Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart Page 10

  “Just had breakfast. So, eat any start-ups lately?”

  “There are no start-ups,” Bernard replied with a protracted sigh. “Deer in the headlights, everywhere. You bastard, Max. Getting laid? I’m not. Oh, unless I pay for it. Where’s Pops?”

  “Went for a swim.”

  “Said he’d be waiting for my call, fuck sake.”

  “Yeah well, you haven’t noticed? His short-term memory’s not so good anymore.”

  “I’ve noticed. Makes him meaner.”

  “And that’s the road you’re on, brother. You got his sociopath gene, remember? You’re stuck with it. Me, I’ll just keep getting laid. By real women.”

  “I’ll probably cut you out when he’s gone.”

  It was an old threat, as was his reply, “I’m sure you will. So, what was so important? I can pass the message on.”

  “Op-eds across the board. Except for the Sun, which is leading with some more leaked BBC shit on pedophiles and let’s face it, the BBC deserves it.”

  “Well, you would say that. Op-eds on what?”

  “No way you’ve been keeping your head in the sand, Max. Planet Earth has been conquered. We won’t stand for it.”

  Maxwell laughed. “No,” he managed, “you’re right. Don’t stand for it. Given how long it’s taking, you’re better off sitting.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “You and Pops think you can stir up six billion people, do you? Fucking megalomaniacs, the both of you. But you’re deluded, did you know that? It won’t work.”

  “Like hell it won’t.”

  Max looked out into the bay. He saw their old man who’d gone through the house and down onto the beach, now wading into the pellucid turquoise waters. “Okay, say you get ’em all standing in the streets, shaking fists heavenward.”

  “That’s it precisely.”

  “Fine. Then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, brother, then what? Those fists? They can’t punch anything. Those angry shouts? Equally useless. I’ll tell you what happens then and you can chew on this. They all go home. Six billion people, standing around, hoarse and with aching arms, they go quiet, look around, at each other. Then they shrug and, well, they fuckin’ go home.”

  “Once those aliens finally land—”

  “They probably won’t.”

  “What?”

  Max picked up his pad again, studied the essay the Sci Fi writer had written for io9. “Why bother? They’ve already shown that they can do what they want to us remotely. From somewhere in space—and US Space Command can’t even find their ship. So, why bother coming down?”

  “But that’s … fuck, that makes no sense.”

  “We’re stuck with us,” Max said. “Get it, yet? Might as well get mad at God and see where that takes you. People get mad at God all the time, but God never shows up, hat in hand and looking shame-faced, does He? So, you and Pop, you need to get this. Your supposed bug-eyed ET isn’t playing along. Oh yeah, people will start looking for someone to blame, but even that’s getting them nowhere. But—” and he picked up the pad to quote the writer, “‘the only face humanity is staring at is its own.’”

  “Where the fuck you getting this?”

  “I’m getting it from people who made a career imagining ‘what if’s’ and you know what the real kicker is? So far, not one government agency has thought to ask them. They bring in scientists, sociologists, economists, the military. Experts, they call them. But they’re not experts.” He linked the article and sent his brother a quick email. “Check your inbox, brother.”

  “Tell Pops I’ll get back to him.”

  “Sure,” Maxwell replied. “And I’ll let him know about all those useless Op-eds that will by tomorrow make you look like idiots. Mind you, riots may not end up injuring anyone, but it seems property can still get damaged. Wonder if the world will send Pops the bill?”

  “Where’s Jorgen?”

  “Shit for brains, meet Montezuma.”

  “What, again? Well fine, if a head needs to roll. It was his idea.”

  They both knew it wasn’t. It was Pop’s idea. “There you go, brother, the sociopath gene kicking into gear.”

  Bernard sighed. “What’s the point of a high-paid fixer who can’t fix anything?”

  “The poor guy’s got the trots pretty bad,” Max said. “Happens every time, yet Pops insists on bringing him down. He likes to see people suffer.” He watched his old man swimming in the shallow waters of the lagoon. “But hey,” he added, “the cook tells me there’s been a tiger shark on the prowl, a big one, probably came out of the Blue Hole. Anyway, it’s been circling the island.”

