Kern’s laptop chimes twice and he stops mid-punch, the bag swinging crazily till he stills it with his palm, then sits cross-legged with the laptop in front of him.
He’s found that it’s best to read one book at a time. This month it’s Penjak Tharanawat’s Radical Thai Boxing, in an English translation now ninety years old. He’s on the chapter about elbow strikes, how to use them to inflict hematoma and concussion, or to cut the skin over the occipital ridge so that blood will blind his enemy.
As the laptop wakes he remembers the years when its game was the focus of his life, and once again regrets that he came to the game’s end. Even now he sometimes hopes that there’s another game, held in reserve, so far, but about to be revealed, but if there is, there’s no sign of it today, just the usual hierarchy of the folders of the laptop’s library, which is infinite, or might as well be, containing, as far as he can tell, just about all the media that had been published as of sixty years ago.
There’s a samurai manual that has the maxim While you sleep, your enemy trains, and for a moment he’s afraid he’s being lazy and should go back to the bag, though his hands and shins are an agony, but no, it won’t do, hard training is one thing but overtraining is another; the laptop has documentaries about professional fighters reaching back centuries and he’s seen what can happen when they spend every waking hour in the gym, how their bodies stop working and in the ring they’re slow and stumbling and they end up sitting on the curb after their fights wondering how they could have lost when their commitment was total.
Before returning to Tharanawat, he indulges himself by bringing up a video clip, apparently made by a tourist a century ago, of a waterfall in the forest on a mountain in Japan in whose icy flow Miyamoto Musashi had once meditated. Musashi was a ronin, without teacher or attachments, and flawless, fighting sixty duels without losing once as he wandered penniless through the wilds of ancient Japan. An ascetic, Musashi, beyond fear or desire, indifferent to women, money, even survival. As the clip plays, Kern tries to clear his mind, imagine the force of the waterfall’s torrent.
* * *
He’d found his laptop in a landfill some six years ago, not long after coming North, in a deposit of fragmented wine bottles, its black plastic chassis held together with frayed translucent tape. He’d slid it under his shirt, before any of the other pickers noticed, and slunk back to his room to cherish it.
The letters were worn off the keys but the screen was intact, and a hand crank unfolded from the laptop’s side at the touch of a button, which was fortunate, as it was difficult, in the favelas, to steal electricity.
The old owner’s files were still on the disk. The emails were indented rows of symbols without meaning but there were also photographs, thousands of them, flash-frozen moments from decades of a life. The photos were dated, and Kern, able to read numbers a little, figured the owner, who’d been adult, white and apparently rich, must have died at least thirty years before he, Kern, was born. It was eerie, somehow, thinking of all these images sitting there on the disk as the years slipped past.
There were loving shots of a bright red antique sports car and a big house standing alone in a desert. There were snapshots of street corners and signage, probably in San Francisco, that he could almost place. There were groups of beautiful people smiling in the refracted bottle-light of bars and he wondered if their gaiety was affected, a reflexive reaction to the camera’s stare, or if there really was some stratum of existence where everyone was always this happy. Some of the photos showed women alone, abandoned to sleep under rumpled sheets, drinking coffee, standing at the rail of a boat. Sometimes they were naked, sometimes inviting, but it was never the same one for long, except for one, a blonde, who went away for years at a time but always came back, while the others went away for good, and he wondered what she’d been to him. One photo, the only one that had its own folder, showed the blond woman’s naked back as she waded into a dark river, just starting to look back, the densely tangled trees on the far bank reflected in the black water around her waist.
After an hour the laptop locked him out. He hit keys at random, hoping to get the password by luck, but on his tenth try the screen went dark. The injustice was galling—the laptop was fair salvage, its owner long dead, and he’d never find another. He wondered if it could call the police to report itself stolen, if they’d make an exception, for it, and come to the favelas. There were garbage pits nearby, or he could sell it, if he moved fast, but the laptop’s screen flashed, faded, slowly brightened—a gesture he’d come to recognize—and then it launched the game.
He played a small child walking through a dark forest. The eyes of animals gleamed in the shadows and when he approached them they would speak, but never in a language he understood. He found a glowing deer who spoke English, which he barely knew, then, and he couldn’t tell what it was saying. Finally he found an eagle sitting on a tree branch who greeted him cordially, said that it had prepared another world for him, and a better one, and to enter it he had only to walk around the tree three times clockwise and then climb up into the branches. (For a long time afterward he questioned the surface of things, hoping to find secrets by touching worn spots on high walls, turning silently in place when no one was looking.)
