Connect

by Julian Gough

  The flames that almost overwhelmed him die down.

  They go back to the mannequins. From behind them comes another sob. Colt waves his hand.

  The dryers roar.

  *

  Colt puts the palm of his good hand to the naked body; forehead, chest, groin; kneecap, elbow, hand. ‘They’re hot enough.’

  ‘OK.’

  Naomi slaps the wigs back onto the Velcro.

  Colt’s right hand aches now, and pain shoots up his arm, as he drags the male mannequin back to the gondola.

  It’s gone.

  Uh oh. And the mannequins are cooling.

  Colt hauls out the old clothes from behind the palm tree. He and Naomi dress the warm plastic bodies quickly.

  And now another gondola is drifting by, with a couple in it. Small, young, pale, holding hands. Their mechanical gondolier is between arias, smoothly steering.

  ‘Can we have your gondola?’ asks Colt, trotting alongside. They stare at him in incomprehension. He says it again louder, and they shrink back in their seat.

  Naomi sighs, waves most of the remaining blackjack dollars at the couple, indicates with her thumb, out; smiles a question.

  They get out, take the money, bow, start walking away.

  The robot gondolier sings after them, ‘Svanì per sempre il sogno mio d’amore. / L’ora è fuggita, e muoio disperato!’

  The couple stop politely, and turn back, to listen.

  Colt can’t carry out his plan with bystanders watching, but the mannequins are cooling and he’s running out of time. He grinds his teeth and drums his fingers on his thighs as the robot gondolier sings on, its mobile, alarmingly realistic face emoting strongly. ‘E muoio disperato! E non ho amato mai tanto la vita, tanto la vita!’

  Colt autotranslates it, to distract himself, to stop himself smashing the robot in front of witnesses. ‘For ever, my dream of love has vanished. / That moment has fled, and I die in desperation. / And I die in desperation! / And I never before loved life so much, / loved life so much!’

  The swell of the voice summons a vision of Sasha, shimmering through the water that abruptly fills Colt’s eyes.

  Everything’s reminding him of her. This is ridiculous.

  Finally it’s over. The couple clap politely and walk away.

  The robot gondolier greets Naomi and Colt and the two mannequins, as Colt blinks, and dabs his eyes dry with the long tail of the tuxedo.

  Naomi holds the gondola steady in the slowly flowing water, while Colt positions the plastic man and woman wearing their clothes, their hair. Their bug. He switches their faces back on, and they smile up at Colt, surprised, delighted; overjoyed.

  Colt steps back, looks at the plastic couple. Tries to empathize with a drone at maybe fifteen thousand feet, hi-def zoom, doing optical recognition, infrared, clothes, hair. Another drone at five hundred feet, checking for a radio frequency.

  OK. Run the program. Be the code.

  Infrared. Not perfect. Within the parameters. It’ll do.

  Clothes, yes.

  Good pattern-matching.

  No.

  Something is wrong.

  Everything’s wrong.

  ‘Too stiff.’

  He hauls them out, bends their limbs till they are crouching; places their hands over their moving faces. Slides them back inside. Now they seem to be hiding their faces; and the movement of the smiles transmits a little movement to the hands, the arms. Not much, it’s subtle, but they look more alive. Better. ‘OK.’

  Naomi lets go.

  The gondola drifts off down the elevated canal, floating towards the exit, the light. The gondolier begins to sing.

  ‘What now?’ says Naomi.

  ‘Now we find out if we’re just under surveillance. Because if it’s more than that . . . They’ll never get a cleaner shot.’

  The nose of the gondola moves out into sunlight on water that now sparkles. The boat’s bright silk canopy shades the still couple, crouched low.

  As the sunlight hits the robot gondolier at the back of the boat, he shifts into falsetto, hits a high C, and holds it.

  ‘I guess they do have better range,’ says Naomi.

  A drone – small, black, quadcopter, just cameras, sensors – drops from the sky almost immediately and stops in place, low, beside the couple. The immune system must have detected the movement of the bug inside the building; predicted this exit. The small drone circles, gets the angles, triangulates. Identifies the weak bug signal, the clothes, the hair. The patterns. Backs off.

  Calls the strike.

