System Seven (25 page)

Close in, she was weak
and suffering more from depression than the pain or hunger. He drew closer
still and gently extended into her thought stream. Vividly, he saw his own face
looking down at her, mouth etched into a concerned frown, his eyes focused
beyond. She squirmed a bit, uncomfortable with his visit, though overall
trusting. He stayed passive, filled with wonder at the realization that if he
wanted to, he could control her quite easily. Far different than the homeless
people. Naturally pliable.

The side door opened,
bringing him out. Darcy started a bit and looked for assurance, her grip
tighter on his finger. An eager Christine returned and squatted in front of the
little chimp with a concerned look.

“Any luck?”

“Maybe. I’m seeing her
eat something white from the rocks. Maybe someone threw something poisonous?”

“It’s possible, I
suppose. Something white? One of the – oh wait!
Shit!
” She laughed, half in disbelief for having missed it and half
in relief. “Bird poop! Darling’s disease. A fungal disease that mimics T.B. We
tested for T.B. but not for fungal. She probably ate bird poop!”

“It fits with what I
saw.”

Christine’s eyes
welled up. “Oh my God, you are amazing, Allen. I’m sure that’s it, I can feel
it. Oh, bless you. I’m going to draw blood right now. Thank you, thank you!”
She stood and hugged both Darcy and Austin.

He tried sending Darcy
his own resonance message to show how much he wished for her recovery and
health. In a response so quick he almost missed it, Darcy asked if she was
going to be okay. Getting the hang of it, he responded just as fast to show
that Christine was going to do her best to help her.

“Bye-bye, lil girl.
Hang in there.”

In her brown eyes he
saw gratitude.

Two weeks later, Austin
sat on the porch steps of the doublewide. The L-shaped trailer park had
nineteen units, mostly singlewides parked on a slab of west Compton. A boxed
patch of grass held a makeshift kid’s playground with a sun-bleached plastic
slide. The water treatment facility on the other side of the chain link fence
created an occasional refrain from a pump motor bearing going bad. Soft rays of
the sun cresting the distant Chino Hills belied its intentions for the day. The
heat wave would continue summer’s tradition in the basin.

The thrumming of the
city arrested awareness, a slow riptide pulling his thoughts into the mundane,
the ordinary. Ten million souls inside four thousand square miles. Practicing
on the throwaways of society meant a lot of change and not just in his psychic
abilities. Both guilt and gratitude colored his days and nights with them. They
were people imbued with the same god-like powers he was developing but without
hope of realizing them. Those naturally aware often ended up suffering mental
illness without the framework to process their extraordinary senses. The salve
was the thought that someday humanity might not be so lost in the evolutionary
backwaters and that he could help forge a path. Still, it was hard to imagine a
graceful transition, even without the Comannda. All the fear and greed and
division would take years to overcome. Generations.

He rested his jaw in
his palm, fingertips to lips.
His
lips. Squinting brought an unfamiliar bulge of flesh beneath his eyebrows into
view. Narrow eyes. Hazel now. Harder. Mom always loved his almond-shaped eyes.
Both Mom and his face were gone, victims of an unpredictable world. One lost to
a drunk driver, the other to a system drunk with power.

The trailer’s screen
door creaked and banged shut. Miguelito stepped around him on the stairs.

“You got news,
hombre.” Javier’s son headed for the bus stop. He turned and walked backwards.
“It’s been good getting to know you, mang. See you around, you know? Be
coolio!”

With a wave he turned
and didn’t look back, a happy teenager living with incredible secrets.

Inside, Javier sat
watching cartoons and slurped up colorful cereal from a bowl. With one hand he
pulled a necklace out from under his shirt and fingered a pendant. There was a
click and the ankle band opened and fell out from Austin’s pants leg.

“Important people
wanna hang out with you. Don’t ask me why.” He half-smiled. “Instructions on
the counter. Hope you can read ‘em. You got half an hour.”

