Othella (Arcadian Heights)

by Therin Knite

  He straightens up and gently prods his wrist. "Marco was right this time, huh? The pictures were real?"

  "Of course. They were sent by a very naughty someone who has since been dealt with." Dealt with to a degree. Howard has yet to cease debugging that stupid defective droid. Night and day. For two damn years. Obsessive. And it’s gotten worse since the day he shut his personality off. "There must be a virus, Quentin," he says every morning, "or an obvious error."

  That the most advanced computer in the world can’t locate?

  Obviously not.

  "So, you going to kill me?" Martin steels himself, licking at his bloody lip. "Torture Marco’s location out of me then have your thugs shoot me? Knife me? Or will you make it look like a suicide?" The fingers on his left hand spasm, and he winces. "You might as well skip the formalities. You’re wasting your time. I’ve been searching for Marco for months and haven’t found him. I don’t know where he is. And even if I did, I wouldn’t rat him out."

  Ah, feigned heroics.

  "Mr. Martin, there’s no need for you to die. You’re a sensible man. Unlike Mr. Salt, who is deeply disturbed." I prop my hands on my knee and smile. "I can’t permit Marco Salt to keep running around with dangerous material in his possession. I can’t allow the Heights to be under the shadow of such a threat. Personally, I find it a miracle that Mr. Salt hasn’t committed some vain attack on the community yet, given his fragile state of mind. Although, I suppose people in his condition aren’t—"

  "You’re not going to convince me he’s crazy, if that’s your angle."

  "Crazy? No. Depressed. Traumatized. Not quite in his right mind? Yes." I raise my thumbs as a signal to the patrolmen. One of them sneaks behind Martin. The movement doesn’t breach the veil of fear and anger clouding his mind. "Mr. Salt was a good business partner for many years, and as much as it pains me to have to eliminate someone who used to be an asset, it must be done. He’s not the kind of man who will surrender once he’s set his sights on a goal. You, of all people, should know that. And unfortunately, his recent movements suggest his latest goal involves a confrontation at the Heights."

  "Wait, you know where he is?"

  "Indeed."

  "Then why not just off him? Huh?"

  "I’ve tried. He’s slippery." Like a dying eel.

  "If you can’t catch him with all your resources, then what do you want from me?"

  "I want you to do what you do best."

  The sneaky patrolman seizes Martin’s shoulders, and the man starts, struggles to free himself. His good hand bats at the reinforced plating on the patrolman’s forearms. He tries to thrash his way out of the hold, sinking down into the sofa cushion. To no avail. The shoulder grip tightens until Martin cries out and goes limp. His flushed face hangs low in defeat. He mumbles, "Which is? Tell me. What do I do best, Q? Tell me so I can say no and you can get this over with."

  To be honest, I admire his loyalty. I felt that way about someone once upon a time.

  I rise from the chair and crouch in front of him, mulling over how to present my point of view in a way this man will comprehend. And a way that won’t cause Howard to snap his neck prematurely. Howard gets antsy about some of my tactics nowadays, despite their general effectiveness. This is one of those times I wish he wasn’t here, when the sorely limited patrolman programming would serve me better.

  These times are becoming more frequent.

  I tuck two fingers under Martin’s chin and force him to meet my gaze. "How about this? Let me tell you a story, and then I’ll ask my favor. Let me tell you a story about the end of the world."

  3

  Marco

  ( 2 Years Ago )

  I hit Reggie going fifty-two miles per hour. Well, more like clip him.

  The passenger side mirror deals a bruising blow to his hip, and he spins around, loses his footing, and smacks the ground face first. Brakes squeal as my stolen Chevy swerves to a stop on the curb. I haul ass out of the car and rush to Reggie’s side. He’s moaning and hissing, one hand on his hip, his forehead pressed against the asphalt.

  "Reggie! Christ! What the fuck are you doing?"

  At first, I thought he was a deer loping out of the woods. He halted in view of my headlights, eyes wide, mouth O-shaped. I jerked the wheel sideways in the nick of time. If I’d been any slower, he’d be road kill right now.

