The Bath Procession: part two

[The second part of my newest novel, The Bath Procession. This material is copyrighted]

Wade had been asleep when the pilot got orders to land. An atmosphere-shattering descent followed by the shriek of rubber on tarmac coincided with the appearance of a vantablack angel in his dream, a shapely silhouette with unseeable wings that stretched around him as a consuming void. He hit his head on the ceiling and was awake. Cyrus was five rows behind, cursing over his spilled drink.

The pilot didn’t speak English. When Cyrus and Wade stepped out with their overstuffed backpacks into crisp sunlight, he stood on the empty blacktop looking as confused as they were, police hovering about him and the plane in a state of hesitation. A tall man in khaki shorts and bomber jacket with a big American flag on the right shoulder approached the dazed passengers. His mirrored sunglasses reflected the slow procession of the clouds. His silence wore a West Texas accent. The entire airport was still. Wade looked up, expecting to see planes halted mid-flight, waiting to see what the American would say.

Port Remolino was an exemplar in stillness. Its roads, laid wide and aimlessly, were often empty. People walked and preferred to take meandering routes through others’ yards instead of getting places on time. During summers, the eggy drone of cicadas linked all other sounds in a steady symphony, and the days languished on until midnight. Time was subject to slow burn. The clock tower no longer ran, stuck in one position for as long as anyone could remember. There was a bank, a post office, a small factory that produced capacitors for Chinese computer chips; the employees were all ageless and had no memory of their first days. Arrivals and departures at the small airport on the edge of the town were best guesses, and the single public bus had one day simply vanished en route, somehow leaving behind its driver. Cyrus had called it the perpetual forgetting. It was the result of wars in the North, he said, which had the left people all shaken up and internally displaced. During the worst times, any choice one made could put them on the wrong side of an incoming regime. The people faded away to survive, drawn Southward toward the archipelago and the glacial fields where time moved at a geologic pace. Since then, banished from their own memories, they engage in petty domesticisms, unable to strive or despair.

But Remolino was also the lighthouse to those lost in the shifting valleys of Yendegaia, a land that was never still, which cast its inhabitants into vagrancy and left them nothing to survive on but memory.

“Name and occupation?”

Wade rolled over and put his feet on the floor. His head throbbed. A screen of white light had him grasping blindly for something nearby to brace himself against. Something like a dozen spotlights all firing on him, he realized he was sweating. And the voice was the tall American’s reverberating off the concrete walls. He was somewhere behind that nauseous light that Wade couldn’t manage to shut out, even with hands over his closed eyelids. How many hours had he slept?

“Name and occupation–”

“You landed my plane–you expect me to believe you don’t know my name?” Wade got up and grabbed the bars of his cell. The light was hot. He could feel the presence of several other men at the American’s sides, safe behind the sheet of white. They’d taken his shoes, Wade remembered, but couldn’t get through the locks on their packs. Cyrus was being questioned. That was hours ago.

The tall American stepped forward, breaking the screen and enveloping Wade in his shadow.

“Rest assured, we know everything about you,” he said. “But only you can tell me what you’ll do next. So, are you going to try to lie to me?”

“What reason would I have to lie?”

“Your friend is travelling without a passport, did you know that?”

“Then lock him up,” Wade folded his arms and took a step back.

The American ordered the light shut off. When everything was visible, a half dozen police officers were standing outside the cell. It was night. Wade sat down, drained, the aches in his back and hips from the metal cot beginning to announce themselves. The American spoke in Spanish with one of the officers and had the cell door opened.

“You’re no good at bluffing, I can tell you that,” he said.

They went to another cell that had been outfitted as an office, with a sealed and soundproof door. They sat alone on the same side of an overlarge, wooden desk covered with papers and stained coffee mugs. There was dust on the certificates that were framed and hung up on the wall. Gibbs, the tall American, introduced himself and then ran through Wade’s own personal details from a folder he’d been carrying under his arm. He lit each of them a cigarette and asked Wade if he had any opinions on golf or baseball. He told Wade he knew about his wife, asked how she was doing. Wade sat silently as the cloud of smoke above them found its way to a cracked vent and began to escape.

“Who’s the pilot?” Gibbs asked.

“No idea.”

“You get in strangers’ planes often?

“Shouldn’t it say that in your paper?”

Gibbs sighed and laid the documents out on the desk. Wade could see among the pile a copy of his own driver’s license, a picture of himself with long hair. There was a school photo of Natalie from what must have been her freshman year of college, and a candid shot of Cyrus smoking a bong in his parked car.

“You began working for Tabula in 2040. But you haven’t been in the states since 2038?”

