Sea Change

by Nancy Kress

  I drove to the beach and stood on the low bluff overlooking the Pacific. Joe wasn’t there. The tide was in and floating logs drifted aimlessly on the stony shore. The Blob floated serenely on the sea.

  I stood there until my eyes burned from light reflected off the water. But whatever I was looking for was not here. There was nothing left of Ian here, where he’d died. What I had left of him was in my work for the Org.

  “It’s not right. Those people—they can’t grow enough food. I can sell a lot of my stuff and donate the money!”

  I got in my car and drove home.

  2032: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  JEAN CATHCART and Miguel Gomez were charged with “bioterrorism.” They pled guilty. The judge, who seemed saner than most, recognized that although creating GMO carrots was classed as terrorism, neither Jean nor Miguel was likely to release weaponized pathogens or open fire in a crowded mall. He released them on bail, which was paid, ostensibly, by their families.

  “They’re finished with the Org,” April said, stating the obvious. “Everybody will recognize them now.”

  No one answered her. This was the first meeting of the cell since the raid. In the late afternoon, April, Jonas, Tom, and I sat at a table in the “chess club,” waiting for Kyle. It wasn’t like him to be late, and all of us felt uneasy.

  Did the others have the same thoughts I did: Was it you who betrayed the station to DAS? You, Tom, as a planted informant? You, Jonas, from being passed over for promotion? You, April, from some ditzy theory? Or was it Kyle, absent now and in bad financial difficulty?

  Minutes snailed by.

  Tom asked, “Anybody want to play chess?”

  April said, “I’ll play if you show me how the pieces move.”

  Tom didn’t even answer that.

  April said, “Ooo-kay. Jonas, why didn’t they arraign Louis with Jean and Miguel?”

  “My guess is they’re retaining him as a material witness. Indefinitely.”

  We considered that nasty piece of legal imprisonment without trial, and we all shut up.

  When Kyle finally arrived, he looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. His clothes had the rumpled look of having just gotten off a plane or train, and I wondered where, and with whom, he’d been conferring.

  “The teff and wheatgrass stations are safe,” he said, without preliminaries. “The Org has no idea how DAS got information about the carrot station. Neither do I.”

  Silence. I broke it, finally. “Are you thinking it was one of us?”

  “No. I’m not. I know you all.”

  Shrewd and informed judgement or wishful trust? I no longer knew.

  Kyle continued, “I think it must have come from farther up the line.”

  Tom said, “Then why doesn’t DAS have enough information to raid a bunch of stations?”

  “I don’t know. But we’re going to carry on. April, report.”

  She looked surprised at his brusque tone and then did her usual thing of morphing from ditzy April to tech-savvy April. It always startled me. “Posts from all sides have ramped up, information and disinformation both, but no shifts in tone. The sane anti-GMO groups say the carrot station is only the tip of the iceberg, that there are more attempts to create dangerous crops by people who are at best deluded, at worst tools of agribusiness trying to rise from ashes. A lot of worry about cross-pollination and genetic drift. I’m counting Greenpeace among my saner chickens. The—what, Caroline?”

  “Nothing,” I said. Icebergs with ashes and chickens. Well, the Org didn’t use April because she had a firm grasp of metaphor.

  April scowled at me. “The lunatic ecoterrorists say that the carrot station was either the work of Americans who hate the United States and want to destroy it, or foreign powers that hate the United States and want to destroy it, or signs of the End Times before Armageddon, or the first stream in a river of poison that will drown us all, or . . . you get the idea. There are also a lot of posts that I think are coming from overseas, subtle clues in the coding, that seem aimed at getting people to take down the federal government for not protecting us enough. DAS has put out only the bland statements you saw on TV. Nobody has anything out there about the details of the carrots’ engineering, although a lot of sites have invented stuff. The carrots produce arsenic, or cyanide, or—this one made me laugh out loud—hemlock. Hemlock isn’t even in the same biological family as—”

  Kyle interrupted her. “What have we put out?”

