Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  Asanti was more than passing familiar with condescending old white men, even when they were younger than she was. Unfortunately, as much as she might want to tell him exactly what an idiot he was, or shout in his smug face—so much more calculating since he had become head of the Society—she chose her words carefully. “You cannot send Team One to Seattle.”

  Cardinal Fox leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “Team Three arrived on the ground yesterday. They missed their last two check-ins. Tell me why I should even wait for the thirty-six-hour clock to expire.”

  “I didn’t say that Team Three didn’t need backup. I said that you cannot send Team One to Seattle. To be more precise, you shouldn’t.”

  “And yet, you still haven’t told me why.”

  “The last we heard from Sal, Team Three was in a crowded hotel in the middle of Seattle, Washington, a major city.” Asanti paused, then added: “A major American city.” Asanti paused again to see if Fox was going to catch up to her, but he didn’t. Asanti clarified, “If you send in a commando raid, innocent people are going to get hurt.”

  Fox dismissed this. “Shah knows what she’s doing. I trust her to work clean.”

  “I trust Shah. I don’t trust everyone else in that hotel.”

  Asanti sighed inwardly. Fox still wasn’t getting it. She was going to have to spell this out.

  “American hotel,” said Asanti. “Full of Americans. Who are a lovely people on the whole but many of whom have a disturbing tendency to carry too many guns and run to paranoid about their own government, terrorism, or the Illuminati trying to take over their country.”

  “Their government has, by definition, taken over their country,” said Fox, but his smugness was slipping.

  “And the Illuminati don’t exist,” said Asanti. “Your point?”

  • • •

  18 HOURS EARLIER

  The lights glaring down at the front of the stage were so bright that from Tom’s place in the wings the only part of the start-up’s cofounder, Mark, that wasn’t in silhouette was the gleam of his freshly shaved scalp. In spite of a liberal coating of powder—supplied by their programmer, Amber—the sweat had already broken through. Hopefully, the VCs would write it off as an effect of the lights, and not nerves.

  Actually, the sweat was from a far better source: the flush of triumph. It was the last day of the Amazon-sponsored tech accelerator, and for the first time all week, the team from Polly Mnemonic had a working prototype. Mark’s pitch was amazing; the UI was a joy to behold. Amber’s code was a thing of beauty, and now, thanks to Tom, when investors asked to try out the product, it would actually work.

  Mark reached the microphone at the center of the stage. In the wings, the rest of the team held their breath. Mark began his speech:

  “When asked what attributes they most prize in a personal assistant, ninety-five percent of executives said, ‘someone who knows and anticipates my needs.’ There’s something magical about a truly exceptional assistant. But let’s face it, for most of us, a human assistant is a luxury that long ago went the way of gold watches, pensions, and three-martini lunches. We have to make do with digital organizers, wearables, and automatic calendar alerts. But I want you to imagine a digital personal assistant who—from day one—knows your work schedule, your personal schedule, your project deliverables and deadlines, and where you and your spouse went on your first date … all without a single import or download.”

  • • •

  Sal shifted lower in her seat as the tech guy on stage droned on, trying to get a better view of the rest of the team clustered offstage.

  The pitch was gathering steam: “Polly will change personal productivity and digital assistants forever. If you know it, she knows it. If you forget, she’ll remind you. If you remember, she won’t bug you. She is literally your second brain.”

  “Is it just me,” said Sal, “or is that really creepy?”

  Beside her, Grace used checking her hair as an excuse to hold up Liam’s smartphone camera at a better angle.

  Sal could hear the smirk in Liam’s voice, even over her earpiece. “Could be creepier. He could tell them that the technology is based off of stolen oracle bones or that the more you give it to remember, the less information you’ll be able to keep in your brain.”

  “For Silicon Valley investors, that might be a plus,” Sal pointed out. “If the tech becomes the client’s first brain they won’t ever be able to quit using it. Get them on an automatically renewing subscription, and that’s a guaranteed revenue stream for life. Their lives, anyway.”

