Feb 27, 2057, 0105 Hours (UTC -5)

Arlington VA, United States of America

The Roads of Arlington Virginia

Graham Magnusson didn’t speak to the pilots the entire flight back to Virginia other than to tell Nicky he expected better from him and to make vague threats about heads rolling. When they touched down, Elijah drove himself home to his house in DC, leaving Tiffany and Nicky alone for the somber ride back to the R&D facility.

“What do you think Graham can actually do about it?” Tiffany asked.

“Nothing,” Nicky said.

Cold rain drizzled over the windows. The inside of the company car felt frigid even with the heater running. Nicky’s answer felt hollow to both.

“What about if the other pilots don’t rally?”

“I don’t know,” Nicky said.

The bold statement in front of the public in solidarity with Egypt had come easy. It was the long, silent, helpless ride home that was difficult. Baron Nucleonics had other ways of ensuring their message didn’t get out. For all Tiffany and Nicky knew, the network had edited out the segment where the pilots demanded to be sent to Egypt.

What made Nicky feel even worse, though, was that he didn’t know for sure why he had said that, or if he really did want to be deployed against that terrifying rock monster. The reports from the DoD claimed the thing had an automatic defense system that catapulted a rock like a railgun into anything that came close. Nicky wanted to be a hero, but was this how?

Once they were back at the R&D facility, the two pilots departed with some somber ‘good night’s. On the way to his apartment on the east shore of the island, Nicky fought the urge to reach for his phone and look up what people were saying about the Lake Show on social media. Dopamine struggled with his prefrontal cortex, but eventually higher-order thinking prevailed and the phone remained in his pocket where he wouldn’t be able to scroll through it before bed. Back in his apartment, he slipped into bed without changing and fell asleep.

His dreams were always spatial. Never narrative. Landscapes and vistas, nooks and hideaways. Never people. Embedded so deeply in a web of people during waking life, his mind vacationed from them in sleep, refusing to put a single other person in his vast, atomized wilderness.

In this dream he was in two places interchangeably, being now in one place, now the other. One was a log cabin where he could feel the trees were still alive in the logs walls. Life thrummed through the plant fibers and gave him an overwhelming, fluffy, paranoid feeling like smoking weed. Then he would go to the other place, which was an enormous skyscraper which had no windows, just a concrete and steel belly. Long utility corridors and hatchways and fractal-like forks rendered the building a labyrinth where someone could entomb themselves in and be forgotten forever. This too made him feel paranoid, but in a cold, dead sort of way where life became impossible. And these two buildings, the cabin and the skyscraper, bled into one another until they overlapped along with their uniquely oppressive atmospheres.

Nicky woke, sucking in breath and feeling the strum of anxious vibrations along his muscle fibers. There were a couple minutes where he mulled over the nightmare as its details faded, and each neuron that dropped an atom of the dream picked up an atom of reality and with it the memory of what he and Tiffany and Eli had done on national television.

He pulled up social media to find nothing. No mention of Egypt beyond the Djinn being on its second day of destruction. People had clipped segments of The Lake Show with him in it, but none contained the declaration for intervention in them. Nicky exhaled. So they edited it out. It felt obvious in hindsight that’s what they would do and he felt silly for his daydream of heroically supporting Egypt on national television.

In his business email there was an invite to a staff meeting for all active-duty pilots at 10am. One step below an all-pilot meeting. There was really only one thing it could be about and Nicky’s blood pressure climbed because of it. It was one thing to claim BN couldn’t touch him because of his mutation and another to wake up to that same multinational corporation angry with him, especially since they supplied his room, board, and income.

Nicky arrived at the meeting hall ten minutes ahead of start time to find a handful of pilots already there but no one from BN. He sat beside Tiffany.

“They’re gonna name and shame us, you figure? Maybe talk about the importance of message solidarity or something?” Nicky asked.

“I guess,” Tiffany replied, voice still hoarse from lack of sleep. She paused with her mouth half-open for a moment then said, “I had a nightmare last night.”

“What about?”

“About the monolith,” Tiffany said. “Except it was made of wind like a tornado and it was in my hometown back in Iowa. I kept running around looking for my TOCU and I couldn’t find it and I tried to call up the other pilots but the calls wouldn’t go through.”

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Nicky was never sure what to add when talking about dreams and nightmares so all he added was, “damn, sounds scary.”

“Not half as much as actually dreaming it,” she said. “The death toll in Cairo this morning is up to 50,000. But they’re saying the real killer is going to be the starvation and displacement that comes afterwards, not even the djinn itself.”

“So we double down then? Insist on going to Egypt?” Nicky said, not bothering to lower his voice.

Tiffany nodded. “I don’t care what they have to say at this meeting, I’m standing by what we said yesterday. If they edited it out then we just go find another method to get the word out.”

Behind them, Hector and Camilla, a pair of middle-aged pilots, asked what they were talking about with Egypt. Before Nicky could answer, however, Xolani entered the meeting hall with Apple at her heel. In a loud, off-key voice, Xolani sang to the tune of Farmer in the Dell:

“Ol’ Grammy got the axe! Ol’ Grammy got the axe! Hi-ho the derry-o, ol’ Grammy got the axe!”

