Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Right. Exactly. Which, when I mentioned it to 22, he gave me this look like I have no idea what the fuck I’m blathering about. So wherever 08 was, it sure wasn’t there. And now he’s killed in action? With no mention in the news of him even seeing action since, what? Last fall? It doesn’t add up.”

  I stare at the ceiling a minute. This is coming out all wrong. Supposition, not motivation. I don’t know how to make her understand. I don’t know how to make her see how it’s personal. I could say, It could have been us they kept and changed. I could say, When the last flare goes up, who will they take next? She knows all that already. I have to dig deeper.

  Personal isn’t exactly my area of expertise.

  But I have to try.

  “The next flare is either 06 or 22,” I say. “They trusted me, Jessa. 22 trusted me. Ever since I was a kid, that’s, like, all I’ve ever wanted. I don’t even know why. I know it doesn’t make sense to you.” A little laugh coughs out of me. “If it’s any consolation, it doesn’t make sense to me, either. It’s—”

  “It’s love, dumbass,” Jessa says gently. “I know you don’t want to hear that, but that’s what it is.”

  “Definitely not in whatever kind of fucking way you’re thinking,” I tell her, “but if that’s what makes you understand why I have to do this, then sure. Fine. Whatever. Look. I’m not asking you to help me. I started this. I’m the one who has to see it through. I guess what I’m saying is that if something happens to me, I’m sorry.”

  Jessa blows a long breath out the corner of her mouth. She’s exasperated. That’s fair. I’d be pissed at me too.

  But when she speaks, it reminds me all over again of what I already know: I don’t for one second deserve her.

  “What if we, like, post it, but with added commentary? Like the director’s cut, except maybe we do the talking after the video so they can hear 22 really clearly? Point out that thing you just said, about 08 being sick or whatever. Really underline it. He’s not feeling well and now he’s dead. After not being seen in engagements for weeks. After being away from engagements specifically, off doing that demonstration in Moscow. And how is he not feeling well if he’s what they say he is? None of what they’re saying adds up. And that thing 22 said about how there used to be more operatives in the program?”

  “Yeah,” I say, half sure I can’t be hearing all this correctly. “He did. But I didn’t record that part.”

  “And the thing with B and the coffee shop.” Then her face falls a little. “You didn’t get any of that in the video either, I don’t think. No proof.”

  “But we do have what 08 said when I asked him about Elena. We can explain why we asked him about her in the first place, and talk about how the coffee shop disappeared right after we took that video. I mean, it’s gone. That has to mean something. All this together has to mean something.”

  Unless it doesn’t. Unless we put it out there and nothing happens at all. That would certainly be the safest option, anyway. For me, that is. Not so much for 06 and 22.

  And the alternative? Hey. If I suddenly disappear, at least we’ll know I was right.

  “Well,” Jessa says, echoing my thoughts, “it’s staying visible anyway.” She sighs, then sits up abruptly, rubs her palms together, cracks her knuckles. Nervous energy. “People better watch this one. A lot of people. This thing better go septuple platinum viral or whatever the fuck. I’ve never really seen the appeal of martyrdom, personally.”

  “No. No way. I told you, this is my—”

  “Oh fuck you. My god, Mal. I told you before. I’m in.”

  We go quiet for a moment. There will be no remembrance flare for us if they get us. Nothing to mark our passing. Only the assurance that we were on the right path and the hope that someone might pick up where we left off when we are gone. Not only for 22 and 06, but for all of the others, and for the children they take next when these are gone. And for all the rest of us who might have ended up in the Stellaxis labs with numbers tattooed on our forearms instead of being given toothbrushes and blankets and sent to the camps. If we’d made the team.

  Either path, either way, same ending. One’s faster and more glamorous. One’s slower and involves more kidney failure. We’re all Stellaxis property.

  But property can be stolen. Maybe it can steal itself back.

  “I wonder if 22 has any idea how lucky he was, running into you that day,” Jessa says at length, softer now. “Someone who’d actually go so far as to do this. I mean. It could have been anyone. Instead he gets you. Looking out for him. Keeping an eye on his six, you know?”

