Kathe Koja
“Is that a new flower?” Clara in blue bandana and an old Rockaway Girlz t-shirt, pointing at the screen, a potted spotted orchid of sumptuous purple and cream, and “From my flat,” Meghan nods, Meghan at her desk in a lime green jacket like something out of a fashion shoot. “I’m not at home much these days.”
“Like,” one thumb pointed discreetly up, they both know Clara means Ari’s clandestine roost in the room above. “Aren’t they hard to tend, though? Delicate?”
Meghan makes a droll shrug: “No more than most creatives,” as Clara smiles. “My first one lived for years actually . . . That was how I met Stella, Stella Forster, we were both volunteering for the Orchid Conservancy. Stella gave me what was my dream job. Until this one.”
“Dream, yeah,” Clara waving a hand at her workstation, its boxed tiaras and twists of orphaned cords, fresh bag of red Spoolies and a flat can of Action soda; her own road to this moment less career than quest, chasing one idea from Elongation to Black Diamond to 21 Playgrounds to Mountaintop to Dark Factory; when Davide appeared, like a sign, she tried every way she knew to get him into the Factory, but Jonas said no way, Jonas knew Davide had been fired for cause. But then Ari opened the door—
—as a pale square appears on Clara’s screen, Meghan’s pen tip touching it, and “Davide’s new notes,” Meghan says, her expression now purely neutral. “They’re quite extensive, aren’t they. All those entry points—”
“Well you know Davide, everything is ‘say yes to the player.’ That’s how he runs his crew, too.”
Meghan takes a visible breath, a visible pause to frame her approach: Fantastic Fantoms is her client, AWIP’s first client, Davide is her client’s internal asset, and Clara’s protégé as well. But “crews” like his—She knows those pirate crews, not engagement but infiltration, gobbling swag and deliberately skewing data, leaving behind their dirty digital spoor. So “Do we know,” carefully, “how many testers Davide has authorized? Because it is a concern, it’s becoming a real concern—”
“Listen,” Clara very quiet in the quiet of the office, Davide for once is somewhere else, out getting food. “I know you don’t trust Davide. Sometimes I wonder about his crew, too—”
“Then why—”
“—but Davide’s the one who can help us. Meghan,” Clara tugging at the bandana, a nervous tug, leaning close to the screen, “listen. We’re an unsuccessful species, humans, right? the eater species, right? Just look what we’ve done to the planet!”
“I still volunteer at the Conservancy, you’ll get no argument from me. But what does that—”
“And we’ve always assumed Y is completely human-centric, right?”
“What do you mean? Clara—”
“But what if Y is actually fundamentally heliocentric? What if Y could totally reorient us, humans, our actual neuroecologies? That night at the Factory—Meghan, I know what I saw! Eppur si muove! And if Davide could help enable that, even a little, wouldn’t that be worth a try?”
“‘Enable’ it? To what end?” Meghan shifting in her console seat, looking uneasily away from Clara’s earnest stare, to the wall beside her desk, the poster on that wall: a running man, naked and graceful beside floating letters, A WALK IN THE PARK . . . It was a vest pocket park in Stepney where she found that first orchid, on the sundown slats of an empty bench, perfectly placed and potted, who left it there? that gift that led her to the Conservancy, to Stella, to Ari, to this moment, her finger on the orchid’s fragile stem—And her own question to Ari, her own answer, it must be about something, when you find it we’ll all know—
—as “Just think about it,” Clara says. “That’s all I’m asking.”
Turning her gaze to the screen again, “I will,” Meghan says. “If you’ll keep a watch on Davide?”
“I will,” Clara says. Silence between them, a linking moment, then “This is really something,” Clara says. “Isn’t it.”
“I think,” Meghan says, “it really is.”
