Carmella turned over on her back and appeared to be studying the ceiling. “Isn’t that like when the the universe goes cold and everything ends?”

“That’s the effect of it, but not what it is. What it is is the role of the dice.”

“You mean, like a crap shoot? I don’t get your meaning, Sugar.”

“Yeah, it’s like a crap shoot. Take that pretty nose of yours. It’s made of strings of information. They all come together, and they spell Carmella’s nose. But what if whoever wrote that information, instead of using the DNA code that makes a nose, decided to role the dice. Now, you might get a nose, or you might get an ear, but the odds are very high that you would get something unrecognizable and non-functional. That’s what entropy is. It’s the randomization of information.”

“What kind of shit is going through your head, Sugar?”

“I’m thinking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Baby. That says information moves from a state of order to a state of disorder, a state of entropy. Like you said, ‘the universe goes cold.’ But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it just appears that way, when in reality it is just moving from one place to another. After we left Earth, those people back home observing us, it appeared to them that we died, our bodies died, dust to dust, all that shit. But we didn’t. Our information just moved somewhere else, across the universe, or into some other dimension, or who the hell knows where we are. Do you get my drift, Baby?”

“I sure the hell don’t know where you are, Matt Dillon, but I wish you would drift back here to the real world. Damn, Sugar, it’s nearly two o’clock in the morning. I need my sleep.”

“Ah, I’m sorry Carmella. I just need to figure this shit out is all. I gotta make sense of it.”

“Why, Sugar? All you need to know is right here. It ain’t out there in that big old universe somewhere. It’s right here in bed next to you.”

Dillon closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He tried to tell himself that Carmella was right, but his mind kept returning to the stars, to the Earth of his youth, and his long-ago dreams. He tried to remember those days, but the inaccessible memories yielded up only a vague feeling of loneliness.

Carmella began to gently snore. He sat, quietly, trying not to waken her, and removed himself from bed. He located his boots and pants, and carried them into the living room, where he dressed. He strapped on his gun, then he grabbed the day pack he often took on trips up the canyon, tossed in a handful of protein bars, a couple of apples, and his old A harmonica. He filled his water bottle and put it in the pouch on the side of the bag. Outside, the crickets chirped, and the bullfrogs sang their song of the night. They were calling him.

He grabbed his wide-brimmed hat, hanging by the door. He entered into the outdoors, softly closing the screen door behind him. For a moment, the crickets and frogs fell silent. The sky was clear, and the enormous stars seemed too heavy for it to hold. The big moon, bloated like a corpse in the desert heat, lay impaled on a mountain peak; the little moon was yet to rise. Dillon wondered if this wasn’t, maybe, the land of the dead.

He took the path down to the river toward the Sheriff’s Department stables. He might follow the Pecos up as far as Big Snake, then cut cross-country, maybe head up toward Crawford’s Hole or Witches Hat. He could check out the site of that massacre up at Newton’s Spring, and be back by nightfall. Carmella would eat him alive if he missed the Indigo Blues performance this evening.

As he approached the river, the night singers resumed their music, and the musty smell of the water, and its fecund life, its willows and honeysuckle and marsh grass and rotting plant matter put him in mind of another place, somewhere, long ago. But the where and the when were lost to him now.

Hearing his approach, the horses stomped the ground and neighed. He looked for Bettie, the new little sorrel mare Roxanne had broken in this spring; she was a good, surefooted ride. He found her in the third stall, next to Big Black. He stroked her nose, and she whinnied her approval.

“You want to go for ride this evening, girl?” Dillon clipped a lead rope onto her halter and opened the gate. He tied her outside the tack room, and saddled her, talking gently and feeding her a handful of grain now and then.

He had been opposed to the horses at first. For one thing, he had never ridden a horse. It had been part of Pedro’s fucking cowboy fantasy. But in the end, he had to admit that it was practical, out here in this canyon country, with no roads and a shortage of motor vehicles. Now he wouldn’t have it any other way. There was nothing like a midnight ride on the desert chaparral, time slowed to a crawl, just a man and his horse and an endless horizon. Out there he could think about the stars and the vast distance between them. He could think about entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He could figure out the meaning of his life.

He finished cinching the saddle and adjusting the bridle. He looped his day pack over the saddle horn and mounted. With a gentle snap of the reins, they were moving east along the river trail through town, past the sleeping workers and their families, past the bridge to Order, past city hall, into the wilderness.

* * *

The well-worn trail up river to Big Snake held no surprises. A single passing ore barge drifted by on the current, no doubt guided by autopilot, as it’s tiny crew slept below deck. It was at least an hour before dawn when Dillon reached the first S in the river. Directly overhead, the two gibbous Moons provided some small quantity of light, but he was hesitant to take the green mare overland at night in this treacherous terrain. He dismounted and tied her up on a grassy slope, next to the water. Then, he unsaddled her before searching for a spot to nap.

Another mile up river, the lights of Blasón’s toll station illuminated the deep narrows on the upper S of the Big Snake. Pedro’s crew had built a barrier spanning the river, a massive gate which allowed barges through for a price. Matt Dillon had decided long ago to ignore Blasón’s blatant thievery, but he knew Miglia or Cheng would eventually demand he control the situation. He wasn’t looking forward to the confrontation.

His thoughts turned to Jolene Cheng and whatever devil’s bargain she had offered Blasón. It was only a matter of time before it blew up in their faces. Miglia was no fool. The thing was, it put Dillon in the middle. Cheng was his immediate superior, but in the end he still had to answer to Miglia.

Sharma reported to him daily, but, so far, nothing important had come over the lines, just an occasional encrypted message, usually out bound. Then, there was the mystery boy at the convent, and the equally strange young woman who came to town searching for him. She had revealed very little to Dillon, just that she was a little crazy. But he knew the pair were somehow tied up with Cheng’s comings and goings.

He finally found a soft sandy place near the river and tossed down the saddle blanket. The night was still warm, nearly 22 degrees as far as Dillon could figure. The temperature hadn’t dropped below twenty for a couple of weeks now, but it wasn’t as sweltering as a few days ago. A person could sleep in this weather.

For awhile, he played his blues harmonica, releasing its lonely cries into the empty night. When the weariness finally caught up to him, he lay down his head and closed his eyes.

* * *

When Dillon woke, the sun had risen, casting long red shadows across the desert landscape. At the river, he cupped a handful of water in his hands and splashed it on his face. Then he took another and drank deeply before saddling up Bettie and mounting her. He rode northeast, away from the river toward the big black cinder cone called Witch’s Hat. About ten kilometers north of Witch’s Hat lay Crawford’s Hole, an old impact crater. Between the two, the oasis of Newton’s Spring harbored the little mining town of Manifest Destiny.

Dillon wasn’t sure what he would find there. The travelers who reported the massacre had also buried the dead. There would not likely be much evidence left, but he felt he needed to see the scene just the same. Maybe he could find a clue about the killers—where they had come from, where they had gone. That was the crazy thing. It had been fourteen years since Law and Order had been established. Miners had been all over this country, and no one had ever seen a native village or a teepee. Only the savages fleeting silhouettes on the horizon, or the aftermath of their brutality. The few survivors had reported Indians on horseback, but no Indian bodies had ever been found. The dead, it seemed, had vanished.

It was nearly noon when Dillon skirted Witch’s Hat. In the distance he saw the green poplar trees which sustained themselves on the artesian waters of Newton’s Spring. A red-tailed hawk circled lazily in the sky, then seeing a possible meal on the ground, tucked his wings back and fell from the heavens in a swift, graceful dive. Dillon followed a shallow arroyo down the hill toward town. The sun was now becoming unbearably hot and Bettie had worked up a sweat. She would need water soon. Dillon pulled an apple out of his day pack and ate a few bites, then he gave the remainder to his horse. He stroked the length of her neck. “We’re almost there, girl. Hang on.”

Dillon could now make out a few trailers, their metallic shells reflecting the bright sunlight. A dust devil crossed the dirt road between them, stirring up some discarded cardboard and a soft drink cup, before moving off to the west. As he approached the broken down buildings, it seemed as though the town had been deserted decades ago.

Dillon located the spring bubbling from the ground, and allowed the mare to drink her fill before tethering her to graze. He wiped the sweat from beneath his hat lining, then walked toward the center of town. More trailers and ramshackle houses in need of paint; a small cafe/grocery store with a faded Coca Cola sign and a gasoline pump out front; nothing much else.

He imagined the miners, cold beer in their hands, sitting out front of the store, talking about work and telling bawdy jokes, their wives hanging the laundry out on the lines behind the trailers, kids running down the dirt road through town, kicking up dust storms. He could almost taste the dust as it swirled around him. He wondered if there might be a cold drink in some cooler, still powered by the solar array on the rooftop. He decided it would probably be sacrilegious to steal from the dead.

Yet the sun was hot, the kind of hot you don’t want to be in without plenty of liquids.

Dillon turned back to the springs. While the town of Manifest Destiny was clustered here near the bubbling water, the oasis of trees and grass stretched for a kilometer in a long green line before the life-giving liquid was absorbed back into the arid desert earth. He saw, at the far end of the green swath, a rock formation jutting from the sand. The sort of place a raiding party might hide and wait.