  “What you and I crafted. Pro-GMO, some with actual statistics and some with developing-world heartbreak stories. I used that quote you gave me from Norman Borlaug about environmental lobbyists of the western nations being elitists who have never experienced genuine hunger. The posts aren’t too virulent, nothing that would attract attention compared to others, but I multiplied them by three times the usual rate. I also got our sympathizers in Kenya and India to put up fresh pictures. Don’t worry, Kyle, I covered my tracks. Nobody can trace the requests to me.”

  “Good. I may want you to move the computer soon.”

  Only Kyle knew where April’s computer was located, how its encryption worked, or what security precautions surrounded approaching it. My private theory was that unless the building was opened with a special D, it would blow up, but maybe this was just imagination. Or too much TV.

  “Move it?” April asked. “To where?”

  Kyle didn’t answer, of course, and April began fiddling with a chess piece, trying to get it to stand on its head, her pretty young face scowling—should our safety rest with someone so young and so cavalier about using the undernets? Tom watched her intently. From romantic interest? Or federal interest? And when had I become so paranoid?

  Jake’s voice in my head: “You’ve always been paranoid, Renata.”

  When the meeting finished, Kyle said, “Stay a minute, Caroline.”

  The others all stopped moving and looked at me. Then, obedient, they left, chatting innocuously about chess matches that had not occurred, dispersing to their regular lives.

  Kyle closed the door. “Have you been contacted by the press? Do we need to work around that?”

  “The press? Why?”

  Kyle’s weary face looked briefly surprised. “Jake. Wait—you don’t know?”

  “Know what?” Suddenly my heart hit painfully against my chest wall.

  “The accident. You don’t know. Jake was in a skiing accident. He—”

  “Jake doesn’t ski!”

  “Apparently not. He slammed into a tree. He’ll be all right, but he broke both legs in multiple places and punctured his spleen. The press is going wild because that new movie was supposed to start shooting tomorrow and there’s no way he can do it, which is going to cost everybody large amounts of money. Don’t look like that, Renata, the report I saw said he’ll be all right. But if the press is seeking you out for some stupid ‘fresh angle’—”

  “Nobody has contacted me,” I said. What had my face looked like?

  “Okay. Look, skip the next few meetings, just in case. I’ll have Jonas cover your stations for now.”

  I nodded, keeping my face rigid. Jake badly hurt . . .

  Kyle removing me from my stations . . .

  Jake badly hurt . . .

  I drove home. A reporter lurked by the door of my apartment building, camdrone and recorder at the ready. She looked like a big cat with an outlier sheep. I said, “No comment,” and went upstairs to call Jake. No answer. I tried Dylan, but he didn’t answer, either. I couldn’t wait for Dylan to get back to me; I had to know the truth about Jake’s condition. I made another call.

  “Portland Police, East Precinct.”

  “May I please speak to Dylan Sanderson?”

  Silence. Then the voice said stiffly, “Who is calling, please?”

  “May I speak to Dylan Sanderson?”

  “Dylan Sanderson is no longer on the force. Who is—”

  I clicked off. They could trace the call, of course, but I didn’t know why they wou
ld. I didn’t know anything else, either. When and why had Dylan left the force? His cell went again to voice-mail. I left another message.

  Online celebrity-news sites said so many conflicting things about Jake’s accident, mixed with so much speculation, that they were worthless. I did, however, learn which hospital he was in. I booked a 6:30 a.m. flight to Los Angeles for the next day. Then I went online and searched for Dylan’s name. A Portland newspaper had a small story, dated a month ago.

  THIRD OFFICER CHARGED IN “DIRTY COP RING” SCANDAL

  A third officer, Dylan Sanderson, has been charged with larceny, extortion, and evidence tampering in the ongoing scandal at Portland’s East Precinct. Sanderson, who is the brother of movie star Jake Sanderson, was arrested last night at his home. Arraignment is set for tomorrow. Sanderson, like the other two accused officers, allegedly stole street drugs worth thousands of dollars from a police evidence room, sold them undercover to known dealers, and pocketed the money. There is speculation that Sanderson may strike a plea deal in which he names other police officers involved. “We don’t know how high this goes,” said Commissioner Jane Rivera, “but I can assure the public that all—”

  Was Dylan still in jail? Out on bail? Repeated phone calls, for most of the night, failed to reach either him or Jake. The hospital, undoubtedly besieged, would tell me nothing.

