FicWad

Chapter 7 – The Other Angel

Change is, arguably, what makes the world go ‘round – that things don’t stay as they are, whether it’s physical cosmic phenomena and the subsequent turning of the seasons, or the social, cultural and intellectual advances of a human population. Some change is arguably good; some development is beneficial.

But it would also be arguable that the world changes that happened in the last third of Sarah Stuart’s life were almost incomprehensibly drastic, unlike anything that had come before. Some commentators tried to liken it to the Industrial Revolution of the early 20th century, but realistically some of the results were probably a lot closer to the culture shock and displacement of the European invasion of the Americas centuries ago, the loss of ‘normal’ way of life and any traditional concept of society were so extreme, the death-rate from the conquerors replaced with a pointlessness of existence for millions who gradually found themselves out of work and with no chance of ever finding analogous employment elsewhere. It was simply cheaper for most large businesses to just pony up the initial expense and use the machines.

And it was amazing to behold. Changes that used to take a century in her grandparent’s day now took only five-to-ten years max; developments that had taken a few years when Sarah was growing up seemed to happen overnight. And, yes, some of that pervasive automation was handy in streamlining little everyday tasks: she never had to adjust the thermostat or the lighting, never had to shop for groceries and other items she used regularly, never had to worry about driving – driverless electric cars had completely eclipsed the auto industry; entire urban grids had been built around a shared taxi service of sorts that was simply worked into their monthly expense account like any other utility. All she had to do was walk up to the curb of their home and one would arrive for her in under two minutes!

The downside, of course, was that both she and her husband had been automated straight out of their college-trained careers, as unbelievable as it would have seemed even a decade earlier. The process had started out innocently enough with Sarah’s job: the library system she worked in had been gradually building an electronic book database for years – it was so much more cost-efficient for the organization than buying more physical books that could wear out, and more convenient for their patrons. But as the directors decided to start converting the rest of the collection with the dawn of decent holographic augmented reality – rather in the fashion that people used to scan documents for microfilm in what now felt like the technological Stone Age – the need for a physical collection rapidly diminished… and the books and media were eventually sold accordingly at the annual sales to the public, starting with the materials that were less often checked out. Sarah watched as the ‘stacks’ section in her library got smaller and smaller; the children’s collection was admittedly the last to go. Shelvers lost their positions first – there was no need for so many hands to keep what was left tidy and in order. The checkout people up front had been gone for years already, replaced by self-check scanning that patrons could easily do themselves for the most part. Seating areas began to fill the empty spaces that had once been occupied by tall shelves of books - lifetimes of knowledge and learning and pleasure.

There was new emphasis on the library being ‘relevant’, of catering to changing demographics… specifically a rising mostly young demographic that did not go there to read. Community events were staged in the opened-up main area now, often having nothing to do with the library - things that would have never happened in the silent corridors of written word in Sarah’s youth. The rest of the understaff started getting notices that their jobs were going to be eliminated in the coming quarter – hopefully giving them enough time to find other employment, and to apologize for the inconvenience. The managers in the back were disappearing month by month. The reference librarian had been replaced with an AI program that patrons could download to their devices for free. And, in the end, Sarah lost her position, too – she simply couldn’t compete with fantastical holographic images from the stories she used to tell, that the children used to have to imagine to see played out. The staff shake-up had left many scrambling – so many basic employment options people used to fall back on as day-jobs simply didn’t exist anymore - but fortunately at age 65 Sarah was able to properly retire. The remaining administration – two execs who were staying on to maintain and schedule the ‘community event center’ the library had been converted into – had thrown her a really nice going away party, and many of her former coworkers had come to wish her well and to celebrate her career. It was so hard for her to leave, knowing how many lives she had influenced, how many people she had helped all these years – people who met her at the library when they were in grade school and later came back with their children.

The day she turned in her security barcode and walked out – never to return – there were couches and beanbags in the shelving area in what was once the old youth section, with almost two-dozen kids of varying ages insularly playing on their electronic devices – the library had calculated not long ago that only a few of them were actively using their database ‘in-house’; most were just utilizing the free internet. Barely any of them were reading at all.

The experience seriously embittered Sarah against much of the new ‘entertainment’ technology that was coming out. She never upgraded her communications devices to AR and kept her old smartphone for as long as it worked, even buying extra batteries for it online while she could still find them.

Dan was able to hang onto his job a while longer because the college had managed to successfully incorporate the new technology into it with their professors as integral components to the system. The history classes that he taught had switched up heavy paper textbooks for digital ones ages ago, but now even these were scrapped for the next big thing: virtual reality teaching, using lightweight wireless VR headsets in the classroom along with the professor’s lectures. It had been such a trip for him, getting to literally show his ‘kids’, being able to take his students on these incredible mental journeys into the past to very specific places and events and cultures. The programs made all the participants appear clothed and groomed similarly to the virtual people around them so that they could really get a feel for immersively entering the societies they were exploring together.

