Those That Wake 02: What We Become (11 page)

“Shall I just show you? That would be easier.”

Laura’s heart beat a little faster.

“Yes,” she said, the word nearly catching in her throat.

“I’m feeding it to your cell right now.”

She reached down to get it, realized it was still in her room, collecting dust in the shadows under her bed.

“I, uh, don’t have it with me,” she said, already knowing the reaction she would get.

“You don’t have your cell with you,” he said, letting it hang there between them, drenched in disdain.

She searched the side of his head for his cellpatch, which she was sure he had. It took her a moment, though. It was smaller, no more than a quarter inch in diameter, and flesh colored as well, nearly invisible.

“You must have cellenses to go with that thing. Can I see it through those?”

“The lenses are fused to my irises.”

“What?” She squinted at his eyes, saw nothing unusual. “I thought the contact lens version wasn’t even available yet.”

“It’s not. To people like you.”

Who the hell was this kid?

“I suppose,” he said, “the hospital has a paycell somewhere.”

They stood in the cold, medicinal hallway, huddled around the small screen of a paycell, and Laura watched herself doing things she’d never done, in a place she’d never been. On the screen, she was in a public station of some kind, all white and chrome. The camera was focused tightly on her, so it was impossible to make out exactly where she was, but the sound of crowds bubbled in the background, even announcements on a PA system crackled indistinguishably.

She saw her face, but it was tense, unfamiliar. It was carrying something with it she didn’t know or understand. Though that Laura was no older than she was now, obviously, she felt almost as though she were looking at an adult version of herself. There was another figure, close to her. A big figure, a boy, with dark, close-cut hair and broad shoulders. For an instant, she assumed it was Josh. But then, even from the back, the face not visible from the angle they were watching, there was something that was clearly not Josh about him. He stood, rock-like in his stillness, attending the stranger Laura with him on the screen. But even so, there was an unmistakable strength in him that Josh simply lacked, a sense of stubborn immovability in the tension of his shoulders, the angle of his head.

Laura’s body tingled. How could she possibly make those assumptions about someone she had never met simply from the back? Ridiculous.

“Then maybe what we need to do,” the Laura on the screen said, the sound of her voice obviously enhanced, since she appeared to be whispering, “is go back to the Librarian.”

The male she was speaking to said something, and she strained to hear it, catch even the sound of his voice. But it was a one-word response and swallowed by the ambient noise.

“I know we could find him again,” the screen Laura said in the paycell. “I know he would speak to us.”

There was a pause as the two figures stared at each other. Then they both saw something at the same time and moved away, off the screen, which flickered gray and went to static.

Laura looked up at the boy next to her as though coming out of a daze.

“Who was that I was with?”

He shook his head.

“Unidentifiable. He never turned to the camera. I assumed it was your boyfriend, Josh.”

“No. No, that wasn’t Josh.”

He was looking at her queerly now, starting to be convinced by her confusion. Quite despite himself, no doubt.

“Where was that taken?” Laura looked at him, not bothering to mask her desperation anymore.

“Moynihan Station, in New York. June of last year, as I said.”

“New York. I haven’t been to New York since I was, like, fifteen.”

He didn’t bother with a response. The evidence spoke for itself.

“How did you get that?” Laura pushed on.

“I was—” He caught himself, looking up and down the hospital hallway, dropping his voice precipitously. “I was scanning for mention of the word
Librarian
in certain contexts, in certain locations. This was the only one I turned up of any use.”

“Wait,” Laura shook herself from her own immediate dilemma for an instant. “You were scanning every camera in New York City?”

“Not every one, of course,” he said, clearly exasperated at the idea. “Like I said, in certain areas.”

“How do you do something like that?”

