Tag - A Technothriller (21 page)

Siti got down from the Terra and we followed her as she walked up onto the deck surrounding the restaurant. It turned out to be the house of the owner of the land and he approached us after swinging his legs off the hammock he had been lying in on the deck facing the sea.

“Welcome to Sisik. My name is Abdul Haqq,” said the man, who was wearing a sarong and nothing else. He looked to be in his sixties, the grey hair on his head matching the few sparse grey hairs on his chest as he walked towards me his hands lifted in a wai.

I waied him back, as did Mariko, and said, “Hi. My name’s Jonah and this is Mariko.” Mariko smiled at him.

“Come, come,” said Abdul, moving his hand in a small downward wave to indicate that we should follow him. “We have to hurry because night falls very quickly and we only have maybe twenty mins before it will be completely dark.”

He walked around to the front of the deck and down the stairs that led to the beach and we followed him down the shoreline, heading south. The beach was about fifty meters wide at its widest point and narrowed sometimes to just twenty as the jungle pushed its way towards the sea. The only sounds were our feet scuffling the sand, cicadas trilling their mating calls and the palms brushing softly against each other in the slight breeze. There wasn’t a wave to be seen and the ocean was devoid of life for all the movement it displayed.

As soon as I saw the house, I knew that I’d buy it. It had nothing to do with the house, it was the location. A bluff of steep-sided headland, dark in the rapidly failing light, rose in front us, and off to our right was the house. The building seemed to be losing the battle against the encroaching jungle and one wall had tropical vegetation pressed up against it.

Abdul smiled at me and lifted his hand to show the way, saying, “Be careful as you come up the step. The wood has rotted and I am afraid that I have been too busy to replace it yet.”

I wondered if he meant too busy sleeping in the hammock and glanced at him. A twinkle in his eye and the wrinkles gathering made me suspect that he knew what I was thinking but I just smiled and gingerly made my way up the steps to stand on the deck that surrounded the house.

The building was stand-alone and badly run down. It had no Travway leading to it and was only forty meters from the sea, white sand covering the distance between. The rear of the house faced the sea and had a large balcony running around the entire second floor. At the front was a garden full of flowers, reaching to the edge of a small patch of jungle through which was a path that led to the nearest Travway four hundred meters further on. I loved it.

As we walked back through the jungle towards the restaurant, a king cobra slithered across the path in front of us, a cautionary hand on my arm from Abdul as with his other he pointed at it. Mariko knelt down to take an image of it with her Devstick. Siti and Abdul walked on ahead of us, to give us some privacy, and I turned to Mariko.

“So what do you think?”

“It’s perfect. I mean it will take a massive amount of work to get it sorted but it is such a great spot. What do you think?”

“I love it.”

The word, love, hung on the humid air between us, and brought me a serious look from Mariko. I took her hand and we walked back to the restaurant. Abdul led us to a wobbly table set in the sand that was piled high with seafood and a cooler sat beside the table with beer and soft drinks in it. Abdul pulled out a beer and twisted the top off handing it to me. He reached in and did the same again, passing the beer to Mariko.

I lifted the beer in toast to Abdul, Siti and Mariko and said, “I think I’m going to like living here very much.”

Abdul smiled, his teeth shining white in the darkness of his face and said, “Does that mean that you have decided to buy the house, Jonah?”

“Yes and I’d like to talk to you about the adjoining land too. Not for development so we can just keep it unspoiled.”

“You don’t need to worry about that. All of this land belongs to my family, and in an agreement we made long ago, none of us may sell to another without approaching all that live here first. It took me three months to get everyone to agree to sell the old beach house, even though it is falling down. But finally when I explained that it was the only way that I was going to get customers for my seafood restaurant did the family agree.” Abdul let out a loud laugh at his joke and we all laughed with him.

“Siti, you will join us for dinner. Please call your father and tell him that you are entertaining me tonight.”

“Ha, I do not think so, Abdul. It is you who should be entertaining me tonight. Is that not so?”

