King's County (10 page)

We weren't wealthy but we lived near
the water so some of my friends, or really their parents, were.
They were like everybody else for the most part, except with nicer
and bigger houses and toys. You wanted to have them as
friends.

As we all got older, the wealthier kids
started sticking together. They weren't excluding the rest of us
exactly, things just weren't working out the same way as before.
Something about rich kids, the really rich ones especially, is that
they're not alright not having a good time. If they're not having a
good time or a great time, then they think something's gone wrong.
They can't just be bored. They hate it and get anxious which would
always make me anxious. I guess they figure they ought to be having
a great time all the time or what's the point. Maybe being rich is
pretty good but it's not as great as they want to believe it
is.

The poorest kids stuck together, too,
but not in the same way. I guess I was one of them. We'd always
find a way to run down the rich kids – but only in private, never
to their face. Despite what we said, I didn't hate them and I don't
think my friends did either. It's too strange a thing to really,
genuinely hate someone just for having what you want when you never
even had it in the first place.

School was easy. They kept us at a
comfortable pace, carefully tested every two weeks. Our lesson plan
was precisely, individually configured to foster our achievement
and promote righteous equalism among us, as they saw it. Like I
said, it was a bore. They really just wanted us out of everyone’s
hair.

That was the lie. There's always at
least one if you look for it. School wasn't meant for us. The
endless, watered down lessons kept us busy. The equality stuff kept
us from acting out. The teachers and parents, the adults or
whoever, never actually expected anything from anyone. They didn't
need for us to excel and be productive or innovative or even learn
to be good citizens.

Childhood, school, everything was
mandatory and prepackaged. We were stuck in their plan. Any
surprises had been anticipated and carefully engineered out of our
lives. Every test, every boring video or pointless assembly, every
semester, every year was just a mild hurdle to be passed then
immediately forgotten.

Moving away was important to my
friends. We never defined where or why, exactly, but the idea of
it, the idea of moving on, colored all our thoughts and actions.
Our unimpressive backgrounds would not define us. Discussing our
future lives as interesting, influential, respectable people was
only a pose, though, barely even a fantasy. We never did anything.
But it seemed real and that was enough. I believed in it. Maybe the
alternative was too harsh to admit. We weren't prepared for that
kind of reality.

I was waiting at SEA-TAC - renamed the
Green Darter Dragonfly Transportation Hub - when I got the urge to
message my aunt.

My aunt and uncle lived near Eureka
now, near where I was headed. Surely they were still alive. Before
I pulled the trigger, the familiar chiming sound indicated my
transport was ready. I forgot about them. Once in the air,
contacting them started to feel like a bad idea. I remembered their
disappointment in my joining the military and how I'd not spoken to
them since. What would we have to talk about?

From the Eureka airport, an automated
cab got me to the train station listed on Ed's schedule. The
station was deserted but still well maintained. My card opened the
gate to the platform. It was made of old weathered redwood that
clunked agreeably under my boots. I took a seat on a bench made of
the same stuff and dozed off.

There was an ocean breeze in my face
while I slept. The sun was out and warming everything up, perking
up smells and sounds. I smelled wildflowers in the ravine
below.

A bee loitered at the far end of the
platform. The droning sound got closer, closer and more focused. My
eyes popped open. I tensed to swat it away.

The bee was a train now rushing past at
speed, gluing me to the bench, going at least 200kph. The white
enameled length of it whipped through in seconds. I could see the
train in its entirety descending the hillside and snaking around
the edge of the coast.

Three barking tones broke my attention.
A short, stubby car had stopped on the tracks beside me. The front
of it was labeled BOB.

Once I was aboard and in the molded
plastic seat, BOB started rolling then accelerated sharply to where
I could feel it in my chest. BOB was rippingly fast, easily gaining
on the train.

The rear of the train’s last car had
two symmetrical indentations on the sides with a notch in the
middle. BOB ran right into it, latching on with a solid thunk
followed by the whining of servos as it locked into place. BOB’s
cabin split vertically and a short walkway came up to fill the gap.
The rear door to the train slid open and I walked in ducking my
head below the lintel.

A man was standing there to greet
me.

"No bags?" He said and looked me over.
He wore a loose fitting blue plaid short-sleeved shirt and white
shorts. His feet were bare and filthy.

"Who needs them?" I said.

"Who indeed? Welcome aboard. I'm Yuri.
This is Walter." He pointed to a man sitting, watching us from a
work table littered with the remains of their lunch.

"Nice to meet you. What the hell is
this thing?"

He smiled, taking no offense at my
bluntness,

"You're on the Estrella."

*

Yuri showed me to a berth, a small
efficiency styled in minimalistic steel and thin strips of wood. I
asked him if Ed was aboard. He confirmed that he was. We were all
having dinner together, as was their convention, later that
night.

I wasn't tired and I had brought
nothing with me so I wandered the narrow hall of the rearmost car.
At the end, the last berth was open. A man lay on the bed reclining
against a stack of pillows and reading a book.

The book dropped. His eyes trained on
me for a few seconds. When he eventually spoke it was in a low,
fluid accent that sounded vaguely foreign,

"Newcomer, welcome. Dinner’s not yet
ready."

"Yes, thank you. I was just looking
around, you know." I said.

"Yes, I do. Dinner will be in the next
car but they're also having a meeting now so you shouldn't disturb
them. Someone will come to get you."

"Is Edward Hart in that meeting? He's
the one who invited me here."

"I'm sure he is. It's the planning
committee. What is your background?"

"English, maybe, Dutch. My name
is..."

