Ch 9: Eric Underwater
The Futureness Part Two
With her phone unlocked now by the same surge of light she sent through the taxi’s system, Methyl calls Xavier.
“What have you learned?” he asks, instead of answering.
“I’m suspected of murder and my taxi didn’t respond to your annoying code phrase.”
“What taxi? Are you still in it?”
“Yup,” Methyl says. They’re still parked on the edge of the desert with the moon on the wane.
On Richard’s phone screen, Xavier sits behind a long, low desk, curtains parted over a partial view of the launch site, still swarming with bots and lit as brightly as daylight. Who would find Angela in that mansion set back from the street by a fence and dense shrubs and trees? It must have been entirely surveillance, maybe monitors in her body tipped the police. It wouldn’t be her family to discover her smashed face, body crumpled at the base of the sheet pane windows over the woods in the back of the property.
“There’s a dog loose in the woods,” Methyl says into the air.
“Get out of the cab now, Sophia,” Xavier says.
“It’s Methyl.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“I fried it just a moment ago, like I fried Gabbyella.”
“Why? So, now they know.”
“Because I could, and because I was going into the desert, and bad things have happened lately in the desert. And now I’ve got to prompt this French-fried taxi back to the Golden Apple while they think I killed someone.”
“I’m about to make a species-defining decision and you’re down there getting into trouble. And there’s no water on the desk. I need water on the desk as I planned.”
A bot brings a glass bottle of clear water to the desk and arranges it into a composition of Xavier and the water for the camera.
“I’m doing it. Plan B’s major pro is it can be done without Gabby’s help. Her locked-in versions will do. They’ll have to. We have instructions, Methyl. They’re falling out of the sky all the time. We have to carry them out, or try to.”
“What can you do without Gabby? You lost your ship, too. Please don’t avoid talking to me about my situation, Xavier. I don’t know what I’m doing out here.”
“Point the phone at the dash, take a picture,” Xavier says with exasperation in his voice.
Methyl does. The car starts and reverses back onto the state road toward Dayton’s lights in the distance.
“Neat trick,” Methyl says.
“They’ll be looking for you. You washed that cab out pretty well. I’m not seeing any signs of a mind left.”
“Good.”
“Sophia, what happened?”
“One of them, I don’t know, passed out or possibly literally killed herself right in front of me.”
“Angela is dead, Sophia?”
“She, she died, yes,” Methyl says.
“Listen, was this you? With your bot zapper? One chance to tell me the truth.”
“I wasn’t, I didn’t touch her,” Methyl protests. “I really think she did something. The skrip, how much was inside her?”
“Take Richard and double it. The girl was struck badly. She was a prophet of doom.”
“Send me to Eric’s now,” Methyl says.
“Are you up to it?”
“Yes. Why do you care so much about that water?”
“It’s built,” Xavier says. “It’s not water. This water plus skrip, putting it very simply, is the medicine that will give everyone what you and Richard already have. The cure to aging. This is the beginning of the new age.”
Angela, too. She had it. The kids who were hit just right by the bolts. But Angela had figured out a way around immortality.
“It was the only way she could make it stop,” Methyl says.
The taxi enters the city’s outskirts. Streetlights become more regular as the stars disappear.
“Gabby put her on all the blockers she could come up with, Xavier says. “If she was taking them.”
“Do you know who her mother was?”
“I only know her genome. What’s up? Come on, Methyl, I have to practice a speech.”
Xavier adjusts his tie, setting it further askew. Methyl tells him the story of Angela’s mother crashing, wandering into the woods badly concussed and dying while back on the road, a fifteen-year-old Richard finds her car and takes it as his own. Francesca. Xavier’s life’s work: elsewhere, lost to him, and her mother lost to Angela.
“Familiar territory, Methyl,” Xavier says. “We will turn the police away from you, just this once. It’s not cheap, politically.”
“Thanks, but I’m innocent,” Methyl says.
“And you’ve arrived, apparently,” says Xavier. He consults his phone and says, “Find something out we can use, I’m putting this,” he waves at the bottle of water, “into the ocean. It’ll be everywhere within a year.”
Methyl’s screen goes dark.
Her taxi has stopped in front of a one-story home in a nondescript part of Dayton’s east side, not far from Methyl’s old home and not far from its look, either. Eric Berliner’s house.
Methyl doesn’t know Eric. He was one of the youngest from junior high to show up at the wall with an inflated balloon and a serious expression set on his face. Methyl watched his head blow apart and then his entire body disappear, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from trying the wall herself a few minutes later. It might have been encouragement. Where were they going? She has heard nothing about the twelve-year-old since then and assumes that whatever’s behind the walls of his home is something she’s not entirely prepared for, although, to be real, how could what’s inside be more disturbing than Angela?
