The Dark Intercept

by Julia Keller

  Well—except for her dad, when he asked her to go to dinner at the chief’s house. But that was different, right? He was her dad.

  “I appreciate it, sweetheart,” he said. “And maybe you’ll surprise yourself and have a good time.”

  “Unlikely.”

  “I owe you one, then.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  His remark had been intended casually, which Violet knew very well. But she had to take what she could get.

  “I do,” he said. There was wariness in his tone.

  “Good. So maybe we can make a trade. I go to dinner at the chief’s house—and you let me go to Old Earth. Just for a short visit. Just to see what it looks like.”

  He was silent.

  “Dad?”

  “No.”

  “But why won’t you even consider—”

  “We’ve been over this, Violet. Many, many times. It’s too dangerous. I can’t allow it. The discussion is closed.” Odgen Crowley’s word was law in Violet’s world—just as it was law throughout New Earth.

  Had her father heard about Danny’s latest trip down to Old Earth? The one that almost left him in sizzling-hot shreds after a hit from a slab gun?

  Probably not, she decided. Ogden Crowley was in charge of the entire population of New Earth. He’d hardly have time to keep track of a single rogue cop, even if that cop happened to be the brother of Kendall Mayhew. Her father rarely had a moment to eat or sleep.

  “I’ll go to the chief’s house,” she said. “If it helps you, I’ll do it.”

  “Good. Glad to hear it.”

  He was drifting away from her again, his mind returning to its many burdens. She could tell. She always knew when she was losing him. She wondered if he was thinking about the rumors. The gossip that said the Intercept was in trouble.

  Had someone really managed to short-circuit it? She had asked him about it briefly last week. He dismissed it. But that meant nothing. He would always try to protect her from bad news.

  It was time for her to go to her bedroom—which did not mean she was ready to sleep. Violet liked to end her days by reading her mother’s journal, picking a day here, a day there, and luxuriating in Lucretia Crowley’s voice and observations. Violet stored only one thing on top of her dresser: her mother’s black medical bag. Between the bag and the journal, she kept her mother’s memory alive in her heart.

  She rose and walked over to her father’s chair. She leaned down and kissed his cheek. It was as cold and hard as marble. It made her think of Protocol Hall and its cool stone floor, the white slab beneath which was sealed the Intercept’s complex systems.

  In the crook of her left elbow, a tiny blue starburst came and went, synchronized with the surge of love she felt for her father. The Intercept, Violet thought, would have a simple job classifying that one. Because love was the easiest emotion to categorize.

  “Good night, Dad,” she said. “Hope you sleep okay.”

  He didn’t answer. She hadn’t expected him to. He was already far away from her, his brain rapidly synthesizing all the problems of New Earth and Old Earth, too, problems and issues that clicked along as relentlessly as the work of the Intercept itself.

  And then Violet had a wild impulse. She felt a sudden, totally irrational desire to talk to her father about Danny, about how she felt when she saw him or thought about him, about how anxious she was each time he disobeyed orders—all the things she would’ve shared with her mother if her mother were still alive.

  “One more thing, Dad.”

  “Yes?”

  She was just about do it—just about to bring up Danny. She stopped herself just in time. I’m not that crazy. Now she would have to cover.

  “I’m just—I guess I’m just feeling extra nervous about the intervention,” Violet said hastily. “That’s all. I want to do well.”

  “You will. Don’t worry.”

  As much as she loved her father, she could not talk with him about Danny. Because (1) he was her dad, not her mom, and (2) he was Ogden Crowley, president of New Earth. He didn’t have time for her problems. He had the problems of millions of people to worry about. But the most important reason was (3) her father didn’t like Danny.

  He’d never said so out loud, but it was easy to figure out. Violet had watched his face when she mentioned Danny’s name, the way he held back a frown. Kendall Mayhew was the one her father had admired—and now mourned. Danny was the opposite of his fragile, luminously gifted brother. Danny was tough. And volatile. And passionate about things, unlike the cool, rational Kendall. Danny represented some of the very elements that Ogden Crowley wanted to keep out of New Earth: Spontaneity and risk. Fire and intensity.

