Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  And now there’s Sabrina, her every move perfectly calculated. When she was a pulse racket champ, she was known as a counterpuncher. Error-free, high-octane swings that frustrated her opponents into mistakes.

  “I’m sure whatever you did in the past will be forgiven,” Sabrina says. “It was permitted by the president’s executive order, which gave you the authority to do whatever you had to. And I know you didn’t kill Jerry. Or the chief and corporal.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Sabrina thinks for a moment. She closes her eyes and puts the pouch back in her bag. “Mind if I cash this in?” she says. “Daycare’s expensive, and there’s the matter of our blown-up front door and roof.”

  I nod. “It’s yours. Do whatever you want with it.”

  “By the way, your bail’s been set,” she says.

  “I can only imagine.”

  “Take what you’re imagining, then double it.”

  “Don’t let Akeem try to get me out,” I say. “Or any of my other friends. I know I’m not in the position to ask you for anything, but if you could honor this as a last request.”

  She nods, then exits interrogation. Good. She doesn’t need this anymore. It’s a crap job for crap pay. That gem might not be quite enough to make Sabrina and Ascalon part of The Money, but it should bring them pretty damn close. I’ll be glad never to see it again. It’s just a reminder of what I’ve done. I know now that the chief was probably right, for once in his prematurely ended life—I try not to think about the years of happy bureaucracy he won’t get now. Like he said, Akira being alive was the only thing that kept me safe all these years, kept me untouchable. The executive order won’t hold up—if I give them access to my iE, I’ll go down for the tour guide and the others. Akira’s legacy will be questioned. Worse, I could put Sabrina and Ascalon in danger. Whoever it was that rubbed out the chief doesn’t want this looked into and doesn’t believe I will betray a dead woman. Their goal is probably for me to be locked away safely on this puke vessel for the rest of my days.

  I think about the mourners throughout the world, rushing to the nearest coast to float their holo lanterns in tribute. I imagine the water slurping up the dim light of their collective sorrow. I picture myself standing there with them, floating my own lantern. I look behind me, and there are children building sandcastles on the beach. I see my Ascalon back there building with another toddler I can’t make out.

  Two children.

  Shocked, I stand, but the cuffs pull me back down. I feel like I’ve dislocated both my wrists. The big guard appears, uncuffs me from the table, stands me up, and re-cuffs my hands together behind my back. “We’re moving you to holding,” he says.

  But I’m not listening as he leads me down a hallway that bends in an arc.

  The one I gave up

  Saying “the one” means there is another.

  I remember the voice I heard when I was leaving Jerry’s. And again in the paper-walled house in the cavern. Then . . . right before the ball exploded.

  She killed me. But I am still here.

  The words stop me in my tracks. The guard tugs at me. “You’re not gonna give me a hard time, are you?” he asks.

  The child whose remains I found in Akira’s Tomb isn’t the one I’m supposed to say sorry to. I’m supposed to find the one who made the scribblings on the wall of that Japanese house. The one who played with those re-created toys. She must be about sixty now, the daughter Akira managed to hide from the world. I was sure now that it was her laugh, not Akira’s, that had come from the bedroom.

  Two coffins. One filled with a baby’s bones, the other adult-sized, empty. Akira didn’t want me to put her in there. She wanted me to find her other daughter, Ascalon Lee, and bury her next to her sister. But why?

  “Move!” the guard says, shoving the small of my back.

  I stumble forward. He uncuffs me and puts me in my cell. “You actually knew her?” he asks.

  And it’s the first time I look at him. He’s young, maybe thirty, the wife and kid type. He’s got some major years ahead of him. But . . . years of what? We live longer now. We age a little better. But what do we do with that extra time? Me, on my fourth marriage, I’ve just put my thirties and forties on repeat. Jerry worked on an art piece with no end. Akira, who used to hibernate so she could work twenty-hour days, started to hibernate herself for so long she could stay the same age she was when she saved the world, without doing much with or for what she had saved. None of us were any smarter. We were just like my old neighbor Fred, fishing out there in the float burbs with all the wrong gear. “Yeah, I knew her,” I say.

  “What was she like?”

  I think of Jerry and say, “She was a bitch.”

  He’s taken aback. He stands in front of the cell for a moment, not knowing how to respond, then continues down the arced hallway. He’ll probably spend the rest of his shift, the rest of his working life, walking that spiral deeper and deeper into the ocean.

  Saying “the one” means there is another.

  Akira Kimura had two daughters. Twins. I see that now in black and white.

  15

  For obvious reasons, as Earth rotated, no single telescope could watch Sessho-seki at all times. There were other super-telescopes spread around the world. Arizona, China, South Africa, Chile, Spain. Not to mention the ones in space, ion-drive probes with cryogen-refrigerated sensors. The problem with telescopes is that they need light to see. And Sessho-seki, a spectral-class rock to begin with, was sneaking through the spaces between galaxies, evading vapor, stardust, and light. It was coming at us from so far that infrared couldn’t spot it at first. The only way Akira saw it was by building a telescope so sharp that it could pick up the bend of space-time. There was something out there bending it. Something enormous that she couldn’t see. But after studying its giant space-time footprints, she knew it was heading to us. It was massive. And fast. This meant it couldn’t be nudged off course. And in just a few years, it would hit us with the energy of all the nuclear weapons we ever had times a million. The one that took out the dinosaurs killed seventy-five percent of life on Earth. This one would hit so hard that it would permanently tilt the planet’s upright spin. It would kill everything. And we couldn’t even see it.

