You couldn’t hear a sound or see anything moving. It was another world. The houses on the shore didn’t belong. Nor the people either.
— From “A Great Day” by Frank Sargeson
The sunlight stung Adam’s eyes and the world kept falling out of focus. His visual field, his root feeling for the world—everything was disrupted. Things were easier when he closed his eyes. The darkness was comforting—relatively—though incomplete. Amoebic patterns of pale white and orange blinked and slid across the darkly shuttered view.
The car shook with their speed. They were travelling with frightening urgency towards or away from something. Hands on the wheel, Jeremy had tried to explain, but his words had been hard to make sense of, and for a while Adam had been lapsing in and out of a heavy blackness. He knew he had to think carefully, now that he was conscious again, but it was difficult through the expansive pain in his head.
Hey, Adam. Knock-knock.
… Uh-huh?
Come on. Knock-knock.
… Who’s there?
Server request. Knock-knock.
… Who’s there?
Server request server request server request. Knock-knock.
…
Knock-knock, man.
Okay. Who’s there?
Server request server request server request server request server request server request server request server request server request server request server request server request—
Okay! Stop. Please.
You see how that works?
No. It just hurts.
Now imagine a thousand other people knocking and yelling at you, all at the same time: server request server request server request server request server request—
Okay! It fucking hurts.
Overwhelmed computer servers go down for a bit, then they come back up. But people, they get pushed too far, it can be game over. Psyches entirely screwed. They stumble around, pissing and shitting and groaning, nothing more than dumb brain stems on legs.
… But not us?
Not us, bud.
Adam opened his eyes. Jeremy was smiling wide. Then he looked at Adam, frowned, and turned back to face the road, hunching over the wheel. Adam looked too, at the noon-lit wasteland of dirt and scrub stretching out all around them, the Desert Road one long black line splitting the landscape in two.
It looked uglier and more barren than Adam remembered it ever being.
Jeremy looked like how Adam remembered. Except of course for the shaved head, stippled and stubbly, indentations catching the light, showing the subtle ways all heads are misshapen.
Not us, buddy. The question is, are we the only ones who aren’t fucked?
Adam touched the bandage at his ear. It was wrapped tight under his jaw, and angled up to the back of his skull where the central throbbing was, where Jeremy said to be very careful. Jeremy looked at him touching the bandage and Adam brought his hand back down.
I’m glad I could get you out.
… Yeah.
It’s a bit of a procedure and it’s not fun. It was a challenge but I did it for you, buddy. Lucky I had some practice first. Jeremy tapped the top of his own head with the points of two fingers like testing a soft-boiled egg. He checked his wristwatch, an antique analogue with large hands, Roman numerals, a cracked face. You can have more oxycodone in half an hour. Try to chill. You can rest against the pillows, don’t worry about getting blood on them.
Adam nestled his head gently back. Pillows all thin and ratty but collectively they provided cushioning, piled up between his neck and shoulder and the door. His head ached with a strong, steady pressure, as if the fused seams of the bones of his skull might buckle and break open.
They hit a bump in the road and Adam felt his brain smack against the inside of his head. He screamed, and his vision went white, then black, and hot automatic tears streamed down his face. He heard himself whimpering.
*
Last time Adam had seen Jeremy, they’d both been drunk and got kicked out of a bar because Jeremy tried to pick a fight. On the street he kept going, shouting at people around them, and the bouncer shoved him off the pavement, into the gutter. Jeremy called the man ignorant scum, and Adam apologised and dragged Jeremy away by the arm. Adam was furious. Had Jeremy lost his stupid mind? There was no chance of just having fun anymore, because all Jeremy did was start shit. Jeremy was unhinged. Jeremy was an arsehole. Adam didn’t care what was up with Jeremy, he just wanted him to stop wrecking everything. Jeremy spat and took off. He left Adam a voicemail the next morning. He knew where Adam was coming from, knew he was difficult to be around. He was taking charge of the situation, so Adam didn’t need to worry; he wouldn’t see him again. Adam said thank fuck, not sure if he truly was thankful to see the back of Jeremy, but guessing he probably was. He deleted the message, and with the larger problem of a savage hangover to be reckoned with, he fried up a big greasy breakfast…
Something in the memory was missing. Five, six, seven, eight. Eight years ago, and a lot of memories of nights like that final one, the memories all stacked up, overlaid, none especially distinguishable from all the others like it…
What apart from being the last time was different about that night?
What was different—what was different was—
There was a moment when Jeremy stood triumphant in the gutter. And Adam hadn’t grabbed him by the arm, not that night. He’d tried but Jeremy tugged free, his fist closed tight around something. Jeremy stood eyeballing the bouncer for what felt like a long time, but must’ve been a few seconds, tops. Adam told Jeremy to move on but Jeremy was impassive, smirking. Jeremy called the bouncer some name (ignorant scum? something like that) then let something drop from his hand. It was small and black with a tiny glowing light. Adam didn’t know what it was until he turned and saw the bouncer reach up to his head, feeling for the missing earpiece. When Adam looked back to Jeremy he was grinding his foot down into the gutter, breaking the small black thing into pieces, before running off into the darkness where a string of streetlights had failed, with the bouncer shouting after him, and Adam was running too, as fast as he could, though he never caught up.
*
We’re not digital. We’re animal.
Adam opened his eyes and groaned, a small, wounded sound.
We conceive of things very differently to a computer. We remember things differently. We process things differently. Simple facts.
I need to get out.
Bud, no. I’m sorry.
I’m going to be sick.
Here. Go ahead if you need to. Jeremy reached across and unlatched the glove box. He pulled out a plastic bag and handed it to Adam.
Adam fumbled the bag open, let the bitter vomit rise up and out. It dribbled down his chin and the front of his T-shirt, and then he saw that part of the bag had stuck back on itself and hadn’t properly opened.
Shit. Well, don’t worry. We can wash that up.
Huh?
But Jeremy was already slowing down, angling the car towards the side of the road. They stopped, then Jeremy was outside, opening Adam’s door. Vomit slid off the surface of the bag as Adam stumbled out. The bag fell and caught in the gravel behind the front tyre. The lower half of Adam’s T-shirt was soaked and Jeremy said to take it off. Adam raised his arms and Jeremy lifted the T-shirt up, slow and cautious around Adam’s head.
I feel dizzy.
Just a sec.
Jeremy dragged the T-shirt off the ends of Adam’s outstretched hands. He balled the T-shirt up and Adam sat on the edge of the passenger seat, feeling the warm air across his naked torso and scalp. The air tingled his skin and it felt good, like the gentle tug of a tether, reminding him he was bound to the world. The world was still there for him outside Jeremy’s car. He watched Jeremy collect the bag and hold it out with one hand, allowing the breeze to fill the bag with air. Jeremy stuffed the T-shirt into the bag and sent the unpleasant package, with a gentle underarm toss, into the scrubland.
We’re not taking it?
Why? It’s just stinking rubbish.
Won’t someone find it?
Who, Adam?
Adam had spent stretches of time phasing in and out, but as far as he knew, as far as anything he’d seen, little as that was, it was true. They hadn’t seen any other vehicles, any other people. Jeremy moved to the back of the car and opened the boot.
Why didn’t you stop before?
Because we have to keep moving.
Jeremy slammed the boot shut and came around and handed Adam a bottle of water and a fresh T-shirt.
Wash your face before you put this on.
Adam rinsed his mouth out and ran a wet hand across his lips and chin then splashed some water over his hand.
Careful with that. We have a limited supply.
Okay. Adam capped the bottle and slipped the T-shirt on without Jeremy’s help this time. Easing his head slowly through the hole, he felt like a turtle emerging from its shell to see what the world had to offer. The thought made him smile, a little kid’s game. He stifled a stupid laugh – a sudden partial uncoiling of the tension that had been twisting through his body. He took a long, uneven breath, in and out, then turned and sat back in the seat, buckled the belt, began rebuilding the pile of pillows, as Jeremy climbed in the driver’s side.
Adam closed his eyes and watched the pale patterns shift.
