The Forever Watch

by David Ramirez

  She keeps up the chase on the third man, who flees with the grace and speed of a free-runner. He flips through the bars and support struts and leaps from level to level; it seems impossible that he can move like this without the benefit of psi amplification. He is completely unhindered by having to carry a solid-looking briefcase in one hand. So either he has a hacked amplifier as I do, or he is an officer of some rank, or he is on Psyn.

  He is not my worry.

  I close my eyes. With the barriers obstructing my view, I have to do this blind, all in my head. I must not miss, or I’ll bring the container units down on top of us, dominoes smashing each other down. My mental map of the area empties my head of all extraneous thoughts, until there is only data, with our positions, and their positions, rotated and adjusted for Miura’s point of view as she screams up and across the beams and struts and buttresses after her prey.

  More bolts spark as they ricochet off my barriers. Distracting. But not that distracting. My right hand slides down and to the side. In my mind, a straight line along my arm intersects one frame of Miura’s stream of visual data, along the officer’s line of sight. I do the same with my left arm, toward the second crossbowman.

  Hey! Stop them already!

  I hesitate only until another quarrel flies in through a gap in my turtle’s shell and embeds itself into the catwalk by my foot.

  Part of me remembers my youth, those first heady years post-Implant as my talent grew and I could do more and more, brief flashes. Toothbrushes and pencils, working up to tennis balls in the first year. At fourteen, without an amplifier, my raw strength topped out at about twenty-five kilos, enough to lift a small sack of rice. I could throw a softball with my hand and keep accelerating it with psi until it zoomed faster than 150 kmh. At eighteen, when my touch peaked in capacity, I could just barely lift fifty kilos, though it took all my concentration and left me swaying and dizzy and weak afterward. After that, all my improvements were with skill, and with my mental ability to efficiently draw more power off the ship’s power grid using an amplifier.

  And it scaled all over again with an amp. At nineteen, my limit was half a ton. By the time I graduated from the Class V Training and applied for a job with Professor Salvador’s recommendation, well. In olden times, the things I can do would be the stuff of gods. With a proper amplifier, the force I can draw on now is not measured in tons, but in thousands of tons.

  In the present, my mind is a hammer, it is a hand, it is a wrench, it is any tool I need it to be. It is kinetic energy applied without a material medium. It can hold gems up under a vain woman’s earlobes. It can be a bomb. A tingling rush is shooting down from my skull, through my spine, along my limbs.

  “Sorry,” I whisper, clenching my fists.

  Where the strangers stand, two platforms fifty meters away, close to another staircase, unravel. The plastech structure explodes away from them for a moment, then the fragments change direction, imploding around and into their bodies.

  They only have a moment to scream. I can feel it, the feedback through my mind as tons of force smash them in.

  Nice shooting!

  I let the power feed go. My shields drop to the ground far below, as do the two uneven spheres of mangled human and plastech. Two hundred foot drop; they burst when they hit the ground, spreading body parts and shrapnel on the gray floor below. Too far to smell, but I imagine that I can, that the blood is climbing up my nose into my brain.

  I’m on my knees, shaking, not sure for how long. Or rather, I do know the number of seconds, as it is recorded on the machine part of my brain, but I do not feel that time, as though I am not in myself, not in my own head.

  Fuck. Wound slowed me too much—that guy’s got to be on Psyn. Lost him.

  It only takes her a moment to return. I feel her eyes on me. Is she disappointed? Disgusted?

  “Come on,” she says, pulling me up. “I checked the locker. They had to rush. I got something they left behind.”

  “I, guh, I…”

  “Shhh.” Her arm around my shoulders is solid. Strong. It is too small though, and from too low an angle. I smell lavender perfume instead of cigarette smoke and musk. I want my guard dog back. But wishing never did anything for anyone, and Miyaki Miura keeps pulling me back the way we came, and if I don’t start paying attention, I’m going to take a header down a stepladder twenty meters long, or fall down one of the gaps I made when I yanked the catwalk panels into the air.

  “We have to go before Warehouse Security investigates the disturbance. Hurry.”

  “Y-you’re bleeding.”

  “’Snuthing.” She does not even pause when she rips the shaft out of her shoulder.

  I have enough presence of mind to levitate the scarf from around my neck and wrap it tight around her wound in the best pressure bandage I can manage.

  “You did good, honey,” Miura continues trying to soothe me. “You did just fine.”

  Her hand is on my hand. It is not big enough, nobody else’s could be big enough, but I try to take what comfort there is to be had, while we run.

  She brings us back up at a section on the opposite side of the Habitat and deposits me next to a subway stop.

  We are in Moskva Section. The buildings are either massive and imposing, grand monuments copied from pictures in history books, or small and quaint with artful touches of grime. The plastech imitates iron and brass, concrete and red brick, and a museum is not too far away, a bonfire rising into the sky, eight side buildings around a core offset to the port side of the ship, all done in imitation brickwork, asymmetric and symmetric patterns, red and white and green and gold, domes and minarets rising into the sky. Did St. Basil’s Cathedral actually look like that?

