Walter reported she was doing well.
In order to get to the Seaview Unit and pretend to visit and interrogate her mother, Valentina was forced to navigate the maze of the Breckenridge Village complex, which had clearly been designed to intimidate visitors and discourage any unnecessary wandering. The WhisperTrain ride from Pewter Palisades had taken approximately ninety two minutes. She’d detrained smoothly on Level 12, ridden the escalator up to 11, slipped into the nearest private Ladies room and compulsively masturbated for less than ten minutes (after which the door automatically opened). Once she was done, and the coast was clear, she’d ridden the escalator up from 11 and entered the main reception area, which was lit like the ballroom of a luxury cruise ship. One of the helpful Security Staff at a circular station in the center of the lobby bodyscanned her and gave her directions.
“You’ll need to go through Day Room 7. Stay to your right. Look for the signs. You’ll see one leading to Corridor D. Take that past the Roger and Marjorie Bainesworth-Bradley Breakfast and Games Room to Corridor 30. It’ll be on your left. Follow the yellow footprints on the floor. You’ll pass a big double door on your right. Don’t go through that. Keep on going. All the way down at the end of the corridor you’ll see a bank of unmarked elevators. Any one of those will take you to Seaview.”
Outfitted with these precise instructions, Valentina set out on her odyssey ... ten minutes later she was hopelessly lost. She’d circled around the Security station, traversed the expanse of the lavish lobby, and started up the central concourse, which seemed to be the only way into the complex. Weaving her way through the oncoming streams of doctors, nurses, healthcare aides, administrators, and other visitors (most of whom were deeply engaged with their Viewers, or talking to the back of other people’s heads) she found her way to Day Room 7, an overly lit, acoustically savage “daytime active recreation area” roughly the size of an airplane hangar, where everything was done up in iris-punishing primary colors that gave her a headache. The day room was packed with Breckenridge Residents dressed in cheerful daytime attire and arranged in various “active” poses at tables of board games they were not playing. It looked like some kind of wax museum for affluent zombie golfers and their wives. Several of the more responsive Residents were pushing colored plastic pieces around in random patterns on their boards, or were picking their noses, or at scabs on their arms, but mostly they were just sitting there staring. Their cannula tubing had been discreetly taped into the folds of their flaccid skin, which appeared to have been sprayed (or possibly painted) with some kind of orange pancake substance to enhance their overall “active” look. A few of the Residents saw her coming and reached toward her as she passed their tables, clawing the air with their bony fingers. She drew her arms in close to her chest, dodged them, and crossed as fast as she could. She made it across, out the doors, quickly located and took Corridor D, passed the Roger and Marjorie Bainesworth-Bradley Breakfast and Games Room on her right, completely forgot which corridor came next, took a wrong turn into Corridor 6B, descended an almost imperceptible downward incline that went on forever, went through yet another set of doors, down a hallway, which she knew was all wrong, turned a corner without any doors, and ended up in something called the “Long-Term Relaxation Area.”
Valentina, who was not at all squeamish, and who had seen a few things in medical school, and in her many years as a healthcare professional, had never seen anything remotely like the Long-Term Relaxation Area. Formerly active Breckenridge Residents, hundreds if not thousands of them, were lying in rows of single beds that stretched off past the visible horizon. They were lying supine, eyes wide open, arms at their sides, completely naked, their mechanically-ventilated rib cages heaving, section by section, in synchronized waves. Strands of plastic translucent tubing dangled down from the ceiling like vines, disappearing into mouths and nostrils, reappearing out of abdomens and genitals, finding their way to plastic reservoirs of dark brown urine and citrine excrement, which were fastened with clips to frames of each bed. She backed up into the wall behind her, closed her eyes, and repeated her mantra. The multiplicitous oneness of the ...
Wherever this was (assuming it was real), it was definitely somewhere deep underground, some sub-subterranean network of caverns that ran beneath the entire Village. What were these people doing down here? Maybe they simply stored them down here until their loved ones called and scheduled a visit, then took them upstairs and arranged them somewhere and sprayed them with that orange stuff. Or maybe they were offering a time-share deal for clients whose loved ones were aspiringly abundant. Or perhaps these clients didn’t have any loved ones, but they had insurance, which was paying the bills.
