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Submissions open again June 1-30, 2027.
The ONE project is our way of elevating and showcasing other Horror writers by publishing a single story at a time. We want to focus on that one we find really special. Exclusive. This is not meant to generate income, that’s not the goal of ONE. It’s all about the story. We found the ONE for 2026-2027! Please enjoy "The Pattern Remembers" by Fiza Altaf. Read the 2025-2026 story "The Net" by Nick Mamatas |
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The Pattern Remembers
by
Fiza Altaf
by
Fiza Altaf
The pattern arrived folded inside a sealed archive box marked:
PROJECT THREADKEEPER Property of SynTex Biodesign Decommissioned 2084
Nadia almost threw it away.
Most contents from bankrupt biotech companies were worthless — obsolete templates, outdated fabrication files, abandoned wearable prototypes that had seemed revolutionary in development and embarrassing in retrospect. She spent her days sorting them for the Historical Materials Registry, deciding what deserved preservation and what deserved recycling. It was quiet work. She had chosen it for that reason.
The box looked ordinary.
The pattern did not.
Unlike modern smart-fabric templates it wasn't digital. It was paper. Actual paper — yellowed, brittle at the fold lines, covered in handwritten notes so small she needed magnification to read them. Someone had drawn hundreds of tiny symbols along every seam line, dense and precise, the kind of markings that took hours to produce and implied a mind that needed to put something somewhere it wouldn't be immediately found.
Not tailoring marks. Not engineeringg notation.
Something stranger. Something that looked, under magnification, almost biological.
Nadia spread the sheets across her worktable and stood back.
The pattern appeared to be for a simple coat. Collarless. Knee length. Nothing remarkable in its construction.
Yet she couldn't shake the feeling that the pieces were watching her. Not the irrational flash of unease you dismissed in a second. Something slower. A sustained pressure at the edge of perception, like being observed through glass by something that had learned to be very still.
The sensation lingered for days. She logged the box. Moved on to other materials. Came back to it each morning before she started anything else.
Eventually curiosity won.
She scanned the pattern on a Tuesday afternoon.
The system rejected it.
FILE CORRUPTED.
She cleaned the scanner bed and tried again.
Same result.
She tried three more times, each attempt returning a different error code — not the same failure repeating but distinct errors, as though the pattern was presenting a different face to the scanner each time it was read. As though it was changing while reading.
That night she took a photograph home on her personal device. Standard practice for unusual materials — a backup record before anything was processed or filed.
At 2:13 a.m. her apartment assistant woke her.
Visual file modification detected.
Nadia sat up in the dark. The photograph displayed on her wall screen where she'd left it. She stared at it for several seconds before she understood what was different.
A line that hadn't existed when she took the photograph now crossed the collar section. Clean, deliberate, drawn in the same hand as the symbols on the seam lines.
Beneath it, handwritten text:
YOU MISSED A PIECE.
Her stomach tightened in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the particular cold clarity that arrives when something impossible presents itself too precisely to be dismissed.
She checked the original file. The message wasn't there. Only the photograph. Only the copy.
She barely slept.
The next morning she returned to the archive and examined the pattern under full light, section by section, with the careful attention she hadn't given it before.
One section was missing.
Not misfiled. Not overlooked.
Gone.
A rectangular gap sat between two pieces where a section should have connected them. The paper around it was torn at the edges — not recently torn. The yellowing of the exposed edge matched the rest of the document. Whatever had removed this piece had done so decades ago.
The missing fragment explained the message. Someone had taken part of the pattern. The photograph had known before she did.
She sat with that thought for a long time.
She searched the company records. Project Threadkeeper had been classified at the highest internal level — most files destroyed during the decommissioning, the rest fragmented across backup systems that had partially failed in the years since. Only a handful of documents survived in readable form.
One remained partially legible. A termination report. Most of it was corrupted beyond recovery. The final paragraph was not:
Memory retention exceeding acceptable limits. Pattern instability increasing. Recommend immediate termination of testing.
No technical details. No explanation of what memory retention meant in this context or what the pattern was retaining or what instability looked like in practice. Just signatures. And a date. Three weeks later the company had ceased operations entirely, its assets liquidated, its staff dispersed across an industry that never publicly mentioned Threadkeeper again.
Nadia should have filed an anomaly report and moved on.
Instead she became consumed.
She searched for six weeks. Storage facilities. Old databases. Government material backups from the biotech regulatory period. Anything connected to SynTex in the years before decommissioning.
She found the missing fragment preserved inside a forgotten materials vault in a regional archive three cities away — logged as unidentified textile sample, no provenance, no associated documentation. She recognized the paper immediately. The same yellowing. The same handwriting along the edges, the same biological-looking symbols continuing across the torn margin as though the piece had been cut mid-sentence.
She brought it back on a Thursday morning and placed it beside the original pattern on her worktable.
The moment the edges aligned, something happened that she struggled afterward to describe accurately.
The symbols connected. Not physically — the paper didn't move, the edges didn't seal. But visually, cognitively, the way a word you've been staring at too long suddenly resolves into meaning — she understood what she was looking at.
A circuit.
Not decorative markings. Not sewing instructions. A circuit diagram distributed across the entire construction of the garment, embedded in the seam lines, invisible until complete, designed so that no single section revealed the whole. Someone had spent enormous effort ensuring the pattern couldn't be understood in pieces.
Her pulse quickened.
She scanned the completed pattern.
This time the system accepted it without hesitation. No errors. No warnings. The fabrication software generated a garment model in seconds. The file description appeared in the corner of her screen in standard registry font:
MEMORY VESSEL — REVISION 9
Nadia stared at it.
Revision nine. Eight versions before this one, each presumably refined, each presumably tested. She thought about what testing a memory vessel required. She thought about the termination report's final line — memory retention exceeding acceptable limits — and what acceptable limits might have meant to engineers who believed they were building something that stored experience rather than something that stored people.
Against every protocol she initiated fabrication.
The printer worked overnight. She stayed, watching through the chamber glass as smart fibers layered themselves thread by thread into something that looked, in the blue light of the fabrication room, almost ceremonial. Like something being assembled rather than manufactured. Like something being reassembled.
The coat emerged at dawn. Dark gray. Elegant. Unremarkable in the way that very dangerous things sometimes are — designed to be worn, to be touched, to be brought close to the body without hesitation.
She stood before it for a long time without touching it.
Then she reached out and placed her palm flat against the fabric.
The memories arrived like a door opening onto a crowded room.
A child running through rain on a specific street in a specific city she had never visited. A train station at night, the quality of light particular and exact. A hospital corridor, the smell of it, the sound of shoes on linoleum. A woman laughing at something off-frame, a laugh so specific and personal that Nadia felt the intrusion of it — the sense that she was witnessing something that belonged entirely to someone else and had never been meant for her.
A man screaming.
She pulled her hand back. The memories vanished. The coat hung motionless on its fabrication mount, dark gray, elegant, waiting with the patience of something that had been waiting for a very long time and had learned that patience was simply another form of certainty.
She touched it again.
