Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  Amos addressed the camera again. “If the man I’m speaking to turns himself in before the funeral, no one else has to get hurt. But if he doesn’t? Well, let’s just say we’ll see who the real hotshot is.”

  The video ended.

  15

  “I’m going to kill him,” Kurt said. “I’m going to drive down there tonight and I’m going to find him and I’m going to kill him.”

  Minter put a hand on Kurt’s shoulder. “There’s no time, man.”

  “If we leave now—”

  “We’d still be a day late,” Minter interrupted. “And no one is killing anyone. We’re already dead, remember?”

  “Were you even listening?” Kurt shouted, not meaning to take his rage out on Minter but not controlling it, either. “He knows!”

  Minter turned to Ernesto and asked for a moment alone with Kurt. Ernesto agreed and went outside.

  “41 per cent,” Minter said.

  “What?”

  “Amos is trying his best to look convincing, and the lie detector says inconclusive 41. He’s bluffing. It’s a trap.”

  Kurt rushed to load his own lie detector. He replayed the video and pressed the button at various points. The verdicts were all inconclusive, ranging from 28 to 43. According to the app’s analysis of Amos’s non-verbal clues, he was being somewhat less than candid.

  “But why would you lay a trap for someone you think is dead?” Kurt asked.

  “To make sure, man. It’s like if you spray poison in a mouse-hole. You know the mouse is dead, but you leave some cheese outside in a trap just in case. You know it makes sense.”

  “Do you honestly think so?” Kurt asked. He looked straight at Minter and pressed the button on his phone to activate the lie detector. Minter saw him doing this but didn’t mind.

  “If he knew where we were, we’d be dead,” Minter replied. “We both know that. But even if he did somehow know we were alive but didn’t know where, he wouldn’t be playing these games. He would be looking for us quietly, letting us think we’d gotten away with it.”

  Kurt released the button.

  Verdict: Truth [100].

  All that this told Kurt was that Minter believed what Minter was saying, which was never really in doubt. Kurt knew that Minter had known Amos for a lot longer than he had, though, having worked closely with him for two years.

  Minter opened the door to let Ernesto back in. To his credit, Ernesto didn’t ask why they had wanted a moment without him.

  “I still don’t get why he would come out and basically accuse me of faking the whole thing,” Kurt said. “What’s everyone else going to think?”

  Minter shook his head. “Nothing, man. No one else knows he’s talking about you. This is just a free chance for him to settle any doubts in his mind.”

  Kurt sat down on one of the computer chairs. It had been a long and winding roller coaster of a day, and it felt like it was ending with the carriage rolling towards a gaping hole in the track.

  “If you don’t want to watch the funeral broadcast live, I could watch it and pass on what happens,” Ernesto said. “Or you can watch it in here alone, or with everyone.”

  “Just me and Minter. And you, if you want.”

  “I do,” Ernesto said. “I watched the sick tribute event he put on for Stacy so I know what kind of thing to expect.”

  Minter’s eyes lit up. “Exactly!” He looked at Kurt. “That was exactly the same thing. That was the night we took our Seeds out, right, but they didn’t properly deactivate my account until that morning so I could see everything he was saying the day before. He was with Colin at HQ, and he said he was 99 per cent sure that you would stay away like you agreed, but he wanted to eliminate the doubt. He said something like: “If he doesn’t react to us making a martyr out of Stacy, he won’t react to anything.” He was making sure, man, just like he’s doing here.”

  “We’ll get through this,” Ernesto said. “And then we’ll destroy him.”

  Like only a powerful common enemy could, Amos’s threat highlighted the relative pettiness of the secret-keeping and intra-mall conflict that had been brewing over the past few days. This video brought them all back down to earth with a bang, acting as a stark reminder that they were all fighting on the same team.

  “We can’t get into Sycamore’s systems until next week,” Kurt said. He didn’t know why he said it, and neither did Minter, but he said it.

  Ernesto’s face reacted to this shock only slightly and he didn’t ask any questions. “We’ll worry about that once we get through this,” he said.

