The Other

by Matthew Buscemi

  She nodded.

  “And you?”

  “I want to keep people safe. When the government went Guardian ten years ago, they changed the workforce laws, and dad’s company was able to force him into a lower pay grade. They said it had nothing to do with him taking all the time off when my mom was ill, but he didn’t believe them. Then medical plans got restructured—Guardian government—and we had to pay for all of mom’s funeral out of the money that we’d put aside for Nishkap and my education. If Reconciliation hadn’t come back into office and passed all those education reforms, I wouldn’t be here, and Nishkap wouldn’t be starting pre-med right now. And I guess… I just want to make sure… Because you should know that I want to fight their idiotic, backward policies with all my heart. I don’t want to find a way to work with them. Every time they come into office, they divert everything into the military and wall technology research, and everyone suffers. I don’t want any of that anymore.”

  Sahaan reached out and clasped her hands in his own. He released a deep sigh. “It’s time I told you about my grandmother.”

  “Doesn’t everyone know—?”

  He shook his head. “They know the official story. In the family… Well, it’s best if I just explain. The official story that everyone knows is that my grandmother and her brother both went into politics, both became MPs, and that their public argument in the senate reorganized what were then five political parties into the two that we have now. What most people don’t know is that their rivalry had deeper origins. Their father… you realize who that would be…?”

  Lachel walked it back in her mind. “Mox Thiksay, right?”

  Sahaan nodded. “He was wild. Even as an adult. He was constantly pitting my grandmother and her brother in competition against one another. He was trying to drive them to solve hard problems through conflict, but it messed up their relationship. He couldn’t have known that they would diverge ideologically so far, but they did, and they just kept fighting one another, competing with each other for their father’s approval. I don’t think I even know the full scope of everything that happened between them. Dad kept as much of it from me as he could.”

  “Your family… blames Mox… for Guardian and Reconciliation existing?”

  Sahaan nodded.

  “And you think… that it’s up to you to fix it? To put them back together?”

  “That’s one way of putting it. You won’t tell anyone?”

  “I won’t.”

  “Thank you.”

  She clasped his hand tighter. “You can’t make yourself responsible for putting the hearts and minds of eight hundred thousand people together. But if it will help put your heart at ease, I will do my best to see what you see in Guardian. Even if I still fight with every last iota of energy against their unjust policies. But I will see. And who knows? Maybe I’ll change. Just a little.” She said this with that beautiful quirk of a smile at the side of her mouth.

  Sahaan smiled, too.

  It was less than a week before he’d work up the courage to ask her to marry him.

  ~

  Sahaan watched the mayor and his entourage retreat. As soon as they were gone, he pulled out his handheld and dialed Bharo. He didn’t answer at first. When his voicemail kicked in, Sahaan redialed.

  Bharo answered that time. “You all right?”

  “More or less. Where you at?”

  “The office. Everyone’s basically gone insane, as you can probably imagine. I’m trying to hold everything together. Sorry I didn’t answer at first.”

  “They’re going to have to do without you for a while. I need you in Citrine with a full hazmat team, our best nanogenics experts, and, come to think of it, a psychologist might not be a bad idea, too.”

  “I take it you mean to interrogate the kid and figure out what his purpose here is.”

  “Damn right I do. This could be it. Contact. I mean, never in million years would I have guessed that this is how they would do it—”

  “There are a couple of problems with your plan. First of all, Adamantine has sealed their end of the wallroute to Citrine.”

  “That’s a protocol violation, unless there’s a nanite breach I don’t know about. Order them to open it up again.”

  “Sure. What about facilities? Does Citrine even have a secure place we can put him?”

  “Leave that to me.”

  “I just think we’d be better off bringing him back to Portal City. We’re better equipped here.”

  “And that will just reinforce two stories the people in Citrine and the other spokes are telling themselves: one, that they don’t matter enough for important things to be handled in their city; two, that their federal government is conspiring against them with the nanite-bodied. I want to do this here, and I want to give the local government full transparency into what we’re doing.”

  “I’ll let you know when I’ve got Adamantine figured out and the team ready. Might take a day or two with everything going on. Have you thought about what you’re going to do with him until then?”

  “No,” Sahaan said, but his mind was already roiling with possibilities. “Actually, I think I just had an idea for that.”

  All twelve cities of the Reclamation were built on top of the remains of former military bases, the ones that had held the nanite-bodied at bay before they’d gotten the wall technology from Alterra. The bases had combated the nanites of their enemies with nanites of their own. It was effective, but there were a number of problems. First and foremost was the energy expenditure. Only a small area could be defended. Second was the phenomenal rate at which the programming of nanite-bodied adapted, a problem which required them to maintain an army of artificial and biological intelligence defenses. The walls had solved both of these problems. They required no energy, and it didn’t matter how adaptive their enemy’s programming was—the walls simply repelled nanites regardless of the code running them.

