Dreams in the Tower Part 3 (2 page)

20

For at least the hundredth time in the last five days Jason, huddled on one of two beds in a little passenger cabin aboard the container ship
MV
Wyles
, tried to call Sabrina through the non-E com app he had put on her tablet. For at least the hundredth time, he was left disappointed. No, he was more than disappointed: he was utterly demolished, torn by the guilt of abandoning her and aching with worry at what might have happened to his last remaining friend. While there was no way of knowing if his calls and messages were even getting through, he did know that no one else but Sabrina would be able to receive them, regardless of who might be in control of her tablet now, so he kept trying.

There wasn’t much else to do on the hulking container ship—at least not for him. Dellia, who was sharing this cramped cabin with him, spent most days exploring the vessel and discussing things with the captain and engineers of which Jason had little knowledge and even less interest. He chose to limit his online presence to be safe, despite Captain Redding’s assurances that he was quite untraceable aboard the
Wyles
(“Don’t forget, I’ve been a part of this little movement a hell of a long time now,” he would say). The ship’s lounge had a small library with real books, a few old pinball machines, and a pool table in need of serious refurbishing—so Jason had no reason to hang out in there. Since he had no interest in exploring with his cabin-mate, all that was left was the dining room. The food was surprisingly edible, but what really drew Jason in was what the crew referred to as the ship’s bar: several boxes of a strange assortment of liquor and wine from all around the world and a seemingly endless supply of beer that the cook made himself in a spare pantry, all tucked away in a locked closet in the kitchen. As a passenger, Jason wasn’t restricted by the on-duty drink limits imposed on the crew, and he took full advantage of this freedom. He had grown particularly fond of the cook’s heavy stout, black as molasses and nearly as thick. Apart from meals, Jason only left the cabin to visit this so-called bar, and that was happening more and more frequently. Avery, the cook, had taken to digging in his chest pocket for the closet key as soon as he saw Jason enter the dining room.

Jason set his tablet on the bed beside him and nearly reached for the growler full of beer the cook had lent him before thinking better of it. He had learned a hard lesson after the first few nights, when he had taken his drinking too far and found that hangovers combined horribly with the motion of the ship to create hours of morning misery. And anyway no matter how much he drank, he always woke up back in this cramped, musty cabin on this aging ship heading wherever the people above him decided he should go next; his own life’s path was out of his hands. Getting sloppy drunk again would only make his problems that much harder to deal with the next day—and probably make Dellia’s opinion of him sink even lower. Sometimes he regretted following her onto this boat.

But where would he be now if he had stayed behind? Probably, he knew, in the same situation he was in now, only instead of two sides wanting him dead it would be all three—or however many sides there were now; it was hard to know for sure. What was once the Anti-Corp movement was now myriad groups, fighting as much with each other as with Silte Corp and its allies.

There were two curt knocks and the dented metal door swung inward. Dellia, wearing blue coveralls, her hair pulled into a tight ponytail, gave Jason a perfunctory greeting as she entered the cabin and dropped onto her own bed, leaning back tiredly against the wall. She looked at him and smiled then glanced around the room silently, seemingly deep in thought. This introspective silence was something she did a lot; Jason found it a thoroughly refreshing trait.

Finally, just before he was going to ask her which part of the ship she had been to today, she said, “I was in the engine room, just now.”

“Ah,” Jason said, sitting up straight and scooting to the edge of his bed. “Does this mean I get to hear all about the thermodynamics of boat engines now?” He may be able to talk over her head about computing technology and software engineering, but she was apparently an expert on almost everything else. Her enthusiasm to explain how most anything and everything worked was often tiring—and usually hard to follow.

With a playful roll of her eyes, Dellia said sardonically, “Well I am
dying
to talk about it.” She also moved to the edge of her bed so they were a few feet apart. “Actually,” she said in a semi-hushed voice, “I wanted to talk about something else I saw down there. There’s this door at the back of the engine room, looks really new compared to everything else. I went through it and it was like a big storage room or something. Obviously a recent addition, like they built an extra room into the cargo space down there. Anyway, this place was
full
of some seriously heavyweight tech equipment. Servers, satellite receivers, other stuff I wouldn’t begin to have a name for. Most of it’s not running, from what I could see. I wanted to look around more, but an engineer came in and didn’t seem happy to see me there, so I got out quick.”

