THE COAST
THE LANDSCAPE HAD GROWN more rugged and shrouded in haze. Cloud banks from the ocean came sweeping in over the hills to cover the road, and the windows were covered with a fine mist of water.
A few miles before Tomales we drove through something called Westmoreland Memorial Park, which seemed to be some kind of war memorial, where two enormous lode ships rose from the mists high up on a hill ravaged by bombs. As we came closer I saw vehicles parked in the craters, and there were small walkways and footbridges all over the area and up around the ships, and I remembered a discussion we’d had in class once about the bombed-out ships at Folwell’s Memorial Park in Soest City. Half the class was certain that the ships were merely replicas, while the other half was just as certain the actual ships were in the park.
When we reached the coastal road, lack of sleep caught up with me and I stopped at a rest stop. I turned the engine off and took my map out. Below the rest stop, a boggy mud bed reached out toward what looked like a shallow lake, and on the other side of the lake a ridge rose up. I assumed the lake was the bay marked as Bodega Bay on the map, and that the ridge on the other side was part of Cape Victory. We probably had only half an hour’s drive south before we reached Dunne’s Landing, where we would turn right onto a smaller road that would take us all the way out along Cape Victory to Point Linden.
Skip was awake now, and he sat looking at something on the other side of the water. He pointed toward the ridge, and up there on a crest stood a single dead tree. Do you know this place? I asked. Skip nodded.
You’ve been here before, right?
He nodded eagerly and looked back and forth between me and the tree. He was almost jumping up and down in his seat.
It’s okay, Skip. Take out your Walkman; you can listen to Kid Kosmo. It’s not far now. I just have to rest for a while.
I DON’T KNOW how long I slept. Maybe an hour. Skip sat with his headphones on, still spellbound, of course. I tapped his shoulder. Hey, we can keep listening on the car stereo if you want to. Skip looked at me and heard nothing. I pointed at the car stereo. Skip took the tape out of the Walkman and pushed it into the stereo. I put the map back in my bag, adjusted my seat, and drove out onto the road again.
Three assault ships occupied the far end of the bay. Once upon a time, these kinds of ships had been the pride of the federal army, and they had been lined up on the runways where their captains had shaken the hands of presidents before thousands of spectators. Now, here they were, plucked out of the sky, hollowed out and chewed up by the sea, and finally back in service as cliffs for birds to roost on. Behold the Amphion, the pride of the air force: ten million tons of rust and bird shit.
It was the neuronics in the Amphion ships that had burned out my mother’s mind, so I guess it was fitting, in a way.
Dunne’s Landing was just ahead of us, not much more than a jumble of boarded-up shops and a crossroads. We turned right onto San Augustin Boulevard, a cracked country road full of potholes. It immediately led us out of the small town and farther out on the cape.
ALL OF CAPE VICTORY was an endless boneyard. On the map, a small area in the inner part of the bay was marked as San Augustin Salvage Yard, but there were wrecks everywhere. After each turn a new vista of never-ending rows of old suspension ships and combat drones opened up. Some were scarred by combat, while others seemed to have been left more or less intact—but everywhere across the ships there were traces of scrappers. The hulls were open and mutilated, parts where plating and equipment had been stripped. Some ships were almost completely gutted, with only the frame remaining on the grass, devoid of innards like a fish skeleton.
And I grew up like this. Jesus Christ, poor kid. Goddamn mother. Let’s see. Could I remember the names of those ships? Amphions, of course; the big ships carrying smaller ships inside. What was the name of those smaller ships? Pentheus F something. The neuronics in the control chambers of the Pentheus ships were easy to access, especially for someone as small as me. The black cables with the yellow couplings were what you were looking for. Then there were the small assault ships—Autesions, they were called. According to my mother, my father had flown an Autesion ship at the Battle of Boise. The Autesion ships were gold to scrappers. Inside the control chambers there were panels with hatches marked with yellow stickers, and below the hatches there were rods you could pull out, and inside the rods there were a bunch of plastic filters you could remove by pushing a pen into a small hole on the side of the rod so it came apart in two pieces. If you were lucky, those filters were sticky with neurite.
WE CRESTED ANOTHER HILL, and on the other side there were cows grazing around the wrecks. It looked really peaceful, but there were dead cows farther down the road, badly decomposed, almost like mummies. Some of the carcasses seemed to be moving, but it was actually the dark backs of scavenger birds that had gathered to eat, and when we drove by they took flight, scattering on the wind like strange dandelion seeds. I followed the flock in the rearview mirror. It floated around like an amoeba in the air above the dead cows, broke apart, and then flowed back together.
I had lived in three different towns and attended four different schools by the time I started fifth grade. I had friends, now and then. It depended on how my mother was feeling and where we could park our RV. When the others went home to their families and their pep rallies and ice rinks and jamborees, I was busy helping my mother ingest the chemicals her body and country no longer supplied her with.
When I started at a new school, the school bus always had to change its route and drive through areas that none of the other children had ever seen. That was my gift to my new classmates. Kids weren’t supposed to have a reason to get off the bus where we lived.
