Guardian

by Alex London

  Syd couldn’t care less about the new ideas. He just wanted to be left to himself, but being “Yovel” made that impossible. He wasn’t cut out for this savior-of-the-people business. He was just Syd.

  He banged the back of his head against the wall, tapped his finger on the spot behind his ear, mouthed the word to himself.

  Yo-vel.

  It didn’t even sound like a name. It was a reminder of the destiny he didn’t want and that he hadn’t fulfilled. It was a reminder of what Knox had done for him.

  He wished he could forget.

  That day of Jubilee, when the system broke down, Knox’s father wept in front of the machine where Knox’s body had been vaporized. The man’s wealth, all his power, and the last of his family gone in a flash.

  Chaos followed.

  Syd stood with Marie, shocked, uncertain, not knowing what came next.

  Old Mr. Baram, though, he knew. He’d raised Syd, as much as anyone had, all the while expecting that one day Syd would have to give his life so that the revolution could triumph.

  Now that Syd lived, Baram had a new idea.

  He sealed the factory as the battle outside wound down. Without the network, combatbots shut off, drones crashed from the sky, and the Guardians stopped in place, their minds instantly blank. Nonoperative. Without the network, there was no way to transmit orders and no one to follow the orders anyway. Regular people didn’t fight for free and there was no way to pay them. The entire financial system was gone. Deletion was almost instantaneous.

  Baram immediately ordered complete secrecy about what had taken place with Knox and Syd and the machine.

  “Syd destroyed the networks.” Mr. Baram commanded the room, his voice booming from beneath his thick gray beard. “It was Syd, in the face of great resistance, who broke the corporate systems, who erased all debts and deleted the data that held us all in chains for so long. It was Syd—Yovel, as his father named him—who brought us victory, brought us to this new era. It is Year Zero now. We begin again. We begin again, thanks to This. Boy. Here. Yovel. Understood?”

  Cheers could be heard through the broken windows. Syd could only imagine what the millions in Mountain City were thinking now that all their networks were gone. The patrons would be terrified. Would Knox’s friends have any idea what their old pal had done? Would they even notice the network was down, or would they all be too tweaked to notice, partying at some lux Upper City club?

  What would all the proxies and the other slum rats think? They were just as networked as the rich. Everyone was networked. Everyone had been networked.

  Each soldier in the room consented to Baram’s instructions one by one. Even Marie, teary eyed, consented.

  Syd did not consent.

  “Knox died for me,” Syd said, choking on the words. He kept his eyes on the machine where Knox had stood minutes before. His friend had winked at him. There was nothing left of him now. The radiation it took to spread the virus through the system had vaporized him. “He died for all of us.”

  “And we will always know that.” Mr. Baram turned to comfort him, but Syd hadn’t wanted comfort. “To build a new society, we need new symbols. You will be our new symbol. You. Not Knox. It cannot be Knox.”

  “But—”

  “No,” Mr. Baram cut Syd off. “The people will need something to believe in. We are taking away all they have ever known. People will be frightened. They need to turn somewhere and they cannot turn to the memory of a dead patron. They cannot turn to any of the old elite for hope. They must turn to us, you understand? To our symbols. We need them to believe in the world we will create, if we have any hope of creating a better one. You will be that hope.”

  Syd looked back into Mr. Baram’s eyes, but he did not see kindness there. The eyes were fixed, penetrating, and firm. This was not an argument Syd could win. His consent was not even necessary.

  He couldn’t say the words, but he nodded. Mr. Baram patted his shoulder.

  “Good boy,” he said. “Good.”

  Syd’s mouth twisted, fighting back tears.

  “God gives burdens, but also shoulders,” said Mr. Baram.

  “What?” Syd cocked his head at the old man.

  Mr. Baram cleared his throat. “Just an old line from an old book. You could mourn your whole life if you let yourself, Sydney, but you’re stronger than that. It’s time for the future.”

