Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  Brum was in permanent attack mode. She began simplifying her message, maybe under the direction of Chief Chang. He knew politics, and that the key to swaying minds was keeping it simple. In the weeks after my trip to Spain, Brum opened every interview with these words: Akira Kimura is dead wrong. She said Akira was operating in the realm of theory, and therefore had zero proof that Sessho-seki was coming or even existed. When interviewers would hold in their scoffs and ask how it was possible that a person could fool the entire world, including thousands who wielded expertise in the same field she did, Brum stopped answering with math and started answering with this: The Greeks still believed in Zeus during the age of Aristotle. Catholics still believed that Earth was the center of the universe during the age of Galileo. That during the twenty-first century, there were still people who believed Earth was flat five hundred years after Magellan sailed around it. Fooling the world, Brum would say, has always been possible, because people think they’re smarter than they really are. A confidence that, ironically, stems from their fear of seeming stupid.

  And if an interviewer asked Brum about the Ascalon Project, she’d basically flip out. Recreating the energy of a supernova and concentrating its power into a beam? Not only was it insane, it was impossible. She was an ear-piercing boom of relentless doubt. At one point, the president wanted to fire his chief of staff just for Akira’s sake. But she actually demanded that he didn’t. She told him that skepticism was a healthy, vital part of science, and that if Chang were fired, some might speculate that Dr. Brum’s claims had credibility. The act of firing or the demand of resignation would validate this crazy woman who was making a spectacle of herself.

  But I couldn’t stand watching her. It filled me with rage, even though I didn’t understand the science. There was something so plastic about her. She had the look of a natural-born model who meticulously mutilated her symmetrical good looks with ill-fitted clothes over her always matte-black generic foam fit, bad makeup, and a hairstyle that made one wonder whether she actually woke up every morning, walked to the nearest mirror, and tried to pull all her hair out. It was like she was uglying herself to gain credibility. She was manipulative. She was dangerous.

  But now I think maybe I had it wrong. Maybe she dressed that way because it didn’t matter to her. Maybe she was so frustrated that people weren’t listening to her that she actually woke up in the morning and tried to pull all her hair out. Maybe she was genuine, even if she was wrong. What if I was the one guilty of mutilating myself, not Brum? Deforming myself so badly that there was no coming back, all to prove my worth to Akira?

  But I didn’t see things like that back then. All I knew was that when it came to silencing Dr. Brum, there was no off-the-record black ops round trip to Washington. She hung on the arm of arguably the third most powerful man in the world. I had to wait until she came to the island herself. I needed to study the chief’s Secret Service team and its procedures before then. So when word came that they would be paying Akira a visit in three-and-a-half weeks, I used that time to plan. I used my executive order privileges to learn everything about those two, which was standard security procedure for anyone coming to the island by now anyway. And going through Brum’s file, I noticed something very interesting. Despite her perfect grades in high school, she hadn’t been named valedictorian. Despite her standardized test scores, which were off the charts, she couldn’t pass a simple test required for graduation. In fact, the elite institution almost didn’t allow her to graduate. Why?

  Karlin Brum didn’t know how to swim.

  And so, when Akira and I picked up Chief of Staff Chang and Dr. Brum in my SEAL from the shuttleport that night, with the Secret Service team in another SEAL following, I took the normal path over the ocean. That was when the malfunction occurred. The ratchets spun and hit the pawl. The vehicle twisted out of control. I fought with everything I had, really putting on a show for the three iEs hovering in the cabin above us. But the flat spin was too much for any pilot. Physics, I imagined Akira saying with a smile. The chief and Dr. Brum were screaming in the back. Even our iEs jostled in the cabin, looking like they were in a panic. “Eject! Eject!” I yelled.

  “No!” Brum shrieked, looking out the window down at the black water.

  “Don’t worry, darling!” Chang said. “I’ll get you!”

  I looked over at Akira. She was calm, with a hint of a smile on her face.