Clambering up, he found doors set in the trunk. There were other branches, higher up, but just out of reach—the eagle told him there were more doors there, but those were for later, and for now he had to do what was before him. Behind the first one he found a huge cave where brightly colored crystals cascaded in pulses down the slick wet walls from the darkness of the heights. We are here to learn the secrets of number, said the eagle’s disembodied voice. He learned by trial and error which keys meant which numbers, pressing them to match the number of crystals rolling down—bells rang, high and clear, when he got it right. He knew from the chimes high above when the crystals were released, and was waiting, poised, when they came clattering down, subsuming himself in the pattern and rhythm. The light well off of his room was brightening by the time the eagle told him that it was time to go, that he’d learned all he could there, but he was happy, in the cave, and the eagle said nothing as he played on until his eyes finally shut.
He woke to afternoon light with the laptop in his arms. He wasn’t hungry, and in any case it was safer to scavenge after dark. He found the child lying on a tree branch, kicking his legs, the eagle hunching his wings beside him. The next door had writing on it and wouldn’t open so he passed it by, the eagle watching wordlessly. The door after that opened onto a sharp jag of rock protruding out into a void of storms. Vast shapes coalesced in the cloud mass—letters, he thought, and when he pressed the right key the child on the precipice had to grip the rock against the surge of wind as someone spoke the letter’s name in a voice of thunder and the cloud shape flared into fire that turned to smoke and drifted away.
The next door opened on tree roots like long hills, rivers winding through the valleys between them. Craning his neck, he saw the trunk rising up forever, its higher branches fading in the blue of distance. There was a road carved in the bark, and ladders when the way turned steep, though by then it was evening’s last light and he could barely see the way. There was a wooden bridge over a canyon between immense roots and on the floodplain far below he saw the lights of distant houses.
He came to a cirque with a stone well from which there came a blurred muted song. A bent old woman emerged from the shadows, her face concealed in a black cloak, and as she approached the well the world darkened until they were alone in a circle of dim, sourceless light, the great tree gone, the night inky. This is the naming, said the crone, throwing stone tiles onto the well-mouth. Light rose from the well—peering in, he saw brightness occluded by rapid dark cloud. The tiles had shapes on them, letters, and made sounds when he touched them. He moved them, tentatively, considering—when he got the arrangement right the old woman said Sun! as a brilliant star shot out of the well, hung in the air, filled the sky with light.
He and the old woman called forth the world. Moon, clouds, stars, planets roared out of the well and took their places in the sky. Next they called up mountains, seas and forests, and animals to live in them.
The next door opened onto winter. Snow encased the trees, and smothered the hills, and the rivers were quartz. The silence was stifling. The stones of the path just protruded through the white. Nothing moved; he saw a deer, shining with frost, motionless. The wind, stilled, was a white scrawl in the sky. He found the old woman waiting by a waterfall frozen into intricate columns of ice. This is the changing, she said, and cast a handful of bright sparks into the air among the motes of snow. She showed him how to shape the sparks into letters of red firelight; when he’d finally arranged them into a word she said Break! and the ice shattered, its fragments falling down through the air. The waterfall’s roaring, the frigid water pouring by.
They set the flowers growing, the deer running, the wolves hunting. They made the sun rise and fall, and unlocked the wind.
San Francisco’s billboards and video screens had been masses of symbols without meaning, their pulses catching and holding his eye, but now he saw that they just wanted him to buy things. There were abandoned shipping containers by the Bay, with long chains of stenciled white numbers that seemed to float off of their aluminum hulls, and these numbers stayed with him, for it seemed they must be a code that would tell him where the containers came from, what cargo they’d carried through the world, why they were left baking in the sulfurous mud.
Graffiti was everywhere, all the gangs’ marks of territory and memorial. In the buried levels his flashlight found blocky, diamond-eyed skeletons clawing their way out of the wall, bony fingers stained with blood, uttering spiky words that, he found, proclaimed the valor of the Downtown Aztec Kings, which had a sadness, the Kings having been wiped out years ago in their war with MS-13, which had itself crumbled before the waves of new arrivals all determined to seize a piece of the limited markets in drugs and girls.
He dreamed of letters black as embers, crawling with red light, coalescing into words or forms with words’ sweep. At night he swarmed up the new walls to the empty lunar surfaces where no one had been but the drones who had built them; he wrote what he remembered of the dream’s afterimage with scavenged spray paint under wind-driven fog. The favelas were always rising, like hard clouds of grey stone billowing up, and he knew his work would be buried soon, but he liked to think of it, down in the concrete, abiding.
