by Tad Williams
"It was buried very, very deep. People knew about the base at Sand Creek of course, but not what was being done there or what ultimately went wrong. The official story was that it was closed because of a bad fire, with some residual radiation contamination forcing them to seal the site. Some of the dead, like the PEREGRINE volunteers, whose postings had been secret in the first place, were siphoned off to other operations and their deaths reported there. It was a failure of colossal proportions, not to mention that it would have brought down countless billions in lawsuits if the truth came out. They buried it. They couldn't just make it disappear completely, of course, which is why there are rumors about what happened there to this very day."
"And they buried you, too?"
"As best they could. I had no relatives. In fact, they thought I was dead the first twelve hours or so, because . . . because the scene in the construction bay was so bad. When I survived, it became easier just to lose me."
"They made you a prisoner!" Ramsey couldn't help feeling angry.
"Not at first. No, with all that time and effort put into me, quite literally, they wanted to find some other use for me. But my project was gone, I myself was burned, crippled, my circuitry badly damaged. I was functionally useless—and, unlike the other survivors, I was also incontrovertible living testimony to what had happened there. If an ordinary soldier violated his confidentiality agreement, you might be able to discredit him as a crackpot, but what about a man with millions of dollars of state-of-the-art cybernetic implants in his body? Yes, eventually they imprisoned me, but I am actually grateful, Mr. Ramsey. In another country or another time they might simply have cut their losses and silenced me in a more definitive manner."
Ramsey did not know what to say. In the silence, Major Sorensen huffed and sat up, glancing around. Not knowing he had been asleep for almost ten minutes, he did his best to look as though he had just closed his eyes to concentrate better. Sellars looked at him for a moment with what almost seemed like fondness before continuing.
"It's been a long time. What happened then isn't so important, except to me. But what does matter is what happened afterward. After the first few years' rounds of hospitals and research facilities, they decided there was nothing useful left to do with me, so they moved me to the base—the one where you babysat me, Major Sorensen, although I arrived there a long time before you even joined the service. In fact, one of the small ironies of the whole terrible mess was that even though I was Navy, my imprisonment somehow came out of the accounting for HARDCASE, so I wound up on an army base.
"The only thing the top brass really wanted from me was silence, so I lived for years in an environment that might have been something from an earlier century—no telephone, no television, no electronic connection to the outside world. But after I had been ten years on the base, my cultivated show of patience had lulled them. I was allowed a wallscreen, since a one-way, extremely low speed media connection could hardly cause much trouble when the recipient was allowed no input devices.
"I had been waiting years for this, of course. I was so bored, and in those days so angry at what had been done to me, that I had freedom on my mind the way a slave chained to a galley oar does. My only exercise was mental—you can see my legs, my withered arms, what Keener's incendiaries did to me—but I was a pilot, damn it! In a few minutes I had lost everything—my ship, my health, my freedom—but I had in me still that drive, that need. If I was denied the skies, I could fly through information space, the way my PEREGRINE fellows and I had discovered. It might not be the same as walking the streets like other citizens, but it would still be escape of a very real sort.
"It was true that I had no devices to access the net. No visible ones, in any case. But even then my caretakers understood very little about my capabilities . . . and, more importantly, my obsession for escape. It was easy enough to steal a length of fiberlink from the men who installed the wallscreen. When they were gone, it was almost as easy for me to perform a brief if messy operation with a magnifying glass, a butter knife I had ground down to razor-sharpness, and various other implements, including old-fashioned solder. It would have looked horrible to anyone but me, the wires going directly into a long and bloody incision in my arm, but I connected up to the old input control point from the PEREGRINE days and began using some of my implanted systems to force a machine-language connection, reversing through the wallscreen downlink.
