As the night fades a black line lingers on the lightening sky, razor-thin and plumb-straight from sea to heaven. At first he thinks it’s something to do with the early light in the atmosphere, and then that there must be a flaw in his vision, but he blinks, rubs his palms over his eyes, and it’s still there. The line is fainter, higher up; craning his neck, he loses its heights in the depth of blue.
An island emerges, a spire at its center, the black line rising up from it. The ruddy early light glows on what seems to be a city, and even this early whatever castles, cathedrals, factories are shimmering in the heat.
“Get your bag,” Akemi says in his ear. “My knowledge gets a little thin here, but you’ve got to be ready to go.”
Duffel on his back, he watches the docks approach. Cranes hang over the water, paint eroded, cables sagging. It feels like no one’s been here in a hundred years. He wonders what he’s supposed to do here but expects he’ll find out.
The ship glides into a long gulf between decaying concrete piers. The water reflects the sun’s red light. Uninterpretable machinery at the pier’s edge, spindly trees growing out of cracks in the concrete, rust stains spreading from protruding rebar. He looks over his shoulder, realizes the other ships have vanished in the night.
“Now,” says Akemi. “There. Go!” There’s a rusted ladder on the pier’s side, about to slip by, and he wants to stay with the ship and see where it goes, but he runs, jumps and catches the ladder, which sags agonizingly, then holds.
As his face clears the pier’s edge there’s a flash impression of hundreds of hostile yellow eyes and he almost falls as the gulls erupt into swirling cacophony. He looks back in time to see the black ship submerge, become a dark shape under the water.
The stench is appalling—in places the guano is a foot deep. Rail tracks rise above the filth, offering a less foul path toward shore. The spire in the island’s center is immense, taller than skyscrapers, tapering inward to the black line’s base.
“Go toward the tower,” Akemi says.
“What is this place?”
“The space elevator. At least, it was going to be. Basically it’s a giant cable going up into low orbit—it was supposed to be a cheap alternative to rockets, but between the deflating economy and some spectacular failures of engineering it never actually got used. The cable still goes up into space, but now it just sort of sits here.”
If he squints, the rotting buildings look like jungle hills. He crosses a ring road, then a thoroughfare as wide as a city block leading toward the tower. He crushes ferns underfoot, tries to jump between patches of bare asphalt. There’s graffiti here and there, but it’s sparse, faded, probably decades old. He knows he’s alone, and that probably the worst danger is getting crapped on by a seagull, but even so it’s eerie, and it’s hard not to be cautious.
There are buttresses around the tower, practically towers in themselves, slipping in and out of view between buildings, and he daydreams he’s making an assault on a castle, single-handed, pure of heart, invincible and forlorn. His old laptop had a book about King Arthur, but much as he’d liked the idea of it, the stories were less interesting than just foreign—the knights were obsessed with etiquette, finicky about status, and the sword fights were never specific enough to be good; the only parts that really felt like anything were when the knights approached dark castles that still concealed their mysteries.
The ground rises as he approaches the tower; he looks back over his shoulder at the ruined city and the sea. He reminds himself he’s literally exploring a jungle-choked lost city, which is a real adventure by any standard, but the experience is emptier than he’d expected. Did Arthur’s knights ever slouch on their horses, worn by boredom, their thoughts a jumble of past battles and old loves?
“That hangar there, three seventy three,” Akemi says. “I need you on its rooftop.” STAGING 373 is stenciled on a door big enough to accommodate a jet but it seems to be rusted shut. It’s almost disappointing that there’s a fire escape zigzagging up to the roof, as getting up would otherwise be a challenge.
The rooftop is as big as a dozen soccer fields. There are puddles in declivities in the concrete, their brown water seething with larvae.
The cable keeps drawing his eyes. It seems impossible, like a fissure in the sky, an error in the rules of the world—he keeps trying to read it as an optical illusion.
“Just a little bit farther,” Akemi says.
Ahead there’s a little cubical building with a door, probably either a maintenance shed or stairs. He steps on mummified cigarette butts, dented aluminum cans, shards of broken bottles.
“Here’s where you set up the sat-phone,” Akemi says. “We’re going inside, but we need to leave it here so it can get a signal. Can you find a way to secure it so the wind won’t move it around?” In an inward voice she adds, “I should have had you buy tape.”
He tears the sat-phone out of its packaging, which he meticulously stuffs back into the duffel—cardboard, or even plastic, might turn out to be useful, and there’s no way to get more. The sat-phone’s black plastic antenna is as thick as a finger and twice as long. He slots the batteries, hits the power stud and the sat-phone hums to life. He chooses English from the setup menu (for some reason he thinks of a white deer in a forest, probably an image from the Arthurian stories?) and after a few seconds it reports signal acquired and status nominal.
He takes the most intact of the aluminum cans and fills them with tainted water from the puddles. The larvae are disgusting, but the filled cans are heavy enough to make a stable windbreak around the sat-phone.
“Now it’s time to use all those data cables. We need to connect the sat-phone to something inside the building.”
He unwraps a cable, clicks one of its heads into the sat-phone.
The door to the little house is locked but he kicks it open. Steps treaded in cracked rubber lead down into the dark.
“Three floors down,” says Akemi. He picks his way by cell light. No graffiti, though this seems like prime canvas. He unspools the cable as he goes. On the second landing the first cable runs out, so he unwraps the second one, couples it to the first with a connector. He feels like Theseus searching for the Minotaur, but if Staging 373 is the labyrinth, and the cable is Ariadne’s spool of thread, then what’s the central monster?
“What are we looking for?” he asks.
“There’s a computer down here,” Akemi says. She sounds impatient, and like she doesn’t really want to talk, but probably she figures he’s already committed and she might as well tell him something. “It cut itself off from the internet, and we need to get it connected again. So, the sat-phone connects to the net from anywhere it can see the sky, and the cables you’re carrying connect the sat-phone to this otherwise disconnected computer. Okay?”
“What’s so special about this computer, and who cares if it’s on the net?”