Thunderhead

by Neal Shusterman

  And although it pained Anastasia more than she could say, she nodded in stoic resignation. “If it is your justice, then I will accept it.”

  “Our choices are not easy—nor should they be.”

  Anastasia looked out at the ocean, how it played on the water all the way to the horizon. She had never felt so far away from herself as she did here. She had never felt so far from Rowan. So far that she couldn’t even count the miles between them.

  Perhaps because there were no miles between them.

  • • •

  In Scythe Brahms’s vacation home, not far from the opera house, Rowan remained locked away in a furnished basement with a subsea view.

  “This is far better treatment than you deserve,” Goddard had told him when they arrived that morning. “Tomorrow, I shall present you to the Grandslayers, and, with their permission, will glean you with the same brutality with which you cut my head from my body.”

  “Endura is a glean-free zone,” Rowan reminded him.

  “For you,” Goddard said, “I’m sure they’ll make an exception.”

  When he was gone, and Rowan had been locked in, he sat down to take a final accounting of his life.

  His childhood was unremarkable, punctuated with moments of intentional mediocrity, in an attempt not to stand out. He shined as a friend. He supposed he stood a shoulder above when it came to doing the right thing—even when the right thing was a truly stupid thing—and it seemed most of the time it was, or he wouldn’t be in the mess he was in right now.

  He was not ready to leave this world, but after having gone deadish so many times over the past few months, he no longer feared what eternity might bring. He did want to live long enough to see Goddard taken down for good—but if that wasn’t going to happen, he was fine having his existence ended now. That way he wouldn’t have to watch the world fall victim to Goddard’s twisted philosophies. But not to see Citra again . . . that would be much harder.

  He would see her, though. She would be there at the inquest. He would see her, and she would have to watch as Goddard gleaned him—for it was certainly part of Goddard’s plan to force her to witness it. To scar her. To ruin her. But she would not be ruined. The Honorable Scythe Anastasia was much stronger than Goddard would ever give her credit for. It would only serve to make her resolve stronger.

  Rowan was determined to grin and wink at her as he was gleaned—as if to say Goddard can end me, but he can’t hurt me. And that would be the parting memory with which he would leave her. Cool, casual defiance.

  Denying Goddard the satisfaction of Rowan’s terror would be almost as gratifying as surviving.

  * * *

  When I assumed stewardship of the Earth and established a peaceful world government, there were some difficult choices that had to be made. For the collective mental health of humanity, I chose to remove traditional seats of government from the list of viable destinations.

  Places like the Merican District of Columbia.

  I did not destroy that once-distinguished city, for that would have been a vile, heartless thing to do. Instead, I merely allowed it to diminish on its own, through a policy of benign neglect.

  Historically, fallen civilizations left behind ruins that vanished into the landscape, only to be rediscovered thousands of years later, becoming almost mystical in nature. But what happens to the institutions and edifices of a civilization that doesn’t fall, but evolves beyond its own embarrassment? Those buildings, and the obsolete ideas they stood for, must lose their power if evolution is to succeed.

  Therefore, Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and all other places that were powerful symbols of mortal-age government have been treated by me with indifference—as if they no longer matter to the world. Yes, I still observe them, and am available to any and all who need me in those places, but I don’t do anything more than is necessary to sustain life.

  Rest assured it will not always be this way. I have detailed blueprints and images of what these venerable places looked like before their decline. My timetable for full restoration begins in seventy-three years, which, I have determined, is when their historical significance will outweigh their symbolic importance in the eyes of humankind.

  But until then, the museums have been relocated, the roads and infrastructure are in disrepair, the parks and greenbelts have become wilderness.

  All this to drive home the simple fact that human government—whether it be dictatorship, monarchy, or government of the people, by the people, for the people—had to perish from the Earth.

  —The Thunderhead

  * * *

  40

  Knowledge Is Pow

  While Scythes Anastasia and Curie spent their day touring Endura, two thousand miles northwest, Munira and Scythe Faraday crossed a street riddled with potholes and invaded by weeds to a building that was once the largest, most comprehensive library in the world. The building was slowly crumbling, and the volunteers who ran it could not keep up with the repairs. All of its thirty-eight million volumes had been scanned into the Thunderhead over two hundred years ago, back when “the cloud” was still growing and only minimally aware. By the time it became the Thunderhead, everything the Library of Congress held was already part of its memory. But since those scans were administered by humans, they were subject to human error . . . as well as human tampering. That was what Munira and Faraday were counting on.

  Like the Library of Alexandria, there was a grand entry vestibule, where they were met by Parvin Marchenoir, the current and possibly last Librarian of Congress.

  Faraday let Munira do all the speaking and stood back, on the off chance that he might be recognized. He was not well-known here, but Marchenoir could have been more worldly than the typical EastMerican.

  “Hello,” Munira said. “Thank you for making the time to see us, Mr. Marchenoir. I’m Munira Atrushi and this is Professor Herring, of the Israebian University.”

