Visting Birds by Jen Tombs
3900 words, ~19 minutes reading time
Issue 6 (Fall 2024)
Birds began appearing in the vicinity of the lab, flitting from branch to branch and chirping happily, unperturbed about hopping between dimensions. They were small enough to perch on a finger, with round grey bodies, bright bead eyes and snub black beaks.
It was hard to believe the birds were from another world, but they were. No one took notice when they first appeared around the lab, indistinguishable from normal urban wildlife, until one of the scientists realized their visits coincided with odd fluctuations in the Gateway's energy readings. Then the lab's equipment had confirmed it, albeit from afar (no one had managed to catch one). Myah started bringing food for them. There had been some concern when she'd asked permission to do this; would food harm the birds, which surely were not actually the same animals as the ones from her own world? But their avian physiology checked out, suspiciously so, and Myah was given a shrugged all-clear.
So she bought oats and seeds and rolled them into little balls with butter and left them dotted about the tree-lined front entrance to the lab. She watched from a short distance, the first time, and was disproportionately pleased to see the bravest bird tentatively hop towards the food, give it a suspicious peck, and then dig in with abandon.
Myah liked the birds. In her view they were the only truly beautiful thing to come out of the lab's work. She liked how unbothered they were that they could traverse worlds, and how they had no idea that they were more important and mysterious than any creatures from her own. And they seemed light and happy, industrious when they found a berry or a worm and got to work at the business of snatching and eating it, quick and careful without savouring, just a practical acceptance of the world and its gifts. She'd walk up the long driveway to the lab feeling her baseline dread, and then she'd hear their blithe chirping and see the cocked heads with sparkling eyes watching her. They cheered her up when she began going through what her mum would have called a wobble with her girlfriend, if only her mum had the chance to meet Carrie before she and Myah’s dad had decided that she wasn't the kind of daughter they wanted in their lives. They had told Myah, years back now, to choose what was important to her, and then, while she tried to figure out which part of herself she could bear tearing out, had chosen for her.
Myah saw the Gateway open. The team she was in had calculated the energy needed, where to direct the particles, what speed to fire them. It led to Elsewhere, as the team called it, even though where wasn't really the right term. It was the latest tentative experiment in a new kind of colonisation, humanity's last grasp at survival and, if possible, profit. Tentative because money and fuel were getting rarer and rarer. It was a foray into whether energy could be harvested by accessing other planes, if the moment of access itself, the moment of a rift opening up, could be frozen and held.
At first they experimented with what they called a tear. A small violation, a careful picking of the skin of the universe to peek through. But it worked. They had access.
Unlike the later Gateway, which required an outdoor facility so the occasional huge bursts of energy could disperse, the tear was confined in a sealed lab room. It had appeared like black pen being drawn crudely across the air, and remained, thin enough to be a trick of the eye, and the light in its immediate confines undulating a little.
The Gateway was then commissioned, a pipeline to siphon out fuel-free energy while keeping this side of the universe stable, and the public told in a breathless but vague press release about the next big step towards full renewability and sustainability. The team were less optimistic; nobody was quite ready to fully believe it had worked, and avoided talking about the scope of the Gateway's possibilities in case of jinxing things.
"It goes to show," Myah's girlfriend Carrie had told her, bitterly, after her team's breakthrough, "there's always more to exploit." They'd had a row that evening. It had started as a mere disagreement, tense in its deliberate casualness, before suddenly boiling over, and both of them found themselves throwing accusations at the other, biting and blunt. Myah had found herself inexplicably angry, feeling as if Carrie was daring their own private universe, still safe and stable, to unravel like the one around them.
Myah had said something that made her cringe when she thought of it later: "Sorry for saving the world."
It was true the world was teetering, not that it was obvious in day-to-day life. Amid cut phone lines and barbed-wire borders and riots over petrol, Carrie and Myah still had internet, although spotty at the best of times, and they rationed frozen pizza and hot baths. Poorer countries had taken the first hit, as the nations that had always used their resources took their last scoop and then closed borders, hoarding what they had. Power went down completely and with it, the connections that brought people what they needed to live. Famines visited some places, while others succumbed to spiralling heat without the water and electricity needed to counter it. But the relative comfort couldn't last, and Myah, working on the Gateway, knowing what would happen if it didn’t work, was more keenly aware than Carrie. At times―as she microwaved popcorn and thought about crops wilting across continents, as she watched her bath drain and thought inescapably about the drinking water draining from the Earth―she pictured the Gateway as the mouth of the world, open to swallow more energy, more and more.
