Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “Was that the disease that you, erm, found at Longacre?”

  The way she said that word, found…

  “No,” he said, brushing past it. He expected that she knew full well what happened there. Was she trying to get him to talk about it? Why? “All this requires more study. Someone on the ground. Someone with resources—which, you’ll note, I don’t have. I don’t have anything, Sadie. This isn’t just trying to find a needle in a haystack—I can’t even find the damn haystack.”

  “Let’s get dinner.”

  “Dinner.”

  “Yes, have you heard of it? It’s the meal after lunch, sometimes accompanied by drinks. We’re within walking distance of downtown Decatur. Some nice restaurants there. A Jeni’s Ice Cream, too. Can I bribe you?”

  “I don’t know, Sadie.”

  Again, that smile of hers dropped. “Black Swan hasn’t been wrong yet. It’s seeing something, we just don’t know what. I need your help.” The smile came back, then, the gleeful phoenix, reborn from the ashes. “Besides, I’ve got a rather robust expense account, so at least let me ply you with treats.”

  “All right.” He sighed. “You are ceaseless, you know that?”

  “I am, and I do.”

  * * *

  —

  PHONE OUT, SADIE snapped a photo of her dessert: a chocolate ice cream so dark, it seemed to consume the light. “Sorry,” she said, lining up her shot and taking it. Cli-click. “It’s very Instagrammable. Just like those cocktails tonight, my my my.”

  Together the two of them walked through Decatur Square. Families were out under the trees. College students passed Frisbees back and forth. He scraped at the last remnants of his ice cream—goat cheese and cherries—and licked his lips.

  “That whole dinner menu was Instagrammable,” he said. Benji felt himself sophisticated until he ended up at a restaurant like the one they’d just come from. His view of food was that it was nutritive and functional more than it was a thing to be savored and enjoyed. Half the things on this menu he didn’t even understand. What was a gastrique? Or mizuna? Or soubise? What made a quail egg better than an egg from a regular chicken? Looking at the cocktail menu only confused him further. Genever and amaro and cinchona bark and velvet falernum. “I’m pretty sure they made half that menu up, by the way.”

  “We had Black Swan make up a food menu once, and I confess, it…did sound that way, like it came off a fancy Brooklyn farm-to-table restaurant. Bruised henwater and evaporated bacon reduction and…oh God, what was the one thing? I remember! Melancholy duck petals with scap zest.”

  “What in God’s name is scap zest?”

  She started laughing, tears in her eyes. “I don’t even know! The damn thing even generated recipes. Not recipes you could eat, mind you. Recipes that I wager would actually kill you. Or set your house on fire.” She sighed.

  “Black Swan is something personal for you,” he said.

  “You think so?”

  “I do. You’re not just some…company liaison.”

  She licked her ice cream and stared off at the middle distance. “No, I suppose I’m not. I’m a neural designer. The neural designer.”

  He stopped walking.

  “You designed Black Swan.” Of course. It’s why she took any fear or criticism of it so personally. It was her creation. Not just a program, or a design, but something that existed interstitially between artwork and entity.

  “Correct.” She pivoted to meet his gaze. “Not alone, of course. I was only as good as my team, but I was the lead of that team, yes, and most of the code began with me.”

  “And you trust it.”

  “As much as I trust myself.”

  “And it, the machine, trusts me.”

  She gave a playful shrug. “Apparently. Means I trust you, too.”

  “I don’t think I can help it much.”

  “I think you two should meet.”

  You two should meet. The way she said it, it was as if the thing were alive. Which, he supposed, in a way it was—not alive, but aware in some capacity. Intelligent, by some metric. But you would never say that about a computer, or your refrigerator, would you?

  “We can put something on the calendar—”

  “Is your calendar free tonight? Are you busy at this very moment?” She eyed him up. “You seem to be done with your ice cream.”

  “Yes, but I would very much like to sleep.”

  She grinned. “Sleep is overrated, Benjamin Ray. Let’s go, right now. We can hop on MARTA.” The station was only a block away. “I can introduce you properly to Black Swan.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we see where the night takes us.”

  * * *

  —

  HE HATED THE feeling: the anxiety curdling in his gut like milk cut with vinegar. The train took them from Decatur just north of the Emory University campus. The closer they got, the more his nerves nearly dropped him to his knees. They came off the train, walked the few blocks it took to end up at the CDC—his home for nearly two decades. Almost literally, given the nights he slept here, in his office.

  And then you threw it all away, didn’t you?

  Disappointment and shame warred with the righteousness inside him.

  It made him sick, and he wasn’t sure why.

  In part because of what he did.

  In part because of what they did to him in return.

  Some moments he felt like, I did the right thing, and they punished me for it. In the next moment, the opposite came to him with grave certainty: You lied to suit your agenda, and you deserved worse than you got.

  As they approached the building, the evening light gone diffuse behind the Atlanta skyline, he hesitated. Literally slowed his walk until he came to a stop. He swallowed.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he lied. “But I don’t know that I’m allowed in the building anymore.”

