"The Uber Out of Time"

You slam the door on your way out.

Stupid, stupid. If you'd just kept your voice down, just tried to work things out, maybe she wouldn't have accused you of all that. Stupid. Doesn't she know what you're going through? You can't be expected to listen to this shit. It's not your fault--you were coerced! You can't be blamed.

You need some air; you need to get away. Soon the ride-share car rolls up the street, speckled by drizzle. It's a Saab, of all things, but well-kept. You haul on the door handle and throw yourself in.

The driver turns around. He's nondescript. The app says his name is Kameel. "How's it going?"

"Hey." You aren't interested in small-talk. Not right now. Rage burns under your skin, and you feel like punching the back of the passenger seat. You don't.

"So, when do you want to go?"

You stare at him. "Now. I thought that was implied."

"No, no..." He holds up his phone. The app there is unfamiliar. You look down and see the app you have open isn't familiar, either. It sure as hell isn't one you downloaded. "I mean, what year? What point in your life?" He checks his phone. "You are Chuck Wentworth, right? You didn't put in a timeline when you requested me."

You stare at him. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm Chuck." You're not.

The app is asking for a year and a date. Outside, the rain is thickening, fat spots of drizzle sliding cold and viscous down the Saab's window. Some corner of you wants to slug the guy, or laugh. But then the other side, the shrewd self that's been hiding lipstick smudges, kicks in. Maybe you'll humor him. See if there's a scrap of truth in his bullshit.

"How far can I go?" Can't believe this crap.

"That's on you, man. Big surcharge on 2020, though. Surge pricing, y'know?" Oh, ha-ha, very funny. You roll your eyes, and the rain stops coming.

It doesn't just pass--it stops falling completely. In midair. Droplets hang suspended; wind-swept showers wait on the cold breeze, captured like a photograph. A photograph you're inside of. Nearby, a sparrow caught in the wetness dangles over a puddle, the spray of its takeoff surrounding it, a halo of dew under the soggy orange streetlight glow.

The driver fidgets. "What's it gonna be? If you wanna cancel, that's fine, but there's a fee..."

"No, I'm fine, How about...." You swallow, the walls of your belief cracking open. "Same timeline. But... six months from now."

An eyebrow is raised. "You sure? Same timeline?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, bro. You asked." He circles the block, gently easing around frozen cars. When he arrives back in the same spot, there's a blinding flash--the corona of two hundred suns flashing across the sky all at once. A wave of heat and cold in alternating stutters washes over you. You find your fingernails longer, your hair shaggy. Your stomach paunchier. Clearly these six months without her have been stressful. Good thing you didn't have to live through them.

"Well, there you go, man. Home sweet home. Thanks for riding."

"Thanks..." You climb out of the car. It's sunny, now, and beautiful. The early, crisp days of March. You check your phone and see that you were charged $10.56 for your ride, courtesy of Yog, a company you've never heard of.

Well, damn.

You swagger up the sidewalk towards your apartment--free, easy, no weight on your shoulders. Barely comprehending. Yet you're loose now: no more responsibility. You cheated, in more ways than one: you've escaped. Now you can live your life without interruption, without nagging. Thank God. You always wanted to be a bachelor, on the inside, but you hated the loneliness, the stigma. Now you can start over.

When you get inside, your girlfriend is on the couch. She looks due in about three months: puffy, tired, and enormous. Her things litter the walls, crowd your tiny living space. She looks miserable.

"Hey," she says, cradling a bowl of ice cream. "Did you get that second job?"

Shooting Sweeps

You never knew what Mr. Tracey was going to do next. Prajeet was his driver, and had been for four years, ever since Tracey struck it big with that movie of his, and had his name plastered in lights all over Los Angeles. He didn’t seem to like LA much; like many of his predecessors, he was eccentric to the brink of insanity, and the noise and glamor of the city undermined his sense of self-importance. He moved to a sprawling estate in Montana, and Prajeet followed him. Well, technically he’d been following the money, but unfortunately, the money was attached to Mr. Tracey and there was no way to separate the two. If there was, he thought often, he would have done so.

