Connect

by Julian Gough

  He flicks down his visor; automatically sets it to reflective, and she mourns the loss of his face.

  OK, he thinks. Any receiver can be retuned . . .

  He finds a piece of commercial code in the helmet’s own library; runs a scan up and down the radio frequencies.

  There’s a hell of a lot of everything, the mumble of the universe, but none of it loud enough to be the bugs. At that range, a couple of feet away from the helmet, they should be screaming. So either they aren’t transmitting in the normal frequency ranges, or the bugs are dead.

  He doesn’t think they’re dead.

  He frowns, and swiftly rewrites the code.

  OK, now he needs a bigger receiver.

  Naomi watches patiently, as Colt looks around for something that might act as an aerial. She’s learned a lot of patience, since Colt’s birth.

  An electronics and plastics recycling bin, great. He flips up the lid, roots around in it. Deep down in the debris at the bottom, he finds a broken set of old-style earbuds; really old, the type with a cord you plug in.

  Excellent.

  He plugs the cord into the helmet’s universal socket; pulls off the buds, exposes the wire. He looks around.

  There.

  He studies the big rolling steel doors of the loading bay, perfect.

  He wraps the wire around an exposed steel rivet head. Runs the scanner again, and finds a screaming, way out in the boondocks, beyond any commercial frequency.

  How do they do that, with something so small?

  Doesn’t matter. The bag is broadcasting on three slightly different frequencies. The bag; or his guts. He unwraps the wire from the rivet. He can still hear the ghost of the signals, as he stands beside the bugs like this. Good.

  He hangs the bag of vomit on a coat hook beside the steel service door, and walks away from the bag, to the far end of the loading bay. As he walks, all three signals drop off.

  The square of the distance. Perfectly normal.

  Outside, there’s the sound of a truck backing up to a loading ramp, and the peep peep of its reversing signal is louder now than the bugs. Colt breathes out a huge sigh, runs back, gets the bag, and returns to his mother.

  ‘That’s all of them,’ says Colt. ‘Three, in the bag.’ He waves it at her. ‘There’s nothing in my system.’

  Naomi breathes out a tremendous sigh of relief.

  Wow, light-headed.

  She hadn’t even noticed she’d been holding her breath.

  ‘Now we have to get rid of these . . .’ says Colt, and walks back towards the service corridor they just came down.

  With a whine and clatter, a steel door starts rolling upward, and a sharp rectangle of bright yellow light expands across the floor of the loading bay.

  A guy with a big red beard ducks in, under the rising door, and doesn’t see them for a moment in the gloom. Colt has time to pull open the fire door, and disappear into the service corridor.

  But Naomi is too far from it; freezes.

  ‘Hey, lady,’ says the guy with the beard, ‘I think you might be lost.’

  ‘I think you might be right,’ says Naomi. ‘I was looking for the bathrooms.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  He studies her tits and ass. Ugh . . . Naomi gives a little shake of her head, to dislodge an abrupt, furious image of him smashed and bleeding.

  ‘They’re a little tricky to find,’ he says. ‘I can show you . . .’

  ‘No, thanks.’ It comes out with hard edges.

  ‘Sure. Sure.’ He backs off. ‘They’re that way,’ he indicates the fire door, the service corridor, ‘all the way down, and left. Out in the mall.’

  She nods her thanks.

  He walks reluctantly away, and up a ramp.

  Pulls a chunky, old-fashioned device out of his back pocket, taps it. A second loading door rises, with a rattle of metal slats, exposing the back of his truck. He taps again, and the remote unlocks the truck’s back doors, and swings them open. Rubbing his beard vigorously with the heel of his free hand, he studies the bright screen of the chunky device.

  Naomi walks quietly into the shadows towards the service corridor. The fire door swings open just as she gets to it, and Colt emerges, puts a finger to his lips. Points. Naomi looks back.

  The bearded driver scans a code on the truck door with the device, scans a piled pallet just inside the back door of the truck, and grunts in satisfaction. He removes the pallet with a small lifter, brings it down the ramp, and leaves it with some other stacked pallets.

  As soon as the driver has his back to them, Colt drifts from Naomi’s side, out of the shadows, into the loading bay, and throws something into the back of the truck.

