The field, or steppe, or endless expanse of digitally-generated golf course green upon which the shamelessly naked ranks of cherubic Clarion children gathered side by side in symmetrical rows and all held hands went on forever.
Valentina stared at the screen.
They died of diseases, genetic defects.
Mister Mango appeared in the heavens.
They died of mistakes, unfortunate accidents.
The children raised their arms in unison.
They died of infections, invasive organisms.
Valentina stared at the screen.
Mister Mango pursed his lips and blew a beam of orange light down onto the upturned faces of the children.
The mango-colored Oneness of the ...
Valentina was a histopathologist.
Death was, theoretically, treatable.
She lived in a house on Marigold Lane.
Death was theoretically treatable.
The screen dissolved to an ad for Jammys, the anti-oxidant breakfast fruit bars, which came in a range of natural flavors .
In the Pewter Palisades Private Community.
Valentina, the Destroyer of Worlds.
Orange, pineapple, kiwi, banana.
The screen dissolved to the dream of the fetus.
The mother who wasn’t her mother was Death.
A message came in on the HCS60.
It beeped, once, then vibrated briefly.
Valentina snatched up the Viewer.
TURN THE TV OFF.
She clicked it off. A paroxysm of spastic texting ensued.
CURRENT LOCATION IS NOT SAFE.
I KNOW.
RELOCATE IMMEDIATELY.
WHERE?
SOMEWHERE SAFE.
WHERE?
OFF THE NETWORK.
Where was that?
OK, she texted. THEN WHAT?
Nothing.
She stared at the screen.
Nothing. Then ...
DO YOU TRUST US?
YES.
YOU SURE?
YES.
Nothing. She sat there, waiting.
THEN TRUST YOURSELF.
I DON’T UNDERSTAND.
YES YOU DO.
Yes ... she did. Or some semi-conscious part of her did. But how did they know that? Wait a minute. Were they watching her through the HCS60? Watching her sleep? Watching her masturbating? They knew she’d been hallucinating.
I THINK I’VE BEEN HALLUCINATING.
HOW CAN YOU TELL?
STOPPED MY MEDS. WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS .
Nothing.
PLEASE. CAN YOU HELP ME?
MAYBE. DEPENDS.
DEPENDS ON WHAT?
ON WHAT YOU WANT.
She sat there paralyzed.
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
I WANT TO GET OUT.
OUT OF WHAT?
OUT OF HERE.
AND THEN DO WHAT?
JOIN YOU. FIGHT.
FIGHT ... WHAT?
She hesitated. Then she typed it.
IT.
Nothing. She sat there and waited.
WHAT IS IT?
I DO NOT KNOW.
YES YOU DO.
CAN’T EXPLAIN.
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
I TOLD YOU ...
NO.
Something was wrong. They didn’t trust her.
SOMETHING ELSE.
YES?
She typed it.
TEN WEEKS PREGNANT.
No response.
ARE YOU STILL THERE?
VARIANT CORRECTED?
YES.
Nothing. She thumbed the keypad.
ARE YOU STILL THERE? HELLO?
YES.
CAN YOU HELP ME?
NO .
WHY?
YOU KNOW WHY.
NO I DON’T.
Yes she did. She typed the question.
BECAUSE I NEED TO DO IT MYSELF?
YES.
Her stomach clenched like a fist.
I CAN’T. WHY?
IT CAN’T COME WITH YOU.
Of course it couldn’t. She knew it couldn’t.
HERE?
NO. SOMEWHERE SAFE.
“You realize that’s Security, don’t you?”
“Shut up.”
She had to ignore the voice. She texted frantically.
I CANNOT DO THIS.
YES. YOU CAN.
She couldn’t type. Her fingers were shaking. Her head was spinning.
CAN’T YOU DO IT ONCE I GET THERE?
NO. YOU HAVE TO DO IT THERE.
The room appeared to be titling sideways, trying to spill her off the bed. She lay down flat on her belly on the mattress and fingered the keypad.
HOW SHOULD I DO IT?
YOU KNOW HOW TO DO IT. YOU’RE A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL. DO IT. THEN RELOAD THE MEMCARD.
