Light Shines Through | Chapter 3 - Jackie
The Shattered World Series (Book 1)
Jackie | October 2041 — Seattle, Tahoma, Free Republic of Cascadia
Jackie Lennox is gazing out the window, through the narrow band between the tatty sheer and the blackout curtain that casts half of her face in shadow despite the bright autumn afternoon sun. A sluggish breeze shifts the fabric slightly, but it’s not enough to pull her out of her rumination as her friend rambles on in an imperious lecture.
“And that’s why you can’t date cissies, Jackie,” says the other woman sitting across from her at the end of the threadbare old sofa.
Jackie looks up, not because she had heard what her friend had said, but because the tone of the words pulls her out of the cycle of thought she’s been momentarily lost in.
Jackie feels disgruntlement grow inside her as the meaning of Shan’s statement begins to sink in. She focuses on her friend, eyes narrowed.
“What did you say?”
Shan Hollick is one of Jackie’s oldest friends in Seattle, and her obvious go-to for solace after she had kicked her boyfriend Henry out.
Shan is looking at her, perched on the far end of the sofa, an illegal Confederate cigarette between the splayed fingers of one hand, the other hand crossed across her rhinestoned chest. She’s wearing a gold vintage McQueen knockoff that Jackie knows is one of her favorites, but which, to Jackie’s mind, makes Shan look like a giant banana.
Her friend is a tall, elegant woman who discovered her gender through drag. And this, Jackie thinks, is why she is dressed about three degrees more flamboyantly than anyone else would be for an evening in consoling a heartbroken friend.
Jackie loves her own carefully curated fashion, but Shan is a true clotheshorse: the kind of person who dresses to the nines to do laundry, and then changes clothes halfway through just because she can.
Shan leans in, the completely unnecessary vivid yellow feather fascinator in her hair bobbing as she does so, and puts a friendly hand on Jackie’s foot, as if forcing her to pay attention this time.
“Jackie, I know you don’t like me saying it, but I just really think that dating straight guys is bullshit. Fuck, you know me. I think dating cis people is confusing as hell. You’ll get over Henry because, come on, he was a dick.”
She says this with a knowing shake of her head, emphasizing her delivery of the truth. She pauses for effect, and then adds, “But whoever is next? You need to stay in the tribe.” Shan squeezes her ankle like a doctor consoling after injecting a vaccine and then leans back, casting an appraising glance at Jackie as if she can measure how deeply the words have sunk in.
Jackie idly wonders if the person Shan is alluding to “being next” is in fact Shan herself. Shan was one of the first people Jackie had met years ago, when she’d been a teenage refugee from Deseret into the Free Republic of Cascadia. They’d been as close as sisters from the start, and while Jackie loves Shan with a fierce dedication, there’s never been anything but friendship between them. Regardless, even if a relationship were something Shan was interested in, Jackie just doesn’t feel any kind of spark, so as far as Jackie is concerned, the idea is a complete non-starter.
“What are you thinking?” Shan asks her, trying to read her expression.
Jackie sighs, not ready or willing to move the conversation into the more awkward territory of boundary setting with her closest ally. While Shan is her dearest and oldest friend, she’s a Leo, which, by her astrological proclamations to Jackie, means she also happens to be something of an attention hog. Right now, Jackie can’t handle the idea of having to shift into support mode to handle Shan’s feelings. She still needs to vent, and there are some deep, emotional conversations that she can do without for the moment.
And as much as she hates Shan’s use of the old-fashioned term cis instead of non-trans, she also doesn’t want to rehash a recurring argument that had once had them yelling at each other about chirality and chemical enantiomers, and which had resulted in a thrown milkshake and two months of not talking.
She shudders a little at the memory, smiles to herself, and pushes past the sudden craving for a strawberry milkshake from the ancient but beloved burger joint down the street.
“So, you really think Henry was a dick?” she asks; a much safer topic. She leans back and drapes one arm across the back of the sofa, signaling that she’s willing to hear more hard truths — or at least, to let Shan tell her some hard truths and not reject them out of hand.
Shan groans, leans forward, and beats an overstuffed burgundy jacquard pillow with amplified melodrama.
“Ohmigod, Jackie! He was such a dick! He treated you like an asshole, all the time. ALL OF THE TIME!” She stops hitting the cushion and looks up at Jackie. “You know this, right? You have to be aware that he did not treat you the way you deserve to be treated.”
