by Julian Gough
She’s afraid of the dark.
But her son is down there.
Naomi says very quietly, no louder than the crickets, ‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ She gets stuck on that line, not because she doesn’t know the rest of the prayer, but because it seems to her astonishing and strange. ‘On earth as it is in heaven. On earth as it is in heaven . . . On earth. As it is in heaven. On earth.’
The black door begins to close again.
Naomi, shocked, steps forward, ‘No . . .’
The sensor triggers, and the door, halfway to closing, stops, reopens.
She takes a step. Another.
Another.
Enters the darkness.
88
She’s coming. He doesn’t have long. He starts to dictate a document. Hesitates.
Deletes.
Disabling the logs and monitoring software on the new devices was easy, they’re experimental, and the monitoring software isn’t integrated, isn’t finished. But all his office devices are monitored by security bots in realtime. And he wants his thoughts to be private for a while.
Uncensored.
He writes ‘The Case For Project Infinite Ammo’ on a sheet of paper with a pen. Black ink. He stares at the words for a long time. Unbelievable, that he still has to make the case for it. After ten years’ work. Ready to roll it out. And they put it under review. Talk of cancelling it. He lets himself say the word in his head. They can’t read it there.
Traitors.
He knows he has begun to make decisions that he will not be able to justify to Washington. They’re going to take his base, and his project, away from him. Probably in the next forty-eight hours.
He thinks he can save his country by then. Even if the idiots who run it don’t want to be saved.
89
The corridor slants down.
Lights flicker on, as she walks.
After a few hundred yards, she reaches a fire door. It’s startlingly stiff, heavy, like a bank-vault door. She pushes it open at the third attempt, and passes through.
Walks.
A second fire door.
The corridor has no other doors off it. This whole corridor is just an emergency exit, Naomi thinks.
The only things to break the featureless surfaces are small cameras in glass domes above each fire door. The cameras swivel inside their domes, like chameleons’ eyes, to follow her, as she passes beneath.
It is a shock when the third fire door opens at her approach, and she is greeted by a tall man in uniform. His features are European, like a Greek statue of some young athlete, she thinks, and his skin is a dark black. It is a striking face. ‘Naomi Chiang?’
She nods. ‘Dr Livingstone’s representative, I presume?’
He raises an eyebrow, then gets it, and laughs at the half-joke. ‘Oh yeah, he used to be a doc. Afraid he’s gone native since coming here. All soldier.’
‘I gather,’ says Naomi drily.
‘Apologies for not greeting you at the gate, but it seems he wanted to try out the new drones as chaperones.’
‘They were undemanding company.’ Naomi isn’t sure why she’s slipping into this absurd, theatrical persona. But then, what behaviour would be natural here?
‘Caused a certain amount of consternation among the local sheriff’s deputies,’ the tall man says. ‘They patrol the perimeter . . . If I can just have a quick look in your bag . . .’ He broods over her nail scissors for a while, but lets her keep them. ‘This way, please.’
They start walking down the corridor. The slope down gets steeper.
‘Security seems a little informal,’ says Naomi, to keep her mind off how deep they are getting.
He smiles. ‘Well, we’re not really set up for visitors at this entrance. Seeing as how it’s an exit. In fact, you’re probably pretty much the first person to enter through it.’
‘I guessed it was just for emergencies,’ says Naomi, to make conversation; to avoid her thoughts.
‘Don’t think there’s ever been any call to use it as an emergency exit, either. We don’t really do emergencies, down here.’
‘Really?’ says Naomi, trying to control her breathing, feeling the weight of the desert over her head. ‘I would have thought this would be nothing but emergencies. Testing weapons, experimental planes, drones . . .’
The tall man snorts. ‘Main test area is thirty miles away. We’re mostly doing office work, underground, in the desert, in a dry base, in a dry county, a hundred miles from the nearest bar. This is the quietest posting I’ve ever had.’
‘You’re very . . . chatty.’
‘I’m a sociable guy.’
‘I mean, for a secret base. You talk a lot.’
‘Well, I have a . . . philosophical disagreement with what the government wants us to do here right now.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Now, that I can’t tell you. I want to hang on to my pension. But, put it this way, I’m trying to get transferred out. And put it another way, I don’t give a fuck any more.’ He beams at her.
The corridor splits left and right. He leads her to the left, and after a couple of hundred yards they stop at a pair of enormous metal doors.
The doors open.
He steps inside the huge lift.
She hesitates.
He looks back at her, and makes a questioning expression that reminds her of Colt. But what doesn’t?
Naomi laughs. It’s a terrible laugh. ‘I sort of worry about earthquakes. About an earthquake happening while I’m in the elevator.’
He smiles. ‘It’s never been a problem. We’re in a geologically stable area. There are stairs—’ he points to another, smaller door – ‘but the elevator is a lot quicker.’ He reaches out a hand, to encourage her, help her into the huge metal coffin, and she steps back reflexively.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’ But her son is down there, under all this rock and silence. She steps into the elevator.
They go down. Down. Down.
She keeps her eyes closed. Breathes.
