“Hey, mister,” one of them called. “What’s wrong with your car?”
The embarrassment nearly left me speechless, and it took a moment to think. “A snake. Damn rattlesnake got in, and I had trouble finding it.”
They didn’t respond but watched as I climbed in to sit on a metal seat frame and pull onto the road. All of them stared as I drove past, and their looks said the same thing I’d begun to think: I’d lost it. Then again, Phillip didn’t have anyone else looking out for him, and it was still more than nine hours to Annapolis, so between now and then my nerves would have to settle out or I’d blow the whole thing. I rolled down the window and stopped in front of the kids.
“You boys know where the nearest liquor store is?”
Everyone those days was insane. To me, looking around the bar I’d found off of 95 North, I was the only normal person alive, and while two Marines on leave attacked an Air Force officer, slamming a broken bottle deep into his stomach, I grinned at their technique and laughed until the police showed up and dragged them out. Who knew how much I’d drunk? The bottles kept coming, and there was a breeding facility attached to the place so that one minute I’d have a blonde girl bouncing on my lap and then would black out to find a redhead; some were pretty, others a horror of bad genetics, but it didn’t matter to me. This was a place where everything converged, where death and sex and liquor flowed into one whirlpool, with me at its center, mouth wide open and guzzling until I wound up passed out in one of the facility’s tiny hotel rooms. Maybe sociologists could have worked it out. They would have said that the letdown from the Subterrene War in Kazakhstan had resulted in a kind of societal snap, like two kids who pulled a rubber band to its breaking point and then released it without warning, the result being stung fingers and heat. But instead of heat we got breeding facilities. The Deep South and the Midwest, they were the places where sex was easy and encouraged, where government brothels had sprung up on every street corner right between First Presbyterian and the family pharmacy and where all you had to pay was the entry fee and submit to a quick med scan before stepping onto the floor—slick with the day’s production of human sweat and everything else. This was the birthplace of soldiers.
At least a percentage of them. In watching and participating I’d studied the process, and it was like a shot between the eyes when I figured it out: the satos were better than us, not just because of their engineering but because of the fumbling nature of human reproduction. Even here, breeding was a random thing with no control over whose genes went where except for a quick genetic manipulation after conception—at which point the mother was whisked away to some garden spot—to ensure the woman gave birth to another government son. I’d asked myself how many satos I’d killed, but then again how many sons had I fathered? How many other Phillips were there in the world who had no chance of being saved by a crazy man driving shitfaced up Interstate 95? That was the thought that killed my mission. It drove a stake through it, then planted a boot in my face and pushed in the humiliating truth: that my strategy was rooted in hypocrisy, in which I had failed to account for the fact that just because Phillip wasn’t mine, it didn’t mean I didn’t have any children. And if I cared about another guy’s kid, why wasn’t I driving all over the world to track down my own sons born from breeding sites and who, by now, could be close to twenty? Some of them may have even been operators, knee-deep in the sewers of Dzhanga or some other place.
One night I woke up in a girl’s room, still drunk. She grabbed me and begged for me to stay, but it was the grip that got me, that pried loose some petrified crap in my brain and unclogged a torrent of insanity, because I screamed and dropped to the floor. By the time an employee came and got me, the girl was screaming too, and the pair of us had to be sedated by facility nurses, one of whom cooed in my ear as she walked me back to my hotel room.
“She grabbed me by the wrist,” I said.
“There, there, it’s all right; it’s all over.”
“The wrist. She had claws, nails that dug all the way in like she was trying to open a vein.”
The nurse nodded and caught me when I almost fell over. “I bet it was scary, but soon you’ll be in your own rack, and then you can sleep it all off. You know what I’d do if I were you?”
“No, what?”
She grabbed the hotel chit from my hand and waved it over my door lock, pushing me through when it opened. I collapsed in a heap on the rack.
“Tomorrow when you wake up, go into town. On the corner of Main and Battle Streets, there’s an empty building next to Gargin’s Groceries; every morning at eleven they have a meeting there. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I see them go in and come out every day ’cause I live nearby, and you might be able to talk to someone and get rid of whatever’s on your chest. All of them look like you.”
“What?” I asked. “What do I look like?”
“Like one of them that’s seen a whole lot. Like an old soldier.”
The thought terrified me, reminded me that I was supposed to blend in. “That’s not possible. I’m supposed to look like everyone else. I don’t even wear a uniform or have a haircut, don’t even shave.”
“It’s the eyes, baby doll. It’s always in the eyes.”
She shut the door, and I reached out to find the air-conditioning controls, giving up when I couldn’t focus and instead calling out the temperature I wanted. The unit kicked in with a rattle. At first it sounded like the snaps of fléchettes, an autocannon spitting red tracers down range or over my head, and I crawled deep under the covers, bringing them around tightly so I could pray for morning to arrive.
