The Forever Watch (24 page)

Hennessy knocks at my door. My special assignment for him took less time than I thought. Or, no. It's halfway through the morning already. Ugh.

“Come in.”

“Hana?”

“Yes, James?”

“These are the records you asked about. I don't understand why you asked me. Your school pal Marcus works at Water Management. You could put in the request directly yourself and get the data back faster than I could.”

I cannot explain that I am trying to protect Marcus from any future problems if I should get caught.

“Just some ideas I'm working on.”

“Riiiight. Any reason why I'm showing them on my tablet instead of just messaging you with copies of the files?”

So that there are no records of my receiving them in my office, my dear assistant, no system logs of the transmission. For someone normally so perceptive in social situations, Hennessy is talking too much about matters he should realize I want some discretion on. Perhaps he does read it on my face now. Maybe what he wants is for me to confide in him. Hennessy, if I do that and something happens to me, well. You will not be able to take my position if you have been tainted by any future suspicions related to me.

Copying the files over to another psi-tablet takes only a moment. He blinks at that, realizes that I'm using a tablet with no detectable wireless function. Hennessy pauses at my door, closes it instead of leaving.

“I'm not stupid, Hana.”

“Have I given you a reason to think that I have such a low opinion of you?”

“You can trust me. I don't know what this is about, but—”

Direct neural messaging.
Don't. Take care of our team, James. That's what I'm depending on you for.

That seems to be enough to turn him away.

A quick query through the files suggests that the memory is real. At one time a man named Jackson and crew supervisor Cameron were in the same waterworks maintenance team. A repair team was reportedly killed right around when Jackson was Retired. Of course, the given cause was a structural collapse. That was ninety years ago.

What is next? What's next is I'm not supposed to be thinking through all this on my own. That overprotective ass!

I need to get that function to filter away background processor use, so I can get on finding the jerk.

I think about putting up an ad for a memory I do not intend to sell, and leaving a message in a secret location, like a kid playing a game. Instinct holds me back. Why? Isn't Miura exactly the kind of company I want? She is already involved. She is a clear-minded cop. This is the sort of thing the police ought to be good at.

She has posted the ad but not asked me what I have found. As formidable as she is, she too is afraid.

I'll try to meet her next week. No, not even then. I will run as far as I can on my own, until I cannot anymore. There are still many threads to follow, on the Web, and Miura will not be any better at that than I.

Ah, that bitter ache. The sweet pain of a wound I keep picking at. I am still hoping that Barrens will be the one to send a message asking me to go to him. I would. I would forget all this, and go.

16

City Planning takes a turn that puts a stop to everything in my life other than being one of the six City Planning Administrators.

The rumors come true. Directives are issued from the Central Council. All management teams in every department, agency, and bureau scramble to meet the demands of a Habitat Reconfiguration plan that was handed down with almost no warning.

My team, like everyone else's, is swamped. We postpone Hennessy's meticulously planned team-building exercise in the Taiga biome. We schedule shift work. We consume prodigious quantities of coffee.

I try to make contact with Miura if only to inform her that I simply do not have time for further investigations, at least for now. Putting up the ad on the Nth Web takes a thought, even weaving in the hidden memory. When I check for a posting from her in reply, there is nothing.

I guess she is giving it up. That would bother me more if I weren't so busy.

The work makes a mess of me. Everyone in the department is exhausted and moody; Hennessy helps keep the team going. Hah. It is almost as if I planned on giving him more opportunities to lead.

Normally in the Ministry of the Interior, City Planning plans, and Primary City works executes. Not this time.

Each week, we have to assist in the demolition and construction of a new city block to lighten the load on Primary Cityworks.

And it is not just the Ministry of the Interior. So much demolition and construction is going on, the Ministry of Energy has to carefully allocate reactor power, with scheduled rotating power outages in different sections of the Habitat. Significant numbers of officers from the Ministry of Peace help redirect the traffic around all those construction sites. Ministry of Information marketing specialists feed the general public feel-good sound bites about major changes for the better. Nobody is telling us what the Ministry of Health is so busy with, but everyone hears of their struggles too; there are just rumors of some major health-care component to the Habitat Reconfiguration.

Since becoming an Administrator, I have rarely had to involve myself with construction.

Over mere weeks, I destroy and build multiple entire skyscrapers. It is exhausting, draining work. The rest of my crew are worse off—even teamed up in mental gestalt, their combined
touch
rating just matches my own individual ability, because of inherent inefficiencies of different minds linking up their talents. They need to expend 30 percent more effort than I do to accomplish the same task. Among the thousands of crewmen in the combined City Planning and Primary Cityworks effort, mine is the only team that is meeting our assigned quotas and performance metrics.

There are precious few opportunities to check on the Monster.

Night after night, day after day, we sneak in naps either on desks telekinetically converted to cots in our office, or in the backs of the supply trucks when we are on-site at a construction zone. We go back to the gray tomb of City Planning to turn in our reports and shower. Lesser workers, secretaries and janitors, assist us with laundry and food.

Time blurs in that state.

All right.

After this, I promise myself. After the workload eases up. By then, Hennessy will be ready, and the new staff members will be trained up.

Then I'll vanish too. I will find him, never mind if I barely have any idea where to start looking.

 

 

Then my team of ten loses three women to Breeding Duty and one man to early Retirement.

Antonia, Julia, and Erica have a week to psyche themselves up for the long sleep.

I schedule time to talk to each of them and … warn them. But I don't think they quite understand how hard it will be. It isn't in me to share how a place inside me still feels empty, or the dreams I still have.

Then they are gone. A long, paid vacation. Will they be the same when they come back, or will they feel what I feel?

Stephen receives his Retirement notice. He has two months more with us. With the current workload, we can't even throw him a party.

