by Ted Krever
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Jerry Lowery was mulling the velocity of boredom. From his table at the front of the classroom, he had a good view up the skirt of the brunette in the front row and apparently she didn’t mind. She kept crossing and uncrossing her legs and squirming in her seat, offering a varied but ever-more-enticing view of the pumpkin orange thong underneath. After a year at L Corp, Lowery had developed his skills to the point that he was certain the brunette knew exactly what she was showing at each moment, even under suggestion. Which only made his boredom in the face of this display more infuriating.
When he’d signed up, three weeks before graduation, choosing L Corp over the CIA, DIA and Livermore Labs, he’d told himself he was making the brash move, taking the unconventional, daring route. L Corp might not be as recognizable on his resume but surely he wouldn’t be bored.
Wrong. Sitting in Rome in the middle of the night, keeping watch on the girl with the pumpkin thong and a room full of less-gaudy colleagues, he was bored to the teeth. Bored bored bored bored bored. The rumors said this was the big one, the operation that would put the company over, make their stock options gold. Of course, if they told you how, they’d have to kill you, haha. He’d told himself the job was undercover work, duties he’d never be able to confide, changing history (in a small way, of course—Lowery was not a boastful man), betrayal and intrigue. Just like Wall Street but legit. And now here he was, making sure the vectoring was right, checking it against the instrument readings every five minutes (or so—Jerry wasn’t the most exacting of souls), making sure the stream of suggestion maintained its consistency, that the message was reaching the target coordinates at full strength. The truth is, a teenager could learn to implant a suggestion and, after that, you might as well be giving an algebra quiz. The brunette kept moving her leg in and out now, popping the skirt up and down as though waving it at him. Ho Hum. In the end, she wouldn’t take him home; she probably wouldn’t even remember the tease.
Life was a tease. Hang in there, Jerry, it’s not challenging work but, if you do your bit, if this is the Big Hit, there’ll be promotions and raises and bonuses. That was the tease. In the end, he’d still be at a desk in front of a group of post-grads doing invisible work with invisible consequences. He’d get more out of tasking the brunette with a few suggestions of his own. Even if they caught you, the first time was just two weeks lecturing from HR.
The watch he’d laid across the desk in front of him began to beep. “Alright, that’s it for tonight,” he announced and the group began to sit up straight, rub their eyes, filter back in stages to the real world. “Straight to your apartments and to sleep. Sleep. We need you back here, rested, 7pm sharp. No wandering around , no parties—we’ll be monitoring everyone, so don’t get cute.” He threw a sad-eyed glance at the brunette, mourning the loss of possibility. The girl didn’t seem to notice the gesture.
As they wandered out, Jerry scrubbed the whiteboard. Spies, teachers, brokers or Mafiosi—all jobs were routine. Consistency, do the job reasonably well, reasonably the same, time after time. No wonder he was bored. He checked in with the cathedral by cell—they were closing up as well. Managers meeting 530p. Stay sharp tomorrow.
He flipped off the lights and walked out into the warm night. Was there someplace to eat? He was hungry. There was a waitress at a place near the Pantheon who’d flirted with him the night before but she couldn’t still be working at this hour. And he refused to eat based on sex that might possibly maybe happen someday if he got ridiculously lucky. Not.
He headed in that direction anyway. There were lots of restaurants and he wasn’t ready for sleep, no matter the company line. L Corp wouldn’t be monitoring managers. At least, not him specifically. At least, he didn’t think so.
The Coliseum shown through the dark streets like the world’s grandest jack 0’lantern. Lowery cut through a grove of trees across the street and under brick arches extending from one of several hundred local churches. From God’s power to man’s—that was the progression of the human race.
When Rome was the center of the European world, it built three churches a block to God’s glory—now the cathedral on Tiber Island was decommissioned, a conference center for businessmen and politicians to hold polite dinners and divvy up their worldly scraps—financial aid, military assistance, the strings-attached charity of the World Bank. The early Christians had received communion in church; so had his mother, probably last week. Lowery, a man with no active God, had gone to the center several times in the past few days to receive his suggestion, the mental image that he passed on to his charges in the viewing room. An image was all it took, in the Information Age, to conquer the World—an image and the power of the mind.
As he crossed the next street and worked his way around the remains of Palatine Stadium, he didn’t feel much like a conqueror. Rome was a big city; wandering dark places alone at night wasn’t particularly brilliant—but then, what mugger would be looking for a muggee at 5 in the morning?
The ruins had weathered smooth like skulls, the clay red like everything else in this furnace of a city. In June, Rome remained hot all night. The arches of Domitian’s Palace towered in deep shadow, the lights at the Forum nearby placing everything else in silhouette. Jerry wanted a beer. A couple of beers. And maybe a cognac. Tomorrow was the day.
Jerry had walked this way at least twenty times, day and night, since arriving in Rome but somehow, this time, the sightlines looked different, the landmarks springing from the ground at odd angles and odder locations. Where he expected to break out of the Emperor’s overhanging confines, instead he found himself more deeply withdrawn, walled-in. Rows of bone-white pillars stood against the red clay wreckage, pointing skyward like missiles. When he looked up for stars, clouds were gathering, swirling, too quickly and very specifically too close to him. The wind kicked up, gusting through the cavernous gaps between pillars and arches and ruins, whipping his jacket from his hands. He ran after the stupid thing, ending up even deeper in the labyrinth of ancient passageways. Ripples of lightning pulsed through the clouds—this felt just about obligatory, with all else that was happening—next had to be ghosts of Emperors long dead, Lowery both joking with himself and admitting real fear simultaneously. The atmosphere had gone deathly way too fast for real life.
