Guardian

by Alex London

  “Uh-huh,” Syd grunted, walking past Liam for the main door to the ruined old building. He knocked into Liam’s shoulder as he went. Liam followed, staring at the back of Syd’s dark neck, the letters behind his ear, his slump-shouldered walk; and he fought the urge to reach out his metal hand and grab Syd, shout at him, tell him to be better than he was, tell him to man up and become what everyone wanted him to be, what everyone needed him to be.

  What Liam needed him to be.

  But Liam wouldn’t and Liam didn’t. He clamped his mouth shut, steadied himself, exhaled, and imagined his emotions like a waterfall, pouring down from his head, through his neck and chest, down through his thighs and his knees, pouring from his toes and away into the earth. He was empty again, calm and cold. Able to do his job.

  Protecting a person, Liam had discovered, was much harder than killing one.

  [4]

  SYD STOOD ON THE stage that had been assembled in the middle of a wide avenue beneath the blazing blue sky. Some of the skyscrapers that lined the avenue had been repaired, but most still stood in decay, teetering like tweaked-out syntholene addicts on the verge of passing out.

  Below the swaying buildings, the avenue itself was filled from edge to edge with people. There were young women holding babies. There were kids waving signs that said THANK YOU, YOVEL! and YOVEL SET US FREE!, and a scattering of people throughout the crowd waving white strips of cloth over their heads as they cheered. White for a clean break with the past. White for empty records. White for new beginnings. All those white cloths looked like the flapping wings of birds unable to fly away.

  Syd could sympathize.

  The people had to be held back by a line of Purifiers positioned between the stage and the crowd, to keep the people from rushing up to touch Syd or tear away a scrap of his clothing. Their ecstasy was religious and it made Syd uncomfortable to see it. An image flashed in his mind: the girl who had been sent to kill him, dressed like a Purifier. He tensed, braced himself as if he was about to be attacked. A bubble of panic rose inside him. Was this the instant they’d get him? Or this? Or this? The seconds stretched. He bargained with himself to stay calm, to stay still, to make it through the next five seconds and the five seconds after that. The panic subsided. Liam stood beside him on the stage and did his best to project the potential for unrelenting pain on anyone with less than generous feelings for Syd.

  He wondered whether Liam would throw himself in front of an attacker, would take a poison dart for him, would die in Syd’s place.

  He knew the answer and it made him even more uncomfortable.

  On the other side of Syd stood a bearded old man, stuffed so poorly into his tight green uniform that his belly hung over his belt and his white collar was open and flapping in the light breeze. Puffs of gray hair rose like smoke from beneath his shirt.

  “Thank you for joining us, Sydney,” the man said.

  “Liam made the invitation sound so compelling, how could I say no?” Syd whispered back at him. “How often do I get to stand onstage beside the famous Counselor Baram?”

  The man smiled and waved at the crowd, whispering back to Syd through his teeth. “Cut the sarcasm. Sarcastic words hide lazy minds.”

  Counselor Baram had known Syd his entire life; he had practically raised Syd back in Mountain City, when he was just Mr. Baram and Syd was just a proxy, an orphan living in the slums, paying off his years of debt by taking the punishments every time his patron, Knox, did anything wrong.

  Syd had been one of millions, not a thing special about him. He paid for school, he worked in Baram’s shop, and he spent his days with his head down, fantasizing about a date with his classmate Atticus Finch. His feelings for Finch, to put it generously, had not been mutual. It hadn’t really bothered Syd. He enjoyed the quiet hopelessness of it all. He always figured life would start after he’d finished school and paid off his debts.

  Instead, he’d erased the entire system.

  He wondered what ever happened to Finch. Before the Jubilee, back in the Mountain City, Finch had been a guy going places, a gamer with sponsors, a kid on his way up and out of the slums of the Valve to live the lux life with the patrons of the Upper City.

