Devin clicked open his bag and grabbed a clean shirt. He put it on. Its memory fibers clutched and relaxed. The wrinkles disappeared.
“Coffee please,” he ordered. The Carbomizer coffee machine on his dresser began to gurgle. When it finished, Devin took a sip from the cup. It was lukewarm but bitterly potent.
There was a popping noise outside. Devin went to the window, threw the curtains aside and looked out. The unmistakable popping of semiautomatic gunfire came from a few blocks down Mugabe Boulevard. Devin had heard the sound before.
When Devin was younger, National Police tried to blast their way into Goldstein. But the colonists knew they were coming. The colony was always one step ahead of NaPol.
NaPol amassed a small legion of mechanized infantry, dragonfly helicopters, drones, microray-incapacitators, and genuine-sounding, bullhorn-wielding negotiators. The Goldsteiners, however, were dug in. NaPol tested the lines in the thickly wooded terrain but were rebuffed so they dug in too. After a month it got cold. After two months it got dark. After three months, NaPol went home.
The bullets from Mugabe Boulevard popped in bursts of seven or eight. A volley from the street, then a volley from an adjacent building. There was a bright flash. Then Devin heard the delayed sound of the explosion. There were more bullets, another flash, then the thunder of another explosion.
Several armored police vehicles zoomed past the Baldwin on the street below. A dragonfly buzzed overhead, then another. More bullets popped. Then it quickly subsided leaving only a residue of haze, the smell of gunpowder, and plumes of billowing, black smoke.
“Surveillance cameras are picking up activity in the Sharia District. Let’s listen in,” interrupted a reporter on the holovision.
The feed was thirty seconds old. There was a silhouette on screen firing haphazardly out of a third floor window. The view then switched to the street. Two more men were hunched behind an electro. One fired into the window, then ducked from the return volley. There was an explosion and the plastic car, along with the two men, were vaporized in a fireball. The NaPol tanks then rolled in and lit the entire building up with heavy caliber machine gun from an unmanned turret. The bullets peppered the entire face of building. The windows exploded. The surface of the walls turned to a mist.
Devin turned the holovision off. “Time to look for work,” he declared as if the entire scenario that had just went down were nothing more than a Bollywood action movie. He left the room and took the elevator to the lobby.
“Good morning, sir,” greeted the eightyish doorman with a wide grin. The smoke from the nearby firefight made him cough. “Excuse me.”
“Good morning to you.” Devin tipped him with a wave of his multi and a smile on his face. The old man smiled back.
The smell of the spent powder and fumes of burning plastic were almost overpowering on the street. Devin gazed down the boulevard towards the action. It was shrouded in white haze. He turned the opposite direction and began to walk.
Before long, he came upon a kiosk. He waved his multi in front of it and keyed in a job search. Several leads appeared.
“Up to $7,000 per hour. Licensed Only. Ping Numenor.
He thought about using the kiosk portal to submit an application but then thought better of it. His multi was configured to generate random identities every twenty minutes unless suspended. If he applied, his bogus I.D. could be crosschecked with NaPol’s citizen database. A “no match” would draw attention. It was an unnecessary risk.
He scrolled down to the next post. Same dilemma, “Must Apply Online” appeared over and over again. Finally, after a dozen or so attempts he came to an ad for a job agency.
“Programmers Wanted. Apply in person.”
Devin drew the address into his multi with a touch and strolled leisurely down four littered blocks of the city, soaking in the sights, sounds, and acrid smells.
It had been a long time since he was “in country”. What he found ironic was how so little of the mechanical and physical aspects had changed since he had left. He expected new things in lieu of his twenty year absence but there were the same plastic cars, the same holovision billboards, the same clothing and body-piercing styles.
There was one exception. It was the presence of new, obnoxious, glittering skyscrapers dominating the city’s skyline. They were each cartel headquarters, no doubt. The origamy of steel and glass, the orgy of ostentatious engineering inspired nothing in Devin’s imagination except contempt. “Mausoleums paid for by taxes extracted from five hundred million serfs. They got theirs, now I get mine.”
