by James Smythe
The water is still. Laurence drives them up the path. The car shudders again on the gravel.
‘We’re nearly there,’ he says.
He steps out and smells the air, as if this is a holiday. Even where they live, getting this far away from the roads you can suddenly taste how clean it is in comparison. The air comes off the lake and brings the wetness with it, and that makes its way into your throat.
Laurence opens the doors for the rest of them. ‘We won’t be here long,’ he says, ‘just until everything dies down. It’s quieter here.’ He looks happy, Deanna thinks, and he sounds it; there’s a break in his voice, a slight quiver as he looks around. ‘I can feel it, already. Healing, being away from that mess.’ He reaches for Alyx, for her head, to ruffle her hair. ‘Isn’t it, Pumpkin?’ he asks. She flinches and backs away. ‘Okay,’ he says. He breathes, as if he has to catch himself. Deanna sees it. It’s restraint. He’s holding himself back.
He takes out the bags from the boot and he puts one hand in his suit pocket – to check for the gun, Deanna thinks – and then he locks the car. ‘I probably don’t even need to do that,’ he says, ‘because it’s not like there are people here who’ll steal it. Remember we said that? We said that we wanted somewhere that we could leave the doors open.’ He looks at Lane. ‘We used to live in the city, when we left college. This was back before you were born. It makes such a difference.’ He turns and walks up to the house, and he stops. He doesn’t turn back. ‘We have to move on. We have to.’
‘I think that you’re sick, Laurence,’ Deanna says. ‘I think that maybe you need help. We should go and see Doctor Diaz.’ She doesn’t know if Diaz will help, but she’s somewhere else entirely; somewhere that isn’t here, somewhere they will be with other people, and where she can make a concerted effort to get him real help.
‘I’m not,’ he says. ‘I am judged. It’s all so different now.’ He roots around underneath flowerpots for the key to the door. ‘They all think that they know. They all think that I cannot control myself.’
‘That isn’t it,’ Deanna says. She doesn’t know how to talk her way out of this. She steps towards him. ‘Laurence, please … The girls are scared. You have to see that.’
‘All I am going to do is protect you,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t have to play out the way that they say. I can change the narrative, Deanna.’ He turns, and he pulls the gun from his pocket, and he holds it up. He points it at Alyx. ‘This means nothing. This means absolutely nothing at all,’ he says. He puts the gun back and Alyx collapses into tears. He rushes to her and kneels in front of her. ‘No, Pumpkin, no! This was to prove a point. You don’t need to be scared of me, honey.’ He wraps his arms around her and she doesn’t resist. She gives herself over to it. All she wants, Deanna thinks, is to believe this.
He ushers them up the steps and he unlocks the door. The lock is stiff and clogged, and when it finally turns and he brings the key out, he has to clean it off. They haven’t come up here since Sean died, because why would they? It is a place of nothing but memories. Or, rather, a single memory. It is a memory of her son, and the water, and his final moments. The whole house is tainted; there is nothing here that she wants to see.
Laurence pushes the door wide.
14
Every time Amit tries to call Deanna’s phone it goes straight to the answering machine. There’s no pause or hesitation, which means it’s not even trying to connect. Her phone is off or the battery is dead. When he gets to the hotel he runs to the room that they were staying in and he bangs on the door, but he can’t get an answer. He tries to look through the front window but the curtain has been drawn across. The woman from the front desk comes out and stares at him.
‘I help you?’ she asks.
‘The people who are staying here. Have you seen them?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Look. I need to know if they’re here, or where they went.’
‘Are you family?’ she asks. ‘You don’t look like family.’ She goes back to her office, but Amit sees her creak the blinds down and continue staring at him. He tries to call again, but there’s no answer. He sits in his car and watches the sun go down, and he watches people come in and out of the hotel – trucks with couples in them; men on their own; women on their own; no other families, not a single situation that doesn’t look as if it’s transitory – and he walks to the vending machines and buys a sandwich that feels as if it’s made from sponge and tastes even worse; and then he tries to call Deanna again. But again, there’s nothing.
