Kaleidoscope Century

by Barnes, John

  I fallback out of the memory, sick to my stomach, thinking at first it was some hideous nightmare, but no, I’m quite sure we did that. I want to say Sadi did it but the fact is I was right there with him and I loved it too. Even now, when I think of those terrified kids and how long it went on — high as we were on a triple dose of gressors we didn’t sleep or leave them alone for three days. And that last hour — the tall girl with the brown hair mat started to pray —

  I sit up, breathing deeply, wishing for a pill to make it all go away, thinking of putting on the pressure suit and going out and pitching that werp with all its pictures and sounds into the water, think of —

  How good it would be to have Sadi here. He always knew what to do when I was upset. He was much more use to me than Mama or Daddy ever was.

  The memory crawls back now, not of Minneapolis but of the R&R camp in the Erie Islands. Nice day, we were sitting outside. I had been going through You-4 withdrawal — a little, the way I did after every big battle — so I’d had two days of dreadful depression, but then I’d woken up that morning feeling fine. Sadi never seemed to be affected the way I was; he took at least as many drugs as I did but he shook them off easier, and he rarely took them to get over the things he’d done. Good thing, too, because when I woke up sobbing or screaming he could be right there to take care of me.

  “You just have to get your balance, bud,” he’d say. “You had a rough childhood or something. You have a hard time remembering that when it’s happening to them, it’s not happening to you. Freud said that, you know. What makes a thing funny is when it happens to someone else and not to you. And de Sade pointed that out, as long as you get bothered by hitting other people’s noses you’ll never really have the freedom to enjoy swinging your fist.”

  I was sitting there listening to him, a big mug of coffee and a slice of fresh hot bread at hand. Made by Sadi. Naturally. The man could cook. Not like a fag or anything, he could just cook. At least as well as he could talk, and I loved to hear him talk.

  So I sat and listened; no point interrupting something I was enjoying. Between bites of bread I practiced passes with the white knight. The only worthwhile thing I ever learned from Daddy, something he’d done in prison, practiced all this stuff from Everyone’s Big Book of Magic, all the ways to make things appear and disappear out of your hand. That little plastic white knight from a chess set had been dancing around between my fingers a long time, going away here and popping back there. I almost always did that while I listened to Sadi.

  “Look, Josh,” he was saying, “it’s the simplest thing in the world. People make a big deal about the War of the Memes as some big tragedy. The only tragedy is someday a meme will win, and then we won’t have our freedom anymore. But you listen to Hobbes. What he said was that the state of nature was the war of each against all. In other words we’re just doing what’s natural, you got mat? It’s all that old repression and stuff that makes you feel bad, not what you did.”

  “I don’t feel bad now,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, but you know what’s going to happen, bud. Another mission’s going to come up, and we’ll have a good old time serbing somebody One True wants serbed, but then after we’ve laughed ourselves sick on it, you’ll start crying and babbling about some German bitch you serbed fifty years ago, or about your Mama, or something, and I’ll have to nurse you out of it. And I don’t mind taking care of you — hell, you’ve taken care of me more times than I count. We depend on each other and we’re friends and that’s what mat’s all about. But I just wish it didn’t put you in so much pain. I worry about you.”

  I shrugged. “Not much to be done about that, I guess. I don’t think I’ll get over it, but I manage in spite of it. And it could be worse — if Murphy had signed on with Free American or Unreconstructed Catholic, we’d just be fighting all the time. Neither of those memes will let you hurt a prisoner, let alone serb the civilians. At least One True lets us do the fun part.”

  A runner came up to us, a kid who didn’t look much more than twelve years old, with a note saying that Aristophanes Jones and Euripides Frederickson were wanted at HQ, in person. We glanced at each other — because it was getting so dangerous, we hadn’t actually met our CO in more than a year, even though he controlled most of the buddy teams individually. The runner himself was a sign of how bad it was getting; no electronic or fiber optic could be completely trusted anymore.