  “Children.” Menchú’s voice broke into the comm before Liam could reply. “Perhaps we should concentrate on our primary task so that we can obtain the oracle bones, thus rendering the program useless and this argument safely academic? Grace, Sal, can you see Tom?”

  “They’re called apps, now,” said Sal, “and no, shadows are too deep from here.”

  “Grace?”

  “Hold on.” Grace adjusted a setting on the phone’s camera. “Yes. Big guy, red beard, it’s definitely him.”

  “Then let’s go get what we came for.”

  Grace slipped the phone back into the pocket of her silk jacket. Sal couldn’t stop the idle thought that she had kind of liked her in a tac vest. Still, she was happy to trade the G.I. Jane look to have Grace officially back on the team. “Roger that. We’re on our way.”

  • • •

  There were times when Sal’s conscience pricked her about the ethics of using her badge to convince hotel clerks to give her key cards for private rooms. After all, while she was pretty sure that she was still technically a member of the NYPD, considering that she hadn’t been back to New York in … well, longer than she liked to think about, she had to be stretching the definition of “technically” pretty damn thin. Definitely past the point where a threat to return with a warrant had any teeth in it.

  However, when said hotel suite was being occupied by a start-up whose new technology ran on—as far as Liam had been able to figure out—whatever it was that powered the Index (which had tried to steal a chunk of Sal’s brain) and three ancient oracle bones (which had actually been stolen, and nearly taken a chunk of Menchú and Grace with them) Sal felt pretty comfortable telling her conscience to shut up.

  “Are we sure the bones are in here?” asked Grace.

  “They’ve got to be close,” said Liam. “There’s no evidence that the app ran as anything other than a demo before Tom arrived with the oracle bones. The company was on the verge of collapse. The founders, the whole team, is all in. They had to give up their offices to fund Tom’s trip to China. Literally, these hotel rooms are the only property they have left.”

  “Unless they’re running a server out of one of their mothers’ garages,” said Grace.

  “Not for the kind of bandwidth they’d need …”

  Sal tuned out the rest of the argument. It wasn’t really an argument, just nervous chatter. Although she wondered what Liam had to be nervous about. So far, the entire mission had gone like clockwork. They’d tracked Tom—Liam’s old buddy from the Network—to Seattle and then to the accelerator. A little conversation with the front desk had netted them a room number and key. Now, all they had to do was go in, get the goods, and get out. No muss, no fuss.

  The light on the door blinked green and Sal heard the lock disengage with a soft clunk. She turned the handle and the door sighed open, revealing a wedge of cream-colored carpet.

  This is too easy. Sal’s conscience might have been quiescent, but her paranoia was fully functional.

  Sal motioned for quiet, did a last check of the hall.

  All silent. All clear.

  As she stepped across the threshold, the world cracked open, and Sal fell through.

  2.

  The room was dark. Years of dirt and taggers had long ago occluded the high windows, and only a few slanting rays of sunlight penetrated the thick gloom of the dusty air. Sal’s every step sent up a
virtual plume of roach parts and rat shit, and she tried not to sneeze. Or inhale.

  There was a click.

  “Did anyone else hear that?”

  The question had barely left Sal’s mouth when the air around them exploded in gunfire.

  Sal hit the concrete floor of the abandoned warehouse and rolled for cover, rat shit and roaches now a secondary concern.

  “I thought this place was supposed to be empty!” Sal gasped as a dark man with a moustache hit the ground beside her.

  “Sal?” the man asked. “Do you know this place? Where are we? What happened? One minute we were in the hotel and then—”

  Wait. Hotel? What hotel?

  Two pieces of Sal’s memory grated against each other, but she didn’t have time to think. She had to get out of here. They both had to get out of here.

  Where’s Collins?

  Her partner had been right beside her when they took the door. He was supposed to be—Sal looked around, frantic.

