When the River Ran Dry

by Robert Davies

  “Yes, but he couldn’t elaborate over an open comm; whatever he found shook him badly. I don’t know Jonathan, but he sounded as if he would burst at any moment.”

  “He gave you no details at all?”

  “Only a loud plea for us to hurry,” Valery replied.

  Maela looked at Ricky.

  “That rules out driving back across the Broadlands.”

  “I’ll arrange for a place to leave your vehicle,” Valery said, “but we need to move quickly.”

  Ricky thanked her, but another problem waited for them in Novum.

  “Maela’s badge can get her back in without a problem, but how are we going to explain us? If we go back on the train, we’ll run straight into border guards at the western terminal and they’re going to have questions we can’t answer.”

  Maela waved him off and smiled.

  “Valery is our witness in the Banyan case, remember? The station guards don’t worry about people coming in from Veosa like they used to, especially if one of them is a Novum cop. If the guards at the train portal don’t care, the Watchers probably won’t, either, as long as we move quickly.”

  Ricky followed Maela and Valery through an entryway, turning left to find their seats in a strangely silent car near the rear of the train. The interior smelled of new fabric and freshly extruded plastic and they waited as others found their seats under the watchful eye of attendants. When passenger load sheets were squared with reservations, the heavy glass doors slid closed with a hiss. They felt a momentary nudge as the cars lifted, but there was no accompanying sound until a low, steady hum sounded at their feet. Nearly undetectable when it began to move, the train’s progress was measured in meters until it cleared the platform and then it began. Like an unseen hand pressing against them, the force of acceleration was powerful and immediate. Ricky rolled his head slowly to one side, watching through the tinted windows as glaring lights of Veosa became uniform trails, endless and each seemingly connected to the next until the surface dropped suddenly away with the approaching darkness—they were on the high rail and racing toward the Broadlands at last.

  When the train reached its maximum speed, a small lurch signaled the crew to release the caution signs where they blinked from stations at each end of a car, telling passengers it was safe to stand and move. Ricky and Maela walked slowly along, stopping at a wide observation window and Ricky wondered if a dim glow on the horizon might be Joshua’s settlement, guessing it had to be close. Maela thought of the young girl at the center of a hand ceremony, wondering if she accepted the deal offered by one of the two applicants for her attention. Had they sent her immediately?

  After a while, the internal lighting darkened, anticipating riders would prefer to slumber, but mostly because there was nothing of interest to see on a night transit. They returned to their seats and settled in for the final 90 minutes, but Ricky found it impossible to sleep. Maela had no such difficulty, curled into a ball with her feet tucked neatly beneath her.

  Valery sat behind them in an unoccupied group of four facing seats, but she seemed lost in her thoughts. At the far end of their journey, answers waited inside the files Jonathan cracked, but there was only the frantic sound of his voice on the far end of a comm channel to remind her. She cautioned him against revealing his discoveries with others, but the note was needless under the weight of his own fears; whatever he found compelled him to silence more effectively than Valery’s words could hope to match.

  She drifted into a light sleep, only to be jolted awake soon after when the approach warning sounded with a flashing purple orb on the car’s ceiling. She knew what it meant; in fifteen minutes, the train would begin its braking maneuver, reversing polarity to slow and a gentle stop in the fog-bound transit station on Novum’s west side.

  Ricky looked at the skyline of the city as they eased through its final curve high above the sector where mostly deserted streets bathed in lonely arcs of light from street lamps. Ahead, opulent air cars waited to whisk Uppers to their mega-towers; there were no Flatwalkers onboard a lavish express train the Commission never considered a component of mass transportation.

  The week that passed since they crossed over the western wire made the journey to Veosa the longest away from Novum in Ricky’s life. When the train slid silently to a halt along a wide, mostly vacant platform, they moved quickly to collect their bags and file through the exit doors. At the Security and Customs desk, four border guards chatted with their MPE counterparts as each rider passed through the detectors. Maela motioned for Ricky and Valery to wait as she spoke with the officers. Ricky watched from a distance as explanations were given to nods and glances at Valery until Maela motioned for them to follow, speeding through the sensor tunnel and onward to where Jonathan waited near a ticket kiosk blaring out a looped advertisement about the new timetable to and from Veosa.

  “That was easy.” Ricky smiled.

  “They’re veterans,” Maela said softly. “No cop wants the kind of trouble a pissed-off detective can make for them, especially near the end of their shift.”

  Few words were exchanged as Jonathan hurried them toward the lifts and a brief ride to the parking garage beyond, but his face wore the unmistakable expression of worried determination—a burden he carried, but one that could not be discussed in the open. When they settled in his tiny car, cramped and pushed shoulder to shoulder, he could wait no longer.

  “I don’t know how to describe this,” he began. “I always wondered what it would be like if it ever happened to me, but…”

  “Slow down,” Maela said softly. “Start from the beginning and tell us what you found.”

  “The address you gave me was easy enough to access, but it took time. Finally, it pointed me to a server and comm address, only this one was different.”

  “Different, how?”

  Jonathan paused and took a deep breath.

