Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  So now Kara triggered the filter her mom and dad had created. When that filter came down over the world, the artificial rods and cones in her eyes painted very different things.

  The ghost, the invisible man, appeared to her outlined in reds and oranges. She watched the man raise a large weapon, point the barrel at the hopolite’s forehead, and pull the trigger. The hopolite’s head exploded, fragments dripping to the ground. Kara looked down at the mud.

  Jared squirmed. She grabbed his hand and squeezed as hard as she could. He understood and froze. Kara’s fingers waved a quick mantra to execute the code the whole family had worked on in secret when the troubles had begun. The invisible man turned, looked right at them. His face twisted, a rictus of heat lines.

  Now you know, thought Kara. Now you know if it works. There’s always info around. Like air, but more pervasive even. Info gathered by nearby sensors under the ground, in the remains of the tree, built into the very fabric of Agathonosis on a molecular scale. Infodust hanging in the air, testing the ecology of the habitat. Information gathered, reformatted, and presented to her when she asked for it.

  She’d accessed lamina all around her since she was a kid, seeing things that weren’t really there with her contacts on, playing games with other children that other people weren’t a part of. The world was always more mysterious, more layered, deeper, than it would have been without the various lamina they all used.

  And the invisible killer staring right at her would see nothing of her because he used the lamina too. Like all stratatoi he got orders, maps, plans of attack, and info from his fellow murderers through his augmented reality. Kara’s private lamina had been developed slowly over three hundred years, exploiting small bugs in the meshes of realities the Satrapy had created inside Agathonosis. Kara’s parents were descended from a long line of tweakers who had carved out some small freedoms for themselves from the ever present and powerful eye of the Satrapy. Such as invisibility to allow them to gather and hold meetings.

  They’d thought that one special, but it looked as if the stratatoi had it as well.

  She let out a deep breath as the invisible man turned around and ran back toward the homemade mortar.

  “Go,” she ordered Jared.

  He obeyed her, slowly crawling out and skirting the oak tree with her.

  They left the river. Kara didn’t think it was safe anymore. More stratatoi had appeared. They were securing the water, she guessed. Turning off the river’s pumps. That hadn’t been in short supply yet, and the Parvati was muddy, but apparently they wanted control of that too.

  Like everything else inside Agathonosis.

  Kara returned her vision to normal unaugmented reality as they walked out of the brown wastes of the public park and into a series of alleyways. The park reeked of urine, and it was worse here. Perfectly recyclable sewage oozed out of the gutters, piss stains splattered the paper walls of houses. Many maiche walls drooped, ripped off in the first rounds of riots. The houses revealed the insides of rooms and apartments. Frames poked through like skeletons.

  A dead neighborhood. Flayed.

  They passed houses with roofs that sagged from recent rain. Rain. In what had been a perfectly controlled ecosphere. It had all gone so wrong so quickly. Agathonosis had been a paradise. Lakes near great forests that had trees reaching up, unhindered, and less and less constrained by gravity as they grew taller. Sure they were somewhat crooked from Coriolis forces, but at those heights, you couldn’t tell if it they were bent or just tall.

  Now Agathonosis was a festering disaster.

  An occasional face peeked out from a hole in the walls, then disappeared.

  “Can we stop and eat?” Jared asked. Too loud. Idiot ten-year-old kid. And all she had left. She hadn’t talked to any of her peers or seen her parents in weeks.

  “Shhh. We’re not far from where we need to be,” she whispered. Don’t mention food, Brother. Damnit.

  The air-lock door lay just around the next small alley, down underneath a manhole cover. Air locks would lead them into the skin of Agathonosis, into the heart of the Satrap’s traditional domain, but also to freedom.

  She hoped.

  Kara double-checked a heads-up map display in her personal lamina, looking around at markers and tags. She looked back down the street, at the good soil running down the gutters washing off into the storm grates, and heard something rustle.

  “Open the manhole cover,” she ordered Jared.

