Skinner

by Charlie Huston

  Skinner is staring at Terrence.

  “Housekeeping.”

  Terrence shrugs.

  “If you like.”

  Skinner is still staring at him.

  “I heard later that several of Kestrel’s more exotic operations were shut down.”

  “There was a great deal of mainstreaming going on. Cross accelerated the process once he had the board’s proxy. Moved Kestrel into more traditional territory. Improved the bottom line exponentially. He’s a remarkable administrator.”

  “Why did he do it, Terrence?”

  It is the first time Skinner has spoken his name since the conversation began. And Terrence does not know what it means that he is speaking it now.

  “Housekeeping. As you say.”

  “No. Yes. I understand why he tried to kill me. My name. Not good for mainstream business. But. Terrence. If he wanted to kill me, why didn’t he send Haven?”

  A picture flashes across Terrence’s mind, a boy, dark-haired, an absent gaze, swaddled tight in a sheet, arms and legs pinned, as one would wrap a newborn to calm it, staring in smudged black and white from the page of the magazine story that first sent Terrence looking for Skinner. That absent gaze filling Skinner’s eyes now, as if it is leaching into them from the past.

  “I’d sent Haven away. An operation in Iraq. A new asset, first time in the field. Tremendous potential for Kestrel. Only Haven would do for her. So I sent him.”

  “And Lentz got Montmartre.”

  Terrence lifts and drops his hands, helpless.

  “He was next on the chart. I wasn’t designing ops anymore, just handling details, assignments. Lentz was next.”

  Skinner, still staring.

  “Terrence, did you recruit Lentz?”

  “No.”

  Terrence looks up from his impotent hands and into Skinner’s eyes.

  “Cross did. Very impressed with him. Jumped him right up the chart behind you and Haven. Liked Lentz’s mettle is what I recall him saying.”

  Skinner turns on his stool, looks out the long bay of terminal windows, past the bodies of the jetliners parked at their gates, to the sky.

  “An alienation algorithm. Is there anyone other than you who would think of that?”

  Terrence is looking at a duty-free shop on the far side of the coffee bar. Liter bottles of top-shelf liquor, designer perfumes, massive bars of chocolate, jewelry, tiny cameras, candy-shelled music players, noise-abating headphones. He feels an urge to vomit. The fear he’s been holding in his stomach is fighting to come out.

  “Cross doesn’t miss the details. He’s good at details. Extrapolations. He latches onto things. A small idea, you say something to him, cocktail conversation, conceptual, and you don’t know what thought of yours might lodge in his head. You’re emptying the garbage and he picks through it for anything he can use. So an idea like this protocol. The algorithm, it started with the numbers. Just me thinking out loud. But Cross remembered that I’d done the work, had the program written up. When he took over he activated it.”

  Skinner moves a hand close to Terrence, doesn’t touch him.

  “And you sent Haven away. And you gave the op to Lentz.”

  He touches Terrence, fingers on the older man’s wrist.

  “I might have killed you, Terrence. I might have killed you all. I came very close to it.”

  Terrence closes his eyes; light is pulsing behind his lids.

  Am I going to do this? It’s done, old man. You did it already. Fix it. Five is a start. Billions. Fix it.

  He opens his eyes.

  “Cross has a job for you.”

  Skinner becomes still. Inanimate. No visible pulse or breathing.

  There is a file, Terrence owns the only copy, that contains every known photograph of Skinner’s victims. Terrence is looking at them now, a flip book in his mind, disjointed stutter of horrors.

  Skinner blinks. And the young man is there for a moment, the one from MIT, an undefinable potential, untapped but for Terrence discovering it.

  “What does he want me to do?”

  Terrence thinks about the photos in the file and what they conceal. The extremity of violence hides a truth deeper than the sadist others believe lives in Skinner’s heart, something altogether different. Something desperate and afraid. If Skinner learned, when he took up protection, that he need not be a monster in this world, then losing assets had taught him the value of still wearing a monster’s mask. If anyone saw his real face, they would know what it cost him to lose those he protected. He learned that he didn’t have to be a monster, Terrence believes, and then found out that he had been a person all along.

