The Forever Watch Read online

  “You’re in enough hot water helping me with Mr. Mincemeat.”

  “With all the regs my programming is breaking, one more bit of something I’m not supposed to know won’t affect how much Adjusting I’d get. Just tell me what else you’re also working on.”

  He turns, and a kiss silences me for a long, tingling moment. His growing familiarity with what sets my nerves afire is blessing and curse.

  He winks as he leaves. “Tell you soon. I’m close. Got a gift for you. Truth.”

  “I’ll keep a pot on for you.”

  He gives me that savage grin. “Thanks. Shouldn’t take too long.” Which means he might be back at four in the morning.

  When he leaves, I do fire up the coffee machine.

  But I’m not waiting. I put on my own nightgear. A heavy coat that hides my curves, and a self-defense amplifier. Hard-capped boots. I put up my hair and hide it under a hat.

  I go out too. I do not sleep well anyway, unless I have my beast next to me.

  I choose a different location each time when I use a public-access terminal. A lightweight application I programmed into my tablet makes a semi-random selection, controlled with a series of parameters including ease of transportation and safety.

  Tonight, chance has determined that I am to take a bus to the shopping district at the heart of the McKinley Section.

  The rain is the drummer and all the Habitat the drum. Water percusses all those differently textured, different densities of plastech that compose the roads, the buildings, and my umbrella. It raises a soft, whispering rhythm as I walk to the closest stop for the E1 line.

  The bus sighs when it stops, a bright yellow animal on six narrow wheels. It is all aerodynamic curves and shine, covered with subliminal ads for a performance being put on by some band that is popular with the school-age bracket. As I enter, the ads ping my Implant, playing samples of their thumping music, opening a frame in my eyesight showing the slick-skinned, bare-chested youths yowling onstage, while a sea of young faces chant their adoration. I would have found those young boys deliciously pretty, once. I close the streams and flag them as spam.

  The bus driver yawns, sees me without looking, and nods sleepily in acknowledgment. It is empty at this hour, and I choose a seat in the middle.

  The city lights slide by as the bus hums and rolls. Its engine is a limited amplifier under control of the driver. The wheel in his hands does not steer and the pedals at his feet connect to nothing—they are physical representations of mental commands to focus his concentration. His mind propels the vehicle forward, controls the steering and the braking, and in his eyesight, the roadways are lit up and highlighted and labeled by the bus software.

  The bus tilts back as it glides up the steep on-ramp to the port-to-starboard 5 highway. The narrow roads going up and down through the city are glassy threads in the night. Other vehicles I see in farther parts of the section glimmer as they go up and down and along the skyways so far above the ground level, the elevated roads so thin they are almost invisible in the distance.

  Soon, one of the great air locks yawns before the bus. The walls dividing the Habitat sections are thirty meters of specially processed, high-density plastech. In the event of a major accident, such as a relativistic velocity meteorite punching a hole through the hull, the city sections can be isolated in a tenth of a second.

  I wonder how often the gates are tested. They have never been used.

  Far as you know, Barrens would say.

  Shut it, you. You’re not even here and you’re making me paranoid.

  When I enter the access-terminal shop, the manager barely looks at me. Have humans gotten quieter, because of our technologies, because of being able to live in our heads and replay whatever, whenever? I am surrounded by two dozen men and women of different ages and backgrounds and we are, each of us, alone.

  The heart of the Londinium shopping district is also the primary financial center for the Habitat, where Economic Management, another department under the Ministry of the Interior, monitors all production, consumption, pricing, and salary allocation. In the square kilometer just outside the door is the greatest concentration of skyscrapers and high-end stores.

  I touch the bot fragments of the Hunter swarm lurking on the various forums of lonely, sleepless people on the ship, and they return bits of interesting conversations.

  Most of these threads I just copy automatically, to screen through later. Teenagers talking about stories their Keepers tell to scare them, of monsters in the sewers, of a dreaded killer monitoring the Web for potential victims.

