by J D Cortese
As soon as he finished dressing, the guard stepped into the room, crossing the wall with ease as if it hadn't been solid. The unsmiling woman moved her hands all around Agdinar's body, scanning for any weapons that could inexplicably be with him after having been taken there unconscious.
Agdinar then followed those same hands, now pointing in the direction of a corridor without doors or turns. Doors kept closing behind him, and the illumination of the tunnel grew, until everything was intolerably white. The guard stopped, and he also stopped, in mid-step. The white wall near him had birthed a black ellipse.
Agdinar passed alone through the gap, leaving the guard behind. He found the insides small, narrow, and weirdly illuminated by a rainbow of colors. The door, or whatever was separating the chamber from the corridor, closed with a whirring sound that merged with the buzz of an engine starting.
There was no gravity compensator inside the tiny cubicle, and Agdinar was thrown hard against one side before he could think better of his safety.
He was inside a pill being swallowed at vertiginous speed.
* * *
The Overseer stood in the center of a barren blue room. Agdinar had sort of forgotten how portly he was—a barrel of a man—and the way his large head was crowned by his pearly cranium. “Welcome back,” he said, with a practiced smile and projecting a practiced voice.
“Yes, sir.”
“Please use my title. Our conversation is being kept in the official records.”
“And what difference would that make? You're going to convict me—I will be put in stasis.”
“Nothing is so certain, child. It's true that we have rules, many rules, most of which you’ve managed to break. But, from time to time, things do happen, and people visit the lower world...causing trouble.”
“This has happened before?”
“Oh, yes, many times in the past and a few more in the future we know of. It's up to you to save those who would come after you.”
“I don't know how I can possibly do it.”
“By going to the down-world, you have caused quite some trouble—tens of thousands of changes, all the way to catastrophic—and, if you go there again, well, then our entire mission could be compromised. You understand the gravity of this; we have spent the better part of a millennium building the Watchtowers.”
The classic name stunned Agdinar. He hadn't heard it spoken in years. An old symbol of the power the future had over the past. An imperial symbol of the Emperors of Time.
The Overseer saw Agdinar’s distraction but continued undeterred. “I see you're thinking about my words”, he said. “I don't want to put you in stasis, for any length of time. I've come to appreciate our candid conversations.”
Agdinar suddenly remembered a time he was being put in stasis, and the Overseer standing near him. His hand had rested on the hibernation table, as if he'd been holding one of Agdinar’s.
The Overseer was still talking. “I want you to promise me,” he said, “that you will keep watching, and that you are never going back to New York City.”
Saying the name of the city below them was a great breach of protocol for a conversation being taped. Agdinar wondered if there would be any records left of their chat. The Overseer was getting emotional about breaking his own rules.
“I can't promise you that,” Agdinar said, looking down to avoid the Overseer's eyes.
“You will,” the Overseer said, staring from over his subordinate's head. “Please understand me. I would have to stand in Council and defend you, and there are dozens of members who want you in permanent stasis; even the more liberal ones are against you. The Interventionists—you know, the ones who want our motto to be 'to watch and prevent'—even they are talking of a program of alternate stasis and awakening, one year each, for a total sentence of fifty years. Fifty years. Do you really understand what a punishment like this means?”
Agdinar did have an idea of what it meant. His friends aging and becoming unwatching members of the Council, or worse, part of Management. He imagined an old Vaxeer, now as portly as the Overseer, with a crooked smile as he stared at his frozen body in a stasis chamber.
“Yes, Watcher, I can see you're getting how horrible this could be. You are still in good standing with me, even after all this, and you should know that I would forgive your—your massive indiscretions. We were all young once, and I was certainly as impetuous as you are. I see a lot of myself in you. Please do as I say.”
As he observed the Overseer in this more human version, Agdinar peeled the layers of that fat ball and got to see a Watcher just like him, concerned about the world below. The Overseer had served over Paris during the awful Occupation by the Nazis, and even back to the First World War. He had surely seen very bad times, and his plea, somewhat shrouded by the need of secrecy, had both truth and feeling.
For the first time, he felt something other than contempt for the man.
“I will think about that, Overseer,” Agdinar said, and oddly meant it, “but I need time.” This, he also meant, but it was to enact his own plan.
“I understand, and I will give you until tomorrow. But remember, I can't control the trial after it starts.”
“Thank you, Overseer.”
Agdinar started to leave, but the Overseer stopped him with a wave of his hand. His face had turned softer, and Agdinar was sure that nobody would record the next few words.
“When we are alone, you can call me Magnus.”
Agdinar was stunned, and his step vacillated. Nobody had ever known an Overseer's name, let alone been encouraged to use it. Even in private.
“You can use it, don't worry.” The Overseer’s steely eyes were again pinning Agdinar's. “You know, I knew your father.”
“I've never been told...I thought I didn’t have….” Agdinar could barely speak. “There are rules,” he ventured, afraid of the revelation.