Abdul laughed out loud again and turning to us said, “Well it is good that you will be my neighbors.” He faced Mariko, and took her hand. “You are a very beautiful woman. Please forgive an old man’s forwardness, but at my age when we want to say something we usually just say it. It is a privilege of simply having survived.” And reaching over with his other hand he took my hand in it, still facing Mariko he said, “I am a good judge of character, and I can feel the strength in this one. And in you too. This is a good place for you to find the strength in each other.” Smiling widely he placed Mariko’s hand in mine.

“Now I will leave you to sit and make romantic talk on the beach in the moonlight. Come, Siti, let us go inside tonight. It is semi-final of Malay Idol and Johan has an exemption.” Abdul and Siti walked up the beach to the house and went inside.

Mariko and I remained under the old parachute awning strung out over the cool sand of the beach. The only light came from old oil lamps converted to solar and they were set to emit an orange glow similar to the light cast by their forbears.

Mariko spoke quietly, her foot drawing circles in the sand. “I hadn’t planned on this, our being together. Two weeks ago if you would have told me that I was going to be moving out of New Singapore to live with a man who I hardly know, I would have said you were crazy. But I guess that’s love for you. And yes, Jonah, I do love you, but if we are going to be together then we have to understand why we’re together, and we have to always understand, because if we forget then we shouldn’t be together.”

“Yes, I agree totally,” I said. I meant it too. I understood what she was talking about because I had gone through the same emotional whirlwind.

She continued, “It would be nice, as Abdul said, if we can just talk sweet romantic things but I feel like we’re about to make a big commitment and it’s suddenly rushed up on me. Yesterday this was just a dream and a fun thing to do. Today, now, it feels like I’m standing on the edge of… of… sheesh, I don’t know, but it’s… it’s just different.”

I closed my eyes and breathed in, drawing the salty air deep. The breath of a warm breeze rippled the cloth of my outers against my skin and I breathed out slowly, emptying my mind. What I said now had to be right. If I got it wrong, she could be lost forever. I searched in my mind for the right words to say, feeling for her.

Suddenly a rush of thoughts entered my mind. The hairs on my neck stood up, and a shiver ran through me down to my toes scrunched in the white sand. They were her thoughts flying around, disorganized. I breathed in sharply and let out a soft gasp. The thoughts stopped. I was out of her mind. I felt shaken, shocked, maybe it was just the beer, but I thought for one crazy moment that I had actually entered her mind.

At my gasp she turned to face me and placed her hand on my arm, a small smile upon her lips. I smiled back at her and put my hand on hers.

Speaking softly I said, “I know you are scared of losing your freedom but I will never hold you back from what you want to do. All I can say is that everything that is happening feels right to me. I know it has only been a week since we met, but I also know that I will love you forever. If this feels too quick, we can stay in New Singapore. I confess I do love the peacefulness here, but I love you more.”

She squeezed my arm and said, “No. I don’t care about New Singapore, and I love you too. But when we get back to New Singapore I will request a loan from my bank for half of the amount of the house. Our contract will say that as long as we are together here then we will jointly own the property, but if should split up –” and she had held up her hand palm facing me to stop my interruption. “If we should split up then we will sell the property and share the proceeds equally. I also want to continue contributing at UNPOL and there are some things that I need to talk to you about that, but that can wait.”

I interrupted her. “Look, I was surprised to learn that you were contributing at UNPOL, and doubly so at your being in the Special Operations Executive, but I understand and support your desire to keep contributing. My decision to quit from Coughington and Scuttle was my decision. Was it influenced by you? For sure, but only from the point of view that you’ve made me happy. Since I’ve never really been happy, I’ve never had anything to compare, with what I thought was my happiness. Now that I have, I can see that I wasn’t happy. But that’s me and I understand that you are in a different space with your contribution.”

She nodded and smiled and turned slightly towards me.

“I’ve never lived with anyone else before. Well of course I lived with my parents, but that’s different. I’ve always been alone – even when I was in barracks in early UNPOL training I kept myself and my routine to myself. It’s been great living with you this last week, but a week and a lifetime are totally different.”

I kissed her hand and brushed my cheek against the top of it. “Mariko, if my life were to end next week, then I would have wanted to have spent that last week with you.”

“That’s another thing. I’m quite a traditionalist at heart, and although the subject hasn’t come up yet, I want to get it out in the open now.”