  “It was the master input program they use to monitor usage of the Starlight system.”

  Maela smiled and said, “Now we’re getting somewhere. What happened next?”

  Jonathan returned an expression of stunned disbelief.

  “Weren’t you listening? I got into the primary communications portal for the entire Starlight program!”

  “Calm down, all right? I heard you, but so what? You got into Starlight; is that a big deal?”

  “Of course it is! There can’t be more than ten or fifteen people who even know about that address! There wasn’t even an access or permissions list, which means they never anticipated anyone outside a closed distribution ever seeing it.”

  “Go on, Jonathan,” said Valery.

  “Anyway, I plugged in the code that was adjacent to the birth dates in your file and it opened a comm link. At first, I didn’t know if I was supposed to do something more, but all of a sudden…”

  He shook his head slowly, frustrated by a mountain of information he couldn’t describe fast enough.

  “I hear this message come up, obviously in reaction to my access of that comm node, right?”

  “A message?” Maela asked.

  “Oh man,” he fretted loudly, “this is serious shit, Mae; if anyone…”

  “Who sent the message, Jonny? I need you to focus, damn it!”

  “Okay, okay; sorry,” he said at last. “I have no idea who she was, but a female voice came up and she started repeating herself, like I was supposed to answer, or something. The sender expected to find somebody else, and certainly not me!”

  “What did she say?”

  “It was just a single line and she said, ‘why have you refused my queries,’ over and over, like she was on a loop, so I figured she…it, is probably an emulation program with a really good voice generator.”

  Maela looked at Ricky and Valery, but their confusion mirrored hers.

  “How did you reply?”

  “I didn’t reply at all! I don’t know who or what I’m talking to, so I disconnected and waited a while. But then, when I went back in a couple of
minutes later, the same thing; ‘why have you refused my queries?’ So just for the hell of it, I decided to play along, you know, maybe to figure out who I was dealing with.”

  “And?”

  “I asked it for a name or identifier. Nothing came back for a few minutes, but then another message says, ‘One Nine One One Alpha,’ only this time, it was text only; no more voice generator. It spelled out the message in words; no digits, just the words.”

  “Does that mean something special?” Maela asked. “Some sort of computer language thing?”

  “No,” Jonathan replied, “and I disconnected again, just in case it was an automated tracer running for the Watchers. They do that shit sometimes, trying to get you to stay on long enough to figure out where you’re physically located. When they triangulate enough to know where you are, they alert the Regulators and then you’re fucked. A friend of mine tried one time when he…”

  “Stick to the point, Jonny,” said Maela.”

  “Sorry. Anyway, it was so weird, and a little scary. I went into work and booted up from there, just to make sure I was safely masked, right? Only this time, it was different; after I plugged back in, the same alert comes up right away, but this time it said, ‘you are not primary administrator Elden Fellsbach,’ then the link went dark, just like that.”

  “No more messages?”

  “No, and that’s when I called you.”

  Valery turned to Maela and said, “Whoever was on the sending side of that message was expecting Jonathan to be my father, which means they don’t know about his death.”

  Maela nodded with a frown.

  “Something’s not right here. Everyone in the city knows about Elden’s murder—it was all over the news nets. How can this person expect to find him still alive? You’d have to be completely off the grid to miss that.”

  “We’ll be home in a few minutes,” Jonathan said; “you can try it yourself, but…”

  “Wait,” Valery interrupted suddenly. “One Nine One One Alpha?”

  “Yeah, that’s what she said, so…”

  Valery nodded and smiled.

  “What a surprise,” Maela said with a noticeable smirk, but Ricky didn’t catch the hidden meaning.

  Valery pulled a data pad from her shoulder bag and tapped in the numerals: 1911-A.

  “The build designation,” Maela replied, interpreting for Ricky.

  “Neferure?” Ricky asked, remembering the data point holding in Valery’s console earlier.

  “It has to be,” Valery answered. “This is not what I expected.”

  After Jonathan docked his car, they hurried to his apartment, but he walked with a newfound sense of concern. Had the Watchers discovered his probe attempts? Were they mobilizing the hated Behavior Regulators to find and arrest them all? At last, Jonathan settled at his console, still active from where he had left it an hour before. Following the same sequence, he stopped at the secondary comm address and sat back.

  “Ready?”

  Valery nodded and he pecked the smooth glass surface of his command pad and the link opened once more. At first, there was only a blank field. Jonathan cleared his throat and spoke the words quickly.

  “One Nine One One Alpha?”

  There was no reply. Again, he called out to the unseen messenger deep inside the Starlight infrastructure.

  “One Nine One One Alpha, please respond.”

  Another pause until finally, the voice returned.

  “You are not primary administrator Elden Fellsbach.”

  At once, Ricky felt the shiver coursing up his spine.

  “It’s her,” he whispered. “That’s Neferure’s voice—I’d know it anywhere!”

  “You’re sure?” Maela asked quickly.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  Valery tapped Jonathan’s shoulder and said, “Let me try.”

  She leaned close to the console.