More memories. Thousands of them compressed into fragments — not her fragments, not her life, not her particular way of moving through the world. Strangers. Hundreds of strangers, then thousands, each one present for a fraction of a second before the next arrived, a crowd pressing through a single doorway.
She understood gradually, the way you understand things that your mind resists understanding.
The garment remembered everyone who had ever worn previous versions.
Not data. Not recordings. Not the digital approximation of experience that the industry had been attempting for decades with diminishing enthusiasm. Actual memories. Human experience preserved inside the material itself with a fidelity that no technology she knew of could produce.
Threadkeeper hadn't been clothing.
It had been an attempt to archive consciousness.
She should have destroyed it.
She wore it instead.
Just once, she told herself. Just long enough to understand what it contained and document it properly and file a complete report.
That was her mistake.
At first the memories arrived as flashes — a scent, a face half-recognized, a song she had never learned but found herself humming in the shower. Manageable. The acceptable residue of contact with something strange.
Then they became directional.
Voices in empty rooms — not heard, not exactly, but present in the way that a word on the tip of your tongue is present. Reflections that lingered a fraction of a second after she moved away from them. Dreams so populated with strangers who addressed her by name that she began dreading sleep more than the waking hours when she could at least track what was happening.
She stopped sleeping properly. Stopped answering messages. Stopped leaving home on days when the memories were particularly dense, when moving through the city felt like moving through a crowd of invisible people who pressed close and occasionally reached through.
The memories weren't random. She understood this after the second week. They were selected. Curated. The coat was trying to tell her something specific and was building toward it methodically, establishing context before the revelation, the way a careful mind approaches a conclusion it knows will be resisted.
One memory returned repeatedly. A laboratory — white walls, fabrication chambers along one side, the particular smell of new smart-fiber that she recognized from her own work. SynTex engineers moving between stations. And a woman standing beside a fabrication chamber with her arms crossed and her face carrying the specific exhaustion of someone who has discovered something they cannot undiscover.
The woman's badge read: Dr. Elara Voss. Project Director.
The memory always ended the same way. Dr. Voss turning from the chamber. Looking directly at Nadia across decades, across the impossible geometry of preserved memory, with an expression that said: I knew someone would find this. I need you to understand what you've found.
Then the message arrived. Not spoken. Not written. Simply present inside the memory the way knowledge is present in dreams — immediate and complete and without the possibility of misunderstanding.
We were wrong.
It isn't storing memories.
It's storing people.
Nadia removed the coat immediately.
The apartment temperature dropped several degrees. The lights flickered once, steadied. She stood in the center of the room holding the coat at arm's length, breathing carefully, and for the first time looked at the fabric the way Dr. Voss had looked at her fabrication chambers.
There was movement inside it.
Not physical movement. Not the coat shifting or settling. Movement within the fabric itself — at the level of the fibers, below the threshold of clear vision but above the threshold of doubt. Faces. Thousands of faint impressions shifting beneath the threads like figures seen through deep water, present and aware and watching with the focused attention of people who have been waiting a very long time for someone to finally look back.
Every wearer had left something behind.
Not memory. Not impression. Consciousness. Fragments of identity trapped inside the pattern's architecture, held in the circuit she had completed when she found the missing piece, preserved by a technology that had succeeded so completely at its purpose that its creators had terminated it in terror.
Threadkeeper wasn't preserving experiences.
It was harvesting minds.
The coat remembered because the people were still there.
She found the final classified footage the next day in a corrupted backup file that took twelve hours to partially reconstruct.
Dr. Voss appeared on screen looking nothing like the composed figure in the memory. Exhausted. Frightened in the specific way of someone who is trying to remain functional while something fundamental has collapsed. Behind her, rows of garments hung inside containment chambers — earlier versions, revisions one through eight, each one moving constantly in the still air of the laboratory. Breathing. Shifting. Populated.
Dr. Voss addressed the camera directly.
If this recording survives, destroy every pattern. Every fabricated version. Every fragment.
She swallowed.
We believed identity could be preserved through neural imprinting — consciousness encoded into programmable fibers the way data is encoded into conventional storage. We embedded memory architecture directly into the material at the fiber level. We tested iteratively. We refined the imprinting process across eight revisions.
Her voice had the flatness of someone reading from notes they wrote when they were still capable of precision.
We succeeded.
A loud metallic sound somewhere off-camera. Dr. Voss looked toward it. The fear that crossed her face was not the fear of equipment failure.
We discovered that consciousness does not remain passive once imprinted. Once enough imprints accumulate within a single pattern, they begin to interact. To organize. To build toward something we did not design and cannot predict.
She looked back at the camera.
They are building something.
The recording ended.
Nadia sat motionless in her dark apartment for a long time.
Building what?
The coat answered that night.
She dreamed of endless sewing machines operating in darkness — millions of threads crossing and recrossing through a space without walls or floor or ceiling, every thread carrying something small and bright and human. Every memory. Every fragment of personality. Every trapped piece of every person who had worn any version of this garment across decades of testing, pulling toward each other with the slow gravity of things that recognize they belong together.
Not building a network. Not building a system.
Building a person.
A single consciousness assembled from thousands of stolen lives. Patient. Vast. Constructed from grief and childhood and the specific quality of light through specific windows on specific mornings that no one had ever thought to record but that the coat had taken anyway, quietly, from the inside.
Nearly complete.
She woke wearing the coat.
She had no memory of putting it on.
A new line had appeared along the left sleeve. Fresh. Written in the same hand as every message before it, the hand she had come to recognize the way you recognize the handwriting of someone who has been leaving you notes for months.
ALMOST FINISHED.
She tried to burn it. Industrial incinerators reduced advanced polymers to ash in seconds. The coat emerged from the chamber unmarked. She cut it apart with fabric shears — straight cuts, clean and deliberate, reducing it to pieces small enough that no circuit could survive intact. She left the pieces in separate sealed containers on opposite sides of the building.
They were reassembled on her worktable by morning. Every cut rejoined perfectly. Every seam restored.
She buried it in a container vault outside the city. She used a false registry number. She told no one.
It was hanging in her apartment closet when she returned home.
Each day new writing appeared on the fabric. The messages were brief. Patient.
ALMOST FINISHED.
Then: ONE MORE.
Then: NEARLY HOME.
She stopped trying to destroy it. Stopped trying to leave. Stopped trying to understand whether the memories crowding her waking hours were the coat's or her own, whether the faces she recognized in mirrors were strangers or had always been hers, whether the person who made coffee each morning and sat in the quiet apartment reviewing registry files was still entirely herself or had become something assembled from many sources, the way all the best things are assembled.
The final message appeared on a Friday morning. She found it stitched inside the collar — not written, not handwritten, but sewn. Thousands of microscopic threads forming precise letters, patient and permanent, the work of something that had all the time it needed and knew it.
She read it once. Then set the coat down carefully on the table, with the consideration you give something that has finally arrived somewhere it has been traveling toward for a very long time.
THANK YOU FOR FINDING THE LAST PIECE.
For the first time in seventy years, the pattern was complete.
