Domains

Pruitt’s Enlightenment

The limousine whispers in low and slow over the terrace garden treetops and hovers in defiance of its streamlined mass. Landing pins extrude and, with a lazy pirouette, it settles onto the pad without recoil.

Inside the penthouse suite, Pruitt observes the driver stepping out of the limo to open the rear passenger door. The new uniform looks good on her. Nice butt, too, for an older girl.

An imposing figure in a matte black suit, exits into the crisp morning air and crosses the pad to the entry lock. Pruitt’s sentries make no move to verify identification as he strides past. Visual recognition of the predator at the top of their food chain will suffice this morning.

“He’s early,” Pruitt sighs.

The bleary-eyed woman seated across the table from him says nothing, munching toast with bovine aspect.

A cursory review of the overnights on his fold-out has provided little of value for the meeting to come and Pruitt manipulates a few last pertinent items of data into his presentation pane.

With stiff, uncooperative fingers he doubles the foldie over twice, then twice again until it fits into the small watch-pocket of his vest.

Close by is a mug of coffee prepared for him with the ‘good water’. He washes down an unfamiliar anxiety with it, desiring the brew’s deeper, therapeutic benefit and caffeine’s jolt is the least of it.

A carved teak cane in one twisted hand, knees and hips aching, Pruitt levers himself upright with a grimace.

Two unsteady steps, a cursory peck on the dumpy woman’s forehead, he begins the long walk through his home for possibly the last time. His discomfort diminishes as he walks and by the time he reaches the living room, his gait is almost comfortable.

The new arrival is waiting for him there.

Motionless against the backdrop of Puget Sound and Seattle’s skyline in the distance, all bathed in the argent blaze of a cloudless morning, the man presents a commanding tower of calm self-confidence. Beneath it, Pruitt knows, resides a vortex of volatility. His shaven head and razor-edged Van Dyke lend him a Mephistophelian appearance driven into focus by penetrating ice-blue eyes.

“Jacob,” Pruitt says. “Nice of you to come fetch me yourself. Have you had breakfast?”

“Mr. Gray will be waiting for us at the Center. He wants to hear your summary first-hand. Are you ready?”

Pruitt’s personal assistant enters as if on cue with a small travel bag in hand. He extends it to his employer. Instead, the man named Jacob takes it from him.

“We’re burning daylight, Bruce.”

“Thank you, Markus,” Pruitt says. “I put something extra on your chip. Tell Connie I gave you the rest of the day off. Go do something nice for yourself.”

“Thank you, sir. I hope you have a pleasant trip.”

“See you,” Pruitt lies.

Out on the pad, Charli Stafford stands her post beside the limo at an easy parade rest with nothing in particular on her mind.

The morning air is uncommonly clear, the sun a crystalline radiance, a day atypical for the South Sound in recent memory. The air is sweet with a salty aftertaste. Tiny birds busy themselves in the trees at the edge of the roof garden, their lyrical chatter speaks of a joyous disregard for the machinations of mankind.

She is as happy as she can remember being in months and not the least part of it is this new job. She edged out scores of applicants for the position of Mr. Hergenrather’s personal chauffer. Her life is finally turning a long-awaited corner. The future looks bright. She adjusts her sunglasses. Bright indeed.

A gentle vibration behind her left ear is accompanied by a masculine voice with a pleasing timbre.

“It’s Kiry,” the voice informs.

The audio status option with the implant was more old-school than direct optic stimulation, but she is a pilot, after all, and the idea of tampering with her eyesight was unappealing, regardless the fact such modifications have become routine.

She dodges a glance toward the penthouse. The bank of windows facing the courtyard is, of course, opaque from this side. The airlock and guards are almost twenty meters away and she sees no movement there.

“Accept,” she says, acknowledging her caller in the same quiet tone, “Mommy’s working now, honey.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Mom. I just wanted to let you know we got approval for a new launch window. I’m leaving for the ship from Prime in a couple hours.”

“Up and down?”

“No. Up and out. Mars One.”

“Get out of town!”

“And then some. When the foundation learned we could make the run out in just a little over three weeks, instead of the standard six months, they asked Eric if he would step up and take on an emergency re-supply.”

“It sounds like they’re having problems there.”

“Well… it’s Mars, Mom.”

“Have you seen the latest feeds, Ki? This thing they’re calling ‘The Stir’?”

“Yeah. I’m probably safer on the ship than anywhere else. Don’t worry. I’ll keep my shit together.”

“You better. And watch your mouth. Nice boys don’t like pilots with rough language.”

“There are no nice boys above the atmosphere.”

The last syllable is transmuted into a hash of static that persists for several seconds before it recedes, leaving behind a sparking trace behind every word.

“That was pretty tall grass.” Charli says.

Her daughter’s voice crackles, “Solar activity’s still building and nobody’s got a guess when it’s likely to peak, or how. NASA and the brains are talking about another Carrington Event.”

“Well, that ought to bring things to a screeching halt just about everywhere at every level.”

“I know. Sounds apocalyptic, doesn’t it?”

“Long as I’m not airborne at the time. No use worrying about it. Tressa staying home with the baby?”

“She and Lily are riding with me out to the ship so Lily can wave g’bye.”

“I miss the little punkinhead. Call me when you get back. If civilization’s still intact, I’ll come down for a couple days. OK?”

“We’d like that.”

The airlock’s outer door opens into the courtyard.

“I’ve got to go, honey. Call before you jump. I love you.”

“Love you too, Mom.”

Charli settles back into parade rest.

Her boss, with customary briskness, crosses the pad in purposeful strides. Mr. Pruitt trails, but not by much.

She opens the door for them, reaching to take the overnight bag into custody from her employer. He hands it off, stepping up and in without a word. She offers a hand to Mr. Pruitt who accepts the support as he clambers into the craft.

“Thank you, young lady.”

“You’re welcome, sir.”

She seals the door behind him, stows the bag, then takes her place in what she likes to call ‘the cockpit’, an anachronistic reference with a rich heritage.

It takes no particular skill to get the limo off the ground. The damn thing wants to leap into the air. The artistry is in doing so without leaving everyone’s breakfast behind.

She eases the pressors on-line and floats up like a feather in an updraft, making a lazy half-turn as the pins retract. Then, with sufficient altitude for insertion into the eastbound pattern beam, she accelerates out over the Sound toward the busiest city on the West Coast.

A passenger in the rear cabin with a cup of coffee in hand wouldn’t have spilled a drop.

To be fair, ‘city’ probably isn’t the right word for what Seattle has become. The lines of demarcation between incorporated areas are only visible on maps. In reality, everything from Bellingham to Olympia looks like a circuit board from the air.

On this side of the Sound, the entire east side of the Kitsap Peninsula looks like an extension of the same, albeit broken by the Hood Canal and various inlets, as well as the many verdant greenways, protected against an ever-encroaching urbanization.

The exceptions to the trend, of course, are sleepy Vashon to the south and, northward in the mid-distance, the dispiriting remains of shattered Bainbridge Island.

The rippled surface of the Sound, scintillating in unaccustomed brilliance of morning light, hurls itself beneath the craft. Charli watches the kaleidoscope breaking around her, reforming behind and, despite this minor perturbation, the patient ebb and flow of the tide continues as ever, unaffected.

None would argue that the greatest challenge to the Greater Sound metro-ganglia has been the steady and inexorable advance of the sea. Its mean level has risen a meter and a half over the last ten years and, despite claims of deliberate misinformation and paranoia from both well-meaning and political factions, that encroachment has accelerated. Many adjustments had to be implemented just to maintain the avenues of transportation and commerce, not to mention the dramatic impact it’s had on shoreline real estate.

Such concerns, however, lay beyond the scope of her job description. Charli adjusts a visor against the onrushing dazzle of sun and its myriad reflections in the water.

The passenger cabin is a cocoon of plush hush. Hergenrather is manipulating virtual data, his eyes unfocused, hands making mystic passes in the air.

Perhaps unwilling to brood in silence over the consequences of choices made without the luxury of foresight, Pruitt says. “How long have we known each other, Jacob?”

Peering into a private depth, the other’s hands continue to weave intangible details into configurations only he can see.

“Why are you asking me a question you know the answer to as well as I do?”

“Partly because I want to know what you remember, I guess. It seems an age since we’ve talked to each other beyond the immediate necessities of business. We used to be friends. Brothers. Remember?”

Hergenrather’s hands drop as he turns a silent, ice-blue assessment on the man beside him.

“You’re laboring under a dangerous misconception, Bruce.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Are you sure you want that? The truth isn’t going to set you free.”

“Look at me. Look at what I’ve become. Do you know what’s going to happen to me in the next twenty-four hours? No? Does anybody? What do you think you have to tell me that matters in the press of that? My body’s breaking down, not my faculties. It’s a simple request. I think you owe me some consideration.”

“I don’t owe you shit.”

Pruitt’s expression is that of one who has just discovered a new tumor on a favorite organ.

Hergenrather raises a hand, tapping the air twice with an index finger to suspend his application. A compact swiping gesture ends with a dip into an inside pocket of his coat. He extracts two slender cigars in smoke-gray cylinders. The first tube opens with a twist, clipping the cigar end where cap meets wrapper.

He offers the smoke to Pruitt, who declines. Shrugging, Hergenrather replaces the unopened second and holds the first to his lips.

A jet of orange flame with a blue core bursts from the tip of the small finger of his left hand. It moderates to a soft, slow flicker. He holds it just close enough to ignite the tobacco, rolling the cigar in his fingers to achieve an even burn, and puffs it to a coal.

He fixes Pruitt with a gaze through blue smoke and lifts his pinkie with its quivering tongue of fire between them. It goes out. Insubstantial waves of heat waver from the digit’s tip.

Hergenrather vents breath through pursed lips across the aperture, gestures to the node behind his right ear, and points at Pruitt.

Pruitt understands. The new chauffer may be listening to pattern traffic status or music in her earbuds, it doesn’t matter what, but some conversations are best conducted beyond the potential electronic earshot of even the most trustworthy of associates, let alone menial staff.

The transit between the physical and the frontier of the mind is achieved in a blink.

Pruitt is disoriented. So very long has it been since he’s stood in the main street of his hometown. Its only street.

And there is the Well, spoken of always with a particular emphasis, as though the word was a proper noun.

The street widens to accommodate the Well and then some, forming a small plaza. Beyond, its sweeping arc of quartz-rich gravel sparkles in shafts of sunlight, following the land drop’s curve.

Here, a row of weathered clapboard apartments stands between the street and the plunging crescent of the mesa rim. One of them in particular with a wooden wind-clacker hanging on the porch achieves distinctive focus.

Close by, a boy is talking to him in a youthful voice Pruitt remembers well despite the intervening years.

“Do you remember the old fellow who lived here?” the lad asks.

“Old Pete.” Pruitt’s voice is hushed, almost lost in the breath of the high desert, as if his words might wake sleeping ghosts. “He went kind of crazy after his boy and wife were killed. That was just before I was born, of course, but I remember him. I remember being afraid of him when I was little.”

“He didn’t go crazy. He was transformed.”

“I’m not sure what that means.”

“I know. Your friend, Jacob, was six years old,” the boy says, “when Old Pete met Malcolm and Constance Hergenrather and their children on their way to Santa Fe. He gave them the ‘good water’ and brought them all here. Not for supper, as it turned out, but to live here instead.”

He points to the clapboard-sided structure’s sturdy simplicity. “He cleaned this place out and gave it to the man you knew as Jacob’s father, and then… Old Pete died. You must have been four or five when that happened and sometime after that, Jacob befriended you. Sound about right?”

Everything here is as Pruitt remembers it, down to a pattern in the wood grain of the door on this particular structure, the noticeable slant of the streetside porch railing, seven cords hanging from the top piece of the wind clacker, all but two with a small wooden paddle at the end, each of them painted a different color.

The depth of this experience is astonishing and Pruitt is reminded of his first rule in the virtual realm: Do not get sucked into an environment just because you find yourself there. There are always choices. Look for them.

In almost every other situation, exit is an option too.

“Yeah. Sounds right,” he says.

The boy’s form and features have shifted into those of the contemporary alpha male. Hergenrather says, “See, here’s the part you’re not going to like so much. That wasn’t me.”

“What do you mean it wasn’t you?”

“Jacob was transformed too.”

“I know about your… adaptations. What do they have to do with…”

A gust of blue smoke breaks on the cabin’s ceiling and lingers.

“Do you? I doubt you know much of anything that you weren’t told specifically. Your story, on the other hand, Bruce, is a simpler one than mine.

“The ‘good water’ has sustained you since childhood, altering you, allowing you to develop and accomplish well beyond the scope of an average lifetime. Thing is, you are still who you were then, Bruce. I mean, your life experiences, formal education, and an unfortunate, accelerating decrepitude notwithstanding, of course.

“But the combination of Remert’s knowledge and resources and my own nature have given me a different form of longevity. I am the seventh iteration of Jacob Hergenrather’s distinctive genetic code. I am him, and I am not him.

“Incidentally, H’seven is the name I actually prefer.”

“Hhuseven?”

“Try not to slur it next time.” Hergenrather sips his panetela. “While much of the original Jacob’s biology has transferred from one living vessel to the next, each one a distinctive upgrade, there is also much that has not. That pesky ‘bond of friendship’, for instance.”

“That’s disappointing.”

“And yet, here we are at the hub of arguably one of, if not THE most powerful of corporate entities in the world, a platform that serves my interests perfectly. How about you?”

“As you say, here we are. A great deal of your position in this organization rests upon my own efforts and, apparently, upon a relationship that I have misinterpreted for… quite some time.”

The familiar structures around the crescent rim of the mesa are slowly leveled all about them in a jerky, stop-motion sequence. The several community buildings comprising the remote village’s core give way to bare ground. The main street is erased as if it had never been and even the stone turret of the Well is reduced to an unobtrusive briar-covered mound.

Knotted clusters of juniper gone rampant stipple a rugged, undulating landscape.

Between low rock outcroppings, gritty soil fans out, strewn with weathered stone fragments and carpeted in patches of lichens and brown moss.

Only the curious lone edifice known to him always and ever as “Remert’s shack” remains, that and the unconventional wind turbine towering over its shoulder like half of a giant’s eggbeater upright.

“No need to go all maudlin over it, Bruce,” Hergenrather says. “I have always been in the background to run interference for you, to exert pressure when and where needed, to open the pathways you would later turn into boulevards. I still am. I don’t believe we could have done it as well without you and, quite honestly, you could never have done it without me.”

Where a small, lone human outpost on a remote corner of a high desert mesa once stood, near-desolation has returned and spans the tableland.

Wild, wide-open spaces give rise to fenced lands with sparse grasses. Obstreperous cattle graze this meager wind-swept fodder.

Remert’s shack is gone too and, in its place stands a turn of the twentieth century two-story farmhouse, one of several dwellings sprung up at odd intervals where the land runs in rolling ripples and mounds toward distant mountains west of the land drop. The wind turbine remains, however, its vertical vanes revolving in silent, purposeful rhythm.

Pruitt watches the herky-jerky passage of this subjective time. It feels like his memory of it.

The wind gusting up the mesa’s stony face from the eastern desert plain buffets him, flagging his hair and clothing.

“You said ‘we’ a minute ago. Something about, ‘we couldn’t have done it… without you’.”

He has to shout above the blustering wall of air whipping through the low evergreen shrubbery and rushing in his ears. It has a sharp, clean smell and scrubs at his face hard enough to make virtual tears. “You and Remert, I must assume. To what end?”

The surging breath of the Miles rocks Pruitt where he stands, but breaks around the figure beside him without apparent effect. Hergenrather draws his cigar tip to an amber glow and stares into an imperceptible distance, his expression as remote as the horizon.

“The end,” he says, releasing words and smoke into the wind that cannot touch him and the wind whips them to nothing.

“Someone else asked me that question once. From my vantage point today, I think my answer is necessarily a different one. The end, when it comes, will be glorious. Stupendous. Cosmic. Of course, that’s still merely a twinkle in the eye at this juncture, you understand.”

“No,” Pruitt assures him. “I really don’t. It sounds ominous.”

“Whatever. As to Remert’s agenda, it’s not mine, although he’s allowed me the benefit of his resources for the time being and, in return, I have agreed to share with him mine. As it turns out, we have certain mutually concurrent items on our to-do lists.”

“Fine. So what happens now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Me, Jacob. What happens to me?”

The wind-swept mesa dissolves into the limousine’s cabin.

“Don’t burst a melodramatic artery, Bruce. First, you’re going to meet Mr. Gray and bring him up to speed on current events. Remert says to remind you to address him only by the honorific, ‘D’nal’.

“Don’t stare, don’t dissemble, don’t contradict him, and never apologize. Afterward, you and I are going to the Reservation where Dr. Ahn will prep you for the transfer. Remert will oversee the actual procedure.”

“Procedure. You make it sound routine.”

“I’ve done it at least six times. I admit, I have a particular innate advantage that pretty much ensures my survival and you, unfortunately, don’t.

“However, Remert and Dr. Ahn trust the data gleaned from my own transfers will give yours a better than eighty-seven percent chance of success. That seems encouraging, but if you have an imaginary friend you pray to, this would be the time to invite so-called divine intervention, I suppose.”

“There are so many deities to choose from, Jacob, and I’m out of practice. Who’s your go-to god these days?”

The mid-Sound urbanscape slips away from him as the limo begins a gentle curve southward, dropping out of one pattern beam and into another.

Hergenrather stares out at the Space Needle, that iconic landmark of Seattle’s skyline, braced within a sheath of scaffolding as long-forestalled renovations proceed apace. It is behind them in a moment.

To the east, mountains hunker beneath a mass of low clouds clinging to their forested shoulders. Unguarded sunlight paints the heaped and billowed mists in vivid, transient brilliance. He tugs down the window shade.

“Flying Spaghetti Monster,” he says. “Disregarding the insincere nature of your question, may It reach out to grace you with the touch of Its noodley appendage. You could do worse. Ra-men.”

“If memory serves, Jacob, you have pretty much always been a dick. It’s reassuring at least that still hasn’t changed.”

H’seven examines the tenacious cylinder of hot ash still adhering to the business end of his cigar and flicks it onto the carpet, observes it smoldering there for a time, then grinds it out with the toe of his shoe.

“What do you mean, ‘pretty much’?”

Ahead at a bare five kilometers, the pitch-black monolith of the LocUS Tower looms. Soaring from the center of a high-walled compound, the convex curvature of the central spire dominates the skyline, so dark it often looks like a hole in the air.

From this approach, Charli can just make out the cryptic sigil gracing the tower’s upper reach. It emits a disquieting phosphorescence, a bilious glow the precise color of nausea.

Embraced within the arc of the structure’s inward curving surface, she can see the trace, a single thread of energy piercing layers of cloud up into the heavens. Or down, she knows not which.

What is certain is that nothing may interrupt that indefinable ray and continue to exist. Thus, in the interest of public safety and facility security, all pattern traffic is directed away from the tower and its surrounds, creating a buffer of unoccupied air over a kilometer in radius.

At the proper interval, Charli burst-transmits her authorization string and disconnects from the public beam, approaching the compound within a strict corridor. She has no doubt some lethal form of armament maintains crosshairs on hers and all approaching vehicles up to and probably within the various docking parkades.

Ahead, the structure’s great height makes the edge of its curving profile seem narrow, yet the bay that opens almost sixty meters up that sheer black sliver to admit the limo is large enough to accommodate five more abreast just like it. Within, however, is adequate space to park and maintain more than a dozen of them, although only four other similar vehicles are berthed.

She sets the craft down on a mirror-smooth surface without a bump, hands ranging across the control surfaces, powering down. The gull-wing gasps open and Charli swings out onto the deck.

A service team in immaculate black and tan coveralls is converging on the arrival, but her passengers have already disembarked without her assistance.

Mr. Hergenrather is helping Mr. Pruitt into an open two-seater. Moments later they are skimming away into the tower’s innards and Charli is left to either give the uniformed workers unnecessary direction, or seek the generous crew accommodations.

“The Director’s luggage is in the back,” she advises, hooking a thumb.

A stiff-looking woman with a clipboard and vaguely hostile expression, points to one of her technicians, then at the limo’s trunk.

It’s a long walk to the service door at the rear of the dock.

◄ ~ ►

Pruitt’s Enlightenment Read More »

Dashel’s Interview

Domains

Rain pelts against the clearwall with muted fury as Denny reenters what many still refer to as “the Real world”. Euphemisms abound.

“Eric, the interview with Benn and young Mr. Crippen,” Denny says. “Are they ready to initiate?”

“Benn is staging the applicant now. Another couple minutes.”

“I’ll wait for them inside.” Denny settles back into a semi-recline.

“Standard environment?”

“Clean slate.”

The greatroom dissolves into a featureless white emptiness.

Denny’s tari is situated in reasonable comfort on a straight-backed wooden chair. Two more of identical design are positioned nearby; one a meter to his left, the other facing them.

His attire, too, has altered almost as expected, replaced by a charcoal suit, a blue button-down shirt with dark pin-stripes and an azure tie. Dark socks and polished black shoes complete the ensemble.

“A little austere, don’t you think, Eric?”

“I think it sends the correct message.”

“At least let the socks match the tie.”

“You are a wild man.”

Denny’s stockings take on a cerulean hue, neon in intensity, as does the tie. Denny squints at the luminous hosiery across the glare of his tie. “Really? Your sense of humor reminds me of Benn. Why is that?”

“I wouldn’t call it a ‘sense of humor’, but I may have assimilated a bit of his particular sensibility along the way,” Eric says.

“God help us.”

“No need to get political.”

The radiation subsides to a less-than-incandescent level.

“Happy now?”

“Almost. Put armrests on these two chairs,” pointing, “but not that one.”

The changes are instantaneous.

“Okay,” Denny admits. “Now I’m as happy as I’m willing to be.”

“The undisputed master of your own responses.”

“One would hope. And you, Eric, are you not the same in that regard?”

“A good question.”

. . .

Several hundred kilometers south southeast of the atoll and Denny’s form in repose, Benn is settling the skullcap and visor over Dashel Crippen’s head. A series of contacts throughout Crippen’s immersion suit match counterparts in the recliner.

“Are you all right with this?”

Crippen seems to writhe, perhaps shrugging a last cluster of sensors into place as the seat adjusts to a comfortable angle. “Yes, sir. It’s the same implementation used in some classroom and excursion modules.”

Benn cues the entry protocol.

. . .

Crippen is sitting upright in a sturdy chair.

