The Second ChancesSydney Sackett
3100 words We knew almost from the beginning that there was something different about our Lisa: she entered the world with a gasp, not a wail. I remember her cracking open her tiny, squinted eyes, watering against the overhead lights. She peered from doctor to nurse to Brian and me, with my sweating arms outheld to take her. Her downy, near-nonexistent eyebrows curved bemusedly. She coughed amniotic fluids, then sighed. One little red fist moved as if to actually wipe the dribble from her chin. “You’ve got a real special one, Heather,” the nurse said, smiling as she dried and wrapped Lisa in the standard issue swaddling. “And congratulations to you both. She’s beautiful.” Even as she winced to take in the bright hospital room, I could have sworn Lisa rolled her eyes in response. *** She was opinionated, that was for sure. Lisa turned her face away from my breast and garbled insistently till we tried the bottle. She rejected lullabies and bedtime nursery rhymes, but acquiesced to hearing me read aloud from our collection of science fiction novels. She slept fitfully, but didn’t cry at odd hours, simply staring with disinterest past her butterfly mobile till going under again. As first-time parents, we had little comparison for her milestones—we were alerted to some irregularity when we mentioned to a friendly couple that she was already addressing us, as ‘Hebber’ and ‘Bye-an’ for that matter, at an even four months. “Remarkably precocious,” the pediatrician proposed, setting down his colored flashcards. “Her maturity is astounding, actually. Would you be willing to bring her in for regular testing? Say, every Sunday of the week, so we can track her development? I believe you have a truly gifted child on your hands.” Lisa had swept through the CAYC screening up through the three-year-old benchmarks, all while appearing distracted, her chubby legs bouncing restlessly in her carrier. I had a feeling she could have topped out much higher. When Dr. Hayes proposed the testing, Lisa met my eyes and shook her head—that enormous downy head she could barely even lift when set on her stomach, though Brian and I had caught her grunting in frustration as she practiced the drill in her crib. I told Hayes I would think about it, citing concerns for our family privacy, and walked out with my little girl on my shoulder. “I dust don’t want attenshuh,” she whispered into my ear. “Okay, honey. If you’re…sure.” Her diction improved as she groaned and gritted her way through teething. For her first birthday, she requested that we forgo the party guests. “Too hard to puhten.” She grimaced. “Pruh-ten. Don’t wanna be on news.” “Okay, Lisa,” Brian promised. We sat before our baby as though holding a conference, which had become more or less normal in our house. Her calculating gaze swept over him. “Foh- for my birday, I want you to call me Amber.” “How old are you really turning, Amber?” I asked suddenly. It was the question that I think had lurked at the edge of acknowledgment for a long while. Brian traded a glance with me, and I didn’t see any surprise. Lisa, or Amber, sighed with eyes too weary for any child’s. She brushed at her temple as if to move much longer locks of hair. “Twenty-eight tomorrow.” *** It was like this (as she struggled to explain, sometimes wrangling speech and sometimes resorting to tapping out the phrases on our tablet): Amber Wendig had died. It had been bad, and she avoided most of the details. But this hadn’t been reincarnation in the typical direction I imagined it occurring. Amber was from our future, not our past. The ‘first’ Amber—the original—wouldn’t be born for close to two decades. Half-jokingly, the next thing Brian asked was whether she had any pertinent suggestions for his stock portfolio. The look she gave him was so withering, coming from a not-yet-toddler, that he blanched and sat back. “It’s not going to matter soon,” she said. That was the gist of a lot of her answers. The only positive outlook she presented from her original life was when I shyly asked if we would put men on the moon again. I’d always been a space buff, and I guessed she was too, from the way she brightened momentarily. “Men and women. And we get to Mars. I watched the landing.” Her eyes lowered. “Guess they died up there. Will die.” “What happened?” I asked, remembering the Challenger disaster. “Nothing out there.” Amber’s wry, dimpled smile was painful to the heart. I was coming to accept that she wasn’t really my own baby, she was the Wendigs’, who came from the opposite coast and were still at this juncture small children themselves—but a part of me could never stop feeling like her mother. “Problem was down here.” For a lot of reasons, you could say we were cursed with our knowledge. Amber gave us the day it would happen, the problem, and from that point on we knew the countdown we were operating with. It wasn’t nearly as much as we’d hoped for, but it was more than some people got. You could call it a blessing, too. From that day, we lived like we knew when tomorrow wouldn’t come. Because we did. *** Of course she was cynical, but with Amber, Brian and I found a lot of joy in a lot of small things. Snow—she almost seemed her body’s age the first time we woke up to six-inch drifts. “I only ever saw this in movies,” she exclaimed, fighting with unwieldy toddler muscles to pull on her boots and bulky pants. She raced outside, bunched snow between her mittens, flopped face-first into a pile. I saw her crying, but let her pretend it was from the bite of cold as she wiped her reddened face. “Come on, you don’t want to waste it,” she urged. After that, Brian and I could do nothing but give up our hot coffee and space heating to join her. It was the last real snowstorm we got, in my memory, and I’m glad we got to share it with Amber. As a once-wildlife scientist, she loved animals. She adored the zoo, spending hours watching polar bears, whales, and pandas, scanning their informational