The Other

by Matthew Buscemi

  “What happened?” Lachel asked.

  Jaan pulled up his handheld. “It’s stopped streaming, too…”

  The holocaster jolted to life again, now showing a news anchor.

  Sahaan and his family exchanged confused looks. They were interrupting the president for a newscast?

  “We interrupt… We’re interrupting to bring you this late-breaking news. Eight minutes ago, alarms were triggered along the wall system bordering the Eline-Besserine train line just two kilometers outside of Eline. Camera systems have confirmed that another wallslab has been converted into a person. The process appears identical to the one that affected the wall slab in Citrine during Senior Consul Sahaan Ekeer’s political rally. Authorities are en route to the site— One moment.”

  The news anchor put her hand over her ear.

  “This visitor is female,” the news anchor said. “She says her name is Samantha.”

  ~

  Sahaan’s grandmother didn’t have any time to talk to him or his family before the event. They arrived at the venue just before eleven, which Sahaan thought was pretty early (and it seemed his parents had thought so, too), but even as they arrived, his grandmother had already been cornered by a crowd of news reporters, and Sahaan recognized other people from holocasts surrounding her as well. He wasn’t sure what all their functions were, but he knew they were part of the government.

  At school, he’d noticed that some kids told him they thought his grandmother was awesome (even though they’d never met her), while others called her names. None of the other schoolkids seemed to have a neutral opinion on her. It was the same with the news, which his parents encouraged him to ignore. He was supposed to ignore his classmates, too, especially the ones that seemed to hate her.

  So far, he’d managed to never get into a fight over this, mostly owing to the fact that he found it easy to calm other kids down. He just kept asking them questions, trying to understand how they felt. It came naturally to him.

  His family took their designated seats at one of the many round tables dotting an enormous ballroom, and they proceeded to wait in silence. Sahaan looked around the room, but couldn’t find any other kids his age in attendance. All the adults were busy hurrying around.

  Eventually, his grandmother came running over to them. She wore a long, blue dress, and had her hair rolled up into a bun, a style he’d seen her wear before only on the holocasts.

  “Bahaar, Saana, and Sahaan! How you’ve grown! So wonderful to see you!” She gave Sahaan’s father a hug, then a strained hug to his mother, and finally she knelt down to meet Sahaan eye to eye. “You still reading stories?”

  Sahaan nodded. “I can’t wait to visit the Central Library again.”

  “You come up to Portal City again soon and we’ll make a day of it. If your parents approve, of course.”

  Sahaan’s father smiled and nodded. His mother remained stoic, although normally, she also approved of his passion for reading.

  Sahaan’s grandmother stood. “Sorry about earlier. I saw you, but I just couldn’t get away from them.”

  “We know the drill,” Sahaan’s father said.

  “Well, I am glad you’re here. All of you.” His grandmother seemed to be directing that last statement at Sahaan’s mother directly.

  “Thank you for having us.” His mother spoke lightly, just loud enough to be heard over the crowd.

  “MP Ekeer?” A man appeared at their side. “The MPs from Besserine have just arrived and are asking to meet you.”

  Sahaan’s grandmother smiled and nodded, then looked at Sahaan and his family. “Duty calls. We’ll catch up after the reception, I hope.”

  “We have a five-thirty train,” Sahaan’s father said. “Sahaan has school tomorrow. We were hoping maybe after the main event we could chat for a bit?”

  Sahaan’s grandmother nodded. “Of course! I’ll make sure to tell Sahayaak. He’ll make sure to arrange it. At four-thirty, then, after the main event?”

  “Sounds good.” She looked at Sahaan. “I’m looking forward to hearing about all the books you’ve been reading.” Then she turned to his mother. “And Saana, I’m so very glad you were able to make it. It’s wonderful to see you here. Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” His mother seemed to be in shock, her words barely audible.

  And with that his grandmother disappeared into the crowd, following the man who had appeared, apparently toward the Besserine MPs. Sahaan sat down and smiled, thinking of the trip he would get to take in the near future to the Portal City Central Library.

  ~

  Sahaan and his family sat, watching the holocast in rapt silence. Samantha was given clothes, escorted into a heavily armored van, similar to the one Sahaan had ridden in with Charles, and from there, the journalists were cordoned off and Samantha was spirited away.

  Her route would probably be circuitous and very few would know about it, Sahaan guessed. It’s what he would do. Her destination would, of course, be the secure area they had set up in Portal City for Charles.

  Ah well, Sahaan thought. It was someone else’s turn now. For the time being, he was merely to lie here and recover. He also imagined, momentarily, the mood in the Hilltop Suite when they’d had to tell the president that the broadcasting agencies had cut him off. He was glad he’d avoided that one.

  Once Samantha had departed on her undisclosed journey, the news reverted to Guardian’s reaction to the president’s speech. They oscillated between insistence that the walls be expanded regardless of the cause of the explosion and insinuations that the president’s terrorism analysis was mistaken or an outright lie.

  Somewhere during a Guardian commentator’s rant, Sahaan glanced at his family and noticed that Jaan had fallen asleep against Lachel’s side.

  “The president arranged for secure lodgings for you, I hope,” Sahaan said quietly.

