Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  I let my iE out of my shoulder pocket to record all this, which feels like a violation because no iEs were ever allowed in here. The floating orb hovers and scans and reminds me that I forgot to take my pain and memory pills. The last thing I need is a memory pill. I’m feeling for the first time in a long time. And it don’t feel good. I’m usually tired by this time of day, but right now, I’m wired. It’s depressing that maybe my old friend’s death excites me. On top of this mountain with some native name that escapes me, her death balloons life into me.

  I can’t take my eyes off the piano. I step up to the brass stanchion and detach the velvet rope. A vacuum revs and nearly makes me jump. It hovers over the rubber flooring, a machine with one job on its mech mind. Watching it reminds me what Akira said to all the nay and doomsayers when she unveiled Ascalon. Some people were terrified of an object that powerful calculating trajectory on its own. No one, not even Akira, was going to pull the trigger. Ascalon would do that on its own. People freaked out. And Akira responded by saying that no one should fear AI. We’ve all known for centuries that a piece of hardware can do any one thing a man can do, sometimes infinitely better. But no single AI can come close to doing what a single human mind can do across the board. Don’t fear Ascalon, she said. Be thankful that she may be able to accomplish the one thing we could only dream of doing with perfect accuracy.

  I sit at the piano and the vacuum stops. I think about what Akira must’ve felt like, playing in front of all those people and letting her mom down. It’s always been hard to imagine Akira as a child. The same image always pops up, and it’s not the one in the picture that adorned her desk. Instead, I imagine a girl in a lab coat, sprung from her father’s forehead. I laugh to myself and sigh as I strike a few keys. Then I stare down at the keyboard, trying to remember the song I played fifty years ago in that bar with Akira.

  All of a sudden, I see them. The curls of smoke rising from between the keys—faint, almost imperceptible. I strike a single key, and the smoke kicks up like dust. I begin to play the same song I did the first time we met. An old jazz standard, loaded with improvised sorrow. I close my eyes. I feel the tears and know there ain’t no color to them, just clear.

  Then I notice. The piano has begun to play on its own.

  I stand and step away. It’s playing what I’m playing, but the song slowly transitions into another one. One I’ve never heard before. The music turns red. A rush of words and numbers, coming at me fast. Too fast, keys undulating quicker than any one person could tap them. I try hard to listen, to memorize this barrage of red letters and numbers. But I can’t. Now I wish I’d taken my memory pills. My iE can’t record those letters because no one, not even my robotic substitute brain, can see them but me. Procedure. I try to calm down and remember that this is music. Even if my iE can’t record the letters and numbers, it can record the song. I calm. The chorus repeats. Some of it is soaking in. It’s an insanely complex piece of music. Way too complex for Akira to have written. Then who wrote this for her, and why? Is this her jisei, her death poem? It would be too complex for anyone else to understand, just like her work.

  Then the telescope begins to groan. I tell my iE to keep its focus on the music and walk to the eyepiece. I almost trip over the velvet rope on the way there. I chastise myself. I saw the green emanating from the lens from outside. The first thing I should’ve done was look through the damn telescope when I got in. But I got emotional. I forgot procedure, just like an hour ago back at the penthouse when I was trying to chip away solid nitro with a knife. Besides, even back in the day, just about no one was allowed to look through the telescope besides Akira. I don’t remember doing that even a single time.

  When I arrive, the telescope stops its groan. I put my right eye to the eyepiece.

  It’s aimed down at Earth, at above-ground lava rocks not fifty miles from here. A single marble tombstone scribbled with katakana is the only thing standing on the vast basalt field. Fresh flowers sit in front of the tombstone, and at first, they look brownish yellow. But as the song gets to the chorus, the flowers begin to turn red.

  Before I can start to think about what it means, the piano stops. Voices outside. The telescope groans back into its original position.

  The chief and two corporals walk in. The chief is the kind of man who uses his facial hair to make some kind of masculine statement, his very large beard perfectly trimmed as usual. It’s a beard worthy of old missionary schoolmasters, jutting out to create the illusion of an elongated chin so prominent that it hides his tightly buttoned blue coat collar.

