This is a story 'bout the three of us
Down by the water and the tide is rising
This world is burning and I'm terrified
I need a little more time with you, oh
I just need a little more time with you.

Someone's always taking the photo who should be in it with us…

They will tell you, you can't sleep alone in a strange place
Then they'll tell you, you can't sleep with somebody else
Ah, but sooner or later you sleep in your own space
Either way it's okay to wake up with yourself
– Billy Joel by way of Richard McGraw

When you’re chasing the sun in a 747 across the Pacific there’s a good chance you won’t see night for a long time, and if you’re crossing that particular body of water the way I do, there’s no way you’re going to be on that plane for anything less than 12 hours… at least. What you get is the cabin crew enforcing seemingly arbitrary time periods for meals, for refreshments, for times that the window shades must be up and let in the flood of light at 50000 feet, and when they should be down to simulate night, the latter of which is often interrupted by the multitude of people who can’t sleep properly on planes (can you blame them?) and curiously open their shade only to be momentarily blinded by the ever present sun. It’s then you confirm this isn’t real, that these periods of eating and sleeping attempting to stave off boredom with your iPod, your laptop, your books, your magazines, the personal in-flight entertainment which has these days made it all the way back to coach, all of it happens in a self-contained bubble hurtling across the skies that, for the the passengers, has no connection to any time, place, or thing. I’ve done this trip plenty of times and it’s always the same.

I suppose it’s fitting. It’s the gateway to another world and among the people of the world I come from they have a hard time comprehending just exactly what its like where I’m going. “Wait, why do you have a plantation?” they ask. “I don’t get it, where are your parents?” “It’s 90 degrees there in April?” “What do you mean you have a house with staff there?” It’s just so different that it’s futile to explain it all, and even if I try, it’s inevitable that I gloss over the nuance, the actual important parts – how lifetimes ago a disparate group of people from all over the planet came together, and how, set against moral and ethical decisions more often than not tied to wide ranging political events of the 19th century and into the 20th, these various pairings resulted in… well, me. But then again isn’t that everyone’s story?

When I stepped off the plane at MNL the sun finally decided to wave goodbye. Making my way through the terminal, the fluorescent lights stood no chance against a setting sun determined to overwhelm any color on the ground; the sky ran from burning orange all the way to deep purple at the edges, with every color in between. The airport’s halls flooded with sunset, and I knew I walked as a silhouette against the windows. So did everyone else; I could make out dark shapes lugging their carry-ons, but the steep angle of sunlight removed all detail. With my iPhone still firmly plugged into my ears, my head still swimming from the airplane bubble, and the lush visuals, I barely felt grounded in reality. That was okay; I still had another flight to catch (domestic 45 minute jump to another island), an overnight stay with an old friend, then a two hour drive, and a tiny ferry ride to the final destination. Plenty of time to get the brain in order.

I still think about him.

"Nobody does the right thing."
–Marie, The Bourne Identity

ORD. The only reason it resides in a slightly different spot in my head is based purely on emotion; Chicago will always be the closest thing I’ll consider to be home. But an airport’s an airport, whether it’s a giant international hub like ORD or LHR or LAX or SFO or some tiny domestic airport in the Azores with a dirt runway. The anticipation of recirculated air and oppressive mental dulling often leads me to anticipatory altitude headaches.

Just before I step out of the transport and onto the cold international departures walkway I grab a bottle of water from the console and use it to pop a pair of liquigels.
The only ace up my sleeve is abusing privilege. This works especially well at ORD since the facilitators of abuse are local. After securing our boarding passes, I lead Emily to a plain white door off to the right of where the TSA drones are performing their absolute best security theater. Oscar worthy, really.

I open the door and step into a glorified closet really. The CFL bulbs are overexposing a room hardly large enough to fit Emily and I plus our carry-on luggage and one additional man; tall and generally imposing, efficient hair, eyes that pierce in our direction… though I can see the tiniest hint of a sparkle when he and I lock eyes. It’s Loch, wearing a pair of crisply creased slacks and a dark blue, almost black, polo, the company’s logo ironically emblazoned just above a chest pocket. When I used to work there such things were considered superfluous. Maybe it was a joke.

Loch nods at both of us. He knows Emily, though that’s a whole saga unto itself. She and I both know better than to bother with greetings and handshake exchanges. He flips out a keycard and slides it through a reader next to the only other door in the room and keys in a PIN. The door audibly unlocks, and we follow Loch through.