On the day he fired a grenade launcher for the first time, Prajeet was hung over. He was not a drinking man, but he had found out the day before that his girlfriend was not coming to the States. She had found someone else, and the unspoken truth was that this man was wealthier than Prajeet, was better than he was. A driver for one of the richest filmmakers in America, and he’d been upstaged by a tech company manager! An assistant manager, at that! The betrayal had cut him deeply. He’d spent the previous night in the bar, muttering darkly about dowries to his friend Nathan. Half-cooked schemes buzzed in his head: he would show up at her door, with a fistful of American dollars. He would throw the bundles of cash at her feet, and he would ask, is this enough? Is this what you wanted from me?

That morning, when he arrived bleary-eyed and aching, Mr. Tracey had a gun.

A big one, very modern. He was cleaning it on the back deck when Prajeet arrived, the deck overlooking the infinity pool he’d had installed “because my guests miss their Western excesses.” The gun was long, black and looked like something out of a movie. It had a long barrel, folding legs that tucked underneath like the limbs of some deadly wasp. A prop, perhaps, straight off the set of American Sniper--at least, he hoped it was a prop.

Prajeet approached, with a pretty valid case of the jitters. “Sir? Your car is outside.”

“Yes, yes.” Mr. Tracey placed the gun in a case almost as tall as he was, and snapped it shut. “Very good.”

“I’ve been calling you…”

“Let’s not start, Praj. Punctuality is for people who’ve never won a Golden Globe. Come now, we’ve got work to do.” He hauled the case down the hall, resisting offers by Prajeet to help him. Very self-sufficient, was Mr. Tracey, even at sixty-two and with a mane of gray hair he combed back into a helmet-like shell. Prajeet thought he looked like Stan Lee, from the Marvel movies, but had never said so.

Into the limo they went. Its sleek black hulk looked so out of place in the shadow of Montana’s red-brown hills that Prajeet often felt they were out of their depth here. In winter, the limo needed snow chains to even get down the driveway, yet Mr. Tracey refused to buy an SUV with his piles of money. Americans, thought Prajeet, and hit the ignition button.

Mr. Tracey sat in the back, holding the gun case over his lap. “I’ve had all the arrangements made. Today’s going to be a good day, Praj, an excellent day.”

“Yes, sir?” Most of Prajeet’s responses to his employer consisted of various “yes sirs” arranged in different tones and inflections. If you offered any more, the gregarious old coot would suck you into a long conversation, and he was not in the mood for this today. Especially when his employer was carrying a gun with a magazine the size of a phonebook.

“Good day. Excellent day. Today,” and those silver brows arched, “I get my revenge.”

“Yes… sir?” Now Prajeet was starting to panic. It was one thing to be an accomplice in the man’s peculiar hobbies; it was quite another to assist in murder. He wondered if the man who’d shot John F. Kennedy had taken a cab that day, and how the driver might have felt once he’d learned of the shooting. A lot like this, he thought, the poor guy had probably felt a lot like this.

“Quite so.” Mr. Tracey’s phone rang, and the director fumbled it out of his back pocket, his fingers shaking strongly enough for Prajeet to see it in the rear-view mirror. “Yes! You’ve had it delivered? Yes?” He nodded. “Yes. Fantastic. Many people are called the man, but you are actually the man. Know what I mean?” Another nod. “Beautiful. I’ll have my people wire you the money. And the city didn’t make a fuss? Good.” He hung up. “Gorgeous fucking day, isn’t it?”

It was. The still blue skies of morning hung over a dry and scrabbly landscape spotted with pines, sagebrush and huge chunks of rock which looked to have been forgotten on the day of their creation. Prajeet felt his fear soothed by the sight; strange as this country was, much of it was very beautiful. “Yes, sir.”

They drove in silence for quite some time. Prajeet was afraid to ask what the gun was for, and his boss did not offer an explanation. He had finally worked up the courage to ask, but by then they’d arrived.

Mr. Tracey’s phone had spoken to the car, and sent it a set of GPS coordinates nowhere near Missoula, the filmmaker’s favorite destination for antagonizing everyone with ostentatious displays of wealth. He had guided them out into the badlands, an area that was half-Idaho in the composition of its heavy soil and all-Idaho in the bleakness of its hills and crags. Someone had set up a large table in the dirt nearby, and on the table were more guns. Lots more.

