Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  —

  Micronations aren’t really a thing. Despite what Reddit might have you believe, you and your libertarian cohorts can’t build an artificial island out of dredged-up sand or sail an old cargo ship bought at auction out into international waters, declare sovereignty, name yourself His Excellency the Royal Ninja Emperor Cobra Commander for Life, use a pirated version of Photoshop to design a flag with your spirit animal on it, print commemorative postage stamps, spin up your own cryptocurrency, compose a national anthem on your Casio synthesizer, pass a law requiring citizens to dress up as furries on Wednesdays, and give the rest of the world the middle finger. Either your ship will sink and everyone will laugh at you, or you will be invaded by a boatful of sleepy troops from the nearest actual nation, who will laugh at you and seize that sweet synthesizer. Or, even worse, nobody will even notice your audacious act of defiance, and you will return home in under a week, hungry and sunburned, only to be further insulted by the fact that the shelter where you surrendered your cat won’t give him back because you are no longer considered a suitable feline custodian.

  If you’re thinking you are going to do any of this in space, then you are even more delusional. Now, if your plan is to promise a bunch of societal misfits one-way tickets to Mars in hopes of selling a new reality TV show, or to use the lure of a self-sustaining, zero-g, perpetual utopian orgy to swindle a few chumps out of their life savings, fair enough. But if you’ve managed to convince yourself that you are the chosen father of the very first off-Earth evolutionary branch of humanity, you are almost certainly destined for a premature and very fiery death.

  All that said, you do have options. If you already own an estate or two, a private jet, a mega-yacht with its own microclimate, a smattering of buildings, and one or more sports franchises, do not despair. There is still additional status to be bought. But getting smeared across the surface of the Pacific by a super typhoon is for suckers. Getting murdered by skinny Somali pirates is whack. Going feral, bludgeoning one another to death with rocks, and descending into cannibalism is for losers. You need guaranteed safety, comfort, and convenience. You want a comprehensive turnkey micronation solution. What you’re looking for is The Grid.

  The pitch? A matrix of platforms constructed in the Persian Gulf, located just off the coast of Qatar’s capital city, Doha.

  The value prop? While technically still subject to Qatari law, each “exclave” would be granted a perpetual, nonexclusive, nontransferable, irrevocable, and exceedingly liberal license to pursue a wide range of personal interests and/or business activities. TL;DR: carte blanche.

  The cost? Two hundred million USD gets you your very own multitiered exclave with a helipad, boat landing, office/laboratory space, luxury living quarters, and an elevator. Recurring costs of between five hundred thousand and one million USD per month covers various access to utilities (including undersea fiber connectivity), security, maintenance, janitorial services, transportation, and twenty-four-hour, on-demand meal delivery from a wide variety of culinary enterprises.

  Why Qatar? Because oil is over. Because you should have diversified yesterday. Because consider your assets: plenty of coastline, contractors who know how to build stable offshore platforms (but who, in the age of energy diversification, have unexpectedly found themselves with an abundance of time on their hands), unlimited solar power (have you even been to the Middle East? It’s like fucking Tatooine in August), and the fact that Qatar is rated by the World Risk Index as the safest nation on the planet as measured by exposure to natural disasters.

  The question is: why not Qatar? Why shouldn’t you become the Estonia of the Arabian Peninsula? Eff Oman and Saudi Arabia. To hell with Jordan and Iran. Let those sad sacks eat sand while you chart a new economic future by becoming the universal leader in startup incubation.

  The Grid is on, bitches!

  Who’s in?

  18

  SIX MINUTES

  KNOW WHAT’S WORSE than flying coach? Quinn does. It’s called flying cargo. As in being strapped into a jump seat amid stacks of netted and tethered pallets cinched to a roller-studded floor. But if your employer is on the list of most-favored three-letter agencies, there are irrefutable advantages—principally that it’s exceedingly easy on the budget. As in free. Plenty of resources go into keeping paying airline customers safe, but nobody wants to spend more than they have to protecting cargo, so airline executives calculate that if they make space freely available to employees of all the top anti-terrorist organizations on the planet, slightly more attention may get paid to plots bent on blowing up our next-day Amazon Prime orders.

