Laura Charles lay on a lounger at the edge of the pool, sipping a bottle of water and reading a paperback. It was starting to sprinkle. Randy and Catherine were rough housing in the pool, forcing two young boys to cower in the shallow end.
“Hey hon,” Joe said, tapping Laura on the shoulder. “I’m heading to the room for a minute. You need anything?”
“I’m good,” she said, and smiled. His return smile looked more genuine than hers felt. He loved Maui; she hated it. It smelled too much like coconut oil and feet.
“I don’t understand why you won’t get one of those e-readers,” he said, flipping a corner of her book.
“Drop it, please,” she said, offering another strained smile.
“Fine,” he said, and flip-flopped his way out of the pool enclosure.
Laura had a gift or a curse, depending on how you wanted to look at it – she could pick up digital transmissions with her mind. WiFi, 3G, 4G, and more recently 5G — you name it, she could read it, just as easily as she could read the book in her hand. She had first experienced this ability back in 1999, when taking accounting courses at the U of T. That year the university had installed its first public WiFi router in the Gerstein Center, a library she passed every day on her way to class. One day she thought she heard faint whispers from the library, hints of words she couldn’t quite make out. She told herself it was nothing, just some radio playing somewhere, and changed her morning route.
Over the years the problem grew, and with it her denial. By the early years of the twenty-first century the whispers had become clear conversations, sometimes accompanied by pictures, even the odd video if she passed a house with a strong WiFi signal. Over time she learned to ignore it. She couldn’t tune it out completely, but she could fade it enough to function.
Then, in 2008 to be precise, Canada had become an ocean of noise. Before then she’d been able to avoid Blackberry hotspots and the odd Wifi puddle from a house or a coffee shop, but the iPhone, and later the Android, ushered in the zombie apocalypse of digitization. Suddenly buses were full of blank faces staring at screens, and people couldn’t even drive for a few minutes without endangering their lives and the lives of others by answering a text. Laura had spent much of that year at home with migraines. Eventually she had adjusted – it wasn’t like she had a choice — and she no longer suffered headaches. She had even learned, over time, to use her strange gift to her own advantage.
She’d discovered at some point that she could listen to the surface of a signal, or, if she focused, dive below it. When she went deep enough, the sender’s online information would gather in her mind like a tumbling snowball. She knew this was a violation of privacy, and she knew she did it far too often with her own family. She hated herself for it. She also couldn’t quite stop. It had basically ruined her relationship with Joe; exposure to his explicit online life had worn her respect for him down to a nub.
And there was something else. If she dug even deeper, went beyond the sender’s personal online dossier, she would arrive at the edge of what she could only describe as an endless black hole. She’d only experienced it a few times, while experimenting, like a person testing how long they could hold their breath underwater. The black hole terrified her, because it pulled, like a sort of world drain. It was the entrance to the digital superhighway, the Internet proper, and it seemed as enormous as the universe itself. If she ever fell into it, she thought she might be smeared like a bug on a windshield.
She had never told anyone about her ability, for three reasons. First, people would think she was nuts. As a kid, she’d seen Lucille Ball in her later years on a talk show discussing how she could pick up radio signals with her teeth. She remembered feeling embarrassed for the woman. Second, didn’t people with supernatural abilities get kidnapped by the government and stolen away to some underground bunker for the rest of their lives? Or killed and buried in the desert? And third, everyone would know. All the people she had ever eavesdropped on, including her own family, would know. They would judge her for invading their privacy. And she was guilty, more times over than she could possibly count.
A couple entered the pool area. Laura guessed they were mid-thirties, roughly her and Joe’s age. The woman, willowy thin, wore an aqua blue one piece decorated with sea turtles. The man, presumably her husband, was in a red speedo. They found a couple of free reclining chairs and reclined. The woman retrieved some lotion from her bag and applied it to her legs and chest while her husband pulled a book out of the same bag and began to read. No phone or e-reader – a physical book.
They wouldn’t have been on her radar at all, except they weren’t on her radar at all. These days it was super rare to see a couple without a phone, and these two looked upper-upper-middle class, the sort who sported latest models. But Laura wasn’t feeling them; not at all.
