Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  “You’re not a typical audience, fearless leader,” Pilar said.

  “I am, I am. I promise you I am. Seas and dead men, they are food for my soul. Signy, has the bridge found out anything about Skylochori?”

  So Paul wasn’t going to dismiss Jared’s fears, not entirely.

  “Checking,” Signy said.

  Signy shifted the focus of her headset and left the cold and friendly deck, to see instead:

  Banks of monitors. The ship’s bridge output came rolling by, Signy’s demons searching across its transmissions; Skylochori, Rescue, Red Cross, the words for death and drowning and shipwreck in English, in Spanish, in phonetic Japanese.

  Pilar played, again, McKenna’s counterpoint of woodwind and strings, and Signy remembered Jared’s fascination with the corpse in the sea, the faded orange of the tilted life raft.

  The Siranui had made no calls to Search and Rescue at McMurdo. The verbal log there was full of terse comments in aviation-speak, in a mix of regional U.S. accents.

  “No,” Signy told the others. “They have not mentioned this death. As far as I can tell.”

  She slipped back into the virtual.

  —above the Siranui’s deck, Skylochori’s body swayed in its harness. A waft of chilled salt air struck Signy’s cheek and brought the scent of soaked human hair. The keyboard’s feel intruded, a presence beneath her hands that didn’t belong there; cold, waxy. Damn. Signy wiped her fingers on her Lycraed thighs and felt a woolly ship’s blanket under her hands, soft and thick.

  “Damn!” Signy whispered.

  “What is it?” Jared asked, from somewhere far away.

  The texture of the fabric under Signy’s hands changed from wool to crisp nylon. She felt Jared’s warm hand touch Skylochori’s cold fingers, the chill of leathery, salt-soaked flesh. The sobbing, low sound of the cello roared in her ears.

  Signy heard herself whimper and choked back the sound.

  “Signy?” Paul asked.

  “Take that corpse away!” Signy tore the headset away from her face and stared at her netted hands.

  “What corpse?” Janine asked.

  The holo stage became a blur of transparent color; all images shattered.

  “Signy, there’s no corpses here,” Janine said.

  The stage in Taos was white and empty.

  “I saw a replay of Jared’s exam,” Signy said. “You didn’t?”

  “No way, Signy.” The empty stage blurred with colors, Paul seeking something. “Oops, oops, we’ve got a scrambler sequence in here, on everything Jared has sent from the Siranui.”

  But the music still played. Signy closed her eyes, and saw ovals of ice that glazed the ridges of each blue fingernail into manicured perfection; the hand lying slack, cradled in crackling nylon. “God damn it, Pilar, turn that off!”

  “Jared, what the hell are you doing?” Paul asked.

  The music stopped.

  “I’m doing nothing but sitting here in the dark,” Jared said.

  “It’s the music,” Paul said. “Something in the sequences. Clever as hell, actually. Signy, come back in here with us. It’s okay, really. We’ll fix it.”

  Signy lifted the headset back over her face.

  So familiar:

  —Paul in his study, with Pilar and Janine sitting beside him, and a dark octagon, Jared, on the floor by their feet.

  “I guess I left the sensory inputs on when I looked through the logs,” Signy said. “That’s when I got the overlay. I felt wax all over the keyboard. Creepy.” Paul’s imaged fireplace burned bright, and the flames formed mysterious little patterns.

  “You’ve got your own weird little montage,” Pilar said. “I wonder if this guy McKenna meant to do it.”

  “It couldn’t be McKenna,” Paul said. “Unless he’s a genius. This little sequence is tied into the Siranui’s transmissions. I’ll need to dump all of tonight’s stuff, Pilar. Sorry.”

  “I can rebuild it,” Pilar said. “Hey, Signy? You back with us?”

  “I’m okay,” Signy said. “Really.” She stared at Paul’s fire. The ghost of a hand lay flaccid on a flaming sea and sank away in moments.

  “Really?” Jared asked. “Signy, sweet, we’re here. Don’t get twitchy on us, okay?”

  Jared’s voice came to her, concerned, no longer fearful, since Signy was. Jared the comforter.

  “I’m okay. I’m fine,” Signy said. Sinking transparent into the flaming water, the hand’s shape as innocent as a fallen leaf.

