Ashes of the Fall (8 page)

But out here, by the water, the buildings are no more than two stories, linked side-by-side with red-brick, winding stairs, and dusty lawns out in front. I walk to the corner and stare down the cross-street. I can actually see the river.

This is the place where time—and the Circle, apparently—forgot.

I head back to Jaime Aslan’s house, which is like all the others, but has a red door, neater trim—well maintained, with pride—and take the cool brass knocker in my hand. No shock greets me. Purely mechanical, the heavy thud of the century-old brass banging against the door, echoing through the halls.

I hear a voice yell back, “I’ll buzz you in.” Just like that. I must raise an eyebrow, because the voice yells—I can tell it’s an old woman, now—at me, “Well shit, I ain’t stupid. I’ve been expecting you.”

I try the knob, and it turns easily in my hand. I step into the foyer and close the door behind me. The ceilings are tall, twelve feet easily. The foyer leads into a hallway from which rooms spring off to the right. My footsteps pad against the hardwood as I check out the living room—empty, with faded furniture—and dining room.

I get to the stairs, where I can either head up or continue on, towards the kitchen. A little candle glows on the table, by a window next to the backyard. The woman’s shadow stays still on the floor. I head into the kitchen, where the appliances were last replaced around 2010. They’re all clean, well-maintained, but look funny, like someone dug them up from museum storage.

“I don’t think this would pass inspection,” I say, with a nod towards the stove. The woman doesn’t move. She’s sitting straight up, head facing forward. A shotgun is seated in her lap, where you’d expect a cat to be. “Good to see you again—”

“Cut the shit,” she says with that gruff voice, “I know you’re not him. Matthew told me as much.” Taking the shotgun in her hands, she points the barrel’s nose towards the chair across from her. “Besides, I can smell the pussy on you from here. Matthew wasn’t much for the women-folk.”

“Oh,” I say, not sure how to react to any of these statements, “I didn’t know.”

“I ain’t got all the time in the world, so you best not waste it.” I guess that’s my second invitation to sit down. From the sound of it, there’s unlikely to be a third. She coughs as I pull out the chair. “Go on, now.”

I do as I’m told and sit at the table. When I finally get situated and get a closer look at Jaime Aslan through the candlelight, I’m taken aback. Her eyes are cloudy, unseeing.

“You’re blind,” I say.

“You’re fucking observant,” she says. “Matthew picked well, sending you here.”

“They’re killing all the engineers,” I say, “but you’re still alive.”

“Oh, you think the little old Asian lady, in the middle of her quaint brownstone, she can’t defend herself?” She reaches up and puts the shotgun on the center of the table and then takes her hands down. “Those idiots couldn’t hit a fly with an atom bomb.”

“They got everyone else.”

“One of those SC boys sets foot inside this place, they get lit up,” Jaime says. Her fingers grope for something beneath the table. A button clicks, and I see a sudden web of laser beams appear, crisscrossing the hallway that I just walked across. “Ain’t no one on the list of approved scans except you and me.”

“What’s it do?”

“Ask him,” she says, reaching into the folds of her grandma jeans to pull out a pair of dog tags. They clink, real lonely on the table. Then another pair, and another, and another joins them. The stack begins to resembles a mountain of metal scalps. “Assuming you can séance.”

“They still after you?”

“Me and the good Chancellor, we came to an understanding after the ninth man’s spine was turned to ash,” Jaime says.

I look at the shotgun and then back at her. For someone with well-earned trust issues, she clearly trusts me—or my brother. That’s a good thing. But I can’t tell if she’s insane or not. She’d be a hell of a hold ‘em player.

“Face like that, you should play cards,” I say, “could win more hands than not.”

“Who’s to say I haven’t,” Jaime replies with a glint in her dead eyes from the candle’s orange wick. She finds the button again, and the lasers resume their invisible search for unfortunate interlopers.

“Tell me about this deal you made with Tanner,” I say.

“Paranoid mother fucker is dying of lung cancer,” she says, “as chance would have it, so am I. Stage 4. About the only thing me and the prick have in common.” She reaches into the jeans again and takes out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, taps one out on the table. Without much trouble she finds the burning candle and lights it. “Don’t start the habit. Cost me my eyes, too.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to get them,” I say.

