by Mark Ellis
He opened the closet door and gave the clothes hanging there a cursory, disinterested inspection. As he slid the door shut, a faint gleam caught his eye. He parted a pair of hanging bodysuits, realizing the closet was deeper than standard, and saw the little desktop work area the woman had made for herself. The comp console was an obsolete DDC manual model. He looked at it, turned away, then looked at it again and thought it over.
It was fairly common—if unspoken—knowledge that some archivists were allowed a wide latitude in the performance of their duties. Owning a cast-off comp wasn’t a capital crime. It was against the rules, but anyone who ranked high in any of the divisions bent them to some degree or another.
Morales himself had acted on scraps of Intel that came his way from time to time. It was a quick and subtle way to requisition more personal goods before they became generally available or to apply for an upgrade in housing.
Reporting the comp to Salvo might result in a reprimand for Brigid Baptiste, or at worst a lowering of her seniority. Of course, that action might leave her apartment vacant. He brightened at the possibility, though he knew Salvo would hardly be satisfied with a comp-possession charge. He’d need more to obtain a reward.
Sitting down in the chair in front of the machine, Morales turned it on, waited until it had warmed up and the monitor flashed the request for the password. He tried several, hoping the DDC wasn’t equipped with an automatic lockout after a certain number of failed attempts.
After the third try, he paused, reviewing the little he knew of the woman, of the sparse clues to character he might have seen in his search of her apartment. A notion registered and he pecked out “Mom.”
He couldn’t help but chuckle when the screen flashed and displayed the files. There was only one available on the desktop, so he tapped the keys to open it. Text appeared on the monitor, and he began to read. He only scanned a couple of paragraphs before his breath caught in his throat.
Possible Origin of Magistrate Division Source DoD Document, Dated 4/30/94
The concept of a one-world government was known in preNuke vernacular as the “New World Order.” The globalist view was opposed by many American citizens as a conspiracy to remove legal and civil rights granted to them by the Constitution (re. File 01405).
Morales muttered, “Well, bitch, you just bought yourself a one-way ticket to Shit City.”
The contents of the file fit perfectly within the parameters of “anything.” There could be only one explanation.
Brigid Baptiste was a Preservationist.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SHE STEPPED OUT of the elevator, through the archway and into the Historical Division. She passed other archivists going off shift, and most of their facial expressions mirrored her own—sombre and serenely detached, with perhaps a touch of cold intellectual resolve. The primary difference between her and the other historians was the awareness that her centre of interest had changed completely in the past sixteen hours. Brigid Baptiste was increasingly thinking of a place called Dulce and a man named Kane.
The man had presented her with a mystery to solve, but she wasn’t sure if that prospect stimulated her as much as Kane himself. Even though she had never exchanged words with a Magistrate before last night, she doubted Kane was typical of the breed. She had seen plenty of Mags stalking the promenade in search of laws to enforce, and they had always reminded her of tigers on loose leashes.
She felt confident Kane possessed a formidable set of fangs, but he hadn’t bared them at her. Instead, he displayed a wry humour and even exuded an almost reluctant kindness, touched as it was with reserve and introspection. She hadn’t expected that.
Of course, she chided herself, you hadn’t expected him to be shit-faced, either.
Though she was anxious to begin work, Brigid maintained a steady pace. She walked through the long, broad corridors of the division, past scores of sealed doorways that led into hundreds of chambers and antechambers. All of them were filled with the relics of vanished cities and long-dead people. The quiet air smelled of dust and time past, time present, time future and time wasted.
Many of the rooms were strictly off limits to anyone not holding a “Q” clearance. When she had been granted her Quatro designation, Lakesh himself had taken her on a guided tour of a few of the storerooms. Most were crammed to the ceiling with shelves upon shelves of a vast number of books and bound volumes of magazines and technical manuals printed on non-biodegradable stock. There were trunks of clothing, crates of paintings, pieces of statuary and sculpture—in short, anything and everything that had survived the Nukeday more or less intact.
As far as Brigid was concerned, a lot of it possessed little or no historical value. In her unvoiced opinion, an item that was junk two hundred years ago was still junk, even if it had weathered the nuking and the Night Eternal.
There had been too much to absorb, so after a while, Brigid stopped trying. Lakesh once told her, voice full of pride, that the Cobaltville archives contained a greater volume of preNuke artefacts than any other barony in the network.
One room remained frozen in her memory, however—a dark, musty room with disembodied heads glaring down from the walls. African elephants, African buffalo and rhinoceros, wolf, bison, lion, tiger and bear. They were specimens of animals killed and preserved by so-called preNuke sportsmen. Many of the species were extinct, and had been endangered even before the first mushroom cloud had billowed up from Washington, D.C.
Some of the animals that survived the slaughter of hunters and freezing temperatures of Night Eternal mutated into grotesque imitations of their progenitors. Of those, the first two or three generations of mutant animals had run toward polyploidism, a doubling or tripling of the chromosome complement. For a time, gargantuan buffalo and panthers and even snakes had roamed the Terra Infernus, but their increased size had greatly reduced their lifespans. Only a few of the giant varieties existed any longer, or so she had been told. Since she had never been more than ten miles away from the barony, she had no idea if that was a scientific fact or merely wishful thinking.
