The Forever Watch

by David Ramirez

What difference would it make to know? If the news is so terrible that all Gregory can do is drink, would it not just distract us? Or worse, weaken the resolve of the others? We could find ourselves in paralyzing debate over what the Doctor’s findings could mean, whether his interpretation is right or wrong, lose hours of time we don’t have. It will not help us with Archie. It will not help us stop what the Archivists are doing. What possible good would it do for us to know now?

  At the terminal, staring at line after line of logic and information, gazing at the far-flung structure of Archie, I drift in and out of sleep.

  The few hours of uneasy sleep I get are not enough, but it is all we can afford.

  We work at a furious pace. I design the core content—the logical structure that I hope Archie will understand as a request to follow only my commands. Barrens, Susan, Tommy, and Bullet work on the script that will send our message out to every single particle of Archie’s structure, taking into account the differentiation of its subgroups, the signal pattern of its internal communications.

  Gregory becomes a ghost. He mostly hides out in his lab, coming out just to replenish his supply of alcohol. Though sometimes, he will watch us, mouth opening and closing. Sometimes, he begins to speak, then stops, and looks at me. And I say nothing.

  Each day, I get tired a little earlier. I don’t have time to figure out what is wrong with me, why I haven’t fully recovered after my escape.

  The hour of the virtual protest arrives and we are still not ready. The problem is taking control of every single piece of Archie throughout the whole Network. If any significant fraction of the swarm does not receive the takeover virus or does not assimilate it, the Archivists will still be able to access the AI’s extended, sprawling databases through the subunits they can still control. It is all-or-nothing.

  Barrens’s hands close on my shoulders and pull me away from the terminal.

  “I’m sorry. We just need more time.” They were counting on me and I was just not fast enough. Capable enough. Maybe Lyn could have done it, if she were here.

  “Shh. We tried.”

  He gestures toward Susan. “Put it on the wall.”

  She fiddles with her terminal, gets it to project onto the flat, featureless plastech. One window shows the ship’s official news channel. A window with a simple bot is scrolling through the ad system. Another display shows a map of the interconnected nodes of the Nth Web.

  It begins. We see the traffic starting to surge on the map. The endless, scrolling open market of the Nth Web begins to stutter and slow. On the news, a bleach-blond man with brilliant teeth smiles and tells everyone to stay off the Net while major maintenance is being done to the Analytical Nodes.

  “Why isn’t Information Security stopping it?” Tommy asks.

  Bar graphs light up at each vertex, red needles rising from the blue sea of the Web, concentrated in one cluster at the center. Load monitors, measuring incoming access requests.

  We look to Susan. She was only an entry-level propaganda designer; not even genuinely a part of ISec structure. But she has ISec friends and has had some of the training, read some of their manuals and standard operating procedures. She yelps. Glances down at her fingers, bitten to the quick, a little blood oozing. Her cheeks flush when she notices us all pause and look back to the wall.

  Susan hides her hands behind her back. Clears her throat. “Um, I think they’re already doing what they can.” She points and some of the needles are highlighted in green. Sometimes they suddenly drop, and then the traffic spikes elsewhere on the map. “They’re shunting traffic away. They’re trying.”

  It is a dance of light, red spines growing out of the ad system nodes, briefly flashing green before they are cut down, as those Net users are redirected elsewhere. Mirror sites.

  “It’s all fucked anyway,” Gregory moans. “None of it matters.”

  Tommy sneers, raises a fist. “Shit. Doc, put that bottle away. Or, hell, go back to your lab or something.”

  The Doc belches. His hands shake. He laughs and forces it down. “I’ll be quiet.”

  “Why not just close that whole section of the Net?” Bullet asks.

  Susan takes a breath. “If they do, it’s an admission that there’s something serious. That it’s not just bored brats pulling a prank. If they shut down any significant chunk of the architecture, the Archivists win.” She starts to explain some of the propaganda management techniques of her old job to the boys. The psychological effects on a crowd. “I mean, just think about it. Ever since you got your Implant, how often have you gone even an hour without plugging in and using the Network for something? We use it to work, to entertain ourselves, to schedule things, even to control major ship functions. If something as big as the Web Market goes down, everyone’s faith in all the systems, and in the Council, gets rocked.”

  Bullet and Tommy ask her questions, and she answers them.

  Barrens is conspicuously quiet.

  What do you see, Leon?

  Thorn is a self-righteous, arrogant prick. But he’s damned smart. Damned smart. This can’t be all there is to this stunt. He goes stiff. “Fuck! Hana, you gotta message ISec! You need to get them to shut it all down!”

  We all stare at him, gawking.

  Hana. You must!

  I get to my terminal. I’ll trust him, as I always have. I start to draft a document.

  Barrens is there, hovering over my shoulder. There’s no time for that! That bitch from the detention center. Get to her. Tell her to bring down the Network!

  His fear is contagious. I place my hands on the conductive contact points of the terminal and fire Barrens’s plea through the application Karla wrote into my head. His words, his voice. Without hiding where we are or who we are.

  I can already imagine the message winding its way through ISec’s system. I picture them coming for us.

