Mirrored Heavens ar-1

by David J. Williams

  “We could start with why he put us together.”

  “I presume he has his reasons,” she says.

  “Sure he does. Can you name a single good one?”

  “Who said they had to be good?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Maybe he just wants to see how we’re going to react.”

  “You think he finds this amusing?”

  “I think he might,” she says. She smiles slightly. “Don’t you?”

  “Did you ever think you’d see me again?”

  “I figured the odds were against it.”

  “I tell you what’s funny,” he says. “What’s funny is how it seemed so secret at the time. It seemed like we were fooling them back in the academy. A month in the real world—a month into the runs and out of training, and it was clear they must have known all along.”

  “Yes.”

  “They were watching us the whole time,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what’s got you so rattled?”

  “I’m not rattled,” she says. “They’re rattled.”

  “Obviously,” he replies. “They briefed us in real-time.”

  “They briefed us together. Even in the secondary briefings, I’m always the only agent.”

  “That’s the way all of CI works,” he says. “I’ve never met another agent save in the field. I’ve never known an agent who had.”

  “Or at least, that would admit to it.”

  “And we were briefed by Sinclair himself.”

  “Or by something that wore his face.”

  “But why would it have done that?”

  “To inspire us,” says Haskell dryly.

  “And are you inspired?”

  “To stop the Rain? Absolutely. To serve the greater glory of CICom? Sure. To help Matthew Sinclair help Matthew Sinclair? Why not?”

  “You don’t sound that convinced.”

  She says something he doesn’t quite catch.

  “What was that?”

  “I said Sinclair’s a bastard.”

  He stares at her. He glances at the ’copter’s walls. She sneers.

  “What does it matter if he hears us now? He heard us fuck all those years ago. He’s heard all there is to hear. He’s a degenerate. A dirty old man.”

  Marlowe has no idea what to say to that. So he says nothing.

  “Besides,” she says, “it’s not like he’s going to hear anything new. I’ve been telling the microphones this for years. I’ve told him how much I fucking hate him. Told him how much I love him too. But never anything he didn’t already know.” And then a snarl in response to whatever Marlowe’s about to say: “Well, why the fuck wouldn’t he already know? He’s the one who fucking set me up this way. So why in God’s name am I so ashamed of the way I’ve been configured?”

  She wipes at her eyes. “Shit,” she says.

  “Is this why you haven’t been speaking to me?” Marlowe asks.

  “No,” she says. “There’s something else.”

  “That something being my being back in your life?”

  “That sounds like wishful thinking.”

  He doesn’t reply.

  “Look,” she says, “all I’m saying is that we can never forget that Sinclair’s the one who handles the handlers. We can never forget he’s the master Operator of them all. That’s all.”

  “You just changed the subject,” says Marlowe.

  “Sorry?”

  “I was talking about us.”

  “What’s there to talk about?” she asks.

  “What you’re not telling me.”

  “What am I not telling you?”

  “What’s really got you so rattled.”

  “Look,” she says, “enough with all the questions. Enough with the interrogation. Or is this some kind of seduction? I’ve read your files, Jason—”

  “You’ve read my files?”

  “—and you know what? I can’t say I like the man you’ve become. Whatever you’re not trying to kill, you’re trying to fuck. Believe me, Jason: you’d better be ready to make an exception.”

  “Who gave you my fucking files?”

  “Sinclair.”

  “Sinclair?” Marlowe’s as angry as he is puzzled.

  “Or whoever’s speaking for him. Think about it, Jason. I’m the razor. You’re the mechanic. Which means you’re reporting to me.”

  Marlowe shakes his head. “Hey,” he says. “Relax. I think you’ve got the wrong idea.”

  “Good,” she says.

  “I just want to know what you’ve discovered.”

  “What have I discovered?” she asks in a voice that would fool anybody else.

  “Something you shouldn’t have.”

  She stares.

  “I know that look,” he says. “The look that says you’re holding out on everybody. It was driving me crazy throughout the briefing with Sinclair.”

  “Driving you crazy?” It’s a good half-second before Marlowe realizes that her question is sounding in his skull and not in the air around him. That Haskell has spoken aloud the very next moment: scorning him for trying to get inside her pants, then cutting off the conversation. She sits there, apparently simmering. But her words sound in Marlowe’s head anyway.

  “The one-on-one,” she says.

  Not that she needs to. He’s switching into it seamlessly, neural implants letting words flick between them.

  “You’re doing this in code?”

  “The only safe way,” she replies.

  “How did you get my side of the cipher?”

  “When I gave your systems that boost back in that city.”

  “I thought that was just my suit.”

  “Your head wasn’t that much farther away.”

  “So what is it you want to tell me?”

  “That I made covert downloads in the Citadel.”

  “The Citadel? You mean, in South America—”

  She nods.

  “When?”

  “While you were out there slugging it out with the Jaguars on the roof. I downloaded every file that was still intact.”

  “CI files?”

  “Of course. That’s who owns the Citadel, right?”

  “That’s who used to.”