  “You figure there’s a poster hanging up inside with your face on it? Outlaw Benji Ray, wanted for crimes against disease?” She waved him off. “I’ve got clearance. Besides, Black Swan is in the basement with the server farm. You won’t run into anybody if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I’m not worried,” he said, snapping at her. He bit more words—worse ones—back. “Sorry. I just—a lot of memories here, is all.”

  She shrugged and continued walking with a careless sway to her arms, as if his pain were just a speed bump to her. And maybe it was.

  Reluctantly, he followed. And with every step, that feeling in his stomach thickened.

  Into the building they went. Sadie authorized a guest pass at the front desk, and, to his shock, they let him right in without pause. What did he expect, exactly? Klaxons and alarms? Metal shutters slamming down behind him? A SWAT response? He had damaged the center’s credibility, perhaps, but he wasn’t the Devil.

  To the elevators they went. And down we go.

  Sadie smirked, eyeing him as the elevator took them deep into the building’s sublevels. An energy clung to her—the electric enthusiasm of a child about to show off a favorite toy or a new drawing.

  Doors opened, and she led him through the lowest, deepest sublevels of the building. This was part of the CDC’s server farm: room after room, contained behind thick glass walls, of massive server-blade arrays. Humming in the half dark, lights flickering and twitching across it all like digital fireflies. It was cool down here, because it had to be. This much tech generated considerable heat.

  Sadie took him down one hall, then the next—she gestured toward a door that had her name on it. SADIE EMEKA, NEURAL DESIGNER (BENEX-VOYAGER). Beyond that stood another door.

  This one was matte black.

  No sign hung upon it.

  She went to the door and opened it. No lock, and he noted as mu
ch.

  “The room is just a room,” she explained. “Black Swan does not live within it. The intrusions we fear are from out there—” She gestured toward, well, the entire world. “—rather than from someone walking through this door. Black Swan will not interact with simply anyone.”

  The room ahead was dark and deep. A consumptive void.

  “Shall we?” he asked.

  “You’ll go into the Lair alone. I’ll monitor from my office and can communicate with you from there.”

  He made a face. “The Lair?”

  “Just a little name. Ideally, we don’t anthropomorphize it, but just the same I quite like it. There’s a Beowulf-meets-Grendel vibe I appreciate.” She cleared her throat. Was she nervous? Benji thought that she was. Her nervousness oddly undid some of his own. “Way it works is this: You go in, and you can talk to it, ask it questions. It won’t answer in words, but rather, with green pulses or red pulses to indicate yes or no, respectively. It can also answer with images and data, but it won’t communicate with you the same way you communicate with it.”

  “That does not seem like an exact science.”

  “Benji, even an exact science is not an exact science—surely you know that above others.” He wondered again: Was that a dig at him? A reference to Longacre? No. Surely he was just being overly sensitive. Or paranoid.

  “I thought you said it could recite poetry.”

  “It could. And I also said it was very, very bad. Vogon poetry bad. We’ve instead chosen to simplify its communication. Speaking is complex. Language is another pattern, and one that ostensibly gets in the way of what we want it to achieve. This isn’t Siri or Alexa or any of those other…nonsense digital assistants. Those entities, if you can call them that, have a very simple programmatic script—a recitation of certain patterns. But they’re not thinking. Black Swan is thinking. And what it’s thinking about—well, we don’t want it to have to parse that through our messy language. It’s far more useful to let it speak—um, so to speak—in images, sounds, raw data. And of course the binary yes/no system we’ve given it.”

  He took a deep breath. His heart was pounding in his chest. It did feel a bit like he was meant to go in there and fight a monster.

  Or at least meet one.

  * * *

  —

  THE DOOR CLOSED behind him, and when it did, that darkness became absolute. The dull thrum of the server farm could not be heard in here, leaving this space feeling not unlike a sensory-deprivation chamber. How long would it be before it felt like he was floating, distant and unmoored from this world? Benji stood in the dark room and waited.

  Suddenly, Sadie’s voice punctuated the silence:

  “Black Swan, coming online.”

  And with that, the room began to gently throb with soft white light. It pulsed in a way that suggested the gentle rise and fall of breath.

  It wasn’t alive, he knew. This glow-and-fade of light was a programmatic trick. It was done not because it needed to be done but rather, because they wanted you to feel like you were talking to a living thing.

  Something you could trust.

  Something just like you.

  Ideally, we don’t anthropomorphize it…

  And yet.

  “You can speak to it,” Sadie said over the comm. Her voice came not from a single speaker but rather, from everywhere: omnidirectional sound that so perfectly filled the room, it felt like it came from within him.

  He cleared his throat again and said, “Hello, ahh, Black Swan.”

  The room pulsed green once.

  A yes? An affirmative? What did that mean, exactly? That it was acknowledging his presence? What a special day this was, acknowledged by a machine as existing. (Though given how many times technology—from facial-recognition software to automatic towel dispensers—seemed somehow not to realize that black people existed, failing to trigger when they approached, he guessed he should take it as a win and move on.)

  “You called me here, is that correct?”

  A green pulse.

