Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  And yet.

  No one else knows what’s going to happen, except possibly Irina, who is in problematic health, and no one else is in a position to intervene.

  It’s not clear that this is his problem, but he thinks of his family, still out there, and exposed, and of Kern, who has no other protector.

  It occurs to him he’s sitting in the midst of most of the computational power in the world, all idle now.

  It would be a simple matter to shape it to his will.

  69

  Island in the Past

  Kern dreams of nothing, is dimly aware of the nothing in his mind, as though his history had dissipated, leaving no one’s consciousness, a mind like an empty blue sky.

  Somewhere, a phone is ringing. He dismisses it as a figment from a dream but it keeps on ringing and eventually he opens his eyes and his circumstances return to him.

  He sits up, brushes the gravel from his palms and back. His plan for the rest of the day was to make a water distiller like the laptop’s game taught him, scavenge for supplies and try to teach himself to fish. With a sigh, he picks up the sat-phone.

  “Is that you, babe?” asks Akemi.

  “Akemi!” he says. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you. Where are you?”

  “I’m in Bel Air, I think. Actually I’m not sure, but it’s not important. I called because Thales tells me your ride is almost there.”

  “Thales?”

  “A friend of mine. A very technical friend, making arrangements on your behalf.”

  “Did it work out? Whatever you were trying to do?”

  “I think so. If it hadn’t I don’t think I’d be here. I don’t remember very much about it, and to be honest I don’t care. I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy. But you should head for the docks now—Thales says it’s best if you’re there to meet the ship.”

  “What ship?”

  “The H.M.A.S. Nukunu, an Australian naval drone. Thales found a place for you, and the drone will take you there. Sat-phones aren’t secure, so he won’t let me tell you the specifics, but it’s going to be great. Okay?”

  It occurs to him to unplug the phone, let the Nukunu come and go and live like the ancient masters training in seclusion, but he suspects the isolation would destroy him, and the self-annihilating pursuit of perfection seems less interesting than it did. On the other hand, he’s tired of being led, but supposes he can tolerate it one last time.

  “Should I bring the sat-phone?” he asks.

  “Leave it, but you should head out now. Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Sure,” he says.

  * * *

  From the edge of the roof he sees what must be the Nukunu, tiny in the distance, coasting in toward the piers like a gunmetal shark.

  It’s a long hike through the ruins to the docks and he gets lost twice. By the time he arrives the Nukunu is waiting, looking strangely out of place, the only unblemished manufactured thing. It’s about fifty feet long, all angles and flat surfaces, which he thinks has to do with radar invisibility. It holds position a few feet from the dock, emitting a deep thrum. “Permission to come aboard,” he says, a phrase remembered from a book, then drops onto the deck.

  There isn’t much ship to explore, though at least this one has a railing and is clearly meant to accommodate people. There’s nothing much to find except toward the back where there’s a grey-painted module the size of a shipping container marked K-2 VIALIFE locked onto tracks on the hull.

  The module’s door is unlocked. When he opens it, red lights come on in the ceiling, showing the chemical toilet set into the wall, a small steel sink and bunk beds that fill half the space and remind him of medical stretchers. On both beds there’s a green sleeping bag rolled into a tight cylinder and a small pillow, both sealed in plastic and strapped down.

  The ship peels smoothly away. He watches the dock recede—while the distance is swimmable he can still change his mind, and it’s a sort of relief when it’s too far and the island is officially in the past.

  He won’t let himself look back at the black line in the sky.

  70

  History Lacks a Story

  Hot air blowing over her face. Her back is sore from the hard concrete. She’s lying on the floor in the tunnel with the servers, has been for some time. The tower is gone, and even in her other memory the experience survives only as fragments and abstractions.

  She’s swaddled in Philip’s scarf, sweater and overcoat. Wherever he is, he must be cold. She’s aware of nearby routers, phones, pacemakers, cars. The node seems to have gone offline. Her head hurts. She sits up, rubs her eyes, turns her wireless off.

