by Dima Zales
The queen-sized bed is mixed news. At home, I sleep on a California king, and I’ve been contemplating getting an even bigger bed. Then again, a smaller bed means we’ll be huddled closer together, and that has a certain appeal.
Ada gets under the blankets, and I get in from the other side of the bed.
“Good night?” I say, unsure what the gentlemanly protocol would say about me trying to kiss her.
“Will you hold me?” she whispers and wriggles under the blanket, nestling backward into me.
“Sure.” My throat is suddenly too dry to talk.
In the next moment, we’re in the classic spooning position.
My mind is whirling. She smells like summer and feels just as warm in my embrace. An almost healing energy spreads from her body into every injury I suffered today. Placebo or not, all the pain disappears as though I took a Percocet.
“Do you mind if we fall asleep like this?” Ada murmurs. “Does it hurt lying on your side?”
“No,” I whisper. “Not at all.”
After a few minutes of blissful peace, my eyes adjust to the dark, and I notice Mr. Spock and his kin lying in strategic positions around the bed.
As sleep steals over me, I have the eerie sensation that if I hadn’t been a perfect gentleman, a pack of rats would’ve attacked me. Maybe it isn’t called a pack, though, but a swarm or maybe a colony? Or perhaps a pride, or possibly even a plague? Knowing the question might keep me up for needless minutes, I use my newfound power to Google stuff in my mind and learn the proper term is actually a “mischief of rats.” As odd as it sounds, it’s kind of fitting.
I don’t think I even turn off AROS before I drift to sleep.
Chapter Twenty
I’m falling down a never-ending skyscraper in slow motion.
Frantically, I look through every window, searching for something or someone.
Suddenly, I spot my target, and instead of falling, I float in one place and squint through the window.
Inside is a white medical room, and I see Mom sitting on an ancient dental chair. She looks horrified as she stares at the dentist. He turns toward me, and I realize he isn’t a dentist at all.
“I know him,” I scream at Mom through the window. “His name is Anton.”
Mom can’t hear me, and neither can Anton. With an abrupt motion, he grabs one of those frightening metal picks and leans toward Mom.
One moment I’m floating outside the window, and the next I’m crashing through it, jagged pieces of mirrored glass flying everywhere.
The sound of breaking glass continues as I leap forward, just as Anton is about to stab Mom in the chest with the dental pick.
My enemy turns in time for me to punch him in the face, and I hope my desperation and hatred give me the strength required to break his monumentally large jaw.
I hear the distant sound of a phone ringing, but I ignore it and focus on my fist, which feels like I just hit an iron plate instead of a human face.
Before I can even think of throwing another punch, a giant fist connects with my face in a vaguely familiar arc, and I fly backward through the window.
Looking down, I see the pavement approaching at the speed of light. Though I should be terrified for myself, I’m more worried about leaving Mom alone with that monster.
The pavement approaches even quicker, and I brace for the impact.
Chapter Twenty-One
Instead of hitting the pavement, I wake up and realize it was a dream.
Just like in the dream, I hear a phone ringing in the distance. Maybe that’s what woke me up from that completely illogical Superman-like nightmare that only a sleeping mind wouldn’t question.
I open my eyes and note the room is only beginning to brighten from the rising sun peering through the gaps in the shutters. I dismiss the AROS interface that I left on last night and wonder why I didn’t see it in my strange dream. The ringing is coming from down the hall. I have to assume it’s Precious, unless Ada also uses “I Like to Move It” as her default ringtone.
I get up, careful not to step on any members of the mischief of rats.
Precious is with my clothes in the bathroom, proving how fickle my love for my phone has become; once I got something better in the form of Brainocytes, I left the poor device in a moisture-rich environment.
According to the phone, it’s 6:45 a.m., and it’s Joe calling.
My sleepiness evaporates, leaving me feeling like I just downed a venti cup of coffee. “Hey. What’s going on?”
“I talked with a few guys who work at that airport.” Given the time of day, Joe sounds surprisingly alert. “You won’t believe where that plane is headed.”
By “talk,” does he mean needles under nails or just waterboarding? I don’t interrupt him to ask since what’s about to follow must be extremely important, and I don’t want to have a “talk” with him myself.
“Where?” I ask, trying to sound calm. “I know it didn’t get there yet, so it must be really far.”
“It’s going to—”
A blast of noise that sounds like a computer notification cranked to the level of an air siren drowns out his words.
To avoid going deaf, I raise my hands to cover my ears. My phone slips out of my hands. My heart in my throat, I watch Precious hit the tile floor with a bang and shatter into little pieces. Glass from the phone flies everywhere, and a shard punctures my bare calf.
I stare at it, wanting to reject what I just witnessed. My phone is supposed to be impact proof.
Suddenly, I’m standing there again, not holding my ears, and the phone is inexplicably back in my hand. The pain in my calf is gone too, but the noise is still assaulting my eardrums.
Given how holding my ears turned out, I don’t repeat the action. Instead, I tightly clutch the phone. Needless to say, it doesn’t fall and I don’t get cut.
The noise abruptly stops.
“Location application execution halted,” a mechanical voice says, booming loudly enough to have come from Zeus or some other thunder deity.
