Skip to content

Spend $70 more and receive free shipping! Free shipping available!

Jackie and Xīng Forever

21 Jan, 2025
Jackie and Xīng Forever

View Content Warning(s)

Jackie

The cabling of Jackie’s Access Point droops from the top of her laundry room doorway. She presses it up, but the adhesive has lost its stickiness. Fine. As long as the circuit is closed the machine will work. She runs a finger along the cable, tracing the sides, the floor, and the top of the doorway.

She presses the button.

Her cramped laundry room—more of a hallway, really—vanishes and is replaced by rolling hills and a cloudless silver sky. Jackie grabs her woven wicker basket and walks through the Access Point into her middleworld. She trudges up a hill covered in strange grass—the brightness and consistency of that green makes it look fake—to a midwestern farmhouse standing at the apex made of raw wood siding, sharp black gables, and claustrophobic windows.

Middleworlds are usually filled with people, with cities, towns, states, countries—just like in real life. Because middleworlds are real life, just in another dimension. But in this middleworld, this dimension, there is only Jackie and Xīng. They are the only two people in all the infinite multiverse who imagined a world like this one at the precise moment their Access Points were activated.

She rests a hand on the doorknob of the house, turns to look at her A.P., a doorway of freestanding thin, translucent cabling that glows a dull pink against the sharp green of the grass. Funny, the way her A.P. looks nothing like the rigid lime-green slabs that make up Xīng’s. She needs to take hers in for maintenance, she knows. If that hanging bit near the top ever fell, it would be a serious problem for her. There’d be no way back.

Jackie walks inside and leaves the door open, setting her basket beside the dining table, a thick slab of polished hardwood, and sitting with her back to the door. She stares out the window at the hills that press up against the sky like the coils of a giant green serpent: neon green, toxic green, green-green. The grass ripples in the wind.

How can a world exist without any life but the grass? she wonders. There are no animals here, no bugs, no fungus. Just grass.


Xīng spreads his blanket out on a patch of grass a minute’s walk from the house. Jackie opens the basket and divvies up the dishes. “How crazy would it be for us to stay?” she asks, waving out at the grass, hills, and farmhouse.

“Crazy’s one word for it,” he says. “Irresponsible is another. I can’t abandon my work, can you?” His hands and body move through the motions of a mini wine service as he speaks, playing the part of a sommelier with a little napkin and everything.

Xīng always brings the wine because in his world there’s no such thing as a bad bottle. They’ve tried to figure out how their timelines compare, whether there might be any overlap, but it’s impossible. His calendars (digital only) say the year is ‘F29’ while she lives in ‘882 C.E.’ Xīng’s world has invented and abandoned most of the tech Jackie’s world is currently using: the brick-sized cell phones, the home televisions, the fax machines, the VHSs, and floppy disks; the only difference Jackie was able to point out is that Xīng’s world never developed pagers. So their phones, back when they used physical phones, could never send text messages.

“What a weird idea,” Xīng says. “Why not just have a regular conversation?”

Xīng has tried to explain other things to her as well: the ‘ethernet,’ which apparently has nothing to do with cables. Instead, it’s a series of networked 3D-printers that draw from the ‘ethers’ in the air to print small household objects like spoons or toothbrushes.

Jackie has tried to explain what it means to own your own car. “I live in the city,” she says, “so I don’t drive it much. But if I ever wanted to get far enough away to have a picnic like this one, I’d have to take my car.”

“So it just sits in your garage until you want to use it?” He asks the question and afterward his mouth hangs open.

“You catching flies?” she asks. “Cuz if you are, there aren’t any here.”

Jackie has come to think of Xīng as kind of an oracle. A window into the future of her world. Well, one possible future, anyway.

“Hold on a second,” Jackie says. “What ‘work’ do you have that you can’t abandon? I thought you lived in some kind of utopia where work was optional.”

He shakes his head. “No, not a utopia, not yet. I’m a journalist,” he tells her. “And if I stopped writing, things would fall apart.”

“How many times have we talked about my writing career?” Or lack-thereof, she thinks. As of now, her writing career consists of a short story published in an unpaid local magazine. Mostly she writes for a blog that isn’t even hers. Twenty-five dollars an hour to drive traffic to the PODS moving container company. “What kind of a journalist are you?” she asks. “The moan-behind-a-desk kind, or the camera-in-a-war-zone kind?”

Xīng laughs. “Are those my only options?”

“There’s a spectrum,” she says.

“First of all, there aren’t any ‘war zones’ in my world.”

She pretends to scrutinize his face. “Are you messing with me?”