  “There was a problem with the log-in,” Minter said, feeling disarmed by Ernesto’s calm reaction and compelled to offer some kind of explanation.

  “One thing at a time,” Ernesto assured them. He was handling this like the leader Kurt had hoped he would be all along. He turned the computer off and suggested they all go back across to Home for the night.

  Kurt and Minter both agreed. When they arrived back in Ty and Lisa’s bedroom, Ty was the most keen to know why Ernesto had wanted to talk to them so late at night.

  “It was about the funeral,” Kurt said.

  “What about it?” Ty asked, looking for more specifics.

  Kurt didn’t want to go through it all again. “Minter will explain,” he said, which took Minter by surprise. “I’m going to call it a night.”

  “Me too,” Mary said.

  Anthony also got up to leave, promising Lisa that he would beat her next time. Minter was left to answer Ty’s questions. Kurt could hear them talking as he walked away.

  As Kurt was turning towards the final stretch which led to his bedroom, he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. It was Mary’s.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Kurt didn’t answer, which always meant no.

  “What did he want to show you?”

  “A threat from Amos,” Kurt said. He said it quickly, spitting the words out all at once.

  Mary was about to ask what kind of threat when she noticed Kurt’s eyelid quivering slightly. “Sabrina?” she guessed.

  Kurt nodded half-heartedly; all down and no up.

  Mary didn’t know what to say or do next.

  “I’m going to go to bed now,” Kurt said.

  “Come with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My room has two beds,” Mary said. “And I don’t think you should be alone tonight.”

  “I think I’ll be okay,” Kurt insisted.

  “That doesn’t mean you should be alone.”

  Kurt thought about it for a second. He decided that having someone to talk to might be a good thing, and Mary was as good a choice as anyone given that she was the only person other than Minter who knew the context of Amos’s threat against Sabrina in regard to his previous ultimatum of the same nature.

  He went with her.

  “You chose bunk beds?” Kurt said as Mary led him into her spacious room.

  “What’s wrong with that?” she smiled. “They reminded me of music camp. I’ve already slept on the top, so…”

  “Fine,” Kurt said, climbing into the bottom bunk.

  He lay back. The bunk’s mattress was nowhere near as comfortable as the thousand-dollar one on Kurt’s king bed, but Mary’s gentle voice and the general feeling of being close to someone who was unequivocally on his side filled Kurt with a different, stronger kind of comfort.

  “Ty said that you want to leave the mall,” Kurt said.

  Mary hesitated. “Not so much now. There’s been a different sort of balance since you all arrived. And it’s not even been that long since I saw everyone on the outside. I think it’s just knowing that I can’t see them, you know?”

  “At least you have some photos.”

  “Yeah,” Mary said. “Do you not have any of your family?”

  “I downloaded a couple today when I was getting yours.”

  “Can I see them?” Mary asked.

  “Yeah.” Kurt sent some of his p
ictures to Mary’s phone. They were from a publicly viewable album that Randy had uploaded around six months ago.

  The pictures arrived on Mary’s phone. At first she didn’t say anything, because a default response like “they’re both really cute” seemed utterly insufficient under the circumstances. “I know you’re worried,” she eventually said, “but you came here to help them. You’re doing what you think is right for reasons you know are right, and that’s all anyone can ever ask of anyone.”

  “Thanks,” Kurt said.

  After a few minutes of peaceful quiet, Kurt’s phone buzzed twice.

  “Who was that?” Mary asked, sounding like it had woken her up.

  Kurt looked to see. “Just Ty.”

  It was a Chifi text: “So Minter told us what happened. Amos is vermin. He said sick stuff about Lisa when I said I wouldn’t work for him, too. Try to be strong. We’re both here if you need anything.”

  Kurt knew it must have taken a lot for Ty to write and send a message like this that bordered on the sentimental, and he appreciated it. He sent the word “Thanks” in reply then added “We’ll make him pay”, just to keep the spirits up.

