Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  As soon as we hit American soil, GBN speedily packed me off to a private medical clinic in New Mexico while our lawyers fended off warrants to take me into Federal custody for questioning—sort of a New Mexican stand-off. I filed my report on the last moments of the ex-Sheikh, handing it to Arlando from my hospital bed just before they wheeled me into surgery.

  He didn’t argue with me about the editorial content, either. He knew all the rest of the details I hadn’t been able to tell him from Khuruchabja. But we didn’t discuss the reasons he’d sent me out in the first place, and I didn’t give him any lengthy explanations of why I was careful to edit out John Halton and the CDI agents’ activities, as well as downplaying certain other parties’ particular roles. Co-opted, or wiser, I’m not sure which.

  Nonetheless, swathed in bandages, my bruised face and ruined hands gave the extra added touch of pathos, the Dedication of the Press to Truth and the Public’s Right to Vicarious Thrills that can masturbate the ratings into new highs. The Feds and their subpoenas discreetly vanished and I got a brief, revived burst of celebrity with the renewed world attention on poor little Khuruchabja.

  After I’d Filmed my last slipclip as Kay Bee Sulaiman, I went under the knife. Kay Bee Sulaiman was excised and they stitched Kay Munadi back together again. Except for Arlando and my very own GBN security team, my only nonmedical company during the two months I stayed in the clinic was John. I would rouse briefly from the sedatives my bloodstream seemed to be saturated with most of the time, my bandaged hand in his, my first sight always his relieved, anxious face.

  There was nobody John could have seen for a medical check-up, however, although we both knew he had been damaged. The first time it happened, l had been half-dozing from a shot of painkiller while watching the endlessly recycled news-holos. John had been standing by the bulletproofed window, gazing fixedly off at the mountains in the distance. I yawned, and flicked off the tube with the remote.

  “John…”

  He didn’t react. My heart kicked in to attention, and I called his name softly a few more times before he finally responded. He turned slowly from the window to look at me, as if he were swimming in molasses. His body moved mechanically. His eyes were lifeless, that strange, barren expression I’d seen so often before drifting steadily through them. Pure ice. Deadly. Inhuman.

  “John?” This time I whispered his name stone-cold terrified. My hands were still helplessly encased in steel and plastine. I couldn’t have defended myself had I tried. For a fleeting moment I thought of screaming for the guards outside the hospital door. The image of them bursting in and shooting him down stopped me. “Halton… ?”

  He blinked, as if awakening from a dream. “Yes?”

  “Are you all right?”

  He looked at me, puzzled. “Yes, of course.”

  “Where were you just now?”

  He started, suddenly realizing he’d come out of his trance, “inside myself,” he said, frightened. He wasn’t able to explain it any better than that.

  Physically, the doctors have given him a clean bill of health. Even the three bullet scars have vanished. But once in a while he slips away, like a fabricant’s version of epilepsy, unable to control it, lost inside his mind, unaware until after it passes. Sometimes he thinks it’s beneficial, a flash of insight, a new neural pathway discovered. That’s his theory, anyway. Sometimes he just comes out of it trembling and scared. The only people who might know what’s wrong or how to repair the damage that Laidcliff’s booby-trapped nanos have done are CDI.

  In a bizarre way, Laidcliff did me a favor. My face was so ruined, they had to rebreak the bones and start over. I needed some heavy-duty plastic surgery just to rebuild the architecture. I’d always dreaded surgeons and dentists, doing my very best to avoid both. Now that I had no choice, I thought, What the hell, while they’re at it… So I had them install those really high, model-type cheekbones and the classically straight thin nose my mother always wanted me to have. I’m still making regular donations to my dentist’s Swiss bank account, but the replacement clones he implanted are far, far better than the original set.

  I’ve got a killer smile.

