The squib slammed down on some tables, smashing them to sticks, before flipping end over end to land on its broken back. The crowd in the piazza ran for cover. By the time the squib had stopped sliding around, the square was clear bar the camera drones that forever circled. After the manifestation, no one was taking any chances with spontaneous outbreaks of violence. The Weave was watching.
‘That’s another one for me, Aiko.’ Endo laughed.
‘Let’s make sure he’s down first before we start counting.’
Gock pushed Pete in the back, urging him toward the splatted squib and its pilot, who was trying to untangle himself. ‘Go, they might need you.’
Pete let himself be prodded forward, and was near enough to hear the target shouting as he clambered from the wreckage. ‘You little bitch, I am going to melt your brain.’
‘Wait,’ Pete called out. The man was really just a boy, only sixteen or so. Pete felt his mind and read that his name was Risom Cawthorne and he wasn’t just telepathic but also a kinetic. Services had their information wrong.
‘I doubt that, mister!’ Endo shouted back at Risom. ‘You can’t mess with wires.’ With that the two sisters glooped him: from their hips two slim tubes slid out and fired blue gunk at his feet, sticking him down. ‘Now, don’t move. I’m going to fix your ugly face.’ Endo pulled a mask from her shell and moved toward him.
‘You!’ Risom shouted at Pete. ‘Help me. Why are you letting them do this?’
I can’t stop them.
You could try.
They would just do the same to me. Or blow my bot. There’s no point fighting when we can’t win.
That’s when we need to fight the most.
Gock lurched at Pete, throwing his hands at his throat.
‘What are you doing?’ Pete shouted. ‘Get off me.’
‘I can’t. I can’t!’ Gock screamed and clawed at him. Pete pushed him off, but he came again. Then another passer-by jumped toward him in clumsy attack. Risom was controlling them like marionettes.
Don’t do this, Risom.
Traitor!
Pete kicked his attackers away and sent an SOS to Ten. Wasn’t the squad meant to always be in range?
They can’t help you, traitor. I’ve taken care of them. Pete probed and saw that Risom had tinkered with the marauders, triggering their interference protocols and locking them in position. You’re next.
A street pole twisted and snapped near Pete, swinging at him with tremendous force. He leapt out of the way, only just avoiding it. Gock grabbed at his legs and pulled him down.
‘It’s not me. It’s not me!’ he screamed.
Pete’s chin hit the ground and his vision went from blur to white to black. Inside him he saw the staring eyes and then he reached out. He pushed across the square and ... changed Risom’s intentions. The pole dropped from the air and the human puppets fell stunned to the ground.
You bastard. You’ve turned on your own kind.
By now Endo was close enough to shove the mask at Risom’s face, but he thrashed his head back and forth. ‘You’re a fucking coward! Peter Lazarus is a coward!’ Risom bit at Endo’s hand and she took the opportunity to land a punch square to his cheek. He was dazed and she pushed the mask on. The nearly opaque shell softened over his face and then after a heartbeat or two, the body of the psi relaxed; legs deflexed and slumped, his rapid breathing calmed.
‘378 is secure. One point, Endo.’
~ * ~
That night Peter stayed awake. The only time the Prime had for him was at the end of his scheduled day. He couldn’t sleep anyway. He heard the boy screaming out his name again and again. Calling him a traitor.
Something wasn’t right about the whole situation, but he didn’t think on it long. What he had done to Risom was irritating him and he worried at it like a loose tooth. He could ignore it, but now that he’d done it he knew he could do it again.
He looked at Gock, snoring, head back, mouth open to show less than a full set of teeth. He thought how easy it would be to suggest he go to his room and leave Pete in peace. He resisted the temptation and returned to staring out over the megapolis of Yantz.
The view through the lounge window showed the weather rolling in, dusting up the stars until they disappeared beneath the grey. This is how it is to be now, Pete thought to himself. In an isolated tower, high enough from the ground level to be unable to sense the pedestrians. All human contact filtered from above through a snoring proxy, two teenage remotes and a squad of sacrificial soldiers. He was better off in hospital with Nurse Anchali visiting him every two hours. He missed Anchali. He wondered if she had been able to get word out about what had really happened under the Dome.
Ryu came online after midnight. Gock’s loud breathing snorted to a halt and he turned his weary head toward Peter and announced that the Prime could speak with him now.
‘You did very well today, Mister Lazarus,’ Ryu-Gock began.
‘Please don’t congratulate me.’
‘But why not? You managed to defuse the situation quickly enough. Just think how it might have ended if you hadn’t stepped in. Innocent people might have been harmed.’
