by Julian Gough
Something occurs to him . . . Cars on security-clearance lists can be hard to track. Standard military practice, to scrape their location data from the public record . . . Colt roots around in his pockets until he finds a tiny silver passive location tag. He quietly uncaps it, and checks to make sure Donnie is still concentrating on the road. Then Colt bends over, and swiftly slips the needle-sized tag into a thick seam in the floor carpet.
‘You OK?’ says Donnie, glancing across.
Colt sits up. ‘Yes.’
Change the subject.
He says, less of a question this time, ‘This isn’t the way to the lab.’
‘We’re not going to see your mother,’ says Donnie, looking straight ahead. ‘We’re going to see your father.’
There’s another emotion, and it takes a while for Colt to isolate it, to identify it. To name it.
Ah, OK. This time it’s different.
Fear.
He knows he loves his father, but the thought of seeing him . . .
Fear.
But if he is taken to see his father . . . he will see the test range. He’s never seen the test range before. He wants to.
Desire.
Fear, desire . . . no, it’s all too much. He drops automatically into the gameworld, and soon the raw, jagged real-world emotions have been replaced by the smooth, sculpted emotions of the game.
The roads are quiet. Donnie drives at the human speed limit to Las Vegas airport, to the Janet terminal. The terminal that doesn’t officially exist.
At the terminal, security ask way more questions than usual, and Colt has to leave the game, to deal with them. But it’s too much, too intense, the big unsmiling men, so he shuts down, mumbles numbers. It’s OK, Donnie handles everything.
Then Donnie guides Colt through a door, along a corridor. Through another door, across a bland, featureless room.
Through its glass doors, Colt can see planes with no insignia glinting in the sunshine.
But now some guy in uniform steps out from behind a screen, walks in front of Colt.
No words, no warning; he just puts a hand on Colt’s chest, to stop him. Colt shudders, steps backwards.
‘The helmet,’ says the guy in uniform.
Colt takes another step back, another.
Donnie sighs. He’s already got the helmet through two layers of security. He says, ‘The helmet’s part of him. The helmet’s why he’s here.’
Now there’s a second guy, not in uniform. Where did he come from?
‘What, it’s physically connected?’ says the second guy. ‘You can’t remove it?’
Donnie takes them aside and talks.
They let Colt keep it on.
Donnie leads him across the concrete apron to an unmarked plane. It’s a small jet, with seats for maybe fifty people. One of the new short-haul Boeings, Colt thinks. Cool.
Up the steps.
He touches the outside of the plane as he reaches the door.
Thin, thin panels, but so solid. Nice. Those new Chinese composite materials, really precise, nano-bonded layers . . .
Into the cool, dim plane. There are about ten people on board, clustered at the front.
Donnie leads Colt past them, along the aisle, to the back of the plane, stops. Waits for Colt to sit.
Big choice of seats. Window is good, a view is good.
Aisle is good too, for the toilet. But people climb across you to get out.
Lot of empty seats back here. Which row?
Right at the back maybe. Nothing can dislodge and hit you if there’s a crash landing.
But tails break off in crashes.
Centre, over the wings is safe, that’s where the Airbus engineers like to sit.
Also, there’s minimal pitch and yaw in turbulence at the centre point of the plane. Less nausea . . .
Too many options. Colt’s breathing speeds up.
‘Window seat?’ says Donnie.
‘Yes,’ said Colt, and his breathing calms.
Donnie waves him in. Colt sits in the window seat.
Donnie sits beside him, his legs out in the aisle.
They taxi immediately.
Take off.
After take-off, Donnie tries to chat to him about Colt’s childhood, about Naomi, but Colt tires quickly and says politely, ‘I’m going to look out the window now.’
‘Uh huh. OK,’ says Donnie, and Colt looks out the window.
Things look like other things. His brain is connecting, connecting. Making similes. This looks like that . . .
The exhausted hills around the edge of Las Vegas look like the worn stumps of something dead that once was alive. The brown, worn-down teeth of some plant-eating dinosaur.
Lakes the bright turquoise of cyanide.
Now they are flying higher, over mountains whose tightly packed strata have eroded at different speeds, so they look like they’ve been scrubbed, hard, once, with a gigantic wire brush.
A landscape carved and eroded by water; yet there is no water.
Bone-dry lake beds, dozens of miles long.
Like the end of the world. Like you’d boiled off an ocean, then sterilized the dry seabed with radiation.
Colt sees their house; a dot at the edge of a dead lake.
Donnie sits back in his seat, unfolds a small screen, and reads a paper on apoptotic cell death, till he starts to snooze.
Colt feels around in his pocket. Last one . . . He uncaps the short silvery needle of the passive location tag, and slips it deep into the armrest. They might find it, next time they security-sweep the plane; they might not.
A good day’s work. Tagged Donnie’s new car, and tagged a Janet flight. The other gameworld coders will be pleased. Janet flights don’t turn up on the publicly available plane-tracking data feeds. Annoying, when you’re trying to map everything into the game.
He looks back out the window.
*
Eventually the big craters come into view.
Clean, perfect craters from the underground tests, back when they tried out nuclear weapons here. Back before proper computers; back before they could simulate it in software.
