Static Mayhem

by Edward Aubry

  "Wow," said Glimmer.

  Harrison and Apryl both jumped. The wide-eyed pixie was hovering in the doorway.

  "Glimmer!" Harrison sputtered. "Uh …" He had absolutely no idea what to say. He imagined that his circumstance did not likely have any precedent.

  Glimmer looked at Apryl. "Took him long enough."

  "I'm saying!" said Apryl. "I thought I was going to have to start wearing a sign!"

  Harrison winced. Then he laughed. "Can I help you?" he asked Glimmer.

  "It's nothing that can't wait," said the pixie. "Kiss her again."

  He complied. When he looked up again, Glimmer had her hands clasped over her heart. She sighed. Apryl giggled.

  "Now can I help you?" he asked.

  "Oh," said Glimmer. "Right. Alec's verbal again. He asked me to come get you."

  * * *

  Alec was standing on deck, leaning on a rail and looking out over the bay. Harrison let his eyes go blurry. Alec was wearing Bess again. He had wasted no time recovering the sword. Or perhaps she had wasted no time recovering him. The thought made Harrison nervous, so he put it aside.

  "Hey," he said. Alec turned around at the sound of his voice and nodded slightly, but did not move. Harrison walked over to the rail and stood next to him. They watched the water silently together. "How are you feeling?" he finally asked when it became obvious that Alec was not about to take the initiative.

  "Not bad," the Director said. "You?"

  "Pretty good." The conversational tone was somehow both more and less than he had expected. "I think Apryl is my girlfriend now," he added. Saying it gave him a tingling sensation in his chest.

  "Hm. Well done. I thought you were never going to figure that out."

  "Yeah." Harrison held back a smile. They stared at the bay a while longer.

  After a bit, he tried again. "Listen, Alec, I'm not sure exactly what I'm supposed to say here. Am I …?" He faltered. "I don't know. Do I get debriefed or something now? Is there anything you need to know?" He thought about what Alec might or might not already know from his previous mental state. The only things he was pretty sure Alec knew nothing about were the tools and Apryl's power. He found the idea of sharing this information surprisingly invasive. He wondered why.

  Alec shook his head. "You can tell me anything you think I need to know, but I can't imagine what that would be." He did not elaborate.

  "I'm sorry," said Harrison. "I guess I'm confused. If you don't really need anything from me, why did you send for me?"

  Alec sighed. "You really didn't see this coming, did you? Unfathomable." He reached down and unbuckled Bess's scabbard from his belt. He held the hilt out to Harrison. "Effective immediately, I am resigning as Director of the New Chicago Security Agency. This weapon is NCSA property." Harrison stared at Bess.

  "Go on," said Alec. "Take it."

  "You can't do this," Harrison said. "I just went to a lot of trouble to get you fixed."

  "Of course I can," Alec said. "You know full well I can't pick up where I left off before."

  "You think your ability to lead us has been compromised?"

  "No, Cody," said Alec. "I think my ability to lead you has been soundly buggered. I'm not even sure why this is a conversation." He jabbed the butt end of the sword a little further in Harrison's direction. Without thinking, Harrison took it.

  I'm no one's property , said Bess.

  He had forgotten she could do that, and he almost dropped her. He clutched her hilt, willing himself to ignore her voice.

  "Alec, this is ridiculous. We're on a mission here that's … globally important. We can't just stumble around leaderless." Harrison tried to find the words, and found that the simple ones said it best. "We need you."

  As Alec met his eyes dead on, Harrison realized it had never occurred to him that Alec had been avoiding eye contact up to this point. In an even voice, the former director said, "It doesn't strike me that you are leaderless, Captain."

