Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us on 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 chapter:

10 – This Is Fantastic

Jay has no idea how he could have ever handled this recuperation without weed. He has a platinum kush hybrid that is just so good for pain and he’s been hitting it pretty hard. Especially after Amy came back with reports of the intact crown of the fallen redwood. It’s landed in a tough spot, she said, not somewhere he can reach in his current condition. But the pictures have been extraordinary. Epiphytes the likes of which they’ve never seen, mostly variations on leather ferns in aerial mats. She estimates that the top crown is a wooden bowl that holds hundreds of kilos of soil, fungi, and organic debris. She has identified multiple nests of both birds and small mammals. And he can’t get to it.

So he takes another drag off his joint and tells himself to deal with it. Such a fucking Jay kind of move. Take yourself out just when things are starting to get interesting. And what would you usually do if you were bedridden? Read fantasy. But now there’s no point because you’re actually living the fantasy. Except you aren’t. Because you can’t get out of your fucking hammock for like ten more days.

He hits the joint again. Now his head is starting to swim. Thank god. He is getting sick of the dark thoughts cycling around in his brain. He needs new thoughts.

His head lolls sideways and he studies the camp. Everyone looks so intent. They’re all working so hard. Triquet hauls something out of the bunker to great fanfare and begins giving an impromptu lecture on its provenance. From this distance it looks like a wall map. Maybe from the war. Cool.

They all scurry into and out of the bunker like ants. And that is their concrete hive. A bemused giggle escapes him. We are nothing without our hive. It’s like a defensive encrustation we build up around ourselves like sea snails, held together with snot and effort. We’re really no more than the measure of our structures.

And then the metaphor seizes Jay. It’s true. We are polyps, pink and helpless in our naked skin. And we spend nearly all our efforts protecting our defenseless squishy bodies from harm. We weave clothes to protect us from the sun and weather. We build cars to transport us around, like we possess these soulless shiny little beetles we’ve crafted whenever we sit behind the wheel and we send them spinning along with our ephemeral will. Then we enter our houses and they bloom with light, windows as their eyes blinking awake. If they are the body then we are the soul, giving them meaning and direction. We work all our lives to afford one of these houses. We build them strong so they will outlast us, so our homes will survive past our individual mortality and become estates that we pass down to our descendants in perpetuity. The clan is the organism, the clan as represented by the actual structural estate.

We are not these tiny little sylphs, pink and fragile with tadpole fingers and blinking eyes, we are (at our best) multi-generational structure builders, leaving our encrustations all over the planet in spreading concrete stains, reaching higher for the stars with towers and planes and spacecraft that break the bonds of gravity and take our little steel and glass cysts off-planet.

Yeah, the platinum kush is definitely some good shit. He has now become one with both his ancestors and progeny. And he has understood the deep imperative to build, or to maintain that which is already built. Jay has always thought of himself as more from the nomad side of the human family tree, a happy wanderer who has no need of possessions of his own. But now he identifies the base urges within himself that demand all of his evolutionary-biology needs. Exploring. Nesting. Building. Possession of property is hardwired into humans to give them the motivation to build. That leads to fences and territories and inevitably wars. Yet owning and controlling the encrustations is the important part, to ensure that the longterm culture—which spans thousands of years and hundreds of generations—develops properly.

So then what is proper development? Is that realm somehow beyond science in the province of the prophets and seers? The futurists and prognosticators? The policymakers and stakeholders? All of them and none at the same time? Because just when you think you’ve got your castle built, along comes a storm to drop a tree on your roof.

“Hey, sleepy head.” Amy finds him watching the camp with bleary abandon. She has much less patience for Jay’s lackadaisical ways than Pradeep’s rigor. Even though Jay is one of the best field collectors she has ever encountered, when he isn’t climbing trees or digging in the mud with his bare hands he’s basically useless. And now that he can’t move, he’s worth even less.

She puts Jay’s laptop in his lap. “Here you go, honey. Pradeep is bringing in so much data today he could use a secretary to get his notes in order. Let me just get the files off his phone…”

Jay lifts a hand in protest. “Will do. But ‘honey’ is demeaning.”