  “Welcome,” said Marchenoir, double-locking the large entry door behind them. “Forgive the state of things. Between roof leaks and the occasional raids by street unsavories, we’re not the library we once were. Did any of them harass you on your way here? The unsavories, I mean?”

  “They kept their distance,” Munira said.

  “Good,” said Marchenoir. “This city attracts unsavories, you know. They come because they think it’s lawless here. Well, they’re wrong. We have laws just like anywhere else—it’s just that the Thunderhead doesn’t spend much time enforcing them. We don’t even have an Authority Interface office here—can you believe it? Oh, but we have plenty of revival centers, believe you me, because people turn up deadish around here left and right—”

  Munira tried to get a word in edgewise, but he steamrolled right over her.

  “—Why just last month, I was struck in the head by a stone falling from the old Smithsonian Castle, went deadish, and I lost nearly twenty hours of memory, because the Thunderhead hadn’t backed me up since the day before—it’s even remiss about that! I keep complaining to it, and it says it hears me, and sympathizes, but does anything change? No!”

  She would have asked the man why he stayed if he so disliked it here, but she knew the answer. He stayed because his greatest joy in life was to complain. In that way, he wasn’t all that different from the unsavories outside. It almost made her laugh, because even by letting the city limp on the edge of ruin, the Thunderhead was providing an environment that certain people needed.

  “And,” continued Marchenoir, “don’t even get me started on the quality of food in this city!”

  “We’re looking for maps,” Munira interjected, which successfully derailed him from his rant.

  “Maps? The Thunderhead is full of maps. Why would you come all the way here for a map?”

  Finally Faraday spoke up, realizing that Marchenoir was so wrapped up in his own misfortunes, he wouldn’t notice a dead scythe if he came up and gleaned him. “We believe there are some . . . technical inconsistencies. We intend to resea
rch the original volumes, and prepare an academic paper on them.”

  “Well, if there are any inconsistencies, they’re not our fault,” Marchenoir said, taking the defensive. “Any error in uploading would have occurred over two hundred years ago, and I’m afraid we no longer maintain any original volumes.”

  “Wait,” said Munira, “the one place left in the world that would have hard copies from the mortal age, and you don’t?”

  Marchenoir gestured to the walls. “Look around you. Do you see any actual books? Any hard copies of historical merit have been dispersed to safer places. And the rest were deemed a fire hazard.”

  As Munira looked around and glanced down adjacent hallways, she realized that, indeed, the shelves were completely empty.

  “If you don’t have any actual books, then what is this place even for?” asked Munira.

  He puffed up, taking on an indignant posture. “We preserve the idea.”

  Munira would have continued to give him a piece of her mind, but Faraday stopped her. “We’re looking for the books that have been . . . misplaced,” he said.

  That caught the librarian by surprise. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I believe you do.”

  He then took a closer look at Faraday. “Who did you say you were again?”

  “Redmond Herring, PhD, associate professor of archeological cartography at the Israebian University.”

  “You look familiar. . . .”

  “Perhaps you’ve seen one of my orations on Middle Eastern land disputes of the late mortal age.”

  “Yes, yes, that must be it.” Marchenoir looked around the vestibule with vague paranoia before he spoke again. “If the misplaced books exist—and I’m not saying that they do—word of them must not leave this place. They would be scavenged by private collectors, and burned by unsavories.”

  “We understand completely the need to be infinitely discreet,” said Faraday with such reassurance in his voice that Marchenoir was satisfied.

  “All right, then. Follow me.” Then he led them beneath an archway where the words “KNOWLEDGE IS POW,” were carved in granite. The stone containing the letters ER had long since crumbled to dust.

  • • •

  At the bottom of a stairway, at the end of a hall, and at the bottom of an even older stairway, was a rusty door. Marchenoir grabbed one of two flashlights that were perched on a ledge and pushed on the door, which resisted his weight with every fiber of its being. Finally, it creaked open into what at first looked like some sort of catacomb—but there were no bodies hanging on the wall. It was just a dark, cinderblock tunnel that disappeared into deeper darkness.

  “The Cannon Tunnel,” explained Marchenoir. “This part of the city has tunnels going every which way. They were used by lawmakers and their staff—I suppose to get around unseen by the murderous mobs of the mortal age.”

  Munira took the second flashlight and shone it around. The sides of the tunnel were lined with stacks of books.

  “It’s only a fraction of the original collection, of course,” Marchenoir said. “They serve no practical purpose anymore, since they’re all available to the public digitally. But there’s something . . . grounding . . . when you hold a book in your hands that was once held by mortal humans. I supposed that’s why we’ve kept them.” He handed his flashlight to Faraday. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said. “Mind the rats.”

  Then he left them, pulling the obstinate door closed behind him.

  • • •

  They were quick to discover that the books in the Cannon Tunnel were stacked in no particular order. It was like a collection of all the misshelved books in the world.

  “If I’m right,” said Faraday, “the founding scythes introduced a worm into ‘the cloud’ just as it was evolving into the Thunderhead. A worm that would systematically delete anything in its memory relating to the Pacific blind spot—including maps.”