  “I’m trying,” I say, but my voice isn’t working so great right now. It comes out all brittle, whispery, and cracked.

  Jessa’s nodding anyway. “And for the record,” she adds with satisfaction, “that’s exactly the way I was thinking.”

  0014

  THE FINAL VIDEO RUNS ALMOST FIVE HOURS.

  It’s the whole thing, uninterrupted, uncut. From me hunched in the doorway of that building fumbling my lenses in while the citykiller mech bears down, all the way through to the elevator with 22. We go back and forth on this for a while but then decide it looks better if the second half is seamlessly attached to the part everybody’s seen. It looks less like a fake, less like I saw the video on the news, took it, and altered it. That’s the hope, anyway.

  “My name is Mallory,” the commentary says before the video starts. We nix a faceless voice-over and just have me speak directly to the viewer. Visibility is our new motto. No matter how much I hate talking into a camera, how much I hate the idea of having my face plastered all over the news. We’re way past trivial shit like my comfort level.

  “I was born on July 20, 2113. I live in old town, on the sixth floor of the hotel by the movie theater.” Then, realizing that the target audience for this video is everyone, everywhere, I specify: “Outside New Liberty City. On March 14, 2134, I took the 7:30 bus to the 63rd Street stop near Prosperity Park. I was trying to meet with a woman I only ever knew as B. She used to babysit a little girl named Elena, before Elena’s whole family died when their apartment building came down in the war. B had reason to believe that Elena did not die with her family but was taken by Stellaxis Innovations, taken and raised and changed into Stellaxis StelTech SecOps operative 05. She hired me to gather intel on the in-game versions of the operatives, and when I did—” cut to the footage of me asking 08 about Elena—“B, and her sister’s coffee shop where we’d met, and very probably B’s sister as well, disappeared. It’s now a Comforts of Home company store, location number 8943, and it appeared there almost literally overnight, despite that location appearing nowhere on the Upcoming Branches page of the Comforts of Home website.”

  This was Jessa’s idea. Cut to a screenshot of that, with my speaking face thumbnailed in the corner. “As you can see, they never listed it there, and it isn’t with the existing branches. It didn’t even appear in online searches for locations of the store by address until a few days ago.” Further timestamped screenshots: before, after.

  “That coffee shop was established almost a decade ago. For it to vanish without a trace, directly after I received information that could help make B’s case against Stellaxis, with no word about it from the family who owned it? Well. It’s interesting to consider.”

  And so on. I avoid words like suspicious and conspiracy and lies. I simply present the information as I have it. I keep this up throughout the video, pointing out key moments. 22’s painfully weird behavior every time he so much as approached the topic of 08, yes, but also the pond. The decorative fountains. The lushly well-cared-for grass. The free drinking water.

  It’s a lot, all at once. But spreading it out, handing bits of it off for all these potential viewers to help me carry, is a weight I can feel diminishing every second the video ticks on.

  Then, once the footage is over, it’s back to my full-screen face again.

  “I have reason to believe that Stellaxis Innovations did not cre
ate a dozen operatives in their labs but rather stole four dozen children and attempted to turn them into weapons without their consent. I believe these children were tortured in the sublevels of the Stellaxis building, and some of them were damaged irreparably.”

  I replay the section of my conversation with 22: It must have been a lot harder with all twelve of you. Especially when you were so young.

  I replay the close-up of his hand without the glove.

  By that point, 22 says, it was easy.

  I talk about 08 last. 08, who was lately indisposed, under the weather, and nowhere Stellaxis said he was. 08, who is now dead. I point out that in the news the same day 22 said occupational hazard and not off at work, 08 was reported to have been in Moscow, giving a demonstration. How the last time 08 was known to be involved in combat was almost three months ago. How the story behind the remembrance flare was killed in action. How none of these pieces even begin to fit together.

  “ ‘If I suddenly disappear, at least we’ll know I was right,’ ” I say. “That’s what B told me. Right before she did disappear. Here, now, I say the same to you. This video is my insurance policy. I stream BestLife every day. My avatar is called Nycorix. If nothing happens to me, I’ll show up there every day, alive and well. You can check in on my stream anytime. Come say hi.” (That last bit was Jessa’s idea.)

