Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

“Does it matter?” the woman said. She went through the door. I heard the locks. Beyond that door, I heard another door. Excessive doors between me and the outside, but I was too shaken now to make any independent plans.

  Lunch came with a plastic spoon and the same woman who’d brought my strong dress. The plastic spoon would shatter into rounded beads if I tried to bite it jagged. Whoever fixed the meal cut it into spoon-sized bits for me. Beef. They should know I don’t eat red meat. I said, “I’m a lactovegetarian who eats fish.”

  “Pretty hypocritical. Calves die for milk. Fish wouldn’t mind staying alive either.”

  “I’m not opposed to any meat-eating. It’s just that the factory farm product requires too much energy waste.”

  “Imagine this is grass-fed,” the woman said. “I can’t imagine you’re opposed to killing.”

  “As a prisoner, I have the right to a diet that doesn’t offend my conscience.”

  “You weren’t awake at processing,” the woman said. “The dietician will see you some time between afternoon and day after tomorrow.”

  I was starved. Eat the meat, my body said. It was factory meat fed on chemical industrial by-products poor Asians had to eat straight. Whatever poisons, I gagged it down.

  Another woman came in, wearing a uniform. She was skinny, late forties, with bright red fingernails, and eyeliner, like makeup would soften her. Otherwise, no nonsense, even her face was strung together with whipcord muscle. She said, “Allison, I’m Captain Gouge, in charge of the female detainees at this facility.”

  The strong dress wasn’t made to bend to my shrug. The other woman nodded at Captain Gouge and left.

  Captain Gouge said, “We will allow you one phone call. I think you know we’ll tap it.”

  I thought it was unusual that the Captain would visit a new prisoner. Perhaps she was a sympathizer? I asked, “When will I be transferred out of the hospital unit?”

  “You’re not in a hospital unit. Do you want a court-appointed attorney? Or do you have an attorney you’d want us to call?”

  “Court-appointed attorney would be fine.” All anyone could do would be hold my hand while I got sentenced.

  “You claim you didn’t know about the baby nuke. We’d like you to cooperate with a brain scan. Otherwise, we’ll have to execute you before the Amnesty representative makes his visit.”

  I should have wanted the death. “Okay.” Some Luddie must have gone mad-dog, stealing a baby nuke. Maybe we could truce with the Feds and run down the mad dog together? “My group’s officially opposed to nuclear bombs.”

  Captain Gouge sighed. “An Amnesty representative will see you before the first scanning session. Full implementation requires a tracheotomy.”

  Full implementation requires removing a few skull bones and laying read membranes on the brain, get close to those electrical potentials and chemical gradients. I’d be paralyzed again. My hands shook. The skull bones contained the nightmares. The terror dreams lay inside the brain jelly, too, could be read, could be recorded and played back, techno-looped.

  “Your people claim you had full knowledge when you volunteered for the suicide mission,” Captain Gouge said. “Your leaders are hypocrites, ranting against testing baby nukes for the battlefield, but perfectly willing to contaminate thousands of acres of Louisiana and Texas themselves. Tell us the truth and what you know, and we won’t put you through the brain scan.”

  About twenty years earlier, my recruiter Jergen had told me, “You can’t cooperate even just a little bit. They’ll lie to you, make you think your leaders sold you out. Don’t imagine that you can trick them. If you’re captured, consider yourself dead.” Jergen disappeared about eight years ago. I said to Captain Gouge, “Perhaps your people put the bomb in my car when it garaged. You’ve always wanted us to look like insane terrorists.”

  If the plastic had been plastique… if the car had started… if anyone had really planned to pick me up at the gate…

  Captain Gouge said, “They’ve been all the world you’ve known since you were seventeen, right.”

  “Between fourteen and then, I was with another group.” That group stole and put on sex shows for men too afraid of disease to touch wild child flesh.

  “A community. They’ll never trust you again.”

  “I might as well die.”

  “You Deep Ecology people say individual human life is meaningless, but when we catch you, very few of you actually see your own lives as meaningless.”

