by Bob Proehl
“Once everyone who could move was gone, we started going through the hospitals. They’d gotten everyone out they could, but there were people they left behind. The generators were running; they had set things up so people would last as long as possible. I wish they’d—it would have been simpler for the doctors to go through with morphine or whatever and—I knew when we got there. I knew this was the hospital where my mother was. That thing in my head kept showing me memories of her, all the worst things she ever said to me. It pulled up moments when I wanted her there and she wasn’t. It wanted me to understand my mother as an absence in my life so I could go into that hospital and do what it wanted me to do.
“I pushed back as hard as I could. I’ve heard that some of the replacements, right after Houston, never worked right. The first ones, Patrick put in himself. These, they had racks of test tubes. They poured them in.” She touches her ear again. “Maybe I was lucky. I did what Sarah taught me and imagined my mind as a cool white flame. I pushed down and became as invisible as I possibly could. I wasn’t sure I existed anymore. That would have been better, to stop rather than to go in. It felt like slipping my head out of a noose. It felt like when you pull the headphones off and the whole world of sound comes rushing back in.”
“Do you still hear it?” Emmeline asks.
“It’s mostly static when I do,” Carrie says. She cups her hands in front of her mouth and does an impression of a shitty radio signal. “Do you read me—zork—this is—brrzzzk—Ice Station Zebra, command control, do you read?” Emmeline smiles. “More often it’s a feeling. An anger I’m not sure is mine. That’s harder.”
“Maybe Fahima can fix it,” Emmeline says.
“Maybe,” says Carrie. She wonders if she wants it fixed. It’s been years, and she hasn’t done anything but manage it. She thinks of Miquel as the one who’s broken, ignoring the cracks in herself.
Carrie taps the iPod in her pocket. “Thanks,” she says. “For finding this.” She goes to the front of the bus and takes the seat next to Rafa. “Where are we?” she asks.
“You familiar with nowhere?” he says. “We’re somewhere near the middle.”
“We need to make a stop.”
Rafa shakes his head. “Already talked with Hayden about it. The Grand Canyon is overrated, and I am ready to be done with this magical mystery tour.”
“It’s right off the highway near Flagstaff,” Carrie says. “There’re people I want you all to meet.”
Fahima prefers to work underground. She thinks of it as hiding what she does from the eyes of God. When she putters in a basement of the Ruse reachable only via a staircase left off any blueprint of the facility, which she accesses through a false back wall in an unused supply closet, divine eyes aren’t the ones she’s hiding from. She wonders if the reason none of the Tuning Fork devices upstairs work is that they were conceived and built in the cold light of the sun. Their progenitor was made in the basement at Bishop, and it worked like a charm.
Fahima cleans up at the utility sink and climbs the stairs. She waits a moment in the closet, hoping she can exit unseen. She presses a button built into the necklace she’s wearing, and the world goes into soft focus. It’s a new device, and she isn’t happy with it yet. It approximates the ability of one of her old students, but it doesn’t make Fahima invisible, only slightly less noticeable. Before she opens the door, she knows something isn’t right. It’s loud in the hallway, the normal bustle of voices amplified, electric. With the device on, she’ll be seen but not noticed, so Fahima opens the door.
Her math teacher at Bishop, a Stanford professor who dropped out of his “normal” life when a student discovered his ability, told them there were different sizes of infinities. The infinite set of whole numbers contained within itself an infinite set of even numbers, half as large but infinite. Between any two whole numbers lay an infinitely regressing set of fractions, a Zeno’s paradox of tinier and tinier steps between 1 and 2. The teacher delivered this concept with revelatory weight. He built pauses into the lecture so he could hear the soft poofs as teenage minds were blown. It was a sermon to convert them to the gospel of math, turn students into acolytes. This was God winking at them from between digits.
Because she had been raised Muslim, the idea of the infinite wasn’t news to Fahima. But she was intrigued, obsessed with infinities that varied in size. Were they nested like Russian dolls? Was there one infinity studded with others like fruit in a Jell-O mold? It was intuitive: the set of even numbers would have to be half the size of the set of whole numbers. At the same time, it was completely ridiculous. Infinity should be an end point. There ought to be nothing beyond.
