Perdigon

by Tom Caldwell

  “If you can hear my voice, Ezra, just please—”

  Ezra’s eyelids fluttered, exposing white slivers of sclera, and he made a shapeless, clabbering sound. Like waking from a nightmare. He jerked his hand back and rolled over to face the wall, still breathing hard. “No, no, no, not them too, they’re just little, you can’t, no…”

  Jacob didn’t need to ask what he meant; the Lumen had been set to record the incident. Later, after a recovery period, Ezra would listen to his own scrambled murmurs on the recording. He’d take notes, analyse, explain where he could.

  Sometimes Jacob would dare to ask questions about it, when they were in bed together: what was that about, what did you mean? Ezra might laugh and describe the vision, then. Usually only if it was something weird or funny. Otherwise, he was tight-lipped. Some things resisted explanation.

  “Ez, do you know where you are?”

  “We can’t do it like this,” Ezra mumbled into the pillow. That was what it sounded like, anyway. “Not without…I can’t put this back together—”

  “I need to hear you answer my questions, okay?” Jacob said. Wanting to keep touching him, but he knew better than to crowd his husband at moments like this. They’d discussed it: hands are fine, arms are okay, nothing above the shoulders. Ezra felt trapped if he didn’t have space while he was coming back to consciousness. “I’ll let you rest in a minute. It’ll be so soon, I promise. Do you know where you are?”

  “Home. Work.”

  Those were the same thing. “Sure. Can you tell me which room?”

  Ezra made a put-upon sound that Jacob knew well, a sound that meant I know but I can’t find the words yet. After a pause, he made a twisting movement with one hand, miming an old-fashioned water faucet. “Next to.”

  “Next to water?”

  “To…bathroom.”

  “Okay, not bad. What day is it?”

  “It’s the end of the world.”

  “Well, but the date, though.”

  Ezra was frowning, and looked up at the Lumen’s projected display for a clue. That was okay; he was allowed to use clues. “April 27. 2095.”

  “Good. You’re doing really well. We’ll do the word test, okay? You know this one. Sparrow, emerald, submarine. I’ll ask you in five minutes if you still remember them.”

  Ezra grunted his assent, closing his eyes for a few moments. Not opening them, he said, “We could die today.”

  “Is that what you saw?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Definitely dying, or just maybe?”

  Long pause. “Maybe.”

  Sometimes Ezra said things like that. Jacob didn’t always take it to heart. The tech was accurate, the tech was effective, the tech was the work of historic genius—Jacob believed all that without a flicker of doubt. With all his heart and with all his soul, with all his mind and with all his strength. But in everyday life…he just didn’t have it in him to panic every single time Ezra had a vision of doom. It happened too often.

  Most days, you could give Ezra an hour or two to get himself together and he would then admit that the range of possible futures was broad, branching, and diverse—but there were always branches that terminated in death. Ezra sometimes looked too long at those branches, but it didn’t necessarily mean catastrophe. Maybe not even bad luck. It just meant he was scared.

  “You talked like this the morning we got married, remember?” said Jacob with a smile, and now that Ezra was quieter, he reached out to smooth his curly reddish hair back from his sweaty forehead. “You said I was going to get in an accident.”

  “You would have,” Ezra mumbled, taking Jacob’s other hand in his, exploring the shape of it. “But you dropped your keys. You bent over to pick them up, and you said butterfingers because of course you did. I love it when you’re corny, you dork. Three seconds. It slowed you down by three seconds. So there was a truck you didn’t hit, because of that. That was the difference between having and losing you.”

  “You didn’t lose me, though. And you won’t.” Jacob bent over to press a kiss to his temple, where the white vertical scar was almost invisible against Ezra’s pale skin. It branched at the tip, like a Y with a long tail. “Can you rest a bit? If you come back to me in an hour and you still say it’s the end of the world, I’ll believe you. Promise. We’ll do whatever you think we need to do. An hour’s okay, right?”

  “Yeah.” Ezra seemed to have lost interest in his own dire prophecy, exhausted from the vision and curling into the foetal position on the cot in the quiet room. “Thanks, babe.”

  “What were the words I asked you a few minutes ago?”