The locked door with the writing read Knock three times and enter, so he did, and stepped out onto the upper branches where the eagle was waiting. There were more doors there, and the child, who seemed a little older now, opened one onto a huge room where a fire burned in a hearth big enough to hold a car. The eagle said, This is the ancestors’ hall, and he saw that there was a thickly branching tree incised on the stone floor. A mirror rose up from the flagstones and the eagle asked him to write his name in its fog, but he stood there with his arms folded. Then the eagle asked for his mother’s and father’s names, but tentatively, and seemed unsurprised to be ignored. Finally it gave him a book of names from which he chose Kern, for its harsh foreign sound and because it meant “warrior” in the dead language of a cold island somewhere far away, and choosing a name seemed like a magical operation, as though his choice would give him strength.
The next doors opened onto games. There was one where stuffed animals chopped carrots and peppers and dropped them in pots boiling on a stove while a grandmother rabbit watched them from her bed. There was a garden out back with rows of flowers and vegetables. The grandmother seemed to be sick—the blankets were pulled up to her chin, and her voice was kind when she asked him if he’d like to help them make dinner, but he was already backing out of the door.
The next game was about designing clothes and making outfits, and the one after that was about digging tunnels in a mine; his attention was wandering and the outside world seemed closer but then the next door opened onto a steaming, snake-infested jungle where he picked his way down vines thick as cars to a derelict spaceport. Moisture dripped from the roof of the hangar onto the husks of shattered aircraft, covered in moss, long left to ruin. White orchids drooped from cracked fuselage. The steel blast doors were black and twisted, the concrete seared as though in unbelievable heat. In a corner of the hangar, under a thick growth of red bromeliads, he found an armored transport, treads melted, hull intact. The ancient metal clanged hollowly as, using the flowers for handholds, he clambered up. The hatch was sealed, but by it was a black plate with the outline of a hand—on impulse, he pressed his palm to it—the hatch sighed open.
Within the transport was a cavity full of shadows, rotten seats of padded fabric, and a crate painted in black-and-white camouflage. On the crate’s side was a long chain of stenciled alphanumerics, just like the shipping containers, and he wondered if they shared some secret affinity. Inside the crate, fitted in molded foam, was a gun—oiled black steel, the grip deeply textured, an old one, its mechanism so simple he could see it with his eyes—and a tablet computer in layered black armor. Machines within machines, he thought, and, perhaps, machines within those, and so on forever, and for a moment he remembered that he was playing a game, but then the tablet woke to life. We’re dying, said an old man with cheekbones, a soldier’s haircut and a fierce intensity. We’re dying, but there’s hope. If you’ve found this, if you have the courage to take up the gun, then we can still break the Shadow Clan, save everything, bring the war to the final chamber. Even if the spaceport can’t be saved—outside the transport the wind howled through the pierced, listing hangar—even if our army is scattered—birds called brightly in the jungle’s distance—victory can be ours—yours—if only you have the discipline.
There were explosions where the old man was, the lights flickering as the walls shook, the recording momentarily fading out, but he never stopped speaking of survival, of the need to improvise, how everything would be against him, how the Shadow Clan ninja were ubiquitous, unspeakable, an enemy out of nightmares. Find the final chamber, he said, and everything will be explained, but then there was shouting, commotion, a horrible metallic hissing—the old man turned, reaching for his sidearm, his face a mask of hateful determination, and the video turned to static.
* * *
He hunted them unseen through steaming deltas, glittering temples full of chimes, the ebb tides of flooded cities. The Shadow Clan, complacent, thought their enemies long gone. Their installations were like seashells, vast and full of symmetry.
The tablet guided him to long-abandoned vine-entangled depots. He levered open the sealed doors and found water, medicine, and, best of all, weapons, baroque and glorious, the neodymium laser and the Higgs cannon and the phased accelerator reflex rifle—he murmured the names, shivered at their power. They were finicky, though, hard to repair and harder to customize, their manuals in a dense, technical English that he spent hours picking through with the tablet’s dictionary.
He was holed up in a ruined military base by the sea, trying to make a water purifier out of scavenged parts, when the old man spoke from the tablet. There is no room for mistakes, he said. You’re hopelessly outgunned and have virtually no resources. The only one on your side is me, and I’m dead. God help you, boy. You’ve got the one chance, so make the most of it.
The old man’s gravity shook him. He hid the laptop and went out into the favelas but another epidemic must have come and gone because the boys he’d known had vanished, replaced with pinch-faced children who spoke in the voice of the deeper south.
