0

This is how I see them: driving north out of Seattle on 99 through a stretch of car lots and strip malls that seems to go on forever, Astrid curled up in her seat, leaning against the door. They are talking, or she is. Alan is watching the light – signs, streetlights and headlights – passing across her face. He watches her lips move. She is talking about the Kennedys.
“Robert was incredibly effective as Attorney General. The FBI was preparing to subpoena half the casino owners in Las Vegas.”
He tried to put it together. “So that’s the Cuban Mafia connection?” She was tall and thin, a willow to his Frankenstein’s monster. He was wondering if they were becoming lovers.
“No, no.” She closed her eyes, organizing her case. When she opened them again she looked down, began ticking points off on her fingers. “One.” She held up a finger and followed it up with her eyes. “The Cubans felt they…” but she never finished the thought. Her eyes went wide. She slammed both hands on the dash and screamed Alan’s name. He saw the red light and hit the brakes in a reflex.
He might as well have hit the accelerator. The wheels locked and the car rose up on a tiny wave of oil and water and flew into the intersection. It was way too late. Somehow they passed between two cars headed east, the second hitting their brakes so hard the front of the car fell and jerked to the right, somehow enough to pass behind them, maybe missing by inches. But in that impossibly long moment as they came out from between those two cars Alan saw there was no way they were not going to t-bone the next car travelling west and, somehow, he slammed down onto the accelerator and they were through. Cars coming from both directions—then nothing. The tires didn’t even make any noise as he slammed the brakes again for no reason now because they were through but he just needed to stop. The car was clear of the other side and hit a rising slope of the road, the pavement stopping the car fast enough to leave them both with bruises, the car itself turned half sideways across both lanes and into the oncoming left turn lane. They looked at each other.
They breathed. Then he checked both directions, saw no one coming, turned the wheel full post to the left, backed into his lane, and drove to the next parking lot he saw. He turned in and pulled up to where they could look back in the direction they had just come. It was 99, all the way. The light they’d just run was 305th North, the main business arterial down to Edmonds. A constant stream of cars – commuters, shoppers, thousands of cars an hour. Back from where they had come there were major intersections every quarter mile. It had been raining steadily for days, everything – every car, building, mall, mid-rise apartment, condo and tree shone with reflected light.
Astrid pulled her knees up to her chin, wrapped her arms around her legs and looked at it all. They sat for a while watching the cars go by, the rain falling on the windshield.

The security guard watched the Toyota pull into the lot while he was checking door tags along the front of the mall. He had to get out of his car, walk from door to door, confirm the door was secure, and then check the tag. The order was important: shaking the handle could loosen the tag. You want the tag to remain firmly adhered to both the door and frame so the customer is confident their premises were checked and secure. It gives them a physical confirmation.
Apex Security Services was the vendor for alarms, CCTV and patrol for seventy percent of the businesses along this ten mile stretch of 99 south of Everett. The brochure said so. He always turned his chest just so when he got to that part, to make sure they looked at his name tag. He would hold the brochure out, smiling. His name was Everett. It was the funniest thing. They were short drivers so he was filling in, humping the parking lots, checking door tags, looking for what all. When he saw the Toyota pull in and park out in the middle of the lot he returned to his vehicle to check it out. Could be kids making out, more usually drugs. He pulled up close enough to shine a light into the front and back seat. Odd the way the windows were tinted, like they let all the light through but everything inside was a haze, out of focus. No one in the vehicle. That was fast. You’d think he would have seen someone if they’d gotten out. It was a big parking lot. He copied down the license plate and took an extra run around the perimeter. People didn’t usually leave cars like that out on these lots. He’d check for it again tomorrow. If it was still here it was stolen, taken for a joy ride or a prank and then left. Hell, probably was even if it was gone. Joyriders dropped it, choppers’ll pick it up.

“Do you remember stopping at any intersections?” she asked.
“Not for a while.”
“We’ve been driving…”
Alan did the math. “We were going fifty. I braked but we lost traction, call it forty. Say the intersection’s a hundred feet. That would be two seconds.” Astrid just watched him, wondering when he started doing math. “We were probably most the way across the intersection before we saw and processed what we saw. My foot moved from the brake to the accelerator before I even knew the cars were coming the other way.”
S nodded. “It was dark. Who’s to say you were even looking in the right direction?”
It was Alan’s turn to nod. The adrenaline had done something to his head. He was thinking better. And, yes, they had been driving for maybe an hour. But he could only remember talking. “Maybe”, he said, “We’ve been driving along, totally normal, starting and stopping like we should. And we just don’t remember it now because it was totally mundane—nothing to see, one moment a reflection of the last, just driving along…” But that wasn’t true. He heard his own voice and he knew it wasn’t. Maybe they were actually dead already and just hadn’t figured it out yet. From where he was that totally made sense.
Astrid leaned back against the door. “Jesus.” She picked at her fingers like she needed a cigarette. “What was in that shit we smoked?”

