The Forever Watch (12 page)

The sun is bright, and the autumn foliage is molten fire and gold. The breeze picks up, a surge resulting from many factors: vents opening and closing between the Habitat and the biome preserves. Red, yellow, and brown leaves take flight for a moment. More heating elements come online to simulate the sun climbing higher into the sky. Children in the distance run through the flight of fall colors.

A cold sandwich is the start of a satisfying weight in my belly. We share a plastic tub of macaroni salad. For the rest of the afternoon, our kisses will probably taste like the figs we have for dessert. I delete the signals in the corner of my vision, messages from Jazz and Lyn and Marcus, subtle and not-so-subtle criticism of this thing growing between Barrens and me.

Friends care and friends judge; how much worse if they knew about this awful mystery we share? Would they be horrified, or would they admire it? Wouldn't it be good for the ship to stop these deaths? Somewhere out there, Apollo Gorovsky is wheeling about a child, struggling to provide it with adequate care, missing half of the team assigned to raise the boy. And there are others. How many more?

“Hey. You're pretty lousy at this taking-a-break thing,” Barrens murmurs. “We're still on holiday.” He pulls me down and it's nice, lying against this great big beast, my rock, a wall against uncertainty. His fingers are almost too large to lace into mine. The slow rumble of his heartbeat against me, the breath of his huge lungs, soothes me. His is the scent of primal things, soil and trees and grass and sea. I could sleep like this. I let myself ease into it, slipping away.

The tablet beeps. It is done syncing, and I pull out the plug, wrap the cables.

Let's take a walk. Or maybe ride one of those boats in the pond.

Sure. Don't blame me if we fall in the water though. I'm … pretty heavy. Little boats tilt,
he warns.

It's warmer than average, for an autumn-cycle day. In my professional capacity, I know it means that one of the maintenance teams has screwed up a thermal-management protocol. But off duty, it is a fine afternoon to risk messing about in a boat.

 

 

We do fall in the water—and laugh about it. It is good that psi-tablets are water resistant. We get back in the boat and mess about on the water some more.

The sun sets, and it is time to go home.

The walk to the train is damp even with my TK drawing the water out of our clothes and hair. We pass by a stand selling fresh pierogi and fill up our emptied picnic basket with them for dinner. From another stall, we obtain a half dozen fragrant loaves of sourdough.

“I'm going to get fat with all this rich stuff yer buying.” There is that awkward, shy grin.

Don't be like that.

Because theirs is the only talent that is closely tied to metabolism,
bruisers
fuel their powers with more than psi-energy from the grid. Barrens burns through four thousand or more calories in a single workout at the gym each morning. If he has to participate in a combat operation, he can burn ten thousand in moments. More than half of his income goes to pay for food, even with the supplementary ration chits given to
bruisers
.

It would be easier to smile back if it did not bring to mind the enormous disparity between our incomes. I know he does not mind. Consciously, anyway.

A part of the male brain still says he should provide for his female.

In battles between pride and practicality though, well—when we share meals or go out together, I pay. And if future interactions with the collectors on the forums are necessary, it will be my money too.

It's a worthier cause than blowing my Breeding Duty comp on a pet. Or a weeklong biome vacation at a beach.

We are at my apartment, tonight. I insisted because I was not in the mood to use the communal shower at Barrens's. And this way, while he is in there, I can join him and wash his back. It still makes me a bit giddy, feeling that awesome, iron-hard flesh under the soapy skin. His back is so broad, I feel positively tiny as I work my little washcloth in circles across it. He smells good.

Then there is dinner. We eat our evening walk's spoils. We reminisce. I serve up awkward stories about first dates at the academy. And the weird social hierarchies and passive-aggressive conflicts. He talks about the fights he got into at his school, the rivalries, the few friends he found at the end of a day's battle with his fists. The biggest scandal in my class was a plagiarized research assignment. In his, it was two students overdosing on Psyn and trashing the gym.

His stories are better than mine. It is funny to see him concentrate so when it is my turn. We peer into each other's pasts through our words. We could share the memories directly, of course. But we don't.

We drift to sleep on the couch, listening to slow, dreamy blues.

At midnight, we wake up simultaneously. And share a look. Our agreed-upon break is over. Time to get back to the hunt.

I sit up a little straighter. My will demands it, and my bag opens. The tablet flies up and out and into my outstretched hand. In the kitchen, fifteen feet away, a jar lid unscrews itself and coffee floats up into the percolator.

We both hold on to the tablet's conductive frame and dive in.

“I got the forums and rumor threads and stuff, like usual.” I can feel him grimace. “Another message from the weirdos. No new Mincemeat memories for sale, but they do have an encounter with the monsters in the tunnels. I said no thanks, for now.”

It is hard enough dealing with the awful immediacy of the memories we do have, the cloying smells, and in the case of one unlucky witness who tripped and fell, the sick feel of offal under the fingertips. I get enough nightmares as is without adding encounters of strange creatures running around in the sewers into the curse of the Implant's perfect memories.

I skim through the results of the file-deletion searches. This is our usual division of labor.

Nothing stands out, or rather, too many things stand out.

Does my methodology have some fundamental flaw? With today's results, even after the parameter refinement of the black-market memories, there are thousands too many. There are disappearances from too long ago to have been caused by one man. False positives—if they were all correct, they would indicate a trail of death going back too many decades. The killer would have had to have started as a little kid and would by now be a withered, old man over a hundred. It has to mean that the program is failing to differentiate between the normal dangling ident codes that Lyn and I decided were due to innocuous garbage-collection programs or bureaucratic issues, and real disappearances.

We are still on my couch, in my room, on the twelfth floor of the Torus building. Our minds are far apart, in different digital landscapes, but still we are just a thought, a word, apart.

“Sure they're false positives?”