  “Does Pops know? He doesn’t, does he? You know how scared he is of sharks. Max, you’re such a bastard.”

  “Yeah, I forgot to mention it.”

  “And you call us sociopaths.”

  “Oh I’ll feel plenty if Pops gets chomped, bit in half, chewed up. If he ends up in the middle of a feeding frenzy, why, I’ll feel something all right. I’ll look up at the sky, up at God, and smile at such a fitting end to Douglas Murdo. Poetic justice and all that. You see, that’s the difference between us, brother. I feel. You and Pops don’t. Man, you’ve no idea what you’re missing.”

  “Whatever. Pass on the news. Tell him I’ll call again tonight.”

  “If I’m around.”

  “What? Where are you going? You never go anywhere.”

  “Thought I’d take out the cook’s skiff, maybe chum the local waters for a bit.”

  “Ha ha. All right, Max. Love you.”

  “Love you too, bye.”

  “Bye.”

  The sun was down on lower Manhattan, drowning the city below in gloom, and the lights coming on had a murky cast to them, as if seen through nicotine-smeared glass. Lois Stanton stood with her back to the empty boardroom, luxuriating in the moment’s respite, this brief instant of being alone. Vague memories of an old story she’d heard as a child, about the twins who founded Rome, had since morphed into a new story, at least in her mind. Romulus and Remus, the orphaned children raised by wolves, were now the wolves, surrounded by children. The children were nervous but were hoping for the best. The wolves, after all, weren’t always hungry. So, she had her private nicknames for her two employers, the brothers who were the icons of the new neoliberal world order, the one where corporations ran the planet, feeding heaps of bullshit to the poorly educated, anti-intellectual, great unwashed. The Fox crowd, being spoon-fed what they all wanted to hear and never mind the facts.

  She’d come far from her Indiana small town. The road to hell, it turned out, went east.

  The doors behind her opened and she quickly turned to greet James and Jonathan, the sibling masters of appalling wealth and, one presumed, equally appalling power.

  They were getting on, into their sixties now, showing hints of dissolution despite the ten-grand suits. That jadedness came from their eyes, leaching out to make sallow the flagging skin of their cheeks. The skulls beneath the meat were becoming visible. Despite the wealth she’d earned as their private secretary and as head of Adonis Enterprises PR Division, she longed to see them both laid out in caskets, eyelids blissfully glued shut.

  James waved her over to the table as both men sat.

  Lois joined them, seating herself opposite the brothers. Being old-fashioned, she pulled out a notepad and ballpoint pen, and then waited patiently.

  They’d eaten. She had not, having been ordered here to await their pleasure. She could smell the food on them, the sour hint of wine. One glass each, never more. These men didn’t do boozing. She tried to imagine them as teenagers at some high school, but no, that didn’t work. It would have been a private school, boys in uniforms, unlined faces emanating auras of privilege.

  As always, James was the first to speak. “Forty-seven percent and climbing,” he said. He wasn’t addressing her directly, not yet. He was just laying out the groundwork, describing the playing field. “All Def
ense contracts on hold. MIC’s in free-fall.”

  MIC was James’s only-mildly ironic acronym for the Military Industrial Complex, or maybe it was Consortium, or even Conspiracy, for all she knew. He never used anything else and had never bothered spelling it out for her. She’d figured it out from context.

  Jonathan now chimed in. “The boys at the Think Tank, Lois, they’re in free-fall, too.” And he smiled at her.

  Boys indeed. Not a woman in the lot, unless she was serving drinks. The Freedom Institute was old school in the way that only old money could pull off. Its membership required nine figures plus in actual worth. Its primary task was to keep the machine running. Into it at one end went everything not nailed down and out the other end came ever more wealth. She imagined mechanical fangs going up and down, up and down, without pause, indifferent and remorseless the way machines were. Last century’s historians wrote about industrialization in the same terms, and the fact that the word ‘industry’ once had a human component to it was now long forgotten.

  Idly, she wondered if historians still existed.

  “We’re losing net worth,” James resumed.

