Helen Caudill noticed the smell on a Tuesday.
She was outside, which was the first problem. No one goes outside anymore, not on Holmes Avenue, not at two in the afternoon on an unseasonably warm October day. Maybe in another time this kind of day would have pulled people out of their houses and into their yards to do whatever it was that people used to do in them. Helen remembered what they used to do. She was sixty-eight years old and she’d lived in this area of Uptown for more than thirty of those years, and she remembered block parties, and borrowed lawnmowers, and kids on bicycles, and backyard barbecues. The longer people stopped doing these things, the more clear she seemed to remember them. People had lived here. Not in the technical sense: people still lived here, their bodies still occupied the houses, their names still appeared on municipal records, but if you baked something good for instance and wanted to share it with them, well, nobody answered doors anymore.
Helen was outside because she maintained a garden. This was an eccentricity her neighbors would have found charming if any of them had been aware of it, which they were not. An awareness required presence, and presence required waking up and getting to a window and looking outside, and Helen didn’t remember the last time a neighbor did any of those things. Years, maybe.
She maintained the garden anyway. Cherry tomatoes, spinach, rhubarb, and blueberries were what she primarily grew, along with some native plants like milkweed and purple coneflower. The garden was small and impractical and produced food that was objectively inferior to the nutrient formulations available through any standard IV subscription, but she did not care. She liked the way dirt felt. She liked the way a tomato smelled when you picked it in the sun. She even didn’t mind it anymore when the occasional bird or squirrel would make their way into her blueberries. It was a little randomness of life that could not be synthesized, no matter what they said.
She was kneeling in the dirt, staking a tomato plant that had begun to lean, when the smell reached her.
It was faint at first. She thought it was the backyard compost bin but she was upwind of that, and the smell wasn’t right for compost. Compost smelled like earth and rot, and this smelled sweet and thick and it stuck to the back of her throat. She stood up from the garden bed and wiped her hands on her trousers and turned her face into the wind and tried to figure out what it had come from.
The smell had come from the Peterson house two doors down on the same side of the street. Thomas and Catherine Peterson, though Helen hadn’t spoken to either of them in…how long? At least a decade. She’d brought Catherine a cutting from her plant and she had accepted it politely at the door, already wearing her diadem, the slim band sitting across her forehead like a piece of jewelry, its little lights pulsing their slow, blue rhythm. She thanked her and said with expiring warmth, “That’s so kind of you, Helen, I’ll plant it this weekend.” The door then closed and the plant presumably died because nobody in that house was going to walk outside and put it in the ground.
The smell was definitely coming from their house.
Helen stood in her yard and had a conversation with herself that she was not very proud of. It was probably nothing, maybe a rat had gotten into the walls and died, or the garbage disposal had backed up, or something was wrong with the sewage line. These things happened, even in houses that were essentially self-maintaining. The reasonable part of her said she should call city maintenance and report it and let someone whose job it was deal with it.
But there was another part of her that definitely recognized the smell.
Helen had been a girl when her grandmother died, and her grandmother had died at home in a farmhouse by the river in rural Luther two hundred and fifty miles from here, and the family had not found her for two days because she lived alone and nobody visited for a while. Helen’s mother had gone to the house when the calls went answered, and Helen had been in the car, and her mother had told her to stay there, and Helen was curious and did not stay in the car. She had been eight. She hadn’t understood what she was smelling but she understood it now.
She went to the Peterson house.
The front door was sealed, of course. Smart lock, keyed to the residents’ biometrics and whatever service providers they’d authorized. Helen didn’t have the credentials to open it, and almost no one has a mechanical lock anymore, not since the Consolidation when people started installing systems en masse that didn’t require the presence of a spare key. She stood on the front step and pressed the doorbell, which produced a pleasant chime inside the house but nobody showed up, and she pressed again, and again, and the more she pressed the louder the sound seemed to get, but that was only because of the lack of sound from everywhere else.
She called the city maintenance line and the system picked up the first ring. A pleasant artificial voice said, “County Municipal Services, For water and sewage, press one. For electrical, press two. For structural maintenance-”
“I need to report a smell,” Helen said.
The voice on the call went silent for a few moments, then came back: “Thank you for contacting County Municipal Services. Please describe the nature of your concern.”
“There’s a smell coming from a house on my street. Two doors down from me. It’s not a plumbing issue. I think something’s happened to someone inside.”
