The Doubt Factory

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  So Alix had ended up at Dr. Ballantine’s office, listening to the woman drone on about kidnapping and stress and trigger this and trigger that.

  Dr. Ballantine had an abstract oil-smear painting on one wall. Alix would stare at the browns and reds, and fantasize about smashing it on Dr. Ballantine’s head, and then she ended up wondering if that was a sign that she really was somehow going crazy.

  She could almost hear Mom saying, “Violence isn’t like you, Alix.”

  Alix wasn’t like Alix.

  If she’d been smarter about hiding how she was feeling, she’d have been able to avoid the couch sessions, but instead, she’d ended up talking to Dr. Ballantine while the shrink made notes.

  “Were you scared?” Dr. Ballantine had asked.

  “Of course I was scared. But I’m fine now. I mean, I got out all right.”

  “Are you scared now?”

  Alix shrugged. “No.”

  Yes.

  No?

  Yes?

  Not really.

  Alix didn’t know how she felt.

  “Are you still skipping track and field?”

  “I dropped it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not a real thing. Who cares if you win or lose?”

  “Some people care.”

  Alix rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Because it’s all bullshit, Alix wanted to say, but that would just start up another line of questioning about why she felt that running was bullshit. The only answer was that she couldn’t help but think that every time she went onto the track to run around and around the damn oval, Moses would be sitting up there in the crowd. He’d be watching from behind his reflective aviator lenses and laughing at the goofy things rich kids did with their spare time while he and his crew were busy hacking together another crazed attack on “the man.”

  Moses and the 2.0 crew had played a different game. The games of high school seemed silly and small after that.

  Alix realized that Jonah was looking at her worriedly. Again.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Sure you are,” he said. “Are you taking that Xanax or whatever Dr. Ballantine says you should take?”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I wouldn’t,” Jonah said. “They’ll make you fuzzy. Fuzzier,” he amended, looking at her critically.

  “How would you know?”

  Jonah gave her an exasperated look that reminded Alix of Mom when she was trying to get Jonah to pay attention to her, and that made her realize how differently he was acting generally. He hadn’t been running off. He was always where he was supposed to be after school. Hell, he was practically always around, just like he’d been waiting outside her classroom when she came out. He was bitching about his grades, she realized with a start.

  He’s keeping an eye on you. And then she almost laughed out loud at the sudden surge of affection she felt for her ADHD, caretaking little pain-in-the-ass brother.

  “Do you want to go get coffee?” she asked abruptly.

  “Seriously? You think I need to be more wired?”

  Alix laughed and pulled into the Starbucks. The girl at the counter looked like Cynthia. Alix stifled shock/nostalgia/fear/camaraderie as she handed over her credit card. PTSD. It will keep happening, but less and less, Dr. Ballantine claimed. For now, though, every time Alix saw a girl with long lustrous black hair, she was sure it was Cynthia.

  And, of course, it was always some other Asian girl, and then Alix would hear Cynthia say contemptuously, “Her? She’s not even Chinese. She’s Vietnamese. We’re not all the same, you know.…”

  As Alix and Jonah made their way back to the car, Alix deliberately made herself look at every single person in the parking lot, proving to herself that she wasn’t seeing any more Cynthias or Adams or Kooks or Tanks or Moseses. None of them were here. They were all gone.

  Alix put the car in drive and got them back out on the road while Jonah prattled on about whatever Jonah prattled on about now.

  The FBI and Williams & Crowe had assured her that 2.0 had moved on, probably dedicated to wreaking havoc elsewhere. No one was stalking her. No one was peering in through the windows of her house. No one was watching over her.

  Jonah punched her shoulder. “Are you even listening to me?” he demanded.

  “What?”

  “You just ran that stop sign!”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah. And you stopped at the crossing before, where there wasn’t one.”

  “I guess I’m distracted.”

  Jonah groaned. “You are so going to get me killed.”

  “Do you ever wonder about the kind of work Dad does?”

