Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

The device beeped and its screen flashed AUTHORIZED.

He closed the flap of ground, scattered the rocks he’d moved over the surface of the hatch, and broke into a jog toward the Great Wall. The system gave you only ninety seconds to find the entrance before it timed out. Wayne followed the periphery of the wall, his throat on fire, counting nearly imperceptible notches in the adobe until he reached eighteen. He placed his palm on the notch and waited. The wall retracting, offering a gap just wide enough for him to step through into a pitch-dark tunnel. He moved straight forward, feeling the walls with his hands, until he came into contact with another solid wall in front of him. The inner border of the Great Wall. He felt for another notch in the adobe and palmed it; the wall parted. He was in.

Wayne stepped out of the tunnel and the wall promptly sealed behind him. There was a litany of jokes among ISA staffers about getting crushed in the Great Wall, most involving dicks, always unfunny. Wayne had heard them all.

Inside, he stood with his back against the wall, catching his breath, adjusting to the abrupt change in surroundings. No matter how many times he visited the Colony, it always took a minute to adapt, to accept it was a real place and not a hallucination. To step inside it was to lose all awareness of being in the middle of the high desert. The Colony spanned one hundred acres and offered deep green knolls (the grass was fake but convincing), large shade trees, and flowers that did not grow in New Mexico—yellow chrysanthemums, white begonias, and roses. An elaborate climate-control system spritzed moisture into the air on auto-timer, creating gentle humidity.

Wayne’s phone beeped a reminder that it was initiating his allotted visiting time, sixty minutes. On the screen, the timer began to count down.

59:59

59:58

59:57

He had under an hour to see the friend he hadn’t seen for far too long. A person who’d once been the central companion in his life. All those mornings in Irene’s sunny kitchen, hundreds of hours, reduced now to sixty minutes, the maximum visiting time the ISA permitted permanent residents of the Colony.

He began to walk fast toward the neighborhood where all forty-one permanent residents lived, plus another hundred staffers, in individual residences spread over the northern section of the property. The Craftsman-style bungalows, each with a green lawn, were built along a single loop of paved road lined with flowers and trees. He rounded a bend in the path and spotted Irene’s house just ahead, the standard two rocking chairs on her porch.

He knocked lightly on Irene’s door and waited. She was not expecting him. She would likely assume he was one of the Colony’s medical staff who visited her daily to poke and prod. Last he’d visited her, Irene had slowed down noticeably, having acquired the tentative gait of the elderly. He waited for what seemed a long time, reminding himself that crossing the nine hundred square feet of the bungalow might take her longer than it used to.

But the woman who answered the door wore fresh pink scrubs and a cherry-red manicure: Johanna, who’d been a nurse at the Colony for as long as Wayne could remember. She stepped onto the porch and appraised him, squinting in the sun.

“Sight for sore eyes,” she said, in the Jamaican lilt he’d found so comforting back in his rookie days, when he’d looked for comfort everywhere. “I wasn’t expecting you, baby boy.” Baby boy. Her hug was fiercer than ever. She smelled of the same hair oil she’d used for almost twenty years, a warm herbal smell, like grass and sunshine.

“Take it easy, Jo,” he said, as she crushed against him. “I’m too fragile for your guns. How much are you benching these days?” Johanna was famous for her devotion to the Colony’s gym, the muscles of her arms risen to sleek brown hillocks from years of weight training.

“One-eighty-five,” said Johanna, releasing him for her usual head-to-toe appraisal. “Are you eating enough, mister?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Wayne said.

“You’re not.” Johanna frowned. “You should let me cook for you while you’re here. How long do we get you?”

“Just the weekend,” said Wayne. “I’m just here for my biannual. Flash a few slides at the IP, hit a few meetings, then back to the field.”

“One weekend? That’s an outrage. You need more time. You look like you could use a straight week of sleep. Don’t mean to offend.”

“I plan to spend most of my retirement sleeping. I’m almost there, you know.”

Her face dimmed. “You’re leaving us?”

“This is my last assignment before I hit quota. So I can retire early.”

“Oh, sweets, I’m so proud of you. I didn’t realize. You know how time is around here. There’s no keeping track. Congratulations.” She pressed both hands against the sides of his face, like a mother to her young boy. Had his own mother ever cupped his face that way? He could not recall the feel of her hands.

“Don’t congratulate me yet,” said Wayne. “No jinxing.”

“You’re the best field-op this place has ever seen. I don’t understand why those fatties in the IP don’t take better care of you.”

“Shouldn’t you be retiring soon? How old are you now, Jo? I mean, you look like a spring chicken, of course.”

She slid her eyes away from his. “Sixty-five last year.”

“So you could go. Why don’t you go?”

“Come on, baby. You know better. I’ve been here twenty years.”

The Inner Panel had a way of breeding near-fanatical loyalty among their residential staff. Resignations or requests for transfer among onsite Colony employees were virtually unheard of.

“You should retire, Jo,” he said. “Really.”

“I’ll do what I do, sweetie,” she said. “Can we sit awhile? Irene’s sleeping. Would you like iced tea?”

“Can’t,” said Wayne. “I have a training back at Base at two thirty. You’ll have to wake her.”

“Johanna,” came Irene’s voice from inside the house, wan with sleep. “I’m awake.”

“Well, well, well,” said Johanna. “Look who sensed your presence. Like those stories you hear about dogs waiting five years for their owners to come back.”

“I’m the dog,” said Wayne.

Johanna turned toward the half-open door and called to Irene. “Coming, honeybunny. I have a surprise for you. Give me just one second.” She turned back to Wayne. “Let me clean her up and I’ll bring her out. She’s on Depends these days.”

“Oh,” said Wayne, his stomach dropping. Such developments always jarred him.

“It’s nothing.” Johanna waved her cherry nails. “More convenient for everyone, actually. Don’t overthink it.”

“Okay,” said Wayne.

“I’ll clean her up and then give you two some alone time.”

“Thanks, Jo.”

“Johanna?” Irene’s voice wafted from the house again.

“Coming, sweet pea,” Johanna called. “Listen, mister, don’t be a stranger. You’d better come visit me before you retire. And I mean for more than five minutes.”

“Will do, Jo.”

“I’m here for you, doll,” she said, tipping onto her toes to whisper in his ear, “If there’s anything I can do for you, ever…”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. Everyone needs someone to take care of them. Even macho men like you.”

“You could bench-press me, Jo. Who’s the macho one?”

She kissed him on the cheek and disappeared inside.

He sat on one of the chairs in the shade of the porch and rocked, gazing out into the flawless afternoon that suggested no particular season or geography. It provided no guiding evocations whatsoever. It was May in New Mexico, but it might have been summer in New England.