Connect

by Julian Gough

  There is a memory of . . . what? A map she once saw. A map of . . .

  Yes.

  She calls up the map on the dashboard display. There they are. All the ghost towns. White Cloud City. Quartz Mountain. Unionville. Ruth . . .

  The humble towns. Rawhide. Ragtown. Mule Lick.

  And the ambitious. Nevada City. Metropolis. Berlin.

  All those dead towns.

  Oh, such hopeful names. Treasure City. Bullionville. Goldfield. Gold Butte. Gold Acres. Gold Point. Gold Center . . .

  All those dead towns, where the gold ran out. Then the silver.

  The copper.

  The zinc.

  The lead.

  Where the water ran out.

  Now she finds a map that shows all the nuclear explosions in the test range, with their dates. She glances north, through the windscreen. Fifty miles away, some of them. Less . . .

  The territory around her is too indifferent, too dead, too much. She doesn’t want to think of her son out there among the ghost towns and radioactive craters, so she goes back to the map.

  Time passes.

  Something huge roars toward her, on the other side of the road, and she looks up, startled, in time to see the tight-packed platoon of self-drive trucks flicker by.

  Military? Oh, good, no. Just an automated construction gang. Probably heading back to Vegas to reload, after hot-printing a fresh solar surface on some backroads . . .

  She pays more attention to the road for a while, glancing at it every few seconds, but there’s no other traffic. There is the smell of desert dust in the car now; hot, dry, alkali. Like the air inside an old computer.

  The shadow of a bird flickers over the car’s windscreen, over her, almost too fast to register, and she scans the sky, for a drone, plane, helicopter. For Ryan’s eyes.

  Eventually she gets to the turn.

  84

  ‘Many mathematicians to this day don’t realize that information is physical and that there is no such thing as an abstract computer. Only a physical object can compute things.’

  — David Deutsch

  Colt looks up. ‘You’ve created an immune system for the country.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what we’ve built here.’

  Colt looks back at the chart, studies it. ‘Why?’

  Ryan leans back in his chair. ‘Governments make shitty decisions, for dumb, short-term, political reasons.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with—’

  Ryan doesn’t even let him finish. ‘Because to win an election, they’ll invade some joke country that offers no threat. And then not deal with some seriously dangerous threat because it will alienate some big domestic constituency. That is a fucking insane way to deal with threats. It’s like you got cancer, and said, Oh I can’t do anything about the cancer, because it’ll lose me votes in Ohio. I’ll deal with this blocked pore instead. An autonomous immune system will make better decisions. Takes the whole thing out of the political arena.’

  Colt is scanning the data sheets. ‘It forms a neural network . . . but how can they all talk to each other? That’s a crazy amount of power, to transmit . . .’

  ‘They piggyback on local Wi-Fi, local cell towers, the general info-grid. They have priority access to everything.’

  But Colt’s already moved past that. ‘Once you’ve turned it on, how do you turn it off?’

  Ryan grins. ‘You can’t. That’s the whole point. What’s the point of an immune system with an off switch? If you can switch it off, so can the enemy.’

  Colt’s reached the end of the document. He looks up. ‘So it’s decentralized, autonomous . . .’

  ‘Yeah. Once it’s on, it’s on. It’s a small internet of things, so there’s no control centre to destroy, it just routes around damage. Mostly it’s dormant, but threats trigger it automatically.’

  ‘But how do you, how does it, know—’

  ‘—Look, knowledge is never the problem. Generating a quick, automatic response is the problem. I mean . . . 9/11. The system knew enough. But the system didn’t have the power to act. It had to send signals to human beings.’ Ryan is leaning forward in his chair, he’s getting angry. ‘And no individual human being can ever put all the information together. Look at the Boston Marathon kids. The older brother had already been interviewed by the FBI. We knew he was a risk, and it wasn’t enough. Look at the Charlie Hebdo mess. The French had those guys flagged on all their databases. Hell, we’d told the DGSI, this asshole has trained in Yemen.’