As she steps into the hallway, this teenage revelation returns to her as applied to chaos. Chaos ought to be an ultimate state, the complete lack of order. But the Ruse is a broad chaos dotted with smaller ones. Tendrils of it pull passengers from the train car, eager to infect them. It wants to speak its gospel, share its news. Each little chaos is a mechanism in a sprawling, encompassing chaos, which is an entity entirely its own. It takes the form of a frenetic stasis. People move around doing nothing. A public address system Fahima wasn’t aware that the Ruse had chimes. A deep baritone voice speaks.
“Employees of the Roosevelt Island Research Facility,” it says. “Please proceed in an orderly fashion to the New Deal for a presentation. Refreshments will be provided.” Another chime signals the end of the message.
The employees of the Ruse herd themselves back toward the entrances and into the New Deal. By this point, most have stopped chatting among themselves. Speculation is no fun with a total absence of facts. To continue, they need a couple of clues: something strange an Omar said, a blind item news story. Fahima joins the silent march to the bar. She falls in with a group of Omars, and when the opportunity presents itself, she tugs on one of their sleeves. Omar Six turns and looks at her, puzzled for a second.
“Why are you here?” he says. “And why are you all fuzzy?”
“What’s going on?” Fahima asks.
“We have no idea,” he says. “But it can’t be anything good.”
“They’re gathering us up to liquidate us,” says Roxane, one of the Tuning Fork operators, once they’re crammed into the New Deal. “Project’s over, and we’re security risks. Bet on it.” Fahima wants to tell Roxane this isn’t true, but she’s not sure herself. Everyone is cheek to jowl. Each individual’s nervousness conducts itself into those they’re pressed up against until the room is one antsy, twitching mass. Waitresses weave and squeeze their way through the anxious crowd, holding trays of champagne flutes aloft. Roxane takes one when they come around.
“It’s ten-thirty in the morning,” Marlon says.
“This is the cigarette they give you before the firing squad,” Roxane says. She drains her glass and signals for another, but the waitress is a hand supporting a tray, bobbing above a sea of human heads. With the addition of alcohol, the anxiety softens and turns benign. There’s a buzz in the room as if a piece of art is about to be unveiled. Whoever’s making the decisions is waiting until everyone is some combination of worked up and intoxicated. The Ruse’s employees get loose and chatty about whether they’re all about to be killed or fired. Get on with it already, Fahima thinks, tired of being an audience member for a show she’s supposed to be directing.
The front double doors of the New Deal open, and Ji Yeon’s Bloom enters, restaffed back up to a full five. They’re grouped around two figures Fahima can’t make out from where she’s standing. The crowd parts to make room for them, compressing to a higher density to avoid making any physical contact with members of the Faction. When the Faction went through its first big expansion two years after the Armistice, there were rumors that they could recruit you by touch. Those rumors evolved into a superstition that if a Faction member touched you, they had surveillance on you forever, like a witch leaving her mark. None of i
t’s true, and no one really believes it. They shy away all the same.
The Bloom parts like a curtain to reveal who they’ve escorted here. Standing next to Patrick Davenport, who looks as if he has a bad flu, Cedric Joyner smiles out on the crowd. The shudders and gasps of the Ruse employees are muted by the fact that he’s been escorted here by the Faction and the fear of being seen by a full Faction Bloom as noncompliant, but the return of the disgraced Cedric Joyner, the Ruse’s own private Mengele, to Roosevelt Island is received like the sudden appearance of a ghost. Coupled with a rare public appearance by Patrick Davenport, it’s enough to distract the employees from any concerns about their own well-being.
Cedric wears a suit tailored so tight he looks bound up in it, fifty-some snakes compressed into an Armani. He’d always had a primness to him, the look of an ascetic and self-flagellant. Cedric and Fahima were both true believers when it came to Resonance, but Cedric was less interested in the superiority of Resonance than in the inferiority of Damps. Creating a new Resonant was a way of wiping out a Damp—universal Resonance as a socially acceptable form of genocide. The patch Cedric sports over his right eye is new but fitting. You finally look the part, you vicious fuck, Fahima thinks.
