The Great Forgetting (35 page)

Scopes pressed Enter.

A crude desktop came up. He used the flat, square mouse to move the cursor to a folder titled
READ ONLY FILES, ALGORITHM: ASPEN.

He held the tea in his hands, reading over the data that appeared on-screen. On his mug was the logo from the 2026 Winter Olympics.

“Okay, Maestro,” he said. “Let's see what you're up to.”

3
    “We're here to see Tony Sanders,” Jack said again, this time a bit slower. But the robot remained still.

Jack was standing on the broken tarmac of Mu's only runway, the remains of Flight 370 smoldering behind him. The statue had sheared off the right wing, just as the Captain had predicted. The jet had rolled then, and the impact had snapped the fuselage in half. It was a good thing they'd dumped the fuel. Miraculously, no one had died. There were, however, a dozen injured Chinese businessmen lying on the grass. Most had concussions and one had broken his leg.

This robot was whatever passed for a welcoming committee on Mu. It was four feet high, nothing more than a tin cylinder with a dome head that swiveled back and forth, watching them with a single camera eye. It had rolled out of a decrepit hangar like an oversize Roomba while Jack was pulling passengers from the wreckage.

Sam stood beside Jack, squinting her eyes at the machine. Nils's body was strapped to a makeshift gurney behind her (a seat cushion tied to thin steel girders from the wreck). Cole crossed the runway and joined them.

“Looks kind of like R2-D2,” the boy said.

“More like a Dalek,” said the Captain, who had made sure each of the 240 displaced passengers was off the plane before he walked away from the broken bird.

Jack gave his father a puzzled look.

“
Dr. Who
,” the Captain explained. “What kind of a nerd are you?”

“Folgen Sie mir!”
the robot said. Its voice was modulated and shaky, a very old computer program shaking off dust. Then it turned and rolled back toward the hangar.

“What did it say?” asked Sam.

“It said, ‘Follow me,'” the Captain replied. “In German.”

Fifty feet away, Zaharie held up his hands.
“Dàjiā
bǎochí
lěngjìng!”
he shouted to the Chinese passengers of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Remain calm.

“Come on,” said Jack. He followed the robot. Sam, the Captain, and Cole walked behind him. The robot rolled along on thick rubber wheels, deftly avoiding potholes and puddles, and led them through the open door of the hangar. Inside, it was dark and dingy and smelled of spilled oil. They followed it across the empty garage and through another door, into a tiled hall.

“What's this?” asked Sam.

“Looks like a shower,” said Cole.

It was at that moment the door to the tiled hall closed and they heard a lock turn loudly. The robot spun around and regarded them coolly.

“
Ausrotten
,” it said.

Jack looked up to the ceiling. Long pipes ran overhead, from one end to the other, attached to round spouts like the kind used for fire sprinklers in hotels or …

“What did it say?” asked Cole.

The Captain was thinking. “Uh … my German's rusty…”

“
Ausrotten
,” it said again.

“
Ausrotten
,” the Captain muttered. “Uh … uproot…”

“Uproot?” the boy asked.

“Uproot … destroy…”

“Exterminate,” said Jack. He pointed to the ceiling. Painted on the tile behind the pipes was a black swastika. “We're in a gas chamber.”

But before anyone could scream for help, the door at the far end clicked open and a man stepped into the room. He was tall, with gray hair. A surgical mask obscured his face below a dark eyepatch. He looked at the robot and put his hands on his hips.

“Damn it. I thought we got rid of all these guys.”

“Ausrotten!”
it said.

“Yeah, yeah,” the man in the mask said, waving a hand. “We heard you.” He looked at Jack. “Don't worry,” he said, his voice muffled by the mask. “It's just replaying old programming. None of this stuff works anymore.”

“We need to find Tony Sanders,” said Jack.

The man's good eye gleamed. And then he pulled the mask down around his chin.

Jack gasped in surprise. His old friend stood before him, but there was little resemblance to the boy he once knew. Those wrinkles. That eyepatch. There was a nasty scar snaking out from under it. And he'd lost so much weight. He looked older than he should, as if he'd skipped forward ten years.

