The Forever Watch (32 page)

Another trip. This time, a meeting of the top ten of the Archivist leadership, face-to-face.

I am starting to get an idea of the numbers of the Archivists. There may be hundreds of them. Many still hold mission-critical positions in the Habitat. And they are actively recruiting.

Everyone is sluggish when Barrens is gone. Without him, they slowly devolve into introversion, pessimism, nihilism, navel-gazing. They talk in endless circles about why the ship's society is the way it is. They wonder and theorize about what might link these strange, gruesome deaths with the rest of the Noah's dark secrets. Secret laboratories. The tunnel beasts. And so many dreamy fantasies about the Builders, the desire to find something of theirs that will somehow fix
things
.

Come back to me already, Leon.

22

Tonight is the third night Barrens has been away.

They tell me it is longer than usual.

I get up from my bed and head to the kitchen.

Only Bullet stays upbeat and cheerful. He is cooking a meal fit for kings. “I got a feeling they'll be back soon,” he says, shrugging when I, and others, ask. Nobody begrudges him this potential waste of food—they have just brought in more supplies from one of the secret stores close by.

More of that glorious bacon, cooked just so, leaving enough fat to still allow one to taste it on the mouth and chew it. He fries up diced potatoes in the fat to a golden, crisped exterior, still soft within. Onions too. Then eggs, with just enough milk, scrambled, fluffy, perfect omelets. Bullet produces an immense platter of them and keeps them warm in the oven. He begins to cut up fresh apples, with the intent of preparing a light dessert.

When I offer to help, he waves me off.

“Nah, missy. The boss says cooking's not your thing anyway.”

I laugh because it is true. My cooking skill is limited to omelets and cereal, period. And I laugh because the Barrens I first met was too insecure to ever imagine anyone referring to him as “the boss.”

My AI net has now officially been named Argus by the Archivists. They voted on it.

It chimes with inputs from the sensors I set up around our safe house.

I have decided on another name in my head. Though
Argus
is better than
Monster
, Argus Panoptes was a giant with a hundred eyes, and if its intelligence does happen to keep growing, I'd rather the AI not have an identifier that's linked to a legend about a figure that served the gods and was also killed by them.

So a human name, simple, unpretentious. Archie.

I like to think it responds to me better than it responds to them, is better at recognizing my digital touch despite months of work from the hands of others. When I whisper that name as my thoughts tinker with Archie's code, it seems to become even more responsive to me. Almost happy.

From the kitchen, I walk over to the numerous monitors displaying the structure and complexity of the AI swarm. Dragging a seat over, I sit and gesture. My hands and fingers stretch and unfold the components, revealing the underlying blocks of code. I gaze into the growing universe of its digital DNA, trace the lines of its skeleton of data.

The more I examine it, the more sure I am that nothing I or Barrens or his other hackers programmed into Archie could have triggered this emergence.

Archie,
I think in my head into the terminals.
It was pieces of the Builder's programming, wasn't it?
I don't expect an answer, but it feels right.

While my design was partly self-modifying and the uses we put it to created the circumstances that allowed the swarm to find it, the critical lightning strike that keyed its evolution to something more was something alien lost in all those Analytical Nodes.

The timing fits. Its rapid development began soon after that day in the biome, when it found the alien memory.

If my man was not out there, maybe being chased by Enforcers even now, if there were not all these other things going on, and all the overwhelming weight of these secrets we have uncovered and which we have yet to uncover, Archie's true nature would be enough to awe and terrify and exhilarate me. A unique, digital life. There is so much we could learn from it, especially the alien segments of its code. It is also scary, wondering what its final form might be.

Come on, Barrens. Where are you?

Archie's excited ping almost catapults me out of my chair. It reads the sensors at the periphery of the Sanctuary and passes them to my Implant. I sigh, in relief, at the feel of Barrens's approach.

Turning to Bullet, I say, “Seems like you're right. They're—”

Finally in transmission range! Hana, get the Doc ready. Meena needs help.
Barrens's mind's voice is troubled, afraid. It is never like that. This is going to be bad if it can rattle my guard dog so.

I relay his message and Barrens's army snaps to readiness, their ennui forgotten. One group prepares their weapons, while Gregory prepares his improvised clinic. We shut down unnecessary power draws, such as the heat and most of the lights and the tablets and the displays on the walls, so that the Doctor can draw it all for his amplifier.

Two pairs of men and women have propped the ballista into position, aimed at one of the two access points into our shelter. The gleaming, giant-size crossbow is menacing. The arms and the tension lines creak with the strain as the operators turn the cranks, drawing the immense bolt into firing position.

The other entrance goes through the power lines in the ceiling: our escape route, if the worst comes to pass.

The doors slam open.

Chaos then. People thought they were prepared, but nothing could prepare a person for that wheezing, keening wail.

Barrens and one of the others, Tommy, I think, are carrying the third member of their exploration party on an improvised stretcher, two lengths of pipe ripped out of a wall somewhere with their heavy coats stretched between. Tommy is shaking so terribly it is a wonder Meena has not fallen off their rig.

She is unrecognizable. The rich brown mane is falling out in clumps. Her bronze skin is mottled pale and blotchy purples, her belly is bloated, her face is swollen. Blood is trickling out of her nose and ears and mouth, out of every orifice—her coarse denim trousers are soaked, befouled.

Bullet whispers, “What's with her hands?”

The sight of them is paralyzing. Some of her fingers are just … missing. Bloody stumps.

“Doc!” Barrens thunders. “Get over here! You lot, make a hole—quit gawking and get out of the way! Bullet, have 'em disarm the ballista before people get skewered by accident!”

“What happened?”

“Don't know,” Tommy's words rush out, propelled by fear, anxiety. “We were fine, she'd been complaining about aches and pains, and then she just stopped and fell over, and then she started, huh, she…” Then he can't talk anymore, on the edge of passing out.

Gregory takes control, and Barrens lets him. This is Gregory's field. He is brilliant. And he is all we have. “Don't drop her. Miss Dempsey. Please float Meena into the sterile area.”

Deep breath now. Forcing down an urge to vomit. Others around us already have. The smell of puke and blood obliterates the perfume of Bullet's cooking.

“The rest of you back off,” Barrens orders. “Don't get in the way.”

I float her gently, gently off the stretcher. Tommy falls over immediately.

We were carrying her nonstop for the last twenty-four hours.
Barrens sits heavily. “Take care of her, Doc.”

I try hard, very hard, not to jostle her, to move her evenly, supporting every surface. Every place my
touch
fluctuates produces a bruise I can feel swelling, turgid. Adrenaline stretches the time it takes to get her the thirty meters into the Doctor's crude operating theater. I see her skin starting to come apart, even under her soaked shirt.

“Miss Dempsey, cut her clothes off and levitate them away please. Carefully.”

I try. It is easy, with an amplifier, to cut Meena's plastech-based clothes. It is harder to remove the sticky scraps of them. Lifting the cloth away causes more lacerations.

When I lower her onto the gleaming, sterilized, cushioned table, the bruises I gave her pop open into wounds, sores. The path in between the entrance to our lair and the Doc's surgery is a river of blood.

Gregory walks briskly to and fro beside Meena, waving his healer's rings. Faint, silver-gold streaks, a gentle glow, bathing her. “Dempsey, you'll have to assist,” he intones somberly.

What? No, I can't. I trained with buildings and computers, not flesh and blood.

“Hana,” Barrens's voice is a caress, but it is also steel and straightens my spine. He has followed us into surgery. “Meena was our nurse. You're the only other left with a high enough
touch
rating to do fine manipulations.”

Sigh and whine on your own time, Dempsey. Breathe deep, focus. “What's next?”

I'll be right here with you. Just let the Doc guide you.

“Bullet!” Barrens barks. “Keep the others away, got it?”

With a twitch of my finger, I drag the curtains into place behind us.

