Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  A voice in her head said, “someone’s coming.”

  “No one is coming. No one is coming.”

  She packed her Charles Vittorio suitcase, the mid-sized blue one with the wheels that swiveled. She did this quickly, and not very carefully, telling herself that no one was coming. After she had finished, and no one had come, she stared down into the tangle of clothes and the random assortment of hygiene products she had jammed into its crème compartments, which she couldn’t even remember doing. Then she sat down on the bed, and wept.

  Once her sobbing finally subsided, she looked around the room in a daze. The bedroom set was three years old, dark, faux mahogany was it? She couldn’t remember who she’d been when they’d bought it, or whether she’d liked it. She didn’t now. But she didn’t exactly dislike it either. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about it. It didn’t have anything to do with her somehow, and neither did anything else in the room. It wasn’t that they weren’t her things. Most of the things in the bedroom were hers ... the antique mirror that had been her mother’s, the family snapshots, of both of their families, that Valentina had arranged on the dressers, her jewelry boxes, her medicine cases, the artificial flowers, orchids, begonias ... objects, things, alien things. There, on her night stand, were stacks of bottles of Pregadrel, Luprocene, Fertex, Ovitrol, and other such hormones and anti-rejection drugs. She picked one up and read the label: BRIGGS, Valentina Constance (VP) - 3258 Marigold Lane. She slipped her hand up under her blouse and felt her abdomen. She wasn’t showing. Her nipples hurt, though, and they itched something awful.

  She was almost exactly ten weeks pregnant.

  She left her KeyCard and her All-in-One Viewer, both of which were easily trackable, on the table in the foyer, where Kyle would find them, wheeled her suitcase out the front door, which locked automatically, and pulled it shut. The official time was 0730, the temperature 39C and rising. She walked the ninety-three steps to the MoveWay, stepped into the air-conditioned tube and onto the conveyor, pulling her suitcase, looking like any innocuous Normal on her way to somewhere for a two-day trip. She’d put on her blue Matsumoto pantsuit, which set off her hair and eyes quite nicely, or would have had she not been wearing the enormous SeaSyde wraparound sunglasses she had snatched up at Shade World for twenty percent off. The MoveWay was empty, which was normal at this hour, most people having left for work between 0530 and 0600. Montages of Pewter Palisades’ Main Street were streaming past her on the walls of the tube. The Muzak was the usual cheerful nightmare ...

  Main Street, a ten-block “outdoor” shopping loop, was the heart of the Pewter Palisades Community. All the MoveWays brought you to Main Street, in the central landscaped garden of which was the Pewter Palisades WhisperTrain station, where people caught their trains to work. Radiating out from the WhisperTrain station were hundreds of quaint little simulated lanes that were lined with quaint little simulated shops, which were really all outlets of eight or ten chains, like Finkles and BuyWorld and BigBuy Basement. Many of these shops had quaint little names like Zena’s Travel, or Ye Olde Shoe Repair, or Happy Time Cleaners, or Paolo’s Beans, as if they weren’t corporate outlets, but family businesses, owned by people. Their interiors were usually decorated with authentic-looking “ethnic” objects, and the sales assistants wore fanciful uniforms, and spoke with various “ethnic” accents, all of which was quaint and charming and not at all cheap and completely impersonal. Surrounding the central landscaped “garden” was an endless array of stores and restaurants ... stores like Finkles, Big Buy Basement, CRS, and the Content Warehouse, and restaurants like Giggles, Salad Emporium, Fair Trade Burgers, Woo’s, Twannika’s, and Brewster & Cuttlestons, a simulated pub chain. All of this, of course, was hermetically sealed within an immense translucent SkyDome, which tinted gradually throughout the day, creating a virtual “outdoor” effect that studies had proved was almost natural. The MoveWay’s exits were strategically positioned to deposit the residents of Pewter Palisades, not in or outside the WhisperTrain station, but down at the east and west ends of Main Street so that they had to walk past the stores and restaurants to get to the station and catch their trains ...

  Which is what Valentina was doing now, dragging her Vittorio suitcase behind her. She was weaving in and out of the streams of smiling, well-dressed Pewter Palisades residents, who were already shopping, or were standing around outside the windows of Finkles and BigBuy, or sitting at tables in the “outdoor” section of Salad Emporium, or the Giggles “Café,” sipping neon green and purple breakfast smoothies through their bendy straws. A veritable arsenal of surveillance cameras were pivoting around on their slender stalks. Pewter Palisades Security professionals were patrolling in their battery-operated go-carts, biometrically scanning people at random as they strolled up and down the pristine sidewalks or huddled outside the windows of stores. Valentina contorted her lips into some semblance of a Normal smile and snaked her way through them, her technical neighbors, none of whom she actually knew. The voice in her head said, “everyone’s watching.”

  “No one is watching you ... no one is watching.”

  A grinning formation of teenage Clears was coming right at her on the sidewalk ahead, laughing in their all-knowing, all-feeling way, their wind-blown hair and blinding teeth ... and now, in one sickeningly synchronized movement, they turned their eyes on Valentina. “Smile, nod, breathe, walk ...” The two in the center, a girl and a boy, parted to let Valentina pass through, blue eyes tracking her, nostrils smelling her, some pea-sized bud in their neocortex telepathically alerting the others ... she nodded, smiled, walked right through, keeping her own eyes fixed on the station, four blocks ahead and ...

