Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  As we bounced from crest to crest, Gould Island winked larger and larger with every dip of the bow. The truth of it became less and less plausible with every league. I zippered my coat all the way up. The weather might’ve warmed up a bit, but the ocean air still had a bite.

  Finally, we were idling less than a hundred yards from the beach. Lorelei and I stood on the port side, staring at ground zero of The Reidier Test.

  It looked like . . . an island. I don’t know, I think I half expected it to still be smoking. Instead the site was covered with a swath of primary-growth plants and even some overzealous secondary-growth shrubs.

  Ov-uh theah’s some rubble ya can see through thuh bushes, our lobsterman pointed out.

  Part of what used to be a brick wall flashed between the overgrowth. It was the bottom half of a window frame.

  We slowly motored north, up the east side of the island, following a three-foot-high cement wall that demarcated the beach from the woods. It sunk into the earth about a third of the way up the island. We saw several more partial brick or cement structures that were slowly being swallowed up by the green.

  Our captain kept pointing out secret sites that were camouflaged to the untrained eye. What looked like a teepee of kindling surrounded by trees was actually a wooden structure that had imploded. Those “kindling sticks” were actually old beams.

  The northern end of the island was flat—a field of concrete striated with weeds, saplings, and ferns.

  “Jesus, get a load of that.” Lorelei leaned against the side of the boat to try to get close, try to make sense of what wasn’t there anymore.

  Traces of another concrete wall circumvented the former compound and opened up at the tip of the island where the ocean was dotted with the odd pylon.

  “What’s that?” I asked our captain.

  “Was a pe’ah.”

  A pier. Didn’t look like much. I said so.

  “Nah, a big one too. Yes suh. U’sta have an entiya eah’craft carrie-ya docked heah.”

  I tried to imagine an aircraft carrier tied to the pier. Mammoth wires running off it into Reidier’s lab. I played dumb. “What happened to it? Sink?”

  “Nah, theah would’uh been a whole heap of flotsam on the sh’oah. I huh’d it’d shipped out a cuppa days pry-ya.” The lobsterman shrugged.

  On the way back, the captain pointed out two aircraft carriers that were docked at the NAVSTA, the naval base, just across the bay on Newport’s western shore, the former fiefdom of the late Rear Admiral Wisecup.

  Believability, plausibility, reality. I just didn’t know anymore.

  Neither did Lorelei. Instead she gave me a crooked smile while the wind whipped wisps of her hair in front of her face.

  She’d be stunning even in the middle of a goddamn hurricane. Hell if I didn’t swoon a little inside. It was either that or another swell of the Atlantic.

  “I guess we just keep digging. Tomorrow we go to Providence.”

  I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. What I hope to accomplish. I can’t keep it all straight, it’s a Chinese somersault between my memory and my imagination rolling down the banks of the Providence River, tumbling toward perdition.

  * * *

  Adapted from the video surveillance of Gould Island Lab; June 15, 2007

  Reidier rests his hands on the pen tray of the whiteboard behind him, his left elbow patch inadvertently erasing some of his calculations.

  Rear Admiral Wisecup, in an almost comically cliché gesture, pulls out a cigar and butane torch lighter. He has the cigar in his mouth and the bright-blue flame ignited before he pauses to ask, as if it’s a foregone conclusion, “You mind?”

  Reidier, without any aggression, matter-of-factly lets him know he can’t smoke there.

  “You allergic or something?” Wisecup challenges Reidier.

  Reidier adjusts some machine on the nearby table while he proceeds to explain, first with several lines of technical jargon and then again in a more vernacular analogy, that while smoke might seem a rather insubstantial intrusion of particles, it’s a tsunami of interference on molecularly calibrated machines.

  Wisecup takes this in stride. He repockets his cigar and lighter, and even seems a bit amused. Finally after watching Reidier tinker with his machine, he asks, “You ever hear about Pizarro and Atahualpa?”