  The arrangement works just fine for Quinn since, as of right now, she has no idea where she is going. The last geographical certainty she experienced was when Tariq had the concierge set her up with a car that took her directly to the nearest KFC, where she attempted a gastrointestinal reset with a full Ramadan meal. With no plan any more concrete than her determination to “stop following bodies and start following the money,” she proceeded to the cargo hangar of Sohar Airport, where she flashed her credentials, watched as her baggage underwent perfunctory inspection, and was shown to a second-story combination kitchenette/break room with harsh white lighting, pedestal seating, and a plasma glass flight board mounted at a 45-degree angle between the ceiling and the back wall.

  Even though Quinn knows she should be looking for patterns in global financial transactions, she is distracted by something printed on the archaic thermal-paper boarding pass that was handed to her downstairs. All airports have an ICAO code issued by the International Civil Aviation Organization and used by air traffic control for flight planning. The designation for Sohar Airport is OOSH, which Quinn does not read as a code or an acronym, but as a single word—oosh—that she has not heard or thought about in a very long time.

  Molly’s first words were not the traditional “mama” or “dada,” but rather “baba” for balloon and, shortly thereafter, “oosh” for shoes. She loved shoes—taking them off and putting them back on over and over again—which Quinn had always attributed to the fact that her husband stopped at the mall on his way home from work one evening when Quinn was still pregnant to get himself a new pair of running shoes and came home with a pair of baby Nikes with little pink swooshes. For some reason, that tiny pair of sneakers was far more meaningful to Quinn than all of the flowers he got her from the grocery store when he ran out to pick her up some Entenmann’s frosted doughnuts, or the sometimes-sentimental-sometimes-sarcastic cards, or the bucket of Twizzlers he brought home from Costco because she was always craving them. Those shoes meant that he wasn’t just thinking about her when they weren’t together, but that he was thinking about the life growing inside of her, and that he couldn’t wait to meet Molly, and to fall in love with her, and to sleep on the couch with her on his chest listening to his heartbeat. He would be there to change her diapers and feed her in the middle of the night, and to teach her to tie her shoes, and to put Band-Aids on her knees when she fell, and to show her how to ride a bike, and catch a fish, and swing a bat. He would relearn geometry so he could help her with her homework, and help teach her how to drive, and meet her boyfriends, and intimidate them just a little. When she cried over her first breakup, he would hug her and tell her that it was his loss, and that she was the most special person he had ever known in his entire life, and he would mean every word of it. The first time she was hungover and sick, instead of yelling at her or grounding her, he would bring her Tylenol, and encourage her to drink water, and take her out for a greasy breakfast. He would take her to visit colleges, and give her away at her wedding, and when his hair and stubble were more salt than pepper, he would buy his grandchildren their first pairs of Nikes. It was all right there in front of Quinn the moment he took that little box out of the bag and opened it up to show her what he’d bought, but instead of looking at the shoes, she was looking at him, and right then, she knew that everyt
hing would always be OK.

  Another thing Quinn’s husband unexpectedly brought home one day was one of the very first commercially available volumetric video rigs. It took him most of a Saturday to get all the cameras properly positioned and calibrated, but the next day, after her nap, they sat Molly down in the center of her foam alphabet puzzle mat and recorded six minutes (the maximum duration back then) of her playing. Almost subconsciously, after folding her boarding pass up like an accordion, Quinn had lowered her metaspecs and brought up the footage, and now a 3D version of Molly is sitting on the faux-hardwood laminate flooring in the center of the break room. The capture circle had been tiny—just big enough for a baby—so both Quinn and her husband are off camera, but whatever they are doing has Molly enraptured. There is a distant comical sound effect followed by an explosion of that delightful and infectious baby laughter that is the purest, most unadulterated form of joy Quinn can imagine. Eventually it dies down as Molly grows charmingly serious just before bringing the tips of her joined fingers together like frogs kissing—the sign they’d taught her for “more.” Again, the off-camera sound effect, and again, pure effervescence in little human form. Edge detection wasn’t very good back then, so background artifacts from the breakfast-nook-turned-playroom sometimes creep in around Molly’s blond curls, but overall, the effect is spellbinding, and Quinn is transfixed.

