“Why are you laughing?”
“Sorry. I just remembered trying to convince someone that speech would be better, even though it was less efficient. I was arguing. It just struck me as funny because I’m having so much trouble communicating now compared to before.”
“Are you sorry you came here?”
Charles shook his head slowly. “I know it’s important.”
“Why?”
“Because things aren’t okay the way they are.”
“You mean, having the division between the Reclamation and outside.”
Charles shook his head. “I mean, sure, that’s not great, but what I really mean is, even just outside the Reclamation. With the others. Things aren’t okay. A century is a long time to be changing yourself and not seeing any benefit from it. It’s made people… I don’t know. Anxious. Malcontent. Ready to tear everything down. Ready to do something else.”
Another murmur from the same guard into his handheld.
Charles put a hand to his face. “I shouldn’t have told you that,” he whispered to Sahaan. Then he looked up at the balcony and said, “most people out there aren’t extremists.”
The guards did nothing but stand.
Charles turned back to Sahaan. “I’m sure most of you aren’t extremists, either.”
“We’re not,” Sahaan said.
“But that’s what we couldn’t know,” Charles said. “Your political organization. What has my presence done here politically? Has my showing up empowered your extremists?”
Gadh.
Ugh.
Sahaan was quick enough to hide that reaction, though. “It’s too early to tell, but even if it has in the short term, I think we’ll end up better for having met you in the long term.”
Charles smiled weakly. “I hope so.”
“Sir!” One of the guards called down.
“Excuse me,” Sahaan said, then walked up the stairwell.
The guard who’d called down approached him at the top of the stairs. “President Aavee would like to speak with you, sir.”
Sahaan glanced at his handheld. No signal.
“I’ll show you the way to the surface. Follow me.”
“Dr. Ekeer?” Charles called up.
“Yes?”
“Where are you going?”
“I need to make a call. I’ll be back soon.”
Charles visibly gulped.
“I promise.”
Sahaan walked out the door, following the guards. The nanite-bodied had found a way to transmute themselves into our wall slabs and keep most of their memories. The political ramifications would be immense. What was he going to tell the president?
~
No sooner had Sahaan reached the surface than his handheld erupted in a flurry of notifications, but he decided to ignore them for the moment so he could take stock of the surface. None of the base structure remained above ground. He had emerged from a simple stairwell dug out of the earth. The only other visible terrain feature was the road, some twenty kilometers away that led to its own hole in the ground. That must have been how his vehicle had come in.
He got to work on his phone, but didn’t have time to scan more than a couple of emails before he received a call from the president’s office.
“Sahaan?”
“Yes, Mr. President. It’s me.”
“How are you holding up?”
“As well as can be expected, Mr. President.”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s… not a boy, sir. I mean, he’s clearly an adult in a boy’s body. And, he admitted just now, he’s one of them.”
“Should I wait for a debrief?”
“Sir, the military is here and they’re recording everything. I don’t think there’s any point in trying to keep my conversations with him a secret. I’m not even sure we should. Mr. President, this is it. It’s contact. After over a century.”
“Sahaan. They’ve turned one of our wall slabs into a person.”
“I realize that, sir.”
“Good thinking, by the way, bringing the old military installation back online. That should minimize any threat to Citrine while we figure out a way to transport him safely to Portal City.”
“Sir, I’d like to keep Charles here.”
“Sorry. Say that again. He has a name?”
“Yes. It’s Charles.”
“No family name?”
“If he has one, he hasn’t shared it.”
“Why do you want to keep him in Citrine?”
“Because—” How to explain? Sahaan found himself suddenly irritated that he had to explain such things to his own boss. He shoved the emotion aside and focused on how to best elaborate his stance. “Because the people in Citrine, and the spokes more generally, are starting to tell themselves that Reconciliation and the hub cities don’t care about them or their safety. If we bring him into the hub, they won’t have their people monitoring him anymore. They’ll go on telling themselves that we’re not on their side, and I’m convinced that pretty soon, the story will be that we’re conspiring with the nanite-bodied against them. The mayor of Citrine practically told me as much earlier today.”
“I agree with you, Sahaan, but I think it’s all the more reason to bring him in here, where we can better control the messaging to the media, where everyone will behave more predictably.”
“Sir, if I could just—”
“You have until we can prepare adequate safeties for his transportation. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“And I heard you put Bharo on the Adamantine situation.”
“Yes, sir. I did.”
“Good work there. Learn as much as you can, Sahaan. I want twice-daily updates to the capitol. Keep yourself safe out there.”
“Yes, Mr. President. I will.”
Sahaan pressed the red button on his handheld to end the call. He looked back down into the pit he had emerged from and noticed, over near the vehicle entrance, two young soldiers unloading crates from a military vehicle that he hadn’t heard approach.
“What are they doing?” Sahaan asked his two escorts.
“Those are software engineers,” one of them said.
“They’re doing something to make the old systems work better,” the other added.