  Jonah gave her a surprised look. “Are you still thinking about all that 2.0 stuff?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Kind of.”

  Someone honked behind her.

  Alix stepped on the gas and then, in a split-second decision, swerved for the turnpike entrance.

  “Where are we going?” Jonah yelped as he grabbed for a door handle.

  “Who cares? I don’t want to go home right now.”

  “Is this a kidnapping?” Jonah asked.

  “I just want to drive. I’m sick of people looking at me and asking me if I’m okay.”

  “Welcome to my world.” Jonah snorted.

  Alix gunned the MINI. They shot up the on-ramp to merge with turnpike traffic, rolling north toward Hartford. Alix rolled down her window, trying to enjoy the rush of noise.

  “As long as we’re driving…” Jonah hooked his phone into the stereo, and pretty soon they were arguing about whether he was really going to try to play reggaeton in her car while she was driving. Wind whipped Alix’s hair. Jonah turned up the music, full of swagger and Spanish and innuendo.

  It felt good to drive.

  You could just keep on driving. Just keep going. Don’t stop. See how far you can go. Just fuck it and bail.

  Alix wondered if this was what it had been like for Cynthia when she walked away from a full-ride college education to join up with 2.0.

  It was an insane choice. Like a train jumping its track and then deciding it was supposed to be a lear jet instead. Girls like Cynthia didn’t belong in gangs of pranking, political crazies. And yet she’d joined Moses and the rest of the crew. Cynthia had done everything perfectly. She’d gotten the perfect scores. Gotten the perfect acceptance letters. She’d shown herself she could do it, and then she’d walked away.

  Alix thought of all the students at Seitz, every one of them Ivy League crazy. Like horses with their jockeys whipping them forward from their starting gates, trained to gallop, to clear their hurdles… And then there was Cynthia, who, after being given the winner’s cup, had thrown it down and walked away.

  And for what?

  Moses. The crazy prophet, leading his crazy crew right off the crazy cliff on the way to crazy town.

  And because her father was dead, a voice reminded her.

  So she said, Alix reminded herself. Cynthia’s father was dead from Marcea’s heart attack drug—if she could be believed.

  “We’re all like that,” Cynthia had said.

  Well, fuck you, Cynthia. Oh, and fuck you, too, Moses.

  “What?” Jonah asked.

  Alix realized that she’d been speaking out loud.

  “Are you keeping an eye on me?” she asked Jonah suddenly. “Is that why you’re being so good all the time now? Did Mom and Dad put you up to this?”

  Jonah looked offended. “Of course not!”

  “Then how come you stopped running away?”

  “I don’t know.” He made an uncomfortable shrug. “It was kid stuff.”

  “You are a kid.”

  He glanced over at her. “You seriously want to know?”

  “I’m asking, aren’t I?”

  Jonah glanced away, looking out the window at the bright green leaves of the birch trees along the curves of the turnpike.
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br />   “You didn’t see what it was like when you went missing,” he said. “You didn’t feel what it was like at home. Mom and Dad about went catatonic when you didn’t come home the next morning. They didn’t say it, but they were expecting to find your body. You took off, and then you just disappeared off the map. We were all just waiting for you to show up dead. Some rag-doll girl dead in a Dumpster. Probably all chopped up.” He looked over at her, then stared back out the window. “That was some sobering shit.”

  “But I’m fine,” Alix pointed out. “Nothing happened to me.”

  “Only because 2.0 wasn’t homicidal. They could have done anything with you. They just made you disappear. If they’d been different, the cops would have found you floating in the river or dumped out in the woods somewhere.” He swallowed.

  “But they weren’t like that. They were never like that.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they’re still nerving up to do something really crazy. Who knows what nutball activists will do? PETA? Occupy Wall Street? The Unabomber? They’re all pretty much nuts.”

  “No…”

  Alix remembered Cynthia pulling her out of the cage. That had been real. Cynthia cared about her.

