The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “You… you made me?” Hayes asked softly.

  “I did not make you.”

  “But I’m… I’m like this because of you?”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  Hayes fell silent. He shook his head and fought back the sorrow rising in him. “Why did you… why did you make me like this?” he asked.

  “There was no making,” said the machine. “There never was. None of this was intended. You or this city or this strange new world. Nothing was meant to be this way. It simply is. It simply happened.”

  “Can you… can you fix me?” asked Hayes desperately.

  There was another harsh click. “No,” said the machine. “I cannot.”

  “Please. Please, you have to…”

  “I have already spent much of my strength changing you, changing you so you could listen,” said the voice. “You were close, but not close enough, and I was forced to use the machines below your city to make you better. Have you not felt it? Have you not felt your abilities become so focused and clear that they almost pain you?”

  He shook his head. “The attacks…”

  “Yes. The devices they built to run your city were a primitive medium, but they did what I needed. Their signaling mechanisms amplified my few remaining strengths. Gave me a way to reach you. You had to listen.”

  Hayes remembered the flashing blue lights he’d seen when he’d had the vision in the trolley tunnels. “It’s the Siblings, isn’t it,” he said. “You can work through them. If I get close enough, I can hear you.”

  “Yes. Others can hear only echoes. But yes.”

  “And it was you who gave me that… that moment back in the fire, wasn’t it? That was you.”

  Another harsh click. “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  “It was a gift. A moment of clarity. But it would have ended me to sustain it any longer than I had. And I must use my last remaining seconds wisely, for one final act.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He heard the voice sigh beyond. “My presence here has changed things. Destabilized them. Accelerated them. I was a catalyst on a level that even I could not have foreseen. And now I can no longer keep pace. I am dying. Only unformed minds hear me now. Madmen. And children.”

  “Children?” Hayes asked.

  “Yes. This world is falling apart. The factions have grown enormous and hungry, fed by the technology I have provided. And war is coming. Change is coming. The last change. I cannot prevent it. I can only warn you.”

  “But when will it come? What will it be?”

  “I do not know.”

  “But can we do anything about it? Can we stop it?”

  The vision quaked, the field rippling at the edges. “I do not know,” said the voice. “No. I do not think so.”

  “What will happen?”

  “Your civilization will crumble. Exhaust itself. And survive only in shreds and tatters. If that.”

  “So… so we have to stop it,” Hayes said, trembling.

  “There is no stopping it.”

  “But there has to be. There has to be something!”

  “There is no stopping it. This is the way. It is a machine grown so large and with such momentum that it cannot stop, only fall apart under its own force.”

  “But we can… we can tell people,” Hayes said desperately. “We can tell them to stop.”

  “To stop what? Stop hungering? Stop expanding? It is the nature of life and power to want more, to grow faster until it cannot. With the tools I have inadvertently provided, you grow at a rate that makes self-control impossible. There is only one feasible end.”

  The quiet went on, broken only by the sigh of the wind.

  “Then we’ll die,” said Hayes. “Then we’ll all die. And there’s nothing we can do. Is that what you’re telling me? Nothing?”

  “There are…” Another click. “… Possibilities.”

  “Possibilities? What possibilities?”

  “There is no stopping the collapse. It is unavoidable. You have seen your city, and know it is beyond repair. A place of outrage and sorrow, and waste. And your city is the heart of your world. When it falls or begins breeding destruction, the consequences will be catastrophic. Yet for the few who will survive, for the scraps that will persist at the fringes, there is hope. They can make a new world. And learn from their mistakes. But that is in the future, and I will not last long enough to see that. I cannot help them directly. But I can make use of my last moments to ensure they receive at least some aid.”

  “How?”

  “By making sure there is someone to lead your people from your ruined lands, and find a home somewhere in the future. An architect who can rebuild, the seeds of a new future sown.”

  Hayes listened to the words. He looked at the field around him and at the invisible thing waiting in the grass. Then his eyes opened wide and he said, “No.”

  “There is no other choice,” said the voice.

  “No, not me.”

  “There is no other choice.”

  “No, no. No, it shouldn’t be me. There… there has to be someone else. It shouldn’t be me. It shouldn’t be me!” he shouted.

  “But it must be.”

  “There have to be others. Others who are better.”

  “They cannot hear. Nor have they seen the wide expanse of humanity that you have, and known its flaws, and its strengths.”

  “It shouldn’t be me,” Hayes said softly. “It shouldn’t be me.”

  “Would you have your people founder against the future? Die out and become extinct? Live their last days in darkness and savagery?”

  “No, but… but we can stop the war,” he said desperately. “Get rid of the empires. Can’t we?”

  “You cannot stop such a thing. You cannot alter the nature of nature. All life desires destruction. The only thing that matters is if it survives it.”

  Hayes bowed his head. “But I can’t.”

  “When the city burned they did not look to you, yet still you came,” said the voice. “Still you came, and showed them the way. And did you not feel joy? Did you not know their hearts, and love that they were safe?”

