A ride

There was another white flash of light and I was back in the conservatory. The metal hand on my head unclamped. I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. Gideon was hunched in front of me. The robot father was still in his armchair.

“Mr. Kayle,” Gideon asked. “Are you all right?”

I put a hand on my forehead to quell the images still spinning in my mind.

“Have some more tea, Kayle,” Father said. “It will soothe you. I’m terribly sorry. Really. I know that wasn’t easy. I know from my own experience. It is a tragic memory. One I have had to keep all this time, just for you.”

I stood up and felt the blood rush to my head. Gideon urged me to sit back down, and I did.

“So you see,” Father said. “You see now.”

“What did you see, Mr. Kayle?”

I had no way of explaining it to Gideon. I struggled to find the words. He handed me the cup of tea, I gulped it back, and then he took it and returned it to the table.

“Quon is a dangerous man. Dangerous and very, very powerful,” Father said. “I know this because Shen told me, but I also know this because, before he was killed, he uploaded his memories to me. Everything he had in the deepest recesses of his mind. I have been keeping them safe. Quon doesn’t know I have them, and because I am not human, hasn’t thought to take them from me.”

I finally regained myself. As soon I did, I began to rummage through everything else I remembered. The Blue Caribou. The commune. The New Past. Moneta and Jai-Li and Anubis.

“The New Past,” I said. “The Bodies that control the communes—they’re all being controlled by Quon.”

“I imagine so.”

It made sense. Until then, I had always been suspicious of the speed and efficiency with which the New Past had orchestrated their regime. Within months of Day Zero, there had been groups all over the world, collecting people and separating them from each other.

“Quon separated us from each other to prevent us from rising up,” I said.

“Correct.”

I thought about those nights of interrogation. The plugs on our heads, the rumbling grey machine that formed its reports, the Age of Self scripts we’d been forced to learn.

“But I don’t understand. In the communes, we were told our separation would initiate The Renascence. The Age of Self scripts were instructions for us to acquire collective consciousness … but they were really doing the opposite. They were preventing us.”

“Hm. With all the memories, the wants and desires of mankind at Quon’s disposal, he knew how enticing such a premise remained, in spite of the fact he had no intention of allowing such a thing. He prepared the scripts himself. He sold people an idea he knew they wanted—the idea of being united. The idea of humans evolving into something singular and cohesive and powerful … but then he did the opposite of what he’d promised under the guise of following through. Simple and malevolently brilliant. People didn’t know any better. Who could argue? Desire trumps reason, it seems. And after everything was lost on Day Zero, humans were offered the promise of exactly what they desired. To be led. To be taught. To evolve. Evidently, however, somebody forgot to pay the piper.”

I got up from my chair again and walked to the glass wall. I looked out over the murky countryside. Lightning flashed in the mountains somewhere far away, the finger of God pointing at some significant and remote destination.

“And we were brought here,” I said. “Everything that happened before brought us to your house. To you.”

“Shen did his best. Quon’s arrogance led him to believe the mismatched memories were the result of mere incompetence on Shen’s behalf, but he forgot about Shen’s own brilliance and resourcefulness. The captain of Chang’e 11 … The architect of my family. Shen led you here in the only way he could—through a proverbial back entrance. A maze of other people’s stories. Or a jigsaw if you will, of other people’s journeys and memories. Given to you. Guiding you. Theirs, and those of your own.”

I turned around. “Why us? Of all people.”

“Why not you? You are guided by a father’s love, no? Is there any more powerful reason?”

“Quon knows where my son is.”

Father nodded solemnly. “He does.”

“Then we have to find him,” I said. I glanced once again at my outstretched hand. I was still trembling, the weak aftershock of a mighty quake of knowledge that had shaken me from my bearings. “How do we do that?”

Father put his glass on the table in front of him and stood from his chair. He dusted his pants and began to walk to the door that led into the rest of the warm house. His hand extended to suggest we should lead the way. Gideon got up from his haunches, and we followed.

“I have one last thing to show you gentlemen,” Father said. “But please. After you.”

We stood in the front garden of the house. The earth was muddy and the air was dry but cold. Thick black clouds hung overhead, brooding between the peaks of neighbouring mountains. Father led us under the wooden gazebo beside the house. A large object was resting under a thick tarp. I presumed it was an autovehicle—the solar-powered car ordinary people had once bought and used to conduct their ordinary business. Father moved to the back and gripped the tarp.

“If you wouldn’t mind, Gideon. Would you grab that end and pull this off? My back is not what it used to be.”

