Barrens and one of the others, Tommy, I think, are carrying the third member of their exploration party on an improvised stretcher, two lengths of pipe ripped out of a wall somewhere with their heavy coats stretched between. Tommy is shaking so terribly it is a wonder Meena has not fallen off their rig.
She is unrecognizable. The rich brown mane is falling out in clumps. Her bronze skin is mottled pale and blotchy purples, her belly is bloated, her face is swollen. Blood is trickling out of her nose and ears and mouth, out of every orifice—her coarse denim trousers are soaked, befouled.
Bullet whispers, “What’s with her hands?”
The sight of them is paralyzing. Some of her fingers are just … missing. Bloody stumps.
“Doc!” Barrens thunders. “Get over here! You lot, make a hole—quit gawking and get out of the way! Bullet, have ’em disarm the ballista before people get skewered by accident!”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know,” Tommy’s words rush out, propelled by fear, anxiety. “We were fine, she’d been complaining about aches and pains, and then she just stopped and fell over, and then she started, huh, she…” Then he can’t talk anymore, on the edge of passing out.
Gregory takes control, and Barrens lets him. This is Gregory’s field. He is brilliant. And he is all we have. “Don’t drop her. Miss Dempsey. Please float Meena into the sterile area.”
Deep breath now. Forcing down an urge to vomit. Others around us already have. The smell of puke and blood obliterates the perfume of Bullet’s cooking.
“The rest of you back off,” Barrens orders. “Don’t get in the way.”
I float her gently, gently off the stretcher. Tommy falls over immediately.
We were carrying her nonstop for the last twenty-four hours. Barrens sits heavily. “Take care of her, Doc.”
I try hard, very hard, not to jostle her, to move her evenly, supporting every surface. Every place my touch fluctuates produces a bruise I can feel swelling, turgid. Adrenaline stretches the time it takes to get her the thirty meters into the Doctor’s crude operating theater. I see her skin starting to come apart, even under her soaked shirt.
“Miss Dempsey, cut her clothes off and levitate them away please. Carefully.”
I try. It is easy, with an amplifier, to cut Meena’s plastech-based clothes. It is harder to remove the sticky scraps of them. Lifting the cloth away causes more lacerations.
When I lower her onto the gleaming, sterilized, cushioned table, the bruises I gave her pop open into wounds, sores. The path in between the entrance to our lair and the Doc’s surgery is a river of blood.
Gregory walks briskly to and fro beside Meena, waving his healer’s rings. Faint, silver-gold streaks, a gentle glow, bathing her. “Dempsey, you’ll have to assist,” he intones somberly.
What? No, I can’t. I trained with buildings and computers, not flesh and blood.
“Hana,” Barrens’s voice is a caress, but it is also steel and straightens my spine. He has followed us into surgery. “Meena was our nurse. You’re the only other left with a high enough touch rating to do fine manipulations.”
Sigh and whine on your own time, Dempsey. Breathe deep, focus. “What’s next?”
I’ll be right here with you. Just let the Doc guide you.
“Bullet!” Barrens barks. “Keep the others away, got it?”
With a twitch of my finger, I drag the curtains into place behind us.
“Hell. There’s no way I can force you outta here, boss, if you don’t want to be moved. But you better just stand there and be quiet, okay?”
“Don’t pay attention to me! Help her!”
Thinking would only get me into trouble here. I have to empty myself, be another instrument of the Doctor’s, mind open to his commands.
Where he uses psychic surgery to probe or to cut or heal, his telepathy informs me and I must follow, reinforcing her organs, gently holding them in place. Healing is similar to touch, but it is more, it’s an amalgamation of telekinesis, empathy, and the ability to manipulate the biochemistry of another. My talent’s fingers are inside her now, but unlike the Doctor, all I can do is push and pull and cut.
It is abominable, feeling, smelling, almost tasting, how disgusting we humans are inside, just tubes in tubes filled with fluids of differing varieties of disturbing color, odor, and viscosity.
