The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

by Palmer, Jacob

  “We do mind you asking,” Gabrielle said over her shoulder.

  “She’s just kidding,” Luci said. “We’re biologists, programmers, geneticists. We do all kinds of stuff here.”

  “It used to be a private library,” Ash said. “Now it’s mostly just storage, paper historical records and stuff. The rent is relatively cheap, and nobody bothers us. The owners of the building are in China, of course.”

  The meal passed in nervous small talk, and Edie thought of Abram. That she had to warn him about the CIA women, that he shouldn’t return to the apartment.

  “You think I could use one of your phones to contact my boyfriend? Let him know I’m alright?”

  “Actually, phones don’t work down here,” Luci said.

  “I’ll just go out in front of the building or something. It’ll just be a minute.”

  “You can’t call your boyfriend or anyone else,” Gabrielle said with a mouth full of salad.

  “What do you mean?” Edie said, laughing uncomfortably.

  “I mean we’re fucking terrorists. Have you not put the pieces together yet? The lab equipment and the fact that we’re hiding down here like mice? We’re GoldbarBio. The GoldbarBio. There are cells all over the world, but we’re the main group. You hit the jackpot.”

  Edie had read countless articles about this particular bioterrorist cell, as it was believed they were responsible for unleashing the virus that quietly rendered her and Abram, and everyone else she knew in San Francisco, sterile. She sat, stunned, as the others continued eating.

  “Listen, I don’t care. I don’t care who you are. I’m not interested. I just want to talk to my boy-friend.”

  “You may not care, but a whole lot of people do care. And now that Octavia brought you here, we have to figure out what to do with you.”

  “Don’t be mean to Miss Edie,” Octavia said, climbing onto Edie’s lap. “She’s my best friend. She saved me from the devils.”

  “What is she talking about? What exactly did you save her from?” Gabrielle said.

  “Two women, with a child around Octavia’s age, attacked us at Alamo Square Park. They took us back to an apartment in my same building. Across the hall. They claimed they were from the CIA. They were staking out my apartment, I guess. Waved guns in our faces. There was a dead guy on the floor. The guy that lived there, my neighbor. I sound like a crazy person.”

  “How did you two end up here?”

  “A police drone busted through the window, and then a whole swarm of them showed up, and we got away in the confusion.”

  “They just let you get away?”

  “We got away.”

  “Why is the CIA after you?”

  “They wanted information about a memory card,” Edie said. “My boyfriend did an artist residency at a surveillance satellite company, and someone slipped him a memory card.”

  “What was on it?”

  “The files were corrupted or scrambled. There was nothing on it.”

  “Where is your boyfriend now?” Gabrielle asked.

  “He’s out in the Arizona desert somewhere, working on a photography project.”

  “You think they know where he is?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I need to contact him.”

  “You’ve picked a hell of a time to show up here,” Ash said, clearing the table.

  “We can’t let you contact your boyfriend for at least twenty-four hours,” Gabrielle said.

  “What do you mean ‘let me’? Let me? I’ll leave right fucking now. What are you going to do?”

  “For Octavia’s sake, please don’t make a scene,” Gabrielle said.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Sit down.” Gabrielle grabbed Edie’s forearm from across the table.

  “Let go of me, or I swear to God—”

  “Please calm down,” Ash said hesitantly, backing away from the table with Luci.

  “Calm down?”

  “Don’t hurt Miss Edie!” Octavia screamed.

  “We’re not going to hurt Edie,” Gabrielle said.

  “You people are sick,” Edie said. “You’re criminals. Do you realize how many lives you’ve ruined?”

  “With the state of the world, you know as well as I do how fucked it is to even consider having a child,” Gabrielle said.

  “What gave you the right to make that decision for everyone else?”

  “The human race has to be stopped by direct action. A lot of people consider us heroes,” Gabrielle said.

  “Can you at least reverse it?” Edie said, her voice cracking. “I’m serious. Reverse it for me, and I’ll never tell anyone about you or this lab or anything. Just one person. You have to know how to reverse it.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  Edie stared at the dark corner of the room. A poster, a map of the moon. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Gabrielle picked up Octavia and silently left the room with Ash and Luci. A few minutes later, Gabrielle returned and sat next to Edie, taking her hand.

