Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “What?” he says when he sees me come in, jabbing a thick finger at Stop on the machine in front of him, bringing whatever piece of reality he’s watching to a sudden freeze frame. “What do you want?”

  “There’s a stretch I need to see.”

  He sighs, a heavy man’s heavy sigh, making sure I know how irritated I have made him by my presence. I tell him what I need, and he says, “Isn’t that the same thing your partner was wanting? That girl?”

  “Ms. Paige.”

  “Right, right. Well guess what? It’s already processed for return.”

  “But it’s still here?”

  “Yeah. Well…yes. Physically. But it’s been processed.” This is his fiefdom, his keep, and Woody in his sluggish way is active in its defense. There is a process that defines the request I've just made: officer engages with the Liaison, the Liaison files with the Record, the Record upon due consideration produces the desired stretch or stretches. Woody heaves himself up out of his chair, pulls open the filing cabinet behind him. “Lemme get you a G-9.” He looks at his watch. “Actually, it’s after six. So this’ll be tomorrow. Or, actually—”

  “Actually,” I say, “I need to see it right now. Where is it, Woody?”

  “What?”

  “I need to watch it now.”

  I reach across him, to the slot on the side of his screen, and eject the stretch he’s been reviewing. For a split second I imagine someone watching us, in some far future, in the basement of the Permanent Record, some officer or archivist who for some reason has requested this stretch for review, the reality being generated in this room, right now: Laszlo Ratesic makes a rash demand of Woody Stone, who pushes back...

  “The fuck are you doing, Ratesic? No.”

  “Where is that stretch?”

  “Ratesic. C’mon.”

  Woody’s eyes make an unconscious flicker to the rolling cart parked in the corner, behind me, loaded with unsorted stretches marked for return. I can feel it in there, sense what I need, and it comes to me too, how to get it.

  “Woody," I say, finding the right voice for it. Reining myself in. "Did you know that she’s dead?”

  "Who?"

  "Ms. Paige, Woody. My partner."

  “The…” Woody's voice catches, he has to start again. “The girl?”

  “Speculator,” I say. “Agent. My partner.” There are more words. Hero. Martyr. I skip them. I’ve got him already: Woody is gawping at me, his face slack with sad disbelief.

  “That girl is dead? Dead how?”

  “It was in the Authority.”

  “I didn’t—” He looks at me imploringly, his thick chin trembling a little.. “I didn't see it. I’m in here, man. I’m working. Will you tell me?”

  He liked Aysa in their brief moments together, and he’s stricken now. I take it. I use it.

  “She and I cracked an anomaly, okay? A big one. There was a grave assault in progress, and Aysa died in the field.”

  “Wow.” He shakes his head, and then, in his bafflement and grief, requests a two-step verification, confirmation of what he knows he heard. “She died?”

  I nod. He keeps shaking his head. He’s as big as I am, Woody Stone, maybe even a little bigger. Bigger around the middle, with a sagging gut and thick legs. Stubble and sallow cheeks, a life lived staring at screens. “But you cracked it? The anomaly you were working? You dug it down to the truth?”

  I am silent. “I’m trying, Woody. I’m trying.”

  I wait. He grits his teeth. Glances up at the capture above his desk, bearing witness. “All right. Well—all right.”

  He goes over and crouches at the laden cart and paws through it. He scatters stretches like playing cards on his rug and sorts through them until he finds the one I’m after. He slides it in and cues it and steps away, back into the far corner of his office, his mouth twisting in discomfort at his role in this malfeasance.

  “Play,” I tell the machine, and I watch it how Charlie would have watched it. I watch it how Aysa would have watched it: leaning forward, eyes narrowed, pulse active, alert and alive.

  And then, before Woody can stop me, I tell it to play again.