  The gondola vanishes in a blast that takes down a hundred yards of elevated fake marble canal. Broken concrete, shredded silk, vaporized water, plastic mannequin pieces, and shattered carbon-composite fragments of gondola all make a spherical bloom in mid-air, from a white-hot single point that gets bigger and prodigiously bigger so that Colt and Naomi duck reflexively. Even at this distance, the blast’s pressure wave hurts their ears and lungs.

  At either side of the great gap where the gondola had been, rods of reinforcing steel sway down, and shed lumps of concrete, and bound back up again as, from the nearer, higher side, water pours over the broken lip around the swaying rods and down, in a short-lived waterfall, smacking off the concrete plaza below, till all the closed circuit’s waters are exhausted as the pump brings up nothing but hiccups of air.

  Naomi feels like being sick, and feels like laughing. The two impulses battle queasily within her, so that she giggles and gags a little at the same time. Her chest feels punched, and her ears ache and ring.

  ‘Well,’ said Colt. ‘I suspect they’ve decided that we are a threat.’

  Naomi studies his shy, embarrassed face. He glances back at her and smiles.

  He made a joke.

  She feels dizzy for a moment with relief, pleasure, excitement; the same rush she got when he finally, finally, spoke his first word.

  Something’s fixed.

  107

  And now we are dead, thinks Naomi, over and over.

  The vision of their old clothes, their old selves, evaporating, vaporizing, vanishing before her eyes in the bright, expanding explosion . . . it loops and loops in her mind, her heartbeat and breathing quickening each time.

  And now we are dead . . .

  Oh . . . Pleasure floods through her. It’s shockingly intense, it’s ecstatic.

  They leave the Venetian separately, through different doors, and rendezvous three casinos away. Embrace at a junction, in their wedding clothes. Colt is puzzled to find he hardly minds the burning sensation across acres of skin as she holds him. He’s changing . . .

  Other pedestrians smile at the newlyweds. Colt overhears an elderly couple, the wife whispering to the husband, ‘He seems a little young, but hey, this is Vegas.’

  Staying in the crowds, going with the flow, Colt and Naomi move on foot, as far and as fast as they can. They get off the Strip as soon as the crowds start to thin.

  Finally they stop, in some anonymous street.

  Naomi tries to think, to plan, what to do next, but nothing happens in her head. It’s like she’s put on the spotlights and lit the stage, and no one has appeared on it.

  Overload? No. Not just that.

  ‘I need to eat,’ she says.

  *

  They slip into a mall, along a wide, low concourse, into a cheap sushi restaurant. Naomi stands there, studying the big, colourful wall menu.

  She’s so tired.

  She frowns, and points at some salad side dishes, to lift her a little.

  Points at some sushi items.

  Colt points at the extra-spicy wasabi.

  Naomi points at ‘Pay in Cash’.

  The pictures light up on the wall menu, acknowledging their order.

  They sit.

  The waitbot brings the food to the table. It’s skinned as R2D2, to advertise the newly refurbished Star Wars casino.

  Naomi leaves the cash on the tray that sits on top of its head.

&nb
sp; It chirps politely, in a cute, scrambled, R2D2 voice. Prints a traditional paper receipt. Wheels woozily off.

  People are staring at them.

  Look down, don’t meet their eyes.

  She picks up her chopsticks.

  Colt pushes his food away, stands up. ‘Got to check something.’

  He doesn’t wait for her response, just walks out of the restaurant, into the flow of people moving through the mall. Naomi bites back her questions, and watches him till the river of strangers carries him around a curve and out of sight.

  She pokes at her food with a chopstick.

  Breaks it into smaller and smaller pieces.

  Eventually she lifts a tiny piece of rice and beef towards her mouth; but the smell of meat reminds her of the lab, and she puts the chopsticks back down. She shakes her head, to get rid of the memory of the warm metal-and-meat smell. The sight, the sound, of the little cobalt-steel buzz saw she used to use, to cut open the skulls of lab mice for autopsies.

  When he comes back safe, she’s been on a low simmer of anxiety and anger for five minutes, and she’s so relieved she almost snaps at him.

  He sits down. ‘They’re still tracking us,’ he says.

