Occupy Me

by Tricia Sullivan

  You remember who you were when I scanned you, we both know that boy who shivered with loss of blood in the oppressive heat, the flies that came and I took you up with me like I was a Valkyrie like I was a vulture like I was death. You don’t remember the men with knapsacks and surveying equipment who chanced on you because you’d lost consciousness by then and I was long gone.

  And the other one, the one I scanned, he remembers waking up in the simulation with his body repaired and with knowledge of mathematics and languages. He remembers growing up, he remembers being trained in the simulator and he remembers deciding to overthrow the whole fucking system and launch himself back into the life he thinks he should have had.

  You and this other one, you need to come to terms. All of us do. We have to pull ourselves together.

  Out there on the oil rig, the briefcase is wide open and you come to me as if by gravity, you are sucked in beneath the oil, you are dragged to HD. Down here in the beginning and in the end, you and the other self are one waveform. You are pencil sketches laid over one another. There are places where you’ve been rubbed out and scribbled over by him, and vice versa, but each of you also carries the shadow of the other like a mark seen through tracing paper.

  The briefcase is talking to you.

  Identification is possible because you have been changed. Error ratios are higher for altered waveforms. This PEARL has been designed to preserve pristine waveforms. Alterations are not recommended.

  You are under the mud, you are in the wood of the ancient forest, you are flying through space with me and the birdmasters have been blown out into the void; they are finished. His mouth is your mouth is mud is oil is energy is money is power and you are so far from home. How cold must it be outside that plasma field but now you are here with me, inside the folds of the world like a pregnancy.

  Dr Sorle, you have to help me. We have to trust each other.

  Bullets come through the oil come through the side of the fridge asteroids come through the plasma as intersections occur like master chess moves like organic chemistry like magic.

  What lives here in between, down the spaces and races and understatements, what filaments holes and bridges whose iterative patterns can’t be grasped by language nor mathematics, it calls itself the random but this is a masquerade. It is the Immanence, the pre-sense of things. And also their presence.

  I’m the briefcase and everything in it, I’m coming up through the mud and you are coming down, through the HD gates, around the torsion in the world until we connect. I feel your fingertips against me. I know you by touch. We clasp each other – except my hands aren’t hands anymore, they are claws on the folds of my wings that don’t have feathers anymore, nosireebob. We pull each other up.

  * * *

  We careered into the side of the tank and I was bigger than I thought and I lost hold of your hand, lost my orientation. I felt my flank crash into the side of the tank with a big impact. Something rigid gave way. My uprising had created an enormous wave of mud and this lifted you and deposited you outside the tank, on the deck.

  There was a pipe running through a pump outside the tank, an outlet pipe for the recovered formation fluid. I must have broken a seal or hit a release valve because crude oil surged out of a pipe. Gushed into the tank, into my mouth.

  I drank it.

  I took it up my snatch. Into my ears. My follicles.

  And my body was filling with compressed waveforms. They were racing out of the oil and into the furze under these huge, strange wings that were newly mine. They came to me like baby turtles to the sea. Stars to sunset. Inevitable.

  Goldrush of Immanence waveforms all up inside my deepest parts.

  I lifted out of the tank and dropped on the deck. I was much, much bigger than ever before. I no longer had feathers. Or a human voice.

  And then you were there. Everyone else was running away from the sight of me, but you. You were splashing across the flooded deck, and all I could see at first were the whites of your eyes and the flash of your teeth. Then the pale of your palms as you reached out and seized the edge of my wing. You were a cutout in darkness as you held the rail with one hand and tugged at me with the other.

  ‘Don’t go,’ you said. How beautiful your voice is. You said, ‘Don’t give up.’

  And I could hear your ragged breathing and I could feel the blood vessels moving under the skin of your scalp as you strained. You never did work out as much as you should, Dr Sorle.

  ‘I can’t pull you,’ you gasped. ‘You’re too big. Come on. You have to do this.’

