Convergence

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  “You are aware that the American government has dissolved?” he asked.

  “I am. I have not pledged any loyalty to the Northern Alliance. Or the Free States.”

  “I understand that you attacked and killed several of my men.”

  “Your men have attacked and killed far more of mine than I have of yours.”

  He shrugged, looking bored. “This is war. It is true. But you have no country, and you fight for no one. Then you are a terrorist.”

  “Call me whatever you want.”

  “Where is a man to go when he has no country, no home?”

  “I don’t know. I kind of like it here.” Drab, gray walls surrounded us. “It’s soothing.”

  He smiled a big toothy grin, baring yellowed teeth with bits of food stuck between and to them, along with swollen, infected gums.

  “The UN has demanded that any prisoners we take be treated in accordance to the rules of war. Even terrorists are to be regarded as equal to a soldier and given the same privileges. The same… hospitalities?”

  “Super.”

  “Do not be glib. We are discussing your future.”

  “You’re asking me to leave my home, to fuck off to Montana or Quebec.”

  “This is so.”

  “No. I’m staying here.”

  “This facility is set to close at the end of the year. We are setting up a camp for the displaced population under the supervision of the United Nations until such a time that we can determine what to do with you.”

  After the government dissolved in surrender, most of the states were repatriated under the Alliance. A few—Texas and much of the Bible Belt—held out and created their own coalitions. For those of us in California, the ones who stayed behind, we had no country and no citizenship. Although the Alliance had made it clear that we were welcome within their borders, the UN had argued forcefully that the PRC needed to establish a green zone for war refugees and political or military prisoners.

  Alcatraz was one of almost a dozen such zones spread across the state’s nearly 164,000 square miles. The hope was that, eventually, tensions would ease to the point where the unclassified indigenous would be granted visas or permanent residency in California, so that we would still be able to call the state home. Although PRC’s public relations staffers never said it, their government’s desire was to see anyone who was unwilling to swear fealty to them leave. Politically, it was going to be a long, rocky road made worse by bickering, short-sighted politicians who lacked any clear resolutions or ideas to solve the problem.

  “I saw families in the other cells. I want to see my daughter.”

  “Who is your daughter?”

  I gave him her name. He picked up the data tablet again and searched for her. “She stated she was here alone, that she has no family.”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “I see.” He thought it over, then squared the pad against the desk. “I will have her moved to your cell promptly. Is there anything else?”

  “No.”

  A short while after returning to my cell, Mesa stomped in angrily. I was glad to see her, but when I tried to put my arms around her, she pushed away and ducked around me. She threw herself up on the top bunk.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “Did they hurt you?”

  She said nothing.

  “I’m glad to see you.”

  “You’re such an asshole.” Her words were broken, and she choked down a sob. When she finally faced me, tears were running down her face. “I don’t want to even fucking know you. And I don’t want to make bullshit small talk with you. Just leave me the fuck alone.”

  “What is your problem?” I shouted. Her anger was infectious, and my voice was getting deeper and louder, turning almost to a growl. “And secondly, you don’t talk to me like that. I’m your father.”

  “You’re a fucking murderer,” she said. “You’re a coward and a killer.”

  I was standing too close, and she lashed out with a swift kick at my face. I dodged it, her small foot passing a hair’s breadth from my nose. When I stepped forward, she scooted away on the mattress, pressing herself against the wall, and curled up.

  “Don’t you come near me,” she said.

  I glared at her. She glared back. Her eyes were hard and too old for her child’s face. Everybody had always said Mesa had inherited my eyes, and they were right. Familiar hate and fear rested in those eyes, and that was my fault. I wondered how the hell it had come to this. How had I screwed up so much to have ruined her so badly? After a long, stupid minute I sank down to my own mattress. She cried, occasionally making long, dramatic sighs to let me know she was still pissed off.

  I thought about all the ways my life had gone wrong. I was getting pissed off with her, with myself, with everything. Rage boiled inside me. I needed to move, to escape.