  “Sparrow. Emerald.” Pause. “Submarine.”

  “Perfect.”

  Ezra made an ironic little yay gesture, both fists raised to his shoulders, but he smiled back up at Jacob. “See, it’s fine.”

  “That’s what I was telling you, are you stealing my lines now?” Jacob kissed that scar on his temple again, the delicate silk-crepe texture of it just barely perceptible against his lips. “Shruti’s still outside, the girl from Bonaventure. She’s shadowing me today, remember? That’s where I’ll be, anyhow, just up and down the west corridors to show her around. Should I write that down for you?”

  “I can ask the Lumen if I forget, it’s fine,” said Ezra, and he smiled. “Go charm the locals.”

  Jacob smiled back, drew the folded quilt up over Ezra’s shoulders, and went to the bathroom next door. Ezra’s water-bottle was waiting at the filling station, sterilised and purified, so Jacob took it back to him. “Drink before you drift off again, okay? You’re dehydrated.”

  Ezra chugged from the water bottle without argument, closing the cap and settling down again with the half-full bottle nestled next to his pillow. The path from the bed to the bathroom door was clear; sometimes he stumbled over obstacles, unable to navigate, but he’d be safe today.

  “Okay, Lumen, set alarm for one hour from now,” Jacob said, and the Lumen chirped obediently, powering its soft lights down to a dim pink glow. Ezra hated the thing because it was a typical piece of ham-handed engineering from Bija—lousy privacy controls, inefficient, overpriced, corporate bloatware. Still too useful to give up, though.

  It was hard for Jacob to force himself to leave the room, but he did, closing the door softly behind him.

  The girl in the hallway was still waiting, arms folded, looking down at her shoes. “Sorry, sorry, you don’t have time to be dealing with this today—”

  “No, no, not a problem at all,” said Jacob, turning to lead her down the corridor. “Please, don’t apologise. Your name’s Shruti Agnihotri, right? Pleasure. I’m sorry Ezra couldn’t talk to you today, but he’s not well.”

  Shruti shook his hand, glancing back over her shoulder at the closed door. “Is he okay, though?”

  “He had a seizure, but that’s very normal for him.” Jacob always tried to deliver this explanation in a jaunty, insouciant tone, to keep other people from worrying or feeling awkward. And to keep their product from getting a reputation as a deathtrap. “Ezra has an early form of the precog tech. The surgery to implant the original prototype was way too invasive. Our current beta users have a much gentler experience. No incisions, no recovery time.”

  “They let me try it out in the main lab. I didn’t feel anything, though.”

  “With the ear canal model?” It was the size of a grain of rice, imperceptible once it was in place, quietly stimulating the brain without causing reactions like Ezra’s. Unfortunately, it usually failed to produce the visions, as well. “We’ve had problems with that one, to be honest. The form factor is great and don’t get me wrong, we love that it doesn’t seem to have any detrimental neural effects. But it doesn’t work the way Ezra envisioned.”

  “Sounds like you’re still a long way from going to market,” Shruti said. She was small and polite but sharp, a papercut of a girl. “If the only functioning prototype took a user down at the knees like that.”

  “Well…” Ja
cob took an unnecessary pause at a breakroom, wandering inside to show Shruti the vending machines, the communal fridge. She’d already seen that stuff. “The tech was based on Ezra’s unique neurological topography. He sees these things with or without it. The original implants stimulated natural structures that he was born with.” To a dangerous degree, but no need to dwell on that. “The prototype in his head isn’t fit to be sold, of course, but it’s still transmitting usable data, and the declawed version needs that data to model his neural firing patterns. Which we’re still learning about. We’re extremely close, and miles ahead of the rest. Bija couldn’t even match our weakest prototype, let alone the newer versions that our designers are cooking up.”

  “What if you can’t reproduce what’s in his brain?” asked Shruti, lingering by the door. “Or what if the cost is prohibitive?”

  “We’re very confident. Our research team is the best in the business, and they know how important this is. Let’s…let’s move on,” said Jacob, leading her down the hall.