He satiated himself and refilled his water bottle. Then he followed the trickling stream toward the outcrop. Dillon walked slowly, scouring the earth for clues. About half way down, something moved in a clump of willows, and he reached instinctively for his Colt. He froze, listening, watching for movement until he decided his imagination had conjured a phantom. But he moved more cautiously now, attempting to engage all his senses. It seemed unlikely that the band that had killed those people was still around, but you never knew who else might be; Newton’s Spring was an oasis in the desert, a precious water source for thirsty travelers.

He saw nothing on his walk that indicated the recent massacre. No misfired arrows, no dead natives. The strange outcropping, however, immediately drew his interest. From a distance, it seemed like weather-rounded sandstone. But close up, it was definitely something else.

Then it hit him —adobe. This was ruins of an adobe wall, perhaps centuries old. As he encircled it, he decided it had been some sort of dwelling. Again he found no arrows, no footprints but those of barefoot children. He stepped over the rubble of a crumbled archway. Inside the structure, he found some plastic soldiers and other evidence that the town’s children played here. He saw them holding their tiny toys, aimed at one another. “Bang, you’re dead,” they cry and fall, mortally wounded, child and toy melded into one.

A slight dizziness overcame him. Dillon wiped the sweat from his forehead and sat, unsteadily, on a low stone ledge, closing his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, a tall, thin man was sitting across the room from him. The man wore clothes similar to Dillon’s own, denim and light cotton. He seemed vaguely familiar.

“Hello, Matt,” he said. “Welcome to my home.”

Startled, Dillon carefully rested his hand on his revolver. “Where do I know you from?”

“Perhaps we’ve met somewhere. Perhaps…” The man let his words trail off.

“How do you know my name?”

“You told me, of course. Just now.”

That was funny, Dillon didn’t remember telling him anything at all. “And you are?”

“Oh, you probably couldn’t pronounce it. It isn’t reproducible with your apparatus.” The man indicated his throat. “You can call me Ben, if you like.”

“You say this is your home, Ben? You mean Manifest Destiny?”

“No, I mean this dwelling, Matt.”

“You’re nutty as a fruitcake, man. I’ve just been all over here. There is no bedding, no fire pit. Nobody’s been living in this place. Where are your footprints, Ben?”

Ben turned his gaze to the ground, then back to Dillon, puzzlement on his face. “That is odd,” he said.

Yes, thought Dillon, extremely odd. “Do you know what happened to those people, Ben?”

“I tried my best to warn them, Matt. I enjoyed the little ones running around the house. It is so sad.”

“Who? Who killed them? Did you kill them?”

“They killed themselves, I’m afraid.”

Dillon tightened his grip on his gun. “What do you mean, man? They were massacred with hatchets and arrows.”

“Yes, I know.” Ben was looking off into the distance, now. A single tear ran down his face.

“What makes you think they killed themselves?”

“Because…” said Ben, his voice breaking, “because my family, too, killed themselves, you see. All of this around you was once part of the great forest, with green valleys and abundance everywhere. Until we became greedy and turned it into a desert. We had no choice, you see, but to kill ourselves.”

Dillon’s head reeled. Was he hallucinating? It didn’t seem like an hallucination. But what was this madman’s logic?

“How does a man produce an arrow out of thin air, Ben, and then pierce his own heart with it?”

“You should talk to the forest about that, Matt.”

He felt another wave of dizziness and reached for his water bottle. The sun had shifted slightly, its glare obscuring his vision, and he thought he could see the inside of a house behind that curtain of light, a warm, beautiful lived-in home, its furnishings rich and unearthly, and when he looked back at Ben, he saw something, something not human at all, fading in the shimmering photon waves.

He took a swig from his bottle, and, despite the heat, he shivered. He recalled a conversation from the recent past —the girl, Molly, and something she had said to him.

“The forest told me.”

©2009, Duane Poncy, all rights reserved.

Pedro wiped his brow. The hot sun hung at its median in the northern sky, and he thought about stopping at Donna’s Truck Stop for a coke and burger. Rare and juicy, with onions and mushrooms and lots of cheese. That’s how he liked it. He stopped for a moment in the shade of a willow, and gazed across the river, wondering for just a moment about life on the other side. Law was wild. A wide-open sort of place, and Dillon had seen no reason to change it, as long as everyone obeyed the rules. It was the sort of environment Pedro couldn’t abide. The lack of control made him nervous. That was the source of his falling out with his old amigo, Matt. That, and Matt’s insistence on playing by the rules, when any fool could see that the only applicable rule was that the guy at the top of the food chain got to eat the best meal. Fuck that rules shit.

Law and Order had been established to ensure that the gold miners coming down from the mountains with their payloads tithed their share of taxes to the New America Corporation. Pedro insisted that it was only fair that he and Matt take a little extra for their trouble. But Matt didn’t look at it that way. As a consequence, the miners on the riverboats now purchased their goods on Matt’s side of the river. It had forced Pedro to set up his own taxing station further up river at the narrows. Matt didn’t like that, but Matt didn’t have the balls to challenge him. And Pedro had the highway on his side. The bauxite triple-trailers had no choice but to stop and pay taxes to the city of Order.

A brief thunderstorm the previous evening left the air filled with the sweet smell of wet sage and ozone. After five years, Pedro still couldn’t believe how much this place felt and looked like the chaparral country of south Texas, where he grew up. Only the northern sun was wrong, and you couldn’t really convince yourself it was south, because then it would be going in the wrong direction. It was unnerving when he thought about it, so he tried to not think about it when he could.

What he did think about today was the arrival of Her Majesty, along with some special guest. Landing with her whole god damned entourage this evening. It was all a big pain in the ass, but he couldn’t complain, really. It was his job.

“The young man will be a guest of the good Sisters,” her messenger had said. “He will have an around-the-clock guard, and his presence must be kept secret at all cost.”

“Tell Ms. Cheng, ‘No problem.’” he said to the messenger.

Jolene Cheng rewarded him well for his little favors. One of those favors was to keep her doings and goings out of sight of Dick Miglia, and by extension, that meant Matt Dillon. Pedro had no idea what it was all about. Some corporate power struggle that didn’t concern him. He could take care of himself. Jolene Cheng may or may not be Queen of the Fucking Universe, but Pedro Blasón was the King of Order.

Pedro didn’t like the Sisters of the Temple. He didn’t understand them, and their secret hierarchies and hidden agendas didn’t mesh with his need for control. But they were Jolene’s bambino. As long as she protected them, their was nothing he could do. Just keep his eyes and ears open, try to make some sense of it all.

* * *

On the Law side of the river, Matt Dillon was singing the blues. He had been practicing all morning for the gig tonight with his band, Indigo River, and now the hot sun was burning in through his north window, turning the room into a furnace. He wiped the sweat from his dark forehead with the back of his hand, and turned off his karaoke machine. The new material was difficult, but it would have to be good enough. Matt sang an occasional lead, but mostly he performed backup for Carmella Johnson, a gorgeous ebony-skinned beauty who fronted the band. Matt loved to sing, and if it weren’t for his other commitments, he might consider doing it full time. For now, it was all in fun.

Matt thought maybe he was in love with Carmella Johnson, but he wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly. Carmella was a hard woman to know, and even though he had been sleeping with her for two years, he still couldn’t figure out where he stood with her. He wondered if maybe the price of power was never understanding what anyone really thought of you beneath that deferential veneer they all wore.

He sighed, grabbed a beer, and headed for the front door. From the shade of the porch, he gazed across the broad expanse of desert, the ramshackle houses and dusty dirt roads, the willows along the river, and on the other side of the river, the tidy little town of Order. Something was happening over in Order. Matt could feel it in his bones. The Monitors had been alight with signals all week, encrypted messages. Jolene Cheng, no doubt. What the hell was Cheng up to?

Matt and Pedro had once been Jolene’s soldiers, but now they worked for Dick Miglia. Matt was nothing if not loyal to his employers. Cheng was going rogue, and Pedro, the opportunistic little bastard, was trying to position himself for the biggest crumbs when it all settled down. It was pathetic, but no kind of reason could sway him.

Matt trigged his com and requested Sharma Xerxes, his Monitor supervisor.

“Yes, Sir?” Sharma’s voice sounded hollow and distant. He wondered if the New America techs were working on the com grid again.

“Sharma, are our ears still online across the river?”

“No change in status, Chief. Something new come up?”

“No. Just a feeling. Whatever’s going on in Order, it’s happening soon. Just keep up the vigilance.”

“As usual, Sir.”

“Thanks, Sharma. I know you’re on top of it.” Dillon cut the com. Sharma was a good girl. Competent. And he trusted her. He just couldn’t stop worrying. Jolene Cheng made him nervous.

* * *

Later that night, Matt Dillon lay in bed, looking into Carmella Johnson’s deep, brown eyes. He lingered there for a long time, searching until all that remained was his own reflection on flecks of green and gold and sienna and the darkest black he had ever seen.

“There was a theory floating around,” he said at last. “When I was in school back in the teens. Some physicists believed that the visible universe was like a hologram. That we are pixels or something, moving around on a two dimensional surface, and that everything we see is only a projection. Do you think that could be true?”

“Hmmm,” said Carmella.

“Do you know who the pointillists were?”

“Uh-uh.”

“They were a school of art, founded by the French painter, Seurat. They only used the primary colors, which they painted as little dots, creating an illusion of a whole spectrum of color.”

“Like pixels,” said Carmella.

“Yeah, just like pixels. The first pixelated art. Unless of course you accept that everything is pixels.”

“Dillon, where the hell do you come up with these ideas, anyway?”

