Vigilant

DATA TUMOR

My ages sixteen, seventeen, eighteen: angry, angry, angry. Survivor guilt and post-traumatic stress.

Hating Dads for being dead, determined to punish Ma because she couldn’t make it all better. I buried myself in a shallow grave of time-wasting: the sick kind, where you don’t like what you’re doing, know you don’t like it, and keep doing it anyway. Playing clot-head games in VR-land; having listless sex with anyone drunk enough to reciprocate; bitch-fighting my mother, my friends, myself…

One day, I got to thinking how I disliked a particular freckle on my arm. So I got a scalpel from my father’s old clinic and cut the freckle off. When the first freckle was gone, another one stood out… so I cut that off too.

Things kind of got out of hand. I still have to wear long sleeves in polite company.

But there’s no point dwelling on any of the witless, reckless ways I nearly sliced myself up, OD’d, or got beaten toothless in semen-stinking back rooms. You could call my lifestyle an ongoing suicide attempt; but it didn’t work, did it?

Didn’t prove anything.

Didn’t solve the problem.

Faye Smallwood, who once thought she was too strong to be damaged by the world. A glossy girl who suddenly hated shine.

I survived those years mostly because of Sallysweet River itself — tough mining town, yes, but not nearly as rotted-up with focused violence as your average city. We had brawls and drunkards, not gang wars and cold-kill hoodlums.

And I had my protectors: other petty delinquents and rebels, kids like me who’d seen too many corpses. My own bad crowd, eight of us, all convinced that the overabundance of death disproved something about the universe, and the only decent response was to mistrust the whole polite world. To defy. To mutiny against complacent niceness because it had unforgivably let us down.

Idealistic buggers that we were. At age nineteen, we got married — all eight of us.

Quick background data: the humans on Demoth originally hailed from Come-By-Chance, a planet that got settled in the twenty-second century by a small religious sect called the MaryMarch Covenant. The early MaryMarchers believed in a particular type of group marriage — forming your own clan, a commune, a kibbutz, a "life team"…

A family. And at age nineteen, with nothing but ice between Mother and me, some part of my soul longed for any kind of connection.

MaryMarch marriages had fallen out of fashion over the past two hundred years, worn down by contact with more conventional attitudes from mainstream Technocracy society; but they were still legal, here on Demoth as well as our old home on Come-By-Chance. So why shouldn’t a bunch of eight kids from Sallysweet River tie the knot? Such a sweet old-fashioned notion… marrying the boys and girls next door.

Me and Lynn: we were the instigators. Things always worked that way. Lynn had long been in flaming staunch-hearted love with me — the only smudge of lunacy in her character because otherwise she had brains and cool and common sense. (God, if I could be as serene as Lynn for a single day! I envied everything about her… except her dotage on a flake like me. Of course, she envied me back: "For being insane," she said, "for letting yourself be insane… and for those gorgeous Amazonian shoulders that I just want to sink my teeth into. Meow.")

I made up a list of the family I envisioned, and Lynn made it happen. Our typical working arrangement, "Lynn, I want this."

"Then, dear one, that’s what you shall have."

My chosen spouses (besides Lynn):

Angie Tobin, because she was mouthwatering gorgeous and sexually congenial. The sort who giggled comfortably in bed. With Angie baiting our marital hook, Lynn and I could reel in blessed near any man in town. And half the women.

Barrett Arsenault, because he was just as gorgeous as Angie, and wild as squidge-weed. Never turned down a dare, no matter how crazed… and on nothing-to-do Saturday nights, Barrett always came up with something to make the weekend memorable.

Peter Kaluit, because he was funny. By Christ and all the saints, he was funny. Wicked but not snake-mean. He played keyboards too, and wrote songs that would have you laughing yourself wet. To my teenage mind, it didn’t hurt either that he was hung like a bear.

Winston Mooney, because he knew how to get things done. He knew the angles. More than once, when I’d got myself in trouble with the law or harsh company, Winston would squeak me free from the jaws of disaster. He was mad-jack in love with me too, and it would be a slap in his face if I didn’t invite him into the scrum.

