The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

by Gonzales, Manuel

  It is not an easy choice we are asking you to make, we understand how hard this choice must be, the choice between a story you have told yourself again and again, that you have done right by your mother, by her spirit, have taken righteous vengeance against the men and women who stole her from you, and the story that you have done very little at all, have done less than very little in fact, have worked to advance the goals and livelihoods of the two people who deserved your vengeance most.

  We navigate through this life with the good-faith hope that we are doing our best, that we are aimed in the right directions, that we are helping the helpless. Maybe we slip, maybe we mess up, maybe from time to time we do things that are less the right thing. Or we cut corners, or we make choices that serve our interests over the interests of those who depend on us, or we hide the consequences of the decisions we have made with the hope that those consequences will never be seen despite how often we make those same decisions. We go back to the ones we love when clearly they do not love us, or do not know how to love us, or show us their love in a way easily mistaken for hate. We are weak in the face of the hard work it sometimes takes to be strong. We convince ourselves (incorrectly) that silence is not a form of consent. We let good people die and sometimes we kill them ourselves and we hide and we hide and we hide and soon hiding becomes the thing we are best at doing, but it is time, Sarah.

  It is time to stop hiding, Sarah O’Hara.

  It is time to stop peeking out from behind the coattails of Mr. Niles, the flaring nostrils of Oyemi, the long reach of the Regional Office, to stop peeking out from behind your mechanical arm, to stop hiding behind your aunt and the tragedy of your childhood, time to stop hiding from what is real and painful and frustrating and all of the other emotions we find it so easy to hide from, and time to admit that you know, have known, have always known since the first time you saw her, bald and trembling and half-submerged in the milky-blue water of Oyemi’s Oracle Pool with her “sisters,” time to see your mother, time to stop pretending it’s not her.

  78.

  The relief she felt when she came out of the surgery, when she came out of the haze-inducing anesthetics, was an ecstasy kind of relief.

  The relief in having this part of her removed was almost as strong, in fact, as the relief she felt when she’d had that other part of her reattached.

  It lasted for a day, for almost two days, and she wondered how strong the anesthetic had been. She didn’t take any of the painkillers the doctor had given her. She didn’t need them, she felt so fucking good all of the time now. She should have cut the other foot off, too, for good measure.

  The lab was working on a new foot for her. The doctor had asked her to wait two weeks, three weeks, and then the foot would’ve been finished and they could’ve removed the bad foot and replaced it all in one operation, but she couldn’t wait. She wouldn’t wait. She would have cut it off herself if he hadn’t done it for her.

  For now, it was disguised. They didn’t have the prosthetic on hand, and so it was disguised with wrapping and a boot, the kind people wore when they broke their foot. She had a story to tell in which she was a klutz. People liked to hear about when you were a klutz, she decided.

  But in all honesty, she didn’t care what people liked to hear about or what people thought about when they saw her with her boot and her wrap because all she could think about was how good she felt now that the foot was gone.

  This feeling was a fleeting feeling, however. This feeling lasted not even two full days before it was gone and was replaced first by an itch at the base of her leg, around the place where her foot would have started if her foot had still been there, and was followed, not long after, by a sharp, but not as sharp as before, kind of pain.

  At first, it was like she was being touched by a sharp piece of ice. And then it was like she was being jabbed by that piece of ice, or as if the sharp piece of ice were being worked into her skin, were working to gouge out some essential part of her there in that new and raw stump.

  Or, and this was what she decided, it was like the sharp piece of ice was not on the outside working its way in, but was instead on the inside trying to dig itself out.

  She unclipped the boot and unraveled the wrap and looked at the place where there had been a foot, but she couldn’t see what might have been going on.

  She placed her fingers gently on the part of her that was still wrapped in gauze but couldn’t feel anything through the gauze and so she unwrapped the gauze, too, and tested the skin, the nerves, with the soft pad of her index finger and then with the rest of her fingers, and there she felt them.

  She couldn’t see what they were, not yet, but she could feel them. With her fingertips, she could feel them pushing their way out of her stump, and they were sharp and cold and not ice but not unlike ice, either.

  Not ice, no. Metal.

  79.

  Everyone was scared of her now. The interns, the jerks in accounting, the office staff, the travel agency staff. Even the Operatives. Oh, boy, were they scared of her now.

  They were more scared of her now than she could have ever hoped or wished for. They were the kind of scared of her that surpassed even the kind of scared they had been of Oyemi.

  It helped, if helped was the right word, that the skin they’d grafted onto her mechanical arm to redisguise it had sloughed off, simply died and peeled off, leaving the shiny interior exposed.

  The doctor, who was maybe the most scared of her, had no explanation for this, didn’t even correct her when she said it had just died and fallen away. The skin was synthetic. There had been nothing in it to die.

