‘You’re in trouble now,’ Marquita said cheerfully.
‘What happened to the plane?’
‘Emergency landing. Reykjavik. Pilot’s a hero.’
A weight lifted off my heart. Then Marquita said:
‘Boss wants to see you.’
‘You put me on that plane on purpose,’ I said.
‘I did,’ she acknowledged. ‘But I never know outcomes. That’s the acausal nature of the system.’
That night I slept on the sand by Viana do Castelo in northern Portugal, thinking of Marquita and queztlcoatlus and the man falling helplessly – why hadn’t he folded up to HD to escape? I shuddered and curled my crispy wings around me for comfort. Little stars fell down and twinkled against my skin, fading in and out like fireflies. All night.
Fridged
I arrived on this Earth because I was hijacked.
First thing I remember is being trapped in a refrigerator. Light was coming through bullet holes in the side of the fridge, five of them arranged in a haphazard domino pattern. The fridge was empty except for me and a residual smell of mustard.
I pushed from within until the door gave. My fingers grasped the rubbery lip that had sealed it shut and I began dragging myself out of the cold and into a more general darkness. My self: whatever I had become. I wasn’t quite sure yet. The wings were tightly folded. At first I didn’t even know they were there because I was all folded mentally, too, like an origami giraffe.
The fridge was an emperor-sized Mayfield 4910. It lay askew on the side of a messy hill of metal and plastic cuboids: dishwashers, ovens, toasters, microwaves. It wasn’t plugged in; the cold must’ve come from a small energy deficit in the process that had launched me. I was still catching up with myself; I percolated into my own skin shivering.
I was already forgetting the details of the hijacking.
I grabbed the edge of a nearby cappuccino machine to pull myself to my feet; the steel surface was so cold that my fingertips got stuck to it. I shook it off. Icy fog roiled around my feet and in the dim yellow light of industrial lamps I could make out the silhouettes of heavy equipment: a JCB, a couple of quad bikes, a car crusher. Just below me was a trailer with its curtains drawn. There were red geraniums on the steps.
I picked my way down the junk mountain, dislodging a washing machine that tumbled loudly to the bottom of the pile. This brought a pit bull running from around the back of the trailer. She saw me and swallowed her own bark, whining and licking with ecstatic doggy greeting. As I bent to stroke her the door to the trailer swung open. In silhouette stood a slender man. He hugged himself, shivering, and I saw the whites of his eyes flash as he felt the waves of cold roiling down the appliance mountain.
‘What is it?’ he said in Arabic. ‘Who do you see?’
She didn’t go to him at first. She liked me too much.
‘Nasra? Nasra!’
From inside the trailer I could hear an American ad for air freshener on TV. Silently, I sent Nasra back to the man and slipped behind a commercial oven. My body was not young, but it was substantial, dense with muscle, and it moved well. The man came out with a flashlight. He wasn’t in any particular hurry, and when I saw his beam point away from me I took the chance to run across open ground and hide again, this time behind the JCB. Nasra didn’t give me away. She pranced around the man as if all this were a game.
Good dog, I thought, and she whined, hearing me.
After a half-hearted tour that failed to disclose me, the man returned to his television and the dog to her rawhide chew. I took a better look around. I was inside a fenced compound with a lot of big machinery intended to crush and rend. There were offices, two warehouses, and stacks and stacks of junk. A sign over the locked entrance read: Dubowski’s Environmental Reclamation. Beyond the fence was a two-lane highway. Cars swooshed by.
All this while, imagine me fumbling to get up to speed.
My body: not much shy of two metres tall, wide-hipped, umber in colour and packed with lively muscle and enough fat to last a long winter. My grey-streaked twists bounced around my shoulders when I moved. I was fond of myself already.