  “Listen, Edie. We can let you go in twenty-four hours, but I doubt you’ll want to leave. Something big is happening in twenty-four hours. It’s in your best interest to stay here with us. At least for twenty-four hours.”

  “Sure. You’ll just let me walk out of here in twenty-four hours?”

  “Okay . . . We’re waiting for instructions on what to do with you.”

  “I thought you were the main group,” Edie said. “You’re waiting for orders?”

  “Not exactly. We have an unusual leadership structure.”

  “So what are you going to do with me, then? Kill me?”

  Gabrielle sat silently, staring into Edie’s eyes. “I’m pulling for you, Edie. I owe it to you for taking care of my niece. I’m presenting you as a possible informational asset after what you told me about the memory card. If that really was the CIA, and the CIA is after you for what you know, then you are proba-bly important.”

  “What’s happening in twenty-four hours? Is my boyfriend in danger?”

  “I don’t know if he’ll be in danger.”

  “Just tell me what the fuck is going on. I saved Octavia’s life.”

  “She thinks so anyway. Or you convinced her of it. She has a big imagination.” Gabrielle sat for a long time, silent, electronics humming in the background. “Do you know what an EMP is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s an electromagnetic pulse weapon. The military has researched them for decades, but they haven’t found a way to power them feasibly. Power them and make them tactically mobile, that is. We’ve found a work-around.”

  “It’s like a bomb?”

  “Sort of. It doesn’t blow anything up in a traditional sense. It fries every electronic device, hard drive, even the copper wiring, within a certain radius.”

  “So, what, you’re setting one off?”

  “We’re setting one off in the financial district tomorrow. We’re setting them off in every major metropolitan center in America tomorrow. A few overseas. Tokyo, London.”

  “Why?” Edie asked.

  “Discord. Chaos. Misdirection while we release a modified Axti-2 virus, rendering most, and even-tually all, of the world’s human population sterile.”

  “Why distract everyone? Why not just release it the same way you released the last virus?”

  “Because the introduction of the virus is trickier than before. Without a sufficient infrastructural disruption, we wouldn’t have access to key distribution vectors. It’s complicated. Years in the making.”

  They sat in cold silence, and then Gabrielle left the room. Edie scanned the room and considered making an escape. She knew where she was, the exact cross streets. She wasn’t even very far from her neighborhood. She picked up her rabbit, which huddled beneath the creaking chair. The chair was old. Everything was old, at least a century old, with a thin veneer of plastic modernity haphazardly integrat-ed over the top. Bioplastic sheeting wrapped around hasty plywood cubicles. The light was low t
hroughout the complex and came from computer screens and bacterial grow lights. Edie leaned over a fish tank containing a lattice of small test tubes. Is this where they made it? Right here? The invisi-ble knife that cut out my womb. Ended my genetic story. Maybe this exact tank. Maybe I can stop this. Maybe I was meant to come here and stop these people. I need a phone. If I can just talk to Abram. I need to warn Abram.

  “Octavia is calling for you,” Gabrielle said, and Edie jumped, nearly dropping the rabbit. “She’s down the hall off the kitchen, third room. I think she wants you to sleep in there with her. Just twenty-four hours, Edie. That’s all we need from you. Just stay with Octavia and don’t make trouble. I’ll be right outside the door.”

  Edie joined Octavia in a small room that was clearly a hastily converted utility closet. The door was old, dark wood and locked with a rusted skeleton key. Twist-tied bunches of multicolored wires snaked over the ceiling and exited through jagged holes cut into the crown molding. Edie lay with Octa-via on an expensive memory foam pad on the floor. The edges of the large pad climbed the walls of the small rectangular room. Above hung a single lightbulb, an antique filament coated in dust with a yel-low, candle-like light. Everything was warm, yellow.

  “Are you scared, Miss Edie?”

  “No, why would I be scared?”

