Tortured Echoes

by Cody Sisco

  The plan for the demonstration was enacted in the space of five minutes—without Victor’s participation. Victor watched from a park bench as, on both sides of the bridge, small groups of tourists or townspeople gathered, puzzled looks on their faces, pointing fingers and scratching heads as they tried to figure out how to reach their destinations.

  Lisabella arrived and began talking to the Lifers standing guard at the foot of Triton’s Deep Crossing. She recorded footage of New Venice falling under siege. Victor wondered how much her superiors at MeshNews would allow her to broadcast. He fed the ducks some bread he bought from a vendor.

  Ten minutes later he spotted Mía and Pearl, both wearing purple-gray pantsuits, striding along Petit Canal’s east embankment. They were leading a group of patients from the clinic wearing sad gowns the color of frozen salmon. Mía said something to Pearl, who corralled the group of patients, and then Mía approached Lisabella. The conversation grew heated; Mia pointed and stamped her foot. Several times Lisabella turned away, only to turn back seconds later to shout something.

  Victor grew curious, took out his Handy 1000, and brought up a menu to display devices in his proximity. He found a few with the MN prefix, figuring those would be MeshNews and hoping Ozie’s preloaded hacks could access them. Victor selected the first one and got a vidfeed of one of the Lifers. Lisabella was interviewing Wonda. Victor selected the next device on the list. The Handy 1000 went blank, and for a moment Victor wondered if it was the result of a counterhack. Then he heard Wonda’s voice.

  “We think it’s time for purity to be considered a fundamental right,” Wonda said.

  Mía, in a slightly fainter voice, said, “You cannot present this fringe group as representative of what people want here. Look, we have here half a dozen recovering addicts who are benefiting from treatment at BioScan. Their stories are stories of recovery, of resilience, of—”

  “Look, Ms. Barrias,” Lisabella said, “I get it. Yes, I’d love to talk with them some other time. Look around you. This is the story. Adherents of a new ideology flexing their muscles. And a town torn apart by a madman whose horrific crimes they seem to have forgiven.”

  Victor turned off the Handy 1000 feed. They could discuss lunacy as much as they wanted. He wanted to put things right, but this was too big, too chaotic. What could he do? Nothing. He wasn’t going to get involved.

  Spoke too soon, he thought, as Mía headed over to him. He shouldn’t have strayed from the group, he realized. It made him an easy target. Pearl followed behind. Their patients sat down on the grass nearby and watched the Lifers on the bridge.

  “Make them stop,” Mía demanded. “Hardliners in the LT Legislative Council will use this as an excuse to drop the amendments we proposed and pass a Classification Act identical to SeCa’s. Go. They’ll listen to you.”

  Victor gulped. He’d missed a lot by fleeing into blankness for a week, and now it was catching up to him.

  He looked at the protesters, wishing he could hide in the crowd. There would be no room for his kayak with the marines, and the bridge was full of Lifer potentiates sitting and squatting, clogging it up. To join now, he’d have to get past Lisabella, and he sure didn’t want to be all over the Mesh feeds.

  “They’re not harming anyone,” Victor said. Not yet, he added silently. Tosh wasn’t going to give up on his angle just because Victor called for restraint. Donya and the rest of his band of troublemakers patrolled the cityside embankment, making sure no one could get close to the bridge. He hoped the townies and tourists had enough sense not to mess with them. Otherwise there could be violence.

  Mía fumed. “It’s a spectacle. The MeshNews woman is going to catch the attention of the national government.”

  “Isn’t that good?” Victor asked. “Don’t you want the spotlight on MRS? To build support for Classification?”

  “Not like this. We had an agreement with MeshNews, a plan. Now that’s out the window because they’ll be reporting real news.”

  “As opposed to the news you planned to manufacture together,” Victor said. “Good riddance.”

  The wind changed directions. The chanting marines’ voices could be heard echoing off the bridge’s stone underbelly. “Hey hey ho ho, compulsory meds have got to go.”

  “People are laughing at them,” Pearl noted, “saying they’re crazy for worshipping a killer.”

