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Part Two

Adam Dearden hadn’t realized how many people worked at Normal Head until Mr. Mansfield disappeared from his room. Half an army of orderlies, doctors, and security guards manifested from nowhere and filled the halls.

The patients had been woken or retrieved and placed in a large canteen space to be counted and held. Adam was sharp with shock, the fog blitzed away by the last half hour of panic and the unexplained. They weren’t being told anything, and Adam had been specifically admonished by half a dozen extremely tense strangers to not say a word about what he’d seen until directly released to. Like an NDA, only scarier, because the people issuing it had access to medical equipment and he was trapped in a hospital in the middle of nowhere with them.

And yet. Mr. Mansfield had apparently either executed a daring midnight escape or received a thrilling rescue, leaving nothing but a pile of insects, presumably gathered and stacked while out in the woods, in his Houdini wake, as some kind of arcane insult. And nobody had any idea yet how he’d done it, because there were no cameras in the bedrooms at Normal Head. Only in the corridors, the public, and the outside spaces.

Adam sat down, on the northern edge of the room, as far away from the huddle as he could get. How had he done it?

Adam looked at his hands, and discovered they weren’t shaking. The red, amber, and green capsules must’ve been some good stuff. Because—and he quietly, gingerly tested this on himself for the first time, letting the thought crest like a shark’s fin in his mind—the whole event had a little bit of a Windhoek vibe for him. The night of the riot.

Those capsules, he decided, looking at his still hands, were the shit.

Adam turned his eyes up and cast them around the room. He supposed this was the entire strength of Normal Head, every single inmate. There was a different separation than earlier, though. Two large groups, diving the room, yes. But there was a smaller group at the back, working hard to sit apart from everyone else. Adam twisted in his chair to get a better view of them. People were looking at them, but they weren’t making eye contact with anyone but each other. And they all had wet shoes or slippers. They’d come from outside. Adam supposed they could be the “Staging” people—still inmates, but in preparation for release into the outside world.

But the others were split as before, right down the middle of professional demarcation. Being able to give them a proper once-over now, he began to recognize faces here and there, on both sides. He was scrupulous in avoiding any acknowledgment of recognition with any of the strategic foresight people. Not that many people in the room had the mental fortitude for direct eye contact anyway.

“All communication is dangerous,” said Clough, plummeting into the empty chair beside Adam and knocking free his personal cloud of fossilized sweat. “Just fucking looking at someone constitutes communication. Especially if you want to shag them.”

“Hello, Mr. Clough.”

“Just Clough. It’s a good bloody name, Clough. Honest name. Not like names these days. There are probably kids in this room called Wheat. Or Skylar. Or Skyler. Because it turns out they made a name up and never decided how to fucking spell it. I’m an economist, you know.”

“What side?”

“Foresight strategy, pal. Nonprofit economic think tank in Eindhoven. Fucking field economist, I am.”

“How does that work?”

“I go to big conferences and get important people so drunk that they can’t shit straight, and then ask them evil questions and write down the answers.”

“That,” Adam offered, “doesn’t sound so bad, really.”

“It’s bloody great,” Clough agreed. “Except that when you get these bastards shitfaced they tell the truth. And it’s fucking horrible. Over and over again. That last recession? That was practically fucking victory condition. We teeter on the brink of world financial ruin and a return to the days of trading fucking seashells for food, every fucking day. Worse. It wouldn’t even be like Mad Max. Do you even comprehend how sad that is? Nobody runs Bartertown. That’s the thing, lad. It’s a runaway process. The absolute best thing anyone can do is grab desperately at the throttle. But they don’t. Because it’s a speeding death kaleidoscope made out of tits.”

Adam looked around for Dickson.

“Tits,” Clough emphasized. “It just dangles tits out everywhere. And tits will hypnotize a man. He’ll just grab at them and suck. Unless,” he reflected, “they like cocks. In which case just imagine a whirling thresher of cocks. Tasty ones. People just want a taste. And when they’ve had it, they want more, and bugger tending or directing the machine after that. They just crawl all over the thing, trying to drain it of its juices. Its terrible fucking juices, lad.”

Adam spotted Dickson, who looked very harried and sweaty. Adam tried to look a little scared as he waved. Dickson saw it and changed his trajectory.

“Did you know,” Clough continued, in a broken voice, “that more than half of the top nought point one percent—not the One Percent, the Nought Point One Percent—of the highest-paid people in America are financial professionals? Tits. I’m telling you. Draining the brake fluid out of a spinning machine that’s going to shred the planet. I’m a fucking economist, me.”

“Mr. Clough,” said Dickson.

Clough wiped his eyes with trembling fingers. “I’m all right, son. I’m all right.”

“If you need some help, just flag someone down, Mr. Clough. There’s no shame in it. Everyone here is in the same boat, remember?” Dickson nodded at Adam and resumed his course.

“You’ve got it together pretty well,” Clough remarked. “You were a crying zombie last time I saw you.”

“I think it’s the pills,” Adam said.

“Yeah? Not the adrenaline, then?”

“No. The pills. I’m not liking this. Or being kettled in one place with all these people.”

One of Clough’s grimly untrimmed eyebrows rose. “Kettled. Spent some time in the field, eh? Done a riot or two?”

“Yeah. Don’t really want to talk about it.”

The street-protest checklist. Phone in a rugged case, in the front pocket of the jeans, screen turned inward. Slip the wristwatch off before you go outside. Enough adhesive bandages and painkillers (ibuprofen and acetaminophen) to share.

Fog. Fire. The stink of frightened people stampeding.

“What were you doing in the corridor?” Adam said. “When they were opening the guy’s door.”

“I don’t sleep much,” Clough said, breathing through whatever pain had been sharpening itself on his bones. “They’re okay with me going for a walk so long as the sun is up. Which it is, just fucking barely.”

“So why were they trying to get him up?”

