Infinite Detail

by Tim Maughan

  Her eyes flicker across their ghost faces, trying to scan and judge emotions. For most it’s celebration as they flood in, drawn by the music and the shouting and the dancing. The smell of cooking meat, the rumble of bass. Flooding in to find an outlet, to find answers, to find connections again. The rapture of shaking off the old and finding the new, of dancing in the shattered remains of the failed and dead.

  Anika wishes she could hold back the flood, scream at them to go back.

  Instead she lets it carry the two of them on, into the human melee that has drowned the streets. Through the bodies she glimpses herself again, like the first time she took the spex from Mary, almost the same frozen moments—dancing to that familiar rhythm, the crowd around her moving as one, those not dancing lost in the confusing rapture of a new network, a new way of doing things. She watches herself, snippets of motion glimpsed in the spaces between the human nodes, and she remembers being that happy. How it felt. They had won! This was it, everything they’d fought for. Everything had fallen—everything they’d fought against—but they’d remained standing. Vindicated, right, victorious.

  “Here.” She turns to Mary. “This is what you’ve been looking for.”

  Mary looks back at her, confused. Anika can’t make out whether she’s just overawed by the scene or doesn’t understand what she’s saying.

  “Look up into your periphery. Remember the date and time.”

  Mary just gawps back at her. “I—”

  “Listen.”

  Mary does as she’s told, staring back into the crowd, as the slow, spaced-out bass hits from the sound system reverberate through the spex’s bone conductors, and Anika smiles as she sees the penny drop. Mary flicks her face back to look at her.

  “This is … this is her?”

  Anika just nods, turns back to the crowd, lost in some toxic fog of regret and nostalgia. She watches herself dance and wonders how she could have ever been so fucking stupid.

  A shout goes up from the crowd, hands point to the air. Booing. She looks up and sees it, the small police drone—not the fixed-wing air force one that’s been circling for days, this one looks like a lump of floating infrastructure, an overly complex street sign hanging from six whirring rotors. An unlikely looking LED display transcribes the messages a cold female voice recites endlessly from the speakers that hang from the underside of its insectile body.

  A STATE OF EMERGENCY HAS BEEN DECLARED RETURN TO YOUR HOMES BY REMAINING IN THIS AREA YOU ARE ENGAGING IN AN ILLEGAL GATHERING A STATE OF EMERGENCY HAS BEEN DECLARED RETURN TO YOUR HOMES THE USE OF ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION DEVICES IS CURRENTLY FORBIDDEN A STATE OF EMERGENCY HAS BEEN DECLARED RETURN TO YOUR HOMES THE USE OF WIRELESS NETWORKING TECHNOLOGIES IS CURRENTLY FORBIDDEN …

  A missile arches up from the crowd, a bottle. Anika flinches as it misses the drone, wondering where it lands in the crowd. A second one goes up, and to her surprise it makes contact—she’s seen these drones dodge thrown projectiles with unsettling, algorithmically judged ease, but this one seems sluggish, almost distracted. The bottle explodes in a cloud of glass fragments as it hits the drone’s screen, the still-scrolling messages partly masked by a spray of dead LED pixels that glitch across its surface. Another cheer from the crowd. And then, as Anika watches, the whole drone tilts sickeningly to one side, its rotors failing as one, and falls from the sky.

  The crowd below just manages to make way for it as it hits the ground. Screams and more cheers. Anika knows that its failure was due more to infection than a well-aimed Red Stripe bottle, but there’s no use trying to explain that to the ghosts now crowding around its shattered carcass, dancing around it and picking at its polycarbonate bones, hoisting them above their heads in celebration. Another victory, another downed victim of the revolution.

  Anika hits FAST FORWARD.

  * * *

  Less than twenty-four hours. The sky above her is full of bottles.

  The crowd around her has gone, replaced by the exploding glass of missiles falling too short, and the occasional crumpled human form.

  It’s disconcerting at first, the jarring transportation into open space. And then she realizes where they are: standing in the no-man’s-land between two warring fronts.