  “I won’t let them hurt you or your rabbit. They listen to my Aunt Gabrielle, and my aunt listens to me. Are you going to sleep in here with me, Miss Edie? Can I hold your rabbit while I sleep?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s your rabbit’s name anyway?”

  “Pinocchio.”

  “What kind of silly name is that?”

  “It’s a story, a story for kids. I guess kids today don’t know about it.”

  “Can you tell me the story, Miss Edie?”

  And as they lay in the small room, surrounded by the cacophonous hum of server banks and aquarium filtration motors, Edie told the story, and the young girl clutching the artificial rabbit to her chest slipped peacefully off to sleep.

  28

  Abram stood naked in the long, fluorescent-lit motel hallway. A door at the end of the hall-way opened, and the alien Lam walked out and turned to look at Abram. A dissonant electronic hum filled the corridor. The overhead lights flashed and throbbed, white light engulfing everything like liq-uid. A dark shape flashed in the milk, a red octopus.

  “What are you?”

  Abram found he was holding a long screwdriver and stabbed blindly around him. He opened his eyes on the floor of a small room without corners, everything smooth, like the inside of an egg. Lam stood in the room near Abram but looked different now; it was covered in indecipherable blue and red symbols projected onto its waxy gray skin. A smell like bleach mixed with blood. A wounded smell.

  “Get off me!” Abram screamed. “I don’t care what you can give me. I just want my soul back!”

  The being held a syringe-like object in its hand. Like a living syringe. Three figures entered the room and stood next to Lam.

  “How much do the dead cost to bury?” Lam asked the three figures without moving its mouth.

  A large machine appeared from the ceiling.

  “It is for the extraction of gold,” Lam said.

  The machine made a hissing sound. A figure walked into the room with two chrome-mirrored creatures.

  Lam offered Abram the syringe-like object. “Leave now, and you will die with your friend.”

  Abram pushed the object away, tried to stand, and collapsed.

  “Separation, sleep, the nightmare, and then the new. If you do not make it empty, how will you fill it up again? Take the gold bar. When you remember me, I come to you,” Lam said.

  On Abram’s skin, countless blue and red crosses made of veins and blood vessels marked his skin’s pale surface. Alien fluid pumped through the tiny rivulets. Abram looked at Lam, and the being wore a kind of mask, a mask that moved and clicked. Abram felt the regions of his brain that manifested fear being systematically numbed, the mask being a test of some kind.

  “Your arm. Is it hurt?” Lam said.

  The small crosses on Abram’s forearm had reconfigured themselves to spell out the phrase sine me nihil potestis facere.

  “I am the conduit. Two realms meet within me,” Lam said, the mask gone. “We are objects.”

  “Are you real? This isn’t real. Where am I?” Abram said.

  The voice of Lam seemed to whisper into Abram’s ear. Closer than that, inside his ear, inside his skull.

  “When you are gone, so are your dreams.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Abram said.

  “Abolished beings sleep,” Lam said. “Armies fill the night. Look at me. See me. I am here. I am here. I am here.”

  Lam crossed itself in the sign of the benediction and then touched Abram’s forehead.

  “Be calm. I have removed all traces. I am a conduit. I am between heaven and Earth. You are the container. Your actions are my actions. Through these actions, you will know me. You will know the ex-perience of one who does not speak in their own name.”

  Abram examined the crosses covering his own naked body and traced a few with his finger.

  “The crosses are a symbol of your annihilation. You are pursued by wolves, but I will transform them into doves. My heart is milk.”

  “What do we do? Should we run? Should Kenner and I run? I just want to be with Edie again, in our bed, asleep in our bed,” Abram said, his face wet with tears.

  “What do you do with a corpse? I am the conduit, and you are the container. Your actions are my actions. You are a conscious creature embedded in a world of consciousness.”

  Abram opened his eyes and found himself standing in the hallway, wrapped in the thin, cheap motel comforter. An autonomous semi roared past outside. He cradled the gold bar in his arms like a baby. He tried to open the door to his room and found it locked. Stumbling over to Kenner’s door, trem-bling, Abram knocked, his head pounding. He knocked again and then slumped against the door, cry-ing.

