Skinner (39 page)
Authors: Charlie Huston
SHE SPENDS MUCH
of her time in the hut with Raj and the other kids. Minding the screens, searching the information. The ICSD is a constantly trending topic. There are independent city-states popping up around the world. Independent City-State of Mexico City, ICS Bronx, ICS Georgia, ICS Alabama, ICS Mogadishu, ICS Tiananmen Square, ICS Melbourne, ICS Stockholm. Mostly they are no more than a public park or a city block, and none has a reactor. It is being called the ICS Movement. There have been protests on both sides. Riots. Deaths. T-shirts. Songs. YouTube videos in support and condemnation. Here, they receive thousands of daily requests to emigrate, and as many threats of destruction by bomb, gun, germs, and/or various gods.
Sometimes she takes her father’s knowledge into #1 Shed and helps with the work there. The work has no end. It is a race. Even if most of the people in the street don’t know it, their days are numbered. But the new foundation has been poured, and they have reason to believe it will be strong enough to handle the torque of the generator when it begins to spin. The cooling tank is more difficult, and the towers. They have the advantage of no regulations or bureaucracy. One imperative,
Does it work?
Sadly, the Emerson software is another problem. The product itself is fine, but their computers are underpowered and can’t run it properly. One of the electricity goons has found a breach in the army’s perimeter. A captain who is very open to the possibility of bribes. If all goes well, some young men who used to work as IT wallahs in Bandra will go out tonight and buy what is needed and bring it back inside. After that they might go out again and start finding materials she needs to start building her robots, a nest of spiders that she can set crawling along the perimeter.
Her leg hurts. She takes Tylenol. Or something labeled as Tylenol. That is what is available. It does little to help the pain.
She talks to Cross. She called him on her cell the first night, after Skinner left, told him that she’d seen the reactor. Told him it was real. Leverage to restrain any sudden preemptive attacks. They established an online contact protocol. Skype calls routed through the encoded Tor network. Anonymous communications like these are the best they can manage without scrambler technology on her end. They used the channel to communicate regularly in the first forty-eight hours. Feeding him disinformation along with just enough fact to give him the appearance of remarkable prescience as the community struggled to explain how they had missed something this big, and what they planned to do about it now. She knows Cross is far too smart to swallow everything she’s told him, but uncertainty is the only real tool at her disposal. She told the lies and did what she could to get the ICSD through the first few days. Then something happened to Cross. She knows it was Skinner, but she doesn’t ask what he did. Now she doesn’t have to lie to get Cross’s help. Now when Cross calls, it is usually at a very late hour in Maryland or DC or wherever his campaign to restrain action against the ICSD has taken him. He asks if he is safe, sometimes whispering; asking her, on one occasion, what he would see if he turned on the light.
Am I safe, Jae?
Yes,
she tells him,
you’re safe.
And then she tells him what to do to remain safe.
But mostly she is with the kids, in the hut.
In the ICSD she has found the unpredictable edge of things. What will happen next? No one can say. There is no configuration, not here. Events have no precedent. Here is where the future is being manufactured; right next to tanneries and potting sheds and plastic recycling and open sewers. And there is a peace in it, not trying to find what comes next.
Until she is in front of the computers.
There she watches the feeds and the streams and the posts and the bulletins and reports, retweets and blogs and the digital walls. If they decide to come, this is where the signs will first appear. She will be the one to see it. If they discover the secret, that the reactor is not a danger at all, not yet, their relief and pique will show here, if only a moment before the guns come. And even after the reactor is online, if they can last these next few weeks, the guns will be looking for ways to come after them.
An affront has been offered.
They will not bear the insult, not if they have a choice.
Yet there have been some changes. Quantifiable reductions in the use of the term
contraction.
It seems to be a preparation for something. She suspects that Smith is getting ready to release the trove of Terrence’s documents they sent to him from De Gaulle. They have their own darknet protocol, but Smith refuses almost entirely to use it. She knows that Skinner has been in contact with him as well. Smith did something for Skinner. Signals work, sent information to Cross. But Smith won’t talk details. He just leaks documents from Terrence’s trove. A trickle of incrimination so far; he’s preparing to release the deluge. He remembers the burning body, men killed with the gun he made. Now he fires his own shots from the shadows.
So she works in the shed and she walks the streets and alleys and feels something easing in her head when she does. Disaster World is not the inevitability she saw at the end of every configuration. Not anymore. This may not last, but for now she can see a future with lives to save instead of bodies to dig from the troubled ground. Then she goes to the communications center in Raj’s home, and she looks for the configuration of threat that means the world is coming to kill them after all.
And in between she looks at pictures. She waits for the most current Street Views on Google. She presses Cross and Smith for satellite imagery from obscure corners, on thin pretexts. She plunders photo-sharing services. Scanning crowds. Airports, a special interest. Looking for a tiny configuration. Defined by a single face. Looking for a sign of him.
Half hoping for danger here, to bring him back.
His father is always in #1 Shed.
And
he
is almost always in the media center. Even when he sleeps he is here. The other kids come and go, but he is here. At his computer. On the wall is the bloodstain.
His mom shot a man in the face there.
