Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “Not literally?”

  “You know, I don’t know. I was never really sure.”

  Using the information Charlie provided, Mr. Vasouvian along with Mr. Alvaro and the rest of us on the thirtieth floor planned a raid on the warehouse in Glendale. We waited for a week, two weeks; waited and hoped that my brother would come to his senses and get out of there. But an Off Record house could not be countenanced, and soon enough, with or without Charlie, it was time to act.

  Three units of the Service went in together, along with half a battalion of regular police. We made nine arrests, all of whom were subsequently charged with grave assault on the Objectively So and exiled for their crimes.

  “And what about your brother?”

  I just shake my head. I’ve reached the end of the story. I can’t tell any more.

  I don’t know if he thought there was a literal monster or not, but here we are. Staring at Petras’s house.

  You were right, Charlie. You were always right.

  For once I have a gut feeling, the kind Charlie got every day his whole life. There are only a handful of people in the State who could arrange the kind of careful unseen sabotage of the Record that Charlie was convinced happened, but Laura Petras is surely one of them. She did it before, and she escaped apprehension, and now she’s doing it again.

  Bringing another house off the Record. Her own house.

  Mose Crane, itinerant construction man, freelance contractor, must have been among those who worked on the project. Maybe he knew and maybe he didn’t know the nature of the alterations he had been asked to undertake on this property. Maybe he only later realized.

  But he did figure it out, I know he did, because six months later he decides to turn his knowledge into easy money, to use this piece of discovered truth like a crowbar, like a lockpick. To blackmail the judge and the Acknowledged Expert with what he knew. And that’s what he’s doing, prowling around the judge’s house, when he dies, drawing the attention of the Speculative Service. Petras and her allies have to work fast, they send Doonan scuttling to Crane’s last known residence, two steps ahead of us, to remove all evidence of his connection to Petras.

  Paige is in motion before I’ve finished this last piece of explanation. She’s feeling for her weapon under her coat, opening her door. “All right,” she says. “So let’s go get her.”

  “No—wait,” I say. “Stop.”

  “Why? We have to go now, don’t we? We have to go right now.”

  “We are going to wait until she comes out—tail her to work, pull her over. This is something we gotta do very carefully. As quietly and inconspicuously as possible. This isn’t some kid we’re talking about. This is one of our Acknowledged Experts.”

  “Well, so—that’s all the more reason. Right?” Aysa is staring at me, stunned and agitated. Her voice is hot with urgency. “For us to work fast. To go in now. Laszlo. She knows we’re onto her. She has to know.”

  “Or she thinks we think it’s about Sampson, about Tester. Something small—”

  “She’s smarter than that, Laszlo. Laszlo: we gotta go in. Now.”

  “Just a second, Paige. Give it a second.”

  “No.” She shakes her head. She hisses, “Why?”

  She’s right. I know she’s right. I am sitting here doing what I’m always doing, which is trying to figure out what to do, and she is getting out of the car, patting her holster for her weapon, looking at me evenly through the window.

  “Are you sure—in your heart, Laszlo, are you sure that this woman is what you think she is?”

  I nod. Monster monster monster. I am sure. For once, I am sure.

  “All right, then. Let’s go.”

  Paige goes first and I stay close at her heels, matching her stride, directly behind her, an animal pack, a pack of two.

  The air changes, you can feel it change, as we pass through the high hedgerow separating Mulholland Drive from the Expert’s house.A short driveway, lined with wide flat pavers. A desert garden, the glistening knifepoints of succulent cactuses in the wan moonlight.

  “Here,” I say very quietly as soon as we step across the hedgerow and onto the lawn proper. I whistle softly to draw her attention, and then I crouch and point. “Look.”

  The capture is a remarkable forgery, specific in every detail. I snap my fingers in front of it and it moves, minutely, just like a real one. The lens blinks open and closed, open and closed when I move my face; when I snap my fingers, the beak of the microphone jerks up, like a bird’s. I look at Paige and can see that she is feeling what I am feeling, the wavering world, the air rippling and bending with the unacceptable reality: a dead capture. A forgery. A deliberate undermining of the foundation of the State.

  It is galling. Horrifying to think of it—so much reality unrecorded, moments racing past. A hundred moments, two hundred. I stand here, counting. If you split each moment then you quickly reach infinity, all the moments in the world going unrecorded—a quantum of moments. A forever of reality, disappearing as soon as it appears. I am standing in the center of a radius of absence. You don’t realize what a comfort reality is until you leave it, what a good strong feeling is the truth under your feet and in the air around you, how nice it is to be surrounded at all times by the truth. To know that everything is being added to the ledger, that everything that happens will be true and will be true forever, that everything that is is, that everything that has happened has happened and will have happened forever.

  And it doesn’t feel good. It feels terrifying. I feel like I might float up above the Earth, float away, crash down into the sea somewhere. I look to Paige, staring at the dead captures, the row of dummies, and I can tell she is feeling what I am feeling, the world reeling, the sky becoming suffused with the thick truthless air. We are off the Record

  “Hey. Hey,” I say urgently. “Water is made of two hydrogens, one oxygen. Hey.”

  She nods. Her eyes regain their focus. She stands up straight, whispers back to me, “Light is faster than sound.”

  “A million times faster.”

  “Yes indeed it is.”

  And we move on together, creeping like soldiers to the front door, muttering facts, good solid facts, the two of us tied to each other by real things, solid true things.

  The house is a stone tablet with tall panes of glass for doors and windows. The Moon hangs low; sunrise is close. There is a dog barking somewhere inside, urgent and nervous.

  “Wait,” whispers Paige. Holds up one finger. Tilts her head. “Listen.”

  Light noise from the back of the house. Barely audible. A murmuring sound, water running or someone laughing.

  We look at each other, nod, lift our weapons.

  And then, in that quiet moment, there is a minor seismological event somewhere deep inside the topography. The Earth itself rolls slightly, buckles—just a little bit. Just enough so you can feel it. The world adjusting itself to new realities.

  It only lasts a second, a half second, and then the world settles again. The State urging us to fix it. Make it right.

  We lift our weapons. Paige goes first again, and I follow.

  We move silently around to the back of the house, where the sun has just crested the closest hill, the first beams of light, like a Peeping Tom peeking above a fence. The surface of a long pool sparkles, clean and blue, in the new sunlight, and the Expert is a shadow rushing through its depths.

  The view from here is extraordinary, unimpeded nearly all the way around: down this way are the glass towers of the distant downtown, this way the sprawl of the Valley, the long arteries of Ventura and Reseda dotted already with morning commuters. The house sits right on the crest, on the very spine of the hilltop, and as the sun glints above the distant range, the day’s first beams of daylight reach over the fence and flare atop the pool.

  A diaphanous bathrobe is draped over a deck chair. A simple breakfast is set up at a glass-topped table: a board with cheese and fruit, bread and a knife to cut it. A carafe of
tea or coffee.

  The bright form of Laura Petras breaks through the surface of light and she sees us, standing like pillars at the water’s edge. Her head bobs at the waterline, her hair invisible under a tight swim cap, and she looks at us in puzzlement, but not in fear.

  “Mr. and Ms. Speculator. May I ask what you are doing on my property?”

  She flips up her goggles so they form a pair of eyes, inverse and bulging, on her forehead. She squints at us. The look of bafflement and confusion on her face is as carefully forged as the fake captures.

  “I think you know,” I say.

  “I do not.”

  It is disconcerting to see a person dissemble so fluidly, so effortlessly. A shiver of bad feeling rushes up my body. I keep my legs steady on the white pavement.

  “Would you get out of the water please, ma’am?”

  “I will not. I will do so if you tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “No. First you get the fuck out of the water, lady.” That’s Paige. Her gun is pointed directly at the suspect.

