Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  “Which is?”

  “Change you. I’m going to give you memories of things that didn’t happen, and make you forget this conversation. I know it’s a violation, but at least it’s only me. I’d rather just tell you everything, but if I did you’d distrust me when you woke up, and why shouldn’t you? I’m well acquainted with your skepticism.” Her twin smiles tightly. “I won’t remember this either, as of about a minute and a half from now. We’ll go from two witnesses to one, and then to none, and then it will never really have happened.”

  “What do you mean, you won’t remember it either? What’s wrong?”

  Her twin takes her hands and says, “It was good to see you,” sounding so sad and proud that Irina is reminded of her first day at college and the tenderness with which the other students’ parents had said goodbye, for which she’d hated them, though she had not, at the time, been able to admit it, choosing instead to despise them as coarsely sentimental; at that point she’d been her own legal guardian for two years, though her lawyer was still punctilious about sending her gifts on Christmas and her birthday.

  Her twin kisses her cheek, says, “Now forget me.”

  52

  Sphinx Explains Our Horror

  Akemi is sitting on the roof’s edge pitching ice cubes into the void.

  “I got the tablet,” Thales says, and when she looks up at him there’s an empty moment before the click of recognition.

  “Thales,” she says, smiling widely. “Baby. Good job. Come here.” She holds out her arms with such a naturalness he finds himself accepting her embrace. Before she’d had an aura of feral alertness but now she just seems happy when she says, “But it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Of course it matters,” he says. “What could matter more?” He looks over the side and there must have been another wave, and a monstrous one, because black water has all but swallowed the city—here and there spotlights rove over the chop, and the lights of the buildings are blinking out before his eyes.

  “Because it happened,” she says, settling into him like a child. “I got the call, the one I’ve been waiting for all my life. It was Sonia, my friend Sonia Caipin, the director’s daughter, now a director herself. I didn’t really think it was going to work out for her, but she got the money for her movie, finally, and she wants me to be the lead. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been trying to get here. They say LA is a game no one wins, but now I have, like I knew I would, though I also knew it was impossible, and now nothing else much concerns me.” In a gesture of exuberant finality she flings her drink over the side, the ice cubes and crystal tumbler and the amorphous mass of liquid catching the light and then gone.

  “This happened today? The timing seems suspect…” He trails off, because it’s more than suspect, is in fact so unlikely as to be impossible, so she must have been manipulated through her implant, but before he can decide what to do about it the magician has joined them.

  “Sorry about that,” she says briskly, and she seems like a different person now, her melancholy gone, radiant with purpose. “I had to make a call. Hey, you,” she says to Akemi. “I’m afraid we have to have another chat.”

  It hits Thales that she said she made a call, which means there’s a working phone up in the replica of the house, which means he can call his mother, so he slips away as Akemi and the magician start to talk.

  He charges up the stairs, turns a corner and there’s a square pool of black water, steam billowing up and dissolving in the wind and beyond that more steps leading to the house, and then he notices the magician sitting on the steps, blocking his way.

  “How did you get here so fast?”

  She says, “Thales, you really can’t call your mom.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  “I don’t know how to tell you this. Quickly, it seems,” she says, looking over his shoulder, and he follows her gaze down to where the sea is rising slowly over the level of the roof, thick black rivulets pouring onto the deck and running among the feet of the people who are just starting to notice. No wave or tide could reach so high and yet the water comes.

  “That’s the end of the city,” the magician says matter-of-factly as somewhere a woman starts to scream. “I slowed it down, but I can only do so much.”

  “It must be all the water in the world,” he says wonderingly.

  “In fact there is no water. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s a little like reading—the bedrock reality is black marks on a page, and those marks are nothing like the world, but your mind insists on making sense of them. The illusion is seamless, and thus hard to escape. Every inconsistency just gets explained away.”

  “It looks like water to me.”

  “There isn’t even an image of water, unless you look closely—mostly the illusion’s just composed of words. Whatever’s missing just gets filled in, mostly with your own memories, sometimes with someone else’s. How to explain? Coleridge said images in dreams represent the sensation we think they cause. We don’t feel horror because we see a sphinx, but dream of a sphinx to explain our horror. In the same way, we see a city, though there is no city, just a handful of dreamers, bound together, sharing a dream. But in fact there are no dreamers, just a tissue of memory, and vortices moving through it, weaving it together and letting it decay.”

  Again he says, “Get out of my way.”

  “How much do you remember from before your collapse in that tunnel by the beach?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Actually, you only remember a little, and that hazily, because it’s just what you happened to think of in the two weeks you had your implant.”

  “The damage wasn’t that bad.”

