📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 26
In which a New Yorker Returns Home to a City That, As It Turns Out, Does Sleep.
Marcus opened the door to their new apartment and, following his instinct to protect Ally from unknown threats, stepped in first. The apartment was a wide open space in a gentrified apartment building in old Boston. The accommodation would have been worth a fortune, and the rent would have been unaffordable to Marcus in his wildest dreams five years ago. They put their bags down in the entrance and walked around, taking in the high ceilings and futuristic kitchen fittings. Marcus found a hand written letter on foolscap on the bench, with a brown cardboard box. It was from Eli.
Marcus,
This is my home in Boston. Please consider it yours. I know you plan to go abroad, but I would urge you to stay Stateside, for the safety of yourself, Ally and your child. I can watch after you here. Please don’t disappear.
And should you change your mind, Shangri-La awaits your return. All you need to do is call Angeli and let her know. You’ll find her contact details in the new prototypical WellsTouch tablet in the box. You might have seen Angeli’s. There are only three in the world. This device will never be released. Please consider it our parting gift, as my token of esteem, and of thanks.
Please reconsider, while there is still time.
Until we meet again,
Your friend,
E.
Ally found a yellow envelope nearby and pulled out a note and some documents.
“What’s that?” Marcus asked.
“It’s from Angeli. It just says all done, see enclosed.” She shuffled the documents to the front and examined them. “Ah… they’ve done it. You now own the building in New York - here’s the deeds – and your vaults there and in Sydney have been refitted as you requested.” She handed him the two sheets and examined the third. “And… here’s our balance statements. Dollars in the bank… and gold in the vaults, with full chemical analysis documentation on the gold.”
“They’ve certainly been thorough.”
“Why do you suppose they’re bothering? Aren’t we the great betrayers?”
“He wants us back, Ally. He’ll do anything to get us back. Including all of this.” He gestured around him at the room.
Ally leaned forward onto the kitchen bench and exhaled heavily. “So… we made it.”
“We did.”
“What do we do now, Marc?”
Marcus leaned forward in kind, and sidled up to her. He casually reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small box, which he flippantly slid across the marble bench-top.
She opened the box and found inside a pair of gold wedding bands. She gasped and stood up, examining them closely.
“We get married.”
She laughed and leapt into his arms, their lips meeting for a long and passionate kiss. He lifted her feet off the ground, spinning her around, and when her feet landed on the kitchen floor again, she immediately resumed studying the rings, soon discovering the inscription inside each one.
“All in,” she read, grinning. “When do we do it?”
“Tomorrow. Town hall. I’ll call now to book us in.”
Her grin kept growing. “Okay! But… we need witnesses.”
“I guess I’ll call Richard, you know - my old friend from the Institute. He and his wife Shereen would do it for us, I’m sure.”
“Ha! They probably think you’re dead.”
“Maybe. But I need to see Rich anyway. I need to make sure my books are okay.”
Marcus stepped out of the subway and looked around in disbelief. New York had changed. This once great city had more homeless vagrants scattered at every corner than ever before. Old men, young women, some whole families. Shops were closed everywhere, many looted. Some streets in Manhattan were blocked off by burnt out cars, and Marcus felt remarkably unsafe as he strolled across the island, unarmed. When he finally reached his building, he stood before a ten story brick structure covered in graffiti, only one window intact.
He stepped into the hall and could already tell that the offices upstairs were likely occupied by itinerants like those he’d seen begging in the streets. He chose to skip a full inspection, and instead entered the enclosed stairwell down to the subterranean vaults. The locks on the doors were intact, and no one had entered since the locksmiths.
There were six vaults altogether, four of them open, and empty. Marcus inspected the mechanical locks and found them to be satisfactory. No combinations. No electronics. No unintegrated components that could be disabled or removed. It looked as if the locksmiths had replaced the entire door on each vault, and the mechanism was deeply embedded in twelve-inch-thick steel. Only a large and uniquely grooved and ridged key for each vault would reveal its contents.
Marcus had double-checked that the door to the vault anteroom behind him was locked, and then he opened the locked door of vault number five. With the release of the locking pin by three full rotations of his key, he was then able to turn the steel wheel to pull open the block of solid metal that was the internal sliding latch. It took most of his strength to do it.