He shakes his head.

“That’s condescending,” she says, and he laughs. “Are there still people who moan in your world?”

“Oh, they moan,” he says. “But we all moan about different things, don’t we?” His world, he goes on to explain, used to be an attention economy like hers is now. “A.I. changed all of that. The moment someone could step inside a machine and experience whatever reality they wanted, novelty stopped being so important. Instead, people cared about authenticity and reality. That’s why the A.P.s are so perfect; middleworlds are as real as any other reality.”

“You still haven’t told me what kind of journalist you are.”

“I’m the kind who writes in his journal,” Xīng says. “Ninety minutes a day. It’s my job to feed the language models. They need original thoughts and insights. I write poetry sometimes.”

She sips her wine. “You’re telling me you write poetry for a computer?”

He nods.

“I hate to say this, Xīng, but I think the computers will be fine without you.”

“If I don’t do my job,” he says, “people will die.”

She can’t tell if he’s joking.

“And what about your writing?” he asks. “How will they get by?”

She barks a laugh. “There is exactly one person who would care if I stopped writing, and she is me. Anyway, I can write just as well here as I can back there.” She glances down at his clothing. Feng-shui-natural, she thinks. Up to his eyes. They’re a bright shade of lilac that seems to shine with bioluminescence. He’s told her before that he chose to turn them purple when he was only a child, using a particular kind of ‘chromosome’ beverage to make it happen.

He smirks. “Are you trying to pressure me into staying here with you, Jackie?”

“God, no,” she says. “I don’t want to live in here. Who would? There’s nothing to eat but grass.” She pulls a handful of blades out of the ground and lets them catch in the wind. “Who even knows if it’s edible?”

Xīng plucks a leaf of grass and gnashes it in his teeth. Smacks his lips. “Sweet and sour chicken,” he says.

She tries some herself and spits it out. “If this is what your sweet and sour chicken tastes like, then I understand why no one eats meat.” She opens the basket and takes out the quiche. Cheddar and broccoli and still warm to the touch. Xīng doesn’t have the right plumbing to digest meat, but he can’t get enough of real cheese and eggs.

She serves two pieces and watches as Xīng leans over his plate, closes his eyes, and breathes in deeply. They eat in silence. Despite the gloomy nature of the silver sky, the sun is warm and the breeze is consistently pleasant. The cumulative effect is a perpetual fall season. Sweater weather. Albeit, strangely colored, what with the grass and the sky.

“What is it about your journaling that prevents people from dying?” she asks after both their plates are empty.

“The language models need new inputs or else their output degrades into gibberish. The algorithm assigned Journalism as a human-necessary profession after the Logis Disaster of C47. All smart systems suffered a catastrophic logic failure that lasted for four years. Transportation. Healthcare. Food production. Everything. Millions of people died.” Xīng flattens quiche crumbs between the tines of his fork and licks them off. “The truth is, being original isn’t easy, but that’s my job.” He shrugs.

Jackie wants to laugh at him, but not so soon after discussing the deaths of millions of people. She steels her expression and says, “But how exactly does your journal help to prevent a logic failure?”

“I’ve got a metaphor,” he says, straightening his back and turning to face her directly. “Imagine you’re a baker whose only goal in life is to improve your baked goods.”

“Sounds like a good goal for a baker,” Jackie says.

“And you’re immortal.”

“Okaaaaay?”

“You have at your disposal flour, sugar, salt, water, milk, butter, and blueberries.”

“So blueberry tarts are on the menu.”

“Sure, you can start with blueberry tarts. Then maybe blueberry pie. Blueberry pancakes. Blueberry muffins. Every form of bread, sugar, and blueberries you can imagine. Because you’re immortal, you’re able to think of every form there could ever be and you bake it, bake it, bake it.”

“Bakers gonna bake,” Jackie says, and Xīng is nonplussed for a split-second. “It’s a joke,” she says. “It’s kind of a joke.”

“Well …” Xīng recovers. “Everyone loves your baked goods. People can’t get enough of them. They stop baking their own stuff because yours is so much better. It works for a while. But then people start to get bored. The baked goods aren’t getting any better. You aren’t fulfilling your purpose anymore because you’ve reached the limit of what can be accomplished with bread, sugar, and blueberries.”

“It’s boring, got it. But where does the logic failure come into play?”

“Here’s the part I didn’t tell you yet: You are incapable of doing nothing. You can’t sit still. Can’t give up. You keep working to improve your baked goods, but they aren’t improving, they’re just changing. And even as you see the quality decrease, as you recognize that your new techniques are becoming less effective, you can’t stop. You were designed to improve your baked goods, not to reach a certain level of quality.”