And then there was Pietr Volkov, advancing on him like a general across a battlefield, lit up like he’d swallowed a neon tube and marching right through the bars of the fence surrounding the ruins. What the hell did he want? Lowery had only met the man once, which was plenty. He’d heard the rumors—or the rumors about the rumors—that surrounded Volkov. Lowery thought back—had he missed a cue somewhere? Nobody had missed session tonight or last night. He’d checked them all in. He hadn’t checked the clarity of the transmission as often as the regs demanded, but nobody did, except Vlada, the toadie—every time he’d checked, everything had been to spec.
Volkov should have reached him by now but he was still marching and Lowery’s panic kept rising. What about check-out? Making sure none of the drones carried any of the suggestion out of the room after they were done? Had he checked everyone? Oh Jesus—the girl with the pumpkin thong! She’d seemed so disinterested, even disdainful—maybe he hadn’t…Shit! Shit! Now…?
“Is it possible,” Volkov bellowed, still a few yards away, “that our enemies know our plans?” The last words exploded inside Lowery’s skull like someone was pounding with a hammer.
“Not from me!” Lowery cried immediately, trying halfway through to drag his voice down and exert some kind of control. Volkov was right on top of him, the two of them alone in the center of the center of the Ancient World.
“Alright, not from you! Maybe from one you were responsible for!” Volkov drilled at Lowery. “Maybe from this girl you have the stupid infatuation with. Is it possible?”
“How can they?” Lowery blubbered, desperately trying not to think of the pumpkin-colored line between the girl’s legs, even though—especial
ly because—Volkov clearly knew about it already. “That’s the whole idea, isn’t it? We each had our portion. I only had Emerald. If they don’t have them all—?”
“Don’t quibble with me!” Volkov bellowed into Lowery’s face. He was backing him into one of Domition’s ancient walls. Behind Volkov, an ancient alcove rose skull-like five stories above them, flashing blue now in the sudden lightning. “You got your instruction at the same time as the others, yes?”
“Y—yes!” Lowery admitted, not sure what infraction he could have committed there.
“So you had Emerald. Who sat next to you?”
“Ruby.”
“How would you know that unless you paid attention to that portion as well?” Volkov thundered. All Lowery had seen was the identifying logo on the screen as they started feeding the images to them—that was all. He was sure. He clung to that denial, repeating it over and over like a mantra. If Volkov was going to read his mind, let him read that, please.
Maybe he did. Instead of ripping his skull off, Volkov held back now a moment, still only half a foot away but regarding him with at least a little detachment. Maybe this was how they looked at you just before they turned you to dust, Lowery thought. It wasn’t like there was any point resisting. An odd thought occurred to him as lightning struck the skull arch behind Volkov and the light seemed to gleam through him.
“Are you here?” Lowery asked, unable to think of a more elegant way to ask the question.
“No, I’m not here, you idiot,” Volkov swiped.”I can’t administer every lazy mid-level in person.”
So he was a projection—Lowery had heard of that, too. The old mindbenders were full of tricks. This Volkov didn’t blink—yes, he did. Now he did, that is, though Lowery swore he hadn’t until just then. He wondered if the projections only blinked once you noticed they weren’t blinking. “That won’t keep me from disciplining you in any method that strikes me as appropriate. Do you understand?”
A second later, the tree in front of them erupted with a lightning hit. Lowery felt the charge in the air and went deaf for a few seconds after the crack. A tree branch the size of a Fiat came down a foot away and Volkov was in his face again.
“Yes, yessir, I understand,” Jerry stammered, trying with difficulty to make eye contact.
“Charge me with tonight’s suggestion,” Volkov ordered.
“What?”
“PLAY IT BACK. NOW! I want to see what you gave your charges tonight, what they sent out. Or shall I just extract it from your frontal lobe?”
“No, no, that—” It was not the easiest time to put himself into a meditative state but at least the lightning seemed to pause while he closed his eyes. Maybe Volkov was just gathering a big bolt to smite him if he didn’t like what he saw. Jerry tried to concentrate. When he opened his eyes momentarily, Volkov was standing, tapping his feet in exasperation.
Finally, Lowery was able to put himself back in the tasking room in the convention center, the place where they all received the images for their shifts. He felt himself in the chair and saw the ruby logo on the screen. He could see the flash of ruby on the next screen but only for a second, see, it’s just peripheral vision and my eyes go right back to my own screen and that’s it! And then, in the air around him, filling the space between him and Volkov, here was his image, his message—the grainy, jagged, useless image he’d given his team to send out. Flashes of close movement, the grunting noises of a struggle and cries for help, jerky shards of picture skimming across the air between them, the desperate movement in the pictures heightened by the frenzied shrieking of the orchestra in the background. And rain—he hadn’t noticed the rain when he learned the transmission but now it was everywhere and he realized it had come off the video image. Everything was just as he’d been given it, he was sure. All the control bytes showed in proper order, the color bars were correct, the control tone was accurate. He’d remembered it objectively, without coloring it with any of his own input. It was an successful tasking, he was sure of it.
Several seconds had passed since the image ended. He was still there. Volkov hadn’t said anything. Lowery convinced himself it was alright to open his eyes—at very least, his transmission couldn’t be held against him. When he did, Volkov had stepped a little further away. He seemed to be concentrating elsewhere. When he saw Lowery’s eyes were open, Volkov said, “Go about your business. Say nothing of this to anyone. We still have a leak. It wouldn’t do for them to know we’re looking for them, would it?” He took a few steps, then turned back just for a moment. “You don’t know who to trust,” Volkov warned. Then he stepped into the swirling wind embracing the arches and was gone, disappeared, vanished.
Lowery touched his coat—it wasn’t even damp. No rain. He took off toward a street, anyplace with cars and other people. Anyplace he could find several—no, many—cognacs with breakfast.
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