  You meant I had to get out of the oil. You were worried about the men with rifles, the klaxons sounding, everybody running around. You didn’t know what was happening to me. That’s the thing about you, Doctor. You’ve never really known what was going on but it hasn’t stopped you, not ever.

  The drag on my wings was unspeakable. It came from other places, other times. Tearing me apart.

  You couldn’t see this. You saw an animal gasping in an oil spill, thrashing. Panicking.

  I must have seemed like a weakling. Because what was really going on was invisible.

  Always is.

  Someone has to pay back the debt. Just like the Resistance, I was built with stolen funds. It’s all catching up to me and you and everything we represent. It’s like I’m a sweater snagged on a thorn bush and the world is running away and the faster it goes the faster I unravel. There are holes in me. I’m leaking. I can’t stay.

  You looked me in the eye. Only one eye, remember? One laser eye, no depth perception required, no cosmological constant neither. Just the straight shit. Me pterosaur, you boy.

  You backed away slowly.

  Something was stuck in my throat. Something was moving. It wasn’t a furball.

  I heaved.

  Not my bad

  The pterosaur drags itself out of the deck steel choking and retching. Its wings rise up, it gives a great nasty belch, and something comes out of its throat.

  There on the deck, covered in oil like birth blood, is the limp body of Austen Stevens. The IV marks in his arms can still be seen. He has lost his slippers.

  He is dead.

  The quetzlcoatlus presses down with its powerful hindquarters, wings spreading. On the fold points of its wings it has a set of claws like hands, which it extends in front of itself like a pair of crutches. As it levers forward on the claws its hind legs push off and it projects itself up with a great whoosh of air. In two strokes it is clear of the deck and rising toward the derrick, its shadow darkening the moon pool.

  Powerful lights are flashing across the many levels of the platform as everyone here takes action. Carl Anderson and his people are trying to herd everyone towards the helipad. ‘This is an evacuation,’ he says, flashing his bright blue eyes like badges. ‘You must come with me.’

  The sounds of drilling and machinery have stopped, but there are loudspeaker announcements and the sound of the helicopter lifting off. People are coming out of the offices and on to the gangways in orderly rows. The atmosphere has gone from friendly and workmanlike to mortally serious. When the pterosaur passes over, there are screams.

  Alison has checked the old man’s body carefully to be sure he is dead, and for signs of injury. The man is newly dead. He’s a little scraped and he’s covered in dark fluid, but there are no wounds on him and there’s no oil in his mouth. He didn’t drown.

  Kang joins her. He confirms that it is Austen Stevens.

  ‘Very nice,’ Alison says. ‘And here you’ve accused the doctor of killing him when he was here all this time.’

  ‘Whoa,’ Kang says. ‘Not my bad. This wasn’t us.’

  ‘It wasn’t Dr Sorle, either,’ Alison points out. ‘Doctor, you’ll be coming back to the mainland with me. No one has any right to hold you here. Right, where do we evacuate?’

  Meet me halfway

  The platform has an arm that extends out high over the sea at a 60 degree angle, and at the end of that arm t
he natural gas filtered off from the formation fluid met the atmosphere and was set alight. It guttered sideways into the sky under a steady south-west wind.

  Evacuation procedures were under way. The first helicopter had taken off. The second was preparing to land. Suited managers stood in the plate-glass windows overlooking the deck like NASA scientists in the ops room. Men and women in hardhats and boiler suits moved up and down flights of stairs, across walkways. Their torches criss-crossed like tiny bat signals as they executed well-rehearsed safety procedures; the knowledge contained in those operations manuals was already in the depths of my nail beds. If I took away the sensory overlay I could directly know the patterns of so many concepts coming to fruition out here on the North Sea: the physics behind pressure gauges and safety seals, the signal processing in the robotic arms, the quantum processes in giant screen monitors with thermal imaging of the ocean floor, the statistical mechanics and psychological theories of bonding and interaction in the design of the recreation rooms. This place is a microcosm of humanity’s machine.

