Empyre

by Josh Conviser

  The chill tunneled into him as he began to down climb. He accepted it, reveled in it. He had driven everything away, failed at everything except this. He could live forever in this cold limbo.

  He could live without memory.

  Without Turing and Echelon.

  He could live without Sarah.

  Happily ever after.

  2

  DUBAI CITY, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

  One more time. Once more and it will be enough.

  Expectation made the image before her tolerable. The mirror reflected Sarah Peters perfectly and not at all. Brown hair. High cheekbones and skin flushed from the shower's heat. Her sharp nose conjured a patrician elegance. The delicate contour of her chin settled her face, consolidating her strong features.

  Others called her beautiful, but the mirror said differently. Objectivity frayed under the lash of Sarah's scrutiny. She gazed into those green eyes and felt betrayed. Tendons in her neck twitched. She wanted so badly to look away, to avoid the inevitable, but the cycle would not release her. As on every other morning, her pupils drew her in. In those black wells, she didn't see strength. She didn't see beauty. She saw only emptiness, a dull lack that defined her. Nausea suffused her and still she couldn't turn away. The reflection wrenched her down to that core place she so loathed—a clear view right into the sewer of her soul.

  Once more and it will go. After this, I won't see it.

  She pulled free from the mirror's glare, the itch of her internal body armor offering distraction. The hex-woven carbon nanotubing tattooed into her flesh was weeks old. Sarah was still getting used to the idea of being impenetrable. She drew a finger down her neck, across the hollow of her clavicle and over her chest. No loss of feeling. Her fingernail's slide drew goose bumps.

  She dug in, gouging the skin over a rib. A droplet of blood formed under her fingernail and slid down her stomach. Sarah pressed harder, but her flesh refused to yield further. The body tattoo held firm. The cut hurt, but not quite enough.

  Sarah pulled back and powered on.

  She wasn't supposed to. Not yet, anyway. The body tat and neural augments were still settling. But she couldn't help herself. The possibility of release was too tempting. She brought her internal diagnostic online.

  For a moment, integration held firm. She reveled in the tech-meshed high, jacking her serotonin levels to wash away the emptiness. The buzz inundated her, gave her focus, clarity, consistency. The black faded under a sparkling white capability.

  Then the glitch hit. Every day, same thing. Interface eroded into digital backwash and emotional loss. She slumped back into herself—into the old Sarah. After such a tantalizing fantasy, reality was a bitter pill. But soon, the interface would hold. Today's augment would finish her evolution.

  One more operation. One more time.

  The thought pulled her from the mirror. She toweled the last of the water from her skin, reentered the master bedroom, shrugged into a loose cut dress and worked her hair into a black khimar. The head scarf made her slightly claustrophobic, but after so many trips to the United Arab Emirates, she had grown used to it.

  She descended the marble staircase to the living room of her suite, her toes sinking into thick purple carpeting. The room's cream-thick opulence bordered on stifling. Luxury defined Dubai—the center for all things material. Sarah flipped a switch and the floor-to-ceiling windows transluced to reveal desert and ocean. She stepped to the slanted plexi and gazed into the distance.

  Her hotel, the Burj al Arab, jutted into the Persian Gulf on a slender, man-made spit of land. Over three hundred meters tall, the building's Teflon-coated fiberglass shell appeared to billow like an old dhow's sail. Below her, the gritted desert and sparkling scrapers of Dubai City melted into a gray sea.

  She tried to push into a future only hours away—when her implants would run clean. The possibility of relief flooded her, a twitchy neurotic need. She felt that eye turning inward again, unsatiated by the interplay of desert and water. Sarah shrugged it off, setting the window back to opaque.

  To distract herself, she kicked into the flow. Laser tracking embedded throughout the suite locked on her eye and hand movements, allowing her to guide the data stream rezzing on the vid-screen before her. The rush of data that formed the world's interchange flushed out before her. Sarah used the eye track to sift through a backwash of spam and clutter to the flow points she hit every morning. Mostly news blogs. Sarah tracked as many as she could, trying to draw truth from a thousand opinions.

