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cynicism. They are watching you. The words of a self-crowned pervert god, hubris trying to dam the
flow of history; or the mysterious Opposition that Kafka had warned him of? It was imponderable,
intolerable. I could be walking into a trap, Pierce considered the idea, and immediately began to
activate a library of macros in his phone that he d written for such eventualities. As Superintendent-
of-Scholars Manson had ceaselessly reminded him, a healthy paranoia was key to avoiding further
encounters with cardiac leeches and less pleasant medical interventions.
Pierce crossed the street and walked beside a canal for a couple of blocks, then across a bridge and
toward the tree-lined gates of a park. Possibilities hummed in the dappled shadows of the grass like a
myriad of butterfly wings broken underfoot, whispering on the edge of actuality like distant thunder.
This part of history, a century and more before the emergence of the first universal-surveillance
society, before the beginning of the history to which the Stasis laid claim, was mutable in small but
significant ways. Nobody could say for sure who might pass down any given street in any specified
minute, and deem it disruptive: the lack of determinism lent a certain flexibility to his options.
Triggering one of his macros as he stepped through the gate to the park, between one step and the next
Pierce walked through a storeroom in the basement of a Stasis station that had been dust and ruins a
billion years before the ice sheets retreated from the North German plains. It had lain disused for a
century or so when he entered it, and nobody else would use it for at least a decade thereafter he d
set monitors, patient trip wires to secure his safe time. He tarried there for almost three hours, picking
items from a well-stocked shelf and sending out messages to order them from a factory on a continent
that didn t yet exist, eating a cold meal from a long-storage ration pack, and trying to regain his
emotional balance in time for the meeting that lay ahead.
An observer close on his tail would have seen a flicker; when he completed the stride his suit was
heavier, the fabric stiffer to the touch, and his shoulders slightly stooped beneath the weight
concealed within. There were other changes, some of them internal. Perhaps the observers would see,
but: Leave the rest to us. He slipped his hands into his pockets, blinked until the itching subsided and
the heads-up display settled into place across the landscape, scanning and amplifying. He had
summoned watchers, circling overland: invisible and silent, nerves connected to his center. Fuck
Kafka s little game, he thought furiously. Fuck them all. Three hours in his unrecorded storeroom in
the Cryptozoic had given him time for his depression to ferment into anger. I want answers!
It was a hot day, and the park was far from empty. There were young women, governesses or maids,
pushing the prams of their bourgeois employers; clerks or office workers skipping work and some
juvenile ne er-do-wells playing truant from the gymnasium; here a street sweeper and there a dodgy
character with a barrel organ and behind him a couple of vagrants sharing a bottle of schnapps. At the
center of a well-manicured lawn, an ornate stone pedestal supported a clock with four brass faces.
Pierce, letting his phone drive his feet, casually glanced around while his threat detector scanned
through the chaff. Nobody His phone buzzed again.
 What was the tavern where you fell for me called? An achingly familiar voice whispered in his ear.
 Something to do with wildfowl, in Carnegra, the Red Goose or Red Duck or something like that 
 Hard contact in three seconds, his own voice interrupted from nowhere.  Button up and hit the
ground on my word. Now .
Pierce dived toward the grassy strip beside the path as flaring crimson threat markers appeared all
around him. As he fell, his suit bloated and darkened: rubbery cones expanded like a frightened
hedgehog s quills as his collar expanded and rotated, hooding him. In the space of a second the park s
population doubled, angular metallic figures flickering into being all around. Time flickered and
strobed as timegates snapped open and shut, expelling sinister cargo. Pierce twitched ghost muscles
convulsively, triggering camouflage routines as the incoming drones locked onto each other and spat
missiles and laser fire.
 What s going on?
 Palimpsest ambush! Hard & 
The signal stuttered into silence, hammered flat by jammers and raw, random interference. Pierce
began to roll, rising to sit as his suit s countermeasures flared. This is crazy, he thought, shocked by
the violence of the attack. They can t hope to conceal
The sky turned violet-white, the color of lightning: the grass around him began to smoke.
The temperature rose rapidly. His suit was just beginning to char from the prompt radiation pulse as
the ground opened under him, toppling him backward into darkness.
REDUX
Army of You
When you see the ground swallow Pierce you will breathe a sigh of relief you ll finally have the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]