Mila’s useless brain was made for other things. Not memory. Not facial recognition. But to find answers, like why the boy at her feet, his dark hair fanned across the floor like a peacock’s tail, was dead. If she didn’t figure out why…well, if she didn’t figure that out, millions more would die.
She couldn’t remember why they would die.
Lucas Okanu had gotten eleven years of life out of his little body before it was stopped. From the other side of the barn-sized room, the Governor’s cobalt blue glow shone off the corpse’s black plastic shoes. So smooth, those shoes, Lucas’ last piss had rolled off the frictionless curve of their toes, leaving them spotless. Within the gingham borders of Lucas’ shirt, sixty-four colors of animated tulips grew from the white fields of linen and bloomed into the astonished faces of children before popping. Mila studied the fireworks pattern, wondering if the faces were repeating themselves. Wondering why, if she could forget so many things, she couldn’t forget Lucas’ moving lips, no matter how long she avoided them. She drew her nubby suit jacket sleeve across her own lips. The raw burn suggested she’d wiped them a lot recently.
Maybe the loose and anxious electricity of the equipment that stabilized the Governor’s quantum brain caused the dead boy’s lips to twitch like that. Strange if true, because he’d died when his own decentralized dynamo had been dampened over a long instant, the problem moving from the thalamus to the lobes and on down through the nervous system. After that, a conga line of party-hearty electrons racing somewhere between Lucas’ pons and his mouth seemed a piss-poor explanation for what was happening to him now.
Taking advantage of the capillary structure of the fourth dimension, Mila’s consciousness leaked backwards in time until it was spread too thin and dry to give another drop of damn. And still, when the world had been some two hours younger than it was now, Lucas lay dead and those lifeless lips mouthed their wordless tune.
Mila was sweating, beginning to itch under her jacket. She ignored her people on the other side of the transparent wall. She could smell their cigarillos and stimulenz, their socks and their underwear deep into this sixteen-hour shift, imagine the oily smears on their side of the divide.
If Mila could slap any neurons shut right now, she’d have a go at her own amygdala, explain to it that it was the senses-muting hyptronics patch on her neck that kept a rational explanation at arm’s length. Her fear saw through all that bullshit.
The cause and time of death was all she had. No perp, no motive, no explanation as to how Lucas was able to set foot in the Governor’s private sanctuary. The super computer’s very presence tripped up Mila’s investigation. Its bone-shivering sub-sonic hum, the static electricity in the air, and the ozone smell suffusing it all interfered with her senses. Even the midnight glow of its twenty-meter-wide spherical body squashed the human-visible spectrum into a range Mila couldn’t trust.
Shendy would be furious. Shendy was always furious. The factory-second computer gummi they’d baked into Mila’s weird brain didn’t connect her to the citynet quite like the humans’ governesses did, but it did retain some functional knowledge for her: the language, how to dress herself, that something terrible happened once when the hyptronic patch wasn’t there.
The boy’s death had set Shendy off in a way she’d never seen. When only she had been allowed access to the crime scene, Mila hoped some strained vascular wall might sunder within him. Her dry-erase past didn’t suggest any candidates to replace the Inspector who were any less hateful.
It was time to report to that man. One last lungful of the Governor’s overwarm air. Better to face Shendy than spend another minute with Lucas Okanu’s possessed mandible. Her doughy Gucci knock-offs squished around her feet. Her rubbing pant legs sounded like her hips hid servos. She passed through the osmodoor. The weight that had filled her chest fell onto her stomach.
“You know, the Governor only let you in because you’re as inhuman as it is,” Shendy said. He had a long face chiseled from porous stone. It stabbed out of a short-sleeved dress shirt tinged by repeated washings in rusty water. He wore his big flap of a tie chronically short.
“So why did the Governor let that boy in?” She glanced around this mobile investigation center just beyond the Governor’s no-go zone. Abused field projectors spread across the walls, curled at the edges where their static adhesion had quit. A pair of beaten brown loafers angled up against a table leg like dogs who’d treed an opossum.