  Her father’s dislike of Danny wasn’t personal. And it wasn’t mean. He just wanted to keep everyone safe. Especially her.

  Standing next to his chair right now, in a room cushioned by darkness, Violet felt a wave of compassion for her father, for all his struggles, and gratitude for all that he did on behalf of others. She looked down at his big white head. She stroked the hair on one side. It was stiff and coarse, like the bristles of an old brush. Violet let her hand linger there for a few extra seconds. She almost believed she could feel heat rising from her father’s head, a heat generated by the fierceness of his ruminations.

  There was a deep abiding sadness in Ogden Crowley. It was the residue of all that he had endured, the pain and the losses and his ferocious hope for New Earth, a hope that was always under siege. Violet knew she couldn’t fix his sadness. It was out of her reach. The only one who had ever been able to do anything about her father’s sadness was her mother. And she was gone.

  Violet murmured another good night. She knew that this one, too, would not be answered.

  And with that, she left him alone with the impossibly heavy burden of keeping New Earth safe.

  * * *

  That night, Violet dreamed about the Intercept.

  She’d had trouble getting to sleep. She punched at her pillow and changed her position, turning onto her side, then turning onto her other side, then drawing up her knees and cinching her hands around them. She was hot, and so she slipped out of her T-shirt, and then she was cold, and so she groped around the floor beside her bed and found the wadded-up T-shirt and put it back on again.

  As she twisted and shifted in her bed, very tired but unfortunately still very wide awake, she only made things worse by letting her mind go over her memories again and again.

  She kept returning to a pivotal moment in her past: the day in third grade when she first learned that New Earth was her father’s invention.

  The class was called New Earth history. And nine-year-old Violet—a little stunned, a little scared, a little upset, and slightly embarrassed—heard the teacher say that Ogden Crowley created New Earth. The idea filled her with wonder.

  My daddy, she thought. My daddy made this world.

  It seemed so—so unlikely. Preposterous, even—which was a word that Violet didn’t know back then, but if she’d known it, she would have used it.

  Her own father? The founder of all this?

  The man who sat across the dinner table from her every night and drank his coffee? Really?

  When she came home from school that day, Violet had asked her mother about it. Her mother was working in her lab. She took Violet’s hand and led her into her father’s study. She told him that Violet had something she needed to know.

  “Is it true, Daddy? Did you—did you make all this? Was it all your idea?”

  Her father had frowned. He put down the tablet he’d been furiously writing on. He pushed his chair away from his desk so that he could turn in Violet’s direction. His injury made it hard for him to move, but he seemed to want to be looking at her when he talked.

  And he told her the story.

  First, he said, she needed to understand something. “The idea isn’t the hard part,” he declared. “Anyone can have an idea. People have ideas all day long—good ones, bad ones, in-be
tween ones. Crazy ones and clever ones. The true challenge is turning an idea into reality. Going from the daydream stage, when you stroke your chin and you sigh deeply”—and here he had sighed in a flamboyant, theatrical way, which made Violet giggle, as was his intention—“to the moment when you make blueprints and materials lists and deal with nuts-and-bolts realities.”

  Nuts and bolts.

  The phrase had enchanted Violet, even though she didn’t know what it meant. Nuts? Bolts? Her parents had been born on Old Earth, and sometimes they used strange combinations of words. That day, her father told her the meaning, told her about putting things together and making them work.

  And he also told her about how he’d created New Earth. The notion had come to him many years ago as he stood amid the wreckage of Old Earth, despairing over the fast-forward destruction of the world, its headlong slide into disaster.

  Saving the world was simple: Split it in two.

  Simply divide the population. Not according to country or skin color or political philosophy or language or god—but by the number of possessions. By intelligence. By money and property.

