The Song of the Orphans

by Daniel Price

  Heath raised his mic to mouth level, then nodded anxiously at the producer. “Okay. I’m ready.”

  —

  “A song,” Mia had uttered, four days earlier. “You want us to put out a song.”

  Theo had gathered the others for a backyard conference: seven orphans and five Gothams, all skeptically watching him from lawn chairs. Mercy and Yvonne had missed the council meeting and had to be briefed on Theo’s latest epiphany. He was still having trouble explaining it.

  He paced the grass in a caffeinated tizzy, his shirttail flapping wildly. “The song is just the envelope. I’m talking about an invitation. It’s like Close Encounters. Devil’s Tower. You know, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.”

  Even the orphans were blank-faced. Theo tried a new approach. “Okay, when Hannah first saw Jonathan at that nightclub, she didn’t know him from Adam. It wasn’t until he played . . . what was it? Zeppelin?”

  “Pink Floyd,” Hannah and Jonathan said in unison.

  “It wasn’t until he played Pink Floyd that he stood out like a beacon. She knew right then and there that he was one of us.”

  Theo saw Liam swapping a baffled look with Carrie. He shook a finger at them. “Right! See? You don’t know who Pink Floyd is. You wouldn’t know a Beatles song if it humped your leg. But I’d bet my life that anyone from our world—anyone—would recognize ‘Come Together.’ They’d know it at the first very shoop.”

  Heath opened his mouth to correct him. Theo waved him off. “I know. It’s ‘shoot me.’ The point is that it’s one of the most famous songs we have.”

  “We get the premise,” Zack said. “We’re just stuck on the details. You want to use this song as a bird call—”

  “More than a bird call. A dog whistle. A shibboleth.”

  “So you want to blanket the world in this bird-dog shibboleth whistle—”

  “Not the world,” Theo said. “We’ll have to find a different way to get the foreign orphans. But the ones within our borders? The Coppers, Irons, and Platinums? Oh yeah. We can reach them.”

  “How?” Amanda asked. “Even if we get all the right people to hear the song—”

  “The Godzilla of ifs,” David grumbled.

  “—how does it bring us all together?”

  Theo scanned the faces around him and laughed. He’d spent so much time being stressed and overwhelmed that his friends rarely saw this side of him. He’d been a certified genius once, a prodigy. Now after five years of alcoholism and ten months of transdimensional chaos, he was once again in top form.

  He stuffed his hands in his pockets and smiled charmingly at Amanda.

  “It’s easy,” he told her. “We give them a way to sing back.”

  —

  The next day, while Jonathan and Heath began their rehearsals, Yvonne returned from town with a brand-new powerphone. The device weighed five pounds and fit in the hand like a clothes iron, but its signal strength was second to none. It was the only celestial mobile that was guaranteed to work in the underland.

  Soon the handset was charged and the hotline was ready. The big challenge now was giving out the number to an entire nation without having it fall into the wrong hands.

  Luckily, Theo had a solution. He gathered Amanda, Zack, and Mia around his laptop and showed them their new phone number. They squinted at it like it was an enigma, an answer just waiting for a question. #83-11-24800.

  Mia smiled with fresh inspiration. “I got the three.”

  “I got the eight,” said Zack.

  “The eleven’s a no-brainer,” Amanda said.

  Within an hour, the phone number was converted into esoteric hints: the number of letters in Luke Skywalker’s saga, the number of points in a field goal, the day in September that the Towers fell, the number of World Wars, the number of Beatles, the old prefix for toll-free calls. Any breacher with a pen and two brain cells to rub together would have no trouble reassembling the number, while even the smartest Altamerican would choke at the first alien reference.

  Zack and Mercy spent the next two days painting the clue cards on canvases, decorating each one with artistic flourishes. At Theo’s request, they designed a final call-to-action, a three-card plea to all the orphans out there:

  WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GOING THROUGH.

  WE ARE YOU.

  CALL US. LET US HELP EACH OTHER.

