by Rich Larson
Victor leaves the alley an empty stretch of cold dirt to the eyes of passers-by. He’s returned them to the dust. That’s the Quo in its essence: some have to return, some have to stay.
One in particular has to stay. It begins to snow, but the flakes don’t reach the ground.
They come every so often, the rewinders. Every few months. He waits for them, like partners in a very slow dance, and eventually, after weeks of trudging through dirty Mauthausen and bundling wood for food, weeks of watching for new faces very carefully, they will appear.
Victor is out on the street again, with the snap pistol hidden safely in his left pocket and now the rewinder’s handgun in his right. He’s passing through the square. The villagers used to seem like ghosts to him, but he understands better now. He’s the ghost.
The hut is waiting for him on the outside of the village, a cramped thing where he either sleeps or masturbates. Dirt floor, wooden walls. Victor picks a nail out of the rotting door frame as he enters. He never bothers making repairs. The family will relocate again soon, hopefully closer to Linz. Mauthausen doesn’t suit him.
Victor sleeps and has bad dreams. He wakes up when the night is sufficiently dark to move corpses.
Someone else is in the alley. Victor doesn’t differentiate the crouched shape from the other weird shadows until it steps forward, pointing a weapon at him. He can’t see the face, so he looks down instead to where the nanoweave has been stripped away and discarded in the snow. The men he killed earlier in the evening are going blue and black, tangled crooked like mating insects.
“English?” the man demands.
“If you want,” Victor says. The voice sounds young. The stance seems competent.
“This is your job, yes? You’re one of their monitors.” The rewinder is staying in the shadows. Victor wonders if he has been careless. Nobody should ever find the bodies, even with tracing equipment. But then, there have never been two attempts in such quick succession. Maybe the third rewinder has been here all along.
“Empty your pockets,” the rewinder says.
Victor reaches into his coat and pulls out the handgun. He unloads it and drops the dissembled weapon at his feet.
“And the other. There’s weight in both.”
Victor drops the snap pistol.
“I’m going to kill you,” the rewinder says. “But first, I have to ask. I have to.”
Victor is familiar with the question, though usually he hears it from a man or woman dying at his feet. He gives the same answer.
“I’m maintaining the Quo,” he says simply.
“That’s what they call it? That’s what they write on your memos?” The rewinder has a tremor in his voice. Disgust, maybe. He doesn’t understand.
“That’s what I call it. Chronology has to be preserved. The cost doesn’t matter.” It feels good, surprisingly, to talk to someone in English. He has missed it.
“Turn around,” the rewinder says. “I’ll walk you to the back of the alley.”
Victor turns on his heel, waits. He feels the gun poke into his back, and then they walk. He finds himself looking at a dead brick wall. There’s soot on it.
“What’s it like, now?” Victor asks.
The rewinder doesn’t answer for a few beats. “The same. We’ve broken time itself, and things are the same.” He makes an angry noise. “Your bosses make sure of that. But this year things change. 1894. Anything of note happening this year?”
Victor’s hands are cold. He puts them in his pockets. “Kate Chopin writes a short story. Coca Cola sells in bottles.” Victor stares into the brick. “Nothing here in Austria.”
The muzzle of the gun jerks forward and he lets his head bob with it, like a puppet on a stick.
“I think there will be, tonight,” the rewinder says.
Victor still has a nail in his pocket. “It’s going to be harder than you think,” he says. “You won’t like it.”
“I’ve used this before,” the rewinder says.
Victor rolls the nail with his thumb. “Not me,” he says. “Him. He’s young.” He feels the man take a step back. Hesitate.
“It’s easier to crush a snake egg than kill a cobra,” the rewinder says. “It’s more certain this way. And I can override any compulsion, social or biological, if it means preventing Auschwitz. Saving millions.”
“There’s no certainty,” Victor says back. “That’s the point.”
He slams his hand backward towards the voice with a rusted nail locked between his knuckles. His other hand comes up as he turns and jars the gun away. There are flesh sounds. The gun goes off and his eardrums implode; his eyes are filled with oil spills.
