by Неизвестный
I felt cold, and not just because of the wind. “This really is the twenty-fifth century, isn’t it?”
“Yes, miss.”
I wanted to go home. I’d spent my whole life chasing reality, trying not to get sucked into a WORLD-based existence like most people, but now I didn’t want this to be real.
The problem with reality is it doesn’t care what you want.
I spotted a trapdoor in the roof and went for it like a mouse diving into its hole. Inside, the gatehouse was less castle-y, with ordinary stairs and wide gray corridors, more evidence that this was real; if it was a WORLD they’d have kept it authentic. Two of the people from up top followed me, a female suit about my age and an older guy in a coverall that said NaLiSu on the pocket. The female suit led the way down through several levels where people in military uniforms were working at desktop computers and out to a big yard surrounded by a sloping drystone wall.
Trucks rumbled in through a security chicane with two hairpin bends that hid the world outside the gate. Each one stopped for about a minute in the chicane, then got directed into one of the big hangars inside the yard. There were a lot of other buildings too. It was all very administrative and functional-looking.
“They do it with lasers,” the older guy said. “I don’t know the details, but it turns out light can bend space. And once you can bend space, that bends time. It’s all in Einstein.”
“What’s Einstein?” I said.
He gave me a pitying look. “Died about a hundred years before you were born. See,” he said to the female suit. “This is what you’re creating. Plundering the future to keep your kids spoiled and ignorant.”
“What’s that smell?” I said.
The female suit said, “Exhaust fumes. These trucks run on gasoline. We can’t risk letting the downstreamers steal our battery technology.”
The older guy sniffed. “In the next century upstream, they’ve already got it. We take it off them. But it’s not going to be easy.”
“What’s in the trucks?”
The guy had crooked, discolored teeth. “Rice, mostly.”
Little black shapes fluttered across the darkening sky. Bats. I’d seen virtual ones before, but these were real. There was something exuberant about their flight that just couldn’t have been generated by an algorithm. And green stuff grew in the cracks between the stones of the wall. The truck engines made the same noise that you’d expect, but throatier, louder, because it wasn’t electronically generated to prevent collisions—it was real.
I looked at the female suit. Her neat, practical look made me feel embarrassed by my pink hair and temp-tats. “How do I get a job here?”
She laughed. “You can’t. We’re closing this era down.”
“Moving upstream,” the older guy said. “Getting too hot in this century.”
“He comes from the twenty-seven-hundreds,” she said. “Started out as a supplier, jumped to the logistics and procurement side. That’s one way to get a job with us. Be born in the future.”
She was sneering at me. Looking down on me because I was a noob. For some reason, I could take it from the old guy, but not from her. “Well, screw you,” I said. “You’re only a gofer anyway.” I wandered away from them across the yard. The trucks had stopped coming in. The human staff banged the gates shut. It was getting dark.
While we were talking, I’d had my OPU working on an environmental analysis of my new “secretary” identity. I was using harvested processing power, which constrained me to a rate hardly faster than the public datarate here. But I had some black-hat tools purchased from contacts in the New SSR, and these now spat out preliminary results telling me that I had access to a bunch of self-explanatory facilities such as “Dining Hall,” as well as something called the Mallett Gate, which did not show up on the map the tools helpfully pushed onto my left retina.
The noise of a helicopter announced the return of my guy and his companions. His nice shirt was smudged and dirty. He smelled like burning.
We ate in the dining hall with the day-shift staff of the Kanto Collection Point (KCP), which was what this was. My heavy consumption of onboard power had given me a ravenous appetite, but the food would’ve tasted good anyway. Real baked fish, real leafy greens, and rice that made me feel like I was six years old again. None of it was tank-grown or reconstituted. It came from the farms here which supplied the goods we trucked through the collection point and back home to 2082.
“We can’t take too many more losses like today,” my guy said. “The instability premium is cutting into our margins.”
“They’ve got it worse in Kansai,” the old guy said. “The downstreamers there are using suicide bombers.”
