Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Fortunately, no one in the immediate vicinity could hear her screaming, or much of anything else, other than the roar of the turbofan engines of JiffyJet Airlines Flight 43, which had just taken off and was thundering across their rooftops at three hundred kilometers an hour. Plaster dust was wafting down from the ceiling. Light bulbs were flickering. Windows shaking. The AC was definitely still not working. The vent was farting fetid bursts of humid air down into the room, which already stank of mildew and sex and something else she couldn’t identify. The temperature in the room was 36C. Outside it was well over 40. Blades of sunlight were stabbing in through the gaps in the curtains, which didn’t quite close, and were made of some cheap kind of tangerine orange heat-absorbing synthetic material. Everything in the room was orange. Or it was yellow. Or some feculant shade of brown. She sat there, naked, dripping sweat, the sweat-stained sheets and scratchy old blanket dangling down from the foot of the bed where she’d kicked them off in her sleep, apparently. The roar of the jet engines peaked and faded.

  Ten seconds later, it started all over.

  She’d had the dream for three nights running ... or three times in succession anyway. They weren’t all nights, the times she’d slept, or hadn’t slept, or had kind of slept, or had drifted in and out of semi-consciousness wearing her wraparound SeaSyde shades. The first night she’d spent on the aisle of a row of sticky seats in an AllNite Cinema, her suitcase wedged in firmly beside her. There were fourteen other patrons in the theater. She vaguely remembered bits and pieces of the family-friendly animated features ... stories based on super-heroic action figures, or talking animals, the voices of which were read by actors that everyone knew and loved and followed, household names like Brad McGrueder, Gigi Duprey, XR7, Beatrix Nivens, and Thor Esposito, who all had family-friendly images and lived on their private islands in the North. These were all standard formula pictures (with indistinguishable plots and settings designed to appeal to the broadest possible family demographic of the global audience) in which some murderous virus-like villain menaced some obvious representation of Normal society and its democratic values, and was either vanquished by the superheros or spiritually enlightened by the talking animals. Valentina did that thing where you keep passing out for two or three seconds, and your head droops down, chin to chest, then jerks back up and your eyes shoot open. Every time she drifted off, there it was again, coming toward her, the Undead Thing, to eat her brain.

  The second night she spent in a series of Cocoa Rococo Co. Free Trade coffee shops nursing an array of undrinkable beverages with fanciful Cuban- and Italian-sounding names. She hadn’t been able to sleep in these places, but at least she’d been able to relax a while in those comfy, mass-produced faux-leather easy chairs (which they had at every Cocoa Rococo Co.) and stare out the window as if waiting for someone (and do that nodding off head-bobbing thing), and occasionally ask the helpful staff, who she’d told she had a bladder infection, for the KeyCard to the customers-only restroom and slip in there and compulsively masturbate.

  The third night she broke down and got the hotel room, by which time she could barely walk. She could hardly think. Her thoughts kept drifting. Two and a half days she had been wandering aimlessly, dragging her Vittorio suitcase behind her, doing her best to avoid the cameras, and compulsively masturbating only when necessary. Days she had spent at the Northside Mall, which was air-conditioned, and where she felt anonymous, periodically pretending to shop in low-end stores like Bullseye Bazaar, but mostly just resting on the podlike benches beside the old ladies with their aluminum walkers. On several occasions she’d slipped into the public restroom, which anyone could use, and had loaded the MemCard, as instructed, and the files had come up, but that was it. Whoever she’d established contact with, back at home on the HCS60, and who had sent her down there to Center City, whether it was actually the N.I.N., or just one of the corporate Security Services, she’d had no further contact from them.

  Finally, at approximately 2100 in the evening of officially 02 March, 2610, H.C.S.T., she’d checked into the Skyline Motor Lodge, a stainless steel and concrete atrocity down at the end of a former strip mall that had been converted to residential use. Families of non-abundant Normals were living in the spaces that had once been stores, pizza restaurants, lottery kiosks, or discount dental and medical practices. These were the people, Variant-Positives, who did the jobs that no one else wanted, construction workers, plumbers, fitters, servers, cleaners, window washers, taxi drivers, scanners, painters, gardeners, inventory clerks, and the like. They lived down there in Center City, a rundown but basically liveable area where the airport, warehouses, waste facilities, reactors, and a lot of light industry was located .

