Generation of Liars
By Camilla Marks
Copyright © 2012 by Camilla Marks.
Lightning Flower Books and Entertainment
All Rights Reserved
Summary: Welcome to The Generation of Liars, where a data-swiping cyber attack has created a generation of pretenders. Meet Alice Fix, a skinny runaway with bright-streaked hair who keeps a very important name hidden inside her shoe. From the CIA to blackhat hackers to her very scary boss, can Alice keep her secrets hidden and stay alive?
Cover Design by Eric Michaels
First Edition
This novel is a work of fiction. Any character’s resemblance or likeness to any person living or deceased is a coincidence. While the locations are real, the events portrayed are entirely fictional. But then again, a liar would say that, wouldn’t they?
PROLOGUE
The Recruitment
THREE YEARS AGO TIME magazine placed an image of a blonde, blue-eyed baby on the cover of its November issue dressed in nothing but a diaper and a lively smile. The cover baby is waving an American flag with one hand while two fingers on his other hand are crossed deceitfully behind his back. The headline accompanying the curious picture reads: The Generation of Liars is Born.
The November issue became the bestselling in TIME’s hundred-year history. The public was hungry, and who could blame them? We had just been attacked.
It’s not that readers of TIME were looking for the dirty details of the attack. Those were abundantly repeated ad nauseam on all the 24-hour news cycles. What readers were really searching for was a glimpse into the future, a commentary on what was the come. You see, this was no ordinary terrorist attack. There was no death and no bloodshed - and the only real casualty of what came to be known as the November Hit was our true identities. You have to go back to that day in November to really understand who I am. This is my origin story. The story of how I became the girl with red stained beneath her fingernails and a strand of cold diamonds pressed against her throat.
When I say that the attack stole our identities, I don’t mean that in some metaphysical, esoteric, self-help book way. I mean our literal identities. The paper trail that accompanies us all from birth. Our nine-digit Social Security number. The attack was not a brick and mortar strike. It was executed on the blurry and undefined battlefield of cyberspace. The atomic cherry bomb that set it all off was a virus that infiltrated the servers at the Social Security Administration. It was a silent boom, but it was a messy boom.
There was a marigold sun in the sky the morning the hackers hit and when I close my eyes I can still relive the feel of the blow dryer heating my palms as I rolled my hair into soft ringlets in front of the mirror. I remember the wholesome scent of the tube of strawberry lip gloss I dabbed over my lips, stronger and riper now in my memories than it ever was in real life. Shiny lips. Green eyes. Lashes like black moths. I was happy with my reflection in the mirror, framed with rose-cut glass tears. But as I swung my backpack onto my shoulders to leave for my 8 A.M political science class, something on the television caught my attention. I hadn’t heard a word of what the news anchor was saying beneath the hum of the blow dryer. Now I did. Fear was making her voice wobble and I noticed that her face was anguished beneath those silly cocktail-hour eyelashes and blush-stamped cheeks women behind the news desk always wear. I cupped a hand to my sticky lips as I read the headline ticking across the bottom of the screen. Cyber Attack Launched Against United States of America.
I was parked in front of the television. The whole country was. The girls from the other dormitories were all crowding around the television in the communal lounge. A second alert came around 3 P.M. A bleeding echo of the announcement was seeping from all the televisions in the building. The unidentified hackers had unleashed a second leg of the attack, and this time it was a quick-spreading virus moving from user to user through chain emails and popular social networking websites. In the aftermath, government programmers deciphered that the virus was designed to seek out and erase all nine-digit number combinations. The target was our Social Security numbers. All very unfortunate since the United States Government had just completed the multi-billion dollar process of converting all public records to digital and cloud formats, and shredding the paper.
Other databases didn’t fare much better. The virus recklessly and indiscriminately managed to tear through the internet like a rocket packed with nails and glass, destroying millions of online files, newspaper archives, and private records. But this story isn’t about the anonymous hackers that did this. I don’t even know who they are or why they did it. This story is about the lives that were changed by the attack, and the strange new possibilities it created. This story is also about the secret note hidden inside my shoe.
Let’s go back to that TIME magazine cover I mentioned. I’m sure you’re wondering how a naked baby with crossed fingers on a magazine cover fits into this equation. Aside from being cute, the duplicitous baby captured the important question about what would happen to us as a society now that our identities had been wiped out. Black market back alley ID rings had already sprung up overnight. Was this going to be a free pass for us all to become whatever alias we desired to be? The person who thought up TIME’s famous cover story, a gumshoe reporter named Elliot Risk, reminisced that in decades past the country had given birth to The Greatest Generation, Generation X, and Generation Y, to name a few. Would the November Hit make us the first ever Generation of Liars?
The writer questioned if we were destined to devolve into a genesis of charlatans and frauds, able to slip skins as easily as a fabricated Social Security card and a box of cheap hair color. To give gauche to his point, Mr. Risk cleverly twisted a popular slogan of the 1960s radicals to say: Never Trust Anyone Over the Age of Zero. There was no escaping this slogan. The slogan got stamped onto T-shirts and coffee mugs - and the cover baby’s face, blue eyes and all, became a sort of symbol for the brave new world we were hurtling towards.
