Everyone's Island

by Kris Schnee

  "Stop," said Alexis. "We're here. Careful."

  The outer ledge, the dock, loomed in front of them. Current threw Tess forward and she raised one arm to shield herself from the impact. She hit the rubbery bumper around the ledge, next to the little ladder. Her knees scraped concrete. The only thing to do was claw at anything in sight until her hands found the ladder and hurled her up with a wave to land on the soaked ledge. She was in front of the stairs and the North Tower door. Someone was yelling and she had a face full of snot and seawater and hair, with scuba gear on her back threatening to make her fall over. Wrinkled fingers yanked at a metal door that still wouldn't budge.

  Alexis and Zephyr were there when Tess turned around. Alexis clutched the ladder and the waves were sucking backwards now. Tess crouched to flail for them, trying to catch either of them. Zephyr's arm jerked to grab her but missed. Finally Tess' hand met Alexis'. Tess staggered backward harder than she thought possible, pulling her and letting her pull Zephyr.

  A wave slammed over them and knocked Tess onto her back on the wet concrete. The back of her neck hit the valves of her dive gear, though she curled sideways to avoid being speared on them. She rolled to all fours in time to see -- empty water.

  "Zephyr! Alexis!" Any moment now one of them would lay a hand on her shoulder. Any moment now.

  Any moment now another wave would take her too.

  Tess threw herself onto the staircase above the worst of the waves, staring down for any sign, any sound of them. Maybe she could dive in and find them. There was still a chance. But her body wouldn't move in that direction. It knew what would happen if she did. While vivid images of being smashed by concrete teeth flashed before her, she found herself scrambling up to the deck with ragged breaths. She was yelling for Garrett, for anybody.

  Nobody in the deckhouse. The world was empty. When she staggered down into the platform, she found the air compressor unattended and three tanks missing. Her, Alexis, and Garrett. He was out there too! She backed away and saw the gun on the floor. For a moment she was too battered into incomprehension to have any idea what it was.

  Flare gun. Tess snatched it, then the nearby bag of flares. She staggered back upstairs to look for anyone in the world. With the wind's help she nearly pitched herself over the platform's edge. She grabbed the railing and saw Garrett way below in a raft. He was scouting the water around the wrong side of the platform. She yelled uselessly into the gale. The sea might grab him too! She'd see one wave and then the raft would be gone and she'd be stuck with nobody here, no communications, no ship (where was Constellation?), nothing. With another yell she fired the flare gun into the hurricane, took out another flare and did it again. Magnesium flame slashed the clouds over Castor. He would see; he had to see. She fired a third and a fourth and watched the wind play cat's-cradle with the flaming trails.

  The gale wanted to kill her. Tess threw the gun behind her as if to get momentum, then hurried back down into the platform for shelter. At the foot of the top-floor stairs she heard the storm still howling and the rain and waves lashing everything, just outside the protection of this little cave of concrete.

  Tess sank to her knees and screamed with no one to hear her.

  PART TWO

  1. Garrett

  Garrett and Tess huddled in a South Tower room, watching cartoons from better days.

  "I'll save you!" said the little fox on the screen, leaping over a squad of killer robots. The party of heroes battled in a bright, simple world where no one really got hurt. Garrett had had loads of fun playing the role, back in his days as a cripple. Back when it wasn't in his power to screw up this badly. Tess whimpered and he had nothing useful to say, no way to fix anything. So they sat there for a while, battered, useless, and afraid. The TV show shined in the dim room with its unreal colors. Eventually he had to stand.

  Garrett climbed to his feet and helped Tess up. "You can have the shower first. I need to look around."

  "Don't go."

  "All right, I'll wait. Then we'll see if we can at least fix the radio."

  Tess nodded.

  "I need your help for that."

  "Okay."

  Garrett paced while Tess showered. The trickle of water and the chatter of cartoons were welcome noise after the massive silence left by the storm. He'd hurried up towards Tess' signal, found only her, and immediately realized why. His boat had nearly swamped a dozen times. Everywhere the ocean had been torn up, writhing, howling... Garrett shuddered. I've killed Alexis. God, what am I going to tell her family? "We had a lockdown plan for hurricanes, but our gadgets malfunctioned?"

