Blackheath
***
The screen glowed dimly, but it seemed to him a beacon in the darkened offices. He waited impatiently while the software scrolled through the files, searching. Outside the office tower windows, the city stretched out, suburbs lapping the horizon. Somewhere out there she was waiting. In the street? Locked up in a Soul centre, awaiting implantation? Maybe it was too late… but it was never too late.
His other hand played with a scrap of paper, folding and unfolding it, casting a glance over the words written there.
_
An intellectual hatred is the worst.
_
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
Yanni had pressed the words into his hands when he left, saying:
"I cannot give you my library but… please, return whenever you miss it."
He had read the words then and there while the truck grumbled fretfully, waiting for him to get on.
"Do you know what they are from?" Yanni asked, his eyes penetrating and inescapable.
"A prayer for my daughter…," Blackheath murmured quietly, his face tight, "and… that one where the rebels got hung." Yeats again. The scrap of paper disturbed naggingly. He couldn't answer the question. He felt he ought to be able to, but he couldn't. He didn't like Yanni's choice, putting those two poems together, like he was saying that Blackheath was the cause of his own problems, that he had endangered his daughter with his actions. But maybe he was reading too much into it, sensitized to anything about daughters because he hadn't seen his own in so long.
A joyful electronic ping signaled he had found it, bringing him back abruptly from the glaring sun of the memories to the dark blue quiet of the office. Photo recognition software.
He upload his own photo from the Seeker database and configured the parameters til the file was accepted. His face stared back at him from the screen, now labeled Jack Rankine. It was not the Jack Rankine that any human who had met him would recognize, but computers recognized what they were told to. And now they would not recognize him.
It was a useless deception in this country, as any person who had met him would not be fooled. His face, let alone his name, was still a death warrant here, wanted for a curling list of offences in the undeclared war on Souls.
But international borders were open to Jack Rankine.