The Watchers: A Space Opera Novella

by Ballard, Jeffrey A.

  Of course the projector puts me here. It was the last place I Watched, the last place dialed into the control panel.

  I start preparing myself for the Universe jump. Calm. Peace. It is no different from skimming in space. One dimension is the same as another. No difference at all. Easier even, my consciousness closer to the source, closer to …

  A whine.

  A tiny echo of a cry on the edge of my awareness, a ghost sound almost, not really physically present. It’s small and sharp and pierces my preparation: Branden.

  Right on the heels of it is panic: Sumiko.

  I’m already heading in their direction before I realize it. Through the building, down onto an abandoned street. I sweep past the rustling of papers, my teeth on edge as the panic grows.

  I burst through a wall of noise into the city proper. Lights from the surrounding buildings flood the area. The swirling police lights seize my attention, the desire to flee is suddenly overwhelming.

  Sumiko is inside a police vehicle. They’ve caught her. Branden isn’t with her.

  I have to get to Klast. But where is Branden? I split my mind.

  One half, I start to go through the preparations for a Universe jump again. The other half I seek Branden—a tiny little consciousness, a confused mass of stimuli and reactions.

  There. Not too far away. Another woman holds Branden, trying to calm him. The woman already loves him, cares for him as if he were her own, tender. Sometimes I hate the ability to see into everyone; this would be easier if I could hate her.

  I dip into Branden. Instead of comfort, I send panic, pain. He’s not with his mother and nothing, nothing, will calm him until he is. A child should never be separated from their parent, for any reason.

  The other half of my brain isn’t doing what it should. It can’t focus. I stop again. This time I focus on building a wall between my minds, so they are ignorant to each other. It’s a dangerous tactic, but there’s no choice.

  I imagine the wall as a thousand threads growing between regions of my mind, interweaving, interlacing, growing thicker into each other. They lock into one another, individually surrounding each part of my mind. A loose thread flaps in my mind for me to pull to set the wall, a keystone thread.

  I pull it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  PEACE.

  I calm my mind. I prepare to jump Universes. The thought doesn’t frighten me as it once had. Focus on traveling closer to the source of my consciousness. Nice and easy.

  Close the senses. No sight. No sound. No smell. No taste. No feeling. Shut them down. I am nothing, devoid of all.

  Nothing.

  Imagine the Prime Universe. But where? Something important. Klast. There’s something on Klast.

  But I’ve never been to Klast.

  Watch Station. Joslyn’s room—the first location that pops into my mind.

  Sight: Blue textured walls. Sound: The silence of space. Smell: Dry, sterile air of Watch Station. Taste: Clean, carpet fibers on the air. Feel: The glass writing table, resting comfortably underneath my forearms.

  The table feels like an old friend in a turbulent time. A place of refuge in a swirling mess. But I am the Watch Director, I will see the Watch through this. The task has fallen to me and I will be equal to it— Emre?

  ***

  Sumiko is near tears, on the razor edge of hysterics. She sits in the back of an armored police vehicle, on a bench made to hold gangs of dangerous criminals. Not a mother trying to be with her child. Her arms are stuck together in electro-cuffs in front of her, magnetically bound to the center of the floor by a stronger bond than any metal.

  She has nearly given up hope of escape, of raising Branden, of seeing him grow. She turns to anger, hatred so furious that now she wants other people to hurt, to cause as much damage as she can.

  Not yet, Sumy, I say to her.

  Her shock kicks her out of her fury cycle. She’s working through my voice, what it means, where I’ve been, why didn’t I stop her from getting arrested? She wonders all these things, but doesn’t ask them. Tentatively, she says, Karon?

  Karon? Am I Karon? I’m not sure, but I know I don’t have time to figure that out right now. Calm yourself, make yourself compliant. Make them complacent. I’m going for help.

  Can’t you make them leave us alone? She thinks to ask me to kill them but backs off before actually asking. More than Branden will be lost if I fail.

