“The outside world still doesn’t know this place exists,” Munira told him. “Apparently the Thunderhead has kept it a blind spot to everyone else.”
Faraday gave her a dubious look. “You’re telling me that those supply ships don’t bring stories home about the place that’s not supposed to exist? “
Munira shrugged. “The Thunderhead has always had projects in far-flung places. No one who’s come has left yet, and the people here have no idea where they even are, much less what they’re building.”
“And what are they building?”
Munira took her time in answering. “I don’t know,” she told him. “But I have my suspicions. I’ll share them with you when they feel a little less foolish … and when you end your prolonged pouting.”
“Pouting is a passing thing,” he told her dismissively. “What I have is a mind-set. I will not suffer this world again. It has done me no good.”
“But you’ve done much good for it,” she reminded him.
“And received no reward for my efforts, only pain.”
“I didn’t think you were doing it to be rewarded.”
Faraday stood up from the table, indicating that the meal and the conversation were over. “When you come back next week, bring tomatoes. It’s been a long time since I had a good tomato.”
Easy instructions for tamper-resistant
security pack
Box 1: Confirmation of surname (please initial)
Box 2: Confirmation of given name and middle initial, if applicable (please initial)
Box 3: Please place the tip of your right index finger here, and hold in place until the space turns green
Box 4: Please refer to lancet instructions
Lancet – instructions for use
Wash hands with soap and water. Dry thoroughly.
Select a slightly off-center fingertip site.
Insert lancet into lancing device, remove cap, and use.
Apply drop of blood to the space indicated in box 3 of security form.
Recap lancet; discard appropriately.
20
Spiral Logic
Loriana Barchok had never felt so light-headed, so dizzy. She tried to wrap her head around what she now knew, but found her mind stretched too thin to even try. She had to sit down, but the moment she did, she found herself standing again and pacing, then staring at the wall, then sitting down once more.
A package had arrived that morning. It required a thumbprint ID to open, as well as a smear of blood to confirm her DNA. Loriana didn’t even know such packaging existed. Who needed anything to be that secure?
The first page was a distribution list. All the people who had received a copy of the enclosed documents. In any other endeavor of this size there would be hundreds.
But this package had a distribution list of one.
What was the Thunderhead thinking? It truly must have malfunctioned if it was sending an eyes-only high-priority document like this to her. Didn’t it know that she was terrible at keeping secrets? Of course it knew! It knew everything about everyone. So the question was, did it send the package to her, fully expecting her to blab about it to everyone? Or did it truly trust her to be the sole keeper of this hidden flame?
Is this what the Toll felt like, she wondered, the moment he realized he was the only one to whom the Thunderhead still spoke? Did he get dizzy, too? Did he alternate between pacing and sitting and staring into space? Or did the Thunderhead choose someone more wise and worldly for its voice on Earth? Someone who could take such an awesome responsibility in stride.
They had only heard of the Toll through the hearsay of arriving workers. Some people believed the Thunderhead spoke to him; others didn’t and thought it was just typical Tonist madness.
“Oh, he’s real,” Sykora had told her. “I met him once – with Hilliard and Qian.” Which made anything he said about the encounter suspect, since Sykora was the only one of the three still alive. “He’s the one who sent us here – gave us these blasted coordinates. Of course that was before all that ‘holy man’ business – that all came later. He seemed rather ordinary if you ask me.”
And you’d know ordinary, Loriana wanted to say. But she didn’t say anything and let Sykora get on with his business.
Loriana was not offered the job as Sykora’s assistant when they first began to settle in a year ago. That went to another junior agent, who lavished praise on Sykora and doted on him like an overachieving valet. Well, if Loriana had been offered the job, she would have refused it. After all, everything they did here was nothing but an illusion of employment. No one was being paid, not even the Basic Income Guarantee. People worked because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves, and with ships arriving regularly now, there was always something that needed to be done. The former Nimbus agents joined construction crews or organized social events. One even opened up a bar that had quickly become the go-to spot after a long, hot day.
And no one needed money on the atoll, because the supply ships arrived with everything they might want or need.
Sykora, of course, put himself in charge of distribution – as if deciding who got corn and who got beans on any given day was a meaningful display of power.
From the very beginning, the Thunderhead’s will had to be deduced from its actions. It began with that solitary plane that flew overhead, almost too high for anyone to notice. Then that was followed by the first ships.
When those ships appeared on the horizon, the former Nimbus agents were elated. At last, after nearly a month making do with the atoll’s limited resources, the Thunderhead had heard their plea, and they were being rescued!
Or so they thought.
The ships that arrived were all self-piloting, so there was no one to ask for permission to board – and once the supplies had been off-loaded, no one was welcome on the ships. Of course anyone was allowed back on – the Thunderhead rarely forbade people from doing anything – but the moment they boarded, their ID gave off an alarm and flashed a bright blue warning even bigger than the red “unsavory” mark. Anyone who stayed onboard was marked for immediate supplanting – and in case anyone thought it was a bluff, there was a supplantation console right there, just inside the gangway, ready to erase their minds and overwrite their brains with new, artificial memories. Memories of someone who didn’t know where they’d just been.
That made most people race off the ship even faster than they’d boarded. Only once they had run from the dock did the mark on their IDs go away. Even so, there were several of Loriana’s coworkers who decided to leave on those ships anyway, choosing to become someone else, anywhere else in the world, than to remain on Kwajalein.
Loriana had a childhood friend who was supplanted. Loriana didn’t know it until she ran into him in a coffee shop one day, hugged him, and chattered away, asking where life had taken him after graduating high school.
“I’m sorry,” he’d said politely. “I actually don’t know you. Whoever you think I am, I’m not him anymore.”
Loriana had been stunned and embarrassed. So much so that he insisted on buying her coffee and sitting down for a chat anyway. Apparently he was now a dog breeder with a full set of fake memories of a lifetime spent in the NorthernReach region, raising huskies and malamutes for the Iditarod.