  Down in the moon pool the water was almost still. Drilling had stopped. Workers closed off the deck containing the Cretaceous creatures that emerged from the oil. When the mud stopped flowing there may have been a kick from the well, but there would be no blowout because the industry had learned lessons from past mistakes. Nearly two hundred intensely focused people were locking this thing down.

  But I’m still here and I’m a hole in the world. I’m quetzlcoatlus. My wings are so heavy. Seawater, synthetic mud, crude oil.

  There are new bullet holes in me and they are leaking allusions to the tracery of the Immanence so pristine in my Cretaceous flesh. I embody it.

  The pterosaur could have gobbled me up when we fell out of the sky together, but it didn’t. Because it knew it was meeting itself – me – coming.

  There was oil in my wings back then. What oil was it?

  I think we all know.

  It was the same oil that built my body, so very very long ago. And the oil was on fire.

  The oil was on fire because I am going to light myself on fire right now.

  I’m going to light myself on fire because my body is full of bullets and I am leaking the Immanence all over this state-of-the-art Pace Industries oil platform and I have to cauterise the wounds.

  And because plasma is my favourite thing. Intergalactic plasma my favourite and my best.

  And because it’s time for all of us unwanted to go.

  How can we do this? We can do it because we are trash.

  Trash can.

  Where can is a verb. You betcha.

  I’m full of oil now. You sneaky hydrocarbons with your HD gates, you. I feel you. I’m full of eggs from the land of the lost. You dead? Extinct? Abandoned? I’m your lifeboat, I’m the mother of second chances. I’m bringing you with me because you’re the rack and pinion steering of the future.

  Fuck that short-haul spaceflight. I want your extragalactic plasma and I want it now. Come on, fire, be my gate to the big places. Take me.

  No passengers. No prisoners. No end in sight.

  * * *

  I press down hard on the deck and lift off with my gravid body, rise up in spirals around the derrick. I grab on to it with my claws and hang there, looking out over Earth for the last time.

  I can see you on the deck below, my friend. I knew you would reach for me, too late. You would call to me, your voice ragged. Then the alarms would break through your consciousness and you would have no choice. The veterinarian shouting at the gunmen to calm the fuck down. Evacuation underway.

  I push off the frame of the derrick and glide out towards the arm that sports its gas fire. For someone as big as I am it’s a tiny fire, easily avoided in flight. I don’t want to avoid it.

  I breathe the last cold sweat of night on the North Sea. After I’m gone the stars will come out. Over Norway there will be curtains of magnetic fire.

  I’m going home.

  The Six Billion Dollar Man

  Alison has insisted that you visit her next time you are in London for a conference. Her flat above the veterinary practice is full of yellow light and cat fur and unwashed mugs. You sit on her aged sofa and she asks about your family. When you ask about hers, she shows you the cross-stitch pterosaur she is working on.

  ‘There’s a real dearth of patterns,’ she gripes as she pours you whisky against your will. ‘If you want a T-Rex it’s easy, but I had to search to find a nice pterosaur. It’s not quite anatomically accurate, but I suppose it’s the thought that counts.’

  You weren’t planning to drink, but something about these words makes you bring the glass to your lips. You hope she hasn’t gone soft in the head in the three months since the incident on the platform.

  ‘Gunther’s having quite an interesting experience in our barn,’ she confides. ‘He’s got a full house with three zoologists, a palaeontologist and a big-game expert advising him. And two carpenters.’

  ‘Carpenters?’

  ‘For the habitats. A lot of fencing, apparently. I keep getting phone calls from Pace Industries demanding access to the specimens, but they can’t legally prove a connection between those animals and the oil, and as you know with most things possession is nine tenths of the law.’

  ‘So . . . You’re keeping them?’

