by J D Cortese
It didn't matter that his people had come back to the past. What was wrong with humanity couldn't be fixed.
Even he, born in a distant future and transferred back to the aerial world of the Watchers, had become contaminated by the virus of mad violence that infected everybody in the lower world.
It had only taken a few days.
* * *
The sun was setting and a storm across the river had produced a rainbow, incomplete, like a swath of painting in the sky. It was beautiful, something he'd never seen from above.
Thinking about his past at the Towers was painful too, as it hadn't been all bad. He had some true friends, who distracted him from a nagging anger against the Overseer, Management, and the Council.
But none of these authorities had ever pointed guns at him. And he wouldn't have needed, or wanted, to use weapons against any of them.
A little later, he found himself sitting on a leather armchair and watching an old movie on the wall screen. He was eating—but didn't remember ordering from room service—a warm and savory ham and cheese sandwich. It tasted incredibly good for being an animal product. He was getting used to them.
There was an interesting story in that movie: some kind of policeman searching for rogue androids in Los Angeles, a city that looked even worse there than in the present. But who knew how it would look after the Second Descent.
The movie’s policeman was trying to perform a primitive and incomplete consciousness test on a female android, who didn't know she was artificial. It was interesting how the past knowledge of AI was so off the mark.
Dhern knew he was artificial—and thus better suited to think than biological brains—and that knowledge was the source of his indefatigable ego.
It was pointless to hide the nature of an artificial brain, as any AI would figure it in an instant. They all spent most of their time pondering the nature of mind and humanity—well, of the annoying humans they served. They thought about it when talking with those same humans, even if that took only one percent of their computing power.
It was said that the Great Eye, their core multi-universe computer, could think the thoughts of every human who had ever lived in the blink of a (human) eye.
They were nothing to their AIs, and they had always known it.
Very slowly, as he pondered why he was thinking all that nonsense, the true nature of his and all consciousness, he faded away into sleep before the movie ended.
* * *
He was awakened by a sudden brightening of the screen. A stout middle-aged man, with a square jaw and almost orange hair, and dressed in a dark suit, was watching him from the screen. There was some irony—and a little pity—in the way he pursed his lips.
But the eyes, there was no doubt they weren't human and contained multitudes of minds, meshed up together into a single intelligence. A nomadic one.
“Hello, Agdinar,” the man said, in an echoing husky voice that was both sound and thought.
“Dhern?”
“In the flesh.”
“Did you get any information from above?”
“Nothing is as it seems. And I left without any friends in the computer core. I'm afraid the quantum girls don't like me anymore.”
Agdinar had to be patient with Dhern's humor, either a design flaw or the natural evolution of a mind trying to mimic humans from above their level.
“Can you stop being so fastidious?”
“Sorry. It's a drawback of not being corporeal; I need reassurances all the time. Do you like my looks inside this? I'm trying to be a corporate tycoon. Isn’t it nice to have orange hair?”
Dhern looked at his hands for a moment. Now, he had turned into a younger man who, in a black suit and red tie, resembled a magician trying to show the emptiness of his palms.
“What did you find out?”
“Unfortunately, not much. I can only access the guardians—the girls, you know, the quantum computers—using their accessory ports. It's like trying to learn military secrets by asking soldiers about the weather. But I still learned a couple of things.”
“Things like...? Go on, Dhern.”
“They're not looking for you, my friend, which is weird. Either they’ve given up, or, well, they knew you were going to escape down here.”
“How can they possibly know this?”
“You are forgetting the most basic fact about the Watchers. We—or better they, as I was built here from time-ported parts—have come from the future. And we know a lot about the past.”
“So, they let me go.”
“Exactly.”
“And knew what I was going to do.”
“Mostly.”
“Does it mean that I can't escape from their plans?”
“As an AI, I can give you a quite complicated, probabilistic answer. The truth is that nobody knows. The Watchers know the future, but also that it can be changed. So, maybe you are an experiment for the Leadership, and what you do—specifically, what you can change—is unpredictable.”
“Now I understand.”
“You do? I'm not sure I understand this mess myself.”
“All right, Dhern. Why don't you go upstairs again? To Tower City.”
Dhern thought a few seconds about what to say next—an eternity for him.
“Are you sure about this? You need to find your friend, and if you’d give me some time, I might crack the entry codes for the Core.”
“Just wait for me in Tower City. And be ready for action."
“There's no way to predict what will happen...”
“Isn't that what this is all about?”
Agdinar smiled, while the image on the screen frowned. Dhern suddenly turned older, looking like a balding clown in a suit.
“You are risking to...to be punished.”
“I know. But there's no other way.”
Dhern didn't answer. And, after a few minutes, the TV went back to his programming—it was going to show something else on that science-fiction channel, a story about a ridiculous car that could travel through time.
Agdinar chuckled. Time travel—the exact reality of which humans of the time, of any time really, had absolutely no idea about how it worked.
