by Kevin Ikenberry
The farms abruptly ended by a massive reservoir ringed with brown frostbitten cattails. Large metal towers, like giant power-line mounts, hung along the horizon as if obscured by haze. I pointed at the reservoir. “For the crops?”
Jay Don checked a contraption on his wrist. “Watch.”
A pinpoint of light developed along the horizon and began to rise from one of the structures. “A launch pad?”
“Sixteen of them. The Wichita Spaceport.”
I watched the contrail arc westerly—toward us. Retrograde? That’s a massive loss of power for a traditional rocket, isn’t it?
<>
I shook my head and sighed. There was so much to learn.
<>
Mally was right. How did I know that? The tractor curved gently south and skirted the Wichita Spaceport. We passed back into the elevated farms on the other side before I could get another glance at the facilities. With all of the flying cars, even this awful flying contraption I’m riding on, why are traditional rockets still used? Education?
<>
The only school?
<>
Not fully functioning—Texas and now Kansas. I almost asked how many people were functional but decided to let it die. The winter wheat waved gently in the elevated artificial gardens around me. We’d covered three hundred miles in the blink of an eye. Sixth graders launching rockets? College students on Mars? Whatever I remembered, that world had indeed moved on. I was a complete stranger to the land and the times.
Berkeley had chosen me because I was a connection to a long-forgotten past. Maybe that was it. Opening my mind to this new reality was the only way I was going to survive Tennessee. Everything I remembered was gone. The hair on the back of my genetically recreated neck stood up straight. I glanced to the south and the twenty-foot-high berm not three hundred feet away through the elevated-farm section.
Over the soft whine of the vehicle’s turbines, a high-pitched scream streaked over my head, followed by a sharp crack from the long brown wall. Then came another scream and crack.
Gunfire. I ducked, and Mally chimed to life. <>
They’ve found us, Mally.
<>
Jay Don screeched in the protected cab. I flung myself toward the enclosure when he boosted the speed of the flying vehicle. Where I intended to put my foot down was no longer there, and I tumbled into open air. Dust kicked up by the turbines concealed my face-first fall into the gravel. Half crawling and half sprinting, I scrambled toward one of the giant concrete supports for the elevated farm and took cover behind it. Puffs of dust erupted in the gravel in front of me. A single round ricocheted somewhere near my head, and I flung myself to the dusty ground with my nose against the concrete.
The vehicle slowed down with a roar of reversed air, like the commercial airliners of my time could do. He was coming back for me, and I started to get up to meet him.
<>
We’ve got to get out of here, Mally. Everything snapped together in an instant. I’d been watched since Berkeley and I had left the Commonwealth of California.
<>
I craned my head to see. The chalky white dust engulfed the vehicle as Jay Don spun its nose toward the brown wall. Bright flashes appeared on the vehicle’s nose, and I could hear the sustained fump-fump-fump of a weapon.
Grenade launcher.
<>
Adrenaline took over as I sprinted to the vehicle and vaulted aboard. Jay Don grabbed me at the shoulders with a burly arm and pulled me into the cab. I collapsed to the floor as he pivoted the vehicle down the maintenance trail and gunned the turbine.
“Forgot to tell ya about them assholes.” He laughed and spat into a rusted coffee can.
No shit. “Who are those guys?”
Jay Don chuckled. “That’s the Oklahoma Reservation. I wish to God the Texans would just invade it. I can deal with big egos better than Injuns with guns.”
“You get that a lot?”
“All the time.” He grunted at me. “You can get up now.”
The floor of the cab stank of chewing tobacco and manure. I pulled myself up to a sitting position. Are you sure they weren’t after us?
<>
“Kit’s right there. Got ever’thing ya need to clean that up,” Jay Don said.
“Yeah, thanks.” I rolled up my pant leg to my thigh and used sterile gauze and a tube of quickskin to clean and fill the fingernail-sized cut. I checked my hands and the rest of what I could see. The fall from a moving vehicle into pea-sized gravel should have left me scratched up as if I’d gone through a cheese grater.
<>
I got to my feet and leaned against the rear of the cab, wiping my hands on my pants. “You’re gonna get killed out here one day, my friend.”
Jay Don shrugged. “It ain’t nothing to worry about. They say the el-farms keep the game away from the reservation. They didn’t want the reservations in the first place, and now they refuse to leave. When all the damned casinos closed, the Injuns about went crazy.” Jay Don spat again and rolled his head on his neck. “Same old shit. Listen, we’ll be at my eastern edge in about an hour. If you don’t mind, I’m gonna take a nap.”