  There he was—

  In an instant, Sal felt her heart stop. Collins was face down on the ground, blood spreading beneath him in a steadily widening pool. Was he dead? Had she just gotten her partner shot? She had to get to—

  Sal was scrambling to her feet when a hand clamped down on her arm. “Sal!” She thumped back onto her ass, hard. The man was shaking her. “Wherever you think we are, this isn’t it. We’re in a memory. Your memory. Sal, think!”

  It was the repetition of her name that did it. Detective LaPaglia would have rather eaten fresh horse shit than call her by her first name. To LaPaglia she was sometimes Brooks, occasionally Detective, and until recently, rook. Sal closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was looking into the concerned face of Father Menchú.

  But that made no sense. The man beside her wasn’t supposed to be Menchú. Yes, LaPaglia was older than she and prone to sporting a thick black moustache, but otherwise nothing like the priest who had been her boss for the last two years and change.

  What the hell is going on?

  Menchú turned her head to face him. “This is like what happened when we encountered the oracle bones in China,” he said. “Well, different, which I assume is due to the connection of ancient artifacts to the Index, but similar enough.”

  Sal was having trouble following. “What happened in China?”

  “Think back, you read the report. The oracle bones connect to the mind. Sal, you recognize this place. That means we are all in one of your memories.”

  Sal’s heart was still hammering in her chest, but she slowly managed to force her brain into something closer to coherent thought. It helped that the gunfire around them had paused. She took a deep breath, and risked poking her head up to confirm her panicked first impressions. A shot sent her ducking back for cover, but a couple seconds had been enough.

  She did know this place. She could never forget it. This was the worst day she’d ever had as a cop. Even worse than the day that had begun with the ashtray holding fingers like sunrays and ended with her brother in a coma being flown to Rome.

  “If this is my memory,” Sal said, “does that mean that none of this is real? That it’s all in my head?” That I don’t have to live through this again?

  Any response that Menchú was about to make was cut off by the abrupt arrival of Grace pulling a heavily limping Liam after her to take refuge behind the same crates where Sal had instinctively rolled.

  “It’s all in your head,” said Grace, “but it’s also real. If that get-up of yours has a first aid kit, give it to me.”

  Liam had already ripped off one of his sleeves and handed it to Grace, who was using it as a bandage around his leg.

  Grace pulled the cloth tight, and Liam grunted. “First ripped up by a bloody werewolf in Spain, and now shot. This is not my year.”

  Sal got a glimpse of a hole in Liam’s thigh as the cloth crossed over, and felt her blood run cold. She knew that wound, but it didn’t belong in Liam’s leg. Sal wanted to look back at where she had seen Collins—where she had seen the person she thought was Collins—on the ground earlier, but couldn’t bring herself to look. She told herself the reason was the bullets still occasionally flying through the air.

  “Quit whining,” said Grace to Liam. “It’s a through—”

  “—and through,” Sal finished with her.

  Grace’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know?”

  Sal shook her head.

  Sal felt Menchú’s hand on her shoulder. “Sal, what happened here?”

  “You mean what’s going to happen here,” said Sal. “Again.”

  “No,” said Menchú. “This is your memory, but already it has changed. We’re here, for one. We’re having this conversation. Whatever happened, it doesn’t have to happen again.”

  Sal could barely hear her own words, but trusted Menchú to understand. “I just want to leave.”

  “The surest route out is through. Clearly you survived this once. You can do it again. We’re with you.”

  Sal couldn’t keep herself from staring at Liam’s leg.

  “Quit stalling,” said Grace. “Tell us what happened.”

  Sal took a deep breath. “Collins—he was my partner, back when I was still with the NYPD—and I were here with Detectives LaPaglia and Knight. We’d each caught a body. I mean, they had one, and we had one. They were two separate cases, but they were both tied to the Russian mob, expanding out of Queens, I guess.” Sal could tell she was babbling and fought to get her story back under control. “Anyway, we didn’t know how closely the two murders were related until both of our investigations led us back to this warehouse. But all the information we had was that the place was empty. I mean, of course it would be empty. Why would a bunch of armed goons still be in a place where they knew the cops would come looking for them?”

