Loop 1.

The over-sized numbers blinked on and off, counting down the seconds until 6:50am. Mo the cat stared at them for a moment, blinked and then looked away, apparently finding something of infinitely greater fascination in the air between over here and over there instead. He turned his head and looked at the enormous face just inches from him. The man shifted his weight slightly and began to breath through his nose, the hot air blasting onto Mo, ruffling his ginger fur.

Mo, ever the happy optimist, took this as a kind of abstract stroking and began to purr in response, the rhythm of his breathing in and out synchronising with the man’s own, to form a strange musical rhythm. Mo looked off again, his interest drawn by the fascinating invisible thing in the air again.

Fred Martinez, Mo’s owner, was not, he would readily explain to anyone willing to listen, the biggest fan of cats. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them, it was just that, well, they freaked him out a little. To him, they seemed not quite there somehow, if you got his drift; they were, he found, as fascinated by sleeping for hours in a warm shaft of sunlight as they were by torturing some poor innocent mouse they’d caught, and that, he reasoned, was not a normal set of priorities for any animal, especially not one you were supposed to share your house with.

No, Fred was definitely a dog person. You could, he said, rely on a dog. They were always glad to see you, always happy to chase a stick, loyal to the end – a dog could, within reason, be trusted. A dog could also be trained to perform useful tasks, such as fetching the morning paper, or to perform cute tricks, like rolling over on command. Plus, a dog would instinctively guard the homestead. But Charlotte, his daughter, had wanted a cat, and Rachel, his wife, had failed to back up what he had thought was a winning argument, so she had gotten her way. Charlotte usually got her way on this sort of thing – it was, ultimately, almost impossible for him to say no to her.

Of course, for his part, Mo, as with most cats, took Fred’s mild disinterest in him as a challenge, and had proceeded to spend as much time with or near Fred as was possible for an animal that was apt to spend 8 straight hours sleeping (before then retiring to find somewhere more comfortable for a quick nap). And so a kind of uneasy truce had built up between them (at least, that’s how Fred liked to think of it – the reality was that Mo had won utterly, and Fred had just gotten used to him, but then humans were like that). Fred did his thing, Mo did his, and Charlotte didn’t seem to mind either way, simply happy that Mo was now a part of the family.

The last few seconds ran out, 6:50 came, and the clock’s alarm began to sound. The shrill beeping took Mo by surprise, as it had done every morning for the last 9 months, causing him to jump, and in turn, waking Fred with a start.

“Whuh-huh?” Fred managed as the startled ball of stripy orange fur dragged itself across his face, leaving a trail of hair in its wake. The groggy man broke open an eyelid and then spat and blew away the morning’s dose of ginger hairs.

“Damn cat!” he called, half-heartedly at Mo’s tail, now disappearing through the bedroom door.

Fred reached over, hit the enormous snooze button on the top of the alarm and rolled over, sliding a hand onto Rachel’s exposed belly. She roused slightly and turned towards him, still half asleep.

“Morning,” he said, and then closed his eyes again, as they both drifted off.

The clock blinked on, counting away more seconds. 6:54 came and went, and then, from Rachel’s bedside table, came the familiar sounds of the Beach Boys, who apparently still wished that all girls could be of Californian origin, despite that chunk of American real-estate having long since sunk into the pacific.

Rachel’s clock radio was tuned to the camp broadcast, which, as far as Fred could tell, seemed to play nothing but a constant string of feel-good hits from the sixties and seventies. Still, it was better than the local Muslim pirate stations, which broadcast a meaty diatribe of anti-western rhetoric, anti-US sentiment and occasionally, for light relief, prayer sermons that explained in great detail (and great length) just why the Western World, and in particular ‘The Great Satan’, were very, very bad indeed.

Rachel stirred again, putting a gentle, soft hand on top of Fred’s.

“Morning,” she said, as if in much-delayed reply to him. Fred opened his eyes and looked into hers. He smiled, shifted towards her, and then pecked a kiss on her cute little button nose. Fred inhaled, deeply, and then blew something that was half a sigh and half a laugh through his nose and across her face.

“Ewww, stinky breath,” she complained, making him smile.

“That damn cat was in here again,” he said.

“Was it?” Rachel grinned

“Yes. I thought I asked you to start closing the door?”

