ARIA

by Geoff Nelder

  Lunchtime bananas for the chimps reminded him to feed himself, so he laughed his I’ll-be-back to Brian then strolled to the staff canteen. He bought pie and chips and sat with Charles. Lester munched while staring through one-way Plexiglas at the well-kept gardens, watching the overhead monorail treating visitors to a cage-free environment for the elephants and giraffes. He didn’t take his eyes off the scene when Charles spoke.

  “Luke says he saw your Katherina at the airport yesterday. Is she all right?”

  Lester struggled to answer. A thought linked to his ex-wife raced along a neuron. The impulse fired a synapse triggering other neurons that when linked allowed Lester to remember incidents, odours, names, and a myriad of life’s history. Every day, some impulses faltered and reached a dead end where the myelin sheaths around the neurons were eroded by alcohol, disease, or genetic wiring faults. The electrical currents in his brain, carrying memory, suffered shortcuts, travelled the wrong way, making him forget a can of sardines on a think-only shopping list. So the knot of neurons responsible for knowing about his divorce and last night’s frolics remained in his brain but had been cut off. The virus had erected no-go signs in his head.

  “She’s okay.”

  Tommy, the catering manager, brought his own burger and sat with them. “You’ve seen Katherina, then?” He looked puzzled.

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Hey, Lester, don’t get mad. It’s just you said you were relieved to have divorced her.”

  Coloured lights sparked in his head. Divorce? Hadn’t he said something similar?

  WEDNESDAY 22 APRIL 2015

  The code didn’t open the staff door at the zoo. It buzzed back at him making Lester grit his already gnashing teeth until a voice-activated intercom asked him for his identity.

  “You know who I am, Eddie. Just open the fucking gate.”

  “It looks like you, Lester, but where’s the funny one-liner?”

  “I’ll give you one when I see you. Have you changed the code?”

  “Not since last week. What did you punch in?”

  “Four nine three six.”

  “Bloody hell, Lester, that’s last month. Try six two two three, and smile or it won’t open.”

  He wrote it on an envelope he found in his pocket. Lester’s vision blurred as he changed into his work clothes. He shook his head but that brought on a dull headache. He’d boasted about his excellent health. A one-hundred percent attendance record. Wow, but today, he crashed into a chair in the staff canteen, sending a coffee across the table into Charles’ lap.

  “Hey, Lester, watch my paternal potential with that hot drink!”

  “I’m doing society a favour to stop more clones of you running around.” Others shut up in shock. Charles was easy going but had the respect of his staff.

  “You’re due some holiday leave, Lester. Take a break. Those chimps are getting to you.”

  Lester, elbows on the table, rubbed his head. He needed to do something for one of the chimpanzees in his care. The more he tried to remember, the sharper the pain stabbed his brain. He shouted bugger off to everyone, hung his head, and left.

  He walked an hour into Chester’s city centre. Alongside the River Dee, he rented a boat, rowed upstream into the Cheshire countryside way beyond his hour’s hire period and idled the day away in a fuzz.

  THURSDAY 23 APRIL 2015

  A quieter man, Lester arrived back at the staff entrance the next day. He found the envelope in his pocket and punched in the code.

  He recognised old Brian and stroked his black and grey hairs, sharing affection. He looked at Isabella, another chimp, sat in the corner of the same enclosure, and an emotion tugged at him but in vain. Lester read her information board, which told him she’d come from London Zoo. He assumed some other keeper was responsible for her welfare, medication and emotional needs.

  ISABELLA WATCHED LESTER WITH BRIAN and waited for some personal attention but didn’t get it. Every day, he cuddled her. Every day, he gave her extra titbits. Every day, he inserted something sharp in her arm. Every day, he made his utterances. He had stopped. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  TWENTY MILES AWAY a large articulated truck stood idle next to a refrigerated warehouse. A loader should have driven his forklift, whistling while filling the truck each week with green bananas, apples, and bags of ground nuts. He hadn’t turned up. Neither had the office girl, whose job was to oblige the orders to be fulfilled and relief loaders to be ordered. The driver hadn’t arrived. The ingredients of the hungry animals’ a la carte menu started to rot.