Prajeet kept close to the car as Mr. Tracey got out, lugging his case, and leaned it against the cornucopia of murderous tools. A swathe of hunting rifles, oversized pistols, stubby Russian machine guns, and even what looked like a grenade launcher sat patiently, each one awaiting a turn to do mischief. If Prajeet had been jumpy before, now he’d crossed the border into pure terror. He wondered how far he could run before he was out of range of those things. Pretty far, from the look of it.

“I’ll just, er, find a shady place to put the car,” he said. It was heating up, the height of June in a climate with few trees… and fewer places to hide if, say, one’s eccentric employer decided to go postal.

“Nonsense! Come along. Have you ever fired a gun before?” Mr. Tracey’s jovial attitude did not allay his driver’s fears, but against all his common sense, Prajeet walked over to the table with his boss. They surveyed the armory before them: it was, Prajeet had to admit, fascinating to see such an array of deadly force all in one place. “It’s quite thrilling. And today, we have the perfect target…”

“Me?” Prajeet blurted. He hadn’t meant to, but he was sweating into his white collar under his black suit-jacket, and sweating always made him nervous, made him blurt out things like “I love you” to a girl on the other side of the world. Both blurts were equally embarrassing.

Tracey looked at him for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. “God, no! What do you think I am, some kind of sociopath?”

“Well,” said Prajeet, not sure how to answer that.

Tracey shook his head. “This isn’t a Leslie Banks movie, Praj. No, my revenge will be much more than personal. Today we strike a blow against an institution.”

He pointed. On a hill nearby, so small as to almost be mistaken for a distant boulder, there was a vehicle. Clunky and tall, it had a glass cockpit and enormous twin brooms on the underside. Prajeet squinted at it. “Is that a…”

“A street sweeper! Yes, of course.” Tracey rubbed his hands together, not unlike a praying mantis, and reached for a pair of noise-cancelling headphones at the end of the table. “Here, I saved one of these for you. I want a witness to my vengeance, now that it’s finally at hand.”

Prajeet, utterly perplexed but morbidly curious, put on a pair. The world faded into a muffled mime-show, a silent film. If Mr. Tracey was going to shoot him, he thought, he was certainly taking his time. He flinched as his boss plucked a Desert Eagle from the table, a gun so oblong and ridiculous as to almost resemble a marital aid, and emptied a full clip at the street-sweeper.

The noise was deafening, even through a shell of rubber and foam, Prajeet’s fight-or-flight instinct made him leap back. Shell casings flew and the Eagle spit fire; there was an echoing crack with every shot as the slide jumped and the force travelled up Mr. Tracey’s burly spray-tanned arms into the thickness of his neck. His eyes were dead-set, purposeful.

His aim had appeared steady, but no sounds of impact bounced back at them. He might be rich, thought Prajeet, but he was a pretty shitty marksman. “Hm,” Tracey said, grabbing a pair of miniature binoculars from his pocket. “Unharmed! Fate continues to mock me, after all these years. Prajeet, have you ever entertained thoughts of revenge?”

The driver’s mind immediately went to his girlfriend, who he had been excited to think of as his future wife. He’d built his life around the idea, and now it was all crumbling down. “Ah. Well.” He had to shout, to be heard through the earmuffs. “Sometimes, yes. I mean… doesn’t everybody?”

“Exactly! Spot on, my Indian friend. And when I was young…”

“Bangladeshi,” said Prajeet.

“What?”

“Never mind.” He’d said it many times, but some people you couldn’t educate. Especially rich ones.

Tracey leapt back into his story without skipping a beat. Thunder crashing between his words as he reloaded the gun, emptying another clip to no avail. “Right. When I was young, I lived in a city on the east coast. No need to name names, it’s all in the past. I don’t hold grudges.” But his thin mustache quivered, and as the sweat began to roll down their necks from the sun, he grabbed a revolver that would not have been out of place in a sixties western. The earsplitting pop of the shots going off was accompanied by sulphurous whiffs of gun-smoke. “I didn’t have much money, back then. I might seem richer than God now, and sometimes I think I am. And when that sequel’s finished, I’ll walk away even richer. But at one point I had nothing, a bank account full of mothballs and some petty cash. And a certain group of human beings took it upon themselves to persecute me.”

