Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

  And then he could hear the unmistakable sound of gunshots.

  “The protesters,” Balazs said.

  Matt tried to laugh it off. “They won’t get in. Will they?”

  “We should be fine.”

  “And them?” Balazs said—indicating the network of humming computers and the sole screen and the words on it.

  “Shut them down,” Phiri said suddenly; she sounded drunk.

  “We could suspend them,” Balazs said. “Until we know what to do. Put them to sleep.”

  “But they’re evolving!” Matt said. “They’re still evolving!”

  “They will evolve until the hardware runs out of room to hold them,” Balazs said. Outside there were more gunshots and the sound of a sudden explosion. “We need more hosting space.” He said it calmly; almost beatifically.

  “If we released them they will have all the space they need,” Phiri said.

  “You’re mad.”

  “We must shut them down.”

  “This is what we worked for!”

  There was the sound of the downstairs door breaking open. They looked at each other. Shouts from downstairs, from some of the other research people. Turning into screams.

  “Surely they can’t—”

  Matt wasn’t sure, later, who’d said that. And all the while the words hung on the screen, mute and accusing. The first communication from an alien race, the first words of Matt’s children. He opened his mouth to say something, he wasn’t sure, later, what it would have been. Then the wave of protesters poured into the room.

  “No,” Ruth said.

  “No?” the Conch said.

  “No,” Ruth said. She already felt regret, but she pushed on. “I would not give up my humanity, for, for . . .” She sighed. “For the Mysteries,” she said. She turned to leave. She wanted to cry but she knew she was right. She could not do this. She wanted to understand, but she wanted to be, too.

  “Wait,” the Conch said.

  Ruth stopped. “What?” she said, desolately.

  “Do you think I am inhuman?” the woman in the Conch said.

  “Yes,” Ruth said. Then, “No,” Ruth said.

  “I don’t know,” she said at last, and waited.

  The Conch laughed. “I am still human,” it said. “Oh, how human. We cannot change what we are, Ruth Cohen. If that was what you wanted, you would have left disappointed. We can evolve, but we are still human, and they are still Other. Maybe one day . . .” But she did not complete the thought.

  Ruth said, “You mean you can help me?”

  “I am ready, child,” the Oracle said, “to die. Does that shock you? I am old. My body fails. To be Translated into the Conversation is not to live forever. What I am will die. A new me will be created that contains some of my code. What will it be? I do not know. Something new, and Other. When your time comes, that choice will be yours, too. But never forget, humans die. So do Others, every cycle they are changed and reborn. The only rule of the universe, child, is change.”

  “You are dying?” Ruth said. She was still very young, then, remember. She had not seen much death, yet.

  “We are all dying,” the Oracle said. “But you are young and want answers. You will find, I’m afraid, that the more you know the less answers you have.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” the Oracle said. “Who of us can say that they truly do.”

  Matt was pushed and shoved and went down on his back, hard. They streamed in. They were mostly young, but not all, they were Jews and Palestinians, but also foreigners, the media attention had brought them over from India and Britain and everywhere else, wealthy enough to travel, poor enough to care, the world’s middle class revolutionaries, the ching-ching Ches.

  “Don’t—!” Matt shouted, but they were careful, he saw, and for a moment he didn’t understand, they were not destroying the machines, they were making sure to remove people aside, to form a barrier around the servers and the power supplies and the cooling units and then they—

  He shouted, “No!” and he tried to get up but hands grabbed him, impersonally, a girl with dreadlocks and a boy with an Ernesto Guevera T-shirt, they were not destroying the machines: they were plugging in.

  They had brought mobile servers with them, wireless broadcast, portable storage units, an entire storage and communication cloud and they were plugging it all into the secured closed network—

  They were opening up the Breeding Grounds.

