by Rebecca Ore
I wondered what my own life would have been like if I’d known I could get free housing for playing a townsperson in a Federal cop training town. “Do you help the extras find jobs?”
“I don’t think so, but I don’t know for sure.”
“Seems like a great place to…” I was about to say put federal protected witnesses, but thought I ought not seem so curious. “… live. Protected by trainee cops and all.”
Mike nodded. I noticed that he didn’t catch my hesitation, then counted the barriers between me and the outside—the door to the apartment, the door to the unit, the car door.
Kearney was driving. He looked back at me as I continued counting gates: the gate to the compound, the several gates to the three fences I’d seen from my window. We were processed out by eyeball, retina, the net in my head. Then, five miles through pine forest, another set of three fences, separate gatehouses offset from each other. Concrete and steel tank barriers like giant jacks forced the car to wiggle through them.
Nine barriers. At the first of the outer three gates, I bent my head so the Army uniformed people could read my identity off my neural net, then Mike and Kearney pushed their eyes into black goggles for retina scans. At the second gate, a woman in an Air Force captain’s uniform put the black goggles on me. At the third gate, even though these gates were only about 100 to 200 yards apart, two men and three women in plainclothes checked my fingerprints, my retinas, my brain net, and took photographs and a sample of the nanomachines that were still rebuilding me.
One of the women drove the car we’d been in back toward the compound. Kearney said, “Wait,” then walked toward another car beyond the gatehouse. I stood as far away from the others as seemed possible. When I moved a bit farther than I should have, the two men edged closer to me. Prisoner.
Kearney scanned the car, pulled out an Uzi, checked it, put it under his suit jacket, then nodded. Mike then said, “Let’s go.”
As I got into the car, I smiled slightly at the two men who’d been uneasy when I stepped away.
Mike said, “You counted the doors and gates, didn’t you?”
I didn’t say anything, just huddled in the comer of the seat and door. The car drove through another gate more conventionally manned, then pulled out onto a four-lane highway going through scrub oaks and pine trees. The roadsides were white. Sand. I saw a house after a few minutes, an ordinary-seeming brick-façaded house with a child’s tricycle in the front yard with a sand driveway. The car passed more houses, a strip mall, some big development on the left, sand showing where machines moved away the grass and trees. The weather seemed too cold for Texas or Georgia. I began remembering where I’d seen State Route 211.
The government couldn’t own all of this. I thought it was too early for them to trust me. My brainwork had details they hadn’t explained.
“We have a surprise for you,” Mike said.
“I’m terminally jaded,” I said. The driver pulled off at the exit for Pinehurst. “We’re in North Carolina, then. I thought we were somewhere in Georgia or Texas.”
We passed a hodgepodge of Gothic, Tudor, and hacienda replica houses on acre plots, then the driver turned again. On the right, I saw apartments surrounded by golf courses, men playing in the cold. The older apartments were two-story units with cantilevered balconies and bays. The newer apartments were five-story units. Kearney pulled up to one of the older units.
I don’t know how I guessed then, but I knew they had Jergen. I was glad not to be so surprised, then, when Lt. Mike and Kearney walked me up to a Christmas-wreathed door. Real evergreen Christmas wreath, I noted, not Jergen’s style at all.
The man who answered the door didn’t look like Jergen until I saw the hands. They’d done his camouflage with surgery, no nanotech at all. But his hands had aged, not changed. When we followed him inside, he went to a counter and sat on a stool, leaned on his elbows and moved his hands randomly over the counter, tapping a bit with his nails, then sliding one hand over the other. He didn’t look back at me, so they’d told him who I was. His height, his ways of moving were the same. I remembered a bootleg virtual reality rig my teenaged gang used. One recognized one’s hot-suited friends in whatever virtual body. I wondered if anyone would spot my moves in this rebuilt body.
“Jergen, it’s me, Allison,” I said. I looked at Lt. Mike and smiled very slightly.
Lt. Mike said, “I believe you told us that you made retina scans and memorized them. We’ve got the equipment.”