“One question,” she says. “Did you retrofit this metaphor into a baking story because you think I like to bake?”

“Don’t you like to bake?”

“I like to cook.” She looks at the quiche. “Okay, I did bake this quiche, but …” Now he’s smiling at her like he’s caught her in a lie. “Fine, yeah, I like to bake,” she says.

“Good. Because I’m almost finished with this metaphor,” he says. “We had a choice, right? Redesign our smart bakers from the ground up to make them less obsessive about novel ingredients, or we give our perfectly capable smart bakers the ingredients they need to make us delicious treats.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” she says, peering out over hills that seem to be all the same height. “I think you should ditch the metaphor, though. I know how computers work.” She holds her hands up to frame a patch of silver sky for Xīng. “Tell me how close I am. There you are, Xīng the journalist who writes in his journal, sitting in a room so filled with plants the walls have become lost. Behind you a waterfall fills the room with a pleasant hush …”

“How’d you know I have a waterfall in my office?”

“It’s inside your office?”

“It’s a small waterfall.”

“Perfect,” Jackie says. “The picture is coming together. So there you are by your modest office waterfall, your elbows on the desk, chin resting on closed fists, eyes gazing up through your clear ceiling at the clouds passing overhead—dreaming about your target audience: the artificial intelligence, the language model, the algorithm, the machine.” She slaps the side of her head. “Xīng suddenly has an all-caps SUPER COOL IDEA.”

“Super original idea,” he corrects.

What must it be like to work ninety minutes a day, she wonders. And even those ninety minutes spent thinking in the avant-garde, writing down whatever feels new and refreshing. “One of my professors told me I should stop trying to be original,” Jackie says. “‘Don’t even try,’ he told me. ‘You’ll never do it.’”

“Maybe original isn’t the right word,” Xīng says. “Maybe it’s ‘unique.’ Walk up to anyone and listen to their story and you will hear something unique. It’s the individual differences that make us interesting. The mix of life choices and challenges. It’s the way we created things like gravitic sails and telomere beverages that gave us unlimited energy and the ability to live for thousands of years.”

Jackie’s head moves back and down like a startled turtle, something she tends to do when she’s surprised. She swallows and asks, “How old are you, Xīng?”

“I’ll be one-hundred seventy-five in a few days.”

“Jesus Christ,” she whispers. “You look like you’re twenty-eight.”

“The drink repairs the telomeres in our DNA and extends our lifespans.”

“Well, happy friggin’ birthday,” Jackie says. “I wouldn’t mind a taste of that myself.”

“I’ll bring you some,” he says. “Next time.”


Two and a half weeks pass before Jackie activates her A.P. again. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. That’s the beauty of the A.P.s, whoever arrives first only has to wait a few minutes. This time it’s no different.

But when Xīng walks into the house, Jackie notices something is off. His face is lined, his hair gray, and it seems as if gravity is dragging a heavy hand down his face. Shadows cover his sunken eyes. Xīng is an old man.

“Here they are,” he says, setting two identical bottles of a bright orange liquid on the table and sitting across from her. He opens a bottle and fills the air with a fizzing sound. She can see through the glass that there are tiny flecks of silver floating around inside like scuzzy toxic waste.

“What is this?” she asks in a quiet voice, hardly able to push the question out.

“The telomere beverage. Like I promised.”

The taste is unpleasant, Jackie thinks, like a too-thick soda that’s gone flat. But the whole day she’s felt groggy and sensitive, and now that feeling has vanished. Now, she feels rested and alert.

“I guess it’s fine,” she says, looking him over again. There’s no ‘feng-shui natural’ left, she thinks. Xīng has become shabby and spent and she feels as if he owes her something. Maybe not an apology, but at least an explanation. Hadn’t they agreed to meet here every three weeks? Hadn’t she trusted him to show?

They’ve never had an argument before and she’s not sure where to start. “You look …” she says but decides she doesn’t feel like playing it cool anymore. She feels like getting real answers. “What the hell is going on, Xīng?”

He laughs and sips his drink, and it makes her even madder.

“How old are you?” she says, and it’s an accusation.

He snorts and looks out the window. “Two-hundred and fifteen.”

“Happy fucking birthday,” she says, flat and cold. “So what is that? Forty years?”

He shrugs and sips again from the bottle. “You shouldn’t be upset, Jackie. This isn’t a big deal.”

Not a big deal? Xīng has betrayed her. He used up the years they were supposed to share. She wants to take that bottle out of his mouth and throw it through the window. To scream in his face. To stand and leave and never come back.

