Tortured Echoes

by Cody Sisco

  Getting him hired at the kennel might be tricky. Maybe there was a contractor with onsite access. That could be Chico’s way in. Or there was always the option to run it as a surveillance op. Whatever it took, she’d get it done.

  The realtor presented her with the keys, still grinning, his teeth straight, if a little yellowed. For a moment, she felt a gentle lustful tug between her legs, but she dismissed it, confident it had more to do with her feeling of accomplishment and progress at landing an apartment than with his sex appeal. She did give him a quick hug, though, before she took the keys and ushered him out the door.

  A little black rain cloud of doom tried to intrude on her thoughts—the image of Victor in a room with Samuel Miller—but she ignored it. His decision. His problems. She kept repeating those four words as a mantra to absolve herself. His decision. His problems. I’ve wasted years of my life on him. Not another second.

  Elena’s stomach rumbled. She was halfway to the chiller to take out a snack when she remembered it was empty, as were the cupboards and drawers. The type-pad on the side of the chiller confirmed that it wasn’t even powered. She turned it on, locked the apartment, drove to the plaza in the center of town, and got a parking space along the main road.

  The Puro grocers at the market were packing up, returning vegetables and fruits to their StayFresh containers. Elena bought onions, garlic, tomatoes, and squash. She would run to the store for sausage and bread later. The farmer-owners behind the stall’s table, an older married couple who had wrinkled faces and most of their teeth, tried to undercharge her. The man winked at her.

  She said, “I’m happy to pay full price.”

  “You’ll pay all right,” a voice said from behind her.

  The husband froze and stared over Elena’s shoulder. The wife hastened to pack the remaining produce.

  Elena turned and stared up into the harsh expression of a man wearing a full suit of black combat armor. A Corp. His buddies, also armored and wearing utility belts to carry their weapons and tech gear, stood nearby, scowling.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, she told herself. She’d left her stunstick in the car.

  An uncomfortable silence lengthened. The grocers hustled, stacking boxes. Their movements were panicked. They finished loading everything onto a cart. All that remained was to collapse the tent so they could take that as well.

  “We’ll take care of that,” the lead Corp said when the husband moved to the tent crank. “You can leave your trash too.” The Corp nodded at boxes on the cart.

  People around the plaza began to approach. The non-Puro sellers had all cleared out. A few Puros—farm folk, not Elena’s armed compatriots—returned from their vans, having loaded their goods already. Onlookers drifted closer.

  Elena watched a crowd gather with a sinking feeling in her stomach. There wasn’t much sympathy on their faces.

  “Don’t know if you’ve heard about Houston,” the lead Corp said loud enough for the crowd to hear. “Puros set fire to the Emporium. Ten bodies recovered so far.”

  The husband and wife were standing close, arms wrapped around each other, trembling. Elena stood stone still, no idea what to do. Houston was hundreds of kilometers away. She wouldn’t worry about it, normally.

  “Sorry to hear it,” Elena said. “Let’s hope it ends there.”

  The lead Corp said, “Not a chance.” He turned to his crew. “Light it up.”

  A Corp with a toothy smile stepped forward, pulled something off his belt, and squirted a viscous liquid on the produce boxes.

  Elena had seen enough. She grabbed the husband and wife roughly and pulled them along with her. “Get out while you can,” she whispered. They started jogging but were stopped short by more Corps.

  “Make them watch!” someone shouted.

  Elena felt a hot blast on her back. She turned, checking to make sure her hair wasn’t aflame, and saw boxes of produce and the tent blazing. Small fireballs leapt into the air. Whatever flammable gel the Corp had used seemed designed to be a crowd pleaser—the fire changed color, blue and green flames licking skyward.

  “That’s two weeks of our crop gone,” the husband said.

  “We’ll make it right,” Elena said.

  The wife asked, “What did he say about Houston?”

  “Just a sec.” Elena checked her MeshBit for the news. It was the first story in her feed. Puros protesting products laced with stims had set fire to the Emporium while there were people inside. She told the grocers what happened, adding, “I don’t believe it. They wouldn’t have done that. There’s got to be more to the story.”