Despite the hysteria following the attack, and the doomful speculation that was exacerbated by the 24-hour news media, the hype behind the article never played out. It took less than a week before life in the United States was pretty much back to normal, and soon the baby’s face on the cover of TIME was replaced by a celebrity divorce. Oh, and inevitably, the hordes of T-shirts stitched with Elliot Risk’s trite slogan found pop-culture repose inside Salvation Army bins.
Now that all records of our Social Security numbers were dust thanks to the November Hit, the government’s foremost priority was to reestablish order and regain control of documenting its citizens. No surprise there. The first step of the recovery was a mandate requiring all citizens to re-register on paper with the Social Security Administration. Eager for their Social Security checks or payroll clearance, nearly every citizen complied.
Nearly every citizen, but not all of us. There was never a perfect re-registration count and it drove the suits at Homeland Security mad. The author of the TIME article, Elliot Risk, wasn’t completely wrong when he postulated on a grand-scale movement of liars. He simply failed to accurately pinpoint the category of people who would take advantage of the situation. People with secrets.
In the wake of the November Hit, an underground and rogue population of people, those who never re-registered their identities on paper, sprang up. They chose to leave their old lives behind and be baptized into the Generation of Liars. My name is Alice Fix and I’m part of the Generation of Liars. But like I said, it’s nothing like that writer predicted, and when that cute baby wearing Huggies on the magazine cover grows up and goes to school, I’m pretty sure he will never learn about us in the history books. We are a group of Americans, scattered across the globe, living our lives
with two fingers crossed behind our backs so to speak.
My reason for leaving my old life behind and taking on an alias is simple.
I have a secret.
A bad secret. A secret as heavy as a lodestone, threatening to drag me down into a bonfire and brimstone abyss. This secret is so terrifying to face that I was willing to give up the only life I knew in order to keep it concealed from daylight. Something gruesome happened on that fate-cursed November day between the time I put my backpack on my pillow to drink in the television and midnight striking. I made a horrible mistake. One I never saw coming. Sitting there in front of the television with my legs crossed beneath my pleated skirt, my poly-sci book doubling as an elbow rest, and the taste of strawberry gloss soaking my lips, I never would have thought that the news I was hearing about the cyber attack would soon become the best thing that ever happened to me. I had no idea that I was about to need to run away.
Let’s get some things straight. Living life under an alias is not for the faint of heart. Running away meant leaving my school, my family, my boyfriend - everything ever I knew. The morning I left was the start of a chilly November day, and when I had gotten sixty miles from home, I met a man in Grand Central Station who said he had a job that could change everything. His name is Motley. Motley is in his late forties, with a full head of sandy blond hair and intense blue eyes.
“Can you keep a secret?” Those were the words Motley stopped to ask me over a screaming train from the New Haven line as it kissed the platform. He showed up in my life wearing a tan three-piece suit and a grin that would have warned a smarter girl to stay away.
“Yes,” I answered. I could feel my teeth chattering inside my cheeks. It must have been something about my insecure eyes that attracted him to me. He was probably drawn to me like a toothy lion to a limping baby antelope. I had the word amateur written all over me. I didn’t know how to read the outbound train schedule and the only possessions I had on me were a pink backpack full of clothes and a very important handwritten note tucked inside my shoe. The note was a confession. I had written it in magic marker under the moonlight the night before. I promised myself I would carry it always, so that if anything ever happened to me the people I hurt could know why I ran away.
“Follow me,” Motley said. The silver tooth in place of his incisor looked like a board game token. “I have a job for you that will take you far away.” He led me down the long, collinear walkway that paralleled the tracks. The station was full of busy travelers dragging scratchy luggage wheels across the expanse of Grand Central Terminal. Noise, color, confusion – I am experiencing the whole thing through fearblindness. I followed this stranger, Motley, a swagger zipping from the soles of his freshly-shined alligator loafers, to inside the Rite Aid wedged into Grand Central Terminal. We passed the magazine racks, brimming with medleys of sensational headlines about the attack; and that baby with the bright blue eyes staring back at me from the cover of TIME. Motley led me to the beauty aisle. The aisle was in bloom with color. Nail polishes, blushes, eye shadows all in cosmic colors of cosmetic luminosity.
He stopped at the hair dye.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Pick something out.” Those were his instructions.
My eyes roved the shiny labels on the shelves. I liked one of the models on one of the boxes. She had cherry-red hair and a spark in her algae-green eyes. I looked up at Motley for approval on my selection. He nodded and carried it to the register to pay. The teenager who rang it up was wearing a white T-shirt and he had used black marker to scribble the slogan, Never Trust Anyone Over the Age of Zero. Beside the register, playing cards were mixed with the impulse buys; chewing gum and mints, and Motley picked up one of the packs and ran his fingers along its edges. He looked like he was about to place it on the counter to purchase it, but he put it back. The brand of the cards was Fool’s Luck.
