Forecast is being serialized semiweekly across 42 web sites. For a full list of participants and links to live chapters, please visit www.shyascanlon.com/forecast. Read Chapter 39 at Puerto del Sol.

Does any person’s life make sense?  Can each successive subjective moment be completely explained by the last, and each decision exactly describe the trajectory of findable forces, internal and ex, that conspire to move a person or to make her stay?  And how likely is it that there exists, somewhere, some unified, absolute record of each persons’ existence against which all other records could be judged?  Unlikely, most agree, in the extreme.  Yet short of such a preposterous ideal, what does one do with all the missing pieces that inevitably force their way in to a life, those bits that bite holes in one’s picture as though instead of not being, they’re emphatically busy being not?  One tries to get at what’s behind them, of course.  One tries to get at what’s fallen or crawled through those holes by taking another route.  One looks and one looks and one feels and one listens, and most of all one thinks, most of all one thinks and one dreams about what those hidden, silent sinews connecting one obvious event to another might be like.  And one arrives, finally, through this process which owes as much to the intellect as it does to intuition, at what might not be a flawless reflection but at what is nevertheless sufficient, sufficiently entire to explain, understand, and, finally to project.  Most importantly to project.  For what good are all the records of all the lives of all the people in all the world if they cannot be learned from, if a lesson cannot be extracted and applied, pushed forward, placed before the next step in this inevitable march to protect us from exactly what those records show?  No good, is the answer.  No good at all. 

At least, that’s what the book says.

Anyway, sometimes you’re lucky.  You’re lucky or you’re just damn good, or both.  Sometimes you’re inside their head in ways they don’t even understand themselves, speaking with their mouth to tell you things they didn’t even know, or don’t and likely won’t ever.  Sometimes you’re so far inside them you can’t tell the difference, anymore, between yourself and your watchjob.  I know we’re taught to perform each part of the job with equal enthusiasm, or indifference, but every Surveillant in the business knows that those tiny transcendences are what make the job worth doing.  And I shared many such moments with Zara, perhaps even more with Helen.  I was inside Zara’s feelings for her parents, and I was inside her feelings for Asseem.  I waded through the ambiguous waters of Helen’s relationship with Jack.  I kidnapped Rocket with her and drove her directly into the arms of Busy and Blain.  I shared her most intimate moments and I felt her fear.  I knew I was good.  I knew I was capturing, recording, creating her very essence – an essence that often, to my astonishment, eluded even those closest to her.  The bottom line is I was a model Citizen Surveillant.  I was at the top of my game.

But other times things don’t go as planned.  Other times you not only blink at the wrong moment, but the wrong moment itself blinks.  Or so it seems.  What I found when I got back to the office was: nothing.  Worse: the only thing I actually uncovered was the only thing I hadn’t believed. 

The monitors in my viewing room had all been turned to random cameras throughout the city, and they spat irrelevant images at me along with little slices of dialogue and ambient sounds that together blurred into a wash of audiovisual noise.  I frantically trained them on the site of Helen’s last location, the Lightning Strikes! building in the edu-musement park, but the signal was scrambled.  I could see the building clearly from the outside, but the those same walls I’d been inside no more than half hour before were opaque, rejecting the cameras, and bouncing back dead air into my ears.  I sounded the security alarm and started a broad scale scan of the park itself to see if I could spot anyone coming or going. 

Within minutes, my troops stormed the area.  I watched them swarm through the shadows and well lit spaces alike, covering the ground like little black ants.  When I felt comfortable with the job they were doing I set about fulfilling the next immediate need: locating the Professor.  It occurred to me that he’d likely already left the building, but I thought his lab might have clues indicating his next move.  Since it was a high security area I notified a security official of the emergency status, and asked him to accompany me down to the lab, to let me in, and provide some protection in case there were any unexpected obstacles.  I didn’t know the Professor to be a violent man, but it was looking like I didn’t really know him at all.  I couldn’t be too careful.

The security official came to the door of my viewing room and waited while I finalized the details and instructions for handling the various targets, should they be apprehended by my men, and describing to them what they’d find in the building.

“Where we going?” asked the official.  He was a large man, with a short haircut and hard, tiny eyes.  He was just what I needed.

“We’re going to the Professor’s lab,” I said.

“The Professor?” he looked confused.  His eyes, squinting, almost disappeared entirely.  “The Professor isn’t working for the Commission anymore, is he?”

I looked him up and down, not sure how to read his posture.  Could he be part of the conspiracy?  I suddenly felt suspicious, and not at all certain I wanted to walk with him into the rather solitary section of the building the Professor had led me to earlier.

“I’m going to have to ask you,” I said, “to engage another of your men.”

He frowned.

“For added security,” I said.  “We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.”

Fortunately, he no longer sought to argue with me, and called someone in, a younger soldier I’d seen around, and felt I could trust.

“Follow me,” I said.

Quickly, we walked down the halls and down the stairs that led to the lab’s secret door.  I was in front, but I made sure the younger soldier remained between myself and the official.  The way was tense, if brief, and the official’s eyes gave nothing away.  When we arrived at the place in the hallway where the invisible door was, I nodded to the retina scanner right beside it.

“Here we are, gentlemen,” I said.  “I know there’s a door here, and I’ll need you to open it, and enter first.”

The soldier looked at me with wide eyes, and then looked back at his commanding officer. 

“What is it,” I said.  “I was in this lab just an hour ago.  I know it’s here.”

“It’s… here, sir,” the man said.  “I mean, there’s a room here, yeah…”  He was being evasive.

