Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  People don’t like to hear this kind of bullshit. They would never believe it, and I don’t blame them. It’s often been said that the human mind is a prediction machine, so maybe it’s just some kind of overpredicting on my part. A heavy psychodynamic pour of my unconscious into my conscious. A splash of Charles Bonnet syndrome, since I’m visually impaired and recognize that what I’m seeing isn’t real. A twist of delirium and astronomer’s gambit. As much research as we’ve done, the human brain remains a puzzle. Not even Akira figured it out. But people born mute sometimes hear voices in their heads. We can see the auditory parts of their brains kick in when they do. The chances of someone having all four of my disorders at the same time is billions to one. And the way I figure, all four need to be firing when this happens, or the whole thing will break. Just because what I see ain’t real, doesn’t mean it ain’t accurate. I have a murder-solve rate that’s unprecedented in the history of the police force. Colorblindness has been curable for years now, but I never had any interest in curing mine. And I’ve prevented crime in the past that no one else saw coming. So I may not be a legend like Akira, but I protected her so she could do a hero’s work.

  The chief won’t stop pinging, and I’m getting irritated. He doesn’t get what I do. He doesn’t have a clearance rate anywhere near mine. He didn’t have a hand in saving jack shit. So why won’t he just let me do my thing? I can’t block the chief’s pings—chain of command is programmed into my iE—so I look down from my SEAL to distract myself.

  A color that I see as vividly as anyone is blue. And as the SEAL steers higher and higher, the ocean blue surrounding the island brings back memories. My father, a hydronaut, worked in aqua construction back when engineers and architects were trying to build the first seascrapers from the seafloor up. Humanity was on a roll back then, and scientists were coming up with a bunch of crazy ideas, shook from the Great Sun Storm that almost knocked us a century or two back. They built seascrapers that protected us from solar flares with deep-water habitation. We made rail guns, giant ones that could fire plasma to outer space. We came up with pills that could change skin color. Organ farms. AMP therapy that could slow down the aging process or turn the work day from twelve hours to twenty-two. After an hour in that thing, a person feels like they’ve gotten a full eight hours of sleep. Then there was the iE, which blew cell phones and every other piece of smart tech out of the water.

  One day, my dad came home from work with a chunk of ambergris the size of a soccer ball and showed it to me and my mother. Plunked it right there on the kitchen table. And when he told us what it was, the indigestible stuff sitting in a sperm whale’s belly until the whale itself dies and rots on the ocean floor, my mom told him to throw it away. He laughed and said it was what the most expensive perfume was made of, worth a fortune. The smell hit me first. That headache of a smell. Then the color. Faint, like the smoke rising off a snubbed wick, but growing stronger and stronger, forming into a ghost being called by a séance. That was when I saw green for the first time in my life. And I was awestruck. The green wafted over to my father.

  “The whale didn’t rot on its own,” I said. “Did someone kill it?”

  He frowned at me. “How’d you know that?” he asked.

  I shrugged. He nodded. “We set off a charge in the vista, and the whale got caught in it,” my father said. “I felt horrible about it, killing the thing, but I found this after. Lucky, huh?”

  It was one of the last times I saw my father happy. Over the next year, as the world population hit twelve billion and we raced harder to make something new and bigger, he dove deeper and deeper into the ocean to build underwater scrapers that would be insulated from power outages in sun storms. He eventually got the bends one too many times. He spent the last year of his life crippled, pissing into a catheter until he became a ghost himself. I responded with hate. I hated his work. I hated the company he worked for. A part of me might even have hated him.

  That was when I started getting into trouble. Started leaning into life, fists first. As a child, I thought my colorblindness would be the only way I’d be able to see my father again, because I was sure his death wasn’t his fault. He broke depth records. He was invincible in the water. When he died, I waited for his green ghost to confirm that it was someone else’s fault, but it never showed up.

  The chief pings again. I relent and answer, voice only.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “To her telescope.”

