‘The coincidence engine is starting to work. I saw it with my own eyes.’
The Intercept was from nobody. It had been more or less sieved from static. Shortwave frequencies, an echo of an echo. The original signal was, they thought, perhaps, a fax; it still retained some formatting features. But its origin and its destination were unknown, and the very fact that they found it continued to be a source of bafflement. It was a one in a million shot: the equivalent of getting a crossed line and hearing your best friend’s voice from the other side of the world.
It wasn’t even a term the Directorate’s officers had been specifically searching for. But ‘coincidence engine’ was close enough to send up a flag: they’d been combing for ‘probability’, ‘paradox’ (since that had been the inaccurate but hard-to-shake term that had briefly attached to the project), ‘singularity’, ‘Heisenberg’ (in variant spellings) and a half-dozen other key terms and areas. Red Queen, who made no secret of not being a scientist, explained to the Directorate’s staff that they were looking for ‘weird stuff and people who seem to know about miracles’.
But then that was more or less a description of what they’d been doing ever since those wackos around the second Gulf War revived the Directorate of the Extremely Improbable. Red Queen would have preferred to work in the State Department, and Red Queen had made this noisily clear – which was almost certainly why Red Queen had the job. In this department, producer capture was not a good idea.
But the arrival of the Intercept, coming so soon after the hurricanes and the satellite photograph, had seemed too much of a… well, there it was.
Someone had flagged it, and now it was here.
The hurricane blew through the junkyard and it made a plane. I saw it. First the gathering wind, and then the sky was filled with metal clashing and screaming and spinning. Rivets swarmed. Currents of air dashed and twirled plates, chairs, tin cans, girders and joists, pinging and banging off rocks. Noise like you never heard. Unholy howl. Rushing and screaming.
Knock, knock, knock and the metal clashing and curving and denting and sticking with great screams. Beyond conception. Beyond seeing. The panel of a trailer. The corrugated sides of a container cracking and flattening. A flash in the middle of it, right in the middle, of a tiny man suspended in air, pedalling his legs like he’s treading water and his tiny mouth open and his eyes little dots of terror. Something forming around him.
And finally the wind calmed and the thing was made, the metal miracle. Water running in beads down its flanks under the heavy sky. To the west, the cloud broke and in the distance the sky was bright, like through a tunnel. There was a double rainbow. And on the other side, the sky was a sheet of black. A terrible promise.
The rotors of the engines were idling in the last of the wind. And sitting high in the air, strapped safely in the cockpit, was the pilot – mouth opening and closing, eyes wide, staring into the enormous sky. It works. I saw it.
Its author, Red Queen reflected, sounded about as well adjusted as that guy who eats flies in the Dracula movie. But the thing about the plane had caught their attention.
And there had been a hurricane. This they knew. Hurricane Jody had moved through the Gulf of Mexico for three days in the first week of August, feeding on the warm air rolling off the coast in the unending heatwave. It refused to blow itself out and refused to come ashore.
Occasionally, like a big dog twitching its tail, it brushed against the land. In the early morning of the 24th, a kiss-curl of the fatal weather system – it looked like a wisp of cloud on the satellite image – had flattened four miles of the Florida Keys.
The contents of two recently evacuated trailer parks had been lifted sideways, chewed to splinters in the hurricane’s mouth, and sprayed seaward like refuse from an industrial woodchipper. A film crew from Fox News went with them.
The hurricane’s retreat had taken a near-perfect hemispherical bite out of the coastline. Thousands of tons of yellow sand were pulled into the sea. Small boats sailed inland through the air and anchored among defoliated palm trees.
The hurricane had retreated, circled at sea, ambled south and west.
It came ashore again sixty-one hours later, on a stretch of coastline where the civic contingency planners had not expected it. The centre of the storm had started moving north-west at twenty knots. Its leading edge sucked a renowned Louisiana gambler bodily through the window of a riverboat casino, never to be seen again, and a steel roulette ball punched four inches into the tree stump to which the boat was moored. The storm’s left flank had sideswiped a single loop of the coastal highway, gridlocked with late-departing refugees, killing forty-eight motorists and 122 pedestrians.
Then, abruptly, it changed direction again and headed back out to sea, brooded.
And then, on the night of August 10th, it had headed inland again, and it did not stop at the coast. It had made landfall east of Mobile and headed up and over the delta with savage speed.