The Official Report on Human Activity

by kim d. hunter

Gen was one of the rare workers whose brain could encrypt. House members would painstakingly download seemingly innocuous scraps left in Gen’s implants and decode the information. The Girl had immersed herself in the coding and unraveling of the barriers between nations such that she felt she could travel anywhere in the world without a visa, though, for some reason, she had little desire to try.

  But the most significant thing the Girl had learned at the house with Gen, the thing she was most anxious to share with the Revue, was how to tell stories. All the formulas for coding and decryption were memorized and passed on orally with fetishistic attention to detail. The training for this began with learning and reciting old stories. Rooms in the house were filled with handbooks, some of which were hundreds of years old, fragile, brittle, and hardly ever brought out into the light. The frail condition of the books further inspired people in the house to memorize the stories. It had become one more thing—not to commit to writing—along with the house security measures. As much as she loved holding the contours of stories in her mind, the Girl had mixed feelings about the high place oral storytelling held in the culture of the house, which included passing stories orally.

  “The stories are great, but I don’t hear that well,” the Girl said defiantly at one house meeting. “What am I supposed to do? You gonna pay for my modification? No! I read stories, that’s how I memorize.”

  No one spoke at first. The young man facilitating the meeting looked sheepish but tried to sound firm and confident.

  “Reading isn’t stories. It’s just words.”

  ***

  Everyone in the Revue was suspicious of the Girl for some time. Nat paid perhaps the least attention to her and Tina was the first to warm up to her.

  “I’ve never been one for security clearances,” she’d said to the Girl after a rehearsal. “They’ll always find what they’re looking for, even if it’s not there. Might as well be open.”

  The Girl smiled broadly, could not control herself, and rushed to embrace a surprised Tina. She responded to the Girl’s embrace knowing only that they both needed to be held at that moment.

  After that, the Girl felt she had nothing to hide and began to tell Tina what she’d learned at the House, how modern weapons and company security were coded in rudimentary sounds she had learned to unravel. Tina was troubled by what she heard. The Girl was on the verge of being a woman, but, Tina felt, was still too young for what she was carrying around. Nonetheless, she thought the Girl should present to the group in the hopes of decommissioning the units that were disrupting the shows.

  “There is the sound and the thing that produces the sound. We think about them together, but as we know they’re separate things: the bell is not the ringing. Well, some folks have learned to blend certain electrical impulses, really to copy what goes on when we imagine a sound in our heads and turn that into a weapon. Who would have thought such a sliver of a thing could ever leave our heads let alone become a force?”

  Nat was interested but distracted. Other Revue members became restless and rude during the Girl’s presentation. Violence at the shows was their main focus and preoccupation. Few, if any, were interested in how corporations had come to blend sounds and their sources until the Girl made a connection.

  “If you give me one of the fallen units from the attacks at the concert, I can trace it. Of course, once we find the company sponsor, what are we going to do about it? I mean, I guess it’s good information even if we can’t really, you know, do anything with it.”

  She now had the full attention of everyone in the room, most especially Nat’s. The idea of tracing the units made his pulse quicken. But then reality chimed in. The Girl was right. Even if they found out which corporation was sending the attackers, what could they do about?

  Nat recalled the period when he truly began to understand slavery, how it shaped the world he shared with the non-dark people. The history he lived with. The barbaric attacks on innocent fans felt like something else.

  The Girl had put plain light on what had been there for all to see, the problem with the companies, the wealth compounded with control, how even such a minor disruption and breaking of certain rules couldn’t be tolerated by certain people with power. That was his analysis. He didn’t know how the Bird and its earworm sound were connected to people being slashed, hacked, and knocked unconscious.

  What had his mentor, the Old Woman, lived through? Things hinted at from the times she had lashed out at him? Where was the teacher who played the trumpet in school? What had happened to the inmates that could not sing and play, to the man with the kora? The only people he’d ever seen that were close to being free and happy were the ones running the prison, and some of them would have been happy to let him drown during the storm. None of it was enough. Now, they were opening the skulls of people who had come to see him do the one thing that drew him close to any semblance of happiness. His anger was so sudden and fearful that, for a moment, he was paralyzed. The grim stupor gripped him and passed, but the rawness that fueled it imploded and compacted.

  ***

  Members of the Revue were more than happy to take time off from touring to let the Girl explain how to trace units to their companies of origin, to sort through the layers of subsidiaries and get to the principal. There were mixed opinions on what to do, though.

  “Why don’t we shame and expose the subsidiaries too? They’re just as bad as the root corporation,” said the drummer.

  “I say we take a break from the stage and chill for a while, wait this thing out,” said the pianist.

  “Take a break, yes, but only to search out these sons-of-bitches. I want to feel somebody’s throat in my fists,” said the trumpet player.

  Tina, exasperated, rose and spoke, at first a bit too loudly, and everyone had to slam their hands over their ears to prevent damage. She modulated her volume.

