Akeem nods. He’s looking down. A line in the sand. “Man, I don’t know,” he says. “Do you see any lasers mounted on the roof? This is Akira Kimura we’re talking about.”
I shake my head. “She wanted me to find this.” The line in the yellow-brownish sand is red.
And I can see it.
I think about all the conversations we had. Conversations about paintings. About music. About invisible light, and how we’ve known it has existed for years, even though our eyes can’t see it. One of our very first conversations. Matisse. Music. A painting of red people on green grass. I told her I didn’t like it much. Didn’t like what most consider a masterpiece.
Then it occurs to me. She knew I was colorblind even though I never told her. Maybe from that first night we met. But how did she figure out when I saw green and red? I’m not sure, but I know now that she caught on. That red line in the sand. She knew. And worse, she figured out a way to manipulate it. This was a woman who has spent her entire life looking out. To light-years away, to the past. And when she couldn’t see far enough, she built the tools to enable her to do so. Of course she saw me, a simple man with a sensory aberration, right in front of her. But how has she done this? Are the things I see and hear really just waves at certain frequencies? Is there some kind of scent or sight or sound that hits my brain and triggers the release of these chemicals?
A horrible thought hits me. What if she set me up for it somehow? The tour guide. I never caught his name. The tattoo. The gem. But I saw the green on his hands . . . I compartmentalize this, locking it away. There are other truths to dig up first.
“You okay?” Akeem asks.
I nod. I take a step over the red line. Akeem follows.
Our iEs drop dead behind us.
We both turn around and look at them. They’re about as useful as marbles now. Akeem’s beeps twice, then melts in the sand. All that’s left of it is a swirl of silver and black.
“I think I’ll head back,” Akeem says.
I nod. “Do me a favor. Just give me an hour or so.”
Akeem tells me no problem and heads back to the other end of the ghost town. I walk up to the sliding paper door and open it, then step in and flip on a light switch.
Unlike her penthouse at Volcano Vista, this place is furnished to the point that it looks lived in, much like my flotsam home. There’s a couch, cushions crushed, pet hair stuck to them. A stack of old books on a mother-of-pearl inlaid coffee table. A pair of neon orange eight-pound dumbbells underneath. And baby toys, the kind that my generation used to play with. A turtle with wheels. A train. A rocket ship. Colorful rubber blocks imprinted with letters, numbers, animals, and dots like dice. Framed baby scribblings hang on the wall. An oblong ball that was used in a brutal sport now long gone.
I walk down the hall and enter a room floored with straw mats. It’s empty except for a tiny electric piano built for a baby, the kind I had as a toddler that parents buy with Hail Mary hopes that their child will be a musical prodigy. It has only fifteen white keys. I know what I’m supposed to do. My knee and back cracking, I sit and rub my eyes. I tap a few notes. It’s oddly in tune. Then I begin to play Ascalon’s song. Backward, as it was meant to be played. At this point, I know it by heart.
I play the song through once. I’ve missed a few notes. This keyboard is so small. I take a breath and concentrate. I play again.
Nothing.
I calm myself. I take a breath, the same one I used to take before pressing a trigger and taking a shot at someone two miles away. I play it again. I see the words in red, again and again.
The one I gave up
In the middle of the room, the floor begins to groan open. I try not to watch. I just play. Both green and red wafts rise from between the keys. I fight to maintain my concentration. The greens and reds curl. I try not to watch them. I keep my eyes on the tiny keyboard and concentrate hard. I know I need to finish the song, and I know there’s a run of tough notes and changes coming up. But I can’t help but see them stream through my periphery. They drift to the now open pit in the middle of the room.
Find her for me and tell her that I’m sorry
The song ends. I take a breath. I am almost afraid to stand and look what’s down there in the now open pit in the middle of the room. I watch the colors. The wafts dissipate. I get up and step to the edge of the square hole, hand on the hilt of my knife.
There are two coffins down there. Both open. One is adult-sized and empty. The other is the size of a shoe box and contains a ball and tiny sticks.
I climb down the hole. I crouch down in front of the tiny coffin. Inside is not a ball and sticks. It’s the bones of a baby, small enough to be a newborn. They are twisted and deformed. One bone, or cartilage perhaps, is in the shape of a tail.
Ascalon Lee.
I hear the voice again.
She killed me.
And then I’m full of rage. I climb out of the pit and head to the front door. I’ve had enough of this—this game, this setup, whatever it is. I don’t want to know the answers anymore. I stomp on the turtle with wheels on the way out. I kick the rocket ship through a paper wall. I turn around and take out my knife. I watch the blade as it heats and finally let in the terrible thought that I sealed away before stepping inside the house. And it’s as simple as this: Akira can make me see green and red. It’s possible she’s played me before. I’ve killed people based on what I’ve sensed, so if she was able to manipulate that, I was just her murder weapon.
What was it she told me all those years ago? She worked on cloaking technology. Child’s play for her. But it meant she could plant anything—even murder and death—where it didn’t really exist.
