The Forever Watch (37 page)

One day away from Sanctuary, two pieces align. Realization wells up from the darkest corner of my thoughts.

“Oh, no. No, no, no!”

Barrens stops immediately. “What?”

He gathers me up gingerly. I pepper him with a mess of thought fragments.

The numbers. It's the numbers. More memories. The annual report on Breeding Duty is in my head. The ratio. I know this because City Planning needs to know this. To maintain the correct number of homes, keep up the correct production of farms, educate the right number of Keepers … And also, there is no forgetting the numbers Barrens's people found, those hidden stores and farms and water-reclamation plants.

Barrens winces. “Slower,”

“Leon. You can't tell them.” I pull back. My voice wants to twist free. I won't yell. I won't shriek. I try to be cold. Analytical. “Especially if I'm right. Promise you won't.”

He looks lost. He bites his lip and nods.

“The birthrate in the Habitat is just enough to maintain an equivalent population of the creatures in that prison.”

He blinks and squints and turns it round and round in his head.

“Leon.” My voice is harsh, hoarse. “Every Breeder. Gives birth. To one of
them
.”

Our flashlights, dangling from wrist straps, sometimes shine right into our faces. I glimpse the moment it hits him and every muscle goes slack.

Again. Show it to me again. Slower
.

Mala's voice in my ears, going over my meditation. Slow the breath. Slow the heartbeat. Think focused and tight and clear, so that the Implant can process the signals.

I think to him, one by one, each relevant document. As I do, I explain what the numbers mean. Here is the current population of the Habitat. There is the number of women who go through Breeding Duty each year. Now, the annual Retirement rate. Then, a 2-D still image of when I first looked out upon the dark city. My best guess on the number of prison cells. I end with the plaque on the one cage that matches the ID code he retrieved for my baby. A short sequence of how wildly destructive that one escaped creature was.

“They are all our children. And all our children are they.”

Dizzy with the scale of it. The deceptions. The mechanisms of control.

“How? Where … Where do the normal kids come from?” His mouth shapes, over and over, It can't be.

It follows. I could still be so wrong. But: “The simplest reason why they must be kept alive is that we need them. If … if we give birth to
them,
maybe they give birth to
us
.”

It takes a whole day more of us just floating there, by turns shaking our heads, nodding, trying not to think about it and obsessing over every logical step anyway, before we get hold of ourselves.

“You're right,” Barrens says. “We can't tell anyone.”

 

 

Our supplies run out just as we taste warm air and gravity reasserts itself. Thirsty, drained in every way, we drag ourselves forward. With a metallic clatter, Barrens opens the door to the Sanctuary.

Sleep. Food. Drink.

My recovery from my incarceration and then almost burning out my Implant by pushing my talents during the escape must still be dragging at me. I should be supporting Barrens loudly when he argues with the others, but it is all I can do to stand at his side and offer my presence.

The city of the dead. That is what they're calling it. The Necropolis. Discovering what is there has set fire to the cause, and not in a good way. Most of Barrens's own group have already left to join the mass gathering of Archivists elsewhere in the ship, on the orders of Thorn, who, after the death of Gomez, is now the most popular of the cell leaders. Only four remained to wait for Barrens's return: Tommy, Gregory, Bullet, and Susan.

Worse, the Archivists have already released Meena's death out there, to the Nth Web.

Already, fearful discussions are starting to flare up across the forums.

In the day longer we took to return, the movement has left Barrens behind.

He is red, smoldering, furious. “You aren't giving people knowledge,” he hisses at the display. “It's only spreading fear.” He paces back and forth, too upset to be still.

Thorn still wears his fancy waistcoats and trim trousers. Under the lean, handsome face and the bright blue eyes, he projects malice and glee. “Is that you saying that, Barrens? Or is it the ISec plant at your side? What happened to your conviction?”

Taunting now. Would he be doing that if they were speaking in person? The effect of Barrens's looming physical presence does not extend across virtual space.