Brigid entered her work area, the chemically treated rainbow insignia on her bodysuit allowing her to pass through the invisible photoelectric field without activating alarms. There was a long row of computer stations, half-enclosed by partitions, all facing a long, blank wall. Hidden behind the stone-and-steel reinforced wall was a bank of sophisticated mainframe computers, the heart and brains of the division’s data base. Lakesh stood by her station, holding her day’s work in one liver-spotted hand.
“How are you today, Brigid?” he asked.
Brigid forced a smile. “Fine, sir,” she said, and reached for the bulging file folder in his hand.
A long-nosed, wizened cadaver of a man, Lakesh wore thick-lensed glasses with a hearing aid attached to the right earpiece. No one knew his actual age, but he was old— the oldest man Brigid had ever known or even seen.
He also made her extremely nervous on some days. He purposely made their hands touch when she took the file from him. His skin was cold, clammy, almost as if ice water flowed through him. Brigid sat down before her console. Lakesh lingered, as he usually did, behind her chair.
“Nothing too complicated today,” he said. His voice was thin, reedy, as though instead of a larynx, he had a pair of roots rubbing together inside his throat. “Editing down and consolidating a series of reports on the causes of the Bosnian war.”
“Simple, is it?” she replied, still forcing her smile. The instant she said it, she regretted it.
Lakesh was utterly, absolutely and thoroughly devoted to his art. History was his obsession, his reason for breathing, and he lived only to record it for posterity. His rheumy blue eyes widened, and she knew she had inadvertently pressed his lecture-mode button.
“Simple? Did the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Croats, the Muslims—indeed, the citizens of the entire preNuke world
have the future they wanted? Hardly.” He pronounced the last word as if it tasted exceptionally unpleasant. His voice was touched by a sing-song East Indian accent.
“The causes of war are never simply based on territorial struggle, economic conflict, or religious or ethnic differences. If we don’t come to terms with that, the cycle repeats itself, doesn’t it? The whole of history all over again.”
Brigid had heard variations of Lakesh’s pet theories, about time cycles, butterfly effects, about one event impacting on another, continents, even centuries apart. Often it was a too metaphysical for Brigid to comprehend.
“The future—if we still have one—could have been changed in the past, you know.” Lakesh’s voice dropped to a musing whisper, then trailed away.
Suddenly he glanced around him in momentary confusion, as if he expected to see something or someplace else. He blinked, and his lips creased in a shamed smile.
“I’m ranting again, aren’t I? And you’re too well-bred to ignore or interrupt me.”
Patting her shoulder encouragingly, he shuffled away. “Get to it.”
Brigid gazed after his age-stooped form for a moment. For a baronial official, in any division, Lakesh was a definite anomaly. The most productive years of his service were long behind him, and why he hadn’t received an administrative transfer decades ago was baffling.
Exhaling a long breath, Brigid flipped open the cover of the file and began working. She expected the documents to be dry packing, and she wasn’t disappointed. But as she always did, she kept her expression and mind neutral as she read the copies of the two-hundred-year-old reports. There were pages upon pages of it, culled from various and sundry preNuke governmental bodies—CIA, NSA, UNSC, DIA and something called Amnesty International.
Though several pages were already censored, blacked out with ink, she was able to patch together a fairly reasonable account of the causes behind the horrific, genocidal conflict in old Europe.
People were at the heart of it, of course. Disobedient, unevolved, unregenerately selfish humanity who surrendered to their baser natures and slaughtered and massacred and tortured on very flimsy pretexts. The core of the fault lay not with governments, which after all were vast extrapolations of the private citizen’s selfish, sinful urges, or with socioeconomic hardships, but only with vicious humankind, who thirsted for the blood of their neighbours.
Despite what Lakesh had said, reading through and collating all the data to conform with the standard point of view was simplicity itself.
Brigid copied the final version onto disk, output it, placed it in her completed tray and indulged in a stretch. Three hours remained on her shift, so she allowed a bit of the professional distance to fade from her mind. Unsurprisingly she found the recollection of Kane’s visit occupy her thoughts.
She shook her head impatiently. There had been other men in her life, a few fellow historians, but none she had ever truly connected with. She was barony bred, just like the men she had involved herself with, so she never quite grasped why the emotional spark couldn’t bridge the gap. They had been raised much like herself—ordered, fed, clothed, educated and protected from all extremes. And their narrow, limited perspectives, their solemn pronouncements regarding their ambitions, bored her into a coma.
Of course, she couldn’t be certain, but she doubted Kane would have the same effect.
Without appearing to do so, Brigid made sure none of her co-workers paid attention to her, then she selected a blank disk and inserted it into her machine’s hard drive. Carefully she overrode the voice control and transferred it to the keyboard. She typed in the proper numerical sequence to access the main data base, then input the word “Dulce. “As she had anticipated, the programmed safeguard kicked in, and the legend on the screen asked for her access authorization. She tapped in “Baptists, gr. 6 arch., clearance Quatro.”
