Triangles are Forever
by Ramez Yoakeim
I arrived home to find it empty aside from Liam Rout sitting in the living room like he owned the place. Instinctively, my hand went to the weapon I no longer carried. Rout didn’t seem concerned. “Relax, Keziah. It’s only a hologram. My meatsuit is in no condition to travel, and you’re not taking my calls.”
“If you wanted to die this badly, you should’ve turned up in the flesh.”
Rout chuckled before it turned into a wheezing cough. Even if he really was this close to the end of a Cycle, why incorporate that into a hologram? “You know very well I’m not talking about swapping meatsuits. I want out,” he said, once his breathing steadied.
Once real-time mirrored neural maps and rapidly matured clones made the irreversible loss of human consciousness a rare oddity, death and dying became taboo, aside from the Al-Nuri clan. What we once meted out by commission became a gift we bestowed only on the worthy among those who sought it. A couple of decades ago, I wouldn’t have refused Rout, but I’d given my word to leave that life behind, and where I come from, a woman’s word is her bond. “You can’t force me to kill you, Rout.”
Rout shrugged. “It’s just a question of finding the right motivation.”
A shiver shot up my spine, and I told my proxy to call Bahlool and Jed. Seconds passed without a response. “What have you done?” I growled at the hologram.
“Your husbands and kids are safe,” Rout said, a self-satisfied sneer distorting his pale, drawn face, “and they’ll stay that way if you do as I ask.”
“For the umpteenth time, I don’t do that anymore.”
“You’re still an Al-Nuri,” Rout said, before adding meaningfully, “as is your line. You have three girls, right?”
“Leave my kids out of this,” I said, my hands bunched up into fists, as if I could punch photons. “There’re hundreds of clan assassins who’d gladly take your commission, why me?”
“You’re the best. Why shouldn’t I have the best? I’m not starting another Cycle. I can’t bear the idea of a new meatsuit, another century or two, only to repeat it all over again. I’ve had enough. It’s time I died by your hands, Keziah Al-Nuri, one way or another.”
I dug my bugout bag out of the backyard and was at the front door when it swung open. My daughters—Adara, Nabeela, and little Raesa—rushed in, shrieking playfully and chasing one another ahead of my husbands. Jed was too busy corralling the kids, but Bahlool saw me wide-eyed and frozen by the door and did a surprised double-take.
“You’re back,” I stammered.
“So are you. The note said you’d be gone a few days,” Bahlool said as they closed the door and noticed the backpack I’d dropped behind it. Their eyes alternated between the olive drab bag and my stricken face, their frown deepening with each turn.
Jed noticed the standoff from across the room. He walked closer, saw the bag, and turned to face me, lips pursed, head tilted, arms akimbo. “Keziah Al-Nuri, what were you about to do?” he demanded. “Did you send us away so you could leave? Why bother? Sweetie, if you wanted out, you only had to say the word.” A raised eyebrow and one hand finger snap rounded out his defiance. Bahlool grunted their concurrence.
“That’s not what’s happening here.” I reached out to both of them. Jed swatted one hand away. Bahlool side-stepped the other.
It wasn’t my first family, nor would it be my last. With open-ended lifespans, till-death-do-us-part stopped being a viable option, but in that moment, nothing mattered more to me than my husbands and girls. “Let me explain.” I told them about Liam Rout’s determination to die by my hands, an obsession that pre-dated our union, and his latest ploy, leading me to believe he’d abducted them and the kids.
Bahlool’s thick eyebrows nearly met. “You thought we’d been kidnapped and you decided to run?”
Jed wasn’t as circumspect. “I fancied knowing you well, Keziah. A killer, liar, and all-around scoundrel, but I never figured you for a coward.”
“I’m doing it for you.” The words tumbled out in a torrent. “Once I’m gone, Rout won’t have a reason to target you or the girls. You’d be safe.”
Bahlool scoffed. “You didn’t arrange the limo, hotel, private shopper?”
I pursed my lips and shook my head.
“What about the azaleas?” Jed said. “Who else would know I love azaleas?”
“I didn’t send them, babe.”
“Figures.” Jed sucked teeth, “Didn’t seem like you. It was … romantic.”
I smarted. I had no idea my husbands felt that way. How did we get here?
“Why didn’t you call the police?” Bahlool asked.
