Jam

by Unknown

  “But it’d still be something!” said Angela, still buoyed.

  Don was turning the little electronic nugget over in his fingers. He came to a decision, and worked the connector into one of the ports on the side of his computer. “Let’s see what’s on it, first.”

  It was only when the USB connector slid home that X stopped feigning sleep. With a violent scrape of chair legs she turned to Don menacingly. “Do NOT look at the contents of that device,” she said, like a Wild West poker player putting a hand to their gun.

  Don met her severe gaze, surprised. A few seconds of silent tension passed. Then he very suddenly jabbed a finger into the keyboard, opening the contents of the drive in a central window.

  “I AM WARNING YOU,” roared X, hopping up and down in her chair. “If you take ONE look at ANY file on that drive, I will do EVERYTHING in my power to ensure that you are all imprisoned and prosecuted by the government of the unmmmtmm mmmmmmm mmmmm.”

  Angela wrapped one arm across X’s mouth and the other across her torso, pinning her to the chair. “What’s on there?” she asked.

  Don picked through the directory. It was filled mostly with rather dry-sounding documents. Don opened one at random and found a scanned image of a notebook page, covered in complex molecule diagrams and idle doodles, side by side and virtually indistinguishable, except for a rather hilarious cartoon of X off to the side with a speech bubble reading, “NAG GNAG GNAG.”

  “Don, aren’t you a programmer?” I said, behind his shoulder.

  “Designer. I write spec documents. I couldn’t make head or tail of this.”

  “Wait.” My eye flew to the screen. “What’s that?”

  “Text document,” said Don, as if it were obvious.

  “But it’s dated the day after the jam hit.”

  He put a finger to his mouth and leaned forward. “Well spotted, Watson.”

  X suddenly went berserk. She shook like a rodeo bull and mooed through Angela’s hand like the rodeo bull’s wife, trying to escape her bonds. For the merest second she was able to shake Angela’s hand off and get a single sentence out: “IT WAS MY FAULT!”

  Angela wrapped both arms around her face. On the screen, a window filled with text appeared. “What is this, a diary?” said Don.

  “Dr. Thorn’s diary?” asked Angela.

  “No, it’s . . . it’s not a diary. It’s more like a statement or . . .” he trailed off as the words seized his attention. His eyes darted left and right with increasing speed.

  Then he started laughing. His lips had been moving as he read, and they’d been gradually sliding apart into a grin. When he reached the end, he expelled all the air from his lungs in a single guffaw. Then he sucked it all back in and did it again.

  I wasn’t as fast a reader. I reached the end a few seconds later. Then I started laughing, too. X sank in her chair with a high-pitched whine like a deflating balloon.

  “What?” said Angela, concerned. “What’s so funny?”

  I was in the middle of sinking to my knees. Don gradually expelled the mirth from his system, giggle by choking giggle, then wiped his eyes. “You want to know why X released the jam?”

  “That’s in there?” said Angela dubiously, but readying her camcorder.

  “Oh, it’s in here. All the deep, dark motivations spelled out in incriminating detail.” I’d almost calmed down, but that set me off again.

  “Tell me!” demanded Angela, coming very close to stamping her foot in frustration.

  “After the last day of testing, Dr. Thorn put the jam in a containment unit and handed it to X and Y. Their job was to drive it and the rest of the sensitive equipment back to the Obi-Wan overland, in her car.” Don bit the inside of his cheek as his grin threatened to take over his face again. “And that’s when her sinister plan was put into motion.”

  “What plan?”

  “Y put the containment unit on the roof of her car while he packed everything else away,” said Don, picking through his words with the care of a minesweeper. “And then they very sinisterly forgot about it and drove off.”

  Angela was silent for a long time, then drily said, “What.” The comic timing was so perfect that it set off another storm of chuckles. By then I was curled up on the floor clutching my head.

  “The jam got into the forests! Chased them all the way back to the ship!” crowed Don. “They didn’t even realize until they were back on deck!”

