by Davina Bell
Summer
The way Pops explained it was that, with the internet up and running again, people were bombarded with new info, all the things they’d missed in the last year, so that it felt like everything in the world was escalating quickly. Whole oceans turned to acid. Pockets of malaria blooming where it shouldn’t have been. Then a huge seam of coal was found off the coast of Alaska, which started that bizarre stand-off—one country disease-bombing another and trading the vaccination for coal. New Zealand completely evacuated, nobody left to fight the flames.
‘And then…’ I told Mikie. ‘Cyclone Cooper.’
‘Mmm,’ Mikie said sadly. ‘Dear old New York City. RIP.’
People were going mad with helplessness by then. Sort of frenzied and half out of their minds with anger about how the planet was already cooked or why it absolutely, definitely wasn’t, depending on who you believed. There was blame spraying out in every direction, and at the same time, cooking videos became ridiculously popular, as did re-runs of a TV show from Norway that was basically twelve hours straight of a crackling fire.
But in among all that was a call that was growing louder and louder for the biggest companies to be held accountable for what they were doing to the planet—or not doing, to be more precise. ‘And that,’ said Pops, ‘included Big Tech.’ Because by then, they were the biggest.
‘Not the governments?’ asked Winter, who had a touching belief in the enduring power of democratic institutions on account of a Grade Four project about the preferential voting system that she had presented as a rap.
‘We-ell…’ said Pops. ‘You girls might be too young to have registered it properly, but it turned out that a ring of supposedly trustworthy governments was behind that whole business with deepfakes, and after that?’ He shrugged.
Turns out those governments had paid that dude in the baseball cap, Pops’s old boss, to get a hurry on with deepfake technology. Deepfakes were those creepy videos that mashed people’s faces and voices to make it look like they were saying all kinds of wacky stuff that they never actually said. They’d been around for a while, and at the start, you could teach a computer to recognise that they weren’t real. But once some serious cash was invested in the whole thing, you honestly couldn’t tell the difference. Everything looked fake, and nothing did. You could make it look like a scientist was saying that climate change had been reversed. You could have a president giving a warning that a nuclear warhead had been fired and we all had forty-four seconds to live, and you literally could not tell if it was actually happening.
‘And that’s what was behind the whole video with the Queen and the ham sandwich?’ asked Mikie, and truly? I was impressed he knew about that.
‘You get YouTube down there?’ I asked.
‘Saw it through a cruise-ship window,’ said Mikie.
How could anyone really trust anyone after that? And then…that thing with the driverless cars, the yoghurt shops. All those children around the world. Oh, it was so awful. That’s when the Resistance officially formed. And TBH, it really wasn’t that hard to get people signing up for a life lived completely offline.
That was also the day my father quit his job. But he didn’t give it up to pursue his lifelong dreams of communing with the souls of axolotls, like he told us.
My father was breeding a special kind of bacteria. It took years. Eventually he bred something that could eat the seabed cables that were wrapped around the planet, spreading that hot, fast internet and fuelling the whole shebang. It was supposed to be the toppest of secrets.
‘But they found out,’ Pops told us that day in the church. ‘A couple of years in.’
‘Who found out?’ asked Winter.
‘That dude in the baseball cap?’ I asked. ‘And all his groupie tech bros?’
Pops nodded. ‘I suppose I always knew they would. They followed me—all the way to Belarus. They wanted to buy it so they could destroy it. But of course I wouldn’t sell it. They started to make threats.’ He paused, picked at the label on the whiskey bottle. Then he looked up, and I could tell from the pain on his face as he gazed at Winter that those threats had something to do with her.
Through the Resistance, Pops found people to share his vision, to help him spread that bacteria. When the moment came, they released it simultaneously on the edges of oceans around the world. It spread faster than fire. Ate the cables in hours. It shut down the internet. Just as he’d planned.
But there were other things he didn’t plan. That he suspected but claimed he didn’t have time to test for.