“Why indeed.” I shook my head. I expected that sort of question from Jed, not from Bahlool. “When was the last time they sided with a woman who looks like me against someone like Rout? I have to disappear, at least until he’s given up or picked another Al-Nuri.”
“You can’t leave, we need you.” Jed sniffled, choking back tears.
The girls had gone silent watching our tense standoff with wide, expectant eyes.
Jed saw them and wagged a finger at me before Bahlool gently pulled down Jed’s arm. “Not here,” they said and quietly handed Jed the bugout bag before corralling us both toward our bedroom. From the hallway, they exhorted the girls to clean up before dinner, promising ice cream with sprinkles for desert. I almost objected to feeding them all that sugar but bit my tongue, exhaling instead with enough force to flatten a row of straw houses.
Bahlool closed the bedroom door behind us and turned to face me. “You’re not abandoning our daughters.”
Jed dropped the bag by the door. “Nor will you break your vow to us.”
“You promised your past would stay in the past,” Bahlool said.
“You swore you’d be a new woman,” Jed added with that one-two punching rhythm they’d grown far too proficient at delivering.
“Now, prove it,” Bahlool said, nodding affirmatively to themselves.
“What am I supposed to do?” Normally, I didn’t care when they ganged up and shut me out, if it meant they weren’t bickering with one another, but this wasn’t such a time. “It’s my job to keep this family safe, but I can’t be here to protect you all the time. What if next time, Rout kidnapped you and the girls for real? If he does, I’ll do anything he asks to get you back. Anything at all. He knows that.”
“I’m not raising my girls with a killer,” Jed said with finality.
“Keziah, we all agreed to leave our pasts in the past when we decided to start this family,” Bahlool said. “Leaving isn’t the answer, nor is breaking your vows to us.”
“What’s the alternative?” I demanded angrily as Jed opened the door to find Raesa standing in the corridor looking lost and scared. He scooped her up with a forced little chortle and hurried away. I hung my head.
Bahlool turned me to face them by the shoulders, lifted my chin with an impeccably manicured forefinger, and stared me straight in the eyes. Quietly, almost whispering, they told me we’d figure it out together, as a family.
Eliminating the few backups of an ordinary person’s genome and neural state is a tedious, laborious task. When it came to Liam Rout’s multiplicities, it was damn near Herculean, even for an old-hand Al-Nuri like me. I spent nine weeks shuttling between bioclinics and databanks, but by the end of it, the only remaining instance of Rout’s essence was the corporeal one ailing at the end of a Cycle.
At Rout’s idyllic estate, a robot ushered me into an opulent leather and mahogany study reeking of floor wax and antiseptics. Sloughing in a wheelchair with a tartan blanket over his legs, Rout wheezed awake as the oversized door thudded closed. He tried to speak but issued a gurgling croak instead, which devolved into a wheezing coughing fit that raked his whole body.
What drove anyone to this masochistic sort of insanity, I’d never know. Perhaps we lose our will to live when the last impossible peak is crested, or perhaps it was little more than nature’s ultimate palladium, buried deeply in our germline, for species circumventing its evolutionary guardrails.
Rout eventually managed to speak. “You’ve come to release me.”
Though I’d been raised to venerate death, I’d never imbue it with as much longing as Rout had. It had to be the dying body yearning for release, I decided, its terminal secretions clouding Rout’s thoughts. I had no doubt he’d feel differently wearing a young, vibrant meatsuit, or even inhabiting a vivid sim of the sort he made his vast fortune peddling, but I hadn’t come to debate philosophy with him. We were well past all that.
“Are you ready?” I asked with more compassion than I thought myself capable of, given what he’d put me through.
Rout nodded slightly, his thin bloodless lips stretching at some private joke in his head. “Your fee’s on the desk.”
When I drew nearer, he whispered, “thank you,” and reached for my hand, perhaps to shake it, but couldn’t muster the energy to do more than brush my palm with ice-cold digits arthritically frozen in a claw.
I leaned over and pressed a sedative infuser to his neck. His eyes flickered open at the touch but soon drooped again. I dabbed his clammy hairless head dry with a foam-cloth and slipped on a scanner’s wispy net. When it finished, I steeled myself, recited an ancient prayer the meaning of which no one remembered anymore, and aimed a disruptor between his eyes. I didn’t hang around to watch the energetic electromagnetic field unbind his body, one cell at a time, eventually turning it into a puddle of simple organics. I picked the anonymous credit coin off the desk and left to face the tempest awaiting me at home.
