by Jacob Whaler
“People think I’m evil, always working in the dark.” Mercer chuckles. “I hope to show you it’s not true.”
Qaara remains standing, hands clasped behind her back, careful to keep a distance. “I’m all ears.” She stares at the dark hair combed and pasted to Mercer's head, like plastic.
He produces a clear glass cube from his pocket. “This contains all I know about the molecule. Only a handful of people are familiar with parts of what I’m about to show you, but I’ve been careful to give no one the full picture. It’s been extraordinarily difficult keeping it secret all these years. Certain measures have regrettably been forced upon me. People have died. I’m not proud of that. But I can’t afford to let the secret out. Much too risky. Until now. I trust you, but just the same, you should assume everything I’m going to reveal is covered by the company’s confidentiality agreement that you signed six months ago. It's imperative you keep all of this to yourself.” His head turns to the side, presenting the profile of a perfectly chiseled nose, mirror-covered eyes focusing on the open door.
“Understood.” Qaara picks her slate off a nearby desk and taps the surface as she tries to remember signing a confidentiality agreement. Not that it matters. She knows better than to cross Mercer. People have died. Surprising that Mercer would confirm the rumors. The door panel slides shut without a sound. She inhales to still her surging pulse.
“Do I have your word you’ll cooperate?”
“You have my guarantee of secrecy. My office is swept for sniffers and listening devices every morning. Standard procedure. I’ve been here all day, so I know it’s clean. Don't worry. We are perfectly alone.”
“I like that.” Mercer stares ahead. “I like that very much. It’s nice to know I can trust you to keep quiet. It’s been too long since I could trust anyone. But there are certain other obligations that come with knowing what I am about to show you.”
“Obligations?”
“Nothing to worry about.” He fingers the glass cube and seems to stare through it. “You’re already in deep on this project. Nothing wrong with going a little deeper. Pop that in your holo machine. Let’s see what comes out.” He tosses the cube on a long, slow arc through the air.
Qaara catches it in one hand and walks to a round sphere on a table to her right. With the touch of a finger, a square hole opens in the middle. She drops in the cube, and with a warm hum, it gets pulled into the interior.
She looks into empty air at the center of the room, waiting for the hologram to appear.
A three-dimensional view of a rocky plain hangs between her and Mercer. Low mountains rise in the distance.
“Transvaal, South Africa.” Mercer leans forward. “Thirty years ago. I was five, and Genesis Corporation was a medium-sized mining company run by my father. They were doing a survey for diamond-rich deposits, drilling in some of the oldest known rock layers in the world.”
“How old?” Qaara says.
“I knew you would ask. But, then again, that’s one of the things I like about you. You’re thorough.” The blue mirrors on Mercer’s face point squarely at the holo, hiding his eyes. “This location was dated at 3.5 billion years, only one billion years short of the age of the Earth.”
Qaara has the feeling Mercer is staring at her instead of the holo. She takes a long, slow inhale. “What did they find in the rock? Something unusual, I assume.”
“Your instincts are right on. It’s a great story.” Mercer relaxes into the chair as if he savors the sound of his own voice. “On this particular day, the drill bit got stuck at 500 meters. As my father tells it, it just stopped and wouldn’t budge.”
Qaara drops her hands into her lab coat pockets, faking an appearance of relaxation. “Based on what I’ve heard, that’s not unusual.” Her mind races to uncover the direction the conversation is going and why Mercer is even talking about it. “Drill bits get stuck all the time.”
“Not when they’re tipped with nanotwined cubic boron nitride. NTCBN. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. The hardest substance in the universe, or so we thought. Cuts through diamond like it’s wet clay.”
Qaara nods. “I studied its molecular structure as an undergraduate at—”
“Yes, of course.” Mercer’s head floats up from the holo and drifts to the side. “My father had them pull up the line and look at the drill bit. Standard procedure.” He stops talking, as if waiting for Qaara to ask the obvious question.
She exhales and obliges. “What did they find?”