  Ahead of her, as she looks into the Croft, is the crowd, retreated now farther up the road, leaving behind it a street full of smashed glass, crumpled bodies, abandoned loot, like a receding ocean tide depositing its bounty of plastic trash.

  Although still launching missiles, most of the crowd seems to have fallen back for its own safety, apart from a few scouts that dance along its forward flank, a dozen or so that refuse to retreat, their faces hidden by spex and scarves and hoods, leading the charge of hurled bottles and taunts.

  Glass still exploding around her, Anika turns to face the opposing front. And there it is, what was meant to be the final battle line of the establishment, a row of police shields, helmeted skulls cowering behind them as the unrelenting shower of glass and masonry rains down on them. Paralyzed and prone, the police line has barely emerged from under the 5102, and Anika realizes now that most of the debris falling on them isn’t coming from the crowd at all but from the roof of the building itself. Looking up, she spots the crowd up there, weaponizing the architecture as they rain fragments of it down onto the invading forces: roof tiles, pipes, microwave transmitters, the reflective shards of shattered solar panels.

  She doesn’t look too hard; she doesn’t want to see herself up there, dropping pottery shrapnel from the kicked-in remains of a crumbling chimney.

  The first canister lands surprisingly near her feet, the second a few meters away. She sees one of the rioters scoop it up as he dances past, and hurl it back. Mid-flight it begins to hiss, along with the one near her feet, and within seconds the world is filled with white.

  She blinks through menus, brings up settings she remembers being there. Filters. Turns off smoke. The air clears instantly, just in time for her to hear the distinctive, ear-shattering crackle of gunfire.

  From behind her, from the crowd.

  Both lines disperse, the rioters scattering in panic, the police falling back in full retreat.

  She almost forgets Mary is there.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” To Anika’s surprise she seems quiet, almost resigned. “I’ve been here before. This is usually where I start. This is where the dying begins.”

  Anika is suddenly flooded with guilt and disgust at this child, too young to remember all this herself, being made to relive other people’s death and suffering. At being turned into a repository for the city’s posttraumatic stress. Anika feels a sudden urge to grab her, hold her tight. To yank the spex from her face.

  She does neither, just looks at her, helpless. “We should stop. That’s enough.”

  “No, please.”

  “You found what you were looking for—”

  “Please. Let’s go on. I want to finish this.” She seems distant, but committed. “I … I’ve always felt trapped in a loop here. Unable to get past this. I need to see how it really ends.”

  “Are you sure? It’s not pretty—”

  “I’m sure. Please.”

  Anika hits FAST FORWARD.

  * * *

  She punches them out of the motion blur just a few minutes short. Unconsciously perhaps, but certainly intentionally. As she stares at the recording’s date and time counter hovering in her periphery she knows there’s no way it could have been a mistake.

  The crowd is back, surrounding them but subdued. Apart from a little head-nodding and shuffling the party has died. At least half sit on the floor, wrapping themselves in blankets, huddled together. Here and there some tend to the injured and fallen. Others stand, grouped together in suspicious circles, whispering to one another and glancing around. Faces are stunned, tired, resigned, and sobbing eyes are bleached red by gas and tears. Anika is struck by a sudden, disturbed cognitive dissonance: all-too-familiar news footage of foreign war zones or distan
t refugee camps suddenly playing out on her doorstep, and all to a relentless soundtrack of grime-tinged techno. Industrial drums and distorted analog chord stabs. Refugee crisis or music festival? Terrorist attack aftermath or warehouse rave morning-after?

  The sound systems are at full volume. Unrepentant and penetrating. She blinks to her filter settings again and kills their volume, and then remembers why they’ve been cranked so high—from the other side of the makeshift barricades that now fill the space under the 5102 comes the booming voice of repeating police announcements. The same warnings, the same orders to disperse and return home. No longer automated, they now sound like a human voice: fatigued, desperate. Pleading.

  And for the first time, among the repeated phrases, she hears call for individuals to surrender, to come forward. She hears names. Names she knows. Rush’s. College’s. Hers.