“Everyone’s on a different schedule. They’re pretty good here, the staff, you know. If you get up with the sun and go to bed with it, they’ll do their bit and come and get you at dawn and put you to bed at sundown. He might well have been one of them. God knows we never saw him around much. Aye aye,” Clough said, nodding at the door. “Here we go, then. That’s the Director.”

A small, lean man around forty, who was evidently quite convinced that keeping his hair very short was hiding his male-pattern baldness. Stubbly and jittery, and yet bound inside a buttoned suit that was slightly too small, a look that bespoke his intention that everybody should know that he went to the gym a lot. He was flanked by medical staff, half of whom had clearly been rolled out of bed, all of whom were substantially freaked out. He showed a small limp as he moved to the front wall and faced the group, his staff fanning around him like courtiers in white coats and green scrubs.

“Your attention, please,” said the Director, in a wobbly whistle of a voice. The room quieted. Glasses were adjusted, bodies leaned in. A few notebooks came out.

“Just after dawn, according to his personal schedule requests, staff attended the room of one of our guests, a Mister Mansfield, for his wake-up call. As you know, we consider the privacy of your personal rooms sacrosanct, and so they didn’t, as many of you are so fond of claiming, just barge in. A few of you may have been woken by their attempts to waken Mister Mansfield. Eventually, according to protocol, they attempted to gain entry to the room. The door was locked and could not be operated. Again, according to protocol, the lock was defeated. My staff then discovered that Mister Mansfield was missing.”

He paused. Adam watched his jaw work. The Director was grinding his teeth.

“The grounds,” he continued, “have been searched, and the security footage has been reviewed. Mister Mansfield is gone from Normal Head, and there is no record of his transit.”

The Director let that settle upon the room like fallout snow. The silence crackled.

“The room was locked. The windows were sealed, and the seals are still intact. As you know, we don’t have cameras in your rooms. But outside your rooms the camera coverage is enough for us to be relatively certain that nobody intruded into our grounds and nobody left. This, however, leaves us with our central problem. Mr. Mansfield is missing. We presume Mr. Mansfield to be either abducted or deceased at this time. If our security was in fact somehow porous enough to let one person in, it may prove porous enough to let two people out.”

“Why do you presume him abducted?” came a voice from the back, a man from the Staging group who’d arrived swaddled in seven layers of winter clothing. “What if he just broke out?”

“We are operating on a basis of information sequestration at this time. We have reasons for the hypothesis. That’s all I’ll say right now.”

“Why?”

The Director sighed, and looked at the speaker as if he was a child whose mother drank toilet cleaner during her pregnancy. “Because it remains entirely possible that someone in this room was involved with the crime.”

There was a rumble across the room.

“Come on,” said the Director. “You are all completely mad people who mess around with technology and weird social theory for fun until your brains shit themselves and you fall over. Any of you could have done this.”

The medical staff stared at the Director in outright horror.

“What?” the Director snapped. “Am I telling stories out of school? Was it a secret that I preside over a large sweaty pile of people in a useless fake profession who somehow didn’t have the mental fortitude to play pretend in return for paychecks all day? While I, Chief Asswiper to the Thought-Leader Elite, have to pay for three evil children, two shitty houses, and one supposed woman who stopped fucking me five years before she threw me out, literally, onto the street, where I was hit by some fat neckbeard on a Vespa so now in addition to all of the above I have to pay for five stupidly costly medications prescribed just to stop me from shrieking like a stuck pig all fucking day. And your issue is what? That I am revealing to people who piss their pants if they see a TV remote that they are in fact so damaged that they piss their pants if they see a TV remote? Eat shit and die. One or some or even maybe all of our precious inmates lifted another patient out of his room in the dead of night and probably fucking ate the poor bastard. Well, it doesn’t matter. Normal Head is on lockdown and in the morning we are calling out for a specialist investigative team. Staging privileges have been pulled. Go to bed. Tomorrow we begin working out exactly who decided to ruin my life.”

The Director left as soon as his last word bounced off the back windows, at a fast limp.

“He might be the most mental person here,” Clough observed.

There was a lot of outrage and discontent in the room. Adam tuned it out. He replayed the pertinent parts of the Director’s rant in his head.

Obviously, he knew what had been redacted from the statement. That awful roiling pile of insects that some comedian had left on the bed. But, even though they were spreading over the bedroom when Adam got his look at the scene, he’d never seen under that pile.

Adam’s vision blurred, and his hearing began to wow like a distorted vinyl record. That seemed to be the end of his allotted thinking time. Everything started to get foggy around the edges. He jerked his head upright, trying to keep it above water and in full consciousness. Clough stood up and then leaned into Adam, seeing that something was wrong. But all Adam could see was someone looming out of the fog at him, and he started screaming, just like he did in Windhoek.

*   *   *

Adam Dearden found himself back in his room, in his chair.

Clough was sitting on the edge of Adam’s bed. Lela was sitting on the floor opposite Adam.

“You fell down the abyss again,” she said. “Shitty thing to have happen on your first night here, I guess.”

“They let us sit with you,” Clough said. “They’ve got their hands full. Lots of people are losing it.”

“And,” Lela added, “we’re among the healthiest people here. We totally would have been moved to Staging soon. At least, I would.”

“Except that they’re going to pull Staging’s privileges in the morning,” Clough chuckled. “They’ll lose their internet connection, and might even be made to move back into rooms in the main building. That tossed a big fat cat among the pigeons. They can cause trouble, and taking Staging away is one less incentive for people in here to stay on their meds and work through their issues. I would say the people in Staging are going to go nuts, but they already are.”

“That’s not true,” Lela said. “Most of them just aren’t ready to go back outside yet.”

“You’ve met Colegrave. Tell me he’s not insane. Tell me Bulat isn’t insane.”

“Hi,” Adam said.