  Sal paused for breath. Half turned and shouted to the people who were shooting at them, “You dumb fucks were supposed to be gone!”

  The only answer was more bullets.

  “Collins, my partner, took one in the leg almost as soon as we walked in.”

  “Check,” muttered Liam.

  “I stayed with him and radioed for backup. But all four of us were pinned down, outnumbered, outgunned. We were being careful with our rounds, but it was just a matter of time before we ran out. Not that it mattered; there were enough bad guys that they could rush our position anytime, as long as they didn’t mind taking casualties. God … it was such a setup. But we were too … We didn’t see it.” Sal swallowed and continued.

  “LaPaglia didn’t want to wait. He said that people dumb enough to get into a shoot-out with four cops were dumb enough to think that they were bulletproof. He and Knight thought they could get around, set up a cross fire, and take them out.”

  He had been so sure. Sal hadn’t liked the plan; it flew in the face of every procedure on the books, but she was the most junior, and she hadn’t said anything.

  “I take it the plan didn’t work,” said Menchú.

  Sal closed her eyes, tried to pretend that she wasn’t here. That she was in a windowless conference room, looking down a microphone at a row of lawyers. That this was just telling the story one more time.

  “It worked, and it didn’t,” she said. “LaPaglia and Knight were able to get into position and keep the heat off until backup came, but they didn’t realize that their positions were overlooked from the upstairs offices. We hadn’t noticed them in the confusion.” No, no time for lies now. Sal corrected herself, “No. I saw the offices, so I assumed the others had too and taken them into account. I didn’t think I could have caught something that they missed. By the time I realized … it was too late. They were pinned down and couldn’t get back to us.

  “It was chaos. LaPaglia and Knight kept the bad guys busy long enough for me to get Collins out. At some point, the building caught fire; we’re still not sure how. By the time our backup arrived, everything was in flames. I tried to go back in after them …” Sal trailed off. �
�They gave me a fucking medal. For saving my partner. LaPaglia’s and Knight’s went to their widows. If I’d just opened my stupid mouth and said something, I could have saved them all.”

  Sal glanced to the upper-level offices. Knowing what she was looking for, she could see the tops of heads crouching below the windows, waiting for their moment to strike.

  “Okay,” said Grace. “Let’s do it.”

  “Do what, get shot? You’re insane.”

  “No,” said Grace, “I’m thinking clearly. If this is going to play out at all like your memory, the only thing that saved you was the other two detectives drawing fire that let you and Collins get out. Right?”

  Chin set, Sal nodded. Daring Grace with her expression to say a word against her fallen comrades.

  “Great. Plus, the building is about to catch fire, and backup won’t get here in time to save us. So we can’t stay put.”

  “But anyone who moves from this spot is going to get shot!” Sal protested.

  “No. That’s what happened before. But now you know what happened and where all of the bad guys with guns are. Right?”

  Sal found herself nodding. She’d spent hours and hours going over the incident: with the department’s investigators, then with the lawyers in the civil suit that followed, and finally in her own mind in the middle of the night. She knew exactly what had happened here. She just wished she could un-know it.

  “What’s the second advantage?” Menchú asked.

  “If we’re wrong about how the oracle bones work, this is in Sal’s head, in which case nothing that happens to any of us matters, because it isn’t real.”

  “Feels fucking real,” said Liam.

  Grace’s teeth flashed white in the dim light. “If this is real, then it means this is my real body, which means those guns just got a lot less scary.”

  Sal stared at Grace in disbelief. “You mean …”

  Grace gripped Sal’s fingers with a hot, fierce pressure that forced Sal’s mind to the present. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you some closure.”