  “We don’t even know who these people are or why the hell we’re their targets,” she said as she sat back down. “At least let her finish telling us what the deal is,” she said, turning to the wiry, dark trumpet player, “before you start crushing people’s windpipes.”

  Nat slipped out of the meeting. He was ashamed of feeling like the trumpeter, having the urge to feel the life being forced from someone’s body in retribution for the concert violence and all the things that had become tangled with it in his mind. He would never be able to admit that to Tina. But he had found a glimmer of hope, if not redemption, when something the Girl said clicked with his memory of the rescue mission. He went to his room to find the old probe.

  ***

  The Scientist and the Author were using copious amounts of their now substantial combined revenue streams to search for their daughter. The firms they employed were among the best. At least one had been used by the first CEO who had used the sleeping cure. None of them had any experience with the more primitive methods of trail encryption the Girl had learned from Gen and company.

  Months passed. The only thing that lifted the parents’ spirits was the occasional lurid pink feather they would find in the Girl’s room or loads of crap the bird left outside of the window. They never saw or heard the creature itself. The Author had dreams where she and the Scientist would “discover” that the feathers and the droppings were hallucinations, mirages they had deluded themselves into seeing. She would awake just as they fell despairingly into each other’s arms.

  One day, the Scientist arrived at the home of one of his wealthy repeat customers only to find the place surrounded by security. He’d seen lights from a distance but had assumed it couldn’t have been his client’s location where the incident was taking place, since the Scientist had received no call or signal of any type.

  When he got close enough for the elite frequency sirens to be picked up by anyone, security confronted his transport unit and insisted he come inside. They refused to answer his questions but bombarded him with their own. It wasn’t until they allowed him to re-board his transport and head home that he di
scovered the woman whose condition he’d come to check on was dead.

  She was the first of his clients to die. When the third one died, the Scientist relented to the Author’s advice to seek legal counsel. By the fourth death, he was in custody. When a fifth death occurred, the outcry from corporate sectors for his punishment was so great that authorities scheduled his trial. This, despite the fact that the fifth murder took place while he was in custody.

  It seemed nothing could save him. The prosecution argued that the Scientist could have timed the murder to occur while he was detained, to throw them off. The fact that he would lose serious revenue once his clients died meant nothing next to the utter befuddlement of the authorities. The closest thing they had to a clue was that the Scientist was the only thing all the victims had in common. Attempts by the less elite wealthy clients to save him were utterly thwarted by stories bought and sold by the most elite clients who had been completely cured, in no small part because they were late to the party and still needed treatment. Stories of vengeance sold well on all platforms, and the wealthy needed vengeance.

  The Scientist could only reflect on all of this since they’d done outpatient mod to prevent him from speaking lest the guards and who knows who else might fall prey to his sleep-inducing verbiage.

  ***

  Murder had not been a conscious, preplanned goal when Nat first learned to trace units to sources and then sources to principal shareholders. Even after he screened the story of his mentor, the Old Woman being picked up on some fanciful charge because she’d been linked to him, he had no conscious plans to take anyone’s life.

  Indeed, he wasn’t even sure that the probe, even with the mods the Girl suggested, would allow him to drift under the security of the locations he visited. He was amazed and heartened to discover that the old-style probe and sound synthesis completely undid the security systems and live security units, disabled the former and paralyzed the latter. He walked in on the wealthiest of the wealthy unannounced, often waiting for them to get dressed and enter the receiving area, as they always assumed only welcome guests could make it into their inner sanctums.

  He began by introducing himself, though some knew who he was. He produced pictures of concertgoers who had been victimized by the “security” units sent by the companies to which the rich person belonged. If his host had posted writings about live shows and earworms, Nat showed their news screens. He then laid out the case that made it clear that the earworm was caused by the Bird and the Bird alone, and that live performance had nothing to do with the affliction. Ideally, he wanted to get to the part about how the ever-warming planet was what enticed the bird to move so far north in the first place. In any event, there was, he stressed, no connection between the earworm and any live performances, including those by the Nat and Tina Turner Revue.

  Reactions to his presence and presentation ranged from laughter to horror, from serious engagement to utter silence. Eventually, the security units would begin to wake and were able to move. The first time this happened, Nat panicked and lurched through the probe to re-engage and subdue the security units again.

  The sudden movement back into the units permanently damaged or injured several of them, but no one realized this until much later. His panicky reaction also stunned the people Nat had come to speak with. He pulled back, shocked, when he realized the probes he’d used to break security had put him in their minds. He tried to pull away. But he found that he was also pulling out of the security units and that would be his undoing. So he re-engaged to knock out the units. As a result, sometimes the person he’d come to speak with appeared to fall asleep. If not, he would probe them for the root of the thought that live shows were connected to earworms. Could he undo the connections? It was tempting. But he didn’t have the skill, and when those who had managed to stay awake when he had first entered them fell like ragdolls, he would leave. There was no trace of his visit.