  Her anger evaporates. ‘Oh, Colt.’ He looks so serious. So grown up. ‘We’ve dumped our clothes, the bug. It thinks we’re dead. How can it still track us?’ Her hunger comes back, fear-flavoured now. She eats the mess on her plate, too fast, gagging, like it’s her last chance.

  He sips his plastic cup of water.

  She checks his plate surreptitiously, because she always does.

  He’s eaten nothing. But he must be starving by now . . .

  ‘Did you eat while you were underground?’ she says. ‘Anything?’

  ‘No . . .’ Colt frowns, to remember. He doesn’t usually bother remembering food. Ah, hang on . . . ‘Yes. Nothing much. A little cake. Couple of cupcakes . . . A plate of cupcakes.’

  ‘Pomegranate.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lot of seeds.’

  ‘Yes.’ He realizes what she’s saying, and stands up.

  She says it anyway. ‘They weren’t all seeds.’

  ‘I need a bag,’ says Colt. ‘Plastic bag. Anything.’

  They walk out into the mall.

  Colt digs around in a trash container screwed to the wall.

  As he does, Naomi reads the sticker on its orange side, to keep her eyes occupied; to stop them from wildly spinning around and around, looking for enemies in every direction.

  This Waste Receptacle is fully compliant with US Safety Standard 343-78-55A. It sniffs for explosives, biological agents, chemical agents, and radioactive materials.

  Your Safety Is Our Concern.

  Colt finally finds a discarded plastic bag. He briskly swings it by the handles, to fill it with air. It opens like a parachute, making a crispy, satisfying noise, with a fat, thump ending.

  Colt laughs. The noise was so right, it’s made his teeth tingle.

  He closes the neck of the bag, squeezes to check it for rips, holes. It bulges like a balloon.

  Airtight.

  Good.

  He peels off his bloody glove, his clean glove, and dumps them in the trash.

  They look for a restroom. The nearest one is closed for repair, a puddle of water coming out from under its locked door.

  When they do find a restroom, all the stalls are full. Six men queueing.

  The restroom beside it, women are queueing out the door. The women stare at them.

  They keep going, walking faster; find a service door held open by an abandoned bucket and mop; walk through.

  Down a shadowy service corridor. Lights only triggered as they pass. Someone has stolen every second lightbulb.

  Through a fire door, into a vast, dimly lit storage area. The lights brighten as they enter.

  Rolling steel doors in the walls, some of them high, above ramps, for unloading container trucks.

  Pallets.

  Nobody around.

  Colt loops one handle of the plastic bag over the silvery knob of the fire door, pulls the bag’s other handle out with one hand so the bag yawns open in front of him.

  ‘Here,’ says Colt. ‘It’ll do.’

  He sticks his finger down his throat, bends over. Vomits into the bag.

  Does it again.

  It’s easier the second time; the smell of puke helps him puke.

  The sound of his retching bounces off the concrete walls, the steel doors, and comes back to him. It reminds him of the noise some monster made, in a cave, in an old episode of Doctor Who. A liquid, coughing noise, all reverb and echo.

  After the fourth time, his stomach is empty. Colt frowns.

  ‘They could be in my intestines by now.’

  ‘You need to clear it all out.’

  ‘Wait . . .

  Colt reaches down into the bag, takes something delicately between finger and thumb. ‘Oh boy. Look at this. Very clever design.’

  ‘Jesus, Colt, I don’t want to look into a bag of puke.’

  But Colt has lifted what he wants out of the bag. He checks his pockets for tissues. None. Of course, they’re not his pockets. He’d forgotten he was wearing a wedding suit.

  That’s why everyone was staring at them.

  He tugs at the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket.

  It slides out; it’s not a full handkerchief; just a triangle of silk attached to a card the shape of the pocket.

  Damn . . . But it’ll be enough . . .

  ‘Jesus,’ says Naomi vehemently.

  Colt looks at her, startled. Worried.

  Is she angry? She’s never angry, not really.

  ‘Sorry, Colt,’ she says. ‘But at that price, the handkerchief should be real.’

  Oh.

  Relief . . .

  He uses the scrap of silk to dry what he has found.

