Nathan and the Scarlet Sea A short story about love, body heat, & the end of (most of) civilization by Peregrine Jack for Jessica Nathan awoke one morning to find himself haunted by doubt and driven, once again, toward the open road. "The road! What road?" That awful stink was in his nose again, the deceptively sweet smell of rotting flesh. He sniffed again and it was gone, replaced by the benign smells of dust and age. Nathan laughed as his sleep-clouded mind cleared. "The road. Oh, weren't those the days," he said to himself, recalling old Route 66 and the abandoned roadside diner Road Runner's Refuge that he and Moose had remodeled and shot their first digifilm at. He thought of all those arrow-straight roads across ancient seabeds and laughed again. This time, the laugh was more subdued, more forced. Nathan's road now was the sea. As with every day in the bunker by the sea, Nathan arose from bed, climbed up the ladder and out into the sun and the salt air. The irony was never lost on him, how the bunker had once been a tomb, a sacred mountain storehouse of urns, in each urn the cremains of a Japanese citizen killed in the bombing of Hiroshima so long ago. It was a place he'd once taken Tatchi. Now Nathan called it home. Nathan with his Kawai digital music archive, a little silver brick the size of a deck of cards containing every song ever recorded in history. Nathan with his Toshiba database with forearm cinch straps and wireless Sony ear implants. Not least of all from the Japanese had come his BTU jack, a nickel-sized plug in his left shoulder which, through a fusion of nerve-endings and micro-circuitry, tapped a small percentage of the human body's 25,000 BTU's (British Thermal Units) of body heat to power peripherals. The energy generated, his energy, was enough to run the few micro-machines that comprised his only friends, his intellectual stimuli, his entertainment. Properly channeled, it could even boil water for tea. Few ironies ever slipped past Nathan. He enjoyed them too much, and so made a point of plucking every last one from the dwindling world of men. As Nathan half slid half stepped down the sand dunes toward the sea he rubbed his eyes and moved to stroke back his hair. In his dream that night, he had been with Tatchi again, she who had insisted he keep his hair long, and in the dream it had been at its longest ever, down to his waist almost. He had often worn it long like that before all life changed irrevocably. Before The Inevitable. For moving his hand up and over his forehead and past a bald pate, he remembered that he'd lost his hair years ago. Pushing forty now but forever muscular and bronzed, tall and bald, his eyes hidden behind dark green goggle sunglasses (no longer an accessory but absolute necessity), Nathan looked the spitting image of his one-time hero, his favorite 20th Century writer. In his database, he had the photo, the one of Hunter from the dust jacket back cover of his favorite author's book, Songs of the Doomed. He wondered if Hunter Thompson had glimpsed the future, the very near future, before taking his own life in 2005. The author's frequent use of the word "doom" certainly proved prophetic, synonymous with the catastrophic events of just a few years later. Nathan picked up speed as he hit the hard sand below the dunes. Reaching back to cinch the strap on his goggle-like shades, he ran headlong into the surf and leapt at the first knee-high breaker clear out of the water like a dolphin and flipped into the air. Seen from the side, had there been anyone to see, he would have resembled a spinning baby in its womb, an airborne yin-yang symbol, a dog's slobber-wet tennis ball throwing off spittle as it flew through the air in some suburbanite's home movie. Nathan landed like a softball in the mitt of the just-curling next wave and disappeared beneath the surface of the warm, scarlet sea. Much of what scientists had predicted for the Earth in the aftermath of Man's Greatest yet Inevitable Blunder had never happened. Or had manifested differently, in ways that had allowed Nathan and a good 100 million or so other humans and a great many animal species to survive. But Nathan never gave any of that much thought. He tried to just live. He knew he was dying, slowly broken down from within like a sandcastle being dismantled grain by grain by an army of underground ants. So he lived day to day. Day for day, and fed on memories like a king forever at banquet wherein the guests are too kind to inform their beloved king that there isn't a shred of food in sight. A mad king, then. Yes, Nathan was a mad king all right. Popping out of the Pacific, he looked back toward the beach and saw with pleasure that all the world was his domain. All that he could see anyway. Right at the base of the bunker sat his catamaran, invisible beneath a camouflage of palm fronds and vines and drifted sands. Beyond that, dunes and jungle, oh, and the river mouth, a kind of breadbox from which Nathan plucked all order of finned and 4-legged food. When the salmon ran, Nathan ate like a king, mad or no. Nathan said, "I haven't much, have I? But what I've got is mine, and how lucky, lucky am I." He embraced himself, the fingers of his right hand tapping the BTU jack almost unconsciously. Had he wanted it, the