The Forever Watch

by David Ramirez

  She pulls herself from the crater in the wall, folding the thin, ragged edges back. She missed. How could she have missed? He was not even lit up yet.

  Time is so slow, the sounds she hears are distorted, the input from her eyes is dim. It has taken long years of practice to understand the world around her when she is this deep in her battle trance.

  The low, rumbling vibrations through the air are words. His words. “Miyaki Miura was my friend. I don’t know who you are. I do know why you’re here.”

  He is too dangerous to waste precious seconds talking to.

  There is no talking anymore. He lights up too. They are two suns circling each other in a decaying orbit. The ground shudders, cracks with their footsteps.

  She is still faster than he is, but not by much. She slips her head to the side, and that great big block of iron that is his fist just brushes her cheek. That slight contact cuts her skin, bruises the flesh beneath, even with the stone-hardened effect of being charged up on so much energy.

  Baton in one hand, knife in the other, she spins by and strikes. She swings the club, it clips his elbow—and shatters. That club is made of one of the toughest grades of plastech, the result of a newer processing method. He swings with that arm again, and now she knows that the Psyn works on him and it is bad. He is much stronger than normal.

  He is snarling, and hissing. She has long known of his beast. He never brought it out before in their sparring matches against each other. She always beat him, before this.

  Now there is no time even for thought.

  Another step in and she is inside his range. She must stay close because of his reach. She steps past him and kicks the back of his left knee. It gives, but only slightly. She thrusts the knife into his kidney, and the tempered, chisel point easily punches through the thickened plates of plastech of his coat to reach the flesh underneath, only for the blade to stop mere millimeters into him, catching on the dense energies of his flesh without reaching his abdominal cavity.

  She ducks under another swing of his arm, dances backward.

  Then she dives in again, into the whirling wind of his hands clawing at her.

  With her mental state, all emotion is suppressed, distant. There is no fear. He has always been ridiculously tough. Psyn has made him into steel.

  The tip of her boot finds the pit of his stomach. She feels her toes breaking. Those huge hands descend toward her leg.

  She lets her rear leg collapse and slides forward on the floor, under his charge.

  Spinning as she pushes off the floor, she flies to the ceiling in a leap, over his maddened rush. She rakes her knife down his back. Blood sprays. Again she is unable to reach the organs beneath.

  She should run, wait until the Psyn runs out, but if she turns her back on him, he can escape, vanish again, nearly impossible to find.

  He sinks deeper into his beast. He lopes along the ground now, not quite on all fours, but crouched low, and at times he plants his hands to help him turn that bulk of his as he chases after her lighter, fleeter shape.

  She pivots around her right foot and avoids his widespread arms. Darts in as he is still turning, and she fires knees into his side, into his ribs, alternating with spinning flourishes with the blade to distract his eyes and cut at his flickering arms, whipping back and forth. She can feel the shock of the impacts traveling up her bones, up her spine, rattling her teeth. More of his blood flies through the air. She is so deep in psi that each crimson droplet is perfect in her vision, she could count them in between the spaces that she is trying to cut him.

  She thumbs the chemical spray in her gloves. A cloud of caustic, toxic gas billows toward him. She has him now. She—

  His shoulder crashes into her abdomen and forces the breath out of her. His tackle powers them both through the air. He slams her down into the ground, and her spine cracks.

  Explosion in her head. Flash of white. She feels her body embedded into the floor.

  He is moving now, so fast, his image is indistinct. The outline of his flame-wreathed body is red mist.

  His fist.

  Another flash.

  Darkness, awareness an instant later. He has knocked her out of her trance. Pain now, all throughout her body. Agony. His fists, his elbows, hurtle down at her again, and again.

  He is this immense darkness, looming. His eyes are red orbs. His teeth gnash.

  She is growing numb. Her body will not listen to her. Her talent is fading from her grasp.

  The last sensation before the dark claims her fully is the sound of meat being beaten, and the click of cracking bone, as the silver emitter plates on her face break away from the threads anchoring them in her brain.

  Gasping. Choking. Coming out of that memory is like being pulled out of deep, cold water. The utter annihilation as all the nerves still firing lose coherence, and the data being collected by Miura’s Implant becomes indistinct noise, background clutter.

  Shaking, shivering.

  “And now,” the Behavioralist says, in her prim, proper tones, “you know.”

  19

  “So, Miss Dempsey, what will you choose? Will you do your duty, for the Noah, for the mission, for humanity?”

  I come back to myself, fill up my head with the dancing randomness of pieces of my childhood. Mala scolding me. Mala holding me. The favorite stew she used to make for me with tomatoes and mashed garbanzos and the bones from the butcher shop down the street. The last commercials broadcast into my head on my last walk to work. Minnow’s fur. The tiny warmth of a baby lying atop me. The feel of Barrens inside me, moving so slow, stretching me.

  She frowns. “Is that shock and disbelief scattering your thoughts, Miss Dempsey? Or are you trying to hide from me?”

  Now, I show anger. It is genuine. Easy to summon. I imagine what she sees of me. The deep flush tints my dark skin. My nostrils flare. My hands clench. My neck is taut. “Of course not! It’s just—how can I tell what’s real anymore?” They can do things. Such skilled Behavioralists.