The Clan’s ninja loved the dark so the dark became his hunting ground. Their grace was inhuman, fluid, wholly jointless. They turned to ash when they died, so he didn’t get a good look at one until he shot down a hovercraft and found the pilot trapped in the wreckage—its body was strangely formless, like a viscous mix of oil and coal; the jewels that were its eyes tracked the barrel of his gun.
He shot the struts out of bridges, loosed viruses in their reservoirs, launched missiles into the power plant on the cliffs above their city. With great effort he taught himself the mathematics needed to decrypt their archives, and then nearly despaired, for he found that he’d only been killing servants, that the Clan lords dwelt up the gravity well in eternal night and silence, their satellites an archipelago rising away from the Earth. The last and most remote, the Void Star, was the only point of light in a blank span of sky. The final chamber was there, he read, as he might have expected. It was a long way away, but at least he knew where he was going.
He stowed away on a Clan shuttle headed into low Earth orbit. The battles in the satellite’s cramped tunnels reminded him of the favelas’ density and confusion. In the satellite’s robotics dump he found power armor; its hull was cracked, but the tablet taught him how to weld it.
On the next satellite he met his first shadow lord and killed it in the dark. He took to waiting for the shuttles out on the satellite’s hulls, at home in his armor, staring up at the galaxies glittering coldly, the empty space where the Void Star glowed. By the tenth satellite he’d found his rhythm, though there was always an eeriness about them when everyone else was dead. Now and then the old man spoke from the tablet, but where at first he’d been encouraging now he was full of rage and obscenity, railing at him to purge the world, and finally Kern stopped listening.
In the penultimate satellite he stood on the thick glass of a porthole, looking down past his feet at the Earth, a brilliant coin in the night. His Gauss rifle clicked as it cooled from burning out the hive/core. He hated his enemies for dying and leaving him alone, but by then there wasn’t far to go.
The last shuttle was cramped, its elliptical walls complexly incised, as though it were purely ceremonial and never intended for use. He felt like he was falling as his destination approached.
The last lord of shadows stalked the empty corridors of his island in the night, howling to itself, raking the walls with its claws. When he had burnt its body with napalm (the lords, he had discovered, were prone to resurrect), he set himself to hunting down the surviving ninja—he found and killed the last one in a vicious struggle in the shuttle bay, and that was that.
The shadow lord’s jangling severed steel claw was the key to the lock in a wide spiral door that opened onto rickety stairs rising in the empty spaces between the station’s walls. He knew it was the end, and time to go for broke, so he dialed the Gauss rifle to MAX-AUTO as he crept up the dusty steps past structural beams. He was expecting to find a last horror lurking but the stairs ended under flickering fluorescent lights before a disconcertingly ordinary-looking laminate door on which was taped a piece of paper where The Final Chamber! was written in black marker. He gingerly took off his helmet, pressed his ear to the door, heard what might have been laughter.
He went in hot, bursting through the door, firing everything he had, or trying to, but his guns had become lifeless, and his missiles didn’t launch; he glided to a halt in a conference room in the middle of an applauding crowd. Thin carpet, office furniture and out the window blue sky and white thunderheads. Impression of men, white and Asian, and dressed formally, as though for an occasion, except for a few shaggy ones in T-shirts and sandals. From the ceiling hung a banner with CONGRATULATIONS! next to a logo like a stylized centaur. The old man was there, clapping steadily, but he seemed calm, and wore a suit like all the rest. The old owner, the man from the pictures he’d found so long ago, was there, too, looking decades younger.
He tried to draw his pistol but his weapons had vanished and so had his armor. A short man in a dark grey suit stepped forward and said, “This world was created for you, but now it is ending.” He explained that they were engineers who had designed a laptop to save children in the far reaches of the world. It was meant to be their school, to teach them everything, to draw them in and hold them while they grew. It would make poverty unimaginable, the relic of a barbarous past.
They told him their names and their titles in turn; it took a long time, but they seemed to think it was important. “Aaron Levy, data architect,” said the laptop’s former owner, who was handsome and distant. “Sol Eagleman, Chief Psychology Officer,” said the old man, smiling.
The short man said, “Keep the laptop for as long as you need it, but when you’re done with it, please give it away. It’s made to last, and it’s always looking for the next child to help. Meanwhile, there is a last gift, the final thing we have to offer.”
A door opened—beyond it were books, shelf upon shelf of them, receding into the distance. He said, “It’s all the libraries in the world.”