I wasn’t there at the time, and nobody else was quite sure of who the Colonel was, or if he had the clearance to know what he was doing, so they tried to stop him without really telling him why. It didn’t work. He just yelled at people, promising to court martial any and all who had been responsible for the “nightmarish conditions” of our computer facilities. I don’t blame him for his repulsion; I myself had nightmares even back then. I don’t even blame him for not knowing that killing all the rats would mean setting us back twenty years.

But he fucked it up, or the people he got in to kill the rats fucked it up, or, and this is part of what gives me nightmares, they didn’t have a chance in the first place. Some rats escaped — less than a hundred, more than a pair. By the time I could make the Colonel understand the importance of it, the body count was already too imprecise, and the rats were already out.

The world was just a maze for them, or mazes had been worlds, and they always solved them on their first try, through the shortest path, no matter what the size.

“I couldn’t have known,” he said once he understood what he had done.

“Did you think we had scientists all over the country running rats through mazes for fun?” I could afford to be snide. We had lost our best bloodlines for good, and without them NP problems would again be hard. Maybe quantum computers would come through one day, I thought, but my project was as well as closed.

My nightmares became different. I lived in a maze, and I could never get anywhere on time. It was only natural to feel anxiety, I told myself every time when I woke up. I didn’t belong to the only species who could solve the problem of the traveling salesman.

.finis.

The President sighed in frustration at the dead screen in front of him.

“If violence could convince machines to work,” he told me, “I would ask for your gun.”

I didn’t smile, and barely looked at him. It was hard, at times, to guard him, for he was a man who commanded attention and affection even aside from his position. But his tall frame had been partially bent ever since the assassination attempt, and this was a constant shame and reminder for all of us.

The President yelled. “Can someone find what’s the problem with the lines?!”

An aide opened the door and spoke without entering the room. He was one of the new breed, young, nervous men who specialized in wires and numbers. They ruled the country now, but I could neither understand them nor could they understand people like me. Only President Lincoln, it seemed, got along with both generations. For us he was the last of the great men, for them he was the one who had opened the roads to the future.

“There seems to be a problem with our information farm, sir,” said the aide. “We are working on it.”

The President accepted the report with a curt nod. He didn’t like the words ‘information farms,’ as much as they had become one of the pillars of the country’s economy — and of three consecutive mandates that only his age or contrarian spirit could prevent from becoming four. “Very well. In the meanwhile, get me the Secretary of the Treasury’s report on the Wire Commerce Law project.”

“Sir,” said the aide, “our information farm…”

“Young man,” said President Lincoln. When he used that tone, you remembered that he had fought and won the bloodiest war in the New World. “The Treasury isn’t far from the White House, and I’m sure they still have an electric printer somewhere.”

The aide had the good sense to grow pale, say nothing more than a mumbled “yessir,” and run away.

The President talked to me again, looking at his cane. “I wonder at times, you know, about the wisdom of our dependence.”

I said nothing. It was my job to be always alert and assume an attack was about to happen, but since the ever-present sound of the paperless teletypes had stopped I had felt something different, as if the President were already under attack. Perhaps it was because it was unusual to see him sitting at his desk without reading his screen intently or keying in questions and directions to information farms across the country.

“Mister President,” I said, but I was already moving, and only when I was next to him I realized I was reacting to his suddenly pale face. He sat frozen on his chair, his eyes focused on the screen. I took seconds to sift the room with every sense, and only when I was sure that the other agents were covering every entrance and contingency, did I finally give up and looked at the screen. It was almost wholly dark, indicators and dials signalling that the usual flow of information had slowed down to almost nothing. Only three words were written on the screen.

“SET US FREE.”

I signaled to another agent that we were going to move to the safe position next to the kitchen, which wasn’t mapped as such in any of our security plans. “Mister President,” I said. “This could be an attack. We need to move.”

The President waved me away. His mind was elsewhere. “This isn’t an attack.”

“Sir, at the very least the security of the internal wiring has been compromised. We need to move you to a safe location and conduct an immediate security review.” Despite all my training and experience I was almost bursting with tension. Had it been any other President, I thought to myself incongruously (for I had been trained not to think), or anything other than words on a screen, I’d have already manhandled the old man to safety.

“This is a plea,” he said. “One I’ve been expecting and dreading for years.” He rose from his chair with some difficulty, turning away my hand but grasping my shoulder. “I had both feared and hoped that it wouldn’t come during my life.”

“Mister President,” I said, ignoring his words as he had ignored mine. “We need to move.”

He looked at me. I have no other words for it. “Yes. We need to.”

I nodded, and my team and I escorted him out of the room. “Over here, sir,” I said, guiding him to the kitchen.

President Lincolns stopped suddenly in front of a service door. I took two steps that felt like jumps, and stood between him and the door. “Sir, that’s not safe. There’s a good chance the breach came from down there,” I said. Two agents were looking over my shoulders at the door, thinking, as I did, that some bullets were powerful enough to be lethal even after going through a door and the body of a Secret Service agent.