She lay there staring at the message on the screen.
IN OR OUT?
“What are you doing? Are you out of your mind?”
She could not do this.
IN OR OUT?
“Do you know what you’ll be?”
IN ... OR OUT?
She fingered the keypad.
IN.
GOOD. NOW EJECT THE MEMCARD .
Valentina ejected the MemCard. She tried to sit up, which did not go well. Her elbows buckled. Her arms gave out. She collapsed face first onto the bed, curled up into a fetal position, and lay there staring at the orange carpet. She wasn’t actually staring at the carpet as much as into a sea of orange acrylic water in which she was drowning, and had been pretty much all her life. Tired. She was so terribly tired. Every muscle in her body was tired. Her teeth were tired. Her hair was tired. Words could not convey the crushing magnitude of how tired she was. She dragged the fusty sheets up from the foot of the bed and pulled them toward her. She slithered and wriggled around in the bedding, writhing like an unearthed worm. Flurries of orange plaster flakes were floating down on her like toxic dandruff. The bed was shaking. The vent was sputtering air like gas from a cancerous colon. Her vulva was red and raw and swollen. She got her hand around it and squeezed. The pain was good. The pain was real. The pain was what was keeping her going ... whoever she was, whatever she was ... whatever she was now becoming ... Valentina Destroyer of Worlds, prophetess of the One Who Was Many ... Terrorist ... suicide ... filicide ... freak ... there were too many words and names for everything ...
“Baby murderer,” the voice in her head said.
No. No. It was just a tape.
Transplant Blues
Part of Taylor’s normal routine, from which he was absolutely not to deviate, was that shortly after the sun began to drop below the western horizon, or at 1830, whichever came first, or whenever Cassandra left for work, he’d slip back out of her bedroom window, down the fire escape, into the alley, which, although the TŌ Fish tent was closed, continued to intensely reek of TŌ Fish, turn left onto Jefferson Avenue, and walk back home to Mulberry Street. Jefferson Avenue, at this time of day, was nowhere near the teeming mass of Anti-Social humanity it was in the mornings when the outdoor markets were open, but it wasn’t exactly tranquil or anything, because the corporate stores would be back in business and the sidewalks packed with sweat-drenched 1s on their way to work in the plants and factories, which were located out in the Northeast Quadrant where hardly anyone officially lived, and they would all be wearing their variously colored, color-coded company ensembles, which looked like pajamas, except for the footwear, and prominently featured the company’s logo, as they walked right at him staring blankly ahead at nothing like a herd of zombies. Also, by this time, the Security gates would be processing the line of returning vehicles, and the Security Specialists with their UltraLite rifles milling around outside the little bunker-style Security stations, where they sat out the heat of the day in comfort, and the Public Viewers would be booming out whatever time it would be at the tone, and running ads for beer and liquor and tobacco products and Plastomorphinol
, and the avenue crawling with company shuttles, which were also color-coded and prominently branded for ease of identification purposes, and IntraZone Waste & Security vehicles, and assorted tricked-out A.S.P. cars and go-carts and scooters, and other such vehicles, and Remotely Piloted Aerial Vehicles, would be hovering overhead, and so on.
Cassandra, under normal circumstances, would be walking east on Jefferson Avenue, lost in that herd of pajama-wearing zombies. She’d be making her way to her privileged job at the GCH Components factory, where she and hundreds of other equally privileged 1s all sat in rows of contaminant-free assembly tables from 1900 to 0500 and contributed to the manufacture of various highly-advanced components of the state-of-the-art consumer products the Normals could not live without ... but these were hardly normal circumstances.
