The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  I return my gaze to the ceiling. Fresh air is flowing from a central vent surrounded by the dim night-lights.

  I check my overlay and realize with surprise that most of my missing icons are restored—the time display, the emotional-analysis app, even the communications apps—though when I dive into the menus, I find there’s no data and no history. My e-mail, texts, phone log, videos—all of it is gone.

  The encyclopedia is still there, though. I pop it open, just to be sure, confirming that its local library of hundreds of thousands of articles is still intact.

  The standard network icon has also been restored. It displays as a red circle with an X in it, meaning there’s no connection available, but I’m not locked down. They can’t lock me down because they need access to my overlay to manipulate my skullnet. So I’m linked to a nonstandard network, one with no outside connections. Realistically, I’ll probably never have an outside connection again. I’m like Carl Vanda in that basement. Once Anne Shima sent him down there, we all knew he’d never see the light of day again.

  Despite this certain knowledge, I’m hungry. I can’t remember the last time I ate, and I hope my captors will consider a final meal.

  I swing my bare titanium feet to the floor. The skullnet icon is invisible, indicating my skullnet is quiescent, but it doesn’t matter. The damage is done. They’ve been inside my head deleting organic memories, and they’ve emptied my overlay of digital memories too.

  The skullnet icon revives with these thoughts, flickering faintly as the embedded AI launches an automatic routine, ensuring I won’t feel too bad.

  Jaynie warned me I needed to get rid of the skullnet. Guess I should have listened.

  I look again at the time on my overlay. Assuming they haven’t fucked with my internal clock, assuming I remember right, nine hours and maybe twelve minutes have passed since the US Navy returned me and Nolan to the Brunswick airfield. Something happened after that. I don’t remember what it was, I just know my squad is dead.

  I heave myself up with a groan. The lights respond to my movement, brightening slowly, revealing the glassy glint of camera buttons in the four corners of my cell.

  I piss, wash my face, drink water, swear vengeance.

  First step, I want to start my overlay recording—but that turns out to be a no-go. Though I can see the video icon, there’s nothing behind it. The program that handles videos has been wiped. Determined to make something happen anyway, I move to the center of the room and address the walls. “I’m awake. So let’s get on with it.”

  Someone is paying attention, because less than a minute later, the door opens, revealing two guards on the other side. Dressed in dark-blue uniforms without insignia, rigged in dead sisters, wearing chest armor and helmets with black visors, they are anonymous. They’re not carrying any firearms that I can see, but then they don’t need to, not while they’re powered by exoskeletons.

  “You going to be stupid?” one of them asks me. “Or are you going to cooperate?”

  I recognize the voice. It’s Crow. The one who had his arm around my throat.

  “Cooperate with what?” I ask him.

  “Whatever you’re told. Right now she wants you cleaned up and fed.”

  “She? The woman with the Southern accent?”

  “You going to make a fight out of it?”

  It’s a temptation. “Who the fuck are you people?”

  “Your new owners.” He gestures to his silent companion— a shorter figure, by a good eight inches—but man or woman? Beneath the rig, I can’t tell.

  Both the Silent One and Crow take a step back, leaving the doorway clear.

  “Into the hall,” Crow orders.

  I consider making a show of resistance. They could either come after me and haul me into the hallway, or close the door and leave me to starve for another twelve hours.

  My head still hurts. I don’t want to aggravate my concussion by getting my skull slammed against the wall and I don’t want to starve. So I do as I’m told and step into the hall. The passage is short, barely twenty-five feet in length. On my left are two doors facing each other, before the hallway dead-ends. On my right, the hallway is closed off by a steel door with no handle. Directly across from me is an open doorway into a brightly lit shower room.

  Crow gestures at it. “You’ve got three minutes to shower and change. Clean clothes are hanging on the wall. If you get done in time, you get to eat. Go.”

  I decide I don’t like Crow. Despite my recent resolve, I play out in my mind what would happen if I went for him.

