Chapter 23 — The Witness.131
@solena.rising
“Tonight, loves. They’re going to stand me up in front of the whole basin and I get to bring every one of you with me, live, because the tide doesn’t believe in closed doors.
A year ago I was performing for strangers and praying the count would climb fast enough to save me.
Tonight I’m not performing for anybody. I’m going to stand in the light and let it find you too.
Thank you for never leaving. Come down with me tonight. All the way down.”
My bag was packed by six.
It is a small and stupid kind of packing, a grown man putting three faded tees and a charger and a toothbrush into a rucksack, but I did it with the gravity of a state funeral, because it was the first thing I had been free to do for myself in almost three weeks and I wanted to feel every second of it.
Then I stood at the door of the little room with the bag on my shoulder and my passport in my pocket and the whole open island in front of me, and I did not walk down to the dock.
I want to be clear that I knew better. I had a way off this rock for the first time since the ferry, a real one, paper and everything, and the smart move, the only move, was to put one foot in front of the other until I was standing on a boat that wasn’t theirs.
Solena had told me to go. My dead father had told me to go, through her mouth, which was the cruelest postage anyone had ever used.
Every sane cell I owned was pointed at the water.
And I went the other way, because of two things I could not put down.
The first was the thing I had been ignoring since the very first Transmission, the snag in Caspian’s eyes, the blink that played twice.
I am a person who never finished anything, who quit the one thing he was ever good at and called it burnout, and I had spent three weeks being told by everyone including myself that the wrongness I kept seeing was my own stagnant water.
I could not get on a boat without knowing whether I was a man with a point or a man with a problem. I had to see it.
The second was colder and I am less proud of it.
If the man on the wall was a fake, and I could prove it was a fake, then I had the one thing that might reach my mother where nothing else had.
Not an argument. Not a rescue. Proof. The single fact her wanting to believe could not paint over.
I told myself I was going to look behind the curtain for me.
I was going to look behind the curtain for her.
So I left the bag on the bed, because you do not bring luggage to a burglary, and I went to find the inner sanctum on the one morning the whole island had its back turned.
It was not hard. That was the part that should have warned me.
The compound was a beehive an hour before noon, because they were building Solena a coronation, and a coronation at Tidewell meant cable.
Cameras on tripods down by the deck. A boom.
Two of the seafoam staff walking a cart of lights past me without a glance, because nobody glances at the bored plus-one, which had been the truest thing on the island since the day I arrived and was about to be the most useful.
They were wiring the whole basin to go out live tonight, the prize creator at the top of the ladder, broadcast to every last one of her hundred and thirty thousand, and the machinery they were running it on had to come from somewhere.
I followed the cable.
It ran from the Transmission hall, where I had watched a dead man skip like a scratched disc in a storm, back along a covered walk I had never had a reason to take, to a low building behind the kitchens that I had always filed as more kitchen.
No windows. A door propped a hand’s width with a folded towel, because whatever was inside ran hot, and you could hear it from ten feet off, a flat electric roar that did not belong anywhere on an island that sold silence by the jar.
I stood outside it for a moment and gave the universe a fair chance to stop me. It declined. I pushed the door.
The cold hit first, the engineered cold of a room fighting its own heat, and then the noise, and then the light, dozens of small hard lights, green and amber, blinking in stacks.
Server racks. Two long aisles of them, floor to ceiling, fans screaming, more raw computing power in that one hot room than in the rest of the Isle of Saltren put together, on an island whose entire pitch was that you could put the surface world down.
And at the end of the aisle, on a wall of monitors, was Caspian.
Not the smooth one. The one underneath.
On one screen his face hung half-built, a mesh of fine grey lines with the skin only painted across the top, the eyes finished and the jaw still bare wire.
On another, the done version ran through a blessing I’d heard him give a dozen times, the sound a half-beat ahead of the mouth, a counter ticking off frame numbers in the corner, and every few seconds the eyes did the same blink, a half-second of looped footage dropped in to keep a dead man looking alive.