I remember the dive shop. The tour guide. She isn’t who you think, he said. Jerry is right. Akira Kimura was always using me and continues to even in death. If what I see is waves refracted through a prism, and she controlled that prism, there was no telling what she might do with it. This is the one ability of mine I’ve never doubted, that proved right so many times I never even considered it could be wrong. And she knew that.
Fuck Akira Kimura.
I throw the knife at the framed baby drawings hanging on the wall. Bullseye. The wood behind it begins to smoke.
As I step outside, I feel the heat behind me. Houses like this go up in flames quick. All that ingenuity, the light paper walls, the build without nails, the shingles that keep the roofs from collecting water. But they’re structures of tinder.
Akeem is there, looking at the burning house, waiting for me. “I found another way into the place,” he says. “Why’d you burn the house down?”
I don’t answer.
“What is all this?” he asks.
“I don’t give a shit.”
“What is this all about?”
“Ego.” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“She thought she was a god.”
I stop walking. I look around the contents of the dome and open my arms. “All this. You know what it is?”
“What?” Akeem asks.
“It’s Akira’s mausoleum. Her tomb.” I point to the house burning behind me. “This entire goddamn thing is her pyramid.”
“What does she want you to do?”
I storm toward the beginning of the cobbled path. My iE rises from the dead and hovers above me. Akeem follows.
“She wants me to put her in it,” I say, “then get rid of the evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“So where’s the exit?”
Akeem points west, and we head to a maw etched into a dark corner. I light it with my iE. A cave. “I guess we should’ve looked for the actual entrance instead of doing all that digging,” Akeem says.
I barely register his words. “Did you know that the female giant octopus starves itself to death for six months while it nu
rses its eggs?” I ask.
“That’s maternal instinct for you,” Akeem says.
We walk through the cave. “Not all mothers have it.”
“I don’t blame them,” Akeem says. “Sounds shitty.”
I want to agree, but something primitive in me resists. And for some reason I’m having recollections of trying to build a fire as a kid.
“Hey,” Akeem says, “before we go out there, there’s something you should know.”
“What?”
“There are islanders up there telling us we gotta leave now.”
I crack a smile. “Of course there are.”
“What do you mean?”
“She brokered the deal with the specific condition of letting the hippies live on the land, which everyone thought was altruistic. I never knew what she got out of it till now.”
“And what’s that?”
“They’re there as a front for all of this. Maybe even to protect it.”
Akeem nods. “Nothing’s for free.”
Spoken like a true member of The Money. And they’re right. Nothing is, no matter who you are. As the black rock slopes up, I remember something, something I heard once ages ago. Something about looking up from the pit and thinking you’re seeing god, when really all you’re seeing is the reflection of the devil laughing at you from below. Nothing strikes me as truer now. And I don’t need to see, hear, or feel it in green or red. Not that those should matter to me anymore. If it can be tricked, it ain’t truth. I’d rather go blind than see those colors again.
Akeem and I emerge from the cave, and there are a good three-dozen islanders, all dyed as black as the frozen mounds of basalt we’re standing on now. The wind is gusting hard, and up ahead, the earth sputters lava. Blue flames sparked by methane flare from the cracks. Tumbleweeds of bundled strands of blond lava glass roll past us. One of the islanders, tall with brown hair and blue eyes, steps forward. “We’ve been waiting for you,” he says. He frowns at the hole in the ground, concerned about the smoke.
Akeem has already reattached the drill to my SEAL. He’s looking at the islanders nervously, like they’re the warriors that used to exist way back when, the ones that would kill a captain, boil him, and eat his big toe. These, they’re just eco-crazy pacifists who crave the simple life. A life where picking food off the ground and breathing clean air is enough. I turn to Akeem. “Let’s go,” I say.
He nods. We head to my SEAL. The tall, blue-eyed islander follows. “But Ascalon?” he says.
I don’t answer. We spot the SEAL, where another half-dozen islanders await us. When we get to it, Akeem ignores them and climbs in. I turn to the one that’s been following us since the exit. “Where you from?”
He looks around at the rest of them then turns back to me, head down. “Carson City, southwest edge of The Great Leachate. But my great-great-grandfather used to have a timeshare here.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, climbing in. “Well, you take care.”
“But we have questions,” he says.
“I don’t got answers.” I close the cockpit and take off, ascending over these ghosts still clawing at the cracks of the thing they already broke and conquered. My iE pings. Sabrina. Somehow she’s pinging me from my own goddamn iE so I can’t ignore the call. Fuck. I open the cockpit midair and direct my iE to float twenty feet in front. I pull out my rail gun and aim.
“Hey, should you be using that thing?” Akeem asks.
“Ever see one fire?” I ask.
“No,” Akeem says. “Proceed, by all means. I wanna see.”
I think for a second. About when I first started to see traces of green and red as a kid after years of being colorblind. In my adult years on the job, I saw them more and more, it occurs to me. Maybe they appear so strongly now because my brain is trying to spot them. Every moment. Every day I fed that appetite. The one for self-worth, for being right. I fed like a fucking crustacean at a Friday Night Prawn Bake. I want to stop feeding it. I wish I could starve my prediction machine, this psychodynamic merging. But I look around. Just one more time, I scan the air around me, knowing that there’s usually no such thing as just one more time. But, I promise myself, just once more. One more bite before being boiled alive.
