The Forever Watch Read online

  It is a five-kilometer hike through wooded hills to the picnic area. Each biome is only a square kilometer; the trail I insist on twists and turns along the hills. He suggests that we take the bus to the other biome entrance, right next to the barbecues and the benches and cabins, but I feel ambitious. I want to make this worth it for him.

  In minutes, I am reduced to huffing and gasping, and he smirks just a little bit as he takes my backpack and carries it along with his own.

  Looking at the sky, and tall redwoods leaning over us, it seems almost easy to forget that we are on a ship. Pebbles and bugs and things are underfoot. Sometimes, birds call to each other in the distance. Illusory mountains rise at the illusory horizon, tall, imposing peaks copied from the Rockies. The air smells alive, much more so than outside in the Habitat. I can tell Barrens loves it; it is his first time in one of the preserves.

  He keeps looking at everything all around us, and every once in a while he crouches low and crumbles a little dirt between his fingers. This is disgustingly easy for him; he could probably jump and swing from tree to tree all the way through and he wouldn’t be breathing hard.

  Remember, wash hands before eat—

  “Hana, doll, you’re breathing so hard you can’t message me straight anymore. Chill.”

  Helps distract from the walk.

  “Shit!” I stumble on a tree root, and he manages not to laugh.

  When we finally get out of the forest, I fling myself onto the soft, manicured grass of the picnic area, wiggle my toes in my hiking boots, and sigh. I’ll be sore later.

  Barrens lowers himself next to me and opens up our packs. His eyes are bright. There is a tension to him too. A part of him that probably wants to run amuck through the forest, burn off thousands of calories, find something to chase and hunt and kill and bring back to cook.

  “Thanks, Hana. This is … this is nice.”

  Hopefully, he never looks up how much today’s permit costs or he’ll say it’s way too much to spend on him.

  Ah. A hard-line socket off the path! I hop up and set up the tablet.

  He sprawls out on his back and I sit cross-legged next to him. A yellowed leaf drifts down from the tree giving us some shade, and I brush it out of his wiry hair.

  An ordinary couple having a picnic in the park on a Sunday morning. Nobody would look at us and think we are engaged in anything of questionable legality. I hope.

  While we relax and take in the breeze and the sun, the tablet continues its download from the search program and uploads parameter modifications. The wireless transmitter of the device is burned out; hence the cables snaking through the grass, plugged into a port next to one of the many trails cutting through the biome. Usually, these ports scattered through the ship are used only by the maintenance crews, but anyone may use them.

  Once again, I use the tricks Lyn and I figured out together. A program masks my access through the intermediary of a functioning ghost-ident code and a maze of proxies hiding the data accesses across dozens of Analytical Nodes spread out across the ship.

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “Just remembering when we were kids. I guess it was more fun for me than you.…”

  “Ah, it wasn’t that bad. I was huge even then. Not too many people messed with me, and the few who did gave me some fun fights.”

  I can’t imagine bonding with my friends over fists and bruises.

  Looking down, I glance at the status of the running applications on the tablet in my hands. This one was reacquired from an architect-in-training for the same price as a decent pair of running shoes. I met with him over blini in Café Moskva, a dainty little store under the shadow of the replica of St. Basil’s Cathedral. No names needed, just one of thousands of goods sold over the Web, arranged by anonymous posting on a junk-exchange forum.

  As a graduate under Dr. Salvador’s APE 133, I could synthesize one directly from raw plastech, but it’s hardly worth the hours of intricate psychokinetic circuit-tuning it would take to do so, as I would also have to configure and program it. Repairing this one took fifteen minutes.

  I plug updates into the data-miner swarm, watch them propagate through the pieces. My snooping application creeps across the chatter, building associative trees around the absence of individuals taken off-system. The population changes and grows. The swarm downloads new entries into the local database in the tablet.

  Right now, I am not supposed to be thinking about a killer in the dark.

  I scoot closer to Barrens and bend close. My lips are just short of his, and as he rises to kiss me, I lean back so that his mouth can chase mine.

  “Happy birthday, Leon.”

  He bites just a bit, just hinting. Desires, emotions. The language of all the different ways he holds my hand. It is a lovely, lazy day. We could be on Earth, under a real sky, listening to the sound of the brook splashing its way through its rocky course.

  He looks at me. What does he see in me when he gives me that stare that sparks that curious internal quivering.

  “Happy birthday to me, yep.”

  In Barrens’s eyes, there is a hunger. Is it for me alone? Or would he look this way at any other woman who could love him?

  I like to think psychic abilities would not help answer that, though the Behavioralists surely have endless relevant studies about peer-bonding, relationships, and intimacy. If we both had strong reading talents, we would never have to wonder; we could commune, sharing thoughts directly, and not through the interface of signals from Implant to Implant. Jazz talked about a relationship she had like that, and how quickly it became awful and boring. The fantasy of completely sharing oneself with another is better kept a fantasy, she told me—the reality is full of endless little annoyances at random thoughts and feelings, plus the rather disturbing sense of losing oneself, of the dissolution of identity.

