A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  Johnny shook her head. That, I thought, wasn’t part of what the books had told her. She just didn’t want Sparrow watching her while she used whatever it was they were talking about. For good reason: what else would he do with it but turn around and run to the Society? Just like I was going to do when I had access to a phone again? Whatever she was doing, she wanted to do it outside of their purview.

  She said, “You know, if it’s compensation that’s the issue, I’m happy to help out with that.”

  He smiled. “What use do I have for money? I have everything I need here.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  He spread his hands, still smiling. “I want only to help you, believe me. But you must understand, the machinery is such that we must do it under my terms, or not at all.”

  “Neither of those is an option,” Johnny said patiently.

  “I am very sorry about that.” He sighed, and helped himself to a biscuit from the tin, dropping big granules of sugar on the table that landed with audible ping! noises. He frowned, swept them into his palm, and went to empty it in the sink. “Ants,” he said, when he returned. “Nothing gets in here. No outside air, no water, no radiation, no signals, no bacteria, no anything. But ants? How do they get in?”

  Johnny and Huxley watched him without expression. He glanced at me as if I could help, then went on, brightly, as if he had just thought of it, “There are, I think, many… extremely qualified persons in the city, who might be able to help you in other ways. In fact, I think they have been... called into service finding solutions to the problem. They would be grateful, I am sure, for any assistance you can provide.”

  “Uh huh.” Johnny dabbed at her ear with a paper napkin. I thought about something Huxley had said about the Society while we were in the ley: Oh, they’ll have their field staff everywhere, they’ll empty out every one of their bloody offices, down to the last ninety-year-old who once went on a trip in the ’sixties to check out a runestone dug up in a churchyard five miles away.

  “Perhaps I could put you in touch with them,” he said. “No sense running over the same ground, of course. A waste, duplication of effort.”

  “No thank you,” Johnny said. “We’re making our own inquiries.”

  “Well. Perhaps I will contact them anyway,” he said. “And let them know that you are doing so. In case they have information that could be... useful. To you.”

  Johnny, who did not seem to have blinked in a solid minute, narrowed her eyes so minutely that for a moment I thought I hadn’t seen it. “It would be better if you didn’t. Don’t you think?”

  Was that a threat? It certainly sounded like one; and like one of her usual ones, too, which left the actual consequences unsaid. I glanced between their faces, unmoving now, unsmiling.

  “The wards make it very difficult to harm me, here,” Sparrow said softly. “It would not be wise to try.”

  “Nobody said anything about hurting you with magic.”

  He had the good grace, at least, to look a little taken aback. The air between them seemed to fry; in a Western movie, I thought, their guns would have been pointed at each other underneath the table. Gut-shot. Terrible death.

  “I wish only to help,” he said again. “I am very hurt that you have come here to threaten me.”

  “After asking nicely,” Johnny said. “And after trying to pay.”

  “But you will not take my terms.”

  “Nope,” Johnny said. “And after I’ve said please, and offered free cash, I start moving down the hierarchy of ways to ask.”

  He smiled even more widely, showing beautiful white teeth. “So I have heard,” he said. “Dr. Huxley, please, you know me. I exist only to watch for things that may be helpful.”

  “And sell ’em later. I hear you. Only thing is, I hope you’re watching her,” Huxley said. “You’re a survivor; you’ve got a good sense of danger. Don’t you?”

  He swallowed, glanced at me, glanced back to Johnny. His face clearly said, Surely I am not being threatened by an old woman and a teenager?

  I kept my mouth firmly shut, and shrugged.

  He sounded genuinely anxious, which made everything so much worse when Johnny leaned over the table, the mercury-heavy stuff flowing from the corners of her eyes, and said pleasantly, “Then I’ll wipe it.”

  “What?”

  “I can do it from here. Erase everything and fry its innards. End the Seeing. I just think it would be better for all of us if you let me use it,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “She’ll do it,” I said. “She blew up my living room once.”