  Wednesday 22 April 2015:

  London. Six days after the amnesia infection started. Many US inhabitants have lost forty-five weeks of memory and many in other countries have started to lose theirs.

  RYDER RAISED HIS VOICE TO EMPHASISE THE URGENCY. “We shouldn’t be going to work, Teresa.”

  “I’m going to my biology lab. You’ve used your media-edutainment imagination on the amnesia problem in the States. I’ve experiments running and my lab techs need guidance. If you’re right and we should head for the hills, I have to wind things down and collect essentials.”

  “Make this the last time. It’s always possible someone there is infected, even the dean, who I need to see.”

  RYDER DROVE THEM BOTH TO THE UNIVERSITY and was relieved to see only a handful of students and staff. His stomach tensed when he saw the dean in Teresa’s lab.

  “Hello, Teresa, and this must be your young man.” Maurice Dover smiled. Ryder flashed teeth at him. It would have been the clever thing to do since Maurice tugged Teresa’s department’s purse strings. Ryder’s extra inches allowed the lab’s neon lights to reflect off Maurice’s bald head and polished cheeks.

  “Hi, Maurice, sacked anyone today?” Teresa said, to Ryder’s surprise.

  “You’d be the first to know,” he said, picking up a ten-inch alloy thermistor off a trolley and twiddling it in his fingers. He probably didn’t know it was an anal thermometer. “Ryder, you left me an odd message, yesterday. ‘Be here at eleven.’”

  Ryder, red-faced from knowing he was to tell this influential man about a difficult-to-believe scenario, had his hand shaken as if it was an old village pump.

  “Maurice, I—we—need a huge favour of you.”

  “I’m not withdrawing your invitation to the May Garden Party. What, bigger than that?”

  “We need to speak to your close friend, Brendon Stone. It’s so urgent.”

  “Of national importance?”

  “Global.”

  “Then why stop at Brendon, he’s merely the prime minister? I’m on nodding terms with Altrecht Finkner, the UNO General Secretary.”

  “Brendon is here in town, Finkner is in Malawi, and what we need to ask of the PM affects the UK, Europe first. Oh, I don’t know. It’s likely to be too late anyway.”

  “Try me, Ryder. But you know I can’t get Brendon to push open a window in his schedule without good reason, even for me.”

  Teresa spoke up at last. “Ryder thinks the Americans have brought an alien virus from space, and it’s spreading fast. We thought the government should know and possibly shut down travel out of the States.”

  Maurice took a step back. “Whoa. I need evidence. You both have integrity, so I’ll contact him. Set something up. Have you contacted the NIPB?”

  Teresa threw up her hands in a show of exasperation. “I tried to but all I got was their answer-phone saying, ‘National Immunology Protection Board—if we’re not answering, we might be dead, but leave a message anyway.’”

  “Well, their joking aside, they’ll need to be involved with any isolation procedures.”

  Ryder raised a finger. “I sent them a scrambled-code query about it with some footage from NASA a couple of days ago. No response.”

  “You didn’t tell me.” Teresa frowned then reddened.

  Maurice rubbed the thermometer like Aladdin’s lamp. “Perhaps their loony answer-phone message is a cover. They could be ont
o it already and Brendon already knows.” Ryder had now met a fly-in-the-face-of-danger optimist.

  Maurice walked over to a corner of the lab, nattering into his mobile phone. Teresa glowered at Ryder who shrugged back. He was in trouble, again.

  Maurice turned from his phone. “Three p.m. with the PM. At the Foreign Office, not Number 10.”

  “Did he say he already knew about it?” Ryder asked.

  “Not as such, but Brendon didn’t sound shocked. He was in a meeting with the US Ambassador who’d flown in from the States this morning. What?...Why are you looking at each other like that?”

  “I AM NOT GOING YET.” Ryder responded to Teresa’s tearful pleas for them to run from all the problems and not go to see the government now that ARIA was in the city. “Let’s try the NIPB once more.”