“Hell. There's no way I can force you outta here, boss, if you don't want to be moved. But you better just stand there and be quiet, okay?”

“Don't pay attention to me! Help her!”

Thinking would only get me into trouble here. I have to empty myself, be another instrument of the Doctor's, mind open to his commands.

Where he uses psychic surgery to probe or to cut or heal, his telepathy informs me and I must follow, reinforcing her organs, gently holding them in place. Healing is similar to
touch,
but it is more, it's an amalgamation of telekinesis, empathy, and the ability to manipulate the biochemistry of another. My talent's fingers are inside her now, but unlike the Doctor, all I can do is push and pull and cut.

It is abominable, feeling, smelling, almost tasting, how disgusting we humans are inside, just tubes in tubes filled with fluids of differing varieties of disturbing color, odor, and viscosity.

Barrens keeps his thoughts perfectly still, as if he were just a statue. He is as a stone, silent.

Meena is breaking apart right in front of us. Her flesh disintegrates. Her bones. Her skin. It pulls apart from its own weight no matter how I hold the jigsaw pieces together, no matter how Gregory forces healing energy into the seams to knit the cells together. Every time he closes a cut or break, internal or external, a dozen other hemorrhages begin. At random, parts of her remain untouched. Her left foot is completely whole, while the right is a mangled mess. One heaving breast is a lone, perfect reminder of her previous beauty, rising from the red ruin of her torso, where the bones of her ribs and some of her internal organs are visible through the rents in the flesh.

We draw so much power the lights go out. In the dark, Meena's body is lit up, a bonfire of our combined energies.

What is worst is the awareness in her eyes, the horror in them. The whistling wheeze of her breath through the collapsing bulb of her nose and through her disintegrating teeth is a sound that will haunt me forever.

Meena's own talents flare wildly throughout the process.

That's what's killing her,
Gregory's thoughts exclaim, confused, astonished.
Her own raw psi is randomly destroying her cells.

It is the longest hour of my life. If I thought it was something before, the eternity of that first day in the Information Security holding pen, this is as far beyond that as nothing I can think of. In the last minutes, Gregory shakes his head and pulls back, glowing rings around his fingers shutting down.

Her brain is coming apart. Her last coherent thoughts beg for mercy, to make it stop.

“Let her go.” His voice is hoarse. “We're just prolonging it.”

We are crying, the Doc and I. But Barrens, Barrens is still and steady, a pale boulder, waiting. We look at each other, the three of us.

Gregory takes a deep breath. “I can't.”

“I'm sorry, Meena.” Barrens pushes past us. He pulls a knife, and I know he could end it instantly, with his skill and strength. It would be painless, for her. But for Barrens, it would be one more person's blood on his hands.

Staring at his back from behind, I wonder if he has somehow gotten even larger. But his bent shoulders put that illusion to rest. I step in his way and I put my arms around him. No.

You've done enough, Leon.

Compared to what I've done. Compared to killing those poor dumb boys in the darkness, because I was afraid, because I was untrained. This is a mercy.

If I just let her go, she will go to pieces on her own. Aware as each part is severed.

I focus the
touch
, let it build, let it charge, formless at first. All at once, I let it out, channeled into her mind. It crackles along the channels of her neural Implant and destroys the organics of her brain in a flash of thought.

I need to get out of here. But I can't move. Nausea roils in my gut. Barrens sees me. Really sees me. Between us, without a touch of psi or the connection of Implants, we share awareness, the awful familiarity of this experience. We have seen the aftermath of this before. Many times now. In memories, on flat 2-D images, referred to by names on a list. Mincemeat.

23

Bullet breaks out his hidden stash of whiskey.

Everyone needs it. People stumble off, eyes glazed over, some alone, some in pairs, huddled up in their bunks or on the couches or just sitting on the floor in one corner or the other.

Only Barrens and I do not drink.

He leads me away. For an hour, we walk in the cold, dark, unpowered tunnels. Down several ladders, turning round and round. We come upon a wider corridor with a ghostly light in the distance.

“This is where we found you.”