Join by Steve Toutonghi

Author:Steve Toutonghi [Toutonghi, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General, Literary, Fantasy, Epic, Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9781616956707
Google: 5Ls_CgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1616956704
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2016-04-19T07:00:00+00:00

Team Teenager is back on the planes of Uyuni: Chance One— Ashton. Chance Two—Renee. Chance Three—Jake. Chance Four —Shami-8. And Chance Five—Javier. Which, Chance realizes, means all of the drives must be asleep. Chance tries to ignore that, tries to avoid waking up by focusing too much on the fact of the dream.

“Hamish Lyons was joined with Music.” Jake, Chance Three, is speaking.

They’re standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle, their backs to one another, facing the endlessly receding white salt plains. Each of them throws a long, distinct shadow that extends outward, as if the sun were in the center of their circle. But there is no heat from behind them. Their bodies are cool.

Jake’s voice is felt as much as heard. It is audible like the sound of wind hissing across the plain. Then with each syllable, his voice takes a firmer shape, until at last it detaches from the sounds of the wind and becomes more fully the sound of breath shaping words.

“There’s no record of him among ferals.”

“Before he joined Music, what did he do?” Shami’s voice is sweet and comforting, high and strong. The five of them are clothed in loose denim and fleece. There is no concern about misunderstanding, no worry about perception, no work to say things well. They can each feel the bodies of two others touching the sides of their own, and the whole shifts gently as each of them breathes.

“He’s the neurophysicist whose work is most closely identified with the quantum network,” Jake answers. His words sound like an article Chance once read, but Chance’s mouth is speaking them. “He created experiments to demonstrate the effect of consciousness on the physical world. He was twenty-nine when he joined Music.”

“Should we tell Leap?” It’s Renee who asks, her curly hair shifting slightly in the breeze.

“Tell Leap what?” asks Javier.

“That he can’t help her,” says Ashton thoughtfully, considering the most likely shape of events. “That Hamish Lyons is gone. That whatever he was disappeared a long time ago into the meme virus that claimed Music. That I don’t think our conversation with Rope provided anything useful.”

“Why say that?” insists Javier. “How do we know that?”

At the far edges of Uyuni, miles across the salt plain, in a distant gray dimness, each of them sees very slight movement. They each notice it at the same moment and strain to see it better. Javier realizes that he really should be seeing mountains rising up at that distance, at least in that direction, but the mountains aren’t there. Instead there is a shifting, as if a storm were shuffling dark clouds very slowly toward and then away from a vanishing point on the horizon. With a chill they each have the same realization at the same moment: that movement is of bodies pressed together, people perhaps, so distant that they are indistinguishable from one another and indistinguishable from the weather that is moving them.

The five teenagers know that the faraway bodies are both familiar and alien.

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