  He mutters, "Looking for you, dumbass."

  The area is dark and deserted, but the roads wildly curve through the woods, so someone could happen upon the scene and start asking questions at any time. I sling one of Reggie’s arms over my shoulder and lug him to an unbalanced standing position. His breathing is labored as if he’s been running for miles. His jeans are dirty and torn, pine needles and briars stuck to the denim. There’s a splint on his left wrist. Half his face is a mottled yellow-brown.

  Old wounds. But not too old.

  I help him to the car and carefully lower him onto the back seat. He lets me lead without resistance and tries to catch his breath. While I’m checking the passenger side mirror for damage, I glimpse a pair of headlights cutting through the trees. I hurry back into the driver’s seat and get a move on.

  Clear of the following vehicle, I switch on the interior light and use the rearview mirror to peek at Reggie. He hasn’t moved, but his chest rises and falls at quick, even intervals. His eyes are closed, and a lip busted a week or two ago shudders as he breathes.

  "Reggie."

  "Hm?"

  "How the hell did you find me?"

  I love Reggie and all, but if he can track me down with his resources, then so can Q with his superior Heights tech. This meeting is not fortunate. We could both end up dead tonight. What happened to Reggie’s innate sense of caution?

  "Called in a favor with an old CIA buddy. He used his contacts to help me find you."

  "Shit." Knowing Q’s government connections, he’s been following Reggie every step of the way. There could be a helicopter full of patrolmen overhead, waiting for an ideal moment to shoot the car to kingdom come. I’ll have to ditch it and snag another one. "You shouldn’t have done that. You should have stayed at home and made money and been happy. You were safe, Reggie. God dammit! Why bother with me?"

  "I’ve known you since you were three, Marco. How can you ask me that question?"

  "This isn’t about our friendship. It’s about staying alive. You’re not safe. We’re not safe. Q’s probably on our tail. You don’t know what’s been happening, Reggie. But it’s big. It’s huge. And it’s not a prank. There’s a conspiracy, and I finally have a lead for exposing it."

  Reggie springs up, clutching his hip, and meets my mirrored eyes. "What lead?"

  4

  Quentin

  ( 2 Years Ago )

  When Martin recovers from shellshock, ten or so minutes after I complete my tale of woe, he enters that struggling captured animal mode human beings sometimes display. He shatters his own coffee table with a flailing leg, flops around on the sofa until he frees himself from the patrolman’s grasp, and flings himself across the room in my general direction.

  His freedom lasts four and a half seconds.

  The patrolman leaps over the couch and springs forward, ramming into Martin from behind. There’s an audible crack, and the man shrieks in pain as he tumbles to the floor under the patrolman’s weight. They hit the carpet with a resounding thump, and Martin stops moving.

  Mild alarm swells in my chest. I can’t let the man die yet. I require his assistance.

  And, truthfully, he’s one of the few people I’d like to see live through this debacle. Salt can burn, the bitter fool, but Martin is a true intellectual. Someone I can have a conversation with. Like Howard in the time before. Like Howard until last year. Martin asked all the right questions in all the right places during my story, probed at the points I was intentionally vague. Smart. Bold. Critical. Not a hapless, sentimental idiot like his nut bar of a best friend.

  I whistle, sharp and loud, and the patrolma
n’s head whips up. The faceless helmet examines me, silent. Howard could access any system in the apartment and use its speakers to talk, but he adamantly refuses to reveal his existence to anyone other than me. Understandable. But an unnecessary precaution in this case.

  "Get off him, Howard. I think you broke his back."

  The patrolman rises with unnatural grace and steps away from the motionless man sprawled out on the warm brown carpeting. Martin is twisted like a broken puppet, and for a second or two, I’m convinced he is dead. Then I spy his chest moving. Slow. Erratic. His fingers begin to tremble as he regains awareness. His legs remain stationary.

  "Good Lord. Did you paralyze him?"

  The patrolman doesn’t respond, which confirms my fears. Howard zips up tight whenever he makes a dumb mistake. Runs from his failures like they’re too slow to chase him down. You’d think as a machine with access to a compendium of all human knowledge, he’d act more mature than a humiliated teenage boy. Acknowledge his mistakes. Regrettably, Howard never quite grasped that element of adulthood. Not in life. Not in his computer afterlife.

