by Nur İpek Önder Mert
The ridges of Gomodos … Its inhabitants were once again fleeing in panic from the hydrogen sulfide downpour that began at the summit, retreating into the shadowed corners of the city, while those already inside descended underground. Everyone did – except Hammer.
For Hammer, survival was only possible when everyone else withdrew into their shelters and those who could not were left to die. In an atmosphere where even the ringed worms, bursting from the heaving chest of Mother Nature’s final breaths and piling up on the pavements, could not defy death, he owed his own continued existence to the bulge hidden beneath his parka.
With every rainfall, she would lean against the streetlamp suffocated by the khaki-green fog that descended upon the city along with the toxin-laden clouds, and observe her surroundings. When an approaching silhouette appeared, her eyes would slowly retreat into the shadows, like a panther smearing the darkness itself. Her mouth would moisten, her pupils would dilate. The breath of her prey, misting the night, seemed to blow straight into her soul – a shiver running through her like a breeze carried from long-forgotten summer evenings.
When the switchblade slid gracefully from her left wrist into her palm and snapped open, there was no turning back. Unless, of course, that nameless unrest – the one she could never quite crush – tightened around her chest and ruined everything.
You must live in order to keep living, Hammer. That’s all, my girl. That simple. They made today’s decision – all of today’s decisions. And you endure this torment for them, to save them from themselves. You cannot stop. Not now. Not after coming this far.
To give up meant starving for days. Determination, on the other hand, meant accepting that the helplessness in her victims’ final gaze would haunt her sleep. That was why she now attacked from behind – seeking to bring them down with the least effort, in the shortest time possible. She would quickly search their pockets and vanish into the darkness with the agility of a sewer rat, carrying whatever food she could find. She had hoped tonight would be no different.
The air had grown heavy with sulfur-saturated raindrops, and the stench of rotten eggs had fully claimed the streets. Even as a post-transgenic being with high cellular plasticity like Hammer, she could not breathe that toxic atmosphere for long. Nausea rising in her stomach, she pulled the gas mask over her face. Slightly staggering, she turned into the street where she would lie in wait.
With every step, the buildings seemed to lean over her, the ground rippling beneath her feet – as if something below was secretly tracking her trail. Perhaps the city, buried alive in its own soil, was writhing in its grave, trying to make itself heard. And Hammer – who would ever hear her?
She tore herself from the vortex of her thoughts and quickened her pace. Whatever happens … focus on your task, my girl. When she reached the spot where she would observe her prey, the greasy glow of the streetlamp flickered – and died. Then, all at once, every building went dark. Silence fell.
From not far away, she heard metal doors being forced open, someone dragged inside. The Watchers?
When the sharp crack of gunfire ripped through the silence, she was certain it was their work. However, The Watchers were so afraid that at the slightest security breach they would cut the power to the entire area and empty a whole squad’s magazines into a single person. And Hammer knew very well that someone who is truly afraid is the most dangerous of all.
She slipped into the piles of garbage with the stealth of a thief. Her stomach growled from hunger. The more she tried to suppress it, the more sweat poured down her back, and the cold wind made her teeth chatter.
After several breathless minutes that felt like a lifetime, the lights finally returned. The power lines encircling the city began to throb again, humming at a rising frequency.
Hammer stepped out of her hiding place and drew as deep a breath as her mask would allow. She tilted her face toward the rain.
A line from a poem – she could no longer remember which – rolled from her cracked lips without effort: “Grow more beautiful … for now you are alive – only until death …”
She opened the front of her parka, now twice as heavy with absorbed rainwater, and shook it out. Her warm belly was exposed. In this life that felt like a living nightmare in every detail, the only undeniably real thing was right there – growing, fed by her blood and flesh. It was made of what she was made of. The same substance in a different composition – far better. However she looked at it, it felt like absolution; a second chance, the luxury of saying: “It didn’t work – let’s try again.”
She warmed her palm with her breath and let it glide over her belly. With a sharp twinge, the presence inside stirred. She warmed her palm with her breath and moved it slowly over her belly. With a sharp twinge, the presence inside stirred. She felt the small hand press back against her own, as if sharing the quiet sorrow of a visiting day from within. Though only four months old in body, it felt as though the child had arrived too late to the world in spirit.
