The Flicker Men

by Ted Kosmatka

  “Here, help me break this.”

  She lay the board across a nearby cinder block. “You’re heavier,” she said, motioning at the board. I stepped onto the wood, and it broke with a loud crack. She grabbed the longer piece.

  “Again,” she said. So I did.

  I thought about running.

  I might have been faster than her. I outweighed her by sixty pounds, so I was probably stronger. Other than the knife, she didn’t seem to be armed. A gun was hard to conceal without a bulge of some kind, but it wasn’t impossible. She could have had a derringer strapped to her calf beneath her loose jeans. I let my eyes wander over the surrounding landscape. I saw tall, swaying grass and bushes and the upward slope of a hill, leading up into trees. Bombed-out buildings all around. In the distance, at the top of the hill, I saw a chain-link fence that might have once been topped with barbed wire but now only trailed dangling crimson strands—either snipped intentionally long ago or rusted through and fallen. Only the brackets at the top of the fence stood as a reminder that the protective walls of the citadel had once had teeth. I could make it to the fence, and then up and over, and she’d likely never catch me. Not unless she was fast. Not unless she was armed. Not unless she was willing to kill me.

  Her shouts might rouse her friend, I knew, but he was still thirty yards away, inside a building, back at the dying fire. So I’d have a head start.

  She looked at me as if she knew what I was thinking.

  “A mile of woods that way,” she said. She pointed to the fence. “A big hill and a drop, and then you’d come out on the tide flats. If the tide is in, you’d hit the canal and cold water. Maybe some current—enough to suck you out to sea—or maybe not. If you’re lucky, and the tide isn’t in, you’d hit a mudflat, three quarters of a mile—a dangerous crossing but doable—and then beyond that a rise and woods and then a town at the top. Roads. A dock. Civilization.”

  It wasn’t a dare. Not even that.

  Because the math had an escapable calculus. If I did get free from them, then what?

  Sailors have died abandoning ships they should have stayed on.

  She looked at me. “So?”

  I gave a last, lingering look at the fence and the woods. “Not today,” I said.

  * * *

  We gathered wood until our arms were full, and then we started back. She took a different path through the ruins. “This place used to be a smeltery,” she said. “God knows how long ago. Then it was a gasworks for three decades. Then a storage lot for ingots. Then empty. Maybe someday it’ll be bulldozed and turned into condos. It’s amazing how something can be built for one purpose and then transform into something else.” We ducked as we passed through another hole in the wall. This building was smaller but empty as the rest.

  “Did you guys put these holes in?”

  “Tactical retreat is what Hennig calls it. The holes give us the short path if we need it. As long as we stay out of the line of sight, then whatever’s following might miss the holes and have to take the long way around.”

  “And if you can’t stay out of sight?”

  “Then we better be faster.”

  “Faster than what, exactly?”

  “Same thing everyone needs to be faster than,” she said. “What’s coming for you.”

  We walked across a pile of corrugated steel roofing that clattered under our feet. I lost my balance on the slick tin but caught myself.

  “We call these places hides,” she said. “This one is better than most. Private and out of the way. The cops patrol the exterior sometimes, but they never come inside. Keeping the bums and vagrants away is the hardest part. They wander in. Hennig makes them go away.”

  “I bet he does.”

  “Not that kind of away. Nothing permanent. He’s not a bad guy.”

  “Easy for you to say. You didn’t get punched in the face.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t even understand what you don’t understand.”

  “Then enlighten me.” My arms had begun to ache from carrying the wood.

  “That’ll happen soon enough.”

  Something about the way she said it made me uneasy. I took a guess. “Vickers,” I said. “When?”

  “Oh, Vickers is already here.” She stopped.

  We were outside the building where we’d spent the night. I realized then what the walk might have been about, besides the wood. If Vickers had second thoughts about what to do with me, then they’d be inside waiting. No need to discuss it with me standing there.

  Mercy cocked her head toward the hole in the wall. “After you,” she said.

  Either way, I didn’t have much choice. I walked toward the hole, bent, and stepped through to the other side. She followed close behind. Maybe too close.

  My vision took a moment to adjust.

  We were in at the edge of the encampment. I saw the trailer and the fire. I looked for Hennig, but he was nowhere to be seen. Hiding behind the cargo hold, waiting to pounce? Or sent away?

  I stepped farther in. The camp was deserted.

  But I didn’t have to wait long.

  A moment later, I heard voices approaching from the other room. Hennig came through the doorway first, followed by Vickers. Or who I assumed must have been Vickers.

  She was still partially in shadow. Tall, with short brown hair. She wore dark slacks, and a long sleeve button-up. White collar. Gold bracelet on her left wrist. By her clothes, she might have just stepped out of a boardroom somewhere or been impaneled on a grand jury. Whoever she was, she wasn’t dressed like a person hiding in the woods.

  Because there was nothing else for it, I walked around to the other side of the fire and dumped my cache of wood on the floor. The stranger glanced over at me as she approached the fire, taking note of my presence for the first time. Her pale green eyes lifted to my face.