  It was an afterimage. Her eyes were tired, the hand was just an afterimage from her own fears. Wasn’t it?

  “I’m going looking for McKenna,” Paul said.

  “Why?” Janine asked.

  “So I can congratulate him. Before I crush him to virtual pulp.”

  “I’ll help,” Pilar said.

  Paul had started to destroy his study, methodically stripping everything away, down to a basic carrier signal that brought ghost voices to Signy’s ears, and no visuals at all.

  “Signy?” Jared asked.

  “I’m here.”

  “It’s time for sick call. I’ve got to go to work. Call in as soon as Paul gets us back up and running, okay?”

  “Okay,” Signy said.

  Jared would have sensed, if anyone did, how frightened she had been. In reality more than real, in sensations brought to the edge of overload, even death was a possibility. Some had died in the nets, where nightmares could get up and walk around and put their virtual claws around virtual necks.

  A wild program had scrambled what happened tonight, that was all that had happened; a hacker, maybe, looking for something and finding a bunch of people watching the ocean. Big deal. But there were possibilities of synergy, of feedback loops, of emphasis laid in unconsciously by multiple inputs to a set of images that could go from order into chaos, from pleasure into pain. That edge, that point of balance, was the magic, was what they always sought.

  Tonight, though, was pure accident, was a strange little tech’s game or mistake or whatever. The sensory inputs were just scrambled into that weird set of terrors. They weren’t designed by anyone, not by Jared’s fears, the ones he couldn’t put names to, not by Pilar’s guilt, if Pilar still felt guilt.

  We’re always so damned careful, Signy told herself. We don’t let damaging things happen. We watch out for each other. Don’t we?

  NINE

  Signy paced through the empty house, stared at the dishes in the sink, heated cold coffee in the microwave, and went back to the studio.

  The console waited. The sooner Signy got back on the damned thing, the less likely it was that she would freeze up and not be able to do it. She listened to audios that told her that Paul was running a reduction of the scrambler sequence, that told her Pilar worked at the synthesizer. Janine began rebuilding Pilar’s iceberg sequence, working from Jared’s raw transmissions.

  Paul got his study reformatted and up and running again, with Pilar and Janine in it, all back to normal. But it wasn’t.

  Signy picked up her headset and slipped it on. “I’m going on break for a while,” she said.

  Pilar looked up from her synthesizer and nodded, her face blank, intent on whatever she was feeding into her headphones. Paul and Janine didn’t seem to hear Signy at all.

  Signy tiptoed away and settled herself on the banco in the bedroom. She sat by the fireplace and stroked her mother’s blanket, purchased from Taos Pueblo years ago. Woven from strips of rabbit fur, it was dense and thick on Signy’s fingers. Yeah, regression had its uses, and curling up under a blanket was regression in the purest sense.

  The blanket had traveled from Taos to Atlanta with Signy’s mother, and to Tucson, where a six-year-old Signy had found it in a box of old things and adopted it as her own. When Edges bought the house by the river, the blanket had come back to Taos. Its colors matched the colors of the mesas, and the rabbits outside were surely distant cousins to the sacrificed ones whose fur comforted her hands now.

 
Rabbit stew had become a staple in Taos, and not from gastronomic preference, either. There had been three cases of tularemia in Taos County in the past year. Signy pushed aside the guilt of the groceries she’d just bought, pushed away the memory of the six women blanketed in the snow outside the grocery store, still waiting late on a cold winter’s night. She couldn’t feed them all.

  Paul’s voice, Janine’s voice, drifted into the bedroom.

  “I think I see a way out of national quotas,” Janine said. “If I could just talk Tanaka into it.”

  “Tanaka’s legal department is good. Let’s just go with what they want,” Paul said. “They’ve spent mega to get the wording; they think the population quota system for permits will control overfishing problems. You’ve got a group of cautious nations involved in the takeout if this goes through; they don’t want to blow what safety we have in this leaky food bucket,” Paul said.

  “No. There’s something better. It’s a permit system the North Atlantic group worked out, based on bids, not nations, and they’re right. Tanaka’s wrong.” Janine’s voice continued, a murmur that rose and fell. Signy wondered whether they continued their talk to soothe her, whether they waited for her to return to them.