  Three times I watch Mose Crane crawl up the pitch, and three times he falls, flailing, and three times I stare at that smudge of shadow, which is pointing in the wrong direction. It is pointing west—a shadow that would be cast in the late afternoon, not at daybreak. The shadow makes no sense. Except it makes sense as a marker, a symbol, a representation of an idea—that this is supposed to be a clue. This is supposed to draw me in. There is no question. The shadow is there and there is no question that it is there, but it is not a shadow cast by a person, it is not the shadow of the frame of a skylight. It is a shadow of something that was never there, a mark left to draw me, a false clue.

  The clue drew Aysa’s attention and then it drew mine, but the clue was planted there. An anomaly is a mismatch of facts, suggesting a deliberate falsehood beneath the surface truth. But what if the anomaly is itself the deliberate falsehood?

  This stretch was altered subsequent to creation to include the shadow so that we would see it.

  The stretch is still rolling. I tell it to stop, just as Mose Crane hits the ground again, and the machine obeys and the room fills with the subsequent silence.

  I wish I could say “Stop” to everything, to all of this, shout “Stop” and let reality hang in the balance for a minute, or forever. Stop, I think.

  What truth is confirmed by the lie I’ve found?

  “Hey, Stone.”

  “Yeah?” His voice is hesitant. I don’t know what I look like, what kind of wildness has come into my eyes, but I’m making Woody nervous.

  “How does a stretch get changed?”

  “What?”

  “Reality, Woody. Is there a way to alter one of these stretches of reality, once they’ve been captured and transferred?”

  Woody stares back at me, scratches his thick neck. I have reached the edge of his understanding. He looks at his machine. Dumbfounded. It is like I am asking if there is any way to alter a dog so that it can fly, to alter a fish to make it stand up and walk across the street.

  “No,” he says finally, but there is a tremble in his voice. A truer answer, just beneath: I have no fucking idea.

  “‘No’ because you know the answer to be no, based on evidence?”

  “‘No’ because—‘No’ because—” Woody is stammering. It is like he is caught in a loop, a half hitch of reality, as if his reality has been altered, spooled around on itself to say “‘No’ because” and only “‘No’ because” forever.

  “‘No’ because—” Finally, with a deep breath: “‘No’ because nobody would ever do that.”

  “I know,” I say, but the problem is, I’ve already figured out that yes, somebody would do that, and now I’ve come down hard on a bone truth, on the brutal bone truth that if there is ever anything that somebody could do—something violent, something vicious, something cruel and unconscionable—if there is ever anything that somebody is able to do, somebody will find a way to do it, somebody is going to do it, somebody has already done it.

  So of course someone has figured out how to alter stretches to make them reflect reality that never occurred. Someone has done it. Someone has done it to this one, the same person who invented Mose Crane so I might find him.

  The only question is who did it, but that isn’t a question anymore.

  I know it, I have known it, I can't not know it anymore.

  “Woody?”

  “Yeah? Yes?”

  He is wary of me now, I’m an animal set loose in his small office, charging in circles. He doesn’t know what I’m going to do next. “I need to do a live watch.”

  “Well—”

  “Don’t say no. I need to connect to live captures.”

  “Where?”

  “The Record.”

  “I—come on. Laszlo. I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  He can’t beca
use the world is watching. Because reality is always being captured. Because if anyone sees him do such a thing willingly, he will face the consequences. So he will have to do it unwillingly, that’s all.

  I draw my weapon and aim it at Woody. “A live feed. Right now. A tapestry. Every basement. Now.”

  Woody turns back to his deck and I keep the gun aimed at him, continuing the performance, until he presses a final button and the blackness of his screen lights up into a thousand subdivided screens. The Record itself has eyes inside it, of course it does, the Record is on the Record, and Woody the magician can open its eyes, open all of those thousands of eyes at once. He turns his screen into a tapestry of screens, divided into a dozen boxes which then scroll, each of them, and we are suddenly everywhere inside of those famous basements, peering into the catacombic guts of reality itself.

  It doesn't take long to find him.

  Arlo Vasouvian in the dim subbasement light, moving with deliberation along a narrow carpeted space between two file cabinets.

