Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

  At night, I was a child bomb exploding on that terrified cop. The million flesh shreds didn’t know if they were me or him. After I could move, I wondered if I could walk away from all these nightmares, leave the bomb hanging in the car, throw the trigger in the Mississippi, go.

  I couldn’t let my nightmares run me.

  “The problem is that we humans breed like coyotes,” the refinery man said as he gave me a pass card. “You kill us for the environment, we breed even faster.” He was a small, slight guy with black hair and pale skin, blue eyes and plump lips, an indoor clerk, so I’d been told.

  I said, “I’m killing oil, not people. If you don’t like what we do, why’d you help us?” I didn’t like to discuss politics when I was handling a situation.

  He laughed, then patted my hand. “I’ll be out of there.”

  “You don’t know when I’m coming in,” I said, holding the pass card set for my new fingertips and present face, that instant realizing he would know. “Not in advance.”

  “Not in advance,” he said. “But won’t you want to escape the blast yourself?”

  “Perhaps not,” I said. “But I’ve got more work to do.” Not that I was special, but training a new operative could cost us operations.

  The refinery clerk said, “I’m getting paid.”

  I didn’t like hearing that. Should I abort the mission? But then, if he’d been bought out by a faction with more money, would he be saying this?

  Perhaps. Perhaps I should get in touch with my cell leader. Perhaps I was supposed to get in touch with my cell leader. “Would you betray me for even more money?”

  “You Luddites got a reputation for revenge,” the clerk said.

  “You don’t care about the cause?”

  “Some,” he said.

  Maybe I should make blowing the refinery a suicide mission to get this little fool. I said, “So I won’t be seeing you again.”

  “No,” he said. The plump lips glistened a bit.

  I set up a remote disguised as a courier skitter to check to see if anyone followed me. The silver remote spun on its axis, danced from doorway to doorway, behind me, then ahead of me. Its whole surface was photon-reactive. Nothing of a constant size followed me or paralled me. If the little clerk had tipped them, then I might be getting relay spotted. I wondered if I should send the bombs in by remote, but I’d been told perimeter electromagnetic pulses would scramble everything.

  The car swung around on its hooks and came to rest on its tires. I paid the garage in cash and drove the car off without checking for tamper marks.

  How long has the human population been over the psychological carrying capacity? Since whenever we invented castes to break us up into pseudo-species. I drove the car by the docks filled with more African cars, various containers filled with rayon, and bales of oil-cake plankton. In the background, blue flames bouncing off towers, tended by humans who’d become their job categories so we, by thinking people into pressure guage readers, pipe fitters, and remote operators, could reduce the population pressure. Technology makes people into machine parts. Don’t think of them as people, they’re not in the way.

  The scanner sitting over the back seat said a constant volume followed us. I slowed down to see if the big Volvo truck would pass. It did. The side window opaqued and played a cock rising out of pubic hair and balls. I touched Mr. Gun sitting beside me. The window spelled out: be that way, bitch.

  His gonads conned him into thinking he was special. The truck sped on. The scanner would have been happier exposed to all sides. I was going down Delta, on the west bank of the Mississippi, heading for shaky ground. I found the turn off to the refinery and drove the car up to the gate. The pass seemed good. Behind a long sheet-metal building I got out of the car and had to hold onto the hood for a second. My exhausted muscles seemed as though they’d trembled for hours without me noticing.

  Next. I pulled off the plastic trim and slid it against a wall and an untrimmed edge of weeds. The car stayed here. Another cell member would pick me up. I’d been told to:

  Walk back through the guard station, tell any humans around that you’ve had car trouble. Keep walking, we’ll get you.

  The plastic explosive will take out the whole refinery.

  The place stank worse than crematory oil, this grease from pre-human times. I pulled off the clip holding the earring stud against my ear. It took two hands to do that, then I cupped my left hand under my ear and slid the stud out of the pierced hold with my right. I pressed the code holes to give me five hours, then pushed the trigger against the plastique.

  I decided I ought to drive the car out. If something happened to the ride waiting outside the gate, I could get away faster.

