by Audrey Auden
“While the campus was on lockdown, one of your coworkers tried to leave through a back gate. A security guard forcibly detained him. The police came to investigate the accident, and apparently when they interviewed him he wouldn’t speak to them without a lawyer.”
“Who?” said Emmie, her face pale, “Who was it?”
“A young man named Zeke Eckerd. Do you know him?”
Emmie put a hand to her forehead and leaned back against the sofa. She remembered brushing past Zeke on the way to the spliner. Owen had said — at the thought of Owen, her stomach lurched.
“Zeke?” she whispered, “I don’t believe it.”
Mom and Ollie exchanged another look. Mom reached out to touch her knee, saying gently,
“The police need to come by to interview you about what happened, as soon as possible. As soon as you’re able to receive visitors.”
“Well, they can wait,” said Dad, frowning, “She’s in no condition to be talking to anyone right now.”
“I know it’s hard, but it’ll be better to get it over with while the memory’s still fresh,” Mom said gently, “Anything you remember might be critical.”
Emmie closed her eyes and nodded. Her father squeezed her foot.
“Take as much time as you need, love.”
“I need to be alone,” Emmie whispered, “Sorry. I don’t want you to leave. I just need to be alone for a little while. Ollie, can you help me back to bed?”
∞
Ollie propped Emmie up on the pillows and spread the blankets back over her. She was turning to leave when Emmie said,
“Ollie, where are the clothes and other stuff I was wearing when they took me to the hospital?”
“Oh. Mom brought them. Do you need them?”
“Yeah. Would you mind?”
Ollie went into the hall and came back with a plastic bag.
“Thanks,” said Emmie, “That’s all. Can you close the door?”
Ollie left the room. Emmie emptied the contents of the bag onto her lap. Her clothes and gear were inside, along with her smartcom. One knee of the jeans she had been wearing over her immerger leggings was badly scuffed, and the other was torn. There was a smear of dried blood on the sleeve of her shirt. From her shirt pocket, she withdrew a handful of splinters, all that remained of the wooden box that had housed Tomo’s tablet. Her smartcom, in its virtually indestructible titanium case, appeared unharmed.
She pulled out her immerger belt. Its small processor unit was crushed, and only a fragment of the green tablet remained jammed into its port. She tried to loosen it with her fingernail, but the remainder of the ceramic coating and the solid-state storage medium crumbled into her lap.
“Damn,” she muttered, her eyes blurring.
She reached gingerly for the spare immerger headset and belt in the drawer of her bedside table, fastening the belt very loosely around her waist before slipping on the headset. She bit her lip, then whispered,
“Dom? Are you there?”
After a long silence, Emmie leaned back against the headboard. She tried to force herself to take slow, shallow breaths, but these eventually gave way to heaving sobs.
∞
Emmie drifted through the next two weeks in a haze of painkillers and grief. Christmas and New Year’s Day came and went. The police came and went twice. Her parents came and went many times.
Ollie stayed in the guest room, answering calls from friends and family, arranging the flowers and cards on the table, trying to tempt Emmie’s appetite with ever more ambitious culinary endeavors. Uncle Frank stopped by frequently with his boys, sitting by Emmie’s bedside and entertaining her as best he could with anecdotes about the latest goings-on at the Lab.
Owen’s family arrived to make arrangements for the funeral. They had been staying with her parents for three days when Ollie returned to Emmie’s house after work and sat down at her bedside.
“Emmie,” she said gently, “Come with me to Mom and Dad’s. You know the Cyruses want to meet you.”
Emmie covered her eyes with her hand, her face contorting with grief.
“I can’t,” she said hoarsely, “I can’t. How can I look them in the face? It’s my fault he’s dead.”
“Emmie,” Ollie said, climbing onto the bed beside her sister and wrapping one arm around her shoulders, pulling her close, “Don’t do this. Be strong. They’ve come to say goodbye to him, and you can help them. He loved you, and this place, and all the work you did together. You can show all of that to them.”
