The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  He caught a glimpse of the pretty waitress standing by her podium at the front of the restaurant as he banged out the door, her eyes wide and her hands up as though to ward off a blow. He caromed off the wall of the dark corridor and ran for the glass door that led out to Second Avenue, where cars hissed by in the night.

  He made it onto the sidewalk, crashed into a burly man in a Mets cap, bounced off him, and ran downtown, the people on the sidewalk leaping clear of him. He made it two whole storefronts—all the running around on the Campus handball courts had given him a pretty good pace and wind—before someone tackled him from behind.

  He scrambled and squirmed and turned around. It was the guy in the Mets hat. His breath smelled of onions and he was panting, his lips pulled back. “Watch where you're going—” he said, and then he was lifted free, jerked to his feet.

  The blood sang in Lawrence's ears and he had just enough time to register that the big guy had been lifted by two blank, armored Securitat officers before he flipped over onto his knees and used the posture like a runner's crouch to take off again. He got maybe ten feet before he was clobbered by a bolt of lightning that made every muscle in his body lock into rigid agony. He pitched forward face-first, not feeling anything except the terrible electric fire from the taser-bolt in his back. His pan died with a sizzle up and down every haptic point in his suit, and between that and the electricity, he flung his arms and legs out in an agonized X while his neck thrashed, grating his face over the sidewalk. Something went horribly crunch in his nose.

  * * *

  The room had the same kind of locks as the Securitat room in Penn Station. He'd awakened in the corner of the room, his face taped up and aching. There was no toilet, but there was a chair, bolted to the floor, and three prominent video cameras.

  They left him there for some time, alone with his thoughts and the deepening throb from his face, his knees, the palms of his hands. His hands and knees had been sanded raw and there was grit and glass and bits of pebble embedded under the skin, which oozed blood.

  His thoughts wanted to return to the predicament. They wanted to fill him with despair for his situation. They wanted to make him panic and weep with the anticipation of the cells, the confession, the life he'd had and the life he would get.

  He didn't let them. He had spent sixteen years mastering his thoughts and he would master them now. He breathed deeply, noticing the places where his body was tight and trembling, thinking each muscle into tranquillity, even his aching face, letting his jaw drop open.

  Every time his thoughts went back to the predicament, he scrawled their anxious message on a streamer of mental ribbon which he allowed to slip through his mental fingers and sail away.

  Sixteen years of doing this had made him an expert, and even so, it was not easy. The worries rose and streamed away as fast as his mind's hand could write them. But as always, he was finally able to master his mind, to find relaxation and calm at the bottom of the thrashing, churning vat of despair.

  When Randy came in, Lawrence heard each bolt click and the hiss of air as from a great distance, and he surfaced from his calm, watching Randy cross the floor bearing his own chair.

  “Innocent people don't run, Lawrence.”

  “That's a rather self-serving hypothesis,” Lawrence said. The cool ribbons of worry slithered through his mind like satin, floating off into the ether around them. “You appear to have made up your mind, though. I wonder at you—you don't seem like an idiot. How've you managed to convince yourself that this—” he gestured around at the room “—is a good idea? I mean, this is just—”

  Randy waved him silent. “The interrogation in this room flows in one direction, Lawrence. This is not a dialogue.”

  “Have you ever noticed that when you're uncomfortable with something, you talk louder and lean forward a little? A lot of people have that tell.”

  “Do you work with Securitat data streams, Lawrence?”

  “I work with large amounts of data, including a lot of material from the Securitat. It's rarely in cleartext, though. Mostly I'm doing sigint—signals intelligence. I analyze the timing, frequency and length of different kinds of data to see if I can spot anomalies. That's with a lower-case ‘a’, by the way.” He was warming up to the subject now. His face hurt when he talked, but when he thought about what to say, the hurt went away, as did the vision of the cell where he would go next. “It's the kind of thing that works best when you don't know what's in the payload of the data you're looking at. That would just distract me. It's like a magician's trick with a rabbit or a glass of water. You focus on the rabbit or on the water and what you expect of them, and are flummoxed when the magician does something unexpected. If he used pebbles, though, it might seem absolutely ordinary.”

  “Do you know what Zbigniew Krotoski was working on?”

  “No, there's no way for me to know that. The streams are enciphered at the router with his public key, and rescrambled after he's done with them. It's all zero-knowledge.”

  “But you don't have zero knowledge, do you?”

  Lawrence found himself grinning, which hurt a lot, and which caused a little more blood to leak out of his nose and over his lips in a hot trickle. “Well, signals intelligence being what it is, I was able to discover that it was a Securitat stream, and that it wasn't the first one he'd worked on, nor the first one he'd altered.”

  “He altered a stream?”

  Lawrence lost his smile. “I hadn't told you that part yet, had I?”

  “No.” Randy leaned forward. “But you will now.”

