“It’s easier than you think,” Rachel said. “We’re still rebuilding our lives, so we might as well define ourselves as people whose value offsets their risk.”
“Exactly so,” he said. “That brings me to today. The car chase through the city. How often are serious public relations disasters going to happen with you and your people?”
Rachel didn’t reply. Instead, she pretended to look over her shoulder at where Mrs. Wagner, wearing nothing but angry reds, had forced Jordan to take refuge in the front seat of his car.
“Agent Peng,” Summerville said. “I will try to convince my employers to back OACET only if I’m sure that their endorsement won’t backfire on them.”
Holy. Freakin’. Crap.
Rachel stood. “Would you like something to drink?”
Frustrated orange started to crawl out of Summerville’s fingertips; he was itching to make progress. Still, he said, politely, “Some water would be lovely.”
Rachel left the study and closed the French doors behind her, sealing Summerville away.
If the telecommunication companies backed OACET…
This was an entirely different conversation than the one she had had with Summerville at the White House. There, they had been playing with the idea that Big Telecommunications might sever ties with Hanlon. Now, this…
This could be everything.
She found the two nicest glasses they owned, and let the water from the tap run over her hands until they stopped shaking. A few deep breaths, and that cold, calm Rachel who could shoot someone in the head and not think about it until later had taken over.
If Mulcahy wants me to be a spy, then I’ll be a spy, she thought. So. Spycraft 101 it is… Feed him a little bit of information to seal the deal.
Back to the study, and to her favorite chair, where she told Summerville: “If I was involved in that incident, it wasn’t by choice, and would have been only while trying to save a life.”
“Admirable, I’m sure, but irrelevant. Not when the media can turn the facts against you.”
“Has that happened?”
“Not yet,” he admitted. “Mitch Alimoren and the Secret Service are taking responsibility.”
“Well,” she said, as she felt a rush of relief at hearing that Alimoren was keeping his promise to OACET and the MPD. “If the Secret Service is responsible, then isn’t this discussion irrelevant?”
“Not if we decide to build a long-term alliance with you. How often will things like this happen?” Summerville asked. “To you, or to other members of OACET?”
“We’re well aware the media enjoys spinning facts into straw,” she told him. “Generally speaking, we go out of our way to never do anything that could be perceived as a violation of the social contract. Since we can hide our tracks better than anyone else, it’s assumed that we’re always doing terrible things and covering them up—I think this says more about the rest of society than OACET, by the way—but we always try to abide by the law. We know if we’re ever caught breaking it, that’s when you’ll all come down on us and rip us apart.
“We’re not perfect,” Rachel continued, thinking of magically changing traffic lights and a stolen pair of hospital scrubs. “We still make mistakes. But it’s better to try to be the kind of people we want to be, than risk being ruined because of a stupid decision.”
“I suppose that’s the best I can ask,” he said.
“If you can find a better way to live, please tell us, and we’ll do it. Now…” she said. “What did you mean by ‘backing’ OACET? Be specific. I’d like to avoid the confusion from our last conversation.”
“We’ll remove our support from Hanlon and dedicate our resources to OACET instead,” Summerville said.
“Does that include backing us in Congress?”
“It depends,” he hedged. “Stunts like that car chase today—”
“In routine matters only,” she clarified. “And if Congress decides to come after us like they did when we first went public. We don’t want to go through anything like that again, not alone, not without strong support.”
“I think Mulcahy and some of my employers would need to define limits on when and how we would help OACET, but I don’t see a problem with that arrangement.”
“That’s fair,” she said, after carefully checking his colors for signs of lying. “What do you want from us in exchange?”
“Nothing more than what you suggested at the White House,” he replied. “We want volunteers from OACET to work with our technicians to develop security methods.”
“To keep us out of secure areas, or to block us completely?
“To fix—to block—you.” Summerville was perplexed. “Wouldn’t OACET benefit if you could pretend the last five years hadn’t happened and go back to your normal lives?”
Fine. Spycraft 101 it is.
“We’ll comply with anything you want if you’re pursuing security protocols. But if your goal is to block us, we…” Rachel began, before staring off into space, as if searching for the right words. She wasn’t: she had mapped out her game plan in the kitchen. All or nothing, and we might win everything.
“Agent Peng?”
She sighed, and hunched over the slightest bit. “Call me Rachel, please.”
His colors took on a wine red hue. With her legs tucked beneath her, her body curled in on itself, he couldn’t help but be reminded that she was a rather small woman who was just a few years older than his nephew.
Summerville was a lobbyist. He read people—powerful people—for a living. She was not about to try to manipulate him with anything more than small doses of honest body language. The backlash would rip her head clean off.
She didn’t like to be cornered into telling the truth, but the truth was sharp and could cut deep. If used properly, it was one hell of a weapon.
“If I’m ever asked, I’ll deny having this conversation,” she told him, glancing out the window as if to make sure no one was snooping in the bushes. “Do you remember when OACET first came out? How there was a very vocal minority who suggested that there was one easy way to solve all of the problems we posed?”
