S. Swann - Prophets

What clothing store has bulletproof windows?

Something hard and metal slammed into his back and he collided face-first into the undamaged window. His sidearm went sailing down the alley. The breath jarred from him, he collapsed on the ground, rolling up to face his shimmering attackers.

“I guess,” said the one with static in his voice, “you just don’t want to do this nice.”

Mallory spat from a bloody lip. “I guess that was a bad idea.”

“Bad idea, he says.”

“That’s funny.”

An invisible gauntlet reached down and grabbed the front of Mallory’s shirt, and Mallory got the sickeningly surreal vision of most of his torso disappearing as the man lifted him to his feet.

“For your own benefit we’re going to have to educate you out of these bad ideas.”

Mallory’s feet left the ground and his back slammed into the wall. He could hear the servos grinding in his attacker’s unseen armor. In his head, Mallory began praying, preparing for the worst.

This close, Mallory could only see the world through the distortion of the camo projection. Through the angular ripples of the projection, he saw a bright flash erupt from the ground behind the man holding him. A ball of smoke rolled upward from the flash, revealing a circle of the walkway melted to black slag. The air was suddenly rank with the smell of hot metal and burned synthetics.

“What the fuck?” The man holding him dropped him and backed away. Mallory staggered against the wall but remained upright. His two attackers were standing right next to him, but Mallory had the sense that he was no longer the focus of their attention.

“Okay, boys, playtime’s over.” The new voice came from a petite woman standing at the mouth of the alley, back where Mallory had come from. She had brown skin and straight white hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a white jumpsuit with a shoulder patch that Mallory couldn’t make out at this distance.

Her most distinguishing feature was the razor-thin gamma laser carbine she held pointed down the alley at them.

“This ain’t your business, lady.”

The woman cocked her head. The barrel of the carbine didn’t move at all. “You know, it might be a good idea for you to think about whether you should be telling me what is and isn’t my business.”

“Now wait a goddamn minute—”

“Cool it, Reggie.”

“Now you going and using my name, what the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“She’s BMU, Reggie.”

“I don’t give a shit if she’s the fucking pope—”

“Well, I do. Rolling a tourist isn’t worth the trouble.”

The woman added, “Listen to your brother, Reggie.”

“What? No one said anything about who—”

“I told you. BMU. Understand?”

After a long pause, Reggie said, “Okay, cut our losses. Fuck it.”

Both shimmers moved away leaving Malloy alone in the alley.

The woman walked down the alley. Without the distortion between him and her, he could now see the shoulder patch on her jumpsuit. It wasn’t too surprising to see the initials “BMU” embroidered in gold on a red field. Below the initials were a crossed sword and rifle.

She also had a name embroidered on the left breast of the jumpsuit: “V. Parvi.”

She bent over and picked up Mallory’s slugthrower.

“Thank you,” Mallory said.

“You’re welcome,” she stepped over to him and handed him his gun. This close, she wasn’t just petite, but tiny. She was a full head shorter than his Occisian build—barely 150 centimeters, if that. “But don’t go thinking that anything on this planet’s free, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick.”

The woman was named Vijayanagara Parvi. She belonged to an organization with the somewhat generic name of the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union—she was a recruiter. Apparently, Father Mallory’s alias, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick, had just been recruited by Ms. Parvi. Of course, she told him, he didn’t have to sign up with the BMU. However, it made economic sense. If he didn’t, he would owe the BMU for her services, and he wouldn’t have the benefits of being a member of the union.

Of course, the primary benefit would be that he would cease being a target for bottom-feeders like Reggie and his brother.

“The way it works on this planet,” she told him, “you need to be part of something scarier than the shitheads who want a piece of you.”

In the end, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick went along with her pitch. The whole situation fit so seamlessly into Mallory’s cover he chalked it up to divine providence. It didn’t even matter that he had the strong suspicion that Reggie and his brother were employed by Ms. Parvi and the BMU to help recruit new blood. Signing up for the BMU was something that Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick would do even without the extra incentive.

He also felt a level of security when Ms. Parvi confirmed many of the details of Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick’s history. Mallory’s cover seemed to have stuck, however rushed it had been.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mysteries

Knowledge is not the same as intelligence, and having too much of one often leads to having too little of the other.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

Sometimes it’s smart to know when to be a little ignorant.

—ROBERT Celine (1923-1996)

Date: 2525.11.12 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

Tjaele Mosasa sat in a small building in an aircraft graveyard on the outskirts of Proudhon. In the office around him, holo displays crowded the walls. The displays showed unfiltered broadcasts from across all of human space, chattering in every language of the human universe. The data from the signals varied in age from several days to several decades depending on whether Mosasa’s receivers were leeching a tach-comm broadcast or a slow light speed signal that wasn’t intended to communicate beyond a planetary system. The off-planet broadcasts cycled through signals every few seconds based on some custom filtering algorithms. A dozen other screens showed text data scrolling by quicker than any human would be able to read.

The data flowing through the office, flowing through Mosasa, came from every aspect of human civilization. News broadcasts, soap operas, technical user manuals, tour guides, classified intelligence briefings, personal tach-comms, telemetry data from satellite diagnostic systems, pornography, patent applications, want ads, suicide notes, tax returns, census data—

If someone, somewhere, digitized some scrap of data, it was Mosasa’s goal to route it through the hardware in this room. Even when he wasn’t present here, he had encrypted transmissions broadcast to receivers implanted in his body.

Mosasa absorbed the data on a preconscious level. The software that formed the highest level of his consciousness, the part of him that thought of himself, was too complicated, slow, and unwieldy to process all the information he gorged on. That duty was reserved for an older part of himself, the part that was designed to process the data, to model it, to give him a view of the universe beyond this office.

The individual holo broadcasts, reports, novels, technical manuals no more impacted his conscious awareness than a single photon. However, like a photon, he didn’t need to be aware of any particular data element for it to contribute to his image of the universe.

The core of Mosasa’s preconscious mind assembled the unending stream of data into a view of the human cultural and political universe just as his eyes assembled an unending stream of photons into a view of the physical office around him. Both views were completely arbitrary constructions of Mosasa’s brain. Both were concrete and unquestionably real.