Terminal White

by James Axler

  Citizen 619F closed the door to her apartment, leaning with her back against it and letting out a weary sigh. “Baptiste,” she said, remembering the word that the Magistrate had said. She wasn’t certain that he had been a Magistrate then, since the memory was too fuzzy.

  She moved through the apartment, sat, ate, washed. All the while she was trying to cling on to the word and remember what had happened. She could hardly recall what had happened after her shift now, every memory was transient, like a fading Polaroid.

  Eventually, Citizen 619F lay down on her couch, which doubled for a bed, plumped up its meager cushion and switched off the single lightbulb of the room. She had not written a journal entry today, because there was so much to remember and so much that kept slipping from her mind that she knew that the process would only be frustrating.

  She lay there in darkness, listened as the apartment’s ventilation system whirred into action, bringing clean, new air into the meager living space. Gradually, her mind relented and she went to sleep.

  * * *

  MAGISTRATE 620M ENDED his shift and returned to his own residence. He was thinking about the citizen who had bumped into him, the woman with the red hair. The hair had been clipped down and tucked neatly beneath her cap, but it was impossible to hide its vivid color, the color of burning flames.

  620M stood before the basin in the communal bathroom, cleaning his teeth. He looked at himself in the mirror as he thought about the woman with the flame-red hair, wondering where he had seen her before, wondering how the meeting had seemed familiar. A Magistrate is trained to notice details, to piece information together, but he was having trouble doing that for some reason.

  He spit toothpaste into the stream of rushing water running from the faucet. “Description of suspect,” he said aloud. “Late twenties, Caucasian, five-seven, slender.” He took a mouthful of water and rinsed. “Green eyes. Red hair.”

  The face in the mirror stared back at him as he rinsed again, but 620M—Kane as was—was looking past it, searching his mind for the image of the woman, the familiar face in the crowd.

  * * *

  CITIZEN 619F DREAMED of a dark space lit only by volcanic rock. In the dream, she was with the man—the Magistrate—and they were working together to stop a disjointed monster made of hunks of shale. It seemed impossible. It seemed familiar.

  Subliminal Instruction to Ioville Citizen 618M:

  Attend Cappa Level at 1320.

  Fitness training. Obey Magistrate instructions.

  Task: 2 hours.

  Designated break: None.

  Chapter 22

  Citizen 619F awoke feeling unrested. The lightbulb had automatically switched back on, bathing the room with light. 6.2 hours had passed since she had closed her eyes, the 6.2 hours of sleep prescribed to every citizen of the ville.

  She lay there in the tangle of her bedclothes and tried to remember what it was that had so bothered her the day before. Her electronic journal would give no clues—she had long since learned that, the way it wiped its memory—her memories—with every shutdown and boot-up cycle.

  There had been something, though, she was sure of it. A face maybe? Or a name? A name.

  She lay there a moment longer, taking another breath in the glare of the single light source, reaching into her mind for some hint of what it was. The air con hummed and whirred, blowing cool air into the apartment.

  There was no time. She had to keep moving. Designated Task #004 was waiting for her. Tardiness would not be tolerated.

  She climbed out of the unsatisfying bed, threw the covers aside and strode across the tiny room of the miniscule apartment and into the refresher cubicle.

  The refresher was small, not much bigger than a large wardrobe, and featured a shower, toilet and basin, above which was a mirror. Citizen 619F switched on the shower, stripping out of her clothes and letting it run hot.

  She could not think in the communal areas. Could not think in the apartment. Something kept making her mind jump back, return to the concept of instructions and designated tasks and orders, orders, orders. Even here, as she conducted her ablutions before getting into the shower, she felt violated, like there was something always in her head, buzzing, distracting her from her own thought process.

  The ventilation.

  The history.

  The man and the word he had said.

  All these things were bobbing around in her mind, like survivors from a sea wreck, bobbing about in the ocean.

