We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  “I saw you all on YouTube, moron,” she said, folding her arms. “Introduce me.”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’ll explain later, but it’s not a good time. And Mathias isn’t here, he’s still away, so… it’d be best to wait until he’s back and then you can meet the whole crew at once.”

  “I know Mathias, but whatever, that’s fine,” she said. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing she was hurt, so she just cocked an eyebrow, pulled out her phone, and said, “Sorry, I have to take this, it’s Jesus Christ.” With that, she turned and pattered back down the stairs.

  David did feel like a moron. He turned back to his brethren. The sun was setting behind them, and David looked down at their elongated shadows stretching far and thin along the concrete. Owen was making shadow puppets with his hands. Fu was crouching and jumping, his shadow peaking and fading like a stereo’s equalizer bar. Lee smoked.

  “Who was that?” Lee asked. “That the girl who drew our outfits?”

  “Man, I told you, the artwork was by a sophomore dude in my marketing class,” David lied.

  “Why don’t you just introduce us, dude?” asked Fu.

  “Okay, whatever,” said Owen, changing the subject. “How does it happen?”

  David was happy to take his cue. “I say gravity stops working and we all go floating up into the sky like balloons,” he said.

  Fu: “Gozer the Traveler will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. Like in Ghostbusters.”

  Lee: “What if there’s a collective orgasm and everyone on the whole planet cums at the exact same time, and it’s so crazy that your brain just fucking melts.”

  They tried to be light about it, but underneath their cloying, speculative banter was more than blind trust. The future opened and shut during David’s Big Bang, the same as it had for them all. The world was going to end, and soon.

  David was hoping for a warning sign—a nice, clear buildup to the grand finale—but then again, the idea of it all going down quite suddenly today or tomorrow didn’t seem far-fetched at all.

  “Mathias says,” said Owen, “that time is going to be the first thing to die, but it’s the lack of potable water that will kill the most people. That’s why he’s so into filtration and stuff.”

  “I wonder if every era believes the end is nigh,” David speculated. “Maybe it’s intrinsic to being human: fearing our collective destruction and doing whatever it takes to avoid it.”

  The guys nodded. They were now part of a noble lineage of the scared and ambitious. Their job was to gather other such overachievers. Initiate and protect them. Train them to be good in the face of apocalypse. And maybe, with enough preparation and devotion, the gods might let them be.

  Time to buck up, David thought. There is life to be living, and precious little left.

  Owen craned back his head, squinting at the sun. “Does the sky look weird to any of you?”

  ii.

  Everyone popped a Zeronal so they could hit the ground running. Their New Year’s resolutions—each geared toward their individual thesis and, now, aligning with David’s broader plans for the USV—were a point of focus since Mathias had left. When they had a task to accomplish, they aimed to get shit done as quickly as possible so they could get back to The Egg. They alternated as needed, cultivating both the animal and the automaton within themselves.

  Sometimes a man needs to be a machine. And sometimes he needs to be a beast.

  David chauffeured the MaxMobile, tracing the I-295 corridor beside the Delaware River that separates Pennsylvania from Jersey. They each had a different destination.

  Peacemaker/Owen was learning to fight, frequenting a Bordentown krav maga school taught by a former Israeli Defense Forces field officer. This training complemented his cardio regimen at The Egg, which had reached exciting heights. While Owen continued to research solar, he’d jettisoned other power projects—the piezoelectricity, for one, which was just too complicated. He’d instead purchased a stationary exercise bike and hooked it up to a simple generator, a DC/AC inverter, and then their battery bank—he dubbed it the Electrocycle—where a single workout could produce about forty watt-hours, enough to power a phone for a few days. It was meager, and a person could only pedal for so long, but if they were really going to scale the USV and buy more bikes, and if enough human hamsters contributed, Owen said, they’d eventually have enough wattage to power the whole darn Egg.