  “You’re thinking too hard, Shelley.”

  My gaze shifts to Crow’s silent companion. “Was that your operation in the basement of the DC courthouse?”

  “That fiasco?” Crow asks. “Shit, no. That was hers. I just signed on. You’ve got two and a half minutes.”

  Even if a miracle came to pass and I managed to kill both Crow and the Silent One, I’d still have to get past a locked door. So I give it up and do what Crow wants, stripping off my reeking clothes, and washing away the salt spray and the sweat in a blissfully hot shower. There’s no razor or depilatory, so I’m stuck with the stubble of my beard. After I towel off, I step into a loose-fitting pair of electric-green canvas pants, and then pull on a matching T-shirt. I feel like a lime glow stick. “Afraid you’re going to lose me?” I ask.

  “Can’t be too careful. I hear God’s on your side.”

  Is that why I’m here? Is that why I’m alive and my squad is dead? Bitterness slams me. The Red let this happen. Why? Because it doesn’t see everything? Because it’s not always there? Because there’s room for chance? Or because this is a necessary part of the story?

  It dismays me to think that’s what it might be.

  “Step into the hall,” Crow says, “and present your hands.”

  I’m well practiced at the prison routine. Handcuffs go on my wrists and we march to the steel door at the end of the hall. It opens for us with an electronic buzz. The hallway continues beyond it, but instead of being sealed off with another imposing steel door, there’s an elevator, and an ordinary fire door marked with an exit sign.

  “In here,” Crow says, his hand on my arm as he steers me into a side room.

  The room is furnished with a plastic table and two chairs. On the table is Greek takeout, for fuck’s sake. The food is barely warm—it’s probably been forty minutes or more since it was picked up—but now I know I’m still in North America. While Crow watches from the door, I eat—gyros, spanakopita, salad, and even an order of fries. I eat everything, despite my headache; the handcuffs don’t slow me down at all. Afterward, I’m marched back to my cell.

  “Don’t I get to see the Southern woman?”

  “Her name’s Shiloh. You’ll get to see her later.”

  The truth is, I’m exhausted. I lie down on the bunk, the lights dim to faint red, and I sleep.

  • • • •

  The pattern repeats—a shower, food, and then sleep. My beard grows and my body heals. Exhaustion recedes until sleep doesn’t come so easily anymore. I lie in my bunk and think about Delphi, wondering if she’s safe, if she knows what happened to me. I wonder if the organization has any plans to retrieve me or if they’ll just assume I’m dead. It’s not like I know enough to compromise them.

  After three days, Crow brings news: “Shiloh is ready to see you.”

  Per usual, my hands are shackled, and then Crow and the Silent One escort me to the room where my fast-food meals are delivered. This time the table is empty. Crow sits me down at one end, taking up a position behind me while the Silent One stands just to the side of the door.

  In less than a minute the door opens. A woman comes in dressed in brown slacks and a black, long-sleeved shirt. Her Caucasian skin is tanned golden, with a scattering of faint freckles on her nose, her hair is trimmed in a brown-velvet
buzz cut, and she’s used brown eyeliner to emphasize her brown eyes. Physically, she looks soft, a little pudgy. Not an athlete.

  Shiloh is not her name of course, any more than Crow is the name of my warden.

  As she sits at the opposite end of the table, my encyclopedia posts the results of its automatic facial-recognition routine. It’s identified her from its local library of articles. Her real name is Jasmine Harris. She’s thirty-four years old, an acclaimed specialist in adaptive artificial intelligence and a major stockholder in Exalt Communications—the same company I researched after seeing their aerial network nodes along Interstate 80.

  Maybe it’s just a coincidence that I’ve already heard of her operation—but more likely, there are connections between us I’m not seeing yet.