  Wait. What?

  Mincemeat killings have always been around, posted malta194x.

  What is this?

  Behind my closed lids, my eyes flicker up and down as I scan a particular thread of postings and replies. They keep using Mincemeat as a term. And there are static 2-D pictures. Gruesome images of the sort I have seen before. Different dates. Uploaded by different users.

  I unfold the structure of the thread deeper and deeper, examining post after post. One forum name appears the most: jaegercal.

  He asks, “What could explain the level of damage in these images?” He asks if there are broader implications. He asks others to help him build a timeline. Other posters mock him. Call him a nutter if they’re from Londinium or atama ga kurutteru if they’re from Nippon Re-creationists or a Don Quixote if they were trained in the Arts and Literature Preservation Program. But some are serious contributors and mention specific names, supposed victims that died ten years before, thirty years before. Longer.

  MalthusMarx declares, “This whole thing is ridiculous, because it means Mincemeat’s kills number in excess of a hundred. Information Security might hide such a thing, but the Council would never allow so many killings, something that disrupts the balance of the ship.”

  And jaegercal replies, “Does that not imply that it is something more than just one killer?”

  CactusRose concurs. And adds, “Your suspicion is that all Mincemeat Deaths are being covered up as early Retirements, but are not early Retirements anomalies in the first place? Maybe the question is not how many early Retirements are Mincemeat victims, but whether all early Retirements are.”

  The thread explodes into a whirlwind. It comes down, mostly, to jaegercal, who becomes the de facto moderator for these posters. And CactusRose, who alarms me with cutting insights that egg on the mass of them into considering darker and darker possibilities.

  I set Hunter to search for jaegercal. Because I know the feel of that writing. Immediately, there are more hits, also in these low-population channels, the unmonitored regions of the Nth Web where the criminal element sometimes does its business. These areas on the periphery are ghost zones on low-use Analytical Nodes that come fully online only when additional processing power is needed. There are so very many of them, and the Nth Web is gigantic in the first place, too big for the finite resources of the Ministries to watch everything.

  Traces suggest that jaegercal has also been active in forums about alien conspiracies. And about … Breeding Duty?

  A few moments to find the ident code and comparing it to the memory of the first table of dangling IDs we found, and there it is. That long alphanumeric string was one of the first dozen that Leon and I found together.

  It doesn’t have to be him. But the way he writes is the way I hear him talking, and I know it’s him.

  Oh, Leonard, what are you doing?

  I run traces on that name. It is a relief to see them dead-end. At least he’s been careful.

  How long, I wonder, before these forums are deleted, and the less cautious participants brought to the attention of Information Security? Or will they slip through the cracks, just like all the dangling ident codes floating through the system?

  I download the contents of those forums and flash the local history of the terminal.

  Around me, other night owls play games on the system and mess around with their friends, doing things they do no
t want their Keepers to catch them at.

  I exit the public-terminal shop, get on another bus, and sit in the rear.

  It’s packed. An offset shift is ending, and another is beginning. Officemates and maintenance workers talk about their stiff necks and aching feet and joke about all the sex they’re not getting, or about how hot this one girl is, except she’s gay.

  A few of them look at me, and not with that casual weight of physical interest, but with concern. A deep breath, and I steady my expression. Placid. Empty.

  Barrens wants to protect me to the extent that he can. That includes keeping me out of things he can do on his own. Ah, but it stings. I want him to need me more. I want him to tell me everything, the way I’ve been telling him everything.

  My will pages through the menus. Starts music playing in my thoughts. The application in my hand streams mournful torch songs with wailing saxophones, and women with voices that throb with implied hurt.

  I hope he doesn’t read too much into the words of those crazies.

  A deep breath, a sigh.

  I’m not a sappy teenager, and it isn’t as if he’s cheating on me.

