The Forever Watch Page 2

  She flips the faux-leather cover on her tablet closed and stands.

  “Is that it?”

  “Yes, that’s it. You’ll be expected back at work tomorrow. You are discharged.” She pauses, looks to one side as she accesses the Network. “Yes, the paperwork has gone through. The Noah and humanity thank you for your service. When you check your account, you will see that the standard amount has been deposited.”

  A week of evaluations, and the Behavioralist never even told me her name! Typical.

  I take a deep breath just as those tall, black heels are about to pass the threshold of the doorway. “Could I, perhaps, just have an image of him, or her? Just a static two-D?”

  She looks back at me and purses her lips. “You were briefed, Ms. Dempsey. You know that is not permitted. I’ll adjust the dosage a tick upward. Now, let’s not speak further of this.”

  The urge to weep is strong. I fight it down. “Have you gone through this too?” She has gray hair, so by that age …

  Those steel eyes soften. “Of course, Ms. Dempsey. Only postbirth Behavioralists see to Breeding patients. Go home. Take your meds. Buy something nice for yourself with the compensation package. You’ll feel right as rain.”

  I try to imagine that it will be so. But still, I want to hold my child, just once. I hope the drugs help me forget soon.

  2

  As promised, the orderly comes by. Still smiling. Flirting. He holds my wrist rather familiarly with one hand and administers my last intravenous dose with the other.

  Call me, he messages. Not mind-to-mind, as he has no telepathic talent, but through the standard messaging app preloaded on everyone’s Implant.

  To home then, by way of a ride in a long, sleek, white car. One last service provided for Breeders. The driver does not try to make small talk. Does he do this every day? What else does he do for BD Central? I could find out. It would take a few seconds. But everything seems to take so much effort. Just paying attention. Numb. The cityscape slides by in the windows. He stops, and here I am, at Torus—a ring-shaped building with clean, upper-class apartments for officers. Gray carpets, sterile steely lights, tastefully selected prints of ancient Earth art.

  I could have afforded better years ago, but never got around to it. Moving would be inconvenient and I am set in my routines. But maybe it’s time for a change; maybe that’s what I’ll do with the Breeding compensation. Put in the down payment for a lifetime rental on an actual house, in the same exclusive neighborhood where my friends live.

  Up the elevator to the twelfth floor and I am swaying now, stumbling to my door. I have not done anything today but think and wait and I am exhausted.

  I think the password to the lock, and there they are, laughing and cheering. They have glasses, they are eating, they are so close around me, touching my shoulder, my arm … They are very, very loud.

  “Heya, D! So, what was it like?”

  “Oh, come on! She was just asleep. It’s not—”

  “Give her some goddamn room!” Barrens’s voice booms as he shoves them aside without a care for their complaining. He looks down at me and smiles what passes for his smile. Half snarl, it is harsh and a little cruel. “Eh. Hey. I told ’em a party wasn’t a good idea, but—”

  For a moment, we just stand there, him looking down and me looking up, for perhaps a little too long, while music and conversation pound the space around us.

  “Come on, join in!” the others insist.

  There are balloons of different colors. There is a cake with ten candles on it, surrounded by platters of steaming food. It’s a carrot cake layered with enough sugared cream to induce diabetic shock. There is fettuccine with a cream sauce. There is tofu, breaded and delicately fried, seasoned with miso and spring onions. There is fresh bread, and an assortment of expensive cheeses. Most pricey of all, there is animal protein—an actual fish, steamed and stuffed and glazed with a sugary, peppery crust. In all, it represents resources that would cost an average crewman an entire month’s income.

  That is not a problem for Lyn and Marcus, who probably pushed the idea of this party to its completion.

  Lyn is a project leader in Nth Web Development and Maintenance, one of the research arms of Information Security. And Marcus is the director of Water Management. It would not have taken much for them to convince Jazz, who loves any opportunity to party. She does research in High Energy Physics, but is not like the stiffs in her department.

  Technically, as a City Planning Administrator, I am higher ranked and in a more direct line of command to one of the Ministers of the Council, but the internal hierarchies of the departments under the individual Ministries are not straightforward, and the three of them are all paid somewhat more than I am, though even I earn many times what the average crewman on the ship makes.

  We met back in school, long before we qualified together for the Class V Training Center, the second-most-prestigious career-preparation track there is.

  They are dressed in actual organic silk and cotton, wear shoes of leather, and have jewelry with real gold.

  The rest of the less luxuriantly attired attendees are from our respective departments. Mostly young, ambitious kids a year out of their training groups, waiting for the opportunity to get ahead, get promoted, and replace us, and a few older officers who hit their ceiling and will never reach any higher.

  My old schoolmates direct the evening’s course and keep the social contract going. We chat about things that don’t matter. They tell me about all the events I missed out on while I was on Breeding Duty, and I cannot help thinking that for all the things they talk about, nothing has changed between before and the present. Nothing, but myself.

  Then there is Barrens. Barrens does not fit in with the rest of us. He is at least half a foot taller than anyone else in the room, and broader too. His clothes are cheap plastech processed to look like a plain, white, stretch T-shirt, and denim pants, and functional black shoes. His complexion is pale and watery—too many night shifts, not enough simulated sun.