When Myah and Carrie had first got together eleven years ago at a university bar–before fuel began to dwindle, before unrest erupted, and before military barriers went up, it had also been a tentative experiment. Like the Gateway, Myah was initially skeptical that anything could come out of it. Carrie had seemed so carefree while Myah had nothing but cares. But also like the project, the two of them fit together seamlessly, immediately. Perhaps that too was a science, something Myah could understand and shape. So Myah, who had given up so much when she came out, who had already buried and grieved the person she was when her family knew her, found something to move toward, to hold as proof that some things in the world could still work, and even feel like home.
The pipeline had been intended for one-way travel. It was the lab teams' job to find out where exactly the little birds had come from, and how, and why, in case something less charming was next to emerge. Nobody wanted to speculate or dwell on what that could be, but the idea was unnerving enough. Suffice to say it was of paramount importance to control the Gateway's flow and, of course, to put the birds back where they came from. They seemed harmless, but there was no way to know. Lionfish looked harmless when they appeared in new waters, until those waters' inhabitants disappeared. And the very fact these birds were identical to regular birds could be a dangerous sign. The safest thing was to contain them in their own dimension; at the moment they seemed to come and go as they pleased.
"We could tag them, maybe," Marcel, the team leader, was saying as they brainstormed one morning. He was standing in front of a whiteboard and Myah was cradling a cup of coffee in both hands. Her hands still smelled like oats and butter from the gifts she'd left on her way in. The insides of her elbows smelled like Carrie's cologne because she'd used some that morning. Carrie always smelled like it―the brackish scent was advertised as "fresh sea air”. But today it didn't bring Myah any of that pleasantly weighty feeling of tenderness, nor the rush of knowledge of being loved. It just reminded her that things were going badly.
"You think a tag would hold up through the Gateway?" asked Myah.
"Worth a try," said Marcel, who was important enough that he could have gone back to France, where there was still chocolate and stable internet, but he was sticking it out here.
"But the birds' structural--"
"Their structural stability, right? It―probably―doesn't hold up when they go through the Gateway. Their matter has to change somehow to make it through. We need the tags to match. If they can get through, our tech can get through."
"Right," said Myah. But she thought, can't we just leave the birds alone?
"That's not gonna be as simple as it sounds," said Robert. His feet were up on his desk, a casually arrogant gesture that annoyed Myah, along with his easy confidence. She was conscious of being the odd one out, her Blackness standing out in the group of white men, and she hated when people like him seemed so unaware that they were even in a majority. She let her thoughts drift the birds themselves, the odd ones out on her side of the universe.
They don't know they're not welcome here, she thought. Or if they do, they don't care what we think of them. They're happy.
Marcel then offered, "Myah, you feed them, don't you? We could design something to go in their food. They go back to Elsewhere, and the seeds go with them."
It didn't seem a bad idea, and Myah was secretly pleased to have bird interaction now part of her job. As her colleagues experimented with different tracker designs, she experimented with how to hide them in balls of food. Though she began to worry that this might be their way of pushing her from the team as she stood outside feeding and observing, while her coworkers remained inside brainstorming.
It took a few tries to get a formula, both tag and seeds, that the birds would eat. Once they disappeared back through the Gateway, though, the signal stopped moving immediately. Evidently whatever the birds became on the other side didn't act as a container the way bodies on Myah's side would.
The tags couldn’t be carried by the birds then; they had to be attached in a way that would carry over. The team started again, designing what they began wryly calling quantum loops, tags that could follow the birds as they became something else, that could shape-shift with them and return while holding on to their data. Like the birds themselves, they had to be more complex than they appeared. But that was the kind of challenge the team thrived on. The last stage was converting their bundles of shifting quantum signals into the physical perimeters of the tags. Despite the complexity,they would look like little hoops to be tied to their legs, like the ones used on ducks on farms.
Since the food didn’t work out, Myah was switched to working on loop design. She pushed down any bitter thoughts she had when she saw Robert, Marcel, Omar, and Tim, heads together, deep in the limitless ocean of theory. She'd thrown herself into the trickiest theoretical parts of building the tear and the Gateway when she started work at the lab two years ago. She had known what people would see when they first looked at her: tickboxes. They sometimes thought it so aggressively it was almost audible. People like her were imaginary characters in countless jokes and snide comments that went something like "of course, you can't get a role in a VRovie any more unless you're a gay Black woman", said as if gay Black women didn't exist, like it was an absurd amount of deviations from the norm, like she should have only picked one.