“I don’t know.” Dillon drew back into himself, trying to remember something. Some piece of himself forgotten long ago. “I used to be interested in physics and art and all sorts of things before I joined the F.B.I. back in ‘22. I got all this shit in my head, and it just bubbles around up there, like a pot of boiling stew.”

“That stuff will drive you crazy, Sugar.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

* * *

The boy’s face, as dark as the moonless night, stared out the limo window at the chaparral landscape rushing by. The vehicle hummed quietly, and its interior lights reflected off his somber profile, outlining his features in sharp relief. He would be a handsome young man in a few years.

Jolene Cheng looked at him for a time in silence. “You know that this must be done,” she said at last. “The Sisters will treat you well. They will continue your education, and it won’t be long until you see your mother again.”

The boy was silent, but she could see the slight change in his face, a hardening.

“It’s all for the best, Joey. My daughter has allowed you to grow soft. You will not survive this world if you are weak. Do you understand that?”

The armored car ahead of them braked as a jackrabbit bounded across the road. She could see the lights of Law and Order on the horizon. The boy’s face showed no sign she could read.

“Why?” he said at last. “Why can’t you just let us live in peace? Don’t you have enough, already?”

Jolene let the fog of silence engulf them again. It was the same argument every time. What could she say that would change it? He needed to learn that the bad guys don’t give you a break. If it’s not the barbarian natives, it will be Miglia’s minions. You have to be as ruthless as they are.

The first time she had told him this, he protested. “The natives aren’t what you think they are. Aunt Bridge lives among them. She thinks they are people, too, but they’re not.”

“Then what are they?”

“I don’t know,” said Joey.

“There, you see. It doesn’t matter what we call them, they are still savages who ambush the miners and kill our settlers.”

Joey pouted. “The forest only wants to protect itself.” His words trailed off.

The boy was obviously confused, and he possessed too much imagination for his own good. What he needed was a disciplined, down-to-earth education. The Sisters would set him straight.

Pedro Blasón met them at the edge of town, his small coterie of police vehicles merging with flawless choreography into Jolene’s substantial entourage. Pedro roared up alongside the limo on his City of Order Police Department Harley and gave Jolene a thumbs up. He flashed an enormous grin, his long hair whipping wildly beneath his dew rag, before speeding off toward the front of the procession.

Pedro was too cocky with this outlaw act. Jolene hoped she wouldn’t have to deal with him before the Joey business was behind her. She needed a loyal lieutenant, not some fucking Pancho Villa. Over-taxing the truckers was one thing, but shaking down the ore barges had to stop. If she didn’t stop it, Miglia would move in, and nothing good would come of that.

The boy was sleeping now. In sleep, he had a look about him that reminded her of his grandfather. The association with Joe wasn’t negative, and that surprised her. It stirred up a fleeting sadness that she didn’t recall having ever felt before, and it disturbed her in some way she didn’t understand.

©2009, Duane Poncy, all rights reserved.

He knew it was a childish impulse, but all Gabe really wanted to do at the moment was jump that rail and find a place to hide, damn the regulations. The thing in his mind that made this morning different was the imminent arrival of the Sofias. The Sofias reminded him of the hypocrisy behind his own privileged existence, that, in fact, the Sofias, the Sisters and Brothers, and the Temple of New Life itself, existed for the sole purpose of protecting the Compound and its vaults and laboratories interred deep in the cliffs of El Pared. The Sofias were not bearers of wisdom, as popularly believed, but master manipulators who wove spells to enthrall the masses, and it insulted his own humble origins. Gabe’s view of the Sisters was no secret to his colleagues, many of whom shared it, but avoiding their benefactors was frowned upon by some of these same peers, who viewed schmoozing as a public duty.

Gabe slid open the glass doors which led to the veranda and casually strolled out to the south gardens, as far as possible from the Compound proper, where he could feel the thunder of the falls and the promise of its spray cool on his face. He grabbed the rail and swung himself over, landed on firm ground, and trekked the fifty meters to the falls. Each step he took toward the edge felt like a step toward himself. He arrived at the falls unprepared for the sheer power of the water and the incredible distance to the basin floor; his stomach reeled, his balance shifted, and he stumbled back from the abyss. Pausing to wait for the vertigo to pass and for his knees to stop shaking, he now saw the water-eroded contour of the shelf as it disappeared behind the spray. It seemed to him that a path existed, wide enough to walk safely upon, at least as far as he could see; he could always turn around, come back if it proved to be impassable. He summoned his courage and moved forward cautiously. Behind the falls, centuries of water had carved out an indentation deep into the soft cliff, but it also left the ledge muddy and dangerously sloping toward the precipice. A very narrow passage, a half meter wide, hugged the wall, and Gabe edged along in small, cautious steps, keeping his eyes on his goal until the ground felt safe again beneath his feet.

Beyond the falls, the shelf widened out once again to fifteen meters or so, and extended another hundred or so meters before narrowing and vanishing back into the face of the cliff. The ledge was flat and grassy, with a few small pine trees and scrub oaks clumped near the wall, giving him plenty of room to stretch and think. He located a comfortable spot and laid back in the grass to fritter away the remainder of the day. For the first time in years, Gabe thought about his childhood in the hills of eastern Oklahoma. They had been hard but happy days with his parents and extended family, Keetowah Cherokees, a tradition which went back all the way to his famous outlaw ancestor, Zeke Proctor. But his parents were academics and cultural traditionalists, not in the least bit religious; for them, as for the scientists who had educated him, the scientific method was all of the religion they needed—and it was all the religion Gabe needed.

In many respects, his childhood was a normal one; tramping the fields and hills of the western Ozarks, his uncles had taught him to hunt and honor his prey, to bathe in the river, and to fend for himself in the woods—what little was left of the woods. He learned to play soccer and stick ball and run with the boys from the neighboring farms, but these hours were strictly limited, and his parents expected him to spend much of his time studying.

“You have been given a gift, Son,” his mother would tell him. “It is your responsibility to develop it and use it for the good of the people.”

Gabe’s gift was math. At four years old he had an uncanny ability to solve complex mathematical formulas. By the time he was six, his extraordinary intelligence could no longer be hidden from the world, and he had attracted the attention of important government and academic players. A tug of war began for Gabe’s soul, but his parents, sympathetic to the Bolivarian Alliance and its call for indigenous ascendancy, had discovered the Temple of New Life and another option for their son’s future—Sweetland.

The memory of his arrival on Sweetland had a bitter taste for Gabe; his father, Nathan Proctor, had died crossing over, and Gabe and his mother, Carla, eventually settled in Echota with several other Cherokee families. Carla taught Earth History and tried to keep alive the Tsalagi language at the University of the South. But Gabe became a lost, lonely child. He made the University library his home, and spent every waking moment hiding behind a book. So, it was no surprise that he said ‘no’ when the scientists came from Esparanza to offer him an elite education in The Compound. But Carla had been insistent.

“This is your chance to develop your gift, Gabe.”

“I can do it here in Echota, Mom, with you,” he had reasoned.

“You can do better than that, Son.” And so it went, around and around until he relented and, swallowing his tears, left with a guide for the long journey to Esparanza. Gabe received a letter from his mother every Primerdía, without fail, but he missed her terribly, and he missed his father, and he missed the Cherokee hills of Oklahoma.

Back in his quarters that evening, Gabe began writing a proposal. He knew it had little chance of success—return to Earth was essentially limited to the Sofias and the inner circle of senior scientists—but the more he thought about it, the more important it became in his mind. The difficulty would be in convincing the Directoriat that a junior quantum neurophysicist had a legitimate reason to go to Earth.

One thing might get their attention, he thought, and that was his work on neuro-entanglement and his theory about the origins of the mysterious disease, popularly called the saudades. A number of suicides over the past several months were believed triggered by this condition, named by the Galician immigrants, who described it as a sort of heart sickness. Saudades was approaching pandemic dimensions in the Communities. It was a long shot; the theory wasn’t much more than a postulation at this stage, but if he could conduct tests on some of the tiny number of permanent returnees, then perhaps he could learn something.

There were so many buts and ifs, and late in the night Gabe nearly gave up on the whole idea. He knew the proposal was dishonest on its face, that his true motive was his desire to see his childhood home once more. On the other hand, it would be truly useful research. Finally, in frustration, he put down his pen and turned in. He could decide tomorrow.

* * *

After two weeks, no word had come about Gabe’s proposal, not that he expected any news, he told himself, unless they meant to humiliate him, which he probably deserved. He dove deeper into his work, thinking it might help offset the imagined guffaws issuing from the assembled senior scientists.

On occasional days, like today, he utilized his private hideaway to think and unwind from the frustration of work, and laying in the shade of his tiny oak thicket, Gabe pondered his morning conversation with Caleb Jacobsen, from the Astrophysics Department. Caleb, who was a few years older than Gabe, had requested to join him for breakfast, expressing an interest in Gabe’s proposal.

“You know about that proposal, huh?” asked Gabe, surprised.

“Yeah,” said Caleb. “The Department Chair mentioned it, yesterday.”

“Don’t tell me, he was rolling on the floor with laughter.”

Caleb gave Gabe a look of consternation. “No. Actually, he thought it was quite an interesting idea.”

“He did? You’re joshing me, right?”

“Gabe, do you realize how much respect you have among the Physics faculty?”

Gabe was astonished. “Not really.”

“Well trust me, even over on my side of The Compound. So tell me about this idea of yours, the gist of it.”

