Skinner

by Huston, Charlie

  She could laugh at herself.

  If a sandstorm materializes out of nowhere and blows her over the rainbow or if the Frenchman Mountain Fault becomes active and opens a crevasse beneath her feet that sends her tumbling into a buried city or if frogs rain suddenly from the sky and destroy all civilization, she’ll be ready. She could really just laugh at herself. But she doesn’t. Intimately aware of how the unexpected and nigh on impossible can manifest and warp the fabric of one’s personal space and time.

  She unbuckles her seatbelt, unlocks the door, pulls the lever, catching in her face the updraft of superheated air rising from the surface of the tarmac. She gets out, boots grinding sand into the road surface. The all-muffling silence of the desert. Standing still, disoriented by the lack of forward movement, she puts a hand on the roof of the Rover, burning her fingers. The motel, bed and shower inside, across the road.

  The Worm will find the hidden dangers.

  She circles around the battered Series III Lightweight, unlocks and opens the rear door, and peels the packing blanket away from the row of five black and silver Gator roadie cases. She pulls out the smallest of the cases and walks toward the motel. She walks in a jagged configuration of rights and lefts. She imagines her path viewed from above and traced by a satellite. An entirely likely proposition. The path, from that celestial viewpoint, reads as irregular biology. The EKG of a restless mind. Blood pressure under extreme duress. An erratic heart.

  Twenty meters from the motel, well away from its awnings, in an area outside of the killing zone of a falling telephone pole or snapped high-tension line, she sets the case on the ground, flips, twists, unlocks two clasps, and raises the lid, revealing the coiled Worm inside. Thick as a garden hose, a black articulated whip of alloy, carbon fiber composite and Kevlar with a lidded cyclops eye at one end. Mounted into the interior of the case’s lid, an iPad loaded with her own Linux hack. Restraint webbing released so that she can slip her hand into the center coil of the Worm, she tugs slightly to free it from the snug foam nest. She has to get closer to the motel. A challenge made easier with the Worm in her hand; a comfort. She walks, teased by the high-tension hum overhead, taunted, refusing to look. It’s there, it wants to kill her. So what? Everything wants to kill her today. Five meters out from the motel, breathing deep, she stops.

  Down on one knee, she gentles the Worm to the earth, its black coat instantly dusted with ultra-fine desert sand. She takes her Leatherman from its pocket, flips open an awl, uses the tip to slide open a tiny cover on the underside of the Worm, pokes the awl into a divot under the cover, sees a green LED come to life. She slides the cover closed, pockets the Leatherman, rises and backs away from the motel, returning to the open case. The iPad inside is already awake, roused when power tickled the Worm. She taps a squiggle icon, opens the Worm’s control panel, runs down a menu of search options, chooses a simple foundation inspection routine, and flicks the Worm alive.

  In the dirt, it wriggles, the lid of the eye snapping open and shut as it rises to attention, half a meter of the Worm uncoiling and arching upward, swinging the lens about, mapping, gridding the surroundings, finding the motel at hand and darting in that direction, settling into the dirt, writhing, unspooling, moving exactly like what it is: an articulated robot snake. The inspection routine itself is simple, but running it requires a complex emotional contortion. Using the Worm and its cohorts in their cases leads inevitably to the contemplation of buildings blown up, shaken to the ground, washed from their foundations. And the very specific types of bodies to be found in these variously demolished structures. The dismemberments of explosions, the paste left as residue when several floors compress into one, the sea-wrinkled skin and seaweed hair rippling in brand-new currents running across what was, until recently, dry land.

  The Worm twists, seals its single eye, and begin to burrow, a tight corkscrew drilling itself into the ground to discover the hidden faults of the motel’s foundations.

  One of the pockets on her vest buzzes. The phone. Terrence. Why isn’t she at Creech? As if he doesn’t know why she’s not there. She’s not ready to be there. They want her eyes. They want to know what they can’t see. How dangerous it might be. How can she tell them anything if she doesn’t even have her eyes open yet? She’s like a newborn puppy now, fresh from the desert, eyes gummed shut. Terrence knows. He taught her how to do it. Open her eyes to the world, use her compulsions, let the information in. Don’t run from it, look at it.