“I understand you’re reporting an odor concern at a residential address. Can you provide the street number?”
Helen gave it to the AI agent.
“Thank you. And can you describe the nature of the odor?”
Helen closed her eyes. “It smells like something died.”
Another brief, impersonal pause – The city’s budget probably didn’t afford them the fastest technology – then came back. “I understand. For wellness and welfare concerns, I’ll need to transfer you to the District Health Office. One moment, please.”
The hold music started playing. Helen stood on the Peterson family’s front step and listened to it and watched a fly land on the doorframe and crawl along the weather seal. Then another voice, just as artificial and identical in its pleasantness: “County Health Office, Welfare Division. How may I assist you?”
“I need someone to check on my neighbors. I think they might be dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your concern. Can you provide the address?”
She gave it again and she answered the same questions again. She confirmed that no, she had not been inside the residence, that she did not have access credentials to unlock the door, that her concern was based on an odor she had detected from outside.
“Thank you, Ms. Caudill. I’ve logged a welfare check request for the address provided. Non-emergency welfare visits are currently processed in the order received. Your estimated wait time for a field visit is eight to twelve business days.”
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“...Eight to twelve days?”
“Current processing times reflect high volume in our service area. If you believe there is an immediate threat to life, please hang up and dial 911.”
“I just told you I think someone is dead.”
“I understand your concern. A welfare check has been logged and will be processed in the order received. If the situation changes or you have additional information, you can update your request online at–”
Helen hung up.
She stood on the front step in the warm sun and looked at the street. Every house was sealed. Every blind was drawn. Somewhere behind every door, in every living room and bedroom that had been converted into a session space, people were lying in their cradles with diadems on their heads and IV lines in their arms, living lives that were better and more satisfying than anything Uptown itself had ever offered, and the street itself was as empty as if everyone on it had already died.
She went home, went into her garage, found the crowbar she kept with her gardening tools, went back to the Peterson house and broke a window.
The smell inside was a physical presence. It hit her like a wall and she staggered and pressed her forearm over her nose and mouth and breathed through the fabric of her sleeve and kept moving. She had come this far and no one else on Holmes Avenue was going to do it anyway.
The living room was dim. The blinds were sealed and the only light came from the monitoring panels on the two cradles and the slow pulse of a diadem and the amber glow of the IV rack’s display. The flies found her before her eyes adjusted and she felt them on her face and hands, dozens of them, and she swatted at them reflexively and heard the room’s true sound for the first time. A low, dense, almost mechanical vibration of thousands of insects that had found their way through whatever crack or seam the smell had led them to and had been here for days, doing what flies did, which was the very thing Helen was trying very hard not to think about as her eyes adjusted and the room resolved itself into shapes she could identify.
There were two cradles, placed side by side and close enough to touch.
The one on the left was wrong.
Helen didn’t process it as a body at first. The shape was too distorted and too swollen, the proportions altered in ways that her mind resisted interpreting. The abdomen was bloated to nearly twice its natural size, straining against a thin sheet, and the skin that was visible–the arms, the neck, the face–had darkened to a spotty greenish-purple, taut and shiny where the swelling stretched it, loose and beginning to slip where it wasn’t. The face was the worst. Helen looked at it, looked away, then looked at it again because she had to, she needed to know if this was Thomas Peterson, and it could have been anyone or no one, the feature so distended and discolored that the face had stopped being a face and became just a surface. His eyes were swollen shut. His lips had pulled back from his teeth. Fluid had pooled in the cradle beneath him, dark and thick, and the flies were there, everywhere, crawling intimately across the body. Helen could see eggs too, pale clusters in the folds of his skin, in the corners of his eyes, in the crease of his neck. Some had hatched and she could see them moving.
She could see the maggots. Wriggling, burrowing, each one no larger than a grain of rice, but there were hundreds and hundreds of them, clumped in his eye sockets, writhing in slow blind knots in his hair, digging into the softened skin at the edges of his orifices. They moved in a collection that made the body itself seem to breathe as if the thing that had been Thomas Peterson was still alive in some inverted sense.
Helen pressed her back against the wall and closed her eyes. Her heart was hammering and her stomach was trying to dump all of its contents out of her throat and the smell was so thick she could taste it, sweet and heavy and rotten, and she stood there with her eyes slammed shut and her sleeves squishing her nose and she thought about anything and everything else: clean things, things that didn’t smell, things that didn’t move, fresh snow, frozen lake, her garden. Then after a few moments her stomach calmed down enough that she could open her eyes again.