  “Once,” Johnny said, not breaking her gaze with Sparrow.

  “Surprised it didn’t catch the gas line.”

  Huxley kicked me under the table. After another unbearable minute, Sparrow said, “18475036759174998. Do you need for me to write it down?”

  “No, I’m good. Thanks.”

  HALF OUT OF habit, half out of what I still, vaguely, hoped was my mission, I followed Sparrow and Johnny into the glass kiosk, through a concealed door on its far side, and down a long cluttered hallway. Or no, it wasn’t cluttered—but the walls and ceiling were covered with things I hadn’t seen in the bunker so far. Hundreds, even thousands of ward sigils, dangling from the smooth concrete ceiling in copper or steel wire, worked into the walls in ceramic tile.

  At the far end of the hallway was another glass kiosk similar to the one in the room we’d come in, with blue panels this time instead of orange. Inside was the same console setup, with the same couple of dozen smallish monitors, each about the size of Johnny’s laptop. I expected Sparrow to give us a long speech about the calibration, the settings, something like that, but he simply slammed the door behind us and stomped off. Fair, I thought; it was like we were being trusted to babysit, and he’d only just met us. How was he supposed to trust us with his most precious possession?

  I sat delicately on the edge of the console, making sure my ass wasn’t touching any buttons. Fire a nuke or something, God only knows. Send orders to a million submarines or something.

  “This place is something, isn’t it?” She yawned, and began to punch buttons into the console’s central keypad, making satisfyingly metallic clacking noises. “It’s all this bonkers experimental tech, all cutting-edge Cold War stuff. They say he dug right into the walls, embedded things into the concrete, cables and wards and seals, rewired things, pulled and stole new cables…”

  “What is this? I mean, the… the Seeing.” I had grown wary of words in which you could hear the capitalization, and this was no exception. “Did I really say we should come here?”

  “Sure did. Interesting thing, too. I suspected something like this was here, but everyone said it was just… you know. Oh, he watches a lot of news. Oh, he’s on the internet a lot. Everyone thinks he’s like a one-man Lone Gunmen, sort of thing: watching all the channels and reading all the websites, hacking into security camera footage, storing and recording it all just in case he sees something interesting he can sell or give to the Society or whoever. But the truth is, the books said, he’s also got an equivalent magical setup, and no one gets to use that but him.”

  “Yeah. He nearly shit a brick when Huxley asked about it.”

  “Yep. This”—she gestured at the monitors, which were flickering one by one into life, glowing in various colours that gave me an immediate magical headache—“tracks magic. Sort of. Supposedly. You know, whenever magic is used or moved, it makes a little… sort of a flare. So if I were him, I would set up the other system to activate, sort of like a motion-detector system, to access video or audio near those flares. And maybe track local news stories, emergency response scanners, that kind of thing. And it’s warded so heavily, right over the nexus, that magic done in here, if you can do it at all, is essentially invisible.”

  “So he’s probably listening to us right now,” I said.

  She blinked innocently up at me. “Could be.”

  That, I thought, would be
the first thing she’d deactivate when she started working. Deactivate if he was lucky; break if he wasn’t.

  I waited in silence as she got out the manicure kit from her bag, stood carefully on the chair, and clipped the wires in the obvious security cameras. Then she dug into the console itself, unscrewing a half-dozen panels, tugging more wires loose from their connections, and finally drawing sigils on the backs in Sharpie before placing them back down and pushing the screws to one side. When she gave me a thumbs-up, I said, “And that’s another thing.”

  “About what?”

  “About girls. And their big giant bags.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Where are you supposed to put your keys, wallet, coin purse, water bottle, makeup bag, planner, phone, charger, pills, notepads, hand sanitizer, lotion, comb, gum, and snacks?”

  “All I carry around is my phone and my wallet.”

  “Your life is impoverished,” she said.