“Our skills are in demand,” Wade explained. “Companies look for us wherever we happen to be working. For now, it’s Tabula. Before that it was Kurie, before that–”

“The Vatican?”

“That was earlier. And for different reasons…”

There was a commotion on the other side of the ‘sound-proof’ door, and Wade could pick up the muffled sounds of Cyrus’ frustration, chairs scraping harshly against the floor. If they were arguing, Wade reasoned, Cyrus would be using his rudimentary Spanish, which consisted mostly of slurs and euphemisms.

“I’m sure all of these American companies have offered you some sort of legal protection as part of your arrangement,” Gibbs said without looking up. “You may have been misled about the degree to which the U.S. law intervenes in other countries to pursue people in your… situation.”

“Do you not represent U.S. law?”

“There is no law here, American or otherwise.”

“Then just America’s interests?”

“What I represent is knowledge. Knowledge is what I serve, and that is because it is what America serves. We know the most of any nation, and we are engaged in the eternal pursuit for more knowledge–more exclusive knowledge. Good American men die retrieving this kind of knowledge, it’s because that’s where our power comes from. When America is gone, the knowledge will live on, and it will be thanks to us. There is this inescapable link we Americans have to this pursuit, I know you feel it too.”

A body (Cyrus’ presumably) slammed or was-slammed against the other side of the door. There was a confused rustling of limbs and fabric and somebody was in pain. Wade froze; afraid the scuffle might end with a gun shot. He prayed for something to save them before he could no longer control himself and a confession surfaced–

“The explosives are mine,” he was going to say, prayed he did not. The words were stuck in his throat. Gibbs closed his folder and spoke calmly to Wade:

“What do you know about Olamehd?”

“They hired us–or Tabula, really–Tabula just puts us on this job and–”

“To do what? –and pretend for a moment I don’t have the answer written down in my file.”

Wade glared at the door as Gibbs leaned into his periphery, imposing himself and an air of enforced calm on all the chaos. Something about his demeanor told Wade he already knew about the c4 in Cyrus’ things, and that they would both be in worse trouble if they didn’t go through with the job.

“S-scrubbing servers, essentially. It’s–we, uh… we’re compressing sims. And properly deleting the ones with corrupted root files so the patients don’t suffer–they can still feel pain. They can feel pain forever, in a sense, if you don’t do it right. Olamehd, they… they’ve got apparently loads of these sims–but they’re people, they’re not just LLMs or any iterated, self-contained neural network–everyone one of them lived, like you and I, and–and they…” Wade’s shoulders drooped. There were no more sounds on the other side of the door. The smell of singed cigarette filter made him retch. I’m going back to jail, he thought.

Gibbs flipped through his papers. After a moment of quiet, he asked, “You didn’t consider it odd that people were being simulated in a remote area like this?”

“Sims can survive on portable drives, in pieces. Where a patient ends up isn’t often where the patient was simulated.”

“We confiscated your gear; don’t tell me you came here expecting a single flash drive.”

“I can’t finish the job without Cyrus,” Wade put his hand over the papers in Gibb’s line of sight.

“He’ll be fine.”

Wade felt his eyes begin to water, and he almost laughed. Cyrus was a hired contractor. An old friend, sure, but also a man with a criminal history and three kids, he would take care of himself. Wade couldn’t bluff anymore; he was getting soft. He tried earnestly to get Gibbs to understand. They were only expecting servers–these servers could be massive, Wade had seen servers big as parking lots on previous assignments, excavation was part of the job. All this, of course, would be enough evidence to land the entire team in prison, possibly even a few executives at Tabula. But Wade was too old to run. With nowhere else to flee to, he threw himself at Gibbs’ mercy.

The sun was coming up. There were no windows but the men sensed it. Their circadian rhythms synced for an instant, and they both looked toward the corners of the ceiling for a clock that wasn’t there.

“Are we arrested then?” Wade asked.

“I already told you; I’m not the law. I’m here to understand, and you’re wise not to get in my way. What you learn about Olamehd, I want to know. You could consider them competition in our shared pursuit of knowledge. I hope our paths align, and I hate to have enemies in this place.”

Gibbs led Wade to the lobby where Cyrus and the police officers were commiserating over styrofoam cups of instant coffee. Cyrus had a black eye, and one of the cops a gargantuan, bloody lip.

Natalie was waiting outside, staring in the opposite direction as if she’d just stopped to watch the clouds. She’d parked on the sidewalk, a gray utility truck with big bulbous tires and a lengthy bed. Snowflakes were caught in her hair and peppered the interior, having blown in through the opened sunroof. The three didn’t speak as Cyrus tossed their gear in the bed and crawled through to the back seat. Natalie handed both of them a pair of goggles.

