by Nels Wadycki
"The Androkal."
"Yes."
"That's it? You have no information on the people who did it? The Continuum has no information on them?"
Again, pity and a condescending condolence appeared on Natalya's angular face.
"You really don't know? The leader of the Rebels—we don't have a better name for them—I mean," she paused, looked down, then at Ana again, "you don't know?"
Ana dropped the hovercar to the ground, the alley just as dark as it had been where she'd forced Natalya inside. It was almost as if the weight of the moment dragged the car down to the poorly paved piece of earth. She turned to face the Raven, and her face showed the same gravity.
"I know," Ana whispered, "but I want to hear you say it."
"The leader of the Rebels is Guillermo Callif. He was your brother until the Continuum kidnapped him at age eleven."
Ana did not look away, but when she blinked, tears ran hot down her cheeks.
"Why?" She whispered the question, then her throat convulsed and it repeated as a deafening roar in the tiny space of the hovercar. "Why!"
"The Continuum selected him to be their leader. I had as much say in the matter as I did with recruiting you."
Ana shoved aside the fact that Natalya was trying to cover her ass. She wasn't pointing the gun at her passenger anymore. Nothing to fear but the rage of a woman who was waiting in line to cross the border into Out of Control.
"He's not leading you though. So, that kind of backfired, didn't it?"
"Guillermo found some documents before he was prepared to see them. They should have been hidden better, but our former leaders underestimated his intelligence and cleverness. Your brother misinterpreted the information and it changed his beliefs regarding the Continuum, radically. I'm sure it was something like what you are going through right now. He turned his back and left and disappeared. But after a while he came back and started fighting against us."
Before Ana could excoriate her with the kind of retort she loved to toss as Natalya, the Raven continued.
"Ana, I know I've been harsh. I made assumptions about what you knew and acted on those assumptions. In that way, I made the same mistake Guillermo did. I realize now, through your admirable show of honesty here, that I was wrong. But the Agency was wrong for thrusting you into a situation without the background that you needed to be successful. I hope you too won't make the same mistake your brother did and turn away from the Continuum."
"Get out."
"Ana, please—"
Ana brought the gun back up and leveled it at the Bitch Natalya.
"Get out!"
Natalya reached back to the door panel, her eyes locked on Ana's, opened the door, and slid out.
"Ana, I can promise—"
"Shut the door!"
As soon as it was done, Ana took off, climbing into the swirling Friday night traffic—people going to theaters, restaurants, bars, hotels, and one woman who remembered the last time she had felt so emotionally beaten down was when she failed to find a three-year-old who looked just like the pictures of her brother at that age. Some of her most vivid memories of him were from that time when she was eight and he was three. She almost had him again; she sensed that he wanted to return to her. But he stood on the other side of a chasm that spanned half a lifetime. Even if she called out, would the sound carry across that vast distance? He had to know she wanted to see him again: to create a robot out of parts stolen from around the house; to tell him what her life had been like and have him listen like she was gossiping about high school; to listen to him relate the events of his life since that day when the Continuum stole him from her.
But as close as she was, Ana had no way to reach him. There was no bridge that would allow her across that great divide. No hovercar or airplane to commandeer. The only option was another long journey through the dangerous ground of the Continuum's archives, searching for every record she could get hold of pertaining to her brother. There had to be mountains of data on the former future leader of the organization, but Ana was in a fragile state for trekking through such hostile territory. She did not even bother hoping that this would be the last time she'd be working with her mind so close to snapping and so little left to lose. Instead, she slipped the hovercar into the spot reserved for her in the Spire's parking garage and headed upstairs.
--
Ana was surprised—and alarmed—to find that her security codes still worked to get her into the Spire. She had assumed that they would have been shut off after she locked Natalya in an interrogation room, but clearly the Continuum's threshold for acceptance of devious behavior was much higher than the Agency. Not necessarily a bad thing. Especially for someone who liked to take liberties in missions if it meant the successful completion of objectives.
She forced herself to stand tall and regained her old familiar strut as she passed through the halls of the massive building, threading her way through cloudy memories of the passageways to what she hoped was a data center that would connect her to the Continuum's files on her brother. As though it would be that easy.
The terminals were laid out in four rows of eight, bisected by a walkway to the front of the room. Ana took a seat in the back row, all the way to the right, as close as she could get to out of view of anyone coming in to the room. She remembered when Aerin would talk about putting on his scuba gear before diving into a deep research project. It was just a joke, but as she started to wade into the ocean of information brought up on the terminal before her, Ana couldn't help but wish for some gear to help her slide through with less friction. As it was, she picked her way across the web that stretched out to infinity, aware that any step might be the one that brought down a black widow to trap and poison her.
