by Rebecca Ore
I watched us on the screen, looking for signs that I’d annoyed either Joe or Miriam enough that they would have set me up. They immediately began to frown at me, to whisper at each other.
“Are you reworking this memory?” Kearney asked.
“I’ve known them for years. Either Martin Fox set me up or they did. But I didn’t see them again after Martin Fox proposed sterilizing the human race.”
Miriam said, “If you ever disappear, then don’t come back. If you miraculously escape custody, we won’t trust you.” On the screen, I asked, “Can I trust Martin Fox?”
Joe said, “We’ve been on operations with Martin. He’s reliable, but a little extreme.”
Kearney said, “She’s confabulating.”
I said, “So what’s the next operation.”
We did Hetch Hetchy and went east. Kearney said, “You’re a bit too proud of Hetch Hetchy.”
After Miriam and Joe disappeared, Martin Fox said, “We’re going to run support for a while. I know it’s not as dramatic as doing the actions, but the letter-bombers need a couple levels of cutouts.”
Kearney asked, “When was this?”
I tried to remember. “When nanotech and recombinant DNA people were getting hit. Couple years ago.”
On the video, I picked up a six-pack from a culvert and walked it over to a kid wearing night-vision goggles. The kid rode away on a recumbent bicycle, his belly in a sling, steering with his hands, the pedals magnetically clamped to his shoes. In infrared, he was a faint light no higher than a dog weaving through green car heat.
The newspapers told about the eighth letter bomb, not the earlier ones.
Martin Fox said, “Miriam and Joe left the country. We think Jergen was captured, but our hacker sources don’t tell us anything about you, Allison. We could be fucked. They can tear his head apart by reading his brain.”
I said, “I thought you had to cooperate with the squids to have that work.”
Martin said, “Watching your own memories can be tremendous fun if you have either an edit button or a chemical lobotomy.” He smiled at me as though he was now watching my own interrogation.
Kearney said, “Allison, how did you become Maggie Higgins?”
Martin took me into walk-up cube on East Broadway where a med tech peeled my fingers and lay in the fake prints.
I said to Kearney, “Perhaps Martin Fox decided to get rid of all Jergen’s associates.”
Kearney said, “So you weren’t that valuable.”
I said, “Guess not.”
“Isn’t Fox a lot more violent than Jergen?” Kearney said. “Can’t you see that?”
“Did he kill Miriam and Joe, too?” I asked.
Kearney didn’t answer. I felt slightly dizzy, then the video showed me picking up the Xhoshiba at a truck stop in the mountains just off I-40. “Did you see anyone, Allison?” Kearney asked.
I looked back at the trucker who’d given me the ride and laughed, said, “I guess my friends are inside, but here’s their car. I’ll be okay now.”
“Aw, well,” the trucker said.
Kearney said, “Was he one of you?”
“No,” I said while on the screen, I looked around. The other people seemed innocuous. I got in the Xhoshiba and drove down to Asheville and spent the night in a decommissioned chain hotel, now sold to people too poor to get a franchise. They were sympathizers I knew slightly, but the screen didn’t register this. I decided not to tell Kearney.
He said, “Trace the people.”
My brain threw an image of a party on the screen. The woman who’d own the hotel years later was giggling. Jergen said, “We appreciate your letting us stay here tonight.”
“Just don’t tell me anything I don’t want to know.” The woman took us upstairs and showed us to a mattress on the floor. “I’m glad you could come for the party. Less likely anyone would notice strangers at the door.”
“Should we come back down?” I said.
“I’m too tired,” Jergen said.
I went down and heard our hostess tell another couple, “She’s one of the heavies.”
I came up to them and put my arms around the couple. “Are you concerned about the environment, too?”
The woman excused herself. I kept holding the couple, remembering…
Machine sex, me with thermoplastic dildos in every orifice, the machine pumping me while my gang cheered. “Beat the bitch.” Another woman from another gang lay masturbating under her gang’s sex machine. My gloves…
“Allison, what more do you remember about the party?” Kearney asked.
“I beat the bitch,” I said, trying to remember the orgasm contest and getting a shock, not an image on the monitor. “Wasn’t I cute then?” Fuck Kearney, he wanted to know all about me. Here I was. naked and throbbing.
“The party. Allison.”
On the screen I was saying to the couple, “I used to be a technophile, but I discovered nature.”
“What kind of technophile?” the woman asked. The man squeezed my butt.
“The baddest kind.” I said. I remembered the gloves moving the machine. One of the boys wiped my face. Rules were he couldn’t touch me below the neck, but he could run his tongue in my ear. Next time, we could have the machine do that, I thought. And up yours, too. Kearney.
“Do you need more information?”
Kearney said. “Let’s close her up for now. We’ve got ID on a couple of the people. Allison, if you can’t get off the machine…”
My body arched against the machine, muscles spasming. My gang cheered as I collapsed. I heard the other girl moaning, but the dildos read vaginal contractions, nipple turgidity. You couldn’t fake orgasm with a machine.
“Allison, we can get you any kind of machine you need,” Kearney said. “We’re going to put you to sleep now, but from now on, you’ll be wired for memories. Also, we didn’t get Jergen. He surrendered.”
No. I wanted to see more. The drugs they’d given me took away the sliminess I generally felt when I remembered mechanical fucking contests. And I was showing Kearney what a hard-ass bitch I was, throw shit in his eyes.
“Remember to get whatever they’ve planted in her cervical vertebra,” a voice said as I fell asleep, my real-time cunt throbbing as though machines had worked it.
I woke up strapped to a low bed, my head helmeted, the walls, ceiling, and floor around around me padded. My face and neck ached. The blond, fuzzy Amnesty boy sat on the padded floor, barefooted, wearing loose pants and a tunic. He’d tucked one leg under him, the other bent in front. He dangled one hand off the bent knee. His bare feet seemed so appealing.
“Do you remember what happened?” he asked.
“You were telling me a story about filing off my teeth,” I said, then I remembered how much I remembered. I’d betrayed Martin Fox, Miriam and Joe, perhaps even Jergen if he still lived. No, Jergen himself surrendered, cooperated. But maybe Kearney lied. Jergen hadn’t betrayed me. I threw myself against straps and screamed, “Bastards.”
The fuzzy boy said, “You couldn’t help it. We had you wired and dosed. Bravery, self-control, none of that mattered.”
“Damn Kearney. Jergen would never turn himself in.”
“I wasn’t at your interrogation.”
“I’m tough. I could have handled it all without the antianxiety drug. I got to be young again. I saw Jergen again.”
But remembering on the screen had been more fun than I could stand now. That had been the anti-anxiety drug. I closed my eyes, remembering how vivid my memories had been on the video monitor. They’d never been that vivid inside my brain. “But you do know that I didn’t mean to use a baby nuke, don’t you?” I heard my voice pleading, hated it. Why did I want this fuzzy boy to like me?
“Yes, Allison,” the fuzzy boy said.
“Do you have a name?” I asked. “Do you have some drug that imprints your prisoners on warm, fuzzy captors?”
“Jim,” he said. “I really am from Amnesty.”
“Jim, it’s your job to be warm and fuzzy, isn’t it? I desperately need a friend, or they’ve given me drugs that make me think I do.”
His hand suspended over his bent leg twitