Vanadium Dark

by Ben Sheffield

  The speech to text software captured his words perfectly, even omitting the “uh.”

  He hit “send.” Project Elephant's interns would process, encode, and dispatch the video. They would do so with a scrambled version of the video. Only the Elephant Handler and his clients were allowed to view the world through the Vanadocams' eyes.

  He looked at his timer. That had taken three minutes and forty seconds.

  As he'd feared, he was rusty as fuck.

  “Thanks, Joyce. Another one.”

  “A cat-three?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  CASE FILE NO. 76452673

  CATEGORY: 3

  MAGISTERIUM: PUBLIC

  PARTICULARS: ARSON AGAINST GOVT PROPERTY

  He entered new co-ords, went to a time several hours in the past, and found himself looking at Sacramento's town hall as it was splashed with gasoline.

  Some kooks had set fire to the building in the early dawn. Viktor wondered at their chutzpah. How did they think that wouldn't draw the attention of the digital eye?

  A match was thrown down. A dervish of fire flared up.

  The two perps wore balaclavas. He watched them bundle into a car and take off down the road.

  Via the Vanadocams, he gave pursuit.

  What happened to the town hall? Was the fire extinguished? He had no idea. That was not his problem. For all he knew, the town hall was still on fire. For all he knew, half the town had burned down by now.

  All he knew was that he'd been given two hundred and ten cases to solve. And this was number two.

  He froze the video, activated motion tracking, and fixed it to a dark teal pixel on the getaway car.

  He pressed play and watched as the camera tailed the car down the road. He was impressed at how much smoother the software had gotten. Once, it had handled off-axis movement in a dizzying ectoplasm of jittering and jumping. Now, he almost seemed to be tailing them in a car of his own.

  He sped up the footage by 20x, and the car streaked down the road faster than the maglev that had brought him to the Pentagon. Cars passed them on the opposite lane in barely perceptible motion blurs. Clouds tumbled and spun across the sky like laundry in a washing machine.

  The car entered a garage in an apartment complex.

  The occupants got out, still wearing balaclavas, and turned off the light.

  So that was their game. They thought that the Vanadocams could not see in the dark. It was a common misconception, one that the government was in no hurry to discredit. Clearly, they thought they could swap out the car's license plates in total darkness then disappear into the warren of apartments.

  There were many people who had thought they could outsmart—or outdumb—the Vanadocams. The nation's prisons brimmed with them.

  The truth was, there was no escape in any United States city. Within a few more years, there would be no escape anywhere.

  Whatever you did, the eyes saw.

  He activated infrared mode, took photos of their faces, and sent them to the FBI. Nailed to the fucking wall. It had taken two minutes and ten seconds.

  “Thanks, Joyce. Do you have one that's hard? I'm bored already.”

  Leavenworth

  Creak...creak...creak...

  Anzor Khujadze lay on his mattress.

  His mattress.

  The possessive pronoun did little work. He did not own the mattress. He also did not own the pillow, the blanket, the paper gown, the combined toilet/sink unit, the cinderblock walls behind him, or the steel bars in front of him. They all belonged to Leavenworth Penitentiary.

  The mattress was “his” in the sense that he slept on it, he supposed.

  Creak....creak...creak...

  The sound was driving him crazy.

  It came from the cell to his left. He hoped someone would do something about it soon. The hours were long in Leavenworth, and that creaking sound was bitter company.

  He was tracing characters on a piece of paper he'd bought from the commissary for three new cents.

  The Georgian alphabet. He was learning the language. His grandfather had been an immigrant.

  He'd never spoken a word of the language before coming to prison, nor had he known anything about his grandfather's country. He supposed he was casting around for a pontoon to moor his emotional rowboat, but no matter. Learning the language filled the hours.

  He could write his name in Georgian. ანზორ ხუჯაძე

  Kartveli was a perverse script. The characters all seemed suggestive of torture equipment.

  The letter ჯ, jhan: a cruel pincer or scissor-like device, ready to sever the fingers and toes of heretics.

  The letter წ, cil: a pointed instrument that widened out from the base, tearing rectal and vaginal passages like the medieval Choke Pear. It even had a handle with finger-holds.

  More than a hundred years ago in Georgia, a man had been born called Ioseb Besarionis Dze Jugashvili.

  He is most often found in history books under the name Joseph Stalin. He'd released the spigot on an ocean of blood that still stained the pages of history.

  Anzor wondered if Kartveli had trained Stalin's mind in the ways of torture, in the art of decanting blood from human vessels.

  Creak....creak...creak...

  That fucking sound!

  The man in his next cell had been a black guy called James Waller. A former USMC staff sargeant, court-marshaled in Syria for raping two female privates under his command.

  James said he hadn't done it, that the women had set him up. His story sounded convincing. Maybe because he'd had ten years to practice it.

  James had not needed to be told who Anzor Khujadze was. His name had appeared in papers coast to coast.

  Everyone knew that name.

  Besides, any discussion of Anzor’s past life would end with him talking about Project Elephant, a subject he was ordered to explicitly avoid. His solitary cell privileges depended on it.

  He was the Leavenworth celebrity.

  He'd spent some time with the animals of the general prison population. Guys licking his ear, asking him if he'd like to be their woman. Guys sidling up behind, pulling down his pants, and worming a finger up into his asshole.

  As he traced Kartveli glyphs onto the paper, Anzor noticed again how crookedly he was holding the pen. He noticed again the eerie, wandering pain he'd lived with for years.

  A necessary knuckle of his right index finger was missing.

  For a while, he'd been on kitchen detail.

  Some idiot bull had given a schizoid a potato peeler.

  One second, Anzor had been putting together bologna and cheese sandwiches. The next, the guy had grabbed his wrist and forced it on to the cutting board.

  The potato peeler cut through perhaps a few millimeters of skin. Then the freak let go of his wrist, grabbed another cutting board, and slammed it down.

  Anzor remembered a tremendous surge travelling up his arm as the nerves were truncated forever. His eyes rolled in his head, and he stumbled back. Dark red flowers seemed to spread and grow on his prison johnnies.

  He’d wondered whose blood it was. He wasn't hurt. He felt great. Never better.

  Christ, where was all the fucking blood coming from?

  Then the schizoid was in his face, holding the end of Anzor's severed finger like a talisman.

  “I'll be keeping this, traitor. A little souvenir. I'd have asked for an autograph, but that just isn't my speed.”

  The head bull had yelled something. There’d been the crackle of a Taser, and the schizoid's face rippled like tent canvas as 50,000 volts passed through his body.

  Surely that's not my finger, Anzor remembered thinking, dark storm clouds already thickening before his eyes. I feel fine. I feel fine. I feel...

  Even now, Anzor could hardly believe that he'd had part of his body abbreviated so suddenly and effortlessly. Some days, he almost thought he'd been born without the extra knuckle of the end of his finger.

  The knuckle c
ould have been reattached, but it had fallen to the ground and rolled out of sight. Nobody could find it, he was told.

  He doubted the guards had looked for very long.

  After the incident, he'd been reassigned to a more secure wing of the prison.

  The good behavior boys stayed here. His cellmates were affable, tolerable, or ignorable.

  He'd had by far the most rapport with James Waller. Some of his better memories of Leavenworth involved talking with the guy about music or art. Neither talked about their time in the army. It seemed they'd reached an unspoken agreement that this subject was off-limits.

  Before being conscripted to serve in Syria, James had played in a tonescrew band. Tonescrew was a popular fusion style from South America, based on drastically altering the pitch of instruments by electronic means. You'd pick the twenty-fourth fret of a guitar and then drop the pitch four or five octaves. Or you'd pluck the lowest string of an upright bass and pitch shift it up. The tones and timbres produced by this were strange and challenging. Organic, yet artificial. Music of tomorrow. The question was whether the world would get a tomorrow.

  James had performed some tonescrew a capella in prison for him. Anzor had appreciated the effort, but tonescrew could not be done a capella. And truthfully, he did not want music of the outside world teasing him even in mangled form.

  But James had a dark side, and Anzor preferred his toneless humming to his moods and rages.

  James spun into downward spirals and would sit and sulk on his bunk for days. He refused to work. He accumulated black marks on his record. A screaming fit with a CO once caused him to spend three days in SHU.

  “What was it like?” Anzor had asked when James came back. He'd never experienced solitary. He might be a traitor faggot, one of the most hated men in America, but he did his best to behave.

  James was silent for a couple of minutes.

  Then, long after Anzor had stopped expecting an answer, he started talking.

  “It's so silly being on Earth. So pointless. Just goin' round and round the sun, and what's the good of it? No more. I don't wanna be on this ride. I wanna stop. I wanna get off.”

  He crawled into bed, and pulled a blanket over his head.

  Anzor could not guess or diagnose James's problem. Bipolar disorder? A request for clemency knocked back?

  He didn't ask. And he never found out.

  In prison, a loose mouth caused teeth to fall out. Nobody shared problems. You could be handing someone a lever to use against you. Even with people who said they were your friends, it paid to be careful.

  Depression was common in Leavenworth, as though the rats that had infested prisons in the Twentieth Century had moved into the prisoner's minds in the Twenty-first. You got used to morose faces, and dissociative blank-out episodes. It never seemed unusual for you to be in the middle of a conversation and for the other person to just... stop talking.

  Prisoners dealt with it in any number of ways. Some slashed the crap out of their hands on any sharp edge they could find in the hopes of getting sent to the infirmary for some Vicodin or Sycorax.

  Others bartered and traded for even harder stuff, tapping into the contraband narcotics flowing through the prison like a river.

  James dealt with it by buying twine.

  He'd save the two new cents he earned per day at the machine shop and buy little lengths of string from the commissary. No balls of the stuff were sold. They were given out in little ten or twenty-inch lengths. The idea was that you'd use them for little cell art projects or to mend torn clothes.

  James collected all these pieces of string and, in the dark of his cell, tied them together.

  Little pieces became big pieces.

  He braided them.

  Thin pieces became thick pieces.