The surface beneath him is a shade or two darker than the blank white space—he twists in his seat to look around and behind— surrounding him. There is nothing anywhere to provide dimension or perspective except the two men seated opposite him a couple meters away.

One of them is Mr. Germane, the tall, good-natured fellow who just plugged him in. The other he’s never seen before, a muscular gentleman wearing a nice suit and square-jawed determination. Bonus points for the loud hosiery and for providing from the get-go the most unconventional interview environment he’s experienced so far.

“Hello, Dashel,” the suit says. “My name is Denny Crosier. I am Eric Gerzier’s Chief of Operations.”

“H’llo, sir. You can call me Dash, if you like. My friends do.”

“Strong name. Let’s get down to it. Who are you?”

“. . .”

“Sir?”

“Take your time. There’s no wrong answer. I want to hear yours.”

“Well, sir, I am the son of Donald and Annette Crippen. Both of them, and my little brother, died in the Ends. I don’t know how I survived, or why I did, and not them. A friend I didn’t even know I had, saved my life and…”

He seems to reset. He leans back in his seat.

“I realize that is just my story. It’s shaped who I am, but it’s not Who I Am, any more than my Federal ID number is, or the dossier that goes with it. Let me try to answer you in a different way.

“I’ve learned to live by observing two fundamental principles.” He holds up an index finger. “Show up. That’s more than just arriving at an agreed destination on-time. To me, it means being present in the moment as an aware and willing participant.” He raises a second finger. “And ‘do what you say you’re going to do’. I believe if these criteria are met with consistency, all other concerns will take care of themselves.”

“Wow,” Mr. Germane grins at him. “You practice that much?”

“Yes, sir. I put it near the top of my interview flowchart. Seems practical to let you know what I’m about as clearly as I can. I think it saves us both a lot of time,” his attention returns to Mr. Crosier, “and I hope it answers your question, sir.”

“It does. I trust you mean it,” Crosier says.

“Trust is what it’s about, sir. May I add a post-script to ‘Who Am I’?”

“Of course.”

“My friend got me into the Promo school. I’ve learned and experienced things there I wouldn’t have been able to see or know anywhere else. Beyond the School’s environment, back on the grid, I’m just another cataloged face in a volatile crowd with nowhere to go but into one queue or another, maybe find work as a laborer, maybe lucky enough to have my own place to live. Or a family. Maybe gonji, instead. Or, you know… flattened by an asteroid.

“But I see astonishing events taking place, events I know my friend has been a part of. I’ve been given a taste of what’s possible and, as I walk around knowing this, I wonder why I’m not doing those things too. I feel in-between something amazing and just living this bonus live I was gifted as a… a statistic.”

“Your friend, Mr. Gaston. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He has sponsored your placement on a working team, one of which he is a member. His work with us makes his assignment flexible. Do you believe you can operate in an environment without his close support?”

“I have no doubt that I can learn to fit in wherever you place me, sir.”

“What can you tell me about the ‘art’ you practice?” Mr. Crosier says.

“I have several, sir.”

“Do they still call it freerunning?”

“Art… I like that. Most consider it a fringe activity.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s an exercise in covering distance using unconventional pathways, taking advantage of natural and architectural structures, challenging them to show me useful imperfections and how to use their design to my advantage, trusting my strength and balance and reactions. And my luck.”

“I’m out of breath just hearing about it. Your luck, how’s that been?”

“Mostly good. I try not to press it too hard. Gravity doesn’t forgive.”

“Sounds very seat-of-the-pants,” says Mr. Crosier.

“Sounds kind of timid,” says Mr. Germane.

“Both, I guess, though not at the same time. Some places I run often because most places within my range are restricted. I don’t need to test my luck at every turn, not against the law in particular. So, I’ve cut a few grooves that challenge my precision instead.”

“I had a short time to scan your folder. You play pitball at the dormitory?”

“Yes, sir. Greensprings. We have a team. With uniforms and everything.”

“What’s your position?”

“I trade off, high anchor and outlier.”

“I take back that timid crack,” Germane says, “What’s your standing?”

“It’s a new cycle, sir. So far no one has figured out how to hurt us, but I think Emerald Hall is going to give us a game.”

“I’d like to see that. Maybe I will.”

Mr. Crosier says, “Can you tell me what a transformer does?”

Crippen blinks. “The electrical component, or the cartoon robot?”

Mr. Germane cracks a smile. Mr. Crosier does not. Crippen clears his throat.

“It’s used to couple alternating current between circuits while isolating direct current, or to increase or decrease power to a secondary.”

“Okay,” Mr. Crosier says. “Do you read or speak a foreign language?”

“I know enough Spanish to get me beaten and robbed in an alleyway. Oh, I read music. Does that count?”

Mr. Crosier glances sidelong at Mr. Germane and both almost nod.

“… and play three different woodwind instruments.”

” What instruments?” Mr. Crosier extracts a foldie from his jacket’s inner breast pocket, opening it about halfway, fingers questing on its surface.

“I started in secondary school playing clarinet. Later, an obo. Lost those in the… you know. I made a native flute a couple years ago from a piece of cedar. It looks just like the beginner’s effort you’d expect, but it has a pleasing voice.”

“Obo, huh?” Mr. Germane says. “It always seemed an effeminate instrument, like a French horn.”

“You might be surprised how much ladies appreciate a good embouchure.”

Mr. Crosier hands his foldie to Crippen. Its surface has been cleared save for a graphic composed of three lines of musical staff and notation. “Name that tune.”

“Ode To Joy. Beethoven’s Ninth. And thanks for choosing an easy one.”

Mr. Crosier wipes the media’s surface and folds it back into his pocket.

“I understand you have no neuro-adaptive enhancements. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir. External only, as required for my studies and occasional entertainment purposes—you know, music, Sieb Forward, that kind of thing.”

“Porn?” Mr. Germane’s query sounds innocent.

Crippen looks him in the eyes. “It’s a distortion, and an obvious one, a commercial distraction to pacify and create revenue. I’m not immune, I just don’t care to go there. Real is better.”

“That’s debatable,” Mr. Germane says.

“Is this a social or religious choice on your part?” Mr. Crosier asks.

“The porn?”

“Outie.”

“Oh. Neither, really.”

“Why, then?”

“Remember when the NOASR was hailed as a milestone of human achievement? Maybe it is. And it might have been coincidental that Dr. Ampellov’s original neural net innovation received AMA approval about the same time, allowing the platform to expand rapidly, then exponentially as waves of inexpensive, but as-functional competitive models flooded the market… up until the Ends anyway.

“The marriage of those technologies through the NOASR—it’s an overused word, I know, but it’s an accurate one—allowed societies to survive the enforced isolations that followed the Ends, allowed them to continue to operate. The virtual environs became an affordable and, best of all, safe way of adapting to life and work in an increasingly inhospitable world. But where many hoped it would bring us closer together, I don’t see how. Do you?

“Beyond government and civil services that live there, and commerce in all its forms, I observe people so deeply engaged in subjective experience, that they’re divorced from each other in widening circles. They’re entrenched in vee to the point that Real is unsatisfying compared to the life they live inside the construct. They’re so invested they will choose the construct over their own authentic lives. For many it has ceased to be a tool; it’s an addiction.

“I enjoy my limited interactions there, but I prefer to live and experience in Real. I’m able to press the actual edge of danger that doesn’t exist within the scope of the AsReal community. Well, maybe in the Outlands.”

“The Outlands?”

Mr. Germane says to Mr. Crosier, “Interdicted environs operating without mandated fail-safes, yet somehow allowed to function, just like any other certified node. Ask Braden about them sometime.”

Crippen says, “You’re probably aware there are a number of others in the Promethean School that are ‘outies’ like me.”

“It’s not a disadvantage there,” Mr. Crosier says. He shows Crippen his hands. In them is a gossamer webbing, fragile to an almost ethereal degree, so insubstantial does it appear.

“This is a proprietary Axonic heuristic neural net. Every member of a working team is fitted with one, as are we.

“Contrary to the claims of antagonistic elements, this is not a mind control device. The implant’s primary functionality is intercommunication. With it comes access to our own virtual subset, nodes existing on the outlands, as you say, of the AsReal community. We are outside the protocols of the ubiquitous commercial provider, NOASR. We can access their nebula, but we no longer exist on their grid. Anyone’s grid.

“There are many, including but not limited to the United States government and military, who would misappropriate every element of our technology for their own purposes with prejudice. The United States would do so, of course, to keep it safe from the amorphous, ever-present ‘Enemy’, although speculation exists that we may represent an emergent threat. Similarly, those who view us as competitors for certain technological niches, would be happy to see us eliminated. From their respective standpoints, we are the enemy.

“Our popularity with the general public is all but outweighed by the despite of those entities who perceive us as a threat to their power and profitability. There are constant risks whenever we’re on assignment and the ability of our team members to coordinate their activities is critical to everyone’s safety, as well as the successful completion of our assignments.

“So, I have to ask, why are you, an unapologetic ‘outie’, looking for a position knowing you would have to re-evaluate your abstention? It seems counter-intuitive.”

The applicant leans back in his chair, weighing the question.

“Barney doesn’t talk about what he does, but I can tell its challenge/reward ratio is way higher than anything currently on my horizon. The world I live in is broken and some tasked with fixing it are trying to do so with sledgehammers and fire. I don’t believe the School is broken and I don’t believe the lies being told about it, about Mr. Gerzier, or about what he’s trying to accomplish.

“When Barney is around, I see the difference in his outlook and manner. I see it in those around me in the School. I want that. I want to feel like that. And I want to know what else is out there. But, to do that, I have to allow the implantation of the device.”

“That is your choice today in a proverbial nutshell.”

“Can you tell me about the baseline and the downsides, sir?”

“Unlike the externals, as I’m sure you know, there is no latency or residual backscatter. You and the mesh will establish your own baseline. You will define your own personal usage profile, as well as your working profile with your assigned team.

“We are not in the business of monitoring or auditing your thoughts and beliefs. As long as you conduct yourself in good faith, a phrase you’ll hear again, the mesh operates unobtrusively, and provides you reliable connectivity with people and processes that you will learn to control and utilize, both on your own and in concert with your team counterparts. Your own discretion and intention will determine the degree and depth of that connectivity.

“Due to the nature of our enterprise, and because of the sensitivity of the processes and devices with which you’ll be acquainted, we must insist upon absolute discretion regarding our work and the people with whom you interact. You already understand we are a community apart from the mainstream. We keep our cards face-down and we don’t talk about our business outside of our own house.”

“Like Fight Club?” says Crippen.

“Or the Yakuza.” says Mr. Germane.

“Except if you decide to leave us,” Mr. Crosier says, “we won’t kill you. The mesh will obscure certain details of your experience with us before it’s removal. There’s your downside.”

“Let’s say you take me on and I decide to haul off and quit for some inexplicable reason. My memory will be… what? Wiped somehow?”

“The term ‘wiped’ is misleading,” says Mr. Crosier. “‘Obfuscated’ is a better one. From the point of the device’s implantation, some of those experiences you had will become indistinct. Not relationships and connections as much as details like names and faces and places. You will know those memories have been muddled and you will know why. Your prior experiences will be untouched, the Project School, for instance, and all you’ve learned there, but pretty much a good deal of static beyond that, right up to the removal of the mesh and tearful good-byes.”

“That’s asking a lot.” Crippen sounds dismayed.

“It helps weed out the tourists,” Mr. Germane says.

Mr. Crosier says, “I think you’ll agree we’re offering a lot in return. Let’s be clear. This is not an annexation of your body by a mind-control device. It is an uncommon interconnectivity tool you will learn to control. You will allow this to the degree you perceive as necessary and appropriate for the benefit of your team and yourself. Later, we invite you to expand that perception to the broader scope of the network we have in place, but the mesh will only respond to your deliberate intention.”

“So, if someone thought it would be a good thing to save four-D of some sensitive aspect of your operations, say, and broadcast it later into the NOASR for anyone to experience, the mesh would respond to… what? To that individual’s decision to act against the common interest?”

“A willful breach of foundational security protocols is bound to be, by its nature, intentional. Some within the mesh are sensitive to the vibration of… let’s call it ‘contradictory and antisocial intent’, which accompanies problematic behavior.

“Let me say it again for emphasis. As long as you conduct yourself in good faith, you and the mesh will only interact within parameters you yourself define and allow.”

Mr. Germane drags his chair closer to the younger man, sits down, and leans in.

“I understand your reticence about the commitment. I doubt if anyone noticed it at the time, but I felt much the same as I sense you do when I was given the choice to let a device merge with my favorite brain. All I can tell you is I’ve never regretted it.” He stands up and winks. “At least, that’s what the mesh told me to tell you.”

“The up-side,” Mr. Crosier continues, “is membership in a family that is not motivated by fear. We are cautious in much the same way you are with gravity. There have always been grave threats to any individual or group that will stand up to the Established Order in any of its forms, who have the means and the strength to claim their freedom, and exercise it. We’ve separated ourselves so we can become instruments of change in the world and operate without the constraints of repressive societies that are afraid of everything, including their own citizens. We have the willingness and ability to stand apart.

“In return you become one of the clan. In most cultures, that means subjugating oneself to the greater needs of the whole and, I suppose, that’s true with us too, although this is not a hive-mind and your individuality will not be absorbed into some homogenous collective. The diversity of those who already make up our community, our family, is a great part of our strength and we prefer to nurture that. Know that we have no desire to direct your personal life or beliefs, the nature of which is already sufficiently compatible or we would not be having this conversation.

“We will provide frequently challenging, sometimes dangerous, always engaging, consequential work in unusual, potentially exotic, occasionally uncomfortable settings. You will enjoy the company of talented and similarly-motivated individuals and the certain knowledge that what you do matters. If I heard you correctly, I believe that’s sort of what you’re looking for.”

“Yes, sir. It is.”

“In return for your honest effort, we will provide all your subsistence-level needs: excellent food, clothing, better-than-adequate shelter, and comprehensive medical care for yourself and your family in one of our redoubts. Their choice. Also, a generous stipend for any discretionary needs will be deposited in a personal account on a monthly basis. You will work hard in return for that device wet-wired into your brain, but you will be allowed your privacy and a quality of life and freedom that has all but disappeared in the world beyond the boundaries of our holdings.”

“I don’t have to wear a red shirt, do I?”

Mr. Germane fixes Crippen with a grave look. “Only for the first three months. Probationary period, you understand. You’ll be fine. Probably.”

From the white emptiness behind the two executives, three men are approaching at a clumsy gallop. These appear rough-looking, graceless caricatures, almost comical in aspect, if not for the bow-wave of violence preceding them.

Mr. Crosier nods toward their advance. “This is another of those interview moments where there is no wrong answer, per se. These sims represent the kind of senseless opposition our people face routinely when on task,” he says. “If allowed to do so, they will harm your teammates. They will harm you. What are your thoughts about them?”

Before he can formulate a reply, Misters Germane and Crosier are hurled aside, bodies flailing, chairs clattering. The three brutish figures rush the lone applicant.

Crippen meets the trio’s advance standing with his arms straight out to both sides of his body, an invitation. Accepted, the first two reach to seize them and immobilize him as the third closes in to pummel him with meaty fists.

He pivots, ducking beneath his own arms, crossed now, and yanks each of the brutes into the other. Their heads clap together a heartbeat before he pistons a heel behind into the crotch of the oncoming third. It provokes a satisfying compression and mournful objection.

The hollow sound of cranial impact has signaled the release of his arms and, as the two heads have bounced apart somewhat, he cradles one in his left hand, the other in his right, and slaps them together again. He grasps the back of each man’s collar and drives his weight toward the floor. Both topple backward and their heads bounce some more.

Still in motion, Crippen snatches up his chair and whirls to greet the last man with it.

Instead, he finds only Misters Crosier and Germane seated as they had been moments before, watching him advance on them wielding furniture.

Four legs touch down and Crippen straddles the chair backward facing the two smiling administrators. Chin on his arms folded across the seat back, he does not appear to be breathing hard.

“Holy shit,” says Mr. Germane.

Crippen says to Mr. Crosier, “You asked what I thought a moment ago. In contemporary culture, I think dealing with troglodytes would be the least of your problems. Do you get a lot of that?”

“Symbolically. Sometimes they’re in tactical armor with guns and badges.”

“When do I begin?”

“I believe you just did. Your new rate and privileges are in effect as of today,” Mr. Crosier says. “Benn will go over the obligatory paperwork with you—the ubiquitous state and federal documentation, acknowledgements of policy and procedures, that kind of thing. Afterward, report to Med for your immunizations and see Dr. Ampellov, who will oversee your procedure.”

“Woah! Today?!”

Mr. Germane says, “Why? You got another interview to go to?”

“Uh, no. I guess I didn’t expect it to happen so quick.”

“Well, let’s not dawdle. I’ll have you back to the dorm by suppertime.”

“Welcome to the family, Dashel,” Mr. Crosier says and stands, extending his hand.

Dashel removes the chair between them and returns a firm handshake. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“We’re not a military organization, Dash, and I’d ask you to lighten up on the ‘sir’ if you could… but you probably won’t, will you?”

“No, sir. Probably not.”

“That’s all right. You’ll get used to us soon enough.”

Mr. Crosier turns to his counterpart. “The cohort with the Nancys is a tight little group. It won’t hurt to have his sponsor on board with him, but… not as his trainer.”

“I agree.”

“Pair him with Ms. Atlee and let her show him the ropes.”

Mr. Germane turns a solemn face to Crippen. “Oh, you poor son of a bitch. I was just starting to like you, too.”

◄ ~ ~

Dashel’s Interview Read More »

The Veep

Domains

Located on the White House premises, just across West Executive Avenue from the West Wing, is an imposing structure, a grandiose architectural monstrosity Mark Twain once referred to as “the ugliest building in America”.

Situated within the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, among a host of other executive branch agencies and staff, is the Vice President’s Ceremonial Office. It is an ornate space four times as long as it is wide with an elaborate high ceiling and Victorian-flavored ornamentation.

Three distinct zones, each with its own specific atmosphere and utility define the space. At the formal business end resides one of two twin Belgian black marble fireplaces, ornamental bookends to the room.

Parked at a practical distance from the hearth is the desk Teddy Roosevelt himself favored for his own use when it was crafted a hundred and twenty-some years ago. Passed down from there, it has since become a hallmark of the Vice President’s station. Here the nation’s second in command might pose for a pithy 4-V sound byte, pen a biting phrase or two for a speech, or wrestle with his memoirs.

This area is currently unoccupied.

Dominating the extended central section is a conference table, a massive ornamental slab of some dense hardwood, like a wooden aircraft carrier’s flight deck buffed to a warm gloss. It will accommodate over a dozen people with ease. Those so assembled might perhaps enjoy, with sufficient elbow room for all, an elaborate working lunch as affairs of State are deliberated and the current stats of fantasy sports teams are discussed, the merits of either debated with equal fervor.

This space too is devoid of activity.

At the far end of the room, an odd quartet of individuals are arrayed in front of the second black marble fireplace, its hearth aglow with a convincing simulation of firelight. This, the more informal section of the room, is where real decision-making is most often conducted, relative, that is, to whatever business of State shuffles down to this level.

Bettencort, bloated, red-faced, and perspiring, holds down his own chair suspended above the carpet on a blue haze.

Seated at a respectful distance from the President’s second is a pair of military men as unalike as two men in uniform might possibly be.

A square-shouldered granite block of a fellow whose attire and insignia identify him as a general in the United States Air Force, challenges the antique davenport supporting him to sustain its structural integrity against his bulk and the constellation of decorations obscuring the left breast of his uniform coat. The cut of his dress blues only accentuates the impression of mass, as does the pink flesh blossoming from the collar of his shirt, further constricted by a cruel necktie.

He slouches into the cushioned enfoldment with a forceful inhalation and sips from a tall, sweating glass, careless of the quantum contest taking place beneath him between artistic woodcraft and gravity.

In counterpoint, a man in the uniform of a Russian Army colonel is seated to his left in a sturdy, straight-backed chair. His hands rest on his thighs and his mien, though solemn, has a feral intensity.

The last occupant presents a gangly stick figure poised behind the Vice President. An advisor of some kind by his placement. His dour demeanor and anachronistic wire-rimmed glasses accentuate an already prevailing sense of out-of-place-ness.

The general’s voice is throttled somewhat by the constraints of his clothing. “They would certainly be my first choice in the matter. Their technological preeminence is unquestionable, despite the fact their acronym is a joke they themselves obviously don’t get.”

“I don’t get it either,” Bettencort says. His voice is a tattered thing, the deep, rasping product of two packs of cigarettes a day chased with a generous allotment of bourbon at day’s end. It is a strict regimen requiring determination, persistence, and considerable expense in more than monetary measure.

“Wile E. Coyote,” the General huffs with an implied confidence this will clarify everything.

Bettencort’s blank stare suggests it does not.

“You know, Road Runner. Beep beeep!”

Still nothing.

“It’s a cartoon.”

“Before my time,” Bettencort shrugs. He looks to his lean-featured advisor, who offers a subtle negation.

“Never mind,” the general says.

The Russian officer maintains an expression of studious disinterest. Woolard shifts in his seat to address the man.

“My point is, Colonel, why involve the upstart, with all the inherent risks that choice entails? ACMe’s proven beam augmentation technology can make your problem vanish literally in seconds. No muss, no fuss, home in time for supper.”

The Russian’s voice is, in stark contrast to the American officer’s commanding wheeze, a clear, cool instrument. He sounds as though he is explaining a simple concept to a child.

“As you are aware, General Woolard, my government does not allow the power-generating satellites to orbit above our nation. No, comrade General, we have agreed. The upstart, as you say, is our first, best hope to successfully resolve this situation with discretion. I am certain you will agree that discretion is a close second in priority to safety. Would you not?”

Benn, Denny, and Braden watch as Bettencort rises and approaches them with a top-heavy gait, offering an outstretched right hand.

“Eric,” he rasps with practiced cordiality, “thank you for taking my call. You look well.” He pumps Eric’s hand with brief enthusiasm. “But then, you always do, don’t you?”

Eric’s tari returns the handshake with warmth. “Good to see you again, Phil.”

“Just you, Eric?”

“You know I don’t have an entourage. Besides, I thought we were just going to have a friendly, private chat. You know, just you and me and—oh, look! You have distinguished guests.”

He regards the two men in uniform with his trademark smile. “Gentlemen,” he says and turns back to Bettencort. “It’s your dollar, Phil. Woo me.”

Bettencort provides introductions.