“Mom!” Laura jumped. It was Catherine, whipping her long hair around carelessly and getter her mother’s legs all wet. Laura sometimes bemoaned the fact that her daughter was sixteen years old going on ten. “Randy was trying to fucking drown me again.” Laura looked toward the pool to see her son throwing his hands up in apparent frustration. The two younger boys were still in the shallow end, pretending to have fun while keeping wide eyes on Randy.
“Swearing,” Laura said, and held her hand out. Catherine sighed, went to the pants she’d crumpled by a chair, dug in a pocket, pulled out a dollar, and gave it to her mother. Laura had insisted her kids carry pocket cash wherever they went, and most of it ended up coming back to her.
“Cath, you’re old enough to deal with this yourself. Anyway, It’s lunchtime. Let’s go.”
On the way back to the suite the kids announced their plan to check out the beaches of northern Kihei after lunch. Laura told them to be back by two. They were all going to a luau later and she didn’t want the usual last-minute rush of Catherine fussing with her hair and Randy looking for his ear buds. They glanced at one another.
Laura knew her children had gone online two weeks before and chatted with a young guy from the island who sold some exotic strain of weed. They were going to meet him this afternoon. She’d given them the tight deadline to jeopardize that meet up. For all its challenges, her ability could be an effective clandestine parenting tool.
That night Laura lay in bed thinking about her children. She was pretty sure they hadn’t met their guy, so one small win for Momster in the battle of raising two rowdy kids. But weed was legal in Canada now, so in two years Catherine could buy it at the strip mall and Randy could do the same in three. No, she had bigger concerns nibbling at her psyche tonight.
Her son was looking at an unbelievable amount of porn every day, and not just the regular stuff. Hard core, pervy crap. BDSM, in which women were tied up and treated like human garbage. She knew boys had a natural curiosity for the perverse, but she was worried it was growing into a habit. It was the same sort of stuff that his father watched on occasion; wouldn’t that little nugget of information spin his young head right around. If only she could tell him.
And Catherine seemed to be shutting down these days. She hadn’t signed up for intramural baseball like she had every year since grade school, and lately she’d stopped meeting with her friends. Laura had tried talking to her about it a few times and gotten shut down.
She sighed, rolled over, and tried to go to sleep. When she finally dozed off she had the same dream that had dogged her since Steve Jobs had kicked off what was arguably one of the largest social experiments in human history. She was running down a creek in the woods, terrified of a 20-foot wall of river water rushing up behind her. There was a clearing up ahead and if she could just make it there she’d be safe. But when she looked over her shoulder it wasn’t a wall of water she saw, but an enormous black void, sucking the river, its banks, all the trees, even a few hapless birds, into its growing maw. From its depths she heard a terrible grinding, as if there were metal teeth in there, eager to grind her to a pulp. Feet from safety, she was pulled backward, off her feet, screaming.
She woke up as she always did, with a sheen of sweat on her body, her heart pounding. Beside her, Joe snored lightly. She sighed, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
The next day, the Charles family browsed the aisles of a general store down the street from their hotel. The kids wanted snorkeling equipment, Joe was on the hunt for a case of Laguna beer, and Laura had no motive other than to carry out her duties as family time cop.
The place was buzzing. Laura tuned out the cacophony without even thinking about it, but a few transmissions leaked through; they always did. One man was having a conversation with his wife about a mole prognosis (bad news), while a woman texted a man in France saying that she had bought the plane ticket and her husband had no clue. A kid broadcast an invitation to his seventh birthday party: Come one, come all, Trevor is having a STEVEN UNIVERSE BIRTHDAY on SUNDAY!
As they stood in line, Laura picked up something she called a dark transmission – disturbing information she didn’t want to know. It came from a tall man ahead of them wearing a touristy Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat. He was texting across a VPN that had stronger than normal encryption; Laura knew this because the signal flowed sluggishly, like sausage being churned through a meat grinder. The man was holding a young blonde woman in a hotel suite nearby and wanted to know if he should dispose of her.
Laura felt sick. She thought of a girl Catherine’s age tied to a bed with tears streaming down her face, trembling in terror.
“I’m going to step outside,” she said to Joe. “Get some air.”
“Sure,” he said. “You look like you could use it.”
Outside she lit a cigarette and took a long drag, then stared at her phone. She would make an anonymous 911 call, but first she would watch the man go to his car and get his plate number. Without that she had nothing. Hopefully he came out before Joe and the kids. He’d been ahead in line, so he should.
That was when she saw the strangers from the pool. They must have seen her first, because they were walking quickly toward her, almost jogging. Today they were in business casual, she in loose white cotton slacks and a billowy sky-blue blouse and he in tan slacks and a white dress shirt with an open collar. They were trying their best to modulate their steps.
Laura dropped her cigarette and instinctively turned back to the store entrance. Common sense told her she wasn’t likely to be abducted here in plain daylight in front of a busy store, but still, it would be safer inside, amongst the crowd.
“The girl in the hotel room is named Anna,” the man shouted. “We already have people going to her.”
Laura stopped. “What?”
“Anna,” the man repeated. “She’s going to be fine.”
They were only a few feet from her now, both breathing heavily. Laura stared incredulously at them.
“Oliver read your mind,” the woman said. “He can only do that when you’re upset. My name’s Jessica.” She extended a hand. At a loss, Laura shook it.
“Oliver,” Oliver said, and shook her hand as well.
“Who the hell are you?” Laura asked.
They both smiled. Laura had the impression they were salespeople. She and Joe had gone to Vegas a few years back and had been approached in their hotel lobby by a couple trying to sell timeshares who had smiled this way.
“We’re like you,” Jessica said. “Well, not exactly like you, but we have abilities. And there are more of us. We’re a collective, trying to use our talents for good.”
Laura squinted. “What sort of good?”
“Well, stopping guys like Lenny in there for one,” she said, pointing at the man in the straw hat who had been texting about kidnapping, and had just stepped out of the store and was strolling to his car.
“We want you to come with us so we can tell you more,” Jessica said.
“Are you insane? My family is going to be out here any minute. I can’t just leave.”
“You’ve done it before,” Oliver said, staring across the road at the sun glittering Pacific. “In Vegas.”
“What the hell did you say?” Laura had walked out on Joe without telling him once, during a Vegas trip, because he had admitted to a one-night stand that she had already known about. She had spent forty-eight hours wandering the casinos, drinking just enough to keep herself numb, and then she’d gone back. Nobody but her and Joe knew about that. They’d even kept the kids in the dark with some excuse she couldn’t remember at the moment.
“I told you, he reads minds,” Jessica said, flashing another big smile. “Try to ignore him. I do.”
“Don’t you want to do something with that dark secret of yours?” Oliver said “Other than eavesdropping on people and feeling guilty about it, I mean?”
She didn’t answer him. Instead, she peered through the store’s sliding doors. Joe and the kids were at the cashier paying for their things.
“Right now? Just walk away from my family?”
“You can call Joe in a little bit,” Jessica offered.
Christ, she knew Joe’s name. Part of Laura wanted to go with them, wanted to believe they were well-meaning. And if they weren’t? Well, if they knew Joe’s name then they already knew too much.
“So you’re not government?”
“No,” Oliver said. “Not at all.”
Sweat beaded on her forehead and dripped into her eyes. She held her arms away from her body and fanned her pits, not caring one bit how unladylike it looked. She squinted at her new acquaintances.
“We need an answer,” Jessica said. “Your family is just about finished.”
“Okay,” Laura said. “Let’s go.”
The hotel lobby was like the one at Laura’s hotel – gleaming white tile, bulky leather furniture, an enormous oil painting behind the front desk. It made her wonder whether every chain on the island used the same interior decorator. It was nice to get out of the sun, but the AC was so strong it chilled her sweat-covered arms and chest.
“You need to pay for a room,” Jessica said. “Make sure you ask for west-facing. That’s important.”
“You’re not staying here?”
“No. We’ll be gone by this evening.”
“My husband will know if I pay for a room. We have a joint account.”
“Then call him and tell him you’re going to be renting the room. Would he be so surprised?”
Laura gave her a razor-edged look, then went to reception and asked if she could make a local call. She told Joe she was going to spend the night on her own. He sounded hurt but too weary to fight. She promised him everything would be fine in the morning.
In the room, Oliver and Jessica told her to lie on the bed and relax.
“I’m going to stand for a while if that’s alright,” Laura said. She was still within arm’s reach of the door.
“Don’t worry,” Oliver said with a dry chuckle. “This isn’t a sexual thing.” That was, of course, precisely what she had just been thinking. Oliver’s ability to reach into her head was disarming. “But stay by the door if it makes you feel more comfortable.”
Oliver went through the room scanning the walls and ceilings, picking up and examining anything he could, opening drawers, and running his hands along hidden surfaces like the back of the television and the space between the wall and the AC unit. Laura assumed he was looking for hidden surveillance devices. When he was done, he put the coffee on and set a thin laptop on the desk which was attached to a dark grey box with a bunch of rubber antennas sticking off the top like spiked hair.
“What’s that?” Laura asked.
“It’s a jammer. It’ll block WiFi and phone signals for a kilometer if I turn it up, but I won’t do that. We only need localized silence.”
“I didn’t even know those existed! Are they legal?”
“Not at all.”
“You know, I might feel more at ease here if you two explained to me what we’re doing.”
Oliver was attaching a foot-wide grey satellite dish to his computer and carefully adjusting it to point out the open window. Occasionally he glanced at the laptop, tapped a few keys, and re-adjusted the dish.
“Explain it to her, Jess.”
Jessica said, “Laura, are you familiar with Darwinian theory?”
“Passingly. Animals evolve over time according to survival of the fittest – those who are born with beneficial mutations live long enough to pass their genes on to the next generation. What does that have to do with me?”
“I’ll get to that,” Jessica said. “That’s the theory they teach in schools, but it’s incomplete. It doesn’t explain sudden bursts in the evolutionary line. The Cambrian Explosion, about 540 million years ago, is a perfect example. Did you know that the ancestors of just about all the animals you see on Earth today appeared during the Cambrian period? And they didn’t appear gradually, either; from an evolutionary timescale it was like they popped into existence overnight, as if Mother Nature had simply dropped them from the sky. Scientists have theories, but they haven’t agreed on an explanation.”
“And, what, you two have figured it out?”
Instead of answering her, Jessica pulled her blouse out of her waistband and lifted it to expose her belly. There was a hole to the left of her bellybutton that Laura first mistook for a healed surgical drain of some sort, but it was rectangular and there was something thin and white going across the center of it that looked like a bone chip.
“What you’re looking at is a biological USB port,” Jessica said. “I was born with it. An irregular nerve bundle runs from it up to my brain. I can upload information directly into my mind. It allows me to learn instantaneously.”
Laura stared for a few moments in disbelief, then said, “You must have been born before USB technology even existed.”
Jessica tapped the side of her nose. “Yes, I was. You see, we believe that whatever was responsible for upheavals like the Cambrian is also responsible for these more recent mutations. And as far as we can tell it isn’t limited by time.”
That last line hurt Laura’s brain. Everything was limited by time, from human lives to the universe itself. Time travel only worked in the movies.
“We have our own name for the phenomenon,” Jessica said. “Bitemporal Darwinian Adaptations, or BDA. Your BDA is relatively common, believe it or not. We’ve met dozens like you, and most of them work for us now, as purely digital entities on the Internet.”
Laura looked at the small antennae dish Simon had set up by the window, and suddenly she understood. These people wanted her to cross the dark void at the end of the transmission, and become — what? An application? A virus? A digital entity? That could mean anything.
“What do you people do?”
“It’s simple, really,” Jessica said. “The Internet has blanketed the earth, and yet before us it’s gone largely unmonitored. Those who we work with, they know the Internet as well as you know the streets in your hometown. They’re our boots on the ground. They find the digital bad guys, Laura. The pedophiles, the blackmailers, the terrorists. They find them and then we inform the world.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
Jessica’s smile reflected a practiced patience. “Precisely. You won’t hear about us in the news, but we trickle our knowledge to every world leader through anonymous channels. They don’t always listen, but there’s nothing we can do about that. You can lead a horse to water, yada, yada.”
“And it’s up to me whether I go along with this.”
“Completely.” If she was lying, she was very good at it.
“Then I’ll have to pass.”
She had been so close to saying yes. For years she’d wondered what would happen if she just let herself fall into the void. Judging by Oliver’s setup, doing so on her own could be catastrophic, like trying to skydive without a chute. But they were offering he the equipment. She could escape, presumably safely, if these people could be believed.
Only now she realized she didn’t want to. She kept seeing Randy, Catherine, even Joe, who had always been a caring partner even if the foundation of their marriage was crumbling.
Jessica and Oliver didn’t try to talk her out of her decision; they simply smiled understandingly, which Laura found disconcerting. Up to now this had felt like a hard sell.
Then she opened the door and understood that she wasn’t going anywhere.
The tall man from the store – hadn’t Jessica called him Lenny? — blocked her exit. Laura stood inches from him, staring at the design of his tacky Hawaiian shirt. He pushed her, and she stumbled back into the room. He closed the door and pulled a pistol from his waistband, then Oliver grabbed her, threw her face-first onto the bed, pulled her arms roughly behind her back, and secured them with a zip-tie.
“Wrong answer,” Jessica said, bending down so she and Laura were eye-to-eye. “I’m sure you understand there are practicalities to remaining anonymous. As George W. Bush once said: if you aren’t with us, you’re against us.”
This was it; they were going to kill her. There were no deserts in Maui, so maybe they would feed her to the sharks or throw her into the volcano.
Jessica, still bent over her, said, “You can still change your mind. We can come to an agreement.”
“What, and be your slave?” She spoke in a shaking voice. Her own bravery shocked her. “No thanks.” “Suit yourself,” Jessica said. Then, to her tall accomplice with the tacky shirt: “Lenny, take her to one of the places. I don’t want to know which one.” She nodded at Oliver. “Give him a hand to the car. I’ll wait for you here.”
“Make a noise and I’ll break your nose,” Lenny whispered to Laura as he led her out of the room. They took a stairwell, Oliver jogging down ahead of them, presumably to check for witnesses. Lenny draped himself around Laura as if he were helping her down the stairs, which hid the fact that her arms were tied behind her back. Any security cameras would see a regular couple, the man helping his wife who may have had too much to drink.
The stairwell emptied out on the side of the building. Oliver went back in while Lenny took her to a non-descript Honda with rental plates. He helped her into the passenger seat – still playing the gentleman. He climbed in and they drove off.
She had always a good sense of surrounding, and she recognized the road they were on. She and the family had driven south on it when they had arrived, from Kahului Airport to Kihei. Now she and Lenny were headed north. She briefly pondered whether the woman he had texted about in the store was still alive.
“Where are we going?”
“None of your fucking business.”
His phone buzzed. Ignoring distracted driving laws, he answered it with: “Ya huh.”
She could have listened in but what was the point? She would only learn his plans for her, which would scare her more than she already was.
“Yep, gotcha,” he said, and then something happened. He swerved dramatically toward the ditch without slowing down, his eyes wide and unfocused. “bahhh… brmmm” he droned, making spit bubbles. The phone dropped from his hand and clattered into the foot well. They were shooting off the road at eighty kilometers per hour and Laura, her hands immobilized, could do nothing about it. She screamed, a high-pitched bray.
Lenny’s eyes suddenly cleared, and he yanked the wheel violently, fish-tailing them back onto the road.
“Holy shit!” he shouted. His voice had changed from in-control to manic. He absently wiped drool from his chin. “Holy fucking shit!” Then he looked over at Laura.
“Sorry, Mom.”
“What did you call me?”
Lenny pulled the car to the side of the road, clicked his hazards on, and turned to Laura.
“I called you Mom. It’s me, Catherine.”
Laura felt the world shift underneath her. She stared at Lenny. Lenny smiled back. The light in the eyes, the turn of the lips – it was Catherine. No doubt about it.
“What… how?”
Now, absurdly, the big man looked bashful.