The one aspect of this that made the old history prof a little leery was the battle scenes: he was always careful to restrict the violence/suffering/gore to the lowest possible settings rather like an old-school videogame, not wanting to induce PTSD in any of his students! But after a few years went by and more and more people psychologically adjusted to using AR and VR in their daily lives (along with gaming for entertainment), his students started to complain that he was babying it down, that the scenes weren’t realistic. He hadn’t wanted this realistic! In spite of their irritation, he continued to do so, and not just for his own sake: he was beginning to observe a general lack of empathy and compassion in the young people around him on campus in ‘Real Life’ – such as it was; it was always hard to tell anymore with all these new toys and gadgets they were all playing with, wandering around in the clear visor-glasses with projected personal audio that bypassed the outer ear and triggering the hearing centers in the brain. It was impossible to tell who was interacting with who, who was really seeing and hearing what at any given time. He had come to long for the ‘old’ days when all he had to deal with was kids with their smartphones seemingly glued to their faces: at least those could be put on ‘airplane’ mode and put away. Not these – much of the new social technology never went into any sort of standby mode; some of it was literally impossible to turn off! He had already had one instance of a boy who had been caught watching an interactive porno sitting in his lecture hall before class started – and it was only noticed because the girl seated next to him had complained. They had taken disciplinary action, but the incident was hardly isolated; other faculty privately told him of similar experiences they had had within the last year or so. These kids they were seeing coming to college now were increasingly just living in their own little tailor-made worlds – nearly oblivious as to where they were, or simply callously treating the outside world as their private playroom. They didn’t even interact with each other very much.

What had been saving his own position had been the perceived need for a series of human voices in human history – this became devalued also, to the point that many faculty on many campuses across the globe were starting to lose their tenures to VR programs that could be made even more immersive without the ‘modern’ voices to ‘interrupt’ the learning process. In the end, the most fiscally successful courses came to rely on only a few star professors in each field from universities all over the world – and the students never even bothered learning their names after a while because they were so well-hidden in the newer programs (which were specifically designed around those individual profs, what they wanted to present). Online virtual college was taking a chunk out of the physical university system, also, and to defer future expenses that could become catastrophic for the institution without something to offset the lack of funds accumulated from student housing on-campus, Syracuse started letting go of their more specialized professors, including Dan who was given the option of honorable retirement, which he accepted. The official reception was formal, but surprisingly few of his old pupils ever came back to say their goodbyes at all, even ones he remembered enjoying the class and doing well in it. He had a sinking feeling that he knew why: he wasn’t even out the door yet and he had already been forgotten in favor of the next experience, the next diversion. In fact, it frightened him more than a little that it would be rather easy in a few more years for a professor to teach anything they wanted without any oversight at all; it would be easy to pass off anything as truth. Who in administration would even know? There were no course materials to look at for reference; the ones in existence were so old they were mostly being recycled – who wants their old textbooks sitting around collecting dust? Who reads them? Even he didn’t.

That wasn’t to say that Dan went quietly into retired living: he continued to keep up with current research and studies in his fields of interest for his own private enrichment, still writing papers for an old-style online tutorial blog. With the levels of premature dementia rampant in society, he was determined not to become a statistic by refusing to use his brain.

Sarah was through taking acting courses – with only Dan’s retirement check coming in, there wasn’t enough money now – but she was still in a small local troupe’s theatrical productions. Yet even here in such a human medium and artform, AR had made inroads. Many of the venues that they tried to book were set up with platforms to support ‘augmented’ sets and even costumes – visuals that would appear overlaying the physical stage and performers for an audience wearing wireless goggles. There was an ongoing programmer project to virtually manufacture visuals for as many plays as possible; most of the work was being done by kids, it seemed, and (the one upside, as far as many managers were concerned) most of them were free due to current copyright laws – there could be no profit generated from the venture. Some of it was being made for public domain works – for profit – but those outfitters tended to stick to guaranteed sellers like Shakespeare or old classics that were perennial favorites; sometimes the quality could still be a little touch-and-go, but new was new (‘new’ being analogous for ‘still alive and kicking’ here.) While the equipment for the displays could be difficult to fund upfront, it was usually made up for quickly enough in ticket sales to defray the expense, and the technique was touted as a way to literally save live theater in an age of instant and continuous insular digital entertainment. Many new plays were even being designed around the medium in favor of audience participation - ‘getting rid of the walls’ it was called – blurring the line between the collective environment and the players and redefining who was really onstage; everyone got to be a star this way, what people seemed to want. The effect had a tendency to distract from the plot, though, any sort of message other than having a good time for an hour or so.