  These days, I can’t even get him to apologize. For anything.

  I guess he can’t understand the purpose of apologies without access to the emotions that prompt them.

  I rub my temples and fight off a growl. "Howard, pick the man up—carefully—and put him in the car. Also, if you can manage it, find the nearest hospital with a spinal cord rejuvenation machine and input the location into the GPS. Unless you’d like to break the car, too."

  A minute of stillness passes before the patrolman bends down and lifts Martin into a bridal carry. The injured man moans, his eyelids fluttering, as the patrolman performs a jerky about-face and stomps off toward the front door.

  Howard has left the building and returned the patrolmen to their regularly scheduled programming.

  I dig the car keys out of my pocket and mutter, "Guess I’m driving."

  5

  Marco

  ( 2 Years Ago )

  Reggie, belted into the front passenger seat, digs into his fast food bag and starts devouring a burger. Like he hasn’t eaten in years. I weave us through shadowy back roads, avoiding highways that cut through heavily populated areas. There are too many checkpoints these days, and Q is monitoring many of them. As I discovered in Cincinnati. I still miss that gorgeous Mercedes I jacked from an unsuspecting lawyer. Beautiful car. Now riddled with bullet holes in a dump somewhere.

  After Reggie shoves the last bite of burger into his mouth, I ask, "So you know what’s happening at the Heights?"

  "I know what you know plus a bit of background."

  A non-answer.

  "Oh?" I prod.

  "Yeah." He shuts me down.

  "Reggie..."

  "I know enough, and it’s more than I want to know. And nothing I know will affect anything you do. So drop it. I’m tired of talking about it. I’m tired of thinking about it. I’m tired, Marco." Tight-lipped, he wipes his hands off with a wrinkled napkin then pats his injured face. "Trust me. Q came by for a visit and gave me a thorough lecture."

  My stomach twists into a knot, and I grip the wheel so hard my bitten nails leave marks. "He hurt you? He’s after me, and he hurt you?"

  "He figured I might know your whereabouts."

  "But you didn’t?"

  "Not then. It was a few weeks ago. I told him as much, but he didn’t seem to buy it. He left a patrolman at my door. The bastard wouldn’t let me leave." He scoops a handful of fries out of his bag. "Then I got lucky. Thanks to the end of the world."

  "What?"

  "The angry poor finally came after the New York elite. My street got hit with three car bombs one night. Six days into my Q-enforced confinement. Blew out all my windows. The patrolman left his station and went to check out the street. For less than a minute. But I was ready. I had a go bag packed just in case. I grabbed it and snuck out through my kitchen. Then I ran. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore. Ended up spending the night with a group of homeless punks in Central Park." A breathy chuckle. "They were actually nice kids. Gave me food and everything. Of course, the patrolman tracked me down the next morning, and I had to book it."

  Reggie’s tale mimics mine in all the places that leave my chest aching. I’ve deliberately refused to contact him for this exact reason—associating with me is dangerous. But Q is growing more agitated by the day, it seems, and near misses aren’t enough for him anymore. So he’s going after people I care about, trying to squeeze information out of them, trying to draw me into the open with threats to my shrinking pool of loved ones.

  We cross the Missouri state line at two AM, and most of the surrounding territory is dark. A major power outage from the violent thunderstorms that tore through the state three days ago. A nervous tremor assaults my fingers. There’s debris in the road. Few cars pass us by. Hard to navigate terrain. No crowds to blend in with. If anyone’s chasing us, we’re sitting ducks.

  Reggie finishes his fries and leans his seat back as far as it will go. His lids are heavy, but I feel compelled to ask him, "How did you finally find me?"

  One eye closes, but the other trains itself on me. "Luck. One of my buddy’s contacts spotted you in a small town in Tennessee and gave me your location. I’ve been tracking you since then, but I was ambushed a few hours ago."

  "By the patrolmen?"