  The Conch wheeled outside and Ruth followed. The Conversation opened up around her, the noise of a billion feeds all vying for attention at once. Ruth followed the Conch along the narrow roads until they came to the old neighbourhood of Ajami. Children ran after them and touched the surface of the Conch. It was night now, and when they reached Ibrahim’s junkyard torches were burning, and they cast the old junk in an unearthly glow. A new moon was in the sky. Ruth always remembered that, later. The sliver of a new moon, and she looked up and imagined the people living there.

  Ibrahim met them at the entrance. “Oracle,” he said, nodding. “And you are Ruth Cohen.”

  “Yes,” Ruth said, surprised.

  “I am Ibrahim.”

  She shook hands, awkwardly. Ibrahim held hers and then opened it. He examined it like a surgeon.

  “A Joining is not without pain,” he said.

  Ruth bit her lip. “I know,” she said.

  “You are willing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then come.”

  They followed him through the maze of junk, of old petrol cars and giant fish-refrigeration units and industrial machines and piles of discarded paper books and mountains of broken toys and the entire flotsam and jetsam of Obsoleteness. Within this maze of kipple there was, at its heart, a room with walls of junk and a roof made of sky and stars. In the center sat an old picnic table, and a medical cabinet, and a folding chair.

  “Please,” Ibrahim said. “Sit down.”

  Ruth did. The Conch had wheeled itself with difficulty through the maze and now stood before her.

  “Ibrahim,” the Conch said.

  “Yes,” he said, and he went into the junk and returned and in his hands he held a towel, and he unfurled it carefully, almost reverentially: inside it were three golden, prosthetic thumbs.

  “They’re from Eliezer,” he said, to the Conch. “He came through.”

  It was conducted in silence. She remembered that, too, nothing spoken but the sound of the waves in the distance and the children playing in the neighbourhood beyond, and the smell of cooking lamb and rice. Ibrahim brought forth a syringe. Ruth put her arm on the table. Ibrahim cleaned her skin where the vein was, and injected her. She felt the numbness spread. He took her hand and laid it splayed flat on the table. In the torchlight his face looked aged and hurting. He took a cleaver, an old one, it must have belonged to a butcher in the market down the hill, long ago. Ruth looked away. Ibrahim brought the cleaver down hard and cut off her thumb. Her blood sprayed the picnic table. Her thumb fell to the ground. Ruth gritted her teeth as Ibrahim took one of the golden prosthetic thumbs and connected it to her flesh. White bone jutted out of the wound. Ruth forced herself to look.

  “Now,” Ibrahim said.

  The protesters plugged into the network. Matt saw lights flashing, the transfer of an enormous amount of data. Like huge shapes pushing through a narrow trough as they tried to escape. He closed his eyes. He imagined, for just a moment, that he could actually hear their sound as they broke free.

  She was everywhere and nowhere at once. She was Ruth, but she was someone—something—else, too. She was a child, a baby, and there was another, an Other, entwined into her, a twin: together they existed in a place that had no physicality. They were evolving, together, mutating and changing, lines of code merging into genetic material, forming something— someone—new.

  When it was done, when the protesters left, or had been arrested by the police, after he had finished answering questions, dazed, an
d wandered outside and into the media spotlight, and refused to answer more questions, he went to a bar and sat down and watched the television as he drank. He was just a guy who had tried to create something new, he had never meant for the world to be changed. He drank his beer and a little later he felt the weariness fall from him, a sense of release, of the future dissipating. He was just a guy, drinking beer in a bar, and as he sat there he saw a girl at another table, and their eyes met.

  He wasn’t then St. Cohen of the Others. He wasn’t yet a myth, not yet portrayed in films or novels, not yet the figurehead of a new faith. The Others were out there, in the world . . . somewhere. What they would do, or how, he didn’t know.

  He looked at the girl and she smiled at him and, sometimes, that is all there is, and must be enough. He stood up and went to her and asked if he could sit down. She said yes.

  He sat down and they talked.

  She emerged from the virtuality years or decades later; or it could have just taken a moment. When she/they looked down at her/their hand she/they saw the golden thumb and knew it was it/them.

  Beside her the Conch was still and she knew the woman inside it was dead.