entire island could be his, in the legal sense, archaic as the term had become. After The Inevitable, there was no shortage of land, and ownership was more or less a matter of just being there. Correction. Compared to life in 2007, there was a huge shortage of land. But all things being relative, there were so far fewer inhabitants of Earth that the inhabitant per square foot ratio had been about 10,000 times reduced. One could almost imagine that no one had died at all, but that the Earth had merely grown 1000-fold and all one's relatives and friends were living contentedly on islands of their own all around the globe. Nathan liked to look at it this way, when he looked at it at all. Even now, years later, comprehending the scale of the catastrophe was almost impossible for Nathan. So to Nathan, most days, the Earth had merely grown and the seas most of all. Not liking all the scars carved into her flesh in the way of roads, Gaia had washed them all away, and where once there were massive continents, now there were only islands, millions of them. And those "ancient" sea beds where once he'd driven in vectors and loopdiloops and NASA had landed Space Shuttles, and, in secret places, the government had ignited nuclear warheads underground. These were seabeds once more. Deep seabeds. Another irony in a long list. The sun was brighter than usual today. As Nathan stood staring at the beach daydreaming, his skin dried rapidly in a perceptible wave starting on his head and moving downward as though peeling off a layer of him, right down to the red water's edge, to his waist where he stood submerged in the sea. Nathan's mind was elsewhere for the moment, oblivious to the danger. On the beach, in the syrupy forms of heat waves rising, Nathan's mother waved him in, clad in a flower-print bikini, her hair in a 70's perm, his little sister at four or five years old seated, clutching fistfuls of sand and throwing them at her outstretched toes. "Yes, Mom, I'm coming," he muttered. With that he dropped out of sight beneath the water, resurfacing with fistfuls of clay which he smeared atop his bald head, bare shoulders and arms, and began walking toward the shore. In the 45 seconds it took his feet to touch dry sand, the caked-on clay had hardened completely. As he walked toward the dunes and past the spot where his mother and sister had been, the dry clay dropped off of him like pieces of a puzzle, crumbled to dust and whirled off with the wind, taking with it Cape Cod, his family, his history, all he'd ever known. The puzzle, however, remained. The puzzle of Why. When not sailing, Nathan found the wind tiresome and malignant, and so ran at top speed up the dunes and to the bunker where he half-leapt down the ladder and into the cool, calm darkness below. Of the more or less permanent changes to the Earth's climate to which its remaining inhabitants had no choice but to adjust, the ceaseless wind was Nathan's greatest grievance. It haunted him. But sure as Kerouac had relied on freight trains despite the cold, the stink of urine, and the harassment of rail yard bulldogs, Nathan relied on the wind to move him around, and in a sense to keep him alive. This was a good island, the bunker the best. And the significance of his having once been here with Tatchi had kept him here far longer than he usually landed. But he knew that soon he would have to leave it. Perhaps today. Next was the sun, a lot hotter than it had ever been either in Death Valley, California or the equatorial Amazon before The Inevitable, and far more deadly. For that, Nathan had his prize possession: a UV-protectant rip-stop nylon suit that he'd found skin diving the wreck of Space Shuttle Peregrine in the shallow waters off what Nathan's database told him had once been a valley high in the Andes. In Nathan's mental collection of ironies, the Peregrine ranked high. Named for the first baby born off the Mayflower in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the shuttle and her crew had been left homeless in orbit and had been the last of mankind's great "ships" to return to home. Nathan's suit was in fact a space suit, plucked as it were from the belly of a Mayflower of a vastly altered New World. Nathan wondered what it would have been like to be up there then, whirling round the Blue Planet, and watching it change so quickly, deadly fast, fast enough that Houston Space Center was a fish tank before they could even think of coordinating a landing. Nathan remembered when Hurricane Francis had born down malignant on his beloved New Orleans in 2004 and he so far away in Japan, feeling helpless, praying for his friends. Maybe that's what it was like for the astronauts. They had front row seats for the End of the World, and all they could do was watch. Which, he supposed was a hell of a lot better than it went for 7 billion dying below. Not that Nathan's life was anything near what you might call "goal-oriented" anymore, but of the few wishes he had, one was to track down one or all of the astronauts of the Space Shuttle Peregrine. It was curiosity. And another "c" word that Nathan rarely admitted as a goal: companionship. As much as he tried to fight it, Nathan knew his species was inherently social, and his talent for denial only carried him so far. And when it