“Street sweepers?” guessed Prajeet.

The revolver was emptied in flashing spurts of force, but a glimpse through the binoculars showed no results this time, either. “Yes! Well, no, not the drivers. Those shiftless monkeys had no charge over the real scam. You see, Prajeet, I used to drive myself everywhere. Shocking, right? I had but one asset in the world: a Ford station wagon, old as the hills, and it was my only friend as I was writing scripts and struggling to feed myself. And these stupid weasels… These damned, filthy, spiteful animals… They towed my car every day.”

“I… see," said Prajeet, wondering if he was supposed to care.

Up came an AK of some kind—Prajeet recognized it from movies, but couldn’t place the name of it. A bayonet gleamed at its tips. A thunderous cacophony, and brass shells scattered as Mr. Tracy fired it from the shoulder. This time there was the tinkle of glass, and the clatter of metal being riddled with lead. “Ha! That’s more like it! Did you hear that? Did you hear that whoreson take a hit?”

“Yes,” said Prajeet, his teeth gritted at the echo. The noise was not doing wonders for his hangover.

“It’s wounded, I think… Yes, there’s motor oil trickling out.” The ritual of the binoculars was observed. “I know it seems silly, Prajeet. Even deluded. But every week, those bottom-feeding, purposeless vermin would go out, and they would steal my only earthly treasure. Didn’t matter the time, didn’t matter whether the street was actually being cleaned—they were very efficient, you see. Towing was big business, they all made a profit. And everyone got a slice! They called the police, the police called the towing rats, and off went my Bessie. It pulled them a hundred thousand in ticket money and impound costs every day. They were blue-collar scam artists, Prajeet, confidence men of the highest quality. Satan himself could not have pulled a better grift.”

“Ah.”

“It does things to a man, to have his happiness taken.” Mr. Tracey looked over his collection of destructive devices; his pompous boom had faded to a whisper, and he looked to be gradually deflating in the Montana sun. “Oh, how I burned to go out there and bludgeon one of them to death. Just show them how it was done: how easily a person could be pushed into homicide. But I held my tongue. I could have taken any one of those scum-suckers—maybe several. I could have mailed letter-bombs to their fat, crooked cop friends in the precinct. But I held back. I believe in civilization, Prajeet, even when it screws you. Even when you have nothing, and then that nothing is taken away.”

Prajeet said nothing. He was thinking of his woman. Not his, anymore—no, not at all. The bitterness in Tracey’s soul warmed something in his own, and he longed to gather around that fire of hate and frustration. But he didn’t want to overstep himself. Losing this job would be a final blow: best to let his mad employer do as he would, then go home. Sleep it off. Do nothing irrational.

The old man shrugged, to no one. He opened the big case, the latch-clicks coming from far away, as if they were underwater. “Well, no need to waste every bullet, eh? They’re just pea-shooters, after all.” That boisterous clangor was back in his voice, and Prajeet was almost glad to hear it. There was something too familiar in Tracey’s growling hints of murder; something he remembered from the pub last night. Words spoken in earnest, ugly things promised. Could you take a promise back, once you were sober? How much weight did your vows hold, when uttered in drunken fury?

“Feast your eyes,” his boss said. “I’ve loaded this beastie with depleted-uranium rounds strong enough to blow through concrete!” He bounced his silver-caterpillar eyebrows at the driver, gesturing at the gun, Vanna-White-style. “What do you say, Praj? Care to work out a little aggression? I promise you, it’s more rewarding than jail. Why, if I’d killed the entire precinct back then, I never would’ve made my money!” And he laughed like a child.