Sarah had been in a few of these new-style performances and had found the effect not unlike what actors had to go through in ‘green-screen’ filming – only this had to be performed live: everyone onstage was in the skin-tight suits that could cover everything – even hair and face if desired – and with no physical scenery at all usually! The effect for the actors could be disconcerting; it certainly wasn’t something that everyone was good at. Her own imagination helped her to visualize what everyone ooh-ing and aah-ing in front of her in the seats were seeing, but she often visited the old prop closets at other times, longingly fingering the costumes, not sure how much longer theater in general was going to last even in this format – it just wasn’t the same. Nothing could replace physically turning into someone else and emerging from the cocoon at the end of the night as herself once again. The makeup artists and costume designers who had migrated back to live theater after losing their jobs to CGI in the movie industry were dying out here, too. She couldn’t help thinking that this feeling of clear-sightedness meant that she was getting old… and then she’d see some girl walk by her without even seeing her, lost in her own manufactured dreams. And she’d thought she was a dreamer…

The phenomena made her think of an extremely old British Isles faerie story she’d come across in high school, about a midwife who gets summoned by a faerie prince (why were they always princes and princesses?) to help deliver his human wife’s baby; the woman was instantly transported inside his mansion where the lady was, and the delivery went fine until it was time to anoint the newborn halfling’s eyes with the truesight ointment – and the midwife accidentally rubbed one of her own eyes afterwards because it itched… only to see out of that eye that she was in a cave with a small fire in the corner, the new mother who had appeared in silks only moments ago was truly half-dressed in rags, and the ‘fine bed’ she was on was a slab of rock with dried moss and fern fronds piled up so it wouldn’t be so hard on her back. Even the mother didn’t seem to know…

Is this these people’s children’s future? she would catch herself thinking in certain moods, the longer it went on. ‘Neural lace’ – specifically the use of it for wirelessly hooking up the human brain to a grid of virtual reality experiences – was boasted of as being just around the corner, a series of custom-made artificial worlds – paradise, even – that people could log into and literally never have to leave. An entire life could be lived this way – completely ignorant of isolation, squalor, wretchedness… and the real environment and people around them. Such technology was already in the test phases at NASA in the manned Martian space program, to help the astronauts psychologically deal with the nothing of the long flight and the boredom and prolonged isolation once they arrived. Like all the rest of it, this did seem to have good, decent uses, but…

Even with the abysmal rates of unemployment – early statistics had predicted 40%, but it was edging toward half – the Stuart children were doing remarkably well; they seemed to be made for this world. Debbie (now 40) had less concerts than she used to; ticket sales were down because many people were choosing to watch them remotely rather than in person because it was cheaper. She still had plenty of work opportunities, though, because movies and especially videogames were in higher demand than ever; there were always going to be open positions for a concert-level pianist in the entertainment industry, even if the medium changed: it was simply too ‘classic’ of a sound - an idiosyncratically human psychological effect - to be culturally replaced, oddly enough. Sarah wasn’t certain whether her eldest daughter had inherited her biological grandmother’s selfish narcissism or if it was just the condition that seems to afflict many career performers – that the performer and their art always come before everything and everyone else no matter what – but Debbie had already shot through one failed marriage and seemed to be nursing along a second; all other parties involved were pushing for her to try couples counseling rather than cutting-and-running this time around. To her mother’s small relief, at least there were no children involved, but she couldn’t get over just how strongly Deb reminded her of Linda Williams now. Sarah’s biological mother had died a few years back (of secondary health problems due to cocaine use, apparently, but no one ever talked about it), and she had only learned of it online through an illegitimate sister she didn’t even know she had! It wasn’t the most comfortable of communiqués, and after the high-profile remembrance service that they’d had to get tickets to attend, Sarah hadn’t kept up the contact.

Ethan – her shy, brainy son – turned out to be the most ‘normal’ of their brood, or at least the happiest in a more traditional sense once he was finally in his element: he had gotten an engineering job with NASA immediately after graduating from Mines Summa Cum Laude with a degree in aerospace engineering, and wound up marrying one of his coworkers, a computer science specialist named Hailey just a few years later. They were stationed in Florida near the Cape Canaveral base of operations, and their son Skylar was already three years old. She and Dan had been out to visit them a few times since their retirement, and found their demesne – a condo of sorts in one of those new mini-city skyscrapers with all the amenities of a New York City borough, basically – breathtaking, if a little insular like a gated retirement community. He had been active in the manned Mars program, helping to build the equipment used inside the ships; men had been orbiting Mars in 2029, but the real terrestrial missions were underway now; the community there was nearly ready for the second launch and the return home of the first astronauts to walk on the Red Planet! The building where their son lived was so close to where he and his wife worked that they could walk there in good weather – and there was no need to catch a ride anywhere else unless they really wanted to go do something in a different city: everything they could possibly need to live was already right in their building! Unlike his tech-reticent parents, Ethan loved all the new gadgets and home devices; his home was the epitome of futuristic comfort, complete with a robotic ‘servant’ that looked somewhere between a greyhound and a cheetah in build, who handled everything from keeping the place clean and fetching items on verbal command to playing with Skylar and doing silly things to amuse him! His son, of course, had everything electronic at his disposal, including his own multi-platform-compatible VR/AR station in his room – at his age! Sarah had once voiced her concern over this to Ethan privately, and he easily laughed it off, saying that by the time Skylar was an adult there wouldn’t be any difference! He saw himself as part of a team that was building a brave new world for their children.