  ***

  The Scientist, who had spent a great deal of his time avoiding interaction or desperately trying to figure out how to make it work, now found himself with more different kinds of people than ever before. Some inmates felt sorry for him when they learned he had been modified and that he couldn’t speak. Some found it frustrating and used the influence they had (he was in a relatively high-end unit) to move him or be moved themselves. Soon he wound up with one cellmate who talked incessantly. He learned more about the man than he knew of his own daughter. Thoughts of his wife and daughter were his shield against the onslaught of words.

  The Author’s visits were the only time he was released from modification. But those meetings were timed and brief. During one such visit, his wife entered looking happy but very tired. She did not let him speak and came in only long enough to tell him that he should steel himself. When he appeared ready, she left, and the Girl entered the room.

  When she had set out to visit her father, The Girl had been anxious and in a hurry. But she had to move slowly and deliberately so as not to be trailed from Nat and Tina’s. It took more than a day for all of the tracking devices to fall neutral. It took all of her will not to respond with excitement. While she had had sporadic contact with her mother, she had not seen her father for what seemed like a very long time. But even the inner joy she held to herself was short-lived and was replaced with a mix of relief and despair when she actually saw him.

  There was an initial spark to his face when he first saw her. They could not touch, but she heard him shout for the first time in her life. His arms shot out to his side as if he were able to grasp her, and then thrust above his head in jubilation. Almost as quickly, his eyes shut over his broad, twitching smile. He sat, and the happiness slowly drained from his face. The grim light of the place, the smell, the reality of her father’s lost freedom settled in on her, overcame her earnest but inadequate attempts to ignore how bad things were for him at the moment, to say nothing of what lay ahead.

  He was babbling. She understood when he talked about her mother, the Author, but that was all. His eyes rested when he spoke of her, so she tried to keep the subject there even though she was anxious to know about the legal proceedings. It was hard to keep him on any one topic.

  “I spoke to mom yesterday—”

  “The trackers they make you swallow, enormous horse pills really. Was she able to get the house back in order? How were the repairs?”

  “She said things are coming back and that she’s doing well under—”

  “—the circumstances, yes, completely understandable. You know they make me watch the search of the house, screen it night after night, but it’s—” He paused and his eyes began to dart back and forth.

  “Mom explained everything. She had some friends look at the search and all the other evidence. One of them wrote a book about it, didn’t even sell as many as mom’s first books, so, no news screens to speak of.”

  Thinking of his wife and her work took him back to days after he’d lost his job. How happy he should have been. The only thing he’d done right back then was not to speak openly about his fear that the Author’s work could sell. Thinking about what should have been suddenly gave him the courage to do the right thing now, the courage to more fully face the emotions he’d felt when the Girl entered the room. He moved his face so close to the barrier that she could see the heat from it color his face.

  “I love you more than the world,” he said, just as silence overtook him.

  ***

  Nat came into the house of a man that he knew was of East Asian descent. But he could not tell if the man and/or his family were from what had been China, or Japan, or any of the Southeast Asian countries whose names were so vague to him now. The weight of all the things of which he was ignorant fell upon him and a great wave of anger and resentment surfaced. He hated self-pity and what he felt of it made him even angrier.

  “Where are your people from?” Nat all but screamed. The man was almost too frightened to answer. He had realized almost instantly who Nat was, as no one e
lse could have gotten past the defenses.

  “What the hell does it matter? Just don’t kill me for God’s sake.”

  “You have to stop sending units to our shows. We have nothing to do with the earworm.”

  “Earworm? What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t have any goddamn earworm. Look, I’m sorry, don’t mean to be—it’s nothing personal, nothing between you and me. I got a family, please, I got a family.”

  Something in Nat felt the need for justification. How many homes of the wealthy had he entered in the last days, weeks, months? Each of them had been connected to head-splitting violence that had happened in front of him, that cut into his sleep and made him think of prison when he was awake. He’d invaded the homes of the wealthy because there was a weight on his chest that made breathing a chore. The man in front of him was part of that weight, wasn’t he? So what if he had a family? Everyone has a family: a mother and a father and all the subsequent connections.

  But what if the man didn’t have the worm? Nat pressed forward and probed him. But the man’s obvious suffering, distorted facial features—had the others grimaced so?—and deep, wretched, involuntary noises made Nat pull back, drop the questions, and make a staggered run out of the house past groggy guards and a flickering security apparatus.

  ***

  The Girl was in a near fetal position on the couch at her parents’ home. A cup of tea steamed on the table next to her and gave the room a rich warm smell. Her mother would come into the room occasionally to check, hoping she would drink before the tea became cold.

  The Girl’s silence and worry became too much for her mother and she sat down next to her daughter on the couch.

  “You don’t know how relieved I am to have you back. If both of you had wound up in prison, I’d don’t know what I’d do.”

  “Prison? How would I have ended up in prison?”

  “You were with people that were interrogated. One of them was killed. The Revue is very close to being shut down.”