The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2)

by Anthony Caplan

  When she got back to the house it was almost noon. Joan was watching her from the kitchen window. She came out on the back porch as Corrag walked across the freshly cut grass with Teddy jumping at her.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “Just out for a walk.”

  “We were starting to wonder. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You missed Jeoff. He’s off to Athens this week. Back on Friday. He took the portagon to Norm Laveque. So you and Beithune will have to take the zipcar into Hanover for that lecture you want to attend tonight.”

  “That’s right. I’d forgotten about that.”

  Beithune had mentioned the lecture on the ethics of food manipulation by a visiting scholar and former Republican general, Stonewall Sikorsky, who had run for Repho President unsuccessfully on the populist Blue Planet platform in the last election three years ago. But his running mate Eddie Slawdog Wilson had been caught cheating on his wife with a semi-pro basketball cheerleader in the final weeks leading up to the vote. Sikorsky still had lots of fans in New Albion for his stance on food export manipulation, and Beithune had said they would run into some of his old high school friends at the lecture.

  “Why don’t you have some breakfast before you get started on the lab prep?”

  “I think I will.”

  Joan poured out a bowl of cereal and some raw milk over it and served her at the granite countertop. Wennill was just finishing up her breakfast, with her face buried in her emosponder.

  “What are you looking at?" asked Corrag.

  Wennill looked up and frowned. “It’s just a video from my school about the first days.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Corrag scooted her stool over and Wennill ran the video for her. The school principal, a portly woman in a standard spandex suit with a permanent open-eyed grin spoke about some of the joys of learning and the pleasures of engagement.

  “And remember to have fun with your class selections,” she said in closing. Wennill took the emosponder back as Corrag looked up at her with a questioning expression.

  “I hate it when they tell you to have fun with your class selections,” said Wennill.

  “You’re so lucky, though,” said Corrag.

  “Why? I don’t see you signing up for it.”

  “You get to be with your friends.”

  “Yeah, and we can wander around all day together.”

  “They need to turn up the O levels in your school.”

  “That’s not the way we do things in the Repho,” said Wennill mockingly. Joan scowled.

  “That’s enough, Wennill,” she said. Wennill made another face and took her bowl to the sink.

  Wennill’s opening days video served only to make Corrag more aware of the passage of time and the conflicts inside her impeding emotional progress. She was almost ready to ask Joan about possible medical treatment. But she stopped short when she considered that health care for the Hunnewells was an expensive proposition, and also that in the Repho emo manipulations were considered a responsibility and prerogative for family units, not a medical necessity. At home, Alana’s medicine cabinet was stocked with subsidized boosters and dampeners. Federation government policy mandated medicated manipulations for elite adults and preschool children in order to maximize augmented connections. Corrag had grown up with Prednizac and Duloxetine supplements in their familiar butterfly shapes with every breakfast, until a sixth grade counselor, Ms. Swedlock, had suggested the value of medicine free middle school years for optimizing prefrontal lobe development. Those had been some especially moody years. Now Corrag would have loved just the slightest hint of the freedom from mental turbulence that Federation medications provided. For her it was simple -- if you had a cut on your finger you put a bandage on it. If you felt suddenly fearful of the dark you took a little blue Alprazol that fizzed in the water with that comforting green sheen.

  The lab prep consisted of cleaning out borosilicate dishes of yeast samples, setting out the ceramic containers of powders and syrups and setting up the laser spectograph that Beithune would use to measure proportions. After doing all that, checking in with Alana and Ricky seemed like the thing to do for her. On the emosponder she punched in the call code for intracontinental and the number for the house on Durkiev Drive and got the icon for the Lyons intergalactic in the upper right hand corner that meant they were in and that soon her image would be showing up on the downstairs nanowalls. She could imagine them in the kitchen in the hour before Ricky set off for work, freshly manicured and shaved in his maroon and cream coat, Alana in her silk bathrobe and the housebot scurrying around to get the buckwheat baguettes on the table. Then her parents appeared together in front of the molybdenum table onscreen. The image was a far cry from what she had imagined. Alana was red-eyed and frazzle haired and Ricky was unshaven, wrinkles on his forehead and in a baggy guayabera that made him look like a Republican bot salesman.

  “Corrag. You’ve been a good girl, I hope,” said Alana.

  “Yes, mother. What happened?”

  “It’s been very tough on us. Your father has been dissed for recontracting.”

  “What? How can that be? He has long tenure with UUW and the Council.”

  “I made a hasty decision to publish, Corrag. The Augment led me to believe I was within the bounds. I think I was hacked,” Ricky said, cracking his knuckles in a nervous gesture. Corrag had only ever seen him do that once, when the housebot broke down and started a fire in the kitchen. She must have been in second grade. The firemen had come and it had been all right, but for a few weeks they had been without a bot, and Alana had almost overdosed on Duloxetine.

  “What was it?”