“Sure..okay. You know about the Omiyoko Study, about three decades ago?”

“Is that when they confirmed the ability of certain plants to communicate with their cloned offspring?”

“Yes. They proved that these plants communicated with one another via entanglement, and could coordinate survival responses to drought and disease. Now, what I am suggesting is that we too are a sort of clone, created by entanglement. What if the entangled particles produced in the process of quantum transference effect one another in some similar way? What if something about the entangled particles on Earth results in the saudades here on Sweetland?”

“You’re suggesting that the saudades is caused by crossing over, that it’s a disease of quantum entanglement?”

Gabe nodded. “I’m close to demonstrating the possibility mathematically, but there are some glitches. Holes you could sail a ship through, actually.”

“For example?”

“In the Omiyoko Study, the original plants and their offspring were all still living at the time of the study. In the process of quantum transference, on the other hand, the original in most cases is no longer alive. Transference involves hundreds of billions of entangled particles, and I can’t represent this change mathematically if I have no idea what entanglements are involved, or how they are involved.”

Caleb looked at him, thoughtfully. “So, what’s your current line of inquiry?”

“I’m playing around with network theory and multiple entanglement.”

“Multiple entanglement? It’s been done in the laboratory, I suppose, but—”

“Yeah, see what I mean? I’m forced to posit a whole new kind of particle that works like a neurological network, entangled with multiple other particles—a real can of worms.”

There was actual excitement in Caleb’s face. “But Gabe, that’s brilliant. Our quantum people have been looking for some fresh way of thinking about entanglement, and they’re going to be all over you with questions when this goes to review.”
Gabe had just shaken his head; peer review had been so far from his mind, and so far from reality at this stage. He only wanted to go to Earth, and now he had overhyped a half-baked idea. The conversation was playing over in his mind when Ellie Fontinot emerged from behind the veil of La Cascada. He sat upright, brushing the oak branches away from his face. Damn, he thought, how the hell did she find me here? A graduate fellow and doctoral candidate, Ellie was also the department gofer, and her appearance meant someone further up the food chain was seeking him out.

“How did you find me?” he complained, irritably.

“Don’t get your shorts in a twist, Gabe.” Ellie grinned at him. “Everybody knows you come over here to be alone. Even Arkady.”

“Arkady knows?” It was a bit of a let down to find that his little act of rebellion was common knowledge, and even tolerated by his department head, Dr. Arkady Zharkov.

“You jump the rail right outside the cafeteria window, for crying out loud. And besides, there are perimeter cams all around the compound.”

“I guess I didn’t think of that,” he said, sheepishly.

“Well, Arkady wants to see you, pronto, and he has Dr. Yoshito in his office.”

Without another word, Ellie disappeared behind the falls and left Gabe sitting on the ground, contemplating the meaning of his summons. Dr. Rebecca Yoshito was the lead scientist in the Quantum Neuroscience Unit, Gabe’s immediate supervisor. Were they going to chastise him over his inadequate proposal? or his absence from the last interdisciplinary staff meeting? Absentmindedly, he picked up the handful of seeds he had gathered and dropped them in a jar beside him in the sand. Then, he closed the lid and replaced the container in the cliffside nook where he stashed it. He wasn’t sure why he was collecting seeds, it just seemed right somehow, some habit from his childhood when the trees of Earth were dying, and everything seemed suddenly hopeless.

* * *

When Gabe arrived at Arkady’s office, he found an additional guest—a stranger—with Zharkov and Yoshito. When he saw the red robes he lamely attempted to excuse himself, “Sorry, I must have made a mistake,” but Arkady motioned him inside.

“Please close the door, Dr. Proctor,” said Arkady. Gabe winced. He hated that rhymey Doctor Proctor bullshit. “Gabe,” continued Arkady, “I would like you to meet Sister Magda. Sister is Mother Hierarch of Esparanza. She has taken an interest in your…uhm…theory of complex entanglement.”

Gabe stood, mouth agape, unable to utter a word. They had even given it a name. He interpreted the tone of the “uhm” however as a clear signal that the senior scientists weren’t entirely happy with the idea, and perhaps a bit miffed that the Sisters had somehow got wind of it.

“Please sit, Gabe. Sister needs to hear your ideas explained in lay terms.”

“Yeah…yes,” Gabe stammered, then froze once more. He felt totally incompetent.

“You are wondering where to begin,” Arkady offered and Gabe nodded. “Sister only knows the basics of quantum theory, and very little of our recent research. Why don’t you tell us a bit about the spin states you have been investigating.”

Gabe felt a slight sense of relief. Explaining basics would give him some breathing space while he figured out how to talk about his ideas. Arkady probably thought he was doing Gabe a favor by providing an opportunity to think things through for a lay audience, but in truth, he wasn’t prepared for this yet. His little scheme was about to backfire horribly.

“As you may know,” Gabe began, “we have long been able to emulate quantum spin, generating up to nine distinct energy states. This is the heart of qunit-based computing developed on Earth in the mid twenty-twenties, and it was this development which enabled the d-gates and other teleportation devices which are responsible for our being here on Sweetland. While this has been a useful technological tool, we also know that naturally occurring quantum spin can have a number of measurable energy levels. Until recently, that number has been nine, but our new equipment has significantly improved calibration.”

Rebecca Yoshito smiled at him, encouragingly, and Gabe relaxed a bit. He still had no idea what to say about his half-cocked theory. Sister Magda cleared her throat. “So, young man, what does all of this have to do with the saudades?”

Here we go, he thought. “You know about network theory and how the brain’s neurological system works as a kind of distributed network?”

Sister nodded. “I think I understand basic network theory. If I want to circulate a piece of information, instead of sending it out individually to each recipient, it is much more efficient to send it to social organizations or mobe trees to which those individuals belong.”

“That’s the general idea,” he said. “When we speak of the brain, we’re talking about a much more complex network, but we can use an algorithm to model it.”

“And the saudades?” the Sister prompted again.

“As you may know, animals teleported to Sweetland also suffer from the so-called saudades—something which resembles clinical depression on the surface, but which responds to no treatment we have found, and in our animal victims this often results in a physical wasting. Rebecca…Dr. Yoshito discovered—a few months ago—a strange anomaly in the neurological system of these animals. It’s…well…it’s at the quantum level.”

Gabe looked pleadingly at Rebecca, who came to his rescue. “The anomalies were in the the marginal division, at the caudomedial border of the neostriatum. The MrD is one if the areas associated with memory.”

“What do you mean when you say they are at the quantum level?” asked Sister Magda.

Gabe picked it up. “When Dr. Yoshito observed quantum particles from this region of the brain, she should have seen a random distribution of the observable quantum states. Instead, what she found was that fifty-three percent of the particles were in an identical state.”

Sister Magda seemed puzzled. “Isn’t that a reasonable margin of error?”

“If we were talking about two binary spin states, yes, but we are dealing with nine detectible energy states, so those results are not statistically possible without some sort of additional factor which is missing from our theory. To complicate matters further, our new equipment, which is able to detect even smaller fluctuations in quantum energy levels, tells us that many of those quantum positions do not match up to our nine observed—”

“—meaning we have several more possible quantum states to plug into the formulas,” Rebecca finished. “As you can see, if these observations hold out, we are looking at rewriting much of what we know about quantum theory. Gabe…” Rebecca was turning the conversation back to him, and he felt the blood draining from his face. This was it.

“I’m proposing that there are an infinite number of possible energy states and that there is a particle X which acts as a distributive network. When we observe a particle which is entangled with particle X, we fix its state, and that, in turn, fixes the state of all other particles entangled with particle X. It’s the only way I can bring the theory back in line with what we see.” He was floundering, but Sister Magda regarded him with a keen interest.

“So, young man, back to the saudades.”

“Well, this all leads me to conjecture that saudades is a result of entanglement, possibly associated with the teleport gates.”

Gabe saw Arkady roll his eyes. He wasn’t buying it.

“It’s just a postulation,” he explained. “I know I need more empirical data before I can even call this a theory. But it’s more than a stab in the dark, and the situation is critical.”

Sister Magda looked at him thoughtfully. “We are in complete agreement there, Doctor. So, you are proposing a visit to Earth in order to obtain some of this empirical data?”

He looked from stone-faced Arkady to Rebecca, who nodded her encouragement. “Yes,” he said. “If I could set up some experiments on the other side, I think it may help me obtain valuable data I need to confirm my hypothesis and develop the theory.”

Sister Magda smiled a slight thin-lipped smile. “Thank you, Doctor. I now have a much better understanding of your work.”

Gabe felt as though he were being dismissed, and looked to Arkady for confirmation.

“Thank you, Dr. Proctor,” said Arkady. “You may resume your…uhm…valuable work.”

©2010, Duane Poncy, all rights reserved.

He focussed on Monitor 1, which tracked his squad as they spread out up the canyon. The spy drone, with its motion-sensitive cameras, hovered silently eight meters above the lead man, high enough to follow the movement of the targets, and to keep an accurate position on each of the seven men in the squad. They were boys really, just turned seventeen and fearless, the way young boys are. That would be sixteen Earth years, he thought, too young to be out here on their own. The targets were not armed, as far as Kolvin knew, but it wasn’t the targets that worried him, it was the hostiles in the forest, whomever or whatever had attacked Outpost 47 two weeks ago. That’s where monitor 2 came in—it watched his ass. But the drones had their limitations, and that was what drove his fear.

