Jonah and Mariko’s Beach House, Sisik Beach, Malaysian Geographic
Wednesday 1 January 2110, 11:40am +8 UTC
Sprawled in a tangle of limbs and blanket, I woke to the buzzing of my Devstick. I reached over, thumbed the Devstick to silent and closing my eyes tried to go back to sleep. But the Devstick had done its work.
Disentangling myself from Mariko, I got up and walked over to the shelves that we had put up on the wall facing the jungle. I pulled out one of her batik wraps and wrapped it around my waist, tying it into a knot below my belly button as I’d seen the locals do. I turned around and faced the sea. Our sleeper, large enough for four people, was against the wall to my left, positioned in the middle. Two windows flanking the bed were now shaded by the Clearfilm shading I’d put up as a temporary measure. Against the opposite wall was the railing guarding the stairs until they reached their zenith a meter up. The kitchen, shower and outlet were on the ground floor.
I went downstairs, treading lightly past Mariko, on the wooden floor that we had sanded together a couple of days ago, and walked over to the bench that we had put up that same day. It was temporary but served the purpose of holding the old-fashioned coffee percolator plus the other cooking machines. I filled the percolator with water and set it onto the electric heat pad. Searching the refrigerator I found some grapes and I ate those waiting for the coffee aroma to hit. As soon as I smelled the coffee I got out the cups and put them on a tray.
I dug the croissants out of the fridge. They weren’t as good as those from the French bakery near our old Env, but they weren’t bad. I put them under the heat and waited. The coffee percolated through and the croissants’ butter melted. I placed everything on a tray, added a tub of raspberry jam, and went back upstairs. Mariko was still sprawled out where I had left her, and I set the tray down on the floor beside the futon in front of the large Devscreen.
I thumbed the Dev on and leant back against the cushions. The late morning sun lent a hard reality to the light outside the windows and I debated getting my eye shades. Laziness winning out, I let the daily data stream flush itself out on the screen.
I flicked over to messages. There were several, mostly from acquaintances wishing me a happy New Year. But one stuck out: the subject was ‘wake up’. I thumbed it and the message read, ‘Jonah, Jonah, wake up’. I frowned and thought that’s weird but then dismissed it as a joke or spam — the sender wasn’t identified which, given that it had reached my personal contact messaging, was a surprise but not unheard of.
I reached over and got the coffee off the tray. Coffee in the morning was a new taste, but I was already a committed devotee. The smell made me hungry and the sweet dark taste made me flick data streams back to the daily feed, my brain kicking into action.
I frowned. Something bothered me but I wasn’t sure what it was. The feeling was like when you’re sure you’ve forgotten something but cannot remember what, and I couldn’t shake it. I spooned some raspberry jam onto a piece of croissant and popped it into my mouth. I felt fidgety. I picked up my Devstick to thumb the Dev again, keeping the volume down. The image changed and I was watching a roundup of global news.
The restlessness grew and suddenly an image of a stark room flashed in my mind. It felt like a dream, only I knew this wasn’t a dream. With those, if I focused, I could recall the remnant images. With this, when I tried, the images hovered just out of reach. I flicked the Dev channel back to messages and scanned the received list again.
I opened it again, and it said the same thing. ‘Jonah, Jonah, wake up’. That was it, the sender a series of numbers and an @ sign that made no sense. It was weird. Another flash hit me with searing clarity: throwing up into a recycler, a golf cart in a tube. I pressed my fingertips into my shut eyes and smoothed out over my eyebrows, pulling taut skin over my cheekbones and down my jaw, breathing deep. It wasn’t from a dream. They were memories, recent memories. Mariko gave a little snore, bringing me back to the present.
I picked up the cup of coffee and walked silently to the sliding door to the deck. Knowing the right side opened with a loud squeak, I swapped my right hand for my left to hold the coffee cup and opened the left side of the clearfilm door on to the deck. Closing the door behind me, I turned and went to the railing, leaning on it, looking out to sea. The midday sun beat harsh on the sand turning observation into a squint, the blue green of the sea easing the glare from the strip of white sand. The gap between the sea and the house was narrow with the morning tide fully risen. The sundial I’d made from a circle of wood found beside the house and mounted on driftwood showed the sun was at its zenith.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and shut my eyes to blackness, swarms of red, a new image. A white room. A naked man sitting on a Biosense. Jibril. Gabriel. The runner. My brother. The thought punched me in the stomach and I threw up the coffee over the railing into the hot white sand. I stared at the spew of coffee as I wiped my mouth and sniffed. It wasn’t a dream.