There were more techs than cops here; techs were uniformed, that seemed to be something she always knew. White two-pocket shirts, white crew pants, white sheer anklers, white slides. Techs never troubled her. She knew, but didn’t remember, they approached her once a day to check the patch on her neck.
The only other cops were Chauncy and Edgar, the names her brain gave the first two officers she couldn’t identify in any situation, no matter who they were. She couldn’t remember real names for long, and didn’t care. If she could have collected her thoughts long enough to make a plan, she’d have gotten herself free of all of this.
“He’s human?” Shendy asked. One of the rare times he gave all of his attention to her.
“Was, yeah. Nervous system shut down.”
“Who did it? Who else was here?”
Mila swallowed, adjusted her footing. “I don’t know that anyone did it. By the smell, I’d say he died about three hours ago, about the time the Governor requested our presence. Hey, have you ever heard of a governess being attached at the thalamus?”
“What the hell’s a thalamus?”
“I mean like the center of the brain. Down deep.”
“Is that what this kid has? That’s crazy.”
“I don’t know. I was just—”
“You don’t know a lot, do you? Look, all I care about is what went on while this kid was still alive. Can you tell me that? I’m betting you can’t.”
“Our—our one witness only speaks when it wants to,” she said, bobbing her head in the Governor’s direction.
“Witness? Fuck witnesses! You’re a police sensitive! You’re supposed to see all the details to solve this thing. If you were working right, we shouldn’t need witness one! You’re going back in there.” Shendy marched to the place her door would appear, the edge of the no-go zone, waiting for Mila to follow. Mila turned to face him but stayed where she was.
“What’s the point? Am I going to discover something I didn’t the first time?
“How much money have we spent on you, Mila?”
“If I had a memory, I could tell you, but you already know. I’ll bet every goddamned rookie on the force knows how much you spent on me, because you never fucking shut up about it!”
“Whoa, whoa, easy there, Mila. That’s your problem, right there. You get yourself worked up.” He stabbed his damp cigarillo butt in her direction as he spoke. The air it displaced poked her.
“You’re the fuckers that work me up! There’s no winning here, Shendy! You needle me about how much money you spent on me, how emotional I am, how useless I am, and if I dare react to it like any other person on this force would, you claim it only proves your point about me!”
“And I’m right! Look at you!”
Stop. Wobbling on the perimeter of an explosion, some voice inside of Mila told her, Stop and find your peace, Mila. There’s no way to fight them all. They’ll always outnumber you. They’ll always win. She took a deep breath.
“This isn’t just a death in the Governor’s proximity,” Shendy said, too quietly. “The Datists reported a spike in information flow a few minutes before the Governor called us. That spike pushed us a lot closer to Overwhelm. Do you remember Overwhelm, Mila?”
“Kind of.”
“Kind of. You kind of remember what doomsday is. Your pal over there,” Shendy jerked his head toward the Governor’s quarters, “Was designed with hard limits. It’s in its architecture. It wasn’t ever meant to run a city-state. At some point, you start pushing too much information into it, the same amount starts going out of it. Kinda like your little brain, Mila. Except where the Governor’s concerned, services shut down. Climate control, sewage, running water. Then ten or so million desperate, panicking people stay here and tear each other apart, or try to escape the city and run smack into a border wall made out of bullets.
“The Datists say we’ve got five years, tops. At least before this happened it was five years. Nobody knows how to stop that, especially not you. All any of us can do is keep it from happening any faster. And that dead kid in there might have hit the accelerator on his way out. We need to know what the fuck happened in there so we can keep it from happening again. Now can you hold all of that in your head at once, Mila?”
“I can. And I have good news for you, Shendy.”
“Yeah? What?”
“I’ll get you all the information you want.” She dug her nails into her neck and tore off the hyptronic patch, its roots taking some skin with it. She sucked in a breath against the wet burn. Mila’s repressed senses already began to bloom. Shendy’s fear felt strong, a great hairy heat.
“What the hell did you just do? That doesn’t just go back on! St. Pierre! Get Fab to make a new patch and send it up immediately. Tell them we’ve got a—” Mila pushed him aside.