  A text from Philip, now twenty minutes old, reads, Can’t wake you getting help. She looks around, foolishly, as though he’ll just be coming back.

  Tempting to lie there and just think about what happened but she’s getting too hot and finds she’s hungry.

  Her legs and shoulders are oddly stiff—had Thales said something about a seizure? Laboriously, she climbs the stairs toward the street, marveling at their solidity, how they’re just there, not a part of some coded illusion. There’s a desiccated moth on the step before her eyes, random particles of grime, a random mesh of uninterpretable scratches, evidence of history whose story is gone, and this kind of evidence is accumulating all the time, means little, has nothing to do with her.

  Out on the street the snow has stopped and it seems warmer. She feels like she’s emerged from death’s kingdom into summer. A young mother in sunglasses pushes a stroller past a crowd of conservatively suited company men and the buildings frame an expanse of sky where a flight of starlings surge into the air under the rushing clouds, and she feels self-conscious, like an upscale bag lady with her staring bewilderment and two sweaters and Philip’s size-large coat, but perhaps because it’s Japan no one seems to notice.

  She turns her face to the weak sun and walks off purposefully, like she knows where she’s going. Blocks pass, and she takes turns at random. Her legs don’t quite seem to be working, but it’s good to be in motion. Something strange on her upper lip—she picks at it, finds a thick crust of dried blood, which she wipes vigorously away. Light-headed, she feels like laughing or falling asleep.

  She’s standing in front of a humming vending machine, kanji dancing anticly across its screen—she could read them, but is tired of doing tricks with memory, and in any case there are pictures of black coffee, cappuccino, café au lait, which are probably what she needs, and she stands there, feeling empty, trying to focus enough to make a decision.

  Across the street is a cafe called Miyakoshiya, a franchise she’s seen before, and through the tall windows she sees people in line, all giving each other exactly the right amount of personal space, and though it’s as everyday and banal as could be it’s so rich in human meaning she wants to cry, and she leaves the vending machine, goes into the cafe, takes her place in line, her heart racing at the prospect of negotiating a simple transaction with another person.

  In front of her in line is a schoolgirl in a uniform, a few pounds overweight, texting ardently, wholly self-consciousness, and a woman in an Asano suit and touch-me-not sunglasses who radiates calm, and a fortyish man whose rumpled button-down and air of intelligence somehow suggest the successfully self-employed. Their gazes rise, touch on her—a tall, spacey gaijin woman dressed for some severer winter—and move on.

  Five minutes later she’s sitting at a tiny table on the patio by the sidewalk, sipping her very hot, very black americano. She has a sesame cookie filled with what must be red bean paste on a small celadon plate. She should text Philip—he must be frantic—it’s basic decency—but she’s enervated to the point that taking out her phone seems insuperably hard, and she can’t bring herself to do more than watch the cars, the drones, the planes passing in the sky.

  She gave most of her money to Parthenon, which means the Mayo is a wash. So much for that! The consequences will be dire, eventually, but not for a while, and
for now she can feel the sun on her face, and the patio’s heat lamp, and closes her eyes. She’s seen the world, and the world beyond the world, and it’s time to be still.

  With a start, she recalls how she’d blackmailed the mathematician, and that something is still owed. Go to any comments section of the London Times and post the name of the girl who left youth’s city when it was time, the letter had said. She remembers Singapore, how it felt when she knew it was time to go, seeing the towers of that city recede for the last time. She rouses herself, and goes to the London Times website on her phone, chooses an article at random—something about relaxed gun control laws—and adds a comment which reads, “Irina Sunden.”

  She’s composing a text to Philip when a bike messenger stops in front of her and leans against the railing. Grimy, sweat-stained particolored biking gear, hipster beard, a complicated street bike that seems to be held together with tape. He says something she can’t understand in what she belatedly realizes is English, but his accent is impenetrable. She sighs inwardly, lets Japanese rise up in her memory, and in that language says, “Pardon me?” at which he looks relieved.