Then the man is lying in the dirt and Victor is over him with the gun held steady in cupped hands. The rewinder is not old. He doesn’t look out of place in his ragged coat and wool trousers—he could be the son of the butcher. Same age. He is trying to knead his eye, but the nail gouged it out and there is only gouting blood and torn socket.
“You’re killing those people,” he gasps. “You’re killing them all. You’re turning on the showers, goddamn you, goddamn you.” His chest is spasming.
“I know,” Victor snaps. He knows. It’s the nature of the Quo. “But if you prevent that, what do you cause? Do you know that? No?”
“Coward,” the rewinder sputters.
“It’s not worth the risk,” Victor says. “Better a known atrocity than the unknown. No matter what it is.”
He shoots him before he has to hear a counter-argument. He has enough of those. For all Victor knows, the other bodyguards and monitors have already failed their assignments, and the world is not as it should have been. If he came this close to failure, here behind this butcher shop, how can he be sure of the others’ success? The Quo might already be demolished, and his job might be a farce. A farce set in the shithole of Mauthausen.
There’s no certainty, not even in the Quo. He hopes he is preventing catastrophe, but sometimes he dreams he is a monster in the dark, saving Belial and murdering angels.
The next morning, Victor goes to the house. As has been his tradition since being deployed five years ago, to Braunau-am-Inn, he finds the small dark-haired boy and watches him play in the yard for a little while.
He wonders if he is a good man or a bad man.
GHOST GIRL
Daudi had another report on his news feed about a ghost girl living in the dump outside Bujumbura, so he put two Cokes in a hydrobag and hailed a taxi outside the offices. It was cool season now and the sky was rusty red. The weather probes were saying dust storm, dust storm, remember to shut the windows.
Daudi put his head back against the concrete wall and wondered how a ghost girl living by herself was not yet dismembered and smuggled out to Tanzania. Maybe some entrepreneur was cutting her hair to sell to fishermen. Maybe she was very lucky.
The graffitied hump of the taxi bullied its way through bicycles and bleating sheep. Daudi slung the hydrobag over his shoulder and pulled out his policense. This was not an emergency, not strictly, but Daudi did not pay for transit if it could be free. The taxi rumbled to a stop and when the door opened, it bisected a caricature of President Habarugira shitting on a rebel flag. He climbed inside and switched off the icy blast air conditioning.
“Bujumbura junkyard,” Daudi said, pressing his policense against the touchscreen.
“Calculating,” said the taxi.
The junkyard was a plastic mountain, any fence that might have once marked its boundaries long since buried. Bony goats wandered up and down the face, chewing on circuits, while scavengers with rakes and scanners stumped around the bottom, searching for useable parts or gold conductors.
Daudi had the taxi stop well away, before it gutted a tire on some hidden piece of razorwire. It didn’t want to wait, but he used the policense again and it reluctantly hunkered down.
There was a scavenger with no nose and no tag sitting in the sand. Stubble was white on his dark skull. A cigarette dangled fro
m his lips. Daudi squatted across from him.
“Mwiriwe, Grandfather.”
“Mwiriwe, Policeman. My shit, all legal.” He waved off a fly. “You ask anyone.”
“I’m looking for the ghost girl,” Daudi said. “She lives here, yeah?”
The scavenger massaged his knobby calves. “Oh, yes.”
“How long here?”
“Aye, two weeks, three weeks since she show up. Her and her imfizi.” He spat into the sand. “She’s a little witch, like they say. She’s got the thing following her all around.”
Daudi squinted up the crest of the junkpile. “How does she survive?” he asked. He saw the scampering silhouettes of children and wondered if one was her.
The scavenger shrugged. “She finds good stuff. Me, I buy some. And nobody trouble her, or that damn imfizi take them to pieces.” He tapped ash off his cigarette, eyed the hydrobag on Daudi’s shoulder. “You here to decommission it? You look soldier.”
“I’m here for the girl,” Daudi said.
“Witch,” the scavenger corrected. “You say it’s genes, but it’s witch. I know. I see her.”
