Flight or Fight (The Out of Dodge Trilogy Book 1)

by Scott Bartlett

  Leo nodded.

  “They have to be related. Who are they blaming it on?”

  “Kids. Whoever it was, it sure limits Dodgians’ options for getting away from everything for a while. Soon there won’t be much left except to get on an Air Earthplane and leave forever.”

  Carl wiped his mouth. “Do you plan to leave Dodge someday, Leo?”

  Leo swirled his gin and tonic as he contemplated Carl’s question. “Nah,” he said after a few seconds. “All I want in life is women, really. I already know I can get them here. Why would I move to the New World and risk going without?”

  “You’ll grow old here,” Maria said. “You’ll be a geezer, and no woman will come within a mile of you.”

  “Oh, and you’ll stay young, will you?” Leo said. “Don’t be so sure you won’t end up alone. Gregory Stronger won’t follow you to the New World, and people age there too. Plus I highly doubt your marriage will last beyond your flight. Right, Carl?”

  Maria and Leo both looked at him. “Actually,” Carl said, and Leo raised his eyebrows. “It isn’t that bad.”

  Maria flashed Leo a catty smile.

  It was true. Now that their actual relationship had deteriorated as much as it was possible to deteriorate, and they’d accepted they were together purely out of convenience, he was more at ease with Maria than he ever remembered being. He still slept on the couch, of course, and she still saw Gregory Stronger, which hurt him, though he’d never admit to it. Things had gotten as bad as they could, so he didn’t have to worry about them getting any worse. Maybe he would start looking for an extra-marital lover too.

  “So, Leo,” Maria said, “where will you be living now that your father has vacated the house you can’t afford on your own?”

  “I’m moving in with one of my, um…”

  “Concubines?” Maria said.

  “That’ll do. I’m moving in with her and our kid.”

  “Wait,” Carl said. “You have a kid?”

  “Oh. Um, yeah.”

  “How old?”

  “Riley will be six in a couple of weeks.”

  “What the fuck, Leo. You’ve had a kid for six years and you never told me?”

  “I couldn’t have you ratting me out to Dad. Not that I thought you’d tell him, but I didn’t want to risk it.”

  “Have I met the mother?”

  “Do you remember Rachel?”

  Carl thought about it. “Vaguely.”

  “Well, anyway, it’s her. We gave Riley her last name, Uneasyli, since I got to pick the first name. Rachel and I are getting back together. She wants to stay in Dodge for now, too, so it works out. We’re going to raise him together.”

  “If you raise him right, maybe he’ll want to leave Dodge at least.”

  Leo raised a hand. “Hey, man. Back off, okay?”

  Carl exhaled slowly. “All right. Sorry.”

  “This Rachel,” Maria said. “Will she be okay with you screwing a cadre of women she doesn’t know?”

  “Gosh, I’m not sure that she will! How did Carl feel when you began pleasuring a parade of men?”

  Carl furrowed his brow. “Were there others besides Gregory?”

  “No. There were not.”

  Carl decided to let their verbal sparring continue uninterrupted for the rest of the meal. He turned his attention to the New World footage playing on the restaurant’s walls, and he drank in the lush green spaces, imagining himself down in them, engaging in recreation. Why didn’t they have any headset tours of those green spaces available? It would surely drive Air Earth ticket sales even further.

  Next, every wall showed a black obelisk that stretched up into the sky until it became a tiny thread in search of a needle. One of the New World’s many space elevators. The New World boasted technology that dwarfed anything employed here in Dodge. He couldn’t wait to see a space elevator in person.

  At last he stood up from the table. “I have to get back to work,” he told his brother and his new wife. “I’ve already been gone for longer than seeing one’s father off warrants.” Someone would note that, either Morrowne or Gregory, and use it against him in all likelihood. He didn’t care, which frightened him more than the consequences of taking a late lunch. Despite his resolution to get to the New World as quickly and efficiently as possible, he couldn’t seem to bring himself to do the things necessary to actually accomplish it.

