Interrogation: Narsis
When my Suits bring the wayward agents in, Lisha strips them naked, bare, except for a blinder of organic mesh—try to rip it off and you’ll rip off your own face. You put the agent inside a filter you tell them is set to disintegrate them. Make them squat on their haunches until the muscles of their bodies shudder and they make those little mewling sounds, those hiccupping sobs of pre-language.
This is interrogation, body politic. This is my job.
I get names. Who took them off their meds, who turned them against Defense. Are you Opposition? Against organics? Who gave your orders?
It’s always the same name.
Keli.
Keli is afraid of three things, they tell me:
Needles, women, and knives.
But no one can find him.
When I get back to my room in the barracks, step through my own filter, it cleans me of agents’ blood.
Then I vomit into the sink.
I vomit every time.
I have more metal promotion loops in my ears than any of the other Suits. I’ve been on oral meds and injections for years. Helps with the job, Defense tells me. They bred me to do what I do, they say, and the meds are perfecting me for it, they say, but I don’t feel perfected to it. I feel obligated to it. There’s a difference.
Then one day we start losing our systems. Me, Flire, Mesta, and three of the other Suits. All of our case files come up empty.
Somebody calls in a click/agent pair to jack in and fix it. The click/agent pair—the agent dark and tall like a Suit, the click small and pale and too-thin—work for an hour. The agent jacks the click into my system and inserts his jack-in knife into one of the fleshy openings on the click’s wrist so he can translate for me. My system has crashed, he tells me; like a bird.
The next day, all the interrogation systems are down too.
Keli is having a laugh at us, I bet.
I go back to the click/agent pair. The agent trembles when I override the filter over his doorway. He starts screaming even before I touch him. I tell Lisha to haul out this agent’s click from the Kettering compound.
Interrogation. The only thing I know. When a new click jacks in and something else comes crashing down, someone needs to ask the questions.
She gives me a four-letter name, the same name: Keli.
I bleed the agent and her click across my boots.
I go home. I don’t make it to the sink before I vomit.
The summons comes after I interrogate the fourteenth of Keli’s turned agents.
Defense puts me in a dark little conference room with the bubble-haze of another filter over it, programmed to allow only us in. There’s a ceiling of twisted blue glass, and glow worms pulse inside of it, shedding blue-filtered light. Inside the filter, there’s only me and two Defense Suits.
I sit at a square table dipped in chalk blue.
They stand. They always stand. They’re bigger than even me, tall and broad-shouldered, black hair, black eyes. I can never tell them apart.
“You have the name of the one causing these problems,” the one on the right says, “yet you have not located him.”
“He’s outside the realm of my authority,” I say. Meaning he’s just a name. He could be anyone, anything, nothing.
Right says, “We have someone whose authority he may be more familiar with.”
Left pulls out a case file from the deep reaches of the black coat, sets the file at the center of the desk.
I pull out the blank pages, press my palm to the first page, watchwords bleed out.
“We’ve acquired a click from the Liberation of Jabow,” Right says. “We emptied the prison camps and brought back one of theirs. Ready to work for us now.”
I skim the text. He’s some genetic anomaly, splicing experimentation, forced starvation, selective breeding, but no organic technologies. No weapons breeding.
“I thought Jabow was a weapons-breeding compound,” I say. “I thought we were getting a hold of their weapons tech with that raid, not just some smart kid.”
“His name is Jan,” Left says.
“A click, then?” I say.
I look up into two pairs of black eyes.
“I can find Keli on my own,” I say.
Left and Right exchange black glances.
Right says: “You have three days to find Keli. After three days, the Council will have an end to this. It ends with the purging of Keli. Or the purging of you. You understand.”
I understand. I know all about spilling someone else’s blood to purge my own ghosts.
Disinterred: Jan
My face in the palm of my hand: I dream in chalky blues and red. I can’t eat, my throat won’t swallow, so they hook me up to tubing, drip drip drip.
I can see the strings around us all now; they’re silky, wormy, organic, just like the rest of their tech. They call it tech. I call it slavery.