  “Abram? What’s going on? Are you okay?” Kenner said, running over from the end of the hallway.

  “I don’t feel good. I feel crazy, like I’m having a panic attack or something. I don’t know. I feel sick.”

  “Here, come in here. You just need some water,” Kenner said, helping Abram from the floor and walking him into the motel room. The lights and TV flashed on, a mirror image of Abram’s room, but instead of the program about aliens, the television played hardcore porn. Abram laughed, wiping ca-thartic tears on the cheap comforter he wore like a monk’s robe. Kenner tried turning off the television but couldn’t figure it out. Abram laughed harder, choking back sobs.

  “I can’t even unplug it because the power cord is wired straight into the wall,” Kenner said, strik-ing the side of the television with the flat of his hand. He struck it again, this time with his fist, and it glitched and went black and then switched to a quiet rolling static.

  “Goddamn . . .” Kenner said, and then he grabbed a disposable cup from the bathroom and filled it from the tap. “So what happened? I left for like twenty minutes, and I come back, and you’re all fucked up.” He handed Abram the water and reclined on the bed, pulling a small bottle of whiskey and a bottle of kombucha from a paper bag. “I got these from the dude in the lobby. He said he would just bill it to the room. You want a drink? A drink may do you good, actually.”

  “I’m fine with water. I need a toothbrush. Did you see toothbrushes for sale in that vending ma-chine down there?” Abram said, glassy-eyed, his face still shiny and red.

  “I don’t think so, but I could go check.”

  “Don’t worry about it. What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. There aren’t any clocks anywhere, and we don’t have our phones. You and I are out-side of time. I’m getting used to not having my phone. Feels like I’ve got a little privacy for the first time in years.”

  “Well, apparently my phone is in this motel somewhere,” Abr
am said. “Unless I imagined that.”

  “You have to stop questioning yourself, man. You didn’t imagine those dead people in my truck. I was there. The blood.”

  “Maybe it was a false memory. A shared false memory,” Abram said.

  “Like a memory implant? Like it said on the memory card. Implanted by who?”

  “I’m just saying things, Kenner . . . I’ve got a headache. I don’t know. I don’t think a memory im-plant is an actual thing in real life. I think I might have PTSD.”

  “I hear that. I’ve been through some crazy shit, but this week is definitely in my top five.”

  “I’m scared, Kenner. I’m not used to this kind of shit. My adrenaline has run out, and . . . and . . . I’m not a brave person. I don’t want to die. I just want to go home.”

  “You know I love you, brother.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re going to be fine,” Kenner said. “We have each other’s backs.”

  “I know.”

  “We can’t fall apart. It’s like a process, you know? Making us stronger.”

  “A process?”

  “It seems like we’re going through all of this for a reason. Here, drink this. It’ll give you courage,” Kenner said, laughing and handing his cup to Abram.

  Abram took a minuscule sip, grimaced, and handed it back.

  “That’s the way. You and me, brother. We have to be warriors. Spiritual warriors.” Kenner held the cup near the LED bulb in the bedside lamp. The room became amber as the light filtered through the cloudy liquid. He downed the cup in two massive swallows and began preparing another.

  “You’re really trying to get shit-faced?” Abram asked. “We have to get up and go to the police sta-tion in the morning.”

  “It’ll help me sleep. I think we’ve both earned a drink. I can’t remember the last time you had a drink with me, and I’m your best friend.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know.”

  “There is a real value in nonrational forms of knowing, like dreams, intuitions, mystical experi-ences like the ones we’ve had lately. They can be sources of wisdom and healing if you just open up to them. A lot of scientific discoveries and cultural shifts have come from nonrational thinking. That’s why getting drunk won’t hurt. It might even help, right? You’re my best friend. You know that. We’ve been friends for twenty years. Everyone else I’ve known has fucked off, got married, life-optimization apps, spends all their time in VR bullshit land. You’re all I have left. We’re like family. We are family.”