The Forever Watch (31 page)

“Me too.”

We talk another two hours.

He tells me about his people. Their quirks. How he gathered them up from the dark corners of the Web. Dreamers. Crazies.

His inner circle consists of Gregory, who never completed his medical training, but was close, Tommy, a police mechanic, Susan, formerly an entry-level propaganda officer, and of course Bullet, whose psychometry has led them to several finds such as the secret food caches.

“They were his recruits. Crèche-mates. Oh, and they have a thing. A deal. The kid likes her; she likes Tommy instead.”

With Barrens right here, the temptation I had to keep fighting to escape to cat-brushing and breast-feeding memories seems to belong to another me.

I missed you.

He holds me just a little tighter.
I regret leaving you behind. I'm sorry.

Dummy.

 

 

I jerk awake. How long was I asleep? The chronometer says it was just ten minutes.

I feel Barrens looking down at me. Smiling.

“I haven't told ya what I think of the new look,” he says, slowly caressing my bare scalp.

Part of me wants to jerk away. The part left from before detention. The remnants of vanity, the old pride in my appearance.

Then he kisses the top of my head, and I feel a shiver start there that seems to run right down my neck and along my spine. That's different. He kisses me again and there's a little spasm that makes it all the way down the leg tucked up over his tree-trunk thighs and along my arms, which still don't reach all the way around his enormously broad back.

“Want me to grow it out?” My voice is all breathy and I feel a touch silly.

“I kind of like this.” He lifts me up, turns me easily. He cradles me against his chest, fingers touching their way down my scalp and neck.

I just listen to him breathing. Wondering what happens if I fall asleep. Wondering if, when I wake, I'll have been triggered in my sleep.

I should sleep somewhere else. It's not safe. If I turn out to be like Miyaki, I could do so much harm.

Don't. You already fell asleep, more than once. Stay.

Doesn't mean it's okay. Miya seemed fine to you too.

“I'll take my chances,” he growls. His embrace tightens.

I've missed this so much, my gentle, pale giant.

21

At first, all I do is rest. And then all I do is watch others work and train. More than a few look at me with outright suspicion, and worry.

It is a week before anyone remembers to tell me that the group has taken the name the Archivists.

The amplifier I took from that ISec clerk serves as a distraction for a little while. It is a civilian defense amp, limited in output and onboard computing power. It looks like a slender hoop of silvery gold; the circuitry is nanoscale and far too small for the eye to see.

The average crewman would not know where to start to modify one, though a number might know how to bypass some of the safety features and overclock the hardware to let it draw about 10 or 20 percent more power, at the risk of overheating and burnout. Salvador had us make them from scratch in class, way back when.

The eyes can't see the circuitry, but when engaging the amplifier, my psi runs through each tiny line doped into the plastech matrix, and through those infinitesimal pulses, a properly written application in one's Implant can map the microstructure. From there, it is about the hours it takes to add a few grains of plastech taken from the raw construction ingots the Archivists have lying around, and adding to the existing template. More capacitors and parallel channels let it draw and hold more power from the grid, more memory and processing power let it actually control that additional power, and finally, it takes mere seconds to flash its operating system and upload the one I keep a copy of in my Implant, which I have been tweaking and using on all my amplifiers for over a decade.

The result: it looks the same, but has close to the ratings and access codes of the engineer's gauntlets I'm used to and has my usual suite of applications loaded to make it more responsive to my style of
touch
and thinking.

Unfortunately, I finish it too quickly and again have too little to do and too much to think about.

I could mope at being kept out of things. I could be offended that no one has asked me to help with the perpetual tweaks on the AI swarm. But from my conversations with Bullet, they too know that it's special, that it's not like any other program they've worked with. Under the prodding of the two most important figures in the group, the others act a little more openly around me, and a few start to talk to me about the data-miner, about my design and how it has changed.

