SpaceBook Awakens (Amy Armstrong 3)

by Stephen Colegrove

  The Asian girl poured steaming water into a pair of clay cups, and smiled as she carried them to Amy and Three.

  “Drink, please,” she said.

  Three took the cup and frowned. “Plain water? Don’t you have tea or coffee?”

  The Asian girl bowed. “I’m sorry. We do not have these things. I can run outside to purchase them if you wish.”

  Amy took a cup. “No, thank you. Water is fine with us. What’s your name?”

  “Lim Chow.”

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Chow. I’m Amy.”

  Three took a sip of hot water. “You can call me Three. It’s a strange name.”

  “It’s not so strange,” said Lim. “I have four cousins in China and they are called by numbers, just like that.”

  “So you’re Chinese?” said Amy.

  The girl nodded. “Of course! Many Chinese live here and catch fish. Please––drink up. I will find you warm clothes and father will take you to the harbormaster.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” said Three.

  “But your family will be looking for you,” said Lim. “This is why we go to the harbormaster.”

  “I don’t have any family,” said Amy, staring down at the cup. “Not in this time, and not in this place. All of my friends were on that ship, and now I can’t even go home.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” said Lim. “But many ships come here every day. The harbormaster or the police will help you.”

  “It’s probably best if we don’t talk to officials of any kind,” said Three. “Especially police.”

  Amy nodded. “Right.”

  Lim’s mother and father entered the shack and shuffled around the stove, talking to Lim in rapid Chinese. The small girl turned to Amy.

  “My parents say normally there would be a huge crowd on shore searching for bits of the ship, but many people go to see submarine stuck on sand at Watsonville.”

  Amy stood up suddenly. “A submarine? What color is it? That could be my ship!”

  Lim giggled and covered her mouth. “You’re so funny! Girls aren’t allowed on submarine. It’s the American navy.”

  “I still need to see it.”

  Three nodded. “It’s too much of a coincidence.”

  Lim’s father watched them carefully. When they stopped talking, he spoke to Lim in a long burst of Chinese. The young girl listened and nodded.

  “If you don’t want to visit the harbormaster, Father says you can see the wrecked submarine. Uncle Shu is going to drive his truck there. After that, you should go to Bennie’s house in Pacific Grove.”

  “Who’s Bennie?” asked Amy.

  Lim smiled and bowed. “It is not a who, but the Benevolent Society of Methodist Women. It’s a charity for girls with sudden troubles. After you have warm clothes and breakfast, we can leave.”

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t pay you for the clothes,” said Amy. “We don’t have any money.”

  “That is not a problem for you to worry,” said Lim.

  AFTER A MEAL of fried sticks of dough and hot porridge that smelled of eggs, Lim brought out a Chinese-style brown jacket, trousers, and a pair of boots for Three to wear, and brushed and braided the blonde hair of Amy’s twin. The warmth and self-drying quality of Amy’s nano-clothing amazed the Chinese girl. She wouldn’t stop asking about the material until Amy told her it was from Paris.

  A Model-T truck with an open bed rattled to a stop on the dirt road behind the shack. Chinese kids burst from every corner of the small fishing village, screaming and shouting, and climbed onto the truck. Lim pulled Amy and Three by the hand into the back of the truck, and the girls were soon squeezed in like cargo on the flat bed, pushed on all sides by chattering, staring children.

  Amy winced as a boy elbowed her in the back.

  “I feel like a sardine in a tin can,” she said to Three. “I guess that’s appropriate.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Monterey is famous for sardines.”

  Three shrugged. “If you say so. At least we’re warm, and not walking.”

  The truck’s engine popped and roared, and began to bounce along Oceanfront Avenue. The young Chinese riders screamed and cheered at the apparently auspicious development.

