by James Knapp
I stepped off the curb and into a puddle as tires squealed and the grill of a car rocked to a stop a few inches from me. A horn blared, and I stumbled back the way I came while someone cursed out the window. I sat back against a fire hydrant and took a swig from the bottle while people trudged by behind me.
I was still sitting there when a slick black car with tinted windows pulled up next to me. I thought maybe it was Nico, tracking me down after what happened with the interrogation, and it made me mad that I caught myself really hoping it was him. It wasn’t his car, though; it looked way too expensive. Its engine hummed, sounding like a jet plane over the rain.
The window on my side rolled down and I could hear music coming from inside, a loud, thumping bass. I started to walk away when I saw Penny lean across the passenger’s seat and wave.
“Yo!”
“What?”
“What’s up?” she asked.
I held out my hands, liquid sloshing in the bottle. “You’re looking at it.”
“You want a ride somewhere?”
I didn’t really feel like dealing with her, but I was wet and cold. The rain had gotten worse, and I wasn’t completely sure where I even was.
I shook my head, letting my wet hair fall in front of my face.
“Come on,” she said. “You’ll get pneumonia. Get in.”
Warm air was coming out of the open window; I could feel it when I leaned in. The seats looked like real leather.
“I’ll wreck your seats.”
“Don’t worry about the seats.”
I opened the door and got into the car, feeling the bass vibrating through the seat under me. The windows slid back up as the engine hummed and she zipped out into traffic.
“Rough day?” she asked. I shrugged.
“I guess.”
“That why you’re walking in the rain?”
“I guess.”
“What happened?”
“He slapped me.” I meant to say more, but that’s all that came out. It was the only thing that seemed relevant. She looked over at me out of the corner of her eye.
“Who?”
“Nico. He slapped me in the face.”
“What the hell did he do that for?” she asked.
“I don’t know why he did it,” I said. “I had this guy under—I mean, way under. He was totally …”
I was going to say “at my mercy,” but I didn’t like the way that sounded.
“What guy?” she asked.
“I can’t say.”
“If it was going so good, why’d he hit you?”
“Well …he slapped me.”
“Slapping is hitting.”
“I …”
I was confused. I couldn’t think straight. The first thing that came in my mind was that Nico wasn’t like that. He wanted me to stop for some reason, but I was so mad, and it was hard to explain, but taking it out on that guy made me feel a little better. Nico was trying to get me to stop, and I didn’t listen. I thought that might be what happened.
I wanted to tell Penny that, but the words didn’t come out. Saying that it was really my fault I got hit sounded like the kind of thing Karen would have said.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just relax. We’ll be there soon.”
“Be where soon?”
“Your new place,” she said. Not “your place,” but “your new place.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Remember this morning? I said we wanted to set you up in a new place, and you said okay? It’s a done deal.”
I did remember that, sort of. She was sitting on my couch when I woke up, and she did say something about that. She said something about getting me out of my place and into a new one. Did I agree to that?
“What do you mean, it’s a done deal?”
“Hey, sorry, but you don’t have much choice at this point; Ai paid off your old landlord and sent people over to move everything. They kept your security deposit, but to be fair, you kind of trashed the place, and anyway, you won’t need it.”
“Wait a minute. Are you saying my place is—”
“Gone.”
“Wait,” I said. “You can’t just …”
Penny looked over at me, and all of a sudden I felt really tired. Something didn’t feel right, but I didn’t have any strength to argue anymore.
“Just relax,” I heard her say, as I slumped back into the seat.
I felt like the whole thing should have freaked me out, but for some reason it didn’t. The more I thought about it, the more okay it seemed. Penny made the whole thing sound so reasonable, and I really wanted to get dry and then get into bed. I could worry about the rest of it later.
“This is a good thing,” Penny said as I started to drift off. “Relax.”
I yawned, settling back into the seat. It was really comfortable and the low hum the car made, with that faint whistle over it, was kind of relaxing. I felt dizzy, and my eyes closed. I felt my head get heavy, and the next thing I knew, Penny was shaking my arm gently. The engine noise had stopped and I could hear the rain on the roof.
“Hey,” she said. I cracked open one eye.
“How long was I asleep?”
“Not long. We’re here.”
It seemed more like a second, but I felt a little better. When I looked out the window, the people outside looked better dressed than they did when I closed my eyes. The sidewalks were clear and there wasn’t any graffiti anywhere.
“Where are we?”
“Alto Do Mundo.”
“Why?” Rich people lived there.
“Because this is where you live now. Come on.”
She opened the door and got out. I followed her, kind of in a trance. We were in a little private lot in back of a huge, fancy building with shiny glass panels. Alto Do Mundo was one of the tallest buildings, and ritziest places, in the city.
“Wait. This is where you moved me to?” I asked.
“Yeah. Come on. You’ll like it.”
