The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (19 page)

Crampton turns and shares his line of sight. “I never get tired of it,” she declares.

“I’m still learning the geography around here.” Lane points toward the miniature mountain. “What’s that big green hill over there across the river?”

She doesn’t miss a beat. “It’s called Mount Tabor.”

“Is it a park?”

“No, it’s in private hands.”

“Who owns it?”

She shrugs and smiles. “I have no idea. I’m way too busy up here to pay much attention to what’s going on over there.” She looks at her watch. “As a matter of fact, I have my next meeting in about ten minutes.”

Lane does some desperate deliberation. He needs more time with her. He reaches over the table and puts his hand on top of hers. “Linda, this is all extremely interesting, and I’d really like to hear more. I know you’re very busy, but is there any chance we could have dinner tonight?”

She instantly perks up. He can almost feel the Concolor fuel the flame that drives the hormonal boilers. She makes no effort to pull her hand out from under his. “I’ll have to check,” she says with studied nonchalance. “Can I text you?”

“Sure.” He removes his hand and stands. “There’s an air hop back at one-thirty, right?”

“You can just make it if you leave right now. I’ll call James.”

“Not necessary. With all due respect to James, I think I can handle it.”

Her eyes smolder in expectation. The diamond-tipped bits drill right through him. “I’m sure you can.”

The air hangs still and warm over the pond, with the water nearly gone to glass. Lane walks along the cinder path that circumnavigates these ten aquatic acres at the bottom of the hillside in Pinecrest. He sees the first signs of fall, an odd leaf fallen here and there in pale yellow or pink. It feels better to be out on foot in the seasonal cusp than back in the house that’s not really his. He should be strategizing his dinner tonight with Linda Crampton, but the thought of sleeping with her might ruin this most pleasant afternoon.

He reaches a small bench just off the path and sits. He stretches and rests his extended arms on its back edge. Off to the right, a thick stand of cattails pushes up against the shore. Their phallic flower heads sprout slender antennae that taper up toward the cumulus drift overhead. Insects weave their way among the plants in busy fits of motion. He looks out over the water and catches the sun’s reflection, a blazing disk turned liquid by the pond’s surface. Sun, water, plants, insects. They gradually merge and transport him back to the most pleasant of times.

Fuller Bay. He and Johnny. Lolling in the cabin, rowing on the water, digging in the sand. The good days, the best days of all.

Lane looks up. There she is. Out of nowhere, it seems. She squats at the pond’s shoreline off to his left, pointing a camera at a pair of Canada geese. A lean, angular face with a strong nose and full mouth. Straight hair of a luxuriant brown that stops just short of her shoulders. Lean arms fully exposed by a sleeveless blouse. Muscular legs stretched taut under snug jeans. In a community full of desperately engineered youth, she’s clearly the real thing, somewhere in her twenties.

She senses his attention and looks over, revealing a set of deep blue eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“Not a problem.”

“I come here a lot, looking for the birds,” she explains.

“A hobby?”

She stands, walks over, and sits on a large stone near Lane’s bench. Rather than answer immediately, she gazes down at the grass, which is rapidly turning to straw with the coming of fall. Beneath the stunning edifice, Lane senses an ineffable sadness, a strange melancholy of some kind. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry,” he says.

She looks up at him with a faint smile. “It’s all right. I’m not really a bird-watcher. I’m just tracking this one pair as they journey through the seasons. For no good reason, really.”

“I don’t think it says anywhere that we have to have a reason for everything we do.”

“I suppose not. I’ve never thought about it. There’s a lot of things I’ve never thought about.”

A jogger interrupts their discourse as he trots by. Trim and gray, pacing himself against the relentless pursuit of the Reaper. His labored footsteps fade off down the path.

She stands and slings the camera strap over her shoulder. Lane has some acquaintance with camera models. This one is expensive in the extreme, one of the Ultradef models from Singapore that capture something disturbingly close to visual reality.

“Well, I’ve got my shot, and I’m on my way,” she says. “It’s nice meeting you.”

Lane stands to acknowledge her departure. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Allen Durbin. I just moved in.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Autumn. Autumn West.”