  "Yeah." He crumples his food bag and tosses it on the floor by his feet. "They totaled my ride. I used my best guess on which road you’d pick and trekked through the woods to get there, but I knew it was a stretch. Well, I thought it was a stretch. Can’t believe you fucking ran me down. Thanks for the inevitable chronic hip pain."

  "Hey, you’re the one who ran out in front of my car. You almost gave me a heart attack."

  The other eye creeps open, and a light smile graces his lips. "Wouldn’t that have sucked? We’re both on the run for our lives, and we kill each other by accident?"

  I laugh. For the first time in more than a year. It feels...nice.

  Reggie’s hand brushes my shoulder. "Good to see you, Marco."

  "You, too, Reggie."

  "So, tell me about this grand master plan of yours. Where are we heading?"

  I want to say we are not heading anywhere, but the expression of warm relief on Reggie’s face is too much, too soon. I refused to contact him for his own safety, but that point is moot now. He’s as safe with me as he is anywhere else. Maybe safer. Apart we’re Reggie and Marco, two smart, stubborn assholes. Together, we’re a force to be reckoned with.

  "All right. Let me start from the beginning. You remember the pictures?"

  6

  Quentin

  ( 2 Years Ago )

  Rejuvenation machines generate an obnoxious whirring noise for the duration of their use. Fifty minutes into the torment of watching the parallel bars go round and round the narrow bed where Martin’s paralyzed body rests, I request a pair of earplugs. The nurse standing watch, a mousy young woman with wide eyes, nods and bolts out of the surgery theater. As the double doors swing shut, I catch sight of a crowd of anxious onlookers.

  The staff was not enthusiastic about my usurpation of the hospital’s one rejuvenation machine. An administrator tried to expel me from the building. Then he came face to face with a patrolman. He’s been cowering in his office ever since. While his not-so-loyal followers have gathered to watch the spectacle unfold. From a distance.

  Two patrolmen stand guard outside the entrance. The other resides in the corner of the theater. It hasn’t moved since the procedure began, and it’s beginning to resemble a suit of armor lining a manor hallway.

  Martin hasn’t budged either. He’s lying on his stomach, naked from the waist up. A white sheet covers everything below his hips for modesty. Needles pierce his skin at even intervals along his spine. They’re attached to an IV bag filled with bluish fluid. The light from the rejuvenation machine interacts with the chemicals in the fluid to induce rapid healing. The exact science behi
nd it is lost on me.

  I’m the manager, not the maker.

  The droids produce the necessary advancements. Howard approves what they produce. I either send what Howard approves to our partner companies for commercial manufacture or stow the projects away until such time as the Heights plan requires them. Me learning science is nowhere in that cycle. Which is an excellent arrangement because I’m terrible at science.

  So like most laymen who get to see a rejuvenation machine in action, I feel a sense of childish awe. Watching a magic light show heal a formerly permanent injury.

  I sit on an uncomfortable stool at Martin’s bedside, searching for signs of life in his half-lidded eyes. He awoke briefly on the trip to the hospital and suffered a panic attack. Screaming. Hyperventilating. Terror blazing through his veins. He passed out, thank the Lord, after three or four minutes.

  He’s conscious now, but his expression is so slack I’m not sure he’s "present."

  I lean close to him and ask, "Mr. Martin, can you hear me? Do you know where you are?"

  No initial response. I wait. Glazed eyes slide around in their sockets, locking onto me after two tries. His lips mouth words. "Do you really think you have the moral high ground?"

  The question catches me off guard. I’m humble enough to admit it. For Martin to have the presence of mind to ask me such a question in his current state is nothing short of astounding. If he’d been born a generation earlier or me a generation later, we’d have gotten on swell. The flow of time is such a pity on occasion.

  I run my tongue across my teeth as I formulate a response. "Yes. No doubt in my mind. Given the circumstances, Mr. Martin, there is no alternative. There is no better moral solution. To achieve the acceptable end, sacrifices must be made now. It’s the only way to prepare. It’s the only way to be ready and waiting when the time comes. To prevent half a millennium of darkness. To stop the vicious cycle from occurring again."