Amy wants to make a further joke, which she is pretty sure he is expecting, but she catches herself. He’s actually right. She meant it as… Well, how had she meant it? As a tender diminutive that conferred affection and care, right? But it was still a diminutive. Sometimes she hates that straight white men get the benefit of the same rules everyone else does. They don’t deserve such generosity after what they’ve done to the world for so long. But that’s not how things work. Either everyone is treated fairly, or no one.

Amy salutes Jay instead and leaves him to the work.

Ξ

Esquibel brings a bin to Katrina, who sits on her platform writing lyrics for a song about Lisica. She is in the middle of constructing an intricate verse when the Doctor interrupts her.

“Hello. Good evening.”

And just like that it flies from her head forever. Oh well. “What’s up, Doc?”

“Yes, well. I am worried about Mandy.”

Katrina frowns, filled with concern. She sets aside her laptop. “Still? Poor little poppet. I thought Maahjabeen’s return would have cured all her ills.”

“She cannot get over the fact that she first let Maahjabeen go, as if Mandy had any say in the matter. She says she should have never let them take her from the beach.”

“So she’d rather be dead.”

“She stopped eating. She stopped working. I’ve never seen Mandy like this.”

“What can we do?” Katrina recognizes that bin. She lifts the lid.

“Her weather station. She said you were planning on placing it on the top of the cliffs? I am hoping we can still do so.”

“Yeh, we ran out of time that night. Good thing. The storm would have obliterated it.”

“Mandy is a very sunny young woman, very generous with her heart. But at the center she is actually a very controlling person. Losing Maahjabeen struck at the heart of that for her. She needs to get her sense of control back, and she cannot do it without data.”

“Certainly. Lovely idea. Doctoring the mind and the soul. The drone hasn’t been up in days. Let’s check it out and get it up on the cliffs before… eh, well. Looks like evening’s actually coming on. First thing in the morning, then? Tell her—tell her we need all her documentation and a project proposal first and, uh, and tell her to prepare a workflow for the data that is coming and also have her put together like a weekly, monthly, and overall goals spreadsheet that will identify where she wants to go with this project…”

Esquibel laughs, holding up a hand to forestall this sudden burst of spritely energy. “Okay. Okay. I think that last bit might be too much. But I get what you are saying. I’ll put her to work tonight. Perhaps she can get some sleep. We will be ready early.”

“Early? But tonight we’re gonna dance til dawn!”

Esquibel chuckles, shaking her head. “Then we will launch the drone at dawn.”

Ξ

Triquet has indeed unearthed a wall map from the sub. But it is not from World War II. It is from ten years later, as Hawaii’s statehood changed the strategic axes of US PACOM, with lots of annotation around Guam and the Philippines. Neatly labeled pastel blobs with borders hand-traced in black ink litter the wide ocean. Tables list the dispensation of their fleets alongside permanent and temporary bases, with supplies and logistics enumerated in columns beneath. China has no naval presence yet. Japan doesn’t any longer. Only the Soviets in Vladivostok have assets. Otherwise, the entirety of the Pacific Ocean is under the dominion of the United States.

“And we turned it into a garbage patch.” Triquet sighs, wanting to find a good safe out-of-the-way spot for this valuable antique. The top floor engine compartment where Katrina throws her parties is a good spot. As long as Jay doesn’t light it on fire with a joint. Triquet chuckles. Lisica would be so dreary without them.

The fourth compartment belowdecks is now catalogued and organized. Someone really thought that crate upon crate of spare diesel engine parts was going to be necessary in the future yet here they sit, still encased in oil decades later. There are a number of bizarre collections like this: an entire stack of flats with boxes of some off-brand powdered fruit drink with 70s artwork; racks of brown bottles holding white pills with faded labels; a tilting column of rotting firehoses in a corner. Triquet becomes a time traveler, stepping through all the postwar Americana.

They return to it now, turning on the downstairs work lights before clambering down the improvised ladder from the control room. The stale pipe smoke smell makes them wrinkle their nose like a rabbit. “How did people live like this? Cigars and aluminum powder and lead in the gasoline and lead in the drinking water. And a highball after dinner every night. It’s actually incredible they lasted as long as they did.”

