The Mangrove Suite

by Tim Niederriter

  I walked closer, gradually aware of the shapes that moved in the clearing around the tree, humanoid and lithe. Cleans. I hesitated where the path entered the clearing and gazed upward. Above me, the branches of the tree trembled with a chill breeze. Not one impossible leaf fell, though, despite the season.

  Someone approached along the path behind me. I looked back and found Elizabeth, her coat bundled around herself, making her way toward me. I nodded to her.

  She raised her head. “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

  I glanced up at the tree. “Thinking,” I said. “Even the smallest aeon parks have one of these in them.”

  “Grand trees. They give energy to all the others.” Elizabeth stopped at my side. She looked at the tree alongside me. “I went to see Thomas. He thinks Rain misses you, Jeth.”

  My mouth went dry. “I know.”

  She sighed. “Are you still looking for Shelly?”

  “I haven’t made any progress, so far.”

  Elizabeth put her hand on my arm. “Let me help you, Jeth. Together, we might have better luck.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I didn’t expect you to want to help.”

  “Look, this is big.” She leaned closer to me and dropped her voice. “Cleans can be restored, Jeth. We have to prove it can be permanent, and this is the best way we have.”

  The tree swayed with another gust. Elizabeth wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. I turned toward her. “Alright. Any ideas where we should look? The banks have been useless so far.”

  “We’d need to break into security memories if we want to know what they know,” she said.

  “Liz, those memories are protected. And not by lightweight aeons, either.”

  “Then it’s a good thing both of us are skilled memeotects.”

  “You want to infiltrate their banks?”

  “I don’t want to.” She looked up at my face. A few strands of hair fluttered at the sides of her face. “We just don’t have much choice.”

  I thought of Ryan again. I hadn’t been able to reach him by network lately. As an analyst, he had access to the kind of banks I needed when on the job. “I have an idea, Liz. You remember Ryan Carter, right?”

  A pair of cleans approached the tree, crossing a circle carved around the base, which humans were prohibited from passing.

  Elizabeth frowned. “The little security guy?”

  “He’s been out of contact with me for a while. Could be he’s working on something secret.”

  “Something like a hunt for a rogue star?”

  I nodded. “It fits his job description.”

  “Great. Well, how do we find him?”

  The cleans began to climb the tree, shimmying up the side to the lowest branches. I envied the athleticism, but at least I still had my mind. They each bore small clippers and climbed along the branch they reached, looking with a bizarre sense of purpose for malformed outgrowths. One of the cleans clipped off a small branch and let it fall to the ground.

  I turned to Elizabeth. “We’ll work together,” I said. Then I reached out with my mind and forwarded all the information I had about Ryan’s work to Elizabeth. She accepted the packet of memories and sent me a packet of her own about security forces and analysis teams. Both of withdrew into our bodily senses for a moment. She smiled at me, eyes shining. Then we dove back into the mental world together.

  Unregistered Memory, Ryan Carter, Network Security Center, Delta Complex

  Ryan hunched forward at the table, face hanging over a plate of vegetable debris and a burger on a bun. His eyes burned after another twelve straight hours of searching the memory banks for clues as to Yashelia’s precise location. He already felt as though he had learned too much. Of course, that changed nothing except for the increased risks of punishment if he failed to deliver. The fat sensocycler, Conner Kohl, sat beside Ryan, quietly eating some kind of pie off a tray and visibly savoring every bite with his enhanced sense of taste.

  The woman, Commander De Vries, had said they could order anything within reason from outside and someone would bring it to them. Apparently, Kohl had earned his heavy gut. Ryan sighed as he picked up the burger. Kohl might be ridiculous, but he got the job done. Even though Ryan was exhausted, he admitted that much.

  In spite of Kohl’s efficiency and professionalism on the job, Ryan had not uncovered Yashelia’s location yet. Even so, he had it narrowed to one of two parks located south of Lotdel Tower, one that looked unoccupied by a canal, and another in an immense greenhouse run by an enigmatic aeon. Ryan’s suspicions told him the greenhouse was a dud place to look. The memory banks held enough information on the aeon owner that Ryan could infer she was innocent.

