The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

  ~~~

  Masoud is waiting for me, and he’s not in a good mood. I can’t see him except as an undefined shadow that blocks the light. He says very little as he checks out the bio-electric interface in my legs. His hands are steady and gentle as always, but I smell anxiety in his sweat. I brace myself for an explosion of temper when he decides it’s my fault that he’s not going to get his Nobel prize.

  A series of little electric temblors shoots up through the stumps of my legs—and then Masoud makes a happy grunt deep in his throat.

  “The interface is undamaged, Lieutenant. It’s Nakagawa’s unshielded processors that failed.” He’s so happy, he actually chuckles. “I’ll let him know.”

  “He’s not going to take it well, is he?”

  Masoud outright laughs. “Joby does not like to admit he can make mistakes.”

  A few minutes later I’m in the basement, in a dentist’s chair, staring at the weird patterns cast by the ceiling light while Joby’s technician swaps out my legs again. Joby’s office is across the hall, but he doesn’t come to see me—not that I’m complaining.

  “Are you putting back the old set of legs?” I ask the technician.

  “Joby says it’s a temp fix. He can’t put together new limbs overnight.”

  I shrug. “The old set worked fine.”

  When she starts snapping together the electrical connections, a searing pain shoots up my spine, but it settles quickly to a vague burn.

  The tech says, “I’ve turned the sensitivity way down, since you can’t adjust it yourself anymore.”

  I stretch the leg out, pull it back up again. “Let’s do the other one.”

  I can’t see anything but fractured lights and shadows, but I still manage to walk out to the hall, where Specialist Bradford is waiting. “Look at you, Lieutenant Shelley. Now what am I going to do with this wheelchair?”

  Turns out Lissa is there too. “Oh my God, Shelley! You’re walking!”

  Behind me, the tech snorts. “Replaceable parts. Makes him easy to fix.”

  Major Chen said something like that, back at C-FHEIT. I don’t doubt that Command is taking notes.

  I reach out my hand and Lissa grasps it. Then I turn to where I think Bradford is standing. “Any chance of getting some food?”

  “How does fortified water sound?” she asks cheerfully, because next on the schedule is a surgery to repair and upgrade my skullnet, local anesthetic only. I complain about that: “I’m exhausted. Can’t you just put me under and let me sleep?” The answer is no, so I’m sitting up the whole time, my head bolted into place, and my empty stomach coiling into an angry knot. But it’s over within an hour. The surgeon glues my scalp back in place, a nurse watches over me for another hour, and then I’m finally allowed to go to my room.

  Lissa meets me there. While I blindly wield a fork to devour the meal brought to me by a CNA, she sits in a chair beside the bed, and tells me her news: “Major Chen wants a modification of the Pace Oversight contract, requiring me to work on-site in a secure facility up in Austin.”

  “That’s good. I don’t want you going back to San Diego.”

  The MPs are stationed in the hallway outside, but the door is closed, cutting off most of the noise of carts rolling by, and conversations spoken in passing.

  “I’m afraid for you, Shelley.”

  I pause with a forkful of rice halfway to my mouth, wondering what she’s been told. Even before the bombs went off, she’d guessed the Red was back in my head. Post-Coma, it still exists. I should be afraid of that, but I’m not.

  I finish conveying the fork to my mouth, and chew slowly on the rice. “What’s going on in the rest of the world?” I ask her. “Have you heard anything? Were any other countries targeted?”

  “I don’t think so. Whoever did this was trying to isolate the United States, knock us out of the Cloud.”

  “And it worked.”

  “Only partially. There are still satellite uplinks, if you can afford them, and data networks can still function in local areas... at least if there’s power. No, if this was an attempt to lock out the Red, it was a clumsy one.”

  I hesitate, unsure how much I can say, finally settling for what she already knows. “The Red has kept me alive. Mostly, it’s been on my side, but I don’t know why. I don’t understand what it’s for. You said it was a marketing program. But what does that mean? That the Red just wants to sell us stuff?”