I dream of cats, cats curling around me, warm, purring. Soothing me to sleep. I can eat again. Some soup. Suit soup. I like to say that out loud sometimes now, I don’t know why: a soup of Suits.
The nurse helps me out of bed and walks me to the garden. There’s a physical shield over the garden, she says, not an organic one, since their organics make me so sick. There’s a high wall around the garden. I can’t see over it. There are spikes at the top, long as my fingers, silver spikes. All of the plants are tall and big and leafy.
The nurse is afraid of me. No one else comes into the house. They are still leaving me books, Opposition texts. They want me to do something for them, to do what I did in Jabow before they destroyed everything, before I was put into the hole. But I still tear out all of the pages. I eat them.
I sleep and my dreams are cats’ dreams. I sleep all day, twenty-eight hours, sleep and I’m still tired. They have cleaned out the bacteria from the water, all of the water, in the basin and tub and toilet. My rash is gone. The boils have scarred over.
They are here.
I wake up. I am shaking.
I hear footsteps, a new voice.
A figure turning into my doorway, black, all in black, with skin of burnished brown and black black hair and black black eyes. It’s one of them. The Suits. They will burn this place down again, burn it down and twist me open …
The Suit looks at me. Her eyes are big, her body tense. “I’m licensed to interrogate you,” the Suit says. “Interrogation,” she says, louder.
“You are the one who stirs the Suits,” I say.
I see her hands shake. She puts them in her pockets. She is tall and broad like the men in Jabow who tried to destroy me, and her face is square and straight with lines at the eyes, there, just where they close. She has to close her eyes more than most people. I can see that.
But she does not close her eyes at me.
Systems: Narsis
He? It? War criminal. Prison camps. For how long they kept him there with the other prisoners in Jabow before they realized what he was, I don’t know. It wasn’t in the case file.
I should have expected him to look like this, skin over bone, hollowed cheeks, shaved head—looks too big for his body, a bobbing melon on a stick. But it is the eyes that pull me. Big, blue-green, with long, black lashes. That pairing, big eyes and long lashes, is boyishly coy; alluring, attractive in this emaciated body of which nothing can be boyish or coy.
“I am Jan,” he says.
I want to touch him, to see if he’s really alive. Can you be that skinny and be alive? Where do you keep all of your internal organs?
“Narsis,” I say.
The too-big head bobs.
Silence again.
“I’m told that you were bred by the Opposition,” I say, finally. “You were bred to be an organic communications hub.”
The lids close over the eyes, the lashes flutter. He looks at me again. I want him to keep looking at me.
“I studied systems,” Jan says. “The cyclical nature of universal systems. When you look up at the stars, you’re only seeing systems, complex relationships between bodies of mass identical in make-up, mutation and construction to the smaller internal systems within the body.”
She wanted to sell him he didn’t study systems, he was a system, but it was likely the Opposition never told him that.
I think about blindfolds and Lisha and broken bones, bruised bodies. Interrogation will kill this little bird. And he’s mad, broken to pieces.
“When you look out at the universe, all you see is yourself, looking in,” Jan says. “Cyclical systems. Abbreviated, simplified version. We were still working out the mathematics. And then they killed the cats.”
“The cats,” I say.
He is twisted up in his sheets so tightly I think he’s cutting off the circulation to all the limbs of his body.
He leans toward me as far as he can in the bundle of sheets and says, “Ask them about the cats.”
I am wasting my time. I turn to go, leave my back to him, stride to the doorway.
“You vomit afterward.”
I stop. I wait until I’m sure he’s not going to say anything else. I turn. He’s staring at me, little hands still fisted in the sheets.
“Ask them about the cats,” Jan says. He buries his head into the pillows.
I walk out into the hall, still shaking, and I have to grab onto the edge of the kitchen table to catch my balance. The nurse is talking to me. I can hear her voice, but it’s muted, distant, and I’m breathing too fast. I vomit
The nurse is grabbing me with her fleshy hands. She has a needle in her hand. I hate needles. She sits me down into a chair, and I’m still shaking. I ask for kaj, but when she gives me some I choke on it and spit it back into my palm, bloody red.