She looked at the second cradle.
Catherine Peterson was lying four feet from her husband’s body. Her eyes were closed. Her face was calm. The diadem’s blue light pulsed in its slow, steady rhythm across her forehead, and the IV drip fed its clear fluid into the port on her arm, and the monitoring panel displayed her vitals in neat eggshell cream numbers that said she was fine. All systems normal, everything was just fine.
Flies were on her too. On her arms, her hands, her legs, they landed and crawled and lifted and landed again, and Catherine didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t react at all, not even the small involuntary twitch that a sleeping person makes when something touches their skin. She wasn’t sleeping but somewhere else entirely, somewhere the flies couldn’t reach and the smell couldn’t reach and the thing in the cradle beside her didn’t exist.
Helen didn’t understand how the technology worked. She’d never used a diadem, had never wanted to, had watched her street and her city empty out around her as everyone she knew retreated behind the slim band one by one. She didn’t know about neural modeling, or session persistence, or the way Heartcapture built independent copies of the people in a user’s life so that the simulation could maintain them seamlessly even when the real person was offline. She didn’t know that inside Catherine’s session, Thomas Peterson was almost certainly present: talking, moving, breathing, laughing, hugging, kissing. Because the system had no mechanism for checking whether the person it was modeling still had a heartbeat. She didn’t know any of this.
But Helen knew that Catherine was lying next to her dead husband and that her face was peaceful, so wherever Catherine was and whatever she was experiencing was not in this room and there were no flies or maggots or strange fluids in her world. It was the most terrible kindness Helen had ever seen.
“Oh, Catherine,” she said softly. “Oh, sweetheart.”
She really didn’t want to do this. She should call someone and wait and let the authorities handle this. The Bureau or the health office or whoever was supposed to handle these situations should be able to come in and do it properly and make it just a little more bearable. But the flies on Catherine’s arms and the maggots working in her dead husband’s eye sockets didn’t allow for much time and Helen thought: how long? The District health office wasn’t going to show up for at least another week, so how long is she going to lie here? How many days beside a body that was being slowly consumed while the machine kept his ghost alive in her mind?
Helen reached for the diadem.
She didn’t know how to operate it, about the session termination switch or the safe-connect protocol or the recommended neural decompression sequence that was supposed to ease the transition from simulated to actual sensory input. She just found the edge of the band and pulled it, and the blue light stuttered and went dark. Then Catherine’s eyes opened.
For a brief moment her face held its peace. It must have been a particularly pleasant and relaxing experience. Then her pupils contracted against the dim light of the room and her nostrils flared and the smell reached her, and Helen watched the woman’s face change. First came confusion, then discomfort, then she was trying to turn her head and search for something familiar.
“Tom?” Catherine said. Her voice was dry and hoarse and thin from disuse, and she blinked again in the dim light. “Tom, honey, where are-”
She turned her head toward the cradle beside her.
Helen caught her with a strength that even surprised herself. She wrapped her arms around her neighbor that she hadn’t talked to in ten years and forcefully pulled her face into her shoulder so she couldn’t see. “Don’t look,” Helen said. “Catherine, sweetheart, don’t look.”
“What? I don’t-” Catherine’s hands found Helen’s shirt and gripped it with a strength that shouldn’t have been possible for her atrophied muscles. “Where’s Tom? He was–he was right here, he was just talking to me, we were-”
“I know,” Helen said. “I know he was.”
“I don’t understand.” Catherine was trying to turn her head and Helen held her tighter. “Why–what is that smell, what is happening, why–”
“Don’t. Helen, please-”
But Catherine was already pulling away. Her body was weak but the need to see was stronger than Helen’s sixty-eight year old arms, and she twisted free with a graceless lurch and turned and looked at the cradle beside hers.
Helen would remember the sound Catherine made for the rest of her life. She had braced for screaming, but what came was something lower and older, a guttural sound from the basement of the human voice where language hadn’t been invented yet. Her eyes were wide and they were seeing what was in that cradle: the swollen, blackened shape, the fluid, the flies, the larvae moving in the places where her husband’s face used to be, and her mouth opened and the sound was coming out of it and it did not stop.