  People watching the fire started chanting, “Puro, Puro, no, no, no. Puro, Puro, go, go, go!”

  Great, Elena thought, now we’re a spectacle, which is pretty much a death sentence. Time to beg Tosh and the King for a reprieve.

  27

  Overlooking the clock-face city in the desert, he said, “Money and power, that’s all there is.”

  —Muriel Stein’s The “King” of Las Vegas: Portrait of a Myth

  31 May 1991

  New Venice, The Louisiana Territories

  After dinner, Del led a group of six potentiates, including Wonda, on a walk through the camp. Victor trailed behind. He needed some silence. Cool moist air smelled of green grass and hints of lilac. Highway traffic created a low whoosh like an unending wave retreating from the shore.

  Despite everything that had happened to him, he felt good. It was a precarious balance, he knew. He was doing his best to keep a firewall between the shock of the data egg and the present moment—a feat Pearl would have congratulated him on. All the messiness of his life and the weird, dull, distance he felt between his mind and body aside, things could be worse.

  Victor recalled the feeling he’d had leaving Amarillo, that maybe the problem wasn’t so much with him as with the people around him. Maybe the Human Lifers gave him what he needed, like the sun and rain were for plants, nourishment.

  His head was full of these thoughts as he walked down the lane of trailers. He didn’t notice the buzzing sound growing louder around him until a red flashing light crossed his path, stopped midair, and crossed again, drawing closer. A dark whirring thing like a fat black beetle hovered in front of him, a single red LED blinking on a repeating pattern, one flash, a break, two flashes, a break, three flashes, a break, and then the pattern started over again. It was Ozie’s code, an old joke about how easy some entry passcodes had been before biometric encryption became the standard for Mesh interfaces. The beetle thing darted away, stopped, came back, started moving away again. It wanted Victor to follow.

  The beetle flew between two trailers, past miniature yards whose borders were marked by short, knee-high fences painted to glow in the dark. There was a narrow dirt track between the yards, a strip of wild grasses, and beyond the vegetation, a looming black fence like a line of ebony piano keys standing on end, the gaps between them too narrow for any adult to squeeze through. Victor followed the beetle along the path paralleling the fence. Its red light glowed steady, illuminating the ground. He came to a gate, which opened—no lock on it—and then he was hiking over a low hill. When he reached the top, he saw that he’d climbed over an embankment along the upper stretches of the Passage. Ouachita Dam loomed over him, its skeleton rib-bone architecture visible in the glare of security lights blaring on top of the dam.

  Ozie stood silhouetted by the lights. He raised one hand in a quick wave, his robot arm.

  “What are you doing out here?” Victor asked.

  “Lifers told me I wasn’t welcome inside. They say I’m not 100 percent human any more. I say they’re 90 percent bacteria. The consensus is we keep our distance from each other. You all right?”

  Victor had no idea how to answer that question.

  “Pearl’s coming to see you. All of them are: Karine, Circe, Mía, even Alia. ‘Where’s Victor? How is he?’ Not that they ask me, of course, but I can read all their messages. Tosh told me about the data egg, who kille
d Jefferson. I’m sorry, Victor.”

  Tosh knows?!

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Victor said, suddenly feeling as if he were walking a tightrope in a hurricane.

  “I’m getting out of here. Going back to Las Vegas. The King knows, wants to make a plan to take out BioScan. I’m going to help him. You’re factored in.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Means you have a part to play. I convinced him to leave it for now. You’re taking one step at a time, I can tell.” Ozie’s voice in the dark was sympathetic, friendly—it sounded just how it had in their college days, but now everything was more complicated, and Victor didn’t know what layers of meaning might be hidden within it. He didn’t try to decode them.

  Ozie said, “You can give me the data egg, okay?”

  Victor shook his head, then wondered if Ozie could see his expression in the low light and whether he’d had anything done to his eyes to enhance them. He said, “I’m done with it.”