They got onto roads which quickly turned to dirt, then to densely matted crabgrass which spread from building to building. The buildings dissolved into their constituent boxes and prisms and drifted apart as Natalie put Remolino behind them. Released from the grid of the town, the concrete shapes spread out, cubes and cones and the occasional trapezoid, nestling in shallow crooks and hiding against boulder piles like jetsam on an ever-intensifying ocean of green. They seemed to Wade to be misplaced, perhaps spolia from some forgotten temple. As Natalie took them farther into the fields, the shapes were draped in long curtains of moss and sometimes sunk into the grass with only one rough corner exposed. But then an old woman or a pair of children would run around the side of a shape to access a spigot or lean out a second story window to check the time by the position of the sun. The locals cast weird looks at the car, flicking their hands out in disgust as Natalie veered around them, no beaten path to guide her through the uneven plains. Eventually the little concrete hovels were gone and the car accelerated up a dewy slope pointing toward the sun. As the brightness increased, the photochromic lenses in their goggles went dark. They burst through a frail wall of snow that had gathered at the ridge. Natalie parked the car and removed a thermos full of coffee that she distributed across three plastic cups.

As she briefed them both–Cyrus mainly, on the technical aspects like rural power sources, internet access, et cetera–Wade peered down the other side of the slope into the uncivilized edge of the region, a tumult of green and white, a mess of visual signals that revealed elevation and overgrowth in a battle with erosion, dilapidation, settling. He hadn’t expected so much snow. It was eerily bright. The bluish ribbon glowing on the horizon was a glacier, he realized. But on the sparkling hills before him were splashes of yellow and lavender. Wildflowers trickled through grass-smothered washes and collected in tiny gardens that were surrounded by black ice. Enormous, frothy clouds moved slow across the sky, reappearing from the left after exiting on the right. They were contained within a crystal sky, or perhaps vice versa. Some effect of the atmosphere intervened on perspective; it was possible the landscape was just a postcard, and all Wade had to do was flip it over.

“How far away are we?” he asked. There didn’t appear to be any towns in the mess before him. Granted, there were certainly a few hiding places.

“It’ll take us a few hours to get to camp, but ultimately not much time lost. The original plan would’ve been to come up from the South–”

“How’d you know you’d find us out here?” Cyrus leaned toward the front seat, staring at her through the swollen lid of his shining black eye. The blood vessels in his cornea had burst and turned it to a glistering ruby with a pale blue cavity. Natalie put the car in drive and made Cyrus promise he would not be mad.

Hidden across the coast, clustering in the divots of long braided slopes and against cliff faces formed by the slow collapse of land into the ocean, were small fishing villages made of the concrete shapes. Natalie’s report, typed and filed mostly to give an air of professionalism to their exploits, indicated these towns had their own social lives, and a couple had unique dialects that may have been the remnants of Tehuelche, an extinct language. The clusters were too spread out for much cultural exchange and the landscape changed too often–what was one day a reedy swamp could freeze over the next, tumbling down a hillside as a giant black avalanche. A pond could evaporate and redistribute itself across the plains as any manner of precipitation, moving with intent across all dimensions of space. Natalie had been engaged in close observation of the distant glacier, her report said. She was sure it was growing but, at the same time, in different places, it receded. From certain vantage points, miles out along the legs of a sharp triangle she’d drawn on her map back at camp, she could make out intricate patterns, geometric arrangements like basalt columns or the spontaneous cubes that bloom from molten bismuth. From different angles the angles were different; if she could observe these multiple opposing perspectives all at once, she reasoned, another image might be revealed with true, physical depth that flat images can only imply.

“It’s too moist,” Cyrus said, pouting atop an overturned plastic bucket and pulling at his beard. Wind was slipping in through a paneless window, kicking cigarette ash into his face, but he was concerned more with the saturation that would threaten his gear.

“I know, Cyrus. They know. We discussed it and they’re bringing by a fix, tonight.”

“A fix?”

Natalie shrugged. This was what they’d come to expect from Olamehd: limitless resources, few answers. Natalie was expected to serve as lone contact while she collected info in Yendegaia, inasmuch as she could expect to hear anything at all. At some point, Olamehd had secured a two-story concrete shoebox overlooking the ocean. The previous resident had left trash, and a front door without any latch.

