by Neil Clarke
“It’s not so esoteric. Every culture has a version. Usually several versions. In the West, for instance, people talk about ghosts, bodily possession. There’s the concept of the muse: an invisible companion, offering vision and inspiration. Even the word genius goes back to the idea: a visitation from a presence that is like us, but more than us. It’s an old, ineradicable insight: that we are not alone in this world. That we are, at times, visited by spirits.”
I watched his hands, thin, knobby fingers clawed around his soda can. Looking at those hands, you could believe he had lived a rough life, hunting insurgents through the Pashtun deserts, weathering storms on a Caribbean beach. Sometimes he reached out and stroked the dials on his arrangement of lamps and speakers. His arm trembled. Abdul Shah might look like a college professor, but he had a hermit’s fingers and bones.
“This was more than that,” I said. “More than a spirit. It was . . . ”
How to say it? I couldn’t stop looking at Shah’s equipment. A few home theater components, doodads from a sauna . . . it was the modernity of his operation that dazzled me. How did he manage to do what he did, with a rig borrowed from a California retreat?
Shah straightened his glasses. “More than a spirit, yes. A feeling. But the feeling, the essence, is always the same. A doubling. A presence. Not happiness, exactly, but a sense of profoundly heightened perception. The Greeks spoke of a daimon, a kind of guiding personal deity. And of course, you know all about Buddhists, mystics, desert hermits, the many varieties of meditation. In Islam, Allah is not merely out there, like some kind of abstract deistic authority.” His hand moved vaguely toward the ceiling. “He is with us. Watching. He is here right now—if we will learn to notice him.”
Shah was watching my own hands. He must have read something in them, a twitch of skepticism, a twinge of doubt.
“I’m not religious, myself.” Shah laid his bony hand briefly over mine. “I was raised in America. I fought for America. My people go back to the scholars of North Africa—the original founders of modern science. It was science that led me to this.” His hand indicated the machines, the coiling wires, the MacBook glowing on its stand. “The irony is that in putting the old fantasies behind us—the gods and demons, the ghosts and spirits—we forgot about something more important. We forgot how to pray.”
The evening wind slipped in around the hoardings, wet and cool with the mist off the bay. The sound it made was almost funny, like a child’s imitation of the howl of a ghost. I wanted to challenge Shah’s mystical theories, but the effects of his treatment still clung to my mind. The sensation was richer than what he described. A presence, yes, but also a kind of sadness, like a fleeting memory from long ago.
Shah nodded and smiled, reading my thoughts. It occurred to me that he’d already had this talk with hundreds of people: those dazed and devoted followers, lying in the darkness below.
“Understand.” Shah held up a palm. “Prayer isn’t magical. Like anything else, it’s a physical process. The neuroscientists are beginning to understand it in their own way. But so much of the art has been lost, there’s now very little for them to study. These people?” His head tipped toward the floor. “They’re learning to recover it. Not modern meditation. Not juice cleanses and therapy. The true, ancient art of opening the mind. This kind of prayer was only a fading memory in the mystery rites of Ancient Greece. It had already been half lost when the shrines of the Ancient Egyptians rose from the sands. It’s a way of worship known only to the first people, the early men and women, who lived with spirits all their lives. With practice, it can be relearned. The techniques I used on you are awkward and crude. But vital. We’re trying to break open a very heavy lock.”
I shook my head. What Shah had done to me was anything but crude. I told him as much, but he chuckled and wiped his glasses.
“Well, any man can fly, if you put him in a catapult and cut the rope. Controlling flight, that’s another story.” Shah stood and drifted among his equipment, tuning this, adjusting that, like an artist who can’t stop fiddling with his work. His voice, his manners, his every movement, had taken on some of the rhythms of his ritual, as if he were unconsciously attuned to secret sources of music.
“The words,” Shah said, “they’re the challenging part. Suggestion, the power of speech: it can be very powerful, if used well. But it has to be tailored for different cultures. In a way, I find it easier to work in this country, honing my techniques in a foreign language. It helps me remember that words are only a technology—a very old tool for reprogramming the brain.”