  That deep sadness is still there, buried. I want him to hold me tight, to fill me up and help me forget. I fantasize about his consciousness and mine smashing together, unifying, mutual destruction, completion. I’ll settle for the heat of his great big paw on my thigh, the memory of last night, the sweet, lingering ache of the flesh, his toothy, contented grin.

  The sun is bright, and the autumn foliage is molten fire and gold. The breeze picks up, a surge resulting from many factors: vents opening and closing between the Habitat and the biome preserves. Red, yellow, and brown leaves take flight for a moment. More heating elements come online to simulate the sun climbing higher into the sky. Children in the distance run through the flight of fall colors.

  A cold sandwich is the start of a satisfying weight in my belly. We share a plastic tub of macaroni salad. For the rest of the afternoon, our kisses will probably taste like the figs we have for dessert. I delete the signals in the corner of my vision, messages from Jazz and Lyn and Marcus, subtle and not-so-subtle criticism of this thing growing between Barrens and me.

  Friends care and friends judge; how much worse if they knew about this awful mystery we share? Would they be horrified, or would they admire it? Wouldn’t it be good for the ship to stop these deaths? Somewhere out there, Apollo Gorovsky is wheeling about a child, struggling to provide it with adequate care, missing half of the team assigned to raise the boy. And there are others. How many more?

  “Hey. You’re pretty lousy at this taking-a-break thing,” Barrens murmurs. “We’re still on holiday.” He pulls me down and it’s nice, lying against this great big beast, my rock, a wall against uncertainty. His fingers are almost too large to lace into mine. The slow rumble of his heartbeat against me, the breath of his huge lungs, soothes me. His is the scent of primal things, soil and trees and grass and sea. I could sleep like this. I let myself ease into it, slipping away.

  The tablet beeps. It is done syncing, and I pull out the plug, wrap the cables.

  Let’s take a walk. Or maybe ride one of those boats in the pond.

  Sure. Don’t blame me if we fall in the water though. I’m … pretty heavy.
Little boats tilt, he warns.

  It’s warmer than average, for an autumn-cycle day. In my professional capacity, I know it means that one of the maintenance teams has screwed up a thermal-management protocol. But off duty, it is a fine afternoon to risk messing about in a boat.

  We do fall in the water—and laugh about it. It is good that psi-tablets are water resistant. We get back in the boat and mess about on the water some more.

  The sun sets, and it is time to go home.

  The walk to the train is damp even with my TK drawing the water out of our clothes and hair. We pass by a stand selling fresh pierogi and fill up our emptied picnic basket with them for dinner. From another stall, we obtain a half dozen fragrant loaves of sourdough.

  “I’m going to get fat with all this rich stuff yer buying.” There is that awkward, shy grin.

  Don’t be like that.

  Because theirs is the only talent that is closely tied to metabolism, bruisers fuel their powers with more than psi-energy from the grid. Barrens burns through four thousand or more calories in a single workout at the gym each morning. If he has to participate in a combat operation, he can burn ten thousand in moments. More than half of his income goes to pay for food, even with the supplementary ration chits given to bruisers.

  It would be easier to smile back if it did not bring to mind the enormous disparity between our incomes. I know he does not mind. Consciously, anyway.

  A part of the male brain still says he should provide for his female.

  In battles between pride and practicality though, well—when we share meals or go out together, I pay. And if future interactions with the collectors on the forums are necessary, it will be my money too.

  It’s a worthier cause than blowing my Breeding Duty comp on a pet. Or a weeklong biome vacation at a beach.

  We are at my apartment, tonight. I insisted because I was not in the mood to use the communal shower at Barrens’s. And this way, while he is in there, I can join him and wash his back. It still makes me a bit giddy, feeling that awesome, iron-hard flesh under the soapy skin. His back is so broad, I feel positively tiny as I work my little washcloth in circles across it. He smells good.

  Then there is dinner. We eat our evening walk’s spoils. We reminisce. I serve up awkward stories about first dates at the academy. And the weird social hierarchies and passive-aggressive conflicts. He talks about the fights he got into at his school, the rivalries, the few friends he found at the end of a day’s battle with his fists. The biggest scandal in my class was a plagiarized research assignment. In his, it was two students overdosing on Psyn and trashing the gym.

  His stories are better than mine. It is funny to see him concentrate so when it is my turn. We peer into each other’s pasts through our words. We could share the memories directly, of course. But we don’t.

  We drift to sleep on the couch, listening to slow, dreamy blues.

  At midnight, we wake up simultaneously. And share a look. Our agreed-upon break is over. Time to get back to the hunt.

  I sit up a little straighter. My will demands it, and my bag opens. The tablet flies up and out and into my outstretched hand. In the kitchen, fifteen feet away, a jar lid unscrews itself and coffee floats up into the percolator.

  We both hold on to the tablet’s conductive frame and dive in.

  “I got the forums and rumor threads and stuff, like usual.” I can feel him grimace. “Another message from the weirdos. No new Mincemeat memories for sale, but they do have an encounter with the monsters in the tunnels. I said no thanks, for now.”

