Read Interzone 251 for Free Online

cardboard box. Through the clear plastic of the bag it looked like stone dust, though I didn’t look at it much. I didn’t want to look at it, but I couldn’t help feeling its weight. It was heavy.
    Lucia’s mother handed it to me, first taking me to an empty corner of the room, pressing the box into my hand without looking at it or me, as if we were passing illegal goods. “I’m keeping most of them, Neil. She’ll be with her father. But I thought you should have this. A small portion. I know you two were very close.”
    “Yes,” I said stupidly, looking down at the white box in my hand. I had no idea what was in the box or what she was talking about. Is it customary to give out party favors at a memorial service?
    “Perhaps you could take them to some place that was special to the two of you” she said next, and that’s when the proverbial coin finally dropped. Ashes. I had a box of Lucia’s ashes in my hand.
    Lucia’s mother was a small woman. Not wizened or bent, but short. And Lucia had been so tall… She looked up at me, full of earnest desire to impart information. “But you must be very careful if you go outside the enclaves,” she said. “There are still diseases in the world. Terrible diseases. I’m sure that’s how Lucia got sick. She was only thirty four, you know…” She stopped talking and lowered her head, staring down at the floor.
    I knew Lucia’s illness was a vanishingly rare thing, that there were hardly any diseases left in the world, and those that still existed were as likely to strike inside or outside of an enclave, but I couldn’t fault Mrs Charyn for her paranoia. She had been through the Dust Wars, and now she’d lost her daughter. I couldn’t fault her for much of anything, ever.
    She lifted her head again and shook it a little, as if her grief was an annoying bug flitting around her face. “She was always going to different places outside the enclave,” she said. “Always different places. Do you know, once she told me that she’d gone to the airport and found an airplane and a pilot, and she just hopped aboard and flew to Chicago! Can you imagine?”
    I could imagine. Only our real destination had been Batavia, not Chicago. Lucia had heard reports of a major new-tech construction project at Fermilab. Supposedly they were going to use the old accelerator to open a portal to other dimensions, or other worlds, or maybe Auntie Em’s house in Kansas. Lucia was bouncing with excitement all through the trip, her hands dancing with gestures as she chattered delightedly about what we would find, what we would see, about all the wonderful possibilities. Beside her, I basked in her enthusiasm, loving her for her energy and optimism. There were times when I almost believed that some of that vitality was my own, but really I was just feeding on her, like a vampire.
    And of course when we got to Fermilab it was shut down, abandoned, dead. We found the construction site easily enough; a glistening black building about four stories high, freeform and amorphous in shape. It was adjacent to an older structure that we learned was called the DZero laboratory. The old-tech inside the DZero building was incredible; dazzling in its massiveness and complexity. But in the new building, everything was simply incomprehensible. Smooth, unbroken surfaces; shapes that might have been display screens and workstations growing up seamlessly from the floor and out of the walls. But nowhere was there anything that looked like a usable control; nothing that gave a hint about how to interact with this construction, how to make it do anything.
    And there was no one there, in the new building or the old one. No bustling robots, no stone-faced, blank-eyed augmented humans, no regular people. Just Lucia and me and emptiness and nothing.
    Lucia wandered through the new-tech building, touching everything, her eyes wide and worshipful, taking it all in as if it meant something, as if it was something other