“Can I see it?” I asked, walking through her door.
I spotted Laura’s other project on the wall – a row of pictures, their names and positions written on them in marker, alongside other information Laura dug up. Sovereign’s CEO, Hugo Fischer, sat above everyone else. The next row down were people who worked in their Berlin biotech department – Tobias Kraus, financial officer for R&D; Eduard Winkler, project manager of the biotech interfaces division; Lukas Zimmermann, communications director of the biotech department; Ilse Richter, the top lawyer and bioethicist working for Sovereign’s biotech department; and Nina Frank, the lead cryogenecist working for Sovereign’s biotech facilities.
The third row had three papers with giant question marks on them. Placeholders for the people who interrogated Laura after she was brought back. She couldn’t remember their faces or find anything about them online. All it said for their other information was that there was a man with thick lips and a woman with fidgety hands who both spoke German with northern accents and the other a balding man with a birth mark who spoke German with what Laura guessed was either an Austrian or Swiss accent.
I turned back to Laura. She climbed to her feet, movements stiffened by injuries, and held up her artwork. The pattern of folded and twisted papers spiraling and looping in and out of each other had both a crude simplicity and elegant complexity all at once. This one had an asymmetry, where the pattern seemed to evolve from one end of the helical superstructure to the other.
“That’s pretty amazing,” I said, gently taking it from her.
She shrugged, walking over to her chest-of-drawers, “it’s nice now that I can use good material rather than what I just had laying around.”
“This one is different than your others,” I said, scrutinizing the pattern, “it doesn’t have the same symmetry.”
“I listened to classical Indian music while making this one,” she said, picking up the bottle of lotion she got from the Value Shop before turning to look at me, “gave me a different inspiration.”
I laughed, “you should branch out into other types of music to see what you can come up with.”
“I was thinking the same,” she said, squirting some of the lotion into one hand, “it can’t all be nineties grunge.”
“You’re really enjoying this art thing, huh?”
She nodded slowly as she spread it onto her burned arm, “when I start working on it, I can forget about how shitty and tired I feel. I just focus and nothing else matters for a while.”
“Distractions,” I agreed, the vanilla smell reaching my nose, “I know a thing or two about that.”
“Is anything going on today?” she asked, setting the bottle back down.
“Masaru and I are doing the second episode of the podcast,” I said.
“Something more lighthearted this time?” she asked, taking her artwork back from me.
I grunted, “I hope so. We’re starting early, so I have to get going.”
“Okay,” she said, sitting back down in the wooden chair.
“I’ll come up and work on my art later today,” I said.
She glanced at me and said, “sure,” before lowering her gaze and resuming work.
When I got downstairs, the guests were already there, ready to go. We got things setup and Masaru talked to Deidre and John Waters.
“I’m glad you two could make it,” Masaru said, smiling.
“Glad to be here,” John said.
“Thanks for having us,” Deidre added.
“You two must be really busy these days,” Masaru said.
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Deidre said.
“The kids can be quite the hand full,” John said, “it’s why we never had kids of our own. We both work quite a bit.”
“I thought my daughter Yuki could be quite a hand full,” Masaru said, “I can’t imagine going from zero to twenty-nine kids in just a few months.”
“It’s been an interesting challenge,” Deidre said, “my sister Teagan just moved back from Cheyenne to help out. Of course, she has her own son, so that just added another one to the mix.”
“What’s his name?” Masaru asked.
“Andrew,” Deidre said, “he’s eleven.”
“He’s a good kid,” John said, “he helps out.”
“We actually get a lot of help,” Deidre said, “from Teagan. From Liana. From the older kids.”
“But especially from everyone’s generosity,” John said.
“Yes,” Deidre nodded, “people have been so amazing. The donations. The prayers. Its all been so wonderful. I don’t know how we could ever thank people enough.”
The podcast continued on for some time, mostly focusing on the strange day-to-day aspects of the Waters’ life now. They touched on the attachment they feel toward the children, but that they were happy so many people were interested in adopting them. They talked about how they had enrolled the kids who were ready for it in school. After about an hour and a half, the podcast finished and the guests left.
Before going back upstairs to work on my art with Laura, I brought food to the shed Darren occupied. Akira was against letting him even stay in the shed, much less letting him in the house. She reluctantly acquiesced to the shed, rationalizing it as a way to keep an eye on him.
I found Darren in his usual spot, sitting in a faded, tattered recliner placed awkwardly in the middle of the single room, surrounded by tools and yard work equipment. The worn baseball cap clutching his head, faded jeans and flannel shirt gave him the rural look I imagined he had cultivated before getting into human trafficking.
“Staying cool back here?” I asked after he shouted for me to come in.
Darren smirked up at me from the recliner, “winduh unit runs all day. Lucky thing bout this drought is ya get plenty’uh sun on the panels.”
“I imagine it’s not so lucky when you’re cutting the grass,” I said.
He shrugged, bringing a bottle of beer to his lips and taking a sip. “Used’uh be a farmer. Takin’ care uva lawn ain’t a thing.”
“You leaving for another reconnaissance mission tomorrow?” I asked, setting the microwave meals down on the counter.
