Chapter Two #2
I do not have a category for it. I stop there, without resolution, the way I am learning to stop.
There was a time — most of my life, in fact — when an unfileable entry was an intolerable thing, a splinter, a system error I would worry at until it resolved, because the whole purpose of the catalogue is that everything goes somewhere, everything has a place, nothing floats.
A floating entry is a thing you did not see coming, and the things you do not see coming are the things that kill you, that is the first law, that is the law the fire taught me.
And here I am, at four in the morning, deliberately leaving an entry unfiled, letting it float, and the floating does not feel like danger.
It feels like the only honest thing in the room.
I am learning, against thirty years of training, that some things are truer for being unresolved, and the woman teaching me this does not know she is teaching me anything, she is two miles south rebuilding a trace script, and I am up here rebuilding myself around the fact of her.
She follows the breadcrumb into the fourth layer at four-eleven in the morning.
I watch her find the synthetic latency window and understand, in real time, that it is synthetic — I watch the understanding move across her face, which I should not be able to do, I am two miles away looking at a camera I built into her own machine, and I can do it anyway, because I have spent three months learning her face the way you learn a city you intend to live in, the main streets of it and the small alleys, the way her mouth does almost nothing when she is concentrating and her eyes do everything, the way a real discovery makes her go briefly, completely motionless, the way the surface of water goes still in the half-second before a fish takes the fly.
She writes in the green notebook. The architecture notebook.
Not the laptop. She is writing the shape of it now, not the proof, which means she has stopped treating this as a technical problem and started treating it as a portrait.
She is drawing the person on the other end of the chain.
I would give a great deal to read the notebook.
I have access to her entire network. I could turn on her webcam and read the notebook over her shoulder; I have never once turned on her webcam to read over her shoulder, and the reason I have never done it is a rule I made in week two and have not broken and the rule is the only thing standing between what I am and what I am afraid I am.
The MM-HOME directory contains her network, her traffic, her metadata, her patterns, her movements through the public infrastructure of the city.
It does not contain her body in a room. There is a line.
I drew it myself, in the dark, for no one, and I have held it, and the holding is the only evidence I have that there is a difference between a watcher and a predator, and some nights it is not very much evidence and I hold the line anyway because it is what I have.
The webcam is eleven inches above the notebook.
I know its exact resolution. I know I could read every word she is writing about me, right now, in her own hand, the most direct access to her interior I will ever have — and I will not, because the notebook is hers, and a thing that is given is the only thing worth having, and a thing that is taken is just more data, and I have enough data, I have drowned in data my whole life, the one thing I have never had is a thing freely given.
So I do not read the notebook. I watch her write in it, which is a kind of starvation I have chosen, and at four-forty she closes it and sits back and looks at the screen with an expression I do file, because I have a category for it and the category is the most dangerous one in the entire system.
She looks satisfied.
She has found the fourth relay. She knows there is a fifth.
She knows the chain terminates somewhere real, somewhere on the Strip, somewhere she can walk to, and she has decided — I watch her decide it, the decision arrives in her shoulders, in the way she finally, at four-forty in the morning, lets herself finish the wine that has been sitting warm beside her for five hours — she has decided that she is going to walk to it.
She is coming.
I close the window. Not the access. Only the window.
I sit in the dark with my four empties in their row and the city below grinding through its mechanical dawn, indifferent, constant, three hundred thousand lights that do not care, and I do the thing I came to the corridor to avoid doing, which is to examine the decision directly, and I find that I cannot regret it, which frightens me more than anything Mara Cole has done, because I am a man who can regret anything, I have built a life out of the cold arithmetic of consequence, regret is the engine of caution and caution is the engine of survival, and I have just done the one thing in eighteen years that I would do again, and the would-do-it-again is the most reckless data point I have ever generated about myself.
I leave the server room at four-fifty. The east corridor is empty and dim, the floor cold through my shoes, the Strip enormous in the windows at the far end where the public floors are, all that frantic light spending itself on no one.
I stand at the glass for the three minutes I allow myself, and I do not pray, because we do not pray, we burned out of a building that God was supposed to be watching and He was not watching, and instead I do the thing I do instead of praying, which is to count: three hundred and forty-two feeds, nine that matter to the mission, three hundred and thirty that matter to the city, and one, now, that has stopped being a feed and started being a door.
She is going to walk through it.
I let myself want it for the length of the corridor — I time it, I time everything, the wanting gets the length of the corridor and not one step more — and then I go back to work, because the want is not a plan and I do not run on wants, I run on plans, and I have forty-eight hours, or I will have them soon, and I will need every one.
But for the length of the corridor, in the cold, with the city spending its light on no one, I let myself be a man who left a door open for a woman because he could not stand one more night of being the only one awake.
And the corridor was not long enough. That is the thing I carry out of the prologue of all this.
The corridor has never been long enough since.