  “Put them all together,” Citizen 619F told herself gently. “Keep focus and put them all in the right boxes in your head.”

  She stepped into the shower, luxuriating in its heat, the way that heat ran across her skin with each sluice of water. Water washed over her body, her neck, her hair and face and, in that moment, the whistling in her ears from the ventilation finally stopped and Citizen 619F remembered something.

  Dripping wet, she stepped from the shower and stood before the mirror, wiping at the misted glass with her forearm until she could see her face.

  Baptiste.

  It was her name.

  Not Cat Alpha, Catherine, whatever that was. That name didn’t fit, although it was tantalizing in its familiarity. She just could not place it yet.

  The mirror in the tiny bathroom was misting over again already. Citizen 619F wiped at its surface with the side of her hand, then picked up the towel and wiped it down properly. In the reflective surface she saw herself, naked, red hair and emerald eyes. She moved close to the mirror and stared into her own eyes as the shower continued to spray.

  “Baptiste,” she said in a voice barely more than a whisper. “Who am I? Baptiste?”

  Her mind seemed to ache with the memory, the yearning to remember.

  “Come on,” she told herself fiercely. “You had a name. What was it? Baptiste. Baptiste something, something Baptiste. Something. B— B—”

  The eyes in the mirror watched her eyes, moving when she moved, but always rolling to keep pace with her eyes. She stared harder into them, harder into her own eyes, once believed to be the windows of the soul.

  “B—” she began, feeling the familiarity of the movement of her vocal cords, feeling the way that the name yearned to be spoken, to be freed from its prison. “Brigid,” she said finally. “Brigid Baptiste. I am Brigid Baptiste.”

  The mirror had begun to fog over again as the shower continued to generate condensation. Citizen 619F—Brigid Baptiste—let it run, trusting the sound to mask anything she said while she was here, masking her words from any bugs that the regime might have. She leaned forward and pressed her index finger against the fogging glass of the mirror, carving two letters in the mist: BB, for Brigid Baptiste.

  Then, still naked, she pulled the towel around her shoulders and sat down on the edge of the shower cubicle, where the warm, flowing water continued to drizzle against her back.

  “Brigid Baptiste,” she said, the words coming more confidently now. “Kane and Grant and...and Cerberus. Oh, son of a baron, I remember it all. It’s all inside here, inside me.” She pushed her hair back, clenched her hand tighter against her forehead. “Come on, what else do you have? Don’t let it stop now, Brigid Baptiste. Don’t let all this stuff get forgotten again.”

  The shower continued to flow as Brigid remembered as much as she could of her previous life, the condensation obscuring the two letters she had written in the mirror’s surface. With each recollection, another ten were triggered. Somewhere along the way, she recalled making her way here to Ioville in the billowing snow, meeting the mirror-clad Magistrates and getting captured by them and the things that had happened after she had been drugged, when she had awoken in the area known as Processing. She remembered how the people there had spoken to her, instructing her, performing the hypnotic process in darkness. They had put something
in her brain, she realized, a subliminal trigger that affected her ability to reason, to think.

  “But you didn’t count on this, did you?” she muttered, tapping the side of her head. “You didn’t count on a woman with an eidetic memory, who could never really forget anything no matter how much you did.”

  At Brigid’s back, the water in the shower had gone cold, spraying against her and the cubicle walls in a chilly drizzle like autumn rain.

  * * *

  BRIGID TURNED OFF the shower, dried herself and dressed in the gray overalls and peaked cap of Citizen 619F. It was just a costume now, like playing dress-up, a persona she would put on so that no one else suspected who she really was.

  She moved through the tiny apartment, eyes sharp as she studied everything. There was nothing here that she might use as a weapon, nothing sharp, nothing solid or easily concealed. In fact, there was barely anything in the apartment at all, just an unforgiving couch that doubled as a bed, a food bowl and a spoon that was more like the handleless end of a shovel, roughly the size and shape of a credit card. None of that could be used, which meant she would just have to rely on her other weapons—her mind, her body, the most dependable weapons in her arsenal.