  I can’t distract myself with history while I can smell the blood on my companion. “You need a hospital.”

  Her eyes in the mirror express what she thinks of that idea. “One of Callahan’s friends can fix me up. It’s not that bad. No bones were broken. I’m slowing the blood flow to the wound. Looks a lot worse than it is.”

  We were both silent during the minutes it took to drive up to the “surface” deck of the ship, and the sound of our voices in the humming quiet of the car is too loud.

  It kick-starts the thoughts I have been trying to put out of mind.

  A police telekinetic could have subdued those men without hurting them. I am not trained for psionic combat. I can build a three-story apartment block from a blueprint with just my mind, an amplifier, and a heap of plastech, carve up appropriately ugly Gothic gargoyles looking down from the eaves, and fabricate what look like stained-glass windows. But that is while sitting under the sun with a cup of tea at my elbow. I do not have that kind of long-distance control while under pressure and being shot at and terrified, standing on a walkway two feet wide hundreds of feet in the air. I have just killed two people.

  I could have just encased myself in an armored block to defend myself. No, but what about Miura then? Already injured, what would she have done if all three focused on taking her out while I turtled up? I suppose I could have enclosed her in a protective shell too. But that would have been a kind of helplessness too. If they had a touch talent and Psyn and took the opportunity to attack us …

  “Stop that,” Miura’s voice cuts through the whirl of my thoughts. “Don’t worry. I felt that TK surge of yours—you probably mangled their Implants too much for any memories to be recoverable from the bodies.”

  Such worries did not even occur to me. What a cold woman this Miyaki is. Could she really have been friends with Barrens, always warm, always concerned about ideals, justice, doing the right thing?

  “Look, you should get back to your own office. Doc’s just a few minutes away. Here.” Miura leans out the window, pulls loose, folded sheets of yellowed, aged paper from her inner coat pocket. “Stuff they left behind. Should go to you, first. Barrens always talked about how smart you are.”

  My hands have finally stopped shaking and manage to take the papers
without dropping them. We shouldn’t be seen together at our workplaces, and we shouldn’t message each other directly. She looks me in the eye, thinks a direct unicast packet to me with a set of instructions.

  When one of us has something to communicate, an ad with a hidden digital watermark is to be placed on the Memory Auction and Exchange site. We are both to run automated search routines that are set off by that watermark, a hidden memory of me, her, and Barrens, sitting in a diner over burgers. The other is then to post a matching ad with a date and time indicating when we should meet. The elaborate instructions are for me to visit a series of locations in sequence where I will wait several minutes at a time, while she evaluates if I have been followed. She must have prepared this structured mental document beforehand. It has different levels to it, highlighted maps, some code modules that select through a series of dangling IDs she cycles through online that are to be used only for emergencies.

  “Let me know what’s in that. Or. Shit, maybe I don’t want to know. I’ll get in touch. Maybe I won’t. I need to think about this. I didn’t seriously think someone else would be there, looking for his loony conspiracy bullshit.” She is talking almost to herself. Miya closes her window and leaves.

  I am still dazed by the aftereffects of too much adrenaline. I burn with the need to talk to someone about what just happened. Who were those people? I have just been shot at, I have just killed productive crew members of the ship who are going to be added to some police clerk’s Long Term Investigations desk.

  My mind races in circles while I make my way back to City Planning. A train ride and two bus rides away.

  They did not have the access required to use amplifiers down there. They cannot have been Enforcers, who could have just incinerated us, or ISec agents who could have shut down our minds …

  Still, these others were organized. Those men in the hooded coats had crossbows. Purely mechanical devices. Prepared for the limits of being off-grid. They knew what they were after. They were not some random tunnel gang.

  On the subway train, I clap a palm to my forehead and shake. My fingertips trace the emitter-plate pattern on my face. I knew nothing about them. They were just there, and I was afraid, and I snuffed them out.

  If only they had not shot at us first! I blame them for being there, for scaring me. I promise myself to look up how combat telekinetics are trained by the police. As an adult my powers have grown far beyond what I thought they would be when I was a child. I have a rating greater than half a dozen police touch support officers put together—it should have been trivial for me to disarm them, if I had known how.

  They had been far away, in the darkness. Even Miura’s enhanced sight had only seen them as blurry figures without faces. I should not, but I know I will. I will look for the LTI files that will surely be opened on them. I don’t need to know, I do need to know, I want and I don’t, and I am angry at everything, at myself, and most of all at Barrens.

  Were they with whomever Barrens has been talking to? Why did it happen like that? If they’d only talked first. Something. Maybe we could have figured things out.

  Maybe they could have brought me to him.

  14

  What do I want? What am I to do next?

  I sleepwalk through the last hours of the day and file all the reports I was supposed to and make the final revisions to our joint proposal with High Energy with the proper efficiency figures. It will go into implementation soon and save us just a little more water, a little more fuel in the long years to come, even after I and everyone else on my team are long dead.

  I send a thank-you note to Savelyev and promise to invite him the next time Jazz and the others throw a party.

