Watermind (13 page)

Hal practically lived in his cubbyhole office, situated above the quick-print storefront owned by his cousin, where his idiosyncratic journalism surfaced each week on crisp fresh newsprint the same color as his skin. Hal looked about forty years old, but in fact he was thirty-two. Thin of limb and chest, his body fat had localized in his low-slung belly. Hal Butler did not get out much.

Without windows, his reality lost the rhythm of day and night. He experienced the world by phone, Internet, TV, streaming audio, and mail order. Through the years, his sheltered existence had sharpened his senses. He often got his best interviews in the odd hours. He scribbled Sacony's name on the back of a magazine and said, “What's going on in your swamp?”

Hal hadn't heard about the frozen pond or the cave-in. His timing was a coincidence. He'd gotten a tip about mysterious midnight lights in Devil's Swamp.
The Eye
wasn't above running an occasional ghost story for local color.

“Wonder what the EPA will think about your secret late-night activities?” Hal pressed.

Sacony barked a laugh. “You're on a fishing trip.”

“Uh-huh, I plan to bring my fishing boat up your canal.” Hal had no idea what his threat would yield, but Sacony's response surprised him.

“You're welcome to visit, Mr. Butler. Drive out to our plant, and my assistant will give you a tour. I hope you'll do an article on our new pipeline construction system. We have a patent pending.”

Sacony rattled off so much boring minutiae about pipeline stumps, bearers, and connector pins that Hal's
coffee went cold. To shut him up, Hal agreed to take the press kit, mentally crossing the Devil's Swamp ghost story off his list. Looking back later, Hal felt like an ass for letting Sacony bamboozle him. But Hal's time was coming.

 

Saturday, March 12

5:55
AM

 

CJ woke with a shriek.

“Shhh,” Max whispered, wrapping her in his arms. “You been dreaming.”

She clasped her legs around his waist and pressed into his body heat. A damp draft was trying to seep under the blanket. Max had left his window open. What was the dream? Her cheeks were wet from crying. She felt ill.

Max rubbed between her shoulder blades and kissed her eyebrows. “It's early. Saturday morning. Go back to sleep.”

“I'm such an idiot.”

“Naw, girl. That's not right. You the most intelligent person I ever met.”

“Intelligence is overrated.” She pulled the pillow over her head. Mornings were the most difficult, waking up, finding she was still alive. Last night, she'd come close to the judgment, the final escape. But then—

“You just lookin' for your sync is all.” Max stroked her hair. “You got the music. Just got to find the down beat.”

She turned and kicked the covers, letting in the cold. “I made insane decisions last night. It's like I can't escape my mother's genes.”

CJ had told Max about her mother. Feckless, whimsical, weak, Carolyn Joan
mater
had abandoned her husband and tiny daughter, not to save the world, not to
rescue the weary or solace the sick. Not even to elope with a lover. She'd gone to California to study glassblowing, that's what Harry said. CJ remembered the sparkly glass animals her mother sent one year for Christmas. CJ had smashed each one with a rock.

“
Lamie,
you got to calm down.” Max cupped her round bottom in his hands and moved her closer. “You 'xpect too much. Sometimes you forget the Lord made us all outta mud.”

“Is that so?” She nuzzled closer.

“Yes.” Max kissed her hair, her neck. “You know what mud is?”

“No, what is mud?” She licked his chest. His nipple tasted of salt.

“Mud is everything in the world all mixed up together.” He kissed her mouth, long and thoroughly.

“Mixed up, that's me.” She slid her hand down his taut belly and gripped his penis.

He groaned and moved closer and entered her. They rocked in the rumpled sheets of his bed, ignoring the cold, making the wooden headboard creak back and forth. She crawled on top, and when she began to climax, her back arched, her eyes shut, and she screamed through her teeth, letting the spasms wash through her, hoping they would wash her clean.