  ‘Uh . . .’ Colt’s trying to remember something. ‘That Chicago wedding . . .’

  ‘Perfect fucking example! All three attackers had been deported from Canada for possession of explosives, total debacle . . . The system, the individuals in the system, lost track. They forgot. The knowledge didn’t trigger an action. Humans, management, guys like me, we are the bottleneck.’

  Colt finds himself nodding agreement with his father; an odd sensation. ‘Yeah, we are the bandwidth problem.’

  ‘Exactly! We can hold five, maybe six items in working memory, and we’re expected to run America. It’s an illusion. Delusion. But the system as a whole knows enough to make a judgement.’

  ‘But what if it’s wrong,’ says Colt. ‘What if it’s triggered too easily, or by a false signal?’

  Ryan shrugs. ‘Sometimes an immune system will kill a healthy cell. But that’s the price you pay for staying healthy. If it happens, we fine-tune the immune system. That’s where you come in. You see patterns—’

  ‘I’m down as special needs. I’m still supposed to be getting homeschooled. They could send an inspector—’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Colt, we kill the leaders of other countries. We will not have a problem persuading the school inspector to leave you alone. I’ll deal with the school inspector.’

  ‘OK, Dad.’

  85

  Naomi takes the unsigned turn, and drives off the matt black of the solar road, off the grid, off the map.

  Carefully, slowly now, she bumps along the packed dirt road for half a mile; a mile; until she sees the fence. The fence is high; chain-link, with a token coil of razor wire on top.

  She slows to a crawl.

  The road ahead passes through a gate in the fence.

  The gate is closed.

  Three cameras are mounted on a tower above the gate.

  Their bodies are silver, to dissipate the heat. Black cowls to shade their lenses from the sun, so light won’t bounce around inside them.

  So the dazzle won’t blind them.

  The camera to the left looks left, along the miles of fence.

  The camera to the right looks right.

  The camera in the centre stares straight down the road, straight through the windscreen, at her.

  The silver central camera’s big black snout moves back, then strains forward.

  Focusing, zooming.

  As she approaches, the cameras pointing left and right turn to look at her.

  The three black snouts strain forward.

  She stops the car. Opens her door.

  Steps out slowly, carefully, into the dry heat.

  So quiet, after the long confused roar of the air past the windows, the gasp of the air conditioning.

  The old quiet electric motor, normally so unflustered, has grown hot, driving that speed, for that long, through that heat. It ticks and clicks as it cools.

  She walks slowly, carefully, towards the gate in the fence.

  Through the wire mesh, she can see no buildings. The packed dirt track she arrived on continues through the gate, running straight till it disappears over a ridge, then reappears, off to one side, a couple of miles away; then vanishes behind a distant hill. No sign of vehicles on it.

  Well, there are countries smaller than this restricted area. Hard to patrol that.

  She can’t see a bell anywhere.

  But this is absurd. Surely she’s already set off an automatic alarm. They are looking at her. They already know she is here. Shou
ld she say something? Can they hear?

  Ah, there is a physical button. On a short metal post, to the right of the gate. Where a driver could reach out, and press. If she had seen it, she could have driven right up to it.

  But she had been staring up, at the cameras staring down.

  She walks to the metal post. Looks down at the round, golden bell button, set into the angled silver top of the post.

  Nothing written on it.

  What did you expect?

  Ring For Service.

  Should You Have a Complaint . . .

  No, it should say ‘Press Me’, like something in Alice in Wonderland.

  She giggles with nerves.

  Will it make me bigger, or smaller?

  Will I disappear?

  He could kill me out here and nobody would ever know.

  Silly thoughts. Stop.

  The post begins to hum.

  She looks closer. There’s a speaker set into the shadowed side of the post, facing her.

  She waits for a voice. But no voice comes.

  Dust-coloured crickets, somewhere nearby, rub their back legs together.

