by T L Costa
“We knew each other when he had his show. Man that was a great vlog, great show, great guy, your brother. Shame about… Listen, maybe we got off on the wrong foot here. My name is Todd Sevier and I’m a reporter for the Montreal Standard. I’m sure your brother told you about me, I even came down to meet him once, when Ralph Nader was giving a talk in Hartford. Man, what a weekend that was.”
Montreal? What, like, in Canada? My chest expands and fills with ugliness and pain and worry and I can’t seem to keep it all from flowing over, from gushing right out of my mouth. I grunt.
“Yeah, well, he called me this morning, said he had a story for me. Also mentioned that he couldn’t believe that I actually landed a job as a journalist, but hey. Anyway, he said that you’re involved in a program with Tidewater and that I might be able to help you out, maybe fill in some blanks, give you some info.”
Keep him talking, keep him talking, don’t let him stop talking. Did B not tell him why he doesn’t have his show anymore? Does he know that B has less chance of becoming a serious journalist now than I have of being an actual pilot? I find a tree. Tall, big thing with crackled bark and punch my fist into the wood. Punch it, hard. Again. Bleeding. Stinging. Feel the impact travel up through my arm, feel it cover the fact that Brandon called him and not me.
“Yeah,” I manage. A hoarse whisper. Thank God there’s no one else down this far on the trail today. No one really likes the parts of the path behind the abandoned shopping centers.
“So what’s this about some guy from Haranco contracting you to test flight simulation programs for him? Sounds cool.”
Shit. This is bad. His words roll through me. I shouldn’t be talking about it. Rick told me to keep the fact that I had the sim quiet. I shouldn’t talk about it. At all. Especially not with a reporter.
I shouldn’t have told Brandon.
I say nothing. Can’t even bring myself to punch the tree. Just stand there like a moron, letting the cold eat me.
“He said that the program even comes with specialized equipment, and that they put it in your house? Is it like a huge Xbox or something?” His voice is steady now, beneath the banter, primed, on the hunt.
“Yeah,” I whisper. Probably can’t even hear me.
“So, is it like a videogame or what?”
“No, it’s not, it’s…” I stop. Look up at the clouds, shifting. Ani. If anything happens to Rick, to his program, then Ani gets in trouble, too. “Look, I shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“No worries, man, I just wondered if you could maybe send me a picture or something. I’d love to check it out.”
“No, I can’t.”
“OK, then. I don’t want to put you on the spot. I just wonder why they’d need someone who worked at Althea to help you set up the system.”
“What?” Shit. Stupid Brandon running his mouth to some reporter starting trouble. Why am I worried? This is Rick’s program. Rick’s a good guy, right? “She’s the programmer.”
“Really?” His voice is light, but underneath I can hear metal. “Did you ever ask yourself why an employee of the United States’ largest defense contractor came to the house of a seventeen year-old boy to give him a videogame system with multiple high-definition surround screens?”
How does he know what it looks like? Has to be from Brandon, I told him all about the system last visit we had before he disappeared. I’m gonna kill B if he messes up my chances for this flight school. My heart turns to stone and falls down to meet up with the rest of the gravel. “What exactly are you trying to say?”
“All I know is that drone attacks kill a lot of people, Tyler. A United States senator stated last week that drones have killed forty-seven hundred people. I imagine that at least half of them were civilians. We’re talking women, children. Your government even redefined the meaning of militant to include any military-aged male, whether or not they were known to have any ties to actual insurgents. Kind of serious stuff.”
Turn this around, turn this around, un-hear what he said right now, dammit. Anger and pain and worry force the feeling from my belly and all I can feel is pressure in my head and heart and bowels and I am going to explode if I don’t get off the phone right now. Can’t even think about talking to a reporter about this until I talk to Ani. Until I talk to Rick.
“None of that has anything to do with me,” I say.
“Look, Tyler, I don’t know what your brother’s told you about me, but I spent a lot of time researching Tidewater, I’ve published a book about them, even. I want to make sure that you know exactly what it is you’re getting into.”