plaques with a casual fluency that made adults double-take. “They named the last one Lightning,” she murmured to us, staring wistfully at two Sumatran tiger cubs play-fighting in their enclosure. “I never got to see him, though.” It became a regular pilgrimage: we’d drive with our girl to witness the remnants of a natural world we had taken for granted. We began to see them as she did, like ghosts who hadn’t yet passed. She saw people like that too—it was the way she smiled sadly at kind strangers and family friends, as though their bodies were already nothing more than blasted bones and ash—but it was hard for us to reconcile. The illusion of continuity is perhaps the strongest one in a society like ours, so used to comfort. How could the world feel this alive if it were full of walking, talking dead? Amber was grateful for our company and our care, that I’m sure of, but there were times when she sat alone by the window and I knew she was remembering her first life. I suppose we assumed she was an anomaly. If others were like her, displaced escapees from a blighted future, it would be next to impossible to find them. That is, if they were lying low. The day came after Amber’s thirty-third birthday—or sixth, as our relatives believed, making Amber perhaps the only six-year-old to sit her parents down for a round of poker after the guests had gone their separate ways. “Heather,” she said over her half-sized cup of morning coffee, eyes wide, and slid the newspaper to me. “I think there’s another one.” “Nevadan boy, 7, stuns developers with ‘groundbreaking’ AGI assistant prototype, ‘Susanna,’” I read before Amber practically ripped the sheet away again. “Everyone had Susanna on their phones where I came from. She was a big deal. I downloaded her the day she came out.” I stared back at Amber until the penny dropped. “He’s accelerating the future. Changing the future,” I breathed. “He wants us to know he’s out there. He wants to find us.” The hope in her eyes was a terribly bright, flickering candle flame I’d never seen before. “We could save everything.” “But you need to be careful. You could end up-” “Causing the problem. I get it. I’ve seen the Terminator films.” She swept back imaginary hair with a pouting lip that always made me laugh. “I’m not a baby, you know.” *** It was the strangest convention anyone had ever heard of. The ‘kid’ genius Raul Jiménez had made more money in a fortnight than most people could imagine, so what he wanted was what he got. No-nonsense bouncers flanked the door to either side of the red carpet runner. The building itself was a repurposed warehouse. Somewhat ominous to look at, but I hoped it meant Raul was expecting a lot of special guests. And ‘special guests’ had been the summoning call: according to Raul’s headliner, you would know if you were meant to come, or you wouldn’t. You could make it inside, or you couldn’t. Amber shifted impatiently foot to foot as Brian and I peered ahead in line. We’d exchanged greetings with a lot of abashed parents and the sharp-eyed children towing them. It kept sending a frisson of excitement through me to meet and acknowledge these families like our own: I know you, I know where you’ve come from. And we were a family, weren’t we? Amber had had other parents, another life and another upbringing, but in this time, she was ours. The bouncers spoke perfunctorily with crestfallen solo adults and turned them away. When they crouched down to converse with the headstrong children of the line—some as young as two or three—they invariably passed them through, although some seemed to take a couple of tries. I could only imagine how the press would interpret this. It came to our turn. Amber had slipped her small hand into mine, perhaps unconsciously, and was nearly vibrating with nerves. The taller man consulted a list on his tablet, then spoke indistinctly into her ear. She laughed, vibrant with relief, and answered him, and we were through, following the velvet-roped corridor into the vast space beyond. “What did he ask you?” said Brian. “The last movie I saw in theatres.” Amber shook her head, grinning. “It’s called Infernosapiens, and it’s going to be awful.” She took both our hands that time, and she led us at her sides. *** There were hundreds of children and their guardians and parents. They’d traveled from countries everywhere in the world. Finally, in this place alone, they could drop their cover and speak as adults, could paste on the nametags of their original identities. A boy around eight leaned in to better hear a curly-haired toddler in a stroller, then shook her hand firmly. Two girls who looked as though they should have been sleepover pals clinked their glasses—I tried to suppress my misgivings about the cocktail table. A world of the future’s refugees in formalwear milled around busily at chest-level and below. “It’s incredible,” I whispered to Brian. “There’s so many of them. Do you think they can really-” “Amber! Amber Wendig!” shrieked a young voice. A girl hurtled through the crowd with braids bouncing, pushing aside a conglomeration of four-foot-tall businessmen who chuckled indulgently. Amber whirled to face her. “Patty? Patty! Oh my God!” They met in the middle, already sobbing. “We were with each other the day it happened. My best friend. Met in my bio major,” Amber managed to explain after a minute, wiping her streaming eyes with a sleeve. “And guest,” said a balding man sheepishly, waving to us as he followed in Patty’s wake. “I guess you folks know as much about all this as I do.” Brian and I shook his hand, and Amber and Patty clung to each other like shipwrecked survivors, making up for lost time and lost lives. All of them lost, I thought, and it wrenched my stomach. All here because they were destroyed. Their world erased when the missiles dropped. All in one day. We knew it, and they knew it. That was when Raul Jiménez took the podium. “Hello, kids,” he boomed into the microphone, a commanding presence for a boy