Panting, Coe said, “Tell me the message.”
“Message?”
“In the envelope. It was meant for me.”
“Envelope?”
Coe raised the gun and trained it on the man. “I’ll—”
“Shoot me?” the man said, still smiling. “Don’t shoot me, please.”
“I’m going to ask you one more time—”
“How can you ever soar with the eagles?” the man said, “When you’re stuck down here with all these turkeys?”
“I’m warning you—”
“Time to soar.”
The smile faded. His expression turned blank. A trembling overtook him. “Got to soar,” he said. “Got to fly...”
Vapors leaked from his collar. He slipped his finger behind his tie, loosened it. Smoke poured out. “Bye-bye,” he said. Metal wings sprouted from the sides of his head.
“Stop it,” Coe said. “Stop it.” He waved the gun at him.
The skin fell from his face; his head lifted off from his neck. It became a fat, mechanical bird. Its wings flapped, propelled it skyward. It circled once, squawked at Coe, and was gone.
Coe briefly considered shooting at it, but his inaction ultimately enabled it to escape. Meanwhile, the body—now headless—slumped to the ground in its rain coat and continued to smoke. Flames erupted from beneath the shirt and engulfed the entire torso.
Coe could do nothing but watch it burn.
Five.
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“A cell-bot,” Ms. Hunter said.
She agreed to meet him in a cafe named Indigo where the ferns inside were real, but the coffee was not. They were seated at a table for two by the window. She kept her raincoat on.
“A cell-bot?”
“A replicant,” she said. “Made in a genetics lab using real cells, tissues, DNA. Clones, essentially.”
Coe said, “Like the kind they used to terraform Mars?”
“Obviously, this one had a robotic head. It’s a spy model. Quantum makes them.”
“Quantum makes them?”
“Intellitech Laboratories,” she said. “On fifteen. They’re a subsidiary.”
“Quantum sent it?”
“Quantum makes them,” she said. “Doesn’t necessarily mean it came from Quantum. Lots of companies use them.” She sipped her coffee. “Doesn’t mean it didn’t come from Quantum, either.”
“Christ.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. It had all begun to make his head ache. “Auditors are spies,” he said, having a satori.
She laughed. “Auditors are lots of things. You didn’t know that?”
“I don’t know what I thought. Yes. No. I don’t...maybe.” All of those years in research, the dossiers, the background checks, the traces—he told himself it was all marketing.
“The corporate world is a cutthroat place, Mr. Coe. Without good business intelligence, how can a company like Quantum, keep its competitive edge?”
“There’s only one: Quantum,” he said, mindlessly reciting the company slogan. It appeared on print ads, billboards, corporate swag like the T-shirts and coffee mugs they freely distributed to employees—it was said with confidence by the big-breasted actress with the pouty lips that had been the company spokeswoman for nearly a decade.
Ms. Hunter smiled. “There’s only one...and we’re fortunate enough to work for it. Do you ever remind yourself just how lucky you are, Mr. Coe? You work for Quantum. The Quantum Corporation. You’re an auditor for the number one company in the world...hell, the solar system.”
“I’m lucky,” Coe said.
“Look at them,” she said, casting a glance toward the window. An endless flow of people passed by the glass, some paused long enough just to look in. “We could easily be on that side. Part of the masses, moving...always moving. Do you ever wonder where they all go?”
“Home,” he said. “Work. School. Restaurants. Cafes like this one.”
“No,” she said, sipping her coffee. Her gaze stayed fixed on the people. “I don’t think they have homes. Their job is to keep moving.”
Coe watched her as she spoke. She was expressionless, unblinking. She was beautiful but cold. He couldn’t get a read on her. “Who do you think sent the cell-bot?”
“What?” she said, dreamily. She turned slowly away from the window and looked at him. Her eyes were blank as if she did not even recognize him.
“The replicant,” he said. “The one that intercepted the message.”
“Oh, right,” she said. Her features softened then. “Steele. Quantum...”
“Who else? The caller made it seem as though there were more competitors than just Steele.”
“Maybe Devereaux, Tokei, Oxford, Atlas...it could be anyone. When you’re Quantum, the entire world is your competitor, whether it’s the box stores that anchor the strip mall or the mom and pop grocer on the corner.”