Lela glared at Clough, as if to say that was all your fault, and then put her attention on Adam. “How are you feeling now?”

“I should probably take some more pills?”

“No, lad,” Clough rumbled, standing up. “Get some more sleep. This can all wait ’til breakfast. Which is probably in five fucking minutes, but still.”

“It was nice of you to get me back here. Thanks.”

“Can you answer a question?” Lela said.

“I can try.” Her undiluted attention made him nervous. It was like having his movements studied by something fast and poisonous.

“Clough doesn’t know you. I dimly recognize your name. But when we picked you up and started walking you out, someone from the other side called you by name.”

Adam rubbed his eyes, faked a small yawn to buy a few extra seconds to search his memory. The other side. She meant strategic forecasters.

“I dunno,” he said, pulling up the most well-worn weapon in his deflective arsenal by pure habit. “I’ve done a lot of conferences. I mean, we all do. I’ve done some cross-pollination things that had corporate attendees. I probably got recognized because of one of them.”

“You gave materials to spooks? You can’t do that. You can’t talk about what you do and think. You can’t publicly publish real stuff. That just gives them new tools to bring to bear on the streets. Every word out of your mouth to those fuckers can help cause pain to thousands of people. They give it all to the intelligence state. They do.”

“Hell, no, I don’t do that,” he said. “You just go and listen. Those things are usually about operational security. The Chief Technical Officer of the CIA shows up with a slideshow, people theorize about Firechat and the blockchain, and you sit and listen and make notes, you know? And if you talk to people in the bar afterward, you just tell them you’re writing a book or something. It’s not a big deal.”

“I don’t do those conferences,” Lela said.

“Well, you’re a specialist,” Adam said. “You shouldn’t be in a place where you talk to authorities about how cities work. I’m more of a roving field researcher. I don’t have a specific expertise I can be trapped into giving up.”

That seemed to Adam to almost satisfy her. Almost.

“I need some sleep,” Adam said.

“Yeah,” Lela said. “Right. I’ve got things to do too.”

Adam pushed himself up and over to his bed. “Yeah. We all do.”

Lela was standing by Clough at the door when she registered what Adam had said. “What do we all have to do?”

Adam laid himself out as if being fitted for his coffin. “We have to find out what happened in that room. Or else we’ll all be trapped here forever and everyone will think that all of us died.”

*   *   *

It was late morning when Adam made his way to the patio. He’d only stopped and cried once on the walk there, and didn’t even feel insulted as he saw the shoes and slippers of people just walking around him as he kneeled with his head on the thin carpet there. He watched an insect, some kind of tubby louse or beetle, crawl ahead of him on the plastic skirting board, its sectioned back fairly rippling with the thrill of beating one of the giant things that haunted his world at a footrace. Even as he shook and curled there, Adam found himself wondering what the journey was like for that fat little object. Humans must be so vast that they were difficult to focus the beady insect eye upon. Towering blurs of things, terrifying and unpredictable natural disasters on the move. Finding yourself inside one of their buildings, like being trapped on a prison planet, the grubby polystyrene sky almost within scaling distance if you were prepared to give up a significant part of your life to such an insane task. If the creature made it outside again, it might be like emerging into orbital space, the next building as far away as the moon. It would take a human nine years to walk from the Earth to the moon. Wind as cosmic rays. Rain as meteor swarms.

He found an empty table, far toward the edge of the patio on the foresight side. Normal staff were very present. Adam watched them move among the tables, touching people on the shoulder, dipping their heads to speak quietly, offering smiles, writing in notebooks with gel pens when complaints were raised, passing out corn-plastic bottles of juices and smoothies and water. The intent was to provide reassurance on several levels, blatantly so. The staff didn’t even care that it was unsubtle. The staff wanted the patients to know that they were available and that they could see all the patients at all times.

Adam was shortly brought two bottles himself, one of some beige solution and one of water, both dewed from a refrigerator. He wasn’t remotely hungry. He opened the bottle of beige stuff anyway, on the assumption that the medication needed something to work with. The experimental sip didn’t go well. It was gritty, and had, at the very least, been processed near some almonds, dates, and generic laboratory vanilla flavor, even if active doses of same had never made it into the finished food-substitute product. He wondered if it was Ensure or Soylent. The label on the bottle claimed it to be fresh-pressed, but there was no indication of the year that that was supposed to have been committed in. He began picking at the corner of the label. He thought about eating part of the label, in case it contained more nutrition than the beige muck. He didn’t, because he thought it might make him look crazy.

Lela appeared in the chair on the other side of the table. “What do you mean, we have to find out?”

“What?”

“The last thing you said before you slipped into a coma. We have to find out. Or we’re all going to be trapped here. What did you mean?”

She hadn’t changed her clothes.

“I don’t know,” Adam said. “Paranoia. Cynicism. They’re going to have to put together some kind of investigative team, which will mean some level of cooperation between all the people who fund this place, and I don’t even know how you begin to investigate something like that anyway. On top of that, whoever did the thing may already have what they wanted.”

“You mean removing that Mansfield guy?”

“I mean Staging privileges have been pulled. And according to you, those Staging huts are the only places where people other than the staff have access to internet.”

She sat back. “Wow,” she said. “You are paranoid.”

“No. Well, maybe. But I work differently than you. I’ve seen your presentations.” He took another small sip of the beige stuff. His stomach spasmed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Forget I said anything.”

“No.” She had those raptor eyes again, and she tapped claws on the faded plastic tabletop. “Say what you mean.”

Adam twisted the cap onto the beige muck and decided to open his water. “You have a bad case of dataism. You assume that data constitute a miniature of reality. Data as the only way to measure any given state or event.”

“Oh my God,” Lela said. “You really are crazy. Thank Christ they brought you here.”

“No more crazy than what you did in Brussels in 2012. All that work you did on waste transportation. You captured an entire city’s sanitation process from goods purchase to landfill. You gathered all the data, and then what did you do with it?”