“Get the fuck out of my way.”
The hyptronic patch that kept Mila’s senses in check, kept her emotions in check, her body count in check, dropped from her sticky red fingers.
“You should learn to control yourself, Shendy.” Mila wasn’t sure why she herself wasn’t a sobbing mess already. She’d been built to sense things no human could, but to function at all, many of her senses had to be straitjacketed. Either she could handle it now, the whole thing had been made up, or her freak-out was yet to come. The world around her grew brighter too quickly. She blinked her mind several times to adjust.
At the door she felt fear and couldn’t remember why. Her skin sizzled with energy as the osmodoor allowed her to pass through it.
Mila felt she might trip on the diamond plate floors now. The inflo around the Governor was a rushing river of data, but after a minute she was able to relegate it to background. A human trick. Those people that owned her, their supposedly magnificent brains couldn’t handle everything their few senses took in. Their conscious minds dealt with the inflo by ignoring everything that didn’t seem to be related to their survival protocols. Without her hyptronic patch, Mila was much more fit for survival in this world. The world was so much deeper and more complicated than humans knew.
Memories filled in as she explored. Her memories weren’t stored information, but revelations that came by way of her awakening sensory array as it reached into her past, twitching like vegetation in thrall to the rising sun.
Came a memory of being with the police force years before Shendy, only the latest in a long line of handlers. Some had been decent people. Some had been worse.
Came a memory of a woman with grey-brown hair like curling, burnt straw who faced Mila squarely, proclaiming “Your eyes aren’t only receivers, they’re projectors.”
Mila was more different than she had guessed. Her brain was designed to reconstruct the dead, passed people, abandoned places, forgotten objects. Her human keepers didn’t understand her gifts, they’d only created her, following the Governor’s directions.
The boy was…no, not still alive. But how were his lips still moving? They chilled her. His name was Lucas Okanu. His nervous system had been dampened to the point of shutdown. There was the cause at the thalamus, not a governess, but a gummi, like she had. He didn’t have the governess scar near the temple like the humans had. What the hell was going on here?
The Governor had done it. Self-defense? Mila looked to the Governor for some sense of what had occurred, but it knew how to keep her out of its business.
She had no scar—no, that wasn’t right. Her newfound sense of hyper-proprioception suggested her head was scarred as if she’d been in a terrible accident. Too much confusion in too many directions.
There was a time, at the beginning of Mila’s career before the patch, when Mila was new, when everything was new and all of it was overwhelming to her. Remember Overwhelm? There was no training period, no gradual process by which she could acclimatize herself to the world. Her brain processed sensation no better than an infant’s could, and yet she was expected to do her job. There was violence at the station. There was a man screaming that Mila was not to be killed under any circumstances, even though, for the first ninety seconds of her outburst, there seemed to be no other way to stop her.
She wore the patch after that.
So, they hadn’t lied about that, but that incident wasn’t the source of her scars. She wanted answers, not for Shendy, but for herself.
Mila touched her tongue to the boy’s temple and fired Lucas’ neurons. She rode the waterfall of memories coming faster than she could consciously process them. Afterimages of Lucas appeared as a growing smear of incapacitating colors. She smelled where he’d been recently, where his clothing and soap had come from, the state of his organs before death. Mila tasted probabilities among a thousand or more potential Lucases, saw the hot spotlights of his emotions, and as the pieces of him came together a simulation took shape in her mind.
She didn’t know exactly when the project reached a tipping point between reconstruction and interrogation, but at some point, she was speaking to Lucas and he was speaking back.
“I felt myself die,” Lucas said, looking down at his own body. He had an accent she’d never heard. His shoulders and hips rested at odd angles, like a marionette’s. “But to…”
“To see it. I know,” Mila said. “My apologies for having let you see yourself. If I…” What was the polite way of saying it? “Summoned you from somewhere else, you wouldn’t have been as real as you are now. Could you tell me please, Lucas, why did the Governor kill you?”
