Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  “Looking for what?” Sabrina asks.

  “Her mother’s iE.”

  Sabrina frowns. “You said so yourself. Akira never had one.”

  “She wouldn’t have had one like ours,” I say. “She’s Akira. She would’ve had something special. And she wouldn’t want anyone to know she had it.” I tap the side of my temple. “She would’ve put it in here. And it wouldn’t be the first time she kept something from me.”

  “So the book isn’t some made-up story,” Sabrina says. “But why is her daughter doing this? What’s her endgame?”

  “I’m betting she’s got her mother’s blood type. The same mitochondria. And now she has enough tissue samples and the funds to grow all the genetically compatible organs she needs. I didn’t catch it at first, but she’s undergone some surgery. Changing her voice. She wants to look and sound exactly like her mother.”

  Sabrina tries to calm Ascalon down. “What do you have to do with all this?”

  “I knew Akira better than anyone. And everyone else who knew her well is dead. Ishana. The president. Jerry. Chief of Staff Chang. That tour guide. I’m the only one left.”

  “What does she want from you?” Sabrina asks.

  “She wants me to find Akira’s iE.”

  “Why?”

  I squint and look for green above Sabrina’s and Ascalon’s heads. Nothing. I need to finish this, or there will be. “The hell with it. I’ll take the 1911.”

  Sabrina pulls it from her back and hands it to me. I check if it’s loaded. “But why?” Ascalon is cackling, bouncing up and down on the bed again.

  “To become Akira Kimura.”

  Sabrina sighs and closes her eyes. Ascalon takes a bad step and falls off the bed headfirst. I’m there to catch her. She laughs and laughs and laughs. I kiss her on the cheek. I blow at the wisps of her thin hair. I take in the fresh baby smell from her head. I love this kid.

  “Do you know where she is?” Sabrina asks.

  I nod. “Pretty sure. One hundred and seventy-seven atmospheres deep.”

  “Volcano Vista,” Sabrina says.

  I nod. “Her new place.”

  I put Ascalon down on the floor, and she runs to her mother, who scoops her up. I’ve gotta try. For my wife and my kid. I move in for a hug. Sabrina sighs in my arms. Ascalon pushes my face away. A chip off the old block. “I love you,” I struggle to say. Not because I don’t mean it, but because it’s something I’ve always struggled to say.

  “I love you, too,” Sabrina says.

  I shake my head. “When the Feds and the prosecutor come, tell them where to find me. And when he wakes up, tell Akeem thanks for everything.”

  “He left a message for you.”

  “What?” I say.

  Sabrina takes something out of her pocket and tosses it to me. It’s the gem. “He said for you to take this and shove it up your ass.”

  I smile and set it on the counter. “I—”

  Sabrina nods. “I’ll give him the bail money once you’re cleared.”

  I look at her. “I’m sorry about all of this.”

  “I know,” she says. “Come back in one piece.”

  I laugh when I imagine coming back in several pieces. Ascalon points behind me. “Gre,” she says in a wispy voice.

  It’s how she says green. I turn around to look at what she’s pointing at.

  “Gre,” Ascalon says again.

  Puzzled, Sabrina and I look at each other. Ascalon points again. “Re,” she says.

  Red. We both look around the room. There isn’t a single red or green thing in here. Ascalon points behind me again. “Gre. Re,” she says.

  I turn around, almost expecting to see a ghost hovering above me. But I see nothing. Then they start forming. The wisps. Faint. I follow them with my eyes.

  They’re coming from the gem.

  I touch my nose. She wasn’t trying to put something inside me. She was looking for something. I pick up the gem and run it under X-ray. The blue projection pops up. There it is, encased in the middle of the gem. A tiny data chip. A sliver of gallium nitride that stores a lifetime. Everything Akira has ever seen or done since the inception of her first and only iE.

  Or maybe nothing. Maybe pure data.

  I look at Ascalon. She smiles like she knows that I finally see what she’s seeing, and that brings us closer together. She has my synesthesia. So much for imaginary. It’s real, genetic—and hereditary. “I’m sorry, kid,” I say.