That thought will be his for the rest of his life. New world. Where Mom shoots a man in the face. Where he works all day and into the night, staring at the screens. Where Father never comes home. Where the army will let no one out of the slum.
David’s family tried to leave. Fear ate them and they tried to leave. David’s father came back alone. The army got David and his mom and his brothers and sisters. David’s father ran. Now he drinks all day. Ashamed. No one knows what the army is doing with the people who try to leave. The TV says they are in a special camp. They have to stay there while the government decides who is a citizen and who is a terrorist. It looks like a refugee camp on the TV, but with big temporary buildings that look like jails; all of them say KESTREL on the roof.
Chiman has died.
His sister was alone at home in the morning while the rest of the family worked. Chiman came home for his cricket bat and found a young man from the neighborhood raping his sister. He had been doing it for years, but out of fear she had told no one. Chiman hit him with his cricket bat and the man took it from him and hit him in the head and Chiman died. The sister screamed and neighbors came and the man ran to the edge of the slum and the army got him and probably took him to the camp. Chiman’s sister left the same night and also was taken by the army. She was ashamed that everyone knew what had been happening to her. So not everything has changed in Dharavi; these things are still happening.
Shitty people.
Raj does not like these shitty people.
But he does like Rani. And she likes him. She says she does. And they are tweeting with Kalki! Two days after Independence, she answered their question.
I have not come to Dharavi. But I want to see the ICSD.
And they talked for a very long time about how to answer and decided to invite her, when it was safer for her to come, and she could have dinner in their homes. And she answered again! Now she tells them to be careful. And asks how they are. Kalki! Jae says it could be someone else. Like when the man pretended to be Skinner and came to their home and his mom had to shoot him. But Raj and Rani don’t believe it. And even if it is someone else, they don’t tell her anything important. And it feels good to believe in this, even if it is a lie.
His friends are in the room with him, and his mom is making lunch to take to his father. His sister is on the cot getting ready to cry because she is tired and hungry. The ball is under his table, next to his feet.
There is no time for the ball now. But soon there will be. Work a little harder for a little longer and there will be time for them all to play soon.
Soon.
Maybe soon.
They didn’t think he could last.
His pale skin would burn in the sun. His soft hands would be torn by the steel. His body, too big, would not bear the diet. Every mouthful must be wrung out, no energy wasted. His body when he came was an engine of waste. Required too much fuel. No. He couldn’t last.
What the hell is he doing here anyway?
They were right. He could not last. He was burned. His hands tore. His body collapsed as he worked in the sun dragging sheets of rusted steel through the clutching wet sand. Then he got up. And dragged until he fell again. And again.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
After months of it, the breakers can barely tell him from themselves.
On the polluted beaches of Chittagong, Bangladesh, where they drag the carcasses of dead ships to be riven for scrap, he has turned dark under the sun and his hands have become calluses and his body has stripped itself of all excess until his skin wraps bone and muscle and sinew like a withered hide.
He sleeps with them in the camp, taking a shift on a cot that he rents with five others. Four hours’ sleep in rotations. There was a fight one night about whose turn it was, and when a drunken man threatened him with a knife he took the knife away from him and then put the drunk into the cot to sleep and threw the knife into the oil-scummed water of the bay.
Someone says he is a soldier who has renounced the wars.
Someone says he is a priest who made a woman pregnant.
Someone says he killed his brother and ran in shame.
Someone says he is secretly filming them.
Another fucking filmmaker
,
they say.
But he has no camera that they can see.
They break fucking ships here on the beach. If you can do the work, you can stay. It would kill most of the world, this work. But he works like a devil. He never gives anyone shit. And he pays his rent and for his food. So fuck it, he’s okay.
But he is a strange fucker for sure.
White Western ship breaker. White skin. It’s brown now. But still that’s what they call him.
Skin.
Strange fucker.
Some nights he goes down to the beach and stands in the viscous tide, harsh reds and rainbow swirls rushing around his bare ankles.
And he looks up at the sky.
Months now.
There are TVs in town. All he has to do is walk a few miles. It’s still the news. He doesn’t know if the ICSD has lasted this long because they have the reactor online or because Cross has kept anyone from going in. He just knows that it’s there. For now.
Safe. For now.
He thinks about her. Breaking the ships. Hidden here. He thinks about her.
As long as he’s here, he can’t be found. As long as he’s here, Cross is afraid. The Skinner Meme in effect. He doesn’t think about the thread dangling their lives. It is always there. Easy to cut.
Nothing new, this dangerous life.
He stands on the shore at night, the cameras whirling by overhead, shooting everything, looking at everything. And he pictures her, safe in a box he has constructed with the threat of himself, looking at her screens, camera lens views of the world at a distance. He knows he is watched then, and he imagines that it is her eyes that are watching him, making him real on this transient earth, and he looks up into the sky and he tells her his secret.
You are my asset, Jae. I protect you.
Everything else is just the world.
Sleepless
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death
The Shotgun Rule
Caught Stealing
Six Bad Things
A Dangerous Man
Already Dead
No Dominion
Half the Blood of Brooklyn
Every Last Drop
My Dead Body
Charlie Huston is the author of
Sleepless,
the bestsellers
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death
and
The Shotgun Rule,
the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and several titles for Marvel Comics. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.
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