Manifestations (13 page)

‘What’s this?’ She took his visor from his pocket and broke off the kissing to pull a cable from her belt and zap it. The helmet threw off a spark and smoke. She opened a small window and tossed it outside.

‘Hey, that’s —’

‘They can track you with it. Now get your clothes off, there might be residues they could use.’ All this went out the window until he was naked and wriggling into new rubber trousers as fast as he could. Alicia watched him the whole time with her emotionless face. She seemed to have lost interest in kissing him.

Through the windows he could see derelict buildings and streets. ‘Where are we?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘I want to know where you are taking me,’ he said.

She looked at him but didn’t answer.

He knew they hadn’t gone far, they hadn’t taken to the air, just kept on. Hovering away from the pharms. Which could mean they were heading into a park, but the disused buildings meant they were in the hot zone: areas contaminated with radiation, chemical hangover and extreme pollution.

‘Will this protect me?’

‘Long enough. We won’t be outside for long.’

They drove for another hour, not speaking, just Zach looking out the windows at the once-populated city. Some of it looked new, but was darkened with grime.

At last the squib pulled into a dock and Alicia handed him a mask. ‘Don’t ever go outside without this. Okay?’

‘Yeah, I got it.’

‘Turn around.’ He did as he was told and she began pulling the straps so the mask squeezed tight against his face. Then she took a spray can and panned it back and forth over his back, coating the seams. ‘Lift your arms.’ The can went up and down his sides. ‘Now, front.’ Alicia finished him and then sprayed her own joins until the can was empty and she tossed it to the floor.

‘Let’s go.’

‘Wait,’ he said.

‘No. Follow me or get lost.’

Zach jumped out of the squib and walked behind her.

Around them a grey-brown mist hung, a cold smog that was thick enough to move in swirls as they passed through it. He looked up, but couldn’t see through the dirty mist. The buildings just disappeared within it.

‘Inside.’ The door looked just like any of the others. He’d never be able to recognise it for himself. They passed through sheets of hanging plastic, the corridor ahead had rudimentary lighting, and a short flight of stairs took them down to a hermetic door.

Alicia stood waiting. There was no handle. Soon the door clicked and swung inward.

‘Arms up,’ she said. He copied her, and jets of steam blew at them from the walls.

A panel opened and they walked through. Alicia took off her mask and began stripping out of the rubber. He did the same. She turned a pair of taps on the wall and began showering, rubbing herself vigorously with soap.

‘Dungeon likes us to be clean.’ Her voice seemed to have lost its colour since they had come inside.

‘What for?’ Zach asked.

She turned to him. ‘You should learn not to ask questions.’

~ * ~

Ben Harvey waited at home for his wife Freya. Along with their two children, they lived in one of the many ziggurats of West. Thanks to his Services commission, they had a family block with a balcony, yard and potted trees. There was room enough for a swing and a bouncer for Bobby and Molly in the back corner. He had wanted one when he was young, but his children were bored with it now. That they could be bored by anti-grav dismayed him.

Home wasn’t much, but it was comfortable, and spacious for four people. It was a little old, and built in the rush of peacetime when people were still afraid the Dark Ages would return, but there was nothing Ben couldn’t fix if he put his mind to it. He lay on his back with a wrench and stiff wire, working through the clog in the disposal unit. Truth be told, he could work with his eyes closed and his hands tied behind his back, but you never knew who was watching.

He had taken the day off sick. He was sick. His nerves were giving him reflux. He distracted himself with odd jobs but every time the door banged, or the floor creaked, his stomach jumped and his heart froze. Ben waited without breathing for the marauders to swarm in and mask him. They would find him eventually. They found everybody.

Ben scuttled out from under the sink and leant back onto his knees, breathing through the urge to vomit. He couldn’t go on like this. Even thinking about it unsettled him. He went to the bathroom and slapped calmers on both wrists then went to sit on the back steps with a cup of peppermint tea.

They had a thin view of the city between the two ziggurat blocks behind theirs. He watched the lines of air traffic march and twist through the sky. Ben had sat in this same spot a week ago and watched as ten armed marauders had chased down a woman in one of the apartment blocks. At first he didn’t know what happened — there was an explosion of glass and he had fetched his binoculars. Then watched in horror as soldiers shot the woman’s feet with gloop, tranquillised her and put a mask over her face. He tried to tell himself she might not have been a psi ...

A ball rolled into his back, one of Bobby’s toys, and he twisted around to see who was there. A boy stood shadowed in the dark interior watching him quietly. ‘Hello,’ Ben said. The boy took a few steps towards him.

‘Hi, Dad. Are you feeling better?’ Bobby asked.

‘A little bit. What are you doing home?’

‘I wanted to see how you were.’

‘Shouldn’t you be in memeology?’ Bobby didn’t answer. ‘That’s okay. You can catch up later. It’s nice you coming to check on your old man. Here, have a seat.’

Bobby dropped his bag and came to join Ben on the step. They had the same sandy-coloured hair and eyes. If Bobby pulled on an orange jumpsuit, they would make quite a pair. ‘I need to ask you something, Bobby.’ Ben tried to keep his voice calm and not too serious. ‘I’m not sure how to ask ...’

‘You don’t need to,’ Bobby said.

‘Oh. Because you can ...?’

‘Yes.’

Ben nodded. He was afraid that would be the answer. ‘Does your mother know?’

‘She isn’t sure yet.’

‘How long have you known?’

‘Six weeks.’ Bobby took his dad’s shaking hand. ‘I think you should take something for your stomach.’

‘I’ll be fine in a bit.’ Ben smiled weakly. No wonder the kid was acting so strange recently. ‘What about Molly? Is she?’

‘I think she takes after you, Dad.’ Bobby rolled up the sleeve on his right arm.

