Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

She clicked her seat belt into place. The day was bright and warm around them. Wayne reversed out of the parking spot and turned right out of the diner’s lot.

“Isn’t the highway to the left?” Viv asked.

“One more minor detour,” said Wayne. “Unless you’re in a hurry?”

“I’m not.”

“My turn. In the game.”

“Go ahead,” she said, reluctantly.

“You are special,” said Wayne.

“Wait, what? I thought we were playing your weirdass game.”

“We are,” he said. “That’s my guess.”

“That I’m special?” Her voice had turned suspicious.

“I’m saying that something you think I don’t know about you, Vivian, is that you’re special.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not just special in the way all ordinary people are special. Objectively special.”

“This game is making my head hurt, Wayne. I want to quit.”

“Let me be more specific,” he said, keeping the stiffer tone. “You’re a child of accelerated gestation.”

“What?”

“There’s no reason you should have told me,” he said. “But I want you to know that I know.”

He paused.

“Hey, Viv?”

She did not answer.

“You don’t have to answer me,” he said.

“Where are we going? Not the White Mountains, right?”

“Not the White Mountains. But it’s safe. When you get there, I want you to do exactly what you’re told. Even if you don’t agree with it. Even if every cell in your body tells you to resist. To run. You need to stay. It’s only temporary.”

“No! I don’t want to go there! What about the White Mountains?”

“You’ll meet a person named Johanna. She’ll help you. You can trust her. And only her. You got that?”

“How can you possibly ask me to trust anything you’re saying right now?”

“I have to.”

“Well, I don’t trust you. I want out of this car. Seriously. Slow down.”

He did not decelerate. Outside, trees and sky smeared by. He turned up the stereo to high volume. The Nocturnalists filled the car.

“Turn that down,” she said, fumbling for the volume.

“Vivian,” he said, “I love you. And so help me God, I am going to get you out of this.”

“Get me out of what ?” Now she sounded terrified.

“I promise,” he said.

Wayne reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts and, in a single fluid motion, pulled out the thick orange pen and moved it to Viv’s throat. He felt the needle puncture her tender flesh. He knew what it felt like. In ISA training, agents had been allowed to practice on each other: you felt a sharp jab, followed by a hot sting, and then everything slurred and wheeled, as if you’d boarded a broken, lurching merry-go-round at some carnival in a nightmare. Then blackness.

2021

Three a.m. It was the safest time, Tessa decided, to cross from her residence in East Lobe to Luke’s office in West Lobe. She’d chosen the time because it posed the lowest risk for running into anyone, though that was not guaranteed. At Seahorse, people worked on the “clocks of personal productivity,” and it was not unusual to see employees at Corporate on their machines at midnight or six in the morning; there were always the early birds and the night owls.

Luke would not be in his office. After their afternoon staff meeting, he’d mentioned he was spending the night at home in San Francisco, in the context of a joke about needing a “proper shower,” though his office had a full bathroom. Tessa wondered if he had a date. She’d never known Luke to have a real girlfriend—where would he find the time?—but perhaps he occasionally used RightNow or one of the other dating apps. She didn’t want to think about it.

Tessa took the elevator down to the closest connector floor to cross the building through the clear tubular footbridge. She wore black leggings and an old UC Santa Cruz sweatshirt of Peter’s. The smell of him gave her courage. Below her was the soaring space of the Center, like the interior of a planet. She kept her gaze straight ahead.

She reached Luke’s office door and raised her palm to the sensor. Zeus authorized her and the lock clicked open. She turned on minimal lighting, just enough glow from the track lighting overhead to allow her to see her way around the spacious office. She’d use her phone’s flashlight, if necessary, to find what she was looking for.

Luke’s workspace was as sparse and pristine as ever, like the inside of some corporate igloo. Tessa surveyed the two darkened monitors on the streamlined desk, blanching at the sight of the Lucite chair on the other side of it. Across the room, Luke had left the floor-to-ceiling picture windows unshaded, though there was no trace of the spectacular view at this hour, just the ash-colored smudge of fog off the ocean, wrapping the building like a closed hand. In front of the window, Luke’s napping pod appeared twinned by its reflection in the mirror, double white orbs.

Tessa stepped out of her canvas sneakers, to prevent the rubber tap of the soles on the polished concrete floor, and crossed the room to the window. Face almost touching the glass, she peered outside but could see only the faint, smeared glow of the iron path lights that dotted the grounds eight stories below.

Despite the vacant silence, Tessa felt a sense of Luke in the room, a sort of residual energy. She knew he was offsite—she’d checked his parking spot after dinner to verify the Elan was gone—but she still had the uneasy feeling that he’d been there just minutes before. Perhaps that was why he really kept the space so featureless, she thought: not so much to free his mind, as he claimed, but to prevent visitors from focusing on anything but him and what he had to say. Peter, who’d met Luke only a half dozen times, called him narcissist lite , which made Tessa laugh. Contradiction in terms, she’d said.

Whatever the case, Tessa needed to move fast. To find what she came for and get back to the residence wing.

But where to look? She turned from the window and scanned the room. Without bookshelves or filing cabinets, there were not many options. She’d come here on pure instinct, in search of the INR-Views that had disappeared from the supply room, allegedly on recall. The “replacements” had yet to show up. Tessa’s gut told her they’d never left. John Kwak was not returning her calls.

And so here she was, in Luke’s bare office without Luke, at 3:00 a.m.

Perhaps her gut was wrong. It was not an instinct she often trusted without question. She was not impulsive. But trespassing here had been an impulse.

She recrossed the floor to the bathroom. Marble surfaces, a single medicine cabinet in which she found nothing but tea tree oil and some “Incan” facial moisturizing lotion. For a moment, she studied her face in the mirror above the floating sink. She looked tired; her eyes were creased at the corners, her skin pale. Her highlights could use sprucing; the caramelly threads seemed conspicuous against her natural dark red.

Viv would be arriving at Seahorse on Wednesday for a short visit. The Cohort, as Tessa had predicted, was eager to meet her. Tessa had not yet broken the news of Viv’s trip to Luke. She was not technically required, after all, to clear her visitors with him first.

Viv’s arrival was part of the reason Tessa was searching for the INR-Views. She envisioned sitting with the Cohort as they used one to show Viv their babies. The experience would empower the pregnant women and validate Viv, perhaps make her feel less marginalized by her own history.

Also, Tessa wanted to redeem her failed promise to issue the INRs to the Cohort weeks ago. Gwen had been especially disappointed when Tessa informed her that the wands had not yet arrived. But soon she’d begun to feel her baby move, quite vigorously, and her anxiety over her ultrasounds receded.