Nick Thacker

by The Dawn (Relics Singularity 1)

  MYERS

  MYERS WAS FALLING ASLEEP AS soon as they’d reached the cellar of the church. He started by sitting against a wall, but quickly slid down and found a comfortable enough position with his arm beneath his head. The soreness and stiffness of his body needed the sleep, but his mind was working too much to allow Myers to sleep soundly.

  He dreamt again of the party, this time moving throughout the crowd of fuzzy people and out onto what must have been a patio overlooking whatever city he was in. It was nighttime, and the blackness of the background scene was superimposed behind the flitting bursts of light and fuzzy heads. Drinks were raised in front on his face — a toast, and he felt excitement as the memory progressed. It was a happy moment; a memory of being complete and together and satisfied. He couldn’t remember who he was together with, but he assumed it was family and friends.

  He drifted back inside, the memory taking control of his active consciousness. He looked down and around, finding fuzzy hands that he’d shake and young children he would greet. At eye level were more faces, more happy people, and the brightness of the lights ahead told him he was entering the kitchen.

  The kitchen.

  He recognized it as his own, though something inside his subconscious tugged back at the thread as soon as the recognition hit, pulling back down inside, and he second-guessed himself. He thought it was his own but was no longer absolutely sure. He tried to remember his own home in the lucid dream. He forced the memory to walk toward the bedroom, but he couldn’t get the door opened. He seemed to be satisfied with the fact that he knew where the bedroom was, and left it at that.

  Back into the kitchen. The bright lights washed out any detail, and it was like floating in clouds as he flowed through the smaller room. Fuzzy smiling faces still popped up in front of him, and he lifted a foot as a large dog — Beast, he knew its name — ran between his legs. He knew he was laughing, and others were as well. The dog was a mastiff, a large breed, its drooping lips and sad eyes swaying them when they’d rescued it years before.

  Myers was satisfied with that memory; he knew it was accurate. They’d gone together that time, Myers hesitant but wanting to please his young children. They’d had a dog before, and a cat, but this was later in their marriage. He hadn’t wanted to commit to something like that, especially when he was about to… when he…

  He lost the thread. That must have been when he was… when he’d lost all the memories.

  He wondered if Alzheimer’s was like this. Threads of memory that faded away into nothingness. Strands of recollections that were strong — he had a wife, kids, a dog, he was an accountant — moving and drifting as he struggled to bring them forward until they were just no longer there.

  The dream suddenly changed to another scene. Again, the desk from the perspective of sitting behind it. Some of the room was now in focus, but only certain features. A huge portrait — of whom he wasn’t sure — hung on the wall to his left, while a large, elegantly-framed door stood directly in front of him. The rest was too blurry to see, and he tried to force his head — the memory — to look around. His face was fixated staring down, straight down toward the stack of papers that sat on top of a desk calendar. An expensive-looking pen was the only thing he could see clearly. What was the pen for? Had I just used it? Am I about to? He watched as the memory of himself picked up the pen and placed it carefully into a drawer on the right side of the desk. His hands were out of focus as well, but they came together and shuffled the papers into a neater stack.

  The stack moved to the front of the desk — he was giving them to someone, and they were laughing. We’re using paper? Why are we laughing at that? The thoughts came at once, and he tried to sort through them linearly, placing them in order, but couldn’t. He was at work, not at a home office. He remembered that. But he didn’t know where work was, or what he was doing. And he couldn’t see who was in front of him in the memory.

  The rest of his sleep phase was filled with competing memories, as if they were leftovers, or scraps, fighting for dominance over the limited space in his active memory. Scenes from one of his daughters’ dance recitals, his wife, Diane, smiling back at him on a river rafting trip, his other daughter winning the district soccer tournament for her high school. These were old memories, vivid ones, and he had no problem conjuring them and darting through them at will. He walked through the scenes, pausing them like a movie, and changed position. His mind attempted to recreate each scene from the artificial perspective he’d requested.

  When his mind became as exhausted as his physical body, he drifted into a deeper sleep, the memories faded, and he slept soundly for a few hours.

  RAND

  JONATHAN RAND WAS LATE TO the bar. Vericorp was in Umutsuz’ Zone 1, while the bar was across town in Zone 3. The train let him off a block away, and he hurried to the neon sign marking his destination.

  Niels’ Bar. The bar was a favorite haunt of the reassigned tech crowd, and Jonathan and Roan had discovered it a year after they’d started at Vericorp. It was tucked away behind a gym and day spa, next to a small plaza surrounded by boutique shops and cafes. By day the bar served lunch and an early dinner to shoppers and anyone perusing through the square, and by night it was a relatively quiet, tame locale for tech industry types who needed a little post-work camaraderie.

  He walked in, the doorman, Jones, greeting him with a nod. Roan was already sitting at the long bar with his back to the door. He snuck up next to him and raised a hand toward the bartender before he even sat down.

  “Hey,” he said. The music, some sort of postmodern trance/dance instrumental, was turned down enough to be present but not headache-inducing, and his voice easily carried over it.

  Roan nodded, not turning to look at him.

  Jonathan accepted the drink — a whiskey — and took it in two quick draws. Not quite a shot, not quite a drink. He liked it that way; it started things quickly but didn’t make him feel like a college frat guy.

  He winced and ordered another. The whiskey here in Umutsuz was like the industry — an afterthought. It was bland, tasteless, and mindlessly boring. But it was cheap, and with the salaries of C-level executives, many of the tech employees found themselves spending many late nights out, towing the line between mild alcohol abuse and flat-out alcoholism. Jonathan wasn’t one of those guys. He liked to drink, but he hated the morning after. For that reason, he usually held himself to no more than three drinks per night.

  “Everything okay?” he asked Roan between drinks. The man hadn’t even turned to look at him. Roan Alexander had always been a drab individual, one of the most apathetic he’d ever met, but most of the time he at least showed mild interest in Jonathan’s company.

  Roan turned, slowly, and Jonathan immediately could see that something was wrong. His eyes were bleary. Had he been crying? Jonathan couldn’t imagine that to be true. Roan, the same man who seemed impervious to human emotion. His jaw was set, and a deep crease cut across his forehead.

  “Woah, buddy,” Jonathan said. “What’s up?”

  Roan grabbed at the glass in front of him. Whiskey, neat, just like Jonathan’s, but his was nearly full. He took a long, slow sip and then spoke. “I’ve been deactivated.”

  Jonathan couldn’t hide his surprise. “Wait, what? Reassigned, you mean?”

  “No, I don’t mean reassigned. I’ve been deactivated. I’m done, Jonathan.”

  Jonathan’s mind raced. “But, your department is… you’re the only one?”

  Roan nodded.

  “And there was no reason?”

  “The System didn’t think it necessary to provide me the details of its decision.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You still moving forward with the, uh…”

  “Yeah,” Rand said. He didn’t need to be reminded of the plan he’d made two years ago that was only now ready to implement. He also didn’t need Roan to say it out loud in the bar, in case someone happened to be listening. He thought about his contacts, working
remotely to help him out, and silently hoped they’d be ready when it was go time.

  “Good. Wish you the best.”

  “We’re going to need to need it. I think Davies is on to me, but I have a feeling we don’t have much longer before this whole thing blows over.”

  Roan looked over. “Yeah? What makes you think that?”

  Rand shrugged. “The way things are going, I guess. Seems to be changing more and more quickly —“

  “I thought you said it wouldn’t.”

  “I did, and I still believe that, but…” Jonathan sighed. “But it’s still different, in some ways. It’s moving the pieces around, putting them into place where it wants them.”

  Roan nodded, but didn’t say anything else. There was nothing else to say.

  They sat for another hour or two, neither man talking much, until long after Jonathan had lost track of the time — and the drinks. He grew tired, woozy, and drunk, but still continued to order more drinks. At such a low-key and reasonably safe establishment, Jonathan had never seen the bartenders or managers cut anyone off, and the trend continued tonight. His three-drink limit was doubled, then tripled, until he felt the room spinning.

  Roan had stopped drinking after his third, but he wasn’t able to hold his alcohol as well as Jonathan. Both men were having trouble keeping their eyes open, but neither wanted to leave the other alone.

  “Hey, hey man, I was thinking…” Jonathan started up again. His words were slurred, but he felt a sudden lucidity come over him. “I — I was thinking, you know, about the System…”

  Roan shook his head. “Enough about the System, Jonathan. Tell that girlfriend of yours. Can’t we just —“

  “But… but you don’t understand, man. And that ‘girlfriend of mine’ and I are getting pretty serious. She’s flying in soon, I think. Hey, that’s not what I was saying. I — I can get through it. I mean, I can hide us from it.”

  Roan didn’t respond. He was either asleep or didn’t care. Or he was purposely ignoring him.

  “I can create a, uh, a cloak, I guess. For lack of a better word.”

  Roan swung around to look his friend in the eye.

  “Seriously. I was thinking about it today. After we talked, I went back did another update. God, those updates… I, um, anyway…” He lost his train of thought and quickly regained it. Damn, that whiskey. “I had an idea. I can do it, and you might be able to help.”

  Roan raised his eyebrows, ever so slightly. I’m almost interested, but I’m not sure.

  “Create a terminal unit, one that’s pocket-sized, that translates a pID into a static IP address.”

  Roan looked back down to his drink and swirled it once.

  “Seriously — think about it, man,” Jonathan said. “Everyone’s got their personal ID, right? Fingerprint, driver’s license, social security number, whatever you want to call it. Their pID is what tells the System there’s a human at the other end. Right? And every station has a static IP, something that’s connected into the System and lets the System know it’s a computer at the other end?”

  He didn’t wait for the non-response of Roan.

  “So, I think anyway, I can program a simple single-board unit that does that translation. We’d need a static for it, but that’s easy to set.” He stopped and considered this, as if it were the first time he was hearing the scheme. “Yeah, yeah, I think it could really work. Man, we get a printer to build a small case for it and we’ve got a portable station transmitter that can bypass — no, uh, replace — the human side. Roan, we can fly under the radar.”

  Roan groaned. “No. A static is static, Jonathan. It doesn’t move. The System would know as soon as a duplicate showed up in a different location.”

  “Nope. No, that’s just it. We set a new static IP, a new station, basically. But it’s not actually a station, just a portable device. But the System doesn’t need to know that — it just thinks it’s a computer that’s being moved around, whenever it pops up.”

  The more he spoke, the more excited he became. Is that the whiskey talking? He wasn’t sure, but he felt good. Great, actually. Better than he had in a long time, and it didn’t matter what Roan thought. Roan was Roan, and he shouldn’t expect more than disinterested pessimism.

  “It could work.”

  Jonathan was stunned. He had to be drunk. There was no way he’d heard Roan correctly.

  “Yeah, I think it could work. You’d need to make sure the static was truly that, dedicated and everything. Won’t be easy to mask the pID without raising a flag, but it can be done. I think.” He nodded. “Yeah, you could do it. I can help, but I know you could do it.” He finished his drink.

  “What’s your current status?” Jonathan changed the subject, realizing he had no idea how much longer he’d have with his friend.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Seriously?” Jonathan couldn’t believe it. Deactivations were usually a process, spanning a week or two. Let people get their lives picked up and ready to move. Apparently not this time. “Tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. Sometime tomorrow I’ll be given the region.”

  “Wow.” Jonathan took a deep gulp of the cheap whiskey. “Scraped?”

  “I doubt it. Hard to tell. I don’t have any ‘trade secrets.’” He made air quotes around the words ‘trade secret.’

  Jonathan chuckled. “Right. Well, that doesn’t really matter much these days.”