  “Excuse me. Miss Irina Sunden? Please accept this delivery,” he says, rummaging in his bag, handing her a unmarked cardboard cylinder as long as her forearm. According to the waybill, the sender is AGK PharmaSynthesis, which she’s never heard of. “I have been instructed to put this package into your hands, and to suggest that you open it immediately. I’m very sorry, but I don’t know anything else. Thank you—please excuse me—goodbye!”

  Christmas in Tokyo, she thinks, turning the package in her hands. Within, something sloshes. As she’s ripping open the cylinder her phone rings. Number blocked, but she takes the call.

  Thales says, “There’s one more thing.”

  * * *

  The sky is darkening and the streets all look the same, as they have for hours, and it seems to Philip that he’s trapped in an endless present of unvarying urban texture. It’s getting colder, but he bought a jacket off the back of a teenager for several times its value, and the walking helps. His initial flash of panic when he found her missing from the server farm seems like a distant memory.

  On another street that looks like all the other streets he tries yet again to call her, and yet again she doesn’t pick up; he’s about to hang up but something’s different this time and he realizes he can hear her phone’s ringtone not twenty feet away.

  Her phone is on an abandoned outdoor table at a franchised sidewalk cafe, and beside it are an empty coffee cup ringed with grounds and a plate dotted with sesame seeds. At first he’s euphoric, because this still life tells a story in which she’s just now walked away, because otherwise someone would have grabbed her phone, but when he touches the coffee cup it’s cold as ice. “Will no one steal in this fucking country?” he demands of the air. A skate kid stops, stares at him, skates on.

  He stands there with the cup in his hand, scanning the street. Her last text—Got to go away now—is now half a day old.

  An hour later he has a private detective agency on retainer, and a week later they email him an obliquely phrased warning about Japan’s strict privacy laws, and the penalties for violating them, along with a link to a site hosted on an offshore server where he finds ten minutes of pixelated black-and-white footage from the security camera in the coffee vending machine across the street from the cafe.

  He sits cross-legged on the bed in his darkened hotel room, running the footage on a continuous loop. There’s Irina looking dazed, staring at the vending machine for an unsettlingly long time, as though slowly coming to terms with the idea of coffee, and then she looks back at the cafe and walks out of the frame, seemingly entranced, and the next nine and a half minutes are defined by her absence. By now he knows all the passersby, and can name them just before they come on screen—there’s posh mom in movie-star sunglasses, diabetic salaryman, grungy bike messenger, hard-core gamer kid, and all the rest of the unvarying cavalcade. He wills the camera to pan left twenty degrees, which would show him the table where he found her phone. In the last three seconds of the clip Irina reenters the frame as she gets into a drone cab which then drives away.

  There are many taxi companies in Tokyo, and most are Yakuza fronts, which seems promising, at first, as he expects them to be willing to be influenced, or at least bribed, but none have a record of a pickup on that street on that day, and they continue to have no record as he puts more money on the table and brings pressure to bear through Mitsui. He hires imaging specialists but however painstakingly they analyze the footage they can’t identify the cab, and there’s nowhere else to look.

  71

  Dolos

  Shock of impact and Kern is on the floor, bound in his sleeping bag, the tortured metallic groan invading his dream of black ships.

  He scrambles out of the bag. The floor is at an angle. Balance found, duffel grabbed, he opens the module’s door, expecting to see another ship, but in fact the Nukunu’s hit a breakwater made of huge, haphazardly interlocked concrete anchor-things; beyond them, a beach.

  Waves rock the ship, white water washing over his feet.

  He times the waves, jumps onto one of the concrete anchors. It’s slimy, but he finds a grip.

  When he looks back the ship is pulling away. He hopes he was supposed to disembark. Too late now!

  He clambers over to the beach, wondering where it is he’s supposed to be going. Hard to get more lost than this. He resolves never to go to sea again.

