The Pedestal (38 page)

I haven’t grasped the depth of my longing for Earth until I’ve returned to the protection of its atmosphere. I’ve forgotten how rare and beautiful this planet really is, bejeweled in mesmerizing shades of aquamarine and jade, liquid with symbiotic life. For a brief moment, my fate seems inconsequential. Drawing near my homeland, I’m helplessly transfixed by the sheer beauty of it, the fantastic variety of color and textures, the sedimentation of living layers held firmly in its bosom.

Suddenly, hot breath is on my neck and Gunn’s gravelly voice blasts past the turbulence of reentry, through my blissful reverie. “Soak it in, kid. May be the last thing you ever see.”

We land at a small airfield near Houston and I’m dragged across an empty tarmac toward a transit bay. A shuttle awaits us. As I step inside—with the brusque assistance of Gunn—I find that I’m not the first passenger. For a split second, I’m relieved that she’s here, that she’s survived Grogan’s gamble. But as Fiona affixes her eyes on mine, I see something in them that I never expected, something that breaks my tired heart.

“Sit down,” Gunn snaps. I obey, and the shuttle begins to move. My eyes are glued to Fiona, and for once, there’s no lust there.

“What is this, Fiona?” I ask. Her mouth forms a sad frown and she shrugs. For a moment, I wonder if I’ve misinterpreted the situation. I’ve been known to do that now and then, after all.

“I’m sorry, Wilson. Things weren’t supposed to play out like this.”

“Oh, spare me,” Gunn interrupts with a groan. “Don’t go getting sentimental on me now. We got things to do.”

“You aren’t going to kill him, are—”

“Now? Relax, lady. If I wanted the kid dead, he’d be dead already. I’m not done with him yet.”

Fiona seems guardedly pacified. “Mr. Gunn, we need to contact my brother. He did his part and got Wilson here; he needs to believe you’ve done your part.”

Gunn rolls his eyes. “Ah, screw your brother, lady.”

“Mr. Gunn, I won’t let you turn my brother into a liability. If he thinks I’m still in danger, he’s going to reach out for help. We don’t need that kind of attention. Need I remind you of what’s at stake here? If any of this gets out, none of us are safe.”

Gunn takes a step toward Fiona, glaring down at her diminutive form. “So maybe I’ll just take him out then, huh? Lure him to the surface and trigger a little stroke or something.”

Suddenly Fiona is a very different creature than the woman I thought I knew. “Listen up, you psychotic bully,” she seethes. “I’m to report to the president of Unified America in less than an hour. If I even suspect my brother is in any danger, you’re going to feel her wrath.” She pauses briefly, then flashes a terrible smile. “Big sister can be ruthless.”

Palmer Gunn scowls and seems to loom over her like a great gargoyle. He wants to hurt her, I can tell. But instead, he matches her terrible smile with his own and chuckles. “Fine. But don’t think you can throw your weight around to save this one.” He gestures at me with a dimpled chin. “Once we scrape his NanoPrint, he’s dead. I got orders, just like you.”

My eyes glaze over with shock. What could the president possibly hold against me?

Fiona looks away, out the window at the airfield on the horizon. “I know,” she mutters. She turns to me, but she avoids my eyes. “I’m really sorry, Wilson.”

My brain is overloading from the sheer contrast of stimulus I’ve experienced in the last twenty-four hours; I feel like I’m so close to understanding it all, yet—as always—my mind is incapable of drawing the pieces together. My thinking muscles are just too tired, cutting off in midthought, merging ideas that don’t belong together. I think of Wallace and the bizarre fragmentation of his mental processes under the influence of a BP7 seed, and I can’t help but draw some similarities between that and what I’m experiencing.

It’s then that something occurs to me, something that perhaps should have long ago.

“PRMC,” I say. “It’s a Miritech company, isn’t it?”

Fiona swallows visibly, steeling herself for something. Her face begins to smooth into an expressionless mask. “Always a few steps behind the pack, Wilson.”

