The Forever Watch Page 3

  He bends over me. Before I have time to be scared of his size, he puts his blue uniform coat around me. It is warm and smells of cloves and cigarettes.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice is so deep, I can feel the vibrations in my chest as he tries, with endearing awkwardness, to calm me down. I am still shaking. He says, “Idiot’s right. Not much punishment or anything while he’s mission-critical. But that status isn’t forever, and others are allowed to defend themselves, if they can.”

  “Y-you … You’re bleeding, really bad,” I get out.

  Gently, he gets me to my feet. The heel on one of my shoes is torn off, and somehow that makes me feel even worse.

  He holds a hand to his side. “’Snuthin’. Look, I called in the medics already. You wanna kick him? You know, before they get here?”

  “What?”

  “You wanna kick him? A few times maybe? You’ll feel better, I promise.”

  Somehow, he makes me laugh. I do kick Holmheim. Just twice. But he’ll ache down there much longer than I will. I sank my stupid, pointy shoe in deep.

  My hand disappears in the cop’s hand when we shake. He is that much larger, and I am not a small girl.

  This is how our odd little friendship begins.

  On the balcony, I move eyes from the simulated horizon and I’m looking up at Barrens. He is looking down at me.

  He has moments when his features twist, make him seem like a small boy. I cannot say no to him.

  I can still smell the odors of his gut wound, the blood leaking down his belly, and the garbage around us in the alleyway. He was hospitalized for weeks because of persistent infections.

  So I sigh, and nod. I wonder how bad what he’s asking will be, but maybe he’s right. Maybe I need this. I don’t know if I can just go back to the way things were.

  Ah, I’ve forgotten how being around him makes me feel—standing this close, even tranquilized by the pills, something inside squeezes, just a little.

  “Next Sunday, if you can sneak me into your office, let’s see what we’ll see.”

  Barrens smiles and passes me his cig. “Thank you, Hana.” He so rarely says my name that way.

  I take just one drag and choke a little before passing it back. I use my psi and play with the smoke I exhale. It gathers in the air in the shape of a bulldog, like from the documentaries of Earth, and it barks and runs circles around us, ghostlike.

  “Nice,” he murmurs.

  He embraces me. Deep inside, past the fog, there is giddiness, desire, a wish that I could prod him into doing more. He’s never done that before.

  He does not say good-bye when he leaves.

  Other than that hug, this is how it’s always been with us. I might not see him for months, not a call or message, and then on a good day or an ordinary day or a particularly bad day when I’m remembering what I want to forget, he’ll just be there. Distracting me with a request for some lessons on database queries, on programming, on analysis, or with a talk about freedom and responsibility, his rough voice quietly dropping a few hints, here and there, of the evils he sees.

  And once in a while, I’ll send him a message over the Nth Web, and we have coffee at a cheap café where nobody knows us, and I’ll tell him about my day while he quietly vibrates in place, tense and anxious at first, slowly relaxing. He does not talk much about the simmering red inside of him, and I don’t talk about my blues; we just sit together, sometimes listening quietly to the amateur jazz performers on the stage, and sometimes, our fingers touch, and we don’t say “Bye.”

  I want to ask for more, and sometimes I’m even sure he does too.

  3

  Another effect of the neural Implant is that one never oversleeps, unless one is seriously ill, or intoxicated. It is difficult to ignore an alarm clock inside your own skull: the internal timekeeper built into the Implant.

  Despite not falling asleep until four in the morning, I wake up bright and early, with the spring dawn, from the Implant’s firing off thoughts of Wake up wake up wake up that cut through sleep and dreams.

  It’s autopilot. Showering. Choosing the day’s clothes out of the dustless, hermetically sealed closets. Picking out matching shoes. I take my medication. I go to work.

  It still takes twenty-two minutes to get there. The same walk, the same bus ride. The team is the same too, except for the addition of a new trainee, Wong, who greets me a little too stiffly and politely. Ah, to get such respect from all my subordinates. How long will that fresh-faced awe last?

  The big project I organized just before I received my summons for Breeding Duty—a new resource-tracking and analytics module—was completed in my absence. Going through the reports, it is clear that my assistant, Hennessy, has done a decent job while I was gone. The number of error reports has steadily dropped off, and at this point, 93.25 percent of user help requests can be handled by the system’s agent programs, without need for human intervention.

  He does not even seem to mind having a younger woman as his boss. That’s rare. Also, not once has he attempted to glance down my blouse during meetings. I must remember to buy him a gift.

  The first day of the rest of my life, the goal is to reassimilate into the living world. I tell myself that what happened to me is fading. I practice pretending everything is okay. I succeed in not thinking about that first waking moment, clutching my belly, knowing something is missing. Most of the time.

  This is just another transition in life. Just another test. Everyone’s life on the Noah is full of tests. My childhood had more of them than the average because, the better you perform, the more you can do, the more they push you to maximize what you might become.

  This is not nearly so terrible as the third Track Determination Exams when I was fifteen. Wasn’t it worse back then? Before the day I met Barrens, wasn’t that the worst day of my life?

