This Eden

by Ed O'Loughlin

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

This Eden is a smart modern-day adventure reminiscent of both the cyber noir novels of William Gibson and the golden age of espionage fiction. Ever felt like you were living in a dystopian tech thriller? That's because you are... Michael is out of his depth. The closest he ever came to working in tech was when he rode a delivery bike for a food app in Vancouver. Yet when his coder girlfriend dies, he is inexplicably headhunted by sinister tech mogul Campbell Fess, who transplants him to Silicon Valley. There, a reluctant female spy named Aoife lures him into the hands of Towse, an enigmatic war-gamer, who tricks them both into joining his quest to save the world, and reality itself, from the deadliest weapon ever invented. Hunted by government agents and corporate goons, manipulated at every turn by the philosophising Towse, Aoife and Michael find themselves in an intercontinental chase which will take them from California to New York, from the forests of Uganda to Jerusalem, Gaza, Alexandria and Paris, and to a final showdown with the truth in Aoife's native Ireland. Fast-moving, exhilarating and tense, This Eden is both a classic spy novel and speculative fiction for the here and the now. O'Loughlin adapts the propulsive thriller form to create a sharp yet passionate account of a world under mortal threat from cyber-warfare, feral money, runaway technology, and a cynical onslaught on truth itself.

Release date: June 10, 2021

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Prologue:

Wonderland

 

Alice and Michael had their first date, if you can call it that, at the Museum of Anthropology on the Vancouver campus of the University of British Columbia.

Their first meeting was an accident, as far as we can tell, generated by a random weather event – a light fall of snow. It was the final day of the first semester of their first year, and most of the engineering students had skipped their last class to enjoy the weather. Vancouver is warm, by Canadian standards, and snow doesn’t last there. You have to use it while you can.

Fragments of that day – video clips and photos and social media updates – are still posted on various networks. Others, though since taken down, can be seen by those with the right kind of access. Michael didn’t have any social media accounts, then or ever, but he later shared the pictures from his phone with Alice, who posted them with hers.

At first, we mostly see the students in a parking lot, grinning, red faced in the cold. A few, without gloves, have pulled the sleeves of their jackets over their hands; we can infer from this, and from the ice on their clothes, that there have already been snowballs.

Scroll down the timelines, and we see the same students in a different location, sliding on refuse sacks down a short slope towards a line of birch and pine trees. These birches have already shed the new snow, so we know it is already thawing. Beyond the stark trees we see the grey ocean, and a bank of grey cloud that will bring sleet or rain, and in that grey cloud the grey shapes of ships, riding at anchor. The rain has reached those ships, and is already falling on them, all those years ago. To the north, across English Bay, West Vancouver and the mountains are hidden by clouds.

The snow is thin, and the refuse sacks, sliding through it, uncover wide strips of bare grass. No one is wearing waterproof pants. This game won’t last long.

Alice Field is in many of these pictures. She is wearing jeans, a red hiking jacket, no hat, no gloves, and canvas shoes that are already soaked. Her hair, which is naturally brown, is worn short and dyed red. She is laughing, but her eyes, which are also brown, never rest on the camera. She is watching the slope as it slides up to meet her, reading its curves. She likes to see a few moves ahead.

Michael Atarian – a dark-haired, slight kid with a shy but stubborn look – is in many of the images created in the parking lot, but in none of those that were posted from the snow slope. It could be that Michael had gone a few yards downhill to take shots of the others, and that the game had to be abandoned, washed out by that cloud we saw over the ocean, that imminent rain in that long ago future, before Michael could have a go himself. Or it could be that Michael didn’t like being photographed, and found ways to avoid it, most of the time.

Alice is at or near the centre of most of the pictures taken with Michael’s phone. She will notice that, later.

The Museum of Anthropology is a five-minute walk from the place where they went sliding. It would have been the nearest shelter from the sleet and rain about to blow off English Bay. It was there that the last few photos of the afternoon were taken, in the glass Great Hall at the centre of the building, surrounded by cultural artefacts of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, such as a frontal pole from a longhouse, a Haida canoe, and a Tsimshian bentwood chest, bright in their colours and lines. In a series of selfies, three other students are packed around Michael, pulling faces. One of these is Alice. The other two students, a boy and a girl, are named in the timelines, but they are of no further interest to us.

