The Watchtowers- EarthWatch Read online

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, but I'm also watching what they're doing.”

  ...Be careful. You can't talk about the Watchers.

  “Sorry,” he added. “I'm distracted. This is very...distressing.”

  “Distressing? Are you also an English professor?”

  “No, it’s that…” Agdinar stopped, as he couldn’t explain how foreign her words sounded to him. “This is terrible,” he managed to say, “how they took your friend.”

  “And a military guy like you can't do anything about it?”

  “I've told you—I'm not with the military.”

  “Well, let me look at you,” she said, and grabbed Agdinar by his shoulders. She was strong, and not just in character. Sarinda was an extraordinary early human, both beautiful and driven.

  “It's true that you do look too out of it to be a soldier,” Sarinda said, “even a young one." She continued her assessment of him from up close, as if there were writing on his face. “My father would never hire one so absent-minded.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes. I thought you knew who I am. Military, you're definitely not.”

  Agdinar didn’t want to add any more explaining and started to stand, trying to drag her with him. “And who are you?”

  “Sarinda Paredes. My father is the Major—maybe you saw me campaigning with him. You are incredible, like you're not from this world.”

  That shocked Agdinar. He realized why Dhern had had trouble assessing the immediate future.

  And he knew too.

  ...Oh, goodness gracious, Agdinar.

  Agdinar agreed with Dhern—godly goodness, indeed. He had both saved, and for all purposes then kidnapped, the daughter of the largest political figure in New York and a likely candidate for president in 2060. The ripples of an act like that could seriously change the entire foreseeable future for the city, maybe even for what was left of the country.

  His worries hadn't let him fully comprehend how big his misdeed was. He'd been thinking about how long the Towers' authorities would keep him in stasis as a punishment for a night's escapade to the under-town. But now, after considering the mess he'd created and that, when it came to their technology, there were no true limits of quiescence, he could be kept in permanent unconsciousness.

  What humans of the time would have called a death sentence.

  * * *

  As he started to move again with Sarinda—and after having acquired proper night vision by laying an extra coat of nano-optics over his corneas—Agdinar saw another three Hawks walking ahead of them. These were not part of the group that had attacked them in the woods, and from their looks, were young recruits. They were dressed in dark clothes and sported Hawknight-issued blue hooded sweatshirts, with their characteristic logo: a yellow circle with the black silhouette of a hawk, wings spread, catching a snake. It was meant to represent their taking over the country, as the segmented snake was an ancient symbol of the country’s original thirteen colonies.

  Agdinar thought of the Watchers' founder, Nylan Rugust, who had attended the inauguration of George Washington at Trinity Church. Founder Rugust was their hero, the one who’d brought all of them there, against terrible odds, through a dangerous wormhole. The Watchers' own George Washington.

  Something had gone wrong—they'd gotten distracted and made too much noise—and one of the young Hawks was now staring at them. Another one was pointing with his gun.

  A little too late, Agdinar knew what had happened. Distracted with the park's irregular surfaces, he had let go again of Sarinda's hand. He was still invisible but now she wasn't.

  Sarinda was too far away for him to reach her, her sights set eastward and toward the abandoned buildings that skirted the park—with only a few solitary amber stars of occupation in an otherwise black wall of housings—and he was not going to be able to alert her.

  Agdinar had never used the weaponry on his suit, but he did surprisingly well for a novice. As the energy that sustained Agdinar's invisibility was diverted to his wristbands, two intertwined bursts of green lightning shot out from his hands and breached the gap to the gunman.

  What the poor guy with the handgun might have seen was a flash that lit a gangly kid dressed in what seemed to be a scuba-diving suit.

  It was unlikely that the other Hawks saw Agdinar. The energy blast threw the two nearest Hawks backwards, dragging with them the third one, all bouncing like bowling pins.

  Sarinda had turned, having seen the light blast reflected on the windows across the street. “What was that? Did you see it?”

  “Looked like an explosion,” he said, grabbing Sarinda’s shoulder and turning her away from where the unconscious Hawks had landed, and back into a ghost. “It may have been from one of the bonfires. Let's keep going; this is dangerous territory.”

  * * *

  Agdinar kept trying to catch up with Sarinda while she walked, rushing with her along the park’s paths. It was dark, but some clarity had begun to blur the stars in half the sky. He tried to slow her down. “What were you doing in Central Park?”

  “We just tried to cross, to save some time, and get to my apartment. Tysa said it was safe to get through, and she had that old gun.”

  “And do you agree with everything she says?”

  “Tysa is very good in escaping trouble at night.”

  He didn't want to point out the obvious fault in her assessment. “There's a lot of trouble at night around here. You know the park has been taken over by the Hawks, don’t you?”

  “The Hawks don't control the whole city. There are police officers in the neighborhoods, and they bring order. Their curfews stop all the gangs.”

  “I tell you,” he said, pointing to the flickering light of the bonfires, “the city isn't as safe as you think.”

  “And that you know because you're watching us from up high.” It was Sarinda’s turn to point, this time to the sky.

