Someone To Watch Over Me

by Tricia Sullivan

Genres: Science Fiction; Genetic Engineering; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

When Sabina picks up Adrien battered and bleeding outside Zagreb station, she knows only that she is drawn to this stranger and to the sense of danger he represents. She has no idea that she is also touching the Watcher, a mysterious figure who can inhabit Adrien's body using a brain implant. What might have been a love affair is about to turn deadly, for as Sabina is drawn into Adrien's world, she will become the object of the Watcher's desire in a battle over a metamorphic new technology known as I.

Release date: October 31, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 287

Sample

He was on the wrong train and he had to get off. As he crawled from his seat, grappling for the door amid the scramble of passengers, he was seized by the conviction that there was no such thing as the world except insofar as it was defined by his personal and specific pain. The world was turning all to smoke and aquarelles, whereas his pain was as precise and ruthless as a panther. His pain, in fact, was carving out its own identity, a private timestrand, snarling and obscene. It was athletic, gifted – bewildering – so that when the train whirled away he was left swaying on the platform while his senses, one by one, crunched down toward singularity, eliminating the world and admitting nothing but – you guessed it – pain.

This probably meant he was about to pass out.

Voices; shuffling bodies. Fearful of collapsing in public, he checked his thoughts: agony is vulgar. Tamed by discipline. Think about something else. Zagreb. The conductor said Zagreb. Luckily he still had his bag. Better keep moving. Find a hotel. If any bones were broken, they weren’t important ones. He would buy drugs, sleep for one day, and then on to New York. There, if still coughing blood, hospital.

He was moving unsteadily toward a welter of kiosks. Embarrassment was surely called for. Or anger. Or fear. But at the moment he was strictly into feeling sorry for himself. The Watcher had abandoned him; his role now would be merely to slither away and lick his wounds. He had been put in his place. No one would care what he did anymore, so why keep up pretenses? He permitted himself the luxury of limping.

Peripherally he noticed that an adolescent boy outside the newsstand was giving him the eye. Glancing once, he took in the characteristic pattern of facial pierces that identified the kid as a bootleg wire-seller, and veered away. He had left his own bootlegging career years ago. Now he had enough money to use any commercial wire on the market: he could afford to buy a six-hour Tantric orgasm and the illegal subroutine that would remove the urge to book a flight on the Concorde afterward; but he didn’t use wires. He had a lot of problems, but addiction to pleasure wasn’t one of them.

No, indeed. He staggered toward the Hotel Esplanade.

Preoccupied with his physical condition, he failed to notice the doorman until the latter stretched out an arm stiff as a toll barrier, his language-neutral howdareyou expression barely masking the glee that evidently accompanied the act of repelling intruders. There was a torrent of words in Croatian. In the middle of this obloquy he began coughing and had to hawk and spit right at the doorman’s feet. A clumsy kick was aimed at him but he dodged it without effort.

He abandoned the idea of entering the hotel and shuffled off in hope of finding a taxi. He noticed that a thin stream of blood, diverted by his left eyebrow, was tracking down his face and dripping on his shirt.

There weren’t enough taxis lined up to cope with the crowd. It was just occurring to him that if he had to stand and wait he would probably faint, when he saw this girl at the far end of the row of cabs. She leaned against her car smoking a cigarette and watching the throng approach. The car was either parked or broken down, a fragile-looking doorless affair, piebald with rust. She had presence, or he was giddy with pain, or both, because he made an effort to stop gasping and dragging his right leg. Her leather jacket and old trainers were stained, but the way she inhabited them made their condition immaterial. He wondered if the bruises on his face were visible yet. He gritted his teeth and told himself to beat the two businessmen who were also bearing down on the girl, conversing in rapid Chinese. Picking up his feet, he shouldered past them, muttering, ‘Discourteous occidental fuck coming through.’ He flung himself ahead, falling with a wheeze on the hood of the car. Clutching his midsection, he lowered his head toward the gutter and loosed a long cough; he could feel her eyes on him so he swallowed the warm, foul admixture of bodily fluids and tried to straighten up.

She put out her cigarette delicately against the rusted iron and pushed herself off the car with one movement, coming toward him with the smoke flying out of her nostrils and her dark hair lifting off her face and her cinematic eyes fixed on him so that he no longer wanted to move. He flashed the thoughts: She is an angel. She will save me.