The final photograph shows Alice and Michael alone, beside a high window looking over a pond. Rain is streaming down the window, rotting the snow outside. Both are still smiling, but, with the other two gone, there is room in the frame for some daylight between them: alone together, they look awkward. It was probably around this time that Alice suggested coffee in a cafe off the lobby. That’s how she remembered it, anyway.

And her memory checks out, in so far as we can check it. Alice Field and Michael Atarian had their first date, if you can call it that, in the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, on Friday, 21 December of their first year at university.

 

They had their second date the evening of the day after the snowfall. They met at an Italian restaurant near her house in Kitsilano, where they shared a large pizza and, having shown their IDs, a bottle of Okanagan red. It seemed to Alice that the rain hadn’t stopped since the afternoon before. Water ran down the window next to their table. That’s how she remembered it. And it checks out: she was right. It hadn’t stopped raining.

Afterwards, they split the bill, went back to her house and opened another bottle of wine, though they didn’t really need it. It was clear where this was going. The only question left for Alice was why. They sat together on the living-room couch, facing the TV, though it wasn’t on. They talked about lectures, about the weather, about classmates. The important thing was to keep talking until the situation resolved itself. She listened to the rain on the window, looked at the blank TV. She’d done all this before. Why did this time feel different?

She remembered the snowball fight in the parking lot the day before. The students had formed rival skirmish lines, with those who already knew each other a little more likely to choose the same side. Car roofs provided the wet, sticky snow that is perfect for snowballs.

Alice, who had come to the fight alone, had turned to scoop snow from the hood of a Buick when she sensed rather than saw a snowball flying towards her, coming the wrong way, from behind her own lines. She ducked behind the Buick, and when she bobbed up again she saw him: a dark-haired boy, the other side of the car, looking sheepish. She hadn’t noticed him in any of their classes. It was like he too had just fallen from the sky.

Hey, she yelled. That’s cheating!

It was a bad throw. I wasn’t aiming at you.

Yeah? Well, stop hiding back there. If you want to be in this fight you have to pick a side.

Two minutes later, she was reloading again when she felt a snowball hit the back of her knee. She turned. He was standing in the other line of battle, fifteen yards across from her, with another snowball ready to go. This one was also meant for her, but it flew a foot wide.

She hit him on the chest, then turned away to scoop up more snow.

Another snowball flew past her head, a little high this time. She tucked her new snowball in her left armpit, made another, turned to find him. His back was to her as he gathered more snow. This time she hit him on the nape of the neck, where the slush would slide under his collar. The shot was deliberate. She had a good arm.

He turned, gasping from the shock of the ice running down his bare back. It must have felt delicious. She would always remember his face when he saw her, waiting for his full attention, her second snowball ready to go.

He snatched a shot at her, hit her on the shoulder. He seemed shy, but he wasn’t the type to give up. Which was probably how, on this couch in Kitsilano, he had just found the courage to take hold of her hand.

Alice was careful not to pack her snowballs too tight. That way, she could go for head shots without doing damage. He had brushed the ice from his eyes and mouth, picked lumps of slush from the front of his collar. Finally, he managed to speak.

You throw like a girl, he said.

Most of the boys she had been with before were athletic types, self-centred and sure, worth dating for their muscles and then getting rid of, if they didn’t bail first. They always wanted her to act like a girl, whatever that meant; she didn’t care. They were frightened of silences, but expected her to fill them. She liked to be quiet, most of the time. This kid was also quiet, and he didn’t seem to mind that they’d both fallen silent on this couch in Kitsilano.

Before this, Alice hadn’t really bothered to see herself as pretty. Now, looking into the unlit television, she saw herself and Michael reflected in its screen. She liked to step outside herself, to watch herself from a distance, to be as objective as she could about the subjective. She wondered, watching herself and Michael in that black rectangle, if that first wildly thrown snowball, the one that connected them, had really been random, or if other forces had vectored it in. She decided that if she hadn’t sensed it and ducked, it would have hit her. That choice, at least, had been hers. If you want to play this game, you have to pick a side. Reflected in the screen, they looked pretty together. That would do her for now. She kissed him.

  

Alice still lived in the house she’d grown up in. It had been built in the 1920s from timber frame and shingle, and was small and warm, clean enough, for the most part, though Alice’s parents had a liking for clutter. They’d been renting there for years, from a friend who was, like them, a holdout from the old days, when people without money could still live in Kitsilano. Their rent was a relic of easier times.

