What had she done? She knew what she had done. She had run away from Pewter ... something ... something, something Marigold Lane. She meant it more in the classic sense of, “Oh my God, what have I done?” She knew what she had physically done. She’d aborted her fetus with a barbeque skewer in some fleabag hotel in Center City. She had actually done that. She had killed her baby. Her variant-corrected baby, a Clear. Or had she? She couldn’t remember, exactly. She remembered the blood, the pain, the skewer, but she couldn’t remember seeing the fetus. She remembered Kyle, and Doctor Fraser, and Paxton something, on Lomax Avenue, but she couldn’t remember when all this had started, or where, or what it was she had wanted. She was losing little pieces of her past at the same time she was recalling others. The connections between the fragments were fraying. It was thirty-three something ... Marigold Lane. She’d woken up in a hospital room. When? She was wearing a C-Section scar. And Doctor Hesbani, and the Clears with their forms, and some other doctor she couldn’t remember, and Barry ... that was back in the all-pink room. And now she was here, in Zone 23, but if she had actually killed the fetus, the Clear, why was she still alive? And when had all that even happened, assuming any of it had actually happened? She stopped on the sidewalk and racked her brain. She couldn’t be certain of anything, really.
She wasn’t even sure what day it was.
Directly ahead another Public Viewer (apparently they were all over the place) was running some kind of homage to “Jimbo” that began with his chubby little baby pictures and then dissolved through his life ... in linear time. Down at the bottom, a crawler was running what was clearly an official advisory loop advising anyone viewing the Viewer that Sector C was in a lockdown and that any Class 3-designated Persons outside the sector should shelter in place. In the lower corner was the time and date. Apparently it was 17 April, 2610, H.C.S.T., as well as an assortment of other dates that were totally irrelevant to Quarantined Persons. Beyond the Viewer was another gate, identical to the gate she had entered, except that this one was Gate 14. Mounted on the wall above the gate was some sort of digital countdown clock that was counting down the minutes to something ... of which there remained exactly twenty .
Out ... yes ... that was what she had wanted. She had desperately wanted out of ... something. She didn’t know what, but definitely something. Something that was suffocating her, coating her body like a second skin ... something she was drowning in. She had had a name for it, but now it was gone. The name didn’t matter ... because IT was gone. Which meant she was out, but she wasn’t out. She was locked in here, inside the Zone, where she didn’t belong ... except she did. Apparently this was where she belonged ... because everything, as it was, was perfect. She had wanted out, and she had ended up in, but maybe in was actually out, and everything was backwards somehow. She stood there on the sidewalk, swaying, closed her eyes and repeated her mantra, “the loving, unknowable Oneness of …”
A klaxon sounded somewhere behind her. When she opened her eyes, the sidewalk was empty, or nearly empty, or it was much less crowded. The avenue itself was devoid of shoppers, except for a few disabled stragglers. The vendors in the smattering of stalls still standing were packing up their products hurriedly and securing the wooden flaps of their booths. The roll-down metal gates of the stores that lined the sidewalk were clanging down. Padlocks were being clacked into place. Dead ahead, behind a stand where they sold what looked like sunscreen and hand crème, there was some sort of little service alley that was covered with corrugated sheets of aluminum, which appeared to provide some modicum of shade. Domingo had warned her to avoid such alleys, but she had no choice, she had to go somewhere. She adjusted her futon and started toward it, keeping to the outer edge of the sidewalk, in case there were rapists lurking in there. There weren’t. It was just an empty alley, leading to another street to the south. Just inside the mouth of the alley was a stack of flattened cardboard boxes, which she figured she could mostly hide behind while she waited out the heat of the day and maybe even slept for an hour or two. After she slept she could try again to remember the things she knew she couldn’t remember forgetting, but sensed were still there ... were somewhere back there, or down there, or somewhere, buried under the layers of twisted wreckage they had made of her mind, or that were mixed up with all her other memories, the ones she was sure were in fact her memories, or were simply misplaced in the skein of time ...