She slid a hand across her throat. Anybody watching would see a woman adjusting the collar of her shirt. Summerville saw something quite different, and nodded.
“Say somebody does find some way to block our access to the EM spectrum,” she said. “That’d be no different than murdering all of us.”
A pop of orange scorn mixed within green disbelief moved into his surface colors. “Agent—Rachel…”
“I know you think that turning us back to normal would be helping us,” she said. “It’s natural to think that the problem is the implant. Get rid of that, problem solved. Right?”
Summerville nodded.
“Remember when I asked if you were a parent?” Rachel said. “I was going to tell you a story that explains what it’s like to be a member of OACET, but I decided better of it. It’s an offensive comparison, and parents think less of me when I use it, but I use it because it’s true. Can I tell you that story now?”
She paused, and watched Summerville’s colors roll in and out of themselves as he tried to work out her train of thought. “All right,” he agreed. “Tell me.”
Rachel closed her eyes, and took in the room. She checked the weaves of her shield again, tugging and twisting frequencies until she was sure they were wrapped as tight as she could make them.
She hated resorting to these awkward descriptions. Only those within the collective could understand what it meant to be a part of it; analogies were fumbling, inadequate words that did nothing but clutter up the empty space between an Agent and an outsider.
“Everybody wants to know what it’s like to be a cyborg,” she began. “We’ve all tried to explain what it’s like, and we can’t. There’s no comparison close enough to explain what it’s like to be yourself…” she said, holding up one hand, “…while also being part of another.” She netted her fingers together. “Once the
y’re together, you think it’d be an easy thing to pull them apart, but its not.
“Parents…” she began, and paused as if she was trying to gain courage.
“Go on,” Summerville said, earnest blue working its way out from his core.
“Parents know that each child you have changes your entire family. If, God forbid, something happens to that child, your family won’t go back to how it was before. There’s a new normal.
“We can’t go back,” she said in a rush. “If Hanlon finds a way to block our access to the EM spectrum, he shuts down our community. Our family. Our very selves! Imagine that sense of loss, to have the new normal gone forever.”
She let herself turn towards the sun-bright windows of her study again. “Blocking our connection to each other would probably kill us,” she said. “Or we’d spend the rest of our lives in misery, trying to find a way back to what we had lost.”
Summerville watched her for a few long moments, until Rachel pretended to shrug off her malaise and gave him the bravest of big-girl smiles. “Anyway,” she said. “We can’t help you if you’re looking for a way to fix us. We’ve already been broken. The way we put ourselves back together might not have been the best or the prettiest solution, but it’s where we are now, and we aren’t looking to change it.”
Rachel thought Summerville might keep her waiting while he decided what to do with what she had told him, but he broke into a wide grin.
“You’re good,” he said, his conversational colors mostly purple but with pops of laser-like professional blue scattered throughout. “You’re very good. Another ten years on you, and even an old warhorse like me won’t be able to tell when you’re playing him.”
She nodded to acknowledge the hit. “Still,” she said, “that doesn’t make what I said any less true.”
“Yes,” Summerville said. “I can tell that, too. But I don’t think my employers will like what you’re proposing. OACET is a threat to their business model. They’d be happier if you were blocked altogether.”
“Happier?” Rachel seized on that word as a green the color of greed came up within Summerville’s colors. She remembered him at the Botanic Gardens gala, festive in his reds and greens, same as every other lobbyist or politician.
“There’s always room to negotiate,” Summerville said. “If the price is right.”
“Your employers are willing to back us instead of Hanlon, and support us in Congress? And no further discussion of blocking our access to the EM spectrum as the best course of action?”
“If the price is right,” Summerville repeated.
Rachel threw her scans to the backyard. Santino was lying on his back in the middle of the patio, arms and legs spread wide as he soaked in the spring sunlight. She smiled at the idea of her partner making a gravel angel in the loose stones of their patio.
“Then let me propose an alternative,” she said.
FIFTEEN
“You did what?”
Becca’s tone was beautifully, peacefully bland. Rachel didn’t need the emotional spectrum to know that white shock had settled over her girlfriend like a collapsing snowdrift.
“I offered to let OACET work with the telecommunication companies to develop a universal implant for the general public.”
“Yes. Okay,” Becca said in that same snow-white voice. “That’s what I thought you said. Why… Now, why would you do that?”
“Because I’m a genius!” Rachel shouted the last word as she collapsed backwards on the grass.
Rachel’s bungalow was an easy walk to the edge of Rock Creek Park, a woody stretch of land that started at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, meandered through large patches of the city, and then turned north towards Maryland. This section of the park was mostly trees, but there were grassy spots if you knew where to look for them. Spring was well and truly here, and they had decided an afternoon picnic would be a good way to celebrate Becca’s return. The texts had gone out, and it had turned into an unofficial group outing with a side order of a food fight. After Rachel and Santino had picked up Becca from the airport, they joined Phil, Jason, and Bell at the park, and the six of them had immediately begun hurling potato salad. Hill had arrived after the ruckus was over, but he had brought a jumbo bag of chips, so it had all started up again with crunchy bits.
