Fairweather

by Jones, Raya

  ‘Please tell me you’ve made some contingency plan. I know, I know. You can’t say it because he’s listening.’

  ‘I’ve made six contingency plans but those hypo-tentacles found and destroyed all of them. I haven’t seen anything like that before, it was…’

  ‘Yes, awesome. You broke the ice with Version 7 when you showed due admiration. He actually spoke with you! You’ve touched the one minuscule iota of human soul that’s still in him. Haven’t you figured it out yet? He is the one who does the real scary stuff in cyberspace, not their Dot Com. And he never gets any praise because he keeps himself invisible and people can’t see his handiwork. He’s the one who created the invisible wall around me that you admire so much. When he told us how long it took him to neutralise your firewalls and butterflies, he was talking literally about himself. Consider it an acknowledgement that you are a worthy opponent… were a worthy opponent, past tense. Why are you smirking? I only ever see you so cheerful when you’re having dirty thoughts about andronets.’

  I hugged him to make him shut up about that. ‘You’ve brought me back from zombie state.’

  He disengaged from my hug. ‘Your timing sucks as usual, sunshine. Don’t you get it? This is our long drawn last goodbye. He lets me stay with you like letting a child play with a toy until I tire and do his will. Most of my prattle with him was just bravado. The cosmic picture is a fat lot of good to us at this moment in time. But I have a way out,’ his gaze rested on the untouched gun.

  I told him it wasn’t the cosmic picture that has brought me back. It was his speech about Ground Zero. He sighed. ‘Yes, that speech surprised me too.’

  ‘It broke his spell on me. How did he do it?’

  ‘You’re out of your league. He operates in a hell dimension.’

  ‘Some sort of remote hypnosis?’

  ‘You don’t give up hope for a technological explanation, do you?’

  ‘There’s a technological explanation for my non-birth.’

  ‘Are you okay with that?’ he inquired, concerned. I replied that I’m no different from what I’ve been all my life, except for knowing. I’m okay with knowing. Some things make sense now, although Wye Stan didn’t tell us the truth. Fred frowned. ‘Didn’t he? How do you know? You’ve known all along,’ he realised. ‘Why did we bother to come here?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure until now,’ said I.

  Since realising the discrepancies surrounding my birth, I sought evidence for feasible explanations. Five top scientists disappeared in the year before my birth. Their combined expertise in biotechnology and quantum physics would have made them desirable for Wye Stan’s project. But creating me must have been more like cloning than he would like to hear. They could isolate a stem cell from a teleport copy before the pattern disintegrated, and accelerate its growth, but they couldn’t deliver what Wye Stan wanted—an intact living duplicate of a living person—and they didn’t dare to tell him for fear of their lives. That’s why their backup files self-destructed when he accessed them.

  Fred conceded the plausibility of my theory. Two of the scientists I named were the ones he had shot. ‘But the sad bastard must have figured it out for himself by now. Why should he tell us that story?’

  ‘He was selling you the idea of immortality. He wants you so badly.’

  ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘What do I think?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s not that.’ He got up to fetch water.

  Time went by without us being able to tell the passage of time. We ate plain food delivered when we felt hungry. He told me myths, legends, and fairytales. When he did his physical exercises, I sat still figuring out how to create hypo-tentacles and counter-creatures. We had the lights dimmed, slept fitfully, and had the lights turn up again seven times.

  And then suddenly the gun vanished.

  Meanwhile in cyberspace, the devourer’s relentless tentacles dug deep in the netherworlds of lost and buried data, and unearthed my childhood’s toy-box. The devourer cracked it open. Out popped Harvey.

  Harvey, a sprite facing its own annihilation, pulled out the bag of tricks it had inherited from me. My mother’s wedding ring was a harmless parasite attached to Wye Stan’s cyberspace presence on one end. Its other end was embedded in the fabric of my toy-box. It was so smoothly embedded that I didn’t suspect its existence until the file I retrieved from Phoenix storage has told me about it. Wye Stan altered his signature several times since my mother installed that parasite, and each time the parasite copied the alteration. It did nothing else. That’s why it was never detected. Harvey used the stored information to do two things.

