by Gavin Chait
‘I can’t think here. Let’s go walk in the Meadow,’ she says, tramping to the hall elevators. Dervish follows.
Graham grips the bar on the inside of the glass, her back to Dervish as she stares outside, unconsciously grinding her teeth. They pass underground, and the sunlight gives way to the muted white of the light paint of the lower floors.
‘I’m sorry, Ma’am,’ says Dervish, filling the silence. His body is gaunt and angular. There is little need for physical excellence from an army that trains and operates in virtual environments.
Graham says nothing as they drop through the levels of the old Pentagon. Bright halls filled with clusters of seated people, their bodies wrapped inside their workstations. The Watchers fill these offices, analysing the continuous deluge of data coming from the Earth-side connect. Their role is to hunt for threats to the state, monitor those targets of interest and guide the Operators who carry out interventions and operations.
Dervish’s team has been trying to get ahead of the Achenians in logging images of prisoners. They have struggled to get people inside the automated lockdown environments. Too much of their capacity has been dedicated to monitoring social chatter to assess public response to Achenia’s independence. Most people seem indifferent, but then the full economic impact will not hit until months after they leave.
‘Have you told them?’ gesturing at the passing levels.
‘Yes, Ma’am. They’re disappointed. I’ve asked Camberwell to conduct a review of what—’
‘We know what went fucking wrong,’ she says, her voice a jagged growl. ‘The fucking Achenians can block us, and those fucking fuckers at Justice have so thoroughly fucked up their fucking systems that the most effective way for anyone to evade the Watchers is to get fucking arrested.’
Dervish, within the confines of the elevator, steps back. His armpits are rank. When Graham starts swearing incoherently, someone is about to be crucified.
The Armed Forces watch and are watched in return. Their failures can be acutely public.
She closes her eyes and breathes deeply, squeezing the air out through her teeth. Her fading brown hair tangles over her eyes. She brushes it back with one sweaty hand. Stubby fingers and painfully short nails.
‘How did he get out of US territory without us spotting him, Jim?’ Her hands are leaving wet imprints on the bar.
‘He was never here, Ma’am,’ says Dervish. ‘He was sent to Tartarus.’
Dervish has never killed anyone directly. Before his transfer to the Watchers he served thirty years in the peculiar world of the Operators, logging over twenty thousand hours in simulated conflict environments. Months at a time with the nutrient and narcotic broth piped to the shunt in his gut, persistently hyper-awake inside his workstation. He flew drone missions all over the world, led attacks against remote terrorists and home-grown prepper militia.
The world is a complex place, many regions devastated by environmental catastrophe or still reeling from the collapse of resource extraction and the consequences of the orbital war. There are always those who will strike at the light created by others and, sometimes, the only way to defend is to attack first.
Dervish knows he has killed people, has seen the synthesized targets vaporized, but till today he has never seen anyone die.
Graham seems to disintegrate before him, her life draining away.
She turns away from the glass, and he sees her eyes go from bright to dark. Her normal look of suppressed tension softens, and her skin yellows and goes cold. Where before she looked as if the elevator bar was a restraint, now she leans heavily upon it.
‘Ma’am?’ he says, shocked and unsure of what has happened.
She raises her hand. ‘In the Meadow,’ her voice a husk.
The doors open into a short tunnel ending in a titanium door.
Graham drags herself along the corridor, Dervish hesitantly following.
The door slides open, revealing a second set of titanium doors. Graham steps inside and the first doors close. The magnetic resonance ring slides out of the ceiling and around her. Three hundred random cells selected and sequenced. Her body scan and DNA are matched against her profile. The outer door opens.
She waits until Dervish has been authenticated.
‘Sorry, Ma’am,’ he says nervously as the doors open. ‘The MRI always gets confused when I lose so much weight, and I’ve been piloting that workstation for over a month –’ he notices her eyes are absent and fumbles to a stop.
‘I’m here, Ma’am,’ he says, gently.
Graham looks at him sadly and nods, leading him as they walk together into the Meadow.