  I say nothing, waiting for her to speak. As we study each other across the table, there is a glint of light in her right eye. It’s enough to tell me she’s wearing an overlay. As if this observation has freed her to speak, she asks, “So you know who I am?” Her voice is soft, a little husky, very assured. Her question is not a casual one. It’s designed to make me think about the facts of our relationship: that she has hacked into my overlay, that she can see what I see there, that she knows of everything I do, and that she can control the activity in my skullnet and by extension, she can control me.

  So there’s no sense in denying the truth. I nod and admit, “I know your real name.”

  Deception cannot benefit me in this relationship. Truth and lies arise from different regions of the brain, and since Shiloh can access the data from my skullnet, she’ll always know if I’m lying.

  With this matter clear between us, she moves on. “I’d like you to meet my partners. Say hello, John.”

  A man’s voice issues from a speaker in the ceiling. “Hello, Shelley.”

  “And Mary?”

  A woman this time: “Hello.”

  Fake names. Maybe they’re fake people, but Shiloh wants me to believe they’re real and that she’s not acting alone. “For reasons of security and continuity, John and Mary will remain remote observers. I’ll be your only point of interaction. Your handler, we could say.”

  It’s a struggle, but I manage to keep my smartass mouth in check. “Why don’t you just tell me why I’m here?”

  “I’d first like to tell you about EXALT.”

  A word pops up in the center of my overlay, rendered in huge, bold text. It’s like having something thrown in my face. I’m so startled I flinch, jerking my head back, but the word is still there, written out as an acronym: EXALT.

  I slam my fists down on the table. “Get the fuck out of my head.”

  The text disappears. Shiloh looks apologetic. Through the speaker, John says, “Sorry, I’m new at this.”

  Asshole. At least I know he’s real.

  I lean forward, glaring at Shiloh. “What the hell do you people want with me?”

  “The world is changing, Shelley.”

  “Look around, Shiloh. The world has changed.”

  She dismisses this with a shrug. “What we’ve seen so far is just the beginning. New rules are being rolled out. You’re already operating under them. So is this partnership. We are beginning to understand the algorithms that determine the behavior of the Red. That’s how we succeeded in bringing you here, Shelley. Understanding is power. We’re learning to predict and influence what the Red will do, which means we’ll be able to turn conflicts and competitions in our favor.”

  Yeah, okay. I get it now. Jaynie pointed it out to me months ago when we were prepping for First Light: I think most of the people who know anything about this stuff don’t want to get rid of the Red. They want to control it, because whoever figures out first how to do that gets to run things.

  Shiloh is one of those people, confident in her own brilliance.

  “You want to be a dragon?” I ask her.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  I don’t, but I don’t tell her that. People who want to rule the world tend not to believe that some of us would say no to the privilege. I think about Jaynie quietly calculating what it might cost to construct her own Apocalypse Fortress: Be a lot of money to buy that kind of privacy. She’d like to have the choice, but when the Coma Day bomb maker offered to trade a fortune for his life? She didn’t even blink.

  Money and power mean a lot, but they’re not everything.

  I remind Shiloh, “Being a dragon didn’t do Thelma Sheridan any good.”

  “It’s given her a worldwide audience. The testimony coming out of Niamey is damning for a lot of powerful people. It’s a miracle that trial hasn’t been shut down.”

  I don’t tell her what Carl Vanda intended. I don’t want to bring him up.

  “If you want to know,” Shiloh says gently like she’s conveying delicate news, “no one who’s been following the trial can doubt Sheridan’s guilt. The evidence you provided—”

  “Colonel Kendrick made that happen, not me.”

  She nods to acknowledge this. “Unless the panel of judges is utterly corrupt, Sheridan will be convicted.”

  So there’s that. We achieved at least this one thing. It’s a relief. Even in my present circumstances, it makes me glad.

  I push Shiloh. “Knowing that, you and your partners still want to be dragons? Because there’s one rule of the Red I have worked out, and that’s if you stand up too high, you’ll get hammered down.”

  She shrugs, unimpressed. “It happened once, to Sheridan, but there are still a lot of dragons operating in the world.”