  “Don’t touch anything!” I said. “The ’chutes will self-deploy! And remember, light your flares!”

  “No!” Brum shrieked again.

  I pressed eject. The strongest wind I’d ever felt swept off the canopy. Then the four of us popped out of the SEAL like corks. All four of us sent in different directions so we wouldn’t hit each other. Four ’chutes blossomed at the same time.

  When I hit the water, I lit a flare. Three other flares lit the sky. Everyone was alive. The team of Secret Service in the SEAL behind us went for Akira first. Of course they would. That, I found out during my research, was part of their mandated protocol. In the event of an emergency, keep Akira Kimura safe at all costs.

  I went for Dr. Brum, hoping I wouldn’t have to finish the job. After fighting through at least a quarter mile of chop and bent, corrugated tubed remains of the SEAL, heading in the direction of Brum’s light, I was surprised to see that Chief Chang, bad knees and all, had beaten me to her. He was sobbing. A giant swell lifted and separated us. It began to rain. I fought toward the chief and Brum again. He was still holding her. It looked, oddly, like he was hugging a deflated floatation device. I lit another flare. “Help will be here soon!” I said.

  “Get away from us!” he screamed.

  I looked up, waiting to see the if the Secret Service SEAL was heading our way through all that flare light. At first, the light was colorless to me. Then it burst into a blinding green and red. I squinted and looked away. I spotted saw another green light treading to the shore. It left a trail that looked like an endless green snake, its head rested on shore and its tail slithered all the way to the invisible horizon. I’d never seen green that strong before.

  I treaded and waited and watched the green light reflecting off the black water. The tides began moving the light’s tail. It began to shrink and drift toward us. It moved naturally in the water. By the time the green reached us, I could see that the tail had split. One side drifted to the screaming chief and the motionless Brum. The other wafted to me. I looked at the chief and swear that for a moment, he saw it, too. He knew what I had done. That moment before the Secret Service SEAL broke the tail with its blinding hover lights, while Brum’s brain shut down from lack of oxygen, the chief saw his own greens and reds stitched together, leading back to me.

  When we got back, more interrogations. I played the accident on my iE for the Secret Service. My SEAL was deemed irreparable. It had been ripped to pieces on impact, junk spread out three hundred atmospheres under the sea.

  Two hours later, I was cleared of any wrongdoing and given another SEAL, top of the line. I’d executed my plan perfectly. Chang lost his shit. He lost his power, his job, and the hopes of getting one ever again. He went on every outlet that would have him, none credible, and screamed that Karlin Brum was murdered. That she was killed to cover up the fact that Sessho-seki was a lie. He embarrassed himself so completely that Congress passed a bill that changed the title of Chief of Staff to White House Director. The funny thing was that in all his public rantings, he never once mentioned my name. Akira Kimura killed Karlin Brum, he’d say. And the public would collectively laugh and say, yes, all ninety pounds of Akira Kimura sabotaged a military-grade transport and risked her own life to off a dissenter who hardly anyone was buying at the time anyway. The actual funny thing to me was that even though people completely dismissed that scenario, they had zero problems believing this same ninety-pound woman was going to smash a state-sized rock that was heading our way.

  And now I know
that during those years of Sessho-seki and Ascalon, there may have been a girl around twenty years old watching all this craziness. Maybe she was in college, maybe not. Maybe she was working the abyss mines, helping to plug our underwater cities into the earth’s core. Or maybe she was a black-market bullet runner, servicing all the crazies stockpiling primitive ammo as preparation for the end of the world, thinking their bunkers could protect them from what was coming. No, she would probably have been more than that. She would’ve been the only one in the world not looking up. If she knew who she was, she would have been watching her mother. And if she were nearly as clever as Akira Kimura, she would’ve known what me and her mother had conspired to do.