Liberation: Narsis
I sleep for twelve hours. All of my case files are on my crashed system, destroyed by the dirty click. So I chew enough kaj to numb all sense and go upstairs to ask for Defense. They give me two new Defense Suits and sit me down in the conference room.
The haze of the filter makes me dizzy.
“The cats,” I say.
The new Left and Right look at one another.
“They’re an unknown,” Left says. “We have as of yet to ascertain the exact nature of their function. The Liberation party found him with cats.”
“How many?” I say.
“Four,” Left says.
Right says, “The Liberation party found him in a steel room built into the ground and sealed in a steel escape hatch. Opposition put him there when their lines broke six months before, hoping to hide him until they could come back for him.”
“Did he eat the cats?” I say.
Right frowns at me. “Of course not.”
“The Liberation party killed them,” Left says. “He wouldn’t leave without the cats. We’ll give you the relevant case file.”
“My system’s down.”
“Get a click to store them for you,” Left says.
“I don’t work with clicks,” I say.
“What do you think he is?” Left says. “He’s their version of click, a system on his own, without having to jack in. He’s connected to everything already, or he was supposed to be, before we broke Opposition’s lines and they withdrew from Jabow. There isn’t a security measure we’ve devised that can stop him. He’s brimming with data. The identity of your troublesome rebel should be easy, if he could sort it from the rest.”
“But he doesn’t need an agent to direct and translate,” I say. “He’s both, then. Click and agent?”
“He’s something else,” Right says, glaring over at Left. “We’ll consult on how much information can be released to you.”
“We need you to take care of this,” Left says, slowly. “Your expertise in the area is … unmatched.”
They release another file to me. I don’t call in a click to store them for me. I take them to my room and spread them out on the bed. I press my palms to the pages, watch the text bleed out.
Jan, in a hole in the ground for six months, lying stagnant, forgotten, with food and cats and running water and no organic tech. It was all mechanized: electric lighting, water piped in through some kind of pump system. I don’t understand much about Opposition tech. What I see is Jan described as they found him: sick-thin, maggot-pale, lying in the center of a metal floor, surrounded by cats. The food had run out two weeks before. The Liberation party tried to move him, but the cats attacked them. “Four big cats, about four or five kilos apiece,” the report says. Jan started screaming and the Liberation party tasered the cats.
Liberation put him into a holding cell with the rest of the prisoners of war for three years until Defense realized what he was and pulled him out for experiments; only a handful of sentences about this part have bled onto the page, bits about neural activity and massive allergic reactions. Then they brought him to the Kettering compound, sealed him inside his own self-contained unit, and peeled all of the organic tech out of it to curb his violent allergies.
They sealed him in and shut him up, deemed him “mentally and emotionally unstable for any relevant study until recovery.”
I shake my head and push the files off the bed. I am chasing the words of a mad prisoner, and Keli is turning my agents, and Defense wants me purged if I can’t find out who he is. Three days. Not enough.
I try to sleep, but the dreams are bad. I wake up sweating, but cold, and I’m out of kaj. I lie in the center of my bed and nod off into a milky half-haze that passes for sleep.
Lisha buzzes me. I sit up and he’s standing out in the hall, just outside the sheer filter over my door. I hit the admit switch and the filter light turns green. He walks in, already neatly dressed, black hair slicked back. I check the time. Still six hours until dawn.
His hands are in his pockets, but it’s too dark inside my room to see the expression on his face. “Situation,” he says.
“Why didn’t you send me the data?”
“System’s down.”
“Your system?”
“Our system. The main system. The hub is down. Everything is down. The entire Defense building and the Kettering compound are blind.”
“Fuck,” I say, and inside my head, it becomes a litany: fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
I’m naked, and I dress in front of Lisha. He steps close and smooths the collar of my coat. This close, I can see his face, the hard, square jaw, the black bruises beneath his eyes, the slight curl of his upper lip. He is all planes and angles.
We walk into the belly of the Defense compound.
The com hub is bubbled by a filter and two Defense Suits stand outside. They motion me past, tell me I’ve got clearance, but my skin still prickles as I step through the filter.