  “Damn straight. Ty-kwondo coming his way if I ever see him,” Ty replied.

  Kurt laughed and put his phone on the floor. “What time do you usually get up for breakfast?” he asked Mary.

  She didn’t reply. Kurt stayed dead still and listened until he heard her breathing slowly, which confirmed that she was asleep. He turned off the lamp on the table beside the bed and watched as the base of Mary’s top bunk disappeared into absolute darkness.

  This kind of darkness, where everything was nothing, felt appropriate. Kurt’s mind focused on the fact that he had literally no way of contacting Randy or the kids, or of getting to them before the funeral. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen and there was nothing he could do but wait and watch.

  Having no choices to make and no options to pursue removed the “difficult decision” element of stress which sometimes made it worse, but there was nothing liberating about this kind of helplessness.

  Kurt didn’t know what would happen at his funeral in the morning. All he knew was that the event could go one of two ways and that compared to the churning anxiety he was feeling tonight, tomorrow night would either be a little bit better or unimaginably worse.

  16

  The live SycaNews broadcast of Kurt’s funeral began at noon after a full morning of buildup. Minter and Ernesto had been watching from the start, but Kurt joined them just a few minutes before the main event.

  He asked Mary to be by his side for the viewing, which surprised her as much as it did Minter and Ernesto. The others had all been told about Amos’s threat and all waited anxiously in the food court; even Michael, who patted Kurt’s back in solidarity as he entered the workstation.

  Several viewing options were available. Aside from the main SycaNews feed, which was filmed using a regular AR camera and featured running commentary from two prime time newscasters, viewers could choose to watch the whole event through the eyes of Isaiah Amos himself. The newscasters repeatedly emphasised that this was the first time Amos’s vista had ever been shared and thus an opportunity not to be missed.

  More troublingly for Kurt, viewers could also watch the funeral through Randy’s eyes, just in case they wanted to experience brotherly grief in first-person mode. There was a charge for this service via the Seed, but not via the SycaNews International website since Sycamore were keen to showcase their vista-sharing technology to a global audience.

  Kurt hadn’t put much thought into what Randy and the kids would be thinking. He had told Randy and Julian that he had to go away and couldn’t come back, so the idea of a staged death probably wouldn’t strike them as too implausible. But they would surely never imagine that Kurt might have conned Amos into believing he was dead, Kurt thought. Surely no one would imagine that.

  The cemetery and its surrounding areas had been designated a “No Share Zone” for one day only. While inside a No Share Zone, normal consumers were temporarily unable to record or share their vistas. Some large music venues and sporting arenas were also No Share Zones, but most were deterred by the heavy fee that Sycamore demanded for this type of micro geo-fencing.

  A list of the dignitaries in attendance then appeared on the screen. It blew Kurt’s mind. At just two day’s notice, his funeral had attracted a dozen senators and even the president himself. None of these people had cared about Kurt when he was alive and their presence was testament to how good Amos was at twisting events into causes. As he had done with the Seed’s launch, Amos presented Kurt’s very public funeral as a show of defiance against evil terrorists who sought to destroy freedom.

  And, as at the Seed’s launch, a large contingent from Fury River had played right into his hands by coming along to picket.

  It surprised Kurt that Amos let Fury River anywhere near the cemetery given that they were implicated in Kurt’s death, but Amos was never one to miss an opportunity. The 200 or so Fury River protestors were surrounded by police officers at three sides and penned against a metal railing. It was an emotive sight; a real spectacle.

  On the SycaNews International website Kurt was using to watch the broadcast, the schedule suggested that the funeral would be over inside twenty minutes. The shorter the better, he thought. All he wanted to see was his family arrive and leave without incident.

  The camera spun around to show a long black car pulling up. Amos stepped out, flanked by two burly bodyguards. Kurt recognised them as the men who had held him back while Stacy was murdered in cold blood. Exactly a week had passed since then, without question the longest and worst week of Kurt’s life.

  “Are we definitely recording the stream?” Ernesto asked.

