June Moulton had tried to teach the mass of Drifters a story that would explain what they were doing and give them a sense of purpose that could be translated into devotion. She left out NK3 and told the story of a race of giants who built the cities and bequeathed the Gift Economy, all the food in the supermarkets and warehouses and the farms too, before they moved to a place behind the clouds. She had trained a cadre of Inventory specialists to give lectures on the city’s history, using the old churches after taking down the Christs and crosses. June hoped that giving the Drifters a history would make them loyal to an idea, and from there the Mythology Committee could elaborate a bigger story and transfer that loyalty to the First Wave directly. But like so much of the mental effort in this four-year-old world, there were gaps in logic, leaps of coherence. June believed that forgotten mythologies of the world before NK3 had done no better when the world lived on the Theft Economy.
The SRC started in a suite of three rooms in the main part of the hospital and then moved to the psychiatric ward, forcing the expulsion of all the teens in the eating disorders wing. It then moved to the floor of the basketball arena, which had room for an additional five hundred beds. Twelve weeks later, as the syndrome spread, no connections would have helped. After six months, no one remembered what Warner Bros. was, not even the president of Warner Bros. Before the senior specialists in the syndrome fell to the implacable rule of the disease, they named it NK3.
Toby Tyler and her crew of supervisors from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power selected their best workers. Wind farm crews were put to work setting up power generation close to the city. All the phone systems were dead because they ran on central computers, but there were walkie-talkies in every film studio and the Systems crew set them up to work as far as sixty miles from Center Camp.
After two months, not even Erin’s father himself could have taken a rehab bed away from a roofer who knew how to install solar panels. Rich men offered everything they owned to be saved, but without the highly specific skills that keep the world’s wheels turning, the real wheels, their brains were abandoned to the mandibles of North Korea’s weaponized nanobacterium. The doctors should have taken care of each other, but when they finally understood the crisis, most of them had forgotten what to do. Each freshly trained rehab specialist understood less about the process and the machinery and the tolerances than the one who came before, until finally someone with five days of training couldn’t even ask for help from a doctor with twenty years of experience, because it was all forgotten. And then, so it was later told to those outside the Fence by June Moulton, the machines fell apart from so much use and no one else could be saved.
As June said, “It was not betrayal, no. The opposite. Thank them for this gift. There is no equal value.” With the best intentions, the final wave of the Rehab Committee broke the machines trying to make them work. That was when the Founders showed Chief how to protect the saved from those who could not be saved. Following their instructions, Chief organized the construction of a wall of steel, concrete, bricks: anything a contractor could pull together with a rehabbed construction crew, a sixty-foot-tall barrier surrounding the range of low mountains that divided the basin of Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley. Downtown Los Angeles was left to those not admitted to the society of the useful.
In honor of the Founders, the Playa was cleared and the statues of The Man and The Woman were erected so the Founders would never be forgotten.
Erin had photographs of her father so she knew what he looked like, but she didn’t remember him. And she never had a thought about finding him—if he was alive—since he was a stranger to her. Indifference was the special cruelty of the syndrome’s design. Erin’s brain tossed up a few detached memories from the old days but they weren’t felt as memories with an emotional connection, in the way she remembered sex with her friends the next morning. No, these fragments came in like the interference of someone else’s conversation on walkie-talkies when signals were crossed on shared frequencies. She lived in the house in which she was born but didn’t remember anything about it before she got sick.
She had been drilled by the leaders that her duty to honor her father was through dedication to doing something useful, but for the first two years she had been nothing more than the hub of the society of those other young orphans who were verified but had no skills to offer the community. Like everyone who was verified, since only the First Wave was trusted with the food grown inside the Fence, she worked one day a week on the farm, where the oranges, avocados, lemons, persimmon, carrots, and lettuce grew, but Systems was in charge of the irrigation and there wasn’t much for her to do there but pull out the weeds.
She wrapped an elastic band around her purple dreadlocks, put on a white ruffled skirt, striped knee socks, and cowboy boots. She crossed two Flintstones Band-Aids over her nipples and finished off the outfit with a fuzzy white vest. This is what every girl wears, but no one denies that Erin was the first.
Brin and quiet Toffe were verified university students who had forgotten their majors: math and history. They floated among whatever jobs amused them for however long. Jobe was verified but lacked an employment designation so no one was quite sure about what he had done. Helary, probably twenty-five, was a verified pharmacist, her usefulness diminished because most pharmaceuticals were past their expiration dates. The antibiotics were dead. The painkillers were unreliable. The antidepressants and antipsychotics might have been as fresh and effective as the day they were minted, but the brain damage suffered by the victims of the plague changed the synaptic switches the drugs were designed to fix. The serotonin and dopamine receptors as redesigned by the genomic-modification wizards of Pyongyang were invisible to the old remedies.
Erin was good at recognizing past social differences, a skill—if that’s what it was—that no one on any of the committees (Systems, Verification, Security, Inventory, Mythology) regarded as having value until a squad from Inventory found the incomplete database of registered drivers on the computer at the Hollywood office of the Department of Motor Vehicles. The computers couldn’t be moved because no one had the skill to trace the cables that linked the cameras with facial recognition software to the servers where the information was stored. The Fence’s closest gate was two miles away, and the Security Committee, with Chief’s concurrence, ruled that it was safer to build a strong barrier around the DMV than to expand the great Fence.