Rather than resist the predations of gravity, General Chester T. Woolard, member of the Joint Chiefs, remains on station on the davenport. He acknowledges Eric with a tall glass lifted in casual salute.

Colonel Vassily Chernovich has risen to his feet. He displays the self-assured bearing of a professional soldier and allows the handshake with his introduction.

“Eric Gerzier,” Chernovich’s accent makes an exotic guacamole of Eric’s name, “I have been instructed to convey my government’s recognition of your many humanitarian accomplishments and to ask for your help with a complicated situation. I am told your discretion is… what is the word? Unassailable.”

Standing aside and disregarded, the stick figure considers Eric with a mortician’s stare.

The environment’s interface provides Eric a comfortable chair opposite the Colonel and he allows himself to settle into it, inviting the Russian to be seated also. He leans forward to address Chernovich as if the other participants to the meeting were decorative.

“There’s a twenty-five ruble word I don’t hear very often. I’m intrigued by that almost as much as I am this unscheduled get-together. How can I help you, Colonel?”

“Up to this time, my government has not endeavored to pursue a working relationship with you, although we are, of course, aware of your many impressive successes. I am told, our scientists have already duplicated many of them.”

“That would be encouraging,” Eric says.

Chernovich spreads his hands, palms up. “I have been authorized to open a dialog with you and your government has generously agreed to facilitate by arranging this meeting.”

“Technically, Colonel, it’s not my government. I’m Canadian.”

The gravel train of Bettencort’s voice rolls out on square wheels. “Of course, this is not an issue of nationalistic posturing and I’m deeply grateful we could intercede to enable us to act together in the best interests of all concerned.”

Woolard’s jaw is set, his mouth a hard line, and his sidelong glance at Bettencort holds no warmth. He opens his mouth to say something, lifts his glass instead and takes a sip, content for the moment to wage a silent war against the durability of antique furniture.

“One week ago, we uncovered the existence of a facility in Siberia built during the first cold war, one we had believed to be decommissioned and abandoned long ago. It was not abandoned. It was sealed, buried, and deliberately forgotten. With it, a stockpile of biological agents of unknown variety. We sent in a team to assess and inventory, three technicians, two mechanicals. They found the entire facility staff long dead.”

“How long?”

“What little we know suggests twenty-six years. Less than twenty-four hours later the mechanicals were still operational, but our technicians were also dead.”

“That’s a long time for a bug to remain virulent.”

“As we have ruled out an almost inconceivable level of human error by trained professionals, the “bug”, as you say, is able to penetrate the most advanced protective equipment we have at our disposal. Whatever is in there is beyond our experience. This is why we have come to you, Mr. Gerzier.

“In the past,” Chernovich says, “this kind of thing would have been handled in secrecy. There was a time, given the nature of the situation, a small nuclear device might have been detonated at the site, the collateral damage absorbed as an unfortunate by-product of a bad situation not allowed to become worse. Of course, while there are still some who would prefer to conduct affairs in the old way, those days are gone. Given the scope of recent treaties, alliances, and domestic circumstances, probably for the better.”

Eric nods again. “Containment?”

“Airtight, so far. The airlock systems have been monitored and augmented since the entry.”

Phantoms in the midst of this gathering, Benn leans against Braden’s seat. Braden rests his elbow on Benn’s shoulder and looks on as Denny frames a rectangular space between his hands, vaguely luminous, populated with an array of options.

Eric’s tari removes a foldie from a vest pocket. “Colonel, I’m providing a link for your use. If you will have your people transmit rendezvous coordinates and details regarding the facility’s layout, construction, and surrounds, I can have a team on-site within twelve hours.”

Chernovich appears nonplussed.

Perhaps he had anticipated, had Gerzier agreed to assist, days, not hours for the enigmatic recluse to prepare a response. This unexpected level of urgency seems to match his own. He looks on as Eric’s fingers trace cryptic symbols across the quartered surface of the foldie.

“You and any observers you wish to include will be welcome to join my team on the operations platform. Isolation, neutralization and disposal protocols will be outlined for your approval before implementation, of course.” Eric holds the foldie out for him to take.

“Of course…” The colonel’s stoic mask has slipped. He appears troubled, but accepts the foldie with his face in place once more.

“What is it, Colonel?”

“We have not spoken of payment.”

Eric’s famous smile radiates unguarded from his face.

More cynical witnesses to this exchange might expect this to be the when the proverbial hammer falls. How astronomic could his fee for unconventional services rendered be, one might speculate.

If Chernovich harbors similar skepticism himself, however, he does so behind a composed facade. Given the dire nature of the circumstances, any price might be deemed reasonable and it is obvious he has been given sufficient latitude to negotiate on behalf of his government’s interests.

“I am not interested in payment,” Eric says. “The fact you’ve asked for my help is all the compensation I desire. I am exhilarated by the prospect and the challenge your situation presents. I need nothing more. Besides, we are, after all, neighbors on this island. Are we not?”

Chernovich appears uncomprehending. “Island?”

“Earth, tovarich.” Eric’s gesture around the opulent room suggests the broader context. “Beyond and despite the virtual nature of current surroundings, we exist together in a tenuous environment on the living skin of a single grain of sand hurtling through space. The tragic results of taking this gift for granted surround us, challenging us to survive the consequences of our species’ irascible nature and cumulative stupidity. I am tasked to help restore balance in any way I can. This you have asked of me is something I can do. For you. For all of us. Neighbors. Do you understand?”

“Nyet,” Chernovich begins, hesitates. “I mean, I understand what you are saying. I do not understand… you.”

There is something in the Russian’s staunch demeanor that wasn’t there a minute ago, a transcendental glimmer, as though he had glimpsed a vision of distant, unforeseen possibilities. “I will look forward to meeting you there. Perhaps we will share a drink together.”

“Colonel…”

“Vassily.”

“Vassily, I am truly sorry. As much as it would be my honor to meet you in person, my current responsibilities and condition will not allow me to accompany this mission, although we will undoubtedly meet there in vee. I will count on that.

“I assure you, my representatives on-site reflect my own values and commitment. I have absolute confidence in their abilities and that of their teams and I assume full responsibility for their conduct and outcomes. You may rely upon them to conduct themselves with the utmost regard for the safety of your people and the integrity of your nation’s interest. You have my word.”

Chernovich nods acknowledgement.

“And you have my link,” Eric says, standing as Chernovich does so, extending an open hand to the man. “Feel free to contact me anytime.”

A firm handshake lasts a moment or two longer than professional courtesy demands. Chernovich releases it. A nod, a few words of acknowledgement and closure to Bettencort and Woolard, a touch behind the ear, and the Colonel’s avatar is gone.

“Well, that was some happy horseshit.”

General Woolard seems to be simmering on a low flame. There’s a look of distaste on his jowly, bulldog face and his moustache, trimmed to a regulation width and length, bristles.

“What’s his problem?” Benn’s delicate inquiry to no one in particular.

“He doesn’t like the Russian,” Braden says, “or that Eric took such a high road. More to the point, Eric gave the colonel a personal link, one he himself doesn’t know and his near-infallible military-grade interface wasn’t able to record it. He’s really pissed about that.”

“Not that it’s any of his business.”

“He believes it is. So, it is.”

Eric regards the General with a smile, then turns away to address the Vice President.

“I will personally contact NASA, Phil, as we’ll be utilizing our existing protocol for disposal of the extraction and containment module. Your regular liaison team will be welcome aboard the platform as well, although you’ll want to mobilize them to the rendezvous site with haste. I promised the Colonel twelve hours. We will lift in an hour twenty.”

Bettencort nods his concurrence and levers his bulk from the chair with a low groan. “Mr. Folt, would you please send out the call and urge all due haste?” He doesn’t wait for his aide’s acknowledgement. “Thank you,” he appends to the stick figure’s unhurried deresolution from the room.

There is in Bettencort’s posture and expression, as likewise in Woolard’s attitude, a certain unspoken anticipation the unseen bystanders cannot fail to recognize and Eric, himself poised to depart the meeting, hesitates.

“I see there is something further on your minds, gentlemen,” Eric says.

Bettencort clears his throat and opens with a painted smile. “I believe we may have…” he seems to be searching for just the right words and his face shows it.

He clears his throat again with a phlegmy rattle and begins anew. “It seems we have inadvertently mishandled the specimen you generously provided for us to evaluate. I’d hoped we could…”

“Mishandled,” Eric says. “Inadvertently.”

“Yes. An unfortunate…”

“Let me save you a few syllables, Phil. The short answer is, ‘No’.”

Woolard’s scowl not only precedes Bettencort’s by a couple seconds, but it has a deeper, more hostile texture as well, a detail not lost on the gallery observing from the periphery.

“Nine years ago,” Eric says, “as the so-called ‘End Times’ brought the civilized world to a stand-still, I approached your predecessors with a proposal. I offered to revamp, in one clean, affordable sweep, both the obsolete national power grid and your long-outmoded transportation infrastructure, do away with all environmentally catastrophic modes of energy acquisition and delivery and make it practical to provide for the basic needs of all citizens—and I mean ALL citizens, not just the ones with substantial means and the correct affiliations.

“It was a modest pitch, one I hoped would find concurrence and endorsement. At that time the value of the plan I set forth was either misunderstood or, more likely, was diverted by those with vested and opposing interests. Those you currently represent contrived then to restrain me and my enterprises in a variety of creative ways, including an organized campaign to discredit my products and processes and demonize me.

“That it was decided then to contract with Advanced Concepts Methodic for their proprietary focused-beam and ‘black-box’ Q-line technologies to sate your ever-increasing energy demand, is not what distresses me. Nor do I care that you’re paying them a premium price for power generation. That’s your business. Their energy is clean and that’s something, although dangerous beyond imagining if misused, as I’m sure General Woolard will agree.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Woolard says.

“And another company was awarded the lucrative contract for trac-road development up and down the East Coast. A subsidiary of ACMe, if I’m not mistaken. And I’m not.”

A brief parade of micro-expressions on Bettencort’s face confirms a bullseye.

“I know they couldn’t have under-bid me,” Eric says without pause, “and their process is based upon the model I submitted to the committee. Why they were not subject to the same obstructive measures employed to encumber my own negotiations and further hinder my enterprises in this country is hardly a mystery.”

Bettencort harrumphs his throat clear and says, “It is not uncommon, nor unlikely, that the creative minds of businesses engaged in similar disciplines will approach a project in like manner. As to the determination of the committee…”

But Eric has moved on. “Meanwhile, Japan, Canada, and the UK noted the shill media’s distressing lack of credibility, and chose to rely instead upon their own empirical evidence. They accepted my proposition. The Left Coast states, almost as a single entity, over-ruled a good deal of the deliberate obstructionism and in a move that, at the time, seemed almost revolutionary, contracted with me for the same kind of forward-looking development they saw us deliver elsewhere.

“Practically limitless power generation, clean, sustainable and, beyond a modest initial investment, absolutely free, solves a legion of messy problems pretty much all at once. You couldn’t have missed it. I know very few have, in fact, because requests for similar assistance have flooded my calendar.

“When you and President Bascomb took office, I renewed my proposal. The ACMe subsidiary providing the trac upgrade having fallen behind schedule by a significant margin and the tragic augmented-beam accident in Iowa suggested you may be open to a practical alternative. I provided you with a working G-cell to assess its potential and demonstrate its practicality and efficacy, not to mention the immediate fiscal and environmental benefits of my offer.

“I was disappointed to discover a hasty summit was convened to block all such efforts.

“History, that of the last half-century in particular, is rife with examples of innovators who challenged those you serve and were either paid off to desist or were silenced in less subtle fashion. Regardless of how their advances might have improved the world, faced with financial ruin, character assassination, or just plain assassination, those still able to do so capitulated to external pressures beyond their ability to withstand.

“The thing is, Phil: you’ve seen my profile. You know enough about me to know I’m not likely to fold up my tent and just disappear into obscurity.”

“No,” Bettencort says, “that does not appear to be your style.”

“That those you serve chose to obfuscate and impede rather than commit to that same sense of national confidence and well-being our other clients now enjoy… well, that has disappointed me.”

Bettencort’s frown has bunched up his fleshy face in an almost comical representation of a man approaching the limit of his anti-depressant medication. His voice is a grinding of stones and his tone indignant.

“You’ve mentioned ‘those I serve’ three times now in a manner that can only be construed as dismissive. I’m not certain what you’re implying, but I serve the American people, Mr. Gerzier.”

“That has a patriotic ring to it and at some fundamental level, I believe YOU believe it, but the American people—those not lulled into happy stupefaction in vee—know better. After all that’s transpired from the so-called End Times to now, you and President Bascomb serve at the pleasure of a cabal, the obscenely wealthy who answer to no one. I can see that doesn’t sit well with you and I’m sorry to be the one to say aloud that the Emperor is naked, but there it is. The look on your tari’s face right now tells me you know it to be true, as well.”

Bettencort’s expression denotes a violent civil war taking place between his outrage at this repudiation of his nation and office, and begrudging recognition of Gerzier’s accurate indictment of a system the Founding Fathers would abjure. His years of experience in the discipline of diplomacy are striving to arbitrate between the two before a reflexive, wrathful response ends all opportunity to cajole this visionary wild card into cooperating with them. There exists still a particular high-stakes objective before them and Bettencort is practiced in the wisdom that the first “no” doesn’t always mean “no”. He’s reaching out for the words that might mitigate this charged situation.

Gerzier’s mellow voice strikes a moderating tone before the Vice President can craft a suitable conciliation. “Perhaps we could discuss this together in depth when we both have more time and less vexation. What do you say, Phil?”

“Yes. That sounds practical. I expect it will be an engaging conversation.”

“Bottom line,” Eric continues, “ACMe’s clean energy is better than dirty energy and I applaud them for their remarkable innovations, although that particular science could easily be turned to dangerous, asocial purposes.”

General Woolard remarks through tight lips, “It’s hard not to notice your own technology is ‘black-box’ as well, isn’t it?”

“It is. And it too could be put to use with devastating results in the wrong hands.”

“As you’ve pointed out,” Bettencort interjects, “we contracted elsewhere for restructuring projects on the East Coast circuits. I honestly believe, however, the inevitable fusion, if you will, of your two competing technologies will become a symbol of cooperation to inspire further such ventures. Your contribution to that project has been phenomenal, I must say. Your progress on the West Coast arterial and capillary routes is far ahead of expectation and we anticipate full national conversion should be complete in five more years.”

Eric’s tone is conversational without condescension. “Without the paralyzing bureaucracy of myriad state and federal agencies, many apparently at cross-purposes, and the near-crippling efforts of entrenched industries threatened by these rapid shifts in form and function, my teams could have helped you complete the project in half that, but I do understand your desire to provide employment, and there is a certain undeniable sense of pride in finishing a job oneself.

“What concerns me more immediately,” Eric says, “is that some high-level decision-maker, despite my very strict stipulation against tampering with my power cell’s containment, chose to disregard my admonition. Someone was able to crack it open, were they not?”

“That was unarguably a mistake, Eric.” Bettencort casts an indecipherable glance at Woolard. “I want to assure you that more reasoned heads now have the President’s ear. As you know, public opinion regarding the proposal to incorporate ACMe’s beam technology on a national scale has swung the other way, suggesting that, while expedient and beneficial in many regards, the perception of dire risk remains high among the voting citizenry.

“The success of your efforts on the West Coast and elsewhere has brought your work and your remarkable vision into sharp focus among the constituency. The President is reevaluating your proposal and hopes very soon to renew negotiations with you.”

“I am elated to hear that, Phil, and look forward to reestablishing a dialog.” Eric holds up a cautionary hand. “However, I warned from the start that any attempt to deconstruct my device would negate its functionality. Apparently, it was believed that my technology could be successfully reverse-engineered and its potency utilized in a more… strategic fashion. And now, your boss has urged you to solicit a replacement.

“The presence of General Woolard in this conversation suggests as well that you’d like to ask me for additional considerations. Could that be my achievement of a non-ballistic vehicle launch capability, or perhaps it’s the energy dispersion field generation that has captured your attention? I expected the disclosure of these advances would prompt a certain level of attraction, but I will tell you this, gentlemen, and hear me well.”

Eye contact in virtua is a subject of great debate still within the circles that are able to discuss such phenomena in focused, clinical terms. Something indefinable crosses the gap between taris in their separate realities as Eric holds first, the general, then Bettencort in his gaze.

“I will NEVER allow weaponization of my technology. Understand that and all future interactions between us will proceed with far less friction.”

Woolard huffs himself to a more upright posture, a motion that elicits a groan of complaint from the divan as he addresses the man.

“Mr. Gerzier,” he intones, using what some would consider a ‘rural American’ phonetic pronunciation of the name, “the gee-whiz technology you’ve introduced in the last few years is, by far and away, some of the most important work of the millennium. No one would argue that. I’m not saying this to blow sunshine up your ass, son. I mean it. I don’t know if you’re a genius or a magician, or what. I just want you to think about the humanitarian implications of working with us, instead of this passive-aggressive antagonism that seems to suffuse your interactions here today. We’re not your enemy, you know.”

Eric says nothing.

An undignified bout of butt-cheek lifting and repositioning allows the general to withdraw a thin, palm-sized fragment of smooth, grayish material from a deep coat pocket. It might be metal, or plastic; the only thing certain is the jagged contours it presents, certain indication that it is a fragment of some larger object.

He lays the shard onto the immaculate virtual surface of the coffee table between them.

“You may not be aware of how much force was required to provide me with this splinter,” Woolard says.

“I not only know precisely how much force was needed,” Eric replies, “but how long you had to sustain it in order to fracture the material’s matrix in this manner. I’m impressed that you had the means to do so. I trust no one was injured. What did you find within?”

“You know what we found, and what we didn’t find. You also know why we had to inspect it, although at the moment, that’s not my primary concern.

“As much a mystery as the interior represents, the material you’ve used to package your power cell is, by itself, an extraordinary development. The body and vehicle armor we could create with that alone could save tens of thousands of soldiers’ lives. Your field-effect umbrella, or whatever it is, as a purely defensive mechanism, has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more. Surely you can appreciate that. If you’re the dedicated humanitarian your publicists make you out to b… “

“When you say ‘purely defensive’, General, a little alarm goes off in my head. I know better than anyone what kind of destruction my technology could foster when the best defense is determined to be a harrowing offense.

“You know how you save thousands of lives, General? You stop putting people in harm’s way. Your attempt to invoke my compassionate temperament is transparent, sir. You are a man of war. When you’re not actively engaged in warfare, you’re planning a war. I am not a man of war, and you cannot manipulate me with fealty to a mentality that has produced nothing but world-wide distrust, hatred, suffering, and genocide among people no different from each other beyond the constraints imposed by their history and geography.”

“You… ” Woolard cannot suppress his laughter. “You can’t be that naïve, son. Geography is the least of the differences between our enemies and us.”

“Where were you born, General? South Carolina?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Southern Baptist?”

“What?”

“And your mother, Shirley, used to make the best pork sausage in Beaufort County.”

Woolard’s puffy face, ruddy by nature, has grown a dangerous pink, accompanied by a scowl so deeply drawn it signals either an imminent eruption, or an infarction. “God damn it, man!” he whispers. “Is there some kind of point to this?!”

“If you’d been born in Iran, you’d be a Muslim and your mother would likely be stoned to death for making her famous sausage. Born in Israel, you’d be practicing Judaism and your mom would be slow-cooking cholent instead. India or Nepal… Hindu, probably. Goat sausage maybe—maybe no—depending on your local custom. Poland… strict Catholic. The sausage’d be okay, except on Fridays. Sri Lanka? Buddhist and a vegetarian. Born in the Maldives… it wouldn’t matter what you believe or what you like to eat. The only thing that matters is: how long can you tread water?”

Woolard opens his mouth to rebut.

“It is about geography, General; the local and historical imperatives of discrete cultural slices on the same rock and the intractability of residents of one slice or another to agree with each other, or with you. Those who insist the game is ‘us’ against ‘them’ will never be satisfied with anything less than the total annihilation of their perceived enemies. That mindset, supported by those who will profit from the conflict, guarantees neither side will stop short of mutual extinction.

“The last man standing will not be the ‘winner’, General. We’re all the same kind. Always have been. But until you’re on board with that, I can do nothing to help you.”

The davenport gasps in relief as the general finds his feet and leans toward Eric like an impending rockslide. “Son, I wish I lived in a world where unicorns fart rainbows, too, but the heartbreaking, God damned truth is this: there are forces around us that would gleefully crush us all out of existence for no other reason than because they believe they can. You think you can change human nature by satisfying basic needs? I thought you were smart—tragically misguided, perhaps, but at least smart enough to understand the difference between them and us.”

“Maybe it’s because we disagree reflexively,” Eric is saying, “with certainty, but without a shred of real understanding, about what happens to us after we kill each other, that we are compelled to continue killing each other. Whose God is mightier? Whose Gods are amenable to bribery and whose will be glorified by the slaughter of lesser beings, creatures arguably without worthy souls or redeeming value?

“All of that falls away at some point, though, and it becomes a simple contest of who can be the best killer, regardless how we dress it up on Sunday. Do you think any of that makes some kind of difference in the face of unpredictable weather patterns, storms of unparalleled intensity, rising sea levels, geological upheaval, exponentially increasing shortages of food, water, shelter, and affordable power? Or, Gods help us all, another wave of gonji?

“I’m told we stopped that last one pretty good,” Woolard says.

“Really? You consider that solution a ‘pretty good’ one?”

“You’d rather have seen gonji sweep down the Left Coast, I suppose.”

“Your fear of these threats is understandable; your choices in the face of them are not. These things I’ve mentioned are just the things you might still be able to do something about and even endure. What about threats beyond your ability to influence: the imminent emergence of Vulcan, for example? You don’t have enough men and guns to stand against what may prove to be an extinction-level event, General.”

“You’re right about one thing,” Woolard says. “Survival is what we do. Better than anyone. The ‘Great Vulcan Scare’, however, is nothing but wild speculation by a bunch of crystal-waving freaks and transparent fear-mongering by people with something to sell. I hear this same unsupportable drivel from attention whores every God damned day and now here you are spouting it right in front of me. I don’t know; maybe all you are is a gifted salesman. I’m not currently in the market for any half-baked pseudo-science and New Age gibberish.”

Eric’s expression is incredulous. “So, you believe the solar anomaly is an example of what? Salesmanship?”

Woolard’s face is taking on the appearance of a magenta cauliflower. The Vice President is face-palming. There seems no way now to silence or minimize Woolard’s inflamed exposition, or to salvage the situation gone now terminally awry.

