Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us for the second volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!

Audio for this episode:

30 – The Cigar

The next morning, Triquet sits cross-legged in their tent in a pink rayon frock dress from 1975, surrounded by stacks of neatly folded clothes and trays filled with make-up and beauty products. They sing to themself in a soft alto, channeling Beth Gibbons from Portishead: “Cause I’m still feeling lonely… Feel so unholy… Cause the child rose as light… tried to reveal what I could feel… And this loneliness… It just won’t leave me alone… It just won’t leave me—”

“Hello? Triq?” Mandy’s head leans into view, long black hair hanging down like a flag. Triquet would kill to have hair like that. This mop of fine, frizzled pale nonsense they were born with has been the bane of every costume and incarnation they ever tried.

“Present and accounted for. Come on in here, Mandy girl.”

“Oh. Uh… I mean, okay. It’s not a big… I just wanted to ask— I’m just taking kind of a survey…”

“Ask what you like. Sit yourself down and I’ll do your nails.” Triquet takes a deep breath to prepare themself, feeling old and wise. Mandy’s voice has a neurotic edge that promises trouble. Maybe with a bit of kindness Triquet can help.

Mandy crawls in. “Oh, wow… I haven’t seen…” The inside of the small tent is crowded with items, all ordered in their places. The sleeping bag and pillow are rolled neatly in the corner and Triquet sits on what looks like an ornate prayer rug. Scarves and small tapestries hang from the roof’s seams and LED candles of a variety of pastel hues illuminate the corners to give the interior a soft, homey feel.

“Here. Sit here, facing me. Nice and close.” Mandy dutifully scoots in, cross-legged, til her knees bump into theirs. Triquet holds Mandy’s childlike hands, smiling at her with warmth. “Oh, poor baby’s got a chill. Got to warm you up.” Triquet pulls out an orange shawl they knit last winter from a thick acrylic yarn, and drapes it about Mandy’s shoulders.

The girl’s lower lip still trembles. Her eyes remain haunted. “Thanks. That’s so nice. I just—” Mandy’s breath catches in her throat. “I just wanted to make sure… Just asking everybody… I mean, I know people must blame me for Jay being gone…”

“What? Whoa. No. You?” Triquet’s parental smile falters and their face splits into a disbelieving grimace. “What an odd idea. What does his disappearance have to do with you?”

But Mandy has worked it all out in her head. “I forced him to deal with that shaft when he didn’t want to, and for far too long, and I was going to force him today to do it again, so he obviously left to avoid me and then things just spiraled out of control. So…”

“To avoid you? Seriously?” Triquet unwraps a travel packet of wet wipes and cleans Mandy’s hands with them. Ye gods, how dirty they all are. This will need a second wipe. “Oh, honey-bunches-of-oats, I hope you take this in the best way possible but this is all beginning to sound like a pretty serious case of main character syndrome. Know what I mean?”

“No, this isn’t about me, but it is about what I did to—”

“What you did? Please. Okay, will you bet me? Like if you win, I’ll give you a full makeover and if I win you give me one of those amazing massages? Please. Cause this is the easiest bet ever. I can one hundred percent guarantee you that you, young and brilliant Mandy Hsu, are one of the last things rattling around in Jay’s brain. Think for just a second who we’re talking about here.”

“It isn’t main character syndrome,” Mandy protests sullenly, holding out her fingers as Triquet begins to trim her ragged cuticles with a pair of nail scissors, “if it’s just my idiocy that gets people to endanger themselves all the time. Again and again. I mean, he might be dead! We don’t even know! They said nobody’s ever come back from across the river! Not in like six generations! Katrina asked the villagers as many ways as she could!”

“Mandy. You’ll have to sit still or I can’t guarantee the quality of my work. Please. I’m an artist.”

Mandy takes a deep breath and stops fidgeting, watching Triquet work with minute precision on her nails.

“I think…” Triquet murmurs, “Jay has a plan of his own. Some rare plant he’s looking for or some wild theory he needs to test. He didn’t go just on a whim, or in reaction to what any of us might have said to him yesterday. This is all on Jay, that crazy bastard. But I will bet you he’s still alive. Don’t worry about that. He may be a goofball, but there’s something pretty resilient about him. He reminds me of the stereotypical American G.I. of World War Two. The Germans called him undisciplined and independent. He wouldn’t even stand up straight! But they learned the hard way that there’s something more important than looking good on parade. Jay’s got that. Sure he doesn’t look like much, but I bet in a pinch he’d be the first person you’d want by your side.”