  “BestLife is my job. I’m not going anywhere. If I stop streaming, if my character suddenly gets deleted, if one day I out of nowhere decide to quit? Then something’s happened to me. Something bad. They locked out my implant, or they arrested me, or I’m lying in a ditch somewhere with a bullet in the back of my head. I don’t know. Maybe I’m being melodramatic. I hope I am. If I’m wrong about the operatives, I have nothing to hide, and no reason to fear for my safety. Nobody will come to shut me up, and everything will go on exactly as it did before. But if I’m right, then the operatives aren’t what we’ve been told they are. They’re not intellectual property. They’re not even soldiers who signed up to fight in this war. They were human children. Systematically kidnapped, and tortured, and used until they died. And it’s time for Stellaxis Innovations to answer for what they’ve done.”

  Having thrown down that gauntlet, I pause for effect. “17 is dead. 28 is dead. 33 is dead. 42 and 38 are dead. 11, 21, 02: all dead. 05, Elena, is dead. And now 08 is dead too. Along with whoever used to be 01. And 03, and 04, and all the numbers in between the ones we see on the news and in the stores and in BestLife every day. Children like the one I used to be, like most of the people here in old town used to be or are today, with bombed-out homes and dead families. Children who died twice over. Children like Elena, who we’re too late to save.”

  The video ends on a shot of 06 and 22 in the mouth of the alley, 06 healing civilians while 22 keeps eyes on the street outside. My face is gone from the screen now entirely, leaving only my voice: “It’s not too late to save the last of them.”

  * * *

  I’D BE LYING if I said I didn’t sit there for the whole rest of the day, watching the view counter climb. Checking the newsfeeds obsessively until the video gets picked up and broadcast. The Stellaxis-owned feeds won’t touch it, of course, but the Greenleaf-owned ones snap it up, and a bunch of indie feeds and blogs take it up from there, and people spread it around. Jessa informs me it’s popped up on “the three best-known conspiracy sites,” whichever those are, but I don’t even care, because the view counter climbs through the thousands, the tens of thousands, the hundred thousands, and on into the millions by early afternoon.

  It helps that I had the other video, before. It helps that this is about the operatives, pretty much universally adored as heroes and celebrities, even on the Greenleaf side of the city, where there’s apparently a thriving black market in SecOps merch. It helps that the whole entire dragon’s hoard of water at Stellaxis—and maybe elsewhere in the city, where the important people live—makes thirsty people really, really angry. It helps that this war has gone on so long that so many can effortlessly relate to the concept of a collapsed building, a dead family, a missing child.

  I wonder how many of the thirty million viewers and counting can remember that big bright empty room full of kids. I should have mentioned that.

  I don’t budge from my bunk until evening. Some of my roommates—Suresh, Keisha, Tegan, of course Jessa—bring me coffee and snacks and encouragement. I think the others are pissed at me. Talya in particular is going around making comments under her breath about how I’m going to get them all killed and I should have said something, we should have decided together, as a group. Instead of me clawing after another fifteen seconds of internet fame at everyone else’s expense.

  I don’t even know how to respond to that last part, but as for the rest? Maybe she’s right. Maybe I should buy a tent and sleep up on the roof so if someone tracks me by my implant and calls in a middle-of-the-night precision strike, I won’t take anyone down with me. Maybe I should go into hiding. But where? I don’t have anyplace to go.

  When I finally gather the nerve to read the comment threads, though, I start to wonder if I was worried about nothing.

  I get to learn all about every random person’s expert opinion of how ugly and stupid I look in the video, or how annoying my voice sounds, or how much I suck at the game so of course I’m attention-whoring here instead. The word traitor makes repeat appearances, and ingrate, and insane. And if I had an ounce of water for every time I scrolled past bitch and cunt, I could probably drown them all.

  “This was a stupid idea,” I tell Jessa. “Nobody’s taking it seriously. Or they are but they don’t care.”

