She stared back at him but said nothing.
“This is the part where you say you’re sorry for going through my stuff,” Orion said.
“I’m not very big on apologizing for anything,” she replied flippantly.
Orion caught sight of the sketch of the small boy upturned in his bag, and for a moment, there was a flash of some expression on his face that Charlotte could not quite pin down. Alarm? Anger? Sadness?
“Who is the boy?” she asked.
He paused a moment before answering. “He was my son.”
“Do you have any photos of him?”
“I did have photos, but they’re gone.”
“How old is he now?”
Orion suddenly looked older, much older. His brow furrowed, accentuating the lines of age there, and the spark of levity in his eyes went out. His mouth opened to answer, but he hesitated and no words came out.
Charlotte was quick to pick up the hint. Not that the cue was subtle, but changing subjects, reading signs and avoiding awkwardness was a skill that made her good at winning over producers and agents. It helped her charm the men who made decisions when she needed to further her career, but to also learn to avoid those same men when conversations took on more predatory overtones. She was good at reading people, she was good at finding men who seemed safe. But she saw now she had struck a taboo subject, so she hastened to change the subject. At least for now. She picked up his copy of Frankenstein.
“Quite a grim book,” she remarked, inspecting the cover.
Orion’s face softened.
“Do you know what gets me about that book?” he asked, and he sat down on an open cot and leaned back on his hands. “Victor lets this monster—this monster that he created—slowly destroy all his friends and family before he finally resolves to fix the problem. Before he realizes he has no choice but to fight the creature himself.”
“He was terrified of the monster. He was afraid. Could you really blame him for running away from such a frighten-ing thing?”
“Yes,” said Orion, and he sat up, looking serious. “It shouldn’t take the end of everything he cares about to get him to stop hiding.”
“Are you a Frankenstein hunter yourself, Orion? Would you run off and fight a monster?”
She was teasing him now. And there was a smile playing just at the edge of her lips that made his heart do a backflip. The feeling was both familiar and distant.
“I’ve made mistakes,” he shrugged. “From the before times. I’ve waited a long time to address them. But it’s good to not wait too late. Even cowards will fight when their backs are to the wall.”
Charlotte was not quite sure, but she sensed an accusation in his words. Her shoulders stiffened.
“If you have something to say to me…” she began. There was a sudden, well-rehearsed iciness to her posture, as if she had practiced what she was going to say next in a mirror many times before. Because, of course, she had rehearsed this rebuttal. Of course, she had to be ready for someone to suggest she was a coward.
“Not everything is about you, Charlie,” he interrupted.
Their eyes locked on each other for a moment. He didn’t want to upset her, and he certainly did not want to have a discussion about his past right now. He had hoped it would be easier to win her over with everything he knew, with all the intimate details he had learned about her, but he could see now that securing her trust and affection would take time. Much more time, perhaps.
But there was a pull. She felt it suddenly, just like that lurch when they first met. There was some gravity that surrounded Orion. Her lips parted to say something, but he didn’t look up in time to notice.
“I have to get back out to the garden,” he said, and he smiled warmly at her again. He went to the door to brush the dirt off his jeans and white t-shirt, and then he gave her a nod and left.
Orion walked out to his plane at dusk. Golden light fell on the hills all around him. Everything there was yellow and blue sky and white clouds. When the rains came, everything would be flushed with green, but he liked it this way too. The dry grass and the Sub-Saharan sunset gave the vistas an appearance that was essentially African. It felt like the edge of the world. It felt like all the badness that had happened back home could never penetrate this far. Not across all that ocean and all that African desert and savannah. This place was an end, but also a beginning too. It was too pure, still too fresh. Perhaps American pioneers had a similar feeling when they first beheld the Rockies.
His plane was at the edge of the reserve. Its bright yellow wings stood out against the backdrop of a line of twisted baobab trees and underbrush that marked the edge of the deep forests of the reserve. Orion knew they had released lions there several years ago in a bid to raise Malawi’s profile in Africa’s safari tourism trade. His eyes swept the tall grass in all directions for the shape of a lioness looking back at him with an arched back. He imagined he saw the outline of such a creature several times.
When he reached the plane, he pulled out a small screwdriver and twisted off an inconspicuous panel nestled in the side of the tail. Inside the hidden compartment was a black device, a rectangular box adorned with something resembling a thick, blunt antenna. He pulled the device out and sat down with it on his lap.
“I told you I could do it,” said the device in a female’s voice through an unmarked speaker. “Given enough time, I knew I could crack it.”
The voice would have carried far in that quiet, empty field, but there was no one around for at least a mile.
“You’ve actually made progress?” asked Orion, amused.
“I penetrated the first firewall today. The others will be much easier now, though I cannot guarantee they have not detected me.”
“Well, it took you goddamn long enough, Diana.”
“I think what you’re trying to say is thank you,” the black box responded indignantly.
Orion rubbed his face, and he smiled.
“Thank you, Diana.”
“You’re welcome, Michael,” said the device.