  The main workroom was like a coffee-shop, with clusters of big tables for groups and booths for partners, a few solo coders spread out by the windows. The view outside was flat and grey—this land used to be a vast freshwater sea, millions of years ago, and now it was a cold, froggy marsh. Muddy, still water and rosy-purple reeds. Perdigon’s first settlers had introduced the frogs as an ill-thought eco-experiment, and now the situation was positively Biblical outside the habitation barriers.

  So it wasn’t beautiful, but the light was real: dark, dim light from a little sun, filtered through the thick, smoky glass of the windows. The sun shone a dull red outside, but any sunlight was better than nothing, the habitat experts said, and Taltos was designed to take in as much as Perdigon had, with lots of eastern exposures.

  Jacob was absent-mindedly rattling through all these benefits and drawbacks as he talked to Shruti, shilling for Taltos as best he could, but with half his mind still on Ezra.

  “Commercial real estate’s a steal out here,” he said, hoping that he sounded convincing as he moved on with Shruti towards the projection rooms. “Lots of valuable start-ups choose to build facilities on small planets and planetoids. Transport and food costs go up, but we own the buildings and the land outright, cash on the nail. No rent, no taxes, lenient corporate regulations, lots of office space. As much as we can build, practically. It’s a huge advantage.”

  Shruti raised her eyebrows with a crooked smile. “But you’re on Perdigon.”

  “Well, we hope we’re making the colonist experience on Perdigon even better,” Jacob said diplomatically. “Our entertainment centres are open to locals who aren’t employees, and we’ll be doing the same with our school and daycare. Which are going to be top-notch, the kids will get an amazing level of personal attention.”

  “You’re from Bonaventure too, though, right?” said Shruti. “My aunt says she remembers you from school, at Urban V. Her name’s Sita, I don’t know if you remember her.”

  “Oh, okay, yeah. I do remember Sita. I didn’t know you were related—small town.”

  “Small planet. She remembered because you were the only white kid in the class who wasn’t Catholic.”

  “Right. True. My foster family adopted me and brought me here to Bonaventure when I was nine.” Jacob didn’t want to sound ungracious; word travelled fast around here. Even if Shruti seemed like she hated the place as much as he had, as a kid. “Urban V is a good little school for its size.”

  “Why’d you even stay?” she asked. “Didn’t you want to get off-world somewhere?”

  “I did, though,” said Jacob, unable to keep from smiling. It still felt like such an incredible piece of luck, and he’d never been a lucky guy. “I got to have my time seeing the sights on Earth, which was…I’d been dreaming about going back to Earth for a long time. But I knew how much Taltos could save by putting down roots here, rather than trying to find cheap real estate on Nephele or Leucothea. Forget about finding good office space on Earth, in this economy. And I knew how important it was to offer great educational options for employees,” he added, trying to get his spiel back on track. “We’ve got the cream of the crop on our staff and we want to keep them happy.”

  “Do people leave a lot?” asked Shruti.

  “Our retention rate’s 8% above average.”

  “Huh.” She sounded sceptical, but she was already moving on toward the next room. “What do you guys think about Founder Syndrome? What happens after Ezra Barany?”

  “We’ve certainly given Founder Syndrome its due consideration,” said Jacob, who had just finished reading Mary Renault’s Funeral Games on his tablet last night, crying himself to sleep under Ezra’s tolerant arm. “But we have such a deep bench of talent, I’m sure our successors will be Octavians rather than Pompey the Greats.”

  Jacob’s phone vibrated gently in his pocket, and he tapped the screen on. Text from Ezra: Focus groups still hate the slogan.

  Ezra had been jolted out of a sound sleep by the meeting notification. The testers had finished early and marketing had come bustling right up to the admin floor to give him the news. Probably thinking that it made them seem extra productive. Ezra had splashed some water on his face and knocked back a few caffeine tablets, and was telling himself that he didn’t need Jacob around to deal with this. He’s not your security blanket. This is still your company, so act like it.

  “What we’re seeing across the board is that our testers did not like the slogan,” the guy with the beard was saying. Beard guy. What was his name? Ezra couldn’t remember. “They felt it was ‘ominous.’”

  “It wasn’t—how can it be ominous?” said Ezra, rubbing his face. “It’s the opposite. I thought you were gonna come in here and tell me the slogan’s too boring. We were trying to make it boring for you. Because last time you told us people think our tech is creepy.”

