The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  “What is it?” Rosa said. “What’s happening?”

  “You didn’t feel it?” Mo said.

  “What?” Rosa said. “Do you think that Philip went through?”

  “It seemed like a person,” Marie said haltingly.

  “It seemed like a woman,” Mo said. “We gotta get out of here.”

  “Oh my God,” Marie said. She had the urge, an urge she hadn’t had in twenty years, to cross herself.

  “What? What?” Rosa said.

  Mo’s voice was cooing and sweet. He held Rosa’s hand and turned to put his back to the port. “We gotta get out of here, babe. Marie’s right. It’s worse than we thought.”

  “It’s seducing us,” Marie said. There was a light at the end of the aisle from the open door, the light beyond the foyer: all they had to do was get there and close the door behind them. The light felt very far away.

  “We haven’t been strong,” she said. “We’ve just been lucky.”

  Chapter

  6

  THE OPTIMISTS

  Doors was the kind of guy who would start by telling you something that offended every single one of your sensibilities, yet by the end of the conversation, you were nodding. Brandon’s mother would have called this dangerous.

  But if I’m aware it’s happening, Brandon argued with her in his head. If I am just reexamining my preconceptions. Sometimes it’s wise to rebel, and other times it’s better to listen.

  All that zen stuff, Mom would probably say. Then: If your friends jumped off a cliff…

  Pretty rich, Brandon thought, coming from one of the people who had, in effect, jumped off a cliff.

  “Dreyer, are you getting this?”

  Sometimes you could hear the squeak of Doors’ German accent like a rusty hinge. This sounded like sis. Getting lost its final g. Doors was an invented last name, legally applied decades before young Albrecht could have known that he’d be the one to create—no, discover—portal technology. The name was meant as a metaphor for the American Dream, for doors that everywhere swung open when you nudged them with your knee. Portal technology had been fantasy back then, time travel laughable. All this was part of the official story. Brandon knew that the press’s appetite for rumor and conspiracy where Doors was concerned had no basis in reality. There were insinuations of Nazi sympathies, concerns that Doors was not a true American. By the time Brandon joined the company, the press was on to complaining that Doors owned too much of the market, and PINA was an unhealthy monopoly. When Brandon, early in his tenure, explained to his boss that the word schadenfreude had become common English parlance, Doors had laughed scornfully. Of course, he already knew that. People want to see the mighty fall. This was why he lay on so thick his immigration Dream story. Even so, Brandon knew that at bottom, journalists and politicians had for Doors the feeling that most of them did, the feeling one had in the presence of a movie star. They were overawed at his daring, afraid of his power. Doors was not like us. Doors wasn’t associated with tech so much as with glamour and the creation of mystique “That’s what one does in America,” Doors explained to Brandon, who then gave the quote to the news outlets. “In America, one learns to be savvy or dies. We Americans, we do not reward good hard work—how boring!—we reward the naughty boy, the little Huck Finn, the good troublemaker.”

  “Dreyer?” Doors said now. “Your notebook looks peculiar in that you are staring at a blank page.”

  Brandon nodded. Then he smiled, shook his head. “Was just thinking about how I might word it,” he said. These meetings with Doors were sporadic, and Brandon had never been a person to take notes with pen or pencil. His hands still wished to clutch and thumb-tap, or to pose clawlike over a keyboard.

  “Just get it down, for chrissakes,” Doors said. He wore his longish black curls slicked back, his salt-and-pepper beard nearly shorn but with just enough stubble so that it really did resemble a sprinkling of salt and pepper across his wide jaw and its famous cleft, a period to punctuate his face with certainty. Brandon knew that he himself was, by comparison, goofy and unsure, with his slightly crossed eyes and crooked smile, his body lanky and a bit clumsy. Whereas everything on Doors’ person was calibrated to give the appearance of certainty, each trait recognizable from its repetitions in the old media. A man such as Doors had been made for TV; but was he unable to thrive without his elephantine ego being fed by the endless straw bales of media representation? Apparently not: Doors was as energetic as ever.