  A news alert drew Sarah from her data skim. She pulled up her favorite blog, cutting away advertising tendrils to skim the raw feed. The words rose before her, eliciting an eerie sense of déjà vu.

  Lhasa, Tibet.

  Dalai Lama assassinated by a Chinese national with links to conservative paramilitary organizations...

  Uprisings of minority populations throughout China...

  Chilled relations with India...

  New peace between the superpowers lies stillborn...

  Sarah's mouth went cotton dry. She slurped at her coffee. It didn't help. Flipping out of raw blog, she watched clips of protests raging through India and within China's own borders. The events playing out felt staged. And she'd written the screenplay. She had run this exact event progression.

  A tingle rose in her gut. Was it guilt? No. She pushed it away. She was just an analyst. She wrote reports—found links in the random, and threw out what-ifs. That was it.

  No one was better at event projection than Sarah Peters. She found the linchpins around which history turned. It was her gift, her skill. Now, it was all she had left.

  After Echelon, she had tried to walk away from the whole thing. She and Ryan had done their part. She was ready to let others worry about the big picture shit. But Ryan had slipped away. She had pleaded with him to stay with her. To love her. Not in words, she was too proud for that, but with every fiber of her being. He had refused.

  So she had left him to his slow rot and pushed into the new world they had created. She told herself that her skills would help ease the tensions that Echelon's revelation had sparked. Truth was, she didn't know what else to do.

  So she went private, working event cascades for the highest bidder. As a contractor, she had done jobs for Brazil's Agência Brasileira de Inteligência, Japan's Cabinet Intelligence Research Office, and France's Directorate-General of External Security. For each of these institutions she had run complex modeling ops, forecasting possible futures based on the patterns she pulled.

  Basically, she was a fortune teller. But her combination of gut instinct, pattern recognition, and masterful data mining allowed her a veracity rate that Nostradamus couldn't touch.

  Two years ago, Sarah had been pulled off the market by an organization she knew only as EMPYRE. She had done a cursory check before accepting the offer. EMPYRE had roots in the United States. She suspected it was a well funded think tank, possibly even a shell for part of the American intelligence infrastructure. But what she had really cared about was the pay. She'd developed a habit—a need really—and it cost a lot. With EMPYRE's money, she began modifying her body.

  Now, she stared at the clips coming out of Asia. Sarah had run this event cascade for EMPYRE three months ago. She had forecast that the Dalai Lama's return to Tibet from his exile in India had a high probability of shifting the balance of power. Peace between China and India would have resulted in a decline in American hegemony. American political and economic power would have slipped had China and India overcome their long-standing animosities.

  The Dalai Lama's assassination shifted events down a new track. It would cause just enough anger to keep the conflict simmering. But India wouldn't retaliate. Though the religion had been born within its borders, India was not a Buddhist country. Escalation held little political promise.

  And then there was the added benefit, to the United States, of increased domestic tension within the middle kingdom. With China fighting its own, the Shanghai Stoc
k Exchange would take a hit. All this would bolster the United States' position.

  That she had drilled out how critical the Dalai Lama's return was to the balance of power only meant she'd done her job well. No way a simple report had anything to do with the assassination. She refused to believe it. If EMPYRE was something other than what she had thought, something darker, she would have to give up the paycheck allowing her to complete her transformation.

  An arc of adrenaline punched through her. She pushed the thought-line away and killed the flow link. She'd honed her mind to see patterns in the chum of life. Sometimes that need to lock pattern drew ghosts.

  And some things were too horrible to consider.

  In the dead screen Sarah caught her translucent reflection and tickling need urged her to action. She downed the last of her coffee and headed for the door.

  Two businessmen spilled into the hall from the room across the corridor. As the door to their suite closed, Sarah spotted the dregs of what had clearly been an all-nighter. Women lay draped over couches. Men drank in corners, shades drawn.