  “They’re not worshipping him,” Victor explained. “He’s a test of their faith. If they can mobilize for him, it’s a sign of their righteousness.”

  Mía asked, “How can you be on their side?”

  “I’m just telling you what I understand about them,” he said. “I’m not on anyone’s side.”

  “Little owl,” Pearl said, “If you—”

  “Stop, okay? I’ve had enough of people telling me what to do.”

  “We tried,” Mía said to Pearl. “I’ll go tell Circe it’s time for Plan B.”

  “Right. I’ll see you in a bit,” Pearl said.

  Mía left them. Victor wondered if she would be shaking her head all the way back to the administration building.

  Pearl sat down next to Victor.

  “You don’t have to look after me,” he said.

  “Maybe I enjoy spending time with you. There’s so little time in the end.” Her tone was somehow wistful and grim at the same time. “Tosh told me what Jefferson told you.”

  She looked at him. He could feel her gaze like a cloying fragrance trying to drag him by the nose to face her. He stared at the ducks jostling each other, swarming bread bits, not wanting to get too close to the hand that fed them.

  “What I want you to know,” Pearl said, speaking clearly and crisply for a change, “is that life is not binary. You don’t have to choose between this and that, right and wrong, allegiance to one side or another. You don’t have to struggle with not knowing whether to believe Jefferson or your aunt. You can accept the doubt. You can be at peace in the now, the beautiful, complicated, blossoming now. You understand?”

  He noticed the lines on her face, countless folds around her mouth and eyes. Her hair was grayer than he remembered, and her eyes were bright behind big, round, amber-tinted glasses. Ember-red warmth radiated from her and maybe also blue-tinged resignation.

  “I want to believe it’s not my fight,” he said flatly. “That none of this is.”

  Pearl patted his knee. “Perhaps not. I just thought it might help you to see it my way.” She stood, theatrically brushing her sleeves. There was a dignity to her short stature, he decided, that most tall people lacked. She said, “I’ll be going now.”

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “I have a cottage in Carmichael. I think it’s time to put it on the market. And then I’ll see. Good-bye, Victor.”

  Pearl walked through the crowd of ducks, her shuffling steps causing them to clear a path, and headed toward the bridge. Victor watched as she slowly picked her way through the crowd of seated Lifers, stopping to chat several times as she made the ascent and then vanished from view.

  He should be sitting with the Lifers. His influence over them was already fading. It wasn’t helping that he was a spectator today rather than a participant. But he couldn’t bring himself to sit in the midst of a crowd chanting to help Samuel Miller. The thought sent a shiver up his spine. If only there was a way to get them to pursue a more worthy goal.

  A black van with “Sheriff” emblazoned on the side in gold block letters pulled into the parking lot along with several white vans. Men and women in riot gear began to emerge. They stood around, drank coffee, threw their cups on the ground, hoisted equipment over their shoulders and into their utility belt pouches—face shields, heavy looking air cannons, and canisters of sleeping gas. More vans arrived. The enforcers’ numbers swelled past fifty, outnumbering the Lifers, but not by much.

  Victor was running through things he could say to the Lifers when Del walked up and jabbed a finger into Victor’s chest. His whole body was shaking.

 
; “You did this!” he said. “You and your blank face. We were a calm congregation before you arrived.”

  “I didn’t say anything important,” Victor replied. The man’s anger was visceral, sharp, as if spikes grew from his skin and clothes, and when he shook, he bristled like a porcupine.

  “‘I didn’t say. I didn’t do,’” Del said, mocking Victor’s voice. “A curse on you! I’ll have nothing more to do with this buffoonery.”

  Del stared down the Lifers who were listening to the discussion, some wearing concerned expressions, others looking amused.

  Victor said, “I met you protesting. How is this any different?”

  “You watch!” Del said, his voice oozing scorn. “We held peaceful gatherings. We stayed true to our beliefs. They’ll follow you over the edge of a cliff, and I can only thank the laws I’ve come to my senses before everyone jumps.”

  He stalked away, kicking up a trail of dust as he went.

  The operation to remove the Lifers began with the bridge wing, higher ground being most important to any battle. Victor knew that much from Ozie’s many rants about the history of warfare. Gravity itself turned out to be a weapon that losing forces often failed to anticipate and wield.

