David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Wired contacts?” said Mark. “What? That dude invented LinkedIn or EliteNet or whatever?”

“Contact lenses, Mark. It’s called visual-channel-collection technology, and we’re five years into it.”

“Who would wear such things?”

“I’m wearing them right now,” she said and looked him right in the eye. He could see no contacts in her eyes, only the brown, with a hazel fleck in the left. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever known before,” she said.

He was adrift. They were serving egg salad sandwiches and building a secret world around him, around everybody.

“We’re early adopters; we’re stakeholders, Mark,” said Tessa. “We want to be part of what’s next. Don’t you? Or do you want to be one of those people who would have been, like, Thanks, no, Industrial Revolution, I’ll stick with my loom and my gaslight ? You want to be left behind?”

She was eating her pie now. “These ships are just a small part of what’s next. And yes, right now this part runs up against something called the ‘right to privacy’”—she made air quotes—“which is a notion that hasn’t really meant much in thirty years and means less every day. You may as well defend people’s right to own steamboats. Someone’s going to control access to all the data and all the knowledge. All of it. Everything that every government, every company, and every poor schmuck needs to get through the day. You want that to be the other guys? Once everyone’s on our network, the old, unwired world will be worthless.

“And that’s how you guys will make a lot of money out of this,” said Mark, trying to be all bottom-line-y.

“ Money does not come close to describing what we’ll make a lot of,” said Tessa.

When sleep finally came for him that night, Mark was tossed deep into a grandly staged drama where his mom told him not to take this job. Do not take this job, she said, pulling away from Sine Wave 2 in her old lavender Dodge Dart, which was now also a helicopter. And he went back inside the ship, which was no longer the ship but had become his childhood home, and he grappled with Tessa beneath his Luke Skywalker bedspread, the sweetness of the grappling cut with anxiety that James Straw would walk in on them.

Leo,” said James. “Leo.”

Leo woke. The jasmine was still in the air. He had fallen asleep with his shoes on, which made him feel dangerous.

“Your sister’s here.”

“What? No.”

“Yes. At the smoking station.”

Leo clawed at the light in the room. He’d been asleep for less than an hour, he was certain. Unless he had been asleep for twenty-four hours. “That’s not possible. I mean it’s highly unlikely.”

“Ah. Okay. Someone pretending to be your sister is here, then,” said James.

Leo got upright and started moving out of the room and down the hall, still napped-out and confused. James was right behind him and they moved briskly. A woman at the men’s smoking station would be a level-one breach of Quivering Pines’ gender-segregation policy and would probably set in motion some sort of regime response. They were racing the clock.

“I left her out there, but I couldn’t keep Clive from talking to her,” said James. “He thinks he just won the lottery. Hurry. He’ll bore her sideways.”

The small knot of men in the lounge were also aware of Leo’s alleged sister outside. But they had gone into prison-yard mode, and no one wanted to be called a snitch. Leo realized that they liked him, that they didn’t want him booted from their midst. He passed through the lounge and stepped out to the patio, and as he did, one man posted himself along the corridor to keep a lookout for counselors, and another clutch of men arranged themselves in front of the patio doors and busily scribbled in raggedy notebooks to distract from and obscure the transgression taking place outside.

Leo saw a girl there and in the bright sun was a little dazzled. Clive was talking to her. She was dark like Leo. No, darker. Very pretty. But too small to be a Crane. Cranes leaned back on the air behind them; this girl leaned in. He stopped at the edge of the patio. James stopped beside him.

“Yeah. That’s not my sister,” he said.

“Really?” said James. “You sure about that? This is important.”

“I’m serious. That’s not my sister. Look at her.”

The woman turned around just then and looked at Leo.

“Shit. I guess you’re right,” said James. “Well, she said she was your sister. I’d better come out there with you.”

They walked to the smoking station. “Clive,” said James when he and Leo had reached the smoking station, “come back in with me. I want to talk to you about something.”

“In a minute,” said Clive.

“No, Clive. This can’t wait,” said James.

Clive copped on. He quickly dug a business card from the breast pocket of his fleece top and handed it to the woman. James gave Leo two of his menthol cigarettes and then escorted Clive back to the facility.

Leo gave the girl one of James’s cigarettes. “Here,” he said, “look like you’re smoking this.” He demonstrated by taking a fake drag. “So you’re my sister,” he said.

“Yeah. No,” said Leila.

“You’re not my sister?” It came out like a question.

“No, I’m not.”

“I know. I know you’re not. Why’d you tell James you were?”

“The lady at the front desk kind of supplied me with that one. It seems that your sister was expected. I needed to see you.”

“Do I know you?”

“No.”

This was a relief. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here because of your broadside. I’m with the people resisting the thing you warned about, and we want to know what you have on Deveraux.” She held her cigarette like she’d seen them held in the movies, but she took a passable fake drag, and then did a good fake exhale.

“You read my broadside?”

“I did.”

Leo noticed that the eye of the stanchioned cigarette lighter was glowing orange. Behind the girl was the medical building; a slender telescoping satellite antenna had sprouted from its roof.

“Did you drive here?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“Are you in the lot?”

“Yes. It’s a little black Toyota. Two doors. Beneath the basketball hoop.”

“How about I meet you there in four minutes?”

“Copy that,” said Leila.

Leo turned and walked quickly back to the patio. The summer buzzed in his ears. He was elated. More. New. Information. James fell in with him when he strode into the lounge. The onion-shaped counselor had come down the corridor and was sniffing at the frisson in the room. He looked perturbed. Leo motored back to the dorm room, James right behind.

“What’s up?” said James when the door was closed.

“Couldn’t rightly say,” said Leo.

“You packed?” said James.

“No. They packed for me,” said Leo. He dropped the Dopp kit into the duffel and slung the whole thing over his shoulder, like a sailor. He stepped up on the windowsill. “James, I’m going to leap out of this window now,” he said.

He leaped, and landed twenty-four inches below the window in the loamy softness of the Quivering Pines bark-mulch moat. A ceanothus scratched at his legs. “I’ll see you on the outside,” he said to James, through the window.

“Go with God,” said James Dean.

Leo made his way across the landscaped zona that surrounded the residential wing. He bobbed and weaved a bit between the bark-mulch inner ring and the hedgerow before the parking lot. He saw the girl in a Toyota where she said she’d be. He dashed over to it and tried to get in on the passenger side. But the handle lifted, clickless and impotent. He rapped on the window. She looked at him. He saw that she was beautiful, eyes full of intent.