Brave New Worlds

He felt himself blushing. 'It's not like that. Wow, you've got strange ideas about us. I want to find this guy because he disappeared under mysterious circumstances and I want to—' How to explain Anomalies to an outsider? 'It's a thing we do. Unravel mysteries. It makes us better people. '

'Better people?' She snorted again. 'Better than what? Don't answer. Come on, I live near here. You can wash up at my place and be on your way. You're not going to get into any backpacker's hostel looking like you just crawled out of a sewer — you're more likely to get detained for being an ‘indigent of suspicious character. ''

He let her steer him a few yards uptown. 'You think that I work for the Securitat but you're inviting me into your home?'

She shook her head and led him around a corner, along a long crosstown block, and then turned back uptown. 'No,' she said. 'I think you're a confused stranger who is apt to get himself into some trouble if someone doesn't take you in hand and help you get smart, fast. It doesn't cost me anything to lend a hand, and you don't seem like the kind of guy who'd mug, rape and kill an old lady. '

'The discipline,' he said, 'is all about keeping track of the way that the world is, and comparing it to your internal perceptions, all the time. When I entered the Order, I was really big. Fat, I mean. The discipline made me log every bit of food I ate, and I discovered a few important things: first, I was eating about twenty times a day, just grazing on whatever happened to be around. Second, that I was consuming about 4, 000 calories a day, mostly in industrial sugars like high-fructose corn syrup. Just knowing how I ate made a gigantic difference. I felt like I ate sensibly, always ordering a salad with lunch and dinner, but I missed the fact that I was glooping on half a cup of sweetened, high-fat dressing, and having a cookie or two every hour between lunch and dinner, and a half-pint of ice-cream before bed most nights.

'But it wasn't just food — in the Order, we keep track of everything; our typing patterns, our sleeping patterns, our moods, our reading habits. I discovered that I read faster when I've been sleeping more, so now, when I need to really get through a lot of reading, I make sure I sleep more. Used to be I'd try to stay up all night with pots of coffee to get the reading done. Of course, the more sleep-deprived I was, the slower I read; and the slower I read the more I needed to stay up to catch up with the reading. No wonder college was such a blur.

'So that's why I've stayed. It's empiricism, it's as old as Newton, as the Enlightenment. ' He took another sip of his water, which tasted like New York tap water had always tasted (pretty good, in fact), and which he hadn't tasted for sixteen years. The woman was called Posy, and her old leather sofa was worn but well-loved, and smelled of saddle soap. She was watching him from a kitchen chair she'd brought around to the living room of the tiny apartment, rubbing her stockinged feet over the good wool carpet that showed a few old stains hiding beneath strategically placed furnishings and knick-knacks.

He had to tell her the rest, of course. You couldn't understand the Order unless you understood the rest. 'I'm a screwup, Posy. Or at least, I was. We all were. Smart and motivated and promising, but just a wretched person to be around. Angry, bitter, all those smarts turned on biting the heads off of the people who were dumb enough to care about me or employ me. And so smart that I could talk myself into believing that it was all everyone else's fault, the idiots. It took instrumentation, empiricism, to get me to understand the patterns of my own life, to master my life, to become the person I wanted to be. '

'Well, you seem like a perfectly nice young man now,' Posy said.

That was clearly his cue to go, and he'd changed into a fresh set of trousers, but he couldn't go, not until he'd picked apart something she'd said earlier. 'Why did you think I was a snitch?'

'I think you know that very well, Lawrence,' she said. 'I can't imagine someone who's so into measuring and understanding the world could possibly have missed it. '

Now he knew what she was talking about. 'We just do contract work for the Securitat. It's just one of the ways the Order sustains itself. ' the founders had gone into business refilling toner cartridges, which was like the 21st century equivalent of keeping bees or brewing dark, thick beer. They'd branched out into remote IT administration, then into data-mining and security, which was a natural for people with Order training. 'But it's all anonymized. We don't snitch on people. We report on anomalous events. We do it for lots of different companies, too — not just the Securitat. '

Posy walked over to the window behind her small dining room table, rolling away a couple of handsome old chairs on castors to reach it. She looked down over the billion lights of Manhattan, stretching all the way downtown to Brooklyn. She motioned to him to come over, and he squeezed in beside her. They were on the twenty-third floor, and it had been many years since he'd stood this high and looked down. The world is different from high up.