1

Uli was agitated. He was thinking maybe he was God and if he was, the morning had not gone well for God. God was pissed. The toaster hadn’t popped and the bread burned while he’d been distracted, laughing because he’d finally gotten it right, solved one of the big riddles. He’d forgotten the toast until the kitchen started filling with smoke.
Otherwise time was passing normally. Four A.M. Beijing, nine P.M. London, whatever. He liked to stay in the here and now. Routine helped. Later maybe some cards, a cigar, some brandy. Gabriel was coming by, later. It was morning in Heaven and he’d been working toward coffee and toast. Apparently it was more than he could handle. God is not a morning person. Coffee was good enough for now. Maybe he’d try for toast again later.
He’d found a way, broken the case. That’s what mattered. He’d been thinking about it wrong, using amyloid proteins to motivate adult neurogenesis. What he’d just done instead is apply an altered Methyl CpG protein to a glial substrate that would normally signal neuronal stem cells to differentiate. Introduce a novel enzyme to alter expression, spit out a novel protein that lives and breathes like a normal-nothing-to-see-here transcription factor and you have a normal cell that acts like a brand new baby stem cell.
In a white powder form. The trick was getting the dosage right. He might have OD’d. The agent seemed to produce astrocytic and neural cells proportionally, so that was good. Still, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t taken too much.
That’s how things were when they’d knocked on his door. He opened the door in his wrinkled boxers and tee shirt and said “Hey”. Astrid or Alan, he couldn’t remember which, asked “Mind if we come in?” Uli shrugged, “sure” and opened the door. They were a couple Ave rat hippies, living in the District for years. He led them to a couch by the window and dropped into the recliner.
The place was the daylight basement with a picture window looking out over the lawns of Landover Creek.
Alan saw a hallway and a door open to a back room with tables, stacks of computers and things that looked like hooded blenders and toaster ovens with clear plastic lids, beakers and tubes. Nothing was on. The place was quiet. Uli was in his underwear and house slippers. He looked like hadn’t bathed in several days.
The air smelled of burned toast, charcoal smoke hanging in the air. Uli waved a hand at a passing wisp. He said, “Sorry for the miasma” as he relaxed into the chair and stared at his visitors. Staying in context was taking a little work.
“I kind of like it,” Astrid said, “Reminds me of my grandma for some reason.”
“Nice lab. You’re still working on your project?” Alan meant his PhD. Uli was in danger of becoming another victim of the non-terminal thesis syndrome. He had an idea and it was going to kill him.
“No, not really,” Uli pulled a tray out from beneath his chair. “Smoke a joint?”
Alan and Astrid had to tell him a story. There was never any question they wouldn’t say yes. It would be impolite and they’d both had too much coffee.
“You remember that guy Gail called Carrot?” Astrid asked. Uli was rolling, looking down at the weed and paper between his fingers, working it back and forth.
“Gail from behind the counter?” he said, “Carrot stuck up with a big nose?”
“Yeah,” said Astrid, “His name’s Orin.”
“Computer Science, independent contractor of some kind. Gail said he always tipped really well,” Alan offered, not because Orin needed defending but because it was part of the story.
Uli smiled. “He always lays his books and pens in this precise geometric pattern on the table.” He made squaring motions, the joint between the first two fingers of his right hand.
Astrid and Alan both smiled. Astrid said, “Kaitlin stole his laptop.”
Uli straightened up, his hands still saying square shapes, the joint like a conductor’s wand.
Astrid nodded. “Orin wants it back. Offered us money.”
“How much?”
“A grand.” She couldn’t keep the lie out of her voice.
“No. Like, really two grand grand?”
Astrid shook her head. “No, like five grand grand. Five thousand dollars if we get it back, no questions asked.”
“Damn. He never heard of backup?”
“I guess not.” She shrugged. “There’s something on it. He even gave us money for expenses up front.” There was an honest suggestion in that. Uli’s eyes were bloodshot and his skin was pale, almost junky grey. Astrid would like to get Uli out of this basement and Orin had given them five hundred up front just because he knew they knew Kaitlin, no strings attached. They weren’t friends but they’d seen each other for years. He knew they’d at least try. Astrid knew with a price like that she could offer Kaitlin more than enough for a trade.
“She’s not using,” Uli said, “So if she took it, it’s not for drugs. There’s something else.” He was doing knuckle rolls with the joint, swinging it like a coin between his fingers.
Alan nodded at that, watching his trick with the joint. “She’s not planning on coming back for a while. Not after that.”
“Okay.” Uli was not coming along. “She’d be going up to Tony’s.”
Astrid was confused. “Tony would buy a stolen laptop?”
“No, if Kaitlin took it she’d want to see what was on it, at least before she sold it. She’d want to know what he’s been up to all these years.” Tony had the expertise to figure it out, even if the drive was encrypted, which seemed unlikely, considering.
“It’s a new life form,” Alan said.
Uli lit the joint and took a drag, closed one eye and jerked back from the smoke when it flared a little oddly. “Like AI?”
“Not like AI, he said, intelligence that’s native to the medium. He called it his baby.”
Uli handed the joint over to Astrid. “Baby Sa-rang.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him through the smoke. “Hmmm?”
“Nothing. Old reference. Competing with computers is not good for sentient colonies.”
Astrid said, “Now this is why I think you should come with us. Some fresh air might be good for you.”
Alan held the joint out to Uli but Uli waved it off. “No, you guys finish that.” He paused. “In fact, why don’t I roll you a couple for the road?”
Uli was cool. As they got up to go he handed them two joints and said, “For your quest.”
Astrid called Orin on their way back to the car. He hadn’t asked for it but she thought he would appreciate an update. She wanted to let him know they were doing what they could.