  What do you think, you’re going to live forever?

  “They have an asset for you.”

  Skinner’s eyes crinkle at the corners, just that much, focusing, and a vertical line creasing his forehead disappears.

  “What?”

  “Who.”

  Skinner touches the corner of his eye, rubs.

  “I’ve been up in the sky a long time.”

  Terrence reaches inside his jacket.

  “Welcome home.”

  He takes out a slightly bulging envelope the size of a business card.

  “USB drive.”

  Skinner accepts it.

  “James Bond.”

  “Consumer electronics.”

  “Everyone is James Bond now.”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  Terrence points at the envelope.

  “Details. Flight numbers. Bank accounts. Frequent flier miles. Names. Dates. Details.”

  He reaches across the counter.

  “Her name. Jae. The Disaster Robot Lady. The USB is for her. Beyond the job details, there’s more. For her.”

  He touches the back of Skinner’s hand.

  “For her, Skinner. Yes?”

  Skinner squeezes the bulge in the envelope.

  “I want to be on a plane. I need to be inside something. I need to think. Plan.”

  He rises.

  “It was sloppy, Terrence, the way Lentz killed my asset at Montmartre. A sloppy tip of the hand.”

  He doesn’t look at Terrence, his eyes tracking an Airbus as it taxis to the top of the runway.

  “Anyone paying attention would know that you let me get away.”

  Terrence’s own eyes are studying the floor, polished concrete, their dark reflections blurred beneath their feet. He shrugs.

  “They knew. And it was the last thing they needed to be able to get rid of me once and for all. So.”

  Skinner looks from the jet outside to the man next to him.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Terrence tugs at his collar.

  “Yes.”

  Skinner starts away, stops.

  “It’s good to see you, Terrence. I’ve missed our talks.”

  And he walks away, a man with a flight to catch, anonymous death, stopping at a kiosk for a copy of the Financial Times.

  Terrence doesn’t watch. As if some kind of distant muscle memory has been engaged from the night Skinner killed the boy in the hoodie, he feels his stomach turning. In a restroom off the concourse he vomits a few teaspoons’ worth of lemonade. Tears from the strain of puking dribble from the corners of his eyes. He wants, with no warning, to see his ex. To tell her something about his work. Something he could be proud of. But he’s not certain what.

  I did this. I did that. This was good. That was bad. Things you don’t even know you did, things you said, those are the things that can do the most harm. I said something once. Can you imagine? Words. How can words leave your mouth and become something evil? I said evil. Is it me? All the time? Is that what I was all the time? Evil. Our boy, I wish I could have met our boy. I’m most sorry about that. What a thing that would have been, to be a father.

  He stops his mind’s monologue, secret confession to a wife who isn’t his anymore. It’s done now. It’s all done now. Whatever the cost, it’s done. Skinner is on his way. And Terrenc
e was the one who released him.

  People die all the time. Now more will die. So.

  Time to go.

  When the arm loops around his neck as he steps out of the stall, he experiences a moment of relief, knowing the man who is killing him. Relief in whatever intimacy that allows him in his final moment. Relief in knowing that his death will be expert, fast, and without great pain. Then the moment is lost, with everything else, blacked out by a cloth pressed to his face, a chemical smell, a brief stab of pain in his left shoulder that shoots to his fingers and rebounds up and into his heart.

  Regrets falling away as his body drops to the tile.

  I did it.

  arcade

  THE OVERCOOLED AIR, jumbo HD screens, and testosterone laced dialogue inside Creech UAV operations always put Jae in mind of the bowling alley video game arcade back when she was an Atascadero High Greyhound. Jae had initially been dragged there by one of her girlfriends. Bolstering the other girl’s self-confidence as she engaged in adolescent stalking activities centered on a weedy boy with greasy hair, a proclivity for tearing the sleeves off of his Metallica t-shirts, and all the high scores on Mortal Kombat.