  Yes, well, she wanted to tell him, that’s what happens when you invest in war and suddenly peace breaks out everywhere. And, it seemed, little chance of things ever going back to the good old days of strife, mayhem and suffering.

  “We’re fighting back,” said Jonathan. “And we’ll win this, Lois.”

  “Public statement or backroom assurances?” Lois asked, ignoring James’s sudden frown.

  “Backroom to start,” Jonathan said. “Most calls we’ve already made. Take it to the lobby teams.”

  “Then we go public,” said James. “Some bright sides. Real estate’s going up. Populations heading into cities, adds pressure on housing, prices go up and we’re already positioned for that windfall.”

  She nodded. Get rich enough and diversifying your interests and investments only made good sense. You can survive getting a rug pulled out from underfoot when you’re standing on fifty rugs.

  “Distribution, transportation,” James went on. “Hungry people and feeding them. Logistics. Surpluses too valuable to dump.”

  “Finally,” Jonathan said, “and isn’t that a good thing, Lois?”

  “Worth emphasizing,” she agreed, making a note.

  “Tech’s shaky,” said James. “Not sure what’s coming, what’s going to get dumped in their laps. R&D, all that money invested.”

  She eyed him. “You think more is coming?”

  “Think Tank does,” James said, nodding. “We need to position ourselves for the landing, the negotiations. We have the infrastructure to manage what they’ll give us.”

  Which ET seemed to be not only ignoring, but also not needing.

  “Atmospheric analysis.”

  Lois sat up, studying James. “I’m sorry, what?”

  Jonathan explained. “Some egghead took some readings. Electromagnetic skeins.”

  “Skeins?”

  “We’re caught in a web,” James said. “Seems we’ve found out how it’s all being done.” He glanced at his brother, who had more technical savvy.

  Jonathan nodded. “Still can’t be blocked or cut off. This web, it’s probably a natural phenomenon; it’s what the planet does, being a planet. But ET can manipulate it, make it bulge or tighten up, or stretch out. Its power source is the planet’s magnetosphere. Clever, damned clever.”

  “And then there’s the quantum angle,” added James, as if quoting scripture, or speaking in tongues.

  “It’s a fine net,” Jonathan said. “Subatomic level.”

  “I’ve not seen this discovery reported anywhere,” said Lois, somewhat bewildered to be hearing this from these two men.

  “No,” said James. “And you won’t. Not for a while yet, maybe not at all. This is intel. Detection precedes intervention, we feel our way through, observe and analyze. Our best people are on it, and once we crack it, we own it.”

  “For now,” Jonathan said, “we ride this out.”

  “Confidence,” James said to Lois. “That’s your bottom line.”

  They were done with her. She stood up, looked down at her notepad, and read what she’d written: Orchestra leader smiles, band plays, Titanic sinks. “Got it,” she told them, and then made her way out of the room.

  A scale model of the Infinity-3 on a brushed aluminum stand dominated the sideboard above the sleek black filing cabinet. A smaller model of the first electric car, bearing the company’s flag-name, Kepler, served as a rubber-wheeled paperweight on the desk.

  It was late afternoon. Simon Gist, founder of Kepler Industries, sat with one hand resting on the beautifully recreated model car, slowly rolling it back and forth.

  Seated opposite him were two of his favorite people. Mary Lamp, the VP of Operations here at the Roswell Kepler Center, was diminutive, spidery, her black hair a bit of a mess, her face extraordinarily pale given this New Mexico setting, her blue eyes fixed upon him with unwavering intensity. It was a stare that many found unnerving, but not Simon. He liked that promise of no-bullshit.

  Beside her was a man who looked startlingly similar to the actor Fred Ward, who’d played Gus Grissom in The Right Stuff, and then went on to show his comedic chops in Tremors. Simon’s Chief Engineer, Jack Butler, had large battered hands, a mechanic’s hands, grease included. He was restoring a ’71 Datsun 510 in his spare time, something of a bird-flip to Kepler’s electric-car-in-every-driveway aspirations, a detail that amused Simon no end.

