by Brandt Legg
“I thought librarians could pull books in their sleep,” Vida teased. “But Mister H, you’re kind of sleepwalking up these aisles.”
“You’re right, Vida,” Runit said. He checked his list and saw an easy section ahead ‒ history. There were a ton of books in there, close together. “You two split up again, like you’re supposed to be, and we’ll have a little contest. First one to a hundred books.”
“Gets what?” Vida asked.
Runit touched his INU. “I’ve got ten digis.”
“Cool,” Grandyn said, grabbing his INU. “I’ll put in ten.”
“Winner take all?” Vida asked. “I’m in.” Her INU lit and she sent the funds.
Runit nodded, smiling. He knew he’d win, but he’d buy them a pizza or something with the loot. “One, two, three, go!”
They split up, and fifteen minutes later Runit already had forty-four books. But then he pulled A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. It had been Harper’s favorite. The memory sent him back to her rants on the pre-Banoff world. They had made Runit laugh so hard he’d end up crying. He smiled, flipping through the pages.
Harper had been a history professor specializing in the world before the plague. But in another life, she could have been a stand-up comedian. She had a talent for making the most serious situations seem ridiculous. A particular favorite target were the justifications for war during the prior few centuries.
“Sending young people to die over money, oil, lines on a map, tea, and taxes is kind of like shooting chickens because you don’t like the price of eggs,” she’d say before launching into a presidential tone, delivering actual lines former world leaders had used to justify war. It always sounded rather ludicrous and comical all those years later. Runit often wondered how it seemed to the citizens who had actually lived through those crazy times when war was entered into so easily. Harper had also written many serious papers on pre-Banoff conflicts and fiscal policy. She’d not been a fan of the economic systems favored in that age, nor the present one. She had done detailed research, linking every major war in history to money.
“How could there ever be a real moral reason for war?” Harper would ask rhetorically. “It always comes down to someone’s greed. History is populated by the distorted tyrants and corrupt businessmen willing to trade a cup full of blood for a purse filled with gold. Prior to the Banoff, the world spent trillions every year on weapons. What does that say about our species? How can we evolve to something higher when we insist on killing one another for profit?” And after one such diatribe, she had ended with the whispered question, “And what do we spend today to keep this cheated peace?”
He recalled a conversation in which Harper had cried over the issue of prison reform. “In the pre-Banoff days the United States had millions in prison, but at least they had a chance. The Aylantik government doesn’t believe in large prison populations. They just execute people.”
“But drugs were illegal pre-Banoff, and with the poverty issues of that time, it’s no wonder they had millions in prisons. The AOI might be harsh, but they keep the peace. And they do have people in prison, at least a hundred thousand,” Runit had said, then added the foolish comment, “They only execute the really bad ones. It’s not that many.”
“I cannot believe you just said that.” It had been the harshest expression he’d ever seen on her face. “Who decides how bad is bad?” she continued, glaring at him almost like a stranger. “Of course, the Aylantik government doesn’t release execution figures, but some estimates have it as high as twenty thousand a year.”
He dug in deeper. “Whose estimates?”
“Monitoring groups.”
“Those groups aren’t even legal. Those people could wind up in prison themselves.”
“Or maybe they’ll be executed too.” Her tone was brittle.
“The figure isn’t anywhere near that high. It couldn’t be.”
“Maybe not the legal one, but they have other ways to remove troublemakers.”
She didn’t get the chance to elaborate because just then, Grandyn and some friends had come home. He was eight. They wanted snacks and help fixing a broken remote control car.
Harper was dead two days later, and now, after seeing the KEL diagram, he thought desperate things and had a horrific realization that even in its vile blatancy he wanted to deny.
Chapter 27
Grandyn found Runit sitting on a stack of books, crying softly. He looked at the book in his hands and nodded. A similar copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was in his night table at home, only it didn’t have a cover and the spine had been chopped off. Partly destroying a book avoided the heavy possessions-tax, especially the particularly high ones levied on books. It had belonged to his mother. No one knew where she had gotten it. Grandyn had read it many times, mostly to feel close to her, but he didn’t really understand why it was so important to his insightful mother. It covered about five hundred years of what Grandyn considered ancient history. He didn’t get why anything that had happened before the Banoff mattered. Everything he’d read about it made those years sound barbaric.
“Come on, Dad.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Grandyn always broke down a little when his father cried. “She’d be glad about what we’re doing, wouldn’t she?”
Runit wiped his eyes. “She sure would. Your mom would have led the fight to save these books and she would expect us both to work around the clock to do it.”
Grandyn embraced his dad. They were close, but the hug still surprised Runit, and he fought a fresh wave of emotions. He rallied quickly when Vida came laughing around the corner, pushing a cart.
“Looks like I win,” she said. “You can count them, but I can tell you there are actually a hundred and four because I’m just that good.”
Grandyn had about eighteen before he went to see if Runit even had a chance to beat him. He hadn’t counted on getting stopped. “Okay, baby,” Grandyn said to Vida, laughing. “I guess you’re buying dinner.”
Nelson crowded into the tight aisle. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Is everything okay?” Runit asked. “You look stressed.”
