The Other

by Matthew Buscemi

  “How long will martial law last?” Jaan asked with a small frown.

  Sahaan shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Your father’s had a rough time of it, Jaan.”

  “Sorry.”

  Lachel continued. “President Aavee is here, too.”

  Sahaan nodded slowly.

  “I am so glad that you’re all right.”

  “It’s good to see the both of you.”

  Jaan burst into another question. “What’s President Aavee going to do next, Dad?”

  “Well, first we’ve got to clear the nanites out of our territory, then restore the walls, then we’ll have to find Charles.”

  “On the news they said he’d forgotten everything,” said Lachel.

  “He remembered one thing.”

  “What was it?” Jaan insisted.

  Sahaan shook his head. “He didn’t have a chance to tell us. There were reporters all around us at the station, and then we got on the train. That’s why we have to find him.”

  Lachel nodded. “We should let you talk to the President.”

  Sahaan returned a nod. He looked at Jaan and thought of the time they’d introduced him to the President, Aavee being all smiles and charm and Jaan being scared stiff with nerves.

  “Love you both,” Sahaan said. Lachel gave his hand one more squeeze, then released and guided Jaan out the door.

  Not moments after they had exited, President Aavee and his entourage of three dark-suited agents entered the room. Aavee strode up to Sahaan’s bedside while the agents fanned out around the room. Sahaan had experienced this enough times not to be fazed by it.

  “Sahaan,” President Aavee said, “so glad to see you’re safe and on your way to a full recovery.”

  There was something about the President’s demeanor that Sahaan couldn’t quite place. He had always, in Sahaan’s memory, held himself perfectly at ease despite the severity of any situation. He was doing the same now, but minor details felt… off. The breach of the walls had slipped through even the President practiced serenity.

  “Any news on Bharo?” Sahaan asked. “Last they told me, he was in surgery.”

  “He’s out now, but they don’t know any more. It was successful, but they’re waiting to see how he responds.”

  Sahaan nodded. “The doctor told me about martial law and I learned about the nanite breach from my family.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been debriefed already.” The president grinned. “I should have just sent your family and saved myself the trip.”

  Sahaan laughed.

  “But, seriously, this is one hell of a situation we’re in. I’ve shut down all transit between the cities except for military trains. I’ve asked all the mayors and regional councils for a daily report, but after two days I’m still waiting for a response from the local governments of Cynine, Exenine, and Enerine, so who knows what’s going on there. And then there’s Citrine—”

  “They’re completely cut off.”

  “Yes, but the mayor has been in constant contact with us.”

  “Making sure we’re still here?”

  The president nodded. “Nothing like a disaster to bring people together. Mayor Samaapt, at the moment, seems more afraid of permanently becoming an island than displeasing his party’s leadership. For the moment, he’s not towing their line.”

  “What’s the plan to restore the road?”

  “We’re going to pull all of Adamantine and Adrine’s backup walls out of storage and haul them up to the exclusion zone. Then we’ll push the slabs into the zone with military-grade tractors and force the nanites back out the breach. Then we can simply replace the slabs. The Service wanted me to hold off so that they could thoroughly analyze the explosion, but I told the military to proceed with the wall replacement.”

  “You don’t want them programmatically adapting.”

  “How easily we forget pre-Reclamation history. People living crowded in tiny, dirty bunkers. Half of them giving up their higher cognitive skills to supplement the systems that kept the nanites out. If your bunker lost a handful of computer sub-systems or more than a few human computers for any amount of time—” Aavee snapped his fingers. “—the nanites broke in and morphed everyone in your bunker into one of them. They call themselves ‘Guardian.’ Which party insisted on maintaining the emergency subsystems? Which party focuses our spending on the maintenance of our existing infrastructure? Of our emergency power stations?” The President seemed to look beyond Sahaan for a moment, then his attention snapped back, but he remained silent.

  “What about the polls?” Sahaan asked.

  The last traces of amiability dropped out of the President’s expression. “It would be the height of imprudence to check polls during a national emergency of this magnitude.”

  Sahaan smiled gently. “Of course. But, if you had happened to catch the polls on the way here, say in an off moment, when you needed a mental break anyway, what would they—?”

  “There is now an eighty-nine percent chance that Gadh will win.” President Aavee paused, both exasperation and despair seeping in at the edges of his expression and demeanor. “I swore an oath,” he continued, “to protect the Constitution of the Reclamation and all of her citizens. I will continue to do that to the best of my ability for another six days, even if a majority of those citizens prefer the illusion of security to the genuine article.”

  Sahaan took a deep breath. “My last question, Mr. President. What happened to Charles? The doctor said that he wasn’t found in the wreckage.”

  President Aavee motioned to one of the agents. A female agent near the door stepped forward toward the bed and tapped at a computer tablet, then handed it to Sahaan. He found himself presented with a video playback interface.

  “Hit the play button,” the president said, and Sahaan did so.

  At first, Sahaan wasn’t sure what kind of video he was watching. It was filmed without color and extremely grainy. He realized momentarily that the light in the background was the coruscating trainwreck, and that a black-ish bulk nearer to the camera was a derailed car that hadn’t caught fire.

