Clay sped the aircar back towards the metroplex. If the Tokusha were tracking him, he’d just accidentally given away Ursza’s location, to say nothing of a Noto Lib safehouse, whoever Noto Lib was. Judging by the armament, they were half-expecting visitors already. There was still work to do, the girl had said. Hopefully, she’d left herself enough time to finish it before the pain returned.
Halferne, and/or Mother Eye, may have taken the heat off of him for Hoefer’s murder, but he was now certainly all over the newsnets for a starport shootout with Cerberus and local authorities, and for absconding with a government prisoner. It wouldn’t take long for them to identify the aircar he was in, formerly Ness’, as the one illegally parked escape vehicle.
These were minor complications. For now, his main mission was to get Keraunos back from Cerberus. He reached under the passenger seat and, after a panicked moment, found what he was looking for and stashed it in his jacket pocket. Experience has proven to be a liability more often than it has helped in this world. Now, he had one slim chance, and it relied on sheer willpower and a handful of lucky guesses, two things he hated having to fall back on.
He pulled up Norinaga University on the autonav and set a course, his first long shot. Klein mentioned that the black markets there were ground zero for Jade Shield’s operations. That would be a good start. It would get him off the grid, and hopefully, nobody there would be actively looking to kill him. At the very least, he suspected they wouldn’t blindly listen to Mother Eye if she gave them a halfway plausible reason to turn him in.
He parked Ness’s aircar on a platform overlooking a run-down residential zone bordering the University grounds. Children were playing in a public park area of some sort, and adults congregated on walkways and in doorways. This was a good sign. While the area looked somewhat desperate, the presence of children told him it was at least dangerous during daylight hours.
He descended the interlaced ramps down to ground level and walked to the University’s main gates. They stood open and inviting, though nobody seemed to pay much attention. The greenspace beyond was well kept, with a few large trees and tables. Students gathered in small groups, most sat along reading or studying. No one paid any attention to the middle-aged off-worlder wandering in their midst. His heart sank when he spotted three pair of Tokusha soldiers patrolling the grounds.
He crossed the courtyard and entered one of the common buildings. Food stalls and other businesses selling necessities lined the perimeter of the foyer. Another pair of Tokusha guards calmly walked through the room. The crowd was a bit denser, allowing Clay to blend in better, though the soldiers seemed much more alert than the ones in the courtyard.
A round kiosk in the middle of the room showed the latest news headlines. A ticker underneath indicated corrections were currently sold out. It had to be a joke, he thought, considering an implication of a finite supply of subjective truth. He made his way closer to hear the commentary that accompanied the headlines. Even knowing it was wildly inaccurate, it may provide some kind of insight, even if he couldn’t trust Mother Eye’s intent. She’d been secretly helpful with her Eyes of Baal reference that led him to Ursza in Harba City, but on the other hand it was equally likely she had used him to lead the Tokusha straight to her location when they invaded.
The first story caught his attention: “Chancellor Prevo Announces Expansion of Government Educational Initiatives.” The story was typical propaganda, considering his location. The accompanying video, however, showed Prevo speaking to someone at a conference reception —tall and well-dressed —with their face overlaid with a hand-drawn image of a basic face with a crooked smile—the sort of picture that a toddler might draw. When the video showed a different moment at the reception, where he spoke to a different individual, the same face was overlaid again. Each time a thought bubble above the image had a variant of the message “It’s not me…,” “Also not me…,” or “I don’t really exist, you know…” It was almost comical.
“Excuse me…” Clay said to the kiosk operator, holding up his datapad with a puzzled look.
The man behind the counter just smiled and chuckled. “Student protest going on. A few of the inventive ones have hacked the local node for the newsnet feeds. They’re not altering the truth, so it’s not a government offense. Just a little harmless graffiti.”
“I guess I’m not up on their humor. What’s the significance of the smiling face?”
“Unofficially? That’s Tariq Saleh’s mark. I assume they’re saying that, since nobody knows who he really is, or if he’s even real, he could be anyone, or he could be no one.” The kiosk operator grimaced slightly. “Again, since it can’t be disproven, it’s not altering the truth.”
“Therefore, it’s not a government offense, just graffiti. Clever.” Clay dropped his head as the pair of Tokusha walked right past him. He was certain they should have seen him by now. It had been the same in Harba City — no recognition, no acknowledgment, no questions – as if they had been ordered to ignore him.
“I guess the government just considers it a minor nuisance and not worth the effort to shut down,” the man continued, “but she’s been looping the same six stories for the past day. Those blue goons have been here for a while trying to figure out where they’re jamming her from, but the kids are always one step ahead of them.”
At least that provided a meager explanation of why the Tokusha were there and why they paid him no mind. Clay continued watching the newsfeed. The next story was the one he had been expecting. “Tokusha Soldiers Foil Terrorist Attempt to Bomb Starport.” It included some surveillance footage. Clay had tried to keep his face pointed away from the cameras, at least as much as was possible in the middle of a firefight. To his amazement, the smiley face covered his own head, making him completely anonymous aside from his clothing, which was at least non-distinctive.