  “They’re regaining control,” Tommy murmurs.

  My attention returns to the wall displays.

  The towering red lines are flattening out, as is the rate at which they appear. In the other windows, the ad system begins to respond more smoothly again, and on the news, as a particularly beautiful propaganda officer explains a new Council initiative to reallocate the training quotas for the different academies and training centers, a line of text pops up at the bottom, informing all that the maintenance is done and normal service has been restored.

  Gregory raises his bottle. “Cheers. You have a little more time after all. At least until we all get shoved ass-naked into a bunch of little cells by men in gray coats.”

  “Okay, back to…” Bullet pauses. “Who’s sent me a message?”

  I have one too.

  The gorgeous, blue-eyed blonde on the news twitches. Then, despite all her training, a moment of shock shows in her eyes. Her voice hitches as she tries to drone on about the Council plans for the future improving everyone’s quality of life.

  I point at the wall and play back the last seconds on the map. Just for an instant, just as ISec neuralhacks successfully flatten out the stress on the system, every node on the map registers a comparatively small red flicker upward.

  Only Susan and I notice it. She has her hands jammed against her mouth, starts shaking her head.

  “Too late.” Barrens’s voice is tight and cold.

  Tommy yells, “What? What’s the big deal?”

  “They,” Susan gulps, whimpers, “they sent out a message to everyone.”

  “What do you—”

  “Everyone that was on the Nth Web, whether participating in the protest, watching the news, or doing anything at all. We all just got the same message.”

  From the load average on the map: just about 92 percent of the entire population of the Habitat. Thorn and the rest of them have successfully used Archie to spread their latest release to nearly every crewman on the ship.

  Out of the corner of my eye, there’s that constant blinking point of light. Insistent.

  The attached file is labeled G-
0. It has already been decrypted.

  “Choose for yourselves,” Barrens declares. He slouches back in his seat, closes his eyes, and dives in.

  The others talk it over for one minute, for five minutes, then ten. They go under.

  Except for Gregory, who keeps on drinking. He looks at me and then unscrews the top from another bottle of homemade brew. “Pretty sure I already know what’s on it.” He gets up and sways, stumbling his way to one of the coffin-size sleepers. “I don’t want to hear any talk ’bout it. Get me when you all decide what to do next.” He belches, shuts the hatch.

  And now, though Barrens is close enough to touch, I am alone.

  Karla’s voice is in my head, pestering me about choices and decisions, and freedom. I could have gone one way and never helped Barrens along this path.

  I slide into the file.

  It is not a memory, after all. It is data from the surveillance system built into yet another secure, secret, undeclared location outside the Habitat, drawing power, getting shipments of food, with its own staff, none of whom are listed in the rolls of the crew.

  It is a woman on a bed.

  I recognize her. She has brown eyes. An average build. She could be anyone. But she isn’t just anyone. She was Apollo Gorovsky’s Keepmate.

  The clip has been heavily edited. I would guess that only a few frames taken from each day were strung together to the day before and the day after, a link in a chain that, based on the file size, is ninety-four seconds long.

  After the first ten seconds, there is a pause. White text on a black background announces, “This is footage after a Keeper was forced into early Retirement. She was only twenty-four years old. The rest of this covers a period of approximately three months.”

  In a series of flashes, one image flips to the next—screen shots of Sasha’s identification files, her school records, her test scores, her employment history, her medical records, her purchase log.

  Then it starts. I cannot close my eyes to it. It is pulsed into my brain along the optic nerves. Too stunned to break myself out, I see what cannot be unseen. Of course, I have witnessed it before.

  In the beginning, she is fine. She is merely bored while the Doctors scan her on the bed, day after day. Then her cheerful smile fades. Her skin turns pale, except for where bruises bloom. Her eyes turn red.

  I am watching Meena’s death all over again. Only slower. This is a process over months. In the last days, the pain must be incredible. She is in pieces, so much raw flesh, organs and bones maintained by telekinetic fields and sterile bandages. It is just like when Gregory and I held Meena together with all our might and concentration. They keep her on full sedation … but when the eyelid disintegrates away from her one remaining eye, it flicks back and forth, back and forth. And I cannot say anymore if Sasha is asleep and just dreaming, or if she is horrifyingly aware, and awake, as Meena was.

  Detached from my body, I still feel myself swallowing, biting my lip. Why don’t they just let her go?

  Then, I see them. So small they are invisible except for when they catch the glowing storm of energies around her body, minuscule silver lines extend in from the surrounding darkness.

  I have had those inside me too. During my examination before Breeding Duty, and further before that, prior to my neural-Implant surgery.

  Medical microprobes.

  Can it be that after three hundred years, human science still cannot understand what this thing is? Do they prolong it to study this thing as much as they can?

  At last, it ends when too much vital tissue is compromised and her blood can no longer be kept circulating by psychic surgery and telekinetic pressure.

  A few more slides, black backgrounds, one line each. The text is red as blood.

  “Every single person that Retires ends his or her life this way. There is no Retirement Office; it is just another combined branch of the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Health. There is no pleasant beachfront living, with daily dances and bingo.

  “There is only this.

