“Can’t believe you left the house without your umbrella, Mister Walleus,” the man in the gatehouse says to me. “Might’ve gotten your new haircut all wet.”
“Good thing I can clean it with my hand, then.” I pat my bald head. “Work smart, not hard. It’s in my genes.”
We’ve had the same exchange every time I come home for the last five years and still he smiles like it’s the funniest joke ever told. Life in Eitan must be a lot easier with blissful stupidity like his.
The scanner and my car exchange their information, then the gate yawns open.
“Hopefully tomorrow will be a dry one,” he says, waving at Cobb as the car drives itself forward.
It navigates through Donnculan, each court’s name honoring a different Tathadann dignitary: judges, generals, politicians, police. If I’d been in charge of planning and development, I would have named everything after their whores, because no statesman can get anything done without the promise of some pussy once he’s finished.
Cherry blossoms line the main drive. Two small droids hover at the tips, pruning away the errant growth so that the branches will arch like a canopy over the sidewalks. Thick bushes with some kind of red flower keep the street out of everyone’s yards. A mother chases after her son who is going too fast on his bike, the training wheels rocking him back and forth. He takes a corner without any brakes and flips over, the handlebars pinning him to the concrete. She yanks it off him and he rights himself, wiping his tears and a bloody cut on his sleeve then taking off again.
This is the second section of the neighborhood I’ve lived in, the one with connected houses. When I first joined the Tathadann, they gave the boys and me a detached home two miles inside the gates – fully furnished and with a closet full of white suits so finely tailored to my body the old man had to move my balls aside to get the right measurement – sort of incentivizing my switch, or at least not making me feel like such an asshole about it, and looking sharp while I did it. Every third house had a fountain sitting in its front yard – which likely meant there were at least two more at the back, if not a pool as well. In here, there’s no landmarks in the landscaping or architecture, and all the houses are white. That suggested solidarity, they said. Our house was so far back that, if I hadn’t been issued a Tathadann car – one of the newer ones that drove themselves by radar triangulation – I would have had to track the mileage to remember where I lived.
As fast as my position within the party grew, from managing the water dispersal to wrangling intelligence and commoditizing memory, the size of my house shrank and moved closer to the community’s perimeter. Those suits got cheaper and came less often, too. At first, it pissed me off, but after a few drinks it occurred to me that I’d moved past the need for constant surveillance and they would finally leave me be.
At Mayhe Court, we swing left then drive to the end of the street, kids chasing each other around the asphalt circle.
Yeah, I live in a goddamned cul-de-sac now.
Cobb scampers up the sidewalk to the brick steps and hits the front door with so much momentum he tumbles backward. He stares blankly at the house like it attacked him. I step up to the sensor, say, “Open up.” The voice sensor is as bad as the biometric reader and I have to clear my throat and try twice more before it opens.
Inside, I call out hello but it echoes through the house, so I scrounge up some food for us. I throw containers of leftover roasted pork, potatoes au gratin, and poached asparagus in the top part of the dual-oven and tell it to warm up. “But not too hot this time,” I say. “You burned my mouth yesterday.”
I call out to Cobb, “Do you still want some chicken?” When there’s no answer, I assume he’s hungry and turn on the indoor grill in the center of the kitchen island of burners, put on a couple pieces of chicken and tell it to grill them medium.
While the food cooks, I go into the living room and draw the shades then press my hand exactly four feet above the seam in the carpet. The laser inside the wall analyzes my DNA, then there’s a pneumatic hiss beside the bookshelf.
The sudden interest in Riab’s family is a little unnerving, but I don’t really know who’s writing the orders, and Riab’s family seems a little small to concern Morrigan. What has me curious is Henraek mentioning the power substation, something I haven’t thought about in years. I’d say it has to be urgent for him to bring it up inside the Gallery, but this is also Henraek, the man who shot three holes in the door to our old apartment because the tumbler inside the knob kept catching. For a man who constantly bitches about his dealings with others’ pasts, he damn sure loves wallowing in his own.
I push on the wall and open up the panic room.
More than three dozen green and white scarves hang on the walls, some striped, some printed with mantras, some with notable dates or player names. Against the far side is a bookshelf crammed full of photo albums holding clipped articles that damned the raids, old pamphlets, blueprints of buildings and schematics of bombs. More albums rise like towers around the foot of the shelf. I installed the room myself after I’d been here a couple years. Even cloaked the reader by altering some old plans from a bomb-maker called Nael, rejigged to read only DNA related to mine, in case of emergency or an official stopping by for a surprise inspection. Seemed safer than hiding all of this under my old foul weather gear in the back of the closet.
