Wakers

by Ron Collins

  The corner of Kinji’s lip curled into a wry smile. “Why, Miss Brae, I think you might just be making me go all gooey inside.”

  “You always know just what to say.”

  They ate in silence then.

  Kinji pushed the remains of her salad away and took a sip of her drink. The dopamine tabs mixed with food had done their job. She felt content, despite her concern about Bexie.

  Everything felt right about this.

  She felt pieces of her life coming together like her paintings sometimes did, that insane moment when nothing fit, but she knew things were going to work out. The only way to make sense of it, though, was to keep plowing ahead and find out what came through.

  “I hope the CIO can’t read me.”

  “The CIO is a dope,” Tania said. “For all its bluster, it’s not much more than a glorified babysitter. And a babysitter can be duped if you work at it enough.”

  “Are you going to help?

  “What do you need?”

  “I’m going to go to the safe zone, and if he’s there I’m thinking about helping him get in further.”

  “If you do that, and something goes wrong, you could get cut.”

  “I know.”

  “There you go. You want to jump his bones, though.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  At least that was something Tania could understand.

  CHAPTER 24

  The fold in Bexie’s Think Space was so tiny as to almost escape attention — no more than a wrinkle in a bedsheet, really, a slight ridge that rubbed so gently on his consciousness he could have missed it.

  Perhaps he would not have found it if the environment wasn’t so dark or so featureless, or if he wasn’t so intensely focused on his own inner workings, wasn’t straining so hard against the Central Inspector’s brainwashing code.

  But Bexie was focused, and he was fighting — anxious people can hear their bodies working, the phrase came unbidden — and it was there, a spiderweb line of midnight blue against infinite darkness.

  Look for the blue in your Think Space, Kinji had said.

  He reached to the fold, understanding even then that it was an exit, and understanding even then exactly how dangerous a game Kinji had decided to play for him.

  Underneath came a faded blue glow.

  And a crease.

  The difference came immediately.

  There was no pressure here, no cold trickle of the doctor bot’s conditioner. No hum in the background that was so soft and so incessant that it could be heard only when removed.

  In that instant, the concept of what freedom meant exploded inside Bexie Montgomery’s brain.

  Exaltation.

  A warmth inside him.

  He was free, he thought, as he stretched his mind, grasping for input, looking for ideas.

  But he found nothing.

  He tried again.

  Again, nothing.

  The fold was a self-contained capsule, a lifeboat, maybe, shelter from the storm, but barren, devoid of supplies of anything else that might sustain him. No vision, no newsfeed, no people. The realization crushed him.

  “Get me out of here! Get me out of here!”

  He pounded on the walls like they were a coffin’s lid until his capacity for fear had been drained.

  Then.

  Only then.

  Did he calm himself.

  Let his mind probe the shell of the fold, but sit in the middle of calmness, thinking. Let his thought create a light for himself, stretching out into the darkness.

  Using his thought only, he added a table and a soft chair, which he sat down in, and from which he imagined a surround screen and a blueprint, and as he thought of each, the images formed, complete with the design pages of the soup delivery system Kinji had shown him.

  He understood it all, then.

  This was a lifeboat, a safe place that the Central Inspector couldn’t reach, but also a place where he had nothing but himself. Living here was like being buried alive.

  How long, he thought, would he have to wait?

  It was then, peering into the display that he felt the presence of Kinji Hall again, the pressure of her fingers hard over his skin, the soft whisper of her voice. He felt a lever then, sensed her essence.

  He drew a finger to the screen.

  Toggled the lever.

  And a river of thought came to him.

  Free Think: A History

  Rebels have existed in the human strain since the days of Homo erectus. Through the ages they’ve come in forms as varied as Galileo, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rosa Parks. They are people who live their own lives in their own fashions, fighting for things that are right as they see them, each forging their own brand.

  The origin of this safe zone — which is known to us all as Free Think but that others branded under names of their own — is the result of work done over a century ago by Anu Patil and Zhang Wen, two such rebels who met on the campus of a university in Tallahassee, Florida.

  Both were brilliant.

  Both were offspring of strictly adherent families.

  Ms. Patil was a young woman born of parents from the Dalit caste who strictly practiced the Hindu faith. Her desire to attend school as a female, even in this modern day, caused great friction in the family.

  Mr. Wen was born to a family headed by a factory worker who was, by all recorded history, completely content to lead his life attached to the machinery and processes that produced material for his company. Zhang would not even have been born, though, if his father had not secretly killed a daughter who had come prior to him. The Zhangs were allowed only one child by the state. Zhang Wen’s life was spared by being born male.

  The two met while contributing to the earliest research into networked Think Space. Their relationship grew and, within their community, the two became inseparable.

  When Anu’s father arranged for her to marry she fought long and hard but, in the end, felt she had to capitulate. With their time growing short, the pair of lovers rebelled in the only way they knew how — by creating a small bubble in the network, a place cloaked in privacy shells and security walls that only they could find, a small island of renegade memory that shifted from host to host where they would always be able to retreat.