Jergen said, “How did you recognize me?”
“I used to play in virtual reality,” I said. “You learn to recognize people by their move style. And you’ve still got the same hands.”
“They told me they did a tree-read on you and confirmed what I’d told them. Since I surrendered, they let me shield one person. I shielded you. I hoped without me, you’d drift out of the Movement to something else. What happened to Joe and Miriam?”
“They surfaced briefly to get me in touch with Martin Fox, then vanished again. You might as well’ve turned me in, Jergen. Nobody quite trusted me after you left, but maybe that was the plan. Leave one person untouched, not wanted, and the group goes rancid with paranoia.”
“I was hoping that without me…”
“Pretty damn vain of you, I’d say. You cooperated?” Somehow, also, I knew that he had, that he hadn’t been wired up, hooked to a video, and drugged.
“I was tired,” Jergen said. “I’m sorry, Allison.”
“I went on years without you. Miriam and Joe were as much an influence on me as you were. You were tired of what? Of the movement? Of me?”
“I wasn’t sure Joe and Miriam cared about ecology so much as doing damage to the industrial system. They never gave us retina scans. The money people, the anonymous sympathizers, sent them.”
I said, “The movement worked for me, Jergen. I’d have been dead without you, but the movement kept me alive after you abandoned me. Orphanages, kid gangs, aging eco-terrorists, now the Feds—all keeping me alive.”
Lt. Mike said, “He saved your life twice.”
I wanted to say, Jergen? They’d finally surprised me. I found a chair behind Jergen’s back and sat down.
Jergen turned his head slightly, but didn’t turn around to face me. He said, “When I heard what you’d tried to do, I felt that you were my Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Well, now I really am an artificial beast.”
“You believed everything I told you, everything all my friends told you. I wasn’t so sure, myself. And I was tired.”
“You said that already. I bored you with my parrot chatter back of what you told me were your principles. Principles you’d die for.”
“I also told you that once busted, never trusted. Allison, shit, Allison. I’m sorry, but I’ve asked them to give you a chance.” He nodded at Mike and Kearney.
I thought back, wondering if he’d always been an agent, then realized I was being paranoid. He should have taken me with him, but shit. “Tired?”
He finally turned around on his stool. “Tired of feeling guilty when people died. Of not feeling part of the real world, always with people who agreed with me, never talking to people who disagreed with me.”
“There’s quite a gap between eco-activist and federal collaborator.”
Jergen said, “The government isn’t the boogy-man.”
“Do you have a mantis?” I asked, wondering if some insect transquilized him to this state.
“No, I have a wife now, two children.”
“You bastard,” I said, forgetting Lt. Mike. “But then I knew that door wreath wasn’t your style.”
“Didn’t you agree to be interrogated with the squid?” Lt. Mike said. “Did you ask for a semi-sweet control?”
“I didn’t want to die,” I said. “But I didn’t arrange to be busted.”
Jergen said, “Ultimately, the cause wasn’t that important to you, either.”
“When you walked away, you left a vacuum for
people like Martin Fox.”
“Martin Fox was inevitable.”
“Did you help them catch him?”
“Good grief, yes. Allie, the man was a mad bomber. He destroyed half the Gulf Coast.”
“I thought we were just blowing a refinery.” I stood up and asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”
Jergen pointed to a door on the left. The toilet, sink, and tub were surrounded by philodendrons and orchids. I could have escaped through the greenhouse, if the glass, plastic, or polycarbonate would have shattered, if I’d tried. I didn’t imagine the try would get me anywhere useful, so turned back to the horrors bubbling in my brain.
Nets. Ideas. Tree-routes to base concepts. The government fought pollution but not enough. The insect I killed was a gene-tech biosphere contaminant.
Hold that thought, I told my strange new face. I emptied my bladder into the ecological non-flushing toilet. The philodendrons and orchids will eat tonight.
I went back out and asked, “Even if you surrendered, why didn’t the government do something to you? I never heard of an eco-warrior going on trial. Why not?”