“Yes...” I said doubtfully, wondering what was coming next, thinking maybe she wanted me to go and visit her parents, which was not something I was looking forward to yet.

“Sexual partners,” she said and gave me a very direct look.

“Yes,” I said confidently.

“Just you and me unless we agree otherwise, agreed?”

“Yes, agreed,” I said and smiled.

Taking my face in her hands, she climbed out of her seat and straddled me, kissing me deeply with her tongue.

Chapter 20 A Lunchtime Chat

Jonah’s Env, Unit A, 20th Floor, Woodlands Envplex, Woodlands, New Singapore

Friday, 27 December 2109, 8:45am +8 UTC

I woke up lying face down on the sleeper in my Env in Woodlands. A shaft of sun streamed through the window. With one eye open I saw the rose lying on the pillow next to me, and I smiled. I turned my head the other way and looked at the Dev beside the sleeper. 8:45am.

I turned over on my back and scooted my backside up so that I could rest against the wall of the Env. It had changed a lot in the last two weeks since being occupied by Mariko. Books, paper books were piled in stacks around the room.

“Our library,” she had said, as if it were obvious that we needed paper books when we could read them on a Devstick. “A Devscreen with all the titles of the books you have on your Devstick just doesn’t have the same meaning as seeing the spines of real books,” she’d continued as we returned from another visit to the second hand book store on Orchard, near the Hyatt VacEnv. And she was right. I found myself absorbed in the feel of a book in my hands. So different from reading them on the Devstick. It is strange that although paper is such a low-tech medium, it allows for a far more random relationship with the data than a Devstick. What could be more random than laying books on the grass and allowing the breeze to select what you will read? You can’t do that with a Devstick.

Apart from the rose, she had also bought croissants from the French bakery on ground level, three blocks down from my Env, and started the coffee pot. Another new vice that I’d acquired – but then I’d lost a couple as well so maybe I was ahead of the game. Thinking about her I knew I was ahead of the game.

Since that day when we’d returned from the Lev port at Changi and she’d insisted on bringing me back to my Env, I was embarrassed at being that affected by the alky, and she had laughed it away, stripped my outers off me and pushed me into the outlet. I’d showered and felt clean and when I came out of the outlet she’d put new sheets on the sleeper and folded it back for me to crash on. She’d been sitting on the sleeper and patted the empty space exposed by the folded sheet. I’d walked over and laid down. She’d brushed the hair off my forehead and out of my eyes. No one had ever done that before. And it was a first of firsts. I’d fallen into a deep sleep, waking later to see her in the sleeper beside me, her arm over my stomach.

That was fourteen days ago now. I swung my legs out of the sleeper and walked across the padded floor of the Env to the outlet near the door. I took a seat on the recycler and tapped the Devscreen set into the wall opposite. Keeping myself on silent, I hit the menu for my data stream and, with my elbows on my knees and my chin resting on my knuckles, watched the screen. Mariko would be back at 2pm and then we’d go. I rubbed my unshaven jaw. It was unfamiliar to feel the stubble against my fingers, but since I’d resigned from my contribution at Coughington and Scuttle, a lot of things felt unfamiliar to me. I liked the feeling. It felt like I had gotten off a treadmill.

Finished, I pressed a button on the side of the recycler and a blast of ice cold water hit me full force. I yelped and jumped up, the water immediately cutting off. Mariko, I thought, and laughed. She had set the temp to manual and turned it to an icy three degrees Cel. She had a nasty sense of humor. I would have to think up something in return.

I reset the switch on the recycler to automatic and sat back down. A sec later the water, now warm, sprayed and cleaned me. I rose and entered the shower cubicle, but as I did so a new direct datafeed on the Dev caught my eye. It was from my uncle. I hadn’t told him of my decision to quit Coughington and Scuttle, nor of my decision to quit the pro bono work at UNPOL. I had just done it. I had acquired enough self-leave, and as a partner I could leave when I wanted, so I had quit within a week after returning to Earth. After that I had spent all of my time with Mariko when she wasn’t contributing. The rest of my time I’d spent reading and writing. I had never been happier.