  * * *

  The blue silk ribbons slid through Lawrence's mental fingers as he sat in his cell, which was barely lit and tiny and padded and utterly devoid of furniture. High above him, a ring of glittering red LEDs cast no visible light. They would be infrared lights, the better for the hidden cameras to see him. It was dark, so he saw nothing, but for the infrared cameras, it might as well have been broad daylight. The asymmetry was one of the things he inscribed on a blue ribbon and floated away.

  The cell wasn't perfectly soundproof. There was a gaseous hiss that reverberated through it every forty six to fifty three breaths, which he assumed was the regular opening and shutting of the heavy door that led to the cell-block deep within the Securitat building. That would be a patrol, or a regular report, or someone with a weak bladder.

  There was a softer, regular grinding that he felt more than heard—a subway train, running very regular. That was the New York rumble, and it felt a little like his pan's reassuring purring.

  There was his breathing, deep and oceanic, and there was the sound in his mind's ear, the sound of the streamers hissing away into the ether.

  He'd gone out in the world and now he'd gone back into a cell. He supposed that it was meant to sweat him, to make him mad, to make him make mistakes. But he had been trained by sixteen years in the Order and this was not sweating him at all.

  “Come along then.” The door opened with a cotton-soft sound from its balanced hinges, letting light into the room and giving him the squints.

  “I wondered about your friends,” Lawrence said. “All those people at the restaurant.”

  “Oh,” Randy said. He was a black silhouette in the doorway. “Well, you know. Honor among thieves. Rank hath its privileges.”

  “They were caught,” he said.

  “Everyone gets caught,” Randy said.

  “I suppose it's easy when everybody is guilty.” He thought of Posy. “You just pick a skillset, find someone with those skills, and then figure out what that person is guilty of. Recruiting made simple.”

  “Not so simple as all that,” Randy said. “You'd be amazed at the difficulties we face.”

  “Zbigniew Krotoski was one of yours.”

  Randy's silhouette—now resolving into features, clothes (another sweater, this one with a high collar and squared-off shoulders)—made a little movement that Lawrence knew meant yes. Randy was all tells, no matter how suave and co
llected he seemed. He must have been really up to something when they caught him.

  “Come along,” Randy said again, and extended a hand to him. He allowed himself to be lifted. The scabs at his knees made crackling noises and there was the hot wet feeling of fresh blood on his calves.

  “Do you withhold medical attention until I give you what you want? Is that it?”

  Randy put an affectionate hand on his shoulder. “You seem to have it all figured out, don't you?”

  “Not all of it. I don't know why you haven't told me what it is you want yet. That would have been simpler, I think.”

  “I guess you could say that we're just looking for the right way to ask you.”

  “The way to ask me a question that I can't say no to. Was it the sister? Is that what you had on him?”

  “He was useful because he was so eager to prove that he was smarter than everyone else.”

  “You needed him to edit your own data-streams?”

  Randy just looked at him calmly. Why would the Securitat need to change its own streams? Why couldn't they just arrest whomever they wanted on whatever pretext they wanted? Who'd be immune to—

  Then he realized who'd be immune to the Securitat: the Securitat would be.

  “You used him to nail other Securitat officers?”

  Randy's blank look didn't change.

  Lawrence realized that he would never leave this building. Even if his body left, now he would be tied to it forever. He breathed. He tried for that oceanic quality of breath, the susurration of the blue silk ribbons inscribed with his worries. It wouldn't come.

  “Come along now,” Randy said, and pulled him down the corridor to the main door. It hissed as it opened and behind it was an old Securitat man, legs crossed painfully. Weak bladder, Lawrence knew.

  * * *

  “Here's the thing,” Randy said. “The system isn't going to go away, no matter what we do. The Securitat's here forever. We've treated everyone like a criminal for too long now—everyone's really a criminal now. If we dismantled tomorrow, there'd be chaos, bombings, murder sprees. We're not going anywhere.”

  Randy's office was comfortable. He had some beautiful vintage circus posters—the bearded lady, the sword swallower, the hoochie-coochie girl—framed on the wall, and a cracked leather sofa that made amiable exhalations of good tobacco smell mixed with years of saddle soap when he settled into it. Randy reached onto a tall mahogany bookcase and handed him down a first-aid kit. There was a bottle of alcohol in it and a lot of gauze pads. Gingerly, Lawrence began to clean out the wounds on his legs and hands, then started in on his face. The blood ran down and dripped onto the slate tiled floor, almost invisible. Randy handed him a waste-paper bin and it slowly filled with the bloody gauze.

  “Looks painful,” Randy said.

  “Just skinned. I have a vicious headache, though.”

  “That's the taser hangover. It goes away. There's some codeine tablets in the pill-case. Take it easy on them, they'll put you to sleep.”

  While Lawrence taped large pieces of gauze over the cleaned-out corrugations in his skin, Randy tapped idly at a screen on his desk. It felt almost as though he'd dropped in on someone's hot-desk back at the Order. Lawrence felt a sharp knife of homesickness and wondered if Gerta was OK.