  Dr. Ugs/Lee jumped out of the car in Trenton to meet with paranoid underworldians at a music venue called Conduit. Lee’s main contact was a DJ named Derek who also worked at a hospital. Fu somehow decided this dealer was an anesthesiologist and referred to him as “DJ Dirkesthesiologist,” which annoyed Lee in all the best ways. Lee was trying to create a new strain of the Big Bang DMT experience—a low-dose alternative that was more manageable and had the mainstream allure of a party drug. One of his earlier iterations didn’t work and instead paralyzed the user for about thirty minutes. He held on to this formula, a potent varietal they called “Liquid Zero,” in case they ever needed to incapacitate anyone on purpose.

  David then dropped off Golden Echo/Fu in New Brunswick at Ivan’s Audio-Visual, where they knew his name. What began as a sensible yellow-and-black North Face parka became bejeweled with six-inch speakers, woofers, tweeters, and artery-like webs of speaker wire. He called it the “RacketJacket.” The final touch was a gold motorcycle helmet outfitted with a wireless headset microphone. He bought four more mics and routed them to the jacket, making a mobile amplification system, a super-megaphone—the perfect thing to disseminate the voice of a leader.

  If their leader ever returned.

  And the RacketJacket worked. Mostly. It was going to work. It was all going to work.

  As for Infrared/David, he kept his laptop in the van, using the engine to keep it charged. In the gaps of this meticulously crafted carpool schedule, he’d lean back in the driver’s seat and work: Establishing strategic objectives. Identifying target demographics. Figuring out finances. Plotting specific activations to move the needle on all their key performance indicators.

  Phase one was to establish the USV brand.

  Phase two was about boosting membership.

  Phase three was education and training.

  Phase four was disaster deployment: mass do-gooding when the shit hits.

  And phase five was sustaining this new heaven on earth.

  He thus expanded his initial USV outline into a pretty comprehensive business plan for a growing, scalable member-based organization. And since it was so damn good, he decided he’d simply change any names and incriminating details and enter the annual Princeton Entrepreneurs’ Network Startup Competition, which had a history of launching major tech startups and other successful ventures David might’ve applied to if the world wasn’t ending. Ted Zhou, the professor of David’s Entrepreneurial Leadership class, was judging the PEN competition this year. Last year’s winner had landed $5 million in VC funding, he’d heard, so why not submit?

  David smacked the laptop screen down reflexively as Fu banged open the MaxMobile door and jumped into the passenger seat. They had an hour to kill before picking up Owen, so Fu asked if they could hit a comics or costume shop. David made one more stop, picking up Mathias’s grandfather’s axe from a guy he found on Yelp who did side work restoring old weapons—he thought it’d make a nice welcome home gift for when Mathias ever returned. Then they GPS’d a vintage clothing shop called Incogneeto in Somerville, around the corner from a joint called Comic Fortress.

  Fu was quiet in the car. Something was up with him, David was sure of it. Fu hadn’t quite found his persona yet, and while he was fun as hell once you got to know him, he was a shy soul, and the USV’s increasing publicity was freaking him out.

  “That’s where Paul Robeson went to high school,” said Fu, pointing to an oppressive Somerville building. “Robeson was a lawyer, a player in the NFL, a Shakespearean actor on Broadway—sang opera in like twenty-five
languages—a huge civil rights activist. That dude was a superhero.”

  David loved going places with Fu. He was smart as shit, but not in an annoying way. David assumed he didn’t know Paul Robeson trivia off the top of his head, but Fu was the kind of person who’d research the cool stuff about an obscure Jersey town during the ride there, because it was more interesting to know a town’s historical context than simply pass through to do some shopping. He wasn’t a great student, per se. As the only Korean kid in a white Connecticut suburb, he had a hard time in high school, and the PTSD manifested in his focus on solitary bodybuilding as well as an aversion to classrooms. Before The Egg, he’d skip every class and then, a week before the final exam, he’d drag his textbooks and a sleeping bag to a computer cluster and teach himself the entire semester. And it worked. It was always one detail that made a whole course make sense, he claimed. He loved focusing in on one single circuit, and through this specificity he’d discover an entire system.

