“We lag behind the elves a bit,” said Desiree as answer.
“Has it done anything?” Neon wanted to get closer to it but had seen enough movies to gain wisdom.
“We’re not sure,” said Desiree.
“I think it’s messing with our sense of time,” said Keita, “so it seems to be here, but when we blink, it’s not.”
“But you’re not blinking synchronously,” said Yvonne.
“That worries me, yes,” said Keita.
“So, you mean it’s definitely here and not here?” said Yvonne.
“Be still a minute,” Keita directed.
The chamber went motionless and quiet save for breaths and heartbeats. After a moment, Yvonne and Neon shared a quizzical raising of brows.
“You felt that?” said Keita. “Like it got warmer in here without a central heat source.”
“I felt it,” said Neon.
Yvonne nodded. “Just a little. But it was weird; not on my body but in my body. Like suddenly, everything was active.”
“I feel smarter,” said Neon.
Keita brushed that off. “That’s merely adrenal or psychosuggestive.”
“No, I mean literally smarter. My brain is on fire.”
“Hook her up,” said Desiree.
Keita rummaged in a hip pack and pulled a tightly coiled cord. She connected one end to her scanner; the other, with its multi-leads, dangled like a limp squid.
Neon dropped cross-legged to the cool floor and closed her eyes as Keita gently pressed pads to temples, forehead, and the base of her skull. She took a deep, steady hit of Keita’s subtle woodsy citrus fragrance. It felt good. Felt calming.
“I see patterns and equations,” the woman from Day City reported from the view in her mind’s eye.
“Do everybody,” Desiree told Keita. “I’ll do you.”
“This won’t be conclusive,” Keita cautioned.
“Shits ’n giggles,” said Desiree.
Once completed, with gear packed, Keita went off in search of Gang of Four’s number three, Vanh, who was also a certified MD. If there was a whiff of weirdness, xe’d see.
“Still feel it?” Desiree asked.
Neon nodded.
“All right, everybody out.”
Po, who’d been delayed teaching a class, caught them just as Desiree sealed the chamber.
“You feel anything weird with this, Po?” asked Desiree.
Po frowned at the word weird. Everything was weird to humans.
“Did it affect you? Noticeably?”
“Yes,” came the elf’s baritone.
“How so?”
“Calming.”
Desiree nodded her thanks. “Nobody in or out for a minute, please.”
Po, in turn, nodded acceptance.
Neon and Yvonne followed the captain in silence through the honeyglass corridors back to the Depot, which, though decorated in textiles, plant oases, and varied arts from each of Africa’s countries, felt staid in comparison.
“I don’t think most of the elves even notice us anymore,” said Neon.
“It is starting to feel a little like Shropshire Mall, isn’t it?” said Yvonne. To Desiree: “Upscale, booshie mall back home. Deep suburbs.”
“Difference here is it’s not ignorance, it’s acceptance,” said Desiree. “Don’t forget that.”
“Giant, quiet elves can be mildly unsettling,” said Neon.
“They respect your privacy. How’s your head?”
“I got a sense you wanted to say privacy like a Brit. Like it’s your secret preference.”
“It is. I like that word.”
“You sensed that?” said Yvonne.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’d it feel like?” said Desiree.
“Like I had your brain for a quick second.”
“The blink of an eye,” Desiree said, thoughts forming. “What the devil happens to the universe when we blink?”
“Nothing,” said Yvonne.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Desiree. “Bilo mentioned ‘partner states.’”
“That was just a theory he had,” said Yvonne, recalling notes Keita had given.
“I don’t think anything Bilo thought was a theory. Dude was straight-connected to the All,” said Desiree. “I need to do some more reading. You,” she said to Neon, “check in with Keita and Vanh again before long, then we all sit down with Po and figure out what the universe wants from us next.”
