by Dani Kollin
Sandra’s voice remained firm but comforting. “If that’s what it takes.”
J.D. shook her head. “No victory can emerge from that level of insatiability. All I have done, all I can do, is delay the inevitable. Trang will rebuild and come back. And if I do manage to win again, he’ll just come back—again. And so I’ll sacrifice how many more parents? And how many more children? Everybody’s looking to me to win this war, and I feel like I’m the only one who knows the unequivocal truth: I can’t do it!”
“Yes,” replied Sandra, voice hardened, “you can.”
“No, Sandra. I can’t. Battles, yes. By the beard of the Prophet, I may have just won the biggest one yet, and it’s still not enough.”
“By whose estimation, J.D.?”
“By mine! Don’t you get it?”
“I believe I do, but please, elucidate.”
“I’ll put it in lawyerly terms—my last job.”
Sandra nodded.
“Imagine I have to win a case. And I do. But the prosecution gets another try—this time with a different jury; and if I win again, they’ll get a different judge; and if I win after that, a different law firm. No matter how many times I win the case, the prosecution gets to try it again and again and again. And here’s the thing: The first time the prosecution wins, I lose with no chance for a retrial. So it doesn’t matter what brilliant arguments I make, what witnesses I produce, what evidence I find. Because eventually one of those trials I will lose. It’s inevitable. The UHF has more people, industry, and credits. They will eventually succeed because they really only need to win once. So how am I supposed to face my people knowing that? Knowing that the court is stacked against me?”
Sandra smiled, leaned forward, and took J.D.’s hand in her own. “Janet, dear, that’s easy.” The President’s tawny eyes seemed to flare a deeper shade of amber. “We’re going to burn the courthouse to the ground.”
Executive office
Burroughs
Mars
Irma Sobbelgé stood outside the door of the executive office, hesitant and afraid. There was a time when raised hairs on the back of her neck would have been nothing more than mildly annoying. Being under constant surveillance and the threat of imminent danger were, especially in her position, par for the course. She could respect those feelings, but to kowtow to them would’ve been foolish, not to mention a possible prescription for forced therapy. In her life as the UHF’s Minister of Information, those standing hairs were merely looking out for her, and not, as they were now, exhausting her. She knew that she, like any of the other Cabinet ministers, had a target painted on her back and that any misstep would cause her to vanish from the center of power or, more likely, from existence. But she was tired of being afraid. And the person she most feared was now waiting patiently on the other side of the door. She took a barely perceptible breath, steeled herself, and entered.
The seemingly genuine smile of warmth from Hektor was more disturbing than the metallic, impersonal stare of Tricia—that, Irma had become inured to. But seeing Justin Cord’s former wife, Neela Harper, had taken her by complete surprise. She allowed those feelings to register on her face, as there was no harm in anyone seeing them.
“Irma,” beckoned Hektor, “we’ve been discussing ways to make the Unincorporated Woman dead or, at a minimum,” he suggested with a Cheshire grin, “inconvenienced.” He looked pointedly at Tricia. “It seems our well-funded Minister of Internal Affairs has nothing of particular value, short of opinions, to add to the conversation. I think I speak for all of us when I say I hope you’ve had better luck.”
Irma shrugged her shoulders, ignoring the chill running down the back of her neck. “Cheated on her taxes,” she offered meekly, knowing how lame it was but secure in the knowledge that since dirt-digging wasn’t her main job—selling was—she’d probably be forgiven. If only Tricia had been so forgiving.
“To accuse her of tax evasion,” gunned the Minister of Internal Affairs, “would not only be useless but would, unforgivably, also give her an appealing, heroic antitaxation flag to rally around.” Tricia folded her arms neatly into each other. Though her face remained placid, none could mistake the smugness emanating from it.