  Teresa used a computer in the lab and discovered that a request had gone to the NIPB counterpart in the US for a twenty-four-hour hold on external travel.

  “That’ll help,” she said, brightening.

  Ryder smiled at the limited progress. He picked up the temperature probe Maurice had then remembered what it was for and put it down. He coughed then said, “Okay, so diffusion of ARIA by air can be slowed down, but how can it be policed? Even if all the major ports and airports were closed, thousands travel to Mexico and Canada—small boats, you name it. And we’re assuming the people doing the enforcing remember their orders.”

  Teresa placed a hand on Ryder’s arm. “I know where we can go.”

  Thursday 23 April 2015:

  Transatlantic flight New York (LaGuardia) to London.

  THE DREAMLINER 7E7 cruised so sweetly, co-pilot Linus Bingham had to keep reminding himself they were travelling at 600 miles per hour, six miles above the Atlantic and that he and Captain Gilmore Drayton held the lives of 250 passengers at his fingertips hovering over touch-sensitive controls. The airplane didn’t need pilots at all. The damn thing preferred to use its own computers and navigation system from take off to landing. Even to taking emergency re-routing around violent weather systems. Engineering didn’t need the human touch. Even the cabin crew had less to do since health and safety regulations and price wars ruled out hot meals and drinks.

  Linus admired the sky and sipped illicit hot coffee. The sun, setting behind the plane, sent illuminated ripples under the highest of the ice crystals making up the cirrostratus in front. He’d find no birds at this height, but he saw another airplane spew out its condensation trail, a long, elegant river of ice, pink with the low sun, and the crystals already drifting down like lace curtains.

  “Isn’t this the cushiest of jobs, Gilmore? We take over from auto when we feel the need to practice, but otherwise, we’re here only to make passengers feel safe.”

  “I’m not worried, Linus. If they want to retire me, let them, as long as the pension lets me go to the Hawaiian beachside homestead I’ve invested in.”

  Linus glanced at the captain’s neat-but-grey beard. “Cap’n, I’ve not heard you look forward to ending your flying career before. You ill?”

  “Hell, you’re right. I don’t know what came over me. I’ve had a funny head all day. Got a feeling that LaGuardia Airport has sick-building syndrome.”

  “I know what you mean. Do you want to have a lie down for ten? I’ll let you know if any gremlins try to take over.”

  “I’m not tired. Just can’t wait to get to...Paris.”

  “Paris? When’s that then, Gilmore? I thought you were booked to fly the return trip tomorrow.”

  The captain, confused, tapped the flight schedule.

  “Of course, Heathrow. You know, Linus, maybe I will take a nap. I should wake up as sharp as this Dreamliner’s nose.”

  LINUS LOOKED CONCERNED for the pilot but also for himself. Joking aside, he’d never been affected by the constant drone and vibration of jet engines. At thirty-three, twenty years the junior of the captain, the stresses in the job didn’t get to him in the same way. Maybe his blood pressure and pulse rate leapt when taking off and landing, but not as much as the worry of his wife finding out about Hazel Draper. How could any red-blooded man resist her? She wouldn’t win beauty contests, but she’d win any contest for Miss Lust-After. Her sleek, long, black hair, full, sensuous airline-pink lips, and deep, come-to-bed eyes drew out Linus’s primitive urges. And she knew it.

  He pressed the buzzer, calling for her.

  Closing the cockpit door behind her, she looked around.

  “Hey, this is a bit much; throwing the captain overboard just to grab some nooky with me.”

  “Yeah, I gagged and tied him up in the officers’ rest room. Now come and sit on the co-pilot’s lap and loosen some clothing, you minx.”

  “I don’t think your wife would approve. In any case, we have a problem with some of the passengers.”

  “Not again. Another riot over wrong cheese in the sandwiches?”

  “If only. Several of them acted confused when they boarded then one, a Mr Cowley, insisted we take him off because he had a funeral to go to upstate.”

  “You’ve dealt with weirder situations...”

  “But his business partner with him said he went to the funeral last week. Others are missing a lot more of their memories and don’t remember booking this flight. I wish I hadn’t come on it now.”

