Static Mayhem

by Edward Aubry

  "How did you do that?" he asked, pointing to the screen.

  Harrison resisted the urge to shrug. "I touched the screen in the administrator's office," he said. He hoped he had made it sound deliberate.

  This, surprisingly, got Mitchell's attention in a big way. "How'd you get in? All the doors are locked."

  Harrison shook his head. "Not the one I found," he said. It sounded weak. "Maybe it was too heavy for you." He felt like he was back-pedaling now, making excuses. Except the door had been unlocked, so he really was offering honest conjecture. He pulled himself back from that road. If he felt nervous, he would sound nervous, and if he sounded nervous, he would sound like he was lying. Time for a new idea. "Have you been down here long?"

  Mitchell nodded. "A while."

  Great. "Do you know how long?"

  Mitchell shook his head.

  "A few days?" He was deliberately aiming low.

  "Longer, I think."

  "Weeks?"

  The boy thought before responding. "Maybe."

  It was time to risk the big question. "Is there anyone else here?" He waited for Mitchell's reply, unsure how he would react to any answer.

  The boy simply shook his head. "Not now. At least, I don't think so. Not counting you." Harrison could hear there was more to this answer and debated whether to wait for it or fish for it. Fishing won.

  "Have you seen anybody else since you've been here?" he asked.

  Mitchell shrugged and looked down.

  "Mitchell?" said Harrison softly. "It's okay. You don't have to be scared." He had no idea how to make the boy believe that, or even if it was true. "I just want-"

  "There was a lady."

  Harrison waited for more, got nothing. A lady. Human survivor number four. In five minutes, his census of the planet had doubled. "Did she leave?" he asked calmly, desperately. He didn't dare ask his real question, which was, of course, Did she die?

  Mitchell nodded. "She was nice," he volunteered. "She came in a while back. She was pretty cool. Didn't want to stay, though."

  Harrison's reaction to this was shock. He had already adopted this boy, whether the boy knew it or not. The very idea that an adult would come down here, find him, and walk away was appalling. Inhuman. "Did she ask you to go with her?" he asked, outwardly, at least, reserving judgment.

  Mitchell nodded again.

  This stunned Harrison. So she didn't just walk away, she tried to take him, but somehow took no for an answer. "And what did you do?"

  "I hid."

  Harrison imagined all the reasons a child would refuse the protection of an adult in a hostile environment. Fear? No, she was nice, he had said. Agoraphobia? Not likely, considering how easily he was warming up. This was turning sour. Harrison pursued it. "Why?"

  Mitchell didn't seem sure how to answer. Finally, he mumbled, "I dunno."

  Harrison fumbled for words. Some undisclosed anxiety had kept this kid trapped, on his own, in a dungeon, no doubt living on Cheetos. It was all Harrison could do to keep from sobbing. "What did she do when you hid?" he asked, trying to sound inquisitive instead of horror-stricken.

  He shrugged again. "She looked for me, I guess. She was shouting a lot." He looked away, and rocked his head to one side. "I think she was maybe crying a little bit, too."

  Harrison took a deep breath and plowed ahead. "How old are you?"

  "Is it August yet?" the boy asked.

  It was, by Harrison's reckoning, late September. "Yes," he said in an even voice.

  "Then I'm eight."

  Eight. Alone, and eight years old. "Mitchell," Harrison began slowly, cautiously, "you know how if you get lost in a city, you're supposed to find someone? Do you know what I mean?" Harrison was thinking back to his own childhood training. His mother had always told him that if he were to get lost in a large crowd, he should find a mother with her children, or even better, a pregnant woman. The odds were good that he would be safe with someone already in a nurturing role. He had no idea how he was going to parlay this idea into a reason for Mitchell to trust him. He tried to think of ways to use it as a springboard.

  "Are you a policeman?" asked the child unexpectedly.