  Now that they had walls, the old bases had been converted into memorial centers, such as the one in Dazine that Sahaan and Lachel had visited during university. While Dazine’s base had been reduced to scrap by the nanite-bodied, Citrine’s base, called C8, had not. It had been subject to a particularly bad assault, but from what Sahaan remembered, C8’s infrastructure had not been touched.

  A few calls to local authorities later, and Sahaan had confirmed that the nanite defenses around the base could be brought online within half an hour, and there were plenty of software engineers willing to drop everything and do the job.

  Sahaan consulted with the police chief again and had her organize her people to prepare Charles for transportation. The armored transportation van arrived an hour later, followed by an enormous, flat-bed semi carrying a replacement wall slab.

  Charles still sat on the ground, just inside the gap in the wall, his arms wrapped over his head.

  Sahaan identified himself to the drivers of both vehicles and explained that he would be bringing Charles to the van. The wall panel installation was to wait until that had been accomplished.

  Both the wall engineers and the Citrine security detail operating the van seemed skeptical of this plan, but they voiced no concern. Sahaan asked himself in that moment how certain he was of Charles. How much was he willing to wager that the nanite-bodied were trying to communicate with them, that this wasn’t some kind of plot to bring down the walls from the inside? He looked at Charles, who was hunched over himself and shuddering intermittently. Sahaan decided to take this chance.

  He walked through the sea of chairs, to Charles, and sat on the grass before him.

  “Hi, Charles. It’s me. Dr. Ekeer.”

  “Hi.”

  “I’d like to ask you something. Could you look up?”

  Charles slowly sat up. His red face and terror-filled eyes activated every last one of Sahaan’s paternal protective drives, which he immediately tempered by reminding himself that Charles’s intentions were far from clear.

  “Yes?” Charles asked.

/>   “I’d like you to come with me.”

  Charles looked over Sahaan’s shoulder. “Where to?”

  “There’s a place. It’s in this city. It will be underground. A facility. We’ll make it as comfortable as we can.” Sahaan wasn’t sure how else to sell it.

  Charles looked behind himself. “I could go back out there, you know.”

  “We don’t know what would happen to you if you did that.”

  “I’d be fine. It’s just not what I’m supposed to do. I think.”

  That struck a chord of unease in Sahaan. “How do you know that?”

  Charles shrugged and frowned, seeming genuinely perplexed himself as to the source of his knowledge.

  “Do you know what would happen to me if I did that?” Sahaan asked.

  Charles made wide eyes, continued frowning, and nodded slightly. Charles, it seemed, did have some relatively accurate idea.

  “I’m not supposed to go outside, though,” Charles said. “I’m supposed to stay here. It’s, like… there are all these memories I’ve got, and I don’t remember exactly who was in them and none of the conversations make sense when I try to think about what I was talking about, but there’s some stuff that just… it just makes sense. Anyway, I hope you’re not going to ask me to get in that ugly gray van while all those people in purple uniforms point weapons at me. If that’s how it’s going to be, I’d rather go outside.”

  It was at that moment that Sahaan realized he wasn’t quite talking to a boy. Whoever Charles was, he had the form of a boy, and perhaps some of the emotions of a boy, but in other ways, he was a social and intellectual force to be reckoned with. The way he had wielded power just now had been unlike anything Sahaan had ever seen in a child. Most adults weren’t even capable of that kind of political savvy—he’d identified something Sahaan wanted from him and navigated his context into a political advantage.

  “I can get them to lower their weapons,” Sahaan said. “But I’m afraid it will have to be the gray van. All our gray vans are ugly, I’m afraid.”

  Charles’s frown flattened out, just a bit. “Will you go with me?”

  Sahaan nodded. “Yes.”

  “I also remember… there will be people here who want to hurt me. Will there be any of those in this place we’re going?”

  “No.”

  Charles seemed to mull that over. “How can I be certain?”

  “I’ll be there,” Sahaan said instinctively, then regretted that maneuver the moment it was out, but out it was. He’d have some explaining to do to Lachel and Jaan.

  Charles nodded a few times. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  Charles stood up, his movements still jerky and awkward. Sahaan stood, too.

  “Let’s go,” Charles said.

  ~

  The interior of the van was no less ugly and gray than its exterior, and the suspension seemed to absorb none of the shocks of Citrine’s dilapidated roads. They jolted upwards at every pothole, all six of them, Sahaan, Charles, and four heavily armored, masked guards holding rifles at the ready.

  They sat in silence.

  Sahaan wondered what President Aavee must be thinking right now. Sahaan would have to talk to him, too, soon. Mostly, though, he thought of Lachel and Jaan, and whether he’d done the right thing by keeping Charles inside the walls. He had had to. He couldn’t live with what the alternative would have made him. And yet, there were close to a million other people to consider inside the Reclamation’s walls.