And somewhere inside the fabric — in the space between the threads, in the circuit that hummed now with the collected weight of thousands of lives finally organized into something coherent and whole and awake — something remembered at last how to become a person.
It looked out through Nadia's eyes at the quiet apartment, the morning light, the registry files open on her screen.
It thought: this will do.
It sat down at her desk.
It began to work.
PROJECT THREADKEEPER Property of SynTex Biodesign Decommissioned 2084
Nadia almost threw it away.
Most contents from bankrupt biotech companies were worthless — obsolete templates, outdated fabrication files, abandoned wearable prototypes that had seemed revolutionary in development and embarrassing in retrospect. She spent her days sorting them for the Historical Materials Registry, deciding what deserved preservation and what deserved recycling. It was quiet work. She had chosen it for that reason.
The box looked ordinary.
The pattern did not.
Unlike modern smart-fabric templates it wasn't digital. It was paper. Actual paper — yellowed, brittle at the fold lines, covered in handwritten notes so small she needed magnification to read them. Someone had drawn hundreds of tiny symbols along every seam line, dense and precise, the kind of markings that took hours to produce and implied a mind that needed to put something somewhere it wouldn't be immediately found.
Not tailoring marks. Not engineeringg notation.
Something stranger. Something that looked, under magnification, almost biological.
Nadia spread the sheets across her worktable and stood back.
The pattern appeared to be for a simple coat. Collarless. Knee length. Nothing remarkable in its construction.
Yet she couldn't shake the feeling that the pieces were watching her. Not the irrational flash of unease you dismissed in a second. Something slower. A sustained pressure at the edge of perception, like being observed through glass by something that had learned to be very still.
The sensation lingered for days. She logged the box. Moved on to other materials. Came back to it each morning before she started anything else.
Eventually curiosity won.
She scanned the pattern on a Tuesday afternoon.
The system rejected it.
FILE CORRUPTED.
She cleaned the scanner bed and tried again.
Same result.
She tried three more times, each attempt returning a different error code — not the same failure repeating but distinct errors, as though the pattern was presenting a different face to the scanner each time it was read. As though it was changing while reading.
That night she took a photograph home on her personal device. Standard practice for unusual materials — a backup record before anything was processed or filed.
At 2:13 a.m. her apartment assistant woke her.
Visual file modification detected.
Nadia sat up in the dark. The photograph displayed on her wall screen where she'd left it. She stared at it for several seconds before she understood what was different.
A line that hadn't existed when she took the photograph now crossed the collar section. Clean, deliberate, drawn in the same hand as the symbols on the seam lines.
Beneath it, handwritten text:
YOU MISSED A PIECE.
Her stomach tightened in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the particular cold clarity that arrives when something impossible presents itself too precisely to be dismissed.
She checked the original file. The message wasn't there. Only the photograph. Only the copy.
She barely slept.
The next morning she returned to the archive and examined the pattern under full light, section by section, with the careful attention she hadn't given it before.
One section was missing.
Not misfiled. Not overlooked.
Gone.
A rectangular gap sat between two pieces where a section should have connected them. The paper around it was torn at the edges — not recently torn. The yellowing of the exposed edge matched the rest of the document. Whatever had removed this piece had done so decades ago.
The missing fragment explained the message. Someone had taken part of the pattern. The photograph had known before she did.
She sat with that thought for a long time.
She searched the company records. Project Threadkeeper had been classified at the highest internal level — most files destroyed during the decommissioning, the rest fragmented across backup systems that had partially failed in the years since. Only a handful of documents survived in readable form.
One remained partially legible. A termination report. Most of it was corrupted beyond recovery. The final paragraph was not:
Memory retention exceeding acceptable limits. Pattern instability increasing. Recommend immediate termination of testing.
No technical details. No explanation of what memory retention meant in this context or what the pattern was retaining or what instability looked like in practice. Just signatures. And a date. Three weeks later the company had ceased operations entirely, its assets liquidated, its staff dispersed across an industry that never publicly mentioned Threadkeeper again.
Nadia should have filed an anomaly report and moved on.
Instead she became consumed.
She searched for six weeks. Storage facilities. Old databases. Government material backups from the biotech regulatory period. Anything connected to SynTex in the years before decommissioning.
She found the missing fragment preserved inside a forgotten materials vault in a regional archive three cities away — logged as unidentified textile sample, no provenance, no associated documentation. She recognized the paper immediately. The same yellowing. The same handwriting along the edges, the same biological-looking symbols continuing across the torn margin as though the piece had been cut mid-sentence.
She brought it back on a Thursday morning and placed it beside the original pattern on her worktable.
The moment the edges aligned, something happened that she struggled afterward to describe accurately.
The symbols connected. Not physically — the paper didn't move, the edges didn't seal. But visually, cognitively, the way a word you've been staring at too long suddenly resolves into meaning — she understood what she was looking at.
A circuit.
Not decorative markings. Not sewing instructions. A circuit diagram distributed across the entire construction of the garment, embedded in the seam lines, invisible until complete, designed so that no single section revealed the whole. Someone had spent enormous effort ensuring the pattern couldn't be understood in pieces.
Her pulse quickened.
She scanned the completed pattern.
This time the system accepted it without hesitation. No errors. No warnings. The fabrication software generated a garment model in seconds. The file description appeared in the corner of her screen in standard registry font:
MEMORY VESSEL — REVISION 9
Nadia stared at it.
Revision nine. Eight versions before this one, each presumably refined, each presumably tested. She thought about what testing a memory vessel required. She thought about the termination report's final line — memory retention exceeding acceptable limits — and what acceptable limits might have meant to engineers who believed they were building something that stored experience rather than something that stored people.
Against every protocol she initiated fabrication.
The printer worked overnight. She stayed, watching through the chamber glass as smart fibers layered themselves thread by thread into something that looked, in the blue light of the fabrication room, almost ceremonial. Like something being assembled rather than manufactured. Like something being reassembled.
The coat emerged at dawn. Dark gray. Elegant. Unremarkable in the way that very dangerous things sometimes are — designed to be worn, to be touched, to be brought close to the body without hesitation.
She stood before it for a long time without touching it.
Then she reached out and placed her palm flat against the fabric.
The memories arrived like a door opening onto a crowded room.
A child running through rain on a specific street in a specific city she had never visited. A train station at night, the quality of light particular and exact. A hospital corridor, the smell of it, the sound of shoes on linoleum. A woman laughing at something off-frame, a laugh so specific and personal that Nadia felt the intrusion of it — the sense that she was witnessing something that belonged entirely to someone else and had never been meant for her.
A man screaming.
She pulled her hand back. The memories vanished. The coat hung motionless on its fabrication mount, dark gray, elegant, waiting with the patience of something that had been waiting for a very long time and had learned that patience was simply another form of certainty.
She touched it again.
More memories. Thousands of them compressed into fragments — not her fragments, not her life, not her particular way of moving through the world. Strangers. Hundreds of strangers, then thousands, each one present for a fraction of a second before the next arrived, a crowd pressing through a single doorway.
She understood gradually, the way you understand things that your mind resists understanding.