The forward camera on monitor 1 shifted rapidly, showing movement up a steep ravine. Kolvin touched his com switch. “Target to your right, thirty degrees, forty-five meters. Acknowledge.”

“Ack,” came the reply. “Closing in on Target.”

“Once you have them, get back here pronto, Cooper,” he said.

“Will do. Almost have them, Sarge.”

On the lower half of the screen Kolvin watched seven blue dots, representing his men, converge on the two red dots. Once they had them, it would take another twenty minutes for the squad to return to base, and forty-five minutes more to clear out of the woods. That was too damned long. Monitor 2 came to sudden life, and Kolvin sucked in a deep breath. The cameras swiveled upward into the treetops, and high in the branches a shape moved slightly, its outline too vague to identify. It moved once more, just a hair, and the sun glinted off something long and metallic.

“Zoom in,” he said, feeling the panic return. The camera pulled the image closer—it looked to Kolvin like an Egyptian AP70. He’d seen a number of these anti-personnel launchers during his service in the Sinai Wars, too many to ever forget.

“Sniper,” he said under his breath, but it was too late. He heard the shots and watched the camera follow the two AP rounds hurtling toward him in slo mo. Funny how I can see them so clearly, he thought. They should have been a blur at 500 kilometers per hour. Paralyzed now by fear, he watched the miniature grenades rip through the roof of his canopy and explode in a circus of color, dispatching scores of nano smart bombs into the air to snuff out all life within a fifty meter circumference. He didn’t feel, or even see, the miniscule projectiles entering his body to deliver their peaceful death.

* * *

Molly Whitedeer swung her leg wildly, missing the soldier’s head, but pulling free of the strong hand which gripped her ankle. She scrambled up the slope toward Joey, who was now some distance above her near the top of the hill. Pieces of crumbled shale, dislodged by Joey’s boots, showered down upon her, making her own flight more difficult; but the falling rock gave her an idea, and as she climbed, she began to kick chunks of shale into the face of her pursuer, who quickly fell behind as he dodged the hail of stone.

When she looked up again, Joey had disappeared over the edge. He was the one they wanted, and she wasn’t going to let them have him, even if that meant allowing herself to be caught. The two of them had made a pact: if she was captured, he would not wait for her or attempt to rescue her. But the twelve-year-old idolized her, and she wasn’t confident he could hold up his end of the deal. Molly renewed her effort, kicking ferociously at the loose shale, but the soldier had pulled down his visor and was no longer bothering to avoid the debris. He headed straight up the hill at her, and she switched tactics, concentrating once more on climbing the hill. When the top of the incline was within a few feet, two pairs of strong arms came out of nowhere to seize her and drag her the remaining way up and over the edge of the embankment. She saw military boots and camouflage trousers, and they told her what she needed to know—she had been outflanked. And when she looked up, at last, she saw Joey in the grip of two burly boys in uniform.

There were seven of them altogether. The leader’s name was Private Cooper. None of the soldiers appeared older than Molly herself. Borns, she thought. They were Borns, like she and Joey, and that would explain why they moved so confidently in the forest. She hadn’t counted on that.

The soldiers snapped electronic anklets on them, and warned them not to wander more than 20 meters from Private Cooper, unless they wanted to feel the most excruciating pain of their lives. Cooper sent two of his men ahead, and the remainder escorted the shackled captives, two in the rear, one on either side, and Cooper in the lead, as they moved back down the canyon. Escape seemed out of the question. The downhill pace was brisk and Private Cooper clearly had a bug in his pants and a panicked look in his eyes. The others also seemed worried as they talked to one another in hushed tones. Perhaps their radio wasn’t working, or some crisis occurred back at camp, Molly couldn’t quite get the gist of it, but they were in a hurry, that much was certain.

They walked for a time in silence, listening to the sound of tramping boots and snapping branches. The trees here, near the western transition zone, were what Mama called pines, although Molly knew that pines were Earth trees, so they couldn’t be pines or firs or anything like that. The party pushed through the underbrush until it reached the trough of the canyon where a small creek ran to the west, and they turned to follow it downstream.

“I’m sorry, Joey,” Molly said to her nephew at last, when she thought the soldiers were distracted. “I didn’t think they would come this far in.”

“They’re Borns, aren’t they?” he said.

“Yeah, I think so.”

She had counted on the fact that most of the adults, those who had crossed over eighteen years ago, before they shut down the d-gates, had an uncanny fear of the Sweetland forest. The dread, in fact, was so intense that few of those immigrants would even acknowledge its existence. Borns were somehow immune to this delusion. It was an ominous sign if the New Americans were inducting Borns into the military. In a few years, when there were enough of them, they would be capable of invading the Communities from the West, through the forest. The peaceful Communities had no army to defend itself, and until recently, it hadn’t needed one. Now, the New America Corporation seemed unwilling to settle for half a continent, when they could take the whole thing.

The radio on Cooper’s belt crackled, and a voice spoke for several seconds in an excited but unintelligible garble.
“Shit,” said Cooper. He halted the procession with a raised hand and motioned the other soldiers to gather around. “It got Sarge,” he said. “He’s dead just like them others.”

“Damn fool,” said another of the young men, “I told him he should stay back and let us handle this.”

Molly listened to this conversation with alarm. “What killed him?” she asked.

The soldiers merely stared at her. Then Cooper said, “Whatever it is they see and we don’t, Miss. Some call ‘em Indians, some say enemy soldiers, but whatever it was ran through a whole outpost two weeks ago, killed every last man up there.”

* * *

They carried the body of the man they called Sarge down the canyon on a stretcher made from his canvas tent and loaded it into a flying machine the soldiers called a helicopter. The landscape in this place was treeless and alien to Molly, who had never been anywhere outside the forest. The barren earth expanded as far as she could see into the western horizon, and it seemed to her for the first time in a visceral way that the universe was infinite, and she small and insignificant.

The big rotors started turning, churning up dust, and one of the soldiers took Joey by the elbow and led him toward the helicopter. Halfway there, Joey twisted away from his escort and shouted, “Molly,” before being grabbed by a second soldier. The soldiers, one on each side, dragged him the remainder of the way to the helicopter as he continued to call out her name.

Molly was frantic, and would have run after him, if not for Private Cooper, who grabbed her wrist with an unyielding hand. She struggled for a minute, furious, and finally, unable to free herself from Cooper’s grip, she called back to the boy, “I’ll come and get you Joey, I promise.”

Molly turned to Cooper and kicked at him with a viciousness that surprised her, but he nimbly avoided her boot and laughed.

“You’re a feisty one, ain’t you?”

Instead of becoming more angry, she succumbed to her grief. “Where are they taking my nephew?” she demanded, her voice a terrible howl of pain. “Why can’t they take me with him?”

“I guess someone figured you’d be less trouble separated,” said Cooper. “Don’t worry, Miss, you’re both going to be taken good care of.”

Molly wanted to cry, but stubbornly held back the tears and focussed her mind on her predicament. What Cooper said was true. Jolene Cheng wouldn’t want her grandson damaged, and while Molly wasn’t exactly Cheng’s family, she was Joey’s family. In any case, Cheng couldn’t possibly be as evil as she was usually portrayed in the Communities, a description which approached devil incarnate.

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked Cooper.

“I’m driving you to Port Harvest, where someone’ll pick you up.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” said Cooper. “Maybe Ms. Cheng, herself. Or someone who works for her.”

The helicopter finally lifted off, taking Joey from her reach. They sat on the dusty ground and waited. By the time the truck arrived with New America Corporation, Special Security Forces painted on its door, Molly had a rough plan sketched out in her mind.

* * *

For several long hours Molly rode in the cab of the truck with Private Cooper. The heat of the sun and the boredom of the bleak, featureless landscape put her to sleep, only to be wakened after too brief a time by a rough patch of road, and around again in a cycle until at last the scenery began to change. To the north, a river now ran alongside the highway, and the landscape to the south began to resemble prairie, with tall grasses and large herds of grazing animals.

“What are they?” she asked Cooper.

“Ain’t you never seen cattle before?” said Cooper.

“No. Are they from Earth?”

“That’s what they tell me. They sure make good burgers.”

“Burgers?”

“Yeah. Great big fat sandwiches. That’s what they’re for.”

Molly felt sick. “They raise them to eat?”

Cooper laughed. “You sure are a strange one. Are all you Bols like that?”

“We don’t eat animals. And we aren’t bowls, whatever you mean by that.”

“You’re a Bolivarian ain’t you?” said Cooper.

It was Molly’s turn to laugh. “That’s an old Earth word, and it doesn’t mean anything on Sweetland. Do they teach you that here in New America?”

The boy looked confused. “What are you then?”

“The Communities don’t have a single ideology. We’re a democracy.”

Cooper didn’t say anything more, and his face grew a scowl as he drove into the afternoon sun. In the space of his silence, Molly closed her eyes and returned once more to sleep.

* * *

She is in the forest, but it is the forest of her childhood, a forest of mushroom trees and faerie bushes and mistol, with its sweet, succulent fruit. The girl who is walking beside her is tall and thin; not just thinness in the usual sense used when speaking of a thin child, but thin in density; as though you could feel the morning breeze blow through her, or she could walk right into a tree and emerge unchanged on the other side. The girl is speaking to her in normal, everyday Linguish, but Molly can’t quite grasp the meaning of the words. She knows somehow the girl is talking about how the past determines the future, but through the agency of the present, through memory and dream, and how we must remember things truthfully or our dreams will be flawed and our future misguided.