  Harrison stared at his former superior. "Oh, my God," he whispered. He tried desperately to compose a counterargument, but couldn't find one compelling enough. Finally, he stood up a hair straighter. He turned Bess around so that he held the scabbard, and offered her back to Alec. "Fine," he said calmly. "Forget about we need you. I need you. We have a job to do, and I need muscle I can trust. Now that you're a civilian again, I'll just have to field deputize you. Mr. Baker, under my authority as ranking NCSA agent on site, I am issuing you this weapon, and …" He paused. "Hell, I don't know. There must be some regulation language for this sort of thing, but you know what I mean. Just take it."

  Alec stared at the sword. "De Queiroz outranks you," he said.

  Harrison shook his head. "She's senior, but not ranking. It's never come up, but technically, I've been promoted above her. I looked that one up before we left. I thought it might come in handy if she and I had an argument."

  "You still haven't the authority," Alec said. Harrison stared back, pushing Bess a little closer, and Alec sighed. "Sod it. Of course you have." He hesitated, then grabbed the sword.

  Harrison felt a shiver of relief run up his arm. "How do we explain this to the others?" he asked. "They're going to be surprised."

  Alec shook his head. "Explain it any way you want, Captain. I'll tell you right now, though," he said, pausing for emphasis. "The only one likely to be surprised is you."

  Harrison nodded. He's right, he thought. But partly mistaken. Not even I am truly surprised by this transition. "Do you know where we're going?" he asked Alec.

  "Of course," he said. "Indian Ocean. Exactly half a world away from New York City in every direction. It's a good idea, I must say. You have overlooked one thing, though."

  "What's that?"

  "There's nothing there. You'll have a terrible time finding the exact spot in the middle of the sea, and a worse time trying to hold position while you set off your counterbomb."

  "Actually," said Harrison, "it turns out there is something there. There's a chart on the bridge which I'm hoping is accurate to the world's current geography. If I'm right, we're heading for Counterbomb Island."

  Chapter Thirty-Six:

  Juxtaposition

  Jake stood on the bow of the Ptolemy, his eyes closed, grinning as the salt spray hit him in the face and gusts of wind caught his jacket and ballooned it around his back. Mostly though, the wind had little effect on him. They were riding it. They were one with it.

  "We must be going a hundred miles an hour!" he shouted. Just as he said this, the nose of the ship caught a crest of a wave and lurched upward. The boy's eyes snapped open, and he whooped. The ship dropped back with a crash.

  "About thirty-five knots, actually," Harrison said.

  "No way!"

  "Way." Harrison looked at the sea. It was easy to lose any rational sense of their speed. They had nothing by which to judge it. For two days, they had been completely out of sight from land. He could sense motion, but with nothing but water in every direction, they could be standing still, and the crew might not even know it.

  They still had over a week before they expected to arrive at their island destination. Hadley and Glimmer had been hard at work constructing the counterbomb. The question had been raised immediately as to how they were going to set it off. The scientist and the pixie agreed that it would take an enormous amount of energy, but neither had a suggestion as to a source. Titania had said it would work, though. Harrison assumed this was another puzzle for them to solve. He had to take it on faith that they could do it.

  "Hey," Claudia said, "it's your turn." She was sitting across from Harrison at a small table on the deck. On the table sat a Scrabble board and a pixie, who was sitting cross legged and studying the board. The mechanics of the game fascinated her. Harrison watched Glimmer. He still found her endlessly charming. Today she wore a yellow polo shirt and blue shorts, over which was a red apron adorned with three pockets (one blue, one green, one yellow) and a pair of yellow arches in the form of a stylized M. She
also had on a red baseball cap with the same yellow arch logo. Still no shoes. Harrison had experienced a mild revulsion to the sight of her uniform at first, but got over it quickly. The last creature he had seen in that uniform had tried to feed him to its young.

  Her wings were waving absent-mindedly, and Harrison could actually make out details through their translucence. He could see some of the tiles on the table near her. Their edges were clear and sharp. He did not remember her wings ever having been so transparent. He assumed it was a combination of the bright daylight and the sea air. Whatever caused it, it was lovely.

  On her previous turn, Claudia had created the word, "ass." She had now improved on that.

