Manifestations by David M. Henley Read Free Book Online

kit for his birthday and they’d built it together over two nights, just so his son could make his model cities. Windsor Antram, the father, was forty-six years old, partnered to Eliza Barthes, though Garry’s mother was a woman called Jasmin Tosche, who was now with a man who spent most of his time in the Cape. They hadn’t had any contact with him in weeks and Garry’s mother was becoming distraught.
     
    Zach hated looking at the lives of other children and redirected his attention. The thing about the mother’s partner disappearing interested him but if he looked through any information connected with Atlantic a flag would go up and he’d have to explain to Mister Lizney what his interest was. The Cape was a no-go zone.
     
    What is my teacher up to now? he wondered. Now that his bugs had been disabled he had to watch from the outside. Zach tuned to the omnipoles near his teacher’s residence and watched. Omnipoles were everywhere in the WU and some people joked that they were the real civilisation and we humans just ran amongst them; they were regularly spaced streetlights, Weave nodes, and held an array of passive sensors and inductive power coils. There were four poles in proximity to Lizney’s home and Zach had each of them adding their data directly to his own stream for processing.
     
    The light in Lizney’s unit went out. A woman rode past on a bicycle. Zach sat and waited, but nothing more happened.
     
    So why does a man like Lizney not have a symbiot? Belief system, impairment or because he had a negative assessment from the ups? What exactly was a ‘negative assessment’? How did one get ‘negatively assessed’? Technically, he knew that the Will could restrict someone’s activities if they deemed them counter to the Will, but in reality he couldn’t see how this would ever apply to a person.
     
    He scanned through the Weave and compiled a better definition: when the actions of a given Citizen are deemed to be of negative effect to the World Union. It was a common phrase that meant little; Citizens had actions denied all the time, every day. But what kind of action would the Will decide was such a threat as to deny a person a commonplace item like a symbiot?
     
    Of the sample cases he looked through, there was nothing like it. Unless of course he just couldn’t access such cases. There was lots of data behind the Lizney wall he couldn’t see. As he was only thirteen, the Will determined that not all information would be available to him. This would repeal as he got older, and when he became a Citizen and gained more value.
     
    It didn’t make any sense anyway. If Lizney was a malefactor, and the Will was denying him a symbiot, surely such an untrustable man wouldn’t be allowed in charge of twenty impressionable children?
     
    Maybe it was privacy. Zach didn’t really know what that was. It was something a lot of older people spoke of. They didn’t see the Weave as he did, didn’t always have their streams on. A stream to him was just like clothing, you always wore it. To be out of contact with the Weave, to have part of your life go unrec, was a real anxiety for him. He couldn’t wait to get a symbiot.
     
    Zach felt himself fading into sleep, his helmet automatically starting to pull him out. He had to stay awake and he demersed just enough to reach into his bag for the stimulants he had been sneakily collecting. He needed something.
     
    He spent the rest of the night pinging around as fast and randomly as he could. He couldn’t concentrate enough to read. He fixed three broken links all by himself that were easily corroborated and tagged for implementation.
     
    The WU was working towards a day when the information on the Weave would be cross-referenced and sacrosanct; parity. In the future, Miz Maxwell told him, there might not be a need for scouts to look for errata, as it would be impossible to enter false information.
     
    Bronwyn was clearing the kitchen when he clicked off