‘There wasn’t any time,’ he said desperately, wiping the back of his hand against his nose. ‘And I’m trying to fix it. I’ve found the cure.’
‘What do you mean?’ Winter whispered. ‘A cure for what?’
Oh, my hat, you can’t even imagine the scene that unfolded when Winter found out about The Greying—that it was Pops and whatever he had put in the water that had caused it, that awful dripping away of life and slipping away of beautiful minds, greying of skin and certain death. She trembled with a sorrow so deep, it went right to the layer of the Earth that was molten. Tears dribbled down her face. She didn’t even bother to flick them away. Eventually she whispered to herself, ‘Minami.’ And she was right.
Minami had died in one of those death hangars. We had seen her being led away on a street corner in Akihabara, her eyes glossy and vacant, a strange half-smile on her perfect lips, her walk still the glide we used to mimic. Through the cut-out window in the back of her shirt, we had seen the dark web of bruises, intricate and beautiful, like the inky brushstrokes of Japanese calligraphy. Boy, had we cried that night in bed for all the things we’d never said to Minami. Somehow it was worse that we’d loved her so much from afar.
‘She wouldn’t have suffered,’ I said helplessly. ‘They just sort of… fall asleep. Isn’t that right, Pops?’
‘Well…’ he said cagily. ‘There’s some initial pain. Intense pain. Bruising. A fevered state. Confusion. But yes, once they pass to unconsciousness, they—’
‘Is that why we came here?’ Winter interrupted. ‘You ran away because you made people sick?’
Pops winced. Then he nodded. ‘Partly. And there will be government agencies after me because of all the laws I broke—the security risk of the things that I’ve done. There are others, too, who want what I know.’ He sighed. ‘But that’s for another time.’
Winter glared at him. ‘Tell us now.’
And so he explained about using The Greying as a weapon of sorts—how it was being tested in remote areas by groups who were up to No Good. How everyone would be after a cure. How they’d be hunting him down to find it.
‘Is that everything?’ I’d demanded, my tiny mind blown with the hugeness of it.
‘But it wasn’t,’ I told Mikie, stroking him absentmindedly as I looked out at the mess my father had made of the ocean floor.
Pops explained to me and Winter the effects of his work on the water, the seas, the Earth’s tilt, the shift of its axis, the turning of the world. I tuned out a little, I’ve got to admit, but Winter seemed to follow. Truly, she was always the cleverer one. ‘If my modelling is correct,’ he said sadly, ‘the Earth will stop turning sometime soon. And the consequences…I’m still figuring them out. But needless to say, it won’t be good.’
‘Will that be the end of the world?’ Winter asked.
‘Oh, the end of the world is already here,’ Pops said gloomily. ‘Has been for a while. It’s just not that evenly distributed yet.’
‘So is there any hope?’ I asked.
‘Depends what you mean by hope,’ he said.
‘Don’t you listen to that,’ I had whispered to Winter as he threw back his neck to drain the glass bottle.
Winter
‘Well, you’ll just have to choose,’ Edward said calmly as Pete scrabbled in his arms, trying to lick his face.
I held the black box close to my heart and stood up.
I thought about my mother.
‘Who are you?’ I whispered. ‘Where are you from?’
He swallowed. Pete squirmed. Edward tightened his grip.
‘Give me the box,’ said Edward, ‘and I’ll give you the dog.’
Summer
I said to Mikie, ‘I bet right now that you’re thinking that Pops was a monster, and good riddance to bad rubbish, and that we’d have been better off without him. The world, too.’
‘Heavens, no,’ said Mikie. ‘I get it: people are complicated. Besides, he can’t have been a complete waste of space. He gave the world a kid like you.’
I glowed pink with pride then, as if someone had turned on a torch inside me. This dude really understood. Like I’d told Winter a zillion times, people aren’t just their best bits and worst bits—not just a length of a prison sentence, the weight of a medal on a ribbon. ‘Haven’t you read enough by now to know that human nature is all about the nuance?’ I asked her once when we were blindfolded on a plane, tucked somehow into an overhead locker, and I have to admit, I felt pretty sophisticated right about then.
