The Forever Watch Page 6

  “It’s easy to play with plastech. A child can do it and make a chair, a toy, or a dollhouse.

  “In order to be in this class, Advanced Psychokinetic Engineering 133, you are all at least in the ninetieth percentile of touch talent. This means that you aren’t going to be making furniture. You aren’t going to be making clothes. Should you pass this class, that means you should be capable of synthesizing the most infinitesimal of nanocircuitry, or of building a vertical farm with a thousand floors, all with the power of thought, an amplifier to tap into the ship’s power, and some raw plastech.

  “On this first day, you are all to do something you think would be simple, but isn’t. You are all to manufacture a single strut, just like this.”

  His wrist amplifier just barely gives of a flicker of blue; Salvador is extremely efficient. Glowing when using psionics is impressive, but it’s actually a sign of waste energy, raw psi exciting the electrons in the air. The gray brick melts and flows and becomes a simple cylinder one meter long and a centimeter thick.

  “Doesn’t look like much, does it?”

  He takes hold of one end, and we all nearly jump out of our seats when he smashes it into the worktable, which splits in half despite being a meter thick. Quite the stunt; not many engineers have both the psychokinesis of touch and the psychometabolic manipulation of a bruiser.

  “This strut can withstand a load measured in tons. It can deflect five centimeters without fatiguing. It is not electrically conductive, and it has to maintain its strength at a temperature as hot as the surface of a yellow star. Why?

  “Because struts like this go into the ship’s reactor assemblies, ladies and gentlemen.

  “Should one of you ever be trusted with something so critical as the Noah’s engines or her reactors, what do you think might happen if a moment’s idle thought results in a tiny, undetectable defect in one of these components, or one of any of the millions of parts that will need maintaining over our thousand-year voyage?”

  I shrink into my seat as he glares at us. It feels as if he were glaring exactly at me, but I’m sure we all feel like that.

  “Miss Dempsey! Come down and reshape yon knight into one of these, and it shall be the first to go under today’s stress tests. Let’s see if you belong here, or if you should be transferred to”—Salvador paused—“an Arts program.” He has a fantastic sneer. Potent. I feel all of four inches tall. On my Implant, I call up the relevant equations for stress and deflection and try to figure out just how dense the strut needs to be and what polymeric arrangements we studied recently in Materials Science grant the most strength.

  I shape my plastech, and as I walk down to the stage and to the ominously huge piece of machinery at the back designed to apply force to an object until it breaks, I try to show no fear.

  I can’t help smiling. Mine was the only strut that didn’t shatter.

  In the time it took me to get through a stack of inventory reports, my pyramid has reached its peak of a mere four inches. But it is yellowed, has the consistency and density of old limestone, and is carved through with a thousand tiny lines to give a hint of all those blocks that made up the original.

  I was at the top of APE 133, and when we graduated, Salvador shook my hand and told me I ought to apply to City Planning.

  At the end of the day I and my coworkers stream out the heavy doors under the watchful gazes of gargoyles rescued from some cathedral in France or Germany before it was destroyed. Down the stone steps, a great big fellow in a blue coat is standing off to one side. He is walking, back and forth, and the flowers in his hand are plastech, like most everything else, and he is so very, very much larger-than-life. He draws every eye when he sees me, and a smile is on his toothy, massive mug as he walks up to me and shyly offers me sunflowers and daisies and a rose.

  “Heya.”

  If I could, I would crawl into his coat and hide. I just take his arm and resign myself to my whole team giving me the nth degree tomorrow. At least they look more amused than disapproving. I can only wince at the thought of what Jazz, Lyn, and Marcus will say.

  Barrens’s face smooths over as he examines mine. “Did I make a mistake, coming here?” The life in his voice fades, just a bit.