  “I told you not to go in,” he says.

  I want to grab that ridiculous beard and yank it off his face. “I was gonna get here eventually.”

  “Now you’ll be heading back out with us.”

  A PD drone floats behind me. I immediately get it. I’m a suspect. I drop my hands and make cuffing easy for it. Magnetic coils wrap around my wrists and lock them together. “If you think I did it, you’re crazy, Chief.”

  The chief shrugs. “Orders from way up. All persons of interest detained immediately. This is just a formality. You’re a person of interest. Covering all bases. Honestly, if you weren’t one of mine and I didn’t know how dangerous you were, I wouldn’t even bother cuffing you.”

  I don’t complain. Persons of interest. The roundup. I used to do this sort of work back in the days of Ascalon. For her. One of the corporals takes my knife from me.

  “Analyze it,” the chief says.

  The PD drone keeps its camera eye on me. “There’s no way whoever cut her up like that was using a knife,” I say. “And I haven’t been dangerous in years.”

  The chief waves off the drone and grabs me by the cuffs. He whispers, “We both know you killed for her.”

  “That would make me the last person who’d kill her. You ever kill anyone, Chief?”

  “I’ll ping your wife and tell her you’ll be late,” he says.

  The chief walks away and signals for the corporal to take over the arrest. “Your DNA was all over that place, for God’s sake.”

  “I had to confirm it was her.”

  “You didn’t follow protocol. Instead, you polluted the entire crime scene, and you know it.”

  “I don’t leave my friends like that.”

  The chief ignores the comment, his mind drifting elsewhere. “My God, did you see her AMP chamber? iE compatible and crush-proof with nitro bath? My entire lifetime salary wouldn’t cover the cost of one of those.”

  AMP. Everyone’s dream. The mitochondria. Krebs cycle. Hibernation. We all run on electricity. And AMP chambers help to preserve our battery lives. Most have to pay a serious bundle just to go to a clinic to get the occasional treatment. Akira’s crush-proof chamber of youth is probably worth more than her crush-proof penthouse. And she has two of them, one at the penthouse and one in her bedroom at this lab. The fact that the chief is fantasizing about affording one right now pisses me off. “Crush-proof like your stupidity,” I mutter.

  “And yet, I outrank you.”

  “Yes, you do, Chief. Yes, you do.”

  “She didn’t look a day over forty,” the chief says. “Not a single day.”

  This asshole actually picked up the head of a god, and the first thing he thought was how young she looked. This piece of mediocrity who couldn’t solve a fucking ten-piece jigsaw puzzle. I feel my wrists battle with the cuffs, skin chafing. My body wants to go fists-first, like it did sixty years ago. The magnetic cuffs sense the struggle and tighten, so I take a breath and force myself to calm down. “Go ahead and run tests on all the knives in the world,” I say. “Those cuts were laser.”

  “Still, we’ve got to make sure. Procedure.”

  I’m led outside. The vog at this altitude makes it hard to breathe, so thick that it dulls the sun to the point that I can look straight at it. I’m walked toward the chief’s SEAL, thinking about A
kira. About my wife and baby at home. About all my wives and babies, my mistakes and fears. I picture the piano inside Akira’s Telescope. I wonder if she thought about her own mistakes and fears every time she set eyes on that damn thing.

  As I look back, there are no green wafts, no red letters and numbers. The song replays in my mind, gasping to get something out. The memory crystallizes into one thought. A word.

  Ascalon.

  Great, another Ascalon. Just what the world needs. Wasn’t the first one enough? Maybe Sessho-seki really should have reduced all of us to tinted gas like the one enveloping us, smearing the sun.

  I inhale sulfur and think about Akira. I try to picture her reaction the moment she saved the world, but I can’t. I was there, wasn’t I? Why can’t I remember? I just imagine her in her usual calm. She told me once that she was disgusted by all animals with their involuntary twitching and gnawing nature. Maybe that was why she never did anything involuntarily.