  Headlights on the beach. Someone standing in front of them—a man, hatted and overcoated, probably Asian—waving his arms like he’s trying to flag down a plane, and now he’s shouting into the night what Kern realizes is probably meant to be his name.

  Kern gets closer, staying in the shadows, studying the man’s silhouette—he’s middle-aged, Japanese, looks worried, seems harmless.

  “Hi,” says Kern, from five feet away, and isn’t even pleased when the man jumps.

  * * *

  The car is so old it has no computer, not even a nav, though the leather of its seats is smooth and uncracked and its hull’s in a high state of gloss. He’d tried to sit in the front seat but the man—the driver—had seemed embarrassed and ushered him into the back.

  The beach is far behind. Streetlights slide by. The could be anywhere. The driver, who speaks no English, seems to know where he’s going.

  Kern loses track of time. The journey feels indefinite. He wants to sleep but is too restless and just stares out the window.

  The driver’s phone bleats. He fishes it out of his pocket, hands it back to Kern without looking at the screen. It’s the cheapest of cheap models, a disposable kind he’s seen in Red Cross charity kits—limited battery, no GPS. There’s a text reading:

  Welcome to Japan! Sorry for the bumpy ride—my technical friend said your ship would have pinged the Coastal Authority if it had thought it was within five miles of Japanese waters, so he had to trick its navigation system and improvise a docking.

  He wants you to be sure to stay off all cameras, so no bathroom breaks, please. It’s only two hours to Sakai.

  I’d tell you more but my friend doesn’t want me to use any low probability terms. Don’t worry—you’ll be okay.

  xxo,

  Your friend from the phone

  P.S. Please delete this once you’ve read it!

  He deletes the message, hands back the phone.

  Soon, they’re in a city.

  It’s almost dawn. There are other cars on the road now. The driver has said almost nothing, but seems unflappable, like he’d keep on calmly driving his spotless antique automobile through minefields and artillery fire should he find them in his way.

  The car stops in front of a low, grimy building that looks like it used to be an auto body shop.

  The driver turns around to peer at him through his spectacles and says something in Japanese. Kern feels he’s saying it’s time to part.

  “Here?” Kern
says, making an inquiring face, reaching as though to open the door.

  The driver nods, gets out, opens the door for him, bows him out of the car, then gestures toward the front door of the auto body shop. Kern goes up, hesitates, looks back. The driver nods encouragingly, makes as though to shoo him inside.

  Kern knocks, and in a few seconds the door is opened by a Japanese man wearing singed and filthy work pants and three torn fisherman’s sweaters over an untucked plaid shirt. He is old, very old, but entirely present. He cocks his head to one side and smiles at Kern cautiously, like he’s a welcome guest who might happen to be carrying a bomb.

  In a voice that sounds English-from-England the old man says, “You can’t imagine how interested I’ve been to meet you. But you seem to have come a long way, so, please, come in.”

  72

  Memorial

  Half an hour after touching down in San Francisco, Philip is in a cab on his way to W&P.

  On the freeway he reads the coverage on Water and Power’s wholly unexpected paramilitary assault on Biotechnica’s Bay Area research facility. According to a W&P spokesman, founder James Cromwell’s adverse reaction to an experimental longevity drug sent him into the intense manic state that led to the tragic events at Biotechnica and finally his suicide; in the spokesman’s view, this doesn’t diminish Mr. Cromwell’s enduring legacy as a humanitarian and an entrepreneur, nor does it reflect on the principles of good citizenship and ardent but ethical capitalism on which Water and Power Capital Management was founded. Skimming the press releases, the rhetorical posturing and the webs of pending litigation, Philip has the sense that Biotechnica is getting the worst of it. Senator Willem H. Lugh (R., North California) praises Cromwell for his philanthropy and calls for more rigorous vetting of certain classes of neuroactive drugs. Editorials bemoan the erosion of the state’s monopoly on force, draw comparisons with the last days of the Roman Republic and call for change, but that will soon pass, and then it will be back to business as usual, world without end.