What’s so wrong with the real one? his mother had thought sadly, but knew better than to say it aloud; she’d learned the hard way that her son wouldn’t listen to her on that one. Real nature – plants, trees, flowers – was conspicuously absent around their building (although she was shown briefly that it was superimposed with AR on the outside, making the place look like a modern Hanging Gardens of Babylon.) There was a community vegetable garden on the rooftop as well as a miniature orchard, but Ethan’s family never went up to use it – they were ‘too busy for that.’ While Sarah and Dan barely had any of this type of equipment at home by conscious choice, VR finally made an appearance in their home one Christmas when Ethan gave them both 5th generation lightweight screen-glasses that weren’t even available to the public yet; they each had individual control bases, but the system was made so that the pair could share one if they wanted to interact in one of the environments, and it had come preprogrammed with a small collection of relatively sedate apps that he thought his aging technophobe parents might genuinely enjoy (along with one easy, silly videogame at the insistence of their grandson.)

Sarah took her console and headset with her once on one of her visits to Jareth; it had gotten significantly harder to see him frequently again now that Dan was home a lot, but she was carefully timing it so it was still ‘regular’. Upon explaining what it was (the base was so small it could run for several hours on a rechargeable battery), she had offered to let him borrow it briefly if he wanted to.

“I hate what’s happening to our society because of stuff like this,” she had sighed, “but it is good for one thing: mental escape. This is probably as close to freedom as you’re ever going to get – go ahead and try it,” she held out the glasses for him.

He seemed to consider it for a moment, but almost immediately shook his head. “I truly appreciate the gesture, Sarah, but you seem forget what I am – I would only see it for the artificial illusion that it is.”

“Are you sure? I mean, I was pretty skeptical of this myself for a really long time, but the graphics have come so far in the last few years – a couple of these programs look pretty darn real to me!” she laughed a little self-deprecatingly.

Jareth just looked at her, crossing his arms. “Do you honestly think that’s all I see when I look at the outer world?” he laconically answered her, raising an eyebrow.

And that’s when Sarah realized that she had literally never given the prospect any thought at all! His physical…incarnation? manifestation?… kept throwing her off!

He was obviously mulling something over just now, watching her reaction, but looked like he had decided against whatever-it-had-been.

“What?”

He smirked. “You couldn’t handle what I see, either,” was all he said as he turned and walked to the small balcony.

His bedroom had never felt so much like a jail cell to her…

Compared to her far-flung siblings, Ailsa chose to stay where she was comfortable – in Syracuse, close to home, in a relatively quiet apartment building just a few blocks away from her parents’ house. Probably the one thing that kept her mother from being a complete pessimist about all of this technology was the fact that it had allowed her youngest daughter access to a world she was still incredibly daunted by in person: she’d been able to take a handful of college-level art classes entirely online, using touchscreen programs and stylus apparatus to complete her assignments. She had initially been going for a degree, but she had quickly gotten turned off at how often her professors kept trying to channel her considerable skill into more lucrative fields than creating painting after luscious painting of unicorns and Pegasuses – she picked up enough technique to help herself and then struck out on her own. Her parents had helped her move out, then helped with her rent at first while she got on her feet professionally: her singular artistic bent could’ve spelled starvation for anyone besides Lisa Frank in the old days, but there were so many specialized cultures online now that would’ve been considered ‘fringe’ once upon a time that they knew it was just a matter of her finding her niche – she had the talent to make this work.

And work she did – in her tiny bedroom, for hours and days on end, churning out image after glorious image out of the private paradise that she already had in her head; Ailsa had never gone in for VR, AR, or any other version of R(eality) that didn’t originate outside her window, on her workhorse of a personal computer (a laptop still didn’t have enough space to run the programs that she needed), or in her own imagination. Her young nephew once made the mistake of trying to show her a bright, fast-moving game on his glasses one holiday and she immediately had one of her shaking attacks… and to everyone’s surprise Skylar knew exactly what to do! Dashing out of the room, he came back with a blanket from the hall closet, wrapped her tightly in it, and carefully rocked her back-and-forth sitting where she was, repeating a comforting mantra a few times… and she calmed right down! There were so many kids ‘on the spectrum’ coming up that Autism Sensitivity Training was an actual part of his elementary education!

