Smoketown Read online

  Dr. Etive nodded in agreement. He continued.

  “I don’t know if birds spread the disease, but if they did it’s been twenty-five years. Today’s medicine far exceeds anything available then. And yet they are still outlawed. It borders on hysteria, and is at least ornithophobic, an entire culture of it. These investigations can lead to the remedy,” Eugenio finished.

  “The Crumble,” she said. “Well-named, how things have deteriorated.” She stood and walked toward the kitchen. “Tea?”

  Eugenio nodded and watched as Dr. Etive disappeared into the kitchen. He turned up the sensitivity of his recorder.

  “So what do you want to know from me?” she asked from the other room.

  “I want to know how it started. You were there.”

  “The whole world knows how it started—Peter Warrel,” she answered. The sound of metal on china filled the momentary silence.

  Eugenio knew better than most. Researchers from the iCDC concluded that Patient Zero had been Peter Warrel, a visiting engineer from the island of Northern Illinois. He had stayed just long enough to release three infected skin nanos that went on to infect a housekeeping tech as well as the head of the Leiodaran Trust, Eammon McClaren. Shortly thereafter, Peter died in a weeping, curled heap on the bed of his complimentary room in The Spires where he was later found by Frederica Sholt, the unfortunate tech assigned to his corridor.

  The two initial carriers, Frederica and Eammon, infected dozens more in the first seventy-two hours of a lackluster conference season and a vigorous carnivale festival. Besides their families, they spread their illness to all Spire guests in the techhouse corridor, the mayor, visiting governor, regional director, the Nepalese ambassador to Chaiwan, and two mistresses. ICDC had even found that Eammon and Frederica had the particular pleasure of re-infecting one another quietly in a corridor, where out of mounting anxiety they touched for the first time, a simple squeeze on a bit of bare shoulder.

  “Yes, as well as Sholt and McClaren,” Eugenio said.

  “A classic case really. Disease usually spreads along the framework of social structure,” she responded.

  “True, but the iCDC doesn’t usually quarantine whole cities—not before or since in fact.”

  “It was the first superbug. They didn’t know any better. Within a week the numbers had exploded into the thousands. On the eighth day they cordoned us off.” Dr. Etive walked back into the room, empty-handed. As she spoke, a tray with two slim china carafes floated past her and onto the table between their chairs. “There’d been a carnivale going on, you know. Needless to say with the electrified fences and armed riot brigades, the festivities ended rather abruptly.” She settled in the chair opposite Eugenio before she continued.

  “For days on end, the broadcasts showed scores of conventioneers and carnivale tourists who had been locked out of their hotel rooms, sleeping in the parks. I saw them myself: the tourists wearing skimpy costumes and smeared face paint. Some of them still had their virtu rigs on. Laughable, but true.” She shook her head and gazed into the distance.

  Eugenio chuckled softly as he lifted the glass of tea slowly to his lips. Dr. Etive did the same.

  “You went out on the streets then?” Eugenio straightened in his seat and moved the recorder closer to Dr. Etive.

  “Once. That’s all it took to know I didn’t want to go back out. Things were much more terrible than they made them seem on the broadcasts: fighting for food and shelter, the horrible little economies that crept up, rampant attacks. Of course for all the thousands dying they still spent half their broadcasts talking about a chosen few—celebrities, founding families, a visiting tycoon or two.”

  “It seems that’s when the terror really began—when people realized no one was safe,” Eugenio said, thinking of his research. In particular, the speedy and thorough demise of the McClaren family hit Leiodaran news stations in waves, creating a bounty of vid clips and historical lessons on all the family had done to build the city up and how little to protect it from microbes and visiting businessmen. Eugenio would have given anything to interview a McClaren, but virtually the entire family had been wiped out during the quarantine.

  “You said you went out once. Why? Where did you go?” Eugenio asked.

  “I had to get home,” she answered.

  “Where had you been?” he asked.

  “Out,” she answered curtly. “Why did you become a Mendejano later in life? Marriage?”