  “Maybe not,” Roan said. “But I’m not a threat, either. I’ve been relegated here, just like you, and I’m probably just not needed anymore.”

  He felt the lightheadedness of being drunk lifting slightly, replaced by an overwhelming sense of fatigue. “I have to go. Damn, I can’t keep going. What is it, Tuesday?”

  Roan nodded.

  “And listen, I’m going to figure this out, man. I’m going to get us out —“

  “Don’t.” Roan cut him off. “I’ll be fine, honestly. I’m not worried about it. Hell, you and I both know just about anything has to be better than this… this life.”

  “But —“

  “But nothing, Rand,” Roan said. “You’re going to need someone on the other side when this this blows up, and you know it. I’ll be there, ready to go, and I know you’ll be able to find me.”

  Jonathan nodded again. “Sure, yeah, I’m with you. It’s just —“ he drifted off, suddenly encapsulated by the large mirror hanging behind the bar.

  “Yeah,” Roan said, standing while he waved the bartender over to close out his tab, “I’ll miss you too, man.”

  Jonathan stuck out a hand, and Roan accepted it. They’d been through three years at Vericorp together, and it was time to change it up again. If there was anything consistent about this new world it was inconsistency.

  The bartender appeared in front of them, and Roan reached out a finger to initiate the Current transfer. Jonathan did the same, and both men declined the receipt and stepped back from the bar.

  Out in the open, he walked a few steps to test his balance. Good enough to get to the end of the block. He wasn’t sure how long he’d need to wait before a train slid by, but there were benches. He could make it.

  Satisfied, he started toward the door, following closely behind his friend. Rand wasn’t sure if he’d ever see him again.

  MYERS

  “WHO ARE YOU?” MYERS ASKED.

  “Look, old man, I —“

  “Stop calling me old man.”

  The kid stared back at Myers.

  Myers squinted. “Okay, fine, I get where you’re coming from. But I think it’s mostly because I’ve been running for two days straight.”

  “Looks like you’ve been running for fifteen years.”

  The kid shifted, moving into the corner of the cellar they entered below the church. Myers was situated against a long wall next to him, sitting propped up between two large empty barrels. The rest of the cellar was filled with forgotten remnants of what it must have taken to keep a church stocked full of whatever it was church
es were stocked with. Myers hadn’t been in a church in a long time, and this one looked like it hadn’t been visited in a while.

  “Okay, well what’s your name, then?” Myers asked.

  “Ravi.”

  “Ravi?”

  The kid shook his head. “You’re really not in a position to judge, you know that?”

  “Got it. Okay, Ravi, like I asked before, who are you? Why are you here, in, uh, Istanbul?”

  “I live here. But not any longer. Time to move on.”

  Myers raised his eyebrows a bit, suggesting a question he didn’t ask out loud. He looked down at the roll of pads and blankets Ravi must have handed to him to use as a bed, then back at Ravi.

  They’d spent some of the night in the cellar of the church, though Myers didn’t sleep nearly as well — or as much — as he’d really needed. He felt rested enough to have a conversation, but he could feel the fatigue setting in behind his eyes, slowly taking him over.

  “Look — we don’t need to be buddies. I just need to get out of town, get to the next place, you know how it goes.”

  “No, Ravi — I don’t ‘know how it goes.’ Care to explain it to me?”

  Ravi looked back at Myers, his beady eyes dark and brooding in the light of the single candle they’d found and lit, standing in the center of the room. “How long you been out?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How long you been out? Like, out here?”

  “Uh, two days — I guess. I don’t remember anything before that.”

  “Shit, man, you’ve been out two days?” He shook his head again, then dropped it down toward his lap. “This was a bad idea.”

  Myers took a deep breath, frustrated. “Ravi, listen. I don’t need you to like me, but I need you to at least help me. I’m not asking for much, here. Just tell me what’s going on. I have to get out of here and figure out who did this to me, then —“