Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  She had been alone. She didn’t want to be alone again. And Magda wanted—

  No. Viv could have lied, made herself out to be stronger, more controlled, less afraid. She could have turned Magda away, refused to let her come, faked an argument. It would have hurt, but she had hurt herself enough over the last few days—she was used to the prospect.

  Perhaps there was some brutal subconscious calculus at work. The more incriminated Magda was, the less risk she’d sell Viv out under pressure. But that wasn’t the whole story either. She wanted Magda there. She’d come so far alone.

  Had Viv arranged all this? Not consciously. Consciously, she thought this was a horrible idea.

  Did that matter?

  Could your subconscious be evil?

  She considered ditching her, leaving Magda out in the cold. But she had promised.

  Focus on the job.

  If there had been a better option than a physical break-in, Viv would have found it back in Mountain View. The digital security here was top notch, built to resist advanced persistent threats, which people who weren’t security geeks tended to call governments. The physical security wasn’t a pushover either, but it came from a company that licensed tech from companies owned, through a double handful of sock puppets, by Vivian Liao.

  Not that she built back doors into clients’ systems. That would be very wrong. No, she just kept plans to their systems around in case she ever needed to analyze her way through them. To improve them. For example.

  Magda’s key card opened the door. Viv slipped in. The lights here were too bright, the halls too soft and silent. She breathed deep, stepped into the light and the security cameras’ field of view, and trusted to her makeup.

  She’d spent weeks before she left, and three hours this afternoon, testing this idea, making sure she could pull it off with Magda’s over-the-counter makeup printer. Her face looked like a melted checkerboard, black and white swirled and spiraling. Back in high school the game had been to fool face recognition on her friends’ phones by painting her face weird patterns. She’d just taken that idea one step further.

  The cameras asked the security system whether she was on the master list of People Who Were Supposed to Be Here. The security system tried to check—which meant reading Viv’s face. But where were her eyes under that makeup? What was her mouth? The system used math to break the black-and-white grid down to meaning, but since Viv knew the math it would use, she could control the meaning it would find. So when the security system read her face, it interpreted the melted checkerboard into a few dense lines of code, and executed them.

  That was the plan. In ten seconds she’d know if it worked. She tried not to hold her breath. If she’d screwed up somehow, she’d need all the air she could draw for running. Ten seconds. She pressed her palms against her jeans and tried not to think about failure. At least if she slipped up here, Magda would still be safe.

  Ten seconds. Six heartbeats. Well. Under these conditions, maybe more like twelve heartbeats. Or eighteen.

  The hallway lights flickered three times, and she gasped with relief—and for air. That was it. For the next hour, the security system belonged to her.

  So don’t waste time, Viv. Go.

  Through the front hall, left, downstairs to the side door. Footsteps froze Viv solid, but it wasn’t a guard, just some dork trudging past with a monitor under his arm. He vanished around a corner, taking with him a few months of Viv’s life.

  When Viv reached the side door she knocked shave-and-a-haircut against it, and the sensors heard her and popped the lock. Magda waited outside. She waved with her fingers, smiled parade broad, and Viv, still unsure, still scared, couldn’t help smiling back. She was enjoying this too much. At all was too much.

  “You look ridiculous. I love it.”

  Viv raised a finger to her lips. Magda placed one beside her nose like she was in The Sting. Viv rolled her eyes, nerd, but it felt so good to see her that Viv couldn’t sell the tease.

  Viv led the way. Down and down, and then—the server farm.

  It was cold here. Viv breathed out ghosts of fog. Another knock, and they were in. Take that, retina scanner.

  Servers stood in racks. The room was silent save for fans and the air conditioner’s hum. Viv’s first step tested the tile floor as if it might crumble underfoot. The tiles gave slightly into the storage space below, but did not rattle. Magda followed her, steps light.

  This was a new experience. Nerves expected. Viv had been a lot of things in a career newspapers sometimes called meteoric, which Viv liked because it made her think of dinosaurs. Now she was a thief. Stealing her life back. Stealing the future.