  I’m falling asleep on my first day in the holding cell on Vomit Island. I’m still at the shallow end of the prison, not yet convicted. My floor is filled with smugglers, flower poachers, polluters, and iE hackers awaiting trial. It’s a rough morning, and the moors strain to hold the structure in one spot. I can imagine what it’s like for the prisoners on the bottom. Even from up here, my ears are filled with the sound of creaking moors. That sound is soon overtaken by the retching of prisoners. I finally drift into sleep.

  But then I start dreaming, and like most of my dreams, this one’s not giving me the relief I seek. I’m at Jerry’s cloudscraper, and I can smell and hear the color scheme of her furniture, vibrant greens and reds. This is the first time I remember seeing these colors in a dream. I look around. Her sculpture is only one image: Ascalon the ray, sitting in a deep-space satellite, about to fire into the dark places between stars.

  I turn and notice where I’m standing. I’m in front of that painting hung in the alcove, the one with children playing around a giant banyan tree. It’s the only thing in the room that isn’t green or red. Two children have managed to climb the tree: the boy hugging a branch and looking down at the children beneath him, and a girl, casually sitting on a branch and looking down too.

  Another girl with blond hair in a white sweater is looking up at the two, emitting jealousy, while two girls on the ground smile for the artist, oblivious to the kids above them. The last girl is in the sweater that I know is red, even if I can’t see it.

  I smell perfume and look to the side. Akira is standing next to me. I turn to the other side, and there is another identical Akira, pointing at the picture. Right at the girl in the red sweater. Music in the background begins to play. Ascalon’s song.

  The one I gave up

  I look at the last child, who is standing on the left side of the tree, facing away from the painting’s viewer. She’s gripping one of the thinner sinews of the banyan with her left hand. She seems to be looking at something else entirely. Gray-brown smudges . . . A river, maybe? But with all the grass under the foot of the children and the tree, I can’t really tell. All I know is that even if I can’t see her face, she has no interest in being a subject of the artist. Her right foot is slightly raised, like she’s tempted to step either around to the other side of the tree or into the river.

  That’s when I see them. Wafts of green and red curl from both Akiras’ eyes and drift to the painting. First, the green slowly colors in the grass. Then the dark patch becomes clearer to me. It isn’t a river. It’s a pond. A darker swamp-green, murky with unknown.

  Then the red starts filling the painting. There is only one red object in the whole thing. The girl’s sweater. Dot by dot, it becomes redder and redder. A real, aria red. Then the girl ages in front of my eyes. She grows taller. Her hips begin to flare slightly. Her chestnut hair darkens into a brown that is close to black. She is no longer a child like the rest of the people in the painting. She is a young woman, still refusing to look at the artist. Still far away from the rest of her classmates. I see her take a step. Then another. She strips off her jeans and her red sweater and dives into the pond. After the splash, the pond’s surface settles into a taffy twist of green and red. The girl does not come up for air. She is gone forever.

  I already know who she is. I feel it in my old, creaking bones. Everything is binary, as Akira used to say. Even Ascalon the Savior was part-satellite, part-neutrino stream, which scarred the sky forever. I look around. Both Akiras are gone. I look back at the painting. The daughter who survived.

  They were twins, orbiting each other like in most star systems. After they were born, Akira killed one and hid the other, who was in her twenties when the world-saving cosmic ray was named after her instead of the other way around. She would be in the shallow end of her sixties now. But all those years ago, she was just the girl in the red sweater in Jerry’s painting with her back turned to the artist. Could she have been under the charge of Jerry Caldwell? It would explain so much about her falling out with Akira. Ascalon may not even have known her parentage. But something tells me she knows now.

  And that’s when I wake up. My toes are clenched in an arthritic curl. The rough waves have passed, and the only sound is the opening of cell doors for chow time. How could I have missed it all these years? There was that gap in her young life while she pursued her many PhDs. Everyone, including myself, assumed she’d just studied twenty hours a day, every day, for years. Such a ludicrous thought. Someone who functioned like a machine with no social interaction, no personal curiosity. No one was like that.

