The life of a spy is never the best, especially when time travel is concerned. You never know who you might meet in your travels. Might even be a relative…
The long fall really sobers me up. As the clouds part and the ground swells, a lifetime of questionable choices thunders through my brain. One damn thing after another. Still, the choice that brought me here, I wouldn’t change for anything.
Not thirty minutes ago, I polished off my sixth snifter in the lobby bar of Hotel Yes!, London Zone, coldly surveying the endless traffic through the revolving door. Spacers are easy to spot, but you have to use your eyes. They have no cryptoprint, no retinal record, nothing to bioverify or geneaffirm. They get shot into the unknown at the speed of light and come back ghosts.
Before I could beckon the robotender for another, Benison’s Most Wanted finally rolled into the bustling, palatial lobby. Lila Mason. She’d let her hair grow out since we last crossed paths, and updated her costume to this century, but she still couldn’t shake that spacer look. The pale awe as she gawked at every strange face, fashion, or elaborate holo-ornamentation decking the high walls and ceiling. The look of someone lost in an alien world they used to call home.
The tide of people carried her past the deskbots for the back elevators. I slid onto my good leg and merged into the sea of milling patrons, finally slinking, as gracefully as an old man could, between the closing doors behind her.
I chanced a glance at her reflection in the mirrored elevator wall. She was pursing her lips, exhaling slowly, trying to act like she belonged. Breaking my gaze, I wondered where she was carrying the data our mutual employer was paying me so handsomely to intercept.
So naive. A head filled with obsolete ideas from a time when a single voice could change the world. Had she stuck around at regular speed, her ideals would have fossilized like everyone else’s, under the heat and pressure of tyrannical megacorps like Benison. But for her, hope and reality still shared a bed, and she thought she was walking into a handoff with an interested party. Thing was, the interested party was only interested in keeping her mouth shut. Permanently.
Elevators, though, haven’t changed much since the old days, save for their speed. The final pair of elbows got out on forty-eight, then the two of us shot up to sixty and the doors chimed open.
Ladies first, my hand said, and she smiled and stepped out without a whiff of suspicion for the pitiable husk limping into the bland hallway behind her.
Here had nothing of the vaulted ceilings and projected detailing reserved for the sweet deceptions of the lobby. The guts of the building were giving up its three-star secrets. The truth is always ugly.
I closed the distance as she pulled out her card, and as she swiped, I pounced, nudging her onto the bed as I kicked the door closed behind us.
Rolling to face me, hair a-flutter, she said: “G-Gilchrist?”
I didn’t respond. She’d sort fiction from fact soon enough. Instead, I checked the corners, quietly catching my breath from the rapid exertion. I hitched my jacket to show the grip of my pistol. It usually keeps them from screaming out.
“Listen to me,” she pleaded, sudden fear in her glazed eyes. “I’m not the only one who has it.”
I stepped toward her, shaking my head. “You didn’t transmit it. You’re not that dumb. That’s why you came to hand it off in person.” I gave her the gimmie fingers.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, unconvincingly, crossing her arms and staring out at the crowded cityscape.
She flinched as I approached her, but not by much. She wasn’t overly surprised by this outcome. It’s a strength, to be so used to disappointment.
Her right jacket pocket was empty, her left: Bingo! A frisson of nostalgia for the palm-feel of an old memory distal. Obsolete by most standards, but still the latest thing on those ancient long haulers. Some irony that those poor bastards toiling at the edge of the known universe are stuck using tech that wouldn’t make it into a kid’s toy back here. Earth moves on, for better or for worse.
She stared dejectedly at the stained carpet, before her features hardened. “Don’t you understand?” she snapped. “It’s all their fault. They said they didn’t know, but they did!”
I smiled. It was the first I’d seen of it, the anger driving her crusade. Palpable fury at the suffering of others, and the need to right others’ wrongs, no matter the personal risk. She really was a relic of a bygone age.
It wasn’t just the horror at what had transpired out there. Every fool from here to New Timbuktu had heard about the Orianis disaster, of the scores of human beings disassembled, piece by piece, by an inquisitive, planet-sized consciousness. It was what she’d discovered after the fact: that Benison Corporation had known the danger all along, and sent them in there anyway. Neodymium doesn’t mine itself.
This is what had flipped her switch.
I realized I’d been staring at her taut face for a while now. “Tell me something I don’t know.” I said.
“Animals,” she muttered, shaking her head in disgust, “animals…” She leaned back onto the bed and deflated; relieved, it seemed, for the whole mess to be coming to an end, one way or another.
Taking the armchair, I stretched out my aching knee and got a real good look at her. Despite the rings around her eyes, I so envied her youth. She was yet to develop any of the ailments that ultimately dominate the majority of one’s life. I had earned a good five over the long years, and was as ready as ever to give them back.
Time was against us, and I had expected the penny to drop by now. I thought I’d better give that penny a little nudge.
“I don’t seem familiar to you, at all?”
She tried to meet my eyes, but looked straight through me. “In the elevator.” Her eyes widened. “And the skyport, you were there.”
“I wasn’t the only one.” I said.
“I got away,” she said, slamming her fist into the made bed. “I gave you the slip.”
I said nothing, just watched her pride fade as she stared out into the perfect blue, dark feelings pulling her lips tight. “I knew I wasn’t cut out for this righteous bullshit.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said. “You shook two very experienced men at Fra Mauro, the third had better luck, before I killed him, of course.”
Her head turned slow, eyes hazy with confusion. “What did you say?”
I stifled the laugh, but it made its way out through my nose like a happy pig. “I don’t want you dead. I’ve been looking out for you. They’ve been all over you since you crossed the frontier.”
