The Ultra Thin Man

by Patrick Swenson

  Brindos woke up the next morning, still in the chair, and didn’t have a clue what time he’d fallen asleep.

  He reset the newspaper for the morning edition, waited a moment for it to download and, as expected, found the story on the front page, the headline reading “Death Toll Rises from Cruiser and Conduit Disaster.”

  Appparently, the cruiser had carried crews and supplies on route to the terminals outside East City. This was a Class-A carrier, strictly prohibited from coming near terminals within urban zoning. A fail-safe tracking system supposedly prevented air traffic from colliding with the Transcontinental Conduit, but, for reasons unknown, the carrier steered into it anyway, stretching it. The errant carrier pulled over Tower One and dragged it for twenty kilometers, plowing through residential areas of East City until it finally embedded itself in the East City reservoir like a grapple hook, holding the Conduit taut. Incredibly, the filament still held. The Conduit cut through the advancing hull of the ship, and the ship fragmented onto the plains below.

  Brindos received news snippets on his code card as word of the disaster reached the rest of the Union worlds. Casualties included over five hundred dead, several thousand injured, and thousands more evacuated from the immediate area. Officials expected the number of the dead to rise to nearly a thousand. Tower Two on the outskirts of the city had survived intact, as had the other four towers across Ghal, but the Conduit, still relatively taut, now had to be tagged with flourescent markers in the areas of East City where the public could come into contact with it. Experts were unclear whether the temporary disruption of the Conduit’s operation might have an effect on weather patterns.

  It was time for him to go to East City and see it all for himself.

  Brindos approached the front entrance of the hotel and stopped at the desk of the concierge, but it wasn’t Joseph standing there. It was a skinny man whose name tag said CECIL.

  “Excuse me,” Brindos said. Cecil looked up with a smile. “I need the next shuttle to East City—”

  “I’m sorry, you can’t go. All passage to and from East City has been canceled.”

  “I need to go.”

  “Everyone has to go, needs to go. Let me tell you,” he said, “this isn’t my job. They hired me to be a management trainee, not this, this—ah, here it is.” He pulled out a sheet of paper from the pile on his desk and practically threw it at Brindos.

  Getting away from Cecil, he read the announcement. No ground transportation. Flights to East City canceled. No one allowed near the disaster site. Everything a mess, total chaos and havoc.

  Brindos found Joseph standing outside the front doors. The light of day was muted due to heavy cloud cover, rain threatening. Across the street from the Orion, a competing hotel, the Glitz, still had its chasing lights marquee announcing free meals and cocktails, automated sleep systems, and 20 percent off anything in the adjoining emporium.

  Earlier, Joseph had complained about the “glitz” of the Glitz. “Like a bad neighbor moving in,” he said. He also talked about the old days on Earth, during better times. Brindos approached him now and the concierge smiled.

  “You ever get time off?” Brindos asked him. “Sleep?”

  “Mr. Roberts, good morning. An old man like me, I take all the hours they give me. Did I tell you about the Tigers?” he asked.

  “Call me Dexter.” Brindos smiled back, remembering an earlier discussion about major league parks, night baseball, hot dogs, beer, and open air. Joseph had mentioned the Yankees, but not the Tigers. “You lived in Detroit?”

  “Oh, yes. Grew up there. For a while, I lived in New York, and I saw a few Yankees games as a young man. When I went back to Detroit, I went to thirty games a year. The Tigers rarely won, but so what?”

  “I never saw a big league game,” Brindos admitted. “They were all closed down by the time I was old enough.”

  “Goddamn open space laws. Without the major sports arenas … well, that basically did in all of professional sports. That’s part of why I left.”

  “A few teams still operate and play in smaller parks. There’s a Tigers team still playing at a high school field. Nothing like the old days, though.”

  “Got that right,” he mumbled.

  “Anyway, remember you said if I needed anything, to see you?”

  “What you need?”

  “Cab ride to the airport. Cecil says I can’t get there.”