Outbreak
Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometers away, in a world of comfort and infinite abundance from which Valentina had been banished forever, Billy Jensen was on a roll. He was taking out Targets left and right, as fast as the Target Acquisition Specialists at KILL CHAIN Command could throw them at him. BOOM! He took out a former library, or archive, or some kind of school or something, the interior of which was swarming with Terrorists. BOOM! He took out a Terrorist vehicle, a tricked-out mini-van, or shuttle-type bus, that was zig-zagging down a four-lane avenue trying to evade the heavy fire a Security chopper was laying down on it. He didn’t even pause to watch the chopper take out the few surviving Terrorists who were crawling away from the smoldering wreckage, most of whom were missing limbs, because BOOM! He took out a Terrorist building, or the top two floors of a Terrorist building, but he only got points for the uppermost floor, because that was the designated Terrorist Target. A few seconds later, other Terrorists, several of them dressed as elderly women, all of them bleeding, and badly disoriented, ran out through the building’s entrance and into a Security Services crossfire. The Target Acquisition Specialists fed him yet another Target, a concentration of suspected Terrorists attempting to breach the Lockdown Cordon. This one was going to be a little tricky, as there were Specialists in the immediate vicinity ... he switched from anti-structural ordnance to anti-personnel and BOOM!
He took a second to check the scoreboard. Operator 225 was still leading, but Billy, who was Operator 262, was six points behind and gaining steadily. BOOM! He took out another domicile, slipping his missile right through the window and into what looked like a Terrorist kitchen ... but by this time Operator 225 had clocked him coming up from behind and he had stepped up his already devastating game and was taking out designated Terrorist Targets with just unbelievable skill and precision.
Billy Jensen, Clear that he was, did the math and faced the facts. He wasn’t going to make the semi-finals. Operator 225 was too good. Billy was good, extremely good, very, very good ... but he was not this good. Operator 225 was a player the likes of which Billy had never seen. The guy was a veritable crosshair artist. A joystick wizard. He could not miss. This was not a conflict for Billy, as the Clears were incapable of envy, or jealousy, or of taking any type of personal pleasure in others’ defeats, or humiliating failures, and in the final analysis all the operators were all just members of one big team whose competition against each other (i.e., as individuals, to win the game) ultimately served to make the team stronger, and proved the wisdom and superiority of the convoluted pseudo-cooperative competitive philosophy underlying it. So it wasn’t like he was begrudging Operator 225 his success or anything, or yearned to defeat him in any sort of professionally or personally humiliating way, but as long as Billy was still in the game, he felt he owed it to the other players to maximize his full potential, if only to keep the competition honest. There wasn’t any way he was going to win it trading Targets with 225, however, if he could keep it close, he knew there was still one outside chance. What Billy needed (and what some subconscious part of his Clarion brain had been praying for) was the “Special Bonus Terrorist Target,” for triple or even quadruple points, depending on the value of the Target. He’d never gotten one in competition, but he had seen it happen for other players, pushing their scores up over the top, often in the closing seconds of a round. It wasn’t something you could ever count on or allow yourself to be distracted by. Distractions degraded your reaction time, and were the bane of every KILL CHAIN! player. He erased the thought of it from his mind, which he made a placid, fe
atureless blank, aimed, fired ... and missed a Target, obliterating an adjoining tenement, and twenty to twenty-five Anti-Socials, none of whom had been designated Terrorists, or probable Terrorists, so zero points. He forgave himself for losing focus, acquired the next Target, a moving Target (a Terrorist male on a motor scooter with a female Terrorist riding behind him), plotted his vector, fired ... and got it! He couldn’t afford any more mistakes now, as 225 had pulled well ahead, and was picking off Targets ten a minute. The guy was a MercyKill machine. He was going nuts on a group of Terrorists the Specialists had flushed out into the open. They were caught out in this lot, or field, with nowhere to go. It was bug-splat city. But by this time, Billy was deep in “no mind” and locked into his groove and ... BOOM! He got a lucky three-for-one, two Terrorists helping a wounded Terrorist, and BOOM! What looked like a Terrorist restaurant, or take-out place, and ... BOOM! Whatever.
