Tom, John, and I were locked in a tense silence. We avoided each other’s eyes. John just sat there with his hands clasped, staring at the floor. Morag herself sat, eyes wide, mouth a small bud, her expression unreadable. I wondered if she was going through some kind of shock, too. After all what greater trauma could there be than to be reincarnated?
As for me I felt utterly dislocated, battered by the blast we had lived through, and now suspended in midair in this antique military vehicle, with my dead wife at my side. I couldn’t have guessed even an hour before that the logic of my life would bring me to this situation, here and now, with everything turned upside down.
Shelley said at last, “I wonder what happened to our moles.”
I imagined all those moles burrowing in the dark, plaintively listening for each other with their fine acoustic, electromagnetic, and seismometric senses. Mostly they would have survived; they were surely far enough away from the detonation. “They are probably fine,” I said. “They’ll find each other. They’ll know something has gone wrong, and will go dormant.”
“Yes. But they’ll be frightened.”
John raised his eyebrows. But Shelley wasn’t being anthropomorphic; you had to think about the mental state of your sentient engineering. I said, “We’ll get them back.”
Sonia said, “So we did more harm than good in the end.”
“We’ll fix it,” I said. I surprised myself by my firmness. “We have to. The issue of the hydrates hasn’t gone away, no matter what happened today.”
Shelley said, “But Ruud Makaay is dead. So is Barnette.”
“We’ll just have to fill Ruud’s shoes,” I said. “And, to be blunt, maybe we can leverage Barnette’s death to help us.”
“You think that will work?”
“I bet it’s what she would have wanted.”
John raised his head. After all we had been through, even a bomb blast, his mouth, where I had hit him, was still leaking blood. “That doesn’t sound like you, Michael.”
“Maybe I’m not the same person I was a couple of hours ago,” I snapped back at him. “Things sure don’t feel the same to me. How about you?”
He risked a glance at Morag. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to deal with this situation.”
“Then shut the fuck up,” I said.
He dropped his head again.
One of the troopers took a message from the Chinook’s pilot. The mass distribution was all wrong, she told us; the pilot was actually worried we might have a stowaway. So we were all searched, and the troopers combed the hold.
It turned out to be Morag. Her actual mass far outweighed the Chinook’s systems’ estimates, which were based on her external appearance.
The troopers looked at Morag, and at each other, and shrugged. We flew on.
We landed at Fairbanks International Airport. We clambered out of the Chinook while more choppers, military, police, and coast guard swooped out of the sky, and ambulances and military vehicles bustled on the ground.
Our trooper escort tried to hustle all of us into a military lorry, a heavy-duty armored job that stank of gasoline; the military had held on to the raw power of gas. Tom made a fuss about Sonia’s damaged arm, and demanded an ambulance. But Sonia herself brushed that aside, and we all got in the back of the truck.
Under escort, we were whisked away from the airport, and raced along a straight drag called Airport Way. We turned off before we reached Fairbanks’s downtown, such as it was, and pulled into the Memorial Hospital, where still more troops had gathered to meet us. I had to admire the speed with which all these resources had been mobilized.
Inside the hospital a serious young army officer told us we were to be treated for our injuries, and then interrogated about what had happened out at Prudhoe. He didn’t say anything about our legal status or our rights. John made some noises about legal representation, and he gave the officer some contacts he wanted called. But I already had the sense of being trapped in a vast, inhuman process that wouldn’t let up until I was spat out the other end, drained of any useful information — and hopefully cleared of suspicion.
We were to be separated, we were told, to be examined individually. But I wasn’t going to let Morag go. It wasn’t just my personal feelings; the situation seemed far too strange to allow it. At first the army officer wasn’t having any of it. But I pulled rank. I was a senior figure on the Refrigerator project, after all, and John weighed in with some support; he was always good at that stuff.
So while the others were taken away individually Morag and I were allowed to stay together, although our guard complement was doubled.
We were led to an examination room, where we were attended by a bewildered-looking doctor, a couple of nurses, another army officer, and a black-suited FBI agent from the local field office in Fairbanks. The doctor briskly put us through some medical checks. I was treated for cuts, bruises, a bang on the back of the head. My breathing had taken a battering, my chest crushed, and my lungs filled with smoke; they made me suck down pure oxygen for a while. Otherwise I was unharmed. Then I was put through more checks that had little to do with my health. My blood and DNA were sampled; I was X-rayed; all my implants were interrogated; I was even put through a full body scanner. I expected it all and endured it.
In parallel, the medics investigated Morag. She gave up blood when they stuck a needle in her, her cheek swabs offered up DNA, the X-rays showed she had bones and organs in the proportions you’d expect. But that business of her excess weight clearly baffled them all. And the scanning machines were puzzled when she showed none of the implants you’d expect in somebody her age, no spinal interface, no sonic chips in the bones of her skull, no medical monitors swimming around her bloodstream.
It wasn’t impossible to find people free of such gadgets. There were those who had religious or other moral objections to interfacing so directly with technology, and in many parts of the world such facilities weren’t available anyhow. Older folk especially resisted having electronics stuffed deep inside their bodies; I don’t think uncle George had a single implant his whole life. But for most citizens of the advanced societies of the West, the implants were so obviously convenient, and such a key interface to the services and products of your society, that you just took them without thinking, the way earlier generations had bought cell phones and transistor radios. Anyhow, Morag was bare.
And when her lab results started coming back the army officer and FBI agent started to look at her very quizzically. I could understand why. She had given them the DNA of a woman seventeen years dead.
When they had done with their examinations, the medics insisted we get a little rest before the authority types started in on their interrogations. The FBI guy and the army officer agreed to a couple of hours. We weren’t going anywhere, the search through the debris at Prudhoe Bay, by fingertip, sniffer dog, and microscopic robot, was only just beginning — and I was sure our little private room would be saturated by surveillance technology, our every word and gesture monitored, recorded, and analyzed. Odd how you start to think like a criminal in situations like that.
But they left us. And for the first time since her return, I was alone with Morag.
We lay side by side on cots in a small private room, holding hands. As we calmed down, out of the rush of events, I had time to think, to feel. And I tentatively began to explore, in my head, the possibility that all this might be real.
“I wonder what they’re making of me,” she said. “Not only should I be dead, that’s bad enough. I should be seventeen years older than I am. I’m probably freaking them all out.”