The vault was a three metre cube, with grey interior walls and extensive shelving all around the edges. Only one rack of shelves held anything. It was packed neatly with bars of glimmering gold bullion. Marcus pulled a small electronic scale out of his shoulder bag and weighed one of the bars. Satisfied with the weight, he activated his chemical testing wand and pressed the tip of it to the bar. It registered at twenty-four carats. He quickly pressed it to each of the bars, yielding the same result every time.
His quick survey left him feeling like he could relax. Eli had not ripped him off, and although the generosity confused him, his newfound wealth eased his worries considerably.
He had just used some of this wealth to purchase a quaint wooden house in a sleepy Australian town called Bowral. It was a couple of hours’ drive from Sydney, and a week ago Ally had boarded her flight to make a head start to their new home in a faraway land while Marcus tied up his loose ends in New York. He felt desperately lonely since she had left, but the problems in the US were reaching boiling point, and they had agreed that it would be safest for her to leave immediately.
Now, in his vaults, Marcus was finalising his business in the crumbling United States, ready to leave it behind, forever. He stepped out of vault number five and locked it behind him, content to leave this fortune safely buried under New York City, should he ever return and need it.
Vault number six was his true fortune.
As he cracked the seal of the heavy door, a blast of warm, stale air struck his face. The smell sent pleasure trickling down his spine. The books smelt sweeter than he remembered. Like cinnamon and cloves.
The dim light from the anteroom scanned across the vault interior as he slowly swung the massive door open. It was like the wings of an angel opening up, offering to enfold Marcus, and upon its bosom hold him, and keep him. Some small, egoless part of him wanted to simply step in, close the vault door, and never leave this paradise that he had built.
For a time, Marcus stood, simply overwhelmed at the thousands of books in front of him.
“Hello, old friends. What am I going to do with you?” This vault is supposed to be unbreakable. But they keep saying the war in Eurasia might come to America. And New York would be first strike zone, he thought. “What do you think, guys? Should I take you with me? Or leave you safe and sound down here?”
The books sat on their shelves, unmoved.
After long moments flicking through some of his favourite volumes, Marcus finally locked the vault, and made his way upstairs; his mind still not made up.
It took a walk across town to Times Square for him to finally decide what to do with the books. As his weary legs came to a halt in the centre of the iconic epicentre of American commerce and entertainment, he looked up, and saw a changed world. Many of the screens were blank. Some in disrepair, some simply not in use. Others contained advertisements from government agencies, mostly stern warnings against non-compliance with this regulation or that.
The side of One Times Square, which once lit a red and white blaze across the faces of countless tourists, and that had been occupied for several years by only WellsTech Incorporated and soft drink ads, was now completely blank. Many of the windows of the offices were smashed, and the street level was littered with more bums and desperate looking refugees than tourists.
New York is dying. There’s nothing left here for me. I need to take the books with me. I could charter a cargo plane and fly over with them myself… but I don’t want to lose any more time in getting back to Ally.
Marcus decided.
I’ll ship the books over now. I’ll come back for the gold myself after the baby is born.
He headed for the nearest FedEx office, guided by his WellsTouch tablet’s voice in his ear down West 43rd Street. The tablet had proven to be the single most useful and versatile piece of equipment Marcus had ever owned, and he struggled to fathom its production cost. It was extremely light, and totally transparent across its entire surface, save for a thin rectangle of gold conduit that was embedded about a centimetre in from the outer edge of the unbreakable sheet of clear metal.
Inside the hair-thin line of gold was a super-elongated iteration of WellsCell’s latest battery design, studded with millions of microscopic laser-emitting diodes that were the source of the image inside the glass-like pane. Rather than traditional fixed position pixels behind a sheet of glass, this device used its inbuilt laser emitters to project light into the transparent aluminium itself, creating a grid of light that used complex intersections of frequencies to create the most life-like image Marcus had ever seen on an interface.
He struggled to derive enjoyment from the digital world of image reproduction now. Since his perplexing eye surgery at Shangri-La he had found himself able to perceive a great deal more detail in everything, noticing imperfections in the colour graduations of digital images. Even the RAG-DOS projection of Eli had lost its charm when Marcus found himself able to perceive the distinct blocks of colour that to an unaltered human eye appeared as a perfect replication of the analogue texture and tone of real human skin.
But whenever Marcus turned on this WellsTouch tablet, he had to smile and silently congratulate Eli once more. The laser emission grid produced an image so pure and lifelike that even Marcus’s superhuman eyesight was unable to detect the pixels at all.
