“Securitas, disable interior liner on Door Three.”
The energy-field fortifying the deck-door crackles and dissipates, giving Paul access to the patio, which juts defiantly outside over his yard, piercing the cone of solar panels humming in the gulley with shadow. At its furthest, it’s pillared to thirty feet above the incline.
Cluttered around the patio is a curiosity-shop’s store of technological abortions, prototypical implants, and doodads, complimented on the side by two double-locked boxes containing a pair of plasma rifles with no trophies to speak of. Stacked neatly against the lacquered hardwood banister is a cord of Aleppo pine and a box of kindling—his last defense against the midwinter desert chill.
Paul opens the patio door, but waits in the vacant threshold, temporarily content to let his eyes skip across terracotta waves and rock the cradle of cotton-candy clouds weighed-low with the sun.
Returning his attention to the tablet, Paul carefully steps outside, feeling the warmth of the last of the daylight. He looks up without addressing the sun directly with a gaze, and notices a purple and pink cloud-formation separate. The ordinary illuminates the extraordinary: A fragmentor! I’m going to need a fragmentor, he realizes. The code rolling down his tablet’s screen into obscurity cannot be completed; not now—not without destroying the device and erasing a decade’s worth of work.
He bolts back into the retreat, excited about his potential breakthrough, leaving the door open in consideration of any prospective bladder-heavy dog. Paul opens the middle compartment on the pantry-cupboard straddling the divider wall between the kitchen and bathroom, and yanks on a wired-can of ration putty. He recoils from the shelf, clutching the tablet to his breast. There’s a click, followed by the sound of whining gears. The cupboard pops up an inch, and slides to the left, leaving a gaping rectangular divot in the floor.
Paul descends into the darkness. The temperature drops, almost a degree by rung. Ten degrees down, he overextends his leading leg, kicking terra firma. With a reflexive twist, he flicks a switch, and a string of lithium lights powers on, washing the cramped tunnel, enclosed by corrugated white-washed walls, in a sterile-looking plum colour.
Preceded by plumes of breath, he ventures down the passage, careful not to bump his head on the piping and fiber-optic cables soldered along the ceiling.
“Securitas, update.”
“Perimeter is secure. Comms are clear. Batteries have charged and solar panels are folding.”
“Alright,” Paul says in a wavering voice. “Cloak the gulley and jam all scans.”
Content with having addressed his paranoia, only sometimes warranted, he presses into the tunnel’s destination: a small, oil-stained room coned around a crooked desk, cluttered with computer screens, quantum-processors, pickled brains, and wiry mishmash.
A photograph of Rachel and the girls, compulsively thumbed at the corners, leans against a screen set lower in the spider’s eye. Paul sits down and looks at it sedately. He hears their voices. The picture reaches out to him with context, undermining his resolve and handle on the past. He hears Rachel telling him to take his time and to relax. Angela’s keen to tell him about her day, puppeteering also for little mute Pythia, who says nothing; he feels her silence, just the same. Born with a rare form of autism, she could only mime or sign her affection, always more genuinely than the other two mouths oiled-over with thumb prints.
Paul shakes his head, and digs into the top drawer. He pulls a SIK bottle out, and whips off the top. One scalene left. Great for treating problems in the short-run, but like the corner-store glasses dad used to buy and wear, the short-term relief bares deleterious long-term consequences. He pops it, tucks the picture of his estranged family away, and plots his elbows on the desk, covering his eyes with his palms.
“Get a grip, man,” his slurs with conviction.
Via a Monocle prompt, he turns all of the screens on. Paul’s tablet immediately synchronizes with the amalgam of other whirring, buzzing appliances, and ten-years-worth of code and obsession begin to stream on all monitors. Paul’s world-changing Empty Thought varnishes the cave in shades of green.
Ever since creating the CLOUD, he knew he had to be the one to destroy it. That is, when it failed to accomplish what he had intended it to do. When wasn’t important; how, on the other hand…
The Empty Thought started out as an anti-virus program Paul’d been working on in his Outland lab. By fate and with a little bit of tweaking, it became a data singularity in potentia. Isolate a malignant tool, file or script, activate the Empty Thought, and then bam! Oblivion for the targeted file and anything associated with it; well, anything with a virtual component within reach, really. Electronic antimatter.