Darlene Carew, because she was timid and lonely. Not whiny or pathetic, but sad. A bony-thin girl as pretty as porcelain, but who never got asked out; who never dreamed of doing the asking herself; who wrote poetry and listened with shiny eyes whenever I recounted my latest slap-and-tickle adventures. I figured Darlene could be my personal project — cut her in on a piece of Barrett, Peter, and the rest, give her some new experiences to put in her poems.

Finally, Egerton Crosbie (Sharr’s brother), because he was good-natured and built like a streetcar. Without him, I’d be the brawniest one in the household… and I sure as hell didn’t want to get stuck with the heavy lifting my whole life.

There: my husbands and wives. Cajoled, enticed, teased, negotiated into a grand old MaryMarch union.

The idea shocked the people we wanted to shock — my mother, for example. She wasn’t even of Covenant descent (Dads met her at medical college on New Earth), so our announcement struck her as flat-out perverse. Longtime MaryMarchers had a milder reaction, but still considered the marriage in bad taste: using a respected-if-not-respectable religious institution just to annoy our elders. Which was bang-on-the-head true.

Still, we had the aroma of legitimacy on our side: like someone who fasts on Fridays or wears a crown of real thorns to the Atonement service. People moan, "We don’t do that anymore!" but they won’t go so far as to stop you. Deep down, there’s always a knot of guilt that they’ve abandoned the old ways. That they’ve settled their butts in a padded pew and made themselves comfortable.

So the eight of us married. Started our own family compound: eight small domes ringed around a bigger central one. For a while, of course, it was sex, sex, sex — what do you expect from nineteen-year-olds? We had no other ideas about what marriage was. I took all seven of the others into my bed, individually, or in threesomes, foursomes, more-somes…

Faye being bad. Playing musical beds, not for any healthy reason like love or pure wet lust, but mostly just to be wicked. To get revenge on my mother for all the things she’d once imagined about me. To shock the rest of the community. To trivialize myself.

But the free-for-all burned itself out after a few months. Egerton and Darlene began pairing off together almost every night. Then Angie and Barrett. The other four of us stayed more loose and lubricious, occasionally showing up at each other’s door on nights we wanted comfort, but sleeping more and more on our own as time went on.

When Lynn got pregnant, both Peter and Winston claimed to be the father. Not fighting over it; just both of them volunteering, eager to be dads. Which put Lynn, Peter, and Winston together, didn’t it, even if Lynn occasionally planted me a fierce kiss as she padded past — the three of them cheerful parents-to-be, then overjoyed parents of Matthew and Eva. Naturally, the story went that Peter fathered one of the twins, while Winston fathered the other… but no one really knew who begat whom, and of course, they refused gene-testing to find out the truth. That would only spoil the solidarity.

So Darlene/Egerton, Angie/Barrett, Lynn/Peter/Winston — all of them sorted out. I was happy for them, truly. And I wasn’t so cruelly cut off on my own. As the months and years trickled by, from time to time any one of the seven might show up at my dome near bedtime, saying, "Faye, you looked so lonely at dinner…"

Sometimes we talked, then I sent them away. Sometimes they stayed the warm-flesh night. My husbands, my wives, my lovers, my friends, my teammates, my safety lines to the world.

It wasn’t so bad being the odd woman out. You can learn to live with anything when you’ve developed the notion you don’t deserve more.

Meanwhile in those years after the plague, Demoth was going through a merry old flap-up of reshuffling. With only a sliver of its former population, the planet didn’t have nearly the same mineral needs as before. All but one of the mines around Sallysweet River closed, but that was no hardship — so many Ooloms had died, there was work to be found all over Great St. Caspian. The government spent prodigious amounts on retraining; my spouses all got good educations, then good jobs.

For a while, it still looked like Demoth might need a splurge of immigration, just to keep things running. Add it up, and we only had six million inhabitants on the entire planet — blessed near empty, even by the sparse standards of Fringe Worlds and colonies. But the humans and Ooloms who’d come through the plague didn’t want newcomers barging in: people who’d act sympathetic about the die-off but wouldn’t know. So we buckled down hard and pulled things together on our own.