Patrick steps forward to address the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says. “I know it must come as a shock to see myself and members of the Black Rose Faction here. The Black Rose Faction has always respected the sanctity and independence of this facility, and I personally consider the work done here of the highest importance. Truly, the vision of who we are going to be as a nation is being birthed here.” He holds out his hands and applauds them all with a dainty golf clap. “In particular, the progress of Project Tuning Fork has been of interest. I believe success in this project is all that separates us from a lasting peace with the rest of the world. Which is why it’s pained me to see the project struggle. I’ve decided it’s time to involve myself directly. I’ve been lucky enough to secure the talents of someone who is intimately familiar with what you’ve been doing here. Cedric Joyner will be the new interim director of Project Tuning Fork. Mr. Joyner, would you care to say a couple words?”
“My friends,” Cedric says. “I cannot express how good it is to see you all again. I wish it were under better conditions. Given the volatile juncture at which we currently stand, the Black Rose Faction recalled me from my studies to come back and contribute my knowledge to the project and help us reach the goals that are so near to our grasp.”
Fahima waits for someone to speak up. Cedric’s sins weren’t just horrible, they were public knowledge. When Cedric disappeared, there was no rumor too atrocious to be true. The most horrific theories were favored because they fit with what people already thought of him, and the truth about what he’d been doing in his satellite lab in the Bronx was on par with people’s worst imaginings.
One night, Fahima got Omar Eleven drunk and asked him about it. Eleven had been on the crew that was sent in to clean up after Cedric. “Sci-fi horror show shit,” Omar Eleven said. “Resonant limbs Frankensteined onto Damp bodies, flaming red with infection at the graft site. People still alive with their skullcaps popped open, waiting for him to try different brains on them like hats. A couple of us asked to be reabsorbed after. I still see shit sometimes.”
Cedric’s voice drips with the glee of someone who’s gotten away with something, or who’s gotten caught and still profited from his crime. Fahima can’t help but imagine he’s speaking directly to her, rubbing his victory in her face. “In the next few days, Mr. Davenport and I will be talking with all major stakeholders to plot our course moving forward. Mr. Davenport and the Black Rose Faction are making efforts to secure us certain resources that were previously thought out of our reach, and they will be working closely with us until the project is complete. Which, given a broad assessment of the data, I believe will be on a much shorter schedule than any of us dared hope. I’m so impressed with the progress you’ve made while I was away.”
A murmur passes through the crowd, quickly chilled by a minor motion from one of the Faction agents that could have been a lunge. Cedric has accidentally strayed close to one of the open questions about him. Where did he go? He should have been in prison. Fahima enjoys imagining that he lost that eye to a jailhouse shiv. But he’s come back an all-conquering hero, complete with an honor guard. So from where?
“I’ll be calling several of you in for meetings this afternoon,” Cedric continues, “but I don’t mind if things are a bit candid. Please, enjoy yourselves. Think of this as a celebration of how far we’ve come and a moment to contemplate the brave new world that lies ahead. Thank you all for your time.”
Tepid applause follows as Cedric begins glad-handing through the crowd like a candidate for local office. Even those out of his earshot don’t seem inclined to talk. With the Faction here, the notion that anything on the Ruse is out of earshot now seems naïve. People talk niceties, aware they are being watched. The funny thing is that they talk like this all the time. The expectation of listening devices and eavesdropping psychics is a way of life. It’s only when people notice the red light blinking on the security camera or catch a stray thought that isn’t their own, mental chaff from a clumsy psychic scan, that they become aware they’re self-censoring.