  She moved toward the door, still tucking rogue locks of red-gold hair beneath her cap. “You are Brigid Baptiste,” she muttered to herself as she stood at the closed door. “Do not let them make you forget this. Remember it no matter what they say or make you do.”

  Outside of her apartment, the lobby was oatmeal gray with a coolness that made her shiver involuntarily after the warmth of the shower. She marched through the lobby, out into the thoroughfare beyond.

  A trolleybus was just pulling up across the street where a half-dozen people waited—each of them dressed in identical gray overalls and peaked caps that matched hers.

  “Brigid Baptiste,” she whispered under her breath. “You are Brigid Baptiste.”

  She watched the other people get on the trolleybus, watched it pull away with a purr of its electric motor. She should have been on that bus, she knew—that was her ride into Epsilon Level and her work at the manufactory, performing Designated Task #004 for the good of the ville and the barons. The people who had got on the bus had all stood the same way, Brigid realized—kind of stooped, heads down, watching the ground. She tilted her head down, adopting the same pose, but she kept her eyes looking up, looking forward, watching everything from under the peak of the cap.

  “Brigid Baptiste,” she whispered, just mouthing the name now, not even saying it aloud.

  She could not be late for her shift. That would draw attention to herself, and she was already running late after the time spent in the shower. No need to find an excuse, if she could just move quickly.

  She began to run in the direction of the trolleybus, down the main thoroughfare that led into the central core of the ville where the factories were based. She ran easily, long legs eating up the distance in great, easy strides, arms pumping in easy rhythm, picking up speed and navigating obstacles in her way without conscious thought. It felt good to run—all that combat training with the Mags had kept her trim and in shape, as had the steady diet of nothing but tasteless proteins, but she had not really cut loose like this in three weeks. Now she ran like a gray blur through the walkways, ducking down tight alleyways where the trolley did not go, one time running through and out the lobby of another residential block that was intended for men only—there was no unauthorized fraternizing in Ioville, she realized. Every step of her life for the past twentysomething days had been dictated to her, running her like a robot.

  You’re not a robot, she told herself. You’re...Bap... Brigid. Brigid Baptiste.

  The name almost wouldn’t come. It scared her how difficult it had become already, how much harder it was going to become. Already she was beginning to lose the sense of identity that she had discovered in the shower, the puzzle pieces slipping from their slots, the great deception lowering back into place to cover her eyes, her mind.

  “No,” she hissed to herself. “You’re Baptiste. Brigid Baptiste.”

  She cut through the gray-walled communal lobby of another residential block, slipping out the rear door and rushing onto the street once more, finally outrunning the trolleybus that was making its scheduled stops as it made its way to the manufactories of Epsilon Level.

  * * *

  THE WALKWAYS WERE SILENT, the gray-white walls bland and characterless. Brigid eyed them differently now, saw the way they seemed to drain the color from the world. It was as if this whole ville was dedicated to the mundane, to making things listless and dreary. There were vents on every wall, she noticed, set behind shaped grids, circulating the air into the walkways, the buildings.

  She trotted into the entrance doors to the Sandcat factory, stripping out of her clothes to prepare for decontamination.

  * * *

  SHE HAD BEEN on the production line for three hours. Her break was almost due, but its imminence promised no letup in her duties, only its arrival. She had been thinking about Brigid Baptiste—thinking hard. And yet, each time she thought she had it she had lost it again, almost feeling the thoughts slipping from her grasp.

  There was something here, Brigid realized. Something out here, in the factory, in the walkways, maybe—probably—everywhere, that was doing its utmost to hinder her thoughts. Every time she stopped thinking about it she would start to lose that grip on her name, like it was being washed out to sea and she could only barely keep hold of it.

  Brigid Baptiste.