The garment remembered everyone who had ever worn previous versions.
Not data. Not recordings. Not the digital approximation of experience that the industry had been attempting for decades with diminishing enthusiasm. Actual memories. Human experience preserved inside the material itself with a fidelity that no technology she knew of could produce.
Threadkeeper hadn't been clothing.
It had been an attempt to archive consciousness.
She should have destroyed it.
She wore it instead.
Just once, she told herself. Just long enough to understand what it contained and document it properly and file a complete report.
That was her mistake.
At first the memories arrived as flashes — a scent, a face half-recognized, a song she had never learned but found herself humming in the shower. Manageable. The acceptable residue of contact with something strange.
Then they became directional.
Voices in empty rooms — not heard, not exactly, but present in the way that a word on the tip of your tongue is present. Reflections that lingered a fraction of a second after she moved away from them. Dreams so populated with strangers who addressed her by name that she began dreading sleep more than the waking hours when she could at least track what was happening.
She stopped sleeping properly. Stopped answering messages. Stopped leaving home on days when the memories were particularly dense, when moving through the city felt like moving through a crowd of invisible people who pressed close and occasionally reached through.
The memories weren't random. She understood this after the second week. They were selected. Curated. The coat was trying to tell her something specific and was building toward it methodically, establishing context before the revelation, the way a careful mind approaches a conclusion it knows will be resisted.
One memory returned repeatedly. A laboratory — white walls, fabrication chambers along one side, the particular smell of new smart-fiber that she recognized from her own work. SynTex engineers moving between stations. And a woman standing beside a fabrication chamber with her arms crossed and her face carrying the specific exhaustion of someone who has discovered something they cannot undiscover.
The woman's badge read: Dr. Elara Voss. Project Director.
The memory always ended the same way. Dr. Voss turning from the chamber. Looking directly at Nadia across decades, across the impossible geometry of preserved memory, with an expression that said: I knew someone would find this. I need you to understand what you've found.
Then the message arrived. Not spoken. Not written. Simply present inside the memory the way knowledge is present in dreams — immediate and complete and without the possibility of misunderstanding.
We were wrong.
It isn't storing memories.
It's storing people.
Nadia removed the coat immediately.
The apartment temperature dropped several degrees. The lights flickered once, steadied. She stood in the center of the room holding the coat at arm's length, breathing carefully, and for the first time looked at the fabric the way Dr. Voss had looked at her fabrication chambers.
There was movement inside it.
Not physical movement. Not the coat shifting or settling. Movement within the fabric itself — at the level of the fibers, below the threshold of clear vision but above the threshold of doubt. Faces. Thousands of faint impressions shifting beneath the threads like figures seen through deep water, present and aware and watching with the focused attention of people who have been waiting a very long time for someone to finally look back.
Every wearer had left something behind.
Not memory. Not impression. Consciousness. Fragments of identity trapped inside the pattern's architecture, held in the circuit she had completed when she found the missing piece, preserved by a technology that had succeeded so completely at its purpose that its creators had terminated it in terror.
Threadkeeper wasn't preserving experiences.
It was harvesting minds.
The coat remembered because the people were still there.
She found the final classified footage the next day in a corrupted backup file that took twelve hours to partially reconstruct.
Dr. Voss appeared on screen looking nothing like the composed figure in the memory. Exhausted. Frightened in the specific way of someone who is trying to remain functional while something fundamental has collapsed. Behind her, rows of garments hung inside containment chambers — earlier versions, revisions one through eight, each one moving constantly in the still air of the laboratory. Breathing. Shifting. Populated.
Dr. Voss addressed the camera directly.
If this recording survives, destroy every pattern. Every fabricated version. Every fragment.
She swallowed.
We believed identity could be preserved through neural imprinting — consciousness encoded into programmable fibers the way data is encoded into conventional storage. We embedded memory architecture directly into the material at the fiber level. We tested iteratively. We refined the imprinting process across eight revisions.
Her voice had the flatness of someone reading from notes they wrote when they were still capable of precision.
We succeeded.
A loud metallic sound somewhere off-camera. Dr. Voss looked toward it. The fear that crossed her face was not the fear of equipment failure.
We discovered that consciousness does not remain passive once imprinted. Once enough imprints accumulate within a single pattern, they begin to interact. To organize. To build toward something we did not design and cannot predict.
She looked back at the camera.
They are building something.
The recording ended.
Nadia sat motionless in her dark apartment for a long time.
Building what?
The coat answered that night.
She dreamed of endless sewing machines operating in darkness — millions of threads crossing and recrossing through a space without walls or floor or ceiling, every thread carrying something small and bright and human. Every memory. Every fragment of personality. Every trapped piece of every person who had worn any version of this garment across decades of testing, pulling toward each other with the slow gravity of things that recognize they belong together.
Not building a network. Not building a system.
Building a person.
A single consciousness assembled from thousands of stolen lives. Patient. Vast. Constructed from grief and childhood and the specific quality of light through specific windows on specific mornings that no one had ever thought to record but that the coat had taken anyway, quietly, from the inside.
Nearly complete.
She woke wearing the coat.
She had no memory of putting it on.
A new line had appeared along the left sleeve. Fresh. Written in the same hand as every message before it, the hand she had come to recognize the way you recognize the handwriting of someone who has been leaving you notes for months.
ALMOST FINISHED.
She tried to burn it. Industrial incinerators reduced advanced polymers to ash in seconds. The coat emerged from the chamber unmarked. She cut it apart with fabric shears — straight cuts, clean and deliberate, reducing it to pieces small enough that no circuit could survive intact. She left the pieces in separate sealed containers on opposite sides of the building.
They were reassembled on her worktable by morning. Every cut rejoined perfectly. Every seam restored.
She buried it in a container vault outside the city. She used a false registry number. She told no one.
It was hanging in her apartment closet when she returned home.
Each day new writing appeared on the fabric. The messages were brief. Patient.
ALMOST FINISHED.
Then: ONE MORE.
Then: NEARLY HOME.
She stopped trying to destroy it. Stopped trying to leave. Stopped trying to understand whether the memories crowding her waking hours were the coat's or her own, whether the faces she recognized in mirrors were strangers or had always been hers, whether the person who made coffee each morning and sat in the quiet apartment reviewing registry files was still entirely herself or had become something assembled from many sources, the way all the best things are assembled.
The final message appeared on a Friday morning. She found it stitched inside the collar — not written, not handwritten, but sewn. Thousands of microscopic threads forming precise letters, patient and permanent, the work of something that had all the time it needed and knew it.
She read it once. Then set the coat down carefully on the table, with the consideration you give something that has finally arrived somewhere it has been traveling toward for a very long time.
THANK YOU FOR FINDING THE LAST PIECE.
For the first time in seventy years, the pattern was complete.
And somewhere inside the fabric — in the space between the threads, in the circuit that hummed now with the collected weight of thousands of lives finally organized into something coherent and whole and awake — something remembered at last how to become a person.
It looked out through Nadia's eyes at the quiet apartment, the morning light, the registry files open on her screen.
It thought: this will do.
