Oceanic (15 page)

Daniel said, “If you take any data from the Play Pen logs—”

“I’ll honor all the confidentiality clauses in my contract.” Lucien smiled. “But anyone can take an interest in the Higgs field; that’s public domain.”

After he left, Daniel bribed the nurse to crank up his medication, until even the sting of betrayal and disappointment began to fade.

A universe
, he thought happily.
Soon I’ll have a universe of my own.

But I’m going to need some workers in there, some allies, some companions. I can’t do it all alone; someone has to carry the load.

1

A few weeks after his fourteenth birthday, with the soybean harvest fast approaching, Lincoln began having vivid dreams of leaving the farm and heading for the city. Night after night, he pictured himself gathering supplies, trudging down to the highway, and hitching his way to Atlanta.

There were problems with the way things got done in the dream, though, and each night in his sleep he struggled to resolve them. The larder would be locked, of course, so he dreamed up a side-plot about collecting a stash of suitable tools for breaking in. There were sensors all along the farm’s perimeter, so he dreamed about different ways of avoiding or disabling them.

Even when he had a scenario that seemed to make sense, daylight revealed further flaws. The grille that blocked the covered part of the irrigation ditch that ran beneath the fence was too strong to be snipped away with bolt-cutters, and the welding torch had a biometric lock.

When the harvest began, Lincoln contrived to get a large stone caught in the combine, and then volunteered to repair the damage. With his father looking on, he did a meticulous job, and when he received the expected praise he replied with what he hoped was a dignified mixture of pride and bemusement, “I’m not a kid anymore. I can handle the torch.”

“Yeah.” His father seemed embarrassed for a moment, then he squatted down, put the torch into supervisor mode, and added Lincoln’s touch to the authorized list.

Lincoln waited for a moonless night. The dream kept repeating itself, thrashing impatiently against his skull, desperate to be made real.

When the night arrived and he left his room, barefoot in the darkness, he felt as if he was finally enacting some long rehearsed performance: less a play than an elaborate dance that had seeped into every muscle in his body. First, he carried his boots to the back door and left them by the step. Then he took his backpack to the larder, the borrowed tools in different pockets so they wouldn’t clank against each other. The larder door’s hinges were attached on the inside, but he’d marked their positions with penknife scratches in the varnish that he’d practiced finding by touch. His mother had secured the food store years before, after a midnight raid by Lincoln and his younger brother, Sam, but it was still just a larder, not a jewel-safe, and the awl bit through the wood easily enough, finally exposing the tip of one of the screws that held the hinges in place. The pliers he tried first couldn’t grip the screw tightly enough to get it turning, but Lincoln had dreamed of an alternative. With the awl, he cleared away a little more wood, then he jammed a small hexagonal nut onto the screw’s thread and used a T-handled socket wrench to turn them together. The screw couldn’t move far, but this was enough to loosen it. He removed the nut and used the pliers, then with a few firm taps from a hammer, delivered via the socket wrench, the screw broke free of the wood.

He repeated the procedure five more times, freeing the hinges completely, then he strained against the door, keeping a firm grip on the handle, until the tongue of the lock slipped from its groove.

The larder was pitch black, but he didn’t risk using his flashlight; he found what he wanted by memory and touch, filling the backpack with enough provisions for a week.
After that?
He’d never wondered, in the dream. Maybe he’d find new friends in Atlanta who’d help him. The idea struck a chord, as if it was a truth he was remembering, not a hopeful speculation.

The tool shed was locked securely, but Lincoln was still skinny enough to crawl through the hole in the back wall, hidden by junk for so long that it had fallen off the end of his father’s repair list. This time he risked the flashlight and walked straight to the welding torch, rather than groping his way across the darkness. He maneuvered it through the hole, and didn’t bother rearranging the rotting timbers that had concealed the entrance. There was no point covering his tracks. He would be missed within minutes of his parents rising, no matter what, so the important thing now was speed.

He put on his boots and headed for the irrigation ditch. Their German shepherd, Melville, trotted up and started licking Lincoln’s hand. Lincoln stopped and petted him for a few seconds, then firmly ordered him back toward the house. The dog made a soft wistful sound, but complied.

