Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  She hugged Lisa first and made her way around everyone other than Michael, who only nodded. She came to Kurt last.

  “I’m going to miss you,” he said.

  She hugged Kurt for much longer than anyone else. “I’ll be fine.”

  “I know,” Kurt said as they separated. “I’m just worried about who’s going to cook all my food.”

  Mary gave him a playful shove and walked away with Val.

  ~

  Throughout the afternoon Kurt found himself wishing that he could contact Val or Mary to see how it had gone. When the sun left the main walkway, there was still no sign of Val’s car.

  Ty and Lisa invited Kurt to their room, telling him that there was no point in just waiting by the door. Kurt agreed with them but asked if they would mind going to the workstation with him instead, so he could be on the internet while they did whatever they were going to do. They went with him.

  Kurt looked at the SycaNews properly for the first time since the funeral and saw that his name didn’t even feature on the front page. After one day of reaction, typical news stories had returned to the headlines; things like election coverage and those always riveting interest-rate fluctuations.

  Kurt didn’t know where Minter was but assumed that he was in his room. Until his phone buzzed, that was, alerting him of an incoming Chifi call. It was from Minter.

  “Val’s back,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, man.”

  “How did it go?”

  “I dunno, she’s not out of the car yet.”

  “Where are you?”

  “South monorail,” Minter said. “Come down.”

  Ty and Lisa had heard Minter through the speaker and set off running with Kurt. Only at times like these did Kurt appreciate the size of La Plethora. Even after a few weeks off, he still had enough of a training base to comfortably run for an hour or so. But healthy-enough people of more regular fitness levels like Ty and Lisa could only go for around three minutes, which wasn’t enough to reach the end of the mall at their sluggish pace. Kurt mumbled his apologies and ran on without them.

  He got near the entrance and saw Minter and Val talking. He was too far away to discern their moods and didn’t want to stop to zoom in. He reached them quickly enough. They both turned to him.

  “So?” he said, panting from the exertion.

  “All good,” Minter said.

  “Did she do it?” Kurt asked Val.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is she safe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have the footage?”

  Val handed Kurt the bag she was holding. He lifted his computer out and saw that there were seven brand new pairs of UltraLenses, too.

  “How did you get them today?” Kurt asked. “How could she give you them when she was wearing hers?”

  “She left them in a bin,” Val said. “Like a drug drop.”

  Kurt silently applauded whoever had come up with that idea. He turned his computer on. The video recording of Mary’s seeding, taken with the same hidden camera Stacy had used at HQ, was right there on the desktop, exactly as it should have been. From what he had seen so far, both Val and Mary had done everything perfectly.

  “Have you Chifi’d Ernesto and Anthony?” Kurt asked.

  Minter nodded.

  Ty and Lisa arrived into view, willing each other to keep jogging as they passed the Coffee Curve. Kurt shouted “she did it,” which spurred them both into a final push. Anthony and Ernesto followed close behind.

  As soon as they arrived, Kurt played the video. He jumped forward to the moment when Mary entered the Tasmart. It was a medium-sized store, and fairly busy. She walked up to a fresh-faced Seed Specialist and expressed her desire to join Sycamore’s brave new world.

  The very young man asked her a few questions and Mary gave all the right answers. Kurt’s face was a permanent smile. He kept expecting something to go wrong, but it never did. He knew it didn’t — Val had just told him that it didn’t — but to see something going so perfectly to plan made a joyous change after the torturous week he’d had. The Seeder didn’t even ask for Mary’s previous address, which was definitely the weakest part of Minter’s backstory; a tiny farmhouse which she would have had to convince them wasn’t on any map.

  Mary shuddered and yelped a mild curse word when the seeding needle entered her palm but otherwise didn’t utter a single unrehearsed word. If the teaching fell through, Kurt had no doubt that Mary could pursue a career in acting.

  Once the seeding was complete, Mary asked about buying extra UltraLenses for her reluctant family using all the right phrases. Far from being suspicious, her Seeder was almost delirious to be making such a big sale.

  Minter had been right and Mary had done everyone proud.

  Kurt sent a Chifi text to Harry and Joyce’s phones. He didn’t know if they even kept their phones switched on, but both of them had played their part in getting Kurt to the mall so he felt that they deserved to be kept up to date.

  Like Kurt, none of the others knew quite how to react to something going so well. Everyone just stood on the walkway near the entrance, in almost the exact spot where Ernesto had punched Kurt, smiling and smiling and smiling.

  They had someone on the outside; someone who was with them but not in there with them; someone who was seeded.

  At long last, things were looking up.

  18

  Mary’s successful seeding gave the whole group a much needed boost, and the rest of the evening and the following morning passed with a tranquility rarely felt inside La Plethora. Even those who had opposed the idea, chiefly Michael and Harry, recognised the benefits and opportunities afforded by having a seeded ally now that their concerns had been proven unwarranted.

  Kurt was happiest of all, knowing that Mary’s ability to contact his family with a degree of furtiveness would give Randy enough time to react before Amos knew anything was amiss.

