The Dark Intercept

by Julia Keller

  Reznik leaned back in his chair and piled his big feet up on the desk they shared. He pretended to be eating popcorn from a bowl on his lap. He grinned and fluttered his fingers, as if he was digging in. He tossed an imaginary kernel up in the air and caught it in his mouth, chewing with exaggerated vigor.

  A small square in the lower right-hand corner of their screens continued to follow what was happening in the alley. The video was supplied by the drones making their grim, endless circles in the drab sky over Old Earth.

  Reznik tossed another fake kernel up in the air. Snap, chew.

  Violet rolled her eyes.

  “Cut it out, Rez,” she snapped. “Don’t be a jerk.”

  He snickered. Hopeless, Violet thought. Expecting Rez to act mature—that’s a lost cause. Totally.

  They watched their screens. The Intercept had selected one of Tin Man’s memories from a decade ago and fed it back into his brain.

  It was tearing him to pieces.

  * * *

  Molly Tolliver, aged five years, three days, four hours, twenty-two minutes, and eight seconds, lies in the ill-lit, foul-smelling room. She is too light to leave an indentation on the thin mattress. Her pale body, covered by a wispy blue rag that doubles as her dress, is cocooned in sweat.

  An odor of decay rises from her. The vapors are thick and shimmering. Most of the bad scents are not produced organically by her body but by the artificial enzymes that have been pumped into her for three days now, in a frantic attempt to save her. The enzymes, as they break down, induce an accelerated tumble toward death. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes, or so the theory goes—the free fall of decay will reach a critical point and then use its accumulated energy to kick-start a rally in the opposite direction. You never know, someone had said about the fever’s lethal whimsy and the possibility of a turnaround. That someone was a fellow scavenger, sharing their hollowed-out, roofless house. Worth a shot.

  It didn’t work. Now the stink is tremendous. It’s bigger than she is. Molly is long past being embarrassed by it. But for her family—which means her mother, Delia, and her older brother, whose real name is Tommy but who is mostly known by the nickname Molly gave him, Tin Man—the reality is that they cannot not notice the rancid smell. This isn’t fair. It isn’t right that their last memory of Molly is wreathed in a disgusting, vomit-calling smell, an abomination that’s like the mingling of dog shit and cat shit and rotten fruit and moldy basement and a shotgun-spray of farts. It’s disrespectful.

  Tin Man blinks. He reaches out to touch his sister’s forehead, not knowing if her skin will be hot or cold.

  It’s both.

  How can it be both? He doesn’t know. But it is.

  Before she got sick they were together all the time, he and Molly. They played, they ran, they chased each other across the broken streets of Old Earth, running and giggling, stealing what they could find to steal, darting through the wet, cold, smelly alleys. Molly was quick and small, and she could scoot into places that most people couldn’t, like a sleek letter opener sliding under the sealed flap of an envelope. That’s how Tin Man described it once to their mother. He knows about letter openers. He’s swiped a few from the smashed cabinets in the abandoned houses. There’s always junk left behind by the people rich enough to have scored a ticket to New Earth. Letters, packages, catalogs—they had made a big comeback in the mid-2280s. People realized that they missed running their hands across real paper. Missed folding it. Missed the elegant ritual of dealing with it. Thus letter openers became a hot item. The fancier, the better. Electronic mail is quicker, yes, but it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t seem to satisfy a certain longing in the soul. So on New Earth, the volume of Touch Mail is rising. And letter openers are easy to sell to New Earth tourists who sneak down here for a walk on the wild side.

  A few days ago, Molly coughed. She covered her mouth. She pulled her hand away and looked at her small palm. Sticky orange webs of phlegm were strung between her fingers like cobwebs in a corner. This is Missip Fever—named after a river called the Mississippi, a river that dried up a long time ago. Notorious viruses are christened for the trickling remnants of once-mighty rivers along whose raggedy, germ-sown banks they first gain a deadly foothold.

  It’s a week later and here she is.

  Dying.

  And doing it both too fast and too slow.