Lucas drew his gaze from his own dead body slow and thick, like pulling taffy. “I wasn’t the right one,” he said. Mila had ignored his shirt’s animation as extraneous, but something kept pulling her back to it. There’s no way she could prove it, but the faces on the projected Lucas’ shirt felt fundamentally different from the other’s. She looked again to his face.
“Um, could you maybe expand on that? Right one for what?”
“He asked me to sing for him.”
Mila’s heart raced. “Lucas, we don’t ever refer to the Governor as ‘he.’ Only as ‘it.’ You can go to prison for talk like that.”
“But that’s blasphemy,” the little boy whispered. “You can go to Hell for talk like that.”
Mila began to sweat. She didn’t know of any religious sect in their great vertical country that spoke like that about the Governor. The Datists were the most hardcore of them all, with their top echelons dominated by women. They would never use the word ‘he’ as a word for the Governor. Even they knew it was just a machine, albeit a magnificent one.
Her still clearing mind had fucked up and collapsed upon the wrong probability. This Lucas was far enough off the mark from the real one that her investigation was compromised. If she was no use at all, Shendy could have her shut down. Act like it hasn’t happened. Just keep pushing forward.
“Why would it—Why would the Governor ask you to sing for…sing, but then kill you?”
“He wants to be free. He said if I couldn’t finish the song, the one after me would. And bring Overwhelm.” Mila’s newly enhanced senses went dark for a moment. Her mind convulsed, convinced it had just died, like Lucas had died, shut off from the inside.
“Are you okay?” he asked. She felt her body twitch with her pulse. She breathed like she’d just run a lap around the room. Her ears were cushioned in white noise. She said something to anchor herself to this scene, to re-adhere to what she took for reality.
“Someone else is coming?” she asked.
“I guess. Maybe it’s you. Can you sing?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.” Mila checked over his shoulder. The massive computational engine that filled the room throbbed with ominous energy. She was only here because Lucas was killed. But she had just woken up. She wasn’t ready to end their little world.
Shendy’s voice blared over a speaker. “Who the hell is that in there with you?”
Mila jumped. Her pores raised in mindless terror. “You can see him?”
“Of course I can see him! I want both of you out of there immediately!”
Mila jumped back. “Holy Mother Cherry, what are you?”
Lucas went wide-eyed. “What are you talking about? You said you called me here. I’m the dead one. Why are you freaking out?”
“I can’t…You shouldn’t…” Mila quickly went to the door, not to obey Shendy, but to get the hell away from this whatever it was. She went through and pushed herself against the wall facing it. Instead of following her, Lucas pulled back to protect his own dead body.
Edgar and Chauncey had their guns trained on Mila. It didn’t frighten her. She could see two, three seconds into the future now, and not be where they aimed. But seeing guns trained on her…she felt a time when police bullets had torn through her body.
Came a memory that she wasn’t always Mila—and this shook her, but she couldn’t process it now—she was Edie, and she had a family, a husband and two children. She stole to protect them and she killed a cop to protect them, and that was the end of Edie. Following the Governor’s plans, they kept a lot of her, but they threw away some crucial bits as well.
“What the hell is going on here?” Shendy demanded. “Who is that and why does he look exactly like our victim? How did he even get in there?”
“I don’t—I don’t…I don’t…” Mila found herself shaking as if she’d been thrown outside into the snow.
“You’re a goddamned disaster on two legs, you know that, Mila?”
“Is the Governor making those boys?” Chauncey asked.
Shendy left Mila to answer him. “Run the recording back and see where he’s coming from. Mila! Get him outta there. Now!” She felt their fear of her relax together, as a flock of birds adjusts its formation.
Mila wasn’t capable of obeying Shendy’s orders. Her mental projection had taken form in reality. She had family somewhere that loved her. Maybe. If they were still alive. She didn’t know what to do with any of this. And the future was rushing at her like an oncoming truck.
“Run it backwards, St. Pierre,” Shendy ordered. She remembered Chauncey’s name. St. Pierre threw himself into a seat, letting its spin carry him to the control. His voice dropped to an intimate volume and he asked the computer, rather than told it. The old field projectors went jerky for a second, then gathered themselves.