She did not look pleased. She shouted something in Croatian, and he saw her waving at the two Chinese over his head. He shut his eyes against new insurrections in his chest, leg, kidneys and head and found some money in the pocket of his jeans. He thrust it toward her, but she was still tearing strips out of him by the tone of her voice.

‘No Croatian,’ he groaned. ‘Hotel. Hotel. Just take me to a fucking hotel. Please.’

He straightened, coaxing down a wave of nausea. His head pounded. When he thought he was fully upright, he opened his eyes. She was not beautiful, not even close, but she was … she was …

‘You need hospital, not the hotel,’ she said. She looked at the money, and then back at him, as if she could not reconcile the two. ‘Get in.’

He folded himself into the car. ‘No hospital. Hotel.’

She started the car. He stared at the dashboard, which moved closer and then farther away.

‘Which hotel?’

‘Good hotel. Money hotel.’

She pulled out into traffic. ‘No respectable hotel wants you, like this. They will throw you out, the concierge. Anyway, you don’t need the car in city center.’

‘Your English is very good.’

‘Thank you.’ She took a sharp turn and he had to grab the door frame to keep from sliding out.

‘We could go to your place,’ he said. ‘You could nurse me back to health and I could …’ It was odd, but he was forgetting how to speak. He knew the words, but the correct movements of the tongue and jaw were suddenly mysterious. He closed his eyes again.

‘Protect me from crazy foreigners who fall on my car?’ She was laughing; that would normally be a good sign but something told him she was still a long way from flirting with him. ‘I will take you to hotel where all Americans stay.’

‘Oh, no … please.’ His words were becoming syrupy. ‘You wouldn’t do that to me. Can’t you take me somewhere quiet, where I won’t be bothered?’

‘You have no reservation? Not good. I do what I can.’

He heard the engine blast into a lower gear as they began to ascend into the residential districts, but he must have lost consciousness after that because the next thing he knew the car had stopped and she was shaking him.

‘We are here. Are you getting out? If you don’t get out now, I take you to hospital and they must deal with you.’

‘I’m getting out.’ He did it gingerly, then leaned back through the place where the door should be and proffered some more money.

‘You already paid me too much. You paid five times the fare.’ She seemed to be struggling to keep a straight face.

‘Will you wait for me, then? I still need you. This place is small: it might be full. I’ll be right back.’ Without waiting for an answer, he hobbled into the hotel and tossed an ax card on the counter before the oiled and unfriendly clerk. He filled in the registration card and came up with some cash for tips. The clerk was saying something about no rooms, sir, you are a disgrace to his hotel, leave at once before I call security. He turned the registration card over and wrote: ‘3 large steel bowls. Cotton. Syringes. Vodka. Scissors. Adhesive tape. Penicillin.’

He glanced up, thinking, and glimpsed himself in the mirror behind the reception desk. His green eyes were bloodshot. His white braids were caked with some unpleasant substance, and instead of sticking out from his head at all angles as they were meant to, some of them were clumped into an unsightly mat. His dark skin had a green cast, like an old statue. His upper lip was swollen and furry with dried blood.

The clerk fumbled with the phone. The only word he understood was ‘Milicija’ – police.

He put the pen down and tugged the cord out of the phone.

‘Get me a room,’ he said, ‘before I jump over this desk and redecorate you. Police. Ha. You make me laugh.’ He coughed. ‘Take the ax card. There’s plenty of money on it.’

He returned his attention to the list. ‘One dozen red roses. Ice. Clean white sheet torn in strips 18" × 3". Latex gloves.’

He thought a second and then added: ‘Sewing kit.’

Horror and disbelief were wrestling with one another on the clerk’s face. The ax card was handed back to him. His balance had been noted; he saw the clerk swallow.

‘Can you read this?’ He passed over the list. The clerk frowned.

‘Yes, but, sir, you wish to see doctor. We cannot allow you inside like this.’

‘No.’ He put his palm down over the list. ‘No doctor. No disturb. You understand? I want quiet and I want rest.’ When he picked his hand up there was money beneath it. The clerk looked at it as though afraid to touch it. But the key was given to him, the bell was rung, the bag was taken. He was tempted to follow the bellboy upstairs and collapse, but instead he pocketed the key and went outside. Her car was still there. He got in.