  After another hateful day at SafeTalk doing hateful things for hateful people, Carl went home, every fiber of his being crying out against the part society had cast for him. When he’d decided to risk it all for Natalie he’d finally felt the beginnings of what it might be like to experience self-respect. Now that had all been dashed, and he’d gone back to being the dark heart of a corporation bent on subduing and silencing an already cowed public.

  He couldn’t get his mind off of what Natalie had done to that poor boy. He wanted to go to her and demand to know why she’d done it. Natalie had always been different, but it had always seemed like mere quirkiness, which was in part what endeared her to him. But obviously it was more than that; she was sick.

  Still, something about the whole thing bothered him. Maria was out visiting with Gregory, and Carl made up his mind to revisit some of his lifelog memories with Natalie. He went into Maria’s bedroom, which used to be their bedroom, and began rooting around under the bed. A cry of satisfaction escaped his lips as his hand fell upon an old box filled with things he hadn’t touched in years. He hauled it out and rummaged through it, finally pulling out the object of his search: his old headset. He went back into the TV room, lay down on the couch, and put it on.

  Weeks had passed since he’d last seen Natalie, and as he accessed a recent memory of her, the sensation that they were suddenly in each other’s presence startled him. He’d forgotten how surreal it could be, watching your lifelog through a headset instead of on a wall or on your phone. It provided total immersion, the closest anyone could come to truly reliving the past.

  He and Natalie were talking over food, or at least the gruesome fare that passed for food in the SafeTalk cafeteria. Both of them poked experimentally at the lumps on their plates, not doing much eating. Thanks to the microcameras woven into his clothes, Carl could look around the room in any direction, despite that in reality he’d been facing Natalie the entire time. He saw Gregory Stronger two tables over. “Ass,” he said. He glanced instinctively to see whether Natalie reacted. She didn’t, of course.

  He skipped further back in time, to the moment they’d met. There. It had been his second week into a short-lived contract with Gawp. He sat alone at a cafeteria table this time, stirring his food, sizing up his new colleagues, wondering what sort of competition they posed. In other words, behaving exactly like everyone else.

  “Hi,” someone said.

  Carl looked up. It was Natalie, but he hadn’t known that then. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Mind if I sit?”

  “I don’t normally sit with anyone.”

  “Neither does anyone else here, it seems. Maybe we could start a trend.”

  “Why do you want to sit with me?”

  She crossed her arms. “I heard you’re the best in your department. I plan to be the best in my department, so I thought we might have some other things in common too.”

  “All right.”

  She lowered herself onto the seat across from him. Carl noticed a few heads turning their way. He hadn’t noticed that then. He’d been too busy wondering how to navigate the novel experience of socializing with a coworker. Someone he could very well end up competing with for promotion.

  “I’m in the Search Engine Optimization department,” Natalie said. “Up until yesterday I worked for Searchable.”

  “What did you do there?”

  She chuckled. “Only two things to do at Searchable, really. Troubleshooting and public relations.”

  “Which were you?”

  “Troubleshooting. I’m expecting thi
s job to be a little more engaging. The technical challenges at Searchable were fairly lacking, since it’s so entrenched.”

  “Entrenched?”

  “Yeah. You know. No real competitors? No need to innovate or change.”

  “Of course. The market determined they were the best. That’s why they have no competitors.”

  “They do technically have them. There are other search engines in operation. They’re just incredibly inaccessible, with hideously long URLs and poor net-neutrality subscriptions. I quite like a couple of them. I’d probably use them if they weren’t so damned slow. That’s Searchable’s advantage. They can afford speed. Plus, when you want to search something on your phone or a wall, which search engine comes up by default? Searchable.”

  Carl sniffed, and silence reigned for a few seconds. Then he shook his head. “The only remarkable thing about this conservation is that we’re having it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like you’re telling me about the wetness of water, or how useful oxygen is.”