Now, according to the official rules of KILL CHAIN!, which were set forth in the KILL CHAIN! Players Online Terms of Service Agreement that everyone had to scroll down to the bottom line of and digitally sign, anyone of the age of majority (or any minor who could get his parents to digitally sign an online waiver) was entitled to become an Official Player, and compete with other Official Players in Interterritorial Special Events like KILL CHAIN! OUTBREAK! or KILL CHAIN! PANDEMIC!, or any other name the producers came up with, regardless of their variant-correction status. In reality, of course, all the players were Clears. This wasn’t the result of any ingrained form of subtle discrimination or anything. There was nothing preventing Variant-Positives from signing up and trying to compete. It was just that the Clears were so vastly superior, and handed the Variant-Positive players their asses in such a demotivating way, that playing against them significantly lowered the Variant-Positives’ self-esteem, and left them feeling deeply inadequate, and comparing themselves to archival footage of drooling mentally-challenged persons, which took all the fun right out of the thing. The psychomotor aspects of the game (i.e., target acquisition, tracking, accuracy, and collateral damage to target ratio) were nothing to the Clears. They smoked that stuff. The same went for their rational metrics, which the Variant-Positives were just no match for. But it wasn’t only their peerless intellects and athletic abilities that set them apart. No, the thing that really gave them the edge, collectively over the Variant-Positives, and individually against each other, was an unquantifiable attribute, which they all possessed to some degree, but that was more pronounced in some than in others (for example, in Operator 225), and which due to its delusory and numinous nature is almost impossible to accurately describe, but let’s go ahead and try it anyway ...
OK, remember Meyer Jimenez’s theory about the evolution of civilization, and those bands of nomads, and those tribes with their shamans, and peoples with their kings and priests, and so on, and his whole genealogy of morals and ethics, and how all that purportedly stemmed from people’s fear of being killed and eaten? Of course you do. And you know he was right. Because of course it all goes back to fear. Everything. It all traces back to fear. To our fear of snakes and bears and lions, and those giant pigs with their grinding molars, and storms and earthquakes and fires and floods, and falling stars, and the gods, and time, and other people who are not like we are, or anything bigger and stronger than we are ... because anything we cannot understand, and name, and tame, and control, we fear.
See, what Meyer, in his inebriated way, was trying to get across to Taylor, is that, essentially, people are ruled by fear. That fear is our master. That we are slaves to fear. And that being these excessively self-aware creatures, the thing we fear most of all is death ... because of how we are going to be dead forever, and we can’t seem to get our minds around that. *
According to Meyer, this certain knowledge, or depressingly morbid ontological model (i.e., that of our own individual deaths, as well as the inevitable erasure of everything), which of course is based in scientific fact, and is not just groundless superstition, or wishful thinking, or some convenient belief, like some fairy tale about heaven or whatever, just terrifies the bejesus out of us. Knowing (or believing) that we are going to be nullified, and be nothing, forever, scares us shitless, and is the impetus driving all our efforts to solve the riddle of space and time, and our desire to control and dominate everything ... in order to control and dominate death. What we’re dealing with here (according to Meyer, who probably spent too much time on this stuff) is nothing less than what makes us human ... this awareness, or knowledge, or concept, of death, ** and the total unfairness and cruelty of death, and our crippling fear and hatred of death.
And now here comes the kicker, because oddly enough, despite our terror and hatred of death, and our feeling that death is unfair, and wrong, or is some sort of flaw that we need to correct, or disease we need to treat, or something, we are also rather enamored of death, and of reading or hearing accounts of death, and of watching representations of death, and of killing other creatures just to watch them die. We’ve got this ambiguous thing about death. We hate it and love it. We fear it and crave it. We’re ashamed of it even as we bow down before it. We’re fleeing from it as we rush toward it. You could almost say, in some twisted way, that all we’ve done and built as a species, since the dawn of human civilization, generation after generation, empire upon the dust of empire, is all just one big monument to it ... one big weird-ass monument to death.
Billy Jensen did not get this. Death was just not a big deal to Billy. This whole ambiguous relationship we have (and the Variant-Positives had) with death ... the Clears didn’t have that. It just didn’t register. They understood it in an abstract way, but it did not move them, at all, emotionally. For Billy, watching a human being fight for its life as it slowly died, watching the shock and terror in its eyes as the last of its life was extinguished forever, would have been about as fascinating as watching someone delete an email.
This is the part that’s so hard to describe, because as far-fetched as this is going to sound, Billy had no fear of death. None of the Clear generation did. Now this had been proved in batteries of tests. It was something to do with their lateral amygdalas. It wasn’t like when people tell you, as some people will, or possibly have, that they have “overcome” their fear of death, or have “faced,” or “conquered,” their fear of death, or have made some other transcendent form of accommodation with their fear of death, which (a) is a load of horseshit, basically, and (b) the Clears didn’t have to do, as they had no fear of death to begin with, so there was nothing to overcome or conquer.
