Which OK, technically, made her a switch ... but that wasn’t what it was with Sarah. No, with Sarah it was all about “surrender.” And not just sexual and emotional surrender. Spiritual surrender. Complete surrender. The way she’d explained it to Taylor, repeatedly, was that what she needed was to let go utterly, as in to lose her self (by which she meant her identity, or ego, which ideally needed to be shattered to pieces) and fuse with some unnameable something, which Sarah insisted was not God ... but which sounded a lot like God, to Taylor.
According to Sarah, this unnameable something was neither God nor The One Who Was Many (which Taylor didn’t get the distinction), but, rather, was something virtually identical, yet essentially different in every way. She had tried to describe this essential difference (or differences, as they were apparently infinite), unsuccessfully, to Taylor, repeatedly. All of it sounded suspiciously like the Normals’ bible, The Path(s) to Prosperity (except for the part where spiritual enlightenment made you rich, or the other way around) .
For example, whereas the Normals believed that “everything happened for a reason,” Sarah, and whatever group she was with, believed that “everything happened as it had to.” Whereas the Normals trusted in the “Will of the One,” Sarah trusted in the “Wheel of Becoming,” which was what she claimed her triskelion tattoos with the sixes or the nines were supposed to be. “Surrender” wasn’t giving up, or having faith in any deity, it was some kind of radical affirmation, “affirmation without judgment,” of life and death, love and hate, joy and suffering, and ... well, basically, everything.
And OK, that was fine with Taylor ... affirmation of life, or whatever. He didn’t quite get what it had to do with resisting all forms of Corporatist oppression, or the smuggling, or hiding, of unauthorized babies, but it wasn’t like he really gave a shit either. No, the thing that was starting to gnaw at Taylor by late December 2609 was ... OK, it was actually several things.
The first of these several things was Sarah, who (Taylor wasn’t a total idiot) was almost certainly a faith-based Terrorist, and all this convoluted crap she was spouting, and whatever her real agenda was. See, the thing was, while Taylor was perfectly willing to help her surrender whatever it was she needed to surrender, without judgment, and affirm whatever, and fuse with whatever, and slip one finger up his ass and bounce up and down at lightening speed on his cock as if possessed by whatever ... all this faith-based Terrorist hooey was starting to make him a little nervous.
Another one of these several things (these things that were starting to make Taylor nervous) was the fact that, as far as the baby smuggling went, nothing, or virtually nothing, was happening. Taylor, apart from fucking Sarah, had been sticking to his normal routine as ordered. There’d been a few further clandestine meetings at the Pussyhorse Lounge to go over “logistics” and “coordinate” various “action contingencies,” but these had all been perfunctory affairs. Taylor wasn’t privy to operational details, like how they were going to “transport” the baby (or the “package,” as Adam was calling it now), or where they were going to “transport” it to, so there wasn’t much for Taylor to do until Cassandra actually had the baby, at which point he would “collect the package,” “conceal the package” in a Transplant bag, and “transport it to the rendezvous point.” The rendezvous point had not been determined, but logistics dictated it was going to be one of the covered alleys off Jefferson Avenue. It wouldn’t be Cassandra’s alley, of course, as it didn’t lead anywhere and was thus a deathtrap, but one of the other covered alleys that snaked back into the warren of lanes that lay to the south and west of Cassandra’s, like the one behind the little Fruity Juice stand ... or wherever. They’d tell him whenever they told him. It wasn’t like he had any say in the matter.
Yet another one of these several things that were making Taylor uncharacteristically nervous (in addition to whatever Sarah’s game was, and the dearth of movement on the baby-smuggling front) was the timing of the tentative projected launch of the Day of Autonomous Decentralized Action, “stage three preparations” for which, according to Adam, were now well underway. Although the launch date remained a secret (or hadn’t been consensually decided on yet), based on the more or less totally made-up inception date that Taylor had provided, Cassandra’s “projected delivery window” overlapped the “base parameters” of Adam’s “projected D.A.D.A. launch window,” which meant that it was entirely possible that whatever debacle these idiots were planning would have already started when Cassandra gave birth, and theoretically might be in full swing. If it was, and assuming the D.A.D.A. was actually anything resembling what these morons were envisioning, IntraZone Waste & Security Services, and possibly even Hadley Domestic Security, would, by the time Cassandra delivered, have (a) locked down the entire Zone, (b) declared an indefinite curfew, (c) dispatched Security Specialists to occupy the streets and quell the disorder, and (d) otherwise made it impossible for anyone to smuggle out unauthorized babies.
Taylor, at one of their Pussyhorse meetings, * had shared these concerns with Adam and Sarah, who had smiled at him like he was some kind of idiot and advised him to stick to his normal routine. This was Adam and Sarah’s mantra, “No deviations ... stick to the plan” ... which OK, one, they hadn’t told him the plan, and two, what were they ... fucking parrots? How many times did they need to say it? Taylor got it. “No deviations.” Adam would say it extremely slowly, then he’d give him that condescending look. Taylor fucking hated that look. Who did this dickless Transplant asshole think he was with his fucking looks, and his jargon, and his over-articulation? So he had read some fucking books. Taylor had read some fucking books. Taylor had read a lot of fucking books, and he didn’t much care for Adam’s attitude. He was thinking maybe, when all this was over, assuming Adam wasn’t a bug splat, he would take him down to the Dell Street Canal and deviate his face a little ...
