Normal

  “Oh, fuck,” he said, and sat down in the middle of the corridor and held his head in his hands.

  Dickson appeared from nowhere like the world’s shittiest elf, sweating, bloodshot eyes on stalks and grinding his teeth like he was trying to gnaw through a railroad track. “What’s up? What’s up? What’s up?”

  Adam looked up at Dickson with tears in his eyes. “Could I have lunch? Lunch is a thing I used to have. I would really like lunch.”

  * * *

  Out on the patio again, Dickson’s friendly hand on Adam’s upper arm, threading him between the tables and holding him up when his knees threatened to fold. Lela spotted him, and, getting up from his own table, so did Clough. Adam saw Lela sigh and then haul herself from her chair grudgingly, preparing to try to score some more social points to get her into Staging. Clough’s table was close to the gap between strategic forecast and foresight strategy. Adam indicated to Dickson that they should head toward Clough. Lela watched them change tack and followed.

  Clough stretched a big spade of a hand out. “All right, lad?”

  Adam took Clough’s wrist, and looked over on the other side. He saw a table with only one person seated at it. “Take me over there, Dickson. Clough’s coming too.”

  “Okay,” said Dickson, doubtfully. Adam looked over his shoulder at Lela. “Come on,” he said.

  “Let go,” Clough said.

  “Do what I say or the Danger Mouse DVD is history,” Adam said.

  “You heartless fucking bastard.”

  They crossed the aisle, from foresight strategy to strategic forecast.

  The entire space went deathly silent.

  Hundreds of eyes on them as they moved to that table with just one person at it. Adam sat down opposite that person, and looked with intent at Clough. Clough sat down like a dying man giving up the ghost and dropping into his own coffin. Lela stood a few feet away, stranded in their wake.

  Adam cast his eyes up to Dickson and said, “Thank you. Am I allowed food I can chew? I’d really like to try some food, if that’s okay?”

  “Sure it is, Mr. Dearden. I’ll go check and see what I can find for you. Are you going to be okay here?”

  “I’m fine,” Adam said. Dickson had the demeanor of a man watching an insane person urinating in a christening bowl and being unable to do anything meaningful about it. He shook his head and left at an amphetamine trot.

  The person in front of Adam was a rheumy-eyed man in a pointed woolen pom-pom hat with considerable earflaps. He clutched a steaming cup of what looked and smelled like hot berry juice between hands wearing both Thinsulate gloves and knitted shooting mittens, the top halves of them folded back so he could use his fingers. There were so many layers of knitwear on the man that Adam could not easily estimate his actual size.

  Adam dropped everything he was planning to recite and just said, “Are you okay?”

  “Do I look okay?” A little bit of Jamaica in his accent.

  “Well … not really? But it’s not that cold.”

  “A black man can’t live like this. It’s too far north. Did you know there are only nine black people in Canada? I counted.”

  “I think that’s a made-up number.”

  “It is a made-up number, but I counted it, so it’s true. You are on the wrong side of the aisle, pale frost creature asshole.”

  “My name’s Adam Dearden.”

  “I know your kind have names. Didn’t ask to know what they were. Snow-colored mutant fuck.”

  Adam went to speak, and then swallowed back the words, looked at Clough, took a moment to reconfigure his approach.

  “Okay,” Adam resumed. “What do you think happened to that Mansfield guy, and what are we going to do about it?”

  “Son,” the man in the hat said, “you came from the wrong side of the aisle, so I can’t even hear you. You scuttle on back to The Shire there and leave the grown-ups alone.”

  “It is, at worst, fifty-five degrees out here. I know what side of the goddamned aisle I walked over here from. How about you stop playing children’s games and tell me what you’re so afraid of?”

  The man’s eyebrows ascended into his hat. “Afraid?”