  Tell me what you see, he’d said.

  And later, Don’t go to Iraq.

  But she’d gone anyway.

  Shit.

  If she told them, if she told them what she really sees, how truly dangerous it is, they wouldn’t believe her. Or, if they did, they would cease to function. They would freeze in their tracks, paralyzed by the fear. Disaster City, her old home, that was the model. What’s coming is the real thing, Disaster World.

  She lets the phone vibrate, watches the telemetry of the Worm. Terrence will wait.

  But he doesn’t.

  “You need to be at Creech in the morning.”

  She mutes the TV chained to a wall-mounted steel shelf above a wood-veneer chest of drawers. On the screen, a line of riot police barring a crowd of protesters from entering the Swedish World Trade Center in Stockholm. Ongoing street theater being played out as the WTO meets there at the same time as the annual Bilderberg conference. A confluence of power and money bound to draw singular rage in an era of austerity. She angles the remote toward the TV, presses the channel button, but nothing happens. The cable is pure shit, but the Wi-Fi is surprisingly solid. She’s got her laptop open next to her, a browser running on her phone. She slaps the remote against her bare thigh twice and tries again. The picture blips to a fuzzy image of several large-bottomed Mexican women in short-shorts and cutoff t-shirts dancing around a man with a pencil mustache and a microphone.

  “I’m not ready. Two more days. Tell them two more days. How can I tell them what I’m seeing when I don’t even have my eyes open yet?”

  “Could you turn on the camera?”

  “I’m not dressed.”

  She pulls the towel tighter across her flat chest. It is her own towel. The motel’s towels are hopelessly small, worn, and, like the carpet, disconcertingly stained. Her towel is a thirty-six-by-seventy-two-inch rectangle of hyperabsorbent antibacterial material that can be compressed into a pouch the size of an old-fashioned CD jewel box.

  “How was the desert?”

  Jae picks up the half-liter bottle of Tahitian spring water she bought from the vending machine outside the motel office. The desert was like being in an isolation chamber, Terrence. The desert didn’t force my brain to create connections between Mexican TV production and the efficacy of Wi-Fi in the Mohave. The desert felt like limbo. Same as always. It felt like waiting for the end of the world.

  She takes a sip of water.

  “The desert was fine.”

  “Are you on anything?”

  She looks at the brown pharmacy bottles and plastic baggies peeking from her unzipped duffle on the floor.

  “Coming down.”

  “Are you secured?”

  Jae slaps the remote again, presses the button, blips to a scene shot through a night-vision lens. Handheld, documentary or reality TV. Several young people, men, one woman, a law enforcement unit of some kind. Khakis, black shirts, windbreakers and caps with large yellow letters, an acronym: TAPS. An agency she’s never heard of. They give the appearance of being on a night raid in some kind of underground facility, but carry no weapons. They carry cameras, infrared lamps, and several different wands and scopes cabled to various boxes strapped to their persons, everything studded with impressively glowing LEDs.

  Jae looks from the TV to the screen of the Toughbook sitting next to her on the narrow bed.

  Skype open, showing an active call, no video, connected to terrenceTT.

  Is she secured?

  She looks up at the ceiling.
Beyond it and the warming atmosphere are three thousand or so man-made, functioning (to one degree or another) satellites. Those give her little or no pause. It is the additional dozens, perhaps hundreds, of satellites about which she knows nothing that are sometimes the focus of her ever-roving and fretful mind. She considers it unlikely that any of them is singularly dedicated to tracking her movements and monitoring her activities, but unlikely does not mean impossible. Her phone, her vehicle GPS, the Toughbook. All obvious loci for unwanted observation. Hazards of the digital age. Looking into the abyss requires, by necessity, having it also look into you.

  Is she secured?