‘Look,’ he said, turning to her with effort. ‘My name is Adrien Reyes. I know I don’t look so good, but I can’t go to the hospital. I just need to get some medicine. Can you please take me somewhere I can get good drugs. Morphine, Valium, something like that.’

‘Why can’t you go to hospital? I am not drug dealer. Adrien.’

He ground his teeth. ‘I’ll pay you anything you want, but don’t ask me questions. Just take me somewhere I can get drugs. What do I look like, the police?’ He reached into his sock and pulled out a roll of hundred dollar bills but fumbled as he tried to remove the rubber band. He was starting to feel sick again.

She turned on the engine.

‘Get out,’ she said. ‘Go to your room.’

He was afraid he would start crying because he really didn’t have a Plan B this time. He didn’t want to drink himself into oblivion as he’d done on the train. But she took the money out of his hand, peeled off three bills, and gave him the rest back.

‘I’ll be back in one hour, two hours,’ she said. ‘Wipe blood off seat, please.’

In the room he took off his clothes and sponged himself down as best he could. He had decided a shower would hurt too much and he wasn’t sure he could get out of the bathtub once in. He bloodied three washcloths even though he made an effort not to break any scabs. The hotel provided a robe, and as he was trying to put it on, two bellboys showed up carrying the various items he’d requested. He made them clear off a table and drag it closer to the bed and bring extra towels and stack them in readiness, and then he shooed them out. He gave himself a shot of penicillin in the ass.

From his bag he removed a handheld wand powered by batteries. He switched it on and scanned his own skull. He didn’t really believe he was under anybody’s surveillance, but he’d been around HIT too long not to take precautions. While he was unconscious, Max might have planted him with any number of nasty things. There were devices to simply track his movements; devices to interfere with his transmissions to and from C; devices to fuck with his perceptions in their own right. But the only plant that registered on the detector was his own, and he ran his hand over the bump behind his ear where his battery was nestled against the bone of his skull to be sure there were no fresh incisions.

He was clean. He lay down on the outside of the bedspread and closed his eyes, for the first time succumbing to something like relief. But he was not to be alone for long.

As unpleasant as it was to be in Adrien’s body at this moment, it was not to be expected that C would miss any of this. Indeed, when he closed his eyes he could feel C was there, come to witness and explore his exhaustion and pain. The knottings of his mind turned all to silk under C’s touch. The Watcher with its whitewhite divine hands cupped his brain and, even now, made everything somehow all right.

It was asking for his memories of the train journey, vague and jumbled as they were; it had no shame about the fact that it had deserted him during the beating, leaving him to wake afterward on a train somewhere south of Moscow from a sleep he’d mistaken for death. In that time, alone with the blood, the bruises, the betrayal – and yes, the guilt for that was part of it too – he had decided to leave C. This was not the first time he’d made such a decision, only to find himself unwilling or unable to part from the Watcher at the moment of truth; yet this time was different. This time he had not only killed for C, he had nearly died for it.

Forgive me, Adrien – what happened in Moscow was my fault. I’ll have Max’s head, the pretender. We’ll bring him down. We’ll get I and then show him for the lowlife he is—

I won’t do this anymore, he told C. Let me go.

But we’re so close! So close to I, and then we’ll both be working on a new level. You and I can be free of the satellites, Max’s cowboy signal-jamming – no one will touch us. If you’ll only trust me, the way you used to …

The idea made him want to cry. Nothing was like it used to be. Once upon a time C had taken Adrien to the edges of himself and showed him how to be more. Simply by the act of Watching, simply by drinking his life, C had brought him meaning. Now it was no longer content to Watch, or even to guide. These days it insinuated itself into his very core, so that everything Adrien did was really about C and its nameless seething need for this thing called I, this tiny, hotly contested piece of Human Interface Technology.

Even now, while C superficially pretended to soothe him, it probed for details, questing through the sediment of the past few days’ recollections. He knew he was being used but, too exhausted to resist, he could only sit back while C stirred the remnants of his memories, making them blend and swirl hypnotically until they melted him into something like sleep.

C says: Time to review the incident. See what went wrong.

