Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  So, while Akira was bashing particles together and trying to add some weight to those tiny suckers without slowing them down, I kept looking for greens and reds. I studied the island and its population of about 300,000. Too many. I began shipping people off for relocation. This caused a real shitstorm, civil liberties and all that, but we were in a state of martial law given the pending apocalypse, so even if I didn’t detect a speck of murder on them, I sent most of them packing before they could protest. I tried to be nice about it, telling them as they were being rounded up that they don’t want to be here anyway with a woman on top of that mountain juggling high mass particles and supernovas. Years later, after it was all done, Akira said she felt bad and began repopulating the place with those who wanted to come back. But only those who agreed to care for the island like it was the Garden of Eden. And back when I’d been shipping them out hundreds at a time, and Akira hadn’t seemed to notice, I’d cut the population of the island in half by the time the next threat came.

  This one was bad. It was inside The Savior’s Eye. Not many people had unrestricted access to this place, not even Idris Eshana, Jerry, Chief of Staff Chang, or his chosen scientist. I was surprised I had access, and on the first day I went in, Akira showed me around. It was just us two in there, and she started spouting scientific language I couldn’t comprehend, a series of letters and numbers. I had a good memory, but like most people, I was trained to memorize either letters or numbers, not a combination of both. She turned and saw that I was confused, so she ripped a page from her journal and drew a bunch of circles connected to a different bunch of circles and started folding the piece of paper. She talked about forks, mirrors, dimensions, expansion, and infinity, and I’d never felt so stupid in my life. She handed me the folded-up piece of paper, and I put it in my pocket. She said maybe I could try to understand later. When we got to the eyepiece, Akira asked if I wanted to look through it. I said no. She looked a bit surprised. “You’re the first,” she said.

  “The first what?”

  “The first person who’s declined the opportunity to see the asteroid that might destroy humanity.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve seen humanity destroy itself enough times already.”

  She nodded and went back to work. I headed to my desk and looked through the stats on the island’s residents. I scanned through surnames that don’t exist much anymore, with an eye to registered weapon owners and their private psych records. It was tedious work, but soothing in a way. It distracted me from picturing Kathy and John’s faces. Sometimes, I’d see them during the good times, like when John won three gold medals at his very first swim meet, and Kathy and I sat by the pool, swelling with pride. Other times, I imagined their faces melted when the skim boat was incinerated. It didn’t matter which I pictured. The result was the same. White-hot rage. Hotter than the supernovas Akira was mimicking. But on this day, at this time, I was scanning mindlessly. Then I started to smell it. It was the first time in a long time.

  I looked around the huge room. Nothing. I looked back at the eyepiece. And I saw them. Faint traces of green. The next thing I saw was Akira’s face approaching the eyepiece. I practically charged her. She saw me coming and looked confused, though not alarmed. I grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “Wait,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “Something’s wrong with that eyepiece.”

  “You’re just being paranoid.”

  She bent to look through. This time, I gripped her even harder and dragged her halfway across the room.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she said.

  “You told me you wanted me to do this job because I’m the only one you trust. So trust me.”

  She nodded.

  When we got forensics in there, we found out that the eyepiece had been laced with enough VX to kill a whale.

  The president himself sent his team to the island. Just a few hours after finding the VX, everyone was interrogated. Including me. Including Akira herself. A couple of scientists and military personnel were detained because they were the only ones who might have access to the most powerful chemical weapon on the face of the earth or know how to make it, but in the end, even they were cleared. Nobody had any clue how getting VX on the eyepiece was even possible. I barely knew what VX was, so I was in the dark more so than most. I needed to learn about threats like this. After Akira sent the president’s team back, he signed off on another executive order, granting me even more power and access to classified information. I began to study. Not physics, but hacking security entries and deadly nerve agents. I crammed in research on invisible ways to kill. All the while, I was very much on alert for that smell and any hint of green. My computer and chemistry knowledge capped out pretty quickly, considering I’d only taken as much math as I’d needed to get a college degree and hardly remembered any of it. I started pestering Akira with questions, which she said she would gladly answer. And it made us both laugh, because the only way I could understand a goddamn thing was if she explained it in analogies. “Imagine if I poured cement into a barrel of a gun,” she said. “What would happen?”

  “It would blow up.”

  “That’s what VX does. It directs the body to block its barrels.”

  I apologized to her for being an idiot. She told me it made her happy to see me look alive again.

  And I felt alive. Electric. I wanted to find out who was trying to kill my friend. I was in no shape to let someone I cared about die again. I blazed through all the information I could. I saw images of dolls in Russia wearing gas masks. Piles of dead pigeons in Syria. And molecule formulas that resembled military maps. In some cases, they kind of were. It went on for a couple weeks like this, and then I saw them again. The wafts. Faint. Even fainter than before. And they were coming from Akira. My first instinct was to grab her and stick her under a decon shower. And I marched toward her to do just that. But then I started thinking. The wafts, they don’t only come from victims. They lead me to murderers as well.

