----------------------------------------
“So what happened? How did you get away? How did you find me? Why?”
Lars laughed. Abe felt the warmth of that laughter creep into his bones. He smiled and arranged himself as comfortably as he could. He smelled soy sauce being cooked, along with the faint aroma of eggs slowly cooking in boiled water. His stomach growled. “Before you begin, I’m thirsty.” Before he finished the sentence, Umezawa was there with a bottle of water. “Thanks, Ume.”
Lars began. “Well, it was quite the adventure, getting out of that pickle, with Meredith over there betraying our positions, but, see, he didn’t have a choice. He was made to do that.”
“Yes, I think I understand,” said Abe. “I had this really long dream about the Great Elm, and I think it explains Meredith and James and Alayna and Perry and…and…and the other one—”
“Manuel Rojacamiseta,” said Lars.
“Yeah, him too. Alayna found his body. But go on.”
“Well, we got ahead of ourselves in the first place. We didn’t do with the new bionics what we did with James, in our rush to acquire, you know, the comforts of home. If you remember, we took some time with James and took out some of his wiring in an effort to mess with his transmission capabilities. As it turns out, we actually messed with his receiving capabilities. Not that we’ve undone everything by snipping a few wires, but we did, in fact, add some distortion to his frequency footprints. He still looked bionic to whomever was looking for him, but it was just enough different that HF commands were ignored.”
“What?” said Abe. “HF? HF commands?” At that moment, James Thurgerson came from the kitchenette with a bowl of eggs for Abe.
“Compliments of the chef,” said James Thurgerson. “She calls it ‘A Poor Man’s Chanson Tomato.’ I have no idea why there are so many eggs, and there’s no tomatoes at all in this tomato sauce.”
“Onsen Tamago,” corrected Abe. “Haven’t you ever heard of slow-cooked eggs?”
“Well, yeah, but not like these. My dad liked to bury fresh chicken eggs in the dirt for a while,” said James Thurgerson, “and after a few days or weeks, he’d dig them up, crack ‘em, and suck the little baby chick out of it.”
“Ew, gross,” said Abe, looking at his Onsen Tamago. “This is not quite the same.”
“Balut,” said Lars. “He’s talking about balut. Your dad must have picked that up from the Philippines somehow.” James Thurgerson shrugged.
“Fine!” said Abe, digging in with his spoon. There were three eggs cooked to silky perfection. “This is not that, and this is fantastic! It’s super good!” He slurped at the egg yolk in his spoon, which was swimming in a lovely soy-salty broth.
Oh, Stoic, now you’re in heaven. This is the good stuff.
Lars crinkled his nose. “You’re sure this is not like that?”
“Anyway,” said Abe, exasperated.
“Anyway,” repeated Lars. “You were asking about HF commands.”
“Yes.”
“High Frequency, which is a misnomer: these are low frequency radio signals (as opposed to Very High Frequency, Ultra High Frequency, and Microwave) that travel a long, long way, through white and drifted snow, even, and you can modulate them to carry CW.”
“Command wave?”
“Good guess, but no,” said Lars.
“Wow,” said James Thurgerson, “you know more about me than I do.”
“They didn’t teach you all this stuff?” Meredith Donaldson shouted from the kitchenette. Abe snapped his head that direction, disappointed that Alayna and Meredith Donaldson were commiserating together.
That’s right, Stoic. It was all a ruse. She cares nothing for you, and you betrayed your Sano to her. The Onsen Tamago, however, is quite delicious.
Abe spooned a little more yolky goodness into his mouth, where it basically melted into a creamy, salty delight before it slid down his throat into his very thankful tummy.
“They did,” said James Thurgerson. “I feigned interest to get to the next merit level. Forgot it as soon as I passed the exam.” Meredith Donaldson spluttered in disbelief, trying to find a bon mot, but failed.
“Continuous Wave,” said Lars. “Another way of saying Morse Code. They modulate CW to ride on HF waves with simple commands. Apparently the bionics have switches their masters can turn on and off from quite a distance, switches which activate some pretty sophisticated infrastructure, circuits purpose-built for this or that behavior. When we cut that resistor out of James here, it distorted the CW, and James was…free.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“For a time,” said James Thurgerson. “Nanobots are hard at work rebuilding that network, or reconfiguring, or whatever.”