  Magda watched. There was a console at the far end of the racks, some ancient hunk of desktop wired into the iron. Viv crouched beside it and drew her kit from her shoulder bag: AR glasses were more portable than a screen, but nothing beat a keyboard for input. She still felt pissed at Bill Gibson for promising her transcranial electrodes and failing to deliver. Also from her pack: a single-board computer the size of an old USB key, which contained the software she needed for the job, and the Ziploc bag that held her braid.

  For luck, she told herself.

  She plugged her computer key into the console. The glasses dazzled Viv’s eyes and made her sick when she swiped them on. She’d logged who knew how many thousands of hours in glasses by this point, but after two weeks off, your eyes forgot.

  Her fingers remembered keys just fine, though.

  Usually Viv did this sort of thing to music, but she had no player here, no earbuds, no phone. No matter. Between the fans, her heart, the clatter of the keys, she made her own soundtrack. She shivered from the cold, and anticipation. After two weeks away, her wrists didn’t even hurt when she typed.

  This part never looked as dramatic as movies made it seem. The command prompt was a simple bracket, and the cursor hadn’t stopped blinking since 1983 or so. In arcane tongues, she asked some of the most powerful computers in the world to do her a favor.

  Some of the most powerful computers in the world said yes.

  There wouldn’t even be a progress bar if Viv hadn’t coded one herself. It crept up one percentage point at a time. Viv was changing the planet with less bandwidth (for now) than some kid in Allston needed to stream his latest Disney princess fix.

  A red warning light burned in the top left corner of her field of view.

  “Oh,” Viv said.

  “Oh?” Magda did not sound happy about the prospect of an “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry about it, but … we’re being tracked.”

  “We?” and then: “Tracked?”

  It’s fine, Viv thought, it’s fine, this is the kind of thing that’s fine. A red timer ticked down as layers of her anti-tracking onion peeled away. “They’re too slow!” She laughed. It felt good to be good. It would be close, half a minute maybe, but they wouldn’t catch her before the script did its work. Thirty whole seconds to spare. Numbers don’t lie.

  “You’re sure?” And in Magda’s voice Viv heard the first sign her friend might finally understand that she should not be here. Magda was remembering her son, remembering that she was not pranking university security anymore, and that was a bad idea even way back then.

  Viv could be honest. She was not one hundred percent positive. Systems made mistakes. Even her systems. But the progress bar was at ninety, ninety-two, and even if it got stuck for a second, like it did just then, they’d have plenty of time to escape.

  The ground shook.

  Viv fell back, sat down hard. The keyboard clattered to the floor, and she lunged to still it with one hand, overcome with vertigo and fear. That must have been an earthquake—even in Boston. She recognized the gut-level uncertainty, a hiccup, a skip. But an earthquake strong enough to knock Viv on her butt should have rattled the servers in their racks and set the racks themselves swaying. Instead Magda was glaring at Viv like she, Viv, had just gone mad. “Did you feel that?”

  “Feel
what?”

  Not a quake, then; the world had gone weird but not quite quakes-in-Boston weird. Was that how fainting felt? Viv couldn’t afford weakness now, even if she had pushed herself hard all the way from Saint Kitts up the coast. She needed more coffee, more water, more sleep, maybe a square meal. She’d have time after this. Maybe give herself a day or two in the Airbnb before she hit the road again. As soon as this was done.

  She glanced at the progress bar.

  It was stuck.

  Ninety-six. Ninety-six. Ninety-six.

  And still the red trace counter counted down.

  Magda looked at Viv, and Viv saw her fear, all this suddenly real. But that last four percent, that was Viv’s life, her salvation, everything for which she had fought, died (at least, they thought so), and run. Shadowy motherfuckers in suits were tearing down her life to stop that four percent.

  But Magda wouldn’t be here if not for Viv. The fake rose petals. That bottle of real champagne.

  Viv had no idea what the script, ninety-six percent executed, would do—if anything. She had no idea what she would do, if she left it ninety-six percent executed and ran with Magda into the night. This chance would not come again.