“Goodbye, Grandfather.”
Daudi straightened up. He had speakaloud pamphlets in the taxi, ones that explained albino genetics in cheerful Kirundi and then French, ones he did not distribute as often as he was supposed to. But Daudi knew that by the time a man is old his mind is as hard as a stone.
He found the ghost girl rooting through electric cabling, feet agile on the shifting junk. Her sundress was shabby yellow and stained with gasoline. Her hands and feet were callused. Still, she was tagged: her tribal showed up Hutu and she was inoculated against na-virus. Not born in the street, then.
“Anything good?” Daudi asked.
She turned around and blinked rheumy pink eyes at him. “Who are you?”
“My name is Daudi. I work for the government.” He unslung the hydrobag and took out the first bottle. “You want a fanta?”
“Yes.” The girl rubbed her pale cheek. “Yes, I wanna.”
“Here.” Daudi opened the chilly Coke between his molars. Clack. Hiss. He held it out. “What’s your name?”
“Belise.” The ghost girl wound the cable carefully around herself, eyes on the sweating bottle. “Set it down, back up some,” she suggested. “I’ll get it.”
“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” Daudi said, wedging the drink in a nook of bent rebar. “I’m here to take you somewhere safe. Here, here isn’t safe for you.” He scooted back. “Belise, do you know what an albino hunter is?”
“It’s safe,” Belise said, patting a piece of rusty armor. “My dawe is here.” She clambered down to get the Coke and all at once something very large burrowed out from the junkpile. Motors whirred as it unfolded to its feet, shedding scrap metal. The robot was sized like a gorilla and skinned like a tank. The sensory suite glittered red at him. Daudi hadn’t seen an imfizi drone in many years and the sight jolted him.
“Shit,” Daudi said, as Belise skipped back up the pile, bottle cradled in her grimy hands. He realized the old man had been talking sense.
“My dawe,” the ghost girl said proudly. “My daddy is very strong.” She swigged from the Coke and grinned at him.
Daudi had retreated to the bottom to re-evaluate things. Clouds were still building crenellations in the sky, and now wind whistled in and out of the junk. He skyped the offices for a list of active combat drones, but of course it was classified, and the official line was still that they had all been smelted. He sat and drank his own Coke and watched Belise step nimbly across a car chassis while the drone lumbered behind her, puffing smoke.
There had been many of them, once. Daudi knew. He remembered seeing them stalk across open ground sponging up rebel fire like terrible gods while the flesh troops circled and sweated, lying in this ditch and then another, so fragile. He remembered the potent mix of envy and disdain they all felt for the piloting jackmen, cocooned safe in neural webbing a mile away.
He remembered best when one of the imfizi was hacked, taken over by some rebel with a signal cobbled together from a smartphone and a neural jack. People said later that it had been Rufykiri himself, the Razor, the hacker who sloughed off government security like snakeskin, but nobody really knew.
Daudi remembered mostly because that day was when half of his unit was suddenly gone in an eruption of blood and marrow.
Daudi did not trust drones.
“You see, now.” The old scavenger was back. He ran a dirty nail around the hollow of his nose. “Nobody troubles her. That thing, deadly. She has it bewitched.”
“It’s malfunctioning,” Daudi said. “Not all of them came back for decommissioning. Crude AIs, they get confused. Running an escort protocol or something like that.” He narrowed his eyes. “Not witchcraft.”
“Lucky malfunction for her,” the old man said. “Lucky, lucky. Else she would be chopped up, yeah? For eurocash, not francs. Much money for a ghost.” He smiled. “A rocket could do in that imfizi. Or an EMP. You have one?”
“I will chop you up, Grandfather . . .” Daudi took a long pull at his drink. “. . . if you talk any more of muti. You live in a new time.”
“What, you don’t want to be rich?” The scavenger hacked up a laugh.
“Not for killing children,” Daudi said.
“Ah, but you were in the war.”
Daudi stood up.
“You were in the war,” the old man repeated. “You sowed the na-virus and burned the villages and used the big knife on the deserters. Didn’t you? Weren’t you in the war?”