  Apparently Mitchell's parents had given him different training. Harrison remembered being told that policemen were not the first choice. Later, he had learned the elaborate statistical reasons for that. Security guards look like police to the untrained juvenile eye, a fact that some less trustworthy rent-a-cops used to their advantage. He shivered. He now considered using that misunderstanding to his own advantage. It was the perfect opening. Yes, I'm a policeman. You can trust me all the way to Chicago, because I'm a policeman.

  "No," he said.

  Mitchell looked at him quizzically. Either he had thought that was where Harrison was going, or he just expected adults to lie.

  "I'm not a policeman," Harrison continued, "but I'm a good guy. I don't have a badge, I'm not a friend of your Mom's, and I'm not going to give you candy. Let's get all that out on the table right now."

  Mitchell didn't miss a beat. "Are you going to try to get me to go with you, too?"

  "Yes." Harrison waited for Mitchell to run. He didn't.

  "She was nice," the boy said. "The lady who was here for a while. She took care of me. I really liked her." His voice was starting to shake. "She was all right, wasn't she?"

  Harrison said, honestly, "I don't know her, but if you thought she was all right, she might have been all right."

  Mitchell said nothing. It looked entirely possible that he was about to cry. He was obviously struggling with whatever had kept him here the last time someone had tried to rescue him. Harrison thought, remorsefully, that he might have just given this little kid his first real taste of regret. "Hey," he said, urgently hoping to break the mood. "I want you to meet someone."

  Mitchell looked up, a bit brighter. "There's someone else here?"

  Harrison nodded. "Her name's Glimmer. She's … well, she's going to be a little bit different than anybody else you've ever met." He thought for a moment, and for the sake of accuracy, added, "Probably."

  "Where is she?"

  "She's hiding," Harrison said loudly, obviously. "Glimmer?" he called. "There's someone out here who wants to meet you. Can you come out?" He was talking in all directions now, not sure which way to face. Without warning, the pixie appeared right in front of his face.

  "Right here, boss," she said without moving her lips, and no doubt not including Mitchell in on the sound of her voice.

  "Whoa!" Both Harrison and Glimmer turned to him. His expression was one of unbridled wonder. "Is she real?"

  All at once, Harrison felt the last thread of his own doubt snap. "Of course she is," he said with absolute certainty.

  Mitchell was staring, wide-eyed. "Can I touch her?"

  Harrison had not expected that question. Neither, judging from her face, had Glimmer. The first time Harrison had tried to touch her, she had dodged him. He didn't know what she would do now.

  Glimmer responded, "Why don't you ask her?" Harrison's hesitation was slashed by the razor of her sarcasm.

  "Can he touch you?" he asked her softly, not pleading, not negotiating, just direct.

  "Yes." She looked straight at Mitchell. Her face softened. This moment was as important to her, Harrison realized, as it had been to him, and so far he had shut her out of it. She was very different from him in so many ways that it was easy for him to forget the one thing they had in common. They were both lonely. She had been a delightful companion, and suddenly he regretted making her take a back seat to his search for people more like himself, not to mention his fantasy of a woman he had never met. The time for apologies would come, but more important business was at hand. Mitchell reached out.

  "Wait!" cried Harrison, surprising both boy and pixie.

  "What?" they both asked.

  He directed his comments to Mitchell. "You know what it feels like when you rub your sneakers on the carpet and then touch a doorknob?" The boy
nodded. "That's what it feels like to touch a pixie. I just didn't want you to be surprised."

  "Does it hurt?"

  Harrison mulled his options and decided he was having luck with honesty so far. "Yes," he said. "A little. But in an okay kind of way." He looked at Glimmer, who seemed genuinely touched by this admission.

  Mitchell touched her cheek, and Harrison saw, for the first time, that touching a pixie made a little, visible spark.

