The Great Forgetting

by James Renner

  “I don’t…”

  The ground shook violently beneath their feet. Thunder rumbled as the doors to the Maestro’s lair were blasted apart. In moments, the Hounds would be upon them.

  The Maestro pushed Jack inside. Immediately the door slid shut. The cabin filled with an electric hum and the Lady Anne lurched forward as a conveyor belt engaged. Crew and cabin soared sideways down a tunnel, into the dark.

  4 There was room enough inside to spread out and get cozy. Jack counted twenty-four plush seats, the kind you might find on a Greyhound. Everyone found a place to sit. It was a smooth ride, but the transparency of the walls was disconcerting. It gave them a sense of how quickly they were traveling through the earth and it made Jack’s stomach roll.

  Sam was full of the same ragged energy she’d given off that day at the fair when they were kids, when she had sat inside a different glass cage. He took her hand and caressed her fingers. The Captain sat in a chair facing them, wincing at the pain in his knees.

  Sam rubbed her nose against Jack’s neck, a simple gesture that warmed his body. She pushed closer.

  “My dad mentioned Ariel once,” said Cole from his seat across the aisle. “It was a kind of branch office for the Collectors. Four of them used to work there, gathering artifacts up and down the West Coast. But then, around 1990, there was a mutiny among the Hounds. This one Hound, Scopes, overthrew their leader, Titano. To consolidate power, Scopes pulled everyone back to New York. He exiled the old boss to Ariel. He might still be there. We should be careful.”

  “Do you really think you can get us to Mu?” asked Jack.

  “I think so, yes,” said Cole. “I know someone who can take us there. But he might need a little convincing. He’s forgotten who he is.”

  5 Ten hours into their journey a gentle bell chimed and a female voice announced, “Miakoda: City of Spires.” Outside the transparent glass, the tunnel gave way to an enormous cavity in the earth that held a silent metropolis. Great spotlights snapped on as they flew along a raised conveyor. Jack shook the Captain awake.

  Their capsule turned toward the city and rose, slantways, into the air. They swayed slightly as hidden gimbals allowed for a balanced ascent. Jack felt his guts drop inside his body as if he were on an elevator that was rising too quickly.

  Miakoda was an empty city of glass and concrete. Skyscrapers twisted like tops of ice cream cones in configurations that reminded Jack more of Whoville than Cleveland. Spotlights illuminated a great park in the center, a perfect circle decorated with bronze statues and empty fountains. A preserved billboard advertised Lawson’s All-Dressed Potato Chips. Behind them the spotlights turned off in their wake, sealing Miakoda in darkness once more.

  “What happened here?” asked Jack. “It doesn’t look damaged at all. Why did they bury the whole city?”

  “They used neutron bombs in the war,” said Cole. “Kills the people, leaves the buildings. But the neutrinos stick around for a few hundred years, blasting microscopic holes into everything organic. You’d be dead in a minute if you stepped outside.”

  “But where do you bury an entire city?” asked the Captain.

  “Look there.” Jack pointed beyond Sam, through the window, to the domed ceiling. A round hole blinked open and then closed, like an eye. “What was that?” he asked.

  It was the voice of the computer that answered. “Directly above you will see the exhaust port that regulates the immense heat generated by the stray neutrinos that have made this city uninhabitable. The temperature is regulated by tubes of circulating water that must be vented periodically.”

  “Old Faithful,” the Captain said. “We’re under Yellowstone.”

  “Correct.”

  The elevator passed over an empty coliseum, its Astroturf proudly advertising the Miakoda Tornadoes, and then into another tunnel, heading west once more.

  SEVEN

  THE MIND AND THE MATTER

  1 They arrived at the western terminal fourteen hours later, and the Captain nudged the boy awake. Cole had been dreaming of his father. The closer they got to Mu, the more he felt the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. His father had never meant for this task to be his.

  The glass elevator came to a jarring stop at an abandoned subway platform wrapped in hanging white moss. The doors opened with a wiff of compressed air. “Ariel,” the female voice intoned.