Flire and Gri and Mesta are already inside, looking like they haven’t slept for three days. They probably haven’t. The usual hum of the system is absent, but the clicks are still jacked in all along the circumference of the room. Their agents, a dozen of them, stand at the operations console, answering questions from Gri and Mesta, translating data from the clicks.
Flire beckons me over to the entry shaft leading up into the glutinous tubular guts of the system.
“You found the altered pathways?” I ask.
Flire nods. “Come up and take a look at them,” she says. “It’s not anything I’ve seen before.”
She leads the way up the rungs of the ladder. There’s a platform at the top that overlooks the nest of system tubing, the nexus of the system’s brain. I step up next to Flire and she points out over the mass of greenish tubes to a dark, cancerous growth of black big enough to house at least three click/agent pairs.
“Someone’s been injecting saline into these spider veins the past two weeks,” Flire says.
“Can you read the signature of who did it?”
“You think this was one of ours?”
“Opposition doesn’t know our tech. They’d find a way to burn it or blow it up before mixing a virus. This is internal. We can trace the virus back to its jack-in point.” And from there, Flire could just go through the records of jacked-in clicks and see who’d been jacking in there the last two weeks. Easy.
“Narsis!”
I look down at the bottom of the shaft. “Message for you!” Lisha says. “Defense routed Priority.”
I climb down and Lisha hands over the blue Priority paper. Of course, it’s on paper—the systems are down, but for a moment I can’t understand why anyone would send me a paper transmission outside a Defense conference room.
I press my palm to the page, watch blue letters bleed out, only one sentence:
THE CATS SAY THE NAME ISN’T KELI.
Cold creeps up my spine, and despite the kaj I’m chewing, my hands start to shake. I don’t need to ask Defense who they routed it from.
I shove the paper deep into my pocket.
I tell Lisha he’s got first, just as Gri hands him a jack-in knife for printing.
“Location for recovery?” he says. In case I died on duty.
“Kettering compound,” I say.
He hands over the silver jack-in knife. “Drop this by there for printing, then?”
I take the knife by the hilt, slip it into my coat. I have an aversion for jack-in knives, but in this job, I must put up with many things I find abhorrent.
Dense as Blindness: Narsis
The nurse does not expect me. I find that odd since Jan can’t send transmissions on his own. All our tech is organic. Trying to send a transmission himself would have triggered another violent allergic reaction. He must have sent it through her, but she looks at me as an unwelcome annoyance, a stranger stirring her from sleep.
She takes me to him in her brooding way, and when I walk into his room I see that it’s dark. The cold comes back, creeping up my spine, across my shoulders.
“Jan?” I say.
The nurse pushes past me into the room, bringing a candle with her. Yes, a wax and wick candle, the likes of which I’ve only ever seen in ag compounds. She lights four or five more on the desk by the bed and I see stacks of texts there, actual paper texts that could only have been made by Opposition. We haven’t used that kind of archaic tech in almost a century.
He’s staring toward the window on the other side of the room. He is loosely wrapped in his sheets, so all I can see is his shaved head.
“You sent for me,” I say.
The nurse shuffles back out into the hallway, but I see her looking back into the room.
“Ask me questions,” Jan says, softly. “That’s what you do. You ask questions.”
“How do you know about Keli?”
“I am the world,” Jan says.
“What’s his real name? If it isn’t Keli … and how do you know?”
“We’re all just systems looking out and seeing in.”
I’m tired. Flire says she’ll have a jack-in point and sig pattern match in less than an hour.
“Did you ask them about the cats?” he says. He is still looking at the window.
“The cats are dead,” I say, too loud. “I can haul you down to interrogation, if it comes to that, but we’re running out of time.”
“Ask me about the cats,” he says.
I want to hit him and watch the melon head snap off the little bowed stalk of his neck and bounce against the wall.
I walk to the door.
I hope his fucking fat cats screeched when they burned.
I stop. I half-turn.
“How did the cats survive?” I say.
Jan bats his lashes at me. “The cats,” he says.
“You lived two weeks without food, there at the end. You were so emaciated you couldn’t move. But those cats were strong enough to attack the Liberation party, and they weighed in at four or five kilos apiece.”
