The Forever Watch

by David Ramirez

  “Got to take off early. Should start squaring up your tab already…”

  “Wouldn’t … nuh … want to let … debts … linger.”

  With the alcohol and the emotional balancing act of the evening, I didn’t notice the sad tenderness with which he made love to me.

  In the middle of the night, I stir long enough to see him sitting at the edge of the bed. He looks down at his tablet. I can’t see his face well enough.

  “Leon?” Loose, languid, I yawn.

  Another kiss. Softer. The softest. “’S nothing. You go back to sleep.”

  I should have paid attention. I should have asked what he saw.

  12

  I wake up alone, in a tangle of carpet and blankets and clothes, a bleak sun looking down at me. Perhaps we overdo it a little, the change of light levels with winter.

  An envelope with a card is on the low crystal table in the living room. It is handmade paper, the fibers coarse and distinct under my fingertips.

  On the card, Leon has written, in his cramped, irregular scrawl, Happy Yule, my love.

  The eighteen-digit alphanumeric code is an ident number.

  The date and the time-stamp match up with the end of your Breeding Duty. His hand trembled there. M for male. Last three digits match the last three digits of your ID. I don’t know for sure. But this is probably your son.

  I am sorry.

  The places I have to go, what I have to do next, things cannot stay the same, and I must choose if I will fight or give it up and pretend everything is fine.

  The people I’ve been talking to. They’ve found something. Something I can’t ignore. Mincemeat is not one man. Bullet was right too, though. It’s not about execution. There is too much now, to ignore.

  I choose to fight. You know I can’t choose to do anything else.

  And others, less friendly types, I think, have started to close in on who I am, on the Web.

  I need for you to stay safe, Hana. I’ve endangered you enough.

  I have never known happiness, till there was you.

  Good-bye.

  I send out countless messages. I beg. There are no replies.

  When I message Bullet and get no replies from him either, I feel particularly awful.

  Really, Leon? You left me behind and took the kid with you?

  There is no stopping myself from going to his precinct. And waiting. I don’t know how long I would have waited out there, in one of the cramped little chairs in the lobby. But Miyaki Miura spots me and marches out.

  “He’s a fuckin’ idiot. Listen, don’t come round here, don’t go to his place. Go home, do your usual thing. Wait for me.”

  Three days drift by in a haze of numbers and reports and proposals and revisions of proposals. The nights crawl by. I am always cold. Numb. I feel almost as bad as when I was on my post–Breeding Duty meds. As though there were a barrier between me and what I feel.

  At work, my face is a storm cloud and nobody questions my black mood.

  Nothing tastes good anymore. I force myself to finish off an apple at lunch and take the elevator back to my floor.

  Hennessy catches my arm at the door to our department. “Chief? There’s someone waiting for you. Umm, she looks kind of scary.”

  “Good afternoon, Officer Miura.”

  “Hi, Dempsey.”

  She steps into my office. “He’s gone and cocked it up something terrible, Dempsey.”

  “Hana. Just Hana.”

  Her smile is brittle, her eyes dart around, taking in who is watching us. “Miyaki. No, um. Then, you can call me Miya. You’re only the second allowed to.”

  I wave my hands, using touch to lower the blinds over all the clear glass that lets me keep an eye on my team when I please, but also lets them keep an eye on me. I also close the blinds on the windows looking out on the street below.

  “So.”

  Deep breath. Crossing my arms across my chest does not calm me, but if my hands are holding on to something, they will not shake. “He’s really missing,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “What will you do?”

  We each examine the face of the other. Do I look soft and weak to her, as all elites seemed to Barrens? Insecurity pecks at the back of my skull. It has no place here.

  He’s got a storage unit rented in the warehouse districts. “Inherited” it, sort of, from Cal. I want you to come with me.

  Right now?

  I don’t know how many people know about it. Maybe it’s already too late to retrieve whatever the dumbass hid in there. Maybe not.

