Those That Wake 02: What We Become

by Jesse Karp

  “Who was that I was with?”

  He shook his head.

  “Unidentifiable. He never turned to the camera. I assumed it was your boyfriend, Josh.”

  “No. No, that wasn’t Josh.”

  He was looking at her queerly now, starting to be convinced by her confusion. Quite despite himself, no doubt.

  “Where was that taken?” Laura looked at him, not bothering to mask her desperation anymore.

  “Moynihan Station, in New York. June of last year, as I said.”

  “New York. I haven’t been to New York since I was, like, fifteen.”

  He didn’t bother with a response. The evidence spoke for itself.

  “How did you get that?” Laura pushed on.

  “I was—” He caught himself, looking up and down the hospital hallway, dropping his voice precipitously. “I was scanning for mention of the word Librarian in certain contexts, in certain locations. This was the only one I turned up of any use.”

  “Wait,” Laura shook herself from her own immediate dilemma for an instant. “You were scanning every camera in New York City?”

  “Not every one, of course,” he said, clearly exasperated at the idea. “Like I said, in certain areas.”

  “How do you do something like that?”

  “I wrote a word- and tone-recognition program, context algorithms, patched into city networks with it.” He waved it away as if it were nothing. “Believe me, that was not the hard part. I was scanning for more than a year before my software picked this up. Unfortunately, surveillance cameras in places as large as Moynihan Station are strategically placed. That was all I got. The hard part was finding you. I ran your face through all sorts of identification apps. Your likeness was on record; you were in certain systems.” He recited her parents’ names, her address in Stony Brook, her friends’ names, her high school GPA, either from obsessive memory or because it was scrolling across the lenses grafted to his eyes. “But the records were static, ignored, as though they were made-up entries for a person who didn’t really exist. When I sent out inquiries, no one even knew who Laura Westlake was. You’re going to have to explain to me exactly how you accomplished that.”

  But looking at her suddenly trembling chin, her swimming eyes, it was plain that she would be explaining nothing of the sort.

  “Until,” he continued mercifully, though his tone was still quiet and hard, “suddenly, you did exist. Your records began to update normally. People knew who you were, interacted with you. Four months ago. Now, here we are.” He looked at her expectantly now. He had provided everything he could. It was her turn.

  The questions sped around her in such a violent whirlwind, she didn’t even know how to reach her hand in and pluck one out. So she went in another direction.

  “All right, Mrs. Roosevelt, who are you really?” she asked. “How do you do all this? And what do you want with the Librarian?”

  His expression fell into deep distaste. A scowl looked disturbingly natural on his young face. But given all that, he was clearly beyond arguing now.

  “Fine,” he said, acid anger burning his words. “But not here.”

  They were in her car again, sitting beside another field, not far from the first one. He had insisted on an open area with nothing and no one in sight.

  “You know,” he said, when they had finally found a spot that satisfied him, “you might consider a cellpatch. It would save a great deal of time and concern for security.”

  Is that where we are now? Laura wondered. Is it really such a burden to have to simply speak now?

  “My name,” he said, his eyes sliding back and forth at the open fields around them, “is Aaron Argaven.” His eyes fell on her. They were scarcely two feet from her own now, and she couldn’t help but study their flat, gray surface for hints of the machinery that infested them. But they were clean, almost flawless, like the eyes of a little baby. He was studying her back, as though by uttering his name he had offered a revelation of great enormity. “Argaven,” he repeated it.

  “Okay,” she said, trying to accommodate his expectations.

  “You don’t know the name?”

  “Uh, I guess it sounds sort of familiar.”

  “‘I guess it sounds sort of familiar,’” he actually mimicked her in a mock, singsong voice. The last time she could remember that happening she had been in the school playground in pigtails with a jump rope hanging from her tiny hand. “As in Alan Argaven.” He stopped again and the silence stretched out. Still nothing. “The cofounder of Intellitech.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Right.” She had, of course, heard the name before. Who hadn’t? But there was, in her defense, a lot on her mind.