His phone buzzes. It’s Jessie.
I don’t have anything yet, she writes. Are you okay?
Yes, he says. Everything’s fine. White lies until the truth makes itself apparent. He leans back, jacks the chair as flat as he can make it, and he shuts his eyes. He opens them every time a car comes into the lot and he watches the people get out and stumble or dance their way to the rooms. At one point he thinks he hears crying, on the wind, but when he gets out of the car to look it’s gone and the place is silent again.
Jessie starts the night shift by messaging Amit, and then she writes her stories straight away, reeling them off. She can touch-type – that’s the benefit of a private education, her father once told her, those basic skills that most other graduates will lack, and in this day and age it’s about differentiating yourself (he used ClearVista’s algorithms to show her her chances of employability if she listened to him versus if she chose not to) – and she goes into autopilot to do this. She’s waiting on emails from various people about ClearVista, still. She went through the archives to find the names of those most likely to have been hired or poached. She starts with the founders, emailing them and asking them if they know anybody still working there. Chancing her luck, telling them that it’s for a documentary. Most tell her that they didn’t work there. A couple say that they left as soon as the algorithm was complete. She follows those up, asking how it works. One doesn’t reply. The other sends a mocking answer, spotted with truth; they worked in bubbles, on aspects. None of them ever worked there long enough to see the algorithm in its final state. The computers – plural, a series of networked systems daisy-chained together, like nothing you’ve ever seen outside of NASA or MIT – they did the assembly. The different parts dealt with different aspects. Jessie’s contact tells her that he was on the data-mining side. His part of the equation sifted through personal records: property tax, hospital records, insurance, equities, licenses. It worked out what you owned and where you owned it and what stake you had in it, and it applied that information as a factor to the algorithm as a whole. They paid him off and he’s had no contact since. Nearly everybody he worked with left when he did. He gives her some names; one of them is Thomas Hershel. She tries to call him, and she gets his machine. Nothing else.
She looks at the ClearVista premises on Google Street View. A steel and glass lump of Silicon Valley, on a road as long as any she’s ever seen, lined with similar steel and glass lumps. She writes the address down for Amit, and she tries to call the offices. She says who she is and who she works for and the automated woman tells her that somebody will call her back. But nobody calls, and the phone won’t let her into the system again. She checks her email, pressing F5 to refresh over and over.
She tells her boss that she might have a story. She rattles off what she knows, that it seems as if nobody actually works for them any more, because she can’t find a single name of a current employee, and everything on the phone lines is automated. And Laurence Walker’s video, where did that come from? Her boss stops her, raising her hand.
‘Listen,’ she says, ‘this is a dead end. It’s a dead end, and it can’t be a story.’
‘Why?’ Jessie asks. She looks at the screens. They’re showing the Homme footage again. The commentary includes the words evidence and proof. It’s treated as fact, and she can see the slippery slope, even if the others can’t.
‘He’s going to be the nominee, and then he’s going to
be our next president. Nothing can upset that apple cart now. So they’re a tech company. Bunch of nerds in a room somewhere too scared to answer a telephone. It’s not a story, Jessie.’
‘Laurence Walker’s life has been ruined.’
‘As the video said it would be. Maybe that’s the story, when all of this is over. You want to write about truth, maybe start there.’
Back at her desk, Jessie realizes how she thinks this is going to end. They are all just waiting for the money shot, where Walker recreates his own ClearVista video.
She presses F5, but there’s still nothing.
All night she searches for information on a single name: Thomas Hershel. The men and women who set up the company, they’re all gone. They cashed in their money, giving it to a private investor. None of them want anything to do with her, or the company, or interviews. One of them emails her at nearly four in the morning and tells her that he’s signed an NDA. Just that and nothing else. I can’t talk, that sort of message says. I’ve been gagged.
