But most importantly, there was the challenge factor. I wanted to be the one to score in the place where nobody else had.
All in all, it was fair game, but I momentarily hesitated before applying. It was very strange that I had never heard of Beta Blue before. They probably just adjusted its rating, bringing it to the top, I told myself. I really wanted to go to this place.
“Kir,” I said, “get clearance for M-237.”
“Right away,” said Kir.
I got up and walked downstairs. The clearance was nothing more than approval from an algorithm that matched headhunter experience with the estimated Mirror World difficulty, and I had never been denied a request. I knew that I would be wound up until I received permission. I had never learned to take rejection well, even when it was formal and impersonal.
“Your request for Sector M-237 has been approved,” said Kir before I reached the main floor.
So, this was it. My future for the next several months was set.
I stepped out onto the porch and looked around. The sun was almost touching the surface of the ocean, and both the sky and the water glowed with a warm golden color; cicadas peacefully chirped in the trees behind the house. I was moved. This place had begun to feel like home, to the extent that the notion of home was applicable to my nomadic life.
Walking to my flyer I noticed a seagull silhouetted against the deepening blue of the evening sky. I wondered if my friend would be upset facing the closed wall of my bedroom in the morning. My heart unexpectedly ached for a second, but I consoled myself with the hope that the next guest would be kind to it too.
Beta Blue
As usual, there was a blink in all ship systems when it crossed over the Mirror World boundary into Sector M-237. I immediately paused all the navigation programs and ran diagnostic tests. For unknown reasons, the singularity crossing always created some damage, and its severity was impossible to predict.
I wasn’t too lucky this time. Kir estimated that it would take him almost two weeks to repair all of the corrupted software. But I wasn’t complaining. The longer it took, the more time I had to complete pre-entry preparation at my own pace.
The blue planet started slowly filling the external camera screen, and I had a usual momentary conviction that I had accidentally made a loop in space and come back to Earth, but I reined in the desire to ask Kir for location confirmation. Instead, I told him to camouflage the ship and start blending with Beta Blue’s computer network. By now the cabin fever kicked in, and I couldn’t wait to start the field operation.
First, I ran a singularity-scoring program on digital profiles of the planet’s inhabitants. The top hits tended to correlate with a higher intensity of the Dark Triad trait, although admittedly, this technique wasn’t precise, gave a lot of false-positives and failed to pick up anyone completely avoiding the net. But I was fine with that. Our purists would spend months assimilating with the local population to look for subtler signs, but I didn’t have that kind of patience.
The highest score belonged to a Remir Autran, and I asked Kir for his summary.
Remir’s anomaly was obvious. Files that he periodically posted on random obscure websites spread like wildfire. They contained music, the old, archaic style that existed on Earth before artists learned to directly engage the subconscious levels of the brain. This style was still popular at home, albeit mostly among a modest group of connoisseurs.
He was approximately my age, less than a year younger. Kir didn’t find anything particularly noteworthy about his early years. He came from an average middle-class family, dropped out of engineering school during his senior year and never touched the technical field again. He didn’t have a steady job. He had a history of erratic behavior and marked periods of heavy alcohol use. These were all good signs, very indicative of the Dark Triad type. Moreover, his personal life seemed to be a mess, and the list of women he was involved with at one point or another guaranteed to take a long time to review. I impatiently interrupted Kir before he got into specific details.
“Kir, forget about women. Bring on a sample of his work – with video.”
A screen opened in the center of my vision.
Remir, tall and very thin, stood in a circle of blue light. He was wearing a casual Beta Blue outfit – a loose robe on top of a gray shirt and light pants. There was a small pale scar in the corner of his mouth, which gave his face a slightly mocking expression, as if all his seriousness was just a sham.
He tossed back strands of ash-colored hair and looked straight into the camera. A large screen of the performance system interface lit up in the air.
At first, Remir touched the virtual surface gently as if getting himself comfortable, and it responded with the deep sound resembling a waking avalanche. He nodded to himself, moved his fingers across the glowing rectangle, and a jubilant melody burst out into the air like some mighty creature celebrating release from captivity.
I turned off the audio to better focus on Remir. Apparently, it was hard to keep the magic going. His face became contorted, his hair was dark from sweat, and he squinted as if to protect his eyes from the screen’s brightness. I thought that he definitely had an aura of feverish intensity that I had learned to associate with Dark Triad personalities.
I turned off the feed.
“I think we have a decent chance here,” I said. Of course, I didn’t expect any response, but I liked to run things by Kir all the same. “The singularity score may not mean much, I give you that, but overall, he looks promising. Where is he now?”
“He lives in the main city, but for the last 25 days he has been staying in a hotel in the town of Oren,” answered Kir.
“What’s so special about Oren?”
“Nothing. Singularity score is low, population size low.”
“Puzzling,” I said. “What’s wrong with living at home?”