They step out of the elevator, and walk along a corridor that seems to be in more regular use. It’s dirtier, dustier, the paint is scuffed. The fire doors are all wedged open. Other corridors branch off it.
Naomi talks, to stop herself thinking. ‘You must get outside sometimes.’
‘Oh yeah. We’ve got basketball courts, everything. In the evenings, when it cools down, and in winter, it’s very nice up top.’
Naomi nods encouragement.
Keep talking.
It keeps her mind off the weight above her.
And now they step out into a huge space, with a rough, dusty, soft-stone floor. Not a cave. Naomi looks around. Looks up. She can’t see the roof. Can’t get a sense of the shape of the space. Lights hang here and there, blindingly bright, from scaffolding that disappears up past them into the darkness. Generators snore in the distance. ‘This is the base?’
He laughs. ‘The real base is about a mile further on.’ He has to raise his voice. ‘This is just a construction site for now. We’re expanding. Sorry about the noise.’
‘That’s some pretty loud hammering.’
‘Yeah, tunnelling machines.’
‘I thought secret underground bases were just a science-fiction thing,’ says Naomi.
He shrugs. ‘Ever been in a cave in a desert?’ She nods. ‘Nice, right?’ he says. ‘Temperature is cool, stable. Surface buildings out here get a fifty, sixty degree swing from day to night. Crazy. You’re permanently running either heating or aircon. It’s expensive, it’s not good for the equipment, and it leaves everything vulnerable to a power outage.’ They walk past a machine, its spiked steel maw parked up against the rough shale wall. He slaps its dusty flank as he walks past. ‘This is, believe it or not, practical. And environmentally friendly. Much smaller carbon footprint, and we have a couple of rare species up there,’ he points st
raight up, ‘that don’t even know there’s a base here.’
‘What are the species?’
‘I can’t answer that. National security.’
‘Seriously?’
He laughs. ‘Yeah. If I tell you exactly what kind of lizard or butterfly or whatever, that pretty much ties down the location of the base. These are really localized creatures, and there are nerds out there who know this stuff, oh that lizard lives in that valley . . .’
‘But I drove to the base,’ says Naomi. ‘I already know where it is.’
He shrugs again. ‘Regulations. I didn’t say they made sense, I just said they were regulations.’
They leave the construction cavern and walk down another corridor.
Eventually they arrive at a door.
Behind another door, only five hundred yards away, Colt finishes reorganizing the database. He skips in and out of the datasets.
The problem is trivial. It’s hidden in plain sight in the data. They just didn’t know how to organize it right. It takes him ten minutes.
Colt looks up.
90
‘A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep”.’
— George Orwell on Rudyard Kipling
‘Wolfram joins a growing community of voices that maintain that patterns of information, rather than matter and energy, represent the more fundamental building blocks of reality.’
— Ray Kurzweil
Ryan doesn’t stand when Naomi comes in. She is obscurely disappointed. He’d always had good manners, in his odd way.
‘Can I sit down?’
‘Of course.’
Naomi sits on the white swivel chair.
‘Where is Colt?’ she says.
Ryan pushes a freshly filled plate of cupcakes towards her. Gestures to take one. She doesn’t even glance down at it.
‘Oh come on,’ he says. ‘Good for you. Tasty, too. Honey and pomegranate.’
‘Where’s my son?’
‘Please,’ says Ryan, smiling. ‘A little foreplay first. Some polite conversation. You’re looking very well . . . Have you done something jolly with your hair?’
She tries to stop herself smiling. That line, from some ridiculous English period drama, had totally cracked them both up, back when they had watched TV together. Back when they laughed at the same things.
Ryan pulling her pants off, in the living room of their old place, before Colt was born. Spreading her legs, working his tongue very slowly up, between her labia, parting them, and then, just as he is about to reach her clitoris, lifting his head above her neatly trimmed triangle to say, smiling: ‘Have you done something jolly with your hair?’
She shakes the image out of her head.
‘Where’s my son?’
‘Our son,’ says Ryan, and now he’s not smiling.
There is a sheet of paper on the table. A pen. Ryan’s handwriting, a few words. Naomi glances down at it.
Tries to read it at an angle, upside down.
Can’t.
‘You’re working on paper,’ she says. ‘I thought you were all about the technology.’
He shrugs. ‘A sheet of paper can’t be hacked.’
She reaches for it, stops.
‘Go ahead.’
The Case For Project Infinite Ammo
‘What is project Infinite Ammo?’
‘I can’t answer that. National security.’
He smiles, and he looks young again. Oh that smile.
‘But right now,’ he says, ‘you are project Infinite Ammo. And Colt. What you’ve done to Colt.’
‘What have I done to him? What do you think I’ve done?’
‘Oh, come on. It’s clear what you’ve done. You’ve restructured his brain, his entire nervous system. You’ve turned a caterpillar into a butterfly.’
‘He wasn’t a caterpillar.’
‘Well, he certainly wasn’t a goddamn butterfly.’
Naomi picks up the piece of paper. Rolls the pen back and forth on the metal tabletop with her fingertip. Picks up the pen.