“Leon, the alternative is that the Mincemeat killer is immortal.”

“Maybe there's not just one. Maybe…”

“What?”

He scowls. “Ya won't take me serious.”

“I will.”

Well, I do not after all. His idea of a Council-sponsored program for getting rid of undesirables among the crew? It would explain some things, but “they don't need some special assassination group. They can already Adjust anyone they consider dangerous, erase his memories outright.”

“Maybe Adjustment don't work perfect all the time. Maybe this is for when it doesn't.”

I take a deep breath and let it go. Like many of the theories Barrens comes up with, we cannot make conclusions about this one way or another until we have more data. He tends to think up things that disturb me.

What event in his childhood, what shortcoming by his Keepers, sabotaged his education? He is so much more than the test records in his file.

All the same, his latest theory does not feel right. Would this not draw more attention just from the sheer brutality? Why would assassins use such methods? On the other hand, nearly everything about these deaths has been successfully hidden so far, so maybe they're just that good. But why? And why those people?

“I know already, I know what you're thinking. But maybe it's for dealing with people who are getting too close to ISec's precious secrets.”

No.

“Look, it's just an idea. I told you it's too early. But you must admit that the Ministry of Information is crazy paranoid about its secrets. Couldn't you see them deciding that coming too close to something forbidden justifies anything?

“Hana, they lie to us every day. The lies are different depending on the crewman's rank. Maybe even whoever old man captains the ship doesn't know the whole truth. The truths we are taught are different depending on how we test in school. There are books everyone can read, books some people can read, and books that nobody is allowed to read; all determined by the Ministry of Information.

“We don't even know what the exact disaster on Earth was, and that's the biggest event in human history.”

I clear my throat. “Well.”

The problem is, he's not wrong. And I don't want to think that. I know ISec is more than Lyn's desk job and dealing with the data network and checking the validity of the testing procedures of children. Or there would be no need for the Enforcers, black-armored figures with both incredible psychic talents and brutal training to maximize what genetics they have.

I know that they have unchecked powers to detain, interrogate, and Adjust nearly anyone.

“What in the…” The couch cushions shift with Barrens's weight as he leans forward, frowning. “Hana, something's…” He sucks in a breath.

I minimize my internal display windows and look at the external on the tablet. The device flickers, lines of black-and-white static cut through the orderly lists and charts.

“I didn't just screw somethin' up, did I?”

“No, I don't…” We both stiffen up.

“Are you,” he gasps, “you seeing this?”

The safe-wall built into the handheld is pierced; the contaminating data just goes right past it as if it were not there.

It is more than data, it is a telepathic reverberation buried in the electronic signal. Its echo resonates in the mind, picked up as if the neural Implant were an antenna.

Information creeps into my Implant and from Implant to brain. Crackling interference in my ears, numbness in the extremities. It is more than a data recording, but not quite a memory. Other stimuli that are not real ghost through me. I focus, I concentrate on the beating of my heart, the pulse of the blood in my veins, and trigger the security routines in the Implant. Program commands cascade in and out from metal to organic brain and back across the synapses.

Barrens scoots closer. His hand swallows up mine.
Hana, don't fight it
.

I can see his unfocused eyes darting wildly from side to side, up and down.

It could be dangerous. Some leftover neural virus that the program found.

It's important. It's … You have to see it.

Another deep breath.
All right.

 

 

I am a passenger along for a ride in someone else's skull. It is jerky and disorienting, not the smooth dive into a warm sea I am used to.

There is a sky above me. I feel it. The love for her own sky.

But it looks nothing like the blue skies from lost Earth I know through movies and paintings and textbooks and documentaries. Distantly, I am aware of my heart beating faster.

Corruption. That is what occurs to me at first. The sensory impressions of a memory that has been damaged. I stay aware of myself, keep from sinking fully into the experience. The eyes do not see right, the smell of the air is not foul, but off somehow, and the skin … The body itself feels wrong, different.

Turns the focal point of her awareness. Raises her arm in greeting.

Dizzying explosion of mental exchange, at thought densities that are beyond human.

The thoughts are indecipherable, the strangest music in the mind, sensations, feelings, ideas flashing in the darkness like dying stars.

The arm is a glossy grayish-blue. As is the flesh of everyone around her.

Sleek and sinuous. They have twofold symmetry: two arms and two legs and distinct left and right sides, and a front and a back. And that is where any similarity in appearance to humanity ends. Tall, wiry, and lean, their thin coils of muscle anchor at strange angles around their joints. The feet have no toes and they also have no fingers. The long, narrow faces are so unlike anything else I have seen that it takes a moment of forever to take in the sight. The bulging foreheads are proportionately larger than ours, and there is no hair to frame the shapes of the faces. They have no eyes, though depressions above their cheeks imply some vestigial remnants that could have been eyes in some ancestral species. Psychic sight provides the visuals. There are but the tiniest slits for nostrils. And their mouths are narrow, with small, flattened teeth.

Startlingly, they have the same, silvery emitter plates on their faces that we do.

My mind keeps attempting to impose human proportions and musculature onto the experience, and of course it fails, just as it fails to properly interpret the senses and thoughts of a mind that is nothing like my own.

They are strange to look upon but not ugly. There is a beauty to their smiles, which use fewer muscles than ours. Their clothes are simple in cut but radiate in colors the human eye does not see. They glide upon glowing currents of psi, willowy and graceful.

A second dawn, and a second sun rises into an incarnadine sky.

Her companion approaches. Their arms stop short of touching, but fingers of energy entwine, and that dense mental language roars, the music of an orchestra, so many layered threads of communication and melody, beats and hums and trills. There is something like warmth. There is something like love, but more than that, there is a profound, aching sadness, a sorrow that is quiet and mournful and all the colors of regret.