in a ringbearer-style suit and bowtie. Behind him, on the great projector screen, Susanna received and translated his words into a score of languages. “And hello, taller friends and guests—thank them for the lifts, won’t you? I know I’ve had trouble reaching the gas and brakes myself. Welcome to the Second Chance Convention.” *** His goal was to save the world, as Amber had hoped, and his proof of concept was Susanna, forged three and a half decades before she should have entered beta testing. “If any other geeks out here worked on the original dev team, my apologies for stealing the thunder,” he said sweetly, to some laughter. “I just couldn’t wait that long.” He made some introductions of friends, software experts and sociologists and activists, and soon others stepped up to follow his open invitation: a historian, a civil rights lawyer, an epidemiologist, none more than nine at most. A second-grader with neat cornrows introduced herself as a senator, nearly drowned out by cheers—she’d made an impression during her term, I gathered. “You get the pattern, don’t you?” Raul said intently. And I think I was starting to get it. “All of us, we were already trying to save the world. We had the plans. We have the skills. The only thing we didn’t have was enough time.” The text scrolled behind him, then paused in the ringing silence. “They wouldn’t take just one of us seriously. Even me. They’ll eat it up when I roll out an app, but start talking about the 2050s? The end of ‘63? That’d be crazy,” he said bitterly. I sensed that he’d made the attempt before. “It doesn’t matter what a kid does. Never has. Nobody’s listened. But with all of us, with the same story? We have to go public. Get attention. It’s easier to ignore the quiet people, step over them. I’m not asking you to take the chance. I’m telling you if you don’t, the same shit’s going to happen all over again. The floods will come. The forests will burn. The plagues will spread. Then the bombs will drop. And it’d be on us this time, too. You’d be shutting your eyes on the freeway.” He paused again. Amber nodded solemnly, her arm linked with Patty’s. I thought of those girls in their last days. Scientists, brilliant, struggling to find the meaning in their diminished fields. The study of animal habitats for species already extinguished. Amber had wanted her own children one day, but never envisioned a world safe enough for them to enter. I learned that in the aftermath, when the identities of the ‘Second Chances’ came out around the world, not one of them had had children in their original lives. If they could make this work, maybe that would change, too. Maybe we could stop the countdown this time. Maybe kids could grow up someday without hearing it tick. “I don’t know who or what gave us the opportunity. I don’t know if we’ll get another chance to do it right, but I wouldn’t depend on it. There is no one fix. No one person who has every answer. No single country, no single idea. We’re all here because we have to change everything.” Raul’s confidence wavered. “And to tell you the truth, that’s a big project, and I’m not sure what to start with. Something concrete, even if it seems small. Something we couldn’t do the first time. Anyone?” Amber swallowed and raised her hand. Aides passed a microphone to her, and in the second before she spoke, I knew what she would say. No hints from the future. Just call it a mother’s intuition. “Tigers. Sorry, uh, the Sumatran tigers. We could keep them from going extinct this time. If anyone remembers the last one we had, it was in the news when he died-” “Lightning,” people murmured across the crowd. Yes, this was the kind of group that would remember him. “He was alone. I saw the photos from his enclosure. He died alone in the world, and he didn’t know why, and it wasn’t his fault.” Amber’s voice broke. I held her shoulders. “I just think, if we have a chance now, we should save them, for Lightning.” “Let’s start there, then.” Raul smiled. “That’s actually a fantastic one. I was just thinking the Second Chances needed a flag.” You can find it all over the place, that tiger flag. In photos behind the members of that strange, exclusive club. Pasted in shop windows. Hanging over doors. They’ve arrayed it at the UN where Second Chances have gone to make their cases again and again, because the future really is another country, in a way. It’s a country none of them wanted to come home to. We haven’t reached it yet, the last day in that countdown, so I suppose I can’t say whether we’ve stopped it. The world where the future ends in a blinding burst of light could still be out there, further away or closer. Who really knows when there’s no tomorrow anymore? I only know this: I have seen a woman walk on the moon, and I’ve seen a movie in the theatre called Infernosapiens, which was awful and delightful anyway. I know that hundreds of miles away, the Wendigs have just had their baby girl, and I hope she grows up knowing how much she’s loved. I know my own girl, who goes by Amber Lisa Wendig, and she’s tall and beautiful at Patty’s side. They sent a photo from Zoo Atlanta in the spring, where they’ve been leading conservation efforts through an education outreach program. The photo shows a male tiger with his mate. The plaque outside their enclosure lists them as endangered still, but not to the highest extremity. Improvement comes in steps. From the Second Chance Convention, I have remembered that there will never be a single button to press that can fix everything at once, and that every change is worth making anyway. And Lightning has fathered twins. |
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Sydney Sackett
Sydney Sackett (she/her) is a Frostburg State University grad and currently edits full-time. Some of her creative work appears in Etherea, Menacing Hedge, Allegory, and Not One of Us. She can be tracked down to https://sydneybsackett.wixsite.com/website.
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