When he was twelve, Jeremy had tried to kill himself. He and Adam weren’t friends then, weren’t even in the same city. Their friendship happened a couple of years later, in their first year of high school together. Jeremy told Adam about it after another boy, sneering, said to Jeremy at lunch break, I thought you were long dead, ghostdick. Jeremy said to Adam, I’ll tell you so you don’t have to ask, and he told Adam how his dad had found him, how the hospital pumped his stomach and locked him in a psych ward for six months. Word spread quickly, though most kids didn’t bother saying much to Jeremy’s face. When they did, Jeremy snapped back, Haunt your dreams forever motherfucker, and Adam would draw a finger across his own neck as if that made more sense of the threat. One morning, the school counsellor—a stocky woman with sharp grey eyes behind thick glasses, and the rasping voice of a committed smoker—pulled Adam aside after biology class and told him it was a very fortunate thing Jeremy had a friend like him to rely on. Adam hadn’t suspected until then that Jeremy and the counsellor perhaps spoke regularly. But something caught on and the general responsibility he had felt towards Jeremy became absolute from that point, like an invisible cage had coalesced in the air, encapsulating the two of them however far apart their bodies ever were in space.
*
Show it to me.
Show you what, bud?
The thing you took out. The chip.
I can’t.
Show me.
… You don’t believe me?
I just want to see it.
You think I’d lie about this?
… No. I just want to see it. See what it’s like.
It’s nothing special. Anyway, you can’t.
… Why not?
I attached it to a rat … Caught it and kept it for just this purpose.
What … purpose?
Anybody who wants to trace that chip, assuming there’s anybody left who can trace it, they’re going to think you’re lost in the Kaimai Ranges.
…
I let it go while you were still bleary as hell. Check out the cage on the floor back there.
Adam looked behind Jeremy’s seat and saw the construction of wire bars half-concealed by a stained towel. The bottom of the bars were attached to a grey plastic tray lined with wood chips.
I’m not a liar, Adam.
I know.
The world’s gotten all fucked up. I saw it coming and I did my best to get us prepared.
… Thanks.
This is a rescue operation. You can’t kidnap your best mate, right? Jeremy laughed. We’re still friends, yeah? That’s not going to change.
Jeremy looked thinner but not older than he had eight years earlier.
Adam had no recollection of meeting Jeremy again—Why?—Only the time afterwards—Last night, wasn’t it?—In the Milky Way room—
I’m not paranoid, Jeremy said. I can see why you might think that. Paranoia should have been more normal.
I had a normal life. An ordinary life.
Appearances, eh!
Talking about the end of the world excited Jeremy. He was enthusiastic about it—he felt vindicated. But he was volatile, too. Easily riled if his motivations were questioned. And he wasn’t afraid to wield a weapon against a friend. If the story could run wild, if Adam could let Jeremy run wild with the story, would something open up? A clue, a way of understanding this senseless situation? This—Whatever Jeremy was doing———Hoping to do———Test the tale but not the teller——
Augtech’s banned. Dad always said he never saw any.
Banned? Kind of.
… So they?
They shut down the commercial enterprises. But I think they were already transferring the technology to the military by then, or soon after.
The military?
… Your head okay, bud?
Sore. But I’m fine. I want to know … what we’re dealing with.
Well … augmented realities are a great way to create smokescreens. Hide all sorts of shit and control populations and basically just fuck with people.
The advantages are … obvious, I guess.
Evil’s the word. I mean, working things in the other direction, there’s direct psychic espionage—sucking your thoughts right out of your head. And you know, our brains are hugely powerful machines. If you could find a way to network them and harness that animal processing power, then maybe you could drastically improve your chances against all kinds of unpredictable chaos. Calculate the future to some greater extent. Forecast weather months in advance. Out-manoeuvre enemies every time. All for the sake of maintaining a self-managing population of protein-
based processors.
… Until they go down.
Right. Until the animals go down.
Was it an attack?
Perhaps, but there’s been no follow-through. Not yet. Just this mass disabling. I think it spreads region by region.
Spreads?
However it’s working. It could all be a monumental accident… You’re going pale again. Try to relax. I know it’s a lot to take in.
