The Forever Watch (46 page)

Archie chirps slowly, little packets of data. Casualty lists. She stands in front of me. Looks at me.

Yes. Those people won't be coming back.

Karla blinks. She must have felt the flicker of my thoughts.

Dempsey? You should have been knocked out by that. Best put you out myself before you fry what's left of your neurons.

Sleep is no refuge from the pain. I do not know if it is an interaction of the Command upload and the disease, or if it is Archie messing with my Implant, but I am less susceptible to Karla's direct manipulation. I keep drifting in and out of consciousness. I am aware of yelling and cursing. Phantom sensations as ballistae rain giant spears against the armored hide of the transport, while Psyn-fired mutineers die in futility against the sheer power of the Enforcers protecting the convoy. More explosions. The deck shakes under the transport claws. Clouds of dust and smoke, boiling masses of black. Entire city blocks are torn loose from their foundations and drift through the air, burning. Mile-wide panels of illusion generators break away from the Habitat Dome. All the malfunctioning systems and psychic energy unleashed in the air looses uncontrolled weather into the city, churning thunderclouds, a whirlwind driving a hail of frozen ashes and rubble. Fire. Ice. Lightning. Darkness.

It blends into my nightmares. The classical hell described in old texts. The Prison City of our twisted children.

 

 

By the time I wake again, it has been two days.

I am still blind. It is permanent.

I know now that, normally, anyone receiving the Command memory module requires years of specialized preparation to prevent harmful side effects.

Karla can handle it because she was already being groomed for Command. It just came early for her, and to a much higher station than she expected.

As for myself, the too-rapid assimilation of data burned me. Some of my memories are gone—a void in some places, damage in others, blurry faces, missing names. Parts of the brain dealing with the senses are overwhelmed by a snarl of uncontrolled nanite growth from the Implant. Yet I can see. And I can hear.

Thousands of new programs populate the hardware in my head. They are available to me as streams of input and output, worlds of information. Including views and sounds of my immediate surroundings. I could lose myself in all that data if I am not careful.

Archie. Archie has done something to me in concert with the Command module.

While I am being moved, a statue floating an inch over the floor, a portly, gray-haired lady adds armor-plated epaulets to my coat shoulders, containing built-in amplifiers specialized for communications.

It is strange to see myself in the third person, a detached point of view that sweeps around all of us.

While I was asleep, somebody put a bandage around my head at the level of my eyes. It is stained red. They put the mirror shades I borrowed from Karla over the bandage. I guess it is less unnerving.

“I can walk,” I croak out.

“Good.”

Karla releases me. And I walk. The corridors light up in my head with ribbons of luminous orange datafeeds, pressure data, power consumption, structural information.

“Welcome home. You will oversee the formal integration of the Argus AI into the Noah's operating system.”

“Right.” Bile and blood on my tongue. A flicker of thought and my trembling legs are shored up by mental force. My powers have expanded, another effect of the changes to my Implant. I can feel the emitter plates scattered across much of my skin, including my scalp—it is a pattern related to the circuit-board web of chrome lines on Karla, but without the same detectable symmetry and order. I can see myself from multiple angles, as though the walls around us are cameras I peer through. Down my neck, organic splotches spread out in curving roots and branches, a rash of fruit or flowering buds branded upon me by malfunctioning nanobots. There is as much unyielding metal to me as familiar brown flesh. It continues on under my clothes, down to my toes and mirror-frosted fingertips.

I feel around my mouth with my tongue and two teeth come loose.

I am about to spit them out when Archie chirps at me to wait, and nanites anchor the teeth with silvery filaments of microrobotic tissue. That is not supposed to be possible. Archie has taken physical control of my Implant structure.

You've been busy while I was knocked out, huh?

I see a flash of Archie's thought. Thousands of copies of her, scanning through the medical research databases of the Ministry of Health. More of them, luminous ghosts racing from dormant Analytical Node to dormant node, searching for information about the Builders' nano-augmentation.

In just two days, Archie has made more progress with the Builders' nanites than has happened in the past fifty years of human study.

Yes. Ah. Good, uh. Good job.

I imagine giving her a hug, she looks so proud, so fierce. I can feel her wanting to hang on to me. I can feel her desire to fight. To keep me. It's an embrace of only information, but the sense impressions on my nervous system register a tight, crushing hug, a Barrens-level, you're-not-going-anywhere embrace.

I wonder how much Archie does not realize she can do. Could she eventually fix the damage to my eyes, or is that too complex? Even now, her growth seems to be accelerating.

Again, Karla fails to
read
my thoughts when it has to do with the AI.

She drones on about the requirements and specifications for the new Bridge being rushed through construction. There are no windows—we are outside of the Habitat but far from the exterior hull. The walls are angled out, solid slabs of steely gray. There is no paint or tinting. Antique filament-based lighting elements taken out of some emergency storehouse dangle from wires descending from the bare ceiling. Any third-year student in Class V Training could do better, but nobody has had time.

“I want this facility livable and at least moderately comfortable to work in within the week.”

Did you really promote me to XO because you need an interior decorator?

The corner of her mouth lifts all of a millimeter.
Amusing. Be sure not to give me lip out loud where your subordinates can hear.

My body stumbles. Thinking and talking and walking with my muscles is something I've done since I was a toddler, but thinking and talking on the Implant and walking using
touch
is something I have been doing for all of eight minutes.

I could just float my whole body along instead. I have so much psionic power now, it would be easier. But I stand out too much already for my comfort.

All this added power comes with a heavy cost. If I'd had the same training as Karla, the same preparation, would I have absorbed this sudden and heavy apotheosis with the same grace? She is almost unaffected, while I have significant neural damage, lost memories, and I'm blind. A difference in genetics, or training, or is it an interaction with the symptomatic phase of Mincemeat?

