Vanadium Dark Read online

  In the dream, the humanoid must have heard him.

  It nodded.

  My secretary told me that the girl was all right, that she'd come back home. But the Vanadocam mainframe showed me something different. It showed her with you.

  The face was motionless, and yet not motionless at all. It was solid yet squirming, like a mass of shoaling fish.

  Why did you show me something that wasn't true? What's the point?

  A thought came to him, tolling like a bell.

  I AM THE NEW.

  Who?

  I AM THE NEXT.

  What?

  THE UPGRADE.

  Why?

  I AM THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME.

  Each wave of thought just seemed to arrive in his head, nonhuman brain waves subsuming his own, alien dendrites sparking inside his head. The sensation was shocking, awful, unutterably terrifying. I'm being brain raped.

  ROBERTSON IS MINE NOW.

  The final pulse of syllables detonated in his head, and Viktor found himself clawing at his skull, trying to peel back a fontanelle and rip out whatever invasion was happening in there. He had to make it stop. It was intolerable.

  Them the Vanadocam golem was gone, and he drifted away, falling into a blessed mist that held no eyes.

  * * *

  Several hours later, Viktor woke up with the alarm.

  He did not feel refreshed. He felt like he'd gone through something unclean and still bore the stench.

  He'd had a nightmare about Vanadocams, he remembered.

  He got up, showered— staring ruefully at the soaked suit from last night's farce—and ate a Danish he found in the pantry. In the medicine cabinet he saw the various over the counter and under the counter drugs lined up like tiny little executioners. No Sycorax.

  He selected a spare suit, took an elevator down to the basement, and went into the Zoo.

  Joyce looked up at him sharply. “Where were you?”

  “Asleep. I believe my pay grade allows me to have my eyes closed from time to time.”

  “Very funny.” Joyce pointed at the clock on the wall. “You were meant to start work fifteen minutes ago. I was getting ready to send someone to check on you.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Weird night.” He went over to the mainframe and began loading config files.

  “Seriously, is everything okay?”

  “Yes, Joyce! Everything's fine. I just forgot to take my Sycorax, and I got a little overexcited.”

  “We've got the Secretary's personal physician here if you want to get checked out.”

  “Did I stutter? I said I'm fine.”

  “This is a serious matter, Kertesz. You're the highest paid security analyst in the country. If you feel you aren't fit to perform your duty... ”

  “Are you my secretary or my drill sergeant? Everything's fine. Stop worrying.”

  There was silence, broken only by the tapping of keys as she forwarded the first batch of open cases to him.

  A shitshow, as expected. His early departure and late arrival had caused a lot of stuff to back up. Hastily, he dived into a cat-6.

  For half an hour, he frenetically operated the Vanadocams, seeing, recording, filing, capturing, documenting. He went back in time to events six months old and to events that had happened twenty minutes ago. He bashed out cases with such furious intensity that he realized he'd have to slow down, or he'd wear out again.

  But it wasn't this that stopped him.

  It was the memory of the piece of paper.

  THIS MACHINE KILLS.

  He thought of his dream. He thought of Robertson.

  What did the Secretary say had happened to him? A mental breakdown?

  Suddenly, he was curious about the truth of that.

  And he had a way of determining the truth.

  He'd have to break the law. Handlers were forbidden from using the Vanadocam mainframe for non-work-related purposes. There had been an incident in the past—a Handler apparently using the machine to make clandestine inspections of a high school girls’ bathroom.

  Viktor didn't think he'd need long.

  It was Saturday the 12th. He'd arrived on Monday the 7th. By the dates on the files and Secretary Wilson's implied admission, the Zoo in the Pentagon had been unmanned for three days previously. So Robertson had last been in on the 3rd.

  He entered some dates and some coordinates he'd never entered before: his current location.

  The machine took him there. And from a recording more than a week old, he saw Sean Robertson for the first time.

