by Gates, J.
“And when you kill me, Jimmy, there’ll be a million more like me, I promise you that.”
“Well,” Shaw says brusquely, “I think we’ll take our chances and kill you anyway.”
He nods to Blackwell, who puts the wave-gun away. “God have mercy on your soul, May,” Shaw says, and turns to leave.
I’m shaking with rage, but still smiling. Marshaling my strength, I fight to my feet and surge to the door of my cell, holding the cell bars with both hands, and call after them: “I have a debriefing for you, Shaw,” I shout.
He turns back to me, looking mildly amused.
“When you get to the gates of heaven and find out God exists after all, when the real Christ stands to judge you for all the killing and lying and stealing you did in his name, what will you say for yourself then?”
Shaw raps his cane on the floor, his face an unreadable, grinning mask, wilted and pink. “Then, May, at least I’ll have the comfort of knowing I died rich, fat, and smiling,” he says. “God bless.”
The hallway door hisses open as they depart.
“God bless you,” I yell. “You’ll need it!”
But the hall is empty, and so is the threat.
So here, finally, is the end. I’ll die with puke on my shirt, exhausted, with no food, no water, no blanket, no hope. So I take the one comfort I can and lay down to sleep.
Tomorrow, they’ll execute me. Even my dreams are miserable.
~~~
Awake again. I sit up instantly.
There’s a rush of air on my face as the heavy, Plexiglas door on the far end of the room whooshes open. When I stop blinking, I see a man standing before me, leaning against the bars.
He looks like my father, except older, more tired.
“Well, well. My little Napoleon,” he says.
“Dad?” My tongue feels dry and swollen. I glance over and realize that while I slept, the guards must’ve tossed a bottle of water in to me. It sits in one corner of the cell, tempting me, but I feel too weak to walk over and pick it up.
“You don’t look good, sweetie,” he says. “They feeding you?”
I shake my head. “I guess they want me to look appropriately gaunt when they fry me,” I say.
Dad sighs. “Why did you do it, May?”
Our eyes meet.
“You know why. And if you don’t, I can’t make you understand.”
He nods. He looks a bit sick, I suddenly realize. Unhealthy.
“First, May, I promise you I didn’t know what they had planned for the merger. I asked around once you left, and after I found out you tore out your cross and went to the other side, that’s when I started really digging. The more I learned, the more I realized you were right. I found out that they did kill a lot of people in Africa Division, and I swore I’d get to the bottom of it. I hopped the first plane I could find and went there myself, started interviewing members of the security squad who’d carried out the murders. They all said they were just doing their job—following orders. So I went to their supervisor; she said that the head of the division told her to do whatever was necessary to create a hospitable environment for Company growth. So I went to the head of the division, Elton Weiss. He got all defensive and told me that his salary was entirely based on the profits of Africa Division, so he’d simply told his underlings to do whatever was necessary to generate a profit, as long as it wasn’t prohibited by the Department of Expansion Policy Handbook. So I talked to the VP of Expansion Denise Willard and asked her who on earth authorized her to write a policy that allowed such horrors to take place. You know what she said? Her eyes got wide, and she says, ‘You did, sir. You told me to make Africa Division profitable or I’d be out on my ass. You said you didn’t give a damn how I did it. You said, Denise, there are four things that are important in this world: first-quarter profits, second-quarter profits, third-quarter profits, and fourth-quarter profits. Now get the hell out of my office and make me proud.’”
Dad shakes his head bitterly. “I remember saying it, too. . . . All of them thought they were just doing their job, fulfilling their duty, making the Company profitable. And no one took a damned bit of responsibility. It wasn’t me, it was the Company, they said. Africa Division wasn’t the only place things like that happened, either,” he said. “No, it happened all over the world. Then this horrible business with the merger. . . . You were right about it all. I was sick when I learned about all of it. Furious. I spoke about it in a board meeting, too. Pissed a lot of people off. You’d have been proud,” he smiles wanly.
