The outside world is a sense of mass sliding by behind the town car’s darkened windows. Clink from the micro-fridge as the car corners; mouth dry, Thales opens it but finds nothing but two splits of champagne, one open and half empty, its carbonation hissing. As the car corners the crash seat tightens, pressing the gun into his chest.
He isn’t sure what he’ll say when he takes the gun out and points it at the surgeon—is there some form or accepted usage? In the stress of the moment he doubts he’ll be able to manage either the lyrical profanity of a gangster or the ironic detachment of a gentleman-at-arms; best, no doubt, to make his threats simply, and in his own words. He imagines the surgeon seeing the gun and instantly submerging himself in an immovable professional gravity while he, Thales, rants on disjointedly about cities in the waves and oracular strangers and his accelerating sense of losing the thread, and it’s in his mind to stop the car and toss the gun out the window but then he remembers Akemi’s suggestion that his mother sold him out which elicits a sense of emptiness so profound that he feels almost weightless and the imminence of violence no longer much concerns him.
There’s a succession of basso thumps, probably his brothers’ dance music with the volume turned low.
The map is gone from the seat-back display, replaced with an interface he hasn’t seen before, enumerating munitions remaining and hull integrity broken down by panel.
The crash seat seizes him so tightly that it crushes the air from his lungs and then the car clips something and, discontinuously, is spinning, and he wonders if here, right now, this is his death, and then there’s another impact, and the car has stopped.
Engaging, reads the display, and the car hums as the ammunition meters tick down, all at different rates, like stopwatches out of synchrony.
The enforced passivity is unbearable but the seat won’t let him go. Psychologically better if they at least give you the illusion of control, maybe let you fire one of the car’s ancillary guns. The car shakes as the larboard hull integrity falls.
A sound like a whip cracking right in front of his face and now there are matching holes to his left and right in the darkened windows, each the width of a champagne flute. High-velocity armor-piercing rounds, he thinks, just like before, and if it was his father’s turn then it must be his turn now, and it’s almost a relief that it’s finally happening. Through the holes he sees color and hints of texture—grey of concrete, black of smoke, radiant blue sky—and now he can hear the polyphony of gunfire.
The shooting stops, and the ammunition meters stop counting down. Executive override: Standing down, reads the display. It smells of sulfur, burning rubber, hot concrete.
The crash seat releases him. Crouching on the floor, he tries to decide if he should stay in the town car, though it’s either malfunctioning or compromised and its armor is of demonstrated ineffectiveness, or run for it, though he’d have to fight off unknown and heavily armed attackers with an antique pistol he’s never fired and for which he has exactly six rounds.
The windows turn transparent—there’s a chromatic corona around the bullet holes—and he sees he’s in a wide street in a sort of canyon of favelas. The town car is wedged into a pile of cars, some burning, all wrecked, black smoke pouring up. Shattered bits of chassis smolder on the ground, and the walls are marred with bullet holes and black starbursts of carbonization. Drones swarm in the air—he sees with relief that some have the livery of the Provisional Authority but their guns too are trained on his car. There’s no one around—the favelinos apparently know when to scatter. It’s as squalid as a war zone, the kind of place where death comes easily, and now a woman is stepping through the smoke rising from the wreckage of a motorcycle.
Her face is covered with a cloth, probably against the smoke but it makes her look like a bandit. She seems unfazed as the drones converge on her, and then they arrange themselves into a hemisphere with her at the center, their weapons pointed outward, maintaining formation as she approaches the car.
The town car’s windows descend of their own accord and a drone appears on his right, the side opposite the woman, its guns trained on him at such an angle that the rounds would go through him and into the seats—he remembers how stubborn bloodstains can be, and how particular his father’s valet was about the upholstery—but it doesn’t fire, and he’s aware of the passing of more seconds of life.
The woman leans in through the window and pulls down the cloth that hides her nose and mouth. She’s of his mother’s age, or rather agelessness, and her hair, tied back, reveals a scar on her forehead, and then he realizes that he knows her, that it’s the ragged woman, or her twin, but with none of the evident craziness or erosion of the street.
She’s about to say something but stops short as realization hits and then in a flat, definitive voice she says, “You’re the Brazilian prime minister’s son.”
You said that before, he thinks, as she steps back as though scalded, and then something seems to drain out of her and she suddenly looks old. “Oh,” she says, and holds her face in her hands, and now she’s looking at her hands like they’re someone else’s and peering around as though the morning held a secret.