  Now that the networks were gone and the old tech banned, there were no games to play and no sponsors to pay for the playing anyway. Syd’s revolution had stopped Finch’s rise dead in its tracks. Now old Mr. Baram was Counselor Baram, deputy secretary of the Advisory Council of the Reconciliation and now Syd was Yovel, the people’s hero, their savior and the symbol of all that was new.

  Nothing was like it had been. So, in this new world order, why couldn’t Syd be sarcastic? Everyone was in the business of reinvention. He’d even considered growing his hair out.

  “Apologies, Counselor.” Syd smiled, making his continued sarcasm as biting as he could. “Your sage advice is a boon to us all.”

  It was too hot for big hair.

  Counselor Baram let his eyes linger on Syd a moment, then sighed and stepped forward. He held his hand up in a fist. The crowd fell silent. Baram’s voice strained to be heard, but he didn’t use any kind of amplification. Although all the old tech had been banned, the Council still had access to things like loudspeakers and projectors. That kind of tech was a privilege of the Council, but Baram liked to be pure, natural, one with the people. If that meant he had to shout to be heard, it was a small price to pay for his ideals. Syd thought it was just stubborn.

  “My friends!” Baram declared. “We are here today, six months after the Jubilee—” The crowd went wild at the word and Baram had to wait for them to settle down before he could continue. “We are here to celebrate all we have accomplished! Freed from the burdens of debt and the financialization of our sons and daughters, we are building a new society, a society of mutual care and concern. A society where we are judged by our contributions to the community, not by our purchasing power on the unregulated market!”

  People cheered again, even those whose understanding of the new revolution was minimal. Most of the crowd were slum rats who’d grown up just like Syd in cesspools of debt and poverty, where credit was easy but paying for it was a lifelong labor. Even those who had some education, who’d been willing to pay for education—like Syd had—would never have learned any of the anti-market ideas that were the backbone of the Reconciliation.

  Anyone who could actually understand Counselor Baram had probably been arrested just after the networks collapsed, when the Reconciliation stormed Mountain City, rounded up the executives and the managers and the creditors and anyone else with whom they had a problem, and sent them off for labor reeducation or confession and execution. Remaking the world wasn’t always a stage show and a cheering crowd. Politics was just warfare by other means. The losers didn’t get to hold rallies.

  So the people cheered, because their side won. These kinds of rallies were a regular thing now, educating everyone on the dogma of Reconciliation: Private property led to greed, so it was banned. Tech produced false luxury, which produced greed. It was banned. Debt was banned and credit was banned and money of all kinds was banned.

  But it was better than the old system. Everyone was responsible for themselves. No rich, no poor, no patrons, and no proxies.

  Not that the proxies had gone away, exactly. They were the first to be rounded up. They were trained and armed and became the Purifiers. They generally had no interest in reform. They wanted revenge and they wanted power, and the Reconciliation gave them both.

  Today, however, the Purifiers were on their best behavior, keeping the crowd under control while Baram droned on about food cooperatives producing record calorie counts—“exceeding all our expectations!”—and about the containment of Machinist factions through “the appropriate application of humane force.”

  Syd stopped listening. He was a symbol, after all. Symbols didn’t need to listen to speeches. He’d get up when he heard his
name and he’d say the speech that had been written for him. Great friends! Citizen heroes! I am just like you! Et cetera. Eighteen minutes like that.

  Funny to think he’d caused the revolution, but he didn’t get to enjoy it. Syd was as much a substitute for other people as he’d ever been when he was a proxy. It was just that now they cheered for him beneath a blazing sun.

  His memories shimmered like a mirage on the pavement. They waved and sparked the air. And in the sparks, he saw Knox.

  Moments before Knox had climbed into the machine that would destroy the networks and vaporize him in the process, Syd had asked him a question: “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Like I know?” Knox told him, that lopsided smirk dimpling his cheek. “It’s your future. Choose.”

  Had Syd chosen? Was this it? Was this all?

