The Raintree Rebellion

by Janet Mcnaughton

  “That looks like progress,” Astral says.

  The remaining newscasts show a sharp increase in eco-terrorist attacks, but nothing as spectacular as the Oak Moraine fire. Before lunch, we tell the other aides about Falcon Edwards. I can’t contain my excitement. “Erica was saying the councillors aren’t even close to finding out how the technocaust began. But he must know a lot.”

  Griffin looks nonplussed. “Blake, he’s been dead for years. It’s right there in his dossier.”

  I’m outraged. “He was busy killing everyone else. Who killed him?”

  “Pancreatic cancer,” Griffin says. “It’s one of the few types that’s still fatal.”

  I can’t believe this man got away from us. His death gives me no satisfaction at all. “What about transplants? What about regeneration?”

  “My father had a friend with pancreatic cancer,” Kayko says. “There’s no hope unless it’s caught in the early stages.”

  Griffin has been flipping through his folder. “Here it is. He died in 2356.”

  “We’re never going to get to the bottom of this, are we?” I feel like crying.

  “Don’t give up yet,” Griffin says. “I have a lot of hope for this last projection. We’ll start on it tomorrow.”

  Later that afternoon, walking home from Bloor Street, I tell Erica all about our day. “It’s so discouraging. It seems as if anyone who could fill in the blanks is dead.”

  Usually, Erica would try to console me, but this time, she agrees. “We have to brace for disappointment.”

  When we get home, Erica says, “I’m going to start supper now, Blake. Why don’t you check the mail? A message from home might cheer you up.”

  I log in at the computer console in the kitchen. In mail, the Code Tracking address flashes onto the screen. Erica rushes over in response to the cry that I hear before I realize it came from me. My hands start to shake. “Open it for me, please,” I say, standing aside.

  She takes over. Then she looks up, confused. “What does it say?” Task.

  “You’d better sit down, Blake. According to Code Tracking, you died in 2355.”

  16

  Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

  —Twentieth-century philosopher George Santayana

  When Erica and I enter the Queen’s Park building the next day, we march into the main office of the Transitional Council. Erica demands to see Dr. Siegel so forcefully that the young receptionist is too intimidated to refuse.

  Dr. Siegel appears moments later, smiling. “Erica Townsend, what a pleasure,” he begins, then stops abruptly. “Is something wrong?”

  We must look terrible. I spent most of the night crying while Erica tried to comfort me. How did this happen? Could it somehow be related to what my parents suffered during the technocaust? Neither of us slept much.

  Erica points to me. “Does this girl look dead to you?” she demands.

  “Why no, of course not.”

  “Then why would Code Tracking tell us she died in 2355?”

  Dr. Siegel glances around. “We should discuss this privately. Please follow me.” Inside his office, he closes the door and asks us to sit down. “Suppose you tell me the whole story.” He listens attentively while we tell him what we know. “That’s quite a mystery,” he says when we finish.

  “How is a person declared dead?” I ask.

  “The codes that allow the tracking implant to be used are removed from the system. Anomalies like this do occur from time to time. In most cases, it’s some kind of bureaucratic accident, but, given Blake’s story, I think we should investigate further. Would you agree to meet with your Security officer?”

  “Yes, of course,” Erica says.

  “Excellent. You can see him early tomorrow morning. Hanif Abu-Muhsin is one of our best men.” I wonder what he would say if he knew just how true that is.

  Erica seems cheered, but, when we’re back in the hall, a wave of despair washes over me. “I don’t think this is going to get us anywhere,” I say.

  She gives me a searching look. “That doesn’t sound like you, Blake. This is a nasty shock. Get a good night’s sleep before you take your feelings seriously.” She gives me a quick kiss on the cheek. “You’d better get down to the media rooms. The others will be waiting.”