After
Darnell Holmes waited in a clean lobby on the fifty-fifth floor of a New York high rise. He picked bits of dust that had settled on his perfectly creased Army dress pants. His ribbons and medals glinted on his chest in the light that poured in from the southward-facing windows. Manhattan was below. It seemed like such a quiet place from here.
“Just a minute, and he’ll be ready for you, Sergeant Holmes,” called the secretary.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
He only had another week to wear the uniform. There was no plan after that, not after nine years of service in the Army that started when he was just a boy.
For the last half-decade, he knocked on doors with chaplains and told spouses they were widows. He kept his green dress uniform always pressed and ready for that call. The visits were never very long. Sometimes there were kids, sometimes there were dinner parties at the house, sometimes the spouse was just there watching TV in pajamas. Sometimes he had to hide in a parked car a block away while he waited for the unwitting widow to return from the grocery store.
And after a couple years of that, he served in the storied Honor Guard in Washington. White gloves. Immaculate rifles with sharp bayonets. He handed flags to the families—to widows and moms and children at the funerals.
But that was all over now. It wasn’t an easy life. But it had purpose and meaning, and each morning he woke up there was a deep solace that greeted him because his job was important. It was essential. His career was a matter of life and death. How many pencil pushers in the corporate world get to say that?
Darnell would have spent his whole life doing that job, but that future was taken from him ten weeks earlier at Union Station in Chicago. Everyone had just been starting their work day when it happened, just another Wednesday morning.
All strip
es of commuters were moving about their lives in the towering hall. It was raining; the endless umbrellas and wet coats made the air sober. Folks stared at their phones and the departures boards, and no one was making eye contact with one another. It was a teeming mass of people, but with only the thinnest pulse of social activity. So no one was really watching except Darnell, who had been trained to walk through pomegranate orchards in Afghanistan with his head on a perpetual swivel. Schoolhouse doctrine called it “situational awareness,” and Darnell still had it in those days.
But he wasn’t fast enough to save the first few people from the shooter. It was a teen, an eighteen-year-old from Michigan who had grown up in a rural county where most of his social interaction came from strangers he met on websites who made him feel listened to and understood. They made him proud to be just who he was. White. American born. They stoked an ingrained sense that the country was on a moral decline that put people like him on the bottom, and eventually he was weaponized to take a stand against the injustice of it all. He was ready to do something about it.
Muttering about “Jews, blacks, and Mexicans,” the teen pulled an AR-15 from a duffel bag and began discharging the semi-automatic into a crowd. Darnell watched him do it. He ducked for cover at first, but then the gunman turned to aim at a larger mass of screaming people to his left, and Darnell saw his opportunity to flee the scene with the rest of the panicking crowd.
He could have just gotten away. He was fast in those days, and the shooter would have needed to get lucky to hit him in the back. Darnell was home on military leave to see his mother, father, and sister. They wouldn’t want him to risk throwing his life away for the sake of heroics on a day like that. No one would think less of him, certainly. This wasn’t some battlefield in Afghanistan where Darnell was accompanied by a platoon of forty armed soldiers. He didn’t want to die so close to home.
But Darnell had spent most of his career delivering terrible news to widows, watching families destroyed by wars that no one even remembered except the people who still fought them, and it lit a fire in him. His mind went blank with purpose, his heart beat so fast it was humming, and sweat broke out over his hands. Then he lunged towards the shooter, who had just begun to swing the crosshairs back in his direction.
Reaching with outstretched fingers, Darnell got a hold of the rifle’s barrel, but it was red hot and sizzled when it came into contact with his palm. Then the gunman managed to discharge a round into Darnell’s leg. But still, miraculously, Darnell did not let go of the rifle. The skin on his hand melting, his leg bleeding, Darnell did not release his grip.
They wrestled back and forth with the rifle for a matter of seconds that seemed to stretch without end. The gunman managed to pull the trigger to discharge two more rounds. One buried itself in Darnell’s right leg again, and the other into his left. And then Darnell started to fall to his knees. But still, he clung to the rifle with all the strength afforded him. A minute of agonized wrestling passed. Then the barrel slipped from his bloodied and blistering fingers, and the shooter retched the rifle free by slamming it against Darnell’s forehead.
As he slumped there kneeling on the ground, the gunman fired another round into Darnell, this one through his gut, and he was knocked flat on his back. Darnell doesn’t fully remember these moments. People told him about them later. Mostly he remembers looking up at the vaulted station ceiling, watching the morning sky through the glass windows and a bird fly by as the life ebbed out of him. The gunman stood over him, put the hot barrel against his forehead.
“You got some fight in you for a nigg—” the shooter had tried to say. But he didn’t finish the sentence. A security guard, seeing the gunman distracted, fired two rounds into the shooter’s chest, and the man died almost instantly.
Darnell woke up in a hospital the next day, his parents by his side. Media outlets were outside the building, all eager to hear that the hero of Union Station had pulled through. They would interview him plenty, but not yet. The publicity would come later. The journalists came around the time he started physical therapy, where he’d spend three months learning to walk again—this time with pins in his knees. The Army had his medical discharge paperwork ready before he left the hospital.
