Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project)

by John Barnes

  His hands are in his pockets, but it’s too dark inside my room to see the expression on his face. “Situation,” he says.

  “Why didn’t you send me the data?”

  “System’s down.”

  “Your system?”

  “Our system. The main system. The hub is down. Everything is down. The entire Defense building and the Kettering compound are blind.”

  “Fuck,” I say, and inside my head, it becomes a litany: fuckfuck fuckfuckfuck.

  I’m naked, and I dress in front of Lisha. He steps close and smooths the collar of my coat. This close, I can see his face, the hard, square jaw, the black bruises beneath his eyes, the slight curl of his upper lip. He is all planes and angles.

  We walk into the belly of the Defense compound.

  The com hub is bubbled by a filter, and two Defense Suits stand outside. They motion me past, tell me I’ve got clearance, but my skin still prickles as I step through the filter.

  Flire and Gri and Mesta are already inside, looking like they haven’t slept for three days. They probably haven’t. The usual hum of the system is absent, but the clicks are still jacked in all along the circumference of the room. Their agents, a dozen of them, stand at the operations console, answering questions from Gri and Mesta, translating data from the clicks.

  Flire beckons me over to the entry shaft leading up into the glutinous tubular guts of the system.

  “You found the altered pathways?” I ask.

  Flire nods. “Come up and take a look at them,” she says. “It’s not anything I’ve seen before.”

  She leads the way up the rungs of the ladder. There’s a platform at the top that overlooks the nest of system tubing, the nexus of the system’s brain. I step up next to Flire, and she points out over the mass of greenish tubes to a dark, cancerous growth of black big enough to house at least three click/agent pairs.

  “Someone’s been injecting saline into these spider veins the past two weeks,” Flire says.

  “Can you read the signature of who did it?”

  “You think this was one of ours?”

  “Opposition doesn’t know our tech. They’d find a way to burn it or blow it up before mixing a virus. This is internal. We can trace the virus back to its jack-in point.” And from there, Flire could just go through the records of jacked-in clicks and see who’d been jacking in there the last two weeks. Easy.

  “Narsis!”

  I look down at the bottom of the shaft. “Message for you!” Lisha says. “Defense routed Priority.”

  I climb down, and Lisha hands over the blue Priority paper. Of course it’s on paper – the systems are down, but for a moment I can’t understand why anyone would send me a paper transmission outside a Defense conference room.

  I press my palm to the page, watch blue letters bleed out, only one sentence:

  THE CATS SAY THE NAME ISN’T KELI.

  Cold creeps up my spine, and despite the kaj I’m chewing, my hands start to shake. I don’t need to ask Defense who they routed it from.

  I shove the paper deep into my pocket.

  I tell Lisha he’s got first, just as Gri hands him a jack-in knife for printing.

  “Location for recovery?” he says. In case I died on duty.

  “Kettering compound,” I say.

  He hands over the silver jack-in knife. “Drop this by there for printing, then?”

  I take the knife by the hilt, slip it into my coat. I have an aversion for jack-in knives, but in this job, I must put up with many things I find abhorrent.

  Dense as Blindness: Narsis

  THE NURSE DOES not expect me. I find that odd, since Jan can’t send transmissions on his own. All our tech is organic. Trying to send a transmission himself would have triggered another violent allergic reaction. He must have sent it through her, but she looks at me as an unwelcome annoyance, a stranger stirring her from sleep.

  She takes me to him in her brooding way, and when I walk into his room I see that it’s dark. The cold comes back, creeping up my spine, across my shoulders.

  “Jan?” I say.

  The nurse pushes past me into the room, bringing a candle with her. Yes, a wax and wick candle, the likes of which I’ve only ever seen in ag compounds. She lights four or five more on the desk by the bed, and I see stacks of texts there, actual paper texts that could only have been made by Opposition. We haven’t used that kind of archaic tech in almost a century.

  He’s staring toward the window on the other side of the room. He is loosely wrapped in his sheets, so all I can see is his shaved head.

  “You sent for me,” I say.

  The nurse shuffles back out into the hallway, but I see her looking back into the room.

  “Ask me questions,” Jan says, softly. “That’s what you do. You ask questions.”

  “How do you know about Keli?”

  “I am the world,” Jan says.

  “What’s his real name? If it isn’t Keli... and how do you know?”

  “We’re all just systems looking out and seeing in.”

  I’m tired. Flire says she’ll have a jack-in point and sig pattern match in less than an hour.

  “Did you ask them about the cats?” he says. He is still looking at the window.

  “The cats are dead,” I say, too loud. “I can haul you down to interrogation, if it comes to that, but we’re running out of time.”

  “Ask me about the cats,” he says.

  I want to hit him and want to watch the melon head snap off the little bowed stalk of his neck and bounce against the wall.

  I walk to the door.

  I hope his fucking fat cats screeched when they burned.

  I stop. I half-turn.

  “How did the cats survive?” I say.

  Jan bats his lashes at me. “The cats,” he says.

  “You lived two weeks without food, there at the end. You were so emaciated you couldn’t move. But those cats were strong enough to attack the Liberation party, and they weighed in at four or five kilos apiece.”