“Matthew said you were a good liar.”

“There’s gotta be a hundred people in the city same stage as you. Hell, a thousand,” I say. Even with the advent of early diagnosing toilets and monitoring via HoloNet—if you opt-in—we haven’t figured everything out.

“You’re a smart kid,” Jaime says, puffing smoke my way. The wraithlike cloud disperses over the table before it reaches my head. “I figured, when Matt told me about you, you’d be some dumb fuck hood, conning broads to get his dick wet. When you came in, I almost flipped the switch and had the system zap you.”

“Thanks?”

“My MRI, Tanner’s MRI, our brains are clean,” she says. “No metastasis. The Chancellor figures, we’re both reasonably smart, intelligent, lived in New Manhattan all our lives. I’m as good a beta test subject as any for this HIVE business. Sure, they’ve run tests on scraps of the code around the city. But nothing like the full-on thing. It ain’t exactly science, but when you got a few weeks to live, you don’t get to do a double-blind.”

“You know what HIVE is?”

“No one does, kid,” she says. “And the only one who did is six feet under.”

I reach across the table and grab the pack of cigarettes. The corners of her wrinkled mouth turn upwards in what for her is probably a beaming smile.

It looks more like a small smirk, though.

Maybe she figures I’m running a game. Mirroring her to build rapport. Not really. I could just use a smoke, something to calm my nerves. The whiskey’s effects have worn away, leaving only bone-weary exhaustion as my eyelids begin to droop.

She says, “Well, don’t go asleep on me now.”

I say, “How’d you know?”

“You can hear it in the breathing,” she says. “Everything paints a picture, you pay close enough attention. Not too close, though. That’s where you get conned.”

Puff.

Plume.

Long silence, except for the clink-clink of the freezer making ice cubes.

“Well, ask, if you’re gonna ask.”

I come right out with it. “Matt told you I’d visit.”

Her cigarette is just a nub in her hands, but she doesn’t seem to even notice. The cherry, polka-dotted with ash, glows as she takes a long drag and holds the smoke in.

“Before you think I’m holding out on you, I’m telling you the truth about HIVE. I’m on the development list and I told Tanner I’d test it for him—but I’d sooner kill myself than give any information to that prick. I only designed a small piece of the code for Matthew. Something to do with HoloBand to HoloBand network protocols. He never told me what the whole project was.”

I let her keep going. Putting the cigarette out on the table, grinding it into a twisty nub, she says, “Only reason I’m still alive and fighting at all is because Matthew came here earlier this week. Told me I was in danger. He set up all the defenses, not me. Got some of the others out after he learned Tanner was starting to tie up loose ends.”

“But why?”

“So no one besides him and Matthew would know anything about what HIVE really does,” Jaime says with a weary sigh followed by a long cough. I get up, the coughing fit not subsiding, and get a glass from the cabinet. It’s covered in dust, so I rinse it out, and then fill it with water and ice from the noisy freezer.

I set it down in front of her and then sit down back in my seat. My cigarette sits on the edge of the table, a spindle of ash forming at the end. When I pick it up, it falls to the ground like snow.

Jaime drinks, and the coughing stops. Her voice is raw when she says, “I honestly thought you would be more of an asshole.”

“I have my moments.”

“Matthew, he was a nice boy. Problems, sure. You get taken from your parents when you’re fourteen, your inventions used to create a dictatorship, that takes a toll on you. But his heart was good. A different time, different circumstances, the type of kid who could take a world into the light.” Jaime snorts and lights up a cigarette, having not learned her lesson from the last one.
Carpe diem
, I guess. Especially when the clock is measured in days or hours, instead of years.

“What’s funny?”

“I sound like one of those Lionhearted nuts. You know, before the Religious Suppression Act of ’26, they used to pass out their pamphlets and preach at you on street corners. But then that stopped after Atlanta.”

“I’ve heard about it,” I say.

“You were too young to remember,” she says, puffing thoughtfully, in full-on old-person reminiscing mode. I wouldn’t have taken her for the type, and apparently she doesn’t think it suits her either, because she says, “forget the old woman nonsense. I’m just sorry he’s gone, you know. I don’t like talking about it.”