The place: Long Island, New York, North America. Second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Banners of stories unfurled in my memory; narrative salad. Event snippets, language units, satellite maps, all colliding in me. By the time I was twenty-two minutes old I knew everything I needed to know to orient myself. But I didn’t know where I had come from, before the hijacking. And I didn’t know why I was here. The waveform that had invaded my simulation and launched me had been human or closely associated to humanity; I was sure of this because when something comes inside you it reveals its nodes and frequencies, its pecularities. Like a stupid criminal, the hijacker had left fingerprints of its humanity on me. But what had it wanted with me? I could no longer remember the details of what I had been doing when it took me over. I been training for something, learning . . . ? No, the memories of that belonged in some other form, some other world. This newly-assembled body didn’t know anything about that.
All night I hid.
At dawn the man came out of the trailer and scaled the junk heap. He peered at the half-open fridge. It was in good shape apart from the bullet holes. He roughhoused it down the pile and managed to roll it until it lay at the end of his trailer. There, he threw a tarp over it and left it. Workers started to arrive.
During the day, the plant was busy. Seventeen old cars and one school bus were crushed in a noisy machine. Shards of scrap metal spewed out of another machine to form a mound of aluminium curls that roasted in the mid-afternoon sun. Trucks rolled in and out. People walked around talking on phones and drinking out of cans.
I identified where the security cameras were; they gave perfect coverage of the perimeter, but there were blind spots in the interior of the plant, mostly due to machinery and piles of wreckage obscuring the view. I amused myself by plotting pathways around the complex using the cycling of the cameras to conceal my movements.
The trailer man had his curtains closed all day. He emerged in the evening and locked up the plant, fed the dogs, put a lawn chair out in front of his trailer and drank a glass of tea. Then he flipped the tarp off of the fridge and checked it out with a magnifying glass. He poked around inside, knocking on it and listening. Then he took a screwdriver and started to take it apart. He was going to strip it for parts.
I panicked a little. More than a little. My hijacker had sent me on a one-way trip through the launcher, which must still be embedded in the frame of my origin. If the refrigerator still held HD components of whatever mechanism it was that had sent me here, the night watchman could destroy or decalibrate them unknowingly. Without the refrigerator I had no hope at all. I’d be stranded here forever.
The whole thing was like one of those dreams where you are taking a test and you haven’t studied and you aren’t wearing underwear. I know you have them.
I picked up an empty bottle of Snapple and pitched it at the top of the car-crusher, some hundred feet away. It shattered musically and rained down. The dogs went running. While the man was investigating, I went to the refrigerator and rapidly put it back together in the reverse sequence that I’d seen him use. I heard him walking the perimeter; then he went to the office to check the video. While he was in the office I picked up the fridge and carried it behind a dumpster full of reclaimed plastics. I hid it under some sheeting.
It felt really good to lift that fridge. My body craved the sensation of muscles contracting. I wanted to lift everything. But I stayed hidden, even when the man came back and saw the empty place where the fridge had been.
He walked three times counterclockwise around the junk heap, muttering and giving little paranoid glances around himself. Then he went inside again. I crept after him and saw him studying the video.
While he was doing this I took a toaster oven, a games console and two bread machines. I carried them to the blind spot between the crane and the pile of met
al shavings and hid them under the metal. I waited for him to go back to his video screen, and then I took out the games console and diagnosed its problem: there was a Lego laser pistol jammed inside the casing so that it interfered with the power supply. Easy.
In the morning, while the night watchman was handing off to the day manager, I put the console on the steps of the trailer. In return I took a few tools, things I’d need for the other repair work. I overheard the watchman’s name: Akele.
* * *
The yard was a loud place, always moving. This was to my advantage. I like to eat but don’t need to; I can pull energy in other ways. I don’t need to sleep the way humans do – my system can work in parallel, cleansing different regions of my anatomy on a cycle, like dolphins sleeping one side of the brain at a time.
My only real need is weight. Moving it. Metal, or stone, whatever. My body cries out for it. Anything really heavy will do. So I lifted the bucket of the bulldozer and set it down. And lifted it again. And set it down again. Boring, but effective for the moment; it satisfied my system, kept me functioning. I stayed out of shot of the security cameras, and whenever someone came, I got out of the way. Fast.