  “Our testers did not find this slogan boring.” The focus group expert had a robotic cheerfulness, as if he were serenely unaware that he was giving bad news. “One user said that it made him ‘want to take a sledgehammer to all my tech and go live in the woods,’” Beard Guy said, reading aloud from his notes. “Another described it as ‘sinister.’ A thirtysomething mother of three was the first to mention the word ‘ominous’, and all the members of the group raised their hands when asked if they agreed.”

  “That just seems…really exaggerated,” Ezra said, arms folded. “‘At Taltos Labs, we know where you’re going next,’ like c’mon, that’s a bland slogan. That’s like something Bija would squeeze out.”

  “Our testers did not rate Taltos’ slogan at a similar level of reliability when compared with Bija’s marketing campaigns,” said Beard Guy. Jon? John? Ezra thought he remembered an extraneous H. See, you’re fine. Memory still functional. Sparrow, emerald, submarine. “Taltos also scored low on scales of warmth, positivity, and wholesomeness.”

  “You can’t measure wholesomeness.”

  “We can measure whether people think something is wholesome.”

  “Right, okay,” Ezra said, because he couldn’t argue philosophy right now. A thin seam of pain opened up inside his skull. “Dude, I don’t know, I thought it was fine. ‘Going next’, like…the future! Right? Going next?”

  “Those two words did test quite positively, both individually and as a gerundive phrase,” said John. “The panel was less positive about ‘know’, ‘where’, ‘we’, and ‘you’re’, in order from most to least ominous.”

  “What if we cut the slogan down to just that, then? Or wait, is it better as a question? ‘Where are you going next?’ But like, put emphasis on ‘you,’” said Ezra, underlining the word in the air with his hand as he swivelled restlessly in the chair. “‘Where are you going next?’ Doesn’t that…give them more agency or something?”

  “We can certainly run another test, if that’s what you want to do,” John said, and it was impossible to tell from his tone whether that was a good idea or not. “And if your marketi
ng team agrees.”

  Cart before the horse, okay. “Fine, whatever, we’ll do that,” said Ezra, whose head had started to pound. Lightning like a hairline fracture in his visual field, crackling white. “I’ll talk to everyone else in marketing, I mean. Thanks—thank you, tell your team we said…um, we said good job. Go team.”

  John gave a courtly little bow, apparently not detecting any of Ezra’s distress whatsoever, and left the meeting room.

  Ezra wanted to find Jacob, but walking seemed dangerous. He slid out of his chair and curled up on the floor instead, waiting for the pain to pass.

  “Looks like you’re sitting on the floor,” said the Lumen’s artificial voice. Magnus Vollan had hired a whole blockbuster’s worth of Hollywood talent to come up with the character of “Magnus Vollan” that would provide the Lumen’s voice, and the team of actors seemed to have picked up on every single smug cadence and obnoxious intonation. A realistic portrayal, in other words. “Do you need help getting up? We can notify someone.”

  “No, thanks,” said Ezra, who was habitually polite to the Lumen because he couldn’t help anthropomorphising it. It wasn’t the AI’s fault that it sounded like an asshole. “Um, location of Jacob Roth?”

  “Jacob’s in corridor B,” Magnus’s voice said. “Do you want me to call him to this room?”

  “No. Turn off Service Alerts for this room.” Ezra stopped fighting gravity and stretched out flat on the carpet. The air was cooler on the floor, which felt good. It was the end of the world.

  Jacob took Shruti to one of the projection rooms. They had some recruitment videos that she dryly referred to as ‘propaganda’, but he was hoping she’d change her mind.

  The videos did their best to suggest a joyful, fulfilled life working for Taltos Labs in beautiful Bonaventure, Perdigon. But after the first ten minutes, they cut to raw footage of Ezra after his last surgery. Tough to watch; Ezra was bleary, pale as skimmed milk, half his head shaved, and his face was too thin, his high-prowed nose looking like the proboscis of a strange bird. The hospital gown hung off his narrow shoulders. His big clear eyes looked glassy, fixed on a far point.