The Forever Watch Read online

  The people part of the equation is what makes real life so much harder than my simulation.

  The journey from Earth to here has taken 346 years, still less than a third of the way.

  All that is left of the human species is hurtling through space at relativistic velocity, living for the journey, in the hope that our descendants will make it.

  I give up on the game. Even facing away from the playground, I cannot stop listening to a little girl yelling at a little boy for getting dirt on her new shoes. Their tinny voices raise beads of sweat on the back of my neck. They crack my cool, medicated detachment.

  Those kids must be here on a field trip. Keepers are granted access to show children the different job tracks they might enter when they are older. Keepers are professionals—theirs is a full-time position, raising the young, preparing them for the rest of their lives. I don’t want to, but I watch them. They look happy together, the boy and the girl. A man leans against the rooftop rail, smiling quietly to himself as he ticks off items on his psi-tablet, probably a Keeper’s regular behavioral report, while his partner hums softly, unpacking a picnic basket.

  They look perfect together.

  I have a duty, and it is not to an abstract ideal, but to them, and everyone that comes after.

  So I work, there, on the bench. I lock out my senses, connect my Implant wirelessly into the office access point, and blaze through summaries and abstracts of reports, journal articles, anything that might help with the proposal. Hopeless. Nothing relevant, or it’s too far off to be feasible. It is no great disaster if we do not succeed in pushing the project through today, but it is not progress either, and the waste of the resources we have put in, the hours of labor and analysis, the simulations and meetings, well. Waste is a terrible thing in the confines of a closed system.

  Then I remember Jazz mentioning something, back at the party. One of the guys she wanted to introduce me to, also working at the High Energy Labs. Savelyev. Brilliant, she said. And not too proud to work on marginal improvements in efficiency instead of grand, hopelessly abstract theory.

  I put a call in through the system and almost hope he doesn’t answer.

  Jacob Savelyev here.

  Translated into data and back over the system, his thoughts taste small and neat, fastidious, exacting.

  I try my warmest. Hello, Dr. Savelyev. This is Hana Dempsey? We have a mutual friend named Jazz. She was telling me about something you’ve been working on that I think could help us out here in City Planning. I stick a little image of me at the end of the transmitted thought, smiling.

  The fellow is acerbic and impatient and it takes an embarrassing fifteen minutes to get him to understand that, apart from any ideas he may have that I’m flirting with him during office hours, we actually have a mutual professional interest that can help us both.

  When he gets it, Jazz turns out to be right. He is brilliant. With the personal put aside for the moment, it takes a mere five minutes of harmonious data interchange for us to both get something we want.

  Though I do have to remind him I’m not a physicist when he starts sending complex 3-D images of the effects of his proposed injection protocols on the psionic field in the reactor vessels, accompanied by a truly dizzying matrix of equations and quantum control-theory analysis that I can understand just enough to know I don’t really understand it at all. It’s all brilliant flashes of light to me, with the shape of the blazing toroid of energy twisting just a little differently from before, minute changes in the topological space.

  It’s the conclusion from his paper that I need, and the statistics comparing his results to the current standard operating procedures.

  Ah, of course, of course, Administrator Dempsey. May I call you Hana? Here are the five graphs you will want to show, and then throw a page of my equations at them anyway for shock value.

  I can see his self-image leaking through in the messages. A shy, small smile, on a person who is a little too brilliant and has difficulty relating to others.

  Thank you, Dr. Savelyev. You’ve saved my team from wasting quite a lot of work. Yes, you can call me Hana.

  Well, Hana. Ah. I’m sure any nudge from the Ministry of the Interior will help me on my side in Energy.

  We finish our discussion just in time. I tweak the data even as I sink back into my senses and rise from the bench. And I do not have to promise to have a date with him or anything else. He concludes with his thanks and farewells, and already I can feel him pulling back into the cold shell of his expertise and mind.