failed him, the nightmares returned and with them a deep sadness that crippled him by day. "Irony number two hundred and.. was it fourteen?" Nathan had his irony collection numbered. "Naw, that's the one about salmon. Nope, twenty-seven. Irony number two hundred, twenty-seven: conversation between me and Rocky way back when I was on anti-depressants and Rock says to me, Nathan, if you were deserted on a desert island without your Prozac, would you still be suicidal? HA!" Nathan loved that one. And thinking back on his old best friend Rocky made him smile. For a moment. And then reality crept in. And then denial. And Nathan jumped up and began enthusiastically to pack. It was always the same. It was keep moving or go insane. The salmon irony is easy enough. In 2007, the salmon, along with scores of other fish species and our mammalian cousins the whales had been THIS CLOSE to winking out forever. The Inevitable had brought them all back. Humans were now the ones in danger of extinction. Nathan's belongings were scant, but every item held some precious meaning or utilitarian purpose. There was his baseball-sized rock from atop Mt. Katahdin, his lone souvenir from his 2000-mile hike of the Appalachian Mountain range in 2007. After two years spent in cramped Japan, he'd reveled in the open space of Appalachia. He couldn't have known it at the time, but his timing had been perfect. Never again would any human be able to walk 2000-miles of uninterrupted land, let alone 200. For Nathan, it had been six months of forested bliss removed from the mounting terror and horror and international unease as the U.S. nose-dived with appalling enthusiasm and ignorance straight into a deja vu of the waning final days of the Roman Empire. Nathan had one pot, one spoon, and one slug from a 9mm pistol he'd once owned and tried and failed to shoot himself with. He packed these and his electronic companions, the latter items always carefully wrapped in nylon and plastic and whatever padding he had at hand. There were vestige photographs to pack, sketches almost, thanks to the damage of the blazing sun, of his mother and sister and two brothers and their children. The one of his father both angered and saddened him, for Nathan had attempted to restore the lines of his father's face with a crude hand-made ink and a knife tip and had bungled the job badly. When he looked at it, he saw not his father now but some cartoon rendering of the final fool to sit in the Oval Office before it vanished beneath 2000 fathoms of seawater. "That's enough of you," he said. He pulled his Zippo from his pocket, ignited the photo and dropped it to the stone floor. After all, in his database he had endless photos of family and friends. The ones he'd held on to, he'd kept for their tangibility, for something to touch, to hold in hand and feel part of that world again. The 2000 fathoms of seawater over the White House known to most now as the Scarlet Sea was so vast that, were there a cartographer to map it, it might be called the New World Ocean. It was Pangaea in reverse. What Pangaea had once been in landmass, the Scarlet Sea was in endless ocean. But in truth it was naught but a watery grave, a grave for which the fool was almost directly responsible. Nathan took a morbid pleasure in knowing that if the fool had survived the Inevitable, he hadn't lived long. Alone on an island, a pig in the wilderness, the inept fool wouldn't have lasted a month. And if he and his advisors and cabinet members had found other survivors, anybody of any race, creed, color or nation would have greeted them like child molesters in a prison full of felony-rap-sheet fathers. They would have been bludgeoned and eaten, their bones picked clean by the famished new primitives of the New World Ocean. For that was the other change the 100 million had to adjust to. The ocean was no longer blue. It was scarlet. But Nathan, bright as he was and armed with a database, couldn't figure it to this day. A massive algal bloom? Some new breed of octopi that shot copious amounts of red ink? The lack of an ozone layer? And most gruesome of all, could the blood of 7 billion humans and God knows how many animals have been of sufficient quantity to taint all the oceans? The computer told him no. But who knew. No, nothing in Nathan's forearm database, the billion gigabyte great-grandchild of the once-upon-a-time laptop, could answer the riddle of the red. Developed by the Japanese and sold to the Chinese for its military, the database had no moving parts, no hard drive, and was pure nanogenius made to ride on the arm of the soldier in the field. It was made to endure, to outlive its host even, in the event of a direct hit by a grenade or land mine. It was, essentially, bulletproof. And it was waterproof to boot. In and of itself, it contained, aside from a trillion kilobytes of military gibberish which Nathan had scanned but largely ignored, the knowledge of every encyclopedia from the general to the most specific technical and scientific and philosophical, everything. And into it Nathan had downloaded a huge cache of personal data, his family namely. Nathan missed them terribly. No matter that he'd messed up the portrait of his father. "One less thing to carry," he grumbled. But grandpa's wallet, which had