Beth walked out of the project management bullpen and hung by the door. Next to the elevators, Hatch had one broad hand on Gibson’s shoulder, addressing the team. After a while, the chosen nine, Chronon-1, followed Hatch to a glassed-in meeting room.
Beth stayed back, watching.
Gibson never took his eyes off Hatch, hardly blinked, nodding sharply at anything the CEO had to say.
It was a short meeting. Hatch departed. Chronon-1 filed out, marched briskly past project management.
Gibson saw Beth as they passed.
“Yo, Wilder,” he called out, all Louisianan.
“Looks like the squad’s got something on the boil tonight,” she said.
The squad came to a halt while Gibson broke off to get closer to Beth. “Your shift ends around six, yeah?”
“My squad’s on call. Monarch Actual didn’t say why.”
“I’m gonna need to blow off some steam later. I’d like to give you a ride home.” He smirked. “You gonna say yes this time, or what?”
Gibson had the corn-fed steroidal physique of a career operator and a face like a thumb. Whatever juice he was on expressed through his sweat, sour and chemical, half-masked by liberal splashes of Green Irish Tweed.
I know about the gym bag in the trunk of your car. I know what you keep under the bottom lining. I know where the blond hair caught in the zip came from.
“No thanks.”
“Treat me nice and maybe you’ll find out what you’re missing. I’m talkin’ about C-1 now, punkin’ butter.”
Irene hitched a smile behind him. She was loving this.
“Y’know, sometimes we still watch your washout footage. For a laugh. All that screaming.” He waved his arms around. “Calling for Daddy. Goddamn, Wilder.”
“Hey, boss.” Donny was lightweight, tightly muscled, shorter than Gibson. “Come on. Almost show time, yeah? Let’s do it.”
Gibson kissed his fingers, waved her off. “Later, punkin’.”
Horatio crept over. “Do you think tonight has something to do with Project Lifeboat?”
Beth turned on him. “Don’t ever talk about that. Especially in this building.”
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 3:45 A.M. Riverport University.
Jack zipped his jacket against the cold and headed down Founders’ Walk, hands stuffed in pockets. Gone were the electrically retrofitted gas lamps he remembered, the ’70s-era garbage cans, chattering sprinklers, the occasional stray dog, and the grandfatherly feel of the scattered buildings.
They had been replaced by track-lit paths, trimmed hedges, solar-powered lamplight, and buildings that evoked a Future Europe designed by robots-all steel, glass, angles, and facets. A guy in a letterman jacket rested with his sleeping girlfriend on an ergonomic bench. Behind them an older woman in a Ramones T-shirt twirled a set of LED poi, inscribing Möbius figure eights in the air, strobing red and green. In the distance a three-sided infoscreen wished passersby a pleasant evening and directed them to the nearest campus exit. The only thing out of place in this better, brighter Riverport U was the library: a tottering old dame of a building from a time few cared to remember.
Jack hadn’t set foot in there since a senior-year orientation tour. It was a shock to see the changes time had wrought.
The protest camp was in the largest triangular section of lawn he had seen from the street: a collection of tents and canvas shelters, ringed by a makeshift wall of wilted placards, bicycles, sodden bunting, and plastic sheeting adorned with spray-bombed anti-Monarch logos. A few sleepy-eyed protesters shambled from one tent to another, to the mixed soundtrack of acoustic guitar and Rihanna’s last hit. Jack wasn’t sure if the people inside were winding down or waking up.
In the east the sky was lighting up steel. The last time he had seen dawn over this town was from Bannerman’s Overlook.
Again he thought of Zed, wondered where she was, and why life had pathed the way it had. He had spent the first four and a bit years following what passed for leads: things Zed had said, references she had made that sounded like slipups, rather than another fiction.
He was never going to know who she was, where she had come from, or where she had gone. That was just the way it was. After six years, he was beginning to make peace with that.
Or he thought he was, until he found himself here again. Seeing Zed’s house. The 7-Eleven where they’d pour vodka into a Slurpee on a Friday night. The bridge where she free ran. The skate park where she spent some afternoons. He could feel that clear ache pouring into his cracks and he needed to get out of Riverport before it set and became a part of him again.
“Hey, if you’re waiting for the demolition it isn’t happening till eleven tomorrow. Take a flyer.” The girl was in her early twenties, scraps of day-old Day-Glo zinc still visible on her cheeks. She was cherub-faced and surly, zipped into a thermal hoodie and proffering a flyer identical to the one Jack had peeled off the sidewalk out front.
“How’s it going?” He gestured toward the old library. “Are they still going to-”
“Tear it down? Yeah. If this were happening in Europe cars would be burning.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. I mean-”
“Oh yeah,” she snapped. “No time no time? Got some important importance going down? Your dog walker forgot to pick up Mr. Snuggle’s homeopathic Prozac foam? You’re looking at history, an abstract concept made real and it’s standing right there. It was built in a different world, by people with different values. That library is more than the knowledge it houses. It’s shelter from another age, a time capsule, and all that makes it irreplaceable. Once it’s gone we can’t fake it back into existence, like so much other bullshit. For the good of others at least pretend to give a fuck.”
A trip wire snagged in Jack’s head. “Listen,” he said, low and even. “Across the ancient world ten-thousand-year-old relics are being jackhammered into talcum by morons from the Stone Age. In Australia three-thousand-year-old rock art is being dynamited to make way for coal that nobody wants. In Tasmania some of the oldest forests on Earth are being wood-chipped for toothpicks. In China millions of tourists are using legions of terra-cotta warriors as gum receptacles. In Africa billionaires are bidding to be the one to kill the last of a species. In Greenland the ice has pretty much vanished. Prime farmland is being fracked into uselessness. Food prices are set to triple. In ten years we’ll be eating bugs. By comparison this building was erected last week and has as much meaning as the beer cans your hashtag warriors are sleeping on.”
“You’re saying this doesn’t matter?”
“I’m saying this is a flyover town. You need to get out more and I’m not your therapy.”
“This is my backyard, fucko. I can’t chain myself to a Syrian obelisk, but I can do this. So take your smarmy been-there-done-that high-minded fucking-”
“Hey! Sir?” A rent-a-cop was marching over, flashlight in hand. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. “Is this person bothering you? Amy, we talked about this. You and your people can hand out your material, but you were warned: one more incident and you’re out.” The cloth badge on his sleeve flagged him as Monarch Protective Services.
Ah crap, now the hangover. Guilt. He hated this part. “Wait, wait, wait.” Enough to be miserable; no need to be a miserable asshole. “She didn’t do anything wrong.” He extended his hand to her. “Give me a few flyers. I’m heading into the city later. I’ll hand them out.”
Amy glanced at him, skeptically.
“Really,” Jack said.
Amy handed over five. The guard sighed, clicked off the flashlight. “Can I take you somewhere, sir? If you’re not part of the protest you shouldn’t…” The guard’s eyes narrowed. Jack took a half step back. “Jack Joyce, right?”