10
Villainy
Her nightmares felt like dreams, and that was strange, very strange. Was she being guided? Megu lay peaceably in bed, eyes wide open, taking in the night static surrounding her. She’d had the whale dream again. Usually, simply being in the lifeboat on the open sea left her in sweats and shivers, but to know that the whale shot its way to her from beneath led to paralysis, and to see it breach immediately woke her. She’d never known how the whale dream ended.
Except now at sixty-three years of age.
She had no intention of recounting the dream, for that wasn’t important. The matter of study lay in her being awake, calm, and mildly amused. The whale had terrorized her for half her life…and it had wanted absolutely nothing. They weren’t frequent nightmares, and they’d done some good; Mo had been particularly caring when she thrashed and hyperventilated. Hashira Megu was not one to thrash and hyperventilate.
Neurosurgeons had proven useless.
Naturopaths had proven useless.
Megu saw no benefit discussing the episodes in intimate conversations.
Mo believed insinuating himself into the lives of the entire world to be some type of worthy endeavor.
They divorced.
He hadn’t been in her bed to attempt to comfort the whale dream in sixteen years.
The dream itself had been absolutely nothing. When she’d had a soul, it’d terrorized her.
No, not true, she corrected. A whale dream had come two months before the theft of the Bilomatic Entrance. Her soul hadn’t been present for her for even a year before that. She’d given up that particular equation to science.
Yes, but each dream, you’re in a different ship.
Tonight had been a simple wasen, one which she intuitively knew she’d built. It smelled of cedar, cypress, and fresh stain, a dark stain with red undertones that gave the modest boat a sharp, eel-skin presence. Angular, precise, and beautiful in the way uncut cypress and cedar were. Her boat on the sea had felt as though part of the water, not some transient interloper.
Megu remembered bare feet slapping the water as she shoved the craft offshore and hopped aboard, her momentum and weight carrying it out of the shoals. Time blipped, and suddenly, she was in the midst of true power; no shore in any direction, just a boat keeping her afloat upon reality. Nothing to do but set the oars aside and experience the bobbing, up, down, sometimes predictable in strength, sometimes not, but always—and there she smiled in the darkness—grounding.
And the whales? They weren’t randomly coming for either her or air. They were summoned.
Summoned by an aging woman in a boat. She didn’t know what she wanted them for, but she—for the first time since these recurring dreams had affixed to her subconscious—knew they were necessary. This all without a soul, which told her two things: you could dream without a soul, and without a soul, you commanded the dreaming universe rather than floated in it.
She’d never believed in magic before.
Now there might be practical applications for it.
“Text Maurice,” she said to the pad on her nightstand. “Discontinuing replacement of machine until further notice. Will speak with you over breakfast.”
Then she gave the command that would lock everyone involved out of their tasks, before rolling over to resume what she felt would be an unusually good night of sleep.
“You’ve never supported my dreams, Megu.”
She stopped mid-cut of her eggs hollandaise. “Choose your words, Maurice; don’t just speak them.
This building bears your name because of me. Not my support. Me. Please remember. If you mean your need to be seen as powerful, no, I haven’t, because it’s foolish. What was it an American congresswoman said? ‘No one makes a billion dollars; they take it.’ Taking things is easy, not powerful.”
“You knew what you were creating things for,” said Mo.
She placed her gleaming utensils beside her plate. “Your uses never eclipsed my own intent.”
“Will you resume production of the machine?”
“So that you can become a god?”
“So that others will know I’m a god.”
Megu resumed eating. Eggs hollandaise tasted wretched cold, and she no longer wished to start her days cold, unpleasant, or wretched.
She wanted them free from anyone’s needs, wants, or desires impinging on her work. As far as she was concerned, the world had offered up only seven geniuses to human history. Bilo had been the first. She was the seventh. That came with a certain implicit trust from humanity in its rewards to come.
She would prove once and for all that a soul was a hindrance…and allow Mankind to truly, freely build.
