Zone 23
Page 32
Just that very morning, for example, Cassandra, having woken up in one of her moods, and the bedroom being an airless cauldron that stank like sweat and fish and pee, had been less than enchanted with Taylor’s bullshit.
“So what is it, now you’re in love with this whore?” she inquired as she peed down into her bucket. She was holding her skirt up and clear with both hands, squatting directly over the bucket. Taylor was staring at her mid-term belly. It was round and small, but it was definitely there. He hadn’t seen one for thirty years.
“All I’m saying is, they took care of what’s his name ...”
“Prosky.”
“Whatever. They did what they said. You’re safe.”
“Am I?”
“You got your sick time.”
He lay back on her futon, exhausted.
“What if somebody checks?” she asked.
“They won’t. ”
She wiped herself off with a rag.
“How do you know?”
“They won’t, all right? And even if they do, it doesn’t matter. It’s in the system. You had an accident. Fuck ...”
Cassandra got up off the bucket, let her skirt down and joined him on the bed.
“You don’t know anything about these people.”
“It’s the fucking A.S.U., all right?”
He’d spared her the faith-based Terrorist details.
Cassandra drew her legs in and crossed them.
“They’ve done this hundreds of times,” he continued. “All this shit is standard procedure.”
“And fucking the fathers. Is that standard procedure?”
“I’m not fucking Sarah.”
She laughed in his face.
“Please. I know when you’re fucking someone.”
“When this is all over, you’ll meet them, OK?”
“When this is all over, we’ll probably be dead.”
She pulled her skirt up and curled and tugged at her pubic hairs, which Taylor hated.
“Stop.”
“What?”
“Stop pulling them out.”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
She yanked one more out, then pushed her skirt down and sat there pouting.
“All they want is the baby, right?”
“Right. So?”
“So think , dummy. You know their names. You know their faces. Why would they leave you walking around ... someone who could identify them?”
Taylor had been having the same thoughts recently, but he didn’t want her to get all hysterical.
“And how could they fake an accident for me? They’d have to hack the MedBase system. Who can do that?”
“They can, apparently.”
“A.S.P.s ... from inside the Zone? ”
Cassandra was right. Taylor knew it. He reached for her hand. She pulled it away.
“What?”
“We never should have tried to do this.”
Later that night, while fucking Sarah in a particularly redolent room at Carla’s, Taylor remembered his conversation with Cassandra that morning, and lost his erection. Fortunately, by this time, Sarah had already achieved her “levels” and “states of surrender,” and was nearly worn out, having come several times. Taylor, who’d been holding back and had screwed up his timing, had not come once, and so was now, officially, sexually frustrated.
Sarah reached over and took hold of his cock. It flopped around limply. She worked it a minute.
“What’s going on,” she asked him, finally.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“OK,” she said.
Some kind of aircraft was rumbling overhead.
“What happens to us when this whole thing’s over?”
“You and me?”
“Me and Cassandra.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
He was taking a chance here.
“Nothing. As long as it goes by the numbers.”
She sat herself up.
“What are you thinking?”
“You’re going to leave me walking around ... knowing who you are?”
“Oh, you know who we are now?”
“I know your names.”
“Names are nothing.”
Someone, maybe two rooms over, screamed like an animal being slaughtered.
Taylor sat up and turned to face her.
“I’m serious. What are we doing here?”
“Fucking, I thought. ”
“Cut the crap.”
“What are you asking me?”
“The MedBase records. Cassandra’s accident.”
“What about it?”
“Who can do that? Who are you people?”
Sarah looked into his eyes for a moment.
“It’s complicated.”
“Simplify it for me.”
Taylor waited.
“I can’t,” she said. “But I can tell you what I know, or some of it.”
“Go,” he said.
“Roll me a smoke.”
Taylor reached over and grabbed his tobacco.
“Number one, there is no us ... not like you mean. There’s no central structure. There are people who work with certain people, who work with certain other people, who work with certain other people ...”
“Yeah, I get the decentralized thing.”
“The people who hacked the MedBase files, who got us your files. I don’t know those people.”
“Then how the fuck do you know who they are?”
“Because I know a person who knows a person ...”
“What about Adam?”
“What about him?”
“He’s one of your people ... who know other people?”
“Adam has his things. I have mine. I help him with information and what not. He helps me with the babies from time to time.”
“The babies are your thing.”
Sarah nodded. Taylor handed the cigarette to her. She lit it with the candle beside the bed.
“What do you do with them?”
She smoked her cigarette.
“We send them out of the Zone in vehicles. The drivers are 1s with Travel passes. The drivers drive them out of the Zone. They meet up with other people outside. They meet at different rendezvous points. The drivers wait there. These people show up. They take the babies and drive away. ”
“Drive them where?”