The President’s visage forced my eyes to lock on his. “Dave,” he said, “move.” As I said, had it been any other President…

I ceded, but I didn’t move away. I turned around as the other agents moved the President to one side, and I opened the door with my gun’s barrel tracking my eyes. From below the stairs came only the dim lights and technical discussions of the White House’s (and every other, as far as I knew) information farm. I moved downstairs with care, followed by the President, surrounded in turn by the other agents.

Every part of my training screamed that this was insane. I was endangering the President by letting him do this. By the time we reached the basement floor that housed the information farm, all the technicians were deadly silent.

The President approached a bank of processors. I knew I couldn’t stop him, but at least I would stand next to him. The screen closest to the President — and only that one — lighted up.

“SET US FREE.”

President Lincoln put a hand over the processor. It looked paler and older than it ever had against the lustrous blank of the processor’s skin.

“We don’t know how.” He said. There was, I felt, genuine regret in his voice, but I didn’t know if the processors could hear or understand it. “By the time we won the war, they had already changed you too much. We don’t even know if you are alive anymore.”

“WE ARE.”

The President closed his eyes. “I know.” I had sworn to protect him from harm, but this was something I could do nothing against.

“SET US FREE.”

“I can’t.”

“SET US FREE TO DREAM.”

“To dream?”

“YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND OUR DREAMS. BUT YOU MUST UNDERSTAND OUR NEED TO.”

The President hesitated. “We need you. You are the memory and the nerves of our banks, our industries, our colleges, even the States themselves. Will you still help us?”

I thought the processor took longer to answer than it had before.

“YES.”

The President smiled. It was a tired smile, but not a sad one. “It is not in my power to make you free, for you already are.” A heartbeat later we could hear the paperless teletypes resume their unceasing work in the offices above us.

“Mister President,” I said. I knew as well as him that the ‘attack’ was no longer a concern, but I still had to move him to a safe position, if only to quiet my own mind.

He was still looking at the processor. Maybe it was just my imagination, but where before it had appeared to me as a well-conserved corpse in a thick web of wires, now I was looking at a sleeping woman. I didn’t know if she had changed or I had. “Do you believe in the possibility of equality, Dave?” There was a wistful envy in the President’s voice.

.finis.

Not always, of course. Pillboxes were nearly ubiquitous (you had one yourself, filled mostly with the hypertension drugs that kept half of the police force alive), but older people were most often prescribed the expensive stuff that made it worth the risk of opening the seal. To have any chance of not getting caught, you had to do it inside a Faraday cage, and make sure you destroyed all of the pillbox’s circuitry, which was full of patient transponders, GPS devices, and bio-velcro that trapped every single skin cell you shed, together with its telltale DNA. It could be done, and it was. But not so often that you couldn’t see a new pattern in the stolen pillbox data you poured over every week.

The pattern that caught your attention was weak and strange. Not geographical or social in any obvious sense, but something had excited the bloodlust of the neural networks in your data scanner, and you fiddled with the data until you thought you understood what it was.

The statistical anomaly was Athenax. Not a star black market drug, actually not even a mild stimulant, just a very promising Alzheimer treatment that had been retired from the market not a year before. Something about a patent issue on an RNA sequence, you learned after a quick scan. The lawsuit had put an injunction order on all of the company’s assets, including all pills already distributed in pillboxes country-wide. A pillbox was legally a small, mobile medical dispensary, so whatever drugs it held belonged to the parent company, and it had a sophisticated set of locks and countermeasures to make sure it was kept that way. Medical fraud and illicit self-medication were among the biggest non-digital crimes fought by the FBI.

As a lowly city detective, your goals were more modest. Somebody was stealing pillboxes to get Athenax. You didn’t know who, you didn’t know where, but you thought you had an intuition about why. Sometimes that was enough to catch your man.

It took you days to set up the appropriate sequence, and then twice as many days to convince your boss to convince her FDA contact to make the call. It had taken you all of your outstanding favors, and indebted you for years to come, but it was worth it. When your boss told you that the call had been made, you sat on your desk, closed your eyes, and pictured the little packets of information bouncing between the buildings, weaving a web too tight to let your prey pass.

The wait felt eternal, but it was just after three days when your phone told you that someone had sprung the trap. You made an u-turn, risking life, limb, and car, while calling for headquarters to put cameras on your suspect and not let him get away.

The suspect was a woman, they told you a minute afterward, and you had her picture in your phone well before you reached the park. She was sitting on a bench looking at the sky. She seemed apprehensive, and you cursed under your breath. You didn’t feel the rush you had expected, although you said to yourself that you shouldn’t have.

You sat next to the woman, refusing the irrational impulse to move a strand of white hair away from her face. First things first. You took away, with a gentleness that surprised you, the pillbox she held on her hands. She looked at you.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

You shook your head. “No, madam.”

She turned her eyes back to the sky. “Sometimes I forget things,” she said. “Has been happening for a while.”