  He was lanky, preternaturally so. Just skin over a skeleton. He sat in the chair Viktor was sitting in now, goggles over his eyes, staring with what was surely a thousand yard stare, although the Vanadocams let your stare cover more than a thousand yards.

  Viktor panned around him. He saw Joyce, nine days younger, typing away in the background.

  The only parts of Robertson that moved were his hands. When they were not typing, they shook in spasms that sent his fingers tapping against the desk like a voltage-animated corpse. They seemed the one chink in his armor, the one part of his humanity that was expressing itself.

  Then a shaking hand pulled away the goggles, and he got a good look at Robertson's face.

  Blank. Devoid of emotion. Like trying to read a white page.

  Viktor realized that he was perhaps the first Handler to ever spy upon another Handler.

  Maybe he looked like this when he worked, too.

  Robertson turned and said something to Joyce. She answered.

  Oh, to know what they're saying.

  From the drawer Robertson pulled out a notepad and wrote something. Three words. He put it in the drawer.

  He got up and left.

  Viktor was used to squeezing blood from stones, extracting hard evidence from confusing data. His eyes narrowed as he watched the former Handler leave the room, trying to pare the rind from the fruit in this recording.

  The guy was slouched over and seemed physically exhausted, as though he'd spent the day running a triple marathon instead of sitting in a chair.

  He passed the reception desk and opened the door.

  Motion tracking engaged. I think I'll make like a lost dog, Sean, and follow you home.

  Robertson walked up the hall to the elevators. A few suited functionaries waved and said something to him. Robertson did not seem to reply.

  Christ. He's like a zombie.

  An uncomfortable thought came on the heels of that.

  He's like I was last night.

  Robertson stepped into an elevator, and it took him up a floor. The view blurred and streaked like wet paint blown by a gale-force wind.

  Motion along the y-axis was still a weak point for the Vanadocam computer.

  From the elevator, Robertson went into his suite.

  Viktor was curious about what would happen. He saw Robertson take measured strides to his medicine cabinet, and suddenly, he wasn't as curious anymore.

  He tried to zoom in and observe the labels of the drugs Robertson was taking, but the Vanadocams could not render that level of detail yet.

  But there were a lot of them. Robertson's movements were not of a man medicating himself, but of a man removing himself from the need of medication. The hand forcing pills into his mouth was relentless like a bucket-wheel industrial digger.

  The last thing was chosen with care, though. A single pill.

  An anti-emetic? So he couldn't vomit anything up?

  Down it went.

  Down he went.

  Viktor zoomed in and sped up the video 20x.

  Robertson sprawled down on the floor, arms spread out. The light from his window moved as the sun steadily fell in the west. The shadows from things in his room lengthened and extended, marking the passage of time like the gnomons of many sundials.

  The body would have seemed almost still in real time, but sped up it jittered and shook with little muscular contractions. After some time, the body seemed to convulse and squeez
e inward like an accordion, and foamy white vomit erupted out of his nose and mouth.

  Viktor slowed down. The body thrashed miserably in its death throes.

  Viktor observed a red bubble blowing from Robertson's nostril. Very bad – vomit or blood was blocking an airway.

  After that, the end was swift. The movements became less and less agitated, became almost perfunctory. Robertson rolled over on to his back, revealing the pale corona of vomit half-dried to the left side of his head.

  His eyelids fluttered, and he was still.

  It was another half an hour before he was found.

  The Vanadocams carried no sound. But Viktor had some good guesses as to what was happening.

  Presumably the phone in Robertson’s pocket and the phone in his suite were ringing, as Joyce tried to locate him.

  Presumably someone knocked on the door at some point, and was puzzled by the lack of an answer.

  The door swung open. Not a forced entry. Someone with keys to the room had unlocked it.

  By now, everyone knew something was badly wrong.

  Emergency procedures were being brought into play.

  A pair of EMTs went to work.