  “That’s right,” she called at my back. “Run away, you coward. That’s what you’re good at! Just leave me here alone!”

  I could feel the eyes burning into my back, that itchy crawl of my fellow inmates’ gazes pressing upon me. Their eyes held concern and pity, but also anger—and blame. They were questioning my capability as a parent, and I couldn’t really fault them. I wasn’t cut out for that shit. I couldn’t deal with Mesa. I couldn’t handle her. I barely understood her half the time. She was Selene’s baby girl. Selene’s had been the magic touch, the one that always stopped Mesa from crying, the one that had comforted her as a small child, that had told her everything was fine. They’d always had an easier time relating and talking with one another. Mesa and I—we never knew what to say.

  Fuck it. I needed fresh air and a walk.

  I took to the prison grounds again and walked the perimeter, as I had the day before. I spent a long time walking slowly, my hands stuffed in my pockets, trying not to think about anything while errant thoughts and recriminations warred. I loved my daughter, but sometimes, she could be a real bitch who was impossible to handle. She got that from her mother. I missed Selene and wished she were there to deal with Mesa instead.

  “Yo, Jonah.” Jaime was about a yard ahead of me, sitting on the ground, resting against the fence. He patted the ground beside him. “Pop a squat,” he said. “Girl problems, huh?” A sly grin curled around the cigarette in his mouth.

  I shot him a questioning look.

  “Word travels quick around here. Ain’t no secrets, ’specially when they got a mouth like your girl there.”

  “My daughter. She’s a handful.”

  “Yeah, well, she is a woman. You ever think it’d be different, you’re a fool.” He said it casually, with good humor, and I gave him a dry chuckle. That was just how Jaime was. His easygoing attitude made it difficult not to get sucked in by his charm.

  He asked me if I believed in God, and I started to question my assessment of him. The last thing I needed was a creepy evangelist trying to extol the virtues of some bullshit religion on me.

  “No,” I said, putting enough edge into it to let him know I wouldn’t brook anything further.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  I looked at him, letting him know I wasn’t in the mood. Didn’t work.

  “C’mon. Seriously, man, why not? Look, I’m not much of a believer myself. I’m just curious why other people believe or why they don’t. It’s a point of interest is all.”

  “Never saw any evidence he was real, and I always thought the Bible’s just a book.”

  He pointed the cigarette smoke at the port behind my ear. He seemed to mull over my words then asked, “You a dreamer?”

  I nodded.

  He took a chip from his pocket and passed it to me. “You ever see the snuffs?”

  “No,” I said. “How’d you get this?”

  He looked at me as if I were a simpleton, but the expression passed quickly. “I’ve made a few friends here and there. Got this one on the sly.”

  “What’s it like?”

  He shrugged. “It’s like becoming personally acqu
ainted with death, what it feels like. Lets you know it’s nothing to be afraid of, that it feels good.”

  His eyes tracked off, lost in memory. I was suddenly uncomfortable with the route our talk had taken and was preparing to stand up and leave.

  “Why do you think they’re illegal?” he asked, still staring off into the distance as if I weren’t even there.

  It was my turn to look at him as if he were the simpleton. I shrugged, not sure where the conversation was going, not really wanting to get bogged down by a debate. I figured things would go easier if I let him say his piece and move on. “Because it encourages murder?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, a spark in his eye; he was playing with me. “Because it answers the God question.” He cracked a smile, warming to the discussion. “The whole point of religion is that you get a reward in the end, right? Religion was created by men who understood life sucks, so they invented God. Said he’s watching you and keeping score, and if you play your cards right, you get to go to heaven. You get to leave behind all this shit and trade up for an afterlife of bliss and joy. And people buy into this shit. They kill and die for it, they believe it so bad.”

  He paused to take a hit off the cigarette and to make sure I was paying attention. I nodded and encouraged him along, curious despite myself.

  “Then DRMR comes along. People start to wonder. Maybe they can find the truth, see if God and heaven are real. That’s why the snuffs are illegal. It raised too many questions, and gave too many answers people didn’t like.”