  The Xoshiba wouldn’t start. I wondered if I should change the timing and make this a suicide mission after all. But no, we needed to know if we’d been betrayed. I started running for the gate. If I had to be captured, then please let it be officials, I thought, not a techno-punk mob. I had to live to help analyze what went wrong.

  As I turned back for the shotgun, an amplified voice called, “Don’t move.” Lights surrounded me. “Hands up, slowly.”

  I was a snowflake, melting in arc-light glare. The voice asked, “Do you want to use the suicide kit?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’ve been totally fucked, you know.” The arc lights burned though my closed lids.

  “I’ll show you where the bombs are,” I said. If I did, I might live. Or die, changing the explosion time to now. Nightmare, wasn’t this? I could not move. The nightmares trained me for this horror.

  The voice said, “Stay where you are.”

  A man walked out of the glare. The lights dimmed. He grabbed my arms and cuffed them behind me, then cut away my clothes. Being naked and light-blinded was bad, being exposed in dinged and wrinkled body was worse. “Step aside,” he said.

  Two other men scurried up to take my clothes away.

  “I’ll show you where the plastique is,” I said.

  “It’s plastic, not plastique, and your trigger earring is electro-magnetically inert,” he said. “So where is the bomb? And how were you going to get away?”

  “Hitch out,” I said. “The car wouldn’t start.” Who betrayed who?

  “The car,” the man said. “It’s in the car, but put the clothes in the car just in case. Then we’re out of here.”

  Shit, we’d been lured to a dummy refinery. I hoped the bomb blast would be significant.

  From behind the lights, a voice said, “It’s a baby nuke. Bomb team incoming. We’re evacuating.”

  “I don’t have any clothes,” I said. The three men who’d stepped out from the lights grabbed me and hustled me off. Think of it as a operation, I told myself, being cut into, for the sake of the body politic. But another side of myself, the starving kid in the sex display, disease too common for men to do other than watch strange cunt, hated my nakedness.

  Nightmares, what were you trying to tell me?

  A freight helicopter landed. The men pushed me into it. We took off and flew at what must have been the machine’s maximum speed. As the guards shoved me to the back compartment, I saw the little clerk dressed now in a suit with a private guard insignia in the button hole. “Hold her down,” he said. “We’ve got to get her suicide kit.”

  I said, “Give me some clothes and I’ll tell you where it is.” The men held me down. The suicide kit wasn’t in my vagina where the fake clerk jammed his fingers. “Are the nipples real?” He twisted one of them, then reached further inside me, fingers stretching me. I wish he’d had a cut and I a disease. At fifteen, I’d done sex shows for money. I could manage this.

  “It’s my lower right wisdom tooth,” my body seemed to say for me. Two hands immediately went into my mouth and stretched my jaws. The fake clerk pulled out my tooth, then said, “X-ray her. I doubt she has a clue as to what she could be carrying.”

  I don’t want to cry, but my wishes terrified my body. The eyes weep
ed. They spread eagled me in plastic restraints. Then the helicopter jerked and the whole sky lit up.

  The fake clerk slapped me as the helicopter rocked in the bomb shock and the afterblasts of the real refineries up and down the river. He collected himself, drew himself up into being a pro, and stretched out a hand to block the other men.

  “Bet the X-ray plates are fucked,” one of the other men said. The fake clerk nodded.

  Another man asked, “How big was it?” He envied the fake clerk my bruised eye.

  I said, “I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Eighth Hiroshima-sized,” the fake clerk said. “Bitch, your people wrote you off.”

  The naive-as-a-child bomb. I had another suicide kit under my left hand’s little fingernail, but when I began flexing my fingers, the men taped them flat to the X-ray table.

  “I’m just a dupe. You might as well kill me.”

  The fake clerk began pulling out my fingernails. I fainted, then came to. He held the second suicide kit in front of my eyes, curare needle bared.

  “Cover her,” he told the others. “You wouldn’t want to die naked, would you?”