  The morning was cold and clouds covered the gray sky. A strong breeze whipped up the waves on the bay, turning the crests foamy and giving Amy painful memories of the crash and her desperate swim during the night. She turned to look up the hill and watched the lower gate of the Presidio pass by, guarded on each side by helmeted soldiers in white belts and wool uniforms the color of wet mud. Each of the young men rested a rifle on his right shoulder and wore white spats over his boots.

  The wharf was busy with fishermen with nothing to do because of the stormy weather. Most stood around in clumps of conversation and tobacco smoke. Old Model-T cars and trucks dropped puffs of blue smoke as they clattered along the packed dirt of the Monterey streets. Along the sidewalks strode well-dressed bankers in bowler hats, deliverymen in rough blue coats and patched trousers, and Chinese in their strange outfits and round skullcaps. Instead of billboards to advertise their services, the businesses along the street relied on large, hand-painted facades at the top of the buildings and boys on each corner screaming at the tops of their lungs about malt beer, fish dinners, and tobacco products.

  Amy was surprised at how busy the city seemed and the number of trees along the street. Smells of molasses and soap mixed with acrid exhaust fumes from the black, red, and green Model T’s and the smell of fish in all stages of life and death. The Del Monte Hotel rose over them as the tallest structure in the city, its gleaming white tower standing in the midst of manicured gardens and curated ponds like a temporary Xanadu for the permanently wealthy. As they continued bouncing along the street to the north, the space between the houses widened and spread apart into artichoke and strawberry fields. A musty wind of loam and manure replaced the industrial smells of the city. The truck continued to rattle north along the coast, past gigantic sand dunes covered with the pink-flowers of ice plants.

  After what seemed like an hour of jolting and elbows jabbing her in the ribs, Amy began to calculate the chances of jumping out without breaking a leg. She pushed through the kids and leaned over the wooden railing at the side of the truck, the wind whipping her blonde hair across her face.

  Someone grabbed her arm and Amy turned.

  “I wasn’t gonna!”

  Lim blinked at her. “The other side. Please look.”

  A railway from the east cut through the vegetable fields and crossed the dunes to a wide pier on the ocean, where several steamships and a submarine were tied up. Not far away, an identical submarine lay higher and parallel to the beach, waves crashing against a dark gray hull tilted away from the sea and toward the mountains. Crowds of men and women lined the beach and the long wooden pier, watching as a tugboat with a blat-blat engine churned the water and tried to pull the beached submarine with a thick steel cable.

  “That’s not my ship,” said Amy.

  Lim giggled. “Of course! I already told you it was American Navy. It’s something fun to see, right?”

  “Looks like it was tied up to the pier like the other one, but came loose,” said Three. “That didn’t work out so well.”

  Lim nodded. “Big storm a few days ago.”

  “What was the name of your ship, anyway?” Three asked Amy. “I was on board the thing for like five minutes, and nobody ever told me.”

  “White Star.”

  “Strange name for a ship.”

  Amy shrugged. “It’s even stranger for a cat. That’s what I called my first one.”

  Three shook her head. “You Old Earthers with your pet cats. That’s slavery in my day.”

  “How is ‘White Star’ a good name?” asked Lim. “All stars are white.”

  “Some stars, but not all,” said Amy.

  Lim’s uncle parked the truck along the road behind a long line of Model T’s, and
the Chinese kids tumbled over the sides like soldiers storming a beach in reverse. Amy, Three, and Lim climbed down and followed at a safer pace.

  Three watched the laughing children dash across the sand, where a large crowd stood watching the effort to move the submarine. She shook her head.

  “I guess you kids don’t get too many vacations.”

  Lim held a hand to her forehead and squinted at her. “What’s a vacation?”

  Amy left the two girls staring at the beached submarine and walked south along the cold sand. She passed under the round, creosote-stained pillars of the pier and wandered along an empty stretch of sand and waves. The distant, cloud-capped mountains to the south curved in a fishhook, with Monterey at the bottom and Pacific Grove at the sharp western barb to the right. The haze of smoke over the settlements could be easily mistaken for the last scraps of morning fog. Apart from the sails on the bay and the hillside of the Presidio cleared with military precision, it was strangely hard to pick out signs of modern life.