“I wrote a word- and tone-recognition program, context algorithms, patched into city networks with it.” He waved it away as if it were nothing. “Believe me, that was not the hard part. I was scanning for more than a year before my software picked this up. Unfortunately, surveillance cameras in places as large as Moynihan Station are strategically placed. That was all I got. The hard part was finding you. I ran your face through all sorts of identification apps. Your likeness was on record; you were in certain systems.” He recited her parents’ names, her address in Stony Brook, her friends’ names, her high school GPA, either from obsessive memory or because it was scrolling across the lenses grafted to his eyes. “But the records were static, ignored, as though they were made-up entries for a person who didn’t really exist. When I sent out inquiries, no one even knew who Laura Westlake was. You’re going to have to explain to me exactly how you accomplished that.”

But looking at her suddenly trembling chin, her swimming eyes, it was plain that she would be explaining nothing of the sort.

“Until,” he continued mercifully, though his tone was still quiet and hard, “suddenly, you did exist. Your records began to update normally. People knew who you were, interacted with you. Four months ago. Now, here we are.” He looked at her expectantly now. He had provided everything he could. It was her turn.

The questions sped around her in such a violent whirlwind, she didn’t even know how to reach her hand in and pluck one out. So she went in another direction.

“All right, Mrs. Roosevelt, who are you really?” she asked. “How do you do all this? And what do you want with the Librarian?”

His expression fell into deep distaste. A scowl looked disturbingly natural on his young face. But given all that, he was clearly beyond arguing now.

“Fine,”
he said, acid anger burning his words. “But not here.”

They were in her car again, sitting beside another field, not far from the first one. He had insisted on an open area with nothing and no one in sight.

“You know,” he said, when they had finally found a spot that satisfied him, “you might consider a cellpatch. It would save a great deal of time and concern for security.”

Is that where we are now?
Laura wondered.
Is it really such a burden to have to simply speak now?

“My name,” he said, his eyes sliding back and forth at the open fields around them, “is Aaron Argaven.” His eyes fell on her. They were scarcely two feet from her own now, and she couldn’t help but study their flat, gray surface for hints of the machinery that infested them. But they were clean, almost flawless, like the eyes of a little baby. He was studying her back, as though by uttering his name he had offered a revelation of great enormity. “Argaven,” he repeated it.

“Okay,” she said, trying to accommodate his expectations.

“You don’t know the name?”

“Uh, I guess it sounds sort of familiar.”

“‘I guess it sounds sort of familiar,’” he actually mimicked her in a mock, singsong voice. The last time she could remember that happening she had been in the school playground in pigtails with a jump rope hanging from her tiny hand. “As in Alan Argaven.” He stopped again and the silence stretched out. Still nothing. “The cofounder of Intellitech.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right.” She had, of course, heard the name before. Who hadn’t? But there was, in her defense, a lot on her mind.

“Yes, he was only the CEO of the most influential social technology development company on the planet.”

“I get the point. Could you move along, please?”

He expelled a gust of air and shook his head before continuing.

“I take it, then, that you’re not familiar with the recent decline of Intellitech’s fortunes?”

“No, sorry.”

“I won’t bother you with the statistics of Intellitech’s record on research and development in multiple areas of social data collection and tech development that revolutionized everything from medicine to communication. I mean, revolutionized on an unprecedented level. Like the global and unified integration of cell technology. The algorithms for the collection and analysis of data that modern surveillance and intelligence communities use to keep the country safe. I won’t bother you with all that. Except to say that, even with that track record, with its stock at a fifteen-year high, and with no indication of decline from any external source whatsoever, everything crashed. Intellitech was on the verge of bankruptcy in a matter of five months.”

Of course she knew that. Its implications on a variety of levels were still being discussed in many of her classes. But the
why
s were subsumed by the
what-now
s, and the hurried theoretical explanations given by professors were admittedly not of much interest to Laura, anyway.

“Why? What happened?”