  “Ha!” A cutting laugh exploded from Knox’s father, who was pressed to his knees, his face still wet with tears. “Some future! This trash is your symbol? Your whole revolution stands on my son’s corpse and now you pile it high with lies? You’re doomed, Baram! This boy”—he spat at Syd—“always did live in my son’s shadow. He’s nothing. He’s nobody. And he never, ever will be. You’ll fail, Baram. You and your empty symbol will fail.”

  “Eeron Brindle,” Mr. Baram said. “You are under arrest as an enemy of the people. You are charged with the exploitation of debt, with the abuses of the SecuriTech Corporation, and the crimes of every single—”

  “You can’t reboot humanity.” Knox’s father talked over Mr. Baram, indifferent to the charges that had just been made against him. “There’s no ‘year zero.’ No starting over.” His bitter laughter sounded almost like choking. Knox’s father looked at Syd with the same bright green eyes his son had, those green eyes that had winked good-bye the moment before he died. But his father did not wink. His lips pulled back to show the perfect white of his perfect teeth. Even though his hands were pinned behind his back, he seemed to point an accusation right at Syd.

  “Your symbol’s not even a real man, you know that?” he said. “He’d rather be kissing my dead son’s ashes than leading your pathetic revolution of moochers and thieves and—”

  A metal fist smashed across Knox’s father’s face, toppling him forward onto the concrete, blood dribbling from his mouth. He’d lost a few teeth from the blow and his glasses skittered across the floor. He breathed, but did not get up. Over him, metal fist still clenched, stood the boy with the cropped red hair and sad puppy eyes, the boy that Syd would come to know as Liam.

  Mr. Baram nodded his approval.

  From that moment on, Liam had been assigned as Syd’s personal bodyguard.

  The lie went out from that factory and became the truth through repetition: Syd was the people’s hero. There was no datastream anymore, so if anyone doubted it, they had no way to share their doubts very far. And no one, really, had any reason to doubt it. Who would imagine that a spoiled brat like Knox Brindle, scion of SecuriTech, would die for his proxy, let alone for some proxy’s cause?

  The new organization was no longer the Rebooters. They called themselves the Reconciliation and their cadres crossed the desert and entered Mountain City. People were so disoriented at the loss of their datastreams that they put up no resistance. The Reconciliation thickened its ranks from the slums and marched up into the high-rises and mansions of the Upper City. They rounded up the patrons. They rounded up the corporate middlemen and the collaborators. They rounded up any enemies they could find and they settled old scores.

  All with the name Yovel on their lips.

  Syd pressed the bases of his palms into his eyes, remembering, not wanting to remember.

  With eyes closed, he saw the Guardians hacked to pieces, their skin webbed black with veins. He saw Finch gleefully tearing them apart and the crowd cheering him on. The bald man strolled through the slaughter. The pictures popped up unwanted, like old advos in the datastream that you couldn’t turn off, but they weren’t selling him anything. They were accusing him.

  It’s your future. Choose.

  He’d let the Guardians be murdered. Some savior he was. No one cared about them. Call them nopes and erase them. Call him Yovel and exalt him. What was the difference really? It was all the same kind of forgetting.

  He took deep breaths. He wanted to s
leep. At least in sleeping, he could find a kind of peace. At least in sleeping, he could dream about his dead friends and maybe, until the sun came up, feel like he wasn’t all alone.

  He slept and in his sleep he was still alone.

  [10]

  OUTSIDE SYD’S DOOR, LIAM stood at attention. Although the entire building was a restricted area, he still felt the need to be vigilant. He couldn’t disappoint the Council again. Even if Syd hated him for controlling his every movement, at least he’d be safe. That was all that mattered.

  Liam wondered, though, whether that was true, whether he was being honest with himself. Did he want to protect Syd because he was important to the society they were trying to build, or did he want to protect Syd because of some childish fantasy? Was he a believer or was it something . . . else? If Syd lived and hated Liam, did it matter if Syd lived?

  Of course it matters, he told himself. This is exactly why you cannot have these feelings. They are a distraction. You’re a soldier. Act like it.