Our eight-in-hand family eventually moved from Sallysweet River to the poky urban sprawl of Bonaventure… still on Great St. Caspian Island, but out on the ocean coast. Less moss, more bare ice-scraped rock. By mainstream Technocracy standards, the city was a fiddly-dick clump-hole, population only 50,000. But with Demoth severely depeopled by the plague, Bonaventure was the twelfth largest metropolis on the planet. A major hub and port town: where supertankers dropped off raw organics harvested from the Pok Sea algae flats; where the spunky Island Bullet loaded and unloaded its railcars after running its circuit of the mining towns in-country. Bonaventure also had an up-sleeve to the North Orbital Terminus… mostly for distributing the metals mined inland, but also for business travelers and tourists who wanted fast transport to anywhere else on Demoth — up the sleeve in zero time to the terminus, over a cross-sleeve to an equatorial orbiter, then down another sleeve to any population center on the planet.

One of the great charms of Bonaventure — you could leave the place so quickly.

"Bonaventure" was a human word, of course. Pre-plague, the city had an Oolom name, but that got changed when humans took over. The Ooloms wanted it that way. They still outnumbered Homo saps overall on Demoth — roughly five million of them to one million of us — but most surviving Ooloms could afford upscale residences in the Thin Interior, playground communities nestled in the skyscraper trees of ancient forests and jungle. They had an unshakable passion for the deep woods; so they hired us humans to work in Oolom-owned offices and factories, while they retired to soar through the canopy in genteel indolence. Even not-so-flush Ooloms headed treeward, if only to work as servants/accountants/dogsbodies to the truly well heeled. For them, any job in the Big Green was better than facing the urban gray.

For twenty years after the plague, then, Demoth sorted itself out… Ooloms settling down in their posh isolated villages, while Homo saps found their own places on islands and coastal plains — anywhere close to sea level, where the air was thick enough for human lungs to bite into.

And for twenty years after the plague, I sorted myself out too… until finally, at the age of thirty-five, I walked into Bonaventure’s office of the College Vigilant to ask how I could join.

I’d had jobs before. "Warm-body" jobs like keeping an eye on nanotech-performance monitors, or hauling drums of proto-nute to houses whose food synthesizers weren’t hooked up to the mains. I’d also had "Faye" jobs like prancing the puss in stripperamas, or nude modeling for local artists. (A lot of sculptors loved the button scars on my arms, where I used to have freckles.)

But mostly I bared the butt for Ooloms. Oolom men found human women outrageously, capaciously sexy because we were so big. Torso big, I mean — they couldn’t care less about cleavage or crotch, but they turned goggle-eyed at the expanse of a human back. Their own Oolom females were so much thinner… and some quirk of the Oolom male psyche had a gut reaction, thickness = arousal. "You’re so wide!" one admirer crooned to me.

Gives a whole new meaning to calling women "broads."

Some of the other strippers, the ones who flicked tricks on the side, told me their customers often took a woman’s shoulder measurements so they could brag to the boys back home. Considering my own mesomorph build, I could have been the choice rumpus room of the back streets… but I never sank quite that far. I’d take off my clothes for money — where was the crime in treating myself like meat? — but selling my swish was just too disloyal to my spouses.

They were my family. I could devalue myself, but not them.

Which meant that as years went on, as Darlene and Angie and Lynn all had children, I gradually spent more time home helping with the kids than playing Miss Udder around town. The children called me "Mom-Faye"… not the same tug on the heart as plain old "Mom," but I was too much the coward to have babies of my own: afraid it would change me, afraid that it wouldn’t.

Even just being Mom-Faye changed me in time. You know how it goes: after a full day of feeding/bathing/diapering, you’re too tired to spark out for a night strutting bare-ass, and doing squats with a barbell, naked. You say, "I’ll cheapen myself tomorrow"… and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace till you wake one day, look in the mirror, and don’t straight off feel disgust. Such a shock. That your soul may not be an irredeemable cesspool.

Then quick, while you’re still brave, ask yourself what you’d want to do with your mortal existence if the universe weren’t a total dog’s vomit.

What do you want? To live in the real. To name the lies. Wa supesh i rabi ganosh. An aspiration you haven’t let yourself think about for twenty years… but when you ask, it’s right on top of your mind, like the perfume of roses coming from a locked cupboard.

"This is the only thing in my head that approaches an honest dream. So why in the name of Mary and all her saints don’t I get off my cowardly butt and make this happen?"

