Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  The monitors are salvage, as is the bare, stained mattress, gleaming blue in the dull glow, but the laptop, Lares told him, was designed by an AI, and cost a fortune; the keyboard, which looks like the flattened vertebra of some gigantic Pleistocene mammal, lets you code for days without hurting your wrists. The air is stale; he tries not to show that he’s breathing through his mouth.

  On the screens are empty caverns, unsettled water glittering in torchlight, an abandoned forge with scattered tools, and, there, motion, and it’s what has to be a vampire with his eyes like slits of fire, his deeply stained lips and his air of tragic, labored dignity; the vampire steps out of the shadows, scans his crypt wearily, goes to a window to stare out at the sky.

  Lares tears his eyes from the monitors to stare at Kern, envoy from a world that doesn’t interest him. About twenty-five, Lares, already balding, getting fat, in need of a shave. What Kern can see of the floor is covered with drifts of sour clothes, burrito wrappers, random computer hardware. There’d been this little punk-rock girl named Gabriela who said she couldn’t afford boundaries who Lares used to pay to clean up and to blow him once in a while, but she’d disappeared years ago, and now Lares seems to have gone beyond the need for cleanliness or women. In the screens’ faint glow, in which the squalor is barely visible, there is a calm, almost a romance, as though time were in abeyance in the dark room, while in the game, behind the screens, it passes.

  The vampire stretches hugely, and there’s something inhuman in the dimensions of his shoulders. Boredom, irritation, suppressed rage pass over his features, and then he’s stalking down a corridor, the camera following as he flexes and clenches his cruelly taloned hands. “I like the way he moves,” Kern says. “It’s better than last time. Like he’s looking for someone to hurt. It’s as good as a movie.”

  “Funny you should say that,” says Lares, with something like tenderness, his voice rusty with disuse, watching his creation’s rage blooming. “I’ve been working on him for years, but body kinematics are hard. But Sony developed an emotional-movement library and, given their really incredible level of investment in it, their security was unimpressive.”

  “Tell him you lost the phone,” the ghost whispers in his ear.

  “So the last job was a problem,” Kern says, and gives him an edited version of the truth.

  “Are you sure the phone’s gone?” Lares asks, weirdly pale in the screen light.

  “Absolutely,” Kern says. “I chucked it by the Folsom checkpoint. It’s gone for good. No telling who found it.”

  Lares slumps deeper into his chair. Kern says, “So what was it, anyway? Why all the fuss?”

  “Something special,” Lares says, far away. “I needed it for the game. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Who did we steal it from?”

  “Depends on your point of view. Some graffiti kid, proximally, but he got it from other thieves who are friends of his—they didn’t know what they had, but they thought he’d like the images. I knew about it because of these contractors who were going to steal it first. Dumb-asses,” he says tonelessly. “If they were really such bad news they’d know more about encryption.”

  “Contractors?”

  “Ex-cartel. Migrating north along with everything else. Bringing their special skill set to the unique challenges of today’s global business environment. Basically, they’re campesino shooters trying to build a brand on their violent surrealism.”

  “The passport,” says the ghost.

  “I need to get out of town. Can you get me a passport?”

  “How soon?”

  “Now.”

  “Expensive.”

  Kern takes a sheaf of bills from his pocket, holds it to the light to show denomination.

  * * *

  “Paraguayan,” Lares says, showing him the document, a little blue book with a golden seal, still warm from the printer he’d exhumed from under the laundry. “Still technically a country. Kind of a historical survival. They don’t use digital records, so there’s no good way to check it out. It’ll get you on a plane, but don’t try to bring any contraband, not with this passport.”

  “Contraband means drugs,” the ghost says. “Weapons, anything illegal.”

  Lares’ laptop starts pinging. He looks at it. “Movement sensors. It’s probably just someone lost. Or a drunk. Drunks. A lot of drunks. No, most are too small. Oh shit.”