He found his way to the subway station and purchased a day pass from a smiling, holographic face at the ticket kiosk. But when he attempted to enter the turnstile he was rebuffed.
“I’m sorry,” came a condescending female voice from the speaker above. “Invalid identification. Please present valid I.D. to the attendant.”
Devin had his multi but he was not bio-chipped. Patriot bio-chips were surgically removed before anyone was permitted to enter Goldstein. Devin still had the tiny scar. He looked at his wrist as if looking there might somehow cause it to rematerialize. His multi was supposed to mimic the bio-chip signal but it had apparently failed.
“Step back please,” ordered an authoritative voice from behind. “Hands on your head!” Devin complied.
A short, chubby nat with pattern baldness, a mustache, and the all too familiar dark glasses began wanding Devin up and down. He scanned both wrists and shoulders six times.
“Where’s your bio-chip?” he asked Devin while he continued to grope him.
Devin began to feel a panic building. Every Amerikan had a bio-chip in their wrist (or shoulder for apocalyptic Christians). They were inserted at 18 months of age, when parents took their toddlers in for the compulsory autism-HIV-diabetes-herpes-obesity-cervical cancer inoculations. The chipping of babies had managed to reduce child abductions by seventy five percent! That is until pedophiles and kidnappers realized they could just slit the wrists of their captives and pluck out the device with tweezers.
Devin decided to improvise. “It’s right there,” he exclaimed pointing to a spot on his unscarred wrist. “I’m not sure why it ain’t working.”
The nat looked at him crosswise as he tucked his wand into his breast pocket.
“Just yesterday I was trying to board and the same thing happened,” Devin continued. “I rubbed my wrist a little and then it started working.” Devin rubbed his wrist where the phantom chip was supposed to be.
“What’s wrong with you, son?” questioned the nat. “You an anti-patriot or something?”
“No sir. I…”
“Because if you was, any bomb you’d be carryin’ should have set off that alarm back there.”
“No sir. I’m no anti…”
“Maybe you one of those Chinese ninjas. Maybe you gonna karate chop someone on that train there?”
“No sir. I don’t know any karate. Aren’t ninja from Japan, anyway?”
“Don’t get smart with me, son. You lucky you don’t look Chinese or I just might do a full cavity search on you in front of everyone. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Devin’s panic waned as his defiance waxed. “I bet you’d enjoy that,” he snarked.
“What was that, boy?” asked the cop as he grabbed Devin by the collar and shoved him against the wall next to the turnstile. The serfs in the vicinity cleared away and averted their eyes.
“Did you call me boy?” Devin asked.
“That’s right, boy,” answered the nat adding extra emphasis. “Whatchya gonna do about it? You gonna report me? ‘Boy’ isn’t a hate word as far as I know so go ahead and make the call.”
Devin imagined wrestling the chubby nat to the ground, kicking him in the teeth and making a break for it but he reigned his anger in. Roth had warned him that any attempt to resist would surely be met with near lethal force.
“No sir. I was just seeking clarification.”
“Good, ‘cause you see
this?” asked the nat as he pulled the silver skull badge off his black polyester shirt and stuck it in Devin’s face.
“Yes, I do.”
“I want you to read the badge number to me.”
“It says, ‘Transit Authority 4661212’”
“That’s right. Authority! You know what that means?”
“I imagine it means you’ve been deputized to harass people for no good reason,” Devin explained. He was surprised to find that his remark did not trigger a rage in the nat that he was hoping to induce.
“That’s right,” answered the cop. “Authority means I can do whatever I like whenever I feel like it. This badge here is my authority.”
“Congratulations. Having that kind of power must be cathartic. Your father must be proud.”
“You a criminal?” asked the nat.
“Not lately.”
“You like little boys or something?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You a drug dealer? You dealin’ Em?”
“No sir. I don’t even know what that is.”
“You’re full of shit. Gimme your multi.”