I said, “What’ve they got against us?”
I’d already picked up a lot from listening to people. KCP was located in the same place where the Tokyo city government offices stood in our own century. That’s why the view from the gatehouse had looked familiar. But the whole expanse of land that I knew as Tokyo, a city of sixty million, had reverted to wasteland partially reclaimed for farming. It was scary to imagine what might have caused that to happen. Maybe another big nuclear accident. Maybe a war. Maybe it was scheduled to happen the day after I got home.
My guy picked a fishbone out from between his lips. “Well, it’s not just rice,” he said. “We collect all kinds of commodities. Minerals. Biomass. Timber. Natural gas from the Sea of Japan—that’s a security nightmare. The downstreamers in this era haven’t got the technology to hit our drilling platforms, but we’ve got the commies from our own century on our asses, trying to expand their catchment areas. All the same, the goods get through. Everything we need to keep society functioning, really.”
“The future supplies the difference between what we produce and what we consume,” the female suit said. She’d gotten a bit drunk on shochu during the meal; her face looked softer, kind of confused.
“But we don’t produce anything at home,” I said. “Unless you count virtual stuff.”
The old guy cackled. “Exactly.”
My guy said, “We pay for everything, of course. But for some reason, they always end up hating us.” He helped himself to some more shochu. “The Mallett Gate was invented in America. A lot of the early users ended up taking one-way trips to, like, extinction events two billion years downstream. They thought it was a wash. Time travel as Russian roulette. It was us that refined the technology, fine-tuned it. Japan has always been poor in natural resources. That’s often driven us to take desperate risks … Pearl Harbor, Midway. That didn’t work out. But this did. With the flick of a switch, we were suddenly the richest country in the world.” He looked wistful. “Unfortunately, the technology leaked, and now everyone’s got it. So we’re still stuck in a competition for resources … in the future.”
“Started off in the twenty-ninth century,” Kurosumi-san said. “Go any further downstream than that and you run into an extinction event presumably caused by a meteor strike. That was forty years ago. Ever since then, we’ve been hopping upstream a few decades at a time. See, when we go upstream, they don’t know we’re coming.”
I nodded slowly. “But what happens when we go so far upstream we bump into ourselves coming the other way?”
“Ah, well then we’re screwed,” my guy said. “But we can get another generation out of the system at our current pace.”
“And then what?”
He refilled my cup. “Kanpai.”
The downstreamers were shooting at us. Apparently they did this a lot, creeping up close at night. The sky thundered. Our soldiers were shooting back. I covered my ears as my guy dragged me toward the gatehouse. “The demographic bulge,” he shouted at me.
“What?”
I cowered against the clammy stone wall. I felt like I needed shelter, even though I wasn’t really in danger. My guy swung in close, facing me, one arm braced over my head.
“National Life Support was supposed to produce a demographic bulge!” he shoute
d. “To reverse the graying of society! To expand the workforce so we could keep the whole thing going! Hasn’t happened! We don’t even have enough people to defend our downstream facilities! Those are biobots up there! I was being ironic!”
He grabbed my hand and tried to hold it. I pulled away. “If this is some kind of an elaborate pickup line, forget it! I’m not interested in breeding! Ugh!”
“Not that.” He swayed closer to me so he was speaking into my hair. His breath smelled of shochu and his voice sounded like he was crying. “Be my proxy.”
“What?”
“It happens in 2106, according to our latest timeline. You’ll see. You’ll know what you have to do.”
Incoming! A huge slug of data landed in my inbox, trailing a long tail of links. Phraud alarms blinked on my left retina like tracer fire. Then everything went black.
Two Years Later
“Everyone clear on what they have to do?” I looked around the hollow at the faces of my friends. Hard, weathered, young faces striped with camo cream mixed from charcoal and potato starch. No one said a word. These were the pick of the New Edo samurai: they’d been fighting the upstreamers half their lives, and now, for the first time, they had a chance to defeat them. Every line of their tense, squatting bodies screamed ready for action. I nodded, pleased. “If there are no more questions, then let’s get moving.”