She did periodically take certain commission jobs in order to pay her bills (although she was almost painfully picky about what she would accept), but for the most part she still preferred doing her own thing all by herself, in a perfectly predictable, controllable environment that she found comforting. She still didn’t have many friends - even online - but she did have a growing fanbase, ironically enough, in spite of how little she attempted to nurture any ‘community’ on her own part beyond selling her prints through amateur artist websites and digital arts-and-crafts marketplaces, basically. Third-party licensing started to take care of some of her money worries.

Her parents had completely different concerns about Ailsa, things that she seemed to not care about at all – like the very real possibility that she might wind up alone in life, partnered or otherwise, once they were gone (her family was about the only in-person contact that she made any effort to maintain), but they knew all too well what she was up against. It could be quite a challenge for certain adults with Asperger’s to develop and maintain non-fantasy romantic relationships due to how rigidly inflexible they could be on a personal level about even the smallest things; it often worked best when both partners had some form of the disorder because they could understand each other better, but both parties had to really want it, to actively work at it. (Karen Williams – her maternal grandmother – had turned into a nasty old biddy late in life and used to harass the poor girl about it no end, but her other grandparents had been supportive of her life-choice, as her parents were trying to be.) Nevertheless, she seemed satisfied with her self-limited existence, happy. The few friends she did have online seemed relatively close, which put Sarah’s mind to rest somewhat. At least she had someone.

Because she was starting to lose her family, namely her remaining grandparents. Karen was the next to pass away, and the process had been neither quiet nor peaceful even though she had been able to remain in her home with in-house nursing. As just mentioned, she had certainly not been a joy to be around for the last year or two, to put it mildly. Even Toby seemed relieved when she finally went… and stopped hiding his long-term partner, Kevin, from the rest of the family – he had not had the nerve to come out while his mother was still alive. They were married shortly afterwards; if there was any further dissention about the union, it was kept private (which he had known would not have been the case with her.) Considering what all had altered in Sarah’s own children after their interactions with the Goblin King, she had wondered for years if he had had any influence on Toby – not that she thought that he’d caused this, mind you, but simply being in his presence had emphasized very unique traits in her own children in a clinically confirmable manner – and she had sort of been waiting for the other shoe to drop with her little brother, so-to-speak; she had a feeling this was it, and she was sort of relieved that it wasn’t anything so extreme like her own brood had experienced. Although she could also see how having Karen for a mother might’ve made him think otherwise about the opposite sex, too…

Dan’s mother Fiona was next just a year-and-a-half later, and she had not been so lucky as to be able to stay home; they’d had to move her into a nursing facility and sell her house – Dan insisted on using the gained funds to make sure she could afford to stay someplace nice with good care and not be shuffled off into a corner in a Medicaid hospice (the funding for which was barely anything at all now) – both of her kidneys were failing at age 83 and she needed dialysis. Medicine in general had come a very, very long way by 2032 – she could have new organs grown from her own stem-cells in just a few months with 98% transplant success guaranteed since the body was so much less likely to reject them as ‘foreign’… but she had refused the therapy on moral grounds, citing the early study of such clinical uses utilizing stem cells from aborted fetuses decades ago – she did have the legal right to, she was still cognizant – and neither would she allow her doctor to attempt the relatively new, risky experimental procedure to implant a robotic organ instead; she would not be so presumptuous as to act as if any of them had the right to improve upon what God had made. She was ready to die. Even on constant biomimetic dialysis with nutritive supplementation, she only lasted two more months. Her funeral had been harder for Sarah to get through than it had been for the woman’s own son, though; he and his extended family so firmly believed that she was okay where she was now – with her husband in heaven – that Sarah started seriously reconsidering their faith now in the face of an emotionally painful personal death, what that surety might really be worth.

Sarah’s father, Robert Williams, was the hardest loss; she and Dan had been out-of-town visiting Debbie in Las Vegas when it happened, and only learned of it upon their return two weeks later! Ailsa had gone to visit her grandfather at home and had found him dead of a heart attack in his recliner in front of the TV, which was still on… and she’d chosen to handle the whole matter quietly all by herself rather than inconvenience anyone else: coroner, cremation and all! She had very calmly informed her parents of it over the phone in order to physically avoid her mother’s inevitable emotional outburst – she simply didn’t like being around her when she cried, and in her own way of thinking she had just taken the basic logical steps for dealing with the situation as a mature adult; a corpse was a corpse, not her grandfather – she would miss him, of course, but his soul was fine.