  “Were they scientists or generals?” Reidier retorts. The bite of his comment is wielded like a velvet-covered mace.

  “Pizarro was a Spanish explorer in the early 1500s. One of the guys who accompanied Balboa to the Pacific.”

  “So he was a conquistador.”

  “For a while he was mayor and magistrate of Panama City, a position he was awarded for arresting Balboa. But yes, a conquistador. Some might say the conquistador. What do you know about the Incan empire?”

  “Machu Picchu, advanced earthquake-proof engineering with their architecture. A highly adept civilization, built on the tuber. I believe they cultivated over 4,000 varieties of potatoes, actually. They had particularly advanced agriculture, utilizing this wide variety within niche microclimates all up and down the Andes. Subsequently inoculated them against any type of potato blight, like the one that almost obliterated the Irish. Our agribusinesses could learn a thing or two from them. We’re all about adapting the environment to a specific plant, they simply adapted the plant to a myriad of different environments.”

  Wisecup nods. “They were also the single largest empire in the New World. By the time Atahualpa was ruling, his kingdom covered almost the entire west coast of South America. Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Colombia. Over twenty million subjects and he commanded an army of close to a hundred thousand warriors.”

  Wisecup paused for a moment. He watched Reidier and waited for a comment. Reidier finally appeased Wisecup, guessing, “And Pizarro beat him. Is that your point?”

  Wisecup shook his head back and forth. “He didn’t just beat him. He annihilated him with only sixty-two soldiers mounted on horses and one hundred and six foot soldiers, while Atahualpa had a force of about eighty thousand. Two soldiers for every thousand warriors. All because the Spanish had steel swords, steel armor, guns, and horses, while Atahualpa’s troops had stone and wooden clubs, and no animals. An empire fell to a handful of invaders because of a technological advantage.”

  “And that’s what you want from me, the next technological advantage?”

  “I only want what you want, Professor Reidier, to reach our goal,” Wisecup said. “I’m a facilitator. Nothing more. Directives are given to me, and I do everything in my power to help make them a reality.”

  “And responsibility is successfully deconstructed and compartmentalized.” Reidier stops his tinkering and faces Wisecup, giving the Rear Admiral his full attention. “Myopia is a dangerous thing. It’s killed more people than any disease throughout history.”

  “You know da Vinci didn’t only paint the Mona Lisa.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “Among his proficient skills, in a letter to the Duke of Milan, he also listed nine different categories of military engineering: weapons, bridging, bombarding machines, trench draining. He pioneered the renaissance of armed wars.”

  Reidier has pulled himself back in his seat. The mention of da Vinci puts him on edge.

  Wisecup presses his advantage. “Scientific advancement has both taken and saved innumerable lives. It’s the nature of tools. But you got to ask yourself, on August 6, 1945, would you have rather been on the ground in Hiroshima or flying above it on the Enola Gay? We might not be able to stop the march of history, but sometimes we can choose whether we’re leading it or underfoot.”

  Reidier doesn’t have a response for this. Wisecup takes his silence as a cue for having won the argument. Not to belabor the point, Wisecup stands up with a Well then . . . The Rear Admiral takes out his cigar once more.

  “Everything on our end is set. The USS ████ is at your disposal. Whenever you’re ready to start your experime
nts.” Wisecup heads for the door.

  Reidier speaks up as Wisecup is halfway out. “History can be a powerful tool of rhetoric, especially when cherry-picked. Sometimes the long view can really put things into relief.”

  “Is that right?” Wisecup asks with a nonplussed, almost placating attitude.

  “About a thousand years before Pizarro raped the New World, the Mayans were the most advanced civilization on the planet. While Europe was swallowed up by the Dark Ages, the Mayans were building huge cities, constructing towering temples, growing vast trade routes, developing large-scale agriculture, spreading their written language, and divining theories of mathematics, including the concept of zero more than five hundred years before Western Civilization would, and literally mapping out the heavens and creating a solar calendar more accurate than today’s. For about seven hundred years, they were the premiere culture on the planet. Then between eight and nine hundred, poof, that was it. Architectural projects abandoned, monumental inscriptions ceased midproject, cultural centers abandoned, trade routes dried up. This amazingly advanced culture collapsed. You know why?”