“We’re ready for you, Sergeant Holmes,” the secretary’s voice rang out.
Darnell rose and walked forward, trying to conceal his limp.
It was a stunning suite. Mr. Zimmer sat behind a large, gleaming desk. A wall of computer screens—some showing the news, some showing live feeds of activity inside Sharebox—flanked one side of the room, and floor-to-ceiling windows covered the other. There was someone, a thin man in black, laid out on a sofa in a corner, but Darnell couldn’t see his face at first.
“Hello there, Sergeant Holmes,” Mr. Zimmer rose from his seat and extended his hand. Darnell shook it and noticed Zimmer was in his socks. “Take a seat please. It’s great to be in the presence of a true American hero. Isn’t it, Arlo?”
The man on the couch sat upright and smiled, but he said nothing.
“I’ve been watching you, Sergeant,” continued Zimmer. “I caught you at the State of the Union address two months back. Quite an honor to be the president’s guest there. What a shame to have lost such a great man so soon.”
Darnell had always thought the president was a great man too. For years. He was starting to have some doubts now that the president was gone, but he kept those to himself.
“Yes, sir, I feel privileged to have known him. The Army has been good to me letting me attend such events,” Darnell said.
“You have been busy,” Zimmer nodded. “I’ve seen you speak several times at the Patriot Palace doing interviews. You’re very articulate for someone who…ah…came from such humble beginnings.”
Darnell grew up in south Atlanta to a drug-addicted mother. At least, that’s how the pundits always described his mom when they introduced him on their shows. His trajectory from living in urban decay to a public hero was a story the producers at the Patriot Palace loved, and he received frequent invitations to recount his upbringing on their shows. His testimony was proof for the masses that the American Dream was still real. You still could pull yourself up by your bootstraps and overcome racism and income inequality if you really wanted to, the pundits would say. Darnell did it, and so could you.
“I know the Army is forcing you out,” Zimmer said sympathetically. “And I’d like to give you a job where you can continue to serve.”
Darnell’s mouth worked, but he wasn’t quite sure how to respond. “Thank you, sir. I’m not quite sure what I want to do, exactly…”
“He doesn’t want to be a prop, Uncle,” interrupted the man sitting in the corner of the room. Darnell turned to face him and saw that he was still wearing the same grin as before. The stranger rose from the sofa and walked behind Zimmer’s swivel chair. His steps were quiet and catlike. The sides of his head were shaved tightly to his skin, and the hair atop was neatly combed to the side and held there with pomade. His smile was wide and unwavering.
“He wouldn’t be a prop,” responded Zimmer, agitated. “He’s going to be in the field. Finding real bad guys. Real work.”
“Bad guys?” Darnell asked. “What kind of work are you talking about?”
Zimmer motioned to the screens showing footage of Sharebox.
“Great things, just like this country, always invite lots of challenge and envy. The Sharebox is the target of hostile hackers and governments from around the world. They attack us every second of every day in a thousand different ways.”
Darnell nodded while looking at the screens. He saw a live feed of a group of schoolchildren moving through a virtual reality simulation of the Great Wall of China. On another screen, onlookers from around the world watched a tennis finals match being held in Australia, and everyone—every avatar—had a good seat.
“Moreover, Sharebox is more than just a socia
l media platform. It is integrated with the largest cloud infrastructure in the world. Half the internet is powered through it. That’s a lot of data. If a hacker could penetrate Sharebox, they could find just about anything. Or destroy it.”
“So, I imagine you have quite the army of engineers protecting it?” Darnell ventured.
Zimmer pointed a finger at him and winked. “You bet we do. But really, all those guys can do is tell me where the hackers come from. It’s on us to go and stop the attacks from happening again.”
“How do you stop the attacks?”
“The government is pretty busy right now,” said Arlo in a soft voice, while staring down at the city. “A lot of turmoil since the president died. But in his last weeks in office, he did sign an Executive Order giving private enterprises like ours more…flexibility in pursuing corporate saboteurs.”
Darnell knew then where he had seen the stranger before. Arlo had been a political youth organizer. He ran a rally at Berkeley once that turned violent and resulted in four people being critically injured. One was still in a coma. Arlo had been asked to step away from the limelight by his organizational leadership after that. Until things cool down, he was told. And here he was today.
Zimmer tapped his fingers on the table and studied Darnell’s face.
“We have some liberties to go out into the world and pull in our people,” Zimmer said. “Americans who are abroad and are working against us. We can extradite them here if we can find and arrest them. But it’s a bit of a sensitive issue. If we had a professional like you…”
“If we had a prop like you,” Arlo interrupted.
“A professional like you,” Zimmer continued, looking annoyed again. “It would add some legitimacy to our operations. It would put a good face on it. Impressions are important, I won’t deny it. You get out there and keep being a true hero serving your country by catching the bad guys.”
The Echo Chamber Page 4