Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow

In memory of Schrader Heizer, 1969 - 2009. One in, all in.

___

Imagine.

A young woman dreams in her night of serene wonder. Diving below star-flecked sea surface among whales into deepest black, swimming down as one of them. Calls of joy echo through dark water. Tharcia in this moment understands their song, their secret, spoken thoughts.

Plunging
toward black abyss in their thousands, thunder in their ears mounts with rising sea pressure. In ultimate darkness far below, the faintest ribbon of light, stretched taut between past and future. Pink lines, sparked with unknown symbols. The animals dive deeper, the markings resemble written music. Deep in dream, she tells herself,
you must remember everything
.

The ribbon of symbols a complex tapestry of
history and meaning stretches to infinity in both directions. Many whales small below her, dark swimmers, approach the tracery of light. One touches, is consumed as a brilliant flash that ripples the surface, fades and gone. Others touch, flare, and disappear. She is closer, hears music, voices, myriad stories. Glowing lines and symbols fill her universe. Alone now, she is there, and touches it.

Bathed in overpowering brilliance, she is aware of the width and breadth of space, the
deep enormity of time, consumes the knowing of all events, thoughts, intentions, beings, all wishes and deeds that have ever been and will ever be. With knowledge of each yesterday and every bright tomorrow through fathomless time, her body dissipates into light.

Tharcia is already sitting up in bed when her mind becomes awake. Her head whirls with fading scraps of dream. Too much to recall, more than human
consciousness can hold, she is sick with loss as dream-knowledge slips away.

Stumbles the darkened upstairs hallway, trying to be quiet in the creaky house among silent redwoods. In the mirror glare her hair is wild, mouth agap
e. She fights to pull the dream reality across the gulf to her waking mind. Like clutching at smoke.

To her mirrored reflection, her astonished lips form the only words she can find.
I had no idea
.

At first it seems
like another Homeland Security mass-fear distraction to deflect attention from the latest wretched unemployment numbers, a short news crawl on the major TV networks:
Pentagon in Total Security Lockdown
. White-hot on the former 5-color DHS threat scale, meaning we are beyond at-risk and currently under attack, so tune to local AM station, place head between knees and fondly kiss your ass bye-bye. This is replaced minutes later by another crawl, a baffle-worded retraction.
Threat Levels Normal.
Most viewers chuckle sardonically and let it go. The tweet-blizzard fades, traffic choked off by big-iron military counter-intelligence denials, and that seems to be that.

At the regular White House briefing that afternoon, the Press Secretary shrugs off the non-event with a benign smirk. Just a computer glitch during a periodic software update. Cont
ractors were responsible. The briefing eases smoothly toward the jobs crisis.

Among the few who do not
regard the event as system noise is Data Analyst Christopher W. Strand, Ph.D., sharply aware of something extraordinary. An independent consultant in Predictive Knowledge Modeling for the Department of Homeland Security, Strand would be among the first to know. His Pentagon office looks directly down on the central courtyard, which the lunchtime crowd has hastily vacated.

Leaving a solitary figure standing motionless near the
central gazebo.

Nearly a year after her mother’s death, something taps on Tharcia’s window in deepest night. A fingernail, a claw, the dry husk of something. Bolt upright in her bed, she stares at the dark rectangle. Hairs rise at her nape.

“Mom. Is that you?”

It is October and when Tharcia next awakes the view from her window is cheerful green shaded by tall California redwoods. She occupies a room in the home of a man she calls Clay, or Stuka, a man who knew her mother in high school days and who, both of them came to believe, is possibly her father. Moving in with Clay had seemed such a refuge, her mother’s empty house so bleak with echoed memories.

Each holiday in the year now passed was a torture. Her mom’s birthday, every familiar place, each encountered friend with the same questions and fumbled words, some of them not getting it at all. Tharcia’s own birthday, her twentieth,
two weeks away. And days after that looms the anniversary of her deepest loss. Tharcia’s mother Hannah Harrison, a Santa Clara County Parole Agent, practically a cop herself, had gone up against other cops in a spasm of narcissistic rage.
Thanks, Mom.

Tharcia’s
coloring is more Clay’s than her mother’s. Long blonde hair and blue eyes, soft mouth in a symmetrical face. She’d been a cheerful person, a careful student, focused on graduating in her Journalism and New Media program and mastering the sport of surfing. A fast reader, never without a collection of e-books on her iPad. An outwardly happy girl, equally ready with droll wisecrack or warm smile. But now. Her list of recent search terms reads in part: how to summon spirits, contacting the dead, explain life after death, demons and the afterlife, demons as intermediaries, familiars and ghosts, how to conduct a séance, how to operate a Ouija board, learn a foreign language in 10 days.