… Where else, apart from here?
Must be loads of countries. Just another arms race. But whether or not they’ve been scrubbed out too … What’re you looking at?
… The mountains.
In the distance to the west, the mountains were bare and brown.
Where’s the snow?
There hasn’t been snow for a long time. This is good. You’re beginning to notice things. What else is different?
Adam looked around. Heading south on holiday when he was a kid, his mum and dad would challenge him and his older brother to spot wild horses. They’re out there somewhere, his dad would say. If you look hard enough, his mum would chime in. If they found one, then everyone would get an ice cream when they reached the end of the Desert Road. Adam never spied a wild horse, but one time his brother said he did. Fleeting, barely there for a second. Dad acted surprised, but they all got their ice creams.
When Adam was thirteen, his dad admitted that the last wild horse had died a long time before he was even born, and Adam had laughed with appalled appreciation at his parents’ commitment to the joke.
But it wasn’t only horses. Spotting other things, real things, had been worth an ice cream, too.
Isn’t this an army training ground?
No way. Jeremy laughed again, chirpy and light. I mean, yes, in the sense that it was once. And in the illusion they maintained for you and everyone else. But no, I don’t think so. Not in reality. Not anymore.
*
It was like the Milky Way on the darkest nights, a thick smattering of lights, but every star was blood red and wet, dripping across the sky. The pain had been immediate and severe upon waking. Then the shock of seeing the spray of red, the abrupt crinkling of plastic when he tried to move. He wasn’t looking up at the sky. No. He was propped up in one corner of a room. Red stars superimposed upon the nearest wall … The room that contained him, seen through sheets of milky plastic covering every surface, looked like a curdled dream.
I had to. I had to, a voice said, and Adam recognised the voice of his old friend Jeremy, back from the dead again.
Then there were feet and legs, the knees bending as the body crouched. The plastic crinkling with each movement. Arms and torso, then Jeremy’s serious face, close enough to Adam’s that it filled the whole space.
They get them in through the fontanelle, his face said, mouth moving out of sync with the words, which had a long droning tail to their sound. When we’re still babies with soft baby heads. Before our cranial bones harden into place. They do it like that so we can never get them out again.
Jeremy’s face lifted out of view, followed by the torso, then the legs. Crunch of plastic underfoot. Adam turned his neck, slowly, slowly, and saw on the ground a blood-slicked power drill.
In through the fontanelle means out through the fontanelle. I’m sorry, bud. I had to.
The blood stars had blurred then, their colour deepening into black as they sank back into the heavy night falling down over Adam.
*
There’s probably no going back.
Jeremy had slowed the car, approaching a gap in the low bank to the right, the ghost of a dirt road clear in the early afternoon light.
I mean, there’s definitely no going back. So we should check things out. Stay cautious.
Jeremy reached across and rummaged in the elasticated pouch at the rear of Adam’s seat. He leaned back in the driver’s seat, lifting the black binoculars to his eyes.
There’s a rise in the way. Can’t see shit beyond a hundred metres.
Jeremy opened his door and got out of the car and Adam sat there saying nothing. Jeremy stuck his head back inside.
You coming?
They walked twenty metres to the top of a hillock. Unfiltered sunlight heated Adam’s newly shaven scalp. The effect was entirely different to the earlier breeze, that tingling reminder of his place in the immediate world. Sunlight came from a great distance, it didn’t at all care what it touched. The sweat beading all over his head and soaking into the bandage aggravated his sense of corporeal violation, his awareness of his mutilation.
Jeremy peered through the binoculars.
Look, he said after a minute, handing the binoculars to Adam.
Adam squinted ahead, ignoring Jeremy, watching with his own two eyes. He could see a row of objects like tree stumps halfway out to the horizon where the air shimmered above the earth and made everything within a certain band look as though it was moving in some direction——on towards the horizon or———towards him and Jeremy———
Take them and look.
Adam accepted the binoculars and raised them to his eyes. He found the line of tree stumps and saw that they were box-shaped rocks. Beside him, Jeremy began to huff and pace. Adam kept scanning, scrutinising the rocks.