  “Oh, it is real. Real enough that I don’t have to write the belief into you.”

  The memory is meant to rattle me.

  I need to give her what she expects. Is that my idea, or is that hers, slipped into my head when I wasn’t paying attention?

  “So what now?” More bitterness, unfeigned.

  “We are unused to being stymied, Miss Dempsey. The establishment has grown too accustomed to our toys, to the ability to track locations through the Implants, to read the thoughts out of people’s heads at leisure.”

  The woman, who has still not given her name, spreads her arms just so, lays her hands on the table, palms up. “Galling, for my colleagues and superiors. The protocols aren’t working.”

  This is why I have not been Adjusted yet. “You need to do something outside of protocol.”

  Her smile returns, the touch of winter. “Between your friend’s ardent requests for leniency on your behalf, and, since she is not completely without other friends higher up in the chain, and given the abject failure of our methods so far, I am willing to give you a chance, Miss Dempsey. Understand that I am alone in this. Most of the old men refuse to admit that Barrens is a serious threat to the stability of the ship, to the very success of our voyage. They want to peel your consciousness open and thresh out every detail they can find of the man, in the hope that a key will be found there. Something to destroy him before it’s too late.”

  How can Barrens’s investigation into some arcane mysteries involving the crew be so dangerous? Leon, you were right. The higher-ups have become entrenched in self-importance. Secrets destabilizing the ship? I can understand information’s being leaked having some negative effect on productivity and efficiency, but a threat to the mission?

  If there were such secrets, his theory of Ministry-sponsored elimination would no longer be ruled out just because of the victim selection. I let none of that through, lose that thought in a forest of simultaneous, chaotic thinking, about conspiracies, about
propaganda, about all the lies everyone on the ship lives with every day.

  Even the days City Planning simulates for the crew is a lie.

  “I do not exaggerate, Miss Dempsey.” If her smile is a razor of ice, her frown is carved doom on her marble face. “I am not lying about the grave nature of this danger. We. The Noah. We need your help.”

  But why, what’s driven you to killing? Just as they’ve put too much importance on their secrets, you have too. No information can be worth individual lives. Isn’t that what you always complained about? The way the priorities of the mission made us all unimportant, faceless? There has to be more to that memory of Miura’s. But I can’t let the ISec agent read that so I think of the hurt when he left me and howl in my head about his obsession, his ego taking him too far. It is what she wants to see.

  Deep down, hidden in the cracks, I believe in him still. I will believe in him until I find him, and ask him, face-to-face.

  The hum of the luminescent walls crackles faintly—interference from the fluctuations of her grasp on her power. Her patience runs thin.

  “How do you think I can find him when you lot have failed?”

  “A great deal of what has made him and his followers dangerous, Miss Dempsey, came from you.”

  “Oh, that’s silly. I’m not that good a programmer, I—”

  She shakes her head and allows her mask to slip. She is older than she appears. More tired. “I don’t know how Testing could have let you slip through their fingers. You were misplaced with the number crunchers of City Planning. We could have used you much better.

  “Barrens and his men continue to use your bots, your little net of programs—they have turned them to purposes I doubt you realize were possible.”

  Ridiculous. My feet take me back and forth, pacing. “Don’t mock me,” I whisper. I scored well in that part of the Class V evaluations, but I was not in the top tenth of a percent. Lyn did better. Marcus and Jazz. Even Hennessy has better pure coding skills. “Flattery annoys me.” The only reason I couldn’t find Barrens using the Monster is that it would draw ISec attention. Without needing to worry about consuming too many computer cycles, they have a number of brute-force techniques by which to track him through the swarm.

  “Your algorithms, Miss Dempsey. Ones you use habitually, and which you have taught to Barrens, and which he has taught to all his little pet terrorists—they have a flaw. They use more power than they should, they run slower. But they self-modify in the most sophisticated way. It makes your little toy on the Web impossible to crack. There is an element of randomness to them. Quirkiness, the eggheads tell me. Emergent behavior.

  “Somewhere along the way, your programs become more than a collection of machine learning algorithms. They are on the way to becoming AI.”

  What? No—that can’t be right. Its self-modification functionality is limited; the network of the population might have grown, but the individual particles of the swarm can’t have changed that much while still running all the little modules we attached to it.

  Only … I had already started to suspect that alien data was contaminating Monster. Could it have gone so far already? Rather than merely introducing bugs and crashing functions, could the interaction between my code and that of the Builders become something like this? It’s a blur of equations and structure and ideas in my head, and then I push it back under waves of emotion. She must not know what I think of Monster. It could be so much more dangerous than she already fears.

  “I am not a technical analyst, so I will not bother to regurgitate what the technicians tell me. I am a troubleshooter. I solve problems of the human sort.”

  She is a hunter of men.

  She interrupts my pacing by simply appearing in my path. I did not hear or see her move. There is no time even to feel alarmed. Her fingers rest against my temples, chrome to chrome, emitter to emitter. She writes something into my mind. An immense, strange mass of stuff. All the information she believes I will require. Images. Documents. Training memories. Textbooks.

