This book floored me. A dystopian novel with two unlikely companions. Ysmany is a young girl fleeing her community in order to save a baby from a military grade twitch (human who voluntarily chose a technologically advanced “secondskin” suit making them essentially hybrid tech/human) who leads the community and rids them of any perceived threats. Ysmany follows and joins with another twitch, The Ragpicker, who is searching for his long lost husband. Well not the actual husband but perhaps he can find the husbands data and upload it to a syncable he has found. Together they cross a landscape filled equally with beauty and horror seeking refuge for Ysmany and the baby. Their travels will eventually take them back to Ysmany’s community where both will have to sacrifice in order to survive. Such a beautiful novel of loss and connection, and finding a way to survive against all odds. Highly recommended.
THE RAGPICKER by Joel Dane
GENRE: Science Fiction / Dystopian
BOOK PAGE: The Ragpicker – Meerkat Press
SUMMARY:
The Ragpicker wanders the lush, deserted Earth, haunted by failing avatars and fragmented texts. He’s searching for traces of his long-dead husband but his journey is interrupted by a girl, Ysmany, fleeing her remote village. Together they cross the flourishing, treacherous landscape towards sanctuary. Yet the signals and static of the previous age echo in the Ragpicker’s mind and whisper in the girl’s dreams, drawing them toward the gap between map and territory—while offering precious hope.
BUY LINKS: Meerkat Press | Amazon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joel Dane is the author of twenty-four novels across several genres—and pseudonyms. He’s written for TV and podcasts, including a dozen episodes of a Netflix Original Series and an audio drama starring Jameela Jamil and Manny Jacinto. As Joel Dane, he wrote the Cry Pilot trilogy for Ace Books, and Marigold Breach for Realm.
GIVEAWAY: $25 Meerkat Press Giftcard
GIVEAWAY LINK: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/7f291bd842/?
EXCERPT:
Ysmany
In my town, we named ourselves in the winter of our ninth year. That’s when I became Ysmany.
Before that, everyone called me Alice Ann. My father and mother, Server, the other kids in the children’s tent, everyone.
The morning after I took my new name I wished I hadn’t.
I missed Alice Ann.
×××
Even when I was knotting alone in the silence of the frame houses, I felt them—my family and friends and neighbors—linked to me with invisible chains, with what Server called strings or ligaments.
“That’s what love is,” my father told me. “Connection.”
“So is hatred,” I didn’t say.
My father was a good, ordinary man, and easy to hurt. Also, he was right: I loved him.
I loved his ordinary goodness.
×××
“Is love your greatest weakness?” Server asked me. “Or your greatest strength?”
“How the shit should I know?” I said, to prove I wasn’t scared of her.
×××
During town meals, I squeezed between Luz and Dmitri on our bench in the dining tent, where black-blistered acorn flatbread was served steaming from the clay oven. We tore off pieces to smear in sauces and syrups.
On celebration days, everyone got a little drunk. I liked the swimmy, floaty, bodiless feeling. Luz glowed and spun while Dmitri fell quieter and more beautiful.
Despite my gift for knotting the lampstack ligaments, I never felt more connected than during a sing-along. That rare moment when my voice stumbled into a harmony.
One time, Dmitri noticed my voice ringing true.
He smiled at me and I lost the note.
Kindness was important to him. Sometimes I thought he worked too hard at it, but even a strained kindness was still a true kindness. Maybe the truest of all. Plus, he was beautiful, with black freckles on brown skin, like Server’s lessons of braille and morsecode.
She’d started taking me aside for special instruction long before I became Ysmany. For years and years, even though I’d begged her to stop. Her attention pulled me apart from the others. Her attention loosened the weave.
Also, my father once cried after he caught us alone.
×××
The grownups were afraid of Server. I was afraid of other things, like abandonment and pregnancy and the scentless billows of information that engulfed us, even after all this time, every moment of every day. A million million yottabytes of data humming with static in our atoms and cells and breath.
“We’re living inside a corpse,” I told Luz, as she plunked acorns into a basket. “The cloud is a corpse.”