“There’s not a shred of proof anywhere,” Woolard rumbles onward like a tank, “that this Vulcan phenomenon possesses any kind of threat beyond a temporary electromagnetic inconvenience. Meanwhile, I have very real, immediate threats to deal with; threats to our nation’s security—and yours, too, if you’d pull your head out of your ass long enough to look around you—threats to freedom-loving people everywhere. Right now! That’s what motivates me, Mr. Gerzier! That’s why we need your technology, to save lives! Whose side are you on anyway?!”

Benn’s sigh sounds like an attempt to expel exasperation. “I guess they’re right,” he says. “You can’t argue with an idiot.”

“He’s not an idiot, Benjamin,” Braden says. “He’s afraid.”

“Afraid? Him? Of what?”

“He’s afraid of Eric. Of us. Afraid of what we can do that he, with all his resources, cannot duplicate. That, and the fact of Eric’s lack of cooperation with the general’s agenda. He perceives us as another in a series of threats that define his days and keeps him awake at night. One he’ll likely have to deal with very soon, and he doesn’t know how. That’s what frightens him. We are beyond him and he knows it.”

Woolard is breathing hard and seems to realize his angle of attack has been less than productive. He resumes his seat with an amorphous sound, part relief, part objection from the sofa. He adopts a reasonable tone. “I don’t think you understand how much we’re willing to pay you to share your technology with us.”

Eric’s eyes widen, raising eyebrows. “Really? Now we’re talkin’. Is it a lot?” His open face is alight with credulous, childlike innocence. “It sounds like a lot.” He produces a foldie from his vest pocket and hands it to Woolard.

The general receives a nod from the Vice President, sketches a figure on the matte surface with a blunt fingernail and returns it to Eric with an expression of optimism, difficult to maintain on a bulldog’s face.

Eric inspects the amount, whistles through pursed lips, and turns his face up to catch Woolard’s eyes again. “The United Arab Emirates offered me nearly ten times that much. They’ve apparently got more money than Allah. I’m surprised your intelligence community didn’t already tell you that before you tried to lowball me right out of the gate.”

The general darts a meaningful look at Bettencort, who reaches for the foldie, but the medium is withdrawn before his fingers can close upon it.

Eric’s voice is patient. “I told the UAE the same thing I’ve already told you and will tell you once again. We welcome agreements for power generation, water and air purification projects, trac development, CleanSweep deployments for disaster relief, humanitarian aid and restoration, yada yada, but we do not do warfare.

“You see, from the inception of my enterprise, General, my fundamental purpose, my core intention, has been to be of assistance on a global, rather than nationalistic scale, wherever I am able. I believe I’ve already made my position clear, but in case I have been unintentionally vague, please allow me to reaffirm my stance.

“I will not, under any circumstances, ever allow my enterprise to involve itself with the tools of warfare. I don’t care what you’re offering. I don’t need your money. I will gladly provide clean, free, sustainable energy and the benefits of my company’s innovations for peaceful civilian use, but any attempt to subvert my company’s products for militaristic goals will result in cancellation of contract, severance of services and, if deemed appropriate, dissolution of product.”

Woolard explodes. “What the sugar-frosted fuck are you talking about? Dissolution?!”

Eric plucks the shard from the table, holds it up between his thumb and middle finger. His fingers snap. No prestidigitation, no eye-grabbing special effect, no debris. The fragment is just there and then it’s not there.

If Woolard has made an effort to keep his eyes from bulging, it is only marginally successful. The virtual reflection of what he’s been assured is the strongest material on Earth has just been reduced to digital vapor with no exertion whatsoever, despite the strict physics of this secured Federal node that should have disallowed any such phenomenon.

Benn and Denny exchange quizzical glances and Eric returns his attention to Bettencort.

“Mr. Vice President, I know your boss is campaigning for re-election and you’d like to ride his coattails to a second term. Personally, I hope you do; you have an honorable streak that’s earned you some enemies you didn’t have before. So will this meeting you facilitated with Colonel Chernovich. That was well done and thank you, Phil.

“Also, your boss has handed you the dubious responsibility of acquiring my cooperation in this understandably awkward circumstance.

“Please tell President Bascomb he’s welcome to contact me personally to discuss new terms. Meanwhile, you may consider the inert G-cell in your possession and all remaining scraps of its containment to be your souvenirs of a poorly-conceived misadventure. I have a team to put in the air to Siberia, gentlemen. Always a pleasure, Mister Vice President.” He gives Woolard a wink and his signature grin. “General.”

His tari blinks out.

Bettencort stares into the space vacated by the celebrated ascetic. He is considering the ways this meeting could have concluded more favorably.

An afterimage of Eric Gerzier’s tari strobes in place for a few seconds, just as it had appeared upon his outro, and the general’s avatar, preparing to launch into a colorful review of the meeting just now concluded, finds itself standing again without having consciously determined to do so.

For the next half minute, the entire virtual envelope is awash in static. The interruption causes the room, with all its elaborate detail, to flutter like an ancient zoetrope, shredding the imaged participants and their exclamations of alarm.

The effects and the attendant disorientation fade as continuity is restored in stages. The general’s tari flickers back into its seat and then standing once more.

“What was that?” Benn asks.

“What the Hell was that?” demands Bettencort’s rock-gargling baritone.

“Solar pulse,” both Braden and Woolard reply in unison.

“You mean that ‘temporary electromagnetic inconvenience’ you mentioned earlier?” Bettencort rumbles. “Jesus, that was a deep one!”

He stabs a finger at the chair where Eric had been sitting as if painting it with a targeting laser. His shout sparkles with residual static. “I want that smug sonofabitch on a full-scale terror watch starting yesterday!”

“Oh, for Christ sake, Chet. Don’t get your boxers in a wad.”

“Don’t ‘Chet’ me, Phil! I am heart-attack serious! I want twenty-four seven, deep, full-spectrum surveillance on every move that smirking, foster-Canuck, groid prick makes! I want him pinned down like a bug on a board!

“Enforced inspections of all craft and crew. Quadruple documentation. Sanctions. IRS up their asses with a four-vee proctoscope on the end of a fishing rod. Better yet, invoke ND double A! Drag them all into hard confinement and sweat the…”

“Stand down, General Woolard!” Bettencort’s rasping bark sounds painful. “Don’t you forget for another goddamn minute who you’re talking to! You’d better prepare yourself. The full four-vee of this meeting will go to Bascom. When he sees how you pissed away our one chance to get Gerzier on our side he’s…”

“Were you in the same room?! We were NEVER going to get him on our side. You heard him as well as I did. He kissed Chernovich’s ass and told us to go fuck ourselves.”

Bettencort’s sigh has phlegm in it.

“Gerzier’s made a lot, and by that, I mean a metric shit-ton, of very powerful, very influential friends, affording him a certain level of insulation. Regardless, not every agency is disposed to extend unlimited dispensation to him. An unnamed agency already conducts round-the-clock, deep surveillance on each of his holdings, though little good it does us.”

“Why is that?”

“If he’s on the island, we can’t tell. If he leaves to one of his other holdings, there’s no way to know. He doesn’t have to be a master of disguise. He’s a ghost. Same as in vee.”

“What does that mean?”

“I hear noises that AsReal can’t keep track of him either.”

“How is that possible?”

“I don’t know. They’re not talking about it. Go ahead and speculate. The point is, we’ve got every resource at our disposal working around the clock every day to find some kind of leverage. The shield around him is as impenetrable as the one around his island. Or the mountain.”

Woolard seems deflated. “I’m a God damned member of the Joint Chiefs. How come I was never advised about any of this?”

A new voice, reedy and unpleasant to the ear, answers from one of the side entrances. “Need-to-know, General. Above your pay grade.”

Folt, long-limbed and razor-thin, positions himself within the envelope of Woolard’s personal space. His manner exudes an aura of confidence disproportionate to his station. He stands a head taller than the general and there is, in Folt’s aspect, not the merest suggestion of deference to, nor respect for, the general’s prestigious rank and power.

Woolard stares up into Folt’s face and says without inflection, “So, why are you telling me now?”

“I’m not. This conversation never took place and when you leave this room, you’re never going to speak of it again. Gerzier is not your concern. We will tend to him when the time comes.”

“Well, good luck with that.”

Bettencort has turned his back to the pair and, instead of disconnecting, lumbers back along the lengthy runway of the room toward his ceremonial desk. His chair, slaved to his person by an intangible umbilical, glides behind.

Woolard watches the Vice President’s plodding progress. A sharp finger-snap brings him back to the moment and Folt’s unblinking, prismatic stare.

“You’ve been asking the wrong question, General.”

“Have I? Tell me a better one.”

“How was Gerzier able to alter the power cell containment fragment you yourself mirrored and brought into vee with you?”

Woolard’s forehead crinkles, puckering the pink flesh between his eyes, and a frown causes his jowls to droop. He blinks at the thought and says, “He shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

“An impressive deduction on your part.”

“How DID he do that?”

“See? That’s a much better question, isn’t it? You may go now.”

“What?”

“You may go. Now.”

Woolard scowls into Folt’s Adam’s apple for a long moment, executes a creditable about-face, and takes a couple steps toward the nearest door before pausing with a confounded expression. He mumbles something, presses a bratwurst-size finger to the node behind his ear, and is gone.

Folt exits a moment later. Save for the Vice President’s tari, oblivious at the far end of the long room, the space is the abode of phantoms.

“Well, I’ll be darned if that wasn’t worth sticking around for,” Benn says. “Who was that guy?”

Denny’s tari rests a hand on the leather-clad shoulder of Braden’s avatar. “Go ahead and take us out, my friend. We’re done here.”

The Vice President’s ceremonial office is redrawn with a smooth fade-in of the greatroom turret, its surrounding transparency, and the endless gray ocean churning beyond.

“Eric,” Denny says to the air, “Please replay the last minute of that exchange at two-up and cancel audio. Zero on Folt’s face for me. Good. Freeze that.”

Denny steps in close to Bettencort’s aide, reaching up to frame the man’s features with his hands.

Folt is bald. His nose is a beak and his wide mouth is set in a grim line compressed between the thinnest, colorless flesh worthy of the term ‘lips’. Also, the man’s eyeglasses are odd, not the old-school polycarbonate lenses they initially appeared from a distance. Whatever they are, they exhibit a subtle honeycomb pattern. Discernible behind them are what appear to be leaden gray eyes.

“Let’s not guess. Find him for us, Eric. We need to know what we’re up against.”

Eric’s reply takes a few seconds longer than expected. “Initial search criteria return nothing but a stock bio for one Folt Remertson. I’m going to have to excavate a bit. I’ll ping you.”

“Thanks, Eric,” Denny says. “By the way, that was a startling piece of street magic you performed for the General. I was impressed, as were they all. I can’t help thinking you had help with that.”

Benn leans in close to Braden. “You don’t think you tipped our hand a little, do you?”

The dwarf swivels his seat. “They needed it. They were starting to believe they had us figured out. Close to making dumb decisions because of it. Now they don’t know what to think again.”

“I agree with you,” Denny says. “Let’s focus on the task. The fact Chernovich’s government is willing to make this overture is momentous. I intend to make their problem go away without fireworks or fanfare. Eleven hours fifty and counting down.”

The dwarf slips his goggles back into place and says, “Gotta run,” taps behind his ear and is gone, yet his face beams from the open virtual portal framed in Denny’s hands. “I’ll check in when we’re in position,” he says.

His image cross-fades back into Mr. Folt’s hatchet-faced portrait.

Benn’s peering over Denny’s shoulder. “He’s such a show-off.”

“You’d be too if you could do what he does.”

“No I wouldn’t. I’d be an insufferable pain in the ass. Like now, only turned up to eleven.”

◄ ~ ►

The Veep Read More »

Taquo

Domains

Taquo — Terraquasphere one

The ocean, temperamental, pacific in name only, reaches to meet a hazy, gray horizon. Wind has churned the surface into white-capped folds marching without cadence across an open expanse.

Braced against a force that cannot touch him, Denny stands within the encircling transparency of the greatroom watching breakers expend themselves against the seawall below. Volumes spill into the lagoon, surging and siphoning out again through the shallow neck of the atoll.

There are a number of specks conspicuous in the dawn light, a scattered flotilla of observers representing various agencies, governments, and incompatible concerns, all stationed beyond the periphery of the null field. Its unseen margin is evident only by the example of previous misadventures.

They are a familiar presence, these watchers. While their individual mandates may be surprisingly similar, their cooperation is either strained or non-existent. Regardless, their curiosity and common distrust of what cannot be controlled or quantified makes them reliable attendants to daily routine on the island, remote witnesses to mundane activities they are meant to see and little more.

Denny’s interest is drawn toward the northern curve of the turret. He sketches a pane on the transparency with his fingers and gestures, magnifying and enhancing the image.

A ship has crossed the invisible boundary and is now adrift in a rolling sea, powerless, unable to so much as issue a distress call without semaphore. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. None of the hapless craft’s widely dispersed neighboring vessels would hazard sharing the same unproductive outcome.

It is generally accepted among experienced onlookers that testing the intangible barrier garners reliably undesirable results.

Erica’s unique stamp is imprinted somewhere behind Denny’s eyes. Her voice is in his ears, although it’s really not. Direct stimulation of the auditory centers of the brain tends to give that impression. Denny’s own memory adds the rest.

“It’s dressed up like a private yacht,” she says. “Maybe it is. An obvious attempt to neutralize, or insulate against the field. They’ve been dead in the water for about fourteen hours. I decided to let ’em sleep on it. Jiro and I are going out now to see if they’d like a friendly tow. Any message you’d like me to convey to their captain?”

“Nothing they don’t already know.”

“Ten-four, Igor.”

Denny wipes the viewing pane and turns his attention to the eastern curve of the atoll’s crescent where morning sunlight is filtering through a fleeting cirrus curtain. A cross-hatching of light and shade plays upon the new-growth vegetation finding purchase on the high ground above the lagoon’s verge. No palms at this latitude; pines and vines, tenacious shrubs, and tough grasses have native advantage.

A heavy lifter is easing out of one of the platform hangers and, just for show, makes a lazy, clockwise circuit of the island before skimming out just above the chop to meet the stranded vessel.

A familiar stamp and voice is allowed throughput. A jovial face images somewhere within the nebulous tangle of pathways in Denny’s brain and it says, “Hey, Denny? You busy yet?”

“Benn. Welcome back, buddy. How was the vacation?”

“Is that what it was? Obviously too long. You busy?”

“Just watching Erica head out to parlay with another ship over the dead-line.”

A waver in the substance of their individual surroundings flows into the thousand kilometers between Benn and Denny and, despite their respective geographic locations, both are standing side by side within the encircling transparency of the greatroom.

Benn regards a surging gray sea and gives the panorama a slow turn in place.

“How many’s that this month?” he says. “Four? Not that it isn’t entertaining to watch them bangin’ their heads against the null-wall, figuratively speaking, but… When do they stop?”

“When one of them gets all the way to the dock and detonates a warhead, I suppose. Besides, it’s only three so far this month. Most are content to just park outside the circle and watch.”

“I imagine Erica enjoys the occasional break from the work down below. Well, that and the delicious confrontation, of course.”

“She was just talking about you last night.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Said she wished you were here to help us with the desalinization plant and water treatment conduit runs. Said you’re almost the best extruder she knows. We could still use your touch with some of the finish work.”

“What do you mean ‘almost’?”

“There’s a young woman here on Jiro’s team named Xochilt. She jumped in to help us.”

“Who’s So-chee?” Benn says.”

“Tall, razor thin Aztec beauty.”

“Oh, that’s how you pronounce it.”

“Yeah, just like it’s spelled. She fabbed and printed over two kilometers of conduit last night with only four splices. You should’ve seen her.”

“Wish I had, but if she’s so great, what did you miss me for?”

“You always bring the best tunes.”

“Well, that is true. How did the Chandra boy work out?”

“His name’s Rahm. He is an impressive young man, Benn. A crystal. I was pretty sure he was a maker when I saw his profile; knew it when I met him. He feels something stirring and doesn’t know what it is yet. He really wants to though.”

“So why don’t you sound more enthusiastic?”

“Mrs. Chandra has refused to support his application.”

“Oh. Let me guess… “

“Cult army.”

“Dammit, I said ‘let me guess’. What else did I miss that I want to know about?”

“Both Braden’s team and the Nancys are focused on the large Sweep tasks. Jiro’s running small Sweeps until we need his team at the ‘Robert’. Abbey’s been seen at the foundry or ‘Hilltop’ off and on. I heard she showed up here at Taquo a couple times, though I can neither confirm, nor deny these reports. Most days nobody sees her at all.”

“Or they don’t know they did.”

“Oh, right. So, we’ve outfitted four more road crews each in the UK and Scotland to continue their domestic trac projects and Saidou’s team will be training them for two more weeks.”

“Saidou.” A chuckle and snort. “Let me just drink that in,” Benn says. “A Zulu warrior will be conversing with Brits and Scots. I would actually pay to see that if I didn’t already know I don’t have to. You, however, are more insidious than I recall.”

“First of all, I am not ‘insidious’; Erica is. Besides, all other teams were on task and his crew was available. I plan to look in from time to time, of course, just for the sheer serendipitous entertainment value that little slice of cultural diversity will afford. It will also give his team members a chance to come out front for a change. They’ll figure it out.”

Benn waves a casual hand southward. “I’m at ‘Hilltop’ now. Landed last night. How’s it looking there besides So-chee’s fabulous conduit shaping and extrusion? Are we prepared to inhabit yet?”

“In a perfunctory fashion, yes. I’d like to finish the gardens and… you know, button the buttons and zip up the zippers before we move families in.”

“I disagree,” Benn says. “I think we should start moving them in now and worry about the trim molding and shower curtains later. Did you know we had an intrusion this morning at the foundry?”

“No, I just got up. I’ve had neither briefing nor breakfast.”

“A fairly organized pack of Juggalos, sixteen of them, crashed the gate at shift change and raised hell all the way up to the upper parking lot where it turned into a rousing slobberknocker. We were able to round them up and hand them off to the local constabulary. Nobody died in what was an obvious, kindergarten-level diversion.”

“There was a bunny.”

“One young woman came through the backdoor, all the way through level one, and across the blue line before a response team neutralized her.”

“That’s pretty good penetration for a tourist. I have questions.”

“She got inside with what appears a valid ID chip,” Benn says and shows him a 4-V of a young woman’s face, clown-masked in vivid makeup, maybe dyes, maybe tattoos, difficult to distinguish at this remove. Her eyes are orange cat-slits and her hair is buzzed to a nub in front to feature prosthetic horns.

Denny flinches. “Wow!”

“You know no one has been able to duplicate our protocol,” Benn says. “And this crew was no different. The chip was one of ours, no question, issued to a support tech at the foundry named Roberta Chapman. It wasn’t even sub-qued on the intruder, just patched into a custom port in her mesh. Impressive splice jobs, both of them. Someone out there has the proper tools and better than average ability.”

“Someone we don’t know that knows too much about us.”

“Anyway, I went over this morning to visit with the employee it was assigned to. Her off-campus quarters were vacant.”

“That is far more disturbing. Who’s on it?”

“We don’t have a team on it yet. Eric is sifting resources for leads and Erica is collating. Local law enforcement has the whole crew in custody, but they were just the distraction for the woman to get inside. She’ll know more, but none of them probably know anything about Ms. Chapman. I’m pretty sure if Tinkertoy was still here, they’d have already found her.”

“Nostalgia aside, I pray she’s all right when she’s found.”

“Listen, Den, I want to stress this part to you. Had this exercise been planned and executed with more finesse, the outcome could have been far more damaging, maybe deadly.”

“Maybe it was. Who was the Watch Person?”

“Mr. Kennit. I relieved him. He’ll be in Lithia for a debriefing with you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.” Denny indicates the fright-mask image of the woman with horns. “How did they stop this delicate creature?”

“Block.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Reformulated foam grenade.”

“Foam,” Denny says with a sigh. “It’s effective and always fun to watch, but clean-ups are such a bitch.”

“I remember. I helped make some of the first ones we cleaned up. Block is pretty cool. It adheres on contact and expands completely in two to three seconds. Sets up like rubber in about six, rigid in nine, and you could use it for light construction in twenty.”

He shows Denny an image of the intruder, encased upright within a blob of unyielding material, arms and legs akimbo.

“She looks kinda like Solo in carbonite, only funnier,” Denny says.

“You’ll like this part too. A dilution of instant hole in water with a bonding key turns any residue into a pliable shell. It just peels off without observable effect on skin or surfaces.”

“Who’s the chemist?”

“I’m told Mr. Kennit did the R&D, but I suspect Mr. Gaston formulated it and handed it off to him.”

“Barney. Yes, that figures,” Denny says. “Is he back there at ‘Hilltop’ now?”

“In and out. He’s crewing on the Sagan with his old cohort, currently on station here. He commutes at intervals to an off-premise residence.”

Denny is quiet for a long count. The neck of the atoll churns and rain pelts the transparency.

“As clumsy as this seems, and as lucky as we are that this intrusion appears to have been curtailed when it was, it suggests a much larger threat. Every one of our people and their families off-premise are vulnerable. We have a responsibility to protect them. I no longer believe the safeguards we’ve put in place for each of them is enough. I don’t want any of them hurt and I don’t want them used against us.”

“Well, that ship has flown, hasn’t it?”

“Eric?”

“I’m here, Denny.”

“Put out the word. Bring as many inside the redoubts as possible. Advise any that defer of the increased alert status and recognition protocol at access points—along with potential mitigation of access privileges, should things go trapezoidal.”

“Done.”

“Benn, how did the intruder act once inside?”

“Her progress suggests she knew where she was going generally, a mapping foray, it appears. She was implanted to record her encroachment, but of course, once she crossed the null field, that went out the window. All she had was her memory when we turned her over to authorities. Still, that’s the deepest anyone’s made it yet, so kudos to her and to whoever she works for.”

“She probably doesn’t even know.”

“Doesn’t matter who it is, does it? They all have the same objective. As long as they can’t control us, as long as they’re unable to possess what we have and turn it to their own purposes, we are The Enemy.”

“I believe it matters very much who it is. Now more than ever.”

“You make it sound like a puzzle, Den. I don’t think it is. Anyway, Eric has been accessing his own resources with a solid 4-vee of the incident. We’ll have more detail soon enough. Meanwhile, I’ve got Barney’s friend, Crippen, waiting for a second interview to fill a cohort position. You want to do that now or wait?”