  “Yes, he was only the CEO of the most influential social technology development company on the planet.”

  “I get the point. Could you move along, please?”

  He expelled a gust of air and shook his head before continuing.

  “I take it, then, that you’re not familiar with the recent decline of Intellitech’s fortunes?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “I won’t bother you with the statistics of Intellitech’s record on research and development in multiple areas of social data collection and tech development that revolutionized everything from medicine to communication. I mean, revolutionized on an unprecedented level. Like the global and unified integration of cell technology. The algorithms for the collection and analysis of data that modern surveillance and intelligence communities use to keep the country safe. I won’t bother you with all that. Except to say that, even with that track record, with its stock at a fifteen-year high, and with no indication of decline from any external source whatsoever, everything crashed. Intellitech was on the verge of bankruptcy in a matter of five months.”

  Of course she knew that. Its implications on a variety of levels were still being discussed in many of her classes. But the whys were subsumed by the what-nows, and the hurried theoretical explanations given by professors were admittedly not of much interest to Laura, anyway.

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Hello?” he said sharply. “That’s the damn point.” His anger was back in full flourish; whatever softness he’d acquired from watching Laura’s emotions teeter wildly was swept away. Little wonder, Laura realized. He was not talking about the collapse of a company. He was talking about the destruction of his family. “No one knows why. There are all sorts of theories: market instability, improper budgetary oversight, conspiracies of every sort ranging from a union of threatened foreign cartels to pure fantasies like the whim of the Old Man. But it’s all unfounded conjecture. Anyone in a position to really know, all the people in power positions at the company at the time, are silent. They can’t be made to talk, or they’re not around to talk. Which means one thing, obviously.”

  Laura nodded, trying to give the sense that she found it obvious as well, despite having no figment of a guess what he was talking about.

  “An internal matter.” He threw it at her as he would the most rudimentary lesson to a dim child. “Something happened within the structure of the company, and it was so huge, it blew everything apart.”

  “Could it have been that huge, and no one knows anything about it?”

  “Are you joking? What sort of world do you live in? Corporations are turning the fate of the world on a dime every day. Even you must have a sense that that’s happening. But you don’t know how, exactly. No one does. That’s the essence of modern life. Decisions made behind closed doors shape modern existence.”

  Yes, Laura knew that to be true instinctively. And while it was theoretically chilling, sickening, it was so elemental a fact of life that it failed to stir any actual ire.

  “Well,” she said, “wouldn’t your father know about it?” And her stomach dropped out. His father. She remembered it now. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, her eyes stinging with sympathy for him. Aaron’s eyes, however, remained implacable.

  “I don’t want your sorrow. I wan
t answers.”

  “I know. I’m trying.”

  “Are you? Do you know what trying is? When the company collapsed, my father ranted for months, until, finally, he was a pathetic wreck, locked in his room, gibbering in the dark. Until he didn’t even have the strength or courage to go on with that anymore. So ‘trying,’ as you put it, is piecing together his babbling nonsense after he was gone and using it to hunt down his ghosts. I pieced it together. I constructed my programs; I cut into the systems I needed. How much help do you think I had with all that? Was anyone else in my family able? Were any of my father’s associates willing to even speak to me? What do you think?”

  He was raging now. His face was red, and his breath was coming short.

  “Well, it took a year, but I found you. I enrolled myself in this liberal cesspool of a college just to get close to you. That’s trying. And guess what? Now that I’m here, I still . . . have . . . nothing!”

  She stared at him, the car filled with his short gasps. She was pressed against the door behind her, watching him. A year just to find her. He was writing programs, inventing them from the sound of it, before that. Had he been twelve when he did that? Eleven? And officially enrolled in college, one that was apparently well beneath him, at fourteen? Putting aside that his IQ was clearly off the charts, he had spent two years of his childhood devoted to determining why his father had killed himself? Laura suddenly found it impossible to hate him. Pity him, yes. Fear him, surely. But her anger for him had evaporated.