“But how did you learn—?” Nothing he had said, so far, came near to addressing what I wanted to know. “How did you figure out how to do this?”
“To rewrite the mind? To access the wetware of the soul?” He smiled as he recited these familiar clichés. “I didn’t. Yes, I put together this setup. It took me decades. But the underlying techniques, the fundamentals—these were shown to me. Taught to me, I think you could say.”
“By whom?”
Shah didn’t answer. His eyes were on the far wall, watching the window he’d been gazing through when I arrived. The tarpaulin had pulled loose and stretched out to flutter like a flag in the evening sky. “You know,” Shah said, “we actually do very little, once we’ve truly learned to pray. It’s really a matter of clearing the mind, making room within oneself. It’s then . . . ”
He paused. A strange buzzing had begun to shake the air, bristling and needling, like iron filings twitching toward a magnet. I set down my untasted Sprite. “It’s then?”
Shah’s eyes were still on the window. He put out a hand, touching the frame as if to steady himself. “It’s then,” Shah said, as a fusillade of gel bags began to pound the walls, “that they come to us.”
8
The modern gel-round is a tidy piece of munitions. A flexible sac of viscous polymer, cased and laced in an electric mesh, it can squeeze into nearly any shape. With the right launcher, it can be shot, in the form of an aerodynamic needle, over distances of five hundred feet or more. On impact, or at the spark of an embedded trigger, it flattens into a pancake and sheds most of its momentum. With that transition, it throws out a distinctive shockwave, a thump that’ll almost pop your ears.
Colm had programmed his barrage with care. Four squares of plywood burst suddenly inward, making four holes in the centers of the walls. Splinters flashed in the sunset; eight nails pinged to the floor. Five holes now gaped to the night, ready to receive whatever Colm chose to throw through them.
The buzzing grew louder. I followed Shah to the window, reaching out to catch the flapping tarp. The ground seemed to spin and tilt far below, dark under a purple sky. In the half light, I could see the police gearing up. Three sulfur lamps beamed on the fabric of the command tent. Two tiny figures stood out front. They might have been chatting or flirting or fighting, for all I could tell looking down from this height. I recognized Colm and the police chief by the colors of their uniforms: black and gray.
Shah gazed straight ahead, to the eastern horizon, where Belawan blazed in the hollow of its harbor. A spot of darkness crawled slowly across the city lights. The buzzing grew louder—a feeling more than a noise, like a nail scraping along my skull.
I pulled out my miniphone. “Karen? Hello?”
Her voice came to me across a gulf of exhaustion. I wondered if I’d caught her sleeping. “Doug?”
“What’s going on down there?”
A pause. I reminded myself that this woman had been awake for the better part of a week, surviving on sugar and synthetic hormones. “Doug, I think I’ve done all I can.”
Shah was still holding back the tarp, watching the angry shadows of Colm’s drones as they climbed slowly across the sky. I cupped my hand around the phone, trying to dampen the vibrations in the air.
“Karen, Colm’s drone fleet is up here, gathering around the building. They’re sending out the preliminary signal. I thought we’d all agreed that this kind of
acoustic assault would be a very bad idea.”
Her voice seemed to recede each time she spoke, as if she’d set the phone down and run away, fleeing across the black marshes. “It’s a pissing match. You know how this goes.” A crackle of static nearly killed the signal. Karen’s voice crept into audibility. “The police chief says he’s waited long enough. He’s sending in his riot teams. Colm says that if the chief does that, he’s going to launch his own attack.”
“They’re both crazy.”
Another burst of fuzz. Colm’s drone fleet was mucking up the signal. “Get out.” Karen’s voice fought through the interference, repeating one injunction. “Get out . . . get out . . . ”
I turned. Abdul Shah jerked as I grabbed his arm. He was stronger than he looked, skinny but firm. “Send the word.” I pulled him back from the window. “Tell your people it’s time to evacuate. Now.”