So she digs into property records and she roots around in work permits. It’s all signed off to people who no longer work there. ClearVista is a ghost town. She thinks about the software that they use, then; that maybe that’s a good way in. Software has licenses, and somebody’s going to have to pay for them. Somebody’s going to have to put his or her name down somewhere. She looks through those records, everything open, nothing hidden to her and her contacts even at this time of night.
And more and more it comes back to the same name. She speaks with a cleaning company, hired to go and wipe the windows of the glass-covered building ClearVista operates out of, and they tell her their contact name: Thomas Hershel. Thomas Hershel, who signed for a Windows Cyan license earlier this year. Thomas Hershel, who is listed as the driver of the only company car now leased to ClearVista. She tries to call him again, but there’s no answer still; and it’s not even going to the machine any more. She calls Amit instead.
‘I know him,’ Amit tells her. ‘I know him. I have been talking to him.’
‘He’s only on the records the last year or so. The shareholders all sold up in January.’
‘So he bought them?’
‘Or he took over. But he signed the Microsoft license, and then he signed an Adobe license three weeks later. Both were for ClearVista. At the very least, he’s working for them.’
‘He told me he’d left.’
‘Which means he had something to hide.’
‘He’s been looking at the algorithm for me. Reverse engineering it.’ He pauses. ‘He had the software.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Can you email me everything you’ve got?’ Jessie agrees and Amit tells her that he’ll call her back. He tries to ring Hershel’s cellphone, but the line just rings and rings. One way or another, Hershel lied to him. It doesn’t mean anything, but if he’s still working for ClearVista, he could have stopped this. Amit tries to assemble the reasons in his mind, but he can’t. Nothing adds up. Hershel isn’t a mastermind: he’s a surfer, a stoner; he’s just naturally good with numbers.
Jessie emails the one contact who replied to her. She asks him to tell her everything he remembers about Thomas Hershel.
He was brains trust, he replies. He was on the actual assembly of the thing. Had some formula of his own, to do with understanding trends. You know, social trending, like Twitter and Facebook and whatever. He worked all that in. Brass loved him.
Jessie asks him to explain that more. I don’t know much about how the algorithm works, she writes.
Join the club, he replies. Three branches. Data mining (which was my side, where we’re looking at getting information about you from every possible source we can); the questionnaire stuff (where they tried to work out your likely responses to certain scenarios, and outcomes of those responses); and then Hershel and his team were in charge of understanding how the algorithm worked with the rest of the world, basically. None of the rest of us understood that stuff. That was the last stage, actually figuring that out, taking into account everything else. So, in Walker’s case – because I’m guessing that’s what this is all about – they’ll have been looking at the mood about the election, about how people have voted before, what they’re looking for in a candidate. How the house swings. Everything. How they’re talking about Laurence on social media. Basically, the other two departments were focused and personal, but Hershel’s stuff tried to take into account everything in the entire world. Not a big ask.
And Thomas Hershel – he seemed like a good guy?
Sure, her contact replies. I mean, we were all good guys. He was quiet, I remember that much.
Were you friends? she asks.
We were work friends, so not close enough to give a damn what happened to the guy after we all left. He was there longer than me, anyway. His department: first in, last out. They’ll have been the ones left to shut the lights off.
What do you mean?
Figure of speech, he writes.
Amit hands his credit card over to the man at the check-in desk. He types numbers and checks Amit’s driving licence as proof that he is who he says he is, and then he cranes backwards and makes a noise. It’s a sucking of air through his teeth, part whistle, part sigh.
‘This has been declined,’ he says. ‘Do you have another?’ That’s the campaign money, Amit knows, all gone. He takes out his personal card.
‘Try this,’ he says, knowing that there isn’t enough cash in his account, but hoping that his overdraft can bear the brunt. It does, and the ticket is sent to his phone.
‘Did you not want to run the algorithm?’ the man asks him.