  He snapped himself back to attention. The Machinists might make another move on Syd at any time. Their fantasy of a machine that could turn the networks back on, restore the data, and undo the entire revolution might be crazy, but crazies were the most dangerous. They didn’t care about consequences. They just knew that Syd had broken the networks, so Syd’s death should bring them back. It didn’t have to be logical to be deadly.

  There were other dangers too. That Purifier Syd denounced might want another shot at him. Part of Liam hoped so. It was forbidden, but he’d take his own personal pleasure in neutralizing a petty knock-off thug like Furious Finch.

  But professional vigilance wasn’t the only reason Liam had to remain alert. He knew, in spite of the restrictions on this building and the secrecy under which Syd was kept, that he was not alone.

  Cousin was surely watching.

  That exact moment, as if conjured from the vapor of Liam’s thoughts, the hairless man appeared in a shaft of moonlight at the end of the hallway.

  He moved silently, but he made no effort to conceal his approach. Liam felt as if Cousin’s shadow on the wall had more substance than the man himself. Cousin’s hands were clasped behind his back and his green uniform was crisp and spotless. His collar was a solid band of white, like a halo around his neck lighting his smooth face. His thin lips were pursed and the folds above his eyes, where his eyebrows would have been, were raised in an expression of amusement.

  “Brother Liam,” he said, his voice smooth as a python slithering across the moss. “A most informative Advisory Council discussion this afternoon, no?”

  Liam didn’t answer. Cousin was goading him, of course. That’s how Cousin was.

  Liam exhaled through his nose and waited. He tried not to look frightened, but Cousin’s presence always frightened him. He hated to be near the man.

  No one knew Cousin’s age or his origins, or even his real name. He’d arrived just after the victory of the Rebooters, when they became the Reconciliation, and he had immediately made himself useful.

  “My past doesn’t matter,” he had explained, kneeling before the newly formed Advisory Council. “I am here to serve the future.”

  They too were trying to erase the past, so they took him in. Cousin answered only to the Advisory Council. He had special assignments and obscure duties, some of which Liam knew, and a few of which Liam shared. Even though they had worked together for months now, Cousin still filled Liam with a cold dread. Regular people feared the Purifiers; the Purifiers feared Liam, and Liam, as much as he hated to admit it, feared Cousin.

  Cousin rested a hand on Liam’s shoulder. It was surprisingly delicate and strangely small for such a tall man. Liam did his best not to flinch.

  Cousin smirked. He stared directly at Liam and his pupils seemed too large, like his eyes had no color at all, just black discs in an orb of white. The tiny red veins in the eyes and the slight weathering of the skin around them were the only hints that Cousin was, indeed, human.

  “Our young hero shows great concern for the fate of the nonoperatives,” Cousin observed. “If only he showed such concern for the fate of his bodyguard, eh?” He brushed Liam’s shoulder and then rested his hand against the door to Syd’s room. “You could have been punished terribly for letting him run off this morning. Do you think Syd would swoon to see you destroyed like he did for those nopes?”

  Cousin spoke just loudly enough for Liam to wonder whether Syd could hear him through the door, but just quietly enough that it didn’t seem deliberate.

  Liam shrugged.

  “One would think mistakes like today’s would be impossible.” Cousin smiled. “Given how closely you watch him.”

  “It’s over,” said Liam. “I made a mistake. I confessed to it.”

  “I have always been more interested in silences than in confessions,” said Cousin.

  Liam kept his mouth shut.

  Cousin laughed, his face pulling away from his big white teeth. His smile was indistinguishable from a grimace. “I do appreciate your sense of humor!”

  He patted Liam on the back, sucking air in through his teeth.

  Looking at Cousin’s face for too long conjured violent fantasies in Liam. It was the kind of face that made a person want to throw a punch. Liam took a deep breath, thought of the waterfall, emotion flowing down and away.

  “We’ve work to do tonight,” Cousin told him. He waved his hand and a holo projection appeared in the air in front of him.

