Those That Wake 02: What We Become (21 page)

There would be no more of that. The shot was not the ignition of fear, but the end of it. The fear was gone now, incinerated by Aaron’s sparking, super-heated anger at his father. The death of this fear had left behind a valuable legacy as well: a mission and the knowledge that since his father was the only person smarter and more powerful than he, the weight of that power had fallen to Aaron now that his father was gone.

Now, here, in this town, Aaron found a sense of disquiet again. It wasn’t the Librarian that made him nervous—surely not; if anything about the Librarian scared him, it was the prospect of
not
finding him. No, it was the town itself that made him jittery. Laura, the silly twit, walked blithely through it, though it was stomach-churningly clear simply by looking around. Bookstores, smiling pharmacists, and ice cream shops instead of cell stores, datacafés, and receivers in every house and building; there
were
no towns like this anymore. This was not a town—it was a disguise.

Which meant, in the end, that the Librarian
was
near. That was what, once again, burned away the fear: the anger that drove Aaron forward would soon be unleashed, and the debt owed for his father’s death was about to be paid in full.

Laura walked—nearly skipped in her unconsciously jaunty stride—up to the glass double doors of the library. It was not lost on Aaron that the glass doors were an open invitation, a standing embrace: “Come see, we’ve nothing to hide.” It was not lost on him, despite the fact that he had a hard time taking his eyes off Laura’s bottom as she pulled one of those doors open and stepped inside.

Through the small foyer papered with the clumsy crayon scrawlings of little children, they entered the library proper. Aaron had, of course, been in libraries before. His school, every Intellitech office, even his family home, had a library: large, climate-controlled rooms filled with screens and keyboards to plug your cell into and rows of HDs whose channels you could key into on your cell and get audio and streaming facts about the images being broadcast. Sometimes, as in the Argaven home and some of the Intellitech offices—though not at school—there was a small section or single shelf or display case devoted to books. The books were always of some sentimental or historical note, the information in them having long ago been transcribed into more useful electronic form.

This so-called library was filled with books, shelves of them, row upon row of confusing, unaligned, irregularly sized bindings, the titles impossible to read at a distance, requiring you to enter the morbid, dusty forest of them. There was not a single cell interface or HD screen visible, not even at the single desk that stood off to their left, behind which was a figure regarding them.

The woman sitting behind the desk, with clear, questioning eyes, her gray-streaked hair cut short to frame her pixyish face, looked up curiously. Surprise might have passed across her features, not expecting visitors in the middle of the day, teenagers who should have been in school. Or it might just have been a look of greeting. Aaron didn’t excel at picking up and reading social cues. Laura had pegged that one, he had to admit.

“Hi,” Laura said brightly. “We’re, uh . . .” She glanced quickly at Aaron and then back. “Looking for someone?”

One could never be sure what sort of gobsmacking idiocy Laura would come up with. Nevertheless, Aaron had to allow, people seemed to respond to her. It was, at any rate, best to let her do the talking right now. Aaron did not feel equipped to speak to this woman—an antique nameplate identified her as Ms. Hubert—without bellowing in her face.

Ms. Hubert remained silent for a stretch—a peculiar response for someone in the service business—then nodded slowly and rose from her chair. She came out from behind the desk, revealing a neat gray suit that seemed to Aaron incongruous in the midst of such a calculatedly homey town. Her hand touched something beneath her work surface, and Aaron heard—felt—the nearly subsonic
snik
of the cellock activating on the outer doors.

“Follow me,” Ms. Hubert said, turning her back to them and proceeding toward the shelves of books. Laura spun toward Aaron, her eyes tense with uncertainty. He patently ignored her, following with his glare the woman’s receding back into the far reaches of the book-lined alley.

Clearly exasperated, Laura huffed, rolled her eyes, and went after the woman. Aaron held his place a moment longer, surveying the space again. No screens, no ports, but a cellock. This place was just another disguise. He went cautiously after them.