The large hall where the transports have stopped ends in a pair of double doors guarded by blue-coated officers.

Karla has not stopped giving me more tasks she wants accomplished
yesterday
. “We also need more water routed in, and more sewage capacity.” And more food needs to be delivered, which means more cold storage is required, until a separate farm is established for the Bridge. More of this, more of that.

She halts and looks askance at me.
Are you tuning me out?

Of course not, ma'am.

Better not, Dempsey. I'm being so nice to you and all. I even have a little present for you.

Walking again, our heels click across the bare floor.

Where are we going, anyway?

Your new offices.

The guards do not seem to be looking at anything, even as their eyes sweep back and forth, almost mechanically. They salute Karla and wave us through.

Two floors down, we open the doors to what will be my last home. The chamber is larger than I expected. The air is cold and musty, very, very old. I see my friends through the ship's sensors before they turn and see me. Warm arms wrap around me. I can smell her hair.

“Hana! Are you, are you…?” She sees me. She understands. “Oh.” Lyn cries against me softly.

“You look great too. Both of you.”

A sigh. “I won't lie, boss. You look awful. The jacket is too grim for you.” Hennessy can still get me to smile.

“I guess we don't have much time to chat and catch up. Let's get it done.”

“Shouldn't you … Hana, don't you need a bit of rest? Or some food?”

It is too soon. I cannot take sympathy from them. If we pretend I'm not sick yet, then I am just fine. “I'm not an invalid yet. Chop-chop.”

I am grateful, I guess. With Lyn and Hennessy around me, I do not have to pretend to be friendly with the other members of the team, those painfully young geniuses who still have so much time ahead of them. Time I do not have. My mood dips further. I know Barrens would be with me constantly if he could. So he cannot.

Yes. Your man knows them best. There are certain things he can do for us faster than an Enforcer team blasting its way in.

I want him. I want him terribly. I could cry and rage at being parted from him
again
after we promised we would not be, but it won't change reality, and it won't move Karla. It is what it is, and at least I have my friends smiling for me.

“Hennessy, I need a report on the status of the hardware and where we are with supplies, water, facilities for food prep, medical, you know what I'll need.”

“On it.” He starts jotting down notes on his tablet even as he makes his way out. This will be just like setting up a new living community. Knock down walls, build new ones, put in wiring, pipes, kitchens, heating elements, cooling elements, ventilation, ergonomic furniture, all the while considering layout, comfort, efficiency, and productivity. The other half of the work is logistics. Just like City Planning.

“Lyn.” Just a brief moment of awkwardness. She's always had higher ratings than me in most ways. Except with the
touch,
which she never felt like learning to apply to anything outside of work. It does not feel right that she is my subordinate rather than the other way around.

I can guess that one of my tasks will be to train someone to replace me for when the symptoms become unmanageable. Nothing Karla does is accidental. She will want Lyn to have full control of Archie when I am “Retired.” But will Archie let herself be controlled?

Her head grins, ghosts in and out of my perception, my own Cheshire cat of a girl keeping me company. If I live long enough, maybe I'll see her reach two years old.

Through the three-sixty view afforded by my sensor access, I see Karla standing behind me, watching us. She turns on her heel and leaves.

Lyn lets go and takes a look at me. Feels my discomfort. She crosses her eyes and gives me an exaggerated, comical salute.
Come on, Hana. It's okay. I'm here to help.

A deep breath. It rattles in my chest. Maybe I just imagine that. The disease cannot be progressing
that
fast.

“Lyn, show me how far we are in setting up the officers' hard-line terminals.”

“Not that far. This old bird is hideously complex.”

We take our places side by side in front of a great mass of hovering displays in our heads. We are in school again, cramming for a project we slacked on until the last minute. There are lists of lists of things that must be done.

“Just like school,” Lyn says. “We start at the top and work our way down. Hey, this time, we have underlings to boss around.”

I actually have more underlings to boss around than anyone except for Karla. That would have been funny, once. Now it only underscores how big a job this is.

Over coffee and egg sandwiches, we prioritize and we delegate and we send out memos and read requests. The young programmers who “helped” me with Archie are now my gofers of choice. Soon, my first day of work on the job is almost over.

“You should sleep. Hotel Hennessy just opened for business, you know.” Hennessy waves at the far wall, from which he has carved out a number of serviceable bunk beds.

I should sleep, it's true. Everything still aches because of the Command upload. But I have been sleeping all this time. Time I won't be getting back. Instead, I get started on scheduling the biggest job that needs to get done first.

Lyn and Hennessy groan, but that is the extent of their complaining. They send an orderly for even more coffee and settle deeper into their chairs next to me.

“You don't have to keep me company.”

They both shrug. “While you're up, we're up.”

The most important requirement for the installation's functionality is to program a new set of command terminals—specialized machines with instructions and codes for managing the reactor systems, the propulsion modules, grid control, life support, navigation—all vital functions that must respond to direct mental input from the Bridge officers. None of the technicians on the Bridge escaped, nor any of the Council. Most of the development notes for the software were classified and kept
on
the Bridge. They were deleted before the Bridge staff killed themselves, compelled by the Command module in their neural implants to ensure that the mutiny could not take control of the Noah for even a moment.

It occurs to me that Karla, as representative of the Ministry of Information, myself for the Interior, that nasty little paper-pusher Ortigas, who I believe rose up from Energy, and possibly Barrens, representing the Ministry of Peace, are now the de facto members of the new Central Council. The only one I don't know is whoever the warden of the Prison City is, under the Ministry of Health.

I mentally wave off Archie's desire to supply me with the man's face, all his records, his history. He has his own job to do.