Kalakam Island was a small bit of land in the north Sound with a one lane bridge to the mainland.
Tony stayed in an old cabin near the beach on the south end of the island. It was a hella commute to Seattle for classes but rent was free. He kept his class schedule as tight as he could and spent his days at the kitchen table hammering on a keyboard. The island had DSL so he was set.
The isolation kept him focused and his relatives kept him committed. They were paying his tuition. It was a loan, mostly because he wanted it that way. The money was good working the fishing boats and whatever else around the neighborhood and the hours were flexible but he couldn’t be doing school without their help.
His aunt and uncle had rescued him when a drunk white guy killed both his parents on the Ninety Three north of Boston. He was eleven. They drove out across the country, got him out of CPS custody and brought him home with them. He moved into the cabin after he graduated high school. It was in good shape, just sitting empty. His Uncle and his brothers had been buying any house or land on the island that came up for sale. The island wasn’t inside the reservation but it had been a family home before.
It was an oddly public life, though, because everybody was always asking about his shit, like “How are your grades?” and “What classes are you taking?” They had a right to ask, they were helping to pay for it. He’d been enrolled for five and half years. The fact he was almost finished with a masters in computer science seemed to be lost on some of them. He was happy with the arrangement.
Last night Aunt Mabe came by with fresh milk and mincemeat pie and questions about what sort of job he could get working on computers. Tony had several motherboards and their power supplies spread out on the table cabled to stacks of hard drives all running as clients on his network. It was his honey pot. He’d put together an impressive collection of routers and switches for his network topologies and he was capturing viruses but his aunt wouldn’t understand the worth of any of that. He could tell she was seeing the odds and ends piled on the table with the pie and a jug of milk, wondering if he wasn’t just another Indian that couldn’t quite put the pieces together. He tried to show her, pointing to the boxes and cables and explaining the principles of networks and protocols. In the end she got the main points but he watched her eyes as her attention drifted out the window to the trees outside and he changed the subject. She had a mare about to foal, maybe that night. He volunteered to take the late shift.
The next morning he was sitting at the table still in his duck boots and Dickies having a cup of coffee and finishing the last slice of Mabe’s pie when Kaitlin came down the driveway.

