by Bob Proehl
The people who commute here daily call it the Ruse, the sound falling away at the end as if they’re talking about medieval Russians: Rus. Clay likes it because it sounds like wind racing across the East River from the Lower East Side. He waits in line with the rest of the employees at the checkpoint on Vernon and 36th, sipping coffee he polluted with too much milk and sugar to cover up the bitterness. He sees Thao Bui, one of the other operators, and two shapers who work in the physical plant on the west shore. One’s Wesley and one’s William, but his brain refuses to track which is which. No one talks outside the checkpoint. Everywhere that isn’t on the island is an unsecure environment. It’s never been clear to Clay who might be listening, but no one talks.
A Faction agent with a dead expression Hivescans Clay. It’s never the same one two days in a row, or it’s the same one every day. They’re fungible. The Faction runs the checkpoints and polices the borders, but they aren’t permitted on the island. Clay thanks the agent, who doesn’t respond, and crams onto the maglev that ferries the employees across the East River. As soon as the doors shut, chatter picks up, the silent train serving as the Ruse’s watercooler. Employees group by type rather than assigned project, techs with techs and heads with heads. There are only a handful of operators like Clay, and they tend to be left out of light morning conversations. Clay is eavesdropping on a discussion of the latest Hayden Cohen album when he’s gripped by the shoulders from behind and given a vigorous shake.
“There he is,” says Thao, delivering what he considers a massage. “How are you feeling today, Mr. Weaver? Ready to change the world?”
“Hey, Thao,” Clay says.
“Can I tell you I feel amazing?” Thao says. “I am going to bury the needle today. Omars are going to be like what the fuck?” He sustains the last word like an opera singer holding a high note. Clay cranes his neck to see the expression on Thao’s face. Sometimes his enthusiasm is so overpitched, Clay’s convinced it’s an act. He waits for a knowing wink from behind the mask, but Thao is all mask.
“That’s awesome, man,” says Clay. He assumes a boxer’s stance and feints a jab to Thao’s middle. “Get in there and knock it down.”
“I’m going to kill it all day,” Thao says. Clay winces at his choice of words, and Thao catches it. His rubbing turns into a two-handed pat, which is no more relaxing. “You know what I mean.” He gets a faraway look that for most people would mean they’ve vacated their bodies and dropped into the Hive. For Thao it means he’s having a thought. “They should find a way to like combine our abilities,” he says. “Like my power and your restraint or whatever. I’m the gas and you’re the brake, and then you slam on both at once and—” Thao does a chef’s kiss gesture that, combined with his failure to understand how cars work, might warrant a chef’s kiss gesture for idiocy.
“You should tell the Omars, man,” says Clay.
“I’m going to take it right to Miz Deeb,” Thao says. “She’ll be like, Thao, you have saved us all.” He delivers this with his hands clasped under his jaw, eyelashes fluttering.
“Go see her first thing, man,” Clay says, “or I’m going to steal your idea.”
“You wouldn’t even.”
“No, man,” says Clay, tossing back the last dregs of his coffee. “It’s all yours.”
Clay and Thao disembark at the lab bays of Project Tuning Fork. Thao fist-bumps Clay as he peels off for Beta Bay. Clay trudges down the line toward Theta. The bays and their operators are arranged in order of how promising they are, with Alpha Bay currently vacant and waiting for the operator-device combination that can replicate the Pulse at its original scale but without the lethal side effects most of the operators produce. They call the empty bay the Throne, although there’s no device in it. The closest it came to occupancy was three years ago, when Ollie Carson’s numbers indicated he could hit a 70 percent activation rate over a ten-mile radius. Before Ollie and his device could assume the Throne, Cedric Joyner—head of the department and serious creep—took Ollie to Indianapolis for an unauthorized test run. It ended with half the city activated and the other half dead, Ollie catatonic, and Joyner fired, exiled to the Wastes. Everyone on Project Tuning Fork assumed they were finished, but another operator who was nowhere near as talented as Ollie came in and took over as head of Tuning Fork, and the work continued.
