Skinner by Charlie Huston Read Free Book Online

concrete corridor that reminds Jae of a military bunker. In fact, if asked, she’d give her professional opinion that it is a bunker. Cold war era. European. Eastern.
    “Weapons inspectors maybe?”
    She hears a background clatter from her computer’s speaker, the usually soft tapping of computer keys amplified by their proximity to the microphone built into Terrence’s own laptop.
    “Weapons inspectors with a reality show?”
    “Looking for missing Soviet nukes. Ivory-grade plutonium. Did they get all of it from the Kazakhstan reactor? Aktau. I heard they were still trying to make the inventory come out right.”
    The clacking stops.
    “The Atlantic Paranormal Society.”
    Jae is thinking about Soviet bombs, fissionable materials, vast stockpiles scattered throughout the Eastern bloc. Robots she’s designed for rescue have been modified for use in potentially contaminated sites. Die-in-place units, never intended for recovery, that had been dropped through cracks in reinforced concrete caps that were never actually reinforced. The cash margin between a proper waste depot cap and an improper one having been skimmed and split between contractors and party apparatchiks. She’s seen documents, layers of redaction, but between the black lines were bombs enough to blow a hole through the center of the globe, all of them unaccounted for.
    Terrence raises his voice, slight distortion from the speaker.
    “ Ghosthunters, Jae.”
    She’s opening the spider cluster windows, her perimeter is clear, but this close to Creech, the shockwave from a ten-megaton car bomb device would slap this shithole to splinters with her inside.
    “Jae, are you watching TV now?”
    Her peyote-fatigued brain is composing scenarios for her now. A Ford F-150, parked in the lot outside the Indian Springs Casino across the road from Creech. A states’ rights fanatic, unknowing puppet of a Somali al-Qaeda franchise, sitting in the driver’s seat, praying to his First Testament Lord, an arming switch compressed, thumb on a detonator.
    “It’s a TV show, Jae. Ghosthunters. People who call themselves the Atlantic Paranormal Society. They look for ghosts. On TV. There’s an international cast. It appears that they’re broadcasting a special episode. Looking for ghosts in a decommissioned GDR command bunker near Kossa.”
    She picks up the remote, slaps it twice, hits the channel button as if pulling the trigger of a gun, killing the TAPS squad and resummoning the Mexican dancing girls, now clad in bikini mariachi outfits.
    “Weapons inspector reality show. I should have my head examined.”
    Silence.
    “Yes, you should.”
    She laughs. As the fit subsides, she has to use the end of her antimicrobial towel to wipe a rope of snot from her upper lip.
    “Thanks, Terrence, I just blew boogers all over my laptop.”
    “Have you even been to the east? Berlin, I mean. Former.”
    Jae is wiping the screen of her Toughbook.
    “A conference, before I met you. Academia. Neo-automation and design. Something. I talked about self-assembling robots. Sounds old-fashioned now.”
    “I worked there in the seventies. Speaking of old-fashioned. Cultivated an asset, KGB counterintelligence agent. I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone else so impossibly self-serving and dirty to his core. An espionage cockroach. I was certain he’d survive World War III. The real surprise was that we never had one. Not as it was imagined, anyway.”
    Jae leans back into her pillows, channels flipping. She uses her left hand to surf the browser on her phone. Mexican TV. TAPS. Kossa. World War III. Antimicrobial. Snot. Her mind coming clear of the illusory revelations of the peyote and the blankness of the desert, reaching out through the TV and the laptop, signals, Terrence’s voice, hesitant VoIP call-and-response, hunting for a configuration to weave herself into. The information around her, in the air, waves of it penetrating her body, these machines to pluck it from the