“Which is exactly why we need to expand. Listen, I’ll tell you a secret.” He sits on the couch across from me and leans in close. “We’re going to take the west coast.”
His voice sounds muffled, like a radio fighting through static. I struggle to make my throat work. “We can’t do . . . how would we do that? How would we . . . maintain control across that much territory?”
He grins. “We’re going to take over the LOTUS Feed.”
“How?”
“We’ve been closing in on the source for years. We know it’s somewhere in South Cascadia. So we just flood the region with our people, acquire every enclave, and start squeezing heads until the secret squirts out. I guarantee within a year we’ll be shouting from the rooftop of BABL.”
The room is rippling like I’m underwater. My forehead is wet.
“Yes, we have our hands full with the boroughs right now. Things might get bad here. But if we control the Feed, we’ll be in every home and bar and bunker. We’ll be a familiar face and a household name, and we won’t have to fight anymore because they’ll give us what we want. Whatever we say will be the truth, because we’ll be the only voice.”
I open my mouth to ask a question or perhaps to express a doubt, but all that comes out is a retching noise.
His grin widens at my struggle. “Go ahead, R—. Puke on my floor. It’s an exciting moment and you’re a sensitive kid, so do what you have to do to get over it.”
I lean over the edge of the couch as my body prepares to accept his invitation.
“But when you get it all out, let’s talk specifics. I want you to head the first wave.”
I feel a vibration in the floor. It’s faint and my grandfather doesn’t react to it so I assume it’s just my throbbing head. The ripples in his liquor are harder to explain, but my stomach soon heaves these thoughts out of me.
? ? ?
I am not on Earth when it happens. I am a thousand feet above it in a twin-prop plane, swallowing a double dose of Dramamine. It’s been weeks since I’ve had a drink but I can’t shake this nausea. The company doctors chalk it up to anxiety, and that’s plausible enough. We are, after all, in the middle of losing a war.
Mr. Atvist is sending me west, and though I do have a mission, I suspect there’s a larger purpose to getting me out of New York. I suspect it has something to do with the fire and smoke rising from the streets of lower Manhattan. The reports of branches being broken. Executives being executed. The distant booms of tank shells. Mr. Atvist knows which way the wind is blowing, and he wants his heir elsewhere when the tree falls.
It’s tempting to feel touched by this gesture, to feel loved—no, I can’t even think the word without chuckling. I know what I am to my grandfather. I am not a person, I am Family. I am DNA and legacy, a vehicle to carry him into the future. Nothing more.
So when I see dust rising all over the city, when I see high-rises swaying like trees, the older ones breaking and buckling—when I press my face to the window and see the Atvist Building beginning to crumble and flood, I am not sure what to feel. When I hear his voice on the radio, fading into BABL’s bubbling screech but audible until the end, I am not sure how to take his words.
“So it’s all a dream?” he snarls over the sound of cracking glass. “No rules, anything can happen? Fuck this place. Fuck this new world. All of you keep doing your job, you hear me? This isn’t going to end us. I’ll never stop. I’ll never—”
A grim silence hangs in the plane. The crew looks at me. My assistant looks at me. I don’t say anything, so nothing changes. We keep doing our job. We fly away from New York while it writhes and shudders beneath us, and as we glide into the empty expanses of the Midwaste, I see that strange but increasingly familiar sight: ripples on the horizon. Subtle changes in topography. Glittering forms hanging in the blue, glimpsed in my periphery and gone before I can describe them.
Is it really a dream? If anything can happen, can’t it be something good? I look down at the metal briefcase in my lap, this instrument of death and deceit, and I feel the urge to cry mixing into my urge to vomit. Who’s going to make it good?
? ? ?
My sleep is empty. I wake with the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same nausea, as if no time has passed though it’s dark now and the crew is asleep.
I have often wondered if we can feel the approach of important events. Objects of great mass can distort time; could events of great significance do the same? Could the weight of a moment make an indentation that’s felt from both sides, remembered before it happens?
When I wake up on the day of my death, will I feel a tingle and a shiver? Will some small part of me know?