He is drawn back into the middle of it, momentarily disoriented with respect to both time and place. Disordered sensations fly out of memory: smoke and the reek of gun oil; blood on blackened snow, the distant sirens—

Please, I’m in no condition for this. Let me sleep.

It means nothing in the street, C admonishes. As a martial artist you should know. Whether you’re hung over, sick, whatever … in the street it means nothing.

Yeah, the street. The Northern Lights, wheeling overhead like some fucking lunar invasion while Max’s army of believers stalk Adrien down the snow-clad avenues, his breath coming in liquid chunks from bronchitis and one broken rib. There is no way he can escape but he will not accept this, so he kicks open a door, held only by a rusted padlock, ducks inside and throws himself flat on his belly. Knees stained red and armpits jungly with fear, he presses his face to the icy hell of the floor. It’s freezing and the abandoned slaughterhouse has an ingrown stench of sour garbage, dead meat and loathing – should have been knocked down in the nineties and made into a mall but it’s still here as if preserved for posterity, a shell with brown leaks frozen gleaming on the walls and half the ground-floor windows shattered. Strangely, there is a freshly drilled hole in the plaster wall, through which a bundle of electric cables passes and snakes up to the ceiling, where it disappears into another hole.

C observes: These details are unimportant. Center yourself. What happened next?

Where did the fucking kid go? The kid must have been in on it. The taste of metal in his mouth: a trap. Outside the April snow is everywhere, melting sound to blurred globules so that he can hear nothing of his enemies. The Watcher waits, present to his senses but light as an insect; it heightens his perceptions as he tries to put together what’s happening all too fast here.

Who could be working in this building? A construction crew? But where is their equipment?

Your mind is undisciplined, C rebukes, impatient that he should dwell on irrelevant details. Give the memory up to me and I will order it for you.

He halts the flow to fire accusations back at the Watcher: How could you let it get so out of hand? This was all your idea. You begged me to get you this thing I. You said your contacts in the Deep were reliable. But what good were you while I was up to my eyeballs in my own blood?

Believe me, I had no way of foreseeing that Max would get wind of this. We were so close. Maybe something can still be salvaged—

I don’t want to salvage something of it. Whatever I is, it’s not worth killing for. I don’t like what I’m becoming. I don’t like what you’re becoming.

I understand. If you’ll just give me your memories, I can make it all go away for you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?

No. No: don’t try to take my memories.

The guilt is for me to bear, not you.

You only want to take the guilt away so you can make me do it again, and again, as many times as you need it. You can’t have my memory. I remember what happened now. I remember everything perfectly.

You will give it to me, Adrien. If you don’t it will haunt you. Don’t you understand that I’m responsible for you now? There’s no need for you to suffer any of this. That’s what I’m here for. The judgment calls, the moral complexities – those are for me to deal with. All I need from you is your body.

He tries to struggle against this idea. He’s never been able to comprehend how C can make everything sound so reasonable, so normal, when it isn’t.

If you’ll just let go of the memories, I’ll release your endorphins and you’ll feel better, I promise.

C will, too: it knows his brain chemistry better than he does. He’s grinding his teeth, wondering how long he can resist the temptation to surrender, when the girl knocks on the door and brings him back to consciousness.

C retreated. He had to get up to let the girl in and that took a while; she pushed inside impatiently and handed him several small plastic bags.

‘What’s your name?’ Opening one bag, sniffing.

‘Sabina.’ She handed him two small, sealed bottles. ‘I have no needles.’

‘So this won’t turn out to be, like, rat poison or anything, will it? Because I can’t read the label.’

She ignored his playful tone. ‘It’s pain killer but not addicting. Morphine is not so good you have to be careful with it so I brought you this too.’

He shivered with pain while she measured and administered the shot.

‘Please don’t take offense, but I may pass out anyway.’ He groped for adhesive tape, but she had already picked it up.

‘I do it,’ she said, pulling on the latex gloves with what he felt was a shade too much relish. But he submitted. He had already decided to trust her. It was the kind of call you had to be able to make. You couldn’t be on guard against everyone.

She began to tape his ribs and tears sprang into his eyes. The nausea returned, yet even though he gasped and clutched at the arms of the chair she continued taping, impassive.

He said, ‘So, maybe you could tell me some jokes, to keep me from puking.’

‘Puke away.’ She handed him one of the steel basins.

