Eschaton - Season One

by Kieran Marcus

  “Guess what, sensei,” Higgs said and grinned. “It’s a date!”

  Huxley felt a sting in his heart. As if his inability to ask Meitner out wasn’t enough to deal with, his best friend had pounced on her like a vulture. “Wow,” he said sulkily. “You didn't waste any time, did you?”

  “You bet I didn’t, sensei. I’m a man of action.”

  “So where are you going to take her?”

  Higgs stopped, looked at Huxley and laughed. “Oh Huxley!”

  “What?”

  “I’m not taking her anywhere at all, sensei. You are. Dinner, tomorrow at six at the Taormina. Guess what, she loves Italian just as much as you do. What are the odds, huh?”

  Huxley was aghast. “You set me up on a date?!”

  “Fearsome, no?”

  “I bloody hate you, Higgs.”

  “You’re welcome, sensei,” Higgs said and pushed him out into the January heat.

  * * *

  Huxley opened the door to his flat and switched on the lights. Behind him, Meitner stepped inside and looked around.

  “Nice,” she said.

  “Oh please,” Huxley replied and waved his hand dismissively. “You don’t have to compliment my flat. I know it’s a cave.”

  “It’s really not that bad, though.”

  Huxley smiled politely. He knew his place was a better rat hole, but he was glad that Meitner pretended to like it. He had made an effort to make it look presentable. Instead of working on his assignments as a crowdworking contractor, he had spent all day tidying up his flat. He had taken out the trash, washed a week’s worth of dishes, put his dirty laundry out of sight and done all the household chores that he usually didn't regard as a priority because he preferred working hard to pay the rent for a messy, untidy flat over living in a neat and tidy one that he couldn’t afford. All the while, he had been asking himself why he even bothered, because by no means had he expected to take Meitner home after dinner or even planned on asking her. But even though it had been but the remotest of possibilities in the back of his mind, for some reason Huxley had thought it wise not to take any chances.

  “Please,” he said and led Meitner over to the sofa. “Have a seat. Can I get you anything? Coffee perhaps? Would you like some coffee?”

  “Um …,” Meitner said reluctantly. “No, thanks. I try not to drink coffee so late in the evening. It gives me heartburn.”

  “Right,” Huxley said. “Anything else?”

  “You don’t happen to have wine, do you? I think I could do with another glass.”

  Huxley smiled. He was a beer drinker, but in what seemed like another strange coincidence now, Higgs had given him a bottle of red wine for Christmas that had since been eking out a miserable existence on top of his refrigerator in the kitchen. He and Meitner had already shared a bottle at the Taormina. It had relaxed him and made him rather giggly, and he wasn’t sure if he should have any more alcohol tonight. Then again, alcohol was liquid courage, and he could definitely use some more of that, because the sight of a beautiful girl sitting on his sofa made him a lot more nervous than he cared to admit.

  “As it so happens,” he said, “I do have a really nice bottle of red wine. Be right back.”

  “Great.”

  On his way to the kitchen he stopped and asked, “Would you like some music?”

  “Sure,” Meitner said and smiled. “Why not?”

  “Meitner, put on some music!”

  Taken aback by the unexpected command and inhospitable tone, Meitner stammered, “Oh … but … I don’t know where …”

  The other Meitner, the virtual Meitner, talked over her. “Specify type of music,”

  “Oh,” the real Meitner said.

  “I don’t know,” Huxley said. “Play something romantic. Some piano music. Not too loud.”

  Without further reply, Meitner played Chopin’s Nocturne in B major.

  In the kitchen, Huxley took two glasses from the cupboard. He didn’t have proper wine glasses because he had never needed any, so regular glasses would have to do. Then he grabbed the bottle of wine and realized that he didn’t have a corkscrew either. In a bout of panic he rummaged through the tool drawer in the cabinet until he found a screw, a screwdriver, and a pair of pliers. For a moment Huxley pondered whether he should open the bottle in the kitchen or take his toolkit back to the living room. Would his ability to open a bottle of wine without a corkscrew outshine the blemish of not having one? There was only one way to find out.