Triquet clears a space on the largest desktop and covers it with a clean white cloth. Now that things are sorted it’s time to actually investigate what some of these piles hold. But where to begin? They could be methodical and start from the first hatch leading further in, but years of experience have developed their instincts and they head into the second room, where stacks of disintegrating manila folders totter atop leather portfolios.

The folders are standard Army paperwork from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Requisition orders and payroll records. At one point it looked like this island housed twenty-four men. Twenty-four? What for? A listening post would only require its staff and at most a small security detachment, wouldn’t it? That couldn’t be more than half that number. What would twenty-four soldiers do out here all the time? Perhaps it was punishment. I bet they died of boredom. Or it was gay paradise. One or the other. It certainly couldn’t have been anything in between.

But these top pages are more damaged. The date and letterhead have crumbled away. Their fingers leaf automatically through the stacks of reports. They possess the lightest touch, like a cat burglar in a jewelers’ shop. The brittle pages hardly mind being disturbed by Triquet’s deft fingers.

An early payroll report only lists four people. One pulls a much higher salary, at an O-5 paygrade, whatever that was. Two others are redacted. How odd. You have to list the spooks on the payroll, how much they draw, and then you have to strike it out with a black pen. Triquet wonders if all that busywork occurred at a single Orwellian sitting. “You know, for efficiency.”

Triquet sighs, alone in the dark little room. Suddenly it’s too quiet in here. They love postwar ballads. Johnny Mercer. Billy Strayhorn. Their favorite is Sarah Vaughn. She sang Gershwin standards like it was opera, so lush and beautiful. But it is Billie Holiday that they sing now, in a suitable creaky tone for this haunted setting.

“I’m traveling light…

Because my man is gone…

So from now on…

I’m traveling light…”

It is in the portfolios where Triquet expects to find the greatest treasures. And after a cursory examination of the rest of the manila folders, they set them aside and pull open the first of the heavy leather covers. It contains architectural drawings of the concrete bunker above, with the insignia of the Army Corps of Engineers in the corner, as well as the red-stamped word CLASSIFIED. The roof was covered with two large satellite dishes as well as a suite of other instruments. That was a detail Triquet hadn’t yet seen. The bunker was built with defense in mind, with notes in the margins about lines of fire and bulwarks on the beach. The year was 1959.

From the next portfolio, a large format black and white photo spills out. Also marked CLASSIFIED, it is a portrait of the staff of the base in 1962. The bunker behind them looks new. They stand in three rows of six, with only five in the front. Seventeen. And all but five are officers. So the enlisted men, who are the only men of color of course, were here to serve the officers who had technical expertise on whatever equipment they ran here.

They do not look happy. This was evidently a required photo after a long exhausting day. But they are spruced up properly, with shining hair and collars cutting into beefy necks. This one has a sunburned nose. Perhaps there was less cloud cover here back then. And this must be the base commander in the middle. He couldn’t be the tallest so he’s the thickest. Looks like a real hardass. What joy.

And here is a cache of smaller photos, square Kodak prints that must have been developed in a dark room here on the island somehow. The first shows a sailor with a fishing pole proudly holding up a large fish. But behind him is the silhouette of a ship on the horizon. No… Not a ship…

Triquet tilts the photo more closely into the light. That is the conning tower of a submarine.

The next photos show the sub on the beach. A trench is being dug through the sand but the laborers have stopped for a barbecue. In another, the sailors are playing football but in the background the half-buried sub stands dark against the trees. “What were they thinking? What could burying it have possibly gained them? The military is crazy. There’s no telling.”

With a nostalgic sigh, Triquet sets aside the photos. Their ghosts fill the chamber, still here in the things they had fashioned and left behind. They were such simple tough people, with such clear ideas of how to live. Not like the relativistic muddle today. Too bad reality was never so simple, nor clear.

“No one to see…

I’m free as the breeze…

No one but me…

And my memories…”

Ξ

Flavia wrestles with the structure of Plexity. Alonso had some good initial concepts, but the idea that his thousand lines of Perl are going to suffice is absurd. If you are going to do this thing, then do it properly or not at all.

