The Forever Watch (33 page)

“Oh.”

There is still the outline, the depression in the wall where I formed a shell around myself to hide. They broke it open when they got me and never fixed it. The concave surfaces are a mold following the shape of my body.

We look out the clear porthole in the door onto the great power conduit running through the heart of the Noah. It is beautiful, and strange. How many others have stood in this place and seen the same thing?

He tilts his head back and sniffs, nostrils flaring. Takes a few steps closer to one of the walls. His fist and arm are enfolded in ruby light. His blow crunches through the laminated plastech layers. Water gushes. Almost burning hot, it steams in the cold, dry air. He tears off his bloody sweater and shirt. Shoves his trousers down. Just stands there, looking at nothing, while the water sprays him down. With the light from the porthole, his massive body looks as perfect as ever. Pale once the blood has been washed free, he is all hard angles and muscle; perhaps he is even larger than before, now that his group has stolen stores of meat and fish and richer food and he eats better than he could afford in the past.

Eventually, he comes back to himself.

I don't resist when he pulls me to him and starts undressing me. It is to shiver when his coarse, rough fingers touch me.

“We can't stay too long,” I murmur. “A leak like this is too much. It will draw attention.” Shaking now, in his arms. The heat of us and the steaming shower. We live.

“You can fix it, after.”

Fear. We taste it on each other. Maybe it is to fight it off, to feel alive, that causes what happens next. Maybe I just miss him. Maybe this is a denial of death.

We kiss and it is not gentle. It is savage. Primal. I turn my back to him and place my palms on the wall, and spread my legs. When he takes me, we howl, hearts pounding, while the water runs down our skins. Muscle against muscle, we are fighting as much as we are fucking. When we are done, panting, gasping, we slide down to the floor. He presses his face between my thighs, and I stretch my jaw as wide as I can manage to get it around the thick, steaming length of him, and we start again. The long red trails of my scratches down his arms, and the bite marks he leaves on my neck and my thighs are strangely beautiful by the alien light.

 

 

Nobody gets any sleep that night. When we return, wearing new clothes I made by drawing material right off the corridor wall, they are already in deep discussion.

Barrens's appearance and his slow, deep voice stills their rising panic.

“So. Not experimentation. At least, if it is, it's something that acts real slow. Meena was with us since the beginning. Been months since she's even been in the Habitat.”

Most have their eyes down, refusing to look at anyone. The few who are not lost in themselves, in more pleasant memories, murmur their assent.

“This is why we do this. Got to know what's going on.” He takes a breath, barks, “Now. Snap out of it.” He assigns them their tasks. Activities to focus on, to take their minds away from what they have seen.

Gregory needs proper equipment to analyze Meena's remains. Instruments too complex for me to synthesize out of plastech.

Barrens sends one team to go off and find the Doctor the required lab components.

Gomez's face fills the display in the assembly room. He would be handsome if not for that perpetual squint, the pinched lines around his little mouth. Giving instructions.

Another team is to pull memories off all the witnesses and out of the gleaming silver threads of Meena's intact neural Implant, then splice it together and edit it to remove cues of our identities—leaving only our feelings of horror, and the raw sensory input of the smells, the sight of Meena falling apart, the feel of her dying skin when she was touched, the unbridled, twisting, gut-wrenching emotions, and the echo of her pain, her conscious, lost disbelief as her body betrayed her.

Other leaders' faces appear on the monitors and concur.

Barrens grimaces. “What the hell for?” he rumbled. “We need to focus on figuring this out.”

“This is for the packet we're going to distribute,” the one named Thorn answers. “Spread it around. Just label the memory, ‘This is Mincemeat,' that'll be all it takes. This is how it begins. We'll shake everyone out of their complacency! This will change humanity, it'll…”

A deep breath now. This is exactly what Karla wants me to stop.

I hold my breath, waiting to lose control of myself, to become a puppet on a string, a bullet fired from a gun.

Nothing happens.

I shake it off and reach for Barrens's wrist, try to squeeze him, to let him know I'm here.

Leon, release that memory without context, and it will cause a panic.

Agreed.

His face turns bright red, but he does keep from shouting. “No. My people aren't doing that. If it comes time for it, if we must, we will. Not before. We are not going to get civilians who aren't involved Adjusted because you're bored or impatient.”

The argument between Thorn and Barrens goes on a long time. Everyone else pretends not to listen or watch. Gomez looks ghoulishly amused.

In the end, my man is worn down to a compromise. Some of Barrens's team will prepare the propaganda packet, but we will hold on to it—it is not to be released—until all the leaders agree that it is time. This leaves me shaking my head. It is no resolution at all, and the terms for what constitutes when to release it are too vague. Still, at least Barrens keeps them unified.

We organize the last team.

Barrens assigns Bullet and a slightly cross-eyed, soft-spoken lady named Susan to me.
Hana. I know you saw those number codes in the sheets you got out of my storage space. G-0, G-1. You know what they are, right?

Of course. I knew immediately. There was a pair of numbers for each of the two entries. Incredibly long hexadecimal numbers and letters and characters. They are old-style private and public keys for the encryption of files—a process from three hundred years ago, before programmers became more comfortable with the quantum computing allowed by the massive neural banks of psi-tech computation.

We have to find the lock for those keys, Hana. Nobody can work with Argus like you can. The others can handle a simpler search; this thing, whatever happened to Meena, Gregory says there were rumors from when he was in medical training. They'll look for those stories. And they'll help you too, but you'll have to teach them.

I am to do the nearly impossible—find files or databases or a passworded
anything
that might match those keys that could be anywhere on the vast Network.

Close my eyes. This is bigger than any of us. It is the tide that is pushing the others in his organization.

Barrens eyes are looking down at mine.
I should have brought you with me all along.