  Runs back to Naomi’s side, freezes.

  The man returns, locks the back of the truck. As he walks out of the warehouse, the warehouse doors slowly slide closed.

  Through the thin, sheet-metal warehouse walls, they hear the truck pull away from the loading bay, and roar off.

  ‘The bugs,’ says Naomi.

  Colt nods. ‘To the drones, it should look like we’re inside the truck.’

  ‘We’re clear?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe.’

  108

  They leave the mall separately, Colt first, then Naomi two minutes later. She finds him where they agreed, at a corner two blocks away. In the green shade of an awning, outside a coffee shop.

  And Naomi’s euphoria – Colt is there, alive – lurches into reverse when she sees his face. So serious. No, this isn’t over. How can it ever be over? Only their deaths will satisfy the machine.

  ‘Mama, I want to go home.’

  ‘I know, Colt, I know,’ and she puts her arm around him, but he pushes it away.

  ‘No, Mama. I need to go home.’ Colt is about to keep speaking, but . . . wait.

  Naomi’s face just changed.

  He studies her face in the cool green light coming through the awning. It’s not a frown. It’s more subtle. Eyes a little wider. Face titled slightly.

  Wow, he can read his mother’s face. Wow. She just asked him why. She said ‘why’ with her face.

  He feels the world expand and bend and warp.

  Holy shit, everybody’s face is speaking all the time.

  It’s like he’s gained sight after being born blind.

  ‘You’re thinking, why?’ he marvels.

  She nods, says yes, smiles.

  It’s like her face has jumped from 2D into 3D.

  It’s vivid.

  It’s too much.

  He closes his eyes. He’ll deal with it later.

  Why.

  ‘Because all my stuff is there,’ he says. ‘And my servers. I need more processing power. Offline. Not in the cloud.’

  The cloud is full of government. The cloud is full of spies. The cloud is full of pattern-recognition software, looking for his patterns of activity. Looking for him. To punish him. They’ve built the God of Exodus and Leviticus, he thinks. He opens his eyes, stares at his mother’s living, speaking face.

  ‘What will happen when they find the bugs?’ says Naomi. ‘Just the bugs, and not us? They’ll look for us at the house, won’t they?’

  ‘I have a plan. To deal with that. If it works . . .’ He thinks it through one more time, all the details, all the possible problems. All the ways it could fail. ‘If it works, then our house is the safest place we could be.’

  And he feels a rush of the big emotion, the overwhelming one, the one he feels for his mother; he feels it for their home, his room; its warm, small bed, all the familiar smells and shapes and textures.

  ‘And if it doesn’t work?’ says Naomi.

  ‘Everybody dies in the end . . .’ He shrugs. ‘It’s learning more about us all the time. If we just wander around . . .’ He shrugs again. ‘All we can do is drag out how long it takes them to catch us. The quicker we can get home, the better our chances of beating it—’

  ‘OK. Then we need transport,’ says Naomi. ‘Hire a car . . .’


  ‘No debit. No credit. No credit cards. Nothing they can trace.’

  Of course. ‘Sorry. Cash . . .’

  ‘They’ll need ID, and we’ll still be on the system . . .’

  ‘We could . . .’ She can’t bring herself to say steal. ‘Take? Maybe? A car?’

  ‘Yeah . . . an old one, I guess. The new locking systems are hard to . . .’

  The explosion bends the glass of the plate-glass window beside them so that their reflections ripple. There’s a stab of pain in their ears; the awning convulses above them, as the shockwave snaps it into a tight arch. It holds the shape for a moment, then it falls back.

  Further down the street, a paisley sun umbrella, lifted out of its stand, topples off a third-floor balcony. It zig-zags down slowly, like a psychedelic parachute, to land in the road.

  Car alarms howl like electronic dogs, in an expanding ring around the blast zone.

  For a moment, of course, they think that it was aimed at them.

  It takes a few more seconds for the smoke and flame to rise high enough above the nearby buildings to be seen.

  It’s a big explosion.

  Very big.

  But many blocks away, on the Strip, out near the airport.

  ‘The truck,’ says Colt. ‘They took out the truck.’