“Do I look that bad?” said Tony. He smiled wryly and shook his head. “Jesus, Jack. You brought everyone. Sam, Cole, the Captain … and a couple hundred red Chinese for good measure, I see.”

“And Nils,” said Jack.

“I saw. What's wrong with him?”

“Morgellons,” said Cole.

“Damn it. Okay. Let me see what I can do.” He turned to leave.

“Wait,” said Jack. “Where the fuck are you going?”

Tony turned back to them. “They've got something that might help Nils. I have to go into the city. While I'm gone, you should gather everyone in the hangar. You've been placed in quarantine for a bit. Don't worry. I'll have food and water brought down. We'll have you out in a day or two, tops. Procedure. There was a shipwreck back in the seventies. Someone brought measles. Wiped out a quarter of their population. I'll be back.”

Before he left, his last eye found Sam. He nodded at her, then he disappeared out the door.

4
    It was a long drive from Nevada to Big Indian Mountain, but Scopes didn't mind. He loved traversing the country by highway. He loved the way the culture of America evolved from town to town. The more miles you traveled in a day, the easier it was to notice the quaint differences from one place to another. The way prairie dogs got fatter as you drove east. The way French dressing got sweeter the farther you went west. How people said “slippy” instead of “slippery” the closer you got to Pittsburgh. Or how, as you drove south, there were advertisements for “pop,” and then “soda,” and then, simply, “coke.” People were dangerous animals but also infinitely fascinating.

Also, Scopes liked his car. It was a 1964 Chrysler turbine, made the year of the Great Forgetting. The last mass-produced turbine-engine car in the world. It was quiet as the wind and could run on anything in a pinch: cooking oil, whiskey, Chanel No. 5. They don't make 'em like they used to. How could they? They'd forgotten how. The radio was AM and he liked it that way. In the summers he could pick up ball games from Tallahassee to Akron. There was nothing more American than listening to a ball game in mono, the crack of the bat like a smack in the face.

He needed to talk to the Maestro, but he also needed time to figure out what to say. What Scopes had discovered lurking in the algorithm's code was concerning. The Maestro was sneaking software patches into the resets, bits of code that targeted Jack and Tony and their friends. He was actually rewriting their memories as the group progressed, tweaking their personal backstories to motivate them. But motivation toward what end? For instance, what did drawing out a love affair between Jack and Sam and Tony have to do with the bigger picture?

It made Scopes nervous. Could be the Maestro had learned something about the human condition. Had he found another way?

It was time to confront the Maestro about what he knew, but for the first time Scopes was no longer sure that he was smarter than the old man in the mountain.

Scopes realized he was gripping the wheel too tightly. He had to control his anger by the time he got to Big Indian. The anger shamed him. Such a human emotion. He was better than that. More evolved.

He made himself remember Ambala. Her night music. And slowly he relaxed.

5
    When Tony returned, he had no mask. He carried a wooden box, two inches square, inlaid with a dark design, like henna. The Chinese, who had gathered in the hangar, quieted and parted to let him through. He walked briskly to where Nils lay on the floor, and then kneeled beside his body and opened the box. Inside was a tar-like paste that smelled distinctly of treacle.

“What is it?” asked Sam who sat beside Nils's head, a hand on his hair.

“Dodo juice,” said Tony. “Gunk from their stomach.”

“So there
are
still dodo here?” asked Cole, eyes wide.

Tony looked at the boy with his good eye. “There are all kind of things here,” he said. “On the other side of the mountain there's a herd of triceratops.”

“Bullshit,” the Captain said.

Tony winked at him and then used his fingers to scoop out a glob of the ambergris.

“He can't eat anything,” said Sam.

“It doesn't go in his mouth.” Tony gently nudged Sam aside and straddled the Viking's body. Then he distributed the black goo evenly between the fingers on both his hands and pushed them into Nils's ears. He used the pads of his hands to squeeze the mess deep into the man's ear canals. When he was finished, Tony pitched the box to the floor and stepped away from the body. “Back up a bit,” he said. “It works fast.”