Officially, Cassandra had suffered an accident and had hairline-fractured a lumbar vertebra, and was absent from work with a doctor’s approval, which would stand up to scrutiny, according to Sarah. In reality (whatever that meant anymore), Cassandra was locked inside her bedroom, with her cravings, and her abnormally massive gravidity, and her heightened sensitivity to the heat, and mood swings, and general irritability, peeing into a plastic bucket. So she wasn’t exactly in the best of moods. Neither was Taylor, who had just about had it with being the exclusive human being she had had to take her shit out on for the last three months of this fucking nightmare. On top of which, now she was totally paranoid about how much her nosy and annoying roommates (who were taking turns tiptoeing down the hall and listening at her door all night, then conferring with each other in secret in the kitchen, about her) knew, or strongly suspected. They worked at different plants, she’d explained, so one of them always had the night off. She suspected they had worked out some kind of rota by which to monitor her every movement. She could hear them out there breathing, she swore, their ears pressed up against her door, noting how often she got up to pee, or moan, on account of her massive gravidity, or what she was watching for the hundredth time on her shitty little offline pirate Viewer. Oh, and also, forget about sex. Sex was out. There was no sex. The baby was crushing her internal organs. The last thing on her mind was sex. Technically, she was now six months pregnant, but Jesus fucking Christ she was big. Way too big, in Taylor’s opinion. He was starting to worry that they had screwed up somehow and had seriously miscalculated her inception date .
He slipped out the side of the TŌ Fish tent and headed west through the oncoming 1s, scanning faces in the crowd for Watchers. And OK ... good, there they were, the same two that were on him yesterday, standing around outside the entrance of Discount City like a couple of dipshits. He waited until one of them finally spotted him, then he slipped into the CRS. He waltzed them around the aisles for a while, and up and down the non-working escalators, then he dumped them in the feminine hygiene section.
Back outside on Jefferson Avenue, he caught a brief ride on the back of a van that some Mexican guy was already riding, and scanned behind him for additional Watchers. There weren’t any, so he hopped off the van. He stayed in the street for half a block, dodging a series of oncoming vehicles, then cut across the throngs of 1s and ducked into Speedway Motorsports Alley. He was heading home to 16 Mulberry to try to steal a few hours of sleep before he hooked up with Sarah at Frankie’s at midnight and she started in on his head again. He wasn’t getting much sleep at Cassandra’s. He hadn’t been for several weeks now. He wasn’t getting much sleep nights either, as he was spending most of them fucking Sarah, and then lying beside her until 0430 as she interminably whispered in a quasi-monotone (which after a while got seriously hypnotic) about the corporations and the Normals and the babies, and the Autonomous Zones, and the stories and myths, and a lot of other faith-based Transplant nonsense that Taylor by this time had heard enough of. Off to the west the sun was setting like a fifteen megaton nuclear strike, painting the sky in radioactive shades of yellow, red, and orange. Ahead, in the south, the light was fading. Somewhere down there, among the blasted ruins of the cities and suburbs and strip malls, and industrial parks and wilderness preserves, and whatever else was allegedly down there, cells of Sarah’s Terrorist comrades were rousing in their caves and tunnels, and presumably underground parking garages, and who knew where else, the sewers, probably, and suiting up for a night of foraging in the undergrowth of some mutant jungle ... or this was the crap she would have him believe. She couldn’t say how many were out there, thousands at least, maybe tens of thousands, or maybe even more, no one knew. How these neo-primitive Terrorists were surviving below the 40th parallel, where the average temperature was 62C, and the landscape was either arid desert, where nothing could live for hundreds of years, or the charred and melted and twisted wreckage of former megalopolian areas, where hideous groves of mutant flora (and possibly fauna) grew untended, and the rivers, streams, and lakes were toxic, and anything you ate or drank would cause this form of hyper-aggressive cancer that killed you in the space of a week ... Sarah had no answer for that. She wouldn’t even honestly address the question.
“You’re watching their movie,” she had taken to repeating, whenever he even broached the subject. “We have no idea what it’s like down there.”
“Yeah, it’s probably like 18 degrees and breezy.”
“Don’t be an asshole. Of course it’s hot. If it’s this hot here, it’s worse down there. But toxic? All right, sure, toxic. But exactly how toxic?”
“What, like mildly toxic? Partly scorching throughout the day with periods of intermittent toxicity?”
“All these numbers you see on the news, caesium levels, strontium levels, anthrax, ebola, pneumatic plague, where do they come from? The corporations. You’re telling me you believe their data?”
