by J D Cortese
But his heart knew better than that.
And the cold in his bones was preternatural, inhuman, and it tasted like the aftermath of an encounter with alien worlds.
Agdinar didn't have more time to elaborate on why so little time had passed before he’d returned to the purple tunnel.
The two guards rolled under the door and into the room with substantial speed, resembling blue insects in the anti-armor coats their suits had made for them.
Agdinar tried to move away, but one of the guards pushed him against the tunnel's wall. Before he could rebound from the impact, the guard had taken a containment baton and, using it as a physical weapon, smashed it like a bat against his chest.
He folded down and fell on his knees, while the guard kept his distance and readied himself to hit him again. Something felt broken inside Agdinar's chest, although pain didn't surge as fast as he’d expected, remaining only in his left flank. He was dizzy and wasn't sure if he would be able to stay conscious.
While the other guard raised the limp body of his friend, the one with the baton stared at Agdinar from behind a glassy helmet. The man—and he was a tall, portly guy—twirled his menacing rod, generating a wave of pulsing lights that run through its entire length.
And then he pointed it at him.
Everything went blindingly white.
Chapter 35
Their medical rooms were plain enough to remind Agdinar of the cell where he had been kept before. Everything was suffused with light, and bare, as if no med-tools were necessary to nurse him back to health. But he knew that all manner of nano-instrumentation and scanners were focusing on him, both outside and inside his body. Their medics didn't have the need to act through direct contact, or for any kind of bedside manners.
He had inside, like every other Watcher, all the nano-medics that would be needed to fix the little skin bruises, the nose hemorrhage that still trickled into his throat with metallic taste, and a broken rib he must have sustained when being subdued by the guards. Their medicine, like them, was invisible and circulated deep into his veins.
But that medical room was as much a medics' station as another holding cell for him.
After an unplanned nap that left him with the impression of having lasted hours, a familiar voice woke him up. Agdinar couldn't see anyone on the perfectly smooth walls of his white box. He started to walk around the room, skirting the walls for any sign of a window; he almost convinced himself it had all been a mirage.
“Would you accept to see me?”
It was a mellifluous soprano voice he knew. “Bethlana?”
“Yes, it's me,” she said, and a smile was somehow included with the words.
“Come in, if they'll let you.”
The words were instantaneously processed by the security systems, and a door appeared as a dark cutout on the wall across the room.
Bethlana stepped in, dressed in a metallic suit and shining like an angel; her wavy hair, he now noticed, was long enough to reach her waist.
“Agdinar,” she said, rushing all the way to hug him. He was surprised by the closeness, having somehow forgotten how beautiful she was. But he was more taken by her expression of kindness and the powerful hug she gave him, which pressured his ribs and neck enough to trigger a spasm of pain. She kept squeezing his body against hers in a way that was rare for the usually aloof Watchers.
“It's amazing,” he said, “that they have allowed you in here.” He couldn't take his eyes from those golden lanterns and the smooth, dark skin.
“I can be persuasive, you know.”
They were talking while she kept her arms wrapped around him. To have her so close—her breasts on his chest and her hips pressing hard on his—reminded him of how much he'd fantasized about his roommate, daydreaming about having sex with her; all those mornings where she had come naked from the cleaning room, her body bright like a lake at night.
Something about how intently she was pressing against him spoke at length of someone who might have wanted to do the same.
He thought how, sadly, none of the disaster below might have happened if they had allowed themselves to get that close sooner. If Agdinar had understood that he had friends, and love, within the Watchers.
They stayed together long enough for him to think she wanted to kiss him, but when she approached his face, it was to talk softly in his ear.
“I have something to tell you,” she whispered. “You have to get out of here.”
“I know.”
“No, you don't,” she said. “They have taken Vaxeer to another cell, and they're conditioning his release to your judgment tomorrow.”
Agdinar wasn't surprised. “Don't worry, it's all about me. My fault only.”
“You don't understand...how much I care for you,” Bethlana said, holding his body even more tightly and touching his earlobe with her lips. He felt electricity running all over his neck. “They want to ice you. Forever. The Council is toying with a partisan alternative, driven by the Overseer; they will wash away all your memories, making you blank.”
Agdinar didn’t get to ask her if the Overseer was trying to save him. When he turned to Bethlana, her radiant face stopped him.
She reached out and started to kiss him, not like a friend but with passion. For a moment, feeling her body invading his, and a warm chest touching his own, Agdinar was paralyzed and stopped breathing. And then he felt something that wouldn't have surprised him on those mornings of watching her stretching her nakedness in the dark, parsing each of her body’s curves.
He felt a sudden, asphyxiating wave of arousal.
He held her from the shoulders and pulled Bethlana against him, while his tongue ran away from his control and chased hers.
But then, like a wave, her body receded from his and she was standing away from him.
“I have to go,” she said. “Remember what I've said.”