  It is hard enough dealing with the awful immediacy of the memories we do have, the cloying smells, and in the case of one unlucky witness who tripped and fell, the sick feel of offal under the fingertips. I get enough nightmares as is without adding encounters of strange creatures running around in the sewers into the curse of the Implant’s perfect memories.

  I skim through the results of the file-deletion searches. This is our usual division of labor.

  Nothing stands out, or rather, too many things stand out.

  Does my methodology have some fundamental flaw? With today’s results, even after the parameter refinement of the black-market memories, there are thousands too many. There are disappearances from too long ago to have been caused by one man. False positives—if they were all correct, they would indicate a trail of death going back too many decades. The killer would have had to have started as a little kid and would by now be a withered, old man over a hundred. It has to mean that the program is failing to differentiate between the normal dangling ident codes that Lyn and I decided were due to innocuous garbage-collection programs or bureaucratic issues, and real disappearances.

  We are still on my couch, in my room, on the twelfth floor of the Torus building. Our minds are far apart, in different digital landscapes, but still we are just a thought, a word, apart.

  “Sure they’re false positives?”

  “Leon, the alternative is that the Mincemeat killer is immortal.”

  “Maybe there’s not just one. Maybe…”

  “What?”

  He scowls. “Ya won’t take me serious.”

  “I will.”

  Well, I do not after all. His idea of a Council-sponsored program for getting rid of undesirables among the crew? It would explain some things, but “they don’t need some special assassination group. They can already Adjust anyone they consider dangerous, erase his memories outright.”

  “Maybe Adjustment don’t work perfect all the time. Maybe this is for when it doesn’t.”

  I take a deep breath and let it go. Like many of the theories Barrens comes up with, we cannot make conclusions about this one way or another until we have more data. He tends to think up things that disturb me.

  What event in his childhood, what shortcoming by his Keepers, sabotaged his education? He is so much more than the test records in his file.

  All the same, his latest theory does not feel right. Would this not draw more attention just from the sheer brutality? Why would assassins use such methods? On the other hand, nearly everything about these deaths has been successfully hidden so far, so maybe they’re just that good. But why? And why those people?

  “I know already, I know what you’re thinking. But maybe it’s for dealing with people who are getting too close to ISec’s precious secrets.”

  No.

  “Look, it’s just an idea. I told you it’s too early. But you must admit that the Ministry of Information is crazy paranoid about its secrets. Couldn’t you see them deciding that coming too close to something forbidden justifies anything?

  “Hana, they lie to us every day. The lies are different depending on the crewman’s rank. Maybe even whoever old man captains the ship doesn’t know the whole truth. The truths we are taught are different depending on how we test in school. There are books everyone can read, books some people can read, and books that nobody is allowed to read; all determined by the Ministry of Information.

  “We don’t even know what the exact disaster on Earth was, and that’s the biggest event in human history.”

  I clear my throat. “Well.”

  The problem is, he’s not wrong. And I don’t want to think that. I know ISec is more than Lyn’s desk job and dealing with the data network and checking the validity of the testing procedures of children. Or there would be no need for the Enforcers, black-armored figures with both incredible psychic talents and brutal training to maximize what genetics they have.

  I know that they have unchecked powers to detain, interrogate, and Adjust nearly anyone.

  “What in the…” The couch cushions shift with Barrens’s weight as he leans forward, frowning. “Hana, something’s…” He sucks in a breath.

  I minimize my internal display windows and look at the external on the tablet. The device flickers, lines of black-and-white static cut through the orderly lists and charts.

  “I didn’t just screw somethin’ up, did I?”

  “No, I do
n’t…” We both stiffen up.

  “Are you,” he gasps, “you seeing this?”

  The safe-wall built into the handheld is pierced; the contaminating data just goes right past it as if it were not there.

  It is more than data, it is a telepathic reverberation buried in the electronic signal. Its echo resonates in the mind, picked up as if the neural Implant were an antenna.

  Information creeps into my Implant and from Implant to brain. Crackling interference in my ears, numbness in the extremities. It is more than a data recording, but not quite a memory. Other stimuli that are not real ghost through me. I focus, I concentrate on the beating of my heart, the pulse of the blood in my veins, and trigger the security routines in the Implant. Program commands cascade in and out from metal to organic brain and back across the synapses.

  Barrens scoots closer. His hand swallows up mine. Hana, don’t fight it.

  I can see his unfocused eyes darting wildly from side to side, up and down.

  It could be dangerous. Some leftover neural virus that the program found.

  It’s important. It’s … You have to see it.

  Another deep breath. All right.

  I am a passenger along for a ride in someone else’s skull. It is jerky and disorienting, not the smooth dive into a warm sea I am used to.

  There is a sky above me. I feel it. The love for her own sky.

  But it looks nothing like the blue skies from lost Earth I know through movies and paintings and textbooks and documentaries. Distantly, I am aware of my heart beating faster.

  Corruption. That is what occurs to me at first. The sensory impressions of a memory that has been damaged. I stay aware of myself, keep from sinking fully into the experience. The eyes do not see right, the smell of the air is not foul, but off somehow, and the skin … The body itself feels wrong, different.