“How many?”
“Surprise me.
She hunkered down in her nest of cardboard to make sure she was hidden and waved.
“All five. Again?”
Bunny ears.
“Two. Again?”
Rachel held up her other hand.
“Seven.”
“You’ve got it!”
Phil’s happy mental whoop was so loud it resonated throughout the collective.
Happy, she thought, watching the blues and purples mingle. Lovely rich reds floated through the mix; she might have to change her assumptions about reds in her ontology. Everyone at the table wanted to be there, even Santino.
Especially Santino.
Home.
Shawn’s voice kept failing but he pushed on through the dust. He told a riddle. It wasn’t very good, and Santino told him so, and Shawn laughed and laughed.
Rachel wrapped her afghan around her shoulders and jumped off of her table, wavering slightly from the whiskey as she headed to the bathroom. She rounded the corner and crashed straight into Josh: she had done her own version of dropping out of the link without realizing it, shutting down her range to encompass only those within the same room.
Josh held a finger to his lips before she could speak and she realized he wasn’t alone. He stood in front of Mulcahy, whose face was hidden behind his arm against the wall. Josh pulled Mulcahy away and gently pushed the larger man down the hallway, quickly, quietly, so the others wouldn’t see their unbreakable leader weeping with relief.
“Mulcahy says you can tell him,” Josh said to her as they disappeared into the dark.
“Santino?” She looked into the game room, where her partner was talking to one of the gardeners about the care and feeding of African violets. “How much can I tell him?”
A pause, then: “Everything.”
SEVENTEEN
They left the mansion a few hours later, the last of the whiskey buzz burned off by exhaustion. Rachel wanted nothing more than to fall into her own bed, but she had Santino turn off the road at a supermarket. This was a good enough place as any; she had never felt comfortable in parking lots, especially at night. They were about as removed from reality as you could get, sodium lights beating down on dead pavement, half-dead bushes mounded in wasted soil, the cars staking claim to chipped painted lines.
Santino asked her what she needed to buy at this time of night, and Rachel tucked her feet up against the dashboard and started talking.
It was, oh, close to seven years ago when she had been recruited for OACET. She had been about to apply to West Point to pursue her officer’s candidacy. She wanted to go career military all the way, as high as she could before the glass ceiling kicked in, and then she’d fight to break through that. Secretary of Defense had such a nice ring to it...
But September 11th had been a couple of years before that, and the phrase “connect the dots” would never mean the same thing again. Even when she was out in the field, there were rumors of a pilot program designed to bring together the best and the brightest from the federal government, to connect those many disparate agencies and departments and organizations and the labyrinthic tangle of bureaucracies in a way that transcended self-interest.
A program that would allow the country’s government to finally work.
Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?
She had been told she would return to the Army once the orientation was over, that her career path would be straight and true thanks to her participation in this program. She would be changed, but in the best ways possible. She would be able to speak with forces trapped behind enemy lines, or, if necessary, could go in herself and never be cut off from home.
(And if you peeled back the flowery language to see the rot beneath, those departments with the three-letter-names could not wait to get their hands on the cyborgs! Imagine the potential. The out-of-body feature alone had them salivating.)
There was a long selection process. There were countless tests, screenings, drills… The dropout rate was immense. Twenty-five was the top age for candidates, so the competition was energetic and savage. Eventually, the candidates were narrowed down to an even five hundred.
The surgery was successful. The technology was experimental but safe. Not a single person was lost on the table.
For the first few weeks, they lived as though they had discovered magic; they saw the world through fairy-tale eyes. The link was everything. It was impossible to know how alone you were, to appreciate how bitterly isolated you were as a living thing, until that fell away in the collective. Every moment was perfect, like those idyllic nights with a new lover where you get lost in the conversation, the connection, adoring every part of their aspect while you were in turn adored.
It got old pretty damned quick.
They received no helpful advice from those who claimed to know how the implant worked. There were no instructions on how to keep the others in the link out of your own head, and you couldn’t stop yourself from reaching out them when you thought of their name, their job, the brand of their favorite shoes.
(They had already started calling themselves Agents, and were inventing new words as fast as they could. Not being able to describe what they were experiencing to those who supervised their transition was an unexpected and overwhelming barrier: for the first time they realized that, despite all assurances to the contrary, they were no longer normal.)
And then there was the personal digital assistant. It was an interface built into the implant and was cued to the Agents’ emotional status. When an Agent experienced any form of stress, good or bad, the PDA was automatically activated. It was like their avatars, a bright glowing green thing hanging in mid-air. Someone who was either very political or very shortsighted had programmed it to resemble a cartoonish caricature of George W. Bush, and it yammered at them in his voice as it floated at the periphery of their field of vision.
