State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  She turned the metal replica over, and ran her thumb along the curve on its back.

  “Let me see,” he said. She dropped it into his palm, and he flipped it over to look at where the etchings would be on the original piece. “Did I tell you the final translation came in?”

  “No.”

  “Most of it is operating instructions, but it also includes an invocation to the gods. ‘O heavens! Speak! So we might answer.’”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “Thought you might like that,” he said, as he returned the replica.

  “Still not worth all of this,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, and sat down on the concrete lip of the manmade Basin. “I know.”

  So small, she thought, turning the piece of metal over in her hands. There’s almost nothing to it. It’s not even a whole of anything—it’s a small piece of something bigger. And it’s caused so much grief—

  She chuckled aloud at that.

  Maybe, a couple thousand years ago, someone had stared at this wondrous, almost magical piece of technology and thought: Wouldn’t it be easier if I just made sure this fucking thing got lost at sea?

  She pulled her arm back, ready to snap her wrist and send the replica skipping across the Basin.

  “Don’t,” Santino said. “You’ll want it someday. Put it next to Madeline.”

  She closed her fingers around the metal fragment. “I’ll have Jason print me out another.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, but the urge to throw it into the water had passed.

  She settled down beside Santino.

  “I still want to know why Hanlon thought stealing it was worth breaking into the White House,” he said.

  “There’s a reason,” she said. “Mulcahy knows.”

  “I want to know,” he said. “There’s something larger at work here. Can’t you feel it?”

  She could. She was no longer dreaming of the sea. Instead, her dreams were nothing but colors, some of which didn’t have names but mostly blues and greens, stretching across time and space…

  “I want to know what’s really going on,” he said, as he tossed another handful of crackers to the fish. A bright flash of gold came and went across the top of the water. “We’re leaving things unanswered. That’s bad policy.”

  “That’s life.”

  “You can live with that? With not knowing why Hanlon wanted the Mechanism?”

  She shrugged. “I’m a soldier, Santino. If my commanding officer doesn’t know more than I do, I get really nervous.”

  He made a noise somewhere between agreement and anger, and she realized she wasn’t running emotions. She settled her shoulder against his, and he sighed.

  “I love you guys, you know that,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I just need you to be…consistent. Do what you say you want to do. You’re trying so hard to convince the entire world you can be trusted, but… You’re going to get caught one day, and then it’ll be over. For you, for OACET…for me, too, and everyone who’s stood beside you.”

  She stole some crackers, and leaned over the concrete lip to coax the goldfish towards her. “I’ve been thinking about Cardinal Richelieu.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him,” she quoted, wiggling a finger against the surface of the water. The goldfish came closer, and snapped at a nearby perch. “We talk about Richelieu in OACET meetings. A lot. Him and Orwell. About how it’s not what you do—it’s what you’re perceived to do. As long as I keep representing OACET in a positive light, does it matter what I really do?”

  “Yes.” Santino’s voice was sharp. “Yes, I think it does.”

  “Me, too,” she said, as she slowly lowered her hand into the water, and did her best to ignore the matter of fish poop and viruses and all sorts of nasty microscopic swimming things. “I’ve also been thinking about Hanlon, and Glazer, and that case last October, and how we’ve all turned into these puzzle masters. We’ve given up direct attacks, and we’re using what exists to destroy each other instead.”

  “Using the system as a weapon.”

  “Yeah. It’s nothing new,” she said, thinking of peace offerings in the form of wooden horses. The goldfish, now treating her hand as something which belonged in the water, swam around it as it hunted for food. “But if the system is the weapon, then the law’s got to be the shield against it. What would have happened if I had left that phone alone?”

  “The Secret Service would have found the hidden files. And then… I don’t know. An inquiry, probably. You would have been asked to leave the MPD until it was sorted out.”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. The goldfish was close enough to tickle its belly, and she managed to bump the sweet spot right below its gills with her index finger. The fish darted off, then decided that bump wasn’t so bad, and came back for another belly rub. “We could have handled an inquiry. We’ve been handling inquiries for months. But I panicked. I’d psyched myself up, told myself there was something out there that could hurt me, or hurt OACET, and when I found it, I panicked. If I had just stopped and thought about what I had found…

  “I still don’t know what I should have done,” she continued. “It wasn’t what I did, that’s for damned sure.”

  “I don’t know, either,” Santino replied.

  “I also know that I’m not the kind of person who should be trusted with an implant” she said. “I can pretty much rationalize anything, as long as it’s done to protect those I care about. Not for the greater good,” she added quickly. “The greater good can go fuck itself. The people I love matter more to me than any abstract ideal. And that’s...dangerous, considering.”

  The goldfish nestled lower, snuggling against her palms, and she thought about how she let a murderer go free for OACET. How she nearly let the entire country burn for OACET. How she needed to get off of this road as quickly as possible, because if the scenery was this ugly, this soon into the trip, she didn’t want to see what waited at her final destination.