On the second night I took the fridge and buried it under the pile of metal shavings where I kept my other appliances. Then, to distract the night watchman, I left him more ‘gifts’ in the form of repaired things. I knew I had to figure out how to get back through the fridge soon, because the pile it was hidden in was scheduled to be taken for melting at the end of the week.
On the third night, when Akele was temporarily distracted watching the Knicks game, I went to the place where damaged cars were waiting to be crushed. Stripped of anything useful, they were still substantial. Heavy.
I was famished.
Nasra came to keep me company, sniffing among the cars as though trying to help me find what I needed. I started to pick up a Saturn, but it wasn’t heavy enough. Dodge pickup; that’s what I needed. I got under the rear end and lifted the bumper to my chest, at which point I stuck. I needed almost everything I had to keep the bumper at that height, and I had run out of biomechanical advantage to get it any higher. I had to shift my grip, and I dropped into a lower stance to compensate for the fall of the car when I momentarily let go of it. With my hands palm-away I could power the thing up over my head like an Olympic clean-and-jerk. I held it there, braced, thrilling to the sensation of strain, of torment, of utter exertion against the force of gravity.
I shifted my grip again. I got underneath it. I grabbed the undercarriage and walked a few steps, and then, because it felt so good, and because I couldn’t stop myself – and because I am an idiot – I threw it.
That’s when my wings unfolded.
It was a spontaneous thing, like when you break out in a sweat.
The smoke-stained underbelly of the car sailed over me with its greasy pipes and rivets, and I saw stars, clouds, fleets of subspace amoeba transports, lightshot with the hotsauce of pulsars. I saw right through the world to what must have been my home. So much pleasure through every corpuscle of this fragile watery body, all released with the appearance of the wings that were hooking me into HD like your finger in a wall socket.
The car sailed several feet in a semi-parabola and hit a ruined ice-cream van with a bang. Nasra jumped back. Thanks to my wings, I was already in the air. One downdraft took me over the cab of the car-crusher and into the textiles division, where I soared briefly, exhilarated, and then remembered the cameras. I dived into a dumpster full of old curtains.
Face buried in dense goldenrod brocade that smelled of cigars, I listened.
No sound of Akele; but I’d been in the path of the cameras, certainly. I wasn’t sure if they would pick up my wings. All the same, I refolded them as carefully as a lady folds her fan, trembling with excitement. I wanted to fly again. I wanted to lift bigger things. Much bigger.
As if lifting the car had opened up some kind of access to my origin, then I knew what I had to do. I dug my way through the metal shavings and opened the refrigerator womb. I crawled inside and tried to push through the back of the fridge.
Nothing happened.
Sweat streamed off me; I gasped for air in the confined space, and my hands slipped over the plastic. No traction, no HD.
Did I need to know the open sesame? Maybe the key to getting back lay in the form of a memory trigger, some visual code version of clicking the ruby slippers together and saying, ‘There’s no place like home.’ Maybe—
The refrigerator door opened at my back. Akele said,
‘Come out of there now.’
He was angry. A little frightened. I heaved myself out of the fridge, expanding as I went. I didn’t dare let the wings out. He looked plenty freaked as it was.
‘You been messing with my head.’
I extended myself into his brainwaves. Just a little, so he would feel me. If I’d wanted to play with his head I could have done so much more.
He said, ‘You been repairing stuff and leaving it for me to find. Why you want to do me like that?’
In Arabic I told him that I didn’t want to mess with him. That I had seen him fixing things himself and I wanted to help.
It was the first I had spoken to anyone. He didn’t take the language bait; he answered me in the local American accent with its twangs and dead vowels. There was a faint taste of Senegal in his tones.
He laughed. ‘How much you want?’
‘How much . . . ?’
‘Money! My brothers sell the appliances. I have a deal with Jez Dubowski. I repair and resell, keep a little for myself. It has been this way for years.’