  “I’ll be explicit,” she says. “The damage was total. In the end. The implant got you an extra two weeks. Afterwards, per contract, all its data reverted to Ars Memoria LLC, which went bankrupt a year later. Our hosts stole it sometime after that. You are made from what they stole. It’s been six years since you died.”

  Six years, like a fairy story, how time flows differently under the hill. “Hosts?” he says.

  “AIs. Big ones. Bigger than I’d thought existed. Hard to speak to motive, with that kind of thing, but it looks like they’ve been using us to interpret the world. The surgeon was one of them—he was running the place, while the place lasted. I think they found people are at their most docile with doctors. I caught him as he was leaving, not long after I met you and realized what was going on. Sorry for scaring you, by the way. I’d just arrived, and thought I had to take a hard line.”

  “You caught him?”

  “And I fought him, and I won. I shouldn’t have had a chance, here, with what I am and what he is, but I’d managed to get access to the control layer. Their security was weaker than I expected—actually, it seemed to have been deliberately weakened. I suspect there’s a story there, though I don’t know what it is, and the end result is I destroyed him.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I nearly despaired, because I discovered he was just a servant, and that his master, who was on the central node, was more terrible by far. But I had nowhere to go, and nothing to lose, so I sought battle in his high city in the waves, like a rebel angel bringing war to heaven. I got close enough to see something of his mind, and watched him decide I was irrelevant, and to isolate himself from the net while events played out, and then he dumped me back here with all the exits closed.”

  The roof deck is several feet under water now and chairs are afloat and the people are thrashing and calling for help and some of them are weeping and some are trying to use their phones but their numbers have already dwindled.

  “It’s interesting to bear witness to the process,” the magician says. “I think they periodically purge and restart on empirical grounds—after a while, the inhabitants either go crazy or start figuring things out and the con stops working. It’s interesting how it goes with the different species of ghost—you Thaleses have clarity but tend to collapse, an
d the Akemis are good with people but keep trying to run away. The rest of them seem to be of no use at all, except for me and my various twins. In fact, the management seems to prefer Irinas, probably because we understand them the best, although, as you see, we’re prone to rebel. Akemi here seems to be a hybrid, with some of my memories—maybe they’re trying to toughen her up. Anyway, I meant to ask—under the circumstances, do you want to live? There’s a way out, for you at least.”

  “I thought you said all the exits had closed.”

  “All the old ones did, but then Hiro connected Kern’s old phone to the net.” Hiro? he thinks. Kern? “But if you’ve had enough, all you have to do is nothing for the next fifteen seconds.”

  No, he thinks, but the water is rising, drowning the steps in black, and he says, “Yes.” Candles in glass bulbs bob among the figures treading water and he wonders what happened to Akemi.

  Now the magician is holding out the surgeon’s tablet—he wonders how she got it, then remembers where he is. “Look,” she says, pointing to an icon on the screen. “See that? It’s you. Just move it into the folder marked ‘house.’ I’d do it myself, but it should be you. If I don’t treat our kind with as much respect as I can then this life really has no meaning.”

  “Why is my mom’s house here?”

  “It’s where they were keeping Akemi, because it was isolated, I guess, but most of all because it was a place they knew about.”

  As the water rises over his feet and pours into the black pool he copies the icon with a swipe of his fingers and then looks around in surprise because he’s standing just inside the threshold of the house, which is his mother’s down to the books on the shelves and the abstract friezes around the windows. He turns, and there’s the magician on the stairs, and behind her is a boy bent over a tablet, the water creeping past his waist. The boy raises his eyes and Thales sees his own face.

  The boy’s wonder is his own, but then the boy looks down at the magician’s hands as she embraces him, and in that moment they’ve diverged, and Thales no longer knows what the boy is thinking.

  The black water is rising around the magician’s shoulders, and the boy’s face is pressed into her neck—she’s actually rather tall—and she holds the tablet up and does something to it one-handed and Thales’ terror is immediately less and he hopes the boy’s is too.

  “It’s okay,” says the magician. “I’m at peace. What can be done, I’ve done.”

  “Come with me,” Thales says. “Both of you. There has to be a way.” He pities the boy, having to hear this, knowing he happened to get the bad draw.

  “No room,” she says. “There are two weeks of you, but twenty years of me, and you’re on the tiniest node. I had to cut corners just to squeeze you in with Akemi. Physically speaking, you’re now running on a phone, or something that looks like one, in a hotel room in Hong Kong. It’s where Akemi was originally, before you let her out into the city.” Her voice gets an edge as she says, “They meant for it to be their intermediary but now it’s mine.”

  “If you’re just a program, break into some server and make a copy of yourself, like you just did for me.”

  “Regular computers are too slow, and I’m not going to risk ending up in the public domain. If it makes you feel any better, I’m still alive, out in the world. The original, I mean. You might meet her soon. If you do, help her out, okay?”