“The bit was bent and broken, snapped in two. It had come up against something harder, buried in the Earth’s crust in 3.5 billion-year-old rock.” Mercer's hand fishes inside his black suit jacket and pulls out a narco-pipe. “Do you mind?” He doesn’t wait for an answer before bringing the tube to his lips and inhaling deeply. “It keeps me calm and engaged.”
Qaara says nothing, eyeing Mercer’s reflection in the window.
He relaxes deeper into the chair. “So they tried to drill through it, again and again. This went on for three days.” Another long drag on the pipe. “In the end, they broke twenty drill bits. Each one cost a million IMUs. Not cheap, even back then.”
“So what did they do?” Qaara speaks without turning. “Give up?”
Mercer laughs. “You never met my father, did you? He never gave up. Even when he should have. The most stubborn man alive. No, after they broke all their drill bits, my father had to know what was harder than the NTCBN. So he had them dig a mine shaft, two meters in diameter, all the way down to the point of impact. Through five hundred meters of bedrock.” He sucks on the narco-pipe. “Now, would you like to know what they found?”
Qaara nods, not sure why Mercer is playing this game.
“They followed the drill line all the way down and found it bending to the side, out of alignment, almost like whatever was down there wanted to be found.”
Qaara’s eyebrows rise and wrinkle her smooth forehead. “What exactly did they find?”
“This.” Mercer’s hand reaches into his pocket and carefully scoops out a black lump the size of his fist, balanced on his palm.
“What is it?”
Mercer allows the hint of a smile. “That is the ultimate question, isn’t it? Would you like a look?” He tosses it through the air to Qaara.
More by instinct than intention, her hand darts up and tries to snatch it mid-arc. From all appearances, its surface is rough and wet, like fresh mud. But when it makes contact with her fingers, she can’t feel it. All she senses is the resistance of a hard object, like glass covered in oil. It slips through her fingers, and she gropes for it with the other hand. It seems to pass through her skin before falling to the floor with a loud thud. No bounce. It simply hits the floor and sticks like a magnet.
Bending down to retrieve it, she looks up at Mercer. “Sorry. It seems to have slipped through my hands.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not you. This stuff isn’t easy to catch or hold. Like a beautiful woman.” His gaze follows Qaara as she tries and fails to pick the rock up from the floor.
Each time, it slips from her fingers like a live fish.
“Allow me.” Mercer gently scoops up the lump with two hands. “I’ve had years of practice with slippery things. The trick is to get your fingers under it and keep it balanced. Don’t grip it. After a while, you get used to not being able to feel it. Just trust that it’s there, in your hand.” As he holds it out in his palm for her to get a closer view, the twin mirrors on his face focus intently on her.
Feeling his stare, she bends forward, and her head goes into the space occupied by the holo. “Looks like a lump of wet coal.” Her eyes meet the neon mirrors, still staring at her. “I’m confused. Why are you showing this to me?”
Mercer takes a step back and sits in the chair behind him. His gaze goes to the holo floating between them. “After my father found this rock, he took it back to the company’s R&D lab for analysis. They confirmed that it was harder than any known substance. It
had snapped twenty drill bits and didn’t even leave a mark. It got his attention. He figured that, if he could replicate and manufacture it, it would be worth billions of IMUs. And that would only be the beginning.”
Qaara speaks in a near whisper. “Your father never did figure it out, did he?”
“How did you know?” Mercer shows a hint of a smile.
“I studied materials science at MIT. Nothing has ever been published about what you are describing. If it’s true—” She pauses after making such a bold statement. “It would have been nearly impossible to keep such a monumental discovery a secret.”
Mercer leans back, purses his lips and brings his fingers together in a steeple. “Very perceptive. And completely accurate. My father spent twenty-five years and billions on the project but never discovered what this was made of.” He bounces the lump a couple of times in his hand. The index finger of his other hand strokes its black surface, as if it were alive. “To his dying day, my father dreamed of solving this riddle.” The lenses on his glacier glasses slowly turn transparent. One of his eyebrows rises half a millimeter.