Startled, he gulped back his sickness. ‘Have I done something to offend you or is this just, like, normal Zagreb taxi-driver bedside manner?’

‘You want me to be sympathetic? But I am sure you deserve this.’

‘Oh, really?’ He was so startled that he forgot how much it hurt for a few seconds – until she wound another length of tape around him so hard his teeth sang.

‘Obviously you are in the dirty business, a person who has no self-respect. The people who do this, they do not pick on innocent citizens. Therefore, you have done something to deserve.’

‘How do you know I’m not a victim of random violence?’

‘Why don’t you go to hospital? Why do you rip out phone when the concierge tries to call police?’

She continued working and he attempted an abortive inhalation that ended in a choking cough, the products of which spattered unpleasantly into the basin. It felt like tugging on a heavy rope of pain that extended to the bottom of both lungs.

‘Who asked you, anyway?’ he said dispiritedly.

‘Is free service provided with drugs.’ She smirked.

‘Yeah … speaking of which, this shit isn’t working. I need morphine.’

‘So you make a habit of this, then? Morphine every time, yes?’

‘Sabina – shut up.’

She got up and tossed back a couple shots of vodka before offering him the bottle. Then she lit a cigarette, took a few drags, and gave it to him to hold while she lifted the robe off his right leg. She blanched. He didn’t look down, didn’t want to see the gouge again, so he kept his eyes on her face. She had fatigue circles beneath her eyes, and her front teeth were slightly crooked.

She sounded slightly kinder: ‘Adrien, I don’t know. Infection is so easy. You need doctor for this …’

‘Some morphine, then just stitch it up. You can sew, right? Any fool can sew.’

‘You must be crazy. Here.’ She swallowed another mouthful of vodka, shook out one of the pills from a little bag and put it on his tongue, then handed him the bottle. The alcohol almost made him gag, but once it was down he enjoyed the burn.

‘We will wait a little while,’ she said, and blew a smoke ring. ‘Give it time to take effect.’

But it wasn’t long before he started to phase in and out of himself: fatigue or medication, he couldn’t tell.

‘Come on,’ he murmured. ‘Tell me a story. Tell me about yourself.’

She didn’t look at him, but she began to speak. Either the drug was very fast, or she was speaking Croatian. She paced back and forth across the room, leaving him slumped in the armchair surrounded by bloody cotton. She spoke quietly but rapidly, apparently not to him at all. Then her syllables began to elongate, and she was singing, half under her breath, an enigmatic little tune full of steep angles and odd Middle-Eastern semitones. His eyelids began to droop. He flew away on the song, thinking, it isn’t exactly sad, but it’s old, very old.

He roused briefly later, and he could feel the bumps of stitches on his leg. She had turned off the light, but he managed to locate what he hoped were the morphine tablets and swallowed one. The bed was occupied. He could hear her breathing, slow and steady. With an effort, he levered himself out of the chair and into the bed. If he woke her, she gave no sign. Obscurely comforted, he dozed off again, mind swarming in all directions at the solid darkness.

With the pain gone, he could put his memories together on his own terms. Adrift in a zone where he could think but could not move, he began to reassemble the events in Russia that had gotten him so fucked up. He had to go back to the beginning, while C’s purpose and guidance had still been strong: while he had still been on top of the situation.

It isn’t the first time Adrien has gone to Moscow to exchange information he doesn’t understand with people he doesn’t know, but it’s the first time C’s ever felt like a buzz saw idling inside his body, thrumming all his nerves. He’s supposed to be picking up something identified only as I. C is being even more secretive than usual, but it doesn’t take a genius to add up Moscow and the Watcher’s uncharacteristic tension and conclude that I is the latest HIT candy to come out of the Deep.

If C is nervous, Adrien is probably in trouble already. He never questions the terms of C’s arrangements; it’s safer not to know too much. To do his job effectively – to survive, even – he’s learned to switch off his mind and let the body decide his actions.