  She laughs. It’s a brittle, cold sound, like the crack of glass that doesn’t quite break. “Sure, maybe. The thing is, it knows us.” I hear her stand up. She touches my shoulder, her fingers moving in a slow stroke down my arm. “Imagine it has data tentacles everywhere, reaching into browsing and buying records, game worlds, chats, texts, friend networks, phone conversations, airline, banking, utility, and entertainment records, GPS locations, surveillance cameras, whatever.” Her fingers return to my shoulder. “It could know more about us than a spouse or lover knows. It could figure out who we really are, and what we really want—down to the dreams we won’t admit to ourselves—and then steer us in that direction, onto new paths that optimize who we are, that lead us toward the lives we’re best suited to live.”

  “That’s what Jaynie was talking about,” I realize. “Right before the Coma, she was telling me about all these people who just suddenly decided to strike out in new directions.”

  “That’s what I think it’s about.” Her voice is trembling.

  “Lissa?” I reach for her hand; take it in mine. I reach up to find her smooth cheek, and feel tears there. “Baby, what’s the matter?”

  “You, Shelley,” she says with an edge to her voice. “Look at the path you’ve taken. Look who you’ve become.”

  I’ve already done that so many times, and it’s true that I never planned this life. That spring in New York... I already had my applications in for graduate school. Internships would follow, and eventually a place in my dad’s company. It never occurred to me to go into the military. I would have laughed at anyone who suggested it. Then I uploaded that video, and my life changed. “Baby, that wasn’t the Red. It was too long ago. That was just me, pretending I could make a difference.”

  “That’s what you tell yourself.”

  “Come on, Lissa. My dad wants to blame Elliot for what happened. Now you want to blame the Red. Both of you need to accept that it was me. I put myself on this path.”

  And I don’t need anyone—or anything—to blame.

  I think Colonel Kendrick was right when he said I belong in the army, that I’d been lucky to find my place, but it wasn’t lucky for Lissa. I betrayed her when I took up this life.

  I want her to kiss me, but she pulls away. She’s angry with me, and that is not what I want. “Lissa—”

  “You don’t regret anything, do you?”

  It’s like she knows what I’m thinking.

  “I regret a lot of things, but it wasn’t the Red that put me on this path. That’s all I’m saying. The Red is new. It didn’t exist before this year. I think it saw first light around the time I transferred to the Sahel.”

  “Uh-uh. That’s just when you woke up to it.”

  “No. That’s when it got real. I still don’t get it, though. What’s its purpose? Why is a marketing program messing with our lives?”

  She answers with a sarcasm that’s rare for her, “Well, I can’t know for sure, but penniless fuck-ups make lousy customers, don’t they?”

  It’s so absurd I have to laugh. “So the Red makes optimized customers? Happy little consumers who buy more shit?”

  The silence is so cold it crackles. She’s going to walk out on me; I know it. “Lissa, I’m sorry—”

  I hear a little snort, and then a giggle. “You know, when you put it like that it does sound kind of silly and shallow.” She sighs. “But that’s what it looks like to me... and people who threaten the system, like those fanatics who cut us out of the Cloud—”

  “Those people get slammed.”


  She returns to the bedside, takes my hand, and kisses it. “You work for the Red, Lieutenant.”

  I slip my arm around her and pull her in next to me, hoping we don’t knock over the tray. I kiss her cheek. “Yafiah and Dubey sure got a rotten deal.” I don’t tell her about Allison, the little girl I shot down at the bottom of Black Cross, but she got a lousy deal too.

  “No one of us matters all that much,” Lissa says. “Not measured against the backdrop of an entire world.”

  “So you told all this to Chen?”

  “Most of it.”

  “When do you go up to Austin?”

  “I told him I’m not going. Not so long as I can stay here with you.” She turns her head; her lips brush mine. “He said we probably have a week.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he told me too.”

  “After that I’ll go to Austin. I think this research is my new path in life.”

