Manifestations (4 page)

‘There’s just one bit I don’t —’

‘No.’ He refused to discuss it. ‘At least not until I’ve had a chance to reread it. Why don’t you tell me something about you? Who were you?’

‘Don’t you know me, Abe? I was nearly famous. I used to be a singer,’ she joked. Gretel stood up and moved around the table, letting her robe fall open. ‘Let’s pretend that it might have been me you were listening to out there.’ She began humming the tune and sat on his lap, pulling his head to her chest. ‘Do you mind if I call you Colonel? Just this once?’

~ * ~

Stray thoughts brought data collations automatically to his queue. His wife, a new twenty-five, was living in a resettlement commune north of the old Hadrian’s Wall. Her stream was mostly silent. Would she be wondering about him?

After Pinter’s second month they allowed him to begin wearing a symbiot. In his first life he had avoided the machines, preferring a less invasive and easily removable option. He’d seen too many good men get rattled in the field when their wiring had fused, but with what he had ahead of him he would need the instant communication and the data overlay ability that modern Servicemen had. He couldn’t be less than the best if he was to stand a chance against Pierre Jnr. He needed to be fast and all-knowing and connected to Services as though it was another part of his body.

Now he was wondering why he had held back. After the initial learning period it just became a part of his brain. The same way he recalled memories, if he thought about something, or questioned something he didn’t know, the brain would recollect from the bot. Or rather, the symbiot gathered the data and pushed it into his synapses. It was dizzying magic. He was now technologically telepathic, he ruminated.

He began taking runs through the complex, testing the visual data overlay on everyone he went past. Their details and history were listed for him to read and process in a split second. He began to run calculations of distance, speed, trajectory and threat level. It was a shame that no one in the centre registered as a threat.

The doctors warned him to take it easy and for him and Gretel to reduce their sexercise, but they only laughed. They were young now after all. They lazed their days away reading, watching entertainments and making up some of their own; then helped each other reapply their healing gels.

When his memories overpowered his will, and he sank into those nightmares, Gretel lay with him. Sometimes she would distract him with a song, or a demonstration of how her flexibility was returning. Sometimes he would tell her about his dreams, though never the details.

‘Why do I feel that you know more about me than I do about you?’ he asked her one day.

‘Well, I’m not an historical figure like you are, and I’m not the one who keeps thinking about the past.’

‘I know. I know.’ He shook his head at himself. ‘Here I am reborn and all I do is talk about the past. Perhaps we should talk about the future?’

‘Is that some sort of proposition?’

‘Maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t know what the future holds.’

‘Well, now we are talking. Why did you get rejuved, Mister Scorpion?’ She took a seat on him as if he was a pony.

‘The usual excuse. The call of duty.’

‘You’re going back into Services?’ She seemed aghast.

‘I never left.’ He looked at her consideringly. It was impossible to see the decades of life lived in the young body and face. ‘What about you? Why did you rejuv?’

‘I didn’t want to die, of course. Isn’t that enough?’ She smiled at him and stroked his face. He felt calmer and happier when she did that. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be surprised. You’re Colonel Abercrombie Pinter. Of course you’re going back to Services.’

‘I have to. I helped establish the WU, I can’t let it be destroyed.’

‘Who’s going to destroy the World Union? The big bad Pierre Jnr?’ This time he didn’t meet her eye.

‘Really?’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘
Really?
That’s something I should be worried about?’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘You didn’t have to.’ She dug her hands into his ribs and tickled him.

‘I neither confirm nor deny these rumours.’ He barely got the sentence out before he wrestled her to the ground and kissed her. ‘Say you’ll come with me.’

‘Never!’ she declared.

‘Say you will.’ He kissed her again.

‘Maybe!’ She laughed.

‘Stay with me.’

‘Of course I will. I love you.’

‘I love you.’

Their lovemaking was interrupted by a cry from outside. They lifted their heads to listen and the cry was followed by shouts of alarm and dismay. Pinter tapped his symbiot and information began flooding in.

‘What is it?’ Gretel asked. She hadn’t gotten symbed with rejuv.

‘Something terrible is happening.’ There was a ping to his symbiot, a connection request from the Prime. ‘Excuse me, I have to go.’

~ * ~

Pinter was rushed through the final stages of the treatment. The last of his tape was removed, revealing pink new skin with blond hairs beginning to emerge. He was given a salve to apply every two hours.

A uniform waited for him in his room. As sepia as the past. Three pins on the collar.

He stood in front of the mirror and looked himself over. He couldn’t have been standing there long when the door chime interrupted his reverie.

‘Come in.’

‘Oh ... Abe. You’re leaving?’

He turned to her and smiled. ‘Yes. I’ve been asked to go to Busan.’

‘To that thing? What if it ...?’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll be far enough away.’

‘You had two weeks left of the treatment.’

He shrugged. ‘The Command is the Command, Gretel. What can I say?’ She was lovely in white drapery. ‘Do you still want to come with me?’ he asked.

‘Abe ...’ She lunged into his arms. ‘I was hoping you’d say that.’

~ * ~

I am I am I am.
His voice reverberated powerfully, echoing through the endless pale grey.
I am Musashi, defender of the weak and saviour of the helpless.

Actually he was just a junior angel, and his name was Zachary Frost. Like a garden, the Weave was maintained by a multitude of volunteers like Musashi. Clubs and scout groups whose members traversed every corner of the data looking for mistakes, infractions and data that had aged into falsehood. Most of the kids did it for fun, but Zach wanted to become a fully fledged weaver one day. Then he could move out from the orphanage he was in.

I am Musashi. Musashi the ronin. I roam the lands righting wrongs and aiding the weak.