“I gave it to the city, of course.”

“And what happened after?”

“No idea. My job was to gather the data. It’s not like I was hanging out with spooks.”

“Except that it wasn’t really a job. It was a university grant. But you turned over all the data and your conclusions to the city authorities anyway. Because all you cared about was making your miniature of reality. Something someone could hold in their hand. You were blind to the before and the after. Big old case of dataism. Fuck me, this water is disgusting.”

“It’s high alkaline. It reduces inflammation.”

“I think I’d rather be inflamed.”

“Clearly. What is it that you actually do, Adam Dearden?”

“Field research. Other things.”

“What other things?”

“What’s missing from your miniature of reality in this instance, Lela?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Did Clough tell you what we saw in Mansfield’s room?”

The idea of an absent datum made Lela’s brow knit. “No.”

Adam leaned in, lowered his voice. “Some funny bastard thought it would be a good joke to empty a bag of insects over Mansfield’s bed.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“What I said. Don’t ask me how. Someone, or ones, spent God knows how long stuffing ants and spiders and cockroaches and other fucking creepy-crawlies into a bag just so they could upend it over Mansfield’s bed before they left. We saw the lock to Mansfield’s door get punched out, and we saw them open a room, and we saw insects all over the bed and walking all over the room. I saw it. Clough saw it. Okay?”

Lela let the idea dance around her like a boxer, weaving in her seat. She took Adam’s water from his fingers and stole a gulp.

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I’m paranoid, remember?” Adam smiled.

“Indulge me, crazy person. Since I’m an inflexible Puritan who only listens to the data. Tell me the news from Crazytown.”

Adam took his water back. The bottle’s rim had that odd warmth of another person’s mouth that made him think of telephone hygiene supplies. He considered how to frame his response without exposing too much of himself. He reminded himself that everyone here was a little broken, and that made them all dangerous on some level. Also, that his own relative calm was a chemical production that could close its curtains at any point.

“Psyops,” he said.

“Bullshit,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, leaning back with his water bottle, out of her reach.

In some form of abstract retaliation, she took the bottle of beige shit. “I’m having your smoothie,” Lela said.

“You’re welcome to it.”

They stared at each other. It became a staring match. Sociopolitical virtual arm-wrestling.

“Psyops.” Lela smirked. “Really.”

“Do you know anything about it?” Adam said.

“Do you? Or do you just listen to the tinfoil-hat brigade spout about it on internet radio? You sound like one of them,” she said, nodding at the other half of the patio crowd. “Which brings me back to why one of them knew you by name. Crossing the aisle is seriously not appreciated here, you know.”

“There you go,” Adam said. “Binary thinking. It’s either inside your field of measurement or it’s not.”

“You are really starting to piss me off,” Lela observed. She took a drink of the smoothie, which, it turned out, she actually liked. “I’m so glad they have Buoylent here.”

“Buoylent?”

“You know what Soylent is, right? The powder mix that gives you all your nutritional requirements? Half of the Bay Area’s been drinking it for years. They make their own custom versions of it here. Buoylent is like a medical version for mood management. Tastes better than Soylent, too. Much less like drinking a hobo’s sperm.”

Adam drank off half the remaining volume of water in the bottle in one gulp, gasped, and said, “They hand out lithium smoothies at Normal?”

“Please,” Lela said with a curl of her lip. “This is the twenty-first century. They’re not going to poison us with lead any more than they’re going to stick leeches to us. Although, it has to be said, leeches are used these days as artificial veins during surgical reattachment procedures. It’s all about the continuing capture and processing of data, you see.”

Adam gave her a slow clap as she smiled. “Oh, well played, madam.”

“I’m going to Staging soon,” Lela said, smoothing the planes of her jacket down. “I’m an urbanist. I understand processes.”

“You’re not in a city,” Adam said. “You don’t know where you are.”

“Oh, go on, then, new crazy person. Indulge me. Where am I?”

“You’re in an asylum that’s been turned into a combat theater.”

“Really. What kind of combat?”

“Psychological operations.”

“Bullshit. Someone disappeared, is all. Everyone’s freaked out, but—”

“No, this is how modern psyops works. Like this. Cutting a man’s head off on camera and uploading it to YouTube. That’s not just a killing. The killing is, in some ways, the smallest part of it. It’s the theater of cruelty. It’s an emotional contagion. The victim’s family and friends know about it. They can’t help but know. They know that people are watching it online. They know that even when the video gets pulled, stills from the whole thing will circulate. There will be TV and newspaper stories. They know, walking down the street, that anyone they pass could have watched that person die. The terror of interpersonal engagement and communication. All communication becomes dangerous. The impact spreads, becomes sociocultural. Friction in the area they live in. Police and social services get involved. And the windows rattle in the halls of power. Retaliation is considered, and perhaps even enacted, but they’re striking against asymmetrically posed forces that are highly mobile and indistinguishable from the air. Air travel is the vector of infection. It gets harder to use planes. Free movement becomes difficult if not impossible for certain people and regions. Innocent people get killed. Innocent people lose freedoms. The contagion spreads and spreads and nobody can disinfect it. And just when you think the fever is breaking and the infection is dying down—there’s another beheading. Another weaponized psychological outbreak. On and on. And the material cost to the attacker is a knife, a phone, and a minute’s worth of internet connection. Or an abduction and a bag of wildlife. Abduction, the disappearing of people, works in the same way. You see where I’m going with this? A missing guy, a locked-room mystery out of Agatha fucking Christie, and a pile of insects. And you didn’t know about the pile of insects. That information was withheld. But you know it’s working on their heads, the Director and his staff and whoever they’re all dealing with right now. And the first impact result is that we’re now an electronic island. Who benefits from that? Who’s happier knowing that the staff are paralyzed by fear, uncertainty, and doubt and that the presumably far-saner-than-us people who work in Staging now can’t speak to the outside world in any way? You want to go at this from the perspective of dataism? The fact that Mansfield’s body was apparently magically swapped with a stack of wood lice is a datum that was so fucking weird that the staff had to withhold it from the patients, and so until five minutes ago you had an incomplete model of the event and could not begin to process it correctly. Your little fucking miniature train set of the world had some missing tracks and plastic trees. Which it always does, because the world is not a train set, and dataism is bullshit, and you are as much of a threat to the world as anyone over there on the strategic foresight side because you don’t actually know what you’re fucking doing. You might think they’re evil, but they think you’re dangerous.”