The next room is just as overexposed, and I hope to God that the lighting sacrifices we make really do make a difference in the global war against environmental ruin. It’s much bigger though. In fact it’s a regular office: a couple of desks with plenty of the usual office shit, and a one way window looking out onto the security floor. Loch leads us to one of the desks, where a balding, bored man looks up and asks for our IDs and boarding passes. He, like Loch, is also wearing a polo, though this one is white, wrinkled, and has what I suspect are grease spots just below his collar. He mindlessly types some stuff into a computer, looks at our paperwork, gives us a once over, then hands everything back. He stands up and tells us to put our luggage on a small scanning machine in the office, runs it through, then gives us a wanding that ends just about as quick as I could probably go through one of the automatic machines. “OK,” he says, walking back to his desk and barely giving us a look.

Loch leads us to the back of the office and opens a door. “Have a good time,” he says curtly, then secures the door after us.

We walk down a short featureless hallway. It’s overexposed as well, and what must’ve been a new white paint job is refracting off the linoleum; the CFL-thrown light makes me feel like I’m walking through a cloud. The only color in the hallway is Em, me, our luggage, and a sign on the door at the end of the hallway, which, upon reaching it, reads “MAKE SURE DOOR CLOSES BEHIND YOU.” I push it open, and we find ourselves in the main wing of the international terminal. The door swings shut and clicks.

We start walking to our gate, and I see Em turn around, looking at a camera positioned just over the door. She waves, then turns her attention back forward. “Remember when everyone swore you were some kind of government spook?” she says without turning her head.

“It’s an easy mistake to make,” I say. “But I would never work for the government.”

“No,” she says. “Just people that are post-government.”

“Is that the roughly equivalent to post-modern?”

“A post-modern agent,” she says. “You.”

“Just logistics and statistical analysis.”

“Right.”

We walked to our gate and waited.

You're my favourite moment.
You're my Saturday
–Goldfrapp

Raw Footage, Reel 2:1

Kate looks me right in the eye. Honestly, it's hard not to stare at your coxswain when she's barely two feet away and facing you directly. She covered the boom mic extending down from her headband for a tiny moment of stroke/coxswain bonding. "It's not even a choice," she mutters. "We're going to dominate," she says, barely above a whisper. I nodded. She took her hand off the mic, ending our momentary pow-wow, and yelled, "FUCK 'EM UP!" The seven guys behind me yelled in agreement.

As soon as I rolled the window down my ears popped. "What the fuck dude?" I stuck my head out the car flying down the freeway at 80 miles per hour and looked up at the sun, filtered and polarized. It was still blinding. My eyes scrunched up to slits and my peripheral vision faded away.

About 1000 meters in my vision shrinks down to a pinpoint. I can see Kate, talking us through the midsection, urging us to continue walking on the other boats. By the way her head's starting to dart around I can tell she's about to call a power ten. She does, and I start slamming down on the foot stretchers at each catch, jumping off the board and settling smoothly into the finish. My head's tingling slightly. I could do this eyes closed, feeling the boat and listening to Kate make the calls. And I do.

I opened my eyes and looked up into Emily's eyes. "We're getting old or something," she says, curling up next to me. Her hand touches my chin. "You need a shave," she says into my shoulder.

And then Chris yanked my arm and pulled me off the field. "Middie rotation man," he said. He knocked my helmet with a fist. "You got anything up there?" He grinned at me. I spun my lacrosse stick in the palm of my hand and sent it flying, catching it perfectly balanced vertically in my other palm. "Yeah real fucking useful," he said. I tapped his helmet with my stick and sat on the bench.

The rhythmic chunk/ka-chunk of the oars alternately catching and finishing and feathering has lulled me into a woozy cloud. I open my eyes just enough to look at the boat next to us; I can make out the Vespoli logo on the side of the boat. There's a momentary break in the sun as we fly through a bridge, and I could swear I can make out Maia standing there with her arm around Murph, who's carrying their kid in some goofy parental-baby binding device. I almost crack a smile but I can't spare the calories.

It all swirled together. It hadn't been like this for… awhile. The mixture point, when arms and legs and sheets and blankets are all tangled and the room's boiling, the colors are indistinct, fluid. I reach for the glass of water on the nightstand and drink the last bits of ice. He climbs over me and tries to grab the glass, but I swing it out of the way. "I think we should refill this," he says. I can actually feel his abs touching the small of my back and it actually makes me catch my breath for second. Embarrassing; I'm never like that. He gets off me and heads for the kitchen leaving me half hanging over the edge of the bed. The colors are still swirly, but they've calmed down enough for me to spot a Vespoli tshirt hanging off his closet door. I lunge for it, snapping the hanger that held it in half, then curl up in the bed with the fabric.