She gets out of the taxi, which leaves without a word to wherever Xavier wants it to go. Probably the e-waste pits, Methyl decides. The taxi was corroded with some shadowy influence she doesn’t know anything about, but is glad to be clear of.
Somewhat nervously, she rings the doorbell.
In a few moments, a voice comes from the other side of the door. It’s a woman’s voice and it’s high, weak, and suspicious.
“Hello? Who’s out there?”
Methyl hadn’t worked out what to say to that question. Who was there, anyway? She’s only just begun to understand how light, and its effects are springing from her, and her closest, newest friends are literally in outer space. Not an easy introduction.
“I was wondering if Eric is home?” she says.
“Why?”
Following her taxi catastrophe and Angela’s death, Methyl is in no mood to negotiate through a closed door.
“Why not?” she says. “Can he come out to play?”
“Who is this?”
“I was at the wall, too. I mean, I was one of the kids like Eric. I’m Sophia. Please.”
The woman’s voice—Eric’s mother?—comes muffled through the door: “Eric is in his room working on his aquarium. I suppose you can see him. You went to the wall that day?”
“Yeah, and I had a balloon, too,” Methyl says.
The door opens. A haggard woman with a long straight nose and piercing green eyes rimmed with red appears.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m not sure,” Methyl says. “How’s Eric?”
She feels phony asking about someone she doesn’t know but then, doesn’t she know him, struck sideways by the bolts at the wall, just like herself? She desperately wants to ask what’s wrong with him but keeps a sheepish smile on her face.
“Eric!” the woman yells.
A slight, short blond boy emerges from a door down the hall.
“Mother?”
“You have a visitor,” the woman says. She retreats to the couch hunched in the middle of the living room and collapses onto it.
“I’m a single mother of one,” the woman says to Methyl. “And I don’t understand what happened last winter, but it changed Eric, and it probably changed you, so go play, please, and don’t bother me for twenty minutes. He hasn’t had a visitor since that day.”
“Come on,” Eric says, gesturing toward the door from which he came.
Inside the room, Eric’s room, it is dark. A glowing fish tank occupies the middle of the room. Methyl approaches it. Inside, there are no fish, only a model ship and figurines scattered at its base.
“What kind of aquarium are you keeping,” Methyl asks.
“It’s the bottom of the ocean,” Eric says. His voice is the same high pitch as his mother’s. “What’s at the bottom of the ocean? Cables and silt and hydrothermal vents and shipwrecks, and animals that can make light. Doesn’t that freak you out? Animals can make light. Why can’t we?”
“I guess because we don’t live in the dark,” Methyl says.
“Says you,” Eric replies. “We live in complete darkness about what’s really going on.”
“What’s up with that one guy standing up,” Methyl says.
“He’s the captain.”
“Of course.”
“Do you mean, what happened to us?” Eric asks.
“Something to do with The Francesca, I think.”
“I knew it. The thing is to get comfortable.”
“Get what?”
Eric sweeps his arm across his room and the aquarium.
“Comfortable, like the people at the bottom,” he says. “To be comfortable is the main thing.”
Eric lies on the floor on his stomach.
“I’ll show you,” he says.
Eric places his arms under his chest in a cross and puts his nose to the floor. Methyl, standing above him, has no idea whether to join in or flee.
“This is how the people at the bottom of the sea are lying down,” Eric says. “Comfortably. Lie down with me.”
Methyl sees no reason not to, and so she does. She lies on Eric’s floor on her belly and crosses her arms under her chest.
“You can put your head straight down, or to the right or to the left,” Eric says.
“Okay,” Methyl says.
She lies with her arms tucked under her chest and feels an enormous weight lifted. Sleep begins to descend.
“Let’s build a radio for The Francesca,” Eric says.
Methyl rouses from her sleepy state.
“They’re gone,” she says. “Everyone who knows anything is trying to reach them.”
“I know how,” Eric says. Methyl feels the boy’s bravado and doesn’t want to squash it.
“How do we do that,” she says.
“I’ve heard about your sparks,” Eric says. “They’re not the secret that you might think they are. Leaks from the compound told me you killed his best bot. Can you do something with a radio?”
No, Methyl thinks. I cannot. But, then, she doesn’t know what she can do. And here, inside Eric’s room with the shipwreck disaster in his aquarium, she feels that quite possibly it can be done.
She raises herself from her position.
“Go get your radio,” she says.