“What, Todd? What is it that you up there in Canada and my brother, wherever the hell he is, think is going on?”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Yeah, well, until you do, why don’t you tell me where my brother is?” I ask. Save it, save the conversation, turn it around.
“He didn’t say where he was calling from. I’m sorry.”
“I need to go.”
“No, wait, let me leave you my information… how you can reach me…”
“Text it to me.” Have to go. Now. I slam my fist into the tree. Bark tearing through the skin on the back of my knuckles.
I hang up. I feel the buzz of the text coming through. I am so screwed. Brandon thinks I’m flying them. How did Brandon know? Just because Haranco gave me the system? Brandon’s always been into conspiracies and shit. But am I flying them? Did I really kill that guy? I don’t know. But it can’t be good if a reporter is calling me. Can’t be good for Rick or Ani or me or Brandon.
Rick wouldn’t do that. He would have told me if it wasn’t just a game. I slam my fist into the tree. Again and again and again.
Doesn’t make me feel better, though.
The water of the fountain flows in quick, choppy little waves. I stare into it, each little crest of water rising up to taunt me. He’s alive. B’s alive and able to use a phone. To call some guy in Canada. Cause he’s worried about me. But he can’t call me. Can’t call his mom who doesn’t sleep anymore.
Angry, sharp little waves. Wish I could jump in. Wish it was deep. Even though it’s cold. My face is wet. Stinging. Hurting in the chill wind. I wipe my eyes with the back of my sleeve. Don’t care. Don’t care if people notice. Who are they to judge?
I turn my head to the Beinecke rare book library. Odd gray and white cube. She’s in there, Ani. I’ll wait. Class should be almost over. Weird place to have class. Who designs a building shaped like that, anyway? I can’t decide if I like it or not. Doesn’t matter, though, one way or the other.
I hear her. Soft voice, like rain. Talking. About homework or something. I get up, walk over. She nods goodbye to the girl she’s talking to and I say, “I just got a call. Some guy in Canada.”
“Canada?” Her eyes narrow and she readjusts her backpack on her shoulder. “What are you talking about?” She looks down at my knuckles, bleeding, sore. “What happened to your hand?”
“Nothing’s wrong with my hand, it’s fine. Listen, a reporter. B called some reporter in Canada. The Montreal Standard, I think.”
“Why would he call some reporter?”
“He’s an old friend of B’s or something, an investigative journalist, wrote a book about Tidewater. You know, Haranco’s parent company?”
Her mouth opens slightly. “Oh no.”
“Yeah.” Some guys at the edge of the fountain are looking at us. Why are they looking at us? Totally creepy. I motion to Ani, start to walk. Walking helps me think.
“What did he want?”
“Information.”
“About?”
“About Rick, the UCS sim.” Those guys. Staring. Are they looking at her ass? I’ll kill them if they are. “He thinks there’s something weird going on.”
Her eyes follow the trail of a bus. Watching as it takes a corner. Then she looks up at me. Brown eyes open wide. “What about you, what do you think?”
“I don’t know
. Sometimes I think they might be right.” What if I killed Bashir Hamad? “There’s been some nights, some missions that just seem too real, you know?”
“But the simulator–”
“It’s built to be a model of the real remote-access terminal for the UAVs, right? So would it be that hard for Rick to have linked it up with actual drones?”
“No. It would be easy, actually.”
“Right.” I have to ask, have to know. “You didn’t link them, though. You didn’t do that.”
“No.”
“Even if it paid the cash for Yale that the scholarship didn’t cover?” I have to see her face when she talks. To know.
“Never.” The word is solemn, face pinched. “How could you even think that?”
“I’m not thinking anything. I’m just trying to make sense of this. I mean, we’re both a part of whatever’s going on.”
Her hands start to shake and her mouth sets tight. “Mr Anderson wouldn’t do this, though, would he?”
“I don’t know.” I grab her hand. Hold it in mine as we cross the street.