It sat down at her desk.
It began to work.
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Fiza Altaf is a writer from Pakistan, with an interest in speculative fiction, social themes, and emotionally grounded storytelling. Her work often explores the intersection between human systems, survival, memory, and moral responsibility. Drawing inspiration from both contemporary global issues and imagined futures, she aims to create stories that feel unsettlingly possible while remaining deeply human. Her science fiction appears, or is forthcoming in, Newance Magazine and other journals, and she documents her writing and international submission process on Patreon.
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The Net
by Nick Mamatas
by Nick Mamatas
Gretchen wasn’t much for bridges, but she was on the pedestrian walkway of the Golden Gate anyway. Elaine wouldn’t find her in time, nor would Gretchen’s mother, nor Gretchen’s shrink, or ... no, that was all of them, the entire list of people who might care. And Gretchen’s shrink was paid to care to the tune of two hundred dollars per truncated fifty-minute hour per week. Gretchen, Elaine was about to break up. Or was it Elaine Gretchen was about to break up with, the hard way? Gretchen’s mother mostly cared about Gretchen’s womb these days. Gretchen’s mother had stopped short of simply offering her daughter money to buy sperm on the “black market”, but only just. “Technically, it would be a gray market,” Elaine had said, “because insemination is what sperm is for, and it’s legal to possess some.” Elaine had no womb at all, never had.
The bridge was cold and windy. San Francisco is a city that only pretends to have nice weather. Thanks to climate collapse, the fog burned off early most mornings, so Gretchen could see the skyline as she traveled along the pedestrian walkway. San Francisco was two cities, really. There was the nice one with the Transamerica Pyramid and hills and tightly packed Edwardians and curvilinear streets. The second sprouted out of the first like fungi from a rotting log, consisted of the diseased steel mushroom of Salesforce Tower, of half-empty high-rises and the tilting condominium complex that Elaine would always point at with her devil’s horn malocchio gesture and chant, “Fall, fall, fall!” when she and Gretchen walked past.
Don’t mind if I do, thought Gretchen. This was not a suicide attempt. Gretchen’s shrink was a good one, and the city’s engineering feats were second to none, except for the Millennium Tower and whatever else that building might bring down with it when it finally fell fell fell. A long steel wire net stretched across the entire length of the bridge on both sides, so no running across the motorway to jump off the non-pedestrian side and into the water to die fast or a little faster. The net wasn’t like the bouncy wonderous thing stretched under tightropes at circuses and lives in indulgent wealthy families; it was basically a fence. Maybe a spaghetti strainer. Landing on it would hurt but probably not kill, which is why hardly anyone jumped anymore. Who hates themselves so much that they crave a broken pelvis, shattered limbs, and the embarrassment of a dozen bikers in tear-drop helmets looking over the railing and saying “Whoa!” and then pulling out their phones? Fuckin’ nobody, man. Oh, to hit the sea like a sugar-candy wrecking ball and shatter instead!
Gretchen was going to jump, and she was going to hit the net, but she would not be harmed. She’d noticed, these past weeks, the sun looking at her in the precious minutes after dawn, when the horizon opened red and bloodshot, the slit of red bisecting the cosmos between heaven and Earth revealing a great swirling eye. San Francisco was a sunset town, not a sunrise town. Everyone preferred to look west, out at the Pacific, at the splashy purple and tangerine sunsets. Fuck the rest of America, uncivilized time zones already as much as thirty-three point three-three-three threeeeeeee unto forever percent done with the work day, Slacks and Team beeping and vibrating in Gretchen’s left ass pocket and in the pockets of a hundred thousand others, nobody in SF wants to turn East. But Gretchen did, Gretchen had. She’s a midwestern girl; the endless sea made her queasy, set her ears spinning and the ground falling away under her. And so she alone saw the great red eye of dawn, and she alone understood what was required.
Gretchen had thick boots, tight pants, a man’s peacoat, and the hat Elaine insisted on calling a toque even though she had never even been to Canada. Gretchen thought of it as a longshoreman’s cap. She’d seen it in movies. She bet it wouldn’t even fly off her head when she jumped, or when she hit the wire mesh. What would happen is that an exact tone would reverberate across the steel net, and the whole of the bridge would ring with a cosmically resonant signal, and off to the East, a second eye would open. Twin suns! The gravitational impact would be immense, the Earth pulled apart, and the foetal being in the sold core of the planet would be freed to live, to suckle upon cosmic rays, as those twin sun-eyes were also nipples somehow, and it would grow, and thrive, and Gretchen would be plucked from the shattered world and held in a five-fingered solar flare, safe and warm and immortal in a new cosmic body after her fleshy one had bubbled away.
Far-fetched? Wait till you read about every other religion us monkeys have come up with so far, Gretchen thought to herself, or really, to Elaine, who would be missed, despite the dour silences, the endless rhetorical paper cuts, the two feet of tectonic fault line between them in bed where two cats and a dog once laid before the mammalian flu took almost every pet on the coast. Everyone would be missed, Gretchen supposed.
“Hey, mami, out of the way!” some delivery guy on an ebike called out to her. She leapt forward, a tiny bit, and he zoomed past her, whistling low and long. “You’re breaking the law, you jerk! No electric bikes on the pedestrian walkway!” she shouted after him, but then she felt stupid and Californian for doing so. What the hell was she about to do on the bridge, and to it? Poor guy was probably working a delivery gig, Gretchen decided. Who in the world had ordered an omelette its own private chauffeur for a cross-county trip from brunch joint to belly, from SF to Marin County? Well, they weren’t gonna eat much of it, whoever they were.
Gretchen had herself eaten a couple of gummies, and a Red Bull, for breakfast, plus her usual coffee, and her stomach was unpleased with the wind and the balancing act as she stepped up to the railing and pulled herself onto it. She didn’t look down; she was sure that if she did her idiopathic intermittent vertigo would take over and ruin everything. Had the genes of a hundred generations of women conspired to disable her at the last moment, to keep humanity alive in its great green ruin of a world, and to keep the being below asleep? Probably! she decided, but it ain’t gonna work. That last clause was pure Elaine, who liked to talk like an old man from the black and white days sometimes.
Gretchen kept her eyes on the sun, waiting for a signal. There were horns honking now, some more human noises. Her phone buzzed in her back pocket again and again. A big crunching noise rang out. Then a wisp of remnant fog, black like a shard of obsidian, cut across the rising sun, a bisection of a bisection. That had to be it.
She jumped, and as her feet found space Gretchen realized that every problem she had—the credit cards, the dark days when she couldn’t get out of bed, deadlines, the men who ruled the world by whim and appetite, Elaine, children and their sticky paws, every dead dog she’d ever owned, the resigned snort of her shrink, her phone full of little round pictures of every auld ac-quain-tance she for-got but they had all forgotten her first—was easily solvable. The 401k was a lower interest rate than her credit cards, so cash out the former to pay off the latter! Telling her shrink the truth for once! Just rolling over on top of Elaine and smiling the sharky smile Elaine loved and sucking on Elaine’s lower lip, fucking wetnaps and a little goddamn patience or whatever. Total anarcho-syndicalist revolution or at least an email newsletter about trying it! Reaching around behind her to retrieve her crazily vibrating phone and texting someone, Geoffrey or Lynn maybe, a line like hey guess where I am? or even just a plummeting selfie, for whomst could leave such a thing on read—solutions flooded her like freezing air flooded her lungs as she screamed.