At that moment, Coe’s hand-held communicator buzzed. He removed it from his coat pocket. INCOMING: MITCHELL, it read. Coe answered it.
Mitchell’s image appeared. He looked disheveled. Purplish flesh ringed his eyes. “Revis is dead,” he said. “Suicide. He was found hanging from a tree in Druid Hill Park.”
Coe looked toward Ms. Hunter who covered her mouth with her hand. It was too convenient. He missed the message tonight. Revis had been a double agent for Steele and whoever Coe was supposed to meet. He’d missed that message, but this one was clear.
“What does this mean?” Coe asked Mitchell, anyway.
“I think we both know what it means,” he said.
The screen went black.
It was then that he noticed Ms. Hunter was weeping.
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Coe rode the train with her to her apt. She didn�
�t speak. She just stared out the window as she had at the cafe, watching the rain bead the glass, the lights of the city—of the snarled traffic—streak by. The interior of the train was dark, except for the eerie green-blue glow of digital readers. A man in the seat in front of him was reading the evening edition of The Intelligencier. The headline read: Body Found In Druid Hill Park. It was accompanied by a photograph of a modestly handsome man with dark wavy hair and a square chin. He wore small square eyeglasses. Under the photo was the caption: Collin Revis.
They got off in Blueberry Common. It was a quiet working class neighborhood. There was a dentist’s office on the first floor of her building. She lived on the third floor. He rode the elevator up with her.
“Thank you,” she said, “for accompanying me home.”
Coe said, “You don’t have to thank me.”
The elevator opened onto a dark hallway lit only by a small, solitary lamp with an amber shade. They stopped at a door marked 310.
“I’d invite you in, but—”
“I need to get home anyway,” he said.
“Of course.”
“Good night,” he said, and turned to go.
“I suppose you think it was a queer response,” she said.
Coe stopped.
“My getting emotional,” she said, “at hearing about Mr. Revis.”
Coe shrugged. “I assumed it was a normal reaction to hearing that someone you had worked closely with—an auditor whose reports you had transcribed—had passed away.”
She smiled, but her eyes were wet. “That’s exactly it.”
“You’re human,” he said.
“Good night, Mr. Coe.”
Coe managed a smile. “Good night, Ms. Hunter.”
He waited as she unlocked her door and entered. When he heard the door lock from the inside, he strode back to the elevator.
“We’re having a dust storm,” Janeiro said. Her hair was wet. It lay flat against her head. “The entire planet is covered.”
There was the usual delay between messages—their interplanetary call-and-response. He said, “It must be amazing to see—from your window inside your dome, of course.”
He sat there looking at her. After the evening he’d had of spy-versus-spy with mysterious calls and exploding cell-bots, he wanted nothing more than to interact with her in real time—to hold her against him—to fall asleep inside of her. Instead, she in some way felt less real to him. He presented an edited version of the day to her, revealing nothing of the excitement, the intrigue, or even the short excursion to Ms. Hunter’s apt. It left him with very little to talk about.
As she described the red dust clinging to the eco-dome of her city, and pinkish hue it cast on the streets, the buildings, his thoughts turned to Ms. Hunter, weeping—of her enthusiasm, loyalty, and vulnerability. He was ashamed of himself. His shame was experienced on many levels. Shame, because he was freely betraying his long-time employer for a woman he had never met; shame, because he was waging something valuable in the current state of earthly life (a job); and shame, because he was feeling excitement for another woman, while the woman he loved was on the screen before him—their calls, their time, so precious.
“Are you feeling all right?” she asked.
“I feel fine.” But he couldn’t hide a sudden dissatisfaction, perhaps impatience, with the distance between them and the tedium of their communication. He reminded himself it was not her fault, that she was taking a tremendous risk on him, leaving her home planet for an overcrowded, overburdened place that often seemed ready to come undone by the birth of even one more child.
“I love you, Scotty,” she said.
He imagined her voice relaying from satellite to satellite, across the immense, cold void. A harrowing, hellish eight-month voyage awaited her in the near future—if he was ultimately successful in obtaining the obtuse, esoteric information that Steele wanted.
“I love you,” he said, meaning it all the more.
Six.
