The World Wasn't Ready for You
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Synopsis
Black Mirror meets Get Out in this gripping story collection reminiscent of the work of Octavia E. Butler, which deftly blends science fiction, horror, and fantasy to examine issues of race, class, and prejudice—an electrifying, oftentimes heartbreaking debut from an extraordinary new voice.
Justin C. Key has long been obsessed with monsters. Reading R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps as a kid, he imagined himself battling monsters and mayhem to a triumphant end. But when watching Scream 2, in which the movie’s only Black couple is promptly killed off, he realized that the Black and Brown characters in his favorite genre were almost always the victim or villain—if they were portrayed at all.
In The World Wasn’t Ready for You, Key expands and subverts the horror genre to expertly explore issues of race, class, prejudice, love, exclusion, loneliness, and what it means to be a person in the world, while revealing the horrifying nature inherent in all of us. In the opening story, “The Perfection of Theresa Watkins,” a sci-fi love story turned nightmare, a husband uses new technology to download the consciousness of his recently deceased Black wife into the body of a white woman. In “Spider King,” an inmate agrees to participate in an experimental medical study offered to Black prisoners in exchange for early release, only to find his body reacting with disturbing symptoms. And in the title story, a father tries to protect his son, teaching him how to navigate a prejudiced world that does not understand him and sees him as a threat.
The World Wasn’t Ready for You is a gripping, provocative, and distinctly original collection that demonstrates Key’s remarkable literary gifts—a skill at crafting science fiction stories equaled by an ability to sculpt characters and narrative—as well as his utterly fresh take on how genre can be used to delight, awe, frighten, and ultimately challenge our perceptions. Wildly imaginative and powerfully resonant, it introduces an unforgettable new voice in fiction.
Release date: September 19, 2023
Publisher: HarperCollins
Print pages: 288
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The World Wasn't Ready for You
Justin C. Key
Everything had to be perfectly imperfect. A living room couch that didn’t quite align with our centrally hung wedding picture. The entertainment console’s unbalanced arrangement of rimmed diplomas, family photos, and assorted snow globes. The half-filled kitchen trash can, scant dishes in the sink, and a bathroom that was clean but not spotless.
If everything wasn’t just right, I’d lose her again.
My arms were trembling tuning forks as I twisted off the medicine cap, popped a Xanax, guzzled water from the kitchen sink, and counted.
Onetwothree, onetwothree, one, two, three, one . . . two . . . three. My heart slowed. Fragments of worry gradually became coherent thoughts.
I hated medication, but Resurrection, Inc. advised against the electronic limbic treatments that usually eliminated my anxiety attacks altogether. They’d prescribed me a short-acting sedative to take “as needed” until things at home resembled normal. Despite warnings of the medication’s addictive properties, I found myself taking more and more lately.
And then, a voice: “It took me long enough.”
I straightened, banged my head on the bottom edge of the wall cabinet, and gripped the counter to keep my balance. The ceiling lights split into dancing stars. One special pair shone bright among the rest. Eyes I’d feared I’d never see again.
A White woman stood in the dining room. I had spent the morning agonizing over this first moment, formulating the perfect greeting and gestures and phrases. Now my dead wife was here, and I stood clutching my head, my mouth leaking water. What’s more, I was unprepared to hide the shock. With her loose-hanging curls, defined neck, and coy smile, she looked like a distant relative of the wild-haired prisoner from the body-donor pictures. She looked nothing like the wife I knew. The one with tight black coils, full lips, and deep mahogany skin the same shade as mine.
Except for the eyes.
She spread her arms. “I’m White, Darius. Only in America.” The voice was wrong; Theresa’s had been lower. “Ian’ll have a field day with this.”
“Life lasts a lifetime, our love lasts forever.” The phrase I rehearsed had sounded a lot better that morning in front of the mirror.
She laughed. My skin went down a size. This wasn’t going well. I turned to busy my hands with another glass of water.