  “So,” she said, as she netted her fingers beneath the very happy goldfish, “I’ve decided this is how it should be—I’ve got this metric fuckton of power in my head, and I need to keep remembering that the world isn’t simple, and that the stupidest, smallest mistake could ruin it for everyone. So, from now on, you and I talk about this shit. All the time, like when we first met. And if we find ourselves running out of ammunition, then we start talking with Zockinski, or Sturtevant, or anyone who’ll stand still long enough to listen. Somebody outside of OACET, to keep reminding me that the law’s perfectly imperfect and completely necessary.”

  He grinned, a warm smile moving across what she could see of his face. “So, what you’re saying is that you’re Captain America now? Champion of law and order?”

  “Hell no! I’m saying I was raised Catholic—we do penance for our sins. Here, have a fish.”

  She lobbed the goldfish at him, nice and slow, and in an arc that would return it safely to the water. Santino yelped and scrambled backwards.

  Rachel collapsed on the bank, rolling around and laughing, as Santino threw the rest of his crackers at her.

  “Fish water in m’ mouth,” he muttered, scraping his tongue against the sleeve of his shirt.

  She came to rest on her back, staring up at the bright noonday sky. “What I’m saying is, the law needs to be a better shield.” She sighed, and added, “Or maybe we need to recognize that a shield is also weapon in its own right... I don’t know. I’m getting my metaphors crossed.

  “Just know…” she said, as she turned her face towards his before continuing, “Just know that part of doing penance for your sins is that you also pray for the wisdom to avoid them in the future, okay?”

  He was quiet for a few moments, before saying, “I can live with that.”

  “You’re going to have to,”
she said, as she stood and brushed the dead winter grass off of her jeans. “’cause that’s the best I can do.”

  Santino stood and gave her a fast hug. He was warm and earthy, and smelled of the sun and green, growing things. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Back at you.”

  He let her go, and turned towards the Floral Library. He was already ten paces towards the park before he realized she wasn’t following him. “Everything okay?”

  “I want to check on the fish,” she said. “Make sure I didn’t hurt it.”

  He smiled at her before he resumed walking.

  Rachel sent her scans into the Basin and searched until she found the goldfish, unharmed and swimming towards deeper waters. Then, she reached into her pocket.

  The replica of the fragment shone as brightly as always, and she ran her thumb along its now-familiar shape. It fit within her palm, tight and flat, the perfect skipping stone, and she thought of workaday denim and poppy-seed gray.

  She shoved it back in her pocket, and went to rejoin the others.

  Discover the origins of the Antikythera Mechanism

  in the Hope Blackwell novel,

  GREEK KEY

  Coming October, 2015

  Read on for a preview!

  One

  I’m still in the phonebook. Quaint, right? It’s a holdover from when I was a kid, I think. I used to get such a kick out of flipping open the phonebook and seeing my mom’s name. Some of the blush wore off when she married my stepdad and our names changed, but what can you do? You’re all of four years old, and suddenly there’s a person behind a desk telling you that your last name isn’t yours anymore.

  So I decided to make that new name mine. I held that name through my stepdad’s funeral and those two other dudes who came and went in my mother’s life. That name’s still mine, even though I got married myself last October.

  And there it is in the phonebook. Blackwell, Hope.

  I love it. When I start my medical residency, one of the first things I’ll do is call up the White Pages and tell them to add a little M.D. suffix.

  The problem is, when your name and number and address are in the phonebook, it makes it phenomenally easy for those many assholes who hate your husband to show up on your doorstep at three in the morning.

  (And yes, I’m aware we live in the Information Age, but our family’s data isn’t easily found online. I’ll get to the whys of that in a minute).

  Anyhow.

  All of this is my polite way of explaining why I’m starting this story from beneath a couple of police officers.

  I might—might!—have been swearing.

  There were a couple of ambulances parked out front, too, which explains why my husband hit our front door so hard it flew off of its hinges.

  That wasn’t really his fault. Sparky’s built like a linebacker and moves twice as fast. Get a little adrenaline pumping, and things tend to break around him.

  He took in the room while he was moving. Five men, broken and bloody, each of them with an EMT shining a penlight in various places. Me, lying prone on the floor, two police officers not quite standing on me to make sure I stayed there…

  Both cops’ guns came out when the door flew across the room. Those guns didn’t go down when their owners recognized my husband: instead, I swear I saw their knuckles turn white.

  “Guys,” I said, “don’t make me get up.”

  The guns went down.

  Sparky doesn’t smile much in public, but if you’re looking for it, you can see the corners of his eyes twitch.

  “Everything good here?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. Bit of a mistake, as the officer with his boot resting on my back flinched, and I gained another thirty pounds of twitchy cop. “’s fine,” I grunted. “Some members of your fanclub showed up with baseball bats.”

  And tire irons, and crowbars, and even a sledgehammer. I hadn’t been nice to the one who had brought the sledgehammer. Sledgehammers mean business.

  “They came in through the back, Agent Mulcahy,” said the officer who wasn’t crushing my sternum. “They cut through a plastic tarp in the construction area.”

  “Smart,” my husband said. “Our alarm system doesn’t cover that zone yet.” He knelt beside one of our wanna-be assailants. The man’s head lolled sideways before he fell forward into the EMT’s lap.