“Nick, here is a relevant audio recording. It was made 26 days ago by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”
I heard the beeps of a communication device.
“Mr. Autran?” the woman on the phone sounded very calm.
“Speaking,” Remir’s voice was slightly hoarse as if he had a mild cold.
“Mr. Autran, we have a problem. In fact, you have a problem. We’re sure you’re aware of it.”
There was a long silence.
“The president didn’t appreciate your joke about his re-election campaign,” continued the voice. “He was very upset, actually.”
“I … it was a private conversation.” Remir was clearly caught off guard. “In any case, there was nothing offensive.”
He suddenly seemed to regain some confidence, “The president must have gotten the wrong interpretation.”
“Do you want me to play you the recording?” The woman sounded sincerely helpful.
There was another period of silence.
“I didn’t think so,” her voice was openly smug.
“We want you out of the city until election day. There better be no noise from you during that time. Then you can come back on the condition that you’ll publicly support the elected government immediately upon your return.”
“I wouldn’t enjoy doing that. I am not that much into politics, you might have heard that,” said Remir in a friendly tone.
“Perhaps you don’t quite understand. I don’t think you would enjoy losing your city residence permit either. And you probably wouldn’t enjoy having to distribute your work through the official channels. Understandably enough, the Ministry of Culture may not appreciate your style. Not to say that we have been, shall we say, negligent, allowing you to share your music informally despite the amount of network traffic it creates. You might have heard that some critical public functions were slowed down for a while after you posted your last release. I don’t think you would enjoy it if we fixed this glitch.”
There wa
s a pause.
Then the woman continued, “The president got fed up, frankly. Leave the city before the end of the day.”
The line went dead.
“So, he left,” I said. “Not exactly heroic behavior, but civic courage is not a part of our requirements. Plus, what would you have done in his place?” Kir was silent. “Anyway, what’s happening now?”
“The election is in two days. Remir is scheduled to come back the morning after that and will be heading straight to the news headquarters for a live interview.”
“Excellent,” I said, “let’s pack.”
Later that night, Kir landed my small passenger shuttle on a flat clearing in a mountain forest. I stepped onto the grass, slightly slippery from the evening mist, took a deep breath of cool fresh air and looked around.
On the north side, the trees climbed up a steep slope until they gave way to bare gray cliffs with wedges of snow in between. To the south, I saw a cluster of lights in the middle of a large valley below. It was Oren, the town where I was supposed to find Remir. I zoomed in; at close range its buildings resembled a herd of marine creatures exposing their backs above the dark waters of an imaginary sea.
The flyer slowly lifted off, stopped at treetop level and suddenly vanished as the vehicle’s surface switched to a frequency invisible to the naked eye. It would be locked in this position until my return. Earth’s security didn’t allow headhunters to use any machinery on the closed planets out of concern for accidental exposures.
Before disappearing into the forest, I looked back and had to exercise some imagination to believe that the shuttle was still there.
“See you soon, don’t get too lonely,” I said and walked away.
The downward terrain was relatively tame, and I was able to descend in an almost straight line, only rarely having to go around patches of glacial moraines, where the ground was too unstable. A couple of times I skidded on steep slopes, but steadied myself by grabbing low tree branches.
Soon the ground flattened out, gradually leading me to the edge of wheat fields. It took me another hour before I finally reached the industrial yards that defined the boundaries of Oren. I started making my way through empty passages between the lots with parked agricultural equipment. Live security patrols had become obsolete long ago by the comprehensive net of electronic surveillance, and with Kir deleting my image in real time from all cameras I didn’t have to worry about being inconspicuous. Even if I was stopped and questioned by a random police unit, there shouldn’t be any problem. Kir had already run the identity creation program through the planet network, and there were no inconsistencies in the history of my digital construct. It was impossible to tell that I never existed, and in the worst case I could only be fined for the minor offense of not carrying an ID card.
I finally entered the residential district on the other side of the warehouses and immediately noticed that the place had a distinct air of shabbiness. Random pieces of trash were strewn on the sidewalks, and blotches of electronic graffiti flickered on peeling walls of the grotesquely shaped concrete structures. As I got farther away from the outskirts, the streets became cleaner, but the incongruent jumble of city blocks still looked way more prosaic than it had seemed from above.
After a few more minutes, I reached the hotel, where Remir had been staying since his arrival. Before going in, I quickly surveyed the interior through the multiple security camera feeds. Fortunately, the lobby was empty. The lights were dimmed, and a holographic message hanging in midair behind the counter indicated that service would resume in the morning.
I told Kir to unlock the doors, walked in and settled in the chair in one of the curved corners of a weirdly shaped room. Having studied the pattern of Remir’s behavior, Kir predicted that waiting wouldn’t take too long. To pass the time, I picked up a disposable news tablet from the low table, and a sentence immediately condensed on the empty gray screen: “Nick, would you like the latest update?”
