I sipped my drink. My throat was suddenly very dry. “That sounds like the sort of technology people would want to seize for the greater good. Nationalize it, make the code open source. We’ll build in the safest places, firm up the buildings and infrastructure in the vulnerable areas, make sure everyone is protected.”
Riley laughed. “You think the government wants such a thing? Think of all the money it would cost them to make the Bay Area, or any place, safe from quakes. The government can’t even handle hurricanes, and those roll up out of the Gulf of Mexico like clockwork. We need a free-market solution.”
“I don’t mean the bourgeois government, Riley, Jesus Christ. Where’s Panagiotis?”
“The car will take you to him, if you want.”
“Why are you doing all this?” I asked. “Why did you bring me here, why are we even having this conversation?”
“I always wanted to thank you for killing your father,” Riley said. His tone was bland. “I’ve wanted to thank you for a long time.” He held out his arms, like he wanted a hug. “Golden Dawn Seliger!”
“Well rehearsed,” I said. “How do I know you’re not going to send the car off a cliff if I get into it, or just have it run over Pan with me in it, to frame me?”
“I don’t believe in—”
“Force or fraud, yeah yeah.”
“What I mean is that there’s no need for me to do any such thing, as I’ve already won. Thanks to you, really. Once your father was out of the way, I was able to truly cultivate an understanding of magick. It made me what I am. Your example made me what I am. Every man and every woman is a star, and you’ve been my guiding light for a long time.”
“Ever since I managed to get away from you.” I looked pointedly at his arm, at his turtleneck.
“Yes, but now there’s no reason to chase you. I’m everywhere. Even if you don’t own a cell phone, everyone you encounter does, and if you talk to them, I hear it. You ever step in front of a security camera, or enter someone’s house, or pass through an automatic door, I’m there with you. I told you, I’ve won. Take the car, collect your son. If you’re smart, you’ll send him to school and he can make something of himself. That’s better than whatever you were planning to make of him.”
“A god,” I said. “Thanks for the juice, Riley.”
“It’s matched to your metabolism. Yoga suits you. You’ve slimmed down. Looks good. Are you the local occult MILF?”
“Don’t neg me, bro,” I said, and he laughed.
In the car, I slid into the driver’s seat. The mechanisms were strong; you weren’t supposed to be able to wrestle the steering wheel away from the AI, or press the pedals against the will of the machine. But I had spent years practicing my asanas, tensing and flexing my muscles, exercising my tendons. It’s isometrics, powered by will. I sank into the seat, lowered my chakra, put my hands on the wheel, and gripped with all my strength.
Driving the car was like trying to navigate the RV with the emergency brake on, but I did it. I could feel where the car wanted to turn, and assert my will. It was a long crawl through winding hills, but at least there was no chance of coincidentally-on-purpose heading off a cliff. Of course, Riley was actively monitoring my route; he knew everything about me, like a proper stalker, except for my thoughts.
I was telling the truth when I said to Riley that I’d know if Pan were dead. My lie was one of omission — I knew Pan was dead. I felt it when I’d told Lindsey the story from Plutarch. I hadn’t even meant to; it had just come out of me. My True Will.
I let the car leave the road and take a recently carved dirt path into the hills. The Mercedes had been modified for rugged terrain, and I let it do most of the work. The car took the long way around, down through Siesta Valley, then back north on a route parallel to Grizzly Peak Boulevard, until I was back in South Berkeley, and Claremont Canyon. In the woods I could see the search parties at it again, those little lights, but they were unnecessary.
The car’s headlamps illuminated Pan’s body. He was laid out on a blue tarp, his flesh white as bone, horse flies and night birds evacuating in the glare. There was a neat hole in the middle of his forehead, an open third eye. The engine idled, the passenger-side door unlocked, and I had to scootch across both seats to step outside.
My poor son.
My poor dead god. A sacrifice I made, of a god, not to a god.
Of course Riley didn’t do it. He just hired someone and gave him the order to shoot whoever came close. Property rights. That it was a child, my child, was just one of those coincidences that any occultist will tell you do not exist. There are no coincidences. And I was there now, to be found by the search parties and their smartphones, the insane and abusive mother who killed her own child. And they’d only be half wrong. There was probably a gun nearby, with my fingerprints lifted from my old arrest records, artfully decorating the grip.
The machine stood next to Pan’s body, like an obelisk. It was a bit like a cell phone tower in appearance, definitely a sensor of some sort, and not an “earthquake machine.”
I, however, was an earthquake machine. And after long practice, I was immune to pain. I kneeled before my son, and sat into the thunderbolt asana. I tensed every muscle in my body, forced my Muladhara chakra down into my coccyx and deep into the hill, deeper than Riley’s futures machine had been sunk, and focused my will, calling out to the restive Hayward Fault.
And O, she answered me.
Still Life, Reviving
by Kimn Neilson
Ocean View
I have loved leaving things behind: lovers, cities, jobs. Leaving before the end of things, the nasty part, the annoying part. I just bought a computer, my first. You tap the track pad with two fingers and a little box comes up. You can tap “back” with one finger and it returns to the previous page. Back, back, back, though what I liked to do was skip forward, forward, forward.
But then something lies in wait for you, doesn’t it? Life itself taps back, back, back; time itself wheels around and bites you.
Hired for a weird job, that’s how I met you.
I came into town too broke for a room so I slept behind a building on the campus that first night. Next night I was drinking one long beer at a place called Marvell’s, sitting at the bar reading — it was Giles Goat-Boy — and you spilled my beer and apologized a little too much and bought me another and then two more and at the end of the night I was in your bed in a rooming house down the street and had a particularly unspecific bit of work for the next day.
In the morning you bought me eggs and toast at the Cecil — it just closed only last month — and we drank lattes and I began to feel situated. I relaxed a little. There you go. See? I go back, back, back, and I can trace exactly where it went the wrong way, where it went, as they say, down.
We walked around the corner and got into your beat-up truck with a Six-Pac on the back. I noticed the gun rack sans guns running behind our heads. The truck was old but the interior was clean — no wrappers, old coffee cups, not even dust or dirt. I felt even more keenly how stinky I must be getting — well, that night I’d have money for a laundromat.
The work was at the marina, you said, simple stuff. Shifting boxes, cleaning. Ever work around boats? I’d done a little trawling in Alaska, like everybody, and before that stewarded on a cruise ship, but that was like waiting tables. Besides, I got fired and put off at the next port, hence Alaska, hence the trawler.