Back when they actually had to set off the bombs to see what would happen.
Colt stares down. He’s never seen the craters in real life. They might not set off nukes here any more, but they still use the surrounding area for other weapons testing, so ground-level filming still isn’t allowed. US satellites still can’t map it. Normal flights are routed round this flight space.
When he started to code game sectors, when the team were mapping America, he chose the Nevada Test Range precisely because there was so little data. It forced him to think, to improvise, to code.
He loves these craters. He’s studied every tiny scrap of available information. Analysed every old black-and-white photo, trying to calculate diameter, depth. He’s built them in software. He probably knows them better than anyone on earth.
The craters are deeply satisfying to look at. Like mathematical abstractions. Totally clean lines, hard angles. Laid out on a vast invisible grid. There isn’t enough rain here to weather them quickly. There is no plant life to soften their outlines. And they’re so recent; the 1950s, early 1960s. They’re no older than rock ’n’ roll.
Colt mumbles, ‘You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine . . .’ and Donnie looks across. ‘Elvis Presley,’ says Colt.
Colt returns to the view.
There’s the big one, Sedan. From back when they thought they might widen the Panama Canal, dig harbours, level mountains, build dams with thermonuclear explosions.
Idly, he works out the size of the craters, given the height of the plane. He’s modelled all this, it’s in the game, he could just look it up; but it’s more fun to work it out. He works out how powerful the weapons were.
How much uranium-235 must have fissioned. He builds the bombs in his head.
They descend, zooming in on the only sign of human habitation visible from hor
izon to horizon. A few huts, a couple of slashes of runway. Hmm, they’re new. Not in his map of the test range, ingame. Better fix that . . .
Colt blinks. There’s a scale problem. The patterns don’t match.
Ah.
As they continue to descend, the huts become buildings, big ones. Huge. Aircraft hangars. And the runways . . .
The plane lands on the longest runway he has ever seen, and as Colt tenses up, all the people around him begin relaxing.
What is wrong with these people?
Colt stands, gets into the aisle, but there are people in front of him. His heart pounds.
They had been safe in the sky. There was nothing to hit; the plane was in its element, generating lift. No obstacles in any direction, and miles of clear air below it.
But now, now the plane is grounded, out of its element, trundling through a world of randomly moving objects, some of them full of kerosene, some driven by tired workers . . . now the danger is beginning. Don’t they get that?
The steps drive up to the plane, touch the fuselage. The door pops open, slides sideways. Colt breathes hard as the people surge.
Get off. Don’t these people know that the greatest loss of life in aviation history was on the ground, Tenerife, when two 747s collided, one trying to take off while the other was still on the runway . . . Hurry up.
Finally, they get out of the plane. Walk across to a low, featureless, windowless building. An automatic door opens.
The dark visor of his helmet goes transparent as he steps out of the desert sun, into a room-sized airlock. Colt wonders why – there doesn’t seem to be much of a pressure differential.
Through the airlock. More security. Donnie handles it.
A plump, smiling guy joins them. Black skin, white shirt. Donnie talks to him briefly. They get either side of Colt and walk him down a sloping corridor, another, another, deeper and deeper, to a door. There’s a buzzer, but the plump guy knocks on the door instead. Colt thinks about that. How old-fashioned it is. A knock on a door. Knuckles on metal.
They must be far underground now. Colt glances back at the corridor, measures the slope, works it out.
Wow, yeah. Deep.
The door opens.
The plump guy nods towards the open doorway. Colt glances across at Donnie.
Donnie nods, too.
Colt walks through alone.
The door closes.
79
At the airport, her brand-new, top-grade, biometric security pass gets her into the Janet terminal. But it doesn’t get her on a plane.
‘But . . . this gets me into everywhere,’ says Naomi to the tall skinny white guy at the desk. ‘I got this directly from . . .’
Wooah. Her throat closes, and she can’t get his name out. Relax. Relax. Breathe.
‘Ma’am?’
‘. . . from Ryan Livingstone. Isn’t he in charge of the base?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’m allowed to see everything. Everything that exists. He said that specifically.’
‘Ah.’ The skinny guy smiles.
Overactive thyroid, she thinks. She reaches unconsciously for her throat.
He stops smiling. ‘But the people coming through here,’ he says, ‘are going to a place that doesn’t exist. To work on things that don’t exist.’
With an elegant, practised gesture, he runs her security pass through a scanner. Glances down at something. Sighs. He holds up the pass to his eye, to study the hologram, and flicks it with a fingertip.
She notices a white cream around his bitten cuticles. Moisturizer? Or something bitter, to stop him biting them?
Don’t get distracted, focus, focus. You have to get past this guy. Or around him.
‘It’s a very good pass,’ he says, as though praising a child’s drawing of a dog. Even though it looks more like a sheep.
‘Can I have my pass back?’ she says.
‘Sure,’ he says. But he doesn’t hand it back.
She reaches out her hand, but he is already walking away from the desk. Her hand curls up like a dry leaf; drops to her side.
‘Back in a second,’ he says, and walks through an open door. Closes it.
