by Jim Stark
A road ran in front of this row of bubbles. “Every clan has a Bubble Street,” it said in the Netfiles. Victor-E's formidable Bubble Street was where the clan stationed most of its collectively-owned fleet of eighty or so well utilized and expertly maintained vehicles—trucks, vans, cars—even a few busses. A parking lot extended down the road, with short posts every few yards along. Each post had an electric outlet and a cord to plug in block-heaters in winter ... the way people used to tether horses in the Wild West, she thought, bemused.
Lilly gave a last glance at the clan's set-up and walked away from the window. It was time to get down to business.
After tipping the metal equipment case flat on the floor, she unlocked it and withdrew her hard drive. She inserted it into the MIU at her new workstation and turned both units on. As the WDA protocol now demanded, she put her right index finger onto the bioID slot. It still astonished her how, along with the verification of her fingerprint, this novel technology could suck off a few cells of dead skin and confirm her DNA, her biological identity. She then entered her PIN code using the keyboard (the WDA's third, redundant, failsafe ID system), and finally the big, wall-mounted screen of the Master Interface Unit lit up. One by one, all her obscurely-named programs and files were verified “present and secure,” in living color.
She took her small, brown SuperNet Interfacer from her vest pocket and plugged it into the MIU for a function check. Lilly always preferred sitting at a Netstation, using a proper MIU, but these relatively new and fully portable Sniffers certainly had their uses and their virtues. Introduced in 2023, a decade ago, they didn't have full keyboards, not because of any design or manufacturing showstoppers, but because by 2023, keyboards were rarely used any more. Digitized full-interface technology had been largely perfected by then, and choosing between tick-tacking on a keyboard and speaking words was a no-brainer. Nobody picked Door #1. Her only beef with the Sniffer was the inferior quality of the black-and-white images it transmitted and displayed. The person at the other end got only ten images per second, a slightly jerky reflection of the smooth flow of reality.
"Satellite unit confirmed,” came the male voice of her MIU, meaning Lilly's Sniffer was operating properly. “Enough of that nonsense,” she muttered as she accessed the control panel and flipped the “voice” key. Henceforth, she would be addressed by an MIU with a female voice. She needed this tool to be an ally, not a pain-in-the-buttocks. Finally, she was set to begin. “Review major news events in brief,” she commanded.
The voice of the MIU told her about how Lester Connolly had lost his left arm to the flesh-eating disease a few hours ago, and she was shocked—and annoyed with herself for staying out of touch between deplaning and now. She watched the official statement from Dr. MacInnis at the Washington D.C. General Hospital, and then watched as her ultimate superior, Supreme Commander Sheena Kalhoun, responded with words of comfort.
Lilly had no great love for the indefatigable shit-disturber who had dedicated his life to achieving civilian access to the LieDeck, but still ... it's such a terrible disease; I hope he doesn't die, she thought. She was glad to see that Sheena Kalhoun had the good grace to express the sympathy of the WDA to Connolly's family and friends. I bet that stuck in her throat, Lilly thought as she noted the rather careful words the Supreme Commander had used.
She verbally asked her MIU to access InfoBank and retrieve any “faces” between USLUC headquarters and civilians her new “territory” of Pontiac County, and she was surprised to see that young Randy Whiteside had faced with some woman called “Lucky” an hour ago, from his father's limo. Oh yeah—his girlfriend, she recalled from her review of his Netfile. She ran the whole transaction, and was surprised by the apparent depth of the boy's involvement with USLUC. Could that be a pragmatic thing? she asked herself. If the LieDeck was unbanned, sales would go though the roof, and Randy and all other shareholders in Whiteside Tech would make a bundle.
The time had come for Lilly to get on with her own news. “Archive and transmit, coded, to Control Upper America,” she said after she tapped the “instruct” key. “Report number one. Tuesday, February eight, two thousand and thirty-three, four ten p.m.,” she said as she leaned back in the swivel chair.