This, in the wake of Sarah’s bombshell.
She’d dropped it on him back in December, a week or so after he’d pressed her for all those details about the baby-smuggling, and who she really was, and all that.
They were lying in a puddle of bodily fluids on a bed in a private room at the Darkside.
“What if we could get you out?”
He’d been playing this back in his head for a month now.
“To the Autonomous Zones.”
Sarah nodded.
“If they even exist.”
She let that go.
“Me and Cassandra?”
“You and the baby.”
He wasn’t going anywhere without Cassandra.
“Cassandra is safe. They need the 1s. The 1s are their workforce.”
He knew that already .
“So what are you saying?”
“Nothing ... just ... things are changing.”
They lay there staring up at the ceiling, watching each other in their peripheral vision.
“Things?”
She nodded.
“What kind of things?”
Seconds passed.
“Serious things.”
“Could you maybe be a little more fucking vague.”
“I’m saying, you don’t have much future in here.”
So, OK, that was fairly ominous. He’d pushed her, but she wouldn’t go into details. All she would say was that she’d heard from someone who had heard from someone who’d heard from someone that, allegedly, one of their Normal sources (which Taylor still doubted actually existed) had noticed a reduction in purchasing orders for foodstuffs and other consumer items normally allocated to Zone 23, beginning as of the following quarter. The conclusion Sarah drew from this was that some kind of partial purge was coming ... the logical explanation being that IntraZone Waste & Security Services (or maybe even Hadley Domestic Security) had gotten wind of the unbelievably extensive preparations being made for the D.A.D.A. * and was planning to take preemptive measures and, basically, kill a whole shitload of people. Sarah reasoned that the Fifthian Cluster, and anyone demonstrably involved therewith, including Taylor, would be among these people, unless they could smuggle him out with the baby. Him ...Taylor ... not
Cassandra, who he would never see or hear from again.
Taylor had numerous problems with this strategy, which now, as he made his way back home (because, suffocating oven-like dump that it was, 16 Mulberry was his home), he was running through in no particular order. One of these problems was the Autonomous Zones. Because even if they did exist, and there were a few areas that weren’t so toxic, where maybe you could grow bananas or something, and whatever cancer you got from the water wouldn’t kill you for several decades, how was he supposed to live down there? He and the baby. What would he do? Zone 23 was all he knew. He’d been born in the Zone and had spent his life there. And also, assuming she was on the level, Sarah, and could smuggle him out as she promised, and assuming the Autonomous Zones were real, and there were some sweltering swathes of land, or remnants of cities, or wilderness areas, that the Normals hadn’t scorched with white phosphorus, or tactically nuked, or negligently poisoned, or otherwise sucked the last drop of life out of to fuel their vehicles and color their hair, what would Taylor do with the baby? He didn’t know how to raise a baby. He didn’t know the first fucking thing about babies. The whole idea was fucking nuts. Did she really expect him to believe they were running a network of underground baby orphanages? How was that supposed to work? Were they feeding them bottles of toxic formula? Singing them little Terrorist lullabies? Training them on little baby explosives?
Bullshit. There were no Autonomous Zones. Whatever whoever was doing with the babies was happening above the 40th parallel.
The rest of it was all a Transplant pipe dream.
Taylor had recognized Adam and Sarah as Transplants the moment he laid eyes on them, of course, them and the rest of Fifthian Cluster, back at his very first general meeting. Adam, for one, just reeked of Transplant. Sarah less so, but still he knew. Or at least he’d had that feeling about her, which the first time they’d deviantly fucked had confirmed. Transplants were Variant Positive Normals who went “Non-Responsive to approved medications,” or acted weird, or fucked up somehow, and got themselves designated and sent to the Zone. They brought them in on a daily basis, for some reason always in the hour before sunrise, one or two a day, typically, so five or six hundred a year in total. All in all they probably made up two or three percent of the population. Most were designated A.S.P. 1, and went right to work in the plants and factories. Same with the small percentage of 2s. Transplant 3s were extremely rare, and were pretty much left to their own devices.
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