  Brandon stopped fiddling with his notebook’s elastic tie and cracked his knuckles. Some of his colleagues around the table lifted their arms to check retro Timex wristwatches, all gifts from Doors four years ago when they were celebrating the failure of a smartWatch one of their competitors had introduced. The risks the other company had taken, much like the risks PINA had once taken with their phones, were useful; the smartWatch was bait thrown into battle to show whether there were any guns trained on your target. It had bombed, because, Doors believed—and the rest of the company with him—the public was tired of gadgetry. You don’t give people a thirst for novelty, Doors said, in a refrain written by Brandon, unless you have something novel to give them.

  There were, at the table, six men and six women, all between twenty-five and thirty-seven, a carefully haphazard assortment of backgrounds, the sorts of kids who’d been scouted from the Ivy League, mostly, with one college dropout named Benji, who had a form of slow-moving genius Doors recognized, and Brandon, who, while he’d gone to Yale, had met Doors through a friend at a party. Doors had, ahead of his peers, corrected for the overabundance of men in the PINA workforce in policies enacted a decade ago. The Ivy League was gone now, Brandon realized with a pang. There was no longer a well of elite talent from which to draw; the people left at PINA, and whatever children they’d manage to bear, were it. They’d all grow old together. “Loyalty is more profound than any other influence,” Doors was saying. He’d been holding forth on the virtues of loyalty for forty minutes. What was Brandon supposed to write? “Loyalty” with an arrow or an equal sign pointing to “good” or “profound” or “powerful”? He knew the point wasn’t Doors’ words but whatever they were being primed for, the punchline they were all awaiting.

  “The fact that blood is thicker than water is irrelevant. We create our blood ties; the bonds of loyalty are a kind of magnetism.” Doors stopped talking abruptly. Brandon was struck, as he often was, by the seeming innocence in his boss’s gaze. People who didn’t know better thought this was one of his affectations, like when Doors reached for a word he knew only in German. The deer-in-headlights look was not an indication that he was stunned, just sincere. Just this side of warm. Sometimes over a drink, Brandon would try to explain this to someone. Last night, it had been Suzanne. She’d asked, “What’s it like to be in the inner circle?” And he’d said, “Let me explain something to you about Doors.” He never gave away much, even after drink number three, drink number four. He might say Albrecht with too much throat, but mostly it was nothing he wouldn’t say in front of the man himself. One took care these days to be transparently kind, as one had in the days of PINAphones, since you were always one hack away from exposure, and you knew how much of your life was being recorded and held aloft in a cloud. It felt as if everyone might be wearing a wire—an effect of the solar-powered cameras planted all over the place, with their full audio and video. There were wires underfoot and in the walls. In any case, everything he told Suzanne (or Rachel or Riya or Jenny) meant He’s like a father to me. But this Brandon would never actually say, because there was a necessary line between sincerity and telling all.

  Last night, Suzanne had been teasing. “Twelve, huh? So, who’s Judas?” She had been nursing a whisky drink with maraschino cherries (the supply run several weeks earlier had been entirely focused on bars). The bar’s design had been modelled after Ten Forward, the bar in Star Trek: The Next Generation—down to the glowing melamine bar top and the tiered chess sets only the nerdiest among them knew ho
w to play.

  “Who needs Judas in a world without Romans?” Brandon wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by this, but Suzanne smiled and breathed out a smoky, dragonish laugh, and with her mouth pursed around the cherry, she had her desired effect on him. “The thing is,” Brandon said, “without being a revolutionary, Doors did completely change the world.”

  “But he is a revolutionary, then.”

  Only smart, ambitious women here, and sometimes even Brandon, who considered himself a good guy, tired of them.

  “You know what I mean,” he’d said.

  Now, in the boardroom (not really a board room, as there had never been a board), Doors was looking thoughtfully at his notebook. “I’ll get right down to it,” he said.