  “He had a sledgehammer,” I offered.

  “Ah,” Sparky replied. He looked at the officers. “Is Ms. Blackwell under arrest?”

  The officers traded a glace heavy with paperwork and bad publicity, and I breathed easier as the boot came off of my back.

  I dusted myself off as best I could. I had stopped sleeping in the buff years ago, but I had gone to bed in nothing but one of Sparky’s tees and my granny panties, and modesty hadn’t been my first thought when I woke to the sound of strange voices downstairs. Still, his shirts were long enough on me to count as a sundress, so I pretended I was wearing a classic something-something from Christian Dior instead of a threadbare shirt with the logo for the New England Patriots.

  I don’t think it worked. Bras are marvelous weapons in the war against public nudity, and my only clean one was hanging uselessly from our bedroom’s doorknob.

  I cracked my knuckles to work the kinks out, and the officers moved a good few feet away from me and Sparky. This put them closer to the bad guys, and both cops and bad guys were okay with this. It didn’t bother me—I’m weird, Sparky’s weirder, but to the average cop, home invaders are a stupid kind of normal.

  “Are you pressing charges?” the one with heavy boots asked me.

  “Yes,” said Sparky, at the same time I said, “Nope.” An eyebrow went up, so I added, “It’s not like they’ll be coming back.”

  “Split the difference?” he asked. “Yes to trespassing, no to assault?”

  I walked over to Captain Sledgehammer, who was being kept at the edge of consciousness by his EMT. He was a heavy dude, in black biker leather over torn jeans. He saw me coming, and started squirming towards the kitchen.

  I knelt beside him as he wiggled across the floor, his handcuffs leaving fresh scratches in the cherry. I would have rapped him on the head a time or two for that but, hey, I’m a paramedic myself, and I’ve got the whole medical school thing going. Last thing I needed to do was aid and abet his concussion. “Hey,” I asked. “Am I ever gonna see you again?”

  “No!” Sledgehammer curled into a ball. His EMT glared at me, and tried to drag Sledgehammer back to an upright position. Sledgehammer was having none of it, and batted at the EMT with weak chained hands.

  “How ‘bout this? You spread the word to leave us the fuck alone, and I’ll let you tell your buddies in community service that I didn’t kick your ass to Friday and back.”

  Sledgehammer nodded so hard I heard his teeth click.

  “Right, then.” I jerked a thumb at his EMT, who hauled Sledgehammer to his feet and towards the waiting ambulance. It took a few minutes for the EMTs and Boots-Cop to clear the rest of them out, with Boots-Cop making the ride-along to the hospital. The officer who stayed behind had a decent attitude once he got some distance from a partner who jumped like a rabbit. We gave him some juice (Yes, he asked for juice. Some people like juice, and we had juice.), he took my statement, and then he left.

  Leaving us to stare at the chaos where our living room used to be.

  “Sweetie…” Sparky sighed.

  “Don’t start.”

  He tipped the loveseat upright while I went on a cushion hunt, and then we collapsed in a gentle heap. Three in the morning is a hard place to find yourself after a long, long day.

  “How was the…thing?” I asked.

  “The welcome reception for the new French Ambassador,” he said, as he brushed my hair away from my neck. “Decent food. Terrible conversation.”

  “And why were you there, again? That doesn’t sound like OACET business.”

  OACET is shorthand for the Office of Adaptive and Complement
ary Technologies. Sparky’s responsible for it, and the four hun—

  Right, sorry. Let’s try this again.

  The problem with unraveling a major government conspiracy is that if you live through it, your life doesn’t snap back to its usual shape. No, you have positively wrecked any chance of normalcy. Unless you’re sitting on a trove of blackmail documents that will keep you and your loved ones alive, you better learn how to live with the shift in your basic status quo.

  Sparky and me? We had that trove, but we decided it was our nuclear option, to use only when our backs were against the wall and that wall was made of acid-drooling lions. Instead, we went public. We took everything that had happened to Sparky and the other members of OACET, and we threw it all on the ground. Look, America! There’s your politicians’ dirty laundry, blood stains and all.

  This made a lot of very powerful politicians extremely pissed at us.

  And if you think this is the reason for Officer Boots-Cop’s twitchy trigger finger, just wait. It gets better.

  See, back when they were fresh-faced kids in their early twenties, Sparky and a bunch of other up-and-comers in the federal government were asked to participate in a top secret intelligence program. They were told that September 11th had shown that those many hundreds of different agencies, military organizations, departments, divisions, and whatnots which formed the federal government had to learn to work together, or Bad Things Would Keep Happening. Improved access to communication networks among different government entities was the goal, they said.

  But their sneaky idea was to network the people.

  So five hundred said people had their heads strapped into a three-pin skull cradle and went under the laser-guided craniotome. It wasn’t pleasant: Sparky’s scars are hidden by his hair, but man, they’re brutal. They took the top of his skull clean off. Sure, they replaced it with alloys that can withstand the impact of a speeding car, but it’s squicky to think that somewhere out there, a surgical orderly could be using my husband’s parietal bone as an ashtray.