They weren’t supposed to do their own blood work but that was like asking a cook to not taste the soup. So, when Gabe asked Silpa to have a look at her red blood cells, she just got out her kit. “Make a fist.”
A few minutes later she had Gabe’s blood on a slide. “Here. Look for yourself.”
Gabe bent to Silpa’s microscope. In its eyepiece, the blood cells had dots of black. “Maybe it’s a dead virus.”
“No, I recognize this one. It’s an earlier form of malaria. It’ll make a person sick but it’s not lethal. Where do you think you got it?”
Gabe didn’t answer, her eye screwed into the eyepiece.
“Could be a stray,” Silpa said, thinking of the Carolina wren she’d seen the other day: a bird that wasn’t supposed to be this far north but was at the bird feeder that someone set up outside the lab window.
When Gabe looked up from the microscope, the worry on her face reminded Silpa of her own. For weeks she had debated calling Guy’s mother, afraid what a mother would think if a strange woman called, making inquiries about her son. In India, this could mean so many things. None honorable.
There had been times before when he couldn’t meet her in W.2. He’d warned her of this, what with Today’s Army functioning more as a social swarm jet-coptered in to defeat some ragtag uprising, secure a mine, put down a warlord or some such, before being airlifted out to the next crisis. He could be anywhere. With all the information blackouts it was amazing they’d been able to meet in W.2 as often as they had. So even if his mother didn’t know any more about his whereabouts than she did, it probably wouldn’t mean anything.
Looking through the microscope at the black specks in her blood, Gabe understood anger. She used to bike past the duck pond on the way to work: an ugly thing in Humboldt Park, all concrete and chain-link. Signs told people to not climb the fence around the pond or feed bread to the ducks. The pond was littered with chunks of donuts and Cheetos anyway, and Gabe could never figure out if the people who used the park were oblivious, or so used to being told what to do that they ignored all signs as a matter of course. She began taking a more roundabout way so she wouldn’t have to pass the pond after the morning she’d found it littered with the bodies of the ducks themselves. Someone had poisoned every last bird. Now she was pretty sure she was the one who had screwed up Chen’s data: she’d been so distracted by the idea of having caught something that she could have mixed up the lice. She’d worried about it for days, but now she was like Fuck it. Fuck it all. And she was okay with that.
Sitting in her corner of the lab, zoning out over what she’d just learned, and how it made her tiredness make sense, Gabe realized she’d been gazing at what looked like a gleaming gold ingot crawling with ants on the screen of Meadow’s computer. Screensaver? Then she saw the W.2 interface.
Meadow noticed and swiveled to face her, eyebrows arched as though expecting Gabe to ask her something. Not in the mood to talk about what was really on her mind, Gabe said, “I didn’t know you did W.2.” She nodded back toward the screen.
“Yeah. Stupid, huh?” Meadow said sheepishly, glancing back at it. “Like thinking you can defeat global warming by bagging your own groceries.” The ants continued to crawl up the ingot.
When Gabe looked closer, she could see that they were making an anthill out of grains of gold. Two-legged ants—avatars—walked up the footpath of a mountain. A golden mountain.
“Good intentions, anyway,” she said, not meaning to sound so snarky. Once upon a time, she’d been one of them, after all. She even remembered her username: ClrUrCookies.
“I’m in Brazil.2. I’d heard they were building a pyramid.” Meadow pressed the down arrow key to make her avatar fly in a little closer and the bird’s-eye view they’d had of the pyramid pulled in tight enough to show individuals inching up the scaffolding: avatars of nuns, nudists, women in business suits, and of course, the ubiquitous skateboarders and clubbers, each carrying a single gold brick. When they got to its top, they handed it to one of the bricklaying avatars, who added it to the pyramid they were building, brick by brick.
“What’s going on?” Gabe asked.
“I’m not really sure.” Like a telegraph operator, Meadow kept tapping her finger till her avatar was on the ground where she asked a penguin carrying a gold brick and it told her how this used to be the site of one of the world’s largest strip mines. As the penguin spoke, Gabe remembered: in the real world, this had been the site of a real mountain. Then someone discovered gold, and the rush was on, so many peasants, ex-teachers, ex-cops—men from everywhere—hoping to get rich, digging into the earth that after a few years the mountain was level; still they dug, the peasants so poor that to find even a pinch of gold was a windfall. The mountain became a massive pit with hundreds of makeshift ladders going down, companies moving in, hiring the natives to dig, working many of them to death, the entire site looking, from the air, like a volcano crater being dug deeper by thousands of ants.
Then the heavy equipment moved in. The hole was still there in the real world: an abandoned open-pit mine the depth of the Grand Canyon, now flooded, and reminding Meadow of the lake in Italy that was a flooded volcanic crater. The Romans thought it was the passage to the underworld. Here in W.2, though, UNCV had used the crater as a rallying point, running a worldwide campaign to refill the it with gold—with a portion going to charity for the indigenous people who had been exploited to reduce the mountain to a hole. The campaign had been so successful that that UNCV had kept it going, spurring donors to build a pyramid where the hole had been.
“Are you’re helping?”
“No,” Meadow said. She kept looking down at her shoes, as though embarrassed. Gabe noticed that Meadow’s avatar held a red flute. “I heard there was a connection to missing people somehow.”
The way she said it, the sincerity that came over her face told Gabe that she’d been thinking of her son again, and she instantly saw the situation: Meadow going online in search of some kind of memento of her son only to find Russian spam artists, and just plain old con artists who were to the Internet what Bible salesmen had been to Dustbowl America. Meadow had tried to enlist one of those groups that sifts through millions of images for hints of things like downed planes, or exoplanets, but they'd turned her down. Like looking for a needle in a haystack? she'd asked. No, like looking for a needle in a haystack of needles. To make up for her snarkiness, Gabe said, “Like a support group?”
“I’m not sure. Something like that I guess. Only stronger. I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s true.”
The emptiness of losing a child…. Gabe wished she’d realized what Meadow had really meant before she’d opened her mouth. In the old days, someone would be trying to sell someone like Meadow life insurance or the Brooklyn Bridge. Here in W.2, you could actually buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Or at least Brooklyn Bridge.2, and lots of people thought owning it was worthwhile, even if it cost real dollars. Gabe felt a tide of sympathy rise in her for Meadow. For everyone.