“And that is the purpose of the Memories,” said the girl, and Molly knew the girl meant Memories with a capital M, that it was something solid and important.

Molly awoke troubled from her recurring dream. She thought about it for a long time as the truck jarred along the rough road and she watched the sky grow dark from day’s end.

* * *

As sunset faded into night they came to a town, a long, sprawling affair with odd-looking buildings and ugly signs everywhere saying things like, Eat Here, or Motel—Rent for the Evening or by the Hour, or Hottest Dancing Girls South of the Pecos. They pulled up beneath one that read Donna’s Truck Stop, and Cooper knocked on the back window of the cab. “Roz,” he shouted. “Time for dinner.”

It was Molly’s first clue that someone had been in the back of the truck. A shaven-headed soldier stumbled from the rear, stretching and yawning. Molly recognized her as one of her captors.

“This is Roz,” said Cooper. “We got a bunk in back. She’s been sleeping ’cause she’s driving night shift. You’ll ride up front with her.”

Roz grinned. “That would be a good idea,” she said, “unless you want that horndog all over you.”

Cooper’s coarse laugh made Molly blush.

Donna’s Truck Stop turned out to be a restaurant with nothing on the menu Molly could eat except some greasy potatoes and a salad, which consisted of a pile of tasteless leaves, topped with a disgustingly thick, white dressing. As the trio ate in silence, Molly regarded Roz. She hoped maybe the girl had a little more intelligence and personality than Cooper, and decided it couldn’t be any worse. After dinner Cooper clambered into the back, as promised, and Roz drove. Molly rode along in silence for a long time, thinking about Joey and about her sister, Jessie, who would soon be frantic with worry when she and Joey failed to show up in Sangre del Corazon at the appointed time.

Finally she said, “Do you ever think about why we Borns are different from the others?”

“Not really,” said Roz.

“You know we’re different, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess so. That’s why they sent us into the forest to get you, because the old guys are scared shitless. Not without reason, mind you. Just look what happened to Sarge.”
Molly found she had been putting that incident of Sarge out of her mind. It didn’t fit into her picture of the world, of the forest, of the evidence she had gathered with her own senses during her seventeen years of life.

“About that,” she said. “Nothing like that has ever happened in the Communities. The adults are afraid of the forest, but no one has reported massacres or deaths.”

“The immigrants here see something,” said Roz. “Out on the frontier, some of the old military guys like Sarge say they’ve watched squads of soldiers or guerillas moving across the hillsides at dusk. The ranchers around here call them Indians or something. No one paid much attention until recently.”

With a small stab of sadness, Molly thought about her mother’s imaginary Indians. “These things are real for them,” she said.

“I hate to think about this too much,” said Roz, “but if hallucinations can kill them, then can’t they kill us too? Just because we don’t see them…I mean those soldiers at Outpost 47 had real, traumatic injuries, they didn’t just die of fright.”
Molly considered this. She thought maybe she should be taking these words more seriously, but it felt like some old lifelong friend was being accused by a stranger of being a homicidal maniac. She couldn’t quite believe it, she didn’t want to believe it, and yet that old friend always did act a little strangely.

“Another thing that makes the immigrant generation different from us is the forgetting,” said Molly. “Do you know what I mean?”

“You mean like when we tell them how we see things, they can’t remember for more than fifteen minutes? I always thought that was something that just happened when you got older.”

“That’s what I thought too when I was a kid. There was this tree we called a mushroom tree, and they were everywhere around Meadow Springs. It’s trunk was soft and spongy, and it gave off a musty odor. It didn’t have leaves or needles, but its long, thick stems reached up into the sky, and there was something like a pod on the end. Now, you can’t find these trees anywhere in the Communities. When I was older, I asked my sister, Jessie, about them, and she laughed and told me I had a vivid imagination.”

“Yeah,” said Roz. “It’s weird how things changed and they all forgot. I remember these blue things, they looked like tiny parachutes and they floated through Port Harvest every spring on the wind. The old fishermen called them jellies. Now there are blue dragonflies, the exact same color of blue, but the jellies don’t come through anymore and the fishermen don’t even know what we’re talking about when we mention jellies. It’s like the old people have amnesia or something.”

“There were other things like that in Meadow Springs,” said Molly, “small forest creatures, and other plants and trees I remember, but the adults tell me they never existed. Kids have intense imaginations, but—here’s the thing—my sister is an ecologist, her work is to classify the native species, and I remember her studying these things and writing notes on a notepad she carried with her everywhere. If I could find those notes I would hold them up to her face and say, see. A few years ago, I began to read Earth biology books, and I believe almost everything we see now on Sweetland—the plants and animals and everything—is from Earth, except a few spices and root plants we use in the Communities, like breadroot and nunaroot, which we’ve eaten forever.”

“Nunaroot?”

“Jessie makes the best nunaroot stew.” Molly felt a sudden homesickness as she realized she might not see Meadow Springs again. The refugees might never return to the forest and the wilderness communities, which had been virtually destroyed by Cheng’s militia.

“Do you know how long it takes a forest to grow?” she asked Roz.

The girl shook her head. “Not very long, from what I’ve seen,” she said. “You know that outpost that got overrun a few weeks ago? There were trees growing right through the buildings. We found one of those soldiers wedged in a branch five meters off the ground.”

“An Earth tree takes several years to grow that tall.”

“You’re saying they’re not really Earth trees?”

“Yeah,” said Molly.

A light spread across the girl’s face. “But why do we remember when things were different, and the older people don’t?”

“I don’t know why. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. But I think the forest, or the world, or whatever is beneath this illusion, is not our enemy, we just need to understand it.”

Roz looked dubious. “I hope you’re right about that.”

©2010, Duane Poncy, all rights reserved.

     “Shit.” No lunch today. Payday had been yesterday, but for the third time this year, The Agency was out of funds and he was out of food stamps, and out of creds with the burrito man on Division. Not that Arturo had any edible tortillas since the wheat rationing began in August. You couldn’t even buy a loaf of bread in Portland these days. Joe squatted to retrieve his pen and a half-dozen file folders from the floor. As he awkwardly regained an upright position, his eye caught the SmartSpots above the bus windows. They were all flashing in a ribbon of red, white, and blue around the perimeter: Make her happy tonight. Grow your penis three inches. Guaranteed. The spammers had struck again.

     “One hundred twenty-second and Stark,” announced the prerecorded voice on the bus’s speaker system. “This stop sponsored by Tommy Tonkin Bicycles by Toyota.”

     An old woman rose with difficulty from the seat next to Joe, and hobbled from the bus. Joe sat down in her place. The seat bore a large gaping wound which pinched and poked him in the buttocks each time the bus encountered a pothole. The young man seated beside him gripped a ragged backpack, holding it tightly against his chest with whitened knuckles. He looked frantic, his eyes darting between the window and the front of the bus, as though searching for an escape. Joe’s heart skipped. What was in the backpack? Why was this boy so scared? Joe could see that was what he was, just a boy with a few scraggly hairs jutting out of his chin. Settle down, he told himself, there’s a hundred or more reasons this guy might be scared. He looked too much like a jackrabbit to be a ‘cider.

     In front of him, a woman wearing buds jerked her head rhythmically to some fast-paced music. Tweaking. The woman was likely younger than he, but her teeth were gone, and her face was scarred with the pockmarks of an old-fashioned meth addict, leaving her looking years older. He seldom saw active trash-tweakers anymore with all the new designer drugs out there. Plenty of his customers were recovered tweakers or had merely moved on to a drug more subtle in its ravages. This one wasn’t using a common methamphetamine. He suspected something stronger, a derivative called black trash, or death, due to the speed which it destroyed the mind and body. Some called it a suicide drug. Joe couldn’t imagine taking that exit. Why not just throw yourself in front of a bus, for God’s sake?

     A young woman with wrap-around sunglasses sat next to the tweaker. Her head was turned slightly toward the aisle and Joe could see her lips move slightly, almost imperceptibly, her throat pulsing. Over the past few months, increasing numbers of these wrap-arounds had begun to appear. He had a vague idea about their purpose –popular new hardware which tapped into the simulated worlds of the grid. Joe didn’t have much knowledge about that type of thing. Just another way for the advertisers to get into your head and sell you crap.

     He sighed and pulled a file folder from his bag, “Connie Velasques” written in pencil on the tab. Beneath the name he could see the ghosts of Mary Snider, Tomas Sylvan, Letitia Jackson, partially erased. Erased just enough so that a stranger would not recognize them. But Joe did. And he knew their children, and their ex-spouses, and lovers, and their job history, and their drug habits, and their pain. Joe felt the pain of each and every one.

     “You’ve got to remove yourself from all that,” Susan Miller had said to him one day in the break room. “You’ve got to remember your boundaries, Joe. You’re not responsible for the mess these people’s lives are in. You can’t hold on to all this suffering. It’ll kill you.” That was five years ago, his first week on the job. He wondered whatever became of Susie. One day, she just didn’t show up at The Agency for work. It seemed like a recurring script. Many new case workers didn’t last six months, but even old-timers like Susie disappeared without notice, worn out, unable to heed their own advice.

