Windows onto Mirrors

This took me a couple of days to hash out, hence my lack of updating. I don't know why the titular phrase stuck with me, but I liked the image, so there. It's a longer piece again, actually counts as a short story.
Are you shocked? I was shocked.
Anyway...

They look out at him, the multitude, through a window onto mirrors. There eyes burned with cold scorn at his dirty jeans, his stained shirt, the slush of melting snow seeping through the holes in his left shoe. You're better than this, they say to him, what have you done to yourself? How could you do it to all of us?
He has no answers, I didn't mean...it wasn't my fault. His face burns at his hollow, silent, protest. Explanations and excuses chase each other around his brain, grow dizzy and meaningless, fall down only to be resurrected and set again to running.
He turns from the window, running from his reflections in the glass. He has things to do.
There are cameras everywhere these days, tracking, panning, prying. Instinctively he keeps his head and face in constant motion to baffle facial recognition software even as he fights against the wind that whips down the dirty downtown street.
As he passes unseen and unseeing through the entertainment district, past neon flares and clubs advertising all manner of illicit pleasures (so long as one was not a Citizen or shareholder), he is pursued by ghosts. They appear in darkened windows and puddles of melting snow, reminders of the events of the past three months clamoring for attention. Quiet, he assures them, it will be over soon, You will be at peace.
The setting sun imparts a red tint to the scene and he has trouble shaking the impression that he is trudging through ankle deep blood. His foot shattered a puddle that called to mind the spreading stain on the pavement outside his apartment building. He has been troubled by the flash backs since he started running, since he killed the Accountant and his life came apart at the seams.
He had not intended to kill her, the sharp featured woman, he was an upstanding Citizen, a mid-ranking member of the Remembrance Office. He wrote copy for parts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He had a registered companion of four years, and if they didn't have sex, if instead he could be found from time to time in prole bars, well, that was his own lookout. It's not like he was hurting anyone.
It was Steven that placed the call that brought him to the attention of the Office of Accounting. The bastard had gotten a promotion for it, and two weeks ago he too had vanished at last. That memory provoked a sort of grim satisfaction for him, he knew how futile revenge was, knew that the abduction had been an unnecessary risk and expenditure of resources, but seeing him muscled into the back room of the Excelsior between two UnAccounted women had been altogether satisfying.
The Accountant had been waiting for him when he got back from work. His RC had been “Remanded for Auditing” already and his apartment torn apart. He had whistled while walking from the tube stop three blocks from his home, but his heart had dropped when he saw the door. The moment he realized that his front door was standing ajar and that all the lights were out he had several realizations; the uncomfortably bland delivery truck that he had seen twice since getting off of the tube must be following him, it probably contained a close support team, Steve's cryptic comments at the mornings meeting came back to him in force, and the call from home that had rung twice before dropping became the last attempts of a close friend to warn him of the danger.
By the time he made the last of these connections he was at his door and it was far to late to run. The delivery truck had turned onto his street and he could hear it trundling up to the front of his building when the emotionless, alto, voice came from his apartment. “Mr. Maxwell Hubert Carpenter?”
With one hand he pushed open the door, “Yes?”
“Enter.”
“It's my apartment, Mrs... whoever you are.” the accountant had her back to the western facing main windows and her face was cast in shadow.
“That's what I'm here to determine Carpenter. Please close the door, put your hands on the table and tell me about yourself. Oh, and one more thing,” she placed a small black box on the table, it had three lights on it, and a toggle switch; the light that was currently active was yellow, “this is you. All of your records, all of your money, all traces of Citizen Maxwell Carpenter come down to this box. Currently the box is in stasis mode, you are frozen. Depending on the outcome of this interview I will either set it back to broadcast mode and you will rejoin the living or I will set it to cleanse. If that happens all record of you will be deleted, your works will be re-attributed to real authors and everything that you own will return to the companies central inventory for redeployment.
“In all the ways that matter to the rest of the world not only will you cease to exist, you will have never existed. The only people who will know any different are you, the attendants of room two-oh-three, and myself.