  I wasn’t even sure why I so desperately needed to see Jake, to be sure he was all right. We’d been divorced for years. We no longer had Ian as a tie between us. I wasn’t even sure whether he was living with whoever had replaced the women who’d replaced Sage Scott. But the image of him lying helpless with two broken legs, or in major surgery for his spleen, unable to do the work that gave his life meaning the way that the Org gave meaning to mine—at that image, a primitive and urgent need to see him seized me like a boa constrictor.

  People aren’t rational, April said so often that we were sick of hearing it. Irrational online, irrational offline, irrational in my painful heart.

  A few hours of bad sleep before I made a cup of strong coffee and packed. As I drove to the airport, my dashboard news interrupted the weather report with a breaking story. A terrorist, a Ukrainian extremist in pursuit of some insane vision or other, had opened fire at SeaTac airport and killed five passengers and two desk agents at the Southwest check-in before being taken down by an off-duty cop dropping off his wife for a flight to Kansas City. The airport was being evacuated and shut down until further notice.

  I pulled over and rebooked from Portland, just in case. The first flight I could get didn’t leave until midnight. I took it, even though the only seats left were in first class. I don’t fly first class. Why were so many people flying from Portland to L.A. in the middle of the night? Stay home, all of you. Stay home.

  Seattle at dawn is eerily beautiful. Not many delivery or cab drones were flying yet. The rising sun put a glow on Elliott Bay, gradual and mysterious, as if the waters were being created that moment. The skyscrapers, wrapped in light mist, seemed like enchanted towers. It never lasted long. Eventually, an ordinary city emerged that, like all American cities, was still fighting to regain itself after the Catastrophe. Seattle, high tech rather than agribusiness, was hit less than most, but a lot of civic upkeep still got neglected. The sun rose, and I drove to a potholed parking lot in a mostly empty strip mall. The parking lot was half full of a tent city of people made homeless by automation. A lone cop bot silently patrolled the rows of tents.

  One of my Org cell phones sat in its lockbox at a Keep It Safe! It contained no new messages from Kyle, but the lockbox also held something completely unprecedented: a small padded envelope, addressed to Caroline Denton. The upper-left corner of the envelope was smeared with Tiffany Teal paint.

  This was not how we communicated.

  I sat in my car, holding the envelope for a long time before deciding this wasn’t how DAS communicated, either. And if DAS knew enough about us to get an envelope into an Org lockbox, I was already toast. Or, if the envelope came from some ecoterrorist group that had infiltrated us, and whatever was inside would kill me, they knew who I was and could do that any time they chose. I got out of my car, took a deep breath, pulled my shirt over my mouth and nose, and opened the envelope.

  Inside was the toothbrush I had taken from the lost house, along with two folded sheets of paper, each densely covered with Ts, Cs, As, Gs. The papers were headed SUBJECT 1, SUBJECT 2. Both were DNA code from the Standard DNA Identification Genomic Section, a manageable, distinctive stretch of the long human genome routinely used to identify individuals. Jean Cathcart—now out on bail under her real name and so never “Jean Cathcart” again—must have done the sequencing and sent this to me just before the raid on the carrot station. Two IDs—did that mean that two different people had used the same toothbrush? Ugh.

  I looked again at the papers. On the bottom of each was a notation: SALIVA 99% and HANDLE 53%. Confidence levels regarding the accuracy of the sequences. I looked again at the sheet labeled HANDLE. The DNA ID, as far as I could remember, was mine.

  Duh. I had picked up the toothbrush to put it in my pocket. My hand had been sweaty. Probably the toothbrush owner’s DNA was on the handle, too, confused with mine. But the saliva ID would be the toothbrush user’s alone.