Through the fugue of confusion, I understand what happened, or at least part of it.
The horrendous noise was from the alarm Ada coded as per my request. I asked for it to be hard to ignore, and she made sure of that. This means the noise brings good news.
Mom must’ve blipped on the app’s radar.
The second thing that happened, which I’m a bit less sure about, tempers the flood of relief. What was the deal with the phone falling out of my hand, breaking, and then being back in my hand, unbroken? Am I going crazy? Because that felt like jumping back in time.
Then I recall Ada’s warning about pre-cog events. She said something about seeing events that her simulated brain regions anticipated, so that must’ve been my first episode. Maybe the brain-boost regions realized I might drop the phone if I grabbed my ears the way I’d been about to do and gave the biological brain the input, which got turned into a vision of what might happen. Just like Ada explained, this wasn’t a psychic prediction, but more of a forecast, and a faulty one at that, since my phone is impact resistant.
“Are you there?” Joe demands from the phone’s speaker.
“I’m here,” I say, trying to catch my breath. “I’m sorry, Joe, I almost dropped my phone. Where did you say Mom is?”
“Fucking Russia,” Joe grits out.
I nearly drop my phone again, or for the first time—or whatever the proper terminology is, given that pre-cog moment.
The last thing I expected was for my mom to be in Russia. Then again, given how long the flight took, it does fit.
“Where in Russia?” I ask, sounding hollow.
“I just found out it’s in Russia. I have no fucking clue where specifically.” Joe’s words are clipped.
My heart sinks deeper.
Russia has the largest area in the world. It’s just shy of being double the size of the US. My mom is not a needle, but a grain of sand in a haystack.
Then I remember the
alarm and say, “Thanks for letting me know. I was just working on a way to track her on my end, and if I’m lucky, I might have a clearer fix on her location.”
“Oh?”
I do my best to describe what Ada and I cooked up with the app. After I finish, Joe asks a few surprisingly insightful follow-up questions. He ends with, “Sounds promising. Go get the data and call me back right away.”
The line disconnects, which I guess is Joe’s version of goodbye.
I stare at the bathroom mirror in confusion.
My face looks just as swollen, but the pain is more tolerable today. I feel it now that I’m focusing on it, but not as intensely as yesterday.
“Russia?” I ask my bruised reflection. “Really?”
I’m not my grandparents, in that I don’t practice their reverse anti-Semitism. Having said that, if I were ever guilty of disliking a country wholesale, that country might be Russia. I mean you don’t escape with a refugee status the way we did without developing some irrational—and maybe even rational—negative attitudes.
Thinking about it more, I realize I don’t dislike Russians, and I have plenty of Russian friends whom I respect. I also find many famous Russian people admirable and very likable. I guess disliking a country can, paradoxically, be different from disliking its people.
“Mike?” Ada says groggily from down the hall. “The alarm went off.”
This is when I realize a ringing is coming from somewhere else. I guess Ada didn’t take any chances. Besides the crazy alarm going off in my head, she also created something external to make sure she’d know when the app did its job.
“Coming,” I yell. “Can you put the GPS coordinates onto the map, like you did before?”
“On it,” she shouts back. “Come to my office when you’re done in there. I left out a toothbrush for you last night, in case you didn’t notice.”
I look at the edge of the sink and confirm there’s indeed a sealed toothbrush there, the type dentists give out after a cleaning. I quickly prioritize and use the toilet first; then I wash my hands and brush my teeth.
I don’t bother dressing and leave the bathroom wearing only my boxers so I can quickly learn what the app found out. I do bring Precious with me, though, just in case.
“You’ll never believe this,” Ada says when I enter her office.
I don’t share what I already know, hoping against all hope that Ada says my mom is in Russia, but that Russia happens to be an oddly named town in Florida. It’s not impossible—Florida has a city called St. Petersburg and another one called Odessa.
“This”—she taps the screen that’s zoomed in on an image of a small airport—“is in Podmoskovye… as in Moscow Oblast… as in Moscow in Russia.”
The tiny hope bubble bursts, and I feel the need to sit down.
“My cousin just called,” I say and grab onto the back of Ada’s chair. “His findings corroborate this.”
She looks at me worriedly. “You should eat something. You’re too pale. At least the parts that aren’t purple.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say, my injuries aching at the reminder. “What else did the logs reveal?”
“The cell service in Russia isn’t compatible with Brainocytes,” Ada says. “But that isn’t a shock, since we didn’t exactly expect these things to go roaming in the alpha stage of the project.”
The cell service we currently use belongs to a company in Mitya’s portfolio, and they don’t have any cell towers in Russia.
“We can fix this with something like a firmware update,” Ada says, “but only after I do some coding on my end and if your mom is on Wi-Fi, which she isn’t right now. The log is full of connection attempts, and once she does connect to Wi-Fi, we’ll get a new data point. Problem is, they must have fewer public Wi-Fi points in that part of Russia, or she’s outside civilization at the moment.”
“Of course she’s outside civilization,” I mumble. “She’s in Russia.”
“This is all the data we have.” Ada brings up a map with a single dot. “She got onto Wi-Fi here.” She points at a place on the map.