Barrens keeps his thoughts perfectly still, as if he were just a statue. He is as a stone, silent.
Meena is breaking apart right in front of us. Her flesh disintegrates. Her bones. Her skin. It pulls apart from its own weight no matter how I hold the jigsaw pieces together, no matter how Gregory forces healing energy into the seams to knit the cells together. Every time he closes a cut or break, internal or external, a dozen other hemorrhages begin. At random, parts of her remain untouched. Her left foot is completely whole, while the right is a mangled mess. One heaving breast is a lone, perfect reminder of her previous beauty, rising from the red ruin of her torso, where the bones of her ribs and some of her internal organs are visible through the rents in the flesh.
We draw so much power the lights go out. In the dark, Meena’s body is lit up, a bonfire of our combined energies.
What is worst is the awareness in her eyes, the horror in them. The whistling wheeze of her breath through the collapsing bulb of her nose and through her disintegrating teeth is a sound that will haunt me forever.
Meena’s own talents flare wildly throughout the process.
That’s what’s killing her, Gregory’s thoughts exclaim, confused, astonished. Her own raw psi is randomly destroying her cells.
It is the longest hour of my life. If I thought it was something before, the eternity of that first day in the Information Security holding pen, this is as far beyond that as nothing I can think of. In the last minutes, Gregory shakes his head and pulls back, glowing rings around his fingers shutting down.
Her brain is coming apart. Her last coherent thoughts beg for mercy, to make it stop.
“Let her go.” His voice is hoarse. “We’re just prolonging it.”
We are crying, the Doc and I. But Barrens, Barrens is still and steady, a pale boulder, waiting. We look at each other, the three of us.
Gregory takes a deep breath. “I can’t.”
“I’m sorry, Meena.” Barrens pushes past us. He pulls a knife, and I know he could end it instantly, with his skill and strength. It would be painless, for her. But for Barrens, it would be one more person’s blood on his hands.
Staring at his back from behind, I wonder if he has somehow gotten even larger. But his bent shoulders put that illusion to rest. I step in his way and I put my arms around him. No.
You’ve done enough, Leon.
Compared to what I’ve done. Compared to killing those poor dumb boys in the darkness, because I was afraid, because I was untrained. This is a mercy.
If I just let her go, she will go to pieces on her own. Aware as each part is severed.
I focus the touch, let it build, let it charge, formless at first. All at once, I let it out, channeled into her mind. It crackles along the channels of her neural Implant and destroys the organics of her brain in a flash of thought.
I need to get out of here. But I can’t move. Nausea roils in my gut. Barrens sees me. Really sees me. Between us, without a touch of psi or the connection of Implants, we share awareness, the awful familiarity of this experience. We have seen the aftermath of this before. Many times now. In memories, on flat 2-D images, referred to by names on a list. Mincemeat.
23
Bullet breaks out his hidden stash of whiskey.
Everyone needs it. People stumble off, eyes glazed over, some alone, some in pairs, huddled up in their bunks or on the couches or just sitting on the floor in one corner or the other.
Only Barrens and I do not drink.
He leads me away. For an hour, we walk in the cold, dark, unpowered tunnels. Down several ladders, turning round and round. We come upon a wider corrido
r with a ghostly light in the distance.
“This is where we found you.”
“Oh.”
There is still the outline, the depression in the wall where I formed a shell around myself to hide. They broke it open when they got me and never fixed it. The concave surfaces are a mold following the shape of my body.
We look out the clear porthole in the door onto the great power conduit running through the heart of the Noah. It is beautiful, and strange. How many others have stood in this place and seen the same thing?
