It’s a nightmarish sight. Bad as it was to witness the destruction of its façade that night, seeing it partly reduced to rubble in the cold light of day is even worse. It looks like the ruins of a tomb, recently unearthed, roped off by yellow tape and a makeshift chain-link fence hastily erected in the predawn hours. Workers in respirators, hazmat suits, and hard hats file in and out, selling the story that it was an explosion made worse by the hazardous chemicals stored in the building.
When I look up to the sixth floor, however, I see Nathan’s office there in the corner. The windows on that level have been shattered, the walls blown out by gunfire—except his, almost like the perpetrators ran out of bullets or decided it would be poetic to leave one intact. I only hope this holds true for whatever might be hidden inside.
I exit Jason’s mind. He eyes me perplexedly. “Already done?”
“I am,” I say gravely, though I remind myself time passed for me while in someone’s mind at a much slower rate than it did for them. “We have to go back. You were right. Nathan was trying to tell me something with his last thought.”
Jason explains this to Mayra. Both fall silent as if waiting for the other to suggest this is ludicrous. We’re supposed to be getting away from these people, not knocking on their front door.
“What if they’re waiting for us?” he asks. “If our last couple of encounters with them is any indication, they could have a dozen guards around the building itself, to say nothing of the ones they’ll have inside.”
“Nathan could’ve run away. Instead, he spent the last minutes of his life trying to keep me and my servers from falling into their hands,” I say. “If there’s even a chance he was trying to tell me something important, something worth losing his life over, I can’t let him down. I owe it to him to go back.”
This seems to convince Jason. I shrug and add, “Besides, you’re riding shotgun with a holographic wonder woman supercomputer, right? They might outgun us, but they can’t outthink us.”
XX
Okay, so three hours, 150 miles, and 8.4 gallons of fuel later, this hubristic, not-so-super-computer, not-so-wonder-woman is still coming up dry on the plan front. We’ve even switched out who gets the interface chip a few times, allowing me brainstorming sessions with both Mayra and Jason as we journey back to Boston, but to no avail.
“The omnipresent campus security cameras are a problem,” Jason says rightly.
“We can assume they’re going to have photos of both of us,” Mayra says, also rightly.
“They won’t let anybody on campus in a vehicle that doesn’t get searched,” I say back. “And if we try to breach at night, they’ll have the advantage, as their night vision gear seems standard issue. I can only help adjust one of your guys’ eyes to the dark at a time and even then it won’t be as good as their tech-enhanced optics.”
So, we go around and around a few times until it becomes abundantly clear being devious isn’t my strong suit.
When we reach the River Street exit off the Mass Pike into Cambridge, Mayra taps Jason’s leg.
“Your friend explained about her simulation,” Mayra says to Jason, who wears the interface chip. “The cameras are doing the heavy lifting. But there are blind spots. Like, out in the town she could go onto a roof, but the streets were vacant. Got to be some of that on campus, too, right?”
My mind races. She’s right.
“There are, mostly around the edges,” I tell Jason. “We can circle the campus and see which ones she thinks might work. Doesn’t solve the problem of the building itself.”
He relates this to Mayra. “Means there are options. They teach you in enforcement not to look at a problem as a single mass you to have to solve in one fell swoop. Solve it piece by piece, chip away at it, and you’ll eventually eat the whole elephant. Make sense?”
It does, but I’m glad she can’t see my reaction. I feel silly for thinking the perfect plan would just pop in my head.
“What about guards?” Jason asks.
“If they’re understaffed, they’ll over-rely on the cameras,” Mayra and I reply at the same time. “The guards they do have will be focused at sensitive sites, not entrances,” she finishes.
Now I feel less silly and more like a tough, poacher-busting small-town sheriff—if only for a moment.
We circle the campus at a distance, knowing even with new plates, a gas-powered vehicle on mostly empty streets will draw attention. As predicted, we don’t see many guards. The traffic gates are down and there are a couple of uniformed private security types milling around the pedestrian crossings, but it’s hardly Fort Knox.