“That’s the plan,” he said as I strode out in front of him, “I think we gotta good sense’uh their comin’s and goin’s.”
“LoC Security thinking of employing you anytime soon?”
“Don’t reckon they would,” he said, “not with my history.”
“But it’s that background they want for this, isn’t it,” I said.
He turned away, a solemn look on his face. “I know there ain’t any makin’ up for what I done. Not in a thousand years. But I’d rather put what I done ta good use than sit around mopin’ about it.”
“Hey, I’m not one to judge anyone,” I said, “all of us has shit in our past we’re not proud of.”
“Yeah, but human trafficking?” Darren asked, looking up at me again, “I was mighty fuckin’ desperate, but I never imagined I could sink that low.”
“I’d actually like to ask you some more information about that,” I said.
Darren gave a weak shrug, “open book.”
“You said you had some regular customers there.”
“Yeah…”
“Could you tell me about any of them?” I asked.
“What d’ya wanna know?” he asked, “mostly pre-verts. Foreigner, but they paid CSA and PRA money.”
“Tell me about the ones that paid in PRA money.”
“Two of ‘em come ta mind,” he said, “one of ‘em was European. Dunno where from. Germany or somethin’ I reckon.”
“And the other?”
“Mexican, maybe?” he said, “I dunno, one uh’them Latin American countries.”
“Did he speak Spanish?”
“Spoke English,” Darren said, pausing a moment before pointing the index finger from his beer at me, “ya know what? I think he mighta been Brazilian, come ta think of it.”
“Do you know where
in the PRA he was stationed?”
“Somewhere round Chicago, I reckon,” he said, “or, what’s left’uh Chicago that ain’t taken by them Shift gangs.”
“Can you have LoC Security look into that for me?” I asked.
“Can I ask why?” he asked.
“Just trying to put the pieces together,” I said.
Darren nodded, “whatever I ken do ta help…ta help them kids.”
“Have you been over to see them?” I asked.
His eyes widened, “w-why on earth would they wanna see me?”
“Who knows, maybe some of them will forgive you,” I shrugged.
“Why would I deserve ta be forgiven?” Darren asked. “Akira’s right ta be mad at me. Ya’ll got yer ways of showin’ you ain’t about forgivin’ me. Masaru don’t talk ta me bout nothin’ ‘less he has to. Laura makes jokes. Akira’d throw a party on my grave if I keeled over now. I ain’t even gathered the courage ta beg God forgiveness yet. You seem ta be the only one that ain’t treatin’ me like dirt.”
I exhaled slowly. “I’m not saying I can forgive you for what you’ve done. And even if I did, my forgiveness wouldn’t mean a damn thing. I’m very aware of what people will do in desperate situations. Every person you see in the street is capable of what you did, given the right circumstances. And much worse. Every person that looks down their noses at you has just been lucky enough to have never had to cross that line.”
“How desperate folks gotta be ‘fore they do what I done?”
“People have done much worse for almost no reason at all,” I said, “the Nanjing massacre. The Mongol sacks of Zhongdu and Baghdad. The Yangzhou massacre. The sack of Magdeburg. Too many others to name. Senseless violence. And all for nothing.”
Darren stared at me wide eyed. “Never heard uva lotta those thangs, but I reckon I know whatchyer gettin’ at.”
I forced a smile. The things I had named off were only some of the events I’d actually lived through – on either side of the slaughter. Thinking back on them, the idea that people barely know that those events even took place almost made me sick to my stomach. Thousands of lives snuffed out or ruined and people couldn’t even bother to find out that it happened at all.
“If you haven’t heard of those things after only a hundred years for some of them,” I said, “then what you did will be forgotten about within five.”
“I won’t forget,” Darren said.
“No, you won’t,” I said, “as far as I’m concerned, my way of punishing you is far worse than what any of them are doing. I’m not going to tell you that you’re a piece of shit. You’ll tell yourself that enough as you dwell on your remorse. What I’m not going to tell you is that things will never get better. It won’t. It will always hurt. Forever. That’s why you need to see those children. Not to seek forgiveness or absolution. Not to assure them that you’ll make it up to them if you have to spend the rest of your life doing it. But so you can see their faces. And believe me, they will haunt you. In your sleep. On the toilet. Lying awake at night. While you’re sitting alone, drinking a beer. At your own wedding. In the eyes of your own children. And even on your death bed. Those kids will always be there. Forever.”
Darren sat quiet for a while, looking down at the beer in his hand, before saying, “Maybe…when I get back from recon, I’ll go up ‘n see them kids.”
I nodded, but said nothing as I turned and walked out the door.
Some things you just won’t forget. And others you won’t let yourself forget.
The next day Darren had already left by the time I awoke. Masaru and I did another podcast, this time interviewing the Cortez business owner who was the victim of both bombings. She was content to go on record saying she didn’t believe it was an attack by the forty-eights, the way CSA media tried to portray it. Masaru wanted to get the context of everything from her perspective.
“I was actually at home when it happened,” the middle-aged woman named Bita said, only a hint of Indian accent in her voice. She had dark skin, starting to wrinkle at the corners of her eyes and mouth, long black hair pulled back in a ponytail with just a few streaks of gray in it, and a cheery smile despite the misfortune that had befallen her.
