This was not a type of thinking your actual Terrorists ever engaged in, this moral or spiritual type of thinking ... except for the so-called faith-based Terrorists, also known as the N.I.N., who may or may not have actually existed, and who nobody really knew what they believed in, some kind of hodgepodge of quasi-Gnostic neo-Kabbalist sex magick nonsense, Tantric Yoga, Chaos Theory, and possibly something to do with Spinoza.
No, according to the leading Security experts, your actual Terrorists, who did exist (most of whom would have jumped at the chance to eviscerate you and your entire family, especially the kids, on general principle), had zero interest in this type of thinking. They certainly weren’t setting off on any kind of half-baked spiritual quests to “free their minds” and “become what they were” so they could join in some ultimate Armageddonish battle (which was clearly unwinnable and probably eternal) against the Corporatist manifestation of some primordial nebulous demiurgic force. On the contrary, to these actual Terrorists, everything was all about power. And not any kind of spiritual power. Actual power. As in physical power. Economic and political power. The way these actual Terrorists saw it, the Normals had this actual power, this economic and political power. They, the actual Terrorists, did not. They wanted to have it, and they would kill to get it. Morals and ethics did not enter into it.
According to these learned Security experts, who had researched all this stuff extensively, these actual Terrorists subscribed to the theory that right and wrong, and healthy and unhealthy, and all the other moralistic, dualistic terms that those in power had used forever to define themselves and their allies and enemies (and with which Valentina was so desperately struggling as she contemplated the life of her gardener, and her and Kyle’s investments, and so on, and which Taylor was not really struggling with at all), were tactical terms, with no inherent meaning. They did not believe in these meaningless terms, or in any other moralistic, dualistic terms, or axioms, or precepts, or articles of faith. Which didn’t really leave them that much to believe in ... and there was the heart of the problem right there.
According to these same Security experts, who you saw online on a daily basis, these actual Terrorists, despite whatever vision of a better world they were selling, in their heart of hearts, believed in nothing. They worshiped nothing. They stood for nothing. They honored nothing and respected nothing. They clearly didn’t respect other people, who they wanted to murder, maim, and eviscerate, or private property, which they wanted to steal, or destroy, or at minimum senselessly damage, and not for any rational reasons, or to further any cause or ideology, or to free themselves and their fellow Anti-Socials from any invisible post-despotic regime of Corporatist domination ... no, oh no, it was simply to feed their nihilistic lust for destruction, which stemmed from their envy and hatred of others, and their desire for power and control over others, which stemmed from their Narcissistic personalities, which stemmed from their Anti-Social Disease, which rendered them incapable of ever leading normal productive lives in society.
Oddly (and this was never entirely satisfactorily explained by the Security experts), in spite of their envy and hatred of others, and Narcissistic personalities, and so on, these actual Terrorists worked in groups, secretive, highly-disciplined groups, autonomous cells with inscrutable names, like ZF2, A:::A, the B/O3 Fraktion, and the Bond Street Bombers (OK, the latter being probably not that inscrutable *** ), and it was all these autonomous militant cells, or working groups, or factions, or whatever, working in coordination with each other (and not some molar, hierarchical structure, which would have been a whole lot simpler), that the various corporate Security Services with all their hi-tech weapons systems were somehow never able to eradicate ... which given the fact that these Terrorist groups were all based within the Quarantine Zones (so it was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel), if you thought about it, was kind of weird.
Another small item in the Weird Department was the fact that (and this had been officially verified) although each member of these Terrorists groups, or cells, or factions, was an Anti-Social, only a very small minority of Anti-Socials were actual Terrorists (significantly less than one percent). Fortunately, for IntraZone Waste & Security, and anyone else who wanted to find them, this negligible minority was known to frequent a number of extremely unhygienic, off-the-radar drinking establishments located down in the deep Inner Zone, an Anti-Social no man’s land, where you did not go unless you belonged there, and into which not even the Watchers ventured (out of fear of having their balls cut off and stuffed down their throats, and other such antics).