  Mercy filmed the cards on her lumicam. Jonathan and Heath provided the soundtrack. By Saturday night, the group had a four-minute and ten-second music video—the ultimate bird-dog shibboleth whistle. Only one question remained.

  “How do we get it out there?” Hannah asked.

  The issue had initially stumped Theo. For a nation with flying cars and force fields, their Internet was straight out of 1994. There was no outlet, no bandwidth, no public demand for online movies. The very notion of viral videos was completely foreign.

  That only left one option, a rather tricky one at that.

  “Surpdog.”

  This time, only the Gothams in the group understood the reference. They stared at him with matching looks of doubt.

  “That’s crazy,” Mercy said.

  “It’ll work.”

  Peter shook his head. “No one knows who this guy is. Even if we find him—”

  “We’ll find him,” Theo insisted.

  “—there’s no guarantee he’ll help us.”

  The orphans in the circle remained hopelessly lost. Hannah threw her hands up. “Who the hell are you talking about?”

  —

  To fully grasp the legend of Surpdog, one had to know a little about the late Dennis Dudley. The third and youngest son of President Irving Dudley was, by all accounts, an unbearable man. He was a narcissist, a nihilist, an unabashed racist, and a paranoid conspiracy theorist. He also happened to be one of the greatest inventors of his generation. In 1976, while working as a researcher at Edison Temporics, Dudley solved a riddle that had been vexing the scientific community for years. He discovered how to send two-dimensional lumic images through the air without electronic conversion. No binary switches. No blocky pixels. Just eye-popping visuals that looked as real as life itself.

  His eponymous transceiver—a six-foot obelisk made of wire, glass, and copper—forever changed the face of broadcasting. It was the death of television and the dawn of the lumivision age.

  By the time Dudley died in 1985, his invention blanketed the nation—a hundred thousand mini-towers on the street corners and rooftops, in the hills and fields, even floating on lakes. The dudleys worked in perfect harmony, each one routing a million images per second. The average lumivision signal passed through a hundred and twelve relays before bursting into color on someone’s screen.

  There was just one problem. Dudley had built a secret functionality into his constructs, a way to turn any tower into a guerrilla broadcast station. He’d wanted an emergency media system in place for when the blacks took over the country and had assumed his fellow white men would be smart enough to figure it out. The exploit was so well hidden that nobody discovered it until 1987, when a twelve-year-old prodigy named Kevin Thurber (a black kid) opened up a dudley and noticed some curious crosswires.

  The next night, the sixty thousand viewers of Oklahoma-3 caught a strange flicker in the middle of Laugh Riot. Their lumivisions gave way to a crystal-clear image of a wide-eyed Kevin Thurber.

  “Is it on? Did I do it?”

  He did it. Thurber had hacked a dudley with little more than a lumicam and a homemade wire bridge, making him the first lumivision signal pirate. A glib local journalist called him “Thurber the Usurper,” a name that led to the new slang term for his accomplishment: surping.

  The next two years weren’t kind to the lumivision networks. At least twice a week, some tech-savvy miscreant surped a broadcast for their own purposes, whether it was to vent their spleen, waggle their priva
tes, or air a special message. A woman surped National-12 with a plea to find her missing sister (it worked). A man surped Cincinnati-4 to ask his girlfriend to marry him (it didn’t work). The singer Tamara Tamley got her first big break by crooning a beautiful ballad in the middle of Cop Cat, one of the rare instances of a surpcast offering better-quality programming than the show it replaced.

  In 1989, Edison Temporics completed its systematic overhaul of the dudleys, a slow and meticulous upgrade that made the transceivers inviolable, at least to the average tamperer. Surping soon became limited to the crackerjack elite, the technological ninjas who could bypass a tempic wall just as easily as a firewall. Thanks to a new monitoring system and the recent invention of the ghost drill, DP-9 was able to find and catch most of these criminals. The remaining surpers either scaled back their operations or hung up their toolkits entirely.

  The lone exception was Surpdog.