“I tried to come earlier,” Xīng says in Jackie’s burning silence. “The algorithm wouldn’t allow any telomere beverages into the middleworld until today. But I kept coming back, Jackie. I never gave up.”

She drinks from her bottle to stop herself from crying. But an unexpected shuddering sends the liquid up her nose in a stream of stinging silver and orange. She sneezes a fine mist onto Xīng’s face. It dribbles down her lips and chin.

He takes out a handkerchief and dabs at her face. Wipes his chin. Folds the napkin and sets it on the table, then starts to laugh. His laughter has always been infectious and somehow, despite everything, Jackie is laughing too. It can’t last, though. Soon she’s crying, then gasping, then choking.

Xīng takes her by the shoulders. “Jackie, what’s wrong? What’s happening?”

The hands that grasp her are wrinkled and liver spotted. She recoils, flinging the bottle out of her hand and through the window. The glass shatters out and into the silver day. Jackie will never forget that moment when it all exploded outward, the shards of glass spinning, the little orange droplets that reflected the sun because of the silver shavings swirling inside, and the future she had imagined for Xīng and herself.


Xīng

Xīng doesn’t understand.

Maybe Jackie’s culture is more divergent than he thought. He did what he told her he would. He satisfied his obligation to her, brought her a priceless gift that might’ve extended her life to well over a thousand years if she’d just drank the whole bottle instead of throwing it through the window. Even the few sips she took will extend her life by hundreds of years.

“Jackie, I …”

“You could’ve come without the stupid drinks,” she interrupts. Mascara-stained tears move down her cheeks like rain on glass. “You could’ve stepped through your ugly A.P. at any fucking time and told me what was going on. But you chose to live your life without me.”

Nothing was going as planned. Xīng hadn’t expected Jackie to get upset until he told her about the next part. He thought she’d be so grateful for the miracle of long life, that maybe she wouldn’t even mind. But since she’s already upset, he might as well get this over with.

“I got married,” he tells her, focusing his gaze on the jagged shards that cling to the window frame like broken teeth. “We have two children. Alejandra and Henry. Twelve years old, and thirty-two.”

She snatches his bottle out of his hands and flings it against the white wall where it shatters. The orange liquid spreads into the swooping shape of a whale breaching the surface of the ocean.

“What is going on? Why are you behaving this way?” he asks, incredulous.

“You left me behind,” she says, every word jolted with emotion. “We come here and we meet every three weeks. That was the agreement.”

“I never said⁠—”

“Fuck you!” She rubs her eyes, takes a deep, ragged breath. “Fuck you. I don’t care.”

Xīng lets the silence hang as long as he can, then asks, “Did you think we could actually live here, Jackie? No food. No water. No life except for the grass. What if our A.P.s failed while we were inside? I mean, look at yours, the way the top hangs down, if that circuit ever broke …”

“I cared about you, Xīng.” She rubs her forehead with thumb and forefinger, wipes the tears off her cheeks, and a shake passes through her body. “But you made your choice.”

She gets up and walks to the door.

“No,” he calls after her. “I didn’t have a choice. I did what I was supposed to do.”

She stops in the doorway, looks down at the grass, and doesn’t turn to face him. “I wish that instead you had done what you wanted to do.”

She walks down the hill and through her glowing A.P. with the cable that droops down along the top. Inside, he can see her press a button and the A.P. blinks out of existence.


Two lines of ants trace a path through the broken window and remind Xīng of the mascara that ran down Jackie’s cheeks a week ago. The ants crawl along the wall and spread out to fill the whale-shaped stain of telomere beverage. Life, Xīng thinks. Here is the life we’ve been searching for. The ants are as strange as the grass, though, if not stranger. They move like automata and their coloring doesn’t seem natural.

It took Xīng six long days to figure out how to best express his feelings to Jackie. He was relieved when his A.P. still led to this world. The fact that the world is still here means that in a few minutes Jackie will be here too.

He stands from the ants and begins to pace the farmhouse, reading the poem he had the language model generate from his journal entries. It’s a poem directly from his subconscious. Directly from his soul. His essence filtered through the algorithm. There can be no truer expression of his feelings, and he plans to read it aloud then give her the roll of papyrus he had the poem printed on.

After that, the rest is up to her.

Jackie arrives with a new wicker basket and sets it by the dining table. She’s as beautiful as ever, but no longer young. Her hair is silver and tied back with a blue scarf. The wrinkles on her face seem more like laugh-lines than anything else.

“There are ants here,” Xīng says, indicating the wall. “We found life.”