  Angela left an unresisting X where she was, pushed Don’s convulsing torso off his chair and read the text for herself. It was all there, in Y’s unmistakable, clipped tone: A confession written on the assumption that it would only be read after it was too late to matter. Angela glanced at X, who was hanging her head in shame. “It was . . . just Y’s stupid mistake?”

  X sprang back to life. “It was not Y’s fault! It was mine! It was all me! I should have . . . I should have exercised greater discipline.”

  “Why are you covering for that big, dumb android?” asked Don.

  “He was NOT an android!” screamed X. “When he saw what the jam had done to the city, he almost . . .” She deflated again. “I had to . . . It was destroying him.”

  Angela’s face was awful. The corners of her mouth seemed about to dive bomb for the floor. She slowly closed the camera’s viewfinder, unstrapped it from her hand, and watched it sit on her upturned palm for a moment. Then she hurled it at the wall above X, where it broke apart with an apocalyptic clatter. Fragments of lens sprinkled across the American’s slouched shoulders like dandruff.

  “Oh, real mature,” said Don, unmoved. “So much for all that footage.”

  “The batteries ran out on day two,” said Angela, sitting in the corner and drawing up her knees. “I don’t know why I kept . . . I thought I was achieving something.”

  “Erm, I’m just going to check on Tim,” I announced, as the atmosphere of embarrassment became too stifling to stand. I speed walked out, not daring to meet anyone’s eyes.

  I hammered on the door to the bridge for a good five minutes and didn’t even get the courtesy of a quick go away.

  “Tim, we found out the rest of the world hasn’t been jammed,” I relayed through the unfeeling metal. “And it was Y who caused it. But it wasn’t on purpose. Did you know Angela’s camera hasn’t worked since day two?”

  Silence.

  “What are you planning?” I asked. “Everyone seems to be okay with us going to America. If that’s what you’re doing. There’s no reason we can’t all talk about it. And I’m sure we’d all understand your reasons for shooting Dr. Thorn if you told us them. If you did shoot him.”

  Still nothing. I sat with my back to the door, contemplating my dramatically shortened list of reliable friends. It was as I realized that only one name remained that a guilty sensation socked me in the gut. She’d always offered unconditional love, and like a swine I’d left her in a box in the bottom of a fridge.

  I trotted back down to the runway. The wind was strong and very cold and I was still mostly dressed for Hibatsu climate. I wrapped my arms around myself and hurried to the fridge, hoping that spiders don’t catch colds.

  Mary was snoozing away, perfectly fine. The combination of her hair, the fridge, and the tupperware had shielded her from the elements. I picked her up and she shivered in irritation when the wind hit. I held her box close to my face so she could bat at my nose.

  “You okay, Mary?” I asked, as she turned away from me frumpily. “Are you cross because I’ve been distracted? I’m sorry. We’re going to America. But we’re probably going to come straight back to rescue everyone at Hibatsu. You like Deirdre, don’t you?”

  Her abdomen shook and her head lowered. I fancied I heard an irritated sigh, but it was hard to hear much over the noise of the keel ploughing through the jam sea.

  “Don’t tell me you’re jealous?” I interpreted. She didn’t respond. “Mary, come on. There’s room in my life for a girlfriend and a spider.” I tried to work a finger in one of the bre
athing holes to stroke her, but she backed away, and I realized that she wasn’t avoiding me, but watching something on the horizon.

  It was still the middle of the night, but suddenly some of the stars looked a little off. There were several extremely bright ones gathered in a cluster, and some of them were rather lurid shades of red and orange.

  At first I thought Tim had had a change of heart and was taking us back to the city, but the city didn’t have power, and as far as I remembered, its skyline didn’t feature so many funnels and turrets.

  They were ships, lining the horizon as far as I could see. My first instinct was to run a few rather pointless steps forward and wave my arms frantically to get their attention. Mary, her box handle still dangling from my left hand, raised her forelegs in imitation. There was no answering signal, and I let my arms drop to my sides.

  The ships were starting to remind me of the two guys from the opposite rooftop we’d encountered and fought with over the Everlong. They weren’t going out of their way to be noticed. They were waiting for developments, watching us like hawks. Or American eagles.