  Cousin was one of the few who was still allowed to use the old technology. While there was no network anymore, some databases had been rebuilt for the Reconciliation’s own purposes: recorded messages, propaganda broadcasts, surveillance. Liam was allowed to look, but not to touch.

  Like so much else in his life.

  The image floating in the air before him showed a woman in profile. She had long flowing braids of dark, wiry hair. Her skin was black as the smoke of burning cities. She wore a white smock over her green uniform, her hands were sealed in blue synthetic gloves, and she was working on a collection of holo projections in the air in front of her. She paused, looked straight out of the projection and spoke.

  “My name is Dr. Adaeze Khan, and if you are receiving—” she began and Liam detected a Nigerian accent, but then the holo jolted and wobbled; the loop began again. She was working, focused. She turned, looked out, smiled. “My name is Dr. Adaeze Khan, and if you are receiving—” The loop started again. Cousin let it play.

  “Dr. Khan,” Cousin said. “Reboot High Command, now a chief medical supervisor for the Reconciliation.”

  “My name is Dr. Adaeze Khan, and if you are receiving—”

  Liam cleared his throat. “Why her?”

  “Tsk, tsk.” Cousin wagged his finger in the air.

  “I don’t recognize her,” he said.

  “Curiosity is a form of greed, young Liam.” Cousin sighed with mock theatricality. “Acquisitiveness is a thing of the past. We do not lust for material wealth nor do we lust for information we do not require.”

  “You don’t need to quote dogma at me,” Liam answered. “I was there when it was written. You weren’t.”

  Cousin’s face broke again into a smile. “The past is past. Only the future matters now. A future where no one is more privileged than anyone else. Even those who were there at the beginning.”

  Liam clenched his jaw. He wouldn’t argue. Cousin didn’t care about the ideological purity of the revolution. He just liked to argue.

  “Done already?” Cousin shook his head. “You won’t deploy that rapier wit of yours for a parry?” He glanced back to Syd’s locked door, ran one thin finger along the frame. “Or do you prefer the thrust to the parry?”

  Liam glowered. Why did he alone among the Reconciliation have to suffer Cousin’s sense of humor?

  “As you wish.” Cousin shrugged. H
e hitched his thumb over his shoulder. “Shall we be on our way?”

  “I can’t leave my post.” Liam turned his face forward, stood at attention again. He’d been raised a soldier. When he felt insecure, he turned back to his training. It was as good a faith as any. Head forward, shoulders back, feet together. The appearance of confidence produced confidence.

  “You have a job to do with me now, Liam,” Cousin scolded. “This is not an invitation. It is an order.”

  “My job is to protect Syd and my orders come from the Advisory Council.” He didn’t turn his eyes to look at Cousin, but from the edge of his vision, he saw the man’s pale pink tongue moisten his nearly invisible lips. He stiffened his neck.

  “Doctor Khan is part of those orders.”

  “She wasn’t there,” said Liam. “I would recognize her if she had been in the factory that day.”

  “She helped to design the system,” said Cousin. “With Syd’s late father.”

  Liam tried not to react.

  “You understand?” Cousin asked.

  He nodded.

  Cousin rubbed his chin as if he were scratching a beard. His face was as smooth as a child’s. Youthful bright too. “You see how fond I am of you, Liam? I violated all my revolutionary principles telling you more than you needed to know. Do I ever get a thank-you?”

  At last, Liam turned his head to look at Cousin. He clenched his natural fist and felt the fingernails dig into the palm of his hand. He looked at Syd’s door.

  Cousin whistled and two white-masked Purifiers appeared at the end of the hall. They marched loudly forward, their boots thumping.

  “Can they be trusted?” Liam asked.

  “As much as anyone,” said Cousin. “They’re the ones who brought him back here while you had your little chat with the Council.”

  The Purifiers flanked Syd’s door and stood at attention. Liam gave them each a hard once-over. Then he reached out with his metal hand and snatched the white hood off the first Purifier. A pock-faced boy of about sixteen with a nasty scar running across his forehead. Liam nodded at him and pulled the mask off the other. A girl of about the same age, her head shaved. She set her mouth in a frown.