  “Yes, but-”

  “This is who you are. This is what you are. This is what you must be. With the last of my strength, I can help you. And there is no time. The changes that I have brought about are unraveling your city. Already a boy stumbled across a part of me, a part that had long been separate and alone and had grown depraved, and when the boy came to it, it changed him. Changed him for the worse.”

  “Changed him how?”

  The voice sighed again. “It was a part of me for travel. You have seen it yourself, hidden away in buildings not far from here. It has its own mind, for its own purposes. It bent…” The voice clicked again. “… Time. Bent reality. Twisted it so I could move through vast distances in months instead of eons. When the boy found it, it… elevated him. Took his being and sped it up. Placed it on a different level. Now he is a half-thing. Mad and distorted. Living in two times. And the things he has done have torn your city apart. That is how fragile it is. And that is why you must be ready.”

  Hayes swallowed. “What do you want from me?”

  Another harsh click. “Once a man came among me and walked away with a handful of trinkets. He changed the world with these meager things, these toys. He made a new age, though he did not know it. Imagine what could be done with all the concepts that could be willingly shown to you, given to you. Imagine what a world you could make. I can give them. Now, in an instant.”

  Hayes thought quickly. He looked back on his years, lonely and wandering, always living on the razor’s edge. Living nameless lives, adrift among the hopes and madnesses of the people who passed him by.

  “Will it hurt?” Hayes asked. “Changing?”

  “Yes,” said the voice.

  Hayes winced. “And what will I know? After this, what will I know?”

  “Secrets. Laws. Devices. Truths hidden in the furro
ws of reality. Tools that will carve out a home among the coming years. These and more.” Click. “Will you do it?”

  Hayes thought about it and said, “What will I do? With the knowledge you give me?”

  “I cannot say. I am not one of you. I know only how to curb your desires, not how to build. And the path your civilization has taken since my interference has gone well beyond any reckoning I have.”

  Hayes shut his eyes. “And what if I say no?” he asked.

  There was silence.

  “What if I say no?” he asked again. “What if I turn it down?”

  The voice said, “If you, who have walked among these people for a lifetime, and know their hearts and minds more than any other person alive… If you say no, and doom them to a future of ash and scorched earth, then I will trust your judgment, and let it be, and die voiceless here in the dark.”

  Hayes sighed. He found he was weeping. He was not sure if the tears were real or part of this strange vision, but they felt hot and wet on his cheeks, and seemed real enough. “Will I remember everything from before?” he asked. “Will I remember that?”

  “If you wish.”

  Hayes nodded and wiped tears from his eyes. “All right. Okay, then. Do it.”

  The hum intensified. He became aware that somewhere machinery that had long been silent suddenly came to life, desperately working for one last undertaking.

  “Once this is done I will be no more,” said the voice. “I will be gone. Know this.”

  “I know. Just do it.”

  Silence. The thing out in the fields was still.

  “Just do it already!” shouted Hayes.

  The image around him flashed briefly, flickered like a candle flame. Then the air around him grew hot. There was a feeling in his skull of a thousand fingers probing his mind, rearranging it. Dissecting it and rewiring it.

  “Jesus,” Hayes said. “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ!”

  The air was burning hot now. Hayes felt memories melt into one another, felt experiences and times long lost suddenly flare up as if they were the present. He saw a desert train trundling across desolate flats and watched as the rail in front of it erupted, and he heard himself laugh in satisfaction. Then his father was howling at him, screaming about his idiot son and his foolish ways, and he ached with shame. Next he was grinning as he watched a McNaughton trader being led away, sobbing like a child. And then he felt the madness of grief as he watched a funeral from the gates of a cemetery, stinking drunk and half-suicidal. Watched the coffin slowly descending into the dry ground, knowing that the girl inside it and the child in her belly were dead by his rashness.

  The thoughts came together. Crumbled. Rebuilt. Then everything went dark.

  A memory blossomed somewhere in him. One he knew was not his own. He saw the ruins of a city, gray and gutted, and he recognized it as the one he’d glimpsed in the trolley tunnels. He saw the city was ravaged beyond belief, its endless wreckage dark beneath the night sky. Yet somewhere within it there was a train of people, a small thread of folk walking through its rubble, and in each of their hands they held a candle, sheltering the flames against their bodies. A vein of light, still alive in these wastelands. And at the front of the procession he saw a man holding a great torch aloft, leading them away from the city, away from their broken homeland, and out to the wilderness beyond where something waited. A building, or a city, it was difficult to make out. Some great white architecture that reached up to the sky, past the clouds and up into the veil of stars.

  Survive, said the voice. Survive. Peace. And bring tomorrow.

  ***

  Hayes opened his eyes and found he was still underwater. He fought the urge to breathe in and failed, and icy water rushed into his mouth and throat. He convulsed and then kicked himself up to the surface.

