Counting Heads

by David Marusek

  Sam, slo-mo is a vid technique. Your actual descent would take only five seconds.

  “I know that, you brainless knickknack!”

  Sam, I perceive that you are upset with me, but I don’t understand why.

  THEY SAT IN silence. Murphy came to sit on the cushion behind Samson’s head. Full darkness settled upon the stadium. Samson said, “Forgive me. I seem to have become a mean drunk in my old age.”

  “I’m sure it’s due to the pain you suffer, and not to any meanness on your part,” said Justine.

  “Don’t bet the farm on that,” Samson said. “In any case, it’s only fair to warn you that I will soon become an object of public scrutiny, not to mention a fire hazard. You know what happens to the seared when they expire, don’t you? You may want to find more distant seats.”

  Starting from the field and lower bleachers, blue-white stadium lights ignited, tier by tier, up the stadium well.

  Victor said, “It’s not in my nature to meddle, Myr Kodiak, but are you sure there’s not some path for you other than the one you’re contemplating? At the very least, wouldn’t you rather spend your last moments with your loved ones?”

  The lights hit them, and they winced in the brilliance. The rest of the seats on their tier came out, assembling themselves into rings of bleachers. Placeholder spectators appeared in the seats and began to cycle through their pregame repertoire of restlessness, gaiety, and chatter. The great space hummed with fake excitement.

  “Yes, frankly, I would,” Samson said, straining to speak over the noise, “but this is my fate.”

  “Forgive me for arguing, but is it?” said Victor. “There is no doubt that the seared suffered a great injustice, but that time is long past. You’re too late to make a difference one way or another.”

  “That may be so,” Samson said, “but at least I can remind the world of its crime. At least I can go out in blazing testimonial.”

  “By providing a—excuse the expression—a freak show?”

  “It was my valet’s error to bring me here, but it’s too late to go anywhere else. Here will have to do. My mind is made up.”

  “Tell us,” said Justine. “Tell us about your life. Wouldn’t that be better? We care about you.”

  On cue, Murphy, the cat, stepped lightly down the armrest and curled up in Samson’s lap. Victor said it was a sign, and Justine said that Murphy was an impeccable judge of character. Samson didn’t know how to react to the cat, his lap having been barren of any creature for so long.

  The first continent-sized billboard of the orbital Skytel crested the stadium rim. It was broadcasting some sort of variety show. Another hour would pass before the Skytel was in place for Hubert’s hack. Samson tentatively stroked Murphy’s head and was startled by the immediate purring.

  “I’ve got the time, and since you asked,” he said, “I’ll tell you the abridged story of my life. But then I’ll ask you and your Murphy to remove yourselves to a safe distance.

  “First off,” he began, “before I was a Kodiak, my name was Harger.”

  2.20

  Arrow, Meewee said, where is Ellen?

  I do not know, replied the mentar.

  Meewee had gotten out of bed and put on house togs. He’d gone out to the living room again and sat in his favorite armchair. He felt light-headed, and his whole left arm tingled fiercely. Wee Hunk explained it as merely a side effect of his new brainlette temporarily hijacking the efferent pathways of his brachial nerves. It would pass.

  Arrow, do you know how to find her?

  Negative.

  This isn’t working, Meewee complained.

  Wee Hunk said, Let’s try something different. Talk to Arrow about anything except Ellen while at the same time you are thinking about finding her.

  “Huh?”

  An indirect approach, Merrill. Talk to it about an unrelated topic while thinking about Ellen.

  About what topic?

  For pity’s sake, use your imagination.

  So Meewee nestled into the armchair and thought about Ellen’s head and where it might be at that moment and said, “What’s the time and temp?”

  “Eighteen forty-six,” Arrow replied. “Twenty-eight degrees Centigrade outdoors and twenty-two degrees indoors.”

  Meewee said, Well?

  I didn’t hear anything.

  I need a break.

  Later! Wee Hunk snapped.

  But Meewee ignored him and told Arrow to fetch a snack.