  I don’t answer, instead I leave skimming for the resistance that must rise against tyranny. One split, two, three, ten, twenty. I scour the city, ever deepening schisms threatening to tear apart my skull.

  I must not fail.

  ***

  I am rebuffed. Hard.

  I’ve never felt anything like it, never knew such a thing was possible.

  Emre! Her outrage and hunger for knowledge tumble over me. Both are palpable; even if I couldn’t skim her, it’d be obvious from the scowl on her face and her immediate pacing about. Klast, tell me what you Watched on Klast!

  Right, there was something on Klast. But what? Had I been there already? I can’t seem to remember much before landing in her quarters. I try to think back, but hit something blocking me.

  Klast, Emre! Klast!

  I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve been to Klast.

  What! Joslyn stops pacing. Her eyes turn furious. She slips into calming exercises, imagining the tension and harmful emotions as black dust, gathering in her lungs to be expelled out. Expelling large clouds of back dust into the air.

  Go to Klast and Watch. Figure out what happened to the other Watchers. Go!

  ***

  Is your homework done for tomorrow? The delivery should have been here for now. Will they ever shut up? The net wrap-up is on channel eleven-oh-nine. Alyssa’s really quite good looking, right? We’re out of tea. The game starts in ten minutes. How long is the wait? …

  Over a million thoughts pour through me. As soon as one is established not to be part of the resistance, I skip to the next. The thoughts are a flood, thicker than air. That’s the closest description to it, walking through a room and being aware of every molecule around you in a three-foot bubble, but only looking for one, pushing your bubble around in an effort to mow the room, except the air keeps swirling around, thwarting your efforts. And the whole time the jagged edges from splitting dig into your mind, impeding your progress.

  If I don’t find them soon, I may have to try what Sumiko suggested. Control them, offer powerful suggestions to their minds, deny their free will. Do to them what they seek to do to Sumiko and Branden, a part of me loves that— There. Got them.

  ***

  I pluck the image of Klast and the detention facility from Joslyn’s mind before jumping to Klast. The facility is an old imperial palace repurposed to hold VIPs set on the edge of a lush jungle. The small chatter of life, the jungle’s tiny consciousnesses concerned only with base instincts, rise in a clamor as I approach.

  There is human thought among the cacophony, sparse and concentrated in the facility. Disgust wafts from the facility, regret, self-loathing, righteous certainty, and … fortitude.

  There’s a tight cluster of three on the second floor of the east wing. Their emotions are heavy on disgust. I enter and skim the three.

  They carry a body between them. She looks familiar, the facial structure is reminiscent of someone I knew once, a sister perhaps, but the charred skin makes it almost impossible to identify her. Her hair’s been burned off … or has it? Somehow I don’t think it has.

  The Watch. Anja Sapat, a member of the Directorate.

  What is happening to me? My memory keeps sliding away, like parts of it are missing.

  I go deeper into the man exuding the most disgust. He’ll have to go back and scrape the rest of her skin out of the consciousness projector. Bad enough to smell the charred skin from three feet below his nose, but to have to actually scrape it off.

  He doesn’t know the specifics of what’s going on. All he knows is they’
re trying to learn how the projectors work and experimenting with Watchers was a part of that. They had been preparing for this for months, experimenting long before the Watchers showed up, rehearsing actions and countermeasures for when the Watchers arrived. Still, it all went to hell a lot faster than they anticipated. They had been forced to act much more quickly than they thought.

  I try to coax his mind into thinking about the lead person. There’s something still bothering me. This doesn’t feel like the endgame. The current state of things is too open, too quagmire-ish.

  Something grabs me. Something grabs me!

  I knew it! Polston exalts. She’s here.

  Polston is Watching the Prime Universe.

  ***

  The Resistance is more organized than I thought they would be. They had formed when rumblings of the profiling law being passed first started, hoping to prevent the bill from ever becoming law. Now they viewed themselves as an ‘Underground Railroad,’ a reference to a similar action taken a thousand years in their past, of helping slaves escape their unjust masters.