A clean-shaven Austin
stepped from a house into a waiting Subaru, suitcase in tow. The clothes felt
wonderful: clean blue jeans that fit snug, blue cotton t-shirt, and running
shoes. No more baggy jeans and wife-beaters. It didn’t feel good not knowing
the fate of their parents but he couldn’t change that, yet.

“Relax,” Javier had
said. “This is a big meeting so don’t freeze up about the folks. I’m sure
they’re all right.”

The woman who’d picked
him up from the strip mall near the trailer park was a utility only, a
non-Korda following directions. She handed him a sealed envelope. “Please read
this before your flight, Mr. Crichlow.”

His back-story was
provided in the form of a resume, a set of working notes, and a printout of a
dating service profile. Thin and simple, easily adapted. He skimmed it. Allen
Crichlow. Technical sales rep for a Glendale, California based software
company. Names of managers, product lists, descriptions, all familiar
technology he could fake knowledge of in a pinch. Single, living in nearby
Eagle Rock. Cat named Javier.
Cute
.
He’d have time on the flight to commit it all to memory.

The woman dropped him
off at the airport. He stood on the sidewalk with a new identity and a plane
ticket to London. First time overseas, for a vacation. Coach class? He rubbed
his chin and decided he didn’t mind at all.

He was free to move
about the planet.

A window seat afforded
a view of the eastern coast at night, lit up as it had been in the lucid dream
a lifetime ago. Then, Austin had sought the hacker and felt a dark, textured
energy of a place with complex designs emanating intelligence. Now, as land
receded and dark ocean took its place, he half-expected the tiger’s head to
appear. Instead a stranger’s face stared back in the window’s reflection. The
person he’d become was almost as unfamiliar.

He’d smoked pot a
little in high school. Like sugar poured into water, boundaries dissolved along
with coherency and identity. Something like that was happening now but over the
course of weeks, not minutes or hours, and it wasn’t fading. In this, he was
keeping up, learning his place, discovering reality instead of exploring a
temporary high.

He closed his eyes.
Mental restraint was as much a survival skill as learning to perceive beyond
himself. Expressing elevated awareness risked attention, examination. People
were used to the type of contact born of ignorance, a language of protective
responses and basic civility. Intelligent awareness made people uncomfortable, made
people notice. Javier had jammed that into his head so hard he probably had
bruises.
Do not give them your imprint.
Do not give
anyone
reason to remember
you. You are a boring fuck. Only boring fucks stay alive.
Even passively,
there was more to learn about people around him than they would willingly
reveal. Already he’d confirmed that preoccupation with sex was a driving theme
and not just with men. At its best, it was tasteful and provocative; at its
worst, evil and debasing. By far the most common vibe was that of depression.
It weaved itself through most minds, even if only intermittently, pervading the
group mind like an unshakeable background melody. Part of him wanted to help,
to emit a soothing, reassuring vibe to help lift everyone on the plane. Though
strongly tempted, he knew it would be an advertisement to the Comannda and
might even backfire. Experiments had to wait. Instead, he spent the first
couple of hours sifting through his meta-store of memories, reliving them in a
lucid state of recall. It definitely beat the in-flight movie about a senator’s
wife falling in love with the president.

Halfway through the
flight he finished memorizing Allen Crichlow’s dossier. Dozens of questions
stood out, things he’d need to properly cover his ass. So much left for
imagination. If this was to be a primary identity there better be a whole lot
more coming.

An attendant appeared
and offered a pillow. Her long hair made him think of Kaiya.

“Please, thanks.”

Every night since
their time in old London, he’d taken pills before sleeping as insurance against
dreams. More mystery. They would only say it was crucial he take them, that his
life could depend on them. The warning had seemed more than a bit overdone. He
touched a pill in his jeans pocket. The thought of catching Kaiya in a lucid
dream was a powerful draw.

In a plane traveling
over the dark Atlantic, he could say he nodded off without realizing it...