  And it was then that I recognized her.

  It was the woman from Brighton’s penthouse.

  Confused, I glanced at Mercy. But she offered no explanation.

  The new woman appraised me, face expressionless. She could have been angry, or disappointed, or just evaluating.

  Since I wasn’t sure what to say, I said nothing. Just let her eyes move over me while she worked over whatever decision she was coming to. Or maybe she’d made the decision already, and she was just coming around to the way she’d let me know. Mercy walked around the fire and sat at the open mouth of the trailer.

  “We were never formally introduced,” the woman said. She stuck out her hand. “My name is Vickers.” I took a step forward and shook. The hand was delicate, long-fingered.

  “Eric Argus,” I said.

  Vickers turned toward Mercy. “Hennig didn’t do that to his face, did he?”

  “Some of it,” she said.

  Vickers looked at me. “Walk with me,” she said. “We have a lot to discuss.”

  36

  “A long time ago, there was a woman who crunched corporate budgets and filled in spreadsheets and made careful, prudent assessments of risk versus gain; then something terrible happened.”

  “And what was that?” I asked. We were outside the building, walking an old roadway. Here tire tracks beat twin paths through the tall grass that carpeted the landscape.

  “She found that all her assessments were wrong. The world was more dangerous than she’d realized.”

  We came to a particularly deep rut in our path and avoided it by stepping over the strip of grass and into the other track. Above us, the sun angled down through great upwellings of white, cauliflorous cloud. A postcard day. “Accurate assessments can only be made when one has all the information,” she continued.

  “And you lacked that information, is that where this is going?”

  “We all lack it to some extent. I’ve always been a cautious person, but this world has turned me into something I never thought I’d be.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A gambler.”

  “So that’s wh
y I’m here,” I said. “A gamble.”

  She nodded. “In some ways.” She opened her suit jacket while we walked, and she pulled out two glossy four-by-six photos. She handed them to me. “I know you’ve met Brighton, but is there a second man in this photo who looks familiar?”

  I recognized him immediately. “Boaz,” I said.

  “When did you first meet them?”

  “At a conference a few weeks back.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “That night? Swords, mostly, as I recall.” I studied the photos in my hand. They looked like security camera footage. Brighton was with a group of men walking into a building. An old bank or an office building of some kind. Boaz was at his side, a phalanx of businessmen striding toward or away from some high-powered corporate meeting.

  “Ah, the sword talk. He really must have liked you.”

  I handed the photos back. “I didn’t get that impression.”

  “These are a few years old.” She slid the glossy prints back into the inside pocket of her suit jacket. “They’re more careful now. It’s harder to get close to them.”

  “You seem to manage,” I said. I thought about what she’d said. Corporate budgets. Spreadsheets. “You work for them.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” she said. “More specifically, I work for the foundation. I only see them occasionally at the offices, but I have no illusions. All the directives are handed down directly by them. I’m a good little corporate drone, or was, anyway. They hire straight from the Ivy Leagues mostly, though they’ll pull talent where they find it. Certain kinds of minds, good at synthesizing data from a wide range of sources. It’s a specialized talent, but I’m better at it than even they know. Better than they ever expected, and that’s what has led us to this place. I was a little too good at my job.”

  “So I take you’ve quit?”

  “You don’t quit,” she smiled. “No one who works for the foundation ever quits. You run,” she said. “You close out your bank accounts, and you run, and then they catch you. That’s how this goes. How it always goes.”

  “So there have been others.”

  She nodded. “Just a few that I’ve found evidence of over the years. They demand loyalty, but if they can’t get that, they’ll settle for silence. The permanent kind.”

  “If it always goes that way, then why run at all? Why not stay and play the good corporate drone?”

  “Because I learned something the others didn’t. I learned who they really are.” She stopped in the trail and looked at me. “The foundation is where I first saw your name.”

  “Because of the experiment.”

  She shook her head. “It goes back further.” She turned away from me and continued walking. “I was a part of the foundation’s inquiry and evaluation team, running the groundwork for the Discovery Prize, and there was a lot of research that we watched. A complex weighting system, trying to evaluate whose work deserved special attention. There are always hundreds of projects on the list. Thousands of names. I thought at first that we were trying to find those who were worthy, but over time I realized something different.”

  “And what was that?”

  “The foundation’s stated goals were a lie. We weren’t trying to reward achievement. We were trying to predict it.”

  “Predict it?”

  “Yes.”

  “For what purpose?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she turned her face toward the trail and changed the subject. “When Brighton talked to you at his penthouse, what did he speak about?”

  “A lot of what he said didn’t make sense,” I said.

  “Try me.”

  “He talked about waves. The anthropic principle. Gabriel’s horn.”

  “Ah, the horn,” she said. “He does have a penchant for the classical. Was there anything else?”

  I tried to recall. The elevator flashed to mind. The feel of the metal on my face. I shook it off. “Something called the aberis or abrex.”

  “The eberaxi.”

  “Yeah. That was the word.”