Confusion stopped him from saying anything. He didn't get why was she leaving; and he was shaken up, his emotions and heart running wild to the point of making him feel woozy.
As the door behind her opened, Bethlana stood immobile, with a face that contradicted the passion she'd just displayed. It made him think she wasn't acting out of her own will.
The long moment of silence between them was worse than the baton that had hit him in the rib cage.
Then, she smiled again. “Don't worry, I will be back, and he will help you.”
As if a spring had pushed her back, Bethlana jumped back in his arms and kissed him on the lips again, this time with a purity that made him shiver more than her last, passionate embrace.
She then turned and resolutely left the room, leaving Agdinar stunned while trying to understand the purpose of her actions, astonished by the uncharacteristic speed with which she'd abandoned him.
He also felt something moving in his mouth but didn't want to spit it out and check what it was. It felt like a piece of cold glass, small enough to swirl freely underneath his tongue.
A headache was quickly taking residency in the back of his head. The object was now stuck, like a coin made out of cold metal, on the roof of his mouth.
Before the headache finally blinded him, Agdinar realized something important about Bethlana’s kisses and wanted to remember it after blacking out.
The second time, it had been love.
Chapter 36
He was getting used to waking up floating on that bed, with little understanding of his last encounter with reality. His chest was still sore but improving, and the pain on breathing had subsided. The strange object was gone, perhaps because he’d swallowed it.
His mind felt strange—too clear for just coming out of deep sleep—and he focused on the room’s walls as if looking for something. But he had little control of his body, which led him to pace energetically around the room, quite close to the walls and unable to turn and face the other side.
This unsettled state lasted long enough to concern Agdinar. He was having strange flashbacks of
streets, damaged asphalt and puddles of water spreading onto the sidewalks. He saw pipes exposed above ground, and how they entered the sewers. And he saw his old AV, settled in Chinatown; air-screens hovered around the AV’s cockpit, suggesting that someone had entered it and activated the transport.
The AV took off and flawlessly flew to dock in the boarding area for shuttles of a Tower building he knew well, one that was stationary above the southwest corner of Central Park.
Agdinar remembered someone telling him about that military holdout, a large base for military AVs, their most powerful fighters, which had been designed to defend the Towers during an emergency or if they were forced to intervene in the down-world.
Dhern had told him something about that building, which he was having trouble remembering. Just thinking about this brought back the headache, and he had to keep himself steady by holding the wall. And then, he did remember what Dhern had said—his mind-voice now so clear—about the building.
It had a medical hospital, completely severed from contact with the main computers. Isolated.
Like he surely was.
Agdinar let the thinking follow its flow, and he could now see Dhern in his mind’s eye, dressed like a fancy gentleman from a past century. Dhern was explaining circuits and blueprints of the building—he had never seen him do that—and describing where the military transport’s bays were located within the lowest air-floor level.
None of what he was seeing had likely happened, but it seemed quite real to him. He was seeing a strange version of Dhern, expounding with professorial flair and seriousness he rarely showed. But that serious genius could be the way Dhern saw himself. And there was no reason why he would be imagining his AI in that weird way.
Only Dhern could do that.
And only Dhern could know all that information about where he was and be capable of driving an AV back to the Towers.
He will help you, said Bethlana, just before she left.
The magnate version of Dhern materialized in his head, standing in front of a classroom and facing him straight on, the hair weird and his eyes bright orange.
“Finally,” he said to him, “you're quite slow to figure things out.”
Dhern. Talking with him.
“Oh, yes, my dear Agdinar. We're in this one together; as friends, forever.”
The headache and the vision vanished at once. He now knew what nobody else could outside of the snowy room. Reading minds at a distance was something the Watchers had not mastered. Their scientists kept promising they would soon do it, but it was always two decades away.
Minds, so hard to read and even harder to store away.
It had been Dhern—of course, always Dhern—who had figured out a way to bypass all their security barriers and help him to escape.
Agdinar could get help, but only from the inside out.
* * *
It was hard to understand the barrage of images Dhern had been pushing into his mind: a series of rooms full of equipment and containers, which might have been used to put military Watchers in stasis while recovering from injuries. Bodies of androids being uploaded with information from central Quantum. Incoherent views of ponds, tunnels, and underground canals under New York, which could be the medium Dhern had used to move around the city.
It was an indescribable meshwork of visions, with no real message. Although Agdinar thought that it could very well be the way Dhern saw the world, by holding a remembrance of his records and using them to construct stories about himself. Not unlike what humans did, but without the many words needed to create a personal narrative.
And it wasn't unlike what Agdinar had seen of the Eye’s thinking. Human reasoning was quite different, and he had trouble figuring out what Dhern was trying to tell him.
He saw again the professor-like character, with unruly white hair and a worn-out jacket, standing next to an ancient blackboard. “Security,” he said, “don't forget security.”