“You did. However, I think you’ll find that you were the last to go to bed.”

“Oh,” he said, the memory dredging itself to the surface. “Right.”

“Yes, ‘Oh, right’ indeed.”

“Mmmm,” he said and shifted his body even closer to hers, sliding his hand round the curve of her waist, onto her back and then down towards her smoothly curved backside. “And there was me about to punish you.”

“Oh, you were, were you?”

“Yes,” he cupped his hand around her soft buttock; smiled, mischievously. “Like this,” he said and then quickly raised his hand and brought it down in a smack that made an audible crack, his smile broadening into a grin.

Rachel flinched, a slightly shocked expression wrinkled its way across her beautiful face and then she kicked out in retaliation. But she was too late; Fred was already out of the bed by the time her foot swung around, giggling as he went.

“Hey,” she called. “If you’re gonna punish a girl, you have to carry it through. You can’t leave me hanging like this.”

Fred was half way to the door, but turned back to her at this, a witty come back at the ready. A pillow smacked him square in the face, and Rachel guffawed with laughter. Fred cut his losses and went for a shower. There was no way he was going to win this battle.

Fred’s snoozing alarm went off, and Rachel reached across his side of the bed to switch it off, enjoying the warm glow his body had left on the mattress as she did.

-----

“Daddy, Daddy, look what I did!” Charlotte shouted, as she bounced into the room, full of energy. Mo, sat just inside the kitchen door – ostensibly washing himself, but really, Fred knew, keeping up his constant vigil on him – was nearly trampled under foot.

“Mo-mo!” she shouted as the cat got out of the way, sharpish.

“Yes, Mo-mo,” said Fred, turning away from the morning paper towards the young girl. “Now what did you did-ed?” he asked her.

“I did-ed this picture!”

“It’s just ‘did’, honey,” corrected Rachel, gently. “Ignore your illiterate moron of a father.”

Fred glanced at her and poked out a tongue, eliciting a giggle from his young compatriot in the restructuring of the frankly inefficient English language. She handed him the sheet of paper.

It was a picture of them in front of the their house. At least, that’s what he thought it was. Charlotte was only 4 and, like most 4 year olds, was confined to the use of crayons and a more basic, utilitarian interpretation of the world around her. In the top left corner was the sun, bright yellow, with lots of rays coming from it (at least, he considered, out here in the Saudi desert, that was not in the least bit inaccurate – if they had still been in Maine, this would not have been the case). Towards the bottom of the picture a series of figures were evident, and behind them a house.

It was a child’s interpretation of a house – any house – as a tall oblong block, another rectangle for the door, front and centre, and four perfectly square windows, divided into four equally sized smaller squares by two long lines, to define the panes of glass. A triangular roof on top completed the building. The house itself was drawn in bright, brick-red, the windows glass-blue, the door a painted green and the roof, well the roof was purple for some reasons – perhaps Charlotte had run out of different crayon colours.

He had heard, on some TV show or another, that children all over the world drew houses in the exact same way. The form and concept was there – building made of bricks, windows, doors and a roof – but the reality of where they were actually from, and hence the actual architecture that surrounded them didn’t impact on this tendency to present the concept, instead of the fact. Take their current home for example – it was, for all intents and purposes, a concrete bunker. The building was a squat, flat-roofed, single floor dwelling with walls 5 feet thick, that were reinforced with some amazing material that Fred didn’t quite understand, but that could apparently withstand everything short of a tactical nuke strike. The windows were few, and were more like portholes on a submarine than anything that would fit into most people’s definition of a window. The door was constructed from several 8-inch think, reinforced titanium slabs that operated on an airlock principle, completely sealing the insides from the outside world and any biological or chemical danger it may contain.

It was a long way from what was drawn on the picture, so Fred just marvelled at the awesome innocence of youth, if not the actual artistic accuracy of the picture.

“That’s great honey!” he said and then deftly reached down and hoisted her up onto his knee. He held out the picture in front of them. “So, is this us?” he asked, indicating the figures with a thumb.

“Yes,” said Charlotte in that ‘Of course! Are you kidding me?’ tone he had heard many a toddler use at the pre-school class when he had occasionally stopped by to pick her. Apparently, the figures were obviously to all but the stupidest of people. Clearly, he must fall into this category, so she continued.