  He noticed a rise in the volume of the crowd and he snapped his attention back to the stage. Baram was pointing at him and the people were cheering and he waved and they went wild. He guessed if someone else had freed him from a life of debt and poverty, he’d have been happy to see that guy wave too. If only these people knew that the guy waving at them wasn’t the guy who did it at all. If only they knew it had been a spoiled brat of a patron who’d set them free. Maybe that was the speech he should give?

  “That’s right!” Counselor Baram continued. “At great risk to himself, he defied the system, fought past an army of Guardians and made his way here, to Old Detroit, to free us all! Thanks to this boy here, Yovel, the networks that enslaved us have collapsed. Thanks to Yovel, the corruption of the corporate fiefdoms has been demolished, and the people have been given control of their own destinies! On the day of Jubilee! The day of Yovel!”

  The cheering again, the white cloths waving, and Syd waving back, teeth gritted. He stood.

  “Who believes this knock-off story?” he muttered.

  “Just let them believe, Syd,” Liam whispered in his ear. “They need to believe.”

  “And what do you believe?” Syd asked.

  Liam pursed his lips, didn’t answer.

  Syd shook his head and approached the front of the stage. No amplification for him either. It seemed he’d be expected to shout as well. He cleared his throat.

  He wanted to say, It’s your future. Choose.

  He said, “Great friends! Citizen heroes! I am just like you!”

  The crowd chanted, “Yo-vel Yo-vel Yo-vel!”

  He had to hold his hands in the air to quiet them so he could continue. Behind him, Liam scanned the sea of faces, his fingers resting on the bolt gun he wore on his belt.

  “I am here today!” Syd continued. “To tell you! The story of our victory! Over the—!”

  A high shout broke his speech.

  At first Syd thought it was just more cheering from an overzealous citizen, but another shout followed, and then shrieks. Full-throated, piercing shrieks sliced through the air and Syd strained into the glare of the sunlight to see the cause.

  Liam, on instant alert, shoved himself in front of Syd, holding him tightly behind his back with the metal hand digging into Syd’s arm.

  “I can’t see.” Syd squirmed, unable to break the grip. “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell yet . . . it’s—” Liam started and then Syd saw.

  A figure clothed in a tattered gray jumpsuit came lurching from the alley to the side of the crowd. She had long blond hair and she walked with stutter-steps. Through the skin on her face, her neck, her hands, all her veins were visible, black and bulging. Through the tears in her clothes, the black lines of veins mingled with red welts and sores, like the flesh had been scratched off by anxious fingernails. Her mouth opened and she seemed to scream without making a sound.

  Another black-veined figure spewed from the overgrown jungle alley on the far side of the crowd, and another and another. A dozen of them spilled across the plaza at the back of the crowd, careening blindly into the sea of revelers. They moved fast, scratching at themselves, opening and closing their mouths, charging forward, bleeding.

  The people recoiled, stumbling over one another, tripping and shrieking, panicking as the disfigured bodies pushed into the throng.

  As the nearest one heaved herself toward the stage, a Purifier raised his club and with a ferocious blow struck her down. She fell to the pavement with a crack. Her head bounced when it hit. Her long blond hair splayed out in front of her like sparks flying from a live wire.

  It was, of course, an illusion.

  There was nothing alive about her at all.

  [5]

  “GUARDIANS,” SAID SYD.

  “Stay back,” Liam ordered, pushing Syd toward the rear of the stage.

  “But Guardians are harmless,” Syd protested.

  Guardians had been the enforcers of the old system; biohacked from childhood, they had more data installed in their blood than the DNA they’d been born with. They were engineered to look the same and act the same and live entirely by the instructions of their programming. They were people without fear, morality, or weakness, hardly human at all.

  When Knox had blown out the network and deleted everyone’s biofeeds, the Guardians had lost the connection to the software updates in their blood, the instructions from their controllers, the patches that kept them free of blemish. SecuriTech, the corporation that owned them, was wiped away. Now they had no direction, no purpose, and no control. They’d gone dumb the moment the networks fell. They were still strong, but incapable of taking care of themselves. Some were rounded up, put to work like pack animals, hauling and churning and heaving. Others just wandered, feral.

