Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

He turned, and picked up the folded wings from the floor of the shaft.

"Stay here kid," Gavin said. "Princess Lori won’t come if you see the magical gate open, okay? You should really cover your ears and close your eyes too. The overpressure can make your ears bleed."

"What’s overpressure?" Jonah asked.

"More fairy magic."

"Okay."

"How big’s this fireball going to be?" Gavin asked when he rounded the corner.

"Most of the pictures I’ve seen were about a twelve-inch radius," Lori said. "The electrolyte burns will hit the far walls though. I’m inside the airlock now."

Gavin stepped up to the break near the safety door and pulled up the corner of the ruptured plastic, widening the gap enough to wedge himself inside. The safety door was only about an inch from the homunculus’s face.

"Little man in a great big world," Gavin said. "Only way to make a difference is to tear your wings off and set yourself on fire."

"Don’t get too dramatic down there, Babe," Lori said. "It’s not your real body."

"It feels like it."

Gavin stripped the aramid-fiber cloth from one of his wings and separated a rib from the frame. He popped open the battery hatch on his back, and in one smooth motion, wedged the rib across the anode and cathode.

Error F451. Battery short—

Then nothing. Gavin’s goggles went black and the bubbles stopped bubbling.

Lori heard a WHUMP at the same instant the plastic safety door flew out into the ventilation duct. She took Jonah’s respirator from Hope and ignored the desperation in the mother’s eyes.

"Jonah?"

Nothing.

She stepped over the charred remains of Gavin’s homunculus, and traced the path to where he’d said Jonah was.

"Jonah?"

The boy looked at her, and she saw blood at the corner of his ear.

Ruptured eardrum. At least he’ll survive to figure out when to take good advice.

Jonah seemed to be in a state of shock from the explosion and resultant pain, which Lori was half-thankful for as he numbly accepted her fitting the respirator to his face and leading him through the cloud of toxic fumes.

Two months later, when Jonah’s eardrums had healed, he watched the two homunculi he’d known as Mr. Pickles and Lady Twilight wave and then dance while video of their controllers on Earth live-streamed behind them. He promised his mother he’d never venture into the shafts again.

Gavin and Lori put the finishing touches on their main habitat, and began work on their power and ventilation. Gavin had been given control of another homunculus, and corporate put a replacement unit on the next resupply rocket. They’d finished ahead of schedule, since Scott had taken time away from teaching online exobotany classes to help them build, and the other colonists had begun pitching in whenever they could.

"Thanks for saving my son when I couldn’t," Scott said, as they admired their day’s work.

"Thanks for helping us build," Gavin said. He hesitated before adding, "This may sound horrible, but I’m actually kind of glad it happened."

"Why’s that?" Scott asked.

"Lori had been in a funk for about a month," Gavin said. "There wasn’t a reason for it apart from the mental exhaustion of routine and confinement. She—well, after we rescued Jonah—she perked up. She actually told me that, seeing your charred little robot body turned me on. Can you believe that? No offense meant. Of course I wouldn’t want to see Jonah in danger again."

"No offense taken," Scott said. "If you were the sort of people who thrived in dull routine, you would’ve stayed on Earth, right?"

"I suppose. Lori wanted to be a pirate until she was fifteen."

"Hey, I got something from corporate you’re going to want to see," Scott said. "Milton sent it to Hope first, since they’d collaborated on it."

"What’s that?"

"The first data from the inside of a black hole," Scott said. "It’s not quite what anyone thought it was. Maybe that’s your next big adventure."

"If Lori lets me live long enough to reach Titan, you mean."

"Obviously."

“Have you seen Eddie?”

In the dappled sunlight that filtered through the boughs and yellow blossoms of the acacia, the face of the young woman who had spoken was in momentary shadow, and Sebastian Vickery closed the book he had been reading and squinted up at her.

Only a few yards behind her, past the flat gravel shoulder, were the rushing lanes of the Santa Monica freeway—known as Old Man 10 to the few fortune-tellers who still inhabited the overgrown borders and onramp-encircled islands of the Los Angeles freeways—and behind the carob tree at Vickery’s back was a short slope down to the parking lot of a row of apartment buildings.

Eddie might have been one of those freeway-side gypsies, though Vickery couldn’t recall one with that name. There was an Edgy, but Vickery hadn’t run across Edgy since the events of last May. Most of the furtive mediums had lost their livelihoods then, and Vickery himself had been left with what he thought of as an occasional and unwanted vision impairment.

“I haven’t seen anybody,” he told her.

“He was—so mean to me!”

Vickery tried to think of a response, and finally just shook his head and said, “Sorry to hear it.”

“You’re reading a book,” the woman said then, stepping into the little clearing. The diesel-scented breeze shaking the surrounding leaves was warm, but she was wearing a long khaki coat. “I’ve done that. I bet I’ve read… a hundred books.”

Vickery smiled wryly and laid the book aside to get to his feet, but the young woman lithely sat down cross-legged in front of him, and he settled back.

She ran the fingers of one hand through her short-cropped dark hair, leaving it standing up as if she were facing into a strong wind. “Have you read It’s A Sin to Kill A Mockingbird?”

“Uh,” said Vickery, blinking, “yes. Great book.”

“It’s my nickname. Anyway I tell people to call me that.”

“What, Mockingbird?”

“No —Scout. She was the girl in that book, remember?”

“Sure. Her father was Atticus Finch.” Gregory Peck, in the movie, he thought.

It occurred to Vickery that she looked a bit like the actress who had played Scout in the movie of To Kill A Mockingbird —thin, with freckles and narrow eyes and disordered bangs streaking her forehead.

She was holding out her hand, and he reached out and shook hands with her.

“Pleased to meet you, Scout,” he said. “I’m Sebastian.”

“Sebastian,” she said carefully. “I’m happy to make your acquaintance, Sebastian. Are you often to be found here?”

Vickery wondered whether to say no; and whether, even so, he might stop coming to this particular old freeway nest. The contra-natural current generated by free wills moving rapidly past in the freeway lanes hadn’t nearly returned to its pre-2017 levels, but he had made a practice of reading this book, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, in the flickers of enhanced possibility that the current still sometimes provided. There were other nests, all mostly abandoned these days, along the shoulders of many of the L.A. freeways, and he could read in any of those instead.

But he had shaken hands with Scout, and the plain fact of her having found her way here implied, at least, that they were both outliers from the clockwork world out in the surface streets.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m here most afternoons.”

“It’s very peaceful. Peaceful is what you feel in moments when nothing is going wrong, but peace sustains you even when everything’s gone wrong.”