فصل 20

Easy instructions for tamper-resistant security pack

Box 1: Confirmation of surname (please initial)

Box 2: Confirmation of given name and middle initial, if applicable (please initial) Box 3: Please place the tip of your right index finger here, and hold in place until the space turns green Box 4: Please refer to lancet instructions

Lancet—instructions for use

Wash hands with soap and water. Dry thoroughly.

Select a slightly off-center fingertip site.

Insert lancet into lancing device, remove cap, and use.

Apply drop of blood to the space indicated in box 3 of security form.

Recap lancet; discard appropriately.

20 Spiral Logic

Loriana Barchok had never felt so light-headed, so dizzy. She tried to wrap her head around what she now knew, but found her mind stretched too thin to even try. She had to sit down, but the moment she did, she found herself standing again and pacing, then staring at the wall, then sitting down once more.

A package had arrived that morning. It required a thumbprint ID to open, as well as a smear of blood to confirm her DNA. Loriana didn’t even know such packaging existed. Who needed anything to be that secure?

The first page was a distribution list. All the people who had received a copy of the enclosed documents. In any other endeavor of this size there would be hundreds.

But this package had a distribution list of one.

What was the Thunderhead thinking? It truly must have malfunctioned if it was sending an eyes-only high-priority document like this to her. Didn’t it know that she was terrible at keeping secrets? Of course it knew! It knew everything about everyone. So the question was, did it send the package to her, fully expecting her to blab about it to everyone? Or did it truly trust her to be the sole keeper of this hidden flame?

Is this what the Toll felt like, she wondered, the moment he realized he was the only one to whom the Thunderhead still spoke? Did he get dizzy, too? Did he alternate between pacing and sitting and staring into space? Or did the Thunderhead choose someone more wise and worldly for its voice on Earth? Someone who could take such an awesome responsibility in stride.

They had only heard of the Toll through the hearsay of arriving workers. Some people believed the Thunderhead spoke to him; others didn’t and thought it was just typical Tonist madness.

“Oh, he’s real,” Sykora had told her. “I met him once—with Hilliard and Qian.” Which made anything he said about the encounter suspect, since Sykora was the only one of the three still alive. “He’s the one who sent us here—gave us these blasted coordinates. Of course that was before all that ‘holy man’ business—that all came later. He seemed rather ordinary if you ask me.” And you’d know ordinary, Loriana wanted to say. But she didn’t say anything and let Sykora get on with his business.

Loriana was not offered the job as Sykora’s assistant when they first began to settle in a year ago. That went to another junior agent, who lavished praise on Sykora and doted on him like an overachieving valet. Well, if Loriana had been offered the job, she would have refused it. After all, everything they did here was nothing but an illusion of employment. No one was being paid, not even the Basic Income Guarantee. People worked because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves, and with ships arriving regularly now, there was always something that needed to be done. The former Nimbus agents joined construction crews or organized social events. One even opened up a bar that had quickly become the go-to spot after a long, hot day.

And no one needed money on the atoll, because the supply ships arrived with everything they might want or need.

Sykora, of course, put himself in charge of distribution—as if deciding who got corn and who got beans on any given day was a meaningful display of power.

From the very beginning, the Thunderhead’s will had to be deduced from its actions. It began with that solitary plane that flew overhead, almost too high for anyone to notice. Then that was followed by the first ships.

When those ships appeared on the horizon, the former Nimbus agents were elated. At last, after nearly a month making do with the atoll’s limited resources, the Thunderhead had heard their plea, and they were being rescued!

Or so they thought.

The ships that arrived were all self-piloting, so there was no one to ask for permission to board—and once the supplies had been off-loaded, no one was welcome on the ships. Of course anyone was allowed back on—the Thunderhead rarely forbade people from doing anything—but the moment they boarded, their ID gave off an alarm and flashed a bright blue warning even bigger than the red “unsavory” mark. Anyone who stayed onboard was marked for immediate supplanting—and in case anyone thought it was a bluff, there was a supplantation console right there, just inside the gangway, ready to erase their minds and overwrite their brains with new, artificial memories. Memories of someone who didn’t know where they’d just been.

That made most people race off the ship even faster than they’d boarded. Only once they had run from the dock did the mark on their IDs go away. Even so, there were several of Loriana’s coworkers who decided to leave on those ships anyway, choosing to become someone else, anywhere else in the world, than to remain on Kwajalein.

Loriana had a childhood friend who was supplanted. Loriana didn’t know it until she ran into him in a coffee shop one day, hugged him, and chattered away, asking where life had taken him after graduating high school.

“I’m sorry,” he’d said politely. “I actually don’t know you. Whoever you think I am, I’m not him anymore.” Loriana had been stunned and embarrassed. So much so that he insisted on buying her coffee and sitting down for a chat anyway. Apparently he was now a dog breeder with a full set of fake memories of a lifetime spent in the NorthernReach region, raising huskies and malamutes for the Iditarod.

“But doesn’t it bother you that none of it is true?” Loriana had asked.

“No one’s memories are ‘true,’ ” he’d pointed out. “Ten people remember the same thing in ten completely different ways. And besides, who I factually was doesn’t matter—and it doesn’t change who I am now. I love who I am—which probably wasn’t true before, or I never would have been supplanted in the first place.” It was not exactly circular logic. More like spiral. An accepted lie that spun in upon itself until truth and fiction disappeared into a singularity of who the hell cares, as long as I’m happy?

It had been a year since those first ships had arrived, and things had settled into a routine. Homes were built, streets were paved—but stranger were the large patches on multiple islands that were being prepped with concrete a meter thick. No one knew what for. The construction crews were simply following a work order. And since all Thunderhead work orders always ended with something sensible being built, they trusted all would be revealed when their work was done. Whenever that might be.