  Not exactly waiting, I discover. They’ve left me a note, telling me to meet them in the master control room. Kayko’s normally the only one who works there, but I know where it is. I follow a long corridor to a spiral staircase that opens onto a room with small widows on every wall. It’s full of control panels for holo-projection equipment and cameras. Everyone is there.

  “There you are,” Kayko says. “Just in time.” She stands at the main control panel, looking totally in command, like the captain of a ship.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “We’re calibrating the fractiles on that huge rally that was held in 2353.”

  “Come and have a look,” Griffin calls to me. He’s with the other aides by a bank of windows. I find they face the largest projection room, which is huge. Suddenly, the room is filled with little people, thousands of them. It’s as if we’re watching everything from a great height. “I don’t see the outside edges of the stadium,” Griffin says, “Take it down another ten percent. That’s good,” he adds when she does. .

  “Here we go.” Kayko hits a few keys and the whole image is suddenly overlaid with neat squares of red light. “Let me have a look,” she says, joining us. “What do you think? Do those fractiles look manageable?” She seems to love this work.

  “In terms of viewing, they look fine,” Griffin replies, “but how many are there?”

  “One hundred.”

  “One hundred?” Astral sounds incredulous. “And each will be a separate projection? That would take months to work through.”

  “We’ll focus on areas that look important.” Griffin points to a big stage at one end of the stadium. “There’s the speakers’ platform. Some of us will need to monitor that fractile.”

  “What’s that tent to the side?” Kayko asks.

  “I don’t know,” Griffin says. “Could we have a look?”

  “As soon as I code the fractiles and save this, I’ll have a master copy in the server. We can run any section we want. I’ll have to ask the archivist to dub some copies onto micro-disks. Then we can run different parts of the rally at the same time in different projection rooms.”

  “You can’t dub copies from the server yourself?” Griffin asks.

  “I seem to be locked out of that function. It must be a security feature. I’ll save this now.” Kayko goes back to the panel and hits another key. Suddenly, every glowing fractile is marked with a code. “Which one do we want, Griffin?”

  “B-10.”

  Kayko pushes a few more keys and brings that section of the hologram up, full scale.

  “We can’t see from here. Too much in the way,” Griffin says. “Let’s go down.”

  Kayko hands us all remotes and we follow her to the big projection room. Most of the holograms we’ve seen were shot to be viewed in someone’s living space. They don’t cover much area. But this is different. It’s like walking through the actual place. It must have been a hot day; the people around us wear light summer clothes. For one long, surreal moment, we pass through them. The projection simply flows around us, undisturbed. It’s too disconcerting.

  Luisa feels it too. “Can we pause this?” she asks. “It’s like walking through spirits.” The projection freezes as Kayko silently complies.

  I’m relieved. “That’s better.”

  “I didn’t like it either,” Astral says.

  We can see the tent ahead now, though the crowd still blocks our view. “It looks like a rest area, probably where people went when they weren’t on the speakers’ platform,” Kayko says.

  “Just imagine what we’d learn if that had been recorded.”

  Astral sounds wistful.

  We pass th
rough the last of the people. Kayko gasps. “It was.” The door of the tent has been pinned open, maybe to let the air in, and we can see inside part of it, a big wedge of light where a woman sits frozen in conversation.

  “How can that be?” Luisa asks, incredulous.

  “Whoa,” Griffin says. “This is unbelievable.”

  “What does it mean?” I ask. We’ve all spoken at once.

  Everyone laughs.

  Kayko answers. “Anywhere the cameras reached was recorded. Look at that image, though. Doesn’t it look odd?” She points inside the tent.

  “It’s one-dimensional, isn’t it?” Astral replies, “I used to have friends who played around with ancient media. It looks like an old cinematic projection.”

  Kayko smiles. “That’s right. Only one camera hit the right angle to reach inside the tent. It was outside this fractile, but we’d be able to see it in the full projection,” she points directly behind us, “probably fixed to a light post over there.”

  “So it’s just a fluke,” Griffin says, “but such a lucky one.” “Where there’s light, there’s sound. That’s the first rule of holography,” Kayko replies.

