Callsign Cerberus

by Mark Ellis

  As for his father, Kane had seen him only rarely after he had joined the division. Though they were never close, his relationship with his father had turned stiff and coldly formal, as if the man were disappointed in him. Or afraid of him. His father had virtually disappeared from his life once he assumed the mandatory administrator’s post. For all Kane knew, he could have died three years ago, shortly after the last time he had spoken to him.

  He lingered for an hour in the dayroom, then went out into the broad, brightly lighted main corridor. He headed toward the elevator tube that would deposit him at his Enclave. He passed Salvo’s office. The door was open, but the desk was vacant. Kane kept walking, and then turned sharply into the Intel section. Two steps inside, he paused and looked around. His arrival was unnoticed, except by the spy-eye rotating slowly on the ceiling.

  The room was spacious, with vaulted walls. More than a dozen people sat before banks of computers with flashing readouts and indicators. Vid monitor screens displayed incomprehensible images, probably from the alleys of the Pits. The cool semidarkness of the whole place hummed with the subdued beeping of machines and the quiet murmur of comm-techs communicating with other baronies and Magistrates out in the field.

  Kane’s gaze shifted to the left, and he spotted the man he was looking for. He waited until the vid spy-eye lens was no longer focused on the door, then he strode over to Morales and clapped him on the shoulder. “How are you doing?”

  Morales looked up from his deck of computers, hard drives and monitor screens and forced a smile, trying to wipe away the look of boredom on his swart face.

  “Fine,” he said. “Working late, are you?”

  “Just a little. I wonder if you would mind doing a favour for me.”

  Morales suddenly sat up straighter in his chair. When a hard-contact Magistrate asked a support tech for a favour, there was no option but to grant it. No matter how it was worded, a request from a Magistrate was always a command. Kane knew that and how to exploit it.

  Turning his back to the vid camera on the ceiling, he fished the compact disk from his pocket and handed it to Morales. “Put this through a read program, please.”

  Morales eyed the disk warily. Normally computer-time demands came through the duty officer, but the likelihood was that the tech wasn’t inclined to point this out. He inserted the disk into the input port and tapped a few keys on the board. The triangle-and-lines symbol flashed onto the screen, accompanied by the legend, Disk is locked. Access denied. Encryption key required.

  Morales frowned. “Do you have the key?”

  “No,” Kane replied casually. “Just run it through the Syne, why don’t you?”

  Nodding, Morales popped out the disk and plucked a small metal device from a hook beneath his desk. The Mnemosyne, or Syne as commonly called, was a lock decrypter, shaped like an elongated circle divided down the centre by a thread-thin slit. He placed the edge of the disk into the slit and thumbed a stud on the instrument’s surface. It produced a faint, very high-pitched whine.

  After ten seconds, the noise ceased, Morales removed the disk from the decryption device and pushed the disk back into the hard drive. His fingers danced over the keyboard. The monitor screen lit up with the red triangle again, as well as with the words, Disk is locked. Access denied. Encryption key required.

  Both Kane and Morales made sounds of surprise. Morales muttered, “What the fuck? This shouldn’t happen the encryption lock should have been overridden.”

  Kane was only moderately familiar with computers. To him, they were simply sometimes useful machines, and their more arcane workings held little interest for him. However, he knew the Syne was designed to perform only one function—to sidestep security lockouts and make digital memory accessible and available.

  Morales worked the keys again, but the image and the words on the screen remained unchanged.

  “This is something you don’t see every day,” he said, irritated and enthralled at the same time. “Whoever wrote the program knew how to safeguard it against the Syne.”

  “Who would have that knowledge?”

  Morales shrugged. “Nobody I know or ever heard of, that’s for sure. “He paused, chewing on his lower lip. “Want my best guess? Whoever wrote the program either helped to engineer the Syne or had access to the specs.”

  He slid out the disk and handed it back to Kane. “The thing’s useless unless you stumble onto the encryption key. I suggest you take it up to archives. Somebody there might have an idea of how to unlock it.”

  Pocketing the disk, still sounding casual, Kane said, “Thanks. By the way...”

  “Yeah?”

  “This never happened. You never saw me. We never had this conversation. “Kane folded his arms over his chest, allowing Morales the briefest of glimpses of the Sin Eater under his right sleeve.

  The tech’s expression didn’t alter. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about encryption codes. I’m just a key-tapper.”

  “I know,” said Kane with a friendly smile. “That’s why I came to you.”

  He returned to the main hallway and went directly to the elevator. Pushing the appropriate button, he realized there was no point in putting off the inevitable. He had to go home sometime.

  The shaft doors opened upon his Enclave living level. Just outside the shaft was a wrought-iron gate, tall and heavy, with metal hinges that looked like tarnished brass. Kane placed his right hand flat on the small iridescent panel on the front of the gate, where the keyhole should have been. Within the panel, the sensor grid read his handprint, decided he was not a slagger thief or a roamer, and the gate swung open noiselessly.

  The promenade was virtually deserted at this hour. The broad pedestrian avenue was lined with evergreen saplings, giving the recycled air a pleasant fragrance. The trees were illuminated by battery-powered lamps hung on the lower branches.