“This is Mo-mo,” she said, pointing at the large, bright orange cat-like blobs on the far right. Fred felt Rachel come up behind him and lean on his back. Her head dropped down to be beside his, looking intently over his shoulder, as their daughter now explained the finer points of her work to them.

“And who’s this?” he asked, pointing at the smallest of the three humanoid figures, expecting it to be charlotte’s own self-portrait.

She looked round at him, evidently surprised that he had not recognised the person immediately. “That’s you, Daddy,” she said.

There was a moments pause and then he heard Rachel snigger, he shrugged his shoulder, pushing her off and she retreated towards the fridge, a hand over her mouth, holding in her amusement. Charlotte watched her go.

“Why is Daddy the smallest?” Fred asked her. There was one hope of salvation – maybe he was meant to be further away. Maybe his young daughter had grasped the mechanics of perspective at an incredibly young age, proving not only that the picture was accurate, but that she was some sort of undiscovered artistic genius as well.

“Because Daddy is small,” she replied. A new wave of hilarity erupted from behind the Fridge door. Fred ignored his treacherous partner.

“But Daddy is taller than Charlotte, isn’t he?”

“At the moment,” came the crushing reply. Well, it seemed that maybe Charlotte was something of an undiscovered genius after all, but in the field of genetics, rather than the arts. It was certainly true that Charlotte had inherited a bucket-load of Rachel’s tall, elegantly beautiful genes, thankfully avoiding his family’s curse of a short, stocky build.

Fred had always maintained that he was not sensitive about his height (though he knew Rachel would beg to differ), but he couldn’t help but feel a little stunned by his daughter’s outright dismissal of him as a mere midget. Indeed, as Fred examined the picture further, he realised that Mo the cat was actually taller than him.

Fred swallowed what little remained of his bruised pride.

“So is this you and Mommy?”

“Yup, that’s me in the middle,” she said, pointing at the figure with the triangular dress, a full-head taller than his own portrait. “And that’s mommy.” Charlotte indicated the Amazonian stood on the left, holding Charlotte’s hand, great swirls of blonde hair sweeping down towards the ground.

“And doesn’t she look pretty?” he said.

“Yes, mommy is very pretty.” Charlotte looked over towards her mother, grinning.

The figure behind the Fridge door had finally stopped laughing and emerged holding a bottle of milk.

“Thank you, both,” she said, approaching the table. “Now come on Charlotte, get down and have your breakfast, or you’ll make your midget daddy late for work.” Fred shot out an elbow, catching her softly in the belly and making her bend over, giggling a-new and nearly dropping the milk.

Fred guided his daughter as she slipped off his knee and to the floor, then stood up.

“Well, I’m proud of my Daughter’s handiwork, and I’m going to put it up for all to see on the fridge door.” He stepped over to the refrigerator and pinned it with a fridge magnet – an upside-down letter p – in the dead centre of the door.

“Yay!” shouted Charlotte, now tucking into her cereal.

As if on cue, Mo the cat jumped up onto the table and plonked himself down neatly in the centre of Fred’s paper.

-----

Fred slipped the car into autopilot and pushed back in his chair.

Destination? It asked him, in its strange, synthesized voice. He’d tried the pre-recorded voices – the seductive female tone, the reassuringly smooth male voice; they’d even had a bit of fun when they’d got the car recording their own voices, but after a while, Fred had found they all grated somewhat and had reverted to the default synthetic voice – it seemed to convey the vehicle’s personality better somehow.

“Work,” he replied. A light on the dash blipped once in recognition of the pre-programmed location.

It was Rachel’s day to take Charlotte to the nursery and, after this morning, he welcomed the peace and quiet – really, what was getting into that girl? Midget, indeed. As the desert scenery slipped past – an endless sea of dunes drifting like great, silent, frozen waves on an ocean of sand – Fred idly wondered whether Rachel hadn’t put her up to it. It wouldn’t be the first time they had colluded against him.

Still, at least it meant that Charlotte was happy, making the best of their situation. The base was huge – a massive sprawling complex of buildings, parade grounds, ranges, schools, offices; there was even a small shopping district that had grown up. Size meant people, lots of people, and that was good for Charlotte. He’d been afraid when they’d been posted here that it would be bad for her, that she would end up isolated and friendless. After all, she and Rachel could hardly pop over to the nearest town and mix with the locals. That is, unless of course you counted being dragged through the streets, then decapitated in the town square and finally having your head stuck on pole as ‘just a bit of friendly banter’. Plus it was now a smoking, bombed out ruin.