 

Saturday, March 12

8:30
AM

 

“A genuine nutcase.” Peter Vaarveen grinned and batted his white eyelashes. He was lounging in the Quimicron lab, drinking Starbucks. A line of crimson sunburn underscored each of his eyes, where his plaster-white skin had been exposed between his goggles and respirator. His
thick glasses magnified the humor in his eyes. “Yeah, this is macadamia deluxe.”

CJ bit through her thumbnail when he dropped her ten-page report in the wastebasket. She'd spent the last two hours writing up her canal dive, worrying over the adjectives and laying out plans for collecting more data. Peter dismissed her findings in less than two minutes.

She retrieved the crumpled pages. “Go see for yourself if you don't believe me.”

“See what? Fairy dust in the water? ET lights? Maybe it's the spirits of drowned river rats.”

“Asshole.” She squeezed past him and headed for the door.

“Think twice before you show that report to the Queen Bitch.” He gave CJ a wink. “She'll kick you off the project. Doesn't matter how much tail you're giving Roman Sacony. When it comes to the science team, the QB rules.”

“I am not—” CJ realized she was blushing. Without thinking, she wadded up her report and threw it at Peter's laughing face. Then she stalked out of the lab.

Peter's wisecrack made her skin burn. But however much he infuriated her, she knew he was right about the Queen Bitch—Queen Bones would be a better name. Stomping down the empty echoing hall, CJ realized that without better data, Yue would annihilate her. She halted, retraced her steps, then halted again. Building No. 2 felt hollow and deserted on Saturday morning, like a refrigerated morgue. Despite the cold weather, the AC was pumping hard.

CJ ran down a flight of stairs, paused at the landing, had second thoughts and climbed up again. Instead of knocking on Yue's door, she went to look for the plant manager, Dan Meir. He'd always seemed like a decent, sympathetic type. The receptionist station was dark, so CJ gave a quick rap on Meir's door and poked her head in. There sat Roman Sacony.

He'd taken over Meir's desk. His laptop hummed, and
he was talking on his cell phone. He barely glanced up at her intrusion. His nut-brown tan seemed deeper than before, and his thick wavy hair hung down in his eyes. He seemed so distant and cold that she thought he didn't recognize her. Then he beckoned with a single finger and pointed to a chair.

She came in, closed the door and seated herself at the small conference table, where Dan Meir had been temporarily relocated. Meir was also talking on a cell phone and punching a laptop. He gave her a benevolent smile. His kindly expression reminded her of someone's uncle.

Several minutes passed before either of them took a break. From their conversations, she gathered an emergency had transpired in the canal. Meir was authorizing overtime pay, and Roman was asking someone about coffer-dam gates. She sat on her hands and listened.

Roman clicked off his phone and met her eye. “What do you have for me?”

His demand startled her, but it was the opening she wanted. Her fingers gripped the chair seat. “I found electric current in the water, and there were synchronized flashing lights.”

“Slow down. You're talking gibberish.” Roman leaned across the desk. “Did you say synchronized?”

“Last night I dove in the canal and took a sample. I think the electric current—”

“You dove in the canal? What about the pond?”

“It's not in the pond anymore. It slipped down the creek.”

Roman closed his eyes and nodded.

“What the hell is
it
?” Dan Meir's eyes narrowed to creases. “Are you telling me the white stuff that killed Manuel de Silva also caused the cave-ins?”

“What cave-ins?” CJ glanced back and forth between the two men.

Roman leaned back and seemed to peer at some disturbing image in midair. “E-mail me your report. And it better make sense. You can go.”

The abruptness of his dismissal stung CJ. She couldn't believe this was the same man who'd offered to buy her dinner. But he wanted her report, that was the main thing. And he didn't call her a nutcase. She got up to go.

As she was passing through the door, he said, “Reilly, don't make another dive without permission. Got that?”

Her first impulse was to blurt something defiant, but Roman's next words softened her anger. He said, “I need you safe.”

 

Saturday, March 12

9:07
AM

 

She walked back to the lab, smiling. Even Peter Vaarveen's wisecrack didn't upset her. Roman took her report seriously. He wanted to keep her safe.
See, Harry? Somebody respects my opinion.