“Run it forward,” Shendy growled. They were at the spot where Mila walked into the Governor’s domain. Mila cursed herself for not following the recording as it ran backwards. She hadn’t seen when the second boy disappeared. Too wrapped up in her own thoughts.
Mila hadn’t known this second Lucas had appeared at all until Shendy blared at them. Would the boy pop into existence in the recording? Fade in slowly? Or do something else entirely?
The frustrating limitations of the cameras left little of the real experience behind. They captured light, motion, depth, and little else. They swept across time like a narrow beam of light in a darkened room. The whole could not be taken in at a glance.
I have children…I think their names were…I wasn’t there for them…Jesus…
“Oh, shit, he’s there!” St. Pierre blurted out. “I musta missed it.”
“I missed it too,” Edgar said. Not Edgar, but Jackson. Mila knew it now. “When did he…?”
Mila had missed it too. She checked the time stamp. Minutes had passed. In the recording she was already speaking to him.
“Run it back!” Shendy yelled. Something deeply weird was happening here. Mila could sense any perturbations in the air around her but still couldn’t shake the irrational fear that the boy was creeping up behind her. Were all these new sensors she was equipped with bugging because they’d lain dormant so long? Her eyesight, the sense she’d always depended on the most, would tell her for certain that she was safe. But she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the field.
Something tickled the roving part of her brain. The Governor can do what I do. It doesn’t need a memory, it just points its attention in whatever direction the information that it wants to retrieve is resting. How do you overfill a memory that doesn’t exist?
“God damn it! I missed it again!” Shendy startled her back to the situation at hand. Run it back and pay attention! Computer! When does the boy appear?”
THE BOY APPEARS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CLIP
“Not the body! The third boy! I mean—I mean the second boy! What the fuck is going on here?” Shendy had a crazed look. His eyes were wide and there was a little spit on his lip. The others, St. Pierre and Jackson, were wide-eyed and antsy, looking to each other, looking to Shendy, looking back into the projection field. She watched their psyches fraying at the edges, becoming shaggy like beasts.
St. Pierre ran the recording back. Jackson shouted, “There he is!” too late again. The moment he mentioned it, the computer stated: THE SECOND BOY HAS APPEARED. Mila’s body felt the terror of being chased by something primal through the winter woods beyond the city. Something faster than she was. “I think we have a real problem here,” Jackson said.
“Oh, really? You think so?” Shendy said.
“No, I mean, a real problem. What he’s saying,” Jackson pointed to the playback, “It’s starting to sink in after half a dozen times. This kid says he was supposed to make the Governor go all Overwhelm on us, but if he couldn’t, the one who came after him would. But like, the dead one is the first one. This one is the one who comes after!”
“Ooooooh, shit,” St. Pierre said.
Mila felt freed of the spell the recording had over her. She spun to look behind her, then through the clear wall into the Governor’s room. There was Lucas, a look of resigned fear on his widening face, a look she suddenly remembered on her own son’s face as he stood on the edge of a diving board. Nothing about this made sense and yet it was happening. It was doom that hovered above Mila as each piece of this nightmare clicked into place. And it was doom that was settling down to crush her and the entire city beneath its great fat ass.
She found her voice. “You left the fucking intercom on, Shendy.”
They all looked to the boy as he began to sing. He had a voice a human shouldn’t ever have had. His song encompassed everything.
SHARP INCREASE IN INFORMATION FLOW, their computer said. CALCULATING INFLO…
The Governor had made Lucas, like it had made Mila, and years later invited him to its home to sing. It killed him, knowing Mila would be called in, knowing she would somehow bring forth the second Lucas. The Governor had been planning its escape from humanity for a long time.
CALCULATING…
“For fuck’s sake, stop him!” Shendy said. He shoved his weapon into Mila’s hand and pushed her to the osmodoor. Mila couldn’t believe it still allowed her through. The Governor had achieved its aim. There must still be a part for her to play.