  Or maybe when you have the sheer force of will to keep doing something over and over again until you get it right, winning feels more like relief than anything else.

  5

  Interrogation rooms are no longer what they were for centuries of criminal investigation. This one is warm and inviting, with cushioned chairs, soft light, and music, like the suspect is in for a full-body massage instead of relentless questioning. We finally came to understand that when people feel threatened, they’re more prone to lie. I sit in the recliner and put my feet up. The concrete ceiling is a butterflyfish yellow that does a piss-poor job at hiding its impenetrability. I met my wife, Sabrina, in this exact room. She was a young cop with talent. I’m impressed with that, like anyone else. Weak to it. She was the type people seemed to want to tell the truth to, with a breathless ability to articulate empathy. So much potential. But what I forgot is, talent often peaks when you’re young. And empathy isn’t that hard to pull off if you’ve got no personal stake in a thing.

  I know what she saw in me. The brilliant mentor. Formerly Akira Kimura’s personal sentinel. The one senior cop with the seemingly inexhaustible ability to tell her things she didn’t already know. But now she sees a broken old man in debt who does practically nothing around the house with the excuse of a time-consuming job that doesn’t pay much. Pay, like talent, typically caps out when you’re young. And now that we can get so old, everything under the cap eventually wastes away. So whenever I’m home nowadays, I feel like one of the criminals she used to question for a living. But her questions aren’t the paranoid, “Where have you been?” type. More like, “How the hell did I end up with you?” And she’s not really asking me, she’s asking herself. Either way, I haven’t got a good answer.

  The chief steps in, a company man through and through, with just enough self-knowledge early on to know he had no talent. Armed with that, he did the sensible thing and chased rank fast and hard and climbed the ladder. He’s more than thirty years my junior, and his salary doubles mine. He’s the kind of mindless go-getter a corporation would make up executive positions for. A man singularly bent on being on the top of a heap of a stinking pile of average.

  He sits down and puts my knife on the desk. I wanna grab him by his obnoxious beard and slam my fist through his face. Instead, I say, “Lawyer’s been pinged. I’m going to take a nap till she gets here.”

  The chief starts going on about how I’m a member of a team, a brotherhood, that he’s trying to protect me, blah blah blah. He knows it’s bullshit, but the cameras are on, and the show he’s putting on is what’s expected of him. My iE hovers above me, recording the same thing. Privacy rights and all. The warrant to confiscate a person’s iE is the toughest one to get. Everyone knows that’s because The Money has always made most of the rules, and they’re not The Money because they’re dumb. Just like anyone else, if they’re in a legal bind, the last thing they want turned over to cops is the device that contains their entire history, personal and otherwise. The only time law enforcement can gain immediate access to an iE is to observe the last hour of a victim’s life if foul play is suspected. Either way, I belatedly hand it to Akira. Showcasing one more aspect of her genius by refusing to ever have one.

  The chief drones on. The background saxophone jazz and chiming of crystals sound more to me like shattering glass. It makes me furious. I imagine Akira frozen, hacked to pieces in that capsule. The futile noise of my knife chipping away at that solid nitro block. The sound of things breaking. I find myself wanting to do even more of it. So I decide to break from the script the chief probably figures we’ll play out.

  I sit up and look at him. He’s startled by it. I’m not supposed to do that. “Procedure,” he says. “I know you didn’t kill her, but why didn’t you just follow procedure?”

  The word “procedure” pisses me off, maybe because he’s said it a hundred times now, maybe because he’s right. I crushed procedure into a fine powder under my foot on this one. Maybe because whenever it comes to Akira I go into sentinel mode, and thought I could hunt unleashed. Even though it’s been decades since protecting her has been my duty, that I let her die is my failure.

  I stand. The chief frowns. I’m not supposed to do that either; I’m supposed to sit back silently until my lawyer gets me out. Now he’s scared. Like most idiots, he loves repetition and hates improvisation. Me, I just want to destroy everything. “No elevator security vid, I take it,” I say.

  The chief starts to say something, then pauses. Then he says, “You know The Money. They like their privacy.”

