The Forever Watch

by David Ramirez

  “Dah-ling, it’s not the worst thing, you know, having a breakup. After the falling out of love, why, there’s the falling in all over again.”

  Well. Better that he thinks it is just a disagreement between my man and me.

  He pays, and then there is the urge to beg him to keep me company for a while longer. Then I am alone, sitting at a table on the sidewalk, watching everyone else walking to and fro, all of us alone in our heads, even the ones with a loving man or woman holding his or her hand or arm.

  Home feels empty with just me in it now. Without his coat on the chair, or his shoes by the doormat.

  I spread out on the table the papers that two young men died for today.

  Just a handful of sheets, old, faded. They smell slightly of mold. The left-hand edge is jagged—they were torn from something. The header has the Noah’s official seal on it—a fat, bulbous three-mast ship sailing on a sea of stars—the old one that lies at the bottom of the pool in front of my office building, inscribed into the pale pseudo-marble. A touch of my talent and the loose leaves shift slightly, but there is none of the innate connection I feel with plastech-derived fibers. These partial documents were printed on actual paper, organic fibers. They are three centuries old, from the time of the original crew of the ship.

  I am touching history in my kitchen.

  Two sheets are nonconsecutive pages from a report about propaganda techniques, and the success of information-management policies with regard to the percentage of the crew that has accepted the necessity of the Keepers.

  A third sheet has a list of names, described as “First batch, punished for disseminating G-1 data.’ A fourth sheet has the heading, “G-1 Experiments” and summarizes them as a failure because the subjects remained too hostile. It ends with a recommendation about special measures to contain them.

  There is a list of many texts that have been deemed dangerous, some with suggestive titles about the arrival of “the Ship” and the legacy of “the Visitors.”

  There is half a clipping from a broadsheet newspaper describing casualties from a series of collapsed maintenance tunnels.

  The last sheet is divided in two parts, G-0 and G-1, and underneath each of them is a long string of numbers. On the back of the last page are two lines written by different hands. A steady, even one states, “Mincemeat?” Then Barrens’s irregular, wandering scrawl asks, “What was Cal thinking?”

  Deep breath, Hana. Don’t just throw it all down the trash chute.

  We were starting to think that the deaths went back far enough that a single killer would have had to start ridiculously young and was still killing even now when he should be decrepit. Or if it was some conspiracy, it had to have lasted long enough for a couple of generations to be sucked into it. But for Mincemeat to have some connection with documents that are hundreds of years old, back to the time of the Noah’s launch from Earth?

  I miss the days when I thought it is one demented psychopath beating the system.

  “Damn you, Leon. Why didn’t you talk to me that last night?”

  I need to think. I need to analyze and put this all together.

  That deep hollow I’ve been pretending isn’t there eats at me again.

  It flings me into the black, padded chair in front of my terminal. In the space of seconds, it moves me to open half a dozen frames at once, with results from queries about memories available for download.

  There is a charge of credits equivalent to an hour’s work for me, then there is the falling into the memory.

  The culmination of years of training. Psychology, education. Test after test to determine worth and personality compatibility. For this. My neural Implant programs have been modified to alter my hormone balance and biochemistry. My food is laced with carefully balanced supplemental vitamins, minerals, and proteins.

  It is thrilling and odd and primal and perfect.

  Soft humming from my lips, nothing I need to think about, just a warmth and welcoming.

  He is cradled in my arms, and latched on. There is that tugging sensation, and I do not care that it is the result of years of preparation. There is a feeling of profound completeness filtering through me, the knowledge that this little guy is dependent on the nourishment from my body. Before this moment, my breasts were always just there, just cosmetic anatomical features that made my back ache sometimes and drew looks from men, and now they are so much more.

  I am so much more.

  I switch him to the other breast and sigh. I can feel his tiny chest expanding and contracting. His little breaths.

  My partner Keeper watches with a certain awe.

  Nothing could ever match this. If I ever had doubts before about this career, they have all vanished with this first intense connection. I do not know how I thought that the lack of a genetic link could matter.

  This diminutive stranger in my life has taken hold of my heart. Imprinted. He is my child now, regardless of who gave birth to him.

  I binge on them.

  That night, I spend a thousand credits on memories like that. All that emotion, the physical closeness, the acceptance, without having to wake up in the middle of the night to loud crying or having to change a diaper.

  Curled up on my side in bed, the hours pass so slowly.

  A brief, blissful peace before I wake up and feel only worse, the sun streaming in, knowing a full day of work is ahead with my team looking at me and wondering why bags are under my eyes, why I look as if I’ve been crying.

  No more purchased memories, I promise myself. If I let it, I could lose all my days to that. I fix myself the thickest, bitterest black coffee I can manage to swallow and tell myself with each sip that I don’t need that.

  I need to choose, just as Barrens made a choice.

  I can throw all this junk away and go back to my old life, forget about Mincemeat and Leon and Miya and everything. Or, I continue with this, getting deeper. And if I do, will it be to find him again? Or will it be for me?