“Hello?” he said sharply. “That’s the damn point.” His anger was back in full flourish; whatever softness he’d acquired from watching Laura’s emotions teeter wildly was swept away. Little wonder, Laura realized. He was not talking about the collapse of a company. He was talking about the destruction of his family. “No one knows why. There are all sorts of theories: market instability, improper budgetary oversight, conspiracies of every sort ranging from a union of threatened foreign cartels to pure fantasies like the whim of the Old Man. But it’s all unfounded conjecture. Anyone in a position to really know, all the people in power positions at the company at the time, are silent. They can’t be made to talk, or they’re not around to talk. Which means one thing, obviously.”

Laura nodded, trying to give the sense that she found it obvious as well, despite having no figment of a guess what he was talking about.

“An internal matter.” He threw it at her as he would the most rudimentary lesson to a dim child. “Something happened within the structure of the company, and it was so huge, it blew everything apart.”

“Could it have been that huge, and no one knows anything about it?”

“Are you joking? What sort of world do you live in? Corporations are turning the fate of the world on a dime every day. Even you must have a sense that that’s happening. But you don’t know how, exactly. No one does. That’s the essence of modern life. Decisions made behind closed doors shape modern existence.”

Yes, Laura knew that to be true instinctively. And while it was theoretically chilling, sickening, it was so elemental a fact of life that it failed to stir any actual ire.

“Well,” she said, “wouldn’t your father know about it?” And her stomach dropped out. His father. She remembered it now. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, her eyes stinging with sympathy for him. Aaron’s eyes, however, remained implacable.

“I don’t want your sorrow. I want answers.”

“I know. I’m trying.”

“Are you? Do you know what trying is? When the company collapsed, my father ranted for months, until, finally, he was a pathetic wreck, locked in his room, gibbering in the dark. Until he didn’t even have the strength or courage to go on with that anymore. So ‘trying,’ as you put it, is piecing together his babbling nonsense after he was gone and using it to hunt down his ghosts. I pieced it together. I constructed my programs; I cut into the systems I needed. How much help do you think I had with all that? Was anyone else in my family able? Were any of my father’s associates willing to even speak to me? What do you think?”

He was raging now. His face was red, and his breath was coming short.

“Well, it took a year, but I found you. I enrolled myself in this liberal cesspool of a college just to get close to you.
That’s
trying. And guess what? Now that I’m here, I still . . . have . . .
nothing!
”

She stared at him, the car filled with his short gasps. She was pressed against the door behind her, watching him. A year just to find her. He was writing programs,
inventing
them from the sound of it, before that. Had he been twelve when he did that? Eleven? And officially enrolled in college, one that was apparently well beneath him, at fourteen? Putting aside that his IQ was clearly off the charts, he had spent two years of his childhood devoted to determining why his father had killed himself? Laura suddenly found it impossible to hate him. Pity him, yes. Fear him, surely. But her anger for him had evaporated.

“All right, Aaron. All right. Tell me, how does the Librarian figure into this?”

He looked up, his chest still laboring, although now it looked as though his energy was devoted to holding back tears. He was just too exhausted to resist her anymore.

“Of the many things my father let loose in his last few days, the one that preoccupied him the most was this Librarian. From what I could figure, the Librarian had once worked for him, was an employee of Intellitech a long time ago. But he developed a social algorithm called the Global Dynamic, a kind of a theory of human interaction that could predict business and cultural developments on a massive scale. It had the potential to revolutionize economics, the entire political-industrial landscape. He had developed it, but he wouldn’t share it.” Aaron shook his head in frustration. “Something like that. This is all from my father’s disjointed ramblings. Intellitech’s records of this Librarian, his exact position, the time he was employed, even his name, were all expunged. But from what I reconstructed of my father’s logic, what happened to Intellitech at the end is pent up with this Librarian’s theory and whatever it let loose.”

Laura could see what the Librarian meant to Aaron, both a traumatized boy and a terrifyingly competent adult. In examining his pain, Laura’s own whirlwind had quieted somewhat. Enough, at any rate, to see what the Librarian could mean for her.