  The man was a phenom, even among the supersurpers. He’d commandeered more than six hundred broadcasts over twenty-three years, never lingering in one area, never hacking the same dudley twice. Even more frustrating for the Deps, he used a one-of-a-kind solic disruptor to stymie their ghost drills. They had no visuals on him, no witness accounts, no evidence at all except a smattering of dog tracks. His inexplicable paw prints earned him the second half of his nickname.

  Surpdog’s motives were just as baffling as his methods. Unlike the rest of his ilk, he never delivered any masked manifestos. His videos were merely fifty-four seconds of beautiful images from other parts of the world—the Highlands of Scotland, the desert sands of Egypt, the bamboo groves of Japan. The pictures kept changing but the theme remained the same. The best anyone could guess was that Surpdog was a worldly dog, one who didn’t appreciate America’s isolationist tendencies. It seemed an awfully strange cause to wrap a criminal career around, yet Surpdog persisted year after year, with no signs of slowing down.

  Theo had learned about him last October, while he and Amanda were prisoners of DP-9. The West Virginia field office was a hub of the Broadcast Crimes division and had been littered with flyers about their number one target. When Theo had asked Melissa about Surpdog, she explained the case with shrugging indifference. He was a harmless man with an admirable message. She was in no hurry to see him caught.

  Now, eight months later, Theo had become very intent on finding Surpdog. And he knew just the pair to do it.

  On Friday morning, while Jonathan and Heath recorded their song, Peter took David on a covert trip to the surface. Tomkins Cove lay ten miles north of Quarter Hill, a small and wealthy suburb on the western bank of the Hudson. If outsiders knew the name, it was from the Tomkins Cove supernatural drama that was wildly popular in the 1980s. The show had been one of the very first casualties of the lumivision era, as the vampires looked pathetic in super-high-definition.

  Peter had learned from local news archives that Surpdog had been to the area recently. The dudley he’d used to surp New York–5 stood right behind the local police station. Those who’d been hoping to catch the end of Nina Shield, Private Eye were infuriated to find the show preempted by fifty-four seconds of windmills and waterfalls.

  Now Peter kept a watchful eye on the precinct while David scanned the dudley’s past. As Theo had hoped, the boy wasn’t burdened by the limits of ghost drills. He could easily see Surpdog through the solic haze, the curious trick that had stumped a nation for years.

  David creased his brow, then broke out in laughter. Peter eyed him strangely. “What? Did you get him?”

  He did, except there was no “him” to get. That was the trick. The great and mighty Surpdog wasn’t a man at all.

  —

  If the police had bothered to look out their window three months ago, they would have seen it: a huge white Komondor, at least a hundred and eighty pounds, charging out of the woods like a woolly bear. The dog ran toward the station—tongue wagging, leash dragging—until he reached the dudley at the edge of the cruiser lot. There he stopped to do his canine business: sniff the grass, scratch his side, pee a little. Even if witnesses had been standing right next to him, they wouldn’t have seen the ten-pound solic disruptor that was strapped to his stomach, tucked away behind the hanging ropes of fur.

  In an invisible burst, the area became unghostable. The tempis melted away from the base of the dudley, revealing a small metal access door. The dog scratched at the panel, just as he’d been taught. An electronic passkey on his ankle popped an inner latch.

  The dudley had been unlocked before the human half of Surpdog even appeared.

  She came shuffling out of the forest, a small Polynesian woman in a tank top and running shorts. After reuniting with her Komondor in fake exasperation, she crouched to pick up his leash. Once safely hidden between the dog and the dudley, the woman activated her tempic gloves, pulled her tools from her water bottle, and hacked the console. Forty-four seconds, in and out. Surpdog walked away in perfect innocence, just another evening jogger and her pet.

  David followed their ghosts for eight more blocks, until they entered a white camper aerovan. All Peter needed was the license plate number and a few well-placed phone calls to uncover her identity. She was a forty-five-year-old immigrant from the Hawaiian Republic, a field technician for Edison Temporics. Her name was Alamea Wilson but everyone called her Ally. The dog’s name was Barney.

