William Dietrich - Ice Reich

Perhaps it was a bad dream. Certainly Australia seemed unreal. The sand was too red, the sky too blue, the desert brush a vivid, improbable green. Like a children's coloring book. The landscape shimmered and danced, its insubstantiality matching his sense of being trapped in a nightmare. But the pain was real. His head ached and every attempt to rest gave the flies a chance to find him again. Their buzz was as tireless as the sun.

The impossibility of his situation seemed so enormous that he had difficulty processing its logic. He was a sheeter, slang for a computer engineer who matrixed corporate spreadsheets into four-dimensional game theory, and his whole life was built on mathematics. He was an artist of the rational, his boss had praised him. A wizard, a master, a lord of the logarithms. Ethan had swaggered through code like Daniel-fucking-Boone. It was all worth squat right now, a fact that seemed cruelly unfair. Shouldn't all his work, all his education, and all his technological expertise give him some kind of edge? No. Of course not. Cops, credentials, resumes, diplomas: thousands of miles away. And he'd asked for this! Paid a small fortune to do it! Enormously funny, really. A tremendous joke on him. Clearly something had gone monstrously wrong- so nonsensically and outrageously wrong that he thirsted not just for water but retribution. Oh, what rank incompetence this confirmed among the bastards who'd sent him here! What lies they'd told by not telling him enough! If he got home he'd…

What?

Somebody would listen, wouldn't they?

If he got home.

Ethan glanced back. His glimpse of his pursuers produced an instinctive shock of fear. There was an animal wildness about them, a shedding of restraint, that was as unbound and tangled as their hair. He was so disoriented! Drugged for the flight, awakened in wreckage, the harried pilot who unstrapped him displaying none of the cool aplomb he'd come to expect. The aviator had punched out, parachuted down, and moved in anxious jerks, desperate to get away from the wreckage that smoked like a beacon. The plane had broken into two parts, the forward section with his dead friends skidding to the far side of a low rise. Ethan had wanted to go there but the pilot refused. "You don't want to see your friends."

Instead the rattled aviator had unscrewed a tail panel and unbolted an orange-colored electronic box, cursing as he struggled with the tools. Then he brusquely jammed the added weight into Ethan's already-stuffed pack. "This is what's going to keep us from having to walk to the beach," the man had explained gruffly. "If I can get the rest. Wait here." Ethan waited as the pilot trotted toward the nose, and when he'd become bored sitting in the heat and sand and finally trudged up the rise, thinking he was hallucinating a curious murmur of voices, he'd seen a swarm of scavengers who looked like urban groundlings. They'd pinned the pilot against the blackened fuselage like a trapped rabbit, their movements quick, their tone mocking, and their skin brown and hard as bark. "Get back!" they'd howled at the pilot. So Flint had run before he'd fully realized he was running, confused by the impression of faded synthetics and wooden spears, wire decorations and ragged hair, a melding of Stone Age and Information Age: 21st Century Huns.

Now he could hear their crowing. Getting closer. Drawing near.

The address in Daniel's city was in the tower of an anonymous skyscraper cluster forty minutes away by tube. Discreet lettering in the lobby announced the firm's presence on the thirty-third floor. The elevator opened to reveal a number of nondescript small offices: a title company, a financial newsletter, a laser-lift skin clinic. The tour agency door was solid wood, plain, and locked. "Outback Adventure," a tiny sign read in letters slipped into the kind of bracket that could accommodate a rapid turnover of tenants. He glanced at the ceiling. A vid-snake was watching him.

Daniel hesitated, then knocked.

Silence.

He looked at his watch; on time. He tried the knob but it didn't budge. He knocked again. Nothing.

Dammit, it wasn't lunch, but there was no sound from the other side. He eyed the keypad lock and punched some numbers at random without effect, quickly becoming bored. "Hello?" Finally he retreated across the hallway and slid down the wall, sitting expectedly on the floor. He'd wait for the bastards.

With that there was a buzz, a click, and the door swung quietly open. He stood awkwardly and walked over, poking his head through. The inside revealed a small waiting area with ugly plastic molded chairs, a desk, and a pretty receptionist. She smiled. "Close the door behind you."

He stepped through and the door clicked shut.

"Your appointment?"

"To see Mr. Coyle," he said grumpily. "My name is Daniel Dyson."

"Please have a seat, Mr. Dyson." She gestured at the plastic chairs. "I'll inform Mr. Coyle."

"You didn't answer my knock."

"Yes we did. Eventually." She regarded him with quiet amusement.

"You don't want clients to come in?"

"Eight percent of our applicants are turned away by that door and that's for their own good. They wouldn't do well with Outback Adventure, would they?"

He sat while she announced his arrival. The chairs were as uncomfortable as they looked. The brochures on the table featured the same wilderness couple he'd seen on his video wall. There were pictures of empty desert, red-rocked gorges, and bounding kangaroos. The text was spare. "Like primitive life itself, this is a journey with no schedule, no itinerary, and no set destination- except self-realization."

A Zen thing, maybe.

There was a buzz and she looked up at him again, smiling. "Your counselor will see you now." He went through another solid wooden door.

The man who met Daniel reminded him a bit of the brochure Ninja, but without the knives. Elliott Coyle was dark-haired, tanned, and dressed in a charcoal sport coat over a black silk crew shirt and dark pants. He wore black Dura-Flex slippers. A silver pin on his lapel was the only bright point to catch the eye. It showed a kangaroo. That would be something, Daniel thought, to see a wild kangaroo.

There are thousands of them- hundreds of thousands- where you're going." Coyle had followed Daniel's eye.

"How do you know I'm going?"

"I've read your profile, Daniel. You belong there."

"You have a profile?"

"The screening questionnaire, a background check. We don't send just anyone on Outback Adventure. It's too expensive for both of us. So we try to guess- an educated guess, but a guess nonetheless- who truly belongs there. The information we have on you is very promising."

"I'll bet it includes my annual salary, if that's my fee."

Coyle smiled. "Touche."

"Secret passwords, locked doors. Your company doesn't make sense."

He nodded. "You want to know more, of course, which is why I'm here." He stuck out his hand. "Elliott Coyle." The handshake was firm and brisk. "I'm your assigned counselor, the man whose job it is to convince you the experience is worthwhile, to help decide if we should give each other a try, and then guide you through preparation if we come to agreement. I feel it's safe to say that what I'm offering- what we're offering- will change your life."

"Who is 'we,' exactly?"

"Outback Adventure is a travel consultant that contracts with the umbrella governing arm of United Corporations. We have exclusive excursion rights to offer wilderness experiences in Australia."

"And Australia is quarantined. Off-limits. Dangerous, last I heard."

"It was. To keep management of the continent controllable, we haven't advertised its change in status. Instead we screen candidates to find the few who can realistically take advantage of what we have to offer. You're in a select group, Daniel."