hen Isaac stepped out of the school, he saw Roman backing out of the space. Was he leaving?! Isaac ran and smacked the hood of the car just as it was stopped, having cleared the parking space and turning its wheels to move forward.
Roman looked down at him, seeming to wrestle with indecision for a moment, then seemed to decide: gesturing toward the passenger side door with his head.
Isaac pulled open the door and climbed in, closing the door and strapping on his seat belt.
As the van surged forward with a roar, and Isaac thought of the fumes spitting out the back, warm as the exhale of a lion at hunt.
“Why were you leaving?” asked Isaac. “It’s Thursday, right? We have class.”
“Ah, yes. A call from Bob, my noob. He seemed rather… alarmed.”
“Isn’t that kind of how he always is?”
Roman laughed, “Indeed.”
“But why were you leaving?”
Roman sighed. “I suppose you have a right to know, since you are coming. There are, well, there are some concerns. For safety,” he looked at Isaac pointedly. “Remember: you are no hero. If anything arises, simply act passive until the Mind intervenes.”
“So what’s going on?”
“Pict has it that there are disturbances in the plot circle. Ripples of emotion. Changes in the shape of the knowledge hole. Bob is emitting a high emotional signature. And we have a part to play, to push him to a final commitment. We are due to talk to him, are we not? Indeed,” he trailed off into thought, his brow furrowed slightly, his eyes opaque.
“What do you mean, ‘final commitment?’” asked Isaac.
“You’ll see. Be patient,” said Roman.
Unease moved through Isaac like peristalsis. Had he ever seen Roman like this? Normally you’d scarcely ask a question and Roman was explaining things you’d not even asked. Why was he so terse? But surely the Mind would keep them safe. They had the thickspace projector.
They passed through the high-rise homes at the edge of the thickspace, vacs living close, cadging extra connectivity for dreams.
And they drove still on, past the middle-class homes crowded a little less closely, on into the true thinspace, as thin as it gets in the city, where warehouses squatted, long and spacious, empty.
Three men, one black and two latino sat on a cracked cement embankment drinking from paper bags and laughing, a bent-over stop in front of them. A black man? You didn’t see many black men since the Police Insurgency. As the van approached the men stopped and stared at them, ill-shaved and hard-eyed.
Why would anyone be in this district? Any vac that had given themself over to the lucids would be clustered near the thickspace. Any working vac would be where the space was thicker. There were no homes here. But there were people here.
Roman noticed him staring at the men on the corner. “Black market district,” he said.
They pulled up in front of a boarded up trailer parked in a lot behind a windowless tin-sided warehouse, rusting slowly into blood-maroon stains on the concrete, the glass on its front door shattered, jagged around the hole like a lamprey’s teeth.
Just as Roman was throwing the van into park, Bob popped out of the door and tried to pull open the van’s sliding door. It was locked, and Bob cupped his hand to peer at Roman through the dark-tinted driver’s side window, eyes flush with cortisol.
Roman fumbled for a moment with the door, rolling the window down slightly before the lock mechanism popped open. The door slid open, and Bob climbed into the back seat, slamming the door behind him.
“Drive,” he said to Roman.
“Whither, oh nark?” said Roman.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Bob. “Just out of this district.”
“I live but to serve. Now, tell us. To what do we owe this rather abrupt pleasure?” asked Roman. Huh, thought Isaac. Roman’s nonchalance was back. Was he putting on a show? Was he always putting on a show?
Bob briefly leaned his head in his hands, then rolled his eye toward the window, vigilant. “There is no weapons cache at tenth and Walnut. There is no person called ‘Cicatriz.’ All of my inner contacts have evaporated. Some kind of retraction. They’re on to me. They were on to me from the start,” said Bob.
Roman pursed his lips, “But this was, at least, not unforseen. There are feints and blinds. Double-feints and double-blinds,” he adjusted his rearview mirror to peer back at Bob. “Which are you?”
Bob spoke with a snarl, “It doesn’t matter. I’m not safe here. They’re gonna kill me. You have to take me back to the thickspace.”
“Perhaps you are forgetting in your state of high emotions. This game is played for keeps. Whether you are a feint or not is the Mind’s business. Yours is to stay where you are put, and play the part,” said Roman.
“Fuck that! Take me to the thickspace!”
“If I were to take you to the thickspace, wouldn’t you lose any hope of repatriation, of the afterlife?” Romans mouth quirked up at the corners.
“You son of a bitch! You tell me. You’re the goddamn eye.”
“Indeed you would. The Mind is not done with you in your position.”
Bob reached suddenly into his waistband drew forth a pistol, pressing it to the back of the seat behind Roman.
“You fucker! Take me to the thickspace and…” Bob trailed off, his arm limp, the gun falling beneath him as he slumped toward the driver’s seat.
Roman looked over at Isaac, “Precisely,” he said, pulling a U-turn and heading back toward the trailer.
“Oh. My. Mind. What the hell just happened?” Isaac stared at Bob, paralyzed.
“Our Bob decided to attempt to force an unforce-able hand,”
“How could he have thought that would work?” Isaac asked.
Roman shrugged, “The unknown personal mind is, by nature, unpredictable. But in this case, our Bob is living in a high state of tension. It unbalances his emotions.”
Isaac shook his head, “So, what’s going to happen to him?”
“We’re taking him back to the trailer, where he will have the leisure to rediscover his long-term goal of immortality through brain scanning,” said Roman.