The drone’s guns are still trained on him, the barrels black tunnels into nothing. The woman seems to have forgotten he’s there, and there’s nothing to do, and nowhere to go, but then he remembers that the town car, for all its sleekness, weighs over seven thousand pounds, and is engineered to run roadblocks—the Mitsui salesmen had said it could easily push a tractor off the road.
The drone in the window rises away, its sudden absence an unexpected grace. He says, “Command escape, all-in, now!” The car’s engine roars as it breasts through the smoldering wrecks and then the acceleration throws him back into the seat.
The car goes up on two wheels as it corners without slowing and Thales looks back in time to see the woman raise her hand toward a drone like a contralto about to sing, and then the drone detonates like a firework.
Her face is washed out in the flash. She looks self-contained, interested, a little sad.
Then she’s gone, but he hears the echoes of more explosions, guesses she’s blowing up the rest.
* * *
The clinic’s steel gates close soundlessly behind the town car and he kicks open the door and scrambles out onto the courtyard’s sand. The town car’s right side is unscathed but the left looks like a target at a shooting range. Where armor’s been shot up he can see that it’s ceramic, and about half a foot thick, which would be why the interior is so cramped. Bullets are buried in the armor like grubs in a rotten log—he pulls one out between thumb and forefinger—it’s like a crumpled metal mushroom the thickness of his thumb. He watches it scintillate in the light, then flings it off into the garden’s raked sand.
A girl in clinic livery approaches—young and pretty, he notes distantly—and in her posture is both welcome and submission. He gestures at the car and says, “Something happened. There was an attack,” speaking too fast, his fear and urgency demanding a response but she just smiles professionally and he wonders if she heard him because she doesn’t even look at the car, just takes his elbow and ushers him into the cool dark of the clinic. She checks her tablet and says, “We’ve lowered the lights for you, to minimize the potential for”—she frowns—“disturbance,” and he’s going to ask if she happened to have noticed that his car’s been shot to fuck, and call his family, their security, the police, somebody, but he stops, says nothing, somehow certain that his words would disappear like stones dropped in a deep well, and it occurs to him that he’s now inside the clinic and was too distracted to be nervous about bringing in the gun.
The surgeon’s office is as dark as a tomb, the only color the muted red of the worn Persian rug, and from behind his desk the surgeon says, “These are the final tests, on which everything depends, so please do your best today.”
“Actually, today’s going to be different,” Thales says, aware of the weight of the gun over his heart, and it seems like his confidence must be unmistakable but the surgeon just pushes his tablet across the desk and on it there’s video of a man sitting on a stool in a cinder-block room. His arms are folded and he’s staring off to one side, wide-eyed, as though shell-shocked. His sleeveless T-shirt reveals a wiry musculature, and on his shoulders are mottled pink patches of recently regenerated skin. He’s sweating under the harsh overhead light and Thales wonders if this is a deliberate stab at a film noir sensibility.
“Why didn’t you fire?” asks someone off-camera.
The man blinks, seems to recollect himself. “What?”
“Why. Didn’t. You. Fire. We have you on video walking out of the villa and ditching your armor. You could’ve shot out one of the plane’s engines before it got ten feet off the ground.”
“Because she won,” the man says in a hollow voice.
“The audit clearly shows that you had full control by the time you left the villa, yet you did not engage, so how do you—”
“Because she won,” the man says, fully present for the first time. “She could’ve killed me if she’d wanted to.” His accent is languid, the vowels long, some subspecies of American English. “You know what an iron maiden is? That’s what my armor was, once she owned it. But she must’ve found the pictures of my girls, and took pity on me. She told me to remember that, and I intend to. So that’s why I let her go, and that’s why I’m done. I don’t care if I end up digging ditches for a living. I lost, I should’ve died, and I’m going home.”
“Failure is never acceptable, Corporal Boyd.”
“If you don’t like failure, maybe you should give your shooters armor with more security than my kid’s Barbie. She burned it in the time it takes to light a cigarette.”
“Did you make a deal, Corporal Boyd? Did she buy you off? Because we think you made a deal, and we’d be more inclined to show clemency if you admit it.”
Boyd regards him, and beneath his surface apathy there’s a glittering readiness to harm. He says, “Why don’t you come on over here, sweetheart, and whisper that in my ear.”