Mandy finally drops her shoulders. “I guess you’re right. I just feel so awful about it! And I don’t know what to do with all this guilt! Every time something bad happens! I just get manic. I mean, what am I supposed to do?”

“Do? I don’t know, do what you did with Pradeep. You and Esquibel have been doing a great job with him. Or are you somehow responsible for his mystery ailment as well?”

“Yeesh. I feel so bad for that poor guy. I wish I could help him more but every time I put my hands on him I can’t help it. I turn green. He has something seriously wrong. Like way deep inside.”

“But it isn’t your fault.”

“No. Of course it isn’t.”

“And Maahjabeen going out to sea isn’t your fault.”

Mandy opens her mouth, then closes it. She finally allows, “I’ve learned that if I say that it was anything other than Maahjabeen’s own choice, she might physically attack me.”

“And we would cheer her on. Have you always been like this?”

Mandy nods. “I was a pretty difficult older sister to my brother, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t let him have a thought of his own until he was like ten. I always need everything just so.”

“Control freak.”

“The freakiest.”

“Okay. And now finally…”

Mandy gives Triquet her full attention. She appreciates the care they’ve shown her, even if it leads to difficult conversations about herself spoken with a bluntness she finds shocking. “Yes?”

Triquet holds up two bottles of nail polish. “Green or orange? They’re both gels and they both work with your coloring.”

Ξ

Alonso and Flavia sit side by side in their camp chairs. A bit of ragged sun keeps peeking through the cloud cover, warming the air. Flavia compiles her latest version of Plexity’s user interface and watches the progress bar slowly advance across her screen. How much of her life has she dedicated to watching that bar? Years? At least. “And… done. Try it now.”

Their laptops are linked. Alonso opens the program and tries out her changes. “Wait. Where did my options go on this screen?”

“I wanted to make them consistent across all the screens so you can find them under the…”

“Ah. Everything’s in the settings now. Not sure I like that. Yes, it’s more organized but the user will need to take two extra steps to access them. I’m actually wondering, since the collections are all so context-specific, if we might make the intake options part of the collection process. Like a prompt screen before they begin, to reset their parameters for each input. Because what we are learning…”

“Well, sure we could do that, if you want to take fifteen years to finish all your collections…”

“…is that our collectors are spending as much time fiddling with the framework as they are with the actual upload of data.”

Flavia sighs. An inevitable crisis faces Plexity. Perhaps this is finally the time to bring it up with Alonso. “Well. Maybe slow is better after all. Because, you do realize, signore Dottore, that we will never collect even ten percent of the samples you want from the interior of the island. Not in the next four weeks, at least.”

Alonso remains stubbornly silent. His hand finally opens and rotates, as if to say, perhaps/perhaps not.

“Listen, Alonso. You haven’t been in there but the rest of us have. And the idea you have, before you ever spent time in there, is too simple. This island is huge. It’s like—like I don’t know. The size of Venice. You would need so much time to fully explore each and every canyon and hilltop in there. There is no possible way in the four weeks we have left. Especially with hostile natives.”

“If they weren’t so hostile we would already be halfway done.”

This statement is so obviously false Flavia isn’t certain how to respond. She leans back with an irritated sigh. “No. No, you don’t get to blame your unrealistic goals on them. Look. You need to step back from this and look at it better. I know this was like your pacifier when you were locked away but you need to think of it as a funder would. Or a school oversight committee. Think, Alonso. What would you say if someone proposed to cover like twenty square kilometers of an island with a small team in two months?”

“If the concept was sound, I would support it with all my heart.”

“But the concept isn’t sound. The logistics are completely off. I don’t know. I’ve been wondering if there is a way we could get the islanders to help us with collecting but it seems like we’re moving farther away from that, instead of closer. And we only have four extra readers anyway. That’s the real bottleneck.”

“But I’m counting on you. You said your machine learning would help. The automated algorithms. What happened to that?”

Now Flavia is affronted. Instead of acknowledging his own shortcomings, he’s attacking her? “No, that has nothing to do with it. They are already saving you so much time and effort. But they can’t crawl around in the woods on their hands and knees. For that, you still need people. A lot of people. And a lot of readers.”

“So what do you propose?” Alonso has never felt such immense irritability. This—this nerd seems to do nothing but complain. She lives to point out flaws in everyone else’s work and ideas. “I’m beginning to feel that if things were up to you, Flavia, nothing would ever get done.”