  His gaze settled again on his hand atop the model car. Chocolate brown, a descriptive unwisely employed by a magazine journalist a few years back. But not Cadbury’s chocolate. More like Lindt’s. Dark, 97% pure. The man from Nigeria, who’d fled in fear of his life, had made good in America. The American Dream made real and all that. This detail now operated as the opening banner, waved almost stridently in every exposé and interview he’d done the past few years, standing as the solitary proof that the Dream was still real, that it actually still meant something.

  Strident. Yes indeed. Perhaps even desperate.

  “So,” he finally said, “what are we looking at?”

  Jack cleared his throat. The air in this state was dry, and the man cleared his throat a lot. “All the virus scans bounced, Simon. Alice tells me it’s impregnable. Normally, it would have been dumped as a matter of course, but it showed up on every IT address, including the internal ones.”

  Simon frowned. “So it was made in-house? If this is a practical joke, I’m not amused.”

  The file in question had a curious name: Scalable Power Unit Design and Specifications, with Appendices for Conversion, No Patent Permitted. It now sat like a time-bomb on every computer in three departments, still ticking.

  “Alice says no,” Mary said. “It’s on our servers and it arrived there at seven a.m. this morning, but left no back-trail.”

  “How is that possible?” Simon asked. “Never mind. It isn’t.”

  “Spontaneous generation,” muttered Jack.

  Beyond the office, the plant was quiet. Simon had sent most people home and that had been a solemn procession back out to the parking lot. He’d kept a dozen engineers and all the IT people at their desks.

  The risk to ambition was the fatal misstep. Almost impossible to predict. Infinity-2 had crashed in the desert, taking the test pilot with it. All down to a cable snagging on a mangled rivet. But that sort of tragedy was a burden that came with the territory. Earth was possessive of its children. Leaving its embrace was never easy. But ambition in the broader sense, ambition as a life’s commitment, well … the future was uncertain, but in a way it had never been as uncertain as it was now. His backers were locked up, unwilling to commit. Alien technology could kill Kepler Industrial.

  Of course, it would kill everyone else too, in business and technological terms. Resilient as the global economy was, Simon was not sure if it would survive such a fundamental resetting of principles, not to men
tion its most basic assumptions of value, exchange and worth. Simon had spent more than a few nights lying awake, thinking things through. Enough Science Fiction authors had explored the disruptive aspects to benign First Contact, usually in terms of the threat to the status quo—which, for all its faults, was still homegrown, still human. But invariably in these tales, things had turned out if not rosy, then manageable.

  But here and now, in this reality, Simon was not too sure about that. Still, civilization had managed to survive new technologies, revolutionary technologies, absorbing the changes into the great machine of progress. The landscape might indeed change, but the people in it adapted.

  Or died.

  Abruptly he shook his head and leaned forward. “Jack. Pull up your laptop. Take it offline.”

  Jack grinned. “There’s forty-three people downstairs waiting for this, you know.”

  “Because they think it’s a gift.”

  “Yes.”

  Simon looked to Mary. “Do you think it is, Mary?”

  “I don’t know. Why us?”

  “That’s just it,” Simon said, “we don’t know that, do we? We don’t know if every high-tech engineering firm isn’t holed up right now, staring at the same unknown executable file.”

  Jack paused, clearly startled by the notion. “Shit,” he said. “And here I thought … well …”

  “That we’re something special?” Simon smiled. “I appreciate the sentiment, Jack.” He held up both hands as he leaned back. “I certainly thought we were!”

  The two men laughed. Mary’s frown deepened.

  “I’m ready,” said Jack.

  “Open the file.”

  A click on the laptop resting on Jack’s thighs.

  Simon watched his engineer squinting at the screen, watched as the man slowly sat forward, now hunching over the laptop, watched the man’s eyes tracking, darting. “Aw, cripes,” he breathed, “they dumbed it down so far even a cretin like me can follow.”

  “And?” Simon asked.

  “And … shit, Simon. It is what it says it is. A scalable power source.”

  “Fuel?”

  “No fuel.”

  “I’m sorry, what do you mean, no fuel?”