  Hah.

  Anyway, being angry at being protected without my choice is more useful than soaking up the terrible, tiny thought that he just doesn’t need me anymore.

  15

  I plan, prepare, study.

  The main thing is finding him. The Noah is immense. Its true size is classified, but from the massive number of Analytical Nodes that Lyn and I found as kids and with some basic assumptions about the distribution and number of them, the ship’s volume is so vast that a lifetime is not enough time for one person to walk down every tunnel, crawl space, corridor, and hallway.

  Well, I already have a tool meant for finding things in the Monster. I need to retask a subpopulation of the swarm. It is not such a simple thing though. My boys aren’t going to be leaving a trail of bodies and vanishings. What can I use?

  I designed the swarm so that its accesses and use can’t be used to track the people using it. Commands and requests and modifications happen through propagating packets of data, which are taken in and passed on nondirectionally by each particle of the program, ripples in a pool that go back and forth, only the pool is scattered across vast numbers of nodes in the network. I get a headache just imagining its signal pattern. The network the Builders made underlies the Nth Web, and it is just so damned huge. To trace Barrens through his accesses on the Monster, I would need a real-time analysis of the whole mess of it scattered all over the ship—that could take months of continuous processor time, easily enough to be noticed by Information Security.

  There’s not much point in finding my man if it leads ISec right to us.

  If they take me, I’m not going to be let off with a warning and a mild psychosurgical procedure to dial back my curiosity.

  I need time to figure things out and not draw the attention of those grim agents in gray. Or worse, the ones in black—Enforcers could burn me to ash with a thought.

  There is the need to be more normal than normal, just in case I am being scrutinized in connection with Barrens’s disappearance. Anyw
ay, my job is intimately tied into the illusory world we maintain. To fool our bodies, to fool our minds. It is a lie, but a well-crafted one. I ought to be used to this.

  After all the delays, my team’s proposed changes to the water system are finally being implemented. We celebrate with a small party. Marcus attends because it is directly tied into his department’s sphere of responsibility. Because Lyn and he are married, she attends too. Because the two attend, so does Jazz, even though High Energy has its own separate dinner. The food is good, the menu personally selected by Hennessy, who went with fusion Japanese-French cuisine.

  Savelyev is there, and he is polite and kind and adorably geeky. I think I could have really got to like him, once.

  We bond across our lovely little dishes with their flourishes of glittering sauces and delicate spice blossoms.

  My tantrum at Yule got through to my friends, a little. At least they have the delicacy not to mention his name. Though, as far as they know, we’ve only broken up. I doubt they care enough to have checked on Barrens and discovered that he is actually missing. And Savelyev doesn’t even know I was with anyone in the first place.

  We eat and smile, and eat some more. The three of us girls laugh at Marcus’s bewildered, flustered state when Hennessy starts to flirt with him.

  I am okay with how life is. I refuse to give in to the desire to feel weak, to feel down. Better to be pissed at him. I’ll give him what for when I find him.

  The days pass. But they are not real days, without a sun’s rising to mark each new one. They are simulations of days, merely a measure of time. I continue to chase down the ghosts on the system.

  He’s gotten too close a look at how I do my tricks. He’s vanished from the Nth Web, except for the briefest accesses, and then only done through the powerful masking function inherent to the Monster.

  I start to design a modification of the program that measures the processor load throughout the ship only at the time that someone is using the Monster. Distributed through the nodes, this snapshot function should still be lightweight and barely noticeable, and if I can physically map the subtle changes in how busy the network is, node by node, as the program is used, perhaps it can suggest a location.

  Slow and steady. I am going to find you.

  And then it hits me. The Monster has become a genuine Monster.

  The complexity of its population has grown. Alarmingly so. It doesn’t look like the loose, randomized cloud it’s supposed to be. The population as a whole has too much order, with too much substructure to the groupings. This is no longer anything like my course project as a teenager—it has a geometric pattern, but it’s so large now, I can’t see the full shape.

  This is beyond what Barrens can do, beyond my level of skill too. Unless he’s rounded up a hundred-strong team of computer scientists of my skill and above, which is about as likely as Barrens’s becoming Minister of Peace, something more is going on.

  Searching through my Implant memories provides snapshots of the Monster’s complexity maps over time. When did it start to grow too fast, start to really change? An equation to roughly approximate its altered complexity growth curve, and then running the math through the hardware of the Implant to compute backward, and …

  And there. There it is. It began about that day the Monster came across one of the Builders’ memories.

  A shiver as electric possibility runs across the nerves. Are there alien bits of code corrupting the swarm?

  I’ll go mad if I start down that rabbit hole. My eyes need to stay on what’s right in front of me. The parts I do understand still work, that’s what matters.

  Even if it’s slow.

  “Real life” work drains the days. The half of my job that is implementation is about dealing with people. Management. Communication. Evaluations. Directing workflows. Dealing with people is tiresome. I wish I could just shove that half of the job onto Hennessy and only do analysis and proposals.