  To attract other crickets, she thinks, so they can fuck and make more crickets, who will chirp, and fuck, and breed, and die, and become dust out here, pointlessly, for ever.

  Her mind can’t get traction on this moment.

  I’m having some kind of breakdown, she thinks.

  She wonders what Yaakov would do.

  So she rings him.

  She hears sounds, but they’re the wrong sounds. His phone doesn’t ring. A long tone.

  Silence.

  Is she out of coverage? Or is something actively blocking her call?

  She feels a kind of vertigo, and sways. Is she perfectly safe, or in terrible danger?

  Is this just an argument with Ryan about access to Colt?

  Or is this a battle for the future of the world?

  Both, she thinks.

  Both.

  Well, Christ’s mother was also just another mother. Naomi laughs, but it’s weak, and sad. And when the laughter ends, the silence is terrible. The silence of the desert. A million square miles of nothing.

  She takes a deep breath. Pushes down the button.

  I’m depressing the button, she thinks. And the button is depressing me.

  One of her father’s old jokes that wasn’t even a joke. He made it every time they visited Naomi’s aunt. Standing on the porch, ringing again and again, waiting for his sad, ill sister to get out of bed and answer the door.

  I miss Yaakov.

  There is no click, no crackle, no sound. No sense of whether or not the bell has actually done anything. No haptic feedback.

  Maybe it opens a voice channel. She presses it again, holds it down, says, ‘Please let me in.’

  Lets go.

  A voice replies – crackly, thin, through a weather-damaged speaker – and she jerks back, astonished. Even though this was what she had expected, wanted, caused.

  ‘You made it.’

  Ryan’s voice, of course.

  ‘I was worried, when you started speeding, past Rachel.’

  Of course. She is getting the personal treatment. Ryan’s voice is almost friendly as he continues.

  ‘Cow country. One of those wanders out of the sage when you’re doing a hundred, and, well, that’s a lot of burgers at your funeral.’

  ‘I want to see my son.’

  ‘I figured.’

  The gate begins to open. She takes a step back, towards the Pontiac.

  ‘Leave the car.’

  ‘I’d rather bring it.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  Naomi looks through the wire mesh of the opening gate. Through the widening gap. This is not a main entrance. The road at the far side is narrower. Heavy vehicles have cut up the packed dirt surface pretty bad, and rain has cut the gullies on either side even deeper. No point even trying. Fine for a military truck, but her car would get hung up on the middle ridge, and there isn’t enough room to drive to one side of it.

  ‘OK. Where do I go?’

  ‘Follow the trail. I’ll send guides.’

  She walks through the gate. It closes behind her.

  She walks down the high centre ridge of the rough dirt road, truck-tyre ruts to either side.

  *

  She has been walking for twenty minutes.

  Two black dots appear in the sky, over the ridge looming ahead. At first, sun-dazzled, she thinks they are birds. Eagles? Ravens? They slow; stop; hover for a moment, frozen against the sky.

  Then they come towards her, fast and low.

  Purposeful, focused.

  Unafraid.

  No bird would be so fearless. Even eagles are gun-shy. Human-shy . . .

  These move like something with no predator.

  They slow again as they grow close, then stop and hover, one to either side of the road.

  To either side of her.

  Black quadcopters, like the ones Colt played with as a child, but bigger. Faster. More powerful.

  They hum as the four rotors spin, adjust, spin. They hover at either shoulder, keeping level with her as she walks on.

  After a while, one drifts a little higher, and ahead. She can see its camera-eyes looking back at her.

  One drifts a little lower, and behind.

  She walks on.

  86

  ‘We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us.’

  — Edmund Burke

  ‘. . . ravens twain sit on his shoulders, and say into his ear all tidings that they see and hear; they are called Huginn and Muninn (mind and memory); them sends he at dawn to fly over the whole world, and they come back at breakfast-tide, thereby becomes he wise in many tidings, and for this men call him Raven’s-god.’

