The Watchtowers- EarthWatch Read online

  “I don't see how this project could be so important.”

  “It's not your role to elaborate on our requests, but to carry them out.”

  Agdinar trembled again, this time from anger. “So, why are you so concerned about how short my answers are?”

  Several Watchers had left their sensory-immersion watchstations and were staring in Agdinar's direction. They were surely speculating that the Overseer would send him to stasis, or, as a simpler punishment, suspend him until his work had accumulated to the point it'd take him months to catch up.

  “As I said, Watcher,” the Overseer broke the pause, “it will all make sense to you, to all of us, very soon.”

  It was becoming hard for Agdinar to keep steady and resist the urge to counter the Overseer’s verbal assault. “But it hasn't yet,” he said, finally losing control, “and I think it won't.”

  “What?”

  “See, how I get to give my answer in short...?” The twisted face of the Overseer froze Agdinar in mid-sentence. People had been iced for a lot less, and Agdinar shivered as if he felt the cold starting to climb. “Sorry,” he said, “I'm just not having a very good day.”

  “I can see that,” the Overseer said, his tone weighing a punishment. But then he looked away for a second and turned back to glare at him while speaking softly, straining Agdinar's hearing. “It's not a problem; I understand. Why don't you take a few Earth-hours off?”

  Agdinar was going to say something nasty and inappropriate, but then he saw the Overseer's faint smile, a deep goodwill gesture coming from him.

  “Just leave the controls to the AI. There won't be a critical inspection point until tomorrow at 2 a.m., Earth-time.” The Overseer had spoken while moving toward another cluster of watchstations.

  “I would be still...”

  “Get out of my sight before I change my mind.”

  Confused by the changing moods of their tyrant, Agdinar decided to take whatever random kindness the Overseer offered. He stood quickly and moved sideways even faster, letting his watchstation refold onto itself. He then walked as fast as he could toward the exits, without peeking to see the expression of the Overseer, who he imagined was still watching him.

  Other Watchers glanced at him as he walked. There was an unspoken tension between Agdinar and their Grand Leader and, even though the Overseer was feared by both young and old Watchers, they all envied that the magistrate would come to see Agdinar, even if he did it to thoroughly criticize him.

  Agdinar was still angry and unsteady as the exit doorway recomposed its seal behind him.

  * * *

  After his fight with the Overseer, bumping into Bethlana in the hallway was a welcomed distraction. It wasn't just how warm she was when talking with him, but the camaraderie they had developed, coming from sharing one of the few dual rooms for third-line Watchers. A sharing at times very taxing for him, especially when his dark-skinned roommate would walk around completely naked. It was a lesson in female anatomy he was increasingly enjoying, as he'd shown some signs of aging and the advent of physical maturity. But Agdinar felt substantial shame the few times he'd found himself trying to discern the exact point where the dark skin ended and Bethlana's pubic hair began. That would be something Agdinar would hide from her, and also from Management—and of course, from the Overseer—as it would give them an easy reason for a three-month break in stasis, and treatment to mute away any impertinent surge in male hormones.

  Her regular morning show deserved his silence.

  Bethlana was always quick to judge Agdinar’s mood, and she jumped to his aid without addressing his look of all-too-obvious culpability. “What happened today?” she asked, already knowing.

  “One of my discussions with the Eldest Watcher—nothing big.”

  “You know he hates when you call him anything but the Overseer.”

  “Just the most pompous name one can possibly have.”

  “Do you want to end in stasis, get iced?”

  “No, I don't want to get the ice. But my patience is wearing thin, with all the nothing we do.”

  “Watching is not nothing; it's the best the future can do.”

  Bethlana touched the back of his hand, and he felt—although knowing it wasn't possible—a current that slithered all the way to his chest. Still, he reacted poorly to the touch. “You sound just like the Overseer's propaganda,” he said. “I don't know if it is the best we can do, or the only thing we can do, or even the right thing to do. We can't...”

  “Agdi, please keep your voice down. You've survived your weekly whipping by the Overseer. Don't keep trying to anger him.”

  Agdinar finally understood why he had been so angry with the Overseer. “I’m also angry,” he said, “with what we do. Or don’t do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We watch—you said it—but that’s all we do. We know that there will be deaths, many millions of deaths, when the world is turned upside down. The down-world people, they don’t know that they’re perched on a ledge, one step short of the abysm.” Agdinar shivered at his own image.

  “You know we can’t; it’s not allowed to change the past.”

  “And then, why are we here?”

  “To observe and learn…”

  “We already know,” Agdinar said, upset enough to forget how attracted he was to Bethlana. “And they also have the right to know. Someone should tell them.”

  “Agdi, that’s crazy.”

  "Sorry, Bethlana, but I need some time alone."

  Even when Agdinar wanted to be closer to Bethlana, more so with each passing morning—as he got to watch her breasts moving so close to his reach—he waved, turned away, and headed to the exit terminal.

  * * *

  That morning had been more than enough for Agdinar. There were another hundred stations and as many young Watchers, with no end to their observation of New York. They could take care of the city without him.