As their eyes meet, Qaara feels a stab of cold move down her spine. She returns to the holo, still showing a barren plain in South Africa. “And so—”
“And so I continued the project after my father’s untimely death.” Mercer’s fingers cradle the black lump. “Three years ago, we made an astounding discovery. Everything fell into place.”
“Discovery?” Qaara takes a step forward. “What sort of discovery?”
Mercer smiles, and heavy footsteps move across the floor outside the door, like a herd of small elephants.
More by instinct than design, Qaara picks the slate off the desk a couple of feet away and runs her finger across its surface. A fisheye view of the outside of the office appears on the clear plastic.
She sees men in black combat gear flanking the door, six on each side. In unison, they raise their pulse rifles and load. The sound of crisp clicks floats through the wall.
“Don’t be alarmed. It’s just a precaution, to protect both of us,” Mercer says. “I’m about to disclose some very sensitive information to you.”
Qaara’s pulse jumps. “About what?”
“About this.” Mercer eyes the dark object in his hand. “Something I learned after my father’s death.” The index finger of his other hand stretches out and taps the side of the rock.
After a pause, there’s a slight humming sound, and a piece of the rock slides open, like a tiny drawer. Inside, Qaara sees a green jewel the shape of a crescent moon.
7
TRIBE
Jedd steps outside into the night air of the Fringe.
His lungs instantly revolt at the chemical stench of reclaimed plastic and recycled carbon. He pulls a soft pink tube from his pocket, finds the opening in the middle and slips it between his teeth so it’s protruding from the corners of his mouth. As his lips close around the filter, he thinks of the dog he had as a kid, back when he was traveling with the Family. It always carried a favorite stick between its teeth, eager to play fetch with anyone who had the time.
He must look like that dog with the stick in its mouth, only Jedd’s not running off to play.
“Here,” he says, turning to hand a filter to Ricky. “The recycle plant’s working overtime tonight. You better suck on this before your lungs start to melt.”
“Thanks,” Ricky says.
“Let’s hurry.” Jedd breaks into a brisk run down the middle of the street.
There’s a slight drizzle, more mist than rain. A full moon gives the clouds a faint orange glow as if lit by fire from within. On either side, the outlines of the buildings that fill the Fringe resemble a swarm of cicadas emerging from the ground, disjointed, organic and menacing in the dark. The walls of the structures are made of packing materials discarded by the local munitions factory and look like massive jigsaw puzzles of reconstituted chemboard and hard plastic sheets of random colors bolted together at uneven angles.
Welcome to the Fringe, Jedd thinks, the dregs of society. The dung heap of Manhattan.
Every costal city on the planet tells the same story. The wealthy live and work in pristine high-rise cocoons close to the ocean, encased in tombs of steel and glass, protected and separated from the world they ransack, rape and destroy. Slums like the Fringe spring up on the outskirts, necessary to the smooth functioning of the System, the source of subsistence labor, eking out an existence from the dirty industry that supports wealth and privilege, living off the garbage that flows from it.
“Hey, can you slow down to a gentle jog? I’m dying back here.” Ricky pulls up alongside, breathing hard.
“I wonder if he’s still alive.” Jedd whips out his jax and stares at the holoscreen that jumps above it. “His marker is gone, and I haven’t heard anything in the last five minutes. He’s not even on the Mesh. That’s not like him. Someone must have taken his jax. And he wouldn't give it up without a fight.”
“Where is the little runt?”
“In the Tribe Quadrant, two klicks away, if he’s still at the same coordinates.” Jedd picks up his pace with longer strides over the broken pavement. “See you there.”
As he runs, his mind finds a delicate equilibrium between fatigue and euphoria and begins to wander over the ten years since he and Ricky first arrived in the Fringe, just a couple of scared teenagers escaping from the interior of the continent, a place he soon found out had a name on the coast.