  Bored, Jae had dropped a quarter in one of the older games, Centipede, quintessentially deemed a girl’s game, and promptly demolished the high score. A feat that did not go unnoticed by a boy whose initials, RAD, had been wiped from that lofty top spot. Egged on by a few comments that were perhaps a little too close in tone to her father’s preferred mode of simultaneously challenging and demeaning, Jae proceeded to beat her own high score three times in a row. Then she started in on Galaga and Space Invaders.

  Ranks of attackers dropping down the screen, scrolling mazes, incoming missiles. Compared with the hand-eye coordination required in the savage sets of handball she played with her father, the quick twitches on a trackball or joystick felt casual. And with no danger of a sixty-five-gram wad of hard rubber being drilled into her forehead at gun-muzzle velocity, the consequences of failure were irrelevant, but she kept playing anyway. Because each game revealed something new. Not the next level, the unlocked challenges of advancement, but rather the minds of the games’ creators. The skeins of code embodied in the movements of digital aliens and insects, ostrich-mounted knights, robot warriors, frogs and plumbers. The screens became translucent, revealing a deeper stratum of play. Anticipation. Not reacting to the game but foreseeing it. Knowing where the next asteroid would pop onto the screen, what turn the ghost would take on its path to gobble you up, where the enemy saucers would zoom in from the edges of the square of known space.

  The configurations, her father would tell her, were not there. The games were randomized. On his Macintosh Classic II he showed her a brief chain of Fortran code that immediately set to generating random number sequences. The video games were the same, he said; the configurations were a delusion of her own. She was mistaking adeptness at a childish pastime for an ability to perceive intentionality where it did not exist. He expected more from her. If she wanted to play games at the bowling alley she should, indeed, bowl. At least that would provide her with a modicum of physical activity. Did she know, by any chance, that he had played on his high school team and regularly broke 200? Whereupon she soon found herself back at the bowling alley, the league end, rolling frames until her elbow swelled to grapefruit size, having her form critiqued by her father as he used his terrier build to whip balls down the lane, shattering the neat triangles of pins. While, in a booth behind her, the friend who had first brought her to the arcade was busy smearing her pink-lip-glossed mouth against the neck of her greasy love interest.

  The net gain of all this low comedy, as far as Jae was concerned, was that scrap of Fortran.

  Nights, after her father had left for his graveyard shift minding the dials and gauges in the control room of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, she would slip past the closed door of her auntie’s bedroom, TV blaring The Tonight Show on the other side, despite the woman’s refusal to learn a single word of English since she’d been brought here following Jae’s mother’s death, and into her father’s office, kneeling into the ergonomic stool he used to discipline a chronic backache, switching on the Mac to run the Fortran code, watching the numbers tumble across the screen. Searching for what her father said was not there.

  Reason.

  Intention.

  Configuration.

  Will in the design. A human mind had written that bit of code. The random string of numbers had only ten digits to work with. It could only be infinitely random if one let it run into infinity. In smaller observable bursts, massive repetition was inevitable. The mind of the coder. So she knelt in the chair, watching the flickering numbers fill line after line on the screen. Anticipating, silently, what would come next. Stretching her mind, training it to see through the camouflage to the true shape hidden underneath.

  Her eyes never once darted from the screen to the large framed photo ensconced on its own shelf within her father’s bookcase. Surrounded on all sides by engineering and physics texts, programming manuals, histories of human achievement (movable type, agriculture, geometry, the internal combustion engine, law), and a copy of Bernath E. Phillips’s 1937 bible, Fundamental Handball. Other than a constellation of certificates, credentials, and degrees framed on the opposite wall, the photo was the room’s only decoration. There was no evidence of Jae herself. But, then again, her mother’s photo had only come to grace the room following her death.

  Bee sting.