  I HAVE AN idea, Meewee said, brushing crumbs from his togs. You and Arrow have challenged each other. I’ll have it challenge me.

  Wee Hunk, who had reduced his display to a flat frame in order to conserve attention units, said, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.

  Why not?

  If it challenges you, and your ability to use Starkese is not up to the task, I frankly don’t know how it would react.

  Let’s find out, Meewee said and told Arrow to challenge his identity.

  Complying. “Myr Meewee, do you have a shipping address for your household goods, or shall I place them in storage?”

  “In storage, I would suppose,” Meewee answered.

  Immediately, the three Orange mechs raced into the living room and took up attack positions around Meewee’s head, so close he could feel the backwash of their wings and hear their tiny laser cannon powering up.

  Don’t move a muscle, Wee Hunk said. I told you it was a dicey idea.

  Meewee held his head perfectly still. A microcannon was aimed at each temple. Seconds dragged by, and then Arrow said, as though for the first time, “Myr Meewee, do you have a shipping address for your household goods, or shall I place them in storage?”

  I suggest you get it right this time, Wee Hunk said.

  A bead of sweat trickled down Meewee’s forehead. “I—uh—that is,” he began.

  “My household goods—I mean—place my household goods—no wait—check that.” He shut his eyes and clenched his teeth.

  Don’t try to think it, Wee Hunk prompted him. Just feel your undying loyalty to Eleanor and say whatever comes out of your mouth.

  Meewee thought about Eleanor that morning at the board meeting, about the image of the tumbling yacht, about the Garden Earth Project and frozen colonists crossing the heliopause. “Storage,” he said. “Except for several changes of spring seasonal clothes and my ecumenical files.”

  The cannon powered down, and the mechs flew away. Meewee gulped air. His heart rattled against his rib cage.

  You are Merrill Meewee, Arrow said.

  Excellent, said Wee Hunk. Maybe now we can get somewhere with this.

  But they tried for another half hour with no success. Finally, Wee Hunk came up with a suggestion: Simply tell Arrow to tell you how to tell it in Starkese to locate Ellen’s head.

  Meewee gave it a try. Arrow, tell me how to tell you in Starkese to locate Ellen’s head.

  Arrow replied without hesitation, I feel like watching a vid or something, Arrow. Maybe the evening news. Find something interesting for me.

  Meewee parroted the mentar, “I feel like watching a vid or something, Arrow. Maybe the evening news. Find something interesting for me.”

  “Complying,” Arrow said, and the Orange mechs raced out of the apartment through the slugway.

  Well, that got a response, Wee Hunk said, and what’s this?

  A large spinning globe, as viewed from space, appeared in the middle of the living room. Around the globe’s equator hung sixteen satellites, attached to it with a web of strings. Meewee recognized them immediately as the Heliostream relay stations and the microbeams they directed at ground targets. As he watched, the microbeams, starting at the orbital stations, became coated with a silvery sheath that traveled down their length to the ground stations. At the ground, powdery clouds billowed up and spread out like ripples on a pond.

  What is that stuff? Meewee said.

  I don’t know yet. I’m sampling it via meteorological drones. It’s a kind of dust
particle, streaming down the static flux of the beams. I can’t tell much more than that yet.

  Over the next half hour, silver puddles spread outward across continents until they intersected with each other and merged. Meanwhile, clouds of the dust rose into the atmosphere and shrouded Earth in a silvery fog. The prevailing winds mixed and churned it up. It was denser in the temperate zones and almost absent at the poles.

  Well?

  I think it’s nust.

  Which is?

  Microscopic network repeater nodes. Nodal dust. Microscopic particles that link with all the particles around them.

  I don’t understand, said Meewee. What do they do?

  That’s all they do. Imagine if ten particles of nust landed on your hand and networked themselves. Anything that could read them would see a rough approximation of your hand in real time as it moved through space. Wait a few minutes until ten more particles landed and linked up. With every addition, the image of your hand gets sharper. Eleanor is coating every blessed thing on the face of Earth with interactive dust!