We walked in single file, our guns and equipment tied down so nothing rattled, utilizing upstreamer asphalt where it was safe, cutting across country in other places, making for the obscenely bright glow of KCP. I mentally reviewed my own plan for the upcoming action. I hadn’t even told Tomoki how I hoped it was going to play out.
As if my thoughts had summoned him, he moved up from the rear of the column. “If anything happens to either of us tonight …”
I spoke past a sudden lump in my throat. “Your mom and dad will take care of Michiyo. She’ll grow up to succeed where we failed.” Mentioning our daughter, just six months old, made me question what I was doing. Made me remember my own parents, who’d both left me, as I was leaving Michiyo tonight. “But we aren’t going to fail.”
He nodded, his face shadowed by the scrub woods we were moving through. “Asuko …”
That’s my name. Asuko. I never told it to anyone before. Tomorrow’s child. Ironic, huh?
I tripped on a chunk of centuries-old debris buried under the dead knots of winter grass and kicked it, upset. We were walking uphill in the region that had once been known as Shibuya.
“When the upstreamers are gone for good,” Tomoki said, “we’ll rebuild.” He squeezed my hand. “This will be a city again.” He had grown up as a slave on one of the upstreamers’ vast collective farms in what had formerly been Saitama Prefecture. He’d never heard of any such thing as a city until I told him what Tokyo used to be. I had actually described a WORLD set in the early twenty-first century that I used to visit a lot: the incessant construction and development, the commercial bustle, the warmth of neighborhood communities that interlocked like links in a fence keeping out the night. Maybe it was just some WORLD-designer’s dream, but it was the kind of dream this ravaged century needed.
We called a final halt on the bank of the Kanda River, almost within earshot of the blazing-bright towers of KCP. I gathered everyone close.
“The guy who sent me to you,” I said, “wanted me to act as his proxy. See, back upstream, I was licensed as a kind of relationship expert. I had qualifications in compassion and warmheartedness.” Knowing me, they snickered at that, as I’d hoped they would. “He sent me out to spread the word that we, I mean the upstreamers, were withdrawing. He wanted me to break up with you. To say goodbye, no hard feelings, it wasn’t you, it was us.”
The river gurgled over the shallows we would shortly be fording. My men squatted as still as stones.
“Well, I was like, screw that. I don’t owe you anything. So I just shared the data he gave me with you … and the rest you know. We’ve stepped up our campaign. Killed hundreds of them.”
I reached blindly for Tomoki’s hand. Now came the hard bit.
“But I didn’t tell you everything.”
Assaults tend to succeed or fail in the first thirty seconds, and this one was no exception. We blew up the gates using a grenade launcher captured from the upstreamers themselves. After that it was no contest, since I had the security codes to dismantle the KCP biobots. The codes were two years old but still worked piecemeal, leaving fatal gaps in the perimeter defenses. Our guns did the rest. Amid the clamor and carnage, I wondered again why that guy had given me the codes. I imagined, or remembered, a voice from somewhere: They asked us to kill them.
Maybe that’s what he’d really meant when he asked me to be his proxy.
In which case, I was two years late getting on the job. I’d taken time out to fall in love, have a child, and find out what being human really meant.
Now it was time for me to act on that knowledge.
Takagi-san, a huge samurai in particolored scrap-metal armor, emerged from the gatehouse waving his gun triumphantly. The building was clear. I ran inside and up the stairs. At every turn I had to jump over the bodies of office workers sprawled in their gore. We hadn’t spared a single soul. This time, the upstreamers would not be coming back. But I knew that already.
Reaching the command center on the third floor, I tried to open the blastproof door with my security codes. Nothing happened. “Shit!” The base network had gone down. I could not transmit any data.