  The pain is not physical. It is a revolt of my neurons against rapidly assimilating so much data. My throat hurts. I feel my diaphragm squeezing. I cough, maybe choking on my spit, and I am crying out, on and off. Sensation comes and goes—my body detaches from me and comes back. It is as if my brain does not belong with this body anymore.

  “Think on it, Miss Dempsey. We return in the morning. My name is Karla. I think we will enjoy working with each other.”

  The chair and the table recede into the floor. They leave me lying on the floor, twitching, drooling, overloaded, and the doorway disappears when they exit.

  One unifying ghost of an idea, laden with intense emotion, is spread throughout the data dump—her absolute and unyielding conviction that what lies beneath is simply too terrible to know.

  Putting my head back together takes hours. Whatever she did was not an Adjustment. Skills are buried in here, in my thoughts. Learned reflexes overwriting my own, but nothing touching the self that remains me. At least, I think I am still me.

  Even my internal chronometer was screwed up by whatever she did. Much of the normal programming running the neural Implant has been altered in a thousand different locations scattered across the modules.

  Finally, my wiring is straight again, and my body is my own.

  I feel a want, I have a plan. Are these my own ideas in my head, precipitated by the skills and information she gave me, or am I another kind of puppet? I can choose to stay here and assert my will and end up a vegetable tomorrow, or I can dance to the tune of the Ministry of Information and stay myself for a little longer. Every single day I was here, every hour, I spent meditating, refining my telekinesis, modifying my Implant programming. Did I do all those things, or was it Karla influencing me all this time?

  Barrens would tell me it does not matter. Surviving matters.

  Oh, I do want to see him again. I want to ask him, “Why?”

  The thrust of my hand opens the tap. A crackle of touch, just a little power, but a lot of control, is all it takes to break up the fat stream of water into microdroplets, mist. Fog fills the room. Fog that glows eerie blue, masking myself from any psychic observation. It is weightless and takes hardly any effort at all. What consumes every iota of focus I have are the tiny blades of water spinning, whirring faster and faster, grinding at the inside of the faucet spout. The exterior is hardened and impervious, but the inner surface is not as tough, and mostly processed just for corrosion resistance.

  A thread has started almost without my conscious direction. A subprogram running off my chronometer, counting down how many minutes I have before the warden decides that this seeming privacy is dangerous.

  I get out a few grams of plastech powder from the eroded faucet spout, released from the control of the prison system. I fuse the wet, gray dust into dense slivers to continue the process, and it becomes easier and easier. I do not have the raw psychic ability of Karla, I cannot simply override the warden’s control over the substance of my prison, but it is not physically indestructible.

  The subtle whirring sound becomes an earsplitting shriek. My improvised drill has reached the hardened shell. Because it has been hardened so, it has some properties in common with ceramic. Too hard to scrape, too hard to cut—it is brittle.

  Now, my task becomes difficult again. Deep breaths. My heart pounds. My head hurts more, more, more. Everything I have pouring into the growing, shaped slug of plastech in the faucet. Plastech can be expanded by a steady trickle of psionic energy at a specific frequency. It only takes a little time.

  Finally, it shatters. Freeing up a dense third of a kilo of material to work with. Material that is already extremely hardened.

  I shape it into a series of spikes. They are sharp. They are also harder than the substance composing the floor. I drive them into a circle around me, one at a time, with all the force I can muster. Force is interesting. I can only generate so many newtons of force without an amplifier. But because the m
ass of each spike is small, and force is the product of mass and acceleration, each narrow projectile thrusts down as if shot from a cannon in the movies. They pierce deep.

  Now, I repeat what I did to the plug in the faucet. The spikes become seeds as I feed them power. They grow, becoming less dense, expanding. Roots, spreading.

  There is no dramatic explosion of sound. Only the spreading of cracks under my feet.

  The wall is starting to open.

  I fall down my little rabbit hole, into a service cafeteria below. I am dizzy. I hit hard, absorb the shock of a ten-foot drop. Wet warmth at my nose. My ears. Pushing my gifts this far without an amp is a terrible strain. I am bleeding from my nose, my ears. My eyes are probably red, blood vessels popped.

  Around me, Information Security men and women gawk at my nudity. These are not Enforcers or trained field agents—ISec is composed of hundreds of ordinary crew, secretaries, office workers, accountants, programmers, researchers. They get in the way of the ones that are trained, who are shouting at everyone to get down.

  Outside of the prison, the plastech that composes everything around me is not under the control of a jail-keeping routine rendering it resistant to psychokinetic manipulation.

  A series of trays fly to me, and I unravel them into thin sheets and fuse them into a bodysuit around my flesh, and boots to cover my feet.

  Now, I run. I shove my way through the breakfast crowd, toward the kitchens, and the maintenance tunnels. I spot an amplifier around the wrist of a sleek-looking public-relations officer in a slinky dress, her brown eyes comically wide, her mouth clamping down on her sandwich. I tear the amp off her before she has time to think, then I am five feet away and getting farther before it occurs to her to yell, a mouthful of partially chewed mash hitting the floor behind me.