Ignoring the jab, I put a hasty conclusion into words before it can fall apart. “So, I’ve been working for the vice president all this time?” I consider this for a moment and realize that I’ve overlooked the significance of her earlier remark. “Wait—Carlisle. She’s not just the vice president anymore, is she?”

Fiona looks at me appraisingly with eyes turned to stone, and then shakes her head as if annoyed. The longer I look at her, the less I can reconcile her with the woman I once knew. “How do you even manage to dress yourself in the morning?” she mutters. Her demeanor has now completely transformed. My ears burn, my heart turns to lead in my chest.

It’s not merely that I’ve been chastened that saddens me just now. I know it’s in my nature to cringe against such treatment when perhaps I ought to keep my chin up. But I think it’s her blatant and immediate disentanglement from me as a person—as a man who has both consciously and unconsciously yearned for her affection, if not her respect. I know I’ve probably read or dreamed things into our relationship over the previous months—I’m a man who doesn’t take hints well, after all—but until right now, I haven’t realized just how prolific her deception has been. And how ugly she really is to deliberately turn on me rather than put up an ounce of fight for me.

“Does that make it easier for you, kicking me while I’m down?” A shimmer of guilt ripples across her face, but it’s fleeting. She masks it with a bland smile and turns away, dismissing me.

“Go ahead—convince yourself that you hate me, if it’ll make this easier.”

Gunn sighs nearby and rubs at his temples. “Would you two love birds knock it off? You’re giving me a headache.”

For a while, we comply. But with the passage of each second, my anger swells until it can no longer be contained. Spite takes my reins, and it has a smart mouth.

“Too bad about Mars, huh?” I remark, eyes boring into her with a glare that smolders with radioactive intensity. “All those years of hard work down the drain.”

She considers me with a flicker of uncertainty, trying to resist the bait. But she can’t. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she sighs with feigned disinterest.

“It means your seeds—the hallucinogenic fruits of your labor—they’re not sterile.” Her expression turns to steel, and for a split second I fear I’ve only demonstrated my modest intelligence again. But then, her eyes narrow and her mouth curls into a terrible sneer.

“You’re lying,” she says, but the waver in her voice and the fresh desperation in her eyes betray that she knows better. I’m not capable of it, after all. Particularly to her.

Suddenly, behind the exhilaration of this small victory—and just above the merry gliding of the shuttle above the city—I feel a long-forgotten tingling on my wrist.

And everything changes.

My NanoPrint is suddenly humming full blast, laboring to download thousands of unheeded notices. At once, my senses are overloaded with auditory and retinal signage. Wincing, I struggle to dig through it all, sweeping aside the nonsense to reach my file directory. It’s no good; my implant is all but locked up. Still, I’m not completely out of options. If I hurry, maybe I can—

>>Oh, Wilson. I’ve missed you sooooo much!

Marilyn slides from my periphery into the center overlay of my vision at half opacity.

>>Say, handsome—why don’t I configure all these new add-ons for you? I know how you like it when I—

Dang it—not now, Marilyn! I give my digital personal assistant—who is even more beautiful than I remember, I can’t help noticing—a mental shove aside; she responds with a sexy pout before blinking out in a blast of trademarked, skirt-lifting wind. Before I can regroup, her head reappears.

>>
Maybe later?
she whispers with a long-lashed wink, and then she’s gone.

Breathing heavily, I manually add a single request to my process queue. Sequences process there so quickly I almost lose track of my request immediately. Once I find it, I realize a minor adjustment is needed. I open the request to edit and increase its priority rank to
urgent
, which sends it closer to the top of the queue. I still can’t predict when my request will engage—native implant updates are inherently profiled with the highest priority, so they supersede all other processes. For the moment, all I can do is wait.

Our shuttle glides onto pavement with a slight jolt, though I hardly notice.

Fiona sees the strain on my face and visibly tenses.

“What’re you doing?”

“Nothing,” I mutter. A mist of sweat at my hairline channels into a single, telling droplet down my cheek.

Fiona rises to her feet, but there’s nothing she can do.

“Stop him,” she barks to Gunn.