been passed down through generations, was something else altogether. It was an item with no utilitarian value in the post-Inevitable world. But his grandfather's breast wallet, long and soft as silk, from a time when men always wore suits, was an olfactory treasure more valuable than fresh water, Nathan exaggerated to himself. Crafted of the finest leather, it had been a gift from his grandfather's father, a successful leather merchant, on the occasion of his son's entry into the leather business in 1935. Nathan opened it and took a deep draught, imagining he could smell time in its sweet leather scent of old. With that smell, he would travel in time and ride in his grandfather's suit on the steam train into Boston. He could see the snow flurries out the train window, the teakwood bar in grandpa's favorite lounge, the martini in his hand, and the pride attached to every dollar bill that passed through the wallet's leather folds, honest income, honestly earned, and in The Great Depression no less. Nathan wrapped the wallet in nylon and stuffed it in his best waterproof dry bag with everything else. Much to the amusement of his friends back in '07, Nathan had refused to part with his backpack, his sleeping pad, his goose down sleeping bag or anything else from his hike, including his dry bag. When, shortly after finishing his trek, he returned to Japan to visit the family whose daughter he had tutored for two years, he took his entire Appalachian outfit with him, First Aid kit, pocket-sized electronic water treatment unit, compass, tiny stove handmade out of beer cans, everything. Though Japanese Customs was befuddled, his former employer and friend Hito was amused, as amused as anyone could be who clearly saw the rapid approach of The Inevitable. Hito particularly enjoyed the virtually weightless, aluminum can-bottom stove with the Budweiser & Kirin beer logos intertwined. Pleased with Nathan's preparedness, Hito had run out and bought him five plastic liter bottles of Japan's finest moonshine, an elixir with duel utility: fuel or pain killer. A thin shaft of sunlight cut the darkness of the bunker but like a laser lit only the narrow space it occupied. As it reflected no harmful UV light, Nathan was able to go without his goggles in the bunker. His green eyes glowed as he plucked the stove from out of the darkness in its former urn alcove and held it into the light a moment before setting it in the dry bag. The stove was now a relic, a keepsake and a precious one at that, for in it Nathan saw the greatest three years of his life. Hito had been a widower with but one child, a girl who, when Nathan arrived to be her tutor, was not so much a child anymore at 15. Hito was a nuclear physicist by training and worked on what his daughter referred to in her first conversation with Nathan as "his top see-kelet burrshit!" Hito had learned of Nathan through Nathan's popular American culture-based website, an intriguing mix of intellectual musings, political opinion, essays on theoretical science, and adventure tales of Nathan's copious world travels including writings on linguistics, wilderness survival, sailing, fishing, edible plants, and a section called The MacGyver in Me: How to make anything out of junk. Though a man of science, Hito had keen senses of adventure and humor. All of his daughter's former tutors had been straight intellectuals, mostly from Europe, and Hito wanted for her a more rounded education. He had searched for a rare American, a modern cowboy with the mind of a genius, and he had found Nathan, the perfect tutor, a rare Renaissance man. Yet it was nearly a year of emailing before he was able to nail down the ever-traveling Nathan and secure his commitment, luring Nathan (who had no prior interest in teaching) with a king's ransom. Tatchi had grown to loathe her father's hired tutors, and at 15 felt herself beyond the need of them. As such, Nathan's reception was a cool one, his first month with her nearly unbearable. But then Nathan had an idea. By any standard it was a rash measure. Distressed over his daughter's impudence, however, Hito gave Nathan the green light. Nathan would play a trick on Tatchi and insodoing gain her hatred, her respect, her attention, and, secretly over time, her affection, roughly in that order. As teenagers, Tatchi's friends were all too willing to cooperate in the trick. So it was that one night Tatchi found herself blindfolded and deafened by headphones blaring techno music, being driven by her friends, allegedly to a party. When the blindfold came off, Tatchi was on a deep sea fishing ship far from shore and headed to open ocean. She was on her cell phone to Daddy in seconds, livid and crying hysterically. Hito's response: have fun and learn something. A month later, Tatchi was a beloved member of the fishing crew, with Nathan having worked with her side by side on the ship. She'd worked long hours, run through every possible emotion from hatred to boredom to unabashed joy, and come out a very different young lady. Hito, astounded by the change in his daughter, looked at Nathan as one would regard a magician, or better yet if they were not but figures of fiction, a Jedi knight. And so progressed one of the greatest pairings of mentor and acolyte in history. For two years Nathan