Paul runs a diagnostic on his latest line of code, proving himself right. It’s as complete as it can be at this stage. What I need…a fragmentor and a cipher. Easier said than done.
The Empty Thought cannot be contained in its complete form. After all, whatever would save or accommodate it would be ruined. With a data-fragmentor, Paul can conceivably finish the code in segments, and transport the segregated parts to wherever it is he needs them to go. With a fragmentor, the only thing Paul would need is a way of decrypting the code’s activator—he’d data-locked it years ago thinking he was doing the world a service.
Paul yanks an old keyboard out of the second desk-drawer, and prompts the centre screen with a query. “FRAGMENTOR, FOR SALE, CALIFORNIA.”
A short list of dealers and addresses appears. So far as sellers in the region go, there’s an Astro Farnsworth in San Francisco, a Chris Kalnychuk in Anaheim, and an unknown seller in Los Angeles.
Paul queries his aural inbox for comms from Katajima, specifically, comms pertaining to Allen Scheele. One transcript appears, indicating the funeral is in L.A.
Looks like I’m going, after all.
Paul flits on his Monocle and comms Katajima.
Shouta appears. He wipes his face and smiles. “P-S, is that you!?”
“Yeah. Hope I’m not interrupting…”
“Nonsense. Dinner services action, not the other way around.” Katajima crooks his head, attempting to identify the place fish-bowled around Paul. “Where are you?”
Paul’d forgotten to turn off the Monocle’s visual link. “That’s not important,” Paul replies, turning off the camera feed.
“Have you considered taking me up on my offer?”
“I have, actually.”
“Terrific. Then I will see you on Wednesday.”
“Alright. Goodnight, Shouta.”
“I am overjoyed—“
Paul terminates the feed.
He already presses his luck working odd-jobs for Mansueito—the man they call “Chief”—in order to bankroll his efforts on the Empty Thought, all of which is in violation of his parole, not to mention in violation of a long list of petty and criminal laws. Going to LA on business would be suicide. To go there on vacation? An entirely different matter altogether. Wasting this opportunity because of a ten-year-old grudge would be foolish. I might be insane, but I’m no idiot.
Barking upstairs unnerves him. He looks down the corrugated hallway, and back at his bug-eye of screens. With a fluid, finger’s dance on the keys, Paul firewalls his invention, ensuring its secrecy and safety.
Apollo is waiting for him at the top of the ladder. He prods Paul with a wet nose before he’s even made it out of the hatch.
“What are you on about?” Paul says, thumbing the hair down on the dog’s shoulders.
More barking on the patio prompts Paul outside, Apollo following close behind. A magnetic disturbance shakes the house in tandem with a scorching sound. Paul’s heard it before. R50 afterburners on a south-western MAT[erial] transport. Silt and dust, shaken from the rocky protuberances above, give dimension to the fingernail of light squeezed beneath a sky-full of purple cumulonimbus. Paul rubs his face clean of the speckles, and winces, trying to confirm his suspicion.
The transport thunders over the
house and away, trailing heavy black smoke towards the city. A stylized “O,” complete with the trademark pyramid, reveal its nature and purpose. I knew it. A Spirit Train, carrying with it men and women who’ve either invested to insulate and forget their physical prisons in order to live unimpeded in the CLOUD, or, conversely, been marked for reprocessing. Either way, they’re headed to one Outland Outpost or another.
The Outposts were initially purposed only to hold and broadcast the off-board memories and data saved by California subscribers, permitting them to synch to the CLOUD wirelessly. The locals call them “cypulchres.”
Winchester’s cypulchres no longer serve merely as signal-boosting server towers. With time, the CLOUD has produced extremists and addicts. Not everyone can afford all the latest CLOUD tech, or the airtime necessary to synchronize in the first place. Most of the population synch from home or from Outland hospices. Those who can fit the bill frequently have their bodies interred in the Outposts, allowing them to evap full-time without worrying about physical maintenance. California’s cypulchres, stitching the horizon to the Pacific, are catacombs housing the living dead.