  “I was ready to die, but Kearney kept me alive.”

  “Takes a lot out of a person to be ready to die.”

  Knowing that they’d deliberately exhausted my will to die didn’t make me ready to die again. I was angry. I said, “You know the people you work for are capable of planting baby nukes to make us look bad.”

  Captain Gouge said, “You stupid bitch. You keep saying that, I’ll turn you over to the boys before Amnesty knows you ever existed. Rape’s rude and crude, but it does break people.”

  “What an awful thing to threaten another woman with.”

  “We had to see if you contained any surprises. You have a device in a vertebral spinous process. It wasn’t broadcasting, so we’ll take it out when we do the squid surgery.”

  I was surprised. The Movement medics must have put it in when I was in surgery for a bicycling accident three years ago. A spinal tap, indeed. “If it’s a recorder, it will tell you I didn’t know anything about the baby nuke.”

  “Recordings can be falsified. And you didn’t even know you had the device in you.”

  “Would you really throw me to rapists if I wonder if your people set this up?”

  Captain Gouge laughed. “When did you have back surgery?”

  “I’d been in a bike accident. One of those car people turned right on top of me. The medics said they gave me a spinal. We don’t need to know everything.”

  “When?”

  “Three years ago.”

  “You could be more precise. The bomb was stolen three years ago.”

  “March, late March.”

  Captain Gouge said, “The bomb was stolen in September.”

  “No connection,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” Captain Gouge said. “You know your people are ruthless enough to send in a dumb courier. Isn’t the term a waster?”

  “I’m too well trained to be wasted.”

  “Who did you threaten? Reject? One of your people must have it in for you.”

  “I’ve agreed to cooperate with the brain read. Leave me alone.”

  “Was lunch okay?”

  “No. I don’t eat red meat.”

  “You finished it off.”

  “I was starving. I…”

  “You don’t eat red meat. Your people are opposed to nukes. Yet.”

  “Unusual circumstances.”

  “I’m sure that’s why your people used the nuke.”

  “The cow was dead already.”

  “They thought you would be.”

  “So you’re going to force me to eat red meat.”

  “No, we’ll fit the diet to your conscience.”

  “Yeah, you would have asked me at intake, but I was drugged out. And the dietician will show up not later than the end of the week.”

  “You won’t get more red meat. You can discuss the further details of your diet with the dietician later.”

  Why did I feel like I’d been an unruly child being obnoxious about my school grades? I’d told them my training was special. “You’re really good,” I told Captain Gouge.

  Captain Gouge said, “Everyone of you we’ve captured thinks your training was special. No surprise. You think you’re so special your group wouldn’t send you out on a really dangerous mission. Believing this makes you bolder.”

  “I said I’m going to cooperate.”

  “You think you’ll beat the system. No surprise there either. You won’t beat us. We understand you’re subject to nightmares. We’ve got drugs that can tone down the dreams
. We’ve also got drugs that will feed your demons.”

  I’d met the bad cop.

  The ends justify the means. The means are the ends. The two big oppositions in the world today. We can’t live in a degraded world. The life chains are fraying.

  Mr. Kearney said, “The horrible predictions haven’t come true, you know. We didn’t have major fish kills in the 1980s. The Mohawk River and the Hudson were pollution-controlled by then. My grandfather swam in the Mohawk.”

  I said, “We’ve lost half the world’s coral reefs, most of the virgin rainforests. The native peoples…”

  “Come on. Industrial societies are less damaging to the landscape than farming societies. We live in cities to save energy. We farm intensively. What you’d like is enough energy to live away from your manufacturing, entertainment, information. It’s an archaic territoriality most of us don’t believe in anymore. Having your own slice of woodlands, mountains, doesn’t preserve ecosystems. Preserving ecosystems is a large scale endeavor.”

  I said, “First, I’m not a back-to-the-lander. Second, I did believe in something.”

  He said, “You believed you and your friends were superior to other people. When you were a street thief, you and your buddies felt martyred. In the Movement, you got to be both a social victim and very morally superior.”