  Chapter Ten

  Ride

  Harrison spent the next several hours absorbing as much information as he could about the Great Lakes Transit Worm. There was a wealth of information readily available at every touch screen, all of it intended for passengers. He found maps of the entire line and learned that it had been part of a much larger network, with junctions connecting it to an Atlantic Seaboard Transit Worm and a Mississippi Basin Transit Worm, both of which connected to other Worms down their own lines. The entire rest of the network was, for the moment, of no interest to Harrison, apart from possible future reference once he got where he was going. Part of that lack of interest came from focus on the task at hand, but a bigger part came from an early realization that the network was not, at the moment, whole. One of the features of the system, once it had come back online, was real-time monitoring of every station in the network, and most of those monitors were blank or snowy. Incredibly, there was a station in Baton Rouge still feeding a real time image of its empty self from several perspectives that rotated through in a set pattern, but no other station on the Mississippi line was reporting in.

  Harrison centered his attention on the monitors that watched stations on the Great Lakes line. Using GLTW stationery and a pen, he copied a map of the line, circling every station he could account for. He was less than ten minutes into this activity when he emitted a howl. Even against the constant background noise of thousands of screens informing, entertaining, and selling to a teeming crowd that was not there, he heard his own faint echo return to him.

  When Glimmer and Mitchell emerged from the office building a few minutes later, the boy was substantially cleaner. There was a locker room in the building with working showers, and Glimmer had insisted that the boy avail himself of one. He was now wearing a pair of pajamas with the GLTW logo emblazoned across the back and down both legs. Glimmer had found them in a gift shop. They were the only clean clothes they had found so far that would fit him. Glimmer was still dressed as an Olympic medalist. While Harrison focused on exploring the train system, Glimmer had slipped easily, if not quite expectedly, into the role of babysitter. Mitchell hadn't had any trouble accepting the reality of her at all. He apparently perceived her as an adult.

  "Is there a problem?" she asked.

  "No," Harrison said. He looked up, saw Mitchell in the pajamas, considered commenting, and opted not to. "Quite the opposite. I think I can make this thing work."

  "The train?" asked Mitchell. "How is that possible? Do you even know how to get to it?"

  "There's one parked right downstairs, which is pretty fortunate, actually, because I can only find four trains, total, on the whole line, and one of them happens to be here. But I'm getting ahead of myself. One thing at a time." He motioned to them. "Come here. I want to show you both a few things." Glimmer lighted on the counter near where Harrison was working, and Mitchell hoisted himself up into one of the tall chairs.

  "Okay," Harrison began. "First off, take a look at these." He pointed to a bank of small screens built into the counter. The array was angled so as to be easily visible from the area behind the counter, but removed from the line of sight of anyone on the other side. Each screen showed what appeared to be the station they were now occupying, with the notable difference that all but one of the monitors were still dark, as they had been when Glimmer and Harrison arrived. When he touched a circle on the main screen he had been using, each small screen immediately displayed a label, in small unobtrusive type, across the bottom. The first screen in the upper left corner of the bank, the only one that showed activity in the station, read "Buffalo." He pointed to it. "This is us," he said, and as he said it, the image helpfully shifted to a different perspective, which happened to include, tiny and in the distance, the three of them sitting at the counter.

  "Buffalo?" Glimmer asked. "Isn't that where we were trying to get in the car?"

  Harrison smiled and opened his mouth to respond.

  "You had a car? I thought all the cars were gone. I thought all the roads were gone."

  Harrison held up his hand. "They're not," he said to Mitchell, "and yes," he said to Glimmer. "Turns out we made it, though more by dumb luck than anything else. Anyway, turning your attention back to the little TV screens, this one is us," he repeated. He then pointed to the screen to the immediate right. "This one is Erie, Pennsylvania. It's still there, and so is the one in Cleveland, and the one in Toledo." He indicated the next screen in line. "Now, there were also stations in Fort Wayne and South Bend, but I'm not getting anything from them, so we have to assume they're gone." He brought up a map of the entire Great Lakes Transit Worm line so they could see what he was talking about. "In fact," he said, "something like half the stations on the line are down. However, the network has quite a few branches, and some of them double back." He pointed to the map. "Without Fort Wayne, we can't ride this thing any farther west than Toledo, but look here." He traced a route with his finger. "There's a tunnel that cuts from Toledo to Detroit. Detroit connects to Owen Sound, farther north. From there, it's another hop north to Sault Ste. Marie, down the Michigan Upper Peninsula to Green Bay, and then to Milwaukee, all of which are intact." He tapped each monitor in that order, letting his finger rest nonchalantly on the one that said Milwaukee. He tapped it several times, hoping for dramatic effect.