  “Walk ... don’t run.”

  Passing the coveted sidewalk tables at Content Warehouse’s Café de Flore ... all of them packed with young professionals, sitting together in twos and threes in total silence scanning their Viewers, or talking into space on their Cranio-Implants while they nodded and smiled at the people they were with, to whom they presumably had nothing to say, as they scanned the faces of passersby, like Valentina, to see who was looking, and held up their fingers to the servers and smiled ... and here came the mothers with their prams and strollers and slings and wraps and beaming faces and nannies and aides and personal assistants, who probably lived in cramped apartments in Center City, where Valentina was going ... and here came the windows festooned with products, the Viewers, Readers, Memcards, implants, scanners, sticks, chips, clips, the dishwashers, sweepers, dusters, drainers, the steamers, strainers, the temperature regulators, the processors, players, signal distributors, toothbrush sterilizers, palm oil recyclers, the walls of cosmetics and hygiene products, lipstick, gloss, rouge, eye liners, skin crèmes, eye crèmes, hemorrhoid crèmes, wrinkle-removing revitalizing agents, anti-aging nipple decolorizers, mouthwash for people with sensitive skin, genital shavers, penis straighteners, anal buffers, fingernail planers, taste bud shrinkers, dyes, pastes, gels, salves, powders, pills, drops, mists, cultures, solutions, applicators, syringes, suppositories, fifty-two lines of clothing each year, jewelry, accessories, decorative items, products, services, gadgets, gizmos, which everyone owned, or wore, or used, or wanted to wear, or own, or use, the wearing and owning and using of which, and the virtually interminable discussion of which, was, in large part, what made them normal ...

  “Three more blocks ... hold it together!”

  How many nights had she sat across from Susan Foster, or Lydia Fishbeck, or May Pei Gonzalez, or Rachel Greene-Morley, or one of the cheerfully tranquilized wives of one of Kyle’s colleagues at BVCC, none of whose names she could remember at the moment, discussing, actually discussing products ... comparing products, praising products, fondly remembering former products ... that, or recounting the content of Content that one, or both, or all of them had seen, or wanted to see, or had heard was worth seeing? Why? Why was there nothing to talk about, other than products, and Content, and work? Valentina knew the answer ... she almost lost it
and screamed it into the face of the woman walking right at her ... IT! IT had done this to them! YES, it was all so clear to her now, how you couldn’t begin to talk about anything, anything that actually mattered to anyone, whatever that might possibly be, unless you were ready to talk about IT, which of course no one was, or ever would be ...

  “Hold it together. Two more blocks.”

  Faces streaming past her now, normal faces, smiling faces, pausing, turning, sniffing, wincing ... asking each other, “what is that smell?” That smell, of course, was Valentina, who in her haste had forgotten to shower and reeked of compulsive masturbation. She breezed right past them, pulling her suitcase, smiling, baring her big white teeth. “CUNT,” she wanted to scream, but she didn’t. She wanted to stick her sticky, stinking fingers up their manicured nostrils and shove them up into their ethmoid sinuses. The muscles in her cheeks and forehead were twitching. Why had she thought of that disgusting word, a word she had never uttered in her life? Then it hit her ... she was not scared. She was feeling ... well, she did not know. Her heart was pounding, and she had that metal adrenaline taste in the back of her throat ... but her mind was calm, clear, detached. It felt like a switch had been flipped in her head, and now, after months of confusion, or possibly after years of confusion, she was able to think, and see, and hear, and she could feel her body ... which was walking too fast.

  “Slow down, walk ... one more block.”

  The WhisperTrain station was directly ahead, perched on its little green hill in the “garden.” She felt like if she took one leap she would fly through the air in a single arc like an astronaut bouncing in zero gravity and float across the flowered slope and .. .

  “Valentina?”

  She knew that voice. Susan Foster. She kept on walking.

  “Val?” the voice called out behind her.

  “Do not turn around ... do not turn back.”

  The surveillance camera at the southwest entrance panned and filmed her as she entered the station, smiling insanely, her unbrushed hair, the mess of her lipstick, her misbuttoned pantsuit, a bit of a bra sticking out of her suitcase ... two point seven four seconds of footage, which Security Services, six weeks later, would play for Kyle in a windowless cubicle, once, and then erase the disk.

  3.

  Mister Normal

  All right ... here comes the horrible part. Part Three, that is. Or a lot of it, anyway. This is the part where Valentina and Taylor, each in their own horrific way, indulge in some seriously deviant behavior, which neither my publisher, nor its parent company, nor any of its agents, subsidiaries, assigns, affiliates, or employees, promotes or condones. Nevertheless, it is what happened, so I need to tell you about it somehow.

  First, though, we need to get something else straight.