  When the bulls felt like tossing cells, James would stuff the string into his slippers or his mouth as soon as he heard the yells and the scrapes of turning keys.

  From time to time, Anzor would look across and see James's hands—enviably complete, achingly perfect—braiding and tying.

  It was very obvious where this was going.

  Whenever their eyes met as James worked on his little clandestine craft project, Anzor would get a sad look from his cellmate, a face that held misery in its topography, hopelessness in its lines.

  Please don't tell. This is all I have.

  Anzor didn't tell.

  The light bulbs in their cells could be unscrewed, with the bayonet holders in place. There came a day when James drilled a hole right through the holder with a shank made from a loose bit of wire—wire he'd purchased with his last money—and threaded the string through the holder like a lanyard.

  It wasn't string anymore. It was more like a rope. Truthfully, it was something even beyond that.

  All it took was one jump, and Anzor got to hear his cellmate jerking and flopping, feet doing the air dance a few inches above the ground.

  This fact hit Anzor the hardest: three inches between living and dying.

  He could have called and maybe gotten help—maybe saved James's life.

  But it wouldn't have been the type of help or saving James needed. So he’d just let him flop and thrash in mid-air.

  Farewell, James. I don't have your courage.

  Anzor tried hard not to feel sad. It had all gone just as James had wanted it to go.

  Creak...creak...creak...

  He had to keep bad thoughts from his mind, or he might enter a downward spiral of his own.

  There was nothing for Anzor to do, so he picked up his piece of paper, started drawing Georgian letters again, and waited for them to take James's body away.

  Amanuensis 1

  Excerpt from Viktor Kertesz's diary, auto-transcribed with better than 99.5% accuracy. Compensated to remove stutters and repeated words...

  Sometimes, I'm asked how I ended up as an Elephant Handler. Here's a rationalization: romantic ideas about existence.

  My theory's this: if you have not left a mark on the world, you didn't exist. That's the consequence of logical parsimony. A person who did nothing is not a person. If you can be erased from the equation of life while losing nothing, you should be erased.

  Many of us die and immediately become nonhumans—the ultimate indignity. A man can handle dying. But what do you think about never having existed?

  The ancient world was populated, we surmise, with thousands and millions of these ghosts, their existence redacted to null because they have left no trace of themselves. How far back does history go? We know humans emerged in the Holocene about 10,000 years ago, but it's hard to know. Humans left so little of themselves behind in those days. Some bones. Some ashes. They were not quite non-existent, if you'll pardon the double negative, but they hovered right on the edge of the abyss.

  The earliest writing we have seen is only about 8000 years old, and it is like a candle flaring inside a dark room. Nobody knows how Homo habilis lived. Documented prehistory is a contradiction in terms. But we can know—or guess—how the Sumerians lived.

  Soon, more eloquent forms of writing emerged, and they did more than record the past. They recorded lives. This was an ennobling thing, and writing should be better recognized for its role in Jungian psychology.

  Writing. This is all the immortality you need. Scratch your name into a glass bus stop sign. You have attained the immortality sought by Herakles.

  But not now. That's a crime, and eyes are watching.

  Yes, we know more about ancient kings than their subjects. Commoners and the unpopular were seldom written about. But then, perhaps some people are not deserving of immortality.

  But there's another side to this. An undocumented man is a non-existent man. But is a documented falsehood the truth?

  Some would argue that, yes, it is. A coward who gets a heroic ballad written about him becomes a hero. Whatever the truth was is irrelevant.

  This is the artifice of the writing method showing through. Writing is not always honest, and s
ometimes, people lie.

  If we need accurate records, we need something more than writing.

  The Nineteenth Century began to supply moving images, and photography—a sort of writing that is less pliable to manipulation and trickery. Yes, if you're clever you can make a camera deceive. But you have to be clever.

  I was born in 1985, and my father liked having cameras around. It rubbed off on me. I would rig those big VCR camcorders over my kitchen and record myself making breakfast.

  Why?

  Because I felt that if I didn't have evidence that I'd eaten breakfast, I might as well not have done so.

  When I was in high school, my parents' marriage deteriorated, and I became the rope in their tug of war. Most unpleasant. Normally, the rope does not start pulling for one side or another, but I did.

  Early in the mediation stage, when it was clear my mother was trying for full custody, I confronted her.

  She’d told both counselors and her legal representation that her job kept her late and that my father had started locking the door on her from around eight p.m., forcing her to seek refuge in a motel. This was meant to be part of a pattern of incivility and intimidation. Yes, it was true. He had done that once or twice, but only after a bad fight.

  I told her that I had camera footage of her entering the house late at night for every night of the past week. I would be happy to show these tapes to my father's lawyer or anyone else who wanted to see them, if she did not play nice.

  One of the tapes showed her disposing of an empty box of condoms in the trash.

  Nobody's lawyer would see this, I told her. This would be for my father's viewing only.

  Joint custody was awarded. I cannot take full credit. Maybe the judge would have handed down that decision anyway.

  But I learned the power of writing, of documenting, of recording.

  To be an undocumented man is to not exist.

  Working as an Elephant Handler is to give myself eyes and to give others souls.