  The two before her looked far worse for wear, suits rumpled, ties hanging loose.

  “Fuck, Rob, I don't think I can function.”

  “Hey, we gotta close this thing. Work hard, play hard. We got the play out of our system.”

  The businessman's gray features cracked into a brittle smile. “True.”

  “So let's get the work done.”

  There was a reckless consumption underlying Dubai that these two captured, a drive to push the limits, to suck up every indulgence before the world's turmoil caught up to them.

  The businessman nodded. “Okay. Just hate playing hardball with Si-Tech when I'm oversexed, underslept, and—”

  Reaching the elevator, the two noticed Sarah's presence behind them and clammed up. She nodded and they both looked at the floor. In the ride down, the two quietly transformed. On floor twenty-seven, they looked trashed. On reaching the upper lobby, they had pulled themselves together, straightened out their rumples and drawn their ties flush. Exiting the elevator, they melted into the faceless throng. Sarah followed suit.

  Rooms within rooms, lives hidden, realities secreted away. That was the nature of Dubai, and the reason it had become so prosperous. In Dubai, exterior was everything. Morality and modesty were just shells to be worn and discarded when the public eye blinked. Sarah felt comfortable here.

  She followed the suits into the lobby. Over her, the atrium vaulted into a billowing sail of curved white. She descended the escalator, which cut through cascading water features. The falling water offered an undertone to the mix of languages pervading the lobby.

  From the cold luxury of the Burj al Arab, Sarah stepped into the Middle Eastern sun. The land's carnal heat blasted her. She sidestepped into a waiting Rolls-Royce, the driver shutting out the sauna with a satisfying thunk of the car door.

  “Where can I take you, ma'am?” he asked as he settled into the driver's seat.

  “Dubai Mall, please.”

  The Rolls's engine produced a throaty hum as it slid past the other limos and out onto the road connecting the hotel to the mainland. Re-claimed from the Persian Gulf, the land under the hotel was only big enough for the scraper itself. Behind her, the structure ballooned out over the Gulf and hung ephemeral in the desert air, a dream made solid.

  Sarah settled into the rich leather, trying not to fidget. This life, this opulence, didn't suit her. She had come a long way since her days in Scotland, living in a reclaimed industrial zone in New Inverness. Nights spent raging in her punk band. Days spent in Echelon's employ, honing the world's future to a razor's edge.

  She longed for it sometimes, the power that she had possessed under Echelon's aegis, the simple mandate to forge order from chaos—to keep humanity on track. But that was gone. Now it was every man for himself.

  She shook off her musing and watched Dubai City slide by. Looming before her stood the Burj Dubai, the massive scraper at city center. It shot into the sky in fits and starts, rising from a massive base and spindling down to a needle spike.

  The limo veered into the sparkling white entrance of the largest mall in the world. A rippling structure butting up against the scraper, the Dubai Mall swelled through the city, swallowing up most of its down-town. Pulling to a stop under the waved roof jutting out from the structure, the driver rushed to the door and Sarah allowed him to lead her into the mall. The cool rush of air conditioning sent a shiver through her.

  “I'll be fine from here, thank you.”

  “As you say,” the driver replied with a nod.

  Sarah let the mall's size and sizzle pervade her. Plexi sheets overhead allowed an unobstructed view of the scraper. And around her, a rambling city of shops sprawled for kilometers. The new Hong Kong, Dubai was a city built on money. You came here to make it or spend it. There was little else. Its initial boom had been fueled by an oasis of oil. Now, with petroleum's ebb, the United Arab Emirates had shifted its focus to technology and trade.

  Sarah strolled through the mall, losing herself in the unending array of stores. Amidst the glossed goods and services, Sarah's fellow shoppers struck her as utterly bland, clasped tight and conservative. But behind the scenes, in every hotel room and opulent boutique, the most outrageous tastes in human consumption were indulged to the limit, and beyond. Dubai was a town of secret lives, where the more you spent, the less attention you drew.

