Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

by Eliot Peper

  “Take my word for it,” said Diana. “Just quit. You’ll thank me later.”

  “You think I’m intense now? Do you have any idea the person I’d be if I didn’t run?”

  “On second thought,” said Diana, “never quit. You would merge with the machine and transform into a supernatural algorithm that would eat the world and doom everyone to enslaved enlightenment.”

  Sofia’s laugh was throaty and rich. “Me, a techno goddess? Maybe I should consider quitting after all. That sounds appealing.”

  “Speaking of techno goddesses . . .”

  Sofia’s eyes narrowed. “I hate it when you use that tone. It means you’re about to ask me for something.”

  Diana batted her eyelashes, affecting exaggerated innocence. “What on earth could you possibly mean?”

  Sofia arched an eyebrow.

  “All right, all right,” said Diana, raising her palms, “I give up. There is something. But you have to admit that my special requests make you feel special too. Try to channel that superiority you revel in while leaving me in the dust.”

  “Diana”—Sofia shook her head—“it’s too soon. I just gave you a big tranche of intel. You want me to lose my job and go to jail? I can’t risk that. I’m supporting a family here.”

  “Don’t worry, this isn’t something you’ll risk jail time for. It’s simple.”

  “If anything comes out, it’s not just going to ruin my life, it’s going to cost you access to Commonwealth. You know that, right? If you want little birds to keep whispering in your ear, you don’t roast them for dinner. Stop pushing me.”

  Sofia was right, of course. Running agents required managing a delicate balance. Ask for too much, and they’d blow their cover. Ask for too little, and they’d forget what they’d signed up for. Normally Diana would have waited many months before asking Sofia for another favor. In the meantime, Diana would call to chat, supply professional and personal advice, buy her lunch, and send little gifts to her family. That’s what she should be doing right now, not milking her for more.

  “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. I can’t share the details, but believe me, there’s a lot at stake that affects your work. This is something that matters, not just in general but to you personally.”

  There was a special kind of emotional dissonance that came to the surface only when Diana forced herself to do something unpleasant but necessary. It made her more tired than upset, submitting to destiny’s arc rather than raging against it.

  “You know what? No.” A lock of long dark hair fell free from Sofia’s towel turban. “No, no, no. It’s too much, you hear me? Too much. Find another way in, make a new plan, whatever it is you do while you’re ‘jet-setting around the world.’”

  “I’m sorry”—Diana tried to imbue as much genuine remorse as possible into the apology even though she knew it didn’t matter—“but I don’t have time for that.”

  “Then make time. Because this conversation is over.”

  “Wait.” Diana closed her eyes and let out a long breath. She didn’t want to do this, but she needed to do it anyway. It was time to unlock the vault of secrets she had been hoarding for so long, to start spending some of the political capital she had accrued through years of persistent intrigue. Once spent, those secrets would be gone forever. She could only hope that she was investing them rather than throwing them away. Her bet might have long odds, but there was no reward without risk. “Do this for me, and your debt is paid.”

  Sofia swept the free lock of hair behind her ear.

  “No more requests, no more demands,” said Diana. “You’ll be free of me, free to dream up new maths and secure your family’s future. I can disappear from your life altogether if you want. No surprise calls, no lame running buddy slowing you down, no weirdo sending inappropriate Christmas presents to your nephews. I’ll be gone. Poof”—she mimed an explosion—“just like that.”

  Sofia squinted at her as if negotiating a deal with the devil. Diana couldn’t help but think that she wasn’t that far off.

  “Why should I believe you?” asked Sofia, her voice different now, laced with tension. “What’s stopping you from holding this over my head for the rest of our lives?”

  A small corner of Diana’s heart shuddered as if an earthquake were shaking its foundation. It was selfish, silly really. But she had harbored hope that Sofia would wave away her offer to never contact her again. Certainly Sofia wanted her debt forgiven, but had they not built a relationship that went deeper than quid pro quo? They were friends, or almost friends, anyway. They were connected by their shared history of seeking refuge in America from Europe’s ruins.

  But that was the crux of it. Diana might have harbored a sense of kinship with Sofia like sheltering a flame from the wind with a cupped hand. But that hardly made it reciprocal. Sofia had been carrying the spy’s burden all these years, the weight of lying to those she cared about, of betraying those she respected and admired, of being forced to live a double life. Unlike Diana, she hadn’t taken up that burden voluntarily. She had been forced to by Diana herself as recompense for the immigration approvals that were her family’s salvation. Diana knew she didn’t deserve Sofia’s affection. But that knowledge didn’t make it hurt any less.

  “Your status has been final for years,” said Diana. “There’s nothing I could do to renege even if I wanted to.”

  “But you have our correspondence, evidence that I’ve fed you intel over the years. If that comes out, it’s all over for me.”

  “I’ll wipe the logs and you can verify. You know the inner workings of the feed better than anyone.”

  “You could print out paper copies, hide evidence any number of different ways, and threaten me later unless I help you again.”

  Diana pinched the bridge of her nose, then looked Sofia in the eye. “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “That’s hardly—”

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  Sofia stopped short at the iron in Diana’s tone.

