Antioch could no longer say with confidence that his conversations with Reid had been kept confidential. Yes, they had taken place in the Zocalo during the recreations of the ancient fire festival. But hidden among the costumed participants there could have been OneWorld plants.

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“Look, man. Can you tell me whether Reid will even be here in fifteen minutes?” asked Garcia.

“Wait, give him a chance to show up,” said Antioch.

“No time,” said Garcia.

“So, you’re suggesting that we ditch him. He shows up here and the beach is empty.”

Garcia ignored him, shoulders twitching with some memory of insolence or trauma.

“Look at them. They ain’t no fishermen,” said Garcia.

“Those boys? They’re here every day fishing. Snapper, parrot fish. Seen it with my own eyes,” said Antioch.

“Parrot fish? They extinct now, like fifty years, brother. You've been set up with some cheap ass special effects.”

There was a glitch, a glint of light reflecting off the nets cast by the fishermen from off of the rock. Antioch suddenly thought that Garcia might be right, had probably been right all along. That meant that all the months of stalking and cultivating Reid as an informer, all the notes he carried in his head from their conversations, all the coded entries on the transponder were now worthless. What’s more, they were dangerous and would need to be wiped.

“Okay. Say it’s all shit, the Reid notes, all his so-called info. We go up to Tijuana. And then what? What’s Shoeman going to say? That’s gonna be one hell of a conversation,” said Antioch.

“Shoeman ain’t even real, man. Getcha game on, Antioch,” said Garcia.

“How do I know you're real?”

“How do you know anything? Shithead.”

Garcia, annoying as he seemed, had a point. Antioch had a hard time knowing anything was real. He’d been raised by Mancie Littell in Tennessee with the perhaps imagined words of his long absent father Don forever in his ears, ringing the alarm of fight. As a runaway teen landing in the streets of Knoxville, he’d come under the influence of a Chomskyite cell that espoused action against the machine as a path to cleansing and personal salvation. Disillusioned with the personal politics of utopia, he’d joined the Democravian military, volunteering to salvage his abused sense of personal honor in what remained of his youth. Years later, battle scarred, part of that defeated army under General Steiner that had surrendered to OneWorld, still searching for redemption, he’d drifted out west. He’d married Winona, and they’d had a daughter, Uvlin, who was the key to their happiness.

He took on freelance work, investigative gigs during those years, and ended up working full-time undercover for Shoeman’s foundation, the Anthrog Nosti. He liked reporting to Shoeman because the occasional existential threat gave him direction and a backstop to his own still meandering consciousness.

“Let’s go,” said Antioch.

“See?” said Garcia.

The two men walked silently, plodding across the waste ground of a parking lot in Cabo San Lucas. In their wake the wind picked up, scattering spouts of dust across the pockmarked asphalt. The Pacific shimmered beyond the break, a silver pool of mystery. In the distance, shrouds of unresolved matter blanketed an army of giant blades. They rotated at a pace dictated by a fragmented logic that was the object of their quest.

Zipping up Carretera Uno, the coast road to La Paz, they stopped at a charging station in the center of a dusty, overheated crossroad. Teenaged girls ate soft synthetic chocolate cones in the shade, sitting cross-legged at the curb. Local boys, rodeo stars, wearing shades and braided rainbow mullets, charged their amphibious vehicles, customized Chinese puddle hoppers, while Garcia and Antioch waited on their bikes. Only their channel blockers, downloaded on the black market, rendered them immune from the wireless, dopamine enhancing blasts from the OneWorld puppet regime in the radius of the station. Once the bikes were fully charged, they looked around, ignoring the local youth, and gunned the electric motors for the road again.

The sun was sinking out on the horizon, torching, eternal fire in and out of sight. At the crest of the hills, buzzards rode the thermals in silent predatory spirals, drifting up and out of the violet dusk. It hadn’t rained in 16 months. The desalination plants, running on modular fission, worked overtime to provide the remnant population, descendants of the indigenous Guaycura mixed with a century’s refugees from around the globe. The OneWorld north of the border was a sprawling, amnesiac haven amid the wreckage of civilizational collapse. South of the border the lands were running out of water.

(Sharing the setup to the story in Alias Tomorrow, about a writer, William Morrow, and his creation. Available now on preorder in the Kindle library and launching in November in both Kindle and paperback.)

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