He tilts his head back and sniffs, nostrils flaring. Takes a few steps closer to one of the walls. His fist and arm are enfolded in ruby light. His blow crunches through the laminated plastech layers. Water gushes. Almost burning hot, it steams in the cold, dry air. He tears off his bloody sweater and shirt. Shoves his trousers down. Just stands there, looking at nothing, while the water sprays him down. With the light from the porthole, his massive body looks as perfect as ever. Pale once the blood has been washed free, he is all hard angles and muscle; perhaps he is even larger than before, now that his group has stolen stores of meat and fish and richer food and he eats better than he could afford in the past.
Eventually, he comes back to himself.
I don’t resist when he pulls me to him and starts undressing me. It is to shiver when his coarse, rough fingers touch me.
“We can’t stay too long,” I murmur. “A leak like this is too much. It will draw attention.” Shaking now, in his arms. The heat of us and the steaming shower. We live.
“You can fix it, after.”
Fear. We taste it on each other. Maybe it is to fight it off, to feel alive, that causes what happens next. Maybe I just miss him. Maybe this is a denial of death.
We kiss and it is not gentle. It is savage. Primal. I turn my back to him and place my palms on the wall, and spread my legs. When he takes me, we howl, hearts pounding, while the water runs down our skins. Muscle against muscle, we are fighting as much as we are fucking. When we are done, panting, gasping, we slide down to the floor. He presses his face between my thighs, and I stretch my jaw as wide as I can manage to get it around the thick, steaming length of him, and we start again. The long red trails of my scratches down his arms, and the bite marks he leaves on my neck and my thighs are strangely beautiful by the alien light.
Nobody gets any sleep that night. When we return, wearing new clothes I made by drawing material right off the corridor wall, they are already in deep discussion.
Barrens’s appearance and his slow, deep voice stills their rising panic.
“So. Not experimentation. At least, if it is, it’s something that acts real slow. Meena was with us since the beginning. Been months since she’s even been in the Habitat.”
Most have their eyes down, refusing to look at anyone. The few who are not lost in themselves, in more pleasant memories, murmur their assent.
“This is why we do this. Got to know what’s going on.” He takes a breath, barks, “Now. Snap out of it.” He assigns them their tasks. Activities to focus on, to take their minds away from what they have seen.
Gregory needs proper equipment to analyze Meena’s remains. Instruments too complex for me to synthesize out of plastech.
Barrens sends one team to go off and find the Doctor the required lab components.
Gomez’s face fills the display in the assembly room. He would be handsome if not for that perpetual squint, the pinched lines around his little mouth. Giving instructions.
Another team is to pull memories off all the witnesses and out of the gleaming silver threads of Meena’s intact neural Implant, then splice it together and edit it to remove cues of our identities—leaving only our feelings of horror, and the raw sensory input of the smells, the sight of Meena falling apart, the feel of her dying skin when she was touched, the unbridled, twisting, gut-wrenching emotions, and the echo of her pain, her conscious, lost disbelief as her body betrayed her.
Other leaders’ faces appear on the monitors and concur.
Barrens grimaces. “What the hell for?” he rumbled. “We need to focus on figuring this out.”
“This is for the packet we’re going to distribute,” the one named Thorn answers. “Spread it around. Just label the memory, ‘This is Mincemeat,’ that’ll be all it takes. This is how it begins. We’ll shake everyone out of their complacency! This will change humanity, it’ll…”
A deep breath now. This is exactly what Karla wants me to stop.
I hold my breath, waiting to lose control of myself, to become a puppet on a string, a bullet fired from a gun.
Nothing happens.
I shake it off and reach for Barrens’s wrist, try to squeeze him, to let him know I’m here.
Leon, release that memory without context, and it will cause a panic.
Agreed.
His face turns bright red, but he does keep from shouting. “No. My people aren’t doing that. If it comes time for it, if we must, we will. Not before. We are not going to get civilians who aren’t involved Adjusted because you’re bored or impatient.”
The argument between Thorn and Barrens goes on a long time. Everyone else pretends not to listen or watch. Gomez looks ghoulishly amused.