Jackie grunts, and her shoulders slump a bit, because what Shan is saying isn’t wrong. She does have to admit, as much as she dislikes the implication, it isn’t completely wrong. She sighs, a defeated and weakly implosive sound like an old balloon being popped, surprising herself at the sudden release of tension.
“Ugh. I know. He could totally be an ass. But he could also be so sweet. He’d do little things for me to show me that he loved me, like get up early to make tea and bring it to me in bed.”
She looks across at Shan with a hopeful expression on her face.
Shan gives her a short nod and then snorts in laughter.
“That’s it? He made you tea? I, your best friend in the entire damn world, am supposed to feel bad that you broke up with him because sometimes he made you tea?”
Jackie can’t help but smile, and she knows this battle is lost. The full weight of what she’d been avoiding looking at settles on her. All of the small fights — and the big ones. All the days she walked around Henry on eggshells, hoping not to set off his flares of anger. She knows she’s better off and that she’s done the right thing, but goddamnit, she’s going to miss the physical comfort of him. Not just that his body was to die for, but that simply being held by him felt so right in so many ways. And the sex. She shakes her head at herself.
A laugh bursts out of Jackie, a great honking thing that could stop traffic. Shan looks at her with wide eyes.
“What’s so funny?” Shan asks.
Jackie groans again and hides her face behind her hands, peeking out at her friend.
“But the sex with him was so, so good.” She moans this confession, like it hurts her to say it, and like she’s begging for it anyway.
Shan picks up the throw pillow and, true to its name, throws it at her.
Jackie bursts into laughter again, and Shan shakes her head.
“I know, I know. It’s not worth staying for. But goddammit, why can’t I find, like, a really nice guy with a hot bod and a great cock who treats me well and, you know, also fucks me right?” Jackie shakes her fist in the air, as if railing against the golden gates of heaven in a righteous holy war.
Shan laughs, and then shakes her head, puts on a serious face, slumps forward a bit, and puts her hand on Jackie’s foot again.
“Jaquelyn Anne Lennox. Dream the impossible dream. You know why. We’re trans, and even in 2041,” she looks at her wrist, as if her jeweled bracelet is a watch that is telling her the year and not the time, “in the middle of Seattle-fucking-Freakistan-Cascadia, progressive capital of the universe, and still—still—not everyone gets what it’s like.”
Jackie sits back and thinks. She’s heard this line of reasoning before, from many of her friends. She’s even said it herself, from time to time. But in this case, it isn’t the right answer, not completely.
“Yeah. Honestly? It wasn’t that. You know what it was? It was the gigantic error in translation between the words non-monogamous and polyamorous, and how to manage that.”
Jackie gives a short, sharp laugh.
“It was literally like we were speaking different languages sometimes. Or, the same language, but all the semiotics and semantics of meaning in the words were different.” Jackie is contorting her gloved fingers, trying to make her hands smash together, illustrating puzzle pieces that just don’t fit, but looking like satin doves caught in a grotesque circus act.
Shan shakes her head and holds up one hand in surrender. “OK, OK, I get it. But, Jesus, Jackie, please roll on back with words like seminautics and shit.”
“Semiotics.” Jackie corrects, before she can stop herself.
“Whatever.” Says Shan. Then, changing the topic, she adds, “So what about work? Arachnio voted you out two months ago, and you haven’t found anything yet?”
And this is the other thing consuming Jackie’s thoughts. She knows in her bones she did the right thing, whistleblowing on what she had discovered in the deep code of her company’s algorithm. But that rightness hadn’t prevented her from being voted out by the rest of the team in the small employee-owned Mondragon-style startup she’d been part of for the last two years. She sighs, and draws a finger unconsciously across her brow and flicks it, as if trying to wipe the memories from her mind.
Years of fending for herself in desperate situations has taught her to be frugal to the point of stinginess, so she has money socked away. But it isn’t an infinite supply, and those same fiscal habits hammer on the doors of her worry at night as she tries to sleep. A stomach that has known true hunger never rests easy again, she thinks.
Besides, she’s a software engineer, a damn good one. Her hands are wonders on the keyboard, damaged or not, channeling the genius of her code into existence to do good in the world. Sitting around and surfing CascadiaNet and the local dataverse isn’t the same as building something that matters, which is what she’d thought she had been doing at Arachnio.