He smiles, and it’s eerie to watch him smile, the skin of his hollow face stretched tight, the leering death mask. “You don’t see any strings, do you?” he says. “All those metal loops, but you’re blind. We are one thing, one system. What’s theirs is mine, mine is theirs. Symbiosis. One thing.”
“Why did they leave you in there with cats?”
“I wasn’t doing well with people. I had to make connections with other living things. Share information, and matter.”
He existed as a communications hub, incapable of interacting with human beings, so they tested him on cats?
“You’re not functional,” I say. Jan’s outdated, but even outdated, he’s linking things, he’s linking to people, he’s sending me messages even though he’s sitting here with no organic tech … no tech but himself.
The words are out of me already, “Keli’s a system. Like you. Only he works.”
Jan squirms in the bed. I imagine him purring. “You’re not so dense as blindness.”
“Where is he, this system?” I say.
“He’s afraid of you,” Jan says.
“Everyone’s afraid of me,” I say.
I am disgusted with him; this broken, mad thing.
I leave him.
I walk back to the Defense compound, back to the stir of Suits, and I’ve chewed so much kaj that I’m having trouble walking. I keep putting out my hand to the walls of the corridor for balance, but all I can feel is the pressure, yes, there, and I think that means I’m real, I exist, but I’m not sure.
Flire, Gri, Mesta, and Lisha are all waiting for me. Lisha’s at the doorway of the interrogation offices when I come in, and he’s immediately at my right hand. He knows. My lips are blood red with kaj.
“Sig pattern match,” Flire says and hands me the system read-out she and Gri and Mesta were huddled over when I came in. I press my fingers together, hard, on either side of the read-out to make sure I won’t drop it.
“System’s up again?” I say
“For the last half-hour,” Gri says. She barely comes to my shoulder and the lines on her fleshy face are still shallow. “A couple of click/agent pairs rerouted through backup pathways. The central core is still down for at least another three days. It’s running a lot slower, and Defense is still issuing physical Priority notices for another four hours.”
Flire says, “Lisha had Gri and Mesta pick up the click whose sig matched the one at the jack-in point. We also contained the agent. They’re in interrogation room 101.”
The click is naked and blindfolded in the cell, and his hair is white, cropped short. He has fleshy openings on his wrists, the back of his neck, and the base of his spine for hooking up with agents and systems.
“You have background on him?” I ask.
Lisha looks at me out of the corner of his eye. I realize it’s all probably on the read-out in my hand.
“Usual for a click,” Lisha says. “Raised in the compound. Pelan’s his first agent, and her Suit overseers gave them a long-term pairing.”
“How does Kel feel about that?”
“He’s a click. He’s not allowed to feel anything about it.”
“So we have breeding records on Kel going back to the breeding compounds,” I say. “We have a mixer’s report detailing his mixing, conception, and birth?”
“Just like every other click,” Lisha says.
Something isn’t right.
“Relationships with any of the other interrogated clicks?”
“All cressin clicks, including this one. All tailored to work on the main Defense system hub.”
“We know who their mixer is?” Clicks are made in batches.
Lisha pauses. It’s something none of us thought of before. I don’t know why. The connection feels obvious now.
“There are about six different mixers for the cressin clicks,” he says. “The sig patterns of these ones … it’s a familiar sig combo, I remember it from Ethics. Their mixer is, what, the foreigner—Trist.”
“Trist mixed all these agents?”
“I have to look into that. Agents aren’t tailored for specific ops like the clicks were.”
“Go get Mesta and Gri working on it, see if you can find a way to link them. Run cross-referenced patterns on the Defense database.”
He walks back out into the hall.
I step through the bubble filter. The click flinches.
I squat down a couple of feet from the click. “You know why you’re here, Kel?”
He cringes from my voice.
“I do what Pelan says.” He’s shaking.
A common click defense, blaming actions on an agent, but all it means is that if the agent’s purged, so’s their click.
“She says Keli told her to do it, in her dreams, in one of those rooms,” Kel says.
I stand and nearly fall again. My legs are shaky, half-asleep. I need to stop it with the kaj.
Lisha pops through the filter. Before I can say anything, he pulls me out of the filter.