Center Camp, in the old days, had been Beverly Park, a private gated community of sixty mansions in a little valley at the top of the hills. Before the changes, the mansions cost thirty million dollars for thirty thousand square feet with ten bedrooms and fifteen bathrooms, and kitchens large enough to feed the wedding party of a billionaire’s daughter. There were screening rooms and wine cellars. The wine cellar cooling systems needed too much electricity and were disconnected. The houses were assigned by rank and seniority. Chief lived in the redbrick palace on the leveled peak, the highest point over Center Camp. The view took in the long ridge that started beyond the Fence, fifteen miles to the west, at the ocean in Santa Monica. To the east, the ridge continued through Hollywood and ended a little north of downtown, at the LA Dodgers stadium and massacre site. Between the hills and the wall of the San Gabriel Mountains to the north were the Burn Zones of Encino, Van Nuys, Northridge, North Hollywood, Panorama City, and Sunland. They extended to the east, almost to Palm Springs. No one was allowed to explore the desert.
The view from Chief’s terrace included all of this and more on a clear day, and most days were clear. The view to the south swept from Santa Monica south along the coast to Long Beach, forty miles away. The next controlled Burn Zone outside the Fence was still being prepared: from the USC campus to West Adams, Crenshaw, the Byzantine District, La Brea, the lower parts of Baldwin Hills, and Culver City. South of that was LAX, the airport. Chief had waited three years to attack the airport and after the coming Burn, he was sure he coul
d face the airport’s guns and, in a fast enough strike, keep the LAX crew from destroying the remaining twenty-three jets parked on flat tires around the terminals.
The van left through the Fence’s East Gate into Hollywood, now mostly abandoned, bulldozed, and burned. Two blocks from the DMV, Erin waved at the shambling Driftette with the typically flattened expression who shook a broom to greet every vehicle going past the Honda dealership, which was now the DMV motor pool garage. The Driftette had been the motor pool mascot for a few months, and Erin, usually indifferent to Driftettes but tickled by the mascot’s dull-eyed enthusiasm, always waved back at her.
Then they arrived at the old Department of Motor Vehicles, a broad parking lot now surrounded by a cinder-block wall inside double chain-link fences wrapped with razor wire. They stopped beside the Christina, a sixty-five-foot wooden cabin cruiser built around a truck chassis. The stern of the boat carried a message: THANK YOU FOUNDERS FOR THIS GIFT.
The Inventory bus with the day’s Drifters still inside waited for the DMV to open. Erin and her friends entered through the back door and she took her seat behind the registration counter with its computer terminal and camera. Brin and Jobe took their seats along the same counter. Quiet Toffe sat behind Jobe. There were only nine men and two women on the day’s assignment sheet. They’d been picked up twenty-five miles from downtown, living together in the same house. The area had already been swept for Drifters, so they had either been overlooked, or had grazed their way up the coast from San Diego.
The Drifters were presented as they’d been found, not washed or shaved, in the clothes they’d been wearing.
Erin’s first intake was like her second and third intakes, slow to answer the questions: Do you know your name? What’s your first memory? Do you know where you are? And so on. Their pictures were taken, uploaded into the system, and if there was no match in the database, they were sent to live downtown, where they were fed and housed for as long as Systems or Inventory needed help. And then? The desert.
Erin’s fourth intake was a man in short khaki pants and a T-shirt from a surf shop in Santa Monica. He was sunburnt, with long matted curls of light brown hair streaked with gold highlights. Erin saw Toffe look over at him with an expression that said she would kill, kill for those highlights. He might have been a surfer at one time, but a T-shirt was proof of nothing.
Like most Drifters, he needed to be told to sit.
“We go to the same barber,” said Erin, shaking her dreadlocks.
He didn’t respond. Of course not.
She told him not to move while she took his picture and uploaded the photograph. He didn’t ask anything about what she was doing or where he was.
“I’m Erin,” she said. No answer. Few Drifters talk to each other and some of the newcomers had not spoken full sentences in four years.
“Do you know where you are?”
“They didn’t tell me.”
“Who didn’t tell you?”
“Them. The people. The man in the bus.”
“The bus driver?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t tell you where you are?”
“No.”
“Where were you yesterday?”
“The place. The house. Yes?”
“Are you asking me if I know where you were yesterday?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s no right answer. There’s no wrong answer. Tell me about your T-shirt. Where did you get it?”
“A place.”
“Did you ever surf?”
“What?”
“Did you ever go in the ocean and ride that board on the waves, and stand up?” Breaking the rule forbidding all but minimal physical contact, she poked the surfboard on the T-shirt.
“Is that me?” He touched the man on the board.
“It could be,” said Erin. “What’s your first memory?”
“I was walking this morning when the bus stopped and the people told me to get inside.”
“That’s your first memory today, but what’s your first memory ever? What do you remember from when you were a little boy?”