I take this all in, particularly because the guards aren’t the bearded special-ops hard-asses we came across in New Hampshire. In fact, these fellows give the impression it’s just another day on campus. Maybe that’s the idea.
It’s when we park about sixteen blocks away I come up with what I think will be our next best move. I tell Jason, who shakes his head.
“No—no way,” he says. “That’s insane.”
“Tell Mayra,” I implore him.
“Tell me,” Mayra says. “Let an officer of the law be the judge of what’s insane or not.”
He hands over the interface chip. I tell Mayra my plan, and for a moment, I can’t tell if she’s thinking the same thing as Jason. Then she nods, her gaze traveling beyond the windshield to the campus in the distance.
“I think so,” she says, answering an unasked question. “Maybe, maybe.”
Jason protests, but he’s been overruled and knows it. “When are you thinking of doing this?” he asks.
“Right now,” Mayra says. “Daylight’s burning.”
Jason looks stricken. Mayra nods to me and reaches for the interface chip. I black out and come back to Jason. Mayra has left the car, giving us a moment.
“I’m sorry,” I say, lapsing into my role of emotional helpmate.
“It’s not that,” Jason says, taking my hand. “It’s just…this might be good-bye. Again. I feel like I just met you. But you might not be coming back.”
“You’re taking the same exact risks,” I counter. “But this is what we’ve decided to do, right?”
But I know what’s going on. It’s a version of what he felt when I returned to him following his brief nap earlier. He’s not sure what to do with the fact that he has feelings for a digital simulation of a young woman he met in Paris so many years ago. Is he thinking about her? Or about the person—okay, artificial consciousness—he’s gotten to know on the run? One who, well, lied her eyes out about the provenance of their initial meeting?
I mean, if I had it my way, I’d kiss him before he could even get the words out of his mouth, but I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong way to do this. My desire for him is the emotional equivalent of opening the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei. But my guilt over the manipulation makes me wonder if, should I tell him the truth, it’ll be the last I see of him.
If this really is the end for either one of us, it’s devastating to think about all the things we’d never know or get to explore. Looking over at Jason, I can tell he’s thinking the same thing.
“See you soon,” I say.
“Yep,” he replies.
But his hand remains on mine until Mayra knocks on the window.
The best place to enter campus unseen is the Ames Street pedestrian gate near Kendall Square. When security tightened around 9/11, this gate—deemed too far off the beaten path to be well guarded—was welded shut. This worked fine for several years until rust set in, a few semesters’ worth of students kicked at it a few times, and it finally opened. As it was used almost solely as a shortcut by students living in off-campus housing in East Cambridge far from the main gate, nobody said anything. No one cared. A chain hung limply from the nearby fence as if waiting for a lock, but none ever arrived.
As it was no longer recognized by the university as a gate, there was also no need to install a camera over it when the last major wave of cameras was installed i
n 2009, providing the campus with its near-100 percent coverage.
Mayra and I make a long circuit through Kendall Square before turning in the direction of campus. We don’t speak as we walk at first, less to prevent passersby from thinking Mayra is crazy, and more because we have little to say. It’s cloudy out today, the sun hiding behind layers of gray.
“I remember what it was like to think of the future,” Mayra says, breaking the silence. “It’s something—all the planning, all the hopes, but also the easy assumptions of how tomorrow won’t look so different from today. But since Bill died, I’ve found it hard to escape the past. It takes over everything. You have new challenges, but forty years of marriage conditions you to live a certain way. It feels unnatural trying to function as half a person.”
“You miss him a lot?”
“Yes, but it’s not what you think it’s going to be,” she explains. “You miss intimacy first. That feeling of closeness to another human being. We weren’t really romantic anymore. Hadn’t been for years. Those old couples kissing on TV like solving erectile dysfunction reignited their sex life? Not us! But that space he inhabited in the house. The gravity and oxygen he took up. I feel that absence every day. Dying first means he got the better part of the deal, never having to live without someone at his side who’s loved him his whole life.”