  If they’d known about the other part of this, if they’d known about the way in which her own body seemed to be systematically targeted by the nanotechnologies in her arm, targeted for replacement and improvement, if they’d known about her foot, which she’d covered up with a shoe, if they’d known about any of this, they would have been the kind of scared of her that would have bled into a dangerous kind of scared.

  The kind of scared that would have led them to draw up plans, perhaps. Execution and elimination plans, maybe. Dissection and examination and for-the-betterment-of-science plans, perhaps.

  And she didn’t know that such plans hadn’t already been drawn up, did she?

  No. She did not.

  It had taken less than forty-eight hours for her body to grow a new foot, except that wasn’t right, considering the foot was mechanical, and her body couldn’t “grow” mechanical things, but there it was, a new foot for her. It had been painful, but only in the beginning. Less than forty-eight hours, but already other pieces of her were beginning to wither and die and would need to be replaced by machine. She could tell.

  The decay wasn’t visible, but the post-decay replacements were. More of her than just her foot and her arm was beginning to feel inorganic. Her ankle, the lower edge of her calf. The toes on her other foot, four of them, including her big toe, were skinless and had a metallic shine to them. They smelled like pennies or nickels or maybe they just smelled like mechanical toes. When she touched them—and she couldn’t stop worrying at them as if they were loose teeth—they were cold and smooth and hard.

  Her shoulder.

  She’d felt none of this, though. There’d been no pain since the foot. This was a thing she was grateful for but also she couldn’t be sure how grateful she was or should have been. She didn’t like pain. She wasn’t the kind of person who sought out pain and suffering. But without the pain, what then?

  Without the pain, would she wake up one day and find herself replaced, entirely replaced?

  Regardless, though, the nanotechnologies—that was her only guess as to what was causing all of this—seemed to be learning, seemed to be engaged in some kind of trial-and-error process. After her foot, this—whatever this was—had developed a new process of find and replace, something less painful or intrusive or physically s
tressful.

  She had no idea what happened to the organic material once it died. She had no idea what happened to the pieces of her that had been her and had since been replaced.

  She half expected to find a bevy of toes or other patches of herself gathered at the foot of her bed, tangled in the sheets and duvet like socks kicked off during sleep, but there was never anything there.

  80.

  She showed the doctor her homegrown foot but didn’t show him anything that came after. It was a shame, really. Before all of this, he had finally become a little more comfortable around her. Had apparently forgiven her for crushing his leg so long ago, for destroying his lab. Now he avoided looking right at her, and she felt each day more strongly this need to have him removed—from his position, from the Regional Office entirely.

  He had been there almost from the beginning. Mr. Niles had brought him in on their second meeting together. Mr. Niles had told her, I can help you with your problem, but you’ll have to be willing to help us out with ours, too, and when she had offered to pay whatever price he would charge, he had waved that away and told her, That’s not exactly the kind of help we need right now. Then he’d called the doctor into the office, introduced the two of them, described for her the work the doctor had been doing—cutting-edge nanotechnologies, beyond joint or bone replacement—and then explained to her that she would have access to the entire Regional Office if she would be willing to act as a test subject for a new mechanical arm the doctor had devised.

  “You won’t be able to tell a thing,” he’d told her. “No one will be able to tell.” Then he’d held up the doctor’s hand, held it by the wrist, and said, “See this, see this hand? Mechanical, the whole thing.” She’d been shocked, amazed. She had seen high levels of robotic technology on campus, some of the highest, but nothing had ever pointed to something so advanced as this. She asked if she could touch it. Mr. Niles offered it to her, the doctor standing there like a living doll, and it felt warm and pliant and so very real.

  “Okay,” she’d said. “Yes, okay, yes, I will do this.”

  Only later, long after her own surgery, after being given her own mechanical arm, had the doctor told her, in whispering, confiding tones, that his hand wasn’t mechanical at all. He waved his hand in front of her. Shook it, really. Told her, “Blood, bone, nerves.” Then he chuckled and she barked out a chuckle of her own, and then he laughed a loud and only-barely-on-the-edges-of-sanity laugh, and she laughed with him because it was too late, by then it was way too late, and they’d been right. Mr. Niles and the doctor had taken a risk with her and her arm but it had paid off because you couldn’t tell. You looked at one arm and then the other and they looked the same, exactly the same.

  She hadn’t always liked him, the doctor, but she had always respected him, and now she was going to have to kill him.

  81.

  She is the one who first brought you here. Did you know that? Your mother? She brought Mr. Niles to you when you were still a girl and he brought you to the Regional Office, but it might as well have been her leading you there by your hand. Might as well have been her opening the door to Mr. Niles’s office for you, moving Mr. Niles’s mouth as he offered to change your life forever.

  And she brought us to you.

  So here we are.

  We are at your door and we are not empty-handed. We are offering you a way out, and once out, a way forward. They have lied to you and manipulated you and for too long we have stood by silently and watched this play out, but now we are here, speaking out, reaching out to you, to tell you this:

  Stay home. For a week, for two weeks, for a month or six. Or better yet, leave. Cape Town or Nova Scotia or Taipei. That is your way out. And when it is time, we will find you, and we will show you your way forward.

