Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  “You know, I think I am,” says Thales, trying to swallow his tears.

  “I want you to succeed,” the surgeon says. “I’ll boost your working memory. Let’s see if that helps.”

  “Through my implant?” Thales says as the surgeon’s fingers trace patterns over his tablet’s screen.

  The glare diminishes, but Thales says, “Everything feels the same.”

  “Look again,” says the surgeon, and when Thales looks back at the screen the video is playing again and he finds he feels more awake and sees the significance of all the details, in fact it’s almost pressing at him how she clings to him, how he’s adjusted his legs to accommodate her weight, how two of his fingers have found the exposed skin of the small of her back, how plain she’d be but for her clothes and the tenderness in her face when she touches him.

  “I’m so sorry you won’t be with me,” the old man says. “I did try.”

  “Maybe you’ll figure it out.”

  “I refuse to proffer false hope.”

  “Well, I’m happy,” she says, but like he’s the one who needs comfort.

  “But how shall I get along without you through all the time to come? How shall I ever find anyone as dear?”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “But you are, and in about ten years,” the old man says, making an effort to say this matter-of-factly.

  “Ten years is a lifetime,” she says.

  “Ten years is an eye-blink. It will pass, and then comes the next thing.”

  “For you, there will always be a next thing,” she says. “It’s what you wanted.”

  The old man stares into space, then says, “When I was a young man I went to Iceland. I had no real reason—I just wanted to go—I liked their poetry and I wanted to see the world. It was the end of the season, the summer fading, and I rented a car and left Reykjavík, the city, their only city, then, behind. Now to think of Iceland is to think of software but back then there was nothing, just the empty island and the glaciers, remote and menacing, the waste at the heart of a place no one went. It was already evening and I didn’t know where I was going, didn’t even know where I’d sleep, and I was afraid, hurtling along the ring road, as I lost the light. I hadn’t even remembered to bring a coat. It was painterly, the graded shadows of the mountains, the color of distance, the ghosts of shape.”

  “Now you can go back.”

  “That Iceland is gone. It’s arable now. Cultivated. All tourist traps and code factories. But that’s not the point. It’s how I feel. This future I’m approaching.”

  “I’ve stood between you and the world for a while now,” she says, “and I’d do it forever, if I could, but soon enough you’ll have to get along without me.”

  “The world doesn’t suit me.”

  “Then you’ll reshape it.”

  “And if I can’t, then that other door is open.”

  “Other door?”

  “Pills. Heights. I don’t much like guns. These are the doors that lead out of eternity.”

  “I don’t like to hear these things,” she says.

  “I didn’t tell you, did I,” the old man says, recollecting himself. “They’ve changed the terms. Akemi no longer suffices—now they want Ms. Sunden too. Not what I had expected to come of her visit, and I can’t imagine she told us much of the truth, but it doesn’t matter. There’s just the one game in town, so I’ll touch my cap and hop to it.”

  “Your good friend Irina,” the woman says bitterly.

  “She’s interesting. Unique. An intermediate kind of thing. You can’t begrudge me my interesting friends—I’ve been collecting them since before you were born.”

  “Wonderful. She can keep you company through the ages.” Her voice sounds toxic and artificial.

  “We’ll see. She’s essentially mercenary, and her price is within my means. Hiro keeps encouraging me to take more direct action, but I’m not yet prepared to accept his standard of ethics. I haven’t told you about Hiro, have I? He handles my disavowables. His résumé is a demon’s. You’ll never meet him. In any case, most likely that will work out, one way or another, and most likely Hiro will get the phone, last night’s debacle notwithstanding, and soon after that I’ll have no real limits. I’ll hold more power than any one man since, oh, Genghis Khan. I’ll be able to make things whole, and I’ll have everything I’ve ever wanted, except for one thing.”

