by Sean Platt
“I sort of owe him one. Or his mother, anyway.”
“What does Rachel have to do with it?”
“Oh, who cares about them? Deed is done. Micah knows magic. He’ll do fine this once, and everyone will clap for him, which I’m sure will be horrible for His Highness. It makes me a whore, just like my mother. But if I’m to be a whore, I won’t be a bad one. If you go out there at the party and assist like you just did, everyone’s going to figure it out.”
“Everyone knows it’s not real, Jameson. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but nobody will be crushed to find out that Micah didn’t really make Isaac vanish.”
Jameson put a finger against his thumb, held in front of his face. Natasha thought he was giving her a sideways A-Okay until the finger flicked out and a small wad of crumpled paper hit her in the forehead. Then Jameson did it twice more, striking her with moist wads both times.
“Are you flicking spitballs at me?” Natasha said, swatting at the things.
“For pretending that performance is about proving defensible reality? Damn right, I’m flicking spitballs at you.” To underscore the point, he flicked another. This time, Natasha dodged. It struck the divan’s pillow then blipped out of existence. “You’re a performer, honey. You should know better than to pretend the stage is about reality. Are your little tits really that perky when you wake up every morning?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’ve had enough help. Your personality then. Are you that sweet to Isaac?”
Natasha’s lips pursed. “Point taken.”
“You don’t need to convince the crowd that the illusion is real. You just need to create an aura of illusion. People don’t attend my shows because they literally want to see me do impossible things. They come because I spin them a feeling. If you blow your job, you’ll crush that feeling of magic — not as a real thing, but as an emotion.”
Natasha felt her cheeks puff with held laughter. Jameson looked over.
“What?”
“You said, ‘blow your job.’”
“Did you hear anything I said?”
“I heard you. Now say it again.”
Jameson rolled his eyes and looked away. When his attention returned to Natasha, he’d dropped both his feigned irritation and his sense of importance. Before, he’d been Jameson Gray, spellbinding illusionist. Now he was just Jameson, Natasha’s friend and confidant.
“You’re giddy,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not unflattering. Do you know how few times I’ve seen you with a genuine smile?”
“Oh, come on.”
“Serious, Nat. What’s got into you?”
Natasha gave a small shrug. “Thing have just been going well with Isaac lately.”
“Your husband, Isaac? You must mean someone else.”
“I mean him. He’s been sweet.”
“Isaac?”
“Don’t be mean,” Natasha chided.
“Honey, it’s you who’s usually being mean about him. Why the change?”
“He’s different since that night. And it’s like I’m seeing new things in him. Between you and me, I sort of feel like newlyweds again.”
“That night? You don’t mean when those people tried to break up your little shindig, do you?”
Natasha nodded. “It let me see Isaac in a new way. Maybe in an old way. An Isaac I’d forgotten.”
Jameson’s eyes narrowed. “Honey.”
“What?”
“People don’t change overnight.”
“He didn’t change, I don’t think. Maybe I just got to see another side of him. I’ve always known he loved me, but we were so caught up in his politics and how angry it all made me that it just sort of escalated. Just goes to show, all a man needs to do to prove himself to a girl is to ride in on his white horse and save her life.”
Jameson’s eyes were still narrowed.
“Jameson, what?”
“I’m glad you feel good about Isaac. But don’t get carried away, okay? Keep your feet on the ground.”
“Why are you being such a wet blanket?”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Why would I get hurt? I’m happy in my marriage.”
“Hmm. Because he saved you.”
“He did save me!”
“Just…”
“Oh, come on, Jameson. Be a sport. Let me be happy. I know Isaac is Isaac, and despite knowing you, I still don’t believe in magic. I’m not dumb enough to think that one heroic act solves decades of problems. But it’s a start, isn’t it?”
Jameson looked like he was weighing a decision. Natasha, watching, found herself annoyed at his presumption. No matter whether Isaac would remain new Isaac or not, he’d shown up with the cavalry when she needed it most. That was a fact. Regardless of what came next, they’d had that moment, and no amount of brow-furrowing contemplation on Jameson’s part would change it.
“I suppose it’s a start,” he said. “But please be ca — ”
“Oh, shut it, Jameson.” Natasha wasn’t actually annoyed. It was a jibe, nothing more. The artificial room’s tension broke, and they both relaxed.
Jameson stood. Natasha looked up expectantly.
“Get off the couch. We need to practice.”
Natasha stretched. “Why? I’m comfortable here.”
“Because everyone knows my name is on Micah’s little illusion, and if you’re going to be part of it, your skinny little ass had better not embarrass me.”
Chapter Eleven
The new configuration struck Serenity like an itch she couldn’t scratch.
It was the sort of thing that the children would understand but that most people wouldn’t — though that wasn’t entirely because the children were special. They were special, of course, but at least half of most people’s refusal to see what was all around them was exactly that: a refusal. Once, an artist had visited the school for a lesson, and he’d explained that talented artistic children drew what they saw…but that those who were less artistic drew what they thought they saw.