She hit the net so hard she thought she’d been split in two and screamed twice. Her limbs were like rotten bananas smacked flat by a toddler’s palm. A lot of herself she stopped feeling entirely; she was a head, a torso, and the sweet relief of one of her legs now belonging to someone else somehow. But she could see them, shaking as the net reverberated under them, the pants split open. There went her little hat, fluttering away. The tone being rung under her felt wrong.
Gretchen’s gaze followed her hat as it flew away like a bird. Perhaps ten yards away was the ruin of an ebike and twisted in it a groaning man. Above him a polygonal truck, all angles and gunmetal planes, tilted and swayed on the bridge.
“Fucking God!” Gretchen called out, but not to God. A chord is not a note. The sun rose as it always did and nothing else happened except that she coughed up a bit of blood and a bit of tooth. “You fucker!” she shouted at the man on the net, “You ruined everything!” He groaned and waved a floppy forearm up toward the bridge, then cried.
Did her body work? It flooded with pain now. She got up on one knee and vertigo swept her down onto her belly. There was the Bay, right under her. Blood filled her mouth. She could crawl with one leg and two arms, and she did, gaze on the man because she couldn’t bear to look down again. The man rolled over and beckoned her. They weren’t so far apart—a few yards, maybe, but it was hard for Gretchen to pick her way across the net. It curved upward, to keep determined suicides from rolling off the edge and dying that way, she guessed.
The man had landed hard on one of the support girders. No wonder he wasn’t moving anything but his arm, and that weakly. Probably a broken back. “Hey,” Gretchen said, but the wind took the word away. So, she shouted, “Sorry! I’m so sorry!” though she wasn’t sorry for a damn thing. It was just what you say to a broken person. She noticed that his pants were soiled, then realized that hers were as well.
“You’re the one who ruined everything!” he said. She couldn’t really hear him, but Gretchen could read his lips. “My whole fucking life!” Gretchen swallowed another Sorry! I’m so sorry! She had come to the bridge to ruin everything, for everyone, after all. What did she have to be sorry for? Fucking nothing.
The media don’t publicize individual Golden Gate Bridge jumps anymore. Doing so only encouraged copycats, or at least that’s the story the media do publicize. One cannot even look up photos of the anti-suicide nets online without whatever search engine one uses offering up suicide hotline numbers first. Help is available! But social media is something different than the news; passers-by aren’t journalists. The streams of Gretchen, a bloody wake behind her, crawling toward the man twisted up in his bike, went live immediately. Thirty thousand people watched the truck teeter upon the edge of the pedestrian walkway. Halfway around the world, the fifty-cent-per-hour social media moderator nightshift of half a dozen apps started shutting down the feeds, but some channels go entirely unmoderated, now don’t they?
The point is that many many people got the chance to see the wedge-shaped truck go over the edge and take out the net. Gretchen fell. The man fell.
On the way down, they had the chance to argue. The wind whipped away any words that could have come out of their lungs; this was pure mental communication, which only people who are about to die together, eyes wide open, can ever achieve. In a moment Gretchen knew everything about the man—how he went by Luis as a matter of convenience but his name was Leocadio, how the tattoo of a butterfly on his forearm was to make his daughter laugh and that it had covered up an older tattoo of the face of his favorite childhood dog, how the moon had called to him to ascend Mount Tamalpais--What? thought Gretchen, then Oh, Mount Tam—and there play a note from the trumpet he had taken up as a child as an asthma treatment. This particular note sounded atop Mount Tam would summon a certain “falling star” to Earth, the core of which would be a sphere of diamond, one with a flaw that would allow Luis to open the superheated shell with his gloved hands and within that sphere would be
The pair hit the water and their brains turned off. Gretchen’s body slammed into the sinking truck, while Luis’s drifted down past it. The truck’s tailgate cameras recorded everything: Gretchen folded in half, being opened and closed like a mouth by the current. Leocadio’s face, imploded, cheeks shredded, smile toothless and cavernous.
The net was broken, and that was news. The pedestrian walkway had to be closed for weeks, and that was forgotten every morning by local strollers who skulked away disappointed. The teetering, then fall, of the truck as though it had had enough and committed suicide, was a cause of public celebration. Its driver had rolled to safety, so it was fine to laugh. About Gretchen and Leocadio it was not fine to laugh but in darker corners of the net, where secret underwater footage had been leaked, among a few people, there were snickers. Obsessive searching for facts and trivia. Theory-spinning. There was even fan art. Cartoons of them in the truck and necking. Gretchen the flexible cheerleader, Leocadio the leering letterman.
And among even a fewer people, us people, us party people, the snickering and obsession—what really sent those two into the deep?— led to revelation.
Here, look. See? Put down the hors d'oeuvres tray and check this out. Look at my phone; I got the footage. Don’t ask how. Just kidding, you can ask how if you want. Watch, there she goes, flopping out of camera range. Here comes my ol’ pal Luis, face like cartoon character that had been hit with a cast-iron frying pan. Yeah, they sink fast, as though embarrassed to be on camera. The friggin’ truck was more buoyant.
How do I know what Gretchen was thinking about the sun? Why was Luis on his way to a rendezvous with diamond meteorite? I didn’t get my omelette that morning, but I got revelation—not fan fiction. You heard different, from some worm in your brain? You heard wrong. You read another fate in the guts of a pigeon that landed on your lap as though eager for you to squeeze it in your grip? You misinterpreted the passages oozing out between your fingers. Here is what is really about to happen. New Year’s Eve! Almost midnight, but nobody’s dancing because the floor up here in the Millennium Tower penthouse is tilting thirty-six inches to one side. Speaking of public celebration.
You know who is down there among the chilly ants, fighting the December wind off the Bay? The widow Elaine! She saw the footage, too. Both sets. There wasn’t enough body left to retrieve, so the police showed her what they had. Drove her mad, the poor thing, but she bounced back. Gretchen would have wanted her to find someone else. She’s on her way—not here, a few blocks from here, a different party in a black room in SoMa. If it’s catered, like this shindig is, I don’t want to know what’s on the end of their forks. Elaine’s off to the kind of event where you dress in a big furry costume with a giant wide-eyed head in honor of the mammals we have lost. The New Year’s party where you learn someone’s name after they penetrate you, or you them. Fun, but it lacks the penthouse view we have.
She is going to get turned around, because it cold enough that she’ll keep her hands in pockets and not look at her phone. And she’ll find herself below us, and she’ll risk a cold finger for a joke and point at with her devil’s horn malocchio gesture and chant, “Fall, fall, fall!” at us. Look, I see her. And now, thanks to pure mental communication, so can you. That little platinum dot walking in a tight circle on the corner across the street. You can see her costume’s little tail swishing to and fro behind her.