  “All right, Aaron. All right. Tell me, how does the Librarian figure into this?”

  He looked up, his chest still laboring, although now it looked as though his energy was devoted to holding back tears. He was just too exhausted to resist her anymore.

  “Of the many things my father let loose in his last few days, the one that preoccupied him the most was this Librarian. From what I could figure, the Librarian had once worked for him, was an employee of Intellitech a long time ago. But he developed a social algorithm called the Global Dynamic, a kind of a theory of human interaction that could predict business and cultural developments on a massive scale. It had the potential to revolutionize economics, the entire political-industrial landscape. He had developed it, but he wouldn’t share it.” Aaron shook his head in frustration. “Something like that. This is all from my father’s disjointed ramblings. Intellitech’s records of this Librarian, his exact position, the time he was employed, even his name, were all expunged. But from what I reconstructed of my father’s logic, what happened to Intellitech at the end is pent up with this Librarian’s theory and whatever it let loose.”

  Laura could see what the Librarian meant to Aaron, both a traumatized boy and a terrifyingly competent adult. In examining his pain, Laura’s own whirlwind had quieted somewhat. Enough, at any rate, to see what the Librarian could mean for her.

  “Aaron,” she said, her voice soft and calm. “Something’s happened to me. I’m missing a part of myself. Not just the memory of that conversation you have recorded, but that entire part of my life. Something took it out of me and put something else in its place. I remember finishing high school, saying goodbye to my friends, spending a summer with my parents before coming to college; things that, according to you, couldn’t have happened. And you’re right. They couldn’t have. They didn’t. I know it.” She looked out at the open field around them, found it suddenly shadowed by something enormous, something that was hovering over her entire life that she was only now beginning to see. “I don’t remember this Librarian, but I think he must know what happened to me, as well as to your family. We’re going to go together, and we’re going to find him.”

  “And,” Aaron said in that voice that made his youth seem to disappear and animated his voice with something dangerous, “we’re going to make him tell us the truth.”

  Lazarus

  MAL SET HIS CHIN ON his hand and watched the city pass through the darkened window of Remak’s—Alan Silven’s—limo. The city outside was a thing of gleaming silver and glass. Mal had seen it change around him, from the gray, lifeless place that had bred hopelessness into a living, breathing enemy. Even so, he could hardly believe it was the same city.

  The crowds milled, bursting with a harried energy they lacked when their heads had been infected with that Idea. But the energy was all directed back at themselves, used for their own betterment. They were so focused on themselves that the city had wrapped itself in silver, hiding the rusted innards of a tortured and decrepit machine. It was all surface now, because that was as far as people were willing to look.

  As if to offer evidence of its own guilt, the city streets opened up before the limousine as it entered the eastern edge of the island: Lazarus Heights. The dome—once a carapace of gray metal, the wire exo-frame making it appear as a hideous bug crawling over the city streets—was now reflecting the gleaming city around it, its surface a mirrored silver. Spearing up at five points along the eastern edge of the dome were the spikes of the Lazarus Towers, which were connected to one another by networks of walkways, enclosed bridges that were the highways of the city’s upper echelon of corporate go-getters. Only the top tier of society, the most influential, the powers that ran the city from behind façades of cash and oil and technology, could afford a place in these exclusive buildings. An average citizen could not enter the towers, not even approach their doorways, without the gaze of the Metropolitan Counterterrorism Task Force’s luminous green goggles falling on them forbiddingly.

  Meanwhile, below the spires, people teemed around the dome, tourists lining up for blocks to get in, to see from behind the protective screens the ruined debris that had left a mark on the city. They swallowed the awed lumps in their throats, blinked back tears at what the city had faced, never doubting that it had recovered. How, after all, could a city that gleamed in the rising sun ever have forgotten its own humanity?

  In the distance, beyond the towers, the hazy rainbow swell of colors glowed from the East River, both poisoned and beautified by the deadly chemicals that had infected its depths.