“Me too,” I say. A tear runs down from her blank eyes. She doesn’t try to hide it. I look away and bite my lip.

“I tried to tell Matthew there was another way,” Jaime says, with a slow nod, “convince him that he was a damn fool. But trying to convince a genius of anything is like shooting a whale with a BB gun. You’re not even close.”

“Convince him of what,” I say.

“Matthew just looked at me and said, ‘Jaime, I know what I’m doing and it’s the only way.’ I don’t know if it was to atone for the way his ideas have made life worse, or if he truly thought that it was the only way to fix everything. You can’t ever tell with a person.”

I want to scream
what did he do
, but I sit there silently and nod along, even though she can’t see. The cigarette burns my fingers, and I drop it in surprise, hitting my knee on the table.

“He put a lot of trust in you, and I’m not sure I see it,” Jaime says.

“I don’t think you see anything,” I say, before I can help myself, the long day and long night finally breaking my patience, my ego unable to brush off her skepticism.

She raises her hand, and I think she might slap me from across the table. Instead, she just points it, and kind of wags it towards me. “That, my friend, is exactly what you’ll need to survive.”

I manage to bite my tongue this time, instead of uttering something like
glad you approve
.

“There isn’t any easy way to say this,” Jaime says, “so I’ve been beating around the bush here a little bit. But I guess you deserve to know. Hell, you
have
to know. I don’t envy you one bit, but here’s the truth.” Long cigarette drag. She looks away, even though she can’t see. “He did it.”

“Did what?”

“Matthew killed himself,” she says, “because he thought you were the only one who could fix what was broken.”

My mind doesn’t register the first part, so I ask, “What’s broken?”

“Let me get something.” Jaime gets up, feeling her way around the kitchen, eventually locating a parcel in a drawer below the sink. I walk over and take the plain brown box from her hands. It rattles slightly as I put it on the table.

“What’s this?”

“He said, if you got this far, you were ready for what comes next.”

“The system,” she says, cigarette dangling from between her lips, “it needs a change of leadership.”

It’s been a week
since I met with Jaime Aslan. A week since I found out my brother blew his brains out in some twisted way for me to take up his cause. All the box had in it was a note—two pages long—and an old hard drive. 2.5”, solid state. The thing is ancient. Its label is so faded that the manufacturer isn’t even visible.

Written over the yellowed sticker in permanent marker were two words:
The Antidote
.

“What’s that,” Carina says, her head dangling over the bed, bare back arched. The half-tinted windows let in the morning light. She comes up with the unwrapped box, shaking it, her head tilted to the side so that her hair spills on to one shoulder, covering her eye.

“Nothing,” I say, and grab the plain box away with a grimace. I tuck it beneath my arm, as if I’m shielding it from her.

I’ve been trying to find a way to run whatever’s on the drive for a week with zero luck. But you can’t expect a man who kills himself without leaving a note at the scene to explain this next bread crumb.

One thing I do get, though.

Matt might’ve been the best con-man of all.

Actually, there was a third thing in the box—but I don’t have it any more. Matt’s note told me to give it Chancellor Tanner. What exactly? HoloBand 6.0, replete with fully functional HIVE beta software. I tried to fire it up, swap it out with my own band, but it wouldn’t load. Kept getting an error code.

I knew why when I handed it to Chancellor Tanner. It was tailor made for the man himself.

He also informed me, during the meeting—which happened the morning after I met Jaime—that Ms. Aslan had perished from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Tanner didn’t seem particularly surprised, although he was pleased that all loose ends on HIVE were tied up. Even if it meant his guinea pig was no longer alive.

He also took care to remind me during our brief meeting, his pistol at his side, ready to quick draw, I needed to have the project proper completed in seven days.

That’s today.

Carina kisses my shoulder. “You’re so quiet. I’m sorry.”

“I need you to do something for me,” I say. I’ve exhausted all other avenues. With the available resources at National Hall, you’d figure tracking down a working computer from thirty years ago wouldn’t be an issue.