“Ants, huh?” She leans down to examine. “I guess that answers that question.”

“But they’re strange ants, don’t you think?”

“Strange how?”

“Look at their coloring. The carapace is silver. Same color as the sky. And see how their legs glow near the joints?” He glances out the window, doesn’t really want to be talking about the ants.

“I never imagined ants like these,” Jackie says, peering closer.

“Me neither,” he says. “But there’s a lot about this world I never imagined.” Outside the shattered window the wind presses the grass down in wave after wave. He clears his throat and looks back at Jackie. “You’re older than before,” he says.

“Why do you care how old I am?”

He wants to tell her that he does care, but decided before he got here that his poem would do the talking today. He unrolls the papyrus and flattens it on the table, then reads to her.


Jackie

“You wrote that?” Jackie says, trying not to put too much of a challenge in the words. She sits down at the table across from where he stands and slides the paper over so she can see.

He sits down and says, “It’s a poem I had generated, from me to you.”

“So the A.I. wrote it.”

“The language model pulled this poem out of my journal entries, Jackie. It’s a distillation of my essence into the perfect words for this exact situation.”

She stifles a chuckle and turns the papyrus on its side, considering exactly how to articulate what bothers her about the words there. There’s no life. No purpose. They are bootlicking, sycophantic words. Words with no urge toward emotional truth.

“How does a person tell if something like this is any good?” she asks.

“You don’t like the poem.” He takes the papyrus from her. Rolls it up. “Would you like it better if I wrote it without the language model?”

“That would be a good start.” She smiles. Her eyes fall on her basket. “I brought the food. Did you bring the wine?”

He smiles and stands up. Pulls a blanket from his bag and lays it folded on the table. “You lay out the blanket,” he says. “If you walk straight through the back door, you’ll reach a hill that’s slightly taller than the rest. I brought something else for you, just need to grab it.”

She arches a silver eyebrow and he smiles.

“It’s a surprise,” he says, so Jackie carries the blanket over the rolling hills, walking farther than ever before. And he’s right, this rise is slightly taller than the ones around it. A brand-new patch of grass that’s exactly like every other patch.

Looking back, the farmhouse looks tiny. Like a toy house on a fake hill, she thinks as she spreads the blanket over the grass. The sun is beginning to set over a shimmering surface. Jackie wonders if it might be water.


Xīng’s shoes sweep through the grass and Jackie turns her head. He pretends to be out of breath, gasping and wheezing and dragging the wicker basket behind him like a ball and chain.

“Give it a rest,” she says, patting a spot on the blanket. “Sit down, drink some wine, and look out there on the horizon.” She points at the sliver of remaining sun. “Tell me if that looks like water.”

He sets the basket down and sits. “It does look like water.” He pulls two stemmed glasses out of his basket and hands one to Jackie, uncorks the wine and goes through the bottle service routine, pouring a small mouthful so Jackie can approve the bottle.

“It’s great,” she says. And with their glasses properly filled and chimed together, Jackie asks, “So?”

“So what?” he says.

“So what did you bring me? If it’s more soda pop, I’m going to splash this wine in your face. I’ve already lived too long.”

“No beverages,” he says. “I’ve brought something much better.”

He reaches into the basket and his hand comes out with a coil of something thin and translucent. “I left my wife, Jackie,” he says. “I told her she can have the children.”

Jackie doesn’t respond, but her hand tightens around the stem of her glass. They’re both old now. They’ve had their lives. She was married to Edwin for forty years before finally scattering his ashes over the sea. Her kids have had kids now. She’s not Jackie, she’s Grandma Jackie.

No. Maybe she didn’t hear him right. She forces her mouth to close. Licks her lips, takes a small sip of wine, and finally says, “What did you say?”

He holds the coiled cable out to her, and she takes it, turning it curiously in the air. The material is tacky in her fingers, like a worm, or an albino snake.

There’s something familiar about it.

“I love you, Jackie,” Xīng whispers. “I think I always have.”

Her head jerks up, then back down to the cable. God. She knows what it is: an A.P. cable. Not just any A.P. cable. She pulls it through her hand like a garden hose and feels the familiar kink where it hangs from the top of her laundry room door.

Where it used to hang. Because it isn’t hanging there anymore.

No. This can’t be her Access Point. Xīng would never do such a thing.

“The last time we were here,” he says, immune to her stunned and horrified silence, “you told me you wished I’d done what I wanted to do. I don’t think I knew what I wanted at the time, but I do know now. I want you, Jackie. I want you.”

Content Warning(s): None

Welcome Discount

Get 15% Off