Zachary didn’t really keep time in the way that other people did. His clock was always on and set to keep pace with the atomic standard, but it was only a meaningless measure of increments. The times it marked held no significance for him. As the clock changed over from twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes to zero zero hours, this reset — that represented the beginning of a new day — was just another digit changing over in his dash.

His days were broken up into four. In the morning he would rise before dawn, eat a quick breakfast and then spend four hours on the Weave scouting. After lunch he spent the rest of his afternoon in lessons and meeting with tutors before returning home, usually after dinner time, to spend another four hours online before heading to bed.

He was going for his stamina badge as an Angel Scout, which meant two solid months of reverse circadian endurance. For eight hours his stream flowed from node to node. Searching for minor flaws he could fix or flag: broken connections, syntax and miscodes he was allowed to solve himself; errata, beautification and redundancy must all be tagged for a more senior scout to investigate.

Since the manifestation, and now this black mass, there was a shortage of guides. The scouts were encouraged not to immerse alone but he was always careful. He stuck to known paths, and anything anomalous he came across he logged and moved past.

Zach had to process ten thousand connections per night. He normally started close to home, looking at the streams of the orphanage, the kids who lived there and the people who ran the place. They were okay, Lily and Tom, he’d checked them out before. Tom was an orphan from the Dark Age. Lily, his life partner, was from a farming family on the fringe of West. Together they had run a home for strays for over twenty years.

He tapped into the eyes in the dorm room and looked over the sleeping forms to see who was up, immersed in their stream or reading. Jenks was sleeping. Zach put an alert tag on him so he would be notified if he left his bed. He didn’t want that fusebrain sneaking up on him.

Zach needed a place to go if he was going to make quota. He checked the streams of Bronwyn and Gerty to see if they led anywhere interesting, but Gerty was just looking at celebrity indexes, ogling the images of singers, and Bronwyn was studying, she never went online. He pinged her as he went past, flipping everything in her dash upside-down and out of order.

Zach: Don’t stay up all night, Bron.

Bron: Don’t close your eyes, scoob. I’ll get you back.

I am Musashi. Prankster and funmaker. I am a rogue and taunter of silly girls.

There were many areas he wasn’t meant to enter and his stream would give him away if he did. A warning system would go off if he broke the rules. Though he could, potentially, mask a part of his stream and go exploring ... they’d probably find him out. So, the Dome was still off limits, Atlantic and the whole Cape was shut down, as was Busan and Korea and any platforms that might house streams from those areas. That left STOC as the next most interesting place to go and that was always forbidden to the younger scouts.

He was torn, should he go look? Someone had to patrol STOC. Everyone else was concentrating elsewhere, maybe STOC needed more scouts to do maintenance. The only thing was that Omskya was a freak show. He’d seen pictures that ran shivers down his spine. Even thinking about it made him feel cold and ... wet?

Wait a minute ...

Zach tore his headset off and found himself dripping with icy water. His clothes and chair were sodden and there was a puddle on the floor. He heard a giggle behind him and he leapt from his seat.

‘Come back here!’ he shouted and ran through the door.

‘I told you not to close your eyes,’ Bronwyn called back. She raced up the stairs and Zach was close behind when someone stepped into his path and took a hold of his shirt. He heard the door to the girls’ dorm close and looked up into the weary face of Tom.

‘Why are you running through the corridors in the middle of the night, Master Frost?’

‘Nightmares, Tom.’

‘And you are dripping wet because of ... fear?’

‘Ah, no. I, um, forgot to take them off before I showered.’

‘Is that so?’ Tom lifted his eyebrows almost to the bottom of his nightcap. ‘It isn’t because Bronwyn poured a bucket of ice water on you in retaliation for an earlier incident?’

‘Well, if you knew that, why were you asking?’ Zach said, sour about being played.

Tom looked at his arm for the time. He didn’t have a symb, just a passive interface. ‘It is late. If you are still aiming for that badge, I suggest you quickly mop up your puddles and get back to work.’

‘But, Tom, I’m soaking.’

‘And let that be a lesson to you.’ Tom smiled.

‘I’ll get pneumonia.’

‘Then it will be a lesson well learnt. Goodnight. Keep the noise down, please.’

Zach gave up and went back in. He’d get a lock put on the door tomorrow.

When he was immersed again, he quickly forgot about how cold and wet he was. In geographic mode, a parallel of the real world, he began looking for any area he was allowed to go. He dropped into Peru, switching to the visual realm, or actuated level, and began tapping through random shops and services. Here in the visual, people and places and entities could choose how to be represented. Zach was Musashi again, a wandering samurai, with a curved glowing sword and a helmet of burnished steel beneath which there was only darkness. This was the avatar that anyone in the visual plane of the Weave would see; running and talking and fighting. On the geographic level Zach was a dot that pulsed from his home in Sutherland with branches that reached to all the sites he was accessing.

There were many levels to the Weave or, rather, many different ways to look at the data. Visual was the most common because it’s faux physical nature made it intuitive for every user. There was also the code mode, or ‘weaver level’, where the actions he commanded with his thoughts, and minute movements, were written in trinary language. All three of these levels could be mixed to form a unique impression of him, showing the connections he maintained while online and who and what he interacted with.

He yawned. Musashi yawned with him and for a moment his visual representation was lying in a bed with a soft pillow.
No!
Zach snapped at himself.
Have to keep going.

~ * ~

Zach would have sessions with his mathematics, crypto and languages teachers today, after his weekly session with his scout master, Miles Lizney.

Miles Lizney was about four times Zach’s age, putting him close to fifty years old. This was what Zach surmised from his appearance. Observation was Zach’s new tactic. As yet Zach had learnt next to nothing.