‘I’m fine. I trust you.’
‘Have a good flight,’ the man says.
‘I’ll do my best.’ He runs to the gate, and the guards see him, the last man to arrive. They ask why he’s running, and he says that he’s late.
‘This side, sir,’ they say. They send him through the full-body, and they ask him to take off his jacket and his shoes and they run them through and scan them, and they use little knives to prise apart the plastic of the heel of the shoe, slightly; enough that they can peek inside, splitting the glue and checking that there is nothing in there. They open his wallet and take it apart, pulling all the cards out, even the fluff from the lining; and they turn his phone upside down and plug it in and check that it works. Then they hand everything back. ‘Thank you,’ they say. They’ve held the flight for him. He gets on board and everybody stares at him, as if it was his choice to delay this. He sits down and tries to call Deanna again, and Hershel, but there’s no answers. Then they ask everybody switch off their phones for take off. He has a window seat, and he watches the world strip away: the cities, the streets, the woods, the lakes.
Deanna managed to sleep. She doesn’t know how, but she did. She is in their room, because this is where Laurence told her she should sleep, and he told her that this room – the only pictures on the walls the ones that came with the place – this room is where he had thought of for her. He said that he assumed they would take this room for their own, if they actually moved in. He said that he wasn’t tired. He said he had been asleep for long enough, and he wanted to stay outside and watch the sun rise. So she lay on the bed, which creaked with every slight movement on it; and she tried to ignore the house’s new inhabitants, spiders and beetles and ants, who took over the place when the Walkers decided that they couldn’t come back here. The girls had been sleeping – or, rather, not sleeping – in the room next door, another double bed between them, but she went in and got them in the night when she heard them talking, their voices coming through the walls. She heard Alyx ask about the house, and why they stopped coming here. They never told her how Sean died, and Lane danced around the answer.
‘Sometimes a place just isn’t the same as it used to be,’ she told her sister, who asked why, and she said, ‘because there are memories, and they change everything. And you can’t escape them, not completely; so you escape
them where you can.’ Deanna thought that was as good a reason as any.
‘What’s wrong with Daddy?’ Alyx asked then, and that’s when Deanna got out of bed and went to them. She wanted to diffuse that question; she didn’t want Lane to have to answer it. It was easier to let that question fade into the house itself. They went into Deanna’s room, because it was slightly warmer, and the window didn’t look out onto the lake, which was something; and they all slept in her bed, craned around one another, relishing each other’s warmth. The girls were asleep within five minutes, and Deanna five minutes later. As she went to sleep, she was thinking of Laurence; of him diving in and pulling Sean’s body out of the water.
So now, awake, the girls still gently sleeping next to her, she looks around the room. There are no curtains in here, not yet. The only night that they had stayed here before, Deanna stared at the moon and Laurence said that it was perfect; and they had all slept in the same room, the five of them, sleeping bags around the place. It was like camping, Sean said.
She gets out of bed and creeps towards the door and Lane opens her eyes and looks at her but doesn’t say anything. It’s like they both know. Deanna wants to see where Laurence is, because she’s hoping that he’s asleep. If he is, maybe she can get the girls into the car and go. Now isn’t the time for wondering what’s right or wrong. It’s the time for asking what’s best.
At the end of the hall is a window, and she can see the lake through it. The house faces east, catching the sun rising up above the water. The first time that they stayed here they all watched it the next morning; the reflection of it in the still mirror below, looking as if it were rising from the deepness in the far off, splitting into two as it went. She listens for anything coming from below: the sound of him sleeping or, worse, of him awake, ready for the day, waiting for the rest of them to stir. There is nothing, though. Not a single murmur from anywhere. She makes it to the bottom of the stairs and then sidles through to the living room, and then the kitchen. She stops in front of the door to cellar, wondering if Laurence might be down there. She cracks the door slightly and listens, but it’s silent; only the slightest echo of a dripping, of water into water.