“It’s not a corpse,” she said. “It’s just history.”
Actually she said, “Don’t be stupid, Minnie.”
So a few nights later, I stood up during a meeting and said, “What if history is the corpse of the god we used to worship?”
I talked like Server sometimes, to make the others afraid.
×××
My mother thought there was something missing in me.
“Some essential lack,” she said.
×××
Server told me that causation operates identically in both directions, and that she obeyed the laws of physics but not of chronology. Something like that. She was sick in the head. All twitches were sick in the head. The secondskins that had kept them alive through the end of the world, for a hundred years or whatever, the technology that preserved their bodies also poisoned their minds.
Server had served—hah—the community for a long time. She’d built this town over generations, but now she was missing something essential.
She always treated me gently, though.
Like a kindred spirit, or a coconspirator.
×××
The twitches were finally dying, after a long decay. Like a lingering illness, my father told me, that had lasted his entire lifetime.
Server isn’t dying, I said.
Not yet, he said. But she’s slowing down.
He lowered his voice and said: Losing her grip.
×××
As the twitches dwindled, travel between settlements increased. We started seeing one or two people every few years, one or two groups. They usually shied away from our town, though they always left offerings behind.
“To help us build the lampstack,” Dmitri said.
“To appease Server,” I said.
Early that spring, a wagon stopped a day’s journey away and waited for us to make contact. When we did, they shared food and gifts. They called themselves “pioneers” in a slowly, syrupy accent that took everyone else a few days to understand.
Not me. Accents were just another kind of pattern.
The pioneers were three mothers, two fathers, a handful of grandparents, a mess of kids and a baby named VK. Their wagon was drawn by water buffalo that looked like myths. Luz fell in love with their curved horrible horns and booming chests and placid eyes. She said they reminded her of Dmitri.
We invited them into our tents and they told us about a town called Isabella where a thousand librarians recreated the enklopedia pages that flickered onto a screen scavenged from a smartfridge which technicians powered with generators remagnetized or respooled from alternators.
I didn’t understand any of that, but I thrilled to the thought of peeking through spyholes at lightning strikes of history.
×××
The pioneers talked about a land bridge.
They talked about a mass wedding.
One grandfather carved pictures into flatplanel displays. He carved the twins, Tracy and Liam, on opposite sides of a single surface, so when you looked through you saw them both at once.
Except it wasn’t Tracy and Liam, it was Server and me.
×××
The pioneers wanted to trade a buffalo calf and aluminum foil for safe passage and sweet orange preserves for the children.
“What about VK?” I asked. “He’s too young for preserves.”
A mother stroked the baby’s back. “What do you think he’d like?”
“A toy,” I said. “For when he’s old enough.”
She looked at the tokens I’d prepared. “One of those?”
“No,” I said, and Server drifted into place behind me.
The pioneers fell silent at the chilling proximity of a twitch, then listened attentively as she explained the lampstack. They already knew what it looked like: a thousand cords dangling from the rafters, joists, and beams of empty house frames, each cord knotted with dozens or hundreds of objects.
But they didn’t know why.
Server usually called the cords “strings” and the objects “nodes” so I usually called them anything else: knots, tokens, ligaments, lines, circuits, charms, trinkets, strands.
“Is it like an abacus?” one brave pioneer mother asked. “Or an oracle?”
“The lampstack is not reducible to metaphor or simile,” Server told her, with a fatal rasp in her voice.
Nobody else noticed. Not then.
×××
Server bristled at the concept of Isabella, where librarians investigated the past.
“That is dangerously unwise,” she told me. “Retreating into history.”
“Oh, bullshit,” I said.
She spun toward me, her secondskin exhaling tension.
“The past is roots,” I said. “How’s a tree supposed to grow without them?”
“It’s dangerous,” she said, clasping her hands behind her back. “This ‘enklopedia’ they consult is a cave wall and the past is shadows cast.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re afraid they’ll (just) learn the same lessons that killed everyone the last time?”
“Fragmentation,” she said. “Is a prerequisite of survival.”