Sarah was furious with her daughter and inconsolable for weeks (as Ailsa had coldly but accurately predicted); no vacation was that important! She wouldn’t even look at her during the remembrance service. Later when she went to see Jareth, she had wound up breaking down again, sobbing that she hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye to her father, and now he was gone. The king had remained uncharacteristically silent, impassively holding her, letting her cry all over his black leather jerkin; when she finally looked up at him with clearer eyes again, his expression suggested that he was considering something, but whatever it was he’d kept to himself.

She started insisting on going on ‘nature walks’ with him Underground now, enjoying the pristine, undisturbed nature in his forest; it was getting harder to find this even at home – developers were steadily encroaching on their legally unprotected woods, and with safety drones and more people than ever traipsing through the area it simply wasn’t the peaceful sanctuary that it had once been. She had logically known that it would be like this between them, but Jareth’s agelessness had begun to seem strange to her; he hadn’t visibly aged a day since she first met him when she was fourteen – just like the faeries in many of the old stories – but she was all too aware now that if he had appeared more human, she would’ve look old enough to be his mother! She was taking fairly good care of herself, eating right mostly and taking yoga classes for seniors, but her long, dark hair was turning silver (she’d never truly cut it beyond trimming the ends – it was down to her waist). She wasn’t dying it, though – bright silver hair was ‘in’ again, and besides the artificial color had made her face look older, too; she wasn’t rich enough to afford nanite dermabrasion beauty treatments like Debbie, where zillions of microscopic robots were applied topically to perform aesthetic tissue dismantling and repair at the cellular level (her eldest daughter genuinely looked like she was still in her twenties, it was disgusting.)

Speaking of Debbie, she’d gotten her second divorce just a few months after her grandpa’s death, and now she was just living with someone new, to the extreme moral indignation of her father, who would vocally bemoan to his wife that they had raised her better than this – where had they gone wrong? Sarah would gently remind him that they couldn’t live her life for her; it was hers to try to make the best of. The stage and the recording studio were obviously her true spouse, and her adoring fans were her extended family. She had no permanent home, still preferring posh hotels and digital storage to physical baggage beyond her clothing – it was incredible, but between two considerable alimonies and the royalties she still collected along with the payments from her live performances, she really was making enough to live this way. For how long, her parents didn’t know.

Ethan’s family was about to become one of the first to be outfitted with the long-awaited non-medical-use neural lace network – the early civilian version of the Mars mission’s initial program; if the interface was good enough that those astronauts could stand to stay on the Red Planet long enough to form a permanent colony there and begin building for future missions, perhaps it was finally time to allow limited public use of it to see how it would go over. Upon learning of their son’s decision to be in the experimental pilot program for it, Dan had been horrified, asking him when he was going to be getting the Mark of the Beast – but he’d said this when the family had gotten microchipped for their apartment building, too, a few years back. Sarah had tried to view the developments in a slightly more charitable light – the only problem she had ever heard about with microchipped pets had been that the chip could sometimes migrate under the skin and become uncomfortably ensconced in muscle tissue back-in-the-day, but they’d figured out a way to anchor them stable by now.

But the neural lace admittedly made her take pause. There did seem to be a certain amount of revisionist history being taught in the schools now in the effort to raise more empathetically sensitive children, from the third-party studies that Dan read regularly – and talked about almost daily anymore – but how much of even this news was true and how much of it was conspiracy theory Sarah could never decipher. Sometimes it could be difficult to know which news organizations to believe, with the various public and private corporations and businesses that had a monetary hand in what was publicized (and what was occasionally suppressed) to say nothing of blatant personal aggrandizement that had nothing to do with reality at all, but could be made to have relevance in VR. Some of the podcasts Ethan was listening to reminded Sarah of some of the old conservative shows that used to air on AM radio (radio itself had been disbanded… how long ago? Five years? Maybe closer to ten?) And as adamantly opposed to ‘fake’ technology as he was, her husband had gotten rather used to using his VR system to help him relax in the evenings; it was getting difficult for him to do so at all without it. While Sarah saw the behavior for what it was – psychological dependence, although of a relatively mild garden-variety so far – she started utilizing the times that he did this to visit Jareth; her husband was just about dead to the outside world with his headset on and the relaxation app running.