  He is quiet after that first loud moment. The looks he gets from my other friends and our coworkers are curious, amused. Lots of arched brows.

  Some murmuring.

  “The guy with the medals?”

  “Heard he got written up or something.”

  If I can hear it, Barrens, whose senses are sharp even when he isn’t enhancing them with the Power, can hear it.

  He doesn’t offend easily. He just shakes his head and walks out to the balcony, a giant trying not to step on the normal-size people in his way. Out there, he starts puffing on his cigarettes, watching me through the glass.

  I want to throw them all out. I do not.

  They fill the air with conversation, about Web streams I’ve missed out on, old Earth movies being shown in the theaters, and minor improvements in the fidelity of the sky and weather simulation. They make me feel a little less empty. Everyone does his or her part, a show of caring. Of course the young ones from our respective departments are here more for the food, and for a chance to hang out with the superiors they depend upon for their quarterly performance evaluations and recommendations.

  By midnight, the party has wound down and only the terrible three are left, with Barrens content to be an outsider, still puffing away on the balcony. The discussion becomes only marginally more personal. We talk about our school days, about bad dates and old drama and parties and sadistic teachers. The three take turns mentioning men they want to introduce me to.

  “Come on, Hana,” Lyn says. “You haven’t dated anyone in years and years.”

  “I just like to focus on work.”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly the problem. You need a man, dearie, to scratch that special itch. Isn’t that right, Marcus?”

  He laughs, puts up his open hands. “Leave me out of this one.”

  “Sure, just what services one can provide,” Jazz says, leering; it looks wrong on her pixie face. Or maybe too right. “Come now. I’ve heard that most post
-Duty women feel certain urges more than normal.”

  Do they? The entire evening, I have needed to fake my emotions. Since the higher dose kicked in, my head feels packed with sludgy treacle. I have to think about how I would normally feel in response to something instead of just feeling it. Desire is the furthest thing from my thoughts, and I suppose enough indifference or distaste shows on my face that they let it go, when they’d normally needle me about my lack of sex life for a bit longer.

  Lyn smiles and pulls a bottle out of a bag. She waves her fingers and faint blue light outlines the cork as it pops free. She pours a glass for each of us.

  The wine is a deep red. I’ve never liked wine.

  Jazz takes a sip, points to the balcony with her little finger. Her ring has a bit of crystal on it that catches the light. “D, why’s the goon even here?”

  I never explained Barrens to the rest of my friends. We did not go to school together. We were not in any of the same child-rearing groups. We did not grow up in the same neighborhood.

  “Please don’t talk about him like that. Leon is more capable than you might think. He’s a good guy.”

  “Oh, come on. How did you meet anyway?”

  I just shake my head.

  Marcus breaks open a deck of cards, and we make it through a few rounds of bridge. I imagine old people must spend nights like this, after they are Retired.

  At last, they leave. Tomorrow is a workday, after all. And only Barrens is left.

  He opens the glass door for me, and I join him out there.

  “Did you eat anything at all?”

  “Psh. Too rich for me anyway. Would just upset my stomach.”

  We stand side by side, elbows resting on the rail, and look up at the fake sky, with its fake moon and fake stars. Beyond the skyline of the tall crystal towers of Edo Section is a horizon. It is how the night might look back on Earth if it were not just a blasted wasteland, with a toxic atmosphere too thick for light to penetrate, and no one and nothing left alive to see it. Almost always a gentle breeze goes through the city, generated by carefully designed ventilation ducts behind the simulated sky, interacting with thermal radiation from the warmer street level. There are seasons too in the Habitat, also patterned after Earth.

  The Noah has days and nights because humans evolved with all these things, with a sun, with a moon and stars, with weather and seasons, and biologically, we do not do so well without all these environmental signals related to the passage of time.

  “How are you, Leon? I was surprised to see you.”

  “Enh, does a guy good to rub shoulders with his betters once in a while.”

  “How did you even find out about the party?” They would not have asked him to help or thought to invite him.

  He shrugs. “I knew you would be released today. And even if they don’t know me, I know your pals—you talk about them enough. Of course they were going to throw you a party.”

  “They are my friends, you know.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  For a moment, I touch his elbow. He always runs hot. “You’re my friend too.”

  He takes a breath, “I don’t really have friends. There’s you, and a couple of guys from the force.”

  In that dim light, the shadows across Barrens’s face deepened those craggy angles, make his expressions harsher. His jaw and temples are coated in chrome. A bruiser, Barrens is not just physically strong—his psionics lend themselves toward modifying his metabolism and biochemistry, as well as surrounding his body with raw psychokinetic energy. He can make himself faster and stronger, and he is utterly unstoppable.

  I’d seen it before, when he tried to help me.

  “How are you, Leon?”

  It is on his mind too, which is why he is not meeting my eyes when his voice rumbles, “My transfer to Long Term Investigations finally came through. Funny. Years after I helped you out that one time, you know, with that thing, and they finally got around to it.”

  I close my eyes. Cold cases.