Then she started ranting about hyperconnectivity, so I walked away.
×××
“Don’t test her,” my father warned me.
“I won’t,” I promised, but he knew I was lying.
Server scared everyone else, so I liked to badger her. To push the limits. Maybe I wondered what would happen if I pushed her too far.
She didn’t need me but she thought she did.
I told myself that amounted to the same thing.
×××
I collected a basket of lamb hooves from the kitchen then sat cross-legged on the lowest step with them warming my lap. They smelled of myrtle and nettle and fat, but when I licked one it didn’t taste like much.
Some I put aside for the lampstack, others I returned to the basket for the cooks and farmers. For bonemeal and broth and stuff.
“They’re all the same,” Dmitri said, squatting beside me.
“They’re miles apart,” I told him, and one by one I showed him the angles and slopes and cracks that made each hoof unique and beautiful.
He said, “Everything’s different from up close.”
I said, “Then come closer.”
No, I didn’t.
I said, “Yeah,” and ducked my head.
×××
One of the pioneer fathers told me and Dmitri that hundreds of “towers” still stood, scattered across the land. He said, “Each tower, she broadcast her signal to the nearest towers, and attracts their signal in return. Forming paths between them.”
“Like ligaments,” I said.
“Or paths,” another father said.
“Her signal, she keeps twitches away, yes?” the first one said. “She says, ‘No entry for twitches.’ So for us, towers are safe harbors or, or oasis in the desert. You know oasis?”
“We stick to the paths for safety,” the second one told us. “But there are stretches of land you cannot cross fast enough before you are caught.”
“They live thirty-five, forty miles apart,” the first father said.
“The towers do?” I asked.
“La-sha,” the first father said. “And between them? If a twitch catches your scent, they come, yes? Crack you open like a nut.”
“Now the twitches are dying,” the second one said. “Running out of the juice.”
Except the towers were running out of the juice, too.
The towers were failing, one by one by one.
×××
The grandfather swore me to secrecy and opened a safe that contained four envelopes. Each envelope contained a slip of paper that contained a broken paragraph from a long-ago source.
The grandfather said, “This is our entry into Isabella.”
“That’s what you’ll give them so they’ll let you in?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“Perhaps the reason,” he told me. “Perhaps part of the reason.”
I flipped through the packet twice.
We are marching backwards, this tangle of thorns.
The grandfather wouldn’t let me copy the words into my folder so I memorized them.
×××
I woke to find Server beside my bed, whispering a string of words: “. . . gravediggers, explanations, exhumations, infections, addictions, documentations . . .”
My heart turned to water. “Are you talking about the pioneers?”
“Plagues and wonders,” she whispered. “Validation, verification, annotation.”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “Just tell me.”
“Annotation,” she repeated, and the machine bulk of her drifted noiselessly toward the tent flap. “Marginalization, vivisection, selection, election . . .”
I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. I watched her leave, then I went back to sleep, that’s what I did. I went back to sleep, and that was the night she—
That was the night.
×××
A week later, I stretched out on the floor in the house frame numbered 307.
The concrete slab was cool on my back through my shirt. Cascades of knotted cords dangled from the beams and fell around me like a downpour. Colors shifted in and out of focus. My eyeballs itched on the inside: something felt out of place, like bats on a branch in daylight.
The ligaments connected me to fence lizards and concrete slabs and boargrass, but mostly to people. I counted two hundred and twenty-four souls in town. Everyone else counted two hundred and twenty-three.
That was not close, that was a chasm.
I was going to betray them: my friends, my town, my father. Server. Maybe even myself.
I needed to, though I didn’t know why. Why now? Why for this?
I didn’t care why. “Why” didn’t mean anything. We didn’t ask “why” when we wanted an explanation, we asked when we wanted a myth.
×××
The two hundred and twenty-fourth soul in town was the baby.
Server murdered his mothers and fathers, his siblings and grandparents. She killed them and left the corpses for me to weave into the lampstack.
She’d kill the baby next, if I didn’t take him away, and I couldn’t take him away.
Not without help.