The Meadow is in darkness. A single diffuse pool of light tracks their path. Forty acres of obsidian computational blocks, each two metres square, lie before them, the paths between them picked out in fluorescent red lines on the floor. The grid is the most powerful computational processor in the entire country. Designed for a single task. All the world’s communications from the Earth-side connect pass through here. Anomalies and insights are flagged for the Watchers on the levels above.
The lifers amongst the Watchers joke that it takes five years before recruits stop masturbating and become useful to the military. Most quit after serving only four. Set a novice the task of tracking a target through a crowd and they are soon distracted, following pretty boys and girls home and trying to see them naked. The power of being omnipresent is its own curse.
Works is on the level below. The small team was, until recently, dedicated to attempting to open up the Achenian connect and add that flow of information to the Meadow. They have been redirected to hack the sphere. Graham expects as little success with that as with any of the Achenian encryption systems.
The Meadow is about the most secure and discreet place on Earth. Few people have access. Fewer people visit. Perfect for quiet walks. Perfect for conversations that will never have happened.
‘When I was a girl,’ she says, her voice so soft, ‘I spent hours every day watching the orbital war on my father’s headset while he was at work. At night, the sky lit up like fireworks. It was so remote. My mother found me hiding in a cupboard one day, crying. Debris from Yuèliàng had fallen near our school. We were sent home early. That was when I realized it was real. All those people, burning in space –’
Dervish knows nothing about Graham. Her officers regard her as a machine: something printed by the military to command with inhuman precision and violent rage. He is shocked by her sudden fragility, chilled with the fear of what it portends.
She looks at him, her eyes hooded and bruised.
‘I swore I would protect our people. I would be one of the good guys,’ her voice trembles. ‘All my career, fighting through the ranks, I never thought we were –’ She breathes out deeply, nods to herself and collects her thoughts.
‘How did he escape?’ she asks.
‘They haven’t told us,’ says Dervish, deeply shaken. ‘Tartarus appears to still be functioning as normal. It’s difficult to tell. The logs indicate there has been nothing but basic maintenance since it was built. Would you like me to send a team up to have a look?’
‘No,’ she says, a little too sharply. Recovers and holds his arm. ‘No, that will be fine. Did they say anything about Tartarus?’
‘No,’ says Dervish, mystified. ‘Only that he escaped and made his way back to Achenia.’
Dervish stops and stares at his superior. ‘Ma’am, what’s this about? Tartarus is Justice’s problem, not ours.’
‘That depends on what he saw. Jim, if this goes wrong, disgrace is the least of our concerns. The Achenians will want revenge. We’ll be facing a war we cannot win. And we’ll deserve it.’
‘Ma’am, I don’t understand,’ says Dervish.
She grips his arm so tightly he feels as if she is attempting to wrench it off. Pushing her face close to his, she says, ‘It was a terrible, ancient mistake, and I hope I never have to explain it.’
44
When Jos
hua awakes, it is still daylight. He wonders if it is ever night here.
There are clothes folded across a narrow table outside the bathing area. He sees both a bath and a depression he takes to contain a shower. He removes his clothes, folding them and placing them on a basket.
There are no taps, and he wonders briefly how he is to control it when hot water falls in thin, dropless columns out of the ceiling. The water lathers and he washes himself, glorying in the sensation.
As he is considering stepping out and realizing that he had seen no towel, the water stops. Instantly, he is dry.
The basin alongside the shower has a single white rod resting alongside the bowl. He picks it up carefully. I assume this must be for my teeth, he thinks. How do I use it? Taking the risk and inserting an end into his mouth.
There is a caress, as of air; his cheeks inflate and then are still. He runs his tongue over his teeth, replaces the rod on the basin and, hesitantly, blows into his cupped hands. His breath is fresh.
There is no other device.
Feeling slightly foolish, he holds the rod to his face, length-wise. It is smooth against his cheeks and his stubble melts away. He touches his skin in wonder. I would very much like one of these, he thinks.