  “Better than being the scum you thought we were.”

  “People willing to bomb with baby nukes are dangerous. We’re going to open you, but I’d rather have you realize the stakes and agree with us of your own free will.”

  “There was a past,” I said, meaning once upon a time, America only had 120 million people living on her.

  “I think the future is much more important.”

  “Why are you doing this? You’re going to change my mind electrochemically, aren’t you?” I suspected that if I held my core opinions, no brain work that left me still recognizable could eradicate them. I could always re-make up my mind. A hologram shatters into replicant holograms, still the same image in each fragment, only somewhat degraded. A bit of the authentic me could overwhelm the false ideals inserted by the Federal brain workers.

  Kearney said, “Don’t turn this into a dominance struggle. It isn’t I win, you lose.”

  I said, “The bayou country was already ruined. Most of the nukes these days are neutron bombs.”

  “Not that one. Your people wanted the equipment dead, not just people.”

  “Maybe we need to nuke ourselves away, give evolution another chance to make sense. Even if you stopped every Illicher, every Deep Eco group, you’d still have the survivalists, the techno-punks, city gangs, the mass murderers, the thousand and one factions that rise when humans need to thin their numbers.”

  “First, it doesn’t work that way. War breeds babies. Poverty breeds babies.”

  “You think we’re on opposite sides, then? You want to pacify humanity so we don’t breed like coyotes. My people bomb so we get strife-driven population increases?”

  “What do you believe?”

  I said, “We’re not coyotes.” Kearney sighed. I thought about Eastern Europe, Africa in the Twentieth Century, street girls who had AIDS and babies, and added, “I guess you’re right, but you’re a cruel bastard.”

  “You just killed friends of mine. The outlaws always hate us when we have to kill their people, but we’re supposed to be professionals and not take it personally when you kill our colleagues. I’d have thrown you off the helicopter if you hadn’t begged to die.”

  I could almost see my naked body spinning down, limbs spread to catch air and prolong life. This image fell into the nightmare vat. I said, “I thought outlaws were the ones whose mourning wasn’t taken into consideration. You’ve killed my people, too, you know?”

  “Scared you, didn’t I, telling you I wanted to throw you off the helicopter. You are terrified of dying.”

  “That’s just the body, the genes wanted to go on. Humans have to control their bodies. Just like I control my nightmares.” I hadn’t meant to say that. I couldn’t really control my nightmares as well as I wanted to. I didn’t want to have them at all.

  Kearney said, “If you have nightmares, something’s wrong with your daytime.”

  “Captain Gouge said she’d throw me to rapists if I suggested that perhaps your people planted the baby nuke in my car.”

  “I’d kill anyone who’d deliberately plant a baby nuke in my country. Do you want an attorney, or are you going to be fully cooperative?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. Whatever, I didn’t knowingly plant the damn atomic bomb deliberately. “I want to cooperate.”

  “With that note, goodbye for now. I’ll see you again under the squid.”

  That night, the sleeping injection chained the demons, but they moved through my night in their chains, reminding me of how fierce they’d be. The chemical bonds didn’t exorcise them, but exercised them.

  I couldn’t even wake up to be paralyzed. Look at us closely, they told me. My mother and father said, We just wanted to scare you, not abandon you forever. We’d have come back. But now we’ve given away all your things.

  The demons looked like Jergen, like me, like my mother and father. I remembered it all when I woke up.

  The dietician came. As an IV dripped sedatives, beta-endorphins, and various neurotransmitters into my veins, I picked the modified Zen diet, vegan with fish, basically. Modified Zen was the easiest choice. My brain fuzzed, cleared, whirred. I was turning into a mechanical doll.

  As a nurse with a razor shaved my head, a cute guy with a little blond beard held my hand, a nice warm fuzzy to soothe the patient. In a clear moment, I wonder if he’d known what I’d done, or if I was just another prisoner to be jollied out of panic. Whatever I thought, my body liked having its hand held.

  “Will you be with me throughout?” I heard myself ask the cute guy who I thought was a hospital aide.