One of the least hygienic of these places was ... you guessed it, the Pussyhorse Lounge. It was hidden way down at the assward end of this no-name alley off Muybridge Lane, which you got to via this other alley, which nobody really knew where it went, but a stretch of it ran through this desolate tunnel where people got raped and killed, and so on. In spite of its somewhat suggestive name, the Pussyhorse Lounge was not a whorehouse, or a sex club, or a makeshift S&M dungeon. There were plenty of those around, of course. The Pussyhorse just didn’t happen to be one of them. The Pussyhorse Lounge was a straight-up tavern ... which apparently no one ever went to anymore. The place was empty, except for Taylor, Sarah, Adam, of all fucking people, and the facially-tattooed bartender, Eoghan, who Taylor remembered from the bad old days. The three of them, Adam, Sarah, and Taylor, were sitting in this plywood booth in the back, that term being relative, the place was so small. It was just the bar, a couple of tables, and the booth where they were currently sitting, speaking in conspiratorial whispers and ignoring their mugs of luke-warm beer.
Taylor had found his way to the Pussyhorse, in which he hadn’t set foot for nearly ten years, and had walked in just past 2200 with a song in his heart and half a hard-on, all prepared to get himself laid. Sarah was sitting there waiting for him. Sitting there beside her was Adam, which meant ... OK, he wasn’t getting laid. However, one look at their faces told him, and the absence of any other patrons told him, and the way that Eoghan had nodded at him told him, he’d finally found his baby smugglers, or technically, they had finally found him.
He slid into the booth across from the two of them, Sarah, who was clearly attracted to him (she had that unmistakeable look), and Adam, who just as clearly wasn’t. A mug of flat beer was sitting there waiting for him. He ignored it, and checked out Sarah’s tits.
“You know who we are ... we know who you are.” Adam whispered to someone in his beer. “You talk about any of this shit to anyone,” he looked up at Taylor, “you disappear.”
A cockroach with some kind of cranial deformity zig-zagged up the wall beside him. Another one was leisurely traversing the ceiling on its way to the bar to visit with Eoghan. Taylor, who was not that terribly impressed with Adam and his new and more hardcore persona, was staring across the booth at Sarah. He had moved up from her tits to her eyes, which were staring back unblinkingly at him. He was also keeping half an eye on Eoghan, who back when they were both in their twenties had wasted three people that Taylor knew of.
“Cassandra Passwaters disappears.”
Now Adam had Taylor’s full attention.
“Yeah, genius, we know who she is.”
Everyone sat there looking at everyone.
Eoghan looked up.
The cockroach stopped.
Sarah was steadily eyeballing Taylor.
“All right, so you know what’s happening,” Taylor fished.
Sarah nodded.
“So ... what’s happening?”
Sarah smiled. Then she told him. She went into detail. Cassandra, the baby, the whole nine yards. Taylor sat there, deadpan, listening, holding her gaze, watching for signs, but he couldn’t read her, which was disconcerting, because normally he could read a woman. Whatever. He was quickly connecting the dots. Obviously they had talked to Meyer. Because how else would they know all this? Which meant that Meyer was probably one of them .. .
Sarah finished. Taylor nodded.
/> “OK,” he said, “so how do we do this?”
“How we do this is we fucking do this. You don’t do this. We fucking do this.” Adam had clearly rehearsed this shit.
Taylor flashed Adam his total-lack-of-anything-resembling-a-conscience look.
“You see this? The eyes? What did I tell you?” This time Adam was talking to Sarah, who ignored him completely, so he turned back to Taylor. “Look, asshole, we know all about you. We know your whole story. We’ve seen your file ...”
Sarah adjusted her posture slightly.
“My file?”
Taylor didn’t like the sound of that.
He reached for his beer mug.
Eoghan glanced up.
The cockroach was on the move again.
Sarah reached over and gripped Taylor’s forearm. She did it casually, as if to get his attention.
“You think we could run this kind of operation if we couldn’t hack their system?” she asked.
Yeah, OK, that made sense. He relaxed his arm. Sarah let go. Eoghan went back to washing glasses. Adam, who appeared to have no idea how close he’d just come to having the side of his skull caved in with the bottom of a beer mug, sat there trying to look intimidating, which was pointless given his ridiculous haircut.