He picks up the clothes. They weigh almost nothing and seem to pour like liquid in his hands. He pulls on the eggshell-coloured trousers. They tighten comfortably about his waist. Then he draws on the shirt. He realizes it is a dashiki, the same eggshell colouring as the trousers, with subtle red ochre-coloured embroidery along the V of the collar and on the cuffs and the hem.
There are boots, too, which similarly weigh as nothing. He pulls these on, his trousers inside the uppers in the style of the Achenians.
As he heads to the dark glass of the outer wall it dissolves. He feels slightly self-conscious. He knows he is clothed, but it does not feel that way.
He can hear music and smell cooking, and his stomach rumbles.
Nizena’s wife, Kosai, is dancing in the kitchen. The music seems to exist as an entity, taking possession of Joshua as he hears it, filling him utterly. She turns, her face delight, and sashays over to him, taking his hand and swinging him around. And then they are dancing and he is laughing.
‘You must be starving. You’ve slept for almost a day. What can we get you to eat?’
‘We?’
‘Symona and me,’ indicating another figure who floats in from the balcony. She is ethereal, has transparent wings.
Joshua’s jaw drops.
‘Oh, don’t mind her. She’s my symbiont. Thinks she’s a butterfly.’ Raising her voice in mock seriousness, ‘We are all precious butterflies, Symona.’
Symona flies outside and disappears beneath the balcony.
‘Are all your symbionts named with a “Sy”?’ he asks, his stomach leading him into the kitchen.
‘Oh, no, it’s a silly affectation. Nizena finds it quite exasperating. Now, my boy, what shall we feed you? Eggs? Porridge? I can make a fruit salad? You’ll waste away –’ she laughs. ‘I’m the grandmother, I get to say things like that.’
Joshua grins. ‘Anything.’
‘Perfect. I like ’em easy to please,’ she says. ‘Right, you shall have porridge. I like my oats hot, spicy and daring.’
‘Now,’ she says, her face quite serious, ‘no magic tricks,’ as ingredients fountain out of various cupboards, ‘we’ll do this the old-fashioned way,’ and a pot tumbles through the air, landing on the counter, instantly filling with simmering water, milk and cream pouring in from containers floating above it.
‘Right?’ she says, holding out her hand for a spoon, which drops into place.
Joshua is laughing, his hands clasped before him in delight. He is a small boy again.
He takes his bowl, heaped and pungent with a tangle of wild scent and shredded fruit. He does not know these flavours, and his first mouthfuls are tentative.
He walks to the balcony and looks out. From here he can see that a river enters the lake at one end and flows out the other, winding down through boulders and cliffs, white water roaring into the distance. The air is faintly fog-like, softening shapes and obscuring distance.
Kosai, still keeping the rhythm with her hips, joins him and bumps him gently. ‘It’s beautiful, yes? We live on the Metangai side of Tswalu, and across the lake – those cliffs you see – that’s the Moher side. The cliffs run the full length of Achenia.’
He sees a couple flying hand in hand in the distance. They twist and tumble, chasing each other.
‘How does that work?’ he asks, pointing at the dwindling couple. ‘And –’ gesturing at the kitchen with his spoon, ‘– or will I not understand?’
She laughs, shakes her head. ‘It’s not so hard, and I’m the least technical in the family. In the early days, before Achenia was so large, we struggled with containing the radiation we were exposed to. Our atmosphere wasn’t thick enough to absorb it. Nizena came up with a solution. He was young then, made his name. He developed a synthetic mesh network of teeny little –’ she makes a tiny hole between her thumb and forefinger, while still holding her spoon, ‘– micro-thingy molecules which would diffuse in the air, even invented the printers to make them. It makes the air slightly foggy, softening the edges.’
She takes a spoon of her porridge and talks, oblivious of a full mouth. ‘It became like the immune system for the city. Absorbing the radiation and filling minor tears in the surface skin. Over the years it was enhanced to act as a structural material, like the polyps on a coral reef. Think of it as something you can breathe but that can also become selectively solid.