“I’ve missed the shit out of you,” she said, suddenly beside me. Her mouth fell over mine. The lips were thin. Her taste was sweet, different from what I was used to; I had kissed the same pair of lips for almost a decade.
Theresa and I had always been eye to eye. Now, I bent a little to embrace her. This woman’s hips were wider than Theresa’s, her back muscles firm and tense. I pulled away and touched her cheek. The skin was rough and pink beneath the makeup, where Theresa’s had been smooth umber.
“Do you see me?” she asked. “I see you.”
“You have her eyes,” I said. “Your eyes, I mean.”
Before she died, my wife’s features had kept their soft benevolence even at the height of her cancer’s hunger. Long and thin with sunken cheeks, she now had the face of a woman who had been through a lot, but a long time ago. This new refined body was without menace—Resurrection, Inc. had gone to great
lengths to reverse the effects of decades of incarceration—yet somehow frightening in the history still visible along its edges, the shadows of a past life lingering like erased pencil markings.
Whether I knew it then or not, this new body had its own memories.
My first panic attack came the same day I met my wife. As Ian Cole pulled up to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, a hand—perhaps God’s—gripped my heart as I gripped the door handle. What if my body couldn’t take this round of chemo? What if a clot formed in the line and went straight to my brain? Every muscle in my body twitched to run.
“Bruh,” Ian said, his hand on my shoulder. “Your forehead shiny as hell right now. You good? Should I call Jerry?”
“I’m fine,” I said as I opened the door. He and Jerry Brown, old college roommates turned business partners, helped me through treatments the best they knew how. Ian made sure I made my appointments, and that life still had laughter. Jerry the Christian visited to pray over me. He continued silently even after I told him to stop, and I resented him for it. The last thing I wanted was help from Jerry the psychiatrist. “See you in two?”
I was out before he could answer. I hurried through the lobby and up to the oncology floor.
During those months of treatment, I went from being a young computer engineer with a budding 401(k), stock options for three different tech start-ups, my own business, and a vibrant online dating profile to a shadow of a man voluntarily pumping poison into his veins. The chemo had eaten everything else—my hair, my energy, my digestive system, my hope, and my faith. Why not feed it this new sensation, too? I willed myself into the treatment chair; the toxins mixed with my blood while I was still on the verge of a breakdown. It ate at me—all of me—and I found sleep.
I dreamed chemo-torn dreams, my weathered mind left to reconstruct splinters of cognition. I was back in my childhood bedroom, only my twin-size mattress had become a deathbed. My legs dangled over the edge; my feet scritch-scratched, scritch-scratched against the wood as I trembled from the drugs.
My dead mother tended to me. Bits of blackened flesh dropped from the rotting hole in her neck into my tea. She somehow saw my fear with her cold eyes and began to sing. The whites of her spinal
cord were visible through the shreds of her throat. More bits fell into the cup.
And then I felt God’s hand on mine. I tried to pull away. Didn’t He know we were done?
My dreams broke under His touch. I looked down, curious to see the Hand of God. Thin, spotted skin stretched pale over straining knuckles. The slender fingers were strangely delicate. My laughter came out as a painful cough. God was Black. God was a woman.
I looked up, ready, and saw not God, but instead someone broken like me. Her eyes and mouth were tight lines under a domed head capped with a purple polka-dot scarf. Dark patches stained mahogany skin that lay lazily over her skull. Orange lines shuttled treatment from hanging bags into her swollen arm. She wasn’t the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
She woke some time later to me watching her. After a brief, orienting smile, she sat up and pulled her hand into her lap.
“You’re not going to get weird on me, now are you?” She spoke slowly, as if parts of her were still dreaming.
“You were holding my hand,” I said.
“I’m Theresa. Ovarian cancer. What you got?”
“Uh, Darius. Lymphoma. I’ve got three more sessions.”
She nodded, closed her eyes, and laid her head back against her seat. I thought sleep had reclaimed her when she spoke again. “Same, more or less. See you Thursday?”
