Joon-Ho Goes North

He leaves for Iceland on a Thursday without telling anyone first, and tells himself this is because the trip is exploratory and there's nothing to report until there is something to report. This is true. The other true thing is that telling the group would produce a conversation he isn't ready for specifically the conversation where Veira says January, Joon-Ho in the tone she's developed for things she's decided have a timeline, and he says I know, and she says then why are you on a plane to Reykjavik, and he doesn't have an answer that doesn't sound like the behaviour of a person who decided to act alone because waiting felt impossible.

Which is the behaviour of a person who is still learning.

He knows he's still learning.

The frequency signal in the Vein data has been running at the back of his probability models for three weeks, and what he knows about probability is that when a signal is present and you don't investigate it, the weight of the uninvestigated thing accumulates in the model as noise, and he's had enough noise in his models recently to last a considerably longer stretch than three weeks.

He books a flight. No return.

Reykjavik in December is the kind of darkness that isn't hostile, just honest six hours of light a day, the rest a deep blue-black the city's amber streetlights don't fully disrupt. He lands at eleven in the morning and it's already late-afternoon quality light. He rents a car. He drives north.

The signal in his probability resonance is directional now, has been since the restoration, exactly as Veira described: north-northwest, pointing toward the coast rather than inland, and beyond the coast toward open water. Four hours on roads that get progressively quieter and progressively more serious about their weather, and at the end of it he's in a village on the Westfjords coast eight buildings, a harbour, the specific weight of a place that has been here long enough to have stopped caring whether anyone comes.

He gets out of the car.

The wind is immediate and complete. He stands in the car park of the village's only guesthouse, which has a handwritten sign in the window, and feels the probability resonance running clean and precise in the cold air, and he turns slowly until he's facing the harbour.

The frequency is stronger here.

Not because the source is in the harbour. Because the harbour faces the direction the source is in, and facing the direction of a signal amplifies your resonance to it the way turning your ear toward a sound sharpens it. He stands in the wind and holds the frequency in his awareness and turns slowly, and the signal peaks when he's facing dead northwest.

Open water. North Atlantic.

He goes inside. The guesthouse owner is a woman in her seventies with hands that have clearly done sixty years of outdoor work and an expression suggesting she's seen considerably weirder things than a Korean-Czech probability analyst arriving alone in December. She gives him a room. She gives him soup. She doesn't ask what he's doing here.

He eats the soup by the window, watching the harbour in the last forty minutes of December light. He's running a probability model in his head rather than on paper, because the paper version needs inputs he doesn't have yet, and the head version is what he's learned to do in the absence of certainty the whole lesson of the last three months, distilled into a practice.

The model keeps returning the same output. Something is in the water. Not a metaphor. Something is genuinely in or under or around the north Atlantic in a direction he can point to from this window. Something generating a biological Vein signal at a frequency corresponding to none of the five documented bloodlines. Something that's been generating that signal since before the degradation event, possibly since before any living person in the Folklore was born.

His phone buzzes.

Veira: Are you in Iceland.

He types: Yes.

A pause. Then: I knew you'd go early. January was ambitious.

I'm being exploratory.

You're being Joon-Ho. What have you found.

He types: The frequency is stronger here. Directional from the Westfjords coast. I haven't found the source but I'm closer.

A pause longer than the previous ones.

Come home after the weekend. We'll go properly. Together. In January as agreed.

He looks at the harbour. At the deep blue-black past it.

Agreed, he types.

He puts the phone down. He looks at the water.

Something in the water looks back.

He can't see it. But the probability resonance tells him, with a precision that doesn't permit doubt, that the looking is mutual.

He closes the curtain.

He doesn't sleep for a long time.