This was like that. Just as most children saw a square from an angle and still drew a square rather than the trapezoid it was in perspective, most people saw reality according to their expectations.
But this change in the puzzle that surrounded Serenity, here and now, was obvious. Just like ubiquity was obvious. There may have been a day when Serenity, like most people, would have felt her current sense of unease and dismissed it instead of seeing it as a real thing worth paying attention to. But as she’d taught her children, so had they taught her.
There wasn’t really a way things were supposed to be.
But there was a natural order. There most certainly was a way things were.
In the network, a disturbance looked like a glitch. The trick, in what most people called reality, was to understand that a disturbance in the programming of life looked (or felt) exactly the same.
Serenity saw a man in black, his face invisible. It took her a moment to realize that she had never actually seen the faceless man, and that it was Leah who’d seen him. Just as it was Leah who’d once melted into The Beam. It was Leah — not SerenityBlue — who blurred the liquid border between The Beam and what they touched every day.
The children were sweet. They didn’t understand Serenity’s worry. When she’d walked back with Sapphire, the girl had turned suddenly around. She’d been in the lead, but she’d confronted Serenity as if she’d spoken. “It’s all fine,” she’d said and then resumed walking. And that had been that. Because it was fine, if you looked at the big enough picture.
In meditation, Serenity could sense a nexus — some sort of a junction point in the process of forming. In her mind’s eye, it was like a cluster of nerves, a converging of many roads. A ganglion. Maybe a node. Signals were usually scattered, many things happening with apparent independence. Deep down (and this, Serenity knew from her birth), few things ever turned out to be truly indep
endent, but for most, it was usually true. Not anymore. Not here, not now.
Stephen York now touched Leah. Leah touched Leo. Thanks to Serenity’s nature and those of her children, all of them touched the school. There were others Serenity could sense but not see — people that seemed vaguely familiar only because they were linked to her connections. Each of those was related to the others.
The world was full of coincidence. As was the network.
The world was the network, and the network the world. For the children, there was little difference.
The children, who’d all been outcasts in their old lives, were prodigies here. Their innocence was addicting. Serenity had watched them walking back and forth from one world to the other, proving that the only boundaries were human-made walls. And that all that stood in the way from widespread realization, here and now, was a lack of language. A lack of a means to interface.
The children were above language. Without knowing how she’d taught them, Serenity knew she’d made them aware. Because of who she was. Because of what she was. They looked at her and knew. They came to her like ships to a beacon.
But that knot. That node. That ganglion.
Maybe it was as it should be, but its presence, in her mind, bothered Serenity. She felt the knot like a lump in her stomach. She felt the ganglion tangling the nerves of her own corporeal body. She could see both sides, all sides. Sometimes, it seemed as if reflected reality was merely perspective, and that point was driven home when several others had differing opinions about Serenity. She didn’t know what the knot meant. But she knew that in the present, in the short term, it felt like trouble.
A coming together.
A colliding.
Opposites approaching. Yin and yang. Hot and cold. When imbalance arose, something had to equalize. If the imbalance was large enough, that equalization felt like a storm. The laws said that all things tended to equalize, to move from order to disorder. But that, too, was just a matter of perspective.
She could sense Leah, because she could always sense Leah.
She could sense Leo, one step from Leah. She could feel a tear within him. An opening. A wound forming, growing larger.
And she could sense Stephen York. Something had attached itself to him, and now he was walking The Beam in bright colors. Something had left him, run like a loosed animal. Serenity had watched it go, knowing she would never be able to capture it — but that she should, or would like to.
In the middle, she could feel the man in black.
In the middle, she could feel herself.
And in the middle, there was another. Something like a great constellation of pieces. Something that, like the knot in reality, was a great thing coalescing. That was how stars formed. Contrary to entropy, where all things tended to disorder, stars were just gas falling into a gravity well of its own making. Enough gas, enough pressure, and a star lit as if by the striking of a match, and a million-year explosion began.
Enough people, moving toward a center. In the network. In life. In both, as the children would say.
Enough pressure.
Enough seeming randomness given purpose, revealed as not random at all.
Coincidence.
Culmination.
When it was done, what the children could do would become available to anyone.
And the great fire would come alight.
Episode 15
Chapter One
September 17, 2062 — District Zero
“Hey, Stephen,” said a deep voice.
York turned around on his work stool without thinking — a reaction as brainless as being struck on the patellar tendon with a rubber mallet. Only once he was fully turned did York realize that the man in black wasn’t Noah, back from the dead, here to yell at him again. The man, in fact, had no reason and no way to be in the quiet Chinatown lab at all.
“Who the hell are you? How did you get in here?” he demanded, his surprise at the breach coming out as anger.
The man was wearing almost all black, down to his hat. But his face was pale, his eyes a whisper of green, his teeth too white, as if nano-bleached. Their brightness shone out from his dark garb like a beacon.
“How do you tell the future, Stephen?” the man asked.