I pop open the lid of the surplus bullet box, sift through the vials until I find the right one, then step out of the panic room, close the door, and seal it. I stick the vial into the projector unit that I jury-rigged up to the TV so it’d project from within the wall, creating a three-dimensional hologram – state-of-the-art twenty years ago when they built these houses, another vestigial benefit of Tathadann life – then let it boot up while I check on the food, forking the chicken onto a plate for Cobb.
“Your dinner’s going to get cold,” I yell down the hallway, then dump my food onto a plate, plop on the couch and hit play.
The power substation comes into focus, down in the distance. Giant green tubes extend from all sides of the building, housing the conductors that provide electricity to all the Tathadann offices, bars, and shops on the southeast side. No electricity, no communication capabilities. No communication, no way they could raise the soldiers when we went in to gut their headquarters.
A razor-wire fence runs the perimeter of the grounds. Twenty feet of bare dirt stretches between the fence and the tall reeds covering the floor of the valley. It’s all supposed to make it impossible to approach the plant unnoticed.
Unless you’re going at night, dressed in all brown.
And you have a schedule of the guards’ rotation and a fistful of bullets.
I’d told Henraek for weeks that this was a stupid idea. It would never work and he was leading us into the killing fields. He told me I would owe him two drinks for every side of the building that went. He was throwing up all the next day.
While Henraek led the team to the station in the distance, I stayed on the high ground, tucked in between patches of reeds with a .50 caliber rifle mounted on a tripod at my feet. One of our plebes had a sister who had attracted the attention of the clerk working in a Tathadann weapons office. She kept him busy for five minutes – apparently she was as good as the plebe had boasted, though no one wanted to ask how he knew – and we relieved them of some heavy artillery. One of our soldiers, Fergus, brought out the new pulse cannons the Tathadann had developed, but I said to keep it old school. I sat up there half wanting something to go wrong so I could use the gun to mow down a line of the plant’s guards.
On the bottom left, the team creeps through the reeds, and from the zigzag pattern they take – a tactic Henraek would later be obscenely proud of – it only looks like a breeze through the barley. So far, there is nothing new, nothing different I notice from the hundred other times I’ve watched it, which doesn’t mean that I’m missing something as much as Henraek’s got a new bug up his ass, different from the usual one. When the point man reaches the dirt at the edge of the reeds, the floor behind me creaks.
I jump up, fork in hand and ready to stab.
He’s standing there with a large bowl in his hands.
“Goddamn,” I say, turning off the memory. “Donael, you scared the hell out of me.”
“I said hi when you guys came home. Didn’t you hear me?”
“No,” I say. “Obviously I didn’t.”
He looks at my dinner splattered on the carpet but doesn’t comment on it, then holds out the bowl of popcorn. “Want some?”
I shake my head. “Have you seen Cobb?”
“I thought he was tired so I asked him if he wanted to go to bed but he wants to read books.” He hops over the couch and sits in my spot.
“Where is he?”
He shrugs. “Reading?”
“Can you go get him? So we can have a family night? You know, for once?”
“Can we watch a movie instead?” he says. “Memories are creepy. I don’t want to end up like those freaks who can’t talk.”
I kneel on the carpet and scrape the food back onto the plate, picking through the threads of the shag to get the big chunks of asparagus and potato because the cleaning droid they gave us is old and will clog. “Do you want his dinner at least?”
He holds up the bowl like that should be an answer in itself.
“You can’t eat popcorn for dinner. That’s not very healthy.”
“There’s milk on it too. Well, butter.”
“I’ll bring you something real.”
I dump the food down the disposal and I leave the dishes in the dishwasher. There’s not much left in the fridge, so I take two mostly clean plates from the counter and drop some chicken on them.
I hand one to Donael then sit next to him on the couch.
“I think the popcorn would’ve been healthier,” he says, not looking at me but focused on the TV screen he didn’t even want to watch.
“What are we watching tonight?”
He shrugs and shoves popcorn and two bites of chicken in his mouth. “Something funny.” A chunk of chewed meat falls from his lips and lands in the shag. I lift my feet and call out for the cleaning droid.
After I upload a movie from the network I sit back next to him and listen to his crunching, consider my makeshift meal, drop it on the coffee table. He sets the bowl between us and rests his feet atop mine on the ottoman. I tell the system to play.