  “You’re sitting here clutching a hot drink and all hunched up like you think the boogeyman is going to appear from nowhere and cup your balls. You’re all sitting here in terrified silence,” Adam continued, raising his voice, “worried to all hell that people are going to come and ask you awkward questions. Or that people are going to come and take you away in the night. Or that you’ve pissed off someone somewhere who just wanted to come in and scare the shit out of you to let you know they know who and where you are. Am I getting warm yet, Nanook of the fucking North? How about the rest of you?”

  The man in the hat pulled his right hand from his drink and shook one trembling finger at Adam, the cap of the shooting mitten wobbling comically under it. “My name, you fucking northern cave gimp, is Darnel Booth, and it is nowhere near fifty-five degrees, and your incredible lack of manners is forgiven only by the fact that you do not come from a civilized part of the world that was actually intended to support human life.”

  “You’re Darnel Booth? What the hell happened to you?”

  “Hey. You don’t look like an Olympic athlete yourself, and we’re both in Normal Head, so how about a bit more respect?”

  “Darnel Booth.” Adam turned to Clough. “Darnel Booth. Negation Risk Scenario Planning.”

  “I never saw that film,” Clough said.

  “It wasn’t a … Christ. I thought you worked in economic foresight?”

  “Well, I do, but it’s like I told you. I mostly get bankers and politicians drunk.”

  “Don’t do this,” Darnel muttered.

  “Negation Risk,” Adam continued. “The first modern study to identify the issues around scenarios other than nuclear war that would wipe out all trace of human civilization as if we were never here. It was groundbreaking.”

  “And you’re asking what happened to him?” Clough chuckled.

  “Oh,” Adam said. “Right.”

  “I’m not depressed,” Darnel said, hands back around his hot drink. “I just came to a natural conclusion. We should have stayed in Africa. Africa is the environment we evolved for. Technically speaking, it is the only inhabitable part of the world. The only way we will survive into the future is if we fortify the cradle of humanity and fend off you ghost-walkers with heavy armaments. I’m okay with the Indians and Chinese. But they can’t come in. The only mistake I made was writing that paper.”

  “You haven’t published in three years,” Adam said.

  “I was consulting for DARPA. Probably sending it over to them was a mistake. They never released it. I protested. Some people might have gotten hurt. There may have been construction work. Possibly a small bomb. So here I am.”

  Darnel Booth met Adam’s eyes, just once. “Maybe a little bit of abyss gaze,” Darnel said.

  * * *

  A Nordic blonde woman, six feet tall and perhaps forty, loomed over the end of the table. “You are the Stoop Model man.”

  Adam’s stomach fell away.

  “You are. I remember you. The Washington Unmanned Airspace conference. I slept with your friend from Kolkata. You have not gotten more attractive during the intervening years.”

  “Nanfrid Skoglund,” Adam said.

  “You remember!”

  “Not an easy name to forget,” Adam said.

  “You are the Stoop Model man. Do you have an email address for your friend from Kolkata?”

  “Sorry.”

  Nanfrid turned to address people at the next table over. “This is the Stoop Model guy! You remember that? He has a funny face still.”

  “Do I have a funny face?” Adam asked Clough.

  “Everyone looks a bit Cubist to me, these days, to be honest,” Clough said. “I’m not sure where your nose is supposed to be.”

  “I thought I saw you,” said a smaller and much slimmer woma
n, pulling herself upright from the other table. “Adam, right? You did a bunch of warfighter theory at FortStrat back in the day. Stoop Model and other stuff. Stoop was a hell of a thing.”

  A quiet voice behind Adam said, “What’s this Stoop thing?” It was Lela, who’d been standing just outside Adam’s peripheral vision the whole time he’d been seated. Adam thought she’d drifted loose and fallen back to the other side of the patio.

  “Stoop Model. Right. I’m Morelia, by the way. Morelia Gorski. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. And you. I’ve met you, Darnel, don’t look at me like that. This was back in the early days of serious thinking about drones for warfighting, right? We had, like, Predator drones, and Reaper drones, and things like that, and the military and political clients were pushing all of us hard for urban drone solutions. But you can’t just stick a flight of Predator drones into a city, especially a vertical Western city, you know?”

  “Why would you even want to do that?” Lela asked.