“I never wanted you to find out, but I know about your ability. Maybe I inherited it, because I can listen in on signals too. And I can do more – somehow I can…” she looked away, clearly searching for the right words. “I can surf the signal. It sounds dumb, but that’s the way it feels to me, anyway. And if the person sending it is still listening to their phone or staring at their computer, I can usually enter them. Take them over, be them. For a while, anyway.”
This was beyond incredible. Laura had to accept it, though, because it was staring her right in the face. “Where are you?” she asked. “Physically, I mean. What is your real body doing while you’re here?”
“In the hotel with Dad and Randy. I’m in the washroom. I told them I was going to have a bath. When I do this… I think it looks like I’m having some kind of stroke or something.”
“I don’t…”
“Mom, we don’t have much time. Maybe twenty minutes. You need to run.”
But there was nowhere to run. People like Jessica and Oliver and Lenny, they would never leave her or her family alone. This would be a continuing nightmare unless she did something about it.
“Can you really stay in this body for twenty minutes?”
“Sure…”
She grabbed her daughter by the shoulders and stared into her eyes. “This is very important. No matter what happens, I want you to know I love you. I love Randy too, and your dad.”
“Mom, you’re scaring me…”
“What happens to you if something happens to – this guy? Do you know?”
“I don’t… I’m pretty sure nothing happens.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, I can’t be sure! I mean, I’ve never been in anyone who got hurt or… I just think it’ll be fine. Mom, do you want me to cut you loose?”
Time was getting away.
“Yeah,” Laura said. “Do you have something to cut with?”
Catherine searched the man’s pockets and came up with a pocketknife. She cut her mother’s hands free.
“Cath, can you get out of that body quickly if you have to?”
Catherine smiled confidently. “Yeah, that’s easy.”
“Okay,” Laura said. “Let’s go.”
Jessica was getting antsy. Lenny was supposed to have called by now to say he was at the drop site. Another fifteen minutes and she would be forced to declare him AWOL, and then the Internet soldiers would dismantle his online identity, locate him, and inform a hitman who would wipe him from existence. Jessica had made that call before and didn’t like to do it. She’d been a sensitive person once upon a time, and this cold existence could only wipe so much of that away.
“Time to pull this down?” Oliver asked, indicating the equipment. Another way deals like this went down was for the target to change their mind on their way to the disposal site. In that case, Lenny would call and say he was on his way back. That kind of last-minute win occurred roughly half the time.
“Not yet. I need to hear something back first.”
There was a knock at the door. Oliver looked up, startled.
“Who is it?” Jessica said.
“It’s Lenny.”
Something was up. She didn’t know what, and that didn’t matter right now.
“Did you get the job done?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t be a stranger,” she said. She leapt like a cat to the side of the door. Oliver, who was woefully untrained for such scenarios, just gawked at her. She wasn’t concerned about Oliver’s safety – she hadn’t known him forty-eight hours ago. Ans she wasn’t worried that Lenny would come through the door hot. In fact, she sort of wished he would. She was trained in karate and jiu-jitsu and knew how to disarm a man before he could get a shot off, and she yearned to test her skills.
The door opened and Jessica found herself staring at thin air where Lenny should have been. She looked down just in time to see Laura Charles hunkered on her haunches, holding Lenny’s big pistol in both of her shaking hands. Taken off her game, Jessica was too slow — Laura swung the pistol around and pulled the trigger.
The massive bang and kick of the gun stunned Laura, who fell backward and scrambled desperately in the doorway for a few seconds before crawling to the side. Once she was behind the cover of the hallway wall, she stood up. Her heart felt like it was going to explode. She was shocked to find she hadn’t dropped the gun – there it was, cradled in her right hand.
“Laura!” It was Oliver. “I’m going to come out! Listen, I’m not armed!”
She wasn’t going to fall for that. She wrapped both hands tightly around the gun. She was certain Jessica was dead, had seen her head rock back and blood flow from her face. God.
“Get on your hands and knees and crawl out here,” she said. Her voice was as high as a whistle.
“Okay, alright.”