“I'm no sadist, I assure you that two of the three of us will very much regret your state of continued existence. So, talk to me.” She folded her hands in front of her sharp green uniform, leaving the box on the table as a reminder of the imbalance of power.
Maxwell cleared his throat as he placed his hands on the table and found himself greatly desiring a class of water, “I'm, ah, a writer with the Remembrance Office up in Northbranch. I specialize in the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. I won two awards for my Interactive script based on the Great Depression where I exposed the role that communist agitators played in the crash.
“I purchased my Citizenship at auction on my eighteenth birthday using shares I inherited from my great Uncle as security. In the past seven years I have never failed to make payment and I have almost entirely paid down that debt. I have also expanded my stake in the Company between stock bonuses and reinvestment of capital. My current stake is worth, at last check, fourteen thousand dollars.” surely his tongue was not normally this large...
“I know all this, your stake is not at issue. We have received word that you are engaged in activities unbecoming of a Citizen and a shareholder and likely to tarnish the reputation of the Company.
“We have investigated these allegations and found adequate evidence for a confident termination. We do not take this decision lightly, that's why I'm here after all, and why the gentlemen with guns are in the truck outside.” he found it impossible to keep the look of shock and horror from his face, “Now, before you say anything more please examine this,” from an interior breast pocket of her uniform she drew a rolled up piece of SmartPaper™, this snapped open and came to life with a touch and the Accountant pushed it across the table.
Carpenter navigated through the papers contents and felt sick. There were pictures of him dancing at several clubs, including the infamous Kellar, video clips of him singing karaoke and drunkenly railing against the unfairness of the corporate system, and one folder dedicated to him and Tarrance.
“We will be picking up your... plaything, next. He has been under surveillance for two and a half weeks.”
“He's a prole, what do you care who he sleeps with?” desperation tinged his voice.
“He will be charged with undermining the proper operation of the Company. We should be able to reach some sort of solution through arbitration, likely amounting to no more than chemical castration and a modest fine.”
Maxwell crumpled the SmartPaper™ in his right hand, drew a rattling breath, and vaulted the table. He was not a military man, nor was he a terribly large one, but he kept in excellent shape and one of his early lovers, Trey, had made him take up Capoeira.
His first kick took the Accountant by surprise and sent her reeling from the chair, his second sent flying the gun that she had begun to draw, she twisted out of the way of the third and won her feet with her back to the picture window.
“If you hurt me, we will find you.” she assumed a broad stance, her hands held open, elbows cocked, and excellent defensive position against all typical angles of attack but not one that helped deflect a hooking kick to the back of her knee, or the subsequent kick from the floor that took her off her feet and sent her flying backwards out the window.
“Then it's a good thing I don't exist.” said Carpenter, between pants, as he flicked the switch on the box to cleanse. The yellow light winked out a red one flashed three times, and the box went dead.
The man that the shadows don't call Maxwell starts from his reverie as an overladen dump truck takes a turn too quickly and sprays him with lukewarm slush. He checks the street signs against his mental map of the city, a map developed over a lifetime of residence, and perfected in the crucible of the hunt. He ducks down a side street, knowing that he can slip into an alley not far from here that as an easily accessible fire escape. He would rather enter the building that is his destination via the roof than the front door. He's close now, to close to risk the one weapon that he holds before he can fire it.
His own eyes leer at him from the cracked window of an abandoned storefront and he flinches from their gaze. He walks faster, running out of time.
He's been running out of time since his name died. In the moments that followed the death of the Accountant and the purging of Maxwell Hubert Carpenter he moved on pure adrenalin. He picked up the discarded pistol (a compact auto-needler, highly illegal, extremely deadly, and frighteningly indiscriminate) and tucked it into the back of his waistband, carefully making sure that the safety was on. He threw a blue-gray pea coat about his shoulders, grabbed a fedora and matching scarf and, once suitably attired, made his way to the front door of the building.