“Okay,” I finally say. Swallow. “We can start by tweaking the way Archie, um, Argus, builds ontological relationships, concept maps, based on those old pages in your vault.”

Like puzzle pieces falling into place, it feels natural, teaching others something, breaking a problem into its components. We discuss and work out the specifications for the new searches and begin to map out the requirements for Archie to find and identify the lost files. It is just managing a project team. In truth, with the way Archie seems to fit against me, like gloves around my hands dipping into dataspace, I hardly need assistance.

They have their purpose, their cause. Barrens has his need to know the truth, to find out what happened to Callahan, to uncover what Mincemeat is. In the end, everyone does as he or she must, and so do I.

24

We code in the new functions, let them propagate through Archie's distributed architecture—conjugative plasmids spreading through a digital bacterial culture. Once more, I am struck by how different the AI is when I am at the terminal. When Susan or Bullet work with Archie, it responds to function calls like any application. With me, Archie anticipates me somehow. Its reaction time is significantly faster, as if it starts to execute my commands before I finish typing them in. It is more alive for me.

Once we finish setting fully 80 percent of the AI swarm's capacity to the new tasks, there is little for me to do but wait. The volume of information the data-miner must sift through is enormous. Useful results may appear tomorrow. More likely, it may take years. With how huge the Network is, it may take forever.

Barrens does not look displeased when I tell him this. He still looks tired from dealing with the rest of the leadership, but excitement lights the fire behind his eyes. “I didn't expect a miracle. And we got progress on other fronts.”

Other fronts?

Events are accelerating, most everything is out of my control. I guess it was always like that, even when I was working my job in City Planning; I just never noticed because of how cleanly the illusion was maintained. There is that feeling that I am missing something—that I ought to have figured out more with the pieces I do have.

Barrens takes me aside into our sleep coffin.

“Argus—sorry. You like Archie, right? An older search turned up something else. We're planning an expedition now, coordinated with another cell. I'll let the rest of the team know tomorrow, then we'll have a week to prep.”

A deep breath. We curl up inside the tiny space, sitting cross-legged, hunched over. Barrens's hair brushes the top of the chamber.

“An expedition?”

“Deep into the unmapped zones.”

So. “The old lab facilities.”

Barrens shakes his head. “That's what the others think. I don't think so anymore. Thorn, mostly, is fixated on it 'cause he's been pushing the idea that the Mincemeat deaths are the result of human experimentation. After Meena, the timing just seems off. And there's more.” Barrens lifts his personal tablet, accesses the data for me, and we link up through it and our Implants.

Images and text and menus come aglow in my vision, hovering in front of us. My fingers dance through the information, manipulating the maps, highlighting particular figures. It is immediately apparent that this cannot be just some center for secret research.

“It's too large.” The power, food, and water consumption rates are immense, as great as what is used for the Habitat. No, it uses even more power than that. Much more.

“Even if it's nothing, going there will give everyone something to do while we wait for Archie to find the G-0 and G-1 files. And if there is something there, it's big. It'll at least distract the hotheads for a while.”

My hands settle on his jaw and cheeks and turn his face my way. “You are not leaving me behind again.”

Barrens sighs. His eyes turn to one side. I can guess that he is thinking of any number of things he might say to talk me out of coming. The possibility of getting lost out there, in the vast uncharted regions of the ship. Unknown dangers. Maybe even just running across Enforcers guarding that immense sink of the ship's resources.

“No. I'm going. Try to take off without me and I'll just get lost trying to follow you. Anyway, you'll need strong telekinetics where there's no gravity.”

“I want you to stay safe.”

Driving my elbow into his side just gets a slight
whuff
of breath out of him.
Leon. I'm safest wherever you are.

He slouches lower, leans his head against mine.
I guess I was leaning toward having you come with us anyway. You're the smartest person here, Hana. If we do find something, best if there's a real mind with us.

It's been forever since a compliment heated up my cheeks. “That's settled then. Who leads the other group that's going?”

Now his face contorts, as if he were forcing down a mouthful of vinegar. “Gomez.”
The rest of the heads want him there. They wonder if I'll share what we find.

And would you share, Leon? No matter what?

Barrens's eyes fade and slide to memories.

Once, I think, his answer would have been aggressive and automatic. He would have wanted the information disseminated freely no matter the cost.

I shift over, straddle him. Rest my face against the slow, deep beating of his heart.

“Depends.” His rumbling voice goes right through to my bones. Under my fingertips, his muscles are rock, tense, as though he were fighting even now. “I don't know, anymore,” he whispers. “Don't people deserve to know?”

He can only look unsure with me. Only with me. He is changing, and not sure if his heart still agrees with his own mind.

“There is time,” I tell him, “right? We'll do what we were doing all along. Try to learn more, so we can know best what to do, one way or the other.”

Barrens presses his mouth against the crown of my head.
Glad you're here. Whenever I'd get confused, I'd think of you, and how we'd talk about things. I should not have left you.

Those steely coils of flesh slacken, relax. He starts talking about the logistics of our voyage. He shows me the route we will take, the place where we'll meet up with Gomez. Consider what we might find there. How many of us are going, and how much food and water we will need to bring. Flashlights and self-powered lamps for everyone. Cold-weather gear. He bounces motivational stuff off me, the things he will include when he talks to the rest of the group.

I fall asleep first, while he is still working and reworking tomorrow's speech.

I dream about getting a stray data packet. Even as I scan it, it is too late, and Karla has fired me off. I go wild. At the end, there is me in Miyaki's place, being battered to death by Barrens's huge hands.

 

 

Too soon, I am staring at his broad back as I follow. Hot breath misting in the cold, freezing air. Shuffling along in the dark, eyes trained on the dim light of the oil lamps Tommy had built for us.