  People are jostling through the door of the cafe, to look. Colt and Naomi move aside, deeper into the shadow under the canopy; lower their voices in the babble.

  Colt sees a picture in his mind of the truck driver, his red beard.

  ‘The driver . . .’ Colt shivers; shakes the shiver off. ‘The driver must have parked the truck. Left the truck. Away from traffic. A parking lot maybe . . .’

  Why is he talking so much? What is he trying not to think? There are connections being made, thoughts building up, it’s like ants in his skull, itchy, he doesn’t want to look at those thoughts.

  But his mother has been making those connections too, slower maybe.

  ‘Or maybe we’ve been raised from orange targets to red,’ she says.

  Colt closes his eyes but he sees the truck driver again, and now his beard is on fire. The fat of his skin is on fire.

  ‘Maybe,’ says Colt, and his jaw feels stiff and sore, muscles clenched tight. ‘Maybe . . .’

  ‘But . . .’ Naomi pauses, trying to find the upside. ‘. . . they’ll have to think we’re dead now . . .’

  ‘For a while.’

  There’s a song in Colt’s head, a favourite of his mama’s, she loves Johnny Cash.

  ‘I shot a man in Reno . . . just to watch him die . . .’

  A black BMW with tinted windows pulls up at the kerb beside them. Colt and Naomi both reflexively retreat deeper into the shadow beneath the canopy, till their backs are touching the glass.

  The driver opens the door, and steps out onto the sidewalk.

  A young Egyptian-looking man in a lightweight Italian suit.

  He stands there, with his mouth very slowly opening wider and wider as he stares up at the sky beyond the Starbucks across the road, at the column of black, oily smoke that is still rising; at the flickers of dark orange flame that swirl inside it.

  He’s holding a bunch of physical keys.

  Colt glances back at the BMW. Oh, cool. It’s an old-style gasoline car; no self-drive, no safeties.

  A rich man’s car. No, a rich boy’s toy.

  The insurance must be horrendous . . .

  ‘Hey, wheels,’ says Colt.

  By the time Naomi realizes what Colt means, it’s too late, Colt has pushed through the crowd of pavement gawkers.

  He taps the driver on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, sir, but we need your vehicle.’

  The driver closes his mouth, turns and stares at Colt. This teenager with a damaged hand, in a tuxedo. Looks across at Naomi. ‘What?’ he says.

  Oh shit, Naomi thinks. And I’m in a wedding dress.

  ‘Disguise,’ she says. ‘Undercover operation.’ She blushes furiously at the lie, at the Hollywood cliché.

  ‘We’ll return your car once we’re done,’ says Colt briskly. ‘What’s your number? We’ll call to tell you where to pick it up . . . Quickly, please, sir.’

  The driver, still holding his status-symbol keychain, awkwardly digs a black-leather wallet out of his pocket. He carefully tugs a business card free.

  Colt stares at the card as it emerges. Wow. An actual card, on paper. This guy is a real retronaut.

  A couple of classic plastic credit cards follow the business card from its slot. They fall to the ground.

  Nobody bends to get them.

  ‘Sorry,’ says the driver. He holds out the business card to Colt.

  ‘No problem,’ says Colt magnanimously. ‘Give it to her, she’s in charge of recovery procedures.’

  The driver gives Naomi the card.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, and just manages to stop herself bowing.

  Colt sniffs, as the driver withdraws his hand.

  The driver smells nice. Sandalwood?

  ‘You smell nice,’ says Colt, and Naomi smacks her elbow into his ribs.

  The driver is staring at him, not answering.

  Oh yeah, he thinks I’m a cop. Or Secret Service. This is hard. Why do people think math is hard? It’s easy to remember what is true. It’s way harder to remember what other people think is true, but is not.

  The driver’s mouth opens and closes again, but he doesn’t seem to know what to say. The keys, still in his hand, clink gently as he trembles.

  Colt reaches out and takes the bunch of metal keys from his hand with so much confidence the driver allows it.

  Colt tries to remove the car key from the bunch.

  Owwa. Too much damage to the tendons of his right hand. Too difficult.

  He hands the keys to Naomi. As she wrestles the key off a vintage enamelled metal keyring that says ‘Lock Up Your Bunnies’, the driver crouches down to pick up his credit cards.