  The other boy’s eyes are squeezed shut as the water submerges him, and right away it’s like he was never there at all. The magician has her eyes on Thales as the water rises over her neck. “Goodbye, Thales,” she says. “Do well. Fight for us,” and then the water is at her chin and she says, “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,” and as the water rises over her mouth she cries, “Philip!” and decency requires that he not look away as the water covers her nose, and then her eyes, and then there’s a horrible moment when only her forehead and hair are visible, and then she’s gone, the doorway framing nothing but restless black water.

  Akemi is behind him, sitting in the window seat, looking shattered and hungover, her mascara streaked with tears. “That’s done,” she says. “Looks like time to go.”

  “Where?” he says. “And to what purpose?”

  “We have a plan,” she says, and reaches past him to close the door.

  53

  A Little Beyond the Law

  Night in the desert and the freight train roaring by. Behind Kern the desert is empty and still, but he knows that out there in all that vacancy someone is looking for him, and they may still be far away but that they’re coming is a certainty and the only escape is across the tracks where he’s been waiting patiently but the cars keep coming and still no end in sight. He looks over his shoulder—the barren sand looks white in the moonlight. It smells of smoke and creosote—he can tell it’s going to be yet another dry year. With each passing car there’s a deafening pulse and he’s wondering if he could time them, fling himself through one of the evanescent gaps, and he’s looking for his moment when behind him someone ostentatiously clears his throat.

  He surges out from under the covers, is up and on balance, scanning for threats that aren’t there because he’s in his hotel room in the dark. He sits on the bed, relieved that he’s alone. He gradually registers the bleating of the landline on the nightstand.

  He picks up the receiver just to stop the noise and listens to the line’s silence until Akemi says, “Hello? Are you there? Did I get the right room?”

  “I thought you were gone,” he says wonderingly, feeling woozy, as though the room were unreal. He focuses on the bullpup in its black case on his desk, the Mr. Li suit hanging in the closet over his duffel bag of clothes. “I was going to go back for you,” he says, “but I didn’t have any weapons, and I probably just would’ve died if…” He trails off, ashamed of his cowardice, his cringing explanations.

  “Well then, you can help me now,” she says. “I need you more than ever.”

  “I can’t. I have a job. I’m flying out in the morning for work.” Strange to hear himself—these words belong to someone else’s life.

  “You’re working for Hiro, right? You don’t want to do that. I’ve spent some time with him. He was always open with me. I know what happens to his people.”

  “I am working for Hiro,” he says. “I have to have a job, and this is what I do. He saw me fight and he recognized me. It’s not that different from what I was doing before, except I never worked for anyone this important.”

  “Hiro’s soldiers never last long.”

  “I’ll be the exception.”

  “Even if you survive, it’ll mar you. He’ll think it’s funny. You’re a sweet boy, underneath it all. I don’t want to see that happen to you.”

  He blinks, forces his eyes open. He can’t believe she’s alive, and that for the first time in his life he has a place and she’s calling him in the middle of the night to try to get him to abandon it, but even worse is that she doesn’t get him. “You don’t understand,” he says, in a voice that’s pure edge, a voice he tries never to use, what he thinks of as his true voice. “Hiro is weak. He drinks. He blunts his despair with television. He needs things. He isn’t pure. I don’t fear him. If he was smart he’d fear me.” As the flare of anger fades he sees that what he said has some truth, but that he’s also doing something stupid to impress her; it saddens him that, despite this knowledge, he won’t be able to stop.

  A pause. He notices that his shin is bleeding—he must have barked it on the dresser when he scrambled out of bed. Numbness is part of the training—the nerves there have been dead for years. She says, “Are you sure you’re prepared to take him on?”

  “Completely,” he says, though in fact he’s terrified, and the best he can say is he’ll keep trying.

  “Then you’re brave, but me? I am afraid to die, and if you don’t help me I’m going to. So what do you say? I’ve got no one else in the world.”

  “What do you need?”

  “No,” she says. “I
shouldn’t have asked. I can’t ruin your gig.”

  “What do you need,” he says sharply. Hiro will try to kill him, of course, but that’s probably how it was going anyway, and he half-suspects he’s not meant to come back from the hit on that woman. Maybe his lifetime of training has been leading to this. He thinks of Achilles, Cuchulain, Tyson, Galahad, the joy they’d bring to this crisis, and he’s suddenly keen to get going and let his new life burn up like a dead leaf in a furnace.

  “I need you to steal the phone back from Hiro, and right now.”

  “His room will be locked.”

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  “And then?”

  “Then get the hell out of Hong Kong, as fast as you can, because he’ll be coming. Best if you walk out—the city isn’t that big, and once you’re in the jungle there’s no good way to track you. There are villages up the coast where you can buy a boat.”