Maurice, noticing the slight, quiet smile come to her face, offered one thought to the breakfast tableau:
That can’t be good.
His guards followed close. He wished they’d go away. Maybe a rival would seize that moment, whom he’d have to defeat single-handedly. He could. Kosugi Mo hadn’t been defenseless since the age of five.
Why now did he feel utterly open and, worse, pointless?
And this solely after a breakfast of eggs!
The first time he and Megu ever laid eyes on each other had been in a dojo long before. She’d sparred with him. Beat him; outside the dojo, charmed him with an utter lack of guile. He had grown up in a rich home; guile was the first ablution of the day, the first greeting, and the final brushing of the teeth before meeting the world. His father adored what he called “American directness,” but that was really nothing but the Euro-American fetish of behaving as poorly as possible with few to zero repercussions. The moment Mo realized that as the true, unspoken American dream, he knew how easy it would be to mold such a dream to his uses.
Putin wanted world dominance. Bezos flaunted financial addiction. Aileen Stone and her Buford followers sought immortality through omnipresence, while Kosugi Maurice sought nothing less than the fabric of reality itself remade, remolded, and repurposed into a perpetual form of heaven that, millennia hence with humans amongst the life of the cosmos, could be traced directly to him alone. Humanity amongst the stars, not as a fool relegated to sit in the corner that was the ancestral home but as necessary to the continuance of the stars themselves. Necessary to the universe despite its feigned indifference.
His father’s favorite song had been Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Keep Your Head to the Sky.”
Interesting, thought Maurice with the haze of morning bearing down on him, how paths set themselves in stone completely unaided.
“In the Stone” was another Earth, Wind & Fire song.
Shit.
By the time Megu realized she loved him, he had already quintupled his family’s considerable wealth. By the time he proposed, plans were drawn for the Kosugi Lunar Expansion Potential Terran Outpost.
“You’re a maniac, Maurice,” his father had said, which wasn’t the best of deathbed utterances, but there you were. Despite doubting his only child, Father was now buried on the moon.
He and Megu had done it in EV suits of her design she’d wanted to test.
There were times he wondered how one divorced a woman with whom he’d stood upon the moon itself.
Then he remembered he hadn’t. She had divorced him.
“I can’t do anything more for you as your wife,” she’d said. “I will continue, however, to remake the world with you as your partner.”
I will be seventy years old this year, he thought, barely noticing the attendant bowing as his awaiting car’s door shushed open and he entered, Bodyguard One entering from the other side and Two coolly sliding beside him, with plenty of room between all three in the ridiculously spacious vehicle. Kosugi had decided on old-school protocol for a meeting called by the Thoom woman, an unprecedented one at that, which not even Megu knew about. The timing, though unfortunate, didn’t disturb in the least; he’d made an empire of conjoining events to his pleasing. This would be no different.
“Cease Operations.” Megu had outmaneuvered him at the wushu of life since they’d met. Why—in the midst of shifting chaos he and others tried to direct—should this be any different? She may not have supported his dreams but she constructed his reality.
Fair trade left him clear-minded.
The car whizzed through Hokkaido’s streets.
From there, the highland roads.
From there, the rural roads.
From there, the private roads.
From there, the disappearing roads of which whispers were shouts and so weren’t spoken of. Kosugi had chosen this mode of travel because he was in no rush and the scenery was lovely.
From there, a defunct silo he used as a remote bunker.
Meeting on his “turf,” as it’d been put, was an act of good faith. Laughable. What faith did the Thoom have in anything but themselves? It was an act of desperation and cowardice, but he wouldn’t say so until it was to his advantage.
She knew his route; he knew hers. She had snipers on her helicopter; he had snipers behind blinds on his roof. They’d agreed on two guards each in the room with them, guards who would step into a rotor or off a rooftop if given the order. The number of people who would do exactly such astounded no end.
Kosugi wondered how human history would have gone if people’d said no more often.
