by Neil Clarke
I didn’t lose anyone in the Conquest.
Kai stands with me at my mother’s funeral. Her face in the casket is serene, free of pain.
Kai’s touch on my back is gentle and supportive. I want to tell thim not to feel too bad. Thie had tried so hard to save her, as thie had tried to save my father before her, but the human body is fragile, and we don’t yet know how to effectively use the advances taught to us by the Tawnin.
We pick our way around a pile of rubble that has been cemented in place by melted asphalt. I try to bring my thoughts under control. Woods unsettled me. “Any leads on the detonator?” I ask.
“It’s pretty sophisticated,” Claire says. “Based on the surviving pieces, there was a magnetometer connected to a timer circuit. My best guess is the magnetometer was triggered by the presence of large quantities of metal nearby, like the Judgment Ship. And that started a timer that was set to detonate just as the Reborn reached the ground.
“The setup requires fairly detailed knowledge of the mass of the Judgment Ship; otherwise the yachts and cargo ships sailing through the Harbor could have set it off.”
“Also knowledge of the operation of the Judgment Ship,” I add. “They had to know how many Reborn were going to be here yesterday, and calculate how long it would take to complete the ceremony and lower them to the ground.”
“It definitely took a lot of meticulous planning,” Claire said. “This is not the work of a loner. We’re dealing with a sophisticated terrorist organization.”
Claire pulls me to a stop. We’re at a good vantage point to see the bottom of the explosion crater. It’s thinner than I would have expected. Whoever had done this had used directed explosives that focused the energy upwards, presumably to minimize the damage to the crowd on the sides.
The crowd.
A memory of myself as a child comes to me unbidden.
Autumn, cool air, the smell of the sea and something burning. A large, milling crowd, but no one is making any noise. Those at the edge of the crowd, like me, push to move closer to the center, while those near the center push to get out, like a colony of ants swarming over a bird corpse. Finally, I make my way to the center, where bright bonfires burn in dozens of oil drums.
I reach into my coat and take out an envelope. I open it and hand a stack of photographs to the man standing by one of the oil drums. He flips through them and takes a few out and hands the rest back to me.
“You can keep these and go line up for surgery,” he says.
I look through the photographs in my hand: Mom carrying me as a baby. Dad lifting me over his shoulders at a fair. Mom and me asleep, holding the same pose. Mom and Dad and me playing a board game. Me in a cowboy costume, Mom behind me trying to make sure the scarf fit right.
He tosses the other photographs into the oil drum, and as I turn away, I try to catch a glimpse of what’s on them before they’re consumed by the flames.
“You all right?”
“Yes,” I say, disoriented. “Still a bit of the aftereffects of the explosion.”
I can trust Claire.
“Listen,” I say, “Do you ever think about what you did before you were Reborn?”
Claire focuses her sharp eyes on me. She doesn’t blink. “Do not go down that path, Josh. Think of Kai. Think of your life, the real one you have now.”
“You’re right,” I say. “Woods just rattled me a bit.”
“You might want to take a few days off. You’re not doing anyone favors if you can’t concentrate.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Claire seems skeptical, but she doesn’t push the issue. She understands how I feel. Kai would be able to see the guilt and regret in my mind. In that ultimate intimacy, there is nowhere to hide. I can’t bear to be home and doing nothing while Kai tries to comfort me.
“As I was saying,” she continues, “this area was resurfaced by the W. G. Turner Construction Company a month ago. That was likely when the bomb was placed, and Woods was on the crew. You should start there.”
The woman leaves the box of files on the table in front of me.
“These are all the employees and contractors who worked on the Courthouse Way resurfacing project.”
She scurries away as though I’m contagious, afraid to exchange more than the absolute minimum number of words with a TPB agent.
In a way, I suppose I am contagious. When I was Reborn, those who were close to me, who had known what I had done, whose knowledge of me formed part of the identity that was Joshua Rennon, would have had to be ported and those memories excised as part of my Rebirth. My crimes, whatever they were, had infected them.
I don’t even know who they might be.
I shouldn’t be thinking like this. It’s not healthy to dwell on my former life, a dead man’s life.
I scan through the files one by one, punch the names into my phone so that Claire’s algorithms back at the office can make a network out of them, link them to entries in millions of databases, trawl through the radical anti-Tawnin forums and Xenophobic sites, and find connections.
But I still read through the files meticulously, line by line. Sometimes the brain makes connections that Claire’s computers cannot.
W. G. Turner had been careful. All the applicants had been subjected to extensive background searches, and none appears suspicious to the algorithms.
After a while, the names merge into an undistinguishable mess: Kelly Eickhoff, Hugh Raker, Sofia Leday, Walker Lincoln, Julio Costas . . .
Walker Lincoln.
I go back and look at the file again. The photograph shows a white male in his thirties. Narrow eyes, receding hairline, no smile for the camera. Nothing seems particularly notable. He doesn’t look familiar at all.
But something about the name makes me hesitate.
The photographs curl up in the flames.
