“He did today,” I said. “Once is enough.”
“It goes against their religion, man. Their whole thing is like whether something competes with God or not.”
“That’s all we’ve ever been doing. We just haven’t been very good at it until now.” I looked at the mirror again.
“You expecting someone else or—”
I cut him off by putting one hand up and the other to my ear. “Hey Michael . . . oh, that’s great news. Yeah . . . uh huh, yeah. Chris and I are on our way, but we won’t run anymore stop lights.” I tried to laugh. “Are you sure you’re okay? Uh huh, uh huh. Well, that’s a huge relief. Alright then, we’ll see you soon.”
Chris looked confused. “He’s feeling better?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“I thought you said—”
“Well . . . I guess it passed.”
I grabbed my bag and got out of the car. The door slamming behind me barely made a sound, like a single cannon fired far off on the horizon. There was something cold numbing me now, protecting me, taking over as the adrenaline slowed. But even though my mind was shutting down, I could sense that things were still moving around me—that the shots were landing somewhere.
“What about the car?”
The words barely registered. I kept walking toward the Midland Park Library where Michael’s NASA class was.
“Dorian, what are you going to do about the car? You can’t just leave it, can you?” Chris called after me, almost yelling.
I mumbled some incoherent lie, stringing together the first words that came to mind. “Mrs. Monroe’s on her way . . . I’ll have to tell her it’s going to be a little later, though. She got called back into work . . . that’s why she couldn’t come get me herself, but she said she should be off soon. Triple A’s taking care of the flat.”
Chris got out of the car.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to see how Michael is.”
“He’s fine—I told you.”
“Yeah, but I want to talk to him. I just called a second ago and he didn’t answer. It’s weird that—”
“He’s probably back in class now. And he probably feels bad that we both ran around town on his behalf. Especially since you were in the middle of that study session.”
“Everyone understood—they were all worried.”
“Why not just go back, finish up, and come hang out for real in a couple hours? If he’s fine, he’s fine. He’s not going anywhere.”
Chris looked me in the eyes. “Why do you care so much?”
“I don’t.”
He stood there for a long time, considering, before he finally said, “Well . . . could you just tell him to call me when he’s free? And that I’m going to take him out for a space ice as soon as I’m done.”
“Will do.”
“You can come, too, if you want.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Chris stood there another few moments before his frustration abruptly collapsed in on itself. “Are you sure you’re okay? You’re really not looking so hot yourself.” His eyes fell to my splint. “And what happened there?”
“I just tweaked it. I’m fine,” I said, and started walking away.
“If you say so, but . . . you’d tell me if something was wrong, right? And I don’t just mean your arm,” he said sincerely.
I stopped walking and turned back. “Of course,” I answered, both relieved and horrified about what I’d just done, something inside me suddenly wanting to confess everything.
“Well, alright—I better get back. I’ll see ya soon okay?”
“Yeah.”
Chris had started rolling up his window, but then he stopped. “You should really be careful with that chip on your shoulder, thinking the world owes you something.”
“I appreciate your concern.”
“You should,” said Chris, smirking, as he rolled it up the rest of the way.
I figured he’d wait outside since he was suspicious, so I decided to go in for a while to make it look real, and started walking across the parking lot to the library entrance. Running my hands through my hair, I wondered how long it would take the police to put the pieces together if Michael hadn’t taken care of the mask or otherwise gave himself away. This might be the last time I could show my real face in public.
I stood just inside the doors and waited, watching a wedding by the fountain on the other side of the park. They were at the part where the groom walked down the aisle. The bride and bridesmaids appeared a few moments later and the thought came that it would never be me now. Not that I wanted to get married or anything. But it was nice to know you could if you met the right person. If I met Lena.
A few minutes passed and I stepped back out. The late autumn air made my arms quiver, pricking holes backward in time to when Chris and I played football in his front yard.
My fingers hadn’t felt numb then, just alive. I’d felt like I could’ve done anything. Been anything. Nothing yet existing that could complicate the things passing between us—each short-lived exhalation of breath was a confirmation of how real we both were.
The moment faltered and it seemed like the air had turned from crisp to cold, making me wish I’d worn a coat for the first time in ten months. I needed a friend like Chris more than anything now.
I stepped into a clump of bushes off the path and put on the thin contour mask so I wouldn’t be flagged by facial rec if they’d indeed discovered my identity. I thought about heading to the meet up point I’d agreed on with Ethan, but that was risky, and the high of the chase was wearing off and the exhaustion from surgery was coming back stronger than ever. I eventually decided to just sit down and think for a while. And soon, without realizing it, my eyes started to close.
Chapter 41
She was sitting underneath the cherry blossoms as I walked out of the park the next morning, looking just the way she had looked in Syd’s footage and a thousand daydreams.
I was disheveled after a night curled up in leaves, but seeing her there made me feel like the wind was inside me, replacing bone and tissue, making my inhalations one continuous breath. One continuous stream from boy to sky to universe. Every tree branch was an axon or a dendrite and then tree branch again, bending in the breeze.
