Юджин Фишер - Adrift

“Look, let’s have a seat,” she said, dragging a chair away from the table. “I’ll explain as best I can, but I need you to answer questions for me first, okay? Basically, I need you to tell me your story. How did you end up in that container?”

“I paid very much money to have me and my sisters put in it,” said Laurent. “The DRC, it is a very bad place to be. They say the war is over, but the war continues. And it is a very bad place for my sisters. There are many rapes; everywhere there are rapes. I hit open the face of one who wished to rape Nagaila with a rock. So always I am thinking about ways of leaving. Finally I hear about men who can get us to the United States, because there are machines on the ocean that will take us straight there from Africa. I asked many other people, and they say that it is true, that this is the FloatNet. So I thought, this is the best way.” A look of consternation passed over his face. “I did not know that we would stop in the ocean.”

“Well, normally you wouldn’t. You ended up here because the node — that’s what we call the machines that make up the FloatNet — the node that was carrying you broke down, and when a node breaks down, another node in the ‘Net brings it here.”

Laurent nodded slowly at her across the table. “I understand,” he said.

“Do you have any family still in the Congo?”

“No. It is only me and my sisters.”

“How old are you, Laurent?”

“I am twenty-two. Therese is sixteen, and Nagaila is twelve.”

“It was Nagaila you saved from being raped?”

“Yes.”

“Christ.”

Setting out in a breached shipping container seemed less insane to Janet than it had before. Assuming that what Laurent was telling her was true. His sisters did look as young as he said they were. Janet was struck by a painful awareness of the potential for corporate liability lurking within her every potential action.

“Okay,” Janet stood back up, “here’s what we are going to do. We have a room for visitors, and I’m going to put the three of you in it. I’m also going to send our medic by to examine you. I can’t have you wandering the platform, so you will be confined to the visitors’ quarters for now.”

Laurent spoke to his sisters again, and the three of them rose from their seats and picked up their sacks. Before they could follow Janet from the room, Nagaila ran around her brother and said something plaintive, tapping the aluminum can in her hand against his chest. Laurent took it from her and held it up, smiling at Janet out of one side of his mouth.

“My sister would like to know if she may have one more of these.”

“I don’t think that should pose any serious problem,” Janet said.

On the matter of the Congolese stowaways, the Distributed Automated Maritime Shipping Company’s instructions for Janet were: (1) do not allow any communication between Platform Beryl personnel and members of the press, (2) report any new information in a timely fashion, and (3) sit tight until the legal status of the parties involved is determined. Janet sent a memo to all staff advising them of the situation, and the communication restrictions. She asked that anyone who could do so lend clothing to the refugees until she could requisition some for them through the FloatNet, and privately emailed Henri asking him to organize the effort. She also instructed that any unusual activity was to be promptly reported, and personnel were not to leave their accounts logged in when they stepped away from a terminal. After that, there was nothing for her to do about the visitors but wait for something new to happen.

Finding herself far more exhausted at the end of the day than she could have anticipated, she decided to load her VoIP client and call her husband.

“So the next time I’m dying to see you, all I really have to do is drive down to the beach and pack myself in a box?” Caxton said, after Janet had told her story.

“It would be a long drive to the beach. You’re on the wrong coast to reach me that way any time soon. Anyway, the visitors’ quarters are occupied now, so you should probably wait a while before you try it out.”

“What, you don’t have a room of your own there that I could stay in?”

Janet hesitated. Then, “These kids were ridiculously lucky that they made it here alive. About the only thing you can say for their method of travel is that it’s maybe less dangerous than staying in a war zone.”

“Well, I wasn’t actually planning on trying it.”

“Don’t mention it to anyone, either. We were all specifically told not to contact the press, and I probably shouldn’t have told you, except I just wanted someone to vent to.”

“Hey, that’s my job. I’m always here to be your confidant.”

A green bar in the VoIP window bounced longer and shorter across Janet’s screen with each word Caxton spoke. Since the last time they had talked, Caxton had changed his avatar image from the default tulip to a cropped and shrunken scan of a photo from their wedding. Though their faces were reduced to tiny smudges, Janet could easily recognize her stance, his bearing, the contrasting lights and darks in the wedding day glamour shot that she used to see every day on the mantle of the home they had, until recently, shared.

“Yes. Thank you for that,” Janet said. “Anyway. It’s pretty late here. I think I’m all confided out for the night.”

“Of course. So, do you want to give me a call tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. It depends. You may have picked up that things are even crazier than usual here right now.”

“I did get that impression. But it has been, what, eight days since we last talked? Could you try to make time for me?”

“We’ll see how things work out, Cax. We’re under communication restrictions, there are hurricanes out there, and now, on top of it all, I have to take care of these orphans that washed up on my doorstep. That is important to me, you know.”

Caxton didn’t immediately respond to the sensitive subject. Janet continued to push.

“Had you forgotten that that sort of thing matters to me?”

“Come on. That isn’t what we were talking about,” Caxton said finally. “I don’t want us to fight. All I was saying was that I wanted to hear from you. I do want to hear from you, if you aren’t too busy.”

“If I’m not too busy, you will.”

“Okay, that’s great. I love you. I hope your tomorrow is better than your today.”

“Thank you. So do I.”

Janet shut down the program, and Caxton’s window vanished from her screen. His exaggerated enthusiasm for every scrap of her attention wasn’t endearing. The artificial warmth served only to stir echoes in her mind of his previously intractable coldness. She could still hear him reciting at her, in argument after argument: “A man who raises another man’s children has a Darwinian fitness of zero.” Where had he first read that sentence? What convinced him that it communicated some eternal significance?

Janet logged herself out of her own computer, the first time she had done that in weeks. She left her office and headed to her room, no different from any other staff lodging on the platform, but which she was obliged to share with no one.

The next day Janet received Henri’s maintenance report on the Mokinas’ node. Containing suggestions of both sabotage and drug trafficking, it was probably, Janet thought, the most interesting maintenance report in Platform Beryl’s history.

The first discovery was the sabotage. Once the plastic tubs and the empty bottles, pots, fruit rinds, and other waste were cleared from the damaged shipping container, it was discovered that its internal battery compartment had been opened. The battery had been dislodged and the wiring reconfigured. Broken contacts were covered with strips of vinyl tape; splices had been added to circuits. The container battery was supposed to be recharged by the node transporting it. Henri determined that the manipulation of the charging circuitry had triggered a failure condition in the node’s software, causing the shutdown and request for maintenance.