That young man who had the encounter with the tunnel beasts was right. Why are some individuals Retired so young? How can the numbers ever justify it? Stephen Wong is practically a fresh graduate. Hennessy and I have only just gotten him to where he's familiar with all our department forms and protocols.

Again that one poster's most mad idea floats to the top in my thoughts.

No. Madness lies that way. That's not a matter of hundreds of killings, but thousands across the centuries. What could possibly do that? And why?

No time to ponder whether the superiors who are supposed to lead and guide and protect their lessers are instead doing something horrible to us.

There is always too much to do. More roads to reconfigure, more old buildings to demolish and new ones to raise. The months pass. Stephen says his good-byes.

The hundredth day of this work surge arrives. During the moments between, people come and go along the streets with dark crescents under their eyes, cheeks hollow.

Hennessy, have you ever seen anything like this?

It's a stupid question, a sign of fatigue that I even asked it.

Of course not.

Then it's Hennessy's turn to think something foolish to me:
I wonder if these new architectural designs really will save enough power to make it worth converting an entire Habitat section over to them.

Our expertise in civil engineering is enough to know that this isn't so, that it's Ministry propaganda meant for the less informed majority of the crew.

We carry on the conversation in our heads while we instruct our new replacements out loud. Our instruction covers the construction of a large residential-grade tower. The rookies look ridiculously young, as if they were accelerated through the academy and skipped two or three years of training.

“It is of critical importance that you maintain the mental image at all times during a build, and not just rely on preprogrammed instructions in an Implant or amplifier.”

Look at that one, rolling her eyes. We knew it all when we were that young too, didn't we?

I suppose I am laying it on a bit thick.

Hey, if you want to get their attention and keep it, you know you can just show your stuff.

I take a deep breath. Maybe I have forgotten what I was like, even with perfect memory. I am not the same as I was ten years ago, and despite being able to see all the events in between then and now with ruthless and exacting clarity, in many ways when I see through those younger eyes, it is like living out the life of a stranger. It is easier to empathize with what I was like as a child than how I was as a teenager and then a young adult.

Hello? You going to get on with it?

Just focusing, James. Visualizing.

True and not true. I was not entirely lost in my head—I was also waiting for the extremely complex programs I personally coded into my assigned builder's gauntlet to finish booting up and analyzing all the data from the blueprints for this morning's endeavor. The scripts will ensure that I can concentrate on general form and controlling and drawing and directing the power where it is needed, while relieving me of the mental load of imagining the minutiae, the exact measurements, dimensions, loads, densities, shades of color, and performance characteristics of the resulting structure.

I close my eyes and snap up my right arm. The steel-gray gauntlet shimmers in the morning light. Then the sun is eclipsed by the intense blue burst of raw psi energy arching from my face-plates to the gauntlet.

I stand now, in a pillar of lightning, pulling upper-megawatt-class energy off the grid.

Music starts to play in my ears, following a lesser script that draws upon a memory of myself from the night before, listening to Vivaldi, consciousness drifting along the light, playful melody of violins and tying in the notes with each step of the mental choreography I am to dance when it is time.

The light around me fades, and now it is the entire construction site that glows underfoot, concentrating around the ultradense stacks of plastech ingots. The deck floor for hundreds of meters around hums, vibrates.

My hands and fingers curl and sweep, left and right and up and in slow, gentle arcs. Ingots fuse together and flow into the shapes and forms in my thoughts; slabs and beams and columns and joists grow out of the bubbling mass. Delivered in its densest form, the plastech must be spun out and recrystallized in various configurations, so that parts of it perform like steel, and parts of it perform like concrete, and parts of it like wood. It is an organism growing in fast-forward. Skeleton and skin forming simultaneously, shaped with the push and pull of my mind.

Violins sing in my thoughts, and I hum along to the memory as I lift and shape tons of matter. The scripts in the gauntlet cooperate with the ones in my Implant, and they are the players I direct in this performance, the orchestra I conduct. My breath is slow and sure and my heart beats in time with the strokes of my talent.

Vivaldi goes to Puccini.

Telekinesis dopes lines that act as power conduits, it extrudes pipes and drainage and links up to the waterworks, it carves the holes for the windows and bubbles out spaces for rooms and hallways, the thousand, thousand little processes unfurling like the individual notes of an orchestra.

This is to be new housing, following supposedly more efficient design principles. The ceilings of the rooms are high, and many of the walls in each apartment are set to behave like crystal. Future residents will be able to control the opacity of their rooms, to allow more light in from the “outdoors” when they wish it, or to enfold themselves completely in black if they choose. They will also be able to control the thermal properties of the walls and the windows. And rather than appearing in straight lines and right angles, the ventilation ducts are curved and round, a webbed network under the skin of the floors and hidden in the bones of the solid, weight-bearing pillars. Spiral staircases and elevator shafts are hollowed out.

Mozart.

The whole thing starts to tilt here, and then there. The shape of the superstructure is irregular, and that makes it more complex to fabricate, but I have checked over the figures repeatedly in preparation, and I smile as the troops of my imagination carry out their work.

The tower turns and twists, slowly. It looks nothing like the sober concrete block that used to stand here. It is the neck of a bird stretching up, soaring hundreds of meters into the Dome's sky. As the theme plays out, my thoughts slide through it, ethereal blood, and I make room for others to join in.

The outer shell is supposed to be able to control the heat and temperature of the entire building with little additional power. These special panels and built-in computers are installed by Hennessy's group. The smart structure will automatically handle the air and the thermal flow and adjust for the demands of individual tenants. Hennessy is conducting his own concert, with his own music in his head, as he and the team members linked with his mind handle fine interior detailing.