“Who gave you a license for that thing?” Akeem asks.
I’m looking. Where are they? “Who do you think?” I say.
“Akira.” Akeem says.
There they are. I spot the slight green wafts to the right of my iE. If not for the gray vog behind, I might not have been able to see them. They’re coming from something cloaked, a tiny orb shelled with a thousand mirrors.
“What are you pointing at?” Akeem asks.
“A cheap, second-rate magician’s trick.”
I press the trigger. The plasma projectile loops through the magnetic field and leaves the muzzle supersonic. The spherical drone is obliterated. Basically the same thing that should’ve happened to Earth all those years ago.
“How the hell did you see that?” Akeem asks. “It was invisible.”
I put the rail gun down and sigh. “It was cloaked. And cloaked doesn’t mean invisible. It means manipulated. It uses reflected light to fool the human eye.”
“Was it for surveillance?” Akeem asks.
“No. My guess is it was packed with a chunk of ambergris.”
“Ambergris? For what?”
I look up at the sky. A great frigate bird soars alone, heading to turbulence, where it can fly for months without landing. It disappears among the clouds. “Nothing,” I say.
My iE floats back into the cockpit. We head back to Akeem’s to drop him and his drill off. I try pinging Jerry again to apologize. No response. She must be pissed, and I don’t blame her. On the way back, I start to remember the past, even though I don’t want to. I recall Akira always going on about how most things are binary. They come in a set of two—she’d talk about how we always knew this. There was light and dark. Left, right. Up, down. Good, bad. Heaven, hell. Life, death. And we kept discovering and creating new things that were also binary, like numbers, like code. The Money, The Less Thans. In fact, she’d say, looking up at the sky on dark nights, most star systems are binary, too. I’m thinking about that on my way to Akeem’s and determine that it might be the only true thing she’d ever told me. Because I start remembering a different past than the one I’ve thought was true all these years.
11
Back in 2102, no one was lighting holo lanterns for Akira and floating them out to sea. Being the one who discovered The Killing Rock, she was the ultimate bearer of bad news. And when it was announced that she would head up the team to build Ascalon, people didn’t have faith in her. It wasn’t because she wasn’t qualified, because she was Japanese, or because she was a woman; it was because if someone told you they were going to build an intergalactic robot that would save us all, no matter who they were, wouldn’t you call them crazy? Plus, she was awful in interviews. Once, when asked why she was trying to save the world, her response was: a simple calculation. She said that she estimated that .03 percent of the human population was worth saving. That .03 percent actually contributed something worthwhile to the planet or our species. If there were only a thousand, or even a million, of us in total, she wouldn’t bother. But because there were eight billion, she figured saving 2.4 million productive lives was worth trying. I remember watching that interview in a bar and nearly spitting out my drink. It was right in the midst of the hysteria, and back then, after losing my third wife and second child forever, I was rooting for the goddamn Killing Rock. I laughed because .03 was one of those arbitrary numbers that sounded just about right to me.
My third wife, Kathy, had been one of Akira’s .03 in my book. After we figured out that the ocean heals much more quickly than land, Kathy and her colleagues went to work. She was the captain of a plastic skimming vessel, one of many cleaning up th
e North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, trapping and recycling plastic efficiently enough to turn profit. It’s what most of our float burbs and scrapers are made of today. A lot of plastic skimmers decided to give up the job after the world found out that Sessho-seki was coming, but not Kathy. Most jobs feel meaningless when the end of the world is coming, and recycling in particular seems especially futile. Why think long-term when time is short? Not only did people think Kathy was stupid and crazy, some were angry. They felt it was a waste of government resources with the coming of Sessho-seki, even though the government only funded about 1 percent of plastic skimming in those days. An organization calling itself the AWM, the Anti-Waste Mafia, was born, and it declared war on any government program that didn’t relate to saving us from The Killing Rock. Its members tattooed “AWM” on their wrists. They had secret handshakes. They co-opted words like “omertà” and “goombah.” I mean, these people were real American idiots. And most were harmless. But the death threats toward Kathy started coming in about three months after the Sessho-seki announcement. And she didn’t care at all.
I was easy enough to push around when it came to Kathy. Her answer to life was refusing to take no for an answer. And sometimes with a person like that, even though you love them to death, you want them to be far away in the middle of the ocean for large chunks of time. I didn’t protest her going back out there to skim plastic after the death threats. I even let her take our twelve-year-old son, John, with her, despite wanting to put my foot down. The ocean took my father, so a part of me was always scared of it, but I was weak. The thought of battling her in itself exhausted me, so I thought, what’s the use? Besides, these guys weren’t that dangerous.
The AWM fanatic’s suicide bomb went off eight hundred miles from the coast of the island. The boat didn’t just go down. No piece of it was left intact. I should’ve cuffed her and thrown her in a cell and made her stay. At least made John stay. But I didn’t, and they became marine snow. It takes months for organic material like marine snow to reach the bottom. It took me a day to reach mine.
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