had carte blanche to prepare Tatchi for the real world. He taught her everything he knew. Often he would read her to sleep at night from a bedside chair, lulling her into slumber with the heady ramblings of Nietzsche, Sartre, Descartes and Homer. Subjects of interests to her yet foreign to Nathan, they studied or experienced first-hand together. On the rare occasion that Tatchi's impudence flared up, Nathan treated it, and her, with utter indifference. By now, being ignored by Nathan had became the greatest punishment imaginable to Tatchi, and she melted in the face of his authoritative love. Once, before going onstage to perform a one-person play she'd written herself, she buckled with butterflies. Nathan took her in his arms and whispered reassuringly, "This kind of nervous means you are truly alive. Trust me, and I'll trust you, and together we can rule the world!" By the end of the first year, Hito looked upon Nathan as his son. Weeks would pass without Nathan being paid, and when politely prodded, Hito would stutter embarrassed and fumble about for his checkbook having completely forgotten that Nathan was in his employ. Nathan recalled fondly that such occasions were ritually followed by a night out of fantastic sushi with Hito and Nathan jabbering at the table like brothers and Tatchi onstage mastering the karaoke machine. Nathan would then end the night with his falsetto rendition of Blondie's Heart of Glass, sending them all rolling out into the night doubled over in laughter. The end of Nathan's two-year tutoring term was a sad time for all. Nathan could have stayed on longer, another year, maybe more. He was more than welcome. Hito in fact begged him to stay. But Nathan missed the U.S., and had got it in mind to make his long hike of his country's eastern mountain range. He had to go. Tatchi reacted by running away for a full week, returning only in time to see Nathan to the airport, where she remained steel-faced right up to the moment his plane left the ground, then crumpled to the floor and cried as never before. Hito's team of scientists had been developing the human BTU interface for over a decade. It was the project the 15-year old Tatchi had referred to as "his top see-kelet burrshit!" three years earlier. As he came to trust and love his daughter's tutor like a son, Hito slowly confided in very general terms to Nathan the nature of his top-secret work. At Nathan's going away party, with Tatchi conspicuously absent and just he and Hito to toast his farewell, the latter got uncharacteristically drunk on sake and spilled the beans, telling Nathan the exact nature and international ramifications of his invention. At its best, it would forever end man's energy crisis and force peace upon a world that fought primarily over energy. At its worst, it would be seen as a threat by the United States whose vast global power depended on oil. "Oil?" Nathan asked. "But surely the small percentage of BTUs the human body can spare couldn't run an automobile?" Hito smiled wryly. "You're correct, son. But four people carpooling could run and electric car. And imagine a train on which every passenger, once seated, jacks in?" Hito went on to explain to Nathan that oil or no oil, the BTU jack would remove the need of the power grid. Municipal power companies would become obsolete. The profit in the manufacture and distribution of power would cease overnight. This Hito feared would trigger the worse case scenario. Despite the incredible benefits to mankind, greed might win out. "But the BTU jack is a reality, it's arrival on the world stage, inevitable," he said. And so it was that without knowing it, Hito gave a name to the end of life as Nathan knew it. Hito said that soon, they would be done testing and would choose ten international recipients for interface implants, essentially as envoys to "take home" the Japanese technology to show the leaders of their respective nations. Nathan would forever remember Hito's exact words: "You must accept this gift. I will arrange it. Nathan, for America you are the one." How could he forget? Hito's words were right out of the film "The Matrix," and suddenly what had been a celluloid fiction ten years earlier had become reality. Sort of. The real world outcome for humans was to be far better than in the film. He hoped. Nathan said he'd consider it. It was nearly a year later after a series of encrypted and increasingly urgent emails from Hito that Nathan completed his hike and agreed to return to Japan and be, essentially, the first American to have the Japanese technological wonder installed in his body. But as the reality of seeing Tatchi again approached, Nathan was now the one melting in the face of love. He'd spent six months in the woods denying the truth, denying that he'd fallen in love with his student. But no amount of fooling around with other women hikers or old girlfriends could fix it in his mind. When he returned to Japan, she would be 18, a grown woman, with a year between their last visit, a big year, a teenage year, an infinity. Nathan was terrified as he stepped off the plane in Tokyo. But to his disappointment, Tatchi wasn't there, only a very worried-looking Hito flanked by two Japanese-style secret service-looking guys. His adolescent terror abated immediately, making