Lela grabbed his hand. He stopped talking. He discovered that he was shaking, and that he couldn’t stop it.

Adam forced a trembling laugh. “I thought you didn’t do touching of other people yet.”

Lela looked at their hands. Her mouth tightened. She was making herself squeeze his hand, forcing herself over some kind of personal wall. “You looked like you were about to fly apart at the seams. I recognized the way you were talking because I still do it myself sometimes.”

“Why are you here?” Adam asked, quietly.

She faked a rueful smile, and pulled her hands away. “Bad case of abyss gaze.”

It would have been cruel of Adam to push. But he found that he wanted to be cruel. Just for a minute. Just for a tiny bit. Just enough to see a wound open and see a little blood. He wanted to hurt Lela, to graze her. To see if he could, and to toss a coin’s worth of payback into the conversation for the times her tone and attitude had made him feel bad. Adam knew it was childish, but he rationalized it in this way: carelessly harming other people was a decent stand-in for baseline human interaction.

“I’m guessing that that’s what we all say,” Adam said. “What really did it? What broke you and put you here, Lela?”

“I’m not broken,” Lela said.

“But you’re here. You were staring into something that got you locked up here. What was it? Did the data fail you?”

“No.” Lela’s hands whitened around the bottle of Buoylent. “The data never fails me.”

“And that was the problem,” Adam said, working the tip of a knife into that tiny, nearly-but-not-quite-healed nick on her heart.

“That’s the problem. You spend all day thinking of cities as machines for living in. And as the data piles up, and you realize the scale of the problems that cities are intended to solve, you start thinking of the city as a suit of armor to survive in. I mean, in theory and practice, that’s exactly what it is. That’s why cities used to have earthworks and walls around them. A city’s supposed to have everything in it that its citizenry needs to live. If I’m sick, and I live in a city, it’s almost certain that the care I need is closer to me than if I lived in a house in the country, because all the hospitals are in big towns and cities. People in what we think of as a basic Western city simply live longer. Basic, not, you know, collapsing or feral. Basic. Which means they fill up with old people. Huddled up against the health services they need and can afford, and all the other civic machinery that keeps their spaces livable.”

Her voice was speeding up, and taking that flat, affectless tone he heard yesterday. Adam put his hand on the table, where hers had been, open. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to go on.”

“I do, though. I do need to go on. Because you need to hear it. Everybody does. I have to track shit, to do my job. Literally. I literally had to track the passage of shit through pipes in five major cities for six months, at one point. The way we move shit around in cities is fucking vital. It affects the condition of the urban environment, the volume of humans that can be supported therein, the quality of the water and the state of the ecology outside the city. At least. And then, yes, I had to hand over my data to the city authorities, because that’s what I was hired to do. I don’t get to make the decisions. All I can do is overwhelm them with data and reports until they have no choice but to do the right thing. But they don’t, because nobody can hold the right thing in their heads. It’s too big. It’s too big and it’s too deep.”

“Lela, don’t,” Adam muttered, looking at the table.

“You know what I’m talking about. They”—she cast her hand across the gathered mass of people on the patio—“all know what I’m talking about. I got sent to New York. Fucking New York. They pump more than thirteen million gallons of water out of New York every day just to keep the fucking subway running. So that people can perform ten thousand felonies a year on it. And that’s the small number. New York needs to pump another two hundred million gallons of water out of four thousand five hundred acres of city every single day to stop the city from drowning in its own piss and bathwater and the sea creeping up to grab at the ankles of the two million people south of Seventy-First Street. That is one system. Only one. And just in Manhattan. The five boroughs have to process more than a billion gallons a day. Remember Hurricane Sandy? Sandy took out half the pumps and almost all the treatment plants in a fucking second. And it was just barely a Category One hurricane when it hit. A thirteen-foot surge over the wall by Battery Park. That released ten billion gallons of raw sewage into the city and the surrounding waters. Shit. Big storm comes and we can’t protect ourselves from our own shit. That’s the future, Adam fucking whateveryournameis. City-states rammed with aging people huddling up against hospitals and looking up in terror for the big storm that will come and go and leave them floating facedown in thirteen feet of shit. And I can’t do anything about it.”

Adam was hunting Dickson with his eyes, which, if nothing else, kept him from accidentally making eye contact with Lela.

“None of us can. We just look at this stuff, we look wider and deeper, and then just deeper and fucking deeper, and all we can see is everything getting smaller and darker until it’s this infinite black dot of compressed shit and horror. And we get paid for that. That’s the amazing thing. We get paid to stare down the black silo of the future and gaze at the pebble at the bottom that’s nothing but the crushed remains of the species. That’s where we all end up. That’s all we do. And there’s a dollar value on that. We get given money for it. It’s like we’re the sin-eaters for the entire fucking culture, looking at the end of human civilization because it’s supposed that somebody should. I’m fine, by the way. Stop looking for a nurse. I’m going to Staging soon. I’m going back to work. Society needs people to stare at a ball of shit at the end of the world all day. It’s a living.”

Dickson hove into view, a great galleon of a man sailing with peculiar grace through the archipelago of plastic islands between them. He arrived alongside their table with a puff of air. His eyes were rheumy and jittering.