  By now the entire globe, suspended in Meewee’s living room, was completely obscured by a bright cloud of churning nust. Meewee went to the skylight where the evening sky seemed a little more orange than usual, but nothing out of the ordinary. I can’t see it.

  That’s because its density is only about twenty to forty micrograms per cubic meter, depending on latitude and altitude, less than common air pollution. I’m not sure what kind of picture resolution that would give you. But it seems to me it would take an incredible number of attention units to read it. A whole battalion of superluminaries.

  Suddenly a pocket of nust at the equator flashed and seemed to liquify. The transformation raced around the globe until the planet seemed covered by a flood of swirling quicksilver.

  They’ve just linked up, Wee Hunk said. Eleanor has just achieved the first global handshake. Shall we dive in and see if Arrow knows what it’s doing?

  The caveman reached out his arms and pulled, like pulling an invisible rope. Meewee, in his armchair, did the same, and seemed to pull himself down toward the planetary surface. The Baja Peninsula appeared below him like a silver icicle. He pulled until he could distinguish the San Bernadino Mountains and Southern California. Aircraft disturbed enough nust in the atmosphere to be visible, but the resolution at ground level wasn’t high enough to make out anything smaller than a building.

  Come down here, Wee Hunk said.

  Down where?

  Bolivia—the crash site.

  2.21

  Bogdan slipped out of Green Hall, leaving his housemeets to linger over the fruitish and coffeesh and went down to the NanoJiffy for an Icy. On the other side of the wall, he could hear the shattering crunch of the predigester in the kitchen as Francis and Barry fed it dirty plates and cutlery, food scraps, and table linen. By tomorrow morning, all their day’s waste would be masticated, dissolved and filtered, and reconstituted into fresh ugoo precursor, ready to be rewoven into new plates, clothes, and food. The cycle of life.

  As he enjoyed his dessert, Bogdan checked his messages with his new throat phone and discovered that it had no built-in filter sets, and so he had a queue of tens of thousands of calls. Without a graphical interface or helpful valet, he’d have to sift through them individually to find any that mattered. He needed his editor in his room, so he climbed the nine and three-quarter floors to retrieve it.

  The door to Bogdan’s room, his loyal diaron-plated, titanium-bolted, clinker core door that not even a tank could penetrate was ajar. That was not possible. He pulled the door open enough to peek inside. There was a boy lying on Bogdan’s mattress. It was Troy Tobbler. Bogdan pulled the door wide open and burst in shouting, “What the feck! How the feck did you get in here?”

  Troy rubbed his eyes. “You woke me up.”

  “Did you hack my door?”

  “I said, you woke me up.”

  “I don’t care,” Bogdan said and went around the elevator cable housing to stand over his bed and unwelcome visitor.

  “I didn’t hack your door,” Troy yawned, grinding the gritty footpads of his boots into Bogdan’s sheets. “Slugboy did.”

  “And who the feck is Slugboy?”

  Bogdan felt a sharp blow to the back of his head that sent him reeling. He lurched around, but there was no one there. When he turned back, however, he was confronted by a small boy. The boy was a head shorter than Bogdan, and though he had cherubic cheeks and a freckled nose, there was a menacing something about him that made Bogdan think twice about hitting him back.

  “Are you Slugboy?” he demanded.

  “The one and only,” answered the boy, “and you must be—holy crap!” He walked around Bogdan, staring at his bottom. “What are they poking you with? Hey, Troy, you gotta see this. Use Filter 32. I’ve never seen an ass glow so bright.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Troy said, standing up on Bogdan’s mattress. “He’s a hole for hire.”

  “His ass is like a mood lamp,” Slugboy continued. “We should call him the ‘Golden Be-Hind.’ Get it? The Golden Be-Hind.”

  “That was a pirate ship,” Troy explained to Bogdan, “in the olden days.”

  “I don’t care!” Bogdan shouted. “Get out of my room this instant!”