I almost dropped it, but immediately recalled that Kir had already inserted my fingerprints into the central database.
“Sure,” I said. Earth’s surveillance satellites provided headhunters with an up-to-date overview of Mirror Worlds status, but I didn’t have anything better to do anyway.
My curiosity was immediately rewarded. A big headline screamed at me in large red letters: ANOTHER ACT OF SABOTAGE BY EARTH AGENTS AT THE NORTHERN FACILITIES
I skipped the news summary and watched the live video coverage. A casually asymmetric, but still doubtlessly military structure was split in half by what seemed to be a major explosion. In a moment, the image of a burning building was replaced by menacing looking objects recovered on the scene of the bombing. They looked impressively real, and I mentally complimented the secret service artists both for imagination and graphical execution.
Kir’s soft chime alert distracted me from this entertaining activity. I looked up and for a moment didn’t recognize Remir in the hunched figure that stumbled out of the elevator doors. His hair and gray shirt were drenched in sweat in spite of the fact that the place had perfect thermal control, and his robe looked as if he had slept in it.
Without noticing me, Remir walked straight to the counter and punched some sequence on its surface. A small round bottle popped up from underneath. He unscrewed its top section, converting it into a glass and took several hurried gulps. Only after that did he glance at the room.
I put down the tablet, raised my hand in greeting, and he slowly approached. He looked completely different in person. The light in his eyes was gone, and so was the aura of desperate energy. His face had a haunted expression, and the glass in his hand was trembling.
“Why don’t you join me?” I pretended to be oblivious about his condition.
He pulled a chair to my table and sat down. It seemed that he was glad to see another living soul.
I thought that things were unfolding quite nicely.
“How are you?” my question sounded almost mocking, but he didn’t seem to care. He was sufficiently drunk.
“Yeah,” he looked around as if determining the degree of hostility of various objects. “It hurts, the lights are too bright. If they would just turn the lights down, it would be much easier.”
He took several more gulps, and the muscles in his face relaxed slightly. I watched, pondering my next step. Even though it was unethical to exploit his current state there was nothing technically wrong with it, and his shaky grasp on reality could be very useful for my first move.
“I am from Earth.”
He didn’t seem to hear.
“We’re not aggressive,” I continued, observing his reaction. “We don’t plan to invade. Your news is made up.”
He contemplated me in the most focused manner he could muster and nodded.
“No doubt. But … these…” he waved his hand in the air. “This place has official surveillance. You aren’t cautious enough to be a spy, I’m afraid. Very funny of you, though.”
I passed him the news tablet.
“Take a look.”
He shrugged and took it in his hands.
“Kir, show him views from the security cameras,” I said.
The screen flashed, and Remir’s expression changed. He put the tablet on the table carefully, as if it was about to explode in his face. Then he pulled his chair away from me, and his images projected on the newsletter in different angles. And in each of them, my chair was empty.
A light panic appeared in his eyes.
“Who is Kir?” he asked and nervously looked around the room. “And … this …” he pointed to the screen, “this can’t do that.” He started to slowly get up not taking his eyes away from my face.
Now I needed to act quickly.
“I can do more than that,” I said nodding towards the tablet.
Remir was backing away from me.
“Yo
ur depression, anxiety. The dark fog in your brain. Your insomnia.” The timing was critical. “I can make it all go away.”
I guessed correctly. Remir stopped.
“And the headache?” he whispered almost inaudibly.
“Right,” I nodded, “and the headache.”
“How … quickly?”
He was in my bio-transmission range.
“Kir, give him the basic psychoanalgesia,” I ordered.
Remir’s posture shifted as if a loose spring inside his body changed, now suddenly tight and stable.
It was very interesting to watch.
“I don’t believe in talking to people in pain,” I said, “I needed your mind back. It will wear off by tomorrow, though. I can’t cure you, it’s not my specialty.”
His eyes were alert and clear, and incredulous.
“It just let go. All of it.”
He passed his hand across his forehead, “How?”
I didn’t answer, waiting for him to put it all together.
When he did, he stepped back again.
“Really, Earth?”
I smiled reassuringly, “Remir, we want nothing from Beta Blue at large. It doesn’t have anything we care about. I’m here because of you. I might offer you something that you find interesting.”
He processed that for a moment.
“Well, whatever you did,” he said touching his forehead again, “I suppose you could have killed me if you wanted.”
I continued to hold my reassuring smile. Kir was indeed capable of permanently shutting down a human brain. All headhunters’ implants had this function as a last resort in self-defense situations. Fortunately, I had never had to use it.
“But you didn’t,” he continued, “what do you want?”
He was studying me with intense curiosity. He didn’t seem afraid.
“Maybe nothing, I need to find out. And then I might make you an offer.”
Fire of the Dark Triad Page 4