“Blake fully expects that we’ll have to work a lot harder next time, what with machine learning and all. They’ll know we did it on purpose,” said Lars.
“So, HF carrying CW commands,” said Abe. “What does that have to do with all of you being here? And why is Meredith still with us?”
“Yeah,” said Lars. “That’s a tricky one. So, Blake was on to the thing, sort-of intuitively because he’s such an insufferable conspiracy kook. Do you recall that fight in the bower right before we left?”
“Oh yeah!” said Abe. He was trying to savor the Onsen Tamago, but he was already on the third egg. “I guess we all wondered about that.”
“Yeah,” said Lars. “Blake was on to something, but he didn’t quite understand what, and, well, you saw what happened. And then, at cliff’s edge, there, the one you fell off, Meredith got one of those signals—”
“I got it the night before!” Meredith Donaldson said from the kitchenette.
“—the night before,” continued Lars, “and when he got to the cliff’s edge, the command kicked in and he signaled our position—”
“He waved!” Abe said. “He rolled off the cliff, and then he came back!”
“Pretty good, right?” Meredith Donaldson shouted from the kitchenette, laughing.
He’s laughing, Stoic. This man is laughing at your absolute terror and your near-death. Now there’s the model of stoicism.
“Why didn’t it affect Perry?”
“Don’t know!” said Lars. “I’m guessing the HF carrier wave isn’t that reliable, or something. Or maybe another force is at work that we don’t understand.”
“That’s right,” said James Thurgerson, sitting down on the edge of the futon at Abe’s feet. “For example, no one knows how long we’ve been on that mountain. None of us can count days properly. It’s not that we disagree about one day or two days, but that none of us can even conceive of the days at all. We’re all just sort-of…blank…”
“Huh,” said Abe. “But I know exactly how long I’ve been in this hut. Well, how long I’ve been awake in this hut. You’re right, though: I even tried to tell Alayna how long we’ve been on the mountain—I thought it was the brain injury that made it so I couldn’t remember.”
“Back to the story,” said Lars. “You distracted Meredith long enough so that Blake could haul off and nail him in the nads a couple of times. Well, apparently, that sent some sort of electrical signal where it wasn’t supposed to go, which made it so that Perry was able to convince Meredith to stand down. In that split second, the other bionic got to the party, but with Meredith just standing there—I said stand down, I know that’s confusing, but keep up with me—he was just standing there, and the other bionic didn’t know what to do, and I mean for just a split second. James Thurgerson knocked him down, and lickety-split, the poor fellow was deader than a doornail.”
“Did Alayna collect him?” Abe asked.
Umezawa laughed.
Lars said, “As a matter of fact, yes, she did.” His eyes narrowed, and he turned his head to look at her, then, askance, back at Abe. “You two really did get to know each other, didn’t you?”
“She kept me warm,” Abe said. And that, Stoic, is a memory you get to keep forever, no matter what happens from here going forward. That memory is a thing of absolute beauty, something coming from a world where beauty is created. He smiled, in spite of himself, then blushed very deeply when he realized it. “But that’s all. I was…my head was…the idea made me literally sick.”
“Hm,” said James Thurgerson.
“Hm,” said Umezawa.
Abe dug in to the last egg of the Onsen Tamago with renewed fervor.
[https://embodimentandexclusion.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/2.6.jpg]
“At any rate,” said Lars, “we scattered in every direction, to see what we could do about that helicopter.”
“The pilot should have known better!” shouted Meredith Donaldson.
“I feel like the mountain has some sort of discombobulating effect on people’s judgment,” Lars said, shaking his head. “That or the sheer surprise of Jason’s superpower.”
“Stop Small Projectiles?” Abe said.
“The very same!” said Lars. “In any case, he spun the helicopter to get a bead on Meredith, or maybe Blake, or James, one of us close to that little conflagration next to the cliff. Well, when he did, he got his tail rotor hung up in a tree—”
“He underestimated the rate of elevation change,” said James Thurgerson.
“Boom!” said Lars.
“Collected?” asked Abe.
“Yep!” said Alayna from the kitchenette. “But only one of them was a bionic. The other two I left there to rot.”