  He looked piteously at her. “You make me do everything. Carry the—”

  “Do it,” she hissed at him. “The sooner we get there, the sooner you can eat.”

  Her temple hurt as she concentrated. I am a shadow, she thought. Just a shadow. She backed up against the plastic frame of an alley wall, tiptoed, and waited as Jared grunted and yanked at the manhole cover.

  She slit the paper with a pocketknife and stepped through. She sealed it back up with several tiny pins fished out from her pocket and looked around. A few weeks ago this was someone’s apartment. A dead woman lay on the bed, the back of her head staved in. Spoiled cans of fish lay underneath the bed.

  The manhole cover rustled outside. Jared grunted, then paused. “Kara? Are you sure we’re allowed to do this? This goes in.”

  Someone had tried to eat the cans of fish, then thrown up.

  “Kara? Where are you? Please don’t leave me. I’m sorry. I won’t complain again.”

  Kara cut two small eyehole slits and watched the street as Jared turned around in a slow circle, looking for her. She could hear muffled sobs. Kara swallowed the lump in her throat, squeezed her wet eyes.

  Sorry, Brother, she thought.

  After another moment of crying Jared stopped, looked with a few sniffles, then unslung the knapsack and unzipped it. Kara looked down the street and saw what she’d been fearing: a wiry man with a bat walked down along the torn paper wall toward Jared.

  She waited, waited until the man’s shadow crossed the paper in front of her, then burst out with the penknife. She stabbed him in the back with the four-inch-long blade as hard as she could, thrusting at his shadow through long, ragged strips of paper wall. The blade sunk in with a sickening puncturing sound and her victim screamed. He backhanded her, reaching up for the knife.

  Jared sat and stared as Kara sprang off the ground. The man got hold of the knife and screamed again as he pulled it out.

  “Get in the manhole, quickly.” Kara grabbed the backpack and zipped it. Jared looked up at her in something approaching awe. And fear.

  They clambered down the ladder into the skin of their world, aiming for the hull.

  “Faster,” she ordered her little brother. Neither of them had the strength to replace the manhole cover from inside. Soon someone would come after them. Either the man she’d stabbed, or someone else noticing the racket.

  It was quiet down here. And sterile, like the inside of a house, but on and on and on. No natural sounds, just a steady thrum. Biolights ran along a track on the floor and a strip over their heads. The smoothly bored rock walls with metallic vacuumseal sprayed on were physically painted blue with red or green numerals indicating where they were, just as Kara had hoped.

  Stratatoi would soon realize they had intruders in the heart of their domain, inside the warrens and corridors honeycombing the great hull of the world. She had mumbled the words to shut down the telltales inside her that would report where she was, but she wasn’t sure she had done such a good job on Jared. Thankfully they couldn’t see through his eyes; she’d taken his contacts out the day the Catastrophe had fully realized itself.

  Kara kept Jared moving with expert shoves and a kick or two. He stumbled a lot. Eventually he sat down, refusing to go farther.

  “We’re lost,” he cried.

  “No, we’re not,” Kara snapped. Then, softer: “I know where we are. Trust me.”

  “We’re lost and they’re going to find us.” Jared clutched the sack.

  If they stayed here, giving u
p, then, yes. Kara grabbed his arm and squeezed it. “You get back up or that man will come after us and kill us for sure. I can leave you here for him.” Jared got back up. “Keep going straight,” Kara said, her voice cracking.

  Somehow he’d forgive her. For know, she just wanted to make sure he lived. Her little brother was all she had left.

  They went deeper in, following mental maps. Twice she used her invisibility trick to avoid stratatoi walking the corridors. She would hold a hand over Jared’s mouth, lean against the cold wall, and freeze. The stratatoi were looking for something. She hoped it wasn’t them.

  Jared’s stomach growled loudly enough for her to hear several times. She wondered if that would give them away at some crucial point.