  Tin Man watches. He draws back his hand, having grazed her forehead and found it both hot and cold. Inside his own body, he is aware of an excruciating pain, a pain made up of a savage mix of emotions: anguish, helplessness, fear, puzzlement. These feelings have squatted right down in the center of his brain and won’t budge. He’d swear his mind is exploding, over and over again, each explosion igniting the next one in line, and then the one after that. He can’t turn away from the pain any more than he can turn away from Molly.

  The pain isn’t just inside him. The pain is him. He is all pain, everywhere.

  His sister parts her tiny white lips. She whimpers softly, like a pet seeking treats. Watching her, hearing her, Tin Man feels as if every cell in his body is being dragged in a separate direction, fingernails scraping the ground as the cells twist and writhe, fighting their fate. He wants to scream. He wants to hit something, smash it, destroy it. He wants to cause physical pain to himself, so as to balance out the emotional pain, the pain in his head. He is silent. He does not move. He believes in nothing.

  Molly Tolliver takes a small sip of breath.

  Lets it out.

  Takes another breath.

  Lets it out.

  Takes another breath.

  This time, she doesn’t let it out. Her eyes are glassy, fixed.

  She’s gone.

  She is five years, three days, four hours, twenty-two minutes, and eleven seconds old.

  * * *

  As Tin Man squirmed on his backside in a filthy alley in the midst of a cold rain, his curled finger tensed against the crude trigger of his slab gun, he was engulfed by the memory.

  The sadness raced across his brain, showing up from out of nowhere—or so it felt to him—as he aimed his weapon at the cop who had chased him here.

  The remembered scene rushed at him: Molly in the bed, Molly stinking, Molly dying. The images attacked him like his worst enemy would. They pierced him, paralyzing his trigger finger and the rest of his body, too.

  His sister’s waxy sunken cheeks.

  Her eyes, orange and staring.

  The sour smell of her—the smell of death, of ruined and rotting things, of the Absolute and Final End.

  And then the realization that she was dead. Dead. He would never talk to her again. Never hear her laugh. Never watch her run.

  Ever.

  Ever.

  All of it invaded him, overwhelmed him, plunging its tentacles deep into the tender pink core of his brain and rooting there, refusing to be dislodged.

  Instantly Tin Man was sick. The nausea blotted and coated his throat, locking it shut, bubbling up in a thick bath of black acid. He was sheathed in pain. Shackled by it. His logical mind was swamped by what he was feeling. He was hurled aloft onto a gigantic and terrifying wave of toxic pain, a pain that roared and climbed and then twisted back around again, crashing down on him, smothering him, trapping him inside an endless, edgeless, boundless, all-over agony.

  Tin Man couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. His body felt as if it were splitting into a hundred billion sharp-edged little pieces. He was hollowed out by the pain. Scraped raw by it. He was reeling and he was helpless.

  Violet switched her attention from the Intercept feed—the record of what Tin Man was enduring inside his busy furnace of a brain—to the drone’s real-time recording of the drama in the alley.

  Tin Man was sobbing. Spit foamed over his lips. He was shaking so badly that the slab gun vibrated right out of his hand, falling to the bricks with a sad little clatter.

  Danny kicked it away, far out of Tin Man’s reach. He looked over at the drone that had
dropped and roosted amid the greasy welter of garbage cans. Knowing they were watching him from New Earth, he smiled a crooked half smile. Not a smile of triumph—a smile of relief. He saluted the camera as he silently mouthed the word: Thanks.

  Violet blushed. She felt the warmth rising in her cheeks. There was a small flash of blue in the crook of her left elbow.

  It had all happened in a smattering of seconds.

  * * *

  Reznik grunted.

  “I don’t like that guy,” he muttered.

  Tell me something I don’t know, Violet thought. Reznik did his job—he would save Danny’s life when it needed saving—but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

  “He’s just a big show-off,” Reznik added. “And a selfish jerk.”

  She wasn’t going to argue with him. “We’re just about finished,” she said. “Then we can move on to another sector.”

  “Great. As long as I don’t have to look at Mayhew’s stupid face anymore.”