  These circumstances meant Sessho-seki was the greatest horror story there ever was. It caused chills, screams, and heart attacks in the first months after its existence was announced. Questions and theories regarding this monster impact event abounded. What was the asteroid made of? Was it a chunk from another planet, a rogue planet itself, or a celestial body that through gravity had become bigger and bigger through the eons by attracting more space junk? How was it moving so quickly? It must have orbited something at some point. Had something else knocked it out of its orbit with enough force to rip it from the gravitational pull of its solar system and send it our way ever since? Some started questioning the very existence of gravity.

  Thought camps began to form. Consciousness nuts. Multiverse kooks. Religious zealots. Alien invasion conspiracy theorists. Gravity haters. Dozens of them. And no matter what camp, all it took was a fifteen-minute holo to sell a kid on a camp for fucking life. After watching a random fifteen-minute spiel on something they knew nothing about, performed by someone who barely knew more than they did, the kid would defend that camp’s theory to the death.

  The reason it only takes fifteen minutes of pizazz to convert people into true believers is that somewhere deep inside, they want to believe. Even though I didn’t know it at the time and judged the hell out of those crackpots, I had always been the same way. In my own personal midnight zone, I was waiting to be told I saw things more clearly than everyone else even though I was colorblind. Because I was colorblind. And the day my dad brought home that chunk of ambergris, the first time I saw green, there was the confirmation I’d been seeking. Look long enough for something, and you’ll find
it, whether it actually exists or not. And once you find it, you’ll feel less scared.

  But Akira didn’t think about things like this while she was building Ascalon. She didn’t care about the crackpots or humanity’s mental condition. The only dissenters who pissed her off were the ones with just as much science cred as she had who were saying one of two things: that Sessho-seki would not hit. Or worse, that Sessho-seki did not exist. She refused to debate either point. Time was too short, she’d always say. Instead, she responded with this simple notion: Let’s say they’re right and it won’t hit. Or that they’re right and it doesn’t exist. Fine. So we do nothing?

  Most shut their mouths after that. They would bite their tongues and leave her to her work. Begrudgingly support it. It was worth the time, money, and effort, just in case. At the very least, we were learning more about what was out there, they’d say.

  Most. But several didn’t.

  Several appeared on any media program that would have them and denounce her. They would yank at the ear of those with power and whisper or scream that Akira Kimura was wrong.

  And that was when she responded with me. Akira had left something in the desk that I kept at the telescope. It was a device, a small, handheld thing that looked like a taser. She left a paper note saying it would shock any iE into sleep mode. Under that, a scribbled list of names. The dissenters. I turned off my own iE and took the list to Akira, checking to make sure no one else was in the room. “Why?” I asked.

  Her eye was looking through the telescope. “They could defund this project.”

  “Could?”

  “They’re dangerous,” she said.

  “What if they’re harmless?”

  Akira stepped to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “You are simply removing threats,” she said. “Something you’ve no doubt done in your military career. And you’re protecting this project. Indirectly saving all of us.”

  I nodded. She put her eye back on her telescope. “Did you know that two observers can watch the same photon at the same time and disagree on how it behaves?” she asked.

  I squeezed the crumpled list in my hand. “No,” I said.

  “The interesting thing is that both can be right.”

  I thought for a second, then opened the list and added a name. After one last look, I burned it, took the device out of the drawer, and left.

  It wasn’t until years later that Idris Eshana told me that he’d made the device for her. He winked and said he was in the loop. He was proud of it, even though it was a secret. I guess those of us closest to Akira were proud to orbit around her. Micro moons making their own contributions to her noble mission.

  The first scientist I silenced was a celebrity of sorts. An advocate of science education for decades, he was a persistently happy man with a quick wit and an impressive mustache, who appeared on all kinds of programs—vids, pods, and late-night roundtables. He liked to wear neckties printed with something from space—planets, pulsars, or swirls of galaxies. He would never directly attack Akira on vid. Instead, he’d talk about the fact that we have identified well over twenty-thousand asteroids out there whose orbits passed in the vicinity of Earth. That we had an arsenal of telescopes, gamma, infrared, X-ray, radio, and ultraviolet that could detect just about everything heading toward us, and years ago, we already identified 99.8957 percent of the big ones, the ones as large or larger than the dinosaur-killer, these the easiest to spot by far for obvious reasons. The man spoke with grandfatherly common sense. When I left him in his tentacle-lighted Emerald City suite, I think it was the pulsar tie that dangled from the doorknob, his two hundred pounds slumped on the other end of the taut fabric. His iE lay next to him like a toy that had rolled out of his hand. I took the black ops military shuttle back home, staring at the hair of some unidentifiable creature stuck to the seat in front of me the entire way. No record of my round trip.

