Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,70
Thunderhead’s AI guidance as she browsed through its data files, because the worldwide public camera system seemed designed to thwart her efforts. Her attempts to track Scythe Faraday’s movements on the day he died was proving harder than she thought. Video records in the backbrain were not organized by camera, or even by location. It seemed the Thunderhead linked them by concept. A moment of identical traffic patterns in completely different parts of the world were linked. Footage featuring people with similar strides were linked. One strand of associations led to images of increasingly spectacular sunsets, all caught by streetcams. The Thunderhead’s digital memory, Citra came to realize, was structured like a biological brain. Every moment of every video record was connected to a hundred others by different criteria—which meant that every connection Citra followed led her down a rabbit hole of virtual neurons. It was like trying to read someone’s mind by dissecting their cerebral cortex. It was maddening.
The Scythedom, she knew, had created its own algorithms for searching the unsearchable contents of the backbrain—but Citra couldn’t ask Scythe Curie without making her suspicious. The woman had already proven that she could see through any lie Citra put forth, so best not to be in a position where Citra would have to lie.
The search began as a project, quickly evolved into a challenge, and now was an obsession. Citra would secretly spend an hour or two each day trying to find footage of Scythe Faraday’s final movements, but to no avail.
She wondered if, even in its silence, the Thunderhead was watching what she did. My, oh my, you’ve been picking through my brain, it would say if it were allowed, with a virtual wink. Naughty, naughty.
Then, after many weeks, Citra had an epiphany. If everything uploaded to the Thunderhead was stored in the backbrain, then not just public records were there, but personal as well. She couldn’t access other people’s private records, but anything she uploaded would be available to her. Which meant she could seed the search with data of her own. . . .
• • •
“There is no actual law that says I can’t visit my family while I’m an apprentice.”
Citra brought it up in the middle of dinner one night, with neither warning nor context of conversation. It was her intent to blindside Scythe Curie with it. She could tell it worked because of the length of time it took Scythe Curie to respond. She took two whole spoonfuls of soup before saying a thing.
“It’s our standard practice—and a wise one, if you ask me.”
“It’s cruel.”
“Didn’t you already attend a family wedding?”
Citra wondered how Scythe Curie knew that, but wasn’t about to let herself be derailed. “In a few months I might die. I think I should have a right to see my family a few times before then.”
Scythe Curie took two more spoonfuls of soup before saying, “I’ll consider it.”
In the end, she agreed, as Citra knew she would; after all, Scythe Curie was a fair woman. And Citra had not lied—she did want to see her family—so the scythe could not read deceit in Citra’s face because there was none. But, of course, seeing her family wasn’t Citra’s only reason for going home.
• • •
Everything on Citra’s street looked the same as she and Scythe Curie strode down it, yet everything was different. A faint sense of longing tugged at her, but she couldn’t be sure what she longed for. All she knew was that walking down her street suddenly felt like she was walking in some foreign land where the people spoke a language she didn’t know. They rode the elevator up to Citra’s apartment with a pudgy woman with a pudgier pug, who was positively terrified. The woman, not the dog. The dog couldn’t care less. Mrs. Yeltner—that was her name. Before Citra left home, Mrs. Yeltner had reset her lipid point to svelte. But apparently the procedure was struggling against a gluttonous appetite, because she was bulging in all the wrong places.
“Hello, Mrs. Yeltner,” Citra said, guilty to be enjoying the woman’s thinly veiled terror.
“G . . . good to see you,” she said, clearly not remembering Citra’s name. “Wasn’t there just a gleaning on your floor earlier this year? I didn’t think it was allowed to hit the same building so soon.”
“It’s allowed,” Citra said. “But we’re not here to glean today.”