  “No.”

  “And I’m not lying to you now. Do this for me, and your debt is paid.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Diana passed by Dag’s seat on her way to the bathroom. He was immersed in his feed, fingers twitching, eyes unfocused as they gazed through the thin veil of physical reality into the digital beyond. As she had hoped, he was recovering quickly from his ordeal. Non sequitur microexpressions of fear or anxiety occasionally flitted across his face, almost too fast to spot, but he wasn’t catatonic, and at this stage that was a victory in itself.

  She had got him into this mess, and now she had got him into a bigger one that neither of them could escape alone. Was his cooperation predicated on feelings for her that might even survive her recent fuckups? Or was it simply that he saw this new plan as their best chance of making it out alive? Maybe it wasn’t even binary. He could be feeling both or neither, her presence in his life a random walk of emotional turmoil.

  His presence in her life sometimes felt that way. Every time she thought she had him figured out, something shifted. She used to tune out of conversations, summoning her feed while she put small talk on autopilot. That was an ability she’d developed through years of cultivating agents, but perhaps that subtle distance was perceptible to someone who got close enough to you, even if they knew as little about you as Dag did about Diana. Maybe knowing someone’s personal history, knowing their goals, their fears, their dreams, wasn’t really knowing them. Maybe there were secrets that ran deeper. Dag claimed that she was inscrutable, but his questions teemed with painful insights she shied away from like a vampire from blistering sunlight.

  “I get it, I get it,” said Dag, making Diana jump. She had half forgotten he was talking to Javier through the feed. “But I wouldn’t be bothering you if this wasn’t the real deal.”

  Dag paused, but Diana couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation.

  “Remember what you told me right before shutting everything down?” Da
g continued. “You said I’d always have a home with you, that even though the back door was closed, you still had a lot of resources and good people to dedicate to building a better world. Well, this is the time to deploy them.”

  Dag paused again, then said, “Yeah, tomorrow. No, I’m not fucking with you. Be there.”

  Diana left him to it and squeezed into the tiny airplane bathroom. As she peed, she tried to put herself into Javier’s shoes. After escaping a broken family, he had raised his sister and pursued his passion for mathematics and computer science all the way to Commonwealth, where he’d helped design the feed’s security architecture before teaming up with Emily to subvert it on behalf of various progressive causes. When Dag extinguished their exploit and Emily had disappeared, Javier had pivoted, devoting the expertise of his team and the billions they’d skimmed off hedge funds to take a major stake in Commonwealth, becoming an activist shareholder and advocating openly for user rights. It made sense. After losing the ability to manipulate the feed to his own ends in secret, he now used his stake in the feed to pursue the same ends under the public eye.

  In addition to his duties on Commonwealth’s board, Javier traveled the world to give talks, write op-eds, and convince the public that more transparency and accountability were needed at the conglomerate that built and maintained the world’s information infrastructure. He wasn’t a natural extrovert, and these efforts took everything out of him. Having to force himself into the public eye made him a wiser arbiter of its attention than other feed stars and talking heads addicted to their own celebrity. Nothing would please Javier more than stepping off the world stage, but he wouldn’t unless he found a higher-leverage path to effect change. He’d last seen Dag three years earlier, helping Emily to recruit him into their little cabal. Dag might have killed their loophole, but Javier knew he had done so in good faith and didn’t fault him for it. Would that be enough to convince him to skip the Electronic Frontier Foundation keynote he was supposed to give and jump on a plane right back to San Francisco?

  But Javier was only one piece of this puzzle. Diana summoned her feed and pulled up her research notes for the original report she had sent to Haruki. She skimmed the summaries of board dynamics, voting records, annual letters, stock tiers, analyst reports, cap tables, governance structures, special committees, and executive privileges. On the surface, these might bore anyone but a financial maven, but Diana saw them for what they were. This labyrinth of massaged numbers, sexy charts, and legalese was actually a portrait of how power flowed through Commonwealth. No individual report or ratio was particularly enlightening, but when Diana submerged her consciousness in the boundless material, let the acronyms effervesce through the slipstream of her thoughts, patterns began to emerge, patterns revealing that at the end of the day, only a few people were required to actually make major decisions.

  Belatedly Diana realized she was still on the toilet. Dismissing her feed, she stood, the sound of the vacuum flush harsh in the cramped space. Pins and needles prickled her legs. She’d been sitting long enough to cut off blood flow. She washed her hands, threw water on her face, and looked in the mirror above the sink.

  Unlike Diana’s consummately plain features, Sofia made a striking impression with her strong Italian jaw, high cheekbones, and large brown eyes. She had been effortlessly beautiful with her hair wrapped in that towel, a genius who was gorgeous to boot. It was her mathematical brilliance that had allowed her to overcome even the misfortune of being born European to earn a position with the privileged few who maintained, improved, and ran the feed. She would be freaking out right now, trying to find a way to fulfill Diana’s request without endangering the job she so identified with. Ironically this final favor broke no laws or confidentiality agreements but required Sofia to take an overt social risk that was even less palatable to her than private betrayal.

  Diana leaned forward, examining the flecks and whorls of her irises, staring until she became less and less recognizable to herself.

  Maria.

  Helen had invoked Diana’s birth name with the cruel nonchalance of a fickle god. Those three syllables were still rippling through Diana’s psyche, reincarnating entombed memories, displacing the stories she told herself about herself. Dag, Helen, Rachel, Lowell, Freja, Hsu, Javier, Haruki, Kendrick, Sofia, Emily, Sean, Lopez, Nell. Did names hold some secret power, or were they nothing but random phonemes, convenient tags for easy reference? Sometimes a name was so banal as to be unmentionable, and sometimes it was a key that opened doors into forbidden realms.

  Looking into the mirror, Diana wondered whether it was simply her reflection that stared back or whether the mirror was actually a window into one of those forbidden realms, a parallel universe where everything was different except for the fact that she and her doppelgänger showed up in front of the mirror at precisely the same time with precisely the same backdrop and made precisely the same movements. She contorted her face, and doppelgänger Diana did the same. There was no way to trick your doppelgänger into revealing themselves because the shared bond ran far deeper than causality. Your every intention stemmed from the same source. Maybe the woman staring back at her was a kindergarten teacher, not a spy. Maybe she was surrounded by loving friends, was morbidly embarrassed by farting, or, horror of horrors, preferred country music to hip hop. Maybe she still went by Maria, enjoying the ultimate privilege of never having had a reason to hide who she really was.

  Diana lowered her head, letting brown curls fall in front of her face. Enough delving into imagination’s fever dream. She was acting as if she’d inhaled some of the concoction Haruki had supplied. Let the kidnappers wander their hall of mirrors, she had work to do.

  CHAPTER 29

  Dag was still immersed in his feed when Diana came out of the bathroom, but his tone and body language had changed subtly.

  “This isn’t Yushan, Baihan,” he said with distinct coolness. “I’m not following you on a wild-goose chase again. I need to talk to Mr. Hsu directly, and I need to do it now.” A pause as Hsu’s assistant replied. “Given what happened last time, I think that even you can agree that he owes me a conversation. Maybe things will play out differently.”

  Diana walked to the front of the cabin and surveyed the mountain ranges that spread out below like crumpled wrapping paper. When she had crossed the lake to make good on Helen’s invitation, a storm had been brewing in the alpine heights behind the Ranch. She had that same sense now, tension building beneath the surface, static threatening to electrify every touch. But there would be no clouds to release a downpour, no thunder to roll through the heavens. This was a uniquely human tempest—personalities, philosophies, and technologies all coalescing in the melee we call politics.

  She summoned her feed.

  “Haruki?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Good,” she said. “Because I have a new assignment for you.”

  “Look,” he said. “About that—”

  “Hey,” she said. “No second-guessing. Believe me, you’re not going to want to miss this meeting, and I need you to be there.”

  “Meeting?”

  “Tomor—”

  Diana frowned. Another call was coming in. It was tagged “Urgent,” her feed bleating harshly.

  “Look, whatever it—”

  “Sorry, Haruki,” she said. “But I need to take this. I’ll call you right back.”

  She ended one call and accepted the other.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Fear creased Kendrick’s face, his lips pursed, his eyes wide and a little wild.

  “Diana,” he said. “I love you, girl, but I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you know how rare it is for me to get called to the White House? I mean, it’s happened more often over the years of course. The higher you rise in this behemoth of a government, the fancier the company.” He was racing, talking too fast. “But still, it’s not normal, not no
rmal, for me to get called into the Oval fucking Office. I’m a regulator for heaven’s sake. I crunch numbers, slap wrists, do my best to champion the public interest and all that good stuff. I didn’t work on the Hill for a reason. Policy over politics. Stay out of the snake pit.”

  “Kendrick,” she said. “Calm down.”

  “I should never have gotten involved with any of this. What was I thinking? I love you. I said that already. But I never should have fed you intel. That’s wrong. Those weren’t my calls, they’re not part of my purview. And when this happens, when all of it goes down, I’m gonna be under the microscope. Any discrepancy will be blown a mile wide. It’s crazy, crazy. This isn’t why I became a public servant. See? It’s even in the name: public servant. It’s not supposed to be the other way around.”

  “Kendrick,” Diana snapped. He startled, and through the semitransparent feed projection, she saw Dag startle too, head snapping around to check on her even as he continued his own call from the couch. “Take a deep breath, buddy. Remember that golden retriever you were telling me about? Think about him and his dumb, cute face. Imagine his gross slobber and how he goes crazy when his ball gets stuck under the couch. He’s a big stupid dog, and you love him, right? Take another breath. Inhale, that’s it. Exhale. Again, slower this time. That’s it.”

  Kendrick tried to get himself back under control.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said, channeling all the composure she could muster. “Whatever it is. We can handle it. We always have. We always will. It’ll be okay.”

  “Diana, please—”

  “Shh, take a minute. Settle down. My whole job is dealing with crises. The best way to speed up is to slow down. Panic doesn’t help. There we go. Inhale. Exhale. All right, that’s it.”