  Signy had told them she was tired, and she was. Paul and Janine kept talking because they didn’t want to leave her alone and scared. But Signy was alone, and she feared the synthetic comfort of the virtuals. Always, the spaces where she worked were places of safety, of refuge. Signy had known their dangers, but overloads had been a fantasy to her, something that happened to the careless, the daring. Signy was neither.

  She liked controlled reality, where emotions could be edited away. Uncomfortable things like starvation and poisoned food and tough relationships didn’t have to exist there. Except that tonight, a monster presence had slipped into her safe space and frightened her. A result of Jared’s fears, or her own, a virus, a hacker, whatever; she’d been invaded.

  In this group, in these past calm years when they had just worked and loved and fought, Signy hadn’t had to deal with anyone or anything that came uninvited to her world. She’d lost some layers on a skin that had been, for most of her life, thick enough. She’d trusted her world, and trust was always, always, a mistake, damn it.

  Paul and Janine weren’t here in this empty house, in this cold night. They hadn’t been affected, hadn’t felt the damned sensations crawling along Signy’s skin. They could sympathize, and they did, but their concern was an abstract thing, a response of intellectual empathy. Their voices were just voices.

  And Jared? Jared was in sick bay in a ship on a frozen sea, thousands of miles away. Signy wanted him to be here, right here, warm and real, a distraction to take away her fears of the dark. She needed to leave a message for him. She needed to bring up Alan Campbell.

  There was no mysterious hand in the fireplace flames. Signy was not near her keyboard and it was not coated with wax. Nobody else saw that stuff. Maybe she had scrambled her own inputs.

  Sure. Like hell she had. The whole episode had a mistake, a glitch, that’s all.

  In the studio, Pilar’s voice asked, “Hey, you guys going to be up much longer?”

  “Maybe an hour,” Janine said.

  “We’re out of coffee,” Pilar grumbled.

  “I’ll go get some,” Janine said. “As soon as I finish this one bit…”

  And then Janine said something that made Paul laugh. I’ll go back in in a minute, Signy told herself.

  She stared at the rumpled, empty bed.

  The voices from the studio quieted. Signy held on to her security blanket and went back in.

  Paul’s reconstructed study was empty. Embers glowed in the New Hampshire fireplace.

  Signy sat down and screened the messages waiting for Jared.

  [Pilar] Could you get some visuals from under the sea? Go diving, maybe? Please, Jared, I need more than ice to look at.

  [Paul] Signy says nobody’s trying to find out about the dead man. This intrigues me.

  I have to tell Jared something about Alan, Signy decided. I want to tell him I need him here, with me, that I’m afraid for him. That I’m afraid, too.

  [Signy] I fucked Alan Campbell last week. See if you can find out why he’s in Antarctica.

  Not quite right.

  [Signy] Alan Campbell is on the Siranui. He works for Gulf Coast Intersystems. Any connection with what we’re doing?

  Which avoided the problem.

  [Signy] Add: tell him hello.

  Idiot. It was no big deal. How could she phrase this, damn it? Her eyes wandered around the dusky shadows of Paul’s study.

  The silver bowl Paul had bought in Atlanta rested on a table near closed drapes of amber velvet. Sometimes he floated roses in it in the summer.

  Signy remembered how it was, living with Paul in the old New England farmhouse. How it was when Paul brought Jared home, this neat guy who ran the wilderness tour Paul hadn’t wanted to go on, not really. You need to sweat some, Signy had told him, and Paul had gone to sweat, and come back with Jared.

  Before the weekend ended, Paul had asked Jared if he’d like a new job.

  “It’s a mosaic company that we’re starting, an interactive group of ideas and personalities that we want to build, a collection of disparate talents that can define answers and then come up with questions for people to ask about them. We want to work with the psychology of attractions, with the science of spin-doctoring, with virtual realities that can compact and condense amounts of information that would have staggered us in our childhoods.”

  In a weekend, that quickly, Signy had sensed what Jared’s intense sense of life could add to what she and Paul were trying to do. Jared’s acute senses, his intense absorption in whatever he was doing made everything he did seem important.