  The voice in her head, weeks ago now, the one that had plucked at her conscience long after its echoes had faded, had called her Baptiste. That voice had been inside her head, and she knew now what it was—a communications signal, a broadcast aimed directly at her.

  Working on the back panels of a Sandcat, Brigid screwed up her eyes and tried to remember the communications device, the thing that she and...and Kane and...Grant... What they had used to speak to the people in...in... Dammit, what was the name of that place?

  Brigid...Baptiste, she reminded herself grimly, forcing the name into her head.

  “Citizen 619F, is something wrong?” The voice came from behind Brigid. It was her shift supervisor, Citizen 240M, a tall, gaunt man with dark skin and traces of iron gray in his black hair.

  Brigid turned to look at him, opened her eyes when she realized that they were still screwed tight.

  “You stopped performing,” Citizen 240M stated emotionlessly. “Is something wrong? Are you sick?”

  “My...” Brigid began, fumbling for an excuse. “Something in my eye. Dust from the panels.”

  The gaunt man looked down at Brigid from his position behind the partially constructed Sandcat at the side of the assembly line. “Wash your eye out under cold water until it is clear,” he ordered. “Then return to work.”

  “Acknowledged,” Brigid said. She wondered if this was the first conversation that had occurred in this factory this week—perhaps even this month.

  Relieved from her workstation for a moment, Brigid made her way to the tiny-but-functional restroom to wash out the imaginary speck of dust that had fallen in her eye. As she walked she realized, frighteningly, that she was forgetting her name again. Citizen 619F. That’s what the man had called her, that felt like it was her name. No, she told herself. Baptiste. Baptiste was her name.

  She remained in the bathroom a long time, running the faucet and just staring at her face in the mirror. Without the cap she looked more like herself, more like that stranger called Brigid Baptiste.

  All around her, the air vents pumped filtered air into the room. Her gaze was drawn to one as she looked in the mirror, and she turned to look at it directly. A wired grid with an aperture to direct air down, so that it blew through the room. There were ten of these in the room, more than seemed necessary, and Brigid reme
mbered what she had been looking into before, about the air monitoring in Ioville and the emphasis on artificial ventilation and how this seemed unprecedented compared to the historical records of the other villes.

  With a sudden inspiration, Brigid strode purposefully across the room and reached up for the vent. It was above her, so high she was barely able to reach it. But holding her hand up she could feel the breeze it generated, the way it played lightly across her fingers and the palm of her hand.

  She drew her hand away very slowly, feeling the path that the breeze took, tracing it through the air. It was blowing against her, she realized. Blowing against her face in a soft, subtle whisper.

  Brigid strode across the room, put her hand against one of the vents on the opposite wall and traced its breeze as she had the first. This one, too, blew against her, licking against the sides of her head.

  “Brigid Baptiste,” she reminded herself as she felt the air play against her ear. She knew she could lose the memory again, if she wasn’t careful.

  Now, why would an air-con engineer design a system that blew air in people’s faces? she wondered. And if they did, why so subtly?

  There was something here she was not seeing, not quite able to comprehend. The elaborate air flow plans in Cappa Level, the exhaustive ventilation system that ensured no outside air entered the ville without being filtered—it all meant something, but what?

  She knew she had been gone too long. She trotted back to the door and hurried outside, pacing across the factory floor to her work crew on the production line. The supervisor said nothing, as if he had not noticed her protracted absence. Even stranger, he reminded her to take her break just ten minutes later, which she did.

  Brigid sat in the penned-off area of the factory that had been designated for breaks, listening to the roar of the massive conveyor belts and the hum of machinery, the hiss of the acetylene torches and the whir of screws being fastened in place. But her attention was elsewhere. She gazed around the room, sipping from a beaker of water as she traced the vents on the walls. They were evenly paced and ran the whole length of the vast room, each one designed just like the ones in the bathroom with their strange, open central aperture like a spout.