At the front desk the borg staff were grouped in some kind of conference. Matthew and Julia looked up and smiled, not quite in sync. They seemed more and more like full humans all the time
“Where are we going today?” asked Julia.
“To see Dr. Ewing,” confided Corrag, leaning over the desk in a whisper, playing the intimate card.
“Oh, yes. We’ve been told about that plan. It’s all set,” said Matthew, leering in his uncanny, sidewise stare.
Out on San Jacinto Avenue, the traffic on the people mover was like syrup, moving along at barely above a standstill, while the private light-transit trolley rushed ahead on the parallel track. Below on the street level, a mix of pedestrian city workers heading for the sushi and taco bars for lunch looked from side to side in automatic, synchronized single-mindedness. Everywhere spelled the monotonous grip of the every day in the Augment. A signpost on the street crossing said it all.
"SURPASS.”
There were no greetings. There were no accidents. There was no time for any movement that detracted from the mission statement. To surpass the human, to live solely in the virtual, to actually believe it was possible, required a willing suspension of common sense and solidarity. Corrag grabbed Hera’s hand and gripped tightly in fear of loss. Her innocent, preternaturally wise child had barely ever been out of the Hilton and onto the Dallas street, which was the self-regulated and fearsome street of any city in the Republican Homeland or, for that matter, in the civilized world.
Juanacinta was far back in time. She wondered if Hera remembered. Now Ben talked about Brazil, the Basin, as a wild haven. There was chatter on the Unitube of some indigenous place or other in central Mexico; she couldn't quite remember what it was called. Only that it was gathering strength, enough to be put on notice by the Repho and the government of Mexican puppet Panzon Azueto. And of course, besides the Basin, there were the wild lands closer to home: Baja, the thin stretches of the Ozarks, the Appalachians in the East, some of the scrub lands of the Northwest and maybe Quebec and the villages of the Maritimes where it was still possible to hold out wild. These were the organic stretches left to humankind. To the augmented, they were barren places where nothing could flourish except the evil forces that plotted sabotage and insurrection. The absence of the Augment was an ethical as well as a technological challenge. To the Creative class the wild lands were a constant reminder of possibility, a dimension where time and space danced unobserved by the ruthless algorithms of the Augment, a bulwark of sanity to contemplate their continued existence against the odds, and in the last resort an escape hatch.
Halfway to the DART hoverstop, they saw a male child running through the crowd and suddenly stop, a pale look of panic settle on his face. He couldn’t have been much older than Hera. He was dressed in ordinary denim, with the squat, pushed-in features of a lower order borg, or possibly a clone.
“Where is his mother?” asked Hera.
The child looked like it might rush out in the middle of the street to cut across the avenue. Before it had a chance to do so, a matronly borg stepped aside from the pedestrian flow and bent down, putting its face next to the child’s. The borg woman asked a question or two. The child stammered a response. Then she took it by its hand and led it away. The whole episode lasted approximately ten seconds. The stream of humanity barely varied its pattern. Corrag and Hera walked on, talking it over.
“He must have gotten lost. It happens. Sometimes the Augment has a blip in connection, and a mommy loses track of where she is.”
“Was that lady his mommy?”
“No. Well, in a way we are all moms. Yes. But that was a borg woman. Remember, Hera. What have I told you?"
"I know, but I find it hard to think that way, Mommy."
"They’re not real people. It was her job to help the little boy. That's all.”
Corrag whispered, despite the fact that there was no way she could keep anything they said to each other a secret. Maybe by attending to decorum she would escape reprimands in her file. At some point there would be repercussions, and she would have to fight a forced augmentation by taking it to court. The fact that her father was a proven Creative of producer rank would not help.
“Where is she taking him?”
“I don’t know.” There were so many possibilities. The Government Offices in Federal Square was the most likely. The mother would have to be found to have her circuits inspected, and an intervention would be carried out then and there. All in the name of utility, not love. But Hera didn’t have to know that. She had to try harder to hold herself back with her daughter for the sake of protecting her from the evils of this world. But it was hard. They spent so much time together.
The Texas Mental Hygiene offices were in the Junipero mall. They took the escalator from the station and melted with the crowds going in through the crystal-latticed nave. The seasonal stores were packed with the yearly pedestrian shoppers. Popular items that year were the Hillary Perron dolls and Yuna Bieber hair coloring sets for girls. The clothes were all mauve, for some reason, with a rubberized velour fabric on everything from headgear to lingerie. Fashions tended to run in large brush strokes as befitted the Augment’s ageless demographic. Despite her cynicism, Corrag could not help but wonder at the spread of consumer items laid out in the store windows. During the rest of the year the structure found use as a physical training ground for the urban warrior camps. But a residue of tradition meant the people still wandered in an old-fashioned pedestrian mall at Christmas and looked at store windows. These were the officially licensed Repho manufacturers and their lines of consumer products, instantly available through the creaky, yet effective drone-based delivery services.