He would have been happy if she’d just dropped her bags at the door and took off her clothes but it didn’t happen that way. It never did. First of all, it was a bitch of a drive and it was raining. She came in, dropped her bags on the floor and fell into a crouch with her knees drawn in beneath her coat and rocked for a while. Finally she stood, dropped her coat, walked across the room and said “I’m cold. Can we go to bed?” but it didn’t happen that way, either. It never did. She came in the door, dropped her backpack, said “I need to pee” took her jacket off, threw it over the couch and headed down the hall. There wasn’t enough pie left to share so he finished it and sipped the coffee, wondering for a moment that he’d just eaten an entire mincemeat pie for breakfast. He was getting fat again. Something about the pie made the coffee taste like a perfect nut, sweet and rich.
One of his boxes pinged and a console message scrolled across the screen overwriting the prompt. Activity on port x, spew. Another message popped up, then suddenly it was like a bubble machine, little popping sounds as the messages scrolled by. He reached over, shook a mouse on another box and typed a couple lines. What he saw opened his eyes. Somehow someone was DOSing his little private network all the way out here in the woods. There was really only one way this could be happening. He reached over, pulled the power out of the router on the floor by the telephone jack. The popping sounds stopped. He pushed buttons on the KVM and made sure wireless was disabled on a couple machines he wasn’t sure of, then thought of his tablet and groaned. The toilet flushed and Kaitlin came down the hall.
The way he was looking at her made her stop. “What?”
Tony looked toward the backpack by the door. “This is a little awkward, did you bring me something?”
She smiled shyly looking at him appraisingly. “Did you peak at my surprise?”
“No,” he said, “It’s been trying to get a look at me. What is it?”
“A laptop.”
“Whose laptop?”
“Mine. I stole it,” She bit her lip, actually, she couldn’t help it, “From Orin.”
“Orin? Carrot Orin?”
Kaitlin nodded.
“Damn, Kaitlin.”
“He owes me money. I’m not going to sell it or anything like that, I’m just holding it hostage until he gives me my money.”
Tony got it. Orin, Kaitlin’s clients. “He stiffed you…” he put his hand over his eyes as he realized what he’d just said.
“He kept talking about a payday. I just decided his tab was due.”
It was always like this, hard to talk when her work came up. He had a problem with it, she knew he had a problem with it but what was he going to say, “Come live with me in my borrowed shack, share my food bank top ramen while I finish my degree”? His confident good looks didn’t really add much to the deal—Native American couch potato, twenty extra pounds free.
She relaxed a bit, looking into his eyes. “What?”
He avoided the question for her. “Let’s look at this stolen laptop of yours.”

