THE FUTURENESS Ch20: And All the Ships at Sea: A Billion Years is Nothing
Xavier’s bots furiously dug toward the bottom of the Earth’s crust, bots designed from plans embedded in me. Two months from now, Xavier said, would be the time to leave. We’d catch up to the bots at our destination. I visited Methyl in her medical bay room. She watched videos, wouldn’t talk and slept fitfully. She woke from thirty-second naps, or pass outs, losses of consciousness broken by her screams. Nothing inside her would let go of that night at the bridge. It shook her dreams, using a spear’s tip of terror and a cloud of her breath of blue flame inhaled terrifyingly back inside. She mumbled in her pained sleep that she waited behind the Golden Apple for me all alone for months. Why, why are we here? She was the only one who blew out and stayed, the other two having disappeared into hospitals. It was her emancipation from her parents that saved her from that particular care, and now I’ve brought her here.
“Not safe.”
“You never think anything’s safe.”
Maybe Methyl was right. She’d watched forty friends explode and vanish in a gore-filled afternoon. Yet she had marched like the rest, with a balloon held childishly up to the wall and been struck and imprinted but, unlike the others she kept her head above the madness. Now, she’d imposed her death sentence on others. To tell her that those people I made her burn could have met death a minute later at Xavier’s hands would not have helped. I took some comfort in the fact that I still had her lighter.
When I slept, I dreamed of Methyl—Sophia—just after the wall. Of her feeling the crystals under the skin of her neck and not comprehending. I dreamed of her birthday party a week later, her parents stunned to have her back and seemingly whole. Sophia inhales to blow out the fifteen candles. The flames spring from their wicks to flood her mouth. Screams surround the dinner table. Only Sophia doesn’t scream. She slaps her hands over her mouth. Twin blue jets of flame sputter out of her nose as she jumps up and down in pain, but she has saved her own life. I dreamed of the night Sophia became Methyl.
Something new is happening with me, up here. I felt it as the wing was landing, in my back. It’s right to be here. I don’t see the visions in the sky through the hotel’s windows, only the scrum of bots wargaming each other on the ground beyond Xavier’s sixty-meter walls. The war in the sky had come to Earth already. Things were moving too quickly. In my room one night, I called my dad.
“Well, what are you doing?”
His attention was on a car in the garage.
“Ah. Calling to accuse me of drug pushing again, Dick?”
“I’m in Canada, dad. At Xavier’s failed LIGO, I don’t think it was ever for that, his headquarters funded as that. I have something to tell you about the Aventura thing.”
“Xavier told me what you got.”
“He’s saying it says I need to go three hundred miles underground for, okay, a billion years. Stay there for a billion—”
“Xavier exaggerates, always has. When you were about to graduate, he said he was going to be the richest person in the world.”
“He is!”
My dad turned from the car to me.
“There’s a king in the Middle East, just took personal possession of the nation, something like that. Way richer. Things are changing. How’s Francesca holding up?”
“Beat to shit. But she’s legally a person now.”
“She’s what?”
“See you when I get back, then?”
“I’m not taking that shit.”
“What?”
“We didn’t all get zapped, Dick. So, Xavier’s synthesizing what you guys got into a vaccine. A vaccine against aging and death.”
“How come you know all this detail?”
“Paperwork. I had to sign a bunch of shit his assistant brought over. With the vaccine, they figure consent laws are gonna change and they’re getting out ahead of it or something. I signed off on all of it. What was her name? Babbyella. Weirdo.”
“What did you sign.”
“Permission slip for you to go down to Hell for a billion years,” my dad said. “Come on, laugh with me. Also, refusal to be vaccinated.”
“Dad.”
“You want me to skip Heaven and stay sixty-eight years old for a billion years until you come back like a locust? I’ll see you in Hell before then.”
“I’m not going down for a billion years. They read something wrong. There’s a mistake somewhere. I’m talking to Xavier. Take the vaccine.”
“I got two trapped vehicles to take care of tonight,” he said. “Listen, don’t worry about time. You can’t change it. Drop me a note when you and your buddy decide how long you’re gonna roast for.”
My dad ended the call. He’d never been difficult to get off a line.
I didn’t believe he believed any of it. I did believe he signed everything Gabbyella presented him with, and I was positive he found her to be a weirdo. She’d hid behind me at the wall, seemingly afraid of Methyl. I thought, at the time, it was because Methyl was wild, but there may have been something more of a recognition passing between them, girls of the same age, one sussing out that the other isn’t quite human.
•
“Pregnancy is an issue,” Xavier said.
He sat on his leather couch in the heavily curtained room where we’d seen him on video onboard the wing. Gabbyella took a chair to his right. I paced the dim room.
I said, “Michelle likely doesn’t want to be immortally seventeen weeks—”
We’re close on reversing the effects in some people, Gabby said. And of course, many people will want to delay vaccination. Until, until birth, until pubescence. Puberty. Women considering becoming pregnant should delay vaccination against aging until they give, until give, they give—
“Thank you, Gabby,” Xavier said.
“Gabby, one billion years is what,” I said.
The amount of time it takes for the pressure to pressure your added silica and the materials there into the pressure, into the plan
I stared at Xavier. He was gazing into the distance to my right, a knife of sunlight again crossing his shoulder.
“Gabby, cone of silence.”
Cone of silence
“She can’t hear us.”
Xavier leaned forward and rested his elbows on his legs. He inhaled quickly three times and exhaled slowly.
“All good?”
“Not over there,” Xavier said. He flicked his eyes at Gabby. “She’s having a bad week and unfortunately it’s getting worse even though we’re working with her.”
“On her, you mean.”
“What?”
“You’re working on her. Fixing her. Trying to. What happened to her?”
Xavier’s grey eyes seemed to darken. He stood and immediately sat down again and spoke.
“You. You happened to her. She’s the one who’s reading your back and it’s, it’s, I don’t know, blowing her mind out a little, draining her resources from everything else. She’s making mistakes on the outside and now she’s making mistakes on the read.”
“So, not a billion years.”
“The number’s right, but not in the right location. I figured that out without her.”
You can’t do that without me
“Shit. What did you hear after cone of silence?”
So, not a billion years
“Okay, nothing. Apparently, the cone’s fritzing, too.”
“Shut her down,” I said.
You can’t
“It’s part of her deal,” said Xavier. “She’s a good negotiator. This is her version of the vaccine.”
“When’s this stuff going to be given out?”
“That’s a fascinating question. How do you roll out a vaccine against aging and all sickness without causing worldwide riots? Produce eight and a half billion doses and distribute them simultaneously around the globe?”
Cone of, of silence
I’d had it. “I’m getting out of here. I’ve had enough.”
Ship
“What?”
“Ship, man,” said Xavier. “Before Gabby started to stumble, she worked out that your back contains plans for merging you with a starship. That’s what you’re building down there. And then, you are leaving.”
“I can’t, not ready to process this,” I said.
“You’re in good company,” Xavier said.
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