by Barry Lyga
Khartouk chuckled. “I think you can. I think you can help that by telling me the truth. And I think I know how to get you there.”
Rachel’s spine stiffened. “Just so you know: it’s been proven that physical torture is ineffective. The subject will tell you anything you want to hear in order to make the pain stop.”
Khartouk seemed taken aback. “Physical torture? We’re not monsters, Professor McKinney. We’re the United States government. Trust me when I tell you that we are not going to lay a single finger on you.”
Back to Professor McKinney. Still, she wasn’t sure she could believe him … but she wanted to. Both because he seemed so incredibly, almost innocently, earnest (that voice!) and also because she really, really did not want to be tortured. She didn’t know much. She didn’t know where Cassie had gone or how long she’d stayed there or whom she was with, but she did have one teeny, tiny piece of data that the NSA lacked. She knew a name.
Bryce.
“I have nothing to tell you,” she said. “Nothing you don’t already know.”
“Again, I want to believe you, but I don’t. I can’t. It’s my job not to.” Khartouk glanced over at Hernandez. “Lights.”
With a sweep of his hand, Hernandez flipped the switch and doused the room in darkness. Rachel clenched her jaw, holding back the scream that pounded for attention and release at the back of her throat. They hadn’t done anything yet. They hadn’t touched her. She couldn’t crack this soon. But it was so dark, so suddenly dark, and there were two powerful men with weapons not far from her.
A light flickered, partly illuminating Khartouk. It was his phone, she realized. He tapped at the screen and then aimed the phone at the far wall, projecting an image there. It took her a moment to realize —
“You know what this is?” Khartouk asked calmly. Musically.
She did. A slightly blurred image of her with two-year-old Cassie. The first time Cassie had ridden a carousel, at Glory’s Island, the amusement park near Rachel’s parents’ house. Rachel was wearing a yellow sundress that she hated — it bared her shoulders — but which Harlon adored. “You look like Theia,” he’d told her. The Greek Titan of myth, the mother of the sun. Classical allusions were the way to her heart.
Cassie wore the cartoon-themed jumper she could never be without at that age. She wanted to sleep in it, and they’d compromised by letting her curl up with it like a blanket. One day a week, she was allowed to wear it, and this was that day. Her daughter was perched on a lovingly rendered seahorse, her eyes open wide with glee, her arms flung into the air as Rachel held her around the waist.
Harlon had snapped the picture. A good day. Why were they showing it to her? To remind her of what she’d lost and what she could still lose? She knew already.
“You have my pictures,” she said evenly. “I’m not surprised.”
“Do you know how human memory works, Rachel?” Khartouk asked rhetorically. “No one does, really. Take forgetting, for example. We take it for granted that we’ll forget things. But why? Why should we forget things, and why are we OK with it? We don’t even understand the process — do memories decay? are they interfered with by other memories? — but we just accept it.”
“Now I know how my students feel when I lecture them,” Rachel said, and feigned a yawn.
Hernandez snorted nastily in the dark. Khartouk stared at the photo for a long moment. Then, without a word, he tapped at his phone. A dialogue box came up, two buttons duplicated on the projection:
DELETE PHOTO
CANCEL
He tapped DELETE PHOTO and the picture disappeared. Blank white light projected on the wall.
Was this supposed to intimidate her somehow? Showing her a photo of her daughter and then deleting it?
“Memories,” Khartouk said. “Sometimes they’re lost or dim and we jump-start them with evidence. With photos or souvenirs. But what happens if that evidence goes away? Our brains aren’t infinite storage areas. Without prompting, what do we remember? How long do we remember it? How well?”
If there was a point to this, Rachel didn’t know what it was.
“Take out your phone.” It was Hernandez speaking this time. “And show us that picture.”
A million snarky, rebellious replies clawed their way up her throat, but she did as he’d bidden. Flicking through her photo album, she couldn’t find the picture, though.
“It must not be on my phone,” she said. But she thought all her photos were on her phone. Harlon had set up some kind of cloud account. Everything was supposed to be there.
“What about this one?” Khartouk asked. He’d projected another photo, this one of Rachel and Cassie at a toy store. Beaming together at the camera as Harlon snapped away.
“Right here,” she said, bringing up the pic. She held out her phone to show them.
Khartouk nodded and once again brought up the DELETE dialogue. The photo vanished from the wall. “Check it now,” he said.
She turned her phone so that it faced her again. She was no longer looking at the toy store picture. It was now a photo from later in the day, when Cassie had tried her first milkshake. Chocolate, of course. (Or, as she pronounced it then, “chockit.”)
Rachel swiped back, but the toy store photo was gone.