“Nothing would ever—? I built you a working fucking prototype of Plexity in two weeks, you ungrateful asshole. And now you are being an even bigger asshole, thinking you can push everyone to do this impossible amount of work in the next four weeks. If I was in charge of your grant application, it would be denied. I wouldn’t even read past the first page. You need to re-focus on something you can actually accomplish here. Like just the lagoon and beach. It is reasonably cut off from—”

“Reasonably cut off? Think about what you just said, Flavia. There is no boundary for ‘reasonability’ in Plexity. It needs to be a hermetic, enclosed system for us to achieve the proper baseline for the program. It is making me wonder if you truly grasp what it is we are doing here.”

“Now don’t you talk down to me, you boomer.”

Alonso sits up straight. “I am Gen X, I will have you know.”

“Boomer is an attitude, not an age. Just do the math, if you’re such an amazing data scientist. I would say we still have 18 square kilometers of work to accomplish. In 29 days. Let’s see. That’s almost 621 square meters per day, or the area of a small house.”

“Divided by just those four readers and that’s only 150 or so. Ha. The math didn’t work out in your favor, did it?” Flavia only frowns at him. “Look, I know it will be hard. I know we don’t have nearly enough time. If I had written the grant I would have set the initial mission for two years here.” This provokes an involuntary shiver of revulsion from Flavia. “But we only have eight weeks. So we shoot for the stars. I am convinced, as we speak, that Jay is somewhere in the interior making a huge number of collections.”

“He didn’t take a reader.”

“Amy says he doesn’t need one. He will bring back hundreds of samples at least. And with his scouting report we will be able to decide how to approach the rest of the island. I am glad he took the initiative. We have been moving too slowly.”

Flavia just stares at him, then shakes her head in distaste. “Men.”

Ξ

Esquibel exits the bunker, stiff-legged and squinting. She realizes it’s the first time she’s been outside the clean room in nearly two days. The camp is gray. There’s a ground fog still at the edges of the camp under the ferns, but a sea breeze is beginning to riffle the air and chase it away. She shivers. “Doesn’t it ever get actually warm here?”

The only one here to answer her rhetorical question is Katrina at the kitchen tables. “Yeh, why couldn’t we come in the summer? I bet it’s pretty nice.”

But Amy, returning from the creek with a wash basin, disagrees. “I bet it’s more like San Francisco summers here. Temperature inversion. Howling fog. No, I bet this is the nicest weather it gets. Remember how Alonso said it’s under a cloud cover nearly every day of the year?”

“Well, then, next time can we please study a tropical island in the Indian Ocean?” Esquibel crosses to Katrina, who hands her a mug of hot water. “Ah, thank you. I am freezing.”

“How’s the patient?” Katrina stands before a hot pan, making a tottering stack of pancakes. She puts three on a plate for Esquibel and hands her a fork and a packet of honey.

Amy pauses drying the dishes to hear Esquibel’s answer.

“I don’t…” Esquibel drops her head, suddenly weary. “I need better diagnostics. Actual labs. This is some weird island bug that I haven’t seen before. Primary neurotoxic activity with secondary cardiovascular effects. And he just isn’t responding to any of the treatments yet. I’ve been going very slow, only trying things with few contra-indications and minimal side effects. Gram-positive antibiotics. Gabapentin. Nortriptyline. But anything else I try moving forward will have serious risks. I don’t like having to make blind guesses. I’m not used to it.”

“Is Pradeep in pain?” Amy brushes a tear away and goes back to wiping down the plates. “Is he stable?”

Esquibel shrugs. “He hasn’t coded again. But sometimes it seems he is getting close. And his breathing can get very weak. I gave him CPR like three times last night when it seemed he stopped.”

“Jesus.” Katrina kneels beside Esquibel and hugs her. “What a hero. You need to get some sleep.”

“Yes. Just a bit of fresh air and a bathroom break and then a quick nap. Mandy has instructions to wake me if there is any change in his condition.”

“What if…?” Flavia trails off, her mind racing. “Alonso, what if we took a Dyson reader blood sample from Pradeep? Perhaps it could find a virus or bacteria that isn’t supposed to be there.”

Alonso just stares at her. “Huh. I don’t know if we have a control… Has anyone put their own sample into a reader yet?”