She is thinking about cellular automata as the driving engine of the architecture. It’s because of those Dyson field devices. The microfluidics channels they use to define parameters are capable of returning readings that are not binary, but rather impart a matter of degree. If she just adapts the diagnostic firmware a bit she could really make their readings far more complex. Nearly harmonic resonances through the media. In that way it is more like an analog interface than a digital one, and she would like to preserve the features of the analog record, the nearly-indefinable warmth that such signals possess, all the way through the pipeline.

She’s thinking she might use a stochastic cellular automaton throughout the system as a quality assurance agent free-roaming the architecture, stress-testing different neighborhoods of the grid. She’s a deep believer in iterative methods and emergent properties, and the data they will be feeding this program couldn’t be richer. Her child will grow up strong and healthy, with machine learning bootstrapping itself up into one cognitive milestone after another.

Flavia doesn’t like the idea of artificial intelligence. She thinks too much of the common argument is bogged down in the fascination of emulating humans and biology, as if how our brains and glands perform is the only possible expression of intelligence. Artificial intelligence is more the realm of anthropologists and interface devs than mathematicians and programmers. And she is glad that with all the other woo getting tossed around here, Miriam and Alonso aren’t also trying to bring Plexity to life like some kind of Disney Pinocchio. But it will be intelligent, this child of hers, and it will certainly grow. But it will also be the very first of its kind, so it is impossible to say in what way it may grow. Long after she is dead and gone, perhaps Plexity will come to life in some measurable way. But she doesn’t care about that. She just wants the maths to work as smoothly as water slipping over riverstones.

But Alonso is too sloppy with his definitions. She needs better clarification of what he wants from certain sets of resources. With a sigh, she exits her reed-wall cell in the center of the bunker and blinks at the gray light of the doorway. Amy is out there, building a sturdy reed panel to serve as a door. “Finally!” Flavia says, then realizes how spoiled a comment it is. “I mean, thank you, Amy. I would help, but… Eh. My hands. They are like two left feet with the manual work.”

Amy giggles. “Oh, that’s fine. I’m learning a lot about these reeds as I work with them. Much more pliable than similar species back home. They may even be their own subspecies, a kind of flattened tule, more like a sedge than a reed.”

“As long as it keeps the rain out.” Flavia steps past her into the fitful wind. She realizes she should have another layer on but she doesn’t want to return inside. Hopefully this will be quick.

But she stops on the ramp, one foot hovering above the second step. Miriam giggled. And something in the voice emerging from the shadows of the bedchamber convinces Flavia she is intruding on intimacies.

Alonso whispers a reply, his voice deep and husky, and Miriam giggles again. Flavia turns and silently departs, for some reason inordinately pleased at this development. She doesn’t know Alonso well. They had been colleagues who shared mutual respect and a love of wine before this. A couple conferences were all they ever saw of each other face to face. But her heart has grieved along with everyone else’s to see the sad state he has been reduced to. Yet nothing heals like love.

Flavia imagines the two of them hiding under their sheets, sharing secrets and dreams, building a tiny little universe of two. She has done this herself before, first with Niccolo, her teenage boyfriend, and then Marta, one of her latest lovers. But for Flavia all her affairs are temporary. Relationships are project-based, with hard deadlines before she has to reset herself and move on. But these two… Incredible! They have like thirty years of background in their private universe. That is enough time, she is sure, for entire castles to be built and inhabited and to erode into forgetting. Thirty years! With only one person. Flavia is a modern woman and she shivers in revulsion. She cannot imagine.

Flavia returns to the bunker, a bemused expression on her face. Amy, ever solicitous, asks, “Are you looking for Alonso? I think he’s in his tent.”

“Yes, with Miriam.” Flavia smiles. “And the Love Palace is living up to its name.”

“Why, those old dogs,” Amy laughs, as uplifted by the news as Flavia is. She shares a happy sigh. “I swear, getting Maahjabeen back has saved us all.”

Flavia passes inside and Amy realizes she’s been faintly hearing Miriam’s giggles without realizing what they mean. She flashes on the one night all three of them shared a bed, at the very first. They had indeed built a tiny universe under the sheets of their professor’s king-sized bed in Reno. It had been a real inflection point, that night, for all of them, for the rest of their lives.