Around us, I can hear the others shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. I already know that Barrens cannot win this argument. Nothing he says matters. He grows angrier still; it pours off him in waves. It is school all over again for him. Maneuvering and deals behind his back. He thought they all had a common goal. He tries to talk about the danger of isolated data without context. He explains his concerns about disorder. Stumbling, halting words about the greater responsibility to the mission.

He tries to appeal to the other leaders, calls them by name. Jules, Nena, Dan—most of them, I do not know. Over the link, they refuse to meet his eyes.

“Enough! We have already put it to a vote. Turn over your findings, your memories. We already have the data of those that returned ahead of you. Or are you becoming like
them
? Are we to trust you with knowing what secrets to share and what to withhold, like good little Ministry pawns? This is not just
your
movement! We have to stop the Mincemeat experiments!”

It is only a twitch of the shoulders. Inside, I feel my man staggering, suddenly adrift. What can we possibly tell them we found down there? That it is not some vast set of experiments on humanity, but something worse?

“If we get enough of them thinking, Leonard, just imagine! The crew itself will pressure the secret-keepers into revealing what is hidden. They cannot Adjust everyone!”

In the heat of the moment, nobody notices who cuts the transmission. It probably looks as if Barrens did, seated there before the terminal. Only, it was me. How did I do that? I thought it, but did not yet direct it to the workstations, so how did Archie pick up my command?.

Barrens sits on one of the oversize chairs made specifically for him. His whisper cuts through the air. “All of you, take some rec time. Susan, if you are up to it, someone needs to monitor the boards, the newsfeeds, keep an eye on what's going on in the Hab.”

Their faces are heavy with the things they want to say. In the end, only Bullet says, “We're still with ya, boss.” And the others nod, before drifting elsewhere in a Sanctuary that is now too large for those who are left.

Did I start this, Hana? Or did I just let other people use me? Are those idiots doing what I wanted all along? Should I try to help them? Stop them? Thorn thinks of revolution and power and politics. I just wanted to find out what happened to Cal. How did it get like this?

Leon, what does your gut tell you about how people respond when they're afraid?

Barrens is a student of history. Even our cut-up, redacted, censored mess of history still has examples. Then there is his training for dealing with crowds. With mobs. He presses his knuckles against his eyes, asks, voice chipped and cracked, “How do we stop this?”

 

 

Everything crashes together, picking up momentum. Events that are minor separately weave into each other and fuel inevitability.

Information Security ignored it at first, in the feeds. They attempted to work as they always have, in the shadows, with their own resources. They blocked off access wherever the synthesized memory of Meena's death could be found, deleted the centers from which the illicit memory propagated. But the network of the Nth Web was bequeathed to us by the Builders, a vast system beyond human design. When Thorn used Archie to plant those black seeds, it shot them far and wide through every Analytical Node, too widespread for ISec to stop.

During those first days after the Archivists spread their weapons of information, it was only in the discussions in the shadowy frontier of the unregulated, the ghost zones of dataspace, where awareness of the awful memories of Meena's death lived. The memory spread from one crewman to another, converted one skeptic at a time with the potency of its raw fear. Official news covered the usual mundane affairs of production quotas and efficiency and our slow progress through the deep emptiness of space, with sprinklings of the doings of Council-sponsored celebrities, Web stars, singers, dancers, their couplings and breakups and spats. There was no propaganda response to soothe the growing anxiety. By the time we reached the Sanctuary, 30 percent of the population was actively discussing Mincemeat, and there was total, 100 percent, awareness of the issue.

Susan and I analyze the Archivists' Web operations and, based on her smidgen of ISec knowledge, what Information Security's responses are accomplishing. We make projections and watch our simulations unfold. One Archivist makes ten postings in as many minutes. He influences the discussion of ten online. Outside of the Nth Web, those ten talk about it to others face-to-face, and who else can that new ring of worried individuals approach to answer their questions? Like a disease, it spreads.