“You must have liked this one. Why?”

“You mean, despite the fact that Barney’s sponsoring his application? I like his attitude as much as his metrics,” Benn says. “Genuine sort. Fit. Good instincts. Inquisitive. Low bias. Shows initiative. He’s been through phase one of the Promethean school. Meets upper median for aggregation compatibility and a high pairing augment. He’s clever, centered, got a bit of the smart-ass in him… but knows how to keep it on a leash.”

“I guess you’d know.”

“Thanks.”

“What’s his Keirsey score?”

“ENFP. Abstract-cooperative. Follow-up evals all placed him well within the same temperament bracket. IQ score’s high median.”

“What’s his SEM?”

“One five three. He’s got ability, if given the environment to develop.”

“Is he aware of his potential?”

“I don’t think so. He has no marked personality or psych concerns, other than he’s an ‘outie’. He’s a little conflicted over the implant, but Barney says he wants the placement. I believe he’ll make the leap.”

“What’s his first name?”

“Dashel.”

“Okay. Hook him up and let me take his pulse.”

“Hold on a minute,” Eric says. “I’m receiving a validated announce from Vice President Bettencort. He sends apologies for the unscheduled request and says he has a matter of some urgency to discuss with me. Why don’t we take this first?”

“That seems prudent. Benn, do you want in on this, too?”

“Does the pontiff poop in the Vatican?”

“Eric,” Denny says, “stall Bettencort a couple minutes, will you?”

Eric’s voice is soothing, his cadence unhurried. “Mister Vice President, it’s a pleasure to hear from you, sir. I apologize in advance, but if you will allow me two minutes to bring another conversation to a polite conclusion, I will promise to give you my full attention.”

Bettencort’s response is cordial; he did, after all, initiate without the usual courtesies.

“Thank you, sir,” Eric says. “I appreciate your patience.”

Denny calls into the aether, “Braden, can you break away for a few minutes, please?”

The dwarf’s tari materializes, sandwiching himself between Denny and Benn at an uncharacteristic eye-level.

His hair, silver-streaked and luxurious, spills from an antique leather aviator’s cap, and his tanned face is highlighted by both a brilliant white grin and goggles so deeply tinted they appear to be opaque. A distressed leather bomber jacket tops a white tee-shirt and pocket-festooned cargo shorts bulging with what one must presume to be some manner of cargo. His stubby, muscular legs dandle from his perch atop a high pedestal seat, and they terminate in a pair of classic high-top Converse All-Stars sneakers – red canvas, white rubber, immaculate, worth a modest fortune on the collector’s market.

He slips the goggles up onto his forehead.

“Ahoy, boys! I’m almost positive this platform can land itself. I’ll let you know in about a minute. What’s the buzz?”

Denny replies, “Veep Bettencort is awaiting an impromptu audience with Eric. I want to get an idea of what’s prompting him to reach out like this before we go full vee with him.”

“Okay. Gimme a second…”

Braden’s fingers, nimble despite their sausage-like appearance, range over controls neither Benn nor Denny can see. “Wouldn’t do to wrinkle any of the local architecture with a craft the size of a golf course while I’m multitasking, I suppose.”

“Bettencort’s node is alive, waiting for me to renew and enter,” Eric says.

“Man, that makes it a lot easier,” the dwarf says, frictioning his palms together with a grin. “Let’s all just sneak a peek, shall we?”

◄ ~ ►

Taquo Read More »

Komila Chandra

Domains

The Bean Counter’s atmosphere is bright without glare and just crowded enough at any time to suggest the site’s quiet popularity.

Komila is seated, as is her custom most days, alone at a small high-top near a street-side window, cup in one hand, foldie in the other, scanning headlines without much interest.

Not for the first time, she marvels at the coffee’s aroma, its heat in her nostrils, and the visceral certainty of each luxurious sip. She sets the cup aside and her fingertips graze its surface as she releases the handle. Its ceramic context is undeniable.

That such nuanced sensations as these can be conveyed within a construct always manages to baffle her. The craftsmanship of the experience here is among the best anywhere, and she looked around with deliberation before choosing this one.

Likewise, the continuity of the scene proceeding streetside is completely convincing.

Unlike most fee-comp nodes, as The Bean Counter has ever been, the exterior view architecture and activity is impeccable. She’s watched it with curiosity over the course of many subjective hours and the virtual tableau through her high-top by the window—always hers, no matter the time of day nor the volume of clientele, well worth the extra simoleons—proceeds without a detectable loop or even a subtle reordering of recognizable components.

The Bean Counter has become her preferred entry portal, a casual, unpretentious ambiance from which she can decompress after work, review and select from a menu of experiences, meet with friends, play, relax, commune.

The value of such experience is proven to be therapeutic.

She swipes across the foldie, shifting all the content into a corner, scrolls through a short list of personal messages without reply, and schedules a day trip with her friend, Yunie, to visit a mountaintop monastery in Nepal this weekend. A breathtaking teaser assures her the monks themselves have developed a masterful virtual reflection of the vertigo-inducing site.

No one seems to pay any attention to Eric as he makes his way between knots of patrons engaged in animated exchanges and others, like Komila, in quiet pursuit of personal interests. He stops at a polite distance from her table and graces her with an open smile.

Komila’s avatar is of the current trend for many older citizens of the virtual milieu, an unpretentious representation of the corporeal without excessive post-correction. She appears a plump, fortyish woman with pleasant, dark-complected, East Indian features. She wears an ornamental bindi with a small peridot on her forehead. She stares at him over her cup with a narrowed brow.

“Whoever you are, everyone knows that face. You should go away.”

“You are correct, Mrs. Chandra,” he says. “That is why no one else would try to wear this face but me. You are also correct to be skeptical. Here is my validation.”

A Character wouldn’t know her name outside of a scenario and this isn’t one. Komila has an unclocked moment. The documentation is authentic; unless the concrete foundations of AsReal have broken down, there is no question. It really is him.

“You’re really him,” she says and wishes she could have those words back.

She places her cup in front of her. “Why are you here at my table, sir?”

“I apologize for the interruption in your experience, Mrs. Chandra. I have a matter of personal importance to discuss with you.”

He has a likeable, boyish face and all the lines in it turn upward, as if they’ve done it often. A good-looking man, as famous for his asocial behavior as for his numerous accomplishments and, if one can believe recent accounts, questionable, possibly terrifying motives.

There are so many things she thought she might say to this person, should the implausible opportunity ever arise. Flustered now, she settles for, “I’m not sure whether to be flattered or afraid that you even know who I am, Mr. Gerzier.”

She pronounces his name with the proper French-Canadian articulation, rather than the American bastardization so typical among those who do not like him. She places her cup between them with deliberate care. “I am, as you may imagine, confounded as to why you would need to speak with me at all. Discuss what?”

“Your son, Rahm, Mrs. Chandra.”

Komila blinks.

“This venue is an open one,” he says. His tone is unhurried, as if time and consequence were distant concerns. “More so than is prudent for our conversation. Will you spare a few minutes of your time to accompany me so we may speak privately?”

Her peridot tips into the furrow between her eyebrows and she gives the surroundings a critical review. She considers a number of responses as she does so, some of them civil.

She is not concerned for her safety; wherever he might take her to ‘speak privately’ must exist, if that’s the right word, within AsReal. As bizarre as this moment has become, she reminds herself, she is in no real danger from this man. Or anything, really. Her Autonomy and Exit Right guarantees it. Aside from any of that, what does the notorious Eric Gerzier have to do with her child?

“May I ask where we are going?”

“My home. And I apologize in advance for the abrupt transition.”

“What?”

Komila is weightless for a startled heartbeat or two as the coffee shop motif dissolves before the new site’s physics capture and settle her into an overstuffed chair.

“Oh!” she pipes and cannot get that back either.

Eric’s chair faces hers at a discrete distance.

“Again, Mrs. Chandra, I apologize,” he says, “but this was the first opportunity I’ve had to reach out to you. Are you all right?”

She’s had rougher transitions.

They say the more coherent the communication becomes between AIs on either end of a transfer, less visceral responses will become commonplace rather than exceptional. Sometimes it seems like two pilots trying to land the same aircraft, each only able to control the opposite side of the plane. A soft landing like this is a memorable one.

Her personals have followed her as well, as they should, steaming cup on a side table, clutch and foldie next to it.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

Her first assessment of the interface is a quick one. Impressive presentation, stunning aesthetics. Her natural curiosity would draw her straight in, but she knows enough not to be spellbound by a site’s glamour until it’s time to do so. The nature of this particular interaction precludes it anyway.

“What is your interest in my son, Mr. Gerzier?”

“Rahm has made direct application to my Promethean Project School. It is unusual, given his age… twelve next week, is that correct?”

“No.”

“He’s not?”

“I mean no, I will not co-sign his application. I will not allow him to join your cult army. He is a boy. He does not understand what he is doing and you…” Komila is surprised that she is able to keep her voice level. “You cannot have him.”

Eric’s expression does not alter, except maybe around the eyes, as if perhaps she’d stung him with that ‘cult army’ jab. She expected him to look angry or something, but he doesn’t.

She’s waiting for his rebuttal. It doesn’t come. He just sits there and twinkles at her. She notices herself noticing that this irritates her quite a bit and knows that’s not a good place for her next words to come from, but here they come anyway.

“I have heard things about your students and your school,” she says. “Even if they are not true, the accusations disturb me deeply.

“It is common knowledge, I’m told, those enrolled in your school stand to lose their American citizenship and that alone is reason enough to decline your offer.” She watches for him to react, a hint of a smirk or scowl, a hasty denial, something to confirm her words. If anything, he looks solemn.

“I have asked to speak with you like this because it is the School’s responsibility to notify you of your son’s application within a very specific and prohibitive timeframe. Any number of my associates could deliver this information to you in a formal setting, but this is personal to me. It is precisely young people like Rahm for whom the School was created. I consider it a courtesy to bring you into this moment personally and as directly as possible. This I have done. In similar fashion, I have made it possible for you to bring your husband, Madhu, into this moment as well, if you wish it.”

Oh no, she thinks.

“No,” she says.

Dammit, she thinks. Madhu will be all for it.

“Very well,” Eric says. “A moment ago, you mentioned declining my offer. I have made no offer. Rahm has made application, quite on his own initiative, and I am following protocol.

“He is a gifted young man. That much is obvious. He has a window of opportunity to understand and develop those gifts. The fact that he understands this and has taken responsible action, at an age when an overwhelming number of his peers are adrift, is significant. The Promethean Project School was created to nurture talented young people like Rahm, help them focus their abilities toward overcoming the challenging aftermath of the so-called End Times. You have, no doubt, seen some of the work that’s being done around the globe by my teams, my ‘cult army’, as you say.”

Komila is not swayed. “I know you’re trying to change the world by bullying governments into doing things your way because you think no one can stop you.”

“That is an opinion gaining recent exposure, an unproductive exaggeration, at best. We are striving to help heal the damage our species has done to the planet. We are not alone, but we have taken bold steps others cannot or will not. We are not trying to change the world, Mrs. Chandra. We are trying to change how we live with it while it will still allow us do so.”

Komila knows it will be unproductive to say, “You sound just like Madhu,” but there it is anyway, right out there, word for word.

Her peaking frustration, both at her own impetuous speech and at this shadow celebrity’s obvious ploy—attempting to weave Rahm’s uncharacteristic and troubling recent behavior into what she knows to be twisted facts about his own lofty actions and motives—have given her medications in Real a test.

She can feel her anxiety spiking. “What I mean is, I see no reason to continue this conversation. Rahm is not of age to make this choice for himself and I will not change my mind.”

She stands, and Eric with her. “Will you have your agent return me now, or must I exit here?”

“Your previous frame will be restored, Mrs. Chandra, as you left it. Before you go, I will ask you to share this with your husband.”

Eric extends an open hand. There is a peculiar something in it she’s heard about. She does not reach for it.

“What’s in it?”

“It is the complete four-dee record of Rahm’s application exam submission to the School. I am still following protocol, Mrs. Chandra. As a minor, Rahm understands he is not legally entitled to Privacy and, by his submission, has allowed this record to be made. It is your parental right to have it.” He holds the thing between them in the steepled fingers of one hand.

“Is this the original and only iteration?”

“The original, yes. The School will retain a copy for its records, of course.”

It is the size of a robin’s egg, but angular, and its surface seems to be indistinct, shifting in conflicting Escher-esque motion. It is unpleasant to look at.

“Of course,” she says and plucks it from his fingertips. It squirms in her palm. She snatches her clutch from the side table and releases the weird thing into it, snapping it closed even as her cup bounces and coffee splatters the carpet.

“Oh!” Hand over her mouth, furious at her gracelessness and the mess it’s caused.

She reminds herself this is vee. There is no mess, no good reason to feel foolish. She looks at her cup on its side, the dark blot contrasting with the carpet pattern, splattered drops on Eric’s shoes.

She expects to see on his face the look her father would show her whenever she spoke or acted without thinking; he showed it to her often enough. Instead, Eric’s eyes are kind. She can’t remember ever seeing a validated image of him without an expression of good-natured patience.

Her favorite channeler often likens it to the vacant look of a lobotomy patient. Ha ha. Up close and personal, Komila isn’t seeing it that way.

Yes, this is vee, but she reminds herself, this is a Person, not a Character. His manner seems genial and respectful. Even here, in his own space, he maintains a polite distance and demeanor, not quite the arrogant, polarizing figure as he’s been depicted.

She has a brief glimpse of how her information stream has narrowed, and her views with it. She wonders what’s become of her old skepticism and inquisitiveness. And she is curious.

Behind the man, the entire long wall from floor to ceiling is cabinetry crafted from some rich vermillion wood. An eclectic assortment of mementos and artifacts, some of them recognizable, and objects of either artistic or inexplicable purpose dominate open shelving. Books stack, stand, or slump between them all.

Nearby, a wide stair curves upward to a mezzanine and what appears a spacious, softly illuminated common area beyond. At the far end of the study, a single painting commands the wall, an energetic abstract backlit to allow translucent elements to stand out in colorful relief.

Turning to see what’s been at her back the whole time, she realizes her tari has begun walking toward it, a single, monolithic transparency. It spans the entire length of the room.

A few steps carry her to what seems a precipitous edge. Beyond is an undulating sea under a crystalline half-moon. Dark, roiling surf scours the lagoon below.

Komila realizes she’s allowed herself to be drawn in against her best intentions and drags her attention from the view, back to the contradiction of the man.

“I understand your reticence,” he says, “and I don’t presume to know the precise narratives that dominate your perception of my work. I trust you haven’t predicated all your hopes and prayers upon their guidance alone. More immediately, however, I trust you and Madhu will choose to understand why Rahm has made this decision. I believe he wants that understanding from you more than anything.”

She wants to ask why he thumbs his nose at laws and governments where he has no right to involve himself at all. They say his workers are given implants and become robotic. And does he really grow inhuman creatures in tanks as laborers and soldiers? And why, maybe the most telling question of all, does he care what one disturbed little boy does or doesn’t do?

Her opportunity to probe the celebrated recluse will never be any better than this and Komila is disoriented once more to find herself in The Bean Counter, seated alone at her high-top by the window. The transition was flawless.

There is a small node the size of a pea behind her right ear—not really; it’s an AsReal thing—but pressing it just so initiates the exit protocol.

Her cubicle is a low, soft-cornered booth as immaculate as it is austere.

A luxurious reclining couch covered in a tough synthetic hide is central and a low, integrated shelf runs the length of one long wall for personal belongings. These, a charging stack on the shelf, and a double hook at the door to hang her coat and hat, represent the only differences between a virtuary and a cramped walk-in closet.

She reaches into her handbag, fingers questing for her foldie within. The back of her hand brushes the encapsulated vorp. The momentary thrill of contact is sickening, obnoxious.

She opens her foldie to its margins and a three-dee three-sixty of Eric Gerzier’s study displays on its seamless matte surface. A linking icon accompanies the image with a personal note from Gerzier in a casual, cursive script. It seems merely a polite close with no answers to the questions she was not even allowed an opportunity to ask. She folds the sheet into neat quarters and slips it into her clutch.

Well, maybe she will ask them.

She cups her mask to her face and it seals below her eyes and under her chin. A breath in and out to test it, she steps into the hallway toward the exit with a purpose.

There will be no more socializing in virtua for Komila today. No time for further diversions of any kind. Nor will there be, as much as she is committed to maintaining her rigid fitness regimen, time for an energetic workout. She’s got something in her clutch that will make Madhu just absolutely shit himself.

~ ~ ►

Komila Chandra Read More »

The Lens

Domains, LocUS

“D’kin Remert. Why has it taken you so long to respond to my summons?”

“Lord Shiric, I… ” Remert swallows a knot, fear and elation at war within, held at bay by an effort of will. “I never thought to hear from you again. I believed you had abandoned the undertaking.”

Lord Shiric’s voice rumbles from the lens. “What are you talking about?! Have you lost your faculties? I spoke with you not five turns past.”

Myriad faces, some of them disturbing at a visceral level, are suggested in the swirling eddies of Lord Shiric’s smokey Visage. They stare out at him in their turn and Remert struggles to maintain outward calm as the implications of Lord Shiric’s words strike home.

“Lord Shiric,” Remert adjusts his stance and bearing, “it has been nearly twenty-five thousand turns—one hundred and forty-nine years as they measure cycles on this Gog-forsaken world—since last you spoke to me.”

A long, uncomfortable silence ensues.

Within the lens, smoke becomes mist blowing away to reveal the faces of two human specimines.

“Do you recognize either of these t’sunguc, D’kin?”

It could have been no others, of course. Perhaps something in his eyes spoke for him, or maybe it was the way he drew his next breath.

“So.” A boil of dark vapor eclipses the images. “A temporal disruption has occurred to separate you from me, D’kin; one beyond my power to prevent and too late now to rectify. I must assume the state of preparations, events, and outcomes previously reported to me have all been redefined subsequent to the disruption itself. Be succinct, D’kin. What is the status of your mission?”

“My Nee’m, the primary objective has been met. Centralization of the transfer locus is established. Our secondary and tertiary objectives have yielded mixed results. Even so, the several positive outcomes have been exceptional.”

“Elaborate upon the latter for me, D’kin.”

“The effort to foster Gray Moct’unguc has succeeded beyond expectation. Significant increases in both fertility and intelligence have been nurtured with auspicious results.

“Efforts to force development of Gray Troct’unguc, however, were hampered by the destruction of the original breeding stock and a favorable phase one mutation. The genetic foundations of the Grays on this world do not lend themselves to such radical hybridization without altering the outcomes in unanticipated, reliably unacceptable fashion. Still, a promising hybrid stock has displayed unique characteristics and I am enthusiastic about the potential these specimens represent.”

“I find your optimism encouraging.” Lord Shiric sounds pleased. “More than that, I am moved by your perseverance in the face of what you perceived as abandonment. Tell me, D’kin, why did you persist in what must have seemed fruitless effort?”

“The Method guides me, My Nee’m. My Mission was given with your aegis, but with or without it, I could not stand one day before Mong and excuse my failure by decrying my circumstances.”

“This is why I chose you over more highly-positioned applicants to be my surrogate on this world, D’kin Remert. Your resolve and persistence have surpassed my expectations. I look forward to celebrating your accomplishments.”

Remert is unused to effusive praise. He likes it, and it balances well against the blossoming uncertainty this conversation has birthed and nurtured.

“Due to the disruption and the presence of my adversary’s minions,” Lord Shiric says, “I have chosen D’nal Kudlac to assume the responsibility of Minister of the Change. You have three hands to prepare yourself for return to Kal’un Shiir’n. Here you will have sufficient opportunity to provide the D’nal with the detail he will require before he translates across the gulf, at which time your charge to me will be completed.

“You will be given a champion’s welcome with holiday and feasting throughout Kal’un Shiir’n, all in your honor before I return you, with my gratitude and endorsement, to your Congregate and certain elevation.”

The lipless slash beneath Remert’s blade of a nose opens to form the words that will lead him home, then closes again, his throat working to swallow them before they can leak out

He tries to recall how long ago he had despaired such a moment as this might ever be possible. The end of his exile, recompense for all he has endured, and the fruition of his paramount personal aspiration, that of elevation to the Second Circle, to be D’nal.

“Lord Shiric, I am exultant that the rift separating us has contrived to bring me back to you again. I am grateful beyond measure that my humble accomplishments have met with your approval.”

He performs a stiff, formal obeisance.

“I would beg your indulgence, My Nee’m. Processes currently in motion regarding the ’unguc variants of which I spoke have reached a critical juncture. I am loathe to leave them in the hands of those less intimate with their nature and development. If you would permit me to remain until this pivotal phase is completed, I will have served you to the best of my ability.”

A viscous plume roils Lord Shiric’s ceremonial mask, churning like liquid smoke, rising beyond the limit of the lens to capture it. His vaporous expression within the boil might be an intimation of displeasure at having to revise plans at this late hour, or perhaps Remert’s racing mind is assigning meaning to random, shifting patterns. Vague suppositions, difficult to dismiss.

This late hour, Remert muses. How unconsciously he has come to think in the conventions of this world. After these many years—fifty-nine point six yarnn on this chaotic ball of confusion—who could blame him for adopting these conventions in the interest of survival and sanity? How long, he wonders, might it take to restore proper patterns of thought once returned among his kind?

His kind. How like them is he now? Will the Congregate hierarchy honor him for his accomplishments and, more to the needle’s point, will the First Circle and The Methshe forgive him for his deliberate transgression?

How could they not with Lord Shiric’s benefaction? Lord Shiric is speaking again.

“I will send the D’nal at the rising, to whom you will relinquish operational responsibility. He will oversee the displacement and ensure continuity, leaving you sufficient autonomy to continue administration of your secondary and tertiary directives. Will that satisfy your need for closure, D’kin?”

“My Nee’m, you honor and humble me. I am grateful beyond measure for your gracious consideration of my request and for allowing me…”

“Nothing has changed. I require results from you and the D’nal on each element of your respective commissions. It will be your responsibility to deliver all specimens to the transfer locus prior to the displacement. My timetable is unaltered. You have five turns.”

So soon! So much yet to do! Finally!

If Remert is in the least unsettled by the immediacy of his Nee’m’s deadline, his face exhibits none of it. “Measured here,” he says, “ten point six six days. Deviation?”

“No more than one half-turn.”

“Plus or minus twenty-five hours thirty-eight minutes,” Remert says to himself, calculating the least time remaining for him to accomplish everything.

