The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

up the energy she’s tapping into and dispersing it. They’re an exhaust system, coolant rods for a nuclear reactor. “There is something deep. It’s in me, and I’m in it. Is that what we’re looking for?”

“Yes,” says Fahima. She isn’t sure. They are off the map.

“It’s on the other side,” she says. “Some of it is here, but there’s more of it there. It comes through.” She looks directly at Fahima, eyes unfocused. “There’s some coming through already. It’s in you, too.” Emmeline’s head turns the way a cat turns toward an imaginary sound. “Look over there.”

“Emmeline, stay here with us,” says Fahima. “Stay now.”

“There’s a candle in the desert,” she says. “Mister Bishop is watching it from a hill. He’s younger than my dad.”

“Emmeline, come back here,” Fahima says, sounding like a scolding mother. Emmeline ignores her, stretches out her hand, extends her finger. She gives it a little twitch like she’s bopping a baby playfully on the nose. Her hand falls back onto the armrest.

“What is she doing?” Sarah asks. “I feel it in my head.”

“Sarah, be quiet,” Patrick says.

“Is she okay?” Kimani asks.

“Emmeline,” says Fahima sternly.

“I’m sorry,” Emmeline says. “It’s hard to move here, but it’s hard not to move, too. I’m flying through everything.”

“Is there a wall, Em?” Fahima asks. “Something like a wall? A blockage?”

Emmeline laughs at her. “It’s not like any of those things,” she says. “But I know what you mean. It’s part of the Hive. It’s what it’s for. It’s supposed to be there.”

“I need you to get rid of it, Em,” says Fahima.

Emmeline turns her head toward Fahima. Her open eyes search around Fahima, everywhere but her face.

“All right,” Emmeline says.

The machines are in high gear. Fahima can feel heat coming off them. She doesn’t know their upper limit. She doesn’t know what an explosion of Hive energy inside Kimani’s room, embedded in Hivespace, would do. It’s possible she’s killed them all.

Then it comes. A pulse, a rush. For Fahima, it is inspiration and communion. Her mind floods with a thousand immaculate gadgets. She can hear and touch everything with a wire or a circuit. For a heartbeat she is the god of machines, godlike in the sense of an embodiment, a form that contains all iterations of itself. It washes over her, a wave of infinite potential, crashes onto the shore, and disperses.

“What was that?” Sarah says. “I felt everybody.”

Patrick’s face has gone doughy, and he pushes it back into shape with his hands. At first he gets it wrong. It’s sharp and sculpted but not his. Someone else’s. Then he pulls together, looking amazed but afraid.

Emmeline’s eyes return to focus, a little girl again, no longer a conduit, no longer the holder and shaper of unimaginable things.

—

When they manifest in the Hive, it’s in the place where Emmeline was held captive once, years ago. Where Fahima got the first hint of what the girl was and what she potentially could do. If the Hive was built, it could be unbuilt. If it was a valve, letting some amount of energy into the world, that valve could be opened further, letting in more. From there, Fahima saw two possibilities. All of them, everyone with abilities, could become like gods. It was what she felt the moment after Emmeline opened the floodgates. It was terrifying. Fahima is relieved that it wasn’t permanent. She couldn’t stay like that forever. No one could. You’d go out of your fucking mind.

The other possibility was that the energy could be shared. Like a tuning fork struck against a piece of inert metal so that both ring. Only times a million. Times a hundred million. This ringing wouldn’t die the quick death of the tuning fork’s tone. It would resonate with a hundred million other ringings, form into one great note, the start of a song.

Fahima, Emmeline, Kimani, Patrick, and Sarah stand on a hill within the Hive and watch as people appear. They come faster and faster, crowding the infinite space.

“How many?” Patrick asks.

Fahima tilts her head to one side, then the other. “Two in three,” she says. A guess. “I’d say somewhere from half to two thirds within the signal range.”

“What’s the range?”

“North America.”

“I’ll call Lowery,” Patrick says. “Tell him they’re going to need a bigger camp.”

“Bet he already knows,” Kimani says.

It doesn’t stop. Fahima remembers a story. A flock of birds fly by. If there’s a definite number of birds, God exists. If the number is indefinite, he doesn’t. There’s no counting them, Fahima thinks, watching the Hive crowd to overflowing, feeling like a creator god herself. In the Hive it lasts long enough that Fahima and her friends can recognize it for what it is. A people become a nation, Fahima thinks. The wall between us and them torn down until there’s just us.

“What did I do?” asks Emmeline.

Fahima doesn’t have a full answer. She has a suspicion about the candle Emmeline saw in a desert, the massive implications of Emmeline’s tiny hand gesture. A notion of circular time. You might have started everything, Fahima thinks. Alpha and omega.

Patrick puts a hand on Emmeline’s back. “I think you saved us.”

The biggest contributing factor to the day, the one she won’t ever mention to Miquel, is that Carrie’s lost all hope. Months have passed with no word, no response, and she’s stopped expecting one. She’s stopped looking at the fence line. She’s started keeping her head down. You have to make a life here or die, she tells herself. Those are the options now.

Travis made the dress out of fabric Carrie helped smuggle in. It was teal and shiny, like the face of the ocean. Every fitting, Diane talked about what Travis could have done. “He could have dressed you in the true ocean,” she said. “Glimmers of fish and the roil of waves. It would’ve been beautiful.” Her hand traces the juddering seam lines of the dress, jagged like a cartoon