  "Jackassery?" said Harrison. "That's your word?" He did not look pleased.

  "Mm hm," said Claudia. It was just shy of being a gloat. She lifted a tile to show him a bonus square. "Double word. Plus, I get the bonus for using all of my tiles."

  He frowned at her. "Use it in a sentence," he said.

  "In an act of characteristic jackassery," said Claudia, "Harrison challenged me to a game of Scrabble." She was smiling. It was a friendly smile, but Harrison guessed that it hid a bluff.

  "Glimmer," he said, still looking at Claudia, "please bring the dictionary."

  "Aye, aye, Cap'n," she said, then took a moment to stand up straight and flit away. Claudia made a tsk-tsk sound, shaking her head.

  "We'll see," said Harrison.

  While they waited, he looked up at the sails. They were swollen with wind. Like so many of their resources, the sails had proven effusively user-friendly. They had spent two days acclimating themselves to the environment before Harrison had finally consented to set sail. Then it had been a simple matter of setting a longitude and a latitude, and the ship had taken it from there, plotting their course on the enormous interactive wall map. The most direct route took them around the Cape of Good Hope, at the southernmost tip of Africa. Before their side trip to Texas, Harrison had never been farther south than Virginia.

  When he gave the order to get underway, the ship obliged. As the crew looked on, the giant sails on the three masts unfurled themselves and the ship's wheel moved of its own accord. A year ago, the sight of the tall ship sailing itself would have humbled and astonished him; his response now was delight. They had spent the better part of the first day traveling down the Chesapeake Bay, and the view from the rail had enchanted them. It was almost hard to remember that they weren't on a cruise ship, taking a well-earned, carefree vacation. Once they hit the open sea, it was easy to let go of that fantasy, but the need to play while they had the chance still drove them.

  "You called?" said Apryl. She had emerged from below decks with Glimmer.

  "Jackassery," said Harrison. He smiled, but more from seeing her than anything else.

  Apryl shook her head. "You challenged that?" she said. Harrison nodded, feeling smug. When she rolled her eyes, he realized that he had misinterpreted her head shake. "Well," she said, "in this case, it appears to be self-defining. You lose a turn. Jackassery: noun, a foolish act. I've also heard it used to mean the quality of being a jackass, but I'm not sure if that's strictly proper. It's definitely a word though." Harrison pouted. "Sorry," she added.

  Claudia silently collected seven more tiles from the table, and arranged them on her little rack. She studied them, then selected one and placed it on the board, directly under the last letter of her previous word. "Yo," she said. "Five points."

  Harrison glared at the tiny word. "I don't need your pity," he said.

  Claudia shrugged. She placed six more letters on the board. "Youthful," she amended. "Triple word. Plus bonus for using all my letters." She looked up at him. "Wanna challenge that one?"

  Harrison buried his face in his hands. "No, I guess that one's self-defining, too." He felt Apryl's hands on his shoulders, rubbing the stiff spots at the base of his neck. He looked up to see her smiling sympathetically. "I'm getting my ass kicked," he said.

  "I can see that," she replied.

  He looked at his rack. He had six vowels and a V.

  "Hey, Glimmer," said Apryl. "Can I ask you a question?"

  The pixie was sitting next to the board again. She had picked up three of the score-keeping pegs from the Scrabble game and was tossing them like little juggling pins. She seemed very focused and took a few seconds to respond. "Fire away," she said without taking her eyes off the juggling.

  "I'm starting to put together some notes for a project I'm working on," Apryl said. "I want to document the events immediately following the event last May, up to and including what we're doing now. We're basically starting history all over again, and I want to help make it coherent."

  Glimmer kept juggling. "And?"

  "Well," said Apryl, "what I'd like to do, at least at first, is take an anecdotal approach. The event itself left everyone who experienced it totally alone. Some for months. This is the only time in history when everyone on Earth was completely out of contact with everyone else. So I want to collect first impressions. So far, I've only got the crew here to work with. I'd like very much to explore nonhuman reactions, too."

