Harper reached out and touched Madelyn’s hand to calm her down.
“The scale is negligible,” Harper said. “I’ve read the old texts. Even if everyone left on the planet had ten meals a day, it would just be a drop in the bucket. The power is safe and it’s a fraction of the energy that Earth gets just from solar radiation every day. You don’t need to worry.”
“Those texts were written by dead people. You know how they died? They died because they failed to predict the downfall caused by their inventions. Those are the people you’re going to trust? They killed themselves, their families, and possibly put the human race on a path to extinction. Why would you trust those texts?”
Harper blushed and looked down at her plate.
Gabriel cleared his throat.
“Don’t make her feel bad, Maddie. She’s part of the solution. We need every ounce of her optimism to get things back on track. Don’t you dare discourage her.”
“I saw that system you people devised, Gabe,” Madelyn said. “Bonfires? You came up here and lied to me. If you really thought that a solution was eminent, why did you come up here and lie? You wanted to steal my cabin for yourself so you could live out the rest of your days in seclusion. If you thought the bonfire approach had a chance, you wouldn’t have done any of that.”
Gabriel grunted and stuffed more food in his mouth. Harper studied him while he chewed. His lack of response seemed to be a confirmation that he knew he had done wrong.
“What did you tell her, Grandpa?”
He tilted his head and exhaled.
Madelyn raised her eyebrows.
When he spoke, he didn’t look either of them in the eye. “I suggested that the hills were all clear.”
“That’s not so bad,” Harper said. “We’re not far from clearing the hills. I mean, we were until you blew up the fires, but I’m sure that everything will be back on track after a reset.”
Gabriel wasn’t done confessing. “I suppose I also told her that we had come up with a method of trapping the bastards.” He glanced up to Harper.
“Grandpa,” she said. Her shoulders slumped. “It’s way too early for that. We might be years away from getting everything right.”
“I got excited when I saw her back on the ether,” he said. “I wanted to get her to come back down. I wanted a chance to apologize for everything. Then when I saw that she had watched that movie, I thought maybe there was a chance I could convince her.”
Gabriel finally looked up to Madelyn. “I just wanted to get you back with people. It’s not normal for someone to live all alone up here like this. You’re not a hermit. I know you’re not.”
“Grandpa, that’s not your decision to make,” Harper said.
Madelyn put up a hand to shut the young woman up.
“How long until this reset you’re talking about?” Madelyn asked.
“Shouldn’t be more than a couple of days,” Harper said.
“I’m going to point you to a camp where you can stay,” Madelyn said. “It has power and decent hiding places. It’s less than a day’s walk from here. You’ll stay there until your reset and when you go you’ll take the trail that swings wide of my property. Clear?”
Harper nodded.
Gabriel looked like a scolded child. He pushed the last of his eggs around with his toast.
#
#
#
#
#
The whole way to the stream, Madelyn looked forward to her trip back. Back in her grandmother’s cabin, she was going to lock the doors, set the alarms, and not emerge for a month. Hopefully by then everything would be normal and dependable again.
“This is it,” she said. She looked at Gabriel. Despite his limp, he kept up pretty well.
“This path to the lake and then circle around to the north?” Harper asked.
Madelyn nodded. “It’s the third or fourth camp you’ll find. Once it powers up, you better start looking for a place to hide. I know you don’t think the Roamers are still a problem up here, but they are.”
Harper nodded and didn’t argue. Madelyn watched as Harper helped her grandfather cross the stream. When they disappeared over the hill, Madelyn turned for home. She climbed back towards her grandmother’s cabin, trying to tune her brain for the forest again.
It was amazing how quickly her life had been disrupted. All her patterns seemed foreign when she thought about them stretching over the next days, weeks, and months.
It was the suicide. Madelyn had already planned the end of her calendar. The future was not promised to anything. Maybe the adventure of the past few days was the perfect coda on her life. She had endured one last interaction with humanity, and verified that society wasn’t in the cards for her.