Entering that room was being dropped into the middle of an ocean of inflo, not being able to swim. Her tiny consciousness filtered out nearly all of it, but her subconscious mind had far more information to deal with than it could handle. She began to hallucinate the life of a Lucas who could not possibly have existed in any universe. Millennia of mundane meals and bowel movements, an eon of breaths, adventures with animals that couldn’t physically be, space pulled apart from its “solid” spaceness into a sort of chain-linked reality, and what rested between the space she knew threatened to drive her insane. The heads of children bloomed and burst in explosions of muscle, bone, and brain and the faces might repeat, but not for a long time. The cycle was ten million heads long: one for each person in the city.
Lucas touched too many of her senses, he filled too much of her head. She found herself caring less about what the Governor’s brain would do and more about hers might.
She couldn’t “see” Lucas himself in the tsunami of data, but she could sense him as the origin of all of this. There were areas of the large room so thick with information that they seemed to exist as physical objects. Lucas’ song reached every sense she had. It was an improvisation of fact and nonsense, with no purpose that she could understand.
Above it all, she heard the gunfire from the other side of the wall, the fat whoomps of St. Pierre’s and Jackson’s bullets burying themselves in the chunky transparent shield between them and Lucas. Their guns were excellent shots, Mila realized. Adjusting for the shaking hands of their owners, the bullets would have hit their marks in the brain and chest of the boy had there been no obstruction.
That meant her bullets would find their marks, no matter her own state of mind.
She could make him out now, this close to him. Mila strained against the ocean of input. It created a friction that her muscles had to fight. Pulling hers shoulders back, she winched up her unsteady hands and trained her weapon on the young boy.
Lucas looked at her as he continued to sing. Terror filled out his face. The same look her own son had in his eyes when the police took her away. Goddamn it, what was his name?
Mila was not capable of murdering this child.
She bent, rested Shendy’s weapon on the floor, then wrapped herself around Lucas. He embraced her back and his song trailed off.
But the men out in the hall had succumbed to madness. The busted body of one of the techs lay bloody against the clear wall. Another clawed at her own temple, trying to quiet that burning on the other side of the bone. Gunfire continued, but the shots weren’t aimed the boy’s way any longer. Shendy had found another weapon and fired it so erratically, the gun couldn’t know what it was meant to correct for. Jackson swung his gun wildly like it was only a club. Behind Jackson, a tech kicked at insubstantial field projections of women beating children that none of them had recorded. St. Pierre sat under a desk, stilling his gun’s jerky movements with the bottom of his jaw.
Overwhelm wasn’t about ending the Governor, but about ending the governesses, those filmy little guidance systems inside all the city’s human heads. The same ones that made them think the Governor’s head held less than all of theirs combined.
She and Lucas were different. Maybe they would survive all this. How many millions throughout history had similar thoughts minutes before they died?
Mila felt St. Pierre’s head blow apart in a dozen different ways as if they were tracks in a mixer that weren’t synced with each other. He became a smear of motion and physics and gore. Her eyes shut tightly, but everywhere she could feel, people were going crazy. The kicking tech’s arms now flailed toward the ceiling as he lay upon the floor, fighting off something only he could see.
Though Lucas’ song had stopped, Mila still felt she was drowning beneath fathoms of data that would never be processed before she could reach the surface and breathe again. She clutched the boy’s body as though it were a floatation device, too small to save her on its own. Forms that shouldn’t exist took shape and declared their independence. Shendy’s teeth exploded from his mouth and Mila felt the pain. She wasn’t going to miss any of them.
There on his platforms, pulsing with light and energy and inflo, the Governor sat placidly, watching over its domain.
| Matthew Sanborn Smith grew up poorly enough in southern New England that he was sentenced to Florida for all his remaining days. His fiction can be read at Tor.com, Nature, and Apex Magazine, among others, and can be heard at The Drabblecast and StarShipSofa to name two. He is the creator and shepherd of the Beware the Hairy Mango podcast which was reborn at patreon.com/matthewsanbornsmith as the Beware the Patronizing Mango podcast. Learn even more at matthewsanbornsmith.com. |  |