by Julia Keller
He grunted. He wouldn’t refuse her. Regardless of all that had happened between them two years ago, he was still deeply attached to her. Or at least she assumed he was, because she couldn’t know for sure. Without the Intercept, she couldn’t be certain if he was feeling anything at all—unless, that is, he chose to reveal his emotions to her the old-fashioned way, by saying them out loud, which, Rez being Rez, he would never do. His emotions were invisible now, just as they’d been before the Intercept came along. Just as everyone’s were.
Rez held his console facing away from his body. He turned in a circle, giving Violet a tantalizing visual taste of a world she loved but didn’t really know.
She gazed at the tattered remnants of a city, its buildings mostly toppled and lying in great heaps of jagged ruins. There were enormous holes in the street, rendering it impassable by anything but foot traffic, and even that required a lot of leaping and dodging so as not to stumble headfirst into pools of inky black goop. Abandoned vehicles, their windshields smashed and their tires and doors long ago wrenched off by desperate scavengers, lined the streets. A fierce wind seemed to be blowing; Violet could tell by the trash that scuttled in front of Rez’s console. She could make out, in the roiling mix, rags and sticks and cans and crates. There could have been precious things in there, too; there could have been diamonds and sapphires, but no one would know, because on Old Earth everything was swept along by the scouring winds in a great democracy of debris.
Then Rez turned and her perspective changed; she found herself peering down a long gray road that led away from the city, twisting its way toward a somber horizon above which the kidney-colored sky seemed to throb in mute agony.
He turned again. Now she was back in the city. Two women hurried along the warped and mangled sidewalk with bent heads, drawing up the collars of their threadbare coats to keep out that relentless wind. A skeletal-looking dog skulked by, going in the opposite direction; its brown fur was greasy and matted, and it paused to drink from a culvert that sloshed with a filthy liquid that may or may not have been water. Anybody’s guess. A huge black bird swooped into view and then ascended again out of the frame, delivering as it departed an eerily raucous cry that echoed through the hollowed-out streets like a wordless warning, a savage sound that foretold of even worse to come.
“Wow,” Violet murmured, transfixed. “This is great.”
It was an odd thing to say, perhaps, given the bleakness of the scene—or it would have been odd, if the speaker were anybody but Violet. But she had always been obsessed by the shattered place that her parents had left behind when they opted for the new civilization built atop the bones of the old.
She was born on New Earth, after the Great Migration had severed the worlds. Yet because of her parents and their heritage, Old Earth was the home she felt in her soul, even if it wasn’t the one listed on her birth certificate. She couldn’t go down there often—the trip aboard a pod was jarring, and visiting more frequently than twice a year affected all kinds of body systems. And so whenever she talked to Rez on her console, she asked him to let her see Old Earth. Just a few quick scenes.
“Thank you,” Violet added quietly.
He shifted the direction of his console feed. Once again, it showed his face—a frowning face, of course, because Rez was always frowning.
“Sure,” he said.
“How are you doing?”
“Okay.”
“By the way, I’ll be seeing your little sister tomorrow,” Violet said. “She’s helping me out with a court thing.”
“She told me.”
“Really.” Inwardly, Violet winced. She didn’t want Rez—or any of her friends—to know about the stupid thing she’d done to get herself in trouble again, minor as it was. Rez’s sister, Rachel, was her lawyer. She was one of the top lawyers on New Earth. And isn’t there, Violet asked herself, some kind of ethics thing? Lawyers aren’t supposed to tell people about their cases, right?
It didn’t really matter, though. Rez wouldn’t judge her. Not about that, anyway.
“Yeah,” he said. His voice was distracted.
“Are you keeping busy down there?”
Now he perked up. People were hard for Rez, but work wasn’t. Violet knew that very well. She and Rez had shared a cubicle in Protocol Hall, the nerve center of the Intercept, until both the building and the technology that rumbled and churned beneath it were demolished. However he’d decided to spend his time, it would have something to do with computers, and he would be totally absorbed by it.
Rez loved computers more than he loved human beings—almost any human beings, Violet thought, except for his family members, although she wasn’t really sure about that. And he understood computers better than anyone Violet had ever known—except for Kendall, of course, who had invented the Intercept.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve hit a couple of snags. But it’s nothing I can’t deal with.”
She took a quick second to study his face. It had changed since the days they had shared a cubicle. It was still pale. But during his exile on Old Earth, his face had gotten hard. It had edges now. It had new angles and shadows. And there were other changes in him, too, beyond the physical. Not-so-good ones. He was more subdued. Violet missed the zeal that used to be a part of Steve Reznik, the constant fizzing excitement over a new line of code or a counterintuitive app. There wasn’t quite as much brightness in him these days. Part of that, she assumed, was the fact that his mother had died six months into his prison sentence, with only Rachel there to attend to her. Rez never had a chance to say goodbye.
“What kind of snags?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
He was right. She wouldn’t. The extent of Rez’s brilliance still astonished her. After all the months Violet had spent sitting beside him in Protocol Hall, she had decided that Rez’s brain was maybe as much of a burden to him as it was a help, as much curse as gift.
“I can try,” she said.