  “Eh,” Morelia shrugged. “Crowd control. Riot management. Disrupting occupations. Like that. So, anyway, everyone’s getting pushed to come up with urban solutions for these big honking drones. And, remember, these things are thirty feet long with fifty-foot wingspans. They ain’t like flying your little quadcopter you got from Amazon for your birthday, but you can’t hang fourteen missiles off a quadcopter. And Adam here, he saw years ahead. Adam, did you see somebody’s doing a Kickstarter for micro-drones you can launch off your wrist like a bird of prey now?”

  “No,” Adam lied.

  “See, that was Adam’s thing. Birds of prey. Birds of prey, they circle around their target, way high above, and when they’re ready, they just drop at high speed to hit their target with total precision. And that’s called a stoop, see? Adam saw that you didn’t need a big honking drone. You just needed a flight of lots of little micro-drones built around chunks of explosive material. So, say you were trying to control a riot that had a dozen ringleaders. You could stoop-kill just those twelve people, without harming anyone else. Smack ’em in the head with a micro-drone carrying enough of an explosive core to blow their brains out. Stoop Model decapitation strikes. It was brilliant, really. The only problem was effectively guiding them in, because you need really fine-grained oversight of the theater of action and lots and lots of live take and real-time processing. But the theory took everybody off in a whole new direction. Brilliant, man. Brilliant.”

  Adam could feel Lela’s eyes boring into the back of his neck like he had revealed a swastika tattoo there.

  “And now,” Morelia continued blithely, “like I say, people are designing wrist-launched drones. Just like a falconer releasing a bird off his glove. You saw the future, man. You’re one of the real few, you know? You saw the actual manufactured future.”

  Darnel raised his fist to Adam for a bump, and somberly intoned, “Smart shit, man. That was some smart shit.”

  Adam tapped his fist to Darnel’s, and heard the Thinsulate crinkle. Darnel pulled his hand away slowly and splayed his fingers. Exploding fistbump. “Steely-eyed missile man,” Darnel said.

  “Are you sure you don’t have your friend’s email address?” Nanfrid said. “He had a very strange penis, and it made me like women more, but every now and then I like to check. Also he would make a very interesting medical study for when they let me out. Please tell no one. My medical studies are why I’m here. Your genetics must be awful. Did your mother like the zoo more than she should have when you were a child? Did she spend a lot of time there alone?”

  “You should excuse Nanfrid,” Morelia said. “She should probably be in prison.”

  Clough was regarding Adam stonily. “So your job was working out how to blow protesters’ heads off? Fuck me.”

  “And he’s awesome at it. On paper, I mean,” Morelia said.

  “Morry,” Darnel said quietly, considering the last of the juice in his cup. “He walked over from the other side of the aisle.”

  “Oh, wow,” Morelia said. “So that’s where you went. You got a case of the touchy-feelies and went to the other side?”

  “Wouldn’t have put it quite like that,” Adam mumbled.

  “It’s okay, Adam. Not everybody’s cut out for having a real job and defending the future from the forces of darkness.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Lela said.

  Very mildly, Morelia responded with a simple “Fuck you back. I’m guessing you’re from the land of hugs and bunnies too?”

  “I’m from the land of helping make sure living in a city doesn’t kill you while you sit in a room in a city devising ways to kill people.”

  “That’s awfully sweet. You have fun with that while I work with a team to arrange water security so you’re not drinking out of ditches while drawing your little maps.”

  Darnel drained his cup, eyes softly closed, as if he were miles away in a peaceful field.

  “My maps are how clean water gets to your death bunker and has been since people in cities started thinking about how people—”

  Clough stirred to life. “None of you know shit about shit. Money. Money is what pays for us all to be here. Money drives your life, and yours,” he said, pointing at Morelia and Lela in turn, “and every other bloody thing. We are all just greedy fucking monkeys playing with dirt and bones in the shadow of money. Money’s the thing we made that owns us. You’re both wrong and you should both shut up. I’m being held hostage here by the only currency that matters here now, which is Danger Mouse.”