  It had to be the perimeter Australokitty had mentioned. Which meant they weren’t going to be thrilled with the idea of us trying to get through it, not if they really were going to try and keep this all hushed up. And they definitely wouldn’t be impressed by the stolen vehicle we were attempting to escape in.

  I ran back inside, up the stairs, and didn’t decelerate when I reached the bridge door. I threw my entire body against it, which seemed like the most urgent way to knock.

  “TIM! THERE’S SHIPS!” I screamed.

  No response.

  I tried a different tack. “THERE’S SHIPS, TIM!”

  “Yes, Travis, I see them,” came Tim’s voice, almost inaudible through the heavy door.

  “What are you going to do?!”

  “I’m going to keep going,” he said. “What can they do to stop us?”

  “Tim, every single aspect of those ships is specifically designed to stop us.”

  “They won’t shoot at refugees,” he said firmly. “Especially not while we’re on one of their own aircraft carriers.”

  The second point I was most dubious about, because even from a single distant glance at the perimeter I knew that the US Navy could very comfortably lose one aircraft carrier and still have shitloads left over.

  I gave up on him and returned to the computer room. Don was still unblinkingly watching his upload’s progress bar, while Angela and X were still sitting in their respective sulks.

  “What were you yelling to your boyfriend about?” asked Don.

  “We’re heading straight for the perimeter! There’s gun!”

  “There’s gun?”

  “Ships! Gunships! What do we do?”

  X suddenly looked up, her arms still securely tied behind the backrest of her chair. “Does Tim know how to stop this ship?”

  “He doesn’t intend to,” I said, wringing my hands worriedly. “He’s just going to try to plough through.”

  “Then there’s no other option,” said X. “We have to shut off the generator.”

  Don was on his feet so fast his chair was practically catapulted into the wall behind him. “No one’s touching the damn generator! Getting this build uploaded is worth more than your pathetic lives!” The progress bar on the screen was at 70 percent.

  “If the Obi-Wan continues towards the perimeters at this speed, it may be interpreted as—”

  In the distance, there was a shot. It suspended X’s sentence like a semicolon. Then the scream of something overhead served up a tortuous ellipsis, before the exclamation mark hit with an ear-shattering blast.

  “Hostility,” finished X.

  The ship swayed deeply, recoiling from the hit, and Don was bashing the keyboard with absolutely zero consideration for government property. “Connection failed? What the hell?!”

  “They must have hit whatever receives the satellite Internet,” I thought aloud.

  “The satellite receiver,” said X. “Angela, could you untie me now?”

  “BASTARDS!” yelled Don in the general direction of a nearby porthole. Angela was on her feet, tearing at X’s bonds. Another shot went off, followed by a visceral squidge of jam.

  “First shot was probably a warning. Hitting us was a fluke,” said X. “If we advance much further, their aim will improve considerably. We have to shut off the generator.”

  “No. No no no,” said Don, sweating like an ornamental fountain and patting his trousers desperately. “I can save this. I’ve still got my phone. It’s got international roaming. I can rig up a connection. I can do this.”

  “Come on,” commanded X, now freed. She strode boldly for the stairs that led down, Angela following meekly.

  “One hour!” shrieked Don after them, desperately trying to prise his phone apart on the edge of the desk. “Give me one hour!”

  Another shell shook the jam sea, causing me to stumble as I made to follow X and Angela.

  “Thirty minutes!” called Don. “Or I’ll sue your arses off!!”

  “Don says to wait thirty minutes,” I relayed, after I’d caught up with the two women in the cramped passageways in the Obi-Wan’s belly.

  “Tell him it’s out of the question but he will be fully recompensed,” said X, not slowing.

  “Or just tell him up yours,” added Angela, with genuine spite.

  We followed X through a bulkhead hatch and found ourselves on the clanky gantry that ran along the perimeter of the generator room. X began to descend a ladder to the main engineering level. “Stay here,” she told us. “It won’t take long.”