  A few minutes later we walked into HQ, past all kinds of guards and technicians. Through the pulser to fry any electronics we might be carrying. Finger and iris scans to make sure it was us. Getting to be a suspicious world. Finally they showed us in to Murphy.

  He hadn’t improved in the last year. He still had a square head with tightly cropped gray hair, and a lot of wrinkles-running through his deep tan. And he still had the same mad stare. The Organization had not chosen to back people like this because we thought they were good; we picked them in hopes of keeping things stirred up, of not letting any one meme win, by making sure that all of them had a few units like MCA: competent enough but hopelessly crazy.

  Murphy grunted. “Here’s the deal. We finally located the source of the Freecybers, and you’re not going to believe it. Right back in our home territory, near Oneida. And part of the reason we couldn’t find it was that it was never any kind of organization at all. Two freelancers, a husband and wife, working back channels off an old bounce antenna pointed at Supra New York. We finally busted the encryption on it. Well, I didn’t, but One True did.” He giggled, hard, and looked around to see if either of us got the joke. We stared back at him. “I can never remember which one of you I made a special ops captain and which one I made his body guard.”

  First either of us had heard of it. “Him,” Sadi said, his face perfectly straight.

  Murphy wasn’t the type to ask for clarification, so he nodded. Then he giggled again. “See, the stupid thing is that they’d have been fine and had my protection if they’d just worked through the old comsat system. If they weren’t doing this through an antenna on one of those fucking supras, those giant peckers of the one world government sticking into the planet, shit, no problem, I really approve of them fighting off the memes since those are all agents of the one world government. But they had to go and use that antenna and give themselves away as just one more representative — “

  He went on like that for a long time, which was usual. The longer he talked the more he’d remember whatever his goofy principles were. Finally, though, he gave us our transport pass, specific orders, and directions for finding the house. “And there’s one more little surprise. One True thinks this is so important that it wants to talk to you directly.”

  “No,” Sadi said.

  “Unh-unh,” I added.

  “Tape delay. Thirty seconds,” Murphy said. “And I understand the fear, I really do. But remember we’ve worked for One True for a long time and it’s got no reason to sell us out.”

  Sadi’s fists clenching and unclenching, feet scuffling, angry, drawing the attention of Murphy’s bodyguard — “I’m afraid I’ll end up running a copy of One True. I don’t want my personality replaced with another copy of that program.”

  “It just wants to talk to you,” Murphy said reasonably. “And you know that the reason it hires us is because we aren’t copies of it; the shit we do is stuff it doesn’t want to remember or have copies experiencing. The other thing you can do, both of you, is turn it on and off, so you discuss your replies to One True each time. So you can interrupt the interaction — and that should keep you safe. Remember it has to have a dialogue with you, with nobody else present, to get into your mind.”

  I tried real hard not to think about the arguments about whether that was true or not. Most people believed it, anyway.

  I thought we were going to walk right out; Sadi and I kept arguing. But the bonus for the operation was huge, with a strong hint that if we didn’t want to do it he just might have us shot in order to stay on One True’
s good side, and usually the longer you talked to Murphy the crazier and the more arbitrary he got so that prolonging a conversation was always a risk, and besides I had to admit I was a little curious and Sadi was very curious. Finally Sadi figured that as long as we were careful to talk to each other and pass notes while One True talked to us, we might be okay. Upshot, we agreed.

  The face that popped up on the vid was the first surprise: One True, for some strange reason, had decided to look like Dan Rather, or like Harrison Ford — then I realized it was probably an intermediate morph of the two. Kind of like what everyone wanted an American president to look like back when there had been American presidents. Lots of signs of having lived and thought and felt, none of which it had done really, if you were a hardcore humanist, which is what I was trying to be while I talked to the thing.

  Chitchat at us for a while. Missions and all that. Sadi talked a lot about killing and inflicting pain, I think because he was mad at One True for not wanting to have memories of that kind of its own.