"I won't bore you with all the details. My keepers on the base eventually noticed what I was doing—I was so enraptured with my newfound freedom that I was not as cautious as I should have been. They brought four MPs to subdue me—me, all one hundred and ten shriveled, pre-metric pounds!—and ripped out the wallscreen. Doctors sewed me back up. See, here is the scar. They put a big flashing marker on my file ordering that nothing which might allow me that kind of connection was ever to be given me again, and I was subjected to periodic random searches for decades.
"But what they didn't know was that it was already too late. In the early hours of my newfound freedom, I located and downloaded a raft of specialized gear to my internal systems, including a very clever little black market number that permitted me to make remote connection to nearby networks, using my own metallicized bones as an antenna. Long before the telematic jack became a chic accessory for the busy new-rich, I had one of my own, invisibly hidden inside me.
"Since then, I have continually upgraded myself, all without the knowledge of my captors. Not everything could be done by software alone, but to a man who can go anywhere and converse with anyone, not much is out of reach. In a fit of reflexive honesty, the military had kept my pension for any survivors that might turn up. I made it disappear with a small numbers trick, then moved it into some other areas and began growing it—legitimately, always legitimately. I don't know why that matters, but it does. I have never stolen from anyone. Well, except information. I'm not the world's richest man by any stretch, but I have a tidy sum now, and for a long time I bent it all toward self-improvement. Upgrades?" Sellars suddenly laughed, a genuine bark of amusement. "I am the Upgraded Man! Do you remember my chess-by-mail game, Major Sorensen?"
The man narrowed his eyes. "We examined the hell out of that. No codes. No trick writing. Nothing."
"Oh, it was a perfectly legitimate game—we made sure of that. But you can put quite a bit of expensive black-market nanomachinery in the period after the word 'check,' which is how one of my contacts was able to send me the last things I needed to be able to upgrade my system and survive without constant hydration. I tore out and ate a tiny little piece of paper and the little machines went to work. I would not have lasted a day in that tunnel under the base without that improvement."
"You bastard," Sorensen said admiringly. "We were wondering what you were going to do after you broke out. We had every medical supply place in three states on the watch."
"But why?" Ramsey asked. "Why did you wait so long to escape? I mean, you've been there thirty years or so, haven't you?"
Sellars nodded. "Because after I'd gained full-time access to the net, and had read every file, explored every record, my anger began to fade. A terrible thing had happened to me, an injustice—but what did that really mean? Now that I had a sort of freedom, what more did I want? Look at me, Mr. Ramsey. It was clear that I was never going to be able to live a normal life. I still harbored deep resentments, but I also began to put my endless free time into other things. Exploration of the fast-growing worldwide data sphere—the net. Amusements of various sorts. Experiments.
"It was in the course of one such experiment that I found the first track of the Grail Brotherhood. . . ."
"Hang on a bit," said Ramsey. "What sort of experiments?"
For a moment Sellars hesitated, then his waxy face seemed to harden. "I do not wish to talk about that. Do you want me to go on, or have you heard enough for one day?"
"No, please continue. I didn't mean to offend you." But Catur Ramsey's radar was still flashing. It almost seeme
d like the old man wanted to be asked again, but Ramsey had no experience reading the odd features. But there's something there, he thought. Something important, at least to Sellars. Is it important to us, too? It was impossible to guess. He filed it away for later. "Please, go on."
"I have already explained much of what I discovered then. What the Brotherhood seemed to be doing, the weapons at its disposal, all were bad enough. But now, just in the last forty-eight hours, everything has gone completely off the rails. I am having a terrible time trying to make sense of anything and my whole Garden is in an uproar."
"Garden?" said Kaylene Sorensen before anyone else could. "What garden?"
"I apologize. It is the way I order my information—a metaphor, in a sense, but a very real thing to me as well. If you like, I will show it to you someday. It was . . . really quite beautiful once." He shook his head slowly. "Now it is blighted. Order is gone. Something drastic has happened to the Grail network, and also to the Brotherhood itself. The newsnets tell me that several people I believe to be part of their leadership have all died within the last few days, their empires suddenly in chaos. Is this part of some move toward immortality—of conveying themselves into the virtual universe forever, as I suspected that they planned? If so, it seems odd they would leave such disruption behind, since they must surely still need some kind of economic power to maintain that huge, expensive network."
