Paz and the Past

The ground in the Past was still dead, but tall, tough grass had returned in patches, making it more difficult to search. Paz never brought anything with her when she crossed the shimmering border, so she had to be content with scratching and kicking the ground to make it speak.

After she was done filming for the day, she found Llura downloading sides in her bedroom and asked if she wanted to come. The Past wasn’t technically off limits, but it was monochrome and dirty. Most people had little interest in whatever lay beyond the border. Llura had sighed and reluctantly rolled off her bed.

Paz stood up straight in the unmodulated sun and brushed her hair back from her eyes. Llura automatically raised her own hand. They were from the same pod and were almost identical, which meant their hair flopped into their eyes in the same annoying way.

“I don’t know why you come here so often,” Llura complained. “If you’re caught, they’ll terminate your story arc.”

Paz frowned. “I don’t believe that.” She had never known anyone whose story arc was terminated.

Paz knew that in the Past there had been no dramas, no story arcs. But now, everybody was subscribed at birth, and each life became a story arc in a greater scripted drama that was controlled by the Directors.

Llura was in a very popular drama called Hearts Aflame. Everybody watched it. It was the most popular drama in history, and Llura was a major character. The Directors gave her plot twists and reveals. She could voice her opinion, and the Directors pretended to listen.

The drama Paz was in wasn't as popular. In fact, its scores had gone down recently, and she was oddly relieved. It meant her story arc might take an unknown turn. It meant things might change.

She bent down and clawed at a likely mound of soil near pieces of a broken cement path that jutted like teeth from the ground and a line of blackened bricks that drifted off into the field.

She stood up with a triumphant grunt and turned the puffy, heart-shaped locket over in her hands. She could see faint scrollwork on its surface, clogged with dirt. She brought it close to her face with both hands and sniffed. It smelled like everything did in the Past, like burned metal. She noticed a tiny hinge on the heart’s rim and pried its two halves open with a grimy fingernail.

“Ew, what is that?” Llura asked, looking over her shoulder.

The air was still, or the hair inside the locket would have blown away. She pinched the strands between her fingers and help them up to the sun. They were sandy blonde with glints of gold, and when she rubbed her fingers together, they felt soft and coarse at the same time.

She put the hair back inside the locket and snapped it shut.

“What are you going to do with it?” Llura asked worriedly.

Paz looked up at the blue sky, the few stunted trees in the distance that struggled towards the crest of a hill, and started to walk back towards the border.

“The Directors told my mother to rejuvenate. They left a unit in her bedroom days and days ago.”

Llura picked her way through the grass behind her. “Why is she waiting?”

Paz touched the border with the tip of her finger. Oily waves rippled gently outward and then subsided. There were no alarms. There were no sounds at all. There was never any sound in the Past except the wind in the grass, and sometimes a sobbing noise, like a woman crying on the other side of the hill.

Paz hesitated and squeezed the locket tightly in her fist.

“She said she’s afraid.”

***

There hadn’t been a new drama launched in a very long time. People were bored. If their character was popular, they complained, very gently. They envied others’ story arcs, even if they were exactly like their own. There was always some tiny difference that caused dissatisfaction.

They attacked each other in the chats and the Moderators were silent.

Ratings plummeted across the net, and the Directors started giving them notes that were impossible to understand or follow. Be resilient. Do less with more. Remember tomorrow.

Sometimes Paz was hungry and her credits were rejected, or her balance was mysteriously empty. Her script sides were dull and uninteresting.

She visited the Past more frequently and excavated strange artifacts she couldn’t name. They were usually blackened metal or melted plastic. Even disfigured, she found them beautiful in the way they had persisted. She gathered them into piles and sat quietly with them before scattering them into the grass.

Searching with her head down, she had once seen tracks in the dirt that looked like footprints, but they could have been her own. They followed twin metal rails that curled like a ribbon over the dead land, and after a short distance the footprints disappeared.

Once she had walked so far that the gray dirt gave way to a sea of sand. In the distance, floating and wavering above the horizon, she saw a white dome that she knew was called a cathedral.

She dreamed that night that she crossed the sand and entered the cathedral’s vast, cool silence. There was a man waiting for her inside. He stood in shadows and she couldn’t see his face. He reached out to her, and when she touched his hand she woke up.

Paz never again found anything as serenely whole as the locket. She reburied it next to the broken cement walkway and the brick outline of what had once been a house.

Her mother had been replaced by someone who looked like her mother, but wasn’t. She smiled when Paz entered her bedroom. Their conversations were rote and meaningless.

Paz hadn’t spoken to Llura in days and days, but now they sat together on a fallen tree trunk that had turned to stone. Paz knew it had once been a tree because she sometimes looked at things on the net other than dramas, a freedom that was previously allowed within certain parameters. Now there were only the dramas.

“Aren’t you curious?” Paz asked, digging a trench in the dirt with her heel. “Don’t you wonder?”

Llura sat hunched beside her, stroking the tiny gems dotting her cheeks to soothe herself. She was sleek and well-fed. “No,” she said. “What difference would it make?”

Suddenly, the tall grass behind them erupted and Llura screamed. Paz twisted around as something raced past them in a yellow blur. It abruptly reversed course and threw itself at Paz, who only laughed.

“What is it?” Llura asked apprehensively.

“It’s a dog,” Paz said, wrestling happily with the excited animal. “They lived with people in the Past.”

Llura inched further down the trunk. “It doesn’t have a story arc,” she said doubtfully. “The Directors will take it away from you.”

Paz shrugged. Her hair was matted at the nape of her neck, and the bones of her spine pushed through her tunic. “Maybe I won't go back. I’ll stay here in the Past with the dog.”

She held her hand over her eyes and squinted while the dog nosed the dirt intently, doubling back and forth, back and forth.

A few days earlier they had found berries, and Paz had watched the dog pluck the fruit from the thorns with its lips pulled back in a snarl.

“You’re my life,” Llura murmured, already forgetting her fear. “What will I do without you?”

Paz recognized the line from a recent twist in Llura’s story arc. Her partner had been chosen to populate an island neither of them had ever heard of. The Directors told Llura she was distraught. Devastated. Destroyed.

In the distance, a broken building lolled drunkenly in the sun. Curtains still shaded the windows, and sometimes they seemed to move, as if brushed by a tired hand.

“I have to go,” Llura said. She stood, and then waited uncertainly.

Paz nodded but didn’t stand up. She put her fingers in her mouth and whistled. The dog trotted over and flopped down on her bare feet. It tilted its head back to look up at her with its golden eyes.

It was strange, she thought, how something could be both new and old at the same time.

Llura finally turned and walked away towards the border.

Paz petted the soft fur on the dog’s head, and then the coarser hair on its muscular body. It panted happily. She felt its heart pounding against her legs, and her own heart raced to meet it.