  Out of no place, One True said, “I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio.”

  I froze; it felt like my guts were tied in a knot.

  Sadi’s foot lashed out at the wall plug connected to the terminal, tearing out the connectors. The screen went blank as he lunged forward and pressed a set of keys, dumping the program out of memory —

  The place filled up with guards and they marched us off. I didn’t care if they shot us right men, though. “Thanks,” I whispered to Sadi.

  “You’d’a done it for me,” he muttered back.

  There were at least two bad things about this. One, One True not only knew that I was Organization, but had penetrated far enough to get my Organization password. Two, clearly because I had it memorized so deeply — one of the few things I could count on coming through each transit with —

  Transit, I think, getting up off the bed to pace. That’s what just happened to me, I’ve transited again. I throw the curtains open and stare out at the dark face of Mars, lighted by the one tiny brilliant moon that never moves. God, I need sleep. Maybe I got a lot in the last few months or something. Maybe I shouldn’t have had the fourth pot of coffee. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll dream, now that I know what’s in memory. Maybe this is all a hallucination while Sadi and me wait to be shot.

  Well, we weren’t. Though I don’t know how or why we weren’t. Memes don’t have a trace of sentiment so it wasn’t that.

  Still, if One True knew a deep memory to touch, who knew what it might have done next? From that deep memory it could well have proliferated and taken me over. Not the first time Sadi saved me, wouldn’t be the last, and he was right, I had done it for him and would again.

  Still don’t know. Did One True just let it all go? Did Murphy talk it into letting us live? Or what? My next memory is of the mission itself, gliding over snow weeks later. Fell early in those days, by August on the south shore of Ontario. Glaciers were growing.

  Four in the morning, moon high in the sky, gliding over the snow on skis silent as owls, Sadi’s lean racer’s body shooting along ahead of me. The house was only three miles away but we couldn’t be sure what protection they’d have. Maybe none; electronics were now so detectable that some people relied entirely on concealment.

  Sadi was carrying, our gear. As we topped the last ridge, he gestured for me to crouch low and follow him. We swung into a clump of pines, running the risk of hitting something in the dark. “Totally fibered system,” he said. “Probably optical switching and all. No signature worth talking about but as we got closer, One True’s monitoring spotted a slowdown in communication between Freecybers — which means the machines here were paying more and more attention to us.”

  “So what does One True say we do?”

  “It’s going to stage some kind of diversion, then an outright attack, and we go in while they’re busy dealing with the attack.”

  “Attack through the net, right, not something physical coming in?”

  “Right. We’re supposed to wait till — ” He had his hand on his earpiece. “Okay, One True’s put their system in an uproar. That happens several times a day, their security won’t even bother to wake them up if they’re asleep. We should move up to just below the crest of the ridge.”

  We herringboned up; it occurred to me that right now, with our skis pointed at this ridiculous angle, would be a really bad time to have someone step over the ridge. Unaccountably, I shuddered, as if it had actually happened somehow, or as if I remembered getting shot here.

  Sadi waited a few long breaths and said, “Okay, the virus attacks are underway; One True is barging in the logical door, we go in the physical. Time for fun, bud.”

  Just before an op started I always got a sinking feeling in my stomach, and then a wild, crazy whoop of joy in my soul. I don’t know where either one came from; either I was going to get hit or I wasn’t, and with modern weapons there really wasn’t any such thing as “wounded” — you barely had time to notice you were dead. So the thing to do was keep going until you won or the lights went out.

  They didn’t go out this time, either. We skimmed down the ridge, dodging among the trees, and onto the lawn of the big house, one of those huge white sprawling places that was all gingerbread and frouf and was supposed to remind people of the old days, a century before any of them had lived.

  As soon as we were on level ground we put a push on, skating to build up speed, then crouching low to shoot up toward the window where One True was telling Sadi we could get in. One True called that one right, anyway — not a shot was fired at us as we zoomed up to the space under that window.