No, I didn’t think so. The sessions had taken their toll. Even with them, my chances were slim. The quick flick of a knife across my wrist would offer a much cleaner death. A lot could happen before Thursday.
But I didn’t tell her that. “Yes. Definitely,” I said.
And I did. That Thursday and many times after.
That was the worst of the chemo, and in some ways the best. Remission, like our relationship, had its expected highs and lows. I often thought of chemotherapy as a kind of first death. The hopelessness, the fear, the exhaustion, spiraling down to a forfeit that finally ushered us into a second life of recovery and relationship.
We had found love in poison. We had found life in death.
We sat facing each other on the living room couch. Theresa had spent the last hour retelling what she remembered of how we first met. Resurrection, Inc. stressed the importance of these drills to further cement her memories. I relived many of them as she did, only correcting small details and filling in a few blanks. Besides the occasional confirmatory eye contact, her gaze was off interrogating the past. Theresa’s new White skin competed with the memory sewn in her words. She caught me staring and touched my hand. I calmed in her eyes.
Thank god for the eyes.
“This is hard,” she said. “I know.”
“They offered to let me remember you as you are now.” I pulled out my remnant card. “I still can.”
“I want you to remember me like I remember me.”
I reached over to brush away an intrusive strand of hair and found myself trying
to curl it with the tip of my finger. Theresa placed her hand over mine. Her face flushed in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before.
“I hate it, too,” she said. “They tried—Lord knows they tried—but the curls wouldn’t hold. I looked like a weeping willow. Not cute. Brain transplant? Piece of cake. Transracial hair? Who do you think we are? Miracle workers?”
We shared a laugh. It felt good.
“I almost broke up with you when we were both out of the woods,” Theresa said, still smiling.
“Yeah?” This was news to me. I considered telling her to save the story for another time. Her brain was still unraveling itself. How would I know if the memory was accurate or some scrambled perspective? Instead, I said, “Why?”
“We met dying. It didn’t seem like a smart foundation. You never thought of it that way?”
I hadn’t. In the weeks before meeting her, my nights were spent in a bathroom reeking of vomit, a chef’s knife hovering over my wrist, waiting for the courage to end it all, to take back control. After Theresa, when I found myself back on the bathroom floor, it wasn’t cowardice that kept the blade from doing its work, but the want to make it to Thursday. To see her again. The chemo had saved my body, but Theresa had saved my life.
The doorbell rang. Thank God. “That’s the food,” I said.
“I’ll get it,” Theresa said, rising. “I need to stretch my legs every few minutes anyway. I have to keep the neurons firing.”
“You got to sleep, though, don’t you?”
“Didn’t they tell you? I don’t sleep.”
“Really?”
“Joking, babe,” she threw over her shoulder. Her hair went the opposite direction whenever she moved. It was distracting. “Sleep’s the easy part. That’s where all the magic happens. At least, that’s what they told me.”
I admired Resurrection’s work. Despite the company’s assurances, I’d expected the worst from her donor body. Years of incarceration doesn’t look good on anyone. But a month of training both mind and body between neural implantation and family presentation had given her toned legs with little blemish and buttocks that sat high atop her thighs. Nearly caught up in the illusion, I fully realized the magnitude of what Resurrection had accomplished. They’d cheated the grave. Fear grazed my heart.
I went to clear the dining room chairs and table of the clutter I’d artificially planted and began to set for dinner. When I came back out of the kitchen with our guest plates, I frowned. Theresa was sitting in the wrong place. I saw the problem and plucked a piece of mail from the seat directly across from her. The correct seat.
“If I remember this right, this smell is a good smell,” she said as she pulled out
cartons of food from a brown bag.
“Sorry for the mess,” I said, waving the piece of mail. “You can sit here.”
“I’m fine, it’s not a problem. Champignon makes catfish?”
“They do now, yes.” I sat, then stood. My fingers twitched against my thigh. “You sure you don’t want to switch? Facing the kitchen means you see all the dirty dishes, and that means bad mood bears . . . remember?”