  ‘See?’ He pushes it under Naomi’s nose. ‘The black bit. Smaller than a seed. That’s the transmitter. And those tiny metal fronds?’

  ‘Where?’

  They are almost too fine to see. Colt turns his finger, and they catch the light, thin as spider silk.

  ‘The bug must go in looking just like a seed. Disguised. Organic coating. Smooth. But the acid in my stomach stripped away the outer shell, and released these filaments. And the filaments react with the stomach acid to produce electricity . . .’ He peers closer. ‘That’s brilliant.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Naomi. She leans in closer, too, despite herself. ‘Kind of like the old zinc batteries in my mother’s hearing aid.’

  ‘Really? How did they work?’ says Colt.

  This is nice. This is like it used to be. Talking about science with Mama.

  His brain feels so weary. If he half-closes his eyes in the low light of the loading bay, he could be in the cave of his bedroom, drowsily asking his mama questions, not wanting to go to sleep.

  Tell me something, Mama. About what? Anything.

  Naomi shakes her head.

  ‘Tell me, Mama.’

  Naomi sighs. Smiles. ‘When my mother installed the battery, she pulled off a tab, and exposed it to the air,’ she says. ‘The zinc inside reacted with the ambient oxygen; so most of the chemical weight wasn’t in the battery. Each battery got through about twenty cubic centimetres of air per hour. Just, you know, the air that floated through it.’

  ‘Cool,’ says Colt, doing the math in his head for a zinc–oxygen reaction. Mmmm. Nice. ‘Really high power output, and almost no weight.’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ says Naomi. ‘If they had to incorporate the weight of the oxygen into the physical battery, they’d have weighed twenty times as much.’

  ‘That’s good design,’ says Colt.

  ‘Yes,’ says Naomi. ‘After she’d told me how they worked, I was kind of fascinated. She’d let me pull off the tabs, as a treat.’

  She leans in even closer over the tracking device on Colt’s finger, intrigued despite herself, despite the smell. ‘This bug’s ev
en better,’ she says. ‘He’s floating in a sea of battery acid . . . Very high power output.’ From a bug the size of a seed . . . It’s hard not to admire something so elegant. ‘I wonder would it even work, though, lower down the alimentary canal? Once it’s left the stomach?’

  He wishes he could just drift off to sleep like this, listening to Mama, asking a question whenever she stops talking.

  His hand is sore.

  She would kiss it, and it would get better. It wouldn’t just feel better, it would get better.

  He used to mix her up with Jesus in his mind.

  When he heard the story of Jesus curing the leper, or bringing Lazarus back from the dead, he would see a man standing beside his mama, both in long white dresses, and they would kiss the corpse back to life, Mama and Jesus, working together, kissing it better . . .

  A yard away, airgapped, Naomi is also thinking of the past. So many hours spent poring over some insect, or plant, or little piece of technology, patiently answering Colt’s questions. Colt, totally engaged.

  The closest I ever got to him. The best hours of my life.

  And Naomi remembers where they are, and why they are examining a brilliantly designed bug on Colt’s fingertip.

  She gives a little involuntary snort of grief and despair. Again, as sharp as ever, the shock: her son is going to die.

  Colt frowns and looks closer at the filaments.

  They’re at the limits of visibility.

  ‘I think they have little hooks on the end, to anchor them in the stomach wall,’ he says.

  ‘Oh God,’ says Naomi.

  ‘To stop them from going down your digestive tract,’ says Colt, ‘and out the other end.’

  Naomi puts her hand on his shoulder. He shrugs it off, automatically. He doesn’t seem upset, just interested.

  ‘It keeps them in place, in the battery acid, too,’ he says. ‘I guess the surge when I vomited broke them free. But . . . Damn.’

  ‘So there might be bugs still trapped in your stomach . . .’

  ‘Well . . . in one way it’s good. They probably aren’t in my intestines. But yeah, it means I might not have puked them all.’

  ‘How can we check?’

  ‘Find out what frequency they’re transmitting on.’ Colt puts the bug to his ear, grins. ‘And see if there’s still one inside me, transmitting.’

  He flicks the clean bug back into the plastic bag of stomach acid, so it can power up, transmit.