Vortex

1.

Isaac Dvali visited us once more before our planned escape. As before, he screened us from the Network’s embedded sensors, but I wondered whether there wasn’t one surveillance device still operational—namely, my own node. If the Coryphaeus wanted to know what was happening, couldn’t it just look through my eyes?

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking of the Coryphaeus as a personality,” Isaac said. “It isn’t. And it can’t do what you’re suggesting.”

“Still… it’s in my head.”

“Not to spy on you. Vigilance is a Network function. The Coryphaeus will try to influence your emotions and your unconscious beliefs, but it hasn’t established full connectivity yet. For now it can’t act except through the agency of other people. If it wants to speak to you, it will have to use someone else’s voice.”

“You think it might do that? Speak to me?”

“I think it will do anything in its power to keep you from leaving.”

We finalized our plans, simple as they were. Allison and I would travel separately to the high tier that housed the military aircraft. We would need one of the larger vehicles to get to the Indian Ocean and past the Arch without refueling. There wouldn’t be a posted guard at the aircraft bays—there was little need for guard details in a tightly Networked community—but civilians or technicians who happened to be present might try to interfere with us, especially if the Coryphaeus figured out what we were up to. Once we were aboard I would attempt to pilot our ship out of the docking bays. If we got that far, it should be possible to isolate the vehicle (and my node) from any signals originating from Vox Core.

During this time Isaac would be shielding us from the attention of the Coryphaeus. Whether he had enough influence to leverage our escape was an open question, but it might at least improve the odds.

Isaac stood up to leave. He hesitated at the door of the suite, fragile child and luminous monster in equal parts, and asked almost wistfully whether we had any more questions. I said no. Allison shook her head.

“Please be careful,” he said, giving me a studying look. “The deeper the node embeds itself, the better the Coryphaeus knows you. On some level, it’s already negotiating with you. Sooner or later it will offer you something you want. And you might find it hard to say no.”

In the remaining hours I practiced operating Oscar’s Network toys, reassuring myself that I could get the appropriate response from them at least nine times out of ten. I could already interact fairly confidently with the ordinary Networked control surfaces (video feeds, temperature controls, etc.) in the suite. A military aircraft was a vastly more complicated device, but it didn’t need more from its pilot than a reliable communication of intent. I figured I was just about good enough to give it that.

I slept a few hours while Allison kept an eye on the video feeds. The murder of the Farmers had made her somber and deeply wary. Newsfeeds reported minor outbreaks of violence throughout Vox Core: A woman had committed suicide by leaping from the high wall of a housing tier. A man had stabbed his infant daughter with a kitchen knife. Waves of conflicting emotions were propagating almost too quickly for the Coryphaeus to identify and extinguish them. And there was worse news. Allison shook me awake: “You have to look at this,” she said.

I followed her out of the bedroom. What she wanted to show me was fresh video from an overflight of the Hypothetical machines. As the sequence began, the Hypothetical machines were crawling through a dry glacial valley toward the shore of the Ross Sea. No doubt they were closer to us than they had been the day before, but otherwise there seemed to be nothing unusual about the image. The angle of vision altered subtly as the drone continued to circle beyond the safe limit. I wondered what I ought to be looking for—and then it was obvious. Suddenly, simultaneously, all the Hypothetical structures began to deform and dissolve.

Almost at once, there was nothing on the ground where the machines had been but a dense gray fog. The camera zoomed in until fog filled the entire screen, not fog anymore but a granular swarm of small objects. I used my Network skills to overlay a scale gauge in metric units. It told me the objects were all uniformly sized, each one a little more than a centimeter on its longest axis.

Which only confirmed what I already knew: these were the same crystalline butterflies that had swarmed the vanguard expedition in the Wilkes Basin—now in vastly greater numbers. The Hypothetical machines must have converted their entire mass into this form.

The swarm moved like a nebulous arrowhead toward the sea.

