“Long story short, there’s an AI on it and it’s pissing me off. A friend of mine in Japan needs to give it a talking to.” She seems to be speaking through clenched teeth and he wonders what happened to the damsel in distress.
Another flight of stairs, more unspooling, another connector.
“Wait a minute,” he says. “If the sat-phone can’t get a signal inside the building, then how am I talking to you?”
“Ha,” says Akemi. “The phone’s special. It’s hard to explain. Anyway, through that door there, if you don’t mind.”
The corridor looks haunted in his cell’s light. He tries to move quietly but his footsteps echo and he soon gives up. No windows or skylights—he’s too deep inside the building. “You can try the lights,” she says. “There’s tidal power, so it might still work.” He finds a switch on the wall and overhead LEDs glow into life.
“Five doors down on your left,” Akemi says, but he stops at a door marked STAGING OVERLOOK, eases it open. Akemi sighs, says nothing.
The door opens onto a metal balcony with a railing and beyond that total dark. It swallows his cell’s light. He stand there, listening, and then he freezes because from far below comes a faint mechanical whirring.
Stuttering pulses of light—as from welding?—briefly give him a sense of an expanse of factory floor. He thinks he saw a shipping container, microdrones swarming over it—were some carrying tubes? Another pulse of light—this time he’s sure there was writing on the container’s side, probably Meta-something.
“They’ll be unloading the ships,” Akemi says. “The island’s set up for submarine cargo. Don’t worry, it’s just drones, and they don’t care about you.”
“What are they doing down there?”
“Making computers. If you’re done poking around can we please go? We’re kind of in a hurry.”
The fifth door on his left is marked JANITORIAL. A closet, within, empty except for a few filthy plastic buckets. “Look in the fuse box,” Akemi says. There’s a grey metal panel on the wall. He opens it, shines his cell in; it goes deeper than he’d expected, and has no fuses, just what looks like a dozen fist-sized lumps of metal, each glowing a faint spectral blue. They’re pushed together to make a sort of lumpy, irregular snowflake. Looking closer, he sees it’s not actually metal but a mineral of some kind, its surface incised with lines like maps of cities. Wires and cables are pushed into the lumps here and there, their far ends disappearing into little holes in the wall.
“Now push the end of the cable into the blue metal.” He’s going to object, because of course the cable works only if you plug it into the right kind of socket, but instead shrugs and does as he’s told. The metal is surprisingly yielding, and the head of the cable goes right in. Creepily, the metal seems to coalesce around it.
“What is this stuff?”
“It’s most of the computational power in the world,” Akemi says, though that can’t be right—computers are small, but not this small—he’s heard of whole cities of server farms built around hydroelectric dams.
“It’s time to say goodbye,” she says, and sounds a little scared now. “You have to get something from inside the phone, but the phone was never meant to be opened. Do what you have to to break open the hull—you can hit it on the wall, but don’t do it so hard the pieces scatter.”
“And what then?” he asks, meaning what will happen to him, but she says, “You know that metallic stuff in the fuse box? There’s a little bit of it in the phone. Get it out and press it into the metal in the fuse box. Anywhere is fine. And that’s it—do that, and you’re done.”
“Where am I supposed to go then?”
“Just hang tight back up on the roof. I’ll do what I can to get back in touch. But break the phone now, okay?”
He takes her phone out of his pocket and as he holds it in his hand it occurs to him that he has leverage, that if he were so inclined he could force her to explain everything, like how he’s supposed to survive, and it seems pitiful, now, that he’s been so docile, and obeyed her without question, but he thinks of Arthur’s knights, how relentless they were in their search for the grail, though the grail was only vaguely defined, really just amounting to an expression of their purity.
“Okay,” he says. “Any last instructions?”
“No. Thank you, baby. Please hurry.”
“Goodbye, then,” he says, keeping his voice strong, and without waiting for a reply he slams the phone into the wall.
It takes three tries before the chassis cracks and he can pry it apart with his fingers.
When he was younger he’d scavenged cell phones from the landfills because their components had contained just a little bit of gold. The price of gold had been rising for forty years, Lares said, which had finally made that kind of salvage economical; he’d taught him how to disassemble the boards, and as an afterthought a little about their structure, which is how he can tell that most of Akemi’s phone is missing, that it isn’t even really a phone, and that it should never have worked in the first place. There’s a battery, a speaker, and almost nothing else except for a tiny motherboard; on it there’s a sphere of blue metal the size of a match head, the same as the material in the fuse box.
He pries it off the motherboard with his fingernail and holds it up to his other cell’s light—it looks like nothing, a tiny particle of industrial waste. It doesn’t take much pressure to push it into the metal in the fuse box. He tries it with his finger—it’s attached.
The earpiece is dead. This silence feels different, somehow absolute. He’s tempted to keep it in, because you never know, but takes it out, drops it on the floor.
He closes the fuse box, wonders if he should worry about fingerprints, decides it doesn’t matter.
*
It’s a bright day. Storm clouds on the horizon. He feels as blank and empty as the surface of the sea.
According to its screen, the sat-phone is transmitting data at a frenetic rate. In principle it’s a way out but there’s no one he can call.
He feels like he’s living in leftover time.
In the last years of his life, the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi had become a hermit and dedicated himself to learning how to die, which had always puzzled Kern, as it seems like something that would take care of itself, but now he thinks he gets it. Staring at the ruined city, the glare on the sea, he tries to imagine the world without him.
63
Purpose, Impatience, Suffering
It’s dark, and the storm has grown. The waves are like hills sliding under the ship.
The cabin’s monitor shows Kern’s progress through an abandoned factory; with the minimal lighting and the air of industrial dereliction, it’s a little like watching an under-edited student film. Akemi leans toward the screen, entirely focused on her charge, whispering in his ear like a tutelary daemon.