing we can do but try and finish the mission."
"Alright," said Jonah. "But if we ever make it home, I'm going to sue the crap out of the CIA."
Mike and Connie walked down one direction of the tunnel, away from the camp. At first, they sighted around ever corner with their weapons, checking to see if the coast was clear. The coast was always clear, however, and there was nothing but miles of rocky tunnel floors and ceilings coated with corded, sticky webbing. They stopped worrying about what would be around the next corner, treating the walk like one of the hikes they had to go on for basic training. Occasionally, broken objects would appear, standing in a corner or propped up against the wall. They were always destroyed within a few seconds.
"We should go back. We were supposed to meet up back at camp in an hour, right?"
Mike looked confused. "How long has it been?"
A child-sized Victorian chair which was missing most of its back came into existence near Mike's legs. Small pieces of wood broke off of the legs of the chair and vanished into thin air; it suddenly disintegrated into a cloud of sawdust, which disappeared quickly.
"I can't tell time in this place. Let's turn around."
Something else appeared against the wall. It wasn't garbage or antique furniture.
It was Commander Anya Pavlov.
Jonah was much more cautious than Mike or Connie. Immediately after he left camp, he dug in his pack and pulled out a compass. The needle spun wildly, unsure of which way was north. He was curious now. He took out a thermometer. It seemed to be working fine. He looked at his watch. The hands spun quickly backward with every step he took away from the camp, and forward when he walked toward the camp. He couldn't explain any of it, so he started walking again.
As soon as he saw the first destroyed objects fade into view, he replaced his headlamp with a pair of night-vision goggles. Just to be safe.
He walked in the dark, sneaking up on every bend in the tunnel, marking the right-hand wall with a pencil so he'd know which way he came. A few miles in, he saw the beam of a headlamp coming from somewhere near the ceiling, down the tunnel.
"Constance? Mike?" He called out quietly, suddenly uneasy.
A horrible thought: what if that was Mike? What if the light was coming from the ceiling because he was tied up in one of those cocoon things? Jonah took several steps down the tunnel, sticking his head around the corner. What he saw made his blood run cold.
It was the spider.
In the real world, Commander Pavlov had been sitting at her desk, eyes red from crying. Tears of regret. She had sent her own people to die, she had lied to them, and she couldn't lie anymore. She pulled out a pencil and wrote a message on a piece of paper. She ran it through the copier and lit all the copies on fire. Someone came into her office; he saw the words on the papers just before they burned up. Without saying a word, his face set in stone, he put a bullet through his commander's head.
In the tunnel, Anya Pavlov should not have been alive. Connie could see the bullet hole in her forehead. Thick ropes of cobweb were unspooling from the ceiling, grabbing at the commander's legs and arms. Commander Anya had time to look Connie in the eyes before she was hoisted several feet into the air, feet first. There wasn't any time. Mike pulled out a knife and began sawing at the sheets of webbing that had begun to wrap around her torso. The webs covered her head. Mike managed to make a long slit in one side of the cocoon. Something shot out of it, but it wasn't an arm.
Constance pulled out her sidearm and shot into the cocoon over and over again until it stopped moving.
It had been a spider's leg.
Gunshots echoed down the tunnel, painfully loud in the long corridors. Jonah froze. The spider hadn't seen him. It was truly huge, more than twice as tall as Jonah was, with an even wider leg span, taking up nearly the entire tunnel. Its body was slung low under high, angled legs. It had matted black hair across its entire body; it smelled like dust and death. It had only one eye, set in the center of its head, glowing so brightly that Jonah couldn't stand to look at it.
It ran on all eight legs towards the camp, following the sound of gunshots. It was a lot faster than Jonah was. He couldn't hope to catch up to the spider before it got back to the camp, much less to follow it all the way to wherever Mike and Connie were. He took off running back anyway, as silently as he could, keeping his pencil marks on the left.
There was something coming. Constance could feel it.
Mike had crawled in the mens' tent to take a nap. She could hear him crying in there. She couldn't stop thinking about Anya, how her commander had looked her in the eyes, a gunshot wound in her head. She bit a piece off a granola bar and stood up, wary.