“Mr. Dearden? I have to take you to your session with the doctor now. Are you ready?”

“I suppose,” Adam said. “I guess I didn’t know I was going to have one today?”

“Everybody’s getting five minutes with a doctor at some point today. Come on up, sir. I’ll walk you over.”

Adam, standing up, went to say something to Lela, but she was looking away, robotically picking at the label on the bottle. Adam looked to Dickson helplessly, not knowing how to frame the question he thought he wanted to ask. Something about keeping an eye on her, giving her some help … something. He didn’t know. He wanted to do something. Dickson nodded his head toward the doors, and Adam went with him instead.

“Must be a busy day for you,” Adam offered.

“Yeah. None of us really got much sleep.”

“You do look a bit tired.”

“I am. Well, I was. Thank God they let us into the Adderall stocks. I could jog from here to Canada right now.”

*   *   *

Dr. Murgu looked no better than Dickson, but she found a big smile for Adam. The clipboard in her lap had a few sheets of paper and a small pad clamped to it today. “Sit down, Adam. This is only going to take a minute, I swear. We’re just checking in with everybody after the events during the night. Making sure it didn’t do any damage, set anything off, that sort of thing. And I’m told you were actually there when Mr. Mansfield’s door was forced open?”

A tiny spider was loitering with intent in the corner of the window. A spider with a Napoleon complex, not deigning to spin a web but hanging around on the insect street waiting to prove that he could beat the shit out of a fly with his bare palps.

“Yes.”

“That must have been pretty awful.”

“It was weird. I know the Director is sequestering information, and I don’t know what else you’ve been told, so I don’t know if I should really be talking about it.”

Dr. Murgu studied her clipboard, with another smile, one that Adam couldn’t clearly decipher. “That,” she said, “was very operational-sounding. I think I’ve heard detectives on television shows say things like that. Makes it all a bit more dramatic and spooky, I suppose.”

“I suppose. Maybe I heard it off the television.”

“Maybe you did. So it didn’t bother you unduly? Aside from, well, the strangeness of the thing itself? You don’t necessarily feel better or worse today?”

It took her saying it for Adam to discover that he might actually have felt better today. “No, neither one nor the other,” he said. “Aside from the strangeness of it all.”

She made a note on her clipboard paper. Her smile went away. “I see. I’d like to ask you some more questions, but I have an awful lot of people to talk to today. We’re going to adjust your meds a tiny bit, as your responses aren’t quite where I’d like them yet. So, just relax today, and tomorrow we’ll talk about the last week or two of your life in more detail. There are some gaps I’d like to fill. Okay?”

It wasn’t okay. “Okay,” he said. She scribbled something on the pad, tore the top leaf off, and handed it to him.

“Off you go, then. Take this. If you just step outside, Dickson will collect you, and if you give him that, he’ll trot you off to the dispensary. Get some air, keep drinking the juices, and try a meal tonight. See you tomorrow.”

Adam took it and stepped outside as directed. He felt like something had gone very, very badly wrong in the last couple of minutes.

Dickson trotted up, saw the script sheet, and took him to the dispensary window, where he watched Adam be served and take a plastic cup of capsules and tablets and a paper cone of water to wash them down with.

Another patient meandered over to them while Adam took his meds, with a sly gait. He was a well-lunched man in his thirties, plump and shiny like a British pork sausage, in port-colored corduroy trousers and the most appalling knitted sweater and pointed Nordic-style knitted hat Adam had seen since his last trip to Helsinki.

“Hello,” he lied. Or, at least, that’s how it sounded to Adam. “My name is Benedict Asher. You’re Adam Dearden, yes?”

“Yes,” Adam said, looking to Dickson, who was at this point chatting with the dispensary assistant about how they should be given Adderall every day because it was great apart from the tremors and the twitches and the teeth-grinding and the burning piss.

“Colegrave would like to speak to you. Over in Staging.”

Adam discovered he was actually curious about Staging.

“Dickson,” Adam said, “this guy wants to show me something over at Staging. Is that okay?”

“Hello, Ben,” Dickson said, noticing the man in the stupid hat. “That’s fine, but you’ll need to bring Adam back, too. He doesn’t know the layout of the place yet. I’m relying on you to do that, okay? We’re a bit overstretched today, and it’ll be difficult to send someone over there to collect Adam. Do we have a deal?”

“Sure,” Asher lied.

“All right, then,” Dickson said, clapping Adam on the shoulder, “have fun and be careful.” And, with that, he jogged off to the next job, leaving Adam with Asher. Asher had a twisty smile that Adam believed he could quite quickly learn to hate.

They walked through the main building together in silence, leaving by an exit Adam hadn’t seen before. He was tracing the route in his head. He was pretty good with direction and space, generally. It helped when he was working on the street, particularly when things got bad. He was coping pretty well in Windhoek when …

Adam shook it out of his head and concentrated on walking and tracking.

The exit produced them into the open air, a few hundred feet from the edge of the woodland that seemed to wrap around Normal. On the treeline were clusters and stands of the micro-homes he’d seen on the way in, little bonsai houses with sloped roofs and plastic sidings, sitting on thick raised wooden decks.

As they angled toward one farther away and just inside the woods, Adam got glimpses through the buildings’ tall windows. Tiny offices, enough for two or three people, cleverly compact kitchens, suspended stairs leading to upper sleeping areas. He spotted rainwater collection systems and tiny gray-water treatment plants. They were very self-contained.

There was still dew on the grass, which had been mowed a month or two back. He saw a few random dotted skeins of stepping stones, spotted mossy concrete discs set into the dirt, but the trampled lines of grass seemed to be the more popular footpaths.

They reached their target micro-home. It seemed like it might have been there longer than the others. Its sides were turning green, with thistles and blackberry vines tangling in evil possessiveness around the decking.