Loriana had found herself in charge of the communications team, sending out painfully slow one-way messages to the Thunderhead in primitive pulses of static. It was an odd sort of job, because she couldn’t directly request anything from the Thunderhead, since the Thunderhead was required to refuse the requests of unsavories. So all she could do was make declarative statements.

The supply ship has arrived.

We are rationing meat.

Pier construction delayed due to bad concrete pour.

And when a ship with extra meat and fresh concrete mix arrived five days later, everyone knew the Thunderhead had gotten the message without anyone having to actually ask.

While Stirling, the communications tech, was in charge of actually tapping out the messages, he didn’t decide what messages to send. That was Loriana’s job. She was the gatekeeper for all information passing out of the island. And with so much information, she had to pick and choose what got through and what didn’t. Although the Thunderhead had set up cameras all over the atoll now, those cameras couldn’t transmit through the interference. Everything had to be recorded and physically brought out of the blind spot before it could be transmitted to the Thunderhead. There were talks about building an old-school fiber-optic cable that ran to the edge of the blind spot, but apparently it wasn’t the Thunderhead’s top priority, because it had not yet sent the supplies required to build it. So the way it stood, at best, the Thunderhead saw things a day after they happened. It made the communication center critical, since it was the only way to keep the Thunderhead informed.

On the day she received, and opened, the security pack, she slipped a message into the stack that was waiting for Stirling to send using their code system. All it said was Why me?

“Why you, what?” Stirling asked.

“Just ask it,” she told him. “The Thunderhead will know.” She had decided to not even tell him about the package, because she knew he wouldn’t leave her alone until she told him what it was.

He sighed and tapped it out. “You realize it’s not going to answer you,” he said. “It’ll probably just send you a bunch of grapes or something, and you’ll have to figure out what it means.” “If it sends me grapes,” Loriana told him, “I’ll make wine and get drunk, and that will be my answer.” On her way out of the bunker, she ran into Munira, who was tending to the little garden just outside the entrance. Even though the supply ships brought just about everything they needed, Munira still grew what she could.

“It makes me feel useful,” she once said. “Homegrown food tastes better to me than anything the Thunderhead farms anyway.” “So… I received something from the Thunderhead,” she told Munira, perhaps the only person she felt safe confiding in. “I’m not sure what to do.” Munira didn’t look up from her gardening. “I can’t talk to you about anything having to do with the Thunderhead,” she said. “I work for a scythe, remember?” “I know… It’s just… It’s important, and I don’t know what to do about it.” “What does the Thunderhead want you to do about it?”

“It wants me to keep it secret.”

“Then keep it secret,” Munira said. “Problem solved.”

But that was just spiral logic, too. Because information was never given by the Thunderhead without there being a purpose to it. She could only hope that the purpose would become evident. And when it did, that she didn’t screw it up.

“How is Scythe Faraday?” Loriana asked. She hadn’t seen him in months.

“The same,” Munira told her. Loriana supposed that a scythe robbed of purpose was worse than being an unemployed Nimbus agent. “Does he have any plans to start gleaning again? I mean there’s hundreds of workers all over the atoll now—that’s certainly a big enough population to glean someone here and there. Not that I’m anxious to see it or anything, but a scythe who doesn’t glean is hardly a scythe.” “He doesn’t have plans to do anything,” Munira told her.

“So, are you worried about him?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

Loriana’s next stop was the distribution center—a warehouse of quick and easy design, near the dock, where Sykora spent most of his time walking around and doing a lot of pointing.

Loriana was there because she needed to gauge him. To see if he was acting differently. To see if maybe he had gotten the same information she had, whether or not he was on the official distribution list. But Sykora was the same as always: bureaucratic and managerial. The undisputed master of petty projects.

After a while, he noticed her lingering there.

“Is there something I can do for you, Agent Barchok?” he asked. Although they hadn’t been actual Nimbus agents for more than a year, he still acted as if they were.

“I was just wondering,” she said, “if you’ve given any real thought as to why we’re here on Kwajalein.” He looked up from his inventory tablet and took a moment to study her. “Clearly the Thunderhead wants to establish a community here, and we are the ones it chose to populate it. Haven’t you realized that yet?” “Yes, I know,” Loriana agreed, “but why?”

“Why?” Sykora echoed, as if the question were preposterous. “Why does anyone live anywhere? There is no ‘why.’ ” There was no use pushing beyond that. Loriana realized that this was exactly what the Thunderhead wanted Sykora to think—which was probably part of the reason why he didn’t get the package. If he had, he would have insisted on putting his thumb in the pie and ruining it. It was best if he didn’t even know there was a pie to be messed with.

“Never mind,” Loriana said. “I’m just having a rough day.”

“Everything is as it should be, Agent Barchok,” he said in a feeble attempt to be fatherly. “Just do your job, and leave the big picture to me.” And so she did. Day after day she sent the messages that needed to be sent and watched as the massive construction effort continued, everyone laboring with the blind, happy diligence of worker bees, ignorant of anything but their specific task, their worlds having gotten so small that they couldn’t see beyond the next rivet to be welded.

Everyone but Loriana, who, unlike Sykora, did see the big picture.

Because in that DNA-protected package were more than just simple documents. There were blueprints and schematics. The plans for everything the Thunderhead was planning to build here.

And, like the package itself, it required her initials, thumbprint, and a drop of blood to signify her approval of the plans. As if she were the administrator of the entire undertaking. It took all day, and a night of tossing and turning, but the following morning, she gave her biological approval.

Now she knew exactly what the Thunderhead was building here. She doubted anyone even suspected yet. But they would. In a year or two, it would be hard to hide it.

And, for the life of her, Loriana didn’t know whether she should be positively joyful, or absolutely terrified.