  The devourer was still groping for a crack in the Harvey configuration when it received an ‘abort and self-eliminate’ command signed by the Cyboratics president himself. It aborted and eliminated itself. That was one thing. Wye Stan quickly realised what had happened. He followed the trail and came face to face with a six-foot tall fluffy pink rabbit with glittery diamond eyes.

  Harvey had my voice and mannerism. It advised Wye Stan to check out the other thing that happened. Following the advice, Wye Stan discovered that all the andronets in all the star systems received an urgent update of the Jexu Jiu file, issued by the Cyboratics president himself. The update was identical to the original, which I had copied from August in Sol Gate, except for one thing. When Wye Stan read it, as he did straightaway, he learned that my physical death will activate a self-destruct protocol in all the andronets in all the star systems. Any attempt to overwrite that instruction will also activate their self-destruct.

  Wye Stan Pan stood in the middle of an airy spacious hall with walls and floor of cool marble and a ceiling of opaque glass, and witnessed my web of identities, links, and sites, explode out of the toy-box. He saw them reinstall themselves in the ocean of signals. He was powerless to stop it. But he knew that they’d remain inert unless I logged in. He intended to keep me offline for the rest of my life. The andronets were safe as long as I was alive. He could ensure that I’d live a very long time in captivity.

  He promptly removed the gun he had left for Fred.

  Meanwhile all the andronets in all the star systems were searching for my physical whereabouts and found it nowhere. When Wye Stan realised that, he made my captivity visible to them.

  Shortly afterwards, Fred and I found ourselves out on the open moors.

  It was night-time and overcast. We stood barefoot on cold wet grass, and shivered in the thin overalls. A few miles away the ziggurat rose like a mosaic of lights. Cars flew to and from it in an orderly manner. A car landed nearby, flooding us with its lights. The driver, a blond and blue-eyed male in a beige biosuit, got out.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Fred, his unshaven face darkening with suspicion.

  ‘January,’ I answered.

  The andronet’s range was limited to Cy Land but its android had sufficient autonomy to take us anywhere we wished. On board were beige biosuits for us, and food and water to see us through the journey. At my request, the android took us to the Western Rim of Ground Zero.

  Fred kept quiet the whole journey, and I was silent.

  Only after we alighted at the visitor centre, and the Cyboratics car took off, Fred finally asked who had sprung us out of jail. My guess was that it was January. An andronet can be quite resourceful when it comes to ensuring its own survival. The Jexu Jiu update included several scenarios in which I might die. One of them was being trapped as we had been.

  When Fred asked why January also got him out, I explained that it couldn’t risk the scenario in which Fred dies and then I die of grief.

  Fred’s face contorted into a broad grin. ‘Would you really die of grief over me?’

  ‘Probably not, but to an andronet it sounds like something that humans do.’

  Laughing, he asked how long the andronets could protect me.

  ‘Until Wye Stan finds a way to disable the Jexu Jiu protocol.’

  ‘Your battle began but has hardly st
arted.’ He wasn’t laughing anymore.

  I didn’t tell him about Harvey. Not yet.

  Some things that Harvey did I had planned, and some things it did I could guess. But other things I’ve found out only later. I was yet to discover that Wye Stan posted to Harvey an image of himself in his airy marble hall. He correctly guessed that Harvey was designed to react as I would. He correctly assumed that I won’t be able to resist opening a message from my adversary. The image contained a nasty worm.

  Harvey reacted exactly as I would.

  It detached itself from the toy-box, which was a boring place for a lively sprite, and configured itself onto Wye Stan’s personal space.

  In the nick of time, Wye Stan managed to disable his own worm before it turned against him. Only the empty shell of his image remained there for me to find.

  Harvey was harmless as long as its existence wasn’t threatened. The sprite craved the company of someone who would hear my story, for that story was all it knew about its own being. For a long time afterwards, whenever Wye Stan went online he was accompanied by a man-sized rabbit invisible to anyone else.