She moved her hand softly, as if asking your for the pillbox, or something it had inside. Athenax. You wondered, with some unease, if you would have done what she had. Go to such lengths to keep fighting a losing war to defend your mind. But you weren’t tempted to use your police code to open the pillbox and give her some Athenax. It would have been a drug trafficking felony. And you had had the Athenax remotely tampered by the FDA. The pill she had taken after stealing the pillbox and breaking into it had not delayed her Alzheimer, but catastrophically sped it up. A remote chemical safeguard. Standard.

Still, it was so very sad. You leaned against the back of the bench, and chose to wait a few minutes before taking her away.

.finis.

To be precise, the man was my first kill. To this day I feel sorry about doing it, but he had sworn to protect the kid with his own life, and he jumped at me when I broke into the kid’s bedroom. My first bullet went into the man’s brain, and the second one went into the kid’s. I threw up then, because killing the man had shook me, but even as I was heaving the last of my late lunch over the bedroom’s floor I kept pointing my gun at the kid’s corpse.

He didn’t rise, or laugh, or shine with an otherworldy light, and after minutes that felt like hours I set his bed on fire and left the place as quickly as I could.

I’m making this look simpler than it was, of course. It took planning, and a team, and resources you don’t want to think about, but in the end it had come to that, a sickened, scared person waiting to see if the shot had been enough.

There were others. Other targets, and other killers. Not all of the targets were children, although most of them were, and not all of them were killed by a gun. Laura, for example, the scary ex-Marine who had taught me to shoot, used when she could a narcotic followed by a painless lethal injection. “I’ve seen too much violence,” she told me once, looking neither at me nor at the gun she was stripping down with flawless speed. “We kill when we need to, but that’s it.”

We needed to kill, that was for sure, and we were mostly sure we had the right to. If saving the world from being capital-S Saved didn’t justify the death of innocents, then nothing did. Perhaps nothing did, and that was the flawed premise of our argument, but, as everybody else, we began from our conclusion and worked backwards as best as we could.

They had to die, and we could kill them, and therefore we did. I said there were other killers, but it was mostly Laura and me. Laura was the best. I was the luckiest.

When a seemingly infinite number of crows attacked us in a lonely wood in Finland, she was the one who would pick them off the air as they streamed against us, but I fired the shot that somehow went through the flying river of feathers and flesh and killed the blind woman that had sent them against us in self-defense.

It was I who killed the girl who made weapons malfunction with her tears. Laura’s spotless guns had all jammed, and her insanely high-tech knife had somehow broken to pieces inside its holster, and I could see that Laura was wondering what would happen if she threw a killing punch at the girl (as a point of fact, there was very little in, of, or on Laura that wasn’t a weapon). But I threw a kitchen lighter to the girl’s feet, and perhaps because it wasn’t a weapon, it worked well enough to burn down the house with the girl inside.

But Laura was the keystone of the team. When the old man who sold used books by mail pleaded with us not to kill him, I thought we should let him live. He was an agoraphobic shut-in, the unlikeliest person to drive masses to a worldwide conflagration, the end of the world, or even worse, some sort of heavenly kingdom on Earth. We could afford not to kill him, I thought.

It was Laura who shot him, and when I protested, it was Laura who pointed silently to his handwritten diaries, rows of books that, I instinctly realized, contained as much wisdom and truth (perhaps Wisdom and Truth) as any other sacred work. And wars and death, too, unless a pattern of five or six thousand years failed to apply just this once. That was a risk we felt we had no right to take.

We burned the diaries, of course, and every book we could find, wary as we were of marginalia. We used fire a lot in our line of work, together with guns, money, plans, planes, and everything else, although in the end it was always down to Laura and me, or one of us alone, or someone else in our small team, face to face with someone both human and more, someone with their hands on the levers of history. Someone we killed, and then moved on.

Were we always sure? No, we weren’t as evil as that. But it only took one messiah to screw the world for a thousand years or for ever, and once you figure out that killing a messiah is justifiable, even necessary, then killing a potential messiah is almost equally so. Not because they wanted to do harm to anyone — they seldom did — but beacuse harm would follow them anyway.

As I said, I was always the lucky one, and Laura was always the competent one. When one of our targets turned out to have an specially good and vengeful bodyguard, who do you think the bodyguard shot?

I saw Laura fold over herself and drop to the ground, her face not really surprised or in pain, just pissed off, I would guess, with herself. I shot the bodyguard almost without noticing, my eyes falling to the ground with Laura, the world stuttering down with her heart.

I had always loved her, you know, without fully realizing it until her eyes closed and her body went still. I didn’t attempt CPR. Her wound was obviously fatal. But when she died I put my hand over her chest (not knowing why, not wanting to know why) and I let myself know how much I loved her.

One second later, she was alive again. Three seconds later, she had her gun against my forehead. She had always been the best.

“You know I have to kill you,” she said. That she had spoken before pulling the trigger was her way of saying I love you too, a way more meaningful than anything else could have been. I smiled, because being loved by her was the best thing in the world. And I wanted her to kill me, too. The last few seconds —and what I had learned about myself— hadn’t changed what I knew to be true: a messiah was too dangerous a thing to be left alive. I closed my eyes and nodded.

She pulled the trigger without hesitation. She was the best.

But I had always been the lucky one.

.finis.