  It might or might not be in the National Data Bank of DNA that had been slowly compiled over the last twelve years. Some people, including very vocal members of Congress, had fought bitterly to keep the NDBDNA from existing at all. Invasion of privacy, dangerous precedent, etc. Law enforcement, which had its own congressional champions, had won that one, aided by part of a very divided AMA. People whose DNA was on file with the NDBDNA fell into several classes: cops, firefighters, military, criminals, sex offenders, people who taught or worked with children, and—voluntarily—everyone who chose to enroll themselves or their child so that a body could be identified if it was murdered, burned in a house fire, or abducted by aliens and returned as a zombie.

  The Org did not turn down members just because they were on file in the NDBDNA. If DAS caught us, our constructed identities were too flimsy anyway. The fake ID, cell phone, and credit card I had for “Caroline Denton” could satisfy a casual traffic stop or drug arrest, but not a genuine investigation. The Org didn’t have the resources for that.

  So, the DNA from the wandering house might or might not be on file. If it was, I needed someone authorized to use the NDBDNA. I knew someone who would: Joe Peck’s uncle-in-law, Gray Carter. Gray, a white cop, was married to Joe’s aunt, a registered tribal member. They lived off the reservation in Bellingham, north of Seattle. Jeremy had once defended Gray’s sister in court, and Gray occasionally ran IDs for us, under the table. He would think this request came from Jeremy, and I wouldn’t tell him different.

  But Bellingham would have to wait. I put the papers in my pocket and drove south to SeaTac, to wait at a nearby Starbucks until they reopened the airport. If I were among the first ones in, maybe I could wheedle a harried desk clerk into putting me on a flight to L.A. earlier than the one I’d booked from Portland.

  It didn’t work. In mid-afternoon I gave up and drove to Portland, arriving just after sunset. I rented a car and drove to Dylan’s building.

  From the outside, I could see lights in his apartment. But when I identified myself to the smart building, it said pleasantly, “I’m sorry, access is denied.”

  “By whom?”

  “I’m sorry, access is denied.”

  You can’t argue with a building. Nor with a person who refuses to admit you exist. My face had been erased from the building’s recognition file, which only could have been done by Dylan himself. When I tried to slip in behind a resident, the building let out a blatting alarm and shrieked, “Access denied! Access denied!” I was stopped in the lobby by a roboguard. “If you do not immediately exit the building, I will restrain you and summon the police.” I immediately exited the building.

  Dylan did not answer his cell. If I could h
ave, I would have thrown gravel at his window, but he lived on the fifth floor, and the building told me that if I did not move twenty feet away from its walls, it was going to summon the police.

  I left, puzzled and hurt. Why was Dylan doing this? I knew he was home; every window in his apartment blazed with light. Was he so ashamed of having been kicked off the force as a dirty cop that he couldn’t face me? Was Jake far more injured than I knew, maybe dying, and Dylan was afraid to tell me? Or was Dylan even now by Jake’s bedside and someone else was house-sitting his apartment? But that didn’t explain my being erased from his building’s access list.

  All the awkward dinners I’d shared with Dylan had been prompted by an unpleasant emotion: guilt that I didn’t really like Jake’s little brother, even as I exploited him to glean scraps of information about my ex-husband. Did Dylan realize that and finally let resentment about it boil over?

  No answers. An online search turned up no further news stories about dirty cops in the East Precinct. The internet war over the carrot station still raged, and I saw at least two pieces that were probably April’s. I also found a story about Lisa Anderson: RAPIST OF NATIVE AMERICAN GIRL PLEADS GUILTY. So that scumbag had been identified, had made a plea bargain, and—I hoped—had flipped. Jeremy would keep pressure on the cops to find the other two men.

  I drove to the airport, fell asleep sitting up in a highly uncomfortable chair, and eventually boarded my flight to L.A., landing at 2:30 in the morning. I splurged on an auto-helio cab to the hospital.

  “I’d like to go upstairs to see a patient—”

  “No visitors except spouses until 8:00 a.m. Are you the spouse?”

  “No, I’m—”

  “No visitors except spouses until 8:00 a.m.”

  She was an elderly ogre with pink hair, old-fashioned glasses, and the general mien of a prison guard. I smiled as disarmingly as I could. “Look, I just arrived from the airport and it’s imperative that I see Jake Sanderson. I’m—”