  "That would be where I come in."

  "Right."

  Glimmer tossed all three pegs high into the air and caught them one by one as they came down. She stood up and faced Apryl. Having found this new development more interesting than Scrabble, Harrison and Claudia had stopped paying attention to their game. He was grateful for small favors. He was also curious to see if Glimmer would answer Apryl's question with any useful information at all. She had finally gotten to the point with him where she was curbing her compulsive obfuscation, but he had no sense of whether that would be true of anyone else.

  "First of all," the pixie began, "I didn't see what you guys all claim to have seen. Apparently, the effect hit your world like some kind of wave. Which some of you knew was coming before it got there. It hit Faerie all at once. No transition at all. One instant, I'm surrounded by hundreds of pixies, the next I'm sitting alone on a motel roof wondering what the hell went wrong."

  "Hang on," said Apryl. "I'm sorry, I should have brought this up when I was actually ready to interview you. Do you mind waiting a minute?"

  "Not at all," said the pixie.

  Apryl kissed Harrison on the cheek and went back inside.

  With the distraction gone, Claudia turned her attention back to the game. "It's still you," she said.

  "Yeah, yeah," retorted Harrison, who was weighing the relative advantages of creating the word "pave" versus the word "vole." Neither seemed aggressive enough for killer Scrabble.

  Apryl returned. She was holding a Dictaphone. "Would you mind starting over?" she asked. She held her arm out and pressed the record button. Glimmer stared at the little machine silently. Apryl looked confused. "I'm sorry. Do you mind being recorded?"

  "It's not that I mind," said Glimmer. "The thing is, it won't work. My voice isn't exactly a voice like yours. I don't make sound in the air. I do it by pushing on your eardrums. It's a magic thing. Doesn't work on tech stuff. I can't be recorded."

  "Oh." Apryl pushed stop. "Weird. That's too bad." She shrugged. "Well, no big deal. Let me go get a notebook and I'll just jot it all down."

  "Oh, my God," said Harrison. Three Scrabble tiles fell out of his hand. His face had gone blank.

  "What?" said Apryl. She seemed worried. Claudia looked baffled.

  "May I borrow that?" He held his hand out to Apryl. She looked at the Dictaphone and handed it over. "Glimmer?" he said. "Would you mind terribly if I just tried to record you saying something?"

  Now Glimmer looked confused. "We've been over this," she said.

  "Humor me," he replied. He pushed the record button again and spoke into the tiny microphone. "Glimmer recording experiment, take one," he said. He held the machine in her direction. "Give me something," he said.

  "Anything in particular?" she asked. She did not look amused.

  "No," he said. "Yes," he corrected. "Hamlet." />
  She cleared her throat. "To be …"

  He waited for more.

  "Or not to be." She glared at him. "That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them." She paused again.

  "More," said Harrison.

  "To die: to sleep, no more. And by a sleep we say to end the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished." She stopped again.

  "To die," said Harrison, "to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause."

  He hit the pause button. Claudia began clapping, slowly, loudly. Glimmer bowed. Harrison had something else on his mind. He hit stop, rewound the tape to the beginning, and pushed play.

  "Glimmer recording experiment, take one," they heard. Then, "Give me something." There was a brief pause, then, "No. Yes. Hamlet."

  Now there was a substantial pause. "More," they heard. This was followed by more nothing. The silence extended to the listeners. They had all believed her and expected not to hear her voice, but it was somehow still shocking. They had just heard this exchange, and hearing it again, in fragment, was just plain eerie. Harrison could actually hear the faint tape hiss.

  At last, the little speaker offered, "To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause."

  They all heard the sharp click of Harrison cutting off the recording.

  "Well, looky there," said Glimmer. "Turns out I wasn't lying after all. Nice work, Detective."

  "Nobody move," said Harrison. He left them in their bewilderment and went below.