Shah’s tongue darted along his lips. He had the expression he’d worn when I first told him how little time we had, not frightened, exactly, but thoughtful, calculating.
“Listen.” I pulled him toward the stairs. “That buzzing? That’s the preliminary waveform. They’ll run that pattern for a bit, tuning up. It could go on for ten minutes. Could be thirty. We have a little time. But not much.”
Shah looked over his equipment, tapping his teeth with his tongue, as if counting.
“Shah.” I wanted to shake him. “You’ve got to send down the word. Tell your people what’s happening here.”
His eyes settled on mine. “It’s as you said.” A smile passed across Shah’s lips. “They’re not really my people, Mister Lam.”
The noise of the drones had settled into an ambient distraction. Shah’s voice rose like a melody above the discordant tones. “These people chose to stay here. To learn, to practice. I only teach them what I can.”
I shook my head. We had too little time.
“Shah!” I was shouting, now, overloud, the noise of the drones playing havoc with my hearing. “Tell them to leave!”
Shah looked confused. A new sound rose over the background hum, a squawk that echoed off the naked walls. I recognized the cadences of north Sumatran Hokkien, Medan’s contemporary lingua franca. The police chief had brought out a megaphone.
“Mister Lam.” Shah sank between my hands. “You don’t understand. I did tell them.”
I released him. Outside the window, the hovering drones hung buzzard-like in the night, blotting bird-sized swatches of stars. Below, the riot police were assuming formation, blocking off the tower’s three exits. A ramming team approached the bolted front doors. I saw no fugitives fleeing the tower, no refugees huddled on the pavement below. Only that ring of donated food, all of it worse than useless now. And the bright sulfur lamps, and the gleaming helmets, and the tiny figures of Colm and the police chief, preparing to wage turf war over our corpses.
“It was while you were in your trance.” Shah drifted to the window beside me, looking down at the commotion with that smug quietude that was the most cultish thing about him. “I spoke to your colleague. The woman who brought you to me. Shayreen. I explained that we were out of time.”
The riot police had taken position: knots of manpower at every exit, a complement of carbon-fiber shields and clubs. My concern was with the point teams that would soon come charging up the stairwells, throwing out shock grenades and wielding batons. The lead ramming crew had already set up their unit, a black frame that fully surrounded the front doors. A pneumatic device, a kind of giant cattle-gun, it would scan the entrance for structural features, then punch it to pieces with a computer-controlled battery of steel bolts.
“If the people are still here,” Shah said, “it must be because they want to stay. For as long as they can.”
“Praying,” I said.
Shah watched with resignation. “You understand. Don’t you?”
A blaring command from the police chief’s megaphone broke into our conversation. Instantly, a series of concussions shook the building. A stutter of bolts. A crash of glass. The concrete floor shivered as the entranceway collapsed. With a rumble of boots, the cops came in, their shouts and footfalls echoing up the silent floors.
Did I? I wondered. Did I understand?
“Mister Lam?” Shah held my hand, pressing it between both of his. “Let me explain something to you.”
9
Do you need the details, Carter?
You have the engineer’s report. You know the facts. Is there any point in reciting a series of figures you’ll be hearing in courtrooms for the next ten years?
Fifty million in unforeseen damages. The pylons, carbon-netted, seated on ten square acres of in-situ, bore-injected micropilings—half of those will have to be replaced. The platform, the vehicle fleet, the command center: gone. Even Colm’s drone fleet took a major hit. Half of them failed to find their backup recharge station.
Shall I go on? Shall I tally the losses? The payouts to families of the Medan police? The mob of lawyers you’re going have to draft to untangle the thicket of indemnities? The insurance payments? The gifts and bribes?
But all this is rather soothingly cut-and-dried, isn’t it? All this talk of dollars and contracts, it hardly touches the heart of the matter. Because when it comes to the key issue, Carter, the one you don’t want to talk about, the one no one ever wants to talk about . . .
I suppose we’ll never know how many people were in that tower. How many bodies, waiting in the dark, trying to shut out the outside world, even as that world came for them with a vengeance.