room for a more generalized uneasiness, one that would worsen with the days ahead. In late 2007, almost to the day Nathan landed in Tokyo, the Japanese launched into orbit entirely at their own expense and without NATO approval, an open-source master server satellite rumored to contain all the knowledge of every book in every library the world over, and everything ever communicated through or added to the Internet in its 20 or so years of existence. Its name: The Da Vinci. To further fly in the face of religious & terror-based U.S. efforts to shut down the World Wide Web, what knowledge the Japanese couldn't buy, they stole. Just so. Hiring every top white-hat and black-hat hacker from the around the globe, they'd hacked into the most heavily-encrypted systems known to exist from the Vatican to the CIA and FBI to British Intelligence down to cagey cyber-savvy monks scanning the Dead Sea Scrolls into PDF files deep beneath a monastery in the Swiss Alps. And naturally their own government computers were opened up. Everything. All the knowledge of the ages was now circling the Earth for anyone to access. It was Japan's gift to the world, the gift of uncensored knowledge ad infinitum. All it took to access it was a handheld computer. The news showed teachers, librarians, and intellectuals at colleges and universities worldwide dancing in the streets. From New York to London to Berlin to Kyoto to Sarajevo to Israel to Bogotá and Buenos Aires, and back to Silicon Valley, people were surfing like there was no tomorrow, and servers were smoking from overload. But the Japanese satellite server held strong. On the other hand, the leaders of every stick-up-its-ass nation in the so-called civilized world went to pieces. The White House went berserk. It was Sputnik all over again but exponentially worse. The Executive Order from Washington: shoot the satellite down immediately. Knowledge is power, and God help the Puppet Masters of the Western World if every Tom, Franz & Yoshi have access to that kind of power. Congress vacillated however, giving the Japanese time to play their Trump card. Nathan got his BTU jack in what, for the sake of brevity and ease seemed like outpatient surgery. With it came the necessary sub-dermal nanochip hardware to, essentially, "wire it up" to his brain via his nervous system. The entire process took two days. The Japanese government even threw in a few electronic goodies to plug into the thing to show off its almost magical power. What the government didn't know was that Hito never intended to use Nathan as a showcase subject. He implanted another American, a woman, "as a back up" he'd said. The "goodies" were Nathan's few precious electronic friends he would take with him into the future, a future that for most of humankind was about to cease to be. In unveiling the BTU Interface (as was its proper name), the Japanese strategy had been to so overwhelm the United States and the world that no one would dare shoot down the Da Vinci Satellite. The Japanese, naively it would soon seem, imagined that the world would finally find its collective heart, that heart would skip a beat, and that the U.S. & European Community would, justifiably, bow in gratitude to their Asian cousins, and one billion BTUI's would be sold by Christmas. Japan would sell another two billion in the coming year. It was a simple enough sales ploy with highly altruistic overtones: give your customer a gift of something they need, and while they're still smiling over that, sell them something they need even more. Nathan's hand passed through the darkness landing right on the object he sought. An old church key, it had been the key to a small triangular closet beneath the stairs in the 19th century Victorian house of his youth. One day in December of his 8th year, he'd stolen the key from his parents, unlocked the lock, and peered in at all the presents heretofore delivered by Santa. Alas, the presents would never come from Santa again, the boy's curiosity having shattered a mythology more important to him than he yet understood. The grown-up Nathan rubbed the key between his fingers trying to bring back Santa, to bring back faith & hope, to bring back magic and wonderful myths. But all he could see was the darkness of the crypt, and then the headlines glowing white before his eyes as though off rolls of microfilm: "U.S. Calls Da Vinci Satellite Act of War" "Japanese BTUI Declared Sham by Leading Energy Experts"   Of course the White House new better. U.S. Intelligence had been aware of the experimental technology for years, but hadn't considered it a threat. Not until now. Nathan tossed the church key into his bag, unsure just why he kept the damn thing. It wasn't as though it was a reminder of something good. It was the key to his loss of innocence. The Japanese had given the world two keys. One key, said the governments of the world, opened Pandora's Box. The other, said the world, couldn't possibly work. "But where is Tatchi?" Nathan inquired of his host for the ninth or tenth time, having deferred the real badgering until after the surgery. Hito was watching a movie on his computer. Onscreen, Arnold Schwarzenegger was the "good Terminator" telling Sarah Connor he had detailed files on Cyberdine Systems. For the first time