  Harvey whispered in his ear, ‘You need to know three things about me. The first thing is that when I start a search, I don’t let go.’

  Harvey murmured for Wye Stan’s ears only, ‘The second thing you need to know about me is that I grew up in the Edges of Ground Zero.’

  And Harvey said, ‘The third thing you need to know is what happens next.’

  Part 2 - Mandy

  It was early morning in Ground Zero when January brought us there. Low dusty haze obscured the urban and industrial sprawl. Above the haze, the geodesic domes of the Phoenix towns glistened in the sunlight. Aircraft rumble and sonic booms, shrieks of gulls and dogs’ barks, and occasional gunfire, filled the crater. Fred asked whether I could see where I used to live. I guessed the direction where the factory must be, but even when the haze lifted, I couldn’t identify its roof. We strolled to the nearest trail leading upward. I stopped to read a panel explaining about the conservation of these cliffs, astounded, ‘It’s a nature reserve, Fred.’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘I had a romantic notion of the cliffs having power of their own.’

  ‘That’s the correct notion. But we need conservation initiatives to make sure we don’t forget their power. Otherwise people would level them to build more power stations and recycling plants.’ He laughed, ‘I don’t believe I’m doing this, climbing up this rim with Jexu Jiu, no sweat, ha-ha!’

  A short way up the trail we stopped to let a group of keen hikers get past. Fred moaned loudly to make sure that everyone heard him, ‘Nobody in their right mind does this! You can get a better tour on any device anytime. My legs are aching already.’

  ‘They’re aching from those strenuous exercises you’ve been doing for days.’

  ‘I had to train for this pilgrimage, didn’t I?’

  The trail narrowed and became steeper as it snaked up. We climbed in silence until the visitor centre was far below and the sun was high above. We reached some level ground, sweating profusely, and sat down to rest.

  Nearby was a pile of stones erected by countless pilgrims over time. Stones that had rolled off were scattered around. Higher up, people scaled the cliff’s face with ropes like tiny colourful spiders. I scooped up red dirt and let it trickle slowly through my fingers, feeling its graininess.

  Then my mind turned to practical matters. It could have been Version 7 himself who had January help us. Our borrowed biosuits could be bugged, I told Fred. He snapped, ‘There’s nothing I’d say about the bastard behind his back that I haven’t told him to his face already.’

  ‘Doesn’t it piss him off? He needs you very much.’

  ‘He needs someone to witness his deeds.’

  A couple came down the path. Fred waited until they passed before continuing with barely suppressed fury, ‘I’m his private historian. I’ve seen him develop from a teenage nasty piece of work to what he is now. He’s hardly started on you. You’ve graduated from being a disposable by-product to being an interesting puzzle. He loves interesting puzzles. He always solves them. And then he throws them away.’

  An ascending group arrived at our level, and greeted us one by one. They were from Sirius B, they said, and asked about us. ‘We’re local lads,’ Fred replied merrily. They lingered a while, drinking water and chatting. Some of them placed stones on the pile. Then they carried on upwards. When the last of them was out of earshot, I thanked Fred again for the ‘lads from Ground Zero’ speech he gave Wye Stan.

  He corrected: the speech helped me to pull myself together, but I survived on my own. He added grimly that nobody before me had kept their sanity for so long.

  A chill ran down my spine. I asked him to elaborate. He refused. ‘Not now. Enjoy your moment at the cliffs.’ Seeing me stare at him intently, not letting the matter drop, he took a deep breath. ‘The darkness unleashed through him is like nothing you can imagine… perhaps you can.’

  He looked away, his eyes on the distant horizon, his face impenetrable as if all his masks finally fell off and there was no need for a facial expression anymore.

  Some of Wye Stan’s victims died straightaway. Others came completely under his control, and he toyed with them for days or weeks. Fred forced himself to describe terrible acts of depravity that Wye Stan had his experimental victims commit. I was glad when he finally ceased the account. ‘That’s not all, but you’ve got the gist.’

  ‘What will he do next with me?’ I asked, nauseated.

  ‘I have no idea. But it will involve bringing you very close to him.’

  ‘He had me as close as can be.’

