by Cody Sisco
He was rousted from his thoughts by Wonda’s excited voice. “They’ve seen our power, and they know they can’t ignore us anymore.”
“What about the Classification Act and Samuel Miller?” a young male Lifer complained. “There’s nothing about them in the agreement.”
“We’re not giving up,” Wonda said. “He’s still our priority number one. Right, Tosh?”
Tosh nodded, the small gesture carrying outsized weight. His group trailed hers in numbers, but it dwarfed Del’s, who only commanded a handful of old timers. What Tosh’s group lacked in numbers, though, it made up for in aggression.
Victor watched the Lifers with their hammers, saws, cement mixers, and welders, expanding their little village at the foot of the Oauchita Dam. Why would people choose to live in these makeshift accommodations? Was their prior situation so bad that this seemed like an improvement? It didn’t make sense to Victor.
He’d spoken with a man yesterday, a stocky bald guy with a beard and a hairy chest—he never seemed to wear a shirt. He described his hundred-square-meter home in Oklahoma City—“four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a pool!”—the decent salary he’d earned as a court administrator, and his active sports life as a catch-and-carry captain. Then the man’s wife discovered stims and left him for an addict.
Victor thought about telling the man to go track down his wife, get her some help, and rebuild his life. But the man seemed happy. He’d wanted a new start for years, he said. This was his chance to begin again, focus on the things that mattered, do something real. He was sharing a trailer with Donya, and it was great, he said, though he wasn’t a gynophile—he was a duo. He put a hand on Victor’s hip and winked.
Now the hairy shirtless man was helping dismantle the fence. They would reuse the material, reconfigure the borders, and create a bigger Lifer camp with more room for refugees from the materialist fantasy world, as the man called it. We’re living in tune with the spirits now, he said.
And people said Victor had delusions.
Each of the Lifers seemed to be living in a bubble of hot illogical air of their own creation. It was up to Victor to find a way to pop them all at the same time.
Victor had left twenty minutes of messages full of curses for Ozie. The feeds on the MeshBits dropped by the drones had been clever distortions of the truth, enough fact to appear plausible—the legislative summary of the Classification Act was real, but it hadn’t been passed yet. The Lifers weren’t going to trust anything on MeshNews now, so Victor’s access to Lisabella was worthless. He couldn’t change their minds that way. Besides, Wonda’s word was the law of the land. The Lifers didn’t seem to care about Victor’s opinions any more. They only wanted to talk about Samuel.
Victor sent a message to Karine: I have an idea to stop the Lifers.
She replied with an address and instructions: Meet me in ten minutes.
Soon Victor spotted Karine in front of a four-story stone building near the main shopping area that looked like a medieval castle. He rushed over and said to her, “We film Samuel at his craziest.”
She frowned, puckering her lips the way she did when considering new ideas. “I’ll want to hear more after.”
“After what?”
The front door of the building swung open. A tall man in a crimson velour vest peeked out, saw Karine and Victor, and smiled. “Welcome,” he said. “I’ll give you the tour.”
As the proprietor let Victor and Karine inside, all three had to duck their heads to avoid the low stone-arched doorways. “We’ll have to pad those,” Karine said under her breath. Further in, the interior didn’t look much cheerier. Lightstrips affixed to the ceiling didn’t quite exorcise the gloom that came with narrow corridors and small rooms. The proprietor said it had been designed with tourists in mind who wanted a taste of ancient living.
“What are you doing here?” Victor whispered.
“We need an option in case our deal with the Lifers falls through.”
As soon as construction was finished on campus, there would be ample housing. Until then, they had to make use of what was available. The Caddo tribe declined to help—though they had ample land, they had ill will toward the Eastmores. “Maybe in another hundred years they will have forgiven us,” Circe had said cryptically. They were left with in-town housing as the only backup.
“But why are you looking into it?”
Karine looked around. The proprietor had left the room. “Circe is driving me batty,” she said quietly. “I thought she’d be back in Cologne by now, but she won’t leave until the Lifer problem is resolved. I needed fresh air.” Her face was flushed with embarrassment. She was being honest, and the look on her face wasn’t unfamiliar. How much of Victor’s dislike of her had been from his misplaced suspicion?
The proprietor returned, and after he showed them several more identically stuffy rooms, he smiled broadly and said, “What do you think?”
Karine said the accommodations would be sufficient, on a temporary basis, and asked for the lease documents.
The proprietor nodded and said, “I’m glad to do business with the Eastmores. I have no hard feelings about it, but…”
Victor sensed that Karine was restraining herself from rolling her eyes.
“Let me guess,” Karine said. “The rental will put you in a difficult situation. Is it the Lifers or—”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about a lunatic cult. Sorry, son,” he said with a quick apologetic glance at Victor, who wasn’t sure exactly what the man was sorry about, but he understood facing difficult choices. “It’s the merchants. They’re afraid of insufficient rooming capacity in town. Word is BioScan is taking so many buildings off the market, there’ll be nowhere for coin-spending visitors to stay.”