“You’re growing too fast. What’s the rush, little girl? Couldn’t you stand the hunger? Are you telling me to leave you be, that you’ll take care of yourself?”
Anything was possible.
She had accepted being a Carrier, fully aware of what such a pregnancy entailed. Even the ending had not frightened her much. Extraordinary purposes demanded extraordinary sacrifices.
With the resolve of a soldier ready for duty, she zipped her parka back up. She pulled the hood lower over her face. Placing her right foot on the tire of a nearby wreck, she secured the loose lace with a double knot – and her eyes caught the shadow growing on the wall of the adjacent building. A pregnant woman in a gas mask, head bowed as if waiting for someone, gently stroking her belly. And where did you come from now? Are you begging for death, woman? Hammer drew her switchblade while glancing over her shoulder and spun around. There was no one.
She looked from herself back to the shadow. The dress ending just beneath the coat she was lost in, the combat boots, the wet, matted hair – its familiarity was deeply unsettling. The shadow, realizing it was being watched, slowly straightened and turned toward her. It seemed less a shadow than existence itself. Are you a ghost searching for a body to inhabit … or my devil twin, my doppelgänger?
Lightning split the sky. Instinctively, Hammer wrapped her arms around her belly. The laughter of a child running away rang in her ears. Along the crack in the wall, the shadow-being’s skin continued to grow – then peeled away like tulle lifted by the wind, drifting off. Its hair remained in the hands that had been touching its head. As if scraped clean by an invisible scalpel, the skull emerged; its trembling limbs began to break apart and fall away, muscles unraveling from bone strand by strand. And the thing inside its belly – no longer merely wanting to be born – was now clawing desperately, trying to tear its way free. Hammer shook her head as if to drive away a sudden pain. “What is this now? Is this part of the process too? I don’t want this. I don’t want this!”
The voice that had just faded with the distant laughter now whispered again, its breath against her ear:
“Mother … don’t you want me anymore?”
Hammer hurled her knife into the heart of the emptiness.
“Who are you?”
The voice rose now from every alley at once, in different tones, echoing, overlapping, merging into a single rasping breath:
“Mother! Mother! … don’t you want – … don’t you want me?”
Alright. You’re hallucinating now. Stop it, my girl. You’re hungry, exhausted, under a toxic downpour. Just a mild shock … Maybe a simultaneous cellular detox response to poisoning, or an energy-saving update. Calm down, Hammer. Calm.
It struck her for the first time that she was addressing herself by name.
When she thought about it – yes. Yes, she always did.
Is this you speaking, Hammer? Who are you? What is left of you? Looks like you’ve become just like them. What a shame …
She found herself trapped at the center of a cacophony of cloned selves, stretching endlessly along the mirror-walls of her mind, each surrounding her sense of identity: Forget it now, just try to calm down. Sure, sure – energy update. You’re not poisoned. Sweetheart, how are you going to be a mother? You can’t even feed her while she’s inside you. Come on, don’t stall – go find something to eat! You should never have abandoned sculpture. Embalming? What kind of art is that? You sold yourself for a few bones thrown at you! Hammer! Do you know why they gave you that name? You destroy in order to build, and build in order to destroy. But be careful whose hand grips your handle, my girl! When this child is born, those powerful friends you embalmed will regret both their birth and their death – and that day we will stand with everything that has fallen behind us and look up at the sky! Look at me – you don’t look well at all. Is it going to be a premature birth?
She had sunk into herself, staring wide-eyed at her shadow on the neighboring wall, when the sound of rattling tin pulled her out of the blind wells of her mind. “Who’s there?” Between the trash bags, a large ginger tomcat was struggling, trying to push a can off its head with its paws. She released the breath she had been holding. She closed her switchblade and tucked it into her boot. “Was it you? Come on, come here. That’s it … you’re free now.”
The cat disappeared into the night, leaving a thin memory scratched across her exposed knuckle. Hammer grabbed the pull ring of the can lid left in her hand and began to tug at it. “They always leave these half—opened, don’t they? And then –” Her sentence was cut off as the owner of a massive shadow behind her collapsed to the ground like a sack of flour.
Hammer was panting. Blood slid from the smooth surface of the can lid — whose ring had cut into her index finger – carrying tuna scraps with it, dripping onto the corpse stretched out on the pavement. “I have no intention to get hunted while I’m hunting, sir.”