  “Well, you are allowed to give difficult passengers sedatives. Get the other cabin crew to help you; the sedative in the sweets should help them sleep off the rest of the flight.”

  “Okay. Linus, what’s going on? The crew aren’t so hot either. No jokes.”

  “I suppose I’d better put my smart hat on and do a captain-like reassurance tour then.”

  “Excuse me, you are not supposed to leave the cockpit unattended even if you don’t do anything useful all flight.”

  “It’ll be all right for a few minutes. We are on autopilot and Gilmore’s only having a brief nap behind the curtain there.”

  LINUS HADN’T ANTICIPATED the ugliness of passengers when they were confused. One red-faced bully of a woman insisted they continue their flight to Chicago even after he’d explained their schedule. In desperation, Hazel sought his help to stop an old man from repeat-swallowing beta-blockers. Linus took the old man’s tablets off him and told Hazel to lock them up until they landed. The old chap’s wife just muttered away in Russian.

  A distraught mother hit him with a rolled up in-flight magazine because it must be his fault that her two-year-old son had forgotten how to talk sense. He didn’t help the situation by pointing out her boy had teenaged before his time. Linus hadn’t welcomed the sanctuary element of the cockpit so much.

  He should wake the captain and let him placate the passengers. Gilmore had that mature ship’s captain air of comfort and experience that quelled any brewing unrest. First, he’d like to check on their progress, see what near misses they might have had. Now, where were they going?

  He decided to fly the Dreamliner on manual for a few minutes. He leant forward to flip off the autopilot. It wasn’t there. He sat back, reddening, feeling his face heat from his neck upwards. There on the control panel, a green-lit LED shone at him. Of course some were proximity-sensor operated these days. He shook his head. Fancy thinking he was back in the older 747s.

  The aircraft belonged to him as he took control. She handled beautifully. Even on manual, most of the adjustments depended on computerised actuators and relays. He couldn’t crash this bird into another aircraft, mountain, or office block. A lot of failsafe engineering would have to be disabled for a pilot to have complete control these days.

  A few more slow deviations to port and starboard, not so much to spill the ever-higher-percent alcohol drinks no doubt being served behind him but enough to satisfy Linus he could fly. As long as he stayed in the air.

  IT WAS CLEAR GILMORE DID NOT WANT TO WAKE UP even though Linus shook his shoulder.

  “Ah, you’ve caught me red-handed. Just a few hops in a crop sprayer near Sacramento.”

  “Captain,
I need you awake.”

  Gilmore continued talking in his sleep. “What, me?” followed by a soft laugh.

  “I envy your bliss of ignorance, Cap’n, but please wake up.” Linus, stood for another moment before resorting to using a cup of iced water. Through his fuzzy headache, he listened to the drone of the aircraft, some muffled shouting, and the secondary cabin door slamming. He’d locked the security door to the cockpit. He wished it would all go away.

  “Captain...Captain...Gilmore, I need you awake now. Ah, there you are. Do you feel better now? Only I could use another brain to deal with some pesky passengers.”

  “I’m all right, er, Lin...Linton. Give me a few moments to clear my head.” His half-open eyes betrayed his confused state.

  “Captain, we have a problem.”

  “Go on then, L—er, I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Linus Bingham, your co-pilot. What’s your surname, sir, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “What? Don’t you know who I am?”

  “Yes, of course, Captain, but weird things are happening and—”

  “I am Gilmore Drayton. Get it?”

  “Relieved to hear it. You have no idea the madness going on, Captain Drayton. Can I ask another question?”

  “Hurry up then, man, we have a plane to fly.”

  “Okay. Where are we flying to?”

  The captain evil-eyed the co-pilot long enough for another ten miles of the Atlantic to pass beneath them.

  “Damn you.”

  “You are not on your own, Gilmore. That’s why I woke you. At least half the passengers don’t understand why they’re flying at all. I’m your co-pilot Linus. We are on schedule to Heathrow. I had to check to remind myself.”

  “Linus, I have no memory of you. Nor coming on board.”