  “No,” Eugenio said. He waited for an answer; she did the same.

  Eugenio was well-versed in such exchanges—though not in his work. If he exchanged information with every interview subject he would not have come so far in his profession so quickly. Usually Eugenio was a gifted interviewer precisely because he knew what to reveal, but it had been his great pleasure to know a few exceptional people who could draw him out of his premeditated friendliness.

  Long before Eugenio joined the research team at Emergency Management he had met magnetic Lucine. She had saved his life and better still saved him from the dread that was his birthright, the same anxieties that plagued other native Leiodarans. When Lucine decided to move to Leiodare he had offered to find a place for them both, not because he wished to share her bed, but very much her time and, at any opportunity, her thoughts, relentless and deep as the ocean. So he had found a small compound beyond The Shallows, nestled between two empty warehouses. They’d decorated it with the concentric circles of the Mendejano, blessed it in a ceremony that made them brother and sister, ate of each other’s flesh and became soul twins. What they had was better than marriage and he would betray her to no one. He knew what Dr. Etive was fishing for, but she’d come back empty on this particular line of questioning.

  Dr. Etive sipped her tea and placed the carafe back down on the tray.

  “’A soul without a bird to carry it beyond is doomed to forever walk the streets of its regrets.’ Isn’t that a central Mendejano belief? This city then would seem the last place to be,” she said.

  “Or the first,” Eugenio replied.

  “You are an ambitious young man.” She paused. “It can be a dangerous trait, you know.”

  “As is fear. . . I became a Mendejano because of a brush with mortality,” Eugenio answered.

  Dr. Etive finished her tea and brought the cup gently down onto the tray.

  “On the day the Crumble began, my husband and I had been out at an affair that our friend Rory hosted regularly, on the other side of town,” Dr. Etive offered. She raised an eyebrow at Eugenio, waiting. “I don’t know why I didn’t contract the disease, but I didn’t.”

  “And this Rory, that you and your husband were visiting, is he available for an interview?” Eugenio asked.

  “You mean, is he dead?” she replied. “He’s a ghost now.”

  “Excuse me?” Eugenio asked.

  “I said, he’s a ghost. It’s Rory McClaren. So you tell me.”

  4

  Even after seventy-three years of good health, Rory McClaren still stockpiled medicine, hoarded food, and did not ever, under any circumstances, share his quarters with anyone. Though he knew his family had not necessarily died out those many years ago because of their proximity to each other, he took the precaution of living his life utterly alone, at the tip of The Spires where he could look down upon the city, but never touch it.

  He stood now at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that encased his penthouse, with one eye pushed into his monstrously expensive telescope. He watched a chattering of Starlings loitering near The Spires. The teenagers had their hands shoved into their pockets as they cajoled their way through the early evening. The customary dusters that all Starlings wore swirled above the sidewalk as they moved, putting on more of show than the people that wore them. This particular group was less than interesting, not like yesterday’s mob of girls tearing up and down Tindle Avenue, or last week’s colorful display of territorial behavior in The Dire. Rory checked the time and abandoned the scene at the window. He wa
s late for a city government dinner.

  “Closed circuit Monitor I-7,” he said, commanding the immense screen in the great room to life. Instantly the banquet hall of the Arts Guild materialized. A lone morning caller, a handsome Asian man dressed in blue, stood at the head of a long banquet table filled with dark-suited officials and their companions. Each of the other morning callers, resplendent in their respective signature color, was evenly spaced around the table. The caller in blue began to sing, filling Rory’s penthouse with the sound of morning.

  Because Rory enjoyed space more than spectacle, his rooms were sparsely decorated. The library consisted of a collection of old discs, a long mahogany table and one of the first virtu booths that used to dot the city back before the outbreak. The great room held two long divans, a holo projector, wall screen, and his virtu setup, including a top-of-the-line viewer and pack, available only to him as the sole heir of the McClaren family. His walls were windows, spectacular sheets of crystal clear plexi that could withstand hurricane-force winds. He’d chosen thick carpeting for the great room, so thick that he left footsteps behind making it seem sometimes as if he were surrounded by invisible men. The kitchen floor was smoothed rock, and in his bedroom self-sustaining grass never grew, but always comforted, reminding Rory of the world before.