“It’s a temporary measure,” Karine said.
“I understand that. And people will put up with a lot of grief if they can see a light at the end of the tunnel. But folks are afraid this is going to hit them in their pocketbooks. Things tend to get a bit feisty around here when it comes to money.”
“You said this isn’t necessarily your concern?” Karine used a light-hearted tone Victor associated with her at her most cunning and cold-blooded.
The proprietor smiled, and for a moment Victor hallucinated that he had a shining gold tooth, which had to be the funniest trick his brain had played in a long time. He grinned back.
“I’m sure I’ll do just fine,” the proprietor said. “I appreciate you visiting in person. It seems BioScan can afford to be generous. I’d be happy to speak up in its defense at the next merchant council meeting. How about I send over the documents to you this afternoon?”
“We’d appreciate it,” Karine said, with a falsely cheering enthusiasm.
When Victor and Karine had said their good-byes, left the building, and rounded a corner to look out onto the Grand Canal and its colorful traffic of kayaks and casino boats, he finally let out the laughter he’d been stifling.
“What’s so amusing?” Karine asked.
“Something Granma Cynthia always says. ‘Money can’t make you friends, but it sure can make people friendly.’”
Karine didn’t quite smile, though the corner of her mouth ticked up. “Making people friendly is going to cost the company more than we budgeted for. My father used to tell me a fool and his money are soon parted. Let’s try to put a lid on our collective foolishness.”
“You ask me,” Victor said, “I don’t think we should spend a dime on the Lifers.”
“For once, Victor, I agree with you, but the decision has been made. Now, you wanted to tell me about a plan for Samuel?”
As they crossed Triton’s Deep and walked along the Petit Canal, Victor told her his plan, using a low voice so passersby wouldn’t overhear. “They’re obsessed with the idea of us forcibly medicating Samuel. What if we let them see what’s he like off the meds? I think ranting and raving Samuel might be too much for them.”
“An interesting idea. You said something abo
ut filming him?”
“Yes. We’ve been putting out those sanitized bits of him via MeshNews when he’s calm and lucid. We need to flip the script. Show him at his worst.”
She stopped under the shade of a tree. “I don’t like what happened last time we reduced his dosage.”
“Me neither, believe me. It would only be temporary. He’s secure in the drug hut. I don’t believe in any psychic infection.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you impress me, Victor. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this grounded.”
Victor blushed. “Thank you. I—I’m sorry for everything that’s happened.”
“There’s no sense dwelling on it. Come on.” She began walking toward BioScan. “The sooner we start, the sooner it’ll be over.”
34
Looking back, we can see the path we walked by our footsteps in the sand. We remember the feeling of our toes digging in, wet and squishy, pedestrian.
What would we be without memory? Without sight? Perhaps a bird that has never known flight.
Emergence asks us to be present and to experience the “now,” but what must we give up for that privilege and how?
—Estrella Burgos’s Theories of Emergence (1906)
13 June 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
“They put me in chains. I’m not entirely sober,” Samuel said. He held up his hands, which were now manacled together.
“You’re not an addict,” Victor replied. “You’re on medication.”
Samuel was being given mild doses of Personil, about half of the hammer-down mind-wiping dose he’d been taking when he first arrived in New Venice, but more than the nothing and herbs that had brought back his delusions.
Victor set the Handy 1000 on the table, where he could view the feed. A vidcapper mounted on a short tripod pointed toward Samuel. The resolution was decent. The zoom provided a close-up view. The Lifers would be able to see the various illogic tics and emotional earthquakes passing over Samuel’s face. They needed to understand the depths of Samuel’s passion for killing so they could disavow him and make more reasonable demands. Victor would show them the interview personally, one by one if necessary.
Barring that? If that didn’t persuade them? Then the Lifers would need to be neutralized some other way.
“You need your medication, don’t you?” Victor said to Samuel. The sonobulb captured his voice, but he was staying out of the vidcapper’s viewfield. He had no desire to costar in anything with Samuel.
“It doesn’t stop the voices,” Samuel said. “I see the primals now no matter what. Thanks to you. The veil is thin. Why can’t we cross over?” His voice sounded like a plaintive, deranged song, the kind that would make parents hustle their kids across the street to avoid the person singing it.
“Why do you want to cross over?” Victor asked.
“Why do you want to stay? We’re in purgatory! This isn’t real.” Samuel fidgeted on the couch, twisting his fingers, clapping his knees together, trapping his hands, moving in fits and jerks. “We’re in the ghost world. I’ve explained it before. Our bodies are disconnected. We’re meat bags, ghosts without our primals. They’re what’s real!”
“The dose of Personil you’re receiving is about half of the recommended amount for someone with your severity of symptoms. BioScan is under pressure to stop prescribing Personil completely. Is that what you want?”
Samuel looked at Victor, eyes narrowed, silently.
“Do you want to be on Personil?” Victor demanded.
“No, I don’t want to be on Personil. I want to cross over.”
“Tell me how to cross over.”
