He’s entirely serious, and of all the members of the shadow orgs, he embodies those values the most. And yet I can’t help myself. “‘To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal,’” I quote. Glendower shoots me a sharp look.
Maxentius, though, hasn’t noticed. “Yes! Exactly.” He shakes my hand a second time, beaming, and nods to Glendower. “I must be off. Good luck — I hope we’ll see you here again.”
I watch him go. He rescues kittens; that much is a matter of record. It’s part of why there’s now a cleanup detail assigned solely to him. The shadow orgs may prize their secrecy, but Maxentius does make a useful distraction. And, after all, they are all on the same side.
I shouldn’t have made fun of him. It’s not his fault he’s an innocent.
Glendower’s watching me, but unless he’s a nethead — and I know he’s not — he can’t see everything I’m doing. “I’ve set up a contact terminal for you,” he says. “We’d been meaning to change out our security, but good netheads with clearance are few and far between, and I’m afraid we were caught with our trousers down. The virus doesn’t seem to be actively hostile, but my projections show it stopping work outright if it overloads any more of our systems. At the moment it’s benign, just irritating.”
“I can imagine.” Twenty years ago, we’d have been fine with a microsecond lag; forty years, and a five-second lag was nothing. But technology spoils us — I should know, I’ve got a few dozen terabytes’ worth of it in my head. I switch from wireless to node work, and put my hands on either side of the contact terminal, relying on the points wired into my fingertips to carry me in. “I can upgrade some of your security while I’m here, but it’ll just be a patch-up job till I can come back, and I don’t yet have clearance for a second visit. You sure you couldn’t fix it yourself?”
Glendower shakes his head. “It’s rapidshift. I just don’t have the speed to keep it from mutating as I’m working on it. That’s nethead work.”
Of course it is; I created the damn virus. My consciousness is already split between the terminals that dot the base; I damp wireless input to make up for it and start searching.
Glendower waits for a response from me, then shakes his head and laboriously gets up from the chair. He’s got a pacemaker; I can sense the pulse of it like a cricket in the room. “It’s rare to have a nethead down here,” he says, opening a cabinet and pouring a glass of tonic water. “I had to argue just to get the first few working on our security.”
“You’ve got failsafes in place, though.” Those failsafes gave me nightmares for weeks, after I first found out that the Niobe web wasn’t just for solar energy.
“True.” He pours a second glass and sets it on the shelf next to me. I nod my thanks but don’t take it. We’re both silent a moment; realtime maybe ten seconds, wiretime much longer, long enough for me to cordon off my virus and distinguish the main archives from what I’m looking for. They don’t let these out to the general public; they don’t even have access through the Madison facility. The Oculus records.
“You didn’t need to tease Max like that,” Glendower says quietly.
“Probably not.” I’m sorting through records, searching by time, date, subject, even setting aside a part of my brain to flash through random stills, looking for Casey. Oculus’ uploads take up entire spindles; I’ve heard that no one knows why it records everything it sees, but they don’t want to upset it by asking. “It just bothered me.”
“When he finds out you quoted the mission statement of the Klan at him, he’ll be a mess. Max doesn’t work well when he has a crisis of conscience.” He settles back into his chair with a grunt, and tonic water splashes over the back of his hand.
“Then he’ll only be saving the world eighty percent of the time. I’m sure the rest of you can cover the remaining twenty percent.” Something about the virus cordon is bothering me, but I’m so close — and there she is, Casey’s face blurring by, the brief video record categorized with about four hundred others, each no more than a couple of minutes.
“Would you be willing to help out with that twenty percent?”
I stop, sliding Casey’s record into my personal memory like a shoplifter sliding a necklace into his pocket, and turn to face him, keeping one hand on the contact terminal. “Sorry?”
Glendower smiles and thumps his cane on the floor. He needs that cane, I know; an accident when this place was being built wrecked his right foot, and he hasn’t had it replaced. “If nothing else, this incident highlights our need to have a nethead on the team. You’re the best, you’ve got the offline intelligence we need, and you’ve shown great discretion in your work for us here and in Madison.”
Discretion. Right. Which is why I’m now fixing a problem I created. It’s tempting, though — I can imagine Casey saying Who wouldn’t jump at a chance to be a superhero? Or is it only that I want her to say that?
I unpack Casey’s record for later viewing, thinking of the smell of hot dirt in the vacant lot and four-color ink smudged across my fingers. “Let me think about it.”
“Well.” Glendower sighs, then leans over and sets his glass down on the far terminal. “I understand, you’ve got doubts. After all — ” the screen behind him lights up, “ — I think I know why you’re here.”
Casey stares down at me from Glendower’s screen, twenty times larger than life, and I finally recognize what the virus report is telling me: someone, probably Glendower himself, got to it first. I stare at Casey’s image on the screens — an ID photo, not a mug shot. They’d only had mug shots for the ones who’d gotten arrested, and Casey didn’t even make it that far.
Glendower nods. “She was important to you.”
“She was.” I open the video record that I went through so much to find. It’s only about twenty seconds’ worth of Oculus’ point-of-view, showing a door bursting open. Casey crouches at the far end of the room, frizzy hair tied up in a bright red cloth, eyes wide and dark.