  Together.

  Anu Patil lived many years, including her last two decades in jail, building onto the legacy of Free Think, which has today become a haven for outcasts like you, the rebels of our time who build onto their own such spaces, buttressed and expanded with modern approaches.

  We are a mad collection of strangeness, but together we all fear the Central Inspector, all brandish the uniqueness of our own independence as personal banners, and, in the end, we all know that if we give up anything that causes damage to the safe zone of Free Think we will be ostracized, and forever hunted.

  This bond is why we continue to exist.

  CHAPTER 25

  Kinji felt the edge of anticipation that always came from starting a new project. Usually she liked that sensation, the tension of the unknown, but today it was accompanied by a cloud of foreboding. Interesting or not, Bexie wouldn’t be able to extract himself from the link she’d left him. If she was going to help, she was going to have to get into that segment of True Space, and to do that she needed a friend.

  Kinji entered her Think Space, ignoring a strong info stream filled with rhetoric about the latest candidates running for CIO reps, and opened the link for Tania to join.

  While she waited, she jumped channels to find herself in an ad for a sex club in the old Haight area.

  “Hey, I knew this was a good idea,” Tania said, reaching out to touch the ad.

  “You say that to everyone who lets you slip into their space.”

  “Just the girls.”

  “Okay,” Kinji replied. “Enough of the sideshow. Let’s do this.”

  Yet, still she hesitated, telling herself she was taking time to let Tania’s essence fully attach. Would Bexie Montgomery even make
it to the bubble she had shown him? If he didn’t, and if the medical staff had found traces of her link, she might be stepping into a trap of her own making. The anxiety made her want to jump straight to the safe zone and find out, but she had a pattern of usage built over years of operation and to deviate from it was to increase the risk of the Central Inspector’s Office taking note of what she was doing.

  As Tania said, unless you were placed on a priority list for oversight, the CIO was a dope most of the time — not terribly difficult to operate around if you went about it with just a little prudence. But sometimes, waiting was more difficult than other times.

  She dipped a mental finger into an info pod she frequented, noting that Ferdu, a high-profile designer, had released the new multitech mobile she had been promising for the past fifteen weeks.

  It was a seat that flew over a six-dimensional rendition of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.

  Tania chortled with giggly glee as Kinji took a pass at the promotional release and zoomed through a hazy sun surrounded by vivid indigo.

  “Whee!” Tania screamed as they went. “This is just like taking a spike of U-ba, and then going on sense-dep.”

  “Ferdu is like that,” Kinji said.

  “Then I’ve got to meet her.”

  “I don’t think she’s your type.”

  “Jealous much?”

  “If reports are to be believed, Ferdu spends half her time locked up in stasis. The two of you together would probably just explode.”

  Tania laughed, and wiggled her toes as they faded back into Kinji’s zone.

  “Why do artists have to be so weird?”

  “Just strange, I guess,” Kinji said.

  “Yeah, I know. Life is art and all that crap.”

  Kinji laughed at her friend’s sullen tone. She pictured a cat with her head stretched down over her front paws. Cute, but sad.

  “I admit I’ve never really appreciated Ferdu’s sense of the absurd,” Kinji said, “but I love the feeling of Now that I get from falling into her work.”

  Tania’s shrug rubbed against her shoulders.

  With a deep breath, Kinji collected herself.

  “It’s time,” she said.

  Her True Space was a small piece of memory that revealed more of herself than she was comfortable with. She’d learned how to make it a decade back, when she was a ten-year-old, just beginning to understand what it meant to live through art. “If you’re going to make real art,” her mentor said, “you have to be free to think whatever you want.” At the time, she thought the advice was about isolation and focus — that the safe zone she’d given Kinji was a place she could go to when others were chasing her down, a place she could shove her mind into to hide it from her friends or her parents, who were supportive, but obtuse.

  She didn’t understand the other ramifications.

  Her mentor taught her how to set up the rudimentary firewall that led to the entry level she and Tania were in now. How to set values in the security fields to deflect the most prevalent of the Central Inspector’s Office’s watchdogs. Later, when she had come to understand the deeper need for this place, she’d customized it in her own way, built levels and layers, twists and turns.

  There was art, and there was art.

  Now her True Space was a bona fide place where her mind could explore ideas without exposing herself.

  It was also a place where she could do more.

  “You’re only the third person I’ve let in here,” Kinji said.

  Tania’s reply was a gentle touch. That was the thing about her. Yes, her wildness was unpredictable, and, yes, her enjoyment of all things carnal could go over the top, but Tania Brae was the kind of person who understood what it meant to be a friend.

  “Who were the first two?” Tania said.

  “My mom, for one.”

  “And the other?”

  “Less said the better.”

  “A guy, right?”

  Kinji dumped a bucket of sarcasm as she replied. “I was seventeen.”

  “And you thought you were in love.”

