Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  That’s what she told herself as she spent another few nights in the brig. She slept late the morning they all graduated without her before going on to advanced specific training, the real commando crap she’d wanted most to learn. She couldn’t tell how long she was in the brig. Light levels never changed there. She estimated a week. They let her out two hours before she’d have lost her appreciation for the room. Then they stood her before the military population. They berated her and stripped her of the patches she had earned. They ceremoniously took away her uniform and finally-broken-in boots. Through the ceremony, she felt only resolve. She hadn’t let them attack her and that was that. She wasn’t a victim, not in any degree. She’d always fight back, no matter what the cost.

  The cost thus far was a military career, the one career she thought she might have enjoyed. That notion leaked away as she walked down the same path as the other training failures. She couldn’t have enjoyed a life amid hypocrites. She couldn’t have enjoyed fighting alongside the idiots she’d beaten down that night. She knew she was lying to herself, so she stopped. She would have loved every second of it. She had just lost the only hope she had for a future. She was too cruel and stupid for the Scottish army. She wouldn’t even be able to face the Frasers after this. But she had to face worse before then.

  At the end of the walk were her victims, all taking a break from training to hear her apology. The Apology had returned to her life, back like a drunken husband ready to beat her down. It was to be the crowning shame of her every low moment, but something was different this time. General Cameron himself wrote the apology she was to recite, but she thought of one loophole. She was a civilian already and didn’t have to follow his orders anymore. She wasn’t a victim to violence. She sure as hell wasn’t going to stay victim to this. It was time for the Apology to die.

  “You were uncoordinated and weak,” she told them. “I should have killed you all.”

  And she walked past them to the gate office. For a moment she thought she saw, amid the gaping mouths and shocked faces, Pvt. Heather Lyle smiling a proud, toothless grin. At the gate desk where Violet had checked in, they returned her thin civilian shorts, shirt, and shoe pads. They hardwired into her brain and deleted every protected file they had given her. Though they destroyed files for all she had yet to learn, what had been opened and used was now part of her natural memory. Her training thus far was hers and not legally removable.

  They turned her link back on and adverts piled quietly into the bottom of her vision. A ticket to Kyle loaded in front of them. They put her on the same Highland Public GET that had brought her there. The cabin was filled with civilians who didn’t give her a second thought. She tried to realign her identity to consider herself one of them. But she was not one of them, nor was she a soldier. She was no longer a daughter, a child, or any categorizable sort of human being. She was absolutely nothing. She would let that soak in when she got to Kyle. For now she’d just relax. In her cushy reclining chair, the first civilian luxury she’d had in a month. She dimmed her link and looked out the window. This time she wouldn’t miss the view.

  Chapter III: Kvitøya

  ACHNACARRY ACADEMY and its peripheral buildings fell away into the distance. The GET slowly traversed the mountains and rivers, which were sometimes far below but no less majestic in scale. She had seen the region up close when she was very young. Her dad had once taken her around the lochs and ruins to put her in touch with her native land. She’d have preferred a couple hours of games online back then, but now nothing seemed more beautiful. She didn’t understand how she could have missed it up close. Everything was so green, so organic and serene.

  Her dad had told her then how the soil and rock they walked on were the real meat of the world. It wasn’t all concrete through to the core, but she didn’t care. He’d pointed out grass and trees, but she didn’t even remember what he’d said about them. Now it seemed to her nothing had been so important as what she must have missed. The terrain below was alive and ancient, and all she had done in her life was nothing to the thousand-year-old plants and million-year-old rocks. Then she saw the ruins.

  That’s what her dad had been taking her to see: the ruins of Eilean Donan Castle. She saw the island below, and on it the stones of an old castle. Her dad had told her everything about it when they were there. She remembered only fragments now. Back when families were clans, the castle was in their charge. It was a site of battles or escapes or something important to history. It had inscriptions about… someone. It was destroyed in… some year and built again, and destroyed and rebuilt again, and then finally, only recently, it was left in ruin. She cursed herself for not paying attention. What the hell had she been thinking? How could she have squandered so critical a moment with her own father? How much life had she wasted in apathy? Were Violet ever to cry, it would have been then.

  She didn’t. She watched the ruins fade into the distance and pushed her sentimentality with them. What was sentimentality but another way of avoiding the world at hand? Her father and that day were gone. Move on. Two minutes to Kyle. She turned her link back up and skimmed a short news log. She looked at the “top stories” icon and a few thoughts loaded. “WYCo. buys NWS.” “Unocal litigation begins.” She kept looking for anything like what she’d learned from Lieutenant Cameron, but there was no sign of the breakdown of world peace, no stories about Cetacean Divisionists. The train docked over Arcolochalsh before she could do a real search.

  She couldn’t stay onboard, but she didn’t want to go back to the apartment. There was no reason to. The sky was only just going dark, and it wasn’t like she had a bedtime anymore. She wanted to get back online and see just what the civilian world knew about itself, so she headed to the cyberlounge on the arcology’s ground floor. She passed ten new construction zones on the way down and caught a glimpse of the 193rd floor. It had been repainted since she’d been away. The atrium and ground floor were also different—plants rearranged, walls moved, new kiosks and stores replacing ones she’d left so recently.

