Madelyn's Nephew (6 page)

He mumbled to himself as he examined the setup. “Water, heat, waste, compost, air, and food. Why do you have all that wood stacked outside?”

“Several reasons,” she said.

He looked at her. She realized that he was waiting for her to elaborate.

“For one, it’s important to keep the woods clear. You can’t just leave everything to grow together all tangled. It makes it impossible to get around. Second, it’s good exercise. Chopping and splitting works a ton of different muscles.”

He was still looking at her like he wasn’t convinced.

“My grandmother always burned wood and I like it. I like the smell.”

“This thing could probably generate the smell,” he said.

“I don’t use the organic production. It’s not natural,” she said.

Jacob didn’t seem to be listening anymore. He had gone past the controls and was working his way through the reporting.
 

“How is this thing only at eighty-percent? Don’t you ever update it?”

His finger hovered over the button. Madelyn pushed him out of the way.

“No!” she yelled. “Don’t you dare.”

She had shoved him too hard. He caught himself at the expense of putting too much pressure on his cut leg. He grimaced and bent over to put his hand against the bandage.

Madelyn refused to apologize.

“Don’t ever update. Everything is working just fine and I don’t need it screwed up by something pulled down from the ether.”

“It’s all regression-tested,” he said. “It wouldn’t mess it up—even a dinosaur like this one.”

“As long as I’m alive, we operate by my rules. When you inherit this place, you can mess it up to your heart’s content.”

Jacob didn’t answer.

She waited a minute. It looked like he had something to say.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’ll show you the external controls. I don’t have them labelled. The incinerator out in the yard is hooked up to the gamma loop. You set the duration here. Fifteen minutes is plenty. This time of year, I’ll loop the energy back into the water pump here. If it were winter, I might run it through environmental, but we’ve still got some warm days ahead. Engage here and we’re done.”

Jacob nodded. He probably could have figured it out by himself.
 

A warning indicated that there was insufficient organic material to warrant incineration. Madelyn told the panel to ignore the warning. The organic sensor was flaky at best.

“I prefer to stay underground while it runs. It’s safer. Come in here.”

She showed him into the sitting room. At one point, she had spent a lot of time down there. She took one chair and Jacob eased down into the other. She turned on the screen. The movie started playing. Madelyn remembered the girl’s face.
 

“You’ve got dead pixels,” Jacob said as the girl laughed.
 

He was right, of course. There was a whole block of blackness. As the girl moved, she passed behind the black part of the screen. It obscured her mouth as she smiled.

“You can self-repair that. It doesn’t even have to pull from the ether.”

“I know,” Madelyn said, “but you can only do it so many times.”

His voice was flat as he contradicted her. “It’s a million-hour screen. You could literally watch that thing six hours a day for the next four hundred years. Running a pixel repair would maybe take an hour off of the life.”

“Fine. Run the repair.”

Jacob stood and used the controls on the side of the machine. He sat back down as colors flashed.

“You could have waited until we were about to leave,” she said. “Now we can’t watch the movie while we wait.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Me too,” she said. “Tell me about Oslo.”

Jacob didn’t seem like he was going to answer. He only stared at the flashing colors. They were hypnotic as they danced by. She wasn’t sure, but it looked like part of the dead block was already starting to respond again. She tried to remember how long the thing had been broken. The last time she had watched anything was right after David died. The pixels had been gone since well before that.

“I don’t know where to start,” Jacob said.
 

“Tell me about your family.”

“M
Y
MOTHER
DIED
WHEN
she was having my sister. I was mad at my dad because he didn’t seem upset. He told me about his mother—your mother. He said that she died when she was giving birth to his sister. I guess that was you,” Jacob said.

Madelyn nodded. Their father had never told them as much. It had to be. Madelyn was younger, therefore she was the one who had killed their mother.

“I was very young. My father raised us in a little room at the back of the high rise. It was less than two-hundred meters from the Civi, so it was very safe before the collapse. We were almost never evacuated. In fact, ever since I turned eight, my sister and I walked to school by ourselves. Our school was down on the third floor.”

Madelyn smiled at the idea that places still had school. At least they did at one point—she didn’t know what the “collapse” was, but Jacob’s face darkened when he said that word.

“Dad worked on the food crew. I was an apprentice with Engineering. My sister was studying medicine.”

Jacob stopped talking. Talking about his family seemed to be a roadblock for him. Madelyn refocused his thoughts.

“How was the city set up?”

“We used Cosgrow’s plan,” he said. His smile faded when he saw that she didn’t understand. “It came to us on the ether. It was all theory—nobody had successfully implemented it until Oslo. You have a series of bases for sleeping and nesting. You make no attempt to disguise yourself while you’re there, but you make sure that everything is elevated. We never ventured below the third floor at night. During the day, we would pass through in groups. It was all on a timer. Once you hit the button on three, you had only twenty-four seconds to clear into one of four exits. The exit was strictly chosen at random. Even if you had business to the north, if the south exit came up, you were required to use that exit.”

Madelyn eased back into her chair and looked up at the ceiling. It was an interesting idea. She had heard theories, years before, that intentions were a vulnerability. Perhaps the randomness removed the spread of intention.

“Food, equipment, and textiles were all stored separately, at least one kilometer away from a base. One base would replenish a store that another base would use. That eliminates the linear supply flow and confuses any tracking.”

“I don’t understand why that’s important,” Madelyn said. “I collect and bring back supplies. Nothing seems to be tracked.”

“It’s fine because you’re a single person. The issues occur only at scale.”

Madelyn nodded.

“Everything was kept strictly random. We used a distributed algorithm to determine what to produce and where to deliver. Innovations were never shared through the ether, and we were never allowed to complain or compliment.”

“Why?” Madelyn asked.
 