She turned up her nose at Peter, then linked her laptop into the company WiFi. One more time, she reviewed what she'd written earlier, polished a sentence, changed a verb. She laid out her hypothesis as succinctly as possible and tried to restrain the flights of fancy her father so often ridiculed.

First, she recapped her basic assumptions: The colloid had evolved from a mix of river-borne trash and Devil's Swamp pollutants. It consisted mainly of water emulsified with algae proplastid, and it held suspended microelectronic components, which probably came from obsolete computers and appliances dumped in landfills. The emulsion produced ice at room temperature, and it could purify water.

For a while, she debated editing out the water purification part. Roman might immediately seize on the profit potential of cheap clean water and try to claim it as corporate
property. On the other hand, she wanted to impress him with her intellect—so she left it in.

Next, she summarized her new findings: the underwater lights, the gas bubbles, and the electric current that generated the EM field. The flashing lights could be light-emitting diodes. LEDs appeared in everything from kids' toys to car keys, and even a feeble current could make them glow. The gas bubbles could be ordinary methane. And the electric current might flow from a faulty connection in a nearby factory. The current itself may have triggered a reaction that caused the ice. She noted how scientists in South Korea created ice at room temperature using a chemical process that rapidly absorbed heat. Perhaps something like that occurred in Devil's Swamp. She admitted the combination of effects might be simple coincidence.

But CJ didn't believe in coincidence. She felt certain the cascade of diverse phenomena had a common origin. Through the night, she'd been struggling with theories, and the next part of her report launched into the kind of wild speculation that would have made Harry sneer.

The colloid might be generating its own internal energy. They'd found intact photovoltaic cells in the emulsion. The gluey proplastid protected them from water damage, and the Louisiana sunshine could have easily reactivated them. Trash photovoltaic cells may have been trickling electric current through the swamp for years. Over time, the current may have ionized the colloid like an electrolyte and dissociated its various chemical pollutants, thereby releasing pure water. The science team should check for electrolysis.

In her concluding paragraph, CJ's fancy truly left solid ground. What if the current triggered other electronic trash in the water? Switches, thyristors, transceivers, memory chips, they'd found a treasure trove of microcomputer elements in the lab sample, all sheathed in proplastid gel. What if the current prompted some of these components to fire signals to each other?

Each tiny computer element carried a small piece of programming, just a fragment, but who knew how they might interact. Given enough time, even the simplest combinations could yield elaborate complexity. The electrified microchips may have self-assembled into a crude data-sharing web in the water, perhaps the embryo of an entirely new class of water-based computer network.

As she reread this part, she chewed both thumbnails to nubs and retied her short ponytail three times. In the end, she e-mailed the full report.

Waiting for Roman's response, she agonized over the gaps in her reasoning. What about the response to sound? She hadn't even addressed that. So many unknowns.

Twenty minutes later, he replied with one sentence. “Suggest methods to neutralize it.”

“No!” She banged her keyboard with both fists.

“Did your boyfriend break his date?” Peter grinned. His magnified eyes loomed monstrously behind a row of test tubes.

CJ got up to pace. That wasn't the answer she'd expected. Shivering in the chilly AC, she found a lab coat hanging behind the door and slipped it on. Then she sat down and keyed rapidly. “The colloid offers a rare opportunity for research. We may find important beneficial qualities. Our goal should be further study. I'll suggest methods for that.”

The reply came back almost immediately. “Containment in progress. Short-term study okay. Priority goal is neutralization.”

“How can you be so stupid?” she said aloud. She almost keyed it, but Peter's sardonic chuckle stopped her. She glared at Roman's message. Then she punched her laptop keys, letting anger drive her to extremes. “We may be witnessing the spontaneous birth of a sentient liquid neural net.”

At first, there was no reply. She knew she'd gone too far. Why did she have to say
sentient
? Stupid theatrics. Finding her thumbnails too short to chew, she gnawed a
strand of hair. Peter was fiddling with the SE microscope, studying more samples from the pond. She got up and looked over his shoulder at tumbling droplets of fur.