  They finally got to it: a small access door leading to what looked like a utility room. Kara stood and stared at it for a second, looking at a tag that told her the door was more than it seemed. She walked forward and kissed the cold metal.

  Did the stratatoi know about this place? Her parents had found the location when digging around ancient hand-drawn pictures from the original colonists, the pireties. History was frowned on but protected by the general Emancipation. People like her mom and dad pieced together what they could from records hidden deep in human-made lamina. And they’d found this alternate control room. The primary control room had been destroyed in a suicidal fight between the hopolites and the stratatoi two weeks ago when the hopolite insurrection against the habitat’s Satrap began. The hopolites had slowly been exterminated ever since. The Satrap was rumored to have moved into the secondary control center and reinforced it with hordes of stratatoi.

  But the great engineers who had designed Agathonosis did so in triplicate.

  When Kara convinced the first door to open, her breath caught. The doors were several feet thick, not the standard utility inch that they seemed to be. They groaned loudly, echoing through the corridors as they opened, one after the other.

  “In, in, now!”

  They ran in, sideways, squeezing themselves into a twenty-by-twenty-foot room. Dusty control panels ringed the entire room, and several chairs with illegal neural jacks sat in a corner.

  “Jackpot,” Kara whispered, even as she spoke the riddles and poems to close the two sets of doors behind them. She started crying. “Jackpot.”

  She’d been a zombie until now, just focused on getting here, hoping to make it, doing anything to make it.

  The doors sealed behind them. She walked over and started waving panels into life. Jared looked at a display that showed the outside corridor.

  “When they come for us, we won’t be able to get back out,” he said, furrowing his brow. “There’s only one way out.”

  “I know.”

  “How long can we stay in here?”

  Kara unsealed the knapsack and helped Jared lay out the contents. “A few days,” she said. “That’s long enough. Long enough for someone to reach us.”

  The can of beans made her salivate just looking at the picture. She also took out several dried, salted small fish, and some crackers in packets.

  And a dirty cloth doll, with red, clumpy hair. Jared snatched it away.

  “Can I eat?” Jared stared at the can of beans and licked his lips. His hands trembled.

  “The fish.”

  Kara handed them to him and packed the crackers and beans away. Jared needed protein right now. But more than anything they were both going to need fruit soon enough. She was pretty sure he was getting scurvy. Or maybe a half dozen other types of malnutrition problems.

  Jared took the fish off to a corner and began eating, smacking his lips noisily in a way that, several months ago, she would have hit him for. And the doll, that Raggedy Andy doll, she would have snatched it from him.

  But that was all he had now, and he clutched the doll protectively under an arm.

  She turned to the panel by the door, put her thumb to it, and the corners of her mouth tugged up. When the stratatoi came to the doors, trying to shoot or hack their way in, they’d find she’d locked them shut with some old security codes. Ones that would only allow the doors to open from an inside command.

  Then the smile disappeared under a huge mental load of weariness. Oral human history maintained that Agathonosis was a cylindrical, man-made world that flew in circles around several giant holes in the Outside, holes that led to other worlds like Agathonosis, and some vastly larger. So large that they were inside out, with the air lying on the outside of the world. Kara started trying to figure out how to send a message out at the “wormhole” and to someone who could maybe save them.

  Several hours later a series of relays around Kara’s small world caught her audio message. The message used hundred-year-old protocols, but the relays still recognized them. They’d been stolen from someone who’d once worked communications for the Satrapy, and the thief had made sure to bury them into the lamina as deeply as he could, in case they were ever needed again.

  The relays dutifully started spreading the message forward, until it hit a communications buoy near the wormhole. The message started out spoken in Greek, the language of Agathonosis, and ended in stumbling Anglic:

  This is Kara, from Agathonosis.

  We’re starving. They’re killing each other inside.

  Please send help, whoever hears this. We only have days left.

  Oh, shit. Stratatoi have found us. Can they really stop me from . . .