  “Come back for the autopsy.”

  “Autopsy? Have you seen her yet? Somebody killed her with an autopsy.”

  “I did see,” the chief says. “You shouldn’t have touched a thing. You should’ve reported it immediately. I need to supervise this one. I need you to inform me about the moves you’re making before you make them. Drum-tight procedure on this one. The governor’s already aware. The president. The president! This is national security. You need to get clearance every step of the way on this. And under no conditions are you to talk to the press. If we show the public what happened to this woman, there will be chaos.”

  My head is pounding. “Okay, Chief.”

  “The president is already sending his people here. The president!”

  “Got it, Chief.”

  “Stop calling me that. I’m your captain.”

  “Aye-aye.”

  I click out. He didn’t explicitly tell me to stop my mission to Akira’s Telescope, which I’m nearing now. Sitting above the clouds, on the tallest mountain on Earth, this telescope isn’t just a telescope, it’s an entire complex that barely fits on the peak. I look up at Ascalon’s Scar, then down at the island below, which I can see since it’s a clear day. Only someone my age would recognize those buildings as normal looking. The rest of it nowadays—the seascrapers, the cloudscrapers, the theme parks—it’s all architecture that celebrates our newfound admiration of the natural world while we’ve crammed it with nearly thirteen billion souls, forcing us to build into the depths of the ocean or so high that we scrape the top of the troposphere. Glass behemoths that look like monster tulips, clouds, or bamboo shoots. No right angles. Spit shined in parrotfish blue and trevally yellow. Nothing like a near-miss extinction to create a world that looks like a giant tossed salad. But this building I’m hovering over to, it’s not a building trying to look artful by imitating nature. It is a building whose nature is clear: to look further into the unknown than anything man has ever made. To look inside the swirls of galaxies drybrushed in wisteria.

  What I see are the slight green fumes wafting from its god-like eye. And for some reason, I think back to my father, and the fact that the dead are the only extinguished lights we can never really see again.

  3

  Crazy as it sounds, I first met Akira Kimura on a dating app fifty years ago. I had just jettisoned marriage number two, and she’d worked so hard her whole damned life that she’d somehow missed the whole pairing off and Noah’s Ark procreating we were all supposed to do. Signing up for the app was her version of a midlife crisis.

  We met at an old-fashioned Korean-Irish soju pub called Maru Bollix. I’d chosen this cop bar because back then I was still going for my cynical, noir detective vibe on dates, trying to be one of those “sensitive tough guys” we only remembered in black and white. But when Akira stepped in and I saw her reflection in the saloon-style mirror behind the bar, I didn’t need any synesthesia to see plain fact. We were immediately disgusted by each other—and ourselves.

  But she sat down and ordered a drink, and we went through the motions. She had two PhDs, one in astronomy and one in astrophysics, and was pursuing a third in mechanical engineering while working to improve cloaking tech, which she described as a cheap second-rate hat trick. I told her I was working on solving the murder of a woman who had starved her twins to death and, for sympathy, claimed a terminal illness had taken them. She paused, then said the list of suspects must be
long. I said yeah, cracking this one’s probably as tough as a PhD in mechanical engineering.

  We relaxed a bit after that. She was different from my most recent ex, who, adding together makeup, plucking, gym, makeup removal, moisturizing, and exfoliating, spent about four hours a day in front of the mirror. According to my math the one time I clocked her, that was how she spent about seventeen percent of her existence—twenty-five percent of her waking hours. It was tough to judge her, though. I spent about the same amount of time solving the murders of those who probably deserved to die.

  Akira, though, spent one hundred percent of her time trying to figure out anything and everything except herself. I once told her I was an art history major in college. She seemed surprised the subject still existed. I told her it didn’t anymore, but had surprisingly lasted longer than philosophy, photography, journalism, and religious studies. I told her education was probably the next to go. She said, no, as long as people needed babysitting, the field of education would be intact. She called babysitting the world’s second-oldest profession. I laughed and agreed. She added that despite all the advances in neuroscience, psychology wasn’t going anywhere either. I nodded. It would be around for as long as there are people who wanted to babble about their problems. So, forever.