“Don’t I always?” Nelson said humorlessly, ignoring the fact that his friend appeared to have been crying once he saw the book in Grandyn’s hand. “I just need a bac. But actually, I have good news.”
“What a welcome change,” Runit said as Grandyn loaded the books his dad had pulled onto the cart.
“We can do a few test runs tomorrow night,” Nelson said. “I’ve just zoomed my friend, totally encrypted. He’s a driver for one of the fruit companies. He can meet the beverage trucks and run the load to Talent.”
Talent, a tiny town in the southern portion of Oregon Area, had long been a barely noticeable speck in the agricultural district. Its roots went back to its days as a stop on the Southern Pacific Railroad in the late 1800s. The small, residential community had grown between the larger cities of Medford and Ashland, but following the Banoff, it had become even smaller. With the vast population reductions and realignments of borders, much of suburban land, in growing centers around the world, was returned to agriculture, the southern portion of Oregon Area being one such region. Massive tracts of land, measuring thousands of acres, were farmed by small cooperatives that sold to the huge agro-corporations that made up the world’s second largest industry, controlled by billionaire rivals of Lance Miner and Deuce Lipton.
“And where are the trucks going in Talent?” Runit asked.
“I know someone who has land outside the orchard and vineyard district who can hide them,” Nelson said. “He has a big old barn.”
“What about KEL?” Runit asked, growing used to Nelson’s convenient network of contacts.
“There’s hardly any monitoring in those rural areas,” Chelle said, joining them as Vida struggled to navigate the cart out of the cramped space. “There are more cows than peop
le down there, and it’s surrounded by Mandated-Forests.”
The Aylantik government had set aside huge swaths of forested lands around the world, known as Mandated-Forests, in order to help reverse the greenhouse effect left over from the mass polluting days, prior to environmental reforms.
The conversations shifted back to beverage trucks and the magna-lanes. The larger fruit truck would be ready to take the test load to Talent on Friday, and again with the full loads on Saturday and Sunday night. Nelson had everything covered. There were even empty cattle trucks on standby, but everyone was hoping to avoid them for obvious reasons. Then they all scattered back to work, except for Chelle.
Suddenly they were alone, and Runit asked what he had wanted to know since they were at the medical station. “Why were you crying?”
She looked at him as if she might burst out laughing, then she stood very close so that only an inch separated their faces. The proximity made it hard for him to focus on her, but that scent of snow and tangerines pulled him in. It took great concentration not to kiss her. Chelle’s whisper stole into his mind, sounding like a secret shouted in the dark.
The moment broke like a pebble thrown into still water as her hand touched his. He shivered.
“What do you believe in, Runit?”
He backed up a few inches, trying to focus on her face, but she moved with him.
“Can you confess to me now the things that keep you awake?” she asked, in an even softer voice. “The thoughts that hold your whole heart?” He could feel her warm breath on his lips.
“W-What are we talking about here?” Runit stammered.
“The only thing that matters. The only thing I ever talk about . . . everything.”
“Yes,” he said, almost able to taste her tongue. “I believe in everything.”
“Do you?” She laughed. “I bet you do.”
“But, uh, I think the first question was mine.”
She pulled an imaginary thread off his shirt. “Really, what was that again?”
“You cried,” he reminded her.
She stared into his eyes. “It looks like you might have been crying too.”
His eyes watered at her perception. “Sometimes I think of her,” he admitted. “After she died, I tried not to cry . . . I was afraid if I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop.”
“I know,” she sighed. Chelle’s own eyes teared up as they stood mirroring each other for a moment. “My husband, I hear his voice. Every day I can hear his sweet, crackly voice. He spoke in a deep tone that sounded like an on-air guy.” She looked down the aisle. “And I always expect him to come walking up to me. Like he’s going to be around every corner. Three damn years later, and I still think he’ll be right back.”
“How did he die?”
Chelle stared at him, that angry fire he’d noticed when they were reintroduced flaring.
“AOI,” she mouthed.
Runit gasped. It was the last answer he would have imagined. “But he was just a banker.”
“Are you just a librarian?” she snapped.
Chapter 28
Friday, February 2
Before the sun rose over Oregon Area’s Cascade Mountains, an elite unit of Lance Miner’s dark army landed at a local airport and drove into the countryside. They had reason to believe that the unknown woman, the alleged leader of the rumored revolutionary group thought to be called PAWN, might be in the area.
Polis Drast employed many tactics to keep the Pacyfik’s Creatives and other potential revolutionaries in line, but informants proved to be the most effective. The only problem with his spies was that they tended to be unreliable half the time, and when they did have a fact of value, they’d treat it as such and trade it to multiple parties until it became worn and useless.
Drast knew Blaise Cortez to be a regular buyer of anything useful. Several of his purchased spies had been caught with restricted information originating from Drast’s own paid informants. But, as often as not, Blaise could be counted on to provide the AOI with remarkable data.
On the sprawling AOI campus in the dry California Area farmland south of Sacramento, a city half the size of its pre-Banoff heydays, aircraft-hanger-sized data centers handled infinite amounts of KEL-generated feeds from the Pacyfik region. Every day billions of bits were recorded, assimilated, and interpreted. The facility also housed training centers for intelligence and police units, active AOI military squadrons, and a fifty-two-hundred-person public relations department.