  She moves her fingertip over the Toughbook’s trackpad, clicks on a white icon in the shape of a cartoon spider. Eight small windows unfold, each one a square in a grid, live video feeds from the cluster of wall-crawling, eight-legged surveillance bots she released through the bathroom window as soon as she’d come into the room. Little more than camera platforms that can communicate locative data and triangulate with their clustermates, the eight spiders had scrambled away, finding roof edges, corners of walls, points equidistant and as far as possible from each other, plotting overlap between their fields of view. The parking lot, the doors of the other rooms, office, open desert behind the motel, highway, cloudless and star spackled sky above. Occasionally the camera views shift, covering gaps, rotating by minutes. Should a team of unarmed TAPS agents attempt to storm the motel and take obscure measurements, she will see them coming.

  She removes her finger from the trackpad.

  “There is no security, Terrence.”

  “Please don’t tell that to our clients.”

  On the TV, the agents of TAPS, reacting as though they have heard a disturbing noise. They begin waving their wands and scopes, taking readings, speaking into the camera that trails them.

  “Have you ever worked with TAPS?”

  A silence from the computer, longer than the usual Skype delay, and then Terrence again.

  “Shoes?”

  “T-A-P-S. Investigative something.”

  “American?”

  “They have a reality show. Like COPS. I think.”

  The TAPS task force, hustling down a concrete corridor that reminds Jae of a military bunker. In fact, if asked, she’d give her professional opinion that it is a bunker. Cold war era. European. Eastern.

  “Weapons inspectors maybe?”

  She hears a background clatter from her computer’s speaker, the usually soft tapping of computer keys amplified by their proximity to the microphone built into Terrence’s own laptop.

  “Weapons inspectors with a reality show?”

  “Looking for missing Soviet nukes. Ivory-grade plutonium. Did they get all of it from the Kazakhstan reactor? Aktau. I heard they were still trying to make the inventory come out right.”

  The clacking stops.

  “The Atlantic Paranormal Society.”

  Jae is thinking about Soviet bombs, fissionable materials, vast stockpiles scattered throughout the Eastern bloc. Robots she’s designed for rescue have been modified for use in potentially contaminated sites. Die-in-place units, never intended for recovery, that had been dropped through cracks in reinforced concrete caps that were never actually reinforced. The cash margin between a proper waste depot cap and an improper one having been skimmed and split between contractors and party apparatchiks. She’s seen documents, layers of redaction, but between the black lines were bombs enough to blow a hole through the center of the globe, all of them unaccounted for.

  Terrence raises his voice, slight distortion from the speaker.

  “Ghosthunters, Jae.”

  She’s opening the spider cluster windows, her perimeter is clear, but this close to Creech, the shockwave from a ten-megaton car bomb device would slap this shithole to splinters with her inside.

  “Jae, are you watching TV now?”

  Her peyote-fatigued brain is composing scenarios for her now. A Ford F-150, parked in the lot outside the Indian Springs Casino across the road from Creech. A states’ rights fanatic, unknowing puppet of a Somali al-Qaeda franchise, sitting in the driver’s seat, praying to his First Testament Lord, an arming switch compressed, thumb on a detonator.

  “It’s a TV show, Jae. Ghosthunters. People who call themselves the Atlantic Paranormal Society. They look for ghosts. On TV. There’s an international cast. It appears that they’re broadcasting a special episode. Looking for ghosts in a decommissioned GDR command bunker near Kossa.”

  She picks up the remote, slaps it twice, hits the channel button as if pulling the trigger of a gun, killing the TAPS squad and resummoning the Mexican dancing girls, now clad in bikini mariachi outfits.

  “Weapons inspector reality show. I should have my head examined.”

  Silence.

  “Yes, you should.”

  She laughs. As the fit subsides, she has to use the end of her antimicrobial towel to wipe a rope of snot from her upper lip.

  “Thanks, Terrence, I just blew boogers all over my laptop.”

  “Have you even been to the east? Berlin, I mean. Former.”

  Jae is wiping the screen of her Toughbook.

  “A conference, before I met you. Academia. Neo-automation and design. Something. I talked about self-assembling robots. Sounds old-fashioned now.”

