The Forever Watch Page 13

  “That is totally unfair,” Jazz says admiringly, laughing. “I’m suddenly remembering why we stopped playing paintball halfway through school.”

  Marcus yells from the bottom of a ditch, out of sight, but I saw him jumping in and guessed right at his position when I sent half a dozen blurs his way. He always sits still too long after taking cover. “Son of a bitch! I just got my hair done!” He stands, shaking his fists in Lyn’s general direction, in a bunker that serves as their side’s base. “You just had to get her going!”

  Now I’m laughing too. “Hey, you wake up the dragon, you get the fire, baby!”

  For a couple of hours, we’re kids again.

  It is Saturday, the night just after I played at chasing and being chased by my friends.

  And now, Barrens and I are not playing, at all. We are stalking even as we are being stalked.

  It is a cold night. There are no stars tonight, just thick clouds, a haze reflecting the glow from the city.

  I see him before Barrens smells him.

  A slender man in a long coat, with a hat. I notice him because, as he walks along the sidewalk, he keeps stopping, and … touching things. Lampposts. The handles to the doors into the buildings. He does not seem drunk. He is not swaying or stumbling. Sometimes, he just brushes those long, slender fingers against an object. Sometimes he stays with his hands on something for ten minutes at a time.

  He passes without turning to look at the opposite side of the street, where we are. Under the bright circle of a streetlamp, his face is astonishingly young. He looks like a teenager. This … this can’t possibly be our killer. Can it? If it is … the dates of so many of our hits are wildly off.

  Don’t follow close.

  Barrens glides out of the alleyway. Glides. It seems impossible someone so large can walk so quietly. His badge is on the inside of his coat; only a little bit of its red glow leaks as he moves. He crosses over to where our quarry is.

  I take a deep, deep breath of the frosty air. When Barrens is half a block away, I follow too.

  Crap. He practically already found me.

  Haltingly, the stranger is making his way toward the South Edo Precinct. Barrens’s station.

  At every street corner, the slender figure touches the post for the pedestrian lights, the transmission boxes that project ads into the neural Implants of everyone that passes.

  When the stranger passes the next alley, Barrens pours it on. Each step covers several feet. In an instant, Barrens is there.

  His arm comes around from behind, clamps tight against the smaller man’s face. A second more, and both of them vanish into the gap between two shophouses that are closed for the evening.

  Even if the street had not been empty, I wonder if anyone would have noticed.

  I walk the rest of the distance, quick as I can.

  When I get there, Barrens has the boy hoisted up against a wall. His huge paw is clamped tight against the other’s neck. Both the kid’s hands don’t as much as budge the steel pillar that is Barrens’s arm.

  “You’re going to tell us who you are,” Barrens growls. “And how you found us.”

  Wide-eyed, red-faced, the boy croaks something out.

  “What was that?”

  Gasping, the boy repeats himself. “I … juh-just … w’nted … ta … know…” Panicked, he broadcasts to both of us; he has more writing talent than I do and pushes a flood of murky images and thoughts at us telepathically, rather than through Implant messaging. Most of it is too unfocused to understand, but there is a single, clear image.

  It is the inside of a coffin apartment. And it is covered in blood, bone fragments, offal.

  His mind’s voice screams at us, Want to know! Want to know!

  Leon … put him down. He … he’s like you. Like us.

  “Joe. Joe November. Everybody calls me Bullet though, on account of this stupid haircut back in school. Hair’s different now, but the name stuck.” His voice is still a raspy whisper. He keeps massaging his throat. “Dude. I wasn’t fighting back or nothing. Did you have to grab me so hard?”

  Barrens keeps a steady, cold gaze on him as he sips his bourbon. He says nothing, content to let me do the talking.

  I start to apologize. “Sorry, Joe, but—”

  “Bullet, ma’am. Nobody’s called me Joe since my Keeper.” He manages this small smile. The dimples make me want to pinch his cheeks.

  Bullet then. We had to be careful. You might’ve been dangerous.