     He returned to Connie’s folder. This would be just a routine check-in. Find out how Connie was managing at her new job. How the children were faring. If Connie was keeping clean. Connie had just kicked a seven-year heroin habit when she was assigned to Joe in January. She had done exceptionally well over the past nine months. School started last week, so daycare would be less of a money sink while Connie looked for work and did the occasional temporary job. He had high hopes for her.

     Joe’s heart sank when the bus pulled up in front of the apartment building — the ambulance, the blue and red flashing lights of the police cars, a knot of officers standing around an open door. The door to Connie’s apartment.

     It was going to be another one of those fucking days.

     Joe tucked Connie’s folder back into his bag as he stepped off the bus. He hated talking to the cops. His Uncle Louis had been a cop, and Joe knew a little too much of what went on in the back room. And he didn’t like most of these young uniforms, just back from war, with their arrogance, and their disdain for these poor people trying to survive on the broken streets. As if this wasn’t a battlefield, too. But, here the land-mines were everywhere, not just underfoot.

     At least he was in popo territory and he didn’t have to deal with the clean-n-safes. For them, he held another level of disdain altogether. Private security firms, originally hired by the neighborhood business associations to keep transients and other riffraff from their client’s businesses, the clean-n-safes became Portland’s solution to social and economic breakdown. Out in East County, businesses had not been so organized. But, they were beginning to pull together enough to hire their own police force. There will be nothing but anarchy in East County, Joe thought, when the Portland Police Department is finally phased out.

     Across the street, a blackwater, the Fed’s contribution to local law and order, stood sentry at the westbound MAX stop, clutching a semiautomatic. Even from a block and a half away, Joe could see the nervousness in his young face, and the unsureness of his footing. Waiting commuters eyed him with a skittish diffidence.

     Joe approached the popos with caution, as he had been taught, flashing his identity badge to let them know that he worked for The Agency. He deliberately set out on a path close to the building so he could see through the window as he passed.

     “You got business here?” the officer nearest him demanded.

     “I’m her caseworker.” Joe looked askance through the window. Inside, Connie slumped on a couch wearing a pair of those dark wrap-around glasses, like the girl on the bus. No blood, no drug paraphernalia that he could see.

     “You were her caseworker,” said the cop. “Your docket just got cleared of one problem. This one’s gone to Sweetland, permanently.”

     “She’s got kids at school,” Joe said, adding asshole under his breath.

     “Well,” said the cop, “I guess you get a paycheck then, after all.”

     Joe seethed. He just couldn’t figure these guys out. Connie could have been this jerk’s mom. Men in uniform, the grunts, grew up in neighborhoods like these, with single parents struggling to survive, and yet they seemed so eager to turn on their own.

     Joe swallowed his anger. “What happened to her?”

     “I’m not at liberty to say, sir. You should go take care of them kids, now.”
Don’t argue, Joe told himself. Arguing just gets you in jail. Or disappeared.

     “I’ll do that,” he said. “Thanks, officer.”

     Joe retreated to the bus stop across the street, weaving his way carefully through the bicycle traffic. Out of nowhere, a group of young boys dashed past and a bottle flew through the air, landing at the feet of the blackwater, who raised his gun to his shoulder. Crouching, his muscles tense, Joe felt the adrenalin rush through his body as he hurried across the bus lane. He was relieved to see a bus pulling up to the stop. He stepped up into the vehicle, and two of the young troublemakers broke from the pack as it ran by, and boarded behind him. They took the seat across the aisle from him. Joe clenched his jaw. Perspiration formed on his forehead, and he wiped it nervously with the back of his hand. These fools didn’t know what they were playing with. They could get a lot of people hurt or killed, including themselves.

     “Did you see that blackwater’s face?” one whispered, excitedly.

     “Yeah, chuck,” said the other one. “He was friggin’ ready to piss his pants.”

     “You boys should be a little more cautious,” admonished a sixtyish woman sitting behind them.

     “Whatever, Grandma,” said the first boy, with a nasty snarl. But they fell silent, and then left the bus after two more stops. Joe exhaled slowly.

     At last, the bus pulled up to his stop near his office, which was housed in the basement of the old Church of Christ building. The church, recently acquired in a hostile takeover by General Dynamics, had succumbed grudgingly to privatization. The Agency itself now existed in a gray transition zone. In two more years, there would be no public sector at all. Just the so-called free market. Police, libraries, schools, social services, all under the dictates of private profit. Joe could see the havoc being wreaked by the gods of the Free Market. There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing anyone could do. It was what they called a done deal.

     A deep sense of despair overtook him as he entered the basement door, and walked down the dim, shabby hall, its light green paint peeling and covered with black marks from the soles of shoes where hundreds of weary legs had rested as they waited for assistance. Help that often never came. He slunk past Christi, the receptionist, and signed in, then he bee-lined straight to his cubicle and verified that Children’s Services Corp employees were picking up Connie’s kids. He didn’t trust the popo to get things right, but they had made the proper arrangements.

     Too distressed to do any useful work, Joe disconnected and put in his buds, surfing to his favorite gridcast channel. He would sit and listen to some soothing music. No one would know. Or care.

     “Today,” said the news announcer, “the war in sub-Saharan Africa has taken a new turn. Nigerian federal troops, advancing on rebel camps, met no resistance. The camps were empty, claimed startled commanders. They reportedly found no insurgents, yet inside the tents, arms, and ammunition waited, along with some meager food supplies, and a handful of field computers. One British observer reported that ‘It seemed as though the mothership came along and beamed them up. Very eerie…’ Meanwhile, in New York, to no one’s surprise, Governor Chelsea Clinton announced that she would run for President in the coming election. At a news conference announcing her candidacy, she stressed the need to combat domestic disorder…”

     Joe removed the buds and put his head between his hands. “To hell with this,” he said in a whisper. Then, “to hell with this,” again, at the top of his voice. As the anger grew, he picked up a broken cup he used as a pencil container, and threw it across his cubicle with a violence that startled him. “I’m going home,” he announced to the office, making sure that everyone could hear. “Fuck this!”

* * *

     Joe retrieved his bike from the indoor bike corral and rode homeward, carefully maneuvering across the bus corridor, sliding smoothly over to the turn lane. Commuting down 122nd Avenue stressed him out. Too damned much rubbish. Too many buses. He turned off on SE Clinton, the first bicycle-only street he encountered. Once safely on Clinton, he began to think about what he had just done. He might get fired for that. At the moment of his frustration, he hadn’t given a damn, but now fear began to nibble at him. Five years ago, he would have been confronted before he could leave the building. Told not to come back. But that was then. Now fewer case workers had to deal with an exponential increase in the misery index. Joe was good at what he did, and conscientious. And one of his clients had just died. He hoped they would understand.

     At 119th he turned right, toward Division. Division was a rail line, but it also contained a bicycle lane, which took him all the way down to 52nd. When he arrived at the Fifty-second and Division checkpoint, a bored blackwater glanced at his ID badge and waved him though. From the checkpoint, he followed the Hawthorne trolley down to 21st, and then right to Belmont. The five-mile journey took him about half an hour on most days.

     As Joe wheeled his bicycle up to his apartment building, he knew something wasn’t right. From Jessie’s window came the faint but unmistakable blue glow of her veejay screen. He clearly remembered going into her room after she left for school this morning, to make sure everything was shut off. It was routine, because Jessie inevitably left something on, and although he lectured her about the cost of electricity and climate change and the threat of further rationing, nothing seemed to get through to her. It wasn’t defiance, just forgetfulness. She had been like that since she was a little girl. Her Grandma Amy used to tease her, “You’d forget your head if it weren’t screwed on.”

     So, what was Jessie doing home at 2 pm on a school day? He locked up his bike in the shelter at the bottom of the stairs, in its usual place next to hers, and approached his door, turned the key in the lock. Inside, all was quiet, except for the faint sound of a voice coming from Jessie’s room. He put his bag down and walked over to her bedroom door, gently pushing it open. Jessie leaned back in her chair, involved in some fantasy world, talking on her gamer headset. He hadn’t remembered seeing her with these before. They were those wrap-around sunglasses, like the ones on Connie Velasques and the girl on the bus. As he thought about it, he recalled kids wearing them down at the coffee shop, and in the park this summer. The latest cool thing, he supposed. How do the kids say it? They were glitch.

     “Jessie.” No answer.

     “Jessie!” A little louder. She didn’t turn or acknowledge him.

     Joe walked up behind her and removed the glasses. Jessie jumped and wheeled around in her chair, startled.

     “God, Dad,” she said, “you scared the pee wadding out of me. What are you doing home so early?”
“The question is, Jessie,” Joe shot back, “what are you doing home so early?”
Joe could see the look, the evasive movement of her eyes to the right, a signal that Jessie was about to lie. Instead of stopping her, he would let her spin her story. He would gently challenge her until she became caught up in her own web. It never failed. The fourteen-year-old was a terrible liar.

     “I wasn’t feeling good.”

     “So why aren’t you resting?”

     “Well, I wasn’t feeling that bad.”

     “Who are you talking to?”

     “Just some friends.” The look again.

     “And what friends would this be?”

     “Pox and Cedar,” she said. Names he’d not heard before.

     “So, why aren’t Pox and Cedar in school? Are they sick, too?”

     “I think maybe they’re in a different time-zone or something.”

     “Jessie,” Joe lit into her, “how often have I told you that people you meet online are not your friends. You don’t know them. You don’t know anything about them. They might not be kids at all. They might be rapists or terrorists or human traffickers. You don’t know what they are. Don’t you get that?”