In the mist in the graveyards, abominable homemade drones moved. They waddled along with their bags and bundles of cables, and I looked at them and realized that this horrible place reminded me of my mother, and I was filled with something that might be called nostalgia and thought about how you have the memories you have. The scrappers looked up as we passed. I guess not many cars passed by here anymore.
I USED TO TRY to avoid thinking about my mother, but now I was struck by how easy it was. It was as if I had passed some invisible borderline, and what used to be an open wound inside had finally hardened. There was still a pit there, sunken and covered in scar tissue like on people who’ve had their mangled faces reconstructed after an accident, but you could touch the scar without the pain searing through your body.
The time after that, in Kingston, was awful. I thought about my mother all the time. During the first period at my new school I started bawling, and everyone in the class looked at me and I put my head under the lid of the desk. It must have looked funny, I realized when I stopped to think about it. Confused silence smothered the classroom, and our teacher had to explain to the other kids that Michelle was going through a rough time in life right now, and then my grandfather had to come get me.
At some point, when I was about ten, I decided to lock up all the memories of my mother and not talk about her with anyone, and I managed to do that until one night in Soest six years later, when I suddenly told Amanda everything in an empty playground. We had been sitting in the net up on the jungle gym, and my head was in her lap. It was fall, and she was wearing knitted fingerless mittens and caressing my forehead. The gloves were gray, with snowflakes on them. She wore those gloves all winter, and then in the spring she moved.
ANOTHER THING about Amanda before I forget: her father showed up at our house much later, probably a year after Amanda moved away. Ernest Henry. Yes, that was his actual name. Father Ernest Henry. The Reverend. We never really talked, but he remembered me from Amanda’s class. He asked if he could talk to one of the adults in the household, and I showed him into our living room.
This was after Birgitte’s death, and Ted was sitting on the couch, wearing the neurocaster, completely naked. This time I hadn’t even bothered to cover him up when I came home from schoo
l. The Reverend turned to me and said that maybe it was better if he talked to me instead.
We sat in the kitchen. The Reverend held his coffee cup and said he felt great concern about what was happening in Soest. He suspected that there was some sort of signal coming through on the neurographic network that made people sick and destroyed their will and turned them into slaves. The Reverend believed this signal was Satan and that Satan was luring people away from the path of God through the neurocasters, and in so doing was paving the way for the coming apocalypse. He had worried about the casters for a long time, and had tried to urge caution on his congregation: God gave us ears and eyes and mouths and bodies to rejoice in the world God created for us, and the promise of neuronics to move our minds to artificial bodies violated the will of God. The Reverend had started a movement that would help people fight off the addiction and, considering Ted out there in the living room, he thought it might be in my interest to join this movement.
Finally he asked me if I had ever been tempted to use a neurocaster.
I told him I couldn’t use them, that the doctors said it was because of a congenital neurological condition that made one of my pupils larger than the other, and that also seemed to make it impossible for me to use neuronics. It was just black; nothing happened. The Reverend replied that I should be thankful for that. That God had protected me.
I focused my gaze on the small yellow packs of sweetener the Reverend tore open and emptied into his cup. He started stirring the coffee. When I asked him about Amanda, a smile of divine blessing spread across Father Ernest Henry’s face, and he replied that Amanda’s aunt and uncle had helped her find her way back to God and that it warmed his heart that she was still in my thoughts.
You were quite close, weren’t you?
The monotonous noise of the Reverend’s spoon meeting the porcelain cup over and over rose from the coffee and shot up against the ceiling and bounced off the walls where the silverfish contorted in pain and poured across the cereal and oats and instant waffle powder that collapsed inside their boxes and soon filled the entire kitchen, and I remembered the bruises the Reverend used to leave on his daughter’s body and I looked away and said:
No. We didn’t really know each other.
Something had appeared on the road in front of us: road work that had stalled—the workers were all lost in some new neuronic daydream.
WOODEN BUILDINGS painted white, on both sides of the road. Shack, stable. White picket fence. A farm. The white wood was stained with moisture and looked like it had been attacked by algae, as if the buildings had been submerged in the sea until very recently. The road narrowed and passed one of those little bridges made from spaced-out metal bars that stop cattle from passing, and I had to slow down. In the paddocks stood boxes with dead calves inside. We passed a large barn on the right side, and in the darkness within I saw something. Movement. A smiling face. At first I thought it was just an old billboard that someone had put in there, but the face followed us with its eyes and raised its hand to wave. It was a drone there in the darkness. Skip turned his head and waved back cautiously, then looked at me. What was that thing doing in there? I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that it had seen us or the way it waved. Why did it wave?
There was something about this road. It felt like we were going toward a dead end. Technically we were; there were no other roads to or from Point Linden. Cape Victory was one big dead end. I tried to shake off my discomfort and kept my eyes on the barn in the rearview mirror. No. Nothing. The farm looked completely abandoned. From this side I could see that the main house had been on fire; the whole side facing us now was black, and parts of the roof were gone.
RIGHT OUTSIDE the town, two police cars were parked across the road. A roadblock.