  A little bug drone skitters in through the door, stops, seems to be looking at them. It goes click, click, click, which is its sonar, like a bat.

  Kern rises, trying to think of a plan, but a courteous voice says, “Please stay where you are,” in Juarez-inflected Spanish.

  A stranger comes in. He looks like anyone. Like a construction worker trying to dress respectably, like maybe later he’s going off to church. An air of competence about him. He holds a gun, not the hand cannons the gangsters favor but a little silver one.

  “You have some of our property,” he says gravely.

  The room is cramped and the man is six feet away but it might as well be miles and though it’s better to die fighting Kern can’t bring himself to make a move. Strange to have lost everything in the space of a moment. He slumps, tries to look defeated, awaits a chance.

  “It’s lost,” says Lares, putting his keyboard aside, giving the man his full attention. His concentration is intense, his eyes bright. “So there’s nothing for you here.”

  “Are you certain?” asks the man.

  Lares nods gravely. “Sit down,” he says to Kern. “Don’t make our guest nervous,” and his earnestness is such that Kern sweeps what’s probably underwear off a stack of cardboard boxes and sits.

  “You don’t have to sit up so straight,” Lares says to him. “You’re not in church.”

  “You both have to come with me,” the man says.

  “But you’re going to kill us if we do, aren’t you?” asks Lares, somehow like a schoolboy. “And if we don’t you’ll kill us anyway.”

  The man regards him.

  “I just want to know,” says Lares, as though clarifying this point is of the utmost importance. “I need to know where we stand.”

  The man’s gun is trained on Lares’ heart. He’s almost smiling. Kern regrets sitting—the bullet would be better—a flash and it’s done. The ghost says nothing.

  “I have to cuff you,” says the man.

  “Of course,” says Lares, offering his wrists gamely, but he looks grey, seems to be sweating, is struggling to keep his voice steady. “An excellent idea. You know, there’s something I’ve always meant to say at a time like this.” He giggles hoarsely.

  The man ignores him, fishing plastic cuffs out of his pocket.

  “Look at me,” says Lares.

  The man does.

  Like an actor enunciating, Lares says, “And then without warning we came to the end.”

  There’s a deep throbbing hum from the wall behind Kern and his hair stands on end and it’s suddenly very hot, so hot he’s sweating, and he smells smoke and burned meat, and there’s a glugging sound that makes him remember a two-gallon jug of water, its cap off, knocked over in the desert, the water blackening the sand.

  “Watch what you’re kneeling in,” says Lares because Kern is kneeling by the man who has laid himself out on the floor, and a pool of blood, black in the half-light, is spreading, and it’s already too late for his shoes. At first he thinks the man is cut, then sees he’s in two pieces, bisected cleanly just under his collarbones, the flesh at the partition burned ruby, the ruby still spreading. “I thought it would cauterize instantly,” Lares is saying, “and be clean, but there are the arteries. Of course there are the arteries. They’re just tubes. There’s nothing there to cauterize.”

  “Talk to him,” says the ghost.

  “What?”

  “It takes twenty seconds for the brain to finish up.”

  Kern puts his hand on the man’s cheek. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s okay. You’re going to d
ie, but it’s okay. Everything’s over now.”

  The man’s eyes seem to track him. Slight twitching of the lips. Then his eyes fix on nothing, and his pupils get wide, wider, are windows onto night.

  The ghost says, “I’ll have his death with me forever.”

  “I didn’t think it would really work,” Lares babbles. “I mean, it works in the movies but in real life anything this complicated fails catastrophically in the moment of truth, but it did work, and now he’s dead and we’re going to live. They were decommissioning a car factory in Yokohama and I found the auction for the laser they used to cut the engine blocks. Customs labeled it ‘industrial robotics, miscellaneous.’” Kern looks up, sees a slit burned into the far wall, still smoking, the concrete glowing, dark space behind it—there’s a much wider burn line at shoulder level opposite—involuntarily, he hunkers down.

