I must have heard a tiny sound because I glanced up. A man was standing at the bottom of the aluminium mountain. He looked up at me, smiling. He was small, unpretentiously dressed in the kind of summer casuals they wear in the Hamptons. He had on sandals, even. A higher-D shadow was associated with his waveform; it was this signature that I recognised.
My hijacker stood before me. I forgot to breathe. I wanted to pick him up by the back of the neck and throw him. I wanted to drop-kick him right over the chain-link fence and onto the highway. I wanted to let him know exactly how I felt about being stuffed inside a refrigerator and left on a junk heap.
But now that I saw him, so small and weak, I found I was at a loss. I couldn’t even think what to say.
‘I have a request of you,’ he said. ‘That is why I brought you here.’
I took a long breath. I strode down the side of the aluminium-curl mountain. The metal made a rushing noise as it shifted beneath my feet. He stepped back a few paces. I let my wings out.
‘Now listen,’ he said quickly. ‘It is a simple matter. Do this one thing and I’ll make sure you go back where you came from.’
This man couldn’t possibly have the power to send me back.
Still. There was that HD resonance. And his left leg, it didn’t seem quite right. There was a defect in his skeleton; he should be walking with a limp, but he wasn’t. And his brain patterns were all fucked up. Lots of thetas and deltas. Almost looked like a sleepwalker. There was more going on than I could perceive.
‘What’s your request?’
He pointed over the tree line to the south.
‘The beach is down there. You know it?’
Jones Beach. People from the plant went there on weekends. I shrugged.
‘If you stand out there you can see the flight path for a particular helicopter that goes back and forth from Sag Harbor to the city a couple of times a week. It’s dark green. Flies about 500 metres up, stays a good kilometre off the coast.’
‘There must be a lot of helicopters that go past the beach,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t notice an individual one.’
‘You’ll notice this one.’ He held out a business card. ‘Tomorrow from 8:00 pm I want you to be up there. It will be getting dark. The helicopter will come between 8:15 and 8:30. It will have the same insignia as this card. You must get up close so that the passengers can see you. This is very important. You must do this without being seen by anybody on the beach.’
The card said:
IIF
Invest in Futures
Finance Initiatives. Austen Stevens, Chairman
I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’
‘You’re an angel,’ he said. ‘Surely you worked this out by now.’
‘But I’m not anything of the kind. The resemblance is superficial.’
‘That’s not for you to decide.’
I was baffled. It would make sense for me to be angry, only I felt like a lion kidnapped by a mouse. Prisoner of my own disbelief.
‘I have something of yours. I will give it back if you do this,’ he told me.
‘What do you have?’
‘I think you know. The component I borrowed.’
‘Stole.’
‘Borrowed. I’ve stored it safely.’
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere out of the way.’
Did he mean HD? I was afraid to ask. I hate showing my ignorance. I felt my way inside him using all of my senses, but there was no sign of my waveform launcher being tucked up inside the microscopic structures of his body.
‘I will give it back to you. Then you can go and travel anywhere you want. You can return to . . .’ He made a spiralling gesture, whirling his hand up towards the sky. I knew he meant HD but I said:
‘What? Heaven?’
‘Wherever it is you come from.’
I laughed. ‘This is absurd. I’m not your toy.’
‘And yet you will cooperate.’
‘What would make you think that?’
‘Because it is your nature to help; that’s what you were built for. I am asking for your aid. My intentions are honourable.’
‘Then tell me what they are.’
He shifted, rattled his keys in his pocket, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. At last he said:
‘I need a person to see you. I need him to believe that someone like you is a possible outcome.’
‘A possible outcome?’
‘Of his own actions.’
Warily I said, ‘I hope you’re not playing with causality.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not playing.’