“That’s how they’ll come for us,” Allison said. She gave me a look that meant, We need to leave NOW.

2.

We had decided to travel separately to the aircraft docks. Allison had worked out a route that avoided heavily populated neighborhoods, and she left the suite before corridor illumination had ramped up to full daylight. The plan was that I would wait a few minutes before I followed, keeping some physical distance between us and lulling any suspicions the Coryphaeus might have begun to harbor.

But soon after Allison left there was an alert from the door. I opened it to find Oscar outside, smiling nervously. He said, “May I come in?” And I had to say yes.

Back on Earth—Earth the way it had been when I was growing up—I had heard about species of fish that lit up under the sea: bioluminescence, it was called. There was something like that in the way I saw Oscar’s face through my Network-enhanced perception: a soft glow of euphoria, tempered by flashes of fatigue and suppressed doubt and, under all that, an indigo pulse of suspicion, regular as a heartbeat.

I was, of course, just as transparent to him. It was mood-reading, not mind-reading, but he could still catch me in a lie. I hoped any emotional turmoil I couldn’t hide would look like a natural reaction to the crisis.

Oscar said, “Is Treya here?”

“No. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

“I’m sorry. I want to issue an invitation—to both of you. Please, come to my home, Mr. Findley. Come and bring Treya. My family is there.” He was radiating a bright but shallow sincerity, the way a woodstove radiates heat. “Five hundred years of history is reaching a climax. You shouldn’t be alone when it happens.”

“Thank you, Oscar, but no.”

He gave me a penetrating stare. “It’s too bad you didn’t make the decision to join the Network sooner. You’re very close, but I think you still fail to understand how lucky you are, how lucky we all are, to be alive at this moment of history.”

“I do understand,” I said. “And I appreciate the offer. But I’d rather face it alone.”

That was a lie. Worse, it was a mistake. He knew it was a lie. His suspicion flared. He said, “May I talk to you, just for a little while?”

So I had to ask him to come in, to sit down. While he gathered his thoughts I reminded myself that I couldn’t fool him (or the Coryphaeus) with an outright falsehood—it had been stupid to try. The best I could do was to tell the truth, selectively.

“Some of us in the managerial class have raised questions about you,” he said at last. “When you submitted to surgery, those voices were largely silenced. And now that we’re only hours away from— final events, the question is moot. But over time I’ve come to think of myself as your friend.” (He believed what he was saying.) “And as your friend it’s been a pleasure to watch you moving toward a real alignment with Vox. You’re almost there. It’s perfectly obvious. But you persist in hesitating, almost as if you were frightened of us.” He cocked his head. “ Are you frightened of us?”

The truth. “Yes,” I said.

“Vox isn’t just a polity. It’s a state of being. You feel that, don’t you?”

He was drawing a distinction between understanding and feeling, between the fact and my experience of it. “I do feel it,” I said. Also true. I felt it because of what was happening inside my head. The medics had explained this to me. There was a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, not strictly part of the limbic system. It modulated moral judgment, and it was the last area the node would infiltrate and manipulate. I said, “It feels like… well, like standing on the porch of a house on a winter night. There are people inside, and in a way they’re family…”

Oscar liked that: he beamed and smiled.

“But I can’t shake the thought that if I cross that door I won’t be welcome. Because they’ll know me for what I am.”

“What are you?”

“Different. Foreign. Ugly. Hateful.”

“Different in your history, but not in any way that matters.”

“You’re wrong about that, Oscar.”

“Am I? You can’t be sure until you let us know you.”

“I don’t want to be known.”

“Whatever it is you’re hiding from us, I promise it won’t make a difference to Vox.”

“What I’m saying, Oscar, is that I’m not an innocent man.”

“None of us is innocent.”

“I’m a murderer,” I said.

All true.

The burning man in his aura of blue fire:

I killed him because I was angry, because I was humiliated, or maybe just because a storm had blown through Houston on the heels of a record heat wave. Maybe there’s no point asking why.