  “I’m sorry,” says Petras. “I’ve forgotten your name.”

  Paige does not move her gun. “Get out.”

  “Ms. Paige?” I say, ready with my usual note of caution, but Petras is pulling herself out of the water. Slowly the Expert rises from the pool, flicking her eyes from one of us to the other. I hear the dog barking again, somewhere inside the house, greeting the day.

  Petras is in a plain one-piece bathing suit, her hair gathered tightly under the cap. She stands calmly, unafraid, dripping onto the white pool stone.

  “If you want to discuss the Crane matter in more detail I am happy to do so, but in my office, at the appropriate time. And certainly not,” she says, to Aysa, “at gunpoint.”

  The first full splash of sunlight reaches the house, glinting off the second-story windows, making them momentarily into a wall of fractured shadows.

  “We’re not here about Crane,” I tell her.

  “What?”

  “We’re here because your whole house is off the Record. We’re here because you are in violation of subverting the cornerstone of the Golden State.”

  “What?”

  Her whole face haes changed. Her whole body. She is caught and she knows it. I step forward, drop into the vox officio. “You are accused, Ms. Petras, of involvement with the Golden State conspiracy. You are accused of taking your home off the Record. You are accused of high crimes against the Objectively So.”

  With each iteration of the word “accused” her eyes widen further, and all the steel goes out of her stance. Suddenly she is like a fish hauled from the water, trembling, terrified. I have never seen anyone dissemble so immediately, so naturally.

  “Ma’am—” I begin, but Aysa has had enough.

  “Hey,” she says. “Hands in the air. Hands in the fucking air!”

  “Listen to me,” says Petras, looking at me and then at Aysa, back and forth, trembling now. “Listen, I swear to you—”

  Aysa shouts, “No more talking!”

  The ground trembles again, a mild follow-up seismic motion, just enough to make me momentarily unsteady. The surface of the pool ripples and trembles.

  “I have done nothing.”

  “Shut up,” says Paige, and glancing at her I see on her face what I am feeling in my heart, the force of what Petras’s stream of untruths are doing to the air, bending and tearing at it, pulling at its seams like fabric.

  “It’s not”—her eyes widen with feigned alarm—“it’s not so. What you are saying, it is simply not so.”

  “It is so, ma’am. You were a conspirator in the plot initiated eleven years ago by Armond Kessler. You managed to escape justice, and now you have started again, replacing real captures with fakes, on your own property.”

  “This is madness.”

  There are captures in the high palms, captures above the sliding doors connecting the poolside to the kitchen. But they’re dummies, all of them. Connected to nothing, leaving no archive, forging no permanent reality. Charlie told me how astonishing it was to realize how easily a capture can be faked, and these are even better than the ones he encountered in Glendale. Their eyes blink like the real eyes of captures. They swivel to follow motion and catch sound. Masterful forgeries, perfect simulacra of the real thing.

  “And what comes next, Ms. Petras?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “I’ve done nothing.”

  Monster, I think. Monster monster monster. I am imagining fake captures planted all over the Hills and the Valley, downtown and Mid-city, by the beaches and on the pier and in the parks. I am imagining the Record being undermined, one capture at a time, the truth going dark, the eyes of the Record blinking closed, one by one. I did it, I think. I stopped her. A powerful feeling floods through me, magic in my arms and legs. In time, just in time, we have saved the State.

  “I promise you I have done nothing,” says Petras. “I have executed the duties of my office. I have always been loyal to the State.”

  The more she speaks, the more I feel it, the pull and rush of lies, the bending at the edges of the world all around me. My lungs fill up with it, the grit and dust of it, and my eyes are watering from it. The air is bending at all its edges, collapsing around me, cascading down the walls.

  “She is lying,” says Aysa, and I know she’s right, I know Petras is lying because the atmosphere is distending, warping, and I am catching it everywhere, I am feeling the sparks and stars of it, Petras saying “Not so” and Aysa saying “Another lie,” and I know it’s true, and I have my weapon out and aimed.

