She studies him for an uncomfortable moment, then shakes her head. ‘Never.’ She opens the door, steps out of the vehicle, walks towards the very big house and out of his life.
He watches her go, wills her to stop, turn around, run back to the car, tell him that it’s all been a terrible misunderstanding.
That does not happen.
He slots the car into gear and pulls away from the kerb.
‘Well, that blew chunks.’ Corey rubs his face as he pulls the BMW onto Santa Monica Boulevard. He can’t remember the last time he felt this bad. Yes, he’d often been lonely back in the Northern Territory, but this is different, and, in many ways, worse, because he’d caught a glimpse of what life could be like with someone extraordinary — and then it was gone, like smoke on the wind. It feels like he’s lost something precious that will be impossible to replace.
And, to ice the worst cake ever, he asked her who her boyfriend was, thinking he might be able to learn something from the answer, like what kind of guy you had to be to date a woman like her. Well, he learned something all right: never ask questions like that! The answer is a guy who is so far out of Corey’s league that they aren’t even playing the same game.
On the bright side, at least he didn’t have to explain Spike to Lola. Funny how the things you worry about are never the things that bite you on the arse.
Spike barks.
‘Well, I apologise if my lack of success with the opposite sex reflects poorly on you.’
Another bark.
‘Taking my shirt off would not have made any difference.’
Corey drives on. The memory of the night in ‘97 when the quake hit and he lost his mum floods back. It’s funny, that memory only resurfaces when he feels bad — and then makes him feel worse, which truly sucks. He finds the best way to deal with it is not to. Just bury it as deep as possible and ignore it. Eventually it will go away on its own. Of course, that means it will come back again later, but he’d cross that bridge when it reared up unexpectedly.
He did try to deal with it once. He was in his late teens and his need for answers became so strong that for a while he began reading about fault lines and earthquakes in his spare time, not just the ones in Australia but wherever they occurred across the planet. For a brief moment he’d even considered heading to Sydney University to study seismology and research earthquakes, but the call to fly was too strong and he didn’t think he could sit in a classroom for years on end, no matter how interesting the subject.
Corey pulls up at a red light. It’s an intersection. As he said to Lola earlier he’s not great at understanding subtext, but he can’t help but think he’s reached a crossroads in his life too.
Spike barks.
It’s actually a good question and takes his mind off the horrendous feeling-sorry-for-himself-fest he’s been indulging in for the last couple of minutes. What do they do now? He’s in no hurry to return to Central Australia. He loves his home but he wants to experience a world outside the desert. So where to next? He can stay in Los Angeles, try to find some work. He likes the vibrancy of the city, that there’s always something going on, but the Florida Keys are also tempting.
He’d visited them at the beginning of the tour around America, travelled the two-hundred-kilometre-long Overseas Highway, the one they blew up in True Lies, one of his favourite movies, and even though he’d only spent a week there, the place captured his heart more than any other spot during the journey. He’s pretty sure that’s because of the ocean: every time he looked at the Florida Strait it was a different shade of blue. There’s just something about the sea that, after living a desert life for so long, makes his heart sing. When the movie deal is finalised he’ll have the dough to move down there and, as Cape Canaveral is close, it’ll be easy to catch up with Judd and Rhonda when they’re in Florida.
The dog barks.
Corey glances at the animal and grins. ‘Yep, I’m thinking Florida, too.’
4
Alvy Blash is almost certain this is the day he will change the world.
Almost.
The next five minutes will tell him for sure.
He moves to the metre-wide fan positioned in front of the curvy, high-waisted Hyundai iX35 and flicks the power switch. The fan spins up and the large room, with cement walls, floor and ceiling, reverberates with the deep, flat chop of rotating blades. The torrent of air slams into the front of the car with such force it rattles the windscreen wipers.
Alvy points at Jacob, who sits behind the Hyundai’s steering wheel. Jacob pushes the start button on the dash and the engine cranks to life. He slides out of the vehicle and exits the room through the only door, which sits directly beside a long, thin horizontal window that’s double-glazed with shatterproof glass and built into the wall at eye level.
In front of the vehicle the woolly-haired Alvy holds a small, metal spray can in his left hand and turns to Bunsen, who stands behind the shatterproof glass. Bunsen nods then Alvy takes a deep breath and presses the button on top of the can. Once. It emits a fine puff of clear mist that is whisked by the airstream straight into the Hyundai’s front grille.
That clear mist is why they are here. Alvy almost called it Hedorah, after the fictional Japanese smog monster, but went with the Swarm instead because it better describes what it actually is: a very large group of very tiny particles working in perfect unison to complete a very sophisticated task. Granted, calling it the Swarm isn’t as exciting as naming it after one of Godzilla’s nemeses, but it feels right for an invention at the forefront of molecular nanotechnology.
Bunsen triggers a digital Seiko stopwatch as Alvy exits the room, closes the metal door behind him and moves to the window where they all study the Hyundai, its engine ticking over at just over a thousand revolutions per minute.
Alvy’s heart races. He’s never felt this nervous. He’s been fiddling with the Swarm’s formula for the last week, working on the molecular assembler, tinkering with the messenger RNA and tweaking the sequences of amino acids that construct the protein molecules. He’d really wanted to spend another day on it — he always wants to spend ‘another day’ on everything he works on — but gave in to Bunsen’s demand that they perform a live test to see where they stood.
‘Come-on-come-on-come-on,’ Alvy says it through an exhaled breath and glances at the stopwatch. The numbers blink and change, ten, eleven, twelve seconds. He’s spent the last thirty-four months, every day and night since Bunsen recruited him, creating and fine-tuning the Swarm, and now he’s about to find out if all of that time, effort and money were worthwhile.
He’s suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of dread. Did he miss a step? Is the self-replication sequence correct? He thinks so, but you never know until you run a real-world test. He’s actually glad Bunsen pushed him to do this. If it were up to him he would have put it off, then put it off again. It helps to have someone cracking the whip, not that the twenty-nine-year-old needs much motivation. He has embraced Bunsen’s worldview wholeheartedly, has not only drunk the Kool-Aid but come back for more until the jug was empty, then mixed up his own batch.
Alvy always worked on his own in the past, which meant he was a bit of a lonely guy, his excess weight, facial hair and actual hair, and his preoccupation with Grand Theft Auto, not doing him any favours socially (that is, with the ladies). He guessed that’s why Bunsen sought him out: his skill set and solitary lifestyle — there was nothing at home to distract him from the job at hand. Of course, he’s not working alone here, he’s part of the team and he enjoys the dynamic immensely. It reminds him of when he was young and his brother and father were alive. He’s sure they’d be proud of what he’s doing, would realise that the Swarm will one day change the world for the better.