“It won’t make a difference, though. I used to have power, but not anymore. Nobody does. The Company is too big now for any one person, or maybe even any group of people, to change its course. That’s what I’ve learned. It’s just . . . too big.”
“I noticed that,” I say. Only my lips move. I feel for a second as if I might black out, but fight back into consciousness.
“I could have told you it’s impossible to change things by force, May. Blackwell has a hundred weapons systems he hasn’t even played with yet.”
“Well . . . ” I begin, but don’t know what to say. I almost nod off. When I open my eyes again, they’re drawn to the cross on my father’s cheek. Beneath his haggard, gray skin, it looks less like a tattoo or an implant and more like a lesion, like a cancer eating him from the inside out.
“A lot of things changed for me after you left,” he continues. “I realized things. I got rid of the drugs—although it was hard, let me tell you. They were marvelous drugs, and now, without them, I feel like a steaming pile of horse manure. I got rid of the whore, too. And that was hard, because she was a marvelous whore,” he pauses, as if collecting his thoughts. “I’ve been offered a severance package, since I’ve had so many differences of opinion with the board lately. I got an island in the Caribbean. Just a small one, but it has a house, servants. I’m taking it, flying out tomorrow. This is the last thing I’m doing before I leave, and they didn’t even want me to come and see you. They warned me not to, actually. By coming here, I might lose the package altogether. I don’t know, I didn’t check the fine print. . . .
“Oh, God,” he says, realizing something. He takes an N-Nourishe bar out of his pocket and tosses it to me. “I completely forgot I had that with me, and here you are, starving.”
The bar hits my chest and falls into my lap. It takes me a minute, but I peel the wrapper open with leaden fingers and manage to nibble off a small bite. At first, the food elicits only nausea, but as I eat more, a small measure of strength returns to me. At last, I’m able to stand up on shaky legs, cross the room, pick up the water bottle, and take a careful sip.
My father watches all this silently. When I glance over, he’s holding a cell bar with each hand, staring at the empty space between them.
“May,” he says finally, “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” I say.
Dad nods. He glances over his shoulder. “They’re watching us now, I’m sure. Blackwell, Yao, and that damned Jimmy Shaw. They never trusted me completely; now they don’t trust me at all. They’re listening to us right now, reading my thoughts, I guarantee it.”
I notice something.
“Is that the new IC?” I ask, pointing at a small, metallic green device strapped to his arm like an old-fashioned wristwatch.
“Oh,” he says, sounding distracted. “It’s marvelous. Worth every dollar. . . . ” he trails off, staring at nothing again, seemingly fighting some massive struggle in his mind. “They use tiny cards instead of the old memory sticks. Little triangles, but they hold unbelievable amounts of data. Marvelous. . . . ” he trails off again.
I drop the health bar wrapper on the floor and go to my bunk. I slip my hand under my pillow. There, between two fingers, I grasp the tiny data stick Randal gave me. When I was captured, I carried it under my tongue th
rough the cavity search, through the questioning, through it all, carefully concealing its location from my captors and the many cameras they certainly had trained on me for the last few days.
Dad clears his throat. “Those bastards on the board always hated me. Hated the way I cursed, the way I walked. Hated me for the way you were. They never trusted me. For good reason, I guess it turns out.”
He looks at me, filled suddenly with emotion, eyes brimming with tears, but his mouth twists into a grin. This behavior is so unlike him, I’m too startled to speak.
“Cell door, open,” he says.
And it does.
I stand there, astonished.
“One of the perks of being CEO,” Dad reminds me. “My voice is encoded as a master command for all Company doors. Come on, before they see what we’re doing and override my command,” he holds out a hand to me. I take it, and he pulls me through the open door, to freedom.
“There goes my severance package,” he says. “Run, go. I won’t be able to keep up!”
“But, Dad,” I say, “with the sats and everything, neither of us will get away. They’ll catch us in five minutes.”