  Minter assured Kurt that his work would go unseen when the timelock expired in four more days. But as soon as their anti-Sycamore propaganda began appearing in the sky and in the eyes of popular SycaStars like Trixilicious, Amos would know. It would be then — minutes or hours before the hijacking began — that Mary’s ability to warn Kurt’s family would prove crucial.

  Prior to Mary’s seeding on Sunday, she and Val had arranged to meet again on Tuesday morning, which was now less than 24 hours away. Meetings like this would be necessary for Mary to pass on the results of her contact with Julian, and the first meeting would be the most important of all. Initiating a natural-looking conversation with Julian would be one of Mary’s biggest challenges, and Kurt hoped she would be aided by a high base compatibility score courtesy of giving the right answers to the questionnaire and buying the right things in the SycaStore.

  It wasn’t unusual for Kurt to be devoting his focus to an upcoming event like this, but it was unusual for him to be looking forward to something with such positivity. This positivity meant that he could spend the day productively, rather than sitting around worrying.

  His most obvious task was hacking the new pairs of UltraLenses that Mary had purchased from Tasmart. Any worries Kurt had that these Lenses might have been updated models made impervious to hacking were quickly quashed by Minter, who insisted that every pair of UltraLenses ever produced were exactly the same.

  Hacking the UltraLenses proved as easy as it had been in the car. Kurt placed each pair in the small hinged sphere and let his computer do the rest. After deactivating the five pairs that they actually needed, Kurt double- and triple-checked them all then took them to the rest of the group. At this stage it didn’t matter who took which pair, because none had been linked to a phone.

  Kurt realised only after everyone had paired their Lenses to their XK6 that none of their phones were equipped with any of the Lens-compatible apps. He headed back to the workstation with all five phones and quickly set that right.

  When Kurt was done, Ernesto, Lisa
and Val each played around with their new UltraLenses in the same amazed way that new users always did. Anthony and Ty had both worn Lenses before, and Ty delighted in showing Lisa how to work the user-developed equivalent of Transvista so that the two of them could look at themselves through each other’s eyes. Val, meanwhile, was pleasantly surprised by how excellent the optical zoom was.

  Prior to putting them in for the first time, Ernesto had been hostile towards the UltraLenses. Or perhaps hostile wasn’t a strong enough word. Ever since an unclosable ad had popped up in his driving father’s vision, with fatal results, Ernesto had detested the Lenses. But upon trying them out in this safe environment, he soon came around to Kurt’s way of thinking; that there was no problem with the tech itself, only the way it had been used.

  One of the Lens-compatible apps, Radar, had been created by a French Canadian developer called Grappastone. Kurt hadn’t use Radar yet, so he didn’t know that the default language was French. Val opened the app out of curiosity and couldn’t even navigate her way to the language selection menu.

  “Does anyone speak French?” she asked.

  Kurt remembered then that he was supposed to have asked Lisa. He looked at her, more in hope than expectation, but she shook her head.

  And then, like it was nothing, Ty answered. “Joyce speaks French,” he said. “She went to school in Paris. I thought she told everyone that?”

  “Joyce?” Kurt said. He hadn’t even thought of Joyce. In his head he heard an echo of his own words, spoken to Minter about Lisa: don’t write people off.

  Kurt used his phone to check where Joyce’s was, knowing that she now kept it in her pocket, and saw that she was in her room in Home. He ran off, leaving everyone else wondering what the rush was.

  After a few seconds it clicked in Ernesto’s head. “The news!” he said, immediately setting off towards the workstation.

  Kurt found Harry and Joyce. She said that she hadn’t spoken or listened to French in years but had been immersed in the language for a long enough time at a young enough age that she was sure she would be able to help. Kurt explained to her and Harry that he had found a skeptical French journalist who could potentially prove useful. Kurt hadn’t quite figured out how she would prove useful, but an understanding of what she was saying would be a good start.

  Joyce instantly agreed to go to the workstation, keen to help in any way she could, and Harry said he would go along with her. Kurt excused himself to rush ahead and tell Ernesto, but when he got back to the rest of the group he found that Ernesto was already in the workstation.

  “Does she think she can do it?” Ernesto asked when Kurt arrived.

  “Definitely.”

  Ernesto had the video ready to play. Kurt was eager to see how much the journalist had managed to put together about the previous week’s events, and even more eager to see how Professor Walker fitted into her thinking.

  Thoughts of Professor Walker made Kurt think of Minter, so he Chifi’d him to come to the workstation. Minter arrived quickly, just before Harry and Joyce.

  As soon as Joyce sat down, Kurt held out his hand and invited her to press the space bar. She did, and the video played.

  It played all the way through with no one saying anything. Kurt watched again as the pictures of his car and Stacy’s limousine appeared, followed by the photo of him with Minter and Professor Walker.

  When the woman’s name first appeared on screen, Minter typed it into a search bar on the other laptop, which was still connected to the internet via the yellow cable. Her name was Adeline Lemarchand. Minter clicked yes when the browser asked if he wanted everything translated into English, a feature which would have been handy for the video itself.

  The encyclopaedia entry Minter found said that Adeline Lemarchand was a noted author, journalist, social commentator, and contemporary literary critic. Kurt read parts of it while the video was playing. He didn’t know anything about French literary culture, contemporary or otherwise, but the entry painted a picture of Lemarchand as something of a heavyweight commentator.