  “Stop,” I say, and lunge for her, and she raises one hand, and I jerk back, spin halfway around, and my first thought is that she can control reality itself, of course she can, and she has caused the searing pain in my shoulder with a sharp movement of her hand, but then there is a another explosive sound from the house’s second story and I understand that someone is shooting at us, she has signaled someone on the upper floor who has opened fire. Is it Doonan? I wonder, standing there like an idiot peering up, until Aysa grabs at me, pulls me down as she kicks over the glass-topped table to form a shield.

  Petras is bolting back toward the house. A third bullet smashes into the tabletop, shattering it, glass exploding everywhere. The dog is barking wherever it is.

  I shout after Petras, over the lip of the inverted table: “Stop! Stop!”

  Paige shoots up at the window and misses.

  Petras is running, and it occurs to me that I could shoot her. I think madly, I could shoot her, right in the back, shoot her and shoot the man upstairs, shoot the dog, burn the whole house down, and none of it would ever be known. This is the madness of living unrecorded, untethered to time. You can do anything and say it never happened. Anything.

  Paige takes a second shot, clear through the window, and I see the shooter go down, spin backward as blood mists from the hole in his head.

  “Stop!” I yell, and Petras stops. Paige rises unsteadily from behind the table.

  “Turn around,” I say, and Petras obeys. She has the knife that was on the breakfast board that was on the table: a knife, a long serrated blade, the handle clutched in her fist, the blade trembling frantically in the air before her.

  She raises the knife’s brutal edge to her throat. Tears form and fall from her eyes.

  “I swear in the name of the State and my high position that I have committed no crime. Whatever kind of trick you are playing here, I will not have my life destroyed for it.”

  “Drop that knife, please,” I say. The dog has stopped its barking. The sun has risen high enough that I can feel its heat. “Please drop it, Ms. Petras.”

  Her right eye flickers and jumps.

  “No.”

  Aysa has her gun on Petras. I have my gun on her too. This is madness. But the problem is, it’s not madness, because I have given this lady no choice and no chance. I have nothing to use as leverage, no power of mercy. The crimes with which I have just accused he
r, the crimes I know her to be guilty of, carry the maximum penalty, and she knows it the same as I do. The Golden State does not practice capital punishment, but everybody knows what it does, everybody knows what will happen.

  She will be sent into the wilderness, of course. The charges I am leveling carry that penalty. She will not only be toppled from her high position, she will be sent out into the wilderness and die there. So why would she cooperate?

  “Drop the knife!” I shout again, but why would she drop the knife?

  “Ms. Petras,” says Paige, and she steps forward, and Petras steps forward too, and then jumps, and I shout “No!” but it’s too late, Petras is jumping with the knife. I don’t know what her plan is but she only gets as far as screaming and lunging, and Paige is firing her weapon and so am I, and she misses because Petras has slammed into her, buried the knife in her stomach. Paige misses but I don’t. I catch Petras in her side just at the moment the knife slides in, and now both of them are bleeding—Petras gushing from her side, slumped forward, driving the blade deeper and deeper into Aysa, who is screaming, pushing at the other woman as she sinks down beneath her, the white stone disappearing under an opening curtain of blood.

  “No,” I say. I’m running across the slick pavement, slipping on the mingling blood. “No.”

  I am down on one knee, scrambling for Paige’s wound, pressing the heels of my palms into it, holding her closed with my hands.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her, “it’s going to be okay.” I scramble for my radio, smash the buttons, raise the alarm, telling her, “It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay,” and now it’s my own lie that is rolling in the air, because I have no information to support my asseveration. Aysa’s eyes are clouding. Her cheeks are losing their color. There is blood on my arms where I am holding her, a slick of blood expanding on the stone beneath us, dripping over the edge and expanding out onto the surface of the water, and it is not going to be okay.

  “No.” Too little, too late. “No.”