The Other

by Matthew Buscemi

  At least he could get behind his own party’s evaluation of how the country should act, even if he found their willful ignorance of certain key problems unnerving.

  Sahaan dialed Lachel’s number. She answered before the ring tone had even begun.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. Healing. Feeling better all the time. Turns out I was right about Charles.”

  “I saw Catherine’s message. What happens now?”

  “We decide how to contact them.”

  “There’s something you should know. Something that’s not on the news.”

  “Oh?”

  “Nishkap, Jaan, and I were on our way back from the store. There were people flooding out of the train station off of the trains from Adrine and Eline. They looked frightened, which makes sense. But there were also people arriving from the Bengine train. And they didn’t look frightened. They looked angry, intimidating. We hurried past the station and back toward home. I didn’t like how they looked, Sahaan. It worried me. And no one’s mentioning anything about it on the news.”

  The Adrine and Eline train lines would have been carrying people from Portal City, but Bengine was a spoke city.

  “Did they exit the train station?” Sahaan asked. “Did they actually come into Barine?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It looked like they were transferring.”

  “To the Adrine line?”

  “Yes.”

  Shit. “How much food and water do you have?”

  “Enough for about two weeks.”

  “Good. Stay inside. I’ll come for you as soon as I’m able.”

  “Are you still talking to Charles?”

  “He and I are taking a break right now, but I’d say overall there’s been progress. Catherine’s message seems to have jogged his memory.”

  “That’s good. There’s hope, then.”

  “There’s definitely a reason to be hopeful. Take care.”

  “We will.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Sahaan dialed Bharo as quickly as he could.

  “Heya. I’m almost ready to ask for discharge, so I’ll be seeing you—”

  “What do you know about spoke city residents boarding trains bound for Portal City?”

  “Nothing.” A pause. “Why?”

  “Lachel tells me that she saw a group of angry Bengine residents change trains at Barine headed for Adrine.”

  It took Bharo only moments to walk through implications. “Shit. I’ll phone the president.”

  “Think we can rally enough troops in the capital to keep the peace and prevent them from doing something stupid to the containment center?”

  “If we act now, probably. I sure as hell hope so. I better get going. See you soon.”

  “See you then.”

  Sahaan ended the call and pocketed his handheld. He scanned the circle of military personnel around him, looking for a certain individual he’d seen before… There! He waved to Sergeant Major Semaag and began walking toward him. He was able to move faster now but still needed the cane. Semaag decided to pass the nanite defense perimeter and strode forward, meeting Sahaan halfway.

  “Dr. Ekeer?”

  “How many soldiers could you spare from here, Sergeant Major?”

  “If I needed to, maybe two dozen. Why?”

  “We need to leave enough here to keep Charles safe, but all the rest need to get Portal City as quickly as possible.”

  “Is there an order from the president?”

  “Consul Bharo is talking to him now. You should have it soon. If there’s any preparation you need to do—”

  “Understood.”

  “Thank you,” Sahaan said, and returned to the stairwell while Semaag disappeared into the perimeter.

  Sahaan stood over the narrow stairwell. It lay now directly beneath the sun, ablaze and brightly lit at this one point of the day. He had his own battle to fight, his own part to play. He descended, one step carefully after the other toward the door that led to the hallway and the hallways that led deeper and deeper, past disused and broken computers, ancient technologies of defense. What was it all for? Had his ancestors fought in vain so that his generation could tear itself apart out of fear? No. He wouldn’t let it happen.

  Fear won’t win, he repeated to himself. Not in me, not in Charles, not in Lachel and Jaan, not in Bharo, not in his country.

  Fear won’t win. It can’t. Because that would truly be the end.

  ~

  Charles walked up the short flight of concrete steps to a newly decorated storefront a few blocks down the street from his apartment. Just a few days before the building had been an abandoned lot, but yesterday, as he’d been walking home from work, he’d noticed a new building had gone up, the front bedecked with tables and small chairs underneath large umbrellas.

  The sun shone down brightly, and Charles chose a chair beneath an umbrella. He worried only briefly about occupying a table before purchasing anything—only about half of them were occupied. At one sat a couple with a child, perhaps five years old, between them. An older couple sat across the way.

  Charles folded his arms and thought back through Going Nowhere as Fast as Possible, collecting and organizing all his thoughts.

  “Hey.” The familiar voice broke Charles’s reverie.

  Charles stood up. “Hey, Brad. How you been?”

  “Good, man.”

  They proceeded inside the cafe and entered the queue at the cash register.

  “I finished Going Nowhere,” Charles said. “My biggest question… He’s cagey about it. Does he really have actual, physical books?”

  Brad nodded.

  “So, he can read?”

  “I’m not sure, but that’s my opinion.”

  “When the pre-Break authors talk about libraries, my imagination goes wild. I mean, imagine shelves and shelves of books. Imagine being able to sit quietly and just think about stuff.”

  “We had more time for that before, too.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s the weekend now, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you know that the weekend used to be two full days long?”

  Charles shook his head. “When did that happen?”