  A broad man wearing three T-shirts, each of which was made for men of different shapes from his, hove into the conversation, bumping into the table. He had trouble moving his legs and his skin was ripe with broken veins. “Money doesn’t own us. The only thing that will own us like that is strong artificial intelligence. Money will just cause it. That’s what you should be worrying about. Idiots with all the money, plowing it into building a thing just because they can. My name is Gaige. I would shake hands, but I fear nanotechnological contamination. I prefer to keep an airgap, you see.”

  “There’s no such thing as ‘nanotechnological contamination,’” Darnel observed, in a mild voice.

  “And you know everything, do you?” Gaige asked. “You know precisely what’s being developed and tested in skunkworks and black labs all over the world?”

  A few more people washed up around their table.

  “I kind of invented the modern end of the world, pal,” Darnel offered.

  “No, you didn’t,” Clough said. “Money. Whatever prehistoric goat-fiddler invented money invented the end of the world. Only the Romans understood what happened. They knew we created a thing like a god, and they gave it a name and a fucking temple. Juno Moneta, mate. ‘Moneta’ from ‘moneres,’ which is Latin for fucking warning. They said it.”

  “We’re kind of getting off the subject I was wanting to explore here,” Adam said. But Clough appeared to have found himself a plastic pulpit there at the table.

  “Money,” Clough declaimed, “is the dark unknown god driving us all towards certain bloody doom. A giant formless thing from beyond space with a million genitals. It’s the thing in the horror films that you should not directly look at lest you go mad and all that bollocks. It’s crushed the world into new shapes and all we want to do is drink its dark milk because that is the nature of its horrible fucking magic. It’s why we’re all here. And whatever happened to Mansfield is about money. And all the things they’re going to come and ask you are all about money. Who profits from what happened last night? And why don’t you care?”

  Voices were raised, disagreeing.

  “Well, if you are all so terribly bloody concerned,” laughed Clough, “why aren’t you talking about it?”

  Arguments burst across the patio like fireworks.

  Clough patted Adam on the shoulder. “There you go, lad. Bring me my Danger Mouse and all is forgiven and forgotten. Danger Mouse is the only god I have now.”

  Adam looked around. Slowly, steadily
, the line between the two sides was being erased by a rolling conversation. In some places, impassioned debate. In others, low-voiced serious discussion with people describing shapes and angles on tabletops with their fingers.

  Even at his own table, wild statements and crazy manifestos were cooking down into forensic explorations of who actually benefited from making a man disappear. They were engaged. Not, Adam realized, engaged with the painful textures of the real, outside world, but with the smaller, more manageable little world of Normal.

  Adam became aware of something at his elbow. He jerked his arm up, instinctively acting as if Dickson was behind him, touching that elbow to guide him away. He wasn’t done, and wasn’t going anywhere. But Dickson wasn’t there. That tiny weight, that sense of presence, was one of those fat bugs. A weevil or a roach or whatever the hell you call them. The tubby little bastard had crawled up the chair and onto his elbow. Adam waved his arm about, trying to shake it off, but it was hanging on. The thing was awkward to get to. Adam was, absurdly, reminded that no healthy human had ever touched their right elbow with their right hand. It was scuttling around his upper arm, and the problem, Adam admitted, was that he didn’t want to touch the damned thing with his bare fingers.

  He found the ridiculous courage to pluck the bug off. He tossed it onto the table, picked up Darnel’s empty cup, and used it as a ram to crush the crawling annoyance. It made a surprisingly satisfying crack.

  Everyone around the table stared at him, and Adam realized that he might have vocalized something in the region of a somewhat gladiatorial “Ha” as he’d done it.

  “What?” Adam said. “I’ve been dodging these fucking bugs and weevils and roaches all day. It’s not like we’re in a Buddhist temple. I’m a pursuit predator at the top of the food chain and this is a fucking insect that was annoying me. I’ve got too much else going on to feel guilty about it, so stop looking at me like that.”