The undulating turquoise water and pearlescent white sand amplified midday’s radiance to a blinding, uniform glare. I squinted and fought the warm drowsiness threatening to envelope me. Not helping my quest for alertness were Bahlool’s arms tightening around my waist and Jed’s hands caressing my bare arms and shoulders. Unfazed by the blaze, Adara, Nabeela, and Raesa frolicked and shrieked as they chased one another through the surf.
“Quite the coincidence, Rout’s Cycle ending on its own the moment you arrived,” Bahlool noted to a derisive scoff from Jed. At least he stopped pawing me.
I’d told them I didn’t have to kill Rout after all, and so long as a sim of his final neural state continued to run in a sandboxed partition of my implants, he remained technically alive. Though not what I’d consider a fulfilling life, I fared no better on my end. Having Liam Rout haunt me for the rest of my days was a steep price, but worth it to keep my family and my vows intact.
“I’m hungry,” Nabeela squealed, seemingly angry that her three parents hadn’t somehow anticipated the need before she had to voice it.
In an instant, Jed jumped off the sand and ran to the water’s edge to muster the brood. Rout stirred within, chafing at his confinement as he watched my life through a read-only sensory feed. “It never occurred to me raising children could be this much fun,” he noted ruefully.
I ignored him and got up to follow. Bahlool made no move to join us. “Are you coming?”
“In a minute, I want to catch some rays,” Bahlool said and stretched on the sand outside the umbrella’s shade. My eyes traveled over their swarthy body from head to toe as I pretended to brush the sand off my limbs.
Bahlool noticed and chuckled. “What’s going on in that devious mind of yours?” Despite squinting against the glare, their eyes sparkled, and a smile brightened their bearded face.
“Who? Me?” I responded, confused.
“As I live and breathe, Keziah Al-Nuri. You’re leering,” Bahlool accused, mockingly wagging a finger at me. Their smile took a mischievous turn, and the voice came huskier. “Like we’re meeting for the first time.”
Suddenly, alarm blossomed in my mind, but before it could crystalize into a coherent thought, I found myself tumbling down a dark rabbit hole, mute, deaf, and blind.
“Just thinking how lucky I am to have so much to live for,” Rout said through my lips.
“So, Rout gets all googly-eyed over Bahlool, while I slave away in the kitchen to feed your children,” Jed grumbled, twisting his lips and half turning away from me. On the other side of the bed, Bahlool shook the frame with their laughter. I shot them a disapproving glower and snuggled closer to Jed, spooning him, desperate to avoid any discord, now that tranquility had at long last returned to the Al-Nuri household.
“Look at the three of us. Who wouldn’t want to ogle us?” I whispered into Jed’s ear between nibbles on his earlobe.
After a pregnant pause that saw Bahlool and me hold our breath, Jed gave a short, delighted giggle and turned back to face us. “I feared he’d immediately identify his own sim software.” Jed’s eyes gleamed, empathy warring with voyeurism. “He does seem happy.”
I kissed Jed’s back, between his shoulder blades. “Rout thinks he bested me and rediscovered his zeal for living. I’d call that a win for all involved.”
“Let’s just hope he doesn’t take it out on us when he discovers he’d been conned,” Bahlool said. “No sim is good enough to fool someone forever.”
“By then, I suspect, he’ll be so overwhelmed with relief, his gratitude will offset his anger,” I said, raising my voice over the sound of the girls’ shrieks barreling down the hallway towards the bedroom door. “At least, I hope it will.”
Jed jumped out of bed and slipped on a mauve kimono matching the one he wore in the sim. “If it doesn’t?”
Bahlool groaned and pulled on some underwear in anticipation of the imminent stampede.
I shrugged. “I could always turn the sim off.”
Jed and Bahlool gave me a synchronized dirty look and opened the door to our offspring.
About the Author
Ramez Yoakeim writes about many things, many of them grim, but mostly he writes about hope. At one time or another an engineer and educator, these days Ramez devotes himself to solving problems, wherever he encounters them. Find out more about Ramez and his work at yoakeim.com.
© Triangles are Forever by Ramez Yoakeim. 2022. All rights reserved.
