Payback

Chapter 7

‘When’s he coming back? How’d he get inside a f*****g drone? I want to see my dad. Where IS he?’

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘TRY ME.’

Mumshine has cookies in a little pack around her waist. She feeds Hopey while she prepares her response. She’s been holding onto a tiny McBurgerHut book that came with a Happy Castle Colonel Meal. The book’s about bees. Bees are the new dodos. They disappeared around the time I was born and everyone’s kicking themselves for letting bees go. Some people reckon the Mechs seeded a virus to kill bees and stop them from pollinating plants so all the tree cover would die and the climate would become optimised for solar power. Sounds believable. Mechs play a long, cold game of chess.

I punch mum’s car seat.

‘He’s in the cloud. Right? Obviously. So, we’ll go unplug him. You know where.’

Mumshine tries to find a way to increase the speed of the car, remembers it’s futile, and lies back in her seat while the country zips past us.

‘You really want to hear about your father losing his nerve to live and plugging into the Cloud and leaving us, okay. Fine. But buckle up. Cause this is not suitable for my granddaughter.’

I command my org to put us in a conversation bubble, extend it to cover me, Hopey and Mumshine. She asks me if I’m sure I want to hear this. I tell her I don’t have anything else in my life.

Mum transmits the story like she’s an ancient telegraph machine from three centuries ago, blurting little bits of the narrative here and there. When her baby girl Edie was “gone,” as Mumshine calls it–just twenty kilometres away, across town on the campus where we used to take school trips–a parachute of dread landed on the house, crumpling down, filling everything. Mumshine and Dad would put on slippers and tiptoe into my bedroom, their urethras pinched with nervous excitement. Perhaps my back would be miraculously in the computer chair, and I’d revolve and screech at them to get out of my room and everything would be back to normal. Or I had to be hiding in my cupboards. Or I was in my ensuite on the toilet and all they needed to hear was a tinkle and a flush. I had to be somewhere. It was impossible–imPOSSible–that they’d let me do this experiment just to get a tiny bit of favour from the Mechs. My dad was a chess grandmaster, plus a computer genius. He always thought steps ahead. That’s why he knew software programming so well. Every algorithm was about tinkering with the future. He could bend things, so the world worked for him, surely–

Except nah. Mumshine became quieter and quieter. Her panic attacks turned into a bubbling rage, like lava inside her. She called Dad a Quisling a couple times, a Mechalover once. They had this feud dating back to when they first met, when Dad was a sell-out, working for Stanford’s AI programme and Mumshine was a radical trying to blow it all up, some feud they never explained to me. On top of that, it was Dad’s fault they’d told their daughter to go fetch money and she hadn’t come back, Mumshine argued. Dad couldn’t take the guilt at home, his daughter’s museum exhibit of a bedroom, cold and lifeless. The tension when him and mum brushed their teeth at the same time. He started spending longer and longer at work on Stanford Campus, in halls so quiet you could hear a tap drip. Mechs quietly cleaning the floor, erasing the whiteboard, carrying secure data on flash drives. Drones letting people in and out of the gates. Cameras in the fridge, the locker room, the halls. Surrounded. Easier to give up fighting. Escape through surrender.

One night, after a massive fight with Mumshine, Dad sent her a video message saying he was going for a walk and might not be back for some time. Dad was depressed, zombified, shamed about something, remorseful, hating himself–I’ve seen the video. He’s clearly headed to a Cloudport, recording a monologue for Mum as he walks. The Cloudport’s the only place left, he says. He’s going to find the video of me blowing out candles on my fifth birthday, my hair dangling in the cake, getting covered in cream, everybody clapping, the dog licking my hair, me crying. He’s going to walk inside the dream and stay there. That’s where bliss is. A land of oxytocin and marshmallow. Heaven.

In the final video he’s sent Mum, he mulls over a pair of glasses, tossing them from one hand to another, then decides to try them on. They are covered in wires like colourful spiderweb. Early prototypes of the needle-glasses. He winces as he presses them into his face. Then his cheeks bend, his teeth appear, and a drunken, blissed-out smile oozes over his face like a cracked egg as he begins to dream.

I order the Tesla to take us to Cloudport 2112, or as near as possible. It had a target and two circles on Mumshine’s map. The epicentre. It’s calling us.

The world streaks by. The car does 180 miles an hour in a couple of places, even 195. The green fields are gobbled up then we go through the Dunescape. It’s a chain of ranches where sand is dug out of the earth, put through a sieve then the silica is melted out. This is where huge sheets of plastic are created then sent into the city to be diced into square inches and have circuits glued to them. The Dunescape is an ocean the colour of cardboard. The light makes grains of quartz and silica twinkle.

Buildings return, then some houses, then the hospital’s castle-towers spill black shadow across the car and the sun disappears.

Darkness in every crevice. Every tower’s windows dark blue. We’re deep inside the city now. Billboards, overpasses, six lane highway. Zero lighting apart from a few solar garden lights.

Esther’s attack has slipped back a couple places in my mind. Goddamn psycho b***h. Mumshine tells me there are others just like her and I need to be prepared – mentally unstable sentinels, angry they didn’t upload. Being left behind makes the sentinels jumpy, unstable, flighty, panicky, suspicious.

I did Esther a favour by jamming those glasses on her stupid face. She can rediscover her old joyful self in The Cloud. Get our old school group back together in the digital afterlife.

The car veers north, northwest, then fully west before heading up on the crest of the mountains, slowing, stopping.

The views of this city must be worth billions since hyperinflation. Trillions, possibly. Everything is perfect and tiny down in the glinting little Lego city, almost collectible. Except for a blackish, burnt spot.

We park and get out of the Tesla. I have to shield Hopey’s eyes and nose. She struggles and I shush her. There’s smoke staining the air. We spot drones drifting over with wide, outstretched metal arms like mosquitoes. On top of a crest, where a park bench is greyed with soot, I look down on a wasteland in the centre. Mum shows me the glass tower we’re seeking. It’s a shaped like an upended vase or bowl, bulging a little in the middle. Not the tallest or the widest, but shiny, with a curved outside, lots of glass, like one of those geodesic domes. It sparkles where the light hits it.

Around it, beaten-up buildings, some scorched, some crumbling, with bent satellite dishes on the roofs. On the streets, a stench of garbage, lakes of silver where burst water pipes are discharging into the street.

The only place unburned is the sparkling tower. The Cloudport.

Charred circle of city. In the nucleus there’s a dusting of green around the glinting glass crystal of the Cloudport. It looks like vines are creeping over the blackened glass. I’m sure I can see a fire hydrant spouting an endless mist.

‘What happened to my city, mum?’

‘Something big went down while you were away,’ Mum goes. ‘The people down there: They have a weapon. And it’s the only thing the Mechs fear.’