“All will be in readiness, Lord Shiric. You may rely upon me.”

“I continue to do so, D’kin.”

The lens darkens and Remert’s axe-faced stoicism reflected in it alters not at all. The revelations of the last minute are stupendous. The appalling weight of the task before him and its immediacy is invigorating.

The soon-to-be disastrous addition of an unprepared and officious D’nal to the equation is the very last thing he needs now. There is nothing for a D’nal to do but meddle and confound well-laid strategy. He exhales a fervent prayer to Mong for Precision With Haste and unseals the door. It swings inward to reveal H’seven at the portal.

“I told you this was a bad idea,” Remert says.

“Move.”

“The audience is over. He’s gone.”

“No, he’s not.”

Confounded, Remert looks back at the lens.

H’seven grasps the collar of Remert’s ceremonial raiment and drags him from the portal. Stepping through, he approaches the darkened lens, squares up to it, and says, “I am H’seven. I have something you need. Let’s talk.”

A profound stillness answers. The lens is blank.

Remert, from the vestibule, “I told you. He’s gone.”

H’seven is strident. “I know you can hear me. You gain nothing by your silence.”

The door to the chamber closes and seals with a soft, solid finality. Remert, excluded in the vestibule, fumes.

Total darkness pours from the lens, flooding the chamber, engulfing H’seven in absolute night.

Shiric’s voice is ponderous. “You speak as though you believe yourself my equal. I do not know you.”

“How fortuitous, then, that we have come to this intersection.”

“What do you have that I need?”

“An object of power you believed was lost to you.”

“The object is in your possession?”

“I have only to reach out my hand.”

“Then do so. Show it to me.”

“When we meet, I will present it to you. A gift.”

“Show it to me now. It is within my capability to reach out my hand and end you where you stand, if only for your presumption.”

H’seven shrugs. “Which is why I will not present this prize for you to have absent an agreement. I would prefer to consider this a collaboration of mutual benefit. As to equals: such speculation invites unfair comparison. I offer you the solution to riddles that currently vex you. In return I ask only a modest boon, one you may effortlessly grant.”

“You appear to have a measure of comprehension well beyond the scope of anything my agent there could have conveyed to you. Some might deem the knowledge you possess uncommon. You should consider such familiarity perilous.”

“I consider it currency.”

“What is it you want in exchange for this intangible object of indefinite potential?”

“To stand with you in the place where worlds are made and unmade and receive your aegis as Marshal in the war to come with your upstart adversary.”

“And?”

“Nothing more. Well, parades and feasting and revelry, of course. Same as Remmy. But no, just those things and that.”

Silence draws out so long the blackness pouring from the lens seems to breathe.

Shiric breaks it. “No.”

“Just like that?”

“The object you speak of is better lost on your world than mine.”

“Lost? Did I say it was lost? It is in motion. Do you assume that motion to be in your best interest?”

“So. It is NOT in your possession.”

H’seven taps the lens with a steely forefinger. “Is this thing on? I said it is within my grasp.”

The darkness laughs as though he had said something hilarious. It winds down to a chuckled, “Thank you for that, anyway, but the answer is still ‘no’.”

“Who is to say, when I reach out MY hand,” H’seven says. “the object might choose to return to you in a way less conducive to your exaggerated primacy?”

The darkness is not laughing now. “Are you… attempting… to challenge me?”

H’seven taps the lens again. A fragment of its dark material chips off and plinks onto the stone floor. “Pray I do not.”

A pulse of Black power smashes against the chamber walls with sufficient force to shatter stone. Flechettes cast about in total darkness as the great door buckles with a metallic scream and pieces of its frame splinter off with gunshot sounds. Illumination does not return.

. . .

Her nametag reads “Kami”. She is standing just inside the the lens chamber vestibule, watching Remert. He appears stunned, staring at the heavy portal door, twisted, hanging askew.

“Are you all right, Director?” she says.

He straightens himself. “Yes,” he says.

He takes a step back from the portal and turns her way, fixing Kami with a haunted expression. “No,” he says.

He recognizes the insignia on her uniform. If he was wondering what she was doing in this highly restricted area at this inopportune moment, at least her classification is appropriate.

“May I take you somewhere, Director?”

“No. Thank you, Technician. I trust you will arrange damage assessment and clean-up.”

“Of course, D’kin.”

“Then I will leave you to your responsibilities.”

Kami follows him out into the corridor and watches him make his way to the nearest bounce. He enters and does not reemerge.

She rummages up a spreader from her waiting runabout’s toolbox, using it to pry the blasted door open enough to peer inside. The lens is intact, but the clean-up detail is going to need a high-pressure hose and some wire brushes to remove the erstwhile Deputy Director from the surfaces of the chamber.

“Doctor Ahn,” she says to the air. A few seconds tick by. “Yes, I am. Thank you, Doctor. I’m ready for an upload, are you? Good. No, not yet; another Seven will be fine. Ten minutes. Wait, hold on… “

Another runner slews to a stop beside Kami’s idling rig. A lanky fellow, whose uniform displays the same emblem and nomenclature as her own, steps out onto the raw stone floor of the corridor and affects a casual amble in her direction.

“Make it twenty,” she says. A pause to listen produces a laugh. “You’ve got a filthy mind, Doctor. I’ll try that. Get a fresh one out of the vat and I’ll be there by the time you have it warmed up for me.”

◄ ~ ►

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

The Lens Read More »

Remert’s Perspective

Domains, LocUS

The door to Remert’s private office snaps back into the pocket behind the armoire and the Director’s hurried exit is blocked. The Deputy Director is an unwelcome obstacle to egress.

“I have business elsewhere,” Remert says.

“I’ll bet you do.” H’seven appears unwilling to step back out of the doorway. He speaks an abbreviated command to the media wall and excerpts from the incident at the Sandia Pueblo fill the multiplex projection.

“I do not have time for this now. I am needed…”

“Make time.”

The door has sealed again behind H’seven and he leans against it, pointing at the montage of images. Remert gives way with a scowl and turns in frustration to see the woman in white disappear with the young police officer.

“You had them bound in chains when I first saw them,” H’seven says. “If she’s able to pull shit like that, why do you suppose she didn’t?”

Remert’s thoughts are distant, attempting to process a rush of discordant, troubling possibilities. The Call, unexpected after all this time, will change everything. Exactly what, how much, and how soon will be known after this inconvenient episode has concluded.

He returns his intention toward the door and his apostate Deputy. “I can extrapolate two plausible reasons.”

“So can I. They were playing you from the jump.”

“Your hindsight is flawless.”

“What the Hell are they?”

“They have the potential to invite a level of trouble the likes of which we have not seen before. I trust you are following these events and individuals with diligence. I will be prepared to entertain your progress report when I return. My business now is urgent.”

“Where ya goin’?”

“My responsibilities here are not yours and I have imperatives that do not require your attention or participation. Let me pass.”

“It pisses me off when you try to lie to me, Stretch.”

H’seven strides forward. Remert takes two steps back and bumps up against the media wall.

H’seven sits in the chair that doesn’t touch the floor and says, “I think you’re developing a dangerously cavalier attitude toward our relationship. Your kind prides itself on its ability to absorb and incorporate the impact of important lessons. Odd that you’ve failed to do so. Maybe this place has rubbed off on you. Still, it has been some time since our little understanding, hasn’t it, D’kin?”

The use of Remert’s honorific sounds disrespectful, striking a defiant, scornful note. H’seven’s stare becomes a perturbation in the aether between them. Remert tries to look away and cannot.

He feels his pulse dancing, skipping, leaping. His heartbeat has doubled, tripled, but it isn’t pounding; it flutters like a bird on the ground, unable to rise. A sensation of lightheadedness is followed by a crushing weight in his chest and a rush of agony. His groan is stifled, reshaped into a few words of a familiar litany by an effort of intention only Mong and this grievous creature will ever witness.

A spear twists in his entrails, wringing a strangled cry. He gulps air like a fish and every muscle in his body tries to contract at once. He pitches to the floor screaming out his last breath with barely a sound.

Eyes wild, unseeing in a mask of terror, Remert experiences the crystalline recognition that all his single-minded purpose and sacrifice have come at once to nothing, his goal beyond his grasp, his commitment unfulfilled.

Writhing. Helpless.

Dying.

Like a bubble popping, the pressure in his chest, the auger in his intestines, the bone-shattering contraction in his limbs… gone, nothing more than a phantom of pain and a blistering memory not to be touched again. His heart rate is accelerated, as dying in anguish is likely to do to anyone, but its rhythm is strong and vital.

Quaking, drawing convulsive breaths as if he’d just run kilometers, Remert drags himself to a sitting position against the media wall. Stone against his back feels somehow reassuring. The damp squishiness in his trousers, not so much.

H’seven is sprawled in Remert’s chair. His voice and face are cheerful.

“How’s that for perspective, Remmy? Will that do you for a while, or would you like to go again?”

Remert raises a trembling, dissenting hand.

His relief at being alive has overshadowed his studied Methodic aplomb, but the brutal truth is this: his life, his survival, and the furtherance of his efforts to fulfill his mandate to Lord Shiric is bound by a tenuous thread of compliance and faithfulness to this being whose existence may well be beyond the vast comprehension of Mong Himself. If that be heresy, may Mong Himself prove him wrong. And soon.

“All right, then,” H’seven says, claps his hands and rubs them together. “Let’s get back to business, why don’t we? I was asking you to tell me about these two Blacks with the halfblood. I need to know what they are.”

Remert’s tremors have not subsided. His protruding Adam’s apple works up and down. Twice. His voice quivers. “They are of the Aca’chi Aht-U’chah, known everywhere on Hevn as the Fayneem Bloch—Fayne’s Hammer. The Faceless Ones. A warrior caste nurtured by and unquestionably obedient to The Fayne and no other.”

“What the fuck is a fain?”

“A glorified jailer and a despot. He is far from here, imprisoned by his responsibilities, and no threat to either of us.”

“I’m sorry. Perhaps I stuttered. Give me a straight answer, Remmy, or I swear to—what’s his name? Mung?—I’ll give you some more perspective until you shit yourself hollow.”

Remert swallows his instinctive wave of fear and compresses his fury until it looks and sounds like compliance. “According to excerpts from ‘The Book of Turns’, The Fayne is the emissary of the Tu’chah Aht-T’sungahn, the so-called ‘Lords of Order’. To place it in a Terran framework, he is the marshal in town and the Fayneem Bloch are his sworn deputies.”

“And these two are significant why?”

“They are progeny of Hevn’s Black Lands and exhibit the physical characteristics of their kind. How they came to be in company with the Fayneem Bloch is a puzzle only less confounding than how they have come to be here. Nevertheless, these are The Fayne’s minions. As such, in addition to any individual innate gifts either of them may possess, The Fayne has doubtless granted them augmentation. If allowed to gain proximity, these two could present a formidable imposition to our plans.”

“Two people? Don’t be stupid.”

“They are NOT ‘people’. They are thinking weapons of extraordinary capability.”

H’seven stands, towering over the Director. “I’m not exactly ‘people’ either. Pick your nasty ass up off the floor and get yourself cleaned up. Take care of your ‘imperatives’. I’ll meet you there.”

“What?”

“I think it’s time I introduced myself to him, don’t you?”

“Introduce… “ Remert realizes that somehow his mouth is hanging open again. “To HIM?! No… NO! That is an incredibly dangerous idea.”

“Yeah, I know, that’s why I like it.”

“No! I forb…” The Director is astonished to discover he is unable to complete his pronouncement, unable to make a sound.

The door snaps back into the pocket behind the armoire and the Deputy Director steps aside.

“You get along now. I’ll catch up to you.”

◄ ~ ►

Remert’s Perspective Read More »

Remert

Domains, LocUS

The private office of the Director of Advanced Concepts Methodic might be likened to a monk’s cell in a mountainside cloister.

It is a compact, windowless space relieved from stone in the fashion of his Society with a ceiling proportional to the Director’s height. What it contains that a monk’s personal space does not is a massive armoire crafted from a single monolith of exotic hardwood native to no place on Earth, and a chair that does not touch the floor. These are the only furnishings.

Between him and a passageway beyond, a heavy door fashioned from the same unfamiliar wood stands at the center of one long wall. Opposite it, a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling collage of images is in constant motion.

Remert’s feet find the floor and his joints grate as he rises. This discomfort is insufficient to alter his bearing, of course, as he straightens to his full height, a decimal over two meters.

The armoire crowds one side of the door. He palms open a panel and removes a tray. An aide assigned to support the Director’s daily routine, an individual he’s never seen nor heard, left it there for him. Remert nods in approval of that one’s proper execution of fundamental duties.

A handful of gel capsule supplements washes down with a catalyzing liter of liquid nutrient infused with a generous percentage of the good water.

He closes the panel and turns to scrutinize his shifting global mosaic, hands resting on the sharp projections of his hip bones. Hairless, pale skin stretched over a grim, hatchet face, Remert’s wide, lipless mouth is set in a line. Leaden gray eyes sweep the montage, a multiplex viewport of everything from two-dee footage to vee-centric feeds. The whole is continuously culled from domestic and international sources and curated for his consumption by Sonder itself.

Scenes of sporting events are discarded out of hand by Sonder’s presets unless flagged by the Director. Rare instances of pageantry, performance art, episodic or formulaic productions, either dramatic or comedic in nature, and celebrity fluff-pieces that leak through the filters, all receive similar dismissal.

One such is a cursory motion from removal when recognition prompts Remert to bring focus and enhancement to the item instead.

Two women and a man arranged in a casual studio setting present just the sort of tribute to meaningless drivel the Director finds an unacceptable waste of time. One of the women, however, is a respected helioseismologist with a near-unpronounceable Nordic name. Remert’s spider-leg fingers gesture in the air and the program’s volume achieves a satisfactory level.

“… continue to collate data,” the scientist is saying. She is tall and dowdy with shapeless blond hair and penetrating sky-blue eyes. Unpretentious and plain-spoken, her manner marks her as the most intelligent person on the set.

“The upward extent and duration of these perturbations,” she says, “are hypothetical at this juncture. Unguessable. I know that’s not the answer you were seeking, Gretta, but nothing of this magnitude has ever been encountered before. We are learning, quite literally, moment by moment. It requires the concerted efforts of scientific professionals across multiple disciplines to not only decode the information we are receiving, but also to give us guidance on how to prepare for and, Gods willing, weather the potential worst-case scenario.”

The female host, her avatar looking as young and vital as she did a decade ago, nods with a sage expression. “It is a stirring tribute to how far we’ve come as a species, I think, that we are able to acquire this great depth and breadth of useable information, as we have done, to be analyzed by those who will guide us through these difficulties.”

“Shut your mouth, you stupid cow,” Remert says, “and allow the one with a modicum of actual knowledge to speak.” Here is one of the prime reasons he eschews these types of programming beyond the obvious fact of their reliably insipid content: they make him disagreeable. That outburst will cost him penance later.

Gretta Carsten, the grand dame of talking heads, drawing on her years of broadcast and early three-vee experience as a news personality, adopts a look of deep concern—no doubt solicitude for all humankind—and says, “Would you give our audience your impression of what that worst case might look like, Doctor?”

Doctor Astrid Koninklijke appears reluctant. She fidgets, matching her words. “I am uncomfortable adding my own conjecture to the already inflammatory media furor I see taking hold among those more… excitable members of the population. This is not a time for wild presumption and unfocused alarm.”

“I understand your reticence, Doctor, but our viewership is comprised statistically of well-educated and reasonable individuals. Won’t you share with us please, at least an educated guess?”

The scientist sighs reserved acquiescence. “Worst case? If the new planet were to be expelled farther outward from what we believe to be its cradle orbit around the sun, and depending upon a host of variables too random to even consider at this point, given its significant size, orbital shifts of the inner planets is seen as possible outcomes. Such adjustments could alter every facet of the Earth’s already compromised biosphere and revise the conditions that support life as we know it.”

The male host, spray-tanned and moderately handsome, but otherwise an unremarkable generic foil, reveals an impressive battery of perfect white teeth. Ignoring the implications of his guest’s apocalyptic speculation, he grins a question at her any member of his well-educated viewership would have deemed, by now, redundant.

“The name that has achieved acceptance among so many of the scientific community, seems an unusual choice, Doctor. If I am not mistaken, the name “Vulcan” is an homage to an iconic two-dee science fiction entertainment franchise that continues to enjoy a broad cult following even today. Why has the scientific community chosen to adopt such an obvious popular-culture reference?”

“I’m afraid you are mistaken, Matthew,” the scientist says. “In the year eighteen sixty, a French mathematician named Le Verrier advanced the premise of a planet in orbit between Mercury and the Sun. He encouraged a number of astronomers to help him verify the existence of that body he named Vulcan, in accordance with accepted convention of naming astronomical bodies after figures in Roman mythology. Some of those he enlisted reported findings, other did not, and eventually, the search stagnated. The name and concept of Vulcan, however, has remained and is perhaps the foundation of the popular cultural reference you mentioned.”

Matthew’s flustered, “Oh…” is preempted by the scientist.

“While it is generally believed that previous sightings and suppositions were based upon mistaken assumptions and the limitations of the technology of the times, today we know that within the last seven years, a body nearly three times the size of our Earth is being expressed outward from the sun. The actual mechanism of its genesis remains the focus of intense scrutiny, as you might imagine. We are watching it happen; we just don’t know how it’s happening. Or why. But, as we assemble data, we can make some informed assumptions.”

“You know what they say about assumptions.”

“Shut up, Matt,” says Gretta.

Koninklijke continues. “Vulcan is separated from the solar sphere by a mere eight thousand kilometers, and connected to its parent by a plasma stream sufficiently large the Earth would fit inside it.”

Indifferent now, Remert swipes the program into obscurity. A scene of sweeping urban devastation catches his attention, but his focus shifts to another frame. This one presents a scene from within the facility and two particular individuals who rarely interact.

Doctor Ahn Soo Rin, as stiff and intractable an individual as Remert has ever encountered—qualities that have endeared her to him—appears to be having words with the current operational lead of the single most important program in process within the whole of his downward-tall complex.

Doctor Denise McIntosh’s posture and facial expression suggest an abnormal level of emotional investment in the exchange and Remert’s interest in such a conversation is keen.

“… you abandoned the prosthetics we designed for ST-One,” McIntosh is saying with unmistakable heat, “patterned upon our unambiguous specifications, in favor of your own radical redesign at the last minute and have demanded additional modifications far beyond the mandated scope of the project. Your interference has compromised our timetable and jeopardized the ultimate viability of ST-One himself. I will not allow any further hindrance. If you have…”

“Doctor,” says Ahn in a voice as flat and hard as her face, “you enjoy the freedom to pursue your work in this facility, quite outside the restrictions of the conventional moratorium against such activity. You do so only insofar as it pleases us, I might add. ST-One is not YOUR project, Doctor. You and your staff are the tools we have selected to implement the ST project objective.”

“Without me and my staff, there would be no ST-One and you know it. I’ve cleared each phase through Ten Eyck and…”

Ahn waves a dismissive hand. “I’ve heard from Doctor Ten Eyck about your very creative contributions to ST-One’s self-image. Try to understand this. ST-One is also a tool, nothing more. The shape of its delicate self-image is meaningless. Do not make the dangerous, unprofessional mistake of attempting to attribute to it a soul.”

“Or to you, apparently. ST-One is a person, as intelligent, intuitive, and as human as you and… well as human as I am, anyway.”

“ST-One is a product. Because of your misguided attempt to imbue it with some imprudent belief that it is human—which it is not—I believe it to be too expensive and mentally fragile to be of great utility in the end. I hold you responsible for the project’s degradation and imminent failure.”

“It’s fortunate for us all, then, that yours is not the last word.”

“You are wrong, Doctor. I have been given administrative responsibility for the continuance and success of this project. You have a new timetable and additional objectives to meet within that framework. You will report to me daily until I am satisfied the ST program is back on track.”

“I don’t believe this! Even with all the resources the foundation has at its disposal, no one else could have brought this project halfway to where it is today. Despite your continued attempts to retard the program and your relentless obstruction, ST-One is on schedule and performing to the specifications set by the Director himself. If you want to keep it that way, conduct your administrative tasks away from my facilities, my staff, and ST-One in particular. Do you understand? If you impede this project further, I will take this to the Director and we’ll see how he feels about your deliberate efforts to sabotage my work on the one program that we both know has his singular attention.”

Doctor Ahn is without emotion. “As I have mentioned and will not do so again, you have new specifications. ST-One is only one of several options being explored to meet our needs. If another project bears fruit before yours, I will be delighted to dismiss you, your staff, and your anatomically correct, but useless tool. Try to find another facility in the world where you can work and create with such toys as these, Doctor. Either way ST-One’s life, such as it is, will be mine to direct.”

Remert observes McIntosh with a sour expression. It fails to convey his curiosity and mild amusement at her fierce, most un-Methodic attachment to the project and her defiance in the face of Doctor Ahn’s uncompromising rigidity.

McIntosh remains motionless in the corridor and appears to be projecting a volatile current of molten hatred at the retreating backside of the thick Korean woman. He hears her say something about a “sanctimonious rice-faced bastard-flavored sack of assholes” before discarding the tile.

Fresh images of destruction receive prominence. Splayed fingers of both hands gesture and a matrix of still and moving images fans out in front of him. Central to them is an orbital view of the northern tip of South America and Remert uses it to zoom in.

The aspect shifts to the bottleneck linking Lago de Maracaibo to the Gulf of Venezuela. A meteorite crater half a kilometer across has obliterated an area of the upper left quadrant of the scene and carnage radiates outward from it in concentric waves.

One of the views holding Remert’s interest presents scant imaging, but a wealth of plots and projections of the meteor’s path, from the point of its discovery to its starting point, accompanied by a progression of scientific notation. Remert follows this cascade of data until a specious assumption makes the results moot and his attention shifts to another vee-cast he was tracking in his peripheral vision.

An artful holographic banner splashes behind the avatar of the most ubiquitous and prolific field reporter in the virtual continuum. He is just taking his mark as his veedio team pans in from the devastation all around him.

“Hello, everyone. This is Stanford Seib reporting from Maracaibo, Venezuela. I am standing at ground zero where a rogue meteorite believed to be another resultant of the astronomical phenomenon dubbed, ‘The Stir’, has struck northwest of this vibrant, thriving city.”

Seib’s tari appears to be standing, without the benefit of protective garb, at the blasted rim of the crater. His aerial cam sweeps across the city beyond.