  And then a second green pulse.

  What was that, exactly? Sadie must be reading his mind, because she came over the intercom. “Sorry, to explain: Black Swan may pulse an answer up to three times to invoke a degree of strength and certainty in the answer. Two green pulses means yes, a strong yes. An excited yes.”

  “It gets excited?” he asked her.

  But it was Black Swan that answered with one green pulse.

  When the pulse came, it brought a subtle sound: a gentle, womb-throb vwomm.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  He knew it wasn’t a yes-or-no question.

  How, then, would it answer?

  Images began resolving on the wall ahead of him: First, snapshots of his résumé. Glimpses of papers he’d worked on at EIS—those flipping past him, from the wall ahead of him, to the walls at his sides, then discarded behind him and flung back into the data void once more. Images of himself—some taken from the AP, some from internal CDC communications. The photos showed him here in the US but also around the world: at an illegal meat market in Guangdong Province, standing by rows of chickens, ducks, and civet cats; in a Jeep riding the jungle roads of the CAR, on the hunt for monkeypox; he and his team members, like Cassie Tran and Martin Vargas, staring at a wall of maps in Sierra Leone tracing an Ebola outbreak.

  And then, the kicker:

  A photo of him at Longacre Farm in North Carolina.

  There he stood between stalls of pigs, stalls that seemed to go on for infinity. The stall hogs crammed in so tight they hadn’t an inch between them. Even in this photo—black and white—he could see the sores worn into their sides. It made him flinch.

  Did Black Swan know what that moment represented?

  Or was it just another in a line of photos taken from his time as a member of the Epidemic Intelligence Service here in the CDC?

  Was there a reason Black Swan would show that to him?

  Or could it just be Sadie? Could she just be the puppet master putting words into this digital creature so it could regurgitate them again?

  “Why Maker’s Bell?” he asked. “I don’t see anything exceptional there. What is it that you see?”

  Moments passed. And then…

  On the wall ahead, the white glow of the room dissolved into a series of fat, blocky pixels—and those pixels then refined swiftly, breaking down and sharpening into an image. A map. Pennsylvania. It dissolved to pixels once more and reconstituted itself, zoomed in further, showing a town on the map. The town in question: Maker’s Bell.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, frustrated. “I know where it is. What’s going to happen there? Show me something.”

  You motherfucker, he added in his head.

  Then, a video. Projected there on the wall.

  It began simply enough: a cameraphone video looking down the street of a small town past a set of gas pumps. A cop car sat nearby, and presumably the car’s driver—a bald, barrel-chested Caucasian police officer—stood in front of three people walking toward him. He asked them to stop, and they wouldn’t.

  Something wasn’t right with the three walkers. They stared ahead. The video’s clarity wasn’t pristine, but even here it was easy to see those vacant eyes. The three comprised what looked like a young white girl, an older (maybe middle-aged) man of indeterminate race given the video quality, and a woman, maybe Latina.

  The cop pulled a gun—

  From behind the three walkers, people shouted and ran forward. Two paramedics, by the look of it—and as the phone moved, shaky, Benji could see the ambulance in the background. Following the two paramedics were a man in a baseball cap and overalls and another young girl—his daughter, maybe.

  The gun in the cop’s hand wasn’t a gun, though, was it?

  A Taser, Benji realized.
r />   The cop fired it into the middle of the walkers—into the man’s chest.

  The probes went in through the shirt and ticked with electricity—but the man kept coming. And that’s when the cop, apparently having had enough (“the fuck,” he said), stormed up and grabbed the man.

  The man—the walker the cop grabbed, the one the Taser failed to affect—stiffened, caught in some kind of seizure.

  His eyes went dark. So dark it was easy to see even on the crummy phone video.

  (The darkness, Benji guessed, was the result of the eyes going bloodshot from a subconjunctival hemorrhage. Benji knew it didn’t necessarily mean damage to the eye, but came as a result of intense straining or trauma.)

  As the man shook, the tremors worsening, the police officer continued to drag him toward the cruiser—despite the pleas of the paramedics.

  The person taking the video must’ve stretched to zoom, because the image grew, closing in on the car as the cop forced the man inside it. The image was grainier, now, a little harder to parse—

  Then:

  The car shuddered. Something dark sprayed up across all the windows. Something red. The glass broke. Inside the car, the cop screamed. Others outside the vehicle began yelling, too, in panic—some running toward it, others fleeing in the opposite direction. The cop staggered out, covered in…something wet. Red and black. Clutching at himself. It’s gore, Benji thought. Someone’s. Maybe his.

  Before the video ended, the person moved the camera one last time.

  And pointed it at the two other walkers.

  One was a girl, the other a young woman.

  They continued walking forward as if none of this had happened or was happening around them. Their gait remained purposeful. Their eyes, dead as nails. Mouths formed into flat lines.

  Then the video went black.

  Benji stumbled through the darkness of Black Swan’s Lair, seeking egress—he couldn’t find the door here in the dark, and his hand hit the cold wall, and only when the slow steady throb of white light rose anew did he see the outline of the exit.