  He held up the chip between us, showing it to me. Smoke from his cigarette curled up and away, and he took another drag. He dropped the chip in my hand and pointed at it.

  “You got God right there in your hand. You play that fucker and feel good, and you just know. Every time you hit the end, that little deathly sweet spot and the chemical flood it triggers in your brain, that’s your reward for this long, drawn out shit storm of a life. You get to go out with a quick high, the best high, and that’s heaven. That’s it, man. The end.”

  I stared at the chip. A small square of metal barely the size of my pinkie nail, it was almost translucent and shiny. “So, how did you find God?” I asked him.

  “I guess you could say my wife introduced me to him.” He sat there, an elbow propped up against his knee while he smoked and stared off into the distance. He started to speak again, but instead closed his mouth around the cigarette and took a long drag. He held the smoke for a while before slowly releasing it. Finally, he said, “She died in the bombings. We’d gone to the shelters they’d set up in the subways—you know the ones?”

  I nodded, urging him onward.

  “The subways were supposed to be safe, supposed to protect us from the aerial bombing campaigns. And it did. They had some military checkpoints at the entranceways, something defensible, I suppose. National Guard, local police. Supposed to make us feel better about our odds of survival.”

  “PRC didn’t have much compunction about targeting non-combatants, and they didn’t give two shits about the UN crying foul over it. The UN was a bunch of toothless old women, though. PRC knew that much, and they knew the easiest way to win the war was to make it terrifying for all of us. Knew we’d cave when the going got rough. So they bombed the shit out of everything from above and sent in a unit on the ground, a small force that was able to do clean-up. Took our little National Guard protectors right out, quick and efficient. Then they tossed grenades down into our little hidey-hole and left.”

  “My wife got caught in the blast. Shrapnel tore her up, took out some of her throat. She was dead before she really knew what was happening. I was a few feet over, but it was far enough away.”

  He took a long drag off his smoke and slowly exhaled. “You know that saying, right? Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades? Well, I was fucking this close.” He held his thumb a scant inch apart from his index finger.

  “I was close, but she was closer. And that was that. But she was my wife, you know? My life. I couldn’t leave her behind. Her soul, her heart, all those things that make her who she is. I couldn’t do it. I did a back-up. Later, I’d console myself with playbacks, trying to feel her love. I learned so much about her, about the way she thought, what she believed. I learned about how much she hoped. About what a dreamer she was. She believed in God. I kinda knew that she did, but then I learned how much she really believed. She was one of the faithful, man. And she taught me. And then I got to the part where she died… that flash of light, that chemical rush. She was dead before she even knew it, but I swear a part of her did know. She knew, and she believed. So I guess I believe. What you got in your hand there, it’s a simple suicide, mind you, but it has value.”

  He ground the cigarette on the gravel path and struggled to stand. He had to roll onto his knees, get one foot underneath, push up and get the other foot there, holding onto the chain-link fence for support as he hauled himself up. “Bum knees,” he said by way of explanation. “Don’t get old, man.”

  I watched him walk away then looked at the chip in my hand. Our belongings had been confiscated from the campsite and were being catalogued and stored in the commissary. We were welcome to gather whatever we wanted. DRMR was considered to be a basic good, allowable under the prisoner of war provisions following a flurry of protests and petitions to the UN from the ACLU, Amnesty International, and the Occupy movements. Cybernetic enhancements were ruled to be a commodity no different from music, books, television, and computer access. They were, therefore, allowed to all prisoners in America and most other democracies. The PRC had been pressured to allow some measure of American rights to the POWs, and eventually, they relented. It had become a joke that even if the US Army lost, the lawyers would kill the PRC for sure.