  “So then it exists after all. What did he say about it?”

  And here it was. The gamble. The point where I would pay off or go bust. I saw it in her eyes, the way she waited for the answer. I stopped in my tracks. Vickers took two more steps before she realized that she was walking alone.

  She turned and looked at me. There is a moment in any negotiation when you have to draw a line in the sand. This was mine. Vickers was smart enough to see that. Negotiation is about give-and-take. It was my turn to ask questions. Her face was passive, waiting for me to speak.

  “Why does Brighton want me dead?” I asked. “Why did he kill my friend?”

  Her face didn’t change, but her eyes grew weary—the eyes of a defeated general. “The world has its secrets,” she said. “And those who want them kept. Your box tells a story that shouldn’t have been told.”

  I thought of Satvik. Minimizing it. Digitizing it. Turning it into a product. I thought of him wrapped up in a tarp.

  “No,” I said. “There’s more than that. The paper is already published. Brighton talked about the ones who can’t collapse the wave. He called them the fated.”

  “A name as good as any.”

  “What did he mean?”

  “You’re the physicist,” she said. “What do you think he meant?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then it’s because you’re looking at it backward. They’re not the mystery, after all.”

  It was something in her expression. The way she looked at me, as if I had only to consider the obvious. “You mean, we’re the mystery.”

  She smiled. “Of course.”

  It was always there, that incongruity. Free will in a determinant universe. Because the math was dead serious. It was only in us that it failed. The mystery wasn’t those who couldn’t collapse the waves. The mystery was those who could.

  “Consciousness itself,” she said. “That has always been the mystery, hasn’t it?”

  “And what about the fated? Who are they?”

  “Think of them as the connective tissue of the world,” she said. “They work and raise families. They vote in countries that vote and riot in places that riot. They are behind coups or lose their heads to coups or swing close elections. They are a silent minority, functioning within a complex set of parameters. They stabilize the social order, so that societies can grow and flourish.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The anthropic principle requires the universe be just so to produce life, but let’s extend that further. Must it not be just so to produce culture? Certain roles all in proportion. The fated help guide things just so.”

  “They have intent, you mean.”

  She shook her head. “No, they can’t intend anything. Their behavior is prefigured, they can only do.”

  “Toward what end?”

  “Their influence aids civilization. Consider them the grease that keeps the wheels of societies turning. Without the grease, metal grinds against metal. The apparatus seizes. Melts down. The great engine stops turning. But the fated don’t invent anything. They can’t create. For that, people like you are required.”

  “Required by who?”

  She blinked. “By the world, of course. That first time you met Brighton, you ate a meal with him.”

  It took me a moment. My own gears ground against themselves. “Dinner, yes.”

  She turned slowly and started walking again. I realized that she expected me to follow, so I kept close behind on her right. Her shoes made small imprints in the soft soil. She glanced toward me. “What must that have been like to sit across a table like that? I never ate with the man. We’ve spoken only about business. Even before I learned what he was, I sensed there was something terrible in him. Philosophers write that evil exists so that good might reveal itself.” She looked at me. “Do you think that’s true?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  �
�It’s all written down, if you know where to look. Little hints in the documentation, and then it all suddenly makes sense. Always there are different sides. Pick any religion, and you’ll find warriors in the oldest stories. The names don’t matter. I was never a believer, so imagine my surprise when I learned that all the old stories are true.”

  Nothing would surprise me, I realized. Not anymore. “And Brighton is one of these warriors? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes.” Her green eyes were flat and expressionless. “One of the oldest.”

  “What does he want?”

  “What their kind have always wanted. To halt advancement. To impede progression. To delay the advent of post-Malthusian growth. They sow chaos. They are an enemy of the world. Their goal, quite simply, is to stop us from achieving the next level of societal development.”

  It sounded insane. The kind of paranoid delusion made for little white rooms.

  “The opposite of the fated, you mean?”

  She waved that off. “No. The fated are just a tool of the world and, like any tool, can be broken. Mere pawns in the game. No, Brighton and his kind are the opposite of what you are—the ones who push things forward. They’re the ones who hold things back. They’re enemies of civilization itself.”

  “You said, ‘his kind.’ Mercy used those words, too.”

  She looked at me closely. “They’ve used different names in different languages.”

  “And you? How do you name them?”

  Her face was solemn. “The ones who’ve seen them in action all use the same name. We call them the flicker men.”

  I stared at her. A name I’d heard before. A name from a letter.

  “Do you know how crazy this sounds?”

  “Even after everything you’ve seen?”

  “But why? None of this makes sense. These flicker men … even if they are what you say, what possible motives could they have?”

  “You doubt me. That’s good. It’s the scientist in you, demanding evidence.” At that moment, we came to a crossroads in the trail and a fresh tread pattern in the mud. This trail was the way in and out of the facility. Thirty years ago, this was probably a road, with a neat, white dotted line. Now it was layered over with dirt and grass—the asphalt broken up and buried. She led me down the track to the right. “Tell me what you know about Brighton,” she said.