Twenty meters from the perimeter fence, Lincoln climbed into the ditch. The enclosed section was still a few meters away, but he crouched down immediately, practicing the necessary constrained gait, and shielding himself from the sensors’ gaze. He clutched the torch under one arm, careful to keep it dry. The chill of the water didn’t much bother him; his boots grew heavy, but he didn’t know what the ditch concealed, and he’d rather have water-logged boots than a rusty scrap of metal slicing his foot.

He entered the enclosed, concrete cylinder, then a few steps brought him to the metal grille. He switched on the torch and oriented himself by the light of its control panel. When he put on the goggles he was blind, but then he squeezed the trigger of the torch and the arc lit up the tunnel around him.

Each bar took just seconds to cut, but there were a lot of them. In the confined space the heat was oppressive; his T-shirt was soon soaked with sweat. Still, he had fresh clothes in his pack, and he could wash in the ditch once he was through. If he was still not respectable enough to get a ride, he’d walk to Atlanta.

“Young man, get out of there immediately.”

Lincoln shut off the arc. The voice, and those words, could only belong to his grandmother. For a few pounding heartbeats, he wondered if he’d imagined it, but then in the same unmistakable tone, ratcheted up a notch, she added, “Don’t play games with me, I don’t have the patience for it.”

Lincoln slumped in the darkness, disbelieving. He’d dreamed his way through every detail, past every obstacle. How could she appear out of nowhere and ruin everything?

There wasn’t room to turn around, so he crawled backward to the mouth of the tunnel. His grandmother was standing on the bank of the ditch.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

He said, “I need to get to Atlanta.”

“Atlanta? All by yourself, in the middle of the night? What happened? You got a craving for some special kind of food we’re not providing here?”

Lincoln scowled at her sarcasm, but knew better than to answer back. “I’ve been dreaming about it,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Night after night. Working out the best way to do it.”

His grandmother said nothing for a while, and when Lincoln realized that he’d shocked her into silence he felt a pang of fear himself.

She said, “You have no earthly reason to run away. Is someone beating you? Is someone treating you badly?”

“No ma’am.”

“So
why exactly is it
that you need to go?”

Lincoln felt his face grow hot with shame. How could he have missed it? How could he have fooled himself into believing that the obsession was his own? But even as he berated himself for his stupidity, his longing for the journey remained.

“You’ve got the fever, haven’t you? You know where those kind of dreams come from: nanospam throwing a party in your brain. Ten billion idiot robots playing a game called
Steve At Home
.”

She reached down and helped him out of the ditch. The thought crossed Lincoln’s mind that he could probably overpower her, but then he recoiled from the idea in disgust. He sat down on the grass and put his head in his hands.

“Are you going to lock me up?” he asked.

“Nobody’s turning anybody into a prisoner. Let’s go talk to your parents. They’re going to be thrilled.”

The four of them sat in the kitchen. Lincoln kept quiet and let the others argue, too ashamed to offer any opinions of his own. How could he have let himself sleepwalk like that? Plotting and scheming for weeks, growing ever prouder of his own ingenuity, but doing it all at the bidding of the world’s stupidest, most despised dead man.

He still yearned to go to Atlanta. He itched to bolt from the room, scale the fence, and jog all the way to the highway. He could see the whole sequence in his mind’s eye; he was already thinking through the flaws in the plan and hunting for ways to correct them.

He banged his head against the table. “Make it stop! Get them out of me!”

His mother put an arm around his shoulders. “You know we can’t wave a magic wand and get rid of them. You’ve got the latest counterware. All we can do is send a sample to be analyzed, do our bit to speed the process along.”

The cure could be months away, or years. Lincoln moaned pitifully. “Then lock me up! Put me in the basement!”

His father wiped a glistening streak of sweat from his forehead. “That’s not going to happen. If I have to be beside you everywhere you go, we’re still going to treat you like a human being.” His voice was strained, caught somewhere between fear and defiance.

Silence descended. Lincoln closed his eyes. Then his grandmother spoke.

“Maybe the best way to deal with this is to let him scratch his damned itch.”

“What?” His father was incredulous.

“He wants to go to Atlanta. I can go with him.”