"I tried to make friendly with Randy Whiteside on the plane, but his distrust of the WDA runs pretty deep. He's resentful of the fact that his family controls the company that makes all the LieDecks in the world, yet he can't own one or use one ... and I guess that's understandable. Anyway, I decided not to tell him that my new assignment was to monitor Victor-E, so I imagine he'll be surprised if he comes over to visit his Aunt Julia and sees me here ... or hears about me from his Aunt Julia, I suppose.
"As his Netfile suggests, he's gotten quite involved with USLUC. He was on the Sniffer to their D.C. headquarters—a girl named Lucky—Yolanda Dees, really—shortly after the Netnews announcement of Lester Connolly's illness. She said something about how people might think that Connolly was assassinated if he dies ... but I'm sure you're on top of all that bullshit. It's astonishing how civilians get paranoid about the WDA. It makes me want to puke, frankly.
"Anyway, I got here at three-thirty. I had to take a damned cab in from the airport. My car wasn't ready, apparently. I can't believe how unpleasantly cold it is up here ... I mean scary cold! I talked to a couple of Canadians while I was waiting for the cab, and they told me eastern Canada and Québec were experiencing an unusual cold snap. Just my luck ... global warming everywhere but here.
"I was met at Victor-E by Randy Whiteside's aunt, Julia. Nobody else in sight—I'm pretty sure they were avoiding me.
"Her Netfile doesn't do her justice. She's mentally challenged all right, but she's got more than a nodding acquaintance with reality, and she certainly gets to the point! She asked me what she'd have to do for me to shoot her, for Christ's sake! I didn't tell her about my chance meeting with her nephew, Randy, but she never said her last name, so I can explain the oversight that way. I'm sure they must realize I was given the goods on everybody here before my departure from Florida, but I might as well keep up the illusion that the WDA does only minimal homework on Evolutionary clans.
"Let's see ... Randy confirmed on the plane that his little sister Venice wants to live with her Aunt Julia in Victor-E. His father Michael—well ... their father—must be just about apoplectic—to lose his mentally challenged sister to this sort-of cult-like lifestyle, and now maybe his daughter could be coming here as well. I guess I'll meet up with her ... Venice ... sooner or later. Randy says he's going to try to talk her out of it, so maybe I can help him there."
Lilly stopped momentarily, running the family connections through her wetware—her internal computer—the one between her ears. She just hated having to memorize a passel of new names every time she moved, but ... such is the life of a warrior princess, she told herself, sardonically. Back to work, you lazy lout, she scolded herself.
"I committed the horrible sin of not finishing my coffee when I was in the motel's restaurant with Julia Whiteside,” she continued in her report.” It's not that I forgot their passion for waste-not living, just that it fit with the impression I'm trying to give of being ill-prepared ... ill-mannered too, I suppose ... although I admit that at the time, I really needed to get away from her. She can be a royal pain in the you-know-what.
"The only other warm body I met so far is the dog. ‘Big Wus,’ they call him. He's a rather fat male spaniel.
"Oh yeah, plus the cab driver—Alex something. He played the silent type all the way in from the airport. When we arrived here, he flings my case around with no regard for what's in it, and it turns out that he's an Evolutionary too, from Base Walden, a few miles east of Ottawa, if I recall correctly, over on the Canadian side of the river, in any event. He made a strong tingle connection with Julia, and she invited him to face her tonight on the Net. I'll scan for the encounter and archive transactions between those two. I expect they'll have fun talking about what a jerk I am. End of r
eport."
Lilly rubbed her eyes, and felt the full weight of the very long day she'd already put in. WDA agents were always on duty, really, and sometimes Lilly longed for the mental freedom, the psychological easiness of her years as a child and student. She felt owned, not like Kunta Kinte or Chicken George in the book Roots, but ... sort of like that. She ran tired hands through her long black hair and let fly with a gaping, unabashed yawn. I am woman; hear me whine, she thought, remembering the lyrics of a satirical song that the Iconoclasts had released a few years ago. But I chose my brand of slavery, she almost mouthed as she shook her head free of the anxieties that were crowding her inner space.