  By any measure his penthouse was superior to the apartment in which he’d endured the winter of the Crumble, worrying about his family and peering out of the basement windows to discern what was left of the city. He’d spent the entire season locked away in the small apartment he usually reserved for his more hair-raising dalliances. That Afternoon—he still referred to it that way when Rory spoke of it to himself—he’d been holed up with a free-minded couple, pushing the bounds of endurance and invention when the news reports began.

  The reports rolled in and soon dominated every channel and subscription service, the number of dead steadily rising. Rory had extricated himself from the complicated embrace and, sweat still on his brow, stared at the holo report projecting in the middle of the room with mounting uneasiness. He’d called over to the family place and received no response, even on the dedicated line. The robe his nieces had bought him for his birthday lay on the divan near the bed; he grabbed it and stood, fully intending to collect his faculties and devise a course of action. Instead he found himself staring at the newscast. Soon after he shooed the couple away, locked the door behind them and did not leave that place for the entire three months of the quarantine.

  Even now in the great room of the penthouse, a room that could have held the entire Leoiodaran Dance Theater, a full coterie of brass players, violinists and hover artists, the thought of people joining him made his scalp itch. He watched the performance on the giant screen in front of him and tried to ignore the faint tingling above his left ear. True enough, the strong young caller performing had a certain quality beyond his handsomeness, but even his obvious distractions wouldn’t be enough to keep Rory’s mind off of escape and so he sat in the delicious emptiness of his penthouse, watching the performance via the closed-circuit feed that the city provided to Rory for all official functions. As the only surviving McClaren it behooved the city government to find a way to use his cache and perhaps woo him into remembering the city when the time came to settle his final affairs. Rory really couldn’t blame them—even now the McClaren fortune was vast, and Leiodare, like an insecure lover, required tremendous upkeep lest it buckle under the pressure of its own delusions.

  The McClarens originally earned their fortune with The Last Word. Until then no one had applied hologram projection technology to the funereal market, and as Rory’s grandfather, Pop Pop, loved to say on the many occasions that he recounted how they had come to be those McClarens, “People will spend their last dime to get the last word.” And so that’s what his grandfather named the technology, focus group results be damned. In actuality, the levity of the name boosted the brand appeal. It softened the shock of those first few families who sat quietly at wakes until they were suddenly faced with their departed loved one standing at the front of the room, perfectly attired and themselves to the last detail—in some instances standing next to their own coffins, seeming just as solid and certainly bearing a greater resemblance than what was left in the box. Pop Pop also loved to share how some family members fainted at the “miraculous sight.”

  His favorite story involved the famous Finnish soccer player who had had a heart attack when he heard his beloved mother’s voice just as clear as it had been when she last saw him—no audio hiss, no pops, clicks or startup chimes. “Virtually indistinguishable,” Pop Pop would say. And while known to crack jokes at everyone’s expense, Pop Pop had better judgment in business. He found the best and brightest holo techs available and when it became necessary, supplemented their craftsmanship with the innovation of leading neuro researchers and surgeons. These brilliant men and women surpassed his own financial projections when they created a new technology that made The Last Word look like a parlor trick.

  So while The Last Word became the gold standard for funerals, the tech it had spawned, virtu, nearly took over the world. It had multifaceted allure: users could experience events they never would have in their own lives, and not just a hallucination or an approximation, but an experience that felt like any other. Virtu linked straight into the brain; it used the same neural centers as one’s eyes, skin, ears, and all. This coupled with a revolutionary nano interface shut all other competitors out of the market for a decade. A virtu user could truly experience the world through someone else’s eyes; that application alone revolutionized anthropology, profiling, even legislation, and a steady black market of crime reals surfaced trading in snuff to sex, and things much darker.