  Unless it was staged, a cynical voice reminded her.

  Alix slammed the steering wheel with her palm, frustrated. “How the hell would I know?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Had it just been some kind of good cop, bad cop routine? Moses acting all scary, and then Cynthia coming in to save her? How was she supposed to tell what was real? All the things 2.0 had said about her father? Or what her father said about 2.0? Truth. Lies. It was just a muddle of stories that exactly contradicted each other.

  Either 2.0 was a crew of lunatic kids, or Dad was some kind of überevil wizard, throwing dream dust into the eyes of the world, making sure that it stayed asleep while companies pillaged and maimed and killed.

  It sounded absurd no matter how she sliced it.

  Truth? Lies? Madness? Sanity? How the hell could she tell?

  The news coverage sure hadn’t taken any of it seriously. The entire prank had become one of those thirty-second oddities at the end of the newscast. Activists Create Human-Sized Rat Cage. They’d really dug on the giant exercise wheel. There’d been a quick pan of the hanging murals, and that was all. Hilarious. Done in less than thirty seconds. Judging from the news, the only sane thing a watcher could conclude was, “Gosh, Diane, kids sure do wacky things these days! And now in Sports…”

  2.0 had shot its wad, and the world had yawned. But still, Alix would sit at dinner and look across at her father and wonder.

  According to Moses, he wasn’t just bad, he was practically the devil. Doing evil things for evil amounts of money and knowing it and loving doing it. Laughing while he danced on graves.

  It made no sense. This was the man who forgot to eat dinner because he was texting. The husband who was cut off from caffeine because it raised his blood pressure and he couldn’t sleep at night and then would stay up in the kitchen eating ice cream out of the carton. The dad who had picked up her and Denise and driven them home in the middle of the night and never busted either of them for being drunk and stoned.

  Seriously?

  “He’s not a monster,” Alix muttered.

  “Who?” Jonah asked.

  “Nothing.” Alix shook her head. “Something 2.0 said about Dad. That he was doing bad things.”

  Jonah glanced over at her. “Why would you even listen to them after all the stuff they did to you?”

  “I don’t know. Some of the things they said…” She glanced over at her younger brother. “What if they’re true?”

  “This is that Stockholm syndrome thing, right?”

  “No, jerkwad, it’s not.”

  “It kind of is. Seriously, sis. Don’t go all Patty Hearst on me. I’ve read up on her. She totally joined up with the people who kidnapped her. Went all crazypants, robbing banks and shit.” He suddenly looked interested. “But if you wanted to rob a bank, I’d totally help. I’ve got an idea about how—”

  “Will you shut up and listen to me for once?”

  “Okay, okay, I’m just saying.”

  Alix gave him a dirty look. “You’re the one who called in the bomb threat last fall, aren’t you?”

  Jonah looked at her, surprised. “Duh.”

  “I knew it!”

  Jonah didn’t even look embarrassed. “I needed to break into the admin office. I couldn’t clear people out otherwise. I was going to fail English and Trig and World Civ.”

  “I don’t want to know.” Alix tried to collect her thoughts. “Look, I’m just asking, but what if some of the things they said about Dad are true?”

  Jonah looked at her, confused. “Like what? He’s an ax murderer or something?”

  “No. Like he gets paid to…”

  To what? To make people confused about some company’s report about some drug? To take over the government?

  It all sounded so silly. The cartoons of her dad on the factory walls…

  Alix heard her father’s voice. “Sometimes people need to make someone into an enemy just so they can make themselves feel important.”

  Alix thought of conspiracy theorists like the 9/11 truthers. Or the people who still thought NASA hadn’t put a man on the moon. It was like they needed to know something that was special. Needed to be unique somehow, by being smarter and more clued-in to the secrets of the universe.

  “They kept telling me that Dad was the worst thing in the world, basically. And all these companies, they talked like all the companies were practically satanic. Like they’d do anything for money. People we know, even. Like everyone was just a bunch of moneygrubbing psychopaths.”