She’s just as I remember her.
The record shows her turning and reaching for something — a gun? a phone? a vial that could be her medicine and could be something else entirely? All of them are on the same table. She never even touches it before a flash of light from the door cuts her down.
I close my eyes, then open them to face Glendower, and behind him, Casey. “You knew?”
“We’re everywhere, Mr. Carson. We knew.” He looks over his shoulder, at the image of a smiling dead girl. “She’d been part of the Fourth Street terrorist cell. We got to the lab first, but when we came to apprehend her — ”
“Don’t.” I can see what happened. I take another look back into the Oculus records; someone’s lumped all of the recorded deaths together, whether criminal or civilian or just plain dumb luck. Glendower’s assembled them for his own penance, I guess. He doesn’t let himself forget either.
It’s not enough.
“My offer still stands.” He props his hands on his cane and gazes at me. Casey does the same, over his shoulder. “You wouldn’t be the first to forsake vengeance and turn your considerable talents toward a good cause. Or — ” he sits back a little, “ — you can take that vengeance on me. I won’t stop you.”
My breathing slows, and the hand that isn’t on the terminal curls into a fist. I could do it. I could kill him in any number of ways — stop the pulse of his pacemaker, use the autofocus in his spectacles as a link into his optical nerve and burn his skull from the inside out, scramble his neurons till he’s a drooling vegetable — and walk away. I might even get out of here unscathed, depending how what method I chose.
But kill him, and there’ll be another just as certain that they’re justified in their actions. Because it’s their job to save the world. They’re everywhere already, and so many of them wear masks. They say it’s to protect their identities, but it’s also so that we’re never sure who’s one of them, who’s watching. They’re
always anonymous again in daylight.
Who was that masked man? I don’t know, but there’s twenty more of them outside.
Or join them. That’s the logical ending for a nethead; most of us find one big project and stick with it, and this would be in a good cause. If the terrorists had gotten their hands on the Fourth Street biolab, the result could have killed thousands. How many lives could I save that way, how many Caseys could I save . . .
I snip the virus out of the system with an absent thought and take my hands from the terminal, switching back to wireless. “Let me think about it,” I say again, and this time I’m not stalling, I’m pleading.
Glendower nods. “I’m sorry,” he says, bowing his head. “About your friend’s death — I’m sorry.”
And that decides it. Not I’m sorry we killed her, but I’m sorry about her death. Sidestepping the responsibility. Making it an act of God.
I take a few steps toward the exit, hesitant and unsteady. It’s not acting; I have to retract some of my motor skills to handle the download, the massive quantity of Oculus records pouring into my head. But Glendower sees it as the agony of indecision, and he lets me pass. He’s a good man; he wouldn’t deliberately hurt someone like me.
I find my way to the exit unhindered — I think Maxentius, or maybe one of his cleanup crew, waves to me as I go by. As the doors close, I wonder with the portion of my brain that isn’t unpacking records if I’ll make it out of here at all. If the shadow orgs wanted, they could kill me right here, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.
But these are the good guys.
In the silence of the transport I have time to craft the message that will go out with each clip. It’s not much, just a few lines for each record, an autovoice that’s recognizably my own. And links, archives, paths to data that isn’t shared or acknowledged, not even by netheads. Even crafting this, having a message like this unsent in my skull, is punishable by federal law.
The guard waves me through, and I step out into blinding sunlight. The world of data flows around me again — and this time I leap into it, sending out into all nodes, the conspiracists and the news media and the archives. The Niobe GPS activates, and above me the satellite web moves, shifts, focuses.
It’s not enough to stop me.
These people have died because of the shadow organizations, I say over each clip, each death, each victim of the shadow orgs. The desert sunlight shifts, shading from yellow-white to blazing, bright enough to hurt my eyes. They were deemed guilty and executed without trial. The guard is yelling, first running after me and then, as he realizes what’s happening, back to the shade and safety of his bunker.
They were unlawfully executed. And links, lists, the shadow orgs and all their work, thrown open to the world they claim to protect. If they can’t take the scrutiny, they don’t deserve to last.
I turn my face to the incandescent sky and smile, racing to meet the sunlight.
About the Author
Margaret Ronald is the author of Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt, as well as a number of short stories. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.
The Bells of Subsidence
Michael John Grist
The Bell is coming.
It’s night, and I’m lying beside Temetry on a cold grey crater of this world’s endless desert, listening to the oscillations of the Bell. At times we glimpse its Brilliance, the after-image of its long and branic toll splashing across the plush black firmament like an endless corolla borealis. I imagine it far overhead, arcing through the universe, plancking the anthropic landscape from yoke to clapper, and can think of only one word to describe it.
“Godly,” I whisper.
Temetry nods by my side. He doesn’t speak, not since the last Bells came when we were babies, but I know what he’s thinking. I’m thinking it also.
“How are your non-orientable insects?” I ask.
He shrugs. This shrug means he’s had no breakthroughs. I know it, because he’d not be here with me if he had. The men of this world would have taken him for the Gideon heat-sink long ago.