  “My phone is impoverished,” I said. “It died like… I don’t even know what day today is.”

  “Did it? Give here.” In a few minutes, she had plugged her own charger into a little adaptor and rigged up the other end with a piece of tape and two stud earrings she shook out of a pocket in her bag. Plugged in, my phone’s screen seemed to panic for a second, and then the red charging light came on. “Ta-da. You’ll never get a call out down here, but still.”

  “Thanks.” I glanced up at the cameras, hoping they were really dead. Not like her to not be thorough, though. “Do you think we can trust him?”

  “Mm. Good question. We haven’t told him anything he can sell, I don’t think; and he’s got a good thing here, he doesn’t want to attract negative attention. The Society isn’t the only game in town. You’re thinking of Akhmetov.”

  “I guess.”

  “Akhmetov was an asshole. He did a calculation on how to profit off our desperation, and he came up with a number he liked. He knew we were just there to borrow a book. He thought it was a safe bet to not let us trust him. Get in, get out. That’s why it worked, his betrayal.”

  “…You stole the book.”

  “I might give it back one day. You never know.” She worked with the console for a while, setting up a few monitors for regular images: news, of course, more monster footage; something in a city with a lot of domes and spires that looked like bad CGI, the sky wobbling, folding, unfolding, origami clouds that left buildings sheared in half, sliced the river like a knife; a black hole in the ocean, drinking water and spouting it back up. A hint of waving arms, tipped with claws. Most of the other screens she filled with charts, data tables, documents, websites, maps with little blinking dots.

  “There’s the bull,” she said, leaning forward to tap one of the screens. “Official. They put them online now so everybody can read it.”

  “So why exactly...”

  She sighed. “Well, you know my organoids?”

  “Oh sure, I eat a bowl of them every morning. Part of a balanced breakfast.”

  “Anyway, they’re a hell of a lot better than animal testing, but you still have to develop and grow them, you know? And there’s still all these uncertainties, there’s still a percentage of loss, and for some studies, they’re not that useful, like receptor studies and stuff? Membranes? Metabolism aggregates, receptor interactions, things like that. So I thought: Well, how can we get a little bit faster, and take away those uncertainties, or at least get a handle on that randomness, right? Single-cell studies. Go back to the basics. So I kind of built a cell out of math—a pretty good one actually, if I can toot my own horn, a really good model, variables manipulable along a lot of axes—and we started running chemical dose-response tests on it just to begin with, and it was just performing fantastically, self-assembling into accurate colonies, super-fast organized data, three of my labs were testing it independently and excited out of their minds...”

  “This is leading to a mob with torches and pitchforks, isn’t it. Like, you’re about to say ‘So I decided to—’”

  “So I decided to improve the simulation in a very minor way, I mean make the synthetic cell a little bit less synthetic, and... and... So it’s in there, eating math, pooping math, but it’s not quite random enough. It’s almost, but not quite. What it needs, actually, is some fluid dynamics and uptake randomness, right? Resources in a limited medium?”

  “Johnny.”

  “Look, no no no, look. It was math, it was just math, and then I put a little bit of chemicals on it, and it sort of... started to... behave as if it were...”

  “Jesus Christ! That’s everything, that’s everything and everybody, we’re all just math with a little bit of chemicals on us, did you seriously think that people wouldn’t mind that you literally created life?”

  “Yes!”

  “I thought you were supposed to be a genius!”

  “It’s not really alive! It just acts like it’s alive!”

  I rubbed my forehead, where a thin spike of pain had begun to drill into the bone above my left eye. “And you... told people about this?”

  “Well yeah, I published the paper on our own external-facing repository. You know how journals are, it would have been months. And I wanted to get the copyright in place and verify replicability. People would have accused me of being a fraud. Again.”

  “Well, the Pope doesn’t think you’re a fraud.”

  “Which is good, right? ...Do you want some Advil?”