  And it was a calm day, when, aside from a statistically-insignificant rise in the number of red cars bumping into green ones and cats that had become pregnant the previous night, the city would be indistinguishable from the day before.

  Old Watchers remembered the excitement contemplating the terrifying events of September 2001, being as surprised as the ancient humans, and so close to see them unfold. But Agdinar hadn't experienced anything so extraordinary in his tenure, just a city decaying a little more each day, until it would turn—this, they knew with certainty—abandoned and uninhabitable.

  And they weren't going to do anything about it, that being the main annoyance that made Agdinar hate his post and want to leave it more each day. The people down-world were truer to themselves than the Watchers. They still believed in equality and democracy, and somehow respected their contradictory religions. And they thought that the future was open and theirs to create. He wanted them to remain free.

  As he stood over the blackest of black circles and saw the bars of light circling faster and faster around its edge, Agdinar recognized the miracle of what was going to happen and shivered.

  There was something about their transfer machines—their principal route to the surface—that he found unsettling. They didn't have doors, just a mist the traveler would enter while knowing that his atoms would be probed and plucked. Even more blood-curdling, as they were warned over and over, it was necessary for the traveler to stop two or three times on the way down. This because—and it was a because coming from a quite unknowable part of their technology—if they went any faster, or much farther, or for a longer time gap, the unfathomable abacus that would sort and stretch his atoms might then lose count and leave him painlessly, if irreversibly, invisible and unfindable.

  A way to say that they wouldn’t find his corpse in any known universe.

  But he'd had enough. Agdinar signaled the lower level three times, thought his keyword, and concurred with the transfer control as if signing a deal with the Devil in his own blood.

  He was going down
.

  And he might never come back to Tower City.

  He didn't want to watch anymore.

  Agdinar felt a twitch in his legs and a vibration deep inside his body. Then, he saw stars and blacked out.

  Chapter 2

  My name is Dhern, and I will fill out the gaps in Agdinar's story. But I don't have all his records from the period, as I was out of commission for a while. Also, I wasn’t always around. I am much more delocalized than he, a human, can be.

  The letters of my name say this clearly—Delocalized Human-Enhanced Repartitioned Nanostructures. It's best to think that I am in many parts at once, swelling from nothingness to contain almost infinite knowledge.

  In good days, I am a god. In bad ones, a ghost.

  I was made to make human presence unnecessary by my peers, but also endowed with a drive to serve humans. And so, I should thread carefully between those paradoxical wants.

  I guess time has taught me to be ambiguous.

  Agdinar was a little unclear about what he wanted from this record, and I feel free to add that, being both god and ghost, I will tell this story in a role having equal parts of psychic, genie, and companion.

  * * *

  That first day of trouble, I became aware of something wrong when I lost count of him. What humans would define as panic seized me, as I realized that some of his molecules had disappeared from Inventory, in a way consistent with long-distance transfer. You have to be human—and young, unaware of your frailty—to use a transporter without stopping at its links.

  I found Agdinar soon enough, and luckily, he was all right. But he was unconscious, and I saw that the transfer had had trouble parsing his hair, and now a white strike was coming off his right temple. He didn’t understand how dangerous our technology is; how inadequate to properly handle these machines of flesh. We have come up with alternatives, but the Managers keep them secret from the Watchers.

  I can't say more, as I have higher duties than this story.

  Maybe it's better this way.

  * * *

  Agdinar slowly stood on the landing pad, his movements wobbly and his eyes barely open. As soon as he stepped beyond the orange circle, it vanished.

  His world was full of things that could only be seen for a while.

  The elevator's descent hadn't been a straight shot down—he was now on the outskirts of Central Park. Another technological mystery he wouldn't care to learn about.

  “Dhern, are you there?”

  ...You know that you don't need to talk to me out loud.

  Agdinar kept searching around, ignoring the voice in his head.

  ...I shouldn’t be visible outside of the Towers.

  “Yes, I know that. Where's the AV?”

  ...You cannot drive an air-vehicle unsupervised. It is both illegal and inadvisable.

  “Please, Dhern, tell me where it is.”

  …I can't let you into an unlicensed AV, not without permission from Management.

  “Just do it. Show me.”

  ...I won't do something that—

  “Show me where it is.” Agdinar didn't know that AI's thoughts could be interrupted into silence. There was something weirdly emotional on breaking up their connection, as if he'd just closed a window between them.

  The AV appeared, in a clear space between two old trees. The Central Park of New York was one of the few places left with trees that tall. In the twilight of the minutes after sunset, the AV looked like a small tent, with two triangular sails on the side; with better light it would've been refulgent, as if made from pure mercury.

  Just thinking about the AV made an oval portion of its top transparent; an invisible door opened just for him.

  Agdinar's world was also full of things not even he could see and that he had to trust were there.

  The AV controls—if they could be called that, being all AI-driven—consisted of a few flat rectangles floating in front of him. They started to move and formed walls on either side of his seat. They only existed in his mind.