Sahaan had a frightening flashback to fourth grade, when he’d first learned about pre-Reclamation history. Before they’d had the wall slabs, a certain number of young people had to give up their lives to become human computers, each one wired into the bases to give the defensive systems a kind of randomness that the nanite-bodied’s computer algorithms couldn’t quickly adapt to.
He didn’t have to ask that of these young people, and he would do everything in his power to keep it that way.
~
When Sahaan returned to Charles’s cell, he peered down from the balcony to see that Charles had lain down on the bed provided. At the sound of the door, Charles sat up, threw his legs over a bed, stretched his arms, and gazed up at Sahaan… How exactly to describe it? With eyes full of some meager hope, perhaps? At the very least, glad that Sahaan had returned.
Sahaan walked down the metal stairs and sat down at the table in the same chair he’d taken before. Charles remained at the edge of the bed.
“Is everything all right?” Charles asked.
Sahaan nodded.
“The rest of the Reclamation… I bet they’re afraid of me. Afraid that I’ll explode into a billion and nanites, or something like that.”
“Not everyone is afraid.”
“Just most of them, then?”
“Perhaps. Part of my job is to help explain things to people so that they’re only afraid of what they should be afraid of.”
“You don’t seem afraid of me.”
“Should I be?”
Charles shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I won’t explode into a billion nanites, anyway.”
“Do you know…” Sahaan searched for t
he right words. “Do you know how you entered the Reclamation?”
Charles stared at him blankly more many seconds, then shook his head. “I remember talking about it with others before, but like I said, the details are all fuzzy. The first thing I remember here is you talking to me next to that… pavilion.”
“Do you remember your goal?”
Charles’s eyes brightened. “Contact. It’s something I’ve always wanted. To talk to—” He suddenly gazed off past Sahaan’s shoulder and squinted.
“Something wrong?”
Charles shook his head. “A word I can’t translate. I guess ‘human’ will do. Although they—we consider ourselves human, too.”
“How many others want contact, too?”
Charles’s grimace grew more severe, and he remained silent for many moments. “It’s really complicated. And there are a lot of details that are hard to remember. A lot? I think.”
Sahaan realized in that moment, that getting Charles to remember the intent of his compatriots was crucial. Charles’s arrival had been perfectly ambiguous. The Reconciliation party would interpret it as the thing they had always wanted—contact. The Guardian party would interpret it as their worst nightmare come true—invasion, the breach of the walls. In a sense, both were right. Unless Charles proved harmless, or proved hostile. But how to prove it?
“Dr. Ekeer?”
Sahaan realized he’d allowed himself to become lost in thought. “Yes?”
“Can you tell me more about what the Reclamation is like?”
“What do you want to know?”
“We know about the roads out to five isolated cities, and the seven others in the center. Is that all of them?”
“Yes.”
“What are their names?”
“Portal City is our capitol, and the portal connects it to Alterra, the parallel world that Le Choglamsar and Stok Thiksay came from ninety years ago. There’s also Besserine, Dazine, Adamantine, Adrine, Barine, and Eline in the hub. The spokes are Cynine, Bengine, Exenine, Enerine, and we’re in Citrine.”
“I just remembered something.”
“What’s that?”
“Some people are worried. That you’ll want to expand your hub.”
Sahaan nodded slowly. “We’ve anticipated that fear. Some of us. We’d like to establish contact and negotiate terms of expanding the wall system.”
“Others think you can’t expand it anymore.”
What to say to that?
Sahaan crossed his arms. “We’re committed to the integrity of the existing walls and we have adequate means to reinforce them.” Not entirely true anymore, but since Charles had said he didn’t remember how he’d arrived, it probably couldn’t hurt. he’d probably noticed the construction crews replacing the wall panel on their departure and was certainly bright enough to put the details together, but that didn’t diminish the political necessity of the lie. Sahaan caught the click and chatter of the guard talking on his handheld behind him.
Charles frowned. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound threatening.”
Sahaan leaned forward. “Then you’ll need to tell me more. Everything you can remember about your society. This is how we get rid of that fear. Understanding. Talking to one another. Tell me this, then. What do you know about us? We know you don’t have satellites in orbit, not that we can see, anyway.”
“We don’t need satellites. Nanites crawl on top of the field projected by the walls and look inside. And we noticed your satellites. There are a lot of stories about what it’s like here. There are opinions…” Charles screwed his face up. “I’m sorry, trying to remember this stuff… It’s very hard.”
“Are you in pain?”
Charles nodded and lay down on the bed.
Sahaan stood up. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself on my account.”
“I’ll be all right,” Charles muttered, his face to the wall.
“Should I come back later?”
“Give me a minute.”
Sahaan waited for many minutes, then asked, “Charles?”
No response. Sahaan stood and walked over to him. He put a finger on the boy’s neck and indeed felt warmth and a pulse. His chest was rising and falling.