  Natalie shook her head, too. “I’m always amazed at that kind of thinking. People pretend to view Dodgian society as the only possible way for things to be. Like they’re incapable of envisioning anything else. And yet everyone spends their lives working toward leaving forever for the New World, where everything’s supposed to be different.” She took a sip of water.

  Carl skipped ahead to another memory, of sitting inside a café with Natalie on lunch break, both of them sipping coffee and gazing out the window.

  Natalie was telling him one of the main ways Horizon, the dominant net service provider, marketed net-neutrality subscriptions: by buying Searchable ads that would appear whenever a site owner searched for his or her own site.

  Outside, a woman walked by with a young boy, presumably her son. They stopped while he tied his shoelace, and Natalie stopped talking mid-sentence. Carl looked at her. She was staring through the window at the boy, expressionless. She didn’t speak again until the boy finished and moved out of view.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just found that boy incredibly handsome.”

  Then they returned to their conversation about Horizon, as though nothing odd had happened. The Carl sitting in the coffee shop didn’t comment on Natalie’s remark or react to it at all, but present-day Carl found it very odd. He went back and listened to it again.

  “I’m sorry,” Natalie said. “I just found that boy incredibly handsome.”

  The remark was completely out of context and unnecessary. So Carl began accessing other memories of Natalie at random. He encountered more of the same; odd breaks in the conversation where Natalie would trail off before making some bizarre comment that made her sound like a pedophile. Carl had no recollection of Natalie saying such things, ever, for as long as he’d known her. But there they were in his lifelog.

  He returned to the footage of their conversation in the coffee shop and watched Natalie’s face as she made the disconcerting remark. “I’m sorry. I just found that boy incredibly handsome.”

  Zooming in on her mouth, he played it again. There. Something was off about the way her lips moved. They didn’t quite match the words, but you had to watch carefully to catch it.

  On his fifth listen the intonation started to sound wrong.

  Someone had gone through his memories of Natalie and inserted pedophilic comments made to look and sound as though she was saying them! They’d done a damned good job of it, too. Almost perfect.

  He turned on the main TV room wall and accessed his Unfurl account. Posts about Natalie filled his feed, a lot of them from people who knew her personally, and who now recounted times when Natalie had said something that had made her seem like a pervert. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” wrote one of his SafeTalk colleagues. “Now it makes so much sense.”

  The memories from Carl’s lifelog, into which fabricated remarks had apparently been edited, were all from years ago. They’d only seemed strange to Carl because he had come to know Natalie so well. He knew for certain she didn’t make comments like that. But Natalie didn’t have any other close friends. Was it possible these people posting on Unfurl didn’t actually remember those remarks? Perhaps, instead, they’d searched their lifelogs for their own memories of Natalie after reading the incriminating blog post. Poring over them, looking for confirmation that Natalie really was a pedophile. And they’d found it.

  Human memory was imperfect. That was partly why lifelogs were used in the first place. Courts considered lifelogs indisputable. If someone’s lifelog told them Natalie had made an inappropriate comment during a half-remembered conversation years ago, they would almost certainly believe it.

  And if remarks made in lifelog conversations had been fabricated, the blog post by Natalie’s ‘victim’ could be as well.

  Carl stood up but didn’t go anywhere, instead standing in the middle of the TV room stricken by his racing thoughts. Lifelogs were supposed to be sacrosanct, inviolate records of reality. They made up Dodge’s very foundation. And the powers-that-be were screwing with them to incriminate people who disagreed with them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  He’d thrown his coat over one of the chairs in the kitchen. Grabbing it, he headed for the porch and pulled on his boots. He needed to know for sure, SafeTalk be damned. The insurance company, Air Earth, the media, Maria—anyone who might be monitoring his lifelog. Damn them all. Carl didn’t care. He needed to know.

  Natalie didn’t answer her hatch when he rang the buzzer, but it was unlocked, so he pushed it open and hoisted himself inside anyway. She sat in the TV room, a bottle of surry dangling from her hand. She was drunk.

  Carl stood in front of her. “Natalie?”

  “What.”

  “Where’s the antidote?”