with Hito, Nathan lost his cool. "Would you shut that damn thing off for a minute and talk to me?!" Hito told the computer to pause. Hito said he honestly didn't know where Tatchi was. There was something clearly different about Hito, a sense of resignation. Nathan thought that for a man who'd just successfully invented the cure to the world's energy crisis, he should be out celebrating, and being celebrated. But Nathan had seen the headlines. Hito said that shortly after graduation, Tatchi had packed a bag with climbing gear and set out to climb some mountain in the Himalayas. "Some mountain in the Himalayas?" Nathan screeched, "What, Everest?" Hito said he no, he doubted that, but he just didn't know. "It's you, Nathan," Hito said without any emotion. "You taught her all that stuff. You taught her spontaneity. Good for you. Good for her. I love you like a son, Nathan. Now go and find my daughter before it's too late." Hito told the computer to resume. "Too late?" Nathan shouted over the movie. "What do you mean too late?" Hito said nothing. Onscreen, the young John Connor watched two kids shooting at each other with toy guns. He looked to the Terminator and said, "We're not gonna make it, are we?" The Terminator responded, "It is in your nature to destroy yourselves." Nathan slept not a wink that night and left before dawn, making all haste to Nepal. Back in the bunker, he sat down in the dark and cried a spell as he remembered Hito that final day. He had never seen him again. Even now, years later, Nathan remembered that scene from "T2" with crystal clarity. The timing of the Terminator's statement, even given that Nathan had seen the movie twenty times before, would launch Nathan's irony list as Irony Number One. Nathan sat down in the darkness and began to cry as he remembered Hito that last day. He punched a button on his forearm database and said, "Hito." Up popped a photo of Hito. The FB9000, as the database was properly known had a keyboard that Nathan used sometimes to compose a poem or write a song. Mostly, however, he just used the voice interface. Nathan stared at Hito a moment, then said, "Headlines, China, last day," and up popped the last newspaper Nathan ever saw. The headline read "China promises full-scale retaliation against U.S. if Da Vinci Harmed." Nathan chuckled, wiping away a tear. "Irony number six," Nathan whispered. "United States triggers the Inevitable but forgets to shoot down Japanese satellite. Da Vinci unharmed and orbiting the globe to this day." The bunker was silent a moment, and then a woman's voice with a slight Japanese accent said, "Irony Number Seven: FB9000 Database serial number 38267400-A-1 improperly assembled without satellite uplink chip. As always, sincere apologies, Sir Nathan." The voice interface, by the way, went both ways. "Yes, Anita, thanks for the reminder. And stop calling me sir!" "Yes, sir." "Hopeless," Nathan mumbled. Then with more clarity, "Tatchi, most recent" he said, and an 18-year old Tatchi appeared. Nathan stared a moment. "Okay, enough. Shut down." And the database he called Anita silently obeyed. Nathan strapped on his goggles and made for the ladder. He climbed to the opening and saw that it was still far too bright to go out unsuited. As usual he would not launch the catamaran until dusk, quickly rigging her whilst the sun set and setting sail in the last light of day. Suit or no suit, it was best to sail by night and sleep by day. All the remembering had made him weary, too tired to suit up, too tired even to simply run out fast and spear a fish for lunch. Thoughts of the past must have taken his appetite, too, for he felt no hunger. So Nathan laid down for a nap. As he laid waiting for sleep to come, he thought of those final few days "before the whole shithouse burned down," as his grandmother would have said. His race to Nepal, his frantic run in the general direction of Everest, showing Tatchi's photograph to locals, following her trail. He'd climbed all the way to Everest Base Camp when he lost her scent. And then it happened. The Inevitable. Seven billion people, gone, not all at once mind you but pretty quick. Nathan's bed was a man-sized nook in the wall where once a mummified body had lain. Nathan had long ago built up an immunity to dead flesh, dead animals, dead humans, death itself, even his own death, he figured. And in tired moments like this he almost wished he could sleep and wake not in this life, but in the next where Tatchi likely dwelt. But that was the problem with suicide. How could he be sure she was dead? As he drifted off to sleep, he repeated the question he'd long ago asked Hito, "But where is Tatchi?" he mumbled. "Where is Tatchi?" When Nathan awoke, the sharp laser-like beam of sunlight had moved to the far eastern end of the chamber and dimmed to a dull orange. Evening had arrived. With little ceremony, the survivor, the tutor, the self-powered "bionic man" who was born Nathan Barrow, lifted his dry bags and bid the bunker farewell as he ascended the steep ladder. At the top, just before sliding the door aside, he noticed something that made the hairs on his arms stand up. He cautiously backed down a step. Had he been that careless after months of routine? Had he really left the door open more than his ritual inch? Had