  Cole accepted the Boy Scout backpack from Sam. The Captain carried two gallons of pure water, all that was left. He followed the others into the dank cavern. The doors closed behind them with a shudder and the capsule pulled back into the dark tunnel and disappeared from their story forever.

  The floor, walls, and ceiling of this way station were a single tiled mosaic that depicted an army of Indians on horseback engaging a division of German panzers. A red-skinned warrior stood atop a tank, pulling a Nazi from the open lid by his blond hair, knife raised for scalping.

  Cole fished a flashlight out of the backpack and shined it around until he found a wide staircase concealed behind a curtain of moss. Jack went first. After a hundred steps the staircase ended at a blast door.

  “Oh, good,” said Nils. “Another creepy fucking door.”

  Cole tried the wheel, but it was rusted tight. He backed up and let Jack have a go. The history teacher put his back into it and slowly it turned, depositing a scrim of red dust onto the floor. The stairway was suddenly filled with the warm light of the western sky.

  One by one, the travelers stepped out, shielding their eyes against the bright summer sun. They emerged from a concrete shack disguised to look like part of a water treatment facility, large domes of steel and fiberglass on the edge of a wide lake. This was where fluoride was mixed with the water of Lake Merwin before it was sent along to the residents of Cowlitz County, Washington. The air was thick with evergreen mist and the fragrance of the thimbleberries on the edge of the forest. Foothills rose around them, crowning the still waters. In the distance they could see the blasted top of St. Helens, blue and hazy on the horizon.

  “Now what?” asked Sam.

  “We need to find a library,” said Cole.

  2 Two hours later, Jack and Cole walked into the small library that was part of the new strip mall in Battle Ground, just south of Ariel. They had taken a cab, which had dropped off the others outside a Menchie’s around the corner. The Captain was after a yogurt topped with toffee chips.

  Cole made his way to a bank of computers across from circulation while Jack walked around the library, keeping an eye out for Hounds. He busied himself by reading the framed historic newspaper clippings that hung on every wall. Battle Ground was the site of an uprising by the Yakima Indian tribe centuries ago. Their leader, Chief Umtuch, had died here under mysterious circumstances. Ariel, he learned, was known for two other mysteries: D. B. Cooper and Bigfoot.

  The day before Thanksgiving 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper purchased a ticket for Flight 305 out of Portland to Seattle, a thirty-minute hop on a 727. There were few passengers on the jet that afternoon. As soon as they were at altitude, Cooper gave the stewardess a note claiming he had a bomb and would blow up the plane unless they gave him two hundred thousand dollars and four parachutes. The pilot landed at Sea-Tac and the feds gave Cooper the money and chutes in exchange for the passengers. Then the pilot took off again. Somewhere over Ariel, Cooper jumped out the back of the plane with the money, never to be seen again. To this day, it remains the only successful American hijacking.

  Some of the more colorful residents of southern Washington believe Cooper landed near Lake Merwin, where he was promptly eaten by a Bigfoot.

  Bigfoot was popular in this part of Washington State. At least a dozen news articles dating back to the sixties showed grainy photographs of the Sasquatch, spotted by hikers in the woods around St. Helens. One high-res photo, taken in 2005, captured the creature drinking from a river. Jack grinned. There was no mistaking the monster in the picture. It was a naked Hound, bathing himself in a stream.
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  Cole stepped up behind him. The look on his face was troubling.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” the boy said.

  “Uh, good news first, please,” said Jack.

  “Well, I found him. The guy from Mu. He’s alive and he’s still a pilot. So … you know, we’ve got that going for us.”

  “So what’s the bad news?”

  “We’ve got a little farther to go.”

  3 Scopes stood on the beach and watched the waves deposit globs of crude oil all around him. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

  Al-Qaeda had destroyed Deepwater Horizon and now the ocean floor was bleeding crude and the waves were poisoning the shore. Oil stocks were tanking. That was bad enough. But Deepwater was also a HAARP relay and now half of Louisiana was getting a weakened forgetting signal. It would be pointless to have the Maestro reset the broadcast again until a new relay was built and that might take months.

