by Liz Harmer
Three figures came into view. They were making spears! He recognized the man who must have been the Southern drawl, an older guy who had always seemed a little wobbly on his legs and whose voice resembled Morgan Freeman’s. He was an old-timey software guy whom everyone called DOS. The other two Brandon recognized but could not name.
He chanced another look and saw a gone-cold firepit, a pile of logs covered by a tarp, bungees, and some boxy cages that might have been animal traps. Brandon had heard about a group of PINA survivalists who’d been worried about some kind of political uprising, but no one he knew had been involved with anything like that. Instead of gluing his eyes to screens, he should have been learning this—survivalist skills, outdoorsy stuff, how to pitch a tent, talents other than data analysis and PR that might keep him alive.
“We see you, Brandon Dreyer,” came Deep Bass. “Might as well show yourself.”
Then again, perhaps PR skills would always be necessary. Brandon stood up and wiped dry dirt and brown needles from his hands. “Hi,” he said, putting his arms up, half-shrug, half-surrender.
All three guys were older than him. They didn’t have beards but might as well have. In their flannel shirts and trucker hats, they looked like what they were: nerds pretending to be manly men. Two of them were burly white guys, and then there was DOS, thinner but not fit and strong and geared-up the way the others were. Inside, they’d have stood out like red tulips in a field of short grass, and Brandon wondered why he hadn’t noticed them more. He tried to picture them in white button-ups or loose yoga gear.
“Put your arms down,” said Deep Bass, the burliest white guy, shaking his head. “We’re not threatening you.”
“It’s nice out here,” Brandon said, unsure what to do with his arms now that they hung limply at his sides. He slipped his index fingers through the little hooks on his backpack, feeling like a fourteen-year-old trying to appear casual.
“You look like you’re packed up for a little trip,” said Deep Bass, low and accusatory. “You abandoning your shipmates? Or maybe the captain sent you out here, wants to know what we’re up to?”
If Doors knew about these guys, he hadn’t told Brandon. “You guys planning a coup, or what?” he said, deflecting.
Deep Bass took a step towards him, but DOS waved a hand at him calmly. “Nah, nah. We’re just practicing living in the woods. Kind of a hobby, right?”
Ignoring this, Deep Bass grumbled. “There’s some of us who think things aren’t quite as ‘stable’ as they once were. In fact, let me tell you what we really think. We think that everyone else that used to be on this planet is fucking dead.”
“No,” Brandon protested. “Not dead.”
“Oh, you gonna tell me that everyone is alive and thriving, living out their time-travel fantasies like they’re off to Club Med? What we’ve got here is some fucked-up sci-fi nightmare!” The spear Deep Bass had been whittling he now grasped in his hand. “Did you ever see Kate Generato? I don’t know anyone who actually saw her, except on a screen.”
“Billy, don’t lose your shit,” said DOS. He turned to Brandon. “Billy lost his wife. Came home from work, and she was just gone. Didn’t leave a note, nothing.”
“They go into those machines thinking they can come back,” Deep Bass—Billy—said. “Do you think they can come back, Mr. Right-Hand-Man?”
“To be honest—” Brandon cleared his throat. “I don’t know what to think. I mean, yeah, I did see Kate Generato. I met her.” He put his arms up again, mollifying, instinctively deferring to the clutched spear. “I don’t think the people who disappeared died.”
“You think they vanished to some other space-time? Some other time-space?”
“And what about the Testifiers?” Brandon said, shame flooding his body. “They came back.”
Billy scowled. “Everybody here knows that the Testifiers were actors. You know that. And anyway, they are long gone. You’ve watched that footage, right? It’s creepy as hell. Those smiling actors, the joke time machine that turns out to be real? And even Kate Generato, I mean, she’s only one person. Even if you count the Testifiers, that’s just four people who claim to have gone in and come back. There are six billion missing people.”
“To be fair, we don’t know the numbers,” Brandon said. “I guess there is a question, if they are vanishing to another space-time, if that’s what’s happening, whether they’d still be themselves on the other side.”
“The other side!” Billy shook the spear. “That’s a euphemism for heaven.”