  The trouble was, of course, that Rez had a right to be resentful. Danny caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people. No question about it.

  While Reznik punched in the resolution codes, Violet kept her eyes on the screen, zeroing in on Danny’s dark, wet face. Her feelings were all mixed up again. The quick rush of joy she’d felt when Danny smiled at her—okay, at both of them—had faded. Now she was back to being mad at him. But her anger, too, was changing just as fast as the joy had. It was dissipating into something else, another feeling. She didn’t want her anger to soften; he had broken rules, risked his life. Sometimes, though, an emotion had a mind of its own.

  Part of her was afraid Danny would never know how she felt about him. Another part was afraid he already did.

  And still another part was afraid, period. Afraid of having experienced the feeling in the first place.

  Because the moment an emotion was born inside her, it wasn’t hers anymore. Well, it was hers—but not exclusively hers. Within the elegant infrastructure of the Intercept, a new entry in her file had just been created. A series of blunt facts had been inscribed upon an already crowded digital tablet:

  CROWLEY, V. V. [VIOLET VERONICA]. Citizen No. 4612-97-8A-QRZ12.7. MOMENT OF RECOGNITION NO. 327 OF INTENSE AFFECTION FOR MAYHEW, D. A. [DANIEL ANDREW]. CITIZEN No. 7414-82-7D-QFP14.9.

  SYMPTOMS: EXCESSIVE EXCRETION OF SWEAT IN PALMS, SHORTNESS OF BREATH, DIFFICULTY FOCUSING ON TASK. HEART RATE INCREASE FLUCTUATING BETWEEN 15 AND 19 PERCENT. BRIEF BUT INTENSE.

  Moment No. 327.

  It was the 327th time she had felt that way about Danny.

  And each time she did, the Intercept created a record of the emotion. The moment was gathered up, time-stamped, sorted by intensity, verified by a match against the accompanying physiological changes also supplied by the chip. It was distributed into a category—love or pain, or hate or fear, or surprise or regret or jealousy or melancholy, or boredom or despair or delight.

  Or it might be one of those intricate blends of emotions. Moments when you were happy and sad, or scared and excited. The new incident was added to the record. Information was piled atop information.

  The Intercept systematically captured and cataloged every flicker of every feeling, every stray inclination or brief fancy or moment of curiosity, every irritation, every disappointment, every passion. As the machinery clicked and shimmied, as its digital apertures opened, the emotions of the world’s population—both worlds, the Old and the New—rushed into its trillions of eager receptors. These emotions might be daily annoyances—exasperation, frustration, mild disappointment—or they might be intense, volcanic feelings that brought about towering, ravaging agony, from love to guilt to grief to the haunting helplessness of remorse.

  Emotions were harvested from person after person after person. It might be seething anger at a friend’s betrayal, or the golden exhilaration of finally understanding quadratic equations, or the blue-hued sadness of a Sunday afternoon. Emotions were routinely ransacked from soul after soul after soul, just after the feeling flared.

  First one feeling

  And then another

  And then another

  And then another …

  Each time an emotion spiked, an electrical signal was generated in the brain. The emotion was inscribed on the chip embedded in the crook of the left elbow. Then the chip transferred a record of that emotion—through a Wi-Fi connection—to the murmuring computers that spread out beneath Protocol Hall and then on through the branching network laid out beneath the streets of New Earth, mile after mile after mile. The Intercept caught the signals one by one by one, like line drives snagged by a trillion-handed shortstop, and archived them.

  And there the emotion waited. Waited for the Intercept to call it forth when it was required. This storehouse was always at the ready. When deployed back into the individual, the returning emotion created another small blue flash in the crook of the left elbow.

  But Violet couldn’t think about that all the time. If she did, she made herself crazy. She got so hyperaware of everything she was feeling, second by second, and of how the Intercept was eavesdropping on her deepest emotions, that she tripped over shoes she’d left on her bedroom floor or forgot to charge her wrist console overnight. She became totally self-conscious. So she tried not to think about it.