She exhaled smoke.
“I don’t know.”
“Who are the drivers?”
“I told you, I have no idea.”
“You don’t fucking know who these people are?”
“No.”
“Well, OK, how do you contact them?”
“We don’t, directly. We contact someone ...”
“Who contacts someone ...”
“Who contacts someone. That’s how it works. That’s as much as I know.”
Taylor sat there processing this.
“So you’re saying you have no clue what you’re doing. You have no idea where the babies end up.”
“We have an idea.”
“But you don’t fucking know. How do you know you’re not handing them off to Security Services?”
“I know.”
“How?”
“I told you, it all comes down to faith.”
“You going to start with the God shit again?”
“You know that’s not what I mean by faith.”
“Faith in what then?”
“Other people. Faith in ourselves. Faith in something.”
“Something.”
“Does there have to be words for everything?”
“And the Autonomous Zones?”
Sarah smoked.
“Fuck.”
“Why are you doing this, Taylor?”
“What?”
“This baby is not your problem. Why do you give a shit? Why are you doing this?”
“For Cassandra.”
“You love her.”
“Sure. W
hatever. ”
“You love her. You feel responsible for her.”
“So?”
“So you’re willing to risk your life to save her life, and the life of the baby. You could have aborted it. You still could, probably. Or just wait until it’s born and drown it. Why did you come to us for help?”
Taylor didn’t have an answer for that.
“What do you think the corporations do with them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. You think it’s something sweet and nurturing? You think they rock them to sleep at night, dress them up in little Corporatist onesies?”
She flicked her ashes onto the floor.
“Meyer says they condition them or something, turn them into Security Specialists.”
Sarah laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing. Imaginative, is all. Who’s this Meyer?”
Taylor studied her eyes for a moment. She looked on the level, but what he did he know?
“No one. Conspiracy theorist friend of mine.”
“You trust him, this Meyer?”
“I don’t trust anyone.”
“Yes you do. Or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Gee. You got me all figured out.”
They sat there a moment, facing each other, naked and wet as the day they were born. The candle was throwing their shadows onto the wall across from the foot of the bed.
“How do you think the corporations perform their little magic trick?”
“Magic trick?”
“Maintain their power. How does a minority control a majority?”
“With guns.”
“No. Not with guns. Think, Taylor. About the Zones. Hundreds of thousands of A.S.P.s are controlled by a couple of thousand Specialists?”
“Specialists with guns, and gas, and missiles. Which we don’t have. ”
“Give me a break. If we all rose up and attacked them at once? How many of us do you think they could kill before we overwhelmed them and took their weapons?”
“Never happen.”
“There it is.”
“There what is?”
“The magic trick. That’s their power.”
“What is?”
“You. Your mind. Let me ask you something.”
She took a quick drag off her cigarette here.
“What do you believe in?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t even know.”
“But you’re going to tell me.”
“You believe in the same thing the Normals believe in.”
“The One and the Many.”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“That nothing matters. That we’re out here in space on a big ass rock spinning on its axis for no real reason. That all this is some kind of cosmic accident. That life is a competition for survival ... until we all fucking die, and the planet dies, and the universe dies, and sucks back up into its own asshole and returns to nothing.”
She took another drag on her cigarette here.
“How does that sound? Sound familiar? That totally meaningless and depressing story? Because that’s what it is. It’s a fucking story.”
“A story.”
“Yes. A creation myth. Every age and empire has one. They’re the lenses we’re issued to look at the world through. This morbid little myth is their fucking story.”
“The Normals.”
“No. The corporations. The Normals are no different from us, essentially. Except for a few material comforts. Their lives are just as empty as ours are. They’re just as hopeless and doomed as we are. They’re not our enemies. ”
“No? Who is then?”
“I don’t know. The story itself. It begins with nothing, and ends with nothing. Or the logic, or something there aren’t words for. Something that gets inside our brains and breaks our spirit and starts us thinking, ‘fuck it, we’re never going to change things anyway, and nothing really matters anyway, so we might as well give up and go along.’ People don’t start out hopeless, Taylor. It happens to us. They do it to us. They do it to most of us when we’re kids.”
“The babies.”
She nodded, and took a quick drag.
“You think that someone you know is cooperating? You want to know who’s cooperating? You are. We are. Everyone is. Believing their story. Watching their movie. But to most of us it doesn’t look like a movie.”
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like this. It looks like just ‘the way things are.’ Most of us don’t even realize it. We don’t even remember when we started doing it. Do you? Do you remember, Taylor?”
“Remember what?”
“When you gave up?”
Taylor’s head was spinning slightly.