With the cellophane bag crushed in his hand, Motley led me back into the main terminal, and into the conflux of travelers shoving through the midday rush. The next place we stopped was in front of one of the automated ticket kiosks. Motley didn’t tell me where we were headed, but I saw the letters JFK flash on the screen and noticed that three separate tickets were printing. My eyes darted to see if there was a third passenger waiting off in the distance. I spotted no one.
We walked back to the spot where Motley had first approached me. We would catch our train there, he told me. I stepped onboard and clobbered my backpack onto a seat. Motley tugged the scruff of my collar and shoved the bag containing the hair dye into my hands. “Go into the bathroom.” It was clearly an order.
I scuttled towards the back of the train car. My nervous eyes avoided everyone I passed. The seats were packed with businessmen in dull suits on cell phones and vacationers with chins tucked down for a nap. I opened the narrow bathroom door, submitting my senses to lingering noxiousness that had been pent up inside. I shut myself in. The interior of the bathroom was lined in outdated wood paneling and the toilet and sink were flaked with rust.
I dumped the contents of my pockets into the drain: a freshman student ID from Wesleyan University, my Social Security card, and a strip of photo booth shots taken of me and my boyfriend the week prior. There are three separate photos on the strip, and in the first photo I am smiling and there are wisps of my clumsy bangs falling into my eyes. In the middle photo, we are both smiling and looking forward, poised and serious. My lips are shaped like tulip petals, and my green eyes appear bright enough to be sparking off photosynthesis. I am trying to pose like Marilyn Monroe. You can’t tell from the photo, but I know it. I had just written an art history essay on Andy Warhol and in every photo I was trying to pose like his rendition of Marilyn Monroe with pastel eyelids. It’s funny how teenage girls try to take on other people’s identities so wistfully. My older, wiser self realizes that playing masquerade is fun only until it becomes necessary to survive. After a while, fantasy becomes the ropes around your neck.
I can’t stop staring at the strip. The photo paper is soaked with acid tears now. In the bottom photo, my eyes are blinking downward, waiting for the timer to go off. My boyfriend is sneaking a kiss onto my cheek. I realize that in the photo booth snapshots I am wearing the same sweatshirt that I have on at that moment inside the rancid bathroom, which is a pink zip-up hoodie with fuzzy trim that is ratty from wear.
I roll up my sleeves. There is important work to do here in the bathroom. Everything that was in my pockets is now in the sink. I turn on the faucet and watch as the flux of water destroys it all. I ball up the soggy remnants into my hand and toss them into the toilet to watch them get sucked down into the abyss of the train’s bowels. There went my old skin.
Next, I wiggle my foot from my sneaker without undoing the laces and fish out a note I had hidden inside. After I had done the terrible thing that I did that November night, the one I can never mention, I wrote it down. I wrote a confession. The confession was scribbled on a standard sheet of lined college ruled paper, ripped from a spiral bound notebook, the kind you would etch with homework assignments or for passing love notes in class. It haunted me, this paper talisman. For a moment, I considered dropping it into the toilet and flushing it away too, but I couldn’t. Some secrets are impossible to let go of.
I used my teeth to tear the lid on the box of hair color. I read the instructions carefully since I had never dyed my hair before. My pale hands trembled while performing the alchemy of transforming my hair, which was naturally flaxen blond, to an alert shade of red. I tried to wash the bathroom as best I could. The red dye had gotten into the creases in the sink and it looked like blood.
I left the bathroom and took the empty seat next to Motley and I noticed that he had a deck of playing cards on the armrest. Fool’s Luck. The brand I had watched him almost buy.
“Where were you headed before I found you?” He began shuffling the cards.
“I wasn’t sure where I was going,” I told him. “I did something very ba
d. I just need to run away.” I was never going to say what I did out loud. He seemed satisfied with my pert reply. So far he hadn’t even asked me my name.
“It must be fate that I found you. Fate that we should both live at this moment in history.” It was then that I noticed a sinister thunderbolt scar riding from his upper lip to his right nostril. “Just like it was fate when I found him.”
“Found who?”
Motley pointed to a seat three rows ahead of us in the train car, where a kid my age was sitting. The kid was plugged into headphones and a laptop. He looked like a techno wunderkind. “Him,” said Motley. The kid looked up just as Motley mentioned him, a phenomenon of rung ears.
“Is he the person you bought that third ticket for?” I asked.
Motley reached down and braceleted my wrist with his fist. “Wave hello to your new partner.”
“What’s his name?”
“We call him Rabbit.”
“That’s an unusual name.”
“It’s not his name. It’s what we call him.”
“Do I have to change my name too? Before I start working for you, I mean?”
“I suppose we should call you Alice, since you will be following him down the rabbit hole into a very dark world.”
I hugged the backpack in my lap. “A dark world?” I looked ahead the three rows at the kid to get a better look, but his eyes were hidden by a Yale Bulldogs cap. I looked up at Motley, my lashes fluttering over my racing eyes. “What do you mean by a dark world?”
“When you work for me, you’re on a mission. Your mission is to retrieve and destroy an item that is causing me a headache. This item was never meant to exist in the first place, and securing its ruin won’t be easy. It is directly related to the cyber attack.”
“What kind of item is it?” I asked.
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