  "I can read, Harry," Glimmer said, spoiling the moment. "The next one says Chicago. I get it."

  Harrison, barely controlling his grin, slowly and with flourish, lifted his finger from the Milwaukee monitor and placed it soundly on the Chicago monitor. "And the next one," he said, ignoring the pixie, relishing the sound of his own voice, "says Chicago. Right here." He tapped it again. "See?"

  "How far away is that?" Mitchell asked.

  "Going that route, about a thousand miles."

  "A thousand miles!" The number, of course, meant nothing to the boy, except that it was, obviously, very far. "That's like the other side of the world! That's gonna take years to get there."

  "No," said Harrison, "it's like the other side of the lake, and in this baby, we'll be there in just under two hours."

  "Harry," said Glimmer carefully, "not to burst your bubble or anything, but what makes you think the tunnels are intact? I mean, couldn't the stations be just sitting there, like, totally unconnected?"

  He shook his head. "Take a look at this," he said. He touched a spot on the main screen, and the image changed to a diagram of the train itself, sitting in a cutaway view of the tunnel. Looking at the entire vehicle, it was obvious to all three of them why it was called a worm. It was almost perfectly smooth, tapering at both ends. It appeared to have, by Harrison's count, twenty cars, but there were no external connections between them. Instead, the train's surface was contiguous, with flexible joints between cars giving it its segmented look. It was impossible to tell from this illustration whether they were truly individual cars, or whether the train was one long chamber, capable of slithering its way through the tunnel. More significantly, the train did not have visible wheels of any sort, nor did it make contact with the tunnel walls at any point. "This is really cool," said Harrison. "The train is a Maglev, sort of. It rides suspended on a magnetic cushion, repelled off the bottom three quarters of the tube. The tube is a permanent magnet, so even in a total power failure, which as far as I can tell from what I see here is impossible anyway, the train goes right on hovering. There's a whole thing they do with gyroscopes and ballast that keeps the Worm from rolling in the tube.

  "Here," he continued, pointing to the diagram, "along
the top of the tunnels is the actual propulsion, what they call the 'rail.' It's not a real, physical rail, but another series of magnets, designed to attract the front of the train. The magnetic field is always one step ahead of the train, kind of like a hare on a dog track. The PR says it works kind of like a particle accelerator, but then they say not really, and they don't go into detail about the difference. Also, once it gets up to speed, the train coasts almost the entire way. They really use the rail mostly to pull it around turns or up inclines. The point is, it's energy efficient, it's comfy, and it's super-fast."

  "And so this all makes you sure that the tunnels are intact because?" Glimmer was already bored with his new toy.

  He held one hand up while tapping the screen with the other. It brought up a menu, from which he selected several options. As he did this, the smaller monitors all began displaying a series of numerical values, which were overlaid on top of the images they already showed. "I'm getting to that. The tunnels themselves aren't just tunnels. They're vacuums. The trains are zipping through a perfectly frictionless environment, which is one of the reasons they're able to move so fast. Do you see these stats?" he asked, pointing to the monitors. Mitchell nodded. Glimmer rolled her hands in an impatient gesture. "Every station is connected to the tunnels through a series of airlocks. So that passengers can embark without suffocating. The locks are all equipped with pressure gauges on both sides." He swept his arm proudly across his tidy collection of displays. "I ran a diagnostic on every gauge on every airlock on every one of these stations. They all report that they are functioning normally, and they all report zero air pressure in the tunnels I mapped out. If there were breaches anywhere on the line, the tubes would be flooded with air. Not only that, but of the stations which connect to lines I already figured out we can't use, almost all are reporting one atmosphere pressure in those tubes."