Gideon did as Father had requested, and in a second, the tarp slipped off, exposing a large ovular object.

I knew instantly what sat before us.

Metallic and seamless—like a massive and perfect drop of mercury, hovering off the ground in a state of rest.

The Silver Whisper.

This was the gleaming pod Jai-Li had used to escape that tower in the clouds. An immaculate display of engineering perfection, exactly as she had described it. I put my palms flat against the curved metal side. The surface was smooth and cold.

“I know this vehicle,” I said.

“I’m sure you do. Shen insisted it be brought back here. No easy feat, I can assure you. Especially since it was broken. It was found between two mountains near Chang’e 11. Shen brought it here to repair it, and now I can say it’s good as new. I didn’t understand his interest in it at the time, but he said he’d brought it back because of two men who would be looking for a ride.” Father smiled quickly. He rolled on the heels of his feet, his hands behind his back. “I’d know if they were the right men, he said, because one would know how to open it. That was the only advice given.”

I backed away from the vehicle and put my hand to Gideon’s chest, a warning to stand back.

Another memory: “Jai-Li.”

At that, seams appeared on the side of the pod and a door rolled out to the ground, exposing its internal rungs. I felt the stirrings of hope, a faint tempting sense of elation, emotions I hadn’t experienced in longer than I could remember. I looked to Father to see if he’d object to me entering and he waved his hand happily towards the entrance. I went in and saw exactly what I had envisaged. The red seats. The panel of instruments. The outside of the house through the one-way walls. I was humbled by the reminder that a young girl had died in there. A young girl with a will and a dream powerful enough to go on after she could carry it no further. The memories of the mother’s story washed over me. I was once again alongside her in that monolithic tower. Once again at her side on the days of her mother’s collapse and eventual death.

“There’s a problem,” I said, exiting. “There’s a mother and a child looking for this pod. They’re going back to the crash site to find it. They’re expecting it to be there.”

“Then you’ll have to take it back there, Kayle. You’ll put it back where it belongs. It’s in far better condition than she’d left it, that’s for sure! But for now, it’s yours. Your ticket to that side of the world, to the site of Chang’e 11. Remember, you know she’s going to find it only because she told you she was. The question you have to ask is why she told you.”

I stepped out of the pod and back onto the muddy earth. The arched door pulled up behind me and sealed shut, leaving no seams.

“By now you should realise you are part of something more than what you know, my friend,” Father said. “And a little mutualism goes a long way.”

Feeding us had been Mother’s primary concern when we arrived, passing on Shen’s story had been Father’s. Now our hosts did everything else in their power to make us as comfortable as they could. Gideon and I each took a warm shower and changed into new clothes that had been laid out for us by Mother. Shen’s clothes fit me almost perfectly but Gideon could only wear a large jacket and a pair of tracksuit pants; everything else was too small. We were offered two single beds in the spare room. Father told us he hoped we’d stay for breakfast in the morning. He assumed we were eager to be on our way, but said he would be honoured to have us at his table one last time. We assured him we would and then retired to our beds.

I couldn’t sleep. Gideon made no sound, and I wondered whether he too was struggling to cast his mind off from the shores of thought. I stared at the ceiling and retraced my journey back from that charming home tucked between those quiet, ageless mountains. The dizzying echo of Shen’s death bounced off the revitalised memory of Jai-Li’s escape and consequent crash. I thought about the Silver Whisper, how it brought the detail of a stranger’s tale into my own vivid reality, how it completed a circle of fate that held us in orbit around some immense, radiating truth.

I could hear Gideon breathing softly now, and guessed that he’d finally fallen asleep. He hadn’t said much all night and I wondered what he thought of everything we’d heard. Perhaps he was not interested. He did not remember any family that he’d had, or perhaps even did have. There were so many people who recalled nothing at all. I had one son to remember and that one memory had offered me everything there was to be offered by this world.

The weather had calmed. The house was black and still. Gideon’s rhythmic breathing finally coaxed me out of wakeful-ness and into a deep and needed sleep.

I thought that I’d awoken in the middle of the night, but I was only dreaming that I was awake. I was lying on my back on the same bed, in the room I shared with Gideon, but none of it was real. This was a dream bed and a dream room, and I was only my dream self.

The room was dark and soundless. I tried to get up from the bed but I couldn’t move. My neck was held down, my wrists and feet buckled to the bed with leather straps. I could smell the ocean. I could feel it moving beneath my bed. I could hear it slapping the sides. The bed was the raft.

