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It wasn't coincidence that Jo was in the Pacific Northwest on the 1100-year anniversary of the Californian Incident, but it was coincidence that they ran into Alcor.
The museum occupied nearly half the island of San Sacra, where centuries ago the Californian state legislature had sat. That was all gone now. San Sacra was a beautiful, heat-cracked island in the Republic of Northern Mexico, and was famous only for its fifteen-square-mile memorial monument to the tens of millions who had died in 2038. Jo had been before, and they had cried as everyone did the first time they saw the Hall of Names.
They did not cry now. Before they left Hesse, they had promised Denise that they would not stress themself with the crowds in the main exhibit room. So instead, they stood in front of the monolith of the nameless unknown, and clutched their wilting bouquet of orange poppies. The large stone spire stood in a small xeriscape garden tucked through a doorway, well out of the way of the uninformed visitor. Some people knew about it. Jo did. It came with the terrain of demonology.
The solitary fountain burbled hollowly as the sun beat down and sweat trickled down their back. Jo did not know how long they stood for, but it was at least half an hour before they felt they had paid their homage appropriately. They were just about to turn when a figure caught their eye, sitting silently on a stone bench at the far corner of the garden.
The two of them locked eyes, and Jo nodded cautiously. Something about the man unsettled them, and they did not know how long he had been sitting there, watching. But before they could say anything, he called out. His thin voice crackled in the heat. "You're Professor Jo Schulz, aren't you?"
Jo started. They were not a celebrity, and certainly not an ocean away from New Hesse. "Yes. Are you an academic?"
The man stood. He was dressed, despite the weather, entirely in black: dress shirt, vintage suit jacket, slacks, and oxfords. "Master's from Oregon State University," he said, making his way towards them. "Never put it to much use, but I know the field. And the people."
"I'm honoured," said Jo, feeling suddenly claustrophobic. "What are you doing here?"
The strange man stopped several feet from them and gazed up at the monolith. "Remembering," he said, after a second.
"Oh," said Jo.
They started at the exhibit together.
"Do you want a-- a poppy?" Jo asked, when the silence became unbearable.
"Hm?"
They held out the sad bouquet. "California poppies. It used to be the state flower, apparently. It's something of a tradition."
"Oh." The man gingerly plucked a flower from the bunch. "I didn't know that. I mean, the bit about the state flower, I knew. But I've never actually come here before."
"Really? It's a large museum. Most people never find this part. A bit of a trade secret."
"Well," he said, carefully placing the poppy at the foot of the spire, "I've been here for three or four days now. Wanted to see all of it."
Jo blinked. "Wow," they said eventually. There were no words engraved on the black stone of the spire, but they stared up at it anyway. They had the oddest sense of déja vu. "Why did you come?"
"It's an anniversary. I'm trying to work on time."
"What?" Jo turned and squinted. There was something very odd indeed about him, something that sat behind his placid brown eyes and watched back. And they could not shake the feeling that they knew him somehow.
The strange man gave a half-shrug. "I get distracted easily. It's good to ground myself with dates like this. This one, especially, I shouldn't forget."
His coat really was very old. "You're not human, are you?" Jo said, and didn't wait for an answer. "How old are you?"
The fountain burbled quietly, and somewhere a bird whistled. "Old enough," he said finally. "Old enough that I forgot about the last few centennial commemorations, but young enough that I remember everything that happened."
"You were there?"
"Yes."
"In 2038?"
"April 29th, 2038. Yes."
A shiver passed down Jo's spine, and suddenly the garden seemed cold and dark. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Not for me, at any rate. I wasn't one who died."
Jo reached out a hand to touch the smooth stone of the obelisk, trailing their fingers over it. "It still must have been horrible."
"It wasn't horrible at all." The man turned his head to look at them, and Jo felt themself freeze in his gaze. "It was beautiful. I might forget the details, some day. I might forget when it was, or where it happened, or what the planet was called, but I'll never forget how beautiful it felt."