She says this last part without a hint of bitterness, which I find surprising. I sense something here beyond her words. A certain weight. Is it the burden of her partner’s death? Or how it reflects her own frailties? I’m not certain how to respond.
“I’m sorry,” I say finally.
“Don’t be,” she says. “You’re the one who brought me out of that house and gave a little meaning to my last days here. You’d be surprised what giving someone like me some responsibility can do. Particularly since no one’s needed me for much for some time now. So, thank you.”
I glance ahead. The Ames Street gate is in sight. I realize there’s a part of Mayra that thinks this could all be over in a few minutes, so she wanted to make sure she said what she said first. I take her hand.
“We’ll be okay,” I say, though I’m not sure I mean it.
Mayra nods but doesn’t reply. As we step to the broken gate, the familiarity of the sight, albeit now through Mayra’s senses instead of the camera angles I’m accustomed to seeing the simulation building from, takes me into my own past. I wonder if it will envelope me. I flashback to the images of Nathan, Dr. Choksi, and Suni lying dead. I see Jason’s memory of the ruined iLAB building reflected in the glass door. My past is ashes. My future, if I have one, promises…what? Complications, possibly even more lies, but also time in which to keep on living. And maybe that’s enough.
That’s what I have to hang on to.
“Ready to get crazy?” Mayra asks as she slips through the gate, a twinkle in her eye.
XXI
Though it’s only been less than a week since the campus was evacuated, to look at it one could believe it had been far longer. No one has shoveled the snow, which blankets the walkways and steps alike. A pipe descending the side of one of the Cold War–era buildings has frozen and burst, a beautiful explosion of ice cascading out from the break like a blooming flower. A few first-floor windows are shattered, likely by looters. Icicles drip over doorways like broken prison bars, daring someone to step out of the darkened buildings they guard.
Only the trees look the same, the leaf-stripped white oaks rising alongside the pathways like jagged sentinels, letting passersby know come spring, they will lead nature’s reclamation of this place if uncontested.
Mayra strides purposefully past all of this, high-stepping through the snow like a drum major, even when the powder reaches above the rim of her boot.
We’re spotted as soon as we make it to the first main campus artery. This one is plowed. We arrive as a black SUV passes, chains on the tires crunching ice. The driver smokes with his window down and glances our way, his reaction hidden behind sunglasses. Though the truck doesn’t slow, he seems to gauge whether we’re his problem or if he can shrug it off on someone else. As if to punctuate his judgment that it’s the latter, he exhales a dragon’s breath of smoke, flicks the cigarette into the snow, and drives on without looking back.
“So far, so good,” Mayra says airily.
We see no one for the next quarter mile. Mayra pauses a few seconds to catch her breath, leaning heavily on a granite planter, but the only movement arrives in the form of a pair of squirrels chasing each other through the branches of a nearby ash tree.
This changes when we near the iLAB. Though the image from Jason’s memory was bad enough, the reality is worse. The building looks like a pillaged tomb. Doors have been wrenched away and walls obliterated for efficacy’s sake, likely to facilitate the removal of the servers and anything else not nailed down. I wonder if the building’s even structurally sound. Snow has been allowed to blow in through the shattered windows, carrying in trash and leaves. The lobby looks like an abandoned alleyway.
But there in the upper corner, Nathan’s office window remains intact. I can only hope the interior is equally undisturbed.
I count six guards at the site entrance, though a double-wide trailer—some kind of command center—has been set up a few yards outside the chain-link fence and may contain more. Unlike the rent-a-cops at the campus gates, the men here are the same kind of muscle-bound, operator types we encountered in New Hampshire—multiple firearms, multiple magazines, knives, even mace hang from their Kevlar-clad bodies like ill-matched Christmas ornaments.
“Hagar?” Mayra calls out. “Hagar!”
She staggers forward theatrically as two of the guards come out to meet her. The four in back look more amused than intimidated. The two in front—a young Caucasian and a slightly older African American—both have their hands on the machine guns hanging in front of their chests.
“Hagar!” Mayra cries, more agitated by the second.
“Excuse me, ma’am?” the younger guard asks, raising a hand. His accent is Southern. He’s little more than a kid. “You need to stop—”
“Oh, good,” Mayra says, as if seeing the men for the first time. “Maybe you can help me. You see my dog? She’s a little Jack Russell. Name’s Hagar, like the mother of Ishmael and the second wife of Abraham.”
The guard isn’t sure what to do with this information. He doesn’t have a nametag but the heavy boots he wears have “Saitta” written on them in marker. He’s about to address Mayra again when he looks back to his partner for guidance. Mayra sees this as an excuse to keep going.
“She got away from me in the street and ran in here,” she continues, looking all around. “I don’t mean to cause you any trouble at a time like this, but well…she’s all I’ve got.”
She steadies herself as she says this, as if it might be true. Saitta shakes his head.
“Sorry,” he says. “We haven’t seen a dog, and this is a restricted area. It’s dangerous here—”
“Wha…?” Mayra asks. “What happened?”
“There was an industrial accident. The ground is unstable. If you’ll let me walk you back to the gate—”
“Will you let me call her?” she asks, then steps forward. “Hagar! C’mon, girl! Dangerous in here! Hagar!”
The other guard stiffens, no longer willing to placate this madwoman. He smells a rat. He gives Saitta a look as meaningful as a command and the younger man grabs Mayra’s arm.
“Ma’am, as I said, we need to escort you out to the street now.”
As soon as his hand touches her, she softens—staring into his eyes with madness and love. “Hagar,” she whispers quietly. “You’ve become handsome. I knew I’d find you.”
While this makes the other guards chuckle, happy to have let their comrade be humiliated, it incenses Saitta. He roughly pushes her forward, but she “loses her balance” and reaches out for him to steady herself. One hand grabs at his shoulder as the other reaches for her interface chip.
Everything goes dark.
XXII
A second later, I’m shaking my head at Mayra while giving her wrist a triple squeeze. Our signal. She immediately goes docile, a chastised child wanting her punishment to be over.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t help you,” I say through Saitta’s mouth, stern now.
“It’s okay,” Mayra mutters, seemingly confused.
“Can we call you a taxi or something?” I continue, even as I search Saitta’s mind. His first name is Timothy. The other guard is the musically named Cory DeJoria. “Do you have somewhere you can go?”
“Of course,” Mayra says, as if in a trance, indicating the neighborhoods north of campus. “I’ll go home.”
“This way, ma’am,” I say, trying my best to sound as if Saitta’s nearing the end of his patience.
We’re out of earshot of the other guards, but we’re not taking any chances. I’m still holding her arm as we near the Massachusetts gate, the very one Nathan’s killers came through. The gate and guardhouse I’d seen bullet-riddled are back to their original condition. As if nothing happened.
I nod to my fellow guards, indicate Mayra with a shrug, and point to the sidewalk.
“Be safe,” I say.
I give her arm a gentle squeeze but then she heads away. She doesn’t look back even once.
Her placement of the interface chip was perfect. It’s on my—well, Saitta’s—neck below his shirt collar. I adjust it, careful not to break the connection, then head back to my post.
Cory waits for me, lighting a cigarette. “Surprised you were so gentle with her,” he says. “She was crazy as hell. If she’d touched my face, I would’ve shot her then and there.”
I search Saitta’s memory. He thinks of Cory as an odd duck, someone who doesn’t believe all the hype about the coming apocalypse, believing instead it’s a hoax perpetuated by the president to accumulate wide-ranging powers. He’s told Saitta he plans to take the money he makes to Antigua in a few months to live like a king.
Emily Eternal Page 13