“You have to see this,” he says, and he takes me back into the interrogation offices. Flire is there, standing over the main system screen.
“Narsis,” she murmurs, but she doesn’t get anything else out because I’m already there, pushing past her, gazing at the screen. There are names. Names of mixers, Suits, Council Members, agents, clicks.
“There are links,” Lisha says. “I programmed the system to look at them, thinking about what you said, about the mixers of both being the same.” He points out Trist, who mixed the cressin clicks, and the woman who mixed Trist, Gell, who mixed eight of fifteen of Keli’s turned agents and eight of the ten council members. One of the council members, unnamed per the Privacy of Elite Act, mixed Trist and Gell, who were both agents first linked to five clicks now bound to eight of the thirteen agents sent into Jabow for Liberation.
“You say there’s more connections?” I say. “Were we … breeding people specifically for the liberation of Jabow?”
“I don’t think we were supposed to find these,” Lisha said. “The Council is all the way at the top.” As if I don’t know that, as if I’m too blind to see he’s only skimmed the surface of an elaborately linked … system corrupting our own operations.
I’m on the cusp of something, but right now these links are merely superficial. It doesn’t mean anything.
“I have to go back to Jan,” I say.
I’m shaking, but it’s not for lack of kaj.
Catalyst: Jan
She comes back. She has to come back. We are bound together. We are one and the same, she and I, two halves of a whole, click and agent, in the crudest of terms.
I wait for her, sitting up in my bed, with my back against the wall. And finally, there she is, her form taking up most of the doorway. Her face is hardened into a deep frown, but instead of looking ugly, she looks strong. She, all that I am not.
“Tell me about the system, about the Keli system, and how it works.”
“Do you know what you are?” I ask.
“I’m an interrogator,” she says. “I’m a Suit.”
“What do interrogators do?”
“They use any means necessary to get the answers to their questions.”
She steps closer to me, comes to the end of the bed. She is trying this time, trying to understand more than she has the other times.
“You were once an agent,” I say. “You’ve been part of a click and agent pair. You became a system.”
“I became part of a system,” she says, “yes.”
“Then you weren’t an agent anymore. You became a Suit. How did you become an interrogation Suit?”
“I was bred for it,” she says. “Being an agent was just passing through one stage to another. All Suits have to go through it. Defense had me pegged for interrogation from my mixing.”
“Who was your mixer?”
She hesitates. I can see her thinking it over, trying to make the connections.
“One of the Council Members. He’s a Council Member now, I know.” She pauses. She sees the connection. “He’s the same one who mixed Gell or Trist, isn’t he?”
“Why send specifically tailored clicks to the liberation of Jabow?” I say.
“To retrieve you,” she says, and until that moment, I didn’t think she would phrase it that way. The world has stopped for me since I last saw her.
“Opposition doesn’t believe in organic tech, but you’re as organic a tech as they come,” she says.
“So whose weapon am I, Narsis?”
Opposition: Narsis
What is Opposition? Have I ever really known? Has anyone ever sat down with me and given me a definition? Opposition has always been just that. They don’t believe in organic tech. They want the resources that we want. But no one says what the Opposition looks like. By the time Liberation parties move into Opposition areas, the Opposition is always gone, pushed out when their mechanized lines break.
We … We, Keli, tailored people to retrieve Jan.
Our weapon.
What is Keli? He is Opposition. What is Opposition? Opposition is us.
I look at Jan. He reaches out to me, one skinny hand escaping from the bundle of sheets.
I am numb and trembling, but my fingers twine into his. A burst of green webbing moves across my field of vision.
We. I. We:
We, system totality.
Jan reached for her.
We.
She broke. I’m broken! He heard her and he called out and she could not hear.
We are going to die alone and apart, broken, rent, twisted. We’ll die alone if we don’t come together.
She does not fear being alone. She fears coming together.
I fear.
I deny.
We, system totality … No.
No.
Me. Strong, singular, apart, complete.
I need no one and nothing. I am no one and nothing.
We. I. Me.
I.
Alone. Singular. Complete.
“I don’t need you!” I say, and he falls away from me.
We liberated our own fucking weapon.
I won’t become one, too.