“What I mean is, if their molecules got sucked up and rearranged, as they’d have to be, you know, wherever they end up, then I wonder whether a person would still be themselves anymore.”
The three men gaped at him. “Is that what Old Albrecht is saying?” Billy asked softly.
Brandon shrugged. “Doors said something, like, um…” Unconsciously, he took a few steps backwards until he was against the smooth muscled trunk of a eucalyptus. He was telling more than he wanted to. “He said that port can sort, port can think.”
The three stood quietly then, eyes cast down at the needles and leaves on the hard-packed forest floor where it snaked with roots.
“So, you guys are planning, what?” Brandon asked again. “A takeover? Or just taking off?”
Eyes turned up at him, wary. The smaller white guy, the young one who hadn’t yet spoken, cleared his throat and shot a gob of spit onto the ground next to him. “We know you trust Doors. We know you think you know everything about the man and all that’s gone on. But the problem has always been that people put their heads in the sand, hide from reality, distract themselves. Before, everything was about having fun, while the planet filled with poison gas, basically.”
“Let me just stop you there,” Brandon said.
“Let him finish,” said DOS, holding up his hand.
“Anyway, there’s a few of us who wonder if maybe this isn’t the good life. Maybe what we need to be doing is to go and see for ourselves if we can live out here, in the world.”
“But why are you doing all this in secret?”
They stared at him.
“Do you think Doors won’t let you leave?” Brandon shook his head so hard that the bottles on his pack clanged and rattled. Loyalty for the man he’d wanted to betray welled up in him again. “He’s powerful, but he’s not evil. He’s not a monster.”
“What kind of evil is this, though?” The youngish guy rubbed the stubble on his face, studied Brandon. “Think about it. Port can sort, and port can think, yeah? It isn’t just housewives or thrill-seekers, it’s not just the upper crust or the middle class, not just lemmings or followers or even addicts. We are talking about, basically, total annihilation.”
The guy was at least forty, but he spoke like a millennial, wrinkles around his eyes and mouth mismatched with his adverbial flourishes and his baseball cap. “What’s left of us? I mean, we’re on the endangered species list. We are. Okay? And so everybody’s taking off. We’re talking Buddhists and Christians, immigrants from India, immigrants from Russia, indigenous people, prisoners, pedophiles, street kids and hookers and addicts and astronauts and politicians. The fucking president of the U.S. of A. Responsible people and desperate people and bored people, and, I mean, think about the scale of this fucking thing! We’ve been hiding from it. Cowering in our giant beehive like Nazi criminals. Except our trial’s not coming. Civilization has dis-a-ppeared.”
The clear air, the tree bark, the words like shots. It was dizzying. Eucalyptus mixed with the pine-sap smell, stronger now, like a chemical. Brandon tried one more feeble protest. “We’re not hiding out in Stable. We have plans to spread. Doors has things under control.”
“Yeah?”
Brandon nodded.
“To be honest, we’ve lost our faith in Doors. And if his plans don’t work?”
“Melt it down,” Billy and DOS grunted quietly.
Through the trees was the far-off building Brandon knew so well,
its white length as pretty as driftwood beyond the blue flash of johns.
“If the disappeared people don’t come back,” Billy said. “Then, Brandon Dreyer, we have all bitten off more than we can chew. And even if they do come back. The scale of this thing! The disaster of it. A change like this is absolutely unprecedented.”
“Not entirely unprecedented,” Brandon put in, retreating to rationality, to fact. “We live on a planet where the continents all used to be attached.” His scientific knowledge was embarrassingly foggy. “We live on a planet where we and the apes share a common ancestor.”
He could see they were disappointed in him. DOS shook his head. “This is real, man. This is reality.” He turned and spoke to the other two. “If he’s confirming that port is thinking, then we are talking about a giant nervous system. Ports are neurons, and they’re communicating along pathways, right?”
“What?” Brandon said.
“The ports are a web, we think. A giant spiderweb with its own neural-system.”
“Leaving theory aside,” continued the younger guy, “what’s indisputable is the collapse of civilization. Our money’s worthless, and that’s hardly the worst of it. Think about the future! Five years, ten years, twenty…”
Brandon sensed irritation in the older two. They’d heard this speech before. “When you guys say ‘melt it down’…?”