Clay nods to Roxane and Marlon in Gamma and Delta. He notes that Zinzi’s been jumped up to Epsilon from Eta, and Lauren in Zeta is still out sick. Another week and Clay will get bumped up into the vacant lab bay, but for now he’s at home in Theta. Omars Eleven and Six greet him with their standard grunts of here we are again. Fahima makes the Omars on the Ruse wear numbers on their lapels, like the citizens of the Village in The Prisoner. Clay is secretly thrilled that he gets to work with Number Six. On his first day here, when Fahima was giving him the tour, Clay did a passable rendition of Patrick McGoohan’s I am not a number, I’m a human being speech that left everyone but Fahima confused. She doesn’t come around the labs much lately, but since that day, Clay’s sure he’s her secret favorite.
“You boys have anything new for me today?” Clay asks.
“You have anything new for us?” says Omar Eleven. His voice drips with snark.
“Yeah, I developed radical new abilities this morning over breakfast,” Clay says. “I think it’s going to really blow your skirt up.”
Omar Eleven rolls his eyes and turns back to his console. “Fahima was in tweaking the Chair last night,” says Omar Six. “So who knows, maybe today’s the day it all clicks.”
“Let’s make some magic,” Clay says. He opens the door to the entry room, where his suit hangs like a discarded skin. He wonders if they clean it every night or if there are a couple they rotate through. Mostly he doesn’t think about it. Thao imagines himself a science hero, but for Clay this is a job no different from the one he had before the war. Ramifications are above his pay grade, the practicalities of laundering the suits below it. From nine to five, it’s him and the Chair and nothing else. He strips and pulls on the suit. Part of the reason Thao thinks so highly of himself is that they dress operators up like comic book superheroes. Bright colored spandex hugs every line of Clay’s softening physique like an editor circling typos in red ink. He opens the inner door with a hiss of released air and steps into the bright lights.
Clay circles the Chair like a dancer sizing up his partner. He looks for anything different, a new blinky light. He’d notice any change; Clay and the Chair know each other intimately. They have a sense of each other’s limits and possibilities. They work as much against each other as in collaboration, each trying to overcome a lack in the other. Unable to spot Fahima’s latest tweak, Clay sits down and attaches sensors to the suit.
“There’s a connection between the Hive and time,” Fahima explained to Clay when he was hired. “The first Pulse was the result of a decent device combined with an extraordinary operator.” She didn’t give the operator’s name, but Emmeline Hirsch is a legend on the Ruse. She hadn’t died causing the Pulse, but if she hadn’t expended so much energy creating a hundred million new Resonants, she could have won the fight at the Bishop Academy on her own instead of eating a bullet. As combinations of new devices and operators fail from Beta to Omega, they harbor secret hopes for the second coming of Emmeline Hirsch, emerging from the gray water of the East River, the solution to all equations.
The idea is to create a fracture in the Hive by using time as a wedge. Done right, the Source the Hive links them all to will come pouring through into the real world, replicating the Pulse, creating new Resonants en masse. On a good day, Clay pokes pinholes through the Hive, letting energy dribble through. He can spread Resonance at the rate someone can hand out flyers for bus tours on a street corner. They’re aiming at something bigger.
Omar Six’s voice comes through the tinny speakers that hang above the Chair. “You ready to fire up?�
�
Clay smiles. Omar Six feigns enthusiasm at the beginning and end of the day. In between, he shares Omar Eleven’s boredom with their constant failure.
“Ready as I’m getting,” says Clay. He feels the buzz as the Chair comes to life. It searches for his ability, zeroing in on the parahippocampal gyrus, the magical spot in his brain. Clay pushes against the Chair’s prodding, expanding the buzz outward. A translucent bubble forms around him and the Chair, a membrane where regular time meets the faster, more fluid time Clay’s ability produces. In the lab window, the Omars check the readouts, moving as if suspended in a viscous liquid. He wonders if the Omars know how much longer the days are for him inside the bubble. He wonders if Fahima has considered that his ability ages him faster than it does them during the day, like the stationary sibling in Einstein’s twin paradox. He wonders if any of them care that every day he shows up to work, he’s dying a little faster.
