Before Tomorrowland (9 page)

“That’s terribly reductive,” said an older man, who had been eavesdropping on their conversation. “The only people here with an agenda are the organizers who are trying
to warp the face of New Fandom into their own, limited image—”

“Okay,” said Lee, raising his hand. He just wanted to get through, get his mom back to Sloane House, and let this day be over.

One of the Futurians made a fist and shouted, “Rise up! Rise up against tyranny! Boycott WorldCon and join
our
convention! July Fourth in Brooklyn—”

A WorldCon staff member shouted back: “You idiots couldn’t organize a convention if you had orders from Ming himself!” That was about the lamest retort Lee could imagine, but
it must have gotten the other one’s dander up, because the Futurian charged the other man.

“You boys stop this!” The voice was loaded with a shaming timbre only a mother could produce. Lee was as surprised as anyone when the fight stopped and all eyes turned to Clara.
Everyone stood at attention like children in a classroom. Clara was the only woman in the crowd, and she was twenty years older than most of them. “It’s bad enough we have to defend
science fiction from everyone else. Now we have to defend it from each other?”

The WorldCon partisan responded to Clara with the most patronizing tone. “Ma’am, I don’t think you appreciate the complexities of the situation.”

“You’re right, I don’t, because this shouldn’t be complicated at all! Saying science fiction should
only be this
or it should
only be that
is just going to
kill it. All your rules and restrictions are utterly antithetical to what science fiction and fandom should be all about! When I was a little girl, I had dreams none of the other girls did. Know
why? Because I read
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
, and I had a new way of seeing the world! How many technologies, how many industries started because of one person’s imagination? Their
free imagination
.”

Lee wasn’t completely tracking with his mother’s logic and he wasn’t sure anyone else was, either, judging from the furrowed brows and snickers. He thought she was finished,
when she turned back with a thought in her head that she felt compelled to proclaim with a finger raised to the heavens.

“A house divided will not stand!”

The crowd received the final stanza of her soapbox speech in silence…and then went right back to arguing, as if nothing had interrupted them. Clara shook her head and pushed her way
toward the curb. Lee followed his mom, still not sure what had gone down. “Mom, that was…well, impressive!”

“Thanks,” she said, and raised her hand to hail a cab. “It’s good to let off some steam.”

“Yeah, you look better.”

“Nothing like self-righteous indignation to get the blood pumping,” she said, breathing heavily but smiling. She waved her arm. “Taxi!”

Lee grinned back at the bickering throng. “You sure scared the pants off those guys. They probably didn’t know girl geeks existed.” When he turned back to Clara, she
wasn’t there.

“Mom?”

He looked around, then down, and saw her sprawled across the pavement. She didn’t move.

T
HERE WAS
a reflection in the glass. He didn’t know what it was.

He couldn’t hear anything but the thrum of recirculating liquid. His breath was gone. Next to him in the dim light, gallons of saline churned in a tall glass vat, and he saw reflections of
metal cylinders, wires, and tubes, all twisting over each other like sinew. At first, he didn’t see anything else. He was thinking about the pain, and the other noise that was so loud it
muffled the screams of the mechanics. The pain was gone. That noise was gone. The mechanics were gone. Where were they?

A collection of metal parts trembled in the reflection. He tried to move and couldn’t feel the bed or his legs. They weren’t his legs. He looked back into the glass. Two glowing orbs
danced with him in the glass, following his movements, hypnotizing him. He watched as a white goo oozed from thousands of holes in that trembling metal surface, oozing around the glowing orbs. A
skull took shape, then flesh knit over the skull, and the orbs became the eyes of a stranger, staring back at him.

He saw Rotwang’s silhouette at the top of the cave. The hunched scientist stepped down toward him, hands raised.

“Don’t be afraid, son,” he said.

Henry had run from the lab, from Rotwang, from the unfamiliar face in the mirror. He ran and ran far into the summer night, into the desert.

“I am so very sorry, Henry.” Rotwang’s face was still too dark to see. Henry switched on his night vision, even though it still terrified him to do so. The doctor and the walls
of the cave lit up green. “They made me do this to you. I tried to stop them, but they wouldn’t listen to me. Now they want to hurt you, my boy. Exploit you. Replicate you. But I will
not allow that.”

Henry trembled, watching the sadness on Rotwang’s green face, reading its lines.

“Listen to me. I can’t undo what I did, but I can make you better. More human. I can do these things for you, but you have to trust me. Please, Henry. Come with me.”

The nightmare faded. The green walls of the cave and Rotwang’s face melted away, and now the world filled with light and warmth.

It was his first flight. His first real flight.

In spite of his childhood love for the idea of flying, he never learned how. Amelia did her best, but being a natural pilot didn’t make her a natural teacher. Still, he appreciated the
attention. On that first flight, she took him up over the Pacific coast without Plus Ultra permission. He was fourteen, and very nervous. She joked that the trip ought to loosen him up, but she was
just as domineering during the flight as any other time.

“What are you, scared?” she asked. “Take the yoke, it won’t bite you.”

He took the controls. The curving metal of the yoke felt oversized in his small hands. She watched him, not letting off her own yoke.

“Easy. See, it just takes a touch to put us off course. Don’t just stare at the mountains or we’ll fly straight into them. What’s your altimeter say?”

It wasn’t long before she told him to just sit back and watch her. That was fine. He would have been nervous learning from anyone, let alone a childhood hero. As they veered over the
ocean, she pointed at the beach below, dotted by hundreds of sunbathers and red and white sun umbrellas.

“That’s Malibu, there.”

Henry leaned over to see. They were only a couple hundred feet up; well below Plus Ultra regulation for their experimental aircraft. She never worried about things like that. She always had the
same excuse:
“It’ll give them something to do. Those boys in the back room need a story to spin, don’t they?”