They called it the Dead Zone, or Zone for short.
Months after their arrival in the Fringe, Jedd still flinched at the sound of an angry voice or cowered in fear when a hand was raised against him, a common occurrence in their neighborhood. His former existence under the iron fist of old Moses was like living in hell. It took a steady diet of entertainment and food to clear it out of his system.
Eventually, Jedd learned to relax. But the nightmares never ended.
Moses.
The name still carries an aura of awe mixed with terror.
He gave Jedd and Ricky food, when he wanted to, and meted out severe punishments on a whim. In exchange for their lives, he required strict loyalty and dictated every detail of the Family. He rarely missed a shot with his long rifle. Jedd witnessed Moses dispatch anyone who questioned his authority with the tap of a finger on a trigger. Under his dictatorship, the Family lived by raiding other tribes in the Zone, stripping them of food and water, always leaving a few survivors so that the fear of Moses would spread.
Eventually, Jedd got his fill of hate and fear. He got his fill of Moses.
On the clear night of a full moon with shadows sharp as crystal, while the Family camped close to the edge of the Zone, Jedd glimpsed the buried road that led in a straight line through the Divide, a pock-marked minefield ten kilometers across, laden with boulder-sized craters separating the Zone from the outside world.
Moses told stories about how the Divide was laid down by the people of the cities to keep out the people of the interior. Planes had dropped millions of black spheres that burrowed into the dirt and came to life when an erring foot pressed down on them. Like a face marred by acne, the Divide bore the pockmarks and pits of explosions that kept everyone but the suicidal from attempting to cross.
After a day without food, in a moment of despair, Jedd made a decision. He would risk it all to escape. After everyone had gone to bed, he grabbed Ricky and eight other kids.
All ten of them spread out and ran.
Moses was drunk and missed most of his shots, but the Divide claimed what Moses couldn’t hit.
Except for Jedd and Ricky.
With Moses’ big voice and gun booming behind them, they fled. For three days, they chased the morning sun with no food or water. And then they caught a glimpse of the City on the far horizon, surrounded by a slum. When they finally stumbled onto the filthy streets of the Fringe, it was like walking into a candy store.
Jedd and Ricky both began working at the only jobs availa
ble, building illegal structures in the endless slum. It bought them a leaky roof over their heads in Ms. Murphy’s boarding house and enough recycled food to fill a teenager’s belly, almost. There was plenty of work. The Fringe was growing like a fungus, swelled by rejects from the City and, rarely, stragglers from the Zone. Decades before, the slum had spread to massive proportions, sprawling for miles, covering all the empty space and absorbing any structures already in place, fed by an endless supply of cheap building materials from the fab plants that ringed the City.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Jedd brings himself back to the present. He glances behind.
Ricky is fading into the darkness, unable to keep up. It’s been the same story since the day Ricky walked into the Fringe and discovered the Mesh and his natural aptitude for all things connected to it. Too little time working out, too much time exploring the nether regions of the network that unifies all information and objects on the planet.
Not that Jedd’s complaining.
Ricky has a knack for finding his way past all but the most highly encrypted security walls, an intuitive understanding of the lay of the land inside cyberspace.
A handy friend to have when you’re dealing with tech.
A gentle rain begins to fall.
Jedd stops to check his jax, only a hundred meters from Joey’s last position, but there’s still no sign of the kid. Raising his eyes to the sky, Jedd lets a cascade of tiny drops wash his face. When his eyes sting, he wipes his forehead and brings his hand away. An oily film clings to his fingers.
Just as he’s about to wipe it away, he hears a faint roar, like a far-off crowd cheering a back alley rollerball game.
Following the sound, he slips down a narrow street of broken pavement, running his fingers along both walls. A web of wires and cables snake inches above his head. He dodges rats the size of small dogs and races past the back door of a Chinese noodle shop reeking of garlic and cumin. Jedd sprints through puddles until the path finally opens onto a wide street.
Then he hears the chanting, coming from an open square fifty meters to the right.