A horrifying new impulse fired through me: the family, Gideon, the house and the Silver Whisper had been a dream, and this was reality. I was still floating across the ocean. I hadn’t gone anywhere or accomplished anything. My existence was as meaningless as it had always been …

I tugged my limbs but to no avail. My head was still on the pillow, the floral blanket was tucked up to my chest, the mattress still supported my weight, but this was definitely the raft, I told myself.

“Don’t bother,” a crackling voice came out of the dark. “Save your tugging for a dream that cares.”

Jack Turning.

I managed to see him, from the corner of my eye. Jack Turning, sitting on a chair at the window of the room, smoking a cigarette in the darkness. Threads of smoke twisted and curled from the glowing tip of his cigarette, becoming more shapeless the higher they rose. Jack was looking out the window, his face hidden in the shadows. He did not turn to look at me.

“You think you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you? Mr. Kayle’s cracked the code.” He tapped his ash on the floor. “You’re a bigger idiot than I thought.”

The bed rocked gently on the unseen ocean that filled the room, but Jack sat fixed in his spot, unaffected by the elements.

“You think Quon’s the one to worry about?” Jack said. “You just wait till you find me. I’m waiting for you, Dad. I’m the one you really want. And you can forget about your pathetic little drip, drip, drip of optimism, trickling in there—I know you feel it. You’ll take any hand-out of hope you can get, won’t you?”

Jack pulled on his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of grey smoke. Through the misty window of the room, a neon sign lit up the dark: the yellow trunk and green leaves of a drooping neon palm tree. A neon-blue word wired in cursive buzzed beside it. The whole thing was tacky—tacky and unmistakable.

The Blue Caribou.

The lights of the sign drew a faint line of colour on Jack’s profile as he stared out the window. The water beneath my bed began to rise over the top of the mattress. I yanked my legs and wrists again. Jack Turning didn’t bother to look back at me. He went on smoking, calmly, taking in deep, leisurely drags. Outside, the sign continued flickering.

“Who knows? Maybe you will find Andy. Maybe you’ll even save the world. Stranger things have happened.” He dropped his cigarette to the ground and crushed it out with his shoe. “But who’s going to bother saving you, big hero?”

The water rose over the sides of the bed and washed against me. I screamed. I wrenched my limbs. Jack did nothing. He just sat there. Lit up another cigarette. In a moment the water was over my face, sliding through my nose and down my throat. I was filling up with the ocean, and no sound could escape my mouth. The water rose quickly, over my body, to the ceiling of the room, pulling everything under just as it had with that suburb against the marshy shore. I wasn’t just drowning. I was disappearing, another forgotten part of that sunken graveyard, unworthy of the breathing world.

I was vanishing into oblivion.

We had breakfast with the family the following morning but I barely said a word. Father had made the breakfast—scrambled eggs and toasted bread. He waddled around the table in his purple apron, pouring each of us a glass of cold clementine juice. Then he whipped off his apron and sat down to join us—playing the role of the fool for his ever-amused children. I appreciated his effort at lightness but my mind was elsewhere.

The dream from the night before had robbed me of my few scraps of budding enthusiasm. I’d awoken sweating and in a disconcerted state. I knew I had to find Quon—that was a must—but now there was the pressing urge to find Jack Turning. He was out there somewhere, waiting for me, and nothing would be resolved until I met him face-to-face to settle some unknown debt.

After breakfast, Gideon and I collected our things. Mother gave us more food parcels and the whole family came outside to see us off. The weather was beautiful; the spiteful storm clouds were long gone, and we stood under a dome of bright blue sky. The mountains were clear and textured; every crack and bump could be seen from afar. Tufts of low-lying shrubs trembled in a tender breeze.

“Are you ready?” I asked Gideon as we approached the Silver Whisper, hovering beneath the gazebo.

“Yes. I’m ready.”

We turned and thanked the family for their hospitality. Father shook my hand and held it firmly as he spoke:

“Remember, Kayle. Victory isn’t getting what we want. It’s getting what’s owed to us. And what’s owed is balance. Balance between right and wrong, the guilty and the innocent, the saved and the damned. We mightn’t ever have Utopia—I’m not even sure it’s what we really want—but balance: that’s the first step towards retrieving Man’s stolen destiny. Towards peace.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Thank you,” I said. “For everything.” I glanced from one family member’s face to the next, thanking them all. They were all smiling back at me. “We can only hope that one day people will have again what you have now.”