Jergen said, slipping me out some comfort, “The government doesn’t want to spread the word on how things are done. Open trials give the spectators ideas. And I married one of my interrogators. You’re not in the hands of heartless people.”
“If I’d have insisted on being tried, would I have been?” I said. “But Amnesty had me on their books.”
“Amnesty can’t say much if you tried to escape. Or complain if you were so violent, the prison put you in a cyberia.”
I could try to escape. I imagined they had forty-plus ways of catching me. “I’m glad I didn’t try the greenhouse,” I said.
“Oh, Allison, don’t even joke about it,” Jergen said. “The government isn’t the bad guys. We were the bad guys.”
“Out west, I thought everyone was the bad guys. Nobody obeyed the law.”
Lt. Mike said, “People who saved the Montana coyotes were media stars working on private land trusts.”
Jergen said, “Allison, even now, busted and brain-rigged, you’re trying to be hard-assed.”
Kearney looked at me and smiled like he’d be pleased if I gave him an excuse to use the Uzi under his suit. I started remembering what fearing death was like. Then I resented that they would scare me into working for them.
Miriam and Joe were still out there. Lt. Mike said, “Allison, remember the mantis.”
Jergen said, “You had a psychotropic mantis?”
“I was recovering from surgery,” I said. “When I got to the point where I hated being sedated, I killed it.”
Kearney said, “You could have asked me to take it away.”
“Would you have?”
“Allison, they’re humans just like us,” Jergen said. “Most of what we did just bonded us together as outlaws. You stole electronics as a teenager to make you part of a gang. Then I saved you from the cops and you did what you had to do to fit in with me and my people.”
I wanted to flare back, I’ve grown since you left me, but saying that seemed immature. Everything he said was true, good little Allison trying to find a place for herself in the human weed community. But I couldn’t just turn my head over to the government. No, wait, I had done that. “Is my life permanently blighted? Once busted, never trusted. Not by anyone.”
Whoops, that sounded more juvenile than I’ve grown since you left me,
Kearney said, “To quote the classics, ‘Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.’ Let’s go have lunch. I know a Mex place in Southern Pines.”
I watched Jergen, knowing he hated to eat in restaurants. He seemed as uneasy as ever, a true foible rationalized, perhaps, into a political position.
Jergen said, “I’ll stay here.”
Lt. Mike said, “Come with us. Government’s treat.”
I knew Mike knew Jergen hated eating in restaurants, hated big parties. He’d turned his agoraphobia into a political movement, I realized. Drugs calmed phobics these days. Had the government which so kindly didn’t kill Jergen left him with his phobia to hold him to his wife and his apartment surrounded by golfers? I said, “He hates restaurants. Why don’t you send for takeout?”
“Allison, don’t make an issue of it. I’ll go,” Jergen said. He stood up and stretched, yawned, and then got his coat out of a closet by the door. I saw a flash of tiny technicolored parkas and a fur coat.
Momma worked. Daddy was a househusband, but the kiddies didn’t know Daddy used to be a bad guy, so they’d been whisked away, not through the cold but probably across the entranceway, before I arrived with my keepers.
The interrogator wife went to work in her other coat.
The house sizes shrank between Pinehurst and Southern Pines. We drove from the rich town streaked with apartments for horse grooms, clerks, and government informants to the middle class town for shop and restaurant owners, mill executives, and the better-off sorts of craftsmen. Developers in the late twentieth century turned horse farms into subdivisions, complete with the old training tracks and stables, stables now mini-storage units.
The land of olivewood spoons and ceramic teapots with polished stone lids passed into the land of replica crystalware and double silver plate. Magnolias and railroad tracks split the Southern Pines business district. I felt Jergen’s body heat, looked at him. He had his eyes closed.
“It’s worse, then?” I said.
“Seeing you… I don’t know. It’s a bit embarrassing.”
Had I been younger, I would have been insulted, but I thought I understood. “So you think we were wrong, then. Not just Martin Fox, but us.”