Downstairs, Wade sat by the opened door answering emails from his tablet, confirming for their Tabula contractors their arrival and sending Dariya a sanitized version of the ordeal at the airport. He wondered if, in correspondence to Tabula, he should allude to the imminent security threat posed by Gibbs. Maybe this was one of the rare scenarios where he was expected to break the code of discretion and speak openly about the operation. But Gibbs would likely be reading everything Wade sent, anticipating the ways Wade might evade detection. His implied position was now as overseer for the operation, the one working behind the scenes who held real power over Wade, Cyrus and Natalie, even if the others had no idea. Dariya responded quickly, dispelling Wade’s angst and reminding him she loved him. Wade told her to rest and promised her again he would not under any circumstances miss their daughter’s due date.

Cyrus was hungry. Catching a whiff of savory smoke on the wind, he barged downstairs and over to Wade, pushing the tablet to the side and nearly dragging him by the wrist. They followed a stone path to the waterfront where the concrete cubes had rollaway doors opened to the ocean, with tables and rugs and people set across the planks of a boardwalk which linked them in an avenue of sorts.

The warmth of other people put the three at ease. Spanish was spoken in undiscovered accents. They ordered cheap beers and skewers of roasted fish livers, with fried yucca and mayonnaise. They compared the work ahead to previous jobs, foreseeing disaster and presenting the best plans for avoiding the hypothetical.

Along with shifting landmasses (per Natalie’s report) the coastal villages were forced to contend with erosion that accelerated and even halted at times, depending on temperamental geology. From Wade’s end of the table, facing the water and the gray curtain of sky, he could tell the spires of rock out in the sea had come from the coast, still bearing some grass or an abandoned shape. They were the germs of Yendegaia pulled prematurely from the nucleus. The sea would carry them off and the rest of the world would be infected, glaciers and grasslands appearing spontaneously like infected sores.

Cyrus wicked condensation off the side of his Cerveza Austral and rubbed it into his swollen eye.

“That’s disgusting,” Natalie said. “You’ll get an infection.”

“Good,” he barked. “Get me to a hospital and out of this shit-scape. And put it all on Olamehd’s tab.”

“We at least have to get started if we expect any sort of payment–injury compensation or otherwise. Olamehd may have spent a lot on the job, but none of it has found a way into our pockets.”

“Breach. Of. Contract.” Cyrus declared as if this explained everything. He tore a piece of meat from a skewer and chewed as he continued, “we got one with Tabula, they got one with Olamehd. They’re all a lot of nonsense, but in the end they all say essentially the same thing: I get paid for my services, not for the job getting done. The transport of illicit substances across international borders–” (Natalie turned pale and coughed loudly, but no one in the room seemed to speak English) “—is my job, and I take the hit. Getting thrown into a brick wall, face first by some ex-fascists is yet another hit I take, doing my job. Even sitting here is a testament to the lengths I’ve gone to satisfy my end of the deal, while Olamehd plants me in a moldy old shack like I’m a janitor or something. I’ve got half a mind to sue these freaks into oblivion.”

“Please never represent yourself.”

“How did they land the plane?” Wade interrupted.

Natalie looked around to check if someone might be listening. Wade and Cyrus did the same, unsure of who they should be looking for. Wade noticed there was a boat out in the water with several people-shaped dots lining the top, floating far out between two massive slices of mainland. Could they be the ones watching?

“They didn’t say, obviously,” Natalie admitted. “According to them, there was an issue with Port Harris, your intended destination. Land development, or something. They asked me to investigate, but I didn’t see anything like that. The airport was running fine. I was heading back to camp when they called again to let me know you’d be landing in Remolino.”

“Would be landing?” Wade asked, “or had landed?”

“So who the fuck are you working for then?” Cyrus spoke over him, having forsaken his earlier promise not to be mad. His other eye was starting to get red. “I’m serious–Wade’s our only Tabula contact for security reasons, but apparently you’ve been running secret errands for Olamehd while you’ve been down here?”

“We’re already working for them–why is this different?”

Cyrus made an obnoxious sound which the others assumed was his rendition of an ‘incorrect’ buzzer. For the first time a couple bystanders peered over their shoulders to observe but quickly lost interest and returned to their own conversations.

“We do not work for them. And we do not work for Tabula,” Cyrus proclaimed. “We are Independent Contractors. These people who hire us are our enemies. These people want to swindle us and would enslave us if they could. I’m serious!” Natalie rolled her eyes and flagged a waiter for more beers as Cyrus elaborated, “we need to be antagonistic at every opportunity. You’re setting a bad precedent, kid.”

“Cyrus. My job here is to collect information. Yes: I have been spending the past two weeks ingratiating myself with the Olamites. Because the first piece of information anyone can gather in this land of inconsistency, is that the Olamites’ reach can be relied on. You realize this village we’re camping at doesn’t even have a name? Also, for the record, I’m only two years younger than you, you old fart.”