  We dropped skis. Sadi nodded hard at me, once, and I scooted up close with the charge. I slapped it against the corner of the window frame, and we backed off around the corner of the house. Thumb on button; boom before thumb touched bottom; back around, hole in house, burst in, shooting.

  They had trusted their security system so well that they hadn’t even set it to wake them; they first knew that One True had penetrated and we were coming in when the explosion tore a hole in their wall, and the wife was wounded by a stray round while still getting out of bed.

  Their weapons cache in the bedroom wasn’t much, either; the old guy was bending over his wife when we caved in the door, and still trying to pull the shotgun up to where it could do some good when Sadi kicked his feet out from under him. I grabbed the shotgun and that was that.

  Long pause. He breathed hard. Finally he said, “I didn’t get a good look at her wound. She may be bleeding seriously — “

  “Good. I’d hate to have her putting us on,” Sadi said.

  He could always make me laugh.

  I checked her out, though; no point in killing them, at least not until we knew what they were good for. The round had been spent by passing through walls; it had hit her over the kidney but had only penetrated the muscle, not even all the way into the abdominal cavity. I dug it out with forceps from the first-aid kit, making a messy job of it so that she jumped and moaned a couple of times.

  Once we’d sealed the wound we got down to business with them. “You’re going to talk to One True,” I said. “Who’s first?”

  For a long time neither spoke; then the man said “No.”

  I looked at him closely. Ring of white hair around a pink domed head, squashed features, sort of a goatee; looked like a parody of an old-time professor. Just sort of experimentally, I hit him a few times, enough to get some blood flowing from his nose and lips, and then asked if he was ready to talk to One True.

  He said “No” again, so I slapped his wife around some. He still said “No.”

  So Sadi pulled the nice cop bit — he was always better at it man I was because he could think of things to say — and sent me out of the room “to cool down.” I sat just out of sight so I could listen.

  “So are you the nice cop?” the old guy asked, sneering.

  “Unhhunh. So I’ll just cut trying to get sympathy
and so forth from you, and making you feel like I’m your friend, because I can see you know the routine,” Sadi said. His favorite opening. “What we can do is talk about what the deal is, what you will and won’t do under your own power and what I can and can’t offer you. Then if there’s a common ground in there we can do that, and if there’s not, well, then no doubt you’ve figured out that we’re authorized to kill you and to do anything else we like before, so at that point I’ll give you to Yuri and he’ll get to do what he does. I mean, it’s not an accident that he’s the tough cop and I’m the nice one; this is all just a job to me, but he really enjoys it. Okay?”

  Long silence.

  “Is that all right?” Sadi asked.

  The old guy said, “As far as I can see we’re already dead, whether you kill us or feed us to One True.”

  Sadi said later that one rocked him back a minute; he realized only then that these two weren’t carrying any memes, that though they had been making and running Freecybers they were as much themselves as any mercenaries, ops, or elrefs. But he at least had the old guy talking. “So you’d rather just die? I mean, I can do that for you if that’s what you’d rather. I can always just say we demanded that you talk to One True and you wouldn’t.”

  “Can you be quick about it?” the woman asked.

  “I can but I won’t. My own ass is in the sling if I don’t make a decent effort. It’s you or it’s me, so since I have the gun and you’re tied up, it’s you. Should I just bring Yuri back and get started? We won’t ask again if it offends you, we’ll just work until there’s a good scene for the follow-up team.”

  “Not yet,” the old man said. This was the point where Sadi usually got them; we’d gotten a bishop this way, and a couple of politicals. It was one thing to be tortured to make you talk, and try not to talk; it was another thing to be tortured to death without any ability to stop it. Sometimes they got up the nerve but usually they wanted to delay a few more minutes. That was what was happening to these people. “Not yet,” he said again. “I — can we talk — “