“We’re speaking metaphorically. Of course,” Billy said.
Brandon pulled the pack off his shoulders, which were now sore.
“Anyway, we’re going to try something new,” Billy said. The spear was still clutched in his hand and now he pointed it directly at Brandon. “Just to try it.”
“Hey, I’m not going to fuck this up for you,” Brandon said. “But you don’t want to go out there, do you?” He gestured at the deepening woods. “Are you planning to hike, or what? If we’re talking about”—he gulped here, unable to take the words seriously, unable to pretend to do so—“an A.I. spiderweb, why the fuck would you go out there?”
The younger one glared at him. “We’re not going to tell you anything else.”
“I swear, I won’t say a thing. You see my pack, right? You can see what I’m doing.” He sank down and leaned against the tree. “I’ve lost people too. We’ve all lost people.” He bent his head back against that smooth bark, which was cold as a stone.
“I’m with you guys,” he said. “I know what port can do. I swear it. I swear.”
* * *
—
By the time Brandon left the men in the woods and returned to the building, creeping back past those guarding the latrine access, he didn’t know exactly what he was going to do. Just as soon as he left them, the woods in all their splendor excluded him. The ecosystems of worms working through decay, the many furtive creatures making homes in nests and burrows, had nothing to do with him, and, for all its flaws, Stable was humane and safe. The doors going into the main hallway that closed behind him were secure and well-engineered, did not need melting down.
Better here than out there in the great unknown, he told himself, forced to eat insects, possibly, forced to resist the powers of port everywhere he went.
The men had not been surprised when he explained port’s allure, the way it seemed to interfere with one’s thought processes. They were scientists, after all, or nerds at least, and had already come up with those theories. Apparently Brandon was the last to know; certainly he was the last to suspect malice. He muttered to himself as he paced toward the archive, where he would, he knew, become a person obsessed with putting the puzzle together, a person who would never really act. That’s when he saw Suzanne standing near the executive rooms with a tray braced around her neck like a retro cinema waitress. All she needed was a little cap on her pretty head, a little more piping on a red uniform. On the tray were rows of jars full of amber liquid.
“Why aren’t you in there?” she said. “They started twenty minutes ago.”
Brandon tapped his key on the lock and pushed a boardroom door open, even as Suzanne tugged at his elbow, hissing at him to get cleaned up first. But it was too late. For the first time, he was aware that in an hour and a half he’d gone from slightly tousled to dirty and sweat-soaked, as though he’d been hiking through the woods for days. Stress was making him sweat and stink.
At the long, glistening table were the other eleven of the twelve. Everyone wore tight yoga shorts, and the women had bamboo halter tops in colours ranging from bubble-gum pink to teal to heather grey. Zahra was sitting between Benji and Dawn, three chairs away from Doors. As Brandon moved to sit at the last empty chair directly across from Lena, a broad-shouldered woman with a throaty Dutch accent, another four got up and walked to the door. Sebastian, Peter, Joni and Kelly.
“Wait a moment,” Doors said to the four. “Have a drink before you go.” He nodded at Suzanne, who offered the tray and came around to distribute jars.
Doors stood and raised his drink. “To the four of you! To Sebastian, Peter, Joni, Kelly—and the sacrifice you are about to make! To the good life!”
“Hear hear!” A chorus of clinking.
Suzanne met Brandon’s eyes, mouthed the word sacrifice. He shrugged, and she left behind the four with her empty tray.
Then there were only eight of them left, plus Doors, who was exempt from any count. An old PINAtalkie sat in the centre of the table, its mahogany so shiny that the white device was doubled by its mirror image. Doors picked it up and put it to his mouth, staring at Brandon. He pushed the button.
“Testing, testing. Come in, Sebastian.”
“Roger. Sebastian here. Over and out.”
“Thumbs up,” Doors said. “Over and out.” He held the talkie but let one finger hover over the button. Then he turned the volume dial way down.
“So. Dreyer,” Doors said. “Even after your little display earlier, you’ve decided to come back and encroach upon the inner sanctum.”