The barking subsides, and the dogs lazily collapse into the sunlight. Paul walks over to the weapon crates, armoured with heavplast—a durable and bulletproof polypropylene—and unlocks the closest with a quick grind of the combination dial, worn-down by repetition. Inside the crate there’s a pulse rifle, swaddled in egg foam, and, beside it, a revolver. Paul summons up the revolver, prolapsing its foam outline. He cranks the cylinder open to the side, and blows down the barrel. Jamming it under his belt, he grips the railing, and leans forward, inhaling deeply. “Back into the Blue.” It’ll get worse before it gets better.
Chapter 8: OVER THE MOUNTAIN
BLANK COW EYES find him, inverted in the water droplets rolling down the mirror. Paul breaks his stare with the sad, scared, and lonely animal screened behind his ambition and grizzle, and rinses his comb. He hesitates, looking at the wet hair embroiled around the teeth, and quickly returns the comb to its soapy mold on the acrylic basin. Past his hand he sees the waste bin, flush with bloody rags and dried flecks of tissue. Looks like a Satanist’s hamper.
He’d been a naughty outcast, digging Winchester’s NEXUS chip out like he had. Worse than the chastisement he’d receive if discovered is the diminished mobility in his left leg. The Outland surgeon was wise to clip it under the vastus lateralis, where it’d neither chafe nor bruise, but hitch on over time, requiring extraction by a trained professional. Paul could very well have done it professionally or programmed an android to do the same, but instead elected to electro-knife it out after drinking a bottle of bourbon. The rags remind him of his impetuousness and the resultant pain, and the pain alerts him to an opportunity for a diversion.
Apollo, scampering downstairs—abetted by a prosthetic leg and hip—made a wonderful, temporary home for Winchester’s tracking device. It didn’t matter if Paul’s overseers could make sense of his galloping around or his tireless pursuit of round-tailed squirrels…I’m insane, after all.
Paul traipses into the living room overlooking the gully, and calls Apollo. Apollo heeds his beckon call—not to be bested by Zeus, who similarly bounds to the sound of his master’s voice. Paul carefully retracts the tiny beacon from a groove in the Rottweiler’s titanium thigh, and stows it away in his jacket pocket.
“Thank you for holding onto this for me,” he says, patting Apollo, and then Zeus, in turn, for the sake of evenness.
The domestic moment is broken by a loud, singular screech—the retreat’s air-raid siren.
Securitas immediately comms Paul. “An Outland Reduvius drone just laser-tagged the premises from thirty-thousand feet. Would you like to respond with force?”
“If they wanted me dead, they’d have followed-through already. I believe they’re merely marking a parking spot. Prepare countermeasures, nonetheless.”
An incoming comm flits across Paul’s Monocle. Katajima.
Paul closes his line to Securitas. “Shouta…” he says shrewdly.
“Good morning, Paul. Your ride is on the way. Is there any cause for concern?”
“Pardon?”
“Reports show that your retreat’s weapon system is active.”
“A precaution, nothing more.”
“Please do not give Winchester any more reason to question my faith in you.”
“Fine,” says Paul, nonverbally instructing Securitas to disarm.
Securitas turns off the anti-air rocket launchers and radar jammers, as requested. The cloaking mechanism blanketing Paul’s desert-compound sizzles, and then slinks back. Such an inviting gesture as reintroducing earth to sky won’t bring back the killdeer or the warblers, but will at least save Katajima’s pilot some vexation.
Paul disables the patio’s electroshield, and heads out onto the deck, closing the door behind him. He drops the patio ladder into the gully, which clicks into its scabbards rooted in the limestone below. He buckles the strap on his overstuffed duffle-bag across his chest, checks the revolver at his side, and then dips down steadily.
At the base, he recomposes himself and comms Securitas. “Electro-fortify all doors when I leave. The second I’m airborne, initiate Alcatraz Protocol. See to it that Zeus and Apollo want for nothing. That means preventing the Kay9 auto feed from jamming again.”
“Yes, Dr. Sheffield. As you wish.”