  No, it’s got to be that unoccupied park by the canal. Visuals logged by multiple civilian and professional witnesses from as recently as a ten days ago showed glimpses of green deep inside. And green this time of year meant an aeon’s garden. Traffic on the water was more limited as a source, but a clean market was nearby. A market like that attracted a lot of people. Ryan figured that’s why the reports had been so insistent.

  But ten days ago, all information surrounding the abandoned park simply ceased coming in. I’ve got you now, Ryan thought as he finished his burger. They needed to get back in there. Reinvigorated by the food despite the shadows under his eyes, Ryan turned to Conner Kohl.

  “You ready?”

  Kohl shrugged. His tray was empty of pie. “When you are.”

  Ryan grinned. “I have a hunch this hunt is almost over.” He took a small cup of pure ichor from the table, looked around at the four childlike bodies of the banks in the corners of the room, and then slammed the drink in one swallow. Sweetness exploded in his mouth. Light from the veins in the ceiling clawed at his eyes with raw intensity. Ryan tasted tiny traces of burger and bun on his tongue. His grin widened.

  Kohl sipped his own ichor. His eyes grew cold. The red of his hair looked more shocking, and he smelled acutely of lemons, like the pie he had just devoured. Kohl turned to Ryan.

  Ryan felt a bit of drool run over his lips. “Let’s do this.” He set one hand down on the table. Khol put a soft palm over top. Person to person interface was a technique of sensocycling only the best could achieve. Kohl reached out with his sharpened senses and Ryan closed his eyes and went with him, overlaying a view of the physical world like a ghost onto the mental.

  Among towers and canals and streets rose mountains of memories and dipped deep canyons of thought. The shapes of humans moved through these obstacles without heed. Ryan could have laughed. He sped through the eyes of humans, birds, and animals, processing views from all angles as he approached the park by the canal. The combination of sensory and memetic skills made for the wildest ride Ryan had ever experienced.

  He sensed a mind amid the trees of the park, where the grass and bushes were overgrown. Someone forgot this place a long time ago. He rode the mind of a squirrel along the branch. The jittery creature got him close enough to jump skyward to a bird on its way south. From there, Ryan looked down. A towering gray-barked tree with vibrant green leaves stood within the overgrown center of the park, bent over with the weight of the limbs on one side.

  The heart of a forest. Shapes moved around the tree, desperately hacking and sawing at branches with crude metal tools. Ryan sensed no information in those minds. Cleans, huh? He searched for the spark, the spark of an aeon’s mind, and he found it near the base of the tree.

  “There. You. Are!” Ryan laughed with triumph and nearly fell out of his chair as he opened his eyes. He hung onto the back of the seat with one arm. “You saw that, too? You got that, right?”

  Kohl nodded, a smile on his face.

  Ryan laughed again. “Jackpot, baby! Store it in the banks. I’ll call the commander.”

  Kohl removed his hand from Ryan’s, and then closed his eyes again. Ryan snickered as he stood up and focused his mind on the commander.

  Elizabeth and I plunged through the cityscape, two minds to
gether. Without a skilled sensor, neither of us could accurately sense the physical world, but the minds of people gleamed and hummed and seared in the mental world. I searched for Ryan Carter’s mind.

  A smell of ozone burned some ten or fifteen kilometers to the north, intense but distant. I recognized the smell as the one Ryan’s mind carried with it in the mental world, and was thankful despite the bittern twinge in my nose. The fingers of my mind reached out and found Elizabeth’s projection. I guided her in the direction I had caught a whiff of Ryan. What looked like a dark cloud billowed over a cluster of bright minds.