  Stupid way to die.

  Pointless. Senseless. Random.

  Sitting at the edge of the footpath that led from a parking lot to the beach at Morrow Bay. One sandal scraped from her foot as she jerked her leg back and forth in the sand of the path. Neck and face puffing and swelling until she appeared to have neither. Just a mottled purple column of flesh that grew from her torso, hair sprouting from it, a few random holes pushed into it, one of them rimmed with gnashing teeth.

  Jae digging a hole in the sand, pushing her head into it, trying to bury herself.

  Sitting in her father’s office eight years after, looking for the next number before it could appear. Knowing there was an order. That things did not happen without being made to happen.

  Feeling for the design.

  The designer.

  The planner.

  Daring the writer of the world’s code to reveal itself. So that she could smash it in its face for having killed her mom.

  Standing in Creech, she feels she’s looking at the dream scenario for those boys who had packed the bowling alley game room in the final years before the rise of Nintendo.

  Which, she knows, is more than slightly the point.

  The closer modern warfare hews to video game sensibilities, the more effectively it can be marketed to the young men who live in the demographic overlap between Call of Duty and the US Military. Unmanned aerial vehicle operations carrying the extra benefit that they don’t involve being shot at.

  “Do you see anything?”

  She looks at the lieutenant colonel who has been escorting her since she came on base that morning. He is prototypically lean and proportioned for a cockpit, an especially idealized ratio of length concentrated in his tibia and fibula. She’s long known that the cliché about fighter pilots being shorter overall than the national average is false, the more essential measurements being taken when they are seated. Measuring from the hips to the top of the head has obvious implications in an enclosed space; more interesting to Jae was learning that knees to hips tends to be critical. Too much length in the femur and you can’t properly fit in an ejection seat. During a punch-out, a pilot’s knees might extend an unfortunate fraction of a centimeter and clip the edge of the dashboard.

  Lt. Colonel Cervantes’s knees, she imagines, were never in danger when he was piloting his A-10 Warthog in Iraq.

  “Ma’am, do you see anything?”

  Jae folds her arms across her chest a bit more tightly. She should have brought a sweate
r or a jacket from the car. She knows what these buildings are like. Iceboxes in the desert. Fighting a two-front war against both nature and the ever multiplying processors, hard drives, and huge LCD screens inside the operations center. To say nothing of the BTUs produced by the human element. Behind the doors that line the long central hallway of the UAV operations center, pilots, electronic sensor operators and intelligence specialists are crammed three to a room, staring at over a dozen screens, trying to make remote sense of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, and other, more obscure locations. Or, more close to home, patrolling the southern border, searching for illegals and drug smugglers with equal fervor. Through the camera eyes of a Predator or Reaper, one desert looks much the same as another. Deserts and cities, the battlegrounds of the new century’s first decades. These pilots will see much more of both. And, increasingly, they will have occasion to patrol domestic space far from the border. Though, Jae knows, it will be quadrotor drones taking on the city environments soon enough.

  She looks at the screen.

  Desert. High desert. Rocks, scree, scrub, time’s passage revealed in the strata of a cliff face. Everything irregular but sharp-edged, even the gnarled brush that grows in the cracked surface of a fifteen-kiloton boulder. Everything irregular except for one geometrically flawless dark rectangle, three-dimensional, a shape taken directly from Euclid’s forebrain.

  She points.

  “There’s that.”

  He nods.

  “Yeah, there seems to be a consensus that it looks a little out of place.”

  She stares at the shape.

  “When was this?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Is there a closer view? Ground level?”

  He shakes his head, wobbles one hand back and forth, indicating something out of balance.

  “That’s just a little east of Zabul. Very iffy on the ground. Many bad guys.”

  “It has a shadow.”

  He looks over his shoulder, looks back at her.

  “Yeah, some of us noticed that.”

  She steps closer to the screen.

  “So it’s not a rectangle. Cuboid. Rectangular prism.”