Well? You see them? I guess you were right about this being an active army base.
Ah-huh.
They’re fucked though. See the way they move? If our military’s scuppered … Well, they’re a mid-level power, they don’t run the show. But…
Adam gave back Jeremy the binoculars and Jeremy looked again.
Twenty, maybe twenty-five.
Was Jeremy really seeing soldiers? Adam stared at the back of Jeremy’s head, trying to occupy his friend’s mind. Jeremy’s head was shaved but Adam got the idea he’d just kept it that way after operating on himself. How long ago had he done that? There was nothing to indicate a fresh infliction. There was no pink scarring, no older pearled scarring.
Jeremy lowered the binoculars, turned and slapped Adam on the arm, a cheap gesture of camaraderie.
Let’s get back to the car. We’ll be safe to drive through, but I’d like to get a good look at them. We can follow the road a bit longer then walk inland.
At the foot of the hillock Adam spotted what he needed.
I think I can see something, he said.
Yeah?
Adam pointed ahead and to the right where a formation rose from the ground. It looked to Adam like a thicket of bushes, a thicket of nothing.
Jeremy raised the binoculars and looked out.
See anything?
… Not sure.
I thought I saw movement.
Adam picked up the rock and with one quick step forwards he swung it down on Jeremy’s pale head with a resounding crack. Jeremy made a gulping sound and fell, the arm with the binoculars twisting under him. Adam dropped the rock onto the dirt and rolled Jeremy over to check. Jeremy’s mouth and chin were covered with blood where he must have bitten down hard on his tongue. The blood bubbled between his lips. Adam held his hand under Jeremy’s nose. He felt the ragged, warm breath. He turned Jeremy onto his side and positioned his limbs to keep him that way, in case his friend vomited. Adam took the keys from Jeremy’s pocket then went to the car and popped the boot. He saw packets of dried food and trays of bottled water. A pup tent. A khaki tarp and a shovel. He grabbed bottles of water and muesli bars, walked back, placed them in the shade of a shrub within Jeremy’s line of sight.
He returned and found paper and a pen in the glove box. Scratched down in childlike letterforms: I’LL SEND HELP.
A soft exhaustion was beginning to wrap all around——Don’t let it take you over———over———
He drank water then walked again and put the note beside the supplies under the shrub, weighing it down with a stone, then went back to the car, sat in Jeremy’s seat, legs shaking, turned the engine on. He turned the engine off and returned to the note, one glance at Jeremy to see he was still out. He lifted the stone and picked up the note and read it over, and read it over again, the square of paper trembling in his dusty hands, then stuffed it into his pocket. Jeremy’s interpretation would only be a dangerous one. It was the only way of seeing he’d left for himself.
Now Jeremy was knocked out in the dirt and Adam back in the car had to—through the pressure in his head——he had to think.
The road is empty because it is closed.
(The road only closes in bad weather. It’s warm outside. No snow on——)
Whatever the reason for the road’s closure.
(Patrols would be stationed up and down————)
There’s a township not too far away. A café and a military museum. The army base itself, somewhere off—————Drills or———
Jeremy had halluci—————————
(Jeremy had been filled with conviction, you saw that———You hadn’t seen————————)
(And aren’t things different from the way you remember, from the——————Gone————)
The road is empty because——
Move————Just—Start driving——Just———
(Why are things different from how you both remember. Different from what each other sees.)
(Jeremy had no scar, no——————————————)
But all heads are misshapen.
Adam found the oxycodone, swallowed four with water.
The fuel indicator, anyway.
Too low on petrol to turn around, to make it home.
Adam swung the car’s shuddering metal body out onto the road, pointed it in the direction they’d been going, the only direction left to go. Don’t look———Keep——Eyes dead ahead——Focus on the road out front———Eyes off the rearview———Don’t look even half a second. Jeremy stumbling onto the black bitumen, one hand raised to his head and the other in the air. That’s all you’ll see and then you’ll have to choose.
Head throbbing, applying erratic pressure on the pedal, grip on the steering wheel unsteady, Adam sped on through
the wild emptiness, never looking back—————Never——
—————Never looking ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————