A Viewer overhead and to the right of Valentina switched on suddenly. A face appeared ... a blue-eyed nurse, obviously a Clear.
“Can I be of any assistance, Ms. Briggs?”
Valentina nearly wet herself .
“Yes. I’m lost. I’m trying to get to ...”
“The Seaview Unit. You took a wrong turn. Walk back up the way you came. Take a left at the end of the corridor. Walk straight ahead to Corridor 30. Follow the yellow footprints from there.”
The image on the screen sort of flickered for a second.
“Thank you,” Valentina stammered.
“The Long-Term Relaxation Area is a Residents-Only Restricted Area.”
“I know ... I’m sorry.”
“There’s a door to your right.”
Valentina bolted for it. She staggered out into the corridor. The nurse was there on another Viewer, the screen of which was also flickering, or maybe she was just a software program. She cocked her head and smiled professionally.
“Enjoy your visit, and have a nice day.”
Valentina retraced her steps, took a left at the end of the hall, found her way to Corridor 30, and followed the yellow footprints from there. They led to a bank of unmarked elevators. She took one up to the 20th floor, and stepped out into another day room. This was definitely the SeaView Unit. Scores of female Special Needs Residents were seated in rows of sofas and recliners, facing south, toward the lagoon, a wall of tinted, unbreakable glass reflecting their peaceful, expressionless faces. They looked like an audience of elderly mannequins awaiting the start of an outdoor performance. A handful of professional Healthcare aides, dressed in cheerfully-colored scrubs and those perforated rubber hospital clogs, were huddled together in the nurses station, watching what like sounded liked a Finkles commercial.
Valentina tiptoed past them. She stood against a wall at the back of the day room and scanned the reflections of the faces in the glass. The women, despite their disparate ages, appeared to be minor variations of each other. Each of them had the same beige pallor, EasyCare haircut, pale blue pajamas, bright pink lipstick, and matching nails. One of the aides, an older woman, coming toward her with with a kidney-shaped pan, noticed Valentina and raised her eyebrows.
“Catherine Briggs?” Valentina inquired .
The aide took a look around the floor. “Third one up from the end,” she said. She smiled at Valentina like a shop assistant who knows you’re in her store by mistake, because you can’t afford whatever she’s selling, and headed back off to wherever she was going.
Valentina peered across at the group of Residents down at the end, three nearly identical older women staring blankly out the window. Apparently, the one on this end was her mother, unless the aide had made a mistake. Valentina studied the woman, waiting for something to jog her memory. Nothing did. She looked like a stranger. Had she changed so much in fifteen years? Or maybe it was just that she was so far away. She took the long way across the Day Room, hugging the wall around the periphery, and tiptoed up to the group of women.
On closer inspection ... yes, in fact, it was her mother, or what was left of her, or at least the body that had once contained her. Her dominant features were all intact, but they were inexplicably softened somehow, as if Valentina were looking at her through a sheet or fil
ter of transparent gauze. Her hair had gone completely white. Or maybe it had always been white. She had dyed it any number of shades of blonde and red throughout the years. In any event, it was snow white now, which went with her eel-green eyes quite nicely. Oddly, although in her early eighties, she seemed somehow younger than she had in her sixties. She had gained some weight. Her skin was softer. The tension was gone from the muscles of her face.
Valentina pulled up one of the straight-backed chairs they left out for visitors. She sat down directly across from her mother, and stared into her bright green eyes.
Catherine smoothly switched her gaze from some random focal point out the window to Valentina’s face, two meters in front of her, much like a camera auto-focusing. Her peaceful expression did not change. The other two ladies, Dotty and Katja, turned and adjusted their depths of focus. The three of them sat there staring at her. Their eyes, though obviously responsive, were vacant ... they appeared to be simply tracking movement.
Valentina smiled.
Catherine smiled.
“Mom? It’s me. It’s Valentina. ”
Dotty and Katja were also smiling.
“Mom,” she asked, “do you recognize me?”
She checked Catherine’s eyes for any reaction.
Nothing. Not one flicker. Zero.