  People got hooked and rarely put virtu back down once they picked it up. Analysts insisted that the wave would crest, but it kept coming steady and unmistakable as the tide. Restrictions were enacted; laws passed, and flouted. But by then, virtu in greater and lesser degrees was everywhere. Leiodare remained its epicenter. McClaren Industries’ research and development, administrative, and operations centers were headquartered in the city before the Crumble.

  Rory had first tried virtu at five years old. At the family’s annual Thanksgiving celebration, his Pop Pop stood, rotund and regal, in the middle of the room, wine glass in hand and a prototype viewer and pack on the table next to him. In the middle of a loud recitation of how he’d watched the first Spire built from an office he had leased across the street specifically for that purpose, Pop Pop cut himself off, and beckoned to young Rory who had just walked into the room.

  “But that was the past. And here is the future. Rory my boy, come to your Pop Pop. I’ve something to show you.”

  Rory excitedly stepped forward, expecting a treat from one of Pop Pop’s travels, a seashell from upper Mongolia or perhaps a surgechip from the outlying colonies—but instead his grandfather set a pair of very heavy, opaque shades over his eyes.

  “To block out the room,” his Pop Pop explained to the group of assembled family.

  Rory heard his mother’s voice, saying, “Dad. What is this now?”

  “This is Rory’s fortune. All of our fortunes. Don’t worry. He’s about to get the first taste of what will be the humanity’s next must-have.”

  “Dad—” she said.

  Rory heard a click, and his life was replaced by another. The warm room of aunts and uncles was gone. He saw a lush canopy of treetops and above him an expanse of sky stretched out from one end of the world to the other. Strong sun beat down on him. His back felt almost too hot. The sweet potent scent of expensive flowers replaced the smell of roast pheasant. He looked down at a large brown hand that rested in what felt like his lap. A breeze caressed his face.

  Everything went black.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” his mother said as she lifted the glasses from Rory’s head. He blinked, utterly dazed, and looked around at his family, expecting them to stir in a breeze.

 
; “You think I’d put it on him if it weren’t safe? He’s fine,” Pop Pop said.

  “You don’t know that, Dad.”

  His mother had been right. Rory had not been fine, not since then. He’d been rough and tumble and pushing himself beyond boundaries. His time in the trees had become hardwired into his personality and from then on Rory sought thrills. He wanted to repeat that first sensation of adventure and freedom that he’d found up in the treetops of someone else’s mind.

  He kayaked around Leiodare, did late-night base drops from The Spires, joined the service for missions into the Deserts, and until that winter of isolation in his forty-eighth year he lived each moment as if it were being recorded. In his early twenties, he’d even created a few virtu reals of his own and floated them onto the market anonymously, compensated enough by the thought of others experiencing his exploits. In each real, he tried to rival the moment in the canopy that had come to define living for him. But by then virtu didn’t satisfy him. After that single week of recording for others, virtu became an occasional sex toy and not much more.

  Rory rediscovered virtu alone in the apartment during those anxious winter months after the outbreak. When his solitude became permanent, virtu life replaced the one he had locked away from himself.

  No doubt he made a good ghost story, he thought as he watched the city officials on the closed circuit feed. Creepy old man McClaren. Gone were the people who remembered Rory of Yore: the thick black hair and warm amber eyes, the broad shoulders, his way with women, and with men. Rory of Yore: once the title had been an easy seduction strategy—a complement to the well-honed physique, the family name and its attendant air of wealth. Now it seemed a cruel but effective irony—good only for an edgy chuckle between glasses of syrah and meditation. During the winter of the Crumble, Rory of Yore had fallen down a hole, one created in his boyhood, but carefully covered over with conquest since then. In the decades of isolation it had opened and grown so that to Rory it seemed that he lived at the bottom of the world, and not in a tower whose height rivaled that of the mountains surrounding Leiodare.