  Every once in a while, I still check on the hunt for Mincemeat.

  Saturday night, and I am alone at home, as usual. I lean back in my chair, close my eyes, and examine a new memory uncovered by the Monster.

  In that forum where the memory was first uploaded, other discussions rage, other rumors. Stories of some of the subculture going missing. Caught by ISec, taken away. The collectors of these horrid memories have gone deep into hiding or have been vanished; this memory is not from them, it is from someone who was hoping to sell it and could not find them.

  If that is so, if Barrens was found through them or they were found through him … I can do nothing for them.

  Many of the threads fade out with nervous posters saying their good-byes, wondering if their little hobby is on the edge of calling the attention of the men in gray.

  To set aside this memory or not? Well. There is no real choice about that. I do want to know, for myself too.

  Those forum-goers who remain debate whether it actually happened, or if it is just a fragment left over from some unreleased or unremembered creative production. The metadata indicates that it is an old memory, and its quality has been degraded by multiple transfers between devices and viewers—it will be impossible to conclude anything concrete about it either way.

  There is enough signal loss that it will be less like reexperiencing the memory, and more like watching a movie. There will be a layer of separation, which, given what posters are saying about the content, is a relief. I ready myself, put aside thoughts of that jerk I love so much, and load it onto my Implant.

  He is still young. Too young receive a Retirement notice. He does not understand the reasoning of the Retirement Management Agency. What has he done that is so terrible that he is being taken out of the work rotations? Is something wrong with him? He supposed it was not his place to wonder at the equations and analyses of his betters. He just could not imagine how it was more efficient for a mediocre worker such as himself to be removed from active duty on the ship before he had put in the work equal to a significant fraction of all the years that had been invested in raising him from childhood, giving him a neural Implant, and training him how to use it.

  Jackson! Pay attention!

  Sorry, Cameron.

  You better be careful. If you fall over and start choking on that shit, I am not going to dive in there to pull you out.

  Yes, Cameron.

  I mean it! Watch your step!

  Cameron is twenty years older. Why isn’t he getting Retired?

  He slogs through the stinking muck. He is accustomed to the stench by now. It does not bother him nearly as much as the resentment that has overwhelmed him since he received the red envelope with his name on it. In truth, it’s sent him reeling. He has not been able to bring himself to even talk about it. He has barely been able to eat—he’s lost ten pounds already.

  Put some more muscle into it!

  Okay, Cameron.

  The probe is heavy in his hands. It is a long stick with a sensor suite at the end, a limited-use amplifier that detects changes in plastech density. The paddle shape of the sensor head has a lot of drag. A few minutes of shifting it through the thick sludge has his shoulders and back aching.

  Finally, he senses the breach. I got it.

  Without moving the end, he places a psi-tag on a hook projecting from the side of the probe’s shaft. Carefully, he checks that his fingers are clear of the hook, then triggers the probe. He feels a little more power bleeding into his nervous system, enhancing his meager talent. The hook descends, and when it reaches the bottom of the probe, it activates, punching the chisel end of the tag into the crack.

  Another team will be by later on to perform the actual repairs.

  Cameron’s voice screeches in his head, as though the man were yelling directly into his ear. Come on then! Get moving! There’s three more leaks a hundred meters aft! This segment of piping can’t work until all of that is fixed and it can be pressurized again.

  How far back is the fix-it crew, boss?

&n
bsp; Never you mind. We take care of our business quick as we can. Let those wannabe engineers be slow and stupid.

  He draws the probe out, rests it against his shoulder as he pushes harder, marching through the meter-thick layer of crusted sewage. His labored breath is loud inside the confines of the breathing mask. He can feel his perspiration trickling down the inside of the slick, waterproof suit, pooling at the folds at his waist, and into his boots.

  Perhaps he ought to look at his impending early Retirement as a blessing? It was not as if this were a fulfilling job with good opportunities for advancement.

  What would he do with himself, though, in the Retirement section? He was so young, not yet twenty. He would be surrounded by men and women two to four times his age in there!

  And how long before Anita forgot him?

  He would break up with her first. Maybe tonight. He had seen other couples separated by Retirement. He would not be able to take a teary good-bye prolonged over months. Then the last day would come and the Retirement people would take him off, and then to have her sobbing and weepy and restrained by one of those red-coated men with their cheery smiles? No. Not for him.

  Twenty minutes more and he has marked two more leaks. But the last one is driving him crazy. Forty minutes and he just cannot find it!

  I’m telling you, Cameron, there ain’t no holes here. Gone over every centimeter, grid-style, and there ain’t nothing.

  Water Management says there’s a leak there, so there’s a leak there. The computers say so, and they are more reliable than we are.

  Why can’t the fricking computers tag the leak then?

  Patiently, Cameron repeats the same thing he has probably had to say once a day to somebody on his crew for the last ten years. The sensor resolution of the Reclamation System only goes down to the square meter.

  Another twenty minutes and he can hear the repair team closing in now, just a few tags behind.