He had no plan, he only knew that there was a squad of company enforcers just now reacting to the death of their immediate superior. He had the vague idea that he could somehow take advantage of that chaos to affect an escape.
He almost lost his nerve when he turned to descend the last flight of stairs into the lobby as the front doors imploded in a dangerous hail of splinters, followed by a half dozen men and women in the green on green combat armor of the Company. By the time he realized what had happened two of them were charging up the stairs; on instinct he flattened himself into the corner and they passed him by. As the remaining security-men fanned out to occupy the lobby he steeled his nerves and walked, casually but with purpose, through the remains of the front door.
He spent that first night in the tube tunnels. No computers would open for a ghost, they were designed that way, and he couldn't know which of his friends had been compromised and which would take him in. He spent the first day of his death dodging trains and maintenance crews, and exploring the limits of his one piece of technology.
This particular SmartPaper™ was more sophisticated than the typical day-planer, text-messaging models. Furthermore, for at least a short while it was logged in under the name and credentials of a mid level Accountant, with all the access that this implied. He was able to keep abreast of the search that way, as well as performing some basic informational sabotage.
He spent the second night cursing the fact that he had dedicated his intellectual energies to creative pursuits at the expense of the technical.
By the end of the week he had been found, not by his hunters, but by his fellow ghosts. They called themselves the UnAccounted. They were outcasts. Some, like him, had their Citizenships terminated do to “deviant activities” or unapproved talk. Others had been born off the grid and had never entered the system, while still others decided, at some point, to dodge the annual census.
They were not an organization so much as a loosely knit movement, but they shared information quickly and accurately and so it was not long after the death of the Citizen Carpenter that they were looking for his fleshy survivor. They had two advantages over the government bloodhounds, one is that a few of their number remembered their own escapes and could therefore predict his actions, and two they did not have to contend with the campaign of misinformation propagated from a rogue piece of SmartPaper™.
As soon as he found out that these people existed the man who was Maxwell couldn't shake the idea that, just perhaps, he could put his unique skills to use after all. He began to write, to interview the UnAccounted. He believed that by telling the stories of the exceptional ones, those who had been given the gift of impossible circumstances, that he could open the eyes of the proletariat. He even hoped that he might be able to attract the attention of the Civilians. He had to learn to write the truth, not the Company line, and he had to write on the run.
On a dozen occasions he was almost caught. These night time runs and desperate firefights beneath the city, or across its rooftops, wore him down. He is tired, he is broken, but he knows that the book is as done as it will ever be. Soon he can vanish, soon he can let his body follow his name to the grave, but until the stories of the UnAccounted are published he dares not sleep too long or too heavily.
There are three copies of the book, all of them hand written on scavenged paper. One rests none to peacefully at the bottom of a small satchel that the man carries with him now, one is underground and five miles away, by the river in a bunker left over from the last war; that copy is guarded by twenty men and women. The final copy has been laboriously pasted together between the covers of a King James bible and rests in the hands of an itinerant street preacher, the former son of a vice president of the Company he has flown under the radar for sixteen years by being more than half mad. He was thrilled to have a new gospel to preach.
The UnAccounted make potent allies in many ways; they know the city's nooks and crannies better than anyone else, they are absolutely loyal to one another (if for no other reason than that dead men tell no secrets), and they've lived hard long enough that they have become diamond or died. He saw a ninety pound teenage girl take on two armed enforcers and come out on top through sheer ferocity. Where they are not able to help is in interfacing with Civilians, or even well established proles. They have contacts in a number of prole bars and clubs, and they are insinuated with the artistic community, but not a one of them can access the Company 'net.
That is why he is dodging his own reflection and braving the late February weather on this, most fortuitous of evenings. His objective is a building that happens to be seated atop a convergence of the fiber-optic infrastructure on which the 'net runs. This is not, in and of itself, remarkable. Any number of buildings are similarly situated. What's different about this one is that it is under the control of the proles, and there is a group of them that have excavated the buried cables and spliced in their own.