  They also did some nips and tucks when they removed the worst of the scar tissue graffiti on my front, and I had them rearrange and transplant some fatty tissue, flattening my tummy while enlarging my breasts. No amount of plastic surgery is ever going to make me into a raving beauty, understand—that much is still within the realm of fantasy. I’m still homely, to put it kindly, but now if I tried dressing up as a man, I’d look like a woman dressed up as a man. And I’m beginning to like what I see in the mirror.

  The funny thing was, it didn’t make one goddamned bit of difference to John. I felt somewhat insulted by his lack of appreciation when I’d gone through so much pain and trouble to look nice for him, but he really didn’t see any difference. When John says it’s my mind that drives him wild, he honestly means it.

  The news and public interest in Khuruchabja died down as CDI scrambled to sweep as much of their dirt under the Persian rug as they could after deep-sixing their pseudosheikh. The local clergy once again had trouble digging up a suitable nominee to counter Ibrahim’s claim, various contenders busily killing off their rivals. Ibrahim’s future on the Presidential throne was shaky at best, and the Israelis were being very quiet. It looked disappointingly like it was going to be just the same old same old after all.

  Yesterday’s news.

  After I was discharged from the hospital, GBN moved us into a smallish house inside a high-security complex on the outskirts of Washington, near Mount Vernon. It’s similar to the kind of safe-zones the Government usually reserves for union Mafioso informants, exiled foreign dissidents, and paranoid politicians having scandalous affairs with holo stars whom they’d prefer keeping out of the limelight.

  GBN’s private complex protected mostly ex-Govemment sources who had been burned and a few foreign political refugees not in favor with our Government, who were in the process of writing their exposés.

  And us. Halton and I tried to adjust to life in the security complex, as much as two people who expected to be murdered at any moment could adjust. The house itself is nice enough, despite a security-screened gate around it. With enough acreage to buffer one property from the next, infrared cameras in the trees and motion sensors in the flower beds, it’s the kind of miniature prison-palace I might have daydreamed about when I had the freedom of not being able to afford it.

  We have twenty-four-hour personal bodyguards with biotailored guard dogs, repellent electronic fences, top-of-the-line scan cameras, filtered phone lines, ultrasound motion detectors, bomb sniffers, fortified walls on the houses—you name it, we had the works.

  I didn’t feel safer in the least. John holed up like a clam, afraid to go into the city, afraid to open the door or answer the phone or read the mail, cloistered away in the house reading trashy novels all day like some depressed hausfrau.

  Despite the fact I’d fucked up royally in Khuruchabja, GBN does take care of its own. But protecting us was more than simply fraternal altruism or forgiveness on their part. They had a special investment in safeguarding us. No other journalist in the world had her very own fabricant, and, so far as I know, there’s only ever been one CDI fabricant defector.

  GBN sold my beloved city apartment for me, and had my things moved to our new house. The house is comfortable as well as secure, but it lacks the charm and individuality of my funky two-bedroom apartment with its peeling wallpaper, squeaking floorboards, leaky faucets, and windows that needed propping open with spare books on a hot summer day. I even miss the neighbor’s bad-tempered cat who liked to crap in my flower boxes.

  My possessions seem somehow out of place here—temporary, vaguely alien. Like me. Like both of us.

  Of course, CDI knows exactly where we are. If they really wanted to make an all-out effort, all that the security toys would do is slow them down and possibly embarrass them. GBN made no effort to hid
e us, only defend us, while continuing to make the benefits of killing me or Halton of limited return. Living on the run sounds romantic, but in real life it’s a heavy strain on the nervous system. The best we could do was to cover our tender asses, and let GBN watch them watching us.

  We knew CDI was—is still—watching us. Watching John. Maybe they really are concerned that he was damaged and might suddenly mutate into a berserk ax murderer. More likely, they don’t relish the idea of all that secret shit John’s carrying around inside his body outside their iron-fisted control.

  But they actually did send the goddamned Transfer of Title listing me as John’s legal owner. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t have cared less about that; I was furious they’d sent it openly to the correct address—just another little aggravating form of intimidation, telling us they knew exactly where we lived.