"You're only guessing about that," said Michael Sorensen. "About a lot of things."
"I am only guessing about almost everything," said Sellars, amused and disgusted, and at that moment finally won much of Catur Ramsey's trust, "But the probability factors are too high to ignore, and have been since I first encountered this ghastly plot. I'm terrified, trying to grope at something behind a big thick black curtain and guess what it is. But I am certain that whatever it might be, it's bad and getting worse—unfortunately, that's the guess I'm most confident about. Do you think I would have involved a child like your daughter if I could believe for an instant I might be wrong? Me, who had his own life ruined by trusting those who should have known better and planned better? Major Sorensen, Mrs. Sorensen, I can never earn forgiveness for endangering your daughter, so I haven't asked. But I can promise you that I only did it because I felt that the stakes were so frighteningly high. . . ." He stopped and shook his hairless head. "No, that would not make it better. She is your child, after all."
"And we won't let anything happen to her," Christabel's mother said fiercely. "That's the one risk I won't allow." She stared at her husband; it was not a gentle look. "Not anymore."
"I think we understand the basic situation." A part of Ramsey was amazed that he was still sitting here, even more amazed to find he was about to take a central part in something that by any rational standard should be considered a mass delusion. "So the question is . . . what can we do?"
"Let me bring you up to date on the poor and probably hopeless measures I began," Sellars said. "My little group of explorers. I still have hopes for them, and until I know otherwise, I'll assume that they are all still alive, still active."
"Oh my God," said Ramsey suddenly. "Sam Fredericks. Orlando Gardiner. They're yours. . . . I mean, I'd almost forgotten, when we first spoke you said you knew something about them. Is that what you meant—you sent them into this network?"
Sellars shook his head. "In a way. But yes, they are part of the small group of people I brought together. I hope they still are."
"Then you didn't know." Ramsey hesitated. "Orlando Gardiner died two days ago."
Sellars did not reply immediately. "No, I . . . I did not know," he said at last, his voice soft as a dove's call. "I have been. . . ." He paused again for a surprisingly long time. "I had feared . . . that it might all be too much for him. Such a brave young man. . . ." The old man shut his eyes tight. "If you don't mind, I will take a moment to use the bathroom."
The wheelchair turned and rolled silently across the carpet. The bathroom door closed behind it, leaving Ramsey to stare at the Sorensens, who stared back.
Christabel was having a bad dream, running from men in black clothes who were chasing her down a long staircase. They were carrying a long fire hose which trailed behind them like a snake, and she knew that they wanted to catch her and point its metal nose at her and choke her with its purple smoke. She tried to scream for her mother and father, but she couldn't get the breath to do it, and when she looked back the pale-faced men were always closer, always closer. . . .
She woke up thrashing in pillows and a sheet and almost screamed again. She twisted herself free, frightened by the strange room, the unfamiliar pictures on the wall, the heavy curtains which only let a tiny bit of light into the room, yellow light with dust bouncing in it. She opened her mouth to call her mother and the face came up over the edge of the bed.
It was worse than her bad dream, and she fell back with a feeling like a cold hand had grabbed inside her, and just like in the dream she couldn't even make a noise.
"Hay-soos, weenit," the face said, "wha's your problem? Trying to sleep down here."
Her breaths were little and small—she could imagine her sides moving fast like a rabbit's—but she recognized the face, the broken tooth, the black hair sticking up. Some of the worst of the being-scared went away.
"I don't have a problem," she said, angry, but it didn't sound very good.
The boy smiled an angry smile. "Know if I had a big ol' nice bed like that one, claro, wouldn't see me havin' no pesadilla, start crying and everything."
