Excerpt: Signal and Noise

“So tell me about yourself,” I said, already tired of my own life. “What’s your story? What’s your name, anyway?”

“Superman Garcia,” he said with a little bow, truncated because he was sitting crosslegged on the ground across from me. “My friends call me Manny.”

I snorted. “What friends?” I said, which was pretty rude, if I had concluded that he was not actually a vision, which I had, because a vision wouldn’t have brought me water, at least, not water that was so very wet. Still, I doubted that this weird, crazy loner had ever had many friends.

“As for my story, it is the merest prologue to what I intend to accomplish,” Superman began, self-importantly. “I come from a proud line of archaeologists, working the mines of debris a few days from here. Most of it is unusable junk, of course, suitable only to be broken down and returned to its component parts, but there are a few gems. My mother was particularly noted for her priceless finds.”

“So what are you doing here?” I interrupted. Mining was good work, dependable work. Sometimes they hired migrant workers to process some of the slag, like jerking wires out of plastic wiring and stripping the plastic coating off of it, but mostly the big mines were worked by people who knew what they were looking for, and the rest of us fought over whatever scraps we could find.

“Weren’t you listening to me? I have grander plans than picking through garbage for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, of course. How could I forget?” I took the rag bag and some other bits of bedding and made myself comfortable, reclining against the solidity of the stone wall that had been incorporated into this little alcove. “Tell me more about these plans.”

“Don’t you ever look at the ruins all around us and wonder about the people who built them?” he said. The look on his face was intense, like he was trying to see into that Before world that had collapsed all around us. “Don’t you wonder how they were able to build all of these things?”

“It was different,” I said, waving one hand helplessly. “They had some kind of magic back then, or something. You know, like in the stories. People could fly, they could move things with their minds, they could do all kinds of things. We can’t do anything like that.”

“Sure, that’s what they’d like you to think,” Superman said. “It’s not that simple.”