Her current project is somehow fully to express her rage. About the
mother’s carelessness, the boyfriends, the abuse. The emotional neglect. Everything. The main obstacle to having it out with her mom right now is the fact that Hannah Harrison is deceased. If Tharcia can bring her mother back to life, she will. For the sheer joy of slapping her.

If not for the breakup with her girlfriend,
Tharcia would have taken the larger bedroom on the first floor with its ensuite bath, but prefers the upstairs room in this old bunk house where the bathroom is down the hall and winter winds puff ancient dust through warped siding. Her room is decorated with posters of dragons, serpents in dark caverns, large-breasted goddesses with filmy gowns, posters of angels. Her small bedside table is crowded with vials of flower essences, exotic oils, crystals, jeweled pendulums. Cannabis perfume oil in a purple glass bottle shaped like a phallus.

A
bove the bed, a cluster of pencil drawings and charcoal sketches on paper. Tharcia’s work, mostly faces. A sleeping woman, storm of hair across her pillow, sensitive portrayal of love lost. A handwritten poem beside it.

C
andles occupy wall sconces and crowd her dresser along with incense holders, small gargoyle figurines. Balinese and Japanese face masks, fierce protectors, glare from the walls. On the wood plank floor, covered now by her one expensive purchase, a hand-woven rug of Chinese silk, are rubbed-out geometric forms in colored chalk.

Much to the relief of worried Homeland Security officials, a later news item engulfs the tweet-storm that day, exclaiming over the unexpected death of pop singer Annetka, a sublimely beautiful woman with angel pipes, world famous for her many albums, Grammys and Billboard awards, plus Oscar noms for a recent film role. The avalanche of tweets reverberates globally as people share dismay and grief at their unthinkable, personal loss. Annetka’s latest album,
Loan Me Your Soul
, goes double platinum within hours.

New York City
Police remain guarded about the scene in Annetka’s Park Avenue flat. Bio-suited forensic teams and NYC Homicide officials move through all day, careful to wipe their feet. Although news choppers hover, no press or photographers make it within a block of the entrance. Family are contacted, advised not to travel. Police are silent about clues, witnesses, cause of death. First responders emerge tight-lipped, meeting no one’s eyes. A quiet rumor, better than an educated guess: more than one dead at the scene.

Weeks later, after extreme social and economic mayhem, weary survivors begin to ask each other what they were doing the day they knew the many random crimes in the wake of the Pentagon intrusion were more than a statistical blip. Cicero Clay will recall what he was doing. He was having another major fight with the girl.

“It does not stink,” she
says forcefully. “Besides, it’s my own biz.” Tharcia’s clear eyes throw back a challenge.

Clay
faces her with an external calm that masks a familiar interior voice.
If this is fatherhood, they can keep it.
“Smell it out here,” he informs her. Looking toward the house, Clay gives the air a sniff. “Stinks like road kill barbecue.”

Full voltage from Tharcia’s
baby blues. “Of course it does not smell. Chill, dude!”

“Tharcia
, I have a simple request.”

Her reply a
n insolent, so-what glare.

“Could you
for once just
show up
?”

S
he does not connect with the question, which doesn’t hold back her heated retort. “And could you for once not interfere? It’s my life. Men! Knuckle-draggers don’t care.”

S
he walks quickly to her small yellow Mazda, a faded
reading is sexy
bumper sticker on the back. “And stay out of my room, boner boy!”

“What!” Clay strides
after her. “I never go in your room!”

Tharcia
hops in fast and locks the doors, thinking
what if he loses his cool
. She’s never seen violence in Clay, but he’s a big guy and hides a quick temper. Through a crack in the sunroof, nostrils flared, she yells, “Stuff gets moved in there. Leave my things alone!”

She exits the clearing with a scuff of tires, heading for the road.
Watching her dust swirl, Clay reflects. Yes he had signed up to support her in the loss of her mom. He went through that himself at about the same age. Happy to have her company in the secluded house, for both of them it was a grab at family life denied by harsh circumstance. But the last few months she’s dealt him out of every hand and does little more around the place than wash her own few dishes and shut herself in her room. Besides occasional acrid odors from upstairs, her voice sometimes wakes him late at night, sounding not at all like her.

Santa Cruz County Homicide Detective Junipero Garcia guides his unmarked car along twisty asphalt roads that lead through redwood groves near Henry Cowell State Park. The house he seeks is noted only by a thick redwood plank to the right of the driveway, the words
slow children
carved into it. Garcia readies to turn in. A yellow Mazda scoots arrogantly past and with a dust trail dashes away up the hill. Another time, he’d give chase.

The dirt road into the lot rises and curves
. Just before the narrow track opens out into a wide clearing, Garcia passes another redwood sign,
even slower children
. The clearing slopes upward to the left. On the high side a metal building with double doors large enough to clear an airplane’s wings. Opposite, a century-old bunkhouse that by slow degrees subsides into the landscape. A man stands in the space as though waiting, longish wheat straw hair, shades, blue work shirt.