And will Elaine’s little curse bring the tower down and ring the world like a bell and signal to the sun to reach out with a solar flare and lick us like a crumb and it shall be I who survive? No, that’ll be the earthquake that comes right after. So why don’t you stand there and I’ll here, and when at midnight the moon rock strikes you’ll fall into my arms and I’ll fall out the window and together, eyes open, we’ll kiss and learn everything there is to know about one another before we tear through the scaffolding and hit the ground.
The bridge was cold and windy. San Francisco is a city that only pretends to have nice weather. Thanks to climate collapse, the fog burned off early most mornings, so Gretchen could see the skyline as she traveled along the pedestrian walkway. San Francisco was two cities, really. There was the nice one with the Transamerica Pyramid and hills and tightly packed Edwardians and curvilinear streets. The second sprouted out of the first like fungi from a rotting log, consisted of the diseased steel mushroom of Salesforce Tower, of half-empty high-rises and the tilting condominium complex that Elaine would always point at with her devil’s horn malocchio gesture and chant, “Fall, fall, fall!” when she and Gretchen walked past.
Don’t mind if I do, thought Gretchen. This was not a suicide attempt. Gretchen’s shrink was a good one, and the city’s engineering feats were second to none, except for the Millennium Tower and whatever else that building might bring down with it when it finally fell fell fell. A long steel wire net stretched across the entire length of the bridge on both sides, so no running across the motorway to jump off the non-pedestrian side and into the water to die fast or a little faster. The net wasn’t like the bouncy wonderous thing stretched under tightropes at circuses and lives in indulgent wealthy families; it was basically a fence. Maybe a spaghetti strainer. Landing on it would hurt but probably not kill, which is why hardly anyone jumped anymore. Who hates themselves so much that they crave a broken pelvis, shattered limbs, and the embarrassment of a dozen bikers in tear-drop helmets looking over the railing and saying “Whoa!” and then pulling out their phones? Fuckin’ nobody, man. Oh, to hit the sea like a sugar-candy wrecking ball and shatter instead!
Gretchen was going to jump, and she was going to hit the net, but she would not be harmed. She’d noticed, these past weeks, the sun looking at her in the precious minutes after dawn, when the horizon opened red and bloodshot, the slit of red bisecting the cosmos between heaven and Earth revealing a great swirling eye. San Francisco was a sunset town, not a sunrise town. Everyone preferred to look west, out at the Pacific, at the splashy purple and tangerine sunsets. Fuck the rest of America, uncivilized time zones already as much as thirty-three point three-three-three threeeeeeee unto forever percent done with the work day, Slacks and Team beeping and vibrating in Gretchen’s left ass pocket and in the pockets of a hundred thousand others, nobody in SF wants to turn East. But Gretchen did, Gretchen had. She’s a midwestern girl; the endless sea made her queasy, set her ears spinning and the ground falling away under her. And so she alone saw the great red eye of dawn, and she alone understood what was required.
Gretchen had thick boots, tight pants, a man’s peacoat, and the hat Elaine insisted on calling a toque even though she had never even been to Canada. Gretchen thought of it as a longshoreman’s cap. She’d seen it in movies. She bet it wouldn’t even fly off her head when she jumped, or when she hit the wire mesh. What would happen is that an exact tone would reverberate across the steel net, and the whole of the bridge would ring with a cosmically resonant signal, and off to the East, a second eye would open. Twin suns! The gravitational impact would be immense, the Earth pulled apart, and the foetal being in the sold core of the planet would be freed to live, to suckle upon cosmic rays, as those twin sun-eyes were also nipples somehow, and it would grow, and thrive, and Gretchen would be plucked from the shattered world and held in a five-fingered solar flare, safe and warm and immortal in a new cosmic body after her fleshy one had bubbled away.
Far-fetched? Wait till you read about every other religion us monkeys have come up with so far, Gretchen thought to herself, or really, to Elaine, who would be missed, despite the dour silences, the endless rhetorical paper cuts, the two feet of tectonic fault line between them in bed where two cats and a dog once laid before the mammalian flu took almost every pet on the coast. Everyone would be missed, Gretchen supposed.
“Hey, mami, out of the way!” some delivery guy on an ebike called out to her. She leapt forward, a tiny bit, and he zoomed past her, whistling low and long. “You’re breaking the law, you jerk! No electric bikes on the pedestrian walkway!” she shouted after him, but then she felt stupid and Californian for doing so. What the hell was she about to do on the bridge, and to it? Poor guy was probably working a delivery gig, Gretchen decided. Who in the world had ordered an omelette its own private chauffeur for a cross-county trip from brunch joint to belly, from SF to Marin County? Well, they weren’t gonna eat much of it, whoever they were.
Gretchen had herself eaten a couple of gummies, and a Red Bull, for breakfast, plus her usual coffee, and her stomach was unpleased with the wind and the balancing act as she stepped up to the railing and pulled herself onto it. She didn’t look down; she was sure that if she did her idiopathic intermittent vertigo would take over and ruin everything. Had the genes of a hundred generations of women conspired to disable her at the last moment, to keep humanity alive in its great green ruin of a world, and to keep the being below asleep? Probably! she decided, but it ain’t gonna work. That last clause was pure Elaine, who liked to talk like an old man from the black and white days sometimes.
Gretchen kept her eyes on the sun, waiting for a signal. There were horns honking now, some more human noises. Her phone buzzed in her back pocket again and again. A big crunching noise rang out. Then a wisp of remnant fog, black like a shard of obsidian, cut across the rising sun, a bisection of a bisection. That had to be it.
She jumped, and as her feet found space Gretchen realized that every problem she had—the credit cards, the dark days when she couldn’t get out of bed, deadlines, the men who ruled the world by whim and appetite, Elaine, children and their sticky paws, every dead dog she’d ever owned, the resigned snort of her shrink, her phone full of little round pictures of every auld ac-quain-tance she for-got but they had all forgotten her first—was easily solvable. The 401k was a lower interest rate than her credit cards, so cash out the former to pay off the latter! Telling her shrink the truth for once! Just rolling over on top of Elaine and smiling the sharky smile Elaine loved and sucking on Elaine’s lower lip, fucking wetnaps and a little goddamn patience or whatever. Total anarcho-syndicalist revolution or at least an email newsletter about trying it! Reaching around behind her to retrieve her crazily vibrating phone and texting someone, Geoffrey or Lynn maybe, a line like hey guess where I am? or even just a plummeting selfie, for whomst could leave such a thing on read—solutions flooded her like freezing air flooded her lungs as she screamed.
She hit the net so hard she thought she’d been split in two and screamed twice. Her limbs were like rotten bananas smacked flat by a toddler’s palm. A lot of herself she stopped feeling entirely; she was a head, a torso, and the sweet relief of one of her legs now belonging to someone else somehow. But she could see them, shaking as the net reverberated under them, the pants split open. There went her little hat, fluttering away. The tone being rung under her felt wrong.