Like all PDAs, theirs was buggy beyond belief. Direct, simple questions were answered in riddles or not at all. It tended to ask them how they were feeling, over and over again, like an insecure junior high school girl terrified of losing a new boyfriend. It wouldn’t deactivate until they gave it a satisfactory answer, and there was no way to tell what answer would finally shut it off on any given day. At first, most of them believed this meant the PDA was a direct interface with a psychotherapist, and they treated long sessions where they couldn’t get it to deactivate as if they were receiving advice from a shrink. When they finally recognized its advice was never helpful, often harmful, they started screaming at it, this thing only they could see.
The medication came next. Obviously, their new tribe of cyborgs met with doctors on a very regular basis. Obviously, they complained to those doctors about the constant stress of never being alone in their own heads. Obviously, they demanded these doctors get rid of this thing that fed off of their stress so the Agents might have a fighting chance to get themselves together. Instead, they got pills. Prozac and Zoloft at first, then lithium with a small chaser of Thorazine. These came with assurances that the PDA was being retooled, but it would take some time to get rid of it entirely: later, when their assurances were no longer believed, the doctors started added sleeping pills.
This was when they had started dying. Not physically—although that was when the suicides had begun—but the life bled out of them all the same. The more resilient among them compartmentalized their minds and bricked off their inner selves from the PDA and the drugs. They trained themselves to ignore their own emotions; the negative reinforcement of the PDA made this a fast process. Those who couldn’t make themselves detach retreated to those time-honored coping strategies of addiction and abuse.
They were slowly abandoned.
Those doctors who had been so conscientious for the first few months vanished, replaced by a lone harried psychiatric resident who made them fill out a Myers-Briggs questionnaire twice a year and was otherwise there only to update the prescriptions. The
politicians and officials who had cosseted them like beloved children disappeared into their respective bureaucracies. OACET’s budget was cut to shreds. No one returned their calls.
They stopped talking to their families, their friends. Making idle conversation with the clerk at the local convenience store was an effort. Easier to shut down completely, to go through the motions of the day on routine alone. They even shuttered out the other Agents: they might not be able to stay out of each others’ minds, but they could train themselves out of accidentally triggering the connection. No physical interaction, no reaching out with questions, or jokes, or conversation. No love, no sex, no new experiences of any kind. They maintained, but they did not live.
Five years of this.
Five lost years.
Mulcahy pulled them out of it. He was sketchy on the details—he had been recovering himself and said much of what he went through was missing or fuzzy—but his soon-to-be fiancée had somehow deactivated his PDA. With that gone, Mulcahy had been able to rebuild himself, and, as was his wont, rose up and laid waste to their keepers.
Josh had been the first one Mulcahy had set free. A heavy, clunky phrase, but an accurate one: the flawed PDA, the constant emotional exhaustion and eventual detachment, the complete lack of support?
All intentional.
They learned their destruction had been designed from the start. The implants required a biological component to function, and no amount of tinkering with monkeys yielded the same results as when the implant was set in a human host. Someone wanted the technology but not the minds attached to it, so they created a secondary level of programming through which the hosts were gradually beaten down, their personalities eliminated. Their implants were only partially activated during this phase: the cyborgs had some of the capacity of full activation, but all interaction with technology and other Agents had been routed through the purposefully-buggy PDA. The antidepressants and sleep aids had been increased until the Agents were barely self-aware. The goal was to break down the Agents until there was nothing left, until they were shells of human beings, good for nothing but obeying a strong, guiding voice. At that time, the PDA would have been removed and their implants fully activated, and those who wanted access to the implant’s abilities without accepting its risks would finally have their army of living weapons.
Poor Congress! They had been sold a bill of goods when they had signed off on OACET. With a handful of exceptions, they were innocent of this scheme, convinced by its designers they were dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into cutting-edge technology when instead they were funding the living deaths of their best and brightest.
But perhaps not so innocent. Some of them had supported the winnowing. Five hundred Agents at the beginning, their number gradually cut down, and down, and down again…
And Santino knew the rest of the story, or most of the important parts at any rate, so Rachel stopped talking, pressed her face against her knees, and tried to pretend she was alone in the car.
“We’re all a little fucked up,” she said into her knees after he had sat in silence for longer than she thought was possible.
“I got that,” he said.
A few minutes later, he asked: “So Shawn is…?”
“A casualty. Mulcahy turned off the inhibitor and brought his implant to full activation, but it didn’t help. He never came all the way out of it. It…cracked Shawn and some of the others. They had held themselves together for so long, and then they were free, and it turns out they couldn’t handle it. They broke. Some of them killed themselves, and the ones that didn’t are locked up in our basement. Mulcahy’s been beating himself up about it ever since.”
She had her implant turned down to basic light sensitivity, so when she peeked out at him she had to raise her head to see what he was doing. He was staring straight up at the sky. Another summer storm was coming in; lightning lined the clouds, barely noticeable above the halos of the sodium lights.
He must have seen her move in his periphery, but kept staring at the coming storm. “You don’t seem fucked up.”
“Me-you, or all-of-us-you?”
“Both, I guess. But you definitely don’t seem fucked up.”