  When the video came to an end, Kurt turned to Joyce. “Well?”

  “She talks real fast,” Joyce said.

  “We can slow it down as much as you need.”

  Joyce shook her head. “I didn’t say I couldn’t do it. How about we run through it again and I’ll say a little bit at a time? The general idea of it is that she thinks Sycamore are lying.”

  “Lying about what?” Ernesto asked.

  “Everything,” Joyce said.

  Ernesto restarted the video. This time, Joyce spoke over it.

  She said that the first part was a straight summary of the official line: Kurt Jacobs and another Sycamore employee had been found dead in Kurt’s home. She mentioned the Fury River letter and the funeral, which hadn’t yet happened when the video was shot.

  The articulation of the main reporter was easy for Joyce to work with, but she paused the video when the quick-tongued Lemarchand appeared as a talking head. “Are you ready to write everything down?” she asked.

  Minter opened a notepad window and told her to continue.

  Joyce pressed the spacebar to resume the video. “She says there are… several problems with this… official tale of events.”

  Kurt and Ernesto looked at each other, encouraged.

  The picture of Stacy’s destroyed limousine appeared on the screen. Joyce kept translating as quickly as she could: “For the first thing… we are expected to believe that a car… given from the company… with… uh… with a bomb underneath… could be… possible to happen without the company knowing. How can this be?”

  Joyce paused the video. “Are you getting this?”

  “Keep going,” Minter said.

  Now came the picture of Kurt’s Prendicco Finale, taken shortly after he had slammed it into the gate which failed to open automatically after Amos terminated his account. This hadn’t been entirely Sycamore’s fault, but Lemarchand had her doubts all the same: “And for the second thing… we see this spectacular car of Kurt Jacobs… given also from the company… has crashed into the gate… just one hour after… and no one asks a question?”

  Joyce paused the video again. “Got that?”

  “I’ll tell you when I don’t have it,” Minter said, impatient to get to the part about Professor Walker. “Just keep going.”

  They continued like this until the end of the video, with Joyce translating one section at a time as best she could and Minter typing it out as she said it. Some parts required a few listens, but before long they put together a clear picture of what Lemarchand was saying.

  She raised the point that Professor Walker, the man who nominated Kurt for the Talent Search at which he successfully pitched the Seed, had been found hanged the night before the car bombing and Kurt’s disappearance. The possibility of this “so-called suicide” being a coincidence was “not worth entertaining,” in Lemarchand’s words. Kurt knew that Professor Walker had been killed because he told him too much that night, rather than any larger connection to Sycamore, but Lemarchand was certainly correct to question the suicide angle and to rule out coincidence.

  From there, she lambasted the US government and law enforcement agencies for allowing Sycamore the free rein it had been afforded. She talked about “the illegal chip” and “the spy lenses,” which Kurt thought was perhaps a bit much, but her sharpest words were yet to come.

  Why, she asked with a slight laugh and a confused look, would anyone ever believe the word of a corporation built around advertising? Kurt’s favourite line, which took Joyce four listens and a few dictionary definitions to nail down, expanded on this point: “This out of control corporation — this Frankenstein’s monster spawned by the great American lie machine that is the advertising industry — has no place in a modern Europe.”

  Whether it was an exact translation or not, Kurt adored the label “the great American lie machine” as a description of the poisonous advertising industry. Amos had once eulogis
ed advertising as “capitalism’s only native art form,” but Kurt preferred this acerbic French take.

  The other point which pleased Kurt was Lemarchand’s outright rejection of Sycamore’s inevitable incursion into Europe. Plans were afoot for an imminent and aggressive launch, which Amos publicly predicted would “hit them like the blitzkrieg.” Kurt didn’t know how much he could read into the dissenting opinion of one commentator, but it was definitely encouraging.

  Kurt considered that in the same way he sometimes thought that his experiences in the city would be reflected around the country, he often slipped into thinking, like so many others, that his country was the whole world.

  “Well, that’s that,” Joyce said, standing up. “Did you get what you needed?”

  Ernesto, Kurt and Minter showered Joyce with thanks for her help, but she was barely out of the door by the time they started discussing the implications of what they had just seen and heard.

  “That’s big,” Ernesto said. “That is big.”

  “What I don’t get is why the SycaNews Worldwide site would link to that,” Kurt said. This was the only thing troubling him about the video.

  “The external links are just scraped from the most watched stories on other sites,” Minter said. “There’s not an actual person signing off on each link.”

  “So this video must have been pretty popular,” Ernesto said. “A lot of people must be asking questions.”

  “What do you think we should do now?” Kurt asked both of them.

  “Sleep on it,” Minter said flatly.

  Ernesto looked at Kurt and smiled. “Makes a change sleeping on good news, right?”

  Kurt smiled back, because this time he could fully agree with Ernesto’s use of the term good news. Unlike the announcement of Kurt’s death, this sign of nascent international opposition to Sycamore was unambiguously good news. It was news that Kurt didn’t quite yet know what they could do with, but it was good nonetheless.