Hammer knew very well that someone who is truly afraid is the most dangerous of all. In times like these, if you lived in Gomodos – and on top of that suffered from anxiety – you could turn anything into a weapon, and kill with everything. And that night, she knew she would have to face her trial with the shadows one way or another.
While she searched the pockets of the corpse lying face down, its blood seeping from the throat and staining the rainwater running through the gutters, she secretly hoped to find not only food, but something sharp. Yes, you were wrong, my girl. But what if you had been right? Being right after you’re dead doesn’t mean anything, does it?
No blade. No decent food. A cup of fruit yogurt with its gelatin lid swollen, a piece of chocolate that had bled out its fat, sleeping pills, tobacco, rolling papers, and a soaked box of matches … “I hope you weren’t approaching to ask for a light. Why would anyone ask a pregnant woman for a light? I’ll never know.”
When she came up empty-handed like this, she would stand beside the body for a while – as if she were the only relative who had come to see it off. Since their only shared memory was hardly a pleasant one, she could not reminisce. Instead, she tried to imagine, based on the belongings left behind, what this person might have done that day had they never crossed paths with her.
Maybe he would light his cigarette with the flame he took from the book crematorium a few blocks away. From the pleasure in the way he exhaled the smoke through the cage of his palm into the dark, one could tell he had finally figured out how to place the birthday candle into the fruit yogurt for his little sister. Or perhaps, along the way, he would comfort himself with the recklessness of finally having found a job, convincing himself that buying chocolate instead of potatoes actually made more sense … Or he would go straight home, throw himself onto his bed, and, until the sleeping pill took effect, imagine himself among the trembling silhouettes in the luminous halls of sky-piercing buildings.
It was this last scenario that disturbed Hammer the most. Once, she too had been one of the guests of those luminous halls — the woman people looked for at important gatherings of important people. Just knowing she was there made everyone feel better. Because no one ever knew when they would die. In Gomodos, you could die not only of hunger, illness, or as a security threat — but also on a night accompanied by clinking glasses, laughter, and smooth jazz, a night whose breeze alone would have been the most you feared. And you would not want your corpse to decay.
The procedures had to begin before rigor mortis set in. The earlier the intervention, the more flexible the body. Thus, in a far better appearance than you ever had in life, you could, inside a sealed glass sarcophagus, stand forever as a semi-organic monument erected in the center of a square you would only choose to be found in after death. And could be greeting those who had created you, blessing with your authority those rotting at your feet on the altars below. And only Hammer could grant you that. The corrupt sculptor. The self-taught society embalmer.
To abandon the path of immortalizing oneself through art and instead turn toward immortalizing authority could hardly be called a respectable career journey. And yet, in a system where art was reduced to product, the collective to the individual, and the individual to images, she had to admit that for a while it felt profitable in every sense. Until she left behind everything she had gained … From the moment she accepted becoming a Carrier, she no longer saw herself as anything but an interface writing the code of a new life. She knew she could not have endured even this much if she did not possess that urge to shape things, to give form to her amorphous existence. Once again, despite everything, she thought of how grateful she was for all that had happened. Leaving her old friend beneath that streetlamp, she walked toward the abandoned opera house she had made her refuge.
From the terrace with its panoramic view, she let her legs dangle into the void and spoke to her daughter while spooning the sour yogurt little by little. “I promise you. If not tonight, then in the very next rain, I won’t come back without filling our stomachs to the brim.” Her eyes drifted toward the horizon. “You are a gift to me, you know that, don’t you? I have never once regretted carrying you. If I had to, I would choose you again … Of course, I may not have thought this way at first – before I met you … I was defeated, bitter, angry. My fate was already sealed. On a starless night, hiding from the Watchers beneath a ledge, my belly full only thanks to the generosity of the noble family whose corpse I had restored the night before – while my soul starved – I would have left this world without a single one of my works ever being valued. With that acceptance, like everyone who could not truly be themselves, I was ready to become anything else. I didn’t think long about joining the revolution program … Of course, the revolution is salvation for all of us. But beyond everything, deep inside me, there was a voice saying: whether you become immortal by subtracting or by adding, what difference does it make – giving life is also a form of art … And then there was you. You began to exist. As I carried you, I stopped being a burden to myself about becoming someone, my daughter. Day by day, with every cell, I felt that I was nourishing not just a single life, but life itself. Now there is peace in not taking myself too seriously. To hell with immortality … I feel weightless, and yet as if my lightness contains everything at once. The path reveals itself as I walk – I know that. And tonight, I need to feel exactly like this. Everything is as it should be …”
The warm wind blowing against her caught her skirt and brushed her knees. Her ears filled with the pressure of a sudden, dense silence. Then, a razor-thin sound pierced the air and stopped the heart of time. Everything slowed. It was as if the needle of a cosmic record had wavered and jumped back to the beginning. The soil lifted lazily, then settled back into place. Trees dripped into the sky, dissolving and tinting the clouds. And the sky cracked. From its widening fractures, sound began to glow. Everything was wrapped in audible light. Everything was surrounded by everything. The birth had begun.