Drast preferred the company of DesTIn bots to that of humans, mainly because they were predictable and completely trustworthy. Logic and loyalty were two of the three things he valued most. The third might surprise his old friend Lance Miner, but Drast also prized love. He knew people were capable of incredible things in the pursuit of love, but most people didn’t see that side of Polis Drast. They only knew of the first two of his three guiding principles.
“The world is a complicated place,” Drast told a human lieutenant as they stood in the glowing shadows of endless images and data streams. “The smartest animal on Earth is also the least trustworthy. You can bloody well guess what a tiger will do, or a grizzly bear, or even a damn shark, but most humans? Hell, they can’t be counted on except to cut your throat . . . and they do that with a torgon smile on their face.”
“A bit cynical aren’t you, sir?”
“When you’ve seen what I have and know what I know, you’ll call me a realist. If I were really a cynic, I’d have shot myself long ago.” He smiled and swept his arm across a group of INUs, causing the room to become an interactive series of floating VMs showing real-time footage of several AOI teams, as well as Miner’s unit. The sightings of the woman they were all seeking had come from dubious sources.
Drast told his top people that he didn’t buy the stories, but if she did exist he believed she’d have to be in the southern part of the Pacyfik, down around old Ecuador, Peru, maybe even Brazil. There were vast, sparsely populated areas down there among the mountains and jungles where she could hide.
The Amazon Rainforest had dramatically increased in size during the last seven decades. Ever since the Mandated-Forest program was put in place the greatest wilderness on Earth, previously raped by human activity, had rebounded faster than anyone had expected. It now covered more than twice as much land as the former United States. The AOI knew the remoteness of the area had attracted small colonies of “Rejectionists,” as they referred to the unorganized populace who rejected Aylantik rules and modern society. Those people, who dropped out of sight to live off-grid, were a rumor the government never confirmed, and the topic remained high on the lengthy media no-coverage list.
Yeah, she could get lost down there for years, Drast thought. But not up here. In spite of the huge forested tracts and low populations, there were regular patrols, satellite surveillance, and robotic sweeps. She could never have gone undetected all this time.
Even with his confidence, the possibility ate at him. Polis Drast’s rise to power had not been bold and imaginative; it had been steady, calculated, and done with careful consideration of whom to court and whom to screw. Lance Miner would soon make him World Premier, but a major flare-up in his region before then would destroy that and unravel all his hard work. And if the woman was real and wasn’t found soon, then his nightmare scenario might come true.
He placed a zoom to Blaise Cortez.
“Mr. Premier,” Blaise said, smiling as his image projected out of Drast’s INU.
Drast smiled. “A bit premature for that Blaise.” He paused as Blaise seemed preoccupied with his hair, pushing strands here and there. Drast didn’t understand why Blaise didn’t just cut it into a proper style.
“You’re probably right, Polis . . . anything could happen between now and the selection, er, c-section, uh, erection, no, that’s not it, what’s it called? Tax-collection, no, oh silly me . . . e-lec-tion.”
“You’re maturity has always been diametrically opposed to your supposed intel
ligence,” Drast said, angry he hadn’t been able to ignore the jab.
“Election,” Blaise repeated. “A funny word. E-lec-tion. Say it very slowly and it sounds disgusting. But if you say it just fast enough it almost sounds real, like it might even be legitimate.”
“Torgon-off!” Drast said impatiently. “There’s not time for your sophomoric drivel. I’ve zoomed for a favor.”
“I’m sure you have. You want to know about the woman. I gave the man holding your leash all I have. If you need more, you can find it yourself. She’s just one single woman. Can’t the elite AOI manage the task?”
“How much?”
“For what?” Blaise asked, sounding confused.
“For her damn location.”
“I’d always thought you believed her to be a myth. And now you want an address?”
“Listen to me Blaise. You may have convinced Lance that she’s real, but I think this is another one of your shakedowns.” Drast clapped his hands together and stomped around the life-sized projection of Blaise as if he might start taking jabs like a boxer. “For all I know, you’ve taken this fairy tale and perpetuated it all these years so that you might make a play and disrupt the election.”
Blaise laughed. “You give me too much credit, Mr. Premier. I suppose you might blame me for the Aylantik and Pacyfik War, and other events that happened before my birth. Maybe even the Banoff itself was my fault.”
“Damn it, what do you want?”
“Do you know that in Spain, one thousand years ago, they called money dineros? A more beautiful word than digis, wouldn’t you say? Pesos or marks, rupees or rubles, francs or even dollars! Sólo el amor al dinero puede destruir el alma.” Blaise paused his manic rant and stared through at Drast, as if trying to see the smallest detail in his face, then continued. “Forgive me, your Excellency, you most assuredly don’t speak Spanish . . . not that Com, our modern language, isn’t useful in a utilitarian kind of way, but it lacks a certain grace or heart. Do you speak only Com, or are you a truly educated man? No? I thought not. Allow me to translate. ‘Only the love of money can smother the soul.’”