  The clip is only six minutes long, but she has spent dozens of cumulative hours watching it, and as the familiar taste of tears enters the corners of her mouth, she questions whether this is still a source of joy for her or whether it is just another form of emotional cutting. Maybe we weren’t meant to remember for this long and with this level of fidelity. Maybe all of this technology will prove to be a failed and unimaginably costly human experiment. Quinn wonders whether she will still be watching these same six minutes twenty years from now—still subconsciously bringing it up, still tasting tears in an empty room, still haunted by the light-field ghost of her long-dead daughter.

  She wonders whether, in order to move on, she will one day need to relearn how to forget.

  The hologram seamlessly transitions back to the beginning and continues playing. Molly isn’t wearing shoes in the video, and even if she were, they wouldn’t be the baby Nikes her father bought her, since she would have outgrown them by then. Quinn still has one of them. The left one. It’s in the original shoebox, and the shoebox is in a plastic bin that’s stacked somewhere inside her storage unit thousands of miles away in suburban Virginia. The right one is gone. It got chewed up by the black Lab they tried rescuing seven months after Molly drowned. When her husband saw what the dog had done, he pinned it down by its throat and the dog yelped and peed and Quinn could see the whites of its terrified copper eyes. James did not kill the dog, but after he stood up, he screamed, and on his way out of the room, he punched the bedroom door so hard that he knocked it off its hinges. He left a trail of bright red blood splatters as he stepped over the door and went downstairs and left the house, and then it was quiet, and the dog was too afraid to move, and Quinn stood there alone in the bedroom knowing that nothing would ever be OK again.

  19

  AMBERLEY-ASH IS NOT SMILING

  COMMUNICATION IN THE age of mass surveillance demands a sophisticated and intricate dance. One must transact digitally in order to maximize efficiency, but it is imperative that you never associate enough data with a single identifiable entity to allow your adversaries to piece together a coherent narrative.

  For instance, having the name of your next target communicated through layers of obfuscation and bounced around multiple encrypted proxies located all over the globe poses an acceptable risk—so long as you do not transmit payment information back in the same direction. In Ranveer’s view, it is far safer to let easily hacked coroner reports and sensationalized media do the work of broadcasting unique four-digit numbers for you.

  The Grid has always posed unique challenges. Despite Qatari guarantees of near absolute sovereignty, there are still plenty of crevices and cavities inside the matrix of offshore exclaves where one might find oneself trapped. Which is exactly why Ranveer has traditionally preferred to transact with Grid interests electronically, or to send a neutral third party, paid for in cash. But every once in a while, when the world is expecting you to zig, the best move you have is to zag.

  Therefore, given that Qatar is practically just up the street from Oman, Ranveer has decided to take the day and go on-Grid. Emirates Airlines is only too happy to hold his cases inside a private vault that his biometric signature alone can unlock, as well as give him access to a private, vapor-sterilized washroom where, in addition to showering and shaving, he applies the principles of electrolysis to recharge a couple of cartridges.

  There are two stops on Ranveer’s itinerary. The first is a laboratory run by a woman named Amberley-Ash, where he will pick up a bespoke order he placed months ago. The second is a company called PLC, run by the twins Naan and Pita, who, if all goes well, will hand him the last name on his list.

