Page a Day: Twenty One

When stars appeared overhead I went back to my room and slept for twelve straight hours. I woke with my mind sharp and bright and clear and sold nearly the entirety of my possessions, keeping only the costly hardware and software and wetwear I’d accumulated through my career. I bought a small folding knife and cut my hair. At sunset I walked down to one of the piers and threw my ID card in the ocean.

              I laughed at myself for that. The Profusion wasn’t going to drag me back to manage information flow. Its administrators didn’t even know my name; ID cards were blank except for a department seal and a slim magnetic strip. To them, I was a unique sequence of four different letters, and signed every time I swiped my finger to purchase something. 

              I looked at my hand in silhouette against the setting sun. My body, bones and skin and curving flesh. Nerve and muscle and finest hair. I was here, I lived. Else I would miss the supple muscled motion of my fingers.

               I took out the knife I had used to cut my hair. And drew it across my fingertip, just enough to draw a little blood. Your name was verbal, vocal, the sounds your mother called you.  

              Crimson pooled minutely on my fingertip. That was one of the elder faiths, I thought. Drink my blood to remember me. Such had been the lapsed devotion of a boyfriend long gone. But people remembered laughter, touch, lakes and sex and wind and food on languid mornings. The smell of a husband’s hair, an infant’s smile, hot rivulets of tears.  Crimson-splashed rushes to the hospital, the pallid face of illness. Frantic embraces in the night.

           A magsled slid past, the flying silver bullet of its hull bearing some soldier on patrol. I started at the sound of its engine. The pool of blood fell from my fingertip, trickling to the sand.

            Soldiers, I thought, wore bands around their arms, with little machines inside. The nanites remembered everything a guardian did and thought and felt. The military read them after an incident: the Profusion policing its police. Officers reviewed the information by linking bracelets or ingesting the machines the soldier’s blood once carried.

             

Page a Day: Twenty

            “He just said something very much the same to me. But are you from the valley, then?”

            He stood to go. “Are you from the city? Or are you from your mother?”

            “Some would say the city was my mother.”

            He laughed, short and sharp. “So it is with us.”

            He had barely left before I fell asleep.

            The sun stabbed golden spikes through my window. I half-buried my face inside my sheets. I did not want to leave. But my eyes wandered to my linking sphere. I commanded it to release my personal agendas. Yes, I’d been here on Thaeron my nine full weeks of leave. For that long I’d swum in the ocean and breathed unfiltered air and remembered how to sleep. So  I folded up my clothes and prepared to return to the business of the Profusion. I was ready in an hour. 

            Distracted, I picked up the sphere. I recalled my calendar and frowned.

            The dates were incorrect. I’d entered them that way on my application. I’d taken my leave six months ahead of time, with three weeks I hadn’t earned the credit for.  I called my office. There were no messages. I checked my account. No one had written. 

            Startled, I walked out the door. I walked away from my rented cottage and toward Sepira’s central terminal, its towers erect and spiking in the dawn. Behind me swept the ocean. Relaxed, I started walking toward the river that had given the port city its beginnings.

            I never made it to the elevator that would have taken me into orbit.

            I stopped half a kilometer away, just as the sun cleared a thicker bank of clouds. I stared at the long tether binding earth to space and me to the rest of the Profusion. My eyes fixed on the dim point where the cable disappeared in Thaeron’s stratosphere. The sun sped silently across the sky.

Page a Day: Nineteen

I knew Cratyus and Meno by their position, and their frequent contact with me, but I had too often confused them nonetheless. Marcus I knew because he always wore his armor, and because he took double watches every night. He has said that this should be the custom of each officer. 

            “When Meno attacked the smilodon,” I asked. “Was he trying to protect me, or trying to reach his fallen kin?”

            Marcus paused, squinting. I think I finally managed to surprise him. “We are all already dead,” he said. “Yet no one knows it. We are one body.”

            I inclined my head toward the sparer form of Jerem Cozak, kneeling at the next fire. “I believe he would disagree that you are dead. And I know you listen to him. Why was Meno trying to protect me? I have been useless on this march.”

            The man look at me gravely, “We are the body of Jerem Cozak, who is his own head. He knows us better than ourselves.”      

            I nodded as though I understood. “Do you come from the valley of my city? I am ignorant, because I could not be with you when you all came together.”

            His face became more serious. “What is that to you?”

            “The machines of the White Swarm speak with you.”

            He shook his head, and pointed to the same place I had. “They have spoken. He is what they said.”

            “I don’t think you’re from the city,” I tried again, “I think they all gathered at the Temple. But I don’t think you know where you’re from, either.”

            “He told us you were orphaned. It is where we go that matters.”

Page a Day: Eighteen

            I shook my head, marveling. “But that’s impossible. The Letherium machines erase those memories. That’s one of the conditions of becoming Faith to start with – you forget your first forty years of life.”

            “There is no forgetting, and nothing is erased.” He gestured toward the clouded heavens, just as the heavy snow and winds reached our wood at last. “There is only that which is obscured.”

            I raised my voice over the sighing of the branches. “So the White Swarm helped you remember?”

            He shook his head again. “It was the nightwind. Did you think yourself the only battlefield?” 

            I shouted over a gust. “Who are these men? Where do they come from? They weren’t in the city, or you wouldn’t have sent those to the Temple. Who are they?”

            “Who are you?”

            “An orphan,” I said. “Why won’t you answer me?”

            “Because you need only ask yourself.”

            I squinted, then, and determined that I should know one thing at least. “You know what’s happening. Or at least you know more than me, though we woke in the same sarcophagus. Tell me, Jerem Cozak: why do the machines of the White Swarm not speak to me, as they do to you?”

            He shrugged. “I am the command they send. I am your question in return. My heart is calm and clear, and I am more within myself than you are within yourself.  Again I tell you, ask yourself.” And with that, he turned and walked away, talking to the men who tended to the fires.

            I was unfurling my bedroll one-handed when Marcus came to see me, as short and thick and relentless as all the rest. They are strangely uniform, the Never-born. The men and women of my city always varied greatly in height and weight and build. But the Never-born each remind me of the squat, inexhaustible machines that once pumped water from the river up into the Temple grounds. 

Page a Day: Seventeen

            When the Never-born unslung their packs I dropped, kneeling and panting. Others went to work immediately, spreading through the wood to gather dead and fallen limbs or erecting the tents that the city guard had once used in patrols throughout the valley. I was not surprised when Jerem Cozak came to stand beside me.

            “A poor choice,” I said. “Meno marched. He could fight. He stopped that smilodon. The only thing I stop is all the other men.”

             Jerem Cozak frowned, searching through my pack. “You become yourself,” he said, uncapping the bag that holds my water. “Like all the rest of us. When this storm ends, you will be healed.”

            He offered, and I drank. “Meno and Cratyus were soldiers,” I said. I will never be.” I bit my lip, thinking. “But do you mean the machines of the Swarm will help? They are still with us?”

            “You are colder than you know,” he said. “We are not dressed for this. You would have died before sunset.”

            “But I can’t see them, and they did not save those men from the smilodon.”

            His eyes were distant in the fading light. “The animal mind is strange, and the machines have not yet learned all they know – will know. For the other? Each man is born in a house, and in that house he will be strongest. But in time each man will be strong enough to make other houses home.”

            I laughed, so that the Never-born who built and set the nearest fire turned to look at me as they worked. I quieted under their blank expressions. “Certainly you don’t expect me to understand that,” I said. “Who are you, really? Do you remember the Faith at all?”

            Now he smiled.  “I remember him better than he remembered himself, for I remember the boy who would become the Faith.”