I sat paralyzed and squeezed the wheel hard. After I slammed on the brakes, the car keys swung back and forth in the ignition, ticking like the hands of an old clock. I couldn’t take my eyes off the police cars, and I waited for a crackling voice from a loudspeaker to start yelling at us at any second. I sat like that for several minutes until I finally opened the door and put one foot down on the asphalt. Skip threw himself at me and grabbed my arm. It’s all right, Skip.
If we’re nice, then they’ll be nice.
I pried Skip’s hard mechanical fingers from my sleeve and stepped out of the car. I was convinced it was all over and that I would never see Skip again. I would rot away in a cell in some forgotten police station after all the officers in Pacifica had abandoned their posts for one reason or another.
But it didn’t happen. When I came up to the roadblock the cars were empty, and something was lying on the asphalt: a gun, and something that looked like spilled nickels. Empty shell casings.
Once I was back in the car I sat for a long while with my hand clenched around the car keys and caught my breath. I was shaking. Then I took a few deep breaths and looked at Skip.
Permission to activate the warp drive.
But my voice was quivering. Skip looked at me. Yeah, maybe that wasn’t my best Sir Astor impression. He raised his hand to salute me.
Thank you, captain, I said, and turned the key.
IT WAS LATE when we drove into town. I was exhausted and in desperate need of sleep. Skip was already asleep. I parked in the dark beneath a feral cypress tree, turned off the engine, and got out of the car. No cars, no voices. Just crickets and distant thunder. Beyond the hills to the east I could see the red lights from the neurograph towers. I couldn’t see whether anyone had noticed our arrival. This would have to do. I lay down on the backseat, squeezed my hands between my thighs, and tried to curl up in a little ball.
Michelle. You have to wake up. It was all a dream. A game. Jim and Barbara have made me realize that now. We were just playing. And that’s okay. It was all pretend.
Amanda was standing by the side of the bed, and I took her hand and pressed her fingers against my lips. She pulled her hand away. I slid down to the floor and buried my face against her pant leg. What have they done to you?
I WOKE UP. The car was freezing cold and damp, and the windows in the back were fogged over. Skip was sitting straight up, immobile in the front seat, looking out the window. I slowly became aware of a pulsing noise, like a distant washing machine. There was something out there, something gleaming red through the foggy window. I rubbed my sleeve against the glass and looked out.
A crowd of people stood on the other side of the parking lot, gathered around something huge. Neurocasters glittered everywhere. What they had gathered around appeared to be an enormous rebuilt drone, and the noise seemed to emanate from it. The head and the raised arm looked like they had come from one of those big action drones they used to have in the Neurodrome arenas, and bundles of cables poured out of its open head like the arms of an octopus, spilling down to the ground, where they slithered across the asphalt up and over a minivan and into the driver’s seat. I could just make out something there—the pale torso of a naked woman. She was pressed against the glass, her eyes closed, her face twisted with passion.
Skip turned his head and looked at me. I held my finger to my lips and edged over to the driver’s seat, then turned around and picked up the shotgun. I cradled it in my arms and kept it aimed at the floor. And so we waited.
The cables worked inside the minivan for maybe ten minutes. Then they pulled out of the van and made their way back up into the giant round head, where a crown of bony fingers closed behind them and folded together like two interlocked fists.
The mechanical pulsing noise faded away. The drone thing turned around in two giant strides and waddled away into the mist. Slowly the crowd scattered and withdrew into the shadows, the neurocaster lights blinking and disappearing like fireflies into the underbrush. We sat completely still, barely breathing.
When the parking lot was empty again I put the gun in the backseat. When I turned around to start the car I saw the door of the minivan open, and the woman I had seen inside stepped out. She was wearing a dr
ess now and straightened it out before walking away and disappearing into the mist.
I still dream about it. It was the last winter of the war.
We were supposed to repair the equipment at the airbase on Charlton Island in Hudson Bay. Apparently they had lost contact with the base, and since it was winter it was simply assumed they had some issues with the weather. I don’t know how to describe it. It was as if they had all been transformed into termites or something. I mean, the things they had built; there was nothing human about it, if you understand what I mean. No human intellect could have come up with it and made it move like that. And the smell. It was worst in the cafeteria. All the tables and chairs were stacked against the walls, and in the middle of the room there were a number of Dumpsters where they had put them. The children. The stillborn. Like I said, I still dream about it.
Something moved out there in the snow, far out on the white expanse. It heaved itself across the snow crust in a motion that was impossible to fathom. We burned it. We burned everything.
Not a single one of the one hundred fifty people stationed at the base survived more than a few hours after we removed their neurocasters. So when the Convergence talk about their Inter Cerebral Divinity and how it tried to take physical form during the war, I’m not going to say they’re completely wrong. What I saw at Charlton Island was not what I would describe as divine, but it definitely wasn’t human. The Convergence believe that this superintellect actually managed to create at least one successful pregnancy during the war, and that this child carried within itself a perfect nonhuman genome that it is the duty of the Convergence to breed and spread.
The Electric State Page 3