by Rob Hart
But this felt like being hurt for the first time.
Paxton was about to say something when he stood. He lingered for a moment before turning toward the door.
Zinnia wanted to tell him. Everything. Why she was here, what she was doing, even her real name. But Paxton was protected by his ignorance. She couldn’t drag him down with her. He didn’t deserve that.
She couldn’t let that be the last exchange between them either. So she said, “Wait.”
“Why?”
“Please.” She nodded at the chair. “There’s just something I want to say. After that, do what you need.”
He fell back onto the chair. Raised a hand, prodding her to proceed.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” she asked. “Something Ember said in the bookstore.”
“What’s that?” he asked, his voice a whisper.
“She referenced this story I read when I was a kid,” she said, shifting in the chair. “It was about this place. A utopia. No war, no hunger. Everything was just perfect. Except, in order to maintain that status quo, one child had to be held in a dark room, in a constant state of neglect. I don’t know why. It’s just…that’s how it worked. No light, no warmth, no kindness. Even the people who brought him his food were instructed to ignore him. And people accepted it, because it was how things worked. It was like this magical rule to maintain the way things were. Everyone who lived there got all this great stuff, in return for this one kid suffering, and what’s one life against a few billion, you know?”
Paxton shook his head. “What’s the point of this?”
“That story always made me angry. I thought, there’s no way people could live like this. Why would no one help that kid? I always imagined rewriting it with a new ending, where some brave person barged in and picked the kid up and gave him the love he’d been denied.” She labored over the last few words, like the earth underneath them had been turned up, revealing the thing buried below. “In the story, the people who found out about the kid and couldn’t live with it, they just walked away. They didn’t try to save the kid. They just walked away.” She laughed. “That’s what the story was called. ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’ By Ursula K. Le Guin. You should look it up.”
“I don’t care about a story,” Paxton said. “You lied to me.”
“That’s the problem. Don’t you see? No one cares.”
“Stop it.”
“You’ve never lied to anyone?”
“Not like this.”
“You’ve never fucked up?”
He enunciated each word. “Not like this.”
She sighed. Nodded. “I hope you have a good life.”
“I will,” he said. “I’ll have a nice life. Right here.”
Zinnia’s mouth went dry. “You’re taking their side?”
“They’re not perfect, but at least here I have a job, and a place to live. Maybe this is the best way to do things. Maybe the market has dictated, huh?”
Zinnia smiled. “Or you could just walk away.”
“And go where?”
She opened her mouth, as if to say: Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? She wanted to tell him about what she’d seen, and what she’d found, and what she felt, and what this place had done to him, and to her, and to everyone. To the entire goddamn world.
But she wanted him to live, too, so she said, “Remember, freedom is yours until you give it up,” and she hoped that would be enough.
Paxton pushed his chair out, got up, went to the door, and Zinnia said, “Do me a favor, too?”
“Are you joking?”
“Two, actually,” she said. “There’s a brown named Hadley. She lives on my floor. Room Q. Check on her. And take care of yourself.” She shrugged, smiled. “That’s it. That’s all I got.”
PAXTON
Paxton stumbled out of the room, his lungs and heart and skin ready to burst from the pressure, right into a crowd of people pressed up against the window, watching. He pushed his way through and went into the next interrogation room, which was empty. Sat on the chair and put his head in his hands.
The door cracked open. Paxton heard a shuffle of footsteps but he didn’t want to look up. He wanted to scream for whoever it was to leave him alone. Figured it was Dobbs or Dakota.
The chair across from him screeched.
He raised his eyes from the table and saw Gibson Wells.
The smile he had worn on the stage, the one that seemed a permanent fixture on his face, was gone. His shoulders were hunched, giving him the look of a bird of prey. He sat and breathed in deep, then out. Still, despite everything—the illness, the stress of the day—there was a strength to him. That cancer must have been some strong stuff to take out a man like this.
Gibson folded his hands in his lap, looked Paxton up and down. “Dobbs tells me you’re a good man. Reliable.”
Paxton just looked at him. He had no idea what to say. He forgot words. He was afraid of what he would say if he even dared open his mouth. Talking to Gibson Wells was like being given an audience with God. What do you say to God?
Hey, how are ya?
“I know Dobbs a little,” Gibson said. “Every year or two I bring the MotherCloud sheriffs out to my ranch. Get to know ’em, since they’re really the linchpin keeping these places together. I like Dobbs a lot. He’s old-school, like me. Takes his job seriously. Doesn’t screw around. Keeps his numbers real low. I think this might be the safest MotherCloud we have. Now, him telling me you’re reliable, that’s pretty much enough for me to believe it. But I wanted to sit with you for a moment myself. Get a feel for you. So, son, tell me. Are you reliable?”
Paxton nodded his head.
“Speak up, now,” Gibson said.
“I am reliable, sir.”
Gibson smiled again. It was all sharp points. “Good. Now, I’m going to tell you what’s happening. And I’m going to trust that it will stay among friends.”
