Kim Robinson - New York 2140

“See, you are a quant!”

“But it isn’t math, it’s literature. Or like being a detective.”

She nodded, thinking it over. “Why haven’t you detectived this CME bite, then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. So much honesty! “Maybe I will.”

“I think you should.”

She shifted next to me on the cushion.

I registered this and said, kind of cluelessly, “Dessert? Postprandial?”

“What have you got?” she said.

“Whatever,” I said. “Actually the bar is mostly single malts right now.”

“Oh good,” she said. “Let’s try them all.”

It turned out that she had an alarmingly extensive knowledge of costly single malts, and like all sensible connoisseurs had come to the conclusion that it was not a matter of finding the best, but of creating maximum difference, sip to sip. She liked to dabble, as she put it.

And in more than just drinking alcohol. I came out of the cabin with a clutch of bottles in each hand and sat down somewhat abruptly beside her and she said, “Oh my God, it’s Bruichladdich Octomore 27,” and leaned in and kissed me on the mouth.

“You just had a sip of Laphroaig,” I said as I tried to catch my breath.

She laughed. “That’s right! A new game!”

I doubted it was new but was happy to play.

“Don’t drink too much,” she said at one point.

“Hummingbird sips,” I murmured, quoting my dad. I tried to illustrate by kissing her ear, and she hummed and reached out for me. Her dress was rucked up around her waist by this point, and like most women’s underwear hers was easy to push around. Lots of kissing left me gasping. “You’re going long on me,” she murmured, and straddled me and kissed me more.

“I am,” I said.

“And I’m having a little liquidity crisis,” she said.

“You are.”

“Oh. That’s good. Don’t strand those assets. Here, use your mouth.”

“I will.”

And so on. At one point I looked up and saw her body glowing whitely in the starry night, and she was watching me with that same amused expression as before. Then later still she put her head back on the thwart and looked at the stars, and said, “Oh! Oh!” After that she slid down to join me and we crashed around on the floor of the cockpit trying to make it all work, but mainly I was still hearing that oh oh, the sexiest thing I had ever heard in my life, electrifying beyond even my own orgasm, which was saying a lot.

Eventually we lay there tangled on the cockpit floor, looking at the stars. It was a warm night for autumn, but a little breeze cooled us. The few stars visible overhead were big and blurry. I was thinking, Oh shit—I like this gal. I want this gal. It was scary.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Where are we?”

“I don’t know. Weren’t we…”

“We were talking about something.”

“We’re always talking about something.”

“Yes, but it was something important.”

“Hard to believe.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know, but meanwhile, where are we?”

“In some kind of room, right?”

“Yeah… come on. We live in our hotello, on the farm floor of the old Met Life tower. The old Edition hotel, used to be a very fine hotel. Remember? That’s right, right?”

“That’s right.” Jeff shakes his head hard, then holds it in his hands. “I feel all foggy.”

“Me too. Do you think we’ve been drugged?”

“Feels like it. Feels like after I had that tooth pulled in Tijuana.”

Mutt regards him. “Or remember after your colonoscopy? You couldn’t remember what happened.”

“No, I don’t remember that.”

“Exactly. Like that.”

“For you too? Now, I mean?”

“Yes. I forget what we were talking about right before this. Also, how we got here. Basically, what the fuck just happened.”

“Me too. What’s the last thing you remember? Let’s find that and see if we can work forward from it.”

“Well…” Mutt ponders. “We were living in our hotello, on the farm floor of the Met Life tower. Very breezy when out among the plants. A little noisy, great view. Right?”

“That’s right, there we were. Been there a couple months, right? Lost our previous room when it melted?”

“Right, Peter Cooper Village, extra high tide. Moon or something. Landfill just can’t hold a building upright over the long haul. So then…”

Jeff nods. “Yeah that’s right. We were trying to stay away from my cousin, which is why we were in such a shithole to begin with. Then over to the Flatiron where Jamie lived, and when they kicked us out, he told us about the Met tower possibility. He likes to bail out friends.”

“And we were coding for your cousin, that was definitely a mistake, and then gigging. Encryption and shortcuts, the yin and the yang. Greedy algorithms are us.”

“Right, but there was something else! I found something, or something was bothering me…”

Mutt nods. “You had a fix.”

“For the algorithm?”

Mutt shakes his head, looks at Jeff. “For everything.”

“Everything?”

“That’s right, everything. The world. The world system. Don’t you remember?”

Jeff’s eyes go round. “Ah, yeah! The sixteen fixes! I’ve been cooking those up for years! How could I forget?”

“Because we’re fucked up, that’s how. We were drugged.”

Jeff nods. “They got us! Someone got us!”

Mutt looks dubious. “Did they read your mind? Put a ray on us? I don’t think so.”

“Of course not. We must have tried something.”

“We?”

“Okay, I might have tried something. Possibly I gave us away.”

“That sounds familiar. I think it’s something that might have happened before. Our career has been long but checkered, as I recall quite well. All too well.”

“Yeah yeah, but this was something bigger.”

“Apparently so.”

Jeff stands, holds his head with both hands. Looks around. He walks over to a wall, runs his fingers over a tight seal in the shape of a door; there is no knob or keyhole inside this door-shaped line in the wall, although there is a rectangular line inside it, around waist height on Jeff, knee height on Mutt. “Uh-oh. This is a watertight seal, see what I mean?”

“I do. So what does that mean? We’re underwater?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Jeff puts his ear to the wall. “Listen, you can hear it gurgling.”

“Sure that isn’t your blood in your ear?”

“I don’t know. Come check and see what you think.”

Mutt stands, groans, looks around. The room is long, and would be square if seen in profile. In it are two single beds, a table, and a lamp, although their illumination seems to also come from the low-lit white ceiling, about eight feet over them. There is a little triangular bathroom wedged into the corner, in the style of cheap hotels everywhere. Toilet and sink and shower in there, running water hot and cold. Toilet flushes with a quick vacuum pull. In the ceiling there are two small air vents, both covered by heavy mesh. Mutt comes back out of the bathroom and walks up and down the length of the room, placing his heels right against his toes and counting his steps, lips pulsing in and out as he calculates.

“Twenty feet,” he says. “And about eight feet tall, right? And the same across.” He looks at Jeff. “That’s how big containers are. You know, like on container ships. Twenty feet long, eight wide, eight and a half feet tall.”