  These attacks were coming in waves and Scopes could barely keep up. Oklahoma City. Fort Hood. Boston. Terrorist cells, each trying to expose the Great Forgetting. He didn’t know for sure, but Scopes thought these terrorists might be the Maestro’s pet projects. What new memories was the Maestro sneaking into the code?

  Sometimes Scopes wondered if something was wrong with the algorithm itself. Maybe there was a bug in the system. A virus. That would be bad. Scopes needed it to continue long enough for the Wichita brothers to make a perfect mess of things. The Great Forgetting needed to hold together until then.

  His phone vibrated loudly.

  Scopes answered.

  “How bad is it?” It was the eldest brother.

  “It’s bad,” said Scopes.

  “Well. Leave it. I can handle things down there for a couple weeks. I need you elsewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Malaysia. That group from Franklin Mills just surfaced in Washington State. They bought illegal passports from an asset in Seattle. Then Jack Felter booked a flight to Kuala Lumpur. They left before I could flag their new IDs.”

  Damn it. Cole. Somehow the kid knew about Zaharie Shah. Probably his father told him. That was unfortunate.

  “Why are they flying to Malaysia, Scopes?” the man asked.

  “That’s where Cole’s father relocated a prisoner of war. We cooked his brain, made him forget. But he was from Mu. And the kid can make him remember how to get home.”

  “Stop them.”

  Scopes nudged a glob of oil, rolling it back down the beach, into the water.

  4 Zaharie was returning from the Pasar Malam on Petaling Street, swinging a plastic bag full of red snapper and artichokes, when he noticed the American boy watching him from across the street. There were Americans in this section of Kuala Lumpur, quite a few. But most were IT types or ESL teachers. This kid was different. Uninitiated. Like his left foot was still firmly set in Manhattan. He blinked at Zaharie. Zaharie smiled and continued on. His car was parked around the corner.

  The red snapper was a present for his wife. She hadn’t spoken to him since they’d quarreled two nights ago. A stupid argument about fixing the drainage behind their home. She liked the way he prepared snapper. Just olive oil and cracked salt. He’d use the charcoal grill with the mesquite he’d saved. The sun was setting, casting a rose glow on the Petronas Twin Towers in the distance. It would be dark soon. They could eat by candlelight on the patio.

  “Excuse me?”

  Zaharie stopped. The odd teenage boy was directly behind him now. His dark hair was messy like he liked it that way. A very American look. Something about his demeanor set off alarms in Zaharie’s mind, like an abort warning on approach.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. “Are you lost?” There was a hostel on Jalan Thambipillay, not far from here. The kid was probably staying there.

  “You’re Zaharie Ahmad Shah.”

  “Yes. Do I know you?”

  Suddenly, two men jogged out of the alleyway behind him. One was a thin gentleman with overlarge ears, a normal-enough-looking fellow, but the other man was a giant, a red-bearded beast like a Viking from some myth. They grabbed him and before he could shout for help, they’d pulled him down the alley and around a trash bin that smelled of oily nasi lemak.

  “What do you want?” asked Zaharie.

  The boy pulled a pair of pliers from his jeans pocket. “We want to help you remember,” he said. The Viking pulled Zaharie down to his knees and held him there. The other man kept his head still. The boy stepped forward and then the pliers went into Zaharie’s mouth. The tool tasted like gun grease.

  Zaharie screamed. But only for a second.

  The boy held the pair of pliers before Zaharie’s face and in its teeth was a tooth, a nerve still dangling underneath. The pain was numbing, excruciating, but Zaharie stayed quiet. That wasn’t a nerve dangling from the bottom, he realized. It was a bit of copper wire and it was attached to a tiny transistor someone had plastered into a crevasse of his tooth.

  “What…,” he began.