  “Slow, agonizing death.

  “For everyone.”

  Then thousands of still 2-D pictures. A before and after, with a name and an ID number. Some were old men. Beautiful boys and girls in the prime of their youth. Some were children as young as five. The after pictures all look the same, just different flavors of gore. The G-0 file is a listing of every crewman that has been “Retired” over the centuries.

  “Ask Information Security what else they are hiding from you. Ask them about your children.” The flash of the black city, with its cages, the picture of the monster fighting armored Enforcers.

  “Ask them about Mincemeat.”

  Oh, oh. Oh, no. Not this.

  Barrens snarls, wordless, furious.

  The shock of awareness slides through me. But knowing the way I am I to die does not affect me as much as the terrible unknown of just how badly the crew will react.

  And then, we see it.

  It is as if a bomb explodes in the ship.

  Archie lets us monitor the data traffic. Briefly.

  Ten long minutes pass as the system bandwidth fills up with text messages, audio, thought-packets.

  The Nth Web goes black. For the first time, based on my limited access to the truth, the Noah’s Analytical Nodes are cut off and isolated. The Network is shut down. Archie, an emergent AI that lives only as the collective gestalt of countless pieces of communicating chunks of code, dies, its virtual brain cut apart.

  If I had to guess, only the mission-critical nodes are still up.

  “Oh, Karla. It’s too late.”

  I remember when Barrens first showed me his memory of discovering Callahan’s remains, the slow synthesis of suspicions and ideas over the months since then. How much worse can it be for the average crewman? Confronted all at once with awful death, is not the human instinct to find others, an instinctive desire to fight, to survive? Irrational, primal, universal.

  Large blocks have been censored out of the ship’s history of humanity and Earth. It does not take a complete knowledge of history to guess what happens next. My duties in City Planning required me to study crowd dynamics. It will start small. Pairs. Trios. Groups. Then groups start to coalesce. Something happens to humans, a chain reaction—a point beyond which individual reasoning has nothing to do with the behavior of the crowd as a whole.

  Barrens shakes me out of my stupor. Shakes us all out of it.

  “It’s not over. We have a duty to do.” His face is bleak. Hollow.

  Yes. No matter what has been kept from us, this is still true. The mission.

  We share a look. He shakes from head to toe. Nods.

  Ten minutes of effort to wire my psi-tablet directly into the lower-level databus—where the Analytical Nodes transmit the information that directly controls the vital functions of the Noah. Connecting through here, it is impossible to hide where one is accessing the system from. I do not know if what I send will reach anywhere with the systems of the ship sliced apart.

  I write a message to Information Security. The thought-packet contains only Karla. We are coming in.

  28

  Tommy and Susan cannot deal. The way they see their lives and the ship is suddenly different. All they want now is to live. In their eyes, I see the terror of knowing; or maybe I am only imagining in them what I feel myself.

  “I can’t,” Gregory murmurs. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” Susan says. “I don’t want to go there just to get Adjusted and sent to fight our friends.”

  Tommy mumbles, “I have to take care of these two. They’d never make it without me.”

  Barrens shrugs and looks at his feet. “It was me that let you down. That got you into this.”

  That is that.

  They will hide and wait in the tunnels, scavenging food from the undocumented supply warehouses, watching. Until they come to grips with what is happening. Or perhaps they will spend the rest of their lives out there, numb and indiffer
ent to the uncaring world they have left behind. Or perhaps one of the tunnel gangs will find them. That small criminal underground never has enough healers, and even if Gregory never completed his training, he is skilled.

  We stand at the doorway to the blackness of the unpowered regions, with the warm air from the Sanctuary blowing past us into the icy dark.

  Bullet stops to embrace Susan shyly, and to shake the hands of the young Doctor and the burly mechanic. They talk for a few minutes, just a moment of sentiment, remembering their shared childhood.

  “Bye, Bullet.” Susan presses her pale lips to his cheek. She presses a cut lock of blond hair into his pocket.

  Barrens passes around the small, handheld crossbows and belts holding a number of chisel-pointed quarrels. I refuse mine, and he does not insist. We heft our packs to our shoulders and take a last few breaths of heated air before we wrap our scarves around our faces.

  We split apart at the first intersection. Susan, Tommy, and Gregory are headed deeper, to where the secret storage areas are. And we orient ourselves back toward the Habitat.

  Bullet keeps looking back over his shoulder as his friends’ lights vanish around a distant corner.

  Barrens murmurs, “You didn’t have to come with us, Bullet. You still have time to go with your friends. You still haven’t told her how you feel, even.”

  “But I do. Maybe what happened wouldn’t have happened without you two; well, it also would not have happened if not for me. If I hadn’t gone looking myself.”

  So begins another hike into the dark. I never realized how much I could miss my own home, my office job, the chowder place close to the park, the entire life I have been exiled from. Even when we make it back to the Habitat, even if we are not Adjusted so deeply that we are not just empty shells, how could anything be the same again?

  Every time we come across a data-line hard port, I send Karla another message, letting her know where we are, and where we are going. Soon, we cross the great power shaft, and then we reach the same sewer line I escaped through months before.