Lovers and their romantic withdrawals, a tale as old as time. Amy imagines Pleistocene hunter-gatherers under a pile of animal skins, building secret worlds together as they wait for dawn. How much of the past has been lost? Why, nearly all of it. We remember the kings and queens, and more recently historians define policies and economies of ancient tribes and nation states. But this intimate discourse, the pillow talk between people in bed, it is evanescence itself, vanishing as soon as it is spoken. This is the real fabric of humanity, impossible to share or study.

Throughout the ages, this time in bed has been the refuge of folk from every walk of life. The serfs toil in the fields then collapse into each other’s arms. But what must it be like to share a bed with someone who’s abusive? Or dull to the point of silence? Then it isn’t a refuge but an inescapable torture chamber or prison.

Amy thinks of her own parents. The three of them had shared a small flat in a concrete high-rise on Okinawa. Amy had slept on a futon in the entry hall across the front door like a guard dog. She had never heard a sound from her parents in the main room once they had pulled out their own futon. She now wonders if they had remained quiet on purpose, knowing their child was listening in. Perhaps they are much louder and more carefree now, in their late seventies. But somehow she doubts it.

Her father is a quiet nisei who grew up speaking Japanese in his home in Olympia, Washington. He worked as a translator for the American bases in the sixties through the eighties and found a dutiful and cheerful local wife. Well… cheerful until her only child grew up and broke her heart, anyway.

But all the hidden empires of the night! Amy sighs, shaking her head in wonder at the ephemeral creations people share with their night time dialogues, their hidden fears drawn out like thorns. She hasn’t had a real relationship in… twenty years now? Twenty-two? But she still remembers the depths she and Adrian were able to reach. When they had the time. And it was the lack of time that had ended it. All intimacy gone. Just roommates for three years.

The door is starting to take shape. Multiple layers is the answer, laid at right angles like plywood. And she’s doing what she can to reinforce the corners. Nobody will treat it gently so it needs to be able to withstand their abuse. She might even need to make it strong enough for security. How many layers will that be?

It turns out she stops at nine. The door is admirably thick with that many layers, twine weaving through to hold it all together. It doesn’t quite fit the frame until she trims the ends, then it is nice and snug. Now… how to fashion hinges?

Ξ

Maahjabeen rests on an inflatable mattress inside one of the cells in the bunker. It is not her space and she doesn’t recognize the luggage stacked in the corners, nor the photos torn from magazines that hang on the walls like artwork. She is still so depleted her idle mind drifts, occupied with subjects like this for hours. Who would put up a picture of a glacier calving into the sea? And another of some giant Asian neon city from above?

“Knock knock.” Esquibel stands in the doorway.

“Eh. Doctor. Please come in.” Maahjabeen lifts a beckoning hand but her shoulder locks up and she grimaces.

“Still having trouble with your shoulder?”

“Both of them. And my back twinges whenever they do.”

“That is why I brought my specialist bodyworker.” Esquibel pulls Mandy into the doorframe.

Mandy is pale, her eyes bruised and hair tousled. She will not look directly at Maahjabeen, but squints at the floor instead as if fearing a blow.

Maahjabeen is shocked by the girl’s transformation. Had Mandy looked like this on the beach when she had arrived? She can’t recall. Her head was already spinning. “What is wrong with you?”

But Mandy only shrugs and shakes her head and slips into the cell. “Esquibel says I should look at you. I use a Chinese healing discipline called Tui Na. If you like.”

“Not if you are sick.” Maahjabeen asks Esquibel, “Is she sick?”

“No. Not at all.” Esquibel pats Mandy on the shoulder. “Healthy as a horse. Her adjustments are very useful. Exactly what you need I think. This Tui Na does very good diagnosis on your muscle and bone structure like a physiotherapist. I must admit Mandy knows anatomy very well.”

“Then what is wrong with her? Is she angry with me?”

“No!” Mandy blurts. “Never! The fault is all with me! I should have never let you go!”

Maahjabeen doesn’t know how to handle such an absurd statement. She only shakes her head in confusion. “What are you talking about? None of this has anything to do with you. This is something I did to myself. It is only between me and the storm. And God.”