  “Voice-activated,” Lares says. “A key phrase. I thought it was clever. I’ve wanted to say it for years. Sometimes I had to shout it into my pillow. And when his gun is in my face it finally occurs to me that it might not recognize my voice under stress.”

  Kern realizes he still has the passport in his hand. Lares is looking at him oddly. “Are you wearing an earpiece?” he asks.

  “I found it,” Kern says.

  Lares stares at him, shrugs, grabs a bag.

  “What about your stuff?” Kern asks.

  “Fuck it!” Lares says cheerfully, shoving his laptop into the bag, grabbing his wallet and phone, heading for the door. “It’s time to leave. There are a lot of places to hide, and I can work on the game from anywhere. You coming?”

  Kern rises, feeling something is still owed the dead man, unsure what.

  One of the screens flickers, now shows a sword submerged in a shallow pool, the blade pitted and rusting, and he remembers asking Lares how you play the game, how he’d said it wasn’t something you play, it was more like it was art, a “closed semantic universe,” which he’d never really understood, but as far as he could tell it meant that it was made of intertwining stories, accumulating endlessly, like dust in an old room, and the sword would have its place in the order of things. At the time Kern had thought it pointless, though he’d respected Lares’ clarity of vision, but now he sees the appeal of a world small enough to understand.

  Lares stops in the doorway, says, “They’ll be watching the main exit. Do you know the tunnels well enough to find another way out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then do it. The next one is coming in I’m guessing two minutes.”

  24

  Stillness in Memory

  Irina is in one of the Doric’s armored cars, stuck in traffic on her way to Fantôme. Picking at the armrest, she once again checks her implant’s logs and once again finds it unbreached, as she knew she would, for in fact it’s unbreachable, its defenses exaggerated beyond all necessity. It’s like a locked-room mystery—no one breached her implant, and she’s never transferred data off of it, and yet her memories have found their way out into the world.

  She remembers Cromwell’s somewhat exaggerated interest, and it occurs to her to blame him, and it seems like he must be in some way involved, but there isn’t enough evidence to convict. Also, if he’d been so keen on getting his hands on her memories, why bother having her talk to his AI? She must be missing information.

  She looks up Lederer’s Vancouver gallery on her phone. It’s just months old, owned by a pretty couple in their mid-thirties, and a quick search on their names brings up the sale of their tech company and the consequent access of wealth and their many subsequent seed-stage investments and a stalled attempt to produce independent films and their practiced smiles shining from the society blogs and in other blogs they’re nearly naked on the coarse grey beaches of Franz Josef Land for that huge annual week-long rave where they burn the wicker giant and there’s a pervasive sense that they’re searching quite desperately for the next source of meaning in their lives. She could imagine them locking on to the idea of recorded memory as art, if only for its novelty, but they don’t seem so substantial, and she doubts they’d have the nerve to face the inevitable counterattack.

  There’s a lingering sense of their emptiness, and of their need to find some new way to connect, and then she says, “Oh!” for all at once she knows what happened, or in any case the channel by which her memories escaped her control. She clenches her fists but there’s nothing to be done, at least not for now, so she lets herself remember.

  The clinic on the Malibu cliffs had walls of thick green glass. Sea fog hung in the air, diffusing the light. Looking down from the cliff edge, the surf’s violence was incredible, white water roaring over huge prisms of stone, the colossal wreckage of some recent collapse. Behind her, crablike drones with bodies of scoured copper moved cautiously through the brown grass, pausing only to disinter the roots of non-native plants. She’d heard that they were dumping these drones in the foothills, there to wander—robust and solar-powered, they would, over the decades, shift the ecology back toward how it was.

  “If you’re ready, Ms. Sunden,” said the doctor in the lobby.

  “Aren’t you afraid the cliff will collapse,” she said, “and drop you into the sea?”

  “That’s an inevitability, ma’am. But it’s suitable, don’t you think? A constant reminder of our fragility, here, of all places? In any case, the geologists tell us that the rock will last for at least a hundred years. Everything has its time.”