×××
Days passed. Weeks. Server watched the lampstack, I watched her.
Then Liam and Rucky reported an intruder camping past the reservoir: a wanderer, a twitch, moving across our land like an eagle’s shadow.
Liam’s twin sister Tracy frowned. She hated that Server sent Liam on sentry duty but not her.
“Boys are less important,” Suzena told her. “That is biology.”
“He’s so unimportant he gets to do whatever he wants,” Tracy said.
“The wanderer could be a scout,” Liam told Server. “Or could be an outcast.”
“He looks like a twitch,” Rucky repeated.
He looks like an opportunity, I didn’t say. He looks like my only chance to save the baby.
“Take a team,” Server told Rucky. “And retrieve a datum for the lampstack.
The Ragpicker
I am a scholar of abandonment, I am wise in the ways of things left behind. What I am is, is a curator of decay, and at the moment I’m lying on a hillside in foothills that smell of manzanita and sagebrush.
I’m on my belly pretending to watch the house looming above me, a monument of polished stone, rectangles set into rectangles, with three high decks and a dry swimming pool that is littered with seedpods and cellophane and a topsoil scum of windblown dust from which sprouts catalina lilac or peppermint acacia. Taxonomy is not my strength, but in any case, the pool is clogged with spine-edged leaves, leaving no room for more timid seedlings to root among the cracks and buries.
I mean root like saplings not root like pigs. Pigs are feral, monstrous now, eighty generations distant from the slaughterhouse.
The point, if you are attending me, the point you’ll recall is that I’m not watching the house, the house is not the object of my scrutiny. My gaze is on the curved mirror leaning against a snail-studded stalk to my left; I am watching a blurred reflective crescent of hillside behind myself.
I appear alone but I am not.
They’ve been following me for two days.
At least two days.
Two of them, or four. Just out of sight, never drawing nearer, never falling behind. They stalked me from the reservoir through the stretched shadow of that tilted bridge and across the cloverleaf gap. The prickle of strangers’ eyes raises welts on my neck. I smell a human scent when the wind shifts, and I haltingly, experimentally record these words onto internal media for an audience that may never exist—
Wait.
Pardon me.
I’m new to this, coltish and uncertain.
Well, here’s something you didn’t expect: massive cockroach die-off in the cities after the blissful end. Though perhaps they’ve rebounded, I don’t know. I stay away from cities now. Cities are dangerous for twitches like myself, we unfortunate souls who survived the final days while trapped in terminally-compromised secondskin bodysuits that we can neither remove nor ignore.
The air in cities is full of unwanted approvals.
The air here, however, snakes through the undergrowth, and in the mottled glass of the mirror I track each individual gust of wind.
My mind fires fast.
I am optimized for irrelevancy.
I am also weary of being pursued, fretful and agitated. Unease tightens the scars on my neck into a rope. My pursuers won’t face me; they know what I am. They will retreat if I turn upon them, only to later return, so I must engineer a confrontation, an ambush of sorts, after which I’ll continue on my way.
I am heading home.
There. That is something you should know. We are heading home. This is the story of my journey home, like a classic tale of, of
At long last, we’re heading home.
I am lashed onward by the desperate hope that I’ll recover intact fragments of my husband in a hidden homestead cache. It’s not likely, mind you. It’s a remote and attenuated chance, a squeamish squirming and underfed chance but a chance—and odds are funny things.
That’s why they’re called odds.
Three years and three thousand miles away, plus or minus, I put my hand on a syncable in a gutted maintenance van. I’d been stealing eggs from the doves that roosted in the vehicle—plump graypink birds, at least—and I found there amid the weeds and guano a rugged case containing a syncable—an Arielco MT-MT Forensic Bias Syncable—of precisely the correct compatibility.
The syncable is not a cable but a squid-shaped device that transfers data—memories—across platforms, and this one boasts a self-contained power source which, even after all this lost time, positively hums with hope. So I am heading home to recover whatever fragments of Nufar still exist.
Except I cannot proceed without resolving this pursuit.