“You would never get to eat the food you produced, or use a machine you repaired. The best you could hope for is that someone in another base would like something you created and try to imitate it. When people were allowed to give any kind of review, it only led to a lot of people requesting transfers.”

“Seems like it would stifle innovation and improvement,” Madelyn said.

Jacob shrugged. “Some things are good enough. Trying to improve can break the system. Everyone had to go along with the system to keep it running properly. That’s what Dr. Cosgrow said, and he was right.”

“The collapse?”

Jacob nodded.

“It came fast. A rumor spread through the floors one afternoon. People rushed to tell their neighbors. They said that someone had gone crazy in number six. We watched from the top floor as Civi sent a phalanx out. We could only track them down to the auditorium. They disappeared around the corner and we waited. There was no way to get any info from the ether.”

Jacob paused again.
 

In the other room, the chime sounded. The incineration was done and it was safe to go above ground again. Madelyn kept her seat. She wanted to hear the rest of the story.

“Cosgrow is clear on the topic—if a base stops responding, we continue to keep them in rotation for two weeks with redundant coverage from the other bases. Dad gave a speech on it the second day. Civi was quiet. They’re not supposed to communicate status or else they might create a thought bridge. We were all fine until base three dropped off as well. That’s when people began to agitate. They wanted to send an envoy to Civi.”

“Wouldn’t that create a ‘thought bridge’?” Madelyn asked. She was trying to understand her nephew’s lexicon.

Jacob nodded. “The envoy wouldn’t bring back the specific status. She was supposed to come out of the Civi and turn towards our base if everything was clear. She would turn away if there was a problem and we should all disperse.”

Jacob looked down at his feet. He blinked and swallowed.

“Your father was pretty invested in keeping the base intact, I bet,” Madelyn said. Even after all those years, she knew her brother. She could picture exactly how it went. “He sent your sister out as the envoy and told her to turn towards the base no matter what.”

Jacob nodded slowly.
 

“He said that community is an act of faith,” Jacob said. “He sent Abigail out and told her that no matter what, she should come right home. It was perfectly safe.”

Jacob looked like he wanted to cry again. No tears fell.

“She came right back out of the Civi. She turned and walked away from us.”

Madelyn waited for more.
 

There was no more.

M
ADELYN
PUT
TOGETHER
LUNCH
while Jacob took some time outside. She had seen it before—people who spent a lot of time outside grew accustomed to feeling exposed. It was hard for them to adjust to being enclosed by walls again.
 

She opened one of the wall slits and looked at him. He peeled off his bandage and poked at the cut on his leg. Madelyn was surprised when Jacob produced a knife and reopened his fresh wound. Watching him do it, she thought of her brother. She was obliged to open her own cut again too. She shut the slit. If she kept watching him, she was going to bleed to death.

When she took the lunch out to the porch, Jacob joined her. At some point, he had retrieved a bag from the woods. It was tight and clean. He took good care of his stuff. He had packed up what remained of his father’s stuff as well.

Lunch was showy. She gave him bread and butter. She gave him sausage with a tart mustard. They drank iced tea. He ate them without comment.
 

“You can put your bag in your great grandmother’s room. It’s in the back,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said, wiping his mouth, “but I’ll be heading out before sunset. I want to make the ridge before dark.”

“But nighttime is no…”

He raised his eyebrows and she trailed off. Jacob had been outside for three years. What did she expect to tell him of nighttime?

“If given the choice,” she started again, “wouldn’t you rather have a nice night in a bed and then leave first thing in the morning?”

“Thanks, but no. Dad said that if the cabin didn’t pan out, we were going to head to the lake on the far side of the ridge. He said there were camps there.”

Madelyn nodded. “Yes, there
are
camps on the east side, but that’s not an easy place to make a go. They still get snow over there sometimes, and between the bear and wildcats, you can’t…”

He cut her off with a raised hand. “I can take care of myself.”

“I’m sure you can, but this is about making intelligent choices. Why would you make things harder on yourself for no reason?”

He rubbed his eyes and then rolled his shoulders. “I have reasons.”

She opened her mouth to object and then closed it again. She had known this boy less than a day, but it already felt like they had both been on each side of every possible argument. Instead of killing him or fearing for her life, now she was trying to convince him to stay.
 

“At least let me pack up some provisions for you. I can put them in a sealed container so the smell doesn’t attract anything.”

He looked at her and nodded.

“You drink coffee?”

“I guess.”

“Good,” she said. She went inside to pack.

Lunch had been about showing off all her best provisions. When she packed up supplies for him to take, she did the opposite. She packed plain, ordinary stuff that he could use every day. Flour wasn’t calorie dense enough. Instead of bread, she packed canned salmon, walnuts, and dried fruit. She threw in things like herbs, salt, and spices so he could liven up the game that he caught or trapped. While she was at it, she put in matches and a small first aid kit.
 

Madelyn smiled as she took the bag back outside for Jacob.

He was gone.
 

She looked towards the woods and laughed to herself. Of course he was gone. Leaving behind the provisions had been a small price to pay for his clean getaway. She could track him down, but what was the point?

M
ADELYN
OPENED
THE
DOOR
to a dreary day. The low clouds blocked the sun. Rain drizzled for a bit and then came in sheets. Even tucked into the back of her porch, she got wet from the splash-back. She gave up on being outside and locked herself in her grandmother’s cabin.
 

She stared at the walls.
 

David’s skull hadn’t yet taken its place on her memory wall. He sat on the side table. On another wall, her grandmother had mounted family photos and rusty tools. Neither one of them had any sense of style. The decorations were depressing and only served to catch dust. She thought about taking everything down. There was nowhere to put them. She would have to drag everything deep into the woods and then leave her mess there. It was easier to close her eyes and forget about it.