  “Yes, we’ll sell ideas, even products,” Paul said. “But there will be an integrity in it, and that integrity will come from knowledge of the subject.”

  Jared had listened to all of this. He let Paul wind down, thought about the offer for a while, and said, “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?” Paul had asked.

  “Yes, I’ll work with you,” Jared said.

  “Why?”

  “I could use the money. You could use a keeper.”

  The three of them had lived in the New Hampshire house for a while, and sometimes they had shared a bed.

  Signy stared at the list of messages waiting for Jared’s attention. Just say what needs to be said, Signy decided. Jared will ask any questions he wants to ask. I’ll talk to him in a few hours, anyway.

  [Signy] There’s a guy on the ship I met in Houston. Alan Campbell, works for Gulf Coast Intersystems. He’s the tall redhead that was in the mess yesterday. Can you find out why he’s there? By the way, I slept with him.

  * * *

  Signy slept hard and woke early. She wandered into the studio with her second cup of coffee and pulled up the floating raft, intending to exorcise her memories of it. Its orange fabric was faded with salt or sun. It had been hauled on the Siranui’s deck and shoved aside while Jared looked down at the dead sailor. The faded black lettering on its side puzzled her. Signy traced what curves she could, overlaid them, upped the contrast, and tried again.

  She made another pot of coffee. Later, she’d get breakfast and a bath. Just after she finished this one series.

  The tracings she made of the lines looked like Japanese calligraphy. Useless to her; Signy’s internal neural programming could complete the curve of an S, add the crossbars of an incomplete I, but Signy didn’t read Japanese. Maybe Paul had a program that would do it.

  There were other marks below the Japanese. In a line. She searched out English letters, found them—O. O or zero, B, or P.

  OBU.

  Anything else was total guesswork. And Jared had powered up his skinthin rig.

  Signy tried audio.

  “Jared?” she asked. But Jared was recording only; Signy couldn’t talk to him until he chose to listen.<
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  Across from him at a table, Anna de Brum spooned up the last traces of something tan and creamy from a glass dish. Anna wore a ginger yellow coverall and she had a bright red blossom behind her right ear. Dressing up for Jared, Signy figured. Anna laid down her spoon and moved the empty dish to the side of her tray.

  “What are your plans for this afternoon?” Jared asked.

  “I am planning to dissect some squid and weigh their ovaries,” Anna said. “Want to help?”

  “No. What I’d really like to do is go diving.”

  “Do you like that? Scuba diving?” Anna asked.

  “Indeed I do,” Jared said.

  Anna frowned. “I am so sorry,” Anna said. “But I have limitations on how many excuses I can make to go under. The ship’s divers will only go out if a net is tangled or some equipment malfunctions. And they would not like to take responsibility for you, I think. You could hitch a ride on one of the trawlers if there’s a short run scheduled. But all they do is fish, usually.” Anna looked at him over her the rim of her coffee mug. “You could take a nap.”

  “Marshallese sleep on and off all day, don’t they?”

  “On the atolls, yes,” Anna said. “Work a little, eat a little, sleep a little. Dream a lot.”

  And they fear demons in the night, Signy had read, and will not sleep in the open. They sleep in stuffy rooms with the doors closed while Pacific winds cool the nights outside. They’re doing okay on food, so we hear. Sometimes they have mostly fish and coconuts, but at least they have fish, and coconuts.

  “I guess I’ll go back to quarters and check in with my friends up north,” Jared said.

  “I’ll be in the bio lab,” Anna said.

  The corridors Jared traveled held overhead mazes of conduits, like the hallway in Atlanta. Signy watched Jared pull a small monitor close to the unmade bunk in Kihara’s cabin. Signy loved the look of the tight muscles of his ass, oh yes, but she reveled in the smooth motions of his shoulders, the precision of his sure touch. Jared’s grace was never that of excess effort.

  He stretched out on the bunk’s rumpled off-white comforter, on mink brown sheets with a black stripe. Signals from his skinthin sent the feel of a ridge of bedding. He shrugged the comforter into a more comfortable contour. Signy and Jared were matched perfectly in height, something that had always delighted her; they met nose to nose and toe to toe.