Silence. Beautiful silence. I come here for the quiet. Or, at least, as close as I can come nowadays. Cities, even most towns, hold their own cacophonies of information. But here? The only thing pouring noise into my mind within my radius is the shit I chose to bring over. Because, fun fact, it turns out there’s still plenty of places that aren’t connected. I wake up to the dull hum of my shutdown but perfectly happy laptop. Rarely do things truly quiet themselves. I wish I could travel without it, but I know better. There’s so many things I need it for. Especially if I want to maintain my normal life and lifestyle the other forty-odd weeks of the year. That said, I have a rule. I leave it off until after lunch. As I walk down the stairs, I do feel something wrong. The alarm system I made two days ago in the junkyard. It’s upset. Someone is here. That’s never good.
“Phil?” a voice says from my living room. Strong, deep. Only slightly threatening, but definitely not kind.
I shake my head. Waving my hand past the wall, it slides open. “You do know this is trespassing,” I say, “Kind of rude, if you ask me.” I pull the small box out from the hole in my wall.
“Oops,” says the voice, “My bad.” I don’t recognize the voice. Heading down the rest of the stairs with my box at the ready, I see a man sitting in my comfy chair. Early thirties, built like an athlete. The sort of face that would be attractive if he bothered to take care of it. And he has coffee made, and a pair of mugs sitting out. “Want a cup?” he offers with a smirk.
I take one of my mugs from the table, look at it, then him, then pour the coffee. “You’ve made your point. What do you want?” I ask. I take a sip of coffee.
“Is that any way to treat a friend?” he asks. I look at him again. Definitely don’t recognize his voice, his features. I take a deeper drink of my coffee to excuse my silence and instead of trusting my eyes and ears, I listen with my mind. His phone. I recognize it’s hum. No, I know it’s hum. It’s mine. I made it.
I pull back from my sip immediately and aggressively. “Oh, screw you, Willa,” I groan at her, shaking my head in utter doneness. “Why do you got to be like this?” Not mentally prepared to deal with one of my old friend’s bull right now, I collapse with my coffee into my couch and slowly sip.
“Took you long enough,” she said.
I shrug, still sipping my coffee. “Sorry, but most of my friends show up as themselves,” I counter.
“You know the deal, though,” she says, gesturing towards her eyes, then around the sky.
I wave her off. “Not around here, I don’t think. The generator should be taking care of that. Probably.” I spin the box out from my pocket and onto the table.
“Wait, you were gonna wipe me?” She feigns being offended. Or she actually is, it’s hard to tell with Willa.
“No,” I counter, “I was gonna wipe the strange six foot five man who broke into my house.”
She chuckles. “Fair,” she says. Slowly, her body begins to shrink into the built, red-haired woman I knew from the escape. “Better?” she asks.
“Honestly, I don’t much care. I just would prefer not being surprised by someone I don’t know who could easily beat the crap out of me.”
She looks around, then at herself. “You do remember that I could pretty easily beat the crap out of you?”
I laugh. “No shit,” I say, “But I know you, so if you do end up knocking me out, I know I’ll probably have deserved it.”
“Probably?” she says, amused, giving me a look.
“Shut up.” I shake my head at her. “Back to my original question: What do you want, anyways?”
She shrugs. “Maybe I just wanted to chat?” she offers.
It’s my turn to look incredulously at her. “Here? You hate suburbs so much you’ve refused to pass through them to get to the airport, but you expect me to believe you’re good with heading to my hideaway town where everyone knows everyone just to chat?”
“Yes?” she says, more a question than an answer.
I shake my head. “Great. Well, I’m playing with my car today. Enjoy my coffee, and if you want to actually talk, I’ll be in the garage this morning, then answering emails in the afternoon, then heading to the junkyard in the evening to replace the bits that broke when you broke into my house.”
“I barely broke in,” she complains at my specific choice of words, though she does nothing to move or ask me anything.
Cracking my neck and downing the remainder of my coffee, I get up and head out the back, into the garage. The outside air is brisk. I can feel my hair stand up. As I walk past the big blue button on the wall, I nod. It politely listens to me. The space heaters start blowing hot air through the garage, taking in and heating the air on one end, then pushing that air into the open covered garage’s center. It can feel the filter is running out. Another thing to pick up materials for at the junkyard this evening.