The way he said the word friends made Paxton warm and cold at the same time.
“What happened was,” Gibson said, “all those big-box retailers, the ones that are still doing business? You might not know this, but they’re all owned by the same company. Red Brick Holdings. After Black Friday, when in-person retail started to go down the tubes, a lot of businesses ended up liquidating. So Red Brick comes in, saves ’em all, lumps ’em all together under one umbrella. You follow me so far?”
“Yes,” Paxton said, loudly, clearly.
“Good. So, the people who own this company, they do not like me. You seem like a smart kid, and I bet you can understand why. What they did was, they hired that girl out there to break into our energy processing facility to see how it is we generate our power. Do you know how we generate our power?”
“I do not,” Paxton said.
“Well, let’s just say, it’s cutting-edge and real special, and it’s going to fix this world,” he said. “You don’t have kids, do you?”
“No.”
Gibson gave a solemn nod. “If you have kids—and you’re young, you have time—by the time they have their own kids, those kids, your grandkids? They’ll be able to play outside again. Even during the summer. That’s where we’re going with this. Pretty nice, right?”
Paxton almost couldn’t believe it. It sounded too absurd to be true. For years people had been throwing out ideas for how to fix the planet, but none of them had stuck. “Yes, sir, it is.”
“Of course it is. So, this girl was hired to steal proprietary information from us. And, much to my chagrin, someone paid her to take me out on top of it. As if that’s not going to happen in the next few weeks anyway. So she’s tried to kill me, and she’s working for the enemy.” Gibson leaned forward. “I know this is difficult. I just want you to understand. How this whole t
hing fits together. It’s important for you to have the full picture.”
“Okay,” Paxton said.
“That it? ‘Okay?’ ” Gibson asked, his tone incredulous, like a parent who couldn’t fathom a dose of back talk.
“Well, no, it’s not okay. I know it’s not okay, it’s just—”
Gibson put his hand up. “It’s a lot. Listen, I want you to understand something. You saved my life. I don’t take that lightly and you will be rewarded. Guaranteed employment. Your star ranking? Doesn’t matter. You now have life status at Cloud. The way Dobbs has been talking about you, I get the sense he has big things planned. Your life will be a little easier after this.” He put his hand on the table. “But in return, I’m going to need something from you.”
Paxton held his breath.
“All this, you put it out of your head,” Gibson said. “What happened here, you forget it. You walk out that door and into a comfortable life. You never speak of this again. Not even to Dobbs.” He lowered his voice, to just above a growl. “I need you to understand how important it is to me that none of this ever happened.”
Gibson said it with a smile on his face. The smile did not extend to his voice.
“What happens to her?” Paxton asked.
Gibson sneered. “You really care? After what she put you through? Son, that is the wrong question to be asking me right now.”
Paxton thought about last night. Nearly telling her that he loved her. Of the way her skin felt warm, and soft, and the way she put her hands on him, her lips, and, meanwhile, the whole time she was planning to betray him.
They wouldn’t kill her. They couldn’t kill her. It was ludicrous to think that.
“So, that’s where we are,” Gibson said. “I’m going to head out this door and deal with that, and I’m going to take it that you’re on board with my proposal. Before I leave, is there anything else you want to say or ask?” He looked around the empty room and smiled. “Not a lot of folks get this kind of chance.”
I’m the CEO of the Perfect Egg. It was my life’s dream to own my own company, and I did, but Cloud drove me out of business. I had to give up on my dream and come work for you. I was a CEO and now I’m a glorified security guard. The woman I love betrayed me, and all I have to look forward to in the future is a lonely life of wandering the promenade of MotherCloud. That’s my reward.
“No, sir,” Paxton said, folding his hands so tight he squeezed the blood out of them.
Gibson nodded. “Good boy.”
ZINNIA
Gibson Wells walked in and Zinnia felt as though if she squinted she could see the shadow of Death following behind. He reeked of it—the papery skin, the dimming glow in his eyes. He was hanging on by a fingerhold. She was amazed he was standing on his own two feet.
“Where’s Paxton?” she asked.
Gibson looked her up and down, an animal glint in his eye, like he was wondering, in this moment, what he could get away with. After a moment he sat across from her, going slow, as though if he weren’t careful he might shatter, and folded his hands in his lap and said, “Paxton is fine.”
Zinnia had a lot of questions, but the first, the most important, was, “Do we have an audience right now?”
Gibson shook his head. “Watching, not listening.”
Her stomach flopped. She was in the middle of a huge, dark ocean. No shores visible, and something was nipping at her heels. So she went paddling around for a life preserver.
“You hired me, didn’t you?” Zinnia asked.
Gibson’s lip twitched. And then he shifted in the chair, like he was trying to get comfortable.
“How’d you figure it out?”
“I should have guessed it right off, the amount of money you were paying me.” She laughed. “Who else could afford that?”
He nodded. “Do you know the name Jeremy Bentham?”
“Sounds familiar.”