  As the old man grips her hand the scene and in fact the clinic seem to be floating away and Thales realizes how tired he is, more tired than he’s ever been before, and the migraine is coming, and though he knows he should keep fighting to try to make an impression on the surgeon it’s no longer in him to act and he slumps in his chair feeling that the clinic and the surgeon are remote and insubstantial and have nothing to do with him.

  Somewhere, the surgeon is saying, “I need to make changes but I’m not sure where.”

  Thales is distantly aware of the surgeon doing something on his tablet and then, spontaneously, Thales vividly recalls the evening light on the brick wall of an empty storefront on the Westside. The surgeon does something else, and Thales recalls the shifting weight of a glass of water in his hand.

  “What did you experience?” asks the surgeon.

  “A wall. A glass of water,” Thales says, surprised out of his torpor. “What are you doing?”

  “So that was episodic and sensory memory. Let’s try again.”

  The physician does something else to his phone, and Thales curls up in his chair, wholly spent.

  “What was that like?” asks the surgeon, but Thales has pulled his knees to his chest and now sees nothing but black and grey moiré patterns and in fact feels nothing but a flicker of interest in the logic of his dissolution.

  “There,” says the surgeon. “Maybe that’s it. Let’s see if it works.”

  Thales is suddenly wide awake. “What did you do?” he asks, though in the moment of asking he knows, in fact it’s obvious that the surgeon is accessing his thoughts through his implant, and in his clarity he realizes that his clarity is new, and presumably artificial, and he wonders how long he’ll get to keep it.

  “Good,” says the surgeon. “I’ve locked it at high activation. Now we can work.” Thales nods and forces himself to smile, the better to conceal his burgeoning anger at this casual manipulation of the structures of his innermost being, though perhaps this is mere petulance and he should tolerate what’s necessary for his recovery, but now in his acuity it’s like his thoughts are tumbling forward and he sees that the surgeon’s story doesn’t hold together—the protocols amount less to treatment than to a veiled threat and if the videos with the strangers were part of a clinical test they’d probably feel anodyne and as though they’d been scripted for some particular purpose instead of essentially opaque and highly specific—and Thales feels like he’s become a detective sifting the evidence of the world as he searches for a plausible motive behind the surgeon’s actions; it seems like the surgeon wants him to be biddable and inclined to answer questions but the only things that are certain are that information is still missing and that the surgeon has lied.

  13

  Secret Book

  “It’s a front,” Irina says. “Your arbitrage AI. There’s something else going on underneath.”

  They’re in a conference room of perfect neutrality. Neither Cromwell nor Magda appeared for the debrief; her interlocutor, Martin, some flavor of quant, is scowling at his tablet while scribbling notes. According to his class ring, he’s a newly minted Ph.D. from Toronto; he looks like he learned how to knot his necktie on the web. It’s clear he finds it necessary for her to know she doesn’t impress him.

  “A front for what, exactly?” he asks. She freeze-frames his expression—false smile on the lips, eyes narrowed in fear, hostility.

  She remembers the high city and the girl—eurasian, probably a teenager, how her car’s windshield was webbed with cracks and looked like it was last washed a thousand miles ago. S
he’s on the verge of explaining, or trying to, as in duty bound, but she doesn’t like him, and in the absence of sympathy it’s hard to communicate subtle things, and she thinks he’d relish the chance to play interrogator. “It’s hard to say just what it was hiding,” she says, as neutrally as she can.

  “And why is that?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s because the AI was hiding it,” she says. She remembers the AI’s vastness, and shivers as its echoes press at her.

  “That’s a very strong claim,” Martin says, looking up, fingers poised over his tablet. “I assume you can support it with evidence?” He’s in his late twenties, and has that slightly fussy programmer diction—his sense of his manhood will be tied up with his technical skills, and this must be his first job, so he’ll be more invested than he needs to be. She urges herself to meet his hostility with compassion. Fails utterly.

