The Ultra Thin Man

by Patrick Swenson

  “He was an artist?” he asked.

  Dorie smiled. “Indeed. Sculpture, and very good at it. This is helping. Are you seeing things?”

  “Some.”

  She nodded, then rolled onto her back. She seemed to have fought through the effects of the RuBy. “We lived there in Venasaille. I grew to love him in my own way. I know he loved me. He didn’t win the election, but he didn’t mind. He’d proved his point, made his policies known. He sculpted.”

  “What were you doing during this?”

  “I continued university. I did enough rabble-rousing on my own without him. Terl had introduced me to RuBy, but had warned me about long-term use. I didn’t start abusing the drug until later. Until after…”

  She trailed off, and his body reminded him that the RuBy still had its claws in him. The fog had dissipated a little, but the drug’s strength still summoned enough ghosts to help him follow Dorie’s story. His eyes closed again.

  Evening. On the roof of the tower, lying on a cot, her presence at his side. Looking up at the reddish moon that dominated the sky. Coral.

  “We took a vacation trip to Coral,” she said.

  He nodded as the image haunted him. “You lost him.”

  “He excused himself at the rock quarry where we were taking a tour of the mining facility there. The Rock Dome had been mined out for several years, but there always seemed to be people there. Anyway, he said he wouldn’t be long. ‘Union bright,’ he said, and slipped away to use the bathroom. Security reported later that his Ident card had been used to leave the Rock Dome. But he never used it again after that. He vanished.”

  And then reappeared, he thought.

  The Movement of Worlds leader. The more Dorie talked about it, the more he understood he was not really Terl Plenko. Not on the inside, anyway.

  What had happened to Plenko?

  The ghosts were leaving him as he came down from the RuBy, the room around him assuming its former shape and colors. He tried not to give in to it, hoping to keep it with him, or to at least integrate the fading experience with the newly discovered images of his consciousness. Would those stay with him when the effects wore off completely? Would he understand then who he was?

  Perhaps as he re-entered normality, he would let go of the Plenko patterns and change his personality. Alter his defenses. Pliable, bendable, like iron in the fire.

  Before Dorie, before the RuBy, he had believed he was a Helk. He believed he didn’t care about anything or about anyone. Something else had a hold of him now, and he didn’t like it. Also, the fire seemed to be winning, and a few of the pains he’d felt upon first waking here started making themselves known again.

  “I hit the RuBy hard,” Dorie said after the long silence. “I did everything Terl had told me not to do with it.” A tear rolled down the side of her face even as she tried to turn away to keep it hidden. “There were days I didn’t get out of bed, almost comatose. There were days I went out into Venasaille and partied until the wee hours, having almost no recollection of what happened. Not so bright, my Union.”

  She wiped the tear with her hand, rubbing it out like an erasure, from her chin to the corner of her eye. Then she sat up and stared at him, her brown eyes moist. He waited for her to collect herself.

  “During one of the days inside, zonked on RuBy, I lost myself. I have a vague recollection of all these hands grabbing me, holding me.” She shook her head slowly, an almost imperceptible motion. “I woke up here, on Temonus.”

  “In this place?” A sharp pain tore up his side and he grimaced, placing a hand near his hip.

  “Nearby. In a house where I live now in the Helk district. Are you feeling sharp pains?”

  He nodded. “A little.”

  “RuBy’s worn off.”

  “I figured.”

  “I don’t know if I should give you any more right now. Not before … well, later on…”

  Another stab pierced his stomach and he exhaled noisily. “I can manage for a while. Go on.”

  “Not much more to tell,” she said. “Terl started popping up around the Union, making his Movement known, started doing his thing. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t sound like him at all.”

  “And he showed up here?”

  “He showed up here,” she echoed. “I was waiting tables. Turns out he now owns the place. He clocked me out, took me to my house, and told me I was done working. Limited my freedom, assigned some of his cronies to me. You met a few earlier.”

  “Chinkno?”