They call themselves Daybreak! and try to act as a counterpoint to the Remembrance Office and the Advertising Department, the two wings of the Company propaganda machine. That they have been able to operate for close to four years without the violent reprisal of the Company is a testament to three factors, the technical abilities of the staff, the bureaucratic entanglements that arise in the Company whenever there is a conflict of jurisdiction (in this case Maintenance, Accounting, and IT Services all want control of the case), and not least the very limited readership that they actually have.
It's the last fact that worries the man who hopes to change the world as he deftly scales a fire escape and pauses to get back his bearings and his breath. He flits across the rooftops, melding himself to the shadows and the contours of low walls. His goal is a brownstone several blocks from his current position, and he makes it without terrible difficulty; more importantly, he makes it without being seen.
He wins the roof with a final leap and makes his way to the access hatch in its center, he has been assured that it is unlocked but he brought a set of picks anyway. He has gained a visceral understanding of the value of being prepared for all eventualities.
As it turns out they aren't needed, the trap door is hanging open, the lock is broken.
He wants to turn back, wants to run, to vanish again, but he finds himself looking, again, through a window onto mirrors. He is reflected in the lives encapsulated by his book, and with each reflection he has grown less distinct, less human, less him. He hopes that he can make up for in numbers what he lacks in solidity.
He has an army of angry Commissars at his back. He drops through the door and into the hands of fate.
The building is blanketed in the hush of a multitude keeping very pointedly silent. His footsteps echo down the corridors, not muffled by the threadbare carpeting. He trails one hand on the wall as he moves forward as only one in maybe three lights seems to be working. Twice he almost stumbles over dead bodies before he truly sees that they are there.
By the time he makes it to the basement he wishes someone would shoot at him already. He brought the needler tonight, he still has most of a clip because one of the first pieces of advice he was given was to find a less unique weapon. If he's caught tonight before he completes his task he wants the best available firepower, and if he is successful he will have done his duty and will no longer care. He has the gun held at the ready, he still thinks that it is far too light for something so deadly.
The basement door is closed and locked, but so riddled with bullet holes as to make it passable regardless. He makes his way cautiously down a flight of rickety wooden stairs, his heart beating so loudly that he worries that if he does run into anyone he won't hear them until its too late.
The basement is a charnel house. There was some concerted resistance here, and there are the bodies of several enforcers and one man in a silver trimmed Company uniform, indicating that he was at least a middle manager, mixed in with the bodies of five proles. The Daybreak! set up was similarly gutted, half the terminals at least had bullet holes in them and wires were scattered like so many dead snakes, slaughtered upon emerging for the first time from their winter huddles.
He caught a glimpse of his reflection in a bit of broken glass. It was laughing at him. He shot it, and got to work.
He worked with the fevered energy of someone left with only maddest of hopes, digging through the computers, salvaging a cable here, a monitor there, that tower and one router. He plugged them together, praying all the while that he would get it right. He dragged the middle manager over to his answer to Frankenstein's monster and logged on using his fingerprints and a sample of his DNA.
It took him into the early morning to type up the book, and so involved was he in preparing it for posting that he did not here the sounds of feet on the stairs. The cocking of a hammer, the racking of a slide, these sounds too were subsumed by his frantic keyboard work.
When the cold end of the guns barrel pressed against the back of his head he didn't turn around. Instead he muttered something under his breath.
“What was that?” the smooth alto voice was even colder than when he heard it last and undercut by a metallic quality.
“I said, about time you tracked me down.” he didn't move his head or his body, but he very slowly began to execute a series of keyboard shortcuts, timing it carefully he began to speak again, “It's just a shame, really, that you couldn't have held off just a little longer.”
“Oh yes, I'm sure you would have liked the chance to get your libel on Our network.”
“No, it's just that I had promised some friends of mine that they should one day get to meet you.”
“Is that supposed to be some sort of threat? It's all over for you.”
“Hardly, as a matter of fact,” he executed one last key stroke, “It has just begun.”
The report of the gun echoed around the small cement walled room, and where his head had been there was only a window. A window onto mirrors.