  “Yeah, yeah. Fine. Nothing permanent.”

  We have the corner booth in the very back of the smoky establishment just a few blocks down from the precinct. It’s another of Barrens’s cop hangouts. Particularly cheap fake-wood paneling covers everything. Lots of static 2-D pictures are on the walls, of groups of police officers eating together. The dates go back to the first generation of the Noah’s crew. The bar and the tables up front are occupied by half a dozen off-duty blue coats complaining loudly at the display feed hanging from the ceiling. On it, the sports news is covering Edo Section’s baseball league, which has been saddled with a scandal: the pitcher of the top team has been accused of wearing a concealed amplifier during games.

  Nobody is paying attention to us, except for Officer Miura, sitting at the near end of the bar, giving us the occasional, curious glance. Mostly though, she keeps her eyes down on her tablet. I can hear her groaning loudly about the particulars of a case report she is struggling to fill out.

  Bullet takes a swig of beer and grimaces. “So. Um. What’s next?”

  I can’t help tilting my head this way and that and peering at him. “How old are you?”

  He fidgets, mumbles, “Twenty-seven. It’s just genetics.”

  His face is small and round like a mouse’s. Apple-cheeked and skinny and awkward as if he might be all of fourteen. Thick, dark curls, girlish eyes with long lashes. I like him. He shouldn’t be mixed up with all this. But we have something dark and serious between the three of us.

  “You first,” Barrens rumbles.

  Bullet stares at him, then me.

  My story starts probably like yours does. No. Uh. First I need to explain …

  “Take your time. We got all night.”

  I’m a Keeper Certification Examiner. Ah. No, that’s not where I should start either.

  His hands start shaking. Biting his lip, he pulls them in, clenches them against his pants.

  Let’s begin with this. He shows it to us again. A vision that is familiar, gruesome, terrible. Sasha. In pieces.

  He tells us of the fluctuating ratings of Apollo Gorovsky. Of how he did not usually personally involve himself in the test results of Keepers, but found himself interested because of the unusual circumstances around Gorovsky’s partner’s early Retirement, just as they had been assigned a child to raise.

  Sasha and Apollo were just starting out. She hadn’t even finished moving out of her solo apartment. Weeks after Keeper Gorovsky started his repeated requests for a new, permanent partner, I went to her old place and …

  Bullet falters then. He orders and consumes another beer before he continues. The thing is, I have this extra talent, you know? Or, you probably don’t know.

  He yelps as I lean across the table, staring at a cluster of silver emitter plates. On his palms.

  “Psychometry!” I whisper, intrigued. “That’s how you found us.”

  This rare talent does not serve much purpose on the ship. It does not help in building or growing things, it does not help people understand themselves, and with the perfect memories given to everyone by neural Implants, it rarely helps even in police investigations, which are mostly about documentation and collecting the right memory from the right witness.

  Bullet explains that it is like playing back someone else’s memory, except that it is a memory of an object or place, instead of something living. How strange that must be, feeling the psychic imprint of events through inanimate things. The stronger one is, the clearer the vision, and the farthe
r back one sees. It is uncommon in the first place, and those that have it rarely see beyond five minutes. Bullet’s talent is extremely strong; sometimes when he touches something, he has flashes that go back months or years. Sometimes a complete vision lasts long moments; sometimes it is merely a feel, a vibration, a taste.

  There are no amps for psychometry, so I don’t have much control. I only get the strongest impressions most of the time. But when I touched Sasha’s clean, empty room, it went crazy. It’s like I was there. Just after she was torn apart.

  He was overwhelmed of course.

  The vision began to consume him.

  I visited Gorovsky. Touched everything in the apartment. And what would you know, on one of little Zaide’s jumpers, a vibe. Someone who touched Zaide also was exposed to a similar, terrible memory.

  He saw a day in a park. A woman with dark skin, in a blouse that was a little tighter than it had to be and a skirt that showed off, in his opinion, a truly fine set of legs.