The physician stops the video, says, “Explain what’s going on here.” This test, like all the tests, seems arbitrary, and has nothing to do with anything, but despite his exasperation he still he can’t bring himself to draw the gun. There’s always irony, though, the preferred weapon of the weak, so he says, “They’re lovers, having a spat. What does this have to do with me?”
“Very good,” says the physician. “Now there’s just one more test, and it counts for all.”
“Wait,” Thales says, unable to keep his helplessness and strain out of his voice. “Please. Just one second. Could you please just explain to me exactly what’s going on.”
“Look,” says the surgeon, pointing to the tablet, where another video is playing.
It’s the old man from the last video, in a tiny room like a monastic cell with white walls and no windows. He’s lighting candles on a table where dozens of candles are already burning.
His woman enters the frame, stands watching.
“I’m lighting candles for my dead,” he says.
“Family?”
“Victims. One hundred and thirty-eight, as of today. I have their names by heart.”
She searches for a response. “You did what you had to do.”
“What I had to do was kill innocent people, or cause them to be killed, in pursuit of selfish ends. I’m a murderer.”
“No you’re not. Shhh.” She kisses the back of his neck.
“But I am a murderer. I must be honest. It’s the only way to stay intact.” He lights another candle. “Or such is my theory. It’s hard not to think they’d all be dead in half a century anyway, but this is a sociopath’s reasoning, or evolution’s. I’m really trying, but morality looks different on long timescales, and I can’t find a way around that fact.”
“It’ll be worth it,” she says. “You’ll do so much good. Like you said, the world needs a steward, and no one else is positioned to take the job.”
“One day I’ll have islands,” he says, “and on the islands, villas, where I’ll put my enemies, so they can read and garden, raise children, keep mistresses. My exiled adversaries’ memoirs will become an enduring literary genre. For now, I light candles, though it’s already an empty gesture—I no longer much care what I did to them, but I remain scrupulous about going through the motions. I feel all my years today. Oh my god. One hundred thirty-eight names.”
“What about Ms. Sunden?” asks the woman, trying for lightness, her bitterness showing through.
“They said they don’t need her memories anymore. They. The strangers. The others. The shadows, I think, suits them best. Not quite there, never really substantial. I’d very much like to know why they changed their minds. It happened just after she graced my servers with her presence. Now they say they’re ready to proceed. My people are loading the fabs onto a ship as we speak.”
“You’re just letting her go?”
“Ah. No. I’d prefer to, but the shadows are fickle, and I may still need her, so I told Hiro to track her down.”
“And the shadows?”
The old man pauses, a long match burning slowly in his hand. “When I was a young man, I wanted to explore the world, but that faded, as the years passed, and I understood its systems, and for decades now the world has been as legible as a chessboard. But the shadows … I never thought I’d find anything like them. Part of me still thinks this must be self-delusion, like I’m like some sun-dazed early Christian hearing voices in the wind. They’re a wonder.”
“They’re frightening.”
“I hate to say it but I agree. It’s crossed my mind to keep my word and let them be, but it just won’t do. Moreover, Andy insists they’ve developed computer hardware more than a billion times faster than anything on the market, which would be hard to believe if I hadn’t seen their other efforts. I guess we’ll see when we harvest the nodes, or finally get that phone.”
“My love?” says the woman.
“Yes?”
“What will you do when I’m gone?”
“Après toi, le déluge,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine making plans.”
The surgeon stops the video, leans in across his desk. Thales is aware of the room’s darkness, its stillness. The surgeon asks, “Will he honor his agreement?”
Go fuck yourself, Thales thinks as he says, “Absolutely.”
The physician stands and heads for the door.
“Wait,” says Thales, standing in turn, aware that this is his moment, and that it’s about to slip away. His voice is hard, not recognizably his own. “We’re not done.”
The physician stops and stares at him, his face unreadable.
Thales’ resentment and confusion coalesce into a singularity of purpose that permits him to reach into his jacket and put his hand on the gun. He says, “Give me the tablet. Do it now,” and he’s ready to draw, even to fire a warning shot, but the physician, unperturbed, offers the tablet, saying, “Here.”
Thales says, “If there’s a password, security, if you’ve somehow locked me out—”
“There’s no reason for me to do that,” the surgeon says. “Everything is now open to you. Goodbye.”
He leaves, closing the door behind him.
Thales wakes the tablet. It has many folders, one with his name.
He opens it. There are his memories.