Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  "But you don't have zero knowledge, do you?"

  Lawrence found himself grinning, which hurt a lot, and which caused a little more blood to leak out of his nose and over his lips in a hot trickle. "Well, signals intelligence being what it is, I was able to discover that it was a Securitat stream, and that it wasn't the first one he'd worked on, nor the first one he'd altered."

  "He altered a stream?"

  Lawrence lost his smile. "I hadn't told you that part yet, had I?"

  "No." Randy leaned forward. "But you will now."

  #

  The blue silk ribbons slid through Lawrence's mental fingers as he sat in his cell, which was barely lit and tiny and padded and utterly devoid of furniture. High above him, a ring of glittering red LEDs cast no visible light. They would be infrared lights, the better for the hidden cameras to see him. It was dark, so he saw nothing, but for the infrared cameras, it might as well have been broad daylight. The asymmetry was one of the things he inscribed on a blue ribbon and floated away.

  The cell wasn't perfectly soundproof. There was a gaseous hiss that reverberated through it every forty six to fifty three breaths, which he assumed was the regular opening and shutting of the heavy door that led to the cell-block deep within the Securitat building. That would be a patrol, or a regular report, or someone with a weak bladder.

  There was a softer, regular grinding that he felt more than heard -- a subway train, running very regular. That was the New York rumble, and it felt a little like his pan's reassuring purring.

  There was his breathing, deep and oceanic, and there was the sound in his mind's ear, the sound of the streamers hissing away into the ether.

  He'd gone out in the world and now he'd gone back into a cell. He supposed that it was meant to sweat him, to make him mad, to make him make mistakes. But he had been trained by sixteen years in the Order and this was not sweating him at all.

  "Come along then." The door opened with a cotton-soft sound from its balanced hinges, letting light into the room and giving him the squints.

  "I wondered about your friends," Lawrence said. "All those people at the restaurant."

  "Oh," Randy said. He was a black silhouette in the doorway. "Well, you know. Honor among thieves. Rank hath its privileges."

  "They were caught," he said.

  "Everyone gets caught," Randy said.

  "I suppose it's easy when everybody is guilty." He thought of Posy. "You just pick a skillset, find someone with those skills, and then figure out what that person is guilty of. Recruiting made simple."

  "Not so simple as all that," Randy said. "You'd be amazed at the difficulties we face."

  "Zbigniew Krotoski was one of yours."

  Randy's silhouette -- now resolving into features, clothes (another sweater, this one with a high collar and squared-off shoulders) -- made a little movement that Lawrence knew meant yes. Randy was all tells, no matter how suave and collected he seemed. He must have been really up to something when they caught him.

  "Come along," Randy said again, and extended a hand to him. He allowed himself to be lifted. The scabs at his knees made crackling noises and there was the hot wet feeling of fresh blood on his calves.

  "Do you withhold medical attention until I give you what you want? Is that it?"

  Randy put an affectionate hand on his shoulder. "You seem to have it all figured out, don't you?"

  "Not all of it. I don't know why you haven't told me what it is you want yet. That would have been simpler, I think."

  "I guess you could say that we're just looking for the right way to ask you."

  "The way to ask me a question that I can't say no to. Was it the sister? Is that what you had on him?"

  "He was useful because he was so eager to prove that he was smarter than everyone else."

  "You needed him to edit your own data-streams?"

  Randy just looked at him calmly. Why would the Securitat need to change its own streams? Why couldn't they just arrest whomever they wanted on whatever pretext they wanted? Who'd be immune to --

  Then he realized who'd be immune to the Securitat: the Securitat would be.

  "You used him to nail other Securitat officers?"

  Randy's blank look didn't change.

  Lawrence realized that he would never leave this building. Even if his body left, now he would be tied to it forever. He breathed. He tried for that oceanic quality of breath, the susurration of the blue silk ribbons inscribed with his worries. It wouldn't come.

  "Come along now," Randy said, and pulled him down the corridor to the main door. It hissed as it opened and behind it was an old Securitat man, legs crossed painfully. Weak bladder, Lawrence knew.