The house stood on a corner where two side streets met, with the living room in the angle, so the rain had its pick of two windows to run down. Sometimes, when the wind was right, it could wash down both windows at once. As a little girl, Alice loved to turn out the lights and stand on the arm of the couch in the corner. From there, she could look out each window in turn. She watched the cars on the street, headlights mirrored in wet asphalt. The lit windows of houses shimmered with rain. Sometimes, in winter, when the weather cleared and the moon was bright, the peaks showed white above the trees at the end of the street. Other times, when there was no moon, she could see a few of the brightest stars, shining through the haze of light thrown up by the city.

There was a payphone on the corner, and Alice liked to watch the people who came to use it. She wondered who they were, and why they were making calls on a payphone; even her parents had cell phones by then. Some people stayed a long time inside the box, misting the glass with their breath. Others opened the door, reached in without entering, then wandered away again. Years later, she understood: they were checking the refund slot for lost change, begging alms from a forsaken shrine.

Eventually, her parents would come in and turn the lights back on and carry her off to the room she shared with her big sister. She had everything she wanted: the city and the mountains and the rain on the window. She thought she could never live anywhere else.

 

On their first morning there together, when the light crept up the walls, Michael noticed a black and white photograph over the bed. It showed two young people with short, spiky hair, and eyeliner, and Dr. Martens boots. They were holding hands, unsmiling. The girl had a torn dress, the boy wore an old army jacket. The girl looked like Alice.

The far wall was taken up by a closet and a bookcase – novels and travel and history and science. The closet was open. He saw men’s clothes on hangers. Among them was an old army jacket.

He sat up in the bed.

This is your parents’ room.

She pulled him down again.

It’s mine, for now.

They aren’t coming back today?

They work up in the Territories. They teach high school math. They earn more money up there, and it’ll bump up their pensions for when they retire. I’m paying the rent until we’ve saved enough to buy this place. We have first refusal.

She pushed across him, pinning him down.

What about you?

What about me?

Your parents. Where are they?

So he told her.

 

A few days after his nineteenth birthday, when Michael was finishing high school, his parents were driving to work on the edge of Grande Prairie, Alberta, when a truck full of steel for the McMurray oil sands ran a red light and flattened their car. The driver, who was trying to clear off some mortgage arrears, had exceeded his permissible hours, and fell asleep at the wheel. He went to jail, and his family lost its home, and then fell apart. But that doesn’t matter. We’ve checked the incident from every possible angle and it seems to have been a genuine accident, if accidents are ever really a thing.

Because Michael was past his eighteenth birthday there wasn’t much the government could do for him, or to him. But his high school had a contract with a grief counsellor, and the principal sent him to see her. He only went once.

The counsellor’s notes for the session are covered by patient confidentiality, but she typed up a transcript at home, then emailed it to her office inbox. Which makes it accessible. It goes like this:

Hi, Mike. Please sit down.

Thanks . . . I prefer to go by Michael.

OK, then: Michael . . . Ms Shevchenko says that your teachers are worried about your reaction to your terrible loss. She says that you went to school the day after the funeral and acted like nothing had happened.

I didn’t want to stay at home.

Do you like school?

No.

But you have friends there?

Sure. A few.

Are they being supportive?

I don’t really know. I’ve been kind of avoiding them.

Why?

I don’t want to make a big deal of it.

Pause.

OK . . . It says here you have no relatives in Canada. Do you have any family in . . . ? Your parents were from Iran, it says here?

My parents didn’t talk about that. They never mentioned any relatives.

So you’re alone in the world?

I guess.

I am truly very sorry for you.

Thanks.

Pause.

Were you close to your parents?

I don’t know. I guess.

Do you miss them?

Yes.

Pause.

I’m here to help you, Mike, if you’ll let me. You’ve suffered a terrible loss. It helps to talk about these things. It helps to share your feelings with other people.

I don’t want to.

Why not?

I don’t want to have to think about it.

What’s wrong with facing your feelings, Mike?

Part of me is glad that my parents are dead.

You’re glad that your parents have passed?

They were always scared of something . . . Now that they’re gone, I don’t have to worry about them. It’s like they finally got away.

This grief counsellor wrote Sociopath? in her notebook. She had missed the point entirely. Unsure what to do next, she turned to techniques used for drawing out people who are in shock or denial. She didn’t think that he was in shock or denial, but the school paid by the hour, so she needed to run down the clock.