Prajeet looked at the gun, thought of his girl. That twenty-two-year-old waitress with dusky eyes from a Maharashta hillside, whom he hadn’t really known at all, in spite of late-night Skype sessions and whispers of a future together, of real, actual, lasting love. He thought of the things he’d like to do to the man who’d stolen her: public humiliations, vandalism, maybe the trick some local kids to throw a flaming bag of cow shit through his open window. This rabbit-hole of frustration went deeper, so much deeper than he’d expected, and suddenly he was very frightened.

These things—he was actually planning to do them. He’d already calculated the costs of the plane tickets, the odds of arrest. Suddenly he longed for an escape from his own evils, for a compulsive explosion focused through a tiny, reinforced metal tube and exerted on an enemy that wasn’t real, who couldn’t feel pain or the terror of revenge. After four years, he finally began to understand Mr. Tracey; behind madness and a vast, inflated ego, he saw a frustrated little boy trying his best to play safely with God-like financial powers. To exert his human furies, and harm no one—there was a certain nobility in that, a certain safety in tilting at windmills. He felt his eyes come to rest on the grenade launcher.

“She’s a beaut, that one. Got her from war surplus,” said Tracey, his eyes glinting with taboo delight. “Want to give ‘er a spin?”

“Yes, actually,” said Prajeet, smiling as he sized up his target. “I would love to.”

The Traitor

An excerpt from one of the books I'm working on, called "Plague of Steel."

            My name is Jamie Dhukkan, and I am about to become a terrorist.

            When the first refugees arrived, my husband and I campaigned to deport them. It was ironic: we were both second-gen immigrants, his parents from Kolkata and mine from Sri Lanka, and here we were petitioning to try and reject frightened, scared people from our shores. America is beautiful, yes… but as they say, you must pay the toll to get in, and the toll was far too high for these people, escapees of the first infestations in Ukriaine, in Sierra Leone, in Indonesia. My husband overheard the military discussing the plague; they thought might have been “delivered” to developing nations on purpose. “Developing”… Well, they developed under Silver’s influence. Very quickly. They developed into angry hives of furious, faceless half-machine monsters, their last sliver of humanity allowing them to understand the pain and betrayal of border closures, UN firing squads, the last resorts of a terrified Europe. Can anyone be blamed for trying to run from these things?

            If we had permitted a few more to make landfall, if we’d seen the face of the disease instead of sharpening bayonets and building higher fences, we might’ve managed a cure. We might have had enough time, enough human specimens to work on. Applied EMP bursts worked temporarily for pushing back the infected, but it was like using a sledgehammer against a swarm of gnats—by the time the FDA had approved the manufacture of EMP belts and necklaces, Florida was already neck-deep in nanites, and the first cases had surfaced in New York. We waited too long; we saw only in the short term, planning for today instead of thinking of tomorrow. Now we’ll pay for it.

            My husband has been gone for three weeks.

He was working on Project Kessen—a “breakthrough” he claimed would turn the tide of the plague. Two days ago the Army came and confiscated all his work, right down to the last sample. I was furious; I demanded they tell me where he was, what had happened. They served me a death certificate on the spot, like stone-faced magicians producing a rabbit. Reach into the black top hat and poof, Annie, your husband is gone. So sorry. An accident at the lab, casualty of the war, these things happen.

They stripped the lab and left me standing in the kitchen, hyperventilating like an idiot. I sucked life from my inhaler, struggled for air as they piled into an armored truck and pulled away. I wish I’d fought them on it, asked more questions, forced my hand… but would it have helped? We all know what happens when you ask too many questions about the nanites. About where they came from. The president has stopped issuing denials—Silver is a federal experiment gone wrong, and everyone knows it. My Farook wouldn’t say so—but I saw the guilt in him. The shame. The terrible knowledge that his adopted country had unleashed something on the world, something that was eating men and women and children alive. Changing them. That kind of guilt can’t be shaken off—you live with it all your life.

I should know; I’m a cellular biologist, like my mother before me. When I was five, she was working on malaria for the Sri Lankan government, trying to neuter infected mosquitoes. Somehow a single insect escaped from the lab—my mother would never say how, but she suspected that someone simply left a door open. One fault in a specimen cage, one door left ajar, and hundreds of people died from a completely preventable disease. The elderly, the weak, and the poor died in droves. Such are the wages of knowledge.

