Jesse’s voice echoed down the stairs: “All right, let’s go-go Power Rangers! Coffee’s ready. Let’s see what these bad boys of yours can do.”
Mugs in hand, we followed him up to the flight deck, and watched Jesse and Anya set a drone on the launcher. They had already dispatched the USVs: the trails of their dozen wakes were clearly visible as they swam out through a sea as flat as mirrored glass. Soon they would dive to the seabed and follow its contours, searching with their cameras and metal detectors, and occasionally surfacing to communicate with the active UAV. It in turn would relay their findings, and its birds-eye view, to the Ark Royale. When the USVs ran out of juice, they bobbed up to the surface, where their solar panels feasted on the tropical sun. In that way they could theoretically operate continuously for weeks, with a new oversight UAV sent up every six hours.
Jesse started up the drone’s propeller, then launched it. The launcher was basically a hand-cranked giant rubber band that made an amusing whang! sound as it catapulted the aircraft into the sky.
“We better keep the test run short,” Jesse said, after launching the third UAV. “Some weather on the way in couple hours. They said maybe a tropical storm. But don’t worry, this tub’s tougher than she looks.”
After we breakfasted on fried eggs and plantains, I stayed and watched the UAV data on Anya’s laptop while Sophie changed into her swimsuit and Jesse washed up. The drones had already gone off their suggested course, following the electronic equivalent of a hunch. I knew their neural networks weren’t even a thousandth the size of a human brain, but it was still slightly eerie to see them doing their own thing.
“How do they look?” Anya asked from behind me.
I twitched; she had crept up as silently as a cat. “They’ve either gone rogue or they’re on to something.”
She pulled up a chair and sat crosslegged, watching the screen. “What do we do if they’ve gone rogue?”
“I was kidding. I’m sure they’re fine.”
“But if they did, what would you do?”
“Hope that you had good insurance?” I joked.
I glanced over at the frown on Anya’s perfect face, and then quickly away, acutely aware that her hand on her armrest was only inches away from my arm, and that the bikini atop the taut curves of her flawless body made her look more naked than naked. She was such a walking male fantasy that just being near her caused my mating drive to kick into a combination of fifth gear and panic mode, as all the neon lights and bells and fireworks of my animal brain went off at once. It was like all other women ever were flawed experimental chaff on the road to creating Anya Azaryeva. Except that I didn’t actually like her much. Jesse’s claim that she was really sweet was hard to believe with the proverbial cold light of morning illuminating her even colder expression.
“So how did you guys meet?” I asked, on the grounds that if she was talking I didn’t have to. “Jesse’s never told me the story.”
“In New York City.” Even her faint accent made me dizzy. “A hacker convention called Hope.”
“Really? What year? I went to Hope once.”
“Three years ago. The last Hope.” I shook my head. “I went with a gay friend of mine, he pretended to be straight and I pretended to be his girlfriend. I had to do things like that when I was single. Or spend all my time fending off men.”
I wondered what it was like to be so ultimately desirable, to know that everyone who saw you wanted to either be you or be with you. She spoke like it was ultimately a burden. I had my doubts. I wondered why someone so beautiful that she could get pretty much anything she wanted, just by asking, had bothered to master network engineering, an extremely antisocial field. But maybe that was exactly why she had bothered. To be judged and glorified for ability instead of appearance, for once.
“But at Hope Jesse and I met. And. Well. What is the expression? There were sparks.” A girlish, mischievous smile that made her look like an entirely different woman briefly lit up her face. I wondered if that was a glimpse of the Anya that Jesse knew. “So afterwards I found him online. I didn’t tell him I was the girl he’d met at Hope. I was just a name on the screen. We became friends. Then intimate. We wrote each other long emails every day, had IM conversations for hours. I wouldn’t tell him what I looked like. He must have thought me ugly as sin. I made him think I was poor, too. But it didn’t matter. We shared our souls before we met in the flesh.”
I nodded slowly. Relationships that blossomed online, “text before sex,” were not uncommon among my peer group, but I was surprised to hear it of Jesse. He had never been one to spend more time than necessary socializing online. He didn’t even have a Facebook account.
“All right,” Sophie said. She had changed into her black one-piece swimsuit. “Where’s this ocean you keep talking about?”
Anya smiled and stood. “I better show you. It’s very hard to find.”
They descended towards the deck. I couldn’t help but notice that Sophie looked dowdy and thick-hipped and unattractive next to Anya’s incandescent beauty. A big blue dragonfly buzzed around as Jesse came over to shoulder-surf.
“She was telling me how you met,” I said. “Faceless, anonymous soul-bonding across the Internet. Lucky for you. You’d never have gotten anywhere in person.”
He grinned. “That’s her version.”
“Oh?”
“The truth, which is double-plus-eyes-only-top-secret, don’t tell her or I will keelhaul you for real, is when she contacted me anonymously, I was paranoid someone was after me, so I hacked back to her computer, took over her webcam, and went ‘hello, baby, you can cyberstalk me any time!’”
“Oh.”
“But seriously, breathe a word of that to no one. Not even Sophie. I mean, not asking you to lie to your girlfriend, but if she doesn’t ask, don’t tell. It’s a big deal to Anya that I didn’t know what she looked like. She’d kill me. Not even sure that’s hyperbole.”
“Gotcha,” I agreed.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught a visual discontinuity on the laptop, and turned to look. It was set to automatically rotate between drone data on one map and the ship’s radar on the other. At first I thought the black blotch on the radar screen was a returning UAV. Then I realized it was much too big.
“Hey,” I said. “We’ve got company.”
“No kidding? Must be a fishing boat. They don’t usually come this far out.”
The blotch vanished, then re-appeared closer to us. Again, and again. It looked like it was coming straight for us, and fast.
“Huh. Weird,” Jesse said. “Hey, you know what? I’ve got an actual telescope. Want to go play Captain Jack Sparrow?”
We climbed up atop the bridge. Below us Anya carved laps around the boat with a competitive-level front crawl, while Sophie floated on her back. Jesse extended the wood-and-brass telescope, squinted through it, panned it across the horizon, stopped. His curious expression morphed into a frown.
“Who is it?” I asked.
Instead of answering he passed over the telescope. It took me a little while to local the oncoming vessel. It was like Wilfrid’s water taxi, but newer and cleaner, with a big radio antenna and two powerful engines. There were four men on board, all young and strong, in khaki pants and black T-shirts. They looked Hispanic, not Haitian.
“No one you know?” I asked, handing it back.
Jesse shook his head.
“Maybe the Dominican Republic coast guard?”
“We’re a long way from the DR. And they’ve got no flag.”
I turned and squinted at the horizon, and made out a faint dot. I almost imagined I could hear those dual engines. There was no way we could outrun them.