After the fun had ended, Rachel and Becca had moved themselves out of harm’s way to catch up on the past week. They had tucked themselves away on a scrap of lawn that had managed to survive the winter, Becca talking about this and that, pieces of trivia and gossip she had learned at her bankers’ convention in Bermuda.
(Becca was a banker in much the same way that astronauts were pilots; there was some overlap of tasks but these were performed in entirely different environments. Becca, beautiful Becca with her long, dark hair and her core of smooth jade green, understood how money worked. That, in Rachel’s opinion, made her an honest-to-God wizard. In this modern world where money was abundant but unattainable, and those who did get their hands on it tended to squander it or worse, someone who knew how to bend it to her will might as well be doing magic.)
After Becca had finished her last story about five-star dining with A-list celebrities flown in for the event, Rachel had told her what she could about the break-in and its repercussions.
She was lucky the story had already hit the news cycle, as it freed her to go into some detail about the investigation. Hill’s wounded shoulder, with his arm stuck in a sling, gave her account of the car chase some extra credibility. Rachel was told in no uncertain terms that she should never go to a party at the White House without her girlfriend again (“I don’t care if I was in the Islands! It’s the White House! You call me so I can get on the next plane home!”), and then ended with her conversation with Randy Summerville.
That was the part where Becca had gone white with shock.
Understandable, really. Their relationship was still somewhat new, and while Rachel had trusted Becca enough to have an honest conversation about Senator Hanlon and those lost five years, she was still cautious about introducing her to OACET’s deeper secrets. She certainly hadn’t told Becca how OACET believed that the implant, or something similar, was the inevitable future of information technology.
Well, it was. Since they couldn’t get the genie back in the bottle, they might as well try to cram it into some sort of packing material and stick a label on it.
For OACET, the major issue was the collective. They absolutely had to remove the hivemind from the equation: nobody in OACET wanted to be networked to a bunch of early adopters with disposable income. The minor issues were the implant’s ability to override security measures, and the cost of the device and its corresponding surgery. If those three concerns could be met in a less comprehensive, less expensive version of the implant?
Goodbye, smartphones.
Then, decades from now? Hello, new iteration of a technology-centric society.
And then, if OACET survived to see that day, they’d no longer be freaks.
This was a long-term plan, designed to play out over their lifetime. OACET’s Administration had assumed that it would take a couple of years before OACET was considered a credible organization by both the public and private sectors. OACET would spend those years building good karma, and then, once they had shown that their implants made them useful, valuable members of society, they’d see who wanted to work with them to develop the next generation of personal communications technology.
Santino’s OACET-compatible glasses were a test case. Her partner didn’t know that Mulcahy was using the prototypes to establish OACET’s presence within the technology supply chain. After the final version of Santino’s glasses were distributed to those who worked with cyborgs, OACET would move on to developing medical devices, or tools to improve remote access…maybe even get patents on some of Mako’s baby-monitoring equipment.
There was money to be made from the implant and its myriad applications. They just had to survive until t
heir potential trade partners calmed down enough to realize that OACET wasn’t a liability but a fantastic investment opportunity.
Rachel had offered Summerville an alternative that was already part of OACET’s strategy, which could be summed up in an easy three-step process:
Step 1: Work with us, not against us.
Step 2: Help us change the technology so future generations won’t include a hivemind, and address the security and cost barriers of the implant.
Step 3: Profit.
She had expected Summerville to need some time to wrap his mind around what she had proposed. No. As soon as she had started her pitch, his conversational colors had frozen, stunned by her suggestion. This, she had expected. She hadn’t expected how quickly the greens of financial possibilities would appear, along with pleased pinks entwined around her Southwest turquoise and the eye-searing OACET green. Summerville (or his employers) had already imagined the implant as a marketable device, one subject to service plans and rate changes and bandwidth surcharges…
Rachel had spent the rest of her pitch feeling rather like an especially dim student who was telling the teacher what he already expected to hear, but she could live with that. As long as the telecommunications industry believed that OACET would work with them towards achieving mutual goals, she didn’t care who got the credit. She had shown the recording of their meeting to OACET’s Administration, and even Mulcahy had laughed at how well the whole thing had played out.
Ahead of schedule, and doing fine, Rachel thought to herself. Not a bad place to be.
“Promise me you won’t tell Santino, okay?” she said to Becca. “I don’t want him to know about this until it’s a sure thing.” To have that opportunity dangled, and then wrenched away… No. She refused to do that to him.
Instead of replying, Becca’s colors twisted once, twice, and then a third time, turning into frightened yellows surrounding a strand of OACET green. These twined into themselves, like climbing plants who used their own vines for support. Finally, Becca asked in a small voice, “Are you sure Summerville’s not going to hold what you told him against you?”
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