When the River Ran Dry

by Robert Davies

  Beside him, Maela fiddled with the settings on her comm unit, seemingly disaffected while the automatic navigation system made each slight adjustment to their course and altitude until at last, three short tones bleeped out from the control panel to announce their descent. Seconds later, the machine guided itself to a parking cage on the roof of a hulking structure built in the odd shape of a trapezoid, windowless on one side where it rose like a solitary tombstone from an open field.

  Maela waited for Ricky to unbuckle his seat harness, steering him toward a lift station jutting from beneath a wide overhang made of trusses and transparent roof panels. As they crossed the smooth concrete apron, she stopped.

  “Listen, I need to explain this before we go down so you’ll understand.”

  Ricky frowned in confusion, but she continued without a pause.

  “We’re going to see Jonathan Kranz, a brilliant hack talent and general-purpose savant who knows more about everything than anyone else I’ve ever met. He’s also a pain in the ass do-gooder who talks too much and thinks the world would be a better place if everyone would play by the rules and be nice to strangers.”

  Ricky heard the obvious commentary in her description, but Maela’s expression said more than her words.

  “He likes rules, but he also hacks? That’s an interesting combination.”

  “Jonathan is a…let’s just say he’s a multi-faceted individual.”

  “No doubt. How did you meet this guy?”

  She flashed a momentary, obviously false smile.

  “He’s a friend. Well, sort of…”

  “Sort of?”

  “Once upon a time, we were attached, I guess you’d say.”

  “But not anymore?”

  “I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me.”

  “Seems like an odd way to run a relationship.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a great way to end one.”

  “Sorry I asked.”

  She motioned Ricky toward the lifts.

  “He knows we’re coming to see him, but I couldn’t explain any of this over a comm link. Just let me do the talking and don’t worry if he launches into one of his famous tantrums; it’s mostly for show.”

  “This oughta be interesting,” Ricky said with a grin.

  On the southeastern edge of Novum where the fields lay open all the way to the wire, those few who lived between the Uppers and Flatwalkers huddled in a colony of linked structures that reminded Ricky of plastic building blocks popular with very young school children. Neither privileged as those in the clouds, nor sweating in the heat and filth of the streets, they were the quiet ones with intellect more valuable than position or muscle; the designers and engineers who kept Novum on its upward trajectory from what it had been in those last, terrible days of the Fall. Kranz was one of them and Maela stopped outside his door to collect her thoughts.

  When it opened, his expression showed equal parts worry and grudging interest.

  “Come in,” he said, motioning them with a wave of his hand. Almost as an afterthought, he said to Ricky, “I’m Jonathan, by the way.”

  “Ricky Mills.”

  “Yes, I know who you are from the vid shows; that was quite an adventure.”

  “I was lucky,” Ricky said, but a polite and considerate tone seemed nothing like the tedious personality Maela described moments before. Instead, Jonathan seemed to Ricky a likeable sort, dressed only in beige shorts and a pale, green tee-shirt that was entirely too big for so slight a frame.

  Maela wasted little time coming abruptly to the point.

  “Sorry for breaking this on short notice, Jonny, but we need your help.”

  Jonathan leaned against a doorway.

  “Your message was pretty vague.”

  “I know,” Maela replied, “but I couldn’t risk it over a monitored comm.”

  “I’ve told you a million times, Mae; spend the money and get a crypto unit for your comm.”

  She looked away at once to hide the exasperation Ricky guessed was a prominent theme between them.

  “Thank you, but as I’ve explained to you a million more times, my bosses would see it in ten seconds and make me take it back down!”

  The tension was building quickly and Ricky held up a hand to intervene, but Maela caught herself and ended the argument before he could speak.

  “Okay, we can talk about that some other time, but for now, I need you to bust a call log so we can find somebody. Please, just help us do that, all right?”

  Jonathan took in a deep breath to calm himself before nodding in resignation as he sat before his console.

  “Whose records do you want to see?”

  Maela spoke with a suddenly softer tone, Ricky noticed, no doubt relieved by Jonathan’s willingness to help.

  “Last name is Fellsbach; first name, Elden with an ‘e.’ He lives in the Marshall center…well, lived.”

  Jonathan looked up.

  “The Upper who got drilled a couple of days ago?”

  Maela winced at the insensitive words that could only have been painful for Ricky.

  “He was Richard’s friend.”

  “Oh, shit…sorry about that, really.”

  “It’s okay,” Ricky replied.

  “Are you leading this one?” Jonathan asked Maela.

  She paused a moment, stung by the question.

  “They took me off the investigation.”

  “Mason pulled you from an ongoing case?”

  “Yes, Jonny, I got the boot; can we keep this moving please?”

  He knew what it meant without being told.

  “You’re running rogue?”

  “Something else is going on,” she replied with an obvious frown; “something behind the scenes and I can’t do anything about it. I have to run this myself because the suits won’t do shit and the murderer will stay in the shadows if I don’t.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Just start the hack; I’ll take care of the rest.”

