Join (26 page)

“You did a full delete, accidentally, maybe?”

“No, I didn't. I don't even think that's possible. Do you have it?”

“No.”

“Did you do a full delete?”

“No.”

They look at each other in disbelief. Leap One says, “It's as if the table disappeared.”

“This is all fucking crazy.”

“It can't really be that simple to bypass the audio filters,” says Leap. “Just lowering the resolution of the recording, adding in some garble, and saying your name backward?”

“Oh,” Chance One says slowly, “yeah, Shimah Snoyl, Hamish Lyons. And the name Hamish Lyons is probably a flag for net sensors. No, I don't think it's that simple. I bet that audio distortion wasn't random at all. A lot of work went into that message.”

“How would he know we're looking for him?” Leap asks.

“Our research?”

“Okay,” says Leap, unconvinced.

“Or Rope told him.”

“Maybe,” says Leap, “in which case, how do we know this message was from Hamish Lyons?”

“We don't.”

After a few moments, Chance says, “He can't authenticate it because use of his authentication would trip the net sensors.”

“I'm supposed to pack up my drives without any assurances?”

“Who else would it be?”

“Rope.”

“Yeah, it could be Rope.”

Leap One throws up his hands and says, “Okay. Can you put my Two and my Three up here for a day?”

“Yes,” Chance says.

Chance One and Four are both watching Leap One. Chance One says, “We never really talked about Mark Pearsun's suicide.”

Leap One looks at Chance One, on his right, then across the table at Chance Four. Leap's jaw clenches. Then he relaxes and says, “I think it's terrible. I don't want to talk about it.”

Chance realizes with surprise that Leap is hiding something.

Three days later, at 4:30
p.m.
, Leap One, Two, Three, and Four and Chance Four are waiting in Chance's spire apartment. Chance receives a delivery notice. They've been there all day.

They have agreed that Chance Four will try to accompany Leap but that Chance's other drives should be elsewhere. For protection, Chance has spread them out, putting distance between them. Chance Five is at a hotel, Chance One has gone to Leap's house in the Olympic Archipelago, and Chance Two is now en route to Barcelona.

They've been keeping the exterior walls of Chance's apartment opaque. A pod-approach video opens on a wall display. It shows a short middle-aged man with a slight potbelly exiting a pod that's just come to rest on Chance's balcony. Recognition routines identify him as Don Kim, a code-green truck driver. He has dark, thinning hair, is wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He stuffs his hands in his front pockets. He's rocking back and forth on his heels with the habitual impatience of a solo delivery driver. He does not appear to have brought anything to deliver.

Chance motions for the door to open.

“Hi,” the man says. His voice is gravelly, worn. His face is pale and unhealthy looking. “I'm here for a pickup.”

At his hotel, Chance Five is searching the man's profile information on Civ Net, but there's nothing unusual. He's self-employed, with a leased rig. Based out of Detroit. Married. One eight-year-old boy.

“I don't have anything,” Chance Four says. Leap Two is now standing behind Chance.

“Yes, you do,” Don Kim says. “You have at least part of what I'm looking for. I just need her and the other three.”

Leap Two says quietly to Chance, though Don Kim can certainly hear it, “A truck driver. Really?”

“You're Leap, right?” the truck driver says. “I'm Don, but you should already know that. Look, this isn't a joke. I'm going to send you coordinates for my truck. Send over one pod with two of your drives. Land it behind the truck. I'll open the doors. Those drives'll come into the truck. The pod comes back here. Fifteen minutes later—and you have to wait at least fifteen minutes—the pod picks up your other two drives. Then, same thing. Don't worry about clothes, food, whatnot. You're covered. Don't bring anything.”

“I'm coming,” Chance Four says.

“This is the drive that fights, right?” Don says. “Jai Kido? There won't be any need for that. I really wish you'd chosen a different drive . . . All right. Okay. Then you're gonna come fifteen minutes after the second group. We'll be waiting for you.”

Don's upper lip and forehead are both shiny with perspiration. He says, “Now I'm going back. Give me fifteen minutes, then send two of Leap's drives. Got it?”

“Yes,” says Chance.

“Okay, look. This is probably scary, but the reality is that both of you are safe. Please don't vid or in any way record anything. Please set your location to mask. And two things. First, the precautions are about avoiding notice. If they want to find us, they will. We want to avoid looking interesting. Second, I'm the only one who's really putting his neck on the line here. If one of you screws up, my rig'll get confiscated, and they'll fish around in my brain. Leap has money. You'll both be fine. I'll be SOL. So please, do as I say for my sake. Okay?”

Chance and Leap both nod.

Don Kim returns to his pod.

As Chance closes the door, Leap says, “Fish around in his brain?”

“I don't think anyone does that,” Chance says. “That would be a prime violation. Unconstitutional.”

PART FOUR

We used to say that stories had a primary theme: either person versus nature, person versus person, or person versus him or herself. That was before. For stories of our time, I believe those themes have become one.