  Wherever Ryan was, he was surrounded by people with powerful barriers and quick emotional antibodies. I could tell the defenses by the phantom signals that danced on the outside of their signature sounds and shapes, colors and feelings. A bright flash flickered at the center of the black clouds, a solitary bolt of jagged lightning. I guessed that pointed toward Ryan.

  He got intense when he worked evidently, but it finally explained his odd projection signature. When lightning strikes in the real world, ozone in the air burns. Ryan took that concept to his personal mental space.

  The sensation of my projected consciousness racing over a tableau of bright bank towers and the diverse minds of others infused in me a sense of power as Elizabeth and I glided down into the clouds that surrounded Ryan’s lightning. My mind glanced off a barrier I had not even glimpsed as I got closer. Elizabeth, slightly behind my projection, skirted the barrier without colliding. My head ached, but I refused to return my mind to my physical body.

  I rejoined Elizabeth, and we circled the barrier, wary of the nearby lights and sounds and smells of the minds that occupied the clouds before us. “They’re going to be aware of us,” I said through our connection.

  Her projection flickered against the invisible wall. “Make sure you hide your identity information.”

  “Right. You too.”

  We each took a moment to bury our information within ourselves. I picked a memory of pain as intense as I could approach, the one from the hornet bites, and hid my information in the stings. Anyone who tried to uncover that truth would have to endure the same pain I had back then to do so. I hid some of my recent memories in the bee stings as well, the ones about Rebecca and Rain reawakening. Particular memories were harder to smoke out of a mind, but with enough mental attackers, details could be uncovered.

  I rejoined Elizabeth at the barrier. “Any ideas how to get through?”

  Her frosted mind turned slowly before the invisible wall. Tendrils of consciousness extended and felt carefully along the barrier. I watched as she appraised the defenses, then set to evaluating it for myself. Clearing a barrier could take some time. Our bodies were still in Bailey Court Garden and, for a moment, I worried about being found out. I suppressed the feeling, burying it under a thin layer of thought about my mission, about Rebecca.

  My mind brushed against the barrier. The wall was painful to the touch and appeared to enclose the dark clouds completely. I withdrew my mental fingers. There’s always a chink in the armor or I wouldn’t be able to sense beyond this wall. I probed a few points. This was no simple mental maze. A barrier like this had to be created by multiple minds at once.

  “Any idea where the anchors for this might be?” I asked. “Or how many there are?”

  Elizabeth withdrew her tendrils from the barrier. “There has to be at least three of them. As to where they are, I’m not sure.”

  Anchors provided the basis for temporary mental structures, whereas banks usually formed more permanent constructs. Disrupting even one of them could cause the barrier to become unstable. I racked my memory for the types of clues I should be looking for. With a barrier this strong, there had to be at least one outside the barrier. Elizabeth must have had a similar thought.

  “We should check the perimeter,” she said. “This barrier feels curved.”

  “Split up?” I asked.

  “Probably, but signal me if you find an anchor.”

  “Gotcha.”

  I circled around the barrier but found nothing on the outside. Oddly, the area around the barrier was only sparsely dotted with minds on the outside. Within, I could sense at least three dozen minds. I checked the identities of all ten of the minds I found on the outside. The pair that made me the most suspicious turned out to be a mother with a child in a stroller. I continued circling, but when I reached the far side of the barrier, Elizabeth had yet to arrive.

  Nervous tension crept into my mind. I sent a packet to Elizabeth, just to make sure she wasn’t in trouble. She fired one back. I’ve found the anchor.

  Charged with even more nerves, I put on a burst of speed and sailed over the top of the barrier, estimating it to be spherical. I was lucky enough to be right, and I sensed Elizabeth’s mind below me, near the edge of the barrier. Then I plunged down to float beside her.

  A single mind huddled near a bank-formed memory tower a short distance from the tower.

  “That’s him.” Elizabeth floated toward the tower. “We’ll have to attack if we want to disrupt the barrier.”

  “But they’ve got enough minds inside, we’ll have to fight if they notice a breach.”

  “I’m not up for tangling with forty military consciousnesses.”