No, they had to stay on the base at all times, and it had proved a God-send that the place was so huge and there were so many other people. It was good for Charlotte, and in the end it had turned out to be good for Rachel too. When he’d told her she’d have to move (again), Fred had seen that pained expression he hated so much. She’d have to leave her job (again), leave her newly made circle of friends (again) start all over again (again). She’d hidden it well, and he’d known she loved him and appreciated the good that he did for his country, so she had not argued, but he’d also known how it had, deep down, upset her, and he didn’t like upsetting her. But here she’d dropped right in. The base was jammed full of other idle moms and wives who’d all been living the same, constantly up-heaved life as her, and she’d taken to it like a duck to water.

“Why haven’t we lived on a base before, Fred?” He recalled her asking, not long after they’d eventually gotten settled in. “I dunno, hon’, I guess my postings never really called for it before.” Was all he could come up with. In truth, he’d wanted to avoid moving them into the cosseted, strictured world of the military compound, but perhaps he’d presumed too much in making that call for them. “Hmmm,” she’d said. “I think we should always try and live on the base in future.” Strange how you could know someone for years, and yet not really know them at all.

Fred was drawing close to the centre of the base now, the density and size of the buildings increasing as he went, and he flipped the car back into manual. It was an old habit of his – he was happy for the car to drive him around when there were few to no people, but as soon as there were pedestrians, he liked to take over the driving himself. He guessed, if you’d described the behaviour to an analyst, he’d have told you it was a kind of subconscious manifestation of his job, that it was an innate mistrust of the machine and its judgement calls that lead him to want to step in and wrestle control from it. Fred just thought it was more fun driving in towns.

Fred pulled up at the lights, just a block or so away from his building. A thick stream of a people began to cross, some in uniforms, some not; some of them he worked with, some of them he knew socially, most of them he did not. Fred glanced across them, raised a hand in acknowledgement to a few and then stopped.

Who, he thought, is that?

The figure instantly did not fit. He did not match his surroundings, he did not belong. It was as if he had been pulled from somewhere else entirely and dumped here in the middle of the crossing.

The man was standing still, in the dead centre of the road, facing directly at Fred. At least Fred assumed it was a man, from the moderately stocky build, but he was wearing a long, heavy trench coat, with the collar pulled up; underneath this was a black, hooded top, which was pulled up and was similarly pulled down across his face, his features buried deep in the heavy shadow, making it difficult to be sure. However, Fred could feel the eyes burning out at him, staring, unwaveringly right at him with an intensity that bordered on malice. The overall impression that struck Fred was, bizarrely, of a character in one of those post-apocalyptic cyber-punk films that had been all the rage at the turn of the century. Fred glanced down at the temperature monitors on the dash. Inside, the air-con was keeping everything at a cool 18 degrees Celsius; outside, the temperature was already a sweltering 24C, despite the earliness of the hour. Fred’s gaze shifted back to the man in the long coat. How the hell could he wear something like that in this temperature, he wondered. And why a trench coat? In the 9 months they’d been here it had not rained once – and why would it? This was the middle of the Saudi dessert. Rainfall here was probably measured in the millimetres per decade range – not the sort of weather you’d even need to consider wearing rainproof gear in.

Fred leant forward on the steering wheel, and watched as the flow of pedestrians peaked, the man becoming obscured occasionally, only popping out through small gaps and breaks in the crowd, which broke smoothly around him, like a wave hitting a jagged shoreline. It was still early enough that many people where going to work, or coming off of stints on a night shift. Fred’s attention was now entirely focused on the strange man in the heavy coat. He watched as the man slowly began to tilt his head. It was subtle at first, but he gradually realised that it was leaning across to a skew angle.

A huge man in a smart naval uniform crossed between them, dragging Fred’s gaze with him. When he had looked back, the man in the coat was nowhere to be seen. Fred realised that, without knowing it, he had been mirroring the man’s head movement, and straightened his neck. He glanced around again, but couldn’t see him. The lights changed to red for the pedestrians and then cycled to green for the traffic. There was still no sign of the man anywhere.