* * *
Just before nine I ventured up into the town. It was Sunday, the banks were closed, and I had no money. Viana do Castelo was crowded with 3D advertisements floating on the air. I could edit those out at perceptual level, but I couldn’t edit out the white tourist families who stared at me. I passed a three-legged dog and a bakery that smelled of macaroons and fresh bread. I found a biometric credit machine at a tourist café. I looked into the scanner; it read me and promptly announced an error.
Damn. That always happens. These scanners don’t like me. Sometimes they work, but sometimes it’s like my HD components interfere somehow with the visible data. Which shouldn’t happen, but like a lot of things with me, it does.
‘Stupid machine,’ I said to the disgruntled German couple behind me, trying to laugh. ‘I think I broke it.’
They backed away from my direct gaze. They looked frightened, like they thought I was going to mug them. I wanted to say ‘boo!’ in their faces but restrained myself.
I wondered would any driver pick me up if I tried to hitch to Lisbon? Probably not.
Some hours went by. I covered most of the town on foot. I was getting hungry. I wanted to give some wall or pillar a really good push, so I went up to the big church on the hill and worked out on the wall there until I was sweating so hard I became dizzy. I found a half-empty bottle of spring water abandoned on a bench and drank it, tasting the previous person’s waveform signature like a hint of lime, and I felt better.
I noticed an old man leaning on a crutch near the entrance to the church. His daughter was fussing over him in Cantonese – I could hear her overtones from twenty metres away, but more than that I could feel her worry for him. He had one hand on the stone and the other held his crutch, and he was shaking. I could feel his faintness and also his disappointment. He had struggled up here because he had read about this church in the travel guides, and he wanted to feel something divine here on the hill over the city and the sea. But all he felt was aching in every joint, and his heart was labouring, and he was so tired. He felt that some essential truth that had once been so close to his heart was now receding further and further. Spirit should be getting closer with age, but it was leaving him.
I couldn’t help myself. I reached into his consciousness and I sent out messages that would soothe and strengthen his weary body. I felt his daughter’s frustration at her father’s insistence on pushing too hard, and I floated patience into her patterns.
They stopped arguing and she coaxed him to an empty bench. The man turned his face to the sun, closing his eyes. The daughter took a selfie of them both with the church in the background. I walked away.
* * *
Late in the afternoon I loitered at a bus stand. I was trying to figure out where I ought to go once I’d got hold of some money when a light flashed across me. I noticed a man pacing up and down maybe twenty feet away. He was talking on one phone and had bluetooth in his other ear. The sunflash off his phone had crossed my face, and my first impression was that he’d been looking at me, but he quickly looked away. He was casually dressed, but his red polo shirt looked like some kind of uniform. There was a logo on it for Pace Industries and he had one of those utility belts that holds a phone and tools. He would speak English with an American Midwest accent. His name would be Jeff. He would fly business class but wouldn’t drink. He would fold his cocktai
l napkin, not crumple it. Neat mind.
He spooked me. I don’t know why. I started moving away, not too fast because I didn’t want to attract attention, but it was hard to make myself look casual. Everybody was looking at me anyway.
I was crossing the street to get away from Two Phones when I noticed the news display on a screen. Photograph: my hijacker, looking grim. Next to him, a second photo. The old man who had been on the helicopter. The one who had watched me fall.
DOCTOR IMPLICATED IN FINANCIER DISAPPEARANCE
I tripped on the edge of the pavement and lurched forward, crashing to the ground like a tree. A girl who had been sitting on a parked moped smoking a cigarette leaped up and came to help me.
For a moment I didn’t know where I was. She was asking was I OK. I said that I was, that I’d only stumbled.
‘Stupid shoes,’ I added with a snort. She looked at my feet and saw they were bare.
‘Is everything all right here?’
It was Two Phones, inserting himself into the situation all square-chested and confrontational. I got to my feet and looked down on him. I started to brush myself off and then realised that the state of my uniform was irreparable.
‘Are you American?’ he asked me. ‘You OK? You look like you’ve been in a war.’
‘I’m an actor.’ I gestured at my own body. ‘It’s for a part.’