At “night,” I close my eyes and seem to catch a glimpse of something huge coming into shape around us. Mincemeat deaths going on even now. Suspicious Retirements. Man-eating things in the sewers. The secret history of the Noah. The Builders. The other groups of Archivists, pursuing their own ends. My data-mining application that has become so much more, become a secret communications tool, become AI, working relentlessly toward so many disparate goals. Construction of undeclared research laboratories in Beijing Section. And somewhere, the encroaching steps of those who hunt us: Karla, and the rest of Information Security.

When I try to fit it together, this mass of details cascades and swims, refuses to assemble into a coherent whole. The pieces change shape and keep moving when I try to touch them.

The Archivists seethe, agitated, impatient for the next step, the next big reveal. After years as individuals feeling alone in their doubts about society, they have been brought together, they feel validation. They are getting closer to the great secrets at the heart of all the mysteries. They have no doubts.

Their certainty and faith make me nervous.

I wish we had more time alone together, Barrens and I.

He leads. He manages. And he teaches the kids how to fight.

Everyone practices with amplifiers.

They also train to do without amps, for fighting in areas of the ship without power.

Before my detention, this would have resulted in a major argument between Barrens and me. Because he will not rule out the use of Psyn.

Only the rarest of individuals have the internal discipline to use it without personality instability.

Barrens is one. The effect of Psyn on him is eerie. It makes him coldly, mechanically rational. Perhaps, having wrestled with his inner beast all his life, he finds this external chemical influence to be just another mental influence for him to crush into submission.

I avoid those sessions when he trains the others with it. I loathe it. It terrifies me, the drug.

He used Psyn because he had to. Miyaki, fully empowered, amplifier encoded with all the safety bypass codes ISec wrote into her mind, was murdering them.

After that incident, they had all wanted to be tested for Psyn compatibility. Voted on it, demanded it.

He looks uncomfortable when he explains, “Better I help them use it safely than for them to screw around with it on their own.”

Of the twenty men and women in this cell, only a few, other than Barrens, react positively to Psyn. Most, tested with but a drop each, either have too little response, too much response, or are overwhelmed with hallucinations. He is conservative with the dosage and keeps a close eye on the rate of consumption.

He teaches them to work in teams of three, standard police strike teams of a support telekinetic assisting and covering two
bruisers
.

They learn hand-to-hand combat and weapon use. They practice taking apart and putting together and using their crossbows.

An oversize version, practically a ballista of ancient Roman design, fires bolts all of a meter long—it takes two men to operate one, or a
bruiser
or
touch
talent using Psyn. These massive projectiles, shot with such velocity, can punch through inches of armored wall.

The smallest ones are worn on the wrist, little more than slingshots. But rather than true bolts, they fire hollowed shafts with just enough force to shatter them upon impact. Two chemicals are contained in separate cells in the shaft, and when they mix, it produces a caustic gas that burns the eyes and respiratory passages, instantly incapacitating a man with one breath.

They practice target shooting. How to move together, covering each other.

We both acknowledge that he is training a fighting force and not just a group of eccentric investigators; it is a simple enough thing.

“Would you like me to help with that?” I ask.

“Why would you?”

You only want them safe, isn't it? These are defensive tactics and drills.

We do not look each other in the eye. He puts his heavy paw on my hip and I lean into him.

They are grateful though, his little soldiers, when I take the time to build obstacle courses and assorted urban environments for them to train in.

If we could only just stay like this, in one of the deep, unpopulated areas of the Noah, outside of the Dome. Perhaps the Ministries and the Enforcers would just let it go, just let us vanish into these shadows, rather than expend the effort to find us.

Finally, the others accept my presence enough that few object when Barrens has me sit in during his exchanges with the other leaders of the Archivists, facilitated by the AI net's communication functions.

