Engineering Infinity by Jonathan Strahan Read Free Book Online Page A

here?”
    “You’re here because you’re with
me. And you needed to disappear, but that doesn’t mean I stop working.”
    Gennady glanced around. The
landscape here should look a lot like home, which was only a day’s drive to the
west - and here indeed was that vast sky he remembered from Ukraine. After that
first glance, though, he did a double-take. The dry prairie air normally
smelled of dust and grass at this time of year, and there should have been
yellow grass from here to the flat horizon - but instead the land seemed
blasted, with large patches of bare soil showing. There was only stubble where
there should have been grass. It looked more like Australia than Asia. Even the
trees ringing the airport were dead, just grey skeletons clutching the air.
    He thought about climate change
as they walked through the concrete-floored terminal; since they’d cleared
customs in Amsterdam, the bored-looking clerks here just waved them through. “Hang
on,” said Ambrose as he tried to keep up with Gennady’s impatient stride. “I
came to you guys for asylum. Doesn’t that mean you put me up somewhere, some
hotel, you know, away from the action?”
    “You can’t get any farther from
the action than this.” They emerged onto a grassy boulevard that hadn’t been
watered nor cut in a long while; the civilized lawn merged seamlessly with the
wild prairie. There was nothing visible from here to the horizon, except in one
direction where a cluster of listless windmills jutted above some low trees.
    A single taxicab was sitting at
the crumbled curb.
    “Oh, man,” said Ambrose.
    Gennady had to smile. “You were
expecting some Black Sea resort, weren’t you?” He slipped into the taxi, which
stank of hot vinyl and motor oil. “Any car rental agency,” he said to the
driver in Russian. “It’s not like you’re some cold war defector,” he continued
to Ambrose in English. “Your benefactor is the U.N. And they don’t have much
money.”
    “So you’re what - putting me up
in a motel in Kazakhstan?” Ambrose struggled to put his outrage into words. “What I saw could -”
    “What?” They pulled away from the
curb and became the only car on a cracked blacktop road leading into town.
    “Can’t tell you,” mumbled
Ambrose, suddenly looking shifty. “I was told not to tell you anything.”
    Gennady swore in Ukrainian and
looked away. They drove in silence for a while, until Ambrose said, “So why are you here, then? Did you piss somebody off?”
    Gennady smothered the urge to
push Ambrose out of the cab. “Can’t tell you,” he said curtly.
    “Does it involve SNOPB?” Ambrose
pronounced it snop-bee .
    Gennady would have been startled
had he not known Ambrose was connected to the net via his glasses. “You show me
yours, I’ll show you mine,” he said. Ambrose snorted in contempt.
    They didn’t speak for the rest of
the drive.
     
    “Let me get this straight,” said
Gennady later that evening. “He says he’s being chased by Russian agents, NASA, and Google?”
    On the other end of the line,
Eleanor Frankl sighed. “I’m sorry we dumped him on you at the airport,” said
the New York director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. She was
Gennady’s boss for this new and - so far - annoyingly vague contract. “There
just wasn’t time to explain why we were sending him with you to Kazakhstan,”
she added.
    “So explain now.” He was pacing
in the grass in front of the best hotel his IAEA stipend could afford. It was
evening and the crickets were waking up; to the west, fantastically huge clouds
had piled up, their tops still lit golden as the rest of the sky faded into mauve.
It was cooling off already.
    “Right... Well, first of all, it
seems he really is being chased by the Russians, but not by the country. It’s
the Soviet Union Online that’s after him. And the
only place their IP addresses are blocked is inside the geographical
territories of the Russian and Kazakhstani