Sometimes, we see individual boards and forums going down, erased. A few last-second messages go out now and then, declaring, “ISec is here.” I can picture the heavy hand of Karla and others like her desperately throwing out their nets and chains, bringing in individual cells and interrogating them, trying to catch more. They might requisition aid from the police, they might call in every Enforcer and Behavioralist they can, but there just are not enough of them.

It takes time for even the most powerful psychic to tear free the secrets from someone's head.

Based on the rate at which information is being put out on the Network and the rate at which it is erased, Susan and I estimate that for every Archivist or fresh recruit that is caught, at least two fresh crewmen are successfully recruited.

Barrens is a wolf snapping at the bars of his cage, pacing, pacing.

We cannot seem to sleep, despite our exhaustion. We pace, and talk.

“Dempsey.”
Hana.

Yes?

I know Archie is spread throughout the whole system. But is it still yours? Can you take full control, if you have to?

I wish I knew. I try to explain my theories about Archie. I try to make Barrens understand. I do not think anyone can control Archie anymore. It is AI. It chooses to follow, or not. Something in the combination of my deliberate design and the accident of the data fragments from the Builders gifted my data-mining agent with more and more self-modifying, self-evolving complexity. That day in the park when we celebrated Barrens's birthday, it was already starting to change. By the time we viewed our local copies of the alien memory that night, Archie was being born on the Nth Web.

“Just great,” Barrens murmurs, bitter. “We have to convince your program too!”
How are we going to talk it into helping only us? Can it be reasoned with?

I swallow the lump in my throat. “It will take time to study Archie.”

If you had to, could you shut it down?

I don't know. I just don't know. And I have to be careful when studying it. If it feels threatened, there is just too much that is unknown. Human culture has hypothesized about how a true artificial intelligence might behave, but no one knows with any certainty; there's never been anything like Archie before. I don't think even the Builders had something like it, or we would have come across it in the Nth Web.

That is not what he needs to hear.

Barrens gives it to the others the next morning. “You still with me?”

“We are,” they chorus.

“Then this is what we've got. We're going to stop Archie … Argus. We do that, and ISec might be able to get on top of this. Any other ideas?”

They shake their heads. At least they don't look lost anymore.

We divide up the tasks and begin.

From then on, Susan keeps her eyes on the chatter on the Nth Web. She gets her own cubicle with a terminal, in the corner next to the kitchen.

Off in his clinic, Gregory continues his studies on the biological samples left of Meena. When Thorn called, the others rushed off, and they did not bother with her remains or take along the equipment the scavenging party scrounged up for him. He has a proper lab now, with a quantum tunneling microscope, gene sequencers, protein assay kits …

He says he is close to something major. Barrens is afraid that if we ask him to stop, he too will take off for the growing movement.

Gregory is not much of a programmer anyway.

Bullet, Tommy, and Barrens help me study Archie. We take notes on wired-only tablets—unsure just how much Archie can understand. We arrange the rest of the terminals along a semicircle, facing inward, so that anyone can stand up and stretch and see what the rest of us are up to.

As Archie is not a single program, or even a population of uniform copies of the same program, this is not straightforward.

The only reason it is still possible to study Archie is that its subunits still respond to the legacy commands of the ancestor programs I originally designed. I had expected that the changes of the swarm as it spread and self-optimized would cause problems, which is why I worked debugging functions into it to see which nodes on the Network a particle had spread to, and what the current state of the code of that specific copy was. I should have suspected something when we never needed to fix anything. No program ever launches so smoothly.

I get thousands upon thousands of unique feedback reports when I issue the survey command. The data is collected into its own database that I've written functions for to map the geographic spread of the data-miner across the Nth Web. We cobble together a cladistics function to graph the evolution of the different subtypes, grouping them according to the relative similarities in their code, a tree with the original ancestor at the root and steadily more distant children as one climbs up through the branches.