“But if I’d done a better job persuading, or even grabbing—”

Maahjabeen struggles to sit up. She raises her arm as high as it will go and jabs a finger at Mandy. “If you had tried to stop me any more than you had I would have physically attacked you with my paddle. It was not your decision. You insult me with this. Who are you, my mother? You are a stranger. It was my risk to take.”

Mandy is silent, her brow trembling. Then she allows the words to penetrate and the burden to lift. Above all, Mandy is possessed of common sense and she can see the wisdom of Maahjabeen’s perspective, however ferocious it may be. At length, she nods, and indicates Maahjabeen’s shaking finger. “Is that as far as you can lift your arm?”

“Are we still fighting? Because it hurts to hold it up.”

“No. I am sorry, Maahjabeen. Of course you are right. I just feel so bad for you.”

“Then do something. Help me fix my shoulders. They are locked in place. It hurts so much.”

“Yes. Of course. Can you lie face down.”

“No. My back.”

“That’s fine. On your side?”

“No. Only on my back. Help me settle.”

Mandy cradles Maahjabeen as she eases back with a gasp. Her hands encompass Maahjabeen’s left shoulder. “Now we don’t have an X-ray machine here but I don’t think we need one. Do you think anything is broken?”

“Like did I break the bones? No. I did not smash my shoulders against anything.”

“What about nerve damage. Can you feel your fingertips? How about the inside of your elbows?”

Mandy traces the interior of Maahjabeen’s forearm and the Tunisian woman nods. “No. No problems with the fingertips.”

“How is it here?” Mandy’s hands travel up to the cervical vertebra on Maahjabeen’s long graceful neck. With her huge dark eyes and luminous skin she looks like a pharaoh queen of ancient Egypt. But Mandy stops this superficial appreciation of her patient’s features in it’s tracks. She is here as a healer, not some missionary from the lesbian vanguard. Enough time for that later.

“Stiff. Very sore. You see I had to hold the same position for hours on end. Bracing the boat. For three days.”

“Yeah, I think we’re just looking at held muscles. The shoulder is a complicated joint and you put too much strain on certain ligaments and connective tissues. So we need to relieve the muscles and release the tension.”

“You are saying this is me just holding it? I promise you I would release it if I could. The idea that I want to somehow keep…”

“No no. Not that at all. After a certain point, if a muscle remains activated as long as this, we lose conscious control of its release. We need outside help. Reminders. You know, just massage, to start with. Then maybe some of the painful stuff to help get your structure back in alignment.”

“How long are we talking? How many days? Or weeks?”

“Not sure until we do some work. How about this: How long will you be like this if I don’t help?”

“Ehhh. I have no idea. Okay. Go ahead. And don’t worry about being gentle.”

Ξ

Amy collects everyone for an evening meeting after dinner. Jay sits in a camp chair with a makeshift crutch at his side. Maahjabeen is on a cot in the back, Mandy and Esquibel within reach. Alonso presides, his mood brighter than any of them have yet seen.

“We have all done much today, from making the camp livable again to learning the origins of the settlement here, eh? But first, I’d like everyone to hear about Pradeep’s day. This is what I hoped for all of you when I conceived this mission.”

Pradeep nods. “Uh, yeah. It was a fascinating time in the roots of the redwood giant that fell. But what I think Alonso wants me to focus on is the Dyson reader…”

Alonso waves an expansive arm, his hand holding a glass of wine. “Tell them all of it. We are not short of time tonight.”

Pradeep shrugs. “Well, here’s the thing. I was able to get specific results on something like eighty-seven, eighty-eight percent of the samples I fed into the reader. I’m assuming it’s been field tested and it’s error rates are within acceptable limits, but I can’t tell you what a difference it is to be able to classify subjects in the field, still in situ. I began to see how this whole Plexity scheme might actually work. You know those white streaks of fungus in root structures? Well I was able to find which are mycorrhizal, or beneficial, and which are parasitic. It turned out that most of the fungi I sampled were beneficial. Only a few percent were parasites. And they were completely surrounded by the beneficial fungi, almost like white blood cells attacking pathogens in our blood streams.