  The cyberlounge was still there, unchanged except that it now let her inside without parental permission. She found the lounge full of civilians in civilian clothes. The sight amused her. She had become so used to full body uniforms that the men in naught but thin kilts and the women in saris and drapes were silly to behold. Even on the train there had been folks in skin-thin clothes or less, aside from one tall massive man in a suit, but here en masse the bodies were a joke.

  She took a seat on a bean blob near the edge of the crowd and gave the room a last glance before immersing herself online. Civilians in every direction, ignorant soft civilians without cover. Except one man, a big guy in a suit. She thought it might have been the same one from the train, but his suit was a different color. Violet laid back and set her link to immersion. She watched the lounge go dark and let bright, opaque graphics assemble around her, forming her old home silo where she fell back into the net.

  The tall man watching her tapped his hat and turned his suit bright orange. He linked to his team to tell them Violet had gone online and grasped the handle of his dagger.

  THE COLORS of the Internet seemed doubly vibrant after Violet’s long desaturated time offline. She couldn’t decide if it all looked pretty or garish. She floated around the turf of Kyle’s net, tapping her toes gently on the floor graphic to stay afloat, enjoying the near weightless preference set she’d adopted so long ago. The netscape was so perfectly, plastically clean. The loss of her senses of touch, taste, and smell was refreshing. Symbol menus stretched out beneath her, glowing, changing to predict her thoughts. The avatars of four hundred thousand people from Kyle City walked, floated, or blinked in and out around her.

  She didn’t recognize anyone in the short lists; no names popped into her head, none of her old games or haunts called out with recognizable tags. In fact, in the time she was gone, the whole of every net had been rewritten a hundred times. The construction that was busily making her arcology unreco
gnizable was faster and more irreverent online. There was nothing familiar. If one missed a day on the net, let alone months, they would not likely find anything where they left it. Nor did friends stick around, but Violet didn’t have any to begin with. There was no one, nothing online to comfort her, but this was the Internet, so there was a whole lot of that comfortable nothing to be found.

  She hadn’t linked in to waste time and didn’t feel like sifting through news logs anymore. She felt a great need to move on, so it was a job board she floated to, where she looked over the available fates. The listings were past her capabilities or terribly unappealing: architect, bookseller, creature designer, entertainment writer, photographer, illustrator, advertising—so on ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Nothing worth doing or paying enough to ignore that it wasn’t worth doing. She was ready to sign out and head to the apartment when she heard a contact protocol.

  “Violet MacRae?”

  At a loss for who it might be, she accepted the contact. Two avatars, black from head to toe, floated up to her. They were featureless, androgynous, somehow more plain than the blanks of people who hadn’t bothered to create a profile, which was what she was using. She had not posted her name or used her childhood purple squid avatar or a scanned likeness.

  “Who are you? How did you know—?”

  “We can discuss that in a private room,” said one of the identical black figures in a generic voice. It offered its hand. The first thing any responsible parent teaches their child is not to follow strange avatars into private rooms. They could be hack traps, mind thieves, pirate programs, any one of a thousand malevolent creatures that lurked on public nets. Though Violet had proven herself quite tough in reality, she knew nothing about net defense beyond the one inviolate rule: nobody can harm you unless you give them your hand.

  “Why should I trust you?” she asked.

  “You shouldn’t,” said the other black figure. “You will because your hopes exceed your fears.”

  It was as true as it was concise. She touched the black avatars and followed them into a private room. The room was strange. Most rooms had a layer to show the conversation was private, but this one had shells of security and hack armor that showed it to be as impenetrable and exclusive as an executive board.

  “So who are you?” Violet asked.

  “We represent a possible employer. We offer training and residence,” replied one.

  “The life is high responsibility and heavily demanding,” added the other.

  “It does not pay but provides everything you could ever need,” said the first.

  She stared at them for a moment, then asked, “Police work? Military?”

  “This is neither, though there are elements of both.”

  “This offer is available to you and you alone,” said the other. “It will not appear on any general boards.”

  “Why are you offering it to me, then?”

  “You are capable of the rare abilities we require. You also have nothing better to do.”

  Again, they were absolutely correct.

  “So what is it?” she asked.

  “Espionage and counterintelligence.”

  She called up a definition search and loaded the words to be sure. The definitions came in as raw knowledge with icon options for related entertainment, equipment sales, news items, history files, and every advert ever posted with the words. She ignored all but the implication. They were spies.

  “Who would I be working for, and who against?”

  They explained again with sharp, fast responses. “For the general good of society and against those who would undermine peace, freedom, and the balance of power with violent means,” said one.

  “Threats vary in purpose and urgency,” added the other.

  “And the gangs?” asked Violet.

  “We monitor them and intervene often. Had the Orange Gang come back for you, we would have stopped them. You will have the opportunity for revenge, if you wish.”

  Violet didn’t even know that she wanted petty revenge, and they were offering it like a dental plan. She was nearly offended at the suggestion. Nearly.