“We’ll live until then,” he says. “Now go!”
“Wait,” I say. “Give me your IC.”
“What? Why?”
“No time!”
“But it’s brand new.”
“Dad!”
He pulls it off his wrist and hands it to me.
“I love you, May.”
“Love you, too,” I say.
“All compound doors, open,” he says. “Emergency override blocked, code three-four-seven-nine-six-one.”
The Plexiglas door ahead of me opens, and I run.
“I’m proud of you,” Dad calls after me.
As far as I remember, that’s the only time he’s said it. Despite everything, I smile.
The data stick! Running fast on wobbly legs, I jam the triangular card into a slot in the side of the IC. It beeps at me. A moment later, I hear Randal’s voice.
“Hello, Ethan—or Clair or McCann or May, whoever’s alive to use this card. As I’m sure you know, this is the last help I’ll be able to give you. . . . ”
As I turn a corner, sliding haphazardly on the smooth floor, I see a squad member standing at the far end of the hall. He sees me and yells, “Hey!”
I spin and sprint the other direction and around a corner.
Randal’s voice continues: “This is a transmittable p-program, designed to reformat all five billion ICs on the Company network. Once the new program is uploaded, all normal IC functionality will cease. It will be replaced with a manifesto of the Protectorate, a summary of American and Company history, proof of Company transgressions, and finally, an address by you, giving the people the instructions for action. All you have to do is record that last portion and say the words ‘transmission final,’ and our message will be passed to every Company employee in the world.”
Gunshots from behind me. I hear a bullet glance off the wall near my shoulder, but my legs are feeling stronger now. Imager screens on every wall blink on. My picture is there.
The automated voice in the ceiling drones: “Code red, escape: prisoner May Fields. Code red.”
The clamor grows as, throughout the facility, more guards are alerted. I can feel their pursuit rising behind me like a wave.
“It’s up to you, now,” Randal says. “I love you guys. God b-bless the Protectorate, and God bless America.”
A female squad guard appears around a corner and squawks as I bowl her over. Her gun skitters across the floor, and I snatch it up and keep running, hardly breaking stride. A security checkpoint lies just ahead, and behind it, a huge bank of windows, extending many stories high. Squadmen stand next to a row of body-scan machines, talking to a handful of perturbed-looking people trying to get past the security checkpoint. By the time they notice my approach, I’m already on top of them. I scream a vicious war cry and level the gun, but because of the palm coding, it doesn’t fire. Still, the squadmen are startled and duck, buying me just enough time to sprint past them. Behind me, I hear calls of “That’s Fields! Stop her!”
Ahead: a huge window.
Bullets buzz over my head and strike the glass in front of me with several dull cracks. Where each one hits the glass, a shatter pattern appears like a giant snowflake.
This is my only way out, my only chance. They’re close behind me, now. I charge the window, lower my head—
“Please commence recording audio message at the tone—” says the IC in my hand.
Through the window. Shatter.
Falling within the musical clink of broken glass, among a thousand twinkling shards. A story below, I hit a grassy slope, roll, and am back on my feet again, running.
Cuts on every part of my body protest at each step, but the pain only spurs me on. Above, behind me: murmurs of consternation. No squad member dares to jump after me.
I look down at the IC in my hand as it beeps. Mouth gaping like a fish, I capture enough breath to speak.
“I am . . . May Fields. . . . Like you, I was a grateful slave. . . . Now, I know the truth. You are about to learn about all the evils of the Company, and the virtue of the Protectorate. . . . ”
I pause, glancing over my shoulder then dashing across a busy street, narrowly missing several cars. Ahead, a few blocks away, N-Corp Headquarters looms. With nowhere else to go, I fight my way toward it, hoping to disappear into the morning rush.
“Our intention is not to create chaos, or a new order,” I continue. “It’s to reinstate the democracy that was stolen from us. It was supposed to be a government for and by the people, not a Company owning them.”
