Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

The time before that had been their last screaming fight—her screaming at him to wake up and him fighting with silence. Then her acceptance had set in.

What inspired this visit?

The question slithered over and around his brain, a deadly snake in his valley of denial. He stared absently at a woman clicking on her tablet and considered the question. He was going to warn Melanie, right? Warn her about what? A note he’d written to himself? He shook his head and knew that to be too simplistic. He swiveled his head and watched the man sitting next to him pecking at a game on his phone, transfixed. So, Lyle thought, maybe I’m going to ask her if she’d heard of anything like this potential pandemic; she’s a nurse, and one of the most well-read and thoughtful people anywhere. If it’s out there, she’ll know.

He shook his head and watched another man wearing headphones while staring at a phone he held so close to his face that it couldn’t possibly have been good for his eyes. It was oddly peaceful, Lyle thought, all these people so lost in their virtual worlds that Lyle could just stare at them, lapping up and observing the world without interference or conflict. No risk of interaction. Then he had a sudden thought about what he was going to ask Melanie. The question sent a tremor through him. He tried to will the question away and it clung and festered and he knew instantly he couldn’t deny it.

I’m going to ask her why I can’t do it anymore.

I can’t figure anything out. I don’t know how to try. Then he smiled, a private smile, because he knew even that wasn’t quite it. He settled back in his seat and let his shoulders relax. He was going to let the thing reveal itself to him, this powerful motivation leading him east. He looked back at the man sitting next to him lost in a game that involved shooting blocks that, when he hit them, turned into stars and soared and then turned into points.

A drip of drool gathered on the corner of the man’s lip.

Lyle closed his eyes, searching broken, blurry memories from his trip to Steamboat, and disparate clues.

Jackie Badger pulled her rental into the dirt parking lot at Lantern outside of Hawthorne. Alarm bells went off. Why were there six other cars in the lot?

She found out when she walked in the heavy, steel door. In the middle of the room, cubicles had been pushed back to make way for a conference table. Around the table sat eight people, most of whom she recognized but only distantly. Lantern representatives from various tech companies. They’d gathered only once before, at least in her presence, just after Denny’s death. They’d called it a fact-finding mission, but mostly it led to an internal, off-the-record explanation that Denny had died from a heart attack and that the Lantern program would be put on hold. Jackie had held her tongue, not sure what to say, absorbing occasional pointed looks from Alex and, at least once, giving one back. Would there be profit in accusing Alex of, what, murdering Denny? Police were not called, foul play never asserted, which Jackie rightly assumed was the product of wanting to keep this eye-popping project under wraps.

Now they’d called Jackie back to Nevada. It was early evening. The six men and two women sitting around the table were a characteristic lot of ambitious nerds. The men wore jeans and loose T-shirts and fashionable, colorful tennis shoes. Both women wore sweatshirts. In the middle of the table, a speakerphone with a green light on the side. People listening in. Jackie figured telecommunications giants. At the head sat Alex, as petite as Jackie, no less feisty.

“I should have brought donuts,” Jackie said, seeking composure. She unzipped a light jacket.

“Have a seat, Jackie,” said Alex.

“I left something in my car,” Jackie said. “Can I go grab it?”

“Get it later,” said a man she recognized as belonging to Microsoft.

Jackie had vacillated about responding to the request for her presence. In the end, she decided she held plenty of cards.

“I thought Lantern was disbanded.”

Alex cleared her throat. She had evidently been christened here to take the lead. Maybe she’d always been in the lead. It looked to Jackie like an intervention.

“Jackie, we know about Steamboat.”

Jackie blinked several times rapidly.

“Excuse me?”

“We know,” Alex said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Damn it!” One of the men slapped the table. “We need to know what happened.”

“Alex,” Jackie said, glowering at Alex, “what is this? You… you took out Denny so that you could, what, take over?”

“Jackie, I’m not sure you realize how serious this is. You’ve effectively beta tested a very powerful, very dangerous system, and you’ve taken it over from the inside. We need you to remand control, and walk away, or…”

Jackie looked at the other members of the group, swerving her head.

“I have no idea what Alex—is that your name, Alex?—is talking about. Steamboat? Where is that even? Colorado, if memory serves. Something happened there?”

Alex pursed her lips.

“Jackie, this is pointless. I’ve prepared everyone here for your manipulations and cons. I’ve also prepared them for your genius, which is the better part of what is dangerous here. When I realized the system had been used, co-opted, I, we, did a lot of homework. It’s clear that you chose a time and a place remote enough that it might not be traced through news reports. You monkeyed with flight logs—or someone did—and must’ve taken a dozen other steps to cover your tracks, not the least of which was deploying technology that appears to have turned to mush the memories of people on the ground there.”

“My God, Alex, listen to yourself. You sound like someone with intimate knowledge of whatever it is you’re accusing me of. Is anyone else hearing what I’m hearing? It sounds like an outright confession. Something very, very sinister is going on, and I’m out of here.”

“Jackie, who is Dr. Lyle Martin?”

Jackie reddened, froze like a strawberry-colored ice statue.

“You’re in cahoots with him somehow, right?” Alex said.

“Who is—”

“Some doctor who was on the plane, and that Jackie appears to be following, or communicating with,” Alex said, then looked at Jackie. “That’s right. I can do my own sleuthing.”

“He’s a friend. This has nothing to do with—”

“This is how this is going to go down, Jackie. You are dismissed from Google, put on notice that we will, even at the risk to this group, go public with your beta or alpha test, or whatever you want to call it, and pursue murder charges in Denny’s death. Let this end here.”

Faces turned to Jackie. She took a long pause.

“Before any of you reach any conclusion here, I want to offer you an alternative version of events. Alex is evidently the real genius here, and she is scapegoating me. I suspect she wrested control of this from Denny, maybe took him out. I think I know why, too.”

“Jackie, I can’t even get into the system. Somehow, you’ve locked us out.”

“Lies. You know I’m on to you. You’re testing, preparing. You’re worried you might actually have to use Lantern. Denny explained it to me. Look at what’s happening in the world; it’s just as you worried: an authoritarian got elected, separatists storming Capitol Hill armed to the teeth, or a gunman indiscriminately killing toddlers at a preschool field trip— the list goes on.”

She directed her voice to the speakerphone. “Overseas, too. What nation-state is safe? Right?” she said. “I’m not sure if it’s altruism driving you, or the business of self-interest in keeping a relatively calm world. In any case, Alex, you’ve taken full advantage of your partners. What would China Telecom or Orange do if they knew you’d been toying around with their access points?”