  Joseph snorted, walked to the street, and hailed a cab with his hotel datacard. Within two minutes, the automated cab rolled up to the front doors of the Orion.

  “Joe,” Brindos said with a smile, “if you’re ever back on Earth, tickets to any baseball game we can find are on me.”

  “You’re on. Anything you need, you see me, like I said. I’ve bypassed a few lockouts and downloaded the airport into the cab’s travel routine. Just one of the many perks allowed a hotel concierge like myself.” He winked. “It’ll get you there, Mr. Roberts.”

  “Dexter. Please. Thanks, Joe.”

  Brindos got in the back of the cab, said “M.W.C. Airport” to the voice box between the seats, and off it went. As the cab rolled out of the business district and through an area of fairly new, no-frills, low-income housing projects, Brindos noticed the clean sparse appearance of the neighborhoods. The windswept concrete streets and boxlike structures reminded him of an industrial park. Other street traffic had been diverted to smaller arterials, but the cab had no problem bypassing the programming.

  Arriving at the terminal, he headed inside, got his bearings, and eventually found the TWT desk. A fellow wearing tortoiseshell glasses and an expensive suit stood behind a holo-DataNet board. As Brindos approached, the board winked out and the man smiled politely.

  “East City, please,” Brindos said.

  “I’m sorry, sir, no flights to East City.”

  “No, no, the press shuttle.”

  The man smiled broadly, told Brindos that colony officials had scheduled the flight to East City in a half hour, then asked for identification. Goddamn, he hated this kind of thing. Crowell owed him big time. He gave him a name and showed his code card, which now, thanks to the appropriate data from the NIO, looked like a press card from Interworld Press Service, one Dexter Morrison. Plenty of other off-world reporters were stranded here, and Brindos was unlikely to attract unwanted attention.

  Ten minutes later he was on the press shuttle. He snoozed during most of the flight. On the final approach to East City, a soft, automated ping woke him. Brindos looked out his window down onto East City at what looked like a dry riverbed cutting a wide swath through heavily built-up areas of the city. As he gathered his wits, Brindos realized he was looking at the drag path of Tower One.

  From his bird’s-eye view the massive tower sat at a tilt on the far horizon of the city. In the foreground, as the shuttle sank down onto East City, sides of buildings, whole city blocks in fact, had been completely destroyed. The areas most heavily affected appeared to be more of the same residential housing projects he’d seen just a few hours earlier in Midwest City. Street lights sputtered on as daylight faded. The shuttle swung in for its landing, and as they passed over the airport—well out of the disaster area—Brindos noticed that, contrary to what Cecil had told him, it looked untouched by the disaster.

  Shortly after landing, he found himself sitting in an airport cafe called the Temonus Trolley, waiting for the promised tour of the crash site. The place was packed and he ended up taking the last open table. The menu offered American West Coast cuisine as well as local vegetarian fare and some Helk specialties. He doubted the Helk food was authentic, so far away from Helkunntanas, so he played it safe when the order board holoed in front of him and ordered the California burger.

  A reporter asked if he could sit with him and he nodded. “Dexter Morrison,” Brindos said, using his Interworld Press alias.

  “Melok.”

  Brindos raised his eyebrows.

  “Just Melok,” he said, smiling. He ordered a patt
y melt, then tapped the holo a few times to request extra grilled onions, and Swiss cheese instead of cheddar. It looked like he could use it. He was so skinny, Brindos thought he might drift away at any moment. His name seemed familiar, and when he asked him about it, he said he was a reporter from a Midwest City Helk paper, Cal Gaz, which loosely translated meant The Monitor.

  “Maybe you’ve seen my name there,” he said.

  “Not likely. Never read that paper. And it’s Helk, right? They let human reporters on staff at a Helk paper?”

  “Sometimes. I’m the only one at the moment,” he said. “It’s a bit intimidating being around all those Hulks, but the pay’s good. Where you from, Dex? You mind I call you Dex?”

  “Call me what you like. New York. I came here on vacation.”

  “And then the disaster puts you right into reporter mode.”