  Amy sat on the sand above the high-tide line and folded her bare legs under her, covering them with her skirt. She smiled faintly as she watched the waves hiss over and over up the beach, and patted the beige material over her legs.

  “Thank you, nanites, for keeping me warm and dry. You’re the only friends I have left, even if you can’t talk to me.”

  She felt a mild electric tingle in every place the cloth of her blouse and skirt touched her bare skin.

  “That’s enough! I didn’t say I wanted a chat. You’re the best and I appreciate that, but talking to your clothes is a short road that ends with me living alone with forty cats, or someone who collects spoons from every state.”

  The tingle went away for a few seconds, then came back with a warmth that counter-acted a cold breeze that whirled over the tops of the waves and into Amy’s face.

  She stared at the horizon where the ship had sunk. It was truly a guess, because the sea and sky were as cold, gray, and featureless as a bucket of dirty mop water. The waves roared and fell away, roared and fell away. A dozen tiny birds with white bellies and gray backs ran above the surf, legs moving so fast they were invisible, chirping and stabbing at the sand with black beaks. The waves came and went, the birds ran tiny marathons, and nothing changed them. Kingdoms fell, cities turned to ash, and everyone that mattered to a young woman could exist or not exist––none of it mattered in the crushing whirlpool of time. A tear rolled down Amy’s cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Betsy, Sunflower, Nick … and Philip. Especially Philip. If I wasn’t so stupid none of this would have happened and you’d still be alive.”

  Three sat on the sand beside her. “Who’d still be alive?”

  Amy wiped her eyes. “Nothing. Nobody.”

  “You’re blaming yourself for the crash? That’s stupid.”

  “Calling me stupid for thinking I’m stupid is not the best way to calm me down.”

  Three took a circular compact from her pocket and a cylinder of lipstick. “Sorry. I don’t know what to say to people half the time. I’m not good at that stuff. You’re sitting next to a stone-cold freak who’s more Pirate Jack than Barbie. Ignore the fact that I’m staring into a tiny mirror and re-applying my lipstick.”

  “Where did THAT come from?”

  Three shrugged. “Probably from being abandoned at birth. It does things to people.”

  “No, the makeup!”

  Three waved a black rectangular makeup case in the air. “This? I grabbed it before we left the ship. You can’t expect a girl to fight the universe without slapping on a little war paint.”

  Amy sniffed and watched the white birds run above the surf.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Three slapped her on the shoulder. “Don’t get all weepy on me! You’re better than that, and I’m the same way. In fact, we’re the same person, me and you.”

  Amy sighed. “No, Three. We are not the same.”

  “That’s fine,” said the blonde girl. “But don’t blame yourself for any of it. It was my escape pod that blew up. Seriously, think about it––One with her stupid, secret bomb could have killed me. If she and the others thought I was out of control, why didn’t they say something? What’s up with that? Safety first, I always say. Actually, I never say that.”

  Amy hugged her knees and stared at the waves.

  “Right,” she murmured.

  Three waved her lipstick at the beached submarine half a mile down the beach. “Don’t you think it’s weird that your ship sank last night, and now we’re staring at another one? Also, if you squint and look sideways at it, that thing looks like One’s spaceship.”

  “If you say so.”

  Three finished applying the pale pink lipstick and put away her beauty tools. She watched Amy for a long moment, then picked up a tiny piece of driftwood and began to trace slow lines in the sand between her spread legs.

  “Want to know what I think about this whole messed-up situation?”

  Amy shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”

  “I’ve been to wild dimensions and seen things you wouldn’t believe, where up is down and right is left. But no matter how crazy things get, there’s always an Amy Armstrong and there’s always a Philip. Sometimes they grown old without meeting each other, and sometimes they’re born two streets apart. No matter what happens in whatever wacko time and place, if those two meet they’ll be like yin and yang, chocolate and peanut butter, bread and jam, plasma rifle and charging core. They always love each other, no matter what happens. Like I said, you’re lucky.”

  “What about you?” asked Amy. “Were you lucky?”

  Three smiled and dug into the sand. “I stopped on Phobos to sell off some cargo I stole from the Alliance. There was a bar like there always is, and a fight like there always is. I got tossed through a window, and five seconds later, this dark-haired scarecrow lands on top of me.” She sighed. “Philip. Never good in a fistfight. Great pilot, though, and the best shot with a taze-gun. I don’t remember much about the first two days or what happened, actually. He says I punched him first and threw a chair, and that’s why we got thrown out of the bar, but it doesn’t matter. The Alliance had a contract on his head for piracy, and he hid on my ship. We were a hot number for a few months … a pair of goofy lovebirds. He wanted me to sell the ship, move to Fiji with him and raise chickens or something, but I was thickheaded and stubborn. I was stupid.”

  “It happens,” said Amy.

  “A huge Alliance cruiser caught us refueling at Europa. Philip was in the cockpit and I was in a pressure suit changing out the engine igniters when they started shooting. I never even … I never got to say goodbye, you know? One minute I’m yelling at him about the cost of the engine parts, and then he was just … gone. I should have been in the cockpit instead of yelling at him, and we’d have been blown into space together.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “One found me in prison and paid the bounty to have me released. She thought I was cool and mean enough to join her crew of inter-dimensional space pirates slash wackos. There’s not much else to it, and here we are!” Three spread her arms. “Sitting on a beach. Life is great, right?”

  “But you said this ‘One’ version of me wants to destroy us,” said Amy. “Why would she pay your bounty? She could have just left you in prison.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Amy waved at the long and empty stretches of beach to the north and south. “We’re stuck here for the rest of our lives. Is that long enough?”

  Three adjusted the collar of her brown Chinese jacket. “I guess it’s not that complicated. She’s doing it for love.”

  “What?!!”

  “I said every Amy Armstrong has a Philip, right? One had hers, and she lived with him for years. ‘Had’ is the important word.”

  “I guess we’ve got that in common, too,” said Amy.

  “She shot him,” said Three. “Stone dead. Accused him of cheating on her with a cute l
ittle research assistant. This is all second-hand, you know, and it happened before I met her. Turns out One was completely wrong about the cheating, and he was just spending long nights in his lab with the assistant researching trans-dimensional physics.”

  “Ouch. Burn.”

  “Exactly,” said Three. “Because of that, she wants to travel back through time to the moment before she pulled the trigger on her Philip.”

  “That’s impossible. You can’t go back.”

  Three shook her head. “One found a way to link quantum constants in the universe––SpaceBook satellites, Amy Armstrong, and Philip––and thinks that will give her the ability to travel anywhere and any time she wants. SpaceBook is everywhere, it’s how we navigate through the different dimensions. By using a ‘quantum attenuation transfuser,’ One is triangulating the frequencies of different copies of Amy Armstrong on the quantum level, and thinks she’ll be able to find the creator of SpaceBook. Access to the origin point means complete dimensional freedom. The only problem with all of this is that triangulating the frequency means breaking down one of the constants on a quantum level.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Three rolled her eyes. “She shoots a big laser at us and we die. End of story.”

  “A laser? How does that help her travel back?”

  “I thought you were smarter than this. I just told you––she breaks her copies down on a quantum level, shrinking us back through time to an embryonic spark of life. That’s what I meant when I said she wants to destroy us. I didn’t mean on a psychological or emotional level––I meant that she literally wants to change us into pure energy.”

  “Why go to all this trouble? Can’t she visit another dimension and fall in love with another Philip? God forbid she could find someone whose name doesn’t start with ‘P.’”