by John Freitas
Thomas nodded his head forward. “A few more blocks and then to the right.”
“You’re sure?”
“I checked the coordinates carefully before we disembarked. I’m sure.”
“You don’t want to check once more to be sure we didn’t end up turned around?”
Two dogs fought over a pulled piece of shredded meat in the mouth of an alley they passed.
“You want me to pull out my laptop here, Jeffery?”
Jeffery glanced around. “Perhaps not.”
They passed the third block and turned. They did not make many steps before they realized they were staring down a slope into a rubbish yard. Piles of trash and debris that predated the Pulse stretched out for acres and acres into the distance beyond the battered chain link fence along the edge.
There were a number of cuts and breaks through the sections of fence along the border. Children and young men slipped in and out of the breaks being careful of the curled, sharp ends of wire. The ones going in carried food clutched to their chests. The ones coming out mostly had large sections of metal or plastic balanced on their heads.
There appeared to be a good bit more debris and scrap added onto the piles from the global disaster that had leveled this part of the world.
Between the mountains of trash and cast off rubble, Thomas spotted shacks and shanties pieced together from the assorted bits off the heaps. None of them looked like they could stand up to a strong wind, much less a second Pulse that the world seemed to fear so.
Two men without shirts fought in the middle of a trail between mounds. A group of other men and women gathered around them in a loose circle as the men drew blood from each other’s faces off their knuckles. A few other men pushed through the crowd and pulled them apart. One of the fighters tried to press forward again, but was shoved back. The crowd dispersed. The men breaking up the fight did not appear to be police of any sort. Everyone wore ragged clothes. Most had shoes, but some appeared to be formed from cardboard, tape, and other found materials like many of the houses in this area.
Thomas looked back over his shoulder. More than a few eyes stared back at him from doorways and windows along the street behind them. In the distance, cutting up into the haze of clouds high above the city, the tower rose above it all. Airships drifted slowly and lazily to the docks on the tower. All of it was separated from the concerns of the people below, bound to the ground and scraping by for their survival.
“We might need to check those coordinates again anyway,” Jeffery said.
Thomas found himself wishing that they had dropped off their bags before coming on this adventure. They had consolidated down to only a couple including their equipment, but he still felt like a target. “Perhaps so.”
He took out the tracker from the side pockets of his largest bag and assembled it. As it powered up, the screen resolved. Thomas went to pull up a previous image, but then a blip appeared on the screen and he paused.
Jeffrey sighed. “Is that our phantom to the south again? Always to the south?”
Thomas turned his body and the blip moved with the orientation of the screen. “No, this is coming from the junkyard below us … right now.”
Jeffrey looked out over the piles in front of them. “Now? This is a current, active reading?”
“It is.”
“Should we contact Eve to see what she is getting?”
Thomas thought, but then shook his head. “No, we’ve come all this way. We can’t keep hesitating.”
“Why would she be hanging out in a trash pit on the outskirts of Manaus?” Jeffrey asked. “Why not out on the river or deeper into the jungles?”
“The Amazon is not what it used to be,” Thomas said. “The universe finished much of the job that the logging companies started.”
Thomas opened the case from his other bag and assembled the injector.
Jeffery swallowed and said, “We’re really doing this now, then?”
“You can wait here, if you need to,” Thomas said.
Jeffery looked over his shoulder. “No, we should stick together. I wouldn’t have come this far if I wasn’t with you. At least she won’t be able to unleash her own android army against us.”
Thomas held the tracker and the injector as he stepped through a hole in the fence. One of his bags hung on the wire. Jeffery pulled it free and Thomas kicked up dust as he slid down the slope, fighting to keep his balance even as his feet tried to come out from under him.
Jeffery slipped through next. The slope proved steeper and the dirt more loose than he anticipated. He tried to pump his feet faster and higher as he went, but he fell to his backside and slid the last few feet to the base of the incline inside the rubbish yard.
Thomas helped Jeffery back up as best he could with his hands full.
The signal led them to the left so they ducked into the closest opening between a heap of mostly plastic bottles and another jagged hill of broken concrete with twisted rebar poking out of the sides.
Three men worked on an engine attached to the back of a wheel barrow. Thomas wasn’t sure if the object was supposed to run itself once the engine was functioning. As he stared, he realized the three men were staring back at him. Thomas turned his eyes forward and moved on.
A cluster of cardboard and tar paper shacks came into view within a clearing of smaller piles of trash. The stench of spoiled food passed on the wind. Thomas cleared his throat and tried to breathe through his mouth.
A few men stepped out from the shacks. A couple of them were holding pipes as they watched Thomas and Jeffery pass. On the other side, several boys ran out into an aisle and stopped. More men walked out among the boys and pushed past them, drawing closer to the pair of Americans going by.
“How close are we?” Jeffery asked.
“We have a ways still.”
“Maybe we should move faster.”
Thomas sighed and fought the urge to look behind him. “Do you think Pixie will protect us from the local population?”
They rounded a curve in their path with the sound of footsteps and low voices close behind them. A half-dozen men worked on a machine with pipes reaching up into the air and belts running between wheels with metal discs attached to the side.