I turned to reenter the house but seeing Mariko lying on the floor, froze. The runner Gabriel was my brother. Somehow I knew that was true, and then another memory. A loud laugh, Gabriel sitting on a sleeper talking to me.
How will she react? I couldn’t begin to guess. I hoped favorably — that is she’d believe me and help me. Help me for what? I couldn’t trust my mind. What had seemed real was not, and reality was being displaced one chunk of memory at a time. One chunk of memory at a time, where had I heard that? Gabriel had said it, on the Moon. The sun beat viciously down on the top of my head. I walked across the deck and slid the door open, it protested with a loud squeak and Mariko woke, coming upright, shielding her eyes from the glare and looking at me from under the shadow of her forearm.
I walked over to her and sat down, leaning my back against the edge of the sleeper.
She said, “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
I leaned my head onto the sleeper and, staring at the ceiling, groaned. My head hurt. It felt as if my brain had swollen and wouldn’t fit in my skull, pressing against the sides. I brought my hands up to my temples and pushed in on both sides with knuckled fists, groaning again. Another memory came. Gabriel sitting on the sleeper opposite me, talking, and this time the images came with sound. Gabriel saying, ‘It isn’t as bad as it sounds. At the beginning you will think that you are remembering a dream, but over the course of a couple of hours, the details of the dream will be filled in with ever-increasing clarity. Your mind will return again and again to the little reservoir of information that I’ll plant and the signals, travelling from the outback of your brain, will come in ever-larger memory chunks, until you will reach the moment where this description will be relayed to you word for word, complete with the images of me and this room’.
“Jonah, Jonah, what’s wrong? Talk to me.”
The pain disappeared as quickly as it had come. I dropped my hands to the floor and looked at her.
“I’m OK. It’s all right,” I said, and reached up with a hand to stroke her cheek. She made to kiss me, but I held her off with my hand dropping to her chest and pushing lightly. “No, no kiss, not unless you want to taste vomit.”
“What, you threw up? Is it a hangover or what? You hardly had anything alky last night.”
“It’s not that. Look we have to talk, but let’s go for a swim. OK?”
“What, now? It’s midday, and way too hot.”
“Come on, trust me. It’ll be fine. Just follow me. OK?” I got up and, taking the wrap off, put on the swim outers that were lying on the bed. Without saying another word I picked up a waterproof Devstick I had and headed outside, walking down the stairs and onto the beach. I strode quickly over the hot white sand, a glance over my shoulder showed Mariko following, and I dived into the sea.
I was stroking hard in a crawl for the cliff that marked the southern end of the bay. It was about two hundred meters away from me and I had a good lead, but she was the stronger swimmer and she caught me up as I was nearly at the cliff. The waves slapped against its base. She stopped and treaded water. I kept going and then when nearly at the cliff I dived.
In front of me, through the sunlight-filtered green water, I saw that the blunt black edge of the cliff stopped short of the bottom. I dived for the gap that was about a meter wide. Coming up through the gap into a small cave, I climbed up onto a rock. I unfolded the Devstick in front of me, the white light from the screen guiding Mariko to me. She pulled herself up the dry rock face and sat down on the ledge, leaning against the smooth dry rock wall. Marks on the wall indicated that it was man-made or at least enlarged by someone.
“This place is amazing. When did you find this?”
I held up a hand while I caught my breath and panted out, “The first day we moved here, when I went for a walk. I wanted to see what was around the corner of the bluff. It was low tide. I saw the top of the gap and went to look. When the tide’s low you can just see the top of the entrance but you have to be looking for it.”
“OK, so what’s this all about?” Mariko asked, taking deep breaths from the exertion of the swim and holding onto the edge of the ledge. With both hands pushing down, she moved her bum further in.
“When we came up here, you told me what had happened on the Moon. You told me that you couldn’t live a lie, not with me, right?”
“Yes, right, and so?” She said this with a defensive tone in her voice. She’d thought the subject closed and forgotten, and now here it was again, with all the insecurity attached reloading in pallets on her heart. I saw the look and reached out to take her hand, cutting through the light of the Devstick.