They hushed as fresh drinks were placed before them.

“You didn’t answer the question,” Wade said. “I need to know how.”

Wade explained what had happened with Gibbs and the cryptic discussion in the sealed cell. It was the first time he’d had any reason to think Olamehd might be more than a collective of wealthy eccentrics. For a moment they considered as a group that maybe Gibbs was a fraud, an officer in the area with limited authority, taking advantage of a chance to make outsiders scared. But it didn’t seem likely; Wade described Natalie’s photo, one she had never shown him, that he had seen in the file paperclipped to a lengthy dossier. Whoever had ultimately made the call to land the plane (Cyrus reminded everyone that Tabula was always working behind the scenes, watching their every move) was clearly trying to send a message that the price for failure would be incarceration.

Cyrus wondered the obvious out loud: why not just flee? Each of them, under different circumstances, had experience with life on the run. If there was a time to politely exit, the appearance of a federal agent would surely announce it. But Wade’s situation spoke for itself: he was going nowhere. He couldn’t drag his wife and infant daughter to whatever strange region might grant him shelter, and he was not leaving them behind. He was finishing this job, and he was collecting his money. If it meant selling out Tabula, Olamehd–even the two of them whom he loved and sincerely respected–he would.

“That’s that,” he said.

There were Olamites back at camp. They’d let themselves into the shoebox and had already started to remove trash and pull dead ivy off the exterior. They didn’t look like locals, but also looked nothing like the people in the brochure Tabula had mailed Wade several months ago. They were not in white flowing robes. They wore clean outdoor gear in muted greens and browns. One of them had a large camera around his neck, and both had the same windswept look to their hair and unkempt beards. They introduced themselves and were friendly, but the three continued to glance skeptically at them, unable to pin certain details like relative age or ethnic background. One came forward and shook Wade’s hand, tacit recognition of a leader by a leader. He appeared to be the elder of the Olamites, but brimming with more youthful energy. Whether it was a put-on or the result of some secret remedy, it had an effect on Wade, making him feel small and ill.

They’d driven over in a large white van with the same bulbous tires as Natalie’s vehicle. They pulled back the side door and Cyrus froze in delight at the sight of fiber optics and routers and four monitors attached to an untold number of terminals and sensors. He scurried in like a rodent and began to fiddle with parts and create his nest. The van could seal up completely, locking out moisture and sound. The tank was filled but gas was precious and rare in Yendegaia; the Olamehd men (John and Paul, naturally) had left a paper map with the few gas stations circled in red ink.

Wade found the kitchen had been filled with some rice, bread, cheese and dried meats. There was a basket of velvety kale, colored a dusky purple on the convex exterior of its leaves, veiny and pink on the underside. John the elder, apologizing for the appearance, explained that the leafy vegetable was the only produce they could reliably grow here, due to climate and fluctuating soil PH.

“When you visit the compound, you’ll see the farms. We grow it all year round, perpetual harvest, far as the eye can see. You can run out and eat as much as you want, and the Earth gives you more–”

“You just gotta develop a taste for it, first!” Paul the younger said. Everyone laughed.

Around midnight, when the sun finally fell, Natalie and Wade set up on the roof and smoked while Cyrus explored every inch of the Olamite van, shouting up every few minutes to announce a new discovery. The dark settled quickly, and little rivulets of light began to seep upward from the horizon. Aurora australis, Natalie muttered, maybe just to herself. The little boats anchored offshore all turned on their lights, an offering to the draw of the black night.

“How’s the baby?”

“Kicking, supposedly. I haven’t felt her yet…” Wade smiled. “How’s Ozzy?”

“Eh. We split up. Amicably, but…” she shrugged, not interested in finding the right word. Wade apologized, she told him not to: it wasn’t his fault. It was nobody’s fault. The year prior she had watched Ozzy scratch a mosquito bite until it bled, and silently came to understand things about his character he would never have consciously revealed. Her mind was always working in these ways that his could not. It wouldn’t work out. She loved him, fully and truly, and accepted their end as preordained, and vowed to prolong nothing. That time had passed, just as time passes every second without incident.

“The photo you mentioned,” Natalie said. “The one Gibbs had. It’s so funny, that was the same day I met Ozzy. I’ve been thinking about that… We didn’t start dating for a few more years, of course. Which I knew we would. I have that talent, you see. I can always tell how things will go.”

Wade finished his cigarette in silence. Natalie’s talent, he figured, was more a sign that she was setting little traps for herself so that, even in error, she could continue to feel right. There was little to be done for such a person. But what he really feared was the opposite scenario, that Natalie was subconsciously willing reality to unfold in a particular way, and what that meant for his future, considering she was the only one to correctly predict his unborn child’s gender.