  “It’s too complicated for me to try to convey the details,” she says. “My job is to provide an outline of what’s the case, not to convince you of anything.”

  He half-sneers, half-laughs, but before he can speak she says, “I have another appointment,” and rises. She hasn’t read her contract with W&P, but knows that in it, as in all of her contracts, there will be a clause capping the debrief at half an hour—she reserves the right to answer further questions over email—it’s something she usually uses to fend off clients who become fascinated, and want to linger.

  She’s already turned away when she hears his phone get a text and he says, “Wait. Please don’t go.” His tone is different, supplicating. She turns back, finds him looking alarmed. “We’d really like you to stay. I’m authorized to offer new and favorable terms.”

  She wonders what could have changed so suddenly. Not that it matters, as in her heart she’s already gone.

  She says, “You’ve got my agent’s number.”

  * * *

  Afterwards she always needs to be alone.

  She squats by the wall outside the hangar, pulling her jacket close against the cold wind from the Bay, wishing she still smoked, letting herself attend to the echoes of the machines.

  Her mind is aglow with power grids, the ley lines of the freeways, water in free fall in the dark. She reminds herself that these are the machine’s thoughts, not her own, and that she must let them go, but still they whirl in her memory. She inhales the sharp salt reek of the wetlands, watches the planes’ choreography in the airspace over SFO; the fugue stirs, not far from the surface, and she has a sense that planes and bay are shadows and symbols whose true significance is hidden but that revelation is close. Her hand finds a stone on the asphalt, grips it—she grinds her fingers into its surface, savoring its texture, reminding herself that she is here, in this morning, in the world, not lost in the pages of some vast and secret book. She thinks of coffee, its heat and bitterness. Breathe, she reminds herself, staring blankly at the Bay’s glitter.

  14

  Ghost

  The favela’s rooftops are slick with rain but Kern runs flat out, lost in his velocity. The mark’s phone is in his pocket, and Lares’ place is close, but he wishes it were farther so he’d have reason to maintain his reckless forward motion.

  A gap in the fabric of the rooftops before him, and as he accelerates toward the jump his foot slips. Momentary free fall, and through it an awareness of the approaching abyss, but he catches himself, jarring his shoulder, and stumbles off the last of his momentum before reaching the edge.

  At the gap’s edge, he looks down into emptiness, sees how it’s full of rain, the strangers passing far below. He crouches there, panting, the humidity such that his sweat stays on his skin. His shoulder aches but all he regrets is the loss of his sense of flow.

  At least now I’ll have money, he thinks, touching the phone in his pocket, listening to the buzz of the drones flying by. One is close, coming closer; he can’t see it clearly—it’s a shadow on the grey sky—but it lacks the red fore and aft lights of the SFPD ones, so he hesitates, though now it’s practically on top of him, and then there’s a spotlight in his eyes and a muffled squawking—“SFPD sit the fuck down and stay where you are!”—but it’s a lie, it’s obviously a lie, and once again he’s off and running.

  He thought he knew the rooftops and the secret ways across them but the construction drones must have been hard at work because it’s like a nightmare where familiar things have turned perilous and strange, and he almost misses his footing when a berm of wet concrete rises before him where nothing ought to be. The buzz of the drone is close behind him, and if he twists an ankle it’s over, but now atop the berm he sees the city glowing through the fog and there across the rooftops are figures running toward him—they are many, but their hesitations tell him that they don’t really know the way. There’s a stairwell nearby, or was, so he breaks for it, as though he knows for a fact that it isn’t built over, and then he’s in the air over the stairs and then the shock as he hits the landing.

  The stairs descend into the darkness of the favela’s interior, which is good, because flying drones won’t go into confined spaces, and as he runs down flight after flight he’s wondering who he attacked last night and thinking that he’s always known it would end like this, that he’d offend the wrong person and resources would be brought to bear against him such that all his hardness and his will and his incessant training would be meaningless, and leave him without defenses, and he’d thought he was invincible but in fact he’s just a nobody and no one important has ever cared enough to put him down.