  It would be logical. No gray areas. No troubling ambiguities. The rich and the brilliant go in one direction—up—and the poor and the ordinary stay where they are, back on Old Earth, fighting over the scraps and ashes and crumbs of a dying planet.

  Some people agreed with him in principle, he explained to Violet, but they argued for another solution. Find a suitable planet to serve as a second Earth, they proposed. Relocate the chosen ones there. In a place far away from the mess of this torn and bleeding world.

  But Ogden Crowley said no. He insisted that they must stay tethered to this planet. They must use Old Earth as a pedestal. A base. A stepping-off point. That way, the shock would be lessened. They wouldn’t be leaving their home totally behind—but they wouldn’t be staying there, either, to sink into the abyss.

  New Earth was an astonishing technical feat, a marvel—that’s what he explained to Violet that day, with a bright note of pride in his voice.

  New Earth was constructed of hybrid amalgams that were lighter and stronger than any materials known on Old Earth. It was kept aloft by an elaborate system of gravitational leverage—a quantum lock-and-dam system—and sustained by its manufactured atmosphere, by its own food and energy sources. New Earth had highways and houses and driveways and cars and street signs and yards and bicycles and trees and town squares and parks and ponds and buses and schools and businesses and mountains and windmills and solar farms and the bright green promise of tomorrow.

  Its six cities were named Hawking, Higgsville, Franklinton, Mendeleev Crossing, L’Engletown, and Farraday. The capital was Hawking. That was where Violet lived with her parents.

  He told her about the Great Migration. He told her about the moment when the last pod lifted up from the cracked and pitted surface of Old Earth, bound for the silver streets of New Earth. He told her how the people left behind had shielded their eyes from the flash and then settled back to make what they could of their lives in a cold, dark, desperate place.

  Meanwhile, the approved groups that had been transported to New Earth beheld a sky that shimmered and grass that sparkled and rivers that ran clear. Most of the New Earth streets didn’t even have names at that point. Each fresh batch of arrivals walked around for the first day or so, awed and grateful, blinking at the gleam and the dazzle and the wild unlikeliness of it all.

  Some wept, her father recalled, and Violet tried to imagine it: grown-ups crying openly in front of other grown-ups. Weird.

  Some fell to their knees and bent over and kissed the imported dirt. Some couldn’t even talk for a time. Eventually they recovered, of course, and it was as if a communal held breath was suddenly let out and a certain word was chanted like a prayer:

  Safe. Safe. Safe.

  Old Earth, bleak and lost, seemed very far away. Even if you stood at the outer rim of New Earth and looked down, her father had warned her, you couldn’t really see it. It was only a furious gray-black swirl of filth and mist, as if the clouds themselves were in a very bad mood. That’s why few people on New Earth ever bothered to look over the edge.

  What was the point? Old Earth was a place they wanted to forget. Old Earth was a world marked by hunger, danger, and happenstance.

  Happenstance. That was another word Violet didn’t understand at the time. But she didn’t ask her father right then what it meant. She could figure it out later. She didn’t want to interrupt him. She wanted him to go on with his story.

  She wanted to know.

  No: She had to know. She had to know about Old Earth—the birthplace of her parents, and her friends’ parents, and every generation before hers.

  Old Earth, he explained, was a treeless and meager world. A world of grim, jaundiced sunrises. A world of rusty rain. A world run by hustlers and scavengers.

  But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that when the people of Old Earth looked up, they could sometimes see New Earth. Really see it—visible now and again when the black, rain-gorged clouds momentarily parted.

  And during those brief moments, New Earth surely seemed within their grasp.

  Maybe, Violet thought, those left behind would gather on the tops of the highest hills of Old Earth, and they would reach and reach. Maybe they put small children up on their shoulders and told them to reach, too. And to dream.

  New Earth was so near. It should have been theirs for the taking.

