Vigilant

by James Alan Gardner

  Like trying to sip from a firehose. Only in this case, the firehose sprays info-acid all over your hippocampus.

  The condition is called “data tumor.” A possibility I faced myself, lying in that cool blue room.

  If I was lucky, the electronic nurse would raise a baffle field before it was too late. Block the incoming flood by broadcasting static—jam me into radio isolation from the datasphere till the surgeons could remove enough of the link-seed that it stopped working. If the nurse was a microsecond slow in detecting a tumor bloom, I would sit there stat-shocked while the link-fibers in my brain got toasty warm from the electrical activity of downloading reams of bumpf.

  What do you think happens when a network of molecule-thin wire heats a few hundred degrees inside your brain? Cauterization. Blood brought to the boil. High-pressure juices squirting out the edges of your eye sockets.

  The College Vigilant had made me watch a doc-chip of patients collapsing in data tumor. Don’t ask me which was worse: the sights I saw before the camera lens got blotted red, or the sounds I heard after. But neither the sights nor the sounds were pleasant things to remember while lying in a cool blue room.

  There was precious little time to feel my way forward—the link-seed spread its tendrils unstoppably, connecting to new neuron clusters every second. Sixty seconds every minute, favoring me with a tinnitus of hiss in my left ear, then a spasm of muscles in my lower back, then a flash enhancement of color sense in my right eye. (Cool blue chilling left, electric blue stabbing right.)

  Lying in an empty room, clamped down by a nurse machine that loomed over me like a spider…rippled by sensations that were all in my brain…no clear line between waking hallucinations and dreams when I fell asleep…nightmares of being raped by some metal monster that pinioned my body, impaled my mind….

  I want to tell you how it changed me. I do. But like making love or throwing punches in a fistfight, some experiences can’t be broken down into words. There’s no way to tell everything, everything all at once. You have to pretend there’s a throughline, a sequence…when the whole point is it’s happening simultaneously, all your brain cells firing together. Sensations in your body, in your eyes, in your ears, bristling along your skin, rasping in your throat, pressing sharp on your stomach, squeezing around your temples, burning in your chest. And those are just the chance physical offshoots of becoming a link-trellis, transient side effects of the tendrils snaking through your mind. There’s also the gasping moment when a vine tip pierces a pleasure center. Or a pain center. Or, by ugly coincidence of timing, both at once.

  Emotions float up. You find yourself crushed with soul-ripper grief, weeping in heartbreak for ten bleary seconds till suddenly everything switches to funny, which infuriates you, which depresses you, which bores you, which makes you feel wise as an angel, then wicked as an imp.

  All you can hold on to is your Vigil-trained discipline: keep breathing, one breath at a time, take in what’s tearing you up without trying to fight it. Observe it without trying to process it. Get out of your head, because your head is damn-fool busy. Let everything come, let it pass, let the changes happen.

  The seconds pass, sixty seconds to a minute. What you are is just what you are, not what you have to be.

  There’s no linear unfolding. With a link-seed, input comes to your brain in gestalt, an instantaneous neural activation matrix: not this-then-that, but a billion neuron clusters simultaneously receiving their piece of the whole, a single gush of comprehension.

  Everything all at once.

  On the third day of müshor, third day of delirium, I nearly lost my grip. Battered weary by emotions, delusions, physical jiggery-pokery (itches, stabbing pains, dead numbness), wanting to shout, “Stop, leave me be, let me rest!”…my mind suddenly filled with the image of a peacock’s tail. Green and gold and purple and blue, a hundred eyes wide-open, watching me with all the calm in the universe. Colors fanned over every grain of my vision; I couldn’t feel my body, no artificial prod to laugh or cry, nothing in me but the sight of that tail, reaching high as the stars and low as the planet’s core, filling my thoughts, my world.

  And the sound of it: feathers rattling, demanding attention. Look at me. Look at me.

  Placid. Even affectionate.