“What do you need,” Carina says, touching my arm, stroking it gently with her fingertips so that the hairs stand on end.

“An old computer,” I say. Opening the flaps of the box slowly, still undecided—but out of options—I continue, “anything that can read a solid state drive.”

The old drive lands on the sheet when I toss it. We both stare at it.

The Circle’s done a stellar job putting competing tech underground, monopolizing the market with their own HoloBand products—sold under the trade name Golden Nectar, like the corporation is a separate entity and not a giant ruse.

Everyone kind of understands, but pretends the free market exists. The illusion of freedom when you stay inside the lines is remarkably like the real thing. After all, HoloBand 5 did everything the citizens needed. Instant financial transactions, early disease detection, instant data recall, massive productivity upgrades. All to climb a ladder to nowhere—if Chancellor Tanner’s paranoid existence at the top rung is any indication.

Would they play along if they knew the ultimate reward was sickly anxiety and sociopathic myopathy?

In any event, the HoloBand monopoly we live in has left me without any way of accessing this so called antidote. And so, I once again have to turn to Carina, who I’ve been seeing the past few nights.

Whether she can be trusted with something this big is an open question. But if I crack the code, find the full source and give it to Tanner, I can tell him I’m taking an extended vacation. And then I’ll disappear.

Which will fix things.

For me.

When I log on to HoloNet, feeing the rush of absolute knowledge wash through my synapses, I have an encrypted message from Tanner in my inbox.

It simply says,
Incredible. This is going to save the world
. Meet tonight.

That doesn’t leave me with the best feeling.

“Can you find a way to run it,” I say.

“Whoa,” she says, “that’s older than me. That’s from before—”

“The Computing Standardization Act of 2027,” I say.

“We call it The Information Slavery Act,” she says.

“Appropriate.” Shortly after the Circle and Chancellor Tanner seized control of the smoldering remnants of the United States in ’26, they decided that, if they wanted to properly disseminate their bullshit without interference, they needed to control the flow of information. To do this, all technological development was brought under their purview, under a standardized operating system of their own development—HolOS, the core of all HoloBand products.

Owners of non-compliant technology and computers were instructed to turn them in. Anyone caught with such devices by the end of the year was subject to massive penalties.

And, just like that, the Circle had control of the narrative.

Laudable foresight, really, since it’s served them well over the years. You listen to Old Silver Fox long enough, eventually your brain gets worn down and you start to believe the lies. Like that guy from
1984,
you learn to love the thing you hate the most.

The irony is not lost on me that the wonders of HoloNet afforded me that particular piece of information.

“What else is in the box,” Carina says, taking the hard drive in her hands delicately, like she’s holding a piece of pottery dug up from the sands of time itself, “anything good?”

“No,” I say, truthfully. There’s nothing good in the box. Nothing good at all. Just a two-page note written on yellow legal paper, coolly rational, explaining why death was Matt’s only option.

It ends with a sentence about great sacrifice and becoming a hero. If he’d have said it to my face, like a normal human being, I would’ve told him he was headed down the wrong path.

Worse, I still have no idea where his little treasure hunt leads. Forget being a hero. Once I can hop a train out of here, the Circle and this entire island can collapse under their own weight.

But we don’t always get what we want.

“They’ll kill you,” Carina says, “if they find this here.”

“I guess my life is in your hands,” I say, looking at the hard drive, realizing that it’s literally and figuratively true.

She smiles. There’s a knock at the door, and her expression quickly turns to panic.

I walk out, shirt off, check the wall TV. It shows a feed from the hallway.

“I’ll be damned,” I say, staring at the long-haired woman grinding her foot into the hall carpet.

“Who is it?” Carina says from the bedroom. I imagine her peeking out from the covers, only her eyes visible, convinced that the Special Committee is finally here to haul us both away.

When I head back in to grab a shirt, she’s lounging there, naked, definitely scared, but trying to put on a brave face.

“Just my neighbor,” I say.

Her body tension noticeably slackens. “You could’ve said something.”

“I just did,” I say. My mind’s too fractured from the note to even function in that capacity. In the back of class, I used to read the comic books I stole from the local used book store instead of the textbooks on my tablet. I imagine it’s like how Superman felt when someone brought kryptonite into the picture.