  Ascalon looks at the gem and claps her hands.

  Sabrina grabs me by the arm. I look at her. I don’t think she caught on to what me and Ascalon are seeing. “What is it?”

  I point at holo projection. “There’s a data chip in the gem.”

  Sabrina squints. “Why?”

  “It’s her iE.”

  I pick up the gem, hold it up to the light, and inspect its hundreds of green facets. I’m in awe of its value. Not the gem, but what’s inside. The mind of a god.

  “That’s why Ascalon Lee probed you,” Sabrina says. “She was looking for it.”

  I nod. “Akira left this to me. Why?” I’m asking myself as much as I’m asking Sabrina. Akira could’ve destroyed this herself or never even made one in the first place.

  Sabrina peers at the slight chip. “She wanted you to do something with it.”

  I turn to my wife. “What? Why choose me for that?”

  She shrugs. “Who else is there?”

  I reexamine the sliver. So small that it could pass for a crack or a chip. I wouldn’t even have noticed if it weren’t very faintly smoldering in green and red—the smell, or the particles, cloaked by the dense crystal around it. She’s right. Shit, I’m the only one left. Me. I’m fighting back those old feelings of love and admiration. I look at Sabrina, hoping that just the sight of her will help me in that fight.

  “That’s why Ascalon Lee cut up her mother,” Sabrina says. “To find this.”

  “It’s why she left me alive.”

  “She knew Akira would leave it to you without even telling you.”

  I put the gem in my pocket. “She knew Akira would leave clues that only I could see. That it would take me some time to find it.”

  “You’re not going to give it to her, are you?” Sabrina asks.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but there’s no room for either of them in our lives.” I sigh. This demented, genius pair, larger than life. What if they were given the chance to start over? Most people use their iEs to communicate. To share their favorite frivolous things. To vid themselves eating. Fucking. Doing the basest things animals do, but in high-class environments, as if to say this is what makes us a higher species. They use iEs to consume entertainment. To gossip. To game. Walk in simulation. Bathe themselves in it. Drown themselves it. To gain fifteen minutes’ worth of knowledge, then call themselves experts. Some people decide to have their iEs’ data destroyed upon death. Others hire an editor to digitally clean the narrative into something falsely coherent and relevant, then release it to the public or pass it down to their kids. But these two used it to store knowledge that they created. World-shaking knowledge. One embedded it somewhere inside herself, probably near her brain. The other’s is her eye. They directly linked this tech to their consciousness. My mind whirls at the potential of this. Programming ourselves to perform mundane tasks in the subconscious, much like our brains command our lungs to breathe and our hearts to beat. Sure, most people would still just use this to pull up vids to jerk off to, but in the hands of certain people, this technology could have terrifying consequences. Should I destroy this?

  “Be careful,” Sabrina says.

  “I don’t want to kill her,” I say.

  “I worry more about her killing you.”

  I run my hand over Ascalon’s head. Her hair is so fine, so soft. “If I
don’t come back—”

  “I’ll kill her,” she says.

  I believe her. I step to the nearest shelf to rummage through the medical supplies and find what I’m looking for. I pocket it. I kiss Sabrina and walk out. It’s time to compartmentalize. To stop thinking about my family for my family. It’s time to work myself into a nice, violent lather thinking about all the things I hate. Those of us who bitch about our first-world problems. The ones who say privileged shit like, Imagined problems can be worse than real ones. They never are, except to those who don’t have real ones.

  While I’m climbing into the hover, I think about the idiotic grand jury process the Feds want to put me through. Threatening me with perjury charges and prison time if I slip up. Most crimes are illegal across the board—theft, assault, murder—but the act of lying is prosecuted in a million different forms and gradients. Fraud, slander, false advertising, perjury. You can lie to your spouse and kids all you want. Just don’t lie to the Feds.