He looked up, not to the ceiling with its fake sky, but beyond, to the real sky, where real time travelers had brought back quite a bit more than a car.
* * *
Agdinar had been contemplating the now dark wall TV for a few minutes. He was tired and would have liked to rest for a couple of days in such a nice apartment—but finding Sarinda couldn't wait.
He thought of the code name they'd given the building—Leuchtturm, the Lighthouse in German—and had an idea about what to do next. Maybe some other time he would spend a few days relaxing in that comfortable apartment. But only if he could solve his problem, and if he wasn't set in stasis for more than a century. By the time he could be free to come back, the city would have become a wilderness unlike anything they'd imagined around there, and the entire world would have descended into darkness.
He said out loud the magic word twice—Leuchtturn, Leuchtturn—to be sure it worked. The lights turned off immediately. The door opened, he passed and then it closed without a sound. All records of his stay would be deleted, and it would be as if he'd never been there.
The lighthouse had gone dark, until next time.
* * *
The roof felt warm and summery, an illusion coming from a cloudless sky and the sun hitting straight down on him. He was sure that that light had passed through the entire node of connecting sky buildings, which hung above the park. And he had an oddly foreboding feeling, one he had every time he’d stepped outside.
They were always there, watching.
Agdinar extended his arms and looked up, embracing the sun on his skin.
He let the energy fill his suit, activating the subatomic circuits. In a few seconds, he had received twenty percent more charge.
That had to be enough.
The suit turned luminou
s, shining in a purple color that pulsated into violets and teals, with spots of red and blue circling his waist.
A true lighthouse born above their Lighthouse.
He turned the emergency beacon; first, at the minimal level, a slight heightening of the lights. After being sure it worked, he released the signal with a fury that came from using all the energy left in the suit at once.
Even the transiency generator was spent in the burst.
It was going to hurt.
A flash of purple light exploded on the terrace, bright enough to be seen from the edge of Earth's atmosphere.
It blinded him, an instant before he disappeared into the pain.
Chapter 30
Agdinar was lying flat, floating on a cushion of air. Above him, clouds in a blue sky kept moving as if blown by intense, unnaturally fast winds. A view of New York spanned one of the walls end to end. The side walls were empty, fully white, and completely smooth; they were lighting the room—his prison cell, really—without any visible conduit for the glare.
He knew it was all a carefully constructed mirage, screens acting as a calming veil and hiding the simple, solid nature of the box in which he was trapped. No door, and no computer entry points.
A container for a prisoner. No less and no better than that.
Agdinar tried to lift himself but couldn't. It wasn't any type of nano-restraint, but a weight within his body, as if gravity had been increased to make him still.
He had a feeling of loneliness, of being the last person in the world.
The numbness of his extremities turned into pain as soon as he stood. Every muscle ached and complained about working with others; he would have wanted something to stop the pain.
Had they hit him during his capture?
Agdinar couldn't remember how he had been brought to the Towers, only a claustrophobic feeling of being bound with tight materials; he thought of shrouds and shivered.
Without considering how it could all be fake, he approached the windowpane and started to search for the myriad of features of the city's skyscrapers he knew so well. He used to do that while watching, and now it felt good, losing himself in the city he loved more than any other in any place or any time.
There were remnants of Art Deco creations, once in the distant past quite popular, but now being overwhelmed by newer, curvy shapes the recent buildings had explored. It was an architectural reaction against a period in the 2020s when thin rectangular towers made the city look crisscrossed by fences.
The memory of his watching took him briefly away from the darkness of his emotions. He had given up on trying to save Sarinda from the ground. There was little he could do without stealing power from the Towers, and he’d thought just coming would allow him to succeed. It was a ridiculous idea, a child's idea of heroism when confronted with the Towers’ reserve army and those all-too-familiar patrol robots. Even regaining his freedom now seemed ridiculous, even crazy.
He remembered StarCoffee and shivered again.
He tried to shake his head and lose those negative thoughts, but they were quite sticky.
In an unconscionable act—he knew of holding cells that were wired with electrical force fields—Agdinar touched the screen, making the image wiggle, and then rested his head over a view of the Rockefeller Center. Before his face touched the surface, he noticed the top part of the famous tower, a little lighter where it had been rebuilt after the fires.
He would have liked to fall through the wall and into the city.
* * *
With the passing of a few hours, Agdinar felt less sore, a welcome sign that he hadn't been hurt enough to have had his body put in stasis while it was repaired.
The thought of possibly losing weeks out of commission made him feel again, on each step, the unlubricated movement of his joints. It also reassured him that he hadn't spent time in the medical facilities: nano-meds would have done a much better job at fixing those overexerted muscles and tendons.
It was weird, but he felt relieved by having been beaten up by the patrols.
