The Man the system forgot to Name

Chapter 7: The Price of being Branded.

Elias did not go home from the cafe.

He walked.

Not aimlessly this time. With distance in mind. Space had separated him and whatever had just varied the level of his threat.

The city was louder now. Noise on noise in the middle of the day--horns, voices, announcements, movement upon movement. Usually, such anarchy served to make him fade away.

Today, it did not.

He experienced it through the manner in which people stared at him. Not staring. Not noticing. Just... registering. Like their attention brushing him half a second longer than usual.

It made his skin crawl.

He entered a cross street and decreased his speed. Old houses were bent over here, and their shadows were long and amusing. This section of the city was still stinking of dust and oil and history that the system had not even bothered to clean up.

The pressure stirred.

Not sharp. Not commanding.

Curious.

You have changed something, Elias said.

No reply.

He kept walking.

There was a bus station looming at the end of the street. Screens were suspended on metal beams and were cyclic in schedules and alerts. Crowds pressed under them, with their exhausted faces raised upwards.

Elias walked in--and the pressure impaled.

Hard.

His eyesight faded away on the sides.

Multiple observers active.

He stopped.

People bumped into him. Someone cursed. He barely heard them.

"Observers?" he whispered.

No correction came.

The screens above flickered.

Once.

Twice.

Then one of them stalled.

The program stopped half-way along. Letters blurred. There was a moment when a line of text was displayed which was not part.

PROCESSING EXCEPTION

There were gasps of the crowd.

The screen was rectified immediately. Normal information resumed. There was glancing about, and doing that which the city trained them to do.

They moved on.

But Elias stood very still.

It wasn't just him anymore.

The mistakes in the system were coming out.

A security drone was floating lower than normal close to the ceiling, and its lens was swiveling with inhuman accuracy. Another followed. Then a third.

The tension in the chest of Elias tightened so that breathing was an effort.

Leave.

The term did not come in the form of an order.

It arrived as necessity.

Elias pushed through the crowd and, head low, walked on with the most common movements. He left the hub and stepped over the street without glancing back.

He only stopped when the noise had become dull.

His hands were shaking.

This, because of me, was it? he asked quietly.

Silence.

Then, faint but unmistakable--

Correlation noted.

His stomach dropped.

"So what," he said. "I glitch the world now?"

No answer.

He laughed once, short and dry. "That's reassuring."

The stress changed--no more amused, no more angry.

Assessing.

He prostrained himself against a wall, and shut his eyes.

Fear was replaced by something else, which had not been present since the alley.

Guilt.

People had seen it. Just a glimpse, but enough. It was a system that flourished, a system that worked on trust, on the illusion of control. He was putting even the crack in that illusion, by existing more noisily.

You had said, Resistance was a thing, he said. You only said there was going to be collateral.

The pressure pulsed.

Unavoidable.

Elias opened his eyes.

"That's not an answer."

No reply came this time.

Footsteps were coming in the far end of the street. Measured. Unhurried. Too deliberate.

Elias straightened.

A man stepped into view. Mid-thirties. Plain clothes. Neutral face. The type of a person your eyes would slide off or you had to push them to pay attention.

But Elias had it on the spot.

This one sees me.

The man paused a few feet distant.

"Elias Cross," he said calmly. Not asking.

Elias kicked his heart against his ribs.

I believe you have mistaken one man, Elias answered unconsciously.

The man smiled--not warmly.

"No," he said. "I don't."

The pain in the chest of Elias leaped--wild, threatening, insistent.

Interaction risk identified.

The man threw his head back a little. You are bringing irregularities, he went on. "Small ones. But they add up."

I know not what you are talking of, said Elias, which though itself slender seemed to himself.

That is all right, the man answered. "You're not supposed to. Understanding comes later."

Elias clenched his fists. "Later than what?"

The man was looking quickly around the street behind Elias. To the cameras. The lights. What the city listens to, in an absent manner.

Later than containment he said.

No more threatening word came than the word landed.

Then do something new It was the pressure that Elias felt.

It hesitated.

The system was uncertain, as it had never been before.

And in that indecision Elias had realised something important.

He was no longer being monitored.

He was being claimed.

Whether he agreed or not.