  Kane passed rockcrete stoops leading up to single-dwelling apartments. Each facade looked the same, with one window facing out on the promenade. In the half-dozen lit windows he glanced into, he saw the same furnishings, the same colour schemes.

  Conformity, standardization, whatever the euphemism, the four-room apartments were essentially interchangeable.

  He often wondered wryly why outrunners and Pit dwellers viewed the Enclaves as some sort of enchanted land, heaven on earth. He supposed they were, if your idea of heaven on earth was a cell block.

  Kane went up the stoop to his flat and opened the door. It was unlocked. None of the doors on any Enclave level had locks. It was a carryover from the Program of Unification, when the Council of Front Royal had decided that privacy bred conspiracy. The council had further decreed that since everyone had the same possessions as everyone else, there was no need to steal, especially among the elite. The desire for privacy was viewed not just as gauche, but as an expression of deviant thinking. Kane was pretty sure, though, that the Pit residents had locks on their doors.

  Once inside, Kane went to his cabinet and found his bottle of vintage wine. He uncapped it and took a long swallow. Grant, who had found it during a Pit sweep the year before, had given it to him as a gift. He would be annoyed with him for treating the rare liquor like common trash-hatch hooch. It was curious that the preNuke delicacy called Ripple had survived so many years and still retained its full-bodied flavour. The old vintners had certainly known their craft.

  He carried it over to his sagging couch and flopped down, looking out through the three tall windows on the far wall at the lights glittering on the surface of the Administrative Monolith. From his pocket, he took out the compact disk and held it in his palm. Morales had suggested he take it to the Historical Division, but since this wasn’t an official line of inquiry, he would be risking having his request channelled to Salvo for confirmation.

  He tipped the bottle up and took a pull, felt the thick, fruity
liquid scorch a path into his stomach. He considered swallowing a sedative capsule along with it so he could reverse his anxiety and get some sleep. But the tranquilizers often made him feel as if he were walking underwater, and such sluggishness of mind and reflexes was anathema to a Magistrate.

  Glancing around at his few paltry personal possessions, he realized that he had absolutely nothing anyone would want, except maybe the bottle of wine. It wasn’t much, but it was all he was ever likely to have. Most of his property had been inherited from his grandfather and father. Since his apartment was more or less the Kane ancestral home, it should have been filled with relics of earlier generations.

  But it wasn’t. A couple of lamps, a chair, a table, a sofa, the futon in the bedroom, a few antique books wrapped in plastic, a couple of ancient muzzle loaders confiscated from traders nearly thirty years ago, and a pix of himself standing between his father and mother.

  He looked at the image of the cocky, eager kid he used to be. He was smiling in the picture. His father and mother weren’t. His dad had the same dark hair and high-planed features, but he looked brooding and unhappy. His mother looked the same.

  Kane hadn’t seen either of his parents in years. His mother had vanished from his life right after he entered the division. Her disappearance wasn’t unusual. Though matrimony and child producing were considered the supreme social responsibility by the barons, it was also considered only a temporary arrangement.

  Children were a necessity for the continuation of society, but only those passing stringent tests were allowed to bear them. Genetics, moral values and social standing were the most important criteria. Generally, a man and a woman were bound together for a length of time stipulated in a contract. Once the child entered a training regimen of one of the barony divisions, the parents were required to separate, particularly in the case of male children recruited by the Magistrates. So, his mother had removed herself. She probably realized there was a limit to the pointlessness she could endure of being a parent in absentia.

  It was all pointless, really.

  Who was she? Was the entire purpose of her life to give birth to him? After he entered the division, her duties discharged, the rest of her life must have been one long, total anti-climax.

  God knew he tried to see a point and adjust his life in its direction. During his first, formative years at the division, he believed in the Unity through Action doctrine, believed that humans were too intrinsically destructive to be allowed free will and free rein.

  The ruined planet was mute testimony to that philosophy, and he hadn’t argued with it. Who in his right mind could?

  He agreed that the wicked old preNuke world of smouldering desperation and unchecked chaos was inferior in every way to the baronial society. Medical advances kept people from dying early from Nukeday-induced toxins, but the world was still underpopulated. Babies needed to be born, but only the right kind of babies. Like him and everybody else in the Enclaves.

  That was the theory. Deep inside of himself, nearly buried by the strictures of duty, was the notion that there was something very wrong with the theory, at least in practice.

  The contradiction in the theory was that all of the preNuke advances in science, all of the achievements, meant absolutely nothing. They were worthless. Yet those same preNuke achievements had been the building blocks of the Program of Unification. All that Unity through Action had accomplished was simple control—establishing a status, then a quo, and then a method of maintaining it.

  He put the bottle on the floor, noting absently it showed more clear glass than dark wine. Balancing the disk on his fist, he tried flipping it with his thumb, as if it were a coin. Instead, it clattered to the floor and rolled across it on its edge. When he sat up to retrieve it, he felt a not unpleasant wave of dizziness. He plucked the disk from the floor. The mystery it represented gnawed at his peace of mind, like the wine gnawed at his equilibrium. He wondered how many minds throughout history had been unbalanced by drinking the stuff.