 

—Jalisa Romero,

interview on
Fresh Air

 

if you like puddin' and pie one simple question will tell you why

where's that sugar you wanted to try? it all got baked into puddin' and pie

 

—Lulu's Rhymes ‘n' Things

Chance watches as Leap Three
folds his lanky frame into the pod, settling in beside the smaller Leap One. The pod carrying Leap's two male drives rises quickly to transit height and then speeds away. Even though Leap is connected to Civ Net and would presumably let Chance know if anything went wrong, a few minutes from now this solo whom they've only just met, this Don Kim, will have all four of Leap's drives in his delivery truck. What if the truck is shielded from net access? In fact, that seems likely. And what if the truck is no longer there when Chance arrives? Why had Don Kim insisted that they wait fifteen minutes? A delivery truck could get miles away and be lost on one of the new intercontinental thruways within fifteen minutes. And why wouldn't Don Kim just drive away? After all, someone wants Leap badly enough to mount this whole farcical cloak-and-dagger exercise.

As a point of professional interest, the sheer improbability of the situation both repels and fascinates Chance. What's irresistibly compelling, though, is the potential involvement of Hamish Lyons, a founding pioneer of join science, a man whom Chance has both studied and idolized. Hamish Lyons helped to provoke events so important that they were immediately obscured by a welter of conflicting interpretations and torrents of questions about key information. And Hamish Lyons himself—a man generally believed to be dead, or
gone
—may have sent Leap and Chance a message. Could a simple truck ride actually lead to a meeting with him?

Chance One is searching for networked cameras that might show the truck. Chance is pretty sure that Hamish Lyons, or whoever has sent Don Kim, would consider a search for cameras problematic. Don Kim is concerned about observation by the Directorate. This is just the kind of unusual activity that might trip a network sensor; but the fear of making a catastrophic mistake by trusting the truck driver overshadows everything else.

Chance One lucks into a camera feed that shows an empty pod rising from behind a truck of the class Don Kim drives. There are two other trucks parked nearby. In the background, pods are arriving and leaving from an adjacent shopping district's parking lot. During the ten minutes or so that Chance waits, nothing looks suspicious, nothing seems untoward. Shortly after, the pod returns to Chance's apartment. Chance Four steps nimbly into it. The pod door closes, and the pod flies quickly to the truck.

From Leap's house, Chance One continues watching it through net cams. The pod, blue-gray—almost the color of the cloudy sky—cuts a perfect line through an otherwise immobile world and tucks itself into the truck's looming shadow.

It's late afternoon, cold, the
gloaming already stealing through the sharpened light. Don Kim is standing behind the truck. As Chance Four steps out of the pod, Don motions toward the open doors at the back.

The truck is massive, one of the new class of freight haulers designed to move goods through the stormy continental interior. Its trailer is two and a half stories high and eighteen feet wide, built for recently upgraded thruways. The trailer's bottom is four and a half feet off the ground. Inside are eight standard shipping containers, two on the bottom, two on top, and then four stacked in the same way behind those. Don says, “Just stand on the lift,” meaning the large platform beneath the open doors. Chance does.

The lift rises. When it's level with the inside floor of the truck bed, it starts to tilt upward, forcing Chance to hop into the truck's interior. The lift settles in an upright position, and Chance watches enormous metal doors swing shut behind it. The network cameras that Chance One is watching lag slightly, so the doors close first on Chance Four, and then Chance One watches them clamp together.

Just before the doors clank shut, as the afternoon light is blocked, lights come on inside the truck. Chance Four hears gears moving and parts clanging and assumes the doors are locking.

The back end of one of the interior containers slides aside, and more light spills from it. Leap Two leans out of the container, a note of grace in the drab enclosure. Relieved, Chance says, “We're locked in.”

“Yeah,” says Leap, “but you can karate chop your way through that, can't you?”

Chance Four laughs.

Leap says, “C'mon in. Meet my new friends.”

“
Yes, we do live here.
We call it an armadillo.” A tall, broad-boned woman named Jackson is speaking. At her side is Terry, a dark, curly-haired man, maybe thirty, two or three years older than Jackson. The two of them are Leap's “new friends.”

From inside, the shipping crates that appeared to be separate are united into a single two-story apartment. Other than the bathroom, the first floor is open, with furniture and paint dividing the space into a kitchenette, a compact living room with two couches facing each other, a couple of chairs, and a dining area with a large welded table and several other chairs. Leap Two tells Chance that there are bunks on the second floor.

The apartment is brightly lit and clean, and the furniture is comfortable. Leap Four and One are already sleeping upstairs. Three is reading, his long body bent awkwardly into a low-slung chair.

“The truck is the hardened shell of the armadillo, protecting us,” Jackson says, “and we're the soft body inside.”

“I see,” Chance says. Chance Four's shoulders feel stiff. Chance rolls them, stretching slowly as she scans the truck's interior.

“So you need protection?” Leap Two asks.

“Yeah,” Jackson agrees, “you could say that.”