  “So give it to—”

  “No.” Victor didn’t try to put into words how he felt about the way Granfa Jeff had ruined his life with his plans and secrets. His imaginary island beckoned—his mental retreat when he’d needed one during his years in SeCa’s mire—warm sand, salty spray, and an endless shore without people. “I’m done with it. You’re done with it. Everyone. It’s over.”

  Ozie planted his hands on his hips. Victor wondered if one felt heavier than the other. “You don’t get to say,” Ozie complained. “We all—He asked us for help. It’s a debt.”

  “He’s gone. Debt absolved.”

  “You believe what he said, right? About stims. About a cure. About Circe.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Victor turned and started heading down the hill.

  “Victor!”

  He stopped. He waited to hear what plea Ozie would use, already knowing he wouldn’t comply, not that it would fall on deaf ears, only that it would pass through him, like he wasn’t even there.

  Ozie’s feet made rustling noises in the grass as he veered from the path, circled around, and faced Victor, gently placing his hands on his shoulders. “I know this is hard, but you can’t run away from it.” Reflections from the lights atop the dam flashed in Ozie’s glasses. The brightness was blinding.

  Victor shrugged away. “It’s my life. I decide what to do with it from now on.” He stalked down the hill toward the Human Lifers’ settlement.

  Ozie yelled after him, “You can’t ignore the truth!”

  “I’ve got my own, thanks,” Victor mumbled to himself. He headed to Wonda’s trailer. It was empty. He lay down and found the sweet spot at the intersection of sleep, blankness, and dreams.

  ***

  The next morning, loud knocking woke him. He dressed and went outside, blinking in the bright and dewy morning.

  Del had gathered potentiates for an outing. He owned a catamaran that was moored at the farthest north dock on the Passage, a bit upstream from the entrance to the Grand Canal and about a kilometer from the Human Life camp. They walked along a grassy ridge—Del and Victor in the lead, Wonda and four potentiates behind them. The dirt trail followed the terrain up and down. Where it reached low marshy spots, they crossed on wooden bridges that seemed to be made of shipping pallets covered with plywood, damp and moldering. The sun hid behind heavy clouds that portended rain and possible lightning. “How wise is it to go for an outing on the water in this weather?” Victor had asked, but Del had ignored him and none of the others seemed concerned.

  They filed past a guard hut, which was unmanned, and onto the slip, where a dozen boats floated stock still. The water was eerily calm behind a rock jetty, and the wind had died, though Victor had an intuition it would return soon.

  Del went about readying the boat with the help of one of the potentiates, a wiry young man with dark skin and an irrepressible smile that revealed gleaming white teeth whenever he caught Victor’s eye. Wonda helped the others board, gripping each one by the arm, holding them steady. The dock rocked under the shifting weight of so many bodies, while the boat sat heavy in the water, unperturbed.

  Victor climbed aboard, the last besides Wonda, and helped her join him. Though she didn’t seem to need it, he knew she would appreciate the gesture.

  “Squat circle,” Del called out. “As soon as I get us out to sea, so to speak.”

  The engine started up, a guttural sputtering that changed to a smooth hum once they’d cleared the dock and started heading into the Passage at speed. There were no waves in front of the boat, only shallow ripples, the vestigial echoes of the nonexistent breeze. The boat was making its own wind and trailing two wakes behind it.

  Always two. Two is the best, Victor thought.

  Wonda put up her hair in a pony tail to keep it from blowing in her face. Victor’s curls jostled against each other.

  They squatted on fine mesh fabric stretched between the catamaran’s nacelles. Rigging underneath the mesh made X-shaped shadows when they passed through a sunny patch and vanished when they returned to the gloom beneath the clouds.

  The Grand Canal entrance was far off to the left, and to avoid tourist traffic Del swung them around to follow the Passage’s curve, staying close to the shore opposite New Venice. When they were level with the Petit Canal, the catamaran swung right, heading south toward Caddo Lake, low muddy shores to the left and gentle grassy hills to the right.

