The Dark Intercept

by Julia Keller

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  Copyright Page

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  To the memory of Professor Marlene Longenecker, who said to the silent girl: “You have a voice. Use it.”

  PART ONE

  TIME: 2294

  Far away, but close enough.

  The people of Earth are divided.

  The Old Earth lies in ruins. Some people remain, scratching and digging in dead forests and in the smoldering gloom of cold, burnt-out cities.

  Meanwhile, an elite population lives in a place called New Earth—a beautiful land of endless summer that spreads out high above the surface of the broken, desolate planet.

  The only thing the two worlds have in common is a technology called the Intercept. It reaches inside your mind and pulls out your most intense emotions—love, hate, fear, joy—and uses them to control you.

  Thus your feelings aren’t just your feelings anymore.

  They’re weapons.

  1

  Moment No. 327

  She watched.

  It was her job to watch, but Violet would have watched anyway. She leaned over her keyboard, slinging her body so far forward that her nose almost bumped the screen. Her heart was jumping around in her chest. She could feel the sweat pooling in her palms.

  The short, dirty person zipping across the picture on her monitor was named Tommy Tolliver. His nickname was Tin Man.

  Violet knew those things because the data showed up in a small square box next to his face on the screen. The information only stayed for a flicker of an instant before it was updated, but that was long enough. In livid orange letters, the box told her that he was sixteen years old and really, really scared.

  So scared that he was running as fast as he could through the twisted filigree of streets on Old Earth. So scared that his pulse rate was leaping up and up, and his thoughts were a crazy gray tangle.

  The cop who was chasing him was named Danny Mayhew. Violet didn’t need a box next to his face to tell her that. Which was a good thing, because there wasn’t one. The Intercept didn’t track cops. It only kicked in for the bad guys. Not the good guys.

  Tin Man was fast. But Danny was also fast. In fact, Danny was a tick faster. Which meant he was catching up.

  Violet sucked in a deep breath. She didn’t let it out again right away. She was too focused on the action in that strange and distant place to remember to breathe. When she did remember, the breath came out as a frustrated sigh. She used her thumb to flick impatiently at a triangular slice of dark blond hair that had drifted onto her forehead.

  Oh, Danny, she thought. Not again. What are you doing down there, anyway?

  Tin Man swerved into a filthy alley. It was always raining on Old Earth. Or at least it seemed to be on those not-very-frequent occasions when Violet was required to look down there. The rain draped the place in a greasy sheen, slickening the bricks.

  Tin Man’s luck suddenly left him.

  He slid. He slid hard, and he wasn’t able to catch himself before he crashed into a row of four garbage cans. They were the ancient gray aluminum kind, flimsy and dented. The kind you never saw on New Earth.

  Tin Man bounced, teetered, and fell on his narrow butt. The computer connection was excellent and so Violet heard the whump sound crisply and clearly. She winced, even though it was happening to him and not to her, and even though it was happening thousands of miles away on Old Earth. She knew what it felt like to trip and fall on your butt. Everybody did, right?

  Somehow, despite the fall, Tin Man managed to hold on to the ragged cloth sack he was carrying. The sack was tied off at the top by a little drawstring that looked like a brown shoelace. Violet watched him jam it into his front pocket with frantic fingers. He tried to scramble to his feet again, but he was trapped in a sticky makeshift maze of upended cans and still-wobbling lids, plus assorted smelly shreds and rotting lumps and gooey rinds. His feet kept skidding out from under him. His butt bounced against the grimy ground over and over again.

  Tin Man felt helpless. Violet knew how he felt because a rolling ribbon of flashing numbers at the bottom of her screen told her.

  It wasn’t that the Intercept could read his mind—or anyone’s mind. It couldn’t. It didn’t have to.

  By riffling through the archives of his past emotions and using the algorithm to apply those emotions to the present situation, the Intercept extrapolated the probabilities of his current feeling and, in less than a trillionth of a second, selected the most likely one and sent it via numeric code to Violet’s computer. Tin Man knew he looked ludicrous—big tough gangster-boy, marooned in moist trash. That made him feel vulnerable and ridiculous, which in turn made him feel extremely pissed off.

  And a pissed-off Tin Man was a dangerous Tin Man.

  Violet leaned even closer to the screen.

  Let him go, Danny, she thought. Just let him go.

  And then she lectured herself: Yeah, right. Like that’s gonna happen. Get a clue, girl. Danny never backed off from a fight or gave up on a chase. Never had, never would. She understood, because she was the same way—but that didn’t make it any easier to watch.

  Anxiety was skittering madly through Violet’s body. What would Tin Man do? Her throat felt dry and tight. She couldn’t remember the last time she had blinked. She was afraid to blink. Afraid she might miss whatever was going to happen next, because everything was happening so fast.

  Tin Man groped in the waistband of his jeans, twisting and grunting and yanking. The slab gun had been digging into his skin while he ran, its louvered sides sharp as a shovel’s edge, its muzzle pricking him like a hypodermic. Violet could almost feel the slab gun against her own skin, even though she’d never touched one, much less hidden one in her pants.