So after many idle hours I approach the polished stone house. In the colorless moment before dawn I rise with evaporative sluggishness to a flagstone path. A thicket of rosemary is rotting from the inside, dense with mildew or—no.
A human corpse is strapped to a networked lawnchair entombed inside the thicket. I don’t eat people, despite the fact that of all the animals I might consume, a human is the least strange. The meat is my meat, the flesh is my flesh, and what stronger claim do I possess than to my own species?
Still Nufar disapproves, so I hesitate to—
Wait. Perhaps I should linger a moment to explain that my husband Nufar and the other “obits”—programmed personifications of the beloved dead—exist in partial suspension in my personal digital network as does Default, a virtual assistant that stiches together information from tattered databases and wiki patches. She lost contact with the satellites decades ago and now relies upon locally-stored data, the water-damaged footnotes of a once-global network contained in the lumps on my shoulders and spine under my secondskin, the implanted grandchildren of the smartsets and retinserts that once fused humanity into a single global nervous system.
I unstrap my pack: my heart, my hearth, my husband, my hope . . . my simpleminded stratagem for confronting the pursuers, for giving them such an ambush fright that violence becomes unnecessary.
I cross upheavals of concrete and botany and prop my pack against a boulder.
When I turn toward the house, I feel my pursuers watching me. I feel their stares lifting and rotating me, examining my flayed cross-sections, straining toward me, urgent with appetite and algorithm.
The exterior glass walls collapsed long ago, to earthquake and mudslide, to roof-rat and carpenter bee and indifference. When I step inside, shards shatter beneath my boots, which reminds me of music.
Playlist, I tell Default.
Playlist not found, she tells me.
I unwrap one of the rags from my wrist and fashion a hilt for a thick wedge of glass. Knife at my belt and crowbar at my hip, yet I fashion a crude glass blade because I like the shape of the wedge and because I prefer using tools in the location from which they sprung because I, I, I don’t, in truth, trust becauses anymore; I’m only backfilling them now on account of recording this story.
There is an open space with a kitchen and a kitchen island and a dining room with a table that is constructed from some thousand-year material, though the chairs are stumps, and to my left there’s a stone wall with a fireplace.
I ignore the kitchen.
Here’s a fact about the end of the world: there is plenty to eat.
There is plenty to drink.
There is plenty.
The Earth is an endless cornucopia garden. There are fish in the streams, mushrooms in the forest, there are roots and stalks and leaves, not to mention powders in unbreached containers, game animals on every highway and meadow, and three fruit trees within two minutes of where I stand, or four if avocado is a fruit.
Avocado is a fruit, Default tells me.
Maggots add fat to our diet when avocados aren’t available but intact fabric isn’t as easy to find so I slip across the mudcaked tiles, past rotting wallboards half-concealing sheafs of copper wires, more copper wiring than makes sense, and I slink into the bedroom then shiver with fear.
I am no longer within eyeshot of the front of the house. I am no longer within eyeshot of my pack and using my pack as bait is using my life as bait. Still, what am I, what are any of us, if not lures cast into murky currents for the purpose of—
Also, my pack is too cumbersome for undetectable theft.
I will notice them making the attempt.
So I’ll make a show of discovering the liquor cabinet—liquor does not degrade—and wait for them to conclude that I pose no threat. I’ll bait my trap with the pretense of drunkenness, though first I enter a bedroom that looks like eight or seven decades of squirrels and damp and owl pellets and two corpses lazing together in a once-padded social industry settee. They’re largely gristle now, impregnated with insect eggs and elevated into ecosystems, but they died happy, that much I know, they died engaged with distant truths, which even after all this time I find a comfort.
I also find a sealed box in the closet, and inside the box there is a Daisy P sheet used to cushion the more-delicate contents, a sheet which depicts an elegant woman in a yellow dress sitting on a pink chair surrounded by flowers that make Nufar smile in my mind, so I wrap the sheet around myself and request that the obits admire me.
Opinions are divided, as always, so we talk instead about what the corpses left behind—the pool, the view, the synaptic links to society—and then I look for the liquor cabinet but when I turn a corner what I find is a bear.