  There is no racial discrimination anymore in our great shipborne civilization. But there will always be the human instinct of us and them, only now it’s based on test metrics and on rank and the sort of job one is able to qualify for. It’s a caste system justified by science. I tighten my hand around his arm. “It’s not their business anyway!” I stand on tiptoe and the big lug is just too damned tall. I have to reach up and pull his face down, to be able to brush my lips against his. “Come on. Let’s get some bean-dogs on the way home.” I try hard to ignore Hennessy and the buzzing of the rest of the team behind us asking him for details.

  After a light dinner of dogs on buns with mustard and ketchup, and a stilted hour of awkward chitchat, sitting on my expensive, cream-colored couch, watching news streams on the main viewer in my living room, I can’t take it anymore.

  “Oh, this is ridiculous.”

  “Wha—”

  I sweep my hands to the sides.

  The buttons on his shirt slide open all at once, as does the buckle on his pants. As do the buttons on my sundress, from my neck to the hem.

  This time is better than the first. Neither of us is afraid anymore.

  “This Callahan of yours was really something.”

  It is midnight and Barrens is in my kitchen cooking us a second dinner. Whatever he is making smells good. A hint of onions and garlic, something sweet, cumin. Basil.

  “Yes, he was. Kept me put together. My Keepers didn’t know how to handle me. I was always … well … rough. Violent. Got mad all the time, no knowing why.”

  The package has two items. Another tablet with the wireless burned out—this an older model. So I guess it was Callahan that taught Barrens that trick. The rest is a thick folder with physical printouts. Pictures. Tables. Names. Locations. All reconstructed from partially destroyed information. It was labeled “The Mincemeat File.”

  “Dinner number two is served.” He tugs me to the table, obviously proud of the spread. “Now, lay it on me.”

  We talk while we eat. First is a fragrant bowl of rice noodles. The broth is peppery enough to get tears out of me. I love it.

  “There are only pieces here.”

  The data on the tablet too has many missing parts for each entry. I skim through it yet again while he talks about the man that’s become part of the case he was chasing.

  “Yeah. After he got injured and stuck behind a desk, Cal had more time for his hobbies. You know how it is, desk cops are just clerks. When he got bored enough, he asked for a transfer to LTI and got it because of, enh, ‘previous meritorious conduct.’

  “When he had more time to actually try to find files to match to his collection of Mincemeat stories and general weirdness, Cal noticed that a case’s entire logs and files, trees and clusters, vanished after he matched it up with one specific Mincemeat tale, about a Keeper named Sullivan coming to his baby’s locked room and finding … you know. It. Pieces. That story was different because it had a lot of concrete details, a date, a time, names.

  “The commands were from nowhere. The only evidence that baby ever existed was just the memory in his head. How could a baby disappearing be covered up as a Retirement? A death by accident or disease would take faking autopsy reports, medical records, documents signed by so many Doctors. So it was deleted instead.

  “Cal decided that since he wasn’t in an ISec holding cell yet, it meant that it was something that happened all the time, not just in response to his querying the system.”

  That is not quite so. Information Security propaganda would have everyone believe that they are always watching, but while past societies had the problem of not having enough surveillance, the opposite is so on the Noah. There is simply too much data on everyone, and filtering it to find what is important is no
t a straightforward task.

  The Ministry of Information is the smallest Ministry, so they have to automate as much as possible. For the wrong reasons, Callahan was right to think that it was the result of programs being triggered, and not the work of a living gray-coat agent. Long Term Investigations is still a police department, under the Ministry of Peace, and even though it is maintained due to Information Security’s regulations, it is a lower priority to them, just as it is a lower priority to the police. A real ISec officer might look at a collation of reports from their monitoring programs once every few months.

  Callahan’s next step was done with enough skill to keep from catching the attention of ISec. If they had noticed him, he would have been interrogated and Adjusted, though ISec doesn’t keep long-term prisoners the way urban legend says.

  He put a hack in place, monitoring LTI’s isolated-case database. Every time one of these deletion commands went into the system, his little monitoring app would register it and start to copy it even as it was deleted, then reconstruct the incomplete data with probabilistic guesswork.