  But it wasn’t. Violet could imagine their crushing disappointment when the truth struck them: New Earth wasn’t close at all. It might as well have been a million miles away.

  Several years later, her father discovered the existence of a new technology called the Intercept. He was enthralled. It was, he told her, the Next Great Step. It was the answer to everything. It was the only way to keep New Earth truly safe. Forever.

  But that was another story.

  * * *

  In Violet’s dreams that night, the Intercept was a living thing. It wasn’t just a machine anymore.

  It spun. It tumbled. It glowed a bold red. It reached deep into her brain, yanking out her feelings by their scraggly roots, and then tossed those emotions into hundreds of different baskets. It could reach in and retrieve them and fling them back at her, whenever it wanted to.

  Thrashing in the dark net of her dreams, Violet twisted under her blanket. She pushed her pillow away. She was half aware that it had begun to rain outside. Technically, rain never needed to fall on New Earth. But her father had realized, back in the early days of New Earth, that people missed it. They craved varieties in weather, especially in a place where it was always summer. And so rain was programmed into the weather mix, added to the atmospherics controlled by the giant electromagnetic turbines in Farraday. Rain was put on shuffle play, so as to be unpredictable, like real rain.

  Usually New Earth rain was gentle, comforting. But tonight, the angry raindrops slapped her bedroom window with a sinister intensity.

  Nothing was the way it was supposed to be anymore. Not even the rain.

  6

  Rebels of Light

  While Violet slept her moody and troubled sleep, the streets of New Earth glowed bright silver in the moonlight. The low rhythmic hum under the streets continued, as the Intercept did its work. The rain pestered the ground like tiny white arrows.

  A few miles away from the apartment where Violet and her father lived, a man paused in front of a small brick building set well back from the street. The building was grimy and run-down, with a sagging strip of dark green awning and an old wooden door. The door was cracked and split.

  The rain made the building seem far more forlorn than usual. Even on the clearest of nights, however, it looked very different from the mammoth, gleaming architecture that thrived all around it, the soaring towers, the elegant plazas. When the planners selected by Ogden Crowley designed New Earth, they realized that having everything look new could be just as oppressive
as having everything look old. And so, once again using an algorithm that simulated randomness, they stuck in some dilapidated places, places built out of scraps and deliberately scarred and weathered materials. They intended these places to remain vacant, like the fake storefronts in movie studios in the long-ago twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They were here for contrast with all the surrounding magnificence, nothing more.

  But this one was not vacant.

  The man, his face anxious and sweaty, twisted the knob. He closed the door behind him. It made a single solemn click.

  A few minutes later, a woman arrived at the same door from the opposite direction.

  She glanced around furtively. She drew up the blue scarf around her neck until it covered the lower half of her face. Then she, too, put a hand on the knob. She slipped inside.

  Another bit of time passed, and then a third person, another woman, approached the door, and she, too, shot hurried glances to her right and her left before opening it and entering. She carried a sack, an old and threadbare one.

  Inside, there was total darkness.

  As soon as the door closed behind the final arrival, the rest of the group emerged from their standing positions at the edges of the room. They stepped forward to form a ragged, practiced circle. They were young and old, male and female, black and white and brown—but that didn’t matter here, because the darkness was so profound. They were only voices.

  “You’re late.” It was an accusation, not an observation, from a male voice.

  “I did my best,” said the woman who’d been the last to get there. “I can’t take the same express tram from Higgsville every time. Bound to look suspicious.”

  “We’ve discussed that. They’re not watching this shack. They don’t even know it’s being used. As far as they know, it’s just an empty shell. So you don’t need to worry.”

  “I’ll worry if I want to.” She didn’t mind standing up to him.

  “Whatever. Just try to make it on time tomorrow night, okay?”

  “Gotcha.” The woman uttered a disgusted-sounding snort. She didn’t like being lectured. She was seventeen, one of the younger ones. “But don’t talk to me about security, pal. You’re the one who’s living dangerously.”