  “You mean we’ll be able to hear what went on inside that tent?” Astral asks.

  “Sort of. It’s going to be weird. Allow me to demonstrate,” Kayko says with mock formality, pointing her remote at the tent. The people around us come to life again. The ones who walk through me are incredibly distracting. I tense involuntarily every time it happens, bracing for an impact that doesn’t come. “Listen,” Kayko says. With so much noise around us, it’s an effort to tune in the voice of the woman inside the tent. When I do, I realize we’re hearing only parts of a conversation.

  I listen for long moment before I realize this woman is Swan Gil. She’s aged so much since I saw her in that first hologram, even though they were taken only about a year apart. She looks careworn. “Who’s going to look after that?” she says, sitting on a folding chair, facing someone in the tent who’s out of the frame. After a silence, she adds, “Oh, he’s a good person.” She rises and walks toward the inside of the tent. “I’ve been meaning to—” she disappears from the frame and her voice does too. Kayko pauses the holo-projection, her point made.

  “We might learn a lot from this, even if parts are missing,” Griffin says.

  “When can we get started, Kayko?” Astral asks.

  “We need to spend more time analyzing the big picture before we plunge in. This tent is an obvious area of interest, but there may be others. We can’t study the whole projection, but I don’t want to overlook something important.” She goes to a control panel on the wall. “Why don’t we take a break? I have to ask the archivist if he’ll dub copies of this new master file for us.”

  She speaks to him briefly, then says, “He’s on his way down. He says he’s got a document of interest to us, something about the technocaust.”

  “But how?” Griffin asks. “The official records were destroyed years ago.”

  Kayko shrugs. “We’ll find out.”

  Moments later, Terry Raven joins us in the main conference room. When we first met him, he seemed like a calm, deliberate man, but today he’s flushed and excited. “I’ve already captured your file from the server,” he tells Kayko. “You’ll have copies by the end of the day. But I wanted to talk to you anyway. Sit down, everyone.”

  When we sit, he places a micro-disk on the desk. It’s larger than the ones we’ve been using. “This arrived a few weeks ago. Anonymously. The return address doesn’t exist. Security thought the package might be a bomb or a bio-toxin, but it was harmless. They finally released it yesterday. I couldn’t resist listening, of course. The equipment it runs on is generations out of date, but we have some in the archives.”

  “What is it?” Kayko asks.

  “Radio broadcasts from the year 2353. A station called RTLM. I did a search and found it was something called a pirate radio station. It managed to stay on the air by illegally patching into existing communications systems for short periods, moving from one to another. The authorities shut it down when they could, raiding the offices when they were located and arresting everyone, but mostly it stayed on the air.”

  Astral gives a snort of disbelief. “Who listens to radio?”

  Griffin replies, “The poorest of the poor. You need a home to run a holo-display. Radio receivers are cheap and small. They run on solar power and you can use them anywhere. Radio can be an important source of information for the poor.”

  Kayko’s eyes shine as she looks around the room. “We need a plan. Griffin and I and one more person should explore the Hippodrome rally to identify the fractiles most likely to yield information. In the meantime, the two who aren’t working with us can listen to the radio broadcasts.” She turns to Terry. “I don’t know how to thank you. We’re especially interested in 2353. If we’re ever going to learn the truth about the technocaust, that’s where we need to look.”

  “I hope this helps. Come to me when you’re ready and I’ll set you up in media booths.”

  “I’d like to hear the broadcasts,” I say quickly. “I have no technical skills to help with the hologram.”

  Kayko nods. “We need someone who’s done indexing.”

  “I know how to index,” Luisa says.

  “And I’ll work with Blake,” Astral says. “It sounds intriguing.”

  “Give me time to make working copies,” Terry says. “You can start tomorrow. And please make notes—dates, type of programming, names of people on air, that sort of thing.”