Clever. They could control her phone. But everything was backed up in the cloud.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Khartouk said. “You’re thinking, But I have backups.” He sighed sadly. “No. You don’t.” He projected another photo and started swiping through. In a blur of motion, Cassie went from newborn to her first steps to her first birthday …
“See, we, uh, liberated some technology from Google. Related to image lookups. Now, when I delete a photo here” — he waggled his phone in the air — “a bot goes out into the web and finds every instance of that same photo. Every single copy. Every backup. On your computer at home. On your phone. In the cloud. Every copy. And destroys it. Overwrites it with ones and zeroes to a military-grade deletion spec so it can’t be recovered.” He paused to let his words sink in. “Those pictures are gone forever, Rachel. You will never, ever see them again. Except in your memories. Which” — he shrugged — “we’ve already discussed.”
Rachel realized that she’d gone cold. Her body was trembling — the phone in her hand shook. It couldn’t be true. But she had the evidence literally in her own hand.
A photo of Cassie on her first birthday, face cake-smashed. Icing everywhere. Took forever to wash it out, a screaming one-year-old hopped up on sugar, thrashing in the bathtub and then it was gone, deleted. Rachel let out an involuntary moan.
Cassie at two, caught in a moment of repose, staring far off into the distance, something so ancient and knowing and unknowable in her eyes, captured magically, serendipitously, and then, in less than a blink, the photo was gone.
“No!” Rachel screamed. “No!” She lurched up out of the chair but managed to rise only a couple of inches. At some point, Hernandez had come up behind her, and his hands caught her shoulders, shoved her back down into the chair.
She trembled, watching through tears as Khartouk calmly called up and obliterated moments from her life at random. Harlon’s fortieth birthday disappeared into the ether. Cassie’s first day of kindergarten. Her own baby shower. Gone, gone, gone. All as Khartouk musically narrated each image before consigning it to oblivion with a casual tap of his finger.
“Imagine if your daughter dies, Rachel. Imagine if she dies and you don’t even have a picture left to remember her by.”
It went on endlessly. She didn’t know how long. She lost count of the number of pictures. How many pictures do parents take of their children? Surely hundreds in those first soft, sleepless months alone. And over Cassie’s lifetime? How many thousands?
Rachel watched Cassie’s third-grade dance recital disappear. She held on furiously, clenc
hing her fists. Every part of her yearned to scream out Bryce’s name, to give them the single piece of data she had in her possession that could end this.
It would be easy to do.
It would be so easy to do.
*
They returned her to the apartment some indeterminate time later, with a stern warning not to leave the state without contacting them first.
She’d lost track of the time and of how many photos — and which photos — they’d deleted. At some point during the hellish process, she’d stopped begging. She’d just become one protracted moan, her eyes no longer focusing, not even able to steal one final look at the photos as they erased them from her world for good. Eventually, Khartouk had sighed, shut off his phone and said, as though to a disinterested third party, “She’s no good to us. She doesn’t know anything.”
Now, sprawled on the floor of her apartment, her mind refusing to function normally, she felt as though a flu bug racked her body. She lay there for too long, then managed to drag herself to the sofa. With a heroic effort, she used the arm of the sofa to pull herself up to her knees.
And fuck them, she decided.
Fuck. Them.
She’d resisted. She hadn’t given them Bryce’s name. She’d held out as they’d erased Cassie, sacrificing the certain past for the hopeful future.
Harlon’s voice rang in her head. Telling her what to do. She stood and made her way to her laptop. Paused. Then she went to the coat closet, where the cable guy had installed the modem and wireless router. With a fierce cry of victory, she yanked out the power cords.
Your laptop can still pick up other Wi-Fi signals, Harlon told her. It’s not safe.
She returned to the laptop. Flipped it open. From her desk, she scrounged around until she found a USB key. The size of her photo library was much, much tinier than it had been earlier that day. Choking back a sob, she copied what remained to the USB drive. No Wi-Fi on that. No way to erase it remotely. At least, not that she knew of.
It wasn’t much. They could always just take the USB key from her. But it was something. It was something and she would take it.
There was something else she would take, too.
Control.
*
Once she was safely ensconced in her office, behind keycard access and university security officers, Rachel’s fingers drummed over her laptop. There was an idea stewing inside her, one that her brain was a little too afraid to consider. It was risky. But what wasn’t right now? She tapped some keys, made some movements. She watched as if from afar.
Rachel had never read #UniversityMoms before. Then again, she could count on one hand the number of hashtag threads she had read. Once, before Harlon had died, he and Cassie had made her look at #ClassicsProfessorsBeLike, and the comments had in equal parts infuriated and amused her.
She browsed through the thread. The university had pretty good benefits for working parents, including on-site daycare and various support groups, but this thread consisted of minor complaints, general encouragements and — Rachel’s fingers hovered over these conversations — a philosophical thread about the changing role of mothers in their children’s lives today, as technology was helping them evolve into adults more quickly than in the past.
Her fingers flew. She posted before she could really think about whether that was the smart thing to do. Then again, it didn’t matter if it was smart. It just had to be effective. It just had to be something she could do, a task she could complete, instead of waiting for the inevitable breakdown that was sure to come as she watched the world hunt down her only child.
She published it and watched the comments roll in.
*
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Posted by: McKinneyR
I need help from other moms. You might be the only people who understand, who can help stop this. Because, like me, you’d do anything — ANYTHING — for your kid.