  Colt says, ‘It’s OK, your car will be automatically covered by our insurance.’

  ‘Thank you . . .’ Something seems to occur to the driver. He stands up, holding the plastic cards. ‘Which, ah, service? Unit? Are you?’ he asks.

  ‘NSA,’ says Colt.

  ‘Really?’ says the driver, frowning. He brushes dust off the top card with his thumb. ‘I thought they . . .’

  ‘You never saw us and this never happened.’

  ‘OK,’ says the driver.

  109

  As Naomi drives off, she glances across at Colt as he puts on his seatbelt.

  The inside of the car smells like the driver’s cologne, plus leather from the seats. It’s nice. It smells like a father, thinks Colt.

  Naomi stares at him.

  Colt has never told an out-and-out lie, even as a kid.

  Once, when Donnie rang, Naomi asked Colt to answer the phone, to tell Donnie she wasn’t there. But Colt couldn’t do it; he gestured to her to go into another room, so he could say, truthfully, ‘She isn’t here.’ When she didn’t understand, didn’t move, he moved; walked out the door, along the corridor, to the bathroom, making noncommittal noises into the phone. But Naomi followed him down the corridor, to hear what he was saying to Donnie. Colt swung the bathroom door shut in her face. She opened it a crack, peered in; Colt threw the phone into the toilet bowl, smashing the old-fashioned handset, and screamed at her. No, Colt didn’t, couldn’t lie.

  ‘You told a lie,’ she says.

  ‘No, I didn’t. Mama, we need to find somewhere quiet, and I can disable the car’s transceiver . . .’

  ‘You told him we were Secret Service!’

  ‘No, he assumed we were. I told him the truth. We do need his vehicle. We will return it when we’re done. You are in charge of recovery procedures, because I can’t drive.’

  ‘Come on, you said we were in the NSA!’

  ‘He asked what service we were with. Well, we’re not attached to any service or agency.’

  ‘Sure, but you said . . .’
<
br />   ‘I said NSA. It also stands for No Strings Attached.’

  Naomi laughs. ‘Jeeeez, Colt that’s pretty close to a lie.’

  ‘What I meant, in my head, when I said it, was No Strings Attached,’ says Colt, dogged, flushed. ‘It’s not my fault he can’t read my mind.’

  They come out onto the Strip, and see the huge black glass pyramid of the Luxor is on fire.

  ‘Oh God,’ says Naomi.

  Colt turns to watch, through the car’s tinted glass, as they pass.

  ‘That truck must have been making a delivery,’ he says. ‘It’s around by the service entrance.’

  The explosion has demolished the wall that used to hide deliveries. Stripped the leaves and smaller branches from the screen of trees, whose trunks smoulder.

  The smoke pours lazily from the wreckage of the service area. Colt can’t even make out the remains of the truck, it’s so mixed up with other mechanical debris, other vehicles. A forklift. Some kind of small crane. A huge cylindrical metal tank, ripped open.

  ‘He must have parked beside a gas truck,’ says Colt. ‘It went up, when they hit him.’

  OK, that explains the size of the explosion. Windows have been blown out all the way up the south face of the pyramid.

  ‘Will people have been hurt?’ says Naomi.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh God.’ She’s losing control of her breathing. Breathe. Deeper. Slower. Yes. Breathe.

  She goes to put the car on self-drive, while she composes herself; realizes she can’t.

  My God, there aren’t even safeties to kick in, if someone runs across the road, or brakes hard up ahead. Got to concentrate. Keep driving. However bad you feel.

  The windows of the BMW shiver in their frames. Another explosion, in the distance.

  Colt waits till he can see the smoke. Works out where it is.

  ‘They’ve hit New York, New York.’

  ‘But . . .’ Naomi wants to look around, but she’s afraid to take her eyes off the road. ‘. . . why? We’re not there, no bugs there . . .’

  ‘Maybe we dropped a bug there, fell off your sweater,’ says Colt.

  ‘Maybe it’s just losing its shit,’ says Naomi.

  ‘Hah. Yeah. Maybe . . .’ He winds down the window.

  Fire-engine sirens are screaming all over the city.