We’re sitting in the Bulldog Noodle Barn, a crazy little joint with cheap, ginormous servings of greasy food, sharing three dishes and swilling dark, punchy black tea at a grimy little table pushed back against the far wall, near the steaming entrance to the kitchen. It’s loud and dirty and the spoon is wide and flat and plastic and hard to eat with, but I don’t care. I’m too hungry, too pissed-off to care.
Ani’s ranting. “How could he? How is this possible?” Anger at Rick dripping from each and every vowel. The banging in the kitchen and the radio of the cook and the people talking in Chinese and the action between the packed little tables of people eating and talking helps me focus on what Ani’s saying. Doesn’t give me any answers, though.
I watch her lips as they move. I watch her shoulders rise and fall as she speaks, as she eats, firm shoulders. And her eyes. Unyielding. Intelligent. “So what do we do?”
“Nothing,” I say. “We don’t even know for sure…”
“Nothing’s not an option. What if Mr Anderson lied? Lied to us, lied to me. Aren’t you going to talk to him? I mean, I think it warrants at least a conversation.”
I take a swig of the black tea. The thin cup burns my hands, but the tea is good: hot and strong.
“You have to talk to him. He likes you. I knew I shouldn’t have done this, taken his job, this was a huge mistake.”
“Relax. We don’t know that he’s done anything wrong yet, right? If, and it’s a pretty big if when you think about it, he did link the sim up to actual drones overseas, then he had to have a reason. A really good reason.” I let the steam from the tea hit my face. “He wouldn’t just do it to mess with us. There had to be some emergency. What if the military got hacked? Lost the ability to use the consoles to fly the drones or something and knew that Rick had his sim game that could be hooked up to the real thing? What if whoever it is that hacked the system did it so Bashir Hamad could do his planned strike on the prison? But Rick hooked me in, and I got him. Yeah. Yeah, Rick’s gonna mention it next time I see him, I’m sure. I mean, it’s not like he could call us before to tell us what’s going on. Like for security reasons or whatever. But if he had to link the sim to the real thing, he’ll tell us. Soon.”
“I think that’s a stretch. Drones don’t just go offline. They’re really hard to hack.”
“Some kids in Texas did it.”
“Not the ones with the weapons. Besides, you know how many people they have piloting those things now? There’s no way that no one in the entire country except for you was able to make that hit on Hamad.”
“If I made the hit on Hamad.” I shrug. “Rick has to have had some reason, Ani. If he did it. If he even knows.”
“If there was some change made to his project, he would know. If there’s some connection between the sim and actual drones, trust me, he knows about it.” Ani looks away from her tea, fingers pushing the cup around the table.
It can’t be real, well, it could, but then Rick lied. And Rick wouldn’t lie to me. He couldn’t. Unless. Unless he had to. Unless there was something so important that he couldn’t tell me the truth. Something to do with national security, maybe. Still. Still my stomach twists. It’s like there’s so much going on, so many things to be pissed-off about that I don’t even know how to pick just one to pluck out and confront. Brandon. Rick. The possibility that I’m killing people.
No. No. If Rick lied and the sim is real, then I’m killing terrorists. Then I killed Bashir Hamad. And that’s something to be proud of. He wasn’t just a man, he was a threat, and getting rid of him is good. Is making everyone in America that much safer.
If. If I did it.
But if I did it, then Rick lied. To me. Fuck. My head hurts. Hurts like I just bashed it into a tree. And Mom? Is he lying to Mom, too?
She says, “You have to talk to him. People could be dying. Are dying. Tell me that you’ll talk to him.”
“I’ll talk to him about it, sure.” But Rick and I have talked about drones before. I told him that someday, if I couldn’t pilot a real plane, that I’d love to fly drones. Fly anything. It would suck if he lied. But keeping America safe, keep people in Afghanistan and around the world safe from terrorists, doing something in my life that meant something, well, that would be great. “But Ani, what if the people that we’re killing represent a genuine threat to America?”
“Oh, so it’s ‘we’ now? There’s no way I’m OK with this.”