She could hear something down Jonah's side of the tunnel, a sort of dry scratching sound. Suddenly, a gargantuan spider with one glowing eye burst into view. Only a few seconds had elapsed since she had had an uneasy feeling. Reflexes honed over years of operating in the field kicked in. Backward - it's too fast - the tents, no - can't go under: too many legs - up! She jumped straight up, catching the end of one of the cocoon husks and scrambling towards the ceiling, leg over leg as if she was climbing the rope in gym class.
The spider reared up on its hind legs to grab at her. She was too fast; her eyes burned in the glare of its lamp-like eye. She could see it was going to climb the wall and come after her.
Connie reached the ceiling. As soon as she touched the main web, the opaque, white mass changed. It became multifaceted, glowing from the inside, iridescent. Lit up in many colors were images of Connie's entire life. To her left, she could see herself as a kid learning to ride a bicycle. Graduating from high school, going into basic training, joining the CIA, plus some other things that she had forgotten. To her right were images of all the time she had spent in the tunnel. Just slightly to the left of where she touched the web, she saw an image she could never forget: the terrified eyes of the President of Cyrristan, pleading for his life at the other end of her gun barrel.
She saw the webbing on the ceiling as a river of time, flowing from left to right.
The spider was climbing the wall. It touched the web, lighting it up again, showing the life of the spider. She could see images of it up and down the whole web, shrouded in darkness and dust. It wasn't all like that. Not too far to her right was a cord bathed in golden light, a story in pictures of the life of a dark-haired woman. Connie could see fragments of a childhood lived in comfort, a career in real estate, and a very long time spent in the hospital. Darkness, and a cocoon, and a huge black spider with one glowing eye, emerging, horrified at what she had become. Tunneling into the wall. Spinning new cords on the ceiling and weaving the threads together. More darkness.
It was alive. A person. The spider had been a real estate agent, for God's sake. Commander Pavlov had become a spider before Connie killed it. If she died here, would she turn into a spider, too?
The spider made a noise deep in its throat and took its front two claws off the web. It scrunched up its face, not wanting to see the pictures of the woman it had been. The beam from its eye disappeared, and the only light in the tunnel came from the story of Connie's life in the web above her. Connie knew what she had to do.
She stared at a spot just to the left of the President of Cyrristan, pulled out her combat knife, and slashed through the web.
She saw the glowing eye of the spider, staring up at her, taking up her entire field of vision. It was the last thing she saw before she ceased to exist.
A Bird in the Hand
He was barely fledged the first time he turned into a human.
The American Kestrel nests in the crevices of cliffs and trees, though it cannot dig on its own. It relies on natural caves and woodpecker holes to nest in. For his first month, the inside of a rotten tree was his entire world. He learned to fly then, but continued to return to the tree for a few weeks, looking for food. He was hunting, flying a few feet from the forest floor, when suddenly he changed. He was freezing cold, with deep scratches where his feathers should have been. His wings and talons were all wrong, and he couldn't use his beak, and his eyes were giving him information that didn't make sense. He couldn't move his tail; he was a huge gangly pile of limbs on the forest floor, scared out of his wits.
Then he changed back without warning, was a bird again. He lifted his bruised body off the forest floor. Something was very, very wrong.
She was a young child when she discovered she could turn into a bird. Playing alone behind her house, she looked up at a sparrow and thought about how nice it would be if she could fly. Immediately, she found herself on the ground, a bundle of feathers and hollow bones. It took her a while to figure out how to change back into a human, but after she did, her mind filled up with ideas on what she would do now that she could become a bird. Her hours were filled with chores: milking the cow, helping her mother to make pottage stew, and baking the dark, crusty bread that they ate every day. It was a rare day that she could find enough time alone to fly. She never told anyone that she was sometimes a bird - she didn't want to be called a witch or a demon.
On calm days, she could see her bird-face in the surface of the lake. Reddish-brown wings, a beige chest, and a little hooked beak. A kestrel, she thought. She wondered if any of the other peasant children could turn into birds.
As she grew older, she had more questions. Was she a human who could become a bird, or a bird that was normally human? She liked to hunt the mice in the thatched roof of her house and the pigeons in the church's belfry. Did eating pests make her more beast than person?
She would never stop flying. Being a kestrel was one of the only things she was good at.