  Was it possible that Akira was planning to kill someone? Could her playing with those nova simulators and colliders all day be her planning to murder the entire goddamn world by way of Sessho-seki, or even before then? My march slowed to a walk. I always had everything that came into contact with Akira inspected thoroughly. A bottle of shampoo had a harder time getting in here than it would to fucking Mars. I stopped walking.

  That day, I watched her closely. Followed her movements more than usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. She pulled her usual twenty-hour day, then headed to her private quarters and shut the door. She’d spend a couple hours in her AMP chamber, then get back to work. I went to the surveillance room and watched her door from there. About two hours later, just as I was nodding off, she stepped out and headed to the SEAL docks. I got up and followed at a distance. At the docks, she and Dave were standing outside her SEAL arguing. He finally threw his hands up and got into his pilot’s seat.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. It’d be impossible to follow them without being spotted. I thought maybe I should wait and put a tracker on her SEAL once they got back, but security swept that SEAL every day. I couldn’t get into her private quarters to look around. No one could. It was against the rules even for Akira to let anyone else in there. All the new rules that had been put in place to protect her made it harder to do.

  Helpless, I shook my head and sat down. I was exhausted. This woman was a machine, and when it came down to it, my job was basically to watch her while she worked. Considering what she was doing, it was pathetic that I felt gassed. She was painting a technological masterpiece every waking moment. Even when she briefly slept in her AMP chamber, she was probably dreaming about the next touches she would make to Ascalon. All I had to do was ensure nobody interfered.

  I pulled the piece of folded paper out of my pocket and looked at it. All those circles and lines and folds, all of it just an attempt to oversimplify a single concep
t to me, a buffoon. I couldn’t even imagine how complicated her work really was, because I couldn’t even understand the premise in its most distilled form from the person who had created it. My job was straightforward, and I was failing. I felt like I was still carrying that forty-two-pound cannonball while chasing after the fastest woman in the world.

  And that’s when it happened. I looked and the paper and saw something recognizable on it. Dyads. Two-note Möbius strips. Music.

  The circles floated from the page in red. At first, they were just red puffs that ascended, bounced once, and disappeared. Then they rose with sound, and the bounces became notes. I began to hear them. Red notes stretched from the page, clipped by flats and sharps. I put them together in my head, these puffs gasped from the lips of a singing caterpillar. A plucky three-chorder about a place. An old place on an island long forgotten. I stood up and headed to my SEAL so quickly, it never occurred to me that she was never trying to explain a physics theory to me. She was leaving me a clue for something else. Could she know how I perceived things? No way. No one did. It didn’t even occur to me as possible. She was manipulating me? It had never happened before. I’d solved every case that ever crossed my desk.

  Why didn’t I even consider her capable of this back when it happened? Because she’d once told me a story about her failure as a musician, a story about her childhood that I simply accepted as fact. Akira being able to write music? Ridiculous. And I always liked believing she had no musical talent. I wanted her to have a weakness, or at least be worse at something than me. It was pure ego. Because as smart as I knew she was—the smartest person in the world, in fact—at the end of the day, I never really thought anyone was smarter than me.

  So, without question, I went to the place in the drawing’s song, never suspecting that she could be the second incarnation of Mozart. Never wondering why she couldn’t be. She was Mozart in everything else. There’s an icon for you, Jerry.

  I was so relieved that the circles had sung out to me, that I could finally help her, that I jumped in my SEAL to go to this place without thinking. Maybe I thought no one else could puzzle it out except me.

  And not for a moment had it crossed my mind that Akira had scribbled the hangman note. That she was the one who put VX on her eyepiece. That she wanted me to have the power to do what I was about to do.

  12

  Akeem’s place is a huge, floating swirl ten klicks off the coast. The center is an ecodome that grows all sorts of food, and from there the complex expands out, first into freshwater catchers, then docks, and finally a series of high-rises shaped like giant seashells. It looks like what the float burbs were first marketed as when they came out, back when state colleges finally went under. No one who bought that early realized that whatever floats pretty much always starts to sink at some point. That seawater mixed with air ends up damaging everything pretty quickly. Or that it’s hot as fuck living under the sun in the middle of the ocean.

  So people who bought the first float burbs sold soon after and moved to seascrapers. The price of the burbs plummeted, becoming affordable to people like me. But Akeem’s floater doesn’t suffer the same problems as the originals. No cost was spared on preventative measures. Akeem spent so much time underwater for his geothermal work that he didn’t want to live at the very bottom of the ocean like the rest of The Money. But he loves the ocean, too, and couldn’t bear to live without it right under his feet.

  I still feel terrible and figure talking might help, so I ask. “Why’d you build so many high-rises?”

  “For my kids and grandkids.”

  “How many grandkids are you up to?”

  “Seven grandchildren from my four kids. Even three great-grandchildren now.” That’s how you know you’re The Money—when you build so many rooms it’s impossible to fill them, no matter how much you procreate.