“Are they gone?” Jacob asked.
Madelyn stopped. She looked up to her left.
Her nephew was standing there in the woods, next to a stack of rocks.
Madelyn lifted her chin towards him and then kept walking.
She heard him jump down to the path and then fall in behind her.
“That old man showed up after you left. He was almost naked. I watched from a distance. You surprised the hell out of me when you showed up with that woman. Who is she?”
Madelyn ignored him.
Jacob moved around her and stood in her way. He shifted with her when she tried to sidestep him.
“You’re not still convinced that I’m a ghost are you?” he asked.
“I never said you were a ghost. You’re a figment of my imagination. You’re a hallucination that my self-preservation has dreamt up. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to die and it summons you whenever my thoughts turn dark.”
“You know how insulting that is?” he asked.
She pushed him aside and continued walking. Her notions of returning to a solitary existence were balancing on the edge of her sanity.
“How would you like it if someone denied that
you
were a living, breathing human being?” he asked.
“I didn’t like it at all,” she said. She looked straight ahead and spoke like she was talking to herself. “I was treated like I was property. Worse—I was treated like I was the extension of someone else. I didn’t like it at all. What I hated the most about it is that the desire to be in that abusive couple seemed to come from within myself. There was no template for it in my life. I didn’t have a malformed relationship with my father. I had no role models who were dominated by men. Somehow that broken idea was an inherent part of me. I didn’t like it at all.”
“People don’t always seek what they know,” Jacob said. “You might have seen something missing in how your father treated you and you searched for that.”
“What are you, twenty?”
Jacob didn’t disagree. He was walking alongside her.
“Men who are twenty don’t talk like that. They don’t have deep, intellectual ideas about relationships. You ought to be trailing after Harper like a lovesick puppy. I can’t even
imagine
a man who acts correctly.”
#
#
#
#
#
Madelyn locked the door and took a nap. She used some of her power budget to produce a healing wrap for her shin, back, eye, and wrist. Once she started fabricating them, she found plenty of places on her body that demanded attention. With all the wraps stuck to her skin, she stretched out and tried to sleep through the itching heat. Her dreams were troubled by black birds trying to peck her. When she woke up, she felt a million times better.
For so many years, she had avoided using technology in her everyday life. She had forgotten the convenience. As she peeled off the wraps and looked at her rejuvenated skin, she wondered what had stopped her.
“That’s a slippery slope,” Jacob said. He walked in with an apple and sat down on the chair.
“I locked the door,” she said. “For someone who claims to not be a ghost, you certainly don’t have a corporeal respect for doors.”
“I reprogrammed it while you were out. I left your codes in place but I added an administrator code for myself. It seemed logical. This place belongs to the whole family, right?”
Madelyn frowned. She hated it when people used her own arguments against her.
“And I checked the surveillance video from your cameras. I do appear on them, as did my father. If you had a way to test the bone dust in your incinerator, I’m sure you would find evidence of his DNA.”
“I’m not sure DNA survives that process,” she said.
“It does, but you need to have a specialized machine. There’s one in the morgue in Oslo. We had to use it once.”
“Huh,” Madelyn said.
“But you don’t need any of that,” Jacob said. “All you have to do is stop your friends the next time you see them. Ask Gabriel if he can see me. Ask
him
if I’m real.”
“I did ask him about you. He didn’t know what I was talking about.”
For a second, Jacob was silent.
When he opened his mouth again, Madelyn cut him off.
“I’m tired of this,” she said. “Real or imaginary, I’m tired of having a nephew right now. Stay or leave, I don’t care, but I’m going to live in silence for a while. If you want to get along with me, I recommend that you respect that.”
She got up and moved to the kitchen. After a moment of debate, she decided to let her synthesizer make a cup of hot tea. It was quicker and more aromatic than what she would get from one of her old bags. A short time before, she would have enjoyed the tea out on the porch. Today, she wanted no sensory input. She carried her tea down the stairs and then rode the lift to the control room. She drank her tea while looking at concrete.