I sit down on the end of the bed. I feel like something heavy has been dragged over me. I am watching agents pissing themselves. I am watching myself cutting out their tongues. I’m waking up alone every morning and vomiting in the sink after every interrogation, believing I’m cleansing out the dregs Defense couldn’t get to, Defense couldn’t control. I’m watching agents chew off their own fingers and make alters to their dead clicks for the whim of Council members who can’t live without an Opposition.
“What are we, Jan?” I say, and it comes out garbled.
He worms over to me, still wrapped in his sheets, and he tries to touch me again, but I pull away, and I see that he’s crying.
“We are their monsters,” he says.
System Totality: Narsis
“I’m going to be purged, Jan,” I say.
He is sobbing now, and the sobbing wracks his whole little body. I have never despised what I am, who I am, like I do now because I cannot touch him, I cannot stay. I will leave him like I have left everyone.
I stand on shaky legs.
I leave him.
I leave him and he is still crying, and the nurse watches me go and her eyes are so very, very black.
I don’t want to go to Defense now. I want to sleep. But when I finally get to my narrow room, Lisha is waiting for me inside. I left my filter on green. The room is dark, but there’s pale orange light coming in from the globes in the hallway. He is sitting on my bed, and he stands when I enter.
“What are you doing here?” I say.
He pulls a blue Defense Priority paper from his coat pocket and hands it to me.
I open it up. It’s a missive with my tag number on it:
GREEN THREAD
“I didn’t know what it meant,” he says, “so I came down here to meet you.”
“I didn’t send that,” I say.
“What happened?” he says.
“I’m going to be purged,” I say.
“Narsis—”
I laugh. It comes out a bark. “If I tell you about the case, they’ll purge you too.”
I sit on the bed, run my hands over my face. With my hands over my face, I don’t see Lisha kneel in front of me, but I feel the pressure of his face against my thigh. When I look down, I see him kneeling on the floor, pressed against me.
I hesitate. Then I rest my hand, gently, on the back of his neck. I close my eyes and bleeding agents dance behind my lids, clicks with missing fingers. I see Lisha shoving ear mites into agent eardrums. This is our job. This is what we do. Interrogation, body politic.
And it was all just someone’s joke. It was Us and Opposition, fighting no one but ourselves.
“Goodnight, Lisha,” I say, and take my hand away from him.
He stands and walks to the door and leaves the Priority paper on the floor. He does not turn before he leaves. He says nothing. I wonder if he saw the same things when he closed his eyes.
Defense sends me a summons at dawn.
My system is functional now and wakes me up, displays the message:
INTERROGATION ROOM 101 DEFENSE SUMMONS IMMEDIATE
I am still dressed. I walk down to the interrogation offices and palm open the door. The offices are empty.
I sit at one of the system consoles and wait. I don’t want to go into room 101. I know I am waiting for someone who is not yet here.
A shadow appears at the door. One figure. No more Left and Right.
She is thin and wiry and wears black. Her hair is sandy brown, topping a lean brow, narrow face. She slips into the office and hands me a blue Priority paper.
It has my tag number on it, identifying the sender:
I FOUND KELI
I stare at the paper.
“I didn’t send that,” I say, but I did. Of course, I did.
She smiles, and the smile crinkles the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.
“That’s your tag number, Narsis,” she says. “You’ve done well. We’re happy with your progress, but it appears there’s one last obstacle in the linear progression of your education toward becoming a complete communication system, unbound by mechanical interference.”
She leads me to room 101.
I expect everyone to be in that room. I expect agents. I expect clicks. I expect Lisha. Flire. Gri. Mesta. I expect all of them.
But she pushes open the door and there, inside, without a filter, is my twisted little bird.
Jan sits in the center of the floor, tearing at the organic mesh blindfold on his face, squealing and whimpering. He is naked, all limbs, just a broken stick, nothing substantial.
“We had to kill the cats, of course,” the woman says. “We locked him down there long enough to form a bond that became a linking system. Rudimentary, incomplete. He was never fully functional.”
I stare at Jan. I can’t stop staring because I can’t bring myself to move.
“When we killed the cats, though,” the woman says, “it released him, so to speak. There was a great deal of initial turmoil, of course, hence the imprisonment, but we were confident we could bring him here and get him to bond and train his replacement.”
I realize I haven’t had any kaj for over four hours. I am not numb, I just have a pounding headache and the sickness in my gut has gotten worse, not better. Some part of me knows I’m supposed to be connecting things, but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t because if I do … oh, fuck, oh, fuck if I do …
The little woman looks at me, smiling a little as Jan whimpers on the floor, tearing at the mesh on his face. I want to tell Jan to stop pulling on it, to leave it alone.
“I’m Keli,” I say.
“I know,” the woman says. “We gave you your orders. Now it’s time for you to become more. It’s the kaj that’s held you back. We didn’t anticipate your addiction. You learned how to connect with our systems and sabotage them, Narsis. Jan’s your catalyst, just as the cats were his.”
“Stop pulling at that thing, Jan,” I say, finally, but he’s still pulling, and I can see blood at the edges of the blindfold where the skin is detaching from his face.
The woman steps toward me, rests a hand on my arm. “You’re my system, Narsis. My perfect system. Who do you think drew together all those invisible system strings and tugged those agents into doing Opposition work?”
Me. I did it. Me.
I am afraid of needles, of myself, of jack-in knives. I wear steel-toed boots. Glass ceilings. Green thread.
“Narsis?”
I am a weapon of the Opposition. I am our weapon. I turned the same agents I interrogated for turning. I’m as mad as Jan. A mad little bird am I.
“You’ll never understand the nature of our conflict,” the woman says, and when she smiles, I see my own face, the face of an interrogator, she with a license to question, to hurt.
I hear Jan scream. A long, long scream that turns into a howl. He has pulled the mesh off his face. He’s pulled the skin of his face off with it.
He holds his face in the palm of his hand.
I want to burn this woman and watch the country smoke. I want to unfurl the world and repaint it.
I can do none of those things.
I walk to Jan’s tortured body. Blood oozes from his skinned face. He’s missing bits of his eyelids.
I pick him up.
“What are you doing?” the woman says.
“Finishing,” I say.
The woman smiles.
I carry Jan. He is not heavy. The woman does not follow us. I walk and walk, into the belly of the Defense compound and out, down the long curl of walkway into the Kettering compound. We go through a filter, but Jan is listless, and he is oblivious to the red welts that begin spiraling out across his torso, down the lengths of his arms; his body’s reaction to organic tech.
I walk past the vast tower of the compound, up to the spiral of residences on the hill, to Jan’s prison. The gate is open. The nurse is gone.
Jan has his hands curled up into fists. One fistful of my hair, the other fistful of my coat.
I take him to the bathroom and draw lukewarm water into the bath. His blood is on my collar, my face.
“I’m sorry,” he says, but I don’t know what for. What could Jan be sorry for? We were made. We did not create ourselves.
The loss was mine, though. I could have joined him. If we became our own system when he reached for me, we could have fought them. But that would mean giving up myself. I would rather destroy the world than myself.
When the tub is almost full I turn off the water and place him in the tub. Water sloshes over the lip.
He closes what he has left of his eyelids and his body lies in the water, languid. He does not struggle against me. He does not question me.
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
And I say, “I’m sorry they killed the cats.”
I press him gently beneath the water. One hand on his chest, the other on his head, and he opens the bloody bits of the eyelids then, and the big blue-green eyes stare up at me from the shimmering surface of the water. Air bubbles leave his mouth, his nostrils. We stare at one another through the surface of the water. Me above, him below.
A system, apart.
He does not struggle much. He has no strength left to struggle.
I leave the drowned body in the tub and walk out into the front garden, back to the gate. From there I stare out at the Kettering compound. The woman will come for me, her perfect system, without Jan. She will take me off the kaj and I’ll be able to feel everything, see everything, be everything, then. My twisted bird is dead, leaving me and the rest of this twisted world.
I take the silver jack-in knife from the inside pocket of my coat, the one Lisha wanted me to send for printing. I go back to Jan’s body because there is nowhere else to go.
I sit next to the tub. I cut away all the threads.
It is my blood across my boots.