In the dark, as oily rain sheeted off rooftops and plunged down gutters, I walked along an empty back street carrying a jug of methyl hydrate in a plastic bag. In my right pocket I had a box of matches, also wrapped in plastic, and, for insurance, a butane lighter the store clerk had told me was waterproof.

I was eighteen years old. I had taken public transit from the suburb where I lived with my parents, changing buses three times. There had been nobody on the last bus but a few sullen night-shift workers, and I hoped I looked like one more sodden and unlucky minimum-wager. The bus wound through an industrial park as grim as a prison compound. I got off and stood a moment under a bus stop sign, alone. The bus lumbered around a corner, belching diesel fumes; then the street was empty. The warehouse where my father ran his criminal enterprise was a couple of blocks away.

I didn’t know much about the business except that it had been the subject of arguments between my mother and my father, as far back as I could remember. I had spent some of my childhood in Istanbul, where we lived for six years—that was why my friends called me Turk. In Istanbul, as in Houston, we had lived in a comfortable part of town while my father worked in much less desirable neighborhoods. My mother was a Louisiana Baptist by heritage and she had never gotten accustomed to the mosques, the burqas—even though Istanbul was a cosmopolitan city and we lived in a Westernized district. For a while I thought that was why they argued so often. But the arguments continued after we moved back to the States. And although they tried to keep it from me, I eventually understood that it wasn’t the long hours or the foreign interludes of my father’s work that upset my mother, it was the nature of the work itself.

Her shame and discomfort were expressed in small ways. She wouldn’t answer the phone unless the call came from a known number. We seldom visited relatives on either side of the family, nor were we visited by them. As the years passed, my mother grew quiet, sullen, withdrawn. Once I hit adolescence I began to spend more time out of the house—as much as possible. Better the street than these drawn curtains and whispered conversations.

Maybe that makes it sound worse than it was. We were at least superficially comfortable. We had money; I went to a decent school. Furtive though my father’s business might be, he was successful at it. I overheard argumentative phone calls in which he inevitably prevailed. Sometimes men in neatly pressed suits came to see him, and they spoke to him softly and deferentially. I had occasionally wondered whether my father might be a criminal, but the idea seemed ludicrous on the face of it. I guessed he might be operating on the far side of some trivial law, maybe dodging taxes or import duties, but I had learned from television and the Internet that such behavior could be lovable and even, looked at in the right light, heroic. The Spin years had taught us that when the rules break down it’s root hog or die; and in those days you did what you had to do to keep a family together and food on the table.

I loved my father. I told myself so, and I believed it. It was only later that I collided with his disdain for conventional ethics, his pathological need to be obeyed.

The sluicing rain was useful cover. My father’s business was housed in a building older than the Spin, a twentieth-century building with brick walls and small high windows of green leaded glass. It fronted on this dreary street, but the real work was conducted from the rear, where the loading bays were. My father had taken me here twice before, against my mother’s objections, to give me a sanitized tour of the warehouse—he may have hoped to bring me into the business at some point in the future. And I had scouted the area myself just two days ago, working out a plan. I cut down a narrow passage between two adjoining buildings to the laneway at the back. Long ago, a railway spur had serviced these warehouses. The spur line had been paved over but the asphalt had scabbed away in places to reveal the old steel rails, glittering in the smoky orange light of the street lamps. The rain was coming down pretty hard but I could hear the slosh of flammable liquid in the jug I was carrying.

Last year I had fallen in love with a girl named Latisha Philips—fallen in love the way a seventeen-year-old falls in love, stupidly, wholeheartedly. Latisha was an inch taller than I was and so sweetly good-looking that I woke up most mornings afraid she’d figure out she could do better than Turk Findley. She was smart, too. If scholarship programs hadn’t been cut to the bone during the post-Spin austerity drives, she might have qualified for an Ivy League college. She wanted to be a marine biologist. She wanted to save the oceans from acidification. She attended local protests against the sulfur-aerosol launches.