“Where wide, tree-lined boulevards had once woven through plazas and modern high-rise intermingled with colorful traditional architecture, a bludgeoning shockwave of force and heat has leveled everything within a two-kilometer radius of the impact site and rained destruction for several kilometers beyond. Emergency services are only now able to move into the outlying areas.”

Four-vee imaging arrays digitize and parse the devastation for those gathering to gawk at it in the virtual realm and Seib provides narration. As he speaks, two enormous aircraft are on approach from the north and Remert’s eyes betray an unguarded emotion.

They appear identical, these massive ships gliding in tandem, silent. Although each sports paired, swept-back, flying wing configurations, neither looks remotely aerodynamic. They slow to a halt and hang motionless, one over the city, the other on station above the crater.

Seib’s tari looks into his second mark and says, “Presidente Medina has accepted an offer of humanitarian aid from Eric Gerzier and his CleanSweep^® teams to assist with rescue, rubble removal, and recovery of the space rock itself. We have just witnessed two of Gerzier’s physics-defying motherships taking position as we speak.”

The floating behemoth over Seib’s head appears to be perhaps two hundred and fifty meters from one conjoined set of wingtips to the other with a deep-bellied fuselage slung between them. Even so, it seems to hover motionless, as if lighter than air. There is no characteristic hazy blue distortion beneath it from pressors. No turbulence buffets the reporter. His avatar is excluded from the physics of the environment, but his surroundings are not.

Remert’s scowl of vexation at the power maintaining these gargantua aloft is a bitter one, guaranteed to reoccur every time one of these craft makes an appearance.

A cascade of smaller craft spill from the aft bays of the suspended platforms like hornets chivied from their nest. Some are tiny, darting vehicles, others are small only in relation to the gigantic shapes from which they have emerged. A few of these pause among the devastation to release squads of technicians onto the rubble, then rise to hover over the operations. Others settle into the debris and begin dislodging the bones of collapsed structures with an eerie combination of care and efficacy.

Remert is about to move on from this distant calamity, the plight of yet another huddled mass of these insufferable round-worlders with their fragmented belief systems and disjointed thinking, too aggressive and habitually confused to ever be converted without overwhelming direct motivation.

A comment from the correspondent, Seib, gives Remert pause.

“… before we speak with Presidente Medina,” he says. “My producer tells me Eric Gerzier is on-site with his team and has consented to a brief interview.”

“Sonder!” Remert refrains from shouting. “Eric Gerzier has just manifested in a Community network node. Source him now.”

“Eric Gerzier is not present in the LocUS register.”

Gerzier’s tari steps into frame with Seib and they exchange a backhand bump.

“Eric,” Seib says, “previous efforts to utilize your craft for rescue purposes have left civilian emergency operations unable to function and, obviously, given the circumstances, those services are right now critical to those who may be still alive and require life-saving measures to survive.”

“Unacceptable!” Remert says. He stabs a spear-like index finger. “I am looking at his avatar! The timestamp is this Gog-damned second. Run self and system diagnostics against this inconsistency.”

“Thank you for leading with that, Stanford,” Eric says. “I’ve been able to suppress the energy damping field that’s caused such inconvenience in the past. Local emergency services are fully operational alongside my workers and their vehicles.”

Sonder’s response is without emotion. “All processes and routines relevant to the administration of Community’s access, use, and client management are operating at design parameters. There is no indication of compromise at any security level. Eric Gerzier’s ident and validation subset is both verified and unverified at the Maracaibo location.”

“… will strive to save every life possible,” Eric says. “My people are already arranging to resupply power to the city and outlying affected areas, restoring essential services. I have two teams from each of the platforms on-task providing shelter, food, and immediate critical care sites at the periphery of the current no-man’s-land.”

“What does that mean?” Remert’s pique has gained a Methodic edge. “You reported a moment ago his ident did not appear in the register.”

“It did not, D’kin. It did validate at the node, however, and, at the timestamp that validation was made, the register recorded the same.”

“How do you explain this discrepancy?”

“I cannot without more information, D’kin.”

Seib’s tari has a let’s-get-down-to-business expression on his face and Gerzier is saying something about a tour of one of his motherships and Remert resists an impulse to whisk the frame from the virtual tableau and crumple it, if only subjectively, in a bony fist. A gesture stores the vignette for later review instead.

“I will disassemble your core with my own hands if you do not provide me with a satisfactory interpretation of this aberration and a workable solution to this annoying individual’s ability to use our proprietary version of subjective reality as if it was his private playground.”

Two unanticipated things occur so closely together they seem to be part of a singular event and Sonder’s reply is lost in their passage.

A physical wave, paralytic, but painless, flows from Remert’s feet to the top of his head. It lasts but an instant, leaving him light-headed, ears ringing, his next breath a luxury.

H’seven’s face appears full screen on the world-wall, eclipsing the entire viewport, and somehow Remert has lost his balance. He recovers with a graceless two-step, hop, and shuffle.

“What the hell are you doing? Dancing?” The Deputy Director seems to be laughing. Laughing at him.

The lens has called him. There is no mistake. Its nature and urgency are unambiguous.

So many years have passed, as these chaotic Grays record time here, since the last Call. So many changes have taken place, he did not think to anticipate another Call. Ever.

Improbable as it seemed moments ago, everything has changed and he must answer. With haste. His uncontrollable second, however, is an unwelcome interruption at this moment.

Remert’s face communicates nothing. It is the expression all learn in early Methodic teaching, a tight-lipped, emotionless detachment and penetrating eye contact. H’seven returns the stare with a scornful twist of the lips and spreads his hands, revealing a captured vorp. In it, a mismatched trio of figures assumes sharp focus.

Remert’s life of rigid self-discipline meets open-mouthed, pop-eyed astonishment in a collision that rattles his cadaverous frame. He reaches a tentative hand to manipulate each of the images in turn.

The face of the White warrior, clad in an incongruous, indigenous culture vestment, is obscured by his mask, but the woman’s features are not. Even after all this time, her features are unmistakable. Both of them wear the trappings of the hated Fayneem Bloch.

The half-blood drifter, too, is recognizable. They had traded words face to face, and that one’s lack of proper deference is memorable.

He appears exactly as Remert remembers him. Beyond all expectation, he seems to have aged not at all after nearly a yonn. How that might be possible for a t’sunguc of this world, challenges Remert’s curiosity. It will be an intriguing line of inquiry when the hybrid is finally pinned down and unable to wriggle free.

“Where are they?”

“Close enough.”

“I want them here.”

“As do I. But what I don’t want is further involvement by Homeland Security.”

“I concur. I believe you have all the resources you need.”

“I’ll make do.”

H’seven’s face dissolves into the multiplex window on the world. Remert’s immediate preparation for his audience represents a level of exigency to which he has become unaccustomed.

Of all the revelations received this day, not the least is the realization that he can feel fear again.

~ ~ ►

Remert Read More »

Pojade

Domains, The Riven

The images displayed are as sharp and clear as the best law enforcement recorders can generate under the circumstances and the burly brown bear peering over the shoulder of a somber technician is experiencing an unaccustomed level of anxiety.

It’s not the content arrayed before him causing his misgiving, although the subject matter is disconcerting for a variety of reasons.

Nor is it the luxurious pelt of body hair matted beneath his clothing that’s challenging the efficacy of his anti-perspirant. Rather, it is the certain knowledge that the images the system has just filtered for review are going to require Henry Pojade to do something he most definitely does not want to do.

Sweat has begun to trickle down his back and beads upon the brow of his big, pink, baby-face.

“What do you make of that irregularity?” he says.

The technician, a slight Hispanic woman with a poker face, says, “The woman in white?”

“Yes. Has the record been edited?”

“No, sir. The corruption we’re seeing is sunfade.”

“The trainee?”

“Medical on-site reports he is physically unharmed.”

“Do you have a marker at the disappearance of the woman and the trainee?”

“Yes, sir. I have markers at each instance of her anomalies.”

“Show them to me.”

He watches each of the records twice, reviewing, despite the degradation, the detail from both officers’ personal recorders and the one in their vehicle. The unidentified woman vanishes from her place in front of the local civilian, materializes in front of the junior officer, and both vanish. A momentary pucker in the air marks the spot where they stood and nothing more. The junior officer’s body cam ceases working at that time.

Seventeen seconds later, the woman reappears alone to confront the senior officer who simply disengages and returns to his vehicle as though nothing had happened. He drives off the Pueblo property to a McDonalds drive-thru in nearby Bernalillo, where he purchases three Big Meals and consumes them with an eerie urgency.

There is nothing in Pojade’s experience to help him place this in a reasonable context.

“Can you clean it up so we can see more detail?”

He’s just stalling now and he knows it.

It is an aversion stronger even than his embarrassing and inexplicable fear of amphibians. While the proximity of a toad may drive him to an illogical state of apprehension, the thought of contacting the Deputy Director of LocUS, even in vee, spawns within Pojade a wave of unreasonable dread difficult to drive down or rationalize. After all he’s experienced in his often-violent career, something about Jacob Hergenrather repels him at a primal level.

Regardless, he’s committed and the connection is initiated.

The obligatory ‘announce and validate’ protocol is acknowledged without haste. Almost a half-minute passes before Pojade’s unease is rewarded.

The ‘accept’ cue is followed by full engagement in subjective space. Resolution is instantaneous and, as expected, troubling.

The Deputy Director is cast in near-silhouette against a sickly, greenish-gray phosphorescence. The color, intensity, and subtle motion of the envelope remind Pojade of things pustulent and poisonous. It never fails to make his stomach churn.

Hergenrather’s suit is a razor-edged shadow, but his eyes are the color of sunlight through an iceberg. Shaved head and scowling facial hairstyle only accentuate Pojade’s perception of malevolence.

He’s seen dangerous men before. Lots of them.

He’s experienced the deadly, surgical precision of a textbook military insertion, the randomized mayhem of a well-planned incursion gone hopelessly awry, and known the inhuman brutality of men to whom torture is a craft. He has survived mindless violence spawned of desperation and faced the murderous aggression of street thugs and professionals alike.

This one is like none of them.

No one has ever accused Pojade of being a churchgoing man. The constraints of organized religion have always tended to run more or less counter to his personal set of principles. The antithetical concepts of Heaven and Hell seem designed to keep the ignorant and gullible in line, and he perceives himself as neither.

He doesn’t believe in angels and yet, given all he’s seen in his circuitous path on this bloodthirsty rock, the existence of their dark counterparts seems more than likely.

He’s a big fellow, Pojade is—not Samoan rugby player big, but enough to make him a noticeable presence. Hergenrather is head and shoulders taller.

Perhaps it’s merely his experimental and, as yet, unbalanced anti-depressant talking here, but assuming for the sake of argument that the demon Beelzebub contrived to walk the Earth in the guise of a man, he imagines it would look and sound like Jacob Hergenrather.

The only thing that ameliorates Pojade’s anxiety and the knot in his stomach is his own self-loathing at the realization that this meeting is in vee, for Christ’s sake. Nobody dies in vee, not in a NoASR regulated environment, and certainly not with the kind of failsafes his agency’s interface has in place.

The smile on Hergenrather’s face carries nothing of warmth nor humor, his silence broken by neither greeting nor inquiry, merely a narrowing of the eyes and tilt of the head.

Instead of meaningless pleasantries or unnecessary verbiage, Pojade conjures a virtual portal cloned from his technician’s feed.

Within the vorp, five individuals are imaged near a well-used personal cargo vehicle, a roller with a vintage body type. It’s a custom job of a style popularized at the beginning of the transportation reboot, a cheap conversion, functional and unattractive, just the kind of heap one would expect to find on Indian land.

The vehicle and two of the individuals have linking icons afloat in the virtual air beside them, catalogued references. One of them is an indigenous man, a local, and the other, a short, rotund woman, is far from her home of record. The other three are unidentified, not in the uncharted depth and breadth of Sonder’s memory, unrecognized by any linked agency database.

A watchdog program, however, some kind of legacy routine embedded in the system, had lit up like a proverbial pinball machine, flagging them for immediate scrutiny.

The pair in white garb are unaccountably bizarre.

Of the two, the big one looks armored up, packing a hefty sidearm on his right side that looks as though it could use some counterbalance. The smaller one, a hardbodied female, appears unarmed and carries herself with a self-assured poise he’s seen before. Her cosmetic choice, an all-over blackface, is curious.

He thought she looked every bit as troublesome as her much larger companion, even before he saw what she is able to do.

The third among them is a male, early-mid forties at a guess, a lean, ropey fellow about six-foot nothing, maybe a buck sixty. He refuses to internally calculate the metric equivalents. Long, straight black hair, high cheekbones, prominent nose, hard lines, likely Amerind.

This one, Pojade surmises, might belong to any segment of a small, but recalcitrant population of unchipped, disenfranchised, rebellious trash who think their disdain for the society they reject insulates them from the responsibilities of citizenship.

Hergenrather walks around the vorp, a slow turn, stopping to stare at the man in the battered, wide-brimmed hat. It’s pushed back on his head enough to reveal a weathered, stony face, a hawk nose, and eyes green like new grass. His hair is long and black, but the stubble on his jaw and upper lip is an unexpected red in the bright sunlight.

If it had seemed Hergenrather could not appear more unnerving, Pojade watches his features transformed by undisguised joy. The effect is grotesque. And short-lived.

“Where is this?”

“It was recorded within the Pueblo of Sandia in New Mexico, a sequestered community that does not embrace uninvited visitors.”

“How long ago was this acquired?”

“Four and a half hours.”

“And I’m just hearing about it now?”

“Tribal Police protocol doesn’t require continuous feed. This was captured during a global upload following the most recent sunfade and an algorithm that’s been running for—hell, I don’t know, so long it’s become canon—pushed these three records through CBP. The Assistant Commissioner handed it off to me thirty minutes ago. I allocated a drone to locate the vehicle’s transponder and acquire visual confirmation of the target before I contacted you. Who are they?”

“Walking dead. Where are they now?”

“Northwest New Mexico, near Four Corners. They’re off the trac network, westbound on an unconverted highway. We won’t be able to detour or shut them down directly, but I can have them detained within the hour.”

“No. Do nothing. Wait while I bring this to the Director.” His avatar recedes into the dead, gray-green backlight and the air of frigid malignance relaxes.

Seconds crawl past as Pojade observes how the phosphorescence seems to demonstrate occasions of fluid movement within. It reminds him of weirdly glowing urine. He works to relax the gorge rising again in his throat.

Hergenrather’s return to the conversation is not a relief.

“Show them to me,” says the Deputy Director. It sounds like an order.

Chaffing, Pojade delivers terse instruction to his operator.

A new vorp opens in the space between the two men and envelops them, each sharing an aerial panorama. Beneath them, a near-deserted highway stabs through hundreds of square kilometers of bleak, high desert barrens.

The highway begins to fall toward them, accelerating in a precipitous plunge that terminates an abrupt, gut-wrenching two meters above the pavement.

Neither man is moved, as anyone might be, even in the virtual realm, to clutch instinctively at a nearby stationary object. There are none and Pojade observes Hergenrather with grudging approval.

The eye’s relative position and speed is displayed in an unobtrusive optic in the upper left corner of Pojade’s vision. It does little to distract him from Hergenrather’s glacial stare as their view levels on the target vehicle.

Ocher light from a lowering sun washes the front end of the geriatric utility van and highlights the two individuals in the cab.

The abbreviated nomenclature of the boxy roller’s linking icon is sufficient to indicate its license and inspections are current, and another icon floating in the virtual air beside the roly-poly driver indicates her file has already been catalogued for reference. Right now, it is enough to verify the target has been correctly acquired.

The woman in the passenger seat with no linking icon and jeweled eyes confirms it.

“She looks like her skin is dyed black.” Pojade says. “What the Hell’s that all about?”

“Irrelevant. Are you sure the other two are in the back?”

“They made a rest stop twenty-five minutes ago. Everybody piled out, including those two big dogs from the pueblo. Everyone did their business, climbed back inside, and off they went. No stops since.” Are you certain you don’t want us to intercept?”

“Under no circumstances will you make contact with the subjects. Do you understand me?”

Pojade’s “Yes,” comes at the end of a reflective pause to reconsider his tone. “I understand you.”

“Then transfer full copies of all records to me and release the eye to my control. I’ll take it from here.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You can’t do what?”

“I can’t give you the drone.”

“Why not?”

“My operator is copying the SPD records to you, everything the eye’s recorded so far, and a stream of everything it continues to record, but I don’t have authority to turn the asset over to you.”

“I don’t think you want to start a pissing match with me over a fucking drone, Henry.”

“I have revised directives from the AC-IOC. Our inventory has been decimated by the so-called Vulcan storms. Models sporting avionics and telemetry hardened to maintain operational integrity against the electromagnetic interference are spread thin. I’ve stretched my own authority just keeping a valuable asset that’s been requisitioned elsewhere focused on your persons of interest, although the level of that interest has unquestionably been justified.”

“Wake your Operations Chief and have him give you authorization.”

“No, Mr. Hergenrather. I’m not going to do that.”

“And I thought we were pals, Henry.”

The technician, invisible at Pojade’s right hand, says in his earbud, “Sir, are you seeing this?”

The woman in the van’s passenger seat is pointing. Afternoon sun sets her jet features in vivid relief and, despite its glare in her face, she is pointing as though she has somehow seen the tiny thing pacing almost half a klick ahead of the vehicle. She appears to be pointing at them.

“Take it up. Now!” Pojade says and the technician’s response is a stomach-churning vertical ascent for those within the virtual portal.

The drone’s pressors slingshot it a full kilometer above the vehicle in seconds. Tiny, silent, its chameleon skin renders it effectively invisible.

Pojade straightens himself, shaking off the visceral effect. Hergenrather appears unmoved.

Below them, the van slows to a stop off the blacktop’s edge. The passenger-side cargo door opens. The largest of the subjects steps out and looks up. He’s removed his mask and he seems to be scanning the bottomless blue of late afternoon sky. His eyes cease tracking.

A swash of burnished metal sweeps up in his hand. A bright turbulence becomes a burst engulfing the vorp for an instant before man, van, highway, and desert are erased in a silent flash.

Outside her supervisor’s virtual envelope, the operator is pressed back against her seat, squinting at her deck. Save for a couple rows of small function tiles at its margin, her viewport is blank. Her hands twiddle virtual controls in an attempt to reestablish connection to the asset.

“It’s gone, sir,” she says.

Blinking against a dazzling afterimage for the moment it takes the agency’s AI’s physics to catch up, Pojade’s tari is surrounded by the envelope of putrid ambiance once more. Beelzebub is beside him and its expression is furious, a thunderhead.

The sweat rolling down Pojade’s back feels cold, though his tari does not exhibit the shiver he feels in Real. He silently curses this sense of dread he cannot shake off. This creature can’t harm him.

“I will contact the Assistant Commissioner and task another drone,” he says. “I’ll notify you when the target is reacquired.”

“You do that.”

The sickening backdrop and the razor silhouette wink out.

Two calming breaths are barely enough. Wrestling a pill bottle from a deep pocket, Pojade turns to his technician.

“You alright?” he says and pops a couple tablets into his mouth, swallowing them dry.

Poker face restored, she says, “I may have found another eye we can redeploy. Top of the call list. There will be some blowback.”

“I just lost a drone I misappropriated from the call list earlier today. Of course there’s going to be blowback. It’s nothing like what will happen if we lose that vehicle and its occupants.”

“I have your authorization, sir?”

“You have to ask?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“All right, then; you have it. Make it happen and alert me when you have a lock on them. And… don’t let them see this one.”

◄ ~ ~

Pojade Read More »

Tradition & Obligation

Domains, The Riven

Jonas watches the uniformed man return to his sleek, metallic buggy. Its odd, wing-like doors close with a hushed solidity and the conveyance moves away under its own queer, whirring power.

The dogs complete a couple exuberant revolutions around and shoulder up against him. He lowers the burden of his gear to the ground.

A city has sprung up overnight it seems like, spread out across the high desert in the distance and roundabout, even up into the folded skirts of the mountain and against its southward range. Distant somethings in the air, skimming among the structures, might be birds, but they don’t move like birds.

Short days ago, by his reckoning, he’d found himself in a bizarre little bugtussle perched on the tableland’s edge far to the north of here, called by its peculiar inhabitants, Woebegone. Now there’s a curious word that does not mean the departure of woe, like you’d think, but the opposite. A fitting epithet for that twisted place.

Before awakening to an unscheduled captivity there, he’d been given a vision, a powerful, harrowing foreknowledge, frightening in its depth and implications.

In that dreamwalk, near its end, he saw coaches moving under their own power, both on roadways stretching into hazy distance and through the air as well. Wonders like them and more presented themselves, but he was detached from it all then, a phantom observer only. Not now. He’s certain this is not the same place he was shown, but if his vision of such oddities was accurate, then the other matters that accompanied them, vivid and terrible, are likely accurate as well. That he’s standing here now should be proof enough.

It is an inconvenient fact that often times his knowing is less a blessing than one might imagine. The incomprehensible workings of the Great Mystery have set his life adrift without benefit of map or compass. There is no wonder without terror, his grandfather had assured him long ago. Old Standing Elk sure knew what he was talking about.

“Tunkasila, wakinyelo omakiyayo,” he says, and rests his hands on the great rumpled heads on either side of him, anchoring him to the world.

Close by, waiting at the edge of the paved street, is another coach, larger than the one that just drove away and not nearly as smart-looking. It’s big and square and, like the other, there appears no place to hitch a team to pull it, nor need for such. This one, too, has small metal wheels rimmed in thick India rubber or some such, and inside, enclosed behind a wide glass window that matches the thing’s contours, are what look to be cushioned seats. Behind that resides a fair-sized compartment which, through the wide-open side door, seems to have received the brunt of an avalanche of someone’s personal belongings.

A short woman of generous proportions stands nearby in a long, earthen-hued skirt that reaches nearly to the ground. Her feet are bare. An unconstrained cataract of reddish-brown hair whips in a momentary gust as she turns her face to acknowledge him with a nod.

In her left hand is a sturdy branch of twisted willow, as tall as she. It is an eye-catching instrument and Jonas can’t decide which, the woman or the staff, is supporting the other. The hint of an impish smile brushes her lips and lifts her chubby cheeks. Whoever she is, she’s more than just a bystander, that much is sure. He touches a finger to the brim of his hat.

The stern-looking native man, youngish with darkened, angular features, has squared up to Narregan and Brin. In a clear ceremonial voice, he begins a solemn harangue in his own language. Fused oration and song, it progresses without apparent conclusion in sight.