  She told me she didn’t know much about art, but that I reminded her of the man in the suit sitting alone in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. I told her my favorite painting was The Great Wave off Kanagawa. That was a wooden block print, she corrected, not a painting. Then she asked what I thought about Matisse’s Music. I told her I didn’t care for it much. We went on and on. All the masterpieces. And the only thing we really agreed on is that some of the best art is a cry for help.

  “Did you know . . .” she said.

  I was beginning to notice that, like most overeducated people, she habitually started sentences with that question. “Did you know that the female giant octopus starves itself to death for six months while it takes care of its eggs?”

  “Sounds admirable,” I said.

  “That’s because you’re a man,” she said.

  I laughed. Then we somehow ended up on the piano. Maybe because we’d discussed Renoir and how he liked to paint young women playing the instrument, and this Irish cop pub had an old dusty out-of-tune one sitting there. I decided to sit in front of it and show off some—Akira was impressed, and I told her my mother had wanted me to be a concert pianist. That I’d always had a knack for it. I didn’t tell her why, that I heard and saw red when good, really good music played. That musical notes blared in front of me in crimson letters and numbers. Songs, or at least the ones I liked, read to me as stories. My concert pianist dreams were dashed once parents started genetically engineering their kids to have six fingers. Back then, genetic enhancement, with the exception of freak athletics and evil genius IQ, was legal. A six-year-old, six-fingered kid once played at a concert and took my breath away. I knew I’d never be as good as him. And after that, I no longer wanted to play. But I didn’t want to lay all that history on Akira, so instead of talking about it, I finished my song and told her once they created the PhD program in useless skills and knowledge, I’d be the first to receive an honorary diploma.

  She smiled and looked at the piano, teary-eyed. She said her mom had forced her to take piano too. She said that she was terrible at it from the beginning, so she rigged the piano to be self-playing and would sit there in front of her mom and pretend she was making progress. The ruse lasted about six months, until her mom surprised her by entering her in a competition. She went and made a fool of herself. Worse, she made a fool out of her mother. Wistful, I told her about my first wife and child, how I’d enlisted in the army to make enough to take care of them. Then Desert Storm 15 erupted. After three years of rail gun sniper and MP work, I walked out a master sergeant with two farmed organs on reserve for future use. Part of Federal benes. In the meantime, the wife had walked out on me. She’d hooked up with a G therapy nurse during my deployment and taken the kid to live in Portugal with him. I know what it is to make a fool of yourself, I said.

  By the end of the night, me and the yet-to-be world-renowned genius and terrible piano player Akira Kimura had agreed on a few things. First was that the last thing I needed right after a divorce was to be near any romantic entanglement, period. Second, that she admitted that the whole dating thing was a meltdown for her, an attempt to satisfy the craving to be normal. She was, in fact, not normal, not actually interested in being normal, but like that piano-playing version of herself who wanted to satisfy her mother, she sometimes felt guilty for just being who she was. In the end, I got married two more times, and she never went on another date. Even with the heft of her fame and reputation, people didn’t fully realize how powerful this woman was. Squashed a personal crisis with a single date. That’s why it never surprised me, given three years and change, that she also squashed the fuck out of globe-killer Sessho-seki.

  When I exit the SEAL and climb the steps to Akira’s Telescope, the adrenaline I’ve been running on the past hour begins fading fast. It’s cold up here, and the bad knee starts clicking, the teeth start aching, and the heartburn percolates. My fingers, once thick and strong, feel crooked and hollow. I’m feeling old again. My iE pings. The wife. I don’t respond.