  No one called them Guardians anymore. They were officially dubbed “nonoperative entities.”

  Most people called them “nopes.”

  That’s all they were anyway.

  Nothings.

  But these nopes weren’t just deaf and dumb; they looked like the stuff of nightmares. The black veins bulged; their cheeks were streaked with bloody tears. They tore at their own skin until it was raw and open.

  A few of them tried to come from a side street that was still clogged with vines and they’d gotten tangled in the thick brambles. They squirmed and struggled, bleeding where the long green thorns tore into them. One had scratched and torn out most of her hair. All the veins on her scalp were visible, a network of black wires, pulsing and throbbing. Her face was caught in a thornbush, and in spite of that, she continued to try to push forward, rather than plucking the thorns out. Her cheek tore and black blood ran down. She didn’t react. She didn’t even have language to ask for help.

  A Purifier rushed over to her, swung his club down, split her head open.

  Syd saw a tall man in a green Purifier’s uniform directing the Purifiers to attack the helpless creatures. At first, his white hood looked like it was made of something reflective, the way it caught the sunlight, but then Syd realized he wore no white hood. He was simply bald, his head smooth and shiny. He had deep-set eyes and long limbs. He didn’t appear to be carrying a weapon, but he moved gracefully through the crowd and shoved any mutated Guardian that got near him to the ground, where others came and whaled upon it. He didn’t even turn to look at the carnage. His calm was disconcerting amid the frothing crowd. People scrambled over one another and screamed to get away from the nightmare figures.

  “It touched me!” someone shouted.

  “Kill it!” someone else screamed.

  “Calm down!” Counselor Baram tried to yell over the chaos, but no one could hear him. “They will be quarantined! Just stay calm!”

  A group of three Purifiers had cornered a Guardian, a male from what Syd could see, and were shoving him between themselves, bouncing him off their clubs. When he fell toward one of them, they’d strike him back, and the next Purifier would wind up to hit him, tossing him around, like a game of wounds. When he finally fell, they beat
him until it was impossible to tell if he had ever been anything resembling a human.

  The Purifiers whooped and rushed to the next one. Years of terror and humiliation at the hands of the Guardians came out with every strike of a club or swing of a heavy blade at the pained creatures’ heads.

  Another of the nopes stumbled toward the stage, and a small Purifier, surely no older than twelve, twirled around and around with his machete outstretched to get as much force as possible before sailing it through the neck of his target. The fragile body fell straight down. The head spun off and whirled like a top onto the stage at Syd’s feet.

  Liam kicked it away. “We have to get you out of here.”

  “But they won’t hurt anyone . . . they’re . . . they . . . ,” Syd stammered. The images came at him in flashes. Guardians—he couldn’t help but still think of them that way—simply stood in place while Purifiers hacked them to pieces, their legs planted firmly on the ground, even after the rest of them was cut apart. They tore at their own skin where the visible veins ran black. It seemed almost a relief to them as they died. The tall bald man strolled through the carnage, his hands clasped behind his back.

  Liam had pulled a bolt gun from his belt and held it at the ready.

  “They’re harmless,” Syd said. “The Guardians are harmless.”

  “They’re carrying an infection,” Liam said. “Come on.”

  He had to get Syd out of there. He twirled the gun to chamber a bolt and locked the spring. His only concern was for Syd’s safety. It wasn’t just exposure to the sick nonoperative entities that he feared. The chaos they had created would be the perfect opportunity for another Machinist to take a crack at Syd. Enemies of the Reconciliation were everywhere. They could dress as Purifiers and put a knife through Syd’s back while everyone else was distracted.

  Liam would not be distracted.

  He tried to drag Syd away, but Syd dodged his grip, ducked around his arm, and jumped from the stage into the melee.