  ‘Only in the physical. He was nowhere near you. Even face-to-face in the same room you blocked him off. The longer you resist his powers, the more cunning your moves are, the more he’ll want you. And you’ll fall for it. He can be very seductive.’

  ‘What can he possibly seduce me with?’

  ‘With your own ambition to take him out, that’s how. He’ll show you a crack in the wall and you’ll fly to him like a moth to a flame.’

  ‘Too many metaphors, Fred,’ I mumbled, thinking about the job that still had to be done. If Wye Stan invites me back, I’d go there like a shot. ‘Am I doomed, Fred?’

  ‘Left to your own devices, yes.’ He suddenly smiled his warm smile. ‘But I’m here to make sure you’re not left to your own devices.’ I must have smiled back, for he brightly said, ‘That’s it, keep on smiling. Look around you. The end of the world happened centuries ago and we’re still here. Human beings are good at surviving.’

  We fell silent for a while, watching an airbus land at the visitor centre far below.

  I knew that I could go on making my living by finding things that people don’t want found. But that’s not what I live for anymore.

  Fred may carry on deceiving me every step of the way. But that’s not the meaning of our relationship.

  We glanced at each other, and wordlessly agreed it was time to head back.

  Before leaving, Fred picked up a small stone and added it to the monument that countless pilgrims had erected.

  We descended the narrow path in silence.

  When reaching the wider track, walking side by side again, Fred asked about my plan.

  ‘Fight evil, I guess. Hypo-tentacles can be blocked with…’

  He interrupted, ‘I’m glad you’re already on it, but I meant your plan for getting us home. There’s a war zone between here and Phoenix-3 and we have no cash or ID on us. You should have asked January to take us home.’

  ‘Phoenix-3 is not my home. We can find some vacant place in the Edges.’

  ‘You can’t be serious!’

  When he had his moment of melodrama, he revealed that he had the foresight to ask Ricardo for local contacts.

  The visitor centre was heaving with afternoon tourists and hikers returning from the cliffs. Behind the main complex, makeshift stalls sol
d Apocalypse memorabilia and rock fragments that were allegedly meteorite. Making a beeline from stall to stall, Fred inquired about names he had from Ricardo. Nobody knew them.

  At the back of the backyard-market was a stall with knickknacks and bric-a-brac found in derelict buildings. Fred waited for the peddler of useless things to finish serving a tourist. I waited for Fred.

  Sitting on the floor behind the stall, amidst crates and boxes, a small child played with a toy rabbit. It used to be pink and fluffy. Now it was faded and dirty. One of its ears had been chewed off, and its glass eyes were replaced with black buttons.

  The child made it hop and twirl, humming in monotone. Noticing me looking, she said, ‘I’m making him dance in cyberspace. His name is Harvey.’

  There’s a sun so dark that its black light smothers life and its icy rays drain souls. A man who walks in the dark sun casts a shadow so dazzling bright that it makes you want to be with him forever. He keeps you very near him so you don’t suspect that his light is really a shadow. When you see the dark sun, you can’t live at all. This was the last entry in Fairweather’s personal log. Then she died.

  Eight years later she travelled to Earth.

  Stranger things happen in myths.

  When we were captive in Cy City, Fred told me about a woman who refused to get married. It upset her parents, so she left home and had adventures deep in the sea and up in the heavens. She was bewitched by a man who was the moon spirit. He kept her in his dreary big house. One day when he was away, old women helped her to escape. They made a rope for her to climb down to Earth, and told her that she must close her eyes but make sure to open them as soon as she reached the ground or she’d never be human again. The earth seemed far down when she set off, but her feet touched the ground so soon that she didn’t open her eyes quickly enough. She became a spider.

  Listening to the fairytale I thought about the circumstances that led to our journey to Earth. Like a spider casting its web, Fred manipulated rumours of corruption in OK so as to attract the CSG. Was I like the woman lured by the moon spirit into his big house? I didn’t open my eyes quickly enough. When I suggested this interpretation to him, he snapped, ‘Not all myths are about you, sunshine.’