And Ailsa… Ailsa was Ailsa was Ailsa; she never seemed to change at all, she just got older. She didn’t even like buying new clothes, choosing instead to wear her old ones until they just about fell off of her, sometimes commissioning people on crafting websites to make her perfect replicas of the pieces she lost (she couldn’t stand how the newer bio-responsive synthetic fabrics felt against her skin, either.) Their youngest daughter certainly wasn’t getting rich like her older siblings, but she was happily getting by, working on whatever she wanted to; the fans of her particular brand of digital painting had stayed loyal over the years, more than willing to support one of their favorite indie artists, knowing who she was, even contributing to a couple of the more progressive autism rights charities that she had come to promote. The days of treating these people like a problem to be solved were all but over; the technically-minded left-brainers had been aggressively recruited by Silicon Valley corporations for years, but anyone with a more artistically creative bent still faced a considerable uphill battle for relevant employment; she was one of many success stories. There was one relatively new development in her meticulously ordered life: she had made a new male friend online on one of her ASD social forums; he was an IT at a graphic design firm and telecommuted from home same as her! They’d been talking at the same time of day every day for months and she really liked him – he’d even helped her to tweak her aging color palate pro bono (she refused to update her software, too; it still worked) – but she didn’t want to pressure him for anything more unless he seemed like he wanted to. For right now they were just enjoying being internet buddies. Her parents were holding their breath.

Conversely, one thing their kids could all agree to be concerned about was their father. Dan wasn’t as hardline as his parents had been about modern medical interventions, but he did believe in the sanctity of the human body, and over the years he had refused certain medical procedures because of his convictions including robotic augmentation of his joints when arthritis set into his knees in favor of medication and steroid shots, and cellular reprogramming and growth via nanotechnology versus a physical operation to repair the retina of his right eye when it became partially detached. He had a standing order in his living will that clearly stated that, if his heart should ever stop for any reason, there was to be no attempt at terrestrial resurrection of any kind, technological or biological – with a caveat for allowed cardiopulmonary resuscitation if it had been less than a minute, but no more – not if any real time had passed. His children – and his wife – tried so hard to get him to change his mind, but he remained firm in his viewpoint and his beliefs, stating that fallen man was not meant to live forever in this world, that true healing was on the ‘other side’ where his parents and his God were waiting for him. He never stopped praying for all of them aloud before going to sleep after reading his Bible no matter what was going on in their lives, and late in life Sarah began to join him silently; his faith had become something wonderful to see in practice, to vicariously share in. As the years rolled on, she called on Jareth less and less often in favor of spending as much time as she could with her husband, until she was only seeing him once or twice a week; the king always scolded her for leaving him for such long durations, but his reproval didn’t hold the harshness it would’ve once. Even without ever discussing it, she had a feeling he could intuit what was happening with Dan, what was coming.

Because among the other nucleotide pairings those researchers had found nearly half-a-century ago, they had identified a genetic tendency that was not only present but active in Dan – the correct recessive sequence for leukoencephalopathy, the spontaneous degeneration of white matter in the brain – which could have easily been reversed with gene replacement therapy if it had been treated in the early stages… which it wasn’t, as per his wishes. The disease was otherwise completely untreatable once the onset was live; it seemed nearly miraculous that he had lived even this long; most victims died of it in childhood, but it was possible for it to appear later and often be misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis or dementia. Both of his parents had to have been carriers for him to have turned up positive like this, but their children had not inherited the full set since Sarah hadn’t had it – so far, so good. But the genetic screening would have to continue, especially with Skylar; the girls had lucked out, but Ethan had turned up as an inactive carrier. The couple had known about the inevitability for years, but they had kept it private, only telling their children that their father was a carrier – not that he was walking around with a death sentence looming over his head, a ticking time-bomb in his cells. There was no use in distressing them prematurely when he had made up his mind and no amount of worrying would help. It had pained Sarah, but it was his right to choose.

When it finally did strike him at age 75, his decline was breathtakingly swift. All Sarah could do was look on helplessly as the genetic error robbed her husband of his ability to walk, then to move, then to speak and swallow – in just a few weeks flat. As soon as it started happening they knew it for what it was, and admitted him to the hospital right away; a month-and-a-half later he was in ICU. Sarah spent hours at his side every single day, talking to him, even praying for him – that if he was still in there that he wouldn’t give up the hope of his faith. She wasn’t sure he saw her when his eyes were open anymore, even though he could still reflexively grab her hand if she took his; the rest of his bodily functions were being perfectly sustained mechanically – he was being fed everything he could possibly need directly through his blood, and his many vitals were constantly displayed on the large screen above the sofa in the almost hotel-like room: at least it didn’t have to feel like dying in a hospital anymore - mostly. When he had first lost his ability to communicate, tentative ‘lace’ probes were inserted into his brainpan – and the first sentence they got out of him was a very lucid and cognizant order to remove them! He knew perfectly well what the next step would have been once he was fully hooked up: the attempted upload of his memories and personality into a computer program, to live on consciously once his brain rotted away and his body gave out – a medical abomination for anything human in his book.

There were so many things that could be cured in this hospital now: cancer, Alzheimer’s, even HIV – any infectious disease could be eradicated in-house in under half-an-hour using nanites that literally consumed any pathogen they were designed to recognize in the bloodstream or any other tissue where they were injected onsite. But something like this… All they could do was keep him stable and comfortable, and turn the video display terminal onto soothing programming and music. Nothing else had been allowed while there was still time to intervene.