  “What did you say?”

  “From that little plane of yours. I guess you have a nice view of the city from its windows.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “So, I was right,” she said, and smiled. For Agdinar, that was worth the time they’d lost by stopping.

  He wasn't going to argue with Sarinda, not when bordering the dangerous territory of his regular observations. And he was finding it delightful to chat with this Old Earth native. “You were really risking your live,” he said, “coming alone—even with your girlfriend—anywhere in this park at night.”

  “Now, I know.”

  Few words, but charged with so much emotion. “Don't worry,” he said, “we will get her back.”

  “How? They took her, and we don't know where.”

  “We’ll figure that out. But first, we need to get out of here and find a way to track them.”

  “If we don't get her back soon, they...” Sarinda stopped in mid-step, and silently turned to watch the woods they’d left behind.

  “We will do that, and soon,” Agdinar said, still watching for other stray Hawks. “They get people at night but won't do anything to her, not until she ends up in one of their prisons.”

  “Prisons? Where?”

  “In housings around the South Point.”

  “The South Point? Of what?”

  “Manhattan, near the Battery,” he said, confused about a geography he only knew in images.

  “Your language is so weird,” said Sarinda, stopping to look at him. She was just a dark shadow under the bluish light. “I've never heard that phrase.”

  “I meant that I know other pilots who flew over the prisons.”

  She got back to walking, and they passed close to a group, where many children were sitting around a bonfire. It was a chilly night, and there was a threat of morning snow. For the last two decades, the weather had turned unusually cold and irregular. It might have been a leftover effect from two sets of nuclear explosions. The down-world people had never called them what they had been—two brief
nuclear wars.

  Agdinar touched Sarinda's shoulder. “Let's keep away from them.”

  “Why? It's just kids.”

  “Many of them are spies for the Hawks. They recruit their troopers from kids like those.”

  “You are a cynic, aren't you?”

  Agdinar smiled and nodded in agreement. His was a culture of cynics; it might have been the real reason why they were there. “Not really,” he said, “it's just a fact I know.”

  “I try to stay positive. This chaos will pass.”

  Agdinar now stopped to look at her. He knew that what she'd said would never happen, but he couldn’t tell her. She was such a sweet girl, both strong-willed and kind. The weight of losing her friend had turned her posture downward—she was having trouble looking up and to him.

  “It might pass,” he said, “but not without help.” Agdinar was thinking about his discussion with Vaxeer, realizing that the world couldn’t be saved without some help from above.

  “My father is going to change all of this. He will end the Hawks' occupation and get jobs for all our people.” Sarinda finally stood straight and looked at him.

  “Do you really think he can do that?” The city's future Agdinar knew about was dim at best, and those jobs would never come back, no matter what generations of politicians had promised.

  “I'm not much about supporting my father, but he's good at politics. He can change things.”

  “I hope so.”

  “At least he's providing us with a place to hide. He bought me an apartment near the park, north from here; I'm staying there, so I can attend NYU when it reopens next year.”

  Agdinar knew that wouldn't happen either, but he didn't say anything and tried to keep her talking. “What are you going to study there?”

  “Journalism. I want to tell people about injustices, not only the ones coming from the Hawks but also those our government makes.”

  Agdinar had to stop to grab his head—the loud mind-alarm shook him as much as true sound. It hit him hard on the temples, unleashing an instant headache.

  He had saved Sarinda from the Hawks that night, but her denouncement of the government would get her killed during the purges of the following decade—as America finally disintegrated into a half-dozen warring states, menacing each other with their stolen nuclear weapons and competing versions of God. This additional information was reaching Agdinar from Dhern, who was still behind them but making headway with his quantum calculations about their now altered future.

  A life for a life. Ma Xiang, a Boston net-reporter, would now escape capture. The opposition would then shift to the next name on their list—Sarinda Paredes, an up and coming activist.

  Something ventured but nothing gained. Instead of mysteriously disappearing without further records, now Sarinda's torture and mind-extraction would be used as a warning for others not to mess with the growing Northeastern Coalition, to leave Boston alone.

  There was a little emotional hint in Dhern's communication, something Agdinar read as disappointment, and, truly rare for a sophisticated mobile AI, what could only be described as sadness.

  For all their powers, the Watchers could only make small changes in the world’s future. Some events would happen, no matter what anyone would do to move the needle. They were fixed in some unfathomable form, and often for the worse.

  Watching Sarinda walk to the open field at the edge of Central Park, Agdinar couldn't avoid feeling the weight of his painful breathing and the tears surging to fill the rim of his eyes. And he felt another weight, the responsibility he had for Sarinda’s fate.

  It was an unspoken oath his body and soul had taken.

  Chapter 6

  Walking in the city, on solid ground, felt weird to Agdinar. He was intimately familiar with the outline of the streets, the lines of its flood-damaged subways, even the blueprints of the largest buildings. But that was a superficial experience when compared with feeling the meandering breeze and taking in the aromas of the early morning. For him, those were extraordinary sensations, even though the smells were a mixture of family-made and rotting food, and they included a few disgusting undertones from the detritus accumulated on the sidewalks of a city that was only partially functional. A city under siege from the inside, attacked daily by a powerful enemy. And a city whose denizens risked their lives to attend work every day but did it because they didn't have any other choice.