  I also remembered the bit Laidcliff had mentioned about possession of fabricants reverting to the manufacturer on the death of the registered owner, and had GBN’s legal department revise it. The way the title is set up now, GBN as a corporate entity has a lien against John, with me being listed as having the controlling interest. If I should end up untimely demised, GBN retains its rights to John with my controlling interest divvied up equally among two dozen or so individual GBN employees as shareholders. Any nefarious plan CDI might have had to get John back by killing me, our legal beagles assured me they’ve scotched it. Not unless CDI is willing to murder dozens of high-profile people just to get their fabricant back, the lawyers snickered. I didn’t laugh; I wouldn’t put it past them.

  The documents did seem to make John feel better, though. There are some things hard-wired into him he’ll never escape. I gave him my copy of the title, and he put it away carefully with the rest of the papers he’s collected: his phony passport, his GBN employment contract, a special social security number, his brand-new union card—the kind of paperwork people accrete their whole lives and never notice until they need it. Sometimes he sits and goes through the papers as if they were old love letters, trying to get a sense of the person he’s supposed to be.

  After sitting around convalescing for a couple of months, I decided to quit smoking. I drove us both crazy going cold turkey, then moped around the house because there wasn’t anything else to do. Jeez, Kay Bee, go outside and play…

  Finally, I went back to my old job as an anonymous Broadcast Editor on a feed-in desk, only on a part-time basis, however, since I was still in physical therapy. When Laidcliff had broken my fingers, he’d damaged the ulnar nerves in my left wrist, making me clumsy. He’d also managed to nick part of the trigeminal nerve in my cheekbone, numbing half my face. Ironically, part of my physical therapy included a set of biomedical nanos injected along the damaged nerves. My fingers still hurt on cold nights and sometimes I have trouble holding a pencil, but at least I’ve gotten the feeling back in my face, and my hands do what I tell them to.

  But I had to go back to work. I’d become obsessed with keeping my name far enough up in the public consciousness to make killing me an ill-advised proposal. I mean, who’s gonna murder St. Cronkite or a latter-day Peter Arnett with impunity? But I was certainly no bubblehead and I was in no shape to go back into the field again, not immediately, if ever. I, of all people, am fully aware of just how short the viewing audience’s attention span is. I sat behind a feed-in Net, worrying and being paranoid, before Arlando cordially pointed out that I couldn’t watch a Netline while simultaneously looking over my shoulder.

  We were miserable.

  Then Arlando suggested something I should have thought of. I was no bubblehead, but why not Halton? He was certainly the right physical type and he could anchor in any language we needed. No one had to know he was a fabricant, and the higher visibility would give us both some measure of protection. I explained about John’s occasional problem, and Arlando brushed it aside.

  “We deal with crazier problems than that every day, and make it all look seamless. If he fritzes out on the air, we’ll work around it. Don’t worry.”

  I said I’d see what he thought about it, although we both knew John would do whatever I told him to. Arlando wouldn’t push me, and I refused to push John.

  I outlined the plan to John, staying carefully neutral, and let him wallow through the stress of making up his own mind. He’d have to get used to it sooner or later. The next day, we took our security-driven car into GBN together.

  He picked up the necessary anchoring skills with as much ease as he’d learned holo optics, and two weeks later I stood up in the engineering gallery behind Penley, chewing my now-manicured Chrysanthemum Amethyst-polished nails to the quick. Penley jacked into his Netline and ran a few checks, doing his best to ignore me hovering over him. I could see Arlando in the visitors’ observatory, hands deep in his pockets. More than the necessary number of my coworkers seemed to be attending this particular debut, and I wondered how many knew what Halton was.

  On the broadcast monitor, Clark Fitch in Rio was mouthing silent words earnestly; off-air monitors flickered in the semidarkness of the studio. Below us, in a brightly lit circle, Halton was being seated, his equipment adjusted, next to a moderately disgruntled Tricia Kwong. She had been mollified with the assurance that Halton was only there to learn the ropes from one of the best.