“That’s not true,” she replies, “I’ve taken some freerange gigs. Nothing big, but things that have at least a little money coming in.”
Shan snorts a laugh. “Jackie, I know you. If you’re not working on ‘The Next Big Thing’ you aren’t happy. And ‘ranging is great, we both know plenty of people working the gigs, but you need something more permanent. Something worthy of that gigantic brain of yours.”
Jackie smiles a genuine smile at her friend. Shan may be a handful at times, but something is reassuring about being seen so completely by someone. It’s why Jackie knew she had to come here to process her breakup with Henry; in all the world, maybe only Shan can understand her conflicting emotions.
“Look, I know some people in recruiting at PeoplePWR and Digicent. I can make some calls and hook you up.” Shan flashes Jackie her thousand-watt smile, as if the force of her gleaming teeth can make Jackie agree.
Jackie sighs, gently twisting at the corners of the throw pillow as she mulls the offer over in her mind, already knowing that she has to say yes, as much to mollify Shan as because she does need a full-time job. She nods and smiles at her pushy, outrageous, beloved friend.
“Hallelujah! Mother Shannon has saved the day once again!” Shan declares, standing up, and reaching out her hand to Jackie.
“Now come on. Let’s go get some takeout Thai food from the place down by the thing, and come back here and have a girls’ night in.”
It’s not a question, it’s a command, and Jackie is happy to comply, feeling her spirits lift at the thought.
She takes Shan’s outstretched hand and stands, her worry falling away for a moment as she contemplates the impending joy of the best yuba Pad See Ew she’s ever had.
Rain is streaking the window of the ancient electric bus as it bounces down Aurora Avenue. Jackie is nursing a bit of a hangover from her sleepover at Shan’s place the night before.
Takeout Thai and girls’ night had turned into a box wine and video binge, and she’s had less sleep than she’d like, especially for a Monday morning. She doesn’t have a job to get to, but she firmly believes that jobhunting in this economy is full-time work in and of itself.
She has her headphones on, and she has retreated into the world of Wendy Carlos’s Moog synthesizer — a classic as familiar to her as the sound of her own heartbeat. Jackie believes that there is music for every occasion, and it’s usually Beethoven; today, though, she is feeling nostalgic and reaching out across time to her spiritual ancestors.
The bus pulls up to the old Washelli graveyard, and the new micro housing complex for refugees that sits where an abandoned home improvement store used to stand. It shudders to a stop, sighs a wheezing mechanical sound as the pneumatics lower the steps to allow more people to pack into the already crowded vehicle, but Jackie is lost in thought and doesn’t even look up.
The bus rattles back up to speed as more of the street zooms by the window and her eyes catch on a faded old mural on the side of a building. In the image, trains and cars pass a mountain range, and text at the top reads: Free movement of people and commerce is the backbone of this country. Some clever wag has spray painted which one? in red underneath this country.
It makes her chuckle every time she sees it. The mural is far more than seventeen years old. It had been painted long enough ago that the country it was referring to was the United States. The good ol’ defunct United States.
Still true for Cascadia, she thinks. There are just more people, less commerce, and not enough petroleum to get around.
The bus trundles to another stop, and the person who had been sitting next to her gets up, and is replaced instantly with a new person, someone eager to trade standing in the aisle for the comparative comfort of the tattered old pleather seat.
Jackie glances over and sees that her new seatmate is an attractive woman in her early thirties who appears to be of South Asian descent. They catch eyes and trade smiles that mean thanks-and-sorry-and-ugh-morning-commute-amirite? all rolled into one.
The woman says something, but Jackie can’t hear her over the music. She pulls out her earbud and says, “Pardon?”
“Oh, sorry.” The woman says with a warmly apologetic smile. “I was just mumbling to myself that they need to add more buses in the morning so we don’t have to be jammed in here like fucking tinned sardines.”
Jackie stifles a full laugh at the unexpected cursing and anachronistic metaphor coming from this elegant woman. Her voice has the tiniest hint of a British accent, but her clothes, Jackie notes with her keen eye for fashion, seem curated to speak to timeless hipster Cascadian chic.