  “I haven’t got a corkscrew, I’m afraid,” he said as he returned to Meitner and put the glasses and bottle on the coffee table in front of her.

  “Oh,” Meitner said. “So how are we gonna open the bottle then?”

  Huxley smiled and started screwing the screw into the bottle with the screwdriver. Then he took the pliers, placed them around the screw and pulled the cork out with a plop.

  Meitner laughed. “That’s brilliant!”

  “It’s rather simple, really,” Huxley said bashfully and started pouring the wine.

  “I know. I mean, it’s totally obvious when you see it, but it’s the kind of thing that’s so simple that I never would have thought of it.”

  “Really?” He handed her one of the glasses. “So how would you open a bottle of wine without a screwdriver then?”

  “I have no idea!” Meitner laughed. “I’d be totally lost. I’d probably take a knife and pick and poke and hack at the cork until it’s gone and half of it is swimming in the bottle in little bits and pieces.”

  “Good thing you have a handyman like me,” Huxley said, wondering where his swagger had come from all of a sudden.

  “I drink to that,” Meitner said and chinked her glass against his. They both took a sip. “Oh my! That is some wine!”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Huxley replied, rather surprised at the full-bodied, extraordinarily quaffable taste.

  “Let me see that,” Meitner said and reached for the bottle. She read the label and gasped.

  “What’s wrong?” Huxley asked.

  She looked at him with her eyes wide open. “Do you even know what you’re serving me here, Huxley?”

  He shrugged with a sheepish look on his face.

  “This is a 2079 California Grenache!”

  Huxley remained sheepish. “Forgive me my ignorance, but I have no idea what that means. Is that good?”

  “What it is,” Meitner said, “is extremely rare. 2079 was the year of the burst, remember?”

  Huxley didn’t exactly remember the big gamma ray burst of 2079, mostly because it had occurred twelve years before he was born, but he was of course familiar with the effects the event had had on the planet: the droughts, the crop failures, the hundreds of millions of deaths.

  “The radiation,” Meitner continued, “had a curious effect on Californian grapes: it killed off about half of them, and most of those that didn’t die were left to rot on the vines because there weren’t enough workers to pick them. The burst had killed so many people, and for those who survived, producing fine wines wasn’t exactly a priority. They were preoccupied with producing more basic food stuffs. So only a tiny amount of the grapes that survived the burst were made into wine, but they turned out to be some of the best wines ever made.”

  “No kidding,” Huxley said and took another sip.

  “How did you even get this wine?” Meitner asked.

  “Higgs gave it to me for Christmas. It’s … his nan died last year. He found it in the cellar when they cleared out her house.”

  “Wow,” Meitner said. “I’m feeling really bad now. This wine must be worth a fortune, or at least it must have been until we opened it.”

  “Meitner,” Huxley said, “how much is a bottle of 2079 California Grenache worth?”

  She looked at him and pointed over her shoulder. “You’re talking to the other …”

  “Yes.”

  “Right, okay.”

  After a brief moment of research, the virtual Meitner rep
lied, “A bottle of 2079 California Grenache sells at around two hundred thousand Euros.”

  “Oh my God!” Meitner shrieked and put her glass on the table as if it contained poison.

  Huxley laughed. “That’s only about as much as I make in a year.”

  “I’m so sorry, Huxley,” Meitner said, looking miserable. “You wouldn’t have opened the bottle if it weren’t for me. This is all my fault. I should have gone for the coffee. I’m so sorry!”

  Huxley shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I would have opened and emptied that bottle on some lonely Saturday night and I would have been none the wiser, so what’s the difference? Now I’m sitting here, drinking it with you, and it’s totally worth it.”

  Now it was Meitner’s turn to look sheepish. “Really?” she asked.

  “Really.”

  “That’s really sweet of you to say. But even so, I still feel quite miserable about it.”

  Huxley looked into her eyes. “Please don’t.” He took Meitner’s glass off the table and placed it back in her hand. Then he put his arm around her shoulder and very gently pulled her towards him. She didn't resist and leaned her head against his neck. “How do you know so much about wine anyway?” he asked.