The Vigil accepted my application on the spot. They accepted everyone’s application on the spot. If you weren’t proctor material, they had seven years of brutal training to weed you out.

A student of the College Vigilant. Just like that.

My family treated it as a lark. "I always like when you get an enthusiasm," Lynn told me. "You’re such less trouble for a while… till someone pisses you off, and you chuck everything with loose ends dangling." She said the same when I took up piano, and when I bought all those awful chairs to learn reupholstering. The younger kids giggled about Mom-Faye getting into politics, the older kids did impersonations of me losing my temper at a bureaucrat ("Oh you think you’re a clever little man, do you?"), and all four of my husbands asked, "How much will this cost?"

The unsupportive sods.

I studied. Classes, sims, direct info braingrabs. Most of the work I did over the world-net; but when I needed face-to-face, I turned to the proctors in town, the ones who scrutinized Bonaventure City Council — a dozen sharp-witted people, generously serving as teachers and mentors during my seven years as student. Three were human; the rest were Oolom, living among Homo saps for the good of the Vigil.

The Ooloms treated me with sunbeam kindness… even as they perched on my shoulders to add more weight when I did push-ups. They knew the Vigil had to build back its numbers, and that meant encouraging anyone who could grit through the training. Even with two decades to recover from the epidemic, the Vigil was running strapped, barely enough proctors to scrutinize the governments of our world.

I grew stronger, more disciplined. That was the easy part. The hard part was yanking myself out of a pit of cynicism twenty years deep, up to a place where maybe I could believe in an ideal or two. When I talked to fellow students, lots of them felt the same way. They’d gloated when signing up for the Vigil: keen for the chance to rip into politicians, to show up important people as fools and to tell the world, "There, you blind buggers, that’s the brainless corrupt government you elected."

But.

The Vigil wasn’t about humiliating bad guys. It wasn’t about punishing bureaucrats if they disregarded the side effects of some proposed bill. There were no scorecards, no banners, no late-night celebrations where senior proctors offered you champagne toasts for making heads roll.

When you succeeded, government worked better. Passed good laws. Met the public need. That was your sole reward — real people became better off. Safer, or more prosperous, or more blessed by intangibles. (Art. Freedom. Clean air.)

It takes time to shift your outlook: you start by thinking all politics is rat puke, all politicos are hypocrites, and oh, it’ll be rare delicious to kneecap the bastards; but you end simply looking at laws, not lawmakers, and believing there is such a thing as attainable good.

Idealism. I, Faye Smallwood, was capable of idealism.

It surprised the bejeezus out of me.

I graduated from the College Vigilant in the twenty-seventh year after the plague. Standard Earth Technocracy years, not local ones: a.d. 2454. I had just turned forty-two.

My family threw me a surprise party the night before mushor. my rite of passage into the Vigil itself. Of course I knew the party was coming — our whole blessed household tittered with whispers, conversations stopping or lurching to silliness when I walked into the room — and I grumbled to myself about the obligation to act surprised when the moment came. Didn’t I have other things to do? Weren’t there a million last-minute details before heading for the Vigil Proving Center?

But I should have known better than to get the growls. My family made me happy… not through festive inventiveness, but just companionship and gold-hearted loyalty. When the lager’n’biscuits ran out, the other women shooed the men away, declared it "Sleepover Night for the Fortyish Fraus," then took me jointly to bed.

And here I thought I’d have to act surprised.

Twenty-four hours later, my skull top was missing, and I had far too clear a view of my own pink brain. In a mirror. While surgeons planted a link-seed in my corpus callosum.

Mushor. My second birth.

This brain surgery, mushor, was the secret hinge of separation between the Vigil and others on Demoth. All those earlier years of training were skim-milk rehearsal for the real transition: Homo sapiens to Homo vigilans.

Becoming a different organism. Blessed near a different species.

Here’s the thing: joining the Vigil rewired your brain.

Years ago, I’d wondered how Zillif could link to the datasphere when she was paralyzed. How did she work the keys on her access implant? Answer: there were no keys. The implant was a link-seed, embedded directly inside her head.

And now I had one too.