  I’ll get it out of him. I won’t ambush him when I get home. But he’d better talk to me about it on his own by New Year’s. I resolve to not be so defensive when he comes to me with what he’s found, to think into logic that which he does through intuition. All along, I’ve been getting deeper and it was always my choice.

  9

  My dreams take a dark turn.

  I suppose they should have much sooner, with all the work Barrens and I are putting in. Memories of gory ends. Always thinking about this killer, these disappearing victims.

  When Barrens is not around, I wake up with my pillow and my face wet with tears.

  I wish I could just get it out of my system. It is different, remembering while inside a dream. The quality of the recollection is still perfect, but the subconscious mind interprets it, stretches and shrinks it, distorts time sense, degrades some aspects and heightens others.

  It was all getting chased through the darkness, some terrible, silent, immense shape lumbering after me. One recurring dream stands out though. Just myself, giving birth, while another me watches. A younger me.

  When Barrens is with me, he shakes me awake before the worst of it. When he is there, the nightmares are less frequent in the first place. Tonight, I wake to his heavy paw shaking me.

  That awful one again. Birth, blood, my child being taken from me. While something that looks like me, but isn’t, watches. Watches.

  “You guard me even in my sleep, huh?”

  He yawns and rumbles something like “Course,” before turning on his other side and drifting back to sleep. “Course I do.”

  It’s 4:27 a.m. by my internal clock. Not worth trying to go back to sleep, not with how long it will take my heart to stop racing. Might as well get ready for the workday. Have breakfast.

  A hot shower, and I check over my most recent scan of the Hunter.

  Barrens must be working hard on his programming skills because the complexity he’s adding is impressive. New modules are coming online, particles in the swarm that do other things, not just for evaluating other kinds of information, but communications functionality, secure data sharing.

  One omelet for each of us just takes me a few minutes. His breakfast is supplemented with a giant glass of the thick, generic protein/grain slush that is the free staple food provided to everyone on the ship. He has a heavy workout scheduled this evening and will need a ton of calories to fuel him.

  He lumbers out of bed and showers.

  Cheese and red onion and egg, hot in my mouth. I scan a translucent window of text in my vision while eating. Hovering between my plate and my face, the neural Implant’s internal display shows today’s news. More articles about the coming holidays, schedule changes, weather changes. Output results of the vertical farms are always portrayed as positive—shortfalls never make it to the news. Something about a fire in the textile district of Moskva Section. Is that a genuine accident report, or a cover-up for something else?

  It’s not my place to know. I would have accepted that, once.

  I never repeated that night where I checked on Barrens’s activities using other ident codes. I told myself I wouldn’t ask until he was ready. But if he wants me to stop just blindly accepting what ISec says is proper …

  It’s not nagging. It isn’t. “Hey, you. Been putting a lot of work in growing our baby?”

  “Mrraaagr. Backscatter. Signal stuff. Routing,” he mumbles. “Dijkstra. You know. Stuff. Been looking for ways to hide information as Network background noise.”

  “What are the comms for?”

  He blinks, wakes up a little at the tone of my voice. Really looks at me. “I’m almost there,” he says softly. “I will tell you, and it will be soon.”

  “You better.”

  “I will.” He pauses.

  Barren’s fingers turn my face gently. Ah. Wow. It is a long, lingering kiss, while another hand slides up from my waist, under my shirt. So hard, those hands, and rough; it still surprises me how gentle they can be. He pulls a moan out of me.

  A little breathless now. “Good morning to you too.”

  He grins. Pleased with himself. He drops into the other chair, which creaks with his weight. He savors each bite of the eggs, grimaces, and bolts down the cheap stuff. I like to watch him eat. He is not sloppy or disgusting. But food vanishes in front of him. Heaping spoonfuls, chewed rapidly, neatly, swallowed down. And he is always appreciative.

  Another slow kiss after we’re done.

  “Unless you’re going to take the morning off,” I get out, “you’d better stop that.”

  His grin is boyish. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “What time will you be by?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll message you.”