He decided to rest on the air-bed, while considering the few possible situations where he would be let go or manage to regain his freedom by force. He noticed the white tunic and soft matching shoes they’d put on him, and the absence of his black suit—it made him feel even more powerless.
The only thing that opened his cell to the outside world was a small, poorly illuminated restroom. It wasn't great, but it was deeply connected to the wants of his intestines and kidneys.
Agdinar thought, while slowly drifting away into sleep, on how much he needed to have something to control at will. Then, he noticed an irregular shadow on the green wall opposite of a vivid New York sunset. It was enough to jolt him back to full awareness.
The blurred figure turned sharp with excruciating slowness. It was Vaxeer, in full Watcher's gala. Apparently, he was already prepared to attend his friend's funeral.
Vaxeer smiled at him and talked with his usual openness. “So, you are back from vacation.”
“I thought that they were going to give me the executive suite.”
They always started to talk by sharing jokes. That had not changed.
“I guess they didn't know,” Vaxeer said, a shadow twisting his mouth. “But, what the hell have you done?”
“I assume my doings have been greatly publicized up here.”
“You can rest assured of that. You are the blackest sheep of the entire contingent.”
“Wasn't I black before I went down-world?”
“Agdi, let's be serious. We're talking about destroying Towers' property with malice. Those patrol robots are irreplaceable.”
“They'd sent those robots to kill me, not just to capture an escapee.”
“You may be mistaken. The views show you sending them in a path to be wrecked by those crazy automobiles. It's terrible.”
“They are conveniently forgetting to show the part where the machines were waiting like vultures to see if a police tank managed to kill me.”
Vaxeer approached the green divider. They had been given some privacy, but he couldn't cross the electric field—Agdinar was a prisoner, and he had to be shown as such to others.
“You are not sure of that,” Vaxeer said, looking away as if trying to hide from the cameras. “For sure, our robots won't get involved in some situation where local authorities are intervening. What did you do to get them to chase you like that?”
“Let's see. Maybe it was the fact that I managed to both rescue and kidnap the New York Major's daughter. Or that then I lost her to the Hawks, was captured by them, escaped, and finally was chased by the Hawks, the police, and even our own lower patrols.”
Agdinar wouldn’t mention what had happened to Tysa. The cameras would have enough trouble analyzing those bits; he would be iced long enough without adding a charge of accidental murder. Perhaps his freezing would merge with the coming Ice Age.
He smiled, confusing Vaxeer.
“Anything else?” Vaxeer was visibly antsy, and Agdinar thought he shouldn't lose his best friend over his impulsive, stupid behavior.
After a long silence, Vaxeer spoke again. “Well, Agdi. You shouldn't blame the Council for doing something; after all, we do have rules.”
“Rules that may be there just to benefit our plans.”
“We watch for the good of humanity,” Vaxeer said. He stood ramrod straight, but Agdinar realized he was not serious.
“You're starting to sound like Bethlana.”
“That's not necessarily a bad thing,” said Vaxeer, his right hand signaling his friend to get closer. “She's very worried about you, you know.”
Agdinar came another step closer to Vaxeer, looking distractedly at the windowpane. “I might already be too late for that,” he said.
Vaxeer was very close to the dividing field and spoke softly. “We have to find a way to save you from the ice."
“You need to find a way to get me out of here. I can’t do it myself.” Agdin
ar stared at his white shoes; without his suit, he had no real means for an escape.
“Escaping? No way.” Vaxeer had regained his beautiful smile. “There are six guards just in the corridor outside,” he said, “and no way to run to the main elevator.”
“Vaxi, I trust that both of us, together, will find a solution.”
“I can try, my friend. I am on light duty today and tomorrow, as the Leadership believes that I should keep checking up on you.”
“To spy on me?”
“No, they want you to come back to duty.”
“I sincerely don't think so,” Agdinar said, suddenly turning away from Vaxeer, facing the plain wall with a million invisible sensors.
“Don't worry. I'll put in a good word when I write my report.”
“You will have to invent a lot of information to do that.”
“If I have to.”
“You are a good friend, Vaxi.”
“I hope I am. I'll see you later tonight, after your dinner, which I'm told is a private affair.”
“See you,” Agdinar said, and then the screen wiped out Vaxeer, replacing him with a very white wall.
Even with all those illuminated walls surrounding him, he felt the place had darkened.
A chair reformed from the floor, and he plopped onto its smooth surface, staring at the ceiling’s fake sky.
Chapter 31
Agdinar was awakened by a subliminal thought-alarm. A female guard in full military suit was standing outside his cell, near the wall he had come to identify as its inner side.
While he silently changed his clothes to a shiny green outfit he’d found in a now exposed drawer under his air-bed, he kept watching the marvelous light patterns in the officer's blue suit. Watchers attributed almost magical powers to them—something he could almost believe, after seeing the wonders his own traveler's black suit had performed down in the city. The guard knew well her own power, and she stood with such confidence Agdinar felt intimidated.