“Of course I remember. The kitchen’s clean, though. So, no worries, right?”
“Right. Sure. It’s just . . . you sit here, and I sit there. You know what? Never mind, it’s not important.”
Theresa rose. “Trade with me,” she said.
“Really, it’s fine.”
“I’m serious. Looking into the kitchen is depressing. Reminds me that I need to learn to cook all over again.”
My thumbnail picked at my pinkie knuckle. Had I already taken today’s Xanax? Yes, earlier. Before she came.
I smiled. “Perfect. Let’s eat.”
“Where did I propose?” I asked. We lay in bed, continuing the talks that were supposed to be like exercise for a resettling brain.
“Under a willow tree in . . . Marcus Garvey?”
“Central Park. It’s okay.”
“Shit, yes, Central. You were such a hopeless romantic. Didn’t you say you wanted us to be buried under that tree?”
“I was high on love. What can I say? Okay, next question. First kiss?”
But Theresa was staring off to the side, her smile barely hanging on. Her eyes darted within their sockets; her mouth grew thin.
“Theresa.”
“Hmm?”
“You looked . . . distracted. You okay?”
“Yeah, I was just thinking about something.”
“No voices?”
She smiled. “No voices.”
Soft vibrations through the sheets. Theresa frowned, reached under her pillow, and pulled out her phone. She stared at the screen for what seemed like a long time.
“Everything good?” Resurrection, Inc. had issued her a private, restricted line for her probationary transition period.
“Yeah. Just a reminder of my next appointment.” She slid the phone back under the pillow. “What else you got?”
“What was it like?”
“What was what like?”
“Dying.”
“Ah, that,” she said. Her expression went serious. Her lips scrunched up toward her nose. The arrangement nipped at a corner of my mind until I recognized it as a pirated version of the old Theresa’s thinking
face. She probably didn’t even notice she was doing it; her muscles simply weren’t in sync with the neural networks controlling them yet. I imagined thoughts wandering around her brain, bumping into things like someone taking a midnight trip to the bathroom in a new home.
“Please,” Theresa said. She’d stopped me from pushing the right corner of her mouth just a little bit higher, where it should be. “Be patient with me.”
I tucked my hand away. “What was it like?” I said.
“Remember when we went bungee jumping in Ecuador? It’s like that, but slower. A lot slower. I went down and down and down until I couldn’t go down anymore. Then I was coming back up.”
“Immediately?”
“No. Not immediately. There was some time. A couple hours, maybe?”
“A week. It took a whole week to get you back in a body.”
“Wow. I mean, I had to be somewhere, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Somewhere.”
In the soundless night, she watched me. Theresa’s gaze was so much a part of my past, from moments of love to rage to lust, that I felt it even before fully rising from my dream.
Thank God for the eyes. I thanked Him who no longer existed for me, as I had thanked Him when I first knew—really knew—Theresa was coming home. Sometimes it was just easier to have someone to thank.
Thank God for the eyes.
I should have sat up to share this moment with her, whatever this moment was. I should have asked if she was all right. I should have found out why the hell she was watching me in the middle of the night.
Instead, I pushed my face into the pillows to recapture sleep before it scurried too far away.
Thank God for the eyes.
“It’s blasphemy,” Theresa said. She rolled up the plastic from our new coffee maker, shoved it in the trash can, and snatched the Resurrection, Inc. pamphlet from my hand. We’d just moved in together in a one-bedroom on the Upper West Side. While Theresa had been quick to unpack, much of my modest belongings remained haphazardly stuffed in reused cardboard boxes lining the short hallway. The hastily painted walls were bare except for a trio of placards instructing to LOVE, LAUGH, and DREAM.
“What’s the harm in meeting with them?” I said. “See what they’re all about?"
“I already know what they’re all about. It says so right here. ‘Be the master of your fate. Be the Captain of your soul.’ God is the captain of my soul.”
“I’ll make an appointment,” I said. “Just a consult. And if you don’t like it, we don’t have to do it. At all.”