  Center City, which was not a real name, but was what the Normals called the area, completely surrounded the Quarantine Zone and so served as a sort of protective barrier between it and the Residential Communities. Affluent Normals did not go down there, except on very rare occasions, like if they happened to own a business down there and for some reason needed to stop by in person, which they almost never needed to do. They definitely did not wander the streets with ostentatious designer suitcases. Not that it was in any way dangerous. These people were, after all, Variant-Positives, and took their medications like everyone else. It was more just the general scarcity of affluence, and the overall shabby look of the place, the downmarket stores, the tacky restaurants, and the way people dressed, which was, frankly, embarrassing.

  The Skyline Motor Lodge offered a view of a parking lot lined with waste receptacles. The only motor vehicles in sight were HVAC and other service-type vans, the sides of which were stenciled with names like Chavez HVAC, Associated Plumbing, Donny’s Pest Control, and Wally’s Burritos. Milton Hadley Memorial Airport was just down the road, or its runways were. Flights took off every forty-five seconds, mostly massive commercial aircraft (all of which were biofueled, of course), but also fleets of corporate jets, and UAVs, and Security fighters, which barely seemed to clear the rooftops as they pulled up into their initial ascents. Checking into such a hotel, or any hotel, was a bad idea. * However, she simply had to sleep. She’d taken the tram to the end of the line (“Industrial Boulevard,” she thought it read) and staggered into the Skyline lobby, an odiferous, orange-carpeted space where poorly dressed people with unusual haircuts were sleeping, or were trying, on sofas and chairs, in front of an ancient wall-mounted Viewer that was running the Evening Market Report. She’d smiled at the desk clerk, whose name she’d forgotten ... Kim, or Kham, or Khun, or something, mumbled some nonsense about “visiting relatives,” paid in advance with Kyle’s Endeavor Card, took the KeyCard, dragged her suitcase up the stairs to Room 303, stumbled in, pulled the curtains, peeled off her pantsuit, collapsed on the bed, and dreamlessly slept for eleven straight hours. Early that morning, so 03 March, and Day 555 in the Year of the Lemur (and all the other dates it supposedly was), she awoke from the dream of the fetus, screaming.

  At ten weeks, technically, it was a fetus. An organism. A human being. An incredibly small and slimy human being, but nonetheless a human being. Which is to say a human fetus, as opposed to just a fertilized egg. An egg was ... well, it was just an egg. An egg was not a human being. An egg was part of a woman’s body, like any other part of a woman’s body. This was not a part of her body. This was a body in and of itself ... a body attached to her, from her, of her, but not a part of her, growing inside her. She wasn’t showing, or not to speak of, so she couldn’t see it, but she could feel it in there, forming, hatching, feeding on her. It was not hers, this thing inside her. No. They had put it in there. Doctor Fraser, Kyle, all of them. The smiling men with rubber gloves who said relax and spread her legs and shoved their plastic tubes up into her. They spurted their mutant seed inside you and grew these things that looked like people but weren’t people ... or maybe they were ... in another sixty, seventy years, they, the Clarions, would be the majority and people like her would be the minority, the abnormalities, the mutant
s, the freaks ...

  “Everything’s relative,” the voice in her head said.

  “No it isn’t,” Valentina replied.

  The voice in her head was just a tape. This one was. There were other voices.

  “They aren’t human.”

  “What is human?”

  She wasn’t supposed to talk to the tape.

  Repeating her mantra on her breaths to drown out the tape of the voice in her head, she forced herself up off the sweat-soaked bed, her naked body coated with a film of plaster dust that was streaked with sweat, staggered into the filthy yellow bathroom, which smelled like toe jam, and turned on the shower. Her doubts were fear. That’s all they were. Fear was OK. Fear was normal.

  “Not this kind,” the tape in her head said.