  #

  "Here's the thing," Randy said. "The system isn't going to go away, no matter what we do. The Securitat's here forever. We've treated everyone like a criminal for too long now -- everyone's really a criminal now. If we dismantled tomorrow, there'd be chaos, bombings, murder sprees. We're not going anywhere."

  Randy's office was comfortable. He had some beautiful vintage circus posters -- the bearded lady, the sword swallower, the hoochi-coochie girl -- framed on the wall, and a cracked leather sofa that made amiable exhalations of good tobacco smell mixed with years of saddle soap when he settled into it. Randy reached onto a tall mahogany bookcase and handed him down a first-aid kit. There was a bottle of alcohol in it and a lot of gauze pads. Gingerly, Lawrence began to clean out the wounds on his legs and hands, then started in on his face. The blood ran down and dripped onto the slate tiled floor, almost invisible. Randy handed him a waste-paper bin and it slowly filled with the bloody gauze.

  "Looks painful," Randy said.

  "Just skinned. I have a vicious headache, though."

  "That's the taser hangover. It goes away. There's some codeine tablets in the pill-case. Take it easy on them, they'll put you to sleep."

  While Lawrence taped large pieces of gauze over the cleaned-out corrugations in his skin, Randy tapped idly at a screen on his desk. It felt almost as though he'd dropped in on someone's hot-desk back at the Order. Lawrence felt a sharp knife of homesickness and wondered if Gerta was OK.

  "Do you really have a sister?"

  "I do. In Oregon, in the Order."

  "Does she work for you?"

  Randy snorted. "Of course not. I wouldn't do that to her. But the people who run me, they know that they can get to me through her. So in a sense, we both work for them."

  "And I work for you?"

  "That's the general idea. Zbigkrot spooked when you got onto him, so he's long gone."

  "Long gone as in --"

  "This is one of those things where we don't say. Maybe he disappeared and got away clean, took his sister with him. Maybe he disappeared into our...operations. Not knowing is the kind of thing that keeps our other workers on their game."

  "And I'm one of your workers."

  "Like I said, the system isn't going anywhere. You met the gang tonight. We've all been caught at one time or another. Our little cozy club manages to make the best of things. You saw us -- it's not a bad life at all. And we think that all things considered, we make the world a better place. Someone would be doing our job, might as well be us. At least we manage to weed out the real retarded sadists." He sipped a little coffee from a thermos cup on his desk. "That's where Zbigkrot came in."

  "He helped you with 'retarded sadists'?"

  "For the most part. Power corrupts, of course, but it attracts the corrupt, too. There's a certain kind of person who grows up wanting to be a Securitat officer."

  "And me?"

  "You?"

  "I would do this too?"

  "You catch on fast."

  #

  The outside wall of Campus was imposing. Tall, sheathed in seamless metal painted uniform grey. Nothing grew for several yards around it, as though the world was shrinking back from it.

  How did Zbigkrot get off campus?

  That's a question that should have occurred to him when
he left the campus. He was embarrassed that it took him this long to come up with it. But it was a damned good question. Trying to force the gate -- what was it the old Brother on the gate had said? Pressurized, blowouts, the walls rigged to come down in an instant.

  If zbigkrot had left, he'd walked out, the normal way, while someone at the gate watched him go. And he'd left no record of it. Someone, working on Campus, had altered the stream of data fountaining off the front gate to remove the record of it. There was more than one forger there -- it hadn't just been zbigkrot working for the Securitat.

  He'd belonged in the Order. He'd learned how to know himself, how to see himself with the scalding, objective logic that he'd normally reserved for everyone else. The Anomaly had seemed like such a bit of fun, like he was leveling up to the next stage of his progress.

  He called Gerta. They'd given him a new pan, one that had a shunt that delivered a copy of all his data to the Securitat. Since he'd first booted it, it had felt strange and invasive, every buzz and warning coming with the haunted feeling, the watched feeling.

  "You, huh?"