  “I am not the only one to index, then,” Luisa says, and everyone laughs.

  There’s a feeling of elation in the room. This might be a crack in the solid wall that stands between us and the truth about the beginnings of the technocaust.

  I look at the old disk on the table and a shiver goes right down my spine. What will it tell us?

  17

  To cut through all the red tape and give people the truth about our society and the WEAPONS to create real change.

  —Mission Statement of Radio RTLM

  Early the next morning Erica and I follow directions to Hanif’s office, tracing a maze of tunnels through increasingly serious-looking security checks. When we finally reach the right reception area, we’re told to wait. Erica doesn’t like to waste time. After fifteen minutes, she says, “Maybe we should come back later . . .” but the main door opens and in walks Hanif.

  “Ah, ladies,” he says. “Good morning again. Sorry for the delay. Another driver takes over after I deliver you to work, but I have to complete the run to protect my cover. Please, follow me.”

  Meeting Hanif in this setting throws me off balance, but he’s perfectly at home. His office is large and comfortable, the office of someone important. I don’t know whether to feel flattered or frightened by the fact that he was assigned to us.

  Hanif motions for us to sit before he takes his chair. “Why did you wait so long after the Uprising to submit your ID code?” he asks.

  I quickly explain what I learned about my mother when we found my micro-dot. “For a long time I wasn’t ready to know more,” I tell him, “but when we came here, I couldn’t resist trying to find out. Do you have any idea why my code was removed?”

  He shakes his head. “I had a look at the records. It’s a mystery. But it doesn’t look like an accident.”

  “But why would anyone do this deliberately?” I ask. Hanif looks at me for a long moment before replying, his dark eyes filled with compassion. “I’m not supposed to indulge in speculation,” he begins. My heart sinks, but then he adds, “I find it impossible not to wonder, though. If you had been taken for organs or murdered, it would make sense, but it doesn’t seem as if anyone was trying to hide a crime. I can only conclude this was an act of malice.”

  “You think someone wanted to harm Blake?” Erica asks.

  “I don’t think Blake was the target. It might have been aimed at one of her parents.”

>   “But my mother was probably dead by then,” I say. Hanif nods. “Yes, and you were both thousands of kilometres away, out of range of Queen’s Park. That leaves your father.”

  “My father? You think he was still alive in 2355?”

  Hanif holds up his hand. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I don’t want to give you false hope. If someone in power was trying to harm him, there’s a good chance he didn’t survive.”

  I look down to hide my disappointment.

  “A lot of data was removed from your file when the ID code was disabled, but don’t give up. If you know your mother’s name, there’s a chance I can trace her through the system.”

  “Her name was Emily Monax.” Even now, speaking my mother’s name causes a rush of powerful longing.

  “Monax is an unusual name,” Hanif says. “I can work with that. If I can locate your mother in the files, I’ll learn a great deal. Once I have her ID code, I’ll be able to trace her marriage. Then we should discover your father’s name and ID code.”

  I’m too stunned to speak, but Erica says, “We’ll know who he was?”

  “His name, whether he’s still alive, everything Blake wishes to know about her father’s ‘fate should be in those files. I’ll be in touch when I’ve finished my search.” He’s completely polite, but there’s something so final in this last sentence that Erica and I rise as if on cue. “I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that it’s vital for me to maintain my cover,” Hanif adds, opening the door for us. “We mustn’t talk about these things outside these buildings. Just make an appointment through Dr. Siegel’s office if you want to talk again. Do you have any questions before you go?”

  “I do,” I say. It’s silly, but I want to know anyway. “That night just after we got here, when I met you at High Park, was that really your wife and child?”

  For the first time in his professional persona, Hanif grins.

  “Yes. I had assumed you’d stay close to home for the first few days. When Security realized you were out, we had to scramble to cover you. I knew you might recognize me, but I didn’t want you to feel threatened, so I brought my family. Shauna was not amused to be drawn into my work.”