She said it because no matter what had happened two years ago, she and Rez were friends. They would always be friends. True, he had betrayed her profoundly when he illegally accessed Intercept files, sending one of her father’s emotions back into his brain and causing him terrible pain, but Rez was paying dearly for his actions. He had a felony record now. And Violet knew he was sorry for what he had done. That was enough for her. She’d been the beneficiary of forgiveness herself. Everybody had.
He licked his lips. She guessed that he was reconsidering the reason for his call, wondering all over again about the wisdom of confiding in her the way he used to.
“Okay,” he said. “Thing is, I’m having a few problems with access codes down here. According to the terms of my probation…” His sentence trailed off. He didn’t like to talk about his conviction, a conviction that meant every time he touched a computer he had to secure permission from Captain Kendall Mayhew of NESS, the New Earth Security Service.
Rez coughed. The console feed wavered then cleared again.
“According to the terms of my probation,” he said, trying again, “I can’t do any quantum computing at all. But I need to.”
“Can’t you ask Kendall to make an exception?”
“Guess so. But there’s no guarantee he’ll say yes.” Rez shrugged and looked away. The console feed wobbled again, the picture interrupted by jumping lines of static.
“Maybe,” Violet said, “I could ask Kendall about it myself. Tell him what you’re working on. As much as you want me to reveal, that is.” As much as you’re willing to tell me, she added silently.
She hadn’t planned to make that offer. It just came out—the same way, now that she thought about it, she’d agreed to take the Amelia Bainbridge case. She really needed to work on her impulse control.
But the sight of Rez’s troubled face, plus the discouragement in his voice, had moved her. Concerned her. If Kendall didn’t agree, she could always go to his boss. And the truth was, any intervention from Violet Crowley
would probably be effective.
She had clout. She knew it, and she knew that Rez knew it, too. She didn’t like to use it, but she had it all the same. She might be a struggling detective with a load of bills, but she was also the only child of Ogden Crowley, founder and former president of New Earth. And that mattered. It mattered a lot.
* * *
“Okay,” Rez finally said. “If you want to—okay, fine. But if you change your mind, I get it.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
He shrugged again. Shrugging was Rez’s go-to gesture. “Like I said, it’s totally up to you.”
“So just to be clear, what do you need the clearance for? What are you working on?”
Rez’s face softened. His eyes seemed to shine with their old familiar light.
“When they first sent me down here,” he said, “I had to come up with a way to pass the time. I mean, I couldn’t just sit around and brood. So I got an idea. It started the same place all ideas start—with a question. What can we do with Old Earth? How can it be more than just a prison? More than just a haven for disease? Then it came to me—maybe we can repurpose it. Take what we find here and make it new again.”
* * *
Violet was skeptical. How could anybody revive Old Earth? And why would they want to? Sure, she had a deep bond with it, but for most people, Old Earth was dreadful wreck, a dismal has-been of a planet.
“So then I had a brainstorm,” Rez declared, breaking into her thoughts with what almost sounded to her—could it be?—like enthusiasm.
He took a deep breath and then plunged on. “We could make Old Earth into an amusement park. Olde Earth World or something. I’ve already started. I’ve been using whatever I find on the ground—wood, scrap metal—to build it, so nobody can complain about the cost. There’s tons and tons of salvage down here. Amazing stuff that was left behind.” Another deep breath. “All the rides,” he said, “relate to the fate of Old Earth, to what happened here and why. So it’s fun, sure, but it’s also a place where people can learn. The roller coaster with the watertight cars and the track that loops under the ocean and back out again, spiraling through those ginormous blobs of plastic bottles that go for miles—that’s already designed. And the hovercraft that zips along the edge of the melting ice caps at both poles—that’s going to be great, too. I’ve decided to call that one the Ice Cap Zapper. And then—”
“Hey, hold on, hold on,” Violet said, interrupting him but doing it in a gentle, good-natured way. “I get the picture. I don’t want to overwhelm Kendall. We just want him to approve your access to quantum computing. Not book season tickets.”
A sheepish smile. Rez’s smiles were so rare that Violet had started to count them.
“Excellent point,” he said.
This is a good place to leave things, she thought. With Rez in a newly awakened good mood. “Okay,” Violet said. “Well, I’d better get back to work right now. I’m running a business, you know.” More like running a business into the ground. “I’ve got a new case.”
“Hope you solve it.” His tone had reverted back to its normal flatness. He didn’t care about her case—at least that was Violet’s interpretation.
“Thanks.”
“So is it worth it?”
Whoa. Was Rez actually asking her about her detective agency? This might be a first.
“What do you mean?”
“Having to deal with people all the time,” he said. “And only when something has gone wrong in their lives.”
Violet’s surprise intensified. Not only was he asking her about her business—he even seemed to have given it a bit of thought.
“The dealing with people part is okay,” she replied. She had to actively resist adding, Only YOU would think other people are automatically a negative, Rez. “But the other part—meeting them when they’ve lost something precious or when they’re in some kind of trouble—well, it’s not so okay. But that’s the job.”
He appeared to be ruminating about her answer.
“Hey,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re not doing anything dangerous, right? You’re being careful?”