No, for Clears like Billy, this utter lack of fear and fascination with death was nothing unusual or in any way extraordinary. It was simply part and parcel of their genetically-modified state of enlightenment (which was, and wasn’t, what you and I would consider a bona fide state of enlightenment ... which also deserves a little explaining, then we’ll get right back to the action, I promise). ***
Spiritual enlightenment is actually not as complicated as it often sounds, like when people are trying to sell you their books, or workshops, or intensive weekend seminars. It all comes down to lack of attachment (or identification) with what we call the ego. This ego is what we think we are, this individual material vehicle we drive around through space and time, usually in an endless series of circles. Now your sages, gurus, fakirs, mystics, and living embodiments of God, and so on, understand that this ego thing, this individual we believe we are, is really just one of the Many Who Are One (and, it goes without saying, the One Who Is Many), which is, was, and always will be ... which is why there’s no such thing as death. Or time. Time is also a trick. Because everything that ever was, and ever will be, also is ... and always has been, and always will be. The whole idea of the end of time, and the time before time began, is nonsense. It’s just our egos projecting the fear of their individual ego-deaths onto the fabric of what we call “reality.” Check with any enlightened being, or incarnate god, and they’ll tell you this.
Of
course, it’s one thing to be able to say this, or to understand it in an abstract sense, and it’s a whole other thing to actually know it ... to perceive the world we live in that way. Which is why your bona fide sages, and mystics, and prophets, and actual gods made flesh, tend to end up walking the earth in rags and speaking in riddles, and so on. And why normally the first thing they tend to do, shortly after they become enlightened, is give all their money to the poor and hungry, and give away all their earthly possessions, and reject their families, and renounce their names, because all that stuff just gets in the way of the light of truth, and is all illusion, and the ego’s attachment to this illusion, the illusion of its own individual existence, is the root of all human fear and suffering.
All of which we have known for ages.
Now, the Clears were not like GM versions of Jesus or the Dalai Lama or anything. They were engineered by corporations and grown in little petri dishes. They were, however, unattached to their egos, as well as the egos of other persons, who were all just parts of a greater wholeness, and whose individual lives meant nothing.
Life, the way the Clarions saw it, was one big spiritual ecosystem, or holistic, quasi-Spinozist organism, governed by basic free market principles, the goal of which was perpetual expansion, and the generation of unlimited abundance, and growth, and progress, and all that stuff. **** At the same time, life was also a story, the story of this never-ending expansion, the protagonist of which was life itself. Evolution was the plot of this story, because progress, growth and technological advancement were the driving forces of the spiritual economy, and the raison d’être of all existence. Evolution and progress were going to continue until the universe sucked back up into whatever impossible hole in itself it was born out of and disappeared forever.
The point being, the Clears were looking at life through a fairly seriously fisheye lens, and tended to think in terms of aggregates, and conglomerates, and enormous spans of time, which, along with their unattachment to their egos, and the egos of other living persons, is what gave them the edge when it came to KILL CHAIN! ( not to mention the broader social context). While Variant-Positive KILL CHAIN! Players, looking down through their digital crosshairs, saw other people, who looked like them, or their wives, or mothers, or brothers, or friends, and hesitated, just a fraction of a second, the Clears saw Targets they had been ordered to strike, and did not hesitate, not one tick. Their GM brains were operating on a molar (or metasystemic) level. They were like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita (after Lord Krishna becomes Death, of course), chopping down trees with the axe of detachment ... walking the Path of Karma yoga. Actually, given that all of their parents and older relatives were Variant-Positives, some of whom had, it was very likely, considering the odds, been designated, had KILL CHAIN! not been just a game, an incredibly lifelike simulation, and had they really been doing what they were sitting there doing, some of their Targets might have been their mothers, or their fathers, or uncles, or aunts, or cousins, which would not have made the slightest difference. Once a suspected Terrorist Target had been cleared for a kill by whoever did that, whoever they were no longer mattered. It was all just attachment to ego anyway. You took out the Target in a professional manner, collected your points, and that was that. *****
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