  When they got to Comic Fortress, Fu browsed quietly at first, flipping through back issues and examining action figures in their plastic packaging.

  “Help me understand,” said Fu. “Are we joking or like dead serious about this, the USV?” He dusted off a Deadpool action figure, which included lots of guns and knives but also a taco and a bazooka with a boxing glove affixed to the end. “It’s like when you’re a kid, you want to build a fort and you’ve got these ideas for how awesome it’s going to be, with rocket blasters and a drawbridge and stuff. But it’s never that cool in real life. It’s like a pile of branches and bungee cords.”

  David considered this. Fu was right.

  “I want to make sure we keep a sense of humor, but… it’s true,” David admitted out loud for the first time. “We’re trying to fight something much bigger than we are. And we’re faking it.”

  “If it’s going to be a real fort it should at least be weird. It shouldn’t look like anything else.”

  David thought of Mathias by the river, building that hot tub.

  “One thing you should know about me,” David said, “is that I’m extremely derivative.”

  “No, you know yourself. You’re the chief operating officer. Lee makes the drugs—”

  “Shh!”

  “Owen is like the bodyguard. And Mathias? He’s just… the guru. What am I? Nothing!”

  Fu turned and left the store quickly. When David caught up with him on the sidewalk, Fu was already engulfed in headphones. His lacquered hair shone in the sun.

  “C’mon,” David said. “You’re amazing with machines and computers, first of all.”

  “Awesome,” he said. “The Asian kid can be tech support for when the power dies.”

  “Fuck that. You’re the party, the musical soundtrack and gateway drug for the USV.”

  “But I’m stockpiling all this A/V equipment that needs power. What happens when the grid goes down? I can’t just bust out an acoustic guitar. How do I create a soundtrack without instruments or amps? No, I think maybe I’m just a nerd. I’m going to die a nerd. And a virgin.”

  David sighed, perhaps too audibly. “Me, too.”

  “You are not a nerd.” Fu smiled. “The USV’s third commandment, or whatever, right?”

  “Debatable that I’m not a nerd,” David said. “I am a virgin, though. Part of my shadow.”

  They both let their truths hang in the air as they turned the corner and entered Incogneeto, which looked like every other Goodwill shop pretending to be a “vintage clothing” store.

  “Humans are so dang messy,” Fu said. “There’s something so beautiful and, I don’t know, poetic about our messiness, but there’s something dark and destructive and just evil. That’s why I was all about AI. If we could engineer the robotics, and then teach robots to make music and create beauty, that would have been creating the next step. Forget the Luminous Ones, or the Terminator shit, we’d just create artful machines and let our souls evolve. That’s what I was going to do, that’s what Mathias got excited about and why he agreed to fund me. I was the first one to join The Egg. But then, when I saw it all crashing? Once the electricity is gone? That’s the end of machine learning, and it haunts me… what I could’ve done with just another decade or two.”

  “If you’re haunted by one image,” David said, “maybe you need to replace it with another.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re haunted by what could have been, so replace it with what is.”

  So they bought Fu vintage clothes with buckles and straps and futuristic flare straight out of Blade Runner 2049. They stole Fu’s haircut from the Sandman but had the stylist next door at Jade Salon dye it gold, a blond version of the Cure’s Robert Smith. When their inhibitions were just low enough, they popped into Artisanal Tattoo and let two smelly Hell’s Angels ink zero insignias—Ø—right on the centers of their chests, which was painful as fuck. And then they headed to Delilah’s Den, a depressing gentleman’s club with no gentlemen, where David paid a pair of brunettes to tattoo a new, enduring image on Fu’s sexual psyche.

  As they headed west to collect Owen and Lee, Fu smoked a Kool.

  “How do I look?” asked the Golden Echo, who was no longer Fu.

  And David said, “Loud.”

  On the drive back to Pennington there was an excited spirit in the car. The others were impressed with Fu’s new Golden Echo look.