Asher stepped up and tapped on the glass door. Over his shoulder, Adam could discern the black shape of a figure draped in an office chair whose back was so tall that it might as well be a throne.

“Come,” a voice intoned from within.

Asher popped the door and ushered Adam inside.

A man with the thinnest face Adam had ever seen said, “I am Colegrave.”

Fingers as slim and curved as Turkish knives gestured at an empty smaller and lower chair across from the leather throne, which Adam took. The man wore an old black suit, quite well looked after, a crisp white shirt, and a flat black bow tie with the upper points tucked under the collars. And no shoes. After sitting, Adam put his heels to the floor and pushed his chair another six or seven inches away from Colegrave, until he bumped up against a wall. The man had a bitter fragrance that seemed to drape around him like a thick blanket, and Adam wanted extra distance from the contamination zone.

Colegrave pursed his lips. Perhaps he was offended. “Beginnings,” he said. “Beginnings are very important. First impressions, foundations, and basic tenets. I am the longest-serving patient in Staging. I have been here for fifteen years. Do not display human facial expressions intended to denote sympathy. Fifteen years is nothing to me. I have lived for over a millennium, and, in all honesty, the food has never been better. I am the senior figure over here in Staging. This is a different world. This is important. You have crossed into an alternative continuum where the artificial separation between foresight strategy and strategic forecast does not exist. We are neither one nor the other. Here, we are simply Staging. Are you following me so far, Adam Dearden?”

Adam briefly wrestled with the pros and cons of asking for clarity on the thousand-year-old-man bit. Measuring his own energy for it, he decided to let it ride. Some things weren’t worth wasting the braincycles on.

“I’m with you so far, Mr. Colegrave.”

“Just Colegrave, please,” he said, raising his talons. “Basic honorifics will cease to be in the future that awaits us, and I have discarded them in preparation for that awful and glorious time to come.”

“I see.”

“Indeed. The crisis in time will be resolved. The project of democracy shall be undone, even unto the Magna Carta. It’s no accident that the Petition of Right and the final usurpation of power by the English Parliament were contiguous with the assumption of ‘gentleman’ as a thing people could be and the word ‘master’ being taken away from men of expertise and given to anybody. ‘Master’ became ‘mister’ and now we are all tainted by the negation of correct civilization.”

“Fifteen years in Staging, you say?”

Colegrave folded his hands over his dead knot of a knee. “They will never release me. The work I do in Staging is very valuable. And they know that if I were to escape into the outside world I would end it. It doesn’t matter. It will end anyway. The pressure of time is inexorable. You’ve been here a day, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So you are both insane and unlucky. Or insane and a hapless instigator.”

Adam bristled without quite knowing why. “Instigator? Really?”

“You were the only new patient to arrive yesterday. Mansfield was taken last night. I’d be a damned fool to not consider the possibility that you had some involvement. He arrived two days before you, and, from what we can glean, had a meteoric career path in defense intelligence forecasting over the last two years. It certainly wasn’t a rescue, since it was his own employers who sent him here, and would constitute a rather baroque suicide that spoke to an imagination he likely didn’t possess.”

Adam flexed his fingers. “Are you leading the investigation?”

Colegrave had a sudden harsh laugh like a fighting-dog’s bark. Adam jumped from it.

“They would never even think to have me lead the investigation. The Director’s an idiot. He was an idiot even before he was damaged. Any sane civilization would have terminated him humanely and processed his body for mineral reclamation a couple of years ago. Humanely, mind. I’m not a monster. They say I’m a monster, but I’m not. I’d use one of those bolt capture guns they use on cows. Very efficient. Instant death. The bolt immediately destroys the brain, you see, which is precisely the instruction given to police snipers in terror situations. Destroy the brain. It’s quite the fascinating thing to think about, here in a compound in a forest where people with destroyed brains live. I imagine most of us will be put to death, when the world returns to its correct course.”

Colegrave’s voice had drifted off, become wistful, and he was stroking his own left temple with one fingertip, making it tender for the euthanizing metal bolt of the future.

Adam rocked on the back legs of the chair. It gave him a small nostalgic pleasure to do it. Memories of daydreamily pretending to be a stunt rider popping a wheelie while sitting in class during endless dull afternoons that seemed to be a bureaucratic conspiracy to steal the young years from him. “Colegrave,” he said, “I had nothing to do with it. I just saw the aftermath. So did Clough. I don’t see Clough in here.”

“Clough is an economist, and therefore permanently mentally compromised long before he set foot in Normal Head. Also, obviously, the man is both an imbecile and demented, as well as a jackal at the feet of … anyway.” Colegrave had come back somewhat from his execution fantasies and realized that he was losing Adam. “The Director has summoned an investigative team, but that will take time to assemble and transport. Time that we cannot allow to drip away. We, ourselves, must investigate this event.”

“I agree,” Adam said.

“Of course you do,” Colegrave smiled. “You are a man of both sides of the aisle, as it were. I looked you up when you arrived yesterday. When I still had internet. You’re missing from a few of the usual lists and databases. I had to make some special queries. The Stoop Model is only the tip of your particular iceberg. There are a lot of people in Normal who were put here by paranoia and fear over the modern surveillance state, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want questions about how deep your connection with it runs to be asked in the open air. Whatever happened to you in Windhoek must have been quite singular, given your work history.”

Adam was very still.

“That said,” Colegrave continued, “sometimes it is simply a case of one thin straw breaking an overstressed camel’s back, isn’t it? My point is simply this. There are three strains of human in Normal Head. Strategic forecast, foresight strategy, and Staging. It is therefore, apparently, a happy accident that we have one person able to speak to all three phyla of Normal Head patient. You.”

Adam was listening, but only with one part of his brain. Another was constructing a list of lies and pleas to deploy on Colegrave to buy his silence. And another was looking for weapons. His blocks of training and discipline, variously incomplete and specialized, were a gang of bastards ranged around the back of his skull and shouting orders over each other.