  He comes out onto a street full of stalls where they’re just putting up awnings against the rain. Peripheral flashes of lurid video game posters and glowing neon signage and hand-drawn menus over the food carts. It feels better to be around people though he knows they won’t help him but if he’s going to die at least he won’t be alone. He slows his pace and makes himself breathe through his nose, though his lungs are burning, and he takes out his phone to give himself a countenance. A man with a shaved head and a cheap shiny leather coat is coming toward him, in a hurry to get somewhere, and he realizes he’s holding the mark’s phone when from it a girl’s urgent voice says, “He’s one of them.”

  Kern watches as the man reaches casually into his coat, as though for a pack of cigarettes, and takes out something the size of a phone but from the way he holds it Kern knows it’s a weapon.

  In the laptop’s library, there’s a video, very grainy, at least a century old, of an old man with white stubble on his cheeks explaining the secrets of fighting with knives. Kern guessed he was in his eighties, and his accent was southern, possibly Argentine, and he seemed like any other dumb old hick until he spoke of fencing, at which it was as though he were illuminated from within. If your adversary is unskilled, he’d said, then, even if you’re unarmed, his weapon is most dangerous to himself. Kern had studied this video for weeks, practicing its moves to the exclusion of all else, and now he slips to one side, just a little, the way the old man said—Get out of the way but stay close enough to hurt them—and he feels the motion of the air as the weapon, a taser, passes through the empty space where his abdomen had been; he notices the taser is a uniform matte grey, probably fabbed. Get the knife, the old man had said. Let him hit you a few times if he wants to, but get the knife. And then he’s got the man’s wrist, and is prising his fingers from the taser, and as it clatters away his fear flowers into rage.

  For a moment they sway in close embrace, and at first it’s like holding a lover—he’s aware of every shift in the stranger’s body, his rough cheeks, rank armpits, floral cologne—and then it’s like fighting a child, for, though the man is determined, he has no art, really none, and it’s only seconds before Kern has the clinch, his forearms trapping the man’s neck, his palms cradling the back of his skull, pulling him in. The man tries to duck out of it, a beginner’s mistake and a fatal one, and Kern, full of joy and a sort of technical pride, drives his right knee into the man’s face, and then the left, and then right again. He
finds himself supporting the man’s limp weight, hesitates, and then, putting all his weight behind it, spikes the man’s skull onto the concrete floor, and screams, though he hadn’t meant to, a raw cry, torn from within, and the paroxysm seems to last a long time, but when it ends the vendors are just turning to look, and he picks up the phone as tears wet his cheeks and walks away.

  It’s like a cloud has settled on his mind and he keeps laughing a little to himself as he takes turns at random, putting the fight into the past, and he knows the body will be gone soon, taken to some out-of-the-way place and picked over by scavengers, and if the man was in good health and not important enough to register his DNA then his organs will be harvested for the open market and whatever’s left will disappear into the cold water flowing out through the Golden Gate, and he thinks of the sharks there, swarming in the deep channels, how it’s said they’ve multiplied since the ocean got warmer, and then the street turns again and widens into a labyrinth of low, rebar-studded concrete barriers leading circuitously to the gate in a breach in the favelas’ walls, and beyond the fence is the wide unbuilt cordon of cracked earth and dried weeds and rotting garbage and then the city.

  There’s a marine in armor watching people trickle in, a white kid with a buzz cut and bad skin, not much older than Kern, his helmet retracted. They’re not picky about who comes into the favelas but getting out can be trickier—they’ll usually let you past the checkpoint in the mornings, if you don’t give any attitude, and say you’re going to a job, but if you get the wrong soldier you can get arrested, maybe not come back. The marine is staring into space, and seems not to have seen him, and Kern hears bass-heavy redneck music rumbling from his armor, and then he remembers the phone.