  Ricky watched over Jonathan’s shoulder as each menu was found and bypassed by security-defeating protocols he didn’t pretend to understand. Block after block glared red on the monitor, only to disappear with each application of a secondary entry code or high-speed password sweep. After a few minutes, he was in and the first page of a vast record library lay open before them. Elden’s call logs scrolled slowly, time-stamped and only a click away. At last, Ricky stopped him.

  Reading carefully, Ricky looked for incoming calls on the day of his Walk, knowing the unseen benefactor would show. He recognized none of the names at first, guessing them to be acquaintances the old man made over the years. Most were internal calls, originating or terminating at comm units within the Marshall Center mega-tower. Neighbors, Ricky wondered? Maela looked, too.

  “Recognize any of these?”

  “No. They seem to be ordinary calls, but there’s no way any of these people could’ve known about my Walk from Elden, and…”

  Suddenly, he pointed to the monitor.

  “Stop.”

  “Richard?” she asked.

  “Holy shit,” he said with a shake of his head, pointing at a caller who spoke with Elden at 14:46. Below the entry, an immediate outgoing call from the old man’s comm at 14:52.

  “What are you seeing?” Jonathan asked.

  Ricky ran his finger across the screen where incoming calls were logged in chronological order, stopping where the identifier showed Ritnour, Walter M. To the right, where associated outgoing calls waited, Ricky read the second name aloud.

  “Cason, Steven P.”

  Maela smiled and patted Ricky’s shoulder.

  “Okay, now we’re moving in the right direction. It looks like Fellsbach got the word from this guy, Ritnour, and a few minutes later, he calls the good doctor. The timing seems a bit convenient to be anything else, so we’ll presume for the moment Ritnour knew the story.”

  Ricky said nothing, but his face flushed as he re-read Ritnour’s nam
e and Maela continued without a pause.

  “This must be when Cason told Mr. Fellsbach about the switch with those little chips. Clever, but it doesn’t tell us anything about Ritnour.”

  Ricky sat on the arm of Jonathan’s couch, looking only at Maela.

  “He’s one of yours, actually.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Ritnour is MPE—a beat cop down on the Ninth Street Corridor.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah; he sits in one of the kiosks near the Trade Center, but I didn’t tell him anything about my Walk. This makes no sense!”

  Maela looked close at the monitor as if more answers would somehow reveal themselves.

  “Somebody told him.”

  Ricky shook his head slowly. Had a hidden, third party seen and sent a discrete word? Maela leaned back with folded arms, playing through the scenario in her mind. Ricky watched, unwilling to break the spell she made for herself as the force of her intellect took her along veiled paths, each presenting a possible solution.

  “Can you get into the recordings?” she asked softly.

  Jonathan looked up with a weary expression.

  “I’d rather not,” he groaned. “The Watchers have new alert software that went live a few months ago, and they don’t take breaks; if they see an intrusion event from a private system, it will light off the alarms.”

  Maela knew Jonathan’s opinion of the omnipresent Watchers and his belief the omnipresent security measure was, in reality, an army of advanced virtual intelligence constructs aimed by the Commission at the people of Novum.

  “But you could get past it if you wanted to.”

  He looked away.

  “Yes, but not from my system. I’d have to go in and access the gateway from my office at work—Watchers can’t see in from there.”

  “This is important, Jonny; you know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”

  “I know.”

  Ricky watched in silence. The strained relationship between Maela and Jonathan lingered, cluttering the present with debris from a past neither were willing to reveal in front of a stranger. At last, the reluctant specialist gave in.

  “Not many people up on my floor this time of night, so we can go now, if you want.”

  In the first days of the Resurrection, when a skeleton that had once been a colossus began the long and arduous process of digging itself out from the aftermath of the Fall, there had been no time or facility to look beyond the moment—only daily survival at its most elemental level mattered and most were left to their own skill and determination. As time passed and warring factions died out, a civilization began to emerge from the wreckage and lawlessness. A century later, the sprawling landscape had changed from ruin and desolation, transformed by persistence and the instinctive, natural desire for order into a new and thriving community. Although an island unto itself in the restructured world where masses kept within safe boundaries to form new, bustling urban states apart and separated from their neighbors, Novum aimed its eyes once more toward the future.

  The Institute for Technology and Industry was the intellectual bedrock upon which the city’s destiny would be built. Understanding and knowledge were pulled reluctantly forward from the past with often disastrous results as long-lost skills were re-discovered and cultivated by those who were merely curious. At last, the Institute had drawn even with the forgotten universities of the Old Time, returning at least some of humanity to its former place.

  Maela docked her car and paid the fee into an automated system, frowning privately in the certainty others noted their arrival from the caverns where Watchers and their vast network of scanning computers looked over the city’s business with precision and care. As a police officer, she was entitled to come and go as she pleased, but there were limits and a visit to the Institute could spur an idle Watcher’s software to inspect closer. Through a labyrinth of hallways and open experiment bays, they waited at twin fire doors until Jonathan released the locks and motioned them inside.

