The Forever Watch (25 page)

“Ode an die Freude” now, as I make one last series of checks, subjecting the tower to different levels of stress and strain. Those last triumphant notes fade out and away, while the skeleton and skin of the newborn giant sighs and whispers under load-testing and validation.

I clap my hands and release the grid's power and smile up at this strange-looking girl. She is out of place, here in Edo Section's residential area, too much sleek future gleam among all the white and blue pagodas and compounds. Soon, many of those will go too.

The greenhorns look suitably impressed now, and I am pleased by their wide eyes, their open mouths. I have checked their files over—of the four of them, even the strongest is only half of my power rating, though that boy is surely the future of the department. They will be better than the individuals they replaced, if they work at it.

It seemed to me to take only minutes, but that was an ordeal that lasted ten hours straight. My mouth is dry, and without the music to buoy my thoughts along, I feel the exhaustion weighing on my neck and shoulders. The sun is already setting, and Hennessy will be busy throughout the night completing the interior.

I hope our new teammates paid attention and took notes. Watching this sort of work may be boring after a while, but they have to actually do this too, and to do it requires an intimate familiarity with every process. If we were not in such a rush, in their proper training a build-master would walk them through the scanning of each part of the blueprint and then the working out of how one's amplifier programming converts it into scripted telekinetic act based on each contributing mind's will and emotions.

“Okay, ladies,” I croak out to the new ones. “Now, take a break. Eat something. Nap. When you get back, pay attention to Hennessy and keep taking notes on your tablets. You'll join his gestalt next week when we do this all over again.”

It is the end of the day and a department memo winds its way down to the field office, strictly for Administrator rank and above.

Unbelievable.

All this activity is required so that an entire section of the Habitat can be closed off—reassigned for some secret purpose, to be placed under direct control by a joint task force of the Ministries of Information and Health. Thousands of crew have to move into the rest of the Habitat, and all of the food-generating capacity of Beijing Section's vertical farms that will be lost must be compensated for in the remaining farms.

It is to be done by the end of the year. The crew's living space has never been contracted so rapidly before, and certainly not to retask Habitat real estate toward some other purpose.

Something is happening,
Barrens would say, alarmed. No, perhaps he would not be—for him, the Council always makes unfathomable decisions over the crew, for purposes that are never revealed. He might even be amused at my shock.
You're too used to thinking you know why things happen. That's not what it's like for most of us.

He would be right. Too troubled to focus on further reports, on evaluations of our new teammates and recommendations about the next projects, I escape for a time to a public hard-line terminal fifteen minutes away from our current work site. Finally, I check on what fish my nets might have reeled in, in the many weeks I have neglected them.

There is the usual explosion of data to filter down and skim.

And then …

And then. My hands trace the words hovering in my visual feed. It is Barrens. Messages. Assembled from fragments distributed throughout the Web, a line here in one forum, a few lines there on a random person's log about his pets. It is a means of communicating with me that only one who knows exactly how my search algorithms work could use.

They are arranged like pages in a journal. I am hot and I am cold as I feel his emotions poured out in those digital thoughts. Longing for me. His doubts. His excitement about finding like-minded people in the shadows.

The newest entry, however, freezes my heart. The date is from the week before.

They are already watching you, Hana. You have to run. Today. Get to where they can't track your Implant. I will find you.

17

It is here.

It is now.

And I am not ready. I had planned for this contingency, but with the avalanche of work hours imposed by the Habitat Reconfiguration, I never got to completing my prep.

I still don't know where Barrens is. I haven't even completed the design for the signal analysis module.

I was going to have multiple bags with supplies packed at home, at the office, and a smaller one on me at all times, to be ready to run. I bought backpacks with lots of little pockets and extra amplifiers and various useful little gadgets and never even got them out of the packaging.

I was going to write a multimedia management manual for Hennessy, with every little tip and bit of advice I could think of. At least I got around to delegating more responsibilities to him.

I was going to have a nice secure message that would fire off untraceably, apologizing to my friends and telling them to stay safe, and not to worry about me. At least we were hanging out more again, until the cursed Ministry project took over my life.

Chilled and shivering in my seat despite the warm sunlight streaming down on me through the window of the little booth, time running out, I'll just have to manage.

I send out a one-word command to my little bots.
Eclipse
. My part of the swarm begins to make compressed, encrypted copies of its particles and their data. Then they break the packets apart and spirit them away across the Analytical Nodes of the Nth Web. The links are severed, and the ongoing processes write over themselves. The parts of the program not under my control will live on, but the processes directly linked to me will vanish, keep ISec from being able to take control if they are aware of the Monster. The parts of it that I was modifying to track Barrens go dormant.

There is no time to get a change of clothes or the tablets with my latest design efforts.

I have
touch
. And I like to think I am pretty smart. Whatever I don't have, I can make. Plastech is all around me. Even what I am wearing. Though it might take time to reconstruct the coding I have done on the mobile devices at the apartment, it's all still in my head, perfect memories of how they were made.

I step back out onto the street and know that it is too late.

Lyn is there, with a devastated look on her face, as she walks toward me in a colorless, murky Information Security coat, at the head of a column of five black-armored Enforcers.

There is no time to talk. The Enforcers raise their hands, and there is darkness as they reach into my head and shut me off.

 

 

The walls of my cell are in friendly colors. A border at the bottom edge is a deep shade of green, perhaps myrtle, then there's a light blue, like the sky. The painted flowers are in bright yellows, chartreuse and pear.