  I don’t know how long the moment lasted. Long enough. The peacock eventually fractured into another donkeydump of sensations, smells that whistled, bright kicks to the stomach (each one a different color)…but I could handle the new barrage. I was surfacing now, swimming toward the light; I’d passed through the center of müshor and was coming out the other side.

  At the time, it puzzled me why the eye of my personal hurricane was a peacock’s tail. I didn’t have long to ponder the question—too many distracting fireworks going on inside my head. Later, looking back, I shrugged off the vision as random mental floss, some piece of neural flotsam my brain happened to seize on as a life preserver.

  I was flagrantly, hubrisly, witlessly wrong.

  At the end of müshor, my brain was still in one piece. Not boiled in its own juices. And cleaned-purged-regenerated, the way you feel after a pummeling-hard work out.

  But different. Transformed.

  Link-seeds do more than just provide passive information from the world-soul. More even than giving your senses a friendly boost and speeding your reflexes cat-nimble. Those are minor perks, side effects of having new, electron-fast pathways routed through your brain.

  Here’s the thing: a link-seed destroys your capacity to ignore.

  As simple as that. As devastating too.

  That’s why you become a new person. Why the Vigil works, without turning petty or abusing its power.

  When I download information from the world-soul now, it becomes a direct part of me. Unfiltered. I can’t skip past any parts that jar with my vision of the universe. I can’t discard facts I’d prefer not to know. They’re all incorporated, instantly-directly-viscerally, into what I am. Into the physical structure of my brain. The primal configuration matrix.

  Unlike bits of info I read or hear through conversation, a direct linkload is unmediated. Raw. Undeniably present. Unavoidably transformative.

  I can’t pretend new data doesn’t exist—it’s already changed me. It’s molded my thoughts, reweighted my synapses, overwritten whatever I was before. I can’t even want to ignore the input, because it’s already there.

  No sublimation. No turning a blind eye to unlikable facts. The link-seed left me wide-open. Vulnerable to storms and stars.

  And that openness gushed over into the rest of my life. Not just with dry downloads from the datasphere, but things that were already in my brain. I couldn’t dismiss them for my own smug convenience. I couldn’t look away. Which is the very definition of a proctor: someone who doesn’t/won’t/can’t look away. Someone immune to the blind wishful thinking that infects all politics like the clap. Someone who doesn’t just call a spade a spade, but who sees the damned spade is a spade, without thinking maybe it could turn into a backhoe with the right tax incentives.

  It’s not virtue or saintliness; it’s just the way my new brain works. Of course, there are still thresholds—I’m not mesmerized by every speck of dust that drifts past my eye, nor do I think deeply over every word and inflection that reaches my ear.

  But…I no longer ignore the obvious. I’m mentally, physically, incapable of that. Selective inattention is for sissies.

  I shiver brain-naked in the data flow. Aware to my very gut that actions have consequences, and unable to dupe myself otherwise.

  A member of the Vigil.

  4

  THE PEACOCK’S TAIL

  The Vigil left me two weeks free after müshor. Recovery time. Rearrangement time. A chance to clear the decks.

  I no longer needed the electronic nurse perched over me, but data tumor was still a possibility. A white-knuckled looming terror if the truth be told. And data tumor was just the messiest way I could stop being me; there were other more subt
le ways the link-seed could wipe out the Faye Smallwood I’d known. Facts and memes infecting my unprotected brain. Long-loved perceptions swept away, erased by casual input…because I deep-down believed I was so full of crap, when pure truths started coming in, not a drop of the old Faye would be able to stand up for itself.

  Of course, I’d fretted over the same dreads before getting the link-seed…but my old brain could repress the fear, pretend things wouldn’t be so bad. I could watch the doc-chip of that data-tumor victim spewing blood out his eyes, and I could say, “He must have been a weak-willed mook.” Ignoring that the dead man had slaved through the same Vigil training I had, and passed the same tests to prove he was ready for a link-seed.

  But now that I’d gone through müshor…my altered brain had lost the knack of shying away from uncomfortable truths. And I was scared, scared, scared.