Emmie started to sob, and Ollie held her, soothed her, and waited. When at last all the tears were spent, Ollie said,
“You owe this to Owen.”
So Emmie went with Ollie to her parents’ house. They stood above the entryway, arm in arm, and Ollie helped Emmie slowly down the stairs into the living room, where Owen’s family sat quietly arranged on the big sofa. Owen’s mother, Gracie, a small woman with smoothly-coiffed blonde hair, perfect makeup, and a neatly-pressed but faded cotton blouse, saw Emmie first and rushed forward to embrace her, missing Emmie’s pained wince, kissing her on both cheeks. She smelled like roses.
“Oh, honey,” said Gracie, brushing away Emmie’s tears, then her own, “I’m so glad to meet you at last.”
Owen’s sister, Marybeth, a slim, elegantly-dressed young woman whose glossy dark hair stood in stark contrast to her pale face and red-rimmed eyes, followed close behind her mother. Marybeth hugged Emmie more carefully, avoiding the injured shoulder, and said, with one hand pressed lightly to Emmie’s arm,
“I’m sorry we didn’t meet before now. Owen told me so much about you.”
Behind Marybeth stood Owen’s brother, Wendell, and father, Howard. Emmie’s eyes lingered on Wendell, who was a mirror image of Owen, before looking down, fresh tears running down her face. Wendell shook Emmie’s hand wordlessly, as did his father, Howard.
A few days later, the Bridges and the Cyruses, along with a crowd of Owen’s friends from Cal and Augur, gathered for the funeral in Redwood Regional Park, where Owen and Emmie had spent so many sunny days together. Emmie wept in her father’s arms as a Baptist minister performed the service. Marybeth delivered the eulogy, and Owen’s mother scattered her son’s ashes over the roots of the trees with shaking hands, her tears mixing with the dust.
∞
In the weeks that followed, Mom emailed Emmie updates about the legal proceedings. Emmie deleted these unread, but in late February Mom came in person to deliver the news that Zeke had pled guilty to charges of aggravated battery and second degree murder. The judge had sentenced him to fifteen years to life in prison. This seemed to bring her mother some small measure of satisfaction. Emmie felt nothing but numbness.
One morning, a few weeks after Ollie had moved out of the guest room and back to her apartment in Palo Alto, Emmie woke early, pressed a hand to her ribs, and rose tentatively from bed, leaving her bottle of painkillers untouched on the bedside table. She showered, dressed, and walked out her front door, unaccompanied for the first time since she returned from the hospital.
She climbed into her car and drove slowly down into the flats, back to Augur.
At seven o’clock in the morning, she knocked on Ty’s office door, and he swiveled around in his desk chair.
“Emmie!” he said, standing, “How are you? I wasn’t expecting you in. Especially on a Saturday.”
He came over and pulled out a chair for her.
“Coffee?”
She shook her head, and Ty walked back around to the other side of his desk.
“I’m so sorry about everything that happened. I never imagined …” he shook his head. Through her numbness, Emmie felt a stirring of something, perhaps of anger. If it hadn’t been for Ty, perhaps Zeke would never — She wouldn’t finish the thought.
They sat in silence for a while, until at last Ty said,
“Did you stop by to talk about something?”
“Yes,” Emmie said, suddenly remembering why she had come,
“I’m quitting.”
Ty inhaled loudly through his nose and pressed his fingertips together, contemplating his grand view of the San Francisco Bay, now blanketed in morning fog.
“I was afraid you might be feeling this way,” he said, leveling a sympathetic gaze at her, “And I’d understand if you decided to leave.
“But, Emmie, we need you here. Think things over. We could give you a paid leave of absence — or as much time as you need.”
Emmie rubbed her forehead and looked past him toward the bridges crossing the Bay.
“No,” she said distantly, “No, I don’t think so. I won’t be back.”