Esquibel shrugs. “I don’t know what good that will do anyone. It would only be able to tell us like what the molar weight of a viral factor would be and maybe whether it’s gram negative or positive. Without a database of already known pathogens, we wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.”

“Well, does it have any human source data?” Alonso asks Flavia. “The Dyson readers came pre-loaded with all kinds of databases of known organic…” His voice tapers off as he queries Plexity about its own capabilities.

Flavia shrugs. “I haven’t looked. There’s been no reason.”

Alonso reads aloud, “Chinese Female Proteomic snapshot, Liaoning Prefecture, Age 29. Chinese Male. Age 33. Female, 22, Hebei. There’s hundreds. Huh. Who knew? And why are they all Chinese? But I don’t know if there’s any kind of directory or…”

Flavia’s fingers fly on her keyboard. “Where did you find that?”

“Under Miscellaneous. Remember? We created that folder for all the bells and whistles we thought we wouldn’t use.”

“As long as the data is there, I can create a query that will find what we want.” Flavia is back in her element. Actual concrete inputs that she can work with. She unzips a whole hidden database of human-derived samples. Columns of newly-liberated data scroll down her laptop. “Wow. It is a lot. Scattershot DNA. Proteomics profiles. Microbiomes. I will need some time. Sort through all the garbage. Figure out what the best lexical strategy is.”

Mandy appears in the doorway of the bunker, on wobbly knees. She leans against the frame.

“What is it?” Esquibel stands immediately, putting her plate on the table. “Is he in trouble?”

Mandy holds up a weak hand. “No. He’s fine. Just me. I fainted. I…” Mandy takes a couple steps, then doubles over and grabs her knees. “I was just trying to offer a little support, you know. Just hold his feet like I do for Alonso, but wow. Maahjabeen just found me on the floor. She said she’d heard me collapse. She’s in with him now. I just need some…” Esquibel wraps an arm of support around Mandy as she sags against her. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, Skeebee. But whatever’s stuck in him, it’s awful.”

Ξ

“Pradeep.” Maahjabeen waits for Mandy to depart then she kneels beside his cot and kisses his slack mouth. “Darling. Mahbub.”

But he doesn’t respond.

She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care anymore who might see her, who might learn their secret. He is gravely ill. The only man who has ever truly loved her, the only man whom she has ever truly loved. He is only twenty-four and he has a whole life ahead of him. She kisses him again and rests her head on his hollowed-out chest, a mewling cry escaping her.

Maahjabeen prays silently, fiercely, calling on Allah to bring His grace back to Pradeep. She lifts the cold brown hands, kisses every knuckle. A panic rises in her. He shouldn’t still be on this island. He should be on a medical evacuation helicopter. He should be getting wheeled into a state-of-the-art hospital, surrounded by trained staff and beeping machines. Instead he rests on a makeshift cot in a room made of plastic sheets. And they are only waiting.

What bit him? Maahjabeen hasn’t seen any sign, in all her time on the beach, of any of the spiny urchins or anemones that could have caused this. He didn’t ever cry out. There was no point where he appeared to get injured. He just fell asleep on the beach after his panic attack. Maybe this was part of that somehow. Stress could do strange things to people. She knew a girl in college who studied so hard she held the muscles in her neck rigid for too long and caused stress fractures in her cervical vertebra. She literally studied so hard she broke her neck. Crazy things could happen. Or maybe it was intentional. Maybe it all started that night before, with the Lisicans sharing their seafood catch and Pradeep retreating into his tent. Maybe they had secretly drugged him somehow? Then that led to his paranoia and a reaction to it. He somehow knew all along. And now he’s dying…

Or maybe he just ate a handful of bad berries.

“We don’t know. Darling, we just don’t know…” His eyelids flutter so she kisses them again and chafes his hands. Now his breath deepens. Maahjabeen cries out and gathers him in her arms. She keeps chattering at him, making pillow talk in Arabic.

Pradeep pulls his eyes open. They are watery, distant, covered in a milky film. His hand trembles in her grip. He tries to speak but his jaw slides sideways and drool drips from his lip. “Eyyyyhhh…”

“Pradeep. I’m here, my dearest. I will always be here.”

His face slowly screws up into a trembling scowl. His lips purse. “Mock. Jah. Bean.” Then his neck can no longer hold his head and his forehead falls against her shoulder.

A long moment later, after a trickle of warmth has flowed into him, he pushes his face up against hers, then pulls back to look her in the eyes. He says it for the very first time. “I… love you.”

“I love you, too, you amazing man. And you will get better.”