"No, not that, your educational and
professional background. What do you do? You're not a muscle boy so
you must do something or you wouldn't be here. My name is Tyndall,
by the way."

I really didn't know how to answer him.
I felt any answer would be inadequate. For some reason I wanted to
impress him.

"Sort of a business degree, it was a
long time ago. Then military, drone pilot, and I went to space with
Ed."

"The infamous Artemis project. I know
it." He said.

"Oh yeah, I was at this crazy art
colony for a few days, after getting run out of the
infantry."

*

I stayed talking to Tyndall until we
went to dinner. For every answer he gave, I had a hundred more
questions. He liked talking. Three hours in his small berth went by
quickly.

We were on a passenger train called the
Estrella. Long disused and obsolete, it had been commandeered and
refit by an entrepreneur type, a real dinosaur, named Leland.
Leland was seen only occasionally by Tyndall and the others though
he was suspected to spend most of his time on board.

I learned that the guys in the rear car
were different from the rest of the passengers up front. Yuri,
Tyndall, Walter, Ed and a few others had segregated themselves back
here for their own comfort. What they all had in common was a
technical expertise of some kind along with a fine mind to use
it.

Tyndall described himself as a
philosopher who was once a physicist. Walter was a computer
scientist who specialized in assembly coding. I wasn't sure what
this meant but it seemed impressive the way he described it. Yuri
was a geneticist who also wrote music and who once decoded a cache
of ancient clay tablets found in Armenia.

Tyndall could not explain why he and
the others were on the train. He sort of blanked out when I asked.
Maybe he didn't know how to tell me. Maybe the answer was too
complicated for him to express in the moment. I made a point to
bring it up later.

When the door to the dinner car opened,
Tyndall and I both stood up, suddenly self conscious. Ed’s smiling
face popped in our doorway.

"Hola, señor. Come give your Papa a
hug." Ed was smashed and obnoxious but I hugged him all the
same.

"What do you say, Major? Are we going
to eat or should I stick my hand out of the window and grab some
leaves?"

"Eat! Eat! Dinner is ready," he said to
me and banged on the thin wall of the next berth, hollering to the
others down the hallway like a baboon.

*

We sat at a large round table, six of
us. Plates of food took up every bit of space.

Dinner was an amazing, flawlessly
prepared spread. Elaborate Chinese and Japanese dishes lay next to
French classics. There were steaming enchiladas, cheeseburgers, and
gyros piled onto a side table. Walter sat by a Scandinavian style
smorgasbord on a wheeled cart and wolfed down smoked salmon with
cream cheese and capers.

I crunched foie gras rillettes and
toast and sipped a Sauternes. Right away I recognized them. They
were mentioned in something by Flaubert that I'd read in the
Artemis module.

“Those are good,” Walter said to me,
“Pretty much pure fat, calorically dense. You'll be needing the
energy, especially on your first one.”

Ed dodged my questions until he had
eaten a sufficient amount of crab claws. He wiped his face and
burped after slugging down a pint of beer,

"If they didn't want you here, you
wouldn't be here."

"Who? The military? They said I was
out." I said.

"Military... hell no. I mean; what do I
mean - It's them, the same old them it’s always been. Who they are
doesn't matter. I can't really say," Ed held up one finger, pausing
so he could clink glasses with the man next to him and guzzle a
fresh drink.

"This is Richelieu. Richelieu, Je vous
presente Le Capitaine." The sixth man at the table nodded his head
to me as he was introduced then loudly burped.

"We’re being kept out of the way." Yuri
offered. "I mean, I can't prove it, but it makes the most
sense."

"You'll love it," Ed said. "As of now
you’re on the planning committee. Start thinking of ideas for the
next one."

Richelieu spoke up, "We were the
engineers but we took over for the planning committee. God knows
what they're doing now."

"I don't understand - what are you
planning?" I said.

Ed answered first. "We plan the
party."

*

"Most anyone you'll meet is no less
than thirty years old. If you look closely maybe you can tell.
Everyone is on it, and we’re all chipped, too. We'd be dead a
hundred times over otherwise." Tyndall was getting loaded, his
mental powers were near peaking before their slow but inevitable
decline.

"I'm not chipped. They took it out." I
said but the room was too loud.

We were in the next car from the one we
ate in. This was what they had been planning behind the closed
door. A crowd of young men and women were dancing and drinking. Ed
and the others disappeared into the mob leaving me with Tyndall and
Richelieu hanging around a table of pre-made drinks.

The room was impossibly huge. It was
tropical, somewhere in Mexico. On the far wall a blood red sun hung
low over a crumbling Mayan pyramid and there was a mist in the air.
I could see no ceiling instead there was a dim red sky with sparse
thin pinkish-gray clouds. The walls around our courtyard were
carved Mayan stonework. Beyond the side of one wall was a rolling
pasture. A sparkling bay ringed with mountains was beyond the
other.

I told them I wanted to test the
illusion and they encouraged me. The way back to the dinner car was
through an old carved wood, iron studded door set in a three story
high, Spanish colonial style facade.

I reached out to touch the surface and
pulled back. Again I tried but could not manage to completely close
the distance. My head spun; the sound of a hundred mosquitoes
buzzed in my ear. When I withdrew, the irritating sensation
immediately went away. I tried again, going deeper, feeling my eyes
starting to cross. The surface was just beyond reach - I was
lightheaded and losing my footing. I bore down and stepped into it
- the wall repulsed me as if it and I were two like magnetic poles.
It yielded. I made contact. The door suddenly gave and I stumbled,
falling forward with the simple stainless steel door of the dining
car slapping shut behind me.