* * *
—
Before the war, Clay worked on the sales team of a publishing house. He’s familiar with the concept of a work bar, a place where people convene after clocking out to prolong the workday by having a beer or two and complaining about the eight hours that came before. The alternative was to carry the work home and dream about the numbers or the fall frontlist. They pay for your days, and they get your nights for free.
The Ruse modified this concept by placing the New Deal on the island, within the security checkpoint. They didn’t want packs of Ruse employees out in the wilds of Midtown, getting drunk among the civilian population. Because it’s right next to the maglev heading out, a stop at the New Deal at the end of the day is socially obligatory, if not compulsory. Clay tries to sneak out, but Roxane and Marlon spot him through the window. When he shrugs and gestures to a nonexistent watch, they beckon him over, and he capitulates.
The New Deal aspires to the aesthetics of the cookie-cutter spots he used to find in suburban malls. The drink prices are subsidized, but beyond that there’s not much to recommend it. High trebly classic rock punctures conversation, but tomorrow it might be AM gold ballads floating at the edge of audibility. Heads huddle around a corner booth, spouting ideas for alchemical machines that convert base matter into weird drugs. A cluster of Omars chat among themselves at the bar, raising the eternal question of how individuated they are. Marlon complains about his assigned Omars, and Roxane laments the lack of lumbar support in her Chair. Clay settles in with a beer that disappears faster than he intended and feels pinned when Thao shows up with another.
“You see the match last night?” Thao asks.
“Missed it,” says Clay. Thao’s a huge fan of Hiveball, a confusing, violent hybrid of jai alai and football with rules constructed by someone who thought Quidditch was too simple. Clay prefers football matches from an underground European league that allows Resonants to play. It’s glacially slow, but Clay understands the predictable movement of the ball even as players disappear or dart across the pitch at impossible speeds. They play in the middle of the night under the blue patina of sodium arc lights. Bootleg footage shows up on the Internet a week after the matches, and Clay stays up to watch them at the same time they’re played so he can feel exhausted with the players.
“I thought Krieger was going to get killed,” says Thao. “Like as in literally killed.” Clay’s lack of interest in the sport never dissuades Thao from talking about it. “Chicago fucking sucks. You know their goalkeep’s a Damp?”
“That’s a shitty word,” Marlon says.
Thao ignores him. “Like yes, we get it. Your town is this pinnacle of integration or whatever. Can’t I watch a game without it being all politics? Everything else in my life is political. Can I have one thing?”
“Work’s not political,” Clay says.
Cheeks chipmunked with cheap beer, Thao shakes his head and swallows. “Work’s political as fuck,” he says. “If it wasn’t, we’d be working for Cedric and this shit would be done.”
“Cedric was a monster,” Marlon says.
“And a creep,” Roxane adds. “Wasn’t bad enough having him stare down my shirt, I had to feel his grubby brain slinking around my thoughts.”
“But he had vision,” Thao says.
“So did Hitler,” says Marlon.
Thao rolls his eyes. “Hitler Hitler Hitler,” he singsongs.
“Seriously?” says Roxane.
“Cedric understood there’s such a thing as collateral damage,” Thao says. “Can’t make an omelet and shit.” He slaps Clay on the arm. “You were in the war; you get it.”
“I was in communications,” Clay says. He takes a quick swig of beer and looks away.
“I thought you were in the shit.”
“I was a glorified mailman.”
“Were you in the shit?” Roxane asks Thao.
“Dude, I was fifteen,” says Thao. “But I would have been. I’m saying if it wasn’t for politics, me and every operator from Zeta up would be out on our European tour.”
“You think ‘we shouldn’t kill baseliners’ is a political position?” Clay asks.
“I’m saying thinking it matters is a political position.”
Loosened by two beers, Clay is ready to wade into the argument. He’s prepared to let loose on Thao and end the détente of their work friendship in the service of shutting down one more bit of ignorance in the world. As he draws a deep breath, he feels an insistent tug at the back of his head in the aching spot where his ability resides. He raises one finger, about to ignore the tug and continue schooling Thao, but thinks better of it.