  “What the fuck?” says Woody. As we watch, the old man peels the lid off a box. His bifocals are perched on the tip of his small nose; he’s squinting, looking for something. “Is that—"

  “Yes,” I say. But I can’t say the name. It is too painful. There would be glass in my throat. It is one thing to suspect that your heart has been broken, another thing to know.

  “What floor is he on?” I croak. “Which capture are we looking at?”

  “Uh—sub nine,” says Woody. “What’s he doing?”

  “What’s on sub nine?”

  But before Woody can answer, Arlo turns to the capture that is watching him, turns and looks at us watching him, and smiles.

  “What the fuck?” says Woody, pushing away from his machines and looking at the ground.

  Arlo's smile widens into a grin as he is looks right at the capture and raises one hand in greeting, because he knows we’re watching. He can see us seeing him, and his cheery acknowledgment is as sharp and violent as a punch. He is inside reality, looking out.

  I turn away from the screen at the sound I hear behind me, the sound of Woody being quietly sick into the trash can besides his desk. I breathe deep and fight off the same unsettling need, because I am wobbling too, walking slow, dizzy, through a world shuddering under my feet.

  Coda (setup for sequel):

  Agent Charlie Ratesic, the hero laid low, muttered from the depths of his unconsciousness while his head lolled back and forth in his hospital bed. The machines keeping him alive and free of pain beeped endlessly in the small room, their rhythm like a mechanical pulsebeat.

  I was sitting on a chair by the edge of his bed, as I had been sitting for a week, keeping him company, telling him stories, waiting for him to wake.

  “I’m sorry, Charles,” I said, as much to myself as to him, as much to the captures in the room as to the person who lay before me, past the reach of hearing. “I am so dreadfully sorry.”

  I had said these words so many times already. Others had come and gone. Charlie’s heartbroken parents, our colleagues bearing flowers, cards, the doughnuts they knew he loved, which at the end of each day I took out with me and distributed to the doctors and nurses. Poor Laszlo’s, Charlie’s brother, had come every day, come and sat silently beside me for hours after his own shift was through.

  Technically, I had little to apologize for. I had told Charlie not to return to that warehouse. Indeed, I had not only warned him but ordered him not to. He knew that it would be my duty and my responsibility to take the steps necessary to shut it down: an Off Record house could not be countenanced, and I had to act.

  He knew we would be going in there, and that we would come in with weapons blazing.

  And yet when the decisive day came, and we swept in with the full force of the State, there he was, still undercover, skulking among the conspirators, unable to free himself from the idea that there was a monster left for him to find.

  He had been caught in the cross fire. Shot six times, including twice in the stomach and once in the chest—a bullet that pierced the lungs and brought him perilously close to dying right there, off the Record, on a dirty warehouse floor in Glendale.

  And perhaps that would have been better, I thought with sadness as I listened to the machines breathing for him. As I watched the medicine dripping into his arm. Drip, drip.

  “Arlo?”

  I had fallen asleep, I suppose. My eyes opened to find his looking into mine. Charlie, dear Charlie. He spoke, clearly but with difficulty. “The monster,” he said, and I closed my eyes. Still. “I have to…” He cleared his throat. Turned his head to one side.

  “Goodness, Charlie,” I told him. I opened my eyes, leaned forward and took poor Charlie's hand. “I wish you would take pleasure in your success.”

  “Success,” he murmured. “Success.”

  It was like he could not accept the word. Like he was rolling it around in his mouth, tasting it, unsatisfied. The machines beeped and hummed.

  “Yes, Charlie,” I said. “Success. Numerous arrests were made. A grave assault on the Objectively So was ended. All because of you, Charlie. Because of you.”

  “The monster—could be anyone.” He couldn’t stop. He wouldn’t. My old friend, still in the thrall of this wild idea. What was to be done? He looked up at me. Desperate that someone believe him. “What if it were an Expert, Arlo? What if it were someone from the Office of the Record?”

  “Or”—I stood up, wiped my hands, leaned as far over his bed as I could, whispered as quietly as possible—“a Speculator?”