  Clark’s face was replaced by quick real-time footage of rebels in South America, as John and Tricia were cued. Tricia pasted on her professional smile, and John seemed utterly at ease, looking steadily at the camera.

  Penley looked up at my red-tinted reflection in the booth’s glass. “If you don’t stop biting your nails,” Penley said quietly, “I’m gonna throw your butt outa here, Munadi. You’re making me nervous.”

  GBN’s self-promotion theme music played tinnily through the monitor, the engineer pointed a finger at the couple impaled in the bright light, and the red ON THE AIR light flashed.

  “I’m Tricia Kwong in Washington,” Tricia said, and turned her head to smile at John.

  “And I’m John Halton,” John said, his voice professionally polished. His face held exactly the right mix of personal warmth and authority. It sent a wave of delightful shivers up the back of my neck. “Welcome to our viewers around the world to the Friday morning English edition of GBN Global News Report.”

  God, he was smooth! “Medical scientists at Johns Hopkins announced today a major breakthrough in their research into DVS Syndrome which has cost the lives of so many innocent children.” John looked and sounded like he’d been doing this job for years. I noticed Penley whispering names, but John was reading straight off the text display, taking in whole lines without even a twitch of an eyelid to give him away. “We now go live to our correspondent in Maryland, Will McDawney, who is with Dr. Victoria Czaktiz. Will?”

  John’s face on the broadcast monitor was replaced with Will’s own blond cherub features. “Thanks, John,” he said, and turned to the woman in a lab coat smiling fixedly into the camera, the whites of her eyes visible around her irises. “Dr. Czakitz”—Will pried her gently out of her rigid stage fright—“you’ve headed the DVS research team at Johns Hopkins for the past two years, right?”

  “Yes,” the doctor agreed, and took a quick inhale. “We’ve been working on detecting the gene sequence of various DVS retroviruses which we’ve isolated in the laboratory in order to tailor an inhibitor to nullify the effect, and eventually a splicing agent to remove the virus from the cells of affected patients.”

  “One to stop the disease and another to cure it, yes?” Will said, putting her words into a more easily digestible sound bite.

  “That’s right. But what we discovered is, an active DVS viral infection has more than one specific gene sequence causing the disease, and we were surprised to find that not all of them are generated by the same factors present for puberty to occur, which was what we had originally hypothesized. Some children can be infected with part of the viral code, and never get the disease. It’s the combination of DVS viral
infections triggered by hormonal activity in pubescence which activates the disease. While we have yet to discover the method of transmission, we have definitely isolated those particular DVS genes working in synchronicity with others which produce the deadly effects…” Once jolted into the story, Dr. Czakitz relaxed on familiar grounds.

  On the off-camera monitor, Tricia Kwong shuffled the paper files set in front of her, looking uneasy behind her plastic smile. Her puppeteer sat three Nets down, whispering soothingly into her ear mike. John simply waited, following the text display and watching the tiny broadcast screens on the panel below camera level while waiting for his cue. Penley sat quietly, then glanced once at me and shrugged. Halton didn’t need any handling. I had a sudden rush of sympathy for Tricia.

  Fabricants could do a lot of things better than us.

  Over the next three hours, I stood alternately clenching my hands and wiping my palms on my skirt, itching to push Penley out of the chair and take over, although there wasn’t much to do other than edit the Net through onto the text display, and give Halton the correct pronunciation of unfamiliar names. It was a slack morning, few real-time blips breaking into recorded stories. Tricia finally warmed up, she and John handling the live cut-ins as if they’d been working together ever since Zworykin had been in short pants.

  Then it was over, the eleven to three crew already in place. The floor crew unplugged the two anchors from their mock-up desk, and I watched Tricia stand stiffly for a moment before jutting out one formal hand toward John. I couldn’t hear her from the booth, but I watched her speak, saw John smile, nod, shake her hand and say something polite in return. Tricia looked relieved.