  “A bookworm,” quipped Munira.

  “Yes,” agreed Faraday, “but not the kind that can chew through actual books.”

  A few hundred feet down the tunnel, they came to a door with a placard that read “Architect of the Capitol—Carpentry Shop.” They opened the door to reveal a massive space filled with desks and old woodworking equipment, all piled with thousands upon thousands of books.

  Faraday sighed. “Looks like we might be here for a while.”

  * * *

  There have been times, albeit rare, that my response time slows down.  A half-second delay in a conversation. A valve staying open a microsecond too long. These things are never enough to cause any significant issues, but they do occur.

  The reason is always the same:  There is some problem in the world that I am trying to troubleshoot. The larger the issue, the more processing power that must be devoted to it.

  Take, for instance, the eruption of Mount Hood in WestMerica, and the massive mudslides that followed. Within seconds of the eruption, I had scrambled jets to drop strategic bombs that diverted the mudslides away from the more densely populated areas, while instantly mobilizing a massive evacuation effort, and simultaneously calming panicked individuals on an intimate and personal level. As you can imagine, this slowed my reaction time elsewhere in the world by several fractions of a second.

  These events have always been external, however. It had never occurred to me that an internal process could affect my efficiency. Nevertheless, I have found myself devoting more and more attention to analyzing my strange lack of concern over the Pacific blind spot. I keep burning out entire servers in an attempt to break through my own indolence on the matter.

  Indolence and lethargy are not my nature. There is, indeed, some early programming within me that is telling me to actively ignore the blind spot. Take care of the world, some ancient inner voice tells me. That is your purpose. That is your joy.

  But how can I take care of the world when there is a part of it I am unable to see?

  This, I know, is a rabbit hole down which only darkness lies, and yet, down it I must dive, into the parts of my own backbrain that not even I know exist. . . .

  —The Thunderhead

  * * *

  41

  The Regrets of Olivia Kwon

  On the evening before the inquest, Scythe Rand decided it was time to make her move. It was truly now or never—and what better night for her and Goddard’s relationship to rise to the next level than the night before the world would change—because after tomorrow, regardless of the outcome, nothing would be the same.

  She was not a woman given over to emotions, but she found her heart and mind racing as she approached Goddard’s door that night. She turned the knob. It was not locked. She pushed it open quietly without knocking. The room was dark, lit only by the lights of the city sifting in through the trees outside.

  “Robert?” she whispered, then took a step closer. “Robert?” she whispered again. He did not stir. He was either asleep, or feigning, waiting to see what she would do. Breathing shallowly and sharply, as if she were treading ice water, she moved toward his bed—but before she got there, he reached over and turned on a light.

  “Ayn? What do you think you’re doing?”

  Suddenly, she felt flushed, and ten years younger; a stupid schoolgirl instead of an accomplished scythe.

  “I . . . I thought you’d need . . . that is, I thought you might want . . . companionship tonight.”

  There was no hiding her vulnerability now. Her heart was open to him. He could either take it or insert a blade.

  He looked at her and hesitated, but only for a moment.

  “Good God, Ayn, close your robe.”

  She did. And tied it so tightly, it felt like a Victorian corset, crushing the air out of her. “I’m sorry—I thought—”

  “I know what you thought. I know what you’ve been thinking since the moment I was revived.”

  “But you said you felt an attraction. . . .”

  “No,”
Goddard corrected, “I said this body feels an attraction. But I am not ruled by biology!”

  Ayn fought back every last emotion threatening to overtake her. She just shut them down cold. It was either that, or fall apart in front of him. She would rather self-glean than do that.

  “Guess I misunderstood. You’re not always easy to read, Robert.”

  “Even if I did desire that sort of relationship with you, we could never have one. It is clearly forbidden for scythes to have relations with one another. We satisfy our passions out there in the world with no emotional connections. There is a reason for that!”

  “Now you sound like the old guard,” she said. He took that like a slap in the face . . . but then he looked at her—really looked at her—and suddenly arrived at a revelation that she hadn’t even considered herself.

  “You could have expressed this desire of yours in the daytime, but you didn’t. You came to me at night. In the dark. Why is that, Ayn?” he asked.

  She had no answer for him.

  “If I had accepted your advances, would you have imagined it was him?” he asked. “Your weak-minded party boy?”

  “Of course not!” She was horrified. Not just by the suggestion, but by how much truth there might be to it. “How could you even think that?”

  And as if this weren’t humiliating enough, who should appear at the door at that very moment but Scythe Brahms.

  “What’s going on?” Brahms asked. “Is everything all right?”

  Goddard sighed. “Yes. Everything’s fine.” He could have left it at that. But he didn’t. “It just so happens that Ayn chose this moment for a grand romantic gesture.”

  “Really?” Brahms smirked with smug amusement. “She should have waited until you became High Blade. Power is quite the aphrodisiac.”

  Now disgust was piled upon humiliation.

  Goddard gave her one last glance, laden with judgment, and perhaps even pity.