“Just having you here…” His back engages and he sits up a bit. The film over his eyes starts to clear. “I am not so cold. Because you are here… and I love you. It’s the cold, Maahjabeen. That’s what… is killing me.”

“I will never let you get cold. Ever again.” Maahjabeen opens her jacket and pulls him into it, nestling him against her warm skin. She rolls him back onto the cot, cooing. Then she turns, to place herself beside him.

And that’s when she sees Esquibel standing in the entrance of the clean room, frozen in shock, hands parting the plastic sheets. Maahjabeen has no idea how long she has been standing there. She doesn’t know what she heard. Ah, well. Inshallah. What’s done is done. The important part is that being here helps Pradeep. She nods at the doorway. “Come. Doctor Daine. He is conscious.”

“Yes…” Esquibel moves decisively into the room and sanitizes her hands. She puts on a mask and nitrile gloves, then places a hand on Maahjabeen’s shoulder. “Please. I need to inspect him.”

“I cannot let go.” Maahjabeen’s eyes flash protectively. “My warmth is what is keeping him awake. He just told me.”

Esquibel pauses only half a breath before shaking her head to clear it, to strip this salacious scene of all its implications and to move forward with the new information alone, just as any trauma care doctor must do. Data is data right now. It can be a soap opera later. She puts a stethoscope against Pradeep’s neck, to hear it slow and turgid through his carotid. But as she listens it seems to deepen in volume and capacity, steadying. Huh. Perhaps the Tunisian siren is right. Well. It is nice to see her care for someone, even if it is a shock to see the two of them like this. “Pradeep…?” She gets down into his field of view. His eyes are open, dark and staring at the floor. His trembling arms disappear around Maahjabeen inside her jacket. What in the world. “Are you with us?”

“Hello… Doctor…” Pradeep’s voice is a ragged whisper. “You have to… help me fight this.”

“Yes. Good. That is the plan. We are both fighting together, yes? Can you tell me what it is we are fighting, though?”

“It’s down here…” Pradeep pushes the heel of one hand against the top of his pubis bone, just below his navel. He writhes upon making contact, twisting in Maahjabeen’s embrace. “Aaaugh…”

“La, la. Shh.” She soothes him, drawing him in again. Her eyes catch on Esquibel’s wondering stare and flicker defiantly, then soften into helplessness.

Esquibel’s own gaze melts and she puts a loving hand alongside Maahjabeen’s face. Their secret is out. Good for them. Two lovely idols, they are. And besides, their NDAs will keep the secret theirs. Now it is just between the Muslim girl and her god and Esquibel has an atheist’s impatience with the significance of that.

Pradeep settles, Maahjabeen replacing the pressure of his hand with the fullness of her hip, solid against his belly. Her voluptuous warmth soothes him and he releases a groan.

“Lower intestine?” Esquibel wonders aloud. “Digestive? Would you say it is digestive what you are experiencing?”

Pradeep shakes his head no. “Forgot I even had… an appetite. No. That’s all vanished. It’s just… this pit…”

“My guess has been neurological, from your symptoms. Have you ever suffered nerve pain or any nerve conditions before?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Just if you have a point of reference. Neuralgia doesn’t all feel like hitting funny bones. There’s impinging pain, like when a muscle entraps a nerve, or when you get a kink in your neck, or really nasty trigeminal pain from teeth. It can be burning or itching or sharp stabbing. Would any of those apply to how you feel?”

Pradeep shakes his wobbling head no. “More like… I’m being… pulled down… into the cold pit.”

“How cold? Are you going numb?” Esquibel, crouching beside him on the balls of her feet, pivots so she can grab his leg. She hits his patellar tendon below the kneecap with the edge of her stethoscope and is encouraged to see his reflex work properly. She takes off his shoe. “Tell me if you can sense this.” She softly pinches his big toe. “Can you feel anything?”

“Uhh…” Pradeep frowns. “Your hand on my heel?”

She squeezes his toe more firmly. “Yes. My hand is on your heel. How about anything else?” She pinches the meat of his toe.

Pradeep’s face collapses with anxiety. “That’s my toe, isn’t it? Why can’t I feel my toe?”

Esquibel takes off his sock and tries the other toes on his foot. First she runs the cold surface of the stethoscope across them but he doesn’t react at all. Then she pinches each of them.

“No! No! What happened to my toes?” Pradeep buries his face in Maahjabeen’s neck. She holds him tight and stares at Esquibel with urgent need.