She is going to wait, of course she is going to wait, she was told to wait. Relax. She takes a deep breath.
But her chest gets tighter as she stands there, tighter and tighter, and her throat is closing again, and she strains to breathe out, and she has to move, to walk, briskly, to loosen her chest, and it loosens as she walks.
And she is walking away from the desk, she notices. Without her pass.
But her breathing is good now.
She feels she’s being watched, that cameras are following her, that people are following her.
She speeds up a little.
And now she sees something out of the corner of her eye, something black, fast, coming at her from behind, and she swings around with a gasp.
Nothing. Must have been her hair, swinging.
She turns back, towards the exit, the parking lot, her car. Walks faster and faster.
Runs.
80
Colt looks around the large, bare room.
The indirect lighting is full spectrum, set to mimic sunlight. It’s so bright it triggers Colt’s visor, which darkens, making the corners of the overlit room seem paradoxically gloomy.
In the centre of the room, a white swivel chair.
A silvery, matt metal table.
Beyond the table, a man in a black metal chair.
Colt studies his father’s face.
‘Sit,’ says his father.
Colt moves towards the white swivel chair, holds on to the back of it; holds the chair between him and his father; looks around the room.
‘It’s been a long time,’ says his father.
‘Time flies like an arrow,’ says Colt. He takes in a deep breath, and holds it, waiting for the response. Now that he’s thinking so fast, these pauses feel endless, unbearable.
‘Pardon?’ says his father.
Colt waits a little longer, until the air pressure in his head builds up, too high, and so he releases a blast of air through his nose.
Starts breathing again.
So Dad doesn’t remember. OK. OK. OK.
His father slowly pushes a white china plate across the silvery table towards him.
Cupcakes.
No icing.
Good.
The plate grinds across the metal, like there’s a little grit beneath it.
Ah, that’s what the airlock’s for, thinks Colt; but even with the airlock, the desert dust gets in. That’s bad. Alkali dust, terrible for electronics.
People must bring it in on their clothes, and shoes.
He looks down at his feet.
Yes. Dust.
He starts to design a better system, to stop that.
‘Have a cake,’ says his father.
Colt looks up, studies the plate. ‘What’s in them?’
‘Fruit.’
‘No sugar?’
‘No sugar. Honey.’
‘OK.’ Colt turns the white swivel chair a little, sits, and swivels back. Glances, for a second, at his father.
His father points down, at the plate.
Colt picks up a cupcake, and peels off the little paper case from around its base. Drops the paper back on the plate.
He takes a bite of the cupcake. Chews.
Gritty.
Stops.
‘What kind of fruit?’
‘Pomegranates,’ says his father. ‘Good for your digestion.’
‘Lot of seeds,’ says Colt.
‘Roughage,’ says his father.
Colt glances briefly at his father, looks away. Ryan studies Colt’s face, its expression; then looks at the plate, turns it around. ‘Let me see . . .’ He picks up a cupcake. Takes a small bite. ‘Mmmm . . . I’m going to look after you now.’
‘I want Mom,’ says Colt.
‘But does she want you?’ says his father.
<
br /> Colt’s lips shape up to say, what?
Wait, no, Dad says ‘pardon’ when he means ‘what’.
‘Pardon?’ says Colt.
Ryan raises an eyebrow. ‘I’m sorry, Colt. But it’s too much for her. A single mother. A full-time job. She just got promoted. More work, more responsibility. And you’re a teenager now, Colt. A young man. Not a kid any more. I know she won’t tell you this herself, but she just can’t handle it.’
‘She doesn’t . . . want me?’
‘It’s not that she doesn’t want you, but . . . has she seemed tired lately?’
Colt nods.
‘Been crying?’
Colt nods. ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’
‘She doesn’t want to upset you. But since you’ve . . . changed . . .’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘Oh, nothing bad. But you’ll be better off with me, here, for a while.’
‘How long?’
‘Well, that really depends. Don’t worry about it now. But let’s work together to understand you, understand what’s happening to you, to study you. Yeah? And you could help me with my work.’
Colt realizes that he doesn’t really know what his dad’s work is.
His dad has never talked about it before.
It shocks Colt into looking up, staring directly at his father’s face, holding his gaze there, a thing he almost never does.
Even through the darkened visor, his father’s face hurts to look at, like the sun; Colt can feel his eyes burning.
There are marks; deep lines he’s never seen before.
His dad is getting old.
‘Dad . . .’ He’s not sure what to say. ‘What do you do?’
The lines of Ryan’s face shift, new lines appear, as he smiles for the first time.
‘Surveillance?’ says Colt.
‘Mmmmm. We’re working on some more ambitious things.’
Colt realizes he’s hungry. He should be having his smoothie now. He takes another cupcake, peels off the paper case from around its base.
‘But you’ve got drones, right?’ he says. He imagines flying drones. Perfecting the human/machine interface. Soaring over Africa. Mmmm.
The cupcake is pretty good. But his smoothie at home has coconut. Coconut is great for high-level thinking. The medium-chain fatty acids are absorbed pretty much unaltered. Almost no digestion required. The closest food to mother’s milk.