  — William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon, The Story of the Volsungs

  Ryan leans back in his chair, and admires the view from the lead quadcopter. He zooms a little more, deeper into Naomi’s cleavage. He remembers her breasts, from when they first met. Small, brown, firm. He closes his eyes. The nipples growing tight and hard against the palm of his hand.

  They had changed when Colt was born. Still good, but different. He liked their big, new, milky curves. But they were no longer his to command.

  He opens his eyes, examines her breasts again, now, in the world. A tiny wave, a ripple, runs through their curved flesh, with the jolt of each footstep on the hard ground.

  She is finally beginning to perspire. A V of sweat appearing on her sternum.

  When they fucked, it took her so long to start sweating. He’d be pouring, but Naomi . . . maybe a film of moisture would appear on her upper lip just before she came.

  Once he had taken her on ground like this, at Burning Man. They had walked away from the temporary city, away from the shouts and laughter. The boom and fizz of techno fading behind them as they walked for miles out onto the playa, into the silence. Away from the sunset, towards the moonrise. When he flipped her over onto all fours, the dust was bright white on the light brown cheeks of her ass, on her dark brown shoulder blades, in her ink-black hair.

  She says it wasn’t love. How the fuck can she say it wasn’t love?

  There’s an alert tone, as a channel opens. Someone from the external security team. ‘Sir. She’s approaching the southern drop-back intercept position. You’re definitely on top of this?’

  ‘I am definitely on top of this,’ Ryan drawls. ‘You have no idea of how on top of this I am.’

  ‘I’m not comfortable with this, sir.’

  ‘Well, I would be disappointed if you were, Laurence. But this is a trial drone intercept. I have two visible surveillance drones on her, two autonomous, Hornet-class invisibles in backup, and a kill drone about a mile up, with backups on alert in the hangars. She’s about as secure as it gets.’

  ‘OK, sir. I guess I don’t like watching someone just . . . walk in.’


  ‘If your reassuring presence is required, Laurence, I will certainly call you.’

  Down the line, Laurence hesitates, and decides not to take the hint. ‘I know it’s the future, sir, but the future isn’t here yet. And these new automatic systems can screw up.’

  ‘Which is why we run tests. I’ve been following her since Vegas. The base immune system kicked in automatically when she left the 375. Zero threat, Laurence. She’s just helping me test the systems.’

  ‘All right, sir. Out.’

  Ryan moves to the other raven, behind her, and watches her ass move as she walks. So many conflicting emotions and memories surge, that they jolt a tight little laugh out of him. Everything rotating around that invisible point between her legs.

  The former centre of his universe.

  He could call a strike now, and blame it on a software glitch. He could spread her all over Nye County. He’s not logging or recording anything; cameras, his commands. Everything’s disabled. Nothing could be proved.

  But he wants to see her again, first.

  In the flesh.

  It’s not personal. It really isn’t personal. He doesn’t want to have to kill her. But he is running out of other choices.

  87

  She loses her sense of time as she walks. The landscape alongside the road seems to repeat, like the background in a Road Runner cartoon. Sand, rock, bush. Sand, rock, bush.

  The heat makes it hard to think, which is good, because she’s trying not to think about Colt.

  How long has she been walking? An hour? Two?

  The ravens veer to the right, off the rutted road and along a faint path through the scrub and brush. She follows them, for a few hundred yards, till they reach a low mound.

  Set into the mound is a black door.

  It opens.

  The ravens lift, rise into the warm air, their home. Where she now must go, they cannot follow.

  Naomi peers through the doorway. A dark passage. It must slope down, underground.

  She doesn’t want to go underground.

  She looks around in a panic at the hills, the weight of them. At the tracks of old rockslides, visible down their sides. Mountains, fallen on hard times. Young enough, geologically, but already trashed by a million years of earthquakes. Unstable, ready to slide, to crush.