“I don’t know who did your work, but they’re extremely good.” Linda Crampton takes another sip of her white wine, one of many. Her skimpy dress and prominent cleavage indicate that she’s armed for an erotic skirmish of the highest order. The Pond House restaurant’s subdued lighting falls kindly across her sculpted features.

Lane hangs for a moment on her remark, then recovers. Of course. She thinks he’s like all the rest of them, a monument to artificial preservation. “Thank you,” he responds with muted
sincerity.

She drunkenly presses on. “So let’s have the numbers.”

He hovers on the edge of blowing it. He has to assume she means his age ratio. That’s what it always seems to come down to around here. “Well, since you ask, it’s forty-five/sixty-nine.”

“Amazing.”

She takes another sip, and Lane realizes they’re done with dinner, and now simply getting drunk. Pretty soon, he won’t have the cerebral facilities left to get the job done. “Hey, life is short,” he declares. “You better get what you can while you can, right?”

“Right.” Linda turns and looks out a window to the reflection of the full moon on the pond, and the residential lights climbing the hillside. The wine is rapidly contracting her attention span.

“I mean, look at that plane crash out in Hillsboro,” says Lane. “Three guys in the prime of life on a luxury jet, and boom, it’s all over, just like that.” He pauses as if in recall. “They were scientists, I think. Something to do with biotech. Did you know any of them?”

Her eyes turn from liquid back to diamonds and level on him. He’s made a big mistake. She didn’t get to be the executive director of the Institute without a highly developed cerebral cortex. He knows exactly what’s happening on the far side of those drill bits. She’s replaying her entire series of encounters with him. She is zooming in on his questions at lunch about Mount Tabor and linking it to his current interest in the crash and its victims, who all were contracted with the Institute.

“I’m so sorry, Allen, but I’m feeling a little out of sorts,” she says. “I think we’re going to have to call it a night. Do you mind?”

“Not at all. Is there something I can do?” He’s screwed up badly. She’s already reaching for her purse.

“No.”

“I’ll stay and take care of the bill, okay?”

“Thank you.” She extends her hand and he takes it. Stiff, formal, and cool. She makes no mention of further dates.

He watches her walk out and wonders about the full extent of the damage.

The Neolites line the sides of the street by thousands, and Harlan Green ignites a rolling chant as he travels past them, like the crest of a wave moving through an excitable human medium.

“Kill the machines! Kill the machines! Kill the machines!”

Rachel Heinz stands next to Green and holds on to the front wall of the horse-drawn wagon. For this particular event, mechanized transport was completely out of the question. “I wonder how they all got here,” Rachel says to Green. “Do you suppose they walked?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Green replies as he waves and smiles. “All that counts is that they’re here.”

The Neolites have a relatively benign history as political activists, although their recent alliance with the Street Party has generated a certain amount of alarm. In their infancy, they were called the Neo-Luddites, after the rampaging factory workers out to destroy the automated looms during the dawn of the industrial era in Britain. As the ranks of the Neo-Luddites grew after the turn of the millennium, the name became contracted to Neolites. Their focus was not mechanical machinery, but electronic circuitry, the great engine of the Information Age. For this reason, they tended to cluster in places like Portland with its Chip Mill, as well as Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Shanghai.

And now the faithful of this angry flock raise their wooden staffs in salute to Green as he rolls by. They seem evenly split between men and women, and both sexes wear simple robes of earthen color that end at the knees. Long, unkempt hair is the norm, along with worn leather sandals and a complete absence of jewelry. Every hundred yards or so, a leader stands atop a wooden crate (no plastic), with a tapered cone rolled into a primitive megaphone. The leaders are directing the pacing and phrasing of the chant, with their wooden staffs cutting the air like rocking metronomes.

The wagon eventually rolls to a stop at the south security gate into Mount Tabor, where the private forces have retreated from sight. Up the side of the mountain, a column of armored vehicles sits just off the road in a distant display of force. The Neolites have spilled out into the street and blocked traffic in both directions. Someone hands Green a microphone, and he raises his hand to silence the crowd. Their chanting comes to an abrupt halt.

