Fiona Fiona

The farmers are still asleep; that's how early it is. But Fiona is wide awake. She's on her third Diet Coke. She's dressed in her lab coat and she's speed-walking to work. Her heart is beating too fast from the caffeine so she slows, stops, clears her throat of spit from the top of the Ninth Avenue Bridge down to the rusty, dead trains below.

Fiona can see the whole ruinous landscape of downtown Moose Jaw from this vantage point, Main Street North churned up like a giant hoed the asphalt like soil, as though the canola for which the area was so super famous would grow high as the traffic light. The downtown was declared a disaster area after the incident. The tax base was insufficient to rebuild, a real shame since just a year ago it was quaint with shops and attractions that brought the tourists in. A hot spring, health spa and tennis club. A train station transformed into a liquor store. The Tunnels of Moose Jaw museum where unconfirmed stories of rum running and Al Capone were sold. There was a motel and an independent shoe store that used to thrive. Nits Thai restaurant with its movie theatre marquee. Even the casino was tasteful. All of it is boarded up now, this hub of small town commerce, this most sensitive of ecosystems.

Fiona can't reconcile how she got to this place of all the places. Harvard then Stanford then Kabul and now Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Other than the incident, there's never much excitement in this town. Every now and then a concert or a book fair, the lonely sound of a firecracker if it's a weekend. Much of Moose Jaw emptied out a decade ago when Syncrude and Suncor came of age. The men left to drive trucks and suck oil sands dry in hydrocarbon towns like Fort McMurray. The women left to bartend and strip for three times what they'd make in Regina.

Fiona hoists herself up on the metal railing of the bridge. The sun is rising now, sugary yellow and pinks creeping up from the horizon. She looks up across the mess of the downtown and the order of the soy fields to the place where the prairie sky begins, far away, with no hills or skyscrapers to hide behind. Her legs dangle in mid air, one circling the other, like she is stirring up trouble. She is, in a way. She is thinking of him.

Fiona's arms stretch into the colouring sky and the wind changes around them, increasing to a circling roar, as though she is a sorceress conjuring a spell. The jets are coming, Fiona says to the empty sky, not a thread, not a wisp of cloud in sight. Moose Jaw doesn't have cloudy days. That's why the NATO fighter pilots came, that's why Fiona came. Ah yes, she says, the absence of clouds. Her neck aches as she watches the jets rip overhead, squinting up at their red bellies soaring in a v-formation. The rumble they leave in their wake shakes the train cars and the bridge, the rust flaking off like dandruff. It is a deep vibration, her veins like strings being plucked. It reminds Fiona that being alive is dangerous, that she herself has the capacity to be dangerous.

~

Fiona waves her security card and steps inside the 15 Wing building. It's Sunday and it's early hours so the place is empty. Not even the night guard is on duty. When the bosses are away, he takes breakfast at 6:00 a.m. at the Java Express near Buffalo Pound.

Fiona scans her thumb in the elevator and selects subbasement four.

She scans her left eyeball to get inside the lab.

Scans her right to switch on the lights and the Keurig.

All the surfaces and walls in the laboratory are white. It gives Fiona a kind of snow blindness. She blinks and then she sees what she came for. Genetically-Enhanced Fighter Pilot Prototype 17, or GEFPP for short. GEFPP's body is suspended in a bullet-proof, leak-proof glass jar eight feet tall with busy monitors and backlit buttons begging to be pushed. He looks peaceful in the patented translucent goo, floating like an angel in heaven, the one that other scientists in another lab have disproved. He's wearing a suit not unlike a wet suit, only this suit has zippers over top his major organs should adjustments be needed. Fiona pulls on her surgical loupes and examines the black stubble planted across GEFPP's perfectly square jaw. She adjusts the magnification so she can evaluate the thickness of the follicles and the volume of each pore. She engineered his skin so he doesn't sweat, not for heat, not for stress. His parasympathetic nervous system was deactivated in Phase Three.