Irma steamed. Tricia had been right, of course. The incorporated society was proud of the fact that they never taxed. They simply incorporated individuals at birth and gave 5 percent shares of the individual to the government to collect for as long as that person remained alive. Taxation was considered a barbaric construct from a previous dark age. Even at the bleakest moments of the Unincorporated War, the UHF Cabinet had not for a second considered taxation. Instead, it used the heavy sale of bonds, “voluntary” contributions from the corporations, and legal loopholes to get past the 5 percent limit imposed by the UHF Constitution. The most popular method was to offer shares to a patriotic charity and the charity offer to pay for a cruiser or the hospital care of traumatized marines and spacers. So popular was this particular method that fully 18 percent of the war was being funded by the charities. Of course, most of them had been shills set up by Hektor, Tricia, and Irma. The Minister of Information couldn’t even take solace in the fact that she’d donated 10 percent of her outstanding shares to an actual soldiers’ aid charity. Everyone in the Cabinet had been encouraged to donate 10 and only 10 percent of their outstanding shares, so none would outshine the President when he had donated 12 percent of his.
“There was this one thing,” Irma said, her voice trailing off. “Might be more a piece of trivia than necessarily a useful nugget, though.”
Hektor prodded her with an encouraging look.
“Turns out Sandra O’Toole had a child out of wedlock.”
On Hektor and Tricia’s dubious looks, Irma quickly added, “But I can’t help but feel there might be something in it.” Her eyes sparkled slightly as memories of being a senior editor at The Terran Daily came flooding back. “Reporter’s gut, I guess. I’d certainly be open to sussing it out.”
Tricia shook her head. “I fail to see how—”
“You know,” interjected Neela, bullying an opening, “I think a good old-fashioned brainstorm might be in order. Some ideas just need another perspective.” Hektor looked to be as skeptical as Tricia was now scornful, but nodded for Irma to continue.
“The birth was buried under legal protections at the time as she was seventeen, but the time line seems to confirm the court records. She took a semester off after her early graduation from high school before accepting her full scholarship to MIT.”
Both Tricia and Hektor looked dubious. Neela, however, continued to be intrigued.
“Did she have any more children?”
Irma had never considered the question, but knew that for all Neela’s confused actions in at first supporting Justin Cord and the Alliance and then Hektor Sambianco and the UHF, she was still a top-notch therapist. Indeed, Neela was considered by many to be in a league with Thaddeus Gillette himself, the most respected reanimation therapist in the system until his defection to the Outer Alliance. “Not sure,” admitted Irma. “Lemme check.” Her fingers played across the DijAssist’s screen as her eyes scanned for relevant tidbits. She then looked up into the waiting faces. “No, never. In fact, there’s sketchy data to suggest that some relationships may have broken up over her refusal to have any children … any more children,” she corrected.
Neela’s bottom lip twisted slightly upward. “Interesting.”
“Really?” challenged the Minister of Internal Affairs with a slight tilt of the head. “I fail to see how sleeping around at seventeen or having a child out wedlock gets this woman dead.”
“Maybe not dead,” suggested Hektor with a growing smile, “but certainly vulnerable. And vulnerable’s a good place to start.”
For the briefest moment, Neela’s eyes flashed with passionate approval, though they quickly returned their studied temperance. “Exactly right!” she said.
Irma had always suspected that Neela and her boss were an i
tem, but had never known for sure, not until now.
“Sorry,” balked Tricia, slinging a few arrows Irma’s way, “I just don’t see the connection.”
Irma hadn’t either but reasoned that no good could come from agreeing with Tricia—especially at the expense of the newly discovered power couple. She wouldn’t throw Tricia a rescue line now. Bitch would probably try and hang me with it anyways.
“Because,” explained Hektor, “Sandra’s pattern, sketchy as it is, indicates her need to bury information about this child of hers.”
“By refusing to have another?” snorted Tricia. “It was a bad experience she didn’t want to repeat. Why are we trying to read more into it?”
“Perhaps you’re right, Tricia,” offered Neela. “But for a woman, any woman, giving up a child you’ve carried for nine months—and they all carried back in those days—is a traumatic event.”