  “Post-Break. Vestig forms of our organism required more rest—about eight hours of sleep every day. It wasn’t possible to work people more than forty hours in a seven-day span without fatigue taking its natural toll and impacting the quality of their work. Thanks to these supposed improvements, a hundred-hour work week is now the norm.”

  “I would be able to scan so many books if I had a full two days every week. That would be phenomenal.”

  “Don’t forget, you’d be more tired, too. People usually lost that time to just recovering from their work and taking care of their living spaces, which didn’t automatically clean and repair themselves.”

  They reached the cashier and paused to order their voltages.

  “So,” Charles said, “I guess my biggest questions remain around what to do. Wayland laid out all my grievances with what we’ve done to ourselves. It was kind of cool to realize I’m not the only person who thinks about this stuff.”

  “Yeah, I looked you up on the web. You’ve got an interesting background.”

  “You mean the physics part, right?”

  Brad nodded. They picked up their voltages from the counter, went to sit outside under one of the large umbrellas.

  “What can I say? I like solving math problems. Always have. But I also love stories. I found I loved ancient stories, too, the really old ones, like The Politics, but some authors weren’t available for direct download, and that’s how I found out about scanning.”

  “Slower, less efficient, but the experience of imagining is so much more vivid.” Brad grinned. “Think about what it would be like to read.”

  Charles shook his head. “I’ll bet the vestigs have libraries.”

  “Who kn
ows? Their culture could have become anything. Maybe they gave that up and went with optical scanning or direct download, too. You don’t need to change the whole human genome for that, just some simple implants.”

  “Sure. What do you think has happened to the vestigs? Are they staunch militarists backed by their parallel universe friends, or are their walls just waiting for a gate crashing?”

  “If you liked Wayland, then I think you know that there are, at least theoretically, other possibilities. Not that any of those are politically feasible.”

  “Like contact?”

  Brad nodded. “We’re making a lot of assumptions about what they’re like, and that’s based on what their ancestors were like, which was mostly based on the fact that we were trying to change them all into something they didn’t want to become.”

  With his next statement, Charles added an encryption key to their conversation. “What if it were possible to get a person inside the walls? One of us. But, in order to do it, the technology would become available to everyone. Even the hard left.”

  Brad jammed the voltage into his arm port. His words came with the signed encryption key attached. “Difficult question. How would this person get in, anyway? Are we talking about reducing someone to pure-biological? There are a whole host of ethical issues there—”

  “It wouldn’t really be someone here going there… It’s more like, a person would… come to be inside their walls. And we could give them the memories of someone here. That’s easily enough done since we have the SMEI.”

  “SMEI?”

  “The Standard Memory Engram Interface. It’s how we make and share memes.”

  “I see. So, theoretically, this would be a kind of biological person inside their walls, but with the memories of someone here.”

  Charles shrugged. “Assuming pre-Break brains can handle SMEI data structures. There’s no telling what they would or wouldn’t remember. For all we know it could make them completely demented.”

  Brad nodded. “I see. But then, assuming that this hypothetical process becomes available to everyone, then a bad actor could use it construct any kind of organism, like one that replicates nanites with its cells, or self-destructs, or introduces viral agents, or any number of nasty things.”

  “Yeah. That’s the conundrum.”

  Brad tapped his foot, his toes clanging against the bolts in the stone slabs of the patio. “Well, I’ll give you this. It’s a way cooler idea than the holographic messages that the Centrists are always going on about.”

  “Do you think that the risk is worth the potential reward?”

  Brad pondered that over a moment. “I don’t know. In our current political climate, it does seem quite risky. Just look at our president.”

  “It’s impossible to tell what would happen. That’s what makes it so hard—” He cut himself off, realizing he’d almost strayed out the hypothetical.

  Brad’s next words came unencrypted. “What do you like best about being a physicist?”

  “That’s easy. Solving problems.”

  “Anything you don’t like?”

  “The arrogance of some. Of many.”

  Brad nodded. “If I could choose someone to be our ambassador to the vestigs, I think I’d choose you.”

  Charles chortled. “Really? Me?”

  “Yup.”

  Charles plugged in his voltage. They’d talked a lot at the café Brad worked at, and now here outside of work, but what made Brad think that he’d be a good ambassador? Weird. Charles decided that if one day he did decide to act on Project Hermes, he’d find someone other than himself to be the memory template. His personality? It seemed potentially more dangerous than anything the leftists could dream up. And what would his memories achieve there? Solutions to physics problems? Knowledge of literature they already possessed? No, he would need to find a real diplomat to be the template.

  “What else are you reading these days?” Charles tried.

  “Lots.” Brad grinned.

  ~

  One of the most important skills Sahaan ever learned in politics was the ability to appear to make decisions definitively and effortlessly, even when his own thinking on the topic was fraught with indecision and doubt. He found himself in such a predicament now. If he stayed in Citrine with Charles, then he would not be able to help his administration with the impending political crisis in Portal City. However, if he left Citrine now, he could potentially do lasting damage to his relationship with Charles.