They slept on the floor in the room upstairs, which was empty except for two old rugs and some abandoned tools. In the morning, while the others were still asleep, Wade ran off to the same place they’d bought drinks from the night before and was lucky enough to find the woman there selling coffee. He paid her for an entire pot and three fried egg sandwiches, then waddled back up the path, trying to spill as little as possible. After some coffee and a short spat between Natalie and Cyrus over the day’s route, they got the cars running. Natalie led the way, Cyrus in the rear with his precious equipment. The coast began to slip away, taking the nameless village and the boardwalk people into oblivion. They would fade away, she shouted over to Wade, riding passenger, as the wind roared through her open windows. Silt filters through the grass, she said, which is woven loose like a knit blanket. All the concrete shapes are largely not where they were first placed. Villages spring up and disintegrate in the night, leaving people with new neighbors, or none at all for months. These mountains, she nodded to the jagged green around them, will be gone soon.

But while Natalie was forlorn, Cyrus embraced the evolving terrain as opportunity. He worked his way along Natalie’s triangle, installing cell towers and retractable dishes, cutting out channels for long stretches of fiberoptic. The deployment of explosives took on a painterly immediacy for Cyrus, who began to mold the landscape and establish in its place his remote network. It would all be gone soon, he reasoned. So he demolished with impunity, held back by nothing. After one miscalculated explosion, a hillside slid over onto itself, returning to a solid wall of dirt once more; Cyrus turned to his companions, who were hiding from the blast behind a nearby boulder, and bowed like a maestro. Like beautiful music, his devastation would have persistent effect despite the transient spirit of the country. Raising berms with propagating kevlar lattice that would not fade away, and carving delicate scars on the country’s granite skull, he was imposing history on a region that violently resisted.

During lunch, a black dot inched across the sky. The trio watched it as they ate their sandwiches, trying to discern upon it wings or propellers or some other manner of holding itself in the air. But the dot was too high up and stayed safely among the fringe of the clouds.

“Your buddies?” Cyrus asked Natalie, his mouth full of egg and his red eye still locked on the dot.

“This again,” she grabbed their discarded saran wrap and rolled it into a single tiny ball of shimmery plastic and tucked it into her front pocket.

The trouble with an explanation of Olamehd or Olamite eccentricities, according to Natalie’s report, was that there simply wasn’t enough information to convey anything of substance at all. This was true right to the core, it seemed. No dictum had ever been codified to establish proper behavior or belief within Olamehd tradition. It was unclear if the Olamites believed in tradition at all. There was no roster of members, and various rumors that persisted online were often mutually exclusive. It was not an issue with Natalie’s ability to uncover secrets. As Wade skimmed the report while his partners argued from car to car over walkie-talkie, he saw the same persistence to uncover and connect dots as was always the case in Natalie’s reports. But these dots resisted connection. The wisdom of Olamehd was passed strictly on intuition. There was no evidence the word “Olamehd” had existed in any other sense. The phonemes felt like Hebrew or Arabic, but “medha,” Natalie pointed out, was the sanskrit word for wisdom. “Meta,” was a Greek prefix but had been extrapolated by popular American cultural tradition to essentially mean anything above and overarching. The term could be linked definitively to nothing. There were redacted FBI memoranda which implied it was an international governing body with tenuous connections to all the major sim-tech firms, and all their wealthy backers who believed adamantly in an afterlife devoid of judgement. But from their own internal, largely superficial texts, their very existence meant an end for organization, administration, and concrete goals. They espoused the thrill of the moment, the overwhelming capacity of God (whoever that was) to love and forgive. Humanity was precious, life was the answer, et cetera et cetera. Period. No meat to the bones. A clandestine network built simply to exchange platitudes.

Still, Natalie explained, there was no reason to doubt the Olamites’ conviction or their resources.

“On my second day in camp,” she remembered, “an Olamite woman came to bring over supplies. She smiled and nodded while she worked, but she wouldn’t look at me. That didn’t make sense: if the Olamites are sexist, then sending the woman to meet a woman tracks–but their own woman is unworthy to make eye contact with the outsider’s woman? Odd. Unusual, but unremarkable. But it made me want to ask, you know? I wouldn’t typically bother, but this was so odd, it made me need to know… I may have, kind of, trapped her inside with me–just for a minute. All I wanted to know was what she was thinking, who she was. But she couldn’t tell me. She really didn’t know. She didn’t try to rush past me and escape. She told me to my face: she had no thoughts, and she had no name. She smiled some more, even offered to make us both some tea. But I opened the door instead and she left.”