  It would not have been a terrible thing to go out with him. And it might have gotten my friends to ease up on my dating situation. He seems nice, even. So much like the archetype that everyone thinks I should be going out with.

  If I didn’t already want someone else.

  My footsteps are loud against the stairs. The rail along the spiraling steps is embossed with orchids. In the meeting room Hennessy feels my positivity, relaxes into his chair beside mine.

  You have something. You got something done over lunch.

  Yes.

  That’s why you’re the boss.

  “You want to address the Board, Administrator Dempsey?”

  “My team is confident in our figures. But we understand the Board’s position. I suggest a compromise. HEL also has a proposal in the pipe. Separately, the improvements seem negligible when considering the risk-benefit ratio, but packaged together with ours, the graph changes.” A wave of my fingers, and the displays hovering in our brains are updated with new numbers, the line lifting ever so slightly. “A contact at High Energy assures me that they can deploy in three months. By then, my group can add 0.012 percent efficiency to our proposed protocol.”

  The murmurs of approval would have had me giddy and bouncing in my seat, once. At least for a while I can smile without its feeling entirely faked.

  But I am not thinking of Savelyev, or Jazz, or this little victory over bureaucratic inertia. I am already thinking of the coming weekend with Barrens. The days in between could not end fast enough.

  4

  Sunday morning, before dawn, I am awake, yawning. I swallow the last of the watermelon-seed-size, cherry-red pills with relief. Tomorrow, the world will be a touch brighter, perhaps. I will be closer to normal, closer to my old self. Since going on the meds, my dreams have been mechanical and dry, just repetitions of fragments of the days, sitting in front of a terminal and tapping away, coding simulation parameters. Sometimes, boring pieces from puberty, sitting in class and absorbing a lecture. Nothing like the vibrant, strange lives that I am used to living in my sleep. Where are my lunar oceans, my winged unicorns?

  By tonight, the last of the drugs will have dissipated, and maybe when my dreams crack the fog of the mundane again, I can kick my growing addiction to purchased memories. Too much Minnow the cat.

  Barrens’s timing has always been good. He messages me that he’s at my door just as I finish dressing.

  The pads of my fingers slide along the slick, heavy material of the police coat spread out on my bed. It is night blue, a deep shade, depths-of-the-ocean blue. The buttons are gold-plated. Silver tassels are braided together and highlight the right lapel, and on the left breast pocket, a thick, triangular shield of office is emblazoned with a trio of stars and the crest of Earth’s moon. It is a combat amplifier, and when I touch it, it hums as it harmonizes with my brain waves.

  The nameplate engraved above the badge indicates its owner, Miyaki Miura.

  “You didn’t steal this from your coworker, did you?” I call out to the kitchen. The penalty for losing a mainline amplifier is steep.

  “Naw, naw. She owes me a favor. Anyway, she’s on leave for a week. Taking a vacation, you know, going camping in the biome reserve on the top floor of the vertical farm. Damn fine coffee you’ve got, Dempsey.”

  I thrust an arm into the double-breasted greatcoat and pull it on. The sleeves are a little short, but the shoulders feel cavernously loose. Miyaki is shorter
than me, but broader in the shoulders, probably a bruiser like Barrens. I hope he isn’t lying about her willingly loaning me her uniform and shield. It is easy to picture a diminutive, sprightly goddess with rose lightning around her fist taking a swing at me.

  In the mirror, I am a child again, playing at cops and robbers. I cannot remember when I first realized that the cops could also be the robbers, and that some of the bad guys were beyond the reach of justice, so it must have been before I got the Implant. How did I learn that particular life lesson? It is not something my Keeper, Mala, would have taught me by choice.

  I take a deep breath and step out of my bedroom. “How do I look?”

  “Ha! You’re a cutie. City Planning ought to have uniforms.”

  The lug can make me smile.

  He slurps the last dregs of coffee and his face is a bit slack, the muscles loose as he savors the little bit of bliss he’s allowing himself. Barrens never lets himself taste my “elite’s food” as he calls it, but he can’t resist my coffee.