  Great chunks are still missing, but already a terrible pattern can be discerned. People are being erased from the system. As if they had never been born. Others have had their files modified, evidence of falsified Retirements.

  Whoever was doing this was, at the least, trained by Information Security. I am a gifted neuralhack, but I do not have that kind of skill. It is impressive that Callahan was able to get even this much, suggesting he too was better at this than I am.

  “I won’t be able to help you the way you’re asking.” I never felt the need to try to impress Barrens. I am glad this has not changed, despite the change in, well, whatever it is we have got. It is easy to admit to him that while I’m the best neuralhack in City Planning, Information Security is at a different level from me.

  His head droops. “So, I’m on my own on this?”

  “I didn’t say that, Leon. I think there are less obvious ways I can help.”

  I am not without certain skills. My intuition has, over the years, become attuned to ferreting out trends and patterns. While ISec can erase the records of these people, it’s against policy to erase an individual just like that from the memories of all the coworkers and ex-classmates and neighbors they knew. Each of these vanished victims had a home. They bought food and furniture and clothes. They each left the subtle imprint of what they browsed and bought and said on the Nth Web.

  The subject might have been deleted from the records, but deleting everything around a subject? In the Noah’s databases, every entry corresponds to so much data, which in turn is associated with other entries in other databases. A person’s being deleted means deleting his educational history, his employment records, his health records, every single purchase he ever made, every e-mail he received or sent—and such a cascading deletion in turn creates more inconsistencies in the vast, unified system of the Nth Web. That is what we can search for. From there, we can talk to the people that actually knew them, find the memories that are not so simple to erase.

  “Ah, I get it. You can do stuff like check about which departments had to fill in empty positions all of a sudden.”

  I nod. “That’s the idea. Let me see if I can cobble something together that can find them the long way around.”

  I start to lay out the specifications of what we’ll need for Barrens. Lyn would think it a waste of time, but I know he can get this and find details I’d miss.

  It would have to be semiautonomous, this program, and capable of some degree of evaluation. It would be even better if it could self-modify its parameters as it improved its own search criteria. And it would have to be distributed—a small load on multiple Analytical Nodes is less noticeable than a heavy draw on a single node.

  The electronic hardware of the ship is incredibly powerful, each node a quantum supercomputer; the network of all the ship’s nodes that formed the backbone of the Nth Web made it a vast digital universe.

  For this task, a population of simpler self-optimizing agent programs would be much more efficient than a single large program.

  “You can guess what the other benefit is, right?”

  “Okay,” he says, tilting his head over the drawings on the napkins between us. It’s just simplified schematics of what the network of nodes resembles, and a cloud of dots representing the swarm of programs I mean to code. He gnaws a bit on the corner of his lip. “And if it is a bunch of programs spread across the nodes instead of a single program in one place running queries all over the place, it’s harder to trace.”

  “That’s right.” I lean over and press my lips to the side of his jaw. “Don’t chew your lips. They peel and get bloody.”

  “I’ll try. Well. Your idea sounds good to me.”

  It has been a long time since I have had to create something—my position is mostly administrative, aside from the rare optimization improvements we try to develop. I find my enthusiasm growing, despite the morbid subject of Barrens’s quest.

  I slurp down my last noodle and skim through the entries on the tablet. Even with only fragments of file information, a tremendous volume of data is here. “Callahan must have been working on this for a long time.”

  Barrens serves platters of salad next. Apple slices, cherry tomatoes, spinach, with a dressing of honey, oil, and vinegar. Steaming scoops of couscous on the sides.

  “Cal told me about this only a couple years ago. He wanted to pass it on because he was being Retired soon.” There is a loose leaf in the folder, with messy handwriting scrawled diagonally, creeping up left to right. “He thought it’s a single killer. Someone from ISec, or someone protected by ISec.”