  Fifteen minutes pas—seven! How did I manage to do that! I overslept, I—

  Stayed up until five, studying. Did I misthink setting the alarm for the first time in three years? Shit, not even time to shower …

  In a pajama top with winged hearts and striped jogging pants, running for the train. Eyes on me. Yeah, don’t look at me, I’m busy, I’m a mess, I—

  “Sorry! So sorry.” I almost knock over this older guy in a suit. I almost trip, rushing down the escalator to the S-line platform.

  Oh shit, oh shit, it’s leaving, it’s … left.

  I have to take the bus. It is another fifteen minutes to run up to the stop.

  The bus is crowded. It’s shift transit hour, when the night workers leave and the day staff start. Sweat pouring down my face, from the run, from the growing anxiety as the bus seems to have to stop at every fricking light.

  Finally here, the grim black octagon of the testing facility. And I’m late. I am so, so late.

  They do let me in to take the TDE. But half of the time for the Data Structures exam went by before I even sat at the damn terminal.

  I go through all the tricks to calm myself.

  Eyes burning. I think the proctors are looking at me, why wouldn’t they? Stupid tears.

  The terminal locks to my Implant, shuts off access to the Nth Web, isolates me from every other student taking the test, and it begins. Every correct answer gets a harder question after, and every wrong one gets an easier follow-up, and there’s no backtracking. Getting a max score in every exam is nearly impossible, but I’ve heard it’s how kids get selected for Command Officer School, something I can’t admit I’ve wanted for years, and why why why is it so hard to think? The first questions should be trivial, they’re about B-tree implementation.… I’ve done practice tests for this a hundred times, and I can feel Lyn and Jazz and Marcus staring at my back, feel them being worried for me.

  They’re only the exams that determine the path of the rest of our lives.

  All the fiddly little differences between the different kinds of lists. Messing with hash tables. Linking. Operations. Procedures. Abstract data types.

>   All right, I bombed the first test. Get a grip, Dempsey. Stop crying! There’s twenty-four hours more of exams ahead.

  I didn’t make COS. None of my friends did either. But I was wretched for a good long while. I did not cry other than those first moments during Data Structures, but it felt as if I should have. The terrible three took me out and got me properly drunk in between bowls of ice cream. My first hangover was that morning after, in Lyn’s apartment, with the rest of them passed out around the couch and the air smelling very much as if something excessive happened the night before. It was not so bad really. The path of my life had been set. The three of us ended up going to the same training facility, and even if it was not on the path to a seat on the Noah’s Bridge or a high rank in one of the Ministries, it is still Type V training, the educational tier just under that of the top officers on the ship.

  Why do I care so much about a child I never saw, never touched? Women are not supposed to get depressed over this. There was no time for a personal connection. I was just an incubator. I wasn’t even awake for the months my womb was occupied.

  It is not like the aberration that what had happened with Holmheim. That secret trauma that’s got nothing to do with normal life. Or maybe I can say that now because Holmheim wasn’t nearly so valuable as his pride led him to believe and was discreetly Adjusted, those troublesome urges excised from his brain, his creative centers subtly locked down by incidental damage, his future prospects limited. Most of his coworkers probably did not notice the change in him.

  Just as mine never noticed the change in me, and I did change for all that I was not Adjusted.

  The ordinary drama of life on the Noah—messing up a test, Breeding Duty, recovering from all that—is something every woman is supposed to handle. I’m supposed to be stronger than this. Nobody but Barrens seems to understand that I’m having a tough time.

  This is this, and that was that.

  They glitter darkly, in the back of my thoughts, locked away. Subversive, dangerous desires, to hack my way through the system, find out what my baby looks like.

  I consider voluntarily setting up a follow-up with that Behavioralist from the post-Duty evaluation. There is not supposed to be any stigma from psych counseling, but everyone knows those sessions go into one’s career records, and an officer’s emotional-stability score is a significant factor in being evaluated for future promotions.

  After work, I watch streams on the Web. I watch the commercials. They let you taste, for just an instant, the sensation of having that product.

  A few of them are for clothes or food or drinks or shoes. But most of the ads are selling memories themselves.

  A memory can be shared with others for the sake of entertainment, or for educational purposes, or as testimony in the courts. They are bought and sold and spread on the Nth Web the way movies and music used to be when the networking of computation was new. If a crewman cannot afford to pay for the awesome experience of a real steak, he can at least buy the memory of someone who can.

  These days, the most desired of actors and actresses are not the most beautiful, or the most skilled. It is about authenticity. Success is about the emotional breadth of experience to move the minds of those who experience the scenarios one has acted through.

  There is an ad for a memory from a rich Behavioralist with a cat.

  I pay the fee and subscribe.

  For two minutes, I live inside her head.

  Minnow’s fur is so soft. So soft. When I run the brush along his back, he arches against it and purrs. He is warm in my hands. He trusts me. I feel needed and loved, and content, kneeling on the plush velvety carpet, while I slide stroke after stroke of the stiff bristles against him.

  He is worth every credit it takes to pay for his keep. He is beautiful. His coat shines, glossy black dusted with ash gray. The white patches on his feet make them look larger, softer. Being with him is the only bright moment in each day.