  They don’t get solved until the perpetrators die and their crimes are revealed when the dead implants are scanned. Police officers in that department do secretarial work and that’s all. They file information and hide unsolved crimes from the system until they can be declared “solved” so that the utopian illusion is preserved. Hundred percent crime resolution is what everyone is led to believe is true, and it is, if only superficially.

  For some, it would be a cushy job. An LTI Inspector does not have to go around on patrols, does not have to deal with even the minor risks of violent confrontations. But Barrens actually cares for people. It is part of his problem. He truly wants to help. It is a punitive assignment, for him.

  That aspect of his nature is the reason we met.

  My saying “I’m sorry” is not much comfort.

  I am surprised by his grim smile. On him, that is an expression of pleasure.

  “Don’t be. Supposed to be a dead-end job, ya know. But there are opportunities, in LTI. If the likes of me could get some help.”

  I am tired. I just want to sleep. I want to dream fool’s dreams about what my baby might be like. To wonder if, somehow, I might see him someday, just walking around, and know it is him. Is it a boy? It could be a girl. Instinct though, just a little of the tenuous link the Behavioralist talked about, nudges thoughts of a boy to me.

  Or it’s pure fantasy.

  Barrens sees something of my mood. One great big mitt enfolds one of my hands, lets go too soon. “Look, I know you’re having a tough time. I see people went through Breeding Duty. Some of them were never the same, after. Don’t care what the propaganda folks say, I know it’s rough. I do need your help, Dempsey, and I figure, you know—could give you something else to think about, something to put the emptiness out of your mind.”

  “For what, specifically?”

  “Your magic on the Web. I’ve gotten good with what you’ve taught, but I need more.”

  Of course he would if he was tangling with the encryption and security of the LTI databases, which were definitely not for public access. Most of the crew of the Noah are not permitted to know that there is such a department. Navigating its security is another level from the simple neuralhacks I showed him for scripting special probes into the police database or digging through school records or property ownership.

  “I…”

  “I’m a fast learner. Said so yourself. You only have to show me once.”

  It’s not as if he’s calling in a favor. He’s too much a gentleman, in his way, to expect me to pay him back. But there is this, between us: the darkest night of my life. I close my eyes. The memory slices through the meds, and for a moment I feel it all over again, raw and real.

  I am twenty-eight years old. My back is bruised and scraped against the rough pavement of the alleyway. I ache, I’m torn between my legs. I am this close to vomiting.

  A man I thought was my friend is pushing himself upright, away from me. The awful intrusion slides free and his … It trickles down. In my imagination, it burns like acid.

  Senior Engineer Holmheim is gloating, he laughs at the hulking policeman pinned against the wall by his touch.

  Holmheim raises his hand. It is covered with an engineer’s work glove. He is not supposed to carry it off duty. It is a powerful telekinetic amplifier—with it, I could carve a building out of a tank of plastech myself, or crush it. I am rated at twice Holmheim’s strength, and perhaps that is why he has chosen me for this. I am the department’s fast-rising star, the youngest at my rank.

  And I am a rule-follower. I did not have my professional amp with me. What I could do with the civilian-grade amp I did have on me was nothing to him; he burned it out the second I tried to resist.

  So I cover myself with the torn bits of my dress and scream until my throat is raw and watch as Holmheim draws more energy from the grid. Blue streaks stream from his face emitters to the gauntlet, and the gauntlet is like a sun at the end of his arm. Telekinetic leakage kicks up th
e dirt around us, sends black flecks whirling up, sends papers and garbage from the garbage bin in the corner flying.

  The massive cop grunts with the increased pressure. Holmheim is mind-pushing him into the wall with such force that the brick and mortar surface starts to crack, to cave in. It seems impossible that the huge man’s ribs haven’t shattered already.

  “Shouldn’t have messed with me! I’m mission-critical, you dumb Boy Scout! I can get away with anything!”

  The fragments of the cop’s shattered club rise into the air, shimmering with cobalt light. They fuse into a spear. It sticks the cop through the belly, punches through him into the wall with a steely crunch.

  Holmheim is so pleased by this, he is getting hard again.

  “Yeah, ’m dumb,” the cop gasps out. The syllables slosh together in his bloody mouth. “But y’know … if miss’n-cr’t’cal staff ’tack someun, ev’n ’f they n’t punished f’that … well … fella can attack back.”

  “Oh, please. What can a nothing like you do? You’re just a brawler with a badge!”

  The cop snarls. It is a terrifying sound. His ribs are broken, and blood is gurgling up his throat. The badge on his breast starts to glow a bright, bright red. His already huge arms and legs seem to swell.

  “Please! You gonna fight me, Boy Scout? You’re practically a cripple already!”

  Holmheim always likes to boast before the job is done.

  One moment the cop is there, and then he is gone, just the bloody shaft left against the crater in the wall. There is a sound like thunder. Holmheim’s face distorts, becomes a battered mess, his metal twisted and torn as he falls backward, away from the cop’s extended fist.

  The cop spits blood and snot and saliva, wipes his mouth. His speech clears up some, without psychokinetic force crushing in his chest.

  “Idiot. Cops train for combat, not showing off. We get training no technical officer gets.”