  I check over the signal routines between the amplifier and my Implant. I can see Barrens’s heavy-handed but effective hacks. He’s gotten a lot better. It is certainly more than adequate to fool the security checkpoints beyond the public areas of a police precinct.

  “Now.” He claps those meaty paws together. “Ready to do some good?”

  His forehead is knotted up, and the skin around his eyes tightens. He looks ready for battle, a gladiator out of his time, and my smile becomes a grin. More Inspectors should be like Barrens. Sincere, fiery, true.

  “Okay!” My hands come up in a bad caricature of a boxer’s ready stance, and I jab at Barrens’s shoulder. “Let’s do it!”

  Our bootheels click against the checkered tiles. Then we walk down flight after flight of steps, designed to mimic the look and feel of bare concrete. I suppose the police-precinct interior decorators feel that it is supposed to look functional and minimalistic and professional, or perhaps they’ve watched too many Earth movies. Motes of dust catch the sterile, white light from the illuminated strips along the center of the ceiling, murky, translucent rays through the darkness.

  “It’s ugly and poorly ventilated. Got personality down here though, doesn’t it?”

  We enter through an unlabeled doorway. It could just as well be the entrance to a broom closet.

  Instead, the room is dim and airless, and far, far larger than I expected, even with the privileged information I have from City Planning. The single hall is nearly large enough to fit the rest of the entire building. Row after row of shelves dominate the space, laden with bar-coded boxes. Barrens walks me to his desk and system terminal in the corner. The finish of umber, ocher, sepia, and sienna streaks, meant to look something like wood, has peeled off in long, dirty flakes. It clashes with the perfectly smooth, achromatic slab in the center.

  He offers me an ancient chair. The vinyl creaks when I sink into the cushions. I stretch out my arms and pop my knuckles and wake up the hard-line terminal. Function keys light up in rows over the interface surface, which feeds the displays directly to my implants, superimposing the command prompt and some general-purpose frames over my eyesight.

  “Okay, Leon. What exactly do you need? You wouldn’t tell me anything beforehand, so I just brushed up on some general skills.”

  He paces back and forth. His ruddy lips part several times, but he does not speak, and he paces some more. I let him work through his thoughts. The chair squeaks as I swivel it back and forth, watching him.

  Finally, he clears his throat. “I just don’t got enough to list down the specifics I gotta learn how to do. I’m sorry, I should have asked before taking you down here—”

  Easy, big guy. “You know I don’t mind. Take your time.”

  “Look. Look, I do have something specific I want to do. But it’s best to show you, first. If you want to see it.”

  “See what?”

  “A memory.” He looks over his shoulder at the door, as if he expects someone to knock on it and barge in. Licks his lips. “Mine.”

  “Well, let’s have it.”

  He holds up a hand. “It’s, ah, pretty rough. And I don’t know what it means. It could get you Adjusted, if we get caught.”

  A deep breath. “What’s in it?”

  “It’s … It’s a mystery. About my mentor in the force. A violent end that’s been hidden away, hidden even from a Long Term Investigations cold file.”

  “Hidden?”

  “Ah, you know how it works, Dempsey. Detectives don’t do any detecting anymore. We just rely on the perfect memories from witness Implants. The most we do is some poking around through documents, forensic accounting, that kinda junk. A real mystery? It just comes here to LTI to sleep until the perp dies and his memories go in the database. Cal’s death, it’s not even in LTI. He was just listed as a Retirement.”

  Something hidden beyond a department that is already about hiding away unpleasant things from the system? It either falls under the purview of Information Security, which has the real authority beneath the Ship’s Central Council, or it’s been hidden by an elite neuralhack of the highest skill.

  I place both hands on the desk terminal. “Is this an ISec matter, Leon?”

  He clears his throat. “ISec is at least involved in hiding it.”