“Tech equipment,” Jason repeated slowly. “That could mean a lot. It’s probably just what they need to give them the computing power they have. Or more likely what they need to keep this place off the grid.”

“Oh come on,” she said. “Even I know that can be done on a single beefed-up tab nowadays.”

He smiled and shook his head at her naivety. “No. Not out here. Not with so many people connected. They would need at least two independent satellite receivers and a transmitter, not to mention a couple of extremely secure servers, and a—”

“Okay I get it. There was a lot, though. And most didn’t seem like it was being used. I would show you, but I don’t want to risk getting caught around there again.” She leaned in towards him, closing even more of the distance between them. “Jason, don’t you see it? The captain isn’t just some casual hired pawn of the post-AC people. This place is a floating base. It’s the…it’s like the core of whichever group it is we’re working with now.”

“Maybe,” Jason said hesitantly. “But do you really think so? It’s just a bunch of equipment in storage. I mean, maybe they’re just transporting it. This
is
a cargo ship, right?”

She shook her head. “This is why you should leave the cabin once in a while. Every time we stop, they only take containers off the top two layers of the stack and replace them with new ones. At every port it’s the same containers being taken off and replaced. My guess is, if we looked inside the others we would find more equipment or people or—something.”

“That
is
interesting.” A base of operations in the middle of the sea
would
make sense.
And it would hardly be a surprise compared to everything Jason had seen these last few weeks. But… “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t think either of us needs to get any more involved. You’re the one who didn’t want these people having any control over you.”

“Fair enough.” She propped her pillow against the wall and leaned back on it, slumping with the wear of another day doing whatever it was she did out there—probably a little of everything: exploring, working with the crew, learning. She receded into her contemplative state, and after a while her eyes found Jason’s tablet, still lying on the bed.

“You still trying to get in touch with Sabrina?” she asked. “Any luck?” Her voice was more inquisitive than curious; she had shown only limited patience in his dwelling on his decision to leave.

“Nothing,” Jason said, absently grasping for the tab and looking at his own reflection in the black mirrored screen. “I know it’s getting pointless, but what else can I do? My other friends are either too dangerous to talk to or off the map completely. Sabrina is all I have, really, in the outside world. The only one I can trust. And it would be my fault, wouldn’t it? I mean if she…if she’s dead.”

“No,” Dellia said, resolute. “You and her and me—we were all manipulated. It’s no one’s fault but those people who hide behind masks and avatars, and that man who stands in his tower at Silte Corp. You and I have no more control over this than pieces on a chessboard. Whatever happened, it’s not your fault. When Sabrina gets your messages—”

“
If
she gets my messages.”

“
When
she gets your messages,” Dellia said more forcefully, “she will contact you. Until then, it makes no sense to waste your time sending her more or worrying about something you can’t do anything about.”

“I know,” he said weakly. He placed his tablet on the near corner of the little bedside table that was stacked with both of their belongings. Her side was significantly less orderly than his and was spilling over into his neat assortment of basic necessities.

She was right, in any case. She usually was. But what she didn’t know, what he hadn’t talked to her about, was the tiredness of running around, the anxiety of being on the wrong side of some of the most powerful people on the planet, the fear of probably never having a normal life again; it was all too much to deal with. Maybe his endlessly contacting Sabrina was useless, but at least it was a distraction. Giving that up meant he would have to find a new one.

“Thanks,” he said sincerely. “For saying that. I think I needed it.” She smiled briefly and nodded. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “maybe I could go with you tomorrow and you could show me around the ship.”

“Absolutely,” she said. She got up from the bed and unzipped her coveralls halfway. “But you might want to find something to wear that’s a little more durable than short sleeves and jeans. I like to get into some tricky places.” She yawned and let her dark hair fall down around her shoulders. “I’ll be in the shower if you need me,” she said groggily, stretching out so that her fingers brushed the low ceiling. As she stretched, the zipper on her coveralls went down several more inches, exposing bare flesh well below her navel.