  Tania’s response carried just the right amount of deadpan to make Kinji happy with the revelation. “We’d been living in Guam,” she said. “I still love both my mom and Guam. The guy, not so much.”

  Stepping further into her space, she came across an old piece of hers that she’d stored here some time ago.

  A collection of intertwined links comprised a huge puzzle that could only be solved with multidimensional math, but whose eigenvectors released unique fractal patterns that mimicked the viewer’s mood. It was her first major work, done when she was seven years old.

  She smiled at the memories it brought.

  The thing had gotten her noticed by several major critics, and essentially launched her career. Her mother’s response to it had been enthusiastic confusion, though. It was clear she loved that her daughter had done something unique and wonderful, but Kinji was equally certain she had absolutely no context for what that unique and wonderful might be.

  It was the first time, but not the last, she had felt separation from her mother.

  “Come on,” she said to Tania.

  Tania followed until finally she came to the core bubble.

  The safest place she had.

  “Fucking incredible,” Tania said as she probed the security shell from the inside. “Can anything get out of here?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “So, you could tie me up in here and leave me forever and no one would know.”

  Kinji laughed. “In your dreams.”

  “You know me too well.”

  Kinji pulled another block of code to create the switch gate she knew would take her there. It loomed in her mind, hence in Tania’s, too. This was it. Take the switch, and there was no turning back. She felt the query with an acid clarity that sizzled across her tongue and down the whole of her back.

  “All right,” she said. “It’s time. If Bexie’s in the pod I left for him, we’ll be able to contact him through this next portal.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do.”

  Tania was right.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Tania said with a wistful flavor. “To care so much about a person you barely know?”

  Her friend’s presence was strong on the wire. Warm. Vibrant. In close, Tania wasn’t nearly as carefree as she appeared. Kinji felt something firmly here that she’d known in her heart since the moment she’d first met Tania, that, while, to some, her brief affairs might look like whirlwind dalliances of the moment, Tania was not a simple butterfly absorbing nectar from one flower before flitting to the next. Instead, Kinji saw now that her friend was a perpetual mayfly. That while her linkups might last for only a few hours, for those hours Tania Brae felt in the deepest fashion that close connection some call love.

  The revelation made Kinji want to wrap herself around Tania. Her friend was truly something special.

  “It’s his story,” Kinji said. “I think I love his story.”

  “I understand, baby.”

  Kinji stood there with the code block in her virtual hand.

  “Are we going to do this?” Tania asked.

  “Yes.”

  She placed the block into a scanning module. The wall of her bubble faded into dark.

  CHAPTER 26

  Bexie flinched as the lifeboat gave a sudden hard lurch.

  He had been huddled here, uncertain what to do but knowing that if he left the comfort of this place he would be washed away. Yet, the only thing here was darkness so black he couldn’t feel his body.

  Was he dead?

  Had he been stripped of his body?

  Was another version of himself cowering somewhere in the physical world in a darkness even more eternal than this one?

  This was his state of mind when the lifeboat rocked.

  He felt their touch but did not at first believe it.


  “Bexie?” Kinji’s voice came to him from nowhere. “Bexie? Open your eyes.”

  He saw them. Dim faces in the blackness.

  “Where am I?” he said.

  “We’re connected in a deep lock of Think Space. They can’t see us here.”

  “But—” Bexie thought hard, trying to frame a question he didn’t have tools to ask.

  The other essence responded. “It’s all right, Mr. Montgomery.” Her voice was more distant than Kinji’s.

  “This is Tania,” Kinji said. “She’s going to take care of you while I do some work, all right?”

  “But—”

  “What’s the last thing you remember, Mr. Montgomery?” Tania said. Against the dead space of the null, her touch was like a thunderbolt of lemon and strawberry, filling his lungs, then rolling through every part of his body.

  Embarrassment flushed over him.

  “It’s okay,” Tania said. “Tell Kinji the last thing you remember.”

  “I couldn’t move,” he said, fighting the need to cry. “I think I was restrained. But I couldn’t feel anything. Except,” he said, swallowing hard against the cottony constriction growing in his throat, “the worm that was running through my head.”

  “I see,” Tania said.

  “They’re cutting you,” Kinji added from a distance. “Adjusting you down. Taking away a part of you. You’re lucky to have made it here.”

  As Kinji spoke, he felt the world around him shift. A column rose in the darkness — hard, like plastic, tall like a skyscraper.

  “No reason to feel bad, Mr. Montgomery,” Tania said.

  “Don’t tell me how to feel.”

  Warmth came like a blanket.

  “Yeah,” Tania said. “I can see why you want to jump his bones.”

  “Shut up,” Kinji replied.

  Another column coalesced from the darkness, this one at his foot.

  “Where are we?”

  “Your body is still in Geo-Span,” Kinji said. “But the rest of you is in a safe bubble that some hackers made. I left you a link when we talked in the mall.”

  “Ah.”

  “The security gates here are quirky, but breakable. The CIO can get in if it gets lucky, so I’m building you a new place.”