‘Your information was wrong. You didn’t know he was a kinetic too.’
‘Was it? I shall look into that.’
‘So this is what you want of me? I am to hunt psis?’ Pete seethed. ‘I won’t do it. I am only here to stop Pierre Jnr.’
‘Yes, Mister Lazarus. You have said that plenty of times already. But after your recent failure under the Dome, surely you can see that you need some sort of practice.’ Gock blinked, waiting for Pete to respond or for more instructions from above. ‘It is this or the islands — but what good could you do there?’
‘What about the rest of the team? Where is Geof? And Colonel Pinter? What have you done with them?’
‘There is no need for paranoia. Both Geof Ozenbach and Colonel Pinter are still part of the hunt.’
‘Can I see them? Can I talk to them?’
‘Perhaps in time. When your trial is over, your request will be reassessed.’
‘So I’m to be isolated from everyone else? No contact with anyone, but your proxies and remotes?’
‘We are nearly ready to move forward. We are just securing one more member to bring your new team up to a full fifteen.’
‘Who is that?’
‘No one you know.’
‘And once the team is assembled, what will you have us do then?’
‘You will do what needs to be done, Mister Lazarus. There are some new directions to follow up. Geof Ozenbach is working diligently on the problem as we speak. Please don’t bother asking for more information now. None shall be provided.’
Pete bit his lip. ‘There’s nothing I can do to make you trust me, is there?’
‘If I think of anything, I will be sure to let Gock inform you.’
‘Do you think I’m guilty?’
‘Guilty of what? Being a psi? Yes. Did you conspire with Pierre Jnr? Perhaps, perhaps not, or perhaps unwittingly.’
‘Then how can you trust me to be part of the hunt?’ he asked.
‘I’m not trusting you at all. You’re botlocked and watched every minute of the day. Not to mention that my proxy is with you as a constant reminder of my presence.’ Gock smiled. ‘The way I see it, we may as well make use of your skills and presume that the truth about you will reveal itself in due course. My main problem is that your skills don’t amount to very much.’
Pete knew the Prime was right. He had always been able to read anyone who came within his range, but he’d never been aggressive with it. Instead of taking hold of a mind and drilling for the information he was after, he preferred to ask leading questions. Aggression had never been his way. If he encountered Pierre again now, he would do no better than he did last time. He did need to become used to his powers, to command them better.
He closed his eyes and tried not to see the e
yes that always seemed to wait for him in the darkness. It was only a small step from reading someone’s mind to writing something inside.
‘Tell me, Prime, you’ve shown me how you track down and disable telepaths and benders. How would you approach a psi like Pierre Jnr?’
‘It is good that you are now asking this question. It shows me that you are willing to learn.’ Gock paused, slack lips ready to repeat what was said to him. ‘I think, if he is fully manifested, as he was, it would be beyond us to stop him. We must try to strike before he is ready. This is presuming, of course, that your Pierre Jnr is a single entity rather than an organised group.’
‘A group of psis? Is that your other possibility?’
‘One of them.’
‘Is that what I am on trial for?’
‘Yes,’ Gock confirmed. ‘It is conjectured that you are a plant by a psi group.’
‘That could be a hard thing to prove either way.’
‘Yes.’
‘And the trial will continue forever?’
‘Indefinitely.’
‘How am I meant to find Pierre Jnr like this?’
‘You should know by now that your team is not leading the investigation. Geof Ozenbach is in charge of finding Pierre. Your team, and others, are training as response units. If there is a Pierre Jnr, and we locate him again, we must have a way of defeating him.’
‘I was never really leading the investigation before, was I?’ Pete wondered aloud.
‘No. Did you think that you were?’
‘Then who was? The Colonel?’
‘Services, of course.’
‘Yes, but who in Services?’
‘You really are a simpleton, aren’t you? I didn’t think there could be that many left in the world. Services is never one person. Every command goes through a decision-making tree. Many minds voting at many levels with different authorities and the combined result is the directive. “The command is the command”, as the soldiers say.’
Pete had heard that refrain reverberating in the mind of every Serviceman he’d ever encountered. Something learnt by rote and a lifetime of reinforcement.
‘Services really is something I never fully understood,’ Pete admitted. ‘I didn’t realise that the people within it believed in it. It makes sense to you.’ By you he meant Ryu Shima. Gock’s grasp of the system-based governance of the WU was as loose as Pete’s own. His only interest was how he could use the system to benefit himself.
‘It is better than the alternatives.’ As was taught in schools, all the old systems failed: capitalism, communism, democracy, psycho-socialism, cooperativism. The Services system did not segment the population into positions of governed and governing. It was a system that made every Citizen a working component.