  Meitner giggled. “I don’t, really. Honestly, I know nothing about wine at all, except that 2079 California wines are extremely rare. My mother told me. She told me all about the burst and what it did. She’s American, you know?”

  “Oh, is she?”

  “Yeah. She was nine years old at the time of the burst. Both my grandfather and my uncle were out in the garden when it hit. They were dead within a few hours. The family lived on the East Coast at the time, near Boston. That’s probably what saved my mother’s life. It was already late at night and she was inside, sleeping. If they had lived further west where it was still early evening, she probably would have been playing outside and gotten killed just like my grandfather and uncle.”

  Huxley didn’t know what to say, so he simply tightened his grip around Meitner’s shoulders.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “my mother and my grandmother were both inside when it happened, so they survived. But the world around them was a mess. America was falling apart in the following weeks and months, so my grandmother decided it would be best if they moved to Europe. And that’s what they did. Grandma Abby got a job as a lecturer at UCL and taught there until she died five years ago. Cancer. She’d survived the burst because she’d been inside, but she was exposed to some radiation nonetheless. Her doctors thought that this was probably what caused her disease, because we didn’t have a history of cancer in our family.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Yeah. So anyway, my mom got married, got a degree, got me, got divorced, and now she’s living in Paris.”

  “Paris?” Huxley asked. “Why Paris?”

  “She’s with the European Space Agency. They have their headquarters there.”

  “Your mom is with the ESA? That is bloody awesome!”

  “You think?”

  “Of course! I love space stuff. Planets, stars, galaxies, black holes …”

  “Yeah, I can tell,” Meitner said, nodding at Huxley’s 3D poster of the Milky Way on the opposite wall. “Anyway, like many children of her generation—children who survived the burst—my mom took an interest in science, especially space science. Her goal has always been—and it still is, I suppose—to ensure mankind’s survival in case of another catastrophic event like the burst.”

  “That is a very important goal,” Huxley said, “and it’s a disgrace that government funding for these kinds of projects is so shamefully little.”

  “Is it?” Meitner asked.

  “Oh yes. NASA, the ESA, the CNSA, all the big space agencies employ tens of thousands of crowdworkers all over the world because it’s cheap labor and the only way to process and analyze the huge amounts of data that’s coming in from all their satellites and space probes and everything.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I work for all of them.”

  “You’re a crowdworker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Interesting,” Meitner said. “I should introduce you to my mom.”

  Huxley laughed. “Perhaps you should. So is your mom in prevention or in contingency planning?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea.”

  “Oh, okay. You’re not very close with her, are you?”

  “Oh no, I am” Meitner said. “I talk with her at least once or twice a week, and I visit her whenever I can. I’m just not awfully familiar with her daily work, that’s all.”

  “I see. So what about your dad then?”

  “Dad is a biotech engineer. Trying to turn algae into super-nutritious food; for humans, I mean.”

  “Oh, so he’s basically inventing Soylent Green, huh?”

  Meitner frowned. “Inventing what?”

  “Old movie reference. Never mind. So does he live in London?”

  “Yeah. We live in Finchley.”

  “Right,” Huxley said. “See, I didn’t know any of that.”

  “Really?”

  “How was I supposed to know? I’ve only known you for …” He looked at his watch. “… thirty-nine hours and twenty-two minutes.”

  “Well,” Meitner said, “I know a lot of people who would have used that time to pull a detailed dossier off the Internet if they were going on a visually impaired date.”

  With a bemused look Huxley asked, “A what?”

  “Well, it wasn’t technically a blind date your friend set us up on, because we’d met before and we knew who we were going to meet, but it was at least kind of visually impaired, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Right,” Huxley said, chuckling. “I think the correct expression is ‘legally blind.’”

  “That’s right!” Meitner laughed. “It was a legally blind date!”

  “Anyway, the thought never even crossed my mind. I mean, to stalk you online before our date.”