Esquibel replaces Pradeep’s sock and shoe then gently pulls one of his hands away from Maahjabeen and pokes at his fingertips.

“Ow. Okay. I can feel my fingertips. Just my toes then. My poor toes. They’ve been… in the pit too long. You got to…” He shakes his head, the image of the endless mud overpowering what he sees with his eyes. “Nngh. You got to get me out.”

Esquibel goes back to his legs. She runs her hands up his sciatic nerve, rolling him onto his side. She pulls down his pants and tracks it into the base of his spine, directly above the girdle of his hips. With an inhaled hiss of disquiet, she takes out her light to more closely view what she has found there.

“What?” Maahjabeen heard her hiss and fears what it could mean. “What is it?”

“Right at his lowest vertebra, like lumbar five here. A pattern of dots. And now they are inflamed. And here. They look like this.”

Esquibel takes a photo and holds her phone up for Maahjabeen to see. It is the outline of an animal’s head, a tight constellation of puncture wounds in the small of his back. Each of them have grown angry and infected, connecting to each other in the vague outlines of a cave painting. It is unmistakably the head of a fox.

Ξ

“Ta-daaa…” Katrina kneels before Alonso, unveiling a plate with a pile of rice, a filet of whitefish, and a sprinkle of seaweed.

“Oh, thank you, my dear. How did you know I am starving?”

“I don’t think you’ve moved all day, have you?”

“No. I…” Alonso gestures helplessly at his laptop. “I am very busy. I am very much feeling the deadlines closing in on us.”

“Ha! Are you? We’ve still got like three weeks left, right?”

“Four! Exactly four weeks. Exactly halfway today. And Flavia, in her artless and direct way, informed me she thinks there’s no way we will finish our primary Plexity mission before we must leave. So now I am very busy.”

Katrina sets the plate on the platform beside his chair and stands.

“Do you?”

His voice makes her pause. “Eh? What’s that, mate?”

Alonso repeats, “Do you think we can finish in time?”

Katrina wonders how she might handle this situation best. She doesn’t have enough data to decide. She must listen first. “Well… Remind me what the goals of the primary mission are.”

“To characterize all the life on the island.”

Katrina nods slowly. “Okay. Well then I’ve got a question for you. Does it require a rich context for each sample? You know, what the sample is near, at different times and places, all that?”

“Of course. The relationships are the primary hallmarks of life. Not their own individual characteristics. That is the whole point. The purpose of Plexity is to show there is a larger living breathing meta-organism that—”

“Then no.”

“No? What do you mean, no?”

“You need a hundred thousand samples. We can’t get you a hundred thousand samples in the time remaining. I’m sorry. But it’s just physically impossible. You see that, right? I’m not saying the whole project is impossible. But if what you’re asking for is a variety of samples of about, I don’t know, 9000 life forms? Can we get you one Dyson profile for each of those 9000 samples by May 19^th? Yes, I think so. And that can be like your scaffold, right?”

Alonso leans back with exasperation, lifting the plate and shoveling food into his mouth.

“Right? Isn’t that how it usually works? I figure we’re doing a great initial assay of the site, right? Isn’t that, uh, standard protocol for something like this? We get a nice broad overview and then we go back to our institutions, those of us who have them, and show them all this fantastic documentation and write a huge grant proposal for another year out here or something. That’s what I figured we were doing here. I mean, the idea that we could be finished here in eight weeks is, well, kind of silly, isn’t it?”

Alonso can’t look at her. He stares at the columns of data on his screen but he can’t derive meaning from them at the moment. His emotions churn so strongly in him he is afraid he will be ill. “And you think they will let us back on the island after our eight weeks is over? Eh, Katrina? Is that what you are counting on?”

“I’m not counting on anything. But why wouldn’t they? I mean, who does it belong to? Still the military? I thought they were about to give the island up because of some big new satellite agreement. Isn’t that what’s happening? So then we just have to worry about, I don’t know, competing research programs showing up and like rich assholes with yachts? I mean, who’s going to come all the way out here for an unsupported expedition except lunatics like us? All I’m saying is I don’t think we need to be completely done here in four weeks. We just need to show a compelling snapshot to the powers that be so we can continue our work. I mean, Pradeep and Amy said they could spend the rest of their careers here, easily.”

“Yes. Of course. You’re right, it’s just…” Alonso lifts and drops a hand, unable to put into words how much he has invested in these expectations. They literally kept him alive. And sane.

