[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 56

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Part 55}

“It won’t accept the coordinates? If it has an offline map, it should at least be able to…” I shut him down, explaining that I’d already tried that. “Hmph. Well my implant has one. It’s a few years old but I doubt the coastline of South America has meaningfully changed shape in that time. Let me take a look.”

I sent the coordinates to his implant using the hydrophone as an accoustic modem. Upon receiving them He didn’t give me but a few seconds to react, just turned tail and darted off into the blue. I directed the sonar system to lock onto him, and set the sub’s navigational software to auto-follow at a distance of 0.1 nautical miles, matching his speed of 6 knots.

With nothing demanding my immediate attention any longer, there was at last room to breathe. To decompress, and begin to process everything I’d been through over the past few weeks. I felt utterly drained...but also transformed.

Cleaner, leaner, and radiating with health undreamt of back in Shenzen. Hollowed out by the experience of killing for the first time, but emboldened as well. Above all else, having been touched by cosmic gentleness, I knew I would never be the same again.

How, after I witnessed and felt such indescribably beautiful things, could I return to my old life? To the empty pursuit of money and pleasure, not so much a man as a collection of appetites. But what else can I do to put food in my stomach and a roof over my head? The hustle is all I know.

A field of brittle, dead coral passed lazily beneath us, visible through the dome window as I contemplated life. Reordering my values in light of everything that transpired back in the jungle, charting a new path into an unknown future. One where my primary concern would no longer be increasing a number on a screen representing the quantity of imaginary tokens in my possession.

It occupied my mind completely enough that hours passed like minutes. The next thing I knew, Remble was bidding us farewell as the sub approached the coordinates I supplied him with. “You ought to consider revisiting these waters some time. Hear me out! It’s much nicer when you’re not being shot at.”

I fibbed that I’d think about it, then waved at him through the dome as he pumped his tail, accelerating into the blue haze until he passed out of visible range. I fiddled with the delicate controls, scooting the sub gently up to the underwater supports of the dock before surfacing.

I half expected the shooting to resume. But when I popped the hatch and warily stuck my head out, shielding my tender eyes as they adjusted to sunlight once more...the skies were clear. Probably he was still back at the mangrove swamp, shooting at phantoms.

“May they haunt him for the rest of his days” I grumbled. The chieftess asked me to speak up. “It’s nothing. Come on, I want you to meet my Dad.” I tied the sub to the nearest dock post as she clambered out of the cramped little vessel, swearing in her native tongue a few times when she bumped a knee or an elbow in the process.

The cabin was not out on the beach, but a couple hundred feet into the jungle, beneath a deeply eroded rock overhang which looked as if it had once been a sea cave. There I found a weathered looking wooden geodesic dome cabin, badly in need of some fresh paint.

“Not another step” a familiar voice barked at us. Dad emerged from the cabin with his trusty old shotgun pointed our way. “It’s me Dad, put it down.” The portion of the armor comprising my helmet peeled away, revealing my face.

He gawked. “No fuckin’ way! What’s your gear made out of? Is that the new cool thing that everybody’s into now? For fuck’s sake, I feel like I just went fullmetal yesterday and now there’s some new thing I gotta buy.”

I reassured him he was looking at the only two prototypes as he welcomed us inside. The cabin did prove to be much homier inside than out, apparently owned by some kind of new age fruit. When I asked Dad about it, he filled me in.

“It belonged to a college buddy of mine. Way into chakras, colonics, homeopathy, all that garbage. He did turn me on to organic farming though, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. He formed a little...group of friends...who came out here to live with him when the government started paying too close attention to his operation.”

Must’ve been growing more than organic veggies, I’d wager. An aspiring cult leader too, by the sound of it. The center of the cabin’s interior was dominated by a seven foot tall cylindrical acrylic aquarium with a spiral staircase leading up around the back side to a platform at the rim.

From there, a ladder descended into the tank itself, mounted to the inside surface. A scuba regulator on the end of a ten foot hookah line dangled from the little platform, covered in cobwebs from disuse. I gestured to the setup and raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, that!” Dad chuckled. “He had some unusual ideas about meditating while immersed in salt water. Said that it acted as a psychic radiation blocker, and that normally we are so swamped by the thoughts of ten billion other humans that we can’t make any of it out. It’s just relentless background noise that makes us neurotic. Even wrote a book about how his meditation tank replicates the conditions in the womb, where our psychic abilities first develop.”

Hoo boy. One of “those people”. Dad went on to lament that he was convicted on a predictable collection of charges nearly twenty years ago, whereupon his followers moved out of this cabin, returned to the US and went on with their lives.

“Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water” Dad recited. “After enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water.” My ears perked up. It felt deeply relevant for some reason. But then it could just be the sort of hokey pablum that appears profound just because it’s cryptic.

I spent the next hour recounting everything that’s happened to me since Shenzen over piping hot drinks. The chieftess brought them with her, something which closely resembled an unripened coconut. She advised me to twist the stem and pull it off, which she said would start a chemical reaction inside.

I did so, and a few seconds later, fragrant steam wafted up from the small opening. Dad was understandably a lot more reluctant to drink it than I. “You mean to tell me she’s got a plant for every purpose we built a machine for? Houses, clothing, tools...it all just grows right out of the ground?”

Even after finally drinking the steaming contents of his own fruit, he struggled to wrap his head around it. “Boy, some crazy shit happens out in the jungle, don’t it.” I answered that I couldn’t have put it better myself, then asked if he had a boat stashed someplace.

“It’s under some camo tarps behind the cabin. Why?” I told him about the narco sub. He pounded the table. “That’s my boy! Always gotta do one better than your old man, don’t you? But I ain’t complaining, now we can slip out of here under the radar.

That spook whose buddies you iced could still be out there looking for you. Alls he’d have to do is follow the coastline far enough north to spot the dock. I only didn’t take it down ‘cause I figured you might need it to find me.”

The notion sent chills down my spine. “We’d better not waste even another second then. Have you got everything you want to bring with you?” Dad pointed a thumb back over his shoulder. “There’s about three months worth of MREs in the sailboat. How much is there room in your little sub for?”

I estimated at least half of it ought to fit after we dumped out the drugs. Dad whistled. “That’s a lot of money to just go and dump in the ocean.” He wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t bring myself to sell any of it. Not having seen what it turns people into.

So it was that the three of us spent half an hour emptying the neatly packaged bricks of white powder out of the sub, and loading in the replacement cargo. I eyeballed the fuel gauge. Still full, didn’t even use any yet on account of escaping from the swamp submerged, under battery power.

It must’ve been in the final stages of preparation to get underway when we jacked it. Fully loaded with fuel and everything. The battery meter, however, sagged about a quarter of the way down. I knew those old lithiums never read correctly except under load, so I gave the throttle a bump to see how much charge was really in there.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 57}