Faster than anyone expected. As soon as Jack was out of the way, Nils opened his eyes. They were so shot with blood that all the white was red. He looked possessed, and in a very real way, Jack realized, he was. His breathing became ragged, lungs full of mucus. Then he sneezed. And sneezed.
KA-CHOW! KA-CHOW!
Again and again he sneezed. Finally, Nils sat up and, feeling another sneeze come on, squeezed his nose tight with two fingers. The force of the caged sneeze caused a thousand, ten thousand, a million fibers to erupt from his body simultaneously though the pores of his arms and legs and chest. Green fibers shot from his skin like gruesome party streamers. “Gaaaa!” said Nils. “That was so fucking gross!”

6
    Since Tony had breached the quarantine, he was in with them for the night. He sat against the tin wall, and the others from Franklin Mills gathered around him in a tight semicircle. He felt awkward, insecure. There were things they should know and things they should not know, things they should never know. But they'd come so far for him. It moved him to tears.

“You're a real sonofabitch,” said Jack.

“Fuckin' asshole!” said Sam.

“You're a great big asshat,” said Cole. “How long were you gonna let me rot in that loony bin?”

“One at a time,” he said, raising his hands in defense.

The Captain shook his head and said simply, “The fuck happened to your eye?”

“I've missed you, Captain,” he said. “So, yeah, the eye … uh … after I put Mark's body in the lake, I borrowed his car. Drove it to the Gate House. Underneath Pymatuning I found a room with a weird vehicle, this thing called a water cart. Kind of like that log ride at Cedar Point? The one where you sit in the cart that gets pushed down the track by water? Like that, except the cart was sealed so the water couldn't get in. Like a train car, kinda. I traveled three thousand miles down a tube of water. All the way to California. Or would have, if the track hadn't blown up halfway through, I mean…”

*   *   *

Tony was dozing inside the water cart, rushing along the tunnel toward the West Coast, when it happened. It began with an odd sound. Like, if you were swimming underwater and someone cannonballed right next to you. A percussive, dull
GOOOOOSHH
,
and suddenly the bullet-shaped four-seater car Tony was traveling in slowed as water rushed backward around it. It stopped for only a moment, and then he was being pulled faster down the tunnel. The water sloshed violently, bumping the cart against the Plexiglas tube. Tony tugged at his harness, pulling it tight around his chest. A second later, the water cart launched out of the tunnel through a giant gaping hole.

For a moment, he was weightless, falling through the black void, and then spotlights came on high above, painting his surroundings with a harsh yellow light, and Tony saw that he was falling into some abandoned city, between tall pylons that held the tunnel aloft over a street lined by brownstone apartments.

Impact! His whole body jolted forward, but before he could crush himself against the console, the cabin filled with pink foam that transferred his potential energy and converted it to kinetic waves within itself. It felt like Jell-O and smelled faintly of burned rubber. Just as Tony began to wonder if he might suffocate, the windshield retracted and he came spilling out. He rolled away from the water cart inside a wave of foam that quickly dissolved into a pool of pink water.

Hesitantly, Tony stood. His mind reached out to his organs and extremities, to ascertain the location of any injury, but he found he was unharmed. Whatever that pink goop was, it was probably something we should not have forgotten.

He walked away from the spume of water falling from the blasted tube. More spotlights clicked on, responding to his progress, revealing the city in a hundred-foot radius around him.

Tony had never visited Europe, but he'd seen pictures of London on album covers, and that's what this city looked like to him. An old city. Older than Cleveland. The apartments were made of hand-laid brick and rock and wood, packed so closely together he thought they might share common attics, like in those novels about children who wandered into other worlds. The street he was on ended at a great cathedral, the junction of rue Nibi and rue Giizis, according to the street sign on the corner.

He was about to call out. Call out “hello” or “hey” or something, when he heard the sound of running footsteps. His first thought was to hide. Hide behind the church or the side of that brownstone over there, but he didn't know what he was running from and hadn't he been about to call out for help anyway?