  I shook my head, and sat in one of the other chairs as she got to work, half-dozing against the hard curved plastic. This must have seemed cutting-edge back in the day, this chair. Meant to cradle the ass of someone who had the power of life and death over millions, ready to press a button, turn a key, do what it took…

  The magic maps, if that’s what they were, swirled and flailed as Johnny pressed buttons moving them backwards through the weeks, all the way till last fall, forward again till today, back, forward, back. She ran through video footage of people turning, or whatever they were doing (being possessed? being disguised?) and for some reason spent a long time on parking lots and the sides of buildings.

  “Well that isn’t…” She frowned. “Great.”

  “The last time you said that, there was an acid flood in your basement,” I said. “Is this better or worse?”

  “Is that your reference point, seriously?”

  “So, worse then.”

  “It was just the one time,” she muttered. “Anyway, I don’t know. Look at this.” She froze the map on Friday morning, and then pulled up something else, a page of numbers arranged in columns, twelve to the screen.

  “Johnny,” I said gently.

  “Oh, sorry. Uh.” She pressed a series of buttons, and an image appeared, black with the faintest possible gray and white markings on it. “Okay, so you know my sigsats? The ones we sent up last year as part of the UN monitoring project? I didn’t want them to be too light, because it screws up everybody’s astronomical measurements, but that also happens if they’re too dark, right? So I put an ultra chromosensitive, minimally-absorbent nanoceramic coating on all the outer surfaces so they can recalibrate themselves to be exactly the ambient spectrum and not mess people up much. We publish the calibration data in real-time just in case anyone wants to use it to cancel out whatever little noise is left in their own data. I mean, these are very small numbers we’re talking about here, right, and… well, part of the audit from the IARE that I’m undergoing started with this. Complaints about the sigsats. About that daily data.”

  “That it was wrong?”

  “Yes. And that it was wrong for different people in different ways, which is impossible. No two facilities were downloading the same number. We checked all our servers, we went through everything with a fine-toothed comb. And yet…” She stared at the screen. “Maybe our data wasn’t wrong. Maybe it was responding to something nobody else saw.”

  The hair on my arms stood up; I rubbed them absently, put my hands back in my pockets. “So They are co
ming from space?”

  “No. Because nothing else detected anything. They’re coming from somewhere else, and something in our space is being affected by it.”

  “Not something,” I said. “Your things. Specifically yours. Specifically you.”

  “Specifically me,” she said, sounding a little dazed. “Curst by the gods.”

  No, I wanted to say. You asked for the curse. You demanded it. And you made me part of it, thank you. Look at you, sitting there feeling sorry for yourself. You dragged me into this, you dragged in the whole world. You weren’t even drowning and you pulled us all underwater with you.

  Or did you. Did you? If I were cursed, if I had been given great powers at a great cost, the cost of time, the only thing I couldn’t make or buy myself, what would I do with it? Would I make another deal to lift it? Get some of that time back? Lower the cost? I’m not her, I don’t live the way she lives, every time she turns on her powers one second per second off the end of her life, one minute per minute, doling it out bit by bit, flinching every time… if someone came to me and said What if I could do that for you? What would you give them?

  “Nick?” she said.

  “Mm?”

  “Are you okay? You look a little…”

  “Headache. Sorry. You were saying?”

  “I do actually have Advil in my bag,” she said. “And Nurofen and some other stuff, uh, some lab stuff. No? Anyway. The thing is… the thing about curses…” She crossed her legs in the chair, and leaned back, chewing her lip. “Look at the Carthaginian plague in whatever, 400 BC. Diodorus thought it was sent by the gods to punish the Carthaginians for blasphemy. Looting temples. Fuckers, the gods said, how fucking dare. The plague of Constantinople, 750 AD. Theophanes said everybody hallucinated that they had the disease even if they didn’t, and people saw crosses appearing on clothes, particularly church garb, indicating the next victim. People see a plague, they say: this was brought upon us.”