  “Tam Chinkno, his top guy. And others you need to remember. Tony Koch. Tom Knox.”

  A pain hit below his shoulder, in his chest, right as a tendril of the non-RuBy fog swept through him. Koch, Knox. The names seemed familiar. Why?

  “I can’t know for sure,” she went on, “but I’ve been here on Temonus almost a year, with very little access to anyone. From time to time, Terl has come and talked to me. One minute he seems to long for the old days, but the next minute I don’t believe a word of it. He doesn’t come on any regular schedule, and every time I see him he looks more haggard, more irritable. Even Chinkno is nervous around him.”

  “You used that to your advantage when I showed up.”

  Dorie nodded. “I knew you were not my Plenko. I knew it for the same reason I knew the Plenko who owns this restaurant is not my Plenko. My Plenko was killed. Murdered. Do you follow me?”

  “A little,” he said, wincing at a number of pains that hit him all over, one after another. “The Plenko who came to you here is not the Plenko you fell in love with. He’s no more the real Plenko than I am.”

  And so why the hell were there so many of them? Of him?

  “It’s my secret,” she said. “The one I told you about. For a little while, I wasn’t sure about you.”

  He looked toward the wooden door, looking weak and not-so-well insulated. “Should you be talking to me in here?”

  “No one but Plenko gives a shit about me. And he does because he thinks I know something—” She stopped and shook her head. “Well. I’ve got them fooled. They think Plenko has a hold on me. I did my Dorie-strung-out-on-RuBy tough-girl act to win over Chinkno once I realized the truth about you. It didn’t take long after looking at you. Listening to you. I know who my Plenko was, and there’s no doubt about who I am.”

  “But you know more than just whether Plenko is Plenko or not. You know something bigger.”

  She nodded, and her eyes glinted with excitement. “Plenko’s revolution isn’t his own.” She stood suddenly, came close. Her voice lowered to a whisper. “He’s being used. It’s not just a revolution, it’s an invasion.”

  “What?” he whispered back.

  “It’s a thousand monkey wrenches thrown into the inner workings of the Union. And you, my unknown friend, are right in the middle of it.”

  Who cares about revolution?

  Thoughts he’d had earlier when waking up in this room returned. He’d thought he was a Helk. When he’d decided nothing mattered. When he was ready to give up.

  Who cares about Union?

  Something had a hold of him. A fire inside. A fire that was growing, changing him. A fire RuBy kept at bay.

  Who cares about humans, Memors, even Helks? Fuck Helkunntanas.

  Yes, he had thought that earlier, in this very room. Indeed, RuBy kept the fire under control, but RuBy had started it all.

  Who cares about goddamn Alan Brindos?

  He stood up so quickly, Dorie fell backward onto the container she’d sat on earlier.

  “Alan Brindos.”

  “What?” she said, getting up.

  “That’s who I was. The name just came to me.” But who exactly was Alan Brindos?

  She walked back to him, motioning him to sit down again so she could look into his face. “This is good. It’s coming back to you, as I hoped. I was afraid the RuBy wouldn’t work this way.”

  “What way? What’s it doing?”

  “It’s counteracting the stuff they
gave you in the injection.”

  He swallowed hard, not liking where this was going. The fire overtaking him chose that moment to scrunch his gut like a fist squeezing an inflated balloon. He cried out as the pain punched him there, then pounded him seemingly everywhere else inside.

  Dorie put a finger to her lips, trying to shush him. “I know, I know, it hurts, but you don’t want them coming back in here now.”

  “Maybe that is what I want. That injection stopped the pain the first time.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You’re this Alan Brindos, whoever he was. Do you want to be a Helk?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it.”

  “Do you like being used? Do you want to be a part of chaos? Or do you want to be free?”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  She reached up and held his hairless leathery head in both hands, her eyes radiating kindness. “It means, Alan Brindos, that you have a chance, and the Union has a chance. Union bright.” She gave him a sad smile. “But if I don’t free you, if you don’t figure this out, you will die.”