“You want a beer?” Terry asks.

Leap and Chance both decline. Terry says, “Suit yourself,” and heads to the kitchenette.

“What do you need protection from?” asks Chance.

“Well, you, for one,” says Jackson. “I don't know if you've noticed but the human population isn't exactly thriving.”

“By ‘human' you mean people who haven't joined,” says Leap Two.

“Yeah, humans,” says Jackson. “As opposed to, you know, you. No offense, but you know what a Hydra is? That's kind of how I see joins. That's my thing. I don't have anything against you. But you creep me out a little.”

“And you don't seem to want to let us be,” Terry calls from the kitchenette.

Chance and Leap exchange a glance. Neither likes the turn the conversation has taken, especially not while they're in Jackson and Terry's custody. Leap, attempting a reset, says, “So, you call it an armadillo?”

“Yeah,” Jackson picks up the thread again. “It's heavily shielded. That is, there's a lot of obfu-tech inside the first foot of the interior container walls. Throws off their sensors, you know, and paints a picture of a cargo ship. So the idea is that the Directorate doesn't know we're living inside here.”

Terry is back with an opened can of beer. “But of course they do know we live inside trucks,” he says. “At least, they know that there are trucks like this out there. But they probably don't know how many, and they don't know which ones. There aren't a whole lot of setups this nice. We swap containers between trucks every once in a while to keep them guessing. A shell game.” He smiles and takes a swig of his beer.

“We're pretty good at disabling sensors,” says Jackson, “but they know we're here. Out here. I mean, I guess the point is we're not in any kind of war. We're just trying to figure out how to be in a peaceful kind of coexistence.”

“And just who are
you
?” Leap asks.

“We're us,” says Jackson, slightly affronted. “Like I said, the humans.”

“I think Leap's asking,” Chance says, “if there were to be a war, who would the war be between?”

“Between the humans and the joins,” says Jackson, with a spark of belligerence.

“Wait, wait. Look, we're maybe getting off on the wrong foot,” Terry says. “There's not going to be a war. That . . . that's all just a figure of speech.”

“Okay,” Leap Two says.

“To be clear,” Chance says, “we consider ourselves human.”

Jackson shrugs. Her face is turning red, and she's staring at Chance Four, who appears relaxed but has shifted her weight slightly and opened her stance.

Terry says, “Okay. Okay, Jackson and I, we're not like a lot of the others. We're both open-minded, and we have nothing against you, and especially not you personally. And you joins have all the advantages. We wouldn't have anything to gain by violence. So we're not going down that road. And because of our teachings, we understand that one day you'll all just”—he makes a wavy gesture with his hands—“go to the stars,
peacefully
, and leave the Earth behind for us.”

“After you've poisoned it,” Jackson mutters.

Terry looks quickly from Chance to Leap and then takes a swig of his beer. He's obviously embarrassed by Jackson. “Yeah,” he says, “that's what our teachings say.”

Jackson continues, “Our teachings
show
that the world will be poisoned and visited by plagues and by the destruction of fire and storm. This has already begun, and the evidence is before your eyes. We know you have good intentions, all of you, but you have too much power. Joins are apart from the world. And like Adam, you're bad custodians for the Earth. There will be for three hundred days a storm of ash and destruction. It will rise up, and it will rain down. You'll leave to the stars while we stay behind to complete our task and our purpose: to heal the Earth and redeem what is unredeemable. To recover original paradise.”

As Terry is listening, his face tenses, his mouth pinches shut and finally he closes his eyes briefly. When Jackson is done, he opens his mouth and takes a short breath. Then he says, “Yeah, like she said, we know you have good intentions.”

For the next forty minutes
or so, Leap Two talks with Jackson and Terry, mostly asking questions, while Chance Four listens from one of the couches. From inside the armadillo, access to Civ Net is closely managed. Leap and Chance can get to a few mass-media outlets but not much else.

From Leap's house in the archipelago, Chance One scours Civ Net for information about Jackson and Terry. The only mildly interesting tidbit concerns their church, the Apostolic Brotherhood. The church is small and its adherents almost universally peaceful. They tend to avoid people who don't share their beliefs. They also teach of the corrupting influence of many technological innovations, though they embrace some current technology, and Chance finds he can't predict what they will or won't condemn.

The Brotherhood's teachings start with the twelve apostles and incorporate the basic tenet that if God had included Join in his design for the human race, the apostles would have been joined. They were not joined, though, as Judas shows by acting against the others. The Brotherhood concludes that God's messages aren't meant for joins, and we have to look elsewhere to understand his plan for them.

The Brotherhood has only been provoked into organized violence once, during a clash decades ago with the Church of the Apostolic Union. Records concerning the Church of the Apostolic Union end roughly four years ago. There is some discussion implying the members disbanded it. The Church of the Apostolic Union taught that the closeness of the twelve apostles to one another and to the Messiah symbolizes divine approval of Join. They believed a join of twelve would be particularly blessed.