Ana shimmied her way past several security routines, working a piece of thread through a needle loop, and found bits and pieces of high-level information on her brother. Before kidnapping the Raven, before being stonewalled by Aerin, Ana had been too busy gathering intel for the Agency to even consider what kind of information the Continuum held about Memo. With the connection laid bare before her, she knew there had to be huge amounts of data stored somewhere. She followed trail after trail, picking up bits and pieces scattered throughout case files and studies, checking the skies for a rainbow that would take her to a pot of gold. The metadata was consistent and well-defined, but each time she tried to make use of the pattern it formed, she ended up at a brick wall. It was like she chased her brother down a dark alley into a certain dead end only to have him elude her. She parsed and dug, parsed and dug, as fast as she could under the constant threat that her name might be removed from whatever security lists she was on, leaving her at best with no more access, and at worst calling down a storm of real-life security guards.
But then, as she ran up against another sturdy wall of crimson blocks, Ana noticed a crack with a tiny piece of finely wound rope poking out. The data tried to be another stonewall dead end, but Ana noticed the incongruity in the way a report referred to her brother. He was called "Suspect One," only once, in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph. Ana checked and found no other references to Suspect One in any of the Continuum data to which she had access. Probably a classified project, but the fact that it was the only time that appeared in all of the information stored on Guillermo bugged her. She tried looking up Suspect Zero and Suspect Two, but found nothing. If Memo had been referred to as Suspect One consistently, a data scan could have updated all the references with his full name as it appeared in all the other documentation. But the data scan had missed a single instance in a document where it would have made a similar change several times.
Suspect One was the wrong name.
So the right name had to be something close, perhaps something that a data entry auto-corrector would have missed, or incorrectly fixed while attempting to save the entrant time in the process. Suspect was close to Subject in spelling and similar enough in meaning that a programmatic interpreter could have m
ade the mistake.
Ana moved from her current arc to a new path to search for Subject One. The avalanche of resulting information almost buried her. As she started sifting through as fast as the system would allow, she noticed that every mention of Subject One actually referred to the Subject One Project. So, the data filter must have been set up to extract references to Subject One the person, her brother, while leaving intact—but separate—the Subject One Project. The references to all other persons involved were anonymous, but as she began tracking back through the history of the project, Ana concluded that Subject One had to be her brother. She thought it a bit curious that her brother was called Subject One when he was clearly not the first, or even the second, person the Continuum had begun grooming for a leadership position. But as she went back, she noticed increasing references to the Subject Zero Project. At least her brother had not been the guinea pig who had committed suicide at age six "most likely as a result of the Subject Zero Project."
Cross-referencing the Subject Zero Project exposed Ana's credentials to new monitoring and scrutiny, but no alarms were set off by the listeners. She didn't stay long with that project, though, wanting to go back to Subject One, her brother, the person she had come to find.
Ana rolled back in time along the Subject One Project timeline when, near the beginning of the project, she saw documents marked with what were clearly processing and classification IDs from the United States Intelligence Agency. She couldn't take the time to stop to consider it until she reached the beginning where the project documentation clearly stated the Subject One Project was a failed Agency project. The Continuum had picked up where the Agency left off in experimenting on her brother. But he wasn't just an experiment. Both groups seemed to know somehow that he had leadership qualities that they would need when he became an adult.
Ana's hands trembled, and she nearly lost control of the query and her place within the data when she realized that it was possible that both organizations could know. No, the Agency and the Continuum had seen the future and used their time-travel technologies to move her brother like a pawn on a chess board. Or, given his apparent importance, like a rook or a knight. Maybe even a king. The two sides were dark and light, coming across the board at each other, having seen all the gambits and defenses ever used, hoping her brother could somehow break that paradigm and give them an advantage.
Ana closed her eyes, trying to stop the vertigo that threatened to topple her from her seat. Memo had changed it. He had broken away from the board entirely to wage a war against both sides at the same time.
When she opened her eyes and resumed her dive into the data, her stomach buckled and collapsed as she took in a new piece of the timeline. The citation was a simple matter-of-fact annotation in the original Agency file.
The Subject One Project undertook its first affecting action with the rescue of the primary research subject in the form of a kidnapping of the son of a government official in 2109. The three-year-old child was placed with a pre-determined foster home that would allow for the maximum opportunity for the necessary skill development. At the time, the kidnapping of Senator Dilger's son was investigated but remains unsolved.
Ana collapsed, falling from her chair, and blacked out momentarily. Then she got back up on shaking legs, gripping the table where the terminal sat dumbly as if wondering what could have caused such a reaction when it was all just strings of ones and zeroes. Guillermo, her brother, was Senator Dilger's lost son, taken back in time and given to her parents to raise as their own. That was all she could take, and it was all she could do to get out of the room, the hallway, the building and out into the cool spring air.