Father lifted his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Son and Daughter stood in front of them. The nicest family ever made waved their hands as I climbed into the pod after Gideon. There was only one place up front and he moved into the second row. I took the helm. The door rolled up behind us and we took our seats on the red chairs.

“Say goodbye, children!” Father shouted.

“Goodbye children!” Son and Daughter yelled in unison, and laughed. Mother smiled.

I sat before the panel of instruments. Several lights began to flash before I had pressed anything or given any command. There was the hum of the engine, the sound of the oxygen generator warming up. Gideon placed our bags under the chairs and leaned over to help make sense of the screens in front of me. I held my palm over a display screen, and dragged a list of its most recent logged-in coordinates. One of the coordinates was followed by letters and numbers: K49L3 J3NN3R. It did not take long to realise it was a crafty little code version of my name. I was overcome with anticipation. It was all true. Shen knew about Jai-Li. He had known this very moment would happen, and that it would involve me. And this code, this wink of Shen’s eye, served two functions: to confirm my place in that seat and to preserve my anonymity should an intruder get there before me. I selected the co-ordinates by twisting my wrist in the air above the monitor. The words lit up. Our destination was set.

“That must be it then,” Gideon said.

“Must be.”

We were now at the whim of a plan that hadn’t been revealed. And all we had to do was sit back and let the Silver Whisper take us wherever we needed to be. We could see everything through the shell: the family nucleus, waving and smiling, the rugged stone house Shen had built as a retreat from a broken world, the long unused road, the mountains, the desert land and the untarnished sky.

The pod floated forward slowly, from under the shelter of the gazebo. As it moved, the vines shook on their arch and the flowers trembled in their wheelbarrow. The sound of the engine grew from a low drone into a high-pitched hum, and then all sound stopped; we could hear nothing. It was the silence of a vacuum. I could hear my own heart beating and Gideon’s calm, metrical breath.

I was just about to say that something was wrong when the pod rose rapidly in the sky, suspending us high above the land, then raced forward at a perfect right-angle to its ascension.

In a second, the house and the family were far behind us. The Silver Whisper blistered through the valleys at an unthinkably high speed. Inside our bubble, we felt nothing. We might just as well have been sitting in the red armchairs in Father’s conservatory. I looked back at Gideon, seated in the row of chairs behind me. He was looking through the transparent floor at his feet. Far below, within the stone gullies of the mountains, bush willow trees looked like tufts of moss. Narrow rivulets split into tributaries that ended in marshy green or continued winding along the ravine. Above, the full sun beamed through the tinted ceiling. The horizon showed no hint of what else lay ahead. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d think that what lay below was all that was left, that mankind had already been wiped off the face of a tired and frustrated world.

I did not know how long our journey would take, but I was left with no choice but to trust in the vessel, to trust in the plan. I was too exhausted to dwell on any dire alternatives. I rested my head against the chair, closed my eyes, and thought about what I would say to my son the moment I saw him. I’d hold him close. I’d tell him I loved him, in case he’d forgotten. And then I’d show him a better world than the one he’d been forced to accept. I didn’t know how—or if there was a better world left to be had—but I’d try.

The Whisper sped effortlessly across the unending blue sky, towards a long and impossibly distant horizon.

Andy, don’t tease your sister.

But Dad—

Hey big guy. You’re the older brother. That means you should know better.

I really need to pee, though.

I know. There’s a recharge station up the road. We’ll stop there. Just hold it.

But if I hold it I’ll get a bladder infection.

Who told you that?

I read it.

Uh-huh. Well, I’m sure you’ll be fine. Just a little longer. Why don’t we sing a song?

What song?

I don’t know. Don’t you know a good song?

Da-aad, I’m dying here.

Don’t be so dramatic, Andy.

What’s dramatic?

Okay, okay. There it is.

Where?

You see that light up there? That’s the auto-recharge station. See? I knew we were close. It’s just around the corner. Just a little bit further, big guy …

Gideon tapped me on the arm and I opened my eyes. The Silver Whisper had left the land behind and was flying over the ocean. Away from the mountains, it had come down from its great height, and was now no more than thirty feet above the water. I squeezed the back of my neck and turned to my side. Gideon was pointing at something he’d seen in the water: the rounded black backs of a pod of whales moving together, tumbling and rolling through the silvery-blue surf. They moved serenely as one, migrating to warmer waters, I assumed. One of them sprayed water from its blowhole as it keeled over.

I thought about the stranded whale on the beach. The one we’d burned because there’d been no other option. I wondered whether we could have done something else for it, something we hadn’t considered because we too had been stranded, without the provision of hope in our hearts.