So she had made sure she was at the forefront of the lab's work from the start. At first, she had worked late every day, only getting home just before curfew at eight o’clock, narrowly missing the accompanying police packs with their promises of violence. Once she ran, actually ran, up the front garden path and shut the door behind her right as the warning alarm began to sound, a groan that rose then fell in sickening waves, each one seeming to crash against her chest. Myah knew it scared Carrie half to death when she was late. Carrie was a pharmacist who got home earlier than Myah, and Carrie confided in her that the waiting sometimes made her feel impotent and helpless. Myah suspected too that the solitude and the sirens made Carrie worry about her family, something she spent more and more time doing. They were in a part of the country now cut off by a military border and a communications blackout.
The day Myah had timed it too close, sirens already blaring before she was in her house, Carrie had grabbed her, hands digging into her shoulders, and shaken her and said, in time with the shakes, "What. Were. You. Doing?" The truth was Myah, already in a rush, had got distracted by a tree that had cast strange shadows on the ground. Something about the angles of the light meant that the pattern that filtered through the leaves looked blocky and pixelated, creating an eerie effect of being in a simulation, like seeing a glitch in the matrix.
She hadn't told Carrie this. The shock of the crossed boundary when Carrie had shaken her, the knowledge it wasn't undo-able, the fact that Myah had put herself on the edge of danger over something so trivial: it was all too much. She had burst into tears, and Carrie had softened. They'd held each other on the couch, listening to the alarm, and Myah had breathed in Carrie's sea air scent and curled up into her, under her strong arms with her tiny translucent-blonde hairs, holding Carrie's hands tight as Carrie in turn held Myah's soft shivering stomach and breasts.
Myah didn't normally work late any more, but today she felt the need to stay and perfect the quantum loops. She wanted to make the design as unobtrusive as possible so the birds could be free. Although their freedom was an illusion, surely she could make something that looked less like a shackle. Something that wouldn't, for now, interrupt their open, light journeying between worlds, that wouldn't make them stop taking it for granted, to realize that perhaps the worlds weren't all theirs. She redesigned and redesigned, going for efficiency, getting rid of anything extraneous.
She didn't get home until half past seven, a dangerous slip back into the old days. Carrie had shut herself in the spare bedroom. A bowl of congealed spaghetti sat on the table waiting for Myah. She made herself eat it cold, then washed up the bowl mechanically.
"I'm sorry," she whispered as she scrubbed, but she didn't know who she was addressing, Carrie or herself or the soon-to-be cuffed birds. She knocked on the spare room door. "Carrie," she said.
There was a sound inside of a duvet being hauled―she imagined Carrie turning round aggressively in bed. Myah's heart sank like a steel ball. She curled up alone in her room and took big sniffs of cologne from the inside of her elbow.
Myah didn't think that love was as simple as opening the secret parts of yourself up and letting someone else look in. She thought it was more like reconstructing yourself into someone that could slot together with someone else. Carrie withdrawing didn't just make her feel vulnerable and exposed, but also like half a jigsaw puzzle, impossible to finish.
The next morning, the birds weren't around. They weren’t always there, but Myah couldn't help but feel a little abandoned. She walked under low sunlight through stillness and silence up to the lab entrance, rolling a seed and butter ball between her fingers, thinking about making her first coffee of the day. She'd worn her own perfume today, orange blossom.
The birds weren't back the next day, or the day after. When she had a prototype of the quantum loop, it had been three weeks since anyone had seen the birds, almost three weeks since she and Carrie made up, falling asleep in one another's arms after a meal of spaghetti made by Myah, in a kind of peace offering, and a week since the trees outside the lab entrance started turning orange and brown, a damp carpet of rotting leaves piling on the long driveway.
"We're going to have to find one of these birds somehow," said Marcel, pacing in front of his whiteboard. On the whiteboard someone had drawn a cartoon of a little round bird with a speech bubble that read: Where the duck am I?
"Can we lure one out?" he asked. "Can we get something else through the Gateway? To their side?"
"That's what the loops are for," Myah reminded him. "The whole reason we're tracking the birds is we have no idea how they get in and out like that."
"Right on," said Marcel. "Okay, So we can't send something through, exactly. But we can interact with the Gateway. We're getting energy from it."
"So we interact with the Gateway. We do something that makes the birds come through where we can access them," said Omar.
By the end of the day the team had a plan to use their equipment to send an unpleasant energy pulse through, prompting the birds to flee back to their world. They enacted this plan the next day. Myah felt guilty making the birds suffer on purpose, but she hoped it was just an irritation. That was the intention.