There finally came a night when Sarah awoke out of a deep sleep with a sudden gasp – and the memory of the Goblin King’s voice ringing in her ears:

“Come to me! Now!”

She quickly stumbled out of bed, intending to leave dressed as she was - in her nightgown - and ran in the dark to her vanity (the lights came on immediately with her movement) and she opened the bottom left drawer with the false base, pushing it up and unlocking the small square metal box within. Jareth had assured her years ago that the fire-safe had not been necessary, as long as the crystal was not readily accessible. With the object in hand, she willed herself to him in a second – not knowing what was going down but assuming it was serious (he’d never done that before)…

And nearly dropped the crystal in surprise when he grabbed her forearm in the dark with a yank!

“This way! Hurry!”

He ran with her down the twisting stone aisles of the outskirts of the Labyrinth until they came to a sudden wide-spot in the path – a conjunction of five branching corridors…

And there, in the crepuscular dim of twilight – maybe an hour or so before dawn here – kneeling on the stone pavers in front of a quickly burning taper… was her husband?! The candle was unnaturally bright, radiant in fact; when they arrived, he slowly stood and turned to face them – and she saw that he was young again!

And then she understood. He was gently smiling at her. Tears spontaneously streamed down her face.

“Bid him farewell as you would – I’ve rendered him temporarily corporal – but ask him no questions; he cannot speak in this state,” the Goblin King rapidly hissed in her ear. “I’ll only be able to hold him against The Call about a minute longer – that taper’s been burning like a sparkler; it’s already lost three inches!”

She dashed into his open arms – Daniel, her Daniel, just as he was the day she’d met him, as she hadn’t seen him in years; she clutched him to her so tightly that if he’d had lungs yet she would’ve constricted his breathing – but his chest wasn’t moving. He was dressed all in white.

The Goblin King stepped forward into the cast light of the man’s soul: he was all in black. “You may hear now that I am your wife’s secret, but go to your rest knowing that she has always been faithful to you, and has made no vow here but of temporal company.”

The phantom of her husband slowly nodded in acknowledgement, and lifted his living wife’s face up to his, bending to kiss her as if half-asleep. Sarah kissed him back with all the fervor she possessed, and when he broke away she told him over and over and over that she loved him-

Until the taper guttered – going out – and he suddenly dissolved in her arms, vanishing into the darkness his absence literally created… and she crumpled onto the cold, unforgiving paving stones, hard sobs wracking her body, heedless of the gradual lightening of the sky above her. Her Daniel was flown away to his heaven, and left her behind alone.

She felt warm arms lift her, sitting her upright, holding her as he sat beside her, stroking her hair.

“I can guarantee you I’ll be punished for doing that,” he casually mentioned offhandedly, then scoffed a harsh-sounding laugh. “They can just add it to my tab.”

Nothing more was said as the sun slowly rose.

By the time Sarah was somewhat recovered and returned home again, bleary and exhausted, there was a message for her on her cellphone from the hospital, saying that her husband had passed away peacefully but unexpectedly in his sleep: he’d had a surprise blood clot in his left lung, and that was that – there was no way to get to it fast enough. He had actually died of natural causes, as per his wishes.

“I didn’t cause that,” Jareth had answered simply when Sarah voiced her suspicion aloud the next day – and bitterly smiled. “A man like that doesn’t need recourse to a being like me.”

But what are you? Sarah thought, the terrible unanswered question a bottomless black chasm between them again, more pressing than ever. What are you – you who can trap souls and mount them above your bed like trophies?! Who were you originally? Is that why you can never tell me?

But – regardless of what he might’ve been, long ago – what he was now was available to cry on, to hold, and Sarah did precisely this intermittently during the next few months’ visits after the funeral; little things kept setting her off, reminding her, and he would impassively allow her to do what she needed to, to get it out of her system. They never met in his tower bedroom anymore; now that she knew or had guessed what he could not personally tell her about those tapers – that they were indeed the souls of his goblins (who were practically indestructible with them separated and guarded like this) – the prospect appeared to make her far too uncomfortable. He did his best to be amiably distracting elsewhere, usually the kept gardens (the forest only made her weep now), still reading to her often, periodically cursing the death of the printed and bound word in her world; what ‘new’ books he read now she had to purchase for him, which changed their dynamic somewhat because they were a gift and not a Good Neighbors’ loan which could easily be reciprocated. She was freshly leery of accepting his favors again, claiming that she would rather bank on that goodwill for the time being than spend it piecemeal, and while he was irritated to have anything hanging over his head like this, he did not push the issue further. At the time, anyway…