  “Your room?” Troy replied. “That’s a good one. Come on, Slug. Let’s go down and tell Houseer Dieter we hacked the door. He’ll be real happy.” As the two boys made their way to the door, Bogdan fought back a panicky urge to beg them not to tell.

  Troy snickered and said, “What’sa matter, Goldie? You look sick.”

  Slugboy said, “Yeah, but he shines like the setting sun behind two cheeky clouds.”

  “Don’t worry,” Troy said, “I won’t give your room to Dieter. I’ll let you do that all by yourself.” With that, the boys disappeared through the doorway. Bogdan hurried to follow, but stopped and glanced back into his room. He had a weird feeling that something was different, but what?

  Bogdan’s bedroom was little more than a machinery closet. The huge old electric elevator motor filled most of the space, together with its cable drums and pulleys. Electrical control boxes occupied two walls, and wire conduits snaked in all directions. Bogdan used the cable housing for his shelves and the small tool bench for a desk. What passed for his worldly possessions were piled in one corner, and his ratty old mattress was scooched into another. It wasn’t much, but it was all his, and he loved it. Then it hit him—the room was too quiet. “You shut off the elevator!”

  Bogdan rushed to an electrical box and with both of his small hands pushed the huge cutoff switch until—with an explosive blue spark—he closed the circuit. Immediately the huge motor next to him ground to life, the guide wheels rumbled, and the drum took up cable.

  “Don’t ever do that again!” Bogdan shouted down the hall, but they were nowhere in sight. He thought he heard them in the Kodiak stairwell, so he slammed his door—he’d have to change the entry code ASAP—and jogged after them, hurtling himself down whole flights of steps with acrobatic precision.

  On the fourth floor he passed Kitty going the other way. She was humming merrily and seemed very pleased with herself. When she saw him, she stopped to say, “Since when are you pals with that Troy boy? And who’s his loser friend?”

  But Bogdan didn’t even slow down. He blew past her and continued descending. On the third floor, Gerald was coming out of the administrative offices just as Bogdan ran past.

  “Oh, there you are,” Gerald said. “Come back here. The committee is waiting.”

  Bogdan stopped in his tracks. “The Allowance Committee?”

  “What other committee do you have an appointment with?”

  “I’ll be right back,” Bogdan said and continued down the corridor.

  “You only get a half hour,” Gerald called after him, “and the clock is ticking.”

  “Clocks don’t tick,” Bogdan answered from the stairs. At least no clock he’d ever seen. Down on the first
floor, he checked the NanoJiffy. They weren’t there, so he went out to the street. Tobbler housemeets were setting up benches and chairs in the street for the evening’s canopy ceremony, but Troy and Slugboy were nowhere in sight. Houseer Dieter was, however, and he came over when he saw Bogdan.

  “Good evening, young Kodiak. You will vacate our machine room tomorrow,” he said. “We will come up in the morning to repair the elevator apparatus.”

  Bogdan wondered if Troy had, in fact, spoken with his houseer. “There’s nothing wrong with the elevator,” he said.

  “Is that so? It was out of service just now for forty-five minutes.”

  “That was an accident. It won’t happen again.”

  The Tobbler’s eyes narrowed. “Are you telling me, young Kodiak, that you shut off our machinery?”

  “No. Yes. I mean—” Bogdan said.

  The houseer turned to go. “You have violated the truce. There will be consequences!”

  Bogdan watched the Tobbler stalk away, and a moment later he turned around and ran back up to three where Gerald was still waiting in the corridor.

  “My appointment’s not till seven,” Bogdan said. “I’ll be back then.”

  “Fine with me,” Gerald said.

  “Bogdan!” April called from the inner office. Bogdan went to the door. April and Kale were sitting at a table covered with ledgers and files. “Bogdan, we were hoping to be done by seven. We have the thing with Samson tonight.”

  “What thing?”

  “Oh, you missed the announcement.”

  Kale said, “It’s all right. We’ll catch Bogdan next time.”

  “Yeah, next time,” Bogdan said and turned to go. But he remembered his cracking voice and fuzzy cheeks and especially the sprouting hair, and he said, “When is next time?”