  He smiles, and it’s eerie to watch him smile, the skin of his hollow face stretched tight, the leering death mask. “You don’t see any strings, do you?” he says. “All those metal loops, but you’re blind. We are one thing, one system. What’s theirs is mine, mine is theirs. Symbiosis. One thing.”

  “Why did they leave you in there with cats?”

  “I wasn’t doing well with people. I had to make connections with other living things. Share information, and matter.”

  He existed as a communications hub, incapable of interacting with human beings, so they tested him on cats?

  “You’re not functional,” I say. Jan’s outdated, but even outdated, he’s linking things, he’s linking to people, he’s sending me messages even though he’s sitting here with no organic tech... no tech but himself. The words are out of me already, “Keli’s a system. Like you. Only he works.”

  Jan squirms in the bed. I imagine him purring. “You’re not so dense as blindness.”

  “Where is he, this system?” I say.

  “He’s afraid of you,” Jan says.

  “Everyone’s afraid of me,” I say.

  I am disgusted with him; this broken, mad thing.

  I leave him.

  I walk back to the Defense compound, back to the stir of Suits, and I’ve chewed so much kaj that I’m having trouble walking. I keep putting out my hand to the walls of the corridor for balance, but all I can feel is the pressure, yes, there, and I think that means I’m real, I exist, but I’m not sure.

  Flire, Gri, Mesta, and Lisha are all waiting for me. Lisha’s at the doorway of the interrogation offices when I come in, and he’s immediately at my right hand. He knows. My lips are blood red with kaj.

  “Sig pattern match,” Flire says, and hands me the system read-out she and Gri and Mesta were huddled over when I came in. I press my fingers together, hard, on either side of the read-out to make sure I won’t drop it.

  “System’s up again?”
I say

  “For the last half hour,” Gri says. She barely comes to my shoulder, and the lines on her fleshy face are still shallow. “A couple of click/agent pairs rerouted through backup pathways. The central core is still down for at least another three days. It’s running a lot slower, and Defense is still issuing physical Priority notices for another four hours.”

  Flire says, “Lisha had Gri and Mesta pick up the click whose sig matched the one at the jack-in point. We also contained the agent. They’re in interrogation room one-oh-one.”

  The click is naked and blindfolded in the cell, and his hair is white, cropped short. He has fleshy openings on his wrists, the back of his neck, and the base of his spine for hooking up with agents and systems.

  “You have background on him?” I ask.

  Lisha looks at me out of the corner of his eye. I realize it’s all probably on the read-out in my hand.

  “Usual for a click,” Lisha says. “Raised in the compound. Pelan’s his first agent, and her Suit overseers gave them a long-term pairing.”

  “How does Kel feel about that?”

  “He’s a click. He’s not allowed to feel anything about it.”

  “So we have breeding records on Kel going back to the breeding compounds,” I say. “We have a mixer’s report detailing his mixing, conception, and birth?”

  “Just like every other click,” Lisha says.

  Something isn’t right.

  “Relationships with any of the other interrogated clicks?”

  “All cressin clicks, including this one. All tailored to work on the main Defense system hub.”

  “We know who their mixer is?” Clicks are made in batches.

  Lisha pauses. It’s something none of us thought of before. I don’t know why. The connection feels obvious now.

  “There are about six different mixers for the cressin clicks,” he says. “The sig patters of these ones... it’s a familiar sig combo, I remember it from Ethics. Their mixer is, what, the foreigner – Trist.”

  “Trist mixed all these agents?”

  “I have to look into that. Agents aren’t tailored for specific ops like the clicks were.”

  “Go get Mesta and Gri working on it, see if you can find a way to link them. Run cross-referenced patterns on the Defense database.”

  He walks back out into the hall.

  I step through the bubble filter. The click flinches.

  I squat down a couple feet from the click. “You know why you’re here, Kel?”

  He cringes from my voice.

  “I do what Pelan says.” He’s shaking.

  A common click defense, blaming actions on an agent, but all it means is that if the agent’s purged, so’s their click.

  “She says Keli told her to do it, in her dreams, in one of those rooms,” Kel says.

  I stand and nearly fall again. My legs are shaky, half-asleep.

  I need to stop it with the kaj.

  Lisha pops through the filter. Before I can say anything, he pulls me out of the filter.

  “You have to see this,” he says, and he takes me back into the interrogation offices. Flire is there, standing over the main system screen.

  “Narsis,” she murmurs, but she doesn’t get anything else out because I’m already there, pushing past her, gazing at the screen. There are names. Names of mixers, Suits, Council members, agents, clicks.

  “There are links,” Lisha says. “I programmed the system to look at them, thinking about what you said, about the mixers of both being the same.” He points out Trist, who mixed the cressin clicks, and the woman who mixed Trist, Gell, who mixed eight of fifteen of Keli’s turned agents and eight of the ten council members. One of the council members, unnamed per the Privacy of Elite Act, mixed Trist and Gell, who were both agents first linked to five clicks now bound to eight of the thirteen agents sent into Jabow for Liberation.

  “You say there’s more connections?” I say. “Were we... breeding people specifically for the liberation of Jabow?”