Tomoki materialized at my side. “Stand back,” he shouted, and fired a full magazine of armor-piercing rounds into the door. I hit the floor as ricochets screamed around the corridor. Raising my head I saw the door sagging on its hinges. I also saw Tomoki’s lovely smile.
“Get out,” I shouted, my hearing shot. “Get everyone out. The whole gatehouse is the Mallett Gate.”
“I’m coming with you,” he said, and our hands touched just as the building seemed to twist on two axes at once, spinning sickeningly as if gravity had gone on vacation. I knew what was happening. They were shutting down the Mallett Gate from the other side.
I felt my OPU reestablish a connection with the national internet for the first time in two years, and time stretched as I fought the operators. I jammed everything I had learned into the maw of the program that crunched time and space. I told them about breaking my ankle in the woods and being rescued by villagers who lived off the grid … about pain and recovery: swimming in the river, working in the fields, helping to build really useful things with stolen parts … about holding and kissing the person you love. I gave them a whole WORLD based on my experiences, designed over the last two years with the sensory-conversion software that every kid in my own time got preloaded. The twisting and spinning slowed as the unseen operators, humans and AIs alike, took the bait.
Somewhere along the way I lost Tomoki. But I’d been going to lose him anyway. Him and our daughter and everyone.
I sat up, aching all over, in a rectangle of dusty sunlight. Several men and women in lab coats and masks were staring down at me. Someone was screaming in the background. One of the men frantically pushed buttons on a piece of equipment that looked as jerry-rigged as anything we used to build in the twenty-fifth century. I knew roughly where and when I was: America, sometime in the 2060s. I had seized control of the Mallett Gate and gone back as far as possible, to the end of the line, the day the very first working prototype was built.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Asuko.” They weren’t Japanese. They didn’t understand me. I spoke on anyway. “I’m canceling your experiment.” I stood up and pushed the prototype, knocking it over. Glass crunched. Next I pulled my twenty-fifth-century pistol out of my waistband and fired at the researchers, dropping each of them in turn with body shots. It felt as if I were shooting the people I’d loved. By changing the past, I would change the future. I’d never be able to return to my own time, let alone the twenty-fifth century. But with luck, my actions wo
uld help to head off the nuclear war that was scheduled to kick off in 2106. And somewhere, somehow, I prayed my daughter would have a chance to grow up. Through my tears, I said, “This is goodbye.”
There used to be a snack bar or a kebab shop or something at the side of the hangar. It’s scrap now, a shapeless pile of fiberglass and corrugated tin, broken pieces of brown and white signs advertising döner and currywurst. Some of the plastic chairs have survived though, and now Jacob drags three of them through the green-uniformed cordon of nervous Ländespolizei into the rain shadow of the hunched Colombine and Pantalon. Maddy takes one without a word and sits, or rather sprawls, knees wide like a salaryman on a late train, looking out at nothing. After a moment the black figure of the Scaramouche crouches down beside the other two robots; the cockpit opens, and Abby slides down to join Maddy and Jacob.
“Captain Asano says the transport’s almost here,” she announces.
Maddy nods.
Jacob says, “Tanimura get any?”
“She didn’t say.”
Jacob is still wearing his helmet. He takes it off now and flings it across the tarmac. Some of the Ländespolizei look round at the clatter and then hurriedly away. Without his big Malcolm X glasses Jacob’s face looks naked. Maddy and Abby can see that he’s crying.
Abby goes and retrieves the helmet and sets it down at Jacob’s side. Then she draws the third chair up next to Maddy and perches there, her knees drawn up to her chest. In the white chair, in her black Nomex suit, she looks very small.
“You got a few of them, Maddy,” she says after a moment. “Didn’t you?”
“I got one or two,” Maddy says, her voice sounding flat, echoless in her own ears.
Abby looks over toward the hangar, the second ring of Ländespolizei, the green tarps and trailers of the field hospital and the makeshift morgue.
“That’s something, I guess,” she says.
Maddy doesn’t answer.