  And then the memories hit him like a tsunami: the dumb birds that lived on the beach outside Peshtigo; the great geodesic dome in the center of the forgotten city; the lonely mountain capped in snow; the herds of purple buffalo moving across the plains of Ende. Mu. Then: the plan, his capture in New York, the interrogation by that Hound, Scopes, and the agent who looked like an older version of this boy before him.

  “Do you remember?” the boy asked.

  Zaharie nodded. “Yes. I do. Tell me. Has it happened yet?”

  “What?”

  “The end of the world.”

  5 Sam stood on the back porch of Zaharie’s home, leaning against the railing. She watched the jets circle KLIA, Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Malaysia. It was all so alien: those weird towers, like something from a kid’s book about the future, the strange smells of the wet markets, the hurried clip of the language. She didn’t consider herself ignorant. She managed her own business. Had married a doctor. But when Cole had told them that they must travel to Malaysia she’d realized she had no idea where that even was.

  “Same neighborhood as Vietnam,” the Captain had said, as if that should make her feel better.

  That was three days ago.

  That was another thing that troubled her, the speed at which everything was happening now. Like she’d been thrown from a raft and was being carried along by a current, faster and faster, toward a waterfall. Cole often spoke about gradients. Jack had explained it as an uphill battle, this urge to understand the Great Forgetting. But gradients could be downhill, too, they could be declines. And that’s more like what this was. She was trapped inside a car with no brakes, steered by men, careening downhill toward who the hell knows what, in complete darkness.

  Jack got passports for himself and Cole in Seattle, off a Russian man he’d found on Craigslist. The Boy Scout, the history teacher, breaking the law again. So quickly he’d set aside long-standing morals. The Russian, when they met him at a Tim Hortons, was just some kid. A nerd. He gave them two new identities. Until they got to Mu, Jack was “Christian Kozel.” Cole was “Luigi Maraldi.”

  It worked. Of course it worked. They put the plane tickets on Sam’s business card. Coach from Sea-Tac to Kuala Lumpur. Five seats. Three thousand dollars through Priceline. And now here they were, on an alien island, just not the one they were looking for. One last detour.

  Sam thought about the night she’d first kissed Jack, three days after the fair, on the shore of Claytor Lake. How she felt safe for the first time. The touch of his hand on her cheek. How the fireflies were like connect-the-dots in the air.

  The patio door slid open and Jack came out and handed her a blue beverage, something called aiskrim that tasted like lime and milk.

  “It’s set,” said Jack. “We leave tomorrow morning. Early.”

  There was something different about Jack, a hardness she didn’t care for. He was becoming as single-minded as Tony ever was. All he could see now was the way to Mu. When he looked at her it wa
s as if he was simply counting her, checking her off his list of responsibilities.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  He winced like she’d slapped him. “What’d I do?”

  “I just wanted a good life,” she said. “A simple life. That’s all I ever wanted. I fucking deserve it, too. What the hell are we doing here, Jack? Why aren’t we home in bed? What we should do is use your passport and keep going, to Australia or somewhere. Start over. It doesn’t matter if we find Tony. I don’t think it matters anymore. We could be safe again. The police will never find us over here.”

  He went to her and put his hands on her arms, but she tossed them off.

  “The forgettings go all around the world,” he said. “It’s not just the United States. What if you wake up tomorrow and don’t remember who I am or that we ever met?”

  “We’re not going to be any happier on Mu, remembering.”

  Jack sighed, looked out at the city of blue-and-white light. “All the answers are on that island. Zaharie says there are people there who can help us. It’s the only place that’s safe anymore. It’s the only place the Great Forgetting can’t reach.”

  She grabbed his shirt, pushed him back, then drew him near and held him close. “This is a crazy fucking plan,” she said.

  “It’s a crazy fucking world.”

  6 Late that night, Jack went for a walk. His mind was racing, clicking down the list of everything that might go wrong in the next few hours. As crazy as the plan sounded, the risk was minimal. Or at least as low as it would ever be. But Sam’s derision eroded his confidence, leaving him anxious and paranoid. Maybe she was right.