  If I close my eyes, I will lose myself in the way he held me, that first evening, after Breeding Duty, at that ghastly party. I will think of his voice like a bear’s roar and the heat of his smell and the toothy smile on his craggy face that is a snarl to everyone else. I pull on my coat. It feels heavier than it should. My shoulders are stiff, and I know it is from worrying. My bag is heavy in my hand—why even bring that? A neural Implant multicast informs the team that I will be out for the rest of the day.

  “Let’s go.”

  And we are gone, my officemates looking after us, curious, but not curious enough to stop what they are doing.

  “James, you’re in charge for a bit.”

  “Wha—? Chief, there’s—”

  We are gone.

  We watch each other, though we pretend not to, examining each other’s reflection.

  I’ve been in her car about a dozen times, but I never paid much attention to it before. A lean, narrow wedge with three wheels, it is large enough to seat one passenger up front just behind the driver. In the rear is a padded, armored capsule with shackles and straps for a single prisoner.

  She drives smoothly, carefully. She stops at every light and sign, signals before each turn, checks her mirrors before changing lanes, and stays at the speed limit. Not at all like the other police captains I have seen, zooming along recklessly just because they can.

  “Did he leave you a note too?”

  “You got a note? It must be love then. No. He just stopped showing at work. And when I went to his place—” She swallows. Clears her throat.

  “Yes?”

  “Gray coats. I got one look at them and just kept walking.”

  How did they find out? We were so careful. I suppose everyone thinks he is too careful to get caught, until he is.

  “I know he got out.”

  How can she be so sure?

  “Trust me. If they had caught him there, there would have been a fight. They’d never take him in without wrecking the place.”

  Another deep breath. I’ve had to take so many in the past few minutes. Did I think I was feeling drugged and removed from my emotions again? I wish I were because I am terribly afraid right now, and only the thought of Miya’s disapproving glare holds back my panic.

  “Will they come for me too? Interrogate me?”

  “Information Security can’t be seen just talking to every person in Barrens’s life. Most likely, they’ve already checked you out and haven’t found anything yet. If there was something, they’d have already taken you.”

  Small comfort. “Now he’s vanished himself. He was so excited, said he found something, a real breakthrough.”

  Wait. The timing.

  My lists … I try to recall where that particular psi-tablet was, with the latest reports from my botnet. I do an internal memory search for that interface device. Flashing through the images, I see myself setting it down on the nightstand next to my bed, just before I started getting dressed for the party. The next time I walked into that room was after reading Barrens’s note, with me crying as I throw myself into bed. That tablet, with both the newest data-crawl results and my latest tweaks to my data-miner code, is gone.

  Barrens has it.

  I guess that was just one of the things he was working on, with the Monster. The program had changed so much. He was looking into Breeding Duty because of me. Or did he find out through some of the contacts he made, c
reeping through the wastes of the Nth Web, in the forums and on the boards that pop up for one night and then vanish, the better to protect everyone’s identity? Or perhaps one of the collectors of illicit memories. Maybe somewhere out there, some pervert Breeding Duty Doctor is selling memories of births.

  How did ISec find him out, but not me? It has to be through these other projects of his, or these other people on the Web, the things he never brought me in on.

  Miyaki is right. He must have left nothing suspicious. Otherwise, I would already be in a cell, being questioned, having the memories ripped out of my head.

  Through one of the great air locks, and around us, the clean, white homes and glittering towers of Edo Section give way to architecture inspired by an imagined golden age of Paris. Block after block of beautiful buildings of even height, subtle shades of pale colors, harmonious despite the differences, long lanes, lovely streetlamps, plazas with fountains and old statues. The window frames are decorated with figurines and scrollwork. Tomatoes grow out of planters on the balconies. Rosebushes line the sidewalks.