The time had finally come to begin the real work she'd been sent here to do. “Face with Annette Blais now,” she instructed her MIU, tapping the “local transmit” key on the console. It took a few seconds for the woman Lilly had studied to pop onto her screen in the telltale black and white of a Sniffer transmission, looking all of her fifty-four years—grayer up top than Lilly remembered her from the Netfiles—and looking severely put-upon by the unwelcome interruption. “Well hello, Ms. Blais,” she said, “I'm Lilly Pe—"
"I know who you are,” snapped Annette into her Sniffer as she walked briskly down the Mainspoke. “Zilla,” she said under her breath. “Let's do coffee. I'm just one minute away from the E-tery. The staff told me you left your cup of coffee sitting on the table—it's probably still there, so we might as well—"
"Give me ten minutes,” said Lilly, trying not to sound quite as brittle as she felt. “Net, down, now,” she ordered before Annette could respond. Lilly pushed the “override” key just before she said “Net, down, now,” so her reception was not discontinued, as Annette would assume—at least not until the leader of Victor-E actually turned off her Sniffer.
The screen on Annette's Sniffer went to black. “Zilla,” she said, audibly this time, putting her face up close the device, almost as if she knew Lilly was eavesdropping. Then Annette slapped the lid down, terminating the transmission.
Lilly imagined Annette ramming the device into her pocket and cursing the WDA in both English and French. She knew about the Evolutionary use of the name “Zilla” from her study of the Netfiles. She had learned about it during her review of Victor Helliwell's Human One, Two, Three theory. It was short for “Godzilla,” an Evolutionary insult, their way of referring to the instinct, or to a person who is acting on instinct alone, especially when he or she shouldn't be, in their supposedly enlightened view. It was their way of suggesting that the “person” is hardly involved, except in defining the “how” of an event, not the “what.” In fact, Evolutionaries only used the term Zilla if they concluded that a person's words or actions were what a Normal court of law would label “temporarily insane,” meaning an involuntary regression all the way back to Human One—an animal reaction, basically, devoid of any intellectual input, judgment or control.
Careful Annette, thought Lilly as she shut off her MIU and walked to the bathroom. I can push too.
Chapter 6
DOES NOT COMPUTE
Tuesday, February 8, 2033—4:15 p.m.
The man codenamed “Eyeball” was still sitting alone in front of his MIU, watching the Supreme Commander of the WDA smile thinly and push her considerable bosom towards all the applause and cheers in the decorated aircraft hangar. There had been speculation for some months about a huge new spending program that was planned by the WDA for California. There was talk of thirteen thousand construction jobs, and of forty thousand permanent jobs to follow. Where these numbers came from, no one seemed to know, but if they were anywhere close to the truth, the state economy was in for a mammoth shot in the arm. What the project was all about ... well, no one seemed to know that either. Local rumor had it that the installation was to be housed in hundreds of the biggest Pliesterine bubbles, the ten-acre ones, out in the desert. The WDA sure has a thing about secrecy, he thought, even when it serves no useful purpose.
Eyeball watched long enough to hear Sheena Kalhoun announce that the project was to be called the “World Identity Bank,” but he had no particular interest in hearing the details. He pressed “show source” on his keyboard, and as the information was displayed, his heart thumped irregularly. The words across the bottom of his Netscreen read: “L.A. International, Hangar #1, Tuesday, February 8, 2033, 4:15 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.” No fucking way! he said to himself. That ... just doesn't compute ... I don't think.
He killed the sound and double-checked that he'd made instructions to archive the ceremonies as they continued in the hangar—he'd review that later. He took out a piece of paper and began making calculations, working backwards, and using bare minimums in his estimates of the amounts of time that would be required for things to compute:
1—walk from plane to hangar in LA—5 minutes
2—plane taxis on runway in LA—5 minutes
3—time in the air—?
4—plane taxis on runway in NY—5 minutes
5—airport arrival to boarding in NY—5 minutes
6—trip from WDA HQ to JFK Airport in NY—30 minutes
Eyeball knew that “Peace One,” the Supreme Commander's plane, was a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. He accessed the schedules of two commercial airlines on his MIU, noting the departure and arrival times of several flights from JFK to LAX, LA International Airport, flights using that same type of plane. All were about four and a half hours. He multiplied sixty by four-point-five, and got two hundred and seventy. Then he wrote “270 minutes” where the question mark had been, beside “time in the air.” And then he added all of the numbers. “Total: 320 minutes, or 5 hours and 20 minutes, as a minimum,” he wrote.