  That something else concerns “normality,” and the Normals, and what it meant to be normal, and the way things worked in normal society (i.e., 27th Century normal society), which was weirder than I’ve probably been able to convey. I may have even given you the false impression that being “normal” was something akin to being a member of a political party, or something that was printed on your ID card, or coded into your subdermal chip. It wasn’t.

  Actually, it was just the opposite.

  In the 27th Century H.C.S.T., despite the fact that Normatology was an established field of academic study, which various august and elite universities offered a smattering of extremely competitive and insanely expensive post-graduate degrees in, “normality” was not some rigidly defined, or in any way officially codified, concept. There weren’t any rules or sets of guidelines articulating what made one “normal.” There certainly wasn’t any Ministry of Normality issuing edicts on individual behavior, or arresting people for non-conformance, or any other type of nonsense like that.

  On the contrary, the meaning of the term “normality” (as well as that of its various derivatives), which the normatologists were still debating, was of negligible to zero interest to the Normals, most of whom never even gave it a thought, as it didn’t directly affect their lives, which, all things considered, were pretty darn good.

  The Normals, for example, didn’t call themselves “Normals,” or think of themselves, and their families and friends, and everyone else they knew as “Normals.” Most of them had never even heard the term, which was mostly used by Anti-Socials in a pejorative and flagrantly aggressive way. Variant-Positives referred to themselves as “Variant-Positives” in contrast to Clears, and Clears the other way around, naturally, but this was strictly a medical distinction, as opposed to any kind of caste system thing. * The Normals referred to the Anti-Socials as “Anti-Socials” or “A.S.P.s,” but they didn’t refer to themselves as anything (i.e., in contrast to Anti-Socials). Being the overwhelming majority, and the unarticulated normative standard, which no individual could ever attain, and which the Anti-Socials deviated from, they thought of themselves as ... well, as normal.

  Now, of course, there were varying degrees of normal, which the Normals semi-consciously perceived, and instinctively recognized in themselves, and each other, and measured each other, and themselves, naturally, and everything else, in relation to. The way this worked was, more often than not, they would see some Content on their All-in-One Viewers that would somehow start them questioning whether what they were doing (not at that very moment, more in regard to their lifestyles in general, as in what they were wearing, or eating, or reading, or the vehicles they were investing in, or the medications they were currently taking, or their body mass indices, or sexual techniques, et cetera, it didn’t really matter what it was, as it could have been any aspect of their lifestyles, and usually was) was entirely appropriate.

  More often than not, the Normals discovered (according to this Content they had seen, or heard about from their friends or families), there was something about this particular aspect of their lifestyles they needed to re-examine, or to further examine, or otherwise examine. Unfortunately, on a fairly routine basis, upon examination of whatever aspect of their lifestyles this Content had inspired them to question, they discovered there was room for significant improvement, in terms of their spiritual and material growth, and their physical, emotional, and financial health, and their attitude and performance at work, and their level of personal happiness, generally.

  Now, normally, what the Normals would do at this point was they would fleep and tweak and otherwise alert (and in some cases actually physically meet and share this most recent discovery with) their friends, colleagues, family members, therapists, sponsors, and random strangers, many of whom, as if by magic, or due to some recent realignment of the planets, would just happened to have made the same discovery (i.e., regarding their lifestyles and the appropriateness thereof, and their levels of personal happiness, generally). Information would then be exchanged, much of it involving products and services that could help the Normals achieve these improvements in their lifestyles and experiences of personal growth ... which, of course, would then lead them to, or make them aware of, other areas (or lifestyle aspects) which needed examining, and upgrading, and so on.

  All of which (i.e., this perpetual process of continually examining themselves, and each other, and identifying areas for potential improvement, and then scanning the web with their All-in-One Viewers to locate affordable ranges of products and services to hopefully effectuate same ... all of this) was entirely normal. It was what the Normals did all day, except when they were actually working, contributing to the productivity and profitability of the corporations that provided the aforementioned products and services.

  Persons who declined to engage in this process of ongoing lifestyle and personal improvement (also known as the pursuit of happiness), or who questioned or appeared to scoff at this process, while by no means Anti-Social or anything, were looked upon as ... well, not quite normal. It wasn’t like they were branded with a big red “N” in a circle with a line drawn through it, or punished, or oppressed in any way. They just didn’t tend t
o get invited to parties, or important meetings, or bonding weekends, or learn they were being groomed for promotion, or considered for some prestigious accolade, or otherwise emotionally and professionally validated ... or whatever. You know how all that works .

  This happened to more people than you would probably imagine, as all it took was one carelessly-worded Fleep or Tweak, or email, or comment, sent in haste, which someone saw, and took offense to, or was emotionally triggered by, and commented on to that effect, which comment was then refleeped, or retweaked, or otherwise streamed out into the ether, along with the original offending Fleep, or Tweak, or email, or whatever it was, and then sat there on the Internet forever casting aspersions on one’s degree of normality, or outright condemning one as “not quite normal.” This happened to untold numbers of people, otherwise perfectly normal people, with normal jobs at normal corporations, who were otherwise pursuing their personal happiness, and who had just slipped up in a moment of weakness and had said or done something inappropriate. It could happen to almost anyone, really ... well, except for someone like Kyle Bentley-Briggs.