Sahaan walked up the stairs as silently as he was able, then said to the guards in a low voice, “He appears to be sleeping. I’m going to arrange for accommodations in the city. I’ll be back in about an hour.”
The guard saluted his acknowledgment, and two others joined up alongside him to escort him to the surface. Sahaan glanced at sleeping Charles on his way out and sighed. The boy had better become able to share more about the nanite-bodied society. It was the only way Sahaan could imagine that they would be able to avoid the disastrous election outcome of a Gadh presidency.
~
When Sahaan emerged from the bunker a second time, the sun had fallen low in the sky, turning the magenta sky a deep umber. Long shadows from the walls around the complex shrouded the vehicle entrance, but a lamp set up beneath the canopy of a tent illuminated the software engineers, busily tapping at keyboards atop makeshift desks.
His handheld stole his attention, erupting in another flurry of delayed messages and notifications. In summary: the election polls had swung considerably in Gadh’s direction, but most polling agencies expressed doubt as to whether or not it was enough to win him the election; Adamantine had shut down their side of the Adamantine-Citrine wallroad, then opened it up again; Lachel and Jaan had both texted him asking him to call as soon as he could.
He instinctively hit his speed dial for Lachel.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Good. Better.”
“How is he?”
“He’s… interesting. He says he doesn’t remember much.”
“You don’t believe him.”
“His sharing more would help us trust him more. But, I don’t know. If they really have found a way to take a nanite-bodied and put their minds into human bodies, sure, memory loss seems reasonable, if not a mild symptom. How are you?”
“All right. Give or take. Worried about you.”
“I’ll be fine. The one thing he doesn’t seem is dangerous.”
“I’m trusting those political sensitivities of yours to remain alert. I want you home when this all over.”
“Alert as ever.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. How’s Jaan?”
“Asking about you a lot. Want to talk to him?”
“Of course.”
“I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Some shuffling of the handheld, then, “Dad?”
“Hey, Jaan.”
“Dad! Are you all right? You’re talking the nanite-bodied boy, right?”
“All we know is he used to be nanite-bodied. He looks human, now. And he gets tired like we do, at the very least. We’ll know more certain in the next couple of days.”
Jaan’s voice took on an uncertain tone. “Are we in danger? I mean, they took out of a piece of our wall. Can they do that again?”
“I honestly don’t know, son. But I’m going to do everything I can to find out. And, if there is a danger, I’m going to do everything I can to keep it from hurting you and Mom and the Reclamation. That’s a promise. It’s probably going to be a while before I can come home, so I need you to be especially good for your mother while I’m gone. Can you do that?”
“Sure, Dad! You got it.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Sahaan hung up and immediately dialed Bharo.
“Hey,” Bharo’s voice intoned. “How you doing?”
“Pretty well. I saw you got Adamantine to open up their wallroad. Thanks for that.”
“No prob. You know the Adamantine city government. All you have to do is suggest infrastructure funding at them and they’ll be all over any request.”
“What’d you have to promise them?”
“A park restoration we would have gran
ted them anyway.”
Sahaan chuckled. “Nice work.”
“Thanks.”
“The polls are showing Gadh has lost his lead.”
“Yeah,” Bharo’s voice intoned despair instead of relief. “I think you might have been right. The media has never liked Gadh, and I think they may be trying to paint a rosier picture than is justified. If you squint really hard at the numbers, maybe you could draw that conclusion. According to my read, Gadh now has seven cities locked down, enough to secure a Guardian victory. I mean, I just don’t get it. The nanite-bodied might be able to break through our walls now, but how can they expect that man to keep them safe?”
“They don’t want us doing what we’re doing now.”
“What’s that?”
“Talking to the ‘invader.’”
Bharo began talking, more incredulity in the form of a minor rant, but Sahaan’s mind had begun working another angle, one he hadn’t considered until this moment.
Sahaan interrupted Bharo mid-sentence, “Hey, when is the soonest you could get out here?”
“I take it I’m packing light?”
“Yeah.”
“Tomorrow morning. Maybe tonight if there aren’t any logistical issues catching the last Adamantine train.”
“Go find out. Keep me apprised. I’ve got to run.”
“Hey, mind telling me what’s so urg—”
Sahaan had already hit the button to end the call. He shot back down the stairs into the dilapidated hallways of maroon metal, tracing his way back to Charles’s room. He’d realized, speaking with Bharo, that, being in Citrine, the government officials he was giving transparency to were generally hostile to the notion of Sahaan carrying out his investigation. As long as he was around, they wouldn’t dare, but Sahaan had been going up to the surface.
Sahaan shot into the room, ran to balcony railing, where he saw two women and a man in white robes standing over Charles.
“Stop at once!” Sahaan roared as he clambered down the stairs. “I am Dr. Sahaan Ekeer, Senior Consul to the President of the Reclamation, and I demand to know what’s been done to Charles, what more you planned to do, and who ordered it.”
One of the two women stepped forward. “Dr. Ekeer, please calm down.”
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