Eventually, when you’re sitting in a place like an empty parking lot on artificial fill above a suburban arterial intersection – no matter what you’ve just lived through – you look around and realize you can’t stay there. You’re not welcome here, time to move on. You have to leave.
Alan and Astrid both came to that place at almost the same moment and looked at each other. She actually smiled. “You feel okay to drive?”
Alan startled, almost, at the idea, looked around gripping the wheel. “We’re not dead,” he said, which was true, probably. Neither was anyone else, as far as they could remember.
“My breathing’s still not normal.”
Alan moved his hand to his chest, “I don’t think I’m going to have a heart attack.”
Astrid nodded. “Good to know. Okay. More time?”
“A little.”
“But then what?”
“I think I can do it. Will you copilot, help navigate?”
Astrid nodded. Something had just happened far beyond coffee and pot. “What I’m experiencing is heightened momentary consciousness with almost no short term recall. Nothing seems sparkly or distorted.” She paused before adding, almost under her breath, “As far as I can tell.”
It was Alan’s turn to nod. “We’re safe but we have no idea how we got here.”
She brightened up. “But we know where we’re going and why, right? Tony’s… right?” She paused, searching his face. “We’re on the right route.” She fished through her purse and pulled out her phone. “Have we called Tony?”
Alan squinted, like acting out ‘trying to recall’ would somehow make it happen.
“I have no idea.”
She was scrolling her call records. “No.”
“You realize that’s actually bad?” Alan said.
“Yes. Let’s call Tony.”
“Uli. Let’s not call Uli right away.”
Astrid moved in her seat, pulling her legs out from beneath her, crossing them on the seat in front in a slacker yoga move. She stopped dialing and looked out the windshield at nothing. “No. Maybe Tony knows something, what Uli’s been up to.” She looked back down at her phone. “And how long this is going to last.”
As Alan started the car, breathed, put it into gear and turned out of the lot onto 99 north Uli’s compounds were at work on his brain. Neurons were being born. New glial cells were migrating from the nest of their birth, wandering the net of his brain.
The normal adult human brain constantly produces new cells, hundreds of thousands in a month. The brain is a colony, like coral. Brain celss are organisms that have a period of individual movement prior to joining the collective unit as members. In Alan’s and Astrid’s brains a flood of new neurons and glial cells were being born and were swimming along newly formed paths. As the new cells took their places in Alan’s and Astrid’s brains they sent out dendritic arms or glial feet and joined their neighbors. They reached out, grasped their neighbors and began to sing, not with voices but with the force of conjoined paths and not with sound but with signal.
The psychotropic distortion they were feeling was just a byproduct of the larger action Uli had set in motion. Both dopamine-producing and serotonin-producing neurons are active when new neural cells are born and differentiated in the presence of sonic hedgehog morphogenic proteins. Elevated dopamine and serotonin levels are generally associated with a good time, viewed subjectively. Your symptoms, as they say, will pass – an unfortunate side effect of the primary treatment. Enjoy.
Another typical side effect of both dopamine-producing and serotonin-producing drugs is an impaired ability to make good decisions. Which is really only a comparative term. Most judgments made under the influence of drugs are good ones within the possibly distorted frame of reference of the person making the decision. Like, normally, if you’d just decided you have no memory of stopping or slowing for possibly five or ten miles of stoplights and intersections and you did in fact know you just impossibly survived running a red light across a six lane divided arterial you might decide you really shouldn’t drive. Call a cab – or you might realize you feel clear headed and cognitively normal and you promise you’ll pay closer attention from now on.
So Astrid didn’t think there was anything really odd about the really small man standing in the patch of grass and weeds just beyond the curb when she got out to pump gas at the station. He was homely but didn’t seem homeless. She couldn’t help staring a little. He was small, maybe three feet at most and normally proportioned, almost. His clothing looked like they’d been stitched by hand out of some rough fabric. He was watching her – relaxed, arms crossed, but definitely looking at her. Then she realized she was staring too so she nodded and said “Hey,” opening the cap and pushing the buttons on the pump. It was raining and a bit windy.
“What?” the little man said, looking at her, hard, in the eyes.
She stuck the nozzle into the car and set the valve lock. “What, what?” she pushed a stray hair behind her ear.
“You can see me?” the little guy asked.
“I can see you? Of course I can see you.” She pushed her hair away from her face again and looked at him more closely. She realized he was camouflaged or something. He was actually kind of hard to see, which was creepy, like he was stalking people from the bushes at the gas station. She’d been working retail for years. “Is there something I can do for you?”
He looked at her sharply. “What? Is this three wishes or something?”
“A leprechaun asking me for three wishes?” It was beginning to dawn on her there was something odd about what was happening and that calling a really small person a leprechaun like that was probably unforgivably rude. But he’d put her off with his weird behavior.
“Leprechaun?” he spat. And with that, he just suddenly wasn’t there. She didn’t see him turn or move, she didn’t see him leave, either, but he was gone. A moment later she heard him again, though, saying “Fuckin mistake.”
She watched the foliage for a while but nothing else came out of it. This was sort of like a second strike or maybe a third strike. She wasn’t sure how to count it. Now she was seeing leprechauns or vanishing small persons. The pump handle popped and she took the nozzle out and put the cap back while the pump beeped at her with the receipt question. Alan was driving – calm, paying attention, doing the right thing. Tony had a nice place. She wanted to get there.

Kaitlin had been watching Tony for hours. When she first handed him the laptop she’d thought he’d open it up and start typing on it and stuff but he just turned it over in his hands looking at it then set it on the table. He pulled a CD case off of a bookshelf and pulled out two CDs.
He talked while he did things. He was a good explainer. Tony built a honey pot by booting a couple of his motherboard hard drive pile collectives off of the CDs with network watching software and then did things that would make the two computers look like a lot of computers talking to each other. It was a trap. The objective was to let the virus do its thing while he watched. The fake computer land gave it someplace to play. He turned his wireless router back on.
He sort of went away for a while after that, except for saying things that really didn’t make any sense. Orin’s laptop was sending out the secret words and handshakes other computers listen for when they’re attached to a network. Then he stopped talking completely.
She spent some time cleaning and straightening then bundled up and went out to walk down to the beach. There wasn’t much beach to walk on. You couldn’t get too far down either way from the road end Tony was on except on a really low tide because of trees lying out over the water, even in it, where the hillside had been eroded by the tide. You’d think the trees would be dead but they weren’t, not always. If the roots stayed buried by the sloughing soil they could last for years, under water twice a day. The blackberry, salal and poison oak grew down from the collapsing banks. Seaweed and faded plastic trash hung where the water lifted it up and left it in the tree’s branches. The waves were calm at the moment but there was an open fetch straight to the west. She’d seen photos of people surfing six foot waves right off the north end of the island, carving inches over the rocks at Little Point where the breakwater protected the anchorage and the families’ boats. Ben’s dad had taken a front loader and moved a lot of rocks to make the breakwater longer. People still argued about whether it had improved the surfing. Tony said there were more days with waves over three feet. He was mostly on Ben’s dad’s side but still it could just be the weather. She sat on a beach log, rolled a joint and disappeared into the things around her.