  ‘Not me, no. Gunther will look after them, and beyond that we’ll see. It’s not the kind of thing we want plastered all over the internet. Gunther’s place is only thirty miles from Loch Ness. It wouldn’t do. Which brings me to the reason I asked you to drop by.’

  You detect nervous anticipation, a little flustering that should not really be there between the two of you after everything you’ve been through together.

  ‘Oh? What’s the reason?’ You keep your voice light but you are on your guard.

  ‘Come with me, Dr Sorle.’

  Alison leads you downstairs to the back of the practice. There is a utility room containing a teetering old fridge, a washing machine and a deep freeze.

  ‘You’re going to like this,’ she says.

  ‘Please. No more single malts.’

  She puts on gloves and opens the freezer. There’s something about her manner that makes you nervous. She’s eager, excited. You’re half-afraid it’s going to be something kinky; you never know with these older women. They have wild imaginations.

  She reaches down into the blast of cold and pulls out a lumpen object encased in several layers of plastic sacking. It’s a fair size. Maybe a dead beagle?

  When Alison sees your face she bursts out laughing.

  ‘It’s not a triceratops liver or anything,’ she tells you. ‘I don’t want to unwrap it, but just come and hold it for yourself so you see it’s real.’

  You hold out your hands and take it. The thing is bright blue under the plastic. You glimpse what looks like a webbed foot about the size of a toddler’s hand.

  ‘It’s the frog, Kisi,’ she says. ‘From the briefcase. I saved it. Let’s put it back. I can see you have no idea what this means.’

  ‘You’re not planning to sell it to the tabloids, are you?’

  She shuts the lid, shucks off her gloves, leads you back into the kitchen. Tops up the Talisker.

  ‘I’m talking to some nanotech guys from the University. They found traces of a highly unusual carbon structure in the oil in Pearl’s wings. I gave them a small sample of bone from this specimen and they came back with this.’

  She shows him the images.

  ‘You see that? That’s a fragment of the structure from the oil. You can see the filaments and the broken lattice. At least, it seems broken. But when you look at the froggie sample . . .’

  You squint, leaning in.

  ‘I don’t understand. What do you see that I don’t see? It just looks like a thread to me.’

  ‘Pearl talked to me a little about higher dimensional structures. She said that her own body contained higher-dimensional gates, which of course are invisible in thr
ee dimensions. But you can see where the lattice is broken, this is a periodic structure that replicates sideways, if you will. I suspect it repeats, but up a dimension or more. You’re looking at the edges where it’s been torn. So the thing has deteriorated over time. But the material in the frog is pristine.’

  ‘How does this help us in any way?’

  ‘We’ve been given a piece of super-advanced technology. No one else knows about it. We can start our own lab. There are people at the university interested.’

  It takes you a moment to catch on to what she is saying. A lab? Nanotech? You?

  ‘I don’t know . . . starting over at this stage . . .’

  ‘Look. The oil money is gone. It was all ill-gotten gains for everyone concerned anyway. You can’t undo the damage that was done, as hard as you tried. It didn’t work. But this . . . this . . . this frog, it came to you.’

  ‘And to you also.’

  She makes a face. ‘I had nothing to do with it. But if you want my advice, you’ll use it. Forget the six billion dollar man. Go to Kuè and create your own legacy. I’ll help you. I’m not exactly fulfilled sticking thermometers up dogs’ backsides, you know.’

  You swallow your horrible drink.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ you say. Then you go back to the utility room, look down at the closed freezer. There is a door out into the back yard, just a bit of concrete between high walls. Alison has recycling bins out here; a pile of empty dog food boxes melts slowly in the rain. Rubbish. Entropy.

  But there is life in you yet. You can see the heat of your breath in the wet air. Escaping.

  You find you don’t need to think for long. You look up at the open night, even its clouds blotted by ground light, and you phone home.

  Of course your wife was asleep after the night shift. She’s blurry, annoyed.

  ‘Ayeisha,’ you say. ‘I have an idea I want to talk to you about.’

  All flowers in time