“I made most of them. Your father was my friend, before I came. Your father was Nylan Rugust Maximus. And he brought you with him to watch.”
Agdinar was now not only speechless, but also breathless. His knees were suddenly unhinged, and he felt his head wobble.
Nylan Rugust Maximus, from the oldest surviving religious family on Earth, was the man who had started the Watch. The one who built Tower City.
Rugust had brought all of them there. To the distant past.
A past more than nine hundred years before the present time.
He realized the immensity of the Overseer's confession and had to lean his back against the wall.
The Overseer had just told him that he had been a teenager for almost a thousand years.
Chapter 32
After the extraordinary news about his past, Agdinar was trying to calm down and consider how he could get out and do what he'd wanted to do in the first place—find out where Sarinda was. He had been distracted by his captivity and now doubted his original plan; a plan that hadn't considered how much time he could be in the care of a police force with nothing to do but to be sure he wouldn't escape again.
Three guards had come to escort him, a single young Watcher. Three blue suits. A total overkill.
He missed his black suit, and somehow remembered the thought pattern that would open its controls.
Amazingly, a window appeared on his standard corneal viewer.
He could see, through the eyes of the suit, the smooth contours of a semi-dark container who-knows-where in Tower City. It felt like being inside a coffin and it made him uneasy.
Suits contained limited AIs, and their computers reported data but didn't analyze it to provide results.
If one asked them a question, they'd need to poll the answers of many others.
He told himself to stop thinking these digressing thoughts, distractions coming from considering a likely long-term imprisonment—or worse, a giving up of his life to become a frozen penitent.
Then, it hit him, and he shivered again.
When you ask them a question, the suits ne
ed to talk to other suits in order to give you an answer.
He went deeper in his mind, beyond the inner screens floating in his sight and into the brain of his battered black suit. Agdinar didn't know one could do that, but he was doing it.
He thought on his trip to the world below, images about what he'd done to save Sarinda and to unsuccessfully help Tysa.
The emotions were intense, and his forehead started to sweat.
The stored suit reacted by trying to wall him out of its AI, but soon it ceded to his will and relayed the question— Where is she? —to the other thousands of suits in the city.
The guards were now guiding him to a new juncture in the tunnel, which he assumed would lead to another, and another, until he was either sent to or interned into another plain cell, or the same one, any of those boxes with indistinct white walls. All the pretenses of being a dear friend of the Overseer would soon fall through as the lies they were.
And the Council for sure would decide to ice him, long enough into the future for the Second Descent to have destroyed the only world he knew.
But, if he was Nylan Rugust's son, what was really his future?
Deep pain grew inside him, spreading through the conduit he had opened into the college of the suits. And he felt it, his question reaching away and into the biggest of their computers, the stuff of legends and nightmares that few Watchers had ever seen.
The Great Eye.
And something came back, powerful as thick nails burying all over his cranium.
Open your eyes, and see...
He shivered, as it wasn't as much words, or thought, as a massive wave that surged all around him and was ready to break. It was a feeling so overwhelming he felt his brain compressing and twisting all over itself.
I can't, he thought weakly.
Come and see me...
An invitation, from the very same Great Eye. Incredible.
I really can't, he repeated with his mind, this time a little more focused.
There were, after all, the three guards surrounding him as he walked. They were now reaching another corridor, rushing to the right of the current one. They entered it, and Vaxeer was waiting for him ahead, dressed in another green tunic, as ridiculous as his.
Look deeper. It is in you...
He felt the pressure even more, the magnitude of that other mind, so much greater than his. He couldn't resist, and his mind opened.
He saw eyes all over the Towers. For a moment he was an insect, seeing through a fragmented kaleidoscope of spherical views of the world. Suits watching the world at every patch of its surfaces. Millions of views.
And then he saw Vaxeer, three copies of a green statue.
Three eyes were observing him. The ones on the three blue suits escorting him.
Agdinar felt another surge of pain, this one extending to the tips of his fingers. And this time he surrendered, his whole soul pouring through these eyes, into the atomic computers of the guards' suits.
The guards’ suits couldn't take the onslaught and they stopped, trying to cope by rebooting, a desperate attempt at trying to get rid of the unknown, incomputable data. But these suits were endowed with strength-support wiring and a hidden exoskeleton capable of overcoming brutal forces.
The guards froze as if enveloped by a cast of deeply blue ice.
Agdinar knew he had done that.
Also, he knew that he had to go and see The Eye. The prospect felt like more ice, this time in his own bones.
He started to get away, looking back at the immobile guards, and almost collided with Vaxeer. He signaled his stunned friend to follow him, and they sprinted away into the next corridor.
A suit would reboot within a minute, so there wasn't much time for an escape.
As he ran with Vaxeer behind him, Agdinar could still hear painful echoes of the powerful voice. Not quite coming from a machine, and surely not from anything remotely human.
That was a supra-human voice.
The Eye kept talking to him, breaking his mind with tsunami waves of thought.