The town is called Khimki, and the street is named Babakina. On the satellite view, I see gray Soviet-era buildings and a forest in the middle of the town. The public Wi-Fi my mom joined appears to be coming from a school imaginatively named “Number 2.”
“That’s something,” I say, lifting my phone. “Let me call the detectives and give them all this information.”
“Yeah,” Ada says, “you do that, and I’ll go make you a smoothie. Here, take my chair.”
Ada leaves while I dial Detective Sawyer’s number. He doesn’t pick up, so I leave a voicemail describing the situation in detail.
It is only 7:00 a.m., which is on the early side for some people. I contemplate calling 911, but it might be too difficult to explain this emergency. Instead, I call Mitya and cross my fingers. If anyone can give me good advice, it’s him.
“What?” Mitya sounds exactly the way he did back in the day after one of his all-nighters. “It’s four in the morning.”
“It’s actually seven. You’re on Eastern Standard Time now,” I say, wishing I video-called him instead so I could see his expression. “I had to talk to you. I just learned more about Mom.”
“Of course.” Mitya sounds instantly awake. “What’s up?”
I explain the situation, and as I expected, Mitya mutters curses when he learns where Mom is.
If I’m conflicted about my feelings toward Russia, Mitya is very secure in his open dislike of the place. As he told me in college, “You have to live there during your formative years to really get the taste of it.”
I can’t blame my friend. His bitterness is justified. When he finished the top lyceum in Russia, his parents sent him to get the rest of his education in the US, which is how we met. The Levin family was part of the emerging class of so-called New Russians—people who made their wealth after the fall of the Soviet Union. That status came at great peril, and before Mitya completed his junior year at MIT, he learned of his parents’ murder. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but the one time he did, he told me the reason he was gone a whole summer as a senior was because he went back to Russia—and now he can never go back there again. I presume he got some kind of revenge on his parents’ killers, but I don’t know for certain, and I’m not sure I want to know.
“The official route will be too slow,” Mitya says after running out of choice words—a process that took a while since he moved from English cuss words to Russian, a language that prides itself on its rich profanity.
“So what do I do?” I ask, afraid I already know what he’ll suggest and preemptively dreading it.
“I think you should go there yourself,” Mitya says.
“Yeah?” Coldness spreads throughout my body, as though I’m in a Russian winter. “I don’t know anyone there. What can I actually do?”
“I know someone there who can help you,” Mitya says. “His name is Sasha, though he prefers to go by Alex. You might’ve heard of him. His last name is Voynskiy.”
“As in Alexander Voynskiy?” I ask, not hiding my shock. “The one guy who’s actually richer than you?”
“That’s not a fact,” Mitya says dismissively. “Have you seen the ruble-to-dollar conversion rate lately? With all the sanctions and embargoes, it’s pretty bad.”
I try to recall everything I’ve heard about the eccentric Russian. Aside from Mitya, who might come close, we don’t really have Voynskiy’s equivalent here in the States, but I guess he’s like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos all rolled into one. I heard that like Ray Kurzweil, one of Ada’s heroes, Voynskiy takes a hundred and fifty supplements per day, some intravenously.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, it’s Russia.”
“We both know you’d go to hell for your mom,” Mitya says. “This is just a little worse.”
“The center of hell in Dante’s Inferno was very cold.” I laugh, but there’s no mi
rth in it.
“Luckily for you, it’s summer, so unless she’s in Siberia, you’ll be warm,” Mitya says.
“But how—”
“I’ll arrange it for you,” my friend says. “My jet can make the flight if it stops to refuel.”
“When—”
“I’ll need a couple of hours. Will that be enough?”
“I guess.” I try not to sound as overwhelmed as I feel. “But don’t I need visas and stuff?”
“I have a pricey team of lawyers who can do all the paperwork. I also know whom to bribe in Russia, and even in the US if need be. Don’t worry. At the airport where you’ll land, you can bring anyone to and from Russia, no questions asked. Hell, you can even kidnap some Russian citizens—say, the culprits—and bring them here, and my guys will still figure out a way to get them into the country, even if we have to issue them each an H-1B visa and give them a bullshit job at one of my companies.”
I swallow. “What about talking to the authorities?”
“Do it from the cab or let your uncle handle it,” Mitya says. “Don’t worry. Ada and I can support you from here, and I promise to pull some strings with my connections in the government, as well as the media. Is your mom a US citizen?”
“Yeah, for many years now. You should’ve seen her study for that test.”
“Good,” he says. “That will help if the American government needs to get involved. I’ll also contact my friends in the media, so the headlines will be screaming about US citizens being kidnapped and brought to Russia. The pressure will be on.”
“Fine.” I’m beginning to accept my fate. “Let me ring my cousin so I can let him know all this.”
“Your cousin? You mean the psycho you told me about?”
I sigh. “Do yourself a favor and never call him that to his face. But yeah, that one.”
“All right,” Mitya says. “I’ll text you where to go and meet you there.”
“Thanks. I might run out of collectible items to repay you with pretty soon.”
“Don’t mention it,” Mitya says. “See you soon.”