  Tin Man’s mind, according to the box that followed him on the screen, simmered with petty irritations as well as great fear, a fear that spread out over the rest of his thoughts like a black rainbow.

  A holster would have made the gun easier to carry, but a holster would’ve been harder to hide, especially on a body as skinny as his. So Tin Man had carried it in his trousers, despite the very real risk that his body temperature would rise high enough to trigger the thing.

  Violet had read about that. And she’d seen pictures, too—hideous, look-away-now pictures, filled with liquid and anguish. People sometimes forgot about the heat-sensitive firing filament, and in a terrible tenth of a second, the slab gun would blow a hole in their side so big that they could reach in and rearrange vital organs like cushions on a sofa.

  Danny was coming up fast. Violet, right along with Tin Man, could hear the rapid and relentless smacksplat smacksplat smacksplat sounds of his boots as they struck the wet bricks.

  Violet watched. She had to
wait until the last possible second to intervene. Intervention had to be absolutely necessary. She couldn’t be wrong.

  Tin Man was tensed and ready. There was only a thin grazing of light left in the alley, and so the cop, he surmised, most likely wouldn’t see the gray flank of the slab gun until its pulverizing ray had peeled back his skin and melted a portion of whatever it hit. Sometimes it happened so fast the victim didn’t even bleed. The heat of the light-pulse instantly cauterized the wound at the same time it created it.

  Violet saw the numbers jump and squirm at the bottom of her screen, recording a probabilistic shift in Tin Man’s emotions. She interpreted the numbers instantly, reading his feelings as if he were writing them in a journal in real time:

  Tin Man was confused. Why the hell had this cop shown up, anyway? Cops almost never came down to Old Earth anymore. For anything. New Earth didn’t bother to monitor it regularly. New Earth had given it up for lost, and Tin Man approved.

  Lost was how he liked it. Lost let the monsters loose. And that was how Tin Man saw himself: as a monster. Old Earth had made him that way. Old Earth—and the people he needed to protect from its many perils.

  A quick visual of the previous three minutes of Tin Man’s life popped up in the bottom corner of Violet’s screen. The pictures came from the squad of drones that patrolled Old Earth. She followed the video avidly, so that she’d have full information before Intercept Deployment:

  In the fragile, moody pallor of dusk on Old Earth, Tin Man had been selling the day’s last bag of deckle. He hadn’t even bothered to divide the bag into smaller parcels. He didn’t need to. His customer was happy to snap up his entire supply of the pink powder, and to pay him well for it.

  For the past several months, Tin Man had run a good, steady, efficient business in illegal drugs. He sold a lot of deckle. When the deckle ran out, he switched to tumult, and when tumult was hard to come by, he could always dig up a bit of trekinol. Trekinol was trash, but if nozzled directly into the heart, it could create a flutter. A baby buzz.

  The transaction had been seconds away from completion. And then, from out of nowhere, the cop showed up.

  Tin Man heard an official-sounding voice say, “What’s going on?” The customer heard the voice, too, and it caused him to jerk in the middle as if somebody had pulled an invisible string knotted around his waist. The customer vanished, twitching through the mud-colored twilight of Old Earth.

  Tin Man also took off.

  And then the cop, to Tin Man’s surprise, had followed him.

  What the hell? was Tin Man’s irritated thought while he slammed across the dark and dismal streets. Nobody interfered with drug deals down here anymore. Nobody. It. Just. Wasn’t. Done. This cop, though, apparently had missed the memo.

  Tin Man ran. The cop ran faster.

  “Hey, wait!” the cop had yelled. “I just want to—”

  Tin Man kept running.

  The alley. The rain. The skid. The spill. And now, in a very short space of time, The End. For at least one of them.

  But the question was: Which one?

  Smacksplat. Stop. Danny hunched over Tin Man. He was panting, his black-booted feet spread wide, his body quivering, his hands grabbing the fabric that bunched at his knees. His blue tunic was flecked with mud. His dark hair was wet from rain and sweat. His face was pale.

  Tin Man stared up at him, incredulous. All this trouble for a bag of deckle? New Earth didn’t care about Old Earth crimes anymore. Old Earth could do as it pleased, even if that meant the people down here ripped one another to shreds, or poisoned themselves with drugs, or whatever. Nobody cared.

  What was wrong with this guy?

  Tin Man didn’t wait for an answer. The cop had to die.

  Tin Man wrenched the slab gun out of his trousers.

  * * *

  “Sector four,” Violet said.

  She’d seen enough. All the official criteria had been met:

  Imminent bodily threat to a New Earth citizen.

  Lack of plausible escape parameters.

  Reasonable expectation of negative outcome.

  So now she had a job to do.

  “Seventy-eighth parallel,” she added. “Old Earth zone sixteen.”

  She gave her partner a quick sideways glance to make sure he was listening to her. Their workstation was one of a thousand two-person modules arranged across the glass-walled Protocol Hall, the nerve center of New Earth.