She leaned against the kitchen counter and sighed, long and heavy, as her eyes scanned the sheet of paper. The common whirr of an ambulance drew her gaze out of the barred window. I saw my chance.
“I don’t want to lose you,” I said when the siren dissipated into the background noise of a New York morning. “I don’t want to lose us.”
Resurrection, Inc. was located just a few blocks away, twelve floors above a busy Columbus Avenue. The elevator groaned in defiance the entire way up. A tall, thin man with a pin-striped suit, wavy black hair, and a metallic smile greeted us at the top. Theresa burst into laughter when she saw him.
“Ian?” she said, wiping her eyes. “You run this?”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. You were really going to leave all the explaining to me, huh, Darius?”
“I thought you were out today?” I said. Ian led us down a dimly lit hall to double doors branded with Resurrection’s logo: a generous hand cupping a brain, its neurons firing in excitement.
“I cleared my schedule. Did D tell you he helped invent this tech?”
“ ‘Helped invent’ is a big stretch,” I said.
“No.” Theresa’s laughter had come and gone like a midsummer rain. “I had no idea, actually. You told me you were part of a tech start-up.”
“I was,” I said. “Neurotech. Always good to see you, Ian. You mind putting on your business face and showing us around?”
At first, Resurrection’s office seemed like a smaller version of the psychiatry suites I had come to know well. Books lined thin shelves in a waiting room meant for two. A white-noise box hummed from a chipped coffee table. Neutral and unimposing. Ian led us single-file back to the main procedure room, and any illusion of normal fell away. Here, the walls popped with shades of red and turquoise. Stenciled eyes tracked us from a flat-screen built into the wall. Meditation music hummed through my body. At the far end of the rectangular room was a computer hooked up to a long silver-and-black robotic arm with eager fingers. Theresa looked around as if the place smelled foul, then at me. I silently begged her to give it a chance.
Ian gestured to two nonmatching chairs—one green, the other pink—opposite the robotic arm. “Have a seat, make yourself comfortable.”
Ian served us green tea as an assistant fitted me with a helmet covered with electrodes connected to the computer. Theresa refused to participate in this demonstration. Her gaze lingered uneasily
over the contraption on my head.
“How is this better than the brain transplants?” I asked after Ian had explained their service. It had been very hard to take Ian’s idea of neuro transplants seriously back when we were managing Continuum. Jerry, Ian, and I had built the lifesaving electronic limbic treatment clinic from scratch, originally to treat addiction. The noninvasive outpatient procedure targeted the emotional centers of the brain and rerouted their connections from substances to more sustainable coping mechanisms, like exercise or video games. When I got cancer and Jerry got saved, Ian’s propensity for avant-garde endeavors took over. If emotional responses could be stored and rewired, could we do the same with a person’s whole being and transfer it to a donor brain? He scouted out any potential investors with a foot in the grave. Mostly those with cancer, some with a lifelong anxiety over a human’s expiration date. Ian didn’t need fancy promises to woo the desperate into seeing if wealth could translate to immortality. Hope and ambition were enough. Resurrection was born. Even then, despite my own hand in the coffin, I paid little attention to the details of how Ian’s technology cheated death.
“A brain transplant is only the riskiest procedure known to medicine. Dr. Nduom pioneered the first twenty years ago while researching brain cancer. His own son, I’ve heard, and now they are in practice together. No one has been able to get it quite right since. Today, there’s a fifty percent chance of rejection. Fifty percent. That’s flipping a coin to see whether or not your new body attacks your brain.”
“There’s been some success,” I said.
“In Japan, yes. But no one knows the long-term outcome. And you only have one copy of your brain. If something—anything—goes wrong: lights out. In a perfect world, the outcome would technically maybe be better. But we live in the real world. You have your remnant card?”
I did. I hesitated, glanced at Theresa with a nervous smile, and took out my keychain. The blue-and-red-striped piece of metal looked like a dog tag. My ticket into the ELT clinics, it held my past neural configurations, told the staff exactly what treatments I needed, and was always on me. Ian slipped it into one of the computer’s sockets.