  “Can’t say that I do.”

  “Neither does anyone else. Progress isn’t always progress.”

  Wisecup nods, then smiles big at Reidier. “Good thing for us then, that we’ll have your contraption, “’cause no matter what threatens us with our own collapse, we’ll have the ultimate escape route. Our own portal onto whatever ark we choose.”

  “Or the ultimate weapon delivery system, right?”

  Wisecup checks his watch. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got drinks with my lieutenants, and I don’t want them putting any Ice-9 in my scotch.”

  With this final comment, Wisecup walks off down the hall, leaving the door wide open.

  Reidier moves to close it, then stops, shrugs, and turns back, mumbling, “Why bother.”

  Are we alone now

  The years of working beneath the predatory gaze of Didi* had honed Reidier’s instincts, his “paranoia” radar constantly pinging out into the dark corners of his life, an unconscious habit at this point, like whistling a tune or biting one’s nails.

  * * *

  * The freaky Frenchman from French Guiana who drove Reidier crazy.

  * * *

  Yes, Kerek.

  It’s how he spotted the cell phone anomaly so quickly.

  But then he just took it in stride. No angry phone calls to Pierce. No destructive tantrums. No moody sulking.

  Just the norm.

  Are we alone now

  It didn’t seem right. It was inconsistent with a man who would move his wife from one foreign land in the jungle to another foreign land on the edge of an icy great lake because of a nosy Frenchman impotently poking around his hard drive. Arrange a green card for Eve, get married, land a prestigious university post, rebuild his lab—all because his old boss touched his notebook? But now, barely a nod at his current boss bugging his home?!

  Yes, Kerek.*

  * * *

  * See Chapter XV, the .mp4 video file Hilary found on Reidier’s personal hard drive and transcribed. Reidier and Kai whispering to each other. I don’t know why she didn’t put it in this folder. Nor why she’s editing Kai’s name out of Reidier’s question, “It sounds quiet. Are we alone now, Kai?”

  * * *

  Still, there he was, every day, going to his office, taking trips to Gould Island to oversee refurbishment, working diligently at his lab in the basement, within the aquarium of his life. A beta fish that had just bumped up against the glass boundaries of his existence. A pet. A circus act.

  Are we alone now

  NB Footage, Reidier Basement lab, July 2, 2007

  The NB footage perfectly mirrors the content from Reidier’s own personal recording system. He sits in his basement laboratory. He’s lost in work, spins in his chair from one surface to another, scribbles down something, back to his computer to check out some data.

  Back to his scribbling. Without even looking at the computer, types a few keystrokes, while he writes something down in one of Leo’s Notebooks.

  Reidier presses “Enter.” Nothing much happens. Reidier writes more down.

  The video blinks and skips a second.

  Reidier’s still working. The notebook has jumped a few inches to the right within the blackness of the blink. And Reidier’s still writing, although there’s a little less ink on the page than there was only moments prior. A line, maybe two.

  The NB footage goes on. But in this footage, he doesn’t go on to lean back in his chair. He’s not listening. He’s not hearing.

  Nothing. Especially not:

  Reidier: It sounds quiet. Are we alone now, Kai?

  (Pause)

  Female Voice: Yes, Kerek.

  There’s no such dialogue on the NB footage. Just his hard drive.

  Reidier hacked the nanobots.*

  * * *

  * Reidier blinded the watchers, and they didn’t even know it. And he did it right in front of them.

  If I’m reading it right, Reidier tapped right into the Department’s surveillance and “amended” it. The official Department video only has a little skip and then some mundane footage of Reidier and his note-taking. No conversation with Kai. No “Are we alone, Kai?” That was for his own private record of reality.