F
OR
WEEKS
, J
ACOB
WAS
nearly the perfect roommate. She saw him occasionally. He left the cabin early and took his lunch with him. Once or twice she had to wait for him to finish with his shower before she could use the bathroom.
They didn’t have another conflict until Madelyn started one.
She waited on the porch until he came back one afternoon.
“You’re using too much power,” she said.
Jacob stopped in his tracks and blinked at her. It appeared that he had forgotten how to interact with another person. Madelyn understood.
“Pardon?”
“I just looked at the statistics. Together, we’ve used more power in the past week than I did in the previous year. I know it might seem silly, given the capacity of this place, but when I leave this life I want the cabin to be as capable as possible for the long term. You might have kids one day, and then they might have kids. Don’t you want them to…”
He put up his hand, cutting her off mid-sentence. She was so surprised by the gesture that she actually did stop talking.
“It’s you,” he said. He went inside.
She sat stunned for a second and then followed him in.
“What?”
“It’s you.” He wiped an apple with a towel and then took a bite.
“You use power all the time. Where did you get that apple?”
“I picked it. I’ve been harvesting all my own food from local sources. I don’t even drink the water here.”
“You’ve been taking showers.”
“Once,” he said, holding up a finger. “I took one hot shower because I remembered how good it felt from when I was a kid. You were standing there right outside the door when I came out, so that was the last shower I took. I’ve been bathing in the stream and washing my clothes there too.”
Madelyn leaned back against the counter. She searched her memory for other infractions to accuse him of.
“Your heat is being reclaimed,” she said. “It’s not free to pump your heat underground.”
“We’re heat neutral this time of year,” he said. “I looked at the reports. The cabin has been expelling the excess during the day when everything glows with reflected heat. If anything, that heat has been going into the hot water for
your
bathing.”
“How do you explain it then? You show up and my power consumption goes through the roof.”
“What did you have for breakfast?” he asked. He bit out a bad part of his apple and put it in his pocket. The bastard wasn’t even using the compost. He probably knew that it took energy to pump it to the underground tank.
Madelyn thought about her breakfast. She had indulged a little—it was her right. Ever since Gabriel and Harper had cooked eggs, bacon, and juice, Madelyn had a taste for those flavors from the past. She couldn’t keep chickens or pigs, but the q-bat could afford the energy to synthesize reasonable approximations. It wasn’t as expensive as generating a tropical fruit salad.
“Okay, so maybe I’ve been a little extravagant with my breakfasts. It doesn’t explain everything.”
“Go look at the reports,” he said. “It’s not me.”
She expected Jacob to take his leave. He surprised her by taking a seat at the counter and waiting. This was one argument that he looked eager to see through to the end.
Madelyn narrowed her eyes. She didn’t head for the door to the sub-level. Instead, she knelt down and opened the junk drawer. After digging through it, she found the scratched up old remote panel. She wiped it on her shirt and powered it up.
“That takes even more energy than…” Jacob began.
“I know,” she said, cutting him off. “It’s negligible.” The thing came to life in her hands, sapping phantom energy from the q-bat. She fancied that she could feel the air jiggling around her with the stray electronic waves.
The report was detailed. She found the summary at the end. Occupant one had used seventy-eight percent of the energy. Occupant two had only used thirteen. The rest was attributed to environmental concerns. It was the cost of doing business, regardless of the residents. Overall, the battery had used a fraction of a percent of its total capacity. Still, she didn’t like seeing the impact.
“Assuming that I go back to my miserly ways, your impact is
not
negligible,” Madelyn said.
“Ha!” Jacob said. “You glossed right over the fact that your panel acknowledges my existence. I’m
not
a ghost.”
“I never said you were,” she said. She didn’t take her eyes from the panel. “I said you were a figment. You need to reduce your impact by half.”