Over the two-week retreat of mushor, the seed would sprout faux-neural tendrils, nano-thin vines threading through my cerebellum like parietal ivy. The creepers were electrotropic, drawn by EM sparks; they’d infiltrate the regions of my gray matter where neurons fired most profusely. The LGN and visual cortex. Broca’s and Wernicke’s language centers. A smattering of sites in the so-called reptile brain, controlling my heart, lungs and digestion. Once those major roots were established, the link-seed would take its time spreading into areas of lesser activity.

My memory.

My muscular coordination.

My dreams.

Two weeks to a brand-new me. And the moment the surgeons closed my skull, a ruthless black clock started ticking. Tick took, tick lock, adapt or die.

They laid me in a room with cool blue walls. An electronic nurse clamped itself to my wrists and ankles — if something went wrong, mere human reflexes wouldn’t be fast enough to save me.

Three times out of a hundred, electronic reflexes weren’t fast enough either.

There’s one brutal reason why few people on Demoth or elsewhere have direct brain-links to the datasphere. The technology is centuries-old, simple, inexpensive… but it takes granite-hard discipline to use without blowing out your frontal lobes.

Each year, for example, a handful of ambitious business execs bribe some less-than-scrupulous surgeon to plant link-seeds in their brains. The witless saps dream of getting an edge on the competition; they salivate at the thought of instant data access, with no risk of being overheard whispering to a wrist-implant. "And discipline?" they say. "I’ve got discipline. I didn’t bludgeon my way to CEO of Vulture Incorporated without having discipline."

Believing a link-seed is just a faster, hookup-free method of direct braingrab.

Two days later, all blissful confidence, they try their first unfiltered download. A market quotation on some stock they think is important. Which drags along quotations on related stocks. Then the whole financial sector. Then the entire planetary market, and markets on other planets, and every corporation prospectus registered with the InHand Exchange, and quarterly economic statistics on every planet in the Technocracy, not to mention major trading partners and up-League envoys…

Like trying to sip from a firehose. Only in this case, the firehose sprays info-acid all over your hippocampus.

The condition is called "data tumor." A possibility I faced myself, lying in that cool blue room.

If I was lucky, the electronic nurse would raise a baffle field before it was too late. Block the incoming flood by broadcasting static — jam me into radio isolation from the datasphere till the surgeons could remove enough of the link-seed that it stopped working. If the nurse was a microsecond slow in detecting a tumor bloom, I would sit there stat-shocked while the link-fibers in my brain got toasty warm from the electrical activity of downloading reams of bumpf.

What do you think happens when a network of molecule-thin wire heats a few hundred degrees inside your brain? Cauterization. Blood brought to the boil. High-pressure juices squirting out the edges of your eye sockets.

The College Vigilant had made me watch a doc-chip of patients collapsing in data tumor. Don’t ask me which was worse: the sights I saw before the camera lens got blotted red, or the sounds I heard after. But neither the sights nor the sounds were pleasant things to remember while lying in a cool blue room.

There was precious little time to feel my way forward — the link-seed spread its tendrils unstoppably, connecting to new neuron clusters every second. Sixty seconds every minute, favoring me with a tinnitus of hiss in my left ear, then a spasm of muscles in my lower back, then a flash enhancement of color sense in my right eye. (Cool blue chilling left, electric blue stabbing right.)

Lying in an empty room, clamped down by a nurse machine that loomed over me like a spider… rippled by sensations that were all in my brain… no clear line between waking hallucinations and dreams when I fell asleep… nightmares of being raped by some metal monster that pinioned my body, impaled my mind…

I want to tell you how it changed me. I do. But like making love or throwing punches in a fistfight, some experiences can’t be broken down into words. There’s no way to tell everything, everything all at once. You have to pretend there’s a throughline, a sequence… when the whole point is it’s happening simultaneously, all your brain cells firing together. Sensations in your body, in your eyes, in your ears, bristling along your skin, rasping in your throat, pressing sharp on your stomach, squeezing around your temples, burning in your chest. And those are just the chance physical offshoots of becoming a link-trellis, transient side effects of the tendrils snaking through your mind. There’s also the gasping moment when a vine tip pierces a pleasure center. Or a pain center. Or, by ugly coincidence of timing, both at once.

Emotions float up. You find yourself crushed with soul-ripper grief, weeping in heartbreak for ten bleary seconds till suddenly everything switches to funny, which infuriates you, which depresses you, which bores you, which makes you feel wise as an angel, then wicked as an imp.