Her family was neither rich nor poor. They lived in a neighborhood adjoining the gated community where my father owned a house. I believe they rented. I didn’t mention Latisha to my parents because I knew my father would disapprove of her. There had been hardscrabble Findleys in Texas and Louisiana since before those states joined the Union, and part of my father’s legacy was a racism so offensive he had long since learned to conceal it in polite company. Istanbul had been a particular strain for him, but he found plenty to complain about in Houston. When he was at home he dropped his veneer of tolerance like a pair of tight shoes. The world was being mongrelized, he said, and he knew exactly who was to blame. I didn’t know whether my mother shared these views. If so, she never spoke about them; like me, she had learned to ignore my father’s rants even as she pretended to listen to them.

His racism was almost antiquarian, poisonous but—so I thought—toothless. Nevertheless I wasn’t eager to introduce him to Latisha, who happened to be black. I had already met her family. Her father was a pharmacist; her mother had moved to Houston from the Dominican Republic twenty years ago and currently worked at Walmart. They had always treated me with a cautious but sincere cordiality.

I followed the old railbed until I was opposite the loading bays at my father’s warehouse. I found a dark space between two concrete abutments and hunkered down where I couldn’t be seen, not that there was much chance of anyone coming by. The warehouse was closed, and although my father occasionally stayed late to take care of unscheduled business, this wasn’t one of those nights: he had come home for dinner and settled into the sofa with a drink in his hand and a twenty-four-hour news channel to glower at. The rain fell continuously and I was drenched and shivering, although it had been a stiflingly hot day—the rain fell from some colder, higher place than these cloistered back alleys. I watched the warehouse attentively for half an hour. From my earlier scouting trips I had concluded that there would be no one here after midnight but the night watchman, a skinny drifter my father had hired from the bus depot downtown. By watching the windows I had even established his regular routine: an hourly fifteen-minute walk-through of the upper and lower floors, the rest of his time spent in a small room with a single frosted and wire-reinforced window. I guessed he had a video monitor in there, by the way the light flickered.

I had known my father would be a problem, but I was serious about Latisha. We had even talked about marriage. Or “elopement.” Some arrangement that would leave my father out of the loop until it was too late for him to interfere. No fixed date because Latisha, at least, deserved a shot at whatever higher education she could afford to get. But our plans were real. Or at least I had thought so.

Real enough that I had confided in my mother over the kitchen table. She had listened carefully and wordlessly. Then she sat back in her chair and said, “I don’t know what’s good and what’s bad anymore, if I ever did. But if you do this, it’s probably best you get out of the house.” She added, plaintively, “I would like to meet Latisha one day. When that becomes possible. Until then I won’t say anything to your father.”

I’m sure she meant not to. But over the summer something must have aroused his suspicion, I didn’t know what: an undeleted text message, a phone conversation overheard. He hadn’t questioned me but he had questioned my mother, and she caved in and told him what she knew.

My father believed in direct action. I didn’t know he had done anything at all until my calls and texts to Latisha started bouncing. I went to her house but her parents wouldn’t let me talk to her; they said she had decided to break off the relationship. Maybe so, but I refused to believe it until I had spoken to her herself. I kept an eye on the house but there was little sign of Latisha apart from a couple of trips out in the company of her mother.

I got a note to her through a girl she knew, enclosing a more secure IP address—I had changed it without telling my parents. That night I waited for a return message, but when it came it was abrupt and unapologetic.

Sorry Turk yr father talked to my father made an offer: my college tuition paid provided we break up, shitty deal but now my folks insist on it, only chance for a good school & so forth, not too proud to milk a bigot for his money etc. I would tell them go to hell but really what kind of life could we have broke and young + even tho I love you how long til we start to hate each other for what love cost us? Don’t blame anyone but me I know I have a choice & Im probably making the wrong one but its my life & I have to think of the future. Crying now, pls don’t write anymore.