The next morning I searched for my car, only to have the hotel clerk remind me that I’d smashed it into a lightpost the week before, but I couldn’t recall the wreck even though they showed me pictures and handed me my copy of the police report. The clerk was more than helpful. He got me a ride into town with his brother James, who was all of a hundred years old and drove an ancient alcohol burner with a mammoth engine from the prefusion reactor days, when the aftertaste of oil and gas was still on everyone’s tongues, but instead of flooring the thing and letting it loose, the old man peered over the wheel and kept it ten miles under the speed limit.
“Can’t see the damn kids,” he explained.
I opened the window to let the hot air in and closed my eyes, imagining I was somewhere other than North Carolina in a town with a population of two. “What kids?”
“Them kids. Any kids. You gotta watch ’em, sure as hell, or they’ll run out in the road, dent the fender all to hell after you splatter them into a ditch.”
“Yeah,” I said. “There ought to be a law.”
“You said it. Look,” James continued, “I know it’s none of my business, but my brother and I, we served too. Jenny, the nurse at the facility, she said you was a soldier. That true?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Well, you ain’t have to worry, there aren’t any cameras or microphones in our place. We run it clean. Senator Michaelson looks to frequent the place now and again, and he can’t have the Federals listening while he’s having his fun. The senator hisself made sure that we got a waiver from the BAI: no monitoring.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been so drunk most the time that I’d forgotten about Assurance and the semis, and the news brought both a chilled reawakening and a wash of relief. “That’s good to know. Thanks for telling me.”
“Hell. I remember before they wired every street with them cameras, after the first semis was used in weapons systems. Now that made sense. Wire a plane up with one, let it go and get wiped. But to watch us? Americans? Something’s wrong with that, I’d say.”
“I’d say so too.” James was all right, I decided. “What else is there to do around here, James? Is it just the breeder?”
“Pretty much. Unless you’re from here, ain’t no reason to come. You know there’s someone lookin’ for you, right?”
“No, I didn’t
know that.”
James made the turn into town, a tiny village off the map and miles from the interstate, with oak and maple trees that made it look like some kind of idyllic scene from a storybook. Jebson, North Carolina. He pulled over in front of the supermarket, and I got out, walking around to his window.
“An Chinese fella. Said he was lookin’ for a white guy fittin’ your description, name of Stan Resnick. That you?”
“That’s me.” I nodded and looked around. “What did you tell him?”
“Hell. I was in them Asian Wars. I ain’t tellin’ nothin’ to no damn Chinaman.” James grinned around the toothpick in his mouth and turned his blinker on, getting ready to pull out. “I have about an hour’s worth of things to do at my daughter’s house since that worthless son-in-law of mine died in your war. Hour enough for ya?”
I nodded again. “An hour should be fine. I’ll just wait here, and if I’m not on this sidewalk,” I added, watching the car pull away, “leave without me.”
The Chinaman had to be Jihoon, which meant he’d made it. In less than a second, the adrenaline rushed in, Ji a reminder of the mission and making me wonder what in hell I was doing there, but the booze had been gone long enough that the thought diluted itself with others—how I’d explain the car to the rental agency, what to do about Phillip, or what I’d do if they found me because, technically, resigning to the Athens Police Department wasn’t enough to escape the assignment.
But my mind had been made up the moment I saw those trees. I could live in Jebson. Why not? This was what America was supposed to be—small towns that had all but disappeared, swallowed whole by sprawling cities—and what we had inherited from over a century of warfare was a caricature of a human habitat. Jebson had my name written all over it, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine finding a job at the breeding facility where I could work, drink, and get laid to my heart’s content because goddamn it all if I hadn’t earned it. The thought made me smile. It didn’t matter what the Army threatened, because now the dream surrounded and protected me with its quiet heat and with men like James, who I’d once looked at as idiots, but who were the few geniuses left. I bet James could figure a way out for me. Jebson would be the new base for Stanley Resnick, and I was about to take a walk to admire my new hometown when the reason for my trip hit me again, and I decided it couldn’t hurt to see this meeting the nurse had talked about.
There were two empty-looking buildings on either side of the grocer’s, and I chose the one on the left, opening the front door before a faint sound of music ran through my mind and registered as to where it was that I had heard the melody before: church. The service had already started. In my haste, I’d been too rough with the door, which banged against its stopper, and about a hundred people, all of them dressed in suits or dresses, turned to stare. They looked happy enough, but under their stares, it was clear that some of them were looking me up and down with mistrust and maybe not just because I was a stranger. I glanced at my clothes. They were the same ones I had worn that day I tried to tear my car apart and were torn in spots, grease stained in others, and when I concentrated, I could still smell last night’s women. My face would’ve been just as bad—unshaven, bruised from my scuffle with the police—and before the door had started to swing back, I turned and ran, burning with shame and the realization that it had been decades since immersing myself in civilization, that for someone like me it would be impossible. Screw waiting for James, I figured. It wasn’t too far to the breeder, and there wasn’t any way in hell I’d be waiting on that sidewalk so everyone in the service could look at me when they left. The nurse must have meant for me to pick door number two.