  Jonah laughed. “I thought everybody was moneygrubbing. Rich people just do it better.”

  “My little cynic brother.”

  “I’m just saying.” Jonah spread his hands, laughing still. “Anyway, whatever those people say, it’s only one side of a story. These crazies always want to make it sound like some company’s completely evil. You’ve got to talk to both sides—”

  Alix picked up the quote. “—and you shouldn’t rush to judgment, because that’s how you end up being wrong.…”

  Alix broke off.

  Son of a bitch.

  She could practically see Moses laughing at her, wagging a finger as she quoted her father encouraging her to see both sides to every story.

  But what if it wasn’t about sides, or perspectives, or radicals? What if it was just about truth?

  How did you find truth when everyone was talking about sides?

  Moses was grinning at her. Alix could practically see the self-satisfied smirk as he whispered in her ear. “Makes it kind of difficult, doesn’t it?”

  Screw you, Moses, Alix thought.

  “Would you quit talking to yourself?” Jonah said. “It’s driving me crazy.”

  27

  ADAM SAID, “THEY KILLED THE rats, Moses.”

  “I know they killed the rats! I was there, too. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t give up just because we had one setback.”

  “You call rat murder a setback?”

  “Christ, Adam,” Kook said. “You sound like PETA.” She lit a joint and inhaled, blowing sweet smoke at the ceiling.

  “Leather kills, Goth girl.”

  Kook regarded him with dilated pupils. “I’d eat those rats if it would make you shut up.”

  “Cut it out,” Cynthia said. “Adam’s right. We didn’t see them coming in like that.” She looked seriously at Moses. “We didn’t plan on being gassed like that. We had a lot right, but we missed the tear gas.”

  Moses looked from one face to the next and didn’t like what he was seeing. A lot of fear and uncertainty. Before, he’d always been able to coax and cajole them to believe, but now? Now it was serious.

  “We all saw those dead rats,” Tank said. “Stakes are high is all they’re sayin’.”


  “Stakes have always been high,” Moses pointed out, but he could tell he was losing them. “So, what? We quit now? We walk away?”

  “Quit while we’re ahead,” Adam said.

  “And just let everything they’ve done… what? Just go? Like it didn’t count or something?”

  “It counted,” Cynthia soothed. “Of course it counted. But getting ourselves gassed to death doesn’t do anyone any good.”

  “Maybe at least then someone would notice!” Moses shot back. “News loves bodies.”

  He wished he hadn’t said it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Wrong words. Wrong tone. Everything was wrong. He’d always been good with words. He could hack people with his words as easily as Kook hacked servers in Eastern Europe. But these were the wrong words, and he knew it as soon as he said them.

  “Dude.” Kook exhaled smoke. “I so didn’t sign up for a suicide pact.”

  “If you’re dead, there’s sure as hell no party,” Adam added.

  “When the hell did either of you agree on anything?”

  “Around the time you started talking crazy,” Kook said.

  Tank didn’t say anything.

  “Look.” Moses tried again. “I’m not saying we should suicide-pact or anything—”

  “Big relief,” Adam interjected.

  “—I’m just saying that we’re finally seeing what these guys are capable of. We finally see how they act. What they do, how they roll… and now we’re walking away? We knew they were bad, right from the start. Of course they were going to use all that tear gas—”

  “If that had been Tank, he would have been dead, for sure,” Cynthia said. “His asthma would have wasted him.”

  Tank looked at Moses mournfully.

  “I know!” Moses retorted. “I get it. I’m not blind!”

  “So why do we want to keep stirring these people up? They’re coming for us. We poked them too many times, and now they’re getting serious. The next time this happens, one of us ends up dead.”

  “So you’re okay with what they did to your family now? Because I’m not okay with what they did to mine, I’ll tell you that. They’re still in business, and they’re still making money. I’m not stopping until I figure out how to make them pay.”

  “Here comes the Don Quixote shit again,” Kook muttered.