“Now we’re going to get somewhere,” says Thao Bui, one of the last operators Fahima hired. He’s a blunderbuss, no focus. “Now we’re going to see some serious weird science shit. Did you hear him all Brave New World? That is what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah,” Roxane says. “Hooray for us.” Fahima reaches out, about to put her hand on Roxane’s shoulder, but she doesn’t have anything comforting to add. She thinks about the device hidden in the basement, about the data she’s been fudging, making some of the operators, like Thao, look less effective until she can get their fatality rates down. She wonders where Emmeline Hirsch is at that minute and how much time any of them have left before a whole lot of people die.
It’s morning, and Hayden has promised this is the day they hit Phoenix. Rafa’s been driving all night but insists he’s fine, and when the van veers toward an off-ramp near Flagstaff, Emmeline immediately checks to see if he’s nodded off.
“What are we doing?” Hayden calls from the middle bench.
“Carrie wants to go shopping,” Rafa says.
“It’s a little stop,” says Carrie. “We’ll stay the day and get back on the road tomorrow.”
Hayden looks at her, their face pleading. “Can’t we just get there?” Hayden asks. “Can’t we be done?”
“One stop,” Carrie says. Exasperated, Hayden heads back to the bunks. Off the expressway, Rafa routes the bus toward a massive sprawl of a building. It’s been so long since Emmeline’s seen a mall, she has trouble recognizing it for what it is. The word comes back to her and feels strange in her mind, like a word in a dead language, something a tour guide says as he leads you through ancient ruins.
“That’s it,” Carrie says.
“Where should I park?” Rafa asks. The parking lot is half full, studded with cars rusting out on flat tires.
“There,” Carrie says, pointing to a white arch over one of the entrances that doesn’t go directly to a store. She grins broadly, which Emmeline’s sure she’s never seen. Emmeline wonders what would happen if the thing in Carrie’s head took over. Maybe it would put exactly that grin on her face.
They get out of the bus, and Emmeline’s unsure whether to take her things with her. Carrie’s the first one out, but since she doesn’t have anything, Emmeline can’t use her for guidance. They fall into a triangle formation like geese, with Carrie in the lead. She approaches the doors, and Emmeline gasps as they slide open on their own. It’s everyday magic, but she forgot about it, along with malls and school and all the other things she used to take for granted.
The hallway of the mall feels vast and bright, vaulted ceilings of reinforce
d glass honeycombed with supports like a cathedral made of crystal. It isn’t only the sunlight through the ceiling: the fluorescents are working, too, and as she feels the cool air on her face, Emmeline recognizes the thrum of commercial air-conditioning.
“Guys, it’s me,” Carrie yells. “I brought friends. Come out and say hi.” Her words echo in the empty space, nearly drowned by the whoosh of cooled air. Four boys, each younger than Emmeline, emerge from around the corner, in the main concourse of the mall. They’re dressed in overly large business suits cinched with belts and clumsily tailored.
“Killer Carrie!” one of them shouts. “What are you doing out this way? Come on out, y’all, it’s Carrie.” He hugs Carrie in the enthusiastic three slaps on the back way boys hug one another. Emmeline detects movement from every direction. From each shop, packs of teenagers are watching them, peering out from behind empty display racks for vitamin supplements and hair care products. They all look as if they’ve been outfitted from their parents’ closets. Prom dresses and pantsuits, pleated khakis and tuxes.
Carrie takes Emmeline’s hand and pulls her forward. “This is Tuan,” she says, introducing the boy she’d hugged. “He’s sort of in charge.”
“Nobody’s in charge of anything,” Tuan says. “I’m the one Carrie doesn’t scare shitless, so they send me out whenever she breezes into town.”
A group of kids hovers around Hayden, hanging back and starstruck. One of them glows, a purple aura radiating from her skin.
“You’re—” Emmeline starts. Tuan nods. He draws a circle in front of him, his finger tracing a bright line in the air. When the circle is complete, the space inside it shimmers like a pool of mercury. He reaches his hand through, and it disappears. At the same moment, a finger taps Emmeline on the shoulder. She turns to see his disembodied hand emerging from an identical circle, waving at her. He pulls his arm back, and both circles disappear. Some of the girls near Hayden giggle.