  “I’ll stay with you until they start reading. I’ll come back to take you to recovery. It won’t hurt. The brain’s got no pain nerves.”

  I wanted to tell him I was scared, but he was on the enemy’s team. He said, “I know you’re scared. Everyone’s scared the first time. But you’re on our records now. Amnesty won’t let you disappear.”

  My brain fuzzed, then began flipping through memories, then remembered what the aide said. “The first time? Amnesty?”

  He squeezed my hand, then said, “Can you get on the gurney yourself or do you need help?” Another young man wheeled the gurney beside the bed. I’d have thought I could sit up and walk to it, but I could barely wiggle onto the gurney.

  “It’s the muscle relaxant,” the fuzzy-bearded man said.

  “I won’t be paralyzed, will I?” I’d go insane if they paralyzed me and drew out my mind.

  “No, just relaxed. You won’t even worry as much as you’re worrying now.” He pulled a vial out of his pants pocket, stuck a needle into it, drew out a drug that must have been a worry-killer, and injected it through a valve in my IV drip. “Amnesty recommends this to make the interrogation more humane.”

  Nothing I could do to stop this. Might as well relax and not worry. The gurney moved me to the operating theatre. I smiled at the Amnesty boy who was still beside me, stroking my hand. Just what a forty-three-year-old woman needs, a cute young boy.

  A ring of faces, mouths and noses covered with translucent film. “Hello, Allison,” Kearney said. “Are you with us?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “A bit more stimulant,” another male voice said. “Local for the scalp.”

  “Do you want to see the squid?” Kearney said.

  “No,” I said. A brain-scan squid was a giant cone, vaguely squid-shaped, with cables coming out the cone’s tip, the reverse of a biological squid’s tentacles, the bottom an indented read head that sucked up against the brain. The whole thing oozes fluids to keep the brain moist and to improve the electrical connection between the brain and the computer. Small probes slide down into th
e brain to read the chemicals. I’d seen pictures. I didn’t want to see the one that did me.

  “We’re going to map your visual cortex and the speech centers,” Kearney said. I felt a needle go into my scalp, first on either side of the ears, then twice to my cheekbones. “Now, we’re going to screw in the halo and sit you up.”

  While the warm, fuzzy boy continued holding my hand, aides strapped me to the operating table which turned into a chair. The chair swung me upright facing a video wall. Another needle to the scalp, then a metal ring with screws descended around my head. I got a screw in each cheekbone, screws in the back of the neck. I felt and heard them crunch bone. Then the surgical team fitted opaque plastic around my numb eyebrows, down by my ears, around the back over my neck screws.

  Kearney said, “You’ll see your output on the screen. Feedback will help you sharpen the images. Everyone’s visual cortex is different, so we’ll need you to help us read you. We’ll remember that you cooperated.”

  I tried to nod, but couldn’t. Someone was running a catheter tube up my urethra. I took that to mean we’d be here a long time. I tried to move my leg, could have if the hands hadn’t held them. Then I could move them, and the warm, fuzzy Amnesty representative covered me with a warmed blanket.

  “You’ll feel vibrations against your skull. We’re using an ultrasonic cutter.”

  As my skull bones separated, I realized I wasn’t worried at all.

  “Did she void her bladder?” a voice asked.

  “No,” my friend from Amnesty said.

  “You got the dosage right, then.”

  “It doesn’t just aid in the interrogation, it’s a kindness,” my buddy said. “Allison, we wouldn’t want you to be terrified.” I said, “I’m not.” I felt tugging, then heard a sound like torn paper. I was so grateful for the chemicals that kept this from being a nightmare.

  Kearney said, “We’re going to fit the squid now.”

  I thought I’d feel the air against my brain, but there was no feeling at all. “I don’t feel anything,” I said.

  “They won’t hurt you,” my warm, fuzzy boy said.

  No, I did feel a fringe of pain, detached skin and flesh from over the skull. My fuzzy boy said, “Let me tell you a story while they’re working.”