He had a mind full of shutters and baffles. Requisition lists. Hierarchies. He found me suspicious.
‘I’m looking for coconut milk,’ I said, for laughs. ‘A lot of it. You carrying any coconut milk on you, Jeff? It’s good for the skin.’
‘I didn’t tell you my name,’ Two Phones said.
I smiled. ‘I’m a good guesser.’
‘So what’s yours?’ he said. ‘You’re an actor. What have you been in?’
‘My name’s Ms Jones,’ I told him.
‘Ms Jones?’ he laughed. ‘Is that what people call you?’
‘You can call me Indiana,’ I said.
I was enjoying myself, but I don’t think Two Phones was having so much fun. You could tell he had this urge to arrest me and it was frustrating the hell out of him that he wasn’t actually a cop. He gestured to my tattered uniform.
‘You see, there is the small matter of the aircraft forced to make an emergency landing when a crew member smashed a hole in the hull. Tragically, she was swept outside and died. So did another passenger. What a coincidence that your movie is about the same airline.’
The Portuguese girl had retreated to her moped. Two Phones just had that authoritative air about him, and he had physically cut her off. I stepped around him and, in Portuguese, I said:
‘Thank you so much, sorry this man is an idiot. Can you help me and just play along so I can get rid of this fool?’
She offered me a cigarette.
‘I’m fine, thanks, Jeff,’ I said. ‘My sister and I are just going to do a little shopping. See you later. Have a nice day.’
I don’t know what possessed me to say ‘my sister’ but the girl took my arm just as if we really were sisters, and she led me off.
‘How do you know my name?’ yelled Two Phones, but he didn’t follow.
The girl – Gabriela – took me to another biometric machine tucked in the back of a café, and this time it worked. She told me she felt like she was waiting for something to happen, but it never did.
‘I got a text. It said you were Resistance,’ she said. ‘I was asked to take care of you. This is the first time I’ve ever had anything exciting to do. Usually it’s really small things, or nothing at all for months and months.’
I nodded. ‘I think that’s the idea. Small, distributed actions. Networked good deeds. And hey. You’re really helping me out. Thanks.’
She smiled.
‘It would be more fun to be you,’ she said. I rolled my eyes. She lit a cigarette.
‘I want to go to Brazil. There’s more happening there.’
‘So go,’ I said.
‘Just like that?’
‘What are you waiting for?’ I said. ‘Somebody to hijack you and take you there?’
She gave me a weird look.
‘I never heard of a person getting hijacked,’ she said.
I said, ‘You never heard of a lot of things, kid.’
Not one of us
The guesthouse where Gabriela left me was narrow and cheap with a window overlooking a strip of dusty park. After she left I tapped the walls to find the beams. I needed to push. Now, more than ever, if I was going to straighten things out with the hijacker, I needed to be on the sharp.
The building had steel girders so it was a matter of tapping along the plasterboard until I found the places where I could push. I’ve gotten better at hotel room workouts since Marquita found me the flight attendant job. Back at Dubowski’s I’d pulled on the jaws of the crusher. I used to try and stretch and twist pieces of metal, working my spine and limbs from different angles to get the most hit. Isometrics are incredibly tiring, and no one can see how hard you’re working. No one can hear a sound. In time I’ve learned to perform the strength training on myself, using my own body against me. When I train sometimes my wings spring out.
In the hotel room I managed to get some work in just by pressing my body against the wall stud and holding a series of fixed poses. I sat on the wooden chair and pulled up on the seat, against my own weight until the chair creaked and a bit of the seat snapped off. I pushed my hands together and pulled them apart. I bent the towel rack – that was too easy, but bending it back to its original shape without leaving a kink was pretty challenging. By the time I was done with that, my wrists and forearms and deltoids were aching and there were prickling sensations of HD running up and down my back, because when I push really hard I can almost push through to HD. Almost.
As we all know, almost is the cruellest word.