Everything is luminous to a greater or lesser degree—the light comes from everywhere and so it seems to come from nowhere. It never changes, so my body has no environmental cues to track time—even with the internal chronometer function of my neural Implant, my sleep cycle starts to fracture, and I am always tired. No one has spoken to me since I was processed and placed here.

A niche has been hollowed out of the wall for a bed. The top inch of the plastech has been processed into foam cushioning. It is surfaced with what feels like skin, but I have seen it before in my materials briefings and I know its tightly woven fibers are tougher than steel, tougher than carbon composites or ceramic blends. The commode in the opposite corner from the bed is metallic and efficient, rounded. There is not even a door, let alone a doorknob. Food comes in through a slot in another niche in another wall at random times, another measure to confuse the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the brain. There are no utensils, either. There is no loose plastech anywhere.

Every surface is subtly charged with another person's psi. The entire room is a one-way amplifier, under the control of others.

My gifts can affect nothing, except for the water I can get from the faucet and the food I can float from the feed trough to my mouth—just the tasteless, if nutritious, mush of protein, fiber, sugars, and fats from the bioreactors that recycle the organic garbage of the ship. The cheapest eats possible. And there is, of course, no access to the Web.

Eating this way, using telekinesis to lift food to my mouth, reminds me.

At fifteen years old, I broke my right wrist during a game of basketball after school; I tripped across the feet of a doughy-looking boy named Arnold when we both chased after a rebound, and I landed wrong. For the two days it took the pain to fade after a Doctor used Psychic Healing to repair the fracture, I used
touch
for a spoon, to hold my toothbrush, to put on my clothes, to tie my shoes, to be the hand I couldn't use.

“You make that look so easy,” Mala said admiringly.

I am glad I have
touch
instead of
bruiser
psychometabolism. Superstrength and speed won't get me out of this cell, but psychokinesis means I don't have to eat on hands and knees with my head down like a dog.

My clothes were taken from me, every hair on my scalp and skin shaved off with the precision that only a psychic blade can achieve. Perhaps it is meant to be dehumanizing, to encourage prisoners to live in the pleasant escape of perfect memories, better days. Perhaps the persons on the other end of the amplifier that is my prison can eavesdrop on my thoughts more easily that way.

I clear my mind. Meditation is a refuge.

For only an hour a day, I let myself indulge in other people's experiences of cats and children I had purchased over the last year, and my own memories of better times. All maintained through the Implant. I can play them over and over, and when I am sick of them, there are more memories from when I was younger: all the movies I've seen, the books I've read, the concerts I've attended. An inner universe is inside those thoughts. But I have to limit my time in them. It would be too easy to lose myself in my head, to let go of the days.

Humans can get used to anything. I know this because in the bad old days of Earth's dark wars, minorities that were disapproved off by majorities found themselves getting accustomed to much worse than what I am going through now.

They were surrounded by the smell of death in their camps while they were starved and worked to the bone.

Escape into memories, for them, was surely harder.

Knowing now that the psionic technologies we use are alien in origin, I can also understand all the limits humans have in using them. Some things are easy, while other tasks require more understanding of the Builders' technology than we have. Otherwise, why allow prisoners access to these perfect past lives through the Implant to comfort themselves? If they could just turn an Implant off, it would be a more devastating punishment than any prison. No psychic talents, nothing but blurry, deceptive brain-based memory for company, no direct access to the Nth Web, no use of most of the devices it takes to live on the ship at all.

It is harder to code into my neural Implant without an external device, especially with how fuzzy I am from the poor sleep induced by the constant light. But I manage; I just have to be more careful, as stray thoughts add in pictures or smells or touches that have nothing to do with the DREAM33 programming language used on the device. There is nothing but time. Old exercises to refine the clarity of my thoughts reestablish the mental discipline of precise thinking. I cannot affect my environment, but the Implant is still a part of me.

It takes three days to write a function to control the brightness of the signals along my optic nerves. It allows the simulation of a proper night and a proper day by altering the perception from my eyes.

It helps. My sleep starts to return to proper ship time. Clarity returns. Even if the food comes at random, I hold off from eating it until it is at a reasonable hour for a meal. There are things still under my control.

 

 

I exercise when I'm awake. Push-ups, sit-ups, shoulder-width dips, lunges, crunches. The things I used to watch Barrens do sometimes in the mornings, or when he would wake in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep anymore. I shadowbox in the evenings, going through the basic self-defense drills he showed me. Simple jabs, straights, lateral elbows, low kicks.

I push my mental training, now that I am at least rested, and I play with tricks to better apply my
touch
talent even without access to the grid's endless power. I lift individual drops of water into the air and have them dance for me around the room, even as I change their shapes. I cleanse myself with hard sprays of water that I redirect from the tap, and I dry off by shucking the moisture away with the steadily improving grip of my mind. As the hairs on my body and on my head start to come in and turn to stubble, I shave them off with a slender filament, a telekinetic razor—I'd never managed such precision before.

The blade pleases me. But I bury any thoughts of using it as a weapon. There is, after all, always someone watching me. Any visitor that comes for me will know I can do this, will be warned by my jailers.

For Enforcers, such manipulations are just parlor tricks. They are the elite of the elite. From hearsay, I know their psi-training is beyond me. Not just in terms of raw power, but technique.

When I was a student at the Class V Center, one of the Enforcer cadets from Officer Command School came to my psionics class to demonstrate some of their manipulations. That is the only time I have seen a man fly under his own power, without the aid of an amplifier. When that glowing figure descended from the sky to our training field, it was like a visitation from God. He played games with us, simultaneous Ping-Pong games using telekinetically controlled paddles against ten students.