Sirens coming. Cars honk at me as I stumble across a street. Feeling weak now, like my legs might give out at any second. My mind reels. What to say?
“If guns can’t change things, then use words. And if words won’t work, then use action, and leave your job, boycott the Company church, burn your N-Apartment to ashes.”
Squad trucks ahead and the shriek of sirens behind. I turn off the street.
Under the shadow of the headquarters building, I shove my way through a throng of tie-men and women, drawing a thousand strange looks. I fight through the crowd, into the square outside the N-Corp Headquarters entrance, up to the steps of the building.
“If some of us will die for freedom, the least you can do is stand up and demand it. . . . And if everyone stands up and yells together . . . ”
Like a bee sting in my back, the first bullet.
“. . . We cannot fail.”
Next, a pain in my arm, like a pinch, nothing more, but when I look down, I see my own torn flesh.
“Transmission final.”
I turn to face my attackers, raise my useless gun to them. Maybe twenty squadmen are there—young men, mostly. Their scared faces are probably paler than mine, but still they fire.
I see the mist of blood on the steps at my feet. My blood.
What I feel is not so much pain as the uncomfortable feeling that something inside my torso is wrong. Organs shifting, being rearranged.
And here it is, that instant where your whole life is revealed to you, played out before your eyes, just like they say it will be. All the beauty and heartache, loneliness and triumph compressed into a single, flickering, achingly vivid instant.
When it’s over, I am here, under the shadow of the headquarters, with the squadmen still firing bullets into my body.
I hear a low, grinding moan escape my mouth.
Somehow, I am still standing. No, now I fall. Something comes out of my mouth, but whether it’s spit, puke, or blood, who knows? Funny, it’s as if I’m sitting outside myself, watching it happen.
And strange thoughts wash over me: I think o
f my poor body, and what will become of it, where it will be buried, whether it matters at all. I think of the blood seeping out from me, vibrant crimson, thick against my cheek, warming the pavement beneath me.
I think of the concrete, cold under my skin, and the mirrored glass of the buildings above, reflections of reflections, of the parade of empty zeros and ones and the machines making shoes and guns and wedding dresses. The Company.
I think of God, and hope he isn’t really a close friend of Jimmy Shaw’s, or I’m screwed. My eyes roll upward and I see the vapor trail of a jet, painted a vivid pink by the dawn, trailing to the end of a flawless blue sky. A path of magical light, ending.
Then, I think of the people. The real Protectorate. They had filled the square, heading in to work. Now they cringe away from me. They hide their eyes. Some run. Only a few stand and watch.
Pain comes in a huge, dizzying convulsion, then ebbs away.
The people. I imagine them watching me die, hearing my last words on their brand-new, state-of-the art ICs, and, one by one, standing up from their desks.
I imagine them, one by one, walking out of their offices and into the sunlight, refusing to work again until they are free.
I imagine them, holding hands, billions and billions of them, and in that one act of simple defiance accomplishing what all this spilled blood never could.
And somewhere in her N-Academy cell, I imagine my Rose listening to my message on her IC and beginning to dream of a different life.
I imagine a better world, and in imagining it, there is hope.
This is how the revolution begins.
—EPILOGUE—
Dearest Protectorate,
When I first wrote Blood Zero Sky back in 2005, I couldn’t get it published. The people I showed it to felt that it was rife with hyperbole, a depiction of a future so exaggerated that it wasn’t believable. In the following years, however, the world has marched steadily in the direction that the book foretold. Corporations consolidated. Government agencies privatized. A multibillion-dollar bailout blurred the lines between the federal government and our nation’s “too-big-to-fail” corporate giants. Consumer debt soared, and the middle class in America became increasingly marginalized. Now the world of Blood Zero Sky, far from being hyperbole, actually seems a bit too close for comfort—and indeed, the first rumblings of a peaceful revolution have already begun. As a result, I feel compelled to issue a word of caution.