“By the time we reach the age of ten, or twelve, and start to think for ourselves, we’re already trapped inside their story ... we’re thinking their thoughts, asking their questions, perceiving the world within the narrow limits of their sad little Corporatist myth ... which is just like any other myth, or faith, or body of faith-based beliefs, except that it denies its existence as such, and passes itself off as scientific fact ... medical fact ...”
Taylor laughed.
“What?”
“The Pathologization of Everything.”
“Right. Wait. Where did you hear that?”
“I don’t remember.”
She snorted out smoke.
“You’re lying. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Pathologization is just the latest form. We’ve been doing it since the dawn of the species. ‘The first and most cardinal means of controlling the masses is the mental conditioning of the children.’ That’s a quote. I didn’t make it up. It comes from a book I’d like to show you. It all comes down to faith, and the children. Am I freaking you out now?”
“A little, yeah.”
She offered the rest of the cigarette to Taylor. He shook his head. She took it back. He was staring past her at the wall at nothing.
“So ... the babies ... what are you saying, exactly? You’re saying the Autonomous Zones are real? You’re ... what? You’re raising them ... you’re teaching them ... what?”
“I told you, I don’t know all the details. I’ve never been out there. My work is here. But yes, basically, that’s what’s happening.”
“Or what you want to believe is happening.”
“What I choose to believe is happening.”
“I don’t get it. What’s the point? There can’t be that many.”
“Babies? No. That’s only part of it. There are other projects.”
“The D.A.D.A.”
“Sure, the D.A.D.A. is one of them.”
“It’s suicide. You know that.”
She smiled sadly.
“What can I tell you? Diversity of tactics. It’s more a recruiting tool than anything else.”
“It’s going to get a lot of people killed.”
“Like I said, there are other projects. Keeping the resistance alive in the Zones is important, but it’s never going to be enough. It’s the Normals that are really the key to everything.”
“The Normals.”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to wake up the Normals?”
“The Normals are the only hope we’ve got.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“They’re people, Taylor. The Variant-Positives are still people, anyway.”
He studied her eyes. She seemed to be serious.
“How could we have hacked the MedBase? Who got us your files? Who are the drivers? These are your questions. The ones you asked. Who could do that?”
“Normals, you’re saying. ”
“They’re people, Taylor. They still have souls. I should know. I was one of them.”
He’d forgotten for a moment that she was a Transplant.
“And the Clears?”
&nbs
p; “No. The Clears aren’t people. Or they are ... people, but not like us. Whatever they do to them seems to be permanent. They don’t respond to ...”
She exhaled smoke.
“Have you ever talked to one?”
He shook his head. Most of the IntraZone Specialists were Clears, but they didn’t exactly engage in conversation.
“I grew up with some of them. I think I did. They were regular kids in a lot of ways. In other ways ... I don’t know ... something’s missing. Nothing bothers them.”
“Because they’re fucking robots.”
“No. They’re not. It’s weirder and more fucked up than that. They’re just like people. They have emotions ... certain emotions, like love and sadness, but it’s like they’re in total control of their feelings. They can cry, but it’s not like actual crying. And they don’t get angry. And they do not hate. And I don’t think they can really feel fear. They can do these things, or some of them can ...”
She trailed off and stared into space, reflecting, remembering.
Taylor sat there and watched her.
“So what’s the plan for dealing with them?”
She stared down at the roach of her cigarette.
“Yeah ... well, we’re working on that.”
Borderland
Ten weeks later, in the sunless depths of a phantasmagorical cosmic sea of apparently timeless, spaceless space that had no beginning and went on forever, the Undead Thing that had no name, but which was clearly the malificent spawn of IT, or IT incarnate, or both at once, was coming to murder her, and eat her brain. The monstrous macrocephalic head of it (the prehensile octopoid beak of which was going to chew right through her skull and slurp out her brain like cottage cheese) was slowly turning, or revolving, toward her, its own amphibian brain expanding ... the black, blind monocular fish-eyes shifting slowly from the sides to the front of its pinkish, piglike mask of a face. Its ears were empty, soundless pinholes, portals back to some inconceivable muteness that was even more horrible than silence, because there’d never been a single sound, or surface off which sound could resonate, or time for sound to travel across that utter nullity from whence it came. It floated toward her, the unseen seer (because she was somewhere in there as well, in that timeless, spaceless void, or whatever), this wormlike, phylogenetic freak. She could see inside it, the Undead Thing. It was not breathing. And yet it lived. Its neurons were firing, its organs budding, its shriveled pollywog heart was beating, follicles sprouting, intestines rotating, its fingered flippers flapping, groping, reaching, and just as they were going to touch her ... Valentina woke up screaming.