Lars said, “But when we came back yesterday, they were gone, and the helicopter was gone. Some wrecked bits were still there, along with all the bullet casings, but the helicopter and the bodies were gone.”
“Just like the airplane,” said Abe.
“That’s right,” said Lars. “That’s an important detail.”
“What about me? Why did you leave me here for a few days?”
“A few days?!?” exclaimed Lars. “Well, I suppose so, by your reckoning here. We don’t know how many days passed.”
“We looked,” said Umezawa. “Honest: we all peered over the edge of the cliff, and you just weren’t there.”
“What?”
“You had disappeared!” said Lars. “Another mysterious detail. But, see, Meredith jumped down and got back up, right? As for him, he didn’t disappear into ether. You did.”
“And we saw the four of you approaching the other day, remember?” said Meredith Donaldson, who was standing now, moving toward the futon.
She’s still in the kitchenette, Stoic. She’s not interested in you or your recovery.
Meredith Donaldson continued, saying, “We saw you coming down the mountain, when the sniper got Blake.”
“You mean Alayna got Blake,” said Abe, smiling.
“Huh?” said Meredith Donaldson.
“Heh,” said James Thurgerson, beginning to laugh. “My dad always said every blonde looked the same to him, too. He was such a racist.”
“What? What is happening?” Abe said. He felt cold. Well, this is embarrassing, Stoic. Good luck cleaning up this mess. She heard you, you know. She’s listening.
Meredith Donaldson picked up where he left off. “But I’ll say this: when we saw you, Perry pointed out that you were shimmering. This is the dead of winter, February—” he gestured to the map and calendar on the wall opposite the futon. “—February, right? And you were shimmering like you were crawling on the desert floor in the middle of summer. Then, when we climbed up in pursuit, you stopped shimmering. As soon as we topped this cliff, you cleared up and became…real…I guess.”
“Huh,” said Abe.
“Huh,” said everyone else.
“We looked for you,” Umezawa said again. “Honest we did. We didn’t dare climb down because we didn’t know who or what was waiting for us—whoever or whatever took you—”
“Well, Alayna, did, obviously,” said Abe.
“Nope,” said Alayna, still sitting in the kitchenette. “I wasn’t anywhere near, yet. And I found you right where you had fallen.”
“Well, I have to say,” said Abe, staring right at Umezawa, “this doesn’t remind me at all of anything in The Morose Alpaca. Abigail and Nami simply never encountered anything of the sort. It was all magical, you know. And this is all technology.”
Umezawa got the joke, and he laughed. He said, “I really do like it that I get to heal. I mean, if I hadn’t healed you, you’d be dead twice over, and then how would I get to laugh?”
“When was it?” Lars said. He was thinking out loud. “Two nights ago? Yes. We were in the bower, sorting through all this, when, all of a sudden, the bower just stopped. The fire went out, and the cold came in. The trees all stood upright, and instead of a bower, it was a grove again, without sentience. That’s when we realized—”
“When I realized,” said Umezawa.
“—Ume here helpfully pointed out that you must have been alive and nearby, and now you were dead,” said Lars.
“I panicked,” said Umezawa. “I didn’t really believe you were dead.”
“Come on, Ume, we all did,” said Lars. “We felt ashamed that we didn’t look for you, so we got off our tails and set off, come what may.”
“What about Sano?” Abe asked. “And Blake and Perry and Jason?” From the kitchenette Alayna looked up and over at Abe, then went back to staring at her hands.
Lars said, “We made the decision to leave them behind for the sake of the greater good. They’re trying to make a camp for any of us who might survive this excursion, but we don’t have much hope of something sustainable, not something with such a great disguise, considering how many people are trying to capture or kill us all. I mean, we can’t cut anything down, you know, given what happened last time.”
“Now we’re plus-one,” said James Thurgerson. “With Alayna Harris here, so it’s going to be more difficult.”
“Aw, that’s no worry,” Abe said, perking up, and rising to get up and get dressed, “I have no doubt the bower is back in place. If it’s not, it soon will be, and even better than before.”
He stood up.
“Say,” he said, looking at the calendar and maps and aerial photographs on the wall, “why is this thing stretched out over two years?”
----------------------------------------