When I looked around, everyone looked rich and well dressed. They looked clean. One old guy across the street was looking at me like he thought I was a hobo or something.
“Don’t worry about them,” Penny said. “Trust me. You’ll fit in fine. Follow me.”
She took us inside, through a lobby that looked like it must have cost a million dollars, then up a fancy elevator to the sixty-first floor. She turned left in the hall, and then left again before stopping at a door with a bronze number 11 on it. She flashed a key badge at the scanner, and the lock snapped open.
“Here we are,” she said as she walked through the door. She stood there, holding it open with one hand. “What do you think?”
I walked past her and looked inside as she turned the lights on. My mouth hung open.
“Nice, huh?” she said, shutting the door. I nodded.
Nice was kind of an understatement. It was amazing. It was too nice for me.
“This is for me?” I asked. It was all I could think to say.
“Yes.”
“How much …I mean, how much does it cost? I—”
“Rent’s taken care of. Don’t worry about it. Ai’s putting you up. All expenses go through her.”
“But …”
“Oh, come on. You’ve got to admit it’s great. Ai’s richer than God. This is nothing to her. Believe me. It’s not even on her radar. You lucked into something good. How often does that happen?”
“Not very often.”
“So live a little.”
I looked around. The apartment was five times the size of my old place, and every inch was spotless.
“My place is kind of a mess,” I said, still staring.
“Your old place. I’ve seen it. I was in it.”
“I …can’t keep this place like this.”
“So don’t,” she said. “I don’t. It’s your place. Keep it however you want.”
“But why?”
“Is she giving you this? You
’re more important than you think, sister. Besides, she does stuff like this. I think she forgets sometimes the rest of us aren’t like her. I know it seems like a huge deal, but it’s just how she is.”
“Do you live here too?”
“I’m your new downstairs neighbor,” she said, kind of apologetically. “Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”
“Okay …”
The floors were hardwood, and the kitchen had stone countertops. The living room had a gas fireplace, and expensive-looking furniture set around a huge flat-screen TV. They’d installed surround sound and a big stereo rig, and someone even wired up the old switchbox I used to listen in on the psychic line calls. The bathroom was huge and had a giant hot tub in it. There was a TV on the wall in there too. It was incredible.
“Where’s my other stuff?” I asked.
“In boxes. It’s all in the spare room. You won’t need any of it, but keep what you want. Same with your clothes; she set you up with some stuff in the closet you can wear. If you really want to, you can keep your old clothes, but you ought to think about giving it to the needy or something.”
I walked down a short hallway and I could see a big queen-sized bed through a doorway at the far end. To my right was an open doorway leading to some kind of study with a big, wooden desk. There was an expensive-looking computer set up on it with a huge, flat screen.
“Your notebooks are here,” Penny said, pointing to a stack of boxes against the far wall. “From now on, though, use the computer to write that kind of stuff down. Ai will want the handwritten stuff transcribed at some point, but she’ll have someone else do that.”
“You keep track of that stuff?”
“All of it. It all goes in the database.”
“Why?”
“Probabilities,” she said. “If one person sees something, it might not be a big deal. It might even just be a dream, or a hallucination …but if that person sees the same thing twenty times, then probably not. If twenty people see the same thing, and they all see it twenty times, then the probability it’s a real event goes way up. You follow?”
“Sure.”
“This way we’ll know. Scratching stuff down in note-pads won’t cut it, there’s way too much data.”
She walked over to the computer and waved her hand in front of it, turning it on. When the screen lit up, a colorful shape appeared. It reminded me of a nebula, in the shape of a big, wavy ring. There were bright points sprinkled throughout it, and the inside of the loop was completely dark. One big bright point, like a big star, sat on the edge of the dark center.
“That’s it,” Penny said.
“That’s what?”
“The future. Well, a mathematical model of it.”
She touched a spot on the ring and it zoomed in. As the zoom got tighter and tighter, I saw that the shape was actually made up of millions of tiny lines that crisscrossed to connect millions of tiny icons.
“What is that?” I whispered.
“Entries, like in your notebooks,” she said pulling a chair up next to her. “Come here.”
I sat down, and she touched an icon on the screen. When she did, it zoomed in on it until the lines connecting to it filled the screen. She tapped it and a page of text came up next to it.
“This is a single entry,” she said. “The circle means it has a connection to at least one more entry, meaning at least one other person saw something related to it. The green lines connect to related entries.”
She zoomed back out, then back in on a square shape. That one had hundreds of lines connected to it.
“When enough entries reference the same thing, it’s considered an ‘event’; something that most likely will happen, but we don’t know when or how. If the rate of recurrence gets high enough, meaning enough entries reference the same event over and over persistently, then you get something like this.”
She zoomed out again then panned over to a spot where the lines were so dense they formed a white star around a little diamond shape.