  The street divides and Officer Miura hangs a right, descending down into the gray underways below the city level. Lights stream by overhead. We come to the primary warehouse district, an underground section that services the entire Habitat. The cavern, the color of concrete, is several hundred meters high and many thousands of meters across. Trains and trucks flow in and out continuously around the broad, squat columns supporting the upper deck. The columns double as grain silos, food-processing plants. Silver-threaded needles crisscross the air, the distribution lines for the psionic energy grid underneath the Habitat.

  Among the giant cargo haulers, the police car is a little bird crowded by elephants. Each of those titanic wheels has a diameter greater than the length of our vehicle.

  I tap the map systems of the car and see our location and route. We keep heading for the stern. There is nothing there. Or there shouldn’t be. “Where are we going? To one of the abandoned Habitat sections?”

  “His storage unit is right at the edge. Warehouse management sometimes loses track of the building modules out here—they get moved around a lot. No safer place to hide something. Well, other than the unmapped zones.”

  Nobody comes out here. The traffic grows sparse. Disappears. Soon we are just one wedge of light slicing through the darkness with the headlights. The tunnel widens. We see the great wall at the end—the edge where the Habitat is sealed off from old compartments that are no longer used.

  There are fires there, along the dam that goes left to right and up and up as far as the eyes can see. Dark shapes scurry away from our light.

  “What are the—”

  “Tunnel gangs. There are access shafts going up to every part of the Habitat from down here. They won’t mess with us. Civilian amplifiers don’t work down here. Police badges and”—she nods at me—“City Planning’s construction gauntlets do.”

  I do not want to disappoint her by saying that I did not bring my gauntlet. Instead, a small self-defense pendant with management override codes hacked into it let will let me draw upon power and use routines almost as well as a real gauntlet. Funny. That’s not legal either; I wonder why I bothered. It’s not something I would have done before all this. Before Mincemeat. Before Barrens and Holmheim.

  Do I want to impress her? Maybe I do. When Barrens talked about her, he always did so with respect, almost reverence.

  That is why, when we step out into the dark, echoing emptiness, I try to hide how frightened I am. I am too used to the bright lights and clean containment of the Habitat.

  Her badge glows, and her eyes flare deep bloodred—the optical enhancements of a bruiser.

  “Aren’t you lighting up too?”

  Not sure what I was thinking. Was I expecting her to hold my hand or something?

  A packet of thought from organic brain to Implant to the amplifier under my shirt. It draws power from the grid, and with thought and focus, I direct the energy to my hand, to my fingers. A psionic arc light flares to life in the hand I hold out before me, white fire, ionizing gas held inside a sphere of force. Telekinesis makes a bubble of high-pressure air on one side, a lens that focuses the brightness.

  “I’ll try to keep it out of your eyes.”

  At the base of the periphery curtain wall, cargo containers are stacked high on top of each other. Dim orange and red outline their doors, lights that flicker on and off at random. A flimsy-looking framework around the storage units consists of stairs and walkways going up and down and across each teetering stack.

  “I hope you’re not scared of heights.” She has her back to me, but I can hear her smile. She glances down at the tablet in her hands. “It’s that one.” She points.

  It would have to be the highest one in the middle. More than a hundred meters up.

  “I do hate heights,” I admit. “But at least it’ll be too dark to see how far up we are.”

  All those steps. I need to get more exercise. Barrens made me promise I would.

  While we clomp up the steps, which vibrate with our weight, Miya starts talking. She tells me about Callahan. In her voice, I hear something more than friendship and affection, and I wonder if she ever got to tell him any of it.

  “When Leonard showed me the memory, I was in, at first. But then, he got obsessed. It was getting to be too much for me. He was seeing Mincemeat in everything, suspicious junk in ordinary paperwork misfiling.

  “Then, he went to you. I didn’t think he would ever trust anyone else to see the beast in his head. Can’t tell you how hard it was helping him hide that whenever we had to turn in after-action memories. He thought you were real special. Only girl he’d talk about.”

  That was something I’d never thought about. “How did you hide it?”