Hammer lay down among the weeds covering the mosaic floor of the terrace, cradled by the heralding contractions. With each pulse in which her body disintegrated into subatomic particles and reassembled itself, she trembled. Her dry skin flaked apart within the slowed flow of time. The contractions intensified. Blood and bodily fluids leaked through every opening they could find, while the inner walls, with peristaltic movements, expelled bones and organs alike. Her body reshaped itself from the lower regions upward, widening the birth passage.
Her muscles inevitably dissolved, bent, and reformed. Her chest collapsed into the abdominal cavity and connected to the birth canal. Her body had become entirely a passage. A passage that violated the boundaries between the mental and the physical. And through that passage, carried by invisible hands, the baby entered the world.
The baby did not cry. She looked around with conscious eyes. She was neither helpless nor fragile. She could hold her head upright – her spine as well. She straightened, folded her legs beneath her, and stood. And when her small feet touched the ground, time and space trembled. As she moved forward through the quivering wild grass, the given world blinked with momentary blackouts. Walking with such determination and fearlessness, she did not even notice when she tore her umbilical cord free.
At that very moment, the Watchers – pacing their usual routes among the derelict buildings – had gathered under an extraordinary state order and sealed off the surroundings of the opera house. They were ready for conflict, yet as always, they did not know with what, nor why, they were about to fight.
Soon the unit guarding the main entrance saw something moving down through the corridors behind the collapsed side walls of the building. Like an ominous shadow it drained the very energy of the spaces it passed through, creating loops within time itself. A flock of starlings that had struck a window it had just passed by was shattered – condemned to relive, countless times, the cycle of the glass breaking and their own injuries.
The Watchers, unable to make sense of what they were witnessing, took position and raised their weapons, pressing the stocks against their stomachs and aiming at the door. The squad leader stepped forward, lowered his visor, and reported to Central. “Standing by for power cut and suppressive fire, sir. Awaiting authorization.”
“Request denied, Watcher. Identify the entity.”
“Approximately fifty centimeters in length, humanoid form, but exhibiting non-human behavior, sir. It is about to breach the security line. Requesting immediate fire authorization!”
“Request denied, Watcher. Is it a human infant? Describe what you are seeing.”
Dragging her severed umbilical cord and leaving bloody traces behind, the baby exited through the main door, stumbled once or twice, then straightened again and continued walking toward them.
“Yes, sir. A newborn. But she walks, makes eye contact, and shows no sign of fear. She does not even cry.”
“No one is afraid of you, you fools! If she is not crying, why are you? Pick her up and bring her to us.”
“Yes, sir.”
The squad leader signaled for the weapons to be lowered. That day, in that place, the Watchers were seized by a strange feeling that everything was ending for them. They could not have explained to their families the peace that mortality filled them with. As the regime’s fiercest apparatus, they could not have explained it to anyone. If death was inevitable, there was no fear; and if there was no fear, there was no obedience. They did not lower their weapons.
Under the rain whose drops evaporated the moment they touched their visors, they watched her approach without blinking, their fingers impatiently testing the softness of the trigger. When the baby crossed the security line, the lead Watcher fired the first shot. The moment the bullet left the barrel, time slowed. That familiar whistling sound dissolved into a hum, and the bullet – like an abandoned thought – hung suspended in the void. Before it could reach the baby, it lost its reality and dispersed into dust, carried by the wind. The baby’s existence had rendered the bullet’s trajectory an unrealized possibility.