Tricia’s answer was curt and dismissive. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Nor would I,” agreed Neela, “but my understanding from my own patients as well as volumes of research is that those wounds never heal, no matter how many years separate the mother from the child. If we could find a way to exploit those feelings, we can perhaps force a mistake, force an emotional decision at a critical juncture as opposed to rational one. That’s how people die.”
“It’s how Justin died,” noted Hektor. A dark silence followed on his words. Neela’s face seemed to freeze for a moment—as if a cavalcade of emotions were fighting for dominance but none could gain purchase. Just as quickly, she returned to her former self. “Yes, exactly right,” she said embarrassed but by the look on her face not quite sure why.
“It’s an in, Tricia. The first anyone’s managed to find.” He then fixed an approving gaze on Irma. “Good job. I can always count on you. So now the trillion-credit question is, how do we use it?”
“Her daughter’s long dead,” said Tricia, trying to salvage anything from the meeting’s dismal failure. “Who knows what happened to the kids that came after?”
“Someone must,” insisted Neela.
“I wouldn’t know where—,” began Irma.
“Got ’em,” said Tricia, deciding to err on the path of least resistance. Her eyes bounced around the DijAssist screen. She then uploaded what she was viewing over to Hektor’s holo-display. Fifty faces suddenly appeared floating in the center of the table.
“How many in the UHF?” asked Hektor with some urgency.
Tricia’s lips pulled back to reveal a churlish grin. “All of them.”
“In the war?”
Tricia played the control panel. Thirteen faces peeled away. “Thirty-seven,” laughed Tricia. “How very ironic and patriotic.”
“Permanently dead?” asked Neela, a faint trace of sadness evident in the voice of the UHF’s senior empath.
With a flash of understanding, Irma, Tricia, and Hektor knew exactly where this conversation would lead. The President of the UHF and the Internal Affairs Minister both began to beam with excitement. Irma’s mimic was flawless. Only Neela seemed somewhat distraught about what she’d begun with her gentle prodding and what was about to be revealed to a woman she didn’t even know.
THE UNINCORPORATED WOMAN MURDERS HER OWN CHILDREN
In a shocking discovery, it has been revealed that the Unincorporated Woman, Sandra O’Toole, has been helping in the murder of her own descendants. The UHF has learned that when the woman the Outer Alliance made their President was young, she engaged in a copious amount of unprotected sexual activity. The inevitable bastard child was born, and the careless woman abandoned her baby without a second’s thought. Now it’s been learned that unlike their lecherous ancestor, O’Toole’s descendants all remained on Earth, steadfast and loyal to our cause. Many joined the armed struggle to destroy the Outer Alliance rebellion that aims to permanently return the human race to the anarchy of the past. Since Sandra O’Toole’s takeover of the Presidency from the other unincorporated reprobate, Justin Cord, her forces have murdered seventeen of her own children’s children whose only crime was in defending the one just system humanity has ever devised. The Outer Alliance leader is nothing more than a modern-day Medea. And like that shrew from ancient Greece, she too kills her children out of spite and revenge. If this is the so-called anointed woman the fanatics of the Outer Alliance have chosen as their leader, can there be any doubt that this evil experiment begun with the first of her ilk must be ended with the second? Not in this reporter’s mind.
—Helix Folst
NNN
Four of my descendants were in Gupta’s fleet when he attacked Jupiter. They participated in the slaughter of 179 million innocent people. If they weren’t already dead, I would have shot the murdering bastards myself.
—Statement read by Padamir Singh
On behalf of Sandra O’Toole
Tuscan Park
Cerean Neuro
Sebastian stood in a group with Dante, Gwendolyn, and a newly returned Marilynn Nitelowsen. The park was still torn up from the battle and viruses that the Core avatars had unleashed in their attack on the Cerean Neuro, but given what they were all currently witnessing, the scenery was appropriate. Twenty-five yards in front of them, Sandra O’Toole, President of the Outer Alliance and forger of the human–avatar alliance that had done so much to help both sides survive the war, was radiating emotions so intense, none of them dared approach. This group had faced death in more ways than could be readily believed and monsters created by the greatest monster of them all. But at this moment, any one of them would have preferred a nice safe battlefield filled with Al’s monstrosities to the place they were in now.