She dragged her feet off of his dashboard and wiped off the dirt with her sleeve. Wasted effort. He’d steal her Windex and do a thorough job in the middle of the night.
“I’m a best-case scenario. It feels like all of my problems stopped when Josh activated me. I see a therapist but I’m not depressed. I can sleep at night. I drink too much but I can blame you for that,” she tried, and was rewarded with his little grin.
“Why haven’t you told anyone this?”
Rachel leaned back against the headrest and sighed. Outside, the first beads of rain appeared against the glass. “Plans. Strategy. Brainwashing has such a negative connotation, don’t you think? We figured it’d be hard enough for the public to deal with us—the idea of us!—without implying we’re waiting to go all Manchurian Candidate.
“And if we did let this out,” she said, “it’d be polarizing. There’d be two camps: those who think we’re about to snap and wipe out the planet, or those who’d pity us and treat us like convalescents. We wanted to prove we’re neither, first.”
“First?”
“This’ll come out,” she said. “There’s no way to hide this forever. But we figured we could buy ourselves some time, show the world we’re stable before they get more ammunition to use against us.
“It’s another reason to protect Shawn and the others,” she added. “They’d be used as ammo, too. You know how people are: ‘If three cyborgs went nuts, who’s to say they all won’t go nuts? Better to shoot first and set fire to them later… Anyone remember to bring the shovel and the tombstones?’ Etcetera, etcetera, and etcetera.”
“So you’re telling me this because I know about Shawn?”
She shook her head. “Because of what you did for Shawn. Tonight,” she said, waving off his next question. “You saw him. Smiling, laughing… Interacting. We had written him off, but now… I don’t know. He was trying to pull himself out of it. He might come back.”
“I should get stabbed more often.”
“Don’t tempt fate. We’ve still got those two others down in the skull cellar.”
A moth the size of her fist landed on the windshield. They watched as its wings pumped slowly, then it flew back into the night to escape the rain and was gone.
“Why aren’t you freaking out about this?” Rachel asked.
He blinked. “I am. Can’t you see that?”
“Turned the emotional spectrum off. Couldn’t handle it.”
“Ah.” He was silent for a moment, then said, “Back in college, a friend told me she had been raped.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. And I did what I thought a good friend should do. I lost my shit and demanded she go to the police so they could destroy the guy.”
“Bet that ended well.”
“It was the last time she spoke to me.” Santino shifted around in his car seat so his gun wasn’t digging into his back. “It took me a few years to recognize how I had made it about what I wanted, not what she needed. Believe me, I really want to hurt somebody for you, but that’s not what you need.”
“I don’t like the comparison.”
He shrugged. “I can’t help what you don’t like.”
It was one of those conversations that moved in fits and starts. The heavy stuff had been thrown into the open and they were trying to pick up the pieces, gently, carefully, wary of the exposed edges. Outside, the storm was growing; rain slapped against the car and lightning cut across the sky. Santino flinched as a bolt shot down, grounding itself on the bent rooftop rods of the strip mall across the street.
“It’s right overhead,” he said.
“Yeah.” Rachel had her implant set to close proximity and she barely noticed the lightning. She ran a loose scan through the storm. “It’s moving fast. It’ll be out to sea in a
few minutes.”
Another bolt of lightning crackled, bright and strong enough to shake the car.
They watched the storm in silence.
“I have a cousin-in-law who’s blind,” he finally said.
She stuck her feet back up on the dashboard and buried her head in her knees again.
“I don’t want to have this conversation,” she said.
“Just this one time, I promise.”
“Fine,” she said into her knees.
“How long? I’m assuming it wasn’t congenital.”
Rachel shook her head slightly. Her suit pants smelled of alcohol and dirt. “There was an…accident right before we went public,” she whispered. “How did you know?”
“Just a guess. You might want to start wearing sunglasses, or covering your eyes when you go out-of-body,” he said. “You’re the only Agent who doesn’t.”
“But how did you know?”
“Little things, like not reacting to lightning.” Santino said. “You don’t turn the lights on when you go into a room, you never meet anyone’s eyes for longer than a few seconds. I finally put it all together after you explained why you never drive.
“Oh, wait,” he said, and she could hear him laughing at her. “No, it was probably that day when you put on a blindfold and still beat me during target practice.”
“You’re a terrible shot,” she said, and came up out of her knees.
“You put on a blindfold. And beat me. At target practice.”
“Comment stands.”
He started the car and splashed through the new puddles dotting the old parking lot. They pulled into the sparse midnight traffic. After a few blocks, she said, “I don’t talk about it. Even with the others in OACET, I don’t talk about it.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I’m just clearing this up.” Rachel flipped her implant back to the full spectrum and his colors, worried yellows and oranges, flooded through her mind. “I don’t want to be ‘the blind one,’ okay? That label doesn’t come off. And it’s not accurate anyhow, because I am not blind. I see better than anyone else on earth.”
Digital Divide Page 27