“Weird,” Fred said to himself. There was a smart toot from the driver behind; Fred held up a hand in apology and drove off.

-----

“Hey, Fred.”

“Hey, Paul. How's things?”

“Oh, so-so, y’know? Wife’s threatening to leave me again.”

“Doesn’t that make it three times in the one month?”

“Yeah, give-or-take. This time she spent 5 hours on the phone to her mom, and then I got the floods of tears routine. I swear, that mother of hers would happily see me in a hole in the ground. At least that way her precious daughter could come home – hell, she’s probably got at least half a dozen ‘more suitable’ husbands already lined up to take my place.”

“I feel for you, man.”

“Nah, don’t worry, we had a flaming row, and then we got down to the make-up sex.”

Fred raised an eyebrow at this. Paul had once told him that all 8 of their huge brood had probably been conceived during make-up sex. It made sense to Fred, as every single one of them was as high-strung and at least as rampant as the act that had spawned them.

“Dude,” Paul said, noticing the errant eyebrow. “Don’t worry – condoms were all present and correct. I think. It got a little hazy by the third or fourth time.”

“On that last part, I’d like to suspend the ‘I feel for you’ remark,” Fred said, with a sly grin. Paul laughed. “Seriously, though,” Fred continued. “How do you guys stay together?”

“Now there’s a question. I guess it’s something to do with opposites attracting.”

It made sense to Fred – if there were two more opposite personalities in the world than Paul and his wife Sheila, Fred would like to see it. Or actually, on second thought, he probably wouldn’t. Fred had once even experienced what Paul described as a ‘flaming row’ and it was not like any argument between a couple he’d ever heard of. All of the flaming part was entirely localised to Sheila – she’d screamed, ranted, raved, sworn like a sailor, hurled around crockery, ornaments and even at one point thrown a knife at his best fried. Paul, for his part, had remained cool, calm and collected, moderated his language and tone, put forth his point in a reasonable way, dodged, weaved and (thankfully) ducked just in time; all of which had in fact angered Sheila further.

When she’d apparently burnt herself out, and they’d started to kiss, Fred had made his excuses and left. The thing that really got Fred was it had all been over something so simple – a fishing trip with the boys. Apparently, Sheila had arranged a trip for them to go see her mother, but had completely failed to tell Paul, and when he’d gotten back that afternoon she had exploded, like an erupting volcano whose pressure had built up so high that it destroyed half the neighbouring country when it went. Quite why she’d not just phoned him on his cell instead of allowing the anger and resentment to boil to a fever pitch Fred didn’t know, but then nothing about their relationship and the way they behaved made much sense to Fred. They were like the yin and yang of couples.

“I think you’re more like Gunpowder and a Candle,” Fred responded. Paul smirked.

“Anyway, dude, Major Connings was looking for you late yesterday. I think he left a note at your station.”

“Really?” Fred said, looking down and seeing the folded piece of paper. “What was he after?”

“I don’t know, mentioned something about a medical – did you skip yours last month?”

“No, I had it along with everybody else.” Fred’s brow crinkled and he picked up the note, flipping it open. Fred, it said, simply. Come see me when you get a chance tomorrow (15th). Martin.

“Maybe they found something wrong with your brains,” Paul was saying. “I always said you were a tightly wound bundle of neurosis waiting to explode and kill everybody, didn’t I?” But Fred wasn’t really listening.

‘Martin’? He was thinking. That was... odd. In all the years they’d known each other, Fred had never seen Connings sign off with his first name like that. Connings was a steadfast, by-the-military-numbers kinda guy, and so always, always put his rank. Hell, he almost always used official headed paper and got his secretary to formally type all of his communications, no matter how trivial. Indeed, there was even a rumour on base that he’d once written his then girlfriend (and soon to be wife) a love letter and, such a stickler for official-dom was he, he’d had that typed out on headed paper too.

Fred had known Martin for eight years – they’d enrolled in the air force at the same time and had suffered their way through basic training together – and he’d known Martin’s wife, Daphne, for about six of those years. Fred therefore knew for an absolute fact that no such thing had ever happened, but still, it was one of those rumours that managed to hit the nail on the head more accurately than reality ever could.

“Huh?” he said to Paul, who was still rabbiting on.

“I said, ‘you’re mentally defective, bro’.”

“Hello Pot, my name’s Kettle,” replied Fred.