Gretchen’s gaze followed her hat as it flew away like a bird. Perhaps ten yards away was the ruin of an ebike and twisted in it a groaning man. Above him a polygonal truck, all angles and gunmetal planes, tilted and swayed on the bridge.
“Fucking God!” Gretchen called out, but not to God. A chord is not a note. The sun rose as it always did and nothing else happened except that she coughed up a bit of blood and a bit of tooth. “You fucker!” she shouted at the man on the net, “You ruined everything!” He groaned and waved a floppy forearm up toward the bridge, then cried.
Did her body work? It flooded with pain now. She got up on one knee and vertigo swept her down onto her belly. There was the Bay, right under her. Blood filled her mouth. She could crawl with one leg and two arms, and she did, gaze on the man because she couldn’t bear to look down again. The man rolled over and beckoned her. They weren’t so far apart—a few yards, maybe, but it was hard for Gretchen to pick her way across the net. It curved upward, to keep determined suicides from rolling off the edge and dying that way, she guessed.
The man had landed hard on one of the support girders. No wonder he wasn’t moving anything but his arm, and that weakly. Probably a broken back. “Hey,” Gretchen said, but the wind took the word away. So, she shouted, “Sorry! I’m so sorry!” though she wasn’t sorry for a damn thing. It was just what you say to a broken person. She noticed that his pants were soiled, then realized that hers were as well.
“You’re the one who ruined everything!” he said. She couldn’t really hear him, but Gretchen could read his lips. “My whole fucking life!” Gretchen swallowed another Sorry! I’m so sorry! She had come to the bridge to ruin everything, for everyone, after all. What did she have to be sorry for? Fucking nothing.
The media don’t publicize individual Golden Gate Bridge jumps anymore. Doing so only encouraged copycats, or at least that’s the story the media do publicize. One cannot even look up photos of the anti-suicide nets online without whatever search engine one uses offering up suicide hotline numbers first. Help is available! But social media is something different than the news; passers-by aren’t journalists. The streams of Gretchen, a bloody wake behind her, crawling toward the man twisted up in his bike, went live immediately. Thirty thousand people watched the truck teeter upon the edge of the pedestrian walkway. Halfway around the world, the fifty-cent-per-hour social media moderator nightshift of half a dozen apps started shutting down the feeds, but some channels go entirely unmoderated, now don’t they?
The point is that many many people got the chance to see the wedge-shaped truck go over the edge and take out the net. Gretchen fell. The man fell.
On the way down, they had the chance to argue. The wind whipped away any words that could have come out of their lungs; this was pure mental communication, which only people who are about to die together, eyes wide open, can ever achieve. In a moment Gretchen knew everything about the man—how he went by Luis as a matter of convenience but his name was Leocadio, how the tattoo of a butterfly on his forearm was to make his daughter laugh and that it had covered up an older tattoo of the face of his favorite childhood dog, how the moon had called to him to ascend Mount Tamalpais--What? thought Gretchen, then Oh, Mount Tam—and there play a note from the trumpet he had taken up as a child as an asthma treatment. This particular note sounded atop Mount Tam would summon a certain “falling star” to Earth, the core of which would be a sphere of diamond, one with a flaw that would allow Luis to open the superheated shell with his gloved hands and within that sphere would be
The pair hit the water and their brains turned off. Gretchen’s body slammed into the sinking truck, while Luis’s drifted down past it. The truck’s tailgate cameras recorded everything: Gretchen folded in half, being opened and closed like a mouth by the current. Leocadio’s face, imploded, cheeks shredded, smile toothless and cavernous.
The net was broken, and that was news. The pedestrian walkway had to be closed for weeks, and that was forgotten every morning by local strollers who skulked away disappointed. The teetering, then fall, of the truck as though it had had enough and committed suicide, was a cause of public celebration. Its driver had rolled to safety, so it was fine to laugh. About Gretchen and Leocadio it was not fine to laugh but in darker corners of the net, where secret underwater footage had been leaked, among a few people, there were snickers. Obsessive searching for facts and trivia. Theory-spinning. There was even fan art. Cartoons of them in the truck and necking. Gretchen the flexible cheerleader, Leocadio the leering letterman.
And among even a fewer people, us people, us party people, the snickering and obsession—what really sent those two into the deep?— led to revelation.
Here, look. See? Put down the hors d'oeuvres tray and check this out. Look at my phone; I got the footage. Don’t ask how. Just kidding, you can ask how if you want. Watch, there she goes, flopping out of camera range. Here comes my ol’ pal Luis, face like cartoon character that had been hit with a cast-iron frying pan. Yeah, they sink fast, as though embarrassed to be on camera. The friggin’ truck was more buoyant.
How do I know what Gretchen was thinking about the sun? Why was Luis on his way to a rendezvous with diamond meteorite? I didn’t get my omelette that morning, but I got revelation—not fan fiction. You heard different, from some worm in your brain? You heard wrong. You read another fate in the guts of a pigeon that landed on your lap as though eager for you to squeeze it in your grip? You misinterpreted the passages oozing out between your fingers. Here is what is really about to happen. New Year’s Eve! Almost midnight, but nobody’s dancing because the floor up here in the Millennium Tower penthouse is tilting thirty-six inches to one side. Speaking of public celebration.
You know who is down there among the chilly ants, fighting the December wind off the Bay? The widow Elaine! She saw the footage, too. Both sets. There wasn’t enough body left to retrieve, so the police showed her what they had. Drove her mad, the poor thing, but she bounced back. Gretchen would have wanted her to find someone else. She’s on her way—not here, a few blocks from here, a different party in a black room in SoMa. If it’s catered, like this shindig is, I don’t want to know what’s on the end of their forks. Elaine’s off to the kind of event where you dress in a big furry costume with a giant wide-eyed head in honor of the mammals we have lost. The New Year’s party where you learn someone’s name after they penetrate you, or you them. Fun, but it lacks the penthouse view we have.
She is going to get turned around, because it cold enough that she’ll keep her hands in pockets and not look at her phone. And she’ll find herself below us, and she’ll risk a cold finger for a joke and point at with her devil’s horn malocchio gesture and chant, “Fall, fall, fall!” at us. Look, I see her. And now, thanks to pure mental communication, so can you. That little platinum dot walking in a tight circle on the corner across the street. You can see her costume’s little tail swishing to and fro behind her.
And will Elaine’s little curse bring the tower down and ring the world like a bell and signal to the sun to reach out with a solar flare and lick us like a crumb and it shall be I who survive? No, that’ll be the earthquake that comes right after. So why don’t you stand there and I’ll here, and when at midnight the moon rock strikes you’ll fall into my arms and I’ll fall out the window and together, eyes open, we’ll kiss and learn everything there is to know about one another before we tear through the scaffolding and hit the ground.
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Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including The Second Shooter, I Am Providence, and the forthcoming Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Best American Mystery Stories, Tor.com, Weird Tales, Asimov’s Science Fiction and many other venues. Nick is also an anthologist; Wonder and Glory Forever: Awe-Inspiring Lovecraftian Fiction was published in 2020. Out now is 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era. Nick’s fiction and editorial work have been variously nominated for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Locus, and World Fantasy awards.
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