‘What’s that?’ Ben asked. There was a circular red mark in the dip of Bobby’s elbow.

‘She bit me, kind of.’

‘Oh.’

Ben cursed his luck. He’d accidentally married a telepath, after years hiding his own abilities — though she had known about him — and now both the kids had followed in their footsteps.

‘I am being nicer to her now,’ Bobby said.

‘Good idea.’ Ben turned back to look out at the city. The sun was going down. Their side of the building was black with shadow against the orange and pink sky.

‘Do you have a plan?’ Bobby asked.

‘The beginnings of one.’

‘What does Mum think?’

‘She thinks it’s too risky.’ Ben put an arm around his boy. ‘But she’ll do it for you two, I’m sure.’

There was no hiding anything from his wife. Freya’s abilities were short-range, but she could sense what people felt. She needed touch to understand and share thoughts. The day the psis declared war on the Will, she was close to Ben on the couch and his fear had rushed into her. She knew he had been thinking about it for a long time. Escape. The trick was that he hadn’t quite figured out how to do it. How do you escape from Services’ omnipresent eye?

The principle they were counting on, and had been making use of throughout their lives, was that large systems can only observe a portion of their whole at any one time. The Weave was too vast and dense for every scrap of data to be checked and verified — even with its algorithm-eyes.

The movements of people and traffic were always passively monitored, looking for pattern deviation, but rarely focused upon unless they became interesting. High-profile people could never escape the watchful lens. Ben’s family had one thing in their favour: they were lows. Zeros and zilches. People so far down the food chain their actions weren’t important enough to be actively monitored. They had streams like everyone else, but the only thing that would throw up a flag would be behaviour that deviated from their established recorded patterns. So long as they stayed ordinary they could go unnoticed.

Ben tried thinking this through. One false move and Services would be onto them. The Weave was all data, active streams, recordings, and the information collected by the trillion or so sensors and omnipoles in the WU. But not all that data was accessed; it was too big for in-depth processing, it was just there so it
could
be accessed. It was about finding the blind spots. A blind spot that would last long enough for them to get some distance from the city. Any vehicle they took would have to be wiped, reinstalled and fully manual and every day Ben had been watching the twenty-year-old bus that picked his children up for classes and returned them home before dark.

‘The bus?’ Bobby asked, reading his father’s mind.

‘The bus,’ Ben answered.

‘Okay.’

‘Let’s go meet your sister. Then we’ll get dinner going.’

‘Stew again?’

‘What else?’ Ben smiled at his son. It was the only meal he knew how to make.

The school bus was a little old, a little inefficient in that it could only fly the long stretches between stops, and had to drive along the ground when the distance was under a couple of kilometres. Its paint was chipped, the frame rattled and the windows were murky from the attention of two decades of small children. When it suddenly fizzed and wouldn’t start again, the bus driver, Valerie, wasn’t surprised.

‘Well, it had to happen someday.’ She laughed about it. Probably thankful it hadn’t broken down in midair. Out of courtesy, Ben waited with Valerie until a new bus arrived. There were still a few children who needed to get home.

As he waved them off, he called operations. ‘Hey, Bass, the school bus broke down next to my building. You want it hauled to the depot or you want me to see if I can fix it here?’

Bass was a large man. He’d been an average mechanic before he took the coordinator job and now spent his days in a sitting position. He had a flat, impassive look, like a spade with a face on it.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Well, I couldn’t say yet, could I?’

‘What does the internal say?’ Bass asked.

‘It says there is nothing wrong with it.’

‘I hate that,’ Bass said.

‘Yeah,’ Ben agreed. He stood there waiting, Molly pulling at his hand to go inside. As he waited for the decision from above he tried to act normal, uncaring and even a bit bored. Everything happening was normal, he had nothing to sweat about. All he needed Bass to do was come to the obvious conclusion that it was less energy to fix it on the spot than to have it hauled to the depot. Coordinators were all about energy usage.

‘Do you think you can fix it?’

‘I can fix anything.’ Ben snorted for good measure.

‘Alright. You need anything from me?’ Bass asked.

‘Send Desh over with a cart and we’ll have it back on the move tomorrow.’

‘He’ll have to clock some extra hours.’

‘Tell him I’ll throw in dinner.’

‘Alright, then.’

They signed off and Ben whistled out the breath he had been holding.

‘Okay, little one, let’s get you inside and cleaned up before Mum gets home.’

Benjamin Harvey and Deshiel Diaz, or Ben and Desh, were low-level engineers who worked maintenance for the Frisco precinct. Desh was a bender too. One day, a few years earlier, Ben caught Desh tightening a wingnut without his hands and he’d spun it back the other way, scaring the sweats out of the younger man.

Desh had turned to look at him and Ben shook his head slowly. If you wanted to avoid collection, you should never ever use your powers. ‘At least be more careful,’ Ben said and cupped his hand over the nut to show how to hide when he was cheating. They’d been friends ever since.

When Desh arrived he tore in fast and braked late, air brakes bellowing as the utility truck came to a halt. He was a few years younger than Ben, bristly-faced and swarthy. Ben waved at him in greeting and felt a taptiptiptip tip tip tiptaptip on the palm of his hand.

Over the years Ben and Desh had worked out a lot between them, including a way to communicate that was undetectable to Services. Nobody else could listen in and nobody could see it happening. Morse code. If one of them wanted to communicate something without being detected, they would kinetically drum out the code on the back of the other’s hand. Taptiptiptip tip tip tiptaptip spelt just the one word: B E E R.

It took eight jacks to lift the bus off the ground before the two of them could slide underneath to look at the undercarriage. The cart plugged into the bus and began compiling a list of small faults that needed fixing.