The Watchers opened futile suppressive fire. Yet it did not take long for them to accept that this being, capable of manipulating even the laws of physics, was the creator of a new possibility for them. Just as you cannot kill information, a thought, a memory – you could not kill her. And more than that, killing would never have been enough. One by one, they dropped their weapons. First a few, then all of them removed their helmets. For the first time, they saw each other’s faces. They studied each other in astonishment. None of them looked like an executioner.
The baby passed by them and moved on, following the people who had poured into the streets with breaking news alerts. What the Watchers experienced was shown to the public again and again through fabricated street camera footage, accompanied by propaganda claiming that this apocalyptic child was the grim consequence of disobedience.
People, driven by the infectious fear within them, were flocking to the sacred sites to prevent the apocalypse. They prayed by touching their faces to the glass displays of the embalmed monuments of bureaucrats, politicians, and corporate magnates who had devoted their lives to making the world a better place. To appease their human gods, they laid all the food they carried in their hands upon the altars. Each new group reaching the square trampled over those who had died in the crush, racing one another to reach the monument.
Bodies, piled atop one another like the ringed worms clumped along the pavements, soon lost all movement – smeared with mud and food scraps. As the streets and the rain grew still, the baby reached the square. She could disrupt the information she focused on, breaking it into inconsistent fragments. The giant street screens looping the news dissolved into the wind with a single glance from her, and the space surrendered itself entirely to silence.
She climbed the display, slipping and falling over heaps of people who had died from being crushed, from hunger, from worship, from hope. She placed her hand on the glass – and the glass lost its knowledge to be glass. Suddenly, the wind flared in fury, howling over the dead bodies and striking the exposed mummy. The mummy’s head fell, bounced where it landed, and rolled away. With a fragment of memory, the city’s voltage surged.
The wind passed through the grass growing on the terrace of the opera house, licked every floor of the building, and rushed downward. It struck the visor of a Watcher’s helmet lying on the ground in front of the building, then plunged into the side streets. It swept the trash, covered the corpse lying face down beneath a streetlamp, rolled open cans down the dark slope. Cats scattered in fear, fleeing into hiding. The wind lifted all the dust of the city and returned to the square as a whirling column. With all its force it unraveled the wrappings of what remained of the mummy’s body on the monument. As the bandages peeled away layer by layer, hundreds of thousands of ballots scattered into the air.
Among the heaps of flesh swarmed by green-eyed carrion flies, those still alive began to shake off their numbness and rise. One of them caught a ballot paper drifting like a death’s head hawkmoth, its outer surface stamped with a skull. He examined it curiously. Turned it over. Inside a black box, it read: “Yes.” He traced it with his fingertips – fine quality paper, truly. He put it in his mouth and began to chew with appetite. When he swallowed the paper, the gnawing in his stomach finally subsided. His eyes sparkled with joy. Those who witnessed this rushed forward instinctively to feed themselves as well. In collective hysteria they began stuffing their mouths with the papers they caught, eating them by the handful.
Ballots without the right to choose had never been so useful. And only Hammer could have made this possible – the late sculptor and society’s embalmer. It had never crossed her mind that by immortalizing authority she would one day both feed the people and, with the chaotic visual spectacle she had created, produce her most important work, thus ending the ancient debate over what art is for. She had merely added her own style to the task.
When it was noticed that some of the actors in her living artwork had hoarded extra ballot papers in their pockets, tensions rose. Voices rose to claim what they believed was their due. Pushing and shoving gave way to a marketplace of survival where the stronger throttled the weaker. Chaos fermented and climbed to the heights of the city, splashing against the windows of the illuminated halls where entertainment continued in indifference.
As Gomodos was covered in blood, mud, ballot papers, and carrion flies, those above should have known well that the night would not go on with clinking glasses, laughter, and smooth jazz. Sadly, the only embalmer they would have wished to have beside them was on maternity leave. Hammer could now be found not at receptions, but in the squares – like the mothers of the other revolutionary children who were bringing down showcases across the world.
Nur İpek Önder Mert is a Turkish poet and science fiction story writer. She lives in Eskişehir, Turkey. She has a Master’s Degree in Biochemistry from Anadolu University in 2013. She has been writing since 2004. Her literary works have been published in numerous national and international science fiction anthologies and selections and have been awarded various national awards. She is currently working on a science fiction short story collection.