  I lift off, and the wind howls. The incoming tropical storm has been downgraded to a depression. I look down at Akeem’s ridiculously opulent estate floating in the middle of the ocean. I force myself to hate it. Fuck The Money. And The Less Thans? Fuck them, too. We’re all the same. We just want to matter. To learn just enough to seem important. Once our lives didn’t depend on learning anymore, we stopped studying. We bob around in schools, relishing in our superiority to the fish and animals around us, but the only thing that differentiates us is that we realize our own mortality.

  By the time I fly through the wet, choppy air and land at the lot a half mile from the entrance of Volcano Vista, mostly I’m just sad. If I’m going out soon, I don’t wanna go out like Chief Chang. An angry old man. Or a paranoid recluse like Akira. At the hand of her own daughter. I don’t wanna be taken by surprise, either, like Jerry Caldwell or the innocents I put in the ground myself. It’s dark now, and I’m walking along the garden path to the seascraper between trees that seep silently in the humidity. Under the dim polyp lights that brighten when I near, a moth sips the tears of a sleeping bird.

  Up ahead, more light. Hundreds, maybe thousands of firefly specks in front of the grand arch of Volcano Vista. Sound. Commotion. People. Did someone pull a fire alarm? Hard to imagine at this time of night. Nobody likes to be pulled out of bed in the middle of the night, and The Money, who populates the bottom half of the seascraper, has the power to make sure it doesn’t happen. I step into the clearing and see what appears to be a candlelight vigil. The crowd seems to be leaning toward the arch, like plants tilted toward sunlight for nourishment. I squeeze past them. They’re all wearing their beaded bracelets in tribute. I hear whispers. “Someone saw her,” an old man says. “She’s down there. Alive,” says a young woman.

  I break through to the front. Cops have the entrance barricaded. A few media crews are on the scene. I spot the superintendent chatting with security under the arch.

  Then a strong gust of storm wind and a collective gasp.

  The thousands of specs of candle lights lift and float into the dark sky like jellyfish bells. The entire crowd watches, astonished. Even the superintendent and the guards are looking up, pointing. “See, she’s alive!” someone screams.

  For some reason, I expect the superintendent’s eyes to turn toward mine, but they don’t. Instead, he’s watching the floating lights scatter in the night sky, and his eyes begin to tear. Incredible. He’s sobbing. Every person I pass is holding a bulb of light in front of them, like an offering, hoping theirs will glide from their hands like the others. I hear more shouts. “She has risen,” they say. “She’s come back for us!”

  I step through the barricade and head to the entrance. I turn to look, and the superintendent and the guards are still bewitched. A little girl exits the lobby while I turn, and we bump into each other. Her lighted bulb falls from her hands and hits the ground. It flickers, then dims. She begins to cry. I slip through the door, and the clamor of the crowd softens.

  I cross the solar-paneled flooring and walk under the crystal, water-filled chandeliers lit blue by bioluminescent algae that only glow at night. I step to the elevator and scan. The doors slide open. I step in and begin my descent.

  This time, I’m not looking at my reflection in the glass. I’ve spent my whole goddamn life doing that. If I’m going to get out of this in one piece, it’s time to learn how to look across the past, present, and future at once.

  A spook fish passes by in the twilight zone. Its bright-green barrel eyes are embedded inside its transparent head, which lights up like a SEAL cockpit at night. I remember the spook fish can see out through its own head. I need to do the same.

  What did Sabrina want me to remember? That our survival instinct, which makes it easy for us to forget trauma, also makes us unappreciative of close calls and second chances. As usual, she’s right. I think about her words as I set out across the catwalk flanked by trauma and final chances. I need to make sure I remember my way back.

  26

  As I’m heading down, I use the time to make sure I’m ready. 1911, fifteen in the mag. Unlike my rail gun, the 1911 isn’t powerful enough to punch through the glass, so my aim doesn’t have to be perfect. I brought the old heat blade from Muskogee as well, just in case. I try to anticipate what might be down there. Ascalon, perhaps a different color, maybe armed. No, she probably assumes her tail and mind are enough. And they damn well might be. Something tells me I haven’t seen either in their full capacity yet.