The dot reappeared, but no one was looking.

That night, drinking sour cocktails in a pub nestled within a cluster of concrete shapes further inland, Wade retreated to an outhouse to vomit and check his email. Dariya had responded, mostly by way of attached ultrasound pictures which would not load. Fucking network, Wade spat. Fucking Cy God damn it. He drifted away from the sounds of people, holding his phone up into the blue moonlight like an offering, waiting for a signal to cause his precious pictures to appear.

No luck.

Back inside, as the locals were mostly clearing out, singing songs to one another with liquor in little tin cups for the walk home, Natalie and Cyrus were coming to some agreement. When Wade approached, Cyrus snatched his phone and snapped it in half, little pieces of silicon and glass popping out like a firework.

Wade’s hand whipped out on reflex, yanking Cyrus by the collar and face first onto the table, his other hand quickly on the back of Cyrus’ head as if to press it like a lemon. His face was throbbing–’the photos,’ he tried to say. His words were coming out as hisses and spit. Cyrus laughed, and Natalie inserted herself and waved the other customers away, begging for calm. She could explain, she just needed a minute.

“Please,” she said to Wade. “Don’t be mad.”

There was nowhere to get coffee in the new neighborhood. Apparently everyone here made it for themselves. Wade sauntered up and down the tiny road he vaguely remembered stumbling drunk through the night before, desperate for caffeine. Briefly, he wondered what happened to the pieces of his phone. Maybe the land would bring them back. Unnerved by this foreign body, the hills might melt a crater around the two halves of his cell and Wade could reunite them. Still, nothing in the universe could cause the thing to reassemble the way the land could.

The van honked. Wade reeled around to find Cyrus in the driver’s seat, idling the van on a ridge overhead, perched like a cat on a branch, watching, waiting, and smoking a cigarette down to the filter.

“You’re mad,” Natalie cooed through a walkie-talkie. She was on her own now, doing some recon around the network towers while Wade monitored read-outs from the back of Cyrus’ van, confirming clear signals throughout.

“I’m not mad,” Wade said. “I’m bored.”

There was truth to this. Natalie and Cyrus did all their work in pre and post. Wade was waiting for his window to meaningfully impact the situation as the hands-on guide for sims transferring from cramped and outdated serverspheres to their new homes. Then he’d fade back to the background.

“They’ll still track us, you know,” Wade said. “Forget for a second that I’m sitting in what is probably a giant tracking device–they’ve been here for years, generations maybe. How do we know the villagers who serve us drinks aren’t watching us and reporting back to the Olamites?”

The connection disintegrated in the middle of Natalie’s non-response. Something about splitting up, each being as individually unhindered as possible. But this was just a cover in case Olamehd really was listening in. Wade understood the real reason he’d been cut off from Dariya and the rest of civilization: it took Tabula off the table completely, leaving only Gibbs and Olamehd as possible threats. It was clever, and something Wade himself may have done if he had been a little less invested in his inbox. It was possible he lacked the energy to be sufficiently paranoid. On the other hand, Cyrus, who was now opting to sleep alone, driving the van miles away into the night with his headlights off, disappearing into the shifting void so as not to be observable by Olamehd, was already talking to himself and had filled the van’s ashtray to overflowing.

They convened on the border of Olamehd territory. As Elder John promised, there were fuzzy purple stripes running along the distant hills. Wade had had nothing but a sardine sandwich four hours ago, but his stomach still turned thinking of chewing through the rough greens as the Elder had advised.

They left the cars near an icy bog and proceeded on foot. Soon they saw other people, Olamites who waved at them distractedly, their children busy digging up roots and pulling each other’s hair. The Olamites were tanned and subtly muscled, their features ambiguous and proud. Squat stone walls lined a path that appeared under the trios’ feet, and the buildings had straw roofs and rounded windows. There was a foundation under their bricks, and double-digit addresses above the front doors. They had architecture here, it seemed. The trio asked around (the people were very easy to talk to) and were directed to a building which served as a community gathering place, a large sanctuary of sorts. Someone would be there soon to bring them to whomever they needed, they were told. It was a community of several hundred, but everyone knew each other and knew how to find one another whenever.

The ceiling inside the community center was a vast dome reverberating with subtle sounds. Cyrus remarked on the absence of anything–no design, no mural, not even the intricate microscopic gashes that marked earnest handiwork. The plaster was smooth as blown glass.