  “Thank you,” I said. Then I saw the men were carrying a black body bag, patched with blue tape in two places. Hell, a used body bag. They pulled the cold plastic over my skin. My dead body would go naked in the body bag.

  “When we hit you with the curare, you’ll smother,” he said, moving the needle close to one eye. “We could just put you in the body bag now, without using the needle. You’d still smother.”

  I gathered my nerve. Please, do it quickly, I thought, afraid if I begged them out loud to be quick, they’d delay.

  “Where are your politics now?” the fake clerk asked. He raised the needle.

  “On the end of the needle,” I said.

  He pricked me. I continued breathing, my heart pounding. Please let me keep my courage until I’m paralyzed, I thought. Time passed. I kept breathing.

  I began gasping. “Not a real refinery, not a real suicide needle,” the fake clerk said. “Or perhaps I used the wrong needle. Your group sent you on a suicide mission without telling you. And you want to die for them?”

  I turned my head to the side. The fake clerk came back with another needle, smaller. The real needle. He sat watching me, the needle embedded in a cork he held between his fingers. “We were fooled, too. We couldn’t believe environmentals would steal a nuke.”

  “Good,” I said. “At least the bomb crew died.” I felt clammy under the body bag.

  “I didn’t mean to torture you by pulling out your fingernails. You’re lucky I found the kit by the third nail.”

  “Use it,” I said. Who had I offended? Who’d do this to me?

  “We need you alive for a retina scan.”

  “If I tell you who I am, my birth ID number, will you kill me now?”

  “How do I know you won’t be lying? Your retinas will rot quick after you’re dead.”

  “You can still do DNA typing.”

  “True.” The fake clerk pulled his hand back. “So who were you?”

  “Allison Dodge, ID #OHO27555121200. I wasn’t registered at birth, but at age eight.”

  “An orphanage prefix. Lot of those kids disappear. If you’re lying, how will we be able to punish you? You’ll be dead.” He asked someone else, “Can we tightbeam?”

  “Sure. We’re away now.”

  The tightbeam confirmed that there was an Allison Dodge and sent back retina and DNA prints, and my earlier arrest sheet, probation to a housekeeping service, spotted and ID’ed and wanted for various adolescent thefts and sexual misdemeanors. Shot at by cops while running. “Well, Allison,” the fake clerk said, “I’m Mr. Kearney. You sure you’d prefer dying to an adjustment center?”

  I said, “I know too much about reality. We’re trying to save humanity from the planet’s ultimate revenge, you know.” I thought I sounded stupid as I heard myself speaking. From where I’d gotten in this maze, the only way out was death. If I lived, the nightmares would come back with yet more demons.

  Kearney pulled out a stopwatch. “We’ll put you in the body bag when you’re good and dead.”

  Do you want to be doing this, a part of myself asked. Yes, I’m worthless now, I told myself. Kearney turned my head upright, leaned it back over a small pillow, and taped it in place.

  “Don’t want you flinching at the last moment,” he said.

  I couldn’t see his hand, but I felt the prick against my neck. The stopwatch clicked when I stopped breathing.

  I couldn’t move. I wanted to move. Kearney pushed a stethoscope on my breast under the body bag. “Still with us,” he said. Then he closed my eyes. I wasn’t dead yet, then nothing.

  I thought I died. I was in the body bag, my head numb. Was I still breathing? Kearney said, “Careful.” The bag swayed. I was paralyzed, numb. I realized I was still alive, still paralyzed, numb around the neck. On a respirator.

  I found myself very happy. Kearney was torturing me, but I was happy to be alive. The bomb that would have killed me did kill men and refineries that night.

  They pulled back my eyelids and took retina prints. Kearney looked down at me. My eyes still wouldn’t focus. I was still paralyzed, like the first moments awake from a nightmare. He said, “Allison, you played straight enough with us. Next we’ll be asking who you’ve been. And who you’ve been with.” He pushed my eyelids back down with hot fingers.

  Hours or minutes passed. The respirator pumped my lungs. My body sweated. The helicopter landed.