  The room was silent, respectful, and Brandon thought it was amazing that after a year of these bogus meetings—since PINA could not be said to exist anymore—none of them had stood up to Doors. There had been, would be, no outrage. They were loyal to Doors, ready to listen and obey his command. The group was making Doors’ point. They wore their neutral/pleased expressions, affect-free but not quite indifferent, even those who knew they could never go home, since home was outside the continent. All except Zahra, who was biting her lip and glaring down, and Brandon, who couldn’t stop his finger-fiddling and knuckle-cracking.

  “I want you to know how important it is to me that we all remain loyal to each other. You to me, yes, but also me to you. I don’t ask something of you that I would not do myself. I cannot do it myself, though, as—I’m sure you’ll all agree—I’m needed here, on deck.”

  Once in a while Brandon felt a brief stab of paranoia. It was the closed quarters, even if the quarters weren’t close. It was his own doubts about Doors and Doors’ sanity, and his feeling that he was the only one to harbor these doubts. Was this group becoming a cult, their leader’s charisma replacing thinking? His peers looked too quiet, too still, sitting around that table. Were they, like him, disheartened? There was no reason to hold these meetings, and no one would say so. Or maybe there was a reason; maybe the meetings were held to make the rest of the population think that there was someone in charge, a group of elites making decisions, and not this: a lecture on loyalty, an exercise in obedient listening.

  Even he, Brandon, Doors’ closest ally, the one depended on for spin, would not ask the question. He glanced at Zahra. She continued to glare.

  There was a long silence during which Doors seemed to expect a response. When he got none, he went on. “I am going to start sending out teams of four. The first team will head north. We need to go out farther than a supply run and beyond where we can communicate with each other, because we need to know what’s out there. Think of it like—you’ll be nomads with better facial hair.” A few of them laughed weakly. “I’ve selected the first four of you already, but I want you all to be ready to go. All of you must have your bags packed and be ready to leave the instant I tell you to.”

  Yes, definitely, the group had become much more loyal and obedient since moving in here, most of them more than a year ago, since they were merely happy to have survived whatever it was that had happened. Brandon struggled to remember how pissed off and disrespectful they’d been before the move, struggled even to remember his own perpetual feelings of panic and distraction. All of that had been exchanged for this peace.

  “You could just tell us now,” Zahra said, her eyes on the ruddy tabletop, which gleamed with varnish. She seemed to be speaking to herself. “We need to pack a car with enough batteries and chargers, make sure the car’s working…”

  Brandon watched Doors react to this. He had spent thousands of hours with the man, stood beside him while he groomed new recruits, as crisis after crisis hit, while he watched his own face on news reports. He had even watched Doors waving his hands over touch-free keys so that the inputting of code was exactly like a conjurer’s trick, though for years Doors would only code in private or not at all. Brandon had spent so many hours with Doors that he had been called by TIME magazine “the man behind the man.” So he knew, before it happened, what would:

  Nanosecond #1: Doors’ face would go tight as though in pain.

  Nanoseconds #2–6: Doors would smile.

  Nanoseconds #7+: Out of that smile would come a Buddha-like glow of warmth and good humour.

  “Yes, Zahra, everything is under control. We’ll have a car ready. You have nothing to worry about, because each team will stick together.” Doors stood and walked round to where Zahra was sitting, put his hands on her shoulders. (Brandon knew how those strong shoulders felt, hard as fresh tennis balls.) This forced Zahra to look up at him. Kindly, Doors said, “Any reaction you have to this demand is normal. You have nothing to worry about. We’re still in our grief steps.”

  Then Doors glanced searchingly around the room. “Brandon,” he said, calling him by his first name for the first time since the meeting had started, warming them all up, “Why don’t you stay behind and talk to Zahra.”

  Brandon was a good pup and never said no. He tried to give Zahra a Buddha-like smile of warmth and good humour. She narrowed her eyes. The rest of the group filtered out of the room—“Hold your questions, pack your bags,” Doors said in parting, with a joviality that felt off-key—and left Brandon with Zahra in front of the large bank of windows overlooking the quad.