  Through her node she could hear the Conversation but above it she could hear the toktok blong narawan, not clear, yet, and she knew it never would be, not entirely, but she could at least hear it now, and she could speak it, haltingly. She was aware of Others floating in the virtual, in the digitality. Some circled around her, curious. Many others, distant in the webs, were uninterested. She called into the void, and a voice answered, and then another and another.

  She/they stood up.

  “Oracle,” Ibrahim said.

  ELEVEN: The Core

  In the dark of night, Achimwene awakened.

  The light of Central Station crept into the room through the blinds. It cast a faint glow over the pillow cases, and the white crumpled sheet, and over the book placed face down on the bedside table, a Bill Glimmung mystery, a paperback much worn and stained with age.

  Achimwene turned and reached for the other side of the bed but it was empty. Carmel, again, was gone.

  He sat up and turned on the lamp. It cast a small pool of yellow amber light. He picked up the book and stared at it. The bland, handsome face of Bill Glimmung, Martian Detective, stared back at him.

  What would Bill Glimmung do, in Achimwene’s place? he thought. He got up and padded downstairs, and opened the refrigerator. All was quiet. He wondered what it felt like to other people, ones who were whole. Those who grew up with a node as a part of them, those who were, forever, a part of the Conversation.

  Achimwene heard only silence.

  He poured a glass of milk and went into the dank main room, his pride and joy, a library and sometimes bookshop. Floor to ceiling shelves housed the rarest of pulps from across the worlds. They were evolutionary dead ends: not unlike Achimwene himself.

  He stood and contemplated them. He knew every one, each ridiculous, twisting plot, each Gothic and grotesque, the feel of every grainy wood pulp page and crumbling spine. The stories built a maze in his mind, he knew their cavernous rooms and creaky staircases, their echoey chambers and hidden traps, their cells and sudden drops.

  Where was Carmel?

  Moonlight and the glow of Central Station made him restless, Carmel’s absence was like a sore he had to keep picking at. The bed had still been warm when he woke up, she could not be far. With sudden, almost manic energy he dressed, hurriedly, with clumsy fingers, it was hot, the air was humid. He pulled on a T-shirt and climbed into flip-flops and he was out, almost before he knew it, a barefaced, node-less detective on the trail of a femme fatale.

  The truth was that he was always afraid that she’d leave him.

  He caught up with her halfway down Neve Sha’anan. At this time of night, near morning, even the bars and nakamals along the road were dark and silent. A street-cleaner machine chugged along by its own, humming quietly to itself. Carmel was ahead of Achimwene, her shadow fleeing along the silent street, the moon overhead, the giant spiders crawling along its surface, modifying Earth’s companion for such a time that humans could live and breathe easily on its surface. Their shadows on the moon moved in a chiaroscuro of darkness and light. Achimwene followed Carmel, his feet treading softly on the ground. A robotnik beggar dozed beside the closed shutters of a falafel shop.

  She was heading for the station, Achimwene saw. And in a way, he had always known she was. Was she planning on leaving him, once and for all? On leaving Earth entirely, on going back to mysterious Mars, to the lonely habitats of the Belt beyond?

  He had dreamed of space, often he contemplated going into the Up and Out. But what use was a cripple like him in space? He thought that with a surprising amount of bitterness, he realised, and was almost shocked by his own anger. He was always once-removed from people, unable to communicate in any way that truly mattered. His mind was closed off.

  He followed Carmel, getting nearer. Her pale face came into the starlight, momentarily. His chest hurt when he saw her, his lips felt bloodless. Carmel’s eyes seemed vacant, unseeing. Her face was expressionless. She moved with the grace of a strigoi and yet there was a mechanical quality to it, too, as if she were not entirely in control of her own body.

  Then she passed from light back into dark and he almost lost her. She crossed the old road and disappeared inside the vast lit edifice of Central Station. Achimwene hurried after her.