  We leave together and split up at the street.

  By the time I reach City Planning, I suspect I still have a somewhat dazed smile on my face. I’d best not be thinking about those smoldering kisses where Hennessy can peer at me and do his best impression of a Behavioralist. His teasing gibes are playful, but they can be sharp and too perceptive. I ought to put my foot down and remind him that I’m his superior … but I do like him. And he is quite good at what he does.

  It says something about society that the most exciting thing in the office to gossip about is the boss’s love life.

  “They think he’s beneath you, that’s all,” Hennessy remarks as he drops off another packet of proposals. “That makes it juicier. Now, now, don’t get upset.”

  “I’m not upset.” I am upset.

  “It’s not what I think. I think he’s been good for you. You’ve looked a lot more alive. Since the two of you got together. But you know, the whole society is built around metrics, test scores, assigning every person like pegs to their holes. When people see you together, and it’s obvious there’s a, ah, rank gap … People wonder about what the two of you have in common, what you do together, and such.”

  Rank gap!

  “James, I’ve been letting this go for too long. It’s one thing if it’s you. But the rest of the team … Get them focused on their work. Cool off talk about Barrens and me, okay? Or the worst offenders will find themselves buried in the secretarial pool.”

  He raises his hands in surrender. “I’ll warn them.”

  The next proposals to come in front of me are subjected to my most vicious evaluation, with endless corrections and brutal comments. So there.

  Barrens comes at lunch, a great big presence in my doorway. To everyone else, his face probably looks its usual fierce and focused best. But to me, the nervous anxiety is plain. He is worried.

  He almost lifts me out of my chair and hugs me too tightly.

  Leon! Not in the office! He lets me push back a bit, though his hands stay on my shoulders.

  “You’re okay,” he whispers. “Anything, ah. Anything odd happen around here lately?” />
  “No. What’s this about?”

  “Let’s take a walk. The bean-dog stand down the block’s got a special today, two for one.”

  I ought to be annoyed. He is almost dragging me. People are staring. But there is such fear on his face. Fear for me. Every once in a while, he pauses, glows with psi for a second, cranes his neck and inhales, long and deep. He leads me to the plaza two blocks away from the monolithic cube of City Planning. A large fountain in the middle is festooned with baroque statues, marble figures of imposing, muscular angels and fat, little cherubs. And we keep walking.

  What is it?

  Someone is onto us.

  “What?”

  My knees want to give way. A thousand terrors spark and come alive, and I clamp down on them hard, pasting a mask of calm on my face, even as my heart seems to grow determined to escape out of my chest.

  Barrens takes a breath to compose himself. He sends me brief flashes of memory.

  Bruisers, when they use their talent, also have enhanced senses. But I do not have his training. And since I have to keep walking by his side, I can only do a partial immersion, so the contents are further removed from me. All I can tell is that they are brief moments several seconds long. One was from that day he was watching me interview Gorovsky. The others have him standing at various locations, neck craned, looking around. Standing at a sidewalk. The chowder place we like. What do you want me to see?

  There’s a scent! A scent keeps repeating. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but this morning, I smelled it again while doing my run. It just clicked in my head. Someone is closing in on us.

  The concentration required to form Implant-to-Implant messages distracts me from panicking. Staves off the formless anxiety skittering up my spine. In my imagination, there is already a thin man in ISec grays on our heels.

  We walk and talk on the move. Sometimes we talk out loud and sometimes we message each other in our heads.

  The major streets of the Habitat tend to be oriented in concentric loops from the smallest ring road in the heart of the Dome to Circle-zero, the twelve-lane highway just inside the Dome. Most of the lesser streets are a grid of straight lines with names indicating which section that stretch of road is in, and either a number, indicating a port-to-starboard orientation, or a letter, which means the road runs along the length of the ship. Some of the roads are at Deck-zero, the street level of the Habitat, some rise up into the sky, and some descend into the underside of the Habitat.