  “Watch near the right edge,” the president added.

  Sahaan’s eye had indeed caught a vehicle, hard to make out, but visible, careening into view. It stopped at the edge of the wreck, and two individuals emerged from it, entered the wreck, hauled a person out, put him into the car, then re-entered the car and drove off.

  “How soon after—?” Sahaan started.

  “They arrived one minute and thirty-seven seconds afterward.”

  “Then they knew.” Sahaan bit his lip. “Reclamation citizens caused the explosion.”

  “The proper classification is terrorist.”

  Sahaan reeled. He felt sick and almost dizzy. If it had somehow been the nanite-bodied… then… but terrorism? People inside the walls intentionally detonating an explosion that would take out a wall… All so they could get at Charles.

  The president took the computer tablet from Sahaan, drawing him out of his thoughts.

  “What’s our plan?” Sahaan asked.

  “They must still be in Citrine somewhere.” The president grinned. “And, as I said, Mayor Samaapt has been very receptive to working with us. The only price I have asked of him is the local government’s full cooperation in tracking these individuals down.”

  “And is he complying?”

  “So he says. For the time being, we have no way of corroborating his actions.” President Aavee let out a short laugh.

  A thought struck Sahaan all at once. “And Dr. Anaveshan’s team?”

  The President’s eyes lit up with the same realization. “Yes, they must be stuck there. I’ll make sure we find out how they’re holding up. Now, get some rest. I need you back to one hundred percent. Thanks for taking care of Charles so well in Citrine. When you’re feeling up to it, I’ll need a full write up of your time with him. Is there anything I should know now that will help us locate him?”

&n
bsp; Sahaan thought that over a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll let you rest, then.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” Sahaan said.

  The president and his entourage retreated out the door, and Sahaan let himself sink back into his pillow. He’d only been awake for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, but already he felt exhausted. He decided to close his eyes, just for a nap, but he found himself drifting back to sleep all the same.

  ~

  Sahaan had read his book dutifully on the train but had put it down when they’d entered the Portal City limits. The land between Eline and Portal City was covered in fields of grasses and wildflowers and dotted with young trees, all imported from Alterra and transplanted sixty years prior. It was a serene but monotonous landscape and his book easily won out over it. Once inside the city limits, however, all of that changed. Large buildings dotted the landscape and grew ever larger as the train hurtled onward. Sahaan caught a glimpse of skyscrapers before the train dipped underground, and the only view from the window was the emergency lights within the tunnel.

  Sahaan turned to his mother. She was staring at the front of the train car, already in cocoon mode. She couldn’t wait for this to be over, Sahaan guessed. His father sat next to her, reading something on his tablet computer.

  He nudged Sahaan’s mother with his elbow and drew the tablet closer to her. “I’ve gotten us a five-thirty train back, so we can leave at five. We’ll tell them Sahaan has school tomorrow.”

  Sahaan wouldn’t mind spending more time in Portal City, but he dared not say so. Besides, he rather liked his grandmother. He wasn’t quite sure why his mother didn’t like his grandmother. It had something to do with politics, which didn’t interest him in the least. He was far more interested in stories. So far, good stories had made him laugh, they’d made him cry, they’d made him want to learn anything and everything about history, they’d inspired him to do better in school, and on and on. Books had given him so much, and his parents supplied him with new ones readily.

  And grandma always let him talk about stories to her. She’d even told him one. It was about her own grandfather, a man named Stok Thiksay, who had come to Asura from Alterra when there hadn’t been Portal City or Eline or any of the other cities. Only the nanite-bodied and their nanites everywhere. In fact, when Stok had first arrived on Asura, the nanites had nearly transformed him into a nanite-bodied, but he’d been rescued by soldiers from a bunker called A5, and that bunker had stood where the city of Adrine was today. Stok had eventually opened the portal back to Alterra and brought the wall slabs—they were, in fact, an Alterran technology. And slowly, over the course of thirty years, they’d created more walls, at first just defending the remaining bunkers, then connecting them with wallroads, and later pushing the nanites out of the hub completely.

  Everyone knew the story of Stok Thiksay, but not many people were direct descendants of him. Grandma had taken the family name of Ekeer when she’d married, but it was her Thiksay lineage that she remained loyal to. “It makes our family special,” she’d told him. “We’re people, just like everyone else,” his father had told him later.

  Unlike his mother, his father seemed to get along with his grandmother. He disagreed with her, but they got along just fine.

  It was too bad they didn’t visit his other grandparents more often, the ones who lived in Cynine. He’d visited them only once. It was a much longer train ride, and more expensive, too, his parents said. His other grandparents lived in a small house at the very edge of the city. At first he thought he’d never seen such a large lawn in front, but then his grandparents had shown him the huge field in back.

  “Wow,” Sahaan said. “It’s beautiful! So much open space!”