  “I don’t think we were supposed to find these,” Lisha said. “The Council is all the way at the top, and they don’t ask agents to meddle in their business.” As if I don’t know that, as if I’m too blind to see he’s only skimmed the surface of an elaborately linked... system corrupting our own operations.

  I’m on the cusp of something, but right now these links are merely superficial. It doesn’t mean anything.

  “I have to go back to Jan,” I say.

  I’m shaking, but it’s not for lack of kaj.

  Catalyst: Jan

  SHE COMES BACK. She has to come back. We are bound together. We are one and the same, she and I, two halves of a whole, click and agent, in the crudest of terms.

  I wait for her, sitting up in my bed, with my back against the wall. And finally, there she is, her form taking up most of the doorway. Her face is hardened into a deep frown, but instead of looking ugly she looks strong. She, all that I am not.

  “Tell me about the system, about the Keli system, and how it works.”

  “Do you know what you are?” I ask.

  “I’m an interrogator,” she says. “I’m a Suit.”

  “What do interrogators do?”

  “They use any means necessary to get the answers to their questions.”

  She steps closer to me, comes to the end of the bed. She is trying this time, trying to understand more than she has the other times.

  “You were once an agent,” I say. “You’ve been part of a click and agent pair. You became a system.”

  “I became part of a system,” she says, “yes.”

  “Then you weren’t an agent anymore. You became a Suit. How did you become an interrogation Suit?”

  “I was bred for it,” she says. “Being an agent was just passing through one stage to another. All Suits have to go through it. Defense had me pegged for interrogation from my mixing.”

  “Who was your mixer?”

  She hesitates. I can see her thinking it over, trying to make the connections.

  “One of the Council Members. He’s a Council Member now, I know.” She pauses. She sees the connection. “He’s the same one who mixed Gell or Trist, isn’t he?”

  “Why send specifically tailored clicks to the Liberation of Jabow?” I say.

  “To retrieve you,” she says, and until that moment, I didn’t think she would phrase it that way. The world has stopped for me since I last saw her.

  “Opposition doesn’t believe in organic tech, but you’re as organic a tech as they come,” she says.

  “So whose weapon am I, Narsis?”

  Opposition: Narsis

  WHAT IS OPPOSITION? Have I ever really known? Has anyone ever sat down with me and given me a definition? Opposition has always been just that. They don’t believe in organic tech. They want the resources that we want. But no one says what the Opposition looks like. By the time Liberation parties move into Opposition areas, the Opposition is always gone, pushed out when their mechanized lines break.

  We... We, Keli, tailored people to retrieve Jan.

  Our weapon.

  What is Keli? He is Opposition. What is Opposition? Opposition is us.

  I look at Jan. He reaches out to me, one skinny hand escaping from the bundle of sheets.

  I am numb and trembling, but my fingers twine into his. A burst of green webbing moves across my field of vision.

  We. I. We:

  We, system totality.

  Jan reached for her.

  We.

  She broke. I’m broken! He heard her and he called out and she could not hear.

  We are going to die alone and apart, broken, rent, twisted. We’ll die alone if we don’t come together.

  She does not fear being alone. She fears coming together.

  I fear.

  I deny.

  We, system totality... No.

  No.

  Me. Strong, singular, apart, complete.

  I need no one and nothing. I am no one and noth
ing.

  We. I. Me.

  I.

  Alone. Singular. Complete.

  “I don’t need you!” I say, and he falls away from me.

  We liberated our own fucking weapon.

  I won’t become one, too.

  I sit down on the end of the bed. I feel like something heavy has been dragged over me. I am watching agents pissing themselves. I am watching myself cutting out their tongues. I’m waking up alone every morning and vomiting in the sink after every interrogation, believing I’m cleansing out the dregs Defense couldn’t get to, Defense couldn’t control. I’m watching agents chew off their own fingers and make alters to their dead clicks for the whim of Council members who can’t live without an Opposition.

  “What are we, Jan?” I say, and it comes out garbled.

  He worms over to me, still wrapped in his sheets, and he tries to touch me again, but I pull away, and I see that he’s crying.

  “We are their monsters,” he says.

  System Totality: Narsis

  “I’M GOING TO be purged, Jan,” I say.

  He is sobbing now, and the sobbing wracks his whole little body. I have never despised what I am, who I am, like I do now, because I cannot touch him, I cannot stay. I will leave him like I have left everyone.

  I stand on shaky legs.

  I leave him.

  I leave him and he is still crying, and the nurse watches me go and her eyes are so very, very black.

  I don’t want to go to Defense now. I want to sleep. But when I finally get to my narrow room, Lisha is waiting for me inside. I left my filter on green. The room is dark, but there’s pale orange light coming in from the globes in the hallway. He is sitting on my bed, and he stands when I enter.

  “What are you doing here?” I say.

  He pulls a blue Defense Priority paper from his coat pocket and hands it to me.

  I open it up, and it’s a missive with my tag number on it:

  GREEN THREAD

  “I didn’t know what it meant,” he says, “so I came down here to meet you.”

  “I didn’t send that,” I say.

  “What happened?” he says.

  “I’m going to be purged,” I say.