It didn’t help that Sandra had been furiously pacing the same twenty-foot patch of the park, turning at some barrier sensed only by her and just as furiously marching back in the opposite direction. The few words that they could hear in her nonstop rant did nothing to lesson their hesitation.
“Well, someone should go talk to her,” suggested Dante with unusual timidity. The utter silence of the three informed him of what they thought of the idea. “How long has she been doing this?” he asked, changing tack.
“Four days, Neuro time. About eight hours in the physical world,” stated Marilyn.
The avatars smiled at the imprecise nature of the human’s response, but only for a moment.
“Dante’s right, though. Someone has to talk to her.”
“I’ll do it,” offered Gwendolyn with grim determination.
“Not that I’m complaining,” said Dante, “but why you?”
“I’m the only one here who’s a mother and—” Gwendolyn’s face took a momentary look of assuredness. “—I owe her.” She glanced over to Sebastian. After a moment, he nodded his approval. With a stiff upper lip, Gwendolyn squared her shoulders and closed the distance toward the President.
“Sandra,” Gwendolyn said softly. Sandra barely glanced at her. Every time the President passed, Gwendolyn softly called her name. Later Gwendolyn would not remember how many times she’d repeated it. She could have found out, but never bothered. After her tenth try or perhaps her thousandth, Sandra finally slowed to a stop.
“Gwendolyn?” The rage was replaced by genuine confusion.
“I’m here, Sandra.”
“She … she was my baby,” Sandra whispered.
“You told me you never had a child.” There was no hint of condemnation in statement, just simple curiosity.
Sandra shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose there was some comfort in the lie.” She laughed disconsolately. “Waking up in a new century where hardly anybody knew who I was … Well, it seemed like a good time to bury that part of my past. I lied to you, Gwendolyn, but never was really able to deceive myself.”
Gwendolyn nodded but remained mute.
“Though the truth is,” confessed Sandra, “delivering a baby is not the same thing as having one. Having a child involves changing diapers and singing lullabies and reading bedtime stories and saying no and gi
ving in and all the other joyous and painful things that go into raising that tiny, beautiful blob into someone you can be proud of. I couldn’t do all that—certainly not at seventeen. So I chose to let her go. Having an abortion certainly made logical sense, but in the end I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill that which was growing within me.”
“And you couldn’t keep her either.”
“No,” admitted Sandra with a heavy sigh. “There was simply no way. Not with a scholarship to MIT and a mother who was already burdened with the care of my father. I couldn’t ask her to help with a brand-new baby. It would’ve ruined my life and by extension hers.”
Gwendolyn nodded quietly.
“Do you have the equivalent of adoption in avatarity?”
“I—I’d never thought about it, actually.” Gwendolyn’s look of befuddlement brought a slight smile to Sandra’s face. “We are born as whole, fully functioning sentient intelligences from the intertwining of two. We have complete language and complex emotional response, but we’re quite unwieldy and need to be taught how to use and control our vast abilities. It is up to the parents to do this. Until the Unincorporated War, there had never been a cause for adoption, but I suppose we do adopt. Many of us have had to take over the parenting of children whose parents were either permanently lost to Al’s creations or were stuck on the wrong side of the Neuro once the war broke out.”
Sandra nodded. “I made sure my daughter was adopted by a couple with means, a couple who, unlike me, were unable to bear children.” Sandra let a brief sob escape. “I’ve thought about that decision every day of my life for almost two decades. I can’t tell you the number of times I wanted to go to her, the number of times I got in my car and headed in her direction—I knew where she lived. It was easy enough to find out. But each time, I stopped.”