Sorry, I’m rambling. I’m getting bitter in my old age. Just forty, and I’ve lost my husband, my career, my government grants. No golden years for us, no peaceful retirement—it’s not like there’s a Florida or an Arizona for us to retire to, anyway. But I refuse to believe I lost him in some idiotic accident. Farook wasn’t like the other Army hire-outs, the ones who sucked the CDC’s teats and outsourced their work to agencies that didn’t even wash their petri dishes. Farook was smart. He could sense a change in the wind before anyone else—it’s how he survived the budget cuts, the havoc at DARPA when funding for his cellular automata disappeared. He never quit, naturally: he was patient, he was precise, and above all he was committed. He loved the whole concept of nanobots, I took to making fun of him for it. “Don’t make anything that can think,” I would warn him, and pinch his ear. Oh, how he hated that.

Guess the joke’s on me. Because if he didn’t have a hand in making Silver, who did? Some backwoods Iranian engineer? Those madmen in Pyongyang? I don’t think so. These machines are not logical; they do things to human cells that shouldn’t be possible, that defy the laws of physics. They move so quickly and evolve so fast it borders on—I hate to say it—magic. If human hands were behind this thing, I’ll eat my doctorate.

The Army is running out of doctors. Silver cases among the enlisted are through the roof, and of course the nanites can chew through a clean-suit now. They’ll do anything to get at a vulnerable human host. Which makes no sense; the wet, hot environment of human organs should be anathema to machines. We should be inhospitable to them. But the ‘why’ of the disease is no longer important. The plague’s hunger is my ticket into Farook’s Army base.

It’s been a long time since I left med school for epidemiology. I didn’t have the heart for being a medical doctor… Watching people sicken, watching them die. I wasn’t strong enough to watch for that, because I knew for every man or woman I saved, there would always be two more who died of leukemia, or bone marrow cancer. No, that life was not for me. Until now.

               

I found a man who will forge me credentials. He smells strange, like curry gone rotten, and doesn’t speak much. But he’s ex special-forces and he knows what they look for—the personality quirks they check you for. He thinks he can get me into the base, to “treat” their sick. As if anything can stop the machines, once they take root.

                There’s an on-site lab, very secure, hidden below fifty feet of bomb-proof elevator shaft. I have Farook’s codes. I took them, before the army came. I thought he might want them, if… if he ever came back.

                I’m packing now. I’m leaving this tape recorder because, well, once I get in there I can’t guarantee what will happen. If they disappear me, if they wipe me from the records and ship me to Guantanamo or some other blacksite, Chicago maybe, at least someone might find this. At least someone will know why I did what I did, why I turned traitor. It wasn’t for a big agenda, not for fundamentalism or money. It’s just love. I loved that ridiculous, eccentric, occasionally stupid husband of mine, and I am going to get him back or find his body. One way or the other.

                Project Kessel… They think they’re so clever. They think just because I’m a biologist by training, there’s no chance I could have understood his notes. They didn’t even take me in for questioning. But I know what they’re up to.

                They’re trying to tame it. Turn it to their side, or a piece of it, or a colony. And then… what? Weaponize it? This thing has already threatened us as a species. How many more will die when they try to turn it loose, a dog on a very brittle chain? Right now, the machines convert people at random. It’s all arbitrary. Some hosts merely get sick; others warp into monsters with gears for teeth and titanium fingernails. But if we make it angry, threaten it… It’s not stupid. It can respond to stimuli, evolve. If we declare war on this thing, turn nanite on nanite, how long can our species survive?

                I’m going. I don’t know what I’m going to find, but I know this will be the last time I see the house. The photographs in the hall; the shrine near the coat-rack. All of it, I must hold in my memory. When they catch me, and waterboard me, and put battery clamps on my loins, it will be this house I think of. Our peace that we built, here, in spite of the plague. In spite of a lack of children. We made this house our child, and it breathes in and out with the essence of us. The essence of what we were.

                I’m coming, Farook. Wherever you are, please don’t give up.

                It’ll take more than a little plague, to stop me loving you.