Devin took the slender card off his wristband and handed it to the nat. The nat scanned it with his wand and read the details as they scrolled before his eyes on the insides of his dark sunglasses.
He could have had the readouts hard wired directly into his brain but like most nats, he declined. What if something went wrong? His brain might be permanently jammed by scrambled transmissions with no way to shut them off. Risk of malfunction-induced psychosis scared most nats away from the brain implants.
“Okay Mr. Svenson. You’re free to go. Don’t let me catch you karate choppin’ anybody ‘cause I will definitely pulse your ass.”
“Thank you, sir. I certainly don’t want to have my ass pulsed,” quipped Devin.
The nat stared dumbly at Devin as he buzzed him through the turnstile.
Devin boarded the filthy C line. It smelled of rotting fruit and urine. The plastic walls, plexi-glass windows, and aluminum hand poles were stained with grimy hand prints and graffiti. The car’s occupants were cast in deathlike bluish hues of the diode lights.
Devin breathed through his mouth to avoid the smell. He steadied himself by wrapping his clothed arm around a greasy pole nearest the door. He scanned the other occupants as the buzzing subway car lurched forward.
His eyes caught a slender woman sitting across from. She was clad in a vinyl micro skirt, a tightly clinging tank top and little else. Her hair was frostlike white. She wore oversized, opaque glasses and was probably immersed in some program playing before for her eyes behind the blocky black lenses.
Devin wondered if she noticed him leering at her. She sat motionless with her long, slender legs furtively crossed. Her face was perfectly arranged— flawless and without expression. Her featureless skin glowed under the diode light. Her lips were painted glistening black. She mumbled slightly, silently as if she were singing or speaking to someone in her augmented reality.
Devin’s eyes scanned down along the line of her chin, down along the edge of her slender neck, down past her collarbones, between the curves and shadow of her…
“She’ll catch you,” he thought to himself. “Look away.” He looked away, out the window. Grease stained walls of tile flew past outside. Devin prided himself in his act of self-control. He was not an animal after all.
He stared at an old woman taking puffs of oxygen from a green hose affixed to her nostrils. She had bright orange hair fluffed up into a clown-like afro. The bright hair comprised a dollop of youthfulness on the otherwise eroded posture of a frail old woman.
Devin sighed.
In the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the nymph in the suggestive skirt as she uncrossed her legs. His resolve disintegrated. His eyes crept back towards her, aligning with her neck. Then they crept downward. They crept down past her navel, down further. She was sitting just right. Down.
“You’re weak!” he exclaimed to himself. “No. You’re a man. She’s showing it off. She wants you to look. It’s a game. Be sly. Now’s the moment, she’s not paying attention. Careful.”
He scanned along her hip, along the edge of the skirt, down along her slender leg to the vinyl boot that was nearly painted onto her calf. His eyes crept up to the facets of her knee, along the inside of her thigh.
He could not help himself. He was a prisoner of his inner primate. His helpless eyes were pulled along, up, helplessly up to the fringe of the skirt. Up further. One brief glance…
The car slammed down with a tremendous crash that nearly sent Devin into a heap on the floor. The diode lights flickered. The oxygen tank of the old woman with the orange afro slammed painfully into his shin.
He regained his balance but found, to his disappointment, that the nymph had changed her position, obstructing his view. The train regained speed and carried on as if nothing had happened. Devin rubbed his shin.
He noticed two young men at the other end of the car. One wore a shirt with scenes of self-immolation playing out within the diode-silk material. The other fellow had braided hair that changed colors every three seconds: cyan, magenta, cyan, magenta.
“What you looking at?” asked the cyan then magenta haired fellow.
Devin sized him up. They stared at each other, locked into each other’s eyes, unflinching, frozen in time. Devin was not afraid. He had been in many fights in his life.
The thug with the scenes of gore playing out on his shirt leaned in towards the other and joined the staring contest. He pulled up his shirt revealing a pistol tucked into his waistband.
“How the hell he get that on here?” Devin asked himself, remembering how he was detained for missing a chip but these thugs managed to board with guns.