It was from this low brick building that my father had extracted the cash that paid for our house, our backyard pool, the clothes on my back, and the sedition and betrayal of my best hopes. Out of this warehouse and whatever business he conducted here had come my mother’s chronic unhappiness and my own wholesale humiliation. That was why it had occurred to me with the force of revelation that the building ought to be burned down. For the purpose of revenge, yes, but also as a purification by fire. I had read that on the battlefield wounds were sometimes cauterized to stop uncontrollable bleeding. And I was bleeding, and this building was my wound.

Rainwater gurgled down a storm drain by my feet, stranding scraps of paper, cigarette butts, a discarded condom as pale and flaccid as a jellyfish. The night watchman worked his rounds. I could see the sway of his flashlight on the high windows as he moved from room to room. When he was (as I calculated) at the far end of the building I crossed to the loading bays and mounted a few steps to the steel door, painted military green, that was the building’s back entrance. Mounted beside the door was a two-step lock: you used a physical key to uncover a numerical touchpad. I had taken the key from the top drawer of the desk in my father’s home office, and I remembered the entry code from the last time he had brought me here (because it had struck me as ludicrously obvious: the year of his birth).

Whatever part of Latisha’s tuition my father had arranged to pay, he probably considered it a bargain. My father was never ostentatious about his wealth but I had lived in his house long enough to overhear the occasional veiled reference to offshore holdings and IRS audits aborted by expensive lawyers. He could have sent me to Yale twice over if I had shown any aptitude for schoolwork. None of this money had been applied to the premises of the warehouse, however. The corridor inside had been overpainted with cheap yellow enamel, the floor was ocher linoleum, the ceiling lights were flyspecked fluorescent tubes. A door to the right opened into the storage and forwarding area, stairs to the left led to second-floor offices.

My plan was to douse the hallway, start the fire, pull the alarm by the exit (to give the watchman some warning), and run. Whether the fire would be quickly controlled or whether it would spread, whether the damage would be significant or just another financial nuisance for my father, whether I would be caught and punished for it or whether I would buy a ticket out of town and change my name—I didn’t know, it didn’t matter. My rage mattered, my humiliation mattered. So I took the jug of methyl hydrate out of the plastic bag I’d wrapped it in. I put it on the floor. I unscrewed the cap and tipped it over.

The floor had sagged over the years. The liquid puddled and spread toward the interior of the building. The reek of it was eye-wateringly sharp. It filled the crevices in the linoleum and crept steadily down the hallway, pooling here and there. There seemed to be much more of it than a two-gallon jug could possibly have contained.

I took the matchbook out of my pocket and peeled off the wrapping that had protected it from the rain. The matchbook was dry but my hand was wet and I ruined two matches before I managed to strike one into a steady flame. I wondered if the fumes in the corridor might themselves be flammable, whether I was about to be immolated by my own act of revenge. I decided I didn’t care.

I was in the act of tossing the match when the door to the right opened and the night watchman stepped through.

Maybe there was a surveillance camera in the hallway, though I hadn’t seen one, or maybe I had tripped a warning light in the watchman’s cubby just by coming through the door. Or maybe he had left his post for the purpose of taking a piss. All I knew was that he was suddenly standing in the hallway a couple of yards away, staring at me. He was a skinny guy in jeans and a sweat-stained open-collar shirt. He had a big angular head and his hair was shaved close. He couldn’t have been much older than I was. His eyes bugged out in surprise. A small river of flammable liquid forked around his old brown shoes.

He opened his mouth to say something. But I had already tossed the match. It tumbled through the air, leaving a coiled trail of smoke. I had time to take a single startled step backward. The night watchman just gawked. I don’t think he understood what was about to happen.