“Excuse me,” he says. He leans back in his chair and drops into the Hive, letting his body go limp. He’s old enough to remember when answering your phone in public was a dick move. Now he abandons his body in midconversation to take a call.
His Hivebody manifests, leaving trails like in an acid trip. Dominic is waiting, his Hivebody brilliant in sparkling facets, like his real body. He’s as beautiful as he was when they met and doesn’t seem to have aged in the years since. His posture radiates impatience.
“Where are you?” he says.
“I’m having one at the New Deal,” says Clay. “It was a whole day.”
“It’s a whole day for you.” Dom turns his head and mutters this as if he’s speaking to an invisible audience, then turns back to Clay. “You know I have the thing tonight.”
“Shit,” says Clay. The gala Dom has been planning for months, the only thing he’s talked about this week. “Yes, I know. I forgot.”
“And there’s the thing at Rai’s school. Did you remember that?”
“I slipped,” he says. It’s a loaded word between them, and Clay shouldn’t use it as a shield. It’s out before he thinks it.
Dom flinches, then lays a glittering hand on Clay’s shoulder. “Honey, I need you not to slip today.” This is the part when Clay gets issued his orders. Dom is the organized one, the planner. Clay is the one who does as he’s told. “I’m at the site,” says Dom. “It starts in an hour. Can you head right to the school?”
“I’m on the next train,” Clay says.
“You’re not all sweaty?” Dom asks. What he means is a combination of do you smell like beer? and do you smell working class? The answer is yes to both.
“I’ll throw some deodorant on and I’m good,” he says.
“Honey, then you’re going to smell like sweat and deodorant.”
“I can be a little smelly or a whole lot late,” Clay says.
Dom closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, something he does when he’s accepting things in the world that he can’t change. Many of those are things about Clay. “I love you, and I appreciate you’re going to this for us,” he says.
“I love you, and you’re going to be the prettiest one at the ball,” Clay says. Dom kisses him on the cheek. In the Hive’s absence of feeling, Clay h
as the memory of the sensation of diamond brushing against his stubble.
“I’ll bring you some strawberry cake or something,” says Dom, a botched lyric from a Bjork song. When they were dating, Clay tried to get Dominic into things Clay considered cool. Strange bits of that time stud the strata of their relationship. Even if Dom doesn’t remember why, he promises to bring Clay strawberry cake from every event he organizes.
Dom’s Hivebody fractals and fades. Clay comes out of the Hive, aware of the closeness of Thao’s face. Thao’s poised with a Sharpie to draw a mustache on Clay like some frat boy prank. Clay grabs his wrist, squeezes it hard. The Sharpie drops to the floor. For a second Thao gets a glimpse of the monster Clay used to be. Thao’s ability flares up, slowing time around them, but he’s panicked and clumsy. Clay’s ability sloughs it off. They stalemate and release. Clay slams Thao’s wrist on the table, clanking empty glassware.
“Fucking idiot,” he mutters, letting go of the arm. Thao rubs his wrist and gives Clay a toss of his head to indicate they’re cool. Marlon and Roxane shake their heads, but Clay knows he’s shown them something he shouldn’t have.
“I gotta go,” he says, making a point of not including Thao in the goodbye. “Kid stuff.”
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” Marlon says. Roxane doesn’t say anything. Clay picks up his bag and walks out of the bar as a drum counts in the beginning of another song.
* * *
—
Berkeley Carroll is arguably the best private school in Brooklyn, particularly if the parent of a Berkeley Carroll student is doing the arguing. Clay knows because he looked into it; before the war, he and Dom weren’t anxious Brooklyn parents mapping out cost-benefit analyses of every educational outlet in the borough. If they made the choice back then, Berkeley Carroll wouldn’t have been on the table. The tuition was higher than Clay’s salary, and between that and Dom’s event planning start-up, they were scraping to make rent.