  She had come to help Constantin die.

  Constantin’s father had built the dikes around Athens and, as far as she could tell, most of the rest of modern Greece. Handsome, affable, dissolute Constantin; he’d studied law half-heartedly, and then, in his early twenties, found his true vocation in high alpine skiing, and, later, BASE jumping. One August evening he’d put on a jet-black nylon wingsuit, surplus from German special forces, and launched himself from a Swiss mountainside into the fading air over a narrow valley in the Jura; he remembered the silence, he said, how his shadow had flirted with him, hovering close or far as the terrain rose and fell, but he didn’t remember hitting the updraft—later, he would learn that it was the exhalation from one of the hidden caverns where the Swiss cloistered their attack planes—or the fall, or the long tumble over the granite boulders, the dense grasses, the tiny reticulated streams.

  They’d put a chip in his arm, when he was a child, that scanned his vital signs once a second. Noting their collapse, the chip sent an alert, annotated with his GPS and the elapsed time since cardiac arrest, first to the family office, then to the Swiss montane police.

  Four hours later he was in an acute trauma clinic in Bern. The doctors, despairing of the damage to his skull, formally notified his father of their decision to end life support. His father wrecked his office in his newly renovated Provençal villa, then sought advice. His wealth opened doors, dissolved obstacles, and soon his attorneys were ordering the Swiss doctors to stabilize their patient pending his transfer to the care of the surgeons of Ars Memoria, LLC, already en route from Seattle. Twenty-six hours later Constantin opened his eyes, the twenty-fourth recipient of the Memoria implant, the fourteenth to wake from anesthesia.

  “I have a request. Something intimate,” he said, eleven years later, as she sat by his bed, the glass walls darkening against the Malibu sun as it slipped toward the hemisphere of sea. He looked spent, in his web of tubes of blood and worse, as though he’d died weeks ago and was in the process of being embalmed. He’d taken drugs, he’d said, to stay lucid a little longer, so he could wait for her.

  “Name it,” she said, squeezing his hand, afraid it was sex, and would that even work, now, but the door had a lock, and there were worse things.

  “I don’t want to be alone, when it happens, and it’s happening soon.”

  “I’m here,” she said, knowing it for a slight thing, but all she had to offer.

  “Will you open your memory to me?”

  First she did nothing, thinking of her
other memory, that bright and inviolate core of self, but in his need he was like a child afraid of the dark (but rightly afraid, she thought, for the great night is about to swallow you whole, and there is nothing more to be done about it), so she turned on her implant’s wireless. Every device in the room became a beacon. His implant was trying to connect, once a second, every second, and as she accepted the connection the world became informed by crippling weariness and stark fear of the imminence of the end and the pale, worried woman at his bedside clutching his withered hand and beginning to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, voice doubled. He studied his face through her eyes, the image echoing between them, and then she watched as words coalesced—language like foam forming on black seas of thought—and he said, “You know, I envy you your health.”

  He thought of the first time he’d emailed her from the sanitarium in Berne. Who else, he’d written, could possibly understand??? Seven months later she’d been in Denver to see a client while he was there skiing; he’d felt awkward, approaching her in the hotel bar, knowing that everything he said would stay with her forever. “I lose nothing,” he’d said, words coming in a rush. “I remember all the skies, all of them, how the light changes by the second. I remember how the leaves flicker in the wind.” He’d looked uncomfortable, abashed by his poetic effusion. “The vividness never fades. It’s always been here, but before it just flowed over me, like I was standing in a river without getting wet.”

  “How many of us are left now?” he asked. The skin below his eyes was black as ink and she fought the urge to call for a nurse, a doctor, anyone. He saw this, as she saw his fear and his diffidence, and in the absence of even social deceit they arrived at shared certainties—that he was dying, that she would see him through it, and that, for the duration, they were as one person—and in these they found a degree of calm.