  Passing atmosphere forty, I recall the last time I was here. Watching Akira slide into pieces. I wonder which parts Ascalon took and made her own. Not just tissue from organs—she’s got the chops to graft entire appendages. Maybe the hands? The feet? Definitely the hands—they would give her fingerprint ID. I never even thought to confirm it was really her when they first slid off in the chamber. Procedure. It would’ve served me that day after all. I check the 1911 again. I hope this old thing doesn’t jam. I reach into my pocket and take out the two small nose-filler orbs that I swiped from Akeem’s med bay before leaving. Normally, they’re used to stop a broken nose from bleeding. But me, I’ve got other uses for them. Protective. I need to see clearly. I can’t let Ascalon use my sight against me. I hope it’ll work, but hell if I know. A full-on mask would probably be better, but I don’t want to tip her off. And when I think back on her sticking her damn tail up my nostrils, these things also irrationally give me a bit of peace of mind. The gel fillers disappear up my nostrils and expand. My lips part slightly so that I can breathe out of my mouth.

  Finally, the penthouse. 177. I step inside.

  The lights, tracks of orange latticed on the ceiling, are muted. They make the room feel like it’s daybreak. I look down at the floor. I hope she hasn’t implemented the same suction-tech security that was at Jerry’s. I take my first steps gingerly, eyes on the floor. Nothing happens. I walk through the near empty penthouse and pass the artifact telescope. The ocean floor lights up, and the entire room brightens. I glance though the window. The cannonball and the fuselage are still there, but the whale bones, which I last saw being devoured by zombie worms, are gone.

  I step into the next room. It’s dim and chilly. Ascalon is sitting cross-legged in front of the low tea table. Steam rises from the kettle. I look at her. Actually look. She really is a replica of her mother now. The scar on her face is gone, and the white lab coat she’s wearing make that undeniable. There are, however, patches of blue left on her bare forearms. Just remnants from her last tat pill.

  “Please, sit.” She’s even got Akira’s voice now, cold and condescending. It’s almost like being back in the classroom of your least favorite teacher.

  I sit across from her, my gun pointed at her under the table. I look at her hands. Faint scars at the wrists. She smirks as she scoops green powder into the kettle that sits atop a tiny heater. She mixes it in the pot water with a bamboo whisk. The steam rises in the co
ld air. “Her heart is beating in my chest now.”

  I nod. “You gonna pour that tea, or should I do it myself?”

  She stops whisking. “I will pour,” she says.

  She fills my cup, and I look down at the smoking tea. I take a chance and sip from it. She does the same. I look up at her face. A new yellow iE. It’s really the only thing that differentiates her from her mother now. The other eye is definitely Akira’s. A dark disk of a pupil that I always associated with knowledge.

  “I can’t believe she let you run wild for three years,” I say.

  Ascalon shrugs in agreement. “I thought there was a good chance that once she discovered I broke free, she would come after me as well.” She smiles. “Every day in the first year, I expected to see you, her right hand, coming for me. But I believed myself to be dead anyway, so what did it matter?”

  “She never told me.”

  “I know.”

  “Why?”

  Ascalon takes another sip. “Guilt. Embarrassment. Those are the things my mother feared. Not death. The piano story from her childhood is true.”

  This surprises me. How would she know? “And the song?” I ask.

  “She sang it the day she put me into that . . . that thing.” She eyes the AMP chamber. “I just took it and improved on it. Something I’m used to doing.”

  “Did the islanders really just let you dig that hole?”

  “They dug it for me,” she says. “They built the entire place by my specifications. They believed it was what my mother wanted. And again, she didn’t interfere.”

  “She wasn’t even the one who pinged me to meet.”

  “No. That was me. You understand now, don’t you?”

  “Understand what?” I ask.

  “She let all of this happen,” Ascalon says. She blows on her tea. Wisps of steam float off the top. “Which means she wanted it.”

  I finish my cup. Ascalon pours me some more. The scars on her wrists are already fainter. She’s steady with the kettle, even with her mother’s hands freshly sewn on.