Not liking the new odds, Devin averted his eyes. There was nothing to be gained in a confrontation with these thugs other than a bullet to the head. He decided he would live to rebuild his pride another day.
Guns were commonplace back in Goldstein, but the attitude about them was subdued. Weapons were for defense and to be used as a last resort, not for intimidation and thuggery. A gun is significantly less useful as a blunt tool of intimidation when one’s potential victim is most likely armed as well, Devin recalled.
The train decelerated for the upcoming station. The thugs exited. Devin did not look directly at them as they passed but kept tabs on them with his peripheral vision. They passed within arm’s length, glaring at him all the way out of the doors, rudely shoving the orange-haired, old woman along the way.
Three other people boarded. One was a man wearing a white jump suit. He had a crew cut and dark glasses. There were several open seats in the car but he chose the one next to where Devin was standing.
The train lurched forward again.
“Hello,” greeted the man in the jumpsuit while staring forward.
“Hello,” Devin answered.
Devin deduced that the fellow was probably delayed in some mental capacity. The man extended his hand without making eye contact. Devin shook it.
“Coldest April in one hundred and sixty six years,” observed the fellow.
“I wouldn’t know, I’m not from here,” Devin replied, waiting for the obligatory follow up question of “Where are you from?” But it didn’t come.
“Did you know that the national debt is twelve quadrillion, one hundred and fifty trillion dollars?”
Devin was now certain that the man had a faulty circuit somewhere. “That’s a lot of money,” he replied while thinking, what kind of idiots would continue lending it to the government.
The train began to build speed.
The man changed topic again. “Nine thousand, four hundred and fifty-nine Americans have lost their lives in the Nigerian War,” he explained. “The family of the ten thousandth casualty gets thirty million dollars from the government. You could buy a whole townhouse for that. You could buy a Mumbai Motors Tiger GT. You could buy forty thousand transit passes.
You could…”
“I hope it was worth it,” Devin interrupted.
The disabled man fell silent, bobbing back and forth until the train decelerated. The doors of the car slid open. The nymph in the skirt flew out. Devin thought for a moment about chasing after her but decided it was a fool’s errand. He released the grimy pole and stepped over the threshold. Just as his sole touched the concrete of the platform, the delayed fellow spoke again.
“The only place on the planet not experiencing global warming induced global cooling is Alaska.”
Devin froze straddling the subway car and the platform.
“You are blocking the door! Please exit!” Came a prerecorded voice over the PA.
Devin stepped completely out. The doors closed and the train accelerated carrying the disabled man away. It dissolved into the darkness of the black tube like a dream that quickly fades after waking.
“That was obviously no coincidence,” Devin thought. “How did he know? Maybe he gleaned something from me. Maybe he’s a savant of some kind. Maybe he’s got augmentation and he studied me through his glasses.”
“No, I’m not tagged with anything revealing Alaska. Maybe I forgot something. Maybe I tipped him off visually with my clothes, my accent, or my hairstyle or something.” Devin scanned his own body. Nothing that he could tell indicated his Alaska-ness. “It’s a coincidence, that’s all, he assured himself.”
“No, it can’t be. He’s an agent of some kind. They were checking me out. I revealed too much. They’re watching me. They’re scanning me,” Devin concluded. “But I didn’t reveal anything, did I? Yes! You idiot! You froze when he said Alaska. That’s enough for them. They know, now. They know who I am for sure. You idiot!”
He walked up the broken escalator to the bright, noisy city street above. The under-privileged escalator, with side-saddle seating, ascended in perfect order next to him. It was totally unused. Above the stair he spied a tiny camera surveilling the throng. His thoughts drifted back to the secret agent posing as mentally disabled.
“It’s impossible. You’re paranoid,” he thought. “You’ve been careful. You haven’t been here long enough for them to track you down and put an agent on you. It takes hours for the database to put the facial matches together and identify the trending outliers. It takes days for some data-jockey to go through the lists and reports and push the actionable items out to the agents. They can’t possibly be on to me, not yet.”
Goldstein Page 5