Your superpowers go out the window. All the slick words and the schemes and the puppeteering. Emotional reality crushes all of that.

I slip the shirt over my ears, and as I do, I hear the words.

“I love you, Matt,” Carine says.

Finishing with the shirt, I blink, watching her roll over, empty silver chain dangling off her bare chest, her unmade face blinking at me with long eyelashes. With a sheepish look, she covers her chest with the soft sheets.

I’ve heard this before.

It’s a problem.

The problem when crime hits near zero is no one expects to find a liar or a cheat. It’s like a shooting in a good neighborhood. Suddenly all the residents, who has never been within thirty miles of a criminal, thinks that they live in the Wild West. I mean, you gotta figure, given human history and all that, that sons of bitches are out there, but that hasn’t occurred to this girl.

She thinks I’m some sort of romantic hero, here to save the people.

When, really, it’s a longshot to even save myself.

“Not today,” I say, which is the wrong thing to say in this situation, in case you’re wondering. “Just…Jesus, not right now.”

Her expression, so soft before, immediately hardens, two or three years’ experience coming into her face in the span of a millisecond.

Nothing else is said, which makes it worse.

“I gotta get this,” I say, and make an exit as the door buzzes again.

When I open it, I realize I’m not even making any attempt to conceal my identity. The woman in the hall, maybe thirty, thirty-five, doesn’t even glance at me. She wears no makeup, her bangs hanging in front of her face in a cat-yarn tangle.

She just says, “We need to talk.”

“About what,” I say.

“About this,” she says, lifting her pants up to display what is clearly a gun.

“You’re threatening me with all these cameras?” I say.

“Just come into my apartment,” she says in a whisper, her eyes still glued to the floor. “Here.” She points three doors down.

“I know where you live.”

“You aren’t Matthew, so I didn’t know,” she says, factually, “I’ll remember that.” She blinks twice, like she’s saving something to a hard drive. I wonder if this memory is being fed into her own HoloBand, stored there for posterity.

“I don’t know what you want to talk about.”

“Matthew told me if you lived a week, to come and get you,” she says. “He said that would show you were ready. It’s been eight days, but that woman has been here most of the time. Carina.”

“You know her?” I say.

“It’s not smart, bringing her here,” she says. “I ran a background check. She’s part of—” her voice drops into nothingness and she mouths the word
Lionhearted
“—and that’s a problem.”

“You’re not a fan?”

“A fan?” she says, like she still doesn’t get it.

“Something interesting down there,” I say.

“Down where?”

“The floor,” I say.

“No.”

“You’re pretty,” I say, trying honey, lying to soften her up.

Recoiling like I’ve doused her in acid, she takes three large steps back and says, “Don’t do that.”

Fucking kryptonite.

“Sorry,” I say. “Thought we were having a moment.”

“I like other women,” she says in a matter of fact tone. “Not men.”

“Good to know.”

“I’m already one day late because of Circle obligations and this Carina presence in your apartment. I promised Matthew.”

“Lovely,” I say, gesturing towards her door. “Lead the way.”

As my own door closes, I wonder if I should really leave Carina all by her lonesome. The hard drive’s still in there, and a spurned girl is a ticking time bomb. But I hear the shower as the door clicks shut, and I hope that, by the time I’m back, she’ll have cooled off.

I’ll apologize, take a couple deep breaths. Throw her a bone about my family problems, maybe something about what happened in the West.

“That ash cloud,” I say, “that’s something, isn’t it,” as this strange woman unlocks her door.

She says nothing until the door is safely shut and we’re out of the hall. Then she answers simply, “Times will be difficult.”

This seems obvious enough, but the flat and logical way she says it with absolute certainty forces a snaking chill up my spine. It says that the Circle might be bad, but if they fall, the world could tumble into absolute chaos.

“I don’t know your name,” I say, following her into an apartment that looks remarkably like Matt’s. If I stumbled in here sloshed, it would be easy to mistake the two. The wall screen TV plays on mute, Old Silver Fox looking as if he’s about to collapse from exhaustion from eight straight days of increasingly ridiculous damage control.