It's gotten to the point of the race where I can only concentrate on Kate's voice. My eyes are closed again, but I know she's tensing up, itching to call the final sprint. She's really going for it, telling bow seat their catches are early, that we all need to dig deep, to keep our set steady in the last 500, and then she calls it, she calls me to up the rating and for everyone to follow right with me. I barely open my eyes and everything's tearing horizontally, jagged lines in overwhelming sunlight, heat from the boat, the constant din of Kate now in yelling overdrive. The boat's lifting out of the water, the oars are flipping easily through, we're going hard but keeping the check in control. Starting to get dizzy.

The blood's rushing to my head, but it's a pleasant warmth. Our legs are up over the back of the couch, our heads hanging over the edge, the TV's image upside down. "Would you ever get a rowing tattoo?"

God no.



"You ever miss Chicago?"



All the time.

Number 1

My eyes snap open to more street light than morning light, panic rising instantaneously to dizzying nauseous stratospheric heights; the cold sweat forming immediately on my forehead, the back of my neck, a torso now heaving faster and faster. I stumble to the chest of drawers, fling them open and bat away flying clothes, then paw at the top of the chest, sending my RSA security fob, a work ID, rowing sunglasses, a North Face handkerchief, some change to the floor. I tear out the bedroom door glimpsing a blurred image in the mirror with hair half stuck straight up and a pillow mark on my right cheek.

I run past my office looking inside just for a second, but it’s only my stuff. In the kitchen I throw open the fridge door but there’s no leftover food, no old dinners in reusable containers. The door closes and there’s no photo of us stuck on there by a magnet – just a rare-earth hard drive actuator magnet ripped out of a DOD level destroyed drive holding up a picture of Tim waving from the top of some mountain. I open a kitchen drawer full of menus and paperclips and old bills and an Xbox 360 battery case and a first place bike race medal and random shit and dump it all on the floor. My bag’s in a chair and I tear inside; no stethescope, just a one-off DSP-based board from IBM/Zurich’s fabrication facility.

And I’m heaving still, can barely just stay on top of the urge to hyperventilate. I get it barely under control.

I look over by the backdoor and there’s only my keys on the pegboard.

The next wave of nausea comes twice as hard. I barely make it to the bathroom in time.

*ring*

Pick up. "'lo?" barely heard over the loud music.

"Where are you?"

"I dunno... somewhere... we were in... cars?"

"Hose, you drunk?"

"What?"

"Are you beer drunk, or hard liquor drunk?"

"Beer! Beer... bier..."

Pause. "Barley drunk for you means suggestibility. Go update your livejournal."

"Fuck you!" Pause. "They'll do it for me...."

"No. You do it. Finish the shit you're in the middle of."

"FINE. Meantime I'm gonna make some calls."

"Yeah? To whom?"

"Oh you're so fucking fancy, you know the difference between who and whom!"

"So do you dumbass."

"For your fucking information, I run down the list of people I used to play lacrosse with."

"Yeah?"

"Fuck yeah. And they get all sorts of jealous because I can still get drunk and make drunken phone calls and act like a total douchebag and get awesomely horribly drunkenly laid while they're wondering why the illusion of fulfillment from marriage never materialized. And I'll tell you this..."

"What will you tell me Hose? What?"

"It's cause they fucking settled. Settled way before they fucking should've. You think it's THE one. You think THIS, this has got to be it, but it's not. It's totally replicable. It's just a goddamn flood of chems. And most fucks out there can't tell the difference between that and the real shit. The one that's NOT replicable. But people are chicken shits. They pussy out before the real shit's arrived. Weak"

"Go call your old lax buddies dude."

"Fuck yeah."

*sound of phone dropping*

http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/humour-tips-for-becoming-a-roadie-14451

#1 - How many tubes have I blown apart in the beginning? Many.
#2 - The hand gestures are hilarious in a group. Fellow coworkers and I even have one for a silent 'IBM'.
#4 - Triathletes are horribly, horribly annoying.

“You have to PLAY the game, to find out WHY you're playing the game.”
– Allegra, eXistenZ

“Pikul. Wake up.”