  When he thought of history, he thought of the archives. And he thought of a woman he had seen several months before on the promenade. He had learned she was a high-ranking archivist and she lived on this Enclave level. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought her name was Baptist or something.

  Kane unsuccessfully swallowed a belch and eyed the disk, held between thumb and forefinger.

  Yeah, Baptist or something.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BRIGID BAPTISTE stepped out of the tiny shower stall and used a towel to dry her mounds of red-gold hair. There was nothing she could do to keep it from reverting to its naturally wavy state. Wearing it pinned up all day tended to give her a headache, and once a co-worker had suggested she cut it short.

  She had pretended to consider the notion, while privately scoffing at the unimaginative suggestion. Her hair, as thick and as heavy as it might be, was her only legacy from her mother.

  Rather than don the bodysuit with the small rainbow-striped insignia of the Historical Division on its breast, she donned a towel and walked into her private cubicle adjoining the bedroom. The cubicle had once been a closet, but she had converted it into a crowded, miniature version of her work area in the division. There was just enough space in the small box of a room for her desk, desktop display and a chair.

  The computer was a cast-off DDC model, one that had been re-manufactured several times. The older the DDCs became, the less able they were to sustain their workloads. Brigid picked this one up out of a trash hatch and spent weeks repairing it.

  Technically, what she’d done was illegal, but archivists were allowed a certain leeway in the pursuit of their professions. Besides, she was fairly certain the machine had been planted deliberately by a Preservationist for her to find and salvage.

  She sat down at the machine, turned it on and put on her badge of office, a pair of wire-framed, rectangular-lensed spectacles. Unlike many archivists, the eyeglasses were not of historical importance to her, but a necessity. Years of inputting preNuke data and documents, reading screens and staring at columns of tiny type had resulted in a minor vision problem.

  Baronial manufacturing hadn’t gotten around to mass-producing contact lenses, and she doubted they ever would. The barons frowned on them as expressions of human vanity, and therefore considered them superfluous.

  While the machine ticked through its warm-up sequence, Brigid closed her eyes and regulated her breathing, focusing her mind on the documents she had seen that day.

  Almost everyone who worked in one of the divisions kept secrets, whether they were infractions of the law, unrealized ambitions or deviant sexual predilections. Brigid Baptiste’s secret was more arcane than petty crimes or manipulating the system for personal aggrandizement.

  Her secret was the ability to produce eidetic images. Centuries ago, it had been called a photographic memory. She could, after viewing an object or scanning a document, retain exceptionally vivid and detailed visual memories.

  When she was growing up, she feared she was a mutant, but she later learned that the ability was relatively common among children and usually disappeared by adolescence. It was supposedly very rare among adults.

  Brigid was one of the exceptions, and she often suspected her eidetic memory was the primary reason she had been covertly contacted by the Preservationists. But they could not have known of her ability, except through information provided by her mother. Brigid hadn’t seen her in thirteen years, yet she found comforting the possibility that her mother was somehow associated with the Preservationists.

  Now twenty-seven, Brigid trained for ten years to be an archivist, and for the past six had worked as one. Despite the common misconception, archivists were not bookish, bespectacled pedants. They were primarily data-entry techs, albeit ones with high-security clearances. Midgrade senior archivists like her were editors.

  A vast amount of preNuke historical information
had survived the Nukeday, particularly documents stored in underground vaults. Tons of it, in fact, everything from novels to encyclopaedias, to magazines printed on coated stock that survived just about anything. Much more data was digitized, stored on computer diskettes, usually government documents.

  Even though she was a fairly senior archivist, she wasn’t among the highest. Those in the upper echelons, holding “X” clearances, were responsible for viewing, editing or suppressing the most-sensitive material. Still, she had glimpsed enough to know there were bits and bytes of information that were still classified, even all this time after the nuking.

  Her primary duty wasn’t to record preNuke history, but to revise, rewrite and often times completely disguise it. The political causes leading to the Nukeday were well-known. They were major parts of the dogma, the doctrine, the articles of faith, and they had to be accurately recorded for posterity.

  In the mid-21st century, scheming Russians detonated a nuclear device in their embassy in Washington, D.C., even while they negotiated for peace. American retaliation had been swift and total which triggered an atomic domino effect. Supposedly, every nuclear warhead in every arsenal in every nation was used that day. The world came very close to transforming into a smouldering, lifeless cinder spinning darkly in space.

  People were responsible. Russians, Americans, Asians. People had put irresponsible individuals into positions of responsibility, so ergo, the responsibility for the Nukeday was the responsibility of people. Humanity as a whole.

  Brigid had believed that, of course. For many years, she had never questioned it. Humankind had been judged guilty, and the sentence carried out forthwith. As she rose up the ranks, promoted mainly through attrition, she was allowed greater access to secret records. Though these were heavily edited, she came across references to something called the Conception Infinitis, to devices called portals, to a place called the Anthill Complex and to projects bearing the code names of Chronoscope and Callsign Cerberus, which hinted at phenomena termed “parallax points”, “probability wave dysfunctions” and “alternate event horizons.”