  David was pulling off the turnpike when Lee said, “What about you, Dave? If Golden Echo is the music, what’s the point of you?” It hurt, but David tried to take it as a healthy challenge. Lee was helping David figure himself out. Clearing his throat, David answered as confidently as possible.

  “I am Infrared,” David claimed. “I see through the bullshit and—”

  “You should be something else,” Lee said. “Something business-y. Like ManagerMan!”

  “What about my Mohawk?”

  “Then add something Native American,” said Lee. “But let’s face it, you’re just appropriating superficial details. There’s nothing authentic. I mean, I guess you could be the Mohawk Manager.”

  “That’s stupid. I’m Infrared.”

  “You could be the Boy Named Sioux.” Fu spelled it, cocked an eyebrow.

  “I’m Infrared,” David said.

  But maybe, after all his talk, he didn’t know what he was, either.

  When they pulled onto Main Street a familiar pang hit David. Each time they turned onto Woosamonsa Court, he wondered if this would be the moment they found Mathias’s car back in the driveway. As they turned into the cul-de-sac and The Egg came into view, the van always went silent. They tried not to crane their necks. They tried not to look crushed when his car wasn’t there. They parked and pretended to be as big as their shadows had been at Blair Arch.

  Until today, when they found Mathias tending a small fire in the center of the cul-de-sac.

  They parked and exchanged greetings, asking all the natural questions about his last few weeks. Mathias never gave any straight answers but seemed incredibly excited to share some news.

  “We got you a little welcome home present,” David said, presenting Mathias with the rejiggered axe. The original wood handle had been inlaid into a gleaming purple fiberglass handle.

  He looked pleased. “I got you guys something as well,” Mathias said. He reached into his pockets and then rocketed his arms out straight, fingers pointing to the houses on either side of The Egg. Dangling from each pointer finger was a set of keys.

  “We closed on Fred’s place this morning. And as of last week we’re out of escrow on that lovely pink stucco rancher,” Mathias said. “Happy housewarming!”

  “Shit, dude,” said Lee. “What in god’s name are we supposed to do with two more houses?”

  Mathias shrugged and said, “Ask David.”

  iii.

  We love to place frames on the world. Frames help us figure out what’s important by helping us figure out what to exclude. Frames help us focus. We create box
es and then check them off, one by one. These boxes, they even help us escape. We love them, until they’re taken away.

  David shuddered at the thought of the power going again. He closed his eyes and suddenly he wasn’t inside the MaxMobile, he was conjuring the illustrations of Haley’s debut comic book, Tales of the USV #1, printed and delivered, the ink still fresh.

  The opening spread: flying through the air, looking down on the Annex of Forbes Hall, four cinder block buildings creating a rectangular frame around a courtyard. It’s nighttime, five minutes to midnight. Dorm room window frames pop with the glow from desk lamps and laptop screens. Students stare at their computers, separate and stressed.

  It was a Thursday and students were settling in for all-nighters, prepping essays for Friday delivery. David remembered himself in this same state. He remembered comparing lengthy to-do lists with Owen and Bob and Esteban, identifying action items like lunch and sleep as if they weren’t obvious.

  He almost felt guilty for what the USV was about to do.

  Here was David’s plan, originally:

  First, they’d interrupt business as usual at Forbes Hall. They’d gather the students and give them a glimpse of the future they’d all now seen. They’d launch the USV, as individuals and as a collective. They’d support Ultraviolet and let him lead. They’d begin their recruiting.

  And yes, a few dozen students might lose a couple hours of work, but tonight they were providing a vital service, he was sure of it. Between the Halloween failure, the unpredictable weather, and, now, a few publicized run-ins between Princeton students and a cadre of semi-militant religious fundamentalists taken to proselytizing in front of the Wa, the town and school had collaborated on an onerous curfew, announced a week ago via official, student-wide email:

  …due to Borough mandates caused by the past semester’s binge drinking and resulting hospitalizations, no alcohol, loud music, or unsanctioned gatherings will be permitted in or around campus dormitories after midnight until further notice. Breach of this mandate will result in academic probation for the spring semester…