Some things cannot be left to chance. Paul forwards Securitas’ orders to Cerebus via Monocle, quashing ancillary worry about the first AI’s constancy. The inconsistency of his digital progeny is probably its most humanizing characteristic and quite possibly the only fault in its design.
The gears on the solar panels, crimped together like rose petals, whine as they force the structure to blossom, on schedule. Paul wipes silt off of one of the panels as he walks by.
“Incoming U.F.O.,” Securitas warns.
“Yes, thank you, Securitas. I know.”
A black, gnarled V looms on the horizon, warping the sky around it with heat haze. Paul’s Monocle targets it with a scanning reticle, but is unable to provide make or model. No need. Paul knows all about Winchester’s precious Dragonfly.
Paul wasn’t the only egg Outland had poached from the DOD’s Cyber Warrior Project after the War. A colleague who’d fancied himself a renaissance man—building unbreakable, light plastics and navigation systems for autonomous Cyber Warrior drones—custom built and printed the Dragonfly for Winchester. Whatever the reason he offered for naming it so either boiled down to a lack of creativity or a wicked sense of irony.
It looks nothing like a dragonfly, and worlds-more like an antlered-deer’s skull, with turbo fans in the place of eyes, a cockpit fitted between the jaws, and multi-pivot wings wired behind the fuselage where antlers’d be. If it weren’t for Outland’s insectum-based naming convention, the obvious choice would have been “Actaeon.”
Winchester’s ship touches-down just beyond the cone of solar panels, scorching the Mojave yucca grouped around the retreat’s buried septic tank. The pilot activates aft-shields to minimize the kick of debris Paul’s way. Notwithstanding the shower of rocks and sand that manage through the shields, Paul trudges forward, one hand resting on his bag, and the other protecting his eyes.
The ship’s canopy slides back, freeing the pilot’s waving hand.
Paul approaches.
The pilot pulls off his trunk to speak. “Dr. Paul Sheffield?” he inquires with a Texan lilt.
“That’s me,” Paul shouts over the double-stacked turbo fans, thrashing asynchronously.
“Captain Peter Samkorsky. I’ll be taking y’all to Los Angeles.”
BELTED INTO HIS SEAT behind Samkorsky, sucking oxygen through an accordioned trunk, Paul watches the earth track backwards, pulling Barstow’s neighbour, Victorville, in and out of view—still as low and suburban as it was half-a-century ago.
The San Gabriel Mountains rise before them, puncturing clouds and high-hanging smog. Sam
korsky signals to Paul with a thumbs-up that they’re ascending, probably to avoid gunfire from the PIT rats slumming it on the peaks. Paul can see them, victims of war and geography, bunched in their shanties along the wall, which halves Telegraph Peak like Ming’s wonder.
Clouds engulf the ship as it arcs over the rocks. Paul holds his breath for the reveal as the last of the vaporous film curls by like an opening curtain. Smoggy outlines fill with Lotusland high-rises. Los Angeles takes the stage.
Gargantuan towers, windowed-obelisks, and hexagonal pyramids stand above magma-flows of hover-cars and terrestrial traffic, which permeate the Blue Zone and the RIM, hemmed-in and protected from the chaos to the east by the Partition.
Winchester’s Blue Zone, home to Outland subscribers, California’s elite, and tech-progressives, extends up the coast and dominates most of the old downtown to as far as the river. High tech, high life.
Its neighbouring sector, the RIM, is populated by upper and lower middle-class reactionaries and moderates. A porous border separates the two, comprised of checkpoints and magnetic markers. It’s a mixed bag, by comparison, boasting freedoms and tragedies unheard of in Winchester’s fiefdom.
Although most of the RIM’s architecture is relatively unambitious and stumpy, it is checkered along its westernmost reaches by the infamous T-Blocks, which confound any aerial distinction between the sectors.
These vertical suburbs—jet black glass structures in matte-grey iron and titanium corsets—boast their own mayors and their own municipal services. They flicker with illegally-rerouted power and pirated water—pumped up external piping from the Toronto Syndicate’s aquifers in San Joaquin. Paul appreciates their purpose, besides housing RIM ticks: a big fuck-you to their architects insulated in the Blue Zone.
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