“I can’t drive this thing,” I exclaimed. And there was no way I would be able to sleep after the last thirty minutes.
“Who says you need to?” Jay Don held up his hands. “This baby is completely autonomous. I’m here to shoot wildlife, fix problems, and piss off the Injuns.”
“You can sleep on it?”
“Only with a co-driver. That’s you. I gotta pull an all-nighter and run up to the Dakotas and check on a water flue. Damned snow starts earlier every year.”
We traded places, and Jay Don was snoring against the cab windows in less than a minute. Racing through the land of elevated farms built from tombstones and interstates, past spaceports and millions of bushels of wheat, I flexed my fingers and reached for the control yoke.
<> Mally warned. <>
I answered aloud, “Yes, Mom.”
<>
“How can you be a part of my brain and have your own sense of identity? Aren’t we one and the same?”
<onscience. I exist to monitor you, and I will be part of your brain for the rest of your life. I am designed to assist you in all matters.>>
“So, you are my conscience and personal assistant.” I hated the insinuation that I could not keep things in order, but the truth was that I needed her more and more.
Mally didn’t respond. I had the strange feeling I’d managed to upset her. “I’m sorry, Mally.”
<>
Every time I heard my name, the rush of blood to my ears was the same. The tone of the voice brought a fresh flood of emotion and memory. I remembered a young girl, with short reddish-brown hair and mischievous eyes, who whispered that she’d have changed her life to be with me. Raw emotion hitched the breath in my chest. The concept that I had a name and could remember snippets of a life long ago excited and scared me stiff. Taking inventory of my memories left me with more questions than answers. I’d been a soldier, and I’d traveled to Australia as a boy. My parents had been cremated. I’d married the wrong girl. I think I died in Afghanistan three hundred years ago. Then I’d fallen for a woman who manipulated me and then left me in the middle of the night. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Making the same mistakes all over again, huh?
As I watched the el-farms flying past, I found myself wondering about my prior life and just how screwed up I’d been. I didn’t get very far in self-exploration before the tractor slowed automatically at the Mississippi River just south of Reelfoot Lake. Though I could barely see it in the gathering darkness, the river seemed much wider than it had been in the past. I remembered chucking rocks from a diesel-powered ferry as a small child. The ferry ride had taken twenty minutes. Currently, I guessed, the river measured more than two miles wide.
<>
I chuckled, and Jay Don stirred in his seat. He drank water from a bottle, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and played the controls of the farm vehicle like a virtuoso. Two minutes later, we glided to a stop and stepped out into the moist, cool air.
Jay Don shook my offered hand and wished me luck. “You may not find what you’re looking for out there.”
“I have to try.” I shrugged but didn’t say that I was beginning to lose hope. What if he’s right? What then? I pressed the questions down and tried to smile. Fortunately, no tears came to my eyes. Maybe, just maybe, I was finding some strength in myself for a change.
The big man laughed. “Don’t we all. Good luck, friend.” He climbed aboard the tractor and disappeared in a cloud of dust. Standing at the river’s edge, I stared across the water and stared in dismay. My enhanced body could surely swim across the couple of miles of water in front of me. Without a doubt. My confidence surged. But even if I could swim across the strong river, the barrier at the other side was tall and solid from horizon to horizon. Jay Don said that Memphis was the nearest point of entry some fifty miles south.
I made my way downstream and occasionally looked across the black water. The future appeared to be all about walls.
Chapter Nineteen
For a full twelve hours, I marched south along the edge of the Mississippi River, trying and failing to flag down one of the large barges moving south down the wide waterway. I found the remains of an old pier, made my way out to the very edge of it, and sat waiting. With dawn breaking and another storm on the western horizon—a dark grey beast hanging low and belching lightning in wide sheets—I flagged down a passing scow and jumped to my feet as it abruptly changed course and swung by the pier without slowing down. In my microsecond of hesitation, Mally screamed that I needed to jump, and I did. I hit the wet, rusty deck of the scow like a sack of potatoes. Above me were six filthy men. Five of them carried weapons. The tall man with a bandana over his skull and a thick, mangy beard brandished an honest-to-God cutlass. I met his stare for a moment, wondered why men in the frontier couldn’t seem to keep themselves clean, and smiled.
“Permission to come aboard, Captain,” I said with as much respect as I could muster.
The man’s mouth dropped open far enough that I could see only a few teeth remained before he started laughing hard enough to cry. His men glanced nervously at each other then back to me, though no one said anything.
Gaining a vestige of self-control, the captain waved his men down. “Leave him alone, boys. He means us no harm. Ain’t that right?”
