In the blue sky Orion lets go, for a moment. Different paths open before him. There are many people passing in all directions between them and the rail station, a busy day expanding, their bodies just like particles to the universe. The light is hard, casting shadows and silhouettes. Day has gone just a little ahead of him. There is a big man, with long black hair, off in the crowd, and for a second he thinks it is Azad. When he looks at Orion it is clearly not him. This guy is much older. He walks off.
Faith enters a long, curved hallway. The high, arched wood paneling is lit by crystal spheres, hanging on long, thin gold chains. It is known as the Hall of Eyes, circling the Iris. Faith goes alone now, formal, a long white coat over her clothes, down this whispering corridor. A spiral stair disappears into the polished wood wall. In one of dozens of enclaves she removes her workcoat, hanging it on the tall chair. Taking a seat at her desk, she dons a wireless headset, ocean blue, which she has customized with manga tentacle stickers.
First there is nothing as she closes her eyes. She relaxes her mind, focusing her thoughts. The AI systems sense her, analyzing the patterns of activity in her brain, locating thoughts that match personalized templates in its command database. A message writes out in electric grays, streaming text in her closed eyes. It is literal only in her mind:
SEA[ D3[ 09:00:00 ; 50392.- ; 65087.- ; 3’5 ; Orion]]
Prophets, deeper in the compound, compiling her coded request from independent mainframes, return identical results to her, only seconds later.
1[ subject: Orion, RWYLH]
2[ object highlight: 99]
3[ temp: -22]
Add Parameter?
She thinks: MAP[ VIS[ RAI 15’ ; VEC: His eyes]]
Vividly, but in grayed colors a scene is crafted, projected into the theater of her mind’s eye. In layers it comes into focus, inducing a touch of vertigo, as if she were no longer at the enclave. Orion lay horizontal. He wears a jumpsuit, blue, blackened, burnt. His eyes and mouth are closed. It is one still, almost monochrome frame, and so it is not surprising when he does not breathe. The room is otherwise empty. Its smooth walls fade to black fifteen feet from Faith’s view. He lay on a metal cart. Medical tubes trace from his wrists to a canister and mechanical device beneath him. They run with a silver fluid.
The Prophets’ request is psychic, gray:
New Parameter?
SCAN[ 08:00:00 – 10:00:00]]
MAP[ VIS[ RAI 15’ ; VEC: Harmony]]
A series of images begins to appear, like a dream from an old movie projector, almost instantly.
In a scene like transparent animation cells overlaid, Harmony is rendered as a blur of motion, hooking from the corners of her trailing raincoat to her black silhouette, ending at the door. In the center of this activity she stands still for many minutes, and there the thin white oval of her face is clear, her cheekbones, as with her dark eyes. One of her hands extends, pale as a ghost, from these midnight shapes.
CLR, Faith thinks. The image scatters.
There is a question in her mind, a fleck of dust to her like a shadow on the sun. Pain comes with this, a yearning in her tired heart, bearing sharpness, weight. Guilt’s a cancer, and an obsolete concept, she thinks. A relic of poor circuitry. Why can’t I get rid of this pain? Time. Choices gone before I would ever see them. If I hadn’t known? If I hadn’t warned him at all?
When she thinks about Orion even in this moment it is with reverence. With his intuition, his drive, Orion is the lit urban day, immortal. When Amber was around he always had a book in his hand.
Last night, hours before the decision came down from the Judge, the Interpreters knew well what it would be: The laws of Competitive Exception apply. Orion is aware of his fate. As soon as the Iris highlighted the object, it was a breach of protocol for her to see it without oversight, but it was inevitable still that she would.
She thinks, RENDR ANIMATE[ NOW]
Deep in the Iris is a dark, large room. Prophets wear black suits with white dress shirts and blue ties. They are plugged into their screens, with bloodless lips under headsets. Translating Attractor data into the shapes of reality, locating specific elements in that sea, and linking these together, chaining hypotheticals, is their life. This is why the first Attractors—prototyped in secret in 2019, closely following the discovery of the Unified Theory—were hardly more than novelties. Therefore crime in most of the world did not end until 2043.
Four thousand Prophets watch the Iris of Halcyon. Their minds are augmented with electronic circuits. Thin tubes run from their pant legs into the floor. Their emotions are offline. They serve like an optic nerve, without which the Iris is but a dead receptor—the many Interpreters a deaf cortex.
The Attractors are learning at every moment, adding to the World Database, evolving. In this massively autonomic system, billions of commands are sent daily without any Judges’ oversight. Human Prophets cannot maintain that pace. They need not. Society has been stabilized.
Still the Iris and its Prophets are constant in their analysis. They live in the future, experiencing so many hypothetical worlds, cyberpaths chatting through instant mail and groupspeak. Their curiosity swells as tomorrow unveils, in zeros sparking ones that move with flesh and blood.
One of them reacts out of rhythm with this room. She leans back into her form-fitted chair. Tension reveals in her shaking, bony hands, feeling for a release on the sides of the black headset.
The chair responds with a hiss of pressure released. Detaching from her wrists, tubes retract into holes. She bleeds, small trails. Finally, the headset lifts away.
She stands in the half-light, unsteadily bracing on her chair. The room is very dark, dimly lit by electronic screens. Illegible without the headgear, they give a faint yellow glow. Seventy-nine Prophets sit, half-whispering, at their stations. She takes a small pencase, or something of that shape, from her desk and puts it in her pocket. As she takes a step away from the chair her posture straightens. In the round halogen, her bony, emaciated arm scarcely casts a shadow.
A tangle of light hair runs down her back, spilling open, long to her hip.
Through an automatic doorway she passes into total darkness, continuing forward slowly as if sleepwalking, conscious for a time only of a steady descent. One by one, her steps eventually fill hours.
Brightly, a young girl lies in the grass, on a long hill under thick skies, an inch of snow gathering around her, layering on her chest. There is blood trailing from her hairline. Icy feathers protrude from inside of her loose raincoat. A man in black rises behind her.
A man with long dark hair waits at the terminal for a railcar that runs late.
The Prophet keeps going, coming into a new light. She is blinded suddenly by the expanse, but this does not stop her.
As her vision clears she finds that the apparent sun is but a steady glow, cast through ventilation shafts into a huge, dark, metal-reinforced stone cavern. Magnetic rail conveyors cross her path overhead and on both sides, in many directions, over great stone ramps. Crates hover past. A huge windowed container flies by, like a yacht off in the dark, full of spidery metal. She keeps moving forward, walking barefoot on cold stones.