  They asked Robertson questions, snapped fingers in front of his face, and tried to elicit a response. They rolled him on to his side and tried to clear his airways. They commenced CPR, one man pumping Robertson's sternum with his fingers in a diamond shape then locking lips and pushing air into his lungs.

  The CPR failed.

  One man unbuttoned Robertson's shirt while the second unpacked a set of defibrillators, pasted the electrodes on to his chest, and tried shocking his heart back into a pulse.

  As they went about their doomed mission, Viktor realized that more and more people were coming into the room.

  Joyce was there, staring at the body on the floor and nibbling a fingernail. It must have been deja vu for her when I didn't show up at work this morning.

  The Secretary of Defense arrived. He asked questions of the EMT guys, and they answered. His look was one of studied concern.

  There were doctors, men with skills and technology more complicated than basic first aid.

  There were Pentagon security guards.

  There was the man with the small nose and receding chin.

  Fuck. Viktor's heart froze. The face was unmistakable—

  An enormous bulb of a forehead that dwarfed everything underneath it. Those strangely ill-proportioned features, strangely suggestive of a man put together wrong.

  The face wore a bored pout, not the expression of someone witnessing a dead body. But that was expected. It was a facsimile face with constructed emotions behind it.

  He wore civilian clothes and served no purpose that Viktor could detect. Who was he? Why weren't security removing him?

  Suddenly anxious, Viktor remembered his dream. His fingers scurried across the keyboard. They zoomed out and sped up the video. They did various other things for which there was no need whatsoever.

  Viktor wanted to get some ludonarrational distance between him and the small-nosed person. Wanted to still feel that the wall of technology insulated him.

  But maybe there isn't a wall. Maybe he is the technology.

  The awful, impossible thought stuck in his head and wouldn't leave.

  His goggles were yanked off his head.

  “Ow, hey, what the—”

  Joyce stood over him. “I was calling you. I was just about shouting. Are you fucking deaf?”

  “You're not supposed to be in my bay, Joyce. It's the rules.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I couldn't exactly get your attention by talking to you, could I?”

  “Sorry. I'm just distracted. Still getting my head into the game.”

  “Well, you can get it out of the game. Just got a message from the Secretary of Defense's office. He wants an immediate meeting with you.”

  “Now? I could be in the middle of a case.”

  “'Get Viktor Kertesz to my office, unless there's a missile aimed at the White House. And only then if it's nuclear.' His exact words.”

  “Okay.” He rubbed some raw skin that the goggles had scraped. “I'd better get going.”

  * * *

  “You asked to see me, sir?”

  “Kertesz... ” Secretary Wilson chewed his lip thoughtfully. “How's your work going?”

  Viktor stopped an automatic “well” from leaving his lips. His work, by several standards, was not going well. And that lie might be a cross the Secretary would crucify him on.

  “I'm still getting adjusted, basically.”

  The Secretary smiled, a slow, unpleasant smile that seemed to have been drawn from him with great discomfort.

  “Yes, that's right. Leaving your post early. Arriving at your post late. Disrespecting and ignoring your secretary. You were really impressing us a few days ago. So what's going on now?”

  There was a silence that Viktor didn't dare break.

  “In the space of a few days your performance has decayed to a level we, frankly, call unacceptable. Were you aware that of the eighty cases you worked on yesterday, twelve of them have procedural errors that analysts picked up on?”

  “No, Wilson, I wasn't.” Viktor felt genuine shame. He'd been on full autopilot, intent on logging completed cases as if it was some kind of competition or video game.

  “It's an embarrassment. Law enforcement around the country is relying on Project Elephant, and you're supposed to be our best man.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “It's more than that. The reason the Vanadocam network is even legal is that the public has full faith in its reliability. If it becomes known that the Handler is fucking things up... ”

  “Yeah, I understand what's at stake here.”

  Secretary Wilson cracked his knuckles, not taking his eyes off Viktor. “And these are just the errors we were able to pick up on. Remember how you asked about Sean Robertson? Want to know what his error rate was? Two and a half percent over more than ten thousand cases.”