  “A reform piece, clearly an activist element of my research and within the bounds of a professor's responsibilities, calling for diversification of the educational tracks and subsidized extracurricular options on the Augment open to all students through the first two years of college.”

  "That would include fine tuning?"

  "Yes."

  “Awesome.”

  “Not so awesome, honey. We’re going to lose the house,” said Alana.

  “How do you know?”

  “Unpatriotic writings. His name in the Council minutes for the August closed session for delisting.”

  “How can they do that? That’s terrible.”

  “I know. There’s nothing we can do. What the Federation gives, the Federation takes.”

  There was a long silence. Corrag thought she would have to come home. There didn’t seem to be any other options.

  “I guess I’ll come home,” she said.

  “No,” said both Ricky and Alana. “No, no,” continued Alana. “You’re better off there, honey. Stick to your plan. We'll be fine. By the spring we’ll be up on our feet again.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Alana started to cry. Ricky put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer.

  “Your mother will find work in the greenhouses. She has already put her name down for shifts. We won’t be total wards of the state.”

  “What about you, Dad?”

  “I don’t know yet. I don’t know what I’ll do. My augment has been curtailed; it's in holding status, giving me some static. It’s going to take me some time to get my bearings. I won’t say anything else. We are probably being monitored.”

  “Probably?” Corrag could not keep the angry tone out of her voice. “Everyone knows there are no privacy controls on Federation networks."

  “I guess we just never thought about it that way,” said Ricky.

  “Be strong, Corrag. And pray,” said Alana.

  “Pray for what?” asked Corrag.

  “That we’ll see you again soon,” said Alana.

  The screen went black as Ricky stepped forward and put his hand up as if to touch her. Corrag sat back at the desk dumbfounded. What did Alana mean, asking her to pray? They had never even discussed prayer before. She was reverting t
o her Hunnewell roots in times of stress.

  Corrag's childhood home, the symbol of her link to the Democravian promise of a purposeful adult contentment, would be taken from her. It was a catastrophe. She felt oddly calm, not numb, but resolute, thinking of the clarity that the news of her father’s ouster from his position gave her. It was as if the veneer of stability and timelessness had been ripped from the picture of her family’s life together, and the reality of their tenuous journey through life had been revealed.

  Beithune appeared. He was late. Despite looking like a tsunami survivor with his uncombed hair and deep-set eyes, his expression somehow still retained something childlike. He got to work wordlessly. Corrag looked up from her seat at the main desk. She had been going through files on the desktop for Hunnewell Northern Lights accounts going back as far as 2014. The farm had prospered during the secession years, providing food and dried raw milk powder to US military contractor Bechtel. There had been a definite slump in the 2030s, after the farm’s raw milk sales had plummeted. That must have been when they sold off the cows, she thought. She had always heard Alana’s stories about growing up with the cowherd, but they were no longer a part of the farm’s operations. Beithune had on his lab coat now and didn’t seem to want to talk. Hours went by in the lab and Corrag felt like a bot, concentrating on following the instructions Beithune passed to her without comment. At some point she couldn’t contain herself.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she blurted out, passing him a syringe loaded with glutamate.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You haven’t talked to me all day. Why are you ignoring me?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Beithune put the syringe down and turned to her.

  “I have to tell you, Corrag. I’m leaving. I didn’t want to tell you. But I can’t keep it a secret from you.”

  “But you can’t do that. It’s not time for you to go.”

  “I’m not talking about school. I’m talking about the city. I’m going for the inside.”

  Corrag looked at him closely.

  “Do you have plans, connections, any ideas? You don’t just walk inside, you know.”

  “Nothing like that. It’s just right. After last night I can feel it. I think I can take it on. Climb to the top. That was the most vivid virtualscape ever, Corrag. I touched a chord of destiny that shifted the game forever. I mean we did it together, of course. But it convinced me that now's the time to scale the inside barrier. When the game merges with the deepest levels of your unconscious, you're ready to shape your destiny.”

  “Those are just stories, Beithune. Nobody does that in real life.”

  “Last night was strong enough to do it. Didn’t you feel it?”

  “More than felt it.”

  She turned her hand to show him her palm tattoo, fading but still legible.

  “Wow,” said Beithune. “I’d ask you to come with me, but I know you have to stay here and finish out the emissary year gig.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Beithune studied her face.

  “Then come. We’ll take it on together. A shot at fame and glory. How about it, cuz?”

  Corrag considered for a brief second. A flood of emotions overtook her, but the strongest was a desire for freedom. She wanted to make a run with Beithune. It was crazy, but the sheer improbability of his ambition, to ascend to the top of the Sandelsky gaming world with its Byzantine connections to the Repho power structure, was dizzying in its allure.

  “I’m in.”

  She couldn’t believe the words she had just uttered. They finished up the job and cleaned up the work site together. Wennill opened the door and asked if they were hungry. There were sandwiches on the island. They ate, seated on the stools still in lab coats while Joan and Wennill hovered nearby. Wennill was brushing Teddy, and the bot was loading the dishwasher behind her. Joan made coffee. Beithune and Corrag smiled together at her conversation with an air of complicit conspirators. Later in the afternoon they packed bags and took them out to the zipcar separately through the garden and around the side of the house. The bot followed Corrag, but she turned to order it back to the house.