  “I need to know what the Old Man wants,” Remak said, as the limo pulled up a side street, out of sight of the dome and the towers. “If he knows about the neuropleth, how he plans to use it. Only with that information can I work to stop him.”

  Mal turned his somber eyes on the clean, polished face whose own eyes were so keen with intellectual hunger. Not for the first time, Mal thought that Remak’s obsession was most of all that of a scientist, desperate for the facts to tally his theories.

  “The last time I was there,” Mal said, “they were carrying me in. I don’t know what kind of security they have.”

  “MCT on the outside,” Remak said. Of course, he had this cataloged and ready to go for God only knew how long. “Inside it’s a standard level-twelve tech array: cameras, sonics, cycling digital chip scans, thermographics. Internal security is handled by a private firm: Lazarus Services; exclusively ex-military and ex-intelligence personnel. But above, at the top of the central tower, it’s the Old Man’s private suites. Just him, Kliest, and the two bodyguards. He won’t allow anyone else in proximity—doesn’t even allow them to carry guns around him.” Remak spoke like he was briefing a black-ops specialist, not a battered teenager pressed into service and in way over his head. “You’ll enter through the garage facing the water. Get to the elevators and go up as high as you can. I’ll be assisting: I can jump from guard to guard, control them and the security systems. I’ll get you up as high as possible, get you to the staircase or elevator that will take you closest to the top.

  “This is enemy territory, Mal. I don’t have anyone else to ask. By the time you’re within sight of the tower entrance, I’ll be out of Silven and into the guards, ready to assist you. It’s enemy territory, but you’re not alone, Mal. You’re not alone.”

  Mal had always been on his own, and he knew it. Nothing was changing now. Remak reached Silven’s well-manicured hand out in an awkward show of camar
aderie.

  Before it found Mal’s shoulder, Mal’s hand snapped out and grabbed the wrist hard enough to make the eyes wince.

  “We’re not friends, Remak,” he said in a low, even voice. “You’re holding Laura over me, so I’m doing what you asked. That’s all.” He let go of the wrist but held the calculating gaze for a moment longer. Then he opened the door and stepped out into enemy territory.

  The stimulant the doctor had put into him was making the searing flashes of lightning in his head recede to distant cracks of thunder. So, seeing more or less straight, he walked down the block and turned the corner, where the spires of the Lazarus Towers cut the skyline like a razor. They had done the impossible: they had co-opted the skyline from the dome, drawing the eye away from what had once been the city’s defining reality.

  Mal was aware that even at this distance he was already on the spires’ security cameras, maybe not noted by a specific guard just yet, but limping there on their screens, recorded for future review when necessary.

  He spotted himself, warped and elongated in the liquid surface of the dome. He avoided Lazarus Heights for many reasons. His mother had lived near here once, with his stepfather, before the neighborhood grew beyond their means and swept them away with the other undesirables. They were not on friendly visiting terms, but circumstances had demanded he show up at their door once upon a time. Back then the dome was a creeping insect, its gray surface an implacable menace, hateful and terrified messages scrawled across its surface, the rot festering at the center of New York’s heart.

  He gladly left it at his back and came around the towers and turned so that the luminous rainbow of the East River swelled before him, painting Brooklyn with a weird swirling haze, as it squatted low across the water, in the eternal shadow of its regal brother. During construction of the dome’s new shell and the Lazarus Towers, something had spilled into the river. Not oil, not waste, exactly, but some space-age chemical used to strengthen metals and weatherize porous concrete. Remak said that the molecules of the chemical had bonded with the water and that the river was not, technically speaking, water anymore. It was a new element that created a brilliant surface glow when the sun struck it at certain times of day, but was also, slowly, eroding the edges of the island of Manhattan itself, eating away at the very ground people lived on. That was what Remak had said, based on materials that had passed across Silven’s desk. But there was never any mention of it in newsblogs, on the HD. To the world of people hungry for a new sight, a new experience, it was simply more visual stimulation.