Nonetheless, this proved to be as engaging a meeting as Kabuki theatre, as wrought as Italian opera, and as rich as a production by the only playwright of any interest the West produced, Tennessee Williams.
As he rode the elevator to the top of his silo in the middle of nowhere, the penthouse agreed upon as the hardest for him to escape from, the easiest—close to the helipad—for her, Mo gave a brief thought to the two men beside him. Perhaps he’d indeed give the order to jump? It was good to rotate trusts.
He entered an empty yet sumptuous room, one appointed for short sprints of business, longer bouts of pleasure. Not a sex room by stunted USian sensibilities, but one in which meditation, meals, or lounging on ridiculously thin but comfortable mats were summarily enjoyed.
His men positioned themselves exactly where he said they’d be positioned, at opposing diagonals of the circular room, somewhat behind him as he sat dead center of the space behind a glass desk big enough for a proper buffet, their guns clearly visible per agreement. The floor-to-ceiling windows that ringed the entire penthouse floor gave all a full view—save for the elevator block and emergency stairwell—of the interior and exterior.
Within minutes, the chop of rotors announced the presence of guests who’d been tracked the moment they entered Hokkaido air space. After several more moments, the sleek, futuristic dragonfly landed.
Kosugi had pulled up a news feed in the glass and scrolled while he waited.
The elevator car went upward.
Footfalls in the stairwell sounded downward.
The stairwell door opened, slowly yet confidently. The elevator dinged.
Her men stepped out of the elevator. She crossed to the seat opposite Kosugi and remained standing. When her men were in their agreed-upon positions, Kosugi stood as well.
“Madam,” he said, “welcome to Japan.”
The clapback was immediate and harsh.
“Don’t. Give. Me. That welcome shit when you and that bitch and who else has been attacking me unprovoked and one of my favorite operatives disappears without. A. Trace.”
The famous Americanism. Kosugi thought a moment before responding.
“Perhaps you misheard information,” he said. Since it was clear niceti
es were unnecessary, he sat.
“Perhaps you need not fuck with the Thoom, Kosugi.”
Her red hair, coiffed to within an inch of its life in a style suitable for winning an Academy Award, perfectly offset her blood-orange lipstick, demanding attention at every word from her mouth.
His dark hair, with exactly one cowlick allowed to dangle, made his face a showcase for hidden agendas.
“Are you here to suggest an alliance?” he said.
Madam Cynthia sat gracelessly. She looked him eye to eye. “What’d we do to you?”
“Madam,” he said, the tone clearly meaning Slow your roll.
“Maurice-san,” she said pointedly. Hell kind of name was Maurice for a global player?
“I agreed to this primarily out of curiosity. It wanes. Swiftly.”
“I’d hoped to speak plainly. I see you want to dance.”
“Someone whose fumbled steps lost them Buford doesn’t call the dance,” said Kosugi.
“Tell me this: how does someone as evil and soulless as you stay off the Jetstreams’ radar?”
“I am fully vested in my soul, Madam. I don’t poison children with subpar food, create permanent serfs, or ram my dick into the Earth, hoping oil geysers out.”
“That altruistic heart gives you time to fuck with me?” said Cynthia.
Kosugi looked down. He remained silent a moment. She thought she had him, then he tapped the glass and swiped right.
“I’m ordering a carafe. Do your men—”
“They’re good,” she said.
“Mine will have tea.” He relaxed into his chair.
Madam did the same.
Staring contest ensued.
In less than ten seconds, a squat, rectangular bot rolled out of a niche with a carafe, cups, and accoutrements. Its top lifted and slid itself as a tray to the glass; the wafer-thin tray then made its way to Kosugi without so much as a rattle of cups or splip of tea, settled upon the glass, and waited.
Kosugi nodded left, then right. His guards poured their tea and resumed their positions with tiny sips.
Afro Puffs Are The Antennae Of The Universe Page 13