  He burst up from the water, gasping, and clung to the smooth side of the rock wall. He breathed for a few seconds before heaving himself up and over, where he retched water onto the stones. It was then that he noticed a red rain falling from his face, rosy blossoms pattering the stone below. He touched the red drops on the rocks and then touched his face and felt the rivers of blood running from his eyes and ears and nose and mouth. Then he crawled to the edge and washed the blood away and looked at his reflection in the water.

  It was still the same face. Yet the hair had changed. It was now sheet-white, white as bone. He touched it, half-expecting it to crumble under his fingers. It did not.

  Then he looked beyond, past the surface and the reflection to the deeper waters. There was something missing there. An absence or void where a mind had watched and waited, grieving silently for its lost children. He could no longer sense it.

  He stood up and breathed until he was steady. Then he looked at the city below.

  Only madmen could hear it, he remembered. Only madmen, and children.

  Then he walked down to his car, started it up, and began back down the hilly paths.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Garvey and Samantha sat next to each other on the cot, the stolen files laid on the ground, neatly organized into the most important parts. As the wild night had raged on out in the rest of the city they had both been far too restless to sleep. Garvey had found a small bottle of gin in the desk, no doubt squirreled away there by Hayes for his dry spells, and they’d sipped it while they waited for the wailing and the fire to die down. Now in the early reaches of the morning the drink wore off, and though the smell of smoke still hung heavy in the air and there was still the odd scream out in the streets Garvey figured it was now or never.

  Samantha had laid out his suit the night before. She had not been sure why, though she had claimed it was to keep it from getting wrinkled. It had just seemed like something to do, something to occupy her mind, and she’d been grateful to have a task to focus on. She now helped Garvey get dressed in the bleak bunker-light of the safe house, still gray and drained even though the sun had finally come out.

  When he was dressed Garvey picked up his pistol and walked to the back of the room to check it, as if it were a shameful act he’d prefer she not see. She heard him opening it, closing it, then opening it and spinning the cylinder. When he turned around it was gone, secreted away, and there was just a worried-looking man in a suit standing there.

  “All right,” he said.

  She gave him the briefcase and he walked to the door and stood there with one hand on the knob. She found she did not like the way he looked in that moment. It was as if he could have been someone else, just some random stranger. She asked what he would do if no one believed him. He said he had friends, friends in the state and federal offices. He told her she could catch a charge from this, being as she’d stolen from her employer. She shrugged. The world of courts and charges and offices seemed far away in the wake of disaster.

  Then he turned around and looked at her, wry and weary, and suddenly he was hers again. They embraced. With his free hand he opened the door and let a sliver of light in.

  “Stay here,” he said. “Stay here, damn you. Until I get back. It may be hours, maybe days, I don’t know. But stay.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and he walked out the door and up the brightly lit path of the canal.

  Outside it was warm, warmer than he remembered its being in a long time. Garvey shaded his eyes and looked up at the sun and then took off his coat and draped it over one arm. Smiling slightly, he turned and walked up through the canal and onto Broad Street, headed toward a cabbie station, briefcase in hand.

  It seemed as though in the wake of the fire the whole city had changed. It was some taste in the air, some relief that came washing up into the streets as the disaster subsided. People gabbled and spoke on the sidewalks, leaning in close to share news, sometimes embracing each other, stunned to find they all still lived.

  He took a cab close to Evesden Central, but road repair had blocked off most of the main routes and he had to get out and walk the last f
our blocks. All traffic, both pedestrian and vehicle, was being directed down one single alley. Usually it would cause a backup, but these areas seemed deserted. No one wanted to be downtown today, or anywhere near any building of importance. Who knew when the union men would strike again?

  He turned down a small lane, tapping his briefcase against his side. He walked along the narrow path of sunlight, trying to gather its heat onto his shoulders. Then he heard muttering. He looked up ahead and saw two men sitting before a shop, playing dice. He frowned at the strangeness of it but continued on.

  When he heard the first pop he immediately recognized it as gunfire before he even felt the pain in his side. A little pop, just a . 22, barely noticeable to the ear, and his side lit up. He slapped his ribs as if he had been bitten and his hand came away dark red.

  More pops. He wheeled awkwardly around and looked behind and saw a man leaning up against a wall to steady his aim, his gun trained on Garvey’s back. He squeezed off another round and Garvey heard something crack by over his head. Garvey turned and started forward, but then the two men playing dice stood and reached into their coats and he knew then he’d fallen into a trap. He skidded to a stop and ran down an alley beside, still clutching his briefcase.

  He felt warmth running down his side and into his pants. It had gone in deep and since it was a. 22 he knew it was still in him somewhere. He reached for his gun and tugged it out of its holster, nearly dropping it as he did so. He cocked it and ran on.

  He heard shouting. Echoing from somewhere near, someone calling, “He went in here! In here!”

  Garvey kept running. He was limping now and he was not sure why until he looked at his thigh and saw he had been hit there as well. He could not remember when, could not remember how many shots had been fired. He stopped and ducked into a doorway, then leaned up along the side and waited. When he saw the man dash into view he began firing right away, wild shots. One took the man in the belly and he stumbled, his face stupid and surprised. Then Garvey abandoned his roost and ran on.