  I’m pretty sure Bullet did not mean to share that observation in his thoughts. He’s maybe drinking more than he is used to.

  Barrens smirks at that point, leans to whisper in my ear. “I told ya it was a great outfit. You should wear it more.”

  I guess by this point, even Barrens’s suspicious nature is satisfied that the kid isn’t dangerous. I should stop thinking of him like that. He is almost the same age as I am.

  In front of us, Bullet’s eyes are a little glazed over. “Oops. Sorry, ma’am.”

  “John, the little guy’s had enough,” Barrens says, waving off the next round. “Best bring him some water. Or coffee.”

  Bullet presses his hands against the table. “I’m fine,” he says, a little too loudly. He steadies himself. Breathes. Continues. The look on his face.

  Barrens’s smile is gone. “Hey. It’s okay.”

  The questions you were asking Gorovsky. I knew you were trying to figure it out.

  The problem was, facial recognition databases are off-limits to a mere Keeper Examiner. And for a name, all he had was Hana. He did not even know if it was my real first name. So, slowly, over many, many nights, Bullet wandered from place to place, waiting for uncontrolled flashes of his talent to clue him in to where to go next. Feeling for the terrible echo of the memories Barrens and I carry around, glimpses of him and me. I think of those long, long hours, his walking, wandering, bending low to touch this or that, at night, when there aren’t too many people who can see him.

  “Next thing I know”—he belches—“’scuse me. Next thing I know, I’m in an alley being lifted up by—wazzit? From a movie—King Kong.”

  Bullet’s eyes narrow, and suddenly he looks fierce and focused as he reaches out and puts a hand on Barrens. He looks at me too. His face becomes older, tormented.

  Driving you mad, seeing it every night. The blood smell. In your dreams. I see it on you, that terrible, psychic taint. Let me join you. It’s worse for me. That girl! I can’t sleep anymore! I can help. I found you, didn’t it?

  His eyes tear up. He starts to go to pieces, just barely holds it together.

  Her pain is inside me. Please. Please let me help.

  11

  The end of another Earth calendar year is upon us.

  In Edo Section, along the street to Torus, the violet blossoms of the hydrangea shrubs were gone before I noticed them. Everyone’s wearing heavier coats, and soon there is the magic that the younger kids look forward to year-round.

  The heaters throughout the Dome are turned low and, in some cases, shut down completely for maintenance. Condensers and precipitators continue to function, and at night there is snow. Never more than the streetsweeps can handle, but enough to grace the buildings and streetlamps and parks and gardens with clean, soft white. It smooths away the hard corners and adds curves to the straight lines and edges.

  City Planning and Management teams go throughout the city, dolling up the buildings and towers with festive strings of red and green lights, and sprays of decorative gold color. Subliminal thought-packets emanate from transmitters embedded everywhere, filling the ears with old holiday music and songs, from times and places gone by.

  On Sundays, there are parades, centered around the floats built by the children and teenagers, and featuring them singing and dancing, and laughing, as the thousands of adult crew members watch, gorging themselves on an emotional abundance and confluent aura of joy. These memories have to last until the next year, and we all need as much as we can get. The sight of these smiling little merrymakers, still free of worry, is a promise of hope. Yule is an official celebration aboard the Noah. The traditions are good for morale, and if they cause a short-term drop in productivity, studies from a century before with generations of crew that did without holidays and their associated socializing and leisure activities show they were significantly less orderly and efficient in the long term.

  Miyaki no longer plays bodyguard for me when Leon isn’t around, and Joe November, the boyish young Examiner nicknamed Bullet, has joined us in our dark hobby.

  What he provides is the opposite of the sort of thing I and my program do. With his psychometry, he can visit the places I find that are candidates for where a Mincemeat victim was found. He can touch the evidence stashes Barrens finds in the Long Term Investigations warehouse that correspond to my search results. What I find in the virtual realm of dataspace, Bullet can link to physical reality. So, I do not see Bullet much. He is a decent programmer, but the best contribution he can make is at Barrens’s side, evaluating and tracking down the leads I find.