 

There was a truck, a stop light, a sleep-deprived driver. The truck was hauling twenty tons of steel rods for reinforcing poured concrete. It was moving at fifty miles per hour when it T-boned their pickup. Unlike Michael, they wouldn’t have suffered.

As soon as he left early childhood, and could see outside the nest that they had built for him, Michael had started to feel sorry for his parents. He tried to take care of them, their native-born son. You don’t have to live like this, he told them, many times over. You’ve been in this country for years. I’m a born citizen. There are amnesties and lawyers. You’re smart; you shouldn’t have to clean washrooms and warehouses, or deliver junk food, or work in the back of greasy spoons. You’re not too old to learn better English, get yourselves some education. You need to save money and buy a house, before it’s too late for you. There’s no future for you, living like kids.

Needling them like this was, among other things, his way of getting back at them for all the questions they wouldn’t answer about their past.

His parents never took his advice. Sometimes, at night, through the door of his bedroom, he heard them talking in Farsi, which they wouldn’t speak in front of him. It usually meant the same thing: they’d be moving on again, looking for another rental trailer, or short-let apartment, or cash-only job in some northern mining camp, where questions weren’t asked, and where housing was part of the deal.

It was in one of these bush camps, he later told Alice, that he’d decided to become an engineer – a civil engineer, someone who moved about all the time, from project to project, but always belonged wherever they were. Someone who built bridges across rivers, bringing new roads to mine camps and oil wells. Solid on the ground, a man who could buy a house for his parents, and maybe someday build a home for himself.

His dad reckoned Michael wasn’t good enough at mathematics to get into engineering. His mother thought he would make a good teacher, or maybe a nurse. So when Michael rebelled he became an A student, and scraped into engineering at UBC.

 

When Alice was a little girl there was always a chess game on the go in the corner of the living room, on a cheap-looking set made of cardboard and plastic.

Alice didn’t know the rules of chess, but she noticed that sometimes the pieces were all lined up along opposite ends of the board, and then they would start creeping towards each other, one at a time, over a period of weeks, shifting around the board or retiring to the side of it, like the sin bin in hockey, until one day they would all be back on their start lines, and the battle would begin again.

She never saw her parents go near the chessboard in the living room; they played their own games at the kitchen table, on a magnetised travel set, drinking red wine.

Who was playing this mysterious game? Alice could have asked her parents, but she liked to think that they hadn’t noticed the board in the living room, or that they had forgotten about it, or that maybe they couldn’t even see it: maybe this game had ghosts for players, or, even better, maybe its pieces had lives of their own, had picked their own fights and were making their own moves. She decided she’d say nothing to anyone, not even to her big sister, Brigid. She would study the problem until she had solved it or it went away.

One day, she was home sick from kindergarten when the mailman came. She sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in her favourite blanket, and watched her father sort through the letters. Among the bills and junk mail was a small, square white envelope, with a British stamp.

There you are, her father said, looking happy.

He opened the envelope. It contained a white card with a few symbols scrawled on it. He pulled a face, then put it in his shirt pocket.

Uh oh, he said to himself. Uh oh.

Alice followed him through to the living room, dragging her blanket across the floor. He stood, looking down at the phantom chessboard, pulling a face. Oh, Alice thought, disappointed. So he can see it too.

Her father moved one of the pieces.

You can’t do that!

He looked round at her, puzzled.

What do you mean?

That’s not your game! Put it back like it was!

He did.

It is my game, though. It’s mine, and your mother’s.

You play chess in the kitchen. And Sophia’s not here.

He pulled the armchair over to the chessboard.

Come sit in my lap.

Reluctantly, she crossed the floor to join him. She knew that by doing so she would lose something precious. He was about to explain the mystery to her. She’d rather have kept things as they were.

You see here, all these white pieces? Your mom and I are white. The black pieces are a friend of ours, one of our old gang. He’s doing research at Cambridge, in England. He’s just told us his next move.

Her father took the card out of his pocket.

See? It’s written here – P to QB6.

He moved one of the black pieces, the same one as before.

Pawn to Queen’s Bishop Six. Unless your mom can think of something amazing, I think he’s going to beat us in the next four moves.

How will you tell him your move, if he’s in England?

We’ll mail it to him, like he mails his to us. They call it correspondence chess, because you play it by snail mail, one move at a time. It’s the most dangerous game in the world.

No it’s not.