Gibson sat back and, with a great deal of effort, brought his leg onto his knee. “Bentham was an English philosopher. Died in 1832. Smart fella. He was famous for the concept of the panopticon. Do you know what that is?”
Another familiar sound, dug deep somewhere in Zinnia’s memory, but she shook her head.
Gibson held up his hands, like he was outlining something. “Imagine a prison. In this prison, one single guard can watch every prisoner. But the prisoners don’t know whether they’re being watched at any given moment. The best way to imagine this is, think of standing in a great circular room, where all the cells face inward, like a honeycomb. And in the center is a guard tower. From inside the guard tower, you could see into every cell, because the tower has a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view. But when the prisoners look up at the guard tower, all they see is a tower. They can’t see the guard, they just know he might be there. Do you follow?”
“I think so,” Zinnia said. “Sounds more like a thought experiment than a blueprint.”
“In Bentham’s day, it was exactly that. An idea about a way to get people to behave. If people were always under surveillance, they would figure, well, I could do this bad thing, but I might not get away with it, so better not do it. It was a pretty good idea, but not really possible in that day and age.” Gibson smiled and waved a finger in the air, like a bored magician. “But today, it’s much different. We have CCTV and GPS. You look at the population of a MotherCloud, it’s bigger than some cities. It would cost a fortune to staff this place with a police department worthy of this many citizens.”
Gibson sat back, took a deep breath, like he was trying to replenish his energy.
“Thing is, I don’t have to,” he said. “When you look at the numbers here—murder, rape, assault, larceny—they are so much lower than those of a city of comparable size. Do you know what an achievement that is? I ought to get the goddamn Nobel Peace Prize.”
“You are very much a humanitarian.”
He raised an eyebrow but ignored the dig. “I created something here.” He waved his hands around the small, meager room. “A better model than what we had. I built cities from the ground up.” His face curled into a hideous smile, then dropped. “That said, time to time, you need to kick the tires and check the oil. It’s true, I don’t like CCTV. It really is unpleasant to see a camera every time you look up. It’s expensive, too. And I got to thinking, if people are wearing a tracking watch everywhere, then even subconsciously, they know there’s not much they can get away with. It’s like a built-in security system. Why spend money twice?” He shrugged. “That’s my job. Take something, streamline it, make it work better. But that means I have to test the system every now and again. What you found, that’s the first of its kind. And I needed to know it was safe until I was ready to reveal it.”
“You didn’t make it easy, I’ll give you that. Until I got to the chick in the processing lobby. That was a real misfire.”
“We let too many people go to the Black Friday ceremony, which was a mistake. But we were taking bets, too. I never thought you’d even make it that far. However did you find out about the tram line running from CloudBurger?”
“I’ll tell you, but it’s a little complicated.” She leaned forward, and he leaned in, too, excited to find out. But instead she said, “Fuck you. And your human shit burgers.”
“Please,” he said, air bursting from his nose in the facsimile of a laugh. “That’s language unbecoming of such a pretty lady. You did very excellent work. Very excellent.” He waved his hand. He liked to wave his hand, as if a wave of his hand were enough to make anything that bothered him dissipate. Like everything in the world was nothing more than a tuft of smoke to him. “As for the burgers, well, people wouldn’t understand. The amount we save, environmentally, from recycling waste, it’s huge. We made a massive reduction in methane by cutting down on the cow population. And not a single person has co
mplained. More people eat at CloudBurger than any other restaurant at Cloud.”
Zinnia’s stomach gurgled. She was sure she’d puked up everything she had inside her but would have been happy to spew a bit more on the table in front of them, just to watch the old man leap back.
“Now we’re at the really important question,” Gibson said. “Why did you try to kill me? Because that certainly wasn’t part of the deal I laid out.”
“I’ll trade you,” Zinnia said. “The box. In the energy processing facility. What is it?”
Gibson tilted his head, put his foot back on the floor. Smoothed out his pants. Zinnia thought maybe he was going to refuse, but then he looked at her and said, “I guess it doesn’t matter.”
Which pushed her heart up into her throat and lodged it there.
“Cold fusion,” he said. “Do you know what that is?”
“Only in a very general sense.”
“Fusion,” Gibson said, leaning forward, putting his elbows on the table, “is a nuclear reaction. Usually takes place in stars, under immense pressure. Millions of degrees of heat. But it creates a brilliant amount of energy. Now, for a very long time, scientists have been trying to crack cold fusion. Which is the same process, but at or near room temperature. This facility”—he picked up his hand and waved it around—“this entire facility is run on the equivalent of a few hundred gallons of fuel a year. We’re about to move into mass production.”
“That…would change the world,” she said, a little spark of hope flaring at her center, before dying out when she realized that even if the world were fixed, she wouldn’t live to see it.
“It will change the world,” Gibson said. “As good as we’ve done with green energy, there are still pockets of gas and coal. And this is the magic bullet that’ll kill those industries dead. I’ve never been so happy to put people out of jobs.”