The third article showed a video of Tokusha troops circling the smoldering body of a dead man, obviously shot at least a dozen times. Their weapons were drawn and aimed as if he might suddenly stand up again. The headline said, “Tokusha Soldiers Kill Tariq Saleh in Surprise Ambush.” As the camera POV pulled back, once again, the cartoon smiling face grinned back at them. A thought bubble above it read, “Everyone Dies. Ask again…”
The fourth article showed the face overlaid on a man sitting at the head of a table in a dark conference room, addressing a dozen individuals, all with the smiling face superimposed over theirs as well. “Tariq Saleh Assumes Control of Jade Shield.” This time, a thought bubble over the smiling face read, “Miraculous Recovery, but Why? How?”
The remaining two stories were coverage of a local sports team, which played what appeared to be a variant of either field hockey or hurling, and a quality-of-life report advertising that 95% of citizens in Nakano City reported high levels of personal satisfaction and happiness. These stories did not warrant comment and were spared the treatment the first four got.
“They say those last two are correctional stories,” a young man said, suddenly appearing next to Clay. “One is obviously fabricated; the other, an accurate, objective account of a sports game. They’re not precisely the same each time you view them. It’s as if she doesn’t understand why those two aren’t tampered with, so she makes very subtle alterations to the wording each time to get the pirates’ attention. Supposedly, it’s her way of recalibrating.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about all this.”
The young man smiled mischievously. “I study the people, not the technology or the philosophy. I can explain what she says, but they can predict it, even produce it sometimes.”
“It’s a bold prank, and the irony is delicious, but isn’t your ambiguous ‘they’ afraid the government is going to lose patience and come after them?”
“You’re not what I expected at all.”
“Let me guess: taller?”
“Older.”
“Maybe you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
“Maybe I’ve read the signs wrong, and you’re not who I think you are, but you’re the nexus point.”
“The what?”
The two Tokusha were staring at them now, mumbling to each other, and quite obviously running scans and ID lookups. The student grabbed Clay’s arm and led him to an art display in the corner of the room, turning their backs on their observers. “The one she’s protecting. The one at the middle of all of this.”
“Why are you so sure she’s protecting me? She’s nearly gotten me killed more than once.”
“Even without seeing your face, that’s definitely you,” the student nodded toward the display showing Clay in the shootout at the starport that morning. “She approves. Or at least she thinks you’re more beneficial than the student protest, otherwise there’d be hundreds of Tokusha here right now.”
“Beneficial?”
The student nodded, thought for a minute, then backtracked. “You have to understand. Mother Eye needs everyone happy and society kept stable. She lets them have these little non-violent protests hacking her displays because the alternative is that the educated youth begin to see her as a danger and a threat.” He paused to make sure Clay understood him so far. “She’s not sure what you are to her, so she’s studying you, keeping you alive until she does.If you were a threat, this place would be swarming with Tokusha, and you’d be beaten to a pulp as an example by now.” He shook his head to clear it. “I’m sorry, why am I explaining all this to you. You know all that. Hell, you taught them that. Is that why you’re here? To make sure you’re still not seen as a threat to her?”
“I’m not him, kid. I’m not involved with this at all.”
The student squinted, then smiled, tilting his head toward the video display of Clay at the Starport. “There’s a tipping point coming, very soon now. You’re part of it, whether you admit it or not.”
The two Tokusha suddenly began walking toward them.
Clay nodded. “Great. Looks like Prevo’s made up his mind.”
The student chuckled. “Why do you assume Prevo gets to make the call?”
“Now, you’re going to tell me Mother Eye isn’t the regime’s tool?”
“It changes everything if you don’t assume that,” the student arched one eyebrow in challenge. “Besides, there are only two of them. They’re coming for me; not you.”
“For you?!”
The young man nodded. “It’s my turn. Don’t worry, I have the script with everything you want me to feed them. I’ll stick to it. They let me go after a couple of hours. I’ve done this twice before.” He tilted his head toward two men in the corner of the room. “Follow the guys in the red jackets. They’ll show you what you came to see,” he said and walked steadily towards the two Tokusha soldiers.
Clay slowly drifted away from the news kiosk and over behind a crowd of students, then bent down as if picking something up off the floor as soon as the student engaged and had sufficiently distracted the two Tokusha. Without standing back up to his full height, he slid into a small group that was walking by. When he reached the far wall, he looked up to see the Tokusha still studying the crowd he was in a few seconds earlier.
He was outside in the common area before they could reacquire him. He pulled his collar up to conceal his face. Maybe the kid really wasn’t involved and wouldn’t be charged with anything. Maybe it was all an elaborate trick to feed the government disinformation during an interrogation. Whatever the game was, he’d come too late and didn’t know the rules.
The tone of the campus had shifted subtly. It was now quieter, more intense. The Tokusha had thus far done nothing more than patrol, now for the first time they had interfered with a student. Clay studied faces, looking to see who was about to take advantage of the situation. The two men in red jackets that the student had pointed out to him stepped out into the courtyard, proceeded straight to the campus gates, and walked back into the city.
Clay followed them for a kilometer to a narrow alley where they finally stopped. One slid a framed advertisement display to the side, revealing a small control panel. He pressed three buttons in sequence, and the wall slid to one side. Then, the three entered, and the panel slid back into place behind them.
This had to be what he was looking for. Clay waited two minutes, giving them time to get clear of the doorway, then entered the alley. He slid the advertising display to one side and entered the sequence he had seen earlier on the control panel. The wall slid back to reveal a dark, narrow stairwell leading down to the sublevels of the city. He could make out voices and a faint hint of light from below. He descended the steps quickly and confidently, not knowing what lay at the bottom but hoping he could at least look like he belonged and could blend in when he got there.
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