  It’s been ages since I’ve been to this place. In the years I ran security for Akira, I practically lived here. Some people would say that using the word “security” for what I did for Akira is a stretch. But it’s what I did. I kept her safe by any means necessary. That instinct hasn’t faded. I wish I’d been there for her back at the penthouse. No matter how old I might be, I would never have let anyone cut her to pieces like that. Back in the days of Ascalon, people on all levels tried to take her down. And I silenced them all. Aching joints now, perhaps the loss of a step, but when I’m in mode, I know I’ve got a power bomb or two left in me.

  But it’s been ages since I had to be in mode. Decades. I get to the telescope door and let its scanner flash over my face. Even after all these years, it recognizes me and opens, and for some reason, I’m surprised. Not that I still have clearance, but that the machine even recognizes me. Because the older I get, the less recognizable I am to myself.

  4

  The guts of the most powerful telescope in the world resemble a cathedral of twentieth-century office antiquity. I almost leave my iE floating outside in sleep mode out of habit, her strict rule. Then I remember that she’s dead and enter. Upon stepping in, I stand on a cylindrical pedestal of the full-body scanner and laugh to myself remembering how much Akira hated this thing. She’d step on it, this little platform, and her eyes would narrow as the neon rings of blue light lit up and gyrated around her. Today, no neon blue rings alight around me. The inside-out body scan is probably decommissioned now, just like me. I step off the pedestal and into the middle of the grand chamber. The chair in front of the eyepiece, a steel folding chair, looks impossible to sit on comfortably. Lining the wall are file cabinets filled with binders—binders filled with actual paper from back when people could chop down trees with impunity. Now, the unauthorized chopping down of a tree that’s a hundred years or older gets a wannabe lumberjack charged with murder, the same if he or she gunned down a grandma in the street. “Streets” being a metaphorical term nowadays. Only people around my age and older remember rubber tires. Meanwhile, our own tires are running on worn treads down to the tartan of steel, fiberglass, and rayon barely holding us together.

  I look across the room and spot her desk under the No iEs Allowed sign. It’s the same desk from back in the day, sitting in the exact same place. A wooden desk with actual handled drawers. A flat screen, or what laughably passed for flat a hundred years ago, hangs above it. It’s hooked up to a literal handheld remote control. On the desk, a telephone with buttons. The childhood photo of her at a playground—the only real evidence I ever saw that she had a childhood—is gone. Next to the desk, a platoon
of med bots. Off to the right, a chalkboard filled with the powdery ghosts of calculations I couldn’t even begin to fathom. Shelved underneath, erasers caked with the remnants. Akira was always afraid of someone stealing her work. Trying to do what only she was capable of doing correctly. Afraid her work would be used as a weapon. Maybe that was part of the reason she trusted me so much back then. She knew I didn’t understand a damn thing she was scribbling on that board.

  But the strangest thing isn’t this antiquated office and its chalkboard. It’s the grand piano cordoned off with velvet rope. That wasn’t here the last time I visited. I ignore it for now, step over to the desk, and grab a drawer handle. I pause. For the first time in years, I’m shy about invading someone’s space. It’s like touching the property of a saint. I open the drawer and it’s empty. I look around. No green wafts. Not that I expected to see any. It’s not that easy. I still need to use my brain and figure my way through the gaps, through what Akira would call the dark matter, which takes up more space than the trail, just like in the heavens, those devoid gaps between swirling galaxies.

  Even though we go way back, once Ascalon did its work, I was never invited here again. I suppose some places are so sacred to us that we don’t share them with anyone else unless we absolutely need to. And this place is personal. For her, personal meant work. There are zero signs of the public Akira Kimura here, no holos of her thousands of awards, no vid doc of the conversations she had with practically every head of state in the last forty years. So the piano, which cannot be work related, is very strange. I want to laugh at the thought that the largest thing in the room is a reminder of her biggest and perhaps only life failure. I wonder why she had this thing lugged in.