‘I must go. You must rest,’ Gock ordered.
Yes, rest for more training tomorrow. Pete wondered if the twins would now be involved in his reorientation program.
‘I will leave you with these thoughts, Mister Lazarus. For now, I am at the front of this challenge. This threat, be it Pierre Jnr, or a psi rebellion, must be met one way or another. But finding an enemy you can’t see is like catching the wind. It is a great challenge and we must be patient and prepare for the day when the enemy finds us. You did well today.’
‘Thank you, Prime.’ The words slipped out before he could stop them.
~ * ~
‘Without further ado, I would like to invite Charlotte Betts to the stage.’
The room applauded as she came out from between the curtains and took her place at the podium. There were close to three hundred students attending, aged from eleven to seventeen, each of whom had declared their rights as a Citizen of the World Union.
Charlotte smiled warmly as their clapping eased and began her speech. ‘If I recall correctly, when I was sitting where you are now, the speaker made a comment that they felt like it was only yesterday that they had taken their own vows of Citizenship. It would be nice to reiterate that, but I can tell you that for me it feels like a very long time ago.
‘I have been asked to speak to you today about the new period of your lives you are entering. But if any of you know anything about my past, I may seem like an odd choice for promoting social responsibility. Most of my life has been spent not being a good Citizen. I didn’t contribute and for twenty years I didn’t vote.
‘When I was sitting where you are now, I didn’t really know what it was all about and whatever the speaker tried to tell us just went out my spare ear. I knew that I was meant to use my opinions wisely and I understood that my actions counted toward something, and in the vast machine of the Weave those who were in the Primacy were there because they had the support of the Will.
‘I knew all that, but it was only recently that I understood where it all came from, and how causality made it all fit together. I realise now that it’s all about history and history takes time to focus. Much like the events of your own lives will only seem clear once they are long past. Viewed too closely an event’s significance and implications are often hard to determine. Only time brings the necessary distance to events to make their meanings, and the reactions to them, clear. The more distance one can have from events, the more clearly one can see how they are connected. And thus is history born.’
Charlotte paused for a sip of water. The auditorium was silent but for shuffling. That was part one done, now for the push.
‘There are academics who suggest that the great collapse was unavoidable, that the foundations of society were unable to bear the burden of the swollen population and the imbalances within the social ecosystem. But I think it was more than that.
‘The climate is often described as the tipping point. As it became more and more erratic and farms began to fail, the hunger of the population could no longer be sated. But one can only blame the weather for so much.
‘It was an apocalypse. A true ending of an age. Infrastructure broke down, the weather and rising seas provoked mass, emergency migrations. Much of civilisation was destroyed. Over fifty years, the population dropped from thirteen and a half billion to five. There is no end to the horrors that people visited upon each other in those bleak decades.
‘It was only when a pact was made between the Asiatic peoples to resist the Örjian threat that the spiral was reversed. They welcomed all comers, and the new World Union spread across the globe until there are now only a few small areas that are not included.
‘You know this. You have read and seen records from that darkest of times in human history. You have seen how the people of the time thought they were doing right. They thought they were doing what was best for their survival, and their way of life. You have seen what can become normal in the mind of a human being.
‘There are some today who say that we are in extraordinary times. That we are living now and should not worry about how history will record us, but the truth is that we stand facing the past with our backs to the future.
‘The future is the past we will see once it has happened. It is not history that will judge us. It will be ourselves. Every action you take in your lifetime will be with you forever. It takes no special talent to fear the future, but it takes a wise person to fear the history they are making.
‘You have taken your vows at a time when we need you the most. There are big changes taking place in our world. Some are obvious, but others are so subtle we won’t see their effects for many years. I ask you, as a reborn Citizen myself, to be aware. And be active.
‘Please rise. You are now part of the World Union. You are Citizens and you are the Will. Be wise.’
~ * ~
After listening to Charlotte Betts’s Citizenship address, Ryu Shima was not in his best frame of mind when his mother called him to share tea with her.
‘How are you, my son?’ his mother asked.
‘I am well.’
‘Do you sleep enough?’
‘As much as I can.’
&
nbsp; ‘And are you still trying to reconcile the world?’
Ryu didn’t have time for this. Not only was he trying to tame the rising fervour of the Weave and its constant demands for him to deliver details of his progress and strategy —
Ryu to Colonel Pinter: Colonel, I want something for the next report. I want an outline of our defensive lines.
— but that ridiculous woman was growing in popularity, largely in reaction to the measures he was taking to protect them. For doing what he was elected to do ...
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