  It draws her forward, Mary following, toward the barricades built from shattered masonry and street signs and bicycles and ripped-down shop shutters. It draws her past the gunman, with his covered face and his 3D-printed Kalashnikov, as he paces anxiously, looking like he doesn’t know whether to watch the crowd or the cops, whether he’s meant to be guarding or detaining.

  The sound of her name repeats again. It draws her to the barricade, up close now, her face pushed against a gap, peering through at the now-distant police line. She hadn’t heard it back then, and now it triggers thoughts of possibilities, alternate histories, dividing timelines. Parallel universes. Other outcomes.

  It’s all too late, of course.

  She watches the recording’s timer tick away the seconds.

  Exactly on cue, the building behind her explodes.

  Shrapnel the size of bricks pierces her body, failing to rip her flesh apart, while elsewhere she watches it reduce others to clouds of scarlet mist. A huge storm cloud of fragments and debris is rolling across Stokes Croft toward her, swallowing up its dying occupants. In a few short seconds she’s covered by it herself, day turning to night as pixels extinguish the sun, and in the dislocated limbo of the inside of the cloud she allows herself to exhale, a strange sense of clarity, a fleeting moment of quiet and solitude.

  And it is fleeting. As quickly as it rolled over her, the cloud is gone, no traces of debris left as the displaced masonry dissolves into the air, the spex’s smoke-erasing filters kicking in just a little too late.

  It reveals a landscape sprayed red, streets pooled with blood, all fanning out from the now-vacant lot where the missile hit, like child’s paint blown through a straw. Streams and pools, broken limbs and shredded, soaked fabric.

  Screams. Ringing ears.

  “Don’t look,” she hears herself say. “Take them off.”

  “I’ve seen all this before.” That same resignation in Mary’s voice, but somehow tinged with arrogance now. A numbed defiance. “I’ve watched these people die, over and over. I just didn’t understand what happened, why.”

  To Anika’s surprise, Mary reaches in front of her, fingers grasping the virtual jog wheel that floats in front of them. She hits REWIND.

  They watch the cloud reappear and then retreat, bodies and masonry reassemble, blood seemingly evaporate. The building stands again. Mary continues to rewind but now slowly, ultra slo-mo. And there they glimpse it, moving almost too fast for even the app’s high frame rate, a blurred shard thrown from the sky. She lets it roll back and Anika traces the missile’s trajectory, still unable to see the drone that threw it down—its apparent last, crippled act before it ditched somewhere out at sea, according to the stories she’d heard—but she can see enough to confirm what she’d always expected. Poorly aimed, the missile had almost scraped its intended target—the hulking frame of the 5102 and its occupants hiding from the chaos. Rush. College. Her.

  A last-ditch attempt. The death throes of the network. A mistaken, panicked attempt to cut out what it saw as the cancer eating away at itself.

  Anika hits FAST FORWARD.

  * * *

  There’s not much time left on the recording’s clock now, just minutes.

  Anika grabs Mary’s arm and pulls her into an alleyway, knowing what they’ll find.

  Then Anika and then Grids, flattened against the wall. Under her hoodie she can see the bulk of the vest. He clutches a printed AK-47 to his chest. He’s young, barely more than a kid. She always forgets how young he was. Mary gasps at the sight.

  The wall opposite them, the corner exposed to the street, is being shredded by gunfire. Bricks dissolving into pixel dust.

  Then Anika’s hands are over her ears.

  Now Anika’s eyes are full of tears.

  The firing stops. Grids pulls her hands down.

  “You ready?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Is this going to work?” Grids is breathing hard, terrified.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How close you gotta go?”

  “Close.”

  “Let me do it.”

  “No! No, it’ll be better with me. Look at me. They’ll believe me.”

  Grids looks at her; a grin cracks across his face. An almost laugh. “Racist.”

  Now Anika feels sick.

  For a second nothing seems to happen.

  Grids is staring across the street, at things Anika knows are there but she can’t see, people hiding in the shattered buildings, messages from them projected into his retinas.

  “Okay.” He looks at then Anika, nods. “Okay. They’re ready. When they open up, you get ready. Okay?”