  Two days later, in a Vermont forest clearing, Ally woke up to the sound of thunderous barks. It seemed her partner in crime was worked up about something—a deer, a snake, maybe even a chipmunk. Sadly, there was nothing she could do about it. Her employers had once again sent her on assignment to Bennington, a town without a single Komondor-friendly motel. That meant another week in the camplands, which meant another week of Barney yelling at nature.

  Ally folded up her bed, threw on her robe, and grabbed a large bag of kibble from her storage bin. A little breakfast would shut Barney’s barkhole, then she could decide her plans. The Queen of America Pageant was airing tonight, at least twelve million viewers in desperate need of perspective. Unfortunately, Edison had already logged her arrival. She’d have to fly at least a hundred miles out of Bennington if she wanted to hack a dudley.

  Barney’s barks grew louder, more insistent. Ally bumped the door open and brought his food bowl outside. “All right. All right. I’m—”

  She looked up to find two men and a woman standing just inside her tempic fence. Her bowl fell to the ground. She reached for the handphone in her pocket.

  “You have three seconds to leave before I call the—”

  “Surpdog.”

  Ally’s muscles hardened. Her eyes grew to circles. She stammered at the man who’d spoken to her, a disheveled Filipino who looked young in the face but old in the eyes.

  “It’s all right,” Theo told her. “We’re just here to talk.”

  It took twenty-two minutes for Ally’s hands to stop shaking. She’d always feared the day would come when somebody sniffed her out, but she imagined they’d be from DP-9 or Edison Temporics. These people were something else entirely. They had no intention of bringing her to justice. All they had for her was an offer and a song.

  Theo, Amanda, and Peter watched Ally from folding chairs as she screened their homemade video production, an indecipherable message set to bafflingly strange music.

  The moment it ended, Ally closed her lapbook and blinked dazedly at her guests. “There wasn’t a single part of that spoolie that made sense to me.”

  Peter smiled. “We told you it was cryptic.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “It’s not meant for you,” Theo told her. “It won’t mean anything to anyone but a handful of people.”

  “And it’ll mean everything to them,” Amanda said.

  Barney’s tongue lolled blissfully as Amanda stroked his ear. The dog had already accepted the strangers as friends, which was more than Al
ly was willing to do. These people reeked of powerful secrets. Stranger still, the Irishman seemed the least foreign one among them. The other two kept using alien words like “video” and “prime time.”

  Ally ejected the spoolie and twirled it in her fingers. “This is crazy. I mean, for all I know, you guys are terrorists. This thing could wake up a hundred sleeper cells.”

  Peter smiled patiently. “Terrorists have telephones. They don’t need surpers.”

  True. They also didn’t go around offering satchels of cash to complete strangers. Ally could travel the world on what these people were offering, and that was just the advance payment. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe this was too good to be true.

  She jerked her head at the disc. “It doesn’t matter. This is a four-minute spool. Anything longer than fifty-four seconds gets shut down by the network. They always find the signal.”

  “You’ll get around that,” Theo assured her.

  “How?”

  “I have no idea. I just know that you will.”

  Ally wrung her hands, stymied. She supposed she could try a daring quintuple surp: five different dudleys set to a synchronized time release. It would be taxing as hell on her and Barney, but it would buy enough time to play the whole crazy message.

  She took a wistful look at Barney. “C’mere, stupid.”

  He galloped to her side, wagging his tail in mindless bliss as Ally hugged his head. “He only has a year or two left. The vets say he can’t handle another reversal.”

  “I’m sorry,” Amanda said.

  “Don’t be. He’s had a long, happy life. But once he’s gone . . .” Ally shrugged miserably. “My surping days are already numbered. Once Edison rolls out their new magnivisions, the whole infrastructure’s gonna change. Triple-encrypted signals sent directly from space. No more dudleys. No more hacks.”

  Theo shuddered. His foresight insisted, without a shred of uncertainty, that the magnivision age would never come.

  It’s either the end of the world or the end of the world as we know it, Merlin had told him.