Katrina covers Alonso’s hand with her own. “Hey. It’s okay now. You aren’t like fighting for your life any more. You’re surrounded by all your loved ones. And like, admirers. Right? It was something Pavel could never accept. That he could like put these things down that he held for so long to help him survive and finally relax.”

Alonso nods, not really hearing her. “Yes. Well, thank you for your kind words. I should get back to Plexity, now that we’ve all decided that it will just be a shadow of what it could be. Yes.”

“Alonso, that’s not what I meant. I’m in this for the long haul. Eight weeks, eight years. You hear me? I want to see the end of this. But properly. You had to know eight weeks wouldn’t be enough. I mean, didn’t they show you the size of the island?”

Alonso shrugs. “Yes, I admit, it is larger and… more complex… than anticipated. I didn’t know about all these tunnels. I thought we would be further along than this by now. Yes. But all we need are four six-hour shifts for collection teams. And during that six hours you just need to cover one hundred square meters. Flavia worked it all out. In the 28 days left it is really quite a reasonable goal. Then boom. One hundred thousand samples just like so.”

Katrina nods, her smile empty, realizing she has told him all he is able to hear at the moment. She brushes a strand of his curly black and silver hair back from in front of his eyes. “Got it. You know… Another thing… Mandy and I were talking… Thinking maybe this isn’t your very best night to try a round of MDMA therapy?”

But Alonso has already returned his attention to his laptop. “Eh? What’s that? What is MDAA…?”

“The molly.”

“Ah. Yes, we should definitely wait.” Alonso makes a weary face. “Between Jay’s disappearance and Pradeep’s… condition, I can’t ask anyone to face more risk or…”

“Well, it’s not risk. It’s perfectly safe, but the vibe is certainly…”

“Regardless of that, I think we can both agree that yes, this is not the right time for it. Thank you for checking in. And please. My compliments to the chef. The dinner is delicious.”

Ξ

“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.” Jay stands at the bottom of a shaft of gray light, the first natural light he’s seen in thirty hours, rolling a joint. It’s not the easiest thing to do without a table. That’s why he’d pre-rolled five fatties before he’d started on this whole trip. But those are all gone now.

First he grinds some of his daily driver, a combination of OG Kush and Alaskan Thunderfuck. It usually gives him the old solid rocket booster in the shorts when he needs it. But it doesn’t make him paranoid or manic. The Kush keeps him grounded.

It’s been a hard day so he adds a bit more than normal. Then he unscrews the grinder to scoop out some of the kief dust that had collected in the bottom tray. A real hard day, yo.

He dabs his tongue along the paper’s edges and twists it closed. “Man, I love getting high.” Jay lights the joint and takes a couple big cigar puffs to get it going. Then he releases the billows of smoke into the shaft of light, watching their edges uncurl like seventh-dimension monsters of thought. “It’s like, I get to schedule all my highs and lows throughout the day. Like guaranteed.” He feels the rush outward through his scalp into the universe above as his feet send down roots into the soil below. “And now I’m on this planet again, but for real. Yooo. I’m back, bitches.”

He has been walking for hours already this morning, following the interminable curving tunnel, always bearing left ahead of him. He walked all day yesterday as well. It doesn’t make any sense. Math has never been his strong suit but he’s been trying to puzzle it out in his head as he went. The circumference of Lisica can’t be more than, what, twenty kilometers? If it’s like on average four by five kilometers, let’s say a diameter of five. Then it’s… uh… 3πr? So the radius would be like two and a half. Three times pi is nine. Nine times two and a half is like twenty-three. “There’s no way I’ve only walked twenty-three klicks! I’ve put in like twenty solid hours.”

But this is the first time he’s seen any light coming in from above. He relishes the change, after the monotonous hours that hadn’t afforded much of any entertainment. He almost wishes to be like Pradeep, who can effortlessly generate all these fantastical monsters out of the dark to be terrified of—which would be entertaining, but his brain just doesn’t work that way. Jay sees what’s in front of him and that’s pretty much it. And what he’s been seeing for too long is this gray tunnel and its curving parallel rails. Last night he hiked until his phone battery died. Then he crawled into his emergency bivy in a doorway out of the way of the rails just in case anything ever came down them. He plugged his phone into his spare battery and slept pretty soundly, all things considered.