  82.

  Sarah didn’t, though. She didn’t kill the doctor.

  He killed himself. He left a note but it didn’t say much but that he was sorry, but not what he was sorry for.

  It didn’t matter anyhow. Her plan to kill him had centered around her plan of keeping her transformation a secret, but now so much of her was inorganic or some strange mix that there was no way for her to hide the mechanical parts of her anymore.

  It had been six months, almost seven months now, since the assault. Oyemi had not been found, and when she was honest with herself about this, Sarah would admit that Oyemi was probably dead, or had been so compromised that she might as well have been dead. No matter. The Regional Office was operating again, not at 100 percent, but not far from it, either.

  And no one had asked her to step down or to begin the search for her own replacement, not even now that she was in the middle of her own replacement of sorts.

  She missed Henry, would find herself some mornings seeking him out in his office or the break room, and then would wonder what had happened to him, how his cards had fallen, but she found she missed Mr. Niles most of all, and most mornings, when she came into work and made her way to his office, she forgot he was dead, that the office was hers now.

  She was thinking about him now, in fact, sitting at his desk, now her desk. She couldn’t make herself comfortable sitting there, so she stood up and walked around the room and then made her way to the bathroom. She turned on the light. She looked at herself in his bathroom mirror, at the two mechanical arms, at how obviously mechanical they were, and then thought about how sad that would have made him.

  She pushed against the soft parts of her, but this didn’t satisfy her, whatever it was she was trying to satisfy.

  Pushing against the soft, organic parts of her with a mechanical forefinger, all she felt was the cold metal against her warm, squishy skin. Something inside the mechanical finger, some bit of sentient technology, sent a reading to her still-organic brain that determined for her, almost as quickly as if that finger had still been a human finger, that she had touched living skin.

  A readout scrolled through her mind in a strange and unsettling way. Her brain was still her brain, but everything came in as a readout now.

  Looking in the mirror, she wanted to cry because it was all so beautiful, the thing that the thing had created, the thing that the thing had made her into, all shining chromes and swooping tubes and artificial ligaments, so beautiful and flexible and powerful that if she’d seen it in a tech conference showroom, she’d have wept at the beauty of it. She wanted to cry, too, because it was her, not some showroom prototype, and she was afraid and she didn’t know when it would stop.

  She didn’t know if it would stop.

  How long? she thought. How long will this go on?

  Which piece? she thought. Her very next thought: Which piece of me will go next?

  She thought this thought, or rather this thought popped unbidden and unwanted into her head, and before she could whisk it away, before she could bury it deep in the darkest recesses of her mind, she felt it, she felt a soft but urgent pressure in her chest.

  A twitch in her heart.

  From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

  Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

  One can imagine, in light of the not-unfathomable notion that Emma and Henry had conspired to fake her death and enact revenge on the Regional Office, that it would have been Emma leading the team that burned Oyemi’s complex to the ground. No records can place Emma at that scene, though in all truth, any records placing any of this anywhere are difficult if not impossible to find.

  But Emma—if she lived—Emma especially was a ghost at this point.

  Even had Oyemi suspected Henry’s actions, she would not have expected anything from the realm of Emma. And the Oracles? As far as they were concerned, Oyemi had already been duly warned of both Emma and Henry. In light of this, one can imagine the warning system that Oyemi had come to rely on almost completely—the Oracles—failing her when she needed them most.

  Imagine: Emma with
Windsor and maybe another of Henry’s personal Recruits—Jimmie or Becka—on the Amtrak out of Penn Station. The two (or three) of them sitting in the dining car, not hashing or rehashing out their plans, because they know them by now so intimately, so completely, that to go over them even one more time might tip the scales in the other direction, might cause one or more of them to overthink and slip up.

  The lot of them jumping off the train as it slows to round a curve.

  The cover of darkness. Their stealth, aided by their mystical properties.

  Imagine the quiet deliberation as Windsor unmoors the locks—physical and magickal—that Oyemi had set in place to protect herself, her Oracles.

  Windsor’s soft, quiet, consistent breaths, the care with which she works her magick—both literally and figuratively—and the softly tingling buzzing feeling this gives Emma, just under her ears, where her jawbone connects to her skull, how much this relaxes her, how much her own relaxation sets Windsor at ease.

  Dogs roaming the compound that never know the three of them have slipped through the fence and are making their way to the house on the hill.

  The house itself smaller than they imagined, modest, even.

  The small kernel of doubt lodged deep within Emma, unretrievable and not wholly ignorable, that maybe the best course, the smartest course, would be to abort the mission, to find Henry, to set these girls free before it’s too late for them, to jet off with Henry to Finland, maybe, or New Zealand, to let bygones be bygones.