  Minter checked to confirm. “Yeah. I’m recording the computer’s display, too,” he said. “Just in case the stream gets corrupted.”

  Amos’s car stopped before passing the Fury River demonstrators so that he had to walk directly past them, providing an even better spectacle. A row of licensed paparazzi stood opposite the baying mob. These modern paparazzi held their eyelids open with their fingers, knowing that a single mistimed blink could ruin otherwise good footage.

  Amos stopped and surveyed The Fury.

  “Should I pull up his feed in a separate window?” Minter asked, turning to Kurt.

  Kurt nodded. “Can you get Randy’s as well?” he asked.

  Minter pulled up both first-person vistas. The screen now contained three windows, with the main feed on the left and Amos and Randy’s vistas each taking up half of the right side.

  Randy’s vista showed the inside of a car window. He turned around and Kurt caught site of Sabrina and Julian. They were both wearing black outfits and sombre expressions, the kind Kurt hadn’t seen on them since he had helped them through their mother’s funeral a year earlier. He couldn’t see Randy’s face, obviously, but expected that it would be a picture of stoicism, as always, if only for the kids’ sake.

  As Amos reached the symbolic graveside where the intimate-in-name-only service would be held, Randy’s car rolled to a stop. The main camera turned to show it arriving. Randy and the kids stepped out.

  They walked down the narrow pathway between the protestors and the paparazzi, the grimmest of red carpets. No bodyguards flanked Kurt’s family as the protestors hounded them with verbal abuse. Randy walked tightly behind Sabrina with his arms on her shoulders. Julian looked like he was about to step off the path to confront one of the protestors for something they had shouted, but Randy reeled him in. Julian’s face appeared in the centre of Randy’s vista.

  “Volume on that one,” Kurt said.

  Minter turned it up. They heard the end of what Randy was saying: “… so just don’t engage. Like we talked about. Don’t give them what they want.”

  Nothing about the funeral seemed right, but Kurt saw something especially wrong in the fact that millions of consumers would be watching tha
t same father-son interaction from Randy’s first-person view.

  “Back to the main feed?” Minter said.

  Kurt nodded. When the main audio returned, the commentators were talking about Sabrina. Kurt couldn’t remember their names, but the woman used to present the weather forecast and the man had been a serious reporter before Amos recruited him to the SycaNews team. Their attention had turned to Sabrina’s “understated look” and “flawless hair and makeup.” It didn’t matter that Sabrina had barely turned ten; the commentators focused on what she was wearing and how her makeup was because she was the only female there.

  “You know something, Tom,” the woman said, “I think it’s worth pointing out what a great job our friends at KissaBliss have done with this new product range. Remember girls: your face can face anything with KissaBliss. Feel beautiful, feel fabulous, feel your best self. This is bliss. KissaBliss.”

  “And she can cry all day, Debbie, because like all RealU products this KissaBliss collection is upgradable to be 100% — you heard me — 100% tear-resistant. What a deal!”

  Kurt had seen some brazen attempts at product placement over the last few months, but this was right up there. The commentators quickly moved on to Sabrina’s “flowing dress” and “elegant heels,” keen to tell viewers how they could attain the same look.

  “This is disgusting,” Mary said. No one disagreed, but Mary had no idea just how pervasive RealU had become. Mary didn’t know that the ads were in Sabrina’s eyes as soon as she woke up every morning, with virtual before-and-afters of her young face highlighting flaws she didn’t know were there. And Mary didn’t know that since her mother died, the only women in Sabrina’s home were the ones who appeared on the walls telling her what RealU mods she had to buy to look less like herself and more like them.

  The commentators then made some token comments about Julian being a model student “set to follow in his Uncle Kurt’s footsteps,” but their hearts weren’t in it.

  Amos greeted the family at the coffin-free ceremonial graveside. Randy shook his hand without looking too unwilling, which impressed Kurt, but Julian hesitated. It wasn’t very perceptible and Randy nudged some sense into him before anyone else seemed to notice. Amos then crouched to Sabrina’s height and kissed her on both cheeks.