  And I've killed Castor. It was horrible of him, but he felt even worse about that than about Alexis. He would have to fold and slink home. The equipment was probably wrecked, any profit was gone, and there'd be a lawsuit, maybe even jail time. Reckless endangerment or something. He couldn't go to prison; they'd rape and murder him in a week!

  "Hey," said Tess. She'd stepped out with a towel and a borrowed shirt. Her eyes still looked haunted. "Your turn."

  Garrett looked away, uncomfortable now on top of miserable. A dark haze felt stuck to his skin as he washed off the seawater and the blood from stinging cuts. Out, out, damned spot! Alexis would have said. Or what was that line about staining the whole ocean red?

  Still under a cloud, he dressed and found no one in the room. "Tess!" he called out.

  Tess hurried up from the floor below. "Yeesh! You don't need to yell."

  "I wasn't yelling." He reconsidered. "Never mind."

  She was dressed now in her own jeans, clutching a toolbox. "I looked at the lower floors. The platform doesn't look flooded or anything, so the stuff in here is intact." The floor was nearly level, as though nothing had happened. The repairs must've held for long enough to get past the worst danger. He could go down and make a more permanent fix soon.

  He walked with her up to the topdeck. When Garrett stared into the sky it was the deep blue of just before dawn; they'd been dazed all night. The world felt clean and cold, like a crime scene after the investigation. At least the deckhouse had been built with hurricanes in mind. Not surprisingly, everything else topside had been shredded and hurled as by a giant's hand: no flag, windmill, radar or antenna.

  "Ruined," Garrett said.

  Tess said, "Martin will be back. We have to wait."

  What about supplies till then? Garrett ran through a mental checklist. It calmed him to focus on the task at hand. There'd been no problem using the shower, so they had water even if the desalinator was down. They had plenty of cereal and other stored food, and cases of bottled freshwater. He headed into the deckhouse to make sure the place was all right and to check the station's batteries from there.

  Inside, the wind seemed to have touched nothing. Garrett saw the beer can lying on his desk from before he got sick. The sight of it churned his stomach. He'd had just the one that day. But ever since his father died, he'd had one now and again, to help him forget. Or several. He could end up like Uncle Haskell, rotting in an alley before he changed his ways. Garrett crushed the can in his fist. Even while he'd worked on the Castor project, throwing himself into the reality of hardware and plants, he'd been trying to blunt his own thoughts. To live a little less.

  Before he knew what he was doing, he'd stomped over to the mini-fridge and pulled out the two six-packs in it. He startled Tess as he exited. With a grunt he hurled the beer into the ocean. Far below, the sea didn't care.

  "What are you doing?" said Tess.

  "My father didn't raise me to be a God-damned alkie!"

  "Huh? You're not."

  Garrett gave a bitter, barking laugh. "But I could be, if I tried." Garrett suddenly realized how thirsty he was, pulled two bottles of water from the fridge, and tossed one to Tess. No more drowning his sorrows. He had to work.

  The two of them were sitting around in the deckhouse, thinking and getting organized, when Tess sprang up from her computer. "Zephyr!" she said. "He made a complete backup of him
self! It's here on our network."

  The robot was alive, in some sense? "A copy of the AI, you mean. The memories."

  She said, "Yeah, and everything else. He's not dead. I can run him again."

  "Hold on. This piece of software infiltrated our network and put hidden data on it without our consent?"

  Tess stared at the walls.

  "What is it, Tess?"

  "We've been working together, and I didn't quite tell you everything. I set him up with an unrestricted account, not just Net access like we'd discussed."

  Garrett's eyes widened. "Then there could be anything on there. We've got to reset the whole system."

  "Zephyr is on there. Here, I'll run his code."

  "Wait!" said Garrett.

  "Why?"

  He couldn't articulate a reason, in this battered state. "Fine. Go."