‘You get used to it,’ she laughs, noticing Joshua’s nervousness.
She waves her spoon. ‘When the symbionts were developed and we became part of the connect, a few people realized they could act on it. Control it. Pretty soon we were projecting our symbionts out into the world and taking flying lessons.
‘Old Nizena is a bit crusty, calls it silliness. He’ll be here soon to give you the grand tour. Try to look interested.’ She gives him a meaningful look and then peels off in giggles, dancing back into the kitchen.
Joshua turns to stare in admiration after her. He has never known such a force of nature.
‘Ah, my son.’ Nizena is stepping on to the balcony, wrapping Joshua in a bear hug. ‘Are you ready? Shall we go?’
Joshua shakes his head uncertainly, turning to Kosai. She wrinkles her nose at him, and he finds his bowl and spoon seized from his hands and flung towards the kitchen.
‘Off you go,’ fluttering her fingers. Nizena hoists her off the ground and kisses her passionately. He sets her back down. ‘Now, darling,’ she says, ‘don’t go overwhelming him. You know what you’re like.’
Nizena pinches her bottom, she whacks him with her spoon, and then he is leading Joshua back on to the dark glass platform. ‘Tyrant, she is. A tyrant,’ ducking as she hurls the spoon.
‘Right, off we go,’ and grinning. ‘We’ll follow Talas – the river – down to the sea.’
Realizing that he cannot fall, Joshua enjoys the flight. They rush down to the valley floor and out over the water, where today he can see a few sail craft out on the lake. They pass over a familiar-looking boat.
‘We’re happy to carry it back to Ewuru if you wish?’ asks Nizena.
Joshua turns to watch it as they fly past, ‘I would appreciate that.’
And then they are flying over the white flame of the river in torrent. The city ends and there is nothing but forest, birds flying, animal shapes in the trees. Glimpses of white water pounding over rocks beneath the canopy.
‘How is Samara?’
Nizena pats him on the shoulder. ‘He is still unconscious, but he is improving. He should be with us again soon.
‘For today, we will do a little sightseeing.’
Joshua nods. The forests are opening up into savannah. The grasslands are still within the same wide valley. He can see a herd of antelope: many species all grazing togethe
r. There must be tens of thousands of them. He thinks he sees a pride of lions stalking them beneath some acacia trees.
‘It’s quite crowded, but in a spread-out way,’ says Nizena. ‘There are five zones: ice, temperate, tropical, desert and oceanic. Each has its own city with about one hundred and seventy thousand people living there.
‘People get to live where they’re most comfortable, even move between them. We found that people need the variety and to forget they’re living in what is essentially a big tube. We’re heading to the ocean.’
Joshua can see others flying in the distance. The cliff-city of Socotra rushes towards them. This is woven into the grasslands, with acacia trees, red boulders and termite mounds. Some of the acacias are almost bowed down with densely woven nests around which clouds of weaver birds fly.
Between the Metangai and Moher sides of the city is a magnificent plain and what appears to be a great gathering place surrounded by trees.
They pass over markets filled with people, but he sees no agricultural land or anything that might speak of industry.
‘All the factories and farms are underneath this, within the outer layer of the ship. They’re automated. Our open space is precious, and so we have made it as liveable as possible.’
He smiles, ‘Has Samara told you the story about the squid?’
Joshua nods.
‘It’s a great story,’ says Nizena. ‘My son was right. He’ll become a storyteller yet.’
They travel for hours, over a landscape teaming with life and variety. Nizena and Joshua talk the entire journey. Nizena sharing tales about his youth and his life in Achenia, Joshua about Ewuru and their plans for the future.
They are approaching the coast, and Nizena leads them up and on to a cliff overlooking the ocean. A city of white stone runs along the shore, waves pounding on to the rocks below. The sand is white, the water clear and the shallows running fifty metres before dropping over a shelf into violet depths. Through the water he can make out multicoloured corals and shoals of fish. A ray leaps out of the water.