Ty nodded slowly, and Emmie did not meet his eyes as he said,
“Take care of yourself, Emmie.”
∞
Emmie took the stairs down to the creative team’s offices, where the floor was empty and the public channel was quiet. The motion-activated lights came on as she walked along the perimeter of the floor toward Tomo’s office. She pulled up the access codes Ty had sent to her smartcom weeks ago and pushed open the door.
The air inside the office was fresh with the scent of thriving plants. Emmie stood at the center of the room, blinking back tears, then took a deep breath and made her way to the low chair standing just where Tomo had left it. She brushed her fingers along the seat back before moving on toward the heavy Japanese cabinet, where Tomo’s bonsai tree still stood. Delicate red buds were emerging on the tiny, twisting branches, and she touched them one by one with her fingertips.
Her eyes caught a glimpse of something glittering through the crown of dark green leaves. She felt a surge of adrenaline, a clearing in her head. She leaned down until her eyes were level with the base of the tree. There, half-buried beneath the mossy soil, was a button-sized disc, jewel-green.
Heart pounding, Emmie reached out to brush the soil from the tablet’s hiding place.
“Wait.”
Emmie jerked back her hand and spun around to find Dom standing by the window. Her alarm changed quickly to fury. She stepped toward him, trembling, balling her fists as if to strike him.
“You,” she growled, “I don’t ever want to see you again. Do you understand me? Never again.”
“You must listen to me, Emmie. As soon as you have that tablet in your possession again, your life will be in danger.”
“What do you care?” she said, her voice thick with accusation, “You had no problem letting me walk into a trap before. You just stood by, you bastard.”
“I am truly sorry,” Dom said softly, “If there was anything I could have done —”
“You could have told someone!” Emmie cried.
“There was no way for me to warn anyone but you.”
“You expect me to believe that?” she said angrily, “After you’ve hacked into every network, every private channel at Augur to talk to me? No. You let someone die just to cover your worthless hacker ass.”
“Emmie, I know you have no reason to believe me, but I swear to you, if there was anything I could have done to save Owen, anything at all, I would have done it.”
Emmie looked at him, wanting to hate him almost as much as she wanted to believe him.
“None of that matters now — what you could have done, what I could have done,” she hissed. She reached out toward the bonsai tree once more and picked up the tablet. She felt the cold ceramic warming slowly in her palm. Her mind felt sharp, for the first time in weeks, as she said,
“What I need to know is why. Why did this happen?”
CHAPTER 13
On the Road
Emmie decided she had better not mention where she was headed, so she told her parents she was going to spend some time in Yosemite. Ollie wanted to come and keep her company, but Emmie said she needed to be alone.
Emmie left early to avoid the morning traffic, and when she slipped the car into autopilot on the long, open stretch of 580 East, it was barely eight o’clock. She knew that Dom was there, somewhere, somehow, watching, but she did not want to talk to him. She slipped on a headset, immersing herself in Temenos and wandering the streets of Athenai in an anonymous avatar. The release rumor had gone out just as she had planned, and the public channels were now buzzing, just as she had hoped. She remembered Owen’s skepticism and felt a lump rise in her throat. However skeptical he might have been at first, he had backed her up all the way, to the end.
The tears in her eyes interfered with her visual overlay, and she pushed back her headset, pressing her forehead to the cool glass of the car window. Mile after mile of landscape slipped by: the rolling hills with their white forests of wind turbines; the flat expanse of the Central Valley with its blossoming orchards of almonds, cherries, and apricots; the open fields of green and gold; the broad blue irrigation canals.
The car turned south on I-5, passing ever more arid agricultural land and exits to ever more nondescript towns. When the navigation system announced the approaching Coalinga exit, Emmie withdrew from Temenos and took the wheel again. She slowed to turn off at exit 325 and continued onto a country road bordered on both sides by dusty farmland. A few miles later, she passed a large hospital facility and slowed to turn through the front entrance of Pleasant Valley State Prison.