“In the lab this discovery would have been months of work. But with the device in the field, I was able to survey the entire root system in a day and even design a couple simple experiments. Flavia, I think one of the most useful things Plexity could give me in conjunction with the power of the tool itself is the ability to build models with the data in real time—”

“I am absolutely on it,” Katrina says, sipping her own wine. “Data visualization is my jam, mate. I am currently taking votes from everyone on how you like your results presented. So think about it and get back to me. Fancy and detailed, with 3D drill-downs? Simple factsheets? Pies and bars? I mean, we can do it all but I think these things work best when we optimize to a single vision. We can even do animations.”

“Just no animated characters, please.” Miriam sips her own wine and laughs. “I don’t need any cute sidekicks between me and the interface, thank you very much.”

Katrina blows a pink bubble and it snaps. “Do I look like the kind of person who would give you a cute animated sidekick?”

Miriam looks about herself. “There isn’t a single bloody mirror on the entire island, is there? Yes, Katrina dear. You absolutely do look like that person.”

They both laugh.

“But still,” Pradeep continues, “even though I identified like thirty-three species I just barely scratched the surface of what this tool is capable of, and in such a setting. Maahjabeen, I can’t wait to unleash it in the lagoon. Imagine what we can do with aquatic protozoa. That is, when you’re feeling better. It’s just the first thing I thought of today.”

“That is fine,” Maahjabeen nods. “If you need to get out on the water before I am able to join you, you are welcome to use one of my kayaks, Pradeep.”

“Thank you, Maahjabeen.”

“You know what I am an idiot about?” Maahjabeen’s question, obviously rhetorical, still gets no takers. She plows on. “When I went out I should have brought buoys. They probably wouldn’t have survived the storm surge. Okay, they definitely wouldn’t, but we would still get some actual data. It’s like poor Mandy. If her weather station had been on the cliffs…”

“I’d have gotten a good twenty minutes of really killer readings. But it’s okay,” Mandy says. She looks better, perhaps on the path to recovery. “Katrina and I are sending it up in the morning.”

“And we’ll figure out,” Alonso says, “how to help you get some buoys anchored off-shore, Miss Charrad.”

Miriam looks sidelong at Alonso. He never calls someone by their last name unless he is holding them at a distance. During their last combative meeting he had good reason. She was threatening him with her contract. But here, on this convivial night, why would he still be separating himself from the young woman? Ah. Yes, that is probably it. His Cuban blood is awake again and he has realized what a stunner Maahjabeen is. Miriam laughs to herself.

“Now, our esteemed Doctor Triquet, here to fill us in on the latest discoveries from the sub.”

Triquet wears a floral evening gown and tiara tonight, with long white satin gloves and white sandals. Now that Maahjabeen is back, their wardrobe can be playful again. Even celebratory. So they didn’t stint. Although they chose only the third-longest of their fake eyelashes. This is a high-class outfit. Triquet drains their glass and stands. “Hear ye, hear ye, the tale of Lisica. As told to me by stacks of musty papers and photos from the days of yore. I mean, there’s just so much. I’m not sure where to start. Everybody knows that Maureen Dowerd was a woman now, yes? The grave in the trees? Also I’ve found photos of the listening equipment they used to have on the roof. And I think they buried the sub in the beach sometime in the late fifties? Probably 1958.”

“But why?” Miriam shakes her head in disbelief. “I mean, I’m speaking as someone who loves digging, and even I can’t—”

“I’ve found no documentation yet,” Triquet replies, “about the decision to bury the sub, only work orders about its progress. And photos. Like this one.” They share the Kodak print they found with the laborers on the beach and the sub partially buried.

“Aw, I want a barbecue on the beach,” Jay complains. “Looks like so much fun. And we can’t even go fishing like they did. They gave zero fucks about disrupting the local ecology. Probably just threw their trash in the sea. And who was Maureen Dowerd?” As the one who first found her, Jay feels a special connection. “What was her role here?”