  I pocketed the chip and went to the commissary. An hour later, I’d found the few belongings I cared about—my DRMR unit, a data pad, a chip of images of Selene and Mesa, some paper, and a digital pencil. Photographs from another era… I spent another hour rooting around for Mesa’s stuff, bagging what I could. I found her backpack, but it felt light. I undid the zippers and found a stuffed penguin. Mr. Ziggles. I smiled and zipped up the pack. Slinging it over my shoulder, I made my way back to my cell.

  Mesa had cried herself to sleep, and I listened to her soft snores. I put her bag on the desk and let Mr. Ziggles have some air, then lay down. I dug out the chip, trying to decide whether or not I wanted to play it. Jaime had called it a reward, and I needed to be rewarded for something. I had that itching again, that crawling under my skin that made me long for an escape.

  I juggled the chip between my fingers, contemplating it. I hadn’t experienced an actual snuff before. My knowledge of them was purely academic. Even in my art installation, the vagaries of a snuff chip were verboten, mostly so that I could stay on the right side of the law. Snuffs raised certain moral and ethical quandaries that I hadn’t been ready to tackle. Various radical groups and lawyers eager to profit in cases argued that snuff chips were as legal a form of expression as gay pride marches and exhibitionism; however, the courts went unmoved. Legally, the courts said, rape was rape and murder was murder. They were among the worst travesties in a broad spectrum of human frailties, and no one should profit—either financially or emotionally—from such violent transgressions.

  My art display had consisted of a wide range of human experiences. One woman had wanted to donate the memory of her rape, the emotional fallout, and recovery, but I’d declined. I understood her reasoning, but I was afraid that its inclusion would generate the wrong kind of attention and criticism. Most of the memories were donations or had been obtained from MemSpace, Episodic, and other public domain sites. I understood the laws and the rulings against snuff, but a certain curiosity surrounded it. A notion of taboo. The promise of an experience unlike any other.

  I’d heard the arguments for and against. I was curious why Jaime had passed it along to me. He was a snake oil salesman, but his charisma was unmi
stakable, and it made him a likeable sort.

  I inserted the chip then the data spike. I listened to my daughter snore, and then I pushed play. The jolt shook me to my core and left me gasping for air. I fell, even though I was lying down and hadn’t moved, and the sensations were so rich and compelling that “euphoria” failed to properly define the experience. In the end, I was shaken and still as vibrant colors washed over me, numbing me. I smiled. In the wake of my high, I understood the difference between addiction and need, and I hit play again and let the download rush through me. Over and over, until I passed out.

  When I woke, my pillow was soaked with saliva, and I was sleeping on my arm in such an uncomfortable and awkward position that when I moved the wrong way, the bone protested painfully and threatened dislocation. I figured out how to untangle myself and sat up.

  Mr. Ziggles was gone from the desk. When I stood, I saw him on the bunk above me. Mesa hugged him close, her eyes closed. She was at peace, finally, but the horrors I had subjected her to nagged at me again. It was dark out, and the cell door was shut tight.

  I had a raging headache, and I was hungry. I had no idea of the time. I paced the handful of steps between the bed and the desk, from the toilet to the cell door. In an aisle not much longer than the length of the bed, I did pushups and crunches until the muscles ached, I was soaked in sweat and unable to move, and my head throbbed in agony in time with each heartbeat.

  The snuff buzz was gone, replaced by a fog that made the edges of my mind fuzzy. I fell back onto the bed, wincing from the soreness in the muscles of my stomach and back, and tried to sleep again. I was restless and physically worn, but it took me a long time to fall asleep.

  Mesa had breakfast with me, but she was wary and silent. I tried to engage her in conversation, but she remained sullen. She poked at her plate of cold, thickly congealed scrambled eggs and took small bites of unbuttered toast but ate very little. She said even less. Eventually, she decided she was finished and left without a word.

  I walked the grounds again, alone. It was quickly becoming my routine, and I found it comforting. Jaime was talking with a small group of men, and we waved to each other. However, I made no effort to join them, and he made no effort to invite me. A few laps later, he peeled away from them and slowly walked up to me with a pronounced limp. His knees were bothering him, and even my bones were slightly achy in the chill.