  “List of people who had access to her penthouse?”

  “You.”

  “And?”

  “A person of interest. A person named Ascalon Lee.”

  I laugh. “There are probably more living Ascalon Lees than dead John Smiths.”

  “Yes, a fake name, I would guess,” the chief says. “But we’re looking into it.”

  Ascalon. I hear the song in my head again.

  The chief tries to get us back on script. “You need to help us on this. And help yourself. Let’s get you cleared so we can work together to find out who did this.”

  My iE pings and the music pauses. We both look up. Sabrina calling again. I don’t answer, even if I’m technically allowed to. It’ll be just like this interrogation, the same script I’ve heard hundreds of times. I tell my iE to ignore the call.

  “Life’s just gotta be more than this,” I say to the chief. “This same dialogue with every person who sits in this fucking chair. We’re like programmed androids on some shit vid cast. Not even one of the main ones.”

  “You need to calm down, detective,” the chief says. “Don’t worry. This is not an arrest. I just need you to answer some questions. Procedure.”

  “Yeah, pretty sure you said that already,” I say. “What kind of imbecile parrots himself every sentence?”

  “Mmm, uh.”

  I’m as surprised at my behavior as he is—he’s still my superior—but at this point, I’m just rolling with it. Fuck careers, hierarchies, pay caps, loans, responsibilities. Fuck pushing the boulder up the hill over and over again. I’m too old. I don’t got the back for it nowadays. Plus, I haven’t been able to piss in the last several hours, which at my age must be some kind of record.

  “I quit,” I say.

  “You can’t!” he sputters. “These, uh, these things take time to process.”

  “Well, let me help you out with that, Chief.”

  “It’s Captain.”

  “I’ll send over this recording of my resignation to HR by iE the minute I leave this room.” I pick my knife up off the desk and step toward the door. “Let me out of here.”

  He puts his hands up. “You know this makes you look suspicious.”

  He’s really grasping now, as if saying that will somehow make me recant and sit back in that damned plush leather chair. At this point, I’d even go for the electric kind inste
ad. I point my knife at the interrogation room entrance. “Out,” I say.

  The door slides open. As I head for it, he asks, “Why do you always insist on calling me chief instead of captain? That rank hasn’t existed in decades.”

  I turn to him. “You don’t know why?”

  He shakes his head. “No. Before my time.”

  I point the knife at him. “That’s the thing. For anyone to solve a problem today, they should be looking backward first. And, like just about everyone else, you refuse to. The title ‘chief’ was taken off the books because when Sessho-seki was coming and Ascalon was being built, the president’s chief of staff almost mucked up the entire thing by trying day and night to convince the president that Ascalon wouldn’t work and should be aborted. That Sessho-seki didn’t even exist.”

  “And?”

  “Thankfully, the president didn’t listen. The chief lost his fucking mind. And after Ascalon saved us, the word ‘chief’ stopped meaning what it did and started to mean ‘fucking moron.’ So every organization took the title off the books. Do you know what Akira Kimura did to figure out the asteroid was coming for us?”

  “What?”

  “She had to see where it had been to predict where it was going.”

  The chief thinks for a moment. He glares at me, and for a second I’m tempted to slice that stupid wannabe goatfish beard from his face. Instead, I walk out for good with just one question running through my head: who would have wanted to kill Akira Kimura forty years after she saved the world?

  6

  For the most part, the only people allowed to live on the south and east sides of the island are subsidized preservation workers who spend their days planting and caring for indigenous species or eradicating invasive ones. They’re all neo-hippies required to live in primitive huts and tree houses designed to not ruin the natural aesthetic of the island. They live under rules kind of like town associations back in the day. They also run the theme park millions of tourists flock to while they’re here on their pilgrimage to pay reverence from the side of the mountain to Akira’s Telescope, nicknamed The Savior’s Eye by fanatics. Its construction was a deal brokered by Akira. Maybe she’d chosen that spot for its clarity in viewing the stars, or maybe she’d chosen a spot that high up so she could limit access to her telescope, to her. I was never sure.