With startling speed and agility, Gunn is instantly on me, gripping my arms and screaming obscenities in my face. He gets one of my fingers into his meaty fist and yanks it back—seriously, what’s with this guy and fingers? “Stop!” he growls. My brain explodes with agony, and I shriek—but I cry out as much in victory as in pain. My implant has finished updating, and even as it bombards me with a year’s worth of notices and unsolicited spam—I almost laugh at the number of Nike ads in my system—and while Gunn has his barbaric way with my poor, defenseless fingers, I sense my implant bulleting through its queue and finally preparing to process my humble request, and then—

Executing file pedestal.exe.

Gunn begins punching me in a bone-jarring frenzy, as if he can somehow sense that the moment is irretrievably slipping through his fingers. With each blow to the head, my vision dims. “Just kill him,” Fiona pleads, and for a moment I’m flooded with burning hate. “You know I can’t,” Gunn hisses. “Get up front and engage the jammer.” He catches me with a clean right cross to the jaw, and the world fills with black stars, which suck at the light and swell like black holes.

At a run, Fiona disappears into a control chamber at the front of the shuttle. A second passes, then another. Though hurt, my head is clearing. Gunn locks eyes with me, probing for some sign that my inner workings have been interrupted. Arthur’s program stalls; my retinas alight with connection errors, weighing down my spirits like Jovian gravity. Just as quickly as they were born, my hopes blink out of existence.

Fiona reappears and announces, “It’s on.” I stare at the ceiling with my best poker face, but Gunn sees through it. Smiling, he manhandles me into a seated position, rubbing and flexing the pink knobs of his swelling knuckles. “Cripes, that was close,” he says with a relieved chuckle. He offers this observation to me, it seems, as if I’m supposed to nod my head in lighthearted agreement.

Without warning, the shuttle gains momentum, and Gunn’s smile falters; the whine of the shuttle’s twin engines rises to unfamiliar heights as old warehouses and private airfields begin to race by.

Gunn turns to Fiona with a sharp rebuke. “What’d you do? Why are we speeding up?” Fiona pales with uncertainty. “I don’t know, I just…” She dashes to the control chamber, footfalls vibrating through the floor.

Suddenly, our center of gravity shifts dangerously off kilter as the shuttle confronts a corner too quickly. Gunn teeters on his feet, grabbing at a luggage rack overhead to remain standing. A second passes and it feels as if we’re about to roll. Instead, the shuttle straightens and stabilizes on its axis. Still, we don’t lose velocity.

“It’s the nexus jammer,” Fiona calls out, voice ringing with growing panic. “I think it’s interfering with the shuttle’s navigation link.”

Gunn bolts to her aid, cursing the “Chinese piece of scrap” with each step. He disappears into the control chamber, and for a scant moment, I consider the wisdom of trying to lock them both in. Even as I contemplate this, the shuttle begins to slow. Looking around, I realize just how old the vehicle is; the once-white interior moldings have yellowed with time. The seat cushions are quilt-like with worn, vinyl patches. This thing could easily have retired from public service ten years ago or more. Now that I’m paying attention, I notice that a fine, faraday mesh has been applied to the interior; but it’s a sloppy installation—frays of thin copper wire protrude here and there, trailing like wisps of shimmery hair.

I rise on wobbly legs and peer out the window, placing a trembling hand against the scratched resin for support. Outside, the scenery has transitioned to old refinery tanks and stacks of rusting shipping containers. The vehicle encounters a bump in the road, and I feel the window panel give a little under my hand. My gaze slips to a lever set into the base of the window frame. There, a small red sticker reads, “Emergency Exit Only. Alarm Will Sound.”

“Sit down, you little twerp,” Gunn snaps from the doorway at the end of the aisle, but I pay him no mind. Sparks are popping in my head burning holes through the cloudbanks of my rattled brain.

I reach out and rotate the lever with detached curiosity.

“Don’t you freakin dare,” Gunn bellows. I turn to smile at him just as he begins a clumsy scamper toward me, propelling his considerable girth forward against the seat backs along the aisle.