For several terrifying seconds she stood there aiming the gun at the doorway, every muscle and tendon in her body tensed and ready for Oliver to come leaping around the corner. When he did appear, it was on all fours as instructed. He crawled into the hallway, then looked up at the gun pointed at his face.
“What do you want to do now?”
“I want you to…”
Oliver grabbed her legs and she sprawled forward, the pistol flying as she put her hands out to break her fall. He flipped her over, pinned her arms to her sides with his legs, and wrapped his hands around her neck. The hallway – everything – began to rush away from her.
Then it all rushed back, and she was free. Coughing and sputtering, she got to her feet.
Lenny – Catherine – stood over Oliver, who lay on his back. Stunned, Laura stumbled over to see Oliver’s face was bloodied, and his nose looked badly broken. Catherine must have kicked him in the face. Laura had told Catherine to go back to the car, lock herself in the trunk, then leave Lenny’s body. Clearly she hadn’t listened.
“He’ll never leave us alone,” Catherine said, and there was a finality in her voice that Laura didn’t think was caused by her speaking with a large man’s larynx. There was a sense of surrender in the words that scared Laura more than the prospect of Oliver getting up. “He’ll come after us as soon as he’s awake, or he’ll call others. It’s never going to end, is it?”
“One thing at a time,” Laura said. “At least we’re…”
At some point Catherine had picked up Lenny’s pistol. Now, without warning, she pointed it at Oliver’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The gun fire had filled Laura’s head with ringing, so she couldn’t hear whether there was movement on the floor, but the hallway was still deserted. Surely someone had called the cops by now. She stepped over Oliver’s body, back into the room, forcing herself not to look at Jessica’s corpse.
“Get out of here,” she said to Catherine, who still stood in the hallway.
“Not without you, Mom.”
“I’m not going back. These people gave me an option to live online where they said I could make a difference. I don’t think they were lying about that.”
“Live online? You mean enter the darkness?”
Laura was furiously trying to figure out the user interface on Oliver’s laptop while she was talking, but now she stopped to stare at her daughter.
“You see it too?”
“What about me?” Catherine said, ignoring the question. “What about Dad and Randy? You can’t just leave us.”
“I think I can protect you,” Laura said. “If I stay with you I can be killed, but once I’m digitized I don’t think I can be.”
She found what looked like the option to transmit, but it was password-protected. Of course it was.
“Shit, this isn’t going to work.” She stepped over Oliver again, back into the hallway. The ringing in her ears had eased off and she heard sirens outside, approaching quickly. “Honey, the police are going to be here right away. Go lock yourself in the bathroom. Take the gun. When you hear the police come in, go away. Alright?”
She could tell that Catherine was near tears. Playing out on Lenny’s rough face it should have looked ridiculous, but it didn’t.
“Okay, Mom. I love you.”
“I love you too, honey. I always will.”
Over the next few hours, as the sun slowly dipped toward the Pacific, Laura wandered through a myriad of tourist shops, listening in on other people’s digital conversations. Several times she stood on the edge of the black void but couldn’t jump. She worried that someone might already be searching for Joe and the kids but knew they wouldn’t hurt them until demands were made, and there was a good chance Catherine would slow them down.
She wandered toward her own hotel, unsure what to do, yearning for familiar surroundings as the light fled. Eventually she found herself at the pool where she’d met the strangers. It was closed, but it wasn’t guarded by razor-wire or anything, so she climbed the fence, kicked off her shoes, and walked the steps into the shallow end. She kept going until she was neck-deep, then rolled over and floated on her back.
It would be so easy to go under and let the water flood her lungs. Easier than plunging into the unknown, it seemed to her.
A young couple passed close to her in the twilight. They were newlyweds; she knew this because one of their phones was busy syncing pictures with the cloud. The images flashed through Laura’s mind: the couple’s beatific faces on the beach, at an evening luau, on a sailboat, in a helicopter. She went deeper, learned they were from Texas, had known each other in high school and just re-connected online six months ago, had already suffered through an early miscarriage of an unexpected pregnancy.
They were walking out of range. Laura had to decide now.
She closed her eyes, dipped underwater, and tried to relax.
Don’t think. Just do.
She rushed past the selfies, toward the black hole, and leapt.