“And when’s the last time you had ELT?”
“A week ago.”
“Long enough. Pick up the can,” Ian said, gesturing to the red-and-white-striped soda can sitting on the table. Its aluminum caught the light, reminding me of the moon.
“What’s ELT?” Theresa said.
“Electronic limbic treatment,” Ian said. “Targets the wiring in your brain that controls emotion, simply put. We call it ‘limbic,’ but in reality it’s wherever your brain stores your emotional response, which is specific to each individual. No more getting addicted to benzos or alcohol just because you don't
want to be a nervous wreck all the time. Continuum was the first to do ELT. We created, others stylized.”
“So you’re also a customer?” Theresa said to me. “What’s next, you’re going to tell me you’re a robot?”
“Well—”
“Shut up, Ian.” I turned to Theresa. “Look, honey, I didn’t want you to freak out. But we—they—do good work. Remember how bad I was?”
“Just go on and pick up the damn thing,” Theresa said.
I concentrated. Nothing happened.
“You’re getting ahead of me,” Ian said. “Pick it up with your hand. Like you normally would.”
I did. The metal was warm. Despite the angle shift, the can somehow still caught the light. I placed it back.
Ian clacked away at the computer. “Do it again.”
I did. The sliver of movement out of the corner of my eye could have been my imagination, but I knew it wasn’t.
“I was just thinking,” I said. “When I code, I can make a program on one computer and then use it on any other. They all share the same basic language. Our brains aren’t like that. They’re all different.”
“Ah. But when I look at this can, I see red. You see red.”
“My red may be different from your red.”
“Does it matter, though, if we both agree it’s red? In a sense, we don’t talk to each other, our interpreters do. They take our complex network of unique electrical signals and turn them into a common result. If I thought of the word ‘fruit’ and stimulated the same firing pattern in your brain without the interpreter, you might think of the word ‘meat.’ Or it might not even be a word at all. You might see a certain color or smell a certain scent.
“The remnant card stores your neural connections. Resurrection stores your interpreter. Together, it’s like packaging a novel with a universal translator.” Ian turned the computer screen toward me. Thousands of lines connected dots in a virtual plane that took the crude shape of a brain. “See, here’s a snapshot of you lifting the can. Here’s a snapshot of the sensory input and output at that time. And here’s the intersection of those two. The Interpreter.”
Lines of code in an unfamiliar language scrolled the screen for five seconds before stopping.
“Unimpressive now, but it’ll grow,” Ian said.
“What happens to the donor?”
“All neural networks—memories, knowledge, Interpreter, everything—are erased. Once a wipe has been made on a consenting candidate, they are considered legally dead.”
“ ‘Consenting,’ ” I said. “Is that real consent or prison consent?”
“We actually have a hefty waiting list. I’ve spoken to each donor myself. Many feel this is their chance at redemption. And of course their families get a comfortable sum of money, and criminal records are erased.”
“I have schizophrenia,” Theresa said. I had almost forgotten she was there.
“Well controlled; I haven’t had a flare-up in years. Would that mess with any of this?”
“Good point,” I said. She was engaging, which was encouraging. “We probably don’t want any of the schizophrenic donors, especially from prison. Should we edit it out, you think? Could be a dangerous window.”
“All our donors are serving life sentences, yes. And likely for violent crimes. But those with psychiatric issues are more likely to be victims of violence, not perpetrators, even in this population. That said, yes, we’d remove any identifiable brain diseases for both parties so as not to interfere with compatibility matching.”
“Does anything stay behind?” Theresa asked. “After the wipe?”
“No,” Ian said, a little too quickly. I sensed Theresa didn’t believe him. As the Interpreter’s lines of code rolled across the screen, I realized I didn’t either.
“Go.” Theresa shooed me toward the door. We’d spent the day doing memory exercises and sifting through her wardrobe. After some convincing she’d tried on an old favorite: ...
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