  The warm euphoria slips a moment, to grays and gloom, but his tail thumps against the carpet demandingly, and as I resume my attentions, the world is a little less dark, and I immerse myself in pleasure.

  I buy a dozen scenes from that vendor.

  Behavioralists make the best memories. They have this different way of looking at the world. Their reading talents are so attuned that they work not to use them except when needed. This tight rein on one’s thoughts changes the sensorium of experience. They dive into their own sense feedback and live from moment to moment, minds empty, to stop themselves from being tainted by the stray thoughts of others around them. This woman’s memories of her cat are, except for the emotional content, more potent than any of my own true ones.

  I think about whether it would be worth it to blow the entire twenty thousand cred from the Duty compensation on a cat.

  Time doesn’t stop for anyone.

  Before I know it, it is Friday and it is as if I were never gone from the office.

  Behind the tall tombstone walls at City Planning, the hours pass slowly, as if the mass of them drags at the fabric of space-time. Or maybe all workplaces are like this.

  My head aches from the tedium of another report about water-reclamation efficiency. My team has been arguing with our superiors all morning about whether a newly developed purification protocol can justify the resources it will take to change the old one. The discussion is loaded with jargon and numbers and the occasional dramatic exaggeration.

  Hennessy flails about as he exclaims, “Come on! Look at this graph!” The poor dear’s voice gets shrill when he’s excited. It makes him seem less competent than he actually is. “I mean, just look at it! If we do this, it’s projected that we can support a thousand more people than we would be able to without it in a hundred years! That’s a big difference, isn’t it? It’s huge! That’s a, that’s a—”

  “That’s an inflated figure that does not take into account all the added resource needs,” Hester drones in response. She adds more data to the model, and the analysis shows that the net benefit is perhaps just a dozen humans more. “Is that worth risking the existing homeostasis figures?”

  Homeostasis. That word enters these arguments all the time. Hester is good at her job. The old battle-ax is extremely risk averse, which is the way she should be.

  “But it’s these incremental improvements that—”

  “All right, all right. It’s time for a break. Let’s reconvene in an hour. Getting testy in here. We are all on the same side.”

  I close my eyes and press my temples with my fingers, sliding them in slow circles.

  “You all right, Dempsey?”

  “I’m fine,” I lie. I’m not reacting well to the medication. There is no nausea, no headache, no palpitations, but I feel dull, drained, as asleep as I am awake. “I’ll just be at the rooftop garden, okay?”

  I climb in a daze.

  The breeze is better on the roof than at street level.

  The bench is solid granite. It is reassuringly rough, and its structure is chaotic and imperfect and hand carved and lovely. The fountain in front of me sprays a fine, cool mist. The simulated sun warms my face. The wing-beats of a bee hovering in front of a flower steal me away, but not for long enough. Up in the garden’s air, I force myself to recall my passion for what I do, to reach through the haze of imposed chemical calm.

  I need to refocus. Remind myself that what I’m doing means something. That I’m not just a tiny cog in a machine.

  Well, I am a tiny cog. But it is important just the same, being a little gear of the right mass with teeth of just the right size and shape.

  Humanity does happen to be on the brink of extinction. How can any responsible human being be a slacker under these circumstances?

  I entertain myself with an old game I programmed into my head when I was twenty, a newly minted underling of City Planning.

  It starts with just me. Just all the little things I do, talking, filing reports, crunching numbers. It pulls back and diagrams, circuitlike, the
web of interactions between us all, the relationships of food, water, and air, supply and demand, crops and livestock, sustainability and consumption.

  Then it pulls back to the beginning, with the Noah leaving newly destroyed Earth, carrying the best and brightest of those who remain. We do not know what destroyed Earth. Information Security tells us it does not matter anyway.

  Pull on one person here, push there. Maybe that individual makes life a bit better or a bit worse. Arrows going between each person-node change, bright colors representing positive interactions, dark ones symbolizing the negative.

  It is playing an instrument, watching the web of lights play out while trying to improve scores of efficiency and productivity and limiting social unrest and misery. Each touch consumes energy, so one can only influence so many at a time. As the game plays out, new features unlock, productivity-improving entertainments for the masses, sports centers, parks, nature biomes, research projects for fanciful inventions from my childhood.

  Sometimes there are accidents, disasters and crises, fires, meteorite strikes on the hull. Entropy steadily eats away all resources. Sections of the ship are closed and used as spare parts to keep the rest going.

  The lives of the crew are the most precious resource of course—even as the population contracts, the player has to try to maintain genetic diversity, just as the Breeding Department does on the ship. Too little diversity and random routines create diseases or obstacles that the population is not adaptable enough to handle.

  If one does well, the ship, the Noah, makes it to the new world, and trumpets blare and fireworks light up a new sky. If one does poorly, too few survivors make it to Canaan to propagate the species, or the ship does not make it at all.

  I play the game for a few minutes. It is absorbing and simple and easy. My real job is much the same, but with the complications of working with people who just refuse to see eye-to-eye, and with all those bad moods and irrational jealousies and turf wars. And criminals too.