The device was curiously capable of opacifying itself on a per-pixel basis as well. While in its dormant state, it looked like nothing more than a fancy, bevelled sheet of crystal; when active it could black itself out, or create solid white pixels, or anything in between, as required by the image being projected. Marcus hypothesized that it was to do with refraction of the tightly meshed grid of lasers through the particles of aluminium oxynitride, and his microscope confirmed it, revealing to him that the particles were arranged in a recurring texture that looked like an infinite field of Egyptian pyramids. The opacification function allowed for all manner of applications, including photographic and cinematic use, reading, or – with the right software - spectral, chemical or electrical analysis.
The whole surface of the tablet was covered in a nanoscopic acoustic film that was stretched across the tips of the pyramids. The film resonated with acoustic vibrations, and transduced them into electrical signals for digitisation bi-directionally - it acted as both a microphone and speaker - and produced the most lifelike and detailed sound of any speaker system Marcus had ever heard.
Its inbuilt camera was the highest resolution ever produced. With frame-rate capability much higher than the human eye could detect - even Marcus’s - it was impossible to tell that the display was showing a digital reproduction of an image when the tablet was held up in cine-mode. The only clue was the slightly distorted angle the lens produced relative to the natural view through the sheet of metal. While the device was compatible with many existing apps that Marcus liked to use, he and Ally had already programmed a number of new ones for their own research purposes. One such app was a medical scanning program that they had collaborated on by deconstructing a more rudimentary program from the Shangri-La database. They had smuggled it off the grounds on a micro-drive.
The tablet could create laser image projections onto walls, and even a virtual keyboard like the one Angeli had been using on her table back in Lincoln. Marcus had discovered that the camera application utilised several laser emitters that projected from the back of the pane in order to produce optimal aperture and light sensitivity. With Ally’s programming help, he was able to alter the frequency and range of the lasers, as well as the way the tablet interpreted the information that travelled back along the beams, to produce a highly accurate and easy to use medical diagnostic tool. This application had been incredibly useful in monitoring the health and growth of the baby in Ally’s womb.
Marcus solemnly marched past the dilapidated Town Hall and Sondheim Theatres, and past the empty showrooms of Steinway Hall. The only people he passed who weren’t scruffy refugees or drunken vagrants were people moving too quickly, without looking up to see who they were passing, or what was happening in the crumbling city around them. He was stunned by the abject, lacklustre expressions on their faces, their glazed eyes darting up and down a constant feed of virtual imagery on tablets or wearables, never daring to stray into the world of the physically real.
When he finally reached the FedEx office on West 45th, he found the counter unattended, in front of a row of glass-walled offices which were also empty.
He rang the bell on the desk. Nothing.
He struck it again, a little harder.
“How can I help you?” the young man mumbled in a foreign accent when he finally reached the counter after Marcus rang the bell for the third time.
“Hi there, may I speak to your branch manager?”
“You’re speaking to him.”
Marcus studied his acne-scarred face, puzzled at how such an unfriendly adolescent would be elevated to such a position. His name tag read Barry.
“I need some books delivered to Australia.”
“Books? Surely you can buy them there?”
Marcus was taken aback. “Are you trying to talk me out of engaging your services?”
The boy looked as if he’d been slapped. “Uh, no, of course not. We’re here to help. How many books?
“Ten thousand or so.”
Barry gulped. “Ten thous…”
“Listen, Barry,” Marcus leaned forward, “these books are my treasure, you understand? I need them to arrive in Sydney and be shipped to this address as quickly as possible.” He slid a piece of paper over the counter. “Money is no object. I want them overnight if possible.”
Barry looked at the address, then creased his brow. “Okay, sir. I can prepare a quote for you, but overnight won’t be possible.”
“When, then?”
“No less than three months.”
“Three months? What the hell, Barry? This is FedEx! And listen… I mean it. Any price. I just want priority service.”
“I’m sorry, sir. We just don’t have the fleet that we used to, and currently most of what we do have are running humanitarian errands to Eurasia.”
“FedEx is running mercy missions now?”
“We’re under orders from the government, sir.”
Marcus nodded, understanding. “Alright, prepare the quote. I’ll wait.”
Marcus paid the delivery fee in full, and left a spare key to vault number six with Barry. He paid him a generous tip for his personal assurance that he would get it done.
With his purpose in New York City fulfilled, Marcus headed straight for LaGuardia to get on the next available flight to Los Angeles. It was time to start the long journey west. It was time to catch up to his girls.