“I won’t forget you,” I say to him quietly.
He turns to me, and smiles, because he knows I cannot keep that promise. The Bell is coming tonight. His hand worms the grey sand, folds my fingers within his own, and I remember that he is the most beautiful thing I have.
“I love you,” I whisper to him. His fingers tighten, rippling over mine in Euclidean gymnastics, until our hands are joined partway between a reticulated conch shell and an intersecting Klein bottle.
I laugh. It is our joke, a vestige of what Subsidence has brought us both. We are only 11, and I love him, because I know in my heart that he will never forget me.
“I’ll whisper your name to the branes until I die,” I promise him, feeling the urgency of this moment, alone in this crater for the last time.
His smile turns sad. It is the last abiding image I have of him, because then comes the sound of old Ingen, and the moment is lost. She is huffing and panting her rooty head over the crater-lip. This place is no longer special or secret. Temetry’s dazzling smile is sad, forever, because I’ll never see him again.
Ingen is my mother, and she uses me.
She plucks me from the crater without even glancing at Temetry. I don’t think she even sees him anymore. Arm in arm we stroll back to the Gideon bore, and she chatters on about her day, about what permutations she wrought in this planet’s atmosphere, what gains in the heat-sink they explored.
We arrive at the bore-head, a silver pipe in this dry planet’s haunch, and she kneels before me in the grey sand, her hands on my shoulders. I know this is how she talks to her simulacra, plugging fresh wavelengths into their pea-sized minds, laying in the algorithms of growth. I am just another of her extremities, to be ordered, wound, and sent chuttering on my way.
“You must forget that boy, Aliqa,” she tells me. “He’s lost, too far under the Bell. You know that, don’t you? He can’t follow where you’re going.”
She aspires to love me, but I know the thing she loves most is herself.
“Yes mother,” I reply. I am polite and correct, a good Gideon girl.
Ingen ruffles my hair in the way I hate. I am not an infant anymore. Temetry would never do it. “Good girl,” she says, and she leads us into the bore-head. We stand atop the dimple, and she initiates the involutions.
Space folds, and I taste the familiar feel of my mother’s mind in my own, twisting the anthropic plane. A moment later we emerge in our living room.
“Go to your involutions, Aliqa,” Ingen says. “Hone your mind for the Bell.”
I go. In my room I close my eyes, stand upon my dimple, and begin. Far into the night I manifold four dimensions in non-Euclidean space, inverting Tesseracts, decanting Klein kettles, shaving Möbius strips into interlocking many-twisted chains.
I finish in the dark morning, as ever unable to speak or think, the involutions have so stripped away my sense of self. I sit on my bedside vacantly, emptied into submission, until the folds of my mind remember the shape they ought to take, and I can heal.
Then I will sleep.
This is not my hope. It is my mother’s hope for me. She will have me upon the Bells though she must strip the last shred of self from my mind. I am matter to be prepared, used, and replaced.
In my non-state I struggle to think of Temetry, but there is nothing of him there. No I, no you, only the endless entangled looping of the branes.
Pink dawn comes, and on a Gideon screen in my empty room I watch the Bell snuffing down over the grey desert.
It is immense, a vast colorless ark that fills the horizon, eclipsing the grey desert I have known all my life. At the atmospheric boundary its toll emerges as a jarring rumble in the earth, a Brilliance so complex with harmonies and grace notes that it makes all the simulations I’ve heard seem like one-fiddle jigs. The sound is a universe of its own, oriented through the branes in ways I cannot grasp.
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It snuffs down, and all I can think of is Temetry. He will be out there somewhere, sitting the grey crater-sand, folding paper with his hands, his eyes sad as the first sun rises. Before him will be an array of non-orientable sand-hoppers, each folded like Möbius strips with only a single side. Each of their eight limbs will be perfectly formed, aligned, so life-like they could at any moment hop away. He will have sat awake all night folding them, as the only thing he can do.
He will watch as this Bell lands, and he will name it after me, for he knows it will be the Bell that takes me away.
Grey sand fills the screen, and it lands. I feel the branes tremble around me. This is my life, now. Tears run down my cheeks as I realize what it means. I will truly never see Temetry again.
Then old Ingen is at my side, dabbing at my cheeks with her sleeve, hustling me to the door.
“Don’t worry on my account, child,” she bustles, and I realize she thinks my tears are for her. “Old Ingen will abide. There’s much work to be done here yet, don’t cry for me.”
I want to tell her I am not, but bite my lip hard. There is no need to be cruel, now. It will change nothing, only hurt us both more.
At the door she holds me again by the shoulders, and I see that she too is crying. She runs her hands down my sides, smudges away a non-existent speck of dust, and I wonder. Perhaps she does love me after all. Perhaps she is sad to see her most talented creation disappear.
“Be a good girl,” she says. “Do as they say, be polite.”
I smile and nod a this fallacy. We both know I will have no choice. For the next five years I will be indentured to the Bell, and my mind will not be my own. There will be no need for me to do a thing, except survive.
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 16