  “The loving, compassionate oneness of ... ”

  The lukewarm rotten egg-smelling water dribbled in rivulets down her body, backing up out of the rusty drain and into the slippery mildewed basin. Another plane was flying overhead, knocking tiny chunks of moldy grout out from between the tiles. She reached out and pressed her palms against them and closed her eyes and tried to recall the devastating, irreproachable clarity she’d received in her Lomax Escalator Vision. Time, or something, was stealing it from her ... sucking the essence of it out of her. What had seemed at the time so incontestable, so undeniably revelatory, so utterly profound and epiphanic, looking at it now from a different perspective (i.e., that of the voice on the tape in her head), was possibly nothing but paranoid nonsense. She turned the plastic knob on the faucet, making the shower as cold as possible, and stood there under it, breathing deeply.

  “The multiplicitous oneness of ...”

  What if the tape in her head was right? What if she had simply lost it due to some weird hormonal reaction and had abruptly ceased her meds for no reason, exacerbating her already probably pretty advanced dissociative state, and had run away from Pewter Palisades, leaving behind her All-in-One, and was pointlessly standing in this slimy shower having an acute psychotic episode? No, she wasn’t. She hadn’t done that. She couldn’t have done that. This was real.

  “None of this is real, darling.”

  Yes it was. All of it was. The tape was a liar. She knew what was real. The MemCard inside the Hand was real. It was right there in her Vittorio suitcase, along with the HCS60 Viewer ... physical objects, ergo real. The files were on it. They were real. The conversation she’d had with the Viewer ... someone was there, on the other end. But then why had she not received a message from whoever it was when she’d reloaded the MemCard? She’d reloaded it here, in Center City, in the public restrooms at the Northside Mall, and here in her room at the Skyline Motor Lodge, which was what they had told her to do, was it not? Yes. It was. She remembered that clearly. She wasn’t dissociative. The tape was a liar ... she couldn’t remember when the tape had started.

  She switched off the shower and exited the bathroom dripping cold (or coldish) water, lay down on the uncomfortable bed, and compulsively masturbated for fifteen minutes. Turbines roared through the sky above her, drowning out her moans as she came. Her orgasms helped to untangle the thoughts that were tendrilling through her mind like vines, leaving just the essential questions.

  Focus, Valentina, focus ...

  What if it wasn’t the N.I.N. who had sent the message when she’d loaded the MemCard? What if it was Security Services? No. It wasn’t. She wouldn’t be lying there. She would be in a bag in the back of a van. So, OK, if it wasn’t Security, then it had to have been the N.I.N. But then why would they leave her hanging like this? It didn’t make sense, unless ... unless ... no. Yes. She had to consider it. What if there had been no message? (Her heart rate was steadily elevating now.) What if the HCS60 was real, and the MemCard was real, but not the message? Was it possible? Yes. It was. Not very likely, but certainly possible. In which case Kyle would have called Doctor Graell, who would have called Security, who would be here by now ... which they weren’t, so that didn’t make sense either. Nothing did. Nothing made sense. She lay there, naked, hyperventilating.

  “What if none of this is really happening?”

  Listen.

  Still your thoughts and listen.

  Ignore the tape in your head and listen.

  What if she got up off the bed and got her clothes on and took her suitcase and went back home to Pewter Palisades and confessed to Kyle, who loved her dearly? Could things go back to the way they’d been? No. They couldn’t. Of course they couldn’t. Things never went back to the way they had been. Whatever you did was done forever. Time proceeded pitilessly forward. Whatever was or wasn’t real, Kyle, by now, had called Security, if nothing else to report her missing. They were out there, right now, looking for her. What could she do then? She couldn’t stay here. They were likely on their way here already. No, she had to keep moving, but where? She couldn’t just drift from hotel to hotel, circumnavigating Center City, not indefinitely. She had to go somewhere. But there wasn’t anywhere to go ... except home.

  She sat up and bent down and opened her suitcase and got out the Viewer and loaded the MemCard. The files came up, as they had each time. She clicked on a file. It would not open. The prompt came up and asked for the password. She did not have it. She sat there and waited.

  Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing.

  She set the HCS60 aside, got up and got the remote control, and switched on the wall-mounted Courtesy Viewer. The Morning Market Report was playing. An attractive young Clear named Pei Lin Moreno was chirping about a new edition of some kind of software you apparently needed to run some other important software. Valentina muted Pei Lin and read the news that was always running on the creeper at the bottom of every screen.