It was the end of the blueprint, but I was paralyzed for the longest time, unsure of whether to step out of it. I’d always stared through screens and lenses and overlays like they were keyholes into different worlds, ones even stranger than the one I was in. And I always knew that somewhere there was a trapdoor big enough for me to fit through, but folding over into her plane still seemed impossible, even though I was right there. Even though if I called out right now, she’d hear me. She’d look up, and I’d merge into the dialogue.
As a result, I was having trouble finding the words that I’d rehearsed for months, and the ones I could remember didn’t seem to fit anymore. My throat was scratchy. My head swimming. Dazed. Even though I’d hoped against hope that she’d be here, her presence was still shocking since a part of me assumed that the recent events had subsumed her, too. Yet this was happening. All the motion and striving had been reduced to one fleeting moment.
“How’s your empire coming?” I asked in a rough, shaky voice, astonished that I’d actually spoken to her. My muscles had turned to water on the ten paces over but now they were starting to harden. Molecules disconnecting. Expanding. Drifting off into the ether.
She looked up with a tilted head. “Slow. But relatively bloodless at least.” Then she paused and looked at me, as if not believing I’d asked her the question. Floriet was a pretty obscure writer after all, little known outside of specialized academic circles. Definitely not someone you’d expect a stranger in the park to just walk up and quote. “Although, my dad’s been getting on my nerves lately, so we’ll have to see.”
“Yeah. I know how that goes.” I smiled, freezing and then unfreezing again in an instant, feeling every ounce of my blood trickle th
rough me. “But I find that a little hard to believe.”
“What, that I’d kill my, Dad? Well, I’d hope so.”
“No, no,” I said, horrified that I’d already said something stupid. “That things are going slowly, considering you’re almost done with Ourselves there. That’s not exactly bedtime reading.”
“How do you know I didn’t skip ahead?”
“You don’t seem like the type,” I said, directing more nanobots to my orbitofrontal cortex, the brain region associated with confidence. “And I know a skipper when I see one. My aunt.” I lowered my voice. “Classic end-reader. So is my dad. While my grandma starts books in the middle and then bounces around. She calls it reader-initiated en media res. Gets a kick out of figuring out what’s going on.”
“Floriet makes that hard enough as it is,” she said.
I nodded and was about to say something about how she was worth it when Lena asked, “So what happened to your arm?”
“Oh, you mean this nick here?” I held up the splint, knowing I’d gladly break every bone in my body for her—feeling now the same as I’d felt being chased yesterday, like everything was everything.
“You’re probably going to say I should see what the other guy looks like, right?”
“Nah . . . I actually fell in the library.”
She scrunched up her face, laughing. “Really?”
“But it in my defense, it was the highest shelf. And I was reaching for a Guillon’s Circle Seven.”
“Not many people out there who’d do that for Guillon.”
Guillon was one of Floriet’s principle disciples, although was probably the dullest, most meandering one.
“I have this thing for underdogs.”
“Yeah, but Guillon; his sentences are unreadable. And when you finally figure out what he’s ‘trying’ to say, you realize Floriet and Fuentes have already said it five times better.”
“The last few have been pity reads, sure, but A Treatise on Air had its moments.” I paused and smiled. “Are you this chatty with every hobo that wanders out of the woods?”
“Just the ones that know Floriet.”
She’d given me a once over when I walked up, but now she stopped to really look at me, studying my face. I felt warm. Self-conscious. Simultaneously somewhere right, but out of place, like I’d gone outside of the map in a VR game, doing something the developers never thought someone would do. “Well, so we know about the arm now. But how about that grass on your head?”
I ran my hands through my hair a few times.
“Let me guess. You were part of that wedding?”
I looked across the bushes at the remaining wedding tent and the few puddles of pinto bean and sangria vomit. It was never a good sign when you could tell a wedding’s theme after the decorations had come down. “I don’t think I’d even be in this good of shape if I were one of those jokers.”
“So you were partying solo, then?”
“Pretty much.” I laughed. “No, actually I was just out looking for my cousin’s downed pollinator drone. GPS died.”
“What kind was it?”
I knew she was a robotics genius, and she’d think me a poser if I tried to play it like I was anything other than a casual hobbyist, so I said, “Just a Narcroft 457 with a Gspace wireless. I know, I know. Dime store crap, right? That’s what I tried to tell my cousin, but you know some people are just born cheapskates.”
“I’d go with the Porter Lane 7. It’s not that much more expensive . . . actually you could probably get ’em used for about the same price as the Narcroft on XchangeX if you’re willing to do just a touch of self-assembly.”
“I’ll have to pass that along.” I’d been standing about three meters away because I didn’t want to seem weird, but I was starting to think it was actually weirder standing that far apart. Especially since we were shooting the shit now. So I took a step forward as naturally as I could. And then another, walking a few steps laterally so it didn’t seem like I was ‘closing in’ or anything. “So . . . you like drones then?
“I’m not sure I’d say ‘like,’ but I’m on my school’s tech squad for hybrid football, so I work with them a lot. Used to play on the field but . . .”
“But tech squad’s where all the action is.”