The flames were blue and they ran along the surface of the liquid and around the rims of the watchman’s shoes. Then some critical boundary between vapor and air ignited. There was a vast exhalation of hot air, and I was pushed off my feet. I turned and scuttled out the door into the gouting rain. Now the doorway was a curtain of flame and smoke, but through it I could see the watchman burning. He tried to run, and that might have saved his life, but his feet went out from under him. He did a kind of dance before he toppled into the flaming liquid. The dry flooring burned like tinder. He looked like he was screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything over the rush and bite of the flames.

I thought of Allison making her way to the aircraft docks. Maybe she was there already, waiting. Waiting for me, while the rest of Vox waited for a ticket to heaven.

“You don’t have to carry that weight alone,” Oscar said. He sounded as indulgent and unshockable as the pastor at First Baptist, where my mother used to take me when I was a child. “We’ll share it with you, Mr. Findley. The Coryphaeus will share it with you, once your interface is complete.”

The limbic implant was doing its work. I was sorely tempted to accept his offer of salvation, same as I had been at First Baptist, back when my sins were trivial things. Lay your burden down, young man. Lay it at your savior’s feet. Even as a child, I had understood why so many weeping souls made the journey to the altar. The Coryphaeus knew me, word and deed, inside and out. My sins were its sins.

Oscar watched me closely. “But you’re still not ready to take that last step. Unconditional forgiveness from a polity of your peers… you want it, but you won’t accept it.”

A forgiveness that would last as long as it took the Hypotheticals to show up. Or had I been wrong about that, too? Maybe Vox really would be redeemed, maybe Vox would live forever. There was a presence in my head that insisted it would. I said, “I’m not sure every sin deserves to be forgiven.”

“The man you killed has been dead ten thousand years. Clinging to a single tragic misjudgment is a vain and wasteful act.”

“Not talking about my sin, necessarily.”

“Oh? Whose, then?”

“It was more than murder, Oscar. The death of all those Farmers. It was an act of genocide.”

Whatever Oscar saw in my face, it made him flinch. He glittered with sudden uncertainty. “The Farmers would never have been taken up by the Hypotheticals… their death was always inevitable.”

“They were only here because Vox enslaved them and brought them here.”

“ Necessity brought them here.”

“Someone made the decision.”

“We all made the decision!”

“And you all forgave yourselves for it.”

“The Coryphaeus forgave us. The Coryphaeus is our conscience.”

“I don’t mean to offend you, Oscar, but doesn’t it seem to you that a conscience that can rationalize genocide might be defective?”

He stared at me, radiating violet spikes of anger and resentment. Then he shrugged. “You haven’t lived with your node long enough. Before long you’ll understand.”

That’s what frightens me, I thought.

“None of this matters now,” he said. “Come with me.”

I wanted to. All the years of my adult life I had lived in the harsh light of the burning man. I longed to let the Coryphaeus shoulder my sins. And if the price I paid was oblivion or death, maybe that was nothing but belated justice. At least I would die clean.

Did I deserve to die clean?

“I’d rather be with Allison,” I said. “When the time comes.”

“Then why isn’t she here? I know you feel responsible for her, but she’s an aberration, an empty vessel. Even her affection for you is artificial. You’re Networked now—you must have seen that in her.”

I didn’t want to tell him what I had seen in her.

“Go on, Oscar,” I said. “Go be with your family.”

He started to object, then closed his mouth and nodded in resignation. Maybe he saw how deeply I envied him, and maybe he was too kind to mention it.

He stood up. “All right. Good-bye, Mr. Findley,” he said.

The door closed behind him. I waited until I was sure he had cleared the corridor. I told myself it was time to go. But it would be so much easier to rest, I thought. To let what would happen, happen. It was a foolishness, a terrible vanity, this idea of escape. An insult to the millions who had already lived and died in Vox Core and to the millions more whose bright hopes were burning behind my eyes.

I took a last look around. I thought about Allison, waiting for me. Then I headed for the aircraft docks.