W. Thompson: Out of the Waste Land

“Yes,” she said, glad that he hadn’t tried to argue. She looked at the slope, set her cursor on a fairly even stretch of ground, and started walking.

It was slow going. Her feet kept skidding on the muddy ground, and the top of the hill always seemed to be another hundred feet ahead of her, just beyond one more gentle rise in the ground. She tried her modem several times on the way up, without results. She kept telling herself that her luck would change when she reached the summit.

And that had better be soon, she thought as a yellow light winked on her display. The computer was warning her that her body was getting tired, with fatigue poisons building up in her blood and muscles, and blood-sugar levels dropping to a critical level. Fairly soon her muscles would stop responding to her inputs.

The top of the hill was a rise not much different from the last dozen swellings she had crossed, and she reached it two hours after she had left Geisler. It was like being on top of the world; she could see several roads and one highway in the distance, and a small town far to the east, beyond the hills. She clicked on her modem and entered 9-1-1.

A voice, female and mechanical, spoke in her ears. “We are sorry. Phone service has been temporarily disrupted. We are working to restore service. Please try again.”

I could be up here all night, Margaret thought in frustration. She wondered how long it would take the phone company to get everything working again. Their repair service was supposed to be good, but everything was bound to take longer out in the boondocks. She would have to wait. At least that would give her a chance to rest.

She sat on a boulder and looked around. The skies were clearing rapidly and the evening Sun felt warm and good. The view to the west—a decade before her birth Buzz Aldrin had stood on the Moon and described the lunar surface as “magnificent desolation,” comparing it to the high deserts of California. The Moon must be a beautiful place, she thought, if it was anything like this. Sun glinted off several small, temporary ponds like fire on a mirror.

Margaret was so taken with the view that she almost didn’t notice the sound. It was a buzzing noise, low and distant. Not an insect, she thought, before she realized she was hearing the drone of a single-engine airplane. She looked, and after a moment she spotted it, a dark shape flying just above the western horizon.

Almost without thought she knew exactly what to do. She set her eyeplate to maximum reflectivity, and her view darkened as the plate turned itself into a mirrored sunglass. Then she began to nod her head: three fast nods, three slow nods, three fast nods. Over and over, to flash out a Morse SOS.

She kept it up until sunset, when she heard the roar of the rescue helicopter. By then the yellow warning light had turned red.

Margaret was sitting up in the hospital bed when Geisler walked into the room. “Fast,” she said. “Thought it would take days for them to get you walking again.”

“It did,” he said. He stood at her bedside. “You’ve been out for two days. Exhaustion, mostly, and exposure.”

“I guess I wouldn’t have made it through the whole trip,” she said.

He shrugged. “You lasted long enough to save both our butts, which is what counts.”

“Yes. What happened after that plane saw my signals?”

“Plane?” he repeated. He shook his head. “I don’t know about any plane. Somebody on the highway saw a light in the hills, and when he realized it was blinking out an SOS he called the local cops. One of them remembered we were out there, and they called in a rescue copter. They homed in on the light reflecting from your helmet. That was good thinking.”

“Thanks.” She hesitated, puzzled. “Don’t know where I got the idea. It just—” She hesitated again. Now she could remember a train of thought so rapid she had hardly noticed it at the time. Sunlight reflecting off water had suggested a mirror, which had suggested her eyeplate, and the sound of the airplane had reminded her of an old war movie in which a crashed pilot had used a mirror to signal a rescue plane. She wondered if her com puter implant had had anything to do with it. She knew she’d never thought so fast in her life, not by herself.

Geisler couldn’t know what she was thinking. “It just popped into your head?” he asked. “Well, who knows where ideas come from?”

Margaret didn’t answer. I kept him alive, she thought as she looked at him. There was a way to keep him alive, and I found it, and he lived. If there had been a way to do that for Lydia, I would have found it. It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t work a miracle.

“… Talked to your doctors,” Geisler was saying. “They figure that the computer was screwing around with your head, like you said. It tries to coordinate with your brain, you see, and every time it sensed things were getting out of control—like when you’d get a strong impulse to kill yourself, or when you got too upset over life—it stepped in and tried to cancel out the problem by feeding in its own electrical impulses.”

“Keeping me alive,” Margaret said.

“Not on purpose,” Geisler said. “It was just protecting itself from overloading. There’s a negative-feedback routine in its program, but nobody expected it to do this.”

It kept me from thinking until I could handle everything, Margaret told herself. Until I knew Lydia’s death wasn’t my fault. Until I knew….

The tears of grief and loss blurred her icons, making it impossible to speak or move. Geisler sat down on the chair beside the bed. He said nothing; he was just there, which was enough.

Until I knew I was no longer alone, she thought.