Green launches his speech by pointing up the slope. “We gather here at the foot of this
mountain, once a sacred symbol of how nature and man could work together in harmony for the common good. But those days are past, my good friends. Now if you look up these slopes, you see the machinery of destruction and decay everywhere. This place, once so public, is now home to a private abomination. Those who dwell here refuse to share its secrets, because those secrets stain this place with great shame—”

The angry shout of an auto horn interrupts him. By its second burst, Harlan can see the problem. Up the packed street, some fool in an SUV on his way to Mount Tabor is trying to assert his right of way and wedge through the crowd.

By the third beep, the Neolites have had enough. They set upon the vehicle with their staffs.

“Kill the machine!”

Metal crumples. Glass shatters. The security alarm shrieks. The driver panics and accelerates. Robed figures fly through the air, over the hood, and under the wheels. The panicked crowd opens just wide enough to provide a clear view of the vehicle as it comes to a stop.

Dead quiet. The throng of Neolites stands motionless. The victims sprawl in shock on the pavement. The car rests at a diagonal angle across the center line.

Then the victims start to scream. Broken bones, torn cartilage, and severed nerves come alive and sing out stridently into the late morning air.

Green turns to one of his security people in the back of the wagon. “Get us out of here. We can’t be part of this.” He and Rachel are quickly handed down to the pavement and hustled off toward a side street, where several vehicles wait.

With Green gone, the recovering crowd looks for new leadership. One of their robed supervisors mounts his wooden box with his megaphone.

He slowly levels an accusatory arm at the SUV and screams into the megaphone.

“Kill the machine! Kill the machine! Kill the machine!”

In a great and angry roar, the robed legions lunge forward and begin to smash wildly at the car once again. The noise is horrific as the staffs rain down on every square inch of the car’s surface, smashing all the glass and sending tiny chunks spraying everywhere. The burglar alarm’s voice system activates and starts to bellow: “Warning! You have approached a secure vehicle! You have relinquished your right to litigation over countermeasures! Warning!”

As the alarm continues its ridiculous and hollow threat, the staffs fly with unrelenting fury. Some break and splinter, and others come forward to replace them. The vehicle’s occupants remain trapped inside, suffering the terror of the damned.

Six hundred feet above, Thomas Zed and Arjun Khan watch the mayhem play out in vivid detail on a set of large screens fed by video cameras mounted on the south gate.

“We could intervene,” Khan suggests. “We might be able to save them.”

“Absolutely not. The driver was an arrogant fool to take on a crowd like that.”

“This is the largest disturbance yet,” Khan observes. “I don’t like it. They keep getting worse. Sooner or later, they’ll try to get in.”

“Maybe not.” Zed offers no further explanation. He sinks back in his padded chair to sooth his aching back. At this point, something always aches.

On the monitors, the pair can see the crowd losing focus on the battered vehicle and turning to fresh targets. They run wild through nearby shops and offices, ripping out all forms of electronics and mechanicals. Cash registers, terminals, laptops, palmtops, monitors, coffeemakers, blenders, fans, stereos, televisions, disc players. They are dashed against the pavement and piled up in great heaps on the walkways.

Zed watches until the Neolites’ fury is spent and their leaders herd them off. He and Khan are the sole viewers of this event. It will never be seen on the Feed. Appropriate filters are in place to prevent politically aberrant material from getting through. Celebrity perversions, serial murders, and the like are all fair game, but any material that reflects poorly on the public interest is stringently managed.

But Zed knows that the filters will eventually fail, that all the countermeasures will fail. The government will fall and Green will win.

Not a problem. A new government means new opportunities. It’s simply a matter of negotiation. Over a century of personal experience regarding the symbiosis between politics and business has verified this conjecture for him. However, right now there is a more pressing issue.

“How close are we?” he asks Khan.

“Very close. Any day now.”

“Good.”

“The Feed will redact the whole thing,” Rachel informs Harlan as they ride back toward Street Party headquarters. “The Neolite story is going to be dead on arrival. Too bad.”