She tried to wriggle away from him. He knew that she didn’t like to be teased. It made her feel hard, and cold, and lonely, and it made her want to hide away. He laughed and kissed her hair.

It’s true. More people die playing this game than any other. Even boxing or hockey. Can you guess why?

He had set her a problem. He knew that she loved a puzzle. She thought for a while.

Is it because the games take so long?

I knew that you’d get it. The longer the game, the greater the chance you’ll get sick or have an accident before it’s over.

So why not send the moves by email? That would be quicker.

He didn’t answer for a while, and, though she couldn’t see his face, she knew before he spoke that he wouldn’t be telling her all of the truth.

We like it like this. It’s an old-fashioned way to let our friend know we’re here for him. We know that he likes that, to know that we’re here.

The game is a message?

Sort of, yeah. But it’s also a chess game. And he always wins.

He patted her shoulder.

Get off of me. I’ll make us some lunch.

Alice squirmed away from him. Her blanket, dragging behind her, brushed across the little table and pulled the chessboard to the floor. The pieces scattered everywhere, across the wooden floor, under the couch and the armchair, on to the Afghan rug in the middle of the room. She clapped her hands to her mouth, unable to speak.

He put an arm around her, squeezed her.

Don’t worry. I can put them all back where they should be. I keep the game in my head.

She wriggled free of him. It would be hard for her father to reach the pieces under the couch. That was one of her secret places; she liked to lie very still there, to watch the rectangle of light that was the rest of the universe, to try to figure it out without being seen.

She slid on her belly and collected the stray pieces.

Here, she said, handing the white ones to her father. These are yours.

He held out his other hand.

I’ll need the black ones too.

I’ll put them back for your friend, she said.

He watched her replacing the black pieces on the chessboard, each one on the correct square, where the game had left it. When she was finished she looked at him.

Your turn.

He started replacing the white pieces.

Sweetie, he said, it’s time we taught you how to play chess.

 

Michael had to spend one last summer alone in Grande Prairie before starting college. He got a job as a pizza delivery driver. It kept him out of the empty apartment at night.

At the end of that last summer, when the lease on the apartment expired, Michael had to move on again. This time, he would be the one to decide where he went. The choice can’t have been easy. He’d been accepted by the University of British Columbia’s ­Faculty of Engineering, but why bother with that now? It would cost a lot of money that he didn’t have, and he knew he’d struggle with the coursework. Plus, his parents wouldn’t be needing that house anymore, would they? Then again, he may have felt that they were watching him. He may have still wanted to prove them both wrong. Love is a difficult habit to break.

Michael packed a suitcase with clothes, and filled a plastic box with computer gear. The rest of the stuff in the apartment – his parents’ clothes, the kitchen stuff, a TV, some books written in Farsi, which Michael couldn’t read – went to a thrift store. The apartment was furnished. His parents lived light.

Still unsure where he would go next, Michael came back from the thrift store to make one final tour of the empty rooms, hoping that something or someone would say goodbye to him, or offer advice. This was where he’d last seen his parents. There was something new there, something that hadn’t been there that morning when he cleared the place out: a sports bag, sitting in the middle of the floor in his parents’ bedroom. It contained a large amount of currency in midsize denominations – used, non-sequential bills.

His parents had never had money or friends. He didn’t know where this money had come from, but he knew a sign when he saw one. He put the bag in the trunk of his car. He reckoned it might be enough to keep him going all the way through college. You could count that as a blessing. On the other hand, without the money to bind him to the promise that he’d made to himself, and his parents, though they hadn’t asked him, to be an engineer, to live a solid life and buy someone or other a house, he might have escaped from this story, if escape is ever really a thing.

Michael left the apartment just as the three of them had found it, two years before: the keys hidden in the fuse box, the front door on the latch.

 

Alice asked Michael to move into her house two months after they met. They were young and good-looking and healthy, and they were both really nice people – there was never any doubt about that. Before that, he’d been staying with three other male students he’d found on Craigslist, sharing a dump of an apartment, way out in Burnaby – a long commute and a horrible rent. Alice reckoned that if it didn’t work out she could just kick him out again. That’s what she wrote in an email to her big sister Brigid, a final year student of English at McGill, in Montreal. An arrangement made freely could be easily ended. Even the cleverest people believe stupid things.

By then, they had fallen in love with each other, in the way that young people do, the first time they have their own place to themselves. Not much think. . .