  23.

  All four of them are dead, each with a single neat bullet hole through the center of the forehead.

  The duty team, caught unawares by a familiar face. I recognize them all, Librarians who worked the entrance of the Record, rigorous and polite and efficient.

  The first is just inside the door, thrown back against the wall, still wearing a stunned expression, blood in a frozen trickle from the bullet hole down into the line of the eyebrows.

  The second is centered in the lobby, slumped at the wanding station, thrown across the small desk with one hand outstretched, clutching his weapon as if caught just before he could fire.

  The third is at the elevators, between the two shafts and just beneath the keypad, and she sits with legs outstretched and arms slack, and her face turned toward the elevator just to her right, where the fourth of them is wedged between the elevator door and the wall of the car itself, half in and half out, keeping it from closing, inviting me in.

  The lights in the elevator car are dim but I can see the button panel, and there is a dark red fingerprint on the button marked 9, a clue so glaring and egregious it has to have been purposeful. A taunt.

  Subbasement nine. That's where you'll find me. Come along, now…down we go...

  I push the button gingerly with my forefinger and it comes away tacky.

  At the last minute, though, I don’t take the elevator. I step off before the door can close, step around the fallen bodies of the Librarians, and take the spiral stairs instead.

  I go down slowly, one floor at a time with my weapon drawn, and listen at every floor. Pause at sub four, where Silvie’s offices are tucked away. Pause again at sub five and then again, halfway between six and seven, where I hear or think I hear the minute click of a file drawer shifting open. The blood button was 9 and that may be where he is, or it may have been another artful misdirection, another signal rigged to catch my eye and hold it while worlds move in shadow all around me.

  One more clue for me to find, one more part of the trap that was set for me, for my clumsy feet to stumble into.

  With each footfall the ornate structure of the staircase shimmies beneath my heavy frame. The metal stairs are very old. There is gold detail at every balustrade.

  I breathe heavily as I descend.

  “I can hear you, Mr. Ratesic. Laszlo.” The, low and wavering in the stillness of the Record. “I can hear you coming.�
��

  I’m halfway down, between sub eight and sub nine, and I stop and perch on the edge of a stair. His gentle creak of a voice echoes from somewhere close by.

  “You were never one for sneaking up.”

  There are no offices on sub nine, as Silvie’s office sits on four. Just endless intersecting hallways, file rooms, and review rooms. The hallways are dim, lit only by the cool red emergency lights of the Record after hours. Helpless to do otherwise, I go in the direction of Arlo’s voice. And it is even easier than that: there is blood on the floor, dark fresh heel prints on the tile.

  I follow those footsteps, still not believing, still not wanting to believe, that it’s him I am following. Still unwilling to live in the world in which he is the villain at the end of the hall.

  And yet here he is. Around a corner, the sixth door down. He is seated at a table, examining a file. He looks up and squints behind his glasses, gives me his old fond smile as I come into the room with my gun raised and aimed at his head.

  “Get up, Mr. Vasouvian.”

  He shakes his head and murmurs, “No, Mr. Ratesic.”

  The file on the review desk is deep blue: a CSE. Collated Significant Event. I take two steps into the room. All around me are files. Cabinets full of folders; binders on shelves. Up to the ceiling, down to the floor. Collated truth, running from floor to ceiling and to the ends of the walls.

  My gun is aimed at Arlo’s head and I am deciding whether I would really do it.

  “You have to get up, Mr. Vasouvian. You have to stand up and come with me.”

  “No, no. No, I’m not doing that.”

  He seems glad to see me; he seems as he always does. He smiles, and scratches his nose, and sighs. There are flecks of blood on his glasses, a smear on his necktie and on one rumpled lapel of his corduroy jacket. He has killed four people, and left their bodies for me to find.

  “I’m not going to do that,” he says. “This is not a normal situation. You can't think you are going to—what?—arrest me? You will shoot me, Mr. Ratesic, but not right away.”