The Whisper passed the whales, and we arched back to watch as they slid into the distance behind us.

Ahead, there was new land. Our pod raced towards it, and the nearer we got, the easier it was to discern the many tall buildings that fledged the coastline—a city rising from a remote mist.

The Silver Whisper passed over the shore where waves crashed and foamed against enormous concrete blocks. An empty highway ran beside the barricade. Beyond, Gideon and I saw no people at all. We entered the airspace of the city and passed between the skyscrapers, along a main road lined with twenty-foot high billboards advertising products long unavailable. One of these depicted the gigantic head of a handsome man, leering out at us, shaving off his facial hair with a Laser-Razor. Another was an enthusiastic group-shot of the cast of a theatre musical. The grass of a local park had grown long and wild, swallowing benches and swing-sets.

We zipped through the rest of the business district until the skyscrapers gave way to an expansive, wildly overgrown suburb of houses—another ghost town of swampy green swimming pools and untended yards. Then the dense settlement thinned into a few lone houses on the outskirts of the city and the land was once again countryside.

Beyond the rolling hilltops we saw what we knew to be a commune, the high fence enclosing a number of familiar tents. Communers ambled between these tents—people of all ages and ethnicities. As we soared over, they craned their heads and followed our pod with shaded eyes. They were less than twenty or thirty kilometres from a city, but would never have known it. The New Past had done its job:

The renouncement of civilisation.

The desertion of consumer culture.

The crooked proposition of enlightenment.

I’d once chosen to go along with The Renascence (or thought I had), but wondered if there was still any choice left in the matter.

The commune was soon out of sight and our vessel continued over the low green hills and snaking dirt roads of the pastoral landscape.

“You know,” Gideon said. His deep voice was calm and unhurried. “I had a dream last night, in that house. Perhaps it was only a dream, perhaps it was a memory. I don’t know. Either way, it was entirely new to me. It seemed to arrive out of nowhere, as if it had found me rather than I had found it. Does that make sense to you?”

I nodded. He stopped for a moment and looked out at the world through the wall of the pod.

“In my dream,” he continued, “I am very young. I know this. I’m not sure how I can know such a thing, but perhaps that is the difference between a dream and a memory. In a dream we believe we’re the age we’re dreaming we are, with all the insecurities and … ignorance of that age, yes? In a memory, we see the past with our present eyes. Can either be trusted? I don’t know. Perhaps I’ve got this all wrong. Regardless, in my dream, I am a student living in a big house with other students. The walls are plastered with movie posters and reprints of famous paintings. There’s always music playing from one of the bedrooms.

“Most importantly, there’s a young woman who lives in the room across from mine. She’s the only female living in that house, but she gets on with every other housemate. They treat her like one of them. They joke with her and she jokes with them. They aren’t afraid to be themselves—to be crude or absurd. I know all of these things in this dream. I also know I am not like them. I struggle to see her as just another housemate. Her beauty intimidates me.

“She’s standing in the kitchen near the kettle, preparing a coffee. I slip by her to get myself something to drink from the refrigerator. When I close the refrigerator, she’s standing behind it, holding her cup of coffee, smiling. I’m holding a bottle of tomato sauce instead of the orange juice, which is not what I planned on grabbing. She asks, ‘Why don’t you ever speak to me? Did I do something wrong?’

“In my dream, I shake my head. I say, ‘No, you’ve haven’t done anything.’

“She says, ‘You’re not like them, are you? You’re interested in different things.’

“I say, ‘Maybe.’ Then she kisses the palm of her hand and puts it on my cheek, before walking past me. As she goes, she says, ‘I’m interested in different things too,’ and I think to myself, maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll marry a woman like that. Then I wake up.”

Gideon took a second, and added, “And I am sleeping next to you.”

I laughed and Gideon’s mouth lifted in a shy smile I hadn’t seen before—the smile of a perfect thought. “That was a good dream. And if it is a memory … that would be even better.”

“Maybe you did marry her.”

“Maybe,” Gideon said. “Nevertheless, it is always a good sign to have a good dream before a journey. After a good dream you know everything will be all right.”

I sat back in my seat. I stared at the sweeping terrain before us and brought to mind my dream, the one I’d had at the same time Gideon had had his own.

I thought about being tied to the bed and drowning in the darkness. Screaming and straining and watching as Jack Turning sat by the window, uncaring, smoking his cigarette. I thought about how I’d awoken in the morning, sweating and shaking and filled with terror.

“A good sign, indeed,” said Gideon.