  The expected high was 44C. Extreme heat advisories remained in effect. Due to a massive low-pressure system that had formed below the 40th Parallel and was slowly, ominously, drifting north, viewers below the 50th Parallel were advised to stay tuned for further advisories. Consumer confidence, however, was high. Shares and factory orders were up. And, sorry Chip, this was just in ... Jimmy “Jimbo” Cartwright, III, was back in the hospital receiving treatment for the metastatic intestinal cancer that had spread to his liver, and several other organs, but that according to his team of leading oncologists, cardiologists, gastroenterologists, and assorted other medical experts, was under control and was definitely treatable.

  Valentina stared at the screen.

  “What if this is also treatable?”

  “Stop it.”

  “This is probably very treatable.”

  The tape in her head was trying to confuse her. It was trying to get her to subscribe to the theory that whatever it was that was wrong with her brain, and had caused her to totally lose control and inappropriately raise her voice in the lobby of 6262 Lomax after inappropriately bursting into disturbing peals of demented laughter as Doctor Fraser grinned down at her like some kind of frightened cartoon baboon, then violently experience spiritual enlightenment on the escalator to the WhisperTrain station, and go off her meds, and begin a cycle of compulsive and excessive masturbation, and then disappear from Marigold Lane, and not even take her Viewer with her ... that maybe whatever had caused all that was not a legitimate spiritual awakening, nor any other type of bona fide enlightenment, nor the sudden, catastrophic progression of her latent Anti-Social Disease, but was some anomalous chemical reaction that had something to do with early pregnancy and that was probably, if she simply got up now and walked back to the WhisperTrain station, and took the train back to Pewter Palisades, and confessed to Kyle, and sought help now, was something simple ... something treatable.

  Virtually everything, at this point, was treatable. The vast majority of pernicious diseases, debilitating ailments, chronic complaints, dysfunctions, deficiencies, and so on, were treatable. Eating, sleeping, and sexual disorders. Sadness, anger, insecurity, envy, jealousy, boredom, fear ... all these negative emotions were treatable. Most of the organs of the body wer
e replaceable. Traumatic or distasteful memories were erasable. Even Anti-Social Disease, although incurable, was certainly treatable. Surely whatever she had was treatable.

  Valentina stared at the screen.

  “Jimbo” Cartwright was descending the steps of one of his fleet of private jets. Pei Lin Moreno was looking “confident.”

  Life was treatable.

  Death was treatable.

  Treatable ... if not yet entirely preventable.

  Just last year, Kenneth Bainsbury, another illustrious giant of industry, had succumbed to complications of Leukemia, or Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, or Myeloma, or some other hematological malignancy. The year before that it was Ariel Harrington, the powerful InstaMedia magnate, who had died at the age of one hundred and twenty of an astrocytoma, or some other glioma, or some kind of anaplastic something.

  The screen, which it looked like someone had sneezed on, had gone to black for a half a second, and now it was running the opening sequence of that classic Mister Mango commercial where the children all gather in the field at dawn and await the return of Mister Mango.

  Valentina stared at the screen.

  She could feel it in there ... feeding, growing.

  The aluminum frames of the windows were rattling.

  “Jimbo” Cartwright was dying of cancer.

  Everyone was dying of ... something .

  In the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, nobody ever died of old age. When people died, and they did, eventually, often well into their fourteenth decades, unless there’d been some horrible accident, they died of something, something specific, something with a medical-sounding name. Which was usually cancer, but was not always cancer.

  Nine times out of ten it was cancer.

  People died of a variety of cancers, intestinal, lung, and liver cancers, colorectal and prostate cancers, bladder cancers, pancreatic cancers, bowel, blood, and bone marrow cancer. Or, if they didn’t die of cancer, and there hadn’t been some horrible accident, they died of some other disease or condition, like bronchopneumonia, or Alzheimer’s disease, or vascular or frontotemporal dementia, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, or myocardial or cerebral infarctions. Occasionally, they died of renal failure, or pulmonary thromboembolisms, or sudden cerebrovascular accidents, or any of a number of other diagnoses. They never simply died of old age.