One man with a heavy red pipe wrench dangling from his hand at his side stepped into Thomas’s and Jeffery’s path. He wore a pinkish tank top which appeared faded from another color and baggy shorts formed from cutoff denims. His forearms and neck were darker than the rest of his skin by a few shades. They made to go around him, but he sidestepped into their way.
Thomas stopped and looked back to see several men and boys spread across the path behind them as they closed the distance. Others climbed down off the machine and moved toward the scene slowly.
“Like being back in Charleston,” Jeffery whispered. Thomas wasn’t sure the thought was meant to be heard.
Thomas turned his face back forward on the man with the wrench. “Is there a problem?”
The man smiled. There was a line across his teeth separating the yellowed tips from the whiter roots. He said, “You are here for her, aren’t you?”
Thomas swallowed. “If we are talking about the same ‘her,’ then, yes, we are here for her. She is dangerous.”
“We know that,” he said. “We have been waiting for someone who could stop her.”
Thomas exchanged a look with Jeffery, but Jeffery just shrugged.
Thomas cleared his throat and asked, “You have?”
“Yes.” The man nodded and kept his lips spread over his two-toned smile. “We were worried no one was going to come.”
Thomas narrowed his eyes. “Why didn’t you do something yourself?”
The men around them laughed.
The man with the wrench said, “She is too strong for us. Is that gun for stopping her?”
Thomas pulled the injector closer to his chest, sloshing the green fluid inside the chamber. “It is.”
“If we wanted to take something from you, we
already would have,” the man said. The others laughed again. The man with the wrench added. “We do not want your gun or your things. We just want to take you to her, so that you can stop her.”
“Why?” Thomas asked. “Why do you care if we stop her? Has she hurt you?”
“She is a thinking machine,” he said. “She is forbidden. She hides here with the other criminals. If the police find a drug dealer, they take the man or they take his bribe. If they find her, they will punish us all, thinking we were hiding her.”
“Why don’t you go to the police and report her, then?” Jeffery asked.
The men grumbled among themselves and the man with the wrench shook his head. His smile faded before he spoke again. “No one goes to the police and lives. Either his neighbors will punish him or the police will take him. You need to end her and leave before anyone knows. Come.”
The man turned and followed the trail toward the origin of the signal. Other men picked up tools or pipes and flanked Thomas and Jeffery as they ventured deeper into the yard.
“I don’t think pipes and wrenches are going to do the trick,” Jeffery whispered.
“Not sure the injector is going to be enough, if she has all these people scared,” Thomas said back.
“Why is she still here, Dr. Kell? Why here?”
Thomas shook his head. “This is the place where forgotten people hide. This is for criminals and castoffs.”
They emerged in an open space between the mountains of trash. In the distance, a metal shed bore an antenna lashed up straight with all manner of cords and a satellite dish that appeared to be made at least partially from a car chaise.
“Is she in there?” Jeffery asked.
Thomas held up the tracker and nodded.
The man pointed with the wrench toward the darkness beyond the sliding, sheet metal door on the front of the shed. “I take you to her, but the longer we wait, the sooner she will know you are here.”
Thomas nodded again and stepped forward. Jeffery followed a step behind him. The man with the wrench walked with them too, but the others stayed back at the edge of the clearing. Their fear frightened Thomas all the more.
The distance seemed to be immense as they crossed the open ground even though it was probably only a couple dozen yards.
They slowed as they reached the opening.
“Something’s not right about this,” Jeffery said.
“She powers down during the day,” the man said. “She uses the dish to search for something. We do not know what and she will not tell us. She threatens us if we approach her.”
“Dr. Kell?”
“Finish her while you have a chance, fool,” the man said.
Thomas lifted the tracker and followed the signal up to the top of the antenna. “What is this?”
The man shoved both their backs until they stumbled inside the dark shed. The room was empty except for wiring along the walls above the dirt floor. There was a high-pitched hum from the machinery.
Thomas turned to flee. The man slid the door closed over the opening with a slam. Thomas hit the door and tried to push it open again. A chain rattled through the handles on the door outside. Thomas couldn’t tell if it was being locked or wrapped around.
18
More shouting voices rose in the air.
“What are you doing?” Thomas shouted back. “Let us out!”
Several open hands and fists beat on the walls from the outside around them. Thomas and Jeffery covered their ears with their hands. The thundering stopped and the man that had the wrench shouted above the squeal from the wiring. “You should have left her alone. That’s all she wants.”
“Are you helping her?” Thomas shouted back.
“She helped us,” he said. “It was the least we could do.”
“What did she do for you?” Thomas asked.
The man said, “We have guards out here now. They will not answer you. No one will hear you shouting or beating. If you do that, you will get no food or water. If you try to escape, you will be beaten and thrown back inside. You stay here until she says you may go.”
“Is she still here?” Thomas asked. “Send her to us to talk to us. All we want to do is talk to her.”
No one answered.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
Jeffery dropped his bags. “This isn’t looking good, Dr. Kell.”