“
The Stevelets
want him in Atlanta,” his father replied.

“They’re not going to harm him, they just want to borrow him. And like it or not, they’ve already done that. Maybe the quickest way to get them to move on is to satisfy them.”

Lincoln’s father said, “You know they can’t be satisfied.”

“Not completely. But every path they take has its dead end, and the sooner they find this one, the sooner they’ll stop bothering him.”

His mother said, “If we keep him here, that’s a dead end for them too. If they want him in Atlanta, and he’s not in Atlanta—”

“They won’t give up that easily,” his grandmother replied. “If we’re not going to lock him up and throw away the key, they’re not going to take a few setbacks and delays as some kind of proof that Atlanta’s beyond all hope.”

Silence again. Lincoln opened his eyes. His father addressed Lincoln’s grandmother. “Are you sure you’re not infected, yourself?”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t go all Body Snatchers on me, Carl. I know the two of you can’t leave the farm right now. So if you want to let him go, I’ll look after him.” She shrugged and turned her head away imperiously. “I’ve said my piece. Now it’s your decision.”

2

Lincoln drove the truck as far as the highway, then reluctantly let his grandmother take the wheel. He loved the old machine, which still had the engine his grandfather had installed, years before Lincoln was born, to run on their home-pressed soybean oil.

“I plan to take the most direct route,” his grandmother announced. “Through Macon. Assuming your friends have no objection.”

Lincoln squirmed. “Don’t call them that!”

“I’m sorry.” She glanced at him sideways. “But I still need to know.”

Reluctantly, Lincoln forced himself to picture the drive ahead, and he felt a surge of
rightness
endorsing the plan. “No problem with that,” he muttered. He was under no illusion that he could prevent the Stevelets from influencing his thoughts, but deliberately consulting them, as if there was a third person sitting in the cabin between them, made him feel much worse.

He turned to look out the window, at the abandoned fields and silos passing by. He had been down this stretch of highway a hundred times, but each piece of blackened machinery now carried a disturbing new poignancy. The Crash had come thirty years ago, but it still wasn’t truly over. The Stevelets aspired to do no harm – and supposedly they got better at that year by year – but they were still far too stupid and stubborn to be relied upon to get anything right. They had just robbed his parents of two skilled pairs of hands in the middle of the harvest; how could they imagine that that was harmless? Millions of people around the world had died in the Crash, and that couldn’t all be blamed on panic and self-inflicted casualties. The government had been crazy, bombing half the farms in the south-east; everyone agreed now that it had only made things worse. But many other deaths could not have been avoided, except by the actions of the Stevelets themselves.

You couldn’t reason with them, though. You couldn’t shame them, or punish them. You just had to hope they got better at noticing when they were screwing things up, while they forged ahead with their impossible task.

“See that old factory?” Lincoln’s grandmother gestured at a burned-out metal frame drooping over slabs of cracked concrete, standing in a field of weeds. “There was a conclave there, almost twenty years ago.”

Lincoln had been past the spot many times, and no one had ever mentioned this before. “What happened? What did they try?”

“I heard it was meant to be a time machine. Some crackpot had put his plans on the net, and the Stevelets decided they had to check it out. About a hundred people were working there, and thousands of animals.”

Lincoln shivered. “How long were they at it?”

“Three years.” She added quickly, “But they’ve learned to rotate the workers now. It’s rare for them to hang on to any individual for more than a month or two.”

A month or two. A part of Lincoln recoiled, but another part thought: that wouldn’t be so bad. A break from the farm, doing something different. Meeting new people, learning new skills, working with animals.

Rats, most likely.

Steve Hasluck had been part of a team of scientists developing a new kind of medical nanomachine, refining the tiny surgical instruments so they could make decisions of their own, on the spot. Steve’s team had developed an efficient way of sharing computing power across a whole swarm, allowing them to run large, complex programs known as “expert systems” that codified decades of biological and clinical knowledge into pragmatic lists of rules. The nanomachines didn’t really “know” anything, but they could churn through a very long list of “if A and B, there’s an eighty percent chance of C” at blistering speed, and a good list gave them a good chance of cutting a lot of diseases off short.