  “Do you really have a sister?”

  “I do. In Oregon, in the Order.”

  “Does she work for you?”

  Randy snorted. “Of course not. I wouldn't do that to her. But the people who run me, they know that they can get to me through her. So in a sense, we both work for them.”

  “And I work for you?”

  “That's the general idea. Zbigkrot spooked when you got onto him, so he's long gone.”

  “Long gone as in—”

  “This is one of those things where we don't say. Maybe he disappeared and got away clean, took his sister with him. Maybe he disappeared into our…operations. Not knowing is the kind of thing that keeps our other workers on their game.”

  “And I'm one of your workers.”

  “Like I said, the system isn't going anywhere. You met the gang tonight. We've all been caught at one time or another. Our little cozy club manages to make the best of things. You saw us—it's not a bad life at all. And we think that all things considered, we make the world a better place. Someone would be doing our job, might as well be us. At least we manage to weed out the real retarded sadists.” He sipped a little coffee from a thermos cup on his desk. “That's where Zbigkrot came in.”

  “He helped you with ‘retarded sadists’?”

  “For the most part. Power corrupts, of course, but it attracts the corrupt, too. There's a certain kind of person who grows up wanting to be a Securitat officer.”

  “And me?”

  “You?”

  “I would do this too?”

  “You catch on fast.”

  * * *

  The outside wall of Campus was imposing. Tall, sheathed in seamless metal painted uniform grey. Nothing grew for several yards around it, as though the world was shrinking back from it.

  How did Zbigkrot get off campus?

  That's a question that should have occurred to him when he left the campus. He was embarrassed that it took him this long to come up with it. But it was a damned good question. Trying to force the gate—what was it the old Brother on the gate had said? Pressurized, blowouts, the walls rigged to come down in an instant.

  If Zbigkrot had left, he'd walked out, the normal way, while someone at the gate watched him go. And he'd left no record of it. Someone, working on Campus, had altered the stream of data fountaining off the front gate to remove the record of it. There was more than one forger there—it hadn't just been zbigkrot working for the Securitat.

  He'd belonged in the Order. He'd learned how to know himself, how to see himself with the scalding, objective logic that he'd normally reserved for everyone else. The Anomaly had seemed like such a bit of fun, like he was leveling up to the next stage of his progress.

  He called Greta. They'd given him a new pan, one that had a shunt that delivered a copy of all his data to the Securitat. Since he'd first booted it, it had felt strange and invasive, every buzz and warning coming with the haunted feeling, the watched feeling.

  “You, huh?”

  “It's very good to hear your voice,” he said. He meant it. He wondered if she knew about the Securitat's campus snitches. He wondered if she was one. But it was good to hear her voice. His pan let him know that whatever he was doing was making him feel great. He didn't need his pan to tell him that, though.

  “I worried when you didn't check in for a couple days.”

  “Well, about that.”

  “Yes?”

  If he told her, she'd be in it too—if she wasn't already. If he told her, they'd figure out what they could get on her. He should just tell her nothing. Just go on inside and twist the occasional data-stream. He could be better at it than zbigkrot. No one would ever make an Anomaly out of him. Besides, so what if they did? It would be a few hours, days, months or years that he could live on Campus.

  And if it wasn't him, it would be someone else.

  It would be someone else.

  “I just wanted to say good bye, and thanks. I suspect I'm not going to see you again.”

  Off in the distance now, the sound of the Securitat van's happy little song. His pan let him know that he was breathing quickly and shallowly and he slowed his breathing down until it let up on him.

  “Lawrence?”

  He hung up. The Securitat van was visible now, streaking toward the Campus wall.

  He closed his eyes and watched the blue satin ribbons tumble, like silky water licking over a waterfall. He could get to the place that Campus took him to, from anywhere. That was all that mattered.

  Copyright © 2008 by Cordocco Ltd.

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  Alone in the black void, the ship thrust forward, then pivoted as it slowed to a stop. Motionless, it awaited the next flyby, the next ship-killer, the next opportunity.

  Shoulders aching, eyes watering from hours of vigilance, the pilot enjoyed a two-second respite. He cracked his knuckles and popped another Pontefract cake. Then he drew a licorice-sweetened breath. The biggest asteroid yet entered his vector display, approaching on the x-axis. Its trajectory would cross in front of his ship, directly in the line of fire.

  His trigger fingers tensed. He blinked and licked his lips, leaned forward.

  But there, gliding into view from above: a hostile saucer, one of the big ones, firing blindly, unpredictably. In moments it would be upon him.

  “Tea’s up, George.”

  Risk selected, the pilot fired on the Phocean cruiser. A direct hit. The enemy craft became a brief, small starfield, each brilliant point winking out in an instant. As the ion cannon reloaded, the pilot swerved to face the oncoming minor planet gone rogue. He fired – but too soon. The strike glanced off the oncoming rock, set it to spinning. Deadly fragments hurtled directly at him!