In the center of my garage, already lifted onto jacks, sits my pale gray van. From the outside, it’s like most vans. That’s part of the point. As my friend so eloquently put it, there are eyes everywhere. Grabbing my box of problematically explosive junk, I head under the seats of my van. See, while I left most of the engine in the front, I disconnected it almost entirely from the car. It’s for emergency use only, and I have to tinker with several elements around the inside and underside of the car if I wanted to actually use that gas engine to drive this thing. Carefully, I remove the bottom panel from under the seats, a panel that I installed back when I started doing work on my van. And, looking at the electric engine I installed under the seats and the capacitors lining the floor, I close my eyes for a moment. With a thought, the engine hums to life. And I listen for what’s wrong. The engine turns off, after all there’s barely any charge. That’s next week’s job. This week is just making it run happily. And it mostly did. The moment it was alive, there were a few complaints, but far fewer than yesterday. A collection of connections whose resistances are too high, a poorly optimized regenerative motor were the loudest. If I’m hearing the charging motor, though, that has to mean I’m getting close. After all, it isn’t like the connections. It isn’t like the van was actively using it. Clambering into the van, I follow the memory of the complaining connections within the interiorless van. Well, other than the seats, interiorless. I can remember a couple of them clearly, but after that, I’m probably going to have to give her another jolt and listen with my mind once more.
As I’m replacing the third connection that I recall the batteries being uncomfortable around, there’s a knock on the outside panels of the panel van. “You ready to chat?” I ask as I carefully remove the offending wire.
“I guess,” Willa says. I mark the location and put down the toolkit atop the floor of batteries. Heading to the rear of the van, I exit through the back double doors, closing them carefully behind me. “Wow, these space heaters are really good,” she adds to fill the silence.
“They’re not space heaters,” I say, coming around the side of the van, “And of course they are, I made them.”
She shakes her head. “Watch your ego or hubris’ll get you.”
“I always watch my ego,” I joke, “Why do you think I find myself so attractive?” After sharing a chuckle, I move things back on track, “So, what’s wrong?”
“They found me again,” she admits.
I sigh, leaning against a cabinet by the wall. “It’s not like you weren’t expecting that? This is your, what, fourth life since we ran.”
“But I liked this one. And it’s not like they’ve found you more than once yet.”
I wave that thought off. “That’s because they don’t care about finding me. I’m deemed ‘minimal risk’, remember. My…” I pause, trying to decide the word. I don’t want to use their terms, because of the bad memories associated with it. I decide on talent. “Talent is being very good at making and fixing things.”
“Impossible things,” she corrects me.
“Highly improbable and often unprecedented things,” I correct her correction. “You can be anyone. They’re not scared of what I can do. They’re scared of you. That means they care about finding you wherever you go.”
“Any way they’re tracking the phone?” she asks, worried.
I look at her, coldly, “Because you’ve been there for me so many times, I’mma forget you said that,” I joke. I give her a smile after a brief moment, to make sure she can tell I’m joking. She’s upset enough that she might not have realized otherwise. She smiles and chuckles a little back.
“Sorry, I’m just, I don’t know,” she spits out, “It’s a lot and I liked being Harris. He was a hot mess, but I still loved living that life, you know?”
I shake my head. “You’ll like your next one, too. You always do.”
She bites her lip. “I’m not so sure,” she offers. She seems uncertain whether or not she should say more.
“Something about to happen?” I ask, genuine concern in my voice.
She smiles. “Nothing you’ve got to worry about. Unless you want to.” She shakes her head. “I received a warning this time. It’s hard to explain. But that warning came with an offer, of sorts.”
“And you’re going to take it, but don’t know if you’ll like it?” I ask, trying to figure out what’s going on in my friend’s brain. People say human minds are just complicated machines, but that really isn’t true. I’d understand them better if they were.
“Sort of. I think I have to take it, and am pretty sure I won’t love it.”
I stand up. “Do you think this warner wants you to be anyone, rather than someone?” I ask. She shouldn’t have to do that. That’s one of the many reasons we broke out and ran from that place. If she’s going back there…
She looks at me, her face serious. “Worse, I would bet. But I don’t know for sure. Do you want to join, too?”
I shake my head. Gesturing around, I say, “I’m good with my life. But keep my phone, keep in touch. You ever need anything…” I trail off. She knows already, no need to say it.
She nods. “Same,” she adds. “Don’t die, don’t get caught.”
I finish our farewell with a melancholy smile, “Don’t feed after midnight.”
“See you soon enough,” she says, slowly growing in size and twisting her features back into the form of the large athletic gentleman. “Not that you’ll necessarily realize it,” she adds, her voice once more the strong, deep, slightly threatening one from earlier.
“You never know,” I muse, “One of these days I’ll figure out how to tell you’re you.”
She laughs. “Sure you will,” she replies, “Just like how one of these days I’ll figure out how your phone actually works.”
I smile. “Oh, that’s easy. I put a bunch of little imps inside it, who run around making things work just a little bit wrong so you don’t want to change any of the settings but are always a little annoyed at it.”
She laughs at me. “I knew that was on purpose,” she says aggressively. Then, turning on her heel, she heads out of the garage. I watch her go. And hope she’s going to be alright. If what she thinks her new allies are going to ask of her is worse than being anyone, I suspect she’ll need all the luck my hope can provide.
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