She calmly zipped it back up, looking a lot less embarrassed than Jason felt, and said, “When I’m done we can go get something to eat.”

“Sure,” Jason said, watching her turn and enter the bathroom. She gave him a half-glance over her shoulder before closing the door and, though he might have imagined it, he thought she was grinning at him.

Eating in the cafeteria at a proper mealtime could be nice. Wanting to avoid the crew, he had mostly eaten meals either very early or very late—or just snacked on packaged food from the ship’s makeshift commissary. He still didn’t feel like mixing with the sailors, but the thought of eating dinner with Dellia seemed to diminish his reservations about mingling with the crew.

Smiling inwardly, he began rummaging around in his bag for some fresh clothes.

21

Over twenty years in the professional world—plus a few odd jobs in high school and college—and for the first time in his career Mike was going to the office drunk.

See how the great chief administrator has fallen
, he thought, shuffling heavily into the elevator. He hadn’t
intended
to get drunk on his way in, but this morning’s hangover had been particularly nasty and a couple painkillers with a tall glass of water just hadn’t cut through the blinding murk in his head. So a few sips of last night’s leftover bourbon had turned into a few gulps, which had then turned into a careless binge-drinking session rivalling his dorm room days in college. It had started in the kitchen then spilled out into the hallway and continued all through the lonely ride along the skyways. When he had stepped off the cart, he had been surprised by the wobbly footing and thought for a moment the building was shaking.
No, you’re just smashed, you idiot.
Not that it really mattered, anyway; he was usually halfway there before lunch these days.

Numbing reality was a lot better than facing it.

He repeated this over and over in his head as he shuffled sloppily to the elevator and up to his office, desperately seeking to rationalize his new low. The halls of Silte Corp’s upper echelons were unusually empty; Mike wasn’t sure if that was because he was late or early.

“Good morning, Mr. Torres.”

Mike looked up sharply at the sound of Elle’s daily greeting, suddenly realizing he had made it all the way into his office already. “Morningelle,” he slurred. “Hey, I haven’t checked my, uh, my tab. Do I have any—
mmph
…’scuse me. Do I have anything?”

“A message from Monika Leutz,” Elle said. “She requests you meet her in her office at 9 a.m.”

“
Dammit
. Why?”
Calm down.
“I mean, did she give a reason?” He stood swaying, staring down at Elle’s upside-down face on his desk screen.

“No, Mr. Torres.”

“Tell her—tell her I’ll be there.” A meeting in half an hour? And with Leutz, the one person he really didn’t seeing him in his present state. She would know for sure, take one look at him and see the drunken stupidity on his face. This was it, the day he had been dreading, the day his crumbling life crashed down in earnest. “And have some coffee sent up,” he added as an afterthought: his last desperate attempt to avoid what a small part of him had seen coming all along.

When the initial shock wore off, he realized how peculiar—suspicious even—it was for Leutz to be calling him to
her
office rather than coming down here like usual. Whatever the reason, it couldn’t be good. Had they already caught on to his little drinking problem? Was this just a game, a way for her to catch him at it officially? Or maybe it was about his lack of progress with the spying he was supposed to be doing. He had gotten so tired of Lom constantly hounding him for updates that he had ordered the artificial personality to stop bothering him. While Lom wasn’t technically required to obey orders from anyone but his owner, telling Leutz’s personal secretary to stay out of his business probably hadn’t been a great idea.

The coffee arrived, and he greedily grabbed it out of the office delivery unit, scalding his tongue on the first hasty gulp. But he didn’t care: a burnt mouth was infinitely better than facing Leutz’s icepick stare while she considered the many possible ways she could discipline him. Taking another, longer drink, he stood up to get his blood flowing and walked over to the only section of window in his office that he left unshielded from the outside world, the one on the corner facing the southeast side of the city. The sun was high enough that it didn’t obscure his view—but then what was there worth looking at now, anyway?