  There were other data centers. Other options. The New York deathtrap, for example. But when they found what she’d tried to do here, they’d be on their guard.

  Ninety-six. Still. And the red counter neared zero.

  She swiped the glasses off, pulled the computer key. Jesus. She was doing this. She’d done it already. The earth shook again, or was that her? All the gear, in the bag. She ran to Magda, grabbed her hand—“What are you doing?” “Getting us out of here.”—in the server racks, in thousands, hundreds of thousands of computers around Boston and the world, her ninety-six-percent-done script did whatever it could do—and there was no time to explain, she was dragging Magda to the door, glancing back—

  She’d forgotten the braid.

  No time. But (she reasoned, sprinting back down the hall) if they found her braid they’d know she was here, and if they knew that—

  She snagged the braid, left sneaker skids on tile as she turned back to the door.

  And in those seconds, everything had changed.

  A glowing woman stood in the space between the server racks.

  Once Viv saw her, it took her a while to notice anything else.

  The woman was a cutout of light without shadow or contour. Viv thought the woman was two-dimensional at first, but when she rose from her crouch—Viv knelt before no one—the shape changed in a way that suggested three dimensions, or more. Vantablack statues looked like this in person. Fuligin, but green. The light that came off her throbbed.

  The woman wore a crown and a robe and none of this made any sense, but that didn’t matter, because this weird glowing figure had her hand on Magda’s shoulder, and the green light trickled from her shadowless luminescent fingers like sap, and Magda was stuck inside it with her mouth half open, reaching out, afraid.

  The air conditioner hum had stopped.

  Viv thought of cats in boxes. Alive and dead at once.

  “After all this time,” the woman said, “I’d hoped for something more.”

  Her voice was not loud. Just close.

  Viv wheeled, but the woman was not behind her. Wheeled back, and she was standing so near that her face filled Viv’s field of vision. Somehow she’d closed the twenty feet between them in a second. They’d be eye to eye if the green woman had eyes, but what she had instead was a hint of a mouth, the only feature in that perfect face, a pure black line.

  Viv flailed her pack around like a mace. It passed through the woman as if through fog, but when the woman grabbed Viv’s wrist, the wrist stayed grabbed. The green woman’s strength was not a thing of muscle but a fact, like fear, and like fear it burned. Viv’s flesh began to smoke.

  The black mouth opened, and something glittered inside it, but the green woman’s words did not pass through air. They ignored Viv’s ears entirely and flipped switches inside her brain instead. The voice was rich as velvet cake and cello deep, the calm, inhuman warmth voices had when spoken softly with perfect diction close to a good microphone. “Don’t fight me,” she said. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”

  Viv’s skin blistered. She growled, shoved all her weight against this woman, and fell through her to the floor. Her wrist burned like nothing she had ever felt, but she was free. She came up off the floor like the world’s worst sprinter, staggered, and ran straight into Magda—but bounced off her like she might have bounced off a concrete pillar. Viv reeled. When she looked up, the green woman stood over her again. She had not crossed the intervening space. She just moved, from there to here.

  Viv couldn’t flex her left hand. Her fingers were wet, but she only knew this because they slipped on the floor, leaving bloody tracks.

  “Disappointing.” The green woman knelt. This close, her raiment—fuck no, Viv refused that word, refused all the majesty of her—her clothes rustled, overdubbed, too rich, like the green woman’s voice. This close, Viv felt the heat of her. This close, her light had shifting patterns, shadows, patches like the surface of the sun.

  Viv was going to die.

  She had suspected, accepted this might be the case when she tried to run. She had just imagined the set dressing differently. A basement, or a room in an abandoned hotel. Wires. Pliers. She’d seen beds in a schoolhouse in Phnom Penh, where they tortured people for the crime of wearing glasses.

  But whatever this green woman was, whoever she was, she was just another thing like that, another form of a fear Viv was ready for. So when the woman pressed her hand to Viv’s shirtfront and the cloth smoldered, Viv tried to keep herself together. Learn what you can. Escape if you can. “Who sent you?”