As I leaned back against Mikie, exhausted by the sweep of my own saga, I remembered that flight in the overhead locker. How Pops had sung Elvis the whole way so we wouldn’t be scared—till his throat sounded raspy and sore. How he’d done ‘Moon River’ in a fake opera voice while someone shot at the plane, how he’d used the voice that always made Winter giggle. The shake in his legs as he carried us out, one on each shoulder down the spindly stairs of that plane into the heat of another long night far from home.
‘He wasn’t all bad,’ I whispered to Mikie, and maybe to Pops, wherever he was now.
Winter
I thought about my father.
The chance to hand over the contents of this box and get my mother back safe.
How he’d brought us here and built this church. How that’s when we knew he’d gone mad with grief, his bleeding hands on the rough stone. How he left us before he quite finished the roof.
I swallowed. I said, ‘No.’
I didn’t watch Pete drop from the bell tower.
I closed my eyes and imagined his yelps were singing. Imagined him flying, up, up, towards the stars, like Laika, the first dog who ever went to space. Perhaps they would meet out there.
Ten minutes later, Edward snapped my wrist and he got the box anyway.
I was glad Summer wasn’t there to see it.
Summer
Mikie seemed kind of tired, and I wondered if I’d worn him out because, let’s be frank, my narrative style is somewhat barrage-like if you’re not used to fast-talkers, and I wasn’t sure how much hip-hop or spoken-word poetry this guy would have been exposed to, which would at least have provided him with some context.
And then it hit me that perhaps—perhaps it wasn’t me that had worn him out. Perhaps he was dying.
I jumped up. ‘Oh, gosh—shouldn’t I be wetting you with water like they do on the news? Spraying you with a hose or something—buckets, at least? I’m so sorry. I just sat here jabbering and let you get all dry. If I were Winter, I would have thought of that. When we used to go out for Chinese food she would spend the whole time spinning that round little table thing—what do you call them?’
‘The lazy Susan?’
‘Yeah, she’d be spinning that lazy Susan from person to person, making sure everyone had their soy sauce and their sweet chilli and their jasmine tea. We’d get to the end and she’d hardly have touched her meal, and she wouldn’t even let us get a doggy bag for it because she didn’t want to make any extra work for the waiter.’ I shook my head. ‘She’s too much.’
‘Sounds like a honey. I think I would like her,’ said the whale.
‘Everyone does,’ I replied, somewhat annoyed that I couldn’t even have a whale to myself without sharing, but I guess that wasn’t old Mikie’s fault.
‘You don’t need to hose me down, kid. We both know it’s too late for that. But…If you wouldn’t mind…’
‘Yes, Mikie?’
‘If it isn’t too much trouble, will you stay with me?’ said the whale. ‘Until the end? Won’t be too much longer.’
I swallowed. ‘It would be an honour,’ I said. I sat back down and pulled my backpack over and rustled through it, seeing if there was anything else he might be interested in. I came across The Outsiders, tucked down the side, and blow me down if that isn’t a book to get into you before you kick the bucket, even if you’re an oversized marine creature.
‘Do you know anything about gangs—teen gangs?’ I asked. ‘That’s what this book’s about. Not the druggy ones. I mean, like, the bratty ones who run around town and think they’re so tough.’
‘What do you think dolphins are?’ said Mikie.
‘Show-offs,’ I agreed.
So I read it, all the way through, because even though I was Tired (capital T), there wasn’t a night and a day to put me to sleep, just the winds coming and going, whipping my hair into my mouth, which didn’t even seem that annoying, given the context, and the gentle half-sunset, which felt thoroughly appropriate for a twilight-of-life situation. As I started each new chapter, I would put my head to Mikie’s jowl to feel his pulse, the beat of his heart (‘Larger than a Mini Cooper,’ he’d told me proudly. ‘And you, kid, you could actually swim in my arteries, they’re that big.’) and though it wasn’t exactly racing to start with, by the time we got to the whole ‘stay gold’ moment, it was only beating once a minute, max.