The light off the ocean was so bright it blinded him. She banked the plane, and the glare lessened so he could see the color of the water. It was turquoise that day, almost like a colorized
photo of the tropics.

“Are the waters in Tomorrowland as blue as the waters here?”

Amelia’s brow furrowed. “‘Tomorrowland?’”

“It’s what I call the place over there. It needs a better name than ‘the other world’ or whatever it is you guys call it.”

“Henry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about, either. So maybe watch your mouth. Okay?”

Henry blushed shame red. “Everybody talks about it, you know.”

“Everybody talks about a lot of things, you think they’re all true?” asked Earhart. “If you want something to talk about, then talk about this: There is no ‘over
there.’ There is no ‘other world.’”

Henry kept quiet for the rest of the trip. At some point, Amelia must have started feeling guilty for shooting him down. “You know,” she said, “Tomorrowland really is a better
name.”

They were on the run. Henry followed Rotwang across the world, away from the centers of scientific progress, away from Plus Ultra. They found an isolated home in the Central Pacific on a little
atoll near the Phoenix Islands, where life was primitive and perfect. At first, Henry loved it. On their atoll surrounded by water and sunshine, he felt almost like he could breathe again. Rotwang
told him that one day soon, he would.

They scrapped together a hodgepodge of surgical implements, raw elements and metal from Rotwang’s trip to the nearest shipping line. It wasn’t much, but he was brilliant enough to
make it into some kind of shadow of his previous laboratory. He taught Henry about electronics, mechanics, everything he knew. Henry even built his own small robot, but he never turned it on. Henry
hated his own metal body, but he desperately wanted to understand it. Rotwang helped him.

Initially, Rotwang’s goal was to perform tests, draw designs, and make steps toward a new model for Henry to inhabit. Something better, with greater capacity to feel. “One
day,” said Rotwang, “we will find true friends, Henry, to help us make your new body. Until that time, I pray that you have patience for my efforts.”

Patience did not come easily. It was lonely in his body, and lonely on the island, especially when Rotwang went away. Sometimes he would be gone for weeks, gathering supplies, travelling to
Hawaii or farther. He always insisted Henry stay behind. “We cannot risk Plus Ultra finding you, Henry. Their agents are everywhere. Always on the watch. It’s too dangerous, my boy: you
must trust me.”

He trusted him. He even trusted him when their experiments led to different results than the plan: Augmentation. Improvements. Weapons.

“The uranium core inside you,” said Rotwang, “which contains your life essence, is also a vast source of personal power. Power to be wielded for justice. For you, and for the
world Plus Ultra seeks to oppress. Plus Ultra designed this weapon into you, Henry, but until now, I have kept it shut off. This is your rite of passage.” Rotwang paused, tracing his finger
in a circle around Henry’s heart. “Do you still want to punish the men who did this to you?”

“Yes,” said Henry.

After four years alone with Rotwang on the island, Henry got his chance. Rotwang stormed into their hut one day, talking so fast that Henry barely recognized him: “There is a way, now,
Henry! A way to serve both your causes. A plane is coming toward our island. A Plus Ultra plane. With your weapon, we will shoot it down and take what is on board!”

Any talk about Plus Ultra made Henry nervous now. Rotwang had drilled the fear into him. “What’s on board?”

Rotwang smiled and set a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “The key to your new body. A robot, whose artificial intelligence possesses the processing power I need to solve the last riddles
of our work.”

“Will there be people on board?” asked Henry.

Rotwang became quiet for a moment. “Henry,” he said. “You know that Plus Ultra forced me to create you, yes?” Henry nodded. “And you know that no organization that
large can put the blame on one man, or even a few, yes?” Henry nodded again. They’d spoken about this many times before. “They are the monster. Not you. A many-headed hydra, with
no single mind functioning for independent ideals.
They
are the machine. I want you to remember that. Will you?”

“Yes,” said Henry.

“Good. I will not ask you to come with me to the plane after we shoot it down. It would be too dangerous, and if you still have compassion for these wretches, too big a step for
you.” Rotwang put both hands on Henry’s shoulder. The touch, even hardly felt, was precious. “But I need your talent. I need it to help you, and to grow you into a man of action
who will do what is right. No matter the cost.”

Henry tried to put the image of a plane crash out of his mind, but it lingered there in the weeks leading up to their mission. The only kind of wreck he’d ever seen was on the western
coast of their atoll. It was an abandoned tanker, rusting and fading away under the equatorial sun. He would go there sometimes when Rotwang was asleep and listen to an old HAM radio that still
worked. Rotwang was against Henry having any such contact with the outside world and its troubles, but it was a precious secret he kept while the old man poked and prodded and studied his every
detail. He listened to music, serials, the news. Just days earlier, in fact, he’d heard about Amelia Earhart and her beloved Little Red Bus heading out on a round-the-world flight, from Miami
to South America, Africa, Asia…and into the Pacific.

He snapped awake and seized control of his mind, purging the unwanted memories into their proper categories. He ordered himself: Focus. Harden. Be here now.

He sat in the loft of a dilapidated tenement. Dust motes swam in the beams of light cast down from holes in the ceiling. That was the only illumination in the room. The hideout he had chosen for
himself was certainly inefficient for his wireless charging purposes, but the trade-off was an added measure of security. While the old brick walls and lead pipes slowed the process of Henry
absorbing energy from nearby electrically-powered items, they could also block his signal from prying eyes. New York City would be swarming with Plus Ultra agents due to the World’s Fair and
whatever the group was planning for their major event. The flesh on his knuckles repaired itself. Slowly. He resolved to be patient.