  “No one,” that voice replied. “I don’t enjoy this, you know. But I must learn.” She wasn’t smiling. The set of that slit mouth made her look annoyed. Viv’s burning shirt stank of knives and fear-sweat. “We are being interrupted. I would have liked more time.”

  The green woman hadn’t glanced at Magda once. If her control slipped, maybe Magda could get away. Viv’s shirt burned to ash, left her chest bare. The green woman’s fingers curled. Her sharp nails glistened.

  Maybe, Viv thought, desperate, grasping at shreds of logic, maybe the green woman can’t be both here and not at once.

  So when the woman’s hand plunged into Viv’s chest and cracked her ribs, Viv shoved her own body up, and slammed her forehead into the crevasse of that open mouth. Hard teeth printed Viv’s skin, and she felt a bone break near her eye, but none of that mattered. There was a hand around her heart. The green woman roared, and her mouth was large, and Viv understood its glitter now. There were stars in the green woman’s mouth between her diamond teeth, and somewhere a siren wailed, and the green woman cursed, and Magda screamed. Good. If Magda could scream, maybe she could run. Maybe she could escape. Maybe Viv had saved her after all, from herself.

  She felt another earthquake that wasn’t one. The green woman gripped her heart, and lifted.

  The world snapped, and so did Vivian Liao.

  3

  VIV DROWNED IN green.

  Pain guided her from strangling dreams to consciousness: pain in her chest where the green woman had plunged her claws, pain so great that set beside it all her previous yardsticks for suffering—the fishhook through her thumb, the arm broken climbing upside down off a bunk bed at camp, even the pain from her melted wrist in the server farm—seemed first drafts set beside a masterwork. She flailed against the viscous green fluid in which she hung suspended. By old swimmer’s reflex she swam for the surface, only to bounce off a curved rubbery membrane.

  Wait. Green? Viscous? Membrane?

  Soldiers and scientists call the process of decision-making under stress the OODA loop: the subject first Observes their situation, then Orients themselves to it, Decides how to proceed, and finally, Acts.

  For most of Viv’s life, that loop had s
pun so fast its stages blurred together like a bike wheel’s spokes at speed. But now Viv’s OODA loop stopped sharp at Orient, and she pitched against her metaphorical handlebars and struggled not to fall.

  She’d spent two years of nights dreaming about what might happen if her gambit failed, if her faceless adversaries in the administration caught her. But none of her nightmares involved a jade woman who seemed like a cutout from the world, or Viv herself drowning in green slime.

  Fine. Slow down the loop. Start over, at Observe.

  She found her chest intact, her ribs and breastbone whole, which was a pleasant surprise, which in turn said unfortunate things about recent events. Still. Good. She wouldn’t have to worry about bleeding out.

  But she could not breathe.

  Her mouth was open. The green stuff filled her lungs already. That she wasn’t dead suggested the green was a kind of oxygen-bearing fluid, but if it was supposed to feed her air it must have run out. Her chest spasmed. Her throat closed. The green smelled of blood and iron and felt jagged in her throat, and her stomach registered its extreme desire to throw up.

  No. Permission sure as hell not granted. Whatever had happened back in the basement—where was Magda? What had that woman, that light, done to her?—Viv refused to choke on her own vomit before she could (1) rescue Magda, then (2) figure out what was going on and whose fault this was, and (3) pay them back with extreme prejudice, before at last (4) returning to her business of world salvation-slash-conquest.

  So much for Orient. Now. Decide.

  She needed out. She needed up.

  Act.

  The membrane jiggled and screeched beneath her fingernails. She wanted to laugh. A bad sign. Hysteria. Acceptance would come next, and the end. So long Viv.

  To hell with that. She traced the membrane with her hands, followed it down until the ceiling became a wall, then curved back to bond with a flat floor. Not a dome: a bubble. Her fingernails found no seams in the bubble’s surface, but it was stuck to a flat platform underfoot.