  True, when she came to work each day here in Protocol Hall she had to focus on the Intercept. It was a job requirement. When her shift ended, though, she’d close that door in her mind. She’d taught herself how to do that. She couldn’t lock it shut—but she could close it.

  “After a while,” Violet once said to Rez, “you sort of forget about the Intercept.”

  Rez didn’t reply, but Violet knew what he was thinking—because she was thinking it, too:

  Yeah, but the Intercept never, ever forgets about you.

  2

  Danny’s Secret

  “Hey.”

  Violet flinched. She was totally focused on what she was writing and so the voice startled her. When she flinched, her hand jerked and she very nearly dropped her black tablet onto the floor of her workstation.

  It was him.

  A tiny blue flash winked in the crook of her left elbow. God, I hope he didn’t see that. Her sleeve almost covered it, so probably not. Close one.

  “What’s going on?” Danny said. He let his bag slide off his shoulder. He moved closer to Violet. He was standing and she was sitting, so it was even more awkward than usual. A few hours ago she had rescued him from imminent peril; now here he was, as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

  Most of the afternoon workers had already gone home. The people assigned to night shift were still milling around in small groups, enjoying their last few minutes of freedom before they sat down at their computers to monitor the Intercept feeds.

  As dusk fell, Protocol Hall took on a new atmosphere. The same number of people were at work in the vast honeycomb of cubicles, because the Intercept ran twenty-four/seven. But there was a different feel to this glass-walled citadel. Through those walls, the rest of New Earth—its spires rising against the coming dark—was visible. Tomorrow at sunrise its six cities would come alive again, with people making their way to work. Here at Protocol Hall, the sun’s light would touch the glass walls like a magic wand in a fairy tale, anointing row after row after row of the stacked cubicles in which the Intercept was administered. The building quivered ever so slightly as the vast machinery of the Intercept clicked through its endless progressions, whirling and spinning. And watching.

  Seeing Danny’s face when she wasn’t expecting to, Violet needed a moment to readjust. She had to remind herself that this was the real Danny—and not an image on her computer screen. He was here. Right here.

  Something shifted inside her. She didn’t want to identify it, but it was fuzzy and warm. It was also sort of scary.

  And then her anger came slashing back, crowding out the soft things she’d been feeling. She didn’t care what the Intercept did with h
er emotions right now. To hell with the Intercept. To hell with everything.

  Too little time had passed since Violet had monitored Danny’s close brush with death down on Old Earth. He had put her in the terrible position of seeing him almost get pan-fried by a slab gun, and she was furious.

  “You could’ve died.” Her voice was clipped and brittle. “You know that, right? You could’ve taken a direct hit.”

  “But I didn’t.” A hint of a grin. “Here I am—safe and sound.”

  “You got lucky.”

  Danny nodded. “No argument there. You and Rez had my back. Hey—where’s Rez, anyway? That’s why I came by. To thank you guys again. In person this time.”

  He glanced around the compact space, as if Rez might be crouching behind the other chair or hiding under one of the monitors.

  “Don’t know,” Violet said impatiently. Her tone said something else: I’m not his keeper. “He took off when our shift ended.”

  “But you’re still here.”

  “I’ve got some stuff to do.” She didn’t want to tell him what it was, because—well, because it was none of his business. She liked to keep some things all to herself. And the truth was, she was studying Old Earth history, more than what she’d learned in school. She had so many questions about the place where her parents had been born—questions that nobody on New Earth seemed to want to answer. She had pleaded with her father to let her visit Old Earth. He had stared at her a long time before he replied, “Absolutely not,” in a way that let Violet know she’d better not bring it up again.

  She would, of course. But not right away.

  Danny had been born on Old Earth, too. But that had nothing to do with her curiosity about the place. Really, she told herself. It doesn’t.

  “You look exhausted,” she said. He hadn’t changed his clothes yet. He was damp and rumpled-looking, and there was a gray, ashy tinge to his skin. The area around his eyes was smudged with fatigue. He looked tired right down to his bones. And no wonder, Violet thought. The round trip between New Earth and Old Earth was jarring and draining. It took a ferocious toll on the body.