  Sarah negotiated the maze alongside gilded women clutching their shopping bags like lifelines. The desperation in those eyes startled her. Was there something of herself in those looks? No. No, she wasn't here for hedonistic indulgence or to blur a harsh reality with opulence. She needed this.

  Sarah made her way through the throngs and entered a zone built to look like an Italian piazza. She could just make out the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, running discordant to this staged set. A haunting, rhythmic expression, it broke through the mall's sterility. Sarah's heels clicked over the faux cobblestones in time with the call.

  She stopped at a frosted glass door, the word Harry running down its length. From the mall's bustling glitz, she entered an atmosphere that ran to the slow cadence of a different era.

  Hot light gave way to the rich woods and deep banquettes of Harry's Bar. A favorite of Ernest Hemingway back in the twentieth, it had once been the defining watering hole of Venice, Italy. As the city sank, its pieces were sold to the highest bidder. Harry's Bar was transported—down to the last chair and tumbler—to Dubai.

  The place made Sarah uncomfortable. Its verisimilitude was total—even down to the rich, musty smell and ancient Italian bartender. But any aura that Harry's Bar once possessed had been sapped dry. It had become a theme park where, for the right price, you could stare back into the past and ogle. Sarah settled into a booth and the barman approached.

  “Something to drink while you wait?” The man's soft wrinkles matched the ambience to perfection. Sarah found it hard to believe that the old man ever left the establishment for Dubai's glare.

  “Hello, Claudio. Bellini, please.”

  The barman bowed and went to get her drink. When it came, Sarah drank it down in great gulps, the fruity liquored froth taming that urge to turn her gaze within—to think about the pattern growing around her. Tibet was not her fault.

  “Another, ma'am?”

  “Oh, no thanks. Probably shouldn't have had that. It's still morning. You'll think I'm a lush.”

  Claudio smiled, warm and congenial. “At Harry's, another drink is always the order of the day. Besides, they're running late.” He put a slight inflection on the word they, as if he were drawing her into a private intrigue.

  Sarah smiled back. “Well, then. Why not?”

  Sarah let the alcohol do its work. She snatched glances at the silhouettes surrounding her. In the low light, they hunkered over their drinks, talking in conspiratorial whispers. This was a place for lovers.

  The thought dredged up an image of Ryan Laing.
She thought she saw him in the silhouetted face of a man sitting at the bar. Had he come for her? Sarah's heart skipped a beat. The man felt her gaze and turned. His features found the light, resolving into those of a stranger. She looked away, embarrassed.

  Suddenly, she hated Ryan. Hated herself for obsessing over him. She tried to restrain the urge and couldn't. She accessed his flow point and linked to him.

  —How's my explorer?

  She hoped her derision pounded down the link loud and clear.

  —Sarah?

  The word formed in her mind, its pattern familiar, which only heightened her anger.

  —Bumblefuck treating you well?

  —No complaints.

  —There was a time when explorers were the courageous ones. You've bucked a long trend.

  She hated the ensuing silence. It made her want to be cruel—as it always had.

  —I'm going under today. Finishing the augment.

  Another long silence.

  —Don't do this, Sarah. Please.

  —What do you care? I'm always the one pestering you. You haven't linked to me in years.

  —You asked me not to.

  —You really don't know a fucking thing, do you?

  —I've proved that well enough.

  Anger boiled in Sarah. She shouldn't be doing this. What was the point in dredging up old feelings?

  —Good-bye, Ryan.

  —No. Please, think about what you're doing. I know what I'm talking about here.

  —So arrogant.

  —Some things can't be undone, Sarah.

  —You're right.

  She cut the link, relishing his hurt and ashamed of herself for craving it. It was better this way. She needed his pain and her anger. Sarah refused to miss him.

  The Bellini came just in time.

  3