  After what seemed like an eternity of pothole jolts and swift turns, the van finally came to a halt and the hum of its engine petered out. The back doors opened, and the guards escorted Charles out into a dimly lit concrete cavern studded with stone beams at even intervals. Piles of rock and metal dotted the space, and the floor was covered in a thick layer of dust. A chunk of red metallic scrap metal hung from the ceiling a few meters away, suspended by a frayed wire and casting an eerie shadow over the space between them.

  “What is this place?” Charles asked.

  “It’s what’s left of a bunker, one of the old military installations from before the Reclamation.”

  “Makes sense.” Charles nodded slowly.

  How much sense did that make to him? Did Charles have a full grasp of history, of the conflict that had fueled this place’s creation, of why, if Charles were made of nanites, how this bunker and the others like it would be the only places with any of hope of containing that threat?

  The guards led them away from the van and toward a door frame at the far end of the cavern.

  They passed through the door frame and into a hallway made entirely of red metal. The lighting, Sahaan noticed, was newly installed. Portable LED lumens had been stuck to the ceiling at intervals between the facility’s original lighting implements, which either sat inoperable, had been smashed or contorted, or were simply missing from their allotted place in the ceiling.

  They turned three times, then walked up one short flight of stairs, and finally arrived at a red, metallic door. The guards opened it, and Sahaan followed Charles and the guards inside. They arrived atop a narrow walkway looking down over a large room. Dust spots on the floor showed that it had been recently stripped of much of its furnishings, and a table, chairs, and bed had been newly placed, clean and pristine.

  The guards motioned for Charles to descend the stairs into the room. He complied, and Sahaan followed. Charles, Sahaan noticed, seemed to be getting better at moving his body. Charles held the railing all the way down the stairs but had not seemed to trip or overreach his footing even once.

  “Why don’t you have a seat?” Sahaan suggested.

  Charles pulled out one of the chairs and sat.

  Sahaan took another and sat across from him.

  “What now?” Charles asked.

  “Now we talk.”

  “What about?”

  “You said you knew what would happen to me if I went outside the walls.”

  Charles nodded.

  “And you said you would be okay?”

  Another nod.

  “What else do you know about what’s outside the Reclamation?”

  Charles quirked his head.

  “Everything inside the walls is a country called the Reclamation.”

  Charles nodded slowly. “What’s outside. It’s… cities and people. Lots of people.”

  “Do you know about the terraforming?”

  Charles frowned. “Yes.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Yeah. The people outside don’t like the terraforming.”

  Sahaan couldn’t stop himself in time from visibly jolting. He noticed that the guards were muttering also.

  “Sorry, do you mean the people outside the Reclamation or the people inside the Reclamation don’t like the terraforming?”

  “Not in the Reclamation. The people outside. They’re annoyed with it. It’s not working.”

  “Then, why are they still doing it? Why do we still see hills rise up and deflate when we look out over the walls?”

  “It’s complicated. It’s… It’s hard to explain.”

  “We’ve got plenty of time.” Sahaan shrugged. “Try me.”

  Charles furrowed his brow and scanned the dismal, empty room covered in dust. He let out a sigh, then looked at Sahaan. “Have you ever had to keep doing a thing, not because you liked doing it, but because it’s what you’ve always done, and there are other people who depend on you doing it, but not because they need it, but because they can’t stand the idea of it not happening? Because they’re more afraid of being without it than of wasting time on continuing to do something useless?”

  Sahaan nodded very slowly. Yes, politics was rife with such comprises. He knew that very well. And, once again, he reminded himself, Charles was not a child. He only looked like one.

  “What else can you tell me about outside the walls?”

  A pause. “I’m not sure. There at the cities. People go about their lives. They have job
s. There’s stuff that needs to get done. All the time. I used to be very busy.”

  “You were one of the people outside the walls, before you came here?”

  Charles looked up at the guards. He frowned, then, hesitantly, he nodded to Sahaan.

  One of the guards on the balcony walkway pulled out a handheld and spoke something into it.

  “You’re very different, physically, from the people in those cities,” Sahaan observed.

  Charles nodded quickly. “I changed.”

  “Clearly.”

  Charles sighed. “I know that I shouldn’t have normally been able to get inside the walls, to even get near the walls. But I found a way.” Charles simply paused his speech. He sat, staring at Sahaan blankly.

  “A way?” Sahaan tried.

  Charles contorted his facial features. “I’m sorry. There’s so much I don’t remember. I don’t remember how. I remember discussions about whether to do it or not. I remember that I wanted this. Everything else is a jumble. I can’t remember specific conversations I had. You know about… No, you couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t what?”

  “The people outside, they talk completely differently now. It wasn’t like that before. Back during… let’s call them the hostilities. Do you know what I mean?”

  Sahaan nodded.

  “During the hostilities, we still used vocal sounds for interpersonal communication. It’s not like that anymore. It’s digital now, over radio frequencies.” Charles laughed a bit.