he… Suddenly fear and rage propelled him and he tore the door open and sprung out, a python ready to strike. He dropped his bags and stomped to the edge of the bunker for a clear view of his boat, his baby, and whose potential loss was his greatest fear. And with each stomping step he mouthed another obscenity. "YOU FUCKS! TOUCH MY BOAT I'LL RIP YOUR ROTTEN HEARTS OUT! YOU GOD FORSAKEN…" And then he saw it. Another boat. An incredible boat! He rubbed his eyes, disbelieving. But there it was. Anchored just offshore was a perfect replica of a Spanish Galleon, but, but, small! Like a 1:2 ratio. In his awe, he completely forgot any potential danger. "Oh, Tatchi," he said looking down at his own ratty catamaran that he had named for his lost love, "I love you girl, but you're a sad looker compared to that beauty." "I beg your pardon?!" came a voice from behind him. Confused, Nathan stared at his forearm database. "No, over here, foul-mouthed old man. It's about time you got up. I've been sitting in the shade of your bunker for two hours afraid you might shoot me if I came in." Nathan froze. Suddenly he knew something. "I'm dreaming. I'm having a waking dream, he said." But just to test it out, he turned ever so slowly until the source of the voice came into view. "Well, Mr. English teacher, you could have written. Or called, you know, pick up the phone, dial outer space, yeah. I've been like Marco Polo island hopping, looking under every shrubbery and empty turtle shell for you. God, I should have known. You were always so fascinated with death. It figures you'd settle here, the one place you took me that I swore I'd never go back to. Smart, real smart, Mr. Tutor. And another thing, what about.." "Tatchi!" Nathan felt faint and sat down right where he stood. Tatchi ran and sat down beside him and took him by the arms and shook him a little. "Are you all right? God, you look awful! It was Tatchi all right, but different. If he'd any doubt, her abrupt reception and incessant raving had cured him of that. The woman before him was in her mid-twenties, as bald as he and skinny but strong. "I'm old," he said, and at that she smiled, leaned in and kissed him on the forehead. That's when he noticed her BTU jack. "You've got one, too?" "Of course. You don't think Daddy would have denied his own daughter his greatest gift to humankind, especially right at the end there when he knew the fools would trash it. So what's the deal with your database, why didn't.." "No communications chip," he said. "Auugghhh!" Tatchi feigned stabbing herself in the chest in Samurai fashion. "Oh, that so figures. What's it been? Five years? Eight? And all because some government pea brain forgot to install you a comm chip. Great. You know the satellite's still up there?" "I know. I cry as I watch it fly overhead every night, thinking of you." "Oh, Nathan! Tatchi tackled him them, rolling him onto his back, sitting atop him and beating his chest like a drum. Nathan winced slightly. "I'm sick, Tatchi, the radiation." With that, Tatchi stopped punching him and lay her head down on his. "Listen, teacher. You're sick, I'm sick, the whole world's sick and going to Hell." "Gone." "Right, gone. Anyway, I've searched the whole Scarlet Sea for my beloved tutor, my hero, my America. And now I've found you. And you know what? We're going to make babies." "We are? We are. Okay. But wait, the radiation, surely.." "Taken care of. The good tutor taught me well to hit the books and I've been on it, tapping that satellite for all its worth for seven years. You can call me Doctor Tatchi, if you like, for I've more than earned a handful of PhDs whilst killing time looking for you. Anyway, you're not getting away from me now, and we're going to make love every day and make babies and start a whole new race of our own! How's that sound?" Nathan smiled. One question. "How ever did you find me?" "I went from island to island yelling, 'Anyone seen a guy with a plug in his arm?' There were only a dozen of us, and I figured most of those poor bastards went down with the ship, so odds were good if I did find the trail of a BTUer, it would be you!" "Amazing. And how did you know I was alive?" Tatchi merely took his hand and placed it on her breast over her heart and smiled. From his perspective, he could see her Galleon rocking gently in the pinkish waters of the shallows. Tatchi rocked gently on his lap. "By the feel of it, I'd say somebody's not too old to feel sexy." With her sitting astride him, he could hardly hide his erection. Tatchi fixed him with bedroom eyes. "Your place or mine, Superman?" They had never had sex before, and Nathan suddenly felt anxious. "Tatchi, I've dreamed of this day for so long. But when last I saw you, you were my student. I'm a little nervous." Leaning down and whispering into his ear, Tatchi said, "This kind of nervous means you are truly alive. Trust me, and I'll trust you, and together we can rule the world!" Behind Tatchi and Nathan to the west, the sunset reached that point when the clouds blaze their richest red. Together with the Scarlet Sea, it looked as if the whole world was a child's crayon-scrawled portrait of the human heart.   [end]   Copyright 2005 Richard McKinney All Rights Reserved (Just ask & I'll likely let you reprint anything!)