“That’s right, Captain. Just looking for a ride into Memphis.”
The captain nodded. “We can take you there. A few hours at best.”
The men around him mumbled questions. The rusty barrel of a shotgun poked me in the side of the head.
The captain held up his sword and waved it at the men. “I said leave him be! Back to your posts, or find another ship when we dock.”
The men scattered back to their jobs. Getting to my feet on the slippery, filthy deck took a moment. The crew danced across the slick surface. They were graceful compared to me. Thunder crashed overhead as the rain began to fall. The gust swept down off the flatlands of Arkansas, or whatever it was called now, and across the river hard enough to make the scow lean. Grabbing the side rail, I made my way to the quarterdeck where the captain stood. From bow to stern, the narrow, flat-bottomed ship was about a hundred feet long. I could feel vibrations from its engine, but I saw no exhaust. White-topped waves appeared in the water, but the boat remained at speed and the ride was silent and smooth. I noticed for the first time that, unlike his crew, he wore no heavy work gloves.
<>
The crew followed my walk with shifting eyes and dark glances. No one said anything, at least that I could hear. On the quarterdeck, I looked over the mile-wide flatness of the river, which contrasted with the rippling maelstrom above the boat. One of the men took off his glove for a moment, and I gasped. A hole the thickness of a finger and ringed with silver went straight through the man’s palm.
The captain slid up next to me, his gamey smell arriving slightly before him. “My crew are all cube jumpers. The hole in the palm is a dead giveaway.”
“Cube jumper?”
“Illegal in every way. They never returned to the Cubes after their conjugal releases. They’re the cheapest, most honest labor you can find these days. They are willing to do anything, and I mean anything, to stay free.”
“So they abandoned the Cubes, and that makes them criminal? I don’t understand.”
The captain spat into the black river water. “There’s no freedom in the Cubes. It’s sold like paradise, but in reality, it’s a billion worthless button pushers living in a fantasy realm. They come out for breeding more of their own kind, and the smart ones decide not to go back. Out here, there’s a least a chance to live.”
“What about captains? I noticed you aren’t a cube jumper.” I watched him, grinning. “What’s your life like?”
“Been on the river since I was a teenager. I do what I want to do and am paid handsomely for it. Doesn’t look like it, does it?” He chuckled. “Anybody who works hard and has half a brain does their best to conceal it. Flashing your worth makes you a target. You get me?”
I met his eyes and understood. Not much had really changed. For all the time that had passed, the advances and changes that humanity seemed to have made in Australia had failed to reach American shores. I wanted to vomit as I stared out over the slow black water. I don’t matter to anyone, so why should my name and my bloody identity matter to me? With all the money I could spend, who gives a shit what I do? They wouldn’t even care if I never came back.
By the time we reached the massive locks of the Port of Memphis, my mood and thoughts matched the storming skies. Is a soldier really any different than a Cuber? My destiny is determined by those afraid to show their cards. Is that why Berkeley left me in the mountains—because I was going to be a casualty, and she wanted to h
old onto pleasant memories of a dalliance? What is so special about me?
No sooner had we docked in Memphis than I pulled a hood over my head and slunk off to find my answers in the bottom of a whiskey glass. Memphis was a disappointment but perfect for my mindset. Here was a city time had forgotten. I’d not spent much time there before, but the dimly lit streets and the smell of backwater lent the place a second-class image. The people I met in the rain that night watched the ground in front of them and hurried to their destinations. There were no sounds of children or families, just an electric buzz from the neon signs, more of which were for establishments of ill repute than legitimate businesses. The taller buildings of downtown did not match their counterparts in Sydney. Ill-maintained solar panels clung to the south sides of buildings and rooftops. There were no phytomechanical gardens to generate power from chlorophyll and avoid poisoning the environment. When did Memphis become Afghanistan?
An erratically flashing neon clover caught my eye, and I sloshed across a dirty street and fell into the bowels of Memphis, lingering there and reeling from one bar or brothel to the next. In the first bar—an unsightly Irish pub knockoff— I fell in with a group of Celts and immediately found that my endless economic credit would purchase lots of lingering companions. At first, the carousing hedonism was welcome and cathartic. One moment I was tossing back whiskey with the Celts, and the next, I was waking up on a dingy, leopard-print covered sofa next to a woman moaning in Chinese. Not that she minded at all—she just kept moaning even when I sat up, looked at her, and gaped.
Where in the hell am I?
Wearing a haptic hood and gloves, she looked like a welder. She waved and typed on invisible keyboards as she moaned. When she stopped and actually spoke to me, I startled again.