Daudi wanted to wrap his fingers around the scavenger’s piped neck and squeeze until the esophagus buckled. Instead, he took his Coke and walked back up the junkpile to try again with the ghost girl.
The drone had been repairing itself, he could see it now. Swatches of hardfoam and crudely-welded panels covered its chassis. Spare cables hung like dead plants from its shoulders. It was hunched very still, only swiveling one camera to track Daudi’s approach.
Belise was sitting between its feet. “Dunna come any closer,” she said. “He might get mad at you.” Her brows shot up. “Is that fanta for me as well?”
“No,” Daudi said. He considered it. “Too much sugar is bad for you. You won’t grow.”
The imfizi shifted slightly and Daudi took a step back.
Belise laughed. “My dawe used to say that.”
“My mother used to say it,” Daudi said. “When I chewed too much sugarcane.” He watched the drone uneasily. It was hard to tell where it was looking. “Did you have a mama?” he asked her.
“I don’t remember,” Belise said. She rubbed at her nose, smeared snot on her dress.
“And your dawe?”
“He’s here.” Belise slapped the metal trunk behind her. “With me.”
“The imfizi keeps you safe, yes? Like a father.” Daudi maneuvered a rubber tire to sit on. Some of the scavengers down below were using a brazier for tea and the wind carried its bitter smoke. “But maybe it will not always be that way,” he said. “Drones are not so much like you and me, Belise. They can break.”
“They can fix,” Belise said, pointing to the patched carapace.
Daudi remembered much simpler jobs, where the men and women were frightened for their lives and wanted so badly to be tagged, to go to the safehouse, for the government to help them.
“If the drone decides its mission is over, it might leave,” Daudi said. “Or it might paint you.”
“Paint me?”
“Paint you as a target,” Daudi said. “So it can kill you.”
Belise shook her small white head, serene. “No, that won’t happen. He’s my dawe.”
Daudi sipped until his drink was gone. “I’ll take you to a place with so much food,” he said. “No more scrap-hunting. Nice beds and nice food. And other children.”
“I’ll stay.” Belise pointed and Daudi followed her finger. “Take those two. You can have them go with you. I
don’t like them.”
Two small boys rummaging in the junk, insect-thin arms. One had a hernia peeking out from under his torn shirt. They cast nervous looks up every so often, for the leviathan drone and the albino girl and now for the policeman.
“They don’t need my help,” Daudi said. “My job is to help you. Many people would try to kill you. Cut off your limbs. The government is trying to make you safe.”
“Why?”
Daudi rubbed his forehead. “Because albino-killings are very publicized. President Habarugira is forging new Western relations, and the killings reflect badly, badly, badly on our country. And now that the war is over, and there are no more rebels to hunt, people who know only how to murder are finding the muti market.”
“Oh.”
“And the government cares for the good of all its people,” Daudi added. He looked at the empty glass bottle between his palms, then hurled it off into the growing dusk. The shatter noise came faint.
Belise had followed the trajectory, lips pursed. Now she looked up. “Not what my dawe said.” She paused. “About the government. He said other things.”
“Your dawe is dead, Belise.”
Belise nodded, and for a moment Daudi thought they were making progress. “He died with the bleeding,” she said. “With the sickness. But he told me not to worry, because he had a plan. He made his soul go softly into the imfizi.” She smiled upward, and the pity in Daudi’s gut sharpened into something else. He stared at the array of red sensors, the scattered spider eyes.
“Your daddy, Belise.” Daudi put a finger up to his temple and twisted. “Was he a jackman?”
Belise winced. She stared at the ground. When she looked up, her raw pink eyes were defiant. “He was a rebel,” she said.
Back in the birdshit-caked taxi, there was a memo on misuse of government funds. Daudi tugged it off the screen and punched in his address instead. Through the window, he saw scavengers taking in their equipment. Some were pitching nylon tents around the brazier. The old noseless man was tearing open a package of disposable phones, but he looked up when the ignition rumbled. He waved.