Maybe Ben would like an interactive novel. He liked to read histories of the Basin Wars, and he enjoyed the default graphics as he had used to enjoy the gaming challenges of the old Sandelsky line. The past was a nightmare from which they were all trying to wake up, he liked to say, paraphrasing Yeats. Corrag would then remind him of his legendary teenage skills as a gamer, his intuitive talents and prowess. The ways he had figured how to use the data applications to outthink the designers, then showed her how to accumulate wins and impress the architects of Democravia's version of the Augment. All that was behind them now. He would say, “You’re the fighter, Corrag. You found me, didn’t you? God knows where I’d be.”
“Probably the top rungs of the Republican establishment,” she would say.
Once upon a time, he'd been on his way. Ben had parlayed a distinguished military service in the old DDW, the Democravian Defense Wing, into a high rank with the Repho Internal Prosecutorial Service, after they had taken over from the Democravian administration. In those distant years, Corrag had been with rebel forces fighting the Repho in the first campaign for human liberation against the surveillance state, on the Eastern front and then undercover on the West Coast.
Ben was living alone when she’d knocked at the door of the sprawling mansion in the hills outside Santa Barbara. She’d volunteered for the mission, not quite sure what she’d do when she got there. He’d recognized her, broken down and confessed his regrets. They’d confounded the destiny that had been intended, making their way down the coast to the Xen Kai Matamoros Hospital, the one remaining medical institution that still performed the implant removal. It was not perfectly safe. It could have had long-lasting and irreversible repercussions on mental functioning. But it was better than living in a state of perpetual battle between your heart and mind. He still believed Corrag had saved his life.
“Are we going shopping?” asked Hera, tugging at her mother’s hand.
“No. First we’re going to see Dr. Edwards.”
The receptionist greeted them with a fairly synthetic smile and made them look into the ancient biometric headset.
“Oh, you're not augmented,” she said. “You’ll have to see Dr. Edwards.”
“I know that. We have an appointment,” said Corrag impatiently. She looked around at the people
in the waiting room. Nobody looked up from their scapes, all playing the same games, in bubble realities of their own, ignoring their dull surroundings. The Augment was a great anaesthetic, plus it gave bonus discounts on all sorts of purchases when you won. In all products of the Augment, though, there was a trade-off. Mental and submental information was constantly being mined. The capture scans allowed greater personalization in the information flow, but more importantly, they were the key to manufactured consent, predictability and social control. It was harder and harder to resist the allure of this illusion of freedom. Those outside the network still, like Corrag and her daughter, faced official pressure to give up the children. Hera’s educational opportunities would be impacted by Corrag’s decision to keep her free. Hera was already beyond the normal age for the first minimal interventions via oral nanotube supplements. Dr. Edwards would be sure to bring it up again, along with asking about Arthur wIth that non-judgemental, little throat-clearing cough of his. A pang of pain went through her heart at the thought of Arthur. He was way past the stage when she could claim he was going through some personal growth issues. The trouble, in her outdated and inconsequential opinion, was the lack of adults in his life during his formative years, not some missing puzzle piece supplied by the noosphere.
Ben had just come back into the picture eight years ago, too late to have much of an impact on Arthur, when they’d met at the Herbie Pallapus String Quartet concert in benefit of Basin War veterans. Ben’s touch had landed on her shoulder like an angel’s wing brush. He’d appeared out of nowhere, bearded and gaunt, making a living as a busker after the three and a half years of exile at the Amityville prison camps. She’d put the thought of him out of her mind after he’d walked out, six months after the implant removal, never thinking of him as even being alive. His reappearance had fanned the smoldering, inner embers of desire that never seemed to die when it came to Ben.
The music from that evening, Pallapus’s pop heavy beats, still brought back summer-time memories. But for Arthur, having another man around was too late to set him on the straight and narrow. He had been already taking long jaunts south with the diving team of Watts Technical College, secretly looking to join the Dimitrievsky undersea colonies of laborers off the coast of La Paz and spark a revolution which would abolish the Repho state. He’d come home on the run, black and bursting with muscular intensity. He and Ben had never jelled. She didn’t know why. They were both similar emotionally, if you looked under the skin. Arthur looked the spitting image of his father, the illegal Somali artillery specialist on Corrag’s first battle team with the Korazan army.
That last time Arthur had been back, it must have been two years ago, he and Ben had gotten into a yelling match, Arthur shouting about accommodators and parasites, vowing to never live off the fat of the death cult that was the Augment. Except if it was a death cult, as had always been her belief, why was it always growing? Ben called it the quickening, the way a death bound organism had its cycles burning at full bore just before it exhausted itself and collapsed into eternal decay.
Ben had sulked with Arthur around, resenting his stepson’s freedom and lack of restraint, just the way he’d always liked to live before joining the Defense Wing at the age of seventeen, in the wars of the Democravian state against the Basin tribes. Those natives were always protecting the Pachamama from the theft of the planet's life energy. Maybe Arthur reminded him of his old adversaries.
“Mommy, how long?” asked Hera, looking up from her Exe-play tablet.
“Not too much, dear. Come here. Why are you sitting so far away?”