  It happened to Vanda too, but all I say is, “It’s early yet.”

  “True. But Thelma Sheridan had nasty ambitions. She did some very bad things.”

  “Like mass murder.”

  “Yes. Don’t think I’m naïve, Shelley. I used to work for her. So did my partners. We all heard the diatribes, and I had a firsthand view of her paranoia. I put up with it because I was being paid a fortune to do what I would have done for free—try to understand the Red.”

  “You were one of the software engineers in her consortium? That was real?”

  “Very real. But then you kidnapped her and the money dried up.”

  “I hope you’re not expecting me to apologize.”

  That earns a smile. “No. It was for the best, really. It led us to establish our own consortium. It’s the frontier out there, Shelley. Wide-open opportunities.”

  Given that I’m imprisoned in a radio-opaque basement, I’m less than impressed by the opportunities available to me. But I want more information, so I keep up my end of the conversation. “Opportunities for what?”

  “To devise new stories.”

  We stare at each other like this is some significant, revelatory moment, but that’s bullshit. She’s playing me, working to pique my interest, to get me involved. I hate these games. “Just give me the sitrep.”

  “I need you to understand what’s already been accomplished. John’s going to show you another image.”

  I’m ready for it this time. It’s an artist’s rendering of an EXALT aerial node: seven floating spheres reflecting the sky around them, arranged in a vertical line and linked by a filament. “Your company’s putting those up, right? It’s a federal work project.”

  “It’s a new communications system.”

  I delete the image. “EXALT. Expandable Aerial Labyrinth Traffic.”

  “You remember,” she says, sounding impressed—because she can see my overlay, so she knows I’m not reading from the encyclopedia. “EXALT is a communications system intended to replace the bottlenecks of satellite and cable, and to eliminate the vulnerabilities that were clearly demonstrated on Coma Day. What you’re looking at is, of course, only one node in a distributed network of aerial communications towers. Each node is self-powered by solar and wind.”

  “Don’t they blow away?”
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  “They do, but not easily, and they can change altitude to avoid wind currents or use them to migrate. As you said, it’s officially a federal stimulus project—funded to shore up infrastructure while putting people back to work—but the funding and the federal oversight are . . . complex to trace. Much like your reality show.”

  I understand now why she’s telling me about her work. “You’re saying the Red is behind EXALT.”

  She acknowledges this with a gracious nod, a regal gesture oddly enhanced by the nontraditional boldness of her buzz cut. “Exalt Communications was built around an existing design and suddenly we had funding, permits, permission to issue subcontracts. So yes, I’d say the Red wants this. Badly. No more Coma Days, and lots of new ways to observe and interact. We used EXALT to find you, Shelley. We don’t have access to satellite surveillance, but we’ve developed an efficient observation network. We picked you up in the parking lot of a hotel in western Pennsylvania a week ago. Your identity was logged by a facial-recognition routine that runs on the farsights of EXALT users.”

  I flash on that night, the first night out of New York, making it . . . seven days ago? Is that possible? I’m burning through my life—but then, these days I have left aren’t really mine. My time ended with shafts of blazing sunlight lasering through the bullet-perforated walls of a shadowy hangar reeking of blood. Everything since has been borrowed time.

  “What are you thinking about, Shelley?”

  I tell her the truth: “I don’t know.” I draw a deep breath and bring myself back on track. The best thing I can do now, the only thing, is gather information. “It was the girl with the crowbar,” I say. “She had new farsights, but she was starving.”

  “It began there, yes, but there were other observers.” The girl doesn’t matter to Shiloh beyond her function as a mobile platform for EXALT data collection. “Once we had your vehicle type, we were able to track you through public traffic cams.” She smiles a condescending smile. “The license plate images are automatically obscured to protect ‘privacy,’ but it’s a joke. Any good image-analysis program can identify specific vehicles, especially when two are traveling together.”