  ISec. It does so many things. It handles the testing of all children. After all, those tests determine the kind of crewman a child can be. A janitor. An engineer. An artist. An officer. Testing determines who you are, which determines what you can know. ISec chooses school curricula, chooses what history is, controls the culture of society. What books and movies and plays and music are permissible, and what are on the Proscribed List—just knowing that such a list exists is only permitted for those of my rank and above.

  ISec also, of course, handles the security of the Nth Web. What news is fit to be known by the public, and what concentric circles going inward of fewer and fewer individuals are allowed to know of certain truths that must be kept secret. ISec’s visible and invisible influence lies everywhere throughout every crewman’s life.

  The Central Council, the leadership of the Noah, is composed of the Ministers of Information, Health, Energy, the Interior, and Peace, and a single Ship’s Captain who is selected from one of the five, along with the support staff beneath them: an Executive Officer and the handful of secretive navigators and pilots that actually fly the ship. Ostensibly, the five Ministers are equals, but for all that Information is the smallest Ministry in terms of staff, it commands the most resources and is allocated the smartest and most capable of each generation’s children.

  And from the first captain to the present, they have all been ISec. More than this, each has been the Commander of the Enforcers.

  The Ministry of Information controls the Enforcers, the ship’s most powerful combat officers. I think of those most elite of the elites, ISec’s best field operatives, black-clad soldier-scientists who had to have scored at the top tenth of a percentile throughout childhood and training, and shiver.

  “Are we going to have Enforcers after us, Leon?”

  “Can’t say for sure that we won’t.”

  We stare at each other for just a second. We could have our brains wiped, get ourselves Adjusted until we’re just living automata carrying out Behavioralist-implanted routines and programming for the rest of our lives, deeper and worse than what was done to Holmheim.

  “I’ll look.” Maybe I should not. I have achieved the vaunted status of mission-critical, but Barrens just looks so serious. I have no illusions about my place in City Planning, just one of the administrative departments under the Ministry of the Interior.

  He is nervous, and the man that I know is afraid of absolutely nothing. Barrens has commendations for all sorts of reckless feats he does not show anyone, which I know about because I was curious and used my position to get access to his records.

  When he was on the streets, he was always first in. He has smashed through
a wall into a burning building to get out a single trapped resident, charged right into the teeth of a cross fire of TK-fired projectiles from a dozen Psyn-dealers to get to a downed officer, and more. If someone needs help, he does not wait for backup. If there was danger, he was always the one blasting in the door or busting a hole down from the roof.

  So, seeing him blinking rapidly, sweat trickling down his neck, and dark spots spreading across his gunmetal shirt—all this gives me pause.

  It is not as if he saved my life. Holmheim would not have killed me, and Barrens did not reach me quickly enough to stop the rape. It is the realization that I am rationalizing down the trauma, the shame, just to excuse myself from this that gets me to repeat, louder, “I’ll look.”

  He retrieves a psi-tablet from the inner pocket of his coat. “Burned out the wireless access before I put the memory on there and encrypted it. Only someone holding this tablet can get the thing out, and…” He lowers it to the desk before me. “Anyhow, the password is…” He pauses, thinks to me, Blossom, and not just the word, but an accompanying flash of thought, the connection from my name to the word in Japanese, the shape of the characters, the sound in his throat, to a scent he has in mind.

  Do I really smell that good to him? Normally that would get a blush out of me, but the nerves are getting to me, the talk of ISec and Enforcers and Adjustments.

  “Leon”—my fingers pause just before they make contact with the glossy platinum casing—“what am I going to see?”

  “That’s the thing, little missy.” Barrens is pacing again. “I was the guy that experienced it, and I’ve looked at it much as I can stand, an’ I still don’t know what I saw.”

  Deep breath, and my hands make contact. I get to the file before I scare myself any more than I have.

  Damned noisy neighbors partying. It is so loud, he cannot hear himself thinking.

  It is not at all like Callahan to take so long answering his door.