  Hennessy knows something is wrong with me. Every time he looks at me and updates me on the progress of the other team members, I imagine he is building up the courage to talk to me. He is a dear. I guess he actually does like me, as a friend. He doesn’t try to butter me up the way the others in the department do. Every time I’ve asked, he denies any ambition to climb his way up the tree. He says he likes being my assistant and that’s it. Even though I have not been pleasant company, not since Breeding Duty. Moody and too quiet, a distant authority figure on our team rather than a leader, perhaps even unstable.

  I think about what happens next if ISec pursues me. I do not want some young, fresh-out-of-school genius with too-high test scores to be my replacement and walk all over my team.

  It is maudlin. But I consider what needs to be done to groom my flamboyant, cheery assistant for my job.

  Hennessy, I unicast him.

  Yeah, boss?

  Look, when it’s just us, Hana is fine. I haven’t thanked you for Yule. Let’s go for coffee after work, yes? I think we need to put in for a team-building exercise of some kind.

  !!! Of course. Hana.

  His last thought-packet gets a small smile out of me. His mental state drips with warm satisfaction, a touch of dirty glee. Probably he thinks he is finally going to get one of those illicit, hinted-at sex memories I’ve teased him with.

  Instead we spend an evening eating little, flat pastries with honey and sipping tea. I let him take charge of planning the exercise and only guide him with a few comments here and there.

  “James.” I stop him just as he starts getting going on his ideas for the coming year, about more than just improving team performance. He has ideas about other things we can try, for making the city seem a little more welcoming while saving a little more power.

  I should encourage him. I am not going to tell him that I have seen his ideas already, in one form or another, in the Habitat logs. I keep my smile at its warmest and wonder if I’m doing it right. Whenever Barrens smiled, he looked like a savage about to attack. Is my smile also interpreted differently by others? Do I look frosty and disapproving when I wish to seem approachable?

  “Yes, Hana?”

  “I want you to start brushing up on your statistical analysis, control theory, management strategies, and etiquette.”

  His brow twists but he smooths it away with a stroke of his fingers from brow and on through the waves of his steel-gray hair. “Did I do something to displease you?”

  “Not at all. Those are the topics you should work on if you are to qualify for the next rank of the bureaucracy.”

  Hennessy covers his confusion by pouring some more tea into my cup and his own. He lifts his cup to his lips and stares off into the distance. This street-side café faces the ugly block of City Planning across a small square with a circle of cherry trees and a reflecting pool in the center. With his face in profile like that, it is as if he is posing for an audience, and I have to wonder if he even knows he’s doing it. His eyes fade just so, with the telltale glimmer of someone going through his recorded memories.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You are, James.”

  “Why do you want me to test up? There are no openings anywhere.”

  I turn the cup in my hands. It is warm and steaming. It is white, glazed with little blue flowers. The tea is green and fragrant and not quite strong enough for the slightly sweet pancakes we are eating with powdered sugar and cheese.

  “If there should be an opening sometime, it would be better if you are prepared for it.”

  “Hana, you haven’t received a Retirement notice, have you?”

  If only that were so. He looks quite relieved when I shake my head in reply.

  “Look at that. It’s pretty, isn’t it? For a winter sunset?”

  At the false horizon, the colors are ethereal, highlighted with almost neon hints under the clouds. “It’s too bright.”

  “Oh, only you and other City Planning folks will notice. But for everyone else it should be nice, right? And it doesn’t cost any more fuel than other parameter tuples for the sky simulation.”

  Just once in a while, maybe, it was acceptable. Something to surprise people with. Too often and they would become numb to it, then subconsciously alarmed by the unearthly touches.
I consider reminding Hennessy that the idea is not only to provide the best aesthetic experience possible for the crew, but also one that works best with our biology. No, he knows it and did it anyway.

  “You’re sad about something too.”

  “What?”

  “You are.”

  I cannot ever remember even the slightest hint of melancholy on Hennessy’s handsome face. Perhaps that is why it took so long to recognize it in the brittle quality to his smile, the fine lines on his cheeks and around the chrome on his temples.

  “Maybe I am.”

  Everyone has his or her own little tragedies. Have I been too self-absorbed? Then I decide that it is impossible to overreact to crushing human beings with my mind as though they were just trash in a garbage compactor. Still, thinking about others’ problems, surely, is better than thinking about that. Then there are the violent, unexplainable deaths. Disappearances. Urban legends, conspiracy theories. Aliens. It is beyond me already. Crazy stuff.

  It is not too much of an effort to try to mimic the body language Hennessy always uses when he tries to commiserate with others. I touch his wrist lightly and incline my head a little in his direction, turning my shoulders more toward him.

  “What is it?” I try to orient my arms and legs at similar angles, without being too obvious about it, adjusting for the limitations of the pencil skirt that seems more snug than it used to be.

  “Oh, you know. Just a little lonely. Hah, it’s silly, is it not? I was thinking how it would be nice to have someone. I was hoping your situation would work out. I had someone through you, you know, vicariously.” He pauses, examines me for a moment, gray eyes narrowing. And laughs. “Oh, darling—that is not a bad try, but you’re never like that with anyone. I do appreciate the effort at sympathy.