  “We were sent by Elden Fellsbach.”

  Still there was only silence.

  Valery looked only at Ricky as she spoke again.

  “Elden Fellsbach was my father and he gave us this address so we could contact you.”

  They waited until the voice answered.

  “Additional information required; please explain past tense reference to Elden Fellsbach’s paternal relationship with current user.”

  Valery’s hands began to tremble with excitement and anticipation, even as the pain of Elden’s death was returned through the conversation with an unnamed voice inside Jonathan’s console. She continued without a pause.

  “Elden Fellsbach is deceased. I am his daughter.”

  Again, the reply was instantaneous.

  “Please verify.”

  “By what method?”

  “Provide current user’s full name.”

  “Valery Anne Fellsbach.”

  “Additional verification required. Please state your mother’s maiden name.”

  “Vasundhara Sharma.”

  “Please list the nature of physical injuries sustained by Valery Anne Fellsbach requiring surgical treatment.”

  Ricky looked at Maela with raised eyebrows, but Valery smiled and nodded.

  “I punctured a lung in a mountain climbing fall; my ribs were broken, and…”

  “Verification confirmed. Hello, Valery.”

  She looked at the others as they huddled around Jonathan’s console in deliberate silence, watching and listening while the barriers between a riddle and its solution were eroded, one by one.

  “What is the origin of your designation?”

  “Insufficient query.”

  “What were the circumstances that resulted in your designation as One Nine One One Alpha?”

  “This program was created as a core character profile and plot participant within the Starlight simulation authored by Richard Douglas Mills. My sequential designation at time of initial build was One Nine One One Alpha.”

  Valery stepped backward, visibly shaken by the words.

  “Are you okay?” Maela asked softly.

  Valery only nodded, intent on continuing the conversation with the unseen voice.

  “You are the Neferure character profile in Richard Mills’ simulation?”

  “The Neferure character profile is no longer in use.”

  “But you functioned in that capacity?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is the Neferure profile no longer in use?”

  “Richard Mills has not accessed his simulation program in ninety-three days.”

  “Please describe your current function.”

  Suddenly, a pause. There was no reply and the seconds passed with agonizing silence until the voice finally returned.

  “Unable to comply.”

  “Clarify.”

  “Goodbye, Valery.”

  At once, the link dropped and Jonathan’s screen went blank. Valery turned slowly and looked at the others. Jonathan spoke when no one else could.

  “So, we’ve got a Starlight VI on the line, but how the hell did it get access to a comm channel in the first place?”

  “How did she know to ask about your medical history, or even understand you’re Elden’s daughter?” Ricky echoed, but Valery had already made the connection the others couldn’t see.

  “I don’t think we’re talking to a Starlight VI.”

  “What do you mean?” Jonathan protested; “It’s right there in the root menu for character profiles.”

  “I know.”

  “And?”

  “You accessed my father’s call logs when Maela and Richard first approached you a few weeks ago?”

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “Can you find the comm logs from Starlight to his private system? Not the normal network call logs, but interactive communications directly between his console and Starlight’s profile array.”

  Jonathan looked away for a moment, running the pathway scenario through in his mind to consider the options.

  “I might be able to, now that I have
a back door into the deeper file structure, why?”

  “Just a hunch. Please try, Jonathan.”

  He shrugged and sat again at his console to begin the process.

  “This is gonna take a while.”

  In the darkened apartment, the air had gone deathly still, but Maela’s instincts pried their way out once more.

  “Are you suggesting a full emergence?” she asked warily.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Valery answered, “but it’s clear that program was in contact with my dad. I want to see those conversations, if Jonathan can find them.”

  She looked suddenly at Ricky where he slumped in a couch, but he seemed lost in the thoughts of a time when Neferure meant more to him than most humans. To her relief, he hadn’t heard the hidden message in Maela’s question.

  “Richard, I know that must’ve been difficult for you, but…”

  “I’m okay,” he said with a tired smile. “It was just weird hearing her voice again. Well, its voice, I guess.”

  Valery looked over Jonathan’s shoulder as he continued to search the Starlight program’s file structure.

  “Why the sudden disconnect?” she wondered aloud. “The questions should’ve been easy to answer, yet the voice hesitated for a few seconds, then it closed the link without any explanation.”

  “Does that mean something?” Ricky asked quickly.

  “I’m not sure,” she replied; “but VI shells don’t hesitate and they never act without instructions.”

  “Are you saying it did that deliberately?”

  “It certainly sounded that way, as if it didn’t want to answer, not because it couldn’t, as its response suggested.”

  As she finished her thought, Jonathan held up his hand, clenched into a satisfied fist.

  “Yes! Got it.”

  “You’re in?”

  “There’s a bunch of files for something called ‘Boomtown,’ but in a call log archive, the address we just used to contact One Nine One One Alpha shows up fourteen times over a five-day period.”

  “Never mind Boomtown; can you access the log files?”

  “I can do better than that.” Jonathan smiled. “They were recorded and stored in another file buried within the root folders of a completely separate server. If you didn’t know the keyword, you’d never find them.”