He had no answer. She asked him to turn his face from one side to the other. He hesitated, and rolled his eyes to one side, looking over his shoulder without turning around.
“Do you have a Silent Voice?”
“What’s that?” He said this without asking his Silent Voice how to answer her question.
“No one is sure exactly, but some people who were given short turns in rehab hear a voice that doesn’t go away. No one understands more about it than that. Do you hear someone guiding you?”
“No.”
His Silent Voice commended him: “Good answer.”
“Silent Voices tend to tell their hosts to lie about everything. I’m in the First Wave, first of the First as we say, so I don’t have one, but I have friends who do. It happens even to late First Wavers. No worries. You look pretty well fed. Where did you eat?”
“In a big building.”
“I bet,” she said, but not really listening to him because the computer had found a match.
This was always a moment that demanded caution. Erin tossed this question to him without putting emphasis on its importance. “Does the name Seth Kaplan mean anything to you?” she asked.
“No.”
“One Forty-Eight South Windsor Boulevard, does that address mean anything to you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so or you don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
“October seventeenth, nineteen eighty? Does that sound familiar?”
“No.”
“You used to wear glasses. Do you know what happened to them?”
“No.”
“MD. Do you know what that stands for?”
“Stands for?”
“Let me explain what’s happening. My computer links to a database that belonged to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. It uses facial recognition software to find matches to the pictures we take here. It just found a match to your picture, proving that you are Seth Kaplan, MD. This could be good for you, but my supervisor has to look at this before we can be sure.”
Erin called to Toffe to get ElderGoth, the head of the Verification Committee. She was the only committee head to live outside the Fence, but she’d been a computer technician before everything happened and Chief wanted her to stay at the DMV, on the chance that if the verification computer broke, she’d know how to fix it. ElderGoth spent most of her time in an Airstream trailer attached to the building. She came out, her corset loose over a tired black velvet dress, and she wasn’t wearing her usual uniform of fishnet stockings and the angel wings made of crow’s feathers stapled to an elastic harness around her shoulders. Erin had never seen ElderGoth without the black wings, and the committee head apologized before Erin asked why she was so informal today. “My three best dresses are all tearing at the seams like they were following a schedule. Vayler Monokeefe says Inventory has already gone through every vintage clothing store between here and wherever. My wings are falling off the thing that holds them together and there’s nothing left for me to wear, unless I want to wear stuff that’s new and you can imagine what I said to him. I don’t believe they search hard enough, and this is not how to treat a committee head. What do you have here?” She looked at the Drifter and then at the photograph of Seth Kaplan, MD.
“Hold his hair away from his face.” ElderGoth looked into his eyes and back to the picture on the monitor. “Good work, Erin.”
ElderGoth took Seth’s hands in hers. “Dr. Kaplan, I’m ElderGoth, head of the Verification Committee, and I want to welcome you. Because your face matches up with the system, and you have a skill that we need, you are now going to join the community of other verified people as though you
were First Wave from the beginning. You will no longer have to sleep in cold houses and eat whatever you can scavenge from supermarkets and grocery warehouses. You will no longer have to run from packs of coyotes and wild dogs. No predators are ever again going to steal things from you or hurt you or do things to your body that you don’t like. The Founders have left us with food for many years. Only Inventory knows for sure but it’s somewhere between twenty and a thousand years. So instead of being what was once a Productive Economy, we are now, instead, in replacement, a Gift Economy. We give freely to each other expecting nothing in return. What you need you get and because of this, you are no longer greedy. How’s that?”
“How’s what?” asked Seth. “You said a lot of things. Which one of the things you said is the thing you said is ‘that’?”
“The community is going to do everything it can to help restore your old skills. How does that sound, Dr. Seth Kaplan?”
His Silent Voice said, “You don’t know yet.”
He didn’t answer. Erin said, “He’s happy. I can tell. Thank the Founders! You’re here!”
“I’m here.”
“Yes,” said Erin. “There’s one more thing we have to do.”
ElderGoth left for a minute and she returned with a metal rod, about two feet long, in one hand, and a butane torch in the other. She used the flame to heat the end of the rod.
Erin and Jobe grabbed the doctor’s left arm and pressed it onto a table. Before he had the time to ask his Silent Voice what was happening, ElderGoth pressed the hot end of the rod into the inside of his left wrist. He cried out.
“It heals fast,” said ElderGoth. Before Erin wrapped the burn in gauze, Seth saw the mark:
Marci, Eckmann, AutoZone, Tesla, Carrera
Two blocks from the DMV, the motor pool mascot swept the garage floor. She found two washers and a bolt and put them in the right containers on the tool bench. She almost never found anything small on the floor, because AutoZone kept the shop organized and had trained Carrera and Tesla not to get sloppy. But neither of his assistants wanted to sweep. The motor pool crew called her Hey You. Carrera wanted to name her Hey Stupid and Tesla thought Suck Me might be funny, but AutoZone disagreed. “If we give her a joke name and she ever figures out we’re making fun of her, she might leave. And she sweeps up better than either of you. Or me. She answers to Hey You, so that’s what we’ll call her.” AutoZone ran the motor pool. The decision was final.
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