  “And that’s when she pulled a knife and stabbed him because she was a serial killer!” Meitner said in her best attempt at a dramatic, scary voice and poked Huxley’s ribs with her finger.

  Huxley, who wasn’t ticklish at all, pretended to be very ticklish and flinched because it seemed a polite thing to do. “You don’t look like a serial killer, though,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?” Meitner poked him again. “What does a serial killer look like then?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never met one.”

  “Until now,” Meitner said and poked him yet again. This time Huxley flinched so hard that he spilled wine over his shirt.

  “Oh my God!” Meitner exclaimed and covered her mouth with her hand. Then she burst out laughing.

  Huxley put his glass on the table and gave Meitner a stern look. In mock anger he said, “You just made me spill two-hundred-thousand-Euro wine over my favorite shirt!”

  Meitner snorted with laughter. “I’m so sorry. But hey, you do the scary voice so much better than I do, I’ll give you that, Mr. Pendergast.”

  Encouraged by her praise, Huxley tried to make his voice sound even scarier. “I must punish you,” he said and poked her with two fingers, one on either side of her slender body. Meitner, who unlike Huxley was very ticklish, jerked so hard that she, too, spilled her wine. Most of it landed on her blouse. This time they both burst out laughing.

  “Look at us,” Meitner said as she put her now almost empty glass on the table. “Horsing around and making a mess like school children.”

  “Take off your blouse,” Huxley said.

  “What?!” Meitner said, her eyes wide open. “You are not wasting any time, are you, mister?”

  “Oh, no, no!” Huxley said when he realized how his suggestion must have sounded. “That’s not what I meant. At all. I was just thinking we should rinse it and put it on the radiator to dry. You can’t sit around in a wet blouse like that. You might catch a cold.”

  “You’re probably right,” Meitner sai
d and tried to undo the top of her blouse, but without the help of a mirror she was struggling to get a hold of the rather small and very tightly sewn button. “God damn it!”

  “Should I …?” Huxley offered reluctantly.

  “Go on then,” Meitner said and raised her chin, allowing him access to her neck.

  Very carefully, Huxley started unbuttoning Meitner’s blouse. This was not how he had imagined the evening would go. He didn’t want her to think he had only taken her home so he could provoke a wine accident and get her to undress; although it would have been quite a good plan, now that he thought about it. But the evening had gone so well. They’d had a wonderful time together at the Taormina, and Huxley was pleasantly surprised at how affectionate Meitner had been throughout. It was almost as though she genuinely liked him. To be genuinely liked by a girl was an unfamiliar and rather thrilling experience, and Huxley didn’t want to do anything stupid to jeopardize his incredible luck. Driven by desire yet at the same time inhibited by the fear of rejection, Huxley painstakingly concentrated on undoing the buttons of Meitner’s blouse without touching her skin. He was trying not to think about what might lie beneath that wine-soaked blouse, but at the same time he couldn’t wait to find out. By the time he was working on the third button, he noticed how Meitner had lowered her head again. Her face was so close to his own now that he could feel the warm stream of air emanating from her nostrils as she was breathing slowly but heavily. As he kept concentrating on Meitner’s buttons, he noticed from the corner of his eye that her face seemed to get ever so much closer. Her lips were almost touching his cheek now. Slowly, but with a racing heart, Huxley raised his head and looked into Meitner’s eyes. The sternness of her look confused him. He wasn’t sure if she was angry because he kept unbuttoning her blouse or if she was waiting for him to do something more. Her face, as though in slow motion, was still getting closer. Did he imagine this? Was Meitner sending a signal that he could not comprehend? He had seen scenes like this in movies before in which the characters ended up kissing passionately, but how could he be sure that such scenes were an accurate depiction of actual human mating rites? They were movies after all, and movies were fiction unless they were documentaries. He had never seen any documentaries featuring slow motion buildups to first kisses. He had never witnessed slow motion buildups to kisses in real life either. In fact, he had never even kissed anyone before, so how was he supposed to know how these things worked? He should probably call Higgs and ask him for advice.