‘Mikie?’ I whispered.
‘Mmm?’ he said sleepily.
‘Just checking,’ I said.
I sat there, feeling how strong he was against my back, wishing that I could have known him out in the ocean, the sun splashing over his belly as he arched up to the sky.
‘Mikie?’ I whispered again.
‘Hmm?’ He opened his eye.
‘Do you think this haircut suits me?’
‘Real elegant, kid. Like one of those old movie stars.’
‘You know about movie stars?’ I asked, impressed.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Can’t get enough of that Ryan Gosling.’
‘Mikie? If you…If you were Winter, would you have run away from me too?’
For a while he didn’t say anything, and I guess it was a leading question, but I wanted to know the truth, and my instinct was that this dude could tell it to me straight and easy, like an arrow made of peace; that he’d run out of time for the lies and half-truths and types of sweet nothings that you pull out of fortune cookies.
‘I do not know Winter on a personal level,’ he said slowly. ‘But I know this. Winter wasn’t running away from you. She was running towards herself. And when she finds what it is she is looking for, she will run back.’
Boy, did I ever cry then, really cry, and I still don’t know why exactly, but I don’t think Mikie minded, because my tears were salty and I cupped them all in my palms, and when I’d finished, I climbed up, really carefully, just with my shins, and rubbed them on the bit that I think was his forehead, and he seemed to like that.
‘Mikie?’ I said one last time as I lay with my back on his big old back. ‘I don’t know how to love anyone who isn’t Winter. It’s so natural for her. But it’s harder for me.’
‘Summer,’ said Mikie. ‘You are doing it now.’
Winter
I held them close to my heart, the pieces of hand and arm joined just by skin now.
I was sick with the pain. I said to Edward, ‘But you cried. When I told you about my mother. You cried real tears.’
He said, ‘Too easy—that was one I practised a million times in role-play. I did theatre…you know, before. Plus our training was pretty thorough. Had to learn five languages. You oughta put that arm in a sling.’
‘Edward?’ But as I said it, I realised it wasn’t his name and was sick again—over the side this time.
There he was, Pete, so far and still below.
‘I’m only saying this to be helpful, okay, but if you get desperate,’ said not-Edward, ‘you might want to think about eating him.’
I thought back to what my mother had said to me the last time we spoke. ‘Edward?’ I said again. ‘Did you never love me, not even a little bit? Was it all made up? On the boat—that, too?’
He didn’t answer. He turned away.
Summer
And so he was gone, just like that. Mad, am I right, that people—souls—really do fizzle out of existence in a hot second, like candle flames. I was glad that dear old Mikie got saved the indignity of being blown up with explosives, which is what they used to do with whale carcases when they didn’t want them stinking up the beaches. But, boy, did I miss that guy, like I had a whale-sized hole in my heart. And, yes, I know it sounds corny, but here’s the truth: love hurts, and it’s just like they say in all those pop songs.
I set off again, my feet sinking into the cool of the sand under the weight of my pack, like a turtle with a shell made of marble. As I plodded, I peered through the half-dark at that crumpled map, the chunky writing. And suddenly I wondered why I was even bothering, because weren’t we all going to die some day anyway? And wouldn’t it be better to drift off, thirsty but content, like dear old Mikie, than to march headlong into who even knows what?
Winter
I watched Edward leave from up in the bell tower. He took the opposite beach path to Summer’s, started up the mountain. I was so thirsty.
I stood up and the pain of my arm flashed all around me in bursts of stars. I thought about Ponyboy from The Outsiders, who looked up at the stars a lot. How Summer loved Ponyboy.
Down each stair with a clunk and lightning through my wrist and Ponyboy Curtis.
‘Swoon,’ Summer would say. ‘Ponyboy, what a hunk. Bags kissing him first when we get to heaven, and don’t even think about pushing in because you know you don’t actually like guys with ponytails in real life.’