He was talking about food, it sounded like. She didn't understand. She didn't want to understand. She got up and hurried to the door that led to the next room and opened it. Her mommy and daddy and the new grown-up, Mister Ramsey, were all talking to Mister Sellars. They all looked tired and something else, too, like the time that her parents and Ophelia Weiner's parents had thought there was going to be a war about Aunt Artica, which Christabel had thought was a dumb name for a place but not worth having a war about, and all the grown-ups had that same look on their face during dinner.
Mister Sellars was saying, ". . . A South African military program that actually employed a few of the original PEREGRINE designers—they were working with remote aviation, pilots using virtual control modules—but the project was defunded years ago. I found out about it while tracking the PEREGRINE records, and it came in handy. I was able to nudge them into using it, in part because the base was secret and they would be safe there, but somehow the Grail seems to have tracked them down and now they are under siege." He finally noticed her standing in the doorway and gave her a gentle smile. "Ah, Christabel, it's good to see you. Did you have a nice nap?"
"Honey, are you okay?" her mommy said, standing up. "We're just out here talking. Why don't you see if there's anything on the net?"
The fullness and bigness of her parents and Mister Sellars talking about grown-up things, of all of them being somewhere away from home in a strange place, in a motel, suddenly rose up inside her and made her want to cry. She didn't want to cry, so instead she said, "I'm hungry."
"You still have your sandwich from earlier—you only took a bite. Here, I'll pour you some juice. . . ." and her mommy came back with her to the room where she'd woken up and for a little while things were better again. After Christabel had a paper plate with the sandwich and some raisins. Mommy took a bag of cookies out of her purse and gave two to Christabel and two to the boy, who grabbed them fast, like her mommy might decide to take them back again.
"We grown-ups have to talk a while longer," she said. "I want you kids to stay here and watch the net, okay?"
The boy just looked at her like a cat, but Christabel followed her to the door. "I want to go home, Mommy."
"We'll go home soon, sweetie." When she opened the door, Christabel's daddy's voice came through.
"But that doesn't make sense," he was saying. "If the network's harming children, causing this Tandagore thing, then why should the boy be able to get on and off
line without being . . . hurt, whatever?"
"In part because I have been grappling with the security systems in my own particular way to allow that to happen," said Mister Sellars. "But there is something more at work. The system seems almost to have a . . . an affinity, that is the word. An affinity for children."
Christabel's mommy, who had been listening, suddenly looked down and saw that Christabel was still standing beside her in the doorway. A frightened look went across Mommy's face, the oh-my-god look Christabel hadn't seen for a while, the last time when Christabel had carefully picked up the sharp broken pieces of a wine glass that fell on the kitchen floor and brought them in both hands to show her parents.
"Go on, honey," her mother said, and almost shoved her back into the room with the terrible boy. "I'll come in and check on you in a little while. Eat your sandwich. Watch the net." She closed the door behind her. Christabel felt like crying again. Her mother usually didn't like it when she watched the net, unless it was something Mommy and Daddy had picked out that was educational.
"I'll eat it if you don't want it, weenit," the boy said behind her.
She turned and saw that he was holding her sandwich in his hand. After all the baths her mommy had been making him take even his fingernails were clean, but she could just tell that no matter how many times he went in the tub, he was still covered with invisible germs. The thought of eating her sandwich now was impossible.
"You have it," she said, and walked slowly to sit on the edge of the bed. The wallscreen wasn't very big, and the only thing on KidLink was a stupid Chinese game with people running around and all talking out of time with the way their mouths were moving. She stared at it, feeling empty and lonely and sad.
The little boy finished her sandwich, and without asking ate her raisins and cookies, too. Christabel didn't even feel angry—it was strange to see someone eat like that, like they hadn't ever eaten before and didn't know if they'd ever get to do it again. She wondered how he got so hungry. She knew Mister Sellars had lots of meals in packages down in the tunnels, and he was a nice man. He wouldn't have told the boy not to eat. It didn't make sense.