  “Why’s he down there without authorization?” Rez said. “What the—”

  “Sync up the parameters,” Violet declared, interrupting him. Rez’s screen was next to hers, but he’d been watching something else. Another sector. Or maybe playing a game. Whatever. “It’s my call.” Her voice was cold and steady. She’d gone through the checklist in her head. Twice, even. “And I’m calling it.”

  “Copy that.” Reznik squinted, reading the swath of rich code that decorated the bottom of his screen, catching up with the information that Violet had been absorbing for the past few seconds. He laughed. “So—is that right? ‘Tin Man’? How’d he get such a stupid nickname?”

  “Don’t know. It’s the alias of record.”

  “What’s Danny doing down there, anyway?”

  “You already asked me that. It’s irrelevant. Go on. Lock and load.”

  Reznik shrugged. He fist-bumped four buttons in rushed succession on the console in front of him. His screen shifted to another variety of code. He punched another button—last week he’d actually cracked the red cover-cap on one of his console triggers, so violently emphatic were his gestures when he was in the throes of his official duties—and the orange-tinted code shimmied and wiggled as the algorithm automatically recalibrated itself in response to incoming data.

  Reznik’s gaze followed the vapor trail of the code’s gyrations like a man in love. Code was a thing of beauty, like a really great song. That’s how he had described it once to Violet. He’d practically swooned when he said it. Sometimes, he would add, looking glassy-eyed and bewitched, he loathed the sluggishness of his brain when he beheld code. Compared to the cool sleekness of code, he told her, his brain was like a sweaty fat boy trying to climb a rope in gym class, all sagging butt and pitiful little grunts of doomed effort. Reznik didn’t have happy memories of gym class.

  Violet occasionally wondered how his love of code registered in his Intercept file. Code recording his obsession with code: It would be like taking your finger and writing the word sand in the sand. He was totally smitten with code. Sometimes it got a little weird.

  But no matter how obnoxious he was, Violet had to admit that Rez was a good person to have as a workstation partner. He knew all the shortcuts in the Intercept. He knew all the tricky little backdoor maneuvers that helped them do their jobs—as well as a few that had nothing to do with their jobs.

  “Okay,” Rezink said. “Ready to rock ’n’ roll.” It was a funny-sounding phrase he’d picked up in Old Earth history class.

  Violet did what she often did when she was nervous: She touched the small area in the crook of her left elbow. This was the spot where the Intercept chip had been inserted, slipped under the skin so swiftly and so delicately that she hadn’t even felt it. No one did. There was no scar, just a slight area of discoloration in the shape of a tiny crescent moon. Violet’s father, Ogden Crowley—Founding Father of New Earth—had insisted on that: Nobody should feel any pain during the installation. He’d ordered his staff to find a way. Because the Intercept wasn’t there to hurt. It was there to help.

  And as always, they’d done it. People wanted to please Ogden Crowley. Violet had noticed that from the time she was a little girl.

  “Ready,” Rez said. “Four. Seventy-eight. Sixteen. On my mark.”

  “Copy that.”

  “Mark.”

  “Protocol initiated.” With two fingers, Violet depressed the black bar across the top of her keyboard. She felt a surge of relief. Everything was going to be okay.

  Well—no
t for Tin Man. But that was his fault, not theirs.

  She studied the screen. Tin Man tightened his grip on the handle of the slab gun. He aimed its ugly gray snout.

  And then the Intercept pounced.

  * * *

  No sizzle, no crackle, no whoosh, no boom. No thunder. No lightning. Not even a click or a ding. For a second there was no outward sign that anything at all had happened.

  But it had. Irrevocably.

  Deep within the sprawling catacombs beneath their workstation, tucked snugly inside a computer system unfathomably vast, the Intercept was roused to invisible fury.

  Tin Man was about to enter hell. But for Violet and Rez, it was just another day at work. Their job was essentially finished. There was nothing more for them to do. Except watch.

  “Got any big plans for the weekend?” Rez said.

  Violet shrugged. She had plenty of plans, but none to share with Reznik. He was always hinting around about wanting to hang out with her and Shura Lu, her best friend. Not gonna happen, Violet thought. Not meanly, just firmly. She wished he’d get a clue. Why was it that the guys you didn’t really care about were crazy about you, while a guy you did care about—in fact, a guy that you thought about a lot—kept you guessing about whether or not he even noticed that you were …

  No. No. She elbowed the thought out of her mind. She wasn’t going to give the Intercept anything to work with. Nothing beyond her annoyance, at least. Nothing beyond her irritation that Danny had put himself in jeopardy. Again. What was going on with him?

  Reznik didn’t seem to mind that Violet had ignored his question. He was used to it; she ignored him on a regular basis. It couldn’t dent his good mood. Their shift was almost over, and once it was, he could get back to doing what he loved to do, which was to use his computer savvy to explore the depths of the Intercept.

  “Showtime,” he said.

  In the crook of Tin Man’s left elbow they spotted a brief flash of blue. That meant the Intercept chip had just been activated. Their screens immediately shifted to the scene that was frantically flooding Tin Man’s brain, surging and grinding inside him.