He re-stuffed the
envelope and sat on it, reclined his chair, and relaxed. Someone nearby had
freshened their perfume. The scent somehow brought to mind Paris or the
Mediterranean. He recalled the last evening at Kaiya’s trying to break the
cipher code. In slow motion he saw the expression in her eyes, the curve of her
lips, her hair as it fell forward like silk. Memories flowed, comforting and
familiar. Eventually the drone of the engines and the hiss from the overhead
air vents lulled him toward the shoreline of sleep.

He dreamt, but not
lucidly.

In the din of a
darkened manufacturing plant, lights slid past. He lay on a moving conveyor
belt and watched behemoth machines pulse red, orange, and green. Robotics
worked busily all around, hissing and beeping in a random symphony. He sat up.
The high ceiling, dominated by a domed skylight, lit up from the flash of spot
welding. Beyond the skylight the Milky Way galaxy made a brilliant spectacle
and dwarfed whatever facility he was in. He looked down the conveyor and saw a
split point ahead where a connector belt veered left and his continued
straight.

The split point
approached, as did a vague uneasiness. The random tones and static started to
fire differently, slowly arranging into a semblance of order. He glanced up at
the skylight just as two long shooting stars crisscrossed the night sky to form
a symmetrical X, as if the planet were being marked from outer space.

The conveyor carried
him along. Thirty feet remained to the split point. Twenty five.
Stay or roll left?

Something was wrong.
The machines’ cacophony was a signal. Straining to find meaning in the halting
patterns, he looked up once more and saw a bright greenish-white comet streak
down past the skylight on a trajectory that could only lead to the factory’s
grounds. Then, as if in frustration, the machines formed an unmistakable
pattern, delivered with a sudden increase in volume.

“SYS-TEM!” And again,
“SYS-TEM!” He passed the split point, the divider now alongside him.

“LEFT! LEFT! LEFT!”
The machines vocalized perfectly.

He lashed out and
grabbed hold of the divider, the belt like sandpaper tearing at his clothes. He
rotated to get his feet against the divider then pulled and bounced with all
his strength until he fell onto the other conveyor path. It trundled along while
he examined the raw and bleeding skin beneath his torn clothing.

The machines were
looping now, a soft rolling pattern that sounded like ‘woo... woo’, over and
over. It was a sound of relief or
contentment that made him wonder what danger he had avoided. Slowly it broke up
until the tones returned to random patterns.

An overhead paging
system crackled to life, the voice drably male. “You are approaching Ring One’s
boundaries. Please review your programming guide and select only the
appropriate programs for the core. Thank you.”

Ahead in the dim light
of the plant, the conveyor belt ended in a huge rotating Petri dish. Dozens of
skeletons lined its edges. He tried scrambling back but the conveyor tore at
his hands. The belt folded underneath and he dropped down into the glass
enclosure. The walls stood over twice his height, too slippery and high to
scale. A glance at the skylight revealed low clouds, possibly smoke, obscuring
the view of the galaxy.

He shouldn’t have
trusted the machines.

The dream paused then,
as if time was a component and not a constant. It slowly dissolved and left him
awake and uncomfortable in his seat.

The hour before dawn
in the County of London proved delightful. Cool air and openness helped
counteract the long flight. He’d slept until landing but memory of the dream
had left a funk. Threaded with symbolism, it felt threatening and worse,
relevant. The treadmill fit, a perfect representation of life since the file
arrived. He’d trusted the machines only to find out they were part of a trap.
An allegory for the Runa Korda? The comet, a symbol for what? Alien contact?
And why didn’t it impact? Or had it? The petri dish was the most revealing
because it mirrored the feeling he’d had since the hospital – that he was an
experiment. Or perhaps it was mankind that was the experiment.

Following
instructions, he arrived by cab at the Hilton at Canary Wharf. The hotel stood
sleek and modern, surrounded by the Thames River on three sides. Checking in
was a slightly nervous affair. The clerk’s awareness was palatable, reading his
vibe without revealing much of her own. Javier’s training kicked in and he
babbled about how excited he was to be in London for the first time. The
business visitor slash tourist.
The
boring fuck
. Nothing shifted in the woman. He accepted his room card and
thanked her without having gleaned a drop of information from her. Naturally
contained or something more?