At least the professor—of Physics, by the look of the relativity equations chalked on the board—would talk back to him using words.
Of course, Dhern had turned into Albert Einstein.
“Security, my child,” Professor Einstein repeated, with a frown suggesting Agdinar was failing the test. “Images. Images are harder to convert to text; sound is a little easier...”
Now, he got it. The AIs were anything but dumb, and they were communicating with him in a way that the analysts at the Core wouldn’t be able to decode. Dhern was using deep symbols embedded in Agdinar’s brain, and those complex dreams would take days to be converted into a logical description by the Core’s computers.
As if on cue, he saw views of circuits, some of them basic and others overwhelmingly complex. The blackboard appeared again, and Einstein wrote something there; the board then shifted back to show other electrical circuits and the various laws of electricity they used.
Two words, short circuit, were written in radiant red letters.
Agdinar had finally understood and, after decoding Dhern’s riddle, he received an awe-inspiring view of the city, something from the time when he used to watch it from his room's window.
It was meant to represent his freedom, which he now had a hint of how to recover.
For all their energy technology, which drew power from space itself, and their antigravity engineering, which took it from twisting that same space, the basic terminal ends of their systems still used cheap electricity. That secondary electrical power didn't move by cords anymore, like in the world below, but rather concentrated to hair-raising energies wherever several instruments fed from the wall together. It was the only reason they were not bunched together in his cell.
Very quickly, Agdinar moved the medical monitors set on a primitive corner table, and the floating screen they fed into. He raised every piece of equipment as high as he could, to increase the power needed to power its antigravity node.
He was satisfied, but then, remembering a comment from Vaxeer about their most energy-consuming appliances being the re-shapeable beds, he pushed the floating bed until it contacted the other instruments. He could feel the static energy building near the wall, and his inner viewer showed the electric fields curving alongside it.
It was a serious mistake from Management. They hadn't disconnected or blocked his brain interface, as they did with most prisoners—a courtesy he no doubt would pay back in full.
He thought, as hard as he could, on activating the bed's reforming engine and getting as many views as possible of 1930s New York on the screen. A million views, please.
A waiting darkness in the screen, and the bed repeatedly folding itself against the wall like paper origami, suggested that his plan might work.
A picture of an incomplete Empire State Building started to come in focus.
He thought harder, his forehead warm and getting wet with sweat.
The screen started to catch fire, and gray smoke poured around it, setting off alarms in the other instruments.
He thought again, not sure how far he could take it.
The monitoring equipment started to glow on the edges, and then it flashed red, rapidly increasing the temperature of the room.
Smoke covered the entire outside wall, and the general alarm blared all over the floor.
Agdinar was out of the room before the emergency door completely opened.
Chapter 37
After moving beyond the area where the alarms were calling a robot fire-emergency crew, the corridors were deserted in the early afternoon. Agdinar walked undisturbed, even with the white body suit of a convalescent. It helped that most guards would be patrolling the city during the day, and nobody would expect trouble from the nonmilitary personnel strolling the halls.
Agdinar had been seriously underestimated by being just a lowly Watcher. But considering the adventure he'd jumped into for the last week, he now had a couple of tricks saved for an escape. After his run-ins with robots, the Hawks, and the police, running away from the Towers
would be in the mid-range of what he had confronted.
His optimism declined a little as he approached the edge of the building's connecting pathway, an antigravity swirl that communicated floors all the way down to the docking bay. He felt a little lightheaded seeing the huge drop, and at first moved back a couple of nervous steps.
There were a few people sauntering a park on the next level down, but it was, after all, a military facility, and they were surrounded by flying mini-robots and walking medium-sized attack-robots that were smaller versions of the ones Agdinar had fought at the Lincoln Center.
A few steps into that open platform and he would be scanned down to the chemical bonds between his atoms. Agdinar paced in circles under an extension of the upper floor, peeking down on each turn to figure whether there was any way to escape detection and reach the bottom level, where Dhern might have kept his AV.
He had watched enough old movies from the down-world to know he needed a distraction. But none of those entertainment-targeted fantasies was clear about how hard it was to come upon one—or dwelled on the slim chance any of them would succeed.
Agdinar decided to try a simple plan, one that would trigger a distracting alarm. After all, his escape was still unnoticed, and the medical AI world didn't connect all that well with the city at large. He had little time to try something.
He approached a configuration column—surrounded by orange circles on the floor—and inspected the individual silver screens. The screens would give him advice, and the circles could design and make tools, clothing, and almost anything he could want. These production systems were usually quite polite and respectful of human privacy.
“I would like a military attire suit,” he said. “Blue. Full configuration. Officer style.” He was standing over the orange patch, ready to be serviced.
...What is your number of corporal?
The machine transferred thought information very slowly. He'd counted on an unsophisticated model for the open areas.