  The day I came back from the Proving Center, Angie’s son Shaw asked me to do a trick—to show off what the new Mom-Faye could do, tell what the weather was like right now in Comfort Bight. (The biggest city on Demoth, ten thousand klicks to the southwest, sprawled around the mouth of the only major river running through the Ragged Desert.)

  Shaw was just curious, an eight-year-old boy making a let’s-see request…but I broke down in flash-flood tears. I didn’t want to let anything into my brain unsupervised, even a simple “Force one sandstorm, toxicity B, expected duration two hours…”

  Uh-oh.

  The weather report had seeped in from the world-soul without me consciously asking for it. My bout of the weeps got swallowed by cold, cold terror.

  I couldn’t control the seed. Data tumor coming up.

  But nothing dramatic happened. Not this time, I thought after a full minute of waiting. Maybe the next.

  That night I got out my scalpel—the one I’d used when I cut off my freckles all that time ago. In the angry dark days of my teens and twenties, I’d sometimes just rest the blade against my skin, or trace little patterns…very lightly, more of a game than serious intent. I lost points if I actually drew blood.

  It’d been years since I last took out the knife. I’d pulled myself together, hadn’t I? There was nothing driving me to hurt myself now. And if I was scared to shivers about data tumor, surely I could find a more comforting talisman to hold than razor-sharp steel. Something I could sleep with under my pillow and not worry about accidentally nicking a vein.

  I sat naked on the edge of my bed and slowly laid the back of the blade onto my bare thigh—not the sharp side, just the back. That was all right, wasn’t it? That was only goofing around.

  A link-seed means you can’t lie to yourself.

  I found my eyes filling with tears as I thought, “It was supposed to be all better now. I’ve fixed everything, I’ve passed müshor, I shouldn’t still be crazy.”

  Gradually, the cold scalpel warmed to the heat of my skin. After a while, I couldn’t feel it anymore—light, thin metal, matching my body temperature…as if it still knew the trick of becoming part of me, after all these years.

  Eventually I managed to put the scalpel away, without ever touching the sharp edge to my flesh. But I couldn’t bring myself to stash it back in its dark, hard-to-reach hiding place at the rear of my closet. The poor knife would be so lonely back there.

  I put it in my purse.

  The time came for me to stop hiding mopey at home and get out to work: on City Council docket 11-28, “A Bill to Improve Water-Treatment Facilities in Bonaventure.” Mine to scrutinize. Honest-to-God legislation placed in the fear-damp hands of Faye H. Smallwood, Proctor-Probationary.

  “Probationary” meant I had an advisor peering over my shoulder through the scrutiny process: a sober, uncleish Oolom named Chappalar. When I first started my studies for the Vigil, Chappalar had struck me as bashful near humans, always half a step back and matching the color of the walls. He windled around town on foot rather than gliding because it bothered him to be the only flying figure in the sky. Each time before a global election, he petitioned the Vigil for transfer to anywhere with more Ooloms…and each time after, he put on a brave face when he found himself reposted to Bonaventure.

  Lately though, Chappalar had perked up something considerable. Office gossip said he’d been seen sashaying with a silver-haired Homo sap woman, variously described as quiet, chatty, or somewhere in between. Translation: no one had actually talked to her; people had just spied from a distance and invented stories to suit their own tastes.

  The usual naysayers tried to stir up a fuss about “mixed relationships,” but no one paid attention. Humans and Divian sub-breeds had been doing the dance ever since our races made contact centuries ago. Ever since…well, it’s queer to picture the League of Peoples as matchmaking yentas, but after our wave of humans left Earth in the twenty-first century, every alien race we encountered said, “Ooo, you’ve just got to meet the Divians. You have so much in common!”

  The Divians lived nowhere near Homo sap space—the closest planet of the Divian Spread lay hundreds of par-sees from New Earth. But continuous nudges from other League members pushed us out for what amounted to a set-up blind date: first contact on the moon of an ice giant halfway between our home systems.

  And surprise, surprise, we hit it off.