“The diamond means an event is almost certain, and that the event will have a serious impact.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“That’s the wasteland,” she said.
I stared at the diamond shape. It looked like thousands of lines were connected to it.
“That many people have seen it?” I whispered. Penny nodded.
“Now watch.” She tapped the screen again and the whole thing zoomed out until the lines blurred together and became the nebula shape again. The diamond and all the connecting lines became that bright star that sat on the edge of the dark hole in the middle.
“What’s in the middle?” I asked. “In the dark part?”
“We don’t know,” she said. “Ai’s trying to close that gap, to find out.You can see that all around the rim there’s nothing much, nothing conclusive, except right there. That one big event happens right on the edge there.”
“Then what?”
“No verifiable entries. The model falls apart.”
“But why no entries?”
“Maybe there’s nothing left to see.”
Nothing left. I remembered the wasteland and how everything was gone.
“But even in my dream, it’s just the city,” I said weakly.
Penny shrugged. “Ai calls it the void. It doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t anything after the event, just that no one has seen anything after it.”
“Why not?”
“No one knows for sure. Maybe it means no one will be left.”
I stared at the image on the screen. The star sat on the edge of the dark like it was being sucked into a black hole.
“You get it now?” she asked.
“But what are the visions?” I asked. “How do they work?”
“We’re not completely sure yet, but there are some things we know, some rules they all stick by.”
She held up a finger.
“One: the people and places seen in the visions are real. If you see a person in a vision, they exist in the real world, somewhere. Same for places.”
She held up a second finger to form a V shape.
“Two: visions modeled here have probabilities that can change, but once an event hits one hundred percent probability, it always occurs, with no exceptions. A vision modeled at one hundred percent can’t be changed, as far as we know.”
She held up a third finger, forming a W.
“Three: no one has ever seen something in a vision that couldn’t feasibly happen in their lifetime. So no one has ever seen anything hundreds of years down the line or anything like that. We think that no one can see past their own death.”
She tapped the dark center of the ring.
“We expect to see some emptiness then, here,” she said. “No one lives forever, but the problem is that this bright star, this ‘event,’ is less than five years away. It could happen tomorrow. So this void is troubling. You follow?”
I nodded weakly.
“But what does it have to do with me?”
She tapped the screen and a tree of icons appeared. She tapped on, and it zoomed in to show my face.
OTT, ZOE. POTENTIAL E1.
“Potential what?” I asked, still staring at my name on the screen. Penny panned back, showing other faces in the tree. I saw Nico’s go by, and some others I didn’t recognize. It landed on an image of Penny.
BLOUNT, PENNY. POTENTIAL E1 (DISPROVEN). E10.
“Significant people are termed ‘elements’ and assigned numbers,” she said. “Just like there are significant events that people report seeing, there are significant people. Based on the events people see and their probabilities, we can get a sense of who will be significant …who will be directly involved in what’s to come.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
She pulled up one of her sleeves and held out the arm so I could see. There were pocked scars all down it from her wrist to her elbow, following the veins there. They were needle tracks.
“Ai pulled me out of the gutter,” she said. “She saved my life. For me, though, when I got clean, I lost my pre-cog ability. I can still do everything else, better than most, but I stopped having the visions.”
“You don’t see them anymore?” To me, that sounded great.
“I get the odd sighting, but not like I used to. Not like Ai. Not like you. We’re not all the same. All of us can influence others, but not everyone can see. Even those that can, not everyone can see as well as Ai. It’s what makes her special. You see that out there?”
She pointed out a window across the room. Through it I could see the lights of the city as it sprawled off into the distance. From that height I could see the two other major, huge towers, lit up like colored spikes.
“Ai doesn’t run the show alone,” Penny said. “She’s got powerful friends. You’ll meet them someday, for now just know we run everything. We’ve got our own organization, but it all comes back to Ai. She’s the one with the vision. She’s the one that sees and knows everything. It’s all for nothing without her.”
She pointed to the big star shape again.
“She’s looking for someone, someone related to that event. Element zero begins it, but element one ends it. Ai’s been looking for this missing element. She was wrong about me, and she’s been wrong before, but she’s been looking. She’s been looking for you.”
I looked at the star on the screen.
“Is everything really going to be destroyed?” I asked.
“Not if we can help it.”
She put one hand on my shoulder and squeezed. Gently, not like she had before.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “In some ways, I don’t envy you. I know it’s hard. I was in your shoes once, but it is what it is. You might need to step up, and soon.”
She stood up and walked to the doorway, turning back before she left.
“Enjoy your new digs,” she said. “You’re totally free to do whatever you want at any time, but don’t cross Ai. Understand?”
“Yes.” That part I got.
“Sorry about your friend,” she said, and left. I heard her walk back out to the front door and close it behind her. I barely heard her, though, because I was still looking at the screen and trying to figure out what was going on.