My eyes snapped open at the sound of a long buried nickname and I sat straight up in the bed, but my view appeared cloudy and indistinct. Without any effort, my contacts, some ridiculous super-extended wear / self-cleaning via natural tears / auto-axis orienting prototype gift from Seth’s connections at VISTAKON, slid into place with the familiar (yet still strange) rotational sensation. I blinked twice in rapid succession and the cloudiness from sleeping with them instantly cleared. Bryce stood at the foot of the bed, staring at me with the usual blank look. He does not need any kind of corrective vision hardware. “Did you ever think of flying a plane for the Air Force?” I grumbled.

“Of course not,” he replied, tossing my COM at me. I caught it against my chest and fell back into the bed. It met me with a subtle electronic gong as it recognized me: the dog greeting its old master.



I held the COM in my hands and leaned over the railing, the little unit suspended precariously over the gap. Three stories below at the bottom of the missile silo, Greg stood at a lectern extolling the virtues of Ka-band subchanneling (did that make it Ku?). It wasn’t anything I was particularly interested in, though he had a large enough audience which included Claudia. She and the rest of the audience munched on brunchy things that the catering staff had whipped up for the morning events, while Greg periodically paused to get bites of muffin in. He actually timed it well enough with the presentation slides and animations projected onto the rounded walls that I doubt anyone even noticed; not to mention his visually encircling presentation provided plenty of fun eye candy, usually with rapid fire 180 degree vistas courtesy of four independent projectors that pumped out everything from room spanning planetary horizon lines with projected satellite orbits to a slowed down version of what it’d be like to ride (literally) a modulated sub-channel carrier wave. Bumpy and vomit inducing, apparently. I thumbed through the info Claudia and Bryce had secured last night while I had caroused over beers: extensively detailed maps of everything from the HVAC system to conduit runs to the original plans of the silo superimposed over the revamped structure.

“Anything interesting?” I heard Richard’s voice from over my shoulder.

“Down there or in this thing?” I asked without turning around.

“Either?”

I shrugged and handed over the communications device. He stepped up to the railing next to me and gave the little display a quick once over. “So this is what you guys were doing last night. These look very complete.” He stopped perusing the data and looked at the physical unit, turning it over slowly, then handing it back to me. “You were the diversion.”

I shook my head. “Not really.” He joined me against the railing, but I didn’t look at him. “If I was a diversion I’d be a bit more clandestine.”

“And you just handed me what you came up with without even asking.”

“Nothing to hide.”

“Either that or you’re just practicing further diversionary tactics.”

“Whatever you want to believe.” I finally turned to face him just so I could roll my eyes in grand fashion.

“Seth ever tell you how much that little piece of hardware in your hand costs?” He nodded at the COM.

“I have a vague idea. They update them so rapidly that I don’t bother. It never figured into any of our budgetary obligations anyway. How much?”

“Let’s just say that one of those is more than we can budget out from the taxpayers.”

“Big deal. For most government agencies anything that needs money is unattainable. Everything’s expensive to you guys; you’re the cheapest bastards out there.”

“True enough. Comes with transparent territory.” He must’ve noticed my lack of interest and nudged me in the side. “Come on, let’s go get some food.”



We ended up in the largest lounge area on a very large and comfortable couch, no doubt hauled in here weeks prior to the conference by a whirlwind of workers cleaning, scrubbing, implementing redesigns and infrastructure changes to turn an old cold glorified launch tube into something livable. Five store hotel livable. The barista had hooked me up with a pristine and super-hot Americano plus a cranberry scone that, in all of its awesomely lumpy glory, could barely be contained on the plate upon which it sat. Richard dug into a goat cheese and spinach omlette, an oversized mug of coffee nearby. With everyone either at Greg’s lecture or attending the lab on building heterogenous DSP-based neurals we had the lounge to ourselves. “How come you’re not at either of the sesions?” Richard asked between mouthfuls of egg.

“Technical exposition is uninteresting and not the reason to go to the conference. I’d rather hit the more interesting events later and avoid the filler.”

“Everyone else considers it interesting enough to attend,” he said.

“You’re not there,” I countered.

“The stuff is more in depth than I need. The staff technicians can break it down for me if I need to go that in depth.”

“I’ll read up on it and hit the folks up directly if I need to get a serious handle on whatever topic it is. None of that stuff is too relevant to me anymore.”

“Explain again why you’re here when you’re not even in the sector anymore?”

“Didn’t we have this conversation last night?”

“You didn’t answer directly last night.”

I huffed. “Guess I didn’t.” I soaked a bit of scone into the Americano, waited for the excess to run off, then dropped it into my mouth. Richard waited patiently. “I never went to this thing back when I worked for the Company, figured I should do it at least once in my life.”