The one at the top shows my father standing in front of our house. He’s holding a rifle, his face grim. As the flame swallows him, I catch a pair of crossed street signs in the last remaining corner of the photograph.
Walker and Lincoln.
I find myself shivering, even though the heat is turned up high in the office.
I take out my phone and pull up the computer report on Walker Lincoln: credit card records, phone logs, search histories, web presence, employment, and school summaries. The algorithms flagged nothing as unusual. Walker Lincoln seems the model Average Citizen.
I have never seen a profile where not a single thing was flagged by Claire’s paranoid algorithms. Walker Lincoln is too perfect.
I look through the purchase history on his credit cards: fire logs, starter fluid, fireplace simulators, outdoor grills.
Then, starting about two months ago, nothing.
As thir fingers are about to push in, I speak.
“Please, not tonight.”
The tips of Kai’s secondary arms stop, hesitate, and gently caress my back. After a moment, thie backs up. Thir eyes look at me, like two pale moons in the dim light of the apartment.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “There’s a lot on my mind, unpleasant thoughts. I don’t want to burden you.”
Kai nods, a human gesture that seems incongruous. I appreciate the effort thie is making to make me feel better. Thie has always been very understanding.
Thie backs off, leaving me naked in the middle of the room.
The landlady proclaims complete ignorance of the life of Walker Lincoln. Rent (which in this part of Charlestown is dirt cheap) is direct deposited on the first of every month, and she hasn’t set eyes on him since he moved in four months ago. I wave my badge, and she hands me the key to his apartment and watches wordlessly as I climb the stairs.
I open the door and turn on the light; I’m greeted with a sight out of a furniture store display: white couch, leather loveseat, glass coffee table with a f
ew magazines in a neat stack, abstract paintings on walls. There’s no clutter, nothing out of its assigned place. I take a deep breath. No smell of cooking, detergent, the mix of aromas that accompany places lived in by real people.
The place seems familiar and strange at the same time, like walking through déjà vu.
I walk through the apartment, opening doors. The closets and bedroom are as artfully arranged as the living room. Perfectly ordinary, perfectly unreal.
Sunlight coming in from the windows along the western wall makes clean parallelograms against the gray carpet. The golden light is Kai’s favorite shade.
There is, however, a thin layer of dust over everything. Maybe a month or two’s worth.
Walker Lincoln is a ghost.
Finally, I turn around and see something hanging on the back of the front door, a mask.
I pick it up, put it on, and step into the bathroom.
I’m quite familiar with this type of mask. Made of soft, pliant, programmable fibers, it’s based on Tawnin technology, the same material that makes up the strands that release the Reborn back into the world. Activated with body heat, it molds itself into a pre-programmed shape. No matter the contours of the face beneath it, it rearranges itself into the appearance of a face it has memorized. Approved only for law enforcement, we sometimes use such masks to infiltrate Xenophobic cells.
In the mirror, the cool fibers of the mask gradually come alive like Kai’s body when I touch thim, pushing and pulling against the skin and muscles of my face. For a moment my face is a shapeless lump, like a monster’s out of some nightmare.
And then the roiling motions stop, and I’m looking into the face of Walker Lincoln.
Kai’s was the first face I saw the last time I was Reborn.
It was a face with dark fish-like eyes and skin that pulsated as though tiny maggots were wriggling just under the surface. I cringed and tried to move away but there was nowhere to go. My back was against a steel wall.
The skin around thir eyes contracted and expanded again, an alien expression I did not understand. Thie backed up, giving me some space.
Slowly, I sat up and looked around. I was on a narrow steel slab attached to the wall of a tiny cell. The lights were too bright. I felt nauseated. I closed my eyes.
And a tsunami of images came to me that I could not process. Faces, voices, events in fast motion. I opened my mouth to scream.
And Kai was upon me in a second. Thie wrapped thir primary arms around my head, forcing me to stay still. A mixture of floral and spicy scents enveloped me, and the memory of it suddenly emerged from the chaos in my mind. The smell of home. I clung to it like a floating plank in a roiling sea.
Thie wrapped thir secondary arms around me, patting my back, seeking an opening. I felt them push through a hole over my spine, a wound that I did not know was there, and I wanted to cry out in pain—
—and the chaos in my mind subsided. I was looking at the world through thir eyes and mind: my own naked body, trembling.
Let me help you.
I struggled for a bit, but thie was too strong, and I gave in.
What happened?
You’re aboard the Judgment Ship. The old Josh Rennon did something very bad and had to be punished.
I tried to remember what it was that I had done, but could recall nothing.
He is gone. We had to cut him out of this body to rescue you.
Another memory floated to the surface of my mind, gently guided by the currents of Kai’s thoughts.
I am sitting in a classroom, the front row. Sunlight coming in from the windows along the western wall makes clean parallelograms on the ground. Kai paces slowly back and forth in front of us.
“Each of us is composed of many groupings of memories, many personalities, many coherent patterns of thoughts.” The voice comes from a black box Kai wears around thir neck. It’s slightly mechanical, but melodious and clear.