‘He’s extraordinary,’ says Ryan. ‘He can see patterns that we can’t see. That our entire multibillion-dollar bullshit intelligence system can’t see. Connections. Colt is the first of a new type of soldier.’
‘He’s not a soldier,’ says Naomi.
‘He is now,’ says Ryan. ‘He can do important work here, help his country. No disrespect, but that sure beats sitting on his ass at home, playing computer games and scratching his nutsack.’
Naomi shakes her head, starts to scribble out the letters on the page, one at a time, in tight little scribbles.
‘Come here, too,’ says Ryan.
‘To help you kill people more efficiently?’
‘Look, we’re going to do this anyway.’
‘Not with my research—’
‘Because it’s your research, you should be involved, stay involved. Work with Colt. Work with us.’
‘Work with you?’
Naomi blinks as the memories rush back.
They had collaborated on a paper together. It was how they met. Their first piece of serious, original research. A new approach to pain-suppression in human subjects.
Of course, in order to suppress pain, you need to create some pain to be suppressed. And it is hard to get volunteers to subject themselves to serious, ongoing pain. True, there are patients with serious, ongoing pain, but they tend to be undergoing treatment for it already, which masks it; few of them want to experience the pain, raw, day after day, so someone can occasionally experiment, during office hours, on cutting it off. And they tend to have other problems too. Problems of age, chronic health issues. This was research aimed at car-crash victims, gunshot victims; at young, healthy people undergoing sudden trauma.
Naomi volunteered.
They began very formally, in a small lab on the edge of the campus.
The early results were immediately promising.
At the end of day three, they touched hands, accidentally, as they moved past each other, on their way out the door. Both apologized profusely.
On the fifth evening, after they had completed all that day’s tests and tidied up, they found themselves standing face to face, by the door. Neither moved to open it.
Ryan stared at Naomi as though he had just noticed something astonishing about her. His hands clenched and unclenched, but he didn’t move, as Naomi stared back, examining his face. Eventually, she nodded.
He turned Naomi around, pushed her up against the painted concrete wall of the lab, pulled her skirt up above her hips, dragged her underwear aside, and fucked her from behind.
Early the next week, they moved in together, and continued the project from home.
He would tie her arms to the bedposts before they began. The needles, the gag.
There was nothing sexual about the day’s testing.
There was no need.
There was just a flame of pain into which her fluttering, panicked thoughts vanished.
Eventually, as the day went on, her awkward, crumpled self would burn away entirely, and there was just the flame.
It was quiet and beautiful inside her mind.
What she felt for Ryan wasn’t love. It was fiercer than that.
He gave her the pain, and then he took it away.
And she was in control of this. She had chosen it.
Afterwards, she rated the pain and the relief on a standard scale, backed up by pre- and post- blood readings of stress chemicals and dopamine.
The paper gave all the relevant details.
Her wrists tied to the bedposts; the fact that Ryan fucked her after each long day’s testing without untying her first; the fact that she was so ready by then that she came as he entered; those details weren’t releva
nt.
The Journal of Pain and Symptom Management took the paper. It was widely cited. The military had liked its implications for dealing better with combat trauma. That was when they had first reached out to Ryan.
When the study ended . . . He would tie her up, hit her, fuck her while she resisted. She agreed to it in advance. Planned it with him. Told him what to do. And then relaxed into the pleasure, and the pain. If she couldn’t uncross those wires, fix that short circuit, she could at least use it, control it.
There was a safe word.
She never used it. Not once. Even when he . . .
She shakes her head at a memory, no; and snaps back into the moment, into her body now, the slightly burnt smell of the recirculated air; looking into Ryan’s eyes across a table.
He leans back in his chair. ‘We had some good times.’
‘It was just sex.’
‘It was incredibly good sex. And that’s not nothing.’
‘The sex was great,’ says Naomi, and almost smiles. ‘But there was nothing else.’
‘C’mon, that’s way too harsh. There was the work, there was Colt . . . there was a lot there.’
‘Not enough.’
‘If you’d just given me time, instead of—’
‘I gave you plenty of time. I could have given you for ever. Your heart wasn’t open.’
‘And you were the Dalai fucking Lama?’
She pauses. ‘OK. Yes. Our hearts weren’t open.’
‘I know,’ says Ryan. ‘Yeah. I know.’
‘I’ve changed,’ says Naomi. ‘Have you?’
‘Yeah. I’ve changed.’ Ryan pushes the chair back from his desk. The chair keeps on going.
It’s a wheelchair.
And Ryan has no legs.
‘Oh, Ryan . . .’
‘Yeah.’
‘Pakistan?’
‘Yeah.’
Naomi’s hand drifts towards her mouth. ‘If I’d published all my papers . . .’
‘That thought has occurred to me, yeah.’
‘But . . .’ She stares at where his legs stop. Above the knee. ‘Why don’t you . . . I mean, couldn’t they . . .’
‘Oh, sure, I have prosthetics,’ he says, and she thinks for a strange second he’s going to cry. ‘State-of-the-art customized government-issue battle legs. They’re in the repair shop, again. Shorted out, again.’