  “There’d be even more if we could get more walls,” his grandfather had said. Indeed. At the edge of his grandfather’s property, Sahaan could see the towering gray edifices stretching off into the distance. “There’s another thirty kilometers of land between here and ocean, but it’s all Deranged territory.”

  His mother had given her grandfather a look.

  He’d responded in kind.

  “What kind of tree is this?” Sahaan had asked, and the conversation had turned to the different flora that they’d received from Alterra.

  The trains began to brake, and the tunnel opened up into the expanse of railway platforms that composed Portal City Station. Four major lines, each with enormous signs above them indicating which cities they ran to—Dazine, Adrine, Enerine, and above him, then over his head, the enormous letters spelling out Eline.

  One day in Portal City, and he had to spend the whole time as his grandmother’s retirement party. Sahaan wished, for just a moment, that they could see more, that his mother could get over whatever bugged her so much about her mother-in-law, that they’d all get along and decide to take a trip to the Museum of Natural History or the Portal City Central Library. But no. Train in, retirement party, train out.

  He released a small sigh as the train came to a halt, and his father stood up and began pulling their day bags from the overhead luggage rack. His mother remained seated for many moments before standing and silently taking up her things.

  Sahaan did the same.

  ~

  “Dr. Ekeer.”

  Sahaan awoke to discover a nurse at his bedside.

  The nurse continued. “The doctor says you’re ready for some food.” He rolled a tray into position so that it was suspended over Sahaan’s abdomen. Looking over it, Lachel sat in the corner, smiling. Jaan sat next to her, his face glued to his handheld.

  “Thank you,” Sahaan said to the nurse, who proceeded to read some of the monitors at Sahaan’s bedside, then left the room.

  The meal that lay before him was a simple plate of crackers, cheese, and a cup of purple liquid, probably juice. He wasn’t hungry in the least, but he forced himself to have some of the crackers and cheese. His side still hurt and a headache pulsed behind his forehead.

  “How are you feeling?” Lachel asked.

  “Good,” Sahaan lied. For all his political acumen, he was terrible at lying to Lachel.

  “Not worse, I hope.” She stood and walked to his side.

  “No.” At least he could answer that one honestly.

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “About six hours. It’s after eight in the evening.”

  The curtains were drawn over the room’s window, but no light leaked in at the edges now.

  “Mom,” Jaan called out. “It’s starting!”

  “What’s starting?” Sahaan asked.

  “The president is giving a speech,” she said.

  Sahaan grimaced. With both himself and Bharo out of commission, it would have been up to a junior aide to draft it. Sahaan’s headache intensified. For the president to need to give a speech without his Senior Consul…

  “What happened?” Sahaan asked.

  “Gadh gave a speech a few hours ago.” Lachel pursed her lips.

  “And?”

  Lachel released a sigh. “He said that the explosion constitutes an act of war, and he announced his intention, upon becoming president, to expand all the walls by a kilometer every year for all four years of his term. He said he’s changing the mandate of the Guardian Party. Their goal is now to push the walls out until the Reclamation covers the entire planet.”

  Sahaan’s jaw hung slack. He blinked a few times. “You’re joking.”

  Lachel shook her head. The expression on her face broke his heart.

  “That’s insane.”

  “Adults are weird,” Jaan announced. “Do you want to see President Aavee’s speech, Dad? I can put it on the TV.”

  “Yes, Jaan. Please do that.”

  Jaan took up the remote and activated the holocaster on the far wall. The president, now apparently back in Portal City, sat in his office in the Hilltop Suite. They entered the speech mid-sentence. “—have now cleared nanites out of one-third of the area of their incursion. W
e believe we can have the rest cleared out by midday tomorrow. After that, it is only a matter of time before we can lift the exclusion zone and restore train service to Citrine.

  “So far, we have held back details about the explosion that derailed the train carrying the nanite-bodied visitor, Charles. Many assumed that the nanite-bodied created the explosion either to gain entrance to the Reclamation or to recover their citizen, or even both. According to an alternative theory, it was Charles himself who caused the explosion. However, now that we have had time to thoroughly investigate all of the evidence, it is confirmed that none of those scenarios are true, and it is my unfortunate duty to report to you the truth.

  “The explosion was an act of terrorism, committed by citizens of the Reclamation. Their goal appears to have been to capture the nanite-bodied visitor. Creating the first-ever sustained, permeable breach of our walls was, to their minds, a price worth paying in order to achieve their objective. We will find them, we will bring them before the law, and we will teach them that it certainly was not.

  “This government, a Reconciliation government, for as long as it remains, will track down the individuals who have killed Reclamation citizens, destroyed our defensive fortifications, and kidnapped a guest to our country. And yes, until proven differently, we must assume that Charles is a guest, and we will treat him with humanitarian dignity.

  “One hundred and twenty-one years ago, Stok Thiksay delivered us wall technology from Alterra, and that has allowed us to rebuild our cities and re-establish our way of life. However, this technology has natural limits. If we push beyond those limits, it will eventually fail. Who or what will guard us then?

  “The terrorists who committed this act of sabotage—”

  President Aavee’s voice diminished to mute, and at the same time, his holographic image faded away to empty space.