The data infeed digested the identification, and transmitted the message to her console “Authorization denied.”
Brigid tensed. If she tried again and was denied again, she would trip a security relay and alert a monitoring official. She thought it out dispassionately for half a minute before she cleared the screen and typed in Lakesh, gr. 12 arch., clearance Xeno.
The words “Authorization granted” flashed on the screen, disappeared and an instant later were replaced by a red triangle bisected by three black vertical lines. Glowing beneath the symbol was a list of available historical files dealing with Dulce, arranged by date. She chose the one dated 12/20/2000, highlighted it and opened it up.
Her face remained a detached mask, but her heartbeat sped up and she had a difficult time discreetly swallowing the lump forming in her throat. The report had been prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Défense Intelligence Agency, the Défense Advanced Research Programs Agency—all preNuke institutions with a monomania about secrecy—and presumably the incoming Commander in Chief, since it was dated only thirty days before the presidential-inauguration ceremony and the Nukeday. Brigid scrolled down to an index.
I. Conception Infinitis Progression
II. Stronghold Construction
III. Archon Directive Perspective
IV. Appendix
She read each entry carefully, mentally cross-indexing them with information already secure within her memory.
Emotionally she felt like a bright-eyed child, eager to play with her new toys, while her intellect was coldly aloof, observing, recording, noting everything.
The third entry intrigued her on an emotional level, though intellectually she provided herself with a thumbnail explanation. She knew that archon was an ancient Greek term for the magistrates in many city-states. Presumably the Archon Directive Perspective related to the international police force that was being assembled prior to the Nukeday.
Of course, another and far older definition of archon came from an ancient understanding of the world in which the archons were forces lined up on the side of dark against the glory of light. And that was the source for the word archenemy also. She recalled that the recurring mythological image of Archons was that of jailers, imprisoning the divine spark in human souls.
However, due to her recollections of the references to it in the Cerberus Codex, she decided to heed her intellect and act in a thorough manner. She highlighted the first index entry, opened it and an organizational chart appeared on the screen.
Conception Infinitis
Overproject Whisper
Call Sign Cerberus __________Operation Chronoscope
Overproject Excalibur
Genesis Project__Enterprise Invictus____Scenario Joshua
Overproject Majestic
Mission Snowbird (re. Archon Directive),____Project Sigma
Appendix (PTBE)
She recognized Overproject Whisper, Cerberus and Chronoscope from the Cerberus Codex, so she moved the comp’s cursor to Callsign Cerberus and touched a key.
Quantum Interphase Teletransducer Operations
1. Subject scan/coordinate lock
2. Autoscanner initiation
3. Interphase matter stream transmission cycle
4. Subject transmission
5. Subject reception/rematerialization
Operational timeline 6.2 seconds
A diagram appeared, a jumble of geometric cones and ellipses and hexagons. Though she had to stare hard at it, Brigid realized she was looking at a schematic of a teletransducer. It was an enclosed egg-shaped chamber, and the cut-away view depicted machinery beneath the platform of the unit. All the pieces of hardware were labelled, with arrow-tipped lines pointing to them: emitter array, interphase transition coils, parallax point conformals.
Brigid scrolled down to a column of digits, identified as destination-lock codes. Opposite them was a list of stronghold names and locations—three in New Mexico, she noted right away, and number four in Montana.
The data permanently impressed itself on the photosensitive plate of her memory. As it did so, a riot of conflicting emotions exploded in her mind—first and foremost was the wild ecstasy of discovery, then her twenty-seven years of conditioning kicked in and with it came a bone-chilling terror.
Her eyes were seeing things never meant to be seen. Her mind did an insane pirouette, and she recalled the ancient myths of the Gorgons, and of Lot’s wife in the Bible. She waited to be turned either to stone or to a pillar of salt.
When, after a few seconds neither occurred and her mind stopped twirling, Brigid returned to the index. She shifted the cursor from the bottom up, highlighting the Appendix. A page of text appeared:
ULTRA TERRESTRIAL ENTITY (re. Archon Directive Perspective)
The typical UTE as represented by the participant (AKA Balam) in the Archon Directive at the Dulce installation can be described as follows
1. Slightly under five feet in height.
2. Erect-standing biped. Short thin legs.
3. Gracile skeletal structure.
4. Cranium larger than normal human proportions.
5. Absence of auditory lobes (external ear apparatus).
6. Absence of body hair.
7. Large, tear-shaped eyes, generally opaque black with vertical slit pupil.
8. Disproportionately long arms.
9. Internal organs similar to humans’, but developed and arranged differently.
10. Blood type is RH Negative (re Basque people).
An image of an excessively slender figure appeared, that at first glance was a humanoid statue crafted by a minimalist sculptor. His high domed, hairless cranium narrowed down to an elongated chin. The pale grey skin of his face stretched tight over high cheekbones and brow ridges. The texture bore a pattern of fine seams and wrinkles, suggesting great age.