  Hands moved me to a gurney and covered me up with warmed blankets. Some time later, in a bed, other hands catherized my bladder. Kearney told me, “Technology is keeping you alive now.” If I hadn’t been paralyzed, I’d have told him we weren’t opposed to technology, just its overuse.

  Kearney’s voice repeated, “Technology is keeping you alive now.” Same exact inflections. Again, “Technology is keeping you alive now.” A sound loop. For hours, forever.

  I fell asleep against that noise, and dreamed I’d volunteered to be killed by a guy who was doing it slowly. People asked why I’d let him do this to me, he didn’t really care for me. But before I realized I didn’t want to die, I was too maimed to live.

  The dream should have been a nightmare, but I was dead emotionally.

  Then the real nightmare began, cars perched on precarious narrow bridges, a wordless terror, the whole dreamscape folding up around me. Kearney sat across the room reading printouts. “Hello, Allison,” he said.

  I was paralyzed, awake, trying to scream. Then I heard Kearney say, “Allison?”

  “Damn you, Kearney. Why didn’t you let me die?” I was in a windowless room with one door, three thick plastic viewing ports with cameras or people whirring behind them.

  He came over with a needle set in cork. “I thought perhaps you’d changed your mind. We also needed to get you here so we could squid your brain.” Catch my thought quanta. He went on, “Curare’s so cruel. This, by the way, isn’t a curare needle. It’ll put you to sleep, just a pinprick. And it stops dreams.”

  “Could you not?” I didn’t want to die, didn’t want to be toyed with.

  “Yes. Why shouldn’t we kill you? You murdered thousands of people, destroyed millions of dollars worth of oil and equipment. We’re fighting oil fires from the Mississippi to Galveston.”

  “A brain read-out goes better with my cooperation.” I was telling him I wanted to live. I’d nearly died a couple of times in the past, I should have been more callous. “I really didn’t know anything about the baby nuke.” The Movement picked me off the street, educated and sacrificed me. Nobody had cared, except perhaps my first recruiter. “Does it really stop dreams?” Technology kept me alive. Kearney smiled, to let me know that he knew I found a fear of death in that body bag, then said, “We could redo you, new retina prints, new, younger face. A prettier body. The orphanage said you were smart.”

  He’d seen me naked. The Movemen
t doesn’t pay for body work. “Witness protection?” I’d find a way to trick them. All of them, every faction.

  Kearney said, “You have to be a witness first. Next we’d like to insert you as an operative.”

  I didn’t speak. My body, riddled with DNA that wanted to extend itself, was relieved.

  Kearney said, “If I’d been you, I would not have followed through on the operation after the man selling you access was so cynical. We were trying to get you to run backwards. Glad you were so blind to my cynicism. You’d have killed New Orleans, assuming the baby nuke would have gone off wherever it was. Your trigger was just jewelry.”

  “I didn’t know anything about the baby nuke,” I said, again, “but we Nortes do use more energy than the world can afford.”

  He said, “I’ll order you clothes.”

  I asked, “Can you really stop nightmares?”

  Kearney said, “If you cooperate. I’m taking you at your word, Allison. My superiors think you’ll try to trick us.” He left.

  A woman brought me what I’d be wearing. No bra with its suicide straps, no panties with waistbands I could tear out with my teeth or stuff down my windpipe—I got what the jail crowd calls strong clothes, a heavy cloth dress with rolled up sleeves. If the prisoner gets rowdy, the sleeves unroll into a straight jacket.

  Strong clothes can’t be ripped with fingernails or teeth.

  Run it back and forth across brick for a few hours and it might fuzz up a little.

  I pulled it on over my head. It fit like a sack, came down almost to my ankles. Bend my legs up, tie the dress at the bottom, tie the sleeves behind my back, I’d be very secure.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You’re a suicide risk,” she said.

  “I’ve blown up half the Gulf Coast. Don’t you want me dead?”

  “Mr. Kearney will be back this afternoon. Has the dietician been by to talk to you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We’ll see to it,” the woman said.

  “Where am I?” I asked. The woman’s face locked against saying anything. “What kind of institution? Jail? Hospital? Rehab center?”