Oh yeah, and another one of these things, these multiple things that were making him nervous, the primary thing that was making him nervous, was how he was now, on a routine basis, having to evade the Community Watchers who appeared to be trying to incompetently tail him every fucking place he went. Oh yes, they were definitely all over Taylor ... and had been since back in early November. And it wasn’t just an A.S.U. thing either. (There were always a couple of Community Watchers hanging around outside of meetings, taking down names to feed to their handlers, but they didn’t tend to follow people home or anything.) No, oh no, this was definitely personal. The Watchers were all over Taylor, specifically. Not that the Watchers were a problem in themselves, totally incompetent at surveillance as they were. ** No, the problem was, if the Watchers were on him (which they were, they were seriously all up his ass, as in they knew where he lived and his patterns, and so on), that meant that IntraZone Waste & Security had taken an ongoing interest in him, and had him on some kind of Terrorist watch-list, and at some point were going to want to detain him, and anyone who even vaguely knew him, which would inevitably lead them straight to Cassandra.
Now at this point it never occurred to Taylor that the increased heat he was feeling from the Watchers had anything to do with Adam and Sarah, or their baby-smuggling operation, directly. Whatever he thought of each of them personally, they were clearly dedicated hardcore Terrorists, who had been doing this stuff for quite some time (as in without getting caught and detained, and liquidated). Adam was Mister Security Culture. Weasel that he was, he ran a tight ship. His Chinese walls, need-to-know-bases, and the other extensive security measures the Fifthian Cluster routinely took, intensely annoying as Taylor found them, he had to admit, were extremely effective. And Sarah moved around like a ninja. You never saw her coming or going. She seemed to just appear and disappear. He would sit around somewhere, waiting for her, turn his head, and there she would be, as if she had just materialized next to him. He didn’t understand how she did that. No, this heat was coming from somewhere else, somewhere closer to home, Taylor thought ... closer, as in from Apartment 2E.
Someone he knew was cooperating.
Taylor hated Cooperators. He hated them with a thick black bile. He hated them more than he hated the Normals, who he hated, but who he still regarded as people. Cooperators looked like people, walked like people and talked like people, but actually they were a sub-human species of slimy fucking bootlicking sycophants who would rat you out for a pat on the head from anyone in anything resembling a uniform. The Zone, of course, was lousy with them, mostly in Sectors A and B. They got their name from the tag that ran at the end of all the IntraZone Content and was printed at the bottom of the forms and posters.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION!
... IntraZone Waste & Security Services, Inc.
Due to his Anti-Social condition, Taylor could not begin to fathom what the fuck it possibly was that made a person want to cooperate. He figured they were probably born that way. It had to be some kind of neural malfunction. Logically speaking, it made no sense. It wasn’t like it got you out of the Zone or reclassified Normal, cooperating. It didn’t get you anything, really, aside from better housing, maybe, or a better shit job in one of the plants, which, OK, granted, was more than nothing, but hardly justified the risks they took. Cooperators, as you can probably imagine, lived in a permanent state of fear of egregious violation at the hands of the 3s, most of whom, if given the chance, would summarily waste them on general principle. No, it had to be a serious mental short circuit, was the only way that Taylor could explain it, because why else would a human being (or any other type of sentient organism) cooperate with an occupying force of cheerfully sadistic ravenous parasites who were living off the fruit of his labor, and who clearly, eventually, meant to kill him?
But whatever ... all that was academic. The relevant question at the moment was, who was fucking cooperating on him? Meyer? No. It wasn’t Meyer. Meyer was somehow in league with Sarah, who Taylor was right on the verge of deciding was not only Adam’s direct superior (at least regarding the baby-smuggling), but was likely part of some whole other network that Adam had little or nothing to do with, and that the A.S.U. was just one small part of, or was possibly just an elaborate front for. *** Claudia? No, it wasn’t Claudia. Claudia was harmless. She always had been. Plus, she didn’t know Taylor’s patterns. She hardly knew her own fucking patterns, ripped out of her fucking gourd on various substances as she was. Coco Freudenheim? Not a chance. Coco would sooner cook and eat Dexter than cooperate on her worst fucking enemy (not that Coco had any enemies ... or not any living ones, or not anymore). Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard? Taylor couldn’t even entertain the thought. OK, sure, they were all strung out on Plasto, which technically made them likely ... but the two of them were basically ersatz family. Sylvie? OK, possibly Sylvie. Sylvie had always made him nervous, mostly on account of she was so nervous, which Taylor didn’t get what the fuck was wrong with her. Dodo Pacheco? Very possibly. Dodo Pacheco was a spineless weasel, and a degenerate Plastomorphinol fiend, and a known associate of Rudy Rebello, a ratfaced scumbag of the lowest order who Taylor wouldn’t put anything past him, but he hadn’t seen Dodo Pacheco for weeks.