Randomly changing sizes is a horrible way to live. He took to sleeping in exposed areas, just in case he suddenly got bigger. He had learned to move around in the other form already, but he found his inability to fly endlessly infuriating. He never flew more than a few feet off the ground for fear that he would fall out of the sky.
His parents died of old age, then his siblings. The American kestrel lives for five years on average. He had only the vaguest idea that something was wrong with this. Over time, he had grown used to the transformations. Having lived for over 13 years, longer than a kestrel was ever meant to, he had learned something about acceptance. He would simply wait a little while; he knew he would change back eventually.
Until the day he didn't.
She didn't know exactly how it happened. Only that she went flying, and just… didn't come back. Normally, she could only fly for a little while. She stole half-hours here and there, after her chores were done. This was the longest flight she had attempted; her wings were beginning to ache, but she needed time to think.
Why did Hannah have to go and get married? They had been friends for forever. Just because Hannah was legally allowed to get married, she had to go and do it.
Thirteen years old is way too early to get married, she thought, letting a thermal carry her even higher.
An hour passed, another half-hour, and he still wasn't a bird. This was getting annoying, and he was getting hungry. His sense of smell was just as good, if not better, in the larger form, and there was something delicious wafting through the air. He let the aroma lead him into the human town.
"Reverend Aarons? There's a boy outside your window - he just stole a loaf of bread with his teeth!"
"What?"
"With his teeth, Eli! He's just sitting there eating it! I think he might be wrong in the head, he doesn't understand a word I'm saying!"
Eli Aarons was dumbfounded, but he walked outside the house to where the boy was sitting, under the window in the dirt. The child held the bread between his knees and tore into it with his teeth. Eli wondered whether or not he had lost the use of his hands; the child let out a strangled shrieking noise.
"My name is Reverend Eli Aarons. That isn't your bread. Who are you?"
The child watched him. There was an unmistakable intelligence in the boy's eyes. Eli doubted he was mad, and he kneeled in the dust in front of him.
The boy shrieked again. He dug into the bread, ripping off pieces and swallowing them whole. "Where are your clothes?" asked the Reverend. This time, he was completely ignored.
Eli managed to lure the boy into the house with the other loaf of bread, then set the bread on a high shelf near the hearth, earning a betrayed look from the wild boy. "Look at all the twigs in your hair. Were you in the forest?" He closed the door, darkening the room significantly. Suddenly, the child made a mad dash for the window, managing to abscond from the house before Reverend Aarons could react, and by the time Eli left the house, there was nothing left of him but footprints.
She had to return eventually. She would be expected for dinner. She landed behind the cottage, becoming human again before she walked through the door, took a seat at the table, and filled her trencher with stew. The stew was composed of cabbage (again) and leeks (for some ungodly reason). She concentrated on eating as well as she could. Her mother was discussing a rumor about some savage boy stealing the priest's bread. Her father filled his tankard with beer and said nothing. She finished her stew and started in on her trencher, which was stale and tasted of leeks.
His Majesty's Own Flower Arranger
"Arranging flowers is a beautiful trade," said the Florist, "but not when the King hates flowers."
Onscreen, the Assigner's avatar crossed her arms. "Royal Writ, section 5, paragraph 9. 'The King hates nothing and no-one under His reign, but instead cares for all.' This is your first strike; on strike three, you will recieve a treason mark. This appointment was requisitioned on a complaint of: low workload. Please state the precise nature of your complaint."
The Florist swallowed down a lump in his throat, sighed. "If I had a shop in the City, I could arrange flowers for the common people. The City would be made beautiful by my work. I would be more useful."
"Evidence of psychological distress is required in order to transfer from a higher Assignment to a lower Assignment. According to records, it has been 3 months and 14 days since your transfer. Since then, you have completed the following Assignment-related tasks: crafting 314 bouquets. This averages to 3.02 tasks per day, which is well within the boundaries of psychological distress."
Every single bouquet the Florist had crafted over the last three-and-a-half months was burned into his mind. He had stayed awake for 48 hours to create the floral arrangements for the funeral of the King's aunt. The florescent light in his workroom had given a different color to the flowers, changing the shapes of their shadows. In the sun, the final product wasn't at all his best work. Not that he had been invited to the funeral. The King hadn't requested flowers before or since.