  The beacon followed its instructions and kept repeating the message to anything that would listen.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Kara pressed her fingers against the knapsack’s seal and it puckered open. A single can of beans and half a pack of protein-fortified crackers. She stared at them for a minute, then chose the crackers.

  She resealed the sack before Jared could turn around and see how little food was left and slung the knapsack over her back so he couldn’t try to open it. They’d filled several bottles with water from the tap in the small bathroom, but the water had been turned off now, and the stench of the unflushed toilet was getting worse.

  Jared still had his back to her. He sat facing the inner door, shivering at the constant high-pitched whine coming through. He jumped slightly every time something clanged against the outer door.

  “I hate you,” he said.

  He knew they were trapped. He probably suspected they were almost out of food and that the water wouldn’t last that much longer.

  Kara sighed, but not loud enough to let him hear. She walked over to a flat console and waved it on. It glowed alive and became a window to the area just outside the door. Fifteen stratatoi in black uniforms struggled to control the massive bulk of a diamond-tipped drillcar. Dusty, corroded, and old, the insectlike machine hailed from the earliest days of Agathonosis’s creation when the habitat was still just a rock in the Outside. The hundreds of counterrotating bits chewed at the door, spitting and sparking metal shavings aside.

  Dark gouges ran back along the corridor behind them where they had shoved the drill through, spinning and spitting all the way.

  “See,” Jared said. “You were wrong. They’ll get in here soon. We should give up now.”

  Kara reached out a hand, then put it back down at her side. “I don’t think they would let us give up.”

  Jared bit his lip. “It smells really bad in here. I want to get out.”

  There is no out, she wanted to scream at him. Even if we leave, the whole world is like this, another room, just bigger, and everything is broken there too. But she nodded. “I know. Just trust me and be patient, please.”

  “I want my eyepieces back. I’m bored just waiting. At least let me play some games.”

  Kara shook her head. Jared clenched his fists, opened his mouth, then stopped. The room had fallen silent.

  They both looked at the console. The drillcar had been rolled back off to the side and a new entourage of black-uniformed stratatoi walked toward Kara’s screen. Kara could hear the tiny fans and pumps deep insid
e the vents now that the drilling stopped. The comfortable universal hum of Agathonosis hung around her once more.

  A single stratatoi walked all the way forward until he stood just beneath the camera. He filled the entire view, standing up on some platform Kara hadn’t noticed. His eyes gleamed in the reflected light around him.

  The man held up a blank white pad. Kara had turned off all outside feeds but this one visual to the outside. When his lips moved no sound came through. But the pad he held up blurred and words formed. The man held the pad up to the camera so Kara could read the words.

  Whatever I speak will be written on this pad. I am both this man Nikos and I am the Satrap himself at this moment, as I have taken personal interest in this situation.

  Kara shivered. She’d only heard about such a thing happening in the days of Thrall, when the Satraps used the power of the world to break men’s minds to their will. Men had worked ceaselessly for the Satrapy for generations before they were emancipated, though the Satrap of Agathonosis still carefully ruled its world. Had the days of Thrall returned?

  The puppet man’s mouth moved again and the pad shifted to display new words:

  Your time is limited. I can cut the air supply to an entire section of this world, the section that includes the line this room taps. But if you open the lock and surrender, you will be treated with mercy. If you wish to negotiate, speak to me within the next thirty seconds.

  The Satrap could use audio to send commands to the inside of the room. Kara knew it could; after all, it was said that the Satraps had created the lamina all around them. They’d created everything that was Agathonosis, even if the physical things had been made by the stratatoi in the days of Thrall. Talking to it would be dangerous.

  Jared read the note and shouted at her, “They can’t turn off the air, can they? Can they?”

  “I don’t know.” Kara listened to the mechanical hum of air being delivered. It had never been held from the people before. Even in the days of Thrall. But then maybe what she knew of the past was wrong. She leaned against the panel and stared down at the ruler of her entire world and trembled. “It’s the Satrap, and the Satrap can do almost anything, can’t he?”