TWENTY-FOUR
NOSTOS
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Ω
The quality of Folio Ω deteriorates substantially farther down the page. The final five lines are severely lacunose and only isolated words could be recovered. Translation by Zeno Ninis.
… they brought down the jars and the singers gathered…
… ·[young men?]· danced, the shepherds ·[piped?]·…
… ·[platters]· were passed, bearing hard bread…
… rind of pork. I rejoiced to see the ·[meager?]· feast…
… four lambs, each bawling for its mother…
… ·[rain?]· and mud…
… the women came…
… old spindly ·[crone]· took ·[my hand?]·…
… the lamps…
… still dancing, ·[spinning?]·…
… ·[breathless?]·…
… everyone dancing…
… dancing…
BOISE, IDAHO
2057–2064
Seymour
His work-release apartment has a kitchenette that overlooks a sun-hammered hillside of rabbitbrush. It’s August and the sky is beige with smoke and everything wavers with heat blurs.
Six mornings a week he rides a self-driving bus to an office park where he crosses an acre of broiling asphalt to a sprawling stucco Ilium-owned low-rise. In the lobby a polyurethane raised-relief Earth, twelve feet in diameter, turns on a pedestal, dust gathered in the clefts of the mountains. A faded placard on the wall says, Capturing the Earth. He works twelve hours a day with teams of engineers testing next-generation iterations of the Atlas treadmill and headset. He’s a ropy and pallid man who prefers to eat prepackaged sandwiches at his desk rather than visit the cafeteria, and who finds peace only in work, in accumulating mile after mile on the treadmill like some Dark Age pilgrim walking off a great penance.
Occasionally he orders a new pair of shoes, identical to the pair he has worn out. Besides food, he buys little else. He messages Natalie Hernandez once a week, on Saturdays, and most of the time she messages back. She teaches Latin and Greek to reluctant high schoolers, has two sons, a self-driving minivan, and a dachshund named Dash.
Sometimes he removes his headset, steps off his treadmill, and blinks out over the heads of the other engineers, and lines from Zeno’s translation come winging back:… Across its surface spread the heavens and the earth, all its lands scattered, all its beasts, and in the center…
He turns fifty-seven, fifty-eight; the insurgent inside him lives still. Every night when he gets home, he boots his terminal, disables its connectivity, and gets to work. Simmering on servers all over the world, the harvest of raw, high-density Atlas images remains: columns of migrants fleeing Chennai, families packed onto tiny boats outside Rangoon, a tank on fire in Bangladesh, police behind Plexiglas shields in Cairo, a Louisiana town filled with mud—the calamities he spent years expunging from the Atlas are all still there.
Over the course of months, he constructs little blades of code so sharp and refined that when he slips them into the Atlas object code, the system cannot detect them. Inside the Atlas, all over the world, he hides them as little owls: owl graffiti, an owl-shaped drinking fountain, a bicyclist in a tuxedo with an owl mask. Find one, touch it, and you peel back the sanitized, polished imagery to reveal the original truth beneath.
In Miami, six potted ferns stand outside a restaurant, a little owl sticker stuck to planter number three. Touch the owl and the ferns evaporate; a smoldering car materializes; four women lay crumpled on the pavement.
Whether users discover his little owls, he does not risk finding out. The Atlas is fading from the company’s priorities anyway; whole regions of the Boise complex are being devoted to perfecting and miniaturizing the treadmill and headset for other projects, in other departments. But Seymour keeps constructing his owls, night after night, smuggling them into the object code, unweaving some of the lies he has spent the day weaving, and for the first time since finding the severed wing of Trustyfriend on the side of the road, he feels better. Calmer. Less frightened. Less like he has something to outrun.
* * *
Three days at a new resort on the lake in Lakeport. Airfare, all meals included, any water sports they want—all on him, for as long as his savings hold out. Families welcome. He relies on Natalie to handle the communication. At first she says that she does not think all five will come, but they do: Alex Hess and two sons travel from Cleveland; Olivia Ott flies in from San Francisco; Christopher Dee drives up from Caldwell; Rachel Wilson comes all the way from southwest Australia with her four-year-old grandson.