John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Smoke froze the image again. “It’ll shake things, and nicely.”

“Your people deserve the credit, really,” Witcher said

“How many meetings did he have with Bester?” Smoke asked suddenly.

“Four, over two months. We’ve got proof of them all. This is the only one with dialogue, the others were indoors and were very top secret.”

“Our writers in the media will ask, ‘Why is the president meeting this man in secret?’ to start—and then we’ll reveal the latest, the dialogue…”

“Yes, that’ll work, I think.”

An undercurrent in something Witcher had said began to tug at Smoke. He looked at the older man. “‘Your people,’ you said. ‘The NR,’ you said. You don’t think of yourself as NR. Is that snobbism because so many of us are technicki?” Smiling to defuse the implied criticism. “Or because you think of them as a… as a tool?”

Witcher shrugged. His lips pursed. The faint narrowing of his eyes, the way his hands tucked into his pockets as if to force concealment and control on them, indicated one of his little bursts of paranoia coming on. “I just can’t see any reason to keep up this prying into my motives, Smoke. Don’t look a goddamn gift horse in its dentures.”

He turned and walked out, banging the screen door behind him.

The crow squawked softly, as if to reproach Smoke. “You’re right,” Smoke muttered. “I’ve been unsubtle.”

But he thought he began to see, almost intuitively, why Witcher funded the New Resistance: The Second Alliance’s political plans were in Witcher’s way.

It seemed Witcher had his own plans for the world.

When the SA bulls came to his quarters, it was officially three in the morning, and Russ was lying in bed, wide awake, arguing with himself about sedatives. You start using them, you could get dependent on them, he told himself. To which he replied, That’s your tight-assed Southern Baptist upbringing. Hell, give yourself a break.

And then the chime, and he’d answered the door, found the bulls there.

So they’ve come for me, he thought wearily. It’s my turn.

But one of them said, “Sorry to wake you, sir. Chairman Praeger would like you to come to an emergency meeting of the council.”

Not fully awake yet, Russ started to ask why they hadn’t simply used the screens, and then he remembered that the screens were down because the Face was still thrusting itself onto them.

“Okay,” he said. Not as relieved as he should have been that he wasn’t being arrested.

He printed out a preset suit, put it on still warm, and followed them to the council room.

They were sitting at the conference table, which was shaped like a backward S; the room was lit thoroughly but softly, from nowhere apparent. Praeger sat in the center, Judith Van Kips beside him as always; beside her was Dr. Tate, the Colony’s chief psychiatrist. Even Tate looked tired, despite his rebuilt, unnaturally regular features, his surgical affectation of youth, some of his true age showing through the mask of a thirty-five-year-old.

Ganzio, the Brazilian, sat across from Van Kips. He was a slim, black-eyed man with a pencil-thin mustache and a penchant for gaudy real-cloth suits, and now (yes, even at three in the morning!), he was resplendent in a double-breasted suit of sky blue, with blue-trimmed ruffles. He tugged on his lapels to straighten the lines of his suit, glancing at the camera, near the ceiling, that was supposed to be recording all the council meetings for the Colony’s appraisal. He was unaware that Praeger had long ago had the camera disconnected.

Messer-Krellman, the technicki’s union rep—nontechnicki himself and generally regarded as the Boss’s lickspittle—sat to Ganzio’s right. He was a ferret-faced man with an air of boredom.

There was much talk around the table as Russ opened the door. When he came in, the talk died out. They all looked at him, smiling in polite welcome.

Russ remembered the meetings with Professor Rimpler and his daughter, Claire, and how subtly at first, and then more and more clearly, the Rimplers had been excluded from the diffuse cronyism that characterized Admin’s inner circle. Russ, then, had been one of that charmed circle. Now he felt the chill. He was officially, to an extent functionally, still part of the council. But in fact, he was on his way to becoming an outsider.

Feeling a queasy combination of fatigue and wired anxiety, Russ took his seat on Ganzio’s left, asking, “Anyone going to clue me in on why this graveyard shift was necessary?” There was a pot of ersatz coffee on the table, and Styrofoam cups. Russ poured himself some, sipped it, regretted it.

“We have had the results of the comm system and LSS analysis,” Praeger said, sighing the words, “and we’ve been forced to conclude that…” He hesitated, folded his hands on the table, stared at them for a moment. Van Kips looked at him questioningly. He went on, “That the majority of the recent sabotage and the comm system imagery interference has not been caused by radic involvement. Has, in fact, somehow been induced by Rimpler himself.”

Russ felt sweat start out on his palms.

So now it was said. What everyone had been trying not to think.

And no one actually said, out loud: But Rimpler is dead!

“Evidently,” Praeger went on with a weary dryness, “there’s some sort of…” He glanced questioningly at Dr. Tate.

Tate shifted uncomfortably in his seat and said, “It’s a sort of psyche-gestalt presence maintaining the dynamics of Rimpler’s personality despite the fact that we, uh, technically cut his personality away when we removed a large part of the brain tissue we’re using to direct some of the electronics. We can only speculate, at this point, about what psychic mechanism has been engaged. But I’m fairly sure some rather base, almost infantile portion of Rimpler’s personality has survived as a kind of subtle electromagnetic field, which, by a sort of, ah, cyber-telekinesis, seems to be exerting its influence over the contiguous LSS computer control systems. The, ah, ghost in the machine, as it were…”

“Holy shit,” Russ breathed.

“Yes,” Praeger said. “We’ve accrued enough parts to replace the life-support computer system without using cerebro-interfacing. We can… dispose of Rimpler’s brain. But we’re not sure we can get to it. We sent some people in to try to shut him down—he overrode the door sensors, locked our people out. Rimpler seems to have accessed computer security systems. He’s been opening and closing the detention cells at random, for example. The guards have kept the prisoners in place but…” He shrugged. “Obviously, if he can do that, and if he’s truly aware of us—as he seems to be—he can block our access to the LSS using its security backup systems. Electrification, paralysis gas—even drawing the air from the access corridors.”

Russ swallowed. “And you want me to find a safe way through.”

“You’re the Security specialist, and you know the Sec systems like no one else.”

Russ looked from face to face, repressing an urge to shout at them. He stared at their emptied coffee cups. “You were having the meeting long before I got here. You didn’t bring me into it until you had to.”

“This is no time to harp on esoteric rules of procedure,” Van Kips said sharply. “This is an emergency. Can you help us with it or not?”

Russ thought, I’m more on the outside than I thought. It seemed Praeger had decided he was a radic sympathizer—and therefore expendable. In that case, with all the usual irony that attends politics, he’d have to be a radic sympathizer to survive. No more putting it off. I’ll have to make my move. Soon.