  “You know I got kicked out of military training,” she admitted.

  “Yes, we do. You showed great mental discipline during the attack on your parents and proficiency in all activities at the training camp. The actions that ended your military career prematurely were more a result of their inflexibility than your own eccentricity.”

  “You want vicious crazy people?”

  “We want people capable of original thought beyond ordinary limits and violence at corresponding levels. Our enemies often exhibit such levels and demand it in return.”

  The avatars spoke like programs; humans were never so eloquent, not online. What they said was appealing, but she was not one to let artificial intelligences determine the rest of her life.

  “Everything I say is a lie—” she started. One of them interrupted. Programs rarely interrupt.

  “Don’t start, Violet. We’re not programs. She just talks like one sometimes.”

  “The hell I do!”

  Programs never bicker.

  “You do. Yesterday you told—”

  “Stop! No names!”

  “I wasn’t gonna say it, you twit!”

  “Twit my ass. You said ‘she.’”

  “You are a ‘she.’ It’s not classified. She’s female, Violet—tell the news!”

  Programs never ever got the hang of sarcasm. Violet was convinced. “Fine, fine, humans. I get it. So you want violent nutters working for you?”

  The avatars dropped their feud. “We want those who can protect themselves and others,” said the female.

  “I didn’t protect my parents,” responded Violet.

  “Detectors show you had no chance to. Instead you waited for an opportunity.”

  “Our analysis showed your actions that night were 94.2 percent of the ideal tactics. Your counterattack in the barracks was 99.1 percent.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “You are welcome. Your mind is a rare one. That it should exist in a strong, unaltered body is even more unusual. Your capacity to kill when necessary and to deal logically with the repercussions is most admirable. Your actions in training suggest personality traits that may be incompatible with military service but critical for our organization.”

  The other avatar floated gently closer. “With our training you could enhance your abilities to lengths you cannot yet imagine and put them to uses more important than anything the militaries offer.”

  “What company do you work for?” she asked.

  “We are not owned.”

  She suppressed a laugh out loud. “You have to be owned by something.”

  “We are not. We are the only body on earth or off that is totally independent.”

  “You’re pirates? Rogue bureaus? Another gang?”

  “They’re all owned as well. We are none of those. We simply are, and are alone.”

  “How long do I have to think about it?” Violet asked.

  “Our analysis suggests you have already decided to join us.”

  Their analysis was 100 percent psychoprogram-quality correct. Violet remarked, “You sure you’re not robots?”

  THEY TOLD her to log out and wait at home, so she left the private room, left the net, and returned to the real world. The lounge was still full of bodies, so full she had to step over numerous limp figures to make her way to the atrium. She looked up to the window at the top of the atrium wall. The sky was getting dark blue. The halls of Arcolochalsh were bustling with residents returning home after sunset. Violet’s head was busier. Possibilities were racing with concerns, colliding and crashing into derailed trains of thought. She was so withdrawn into her thoughts as she walked that she didn’t notice the orange suit following her out.

  She was being offered what could be the perfect life for her, or the perfect life for who she had been. She might have lost her taste for violence after what she did to
Heather and her fellow recruits. She might not be what they were looking for anymore. A pedestrian bumped into her shoulder, and she restrained the urge to break his neck with all eight ways Cameron had taught her. Still the same Violet. One problem down.

  But the person they thought she was—she was taken aback at the suggestion that she would seek revenge against the gang, but she didn’t know why. On reflection she decided that she did indeed want revenge, and if these people weren’t asking her to regret it, they wanted it. They needed it. They needed her. But she had been a vicious brat as a kid, and she was a dangerous brat as an adult. But they wanted dangerous. Violet got sick of the loop of thought and gave it up at the lifts. The man in orange watched her enter and waited for the next car.

  The pneumatic matrix picked up her car and sent it upward. Layers of atrium fell past, levels and levels of apartments, people living their lives. She felt certain now that none of their lives was so surreal as what hers was becoming. Windows lit up across the arcology, but those lights felt unfamiliar. She arrived on floor 193, where the walls were now ecru instead of the old pale tan. That might have been all that changed, but the place she grew up in felt as alien as Achnacarry had on arrival. This was not her home. Whatever it might have been in the past, the doors she approached were not home. She hesitated at the door. She checked the number to make sure it was the right one. She looked to the right, shortly down the round hall. The Frasers’ door was black; they were out somewhere. She put her hand to her own door, half expecting it not to recognize her. It lit up and let her in.

  She couldn’t think why the black avatars would want her to head to the apartment. There was nothing there but useless memories and useless police detectors, the remains of their trap. The lights came up as she walked into the living room. They revealed autocleaned walls and dusted, vacuumed floors. They reflected off the screen wall and chairs and threw light into the corners, ending the darkness that hid the two people waiting for her. She’d expected people, the human versions of the avatars she had spoken to. She was not expecting them to be wearing orange suits or holding sinister double-ended daggers. She turned around to see the door, still open, and filling its frame stood the man from the train, tall and thick and dressed in orange.