Sarah hadn’t taken her eyes off Taylor.
“You don’t exactly fit our profile.”
“Your profile?”
“We don’t get a lot of 3s. Or fathers. We usually deal with the mothers.”
“Who are mostly 1s.”
Sarah nodded.
“3s tend to be ... a little unpredictable.”
“Which doesn’t fucking cut it,” Adam piped in.
Taylor ignored him.
“So what do you need?”
“We need to believe we can work with you ... safely. ”
“So what do I do to make you believe that?”
“Nothing. We either will or we won’t.”
The cockroach had paused and was reconnoitering. Sarah studied him for several seconds ... Taylor, that is, not the cockroach.
“You grew up out on Jackson Avenue.”
“Around there.”
“What used to be Walt Whitman Road.”
“Yeah.”
“So you were there when the purged the 4s.”
Taylor nodded.
“But you’ve never been active.”
“Thought you said you read my file.”
“Why not?”
Taylor gave her the eyebrows.
“She asked you a fucking question, slick.”
“Guess I never got the point.”
“The point of what?”
“Resistance. Whatever.”
“Nothing in it for you personally, right?”
Adam was intentionally trying to goad him, possibly as some kind of test ...
“Your file goes dead about ten years back.”
Sarah’s eyes were locked onto him.
“I settled down.”
“With the mother.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Smell the roses, you know ... play a little golf.”
“Keep it up dickhead.”
“You used to run with Vaclav Borges.”
“Did I?”
“A particularly nasty character.”
“I don’t know anyone by that name.”
“You remember Eoghan?”
Eoghan glanced up. Taylor kept his eyes on Sarah.
“He remembers you. From back in the Nineties. You and Borges. The Gilmartin brothers. He describes you as somewhat ... ”
“Unpredictable?”
“Volatile was the word, I think.”
“People change.”
“Do they? Really?”
There was that look again.
Taylor smiled.
“I haven’t done shit in forever, OK?”
“We know. We checked.”
She stroked a strand of hair back out of her face with one finger. The two of them sat there looking at each other.
“Why don’t you just blow him already?”
Adam was obviously getting restless, or jealous, or maybe he was playing a game. He drained his beer mug and sucked out the dregs. Sarah’s eyes were still fixed on Taylor. The look was gone, though. She was back to business.
“Look, if we do this, we do it our way. It goes by the numbers. There’s no discussion. We tell you to do a thing, you do it. We say something goes this way, that’s it. It goes that way, or everything’s off. We abort the action, clean up the mess ...”
“Including you,” Adam clarified, just as the cockroach came into range. Taylor got it with the palm of his hand, squirting its guts in Adam’s direction.
“Motherfucker.”
Taylor ignored him. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Sarah.
“Agreed?” she asked.
Taylor nodded.
“Then say it,” she said.
“Agreed,” he said.
“OK. You’re on.”
“Good ...”
“For now. Listen carefully. Here are the ground rules. One. Starting now, tonight, you and the mother do nothing unusual. Nothing. Zero. Nothing changes. Both of you stick to your normal routines.”
“No deviations from your normal routines,” Adam reiterated, as if she hadn’t just said that.
“You realize she just said that, right?” Taylor asked, just wanting to confirm .
Adam glared.
Sarah sighed.
Eoghan was watching them all in the mirror.
“Do I have to keep coming to meetings?” Taylor wondered.
“No deviations,” Adam spat.
“The meetings are infiltrated,” Sarah explained.
“Cooperators?”
Sarah nodded.
“They’d notice if you suddenly stopped attending.”
“You know who they are.”
“Some of them, sure. Why?”
Taylor shook his head.
Sarah studied him.
“You think we should waste them.”
“For starters, yeah.”
Adam smirked.
“We’ll take care of the Cooperators, killer.”
“Maybe you can fucking twinkle them to death.”
“Two. Anti-Baby pills. The mother picks them up like normal. She brings the package home like normal. She flushes the pills on her normal schedule ...”