The woman perfectly arches an eyebrow and says, “Is that Bach you’re listening to?” looking at Jackie’s earbud from which tiny, tinny melodies are plunking out audibly.
“Wow, good ear. It is! Switched on Bach.”
The woman holds out her hand and nods a fractional nod, as if to say may I listen?, strangely intimate for people who have just met on a bus. Jackie hands her the small white device, and she holds it up close to her ear without putting it in. After a moment she smiles and nods, and hands the earbud back to Jackie with elegant grace.
“The Brandenburg Concerto number three, the final allegro. One of my all-time favorites. But I’ve never heard that version before!”
Jackie nods, “It’s ancient twentieth, from like the late sixties or early seventies, done on one of the first synthesizers. It’s magnificent.” She reaches for her phone and pauses the playback.
“It is. Bach is like math come alive, I’ve always thought. And Beethoven, Beethoven is pure animalistic feeling, distilled to music, don’t you think?”
Jackie laughs a throaty, delighted laugh, turning heads on the bus, but the woman beams at her in response. Jackie replies, “But I do think that! That is exactly, precisely what I think, in both cases.” They grin at each other, oblivious to the humid warmth of too many bodies jammed into too small a space, reveling in this moment of human connection.
“I’m Laxmi Sengupta,” says the woman, offering her hand.
“Jackie Lennox,” replies Jackie, taking the proffered hand and shaking it.
Some awareness tickles the back of Jackie’s mind. “Wait. Doctor Laxmi Sengupta? Didn’t you work on the fusion project?”
Laxmi chuffs in surprise and nods her head. The faintest hint of a blush creeps into her cheeks. “Yes, but how in the world did you know that?”
Jackie smiles in response. “I’m a bit of a nerd. I’m a software engineer, specializing in security, but I follow all the science news. And, well, that was quite the breakthrough. I mean, actual fucking fusion, finally!”
Laxmi is clearly pleased at the compliment, verging on embarrassed, and waves her hand as if brushing this off. “Well, I was just one part of a much larger team, really.”
Jackie shakes her head and interjects, “But the materials science. The quantum matter superconductor. That was you. That was a key component in containment and ignition.”
Laxmi’s face is a picture of astonishment now. “Well, yes, that’s right, but it truly was a team effort. I cracked some maths that led to the superconductor improvements, but” she shrugs, “science is standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that.
“But I’m working on a new project now. You know, with all the will-they-or-won’t-they-let-us-fuse politics brouhaha, I’ve got my own lab and a new idea.”
Jackie is about to ask what it is, but Laxmi continues on, as she begins shuffling her bags, shrugging her jacket back onto her shoulders, preparing for the next stop.
“But listen, did you say you were a security dev? Can I give you my contact info? I need someone for the lab, and well, I’m sure I can’t compete with whatever you’ve got going on now, but I’d love to try to convince you over lunch.”
This time, Jackie’s face is the picture of surprise. “No. I mean, yes! Yes, I’d love to talk to you, and as it turns out, I’m looking for something worthy of my skills at the moment. Let’s definitely...” before she can finish, Laxmi has pulled out her phone and bumped it against Jackie’s, transferring her contact info.
Jackie looks down at her phone: Dr. Laxmi Sengupta, University of Tahoma - Seattle, Quantum Materials Research, followed by her number and CascadiaNet address.
She looks up to see Laxmi grinning at her, waving goodbye as she begins to navigate the crowded aisle to get to the back door of the articulated bus.
“I’m serious, Jackie. Please contact me! And wonderful meeting you over some morning Bach!”
With another wave and a dazzling flash of a smile over her sleek black plastic raincoat, Laxmi is through the door, and an older Black gentleman in an archaic business suit has settled into the seat next to Jackie.
She pops her earbud back into her ear, looks back at her phone, and puts Wendy Carlos’s masterpiece back on. She smiles at the serendipity of the moment and begins typing out a message to Laxmi to set up the lunch.
« Chapter 2 — Jake | Chapter 3 — Jackie | Interstitial — Cascadia »
Thank you for writing from your heart. I love the way your words flow and the emotions are so authentic and true. I can't wait to see where you take us to next!
Wow, I felt like I inhabited those spaces. I’m an avid reader, and that is rare for me. Thanks for this. Great way to start a Sunday. Looking forward to more! Be well, and type like the wind!