     She looked as if she were ready to cry or scream at him, Joe couldn’t tell which. It could go either way these days, but to his surprise she did neither. “I’m sorry, Dad. The kids told me about this sim on New Life. It’s really glitch. Everyone’s doing it.”

     “So, where did you get the new hardware?” He held up the headset.

     “They’re citspecs, Dad,” she said. “You are so living in the past. They were selling them in the mall at SimWorld. They only cost $20.”

     “You’ve got to be kidding.” He looked them over before setting them down.

     “I think the idea is to get people into the sims so they shop and buy stuff on New Life.”

     New Life was the latest generation of life sims on the grid. Not so much a game as a simulated world. For a couple of years now it had been the buzz among The Agency’s customers and some of his coworkers. Escapism is how he would describe it, but probably no worse than some of the grid games kids played, or those stupid reality shows. Maybe he was being too harsh with Jessie.

     “Jessie,” he said, “I just want you to be safe. You know that, right? These people…just don’t let anyone know your real name, or where you live, okay? Be careful. And promise me you won’t skip any more school for this nonsense.”

     “I won’t, Dad,” she said, “I promise.”

     Joe closed the door and made his way to the kitchen, where he pulled a beer out of the fridge. Then he went to the living room to zone out on the couch for the rest of the afternoon. He didn’t want to think about work or Connie Velasques, or Jessie, or the state of the world. He just wanted to close his eyes and sleep.

     Claire giggled. She couldn’t help herself. She always giggled like a girl whenever the make-believe bartender asked if she wanted a make-believe drink.

     “What’s so funny, Ms. Deluna?” he asked. He always asked it in exactly the same way.

     “All of it, Jasper. The whole damned ridiculous idea of it. You know what I mean? Grown-up people playing dolls for a living. Jesus Christ, it’s funny.”

     “Yeah, it’s pretty funny all right.” Jasper gave a brief reserved laugh as he turned to serve a customer at the far end of the bar. All perfect, all so disney, she thought.

     Claire glanced at the clock behind the bar. Ten past seven. Why the hell wasn’t Bigshot here yet? These corporate types, always so keen on punctuality. Oh wait. That’s when they’re expecting you. Gotta keep perspective on the pecking order, here, sweetie. One of her weaknesses, the whole perspective thing.

     She admired the neat rows of vintage liquor bottles artfully lined up on the shelf as she watched Jasper go through his routines, dutifully wiping down the counter with a bar rag and chatting with the customers. At quarter past, she stood to leave.

     That was when her eye caught the avatar in the doorway. He was dumb-ass ridiculous. His shoulders and biceps were exaggerated beyond belief, and there was a massive bulge in his pants. A little dick in real life, or some other kind of bullshit. You might think it was satire, except these guys had no clue about satire. Claire had an urge to laugh out loud, but you don’t laugh at a prospective client. Besides, she was pretty much a cliché herself, wasn’t she?

     He strutted up to her with macho confidence.

     “You must be Jeremiah Bigshot,” she ventured.

     “Yes.” His voice was deep and confident. “And you are Claire Deluna. May I call you Claire?”

     “No. Ms. Deluna will be fine.”

     “All business.” He sounded disappointed. “Okay, Ms. Deluna, I can go with that. You’ll allow me to buy you a drink?”

     “Sure.” If Mr. Bigshot wanted to support the 3D artist who created her favorite hangout in New Life, who was she to deny him the pleasure. Besides, it was the expected thing to do. Part of the protocol.

     Bigshot paid for the drinks at the bar and chose a privacy booth near the back of the room. Claire set her encryption. She trusted The Downbeat’s data shields for personal conversations, but an added layer of protection never hurt when it came to protecting her clients. Or potential clients.

     “So, Mr. Bigshot, what can I do for you?”

     “You certainly don’t waste any time, Ms. Deluna,” said Bigshot. Claire resisted saying something really hackneyed about time and money.

     “We deal with sensitive data, Ms. Deluna. I’m afraid files are going missing, and hackers are playing with our data. To complicate things, we recently purchased a company, and it’s beginning to look like a possible source of the mischief. I need someone I can trust to get to the bottom of all this.”

     “And the real life company you represent is…” Claire prompted.

     “Futures, LLC. We’re—”

     “Hold on,” interrupted Claire, “I know who you are. You’re that new tech company that’s been in the news lately. Developing ‘the next generation of sim technology’ or whatever.”

     “That’s us.”

     Claire hesitated. “Hmm. I don’t know…”
She had to think about this one. It might be hazardous. Over the past few years the criminal gangs, which had long promoted gambling and prostitution on the sims, had begun to entrench themselves in the corporate structures. Hacker wars had taken out one of New Life’s major competitors, and a bomb last summer decimated New Life headquarters in Denver, killing a CFO and several staffers. But, they had money to throw around. Lots of it.

     “I’ll make it worth your time,” said Bigshot, as though reading her mind. “They told me you’re the best. I want the best, and I’m willing to pay for it.”

     “Okay.” Claire succumbed to the flattery in a heartbeat. “Fifty k up front and I get full access to all the information I need. That’s all and any info I tell you I need, when I need it.”

     “That’s fine,” said Mr. B. “Fifty thousand NewDineros it is.”

     Claire cleared her throat. “That’s real life dollars, Mr. Bigshot. I hope you don’t think I was born yesterday.” Jesus, she thought, what is it about this job that makes you want to talk in cliches?

     “Certainly not, Ms. Deluna. I just wanted to be sure.”

     When the transfer of the retainer registered, Claire thanked him and promised to make contact first thing in the morning. Then, she promptly teleported to her office. Claire loved her office. She had spent hours getting the details just right, the stains, the paper-strewn desk, the ashtray, and half-empty whiskey bottle; even down to the old, battered fifties couch, complete with stuffing coming out the tear in the cushion.

     “Maxi.” She beckoned and a beautiful, middle-aged brunette with a no-nonsense demeanor, a bit butch, emerged from the door behind Claire’s desk. Claire’s assistant, Maxine Magnolia, had been programmed by K.T. Willow, one of the best hackers on the planet. She was more sophisticated and trustworthy than your typical out-of-the-box concierge. And she had access to a number of corporate, law enforcement, and DHS databases.

     “What can I do for you, hon?” asked Maxi, in her syrupy Appalachian accent.

     “Could you find out everything you can about Futures, LLC, and its subsidiaries, Max? I’ll be checking out until morning.”

     “I’ll get right on it, darlin’. You know Maxi never sleeps.” Maxi winked and disappeared through her door.

     Claire shed her trench coat and reclined on the couch. Fifty thou wasn’t bad. It would pay for a few months rent, both here on New Life, and for her little studio apartment in Seattle.
 
* * *
 
     Bridge Whitedeer transluced her ocs and sighed. It had been a good day. It was time to put Claire Deluna to bed, although she regretted it just a little.

     She gazed out her window over the darkening waters of what had once been the south edge of downtown Seattle. Most of the buildings south of Pioneer Square still stood, rising like drowned ghosts from the sea. A few people still lived inside these doomed towers. At high tide, they exited through windows just above the waterline and rode one of the taxi dinghies or homemade rafts created from plastic bottles and other floating garbage. When the tide dropped low, the inhabitants put on waders and slogged their way to higher ground.  At night, you could see their dim lights flickering in the windows.

     Other buildings leaned and twisted, undermined by the rising water, which had flooded the Seattle underground and eroded their footing. Many older brick structures were clearly crumbling. Even the city engineers said that Smith Tower would likely go within the next few years. The skyscrapers further north stood, as yet untouched, on an advancing shoreline. Seattle, protected by the Sound and the Olympic peninsula from the worst effects of the rising ocean, fared much better than other cities, such as San Francisco, where the strong tides pushed constantly at the western hillsides, pulling the old structures, and the hills themselves, into the sea.

     Bridge was born about the time the scientists began to grow seriously alarmed about the melting ice. It will take centuries, they said, for the sea to rise enough to engulf our cities. Their models were based on incomplete knowledge, denial, and political cowardice. When the Greenland Ice Shelf began to collapse in earnest, only a few cities had adequately prepared. By then, the country was in perpetual war and deep depression brought on by the oil crash. The sea rose three meters between the time Bridge began high school and the time she would have graduated in ’21. Since then, it had raised another twelve meters, fed by the total disintegration of Antarctica’s ice shelves.

     Bridge hunched her thin shoulders and pushed her short, black hair back from her eyes with scrawny fingers. She considered her reflection in the window. Absent-mindedly she teased the mods which were installed, like tiny embedded jewels, behind her right ear. She looked nothing like her alter ego, Claire Deluna.  Claire was someone Bridge imagined was more attractive, with her cute red hair, and breasts you could actually see. A girl with more moxie and flair than her real life puppet master. More suitable as a private eye. Bridge could never be an investigator in real life. Who would possibly take her seriously? And yet, Claire was the best. Mr. Bigshot, himself, had told her so.

     She continued to look out the window for a time, watching the lights and listening. The drumming had begun, its tribal rhythm calling out from the homeless enclaves, and the drowned buildings, as it had every night since the beginning of summer. It seemed more insistent now as the weather grew wet and inhospitable. There was something indescribably comforting in it.

     Finally, Bridge crossed the floor to her tiny refrigerator, grabbed a half-eaten sandwich. She sat at her little kitchen table and took a bite. Then she put her head down on the table and fell asleep.