Taylor sat there, pretending to listen, and nodding every now and then, and mostly ogling Sarah’s breasts, as she and Adam ran down the ground rules. All right, he thought, step one accomplished. Baby-smuggling Terrorists located. Assuming that was who they were. It certainly appeared to be who they were. At the same time Taylor was acutely aware of the fact that he had no proof who they were, and that theoretically they could have been anyone, and that he didn’t much like the vibe he was getting. Not from Sarah, who seemed OK, but from Adam and Eoghan, who seemed a bit jumpy, but he had no choice but to go ahead with this. Whoever they were, they had his number. They knew who he and Cassandra were, knew she was pregnant, they knew the whole story. Which meant they had to have talked to Meyer. Which meant that Meyer was definitely one of them. The question was ... one of who? An A.S.U. within the A.S.U.? Another Terrorist network entirely? Faith-based Terrorists? He didn’t think so. They didn’t come off particularly faith-based ... or, OK, Sarah was a little spooky. She sported a number of runic tattoos, some of which might have been triple sixes, or inverted nines, or triskelions, or something. He could see them through the fabric of her flimsy tunic, but he couldn’t make out the artwork completely. He could also see her tits through her tunic. They weren’t as luscious as Cassandra’s but still ... and her nipples were poking up under the fabric ... dark ... like her hair, and her eyes and ... wait ... what was that shit about his file? Was that just a slip, or had they meant to say that? And what was Adam’s game, exactly? Was he simply the puffed-up dickless punk with delusions of grandeur h
e appeared to be, or was he needling Taylor as some kind of test, trying to taunt him into losing his shit?
Everybody infiltrates everybody ... everybody uses everybody.
“Seven. Paranoia Control.”
“What?” Taylor asked, snapping out of it.
“The closer we get to the launch of the D.A.D.A., the more Security is going to be on us. We’re going to need to keep our shit together ...”
“When?” Taylor asked.
“You’ll know when you need to,” Adam answered, “like everyone else.”
“Look,” Taylor addressed this to Sarah, “she won’t have the baby for another six months, so if you’re planning to, you know, start the revolution before then ...”
“He thinks it’s a fucking joke.”
“No, I think it’s fucking suicide. But knock yourself out.”
“So what if it is? You think they’re going to let us die of old age?”
“That seems to be their plan at the moment.”
“You have no fucking clue what’s happening.”
“And what ... you do?”
Adam smiled.
“We’re getting off track,” Sarah interrupted. “Look, we’ll take care of the timing, all right? You need to trust us. Can you do that, Taylor?”
Taylor nodded.
Adam looked away.
“Eight. Sequestration of the mother ... ”
Now, officially, this was 30 October, 2609, H.C.S.T., and the Year of the Mekong Giant Catfish, and several other totally made-up dates. Valentina, who Taylor didn’t know, had just spent the day at Paxton Wills undergoing various hormone treatments to get her uterus to stop rejecting the Clarion embryos it kept rejecting. Cassandra, who Taylor knew quite intimately, was ten, maybe eleven weeks pregnant, which gave them another five, six weeks to deal with shit before she started showing, at which point things were going to get hairy. The plan was, she would hole up inside her bedroom, away from her nosy and annoying roommates, who, as Taylor now explained to Adam and Sarah, he was relatively sure he could probably handle, as the roommates were all scared shitless of him. The only really serious danger, in Taylor’s opinion, was Cassandra’s bathroom, which the roommates were always going in and out of, and which was right across the hall from Cassandra’s door. However, if you put your ear to her door, you could usually tell if one of them was in there, or out in the hallway waiting their turn, or just nosing around and being annoying. No, their major problem, as Taylor saw it, was not the roommates, but Cassandra’s job, which was soldering mostly touchscreen controllers and accelerometers, and things like that, into the chipsets of assorted models of indispensable consumer products, the names of which she was not privy to, at the GCH Components factory from 1900 to 0500. **** At some point before officially December, they needed to get Cassandra out of there, and keep her out for the next five months. And they needed to do this in such a fashion that, once Cassandra had had the baby, and Taylor had delivered it to Adam and Sarah, Cassandra could go back to work at the factory, and their lives would go on as if nothing had happened. This, Taylor was explaining at length, would be tricky, yes, but not impossible. He’d already worked out most of the details, which he now related to Sarah’s tits.
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