When he arrives, C has already laid the groundwork. C’s contact meets Adrien perfectly on schedule in front of a certain ladies’ underwear store. He takes Adrien to a makeshift mall arcade where the wire-dealers stand in velvet-curtained booths, displaying their licenses like hairdressers; you can walk in depressed and walk out happy, even if you do feel compelled to grab for a particular brand of breakfast cereal in the supermarket for the next three weeks. His contact goes to the back of the arcade, past the whirring and ringing slot machines that never seem to go out of style in this town, and beckons him into a private booth. Adrien tries not to laugh. ‘Nikolai’ can’t be more than twelve, and he is plainly nervous as he whispers the information he’s come to share. He’s chewing bubblegum, for godsake. Adrien would pat the kid on the head and walk out but C comes into him and when C is in his body he isn’t required to think.

Entranced, clinging to the edge of sleep, Adrien remembered the Watcher crackling with anticipation and then delight.

Through his eyes it reads the specs included in the data kit. He doesn’t understand the data, but he can see that this I is some kind of new plant. Surprise surprise.

While they negotiate, Adrien is busy keeping lookout through the parting of the curtain. He can pick out all the types: the ones who want sex, the ones who want faith, the thrill-seekers, the already-jaded. He can pick out which are designers scoping the market for new ideas. He can recognize the bootleggers because they are the best-dressed; and he can see who here might know more about HIT than the average mark. He indexes them all, deciding who might be a threat; who might be some other Watcher’s trans, spying on his deal; who might be from Nikolai’s camp; or from the Deep itself – you simply can’t be too paranoid in Moscow these days.

This is why not everything C says through him survives in his memory: because he isn’t all that conscious of saying it in the first place. But he remembers the kid going on about moral duty.

‘We don’t understand the full implications of this technology,’ he says to C. ‘Now that I has been developed, it should be taken to the University and field-tested there. It’s too soon to allow it on the market – any market.’

And C, what does C say?

Field-tested? On what? Monkeys? Convicts? Political prisoners? No. I will do my own field test.

Something to that effect.

‘You must be careful,’ persists the boy. ‘We don’t know what will occur when we place the patterns into the receptacle. You may not get the result you hope for.’

‘Life,’ C says in Adrien’s voice, ‘by definition is transformation. With all of your technical skill to build such a tool, you are too young to understand what it means.’

That burns the kid: even through the haze of his own ignorance Adrien can see it. The rest of the conversation is conducted in the frost of the boy’s hauteur. The pick-up site is decided. The time is set. C slips away, back to its own body, or to some other signal wave and some other plot – none of which he wants to know about. Adrien goes to the men’s room and when he returns, Nikolai is gone.

He’s eager to finish this business. He hopes that once he obtains for C the plant it covets so much, things will be normal again between them and C will retreat to its proper place in the scheme of things. The nature of the plant which makes C a Watcher and Adrien a trans, or mere vessel, means that he ought not to feel C’s emotions even though it can feel his. However, C has become adept at creeping feedback into the link: that’s how it speaks to him, directs him – manipulates him. Now it seems he is also becoming privy to what C is feeling, and he doesn’t like it much.

He tries to rest in his hotel, aware that his spring head cold is turning into something worse – not surprising considering that the city is suffocating beneath an unseasonable excess of snow, with the sky promising more. When C is in your head you never think: this isn’t fun anymore. You never think: I want to go home. You stay focused – you have to. So he makes himself get up, stretch, and mentally prepare for the pick-up of the plant I. He does not allow himself to think yet of the flight home; it would be bad luck.

The meeting place is in front of a building in a kind of industrial park, deserted after hours except for some activity around the new tv station nearby. Nikolai is standing in the shadows behind an ornamental planter stuffed with evergreens. Adrien is surprised that the same person would show himself twice, and he suddenly wonders if he’s dealing with the Deep after all. They’re simply too smooth to use a mere boy as their main conduit in a transaction.

He walks up to the kid, holds out his hand, and a small package drops into it. Adrien starts to open the package but the little shit dodges to one side and vanishes, at which time Adrien’s heart starts pounding and he knows it’s all wrong.

He lunges forward, ducking around the planter and looking for the kid’s tracks, but the snow has been carefully cleared away for the previous day’s business. Columns and boxes containing dense evergreens make a kind of maze out of the colonnade in front of the building; he weaves among them, fast and quiet, ears tuned for any scuffling noise, any breathing: nothing. Shit. C in his skull is urging: get out, get out fast. He wonders what the Watcher knows that he doesn’t, but he’s too well-trained to stop and think about it. He pockets I, turns, and begins t