  “Don’t want it. Flushed it.”

  “I need you sober. I need to talk to you.”

  “Don’t wanna be sober.”

  Carl went into the kitchen and went through the cupboards until he found another bottle of surry. Cracking the plastic shell attached to the neck caused five pills to fall out into his palm. Four of them he left on the counter, but he took the fifth into the TV room.

  He grabbed the bottle of surry from her.

  “Hey! I need that,” she cried out.

  “No, you need this.” He held out the pill.

  “Get that away.”

  “Take it, or I keep all the surry.”

  She glowered at him for a moment. Then she snatched the pill from his hand and slapped it into her mouth. Within a few minutes she was alert and sensible.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Carl.”

  “Why not? I don’t plan to say anything incriminating.”

  She shook her head. “Coming here was incriminating. Saying you don’t plan on saying anything incriminating is especially incriminating, because it implies that there are incriminating things you might be saying. You’re being watched.”

  “Of course I am. Everyone is watched.”

  “They’re watching you with particular interest. You serve their interests right now, but the minute you don’t they’ll destroy you.”

  “What about you? How can you afford to say incriminating things?”

  She laughed. “Have you been online recently? I don’t have a whole lot to lose.”

  He sighed, and took a pull from the surry bottle.

  “Hey!” she said.

  “I’ll buy you another.”

  “At least give me some.”

  He handed it to her.

  “Natalie, did you…did you molest Jonathan Trangebe?”

  She laughed bitterly before taking a sizable swallow and handing back the bottle “Sorry. I just think ‘Trangebe’ is such a sick joke. The only family phrase I could find to fit it was ‘Adversity maketh strange bedfellows.’”

  “Did you do it?”

  “In order for me to have molested Jonathan Trangebe, Jonathan Trangebe would have to e
xist. I’ve never met a Jonathan Trangebe. I’ve never heard of one. I doubt there’s even a Jonathan Trangebe in FutureBrite’s care. They made him up, Carl.”

  “Impossible,” he said. “They’d never get away with it.”

  “Why not? FutureBrite youth aren’t permitted to have an online presence of any kind. The company is vast, and no single employee ever has access to the entire database of youth in their care. Even if someone wanted to, no one would be able to verify Jonathan Trangebe’s non-existence.”

  “Well, why don’t you say something? Defend your innocence?”

  “My innocence has been dragged into the public arena and murdered. My LifeRank is bottomed out. Besides, they’ve cut my net access and deleted my social network accounts, leaving me with only TV to witness my own destruction.”

  “They can’t do that.”

  “They can when you’re a convicted criminal. I’ll be on a prison barge in less than four weeks, Carl. Now give me that bottle.”

  He passed it back to her. “That doesn’t make sense, either. If you were meant for the prison barges, wouldn’t you be in custody right now?”

  Natalie spread her hands. “Where would I go? I couldn’t survive the storms outside the city. They’d find me, or I’d die. Either way they’re going to have me out of their hair.”

  “How did they convict you if Jonathan Trangebe doesn’t exist? Wouldn’t he have to testify?”

  “I wasn’t convicted for sexual assault. The court subpoenaed my browser history, my search history, my lifelog, everything. They found that I’ve committed multiple crimes, so they chose one and charged me with that. They could do the same to you, if they wanted. They could do it to anybody.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Carl, when you subscribe to LifeRank, you’re also agreeing to their Terms of Service Agreement, which fills over a hundred volumes. And one of the clauses says that you agree they can prosecute you for violating the Agreement. It means everyone in Dodge commits multiple felonies a day. In my case, they discovered I sent my cousin a funny video three years ago that turned out to violate someone’s copyright. They charged me for illegally disseminating copyrighted materials and gave me seven years on the prison barges. Also, I let my father borrow my eReader once, and since that meant he ended up reading books he’d never bought I was liable for violating the End User License Agreement. Apparently, we never actually own our books; we just buy one-person licenses to read them. Something I never knew until recently. For that second charge they gave me nine more years.”