* * *
My new phone announced a message from Filippe:
‘Stop avoiding me. Come up and let’s talk about it.’
There was a Level 3 frequency code that we used for our meetings. Humans like Marquita need cognitive extensions to get to places like this. She told me that the Resistance systems are always set to be a little more sophisticated than contemporary technology, no matter what historical period they are placed in. But none of it seems very sophisticated to me. I didn’t need any special modules to access the code. All I had to do was run the simulation on myself.
I locked the door. The bed made extraordinary noises when I lay down. The message was suspiciously mild. I knew Filippe was mad. Did I want to go up with my wings in this state? He was always angling to find out more about them. Ever since I first went to Marquita, and Marquita explained about the Resistance and introduced me to Filippe, he’d been trying to get his sensors on my wings.
I felt bad about the plane, so I ran the Resistance app and dropped in to HQ. I found myself looking down on the interior of the round tower where Filippe kept his office, central to which is the impressive disarray of his sixteenth-century rosewood desk. The light passing through the tower windows attached itself to the curved wall to my right in oblong lozenges like coloured sweets: gold and chartreuse and purple according to the tint of the glass. The colours lit up the bookshelves that scrolled up the wall approximately forever; if there was a top to this tower, I had never seen it. Twenty feet below me the shifting pattern of floor tiles swirled yellow and white like a shoreline of clean bile. The odd slip of paper from Filippe’s desk went spinning across the moving floor as he worked, unnoticed by him. He always writes with a quill pen.
I let myself down slowly. There didn’t seem to be anyone here but him and me.
‘I’ll be with you in a moment,’ Filippe said without looking up. I regarded his bald spot. He is small, with a curved nose and wide cheekbones and burnished warm skin that shines even when he isn’t sweating. I don’t know how old he is. Marquita claims he hasn’t aged since she first met him twenty years ago, so there seems
no point in guessing.
‘He’s an AI,’ she told me when she first sent me here. ‘He’s an old smoothie, but don’t be fooled. He’s only a projection of the consciousness of the Resistance.’
That didn’t bother me much. I’m only the projection of a something-or-other, and I wouldn’t even be in this realm if I hadn’t been hijacked.
‘I’m sorry about the plane,’ I said. ‘The situation took me by surprise.’
I meant to imply that he might have warned me what was going to happen, but he just grunted and continued writing. He likes using paper. Says it remembers the trees and the trees remember the soil and the soil remembers ancient times. I don’t think this is entirely a metaphor. The paper he uses is probably laced with time paradox just like everything else in the Resistance; the whole place is weirdly conditional. He put some documents in a folder and put the folder in a drawer that was already stuffed with other folders and crumpled tin foil from old sandwiches, and eggshells, and Tic Tacs. The drawer would not close. Irritation flashed across his face. I could feel the tiny movement of the tiles like percolating sand beneath my soles.
I started to walk towards his desk but he stopped me.
‘There. That’s close enough.’
‘You’re trying to keep me at a safe distance?’ I said, incredulous.
‘I don’t know if it’s safe, but it’s a distance.’
The tips of my wings were brushing the round, book-lined walls to either side. It was an uneasy sensation, as though the contents of the books were whispering into my nethermost feathers and insinuating themselves. I retracted my wings.
‘The oil on your wings. I can find no record of a recent spill in the Atlantic where you fell. So where did it come from?’
‘I didn’t get it from the water,’ I said. ‘It seemed to ooze out from inside my feathers. When the briefcase opened. It was the briefcase that damaged the plane. It’s unstable.’
I saw his repressed hostility in the flare of his nostrils as he exhaled through his nose, mouth clamped shut; but he made a note with his fluffy pen. While he was doing this with one hand, with the other he straightened some papers and put an anvil-shaped bronze weight on them. Reciprocally, a stack of folders on the far side of the desk slid to the floor, spilling their contents. I bent to pick them up, but he forestalled me with a gesture.
Occupy Me Page 5