The night of the attack still hung as a nightmare around the apartment; he and Meredith only ever referred to it as ‘that night’ and never brought it up around Natalie, who had—thankfully—stayed soundly asleep through the worst. The riots had been bad, with smoke and gas and smoke filling the streets and flames engulfing parked cars and older buildings from before the era of structural fireproofing. But it had been the aftermath that had convinced Mike that he and his family were about to die gruesomely. After most of the fires had subsided, or in many cases succumbed to fire-extinguishing foam sprayed by automatic dispensers built into the outer walls of newer and renovated buildings, the gunshots had started—audible even seventy floors up—as the Guardian police and the Silte mercenaries opened fire on the rioters all around the city. According to the ONN livestream on Mike’s tablet, the rioters had been heavily armed and escalated the situation into a very real, very deadly battle, which explained why the distant pops and low rumbles had gone on for nearly three hours—hours that felt like days, huddled together with Meredith by the couch, away from any windows. Towards the end of the night, as the surreal sounds of death dwindled (moving north towards Silte headquarters, Mike found out later), two monstrous blasts shook the room so violently Mike was waiting for the Plaza to topple over. That had been where he and Meredith had screamed and woken up Natalie, forcing them to calm themselves and lead their daughter out of the room to keep her blissfully ignorant of what was going on below. After the explosion, the bangs and crashes ceased and the only noises they heard were the helicopters flying all around, shining spotlights between the buildings until a pale dawn crept up over the city.

On the skyway ride to work the next morning, the rising sun had revealed a smoldering battleground in the streets below. Here and there the city’s older buildings were half-burnt and deteriorating in the gentle morning breeze. Virtually every building as far as Mike could look down any street seemed to have contributed in some way to the glass dust blanketing the sidewalks. Along the street, blackened metal frames stood out blaringly in lines of bullet-peppered cars; there seemed to be no order to which had been burned and which had been spared. Even from thirty stories up Mike could make out the bodies by the dark, drying globs of beet-red blood stretching out beneath them along the pavement. There were so many, so many who died…for what? Was Silte so vilified among the masses that they were willing to become these strange, blood-drained lumps of meat on the pavement?

His coffee forgotten, Mike looked out at the city for a long time—longer than it took for the dark brown liquid in the plastic cup to become tepid and stale. The city had been cleaned up significantly; many of the victims of the Great Layoff had been more than happy to take minimum-wage jobs with the state to help clean up, though some perhaps had helped cause the destruction to begin with. All around, the signs of chaos were still there, though, like gaping wounds that had been poorly doctored, sanitized with cheap liquor and covered up with duct tape. Mike looked a short way down the street at the blackened, cracked road where one of the bombs had gone off, taking out the side of a skyscraper adjacent to the Silte building. Both bombs had been destined for headquarters, but neither had made it far enough to do more than blow out some of the lower windows and throw a few of the active offices into mild disorder. Mike looked down at the barricade and the legion of heavily armed guards stationed around the perimeter. Every day the building was becoming more of a military fortress, and every day this was becoming more of a war.

Whose side was he on, really?

“You will need to leave soon for your meeting, Mr. Torres.”

“Thank you, Elle.”

Pulling himself from the window reluctantly, Mike went back to his desk. He looked briefly at the cold, half-drunk coffee before adding to it a few splashes of scotch and swishing it around. He downed the cup’s contents in seconds. Let Leutz see it, let her banish him from the office, let her throw him and his family out into the real world. He didn’t care. That would be easier to deal with than the bodies in the streets.

*  *  *

As he stood outside the menacing door, Mike realized this was the first time he had ever even been to Leutz’s office.
First and last
, he couldn’t help but think. Just as he was about to knock, Lom’s boring face showed up on the little screen above the lock. “Right on time,” Lom said, and then the door opened automatically.

“Come on in Mike,” Leutz called from the other side of the vast room, which was at least twice the size of Mike’s office. “Have a seat,” she said. He crossed the room to her desk, noting how ornate and expensive the furniture and décor were; Leutz had never been very subtle.