“But you’re already OK with this!” The thoughts whir in my head, shaking themselves into a cocktail of pain and hurt and pride and confusion. “What the fuck were you doing at Althea over the summer? You were designing a Universal Control System for them. For people in the Army or the Air Force or whatever to fly drones. Drones kill people, Ani, it’s what they do. What they have to do to keep us safe from–”
“That was different! I only wanted the internship with Althea because it’s like the top internship in the country. It’s like a ticket of admission into the Ivy League.”
“You took the job with Rick–”
“To pay for Yale! I didn’t get the full scholarship I was hoping for, I don’t play sports and I didn’t do a lot of clubs and I needed a way to pay for the rest of the tuition. I didn’t sign up for” – she waves her hand around – “all this. I didn’t. I just wanted to go to school, maybe get some job experience so I could put it on my resume after college.”
“But you designed a system that pilots drones, if you’re not OK with the–”
“I designed a game! A simulator! It wasn’t supposed to be used to fly the things for real, to kill people!”
“What’s the difference? The people who trained on the simulator are going to be flying the real things eventually! You designed something that trains people to kill terrorists, Ani” – I reach my hand out across the table to hers. She pulls hers away like I have acid on my fingertips – “it’s not like it’s a bad thing. Drones are like the next big revolution in warfare. Like the nuclear bomb. Rick says the number of pilots needed to control them is going to boom, and right now he might have just put us, both of us, out in the front of the industry. We’re the good guys, here, Ani. If your machine is actually killing people, then it’s killing the right people.”
Tears run down her cheeks and she shakes her head. “No. No, I don’t think it’s like you think, Tyler. And what if this is real, are you, am I now complicit in some sort of crime? If Mr Anderson connected the system to actual drones used in combat operations, I’m pretty sure that’s got to be some sort of crime.”
I don’t know. Rick wouldn’t do anything illegal. But until just a few hours ago I didn’t think he’d ever lie to me, hide something like this from me, either. “Ani, look, I can’t lose this, OK? If I piss Rick off and I lose this chance, then I lose everything.”
She tilts her head to the side, takes a deep breath. “You’d have what everyone else has, a senior year, a c
hance to bring your grades up and get into–”
“I dropped out” – she lets go of my hand. I wince – “I meant to tell you but it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.”
She throws her hands up and then back down, shaking her head. “Perfect. Just perfect. Good for you. You know what? I have class in half an hour.”
“Wait.” I stand up. Hit the table. My tea tips over and gets all over the table. “Are we… OK?”
She wipes her eye with the back of her hand. “I have to go.” She walks out of the restaurant.
Heart racing. She has to understand. Terrorists. There’s nothing wrong with killing terrorists. Why can’t she see that? Even if Rick lied, which would suck, then it’s still OK because America is that much safer with each terrorist that goes down. I stick the spoon in the noodles. What is that? Bok choy? How am I going to get that huge hunk of green onto this tiny spoon? I shove the spoon into my mouth and chew. How can I make her see that? Shit, wait, did she just break up with me? How can you tell? Facebook status? Man, dating’s complicated.
My phone rings in my pocket.
Shit. I drop the spoon. Reach around to the pocket of my coat where it’s hanging behind the chair. I bang the low-lying table with my knee by accident as I turn to dig through the pocket, practically tripping a waiter as he walks by in the tiny aisle.
I hit talk and: “Hello?”
Silence on the other end of the line.
Shit. Probably can’t get good reception in here. “Hello?” I try again.
“Tyler?” The voice is distant, shaky, nervous.
My throat tightens and the shouting from the kitchen and the clattering of the plates and the swoosh of the swinging door beside me all cluster up and hang around me until it’s just a muffled ball of nothingness. A tunnel of light and sound and the world shrinks in around me, making me desperate for some air so I can breathe enough to say, “Brandon?”
“Hey, bro. Thought I’d just–”
“Where are you?” The words fly from my lips, hot, loud and shaking.
“Don’t get all tough-guy on me, Ty, I’m just calling to tell you that I’m OK, alright?”