  There are ferries that move people between Doha Port and Grid exclaves at no charge, but they are slow, inefficient, and usually crowded. In contrast, a well-established international Chinese ride-sharing company provides premium autonomous quadcopter transport. They are even cleared to take passengers directly to Hamad International, if you can stomach the exorbitant convenience fee. The insect-like devices are known as Qīngtíng, or Dragonflies, and are in constant algorithmic rotation, constituting one of the most efficient logistics operations Ranveer has ever seen. In just seconds, after a launch carefully designed to feel like a lightweight thrill ride, he is looking down between his British-tan wingtips at the fleet of public ferries below, each carving its own long white wake into the emerald-green Gulf.

  The Grid is not nearly as industrial-looking as one might expect from thirty-six regularly spaced structures built using technologies derived from offshore oil-drilling platforms. They are essentially multitiered, steel-framed glass boxes supported at each corner by funnel-shaped pylons with accents that reveal themselves, after dark, to be customizable RGB plasma lighting. The last time Ranveer was forced to make an in-person visit to The Grid, he unexpectedly ended up spending the night and found that he rather enjoyed the cognac he took out on the balcony off one of the exclave’s living quarters. He even briefly considered a nice corner unit as a retirement option for himself, but he knows he is much too restless to spend his remaining days confined to a thirty-by-thirty-meter, four-story artificial island. While he may, when absolutely necessary, visit the odd exclave, waking up inside one every single morning would feel far too much like a cage.

  Cantilevered off the southeast corner of each unit is a sizable blue disc that, if you didn’t know better, you might mistake for a trampoline. In the center of each disc is painted the Chinese character for “quad” (), which looks like an exotic mutation of what was once the universal symbol for helipad. Ranveer cannot remember which platform belongs to Amberley-Ash, but he poked “Corpuscule”—the unique name her exclave is registered under as required by Qatar’s articles of incorporation—into the hologram floating above the directory panel back at the launch and therefore trusts he will be conveyed accordingly.

  There is a brief moment of panic as the Dragonfly swings precipitously back toward shore, and he imagines it continuing along a hijacked path and touching down right in the center of a circle of CIA officers and Interpol agents who have been waiting for days for the safest and most dramatic way to take him. But then he sees that he is losing altitude and closing in on one of the exclaves nearest to shore. Amberley-Ash, Ranveer now recalls, was an early investor in The Grid, and therefore has coveted, low-number coordinates.

  After touchdown, the Dragonfly pneumatically squats, and all four rotors abruptly halt in perfect unison. The canopy splits and lifts like a pair of transparent wings drying in the sun, and the side panel facing the exclave�
��s entrance unfurls into three grippy steps connecting the Italian-leather cabin to the vulcanized-rubber platform. Even though there is no chopper wash to duck away from and shout over, the regular spacing of exclaves creates channels for leisurely Gulf breezes to merge together into sizable gusts, so the transition from quadpad to exclave is buffered by an airlock. As he steps through the initial entrance, Ranveer buttons his coat closed, hoping that the gas-powered bulk strapped to his side will go unnoticed.

  * * *

  —

  Amberley-Ash waits just beyond the second set of doors. Her hair still occupies that portion of the visible spectrum right in between red and orange that, being an accomplished molecular biologist in possession of a very high-end spectrophotometer, she has, Ranveer suspects, spent cumulative years painstakingly perfecting. It’s longer than it used to be—just past her shoulders rather than the layered bob he remembers framing her fair and delicate complexion before—but her overall style clearly hasn’t changed. She is wearing what Ranveer assumes is a black bodysuit beneath a pair of torn denim shorts and a fitted white T-shirt with the word “Recovered” printed across the chest. She is barefoot, which reminds Ranveer that she has a moon tattoo on her ankle and a star on the nape of her neck.

  It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Amberley-Ash is pretty close to the antithesis of Ranveer’s attraction template. His usual weakness is tall, dark-skinned brunettes with expensive bikini waxes who know how to navigate a novella-length wine list. In his mind, there is no bigger turnoff than a grown woman who doesn’t understand the concept of age-appropriate fashion. And yet there is something about this woman that he deeply admires. And sometimes admiration has a way of manifesting itself in unexpected ways.