In the end, my man is worn down to a compromise. Some of Barrens’s team will prepare the propaganda packet, but we will hold on to it—it is not to be released—until all the leaders agree that it is time. This leaves me shaking my head. It is no resolution at all, and the terms for what constitutes when to release it are too vague. Still, at least Barrens keeps them unified.
We organize the last team.
Barrens assigns Bullet and a slightly cross-eyed, soft-spoken lady named Susan to me. Hana. I know you saw those number codes in the sheets you got out of my storage space. G-0, G-1. You know what they are, right?
Of course. I knew immediately. There was a pair of numbers for each of the two entries. Incredibly long hexadecimal numbers and letters and characters. They are old-style private and public keys for the encryption of files—a process from three hundred years ago, before programmers became more comfortable with the quantum computing allowed by the massive neural banks of psi-tech computation.
We have to find the lock for those keys, Hana. Nobody can work with Argus like you can. The others can handle a simpler search; this thing, whatever happened to Meena, Gregory says there were rumors from when he was in medical training. They’ll look for those stories. And they’ll help you too, but you’ll have to teach them.
I am to do the nearly impossible—find files or databases or a passworded anything that might match those keys that could be anywhere on the vast Network.
Close my eyes. This is bigger than any of us. It is the tide that is pushing the others in his organization.
Barrens eyes are looking down at mine. I should have brought you with me all along.
“Okay,” I finally say. Swallow. “We can start by tweaking the way Archie, um, Argus, builds ontological relationships, concept maps, based on those old pages in your vault.”
Like puzzle pieces falling into place, it feels natural, teaching others something, breaking a problem into its components. We discuss and work out the specifications for the new searches and begin to map out the requirements for Archie to find and identify the lost files. It is just managing a project team. In truth, with the way Archie seems to fit against me, like gloves around my hands dipping into dataspace, I hardly need assistance.
They have their purpose, their cause. Barrens has his need to know the truth, to find out what happened to Callahan, to uncover what Mincemeat is. In the end, everyone does as he or she must, and so do I.
24
We code in the new functions, let them propagate through Archie’s distributed architecture—conjugative plasmids spreading through a digital bacterial culture. Once more, I am struck by how different the AI is when I am at the terminal. When Susan or Bullet work with Archie, it responds to function calls like any application. With me, Archie anti
cipates me somehow. Its reaction time is significantly faster, as if it starts to execute my commands before I finish typing them in. It is more alive for me.
Once we finish setting fully 80 percent of the AI swarm’s capacity to the new tasks, there is little for me to do but wait. The volume of information the data-miner must sift through is enormous. Useful results may appear tomorrow. More likely, it may take years. With how huge the Network is, it may take forever.
Barrens does not look displeased when I tell him this. He still looks tired from dealing with the rest of the leadership, but excitement lights the fire behind his eyes. “I didn’t expect a miracle. And we got progress on other fronts.”
Other fronts?
Events are accelerating, most everything is out of my control. I guess it was always like that, even when I was working my job in City Planning; I just never noticed because of how cleanly the illusion was maintained. There is that feeling that I am missing something—that I ought to have figured out more with the pieces I do have.
Barrens takes me aside into our sleep coffin.
“Argus—sorry. You like Archie, right? An older search turned up something else. We’re planning an expedition now, coordinated with another cell. I’ll let the rest of the team know tomorrow, then we’ll have a week to prep.”
A deep breath. We curl up inside the tiny space, sitting cross-legged, hunched over. Barrens’s hair brushes the top of the chamber.
“An expedition?”
“Deep into the unmapped zones.”
So. “The old lab facilities.”
Barrens shakes his head. “That’s what the others think. I don’t think so anymore. Thorn, mostly, is fixated on it ’cause he’s been pushing the idea that the Mincemeat deaths are the result of human experimentation. After Meena, the timing just seems off. And there’s more.” Barrens lifts his personal tablet, accesses the data for me, and we link up through it and our Implants.
The Forever Watch Page 25