  Already the festivities outside were booming through roving speakers. Kites in magenta and green and blue—a kite shaped like a dragon, a kite shaped like a rocket ship, kites emblazoned with variations of the PINA logo—set the blue sky aglow like a stained glass window.

  “It’s reckless to consider the worst,” Brandon said, settling next to Zahra. She was like a punished pupil, folded in on herself and facing the table. “Optimism is our greatest strength; worries are our weakness.”

  Silence. Those round shoulders exposed by the halter tops Zahra always wore bowed more deeply forward. She, like everyone Brandon knew here, did a lot of yoga.

  “Or, if you want to play naughty student, I can be game for that too,” Brandon said, putting his hand on hers.

  She lifted her head. “Don’t give me this bullshit. You of all people.”

  Brandon was aware that women liked to believe they had found something deep in him that no one else knew. Even Suzanne, for all her performances of invulnerability, believed he had revealed himself especially to her. But in fact, he had no secrets from anyone. That was the second greatest weapon: transparency. No one could uncover what wasn’t covered.

  “Me of all people?” he said. “Why should I be different?”

  “God. Stop talking like a fucking yoga robot.”

  “I don’t see why you would be angry with me.”

  She suddenly uncoiled and shook out her arms, stretching back. “For a marketing genius, you can be pretty thick-headed.”

  “If everyone’s a genius,” he said, “then no one’s a genius.”

  “Aren’t you humble.”

  “Look, do you just not want to go?” Brandon could not imagine this, since he himself was hoping to be one of the chosen four. “What’s the matter?”

  “Do you think Doors really has our best interests in mind?” She said this and looked at him cleanly, unblinking.

  Doors had planned everything. Even the glitches and hiccups, which were necessary to let the air in. Each of the twelve had been selected not for their techno-wizardry but because of their control over their emotions and reactions. Brandon recognized this in Zahra’s ability to calm herself: her face quickly became expressionless, her mouth unpouted itself. She could scare off tears; she never cried. Brandon met her eyes neutrally.

  “If you are beginning to question whether Doors has our best interests in mind—I mean, he’s not our parent,” Brandon said. “We’re all adults, and we’re all in this eyes open.”

  “I guess I’m just reexamining my commitments,” she said. “Checking my premises. Worry isn’t weakness. Just because you or Doors says a thing doesn’t make it so.”<
br />
  Zahra still had the slight lilting accent of her Pakistani girlhood. She had not grown up obsessed by Jean-Luc Picard and wouldn’t like it now if Brandon laughed at her accidental emphasis on make it so. He didn’t laugh. He was warm.

  “Do you know that proverb? Or maybe it’s a beatitude? ‘Consider the lilies which neither toil nor spin and even so-and-so in all his splendor wasn’t clothed as beautifully as these. Even your father in heaven.’ I forget the rest. But the gist is: What do you have to worry about?”

  “What’s that? Jesus?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why are you telling me about Jesus and beauty?”

  “I’m not.”

  “We’ve talked about this.”

  “Forget it, Zee.” In one high dark corner of the room beat that flashing green light. “I’m telling you there’s no point in worrying.”

  “Maybe the point is”—she dropped her voice—“the point is that worrying makes you do something. Forces you to act.”

  “And what action should we take, Zee? We’re only afraid of the outside world because we aren’t sure what’s out there. But there’s no evidence of danger or malice. It’s just the ports, ports that we already know so well.”

  “I haven’t seen a port in almost a year.”

  “You can go and visit the one in port-hall anytime you want,” he said.

  She slowly shook her head, with something like disappointment.

  Brandon felt sure there was something she wanted to say to him but wouldn’t say. “Worry is your enemy,” he repeated. “Questions are not your friend.”

  “Right.” She’d been like this even in bed. Never stopped appraising, never loosened control. Was perpetually moving through the poses of a yoga routine. For awhile, it had been his mission to give her such an orgasm that she’d forget herself, but this had proved impossible.

  She leaned in to him now and lifted her eyes. “Why is Doors asking you to reassure me? Why is it your job to ensure that we are all unquestioning? Isn’t there value in thinking for yourself?”