“I don’t know anyone here,” Adam said. “Only Clough and Lela Charron. And I don’t really know even them, it’s just that they’re the only people who’ve talked to me.”

“Have you had a proper look around yet? Taken a pass at recognizing or engaging anyone?”

“No. I got here yesterday, they doped me and put me to bed, I was woken by the staff banging on Mansfield’s door, everything’s happened at fucking once.”

“Then you need to go for a walk. See who you can see. Gather allies. Fellow detectives. You have all the resources, Dearden. You shall be our agent in Normal. Do you accept?”

All the voices in Adam’s head went silent. The walls warped a little, and his perception of perspective got a little dented. The strain of the interview may have been burning his meds faster, he supposed. But he’d said it. He’d had that instinct that something was wrong beyond the details of the abduction himself, and that something needed to be done. He couldn’t lie to himself again. Lying to himself had probably taken him halfway to needing to be sent to Normal.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

Colegrave clapped his hands together. They made a noise like dry timbers. “Bravo. Now. Tell me everything you remember about the aftermath of the abduction that you saw. Every detail. Asher! Bring us two bottles of chilled Buoylent. The Carrot and Apple Surprise flavor, if you can.” Colegrave raised one eyebrow at Adam. “The Surprise is that it’s never seen a carrot or an apple in its brief laboratory life. I happen to like the flavor because it is precisely the kind of cheap chemical slurry that will sustain the existence of the peasant class in the world to come. It’s strange, Dearden. We live in such a debased time, and yet we can quite literally taste the future. You have to admit that that’s kind of wonderful.”

Colegrave was beaming. His teeth were tiny and square with precisely even spacing between them and all the hues of rust and moss that an abandoned shack in the woods could attain, a grotesque display of nature’s comedy dentistry assembled at micrometer tolerances.

They became almost companionable over their bottles of fluorescent orange Buoylent mix—of a shade, Colegrave noted approvingly, that did not occur in nature—and the recitation of the night’s events. Colegrave asked intelligent questions, and Adam became aware that he was in fact in the presence of an intellect, no matter how corroded on its surface. Colegrave seemed to enjoy having a novel problem to solve, and worked without a notebook or other aide-mémoire. Adam would sometimes see Colegrave’s eyeballs jitter around in his head as if he were in REM sleep with his lids up, and decided that the older man was meticulously arranging the components of Adam’s report upon the shelves and in the trunks of a vast and doubtlessly richly Gothic memory palace.

When they were done—and focusing on details had allowed Adam to mentally even out a little, into something like comfort—Adam felt emboldened enough to ask Colegrave about the future he kept alluding to, hoping to learn something about the man’s work.

Colegrave wriggled in his chair with pleasure. “Ah. The great epiphany, Dearden. Let me start here. Would you agree that all the major societies of this Earth are broken? Those things that we call civilizations? Are they all busted and terrible systems?”

“It’s hard to argue with,” Adam said.

“Yes, it is. And so many people in our field start looking for forward escape. Pushing through the current terrors and into a place where things start working again. This is why a lot of us devolved to singularitarianism, the notion of a technological critical mass that would produce artificial superintelligences that would, in a nutshell, fix everything. That notion in itself leads to what’s called a singleton condition: the entirety of the world under a single command structure that is utterly impervious to any form of threat. A singleton could also be attained by a totalitarian human global government with flawless fine-grained surveillance methods and perfected psychological combat affordance.

“But!” Colegrave beamed, raising just one blade of a finger. “Given that artificial intelligence and world governments are unlikely in the extreme, this would seem to be a dead end, wouldn’t it? So we do nothing. We are futurists. We look forward. Here is the revelation, Dearden. We had almost exactly such a thing, a long time ago. Back in the days when our worlds were smaller and crossing them was a lifetime’s work. We had single units of governance that guided and controlled our lives with absolute power. Until we went mad, and the madness crawled through the structures of the world and brought us to our current lunatic impasse. The future, Dearden, is in fact a return to feudal monarchy. Proper hierarchical governance. An archaic revival, on the unassailable basis that democracy turns everything to shit and our accretion of freedoms has been entirely worthless if not completely toxic to our happiness and well-being. We need a Restoration.”

“A restoration of what? There are still monarchies.”

“Pale ghosts of what they were. Look. Monarchies and aristocracies worked for a very, very long time. The weight of the evidence of history is with them, not with the project of democracy or even communism, which commits the same sin of being by definition a government of the ‘people.’ The last five hundred years constitute a horror story wherein the villains of the piece stole power from a stable governance system in order to cast the population of the world into an ongoing lab experiment with no plan or boundary. A dismal science. Can you even imagine the way we live now being tolerated in city-states and kingdoms of the past? God, no. The near future is the resurgence of deep history. It is very beautiful.”

Colegrave grinned. His gums were bleeding.

“I don’t really want outsiders asking me awkward questions, either.”

Also by Warren Ellis

Gun Machine

Global Frequency

Red

A Note About the Author

Warren Ellis is the author of FSG’s first digital original, Dead Pig Collector; the New York Times bestselling novel Gun Machine; and the underground classic Crooked Little Vein. He is also the award-winning creator of a number of iconic, bestselling original graphic novels, including Red, Ministry of Space, Planetary, and Transmetropolitan, and has been behind some of the most successful reimaginings of mainstream comic superheroes, including Iron Man. He has written extensively for Vice, Wired, and Reuters on technological and cultural matters, and is working on a nonfiction book about the future of cities for FSG Originals. He lives on the southeast coast of England. You can sign up for email updates here.

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Part 2

Also by Warren Ellis

A Note About the Author

Copyright

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Copyright © 2016 by Warren Ellis

All rights reserved

First edition, 2016

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eISBN 9781466896017

First eBook edition: July 2016