  Tess spread the screen across the table. Code flashed around the edges while a gleaming model of Castor appeared -- a virtual-space home for the AI, nicer than the real thing. The figure waking the deck had to be Zephyr, but in the simulation he appeared not as a robot but as a humanoid otter. Valerie's handiwork again.

  Zephyr looked around, and finally out of the screen. "V-space? This means I'm the backup." He paused. "Oh, no. What happened?"

  "You're dead," Garrett said. "I screwed up and everything's ruined."

  Tess clutched the edges of the screen. "It was terrible! There was a hurricane, but you saved me and I couldn't save you, or Alexis, and I was right there when a wave crashed over us." She shuddered, and found Garrett's hand resting on hers.

  Garrett held her a moment longer, then pushed away from the table and stood. "This is ghoulish. We're talking to a ghost."

  "He's not a ghost. He's alive! I didn't get him killed after all."

  Garrett turned to stare down at the screen. "So Alexis is dead but this guy has a 'Get out of Death Free' card? Hell, that's more of a backup than I have for some of my personal files!"

  "What are you so upset about? This is good!"

  "I'm not upset. We shouldn't keep this ghost around without a body." It was absurd that this machine could have an extra life while a human couldn't.

  Zephyr looked out from the screen. "Please don't kill me."

  "What?" said Garrett. "I'm not talking about that, just --"

  Tess said, "Deleting data? Garrett, I saw him 'deleted' the first time. Please, don't hurt him."

  Garrett backed off, surprised at both of them. Tess was speaking up for the life -- for the existence of this machine as though Garrett were doing something wrong. With so much wrecked it only made sense to start clearing away the debris. He wanted to punch the walls, to make himself hurt to stop feeling numb. "Okay. You're right; I'm... I'm upset right now. But we have other things to do, and Zephyr can't help us without a body."

  Zephyr said, "I know you don't trust me. I can help you. If you let me continue running, I'll try to earn my keep. I'll gather information for you."

  Garrett felt irrationally hurt. He'd been starting to respect Zephyr's ideas -- but then Zephyr had lost any memories since the backup's last update. Hell, was I proposing to clear away dross or to kill one of my crew? "Do what you can," Garrett said, shaking his head. He felt ignorant, like an ogre solving all his problems by swinging a club at them.

  Garrett left Zephyr running on the main computer, and was pleased to know that the platform's internal communications network was mostly intact. "You built it well," he told Tess as they went back outside.

  "I killed Alexis and Zephyr. It's my fault. You were sick."

  "No! No, I was so focused on the damn hardware that I overdid it and couldn't help in time. You did your work right."

  Tess let her shoulders slump, uncertain. "Thanks. Look, I don't want you two to fight. You're both my friends, and I kind of need somebody right now." Tess looked embarrassed. "Forget it. I don't want to stop moving long enough to remember."

  The black solar-panel "suncloth" that had covered much of the deck had been locked away, he finally noticed, leaving bare concrete. "Wait. The solar and wind systems are down, but we're still getting some charge to the station's batteries. Is it the pneumatic system?"

  Tess shook her head. "It's not giving power, even after what I did. Needs fixing."

  "Then where is the charge coming from?"

  Tess was looking down into the water. "I don't know." She shivered. "I couldn't do anything to stop it."

  "You don't stop hurricanes."

  "Why not?"

  Garrett was still inspecting things. He started down the exterior stairs of North Tower, and swore. "No Constellation!" All he saw of it was a chunk of fiberglass bobbing on the waves. Sighing, he stood on the dock by the stuck door. He looked up to call out the bad news to Tess, but then he saw the banner.

  Across the way, on the far tower, a forgotten roll of solar-panel material was dangling by its cord from the platform's edge. Amid the ruin of Garrett's dream, a stray piece of technology had unfurled itself as a glittering black-green streamer, a sail against the sun and wind. Still doing its job.

  * * *

  "Captain," said Zephyr a few hours later. "We're being hailed by Martin's ship." Martin was bringing the small boat they'd arranged as their main transport to and from Cuba. Garrett had been dreading this conversation.

  Audio only. "Fox, what happened? Are you there?"

  "I'm here. It's bad."