All you can hold on to is your Vigil-trained discipline: keep breathing, one breath at a time, take in what’s tearing you up without trying to fight it. Observe it without trying to process it. Get out of your head, because your head is damn-fool busy. Let everything come, let it pass, let the changes happen.

The seconds pass, sixty seconds to a minute. What you are is just what you are, not what you have to be.

There’s no linear unfolding. With a link-seed, input comes to your brain in gestalt, an instantaneous neural activation matrix: not this-then-that, but a billion neuron clusters simultaneously receiving their piece of the whole, a single gush of comprehension. Everything all at once.

On the third day of mushor, third day of delirium, I nearly lost my grip. Battered weary by emotions, delusions, physical jiggery-pokery (itches, stabbing pains, dead numbness), wanting to shout, "Stop, leave me be, let me rest!"… my mind suddenly filled with the image of a peacock’s tail. Green and gold and purple and blue, a hundred eyes wide-open, watching me with all the calm in the universe. Colors fanned over every grain of my vision; I couldn’t feel my body, no artificial prod to laugh or cry, nothing in me but the sight of that tail, reaching high as the stars and low as the planet’s core, filling my thoughts, my world.

And the sound of it: feathers rattling, demanding attention. Look at me. Look at me.

Placid. Even affectionate.

I don’t know how long the moment lasted. Long enough. The peacock eventually fractured into another donkeydump of sensations, smells that whistled, bright kicks to the stomach (each one a different color)… but I could handle the new barrage. I was surfacing now, swimming toward the light; I’d passed through the center of mushor and was coming out the other side.

At the time, it puzzled me why the eye of my personal hurricane was a peacock’s tail. I didn’t have long to ponder the question — too many distracting fireworks going on inside my head. Later, looking back, I shrugged off the vision as random mental floss, some piece of neural flotsam my brain happened to seize on as a life preserver.

I was flagrantly, hubrisly, witlessly wrong.

At the end of mushor, my brain was still in one piece. Not boiled in its own juices. And cleaned-purged-regenerated, the way you feel after a pummeling-hard work out.

But different. Transformed.

Link-seeds do more than just provide passive information from the world-soul. More even than giving your senses a friendly boost and speeding your reflexes cat-nimble. Those are minor perks, side effects of having new, electron-fast pathways routed through your brain.

Here’s the thing: a link-seed destroys your capacity to ignore.

As simple as that. As devastating too.

That’s why you become a new person. Why the Vigil works, without turning petty or abusing its power.

When I download information from the world-soul now, it becomes a direct part of me. Unfiltered. I can’t skip past any parts that jar with my vision of the universe. I can’t discard facts I’d prefer not to know. They’re all incorporated, instantly-directly-viscerally, into what I am. Into the physical structure of my brain. The primal configuration matrix.

Unlike bits of info I read or hear through conversation, a direct linkload is unmediated. Raw. Undeniably present. Unavoidably transformative.

I can’t pretend new data doesn’t exist — it’s already changed me. It’s molded my thoughts, reweighted my synapses, overwritten whatever I was before. I can’t even want to ignore the input, because it’s already there.

No sublimation. No turning a blind eye to unlikable facts. The link-seed left me wide-open. Vulnerable to storms and stars.

And that openness gushed over into the rest of my life. Not just with dry downloads from the datasphere, but things that were already in my brain. I couldn’t dismiss them for my own smug convenience. I couldn’t look away. Which is the very definition of a proctor: someone who doesn’t/won’t/can’t look away. Someone immune to the blind wishful thinking that infects all politics like the clap. Someone who doesn’t just call a spade a spade, but who sees the damned spade is a spade, without thinking maybe it could turn into a backhoe with the right tax incentives.

It’s not virtue or saintliness; it’s just the way my new brain works. Of course, there are still thresholds — I’m not mesmerized by every speck of dust that drifts past my eye, nor do I think deeply over every word and inflection that reaches my ear.

But… I no longer ignore the obvious. I’m mentally, physically, incapable of that. Selective inattention is for sissies.

I shiver brain-naked in the data flow. Aware to my very gut that actions have consequences, and unable to dupe myself otherwise.

A member of the Vigil.