  “For now, until I can get myself home. They can’t ground flights forever, right?”

  “People are under the impression the airport has been damaged,” he said.

  “Seems to be all right.”

  “The airport is shut down, Dexter, that’s a fact. But rumor says the Conduit was sabotaged. And so flights canceled, safety and security reasons.”

  Brindos looked down at his coffee. He picked it up and took a sip, looking at Melok over the rim. “Sabotage? Really?”

  “But then there’s the official government stance.”

  That much Brindos knew from the paper. “The need for a thorough recheck of all aerial tracking and guidance systems before the resumption of normal air traffic.”

  Melok smiled. “Was that word for word? Because that was good.”

  Their food came via a servo-robot a bit later, and Brindos let Melok grab the plates off the serving tray. The servo-robot said “Enjoy” in a nasal twang and scooted off. Brindos dug into the California burger, suddenly starving.

  Playing the part of an off-world reporter, he felt safe continuing to talk about the Conduit. “Why would someone sabotage it?”

  “It controls the weather,” Melok said quickly.

  “Sure, I know that much. Snazzy tech. Is it working?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve not really looked into it much, but it alters weather patterns somehow, but it’s difficult to measure over the short term. Rainfall in the farm belt is down this season, for whatever it’s worth.”

  “You know that the Science Consortium designed it?”

  “Sure.”

  “But who runs it?”

  “Don’t know. Why do you want to know?”

  “I’d like to talk to someone about it.”

  “Don’t know.” Melok took another bite of his sandwich.

  “You don’t know if I can talk to someone?” Brindos said, trying to refocus the reporter’s attention. Melok’s disjointed manner was putting him off a little.

  “I don’t know who runs it now. The Consortium still? Maybe?”

  What Brindos really wanted to ask him for was a connection between the Conduit disaster, Temonus’s possible secession from the Union, and the Movement. Now that would’ve been a bombshell to drop on Melok.

  “Is there anyone on this world who does know about it?” Brindos asked.

  Melok chased his food down with the rest of his coffee. He smiled. “We may seem a little backward to you, Dex, who no doubt has traveled much and experienced many exotic and modern worlds. We may seem”—he paused, staring away, twirling a French fry in the air, searching for the right words—“passive. But, I assure you that at least I am curious about the Conduit and this disaster. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  Brindos finished his burger, pushed his plate toward the middle of the table, and said, “Sorry, forget it.”

  He waved it off. “Hey, Dex, look, no worries.” He leaned in toward me. “It’s the Movement, you know?”

  Oh, yeah, he knew.

  “Plenko’s got everyone running scared,” Melok said. “He’s a menace. I’m sure he’s behind the Conduit mishap, but I’m not sure how I approach it at Cal Gaz. Publisher’s being very difficult about any piece that puts Helks in a bad light.”

  He gave Brindos his card—an actual paper one—and said to look him up if he found out anything interesting and he’d do the same.

  Yeah, right. First chance he got.

  Brindos put his card in his pocket without looking at it.

  A quick briefing before the tour started turned out to be short and uninformative. The information available to the press revealed little: names of the deceased (a partial list), name of the carrier involved in the wreck, the Exeter, and names of the captain and crew. Evacuation zones. A plea for monetary aid. No official information about the cause of the catastrophe, but the gathered reporters did get a more detailed description of the events.

  If the Exeter incident was sabotage, or an act of terrorism courtesy of the Movement, it hadn’t worked; these people seemed as terrorized as a napping gorilla after a full meal. Brindos sensed an apathetic attitude about the recent disaster. You never knew what lay beneath the surface, but these people just didn’t seem appropriately upset, never mind primed for a revolution.

  They took Brindos and the others out to the crash site immediately after the briefing. He would’ve played real reporter and talked to other sources about what was really going on, but only other reporters scrambled around the ruins, taking vids and pictures of the area, trying to stay out of the way of the emergency workers doing their jobs. Like Midwest City, the older sections of East City were no more than fifteen years old; the white prefab buildings looked as new as the day they were put up. City officials had closed all roads leading into the disaster area to all but emergency vehicles, but they allowed the press to inspect the damage on foot. The street was residential, more tenements, but the absence of activity gave Brindos the impression they were unoccupied, the people evacuated somewhere away from the destruction.