“I would have been as bad as Martin Fox if I’d stayed in the game.”
We pulled in to a parking place under the magnolias, by the train station. I’d been about to ask Jergen what he meant, but we were in public now. Perhaps asking wasn’t a good idea. I’d lost my privacy whoever was around.
Lt. Mike asked, “Are you okay, Sam?”
Sam was Jergen. He nodded. We went inside and sat down between two tables filled with Special Forces people drinking Mexican beer and eating beef and chicken fajitas.
I wondered if they’d come to intimidate me. One of them looked over at our table, bent forward to whisper to his sergeant. They both laughed.
Were turbans old fashioned? Were they a drode head fashion? Jergen flinched slightly and stared at his plate. I remembered, with pity and self-contempt, when I took him so seriously. I stared back at the table, smiled slightly when the Special Forces enlisted guy looked back at me.
Jergen said. “I’ll have the chicken fajitas and a Dos Equis.”
I liked the look of the fajitas on their steel oval pans, but wasn’t used to eating meat. “Refried beans, cheese enchilada, and rice. A beer, Dos Equis would be okay.”
Mike and Kearney also ordered beer and fajitas. I felt sure that the troops on the flanking tables knew Jergen, knew the situation with me. I said, “Jergen, what do you know about strategy games?”
Everyone heard me. Mike nodded slightly, Jergen said, “They give me a drug for the phobia and I run in them.”
“You’re training people in catching us?”
“You’ll do it, too,” Lt. Mike said. “It’s good preparation for when you go out.”
“I thought you were going to use me to find the person making mantises.” Fuck the secrecy, we were surrounded by people who’d have gunned me down for shoplifting.
“Are you really going to cooperate with us?” Kearney said.
I wondered if anyone inside the restaurant was a real civilian. No, these civilians would be most willing to play civilians in the strategy games in this place. Ecology-killing golf links with their herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides were the main growth industry.
“I’ll help you catch the person making the insects,” I said. “I don’t trust you enough to fake running.”
“We’ll get Jim from Amnesty to witness,” Captain
Mike said.
“Why?” I said.
The waiter brought the fajitas sizzling on their metal servers. Jergen’s fork clattered against the tray. I reached for his hand and gripped it, a thing I’d done in the past which seemed to soothe him then. In the past, I’d thought he’d been anxious or excited about the actions we’d been about to run. No, he was damned ordinary agoraphobic. He pushed my hand away and reached for the beer.
Lt. Mike said, “Funny, you didn’t remember his agoraphobia when you remembered him in interrogation.”
Jergen looked over at me, beer can rim between his teeth, and rolled his lips inward, then swallowed more beer.
I said, “So, reading memories out of a brain doesn’t give you everything.”
“We could get everything out, but a lot of what we get from deep probes never happened. Trash and wishful thinking,” Captain Mike said. “And you were cooperating with us.”
Were.
“You obviously think we’re still the bad guys,” the Kearney said. “I don’t think that matters for training exercises, but we do need to know that you’ll cooperate with us when you’re operating outside.”
“I said I’d help you. I cooperated with the interrogation.”
Jergen said, “She’s always been honest.”
Kearney said, “She stole. She fucked machines in sex shows.”
Jergen said, “When she gives you her word.”
Kearney said, “She lies to enemies. If we’re still the enemies, she’ll lie to us. To you, too, if she thinks you went over for the wrong reasons.”
“What will practicing capture prove?” I asked. I’d at least know how good they were. If I could get away …
… with a net in my head, yeah. Could someone in the hacker underground help me? Shit, I could always pass for a runaway drode head, sell access to the black side…
… if I didn’t run into federal infiltrators. But then if I got away during practice and they caught me later, wasn’t that still part of the practice exercise?
“I want Jim to witness,” I said. “Promise you won’t kill me. Promise Jergen and Jim you won’t.”
The three tables of men smiled. Jergen said, “It will be painful. Emotionally, not physically.”