  ~~~

  That night, we go down to the cafeteria, where we can watch the news-propaganda stations while we eat—or anyway, Lissa watches. I just listen. The MPs are with us—a new shift. Lissa whispers in my ear that they act like secret service agents, their eyes constantly assessing the staff and visitors crowding the tables. The volume on the televisions is turned up loud so it can be heard over the low, continuous buzz of conversation.

  The mediots spend a lot of time interviewing refugees and politicians. They talk about the different blast sites. And then they cut to a video of the White House press secretary, reading an official statement. “In the early hours of this morning, in West Texas, an army unit stormed an underground bunker known as ‘Black Cross,’ believed to have been the headquarters of the Texas Independence Army. Blue Parker, alleged leader of the TIA, was found at the facility and taken into federal custody.”

  Lissa takes my hand; gives it a worried squeeze. Major Chen would have told her that I can’t talk about where we were, or what we did. That doesn’t mean she can’t figure it out.

  The press secretary doesn’t take questions, saying only that, “Additional, detailed information will be released very shortly, as soon as it is confirmed.” The disarmament codes are not mentioned, and neither are the unexploded nukes. The president is holding back on that news, which is understandable: there’s a real risk of igniting a fresh panic.

  The mediots move on in their coverage. They talk about the radiation, the upcoming trials, the Congressional investigations, the displaced families, the death toll. They try to sound sincerely concerned, but now and then the mask slips. Behind their sympathetic tone, I hear a giddy excitement. They love this new world in which they get to control the flow of information throughout the country. So long as the Cloud is down, they rule America via satellite; they get to tell us what the facts are, and they get to hide the facts they don’t like. They get to write history. And the history they’re writing says that Blue Parker was the mastermind behind the Texas Independence Army. There’s not a whisper of Thelma Sheridan’s involvement; not a mention of her company. I assume the mediots don’t know about her. The government is probably keeping her involvement quiet while they pursue an arrest.

  Then I hear her speaking—Thelma Sheridan—she’s on the television. Not hiding at all, not evading arrest. A mediot is interviewing her, asking her opinion: “Vanda-Sheridan specializes in surveillance and security. Do you have any insight on what went wrong? How these nuclear weapons fell into private hands?”

  “None of us will know for sure until the investigation is complete,” Sheridan says. “But security issues almost always resolve to one cause—a lack of sufficient funds to support the security infrastructure. With Congress continuously calling for cuts in the defense industry, it’s likely we’ll see even more heinous acts of terrorism by unbalanced people, until our leadership takes the responsibility to fully protect this country, as they are obligated to do.”

  I think of those two fighter pilots, who gave up their lives to stop a rocket from reaching San Antonio. I’m glad suddenly, that I went outside to witness it. Somebody needed to. “Shelley?” Lissa says. “Shelley, are you okay?”

  Lissa doesn’t know about Sheridan’s involvement.

  What if Thelma Sheridan has bought her innocence? What if she’s paid off enough government officials and congressional zombies to ensure that she will never be arrested, that any investigation will be only a façade?

  Major Chen promised it wasn’t going to be a whitewash, but maybe that’s just what he was told.

  “Lissa? I need to go back to the room.”

  I hold her arm and she guides me there. The MPs take up posts outside the door, while I get out the phone Chen gave me and ask it to call Colonel Kendrick. It works like a charm, ringing three times before he picks it up with a groggy, “What the hell—? Shelley? Why aren’t you asleep? Like I was until a few seconds ago?”

  “Has she bought clean hands?” I ask him.

  “Shit. You know my problem with you, Shelley? You don’t know when to sit tight and shut up.”

  “That’s how it came to this, sir. Too many people decided to sit tight and shut up, even when they knew shit was going down around them. And if one person, one organization”—I turn my back on Lissa, cup my hand over my mouth, and whisper—“has enough concentrated wealth to buy a domestic war, nuke seven cities, bring down the Cloud, and get away with it, then how long can it possibly be until some asshole who’s even crazier blows us all to vapor?”