Valentina, truth be told, from an early age, and throughout her childhood, and continuing into her teenage years, and on into her twenties and thirties, although, of course, she loved her mother, had never really liked her mother. It wasn’t just that she blamed her mother for her lousy genes (which of course she did), or even that she had always believed that, contrary to her perfunctory denials, her mother had always secretly relished the fact that the doctors could never find the right combination of medications to arrest her latent Anti-Social symptoms and stop her being a drain on her family ... no, the simple truth was, she just didn’t like her. And neither did most other people.
Catherine, on her better days, was, to put it mildly, acerbic. On her not-so-good days, she was out and out cruel, often bordering on verbally abusive. The woman physically radiated hostility. You felt it the moment she entered a room, lips curled up in a permanent sneer, eel eyes brimming with accusation, searching out a target for her scorn. That target, when it wasn’t Valentina’s father, which it usually was, was Valentina, or at least it had been throughout her childhood. As a child Valentina had not understood this. She had never been anything but kind to her mother, as had her father, excessively perhaps, which had prompted Catherine to be even more acerbic, and cutting, and borderline verbally abusive. Later, of course, in her decades of therapy with Doctor Graell and her earlier therapists, where she had worked through most of her childhood traumas, and the emotionally debilitating effects thereof, she had come to understand and had forgiven her mother, in an abstract, intellectual fashion. Catherine’s inappropriate behavior was not her fault ... she couldn’t help it. It was caused by her drug-resistant condition, which was caused by her defective genes, which she’d inherited from her infamous father, the mysterious Terrorist, Stanislav Barnicoat, whose shadow loomed over Valentina’s family like a toxic cumulonimbus cloud, and regarding whose nefarious Terrorist activities Valentina now needed information ... which was why she’d come to visit her mother .
This was her only chance, she thought. In order to approach the N.I.N. and join their faith-based Terrorist struggle against the maleficent minions of IT, and the corporations, and society generally, and offer her naked blood-smeared body to their well-hung priests in those salacious rituals ... well, first she needed to find them somehow, and her grandfather seemed like the best lead she had. She needed names, dates, locations, anything Catherine might possibly remember, because there wasn’t really anything else to go on. She had searched online with her Viewer, of course (which probably wasn’t such a great idea), but the public records surrounding the life of Stanislav Barnicoat were rather sparse.
Born to one Everlina Tompkins Barnicoat, on 7 February, 2480, during the Age of Emergency Measures, deep in what was then Region 7, the southeast corner of North America, technically one of the “Privatized Regions” nominally administrated by Graham McKenzie, ** but in reality a virtual no-go zone (i.e., a hotbed of insurgent Terrorist activity), Stanislav’s life from the time of his birth until his detention at the age of sixty remained a subject of speculation ... which is to say, there were no records. Nothing. The official records were blank. For sixty years the man had managed to stay completely off the radar, an inconceivable feat of subterfuge, particularly in the Age of Emergency Measures, when the corporations were surveilling more or less everyone and everything around the clock. Then, at approximately 0140, on the morning of officially 21 August, 2540, H.C.S.T. (retroactively the Year of the Bactrian Camel), a BREAKING NEWS SECURITY ADVISORY interrupted individual streaming, and Stanislav Barnicoat’s name and likeness appeared on the screen of every Viewer throughout the United Territories. Charged with Conspiracy to Aid and Abet the Furtherance of Acts of Organized Terror, Attempted Evasion, and Resisting Detention, and a host of other lesser charges, Stanislav was suddenly page one news.
Here was a man, an absolute cipher, a Class 4 Anti-Social cipher, deranged and dangerously paranoid, certainly, but highly intelligent and obviously educated, who had just materialized out of the ether. Where had he lived? How had he lived? He had never held a job in his life, had never attended a day of school, had never purchased a single product. Where did he come from? Where had he been hiding? Obviously right under everyone’s noses. This was not some poor, malnourished, late-stage Anti-Social savage, some cave-dweller from the Recovering Areas. No. He had been there all along, hiding right in plain sight, apparently, passing as normal, or relatively normal, as he went about plotting his nefarious activities, and aiding, abetting, and furthering, and so on. All of which led to one grim conclusion ... somewhere, and very possibly everywhere, burrowed into civilization like disgusting hives of diabolical termites, was an underground network of Anti-Social Persons, and a rather sophisticated network at that, which was probably linked, or cooperating closely, or loosely affiliated with the N.I.N., and was conceivably even an offshoot thereof, or an offshoot of some other Terrorist network that was somehow linked to the N.I.N., or that had followed in the latter’s nefarious footsteps, or vaguely had something to do with it somehow ... in any event, an underground network about which, in exhaustive detail, each and every Security Division of every corporation was eager to learn.