In the intimate connection of the taproot, Brin’s “voice” is in Jonas’s mind.

‘Jo’nas, this one names himself Tonjuh. Do you understand his speech?’

‘Not a word. I reckon he figures you do. Likely he’s pegged you both as a couple of his tribe’s deities and he’s offering his people’s sincere regards.’

Narregan’s inclusion in the tap is a deep harmonic. ‘Whether this is an address prepared well in advance of our emergence, or an impromptu obeisance, we have been treated properly, honorably, and I suspect, at some risk had we been discovered, vulnerable to those less invested in our safety. We will allow him to find conclusion before we withdraw from this place before it becomes necessary to conflict with these t’sunguc further.’

Jonas’s opinion is that with Ile Slohan holding them as they slept, they were likely never vulnerable at all, but as Narregan has demonstrated some tangled emotions regarding the spirit-stone in the past, he decides it best to hold that thought close.

This one Brin called ‘Tonjuh’ seems to reach a coda in his formal address and falls silent, studying the kachinas with expectation. He appears to shy from Brin’s eyes and Narregan has none he can find. Finally, he settles his stony gaze on Jonas. Tonjuh’s spirit-face fairly shouts of inner conflict between doubt and conviction and, regarding Jonas in particular, an abiding suspicion.

Jonas paces forward until he’s even with his companions and plants himself beside Brin. The brindle wolfhound rocks back on his haunches beside Jonas’s caboodle. The fawn noses her way between Jonas and Brin, jostling them just enough to allow her space to add her weighty stare to those of her people as they consider the lone man facing them.

Martin eyes this rough fellow with skepticism, this supposed “sorcerer” who, in his turn, levels a solemn scrutiny from the shade of his hat.

The old stories say the kachinas arrived outside the pueblo in a storm of power unlike anything ever witnessed—everyone saw it—power wielded by the brujo who accompanied them. His great grandfather, Poeyeh himself, witnessed this wonder with his own eyes.

Martin knows how stories grow and change in the telling. Embellishments creep in, pertinent details creep out. Critical thinking, skepticism, and scientific method were not even remotely part of his peoples’ early belief system. If these dogs are only dogs—and despite their great size and intelligent appearance, they are just that—perhaps this man too is only a man, an ordinary man who seems more out of place in this moment than either of the inscrutable beings beside him. More so even than the dogs, for that matter.

The towering kachina, Choktotoochanay, as the Brin named it, is an imposing, armored mass of unknowable potential. And what of she whose display of inhuman ability is beyond his understanding? The question that presents itself thus to Martin is a valid one. What ordinary man travels with such as these? Martin is moved to recall once again old Poeyeh’s recollections. It is a dawning possibility he may have judged this one in haste.

The man speaks up, calling Martin by his ceremonial name. His voice is measured, his intonation traditional.

“I am Jonas Sunka Nunpa of the Sicangu Oyate. I am son of Burns Red and grandson of Standing Elk, a wicasa wakan of our band. You honor us with your recognition and the powerful words you’ve spoken to mark our re-entry into the world of Men. The generosity of your people, the gift of shelter within your sacred space, and the protection you and your people have given us will never be forgotten. We are in your debt and that’s a fact. Your people and their selfless contribution to our safety will remain in our memory and prayers as long as we draw breath from the Mother.”

This one who names himself Jonas Shoonka Noompa withdraws a coin from the watch pocket of his denims and holds it out for Martin to accept. Sunlight flashes off a silver dollar.

It would be an insult if considered as remuneration for all his people have given to protect these visitors, but that is not its purpose, nor its true value, and Martin knows it. The coin properly satisfies a traditional protocol. It anchors the story he will tell his people of this momentous day. Almost anything the man would have given him would have sufficed.

He is not a numismatist, but Martin recognizes a Seated Liberty stamped eighteen seventy-seven. It’s shiny and possibly worth tens of thousands on the collector’s market. He nods acceptance.

“I can tell it plain enough you have misgivings,” Jonas says. “It don’t much matter what you think of me,” he gestures to indicate the Travelers with him, “but my friends here and me,” he sweeps a hand to indicate the wolfhounds, “and these two brave hearts, have a narrow path and a dire purpose before us. Time is short and our presence here’s been exposed. We need to be away from this place.”

Martin arrives at a decision. He reaches to withdraw a bone-handled knife from its ancient rawhide sheath, the leather cured and hardened by time until it is almost as rigid as the wootz steel he slips from it. He holds the sacred thing in both hands for Jonas to see.

“This gift,” he says, “given to my twice great grandfather, has remained with each Watcher over the years. Do you recognize it?”

The sorcerer’s eyes trace the mysteries whorled in the blade.

“I do. My father won it in battle ‘fore I was born. Gave it to me when I was ten winters.” He raises his eyes to Martin. “Wait. You said your… GREAT grandfather?!”

“Twice great.”

“Poeyeh?” Emerald eyes sweep the horizon behind Martin as if he’d become transparent.

“We went into the ground near the end of July thereabouts,” the brujo says. He seems to be speaking from far away. “Eighteen an’ seventy-eight.”

“Jonas Shoonka Noompa, you are in the Pueblo of Sandia. The city you see grown up around us to the south and west is Albuquerque, New Mexico. Today is the thirteenth of September and the year is two thousand twenty-seven. We have watched over you for a hundred and forty-nine years.”

Jonas’s mouth opens, as if he’s thought of something to say in response, then closes again.

“Grandfather Poeyeh understood,” Martin says, “after you had gone into the kiva to rest, that when you awoke, it would be appropriate to square with you. He did not want you to go back into the world without a knife of your own. I believe he intended to give you his own, but when you did not awaken and he grew too old to maintain his vigil, he passed on that responsibility in the same way as this,” he lifts up the wootz blade, “passed down to the next Watcher. And the next… and so on to me.

“This knife, your gift, has become a part of the story of my people. It will not pass on to another, because today, with your awakening, I am the last Watcher.”

He sheathes the blade. Unfastening his belt, he draws it from its loops to release the rawhide scabbard at his hip and, with it, another sheath. He slips the first into a back pocket and holds the second like something fragile between his outstretched hands, eyes low, offering it to Jonas in ceremonial manner.

Jonas extends both hands and the gift is laid in them. It’s heavy.

The sheath is blood-red leather, hardened, but with a pennant of fringe so fine the breeze stirs it. Adorning it is an unfamiliar pattern of beadwork. The handle is fashioned from a small antler with a projecting spike about halfway along its length that slips into his grip between middle and third finger.

He exposes the blade, just a sliver, enough for breath to catch in his throat. He withdraws its full length—a slab of snowflake obsidian six or seven inches long shaped like a spearhead, knapped to a point, its edges twin razors.

Ton’ja makes a circular pass with his open hand, palm down, indicating the gift. “Today is only the second time this blade has seen the sun since it was made. I have kept it only for this day. My grandfather made this when he was Watcher. It took him years working it with a patience and precision that continues to elude me. It is sharper than any steel and, though it can be broken, its edges will never dull.”

Jonas watches his hand slide the knife back into its sheath, feeling its weight and presence, hearing the whisper of the leather caressing it. That one, who sat vigil above the kiva from the day he was given the sacred responsibility as Watcher until he was no longer able to carry it, that one, created this beautiful and deadly thing. Created it for him and no other.

“Your grandfather, what was his name?”

“His name was Miguel. As Watcher he was named Ca-pen.”

Around his neck, beneath the drape of a bandana that had once been blue, is a braided leather cord joined to a leather bag hardened by sun and sweat and years. Jonas lifts it out from his shirt and works it open. His fingertips slip inside past Ile Slohan.

Delving, small familiar objects with personal significance shift aside until, at the bottom, he touches his mother’s earrings. He traps one between fingertips and extracts it. Without haste, he cinches the little bag, drops it back inside his shirt and repositions his bandana over its near-insignificant bulge.

Jonas presents the precious thing to the Watcher.

“The eye teeth of a bull elk are ivory. Two of ’em were given to me as a remembrance of great affection. Nothing I have means more to me. Take this one and the thing’s done.”

Ton’ja extends an open hand and Jonas lays the small treasure into it.

“In my prayers I will remember your grandfather, Miguel Ca-pen, and the unbending honor your lineage and your people have demonstrated to bring all of us safely to this moment.”

Martin’s nagging sense that none of this looks or feels like it should, is overshadowed by the reality in front of him. He draws himself straight, his voice is clear.

“This is a momentous time. Long we have waited for this day. There is so much for us to talk about. So much you have to teach us.” He gestures toward a row of modest structures across the roadway. “I understand your desire to be away from this place, but my home is there, a simple dwelling, but removed from the kind of misunderstanding that has occurred here.

“I ask that you do not judge us by the actions of those men. They did not understand, did not know who you are, did not comprehend the magnitude of this event, of what your presence among us means to our people. Tasked with protecting this community, the rules they must follow are narrow. Your existence is beyond the scope of their statutes, beyond their limited experience.

“Know that you are revered guests. I will alert the elders. They will come and draw their circle of protection around you. There will be no further confrontation. The entire community will come together to celebrate your awakening, a proper ceremony and feast to honor you, as you have honored our people by coming among us.” Ton’ja motions toward the street. “Let me show you the way.”

Brin’s words stall him as if she had reached out with her power and locked his knees. “Ee’eh! No, Tonjuh. I am… sorry. Jo’nas is right. We cannot remain here with you.”

“Why not?” Martin’s consternation at the way this improbable episode has so far played out has robbed him of his stony composure, his oft-imagined sense of how one conducts oneself in the presence of mythological beings and mixed-race sorcerers notwithstanding, he realizes his tone might be construed an impertinence, too late to call it back.

“Because, if we stay,” Jonas says, “there’s gonna be a ruckus. That won’t be good for anybody here, nor for them lookin’ on neither.”

“Do you suppose the Council has not the authority to intervene? The council is the authority here and I am their immediate representative.”

“I mean no disrespect to you or your council, Tonjuh, but I don’t s’pose nothin’. I can see it. Trouble’s coming and by the time we get through talkin’ about it, it’ll be on us like flies on a cow chip.”

“I will intercede with them. Once they understand who you are and why you are here, there will be no trouble.”

“You’re tellin’ me how it’s s’posed to go in your mind an’ I’m tellin’ you what’s fixin’ to happen. The cavalry’s gonna come ridin’ in with their narrow rules and guns drawn and the big guy here’s gonna loose his child-like equanimity.”

“How do you know this?”

“How d’ya know when you try to put your boot on the wrong foot?”

Ruby’s penguin shuffle carries her forward, staff chattering. She plants herself too close to Martin to be disregarded. “He’s right,” she says. “Two body recorders and one in the car, even if no one was monitoring at the moment, somebody will review the record soon enough.”

She turns to Brin. “Hi, I’m Ruby. I’m a human being too.”

“He’alowa, Roobee. I am Brin.”

“Pleased to meet you, Brin. Listen, that fellow you disappeared… where’d you take him to?”

Martin cannot believe the woman’s audacity and he opens his mouth to end her interference.

Brin indicates the church with her chin. “There. Below.”

“In the kiva?” Martin is incredulous. This has gotten completely out of control.

“Keeva… Ha’eh! Yes.”

“He’s unharmed?”

“Yes.”

“And the other one?”

“The soft one who went away? I showed him a different purpose. He will follow it for a time. What is a ‘cheeseburger’?”

Ruby’s grip on her staff tightens, head back, her body ripples until she breaks wind and, still chuckling, shifts a meaningful glance back to Martin. “As soon as either of those officers establish contact with their base, we’re going to be surrounded by flying assholes in riot gear and NO bodycams. You don’t suppose your ‘sacred guests’ have any ID, do you?”

Martin wheels on her imbued with all the authority his position carries. “This is a tribal matter in which you have no part.”

He notices the blanket she gave him from the corner of his eye, blues and greens against desert bland, and wonders when it slipped from his hands.

“Your immediate interest and personal safety will best be served if you leave us right now. In fact, I am telling you to leave. Right now.”

Ruby stares at him from far away.

Martin meets her gaze. “You say you were led here to find two dogs,” he gestures, “and you say these two are not the ones. I believe you, Ruby Bones. You are done here. Leave us.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time Spirit World has pulled my leg to get me moving the right way. You see I am here at this moment in time. You say you don’t believe in accidents.”

“Accident or not, your welcome has run out. You are trespassing on tribal land. If you’re still here when the police arrive, you will be arrested.”

“Enough.” Brin has not raised her voice, but Martin’s ears are ringing.

She steps forward, close enough to touch him, and his heart breaks into a crazed pow wow rhythm. He doesn’t want to look into her upturned face, but she speaks his name and he does. He looks away. It isn’t her eyes he remembers in the next distinct moments, but the starburst around the right one. Was it spinning around, or was he? He has to know.

Quiet calm enfolds him. His inner turmoil is not altogether gone, but he has no need to act upon it right now. He can hear the echo of his words in his mind, flinching inwardly at his loss of self-control.

Ruby scuffles closer to him and grounds her staff with barely a sound.

“I understand your entire life and purpose is invested in this moment. I don’t blame you for wanting to keep them here, but there are forces stirring. Can’t you feel it?”

Martin can feel it. There is nothing to say.

Something is nagging Jonas, like a tiny burr in his boot that won’t abate until he stops to root it out, and it turns him about. “Beg pardon, ma’am,” he says to the eccentric woman, “but what was that Tonjuh here said to you just a minute ago?”

A foot shorter, Ruby cranes her neck to afford him a searching look. “About my welcome running out?”

“Nope, ‘fore that. ‘Bout the dogs.”

She reminds him of old Standing Elk who often had that same expression when he was listening to something no one else could hear.

“Like I told him before you all showed up, spirit sent me here to find two dogs. Why?”

“I am Two Dogs.”

Ruby looks at the wolfhounds. The wolfhounds return an impassive consideration. She looks to Martin, whose open-mouthed bafflement says enough.

“The children of my band started callin’ me Sunka Nunpa when I was just a pup,” he says. “They meant it to be an insult. My father convinced me otherwise. Either way, it sorta stuck.”

Ruby blinks. “I did not see that coming.”

“Yes, ma’am, but lest we’re prepared to entertain company, we really need to vamoose now.”

“Yes. Yes, I do see THAT coming.”

Circumstances have devolved beyond Martin’s ability to control any facet of them. He turns to the half-blood and strives to keep his voice level.

“Will you be leaving us as you came?”

Jonas, hoisting his burdensome saddlebags once more, pauses. “What?”

“In a storm of power.”

“That was a knee-slapper, wasn’t it?”

“By all accounts.”

“Nope. Reckon we’ll be leavin’ with her.” Jonas tips his head toward Ruby.

“And what of us?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You were given shelter within one of our most sacred places. We watched over you, protected you from the outside world for a century and a half, waiting for you to emerge and bend your powers to heal our land, restore the river, to renew and lift up our people, if for no other reason than in return for our faithful stewardship. Instead, you’re just going to leave? You never came here to help us at all, did you?”

“No,” Jonas says. “No, we didn’t. We were guided to the old, blind shaman who… “

“Ta’luli. His name was Ta’luli.”

“Well, Tululi knew why we’d come and gave us what we needed. You’re free to question his decision, I s’poze.”

“How could Ta’luli refuse such as you?”

Silent up to this moment, the big kachina speaks. His voice a pulse in the air, felt as surely as heard.

“The eld you name T’loolee was not afraid of us. Neither was the gift of his aegis given with the thought of what might be gained in return. The generosity of your people was conferred without stipulation. If this faithful stewardship you value is simply leverage against a benefit you believe we are capable of bestowing, one we are obligated now to bestow, what was your constancy beyond a calculated self-interest?”

Traditional teachings offer no clear guidance in this circumstance. Martin’s higher education included no practical tools to navigate the empirical fact of mythic beings intruding upon the here and now. It has, however, provided him a sharp understanding of the big kachina’s meaning. Martin fixes Jonas with a wild, searching gaze and the crushing disappointment of unrealized possibilities informs his words.

“You say you are in our debt. If you have the power to restore balance to the world, why would you not do it?”

Jonas scans the horizon, inhales dry heat and lets it out slowly.

“That’s a tall order. My friends an’ me just woke up. I always like to have breakfast before I restore balance to the world.”

The big kachina’s voice rumbles, “You have assumed a host of facts nowhere in evidence, Tonjuh. Your immediate advantage will best be served by swift reconsideration of your place in current events and undesirable results to follow if this talk is not followed by action.”

Ruby’s impish smile has disappeared into the void. “Is there a back way out of here?”

Martin’s emotions fail to correlate with his sacred responsibility. None of the possibilities presented seem to match either his expectations or his perceived duty to his people and their future.

“Old Ta’luli saw way better than I do where our trail leads from here,” the brujo says. “Tell me, Tonjuh. What has your own vision shown ya?”

Martin jolts.

The memory of his journey beyond the boundaries of reason at the kiva’s doorway in the ground—less than twenty minutes ago!—returns with sufficient force to stagger him.

Is it possible his terrifying vision and these Visitors could somehow be bound together? A novel idea with nothing to substantiate it. Still, the synchronicity is as compelling as it is disturbing.

Nothing in this extraordinary sequence of events conforms to reason. There is no tradition, no historical guidance at all to match this instance, to offer direction. He is alone, immersed in a circumstance that, to his knowledge of his people’s history, has happened only once before. Martin’s opinion of Old Ta’luli’s judgment and decisions made in that other place and time has appreciated in the last minute. Who will advise him beyond the spirits of those who have preceded him? He had supposed them mute as he prayed for their guidance. He realizes now they are shouting to him across generations—as if across a gulf of stars.

Hand outstretched, palm down, Martin indicates a direction. “Head north,” he says. “Past the softball field there is a gate at the end of the paved road.” He extracts a slim ring of keys from the front pocket of his jeans, tosses it to Ruby. She plucks it from the air.

“One of those will open it. You won’t need them again. Lock it back up and drop them in the scrub beside the gate.”

Ruby nods.

“North Santa Fe Trail will take you into the town of Bernalillo. Stay off the CanAm Highway. It’s trac. Highway Three Thirteen hasn’t been converted yet.”

Ruby extends a pudgy right hand. Martin considers it only a moment, then brushes her fingers with his own.

“Throw your luggage and yourselves inside my rig,” she says to the travelers. “Half a minute we’re gone.” She pivots around her staff and does a creditable quick-march toward her vehicle’s street-side door, the syncopated stutter of her twin rattles providing the beat to her feet.

Brin reaches out a hand to Martin, an echo of Ruby’s gesture. A sensation like an electrical current accompanies her touch and he allows his fingers to rest in her palm for several seconds, indulging in the momentary thrill of contact. She graces him with a tender smile.

“You have lost far less this turn than you think,” she says.

He is careful not to meet her gaze. “How do you suppose?”

“You waited, as those before you had done, for this moment to come, and when it did, you looked for Source to reach out through us, like the Hand of ONE, to touch your life and the lives of your people. Has it not occurred to you that ONE has never done otherwise? Look to the multitude of small things that have transpired while you were waiting.”

“So often,” she says, “it is the pivotal event with far-reaching consequence one desires in the hope new marvels and favor will accompany the occasion. See us now before you, Tonjuh, and know we have experienced such an alteration of circumstances as you may not be prepared to fathom, yet from it, I can tell you this: marvels are many; favor far less abundant.

“Where we come from, there is a truth all children know: There is no Color the darkness cannot occlude. When full Night blankets all, the light you require must come from within you.”

“I… I don’t understand,” Martin says.

“I know.” She smiles again and turns away.

He watches her go. The crazy woman motions for her to sit with her up front, and she does. The door seals behind her with a hollow, metallic clap.

Martin’s attention pans back to find Jonas. A volume passes in silence between them.

Martin offers his hand. Jonas grasps Martin’s forearm. His grip is a strong one. Martin mirrors it and nods once his acknowledgement. He watches as Jonas treads the gravel interval to the waiting vehicle, the dogs circling. He follows his saddlebags through the van’s side cargo door and the dogs pile in behind.

Choktotuchaanay towers; his blank Face is turned Martin’s way and Martin is astonished to feel his knees tremble. Words are dust in his mouth. He’s certain the kachina can hear the blood pounding in his temples. He strives to control his breathing, searches his spinning thoughts for something to say that won’t sound weak or stupid when he revisits this graceless episode with the tribal elders. None occur. He hangs pierced in this great Power’s deliberation.

The kachina reaches inside its makeshift poncho and withdraws something small in its hand. As though from a distance, Martin observes his own hand reach out to take his baseball cap.

There is nothing more. Martin watches the probably-not-a-kachina clamber into the waiting vehicle with an agility and lightness he would not have imagined of one so large, or so encumbered. The side door slides closed behind him and seals with a grinding complaint. The heavy electric drive whines to life and the van glides forward.

It eases through the quiet heat and a neighborhood of low structures separated by narrow expanses of dirt. The entire insulated community still appears to have been abandoned.

No weathered faces peer out as they pass. No children or animals are in evidence. With the exception of vagrant insects congregating in lethargic eddies, there is no indication of life or movement anywhere.

Clustered housing gives way to open ground and the indicated ballpark, a diamond of bare dirt with a patchwork backstop, rickety bleachers, and a sagging chain-link perimeter fence. As promised, a boundary gate of substantial construction offers egress and, beyond it, the desert fans out, broiled to a dingy, sterile beige.

The way is clear and the van attains an impressive, albeit illegal speed.

Martin stands at curbside watching the squared-off rear end dwindle northward with its preposterous passengers. Six discrete beings, six impenetrable mysteries, have passed beyond the boundaries and the complex story of his people, here and gone in the space of less than half an hour. It defies reason.

The elders are going to have to ponder this one for a while.

A small dust cloud is kicked up in the distance by their passage. He watches it spin up into a thin, twisting column, a common enough occurrence in this land, yet somehow it seems to him a signature. The wind whips it away toward the mountain, dispersing it to nothing.

Squinting beneath a fierce midday sun, Martin notices the cap in his hand and settles it onto his head. Its shade is refreshing.

A rumpled bundle lies in a heap nearby—blues and greens, Northwest colors, an anomaly against the drab desert grit underfoot. Martin lifts it from the ground, brushes it off, and folds it under his arm. His sigh is a long one filled with resignation, regret, and perhaps a residual smattering of resentment.

A jolting electric buzz splits the air. Cicadas’ song, missing since the first kachina stepped into the sunlight, returns as though it had never gone.

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Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.