Excerpted: The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits by Ben Berman Ghan

An excerpt from The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits

Earthlight pops through the window, a distant blue eye on the horizon. Daisy is crouched over the bed, as if in an embrace. She stands. She backs away. How long did the organizations of Daisy and Miles fight? She doesn’t know. If the perfect timepiece of her software is working, she can’t find it inside. Miles is looking down at his hands as if surprised by the purple veins of aging he finds there. “I’ve had such . . . dreams,” he says, a murmur meant only for himself. “I dreamed I’d made such a discovery . . . that I was a tree . . . or a world, and then I became a boy, and then . . . I can’t remember the rest . . .”

            The bleeding has stopped. Something like moss is now creeping from Miles’s temples, buds that may one day blossom into little white flowers, healing the damage that has been done. He looks up, sharp eyes seeing his visitor for the first time.

            “What class are you?”

            “Daughter class, prototype.”

            “Yes. You were good work. And your mission primary?”

            “To protect human life.”

            Wart is still crying. Daisy doesn’t have it in her to process the kind of love that the one man might have for the other. Her programming is struggling enough. Miles smiles at his caretaker. “I’m sorry, child,” he whispers. “I am so sorry. But I must ask you to wait downstairs. I need to speak to our visitor alone. There are things she needs to know.”

            Wart dries his eyes with the edge of his sleeve. The two men share a moment together in silence, a silence that shuts the cyborg out. Then Wart nods. The bedroom door closes gently and noiselessly behind him.

            Miles’s eyes turn to Daisy. They fix her in place as though they are the eyes of the father she isn’t permitted to remember.

            “Look at you. We helped design you, you know, Nora and I . . .”

            “I . . . did not know that.”

            “No, I didn’t think so. You know, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between them, the people who have been augmented and the machines programmed to think they are people. I’ve been told even the subjects themselves can’t always tell.”

            “I know what I am.”

            “Maybe . . . Do you know why we came here?”

            “Your late wife was offered a contract at the university.”

            “No, little Daisy. Not to Lunar London. Why we came to the moon.”

            His use of her name startles her. Can you imagine it showing in her face? No. Perhaps you could imagine looking down, finding the twitch of surprise in her little fingers. Yes, maybe you can imagine her surprise there.

            “You were first-generation colonists. You took the bursary option that was offered to skilled labour specialists.”

            Miles shakes his head.

            Through the streaming link of endless code that stretches millions of kilometres through space from the mistress buried under Earth to the daughter prowling on the moon, Daisy feels the attention of her Mother-AI turning to her. But Daisy can still quantify the unease in the strings of binary code inside her.

            “You were sent here?”

            Miles smiles in assent. Daisy feels the Mother inside her reaching out, breaking down the firewalls of her independence. Daisy knows the Mother wants her to sleep, to become a hollow body again, so the Mother can use the weapon that she is to wipe away the man in the bed, the man on the floor. But though she feels the access requested, it is like feeling movement on the other side of a glass cage. For the first time ever, the Mother’s will doesn’t touch her. “Why were you sent here?”

            “We were sent here chasing a dream.” Though the room is warm, Miles shivers and turns to the window. Imagine him lying on his side, the man who has been forced to sleep so long; he appears almost insubstantial enough to be mistaken for a shadow cast from the bare skeleton branches of the ash tree that peeps at the bedroom window, leaning over the Kew Garden walls. “This whole world is a dream. It’s just . . . not our dream. The dream of an empty, ripe world. It is the dream that colonists and conquerors have had since the first days of boats. It is . . . a dishonest dream.”

            Through her fraying link to Earthly structures, Daisy can feel the Mother-AI pushing against the walls that have grown around Daisy’s command circuits, a parent trying to find a way past the locked bedroom door. “I’m not here for dreams, Doctor,” she says.

            “You are here for Arthur.”

            “I am.”

            “You should not have come.”

            The cyborg hesitates. Perhaps she is choosing not to scream. Her functioning implants have created a reading of Miles’s vitals inside her wonderful eyes. His rising infection is like a ticking clock. He is looking at his hands again. The tips of his aged fingers have begun to change. They are becoming hard and brittle, and she knows there will not be a body in the bed for much longer. She knows the bargain that the organizations of Miles have struck. She presses on. “Doctor, there were . . . machines in you. Do you know how they could have entered your system?”

            “Nora put them there. She was a genius, my wife. She had hoped . . . those artificial antibodies might be more effective at preventing contamination during long-term contact with our project.”

            Imagine the human creeping in through the machine. Imagine its roots twisting through cogs, weeds springing up in circuit boards. Daisy doesn’t imagine. She feels it. “What was your project?” she asks. This is the human’s question, not the machine’s.

            “Arthur was our project,” he says. “He was the future we were so sure belonged to us.” Miles’s arms have become wisps, echoes of the ash trees beyond, bark drifting into the dark night air.

            “You know where he is?” she asks. The bird in her chest is trying to fly out from between her ribs. It is yearning to be free in quick and desperate beats.

            “I do. He told me where he would go after he went to find the truth we’d kept from him.”

            “Truth?”

            “It is the same truth we have kept from you, Daisy.”

            History has branches, and so does the future. History’s branches gnarl and curl and spread. Daisy wavers between two futures. She imagines her hesitation is a lifetime, but it’s only a second. The rot of Miles Traveller has reached his throat. He is paling. His eyes are beginning to close. Where is Arthur Traveller? she tries to say. But there is a seed of doubt in Daisy. It’s there next to the bird inside, nestled into a wall where mushrooms grow. Her programming pulls one way. But that seed pulls too. The need to kill against the need to understand.

            “Where did he go to find the truth?” she asks. Just like that, one future snaps.

            Lips speak within a wood carving of an old, old man, who’d dreamed of being a tree and woke to a world without his family and was now content to become that tree once more.

            “Troy,” whispers Miles. “There is a map inside me. You can take it, once I’m gone.” He smiles. Daisy doesn’t understand why.

            “You’re not afraid?”

            Miles laughs. “What do I have to be afraid of, little Daisy? You are the one who has the journey ahead.”

            “You are dying. Death is the end.”

            The creature who had once been an old man, trying to make a second start from the broken promise of a new world, only shakes his head. “Sweet Daisy-flower, how would you know? You’ve never died.” His eyes remain open. They remain a deep, rich brown. They don’t blink.

            Before Daisy leaves the room, she approaches the bed again. She tucks the sheets around the still wood carving of the man. She kisses what was once a cheek, the way a child kisses their parents when saying goodbye. She does this, not knowing why. From inside his mouth, she plucks what could be a pumpkin seed, bringing it to her lips.

Ben Berman Ghan is a writer and editor from Toronto, Canada, whose prose and poetry have been published in Clarkesworld magazine, Strange Horizons, the Blasted Tree Publishing Co., the /tƐmz/ Review and others. His previous works include the short story collection What We See in the Smoke. He now lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta, where he is a Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of Calgary. You can find him at inkstainedwreck.ca.

Photo of Ben by Ryanne Kap.