  Our two species are precious close to each other in basic anatomy, intelligence level, evolutionary history…light-years closer than any other species we’ve encountered in the League. Yes, Divians change colors and have ears like grapefruit nailed to their heads; but when they and Homo saps got together, it wasn’t like meeting aliens. More like tagging up with someone from the far side of your own planet—quaint accent and a bag of bewildering customs, but basically a regular joe who shares a slew of your interests.

  Curiosity gets piqued. Bonds form.

  As for species differences, you can prize them as exotic novelties rather than obstacles. Spice. They give you something to giggle over in the wee hours of the morning.

  Understand, I’m talking about Chappalar and his friend now. Because I’m a married woman.

  The gist of Bon Cty Ccl 11-28 was improving two water-treatment plants around town; ergo, to kick off our scrutiny of the bill, Chappalar and I decided to tour those plants. We also decided to tour the three plants that weren’t scheduled for upgrades…partly for comparison, and partly to make sure city council was putting money where funds were needed most. (Fact: some plant managers are more likable/persuasive/politically connected than others. Guess whose plants get financial handouts. While plants run by folks who are unpopular/undemanding/unrelated to the mayor only get significant allocations when equipment falls to pieces. Or when the Vigil gets loud and cranky in council meetings.)

  All of which meant that my first official act as proctor was a tour of Pump Station 3, just beyond the petting zoo on the edge of Cabot Park.

  It was the butt end of winter in Bonaventure. Snow still sat in sodden clumps on the ground, but you could feel the kiss of spring in the air: a licky toddler’s kiss that smeared your skin wet with condensation. The city’s first thaw of the year. No one was fooled by it—Great St. Caspian winters never surrendered graciously—but give or take a few more bitch-slapping blizzards, greener times were on their way.

  My stroll from home followed the shore of Coal Smear Creek, where park staff had just posted thin ice signs: those red-and-black ones with sensors that trigger sirens if someone steps off the bank. You need such precautions in Cabot Park; all winter, kids use the frozen creek for hockey or figure skating (Oolom kids for ice-sailing), and they hate to quit as long as the surface looks solid. Even with the signs, one or two dunces take a through-the-ice soaker every year…as Lynn’s son Leo could attest. Except that Leo never breathes a word about what happened. It’s Lynn herself who tells the story every time Leo brings a girl home.

  Anyway. Picture a gray winter morning, with mist in the hollows, and moist air that doesn’t feel cold even if it’s only three degrees above freezing. The thaw has begun, tr
ickling along the cement walkways and dripping out of the trees. Life is stirring from hibernation, and even a woman with poison ivy in her brain can let herself loosen up.

  I remember the snowstriders that morning—white birds running across the top of the drifts. Every few seconds, they’d plunge their beaks through the crust and pull out frostfly cocoons to gobble. Like all native Demoth birds, they had no real feathers; instead they were coated in downy clouds of fuzz, giving them the look of ankle-high dust balls with small snowshoed feet.

  Suddenly, the striders scree-scree-screeched and took to their wings; they’d spotted a looming shadow floating above the snowscape. Hoar falcon? Kite-manta?

  Without a sound, Chappalar landed on the path beside me. Out for an early-morning glide. All by himself. And he had the air of a man who’d be wearing a huge smile, if he were the sort of man who wore huge smiles.

  “Good morning, Proctor Faye,” he said. “Lovely day.” Like most older Ooloms, he’d learned English from braingrab lessons originally coded on New Earth. It gave him a la-di-dah mainstream accent that always sounded snooty to my MaryMarch ears.

  “Good morning yourself, you,” I told him. “You’re looking like the cat that went down on the canary. Pleasant night, was it? You slept well? In good company?”

  His outer ear sheaths flicked closed in a split second, then inched back open—the Oolom equivalent of a blush. “Sé holo leejemm,” he muttered. You hear too much. “Sometimes I find humans disturbingly intuitive.”

  “Only the women,” I said. “So you had a willy wag night?”

  “I passed an agreeable evening,” he answered primly.