  This neighborhood near the reservoir stood in the shadow of the displaced Tower One. Brindos saw it looming ahead of him like an obsidian giant bending over the tops of the quiet streets, its pinnacle shrouded by clouds.

  He walked to the street’s modified ending, a valley of fresh earth a kilometer across. Buildings on either side of him, sheared off at mid-structure, dangled their internal ligaments over the precipice. Up and down the wide brown gap, crews worked diligently, but he wasn’t sure whether they were trying to restore the giant device to working order, or salvage what they could of it.

  Brindos toured the area the best he could the next half hour, then the press shuttle left East City. The ride back to Midwest City was quiet. Melok sat three rows up from him on the press shuttle and Brindos wondered if the reporter would figure out his angle for a story in Cal Caz.

  After he got back to the Orion Hotel, Brindos’s code card beeped with a message from Crowell outlining his meeting with Aaron Bardlsey. Brindos acknowledged it, briefing him on his visit to East City, and said he’d give the matter of Terl Plenko top priority as requested. His hunch now was that Plenko and Koch were both alive and well on Temonus.

  Five

  I awoke at nine in the morning the day after my meeting with Assistant Director Bardsley. It was my day off, but I didn’t think I’d even make it out of my studio apartment. I hadn’t worked out in the gym for several days and it was pissing me off. I rubbed my eyes, turned over, and recalled mornings on Aryell with Cara sitting on the corner of her bed, wearing one of my white T-shirts and nothing else. She would hold her arms over her head and move side to side, stretching, auburn hair flowing across her back. Turn and look at me from under her long lashes. Smile. Brush her hair back off her forehead and curl it behind her ear.

  She never knew how much I cared for her. Figured, I’m sure, that I was this man of mystery who engaged in an off-world affair the length of my stay on Aryell, but that I’d soon be on my way.

  I blinked and rubbed my eyes. I flashed a moment on an image of Cara at her house in Kimson City on Aryell.
I wondered if whatever had once brought us together had tried to work its magic again, thoughts of her coming to me like the perceived passion I’d left behind. Could’ve just been stress at work. Why hadn’t I even written to her?

  I sat there a good fifteen minutes, eyeing the bottle of good Temonus whiskey on the nightstand, the kind of whiskey everyone talked about and everyone spent too much money on to get. Me included. I’d spent half a week’s pay last night, wanting a good stiff drink. It was still unopened.

  I called Mom, told her I was doing fine, asked how she was doing, same routine. Always after calling, I felt guilty. I wanted to see her more often. She had fewer friends now than I did when I was a kid, and that was saying a lot. She’d never quite got over losing Dad.

  Why was the whiskey still unopened?

  My code card chimed on the nightstand. I glanced over there, groaned, and stood. I grabbed my robe off the floor and walked over. I wondered if Brindos had information for me about Koch or Plenko. I slipped the robe on as I picked up the card.

  The message was not from Brindos.

  An unregistered. Everything froze inside me. A message with no point of origin, no ID, no reply protocol. What we called a one-way, illegal as hell. I could hardly move, shocked by the impossibility of it. Due to strict coding and powerful blocking nanoware, this kind of message never popped up on an NIO agent’s code card. And yet here it was. The note that shimmered onto my screen was short:

  Floor 13. 2 pm. Your life is in danger. I have urgent information for you.—Gray

  The thirteenth floor?

  The unregistered couldn’t have meant Floor 13 of the NIO building because there was no Floor 13, thanks in part to a nod to an old superstition. So what the hell did Floor 13 mean? Was it a place or a project name? I sure as hell didn’t know who Gray was, or what he—or she—would want to see me about. The commonsense part of me screamed setup, but the curious-as-all-hell side, the one that didn’t get out much, couldn’t pass up the intrigue.