  There wasn’t time for me to be clever and suggest the idea of going to free Sumiko. Sumiko and Branden would be most vulnerable while they were in the process of being moved; once they get to their destinations, it will be much more difficult to free them. Plus, my head aches, a million different little fracture lines snake through my identity, each pulsing with a different staccatic rhythm from my own—seams from where I stitched myself back together. Through the pain, I default to what is easiest.

  So I speak directly to the leader, Oliver Rademocher. It takes some convincing, but now he and three others are closing in on the mother’s position.

  My head hurts. I don’t split to skim ahead and stay with Oliver. The thought of splitting again worries me. Instead, I leave the leader and jump ahead to where they had been holding the mother and her baby.

  The police are packing up, about to move the mother in the armored vehicle. The child is with another woman, she feels … warm. The woman and the child are in a separate vehicle, unescorted. This is important.

  Why?

  I try and sort through fragments of my mind. I hop to each one, a stone just underneath the surface of a great lake that stretches in all directions. I can’t see where the next one is, or really the one I stand on. It’s confusing, disorienting.

  I stop on the one I’m on. Unsure where to go next.

  The vehicles start to move.

  Karon, a familiar pleading voice echoes over the water.

  The siren call wakes several stones that rise up above the surface: Karon, Sumiko, Branden, the Resistance. Memories coalesce, but they’re weak, foggy, gray.

  I skim back to the Resistance, Oliver, and inform him of the situation. They start to form plans to free Sumiko from the armored vehicle.

  No, I struggle to say. No, that’s not right. Branden, focus on Branden. Least guarded, easiest to rescue. Give Sumiko hope, strength.

  They listen.

  At least I think they do. Time is fractured. I ride with them. I struggle to make sense of a great lake. They corner a vehicle and storm it. How am I standing on water in the middle of a vast lake? A crying baby—I should calm it.

  I go deep into the baby, soothe it. These people are friends; they will reunite you with your mother.

  But the mother, someone needs to help the mother.

  I split once more, to keep the baby calm and help the mother.

  Something tears. The great lake explodes upward in a roaring frantic rush.

  ***

  Polston tries to seize me. There’s no other word for it.

  I repel her, push her the same way Joslyn did to me. It works, but she’s right back at it, like a crazed cat trying to gain a purchase.

  I keep fighting her, but she’s relentless, a thousand needles striking down on the edge of a bubble. Instinctively, I split, fleeing toward Easbei, to draw her off.

  She splits as well, but her attacks lessen.

  I split again and again and again.

  I’m not sure if she can keep up. She’s still there but not attacking anymore.

  I spread the slivers of my consciousness over Easbei; the planet is important to me somehow. There’s something here I want, no—need, to find. But what? An echo of a memory.

  The woman pursuing me strikes all sixteen of my slivers. Like two birds fighting mid-air, we tumble over each other striking and scratching: me to get free, her to hold me.

  Why is this woman after me?

  Let’s see if she can keep up. I split again and again and again and again until I lose count, rapid fire. I hum through Easbei. I am Easbei. Millions of fractures dance and weave through the cities.

  Danger: That’s all I can hang onto. Pursuit.

  I find my pursuer. She’s overwhelmed. I’m but a thousand particles of light dancing across a windswept lake at sunrise. I skim her.

  She knows what’s happening academically, but cannot split into that many slivers. Neither can I for that matter.

  I expect pain, millions of sharp edges digging into my skull. But something’s different … something’s wrong. The lack of pain worries me—in a detached sense, a worry for later. I go deep into her.

  An orphan. A lost little girl, trying to find a home. A home she found in the Regency: meaning, purpose.

  Polston.

  Now I remember: the occupation. It was never about the DNA profiling law, a convenient excuse to move forward with a plan that had been incubating for centuries. Every failed attempt over the years, cataloged and studied. The Regency has been building toward this for over a thousand years. The goal: Bring the Watch under direct Regency control. Replace Watchers with trusted Regency members.