A pair of teenage volunteers entered the sanctuary and took the trio through the kale farms on a tractor to where, on the other side of the hill, facing a black bay rimmed by dilapidated islands, a small cottage was situated. The siding and the porch were all painted wood, like any old house back in America. It was as if someone had lost it; it belonged somewhere else, clearly. Wade tried peering around the side yard. If this place was running servers, the signs of remote power generation should be obvious. Smoke or steam from rudimentary generators, six-foot tall server towers, all things Wade had seen on previous jobs and was waiting to sink his teeth into. He was starting to feel hungry for work, a purpose escaping him this past week that left a rotten twisting feeling in his stomach.

A woman answered the door. She had shiny green eyes and short brown hair. Wade pulled his hand back, realizing he was reaching for the doorknob which she’d already pulled away from him. She let them in and introduced herself to Wade as the teenagers led Natalie and Cyrus into the sitting room of what was apparently a communal house. There were several very old people sitting nearly catatonic by each of the windows, drooling quietly underneath heavy blankets, while at the same time a swarm of toddlers circled around Natalie, then Cyrus, then Wade, then disappeared into another room down the hall.

They ate informally, served dried fruits and cheese, nibbling while various Olamehd figures passed through and introduced themselves. Paul the Younger made an appearance, helping to shuffle along elder Olamites as they made their greetings. Everyone spoke of how good it was to see the three of them, how few visitors they received this far South, how they should really consider staying. No one mentioned servers or sims. No one seemed to have anything at all on their mind when they spoke, just projecting that distinct Olamite contentedness. Wade was ready to puke again. Natalie was speaking with the green-eyed woman, and Wade couldn’t help himself from looking at the edge of her dress where the fabric was tightest on her hips and her ribs. There was something undeservedly youthful about this woman, Wade thought as he stewed. As if she’d jumped from being twelve, to being twenty-one, to being vaguely fortyish with rich skin and thick hair. She had the alien grace of one who had skipped everything banal and necessary in life that made the rest of them human.

Cyrus had found Elder John and was attempting a direct approach:

“Is all this necessary to the job?” he was gripping John by the bicep. “Time is kind of of the essence, so if we can get on our way here…”

John looked confused, glanced at the ageless woman, then at Paul. Something was exchanged between them, and John intuited that he should let the others talk while he exited.

Paul approached Cyrus but looked toward Wade.

“Did any of the old-timers tell you how long it took them to establish this village? The challenges of building foundation and roads in this Earth? In their time everything was based in caravans, these three-story, slow-moving trucks. I’ve seen a few, but they’re all rusted up now, probably sitting at the bottom of the ocean offshore, carried out by this land.”

Still impatient, Cyrus nodded along. These trucks or towers or whatever, he guessed, were filled with servers, right? That’s what we’re looking for? But it was nothing like that. The weight of years overcame Paul as he tried to assemble the right words, the proper arrangement. It seemed like they were there in his mind, but that they were not ones which the trio would understand. Wade belched and tasted acid–he was definitely going to puke. He ran through the entry, past the unperturbed woman and a confused Elder John and fell to his knees before a hedge that lined the side yard. He could feel the muscles in his lower back and pelvis wrenching as he purged everything, wringing yellow bile from the folds of his stomach. His vision went blank, and when it returned the sight of his own vomit made him sick again. Natalie came behind and put a hand on Wade’s back. He was radiating nauseous heat, struggling to breathe clean air back in past thick saliva. The Olamites assembled and lifted Wade’s trembling body up in unison, his face down so as not to drown on further bile. They carried him down a tiled hall leading under the sanctuary, which was miraculously adjacent to the house with the old people and the kids. The hall leaned gently to the left, sending their crew corkscrewing into the Earth. Wade spewed more bile onto the floor, but it was ignored. It got warmer as they went deeper. Wade’s face, which he hadn’t realized was swollen, began to decompress and drain clear snot from the nostrils and thin fluid like gasoline from his ears. The weight of his body caused his bones to crack. There wasn’t enough strength in him to turn and ask his escorts where they were taking him, and he couldn’t tell if Natalie and Cyrus even saw him taken off.

The veins of light came to mind, aurora australis, then Dariya and pictures he’d seen only in a dream of his daughter on ultrasound. He saw emails unanswered and a geometric object with long, spindly hairs, which Wade realized was an aerial view of Cyrus’ network. He couldn’t see, he suddenly realized, and his recent memories were surfacing unanimously as images. They formed a shapeless abundance. The Olamites spoke from the edges of his mind, without the weariness of sound, introducing him in his weakened state to a new entity that extended something like a hand that came to rest gently on Wade’s face. In her vastness, she disrupted Wade’s ability for sense. Words lagged far behind the immediate transfer as her thoughts became his before they became themselves.

“Hello,” she said.

[This is the second part of four of my newest novel, The Bath Procession. Physical copies available here]