“And you had just opened these stores?” Masaru asked.
She shook her head, sighing “My son and I just moved here from Minnesota about a year ago.”
“Why here, if you don’t mind my asking? Isn’t Minnesota part of the PRA?”
Bita chuckled, “not under the Devolution Act. But without the federal government able to do anything, the PRA has pretty much taken over.”
“But it got especially bad a few years ago?”
“It was when Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho formed The Republic,” Bita said, “all three states passed a secession referendum a while before that, but kept bickering about where to go from there. After The Republic ratified their new constitution, the PRA got worried about other states following suit and setup shop in Minnesota. That’s when Marianne Worth was assassinated. The assassin was allegedly a Minnesota business owner. And depending who you ask, they had CSA sympathies. The CSA says he was the son of a Somali refugee.” Bita shrugged. “I don’t know that we’ll ever find out the real truth, but what matters is how the PRA used it to further pursue their new fantasy of autarky.”
“You were living there for almost twenty years, though,” Masaru said, “what specifically did the PRA do that made you want to move out here?”
This time she let out a full laugh before saying, “once Chairman Gibson came to power, they stopped all that open border nonsense. They didn’t want foreign owned businesses around anymore. My son and I ran five franchise coffee shops – Bitter Brews of Bengal – in Duluth. The parent company is based in India. It’s really not a big company. My husband’s father worked for the man that founded it when it was just a single store in Kolkata. But the bureaucrat that called us to his office to tell us about all the new expenses and hoops I had to jump through actually started prattling on about our business being a form of imperialism. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
“Imperialism? How so?”
“He said that foreign companies – in other words, companies other than PRA state owned companies – that still follow the profit-oriented business model were going to take jobs from people who were employed by PRA subsidized worker-owned businesses. They said what we were doing was legal, but only if we paid all the fees and taxes and tariffs and whatever else they could throw at us. We would have to increase our wages by almost fivefold, and get special licenses and permits that needed to be reviewed every four months.”
“They squeezed you out economically,” Masaru said.
“That’s a much more concise way of putting it,” Bita said.
“And their open borders policy?” Masaru asked.
Bita scoffed. “Poof. Gone. Chairwoman Worth came to power on an open border platform. Welcome in all the poor and downtrodden of the world and all that. It was successful, in that regard. Lots of poor and displaced from the rest of the country moved there. It was a propaganda win – Chairwoman Worth could point to the fact that more people were moving in than leaving, despite the fact that it wasn’t by much.”
“Gibson doesn’t talk much about open borders one way or the other, from what I can tell,” Masaru said.
Bita chuckled. “It was a huge brain-drain. The PRA happily persecuted anyone it saw as historical enemies of the people, namely the rich and white men. The PRA put them in registries, confiscated property, and treated them like second class citizens. Forced them to take things like propranolol and other drugs that were supposed to reduce racist tendencies. Some were forcefully castrated or had their children taken by the state. Many of them left, along with others who hated the policies. Enormous government programs along with the constant influx of poor and uneducated people quickly became an economic catastrophe. Worth kept up with the open border rhetoric while slowly closing them off. Gibson squashed the poli
cy altogether after Chairwoman Worth was assassinated. The PRA is now one of the most isolated places in the world.”
“Is that why you decided to come to the LoC?” Masaru asked.
“We actually thought about going to Montana,” she said, “a lot of people were excited about their new constitution. My son and I actually planned to go there using the LoC to get out of a bunch of paperwork needed to leave the PRA after Gibson came to power. My son knew someone who lived out here. Said Cortez was a great place for new businesses with a lot of the people from down south fleeing the drought. So, we ended up staying.”
“Still pretty dry here, though, isn’t it?” Masaru chuckled.
Bita chuckled, “That’s for sure. But when we looked into Montana, we found out that there’s all kinds of legal stuff involved. Lots of documents and fees just to move there from the PRA. It’s a concession the Republic’s new government had to make to keep the PRA from meddling too much. At the time it was easier to get permission to come to the LoC, although I think they’ve since banned emigration here altogether.”
“And when you moved here you opened another store for that same coffee shop company,” Masaru said.
“We opened a single coffee shop at first,” Bita said, “we got some calls from the accounts manager in India asking why we hadn’t expanded,” she grinned, “I was confused about that. I said Cortez was growing, but it was still a pretty small town. My son finally told me that they wanted us to start selling things that a coffee shop doesn’t usually sell.”
Masaru grinned, “Headquarters was too modest to come out and say they wanted you to sell weed and liquor in your coffee shop?”
Bita laughed. “As soon as we added that to our selection, it wasn’t long until we were able to open two more.”
“It’s been pretty successful then?” Masaru asked.
“Up until two of my three shops were destroyed,” she said.
“What was that day like for you?”
Bita paused a moment before saying, “I heard the bangs. It shook my entire house. When I looked out my window, I could see smoke rising. I knew immediately that at least the one closest to me was one of mine, but I had no idea they would blow up two of them. I mean, why me, right? But I got the call from the LoC Security person telling me that two of my places had been blown up.”
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