  The second and third scientists were a married Chinese couple. One would think they’d be the most difficult to get to, but the 610 Office in China practically escorted me to them. China’s president, a sturdy-looking man who seemed to almost take pride in his premature balding, as if it were a symptom of his tireless leadership, had minored in astronomy in college and was arguably Akira’s strongest supporter. Nothing brought him more joy than sort of understanding what Akira was saying when she explained Ascalon to him. With this couple, I staged an at-home murder-suicide. Plausible that one would turn off both their iE’s before such an act. After it was done, the 610 Office insisted they give me a ride back home. I watched the feed on my way back to the island. The Xinhua Media and PR Agency tucked the report of their deaths beyond the fifteen-minute mark of their evening broadcast.

  With each of these three, the moment after I was done, I waited for confirmation that what they had planned would cost lives. I waited for green. And the green wafts would rise and curl, and I would breathe them in through my nose. They were going to cause all of our deaths if I didn’t stop them. I would force my heart to fill with hate as I looked at their still faces. I would stare until the perfume became choking. I was certain I was doing the right thing.

  But still, I walked around paranoid during those days. I felt like all eyes were on me, like I was constantly being judged. The worst was when I walked in public spaces. People watching public tourneys of virtual dragon mount duels would pause and eye me as I passed. Others were on their way home after work, their tired eyes wandering in my direction under the float lights. Even the rare dog, the descendants of the handful that survived the 2030-something dog plague, would sniff at me and whimper. Who were these people and these dogs who had the fucking nerve to judge me? They probably knew even less about astrophysics than I did. Bellmen, salespeople, and desk jockeys who hadn’t done a hard thing their entire lives, which was why they existed in the permanent middle, where nothing they did garnered notice. In space terms, they were meaningless trojans, tiny planets and moons that stayed in their predestined orbits.

  And then there were the radicals. Fuck the radicals. Try talking to one. I could guarantee you that you’d be interrupted within five seconds by rants on why they were right and you were wrong. If you stated an opinion, a defensive, contrarian outburst would be volleyed back in less than .05 ticks. Watching radicals talk was like watching a pair of starving dogs fight over an imaginary bone. Fuck what they think. Besides, these were the types who killed Kathy and John. A part of me still hoped Sessho-seki would hit just to wipe them out.

  All of them, normal or radical, I could feel them judging. But after every contentious scientist I silenced, I smelled ambergris and saw green. It never once occurred to me that this stain had been left by me. That I had become the radical.

  By the time I paid a visit to the next one, it was easy. An asteroid hunter in Spain who believed in Sessho-seki’s existence, but unlike Akira, believed it could be nudged off its trajectory. She advocated the Keyhole Theory—that when it got close, we could disrupt its course slightly, so that it would just sling by Earth. It would maintain its universal orbit and return again in a few years, pulled dangerously close by Earth’s gravity, but this would buy us more time to perfect the Ascalon Project or maybe even come up with a better savior plan. I tased her iE and nudged her off a cloudscraper. I leaned over the edge and watched as she fell. Green ribbons fluttered like suspension lines cut from a parachute.

  I was so single-mindedly focused on this target that it barely entered my mind that my first wife and kid lived in Portugal, one country over. I had the sway to easily locate them, and I could see how my eldest child, a teenager by now, was doing. I wondered if my ex ended up cheating on her second husband, too, with some rich space tourist on one of her shuttle runs. Maybe she was on her third or fourth marriage too. My mind went to judgment and insults, so I jumped back on the military shuttle, its itinerary wiped permanently from the system. I calmed down and told myself it was selfish and impolite
to pop in on these two. The world was ending, and the last thing they needed was another complication. Plus, I was the last person in the world who should be anywhere near an innocent kid. Looking back now, I think I was ashamed.

  I never reached out. It was easy to stop thinking about them, because my last target would take some planning. This was the one I’d added to Akira’s list myself. I was the only one who knew what I was about to do, and I’d get no support, no ghost transport, no 610 Office, no access. The ones before this were easy to get away with. Akira signed off on them, and the world was so busy looking upward in dread that they almost never stopped to see what was going on around them. But this next one was tough. And I promised myself it would be my last.

  She was the worst of the bunch. Broadcasting her doubt every chance she got, going over her math in public again and again until eyes glazed over. But some people understood her math and started agreeing with her. I needed to stop this before it threatened Akira. I needed to silence Dr. Karlin Brum, Chief of Staff Chang’s scientist. She had the president’s and the cabinet’s ear, for Christ’s sake. I was shocked her name wasn’t at the top of the list.

  But she was hard to get to because she was always with Chang, a big, tall man with supposedly bad knees who seemed to wince whenever he sat or stood. She was constantly piloting him by the arm into or out of one chair or another. People speculated that they were an item, but whatever was between them, they kept private. I had to somehow get to her without touching a hair on Chang. He was the president’s chief of staff so if I got caught, I was done. And if I was connected to this in any way, people would accuse Akira of being behind it.