  Agdinar wasn't sure where Sarinda was leading him to, only that she'd promised to take him to her apartment uptown. He felt surprisingly calm, considering he could be soon captured and made to answer to the Managers—which, regrettably, included the Overseer—and was surely now being hunted by hundreds of his peers, Watchers who were likely scouring the records of every street and air camera. But the risks below were more than the ones above, and that was not very reassuring. He had taken with him a level-7 non-military suit—a lucky foresight, if by any chance something went wrong in his trip—and it could withstand a few bullets from the Hawks. He could also vanish in such a way that those same bullets would pass through him as if he were gone.

  Sarinda was, however, more exposed, and he worried about her. He wanted to stay close until he was sure of her safety, but he also wanted to stay near her for as long as possible. Sarinda wasn’t just beautiful, but very different from the Watchers Agdinar knew—more complex, seemingly both stubborn and compassionate, and, as the night had shown, also a driven risk-taker. He would have loved to see the world through her eyes.

  They exited the enormous city park from its northernmost corner, entering a neighborhood that had remained relatively unscathed by the explosive guerrilla fights of the previous decade.

  The Hawks had focused their might on controlling New York's financial center in its southern end, occupying many buildings in Battery Park. They now dominated the Wall Street cluster, which had in the past grown through City Hall Park and nearing the barren land that was once known as Chinatown.

  His retinal view-panel told him they were walking on the northwest edge of the city, a neighborhood once called Morningside Heights, but more recently renamed by the Hawks—who liked to simplify the names of potential battlegrounds—as just The Heights. The Heights and Harlem were still the best areas to live in New York, if you wanted to live trying to ignore the occupation.

  * * *

  Agdinar tried to steer clear from the city's camera system. The Watchers would be monitoring every piece of down-world imaging technology; at least, what had been left functional by the Hawks, who had systematically destroyed cameras and viewing drones through their domain. The police had given up trying to fix such widespread disruption of a network that used to be the best in the world, tracking several million individuals as they moved about in the streets. Proud of their artificial intelligence recognition lattice, the last Major used to say, "a watched city is a safe city."

  There must have been then a collective smile from the Watchers above him.

  Agdinar, with his training in collecting data from human sensors, and his in-suit database, didn't even need Dhern to control the views of street cameras—which were more numerous as they moved north and into the rebuilt section of the city. He just ordered, with a single thought-command, his personal AI to trick the cameras so that their registries couldn't be used to follow him. That would give him some time to figure out what to do, until his peers discovered his ruse and reversed the insidious software patches he had been leaving in the cameras.

  He wondered what kind of fictions the unnamed AIs inhabiting his suit would concoct for the Watchers viewing them. Would he be shown as a friend of Sarinda, walking side by side with her? Or make him just invisible? Perhaps erase both of them?

  He had descended to the city but was still invisible.

  ...I'm proud that you took care of this, Agdinar.

  ...Thanks, Dhern, but I want you to look around and assure nobody up-world is tracking me. And if they do, confuse them.

  ...That's a tough assignment
. It will delay me, with all those primitive circuits—disgusting stuff. Are you sure?

  ...Yes, Dhern. Do it.

  * * *

  He was looking again at Sarinda, who'd been gaining distance ahead of him. She walked with a sliding gait, her feet barely touching the ground.

  With the growing daylight, Agdinar saw that Sarinda was dressed more stylishly than he'd thought, with clothing so perfectly fitting it seemed tailored for her with great care. Perhaps it was a sign of her coming from a rich, influential family. And her glances to him revealed eyes that were dark green, not brown as he'd first thought. Now that he could see her face without so much anger distorting it, the harmony of her features was much too perfect for the human phenotypes the gene-making computers in the eighth millennium would usually design. That a beauty like this could come from the vagaries of human genes and biological pregnancy was a small miracle. Although Sarinda Paredes was a Spanish-sounding name—he knew it meant “walls” in the language—and her family came from Central America, she reminded him of the peoples of the Euro-Russian Coalition.

  “We are here,” she said. “Wake up.”

  “I'm not used to seeing the city like this.”

  “Like what?”

  Agdinar realized that experiencing the city anew was not something he could share without compromising his overriding secret. The Hawks were violent and dangerous, but the Managers were more powerful, and they might decide to vanish Sarinda permanently to rectify history's record.

  “The morning,” he said. “It's so beautiful and crystalline.”

  “I didn't know the military were into poetry.”

  Sarinda was smiling, the second time since their harrowing night. She wasn’t buying anything of what he had said as cover, but she seemed to be forgiving him. And there had been an intimate feeling in the time they were sharing, walking under an extraordinary blue-sky sunrise. Staying away from the strict logic Watchers were taught to follow when confronting a new idea, Agdinar just thought that they were becoming friends.