ANNOUNCEMENT: We’re currently running our first Kickstarter campaign in more than a decade, to fund Year 17 of Lightspeed and Year 15 of Nightmare. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kickstarter to check it out. Funding the campaign will bring all-new stories to Lightspeed from the likes of Charlie Jane Anders, Travis Baldree, Olivie Blake, P. Djèlí Clark, Ken Liu, Hugh Howey, Seanan McGuire, Rebecca Roanhorse, Veronica Roth, Jeff Vandermeer, and more. The campaign ends October 15, so back now!
I’m only doing maskwork until I find better, but there aren’t many physical jobs to go around in Schrödinger City. Most get done by gleaming machines, by hop-along bots and drone swarms. Luckily, maskwork needs a human touch—and supposedly, village folk are better at it than the folk who grew up here. Could be. I always liked masks.
Most days I wake up in the dark so I can get to the depot early and be near the front of the queue. There’s a whole horde of us each morning, yawning and shivering in the cold, sometimes passing a caffeine stick up and down the line. I’ve started recognizing faces, guessing village by accent. You can only do that on the way in, of course.
Bells peal, the queue starts to move, and a drone comes along to scan for employment blits and electroprod the folk who don’t have one. I still get a bit excited when I arrive at my work drawer, hear it whirring and printing.
Who’ll I be today?
• • • •
In the village, the point of a mask was to be anonymous. People wore them for feast days, for parties—and sometimes for punishments. I’m speaking of the Saltman, of course, but if you grew up in the city you’ve maybe never heard of him. He wears a baggy gray jumpsuit, and carries a switch, and only shows up when someone’s done a real wrong.
The best part is the Saltman’s face: a crusty white lump with craters for eyes, grown from the calcified tears of all the sinners made to weep contrition. As a whelp, I was terrified of him—but fascinated, too, by how he grew and shrank, by how he sometimes walked with a stiff-legged limp, sometimes with rolling hips.
I was nine or so when I found his head in my grandma’s cupboard, and found it to be a mask. I went to her wearing it, tasting my own hot breath and a hundred others, and startled her so bad she jumped. She explained the lotto system, then, the anonymity, the way a collective bogeyman can mete out justice without kicking off a cycle of grudges.
Everyone’s the Saltman eventually, she said, not knowing how bad things would get, how soon the villages would empty out.
• • • •
Today I am Paul. No, wait, sorry—Saul.
The algorithm will tell me more as I need it. For now, I just have Saul’s name and his face and the sort of clothes he would wear to do whatever it is I’m about to do. I watch in the mirror as the freshly printed mask microadjusts to my skull, as its doughy pink mass ripples and reforms to capture all the precise ratios of jaw and nose and brow.
Saul looks kind, with buttery black eyes and the wrinkles you get from laughing. He looks about the age my dad would be had he kept living, which means he’s probably a couple decades older. People who can afford maskworkers can also afford telomere treatments, hair regrowth, dentistry.
The drawer starts whirring again. There’s always a mask and clothing, but sometimes it prints up objects, too, little props to help the scenario along. Today it prints a ribbon-topped giftbox.
• • • •
In the city, the point of a mask is to be everywhere at once. Most days I attend functions: The algorithm sends me to a gravity opera, or poetry recital, or sepak match, any place the client doesn’t want to be but needs to be seen. I lean back in a comfortable seat, relish the chilled air, smile and nod and wave to whoever the algorithm says I ought to.
Sometimes I’m seated beside a beautiful man or woman who looks uncomfortable or resigned, but more often my companion is smiling and nodding and waving just like I do. Sometimes I ignore the show and watch the rapt faces of the audience instead. I count the tell-tale ripples of false flesh, try to guess what percentage are maskworkers.
The money’s minimal, but the job is easy. Usually.
• • • •
This morning Saul needs to be seen at Stringam MediCenter, somewhere I’d never get inside barefaced. They still scan the giftbox twice before they let me through. The staff is all bots, soft white pneumatic things, plus a live nurse at the desk who looks away when she spots me. My shining, fresh shoes clack against the hallway floor.
The algorithm sends me to the last room on the left. The man inside is tiny, fragile-looking, with grease-paper skin and puffy veins that are fed by a whole web of tubes. He has Saul’s dark eyes, or I suppose Saul has his.
My first line of dialogue blinks in. “Hi, Dad.” The mask deepens my voice as I read. “Me again.”
“You’re dead,” he gasps, through a collapsed, toothless mouth.
I’m thinking he’s mixed up, how my grandma was at the end. Then I see my next line and realize I am not here to keep a dying father company.
“That’s right,” I say, dread churning, growing. “Your son is dead. You drove him to it. Now watch.”
The algorithm tells me to open the giftbox, so I do. Maybe Saul was kind. Whoever resurrected his face, whoever sent me here, is not. The gun is too flimsy to be real, and the bots let it through, but my hand still shakes as I put it under my chin.
“Not again,” the old man moans.
But maybe he deserves to be punished, to howl and whimper and writhe against his web of tubes. I can’t look him in the eye, so I look across the bed to the window, where my reflection hovers between jagged skyscrapers. Saul’s face seems pale and strangely grainy. I pull the toy trigger, bang, and my mask spatters itself red.
The old man screams and screams like something broken, but eventually I’m allowed to get up and leave. My legs tremble. My cheeks are slick with salt I can’t wipe.
But I’m only doing maskwork until I find better, and tomorrow I’ll be someone else.
Enjoyed this story? Consider supporting us via one of the following methods:
