You would think that a person of my character, or lack thereof, would’ve instantly sought revenge, but for some reason I didn’t, and that made the guilt even worse. I should’ve wanted to wipe AMW out. I had the skill set and means to at least track down and eliminate their leadership, plus maybe even their families. To inflict the same amount of pain they inflicted on me. But this agony I felt was an impossible weight strapped to my ankle, and no matter how hard I tried to swim up, it was drowning me. And as I went down atmosphere by atmosphere, eventually all I saw was existence flatbrushed in umbra. I thought about my father and the condition he was in after being pulled up from the depths. Forever crippled. Forever suffering. I didn’t want to come back up and suffer the same lifelong misery. They won, I told myself. Once a person’s will is shattered, there is only surrender. So I decided to turn tired metaphor into the end of my own reality. I was perched on the sea crane hovering thirty feet over what would become Volcano Vista’s manmade beach and coral reef sanctuary, my wrists locked in the same cuffs I should’ve put on Kathy, and a cannonball on my lap.
I hated everyone. I saw a world where nobody gave a shit how people who weren’t like them lived. I saw a world filled with people motivated by the fear of running out of shit. The man running out of virility. The woman running out of beauty. The addict running out of supply. The holy running out of faith. The Less Thans running out of money. And everyone, even The Money, running out of time. The Band-Aids: exclusives, memberships, flash feeds and flash sales, flashes to the point of perversion. Underwater cities to hide from sun flares no one could see coming. Grinders, freeloaders, con men, and self-cons taking advantage. A ping, another ping from Scam Likely. People using planetary alignment as an excuse for being an asshole. People looking up and envying manufactured celebrity. People looking down and shaking their heads with pity at the ordinary. A world mucked up with oversimplification. A piece of shit world, and I fit right in. I thought about my first wife, a space shuttle flight attendant, all lashes and curves. The kind you weren’t supposed to marry and definitely shouldn’t have kids with. But I was young, and hot and sultry were all I cared about. Until the kid came, a girl with a hairless body and impossibly long eyelashes like her mother. Then I ran off to the military. By the time the first wife left me, I had already become very good at writing people off. I had been sent off to war to kill, so it was pretty much my profession. Leaving wife two was even easier than losing wife one, and I’d tell people that divorce was one of the top three things that ever happened to me. They’d ask which divorce, and I’d say all of them. And now, I realize I’m the kind of person you shouldn’t marry. Definitely not have kids with.
But then, with Kathy and John, things seemed different. It felt like they were the wife and kid I was supposed to have. Like the previous times had just been auditions filled with sweat, bad props, and complete lack of preparation. Each was a failure I saw coming. But this time was a success. Until they died and I wanted to die. I prayed that after my death, Sessho-seki would drop on everyone else like a fucking hammer. First wife, first kid, second wife, too. I was ready for everything to burn now that the most important people in my life were gone.
Then Akira came up to me. She was alone, wearing a white lab coat of all things, something that became a permanent uniform once people did the math and believed she was right. An asteroid was heading toward Earth and would destroy it in three and a half years. The one that offed the dinosaurs was the size of Manhattan. This one was twice as big.
The sun was setting, and the clouds above hung in the sky like frozen whitewash. Akira climbed up the ladder to the top of the crane and sat next to me. Seabirds dove into the water below to pick at a swirl of big-eyed scad. Volcano Vista was already a beacon to sea life that didn’t know it didn’t have much time left. “How’d you find me?” I asked.
Akira looked up. “Satellites.”
“I like the coat,” I said. “You look ready to turn hay into horseshit.”
“Where did you get the cannonball?” Akira asked.
I looked down at it. A forty-two-pounder. “My dad. He always brought things back when he dove to build the foundations of buildings like these.”
“How did you get it up here?” she asked.
“If you don’t break a sweat trying to kill yourself, you’re not really trying.”
She looked out at the deep, twilled water. Wind blew and sent the monkey pods into chatter. “This cliff,” Akira said. “The ocean. The End of the World. It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it? Did you know it was named that two hundred years ago because it was so far off the beaten path? An old friend told me that.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to make the end the beginning.”
“It’s not worth saving,” I said. “To me, anyway.”
“I need you to help me,” Akira said.
“I’m kind of busy right now.”
Akira nodded. “I saw what happened to your wife and child in the feed. Sorry I found out so late. You know I don’t have an iE, and I’ve been busy.”
“Well, if you’ll excuse me,” I said. I scooted closer to the edge.
Akira grabbed onto my arm. “Take me with you.”
“No. Let go.”
And I looked at her face and saw it. The pressure coming from all directions. Relentless, mashing pressure like the one the deep water was exerting on the behemoth of a building in progress beneath us. Akira had staked her entire career on the claim that the world was about to end. And the even riskier claim that she could save it. Talk about a tough promise to deliver. She’d barely gotten her feet wet on the saving part, and she was already feeling the squeeze. She was constantly beating back her own personal crush depth.
“Your hands are cuffed,” she said. “You’re holding a cannonball. You are in no position to stop me from hanging on.”
“I’m tired, Akira. I’m just so fucking tired.”
“I know. Me too.”
“I can’t do it anymore.”
Her eyes began to well. “Listen. I worked around the clock to discover this asteroid,” she said. “And now I’m working on a solution to save all this. I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. I just do the work of making the impossible possible. I do it for everyone. And can you believe people want to kill me? After what I have sacrificed for this—it’s more than anyone could know. You want to take the plunge, let’s go. I don’t need this either.” Her hands were still locked tightly around my arm.
“Stop messing around and let me go.”
“No.”
“Christ! What the hell do you want from me?”
“I want you to help me,” she said. “These people who’ve been threatening me. They’re terrifying. I cannot work. I cannot focus while worrying about them. I can’t look through my telescope and make calculations and look back over my shoulder at the same time. I won’t be able to save anyone without the feeling of security. That’s where I need you.”
“Find someone else,” I said. “Put together an entire team. You have that kind of sway now.”
“I wouldn’t be able to trust them,” she said. “I can only trust you. We both know that not one out there is better at this sort of thing.” She grabbed my face and turned it to her. “You are part of the .03 percent. You know it, and I know it. Look around.” She nodded out to the horizon, the sun on its slow plunge into the ocean. “We have not hit infinite density. Not yet.”
“Stop with the terminology. Not everything is science or binary or invisible light.”
She looked out at the setting sun. “See the green flash?”
“Yeah.” I lied. I wanted to just tip over into the water and let drowning take care of the rest.
She smiled. “The atmosphere is splitting the sun’s white light. It’s—”
“Yeah, a prism or some shit. Let me go.”
“No,” she said. S
he yanked my arm. “Look at it. Just look.”
I sighed and looked. And of course I couldn’t see it. “It’s a mirage,” she said. She turned to me. “Everything is science. Do you know how I discovered the asteroid?”
“Yeah, through your big-ass telescope.”
“No that’s not how I first saw it. That’s how I verified it.”
“How then?”
“I looked up and saw a halo in the sky.”
“What?”
“I was five years old when I first saw it.” She paused and looked at me. “It was the day of the Great Sun Storm. I spent the next thirty years of my life proving its existence.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
She looked down at the water. “My father used to work until very late. Asian market crypto finance. Every night I would sit on the porch, waiting for him to come home. Sometimes he would. Sometimes he wouldn’t. Sometimes, I would sit out there for hours, just waiting and looking up at the stars.”
“On that night, the sky was very clear. By this time, I’d learned all my constellations. And every night I would look up and count them. I would look up and make sure they were all still there. And on this night, just like every night before it, I did not see anything disappear. Instead, I saw a flash and all the lights went off, then something new showed up. Another spot on what I called the tail of the dragon. It was very faint at first. Like the aura around a lit candle. Physically impossible, really. Preposterous. For me to be able to see it.” She turned to me. “But sometimes I see things that are impossible to see. I knew the halo was death coming from very far away.”
I kept quiet and looked out at the skyline. The sun had set, and the limbo between day and night began. I related to her words in a way she couldn’t even know.
“I’ve never told anyone this,” she said. “In fact, if you told anyone, I’m sure I would be ostracized and removed from this project. But I know it exists. I know it’s coming.”
I nodded. She looked at me. “You never . . . see things?”
“No. If anything, I see less than the average person.”
Akira grinned. She looked out to the ocean. “Your first two wives and firstborn are still somewhere out there, aren’t they?”
I nod. “My first wife took off with our daughter when she was one,” I said. “I haven’t seen them since, so I’m not sure. My second wife, well, I’d rather forget about her anyway.”
Akira nodded. “You never wonder about your first child?”
“Sure I do. But when I got back from deployment and they were gone, a part of me was relieved.”
Akira sighed. “I know that guilt too. It drives me.”
I turn to her. “I came back a monster.”
She grabbed my shoulders. “Listen to me,” she said.
“What?”
“We’re both in the business of discovering what we don’t know. And failure is not an option.”
“Failure needs to be an option,” I said. “Or whatever we find won’t necessarily be the truth.”
“Now there’s the person I came to talk to,” she said. “If you do this for me, I can promise you revenge for your wife and child.”
“I don’t got revenge in me.”
“Protection, then,” Akira said. “You’ll be protecting your closest friend. Do you have that in you?”
I thought about that and looked over at Akira, who stuck her tongue out in the rain and let tiny drizzles fall onto it. It was the first time I’d ever seen her do something childlike, an action so slight but so telling: she enjoyed being alive.
She stopped and turned to me. “Look,” she said, gesturing.
I looked down. The cannonball was gone.
“The night I saw the halo for the first time and discovered Sessho-seki, my father didn’t come home.”
“What happened?”
At first, silence. Then she said, “My father was in an airplane. A small one, a puddle jumper coming in from Seoul. He never made it back.”
She knew my pain. How I saw things. I wondered if she blamed the universe itself for her father’s death. And for a moment, I looked at her and couldn’t tell the difference between us.
She stood up and extended her hand. “Now come,” she said. “Help me save these last droplets of humanity.”
When I think about it now, I still have no idea how Akira Kimura made a forty-two-pound cannonball drop from my lap without me noticing all those years ago. Like an idiot, I never once wondered how she did it. I got caught up when it came to her and forgot about my belief in history. Working a criminal case is largely a study of existing patterns. A natural-born liar doesn’t stop lying. A person with a violent itch that started from childhood won’t stop scratching it once he or she starts. Behavior is consistent, nearly impossible to change. Anyone who says don’t dwell on the past and only look forward is a self-deluded dimwit blinded by pixie dust of guilt and regret. Looking at the past is the only way to accurately predict the future.
Akira knew that well. She was aware of my patterns and my personal tragedies. She knew that what had happened had filled me with a paralyzing rage. So she shared her own pain, confessed an impossible secret, and I believed her. In the weakest moment of my life, this sharing made her more than a friend. We became binary, like asteroid and weapon—one a killer, the other a savior. When I uncuffed myself and followed her down that sea crane ladder, I became something new. Something that snuffed out the light around me. It was my event horizon, not that I knew it at the time. Most of me figured I’d just climb down from the steel perch, then come back tomorrow and try again.
But I didn’t. Instead, I let myself be put through the battery of background checks and debriefings. Once I passed, my job, as it was first explained to me, was to simply watch Akira’s back. Shadow her, protect her. This felt too passive to me. I didn’t have it in me to just wait for another tragedy to strike. So instead, while she pored over the math that made the creation of Ascalon possible, I pored through the threats. By then, Akira had already obtained complete government and financial backing. The top brass wanted her to get an iE, a state-of-the-art one to help her compute and document the saving of the world. But she told them it would just be a distraction that ultimately hindered her progress. When they forced other top scientists on her to help create Ascalon, most didn’t last longer than a month. She would fire them, accusing them of being incompetent dolts to whom she had to explain too much. Even though there always seemed to be people around, Akira worked primarily alone. As did I.