  Two versions of the truth, only one has been edited; and from that point forward, the official record was no longer reliable.

  And the rest of us are left alone in the quiet. Listening for the listeners.

  Exposed.

  * * *

  I cross-checked endless hours of footage from feeds all over the rest of the house. No blinks. No jumping notebooks. Apparently, Reidier hijacked only the surveillance in his home lab.

  It makes sense. He would’ve run a greater risk of detection taking over all of the feeds. Plus, he had endless databanks of footage to access and rerun while he did his own work, now in privacy.

  Whatever doubts Reidier had been entertaining about Pierce and the Department before this moment, his discovery of the nanobots was a defining and transformative moment. No longer was Reidier working with tenuous allies, he was working against covetous spies.*

  * * *

  * “Lorelei.”

  “Danny . . . ?” Lorelei blinked awake, and raised her forearm to try and shield her eyes from the lamplight slicing in from the hallway. She reached out and touched my cheek. “Are you ok?”

  The room spun around the axis of her arm and then rocked back the other way like one of those swinging ship rides at a carnival.

  I hadn’t calculated for this. All my plotting, all my impulse control, and her bedroom wouldn’t stop swinging. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

  Earlier, when I was alone, reading my mom’s files on Reidier’s extermination of the nanobots, I had wanted to leap up from my chair, sprint down the hall, throw open her door, and shout, Call my burner! I had wanted to turn on every light in the house, blast every stereo/iPod/music player whatever, flip on every kitchen appliance, and march around banging pots together. Whatever would provide enough noise and interference, give me enough cover to wander around our roost, active cell phone in hand and root out our own nanobot infestation. But no, that might have created its own interference, muddy the aural waters. Not to mention if the nanobots were there, if we were being watched, then that sure as hell would’ve tipped them off that we were on to them. And once we pulled the curtain back on Ol’ Eavesdropping Oz, then what? If their cover’s blown then they have to come in and come in hard, guns up, zip-tie handcuffs at the ready. NO! No. Our only advantage would be them not knowing we know they’re there. If they were there. If that were the case, if they were on to me the whole time, then it would’ve been a simple matter of letting themselves in and unleashing a swarm of nanobots while we were out slurping chowder and taking boat rides. No. We had to be smart about this. We had to respond, not react. We needed to meditate, think, and not quaff a quart of Jameson n
o matter how loudly our nerves screamed for it. No! No. We needed to stay sharp. We needed to walk calmly to Lorelei’s room. Unsuspiciously rouse her from her slumber. Fake some illness, a cough, choking congestion, yes, ask her for help operating the steam room/shower that was so artfully integrated into the original colonial remodel. Then once there, sitting side by side on the marble floor, leaning against the shower glass, while the steam room whined and hissed awake like a dragon fart, there masked by the steam, muffled by the violent shrill of vaporization, there I would whisper in her ear, I would explain about the nanobots, how she needed to get her burner phone and call my burner, which I would have in my pocket, but plugged into earphones. She needed to do some odd little task, something mundane, play a game of solitaire, heat up some milk ‘cause she can’t sleep, and absentmindedly sing while doing it. In the meantime, I would wander the halls with my normal manic somnambulism, all the while listening, hunting like a bat for bugs, Lorelei’s voice pinging around my ears while I stalk any little interference. And then we’d know if we’d been found.

  But I hadn’t planned on her touching my cheek.

  I didn’t anticipate the look of concern in her eyes, let alone the invitingness of her tone. She wasn’t surprised. It almost was like she was hopeful. Had Lorelei been waiting for me to visit her, like this, in her room, in the middle of the night? Had I missed the signs? How could I have planned for the way her curls flowed around her pillow, radiating away from her, tossed around from the chaos of sleep?

  “Danny?” She propped herself up on her elbow, her curls cascading down across her neck. Her loose white tank top snagged under her arm, pulling away from her, opening. The lamplight from the hall reached around me, caressing the curve of her smooth breasts and barely covered nipples.