Passing between the towering rows of books was distinctly uncomfortable. They smelled of dust and the acid of the pages, and he felt the weight of the metal cases crushing down on him. This was age, inefficiency, the leaden mass of obsolescence. When Laura disappeared from view around the other side, he doubled his pace and came around the corner to see Ms. Hubert standing at a door in a shadowed corner. She reached into a pocket of her slacks, and, again, Aaron felt the technology of a cellock—a whiff of the modern world—activate. Ms. Hubert opened the door, and she waited for them to catch up.

Aaron peered around Laura when he got there, looking through the door and down a flight of stone steps into darkness.

“Where in the name of living hell do you think you’re taking us?” Aaron couldn’t contain himself anymore.

“The cellar,” the woman explained without urgency.

“There is no way—”

Laura went down the stairway. Just to show Aaron up, probably. Ms. Hubert’s curious eyes fell on him. With a sour look, he followed Laura.

With the flick of an ancient switch, a dirty light bulb over the stairs flickered, struggling to produce a halo of sickly light. When they reached the cold, hard floor, they could see another light, isolated amidst groping fingers of darkness. The woman’s heavy footsteps preceded her appearance. They held their ground as she walked between them without a glance and up to a wall that, only now that she had distinguished it by her position, could Aaron tell was actually a metal door, flat and plain and heavy. Laura started toward it, Aaron trailing her, but before they came within striking distance, Ms. Hubert spoke.

“You’re going to have to sleep your cellpatch.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper, but it resounded like a sonic boom in this cold, dark, still place.

“Over my rotting corpse,” Aaron responded without hesitation.

“This place kills live celltech.”

“Don’t worry—you’ve got nothing that could touch my codes.”

“I assure you, we do,” she said simply.

“I don’t believe you.”

She shrugged.

“I didn’t invite you here,” she said. “You came on your own. You can make your own decisions.”

Again, it was Laura who ended the stalemate.

“I’m going in,” she said, stepping forward.

She’d given no sign that she remembered any of this. She was working as she had up to this point on her instincts, which Aaron would have snorted at had those instincts not been on the mark every single step of the way.

“Wait,” he said. “Just wait a second.” He turned to Ms. Hubert. “Who are you?”

“A custodian.”

“What’s on the other side of that door?”

She looked at it, then back at him.

“Not what you want, probably.”

“But,” Laura said, cutting in, “what we need?”

“Probably.”

Laura stepped up to the door without even sparing Aaron another glance.

Though it had no apparatus on its smooth, blank surface, a last cellock activated and the door opened, accompanied by the popping thrum of fluorescent lights coming to life. Illumination cut from the seams of the slightly open doorway, slicing into the gloom of the cellar. The woman swung the door open, nearly blinding Aaron. Laura stepped up and, silhouetted for an instant like a departing soul stepping into a heavenly blaze, crossed the threshold.

Fighting every instinct he had, his stomach queasy and his muscles twitching from the tension of it, he uncelled himself, shutting his tech down to the very last maintenance routine.

The steady hum of electricity that was a constant stimulation to his brain was gone, leaving him feeling naked and alone, more so than he could ever remember, even at the funeral of his father.

Stifling a desperate sound boiling in the pit of his stomach, he walked forward and passed into the light.

From outside, Ms. Hubert shut the two of them in with a whoosh of airtight seals.

The room was small and stark white from the Hoffman tiles that covered every inch of its surface. The tiles created a perfect null to wireless technology and electricity, provided the tile surface was contiguous. Consequent to the null effect, the tiles had to conduct electricity themselves, since no other power sources could function within. It was the largest Hoffman space Aaron had ever seen, though he had heard that the military was trying to construct a room of nearly this size for the president.

The only objects within were a white table and two chairs, most likely laminated in Hoffman coating, too. Aaron looked at Laura, waiting for a sign, some assurance that this was right, that she knew this place. Instead, she stared blankly at the white corners, also, apparently, waiting for a sign.

“Well?” Aaron demanded of her.

She spared him a glance, then pulled out a seat and sat down.

“Sit,” she said.

“Why?”

“So I can’t kick you in the ’nads, which is what I’m about to do.”