  “Right,” she says. “Anyway, the files didn’t help us. Most of it was wiped by EMP anyway. And then that zeppelin started signaling. So I never mentioned it.”

  “If you had, you’d be facing a court-martial,” he says. “Jesus, Claire. What the fuck were you hoping to find? What the hell could justify hacking classified seals?”

  “How the fuck should I know, Jason? Maybe I was gonna find the blueprint of an escape route. Maybe the location of a distress beacon. Or the coordinates of some evac point. Or anything that would have kept the militia from using their machetes to cut me extra orifices while they raped me from every direction.”

  Her voice dies away inside in his head. He sits amidst that silence. Emotions tear at him—fear for this woman, fear of this woman, all of it bound up in something else that he can’t name. He tears away from all of it, focuses:

  “So what did you find?”

  “Like I said, nothing at the time. But once they’d repaired the damage my cranial software had sustained from the EMP, I went back to those downloads with a revamped toolkit. Some of the data wasn’t recoverable. Some of it was. Some of it dealt with us.”

  “One of the files talked about us?”

  “Not you and me specifically. Or maybe it did. I don’t know.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Our memories—” Her voice trails off.

  “Yes?”

  “May be manufactured.”

  “Manufactured.”

  “Yes.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning they might have been implanted by the handlers.”

  “Why?”

  “Presumably to render their asses even more secure than they already are.” />
  He doesn’t reply.

  “Surely I haven’t left you speechless? The handlers brief us in the trance to prevent turned agents from rolling up the network. They’re pros at using the deployment of memory to further their control. If they controlled our waking memories as well, they could configure that memory between missions. Which would make it irrelevant that an agent has been turned. Just install new programs and reboot.”

  He stares at her. He realizes he’s doing so while a soundless conversation is taking place. He turns back to the window of the jet-copter, keeps gazing at the fires.

  “Look, I’ll transmit you what’s left of the file,” she says. “It spells all this out.”

  “Don’t,” he says. “I don’t want to see it.”

  “Still the good little errand boy? I’m trying to show you what happens to good little errand boys.”

  “So does this mean I haven’t done any of the missions I remember doing?”

  “That would be your first thought, wouldn’t it?”

  “What else would be—oh,” he says.

  “Oh. The file isn’t as specific as one would hope. It doesn’t name names. It’s part of some briefing manual to help envoys help their agents ‘adjust’—the actual word—to the alterations. And it implies that this practice is starting to be rolled out across CI agents but isn’t yet universal. And that the other Commands have yet to adopt it as standard procedure. They may not, either. It may remain a CI-specific practice, like the envoys. But if you want my opinion, I’d say that for the sake of your sanity you should just assume that most of your life’s greatest moments actually took place, Jason.” She looks thoughtful. “Plus or minus a few key details, of course.”

  “And what about what happened between us?”

  “What about it?”

  “Does the document say anything about it? About—that kind of memory?”

  “No,” she says. “But think about it. With something like this, security of the handlers probably isn’t the only thing in play. It could also be a question of mission leverage. Someone with a given set of memories might fight harder than someone without. And emotional ties to other agents—especially to agents locked safely in the past—might be the kind of thing that engenders a broader esprit de corps.”

  “But putting two agents with a history together is the kind of thing that could backfire.”

  “It may already have.”

  “Which doesn’t help in figuring out what went on between us,” says Marlowe. “Doesn’t help in figuring out if anything ever did.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “And I’m sure our memories correspond with total precision,” he says acidly.

  “That’s a thought. Try me.”

  “How about the time we took that ’copter to Stanley Park.”

  “What was I wearing?”

  “Blue shirt,” he replies. “Grey cap. We looked out upon Vancouver. We looked out upon the ocean—watched the sunset and the cold came on all sudden. I gave you my jacket and you said—”

  “Stop it.”

  “No. That’s not what you said.”

  “You’re right. That line of verification’s a red herring. The real question is when our memories got tampered with.”

  “Assuming they were.”

  “Right,” she says. “Right: assuming they were, when would they have done it. Because they could have done it anytime from academy onward.”

  “I’d say the last few days is your best bet,” says Marlowe.

  That one makes her look out the window, shake her head.

  “Think about it,” says Marlowe. “We know they’ve assigned us to work together. We know they’re changing up their rules. What better time to prime us than right before we meet?”

  “But I recognized you in that city!”

  “Did you really?”

  “Fuck,” she says.

  “And it may not stop there.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means maybe you never did find a file in the Citadel.”

  “Fuck,” she says. “That bastard.”

  “As you say.”

  “And you’d better listen. Sinclair’s not leveling with us, Jason. On any level. Even within the briefing itself. All that bullshit he was on about running that data through all those comps and coming up with all those probability vectors…that’s all it is: bullshit. He’s got specific intelligence about something, or he wouldn’t be committing key operatives off-planet. He’s not coming clean.”

  “Probably.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Does that scare you? Or just excite you?”

  “I’m not sure I know the difference,” she replies evenly.