Stunned to silence, then a simple: “Why?”
A wide smile ached my old cheeks. “You might not recognize me, but I recognize you. You barely look a day older than when you left me with my pancakes and my coloring books and told me you’d never see me again.”
She scoffed, lips forming up an insult that never came. Instead, her jaw hung loose, eyes searching mine and widening with each barrage of conflicting emotions. “Isaac?”
“But here we are…” I said.
She rose from the bed, her legs giving a little, and I had to grab her, and hold her. Her hand found my face, a finger searching out the tiny scar at the edge of my right eyebrow. The first of many.
“I… I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it.”
She’d only been gone for twelve of her years, but superluminal travel had cost her sixty and change in dilation debt. The debt I was paying with my busted knees and osteoarthritis.
She held me at arm’s length, to get a good look at me. “I was going to come find you, when all of this… when all of this… If you were still… What are you doing here?”
“We share an employer,” I said.
She pulled away, hands falling to her hips. “You work for Benison?”
I’m eight years old again.
“Doing what?” she continued. “You’re one of their cleaners?”
“In my defense…” I started.
“Christ, Isaac!” She was pacing now, hands conducting her vexation. “They paid a five-year advance and promised medical cover for your father. All that, just for you to end up a Benison enforcer?”
“Look…”
“I know it wasn’t ideal,” she continued, “but it was the best I could do. Your dad couldn’t work. What was I supposed to do?”
I said nothing, and let the silence rouse the dead.
“Your dad?” she asked. This one wasn’t rhetorical.
“He didn’t last two years,” I said. “The state took what was left for my care, if you can call it that.”
Her face crumpled, bereft in failure. “Oh, Isaac…”
She was cut off by a heavy knock at the door. “Housekeeping!” said a familiar voice. I should have known they wouldn’t stick to the plan. I’d raised too much suspicion on this storied job.
I put my finger to my lips and took a second to think. Only one option presented itself. I undid my belt.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“You need to jump before we’re over the Channel.”
“The where?”
“Look out that window.”
She did, finally noticing the absent cityscape. She walked right up to the pane, and looked down, and down, and glared back at me in disbelief. “But this is a hotel…”
“Hotels don’t stay put anymore, Mom. This one’s headed for Barcelona.”
“Barcelona? But there were no announcements.”
“There were, you just don’t have the implants to hear them.”
I passed her my belt. She held it awkwardly, bemused.
“Isaac…”
“It’s a gravitator; a safety thing, you know, for people who work high up, or don’t like to wait for buildings to land. It’s automatic. Put it on.”
As she ran the gravitator through her belt loops, I noticed the hollow spacer look had almost completely dissolved, and she was my mom, urgent and alive, just as I remembered her. Something long dormant twisted inside me. I pushed it back down, given the exigent situation.
The knocking turned to pounding. I checked the gravitator, zipped up her coat tight, and slipped my electrowallet into her pocket.
My mom laid her hand on my chest. “What about you?”
My best attempt at a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry about me. These are my friends.”
I held her tight against me, and a lifetime of yearning almost boiled over. I tapped it down, drew my pistol, covered her ears, and shot out the window. Wind and noise filled the room.
I shouted: “I’ll admit to having some complicated feelings about your departure over the years, but I’ve come to understand you did your best for me.”
“Isaac, wait…”
“I’ll find you. Go.”
She nodded. With one last look, one last smile, my mom turned and leaped into the sky as bravely as she’d left the Earth.
I pulled out my terminal and plugged in the distal. Using Benison’s own infrastructure, I could transmit the damning evidence to every public feed in the Bubble, but I’d have to work fast. I quickly selected an inconspicuous node, loaded my custom encryption presets, and—
The lock blew out and the boys rolled in. Levinson, Ganz, and Shaw.
“Got it,” I yelled over the gale. I held up the terminal, distal sticking from the front like a middle finger. “It’s all here.” I pulled the distal free and tossed it to Levinson, my ostensible boss.
Levinson hollered: “The girl…”
“A bit of a scrapper, I’m afraid,” I tilted my head at the blown-out window. “Couldn’t wait.”
Levinson strode to the naked window and peered out cautiously. Ganz and Shaw stayed wide, maintaining our routine quadrangle of mutual distrust.
“All right,” shouted Levinson. “Bognor Regis is as good as the Channel at this altitude, I guess. Nice work, old man.” He shot a look at his subordinates over by the door. “Some grandma’s about to get the surprise of her life!” Ganz and Shaw grinned with sadistic delight.
Ganz yelled, “So let’s blow this rat trap and grab a drink.”
“Next stop’s Cherbourg,” Levinson shouted. “Hope you like wine.” He turned to face me, a calculating gleam in his eye. “Round’s on you, old-timer. You bag ‘em, you buy ‘em.”
Then he said: “Hope you all remembered your gravitators.”
***
The wily bastard made me jump first. If I float, I’m a witch, and he’ll suffer me to live. But I won’t.
So I fall.
And fall.
I could use a distraction. Tumbling over to face heaven, I unzip the pocket of my billowing jacket and retrieve my terminal, hitting Send all on the waiting transmission. They’ll know it was me before I hit the ground.
Once it’s loose on the network, she’ll be safe. They’d kill to silence her, but revenge is bad for business. Trust me, I know.
The untraceable I slipped into her pocket will be enough to begin again, as much as I wish we could have done it together.
As I close my eyes, I’m filled with hope for the first time in a long time. She gave up everything so I could have a shot at a better life. A long shot, as it turned out. But it doesn’t make the sacrifice any less. I never thought I’d ever get the chance to repay her.
It’s more than I deserve to do just that.
END
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