A Better World Read Online Free PDF Page B

Because of that, my government wants to implant a microchip in my neck?
    PEOPLE:
    When you put it that way, the Monitoring Oversight Initiative does seem a little silly.
    FLYNN:
    The problem is that the media portrays this like there are two factions, norms and abnorms, and we’re all supposed to choose sides. But really, it’s a spectrum. At one end you have President Walker murdering his own people because he’s afraid of what brilliants represent, and he wants the power to contain them. On the other, you have abnorm terrorists saying it shouldn’t be about equal rights, that brilliants should rule the world. The extremists are the problem. Most people just want to live their lives.
    PEOPLE:
    Speaking of lives, you and your wife, Victoria’s Secret model Amy Schiller, recently had a baby girl—
    FLYNN:
    Oh God. Not the name question.
    PEOPLE:
    It’s an unusual name.
    FLYNN:
    I don’t know what to tell you, man. We want her to be her own person, to not feel like she has to fit the world’s constraints, and we both really like Thai food, so . . .
    PEOPLE:
    Noodle Flynn.
    FLYNN:
    Won’t be any others in her kindergarten class.

CHAPTER 3
    He was being the spider when the SUV finally stopped.
    The truck was black. There were two men inside. It had been coasting to a halt for almost three minutes. It would be three more before the doors opened. Then five minutes to cross the half dozen paces to where he sat. He had plenty of time to be the spider. An ocean of time, massive, deep, crushing, and cold. Time like the Mariana Trench, thirty-six thousand feet deep. Time that weighed and warped.
    The spider. Tan and black, an inch long. A wolf spider, he believed, although he was no great spider expert. He had been watching it for eleven hours. First had come revulsion, the primal skin-crawl. Eventually, the tracing of hair on her legs and abdomen—he had decided it was a female—came to look soft, almost inviting, like a stuffed animal. Eight eyes, shiny and complete. The fangs fascinated him. To bear your weaponry so blatantly before you, to move through the world as a nightmare. The spider regarded him, and he regarded the spider.
    She was perfect. Stillness itself, until motion was called for. And then motion so fast and precise it could hardly be seen by the prey. Brutal and without remorse. For her the world was only food and threat. Were there vegetarian spiders? He didn’t think so.
    No, she was a killer.
    From his position he could see both the spider and the SUV; he shifted focus to the vehicle. His eyes didn’t move, of course; they were locked in the glacial pace of muscles, of flesh and blood.But he had long ago learned to move his attention even while his body lagged behind. It was a simple thing to focus on the SUV and the two men inside it. The driver was speaking. It took twenty seconds for him to frame six words, and his lips were easily read.
    Inside the SUV, the driver asked, “So who is this guy, anyway?”
    “His name is Soren Johansen. He’s the most dangerous person I’ve ever met.” John Smith smiled through the windshield. “And my oldest friend.”
    Hello, John. I’ve missed you.

    It was hardest with people.
    There was a reason he was alone. In retreat, like a Buddhist monk on a mountaintop. And like the monk, he had been striving not for knowledge or wisdom but for nothingness. Not the idea of nothingness, not the exercise of it, thoughts sent drifting down the river as they intruded on his meditation. No, his comfort had come, when it did, in true moments of nothingness. Moments when he did not exist. Only in them did the relentless dragging of time not overwhelm.
    When he couldn’t be nothing, which was often, he became something else. Something simple and pure. Like the spider.
    People, though, were neither simple nor pure. It was agony watching them move through life like they were fighting through wet cement. Every motion endless, every word taking an eternity, and for what?