  Ten at a time, enforcers approached the foot of the bridge on the east side of Pond Park. There would be a scuffle as the Lifers linked arms and attempted to stop the enforcers from removing the seated protesters. The enforcers would pry one or two protestors from the group, handle them roughly, bind their ankles and wrists, and haul them through the park to one of the vans. The spectacle repeated itself over and over again, slowly eating away at the fringes of the sit-in.

  It all appeared to be going smoothly, a raucous affair if not a violent one.

  Then the Lifers from higher up on the bridge began to throw things at the enforcers, nothing too heavy or damaging, pill bottles mostly, all the while jeering “Fascist!” and “Freedom dies when speech falls silent!”

  One of the escorted Lifers, a woman, screamed, “Pure is power!” over and over again. When she got closer, Victor saw it was one of Tosh’s faction, Donya, the one who’d been so concerned about where Victor sat in the pavilion. As they passed by, she turned toward him, screaming the same mantra. Blood streamed down from the top of her shaved head, coating half her face.

  As dusk set in, light towers turned on, humming, the sound mostly lost in the din of protesters’ shouts of “Free Samuel Miller!” and “Stop the Classification Act!”

  A group of New Venetians on the opposite side of the canals, the city side, were singing a tune Victor recognized from childhood, the city anthem, about water feeling like home. He supposed it was a counterprotest by the native gentry who understood how important BioScan was to the region’s economy and who didn’t really care one way or the other about a mass murderer’s medical treatment.

  A flurry of movement on the bridge caught Victor’s attention. The Lifers were standing, putting on masks with exaggerated features, long noses, pointy chins, mouths agape in silent screaming mirth, an old Venetian design. “For purity!” someone called, and Victor thought he recognized Tosh’s hoarse shout.

  The Lifers rushed down the tri-bridge, in three groups, one toward town and one toward each side of Pond Park. The marine wing’s flotilla started breaking up, their kayaks dislodging from one another, maneuvering to escape up the Grand Canal.

  Several dozen Lifers charged the enforcers and knocked them down, freeing two of their own. Surging through the park, the Lifers had the enforcers on the defensive.

  Several potentiates broke away, sprinted to Victor, hauled him to standing, and then he was jogging with them along the north side of the Grand Canal. “Don’t forget you’re human!” they shouted. “Free is free! No human left behind.”

  Someone screamed, a long wailing sob. “Let me go,” a woman said over and over.

  Victor turned and saw the Lifers that had descended toward town being surrounded by members of the counterprotest. They outnumbered the Lifers three to one. Townies shouted at them, grabbed their robes and shook them, reminding Victor of sheets on a line flapping in the wind. The crowd took hold of a man, pale skin whitened to almost match his robe, and tossed him into the canal. The splash seemed to ignite the townies’ imaginations. Robed figures were hauled up Triton’s Deep and tossed over the side. Lifers in kayaks paddled out of the way.

  Victor broke free of the Lifers trying to haul him away from the scene and descended the embankment. He found an emergency box, one of the bins located every hundred meters alongside the canal that held first aid kits, floating foam rings, and rope. He took a foam ring, tied on one end of the rope, and jogged to where Lifers were flailing in the water, trying to stay afloat and struggling to overcome the weight of their drenched robes. He flung the ring in a high arc as far out into the canal as he could and tightened his grip on the rope, ready to pull.

  “Grab on,” he yelled.

  For a moment, he felt out of body, watching himself from above—the rope, the figures in the water—and then he felt a tug in his hands as one of the Lifers grabbed onto the floating ring, and he began to pull, one hand at a time, the rope digging into his palms, his feet pressing into the cobblestones. He watched the rope moving between his hands. He didn’t dare make eye contact with whomever he was saving. The panic, fear, and relief in the Lifer’s eyes would shunt Victor toward blankspace in no time, and he couldn’t afford to go there right now. A few other Lifers saw what Victor was doing and found more floating rings and rope.

  The enforcers, having regained control of the situation, had reached the bridge and were descending townside. No more bodies were tossed in the water. It looked as if both Lifers and townies were being shackled.