  Tonight, we meet at Stoney’s, a dive bar just outside the posh High 3 Street area, where the pricier nightclubs of Londinium are clustered. The air is thick with smoke and flavored just slightly with vomit, and the seats are peeling. But it’s also loud and crowded with young twentysomethings who have just finished their qualifying exams, the last tests that validate their skills before they begin their internship phase at whatever Ministry track they have been funneled into.

  With the loud music and all this emotion in the air, it is hard to eavesdrop on any one conversation, and even the most skilled Behavioralist would be unable to pick out more than the slightest fragment of individual thought from the dense chaos of kids, singing, dancing, laughing, crying, celebrating, commiserating, hooking up, breaking up.

  We crowd around a tiny table at the edge of the impromptu dance floor.

  “It’s progress, right? Kind of.”

  At least there is more data for all of us to look through and input into refining the Monster.

  The Monster is what we’re currently calling my swarm of programs, as it is no longer a small, sleek hunter ferreting out specific pieces of information, but a multiheaded mess. Though each single copy of the program is still relatively simple, there are now many versions of each, and the whole is becoming more complex at a faster rate than I expected.

  “Monster is good. We’re using a Monster to find one,” Barrens says.

  I’m surprised my design hasn’t collapsed from all the shifts happening inside the subgroups of the swarm.

  “Hey, you know how it goes. If ain’t broke…”

  “The weird thing is, it’s working better than ever.” Inefficiencies should be accumulating and slowing down its rate of improvement, but perhaps the alien might of the Analytical Nodes is so great that wasted cycles are not so noticeable.

  Barrens shrugs. “I can do the tricks ya teach me, Dempsey, but the theory stuff is not for the likes of me. Anyway, we’re moving now. Finding more, and doing it faster.”

  Yet, even though we have more data, we aren’t actually getting closer to what Mincemeat is.

  Beyond the physical brutality of what happens to the victims, I am disconcerted by the lack of a pattern to the physical locations of these deaths. Bullet has touched the places where they fell, and Mincemeat struck them down in their homes, in their offices, in restaurant bathrooms, in lonely maintenance shafts. How can there be no witnesses for
so long? How can this be happening all over the ship?

  “You know what I think about that,” Barrens rumbles, as he adds more locations to our map of the deaths across the ship.

  The clustering is random, a cloud of blood red lights hovering between us, superimposed on a glowing wire-frame diagram. The shared sight augments our vision through a program we made together, loaded on our Implants. While I load up the tables of search results from the data-miner and Barrens does the mapping, Bullet ticks them off, either with an X for a strikeout or a skull for a real victim.

  We talk, sometimes out loud, sometimes through our Implants.

  “It’s not one man.”

  Barrens’s instinct is still to blame the Ministries of the ship. I have my own fears, my own suspicious, creeping worries in the dark.

  “It could be one man, if he had a talent that can act remotely.”

  Leon gnaws on his lip. “Dunno, Dempsey. What’s more crazy, you think?” He pauses for the mental shift to his Implant. That there’s a shipwide conspiracy of killers acting above the law, or that there’s some nut job with Power like nothing any kid’s ever tested positive for? A Power that can kill violently through a locked door, without needing line of sight even.

  Bullet says softly, “There is still not enough data either way, and there are still all the possibilities we haven’t even thought of yet.”

  A Certification Examiner for Keepers, Joe “Bullet” November actually works under the Ministry of Information. Understandably, he does not want to think that some terrible conspiracy involves people who might be his friends, people he trained with and hung out with and graduated with and has known for years. He wants to think the best of people. The existence of the Mincemeat deaths has shaken his comfortable existence. What terrible secrets are out there to justify this if this has Ministry sanction?

  Like Barrens, he doesn’t care about the Builders the way I do when I show him the memory of the creatures forming the Noah out of plastech under an alien sky.