“Do you not alter your behavior, your expressions, even your speech when you’re with your childhood friends from your hometown compared to when you’re with your new friends from the big city? Do you not laugh differently, cry differently, even become angry differently when you’re with your family than when you’re with me?
The students around me laugh a little at this, as do I. As Kai reaches the other side of the classroom, thie turns around and our eyes meet. The skin around thir eyes pulls back, making them seem even bigger, and my face grows warm.
“The unified individual is a fallacy of traditional human philosophy. It is, in fact, the foundation of many unenlightened, old customs. A criminal, for example, is but one person inhabiting a shared body with many others. A man who murders may still be a good father, husband, brother, son, and he is a different man when he plots death than when he bathes his daughter, kisses his wife, comforts his sister, and cares for his mother. Yet the old human criminal justice system would punish all of these men together indiscriminately, would judge them together, imprison them together, even kill them together. Collective punishment. How barbaric! How cruel!”
I imagine my mind the way Kai describes it: partitioned into pieces, an individual divided. There may be no human institution that the Tawnin despise more than our justice system. Their contempt makes perfect sense when considered in the context of their mind-to-mind communication. The Tawnin have no secrets from each other and share an intimacy we can only dream of. The idea of a justice system so limited by the opacity of the individual that it must resort to ritualized adversarial combat rather than direct access to the truth of the mind must seem to them a barbarity.
Kai glances at me, as though thie could hear my thoughts, though I know that is not possible without my being ported. But the thought brings pleasure to me. I am Kai’s favorite student.
I placed my arms around Kai.
My teacher, my lover, my spouse. I was once adrift, and now I have come home. I am beginning to remember.
I felt the scar on the back of thir head. Thie trembled.
What happened here?
I don’t remember. Don’t worry about it.
I carefully caressed thim, avoiding the scar.
The Rebirth is a painful process. Your biology did not evolve as ours, and the parts of your mind are harder to tease apart, to separate out the different persons. It will take some time for the memories to settle. You have to re-remember, relearn the pathways needed to make sense of them again, to reconstruct yourself again. But you’re now a better person, free from the diseased parts we had to cut out.
I hung onto Kai, and we picked up the pieces of myself together.
I show Claire the mask, and the too-perfect electronic profile. “To get access to this kind of equipment and to create an alias with an electronic trail this convincing requires someone with a lot of power and access. Maybe even someone inside the Bureau, since we need to scrub electronic databases to cleanse the records of the Reborn.”
Claire bites her bottom lip as she glances at the display on my phone and regards the mask with skepticism. “That seems really unlikely. All the Bureau employees are ported and are regularly probed. I don’t see how a mole among us can stay hidden.”
“Yet it’s the only explanation.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Claire tells me. “Adam has been ported. Tau is doing the probe now. Should be done in half an hour.”
I practically fall into the chair next to her. Exhaustion over the last two days settles over me like a heavy blanket. I have been avoiding Kai’s touch, for reasons that I cannot even explain. I feel divided from myself.
I tell myself to stay awake, just a little longer.
Kai and I are sitting on the leather loveseat. Thir big frame means that we are squeezed in tightly. The fireplace is behind us and I can feel the gentle heat against the back of my neck. Thir left arms gently stroke my back. I’m tense.
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My parents are on the white couch across from us.
“I’ve never seen Josh this happy,” my mother says. And her smile is such a relief that I want to hug her.
“I’m glad you feel that way,” says Kai, with thir black voice box. “I think Josh was worried about how you might feel about me—about us.”
“There are always going to be Xenophobes,” my father says. He sounds a little out of breath. I know that one day I will recognize this as the beginning of his sickness. A tinge of sorrow tints my happy memory.
“Terrible things were done,” Kai says. “We do know that. But we always want to look to the future.”
“So do we,” my father says. “But some people are trapped in the past. They can’t let the dead lie buried.”
I look around the room and notice how neat the house is. The carpet is immaculate, the end tables free of clutter. The white couch my parents are sitting on is spotless. The glass coffee table between us is empty save for a stack of artfully arranged magazines.
The living room is like the showroom of a furniture store.
I jerk awake. The pieces of my memories have become as unreal as Walker Lincoln’s apartment.
Tau, Claire’s spouse, is at the door. The tips of thir secondary arms are mangled, oozing blue blood. Thie stumbles.
Claire is by thir side in a moment. “What happened?”
Instead of answering, Tau tears Claire’s jacket and blouse away, and thir thicker, less delicate primary arms hungrily, blindly seek the Tawnin port on Claire’s back. When they finally find the opening, they plunge in and Claire gasps, going limp immediately.
I turn my eyes away from this scene of intimacy. Tau is in pain and needs Claire.
“I should go,” I say, getting up.
“Adam had booby-trapped his spine,” Tau says through thir voice box.
I pause.
“When I ported him, he was cooperative and seemed resigned to his fate. But when I began the probe, a miniature explosive device went off, killing him instantly. I guess some of you still hate us so much that you’d rather die than be Reborn.”