  “Did you once?”

  “Can’t we figure that out as we go?”

  “I guess we’ll have to,” he replies.

  The ’copter descends toward Houston.

  Ten klicks south of Agrippa, the train emerges. Though you could be forgiven for not spotting the tunnel mouth, because to say that this terrain is rough is to put it mildly. But the vehicle now shooting out of the black just doesn’t care. It’s like hot mercury, that train, distended across a quarter-klick of rail as it dives through tunnels and sails across bridges, hurling itself along terrain that would have been deemed impassable a scant twenty years ago. The mountains cluster ever thicker; again and again, they seem to have the train completely boxed in. But—again and again—the train’s a mechanical Houdini extricating itself from apparent confinement, doing everything save pass through solid rock as it bores relentlessly onward en route for Shackleton, at the lunar south pole.

  But the view isn’t keeping the Operative’s attention. He’s saving that for the interior of this car. The seats are three to a row on either side of a wide central aisle, with more cleared space up in front. The Operative’s got a row to himself. The tops of the seats are low enough to allow some line of sight to one’s fellow passengers. Though some are military, most of them seem to be corporate—and just technicians at that: grease deep in their faces, tools hung at their belts. The Operative doesn’t like the look of them.

  There are two in particular he likes even less. His sixth sense is crawling: up near the front—one with red hair withering into premature grey, the other with grey hair dyed half-red. They haven’t tried anything. They haven’t given any sign they even know each other. The Operative keeps an eye in front of him, strays one eye sideways a little, stays attuned to what’s behind him—and all the while he thinks.

  And listens too. To the man inside his head. Because uncertainties within the car can’t compete with the voice that suddenly comes dropping down into the middle of the Operative’s skull as the download kicks in, clothed in an image that sits in the very center of the mind’s eye. Ebony skin. Silver hair. Opticals. Oversized ears.

  And grinning mouth.

  “Carson, Carson, Carson,” it says. “Did you miss me?”

  The Operative stares out the window. Stares at his fellow passengers. Stares at the image’s teeth. Doesn’t speak. Just listens.

  “That’s good,” says the mouth. “Real good, Carson. Had to ask, you understand. Even though you can’t answer. Let me assume, though, that the answer’s the same as it was before: no and yes.”

  The Operative just stares. Red going grey has risen to his feet, has joined a few other technicians lounging and leaning around at the front of the car—and in their center is grey going red, dealing out a game of Shuk. Or at least the Operative guesses it to be Shuk. There are five persons in all, and Shuk’s a five-person game. But he can’t see the many-shaped cards that are probably now lying on the floor of the car or on some makeshift tabletop made out of someone’s equipment. So he’s left to make his guesses. For minutes. For hours. Then:

  “Yes and no,” continues Lynx, “no and yes. Can’t say I blame you. It was bad enough when I got here. It’s much worse now.”

  The Operative keeps staring. Red going
grey has thrown his right hand back in triumph, laughing. Grey going red’s getting even redder. Now others are separating the two, the Operative half-expecting all the while that they’re going to turn together and come for him. He’s starting to feel quite underdressed.

  “But we’ll get you suited for it,” says the mouth. “We’ll get you sorted. Though I wish we didn’t have to. I wish they’d sent me someone else.” Tongue licks out, white teeth flashing behind its curve. “You think I’m pleased to see you? You must be kidding.”

  The Operative feels himself tipped back. Ever so slightly: but unmistakably. The train is ascending. The bridges on which it’s riding are rising. More blackness is encroaching. Pulsings in that blackness are satellites sweeping low, catching the sun.

  “Because the truth,” says Lynx, “it’s that this whole game is going up for grabs. This whole scene is getting out of hand. And we, my friend, are right in the middle of it.”

  Now the bridge has risen so far into the peaks that they’re starting to constitute a bona fide horizon. The light of the stars is dribbling onto moonscape. And Lynx’s smile is vanishing.

  “So we got to change it up, Carson,” he says. “We have to draw first blood.”

  So now grey going red is whipping out a knife and trying to cut himself some red streaks. But his target’s not the Operative: red going grey leaps backward, his left arm swinging around in front of him as he pulls his torso out of the path of the serration, his left hand flicking out with one of the many-shaped cards—this one’s a triangle and one of its tips is actually hard-edged sharpness to pluck the jugular, play the red like a firehose out of control. But the hell of it is that grey that’s going red forever is still on the attack. He grabs the wrist that holds the fatal card, tries to turn his assailant’s own limb against him while he stabs in with his other one. The frantic nature of his thrusts parallels the jets of blood flying everywhere. It sends shadows sprawling, bystanders ducking, scarlet splashing, and all the while that smiling mouth just keeps on talking.

  “I think you see the way this is going to go,” says Lynx. Data blasts from behind him to grid the whole of zone. “You’re going to die unless you listen to me. This is our nightmare scenario come to life. This is the moment you and I have always dreamt of. So wake the hell up, Carson. Because that’s the fucking Moon out that window. That’s our fucking planet in the sky.”