John Adams - Wastelands 2

“I had to social-engineer him so he’d help us break into the Black Egg. Like I said, Cody is a very lonely old man.”

“You told him that you’d post photos of us naked?”

“No I didn’t say that exactly,” said Angelo, his voice almost wistful. “It’s worse. I told him I’d stream us having sex on live webcam video.” He straightened his shoulders. “I had to tell him something like that, Rabbiteen. I lied to him. And, really, at this point, so what? What possible difference does it make? The whole universe is about to melt.”

Rabbiteen frowned down at her pistol, turning it over in her hands. She was momentarily tempted to shoot Angelo, but stifled the impulse. It was amazing how many user-friendly little clicks and snicks the pistol had.

“Anyway, my gambit worked on him,” said Angelo. He patted the iPhone, which lay on the seat, its message still showing. “See the digits on the bottom of the screen? Cody also sent you the GPS coordinates to the site.”

He punched tiny buttons on a squat plastic gizmo suction-cupped to the dash of his hearse.

“Continue Highway 6 through Tonopah,” said the genteel female voice of Angelo’s GPS navigation unit. “Turn right at unmarked dirt road number 37A.”

Jaw set, Angelo peeled out of the lot and barreled through the crumbling heart of the stricken desert settlement. Knots of drunken, flare-wielding marauders were barricading the streets with smoldering debris. Angelo accelerated through a flaming police sawhorse, and Rabbiteen braced her heavy pistol in both hands, firing wildly and shrieking flamewar abuse through the open window.

Overawed by the style of the loons in the hearse, the rioters let them pass.

Then they motored sedately through the eastern outskirts of blacked-out Tonopah, past burning tract homes and empty desert shacks, past the silent airport and the abandoned mines.

As they turned off onto the dirt side road, Rabbiteen mimicked the feminine voice of the GPS navigator. “Suggestion. What if I posted naked pictures of myself with this gun?” She shoveled in a fresh chew of betel. “What kind of user response would I get?”

“You mean if your users weren’t torn apart into their constituent quarks?” Angelo smiled and took her hand.

He was feeling buoyant. The world was definitely ending, in fire and blood just as he’d always guessed, yet he’d finally found a woman meant for him. With that sweet, frank way she had of cutting to the core of an issue without ever delivering anything useful, Rabbiteen Chandra was the very soul of bloggerdom.

His last night on Earth felt as vast and endless as a crumpled galaxy, while the full moon had gone the shape and color of a dry-squeezed blood orange. The clumps of sage were pale purple. The world Angelo inhabited had finally come to look and feel just like the inside of his own head. Incredible to think that he and Rabbiteen might be the last human beings ever to witness this landscape. It was as if they owned it.

“Isn’t that a guard house ahead?” said Rabbiteen. “If you want to crash through that, I can lay down some covering fire. At least till I run out of bullets.”

The GPS crooned sedately from the dash. “Proceed though Security Gate 233-X, traveling twenty-two miles further into the Tonopah Test Range to destination Area 52.”

“I’d hoped Cody would be waiting for us at this security gate,” said Angelo, slowing the hearse. “But I guess he never leaves his supercomputer console.” His nerves were fraying again. “The guards around here are brainwashed killing machines. Mindlessly devoted to the fugitive neoconservatives of the Area 52 escape pod. If I stop, they’ll extradite us to Guantanamo. If I pull a U-turn, they’ll chase us down with Predator aircraft. If I barrel through the gate, we’ll smash head-on into their truck-bomb tank traps.”

“Oh, stop talking like that,” said Rabbiteen. “It’s three a.m. on their last night on Earth! How devoted to duty can those guys be? Don’t they have any girlfriends? Or kids?”

The glum little concrete guardhouse that defended the Test Range was in fact deserted. The razor-wire chain-link moaned in the wind and the striped traffic arm pointed uselessly at the starry sky.

The hearse rolled into the empty desert compound, the narrow military road gently curving around peaks that sat on the sand like giant Zen boulders. Here and there old war-gamed jeeps had been shot to pieces from helicopters. Except for this ritualized military debris, there was only the moon and the mountains, the silence broken by periodic updates from the GPS unit.

To cover his growing embarrassment, Angelo propped his laptop on the dash. Automatically he clicked for his blog. “Oh my God!”

Terror gripped Rabbiteen’s heart. “What? What now?”

“Look at my traffic spike! My Webalizer stats are right off the charts! Drudge Report, Boing Boing, Huffington Post, they’re all sucking my dust! I rule the net tonight! Everybody’s linking to me!”

“How about my blog?” she asked. “I blogged the Big Splat before you did—”

“This is fantastic!” continued Angelo. “I’m finally fully validated as an independent citizen-journalist!”

Rabbiteen jealously moused around his screen. “Dammit, my own site has totally crashed! Why doesn’t your traffic max out when you get Slashdotted so hard?”

“My ‘Ain’t It Awful’ site is scalable, babe. I pay full service on the Amazon web-cloud and they just keep adding servers. This is the last night on Earth. No one will ever beat my post for traffic. I’m the greatest blogger in the history of the planet.”

Rabbiteen considered this boast. Though galling, it had to be true. Her boyfriend was the greatest blogger in the world. Except nobody would really call Angelo her boyfriend, because they’d never even kissed.

Feeling letdown, she stroked the glossy screen of her iPhone, scroll-flicking her way through a rolling list of friends and landing on, why not, Prof. Dr. Hintika Kuusk, the Estonian string theorist. Dr. Kuusk was a kindly, grandmotherly scholar; a woman of the world who’d always been very kind to the gawky physics enthusiast named “Rabbiteen Chandra.”

Rabbiteen pecked out a text message on the phone’s eerie virtual keyboard. “About to have sex with Angelo Rasmussen inside Area 52.”

She thumb-smeared SEND and launched her confession into cellphonespace. She was glad she’d told a confidante. Blogger that she was, it always felt better to tell somebody than to do something.

Moments passed, and then the phone emitted its signature clank. A sober incoming reply from Hintika Kuusk: “Fare thee well, Rabbiteen.”

“Farewell 4ever Dr. Kuusk,” typed Rabbiteen, her heart filling. She slid a glance over at Angelo, who was steering with one hand while trying to type with the other. She considered cozying up to him and working her wiles, but just then, with another clank, here came a mass-mailing to Hintika Kuusk’s extensive buddy list: “OMG OMG OMG! Rabbiteen-Karmic-Reality is hooking up with Angelo-Ain’t-It-Awful!”

Within seconds, a follow-up fusillade tumbled onto Rabbiteen’s phone display and laptop screen—from handhelds, from Twitterstreams, from MySpace pages—gossipy whoops and snarks, cheerful shout-outs and me-toos, messages from half the women Rabbiteen knew.

Angelo glanced over, his eyebrows kinked. “What’s the excitement?”

“Oh, it’s just my silly, romantic women friends. Don’t let me distract you from fondling your famous blog.”

Angelo was gentlemanly enough to close his laptop. “We’re being fools. What do you say we pull over now?”

He tapped a button on the GPS unit for a distance update. “Area 52 is now twelve miiiii—” The robotic voice twisted into a sudden anguished squawk. The device sputtered, chirped, and went dark.