  He stared at her hard, and his own eyes watered as the floodgates of memory let loose.

  Alan Brindos.

  The pain doubled, everywhere, as if dozens of red-hot brands burned through his skin, torching his inner organs, but he clenched his teeth, somehow managing to keep screams from escaping.

  With the pain came understanding. With the pain came everything.

  His partner, Dave Crowell. The National Intelligence Organization. Everything flooded back. The Conduit. Plenko. Joseph. Meet my One. And—

  Dorie Senall.

  “Dorie,” Brindos whispered. “Oh, Dorie.”

  She frowned, pulling back a little. “Listen, I know it’s hard to understand. I’ve got to give you this now.” She pulled out another square of RuBy, rolled it for him, and coaxed it into his mouth between his teeth. “I know you don’t want to die, so if we figure it out—”

  “No,” he said as the RuBy dissolved on his tongue. “It’s you. Your apartment at Tempest Tower. I saw you fall off the balcony.”

  “What?” Her eyes went wide as Brindos leaned back against the redbrick wall.

  “Dorie, I saw you die.”

  Nineteen

  Now I’ll tell you about the plan to tear apart the Union of Worlds.

  That sentence from Forno should’ve sent an electric current through my body, shaking me from top to bottom, but when he said it, I didn’t feel a thing.

  Of course that was the plan. It had been Plenko’s goal long before I’d signed on with the NIO. But that wasn’t everything. Without a doubt, Alan and I had become involved in something much larger than Plenko’s Movement. We were part of a large-scale Union-shattering plot, one that Forno had also stumbled onto.

  “Is it safe to talk here?” I glanced at the RuBy addict on the cot, who lay still, staring wide-eyed at the top of the tent.

  Forno said, “Not even remotely safe.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s … encouraging.”

  He nodded at the cot. “He’s not going to tell anyone a thing. Poor fellow will be dead before too long.”

  I gulped, and I imagined I could actually taste the RuBy at the back of my throat. I’d never tried the drug, and although the cinnamon odor was strong, I didn’t know how it really tasted. Another five minutes in this placeand I believed I’d be addicted to the stuff myself.

  “All right, tell me,” I said. If we truly were not safe, even hidden in here, then I wanted him to get on with it. My hand squeezed voluntarily on the blaster I still held at my side. “Start with the Conduit. It’s supposed to be a weather control device. I read the specs.”

  He drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his massive arms around them. “That was the story the Science Consortium told. Hell, they even showed it. In theory, it could work that way. But it was designed, ultimately, to do something else.”

  “To do what?”

  “To replicate people,” he said, his eyes distant. Then he shook his head. “Well, no, that’s not the right word. They’re altering them.”

  That part seemed only too true, considering what I’d experienced so far, and what Alan had told me from his end, before he went silent.

  “Helks?” I asked. “Humans?”

  “Anyone changed into anyone,” Forno said, his voice hushed. “The tech I came across in the NIO basement is way beyond me. I did my best to understand and internalize it, because I had no way to transfer the information. The Science Consortium’s using ultrafast x-ray technology, something light-years ahead of anything I’ve heard about. Something about acceleration and diffraction. Heating matter, shocking it. Signals shooting through a superaccelerator.”

  “Jesus. The Conduit’s an accelerator?”

  Forno nodded. “In part, due to its ultra thin wire. The Conduit’s used to change these pulsed, ultrafast x-rays, and the particle acceleration creates—” He paused, looking me straight in the eye. “Dave, they’ve discovered how to change the very structure of matter.”

  Ultra thin wire. I thought back to my encounter with Forno at Floor 13, the warnings, the information about the ultra thin level. He’d hinted then at the Science Consortium’s involvement with the NIO, hinted at topics such as Temonus, Ribon, Coral, and the Conduit.

  “They’ve come up with a way to change the physical structure of life forms,” I said, trying to follow him. I didn’t think he was following himself very well either.

  “It’s no wonder my brain hurts when I think about this stuff,” Forno said.