  Del cut the motor, and they slowed, drifting, until they were moving as sedately as the water around them. Victor noticed that the potentiates weren’t talkative, though they didn’t seem anxious. Most wore expressions of patient contentment, looking out at the scenery, occasionally reaching out to a neighbor to give an affectionate squeeze or pat. Wonda seemed lost in thought and perhaps slightly anxious; she kept smoothing her hair back from her forehead.

  Del squatted and grinned. “We might as well sit for this,” he said. A couple potentiates, the one with the white teeth included, flashed smiles of relief, and everybody sat, some cross-legged and some with legs splayed out wide, the way Victor did.

  “Don’t suppose you saw the MeshNews segment last night?” Del asked, raising his white eyebrows and looking at Victor.

  “I didn’t. No.”

  “Guess your friend was lurking around. Figured you had other things on your mind. We hope he doesn’t keep harassing you. He’s not welcome among us, you understand.”

  “I don’t think Ozie is sticking around much longer,” Victor said.

  “Good,” Del said. He didn’t look exactly pleased, more as if he’d removed a splinter that had been bothering him and now wasn’t sure if he’d gotten the whole thing. “We’re alarmed by what we’ve seen on the MeshNews feeds. The Classification Act must not pass. It seems the authorities have no regard for purity.”

  Wonda cleared her throat loudly.

  “You wish to speak?” Del asked.

  “Yes,” Wonda said. “Before, we saw Samuel with light in his eyes, animated, talking about starting his life again. But whatever light was in his eyes is gone now. They’ve started him back on the Personil.”

  Victor didn’t care what drugs Samuel Miller was on or what BioScan did with him. It wasn’t Victor’s concern. He thought it was creepy how the Lifers shared a vocabulary where common words like “light” seemed to mean something different and unfamiliar.

  Wonda said, “We know you feel Personil’s not a good treatment. We want you to convince BioScan to stop treating him.”

  “They won’t listen to me,” Victor said, knowing that wasn’t quite true. They would listen, sure, but then they’d go through the same, tired excuses he’d heard so many times. And recent experience had proved an unmedicated Samuel was not desirable.

  Del nodded as if he’d known Victor’s answer all along. “This is a sensitive time for the Seeking. The Louisiana Territories have been hostile to us and to our beliefs, to say the least.” He looked significantly at Victor. “We’ve been chased out of
towns over and over again. I’m hoping the local authorities here will be more tolerant, that the people will understand our principles.”

  Wonda made an exasperated face. “We’ve talked about this this, Del! Samuel Miller is the perfect example of how medication is failing humanity, and it’s up to us to help him.”

  “Come on!” Victor said. “Samuel Miller staying on medication is a good thing. We’re talking about a mass murderer. He’s not like anyone else. He’s not a perfect example of anything except a killer. What you’ve seen were highly edited vidfeeds of him on his good days.”

  Wonda put her hand on Victor’s knee and squeezed. “We know it shouldn’t fall solely on your shoulders to stop BioScan. That’s why we’ve started looking into legal options.”

  Victor gazed into her eyes: light blue, hints of violet, untroubled conviction, determination, no second guessing. He admired her even as he shivered a bit inside. Untroubled conviction could take a person into myriad horrors; Samuel Miller was evidence of that. He supposed his aunt was as well—

  He popped over to blankspace.

  He was floating on his back, moist clouds surrounding him, feeling himself bobbing on the wind. A low thrum of energy pulsed in his groin. He was on the precipice of blankness, not fully gone, light and unburdened, balanced, buffeted.

  Gritting his teeth, he returned to reality. It had only been a moment. Wonda was watching him, they all were. Del and the other potentiates wore curious expressions, like waiting for the curtain to rise before a show.

  “Legal options?” Victor asked, remembering what Wonda had been saying.

  “A private company should not be able to medicate someone against their wishes. That’s what we’ll argue. We’ve started canvasing for funds, and we’ve hired a law firm in town. They’re young, just out of law school, and eager to take on BioScan. They’re going to make a name for themselves. That’s why they’re taking our case.”