  How could she have killed her own daughter?

  Even now, I’m reluctant to dig up the darkest parts of her life. We all wanted to bask in her light.

  I stand up and wash my hands. The water is as cold as the walls in this place. I splash some on my face to wake up. I think about all the enemies I’ve made within the department alone over the years, like the late chief. I’m guessing there are way more in the cafeteria, waiting for me with cereal-spoon shanks and dental-floss garrotes. But at least Sabrina and Ascalon are safe.

  I splash more water on my face when I notice my hands are turning green. I try to scrub it off, but the friction darkens my palms. I inspect the water shooting from the spout. It runs clear. Green water drips down my wrists. Images form on each palm: an adult-sized hangman on my left, and a child-sized one on my right. Seven dashes under each. I rub my hands together again, and when they come apart, the dashes are filled with letters and each illustration with a full corpse.

  Sabrina. Ascalon.

  I need to get off Vomit Island. I yell for a guard. Instead comes a prison drone. I hold out my hands. The drone’s eye pans down. It’s a machine, but I can almost hear it breathe an exasperated sigh before it flies off. I look down at my hands.

  There’s nothing there.

  16

  During lunch in the cafeteria, prisoners dressed in old, broken orange foam fits attack their food since the sea is calm for now, and they know that, for at least part of the afternoon, they’ll be able to hold down their chow. I find that I’m hungry, too, but I’m worried and can’t eat. The half-life of my space-grade anti-anxiety and sleep pills has passed, and I’m wondering if I’m experiencing hallucinations as a result. What I saw just now is impossible. I know Vomit Island isn’t the most secure on the inside, but breaching the plumbing with some kind of magic ink? Only Akira could come up with a trick like that, but she’s dead. Maybe I saw it because I’m surrounded by murderers. Like the small man about my age that I’m sitting next to, the white roots of his hair coming up against the dyed black strands. Not salt and pepper, exactly, just the real color beneath cracking tar. His eyes match his hair, cloudy lenses spreading over his dark pupils. He is jarred by the crackle of incoming feed.

  I follow his eyes to the vid being projected so strongly on the wall that it renders the graffiti underneath it invisible. It’s prison, so we only get 2D. It’s a recap of Akira’s funeral. The procession. The six pallbearers, each an old person of notable importance, guiding the floating, closed coffin down Santa Monica Boulevard. Row upon row of people in formal dress, some with synthetically feathered hats, others wearing kimonos in her honor, heads down, almost bowi
ng. Everyone polished in this rich, rich world. The prisoners mindlessly watch. The cafeteria looks like an emergency room after a three-day holiday, packed with the idiots who overindulged past a reasonable, healthy point.

  Onscreen, the talking heads explain that Akira will be pushed coast-to-coast across each continent like the Olympic torch. California to New York. Paris to New Alexandria. The casket will be decorated in full splendor from India to Southeast Asia. And finally, a boat to her home country of Japan, where she will spend thirty days before being shipped to the island. She was a world treasure after all, the one who saved it. Every human on Earth should be given the opportunity to thank her before she arrives at her final resting place. This journey around the world will take months and end at the island, at The Savior’s Eye, where she will be laid to rest at the feet of a giant statue of her now under construction.

  But then begin the tears and the audible sobbing arising from this pomp and circumstance. This turns into full-blown mourners’ wails. It makes me think of what Akira once told me: everything acts differently when it’s being observed. On a primitive level, we have always known this. The zoologist who needs to observe animals from afar to prevent altering behavior. The botanist who discovered that plants act differently under our gaze. Even subatomic particles will change trajectory under the watch of the human eye. Some amateur scientists were even scared to look at Sessho-seki, thinking that we could change it for the worse if we kept looking at it. Its energy could grow. Its mass. Its velocity. Some blamed Akira for looking at it in the first place. Like she was the one who caused it to head toward Earth.