  The Research wing seemed dark and ominous to Ricky as he walked along a narrow corridor, oddly void of echoes and deadened to sharp sounds like the click of a door handle, or the tap of fingers on an input terminal’s smooth, glass surface. In here, he thought quietly, they made the blueprints for Novum’s next hundred years, teasing out a better life from the technological secrets of the past, using their power to unlock even more that beckoned from beyond time’s horizon. Progress was a measured and well-regulated concept, but it grew from embryonic beginnings inside locked rooms like the one Jonathan steered them toward with a brief gesture.

  The expansive chamber was made of distinct cells, each the private and permanent working home of a technology contributor. This one, Jonathan noted, was a systems integration and architecture space where high-speed interfaces between machines were developed. Ricky looked with fascination, but there were few recognizable clues an ordinary Flatwalker would recognize. Instead, holographic note boards showed line after line of complex math formulas waiting patiently for variables. Beside them, a glowing swirl of numbers and letters that meant something to those who understood.

  At the late hour few researchers remained, but secluded within their work cells, most didn’t know Jonathan was onsite—or didn’t think to look. He showed Maela and Ricky inside his suddenly cramped workspace, climbing awkwardly into a thin, reclining seat he insisted was more comfortable than it looked. At once, Ricky thought of an experience cocoon at the Reese Street Theater and his thoughts drifted unsurprisingly to Neferure. It took a moment before the details became clear again, even to the fragrance she so often wore when his consciousness awoke at Ma’at Palace. Was it made from deep inside his mind, Ricky wondered? A coping mechanism’s strange authority to shift memories into those unseen vaults the mind maintains, perhaps? It wasn’t so disturbing as it might have been months before and Ricky took the odd sensation as an encouraging sign his unfortunate past was drifting farther behind. Maela noticed the strange expression and nudged him.

  “Richard?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  She frowned a bit and turned instead to Jonathan.

  “Your access is masked, right?”

  He nodded and pointed at a blinking icon on one of his four monitors.

  “That’s the activation prompt for Cactus; when I select it, the network for most of the city’s hard comm architectures can be accessed without tripping the intrusion detectors. I have the protocols, so once it gets me past the first portal, I can take it from there.”

  “Cactus?” Ricky asked.

  “It’s a test system we morphed into a larger platform connecting various network infrastructures with specific nodes; it works well for general access if you know how to push it.”

  Maela heard Jonathan descend into tech-speak enough times to know it was about to happen again and she moved him forward gently.

  “What’s next?”

  He waved his hands over the display and waited while it sent out a retinal scan to verify his identification credentials and then he was in. Working quickly, Jonathan peeled back each layer of security, bypassing several barriers that would’ve required authorization from much higher levels until at last, the voice archive revealed itself. Reading from his wrist comm where the location of Elden’s call log files had been copied, he made the sequential inputs and sat back. The system scrolled endless display screens, each visible for only a moment as the access codes he hacked long before did their work. When the machine blinked out a single, green icon, he turned to Maela and activated the system’s external speakers and the playback began.

  “Mr. Fellsbach?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Walt Ritnour. You don’t know me, but I’m calling about Slider Mills, and…”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s gotten into some trouble, and…”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Well, money trouble. I guess he didn’t tell you?
”

  “No, but it’s not surprising. Go on.”

  “He got in over his head at one of the Starlight theaters and he can’t pay back what he owes, so they’re going to make him do a Walk to settle it.”

  Ricky winced at the sudden, painful pause as Elden replied with a noticeable sigh.

  “How did you come by this information, if I may ask?”

  “He stopped by a couple of days ago, asking about the two Bosses who got arrested out in the Zone, and…”

  “I remember.”

  “I thought it seemed a little strange, so I did some digging and it turns out he went to their warehouse to look around, you know, since both of them were in jail? Anyway, I figured he found something and wanted help getting it turned up where you live, so…”

  “And why would you think that?”

  “Well, your neighbors heard things when Slider came to see you, and they know what he does down on the streets, so I just thought…”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “But later, one of the people who listens for me heard Boris Konstantinou was going to make Slider pay him off by doing one of those Walks. Maybe he tried to get the money Slider owed, but it was a lot, so he pushed from another direction.”

  “What direction?”

  “This is sort of awkward, but they tell me Konstantinou has an eye for the kid’s little sister, Litzi, and…”

  “Continue.”

  “Boris told Slider his debt would disappear if he was to convince her to…well, you know what I mean, right?”

  “Yes, I understand, but where did you hear of this? You mentioned people who listen for you. In what capacity are you part of this, Mr. Ritnour?”

  “I’m a cop down on the Corridor. I’ve known the kid since he was little, so I try to keep an eye out for him if I can. His dad died years ago, and…”