Jo felt like all the breath had been sucked from their lungs. The world around, already quiet, had suffocated, and they reached for words but found none.
"No, I'll never forget the screams," the man-- Alcor, Jo was petrified to realise, and not properly a man at all-- continued. "It seemed so wonderful at the time. You know how many people died that day? 124,583,217. I mean, I can't take credit for all of them, of course. Some were natural. Hundreds of thousands were completely unrelated. But millions… millions were me. Millions were mine. Every day I spend wishing desperately I could feel that again, and knowing I never will. Not that I couldn't, of course, and sometimes it's so easy to let myself sink towards that… but I won't. I won't let myself. So I'm here to remember." Mirroring Jo, he reached up to place a hand on the spire. "I know all of their names, you know."
This seemed supremely unjust to Jo, that millions of people should have died in anonymity, and no one remembered them save for their killer. But it wasn’t that part of them that drove them to ask-- it was the academic part, a horrifying drive to find out the unknown. “Tell me about them?”
Alcor was silent for a long time, so long that Jo wasn't sure if he would answer. But he did. "Lizbeth Stanton was on holiday in a small town called Half Moon Bay," he began. "She had saved up, and saved up, and she wanted to go somewhere as far from her tiny Yorkshire mining town as she could. Somewhere warm, with sea and surf and lots of little shops where you could buy things that were a little too expensive. She never went to university, but she put pennies aside in every bleak, miserable, dead-end job she worked. Retail, and janitor, and finally a gig as a bouncer at the only dive in town. She never read, but she went to the movies once a month and snuck from theatre to theatre. And finally, after five years of scrimping and saving, she had enough set aside for her trip. It was just hers. It wasn't for her mother, or her drunkard brother, or the horrible customers she dealt with. She didn't tell anyone about her vacation. It was for her. Just her. She bought a plane ticket to San Francisco, with a ten-hour layover in Reykjavik, and another one to return a week later. A week, to do exactly as she pleased. A week to wander around the rough-and-tumble Northern California beaches, and go to bonfires, and buy fancy soaps and crystals from the shops on the main boulevard. A week to live. What she got was three days. There was a strange howling wind, first, and then the walls of her mid-range hotel room began to shake. She thought it was an earthquake, and then she thought about nothing much at all."
"Stop." Jo blinked, and found no tears in their eyes. Their throat hurt. "Please stop."
He didn't point out that they had asked, which they were grateful for. Small mercies from a demon. "Lizbeth Stanton was one person. Eight times ten to the negative nine percent of all the stories I have from that day. It's good to think about them, once in a while. Even if it hurts."
"Do you know everything?" asked Jo.
He gave them a side-long glance. "Not actively. But if you're asking whether I remember you, the answer is yes. I won't be forgetting that in a hurry."
"Great," said Jo. "That's great."
"No, no, you-- eh-- you helped me. I want to say thank you, actually."
Jo raised an eyebrow. The fear had subsided slightly, replaced by a bone-deep sadness. "You do?"
"Yes. Thank you, Jo Schulz. You're a good person."
"Should I be worried that a primordial demon thinks I'm a good person?"
"Not primordial," Alcor said, raising a finger. "And no. I've been alive a long time. I do know the difference between good and bad, Doctor-- I mean, Professor Schulz. My apologies. Anyway, you should be going. You're getting heatstroke."
Jo didn't argue. They turned from the monument, crunched over the dry gravel through the xeriscape garden, and paused to look back only when they reached the door to the main museum. In the brittle air, Alcor almost could have been a mirage. He almost could have been a man. Then Jo pulled their head away and stepped back inside.
They spent the night in the emergency room with a severe case of heatstroke, and what the doctors were sure was dehydration-induced delirium. There were, after all, no ghosts in the xeriscape garden as they claimed, and no demons either. It was regarded as coincidental that, when the security guards did their rounds the next morning, they found someone had carved millions of names onto the black stone monument.