“Unknown.” Triquet locates her ammo box of valuables. “Not much to go on here, really. She has an address book. Most of the entries are from Minnesota. Her passport was issued in 1956. She received a letter from Auntie P wishing her a Merry Christmas, dated 1957, and informing her of the birth of Jerry’s child. There’s a postcard from 1957. Lake Michigan in the summer. So far, the writing is illegible to me. But there’s nothing like a diary in here or any explanation why she was on Lisica. I figure she must have been staff. Or someone’s wife, which is why so far she doesn’t clearly show up in payroll records. Though I see no reason why they’d record anyone’s gender…”

“Oh, you just need to find the one,” Flavia interjects, “who only makes seventy-five percent as much as everyone else.”

“Amen,” Esquibel says.

“And Doctor Daine.” Alonso swings his head to her a little too fast. His words are already starting to slur. Esquibel’s father was an alcoholic, an insouciant cynic who drowned his dark thoughts in rum. So she is guarded around those who drink. But so far none here appear to be angry drunks, at least, or even moody ones. “How fare your patients?”

“Well, one of them is not following my directives and is fighting growing numbness all over their body.”

Alonso frowns, looking at Jay and Maahjabeen. “Which one?”

“You.” Esquibel stands and lifts Alonso’s wine glass from his hand. “Don’t you think you’ve already had enough to drink?”

“Yes. Yes, you are right.” Alonso smiles at Esquibel, apologetic. “You wanted me to get stronger but I have taken so many left turns it is like…” he throws up his hands and shares a helpless laugh, “like I just went in a circle. Or a spiral. A downward spiral. But now I am back. Maahjabeen is back and I am too. Now. Maybe our intrepid kayak explorer can tell us more about this west coast beach and what she found out there?”

They all turn to Maahjabeen, whose position on the cot prevents her from being easily seen. “I can see why…” she begins, lifting a hand, “the beach does not show up on maps. It is very thin, just right at the base of these cliffs.” She points up the coast to the northwest. “But it is quite long. Maybe two kilometers or more. And the sand is yellow, not gray.”

“Quartz!” Miriam squawks. “Oh, that’s lovely. Is it soft?”

“I don’t know. The uh, pieces…”

“The grains?”

“Yes, were very big. And cold. I don’t know how soft they were.”

“Tell us everything you can about the bunker.” Triquet steps close. “You said you had more pictures?”

“Yes. I could not understand what I was seeing. So I took pictures hoping someone else could tell me.”

She hands Triquet her phone. They frown at the image. “Whoa, Cyrillic. I think it’s like a meme or… like a graffiti saying from the early eighties I don’t know. Katrina? Do you recognize this?”

“Oh, look…” Katrina zooms in to the first character, a stylized д (dee). “This is like a street tag. Somebody got creative with their letters. Der’movaya dyra. They are calling it a shit hole.”

Maahjabeen nods. “That bunker was smaller than this one. And in worse condition. In a bad place too. Completely exposed to the elements at the base of the cliff. I had to lie against a wall the whole time and I still got soaked. The floor is broken up into pieces. The roof is just gone.”

“I wonder,” Pradeep says, “if the Air Force knew of it?”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Triquet says. “They must have been playing spy versus spy here for generations. Maybe they even got together for vodka shots on New Year’s. But look at this other photo. Sorry, doll. Just started swiping through all your pics like a stalker. But no. Here. On the wall over the door. That’s kanji script. Japanese.”

Amy takes the phone and reads it, frowning. “It is a fragment of classical verse. I can’t recall the author. Is it actually chiseled in the concrete? And that molding detail above the window is in a real tatagu-ya style. Maybe the Japanese built that bunker during the war and the Soviets moved in after?”

“Was it empty? Bare like this one?” Triquet demands details like an addict. “Or did it have artifacts?” They giggle, handing the phone back. “Just one site after another. Incredible. Oh, they’re never going to let me publish one hundredth of what I’ll want to. This island is crazy.”

Alonso lifts his cane. “To this crazy island! Lisica! A safe harbor in a dangerous storm! A jewel! A garden! A paradise untouched!” He begins to sing Donizetti’s ballad…

“Una furtiva lagrima…

negli occhi suoi spuntò:
Quelle festose giovani
invidiar sembrò…”

Katrina hops up. “Guess it’s time to set up the sound system. No, keep singing Alonso. This is fantastic!”