  He walked the halls of the Citrine military bunker slowly, to give himself more time to go over everything he knew, think through all potential ramifications.

  By the time he reached the door to Charles’s room, he’d made his decision, and although he wasn’t by any means certain that it was the right one, it was the one he would now stick to.

  Charles lay on his bed, impassive. He remained there, even as Sahaan’s cane clacked on the way down the stairwell. Sahaan sat in the chair at the table.

  “Why did Stok do it?” Charles asked, looking at the ceiling, his tone stoic.

  “Mostly he just wanted to go home. But the militia in Adrine, then it was just called A3, learned about Alterra’s walls from him.”

  “We blame him.” Charles turned himself, and sat with legs over the edge of the bed and making eye contact with Sahaan. “Even though it doesn’t make any sense. But it’s that moment in time. Everything seemed to be going fine. We were discovering amazing new things. We controlled the whole planet. Everything seemed like it was within our grasp. And then the walls showed up, and suddenly we didn’t control the whole planet. And suddenly, sub-atomic quantum mapping got infinitely more complex and hell of a lot duller, too. And the biosphere of perfect organisms we were working on… Well, Catherine already told you how that went. I— Or, the other Charles, rather, is a physicist. He got so massively bored with his work. Imagine, Sahaan, training for a specialized profession for over a decade, and then actually landing a job only to discover that your work consists of repeating the solution to ‘2+2’ in a trillion different ways. So, yes, the other Charles and I, we can forgive you for this. And I understand why you didn’t tell me at first, and I don’t blame you. But most of the Pinnacle will not react in this way. Only the Centrists, and maybe not even all of them, will understand. They will only feel that Stok Thiksay is when everything started to go wrong.”

  “Thank you,” Sahaan said. “For understanding and for explaining.”

  Charles took a deep breath in and closed his eyes momentarily. “How are you going to respond to Catherine’s message?”

  Sahaan pursed his lips. “Unfortunately, there’s another situation we need to address first.”

  “Oh?”

  “An internal problem. In Portal City.”

  “I see. So then, you’re—?”

  “I’ve decided to go back to Portal City, yes. Bharo will be here tomorrow morning.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “If you remember anything about the Pinnacle that I urgently need to know, wave at those cameras,” Sahaan pointed at the ceiling, “and tell whoever arrives. They’ll get me the message.”

  “The memories are getting better now. Though it’s so odd to know that it’s not my life. It seems to me as though I was there, especially as the memories get clearer.”

  Sahaan stood. “I have to get going.”

  Charles nodded. “Take care of yourself.”

  “I will.”

  Sahaan retreated up the stairs and out of the bunker wondering if he’d made the correct choice. There was a good chance that he wouldn’t be in time or able to help the Portal City situation, but he had to try if he could. He could also miss some crucial revelation from Charles. But he had made up his mind, and he had to project decisiveness and certainty, though his own mind was not even close to made up.

  When he’d gone far beyond the encampment perimeter, he dialed a cab. He was walking much more easily now, he realized. He almost didn’t
need the cane. He asked the cab driver to take him to the train station and watched Citrine pass by as the cab sped down nearly empty streets.

  Just under two weeks ago, he’d seen this same city through the windows of a cab on his way to give a speech, one intended to bring people together. And now here they were ready to explode at each other.

  Sahaan shook his head, and hoped his decided path was the correct one.

  ~

  Charles had only been on an airplane three times before in his life. All three times had been for academic conferences when he’d been in graduate school, activities which he had gladly dropped once professional life had supplanted academia. He supposed this trip was a conference of sorts, albeit a much different one than any he’d attended in the past.

  He looked out the window of his plane, watching the water below. From this height, it appeared a flat, static surface. So much water, stretching in all directions. It was comforting that this view, at least, had been untouched by humans and their nanite sculpting technology. It was, however, hard to ignore the glittering sparks of blue that passed through the air in the plane’s wake, an effect of the quantum slipstream technology that allowed the plane to exceed the speed of sound without creating sonic cacophony. Their trains utilized the same technology. Whole continents could be traversed in a matter of hours. One of the early wonders of deeper sub-atomic investigation. But now all the wonders were gone, and a physicist’s job was to complete a catalogue that insisted on belching up three new mysteries for every element they managed to completely document.

  “We’re beginning our descent into Eveling,” the computer pilot broadcast to each passenger’s mind. “The local time is ten-twenty-seven. We will be landing at eleven-fifteen. It is partly cloudy and eighteen degrees in Eveling. Please sit back and enjoy the rest of the trip.”

  Charles decided to take the computer’s advice. He lay his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. He tried to imagine what a person waking up inside the vestigzone would experience. They wouldn’t be able to call out for help over wireless. They would have neither wireless communication adapter nor receivers. They would have organs called a mouth, vocal cords, and ears. They would have to call out to others by vibrating air with their vocal cords. How would he make sure such a person could speak the vestig’s language? He could fill the ambassador’s mind with their writing (plenty of that remained in the Pinnacle’s archives), but how to give the ambassador the ability to speak it?