He yanked the chair out angrily and put himself in it.

“Was this supposed to accomplish something?” he said acidly. “Was this supposed to—”

“Aaron,” said a voice that must have been using the tiles themselves as the transmission medium. It would have to, since no external wavelength could penetrate them. The voice was also electronically modulated; a perfect, crystalline simulation of a real man. “I was so sorry to hear about your father.”

The greeting jolted Aaron like a lightning bolt. Calling him by name as though this were not their first meeting and probing such a raw nerve—it was a potent strategy on the Librarian’s part. How could someone who addressed you with such intimacy be your enemy?

“How dare you speak of my father,” Aaron lashed out, leaning forward in his seat, channeling his aggression toward the empty space before him.

“I knew your father very well, a long time ago. Better than anyone, if familiarity with the data that describes a person could be considered knowing him.”

“You’re lying.” Aaron’s voice was growing more shrill. He was falling into this meticulously designed trap. But he knew it, he
knew,
and so he was still better; better than the trap, better than the man who set it. He felt Laura’s hand cover his, the warmth positively shocking in the midst of this cold white place. He shook it away angrily, without regard to what she might be feeling here.

“I worked for your father.” The cool metallic voice echoed from the tiled walls without urgency, without emotion. “I was Intellitech’s archivist, its librarian, from the moment they incorporated. Every dollar spent on every project, every theory behind every line of research, the details of every life that made up the company, passed before me.”

“Why did you hate him so much, then?” Aaron fired out into space, in hopes of wounding the ghost. “Why did you drive him to his own death?” Aaron’s eyes were burning, but he would not cry in front of Laura. He would
not
.

“I’ll tell you what drove him to his end, if you like,” the voice said with painful detachment. “But you had better be sure you want to know.”

“You think I don’t understand what you’re doing? Stripping me naked, locking me in here where I can’t even see you. Trying to scare me with your portentous warning. I came here to settle accounts with you, and I’m going to do it.”

“Aaron, you’ve come here with a score to settle, I see that, and you’ve dragged this poor girl into your campaign. You’ve brought your anger in here with you, and it colors everything you hear. This is not a trap. I am not your enemy. I’m warning you because I have no cure for the truth. Once I tell it to you, I can’t ever make you unknow it. And I assure you, it will change a great deal more than your view of me. It is going to break the world apart for you, and you’re going to have to piece it together the best you can.”

“My world is already broken,” Aaron said, feeling the burning lines of tears cut down his face. Laura’s hand returned to his, and this time he let it stay. “Do your worst.”

The chamber filled with the feedback of the speakers, an electronic hum that stood in for silence.

“You answer easily,” the voice returned. “But you’re not answering just for you.”

“Tell us,” Laura said, before the voice could address her specifically. Aaron felt her hand grip tighter as she said it. “The truth is why I’m here, too.”

“In 1976,” the voice offered without further delay, “a biologist named Dawkins at Oxford University—”

“I know what memes are,” Aaron cut in angrily. “What’s this got to do with my father?”

“If you want the truth, you’ll have to take it as I give it.” The electronically smoothed tones didn’t chide, didn’t cajole, and it robbed the figure on the other end of some sense of humanity. “What, then, are memes?”

“They’re ideas, units of idea transmission, really,” Aaron said. “It’s theoretical, but supposedly they’re something like viruses, living organisms that transmit from mind to mind instead of body to body, and that’s how ideas grow, how we learn, anything from mathematics to a commercial jingle.” Aaron glanced up at Laura, for presumably he was being forced through this performance for her benefit. But her face had the strangest expression. Because Aaron faltered when it came to the specifics of social cues, he could only guess, but she looked as though she was searching for something, a notion forgotten, a word on the tip of her tongue.

“Yes,” the Librarian confirmed. “Imagine, if you would, what controlling the transmission of memes would amount to for a company whose primary agenda is profit. Suppose you could control which memes got to people, how powerfully, how often, when. Suppose you could, in essence, control what people thought. Can you think of a greater engine of commerce?”