My daughter is 17, and she did something stupid. I did stupid things when I was a kid, too. I don’t know a single adult who hasn’t. But we didn’t have the world watching us back then. I’d say that makes us lucky.
Think of the worst thing you ever did back then. And now think of how you would feel if the world had seen it. Think of how you would feel if the world had permission not just to determine your punishment but to dole it out, too.
That’s what’s happening to my daughter right now. My only child is running for her life. Cassie is just a kid. She deserves to learn from her mistakes, to grow and contribute to the world. She doesn’t deserve this.
As parents — mothers — we have a moral obligation to keep our kids safe. To create a world that’s safe for them. And yet … we live in this world of online justice, where every move we make is up for public debate. Imagine if it were your kid. Imagine if your child was missing because a bunch of strangers decided she’s not worthy of life.
Help me, moms. I’m begging you. Help me save my kid.
100101400101
Rachel and Harlon had differed on how to raise Cassie. Harlon was less concerned with whether Cassie had finished her vegetables than whether she’d figured out the optimal way to chop and cook them. Rachel would assign Cassie chores and talk about responsibility; Harlon would help Cassie dirty every dish in the house while they made inedible cookies (which they ate anyway) and then suggest they just throw them out and buy new ones. “Fail fast and move on!” was his mantra. Cassie was witness to more “discussions” about what was best for her than she cared to remember.
In the hours after the ticker hack, Cassie reveled in the memories, feeling like she was a child again, listening to Mommy and Daddy bicker over how to deal with her. Half of OHM, led by TonyStark, thought Cassie had done a brilliant job proving her worth, while the other half thought her “stunt” to be unnecessarily dangerous, outrageous, immature, aggressive and — what was it Piercings Guy had called it? Ah, yes, Cassie remembered: egotistical.
Given the vociferousness of the debate, she thought it would be a squeaker, but it wasn’t even a close vote. In the end, even Piercings Guy was shamed into raising his hand for Cassie.
She breathed a sigh of relief — she was in. She was part of OHM now. She belonged and she had help.
By way of official welcome, they gave her a smartphone that had been manufactured before she was born. It couldn’t even load apps other than the ones that were already on it. And its interface was a muted series of gray tones.
“Security through obscurity,” TonyStark told her. “Don’t do anything stupid with it. It doesn’t have a GPS chip, so they can’t track you with it, but they can still find you if you’re dumb.”
“And the dull-ass screen?” she asked.
He sniffed. “It’s been proven that the colors in mobile interfaces are designed to stimulate your adrenal responses. You get a dopamine kick from the color combinations so you stay glued to the screen. We kill the colors so we can focus on things other than Candy Crush and BLINQ.”
With a grateful shriek of delight, she scrambled away to figure out the nitty-gritty of the phone. She finally had a new lifeline to her dad, once she could hack the thing to use an encrypted SMS client. She suspected part of the reason for giving her such outdated tech was to test her mettle yet again.
She had just started setting it up when TonyStark found her and announced that he had news.
“We have confirmation your mom has been brought in for questioning,” he told her. His voice was nothing close to gentle; he could have been a waiter telling her the kitchen
was closing in five minutes. “They’re making a big deal of the new processes in place for Level 6, so they’re using Rachel as an example.” He showed her his laptop screen.
Tish and a couple others joined them. Cassie paled when she saw the image of her mother. She looked like she’d aged ten years.
“They’ve arrested her?” she said, aghast.
TonyStark shook his head. “Nah, the records say she’s just there for questioning. They’ll probably release her soon, back to your apartment.”
Good news, yes. Cassie, though, was beginning to wonder if she would ever stop feeling like the wind had been knocked out of her. “And then what? She’s just supposed to go back to work tomorrow? To regular life?” Her voice sounded like someone else’s.
“Cass …” Tish said gently.
“No, seriously, what?” Cassie’s eyes had taken on a wild look. “There’s a mob of people trying to kill her daughter and she’s supposed to just … take it? Let them? Get up in the morning and have a shower and put on a suit and take the subway to work and eat breakfast and drink coffee and —”
“Kid. Come with me.” Tish grabbed Cassie’s elbow and pulled her away from TonyStark. His face flooded with relief. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“A walk? Where, to the end of the hotel?” Cassie muttered.
“Hey,” Tish said sharply. “We’re lucky to be here. Never forget that.”
Cassie struggled to control her breathing. After a moment she whispered, “Sorry,” and then her face collapsed, tears flowing.
Tish led Cassie through a maze of rooms she hadn’t managed to explore yet, on the other end of the building, facing west, Cassie guessed, based on the hints of sunset peeking through the tiny rips and tears of the window coverings. These rooms were in slightly less habitable shape, and she and Tish stepped carefully over holes and dips in the floors. Finally, Tish reached their destination, such as it was: an alcove in the rectangular shape of the rest of the hotel room. There was a makeshift seat — cushion, blanket — and a stack of books Cassie recognized from her childhood. Chapter books, picture books. Kid stuff.