No. He’s not really given to flights of fancy. What he knows with certainty, deep in his roots, is that this world they live in surpasses all else in wonder. No imagined fantasy monsters or palaces or even religions that people can make up in their heads can ever compare to the true infinite complexity of Mother Earth around them, the majesty Jay gets to study each day.

“And I get it.” He cinches his pack, takes one last gigantic drag off the joint before he crushes the roach beneath his heel and field-strips the paper and ash. He fishes out an energy bar and continues walking. “I’ve seen what it’s like in Nebraska. I drove across a few times. But who knows, maybe religion there does seem like a bigger deal on the flat land. I get it. But what you got to do, brother, is just travel one day west and you’re in the Rockies. Then you’ll see what religion’s all about. The peaks. The canyons. I mean, this whole island is all the god I need. Rising up like a… a giant statue from the deep. Yeah. And now I’m crawling across god’s face.”

Jay likes the sound of his own voice. The rush the weed brings delights him and fills him with the fantasies he just derided. He sees the island rising up from crashing seas like a vengeful Polynesian volcano deity with an insatiable hunger for virgins.

Oh, now he’s entertained.

He walks for a couple more hours, his sparkling high fading into monotony. He passes another couple slanting rays of gray daylight, shining through cracks in the tunnel above. He eats some banana chips and empties his last water bottle. But still he doesn’t worry. He likes walking. And he’s needed a huge hike like this to really unscramble himself after being laid up for so long. He’ll find some water somewhere.

Every once in a while he passes junctions, where the rails split and veer into solidly sealed-off tunnels. But it doesn’t look like a mining operation here. Everything’s too clean. It’s all just solid concrete that hasn’t nearly ever cracked or even stained over the decades. Sometimes he’ll find chipped and faded orange numbers at the junctions. He made out 13 at the last one. It relieved him to recognize the language. If this had been like a giant Soviet weapon installation he was crawling through, that would creep him out. It would be like playing a video game in real life. And not fucking Stardew Valley either. This is more like Half Life.

“Come on, now.” Jay takes a deep breath. “Well, you said you were bored and wanted to freak yourself out.” He groans, his feet finally dragging. “Aw, man. This is so dumb. What am I missing? I got to be missing something. There’s no way those kids came all this way. This is like some seriously Kafka bullshit here.”

He realizes if there’s anything anywhere it’s got to be at the junctions. He hadn’t looked very closely at 13 back there because it seemed like all the others and he’d gotten it into his head at the beginning of this walk that the way out would just be at the end. “Come on, now. You can turn around. It’s just right back there.” But Jay has a masculine intransigence that keeps him straining forward. It’s been his undoing down here for sure. “There won’t be another junction for hours, tough guy. Come on. Turn back.”

So with a last lingering look at the unchanging curving tunnel ahead, Jay finally swings himself around and retreats to the junction he left ten minutes before.

His phone is already at 78%. He’s kept it on the lowest setting for the light to extend the battery but he’s not too worried about losing power. The brick he carries is strong enough for five full recharges. Now he cranks it up, painfully bright, to investigate all the nooks and crannies of the wide junction. It is an irregular chamber, with two branching rail lines going off to two directions toward the left, shaped like an aorta from a heart. He inspects the solid concrete walls that seal off the two tunnels. No, there’s no getting through either of them. Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe he’s just in an irregular spiral that somehow continues forever. Maybe he’s already dead and he doesn’t even know it.

Oh. Wait. There’s a door.

Ha. Just as he was about to give in to despair after all. Fucking door right in front of him. Inset in the wall behind the orange number 13. But does it open?

Jay pushes on the steel panel with the toe of his boot and it swings partially open, metal on dust the only sound. A hallway beyond is filled with gray light.

Jay turns off his phone light, squinting in the glare. There’s a smell here, a smell he never thought he’d smell on Lisica.

Jay totters forward toward the light, a ridiculous smile on his face. He hears water trickling in the distance, and sees that the hall ends in an old gun emplacement dug into the cliffs. The gun is long gone but its narrowed defensible view still commands a broad swath of the ocean’s horizon out there. The gray light slants in at a strong angle. This interior chamber, a good thirty meters wide, is full of plants. Their gardener works among them, pulling weeds. She stands, an old Lisican woman in a modern canvas apron, t-shirt and jeans, smoking a giant handmade cigar. She looks at Jay blankly. He can’t tell if he is welcome here.

Jay points at the sativa bush beside him with glee. “Ganja.”

The woman nods, expressionless, and extends to Jay the cigar.