I examined every threat with utmost gravity. Even though I knew the chances were that all of them had been sent by cowards blasting their idiocy off into the ether, I never took a chance. I told myself that never again in my life would I not take a threat seriously. Every single person who posted a threat was identified, arrested, and detained. It was an easy job at first, except for the volume. In just a little over two months, I had over five hundred people plucked from their basements, hourly wage jobs, and bored retirements. I had some extradited. People all over the world got the message, and the crackpots, for the most part, started keeping their mouths shut.
But other threats still arrived in less public forms. Handwritten letters. Graffiti. People sneaking past military security and throwing rotten seaweed at the telescope, since eggs had become precious. With basic surveillance and evidence analysis, these were easy enough to catch, just like the first batch. But these I didn’t only arrest—I had them incarcerated. To me, their brashness made them actual threats. Some of them grew old in those cells. Most don’t remember, their memories wiped clean by salvation.
After that, things settled down for a couple of months, and I began to look at the short list of people allowed to get close to Akira. A handful of senior scientists helping construct Ascalon, each with a large team serving under them. Jerry, her lawyer at the time. Her SEAL
pilot, Dave, who had grown up on the island and knew his way around better than anyone else. Director Parker, Idris Eshana. Chief of Staff Chang. And his head scientist, Karlin Brum. Of everyone, she was the most unsettling. Skin a little too smooth, eyes a little too big, face a little too expressionless, like someone grown in the deepest point of the uncanny valley. She was the one who demanded the full-body scan everyone had to submit themselves to when they entered the telescope, even Akira. In fact, Brum picked the contractor who installed it. As individuals, each of these people were brilliant, except for maybe Chief of Staff Chang. But together, their egos, fear, envy, and ambition were a toxic stew that made me think that they’d get us all killed before Sessho-seki even got here.
Then the first odd threat Akira received came by the way of a note tucked into her handwritten journal. It wasn’t a note, really, just a doodle of a completed game of hangman. The word. Five letters. Akira. We rummaged through past body scans. We ran human genome sweeps. Swept the telescope, the residence she had there, the home she never went to, her SEAL, the note itself, everything for DNA. The note went through every law enforcement scan on earth. Nothing. The president begged her to step up her security, but she refused. Just another distraction. More people who posed potential threats. The president threatened to force the Secret Service on her. She said that if he did so, she’d walk away from the entire thing. So they struck a compromise. I would be granted the authority to do anything necessary to protect her. It was put in writing. Executive order. Akira and I were there when he came to the telescope to sign it. After he left, I asked Akira something.
“What are your chances of beating this thing?” She never answered this question publicly.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Don’t you see? The world is already changing.” And she was right. Before the discovery of Sessho-seki, apathy had hit such an all-time high that people were entering virtual reality arcades to be reminded what certain emotions felt like. But as The Killing Rock sped toward Earth, they didn’t need to be reminded anymore. People started to feel everything again. Everyone except me, or so I thought at the time. I was in a passionless state of seek and destroy. And I didn’t realize that people were watching me, too. Even the most powerful people in the world were afraid I might investigate them. Fewer people started showing up at the telescope, which to me meant lower threat levels. Some nights, it was just Akira and me on top of that damn mountain in the scope that people had started calling The Savior’s Eye. Her sipping her ginger tea and trying to figure out how to engineer a weapon that could produce—and aim—the energy of an exploding star. A cosmic ray that would inevitably slash the sky as particles accelerated and collided. And me, like the rest of the world, patching together a cursory half-assed knowledge of physics without really understanding anything, giving up when we hit the impenetrable wall of Too Fucking Hard. With the world ending, and the last thing most of us wanted was to go back to school.
Midnight, Water City Page 8