The Forever Watch

[sawyl]

Following up on one of Adrian Tchaikovsky's suggestions in a recent Tor piece, I decided to bump David Ramirez' The Forever Watch to the top of my reading list. Set on a vast generation starship called the Noah, midway through its centuries-long journey to the distant planet of Canaan, it follows City Planning Administrator Hana Dempsey and policeman Leon Barrens as they try to solve a puzzling mystery that blows up into a vast conspiracy.

Awakening after months in a coma as part of her Breeding Duty, Hana Dempsey feels a strange sense of loss that cuts through the tranquillisers. The Behaviouralist she sees before leaving the clinic assures her this is normal spill over from the telepathic bond with her unseen child and discharges her without any further concerns. But even after returning to her normal life as a planner, Hana can't shake the feeling that something is badly wrong so when her friend Barrens asks for her help with an intriguing cold crime, she is only too willing to help.

In the early stages of the book we get a great deal of information dumped on us about the strange world aboard the Noah and its post-human inhabitants. Prompted by her face in the mirror, Hana's first response after waking is to reminisce about the first time she saw herself after the installation of her implants. These pervade her brain and some of her body, fanning out over her face, overlaying parts of it with chrome in keeping with her particular abilities, most of which have an aura of magic about them.

Thus Hana is an extremely gifted telekinetic, with some ability to read and manipulate the thoughts of others, whose day job involves the mental manipulation of plastech, a substance that can be turned into almost anything by a person with sufficient willpower and fine control. Barrens, in total contrast, is a classic bruiser who lacks most of Hana's remote skills but whose ability to tailor his metabolism and biochemistry makes him preternaturally swift and strong. And while both, like everyone aboard the Noah to some degree, have internal reserves of psionics that they can call on through their implants, use of amplifiers that tap into the fields of energy that flow through the ship to the point where their abilities become so great that Hana is able to construct an entire apartment building on her own in an afternoon.

The puzzle part of the plot begins with a memory: Barrens arriving at the apartment of a former colleague where, after breaking the door down, he finds his mentor dead and gruesomely dismembered, presumably after his cold case investigation into the Mincemeat killer made too much progress. Intrigued by the puzzle and brought together by the sharing of the memory, Hana embarks on an affair with Barrens, much to the disapproval of her friends, working with him to develop a self-modifying computer program to search the Nth Web, the Noah's version of the internet, for information about the murderer.

Through Hana's eyes and through the reactions of her friends, we get a very clear feeling for just how calcified and stratified society is on the Noah. Hana, as one of the ruling class — she is mission-critical but failed to be selected for the elite Command Officer School, possibly as a result of oversleeping on the day of her data structures exam — is essentially a bureaucrat spending much of her time working on reports for projects which promise fractional improvements on the efficiency of the Noah's already highly optimised systems, while socialising with friends from her college days, all of whom occupy the same sort of rarified levels in different ministries.

Barrens, as cop and a bruiser, is close to blue collar and consequently the subject of much in the way of snobbish mockery on the part of Hana's school friends. And despite everything, his job too seems to be curiously routine: crimes are solved by reading perfect machine memories from peoples' implants and, when the perpetrators are identified, sending them off for Adjustment by a Behaviouralist — essentially a psionic form of brainwashing that runs the spectrum, starting with the minor tweaking of motivations and going all the way up to a psychic lobotomy that leaves the person not much more than a puppet. And on the rare occasion when a crime can't be solved immediately, all the police have to do is wait for the criminal to die and wait for their memories are uploaded to cold case database.

As the Barrens' and Hana's pursuit of the killer gathers pace, their sprawling data-mining program, which they nickname the Monster, starts to uncover a whole range of dirty secrets during its search for information on Mincemeat. They soon learn that the killings go back much further than anyone thought and that the deaths appear to be linked to strange grey monsters seen haunting the Noah's sewers. They discover that the early retirement program, which appears to be largely random with some people being pensioned off almost as soon as their careers have begun, may be being used by the sinister Ministry of Information as a cover for something else.

The Forever Watch is an exciting mix of hard SF — Ramirez is very good on the details of networking technology and computer programs — with weird almost psychic psionic powers added in for good measure. The Brave New World society of the Noah is well imagined and, in keeping with Huxley, obviously intended to keep its inhabitants passive and busy for the duration of the voyage. Unlike Huxley, Ramirez intrusion comes from within rather than without in the form of the Mincemeat murderer, only for the killer to turn out to be the tip of a very large iceberg.

While there are some moments that don't quite convince — I thought Hana's discovery of the Noah's origins might have provoked a slightly more substantial reaction than simple casual acceptance — I liked the book very much and it hit many of my favourite buttons. I'm definitely going to watch out for Ramirez next novel and I think I'll probably be adding Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time to my to-read list too.