She pulled to a stop in the visitor parking lot and stored her immerger belt, smartcom, and headset in the glove compartment. As much as she wanted to ignore Dom completely, she kept her earbuds, just in case he wanted to say something. She reached for the door handle, but before she could bring herself to step out, she found herself whispering,
“I feel the same way now as I did when Tomo died. Emptiness. Not sadness, not fear. Not even anger.”
“It will be better this way,” came Dom’s voice, as she had known it would, as, she realized, she had hoped it would, “Anger will not help you understand.”
She took a deep breath. Despite his infuriatingly opaque motives, despite his unbelievable intrusion into her life, despite his suspicious involvement in the events of the past several months, nonetheless Dom’s presence comforted her in a way that no one else’s had since Owen died.
She steeled herself, climbing from the car to join a stream of people walking toward the processing center. She filled out the requisite visitor pass and waited for her turn to go through the full-body scanner. On the other side, she retrieved her coat, shoes, and bag.
She found her way to the room indicated on her pass and showed it at the door to the guard, who waved her through. Inside the bare, brightly-lit room, men, women, and children sat alone or in groups around small tables, some speaking quietly to prisoners in faded jeans and blue chambray shirts, others simply waiting. She found an empty table and sat down.
A few minutes later, Zeke entered through the double doors at the far side of the room. His eyes fell on Emmie, and she felt her entire body grow tense as he approached and sank into the chair across from her. He looked skinny and pale and so very young in his shapeless blue prison uniform and short-cropped hair.
“I’m surprised you wanted to see me,” he said.
Emmie searched for words and found that all she could say was,
“Tell me why you did it.”
Zeke pressed the tips of his long white fingers to his forehead, closing his eyes.
“I don’t expect you to believe me, but I never meant to hurt anybody.”
Emmie felt no pity for Zeke now — only a cold, hard knot in the pit of her stomach.
“What did you mean to do, then?” she said, “What were you thinking?”
Zeke opened his eyes to meet hers. His eyelids were raw and red beneath pale lashes. Across one cheek she saw a scattering of blonde stubble that his razor had missed.
“I realized as soon as Ty made you Creative Director that he had just been using me to keep the board happy. He wanted you all along. Just like Tomo.
“So I was angry. I wanted you to know what that felt like. To have all your work just disappear without anyone ever seeing it.
“I thou
ght that I was planting an armageddon virus, that it would corrupt the content library, spread to the backup data centers, a complete wipe. But — But I didn’t know what that code was going to do to the spliner. I swear I didn’t.”
Emmie shook her head in disbelief.
“You idiot. You couldn’t even bother to take a look under the hood? Who told you it was an armageddon virus?”
“My —” Zeke’s voice shrank almost to a whisper, “My father gave me the code.”
“Your father?” Emmie said, confused.
Zeke’s pale face managed to turn even paler. He swallowed, his eyes flicking nervously from side to side before he said,
“Have you heard of the Church of the True Cross?”
Emmie shook her head.
“It’s a fundamentalist church,” said Zeke, “A cult, maybe. I’m not sure there’s a difference. Anyway, they believe that an apocalypse is coming, that God is going to punish the world for its sins. Pretty run-of-the-mill fundamentalist stuff, I guess.
“The church hates the alternet. Well, at least they hate pretty much everything that people use it for. Video games. Sensory immersion. ‘Tuning out,’ that’s what they call it. They think it’s this pervasive force of evil leading people away from the path to salvation.
“The Church is one of the biggest funders of the alternet regulation lobby. They know they can’t stamp out the alternet entirely, at least not all at once, so for now they’ll settle for doing what they helped to do to the internet and television and radio over the last several decades. But … government works pretty slowly.”
Emmie tried to understand what he was implying.
“Are you saying they’re involved in cyberterrorism?” she said slowly.
Zeke raised an eyebrow meaningfully.