  “I know what you are doing,” said the bot. “You are running away. Beithune and you.”

  “No we’re not. We’re just going on a camping trip.”

  “You can’t fool me. My parallel processor tells me you are running away.”

  “Listen to me. You can’t possibly know because we don’t even know what we’re going to do. You have to stay silent. Otherwise you will be spreading panic. You don’t want to do that, do you?”

  “I will miss you.”

  Corrag looked at the bot closely. Her angled cube of a head gave her an air of humility and sadness. Was it possible for a bot to really feel human love? She laid her hand on the bot’s grasping appendage.

  “I’ll miss you, too.”

  Later in the early evening, as the last of the leaves were falling off the trees in a strong wind, she and Beithune got in the zipcar’s back seat, their bags in the front pushed down so that no-one could see them. As they pulled out the drive, Wennill and Teddy moved out of the way. Wennill stopped and waved and Corrag waved back. Beithune kept his eyes on his emosponder. He was still just a child, Corrag thought again. A pang of remorse hit her for not having said goodbye to the Hunnewells. She vowed to herself someday to return. She looked out the back window. Wennill was walking back to the house, and Teddy was running along the ditch chasing a squirrel. In the distance, in a window, she imagined she could see the bot staring after them, but that was probably an illusion caused by an overactive imagination.

  The Green River bus station was an architectural and cultural relic of the pre-secessionist era. The riders waiting in the plastic seats of the terminal seemed timeless in their decrepitude, as if they hadn’t moved since the waves of cheap heroin addictions had swept the old New England at the beginning of the millennium. These waiting passengers hobbled by old age and failing health were the children of the great old liberal vision that had failed to hold the United States together, victims of poor choices made by and for them, with lives and bodies that had been scarred by hardships. A middle-aged woman in a print cotton tee shirt with the name of some ancient rock group and faded pajama jeans on her balloon-like legs climbed the steps of the bus, taking them one at a time. Beithune and Corrag made their way all the way to the back. The lights went off. Outside it was also getting dark. Corrag felt a curious sense of relief, as if riding along in this faceless herd of humanity on the dark bus was a protection against fears both real and imagined.

  Four -- A New Reality

  The winter in the Williamsburg walkup was an endless wash of water and roar. The ceiling leaked, and the drip of water was only ever silenced by the nightly fights in the apartments above and around them in the former tenement housing. Outside there was little respite from lapping seawater on the sidewalks and the constant barrage of acidic, gritty precipitation. The sooty skies tinged Corrag’s days, and her nights were filled with the smells of sewage and rotting meat and the gnawing pain of hunger in her belly.

  Beithune had been rejected for three job openings. The last had been with Sandelsky as a design intern. The personnel director had communicated with him at the end of the last round in a curt post interview session on his emosponder and told him he wasn’t sufficiently prepared in the coding standards of Motran 397, the language of choice for Sandelsky designers, but Beithune had laughed ruefully in her face and terminated the connection. When telling Corrag the story later that night, he showed her some of the quantum applications using Motran he’d rigged up with his gaming cube, but she already knew what he was going to say. Their ability to communicate without using words had continued to expand in the days and weeks following their Absolution win. It didn’t happen in any predictable or orderly fashion, but sometimes she just knew what he was going to say and would let the silence lie between them. Corrag felt his despondency weighing on b
oth of them, but the city was an unfolding panoply of sensory experiences sharpened by the razor thin margin of survival they were skating on.

  Corrag’s job as a welcomer at The Meadowbrook Spa and Gun Club paid the rent with a little left over for food. Despite their shortage of bitcoin, they were heading out for a night on the town, to a party with some people Beithune had met at the Butterfly, a houseboat tied up to the Unisphere at the Flushing Meadows piers. The canal porter was filled with nightlifers looking for action, headed for the casinos and the smokehouses of midtown. Corrag and Beithune got off at Corona and walked out along the rickety old jetty. Beithune’s big leather boots made a clopping noise in the puddles, while Corrag slumped along behind him wrapped in her keffiyeh. There were hollers, as a boat of pleasure seekers steamed slowly out towards the harbor lights. At the ramp up to the houseboat, two young men in long hair and bellbottoms with chains hanging off their waists slouched against the hull. The cabin rocked gently, and the swaying lights cast the long shadows of partygoers out on the dark, rippled water. A bearded man held court on the deck, proclaiming loudly to anyone who would listen with the news of his own importance. Three young men in variations of flannel shirts smoked from a bowl of khat and snickered, spitting out over the gunwales. One of them, tall, thin-lipped, fox-eyed, with curly hair spilling out from under his cap, separated himself from the group and approached Corrag. Beithune was right behind her, and Corrag could hear him whispering a warning in her ear.