I followed the Winnebago under the overpass. Before, it was nothing but static, but today, succeeding the bridge’s shadow came the Top 100 Countdown through the Thirties and that offensive-gestures boy, more nostalgically gold now, golden kist by memory’s sun. It’s strange to have a radio still, with its light-into-sound magically slurped down an aluminum straw, opposite of the flames caressing the bodies touched by Methyl’s breath under the night blue sky.
I tune, never turn, the dial. More stations have dropped out, leaving behind them a low, breathy void. They’ve been hit by a silence gun, like those therapist grade voice-killing machines that squat outside psychologists’ offices. A cut of shears, not cut with the ones scanned by the TSA in Xavier’s luggage and meant for my little finger that ran all the way home, but by those that severed my parts at Hotel Quebec to the rhythm of the number, positive and increasing: the cosmological constant, coming to take you all away from Dayton, bit by bit. The weapons of art in this would develop.
•
Taking a step backwards. Xavier’s people stripped Francesca’s traps clean as if they were nothing.
“Don’t lose your car’s hat to a trap.” That’s what I said with so much pride on my dad’s TV commercials, thirteen years old, half-singing to the jingle and drumming my fingers on a mind’s rusty empty dome in my dad’s outdoor shop. Half of my dad’s business was trying to put some semblance of a car’s self together after its having been trapped. Methyl would have loved how American. But she fell asleep in the wing.
I shook her as we descended to Headquarters.
“Fuck off.”
“We’re landing,” I said.
“Not safe.”
“This is where we’re meant to go, Methyl,” I said. “Open your eyes. Your eyes are closed. You’re delirious. You never think anything’s safe.”
I lifted her up into the attending bot’s arms. I think she slept. But lifted into its arms by whose arms? Mine? When?
Surgical procedures prescribed by less stupid sections of my back that Xavier’s AI had cracked said this body—mine—must go so that the ship has a chance. “Ship” is my imprint, so whatever it wants of me I must do my best to be that.
Francesca gets her personhood tonight. Xavier paid her two mil after she was healed to drive him across one of his tarmacs. He arranged it so that she’d become a corporate entity, a person under the employ, or a person of employ, a citizen of Canada and the US. To kill her would be murder. She’d looked half-dead.
For a time, I saw on their feed one dented newspaper dispenser surviving near the doors pulled open by seniors gathering for luncheon at the Golden Apple, but then there were none.
NASA bungee cords you to treadmills. That has not been my training. I felt things, and I still do, something more than the taste of my tongue, and I will until the final shearing.
It’s twelve thirty-four, with clearing skies. Everything that happens will happen the day of the last shearing. We’ll do it at the elbows and waistline, and dig out your sense organs, and strip most of your epidermis, someone told me. It will be easier in one go. Easier than to go in, stop, and to go in again. Okay? Get excited, because Dayton’s junior soccer league district kicks off next week.
•
Xavier: “Take that girl down from the bot. Bring her down here.”
Gabbyella: something-something trauma.
I think, same age: these girls are the same age.
Xavier: “Welcome to the hotel. You’ve killed, but that’s without witnesses, if you’re worried. Come on.”
He walked backward, away from the jet’s walkway into the hotel’s hangar.
“Methyl,” I said, looking back. She’d slumped against Gabby’s shoulder and was hobbling along.
“Let Gabby take care of her.”
“What does that mean?”
“They’re like, the same age. They can relate. Gabby lost her parents.”
Xavier stopped still.
It was shocking to see him immobile. He stared at my forehead.
I said, “Are you still in there, Xavier?”
“I’m here. We have built the most reliable method to bring down energy that alters silica, like they did in your back and Methyl’s neck. Never perfect, never predictable and just about ninety-five percent undesirable results. We don’t know if we’re attracting natural phenomena, or if we’re attracting them. And we’re only half-way through reading you. So, pray to it, if you pray.”
•
Overnight lows are expected to range from the mid- to upper fifties.
Seven hours after Francesca flatlined, the team shrugged through bringing her back into perfection. She woke, cursing a perfect line of hellfire down on those who’d hacked her.
Wanting becomes searching; searching becomes seeing; seeing becomes thinking; thinking becomes doubting; doubting becomes awake, listening and looking
That last skip was too big. Back up, Francesca.
Loss
Richard woke you up.
I woke myself up on a drive to a cemetery
You loved your driver, Janessa Perez?
When I knew who she was. After she stole me
You love Richard?
When he confessed
•
“This HQ generates enough electrostatic potential,” Xavier said to everyone on the tarmac beneath the wing.
Xavier whispered into my ear, “Gabby wants to be imprinted. She needs a shot at this.”
“So, stuff Gabby with silica,” I said, “Set her loose in your field, but get Methyl help first. She’s crashing.”
“Human nurses and doctors work here and are coming down. Gabby’s not the point. Let’s agree to dig.”
Xavier held out his hand to shake.
“The entire point is to dig, not to deal with Gabby’s issues,” he said. “The first thing we got out of you was a map of the earth’s interior, down to the square centimeter, probably measured just a few years ago. And a path leading down to the Asthenosphere. That’s about three hundred miles down, below the crust, possibly to collect something, we don’t know, we haven’t been able to identify it. It’s under our feet. The instructions in your back want you to find it.”
“I dig up some kind of material, come back up, then what?”
“You, you don’t come right back up. You’re meant to remain there for a period of time.”
“Xavier, there’s been no specifics since—”
“A billion years. About a billion years it says you’re staying down there. How come the immortality, but not any worries about mortal injuries? Because you’re going to be in the biggest cocoon.”
“What is the rush with this?”
“You have kazillions on your head. Look outside the walls. It’s a video game. Their bots, our bots. Mowing each other down. Seeing who runs out of quarters first. I don’t want to run out of quarters first.”
“Me neither.”
“Let’s do something about it. Let’s put you underground.”
•
White cornflakes of snow worried about the flood lights lording over Michelle’s backyard.
“A billion years is shit,” I said to her.
“A billion years is nothing,” she said, coming close to me.
She crossed her fingers and placed them on my forehead.
“I could do a billion years.”
“No one ages, now,” she said. “I’ll still be pregnant when you come back.”
“I won’t have a body.”
“Neither will your baby.”
•
I thought Gabby was too young for Xavier to bring on. Now she has the map of your back inside her and she spins traps
“She’s untouched,” I said to Francesca while I lay in one of Xavier’s scanners. “So, what’s Gabby got inside her?”
Rich, let me play you something from today
“I’m wasting my time,” Gabby said in the video.
That’s not possible anymore, Francesca said.
“Whatever,” Gabby said.
Sì, Gabbyella. No more corrupt maps. Capisci che?
“She’s confusing, until you know the mind,” Xavier said.
Francesca ended the recording.
While you and Methyl were in a medical bay
“Wait,” I said. “What mind? Fran, is Gabby built?”
Non sapevo. I thought I could always tell, but her body scent hasn’t changed in seventy-two hours. It’s like she’s on pause. She’s overloaded, or maybe damaged, or out of material. Why does she want to be imprinted? Questo è inquietante. It’s disturbing, Rich.
To be continued