Joe Charles sat in his basement home theater four months later, staring at the blank screen. He still watched satellite occasionally, but he wanted his on-demand back. Craved it, actually; the ability to watch what he wanted, when he wanted, with no infuriating commercials. But he couldn’t have what he craved, because since coming back from the nightmare at Maui, he and the kids couldn’t get WiFi on their computers or any kind of data on their phones, not even text messaging, which was nuts because those were completely different channels. Their providers had exhausted all troubleshooting strategies and thrown up their hands. Joe had swapped out their old home router for the newest model. Nada. He and the kids had all gotten new phones. Made no difference whatsoever. At least they could still make and receive calls.
And this dead zone wasn’t limited to the house, either — it followed them everywhere. When people around them had full bars, they couldn’t even get a signal. It was so ridiculous, so bizarre, that they had agreed not to speak of it to anyone else.
He couldn’t deny the poetic justice. His wife, who had despised online devices as long as he’d known her, drowns in a pool in Maui (he still refused to think of it as a suicide), and suddenly the family can’t get online to save their lives. It was like one of those old Twilight Zone episodes. He looked around to make sure he was alone, then said to the air: “Honey, if you’re doing this, nice one. You win. Game, set, match.”
Every night he came down here to his den to try to get Netflix, even though he knew it was pointless. No luck tonight, so he went to a spare room, opened the closet, and dug out an old board game. He and Laura used to play this with the children back when they had still been children.
He went upstairs to find Randy reading his way through a stack of his dad’s old Mad Magazines he’d found in the garage, and Cathy drawing with some art pencils that hadn’t seen the light of day for several years.
“Who’s up for a game?” Joe said, waving the box so it rattled. His kids ignored him, so he said: “I’ll order pizza.” This got them off their butts.
A half hour later pizza arrived, and the family, one member down and still healing, sat cross-legged in the living room playing a silly game. The conversation and laughter flowed effortlessly, making it easy to forget that since Maui the three of them had been at each other’s throats. Joe didn’t know what made this evening so special, only that it was, and he didn’t want it to end. It reminded him of a time long ago when he was more a hero to his kids than an annoyance, and for the first time since Laura’s death he felt things might eventually be okay.
Catherine was coming back from the washroom. Randy had remembered she was ticklish under her arms and had held her down and tickled her until she’d almost peed herself. Hours ago she would have gotten pissed off and yelled at him if he’d tried anything like that, but something miraculous was going on with her family tonight, and she only wished that her mother could be there to enjoy it with them.
As she came down the hallway toward the stairs, she saw a faint glow coming from the darkness of her father’s room, and her heart leapt. It was his phone; he must have left it on the nightstand. It only lit up like that when there was a call or a text message. Her father rarely if ever received calls, but before their lives had become signal-free he had always been complaining about spam texts. Could it be?
She went in and stared down at the screen. There was no indication of calls or texts; the screen was simply glowing. Disappointed, he turned to leave, but the screen blinked twice, making her turn back around.
She had hoped to hear from her mom by now. She wanted so desperately to believe her mother had made it to the other side, and she wasn’t thinking of the afterlife; she didn’t believe in that kind of stuff. She missed her mom terribly, but beyond that she also needed someone to coach her with her power. She lived in constant fear that someone associated with the bad guys from Maui were going to come after them. So far nobody had. She made a habit of listening in on the transmissions of everyone around her. She took the strange digital dead zone around her and the family as a good omen, surely her mother’s doing.
“Mom?” she said hesitantly.
The phone blinked twice. Catherine’s heart pounded in sync with the blinks.
“You’re checking up on us.”
Blink blink.
“I love you.”
Blink blink.
“Goodnight, Mom. Talk to you soon.”
One blink, and the phone went dark.
When she got back downstairs, her dad said, “Were you talking to someone up there?”
Catherine laughed. “I think you’re losing it. Who would I be talking to?”
“Your imaginary boyfriend?” Randy said. “You talk to him in your sleep too.”
Catherine punched him in the shoulder and grabbed a slice of pizza.
“Come on, who’s turn is it, anyway?”
THE END