With a feeling of dispirited acceptance, Mike dropped into the soft chair on the near side of the heavy mahogany desk and waited for her to tell him his fate. He looked at her face, made bold by his apathy, and she stared back, caressing her glasses with a sharp finger.

“I’d offer you a drink,” she said, “if you didn’t already smell like you soaked your suit in cheap whiskey.”
Here it comes
, Mike thought. “Really, Mike,” she said, leaning back, crossing her arms and taking him in with a predator’s gaze. “You didn’t have this problem before Project Unify, as far as we can tell. I’ve chosen to ignore it up until now, but that’s not an option anymore.” She sighed—and then did something that took Mike completely aback: she removed her smart glasses. Her blue eyes looked absurdly out-of-place with nothing to hide behind; her age suddenly showed blaringly on her tired face.

“What
is
it, Mike?” she pleaded, softness in her voice. “The stress? I need to know how I can help you.”

“It’s…” Mike began. But what would he say? That he was scared? That he could no longer deal with being complacent in bribery and murder and all the other crimes Silvan committed on his quest for power? The truth was, Mike wasn’t exactly sure what his problem was, but he did know that the source was Silte Corp.

“It’s nothing…,” he began stubbornly; then, honesty seeping through uncontrollably, “It’s everything. It’s the violence. It’s being trapped in the Plaza. It’s the…the guilt.”

“Huhhh…” The noise she made was something like a sigh. “Well, Mike, you’re not alone. Everyone in this building feels the same way you do—it’s just we’ve all gotten so good at pushing it deep down. You know, cram everything behind these inauthentic shells or something like that.” She looked away, twirling her glasses absently in her hand. But rather than her usual boredom, her look was one of poorly-masked worry. “You’re different, and that’s why you are so important. But I guess that’s also your big fault, isn’t it? The truth is…the truth is we—no
I
am scared, and if I can’t rely on you…well then I guess I’m all alone up here.”

“I’m sorry…” Mike said, unsure of what else to say. This whole situation was beginning to make him uncomfortable; this woman sitting across from him was more human now than she had ever shown before, and the effect was strange. Somewhere down beneath the scotch he felt pity.

“Don’t apologize,” she said. She opened a drawer and pulled out a small plastic pill bottle, popped it open and slid a circular white pill into her palm. “Take this.” She handed it over to Mike, who studied it in his hand.

“It’s okay,” Leutz assured him. It’s Sobril, a new drug fresh from the OpenLife R&D department. It negates the effects of alcohol, to some extent. After all this chaos is over these things will be on shelves in every convenience store and supermarket in the world. Take it.” Mike shrugged and flipped the little pill into his mouth, swallowing it with a gob of saliva. “Give it a few minutes,” she said.

They sat there in silence for a minute or two and then all at once Mike felt his fuzzy drunkenness receding, leaving not even a headache in its wake. “That’s amazing,” he said.

“Isn’t it?” Leutz had put her glasses back on and was her usual stony self again, her brief little show of vulnerability gone as quickly as it had come. It almost felt to Mike like it hadn’t even happened at all. “No more hangovers,” she said. “No more worrying about driving home. Keep this bottle. And don’t even think about drinking on your way to work again. Got it?”

“Yeah—uh…yes, of course. Thank you.”

“Good,” she said. “Then we can move on to your assignment. Lom hasn’t given me much to feel good about at this point.”

And there it was: the second hammer blow. Just when Mike got rid of one of the worries gnawing at his insides she smacked him back to reality with the other. He had never been a procrastinator before—and he still wasn’t. He simply believed people’s privacy should be left alone. If he could discover anything new through normal means fine, but he wasn’t going to become just like one of the hackers they were fighting against; he wouldn’t drop to such a low level. But what would be the cost?

After a few moments of focusing on something in her glasses’ display, Leutz said, “It’s time for a progress report, Mike. Have you found anything yet or not?”

“Well, not really.” Mike spoke carefully and—he hoped—calmly. It was one thing to reveal his lack of progress; it was something entirely worse to make Leutz suspect he was somehow involved with her enemies. “I mean, I haven’t
noticed
anything.”