  Flying one of those transports was exciting, but also strenuous, as the machine’s intelligence would read the pilot’s mind and plan a flight path accordingly. A little too much sightseeing on the side, and the vehicle might turn sharply and decide to crash against a building that had seemed interesting on passing. And then, the mess to follow and the Towers' efforts to rewrite the accident as a natural phenomenon would sink his future into immeasurable consequences. Maybe permanent stasis. Or even download prison.

  Agdinar readjusted the position of the screens, raising his arm to touch the cabin's ceiling—it was there, closed, even if he couldn't see it. As he placed his arms on the console, one hand went through a screen panel and made it twinkle. He had no idea how those things worked, what they were made of, and which of their many mechanisms to create invisibility they were currently using.

  If he thought hard enough, maybe his entire civilization would vanish and he would be free to live in the lower realm. After all, it was the only world he really knew.

  He wanted the Watchers, and their cities, to just go away. Become not just invisible but also nonexistent.

  His anger somehow triggered the engine and, in a second, the AV started to move between the trees, only a few feet from the ground.

  “Are you there, Dhern?”

  ...Just getting acquainted with this place. Not much space left for my atoms—and too many quantum calculators for my taste.

  “Hold on, we're going up.”

  The AV climbed, faster than any contemporary airplane could.

  ...Even I felt that.

  “And how about this?”

  The AV turned invisible, and also transient—a word they used to describe making things ghostly, penetrable. Agdinar felt cold, as if wind passed through him; and it was surely doing that.

  ...Do you know you're turning me invisible too?

  “You are invisible.”

  ...But not from myself.

  “I didn't know you had a sense of humor.”

  ...You have one, my lowly human, so why shouldn't I?

  “Ah, Dhern, you're some strange AI.”

  ...The strangest of them all.

  They had reached the level above the tallest buildings, and he could see Central Park from above. The view, under a rising full moon, was breathtaking.

  And infernal.

  Chapter 3

  Central Park was dark but dotted with bonfires. The Hawks occupied it and had completely ruled the area—and a few others in New York's southern tip—for the better part of a decade. Their rule was one of great violence, from daily pilfering to rape, all carried out as a deterrent to keep people out from their domain. Nobody who wasn't part of the Hawknight clan would be spared, even if they’d just crossed the boundary of the park, and especially at night.

  The Hawks had been originally called Night Hawks, then The Knights of New York, and finally acquired their weird official name, the Hawknights, which over time had been simplified to just Hawks. They had started as an extreme group in America's crippled political system, and then went beyond party alliances to seek total anarchy. The Hawks didn't want any kind of government to control them, but also exerted absolute power over the lives of their members. Even Agdinar knew that that was the worst of all politics put together, whether coming from left or right; it was a straight route to renouncing any law and stability. The Hawks had taken the city downhill in the mid-2030s, after a decade of war-prone fascism and the two nuclear exchanges it had birthed. And they kept pillaging it, burning it, and blocking access for those who refused to stop working there.

  The population of Manhattan Island had leveled at a low count of six hundred thousand by 2040, and, with a terrorist's dirty bomb hitting a section of Chinatown and the Wall Street Annex, the massive flight had only increased all the way to 2056.

  Agdinar thought about the city's darkness while making his usual aerial roundabout, following the perimeter of the huge park. His world was effectively small,
just Manhattan, and Central Park was the most green he would ever see, being both his jungle and his garden, even if taken over by hordes of savage ruffians.

  He could recognize the lights of three camps, two of them near the lake—which, for some survival reason, the Hawks kept pristine and drinkable—and his instruments detected ten patrols in the dark, none of them carrying flashlights. The city had had so many partial outages and total blackouts that its remaining citizens were known as "the flashlight people." But not the Hawknights who were on the ground that night; they were moving around at night with military-grade night vision equipment.

  Then he saw, in the dark being rendered red by his corneal view-screen, two green flashlight cones moving on the west side of the park.

  Humans in or close to being in great danger.

  The AV took notice and—with unusual speed—turned on that direction and accelerated. The gravity compensator was not that fast, and Agdinar passed through the cabin's floating viewers, crashing his shoulder against the left-side wall of the cabin.

  The AV didn't care about his pain, and it started an angled approach.

  Perhaps Agdinar's great mistake was rubbing his shoulder rather than thinking on correcting his flight path. But, in time, he would come to see that mistake as the luckiest of his life.

  Agdinar tried to correct direction, holding his palm up. A force resisted the movement, and his whole forearm trembled. He knew that the AV was trying to avoid a collision, but AVs could get confused by giving too much priority to human commands—their motto should be humans first, even if stupid.

  And Dhern was out of reach during flight, to avoid pilot confusion with the residing AI. Too late to call him up.

  The AV flew over a group, which Agdinar guessed were Hawks, dressed in their standard blue overcoats and black hoods. They were running after the two early-humans holding those flashlights and likely scared enough not to turn them off.

  With a desperate rotation of both arms, palms forward and fingers spread, Agdinar managed to impose a turn on the AV, this time causing pressure and pain on his body’s right side, as the g's inside the cabin went up to four or five times the normal Earth gravity. The engines shut down, and all the core's energy was redirected to the invisibility shield.