“You didn’t attend previously by choice or decree from above?”

“Personal choice really. I saw it as distracting at the time, and sending Loch kept up Company appearances and obligations. Bryce and I worked better in a vacuum anyway.”

“Loch, yeah. What a great personality he’s got. His idea of friendly is not setting up continued psychological harassment after you accidentally bumped into him in the hallway.”

I shrugged. “You guys made him that way.”

Richard shook his head. “If you’re referring to his “interesting” military career, I doubt it. They may have drawn it out of him, but folks like him? That stuff’s there to begin with. On the other hand, you and Bryce… you never really worked together I thought?”

“He trained me when they hired me, then he left for other things.”

Richard smirked. “Yeah. Other things. With lots of doctors.”

I didn’t take the bait and continued. At least I hadn’t had a total loss of skill since leaving the Company. “Lack of payroll doesn’t kill die hard habits. We just had conversations. Never official, never sanctioned.”

“Would’ve loved to be a fly on the wall for a couple of those convos.”

“You probably did.”

“Funny. Can’t see that goin’ over well with your boss.”

“Nope. Lots of scrutiny. But the shit got done and they let it go.”

“I can’t imagine it was even easy to get in contact with him what with his… circumstances. What did he get out of it anyway, if not money?”

“What did Hannibal Lector get out of helping Clarice Starling?”

“Point taken. You’re no Clarice-level noob though.”

“You’d be the best person to make that judgement wouldn’t you? Maybe not now, but back at the beginning…”

“And now you’re here.”

“Curiosity, and you know, the occasional freelance gig. Gotta keep the creds up.”

“Really? Who you gigging for?”

“You don’t actually expect me to tell you that.”

He smiled. “Just givin’ it a shot. I have to wonder how you have any time to even do that though. You doin’ all that DSP work now with some hot shit team; it’s keeping you pretty busy.”

“The team isn’t hot shit, and yes, I manage.”

“If you’re under 40 and workin’ at the Big Blue in that lab you’re in, I’d say hot shit is a safe bet.”

“I don’t wear a suit and I know the top secret Blue drinking song. It’s the same rules, different place.”

“Possibly. I bet your grandfather would’ve been proud.” He scooped up the last of his omelette.

My throat instantly shrunk to the smallest possible diameter for conscious functioning. I put my scone down and turned and met his gaze. “No,” is all I said.

His eyes grew a bit wider, and he put his fork down, but his G-man demeanor remained otherwise unchanged. “I think my coffee just iced over,” he offered. He took a sip anyway.

“Yeah, whatever.” I turned back to my scone.

I could feel him picking up all the giveaways, the tells, the slight change of musculature in my arm, and running them through his internal analyzer. I knew what he came up with: he’s been out of the game too long. He eventually turned back to his plate. “I’d love to hear your version of him from your perspective,” he said.

“Yeah, whatever,” I repeated. And that was it – he had pushed me into clam mode. We finished the meal talking about kings and cabbages under the weight of the banal.



I broke into Bryce’s suite and flopped down on his couch, thinking about flags and nationalities, the difficulty for most people to cover the octave range demanded by The Star Spangled Banner, and how America, The Beautiful will always the superior choice for the national anthem. Eventually I wandered over to the suite’s desk and sat down, popping open his laptop and logging in with the account he reciprocates for me on all his machines. I found the particular archive I needed and began re-reading through the images scanned from typeset documents from the 70s. #4, Bryce one section read. I skimmed through the pages I had read many times before, picking up on random fragments: emotionally unavailable, study successful, little to no overt reactions.

“Did Richard dig into your epidermis?”

I turned around in the chair and saw Bryce standing in the doorway, the same blank, borderline dour look on his face that’s always there. Bryce’s logical rock-hopping used to baffle me but I’ve been around him long enough over the years to catch up with his lightning fast evals; I knew he hadn’t spoken to Richard, but he knew I had by logical deduction, knew what Richard’s goals were (did I? Of course not… yet), knew how’d he go through with it, knew what my reaction would be after being out of it for so long, knew where I’d end up, probably knew what I was looking at. Bryce knew it and didn’t stop it because he either knew I needed the experience so that he could somehow twist it to his advantage, or didn’t care. Possibly both. Probably both. From my no doubt emotionally clouded brain.

“I hate being your goddamn opposite,” I said.

“You should not hate the inevitable, Pikul,” he said.