Throughout the autumn of 2540, and continuing into the following winter, a crackerjack inter-corporate team of Information Extraction Specialists extraordinarily interrogated Stanislav more or less around the clock. And came up with exactly nothing. Aside from a litany of verbal abuse, a lot of it having to do with their mothers, and unorthodox things that they could do with mothers. Or so the official statements read. After which, again, officially, Stanislav was relocated to a “MegaMax” Isolation Facility, where eventually, at the age of ninety-seven, he died, allegedly of kidney failure.
And that was it for the official records.
But here’s what Valentina remembered. She must have been eight, nine, maybe. They came in person, the Security Specialists. Hadley men. Four of five of them. Sitting around in their suits in the living room. Their haircuts. The skin above their ears. Her father smiling, talking too much. The men not smiling, looking all around. Her mother smiling, but like a snake, asking questions the men couldn’t answer, or maybe weren’t allowed to answer. The cardboard box on the coffee table. Inside it, disks, books, MemCards, ID badges, and assorted papers. And a plastic bag of dark gray ash ... all that was left of Stanislav Barnicoat.
On Valentina’s sixteenth birthday, they sat her down and told her the story. Her father, Walter, did most of the talking. Her mother just sat there, smirking and nodding, and occasionally coughing into her wadded up tissues. The story was, Catherine’s mother, so Valentina’s maternal grandmother, Constance Rosenthal, had
, it turned out, lied to the Hartford HealthCare Company regarding the identity of Catherine’s father, who, according to lines 16 and 20 of Catherine’s corporate birth certificate, and thus officially, remained unknown. Unofficially, and thus in reality, Catherine’s father, Valentina’s grandfather, was the mystery Terrorist, Stanislav Barnicoat. Constance Rosenthal’s lie had somehow held up for almost fifty years. *** None of the family had ever been informed (or not in so many words at least) how the truth had finally come to light, but the only feasible explanation was that the Information Extraction Specialists had, at some point, broken Stanislav, and had learned all kinds of interesting things, one or more of which had led them to Constance, who they promptly detained and extraordinarily interrogated. Again, the details were rather sparse here, but apparently Constance had been uncooperative, because nine months later they received a Fleep from Hadley Global Security Headquarters advising them that Constance had, regrettably, been extraordinarily interrogated to death. Three years later, a Mister Zippy’s normal delivery COD parcel addressed to Catherine arrived at the house. Inside the parcel were assorted papers, jewelry, credit cards, ID badges, and various other personal items, and a plastic bag of dark gray ash ... all that was left of Constance Rosenthal. Incidentally, the following year, on 16 December, 2568, or 25 Kislev, 6329, or the Year of Nepalese Large Eared Pika, and a host of other proprietary dates, Valentina Constance Briggs was born.
Valentina had lived with the shame of her family background for twenty-five years, and probably even longer than that. Sitting up there, beside her mother, as the lights came on in the Seaview Unit, watching the pink and purple sunset off to the right of the toxic lagoon, remembering back, it had always been there, back before she knew what it was, before that fateful sixteenth birthday when they’d sat her down and told her the truth. All her life it had clouded her vision. It had shrouded her mind since the day she was born. It had hung in the air in the house she grew up in, on Chestnut Court in Sturgeson Falls, like one of those noxious egg-smelling farts you can’t believe the person you love and have lived with for years is capable of cutting ... basically, it had ruined everything. Certainly it had ruined her mother. There she was, beside her ... ruined. Valentina had never known the woman her father sometimes described, the one who loved to dance and sing, who read voraciously, and loved to travel, who laughed until she choked sometimes, laughed at silly things he couldn’t explain, misspoken words that didn’t mean anything, archival clips of baby sloths, and cats, and other exotic creatures, in short, the woman he’d fallen in love with, married, and lived with, more or less happily ... until the day her mother, Constance, was picked up by the Security Specialists at the makeup counter of her local Finkles.
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