“What he means,” the officer said, standing forward, “is that this room here’s just a storage room.”  Then he pointed at the eye scanner.  “That’s not an eye scanner, it’s just an eye flush, you know, in case of contact with hazardous chemicals.” 

“Bullshit!” I said.  This was not happening.  “Open the door!” 

Had I taken the wrong turn?  No, I knew this was where I’d come before.  These men were wrong, is all.  They probably just hadn’t had any reason to know before, and had made assumptions.

“W-well, it’s open, sir,” the soldier stammered.  “Anyone can just go right in.”

“Oh really?  Is that so?  Then do it!”

The soldier looked authentically frightened, which was somehow reassuring, and he looked back up to his senior staff, who nodded his approval.

“Go on in,” the man said.

The soldier nodded back, and disappeared through the wall.

“Well?” I shouted?

“Well, sir, I’m sorry, but…”

“Fuck this,” I said, and walked in.

The room was like I remembered, but different.  The tables were as they were, but I noticed that underneath were boxes, parts spilling out of them.  The monitors I’d seen on the wall earlier, I now noticed, weren’t the current model being used.  They were old, maybe broken.  They were being stored.  I ran over to the table where the masks lay – their pieces the only evidence that what I’d seen was real.

“What about these?” I said, holding a flap of fake skin above my head.  “Where did these come from then?”

Both men shrugged.

They were right.  What about them?  Is it unreasonable to have scraps of these now ubiquitous objects lying around on a storeroom table?  I put the mask back down and walked, without saying a word, past the two men, and out into the hallway.  This was not good.  Images of Helen and Busy and the Professor swirled in my head.  The feeling of nausea, which I’d felt on more than one occasion already that day, was beginning to take up a permanent address in my stomach, and I moved with it like you learn to move with a stubborn blister: carefully but with an aggressive edge that cuts through the pain enough to keep pace with the movement of people around you.  If the storage room was any indication, I needed to steel myself against what else may be in store.  I knew too much, at that point, to expect that I’d get a lock on the location of Helen, Blain, the dog or whoever it was that came to greet them in Lightning Strikes!  I was going to have to make the best of interviews with whoever I could find down there.  Drug addicts, criminals, and anyone else impoverished enough to have wound up in that god forsaken place.  Someone had to have seen something, and I’d pay anything to find out what.  I climbed the stairs back to my floor.  If it turned out to be AS-Mask related, and indeed the government was somehow involved, I’d have to go through the proper channels before any information was released, but I had no reason anymore to trust anything the Professor had told me.

I had to prepare for the worst.

When I got back to my viewing room my squad leader was waiting in an open channel to debrief me on their reconnaissance.  The commands of lesser officers rang out in the background, puncturing the low static hiss of the radio he used to connect with my station.  I put on my headset and sat a moment before speaking.  It still hadn’t quite hit me that Helen was gone.  Her face flashed before my eyes but I forced her out of my mind with all the psychic energy I had.  If she was ever going to come back to me, the worst thing I could do is begin to think about her.

“Sir, there’s something you’re going to want to see down here in the Lightning Strikes! building,” he said.

I sighed.  If it wasn’t Helen, or something leading to her, I didn’t want to hear about it.

“Don’t tell me,” I joked.  “It’s disappeared.”

“Well, sir, no, not exactly.”

“Well then what?  Spit it out, soldier.”

“Well, sir, it looks like some kind of hospital or something.”

A hospital? 

I knew he couldn’t see me, but I zeroed a camera in on the major’s face.  He was a middle aged black man with slightly ruddy skin.  He looked around at his troops while he waited for my response, pointing and waving small orders.  Could Rocket have been right?  Were the REMO experiments real?  I wasn’t sure what that meant right away, though it was better than nothing. 

“Have you found any trace of Helen, or anyone that saw her?”

“Not yet, sir,” he said.  His face focused back on our communication.  “Actually, we did find the dog.”  He waved again and a soldier walked into view with a blonde blur of fur at the end of a short black leash.  Rocket.

“Good work, Major,” I said.  “Bring him in for questioning.”

“Sir?” he said.

“I said bring…” I paused.  The pit in my stomach disappeared.  I felt remarkably calm.  “I just meant that he might be able to lead us to something useful, Major,” I said.

“Oh, right, of course sir.  We’ll bring him back with us.”

I watched him lean down and give the dog a pat on the head.  Rocket licked his face, wagged his tail, and let out a quick, happy bark.

I took off my headset and stared at the screens.  My troops crawled across the park, some of them kicking in doors, some pulling REMO addicts back out, some standing around waiting for orders.  They looked ridiculous just then, out of place, and I realized that this was the first time I’d really seen them from my viewing room, on the other side of the glass.  Had I looked that absurd, I wondered, out there in the world?  I had no reason to believe anyone had been watching, of course, but it occurred to me that, only an hour ago, I was bungling around just like the men I was watching, pulled this way and that by unfriendly forces, by a plot not my own.

I sat down and spun my chair around, facing away from the screens.  The door to my viewing room yawned like it was bored.  Surveillants walked by, totally unconcerned with what had happened with my case, and it was both a comfort and a shame.  My life seemed, at that moment, to be over in some fundamental way, but maybe none of this mattered in that big picture everyone always seemed to talk about but nobody had ever seen.  Maybe people, even in this very office, would never even notice the difference, the absence, the lack.  But would their indifference remain if they’d ever known Helen?  If they’d ever known Zara?  And would they ever understand how this precocious, ferocious, and sometimes endearingly atrocious example of womanhood was made?  Would they ever get to watch?

Continue reading Forecast, with Chapter 41 at Lisp Service.