Invasion of the Founding Fathers
Short Story
by Noah Berlatsky
Ed Sedgwick's dad had always been cranky, but death had somehow made him even worse. Ed knew that as one of the first people visited by the Mars Miracle he should be grateful. Everybody who'd lost a loved one envied him, and some who hadn't lost loved ones wished their nearest and dearest had keeled over just so they could be like him, at the center of the resurrection. But Ed had to admit to himself that public adulation or no public adulation, the constant querulous stream of complaints from his dad was getting to him.
Ed kept his voice as even as possible. "You're not late, Dad. We have transporters now, remember? We can be there in just a second." He pointed to the pink shimmering sphere directly outside the front door and restrained an urge to take his father's arm. Dad had insisted on wearing his grey T-shirt which said, "Mars Survivor." The short sleeves exposed black, fuzzy patches of Martian death mould on his arms. Death mould had an unpleasant slimy texture, and Ed tried to avoid touching it.
Dad shook his head. His face was leaner than it had been when he was alive; the nose inparticular stood out starkly. There wasn't much mould on his face luckily, and the patch on his head could almost be mistaken for hair, if you didn't look at him too closely. "I don't like the transporters. They make my sinuses act up," he said. "If only I'd gotten started earlier we could have taken the hovercar. God damn it, why didn't I get started earlier?"
Ed interrupted him before he could gear up again. "It's okay, Dad. We don't have time for the hover car. We can take an Ulyft back, huh?"
They got through the door and were enveloped in light as Dad sneezed. "God damn it!"
***
"You should be very grateful," the heavyset woman behind the desk in the mortuologists told Ed in a confidential bellow. She was wearing the one-piece purple jumpsuit that was standard for official functionaries. It made her look like a grandmotherly eggplant. Ed shifted in the adjusting foam comfort seat that was somehow not very comfortable and made a noncommittal noise.
"I wish they'd hurry up and bring my sister back," she said. "She died in one of those early teleport accidents, where the coordinates for one Starbucks got confused with the coordinates of another Starbucks? It's been a great comfort knowing that she maybe just found a latte on Mars."
Ed sat up and the comfort chair made a distinct farting noise. "So everyone who dies goes to Mars?" he asked. "I thought it was just deaths from natural causes? Or possibly just men? I didn't think any women came back on the first ship…."
The woman pursed her lips. She seemed offended. "Well, that's not what I heard."
"Could you tell me where the bathroom is?" Ed asked, escaping from the chair with a final sad "whoof."
***
Ed peed into the pink sphere, and the stream disappeared. Dad hated the new toilet design. He said on Mars they still flushed. He said that knowing the bathroom contained a portal to somewhere else made him feel exposed, like he was being monitored. Ed had explained that the porta-toilets just sent the urine to a wastewater facility. No one was watching. Dad didn't care though.
Details about the Mars Miracle were vague. The giant planet-hopper Excelsior had set out with colonists and come back with the sensational news that there were already people on the red planet. Video played on repeat loop over the international interwebs showed men walking through old style cities, with paved highways. All the men in the footage wore hats. Dad hadn't worn a hat since he'd been home. It was suspicious.
Ed was going to find out more though. He zipped up and pulled out his laser pistol. The weapon rested easily in his palm. He left the bathroom, striding purposefully down the hallway. The fluorescent lights cast an odd pallor on the mottled carpet. It reminded him a little of the Mars mould. A woman in a purple jumpsuit stepped out of a side door and Ed shot her smoothly. She grunted, and went to Mars, or somewhere.
The woman behind the desk in the lobby looked up with a gasp as Ed shoved the laser into her face. "The charade is over," he said, louder and higher pitched than he'd intended. He lowered his voice. "The charade is over. The Agency knows there's no Mars program. Who is building the mouldy android impersonations? Is it the Chinese? The Russians!" He reached out and shook her. "Answer me!"
She gave a kind of clicking choke. The purple jumpsuit heaved. "Not androids," she said. "Possibly clones. The tech monopolies have been stealing corpses. Armies of the dead…." She took another breath and began to emit a high pitched squeal. Ed somersaulted across the room, knocking comfy chairs aside like puffy, flatulent bowling pins, as she exploded, in a hail of metal and purple cloth.
Ed coughed and staggered through the smoke towards the door to the mortuologist's offices. He'd lost his gun in the confusion. He would have to kill his enemies with his bare hands now or die trying. He toggled the poison DNA disintegrating false tooth with his tongue. No matter what happened, no one would be making a clone of Ed Sedgwick, he thought grimly.
His father, or whatever was in the shape of his father, was in a room towards the back, sitting on the patient's padded table in his underwear. His sunken chest was covered with patches of mould, which seemed to vibrate and shift as he breathed. Ed stifled a shiver of revulsion.
"It's over," he said. "I'm onto you. We're not both leaving here alive."
Dad didn't move. His head was down, so Ed could see the patch of mould on his head. He coughed. "Damn it," he said. "I need to take my medicine."
Ed nodded sagely. "It's a recurrent meme. You aren't anyone. You're just a couple of phrases stuck on replay. A barely animated trope. And they thought they could fool me. It's sad really. "
Dad looked up suddenly. "It's all nonsense," he said. "Teleporters are nonsense. You can't get rid of us that way." He slid off the table, and Ed tried not to look at the underwear. Instead he looked at the mould; bits of it were rustling, like sea anemones. Here was decay as vibrant as life—death creeping about with a drear activity.
Ed focused again and saw, with a vague inevitable panic, that his dad was holding a laser pistol.
"You were always a stupid kid," Dad said. "You weren't even toilet trained till you were five, did you know that? Five years old and you'd ask us to put a diaper on you when you needed to poop."
"Dad!" Ed said. "For God's sake!"
"We really do go up there," the old man nattered on. "We're there now. There's nowhere else to go."
It was true; Ed could see the doctor's office, with its scrubbed, oddly indistinct equipment beginning to crumble at the edge of his vision, like holotube static, blank and friable. The future was a poorly fashioned mirage; nobody really believed in it. The heavy fathers filled it up, their footsteps leaving cracks in the shiny floors, through which you could see red dust and ash. Ed waited on Mars, the dead planet, for the gleaming spaceships to come and carry him to Mars.
Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His full length collections are Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024), Gnarly Thumbs (Anxiety Press, forthcoming), and Meaning Is Embarrassing (Ranger, forthcoming). He has chapbooks published and/or forthcoming with the Origami Poems Project, above/ground, and LJMcD Communications.
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