Hera looked around at the others waiting to get in for some care, sensing something odd in her mother’s tone. Already she was picking up on the coldness, the antipathy towards normal human feelings, the old family bonds that were under attack as a reactionary impulse. They were barely tolerated anymore, a sign of the ancien regime, so to speak.
“Come here, baby girl.”
She pulled on her daughter’s arm. Hera smiled. It was an old game of theirs, Hera resisting and then suddenly collapsing in a pile of giggles in her lap while she was tickled. Just then, the nurse on duty frowned from her perch behind the plate glass barrier of the duty station. She slid the glass open and called out Hera’s name. Hera froze and sat straight up. Corrag pulled down her daughter's blouse and instructed her to tuck it into the skirt. They both stood and walked down the hall. Corrag pushed Hera ahead of her, shepherding her away from the protruding legs of the patients in the rack of chairs, apologizing to the mostly unresponsive owners of the legs for the frivolous, mother-daughter banter that had upset the somber mood of the waiting room.
“Doctor will be right in,” said the nurse waiting at the door. She smiled and turned to the inside as they passed.
Hera and Corrag sat on two hard-backed chairs at the desk. Minutes went by. Hera put her head in Corrag’s lap and tried to curl up on the old chair. The door opened and Dr. Edwards came in, wearing his hospital coat, as if just coming off rounds. He looked exactly the same as Corrag remembered: the balding head, the high crown of the nose, the fuzzy eyes behind the glasses and the grey beard trimmed neatly to the jowls. He stuck his hand out to Hera as she sat up.
“Hi there, Hera. How old are you now?”
“Seven.”
“Do you remember me?”
“Yes,” said Hera shyly.
“Good,” said the doctor.
Somewhat awkwardly, he held out his hand.
“Come look, Hera. I want to show you some pictures in a book.”
Sitting Hera down at a separate desk under the window, Dr. Edward’s opened up a large, old, hardcover book. Inside were abstract representations -- swirling, fantastic shapes and bright colors intermingled with tones of black and white.
“What do you see?” he asked the little girl.
This was the old Heimlin-Shach test of personality function. It was about thirty years old but still the best gauge for the unaugmented child’s development of cortical, visual and predictive integration. He went through about a dozen images, asking Hera to interpret them, pausing after Hera’s considered yet often banal answers. She saw a pig-man chimera in a fountain, two birds kissing in flight, three wolves running. Dr. Edwards paused, letting the little girl’s meaningless answers sink in. By the light of the window, Corrag observed the way his eyes would blink just before he bent over to turn the page. She tried to guess what he could be thinking but could not. He finally closed the book and stood by the window, looking blankly out at the sky. Hera turned and looked at her mother. Corrag waved her hand quickly, making a shushing sound to keep Hera in her seat. The doctor turned, but it wasn’t clear that he had heard Corrag. He walked across the silent room and sat in the seat vacated by Hera. He stared, and Corrag stared back. It was hard to maintain her gaze on his. She concentrated on his skin, the lack of visible aging, the odd sheen on his forehead, as if he’d wet himself down with a damp cloth.
“Do you feel that you and Hera are well-utilized in the world?” asked the doctor.
“That’s a very strange question,” said Corrag. “What do you mean utilized?”
“We want to surpass."
"Of course."
"Your daughter’s answers were fantastic, rich and frothy. I‘d like you to consider a survey for Hera. I will recommend her for it, if you agree. I hope you do. It could be very advantageous for you and the other family members.”
“Not the memory sponge.”
“No. It’s called the metadactile survey. There’s no deep probing of memory files or collective structure as in the memory sponge. Just visual associations. You’d be highly valued and in a position to reap many rewards not usually available to the unaugmented.”
“You want me to come in and look at pictures and tell you what I see.”
“Not you. Just Hera.”
“Not Hera. I’ll do it, but not her.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want her mind touched.”
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“She’s already beyond the age of first Augment.”
“That’s not happening. Not in our family.”
The doctor’s back straightened and he twitched his eyes.
“That will make everything problematic: her long-term educational and career prospects, her health, her ability to one day find a partner. It may not be legal for you to make that decision. It’s certainly not very wise, my dear.”
“I thought you were a protector of our rights. What’s happened to you, Doctor Edwards? You’ve changed.”
The doctor's eyes twitched again oddly. He took a step back and turned towards the window. Hera walked past him silently and stood by her mother, placing her hand on Corrag’s back protectively.
“I like you. I want to help you. Listen to me,” said Dr. Edwards. His forehead was still glistening, but now it looked like a sheen of oil was covering his face.
“I think you should listen to me. I have things I need help with. Ben and me, the work, everything is complicated, Doctor Edwards.”
“The best thing for you, Corrag, and I've told you this before, is to take the Augment. Join the work of building the new order. Our network is solving the world’s most complex problems and giving individuals a new lease on contentment, fulfillment and inner peace. Help us with the work of stabilizing civilization.”
“By offering up my daughter? Risking her humanity for your fantasy world? Never. The interstellars will go without us. We can make our way on the home planet, doctor.”
The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3) Page 4