  Really? Was that before he jammed every pill in the building down his throat and killed himself?

  “Impressive.”

  “Not impressive. Expected. You've given us more than satisfactory performance in the past, and we trust you can rise to that level again. You have to.”

  Secretary Wilson buzzed for a security guard. When the man entered the room, he asked, “Private Nichol, is the observation deck on E Ring safe?”

  “Cleared and secure, sir. Protected by one-hundred-eighty degrees of bulletproof plexi.”

  “Good, good.” With a creak—Viktor could not tell if it was from the Secretary's chair or the Secretary's aging body—Wilson stood up and motioned for Viktor to follow.

  “I've got something to show you, Kertesz. Something to impress upon you the precariousness of where you are—the precariousness of where we are. ”

  Viktor followed the Secretary and the guard. They passed through several halls, going from the center of the Pentagon to its outermost loop. Finally, on the third floor, they stopped at an outside balcony with a view out over to the park.

  What Viktor saw took his breath away.

  He looked out over a sea of protesters.

  “I think you should be aware of some things, Viktor.” That ugly smile was back on the Secretary's face. “You're a bit locked away in the basement and in danger of losing sight of the real world.”

  Bright colors, waving signs. Chants coming from thousands of mouths.

  A picket line of guards stood with rifles, holding the protesters at bay.

  “Shit,” Viktor said. “How long has this been going on?”

  “It started earlier today. There's perhaps six or seven thousand people out there. Counting them is a waste of time. More keep arriving.”

  The milling crowd of angry people drifted around, constrained by armed PFPA personnel. They reminded him of the Vanadocams in his dream.

  Signs jutted out like ships floating in a human sea.
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  DEFUND PROJECT ELEPHANT!

  CAUGHT THE NY BOMBER YET?

  GET YOUR EYES OFF US!

  IT'S ELEPHANT-HUNTING SEASON!

  FREE ANZOR!

  Viktor gestured at the last one. “So people support Anzor Khujadze? Even after what he did?”

  Secretary Wilson shrugged. “It isn't what he did. Some people believe his story, that he's innocent and Project Elephant set him up with fake video. But I want you to draw an object lesson from this. Yes, we are still popular. But that popularity is contingent on the public having faith in our ability to do our jobs. If they catch wind of things going on in the Pentagon, such as you fucking up on the job by showing up late, leaving early, and looking at things you shouldn't be looking at—”

  Oh fuck. What does he know?

  “—that could be the start of a sea change, a sea change that ends in the Vanadocam network being dismantled, a trillion dollars being wasted, and America once more becoming a crime-filled shithole where, at any moment, someone can drive a uranium bomb into a city and kill three million people. Capische? See where you stand in the bigger picture?”

  Viktor nodded, absorbed by the spectacle in front of him. He hadn't known. He did not keep up with the news. He might be the creator of the news in a sense, but he worked eighteen-hour days. Unless it ended up in his inbox in the Zoo, he usually never heard about it.

  “Sorry, Wilson.”

  “It's okay. Things are changing around here, and it's just a question of whether you're willing to change with them. That's all I wanted to say. Private Nichol, please escort Mister Kertesz back to the Zoo.”

  I saw you standing over the body of the man who worked here just two weeks ago, Wilson. A mental breakdown, you said. You forgot to mention that his brain never started up again. Be as friendly as you like. You lied to me, and I aim to keep my encounters with you short and sweet.

  * * *

  Viktor was back inside the zoo, hacking away at his case log and doing well. He was thirty cases to the good in four hours. But his mind was elsewhere. Wilson, Robertson, the protestors, and the noseless man waltzed in his head. He felt deceived. Conned.

  Joyce was very cool toward him. He didn't feel like mending bridges at the moment.

  Finally, with his inbox thinning out to pointless bullshit that he could take or leave, he realized that he would not be able let this go.