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  I wondered how much of Lorway’s Memor know-how figured into this. Did the Memors really have this kind of advanced technology at hand? I didn’t think so.

  “They’ve developed nanoscale machines,” Forno said. “They can even mutate and engineer chemical reactions in the body, at a molecular level, probably even smaller. They not only change living beings physically, they alter their brain chemistry, essentially allowing them to match anything, or anyone they have on file.”

  Making nearly perfect copies.

  Forno went on. “They can even give the subjects a type of computer memory, using the ultrafast light pulses in lieu of binary switching. With ease, they could control how much old memory a copy has or doesn’t have, depending on its uses. Some of this tech has been around a long time. Nano machines, in particular. But no one’s been able to figure out how nanomaterials transform. But this ultra fast acceleration idea? Seems to have done the trick.”

  “How fast is ultra fast? How thin is ultra thin?”

  Forno shrugged. “Approaching the speed of light. And that Conduit wire is miniscule.”

  Something really bothered me about this. Besides the obvious, of course. I didn’t doubt Forno’s explanation about the Conduit, but even the idea of superaccelerating through the means of a thin wire seemed ludicrous. What kind of material could allow that sort of thing? Even I had heard a little about some of this tech, but how could it have made such a giant leap forward in such a short time? The Memors were quiet, often stingy with their technology, but this didn’t sound right.

  “We’re dealing with unknowns here,” Forno said, “so if you’re thinking about temperatures, superconductivity—I’ve reached the end of my knowledge base.”

  “Helk snot,” I mumbled, realizing the truth. I glanced quicky at Forno and said, “Um, sorry.”

  Forno shrugged. “My snot is not offended.”

  I walked over to the man on the cot and stared at his red-rimmed eyes. The tent became very still. Sweat cooled my forehead and my own words rumbled in my head.

  A flicker in the RuBy addict’s eyes. A slight tick along the bottom lid.

  Even sitting, Forno’s gigantic, silent presence became almost unbearable. I stood there a long time, several minutes passing as I stared into the addict’s eyes, Forno waiting me out. Suddenly, I didn’t like
it. The silence was oppressive. Someone in this tent needed to talk to me.

  As if he heard my thoughts, Forno said, “They’ve subdued these people with RuBy. Why?”

  But I had it now. I had it, and I didn’t want to have it. As if someone had slapped me on the back of the neck, forcing the words from my throat—words I didn’t want to say—I said, “They’re making an army.”

  “An army?”

  Now I was ahead of Forno. “New Venasaille—it’s a soldier factory. Not an army as we would think of it. It’s for a quiet, hidden war, and the soldiers are pawns in the reshaping, with the goal of infiltrating every possible known position of power and prestige. You and I both have already seen it with the NIO and the Kenn.”

  The evidence in front of me, I still could not come to terms with this new horror. But nothing fit. I couldn’t even begin to jam these puzzle pieces together.

  “Forno, it makes no sense that the Science Consortium would do this. What could possibly cause five scientists to reshape the Union? To want it so bad that they’d do”—I swept my free arm around in a large circle to indicate the tent city—“this? These atrocities?”

  He shook his head.

  Another terrifying realization came to me and I suddenly felt helpless. “Ribon,” I said.

  “What?” Forno said.

  “It was done on purpose.”

  “Sure. Part of the Movement. An act of terror—”

  “No. Coral Moon was deliberately thrown into Ribon’s path, not to destroy it, not to demonstrate a show of force, but to displace some of the world’s population. To give them these refugees to turn into soldiers.”

  I heard Forno’s voice catch in his throat. “How many people didn’t make it off Ribon alive? They sacrificed a world, decimated its population, all for … I lost family there. Friends.”

  He couldn’t finish.

  I nodded in sympathy.

  And still … Nothing could make me believe the Science Consortium would stoop to something this evil. I didn’t believe Plenko’s Movement could have done it. Helkunntanas itself? A world against the Union? Maybe. But why would they want to?