He subtracted five hours and twenty minutes from Sheena Kalhoun's jaunty climb to the podium in L.A.'s Hangar #1, which occurred at 4:15 p.m., and arrived at an answer of 10:55 a.m. Earlier in the day, when Kalhoun had recorded her Netcast in response to the breaking story about Lester Connolly, she had been sitting behind her desk in her office at WDA headquarters, in the building that had once been the home of the United Nations. Everyone knew what that highest office looked like, and that's where she had been. The absolute latest that she could have made that recording in her office was five minutes to eleven this morning, he figured, EST.
Eyeball retrieved the archived record of the stunning announcement that had been made from the Washington General Hospital at 3:30 p.m. He let the Netcast roll, and poised his pen to make notes as the Chief of Surgery read his prepared script:
My name is Dr. MacInnis. At eleven fifteen this morning, Lester Connolly was admitted with flu-like symptoms and severe pain in his lower left arm. By eleven thirty-five a.m., we had diagnosed his illness as necrotizing fasciitis, the so-called flesh-eating disease, which can sometimes—
Holy Christ, Eyeball said to himself as he froze the image. Kalhoun recorded her public response to Connolly's illness twenty minutes before he was even admitted, and forty minutes before the fucking diagnosis was made! He carefully reviewed his tentative finding, looking for a snag. The only way I could be wrong is if there's an east-to-west wind today, or no wind, and the plane saved a substantial amount of flight time.
He checked the day's weather on his MIU. The prevailing winds had prevailed. There was a fifteen- to twenty-mile-an-hour wind, out of the west. He checked the actual arrival times of the commercial flights he had noted earlier, and they had all been either on time or a few minutes late.
This is more than big, Eyeball said to himself. This is huge!
He went into the bathroom and dashed off a short hand-written letter—not including the calculations; just the bottom line—to Gilbert Henderson, the American investigative journalist who had so humiliated the WDA last year. He popped it into the bag with the rest of his outgoing mail, hoping to God it wouldn't get noticed and intercepted by some over-zealous WDA flunky. Then he lay on his couch to think about what he had just seen, just figured out, just done ... and fell into a disturbed sleep.
Chapter 7
FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS
Tuesday, February 8, 2033—4:55 p.m.
Lilly was back in her small apartment. Her meeting with Annette Blais, the administrator of the Victor-E clan, had been formal, perfunctory and without much substance. The only thing Annette had said that resonated was: “Jeeze you're skinny; we'll have to fatten you up.” For slaughter? Lilly wondered. She and I are going to conflict.
There was still unpacking, never high on Lilly's list of favorite activities. She opened the smaller suitcase and hung up her clothes, so they'd get unwrinkled. The rest of her stuff could wait. Her practically antique steamer trunk would arrive in a few days, with the balance of her clothing. “And all those other things that matter less and mean more,” she said quietly.
She sat in her comfy new Net chair—her predecessor, Harry Lloyd, had got at least that item right—and locked her thin hands into a kind of hammock behind her thin neck, under her long black hair. With her eyes closed, she breathed in the finality and freshness of this pivotal moment in her life. God never closes a door without opening a window, she remembered her mother saying with that “I-really-mean-this” look of hers. I suppose, she thought, although she had little time for fiction.
Lilly figured the day would come when she would feel comfortable here in this place, even though this could never be a real home. Bohemians, she remembered hearing from her darling Grandpa Petrosian ... rest his soul. Then came the ... she had to think about it ... beatniks—that was it—then the hippies, then that punk thing, and now these so-called Evolutionaries. There's always some people who can't fit in and just be normal.
She let her thoughts wander, and found herself considering what would become of her ex-lover, Ed, back in Miami. He was a descent sort, destined for an unspectacular float up to the middle rungs of some random regional WDA office, contentedly keeping tabs on a medium-sized cadre of underlings ... and undoubtedly diddling his secretaries.