“No, this time it isn’t about you. It’s about me, and what happened to me on the Moon, and it’s about what that means to you. I came here because I am scared and what I have to tell you places both of us in extreme danger, the kind of danger where you lose your life or get mind-wiped. Before I continue, let me ask you, do you really want to hear this?”
“Jonah, right now I could have your seed fertilizing me. Of course I want to hear it. Good or bad, in my world you come before everything.”
I smiled at her statement and squeezed her hand. I took a deep breath and blew it out hard, drawing my legs up to sit cross-legged beside her, the Devscreen a block of white in between, backdrop for my hand holding hers. “OK, what happened on the Moon was caused by what happened on a Thursday in December on Earth. It was the 5th of December, in the morning.”
It took me an hour, but I told her everything. Right up to the point that I’d been hypnotized by Gabriel and was thus able to avoid the consequences of the ad hoc Truth Treatment which she’d told me about.
She let out a deep breath, her cheeks ballooning for a moment, then she turned her face to me and said, “Wow Jonah. You really know how to show a girl an exciting time, don’t you.”
“You believe me then?”
“Yes, of course I do. I wish I didn’t, but I think everything you’ve told me happened as you’ve said. I can see it too, the planning, the execution. I was pulled off the Gabriel case after my meeting with you, and when you were cleared of any involvement. Since then I’ve only seen the updates on the feed, but there’s always some level of rumor within SOE, and the rumor was that the runner had gotten away clean, not traceable. But yes, I see your part and why they need you.”
“Sir Thomas’s move out of UNPOL, and the revised Tag Law — the things I penned for that eloquently delivered resignation speech — it’s happening now. They’re making their move.”
“Yes, but from where I sit, Gabriel’s made his move too. Look, you’re in, you’re your uncle’s writer and have a secure line into his base Dev. That puts you in his inner circle first degree, right?”
“Yes, it does. I’ve got no idea where to start.”
“We can work that out. But I think the first thing we can do is to review the information that Gabriel put on your Devstick and tell Gabriel that you’ve remembered.”
“Won’t that be risky?”
“Not if we just reply that you’re awake.”
“Thanks for using ‘we’. You’ve no idea how good that makes me feel right now.”
She smiled and, leaning forward, kissed me. She said, “Look, we both know this is really serious, but we can work this out.”
“You can’t tell anyone at SOE about this. We have no idea who we can trust and who is a Hawk.”
“No, I won’t tell anyone. If Cochran and Sir Thomas are Hawks, you can bet that UNPOL and SOE are riddled with them. It wouldn’t be hard to manipulate the selection boards. I’ll have to stay clear of Cochran though. With her telepathic ability she could probe my mind and discover what we know.”
“Gabriel said that telepathy works best when both subjects cooperate and are within a few meters of each other. That doesn’t mean she couldn’t probe you without your knowing. It just means that you’ll have to try and avoid her and think innocent thoughts when she’s around. When’s your next security clearance check?”
“Not till March,” she said, frowning, thinking hard. “And that’s our deadline. The Popvote for the Tag law comes then. March the 15th, right? So that’s the time frame. We’ve got at least two and a half months and during that time I can be in SOE, working on the inside. After that and before my next security clearance check, I’ll take leave.”
“Won’t that be suspicious?”
She smiled at me with a sideways look over her shoulder. “Not if I’m pregnant. I love your new, well, old, name, by the way. Mark Anthony Zumar. It’s beautiful.”
I smiled back. “You better keep calling me Jonah for now. If anyone heard you calling me Mark — ”
She cut me off with a finger to my lips and a stern look on her face. “Don’t worry, when we leave this cave, you’re Jonah, but we’re going to have to get you trained up in some of the basics of my craft and we’re going to have to get you fit. No more croissants for you.”
“After today, OK. After today.”
“Sure, we’ll start tomorrow. And then I’ll set you up with a routine to follow.”
I nodded and said, “OK. Come on, let’s get out of here. I’m getting cold,” and folding the Devstick, the cave plunged into darkness — a thin sliver of light coming from the underwater entrance to the sea. I heard her slip into the water with a small splash, and slipped silently into the water next to her. We kicked off together and dived down, back into the light. Coming out of the cave I almost swam into a black-tip reef shark, which quickly swam away, frightened of me. Swimming with sharks, I thought. We’re swimming with the sharks.