  From across the street, from holes in broken walls and through smashed windows, a hail of machine-gun fire erupts, the rounds passing them and heading up into the street.

  Then Anika steps out.

  Now Anika follows her, standing at her shoulder.

  Mary stands behind her, stunned and motionless.

  Stokes Croft is a deserted, shattered shell, strewn with bodies and dust. Again to Anika it is a dozen distant histories—Syria, Iraq, Hue, Beirut, Dresden—alien landscapes that could never happen here, nation-state-scale karmic retribution right on her doorstep.

  Sitting in the middle of the road, just meters away from her now, is the tank, dismantling with machine-gun fire the building where her compatriots are hopefully no longer hiding, as its turret slowly turns, electric motors rumbling like giant millstones grinding against each other. Behind it she can see the hole in the barricade where it had punched through, before it had spent the last two hours slowly crawling up Stokes Croft, laying waste to anything that moved.

  As she walks behind her ghost she can’t feel her legs.

  Then Anika pushes her hands into the air, unveils the blood-flecked white sheet she’s been carrying, starts to scream as hard as she can.

  “HELP, HELP! PLEASE! I SURRENDER! SURRENDER! PLEASE! HELP! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME! PLEASE HELP ME! I SURRENDER! I SURRENDER!”

  The turret stops turning. There’s a strange moment of near silence, no sound except for the distant, skittering sound of falling bricks, fragments of architecture collapsing upon itself.

  “OKAY, KEEP YOUR HANDS UP, DON’T MOVE.” The voice seems to come from the tank itself, from some hidden speaker system, embedded in its mottled, bullet-scratched armor.

  Then Anika keeps her hands up, but doesn’t stop moving.

  “DON’T MOVE,” repeats the tank.

  Now Anika wants to scream at her oblivious past self. Don’t go any closer! You’re close enough! You don’t need to get any closer!

  Then Anika keeps moving, drops one hand to her side. It slips into her pocket.

  The turret starts to turn slowly back, the antipersonnel machine gun moving to face her much more quickly.

  Behind them both Grids screams at her “JUST DO IT” and opens fire. Now Anika swears she can feel the rounds pass her head, feel the air they displace, hear them ricochet harmlessly off armor plating.

  In her hoodie pocket then Anika’s hand finds the trigger. Now Anika can feel it, the smoo
th, cold, injection-molded Chinese plastic of the VR game controller against her trembling, clammy hand.

  Finger searching for the trigger.

  Squeezing.

  And then the world screams in digital white noise, and everything is glitch.

  RECORDING ENDS is the last thing Anika sees as she rips the spex from her face.

  15. AFTER

  Knocks on his cabin door.

  “What?”

  “You up, Rush?”

  Jesus. “I am now. What time is it?”

  “About three thirty.”

  “Fuck, Toby. Seriously?”

  “Sorry, man. Just thought you’d want to know; we heard back from the Zodiac.”

  “Really?” Rush props himself up on one elbow. “And?”

  “All clear. Simon is taking us in.”

  “Shit. Okay. I’ll be down.”

  “Don’t take too long, man. You need to see this fucking parking lot. Unbelievable.”

  * * *

  Even with dawn breaking it’s still dark out. Rush throws a sharp beam of yellow light across the bridge when he enters, extinguishing it as quickly as he can by shutting the door behind him. As endless shifts on night watch have taught him, it’s vital to keep the bridge dark—the only light the dim green glow of the few still-working LCD displays in night mode—so that the crew’s eyes adjust to staring across the ocean at night.

  Simon looks back from the captain’s chair to glance at him, flash him a quick smile, before his attention returns to the world outside, to quietly but firmly speaking orders to the last of his Filipino crew, as they gently maneuver the Dymaxion past the vast black bulk of a dead CGM Line container ship.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “That’s nothing, mate. You should have seen what we passed on the way in.” Simon rubs his hands with theatrical glee. “We could spend a month just scavenging this lot, and still not be done.”

  “A month?”

  “Yeah.” Simon meets Rush’s glare, the glee dropping. “I mean, I’m sure it won’t take that long. To get what we need. Parts and stuff. Like a week. Two tops.”