A third screen held one line of his voice as a blue waveform, and a cursor was trimming it syllable by syllable, smoothing a sermon the way I used to smooth a groom’s toast.
It was all here, and none of it was hidden, because who was ever going to wander in.
A face being drawn. A voice being cut. On the desk, a paper schedule of the month’s Transmissions blocked out in marker like a posting calendar, one of them circled with a little hand-drawn wave.
The god was a job. Somebody clocked in and made him a few minutes of fresh wisdom at a time, and it went up on the wall, and a hundred people breathed it back.
I had been right.
I want to put that down plainly, because of what it cost to earn it and what it was about to cost to keep it.
Three weeks of being the paranoid one, the slack one, the man who couldn’t just be happy, the cynic too broken to be fed.
And here it was, humming, in a cold room behind the kitchens.
There was no man in deep retreat. There had never been a man.
There was a render farm and an electricity bill and a face they typed.
I did not hear her come in, over the fans.
“You were supposed to go home, Squid.”
I turned, and the Keeper was standing in the open door I had not closed, the gray woman from the dais and the storm and a dozen rooms where everyone else went quiet, and she did not look ominous now, and that was somehow the worst version of her.
She looked tired. She looked like a woman who has found a raccoon in the server room and now has to deal with the raccoon.
“You’re running it,” I said. Stupid, obvious, the only sentence I had.
“Somebody has to.” She came in and let the door fall shut behind her, killing the daylight, and the green and amber light did unkind things to her face. “I had you flagged your first week. The film-school eyes. I told Coral, that one’s going to be tedious. And here you are. Tedious.”
“It’s a deepfake.” I gestured at the wall of him, because I needed her to say it, needed it spoken in the air of the actual room. “All of it. He’s dead. He’s been dead the whole time. You built him.”
“My father built him.” For one second something moved behind the tired, and it was not grief, it was a kind of professional irritation, an heir annoyed at the inventory.
“I keep him running. Do you know what it costs to keep him running? No. Of course you don’t.
You think the awful part is that he isn’t real.
The awful part, Squid, is how little it matters that he isn’t. ”
“Then I’ll tell them,” I said. “Everyone. The whole island. I’ll show them this room.”
“Mm,” she said, the way you answer a child telling you a dream. “In here, please.”
The warm came back into the room in the shape of two people in seafoam, and I understood that the door had been open my whole stay right up until the exact second I became a problem, and not one second longer.
They were so gentle about it. I will give the island that much.
There was no violence in it, nobody hit me, nobody even raised a voice, two soft-faced people I half recognized from the gratitude circles took me by the arms and brought me down to the floor of the server room with the unbothered competence of orderlies, and one of them produced zip ties from a pocket like a man producing a handkerchief, and they bound my wrists and then my ankles while murmuring to me the whole time in the voice you’d use on a spooked horse.
“There we are.”
“You’re alright, Squid. You’re safe. Nothing here can hurt you.”
“This is a big day for you, this. This is you finally letting the tide hold you.”
A strip of duct tape, then, peeled off a roll with a sound like the loudest thing in the world, and pressed gently across my mouth by a beaming man who told me, softly, that I didn’t have to carry the words anymore, and I lay on my side on the cold floor of the room where they kept their god in pieces and looked at the half-built face on the monitor, eye to wire eye, while a cult tucked me in.
The Keeper watched it for a moment, the way a manager watches a thing get handled.
“Sit him in the back till it’s over. He’s not going anywhere, and I have a broadcast to run.
Nobody talks to him.” She crouched, once, the gray of her filling my whole tilted frame.
“You really should have gone home. She wanted you to. That was the kindest thing that woman has done for anybody in a year, and you couldn’t even take it. ”
Then she stood, and she was gone into the daylight, and the door fell shut, and the fans roared on.
They moved me to a back corner behind the last rack, out of sight of the door, and the two of them settled in to mind me, and time did the thing time does when you are on a floor with your mouth taped, which is stop.