  "It's very good to hear your voice," he said. He meant it. He wondered if she knew about the Securitat's campus snitches. He wondered if she was one. But it was good to hear her voice. His pan let him know that whatever he was doing was making him feel great. He didn't need his pan to tell him that, though.

  "I worried when you didn't check in for a couple days."

  "Well, about that."

  "Yes?"

  If he told her, she'd be in it too -- if she wasn't already. If he told her, they'd figure out what they could get on her. He should just tell her nothing. Just go on inside and twist the occasional data-stream. He could be better at it than zbigkrot. No one would ever make an Anomaly out of him. Besides, so what if they did? It would be a few hours, days, months or years more that he could live on Campus.

  And if it wasn't him, it would be someone else.

  It would be someone else.

  "I just wanted to say good bye, and thanks. I suspect I'm not going to see you again."

  Off in the distance now, the sound of the Securitat van's happy little song. His pan let him know that he was breathing quickly and shallowly and he slowed his breathing down until it let up on him.

  "Lawrence?"

  He hung up. The Securitat van was visible now, streaking toward the Campus wall.

  He closed his eyes and watched the blue satin ribbons tumble, like silky water licking over a waterfall. He could get to the place that took him to anywhere. That was all that mattered.

  --

  Afterword:

  I wrote this story for the launch of tor.com in 2008, at the behest of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my friend and longstanding editor. This story considers the problem with losing sight of the ethical dimensions of hard and satisfying technical challenges, like data-mining.

  I got the inspiration for this story while driving from Martha's Vineyard to New York with Patrick and his wife Teresa (Teresa copy-edited my next novel, the young adult book "For the Win"). We were talking about people we knew from science fiction fandom who had started out bright and promising but who had met their match in the real world's difficulties and sunk into a ferocious curmudgeonliness that would be comical if it wasn't so tragic. I wondered aloud, "Where do you suppose those people would have gone in ages past?" and Patrick immediately answered, "To a monastery." It was so obviously true and weird that I knew I had to write this story.

  Today, there's a monkish order that makes its living refurbishing toner cartridges, just as other orders make honey or beer (mmm, Chimay!). It's not such a stretch to imagine a future order that provides IT services to totalitarian governments.

  Power Punctuation!, by Cory Doctorow

  Hi, Mom!

  Wow, you won't believe what happened today. First of all, I was nearly late for work because my new roommate is worried about the electrical and he pulled out all the plugs last night, even my alarm clock! His name is Tony, and I think he is either weird or crazy, or maybe both! He keeps saying that the Company uses the plugs to listen to our minds! He unplugged all the electricals and put tape over them in the middle of the night. When I woke up this morning, my room was totally black! I had my flashlight from work on the chair near my bed, and I used that to find the living room. Tony was sitting in his shorts on the sofa, in the dark, watching the plug behind the TV. Hey, I said, you watch the television, not the plug, and then he said some bad words and told me that he didn't want me plugging in anything. He is skinny like Jimmy got when he had the AIDS, but he is not sick, he is hyperkinetic, like Manny was when he went to the special school. That is why he is management and I still work on a truck. If I have to be skinny and crazy to be management, I'll take the truck all day long!

  So I got dressed and ran out of the apt and took all those stairs up to the slidewalk because there was a big line up of people waiting for the elevators, like always, and I didn't have time to wait, because my watch was already warning me that I was going to be late as if I didn't know! I ran all the way to the garage, around all the people on the slidewalk, who don't know to walk right and stand left like you always told me. Life up here in the city is different from back home and no doubt at all.

  My watch knew that I wasn't in the garage at 8:25 and it started counting down the minutes till I was late. Its voice gets higher and higher and more and more excited as I get closer to being late, and I thought it was going to bust something as I ran through the door of the garage. It told me that I'd had a close call, but I'd made it, and I felt pretty good about that.

  Wendell, the day supervisor, smiled at me when I came in, which he never does, and I got nervous that maybe my watch was wrong about my being late, except that my watch is never wrong. Jap, he said, you're on special truck 982 today. I said what's that, and he told me that it was a great honor and then he said I'd like you to meet your pusher for today, Rhindquist.