Samuel’s eyes lit up. “The wave function collapses,” he said, his voice a reasonable approximation of a teacher excited to share some terribly interesting fact with students. “You set up a stun stick, lethal force, with a quantum trigger. The wave function collapses, or it doesn’t. It collapses here, but not there. You live on there. In the primals’ world.”
Murder by gadgetry. This interview was going well.
“I can show you.” Samuel grinned. He probably thought he was being coy. Victor shuddered. The look on Samuel’s face—this same look—was the last thing some people had seen.
“Like you showed the people in Carmichael? Hundreds died.”
“They crossed over.”
“All of them?”
Samuel looked down, bit his lip, and shook his head slowly. “That was the price. I planned and planned to achieve the optimal ratio.” He looked up at Victor, a kind a pleading puppy beg.
Victor looked away.
“In any kind of chaos, there are more variables than can be managed. I built as many quantum triggers as I could. The gas incapacitated the majority, giving me time with the stunstick. But I couldn’t afford anyone escaping, so I reprogrammed the autocabs. The crossover target rate was 60 percent. It was the best I could do.”
Victor had long abhorred the twisted logic that fueled the Carmichael Massacre. He’d tried to avoid reading the voluminous SeCa MeshNews reports that circulated every year on the anniversary, but people spoke eagerly of the macabre details, especially as time went on and the raw wound of Carmichael crusted over.
Victor cleared his throat. “Do you want to help me cross over?” he asked.
“You told me to do it. You did! It was your voice.” Samuel whipped his head around, snarling, and lunged. The manacles around his feet stretched taut as he tripped and fell.
That delusion again. Putting the blame on someone else. Classic psychosis.
“Will you help me cross over, Samuel?” Victor asked.
“I’ll kill you!”
Victor stopped the recording. “Good,” he said. “Now tell me again how to make a stunstick lethal.”
***
“You see?” Victor asked. He looked around to make sure the Lifers gathered in the pavilion were viewing the vidscreen, an older model with a stylized plastic frame that looked like bamboo.
The sonofeed was muted as the vidscreen showed Samuel pacing in front of his drawings, gesturing frantically to a vortex of colors, and spouting nonsense about crossing over.
Victor said, “He doesn’t understand the difference between life and death.”
“We understand that he’s sick,” Wonda said. She stood at the front of the group. “I want to find the right path forward. This is a test. Remember what Del told us about tests.”
Victor had no idea what Del had said about tests. Del hadn’t left his trailer in two days. He seemed to be opting out of whatever the Lifers were becoming.
“It’s not about Samuel,” Wonda said, pointing to the vidscreen. “It’s about whether we have the courage to help people like him despite our misgivings.”
“The courage to stand around and talk? Or the courage to take action?” This came from Donya, who now had a bandage on her head.
“That’s not the point,” Victor said, looking at Donya and then at Wonda. “If you want to build support for the Lifer movement, you have to put on a better face. This”—he pointed at a still-frame pic of Samuel’s snarling face—“isn’t going to cut it. The Classification Act—the horrible punitive SeCa version without amendments—is going to pass unless you can get the public on your side. I’ll help you, but only if you stop insisting that Samuel doesn’t need meds.”
Wonda closed her eyes for a moment, no doubt seeking guidance on her path and how to navigate its twists and turns. Victor wondered what voices she heard and if they were anything like the ones that drove Samuel to madness.
“We want to talk to him,” Wonda said. “That’s the only way to know what he needs, what’s really going on. Then we’ll pool our knowledge. We’ll find a creative solution.”
“What if the solution doesn’t make anyone happy?” Victor asked.
She smiled at him. “Someone always wins, and failure can be as illuminating as victory.”
Wonda seemed able to turn a
ny setback into a victory with a gush of enthusiasm. If they could hook her to a generator, she’d probably put out more power than Ouachita Dam. What could he do to stop her?
Victor set the feed on auto-replay, spiked the volume, and left the pavilion, taking the controller with him. If they wanted to turn off the feed, they’d have to smash the display to pieces.
35
We should not blame our adversaries for resisting change. They are the fuel on which our engines run.
—Jefferson Eastmore’s The Wheel of Progress (1989)
15 June 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
“There’s no truce,” Victor said.
He stood with Alia a few steps inside Karine’s office, where Circe had commandeered the high-backed ripe-strawberry-red synthleather chair behind the desk. Karine, meanwhile, leaned against the wall, biting her lips, looking as if she’d rather be anywhere else.
“You gave them hope,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re planning, but they’re not going to stop.”
Karine made a fingerburst near her ear. “Then we’ll withhold the payments we agreed to make in exchange for housing stimheads. We have the leverage now.”
“Money isn’t everything in this case,” Circe said. “They have faith.”
“I hope they choke on it,” Karine said.
Victor said, “If we can show the Lifers how unworkable their demands are, maybe they’ll find a different cause. They want to talk to Samuel. Some of them are gearing up for a fight. Some want nothing to do with any of this. I want nothing to do with this.”
“I do think it would be best if we took the lead from here, Victor. It would be better if you stayed out of it,” Karine said.