  “She will not get away with it,” Kendrick says, biting off each word. “And if you want to be part of it, you will shut the fuck up right now.”

  The line goes dead.

  I stand there a few seconds, before lowering the phone from my ear.

  “Shelley?” Lissa asks. By the sound of her voice, she’s retreated to the door.

  “I’m sorry, baby.” I turn to her, and hold out my arms. She comes to me. We hold each other and I’m shaking, because I’m thinking how close I came to losing her. If she’d been closer to ground zero in San Diego, she’d be dead now. So many people are dead, because for decades citizens like me and my dad, my uncle, and Lissa’s parents—good people—quietly financed war after war because it’s easier to pay our taxes than to risk our livelihoods by trying to change the system. Our silence let wealth accumulate in the hands of people like Thelma Sheridan, people who came to believe they could buy absolutely anything, even innocence.

  But not this time.

  Kendrick promised, She will not get away with it.

  I don’t know how he can promise that, I don’t know how he plans to make good on the promise, but I want to be there when he does. I want to be part of it.

  ~~~

  In the morning I go to my appointment with the eye surgeon who was flown in from California. As I walk into her borrowed suite, with Lissa guiding me and another shift of MPs following in our wake, I’m greeted with star-struck enthusiasm. “Lieutenant Shelley, sir. I didn’t know it’d be you I was treating until just a little while ago, when I saw your record.” She’s well-spoken, with a youthful voice, and a west coast accent. “The army told me I’d be treating a war hero, but they didn’t say it would be the Lion of Black Cross.”

  “The what?”

  Lissa guides me into an exam chair, and I sit down.

  “That’s what they called you in the documentary—”

  “What documentary?”

  Lissa is puzzled too. “The only documentary we’ve seen is Dark Patrol.”

  “This is a new one. It just came out last night on a premium channel. It’s called Bleeding Through, because corruption bleeding through so many levels of our government is what led to Black Cross. I... I couldn’t believe what you and your men had to do down there in that ancient bomb shelter. Lieutenant Shelley, I want to thank you for your service, your courage, and for stopping those bombs from going off. If you hadn’t gotten those disarmament codes . . .” There’s a catch in her voice. “One of the unexploded bombs was within half a mile of my parent
s’ home.”

  So episode two is already out. I guess Black Cross isn’t a secret anymore.

  “It’ll be on mass media tonight,” the eye surgeon adds.

  What was it Ransom said? You were a demon from hell down there, sir. Ransom meant it as a compliment, but I don’t think my dad’s going to see it that way. I’d save him from that knowledge if I could.

  The surgeon gets to work, propping my right eyelid open before teasing loose the ruined lens of my ocular overlay. When she lifts it away with tweezers, I can see again.

  “Holy God,” I breathe, taking in the astonishing sights of inspirational posters on the walls and the surgeon’s smiling face.

  She’s slight, slender, pale, and young, with black hair in a neat braid down her back, and black eyes. From the shape of her face, her lips, my guess is pure Japanese ancestry.

  “Is that better?” she asks me.

  “Hell, yes.”

  I turn to admire Lissa, waiting by the door. She’s dressed in a white shirt and gray slacks. Her black hair is tied back, and there’s an anxious smile on her face. “You look gorgeous,” I tell her, with a wide grin.

  After both lenses are off, the surgeon examines my eyes. “You’re very lucky, Lieutenant, that you had your visor down when you looked into that inferno.”

  The visor is always down. It’s impossible to lift it, but I don’t tell her that.

  “Your corneas are going to need a few days to heal before we replace the overlay, but it doesn’t look like there’s any permanent damage.”

  Afterward, Lissa tells me that she doesn’t want me to get the overlay replaced. “If you don’t have it, then Guidance can’t be looking through your eyes, and the army can’t own you every minute of your life.”

  “I have to have it—”

  “Do this for me, Shelley.”