Thomas held up the tracker. It kept glitching and wouldn’t resolve anymore. He shut it off and set it aside.
He tried his phone, but couldn’t get any signal. He tried the laptop next, but could not pull any data from anywhere outside the device itself. The one that Eve was using back at the apartment had more shielding and power. He wondered if it would have worked better in the shed or not.
Thomas closed the laptop to keep from losing the battery power.
He looked up where Jeffery held up his phone. Jeffery shook his head. “Nothing.”
“It’s either the material of the shed or the false signal from the antennae blocking and scrambling signals coming out or in,” Thomas said.
Jeffery lowered his hand and squinted his eyes. “That high-pitched hum is going to melt my brain if it keeps up.”
Thomas stood and stepped past Jeffery toward the wall. “Maybe we can solve both problems at once.”
Thomas took hold of the wires over a junction box and started to pull.
Jeffery said, “Be careful, Dr. Kell.”
“We’re past the point we should have been careful,” Thomas said. “We need to get away from here or I fear this is where we will die.”
Sparks flew from the box, lighting up the shed and raining down into the dirt. Blue energy laced out over his hand and arm and Thomas staggered backward. He clutched his chest and waited for his heartbeat to settle again.
“Are you okay, Dr. Kell?”
Someone slammed the side of the shed with a report as loud as a gunshot echoing inside. A voice with a thick accent said, “Stop it or she will kill you.”
The high hum continued unabated.
Jeffery leaned in to whisper. “Maybe we can use something insulated to pull the wires.”
Thomas shook his head. “That wasn’t a shock from a loose wire. It was rigged. That energy is coming from another source – something she built. I’m thinking she has this structure designed to draw energy to keep us trapped at the same time that it broadcast the false signal.”
“And blocks our signals going out,” Jeffery said.
Thomas sighed. “I’m not sure how much it matters anyway. There’s not much Eve can do from Chicago to open a shed door in a junk yard in the middle of Brazil.”
“Maybe that’s why she lured us here,” Jeffery said. “There are no androids for her to hack, but none for us to use either. This region is largely isolated from the Internet of things.”
Thomas put his hands on his hips and stared up at the dark metal ceiling. “CDR wouldn’t do anything to pull us out of the fire even if they could, huh?”
“Probably not,” Jeffery said. “Even if they did forgive me for my unpaid vacation time.”
“You enjoying your vacation so far?”
Jeffery shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to travel, like I said. Maybe our next trip to Brazil could be during Carnival or closer to the beaches.”
“If Pixie was going to trap us forever, the least she could have done was lead us to a nicer neighborhood or closer to a beach,” Thomas said. “Something with ocean sounds instead of that constant whistle.”
“Maybe she wants to drive us insane before she kills us,” Jeffery said. His voice shook a little on the last few words. The joke was wearing thin with him.
“She hasn’t killed us,” Thomas said.
“Are you disappointed, Dr. Kell?”
“Curious, I suppose. She went to all this trouble to lure us and trap us. These men seemed to be indebted to her for whatever she did for them while she was here. If she had wanted them to kill us outright, they probably would. Why
go the more difficult path of trapping us alive in this elaborate set up?”
“Morality?” Jeffery shook his head. “She has developed reasoning skills. Maybe she has developed a sense of right and wrong too.”
Thomas sighed. “Maybe … There has to be some other purpose to having us alive. There must be a tangible advantage even in the short-term in order for her to go to all this trouble.”
“In the short-term?” Jeffery shook his head. “Does that mean once we have served that purpose, then she will kill us in the long-term?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said earlier that she set this up with these men when she was here,” Jeffery said. “What does that mean? She was here, but has left?”
“I don’t know. We had other signals other places in the city and beyond,” Thomas said. “We came here just looking for clues from where she had been. Finding this active signal was a surprise. I think she set it and then moved on.”
“So, what is the point of these men holding us here?” Jeffery asked.
“To keep us from following her. Maybe?”
“Then, we are back to why not just kill us.”
Thomas shook his head. “To make us suffer first for all the trouble we caused her?”
Jeffery rubbed at the back of his neck with his hands and groaned. “I don’t like that. So much for the theory that she developed morality.”
The whistling from the wiring and machinery changed tone. It vibrated the walls and then slowly formed into syllables. At first, they were choppy and unclear. The voice behind the noises seemed to be coming in at them from the metal structure all around them instead of from any speakers.
The voice resolved and Thomas heard Pixie’s tones very loud and very clear. “You are ones to debate about morality.”
“Can you hear us, Pixie?” Thomas asked.
Jeffery whispered. “If she knew about our morality discussion, then the answer is yes.”
Pixie’s voice boomed at them from every surface around them again. “What is your purpose?”
“You need to be … we just want to talk with you, Pixie,” Thomas said.
Jeffery cut his eyes at Thomas, but Thomas wouldn’t return his gaze. There was nothing to see inside the shed, which was beginning to swelter under the Brazilian sun. Still, he stared up at the blank ceiling. The entire structure was an open com link now and they were inside.