  “It’s the internet,” Keisha says. Of course they’re all listening in. I’m the fuckup of the hour. “It’s a petri dish for loud obnoxious assholes. It doesn’t mean nobody else is paying attention.”

  “What was even the goal here?” Talya asks. “You thought, what? People were going to march up on the Stellaxis building and demand 06’s and 22’s release? They’re not prisoners, Mal. They’re weapons. At worst they’re employees. Besides, there are entire sites dedicated to the kind of conspiracy theory bullshit you’re slinging here. It’s called conspiracy theory bullshit for a reason.”

  “Right, because it’s better if she just sits on this legitimate exposé of company lies,” Keisha tells her. “Yeah, that makes all kinds of sense.”

  “If it’s conspiracy theory bullshit, what are you worried about?” This from Suresh. “Everyone forgets about it in five minutes and life goes on.”

  “You think that’s the part that worries me?” Talya says. “That’s cute. What you just described, that’s the best-case scenario. I’m thinking more about the part where we come back from work one night and the hotel’s a pile of rubble because somebody high up in that corporate tower needed to make this go away.” She shakes her head, trails off, then reignites. “Or, even better, maybe we’re here when it happens. I’ve already had one home fucking explode around me, and so have you—” pointing to Suresh—“and you—” Keisha—“and both of you.” This last is a dismissive gesture in my and Jessa’s direction. “I would’ve thought you’d know better.”

  “How can you not get that’s why we’re doing it?” Jessa shouts at her. “I know you saw the video. B tried to keep her end of things on the down low, and she has vanished off the face of the earth. Spreading that video around is the best way to protect all of us. Anyway, please. You’ve been an 02 fan as long as I’ve known you. Where’s your loyalty?”

  “Brand loyalty. That’s like telling me that just because I like some artist’s music or some designer’s lip gloss or some gamer’s fucking limited-edition lens case that I should be willing to put my ass on the line for them. Well, I’m not.”

  “You don’t think that,” Jessa says, taken aback. “These people weren’t given a choice to be what they are. They got buildings dropped on their heads too, you know. Just like me—” Jessa’s pointer finger is doing a deliberate echo of Talya’s, makin
g the rounds between us—“and Mal—and every one of you.”

  “Besides,” Talya continues, like she hasn’t heard a word of this, “02’s dead. She’s been dead for years. No stupid conspiracy video is gonna change that.”

  I don’t need this shit. Not right now. I get up and put on my coat and backpack and leave. I go and find an empty stairwell, and I sit in it and wait for something to happen.

  What that is I don’t know. I’m not a leader. I don’t have the first faintest fucking idea how to gather people to a cause. I wish life were like a movie, where some antisocial nobody like me could get up in front of a crowd, have a token moment of shyness, and then magically belt out this huge amazing speech about how the revolution starts right the fuck now, before leading my massive crowd all the way to Stellaxis HQ, breaking down every checkpoint and barricade in our way, and parking ourselves on that green green grass and refusing to budge until 06 and 22 are freed and the CEO himself has admitted to the systematic kidnapping and torture of forty-eight children, the murder of forty-six and counting, and any other lies they’ve been feeding us all this time.

  Instead what I get is my one halfway-decent idea being sidetracked into a series of really long comment threads about my looks and my lack of gaming skills and how I should just shut up and be grateful that Stellaxis is fighting to protect our rights to water rations and safe housing and conveniently located company stores. Here and there I’ll see something supportive, something along the lines of Holy shit this is insane. Somebody has to do something or This war has gone on forever, enough is enough, but it gets buried in the background radiation of assholery.

  It must be bad, because even Jessa is steering clear of me.

  I sit here, alone, for hours. Until my ass goes numb, until my back is in agony, until my bladder threatens to explode. Periodically blinking at LOAD NEW COMMENTS, periodically checking newsfeeds, reading those comment sections too for some godforsaken reason. Waiting for someone to get more productively angry than I know how to get. Someone to gather people and storm the building. Someone to break the locks on the water supply room and tell Stellaxis to shove their fabricated ration system straight up their ass. Someone in a position of power to believe me and be galvanized into action. Something, anything, to sprout up out of the trashfire of this.