“No, but what’s going to *happen* to him?” asked Isaac.
Roman shrugged. “Probably nothing. These spies are usually simply abandoned. They think themselves much more important than they are. They give the enemy something to do, while we gather information in different, more subtle ways. It’s a game.”
“No, but is he going to get killed? How are you going to protect him?” asked Isaac.
Roman looked at Isaac sharply, “There is no protection for him. He must make his own decisions, because he is outside of the Mind. He played his game, and he played badly. If we withdrew him, we would be exposed. It would unravel a series of gambits that have led up to this point. We play the long game. Bob was the short game.”
“How can you leave him to be killed?”
Roman sighed, “If you must know, I consider it highly unlikely that he would be killed. If that were the case, he would have been disappeared before it was revealed to him that his informer status was compromised. He will live, but he cannot be taken away or safe haven would become the status of all our informants, and they would contrive to endanger themselves simply to invoke it.”
“So he’s not going to get killed?”
Roman shook his head, “Doubtful. We shall restore him to his hideout and let him be. He is quite poor in emotional restraint, as most of the rejects are. Once the Mind leaves, the limbic core is unchained. He has no musculature of control, so to speak. His instincts are not to be trusted.”
They pulled up to the trailer, and Roman threw the van into park with a lurch, “Out. We must stow our erstwhile hijacker in his hidey-hole.”
Isaac hopped out. His parents had been big on moving things for themselves, and he was rather proud of the fact that he was not afraid of moving and dragging things when he needed to, even though his classmates would have been horrified at the idea of moving something heavy. “Not safe! You could drop that!” he could hear them saying. He shook his head.
But now he was standing by Roman, who was opening the door. Roman pulled the gun from underneath Bob and held it between his two fingers like a dead fish. He stared at it for a moment.
Then he flipped the safety on and dropped it into the pocket on the back of the driver’s side seat, pushing Bob out of the way so he flopped toward the aisle, his body falling across the second bucket seat.
“Go around to the other side and help me push him out,” said Roman.
Isaac walked the van and slid open the other passenger-side door, came in across the other seat, and began to push Bob toward Roman’s door. Bob’s torso flopped back toward Roman.
Roman wedged himself into the car and wrapped both arms around Bob’s chest, Bob’s arms flapping uselessly out like chicken wings. Isaac didn’t really know what to do, so he grabbed hold of one of Bob’s feet while Roman dragged Bob out of the van. As Roman dragged him free of the van, Bob’s other foot hit the pavement with a thump. Isaac was left in the van holding a single foot, looking surprised, while Roman stood on the cement and clasped Bob under the arms.
Roman sighed and rolled his eyes slightly. “Grip both legs on either side of your body, with each of your arms. We will carry him between us.”
“Oh,” said Isaac. He stepped out of the van and gripped both of Bob’s legs. Roman wrapped both arms around Bob’s torso and pulled him toward the three little steps leading up to Bob’s trailer.
Bob’s body sagged downwards almost to the ground, and Isaac felt himself being pulled down suddenly by Bob’s dead weight.
Roman staggered a little toward Isaac as Isaac’s grip was unsteady, cast Isaac a dark glance, then heaved back toward the steps, gripping Bob’s torso with one arm as he reached up to the door, opening it. Bob sagged down, his butt resting on the ground, his legs clasped to either side of Isaac’s body. So there they were, Bob sprawled between them on the steps leading up the the trailer.
Roman pressed Bob backwards to make room for the open door and Isaac staggered backwards down a step. Then Roman began lurching up the small wooden steps into the dark trailer, dragging Bob after him. Isaac followed uselessly, holding the dead legs, Bob’s tailbone whacking each step on the way up.
The door to the trailer pulled shut as they entered, closing on him and Bob as they moved through it. Isaac thrust at it awkwardly, but the spring made it persist against his clumsy arm.
The trailer was dark inside, and Roman groped for a light. There was on old desk in front of them, and a door leading to a toilet, barely lit by the cracks between the boards on the window.
They slumped Bob on the gray and frayed carpet in front of the desk.
“There,” said Roman. “That’s good enough. Now he can truly discern where he stands. Let us hope he is more convincing than he has been. Now he’ll have less hatred to feign.”
What was this place to Bob? An office? Isaac could see the van in the gap between the two boards covering the window. The carpet was worn into a groove in front of the window. Isaac saw Bob in his mind, pacing back and forth in front of the window. Walking off his anxiety: looping, persistent. Waiting. Watching. Hoping for his reconnect to the Mind to drive up.
What kind of culture disconnected some while leaving others plugged in? What type of Mind used Bob as a pawn-sacrifice in a game for knowledge?
And suddenly something clicked for Isaac. The Mind had meant for him to come today.
He was meant to bear witness to the fate of Bob and the coarse power of the Mind. A threat.
Isaac shivered as a chill ran over him, and he felt bile rising in his throat. The Mind pressed back taking the edge off his resentment, but it was too late, the feeling had passed through his cortex into the calcification of reason.
Roman stood up and stepped heavily over Bob to the aluminum and faux wood door. It re-opened with the noise of a rusty spring and the hollow sound of flexing aluminum.
“Come, my noob. Enough for today,” said Roman softly. And Isaac saw that Roman had not wanted to betray him. But he had.
And when he turned and walked out the aluminum door, down the creaky steps, he felt as though he was leaving something behind.