The Watchers: A Space Opera Novella Read Online Free PDF Page A

know how dangerous that is. Your neural net mixes with theirs—”
    “I know, I know. Well, it was deeper into one more than the others.” Karon.
    Some people approach us from the oncoming direction, so we quiet. After they pass, I say quietly. “This is a horrible law. I just Watched the authorities try to tear a child away from his parents. It was their first child, they wanted him desperately. Gino didn’t want to tell them, but he had to and now he’s dead. Sumiko has only just given birth, now she’s on the run and Karon is probably dead—”
    “Emre, Emre. Slow down, you’re going too fast. None of this makes sense.”
    I resist the urge to scream at her and run back to the projector room. I deliberately slow my pace and try to match my gait to land my footsteps inside the gleaming black tiles and tell her what had happened. I leave out my talking directly to Karon—a big no-no. When a person strays too close to Unification, we’re trained to pluck the memory from them or shift their attention elsewhere and continue to monitor them. But directly speaking is forbidden—the goal is to remain secret, and speaking to someone kind of violates that.
    Renya listens and laughs at random places when I pause, so as to throw off anyone that might be watching. I pick up quickly on it and oblige, smiling and becoming animated with my hands. Acting out a feeling is a disturbing thing. By acting happy and joking, I feel my mood lighten, and it only seems to heighten the gravity of what I just Watched.
    I finish, and we walk in silence for several steps. Eventually she says, “Emre, I’m sorry you had to Watch that. But you need to cooperate with them. Compose your report and brief them personally on it. Perhaps they will want you to follow the situation as it develops—you could even persuade them along those lines. But don’t forget our purpose here—”
    Acolyte Renya is leader of the Plaiselle team. Who would expect an acolyte to be running an intelligence team?
    “Already there are signs that Regent Teife is keeping his word and that half the Directorate are returning as a show of good faith. If we continue to cooperate, he’ll return the other half—” Planting ideas in people is not all that different than removing them, which the Directorate is seriously skilled at. I wonder if the Regent even suspects that that wasn’t his own thought. “—In the meantime, we are to cooperate, gain trust and intelligence that they can use when they return. I suspect they are catching on to the acoustic cloaking. Watch for my signal to move to phase two communication. Understood?”
    “Understood.”
    She turns at the next left, her shoes squeaking slightly on the polished hallway floor. I stop to consider this new information and decide to go back and apologize to Official Delphine and brief her personally. I’ll explain my distaste for what I witnessed and thank her for pulling me out when she did. I smile. I’ll even go so far as to say I do not wish to return—that’ll probably make her eager to send me back against “my wishes.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    I WAS WRONG .
    Official Delphine stands there and stares down at me the whole time, her lips a pale beige from lip balm, compressed into a thin line. She listens the whole time that way, to my explanation, to my apology. Her only response at the end is: “I don’t trust you.” And with that I’m dismissed, released until my next session at eighteen hundred, twenty-one hours from now.
    A secret underground resistance sounds exciting until it actually starts, the mechanics of it. It’s mostly waiting—a chess match, one small move here so that forty moves later you’ll have a one-point advantage to exploit. That’s where we are currently at, the opening—small moves, lots of waiting.
    Renya gives the signal in the middle of the night to move to phase two communication. The acoustic cloaking is a feint, only to be used in the opening hours of a resistance.