Like the echo of a million voices trapped in a valley, repeating hypnotic words.
Come and see me...
But at times, the voices seemed to say:
See through me...
* * *
The friends kept rushing between connected walkways, each one a tunnel illuminated by a different color of diffuse light. Vaxeer was a better runner and soon outdistanced Agdinar, who was panting as he tried to catch up with him.
Unfortunately, the guards had recovered and were in pursuit.
If they didn't find a place to hide soon—any place, anything that was less smooth than those colorful intestinal tubes—the guards would be on top of them.
Agdinar was suddenly propelled forward. A blue flash on his side opened a gash on the tunnel, and since the tube had been getting very narrow, the reactive wave hit him hard, sending Agdinar against the opposite wall.
The entire sky over the city was crisscrossed by tube walkways like those, remnants from the early building period, tubes that had collectively formed the thin branches of a vast forest of suspended channels. But, by being old, they didn't have the same protections as the larger conduits.
Agdinar was reminded of the age of the system when the gravity compensators shifted, perhaps being damaged by the blasters’ discharges that were mauling the walls; he never got to touch the floor toward which he should have fallen.
He crashed with his back on what a few seconds before used to be the ceiling.
The three guards were also caught by surprise by the turn, bumping against each other as they fell to the new floor; one of them might have broken his neck after hitting the tunnel’s surface with his head.
Fear kicked in, and Agdinar rose and started to run, bumping into a woozy Vaxeer. Agdinar tried to steady him, but the drifts on the tunnel's gravity tilted the floor and they tumbled against a wall. They never got to hit that wall, as another dark mouth—this one purple—opened to swallow them.
Agdinar and Vaxeer bounced a few more times in their new downward direction, before stopping at the tunnel’s end wall; but that wasn't really its end, and they slid into a new opening, much larger and steeper.
Vaxeer was the first one to recover from the fall, and he got to look up, through the opening above them. He signaled Agdinar that the guards had started to descend using their suit-cords. And Vaxeer grabbed Agdinar by the elbow, trying to hold them both standing; he shook Agdinar to make him react.
“We need to go,” Vaxeer said, a little too loudly. “They are almost here.”
“And where do we go?”
The question hung for a second, as the place was barely illuminated, not enough to see any exit points.
But Vaxeer's determination showed again in his voice. “Ahead,” he said, “to the end of this tunnel.”
“I meant, Vaxi, that the whole Guardian Force is going to look for us, not just those guards. We don't know much of the city and would have no chance against all of them.”
“Let's just run now and worry later.”
“All right,” Agdinar said, and he started to run, this time ahead of Vaxeer and feeling that he could crash into his back at any time.
It wasn't easy to move fast on a floor so wet and slippery. Agdinar got a painful reminder on his shoulder about how close Vaxeer was from him.
Vaxeer sounded angry. “What's going on? We’d said—”
“Look.”
Vaxeer looked up, and he froze.
The entire room, a dark chamber that could have held an entire fleet of AVs, was not a hangar.
It was a water reservoir. And, with the gravity shift, millions of gallons of water were suspended over their heads. Somehow, and their stressed-out brains didn’t have the strength to comprehend the how, the stored water hadn't rotated as the gravity inverted, leaving behind a lake on the wrong side of the chamber.
They were standing on the bottom of what should have been a huge tank.
Until the next shift.
"Run," yelled Vaxeer.
Agdinar didn't react until he saw the scanning beams of the guards trying to train their weapons on them.
They started to run.
The guards begun to race after them.
And then the environmental gravity decided to give shaking things up another try.
* * *
They had only a few seconds before the heavy rain turned into a funnel of water, which poured into the center of the vast room.
Agdinar and Vaxeer were close to the only visible exit point, but the two guards who were still chasing them were not far behind. And now, they seemed to be also running away from the tsunami to come. They were all trying to find a way out of the water tank.
The wall of water took all of them—one of the guards passed by near the two friends, after being swept by the surge—and then the wave smashed everyone against the wall, very close to where they could have exited.
Agdinar took Vaxeer's hand before the swirling current washed him away. Another turn of the gravity made the water recede, leaving both lying on the floor and near one of the guards, who was sprawled and had apparently drowned.
Another guard was coughing up water, too busy trying to breathe to pay attention to them.
And now, the mass of water was climbing a distant wall at the other end, rising as if they were trapped in a swirling half-full glass.
Agdinar again tried to make Vaxeer stand. “Come on,” he said. “We are close; we can make it.”
Vaxeer appeared dizzy, and he just pointed toward the waters. They tried to climb one of the walls, but gravity was shifting unevenly at both ends of the room.
Vaxeer and Agdinar could barely stand, and they stumbled together toward the wall with the open door; a green cast over its opening suggested a standing force barrier, which they wouldn't be able to pass through.
Agdinar crawled on the door, feeling the pressure of the current gravity vector. A water world now hung over them, and as he looked up, he could see the light of the room’s main entrance giving the water a greenish tint from below the surface.