  “Neither am I,” I said, “but we’ve got to do something.”

  “You’re the faster thinker. I’ll disrupt the anchor. You get in and get the information.”

  That worried me a little. If I darted inside fast enough, I could get to Ryan before they caught me, but Ryan’s mind would not be undefended, between his memetic and security training. He might be tougher than me defense-wise.

  “I’ll try,” I said, “but I might not get all the way out, so once you break the barrier, get out of here.”

  She hesitated for a moment, and I could imagine her frown of concern. “Alright.” She flew toward the anchor.

  I waited for what seemed like an hour, primed to rush inside, and burning with nerves. The barrier before me flickered, visible in blue haze for a moment. Then it broke into splinters, and the shards rained down around the clouds. I accelerated into the storm.

  A trio of minds noticed me. I evaded one of them completely through sheer speed. Another moved to block my path. I dodged that one, too, but hit the third moving sideways. The mind identified herself as Alesia De Vries, commander of a purifier unit under Sudhatho. That made sense.

  Her mental maze was dense with turns and dead ends. My swift pace allowed me to backtrack as quickly as I was cut off. A flame burst up in front of me, blocking my path suddenly. I hesitated only for a moment, then dove though. Fiery pain burned through my mind and I gasped, almost thrown back to my body by the agony. Then I emerged from the fire, seared through with misery but within De Vries’ mind.

  She sent a team of antibodies after me. As I looked up through my dazed and teary mental eyes I glimpsed a though moving within her mind. It looked like a file cabinet with three words written on its side. Rogue Star, Yashelia.

  She is the commander, I thought. If they’ve found Yashelia, she should know.

  De Vries’ antibodies swarmed around me, pounding at the edges of my psyche. One of them injected a cleaning agent into my unconscious, the kind that would clear all my barriers in no time. I leapt for the thought cabinet above me, tearing the out of the grip of each antibody one by one. Only the injector remained embedded. I reached out and seized the cabinet.

  In real time, it took only seconds to capture the information, but here it would feel far longer. I held on tight as the antibodies closed in once again. Heavy blows rained down upon me, battering my projected essence to the core. I held on.

  Tall Trees

  I felt as though I was falling through shadows. Pain flared behind my eyes. Blood rushed through my head and pounded against the inside of my temples. I felt my brows furrow, and then my eyes flew open. Light stabbed into my eyes from the window in my bedroom. I lay atop the covers and listened to my breath
slow from the panicked draw in and push out.

  The pain did not subside and throbbed in my skull even worse. I grunted, drawing the attention of the Elizabeth who I became aware of as she turned toward me from my doorway. She sighed, sounding relieved, and walked over to my side.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “Not the best.”

  She tilted her head to the side and looked down at me. “They stopped you pretty hard.”

  Despite the ache in my skull, I smiled. “I got it.”

  She frowned. “You found the information?”

  I winced as I sat up. “Yeah,” I said. “Shelly’s at the overgrown park near the clean market, but on our side of the canal.”

  Elizabeth nodded, and looked ready to reply, but the sound of footsteps from behind stopped her.

  Thomas walked in. “Hey, man,” he said. “Are you alright?”

  “I’ll live,” I said. “We have to hurry.”

  “I got some things from my associates ready. They’re interested to see if we can find proof that aeons can restore cleans.” Thomas leaned against the door frame. “Where are we going?”

  “The park southwest of here, beside the canal.” I swung my legs off the bed with a groan of effort.

  Elizabeth stepped back from my bed and folded her arms. “You want to fight an aeon?”

  Thomas rubbed his goatee. “Yeah, Shelly’s not just gonna give us her blood.”

  I staggered to my closet and pulled it open. Then I fell to my knees and rummaged through until I pulled out the shotgun I had hid earlier, along with a case of shells. I supported myself on the wall and stood, then turned around.

  Elizabeth shook her head. Her eyes fell from my face to the weapon. “Even if that can hurt her, what then?”