  So I shook Rhindquist's hand. He was a kind of old, fat, short guy, and his uniform was old fashioned looking and not as smart as the one I wear, that you liked so much in the photo I sent home last month. So right away I thought that he was some kind of moron and I was being punished for being late. He said, pleased to meet you, Jasper, and he didn't sound like a moron, but more like one of those guys on your TV stories that are rich and powerful and in charge. I said call me Jap everybody else does and he said twenty years ago the All Nippon Anti Defamation League would have put a stop to that and I laughed even though I didn't get the joke until later. It is that Jap is also short for Japanese, which is like the Moonies but they are from Korea.

  Let's roll 'em out, Rhindquist said, and hopped on the back of the truck and held on tight. I got in and did my ten point startup safety check like they taught me. By point four, he was banging on the side of the truck and saying Let's go! and I leaned out my window and said that I wouldn't skip my safety check for nobody and he said some bad words and I said that I would have to start over again and he'd better keep quiet or we'd never get out of there. My watch said I did right, which made me feel good. I hoped that Rhindquist's watch told him off for trying to shortcut on safety!

  We rolled out a little late. I drove to my first pickup, which is the side of Finance 38. Finance 38 is a very, very tall building and all no windows because they don't want spies from other cities seeing them and their money. I drove over the Severe Tire Damage yard and passed through three security gates and backed up to the shredder bay. I did my four point shutdown safety check and Rhindquist banged on the truck again and said more bad words but I ignored him. His watch must be busy all the time, telling him not to be so mean!

  I went through the metal-detector and into the Finance 38 and the guard's watch and my watch talked to each other for a while and then the guard stopped pointing his gun at me and said, You're late now move this stuff out of here and I said OK and started moving the boxes. Finance 38's boxes are very heavy, and there sure are a lot of them! Every d
ay, there are fifty boxes, as big as the big TV at the community centre back home. I am getting very strong working at this job, Mom! My arms are bigger every morning.

  I moved the boxes back to the truck. I left them for Rhindquist, who started opening them and pushing the papers inside into the hopper. On my normal truck, 3528, my pusher is Vasquez, who is very fast at pushing the papers. Rhindquist was slow, so that by the time I'd moved half the boxes back to the truck, there was no more room to move the rest! I thought that for a guy who's always in a big hurry, he sure works slow!

  So I went into the truck, with my flashlight. And there was Rhindquist, and do you know what he was doing? He was reading the papers before putting them into the shredder! What are you doing? I said, you aren't allowed to do that! He gave me a look, not like he was angry, but like he thought I was a moron or something. My watch told me that I should report him right away, and I started to go back into Finance 38 to use the guard's phone, but Rhindquist did something with his own watch and my watch stopped working! You broke my watch! I said to him!

  He said, That's from the Blues Brothers, and he said, What do they do, attach the disposal baskets to the laser printers? This is all junk, none of this needs secure disposal! And I said, you broke my watch, Rhindquist, and everything in the Finance Buildings needs secure disposal, it's in the manual.

  He said, I didn't break your watch, I just shut it off for a while. It will be OK, trust me. Come here, have a look at this.

  Mom, I did it! I read the paper in his hand, with my flashlight. It said, Johnson, your performance review has been rescheduled for 1630h on Friday, 78th floor boardroom.

  This is crap! Rhindquist said. This doesn't need secure disposal. He kept digging through the papers, and looking at them before shoving them in the shredder. Every time he looked at one, he said, Crap, and then put it in. I couldn't stop watching. I thought we were going to be fired! Or put in jail! Then he said, Aha! He showed me the paper, it said, CONFIDENTIAL at the top, and I felt like I was going to sick up, I was so scared. It said RE ORG CHART, and it had lots of names with dotted lines connecting them to other names. Rhindquist winked at me and put it in his pocket -- his old-fashioned uniform had pockets!