‘I don’t need money,’ I said.
‘What were you doing in there?’
‘Trying to get back where I am from,’ I said. ‘I don’t belong here.’
He told me he’d seen me throw the car.
‘I have to work my muscles. I need it like you need food.’
‘You will get in trouble, then I will get in trouble. You can’t just throw cars.’
I folded my arms. Of course I can just throw cars.
The man frowned and put his fingertips to his eyebrows like a caricature of Rodin’s thinker. His forehead wrinkled.
‘I know what you need,’ he said suddenly, taking a phone out of his pocket and wiping dust off it. Then he showed me a video.
‘Isometrics,’ he said. ‘East Germans used this method back in the day, but nobody wants to train like East Germans. Their methods got a bad rep because of drugs.’
Baffled, I kept silent.
‘You can maybe do isometrics inside a fridge but it’s not enough space. You got to push against something you have no hope of moving. If you can lift a car then you need something much heavier. And if you throw cars people will notice. Then you got trouble.’
‘Good point,’ I whispered. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He wasn’t calling the police. He wasn’t calling his boss. He wasn’t throwing me out on the midnight highway.
‘I wonder if you could move the base of the crane,’ Akele said thoughtfully.
Get Smart
I awakened with charred wings on the sand. The clouds over Viana do Castelo were dense and shapely; I could feel them muffling the town, pressing the sea smooth while light wandered sidelong into the sky. Old men came down the scruffy beach for an early swim, and stray dogs wandered in search of edible trash. A fishing boat spiked the horizon crookedly.
I tried to clean up. The wings kept coming loose from their higher dimensional foldings and it took forever to get them under control. I actually had to reach around and wrest them into my back, squashing them up into HD like a novice air hostess packing a bag overfull of duty-free. My feathers still felt greasy. When I rubbed my oily fingers together I had a funny feeling in the back of my head. Like when you hug someone and walk away with their perfume, their physical imprint.
Only whatever the impression was, it wasn’t a person. It was several orders of magnitude bigger.
On the phone Marquita had told me to wait for transport in Viana do Castelo, but even with wings out of sight I was in no condition to be seen. My uniform was torn, stiff with salt water, and generally askew. My hair was all but gone, and there was nothing to cover the rents in the back of my shirt where the wings had broken through. I looked like a disaster survivor, and of course I had no ID or money. In some countries they’ll throw you in a van and cart you off to detention for less.
Lucky for me I’m not easy to throw.
* * *
At Dubowski’s I trained on every piece of equipment I could find. The urge was more than physical, it was an outlet for my frustration over what happened to me. My wings extended into higher dimensions, but I was stuck here with no mission. Repairing toasters. If I was so strong, how had I been hijacked so easily?
I asked this question of steel and rock and concrete – I pushed and bent and twisted and pulled at the bonds of matter – but I got no answer, just the occasional glimpse of astronomical phenomena like a metaphysical peepshow. Such a tease.
I didn’t know exactly where I’d come from or why my component had been stolen, but I remembered very clearly the waveform of the one who had invaded me and ripped part of me out. He had been human when he was scanned. Some AIs of extraterrestrial provenance had been grafted in to his original pattern, and there had been major repairs to one lower leg – but when he took me he had existed only as minor code within my own system. He wasn’t technically alive. And he was no match for me in any sense of the word.
The idea of it made me furious. How could I be so easily used? I’m not a mug. I’m not a fool.
Am I?
Akele had the night off and had gone into the city to unload some of the stuff we’d repaired. The relief watchman was sitting in the entrance hut watching the Mets game on his phone.
I was crouching on the metal mountain watching the sky go dark. I was scooping up handfuls of hot metal curls, spilling them from hand to hand. Scraps of sunlight remained in the aluminium, almost enough to burn my skin. I had to find a way back through the fridge, back home. I couldn’t give up so easily.
Occupy Me Page 4