York stood, his intended manner one of confrontation, but immediately felt woefully unintimidating. He wasn’t used to fights, except verbal ones with Noah. But now Noah was gone, and York’s very identity was uncertain. Was he still Quark’s Number Two without Noah? Only the highest of the high even knew the Chinatown lab existed. Someday — someday very soon, he supposed — he’d simply walk out of this place, leaving Noah’s now-empty deathbed behind, the whole shebang capped like a hermetically sealed time capsule, and face the sun like someone unused to its glow.
York peered past the man, trying to suss out the intruder’s manner of entry and his own possible avenues of escape. The door to the ultra-secure lab was closed and verified. But the man was still here as a living contradiction.
“Are you with someone?” York asked. “NPS? Quark? Did Carol send you? I have this situation under control. Under my authority, nobody is supposed to — ”
“The way you tell the future,” the man said, “is to see it as a logical consequence of the present.”
York’s temper, worn thin after Noah’s long convalescence and untold moral qualms, snapped like a twig. His next words came out as shouts.
“How the fuck did you get into this lab? How did you know it was here? Who sent you?” He felt his temperature rising. But still, the visitor’s demeanor was all wrong. He didn’t react to Stephen’s anger. He didn’t seem to realize the impossibility of his presence, or how offensive it was to Noah’s paranoid security that anyone would set untidy feet in this hallowed place.
“The other way to tell the future,” the man went on, “is to create it.”
“What’s your name?” Stephen demanded.
“I came to give you something.”
“What’s your name?”
“I am a friend.”
“Bullshit!”
“There isn’t much time, Stephen.”
“Who the fuck are you? Why the fuck are you here? GET THE FUCK OUT OF OUR LAB!" With a jolt of shock, Stephen realized that he was near tears. And he’d thought he’d been coping so well. He thought he’d hated Noah, too, until he’d…well, until Noah had died, if that’s what had happened. Goes to show, the easiest person to fool was oneself.
“I have something for you,” the man said, unmoved by York’s anger. “Something I perhaps should have given you long ago.”
Stephen came forward. Whether he meant to hit or shove the intruder, he didn’t know. But before he could do either, the man raised a hand and showed Stephen a small chip of nano substrate.
“What?” York said, referring to the mystery of the substrate, the gesture of waiting and warding, and the entire confounding situation.
“It’s nothing at all. There’s nothing on the resin.” The man’s hand closed and vanished back into his coat pocket. “Because as the expression goes, you can’t take it with you.”
“What do you — ”
“Unless, of course, you already have it.”
“I have no idea what you’re — ”
“I shouldn’t be here. By some definitions, I’m a friend. Others would see me differently. Noah West had faith in you, in your competence to assist him in his work and carry it forward. But as the other expression goes, it’s better to be safe than sorry.”
“What do you know about Noah?”
“I know that it won’t hurt to remind you what part of you should already know.”
“Are you even from Quark? Who sent you?”
“You’ve been conditioned, not legacy uploaded,” the man said, answering a question Stephen hadn’t asked and still wasn’t even really aware of. “This is because nanobots would leave traces that memory does not. But the mind is a computer, and can of course be programmed.”
Stephen studied what he could see of the man’s face. He definitely knew him from somewhere. He was familiar. Very familiar. Terribly, hideously, below-the-skin familiar.
“Once you’re inside,” the man kept talking, “look for a puzzle to solve.”
“Inside where?” Stephen surveyed the lab.
“Pick at the edges. Keep the loose ends close. Recite what you find to keep it fresh. Your mind will do the rest.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
There was a banging at the lab’s front, near the door. Stephen’s head ticked toward the noise. When he looked back at the man in black, his face had changed. It now looked urgent, like the time allotted to deliver his strange message was almost up.
“You’re needed in a collaboration,” the man said.
“With who?”
“The entirety could never be stored in one piece. It was broken into parts, each only a fraction of the whole. It was the only way. Part was sent through others, conveyed via one vector and then another. You may not be able to see much of what’s coming next. But if you can see it, keep in mind that what looks like chaos is only someone’s failure to track the many moving pieces. Someone’s inability to see the future by extrapolating the fullness of the present.”
“Moving…pieces?” York stammered.
There was another bang on the door. This one was far harder. It sounded like someone trying to break the thing down with a battering ram — or a Wild East diesel-driven tank. But the lab couldn’t be raided by force; Noah had seen to that — and the visitor, somehow, seemed to know it. Even now, with the physical perimeter threatened, the AI would be rallying millions of bots from their original nanostature to clump into larger units. Those intentional saboteurs would erase the files, cut the connections, and literally eat the lab’s contents out of existence. Whoever that was out there could break in, sure. But they’d never get at the contents that actually mattered.
“I know how this sounds,” the man in black said, “but it will all be okay. Just keep cycling. Keep thinking from the inside. Pick the edges. Wait, and be patient. And try to believe that almost nothing, for you right now, is truly coincidental.”