  “Let’s dock under,” Akeem says.

  My hands are shaking. Med withdrawals, maybe. Getting off pharma is like being born again. Day two is the worst. “It’s been a while since I took her under,” I say. “Not sure if she’ll hold up.”

  “It’s only one story down,” Akeem says.

  I try my best to steady my hands and navigate us beneath the ocean’s surface. The SEAL makes a predator’s splash. I take her underwater and see the dock, a ramp up ahead. I speed toward it and lower the wheels. “Why under?” I ask.

  “I’m a simple man,” Akeem says. “Sometimes I just like hearing the splash.”

  As we go up the ramp, it folds in on itself behind us. “You don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

  “I’ve been breeding Maran chickens in the dome,” Akeem says, ignoring me. “Let’s go eat some eggs.”

  Akeem Buhari is one of my more recent friends, which when you’re eighty, means I’ve known him for over a decade. I met him at a crypto fundraiser for cancer research—that disease is one of the few blights we still ain’t managed to beat. A giant asteroid hurling toward Earth? No problem. Cells that uncontrollably multiply and spread until they snatch the life out of us? We gotta kill part of ourselves to get rid of them, but they never stop growing. Even The Money with all their farmed organ transplants eventually succumb. It was how my mom went. She hit that fork in the road at Hayflick’s limit where cells either panic or wither. And they tried everything. Chemo. Gene therapy. By the end, they were cutting her in half and putting her back together like some sick magic trick. I was at the fundraiser representing law enforcement in my ceremonial blues, resenting that I felt like I’d been made to volunteer because I had personal experience with cancer, while Akeem, whose mom had been taken by cancer as well, stood behind the bar serving drinks with a giant smile on his face. Highballs looked like shot glasses in his giant mitts. He was in the middle of a voluntary double shift. His absurd, flower-printed shirt was drenched in sweat. I knew he was a better man than me right off the bat.

  I think about that now, seeing him pour behind his horseshoe-shaped bar. His customers are his wife, two of his children, and three of his grandchildren, all of whom live here with him. They spend most of the time ribbing each other. Akeem’s kids tell their kids that Akeem was the worst cook when they were growing up. They laugh and talk about a dish called Seaweed Surprise. One of his grandkids tells another about leaving her baby out in the living room once and rushing to pee. She came back and her daughter was sitting next to a pile of pet vomit, pointing at it. “Uh oh,” the baby said. Everyone laughs. Akeem’s wife, dressed in a fluorescent foam-fit sarong, talks about the last trip she took with one of the kids who isn’t present. The flowers on her sarong bloom as she reminisces about trips to Rome, Athens, and Istanbul together. Akeem’s wife is in her sixties. The child she speaks of is in his forties. They went on a trip together. Alone. Most kids can’t conjure up the willpower to spend Thanksgiving with their parents. These people go on long vacations together all the time by choice and seem to enjoy the hell out of it. Of the hundreds of families I’ve come across, I’ve seen maybe three others like this one. And I’m eighty. I start thinking that maybe only people like Akeem and his wife should live this long.

  Akeem puts a prairie oyster in front of me. The yellow yolk floats in the middle of a puddle of tomato juice that looks like beige slop to me. I realize I can’t remember the last time I ate, so I gulp it down. After Akeem’s wife, kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids head to their rooms for the night, Akeem and I stay at the bar. After a drawn-out pause where we pretend we’re thinking about what to say but are actually just afraid to say it, Akeem finally speaks. “I only met her a few times. I don’t even know that she qualifies as an acquaintance.”

  “She kept to herself for the most part.”

  “When did she go crazy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Akeem gulps down his drink. “That place you took me to today could only have been the work of someone who’s completely lost their mind.”


  “I used to think she was the sanest person I knew.”

  “And now?”

  “You know how they used to treat gunshot wounds back in the day?” I ask.

  Akeem shakes his head.

  “Docs would pour gallons of .09 percent saltwater solution in the wound. Just over and over. That’s how thinking about this makes me feel.”

  Akeem nods, fixing another prairie oyster and putting it in front of me. As I gulp it down, he steps out from the bar, strips off his foam-fit top, and dumps it in the eager laundry bot. It wheels off down the hall. Akeem heads to the elevator. He notices me turn to watch and says, “Go see your family,” over his shoulder before disappearing through the open doors.

  I look out the window. The sunlight is blaring. It’s tough to see the island from way out here, but I spot its peak through the haze, where Akira’s Telescope sits. On these islands, invasive species and structures have always strangled and thrived. I suppose that’s common, but it happens fast here, the islands a drooped neck already weakened by generations of cozy solitude. Isolation breeds vulnerability. Maybe that’s what happened to Akira Kimura all those years ago. It could be what’s happening to me now. Akeem is right. It’s time to see my family with a clear head—without the sound of whistling on a carefree stroll through the woods, which is usually what astronaut-grade antidepressants sound like.