  Time to go, Victor thought, pulling the last person from the water. Somehow Wonda was already at his side. She grabbed his hand, and they jogged up the embankment, past the botanical garden, only slowing when they were screened by trees and bushes that stood indifferent to the chaos bordering the park.

  “They’re arresting everyone!” Wonda said. She didn’t sound angry, only surprised and perhaps impressed.

  Victor remained silent as they hiked back to the Lifer camp. The Lifers had to see that Samuel wasn’t worth fighting for, and it was up to Victor to show them.

  PART FIVE

  33

  The 1935 Reykjavik Declaration ended the war between Europe on one side and the United States of America, the Nordic League, and Russia on the other. The terms of the peace agreement included reparations that soon drained the U.S. Treasury and caused the country to default on its international debt obligations.

  Over the next few election cycles, an opposition movement came into power that demanded a devolution of powers to the states. Territories that had long been denied statehood, including lands stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, asserted their right to self-determination. Those cries for local autonomy were echoed across the South and Midwest.

  A grand bargain was proposed to repartition existing states and territories and to transfer most powers and lands from the federal government to nine new nations of the American Union. The new A.U. constitution and those of the nine nations were ratified in 1939.

  —“The Grand Bargain: Repartition” (MeshKnows article)

  9 June 1991

  New Venice, The Louisiana Territories

  Lifers at the end of the lane were dismantling a fence. Two within Victor’s earshot discussed which piece of land outside the camp they’d claim as their own. More trailers would arrive soon. It was a boom time in the Lifer camp, thanks to the agreement reached between the Lifers, BioScan, and the New Venetian Consultative Body for Residents and Merchants.

  When the sheriff’s enforcer vans showed up two days ago, there had been a tense moment. The Lifers seemed ready to call for weapons. Then the van doors opened, and the protesters who’d been arrested emerged free people—another concession. The vans departed, and the whole camp celebrated.


  Torsten Lund had negotiated the detente. “Peace and prosperity for all are our touchstones,” he said. BioScan—in desperate need of space to house patients and addicts and eager to calm tensions and not at all reluctant to co-opt a grassroots movement—would pay Lifers to expand their camp and play host to addicts. Lifers wouldn’t protest anywhere except Pond Park and wouldn’t interfere with tourists in transit. The residents and merchants could return to business as usual. Everybody won.

  But when word spread that their last protest was based on faulty information conveyed by Ozie’s air-dropped MeshBits—the Classification Act had not been passed; in fact, there had not yet been a vote—the Lifers were disillusioned. They felt duped. Their fellows had been arrested for nothing, Samuel Miller remained medicated, and the truce began to look more like a buyout.

  Wonda defended the truce, saying it was a step forward on the path to purity. She worked hard to get their hearts back in the fight, holding three well-attended readings per day from Theories of Emergence by Estrella Burgos. Everyone could see that Wonda had emerged as the leader of a faction that was gaining strength by stealing members from both Del’s do-nothing conservatives and Tosh’s armed radicals.

  The philosophy she espoused boiled down to “Let’s treat each day like a fresh start,” but that folksy, we’re-all-in-this-together rhetoric masked a zeal for being in charge. Victor could see it in the way her eyes shone whenever she laid down a new tenet of faith, the latest being that dreams and blankspace pronouncements all amounted to the spirit of the universe speaking to us.

  Victor had started to wish he had a mute button, both for the spirit and for Wonda.

  He still thought about leaving town, but Circe had come to him and begged him to stay and help keep the peace. “I’ll tell you everything,” she’d said, “once we pass through the crucible.” He knew he shouldn’t believe her promises, shouldn’t let himself be manipulated by her. He should get as far away as possible. But the thought of finally putting the mystery of Granfa’s death to rest was too attractive to pass up, and he couldn’t just walk away. Part of him felt responsible for what was going on with the Lifers. He’d begun to suspect that he was the source of a psychic infection, causing them to subscribe to ridiculous beliefs, that he’d unlocked some deep vulnerability in their minds. He knew consciously such an idea was utterly delusional. And yet…