  And I had just handed them their coup d’état, fallen into their endgame trap. They caught the Watch Watching the Prime Universe. It doesn’t matter that the Regency stole the technology, managed to train people to Watch, to the Victor goes History.

  I split again and shoot half of the slivers off of Easbei in all directions.

  I need to get to Watch Station. I stitch the shards of my mind headed in that direction back together. They’re like puzzle pieces, burnt and frayed on the edges.

  They form a gray dome that surrounds me, thousands of jagged lines, a spider patchwork of my consciousness. Something shines through the gaps in the broken lines from the outside, I can’t tell what.

  Pursuit. Polston.

  She’s still pursuing me.

  I form more of these domes. Combining the millions of my individual shards into thousands of these patchwork gray domes, fleeing in all directions through the Universe.

  It’s not enough. She’s still there, able skim and get a sense of my intentions.

  I build walls, thousands of them, but there’s not enough threads, the walls are weak. The light beyond the jagged lines in the dome dims. The keystone thread drops down from directly above. It’s sky-green, the color of my mother’s eyes. I know the color, but it’s the first time I connect it to her eyes.

  I pull the thread.

  A shift. A set—ting. I’m not sure what just happened. A large spherical space station looms ahead of me. A memory, a ghost: Pursuit.

  I … check? I’m aware, but I’m not sure why. There’s no pursuit, no one at all like me. There was once; the person’s—a woman’s—wisps of consciousness lay shattered around me. She had broken it into more pieces than I could count, some floated through space badly stitched together. She had tried to hold on, to assemble her mind. She had failed.

  But there’s life in the station.

  I enter. It feels familiar, a dream, déjà vu. I drift through the station. Do I drift, or do I move the station around me? The life on the station is in a great struggle; they run to and fro, their emotions high.

  I want to care—but I don’t or I can’t. I’m not sure. The station is sliding by me on autopilot.

  Am I dreaming?

  The speed at which the station moves past me, be
gins to slow. It brings me to a door with an embossed “W” and through.

  A white bald woman with clear blue eyes paces back and forth. I know the woman; she’s intimately familiar: Wisdom.

  I skim her lightly. Wisdom, can you help me?

  Emre? she responds. What is wrong?

  Emre. Yes, that was my name once. I do not know, Wisdom. It feels as if a dream, but too real to be so. I don’t understand.

  What is the last thing you remember? There’s an edge to the question, an urgency.

  I seek to remember, but all that remains is the fractured gray dome. It pulses with my effort, the broken lines grow thicker, strain.

  Pursuit. I remember pursuit.

  By whom? she asks me.

  Such a simple question with no conceivable answer.

  She offers a solution, Polston?

  The woman. Yes. I remember her now. She’s an orphan. Like us. Except the Regency is her adoptive parents. The revelation that we’re orphans, never knowing our parents, is both surprising and confirming. I knew this already; why had I forgotten this?

  Wisdom doesn’t answer right away, but I’m skimming her so I see her thoughts anyway. Of course, she surmises. Polston would have to be an orphan. It’s the only way the consciousness projectors can work. The separation from a parent at a young age creates the necessary schism in the mind to exploit. A drive to know where one comes from creates a questing mind, a mind prepared to take risks, accept the unacceptable in the quest for the return to normalcy, in the quest for knowledge. But did the Regency know this, or did they get lucky with Polston?

  Polston has shattered, I tell her. It seems important. Her remnants flutter aimlessly through the universe.

  Which universe? That edge again.

  It seems an obvious question, but I remember Wisdom often asks seemingly obvious questions. This one. What other one is there?

  Her eyes widen, but she schools herself before asking. Are we being Watched?

  Are we? No, I do not think so. But this is a dream; what does being Watched mean in a dream? Wisdom, when will I wake?