  The files at the front of the folder are chilling. Half of someone’s family name labeling a picture of a crime scene that looks just like Barrens’s memory, just blood and gore spilled out across a room. The last page of a medical examiner’s report about the amount of psi energy it would take to cause this level of catastrophic damage. Other reports about remains that went missing from the morgue. But other files look less like pieces of police records and more like oral histories and short stories. They have other labels: “Tunnel Snipes,” “Conspiracy Theories,” “Alien Origins,” “Hidden Histories.”

  “What’s this other stuff?”

  “Hmm? Oh. The other stuff Cal liked to collect, you know. Like I said, he was into weird things. Stories about beasts in the sewers and maintenance tunnels. Alien conspiracies. Passed on his calling to me, huh? Wonder if he foresaw it.”

  A picture slides out of the folder.

  “Whoa.” It is in black and white. A massive blob of light and shadow is in the distance at the end of a shaft. Simian. Irregular. It has two arms and two legs, but they look asymmetric, wrong. It could be a man … maybe. It is actually more disturbing than the clinical image of a Mincemeat victim on an ME’s table. The gore on the slab is abstract, a specimen, but the image of the thing in the darkness pricks the imagination, gets the mind trying to fill in the pieces.

  “Tunnel Snipe A5. Printout from the memory of some engineer replacing a sewage valve. Lots of them have stories about the weird down there. Maybe it’s the fumes.”

  He stands up one last time to retrieve dessert, which is a single, large bowl of roasted sweet potatoes and syrup.

  “Maybe pause on this? It’s not right to have dessert and be talking shop.”

  I do my best half-lidded, smoky-eyed look. I’m sure I’m doing it wrong, but he still smiles and pulls me onto his lap. It’s fair, I guess, since even I’ll admit that his smile looks mostly like a snarl. We lift pieces of the soft, starchy stuff to each other’s lips. We are both licking our fingers at the end of it. Each other’s fingers. I’m blushing and sighing, from the things his off hand is doing. We stopped talking a while ago, and thoughts of killers and myths and coding fade away.

  My body drifts along a river; it curves and curls and there are moments of roars and periods of soft, gurgling sighs. It feels diff
erent under the moonlight, even if the moonlight is composed of infinitesimally small pixels on a vast dome outside the window. My lips are swollen with kissing and on my tongue is the thick taste of loving. My skin is a desert and the sand is shifting with each slow breeze, with each fingertip touch.

  His hands are so large, all rocky ridges and plateaus of calluses, in places rough as sandpaper and in others smooth like worn marble. He is unlike any other I have shared this experience with, so much more real and vital than the pretty ones, the slender ones, the ones who seem half-occupied with some distant image of themselves even as we are coupling.

  The night is long, sometimes we sleep and sometimes we wake, and over and over we sail a little farther together on that mysterious waterway.

  Less afraid and more sure each time, we try more in pleasing and being pleased. We both use psychic talents, he to enhance and control his already prodigious stamina, and perhaps the better to take in my responses by smell and touch and taste, and I to guess just where I might reach out and touch with ethereal fingers of the mind and how better to angle this or that, or to guess the many subtle ways I can change the way those soft, yielding other muscles clasp at him.

  I could wonder what we are to each other, he and I. I could think and rethink and overthink what is emotion and what is merely a synthesis of the spurts of hormones and chemicals in the brain.

  There is what is. I try things I’ve never been brave enough to, and he takes me in ways I’ve never before permitted.

  He has seen me at my moment of deepest shame, grimy and befouled and betrayed in an alleyway. I alone have met the other self he keeps inside, the savage hunter, brutal and unrefined, as well as the small boy that has never felt as if he belonged.

  He moves inside of me, and I hold him when he is gentle and the man, and he holds me down when he is It and primal, and these moments come one after the other and sometimes at the same time, and when I am biting his hand bloody so as not to scream, it is in pleasure and with desire. At his slowest and kindest it still brings me to yelps and gasps, for he is larger and thicker than I thought men could get at all, and when It is taking me with the force and speed of an avalanche, marking me with his teeth and his claws, we howl together, flushed and breathless.