  “I worked there in the seventies. Speaking of old-fashioned. Cultivated an asset, KGB counterintelligence agent. I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone else so impossibly self-serving and dirty to his core. An espionage cockroach. I was certain he’d survive World War III. The real surprise was that we never had one. Not as it was imagined, anyway.”

  Jae leans back into her pillows, channels flipping. She uses her left hand to surf the browser on her phone. Mexican TV. TAPS. Kossa. World War III. Antimicrobial. Snot. Her mind coming clear of the illusory revelations of the peyote and the blankness of the desert, reaching out through the TV and the laptop, signals, Terrence’s voice, hesitant VoIP call-and-response, hunting for a configuration to weave herself into. The information around her, in the air, waves of it penetrating her body, these machines to pluck it from the atmosphere, so clumsy.

  “Jae? Are you still there?”

  She nods in the empty room.

  “Here. Getting back online. Terrible cable here. Forty-nine channels. I can barely see anything with forty-nine channels.”

  “Jae, you need to be at Creech in the morning.”

  “Too soon.”

  “Too late. Very close to being too late.”

  Voices in the background of the call, amplified, foreign languages, she recognizes number sequences being repeated. 1099. 6766. 4320. German, French, English.

  “Where are you, Terrence? What airport? Somewhere in Germany.”

  “Yes. Cologne. I’m meeting someone here.”

  Her hands are off on their own now, receiving signals she’s unaware her brain is sending. Tapping keys, launching searches. Cologne. Flughafen. Flights. 1099. 6766. 4320.

  “Jae. Go to Creech.”

  “I’m not ready to look yet. I won’t be able to help them. I’m still in the desert.”

  “No, you’re not. And the pictures will be easy anyway. Something is happening. Something dangerous is happening. A disaster.”

  Her fingers tapping, channels flipping, scanning.

  “What? I don’t see anything. There are no reports. It doesn’t matter. I’m not digging up more dead bodies. They can call Disaster City if they want robots to find dead people. I won’t go. They need me to look at pictures at Creech.”

  “The disaster hasn’t happened, Jae. It is happening. People are going to die. Jae.”

  Nothing, Terrence silent, just the flights being called in the background.

  “Jae. So many people will die. But not yet. Soon. But not yet. We can. Jae. We can stop it this time. Do you remember?

  Her eyes are stinging. She blinks.

  “I’m tired.”

  “Remember when we met. We tal
ked about your configurations. How they all end the same.”

  She remembers. She cannot forget. Her search for the will of the designer. She found it. Every configuration she maps eventually shows her the same land. Land of the Dead. Where they’ll all be.

  “It’s just what’s going to happen, Terrence. The world. It’s not meant to be here forever. Stop, please.”

  But he won’t.

  “I promised you something when we met.”

  She touches her cheek, it’s wet.

  “You said it all made sense. You said if I looked hard enough it would make sense. You said it doesn’t have to end. The configuration doesn’t have to end with everybody dead. You said if I kept looking I’d be able to see the disasters before they happened. And get there in time. You’re such a liar, Terrence.”

  “I didn’t lie. It just took a long time. Go to Creech. I’m sending someone for you.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone with a job.”

  “Who with?”

  A pause, and then he rushes the word to her.

  “Kestrel.”

  “Ah, shit, Terrence. Shit.”

  But he just won’t stop.

  “What happened before, Jae, it won’t happen with him. It can’t. He’s not like. He’s not like other people. And he’ll give you something at Creech, Jae. A map.”

  “To where?”

  “To the future, Jae. It’s a map to the place where the future is being made. There are lives to be saved there. You can help. Believe me.”

  Her cheeks are wet because she’s crying. She doesn’t wipe them. Her hand is going to the trackpad, clicking the call to an end before Terrence can say anything else. Her mind already caught in the tide. Awash in a dream of the future. A future that doesn’t look like the desert.

  The rest of the night she spends upright in bed, TV channels cycling, cable, an increasing number of infomercials, surfing her phone along a wave of links starting with the Wikipedia entry for Weapons-grade.