Oh yeah ... and if all that wasn’t enough, Sarah’s game, whatever it was, and whatever faith-based Terrorist network she was probably almost definitely with, and whatever their ultimate agenda was, and being left out of the baby-smuggling plan, and Adam and all his condescending bullshit, and the D.A.D.A. launch date, and the fucking Watchers, and whoever was fucking cooperating on him, there was also the whole Cassandra Situation involving her nosy and annoying roommates.
At this point, Cassandra had been “sequestered” (otherwise known as locked in her bedroom) for over a month, and was four months pregnant, and bored out of her fucking mind. She’d been locked in there since mid-November, peeing, mostly, and occasionally puking, into a little blue child-sized plastic bucket that Taylor had to carry across the hall to the bathroom and empty out. He did this just before sunrise each morning, legs still shaking from his sessions with Sarah, brain misfiring from lack of sleep, having dragged himself there from the Darkside, or Carla’s, or some similar sleaze-pit in the deep Inner Zone. The bucket was Taylor’s brilliant idea, and was meant to prevent Cassandra’s roommates from getting suspicious, which they already were. **** Prior to Cassandra’s sequestration, and Taylor’s deployment of the plastic bucket, she’d been in the bathroom half the day, peeing, or being convinced she had to pee ... which all right, was already fairly suspicious, but was back before she started showing, so was mostly just inconvenient for her roommates, who took to standing in line in the hall, wondering in loud annoying voices whether Cassandra was all right, and so on. What was even more suspicious, the way they saw it, was that one day everything was relatively normal (except for Cassandra’s excessive peeing) and the next day she was locked in her bedroom, and no one could see her, except for Taylor, who Cassandra’s roommates lived in fear of and did their level best to avoid. It wasn’t that they were all friends, the roommates. They weren’t. Well, OK, a few of them were, with each other, that is, but not with Cassandra, who they also did their best to avoid. The reason there being, if they knocked on her door, wanting to converse about roommate stuff, like missing food or neglected garbage or whose hair this was in somebody’s soap, Cassandra would often be in there with Taylor, a giant Class 3 Anti-Social Person with scars on his face and crude tattoos they made by hand with sewing needles all over his arms and chest and back, and they’d both be in there grunting and shouting, and punching holes in the wall with the bed ... and sometimes Taylor would answer the door and stand there, naked, with his scars and tattoos, and his drooping but still half hard-on, grinning, and ask them how he could possibly help them.
Or at least this is how it had frequently gone ... until that day in mid-November when Cassandra was suddenly locked in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out, or even open the door, and the only sounds they could hear in there now were the Content disks she was always watching, which didn’t sound like In-Zone programming, and so were probably some kind of pirate Content that Taylor had killed some helpless Class 1 Anti-Social Person and stolen.
Now the cover story was that Cassandra had caught this strain of mutant Hepatitis or something, which Taylor was somehow totally immune to, but Cassandra’s roommates probably weren’t, and so basically, what they needed to do was to not come knocking on her bedroom door inquiring as to whether she had eaten some roommate’s fucking Egg-o-Likes or GM tomatoes, and to stay in their rooms, or the kitchen at least, and out of the fucking hallway entirely. Unless they were using the bathroom, that is, which they really shouldn’t have been doing anyway, due to the risk of serious infection from the mutant Hepatitis ... and so on. Taylor had told this ridiculous story to two of the smaller and more timorous roommates, Tawanda Rae and Fyodor, or something, who’d nearly lost control of their sphincters being in Taylor’s presence for two minutes. He’d instructed these two to tell the others, but not to tell anyone else they knew, unless they wanted to get evicted, and possibly isolated, and possibly worse. A few days later, one of the larger, not-so-timid and more annoying roommates, Jules, or Joel, or whatever his name was, who wore these tribal earlobe rings that Taylor found particularly asinine, had apparently made some smart-ass comment casting aspersions on the Hepatitis Story, which Cassandra had heard another roommate repeating in the hallway with her ear to the door, which the following morning, upon his arrival, anxiety ridden, she’d reported to Taylor. Taylor promptly stomped down the hall and into the kitchen, identified this Jules, took him aside by the throat and scrotum, and strongly dissuaded him from making such comments. Taylor, as Fyodor would later attest in his official statement regarding the failure of Jules, or Joel, to report to work at his factory job, could be very dissuasive. Unfortunately, he could also be rather transparent, which wasn’t a serious disadvantage when it came to lying to Cassandra’s roommates, who were only half-listening to what he was saying, and were mostly just trying to discern what he wanted them
to do so as not to get egregiously violated ... but it didn’t fly at all when it came to Cassandra, his transparency, and bald-faced lying, and so on.
Cassandra, in addition to feeling bloated, and to thinking she had to pee all the time, and to being bored out of her fucking mind, was also getting increasingly nervous, and suspicious, and was asking a lot questions, which was making it impossible for Taylor to sleep, and was building towards an ugly breaking point regarding Taylor’s deflections and lies.
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