It had rained while she'd been inside the tower of cold evil, and blue flames froze all emotion as they crawled up its sides. Ana shuddered. She wanted to throw up, but she needed to get away. She needed to get away from the Continuum, who had stolen her brother away from her and taken the rest of her family with him. She needed to get away from the Agency who had stolen someone else's child and inserted him into her family, giving her a false brother, and robbing her of the only real friend she'd ever had.
Ana stumbled down the street-level walkway with the grace of a rusted robot, the tears that ran down her face only likely to cause more oxidization as her formerly brilliant iron shell crumbled and fell to pieces around her.
--
This time Ana reached Jrue on the first try and flew across the city like a bolt from a rail gun to arrive at the bar where he and Marisol had gone for drinks after their mission. Jrue said they had tried to get hold of her, and Ana didn't doubt it; she'd left her Agency comm in her apartment. She thought about it sitting there on her dresser and relished the thought of tossing it out the front door of her apartment, over the skywalk and out into the streams of traffic that would tear it apart before the durocrete below even got the chance to smash it into a thousand fragments.
Marisol gasped as Ana approached the table. She heard it even over the bass-heavy music of the Lost Mariachis insinuating itself between the floorboards from the dance hall above the bar.
Jrue stood and held out an arm as if to cradle her or maybe just to help her to sit down. Ana hadn't checked a mirror since her ride with Natalya, but she guessed that she looked like she'd been hit by a few dozen hovercars on the way there.
"Are you okay?" Marisol asked.
Ana started to say no and felt tears pushing out around her eyes, but the epiphany that came with realizing she was leaving the Agency stopped her. She stood a few moments with an open mouth, and then said, "Yes."
All the emotional damage suffered in the past two months, or two years, or two lifetimes, was tied to the Agency and the Continuum and their efforts to use her brother as a weapon against each other. Ana had been a piece, smaller than a pawn and less significant, in that game; she had not been kidnapped twice in nine years as part of dueling schemes to control the future, but she saw the Agency for what it was, and it wasn't her family.
Ana stood in front of the only two people who mattered from what was already feeling like a past life. Maybe she had actually died and risen again to bring herself outside the locus of control imposed by the Agency. But her two friends still sat on the side of the Agency, even though they were no less tied to that side than Ana was. It was in their heads. In their heads they were fighting the only war they knew to fight. But Memo had risen above, and though Ana still had no clue how to find him, she felt herself rising above the fray as well, as though she had discovered flight in the middle of a ground war. She was ready to soar away, to patrol the skies until she found Guillermo, then regroup and return to dive-bomb the bastards who had run roughshod over their lives. She would show them the same respect they had for her. She would show them who lived.
The whole story poured from her like the vomit she had almost spilled outside the Evil Spire. Jrue and Marisol sat in stunned silence as Ana laid out the facts before them, and without pausing for breath, launched into her argument to get them to leave with her, to go into the unknown world outside the structure and alleged protection of the Agency's walls.
"Can't you see? In your head, you're fighting for the good guys. But they took my brother! Jrue, they took part of your brain! They took every good night of sleep you ever could have had! For what? For nothing!"
Jrue glanced at Marisol, then looked back to Ana.
"What? You think I'm crazy? That I made it all up?"
"Not that. Just maybe there is a different truth behind it than what you've seen."
"I've tried to believe that for long enough. There is nothing, and that's what I have now. Nothing."
"You have us," Jrue said, his voice calling on the connection the two of them shared.
"I have you!" Ana said, cheering slightly. "I have you and I love you. That's why I want you to come with me!"
"Have you tried talking to Malcolm?"
Ana expelled a huge breath.
"Malcolm is no better than we are. He doesn't have any
more information that I do. Do you think he's seen the Continuum files? Come on. He doesn't know that Senator Dilger's son is my brother. What is he going to tell me that I don't already know?"
"Then let's take it up the chain of command."
"Up to where? Even if we march into Donaghy's office and tell him we know the Agency was responsible for the kidnapping, and even if he admits as much, what does that get us? Is that an organization you want to keep working for?"
"Maybe there was falsified information in the Continuum files."
Ana's training prevented her hands from flying off the table in exasperation.
"What do I have to do to convince you? I want you to come with me. I know the idea of leaving the Agency is scary, but we are fighting a war for people who don't care if we live or die."
"You've said that before; I've heard your doubts and reservations. I understand where you're coming from, Ana, but are you sure you're going to let the Continuum convince you to leave the good guys? Isn't that exactly what the Continuum would want?"
"The good guys? Are you kidding? The people who messed with your mind? Alando Piscina killed nine people and himself because of what they did to him and it's the same thing they did to you and you think those are the good guys?"
"They're better than the other side—"
"Even if they are, why should we be forced to fight for the lesser of two evils? I am going to find Guillermo and find the real good guys."
"The good guys who killed Justin?"
Ana should have been prepared for that one. Instead she just lit into it. The frustration of knowing she was right and not being believed carried the words from her mouth like wind stripping leaves from a tree.