  “Yes, the hotel is right next to the hospital. It will have military guards.”

  Sahaan nodded toward Jaan. “You should take him to get some proper sleep. I’m not in any danger.” The pain in his side had, in fact, diminished, and the headache had turned out to be transitory.

  Lachel roused Jaan and walked him over to Sahaan.

  “Night, Dad,” Jaan said in slurred speech.

  “Night, Son.”

  Lachel kissed Sahaan on the forehead, smiled, and took Jaan toward the door.

  “You’re the best, you know that?”

  Lachel smiled back. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Sahaan took a deep breath and returned to watching holocasts, absorbing all the political opinions and watching the progress of the crews pushing the nanites out of the Adamantine-Citrine wallroad. They were now over halfway complete, and scans of the wallroad area were reporting the newly reclaimed area to be nanite-free. It was about the only good news available. Reconciliation and Guardian voices were louder and more extreme than ever. Sahaan couldn’t help but think back to his grandmother’s last and most famous speech, the one he himself had witnessed as a child, the one that had put a chink in the armor of both sides of the political divide, a moment that had made it seem that the Reclamation might be politically capable of reclaiming itself.

  So much for that.

  And here he was, a lone voice in the wilderness, and stuck in a hospital bed no less.

  He watched the news until his eyelids drooped, at which point he turned off the holocaster and let himself drift off to sleep.

  He awoke later not to a nurse, but to someone new, a young man he had perhaps seen around the Capitol Offices but had never learned the name.

  “Sorry to wake you, Dr. Ekeer.”

  “It’s alright, Mr.…”

  “Vitar, sir.”

  “Mr. Vitar. I’ve seen around Capitol Offices, correct?”

  “I’m an associate secretary for Dr. Anaveshan, sir.”

  Sahaan smiled. “How is Dr. Anaveshan?”

  “As well as can be expected. He manage
d to avoid the worst of the rioting in Citrine, but one of the scientists in his unit is in the Citrine Hospital.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t realize he’d gone out to Citrine himself.”

  “He was on the last train that made it through, sir. In fact, he’s on the phone right now, and he can tell you more about it.”

  “Please.” Sahaan motioned for Mr. Vitar’s handheld, which he promptly handed over.

  “Dr. Ekeer?” Dr. Anaveshan’s voice sounded strained and the audio quality was somewhat grainy.

  “Yes, this is him.”

  “Phenomenal discovery, Dr. Ekeer. Truly phenomenal. This is an encrypted line, by the way. I knew last night, but I had to make sure we could talk privately, you see. There’s no telling how much worse it could make things if this gets out the wrong way.”

  “Have you figured out how they do it, then? How they turn the wall slabs into people?”

  “I think so. We’ll need to get back to Portal City and run more experiments to be sure, but we’re more or less certain now. As you know, because a matter transmutation has clearly taken place, the mind jumps to nanotechnology, as that is the obvious way that we transmute matter at the molecular level. But it makes no sense for that to be the mechanism in this case because the walls repel nanites. Always have, always will.

  “So, we went looking for a way to transmute matter that didn’t involve nanite manipulation. At least not direct manipulation. Have you perhaps read about a set of experiments performed one hundred years ago on Alterra, just before the Reclamation was founded? About the walls and high-energy radiation?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not my field, doctor.”

  “They were testing to see if the walls could be attacked through means other than nanites. They discovered that gamma and other high-energy radiations interacted with the walls’ quantum field, ultimately changing the elemental composition of the atoms they struck. The iron in the walls shifted to manganese or cobalt. They could also ‘push’ the elements into compounds and new configurations by varying the angle of the radiation emitter. Despite all this, as long as a wall slab remained metallic, it kept the metaxic field property that keeps nanites and other microscopic paraphernalia out. It was calculated that the amount of energy required either to reduce a single wall slab’s iron down to argon or to compact it enough to form a gap would require the energy output of a medium-sized fusion reactor. In other words, breaking down every single wall slab in the Reclamation would require energy beyond even the nanite-bodied’s generation capabilities.”

  “But they’ve done something different with the same principle, right?”

  “Yes. We think they’ve bombarded our wall slabs with enough high energy radiation to reduce its atoms down into a configuration of carbon, oxygen, and various other elements—into that of a person. And there’s something else. I recall you telling me that Charles believes he’s a nanite-bodied person, correct?”

  “That’s correct. Should he not?”

  “It’s almost certain that the process that created his mind is a copy process, not a transfer process. The nanite-bodied are made of nanites, but unless they’ve discovered something about consciousness that we don’t know yet, then the person that served as the template for Charles’s mind is still living his own life somewhere beyond our walls.

  “What I am willing to admit is the possibility that the idea is for Charles and Samantha to go back out into nanite-bodied territory at some point and be transformed into nanite-bodied organisms. They would then, theoretically, be able to share the experiences of their time in the Reclamation in a way that is much deeper than any form of communication we understand. We know that they’ve supplemented verbal speech with digital transfer as far back as the war.”

  “Did they really expend a medium-sized fusion reactor’s worth of power for each of these events?”

