The Age Atomic

FOUR

Cold, cold like the grave.

Evelyn smiled, like she could remember what cold was. She knew it was cold because that’s all everyone was talking about on the radio and on the television. Evelyn could read the waves of electromagnetic radiation as they bounced between the skyscrapers of Manhattan; she could see, feel, any and all energy. Eventually she’d worked out how to read the information encoded within some of it. Sometimes she regretted her ability, when the barrage of energy packets become a cacophony, a noise so loud she thought she would go insane. She could block it all out, if she really concentrated, but if there was one sensation that remained to her it was fatigue. Blocking out the noise cost energy, and she had precious little to spare to stop herself falling out of the world. So most of the time she swam through the noise as she ran to keep up with the world as it moved away from her.

People had asked her about it all, back at the beginning. She was fascinating and she was pitiful, but although they’d all felt sorry for her for a while, time passed and they got bored. And then she’d had to make them take notice, and take notice they did. She hadn’t realized she had that ability, not at first, but it made sense. Any and all energy was available to her. She was energy herself, the quantum signature of a person burnt into the fabric of the universe. She could, she discovered, do almost anything, and finally people noticed. The United States soon had their own secret weapon, a sentient, intelligent, “living” nuclear deterrent: Evelyn McHale.

The people who knew what she was called her the Girl Who Fell. To others, including the inhabitants of New York who had accidentally seen her as she went about her business on behalf of the government of the United States — or when she wandered through the city on her own, trying to reconnect to the world — she had another name: the Ghost of Gotham.

Wandering, watching. As she was now.

Evelyn McHale floated six inches from the ground on the banks of the East River in the cold night, running with all her might to keep up with the world, trying to remember what winter felt like.

She listened to the lapping of the water and to the creak of boats moored on the docks nearby. She listened to the rats in the subway and the fish in the river and an argument five miles away, somewhere in Brooklyn. Evelyn couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in Brooklyn, the last time she’d left Manhattan, the last time she’d done a lot of things. When she tried to remember her old life it just came back to that day, and she remembered that day well enough, although she wished she didn’t.

Maybe it didn’t matter. Time wasn’t particularly relevant to her anymore. She existed outside of time, one step to the left of the world. But she could look back in, at the past, the present, the future. She remembered how time mattered a lot to the world around her and the people in it, which is why she kept count. She watched the world age, sensed the fatigue growing in the concrete and steel and glass and rock of the city.

She counted the decay of atoms in space, and she smiled.

She could do a lot of things since that day.

Evelyn moved forward, floating a little higher into the air and gliding towards the water’s edge. As she moved, the soft blue glow that constantly surrounded her grew in intensity as she forced the universe to do her bidding.

She remembered living in the city, one of millions who did just that. She remembered enjoying the crowds, the feeling that she was part of something. And she remembered it all being too much, and the decision that had to be made.

And now she was alone. Alone and falling, again, although this time not from a tall building but from time and space.

Evelyn floated forward, out into the middle of the river, hovering one hundred feet in the air. Her aura flared brilliant blue as she pushed at the world, and she turned, looking out across the city on both sides of the water.

So many people, going about their lives, some long, some short.

People were watching. She could feel them, feel their fear as they caught a glimpse of the Ghost of Gotham. Of course, her occasional excursions drove important people wild in Washington, but that didn’t matter. She loved the city, and sometimes she had to go out and see it again.

People were watching in Brooklyn, and they were watching in Manhattan. Phones were ringing, and there was chatter on police radios. Someone had called the coastguard. A dozen people were scrambling for cameras, and four newspaper reporters were right now pulling coats over their pajamas as they raced to get the scoop.

She had to admit, she sometimes enjoyed the effect her presence had on others, on the living, the way her appearances in the city got attention. She listened as word spread, as heartbeats all over town kicked up a notch, as people told their neighbors to shut the hell up and as others began to pray.

Evelyn McHale, the Ghost of Gotham. If only they knew what she really was.

Fear. She wanted to visit everyone in the city, nod and smile and say yes, yes you should be afraid. Fear was powerful, primal. Although the universe was getting further and further away from her, her connection getting fainter and fainter, fear was her ally, its own special kind of energy that she could use, that helped her keep up with the world.

A boat approached, and someone with a camera had arrived at the nearby dock, aiming his lens at the glowing blue woman floating over the river.

Evelyn sighed. She didn’t need to breathe but she remembered how to sigh. She remembered sighing on that day. She remembered the effect that gravity had on her mass. She remembered the fall, the spin, watching the curve of the Earth, the vertigo, the fear, the hope, the blue of the sky and the grey of the ground and then the light, the light, the light. She remembered her hope that the Skyguard would save her evaporating as she remembered that there wasn’t a Skyguard, that there hadn’t been for years, that New York was unprotected. New York was protected now, of course. The whole country was. She’d taken up the job herself.

Evelyn sighed again, and then she was gone.