They speak of inciting action, of changing the way the crew sees the world we live in. A former low-level ISec agent named Gomez says, “We are not spending all this time preparing troops with the aim of just running and surviving.” An advertising executive named Thorn, sleek and handsome and a little too eager, talks openly of changing the system. He speaks of working on something more potent than crossbows. Many others clamor to have their say.

After these virtual meetings, Barrens looks exhausted, his heavy face worn, leaner. The armrests of the chair he sits in are crooked, crushed by his hands, which express what he cannot.

I just want to find out what's going on. I just think people should know what's going on.

Why are you with them, Leon? You don't need them.

I draw his huge head down and hold him.

They didn't start out like that. But they're not all wrong, Hana. If we find out. Well. Change may need those who are willing to fight.

I make myself useful in between the moments. Aside from improving the surrounding architecture for their needs, building proper kitchens and walls and bathrooms and bedrooms, I modify the support structure in the perimeter around our warren. Simplified data nodes I learned to make in Advanced Psychokinetic Engineering 133 are seeded throughout the walls and the floor to monitor psionic activity, programmed to identify all the members of our subgroup, to house local copies of some of the Monster's subunits, and to warn us of incoming non-Archivists.

I participate in a few exercises myself—to try to maintain my own fitness, mentally and physically.

Escaping from the ISec facility took something out of me. I still tire easily, even with the better food, even with all this recovery time.

This odd collection of lonely, paranoid people is still uncomfortable with my presence, unsure of my standing in the group. Yet they do accept Barrens's words about what I can do. Especially when they see me race through the objectives changes they've kludged into my artificial kids, taking only moments to analyze and redo what takes them many hours.

They seem impressed, I guess. But they remain standoffish. Indifferent. Anyway, they are usually too busy to pay much attention to me. Training, hacking, scouring recovered data, cleaning, maintaining and making more weapons, food prep, laundry. This group is tightly knit together, already has its set routines and rhythms and rotations.

Always, someone armed is watching me.

Tommy, Andrews, and Mann are the worst of them. Their eyes are always suspicious of me, following me. Even when it is not their turn to stand guard over me, they keep their weapons close.

Other than Barrens, only Bullet is relaxed with me. “Don't take it too hard. Those three almost got gutted when Officer Miura went all psycho-killer on us,” he says.

“And you're not worried?”

He shrugs. “I have a good feeling about you.”

It does not mean much, given the lack of the silvery pattern indicating precognition. But his smile helps.

Odd little guy, really. We become a little more than the friends we were. I guess, in terms of the old days of lost Earth, I am like a big sister to him. He hangs out with me, asks me to teach him my programming tricks. I do so, sometimes, showing my little hacks for tablets, for the Web, and internal ones for neural Implants, such as the smoother interface between Implant and gauntlet that I used with the aid of music, when I built skyscrapers with my mind. We talk about our childhoods, about school.

We had the normal upbringing that Barrens, with his beast, did not.

The others respect Bullet despite his sometimes timid demeanor, his misleading youthfulness. Besides the gift of his psychometry, which has made him a celebrity in the movement, he is an excellent chef. It is a good thing he enjoys it because he is so good at it that the rest of the members of our family of circumstance don't like to eat anything less than Bullet's culinary contributions to the cause. Others take turns to assist him, but in the kitchens Bullet is the king.

Once a week, Leon leads half of them off into the darkness, to map their way deeper into the maze outside the Dome.

Often, I lie awake, just waiting for them to return. Worrying.

That nagging voice in my head tells me I should run, now, or send off a coded transmission to Karla and bring the hammer down on everyone. Is that my own voice of reason, or is it a passenger in my head, courtesy of Information Security?

A simmering mass of discontent under the surface is waiting to be unleashed. It has always been there. The confining, limiting pressures of shipboard existence. Humans were never meant to live like this. If we find out all the secrets and set them free, will the discontent ease, just from the knowing? Barrens seems to think so, but the risks gnaw at me. Even after it all comes to light, change won't come easily. Can the Noah afford the cost of that change?