  Angela and I leaned over the gantry railing and watched X navigate the bewildering array of components, pipes, and cables to the main power lever. She pulled it. The lights died, and a moment later the slightly eerie emergency lighting flickered on. Don’s angry outburst was clearly audible even through the layers of bulkheads.

  “Hopefully, this will be enough,” said X.

  There was another explosion, perilously close, and the ship rattled like a china teacup. The echo of the blast faded, and was replaced by a high-pitched rushing sound. I saw water arcing thinly from about three different spots in the hull, and heard a couple of rivets ping merrily off something metal.

  “Get back!” yelled Angela.

  We had all been frozen in place. X snapped out of it first, and began navigating the maze back towards the ladder.

  There was a creak of metal; then a pause; then the wall exploded.

  A hole like the mouth of Satan yawned open, admitting torrents of seawater that smashed expensive hardware aside like Lego bricks. A huge curved blanket of the jam flopped in on top of the water and began to swell.

  X made a desperate leap for the ladder, but it was too far. She fell short by several feet, and was instantly blindsided by a raging white wall of water. By the time the first rush had settled and the sea had started concentrating on rising, X was no longer anywhere to be seen.

  “X!” yelled Angela.

  “There!” I said.

  She was floating on her back above the main generator, not moving. She must have hit her head on something; with the way the room was laid out, not doing so would probably qualify her for some Olympic swimming award. As the water continued swirling into the room, she drifted in a circle, momentarily coming within arm’s reach of the ladder.

  Angela was already climbing down the rungs, reaching out to catch her.

  “Angela!” I said. “The jam . . .”

  “It wasn’t her fault!” she replied. “It was just a stupid accident!”

  “Don’t go into the water!” I yelled.

  The jam had already filled the entire corner of the room nearest the hole and was expanding fast, the incoming water pushing more and more of the red goo inside. It wouldn’t be long before it reached us. Angela climbed down as far as she dared, with the rushing water just up to her knees, then held onto the ladder with one hand and reac
hed towards X. Her hand just managed to brush the hem of X’s skirt, but she couldn’t get a grip.

  “One more time,” muttered Angela, ascending a couple of rungs as the water level rose. She strained as hard as she could, keeping a grip on the ladder with her fingertips, her body almost fully horizontal, watching X circle around again.

  This time, she came close enough. Angela’s hand clamped tightly around X’s wrist, and a triumphant gasp escaped her lips.

  Then the jam struck.

  I’d been too busy watching Angela to notice how far it had swelled. A thick slab of jam flopped hungrily around the American agent’s midsection. She disappeared into the red mass, her hand tearing from Angela’s grasp so violently that Angela lost her footing and tumbled into the raging water.

  She managed to grab one of the many nondescript pipes that ran through the room before the swirling current could pull her into the jam. She clung to the creaking metal with both hands as the red nightmare pulsed and burbled inches from her feet.

  By then I was halfway down the ladder, stretching towards Angela as hard as I could. My arm was too short by about two feet.

  “Angela!” I yelled over the noise. “Do you think you can hold on while I go and fetch a stick?”

  Before she could respond, there was another cataclysmic scream of metal and the gash widened further. A sea of jam brutalized its way into the room and the whole mass of the jam ballooned insanely. It wrapped itself around Angela’s legs and kept going. The extending cylinder of jam came all the way up to the pipe and sucked her hand off it like the last bit of frozen orange on a popsicle stick.

  Once she was gone, the massive red appendage flopped obscenely into the water, wobbling in bloated satisfaction. I slowly placed both hands back on the ladder, and when the jam popped up a single periscope-like tentacle, hunting for me, I scrabbled up as if my trousers were alight.

  I had just dragged myself back into the hall when the horizontal shifted about twenty-odd degrees to where it’d been earlier, and I almost toppled right over the railing and back into the jam’s clutches. The Obi-Wan was going down.

  The sounds of explosions and rushing water were all around me as I ran through the narrow corridors below deck, stumbling as tremors threw me into the many unsympathetic walls, door frames, and fittings.