  “If we’re right, then Charles and Samantha each took about ninety quadrillion kilowatt-hours.”

  “Yikes. Should I be getting myself tested for radiation exposure?”

  “In the experiments, the radiation had to be very focused, and the metaxic field acted as a sink. The wall slabs absorbed all of it. A test couldn’t hurt, but I suspect you’re fine.”

  “Good to hear. Thank you for contacting me directly, doctor. You’re right that we need to be careful about how we roll this information out, especially now.”

  “No problem. Is there anything else I should look into while I’m in Citrine?”

  “Not that I can think of. I hope the scientist on your team is on the mend.”

  “That has yet to be seen. He took a club to the back of his neck. They tell me there’s a chance he’ll be paralyzed.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  “We’ve entered dangerous times. Take care of yourself.”

  “Will do. Thank you, doctor.”

  Dr. Anaveshan hung up. Sahaan passed the handheld back to Mr. Vitar, who had stood waiting patiently throughout the entire conversation. He took his leave and left Sahaan alone in bed to think.

  The nanite-bodied could have destroyed a wallslab or turned it into anything, really. And yet they had chosen to make it into a human being. And Charles was a copy. Presumably this Samantha, too. Sahaan was looking forward to meeting her.

  However, the matter of gaining the information to calm everyone down couldn’t wait the days it would take Samantha to remember anything useful to them. What he needed now was news of the search for Charles. His memories of nanite-bodied society were the one thing that had the potential to diffuse this entire situation. If they could just get him back.

  But how?

  ~

  Once his grandmother had departed, Sahaan returned to sitting together with his family in silence. Eventually, more adults joined the table, and his father struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to him. An older woman eventually arrived next to his mother, and even she began speaking as well, leaving Sahaan between the two of them to sit and wait.

  His parents had warned him that it might be like this.

  “It’s going to be a big event. There might even be media there. Your grandmother is famous, you know. If there’s not a lot to do, please just sit quietly. We’ll make it up to you next weekend. We promise.”

  Next weekend had better be that trip to the Central Library.

  Sahaan sat and let his mind wander off to the book he’d been reading. He’d had to stop at one of the most annoying places to leave a book—three chapters from the end. If he’d had his backpack, he might have even tried to get his book out, but it had been stashed somewhere by the concierge under his father’s name.

  He sighed, thought of his book, and continued to wait.

  Perhaps an hour or so later, a glass was rung a few tables away. The woman holding the glass introduced herself as the Parliament Majority Leader and asked for silence. She made her way up to a stage at the back of the room, where she took up a microphone, thanked everyone for coming, then began talking about Sahaan’s grandmother and all the wonderful things she’d done as a Member of Parliament. It was largely all stuff Sahaan had heard before from other adults—founded the Reconciliation party, then after a disastrous election twenty years ago, which resulted in eight years of a Guardian government, his grandmother had taken over leadership of Reconciliation in parliament, which had been the majority party ever since.

  ‘Reconciliation’ and ‘Guardian’ were just words to Sahaan. He didn’t know what they meant and wasn’t sure he cared all that much what their difference was. The fact was, they didn’t seem all that different to him. Everyone wanted to keep themselves safe from the nanite-bodied, right? What was all the fuss about?

  With a sigh, he joined in the applause when the speaker finished. A man took her spot on the stage and began another speech. This one was about specific things she’d done in parliament to bolster support for the Reconciliation party.

  Bored as he was, Sahaan managed to catch th
e applause for this one just in time, too. He yawned and rubbed his eyes, wondering if he’d even recognize the third speaker or not. When he looked up at the stage, he discovered his grandmother had arrived there.

  “Thank you, all of you, for coming,” she said. “It is a great honor to see all of you here today. My career has been… let’s call it eventful.” A small laugh went up from the crowd. “At times, I’ll admit that, in my heart of hearts, I was not entirely sure we would pull through. But here we are. Twelve years of Reconciliation government and the next election appears as promising as the last.

  “This election cycle, I will not be joining you in campaigning. I leave Zenith House in your hands. I leave the party in your hands, to carry us into the future.

  “Now, at the end of my career, I finally have a moment to look back, to reflect, to take stock of all that I have seen. Even some things that I have not seen. Recently, I had the opportunity to go much further back. My grandson, as it turns out, is enamored of stories.” She winked at him, and Sahaan jolted, eyes wide and back braced against his chair.

  “Taking a lesson from the wisdom of the young, I myself have gone back to the oldest stories about politics. One of our ancient philosophers remarked that, humans being social creatures, that there were many forms of human association—family, friends, business associates—but, he added, no association was more important nor even more noble than the associations created for the purpose of maintaining safety and prosperity within the city, the form of a social organization which was, at his time, the most complex one in existence. His word for city, polis, could be made into an adjective, politike, which he used to describe the social behavior most befitting a citizen.

  “Humbling words. I wonder how many citizens today would agree with the great philosopher that politics is the noblest human association.” Another small round of laughter. “No human being is perfect. This imperfection, ironically, is what we struggled so hard to preserve during the Long War. Our ancestors chose, in the face of relentless military opposition, to preserve the shreds of humanity they held onto.