  "How much damage?"

  "Alexis is dead."

  The radio crackled faintly to itself for a moment. "How?"

  "We followed the lockdown plan, with what limited warning we had. But we had a pneumatic system failure at the worst possible time. Alexis, Tess and Zephyr were in the water. God, it was awful and I didn't even get the worst of it."

  "Tess too?"

  "Tess is fine, just shaken up. Zephyr is here too, but just as software without his body. Parts of our equipment are lost, Constellation included. Things wouldn't have been so bad if I'd prepared better."

  Martin said, "Shut it, Fox. You didn't say that and you're not going to say it again."

  Garrett stepped outside and spotted the approaching boat in the distance. "Huh?" He'd expected Martin to tell him he was a failure.

  "An admission of guilt on your part could be evidence in a lawsuit. Never say anything was your fault."

  Mistakes were made, thought Garrett, taken aback.

  Martin said, "What? You want me to tell you you're an idiot and that I'm giving up on the whole project before I've even seen the damage? If I'm going to continue, I'm not letting my doubts interfere with the decision once I make it. And certainly not your doubts. Now let me get there."

  Soon they gave Martin a tour of the damage, then left him alone to think. Tess stood with Garrett on the deck. She said, "I was mean to Alexis. I didn't get to apologize."

  "Do you want to go home?"

  Tess stared out to sea. "No. I don't want everything to be a waste."

  "Me neither."

  It took a while before Garrett saw Martin again. The investor looked strained. "Fox," he said. "Let me ask you again. Are you willing to keep at this, to do everything that needs to be done to make it work? No matter what?"

  Garrett gave a quick "Yes."

  "I've sunk plenty of money into this project. I won't be happy if you lose it."

  "I said, yes."

  "And there's your own money."

  Garrett glared at the old man. "I told you, I'll do what needs to be done! What more do you want me to say?"

  "You sound like a boy who's being nagged to clean his room."

  At this Garrett snapped. "You weren't here when it happened! I know I didn't do enough and I've seen the consequences. Do you think I'm ever going to forget being out there with my friends in danger?" He jabbed a finger at the ocean. "If you're not going to condemn me, then stop testing me and let me do my job!"

  Martin shut his eyes a moment, and Garrett thought he detected a satisfied smile on Martin's face. Garre
tt said, "Do I get an 'A' for my answer?"

  Martin's expression hardened again. "You get to keep working. Now get out of here. Go ashore and find a way to defuse the situation with Alexis' family. Admit nothing. Make arrangements to buy what you most need, to make the farm work again. I brought some of the items you asked for last time, but I don't know your job well enough to do the shopping properly. Let's get this project back on track."

  Garrett didn't feel he deserved Martin's support, or anyone's. What did Martin see in him? But Garrett shook his head, angry at Martin's smugness. Whether Garrett most wanted to earn the trust Martin had put in him, or to show Martin up, the method was the same: get it right this time.

  2. Garrett

  The boat's engine puttered against the waves. It sounded noisy now that it wasn't competing with a hurricane. He'd been dumb to go out there in that storm, but there'd been little choice.

  Cuba looked shell-shocked. Like a leviathan or an omnipotent two-year-old, the storm had hurled entire trees into the buildings. Other trunks leaned against homes with boarded-up windows.

  Garrett docked, then bought a newspaper with the storm on its front page. He headed toward a bar to relax for a moment and read, but -- no. On the ground was an overturned bench. He righted it and sat.

  According to the paper, this was a bad one. The hurricane had pinballed off Cuba and swerved north to lash the mid-Atlantic coast.

  Garrett cursed. It had to happen sometime, even thought most 'canes stayed south, but the rarity of a northern one made people unprepared. He pulled out his computer and checked the Net for news.

  People had been trapped in the Washington, DC subways as pumps failed and lights went out, leaving them to drown in underground darkness. An ill-maintained dam had burst and flooded everything downstream, knocking a power plant offline on a day hot enough to fry old people in their homes. Fire. Looting. Death. And now there were riots starting elsewhere in sympathy for the government's failure to prevent it all.