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The first thing he heard was the hum of the hovercar just outside his bedroom window. Laying half-asleep, half-awake, in his bed, the sound was first indistinguishable from the other hover traffic outside—that constant drone of traffic, of movement, as if it were to stop, all life would come to a grinding halt. But it was the hum of a particular hovercar, one near his building, flying near his window in what was clearly marked a no-hover zone. The power of the hover engine, so close now it had begun to shake the windows, caused the entire room to vibrate. Immense light, white and searing, poured through the window and pored over him.
Dressed in his pajamas, he first sat up, then instinctively rolled from bed onto the floor, crawling away from the bed as a blast of glass and bullets ripped through the air, shredding the bed. The room snowed cotton and man-made fibers as if he had suddenly found himself inside the center of an enormous snow globe. The concentrated artillery fire remained fixed on the bed for several seconds before moving through the remainder of the apt, shooting out the windows, chewing up furniture, bedding, and carpeting.
Coe had wedged himself in a doorway, balled up and laying close to the floor and making himself into as small of a target as possible. The hovercar moved swiftly then, finishing its assault, and speeding away.
He lay on the floor for some time after that, listening. The monotonous night-noise of hover traffic returned, and with it sirens.
“So let me see if I have this straight,” the detective said, looking down at his e-notebook. His name was Jansky.
Coe had provided a statement, speaking directly into the dictophone of the e-notebook. It automatically transcribed his statement.
Jansky read, “And then this—cell-bot, is it—its head turned into a robot bird and flew away?”
“That’s correct,” Coe said, shivering in the night air as it rushed in through his smashed windows. He’d attempted to put on his robe, but it had been reduced to rags as a result of the gunfire.
“I see,” Jansky said. “And this is related how?”
“I’m unsure it’s related at all,” Coe said. He was hesitant to tell the police anything at all, since it could prove detrimental to his position with Quantum and as a co-conspirator of Steele. But, he needed to give them something since a machine-gunning of his apt could not be kept secret.
“What is it you do again, Mr. Coe?”
“I work for Quantum.”
“Uh huh,” Jansky said. “Doing what?”
“Marketing research,” he told him, a loose version of the truth.
“Sounds interesting. Any idea why someone would want to do this to your apt, or better yet...to you?”
“No. No one.”
“No enemies?”
“Just the cell-bot.”
“The one with the bird head?”
“The one with the bird head,” Coe said.
Jansky looked around the room, at the walls riddled with bullet holes, and the floor covered in glass. He whistled. “Sure pissed someone off.”
“I don’t even know anyone,” Coe said. “I’ve been in the city a week.”
“Maybe a case of mistaken identity,” Jans
ky said, speaking into the dictophone. “I hope you’ve got insurance.”
“Now what?”
“We’ll file a report,” Jansky said, preparing to leave.
“That’s it?”
“Do you know how many people live in this city?”
“No.”
Jansky grimaced. “Me, neither. It’s a lot, though.” He scratched his forehead. “Maybe someone saw something...there’s always someone moving down on the streets below. Whether they’re willing to help someone with a cushy job in a cushy apt so many stories up it’s halfway to the moon, well...that’s anyone’s guess.”
“What about tonight?” Coe asked, following Jansky and two other policemen to the door. “Is it safe to stay here?”
Jansky laughed. “Unless your friend with the robotic bird head returns, who’s going to get you up here?”
“Someone just almost did.”
“There’s your answer,” he said, and walked out.
“I took the liberty of first cleaning up,” Ms. Hunter said.
“You didn’t have to go through any trouble,” Coe said, setting his overnight bag down onto her floor. Behind her, he could see she had placed a sheet, a pillow, and a flannel blanket onto a sofa. He felt both relieved and disappointed. Ms. Hunter was in a pink bathrobe and pink slippers; her legs were bare. In the muted amber light of her apt, her hair looked almost red. It was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore small glasses.
She said with a wave to the sofa, “I trust it will be suitable for you? If not, you can take my bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
“I’m just grateful you could accommodate me.”
She blushed. “I’m honored.”
“Stop it.”
“How awful, Mr. Coe. When you told me the news, all I could think was that you are all alone here. I want you to know, you’re not alone. Quantum is like family to me. You are welcome to stay here as long as—”
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