Everyone but Zahra turned to look at him. He said nothing. Doors’ slight sneer had made “inner sanctum” sound moist and intimate, sexual, even wrong. The room had its own personality, its own smell and feel: the chairs that seemed to hold you as if in a giant hand; the wood and leather that sometimes had the scent of old tobacco, sometimes of sweet rum; the view out the window of the blue or grey sky and the opposite side of the building with its long crisp white line. There were the times they’d come here at Christmas, the one time it had been lightly snowing; the shared thrill of seeing before anyone else in the world the things that would change the world. For years he had come to this room, in some years every day, on some days more than once. Always at his boss’s side, watching as one by one each of the others was replaced and replaced again. Dawn’s face, Lena’s face, Benji’s. Each of them was good and kind; as a group, they were a better arrangement of humans than any other he’d known.
So, yes, he’d been a puppy, imbuing this room with meaning and calling it home, imprinting on each of the others his own affectionate scent. It made him want to cry now, but he wouldn’t.
Instead, he said, “I had been hoping you’d send me out with that pod, Doors. I’m ready.”
“We’re not convinced that you are ready. We’re not convinced that you can be trusted. Our emotions”—Brandon cringed at the paternalism in Doors’ voice—“can be guides, but often they are confusing.”
Dawn’s eyebrows were halfway to her hairline. Are you going to let him talk to you like that?
Silence was his best chance here, Brandon knew, since Doors would not be moved, just as Zahra would not be moved. He was out of the inner circle now, forever. So he said nothing, while Doors waited for him to beg or to cry.
At last, Doors spoke again. “You have something you’d like to tell everyone.”
Brandon remained silent, collected himself and remained collected. He stared back at Doors, returning his best imitation of those intense eyes.
“Why don’t you tell everyone what you’ve found out?” Doors said.
Always, home was somewhere else. Thirst was unquenchable; Zahra had been right. People were nomads, but they were designed to be trees, meant for deep root systems and long lives lived in the same spot. Later, on the road, past the initial thrill of escape, Brandon would find himself pulling over to catch his breath. It was this room he’d long for.
“Brandon,” Doors said, with an unguarded expression. “Brandon, remember how little we know.”
But Brandon had formed a hard case of silence around himself that could not be penetrated. In his mind, he was already tracking the route that would take him to the meeting place the men in the woods had agreed on, before they’d known he was listening. He imagined himself pushing the accelerator down hard as he drove up one hill and down another, the lap-lap-lap of the sea if he stopped by the beach to sit and think. To breathe.
“If you weren’t using this childish silent treatment, I know what you would say,” Doors said. The German accent had thickened, which Brandon knew to be a sign of stress. “You would like to ask me what it is that you don’t know. You would ask me to educate you. Yes?”
Doors had always been gentle with him. He’d hired Brandon during a short-lived phase during which he went incognito to art gallery openings and local parties and approached strangers with comments like “I believe in the power of intuition, don’t you?” Brandon was the only person who remained from this period. Now he was like a child encountering a parent’s temper for the first time. He resisted the urge to blurt: But you’re afraid, Albrecht, of what I know.
Doors began to move around the table, from one to the next, touching a shoulder here, the back of a neck there. This seemed to be a message, even in its vague hostility, of love for Brandon.
“You don’t need to ask, Brandon. Do you think we released these ports on humanity without understanding what we were doing? What power we wielded? Do you think we are eliminating people?”
Brandon saw Dawn flinch as Doors came near her
“And you must know that even if we were eliminating people, that it would be for the best? You know we weren’t doing that, but that if we had been, it had to be so?” Doors’ eyes still somehow radiated calm and kindness. Their twinkle indicated that this performance was an elaborate joke. “The Earth can breathe again. Do you know how beautiful is the creation of such a thing? That time and space, they shimmer, nebulous despite their apparent solidity?” This string of questions seemed to Brandon like hard exhalations filling up a balloon. Doors went to the window. The swaths of colour there—oval of green, stripe of white, expanse of blue above—appeared to form a kind of flag for PINA. “What we’ve made here, yes, it has a mythic quality, doesn’t it? This place is no more real than any place anyone has ever dreamed up. What is your reality test now? How can you be sure what is real?”
