It was ugly. Unpaintably ugly.
Hennessy went on. “The very act of disruption instead becomes the opposite, ruption, the act of maintaining the status quo, because the status quo has now become chaos. Now, if one wants to prove themselves a game changer, they instead must restore order. What a mindfuck! To—”
“Are you saying that you need a break after this?” Bryde interrupted.
“I was making some psychological observations. As conversation. To fill the time.”
“What do you feel?” Bryde asked.
Ronan let out a noisy breath as he drummed his fingers against the window. He had been getting more and more restless these past few days. Knees jiggling. Fingers drumming. Pacing. Jumping on top of shit. Jumping off of shit. He dreamt when they needed to dream. Otherwise he didn’t sleep at all. Hennessy thought this game of dominos was changing him. Or perhaps revealing him.
“It’s fucking weird,” he said.
It was hard to feel the true strength of the ley line here, because there were so many things Hennessy now knew obscured it. Low unshielded telephone lines, standing oily water puddled in pitted asphalt, houses crowded on top of each other with wires trailing from them like guts. Satellite dishes sprouted like dark mushrooms from some of the roofs. There was something else, though, that made it truly ugly, and Hennessy couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Maybe it was just her mood.
“Hennessy,” Bryde said sharply, turning from the passenger seat to look at her in the back. “What do you feel?”
“What Ronan Lynch said,” Hennessy replied. “Something’s janky.”
Bryde said, “This will be a difficult one. Three large buildings will need to be leveled. I don’t know how well we will be able to dream when we are at the site, so we may need to use things we already have. We will need to stay focused. I may need you to do this one on your own. I don’t know yet.”
Ronan caught Hennessy’s eye in the rearview mirror; his thick eyebrows went up. This was unusual. She shrugged.
“In fact,” Bryde said, “I need one of you to drive us there, just in case.”
Need. Need one of you to drive. Bryde didn’t need them for anything. They needed him.
But this evening, Bryde pulled Burrito into an uneven parking lot in front of a closed lumber yard. As Ronan and Hennessy briefly scuffled over who would drive in his place—Hennessy won (Ronan was distracted keeping Chainsaw inside the car)—Bryde climbed into the backseat.
After the door shut behind him, Ronan hissed, “What’s going on here?”
“Do I look like his minder?” Hennessy replied. “You ask him.”
They got back in. They did not ask him. No one said anything as they drove through the ugly town and through a few minutes of patchily occupied countryside. The rutted road suddenly ended at a dark, freshly paved entrance to a corporate facility of some kind. A very clean white sign read, simply, DIGITAL SOLUTIONS.
Hennessy glanced into the rearview mirror at Bryde. In the green-yellow light she saw only that he was sitting perfectly still as he looked out the window, his eyes squinted as if against sun.
DIGITAL SOLUTIONS turned out to be a complex of three unassuming but enormous white buildings in the middle of a well-tended parking lot. In every way it seemed less ugly than the town they’d left behind. Neatly mowed grass that seemed too green for this time of year. Black, black asphalt that was level as glass. Clean white sides on the buildings, each printed with the same ambiguous words: DIGITAL SOLUTIONS.
Hennessy took the opportunity of the empty parking lot to do a few donuts in Burrito, hoping to make her ugly mood dizzy enough to fall down and not get back up again, but eventually she had to stop. Her ears were ringing.
She yawned to clear them, then yawned again. They kept ringing. It was a little like when you’d hit your head and you were struggling against vertigo. It was also a little like when you’d left the television on but turned the sound down. It was also a little like a refrigerator.
She yanked up the parking brake. The snow floated like ash in front of the windshield and melted on the fake-looking grass. Her ears continued to ring. “What’s that sound?”
Ronan said, “Fuck if I know. I thought it was me.”
The sound continued. It was a strange sound, a yellow-green sound that matched the yellow-green afternoon. There were no cars in the lot. No people. No signs of life. Just the ragged clouds and the sickly color bleeding at the horizon. Those clumpy snowflakes that melted straight to grime.
Outside the car, the sound was even louder. It was the unending, unchanging nature of it that was the most harrowing, she thought. It never varied, so it became part of you. Pressing in, pressing out. From the air. From the ground. From the buildings. Ronan’s raven flapped into the air briefly before returning to the asphalt to stand stupidly, shaking her head like something clung to it.
Ronan joined Hennessy, and they stood shoulder to shoulder, eyeing the buildings, the parking lot lights, the identical buildings with their identical lobby entrances made of black glass, all simple as a child’s drawing. The sound continued to come from everywhere. It seemed obvious there was nothing living here. One could not ask for a more complete opposite to the silent, vital forest around Ilidorin.
“What powers the world, bro?” Hennessy said, suddenly understanding what she was looking at. “Zeros and ones. Memes and giggles. Forums and Fortnite. Right? It’s a—what do you call it. Data farm. Server farm.”
“A what?”
“I’ll bet you my fine ass that inside those buildings are banks and banks of servers,” Hennessy said. “Facebook-Instabook-Twitterbook-Tiktokbook-Tumblrbook. This is one of their hive minds. I could be wrong but I don’t think I am. I saw an art exhibit once about a guy who tried to sue a sound.”
“Servers make noise?” Ronan asked. He answered his own question. “Cooling fans.”
“That’s it, Mister Fixit.”
“I can’t dream here,” Ronan said, matter-of-fact. “It would be a shitshow of epic proportions. We have to take it down with what we already have. Too bad you gave your sword to the Mods. Do we need to take down the whole building or just everything in it? Bryde?”
But Bryde didn’t reply. He hadn’t joined them at the front of the car.
They turned to look.
The car’s rear door hung open. Bryde had made it out, but not by much. He was sort of crouched in the diffuse shadow of the open car door. Sort of standing. His body was curved in a question mark. It quivered. His fingers were cages over his ears.
He was screaming.
Or at least he looked like he was screaming. With his hands over his ears he screamed and screamed again, but without sound. It was all the agony of a howl without any of the noise, which somehow made it worse. It was like the sound of the server farm and the scream were a thing happening to Bryde; it made him a different person. Somehow less present. Projected in from a different location.
They did not need to be told that it was hurting him.
What do you hear?
Ronan seemed shaken, too, but it was with a voice full of bravado that he turned his face away from Bryde and said, “It’s up to us, then.”
“We can just go,” Hennessy said. “Leave this untouched. Tell him we did it. Maybe he won’t notice.”