With the exception of Tiffany and Nicky and their added context, it took the other pilots a moment or two to realize that Xolani was singing about Graham Magnusson getting fired.

“He was here yesterday!”

“That’s so sudden!”

“What did he do?”

Nicky’s face burned as he realized he was responsible. Sure, he didn’t like Magnus, but aside from being slimy, Nicky didn’t have any real beef with him. A glance at Tiffany’s uncomfortable expression told him she was thinking the same. He would’ve liked to know Elijah’s reaction, but the old man wasn’t active-duty and didn’t have to appear at the meeting.

Xolani sat down next to Tiffany and Apple beside her and as soon as Apple was seated, Xolani leaned over to her two fellow pilots and whispered, “so ya gonna tell me what y’all did?”

There was no point in even asking Xolani how she knew since the pilots could all guess with scary levels of accuracy what was on another pilot’s mind. Nicky supposed he and Tiffany had done a poor job keeping grimaces off their faces.

“The interview on the Lake Show. We—” Tiffany was cut short by the doors of the meeting hall being thrown open for a group of nearly-indistinguishable BN executives. “I’ll explain after the meeting.”

‘Nearly’ indistinguishable, because one of them, the man in the front, was larger and more striking than the rest. While the other executives wore dark suits and ties with sailboats on them, the larger man was wearing a vertical-striped shirt with the sleeves rolled back to reveal muscled arms. His jaw was clean-shaven and sharp, his eyes focused yet distant. A surgeon’s eyes. And he walked in a way that suggested military service of some kind. His jet-black hair was combed back into a widow’s peak like the prow of a ship.

The man took a seat on the presentation stage along with the other executive officers and waited for the technicians to finish fiddling with the electronics. Once they had worked out all the kinks, a middle manager counted the pilots and flashed the man a thumbs up that he could begin and he mounted the podium.

“Good morning. I doubt many of you know me, as my previous position was with logistics at the central office in San Francisco, so allow me to introduce myself: My name is Andrew Sinclair and I will be taking over for Mr. Magnusson as Head of Pilot Assets,” Andrew said, his voice cold and somewhat nasally. He clearly had no intention of being the ingratiating buddy-buddy Graham had been.

“I could bore you with my work history and talk about how happy I am to be your new boss, but I would rather get straight to answering your questions. First, my predecessor, Graham Magnusson, was removed because he did a poor job communicating with you all about Baron Nucleonic’s goals and objectives and maintaining message discipline from the board of directors down to the pilots. Because of that failure, we had an incident last night with certain pilots going against the wishes of the company.”

Xolani was oblivious to the fact that most of the other pilots were looking at her.

“Personally, I interpret this incident as reflective of poor management skill on Mr. Magnusson’s part, but I wanted to give you all a heads-up that you can expect some changing procedures going forward. For one thing, due to the sensitive nature of our involvement with the Department of Defense, the Department has agreed to allow Baron Nucleonics to initiate charges against any pilot who engages in seditious activity in their capacity as a pilot, defined as willfully undermining, by act or speech, the mission and objective of Baron Nucleonics in its role as a contractor for the the United States. This includes advocating for the overthrow of the United States government by supporting radical ideologies such as authoritarianism and either Centralized or Pan-Democracy.

“What!?” Xolani shouted. “Bullshit! I have a right to free speech! You can’t tell me—”

“Ms. Jefferson,” Andrew said, voice booming through the microphone, “you have hitherto been the beneficiary of leniency in our company policy, but this leniency is now causing trouble for the federal government which is in turn causing trouble for our shareholders. Your advocacy of treasonous action against the government on social media was tolerated because it was innocuous, but as your fellow pilots decided last night to escalate the use of their unelected positions to influence national policy, we have decided that our leniency has gone too far.”

Andrew Sinclair dropped the clinical tone of his voice, leaned into the mic, and in the rough growl of a father scolding their crying child, said, “moving forward, anything which fulfills the aforementioned definition of sedition, including posts on social media, will be charged as such. Doing so with the support of another pilot will be considered seditious conspiracy. Both of these charges carry with them a prison sentence. I recommend you consider your actions more carefully going forward.”

Nicky felt numb. This was so far outside of what he expected from Baron Nucleonics that his brain couldn’t process it. Forget about rallying the other pilots to support cooperation with Egypt, just asking them to rally came with a prison sentence now. As with all changes in company policy, there was an unsettling ambiguity about to what extent it would be enforced, but something in Sinclair’s sharp, vicious face and in the corners of his mouth keeping down a smile told Nicky he was hoping to use this new power on a pilot to whip the others into line.

Out of the corner of his eye, Nicky saw Xolani’s nostrils flaring. Her fist curled against the edge of the desk. She knew it was her that Andrew Sinclair hoped to make an example of. It took all her force of will not to give him the satisfaction.