Kooks and fanatics, you’ll say. Dupes and fools. It sure feels good to use those words. Most of those people won’t even rate a glib dismissal, because no one will ever know who they were. Undocumented drifters, even before they came to Shah, even before one hundred thousand tons of slipshod construction buried them in steel and debris. Most of the dead will never be tallied. Not their bodies, not their teeth, not their DNA. They’ll rot in peaceful anonymity, beneath the coastal Sumatran mud.
I bet you’d like to ask me one thing. I bet you’d like to ask if I know why. Why did they do it? Why did they stay? Even as the dust began to settle on their faces, even as the cracks were rising like black lightning up the walls—why did they claim those precious moments, those last few seconds of prayer and concentration? Do I know what they saw, what they hoped to see, in the final second when the floor fell away and the roof came crashing down?
A lock, that’s how Abdul Shah described it. Breaking a lock to open the mind. He made it clear that I’d only begun the process; my session had been interrupted by Karen’s calls. I had caught a faint glimmer of the wonders to be seen.
And if I’d been allowed to continue my study? If I had received what Shah called a “true visitation”?
I can hear you muttering, Carter, out there in your air-conditioned office. You’re a college boy. You know your history. I know what you’re thinking, because I used to think it too. I looked on them all with contempt and disbelief—
All those millions of seers and followers.
All those countless dead fools and saints.
10
They call it “wave warfare” for a reason. A lot of people think they know what that means. It’s all done with sound, intersecting shockwaves. Under the right conditions, those waves can kill.
What fewer people know is that a sonic attack, as programmed by our people, comes in waves of intensity. The drones Colm deploys, they follow a script. They hit their victims hard, then dial down the assault. They allow for a rest, then crank things up. The intent is to stimulate predictable behavior. First, unease. Then confusion. Then panic. Then flight.
The first wave hit us while Shah was halfway through his story. The buzzing of the drones became a tooth-numbing whine. This sound, I knew, was only a warning. The real attack would be inaudible at first, and it would come in stages. First a deformation of the eyes, disorientation and blurring sight. Next, a throb of pressure in the guts—not pain,
exactly, but a sense of something wrong. After that, the hardcore waves would hit, running through our chests like a ripple of static. Our lungs would begin to quiver and squirm. The air would simply leave us, in a frittering whoosh, and our tissues and brain and our blood itself would let out a long black scream for oxygen.
I braced myself, waiting for the attack to run its course. By the time it was over, Shah had fallen to the floor, twitching and drooling down his check shirt. I grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet, knowing the real danger hadn’t yet come.
“This way!”
He ran in the wrong direction at first, trying to reach the stairs to the lower floors. I yanked him back, leading him past the elevator. Already, cracks had begun to lace the plaster, spilling chips and powder to the floor. The whole shaft hummed; I could hear it moaning like a tuba as soundwaves propagated past the lower floors. I pounded the button. I wasn’t surprised to get no response. The Medan police had found their way to the electrics.
“Shah, stop.” He was still pulling for the staircase. I pointed at the nearby floor. A crack had zig-zagged out from one corner, following a scar-colored seam in the cement. “That was the first wave,” I told Shah. “In about five minutes, they’ll hit us again. We have exactly that long to get ourselves out of range, before this whole structure starts shaking like hammered glass.” I swung my pointing finger, along the crack, past the stairs. “We have no time to get down to the ground. But we can still try to go up to the roof.”
Shah’s lips moved silently. Either he didn’t understand, or he thought I’d completely lost my mind.
I had no time to argue. I dropped his arm and ran. The unfinished stairwell rose above, a twenty-foot column of empty space. Dust whirled down in spiral clouds, shaken loose by the sonic blast. A metal framework laced the walls, offering a scaffold for risers and steps that would never be installed. Rust and dirt gritted under my hand as I tested the strength of the nearest beam. It creaked, but the bolts held. It would make a serviceable ladder—for anyone crazy enough to dare the climb.