It wasn’t long before the heat and the previous week’s drinking caught up with me, forcing me to stop and rest, where my mind raced under the shade of an oak tree. Jihoon was in America. This, of course, meant that somebody had figured out that I’d screwed up because Ji was supposed to be in Bangkok waiting for me, and I’d gotten arrested in Athens, and my rental car had been reported totaled in the garden spot of garden spots, Jebson. So my name was all over the system. Someone had probably given Jihoon permission to go and get me, to do me a favor and let me realign myself to the mission before they sent the MPs to lock me up forever, forgotten. Screw it all, I decided and got up to resume my walk back to the facility; the MPs might already be there, and if I was going to be arrested, there was no reason to put it off.
The MPs weren’t there, but Ji was, sitting at a table in the bar. He stared at me, expressionless, when I sat down.
“You made it out,” I said.
“Yeah. No problem, they never got my DNA or picture.”
“Glad to hear it.”
He sipped his beer and then put down the glass. “You want to tell me why you went AWOL?”
“I didn’t. We were discharged, remember?”
“Yeah. I remember. Only you’ve been spending the government’s money for the past couple of weeks on booze and women. You’re up shit creek.”
“What do you care?” I asked. “After the beating I gave you, I’m guessing you’re enjoying this, that you can’t wait for them to arrest me.”
Jihoon nodded and ran a finger across the table, like he was thinking. I thought I saw a flicker of a smile, but it wasn’t clear, and still there was no reading his expression.
“I told them to have you arrested,” he said. “But someone at Strategic Operations thinks you’re the only one who can pull this off, and so they sent me here to find you and reel you back in. They told me about your wife and kid.”
“Shut the fuck up.” My hands clenched into fists as if they had a will of their own. Who the hell was Ji to talk about my family? As far as I was concerned he was the government, and the fact that he had been with the bureau didn’t help matters, made me want to beat the crap out him again.
Jihoon shook his head. “I went to Annapolis, Stan. Graduated not too long ago. You should be honored; we don’t want to go back to those days.”
“What do you know about those days? What do any of us know except what they plaster onto billboards and feed through those shitboxes they call holo stations? By now that kid has a million nanotubes coupled to his brain, linked to some semi that can monitor every electrical impulse and feed images, sounds, smells into his cortex. They have a semi-aware raping a six-year-old’s mind. Every day. How is that an honor, and what do you know?”
Jihoon nodded, taking another sip. “I know because I had it done too.” He turned his head to the side and pulled his ear down. It was there. You barely noticed it, but a thin scar, about an inch long, ran across the skin and under his stubby hair where the implant would have been located. It stunned me. I knew he was young but hadn’t thought that maybe he’d been young enough to participate in the program.
“I was one of the first,” he continued. “My parents volunteered me. It hurt like hell. They sedate you for the operation and once it’s over give you painkillers for the first week, but it feels like something has invaded your skull and is ripping at the nerves themselves, tearing apart your brain.”
“Do you think telling me that helps?”
Jihoon shook his head. “My point is that eventually it stops hurting and just becomes part of the routine. Normal. I was fourteen when they did it, but I hear it’s even easier if they do it when you’re six, like Phillip. At sixteen, they pull the plug. You want to know the truth, Stan? You want to know what it feels like once the wires are gone and you can’t connect anymore?”
“Don’t call me Stan.”
Jihoon’s eyes widened in surprise, and it was a victory to induce some kind of expression in him. “What do I call you?” he asked.
“Bug. It’s my call sign, my code name.”
“Fine. You want to know what it feels like, Bug?”
“What?”
“It feels fine. You don’t even miss it, except the way you might miss having access to a really fast computer that once made it possible to do the work of a thou
sand people. It doesn’t change the fact that you’re a human being, but it does make you a hell of a lot smarter than the rest of the shits in this world.”
“Great. Just what we need, more smart people who act like computers.” I said it in a sarcastic tone, but Jihoon’s words had made me feel better. He was still an asshole; but better for Phillip to be an asshole than a burnout like his stand-in father. “I’m getting too old.”
“I agree. If you want to call Momson and bow out of the mission, I think it would be a great idea; maybe then they’ll find a new partner for me, and I can get on with this. I mean what was your plan anyway? To go up to Annapolis and break him out, rip your kid from the computer, and kill every Marine guard in the process? You might be a good operator, an assassin, but I doubt you’re that good. Or were you hoping to screw as many women as possible until you somehow fucked him into freedom? I mean explain that one to me ’cause I’m having a lot of trouble grasping the logic in that part of your plan.”
I stared at him, remembering why it was that I’d hated the guy from the start. Jihoon was arrogant. Only that would have been fine because arrogance was a quality that a lot of operators had or they never would have chosen the life. But he was arrogant with nothing to show for it, and that made him part idiot.
“What would you have done?” I asked.
“Me?”
I glanced up at the waiter and motioned for a beer, then nodded. “Yeah. You. The almighty Jihoon, son of the semis but still a cherry, a rube.”
Chimera (The Subterrene War) Page 8