She was instantly miffed. “I’ve already got a dad,” Violet snapped. “I don’t need two.”
“Never mind,” Rez snapped right back at her.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
She started to sign off when she saw that he had more to say.
“Hold on,” he said. “Something I need to tell you about.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s no big deal. Probably not important, but I thought you should know.”
She waited. She was still mad at him. She didn’t feel like being nice.
“So I was running a few calculations the other day, just for fun,” Rez said. “And I used some of the declassified Intercept code. It’s like scrap paper now. And guess what?”
“What?” It came out testier than she’d meant.
“Wow.” Rez reared back his head, blinking a few extra times. “Take it down a notch, Violet, okay?”
“Sorry. Go on.” Why was she so emotional around him these days? It was confusing. This was just Rez, after all.
“Well, it’s kind of weird—I mean, maybe it’s not even worth talking about. But some coordinates just sort of ghosted across my console this morning. And I could swear that somebody else was accessing the Intercept protocol.”
Violet’s breath caught in her throat.
“How is that possible?” she said. “The Intercept doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone. It’s dead. It’s actually deader than dead. How could somebody be using it?”
“Well, like I said, it’s probably nothing. Sheer coincidence. A couple of random algorithms probably overlapped. And it happened to echo a part of the Intercept foundation code. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“Right.”
But Violet wasn’t reassured. She pretended to be, but she wasn’t. Because she knew things about the Intercept’s destruction that Rez didn’t know. Things that nobody else knew.
Except for Kendall. And he would never betray her.
5
TAP
Violet made a mistake. In fact, she didn’t make just one mistake; she made the same mistake three times over.
It wasn’t anything she did.
It was something she didn’t do.
And it was all set into motion when she arrived at the Tram Assembly Point—TAP—shortly after winding up her talk with Rez. She’d gotten here before Kendall, but not by much. In fact, she’d just spotted him striding toward her with his purposeful, straight-line, outta-my-way walk, dressed in his regulation blue tunic and black trousers. Kendall had a long face with gray eyes, a thin mouth, and a straight nose. He wore his hair in a severe buzz cut. His build was slender but sturdy. You wouldn’t exactly call him handsome, Violet thought as she watched his approach, but he was the kind of guy who snared your attention.
When he was seconds away from her, Violet made a quick, fateful decision:
I’ll tell him later.
That was the first time she made the mistake. It was a bad one, and it was to have terrible consequences down the road. People would end up dying because of it—even if, at the time, Violet had her reasons. Good ones. Or so she’d thought.
“Hey,” Kendall said.
“Hey.” Violet looked around. “Wow, this place is really noisy. Makes me want to rip my ears off. And that smell. What is it?”
“All kinds of chemical solvents mashed together,” Kendall answered. He was standing close enough to her so that he didn’t have to yell. “You’ve never been here before?”
“Once. When I was a kid. My dad brought me. He was checking on the recycled tram cars.”
“And you don’t remember the smell?”
“What can I say? I guess I blocked it out.” The truth was, she hadn’t even noticed it back then. She was so thrilled to be hanging out with her father that everything else j
ust fell right out of her head. Usually, he was too busy to spend time with a little girl—even his own little girl.
“Well, if you can pull that off today, let me know how you do it.” Kendall grinned. The grin faded as he turned and spotted the tram car isolated in the far corner. “There it is. Come on.”
Violet had asked Kendall if she could join him here at TAP in L’Engletown. The official police report listed Amelia’s death as a suicide, but there would still be an investigation. And it would start here, in the vast, frenetic facility with the concrete floor and the enormous glass bubble of a roof, held aloft by an elaborate grid of thin steel girders that let in gobs of sunlight.
“So this is the car she was riding in,” Violet said. “Before she…”
“Yeah.” Kendall detached one end of the taut crisscross of yellow police tape that protected the entrance to the sleek silver lozenge.
He stepped inside. Violet followed him. Kendall went right to work, taking measurements and making notes on his console, which meant Violet had a chance to look around the car.
The shadowy interior gave her a mild case of the creeps. It was cool and self-contained, a world away from the controlled chaos that existed just outside its door—the thick acoustical stew of drilling and hammering and nonhuman shrieking. The shrieking resulted from the fact that immensely large hunks of metal were constantly being pulled apart by the extended clamps of opposing teams of robots. To Violet, they looked like kids playing tug-of-war.
“It’s so quiet in here,” she said. “You don’t expect that. Not with what’s out there.”
“Yeah,” Kendall said. He ran a thumb along one of the car’s welded seams. Then he got down on his hands and knees, exploring the bolts that linked the seats to the floor.
Tram cars were retooled every ten days, Violet knew, and brought to TAP to be spruced up and rejuvenated and then returned to the elevated tracks. Thus there was a perpetual round of cars going from track to TAP and back again. Everything on New Earth had to be recycled, with the position and density of every speck and spark and dab and stray ounce accounted for, second by second. This ceaseless calibration was what enabled New Earth to remain poised over Old Earth. The tremendous cumulative weight of its streets and its buildings and its machines and its people had to be meticulously balanced by the power-generating magnets and wind turbines.