'There,' she said, pointing at an apartment building across the way. 'there, you see it? With the broken windows?' He saw it, the windows covered in cardboard. 'they took them away last week. I don't know why. You never know why. You become a person of interest and they take you away and then later, they always find a reason to keep you away. '

Lawrence's hackles were coming up. He found stuff that didn't belong in the data — he didn't arrest people. 'So if they always find a reason to keep you away, doesn't that mean—'

She looked like she wanted to slap him and he took a step back. 'We're all guilty of something, Lawrence. That's how the game is rigged. Look closely at anyone's life and you'll find, what, a little black-marketeering, a copyright infringement, some cash economy business with unreported income, something obscene in your Internet use, something in your bloodstream that shouldn't be there. I bought that sofa from a cop, Lawrence, bought it ten years ago when he was leaving the building. He didn't give me a receipt and didn't collect tax, and technically that makes us offenders. ' She slapped the radiator. 'I overrode the governor on this ten minutes after they installed it. Everyone does it. They make it easy — you just stick a penny between two contacts and hey presto, the city can't turn your heat down anymore. They wouldn't make it so easy if they didn't expect everyone to do it — and once everyone's done it, we're all guilty.

'The people across the street, they were Pakistani or maybe Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi. I'd see the wife at the service laundry. Nice professional lady, always lugging around a couple kids on their way to or from day-care. She—' Posy broke off and stared again. 'I once saw her reach for her change and her sleeve rode up and there was a number tattooed there, there on her wrist. ' Posy shuddered. 'When they took her and her husband and their kids, she stood at the window and pounded at it and screamed for help. You could hear her from here. '

'That's terrible,' Lawrence said. 'But what does it have to do with the Order?'

She sat back down. 'For someone who is supposed to know himself, you're not very good at connecting the dots. '

Lawrence stood up. He felt an obscure need to apologize. Instead, he thanked her and put his glass in the sink. She shook his hand solemnly.

'Take care out there,' she said. 'Good luck finding your escapee. '

Here's what Lawrence knew about Zbigniew Krotoski. He had been inducted into the Order four years earlier. He was a native-born New Yorker. He had spent his first two years in the Order trying to coax some of the elders into a variety of pointless flamewars about the ethics of working for the Securitat, and then had settled into being a very productive member. He spent his 20 percent time — the time when each monk had to pursue non-work-related projects — building aerial photography rigs out of box-kites and tiny cameras that the Monks installed on their systems to help them monitor their body mechanics and ergonomic posture.

Zbigkrot performed in the eighty-fifth percentile of the Order, which was respectable enough. Lawrence had started there and had crept up and down as low as 70 and as high as 88, depending on how he was doing in the rest of his life. Zbigkrot was active in the gardens, both the big ones where they grew their produce and a little allotment garden where he indulged in baroque cross-breeding experiments, which were in vogue among the monks then.

The Securitat stream to which he'd added sixty-eight bytes was long gone, but it was the kind of thing that the Order handled on a routine basis: given the timing and other characteristics, Lawrence thought it was probably a stream of purchase data from hardware and grocery stores, to be inspected for unusual patterns that might indicate someone buying bomb ingredients. Zbigkrot had worked on this kind of data thousands of times before, six times just that day. He'd added the sixty-eight bytes and then left, invoking his right to do so at the lone gate. The gatekeeper on duty remembered him carrying a little rucksack, and mentioning that he was going to see his sister in New York.

Zbigkrot once had a sister in New York — that much could be ascertained. Anja Krotoski had lived on 23rd Street in a co-op near Lexington. But that had been four years previous, when he'd joined the Order, and she wasn't