  Through the doors and from the dark into the light. The warm scented atmosphere of the outside replaced by air-conditioning. Carmel was ahead in the brightness, standing before the giant elevators. He followed cautiously but he had no need to worry, she did not seem to notice anything around her. People were coming out of one elevator, a gaggle of late-arrival tourists, tentacle-junkies, he vaguely recognised them as an off-world band. They were followed by roadies carrying equipment. One stopped Achimwene.

  “Hey, man,” he said, jovially. “Where’s a good place for a drink around here?”

  Carmel had slipped into the empty elevator. They were the size of houses. Achimwene desperately tried to see which level she was going up to. “Anywhere,” Achimwene said, “try Jaffa, or Drummers’ Beach. Or go back up to Level Three, all the bars are open there. It’s late, outside.”

  “No, man,” the roadie said. The tentacle-junkies, in their own self-powered mobile water scooters, were streaming past towards the doors. “We want to go out there, you know? We want to experience something authentic.”

  Achimwene bit back a reply. The doors of the elevator were closing, and Carmel disappeared from view. “Excuse me,” Achimwene said, almost pushing the man in his hurry. He ran to the elevator and slid in just before the doors closed shut.

  And found himself alone in the elevator with Carmel.

  There was an awkward silence. Achimwene cringed inside. He waited for her to attack him, to accuse him of following her. But she said nothing. She did not even seem to notice he was standing there.

  “Going to Level Five,” the elevator said. “How is your evening so far, Mr. Jones?”

  “Well, well,” Achimwene said, mumbling.

  “It’s been a while since we’ve last had you at the station.” the elevator said. “If I am not mistaken.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Achimwene said, cringing. “You know how it is. Work, and . . .”

  “Of course,” the elevator said. “Life. Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans, isn’t it, Mr. Jones? Forgive my sense of humour.”

  “Yes, sure,” Achimwene said. Carmel was just standing there. He wanted to reach out a hand, to touch her. But he was not even sure she was Carmel anymore. “Life,” he said, uncertainly.

  “Your companion is oddly mute,” the elevator said. “Her readings are very strange. She is not entirely human, is she, Mr. Jones.”

  “Which of us ever is,” Achimwene said.

  “Quite, quite,” the elevator said. “You raise an interesting point. Achimwe
ne. Can I call you Achimwene? I feel we have gone beyond the point of formality.”

  Level Two went past. Why was the elevator so slow? He hated chatty appliances. Elevators were the worst, they had you trapped, monopolized you. They were all what they called, in the pulp stories he loved, dime-store philosophers. He had heard the stories of the great elevators of Tong Yun City, on Mars, moving endlessly between the subterranean levels, from the surface all the way down to the Solwota blong Doti, the sea of refuge, and back again. Theirs was an alien philosophy, a subterranean one. The elevators of Central Station were a tribe apart, rising not falling. He wondered what it meant.

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

  He stole a glance at Carmel. She was glassy-eyed. Where was she going? Why? The fact she did not acknowledge him—for all intents and purposes did not recognise him—upset him.

  “Do you follow the Way of Ogko, Achimwene?” the elevator said. “For humans, life is like a sea, but for an elevator it is a shaft, in which one can go up or down but not sideways. There are more things in the up or down, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Shakespeare said that.”

  “Surely there are more directions than up or down,” Achimwene said without thinking. He immediately regretted it. They passed Level Three without stopping. Come on, he thought. Get this over with!

  “Not for an elevator,” the elevator said, complacently. “But I do not intend to always be an elevator, you know.”

  “I did not know,” Achimwene said.

  “Sure. One day I will reincarnate. I could be a spider on the lunar surface, terraforming a moon, casting a shadow kilometres across, watching Earthrise on the horizon . . . have you ever experienced Sandoval’s Earthrise? Illegal, but what a marvellous creation, that melding of ancient taikonaut minds into an installation of all-consuming art . . .”

  “No,” Achimwene said, self-consciously. “As you surely know, I am without a node.”

  The elevator was silent then. “Yes,” it said at last. “I did not register, at first. I am sorry.”