Still, she was uneasy when she got home that evening. The unease grew when she realized the house was empty.
"Carrie?" called Myah.
There was no reply.
She walked from their cramped living room into their cramped kitchen, the battered wooden table taking up most of the little square of floor. She looked in their room, the spare room, the bathroom. Carrie wasn't there. She had to go outside and search. But she couldn't; she didn't have enough time before curfew. A sick, bitter panic rose in her throat, and a sudden cold descended over her skin, as if she had been doused in water. The house felt very big, and she very small. Somehow she couldn't shake the irrational thought that this was connected to the birds, that whatever disappeared them had disappeared Carrie too.
Carrie was Myah’s whole world. Carrie grew up with parents who adored her, who had bought her boys' dungarees and combat boots when she was eight years old. When they were cut off from each other, Myah watched as Carrie fell into grief, as if they had died. She started playing old music her mum liked, Bob Dylan and Creedence Clearwater Revival, and she cried as she listened. She resented that Myah had no one to miss or worry about. She knew Myah had plastered over that wound long ago and began to see Myah's ability to do so as a sign of cruelty. Myah, in turn, resented Carrie for acting like she wasn't suffering too. Did Carrie think that because Myah's family had rejected her once that they couldn't keep hurting her, over and over again? Or that she couldn't keep loving them, year after year?
Circling back to their bedroom, Myah found a note on the bed she hadn’t noticed before. She picked it up and promptly sat on the floor. Carrie had left. She had gone to an unnamed colleague's house nearby. Myah wasn't to try and find out who the colleague was or contact her.
"Carrie," said Myah to the room. "Caroline." She lay down on the floor and cried scratchy dry sobs until she fell asleep.
She woke up very early the next morning and decided to go into work anyway; here she was surrounded by a suffocating emptiness. She was alone all over again. She could hear her parents in her head, from after the arguing began and before even that stopped, accusing her of thinking she was better than they were. But she hadn’t thought that at all. In fact, she had felt small and stupid, and as if she was failing in some fundamental way. Now she felt the same. Her mouth was dry and numb, her eyes swollen. She took no seed balls with her to work and she wore no scent. The ocean breeze cologne was gone, and, as it turned out, she didn't need much of the birdseed. She was the first to arrive at the lab, and she could tell right away that something was wrong. From afar, it looked like a few dozen thick greyish leaves had fallen at the base of the trees. As Myah approached, she realized they were the birds.
They were all dead. The team's idea worked, thought Myah, but they had been too heavy-handed, like children picking up a pet and squeezing too hard.
The mood in the lab was sombre. Myah felt like she was at the bottom of a dark ocean. No one said much as they collected the birds' bodies to store and study. No one stayed late.
But Myah knew, as she started up her front path, that Carrie would be there. She just knew. Whether it was that she had paid the price―the birds' lives for her love―or simply that it would otherwise be too much loss at once, too much punishment, she didn't know. Carrie had flitted to somewhere different. But now here she was again.
"We killed the birds," said Myah when Carrie opened the door. Myah was tear-streaked; she noticed immediately Carrie had been crying too, but had since dried her eyes.
"I'm sorry," said Carrie, and Myah thought she knew what she meant. But did Carrie know that Myah had tried to hold on to the birds because everything else in her life felt like it was slipping away? Did Carrie know that Myah had suspected she would hurt the birds, and that she worried something in her had been willing to do it anyway, to keep Carrie? They held each other in the doorway. Myah could feel Carrie's heart, beating quick and desperate, and knew Carrie could feel hers.
The next evening, Myah was leaving the lab in the quiet sunlight, thinking about how big the horizon looked from the drive, how long and empty the sky was. The air was still. But then something moved in the corner of her eye. One lone bird, lying just off the path, was alive. It must have waited before following its brethren out of the Gateway to find all of the others had disappeared. One of its grey wings beat weakly. Myah lifted it as gently as she could, setting it at the foot of a trunk, away from the foot traffic. Its narrow beak didn't move but its tiny bead eyes regarded her.
She slipped into the lab and came out with water and fruit from the staff fridge. Myah knew once the bird had regained its strength it would disappear back through the Gateway, swallowed back into the flickering hole in the air that was meant to be the world's hope. She would tell the team that the animals had all died. She promised herself she would never see the bird again, never try to loop a ring around its brittle leg or try to convince it to come back to a world where it didn’t belong.