She nodded. “Getting that way. Especially now that people are starting to run robos in skill positions.”
“Like receivers?”
“And fullback and running back . . . and quarterback.”
“Get out of here,” I said, trying to act surprised. Hardly anyone in the country had good enough AI to run a drone at quarterback. You almost had to have artificial general intelligence for that to happen.
“At the end of the season anyway. It took until the playoffs to get its synthetic muscles and nervous system to play nice, and we’re still working on syncing the vision sensors with the GPU to spot delay blitzes and make zone reads.”
“Tricky stuff.”
“You play?”
“Yeah. It sounds like I should give up, though.” I wanted to step even closer, hating the space, wondering what it would be like to hold her. We were about equal height at six feet and I pictured us dancing to a Norman Cruze song.
“I don’t know if I’d say that.”
I chuckled. “It’s okay, it’s okay. I know when I’m covered. What are we talking passer rating?”
“Ninety to ninety-five, but I’m doing another retrofit so hopefully we can crack one hundred over winter break.”
“Winter break,” I repeated. Despite the cool off, the temperature had crept back into the eighties now that the sun was coming up, and there were butterflies and swarms of stingless bees flying around us. “I wonder what Floriet would’ve thought of all this?”
“She’d be horrified,” Lena said as she let a blue morpho perch on her arm. “I know we’ve got privacy laws now for public cam disclosures, but what happens when leaders change? This doesn’t go away.” Another one landed next to the first one. “I mean, look at the cams on this guy. They’re enough to make any fascist cum in his overalls.”
“Definitely too much empire out here,” I said, referencing Floriet, trying to iron out the quiver in my voice.
“Did you know that in the 1930s the Dutch kept some of the best records in the world? Their civil service was absurdly organized and efficient, so when the Nazis came they knew exactly who the Jews were . . . making for the highest extermination rate of any occupied country.”
This was something that Floriet wrote a lot about. It wasn’t that she was anti-efficiency per se, but she didn’t think it was God, either, saying in her last essay, “It’s not even that it’s only as good as what you’re trying to be efficient at. It’s that it tends to be the kind of means that consume the ends.” What would Floriet say in this moment, though? I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything, but nonetheless willed myself to sink deeper into my thoughts, far enough that the maelstrom around them almost muted, a mix of volatile compounds somehow proportioned into a stable stream. This was the conversation that I’d always wanted to have, that I’d dreamed of having, and now was having because I’d always kept believing it was possible.
“I reckon I’m ‘go with the flow’ enough to bore any future tyrant’s surveillance algorithm. Definitely not someone to drag out of bed in the middle of the night.”
My heart thudded, waiting for her reaction, and when she gave a half-smirk, I felt as light as one of the cherry blossoms falling around us. “I’m just hoping they’ll buy my ‘born again’ act.”
“Don’t wait too long.”
“Yeah . . . I just feel like such a hypocrite sometimes.”
“Keeping the empire inside isn’t easy,” I said, quoting Floriet again, but because my brain was starting to sync better with the module it didn’t feel like quoting anymore—but something I’d actually say myself. That I was the one thinking of it. “It gives me new found appreciation for my cat not eating my hamster.”
Lena closed her book and leaned toward me, still seeming both mystified and floored that she’d found someone to talk Floriet with. “Though that’s her point, too: Without being taught otherwise, the cat would eat it.
“And the same goes for us. We need some credible pathway to peaceful self-actualization or we start making life hard for people around us. That’s where the Victorians got it wrong; they tried to dam desire up. The communists pretended it didn’t exist. And the capitalists say, ‘It’s fertilizer; let’s spread it everywhere.’”
“Things are looking pretty fertile,” I said, as a bumblebee flew past me.
“Which is exactly the problem. It looks good.”
I had Floriet pulled up off to the side on my film and was speed-reading through parts that my BCI had identified as relevant to the current conversation so I wouldn’t sound like an idiot. One passage read: Since the 1500s, violence has sharply declined because we’ve been able to channel our ambition away from conquest and into wealth appreciation with the advent of double-book entry accounting and multi-shareholder corporations. But the violence hasn’t disappeared, it’s just been masked. Diverted to the environment with carbon and methane. Diverted to animals with factory farms. Diverted to future generations with debt. If you do an honest accounting, these have been the most violent centuries in human history.
“But there’s five hundred ppm of atmospheric C02 that we can’t see,” I said, trying to synthesize the passage as quickly as I could. It was a little gloomy, but her abstraction analysis was one of my favorite parts. Not only did she talk about violence against the things you normally wouldn’t think about, she also talked about the ones inflicting it that you normally wouldn’t think about, such as bureaucrats and technocrats like central bankers. “Too bad for our kids.”
“Temporal violence,” Lena said, which was another variety: violence against the future. Violence against the unborn. That’s why Floriet disliked global warming and debt so much.
“It’s hard to do a full inventory with these million-year-old cans,” I said, rapping my head, still disbelieving I was with her. Like I was stealing these moments and someone was going to want them back. “Although with Revision . . .”
Sunlight 24 Page 32