  “We did repeated transfers back and forth from my viewing of it to a tablet and back to my head. It degrades the emotional content of the memory. That’s what we would submit for him.”

  I would bet that was Barrens’s idea.

  The metallic frame creaks and sways with our movements. Nerve-racking, in the dark.

  “Be careful. Some of the steps are cracked. If you fall, I’m not sure I could catch you without bringing this stupid scaffolding down on top of us.”

  Breathing. Control. Emptiness.

  I put my left foot on the next step and keep going. As he often told me, All we can do is what we can do.

  13

  “Now we cross this bridge here and—” Miya crouches, holds an arm out to stop me.

  “What?”

  “There’s someone up there. I see someth—gaaah!” she cries out, clapping a hand to her shoulder. A small, dark shape flits by my head, whistles through the air.

  Two shooters, she thinks to me. Not direct telepathy, but through Implant-to-Implant messaging. If one of us had greater talents in reading and writing, there would be less of a delay in transmission; we could have acted as one.

  I am freezing and thinking instead of acting. Gawking, sweeping my light back and forth through the darkness pointlessly. Somewhere out there, I hear the whirring of—what? Gears?

  “Peace officer! Halt your fire and surrender immediately, or I will use deadly force!” Miura’s voice is amplified, roars through the emptiness. When her voice is like that, I can only think of her as Officer Miura. Miya is too cute, something I might call a close friend. Not a name that goes with this warrior woman, hard-edged, dangerous. The voice a lioness’s roar.

  Her left hand darts out faster than I can see, grabs something right out of the air as she snarls, “You were warned!”

  Shield us, stupid! My touch is just barely enough to operate a car! And drop your light!

  I do so, barely in time. Throwing out my hands, I feel my talent get a hold of something five meters away. It comes to a stop just centimeters in front of my face, wreathed in the light of my power—a short shaft coming to a narrow, chisel-shaped point. It wobbles and falls as I see more flashes heading
for us, more projectiles, catching the faint light from the dim orange glow off of the many container doors. I drop to my knees and press my hands to the plastech under us. It warps in front of Miura, a panel breaking off and twisting up at an angle. The points of the weapons punch partway through, but stop.

  The third one’s got something from Barrens’s storage unit! Can’t let him run! Her mind-messages are crisp and clear. Little bleed-through of irrelevant thoughts and emotions, despite the thing protruding from her right shoulder. Blood trickles down her arm.

  Miura leaps seemingly to her death, changes direction by grasping the rail. She flips up and starts flying along the scaffolding, which shivers and sways and rings with her feet and hands thudding against the struts, accelerating her straight up as though she were just sprinting along a flat track. She glows bright with psi energy, a fire-spider clambering up a metallic web.

  Sparks in the darkness, impacts of more of those—what are they? Barrens’s voice in my head, talking to me while we watch an old 2-D movie. Crossbow bolts. Like William Tell shooting apples off my head I think, giggling stupidly.

  Another skitters off the support next to me and parts my hair just behind my neck.

  Those aren’t paintballs.

  As Barrens would say, fuck this shit. I am hyperventilating and not sure if I am going to pass out. I act first.

  I clap my hands together and pull in kilowatt-class energy. My whole body glows as if I were standing in a cobalt spotlight, and the pendant under my shirt shines so fiercely it is a small blue sun. The catwalk stops vibrating, and all around me, walkway panels hop off their frames and float into a rough hemispherical formation.

  Lit up like a firefly, I am a bright target for sure, but at least I am a fortified one.

  Miura pings me, I’m your eyes. I’ll see for you. You take care of those shooters.

  She feeds me a stream of images from her point of view, lit up in the red-shaded, monochrome vision of her psionically enhanced sight. There is some degradation from the conversion through her neural Implant and then mine, static around the edges. She keeps them highlighted for me with bright blue targeting reticules. The data comes with a wash of hunger, a predator’s anger. But tight and controlled, nothing like Barrens’s maddened beast-self.