The Echo Chamber

by Rhett J Evans

  Of course, he would never have shot the hacker or Charlotte Boone the way Arlo had screamed at him to do. He still had ethics, even if his deranged partner on this assignment did not. He wouldn’t accept another assignment with Arlo, that was for sure.

  If he was offered another assignment, he thought.

  Arlo had made a host of threats on the drive back to the hotel to get him fired; he called Darnell “unfit.” Darnell let a guy with ties to the American Nazi movement berate him for being unprofessional, and he just took the licks because he wasn’t sure himself what had happened.

  He thought about the way Boone looked at him on the parking garage roof. She looked terrified and beautiful, and a shudder took him. This didn’t happen in the service. Even when things on the battlefield got heated and confusing, he always had orders. He was serving the country. Not a morning passed where he had to look in the mirror and fear some existential crisis about the value of the life he was leading.

  Sure, there were others who did. There were others who gave up the wars as all a bad job, a scam, an exercise in futility. But he had never lost the faith back then. He was loyal. A good soldier.

  He thought about Sharesquare Industries, and his fat new salary and the cushy post-military life he had been offered by Devon Zimmer, the CEO. He wanted to be grateful for it. These were not good economic times. To his knowledge, Darnell had the best post-Army career opportunity of any veteran he had ever met, especially for a person of color. But as he sat there thinking about the parking garage rooftop and the look on Charlotte Boone’s face when they had briefly locked eyes, the air in his lungs seemed to sour.

  After

  Orion and Charlotte arrived back at the ranch shortly before supper. Their front fender was mangled, and the headlights were cracked.

  “What was all that for?” she had shouted as they drove out of Lilongwe. “What was the point of that destruction?”

  He kept his eyes on the road but was lost in thought, his fingers flexing loosely upon the wheel.

  “Diana,” he said at last—not speaking to Charlotte but to his satchel hanging behind the driver’s seat. “Power yourself down. It’s possible they haven’t tracked us out to the ranch yet.”

  “Yes, Michael,” said a female’s electronic voice from within the satchel, and the tone was familiar.

  Charlotte’s body tensed all over. Her anger nearly died in her throat, and an icy shiver ran through her veins.

  “What have you done?” she asked, her voice low.

  “Charlie, I can explain everything.”

  “You have a copy of Diana here?”

  Orion kept his eyes on the road, no doubt his brain working to find the line between tactful and truthful.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You brought a copy of the most dangerous technology in the world to my home? And I opened my doors to you. And it calls you Michael. Why?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way,” Orion replied, and he turned to look at her, sad and suddenly exhausted. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t need your apologies. I just want you to leave.”

  Orion said nothing for a moment, but he swallowed and nodded.

  “I can leave, but I’d appreciate if you would hear me out first.”

  “I don’t owe you that.”

  “No, you don’t. Not in this life anyway. But I’d like to take you somewhere before I go. I’d like to show you something.”

  Charlotte laughed derisively, trying to affect an air that she hoped came off cool and commanding, but of which neither of them found convincing.

  “Once we get out of this car, I’m never going anywhere with you again.”

  The words seemed to hit Orion hard, and his shoulders slouched. He sighed. Then he spoke softly but quickly.

  “I know your lipstick is Chanel number four-sixteen. It’s the only makeup you still wear out here because it doesn’t run in the humidity, and you’re running out, but you can’t help using it because it reminds you of home. I know why you sleep in the library so much. I know the ranch is running low on money, and you’re scared because this was all supposed to be just a temporary vanity project. I know you came to Malawi, of all the places in the world, because this is the only place you have a good memory with one of your parents. Your mom always pushed you too hard, and your dad was never around. But you met him here once, before you were a star, before he died, when you were just fourteen.”

  Charlotte’s next words died in her mouth. She turned to face the road, her eyes screwed up in sudden concentration, her stomach giving an unpleasant lurch.

  “You could have guessed all that,” she responded after a moment. “I think I said some of that to an old lover.”

  Orion shot her a sideways glance. “You and I both know your old lovers, of which there are few, are all under non-disclosure agreements.”

  “You’re not proving anything other than that you’re creepy,” she said, but her voice quavered. “I want to get out of the car.”

  “You modeled the library in the ranch house after a room your father loved when you were both on safari in Tanzania. He told you that day that he was sorry for not being a bigger part of your life. He told you he was proud of you and that things were going to be different, that he would be around more often. He would help you get a break from your overbearing mom.”

  The blood in Charlotte’s face was draining. She clenched her fingers, and her knuckles turned white.

  “Then he died two weeks later once you were back in the States,” continued Orion slowly, pausing to study Charlotte’s face. He didn’t want to push her too hard, but he didn’t want to stop too short either. “That heart attack—”

  “That’s enough,” shouted Charlotte, and her tone was cold.

  A minute passed in silence. Their beaten-up truck passed the last few brick homes that marked the outskirts of Lilongwe, and they turned westward back towards the lake.

  “I’m not some stalker, Charlie,” Orion said, earnesty somehow still lined in his face. “You know it. You can feel something, can’t you? I’ve seen it in your eyes. Some connection that doesn’t make sense, something you can’t put your finger on. It’s too hard to explain it all here, but I can show you, I promise. It won’t take long, and it’ll clear everything up.”

  It felt like she had to remind herself to breathe. What was that spark between them? That urgency? No one could know those things. Not unless Orion was in her head. Curiosity warred with her caution as she watched the forests on the outskirts of Lilongwe slip away.

  “And if I agree, you’ll tell me how you know all that stuff?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  “Then you can show me what you need to show me,” she said, as if pronouncing a judgment.

  “Great,” Orion answered, with visible relief. “It’ll be a short plane ride—”

  “Then you will leave the ranch permanently.”

  Orion breathed out slowly, the escaping air deflating him.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Before

  One of the many perks to life at the Sharesquare campus was the architectural whimsy. There was a bowling alley, a rock-climbing wall, and a whole room dedicated to skeeball. But Catalina’s favorite perk was the secret bar on the third floor. When she was made an executive, she was given the privilege to access a room that could only be opened by tipping a copy of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations off a nearby bookshelf, which caused a discrete looking wall panel to rotate open. Executives were told to take all precautions necessary to keep the room a secret.

  Inside was a fully stocked bar and a couple oak tables. The room was adorned with framed pictures of dogs playing poker. It was a fun and quirky space that was empty just about all the time.

  Technically, Catalina wasn’t supposed to come here anymore
since she was no longer in charge of her own product team. But she had long since given up worrying about whose toes she stepped on. So she came here most afternoons to drink whiskey and submit new code to the communal Diana code library in peace.

  But today as she stepped inside the secret bar, she found Mike already sprawled out on a leather sofa at the back of the room. He rose with a start.

  “Oh, Cat, it’s just you,” he said as his eyes came into focus.

  “Don’t mind me,” she replied, putting her laptop down and hoping he would simply go back to napping. She walked to the bar and set about pouring herself a small glass of the room’s most expensive scotch.

  “Pour me out one too,” he said, a bit sleepily still. “If you don’t mind.”

  Cat bit her lip and poured out two glasses as Mike rose to join her at the bar.

  “What brings you here today?” he asked.

  “I try to come here every day, but specifically I needed a quiet place to make a phone call. Some newspaper said they’d like me to comment on the Nutrino Mixer.”

  “We’re still working on that?”

  Cat scowled at him.

  “Sorry,” he said, raising his glass to her. “Cheers to us screw ups.”

  Catalina restrained an impulse to snap at this characterization and grudgingly clinked glasses.

  “I take it you’re no closer to success on the brain downloading effort?”

  “Well,” Mike mused, and he seemed to brighten at the question. No one seemed to ask about his progress anymore and his colleagues had stopped making eye contact with him in the hallways as if his failure might be contagious. “We are definitely closer. We’ve made limited progress on a practical strategy for neural digitization, but we’ve hired some theoreticians and are poised to publish a couple white papers.”

  “So you’ve made theoretical progress?”

  Mike’s face reddened. “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds stupid. But yes, we’ve made some leaps in theory. We believe it could be possible to digitize the brain in a matter of a decade, but the problem remains what to do with the information. The capabilities of computing power to host it still lag.”

  “Can you wait a decade for a breakthrough?”

  Mike made a gesture somewhere between a smirk and a shrug. “Yeah, right. This whole company runs on Wall Street quarterly revenue goals. I won’t have anything to show the CEO or investors for years. No publicly owned company could tolerate that. I’m getting shut down. I’ve already been given the news. I’m getting folded under Devon, like you.”

  Catalina felt genuine pity upon hearing this. Mike had never been a stellar employee—at least, not according to her. But he had been set up for failure. She reached out to him, and for a moment they clasped hands. It was the first time she had ever voluntarily made a physical connection with anyone at work beyond a handshake. The moment passed quickly, and they turned their attention back to their whiskeys.

  “What’s the deal with this article about the Nutrino Mixer?”

  “I’m not sure,” Catalina responded, reaching for her phone. “The Post said they did some research on the Mixer, and they were about to publish it but wanted to talk to someone in charge of the product first to get a comment. Give me a second to call them.”

  Catalina tapped in the number for the contact she was given and held the phone to her ear. The phone rang twice.

  “Hello,” answered the female voice on the other side.

  “Hello, my name is Catalina Fernandez. I am the product lead for the Diana-integrated Nutrino Mixer. I was told to give you guys a call.”

  “Oh, of course. Of course,” said the woman on the phone, but her voice sounded grave. Cat wasn’t sure why, but suddenly a knot seized her stomach.

  “Listen, we did a two-month study on the Nutrino, and we found a few irregularities. It started out as a lightweight research piece to understand if the smoothies were truly effective at helping your customers lose weight. But some of the ingredients started catching our health team’s attention.”

  “Okay,” said Cat, puzzled.

  “Stoneseed root is a medicinal herb that is believed to promote sterility in women. Wild Carrot Seed has been used to stem embryonic implantation after sex. It’s essentially a contraceptive. Rutin is a citrus flavonoid that behaves similarly.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re telling me—”

  “We also found trace amounts of perfluorooctanoic acid, a substance used in non-stick pan coating that is believed to be safe in small amounts but also has been linked to fertility issues. Bisphenol A too. Why would Diana source such ingredients for Nutrino Mix smoothies?”

  “Diana is given a wide berth to choose optimal nutrition mixes for her customers. It’s odd that she sourced in some chemicals, but our protocols ensure the smoothie ingredients for each customer are always FDA-compliant.” Cat tried to say the words calmly, but her head was beginning to reel.

  Mike caught her eye and saw the hairs on her arms rising.

  “Yes, that is true,” began the journalist on the other end, and she was talking even more slowly now, undoubtedly choosing her next words carefully. “But did you know that Diana is only serving these specific fertility-suppressing ingredients to a certain demographic of customers?”

  “A certain demographic?” Cat sputtered out confused, nearly choking on the words.

  “Yes, it appears like she is trying to poison a…well, a certain kind of people.”

  The room was beginning to spin. The female voice on the other end said a few more words, and then Cat dropped the phone to the floor.

  After

  A red sun hung over the lake. Its reflection turned the waters a shade of scarlet as a flock of sandpipers glided across the water and settled in a grove of trees on the ranch. They all began chittering to each other, and the sound echoed across the landscape. Orion could see fishermen unmooring their boats, their adolescent sons helping them cast off the ropes, as they rowed off in search of chambo and kampango catfish. Some also carried nets for harvesting rainbow-colored cichlids for sale to Western buyers looking to stock aquariums. Many a dentist’s office fish tank were populated by the Malawi cichlid.

  He would miss all this, if this didn’t work.

  Orion wasn’t sure what he would tell her. Telling her everything at once would be insane. She would never believe it.

  But maybe the chemistry would come back. They had spent a week in that stone city on the island Zanzibar once. He saw her sitting at a beachside bar on a warm night with a cool breeze. He offered to buy her a drink, she declined. He told her she was marvelous in Ruins of Eden, that he was glad she won the Oscar but she should have gotten the Golden Globe too, and probably a producer’s credit for all the work she did behind the scenes. Then Charlotte let him buy her a gin and tonic. And they stayed up all night talking about Hollywood, about Africa, and about how the paparazzi can’t find anyone here.

  The next day he took her up in the two-seater, single engine flyer. There was a small, two-runway airport on the island. They flew to the mainland, across the coast, and into a game preserve. Orion took the prop plane low over the savannah and spooked a herd of shaggy wildebeest. They stopped for a picnic there, landing the plane gently on a long stretch of yellow prairie. She taunted him by pretending to spot lions as they ate. Then Orion took the plane back up again, soaring across the lowlands where the great peaks of Kilimanjaro tumble down into the savannah, and they looked up in awe at the mountain’s snowy tops shrouded in cloud.

  They returned to Zanzibar that evening, exhausted but overcome with the wonder and wildness of all they had seen. They made love for the first time that night in an elegant hotel room with a wide balcony that opened out over the Indian Ocean. The countless stars of the African sky shined in the dark water and gave everything a soft glow. A soothing wind was on the air, so the windows w
ere open. Orion could remember it all. The roar of the waves. The smell of her warm skin. The electric pleasure of running his fingers through her red hair. The way they watched the draped mosquito net canopy over the bed sway in the breeze as they lay there. The memory of that long day was the richest one in all his long lives.

  Then they spent a week together roaming the Stone Town of Zanzibar City, picking their way across medieval embattlements, bazaars, gardens and museums. When all that walking and eating from greasy lunch stands exhausted them, they found a luxury overwater bungalow, held in place by an assortment of wooden poles and bridges, on a perfectly empty, crystal-sanded beach—far from the crowds. And they whiled away the hours in a state of undress with no care in the world to burden them, lost in paradise for three days, indulging in all the heady pleasures that accompany a new romance—when everything in the relationship is all laughter, soft lips, and wandering hands.

  “When do you think this little fling will flame out?” she had asked him, lying curled up with her head on his chest. “That’s what this is, right?”

  “If it’s a fling,” he said, breathing in her scent, “let’s fling together for as long as we can.”

  She felt his chest rise and fall, and she moved her fingers in delicate circles on his skin underneath a satin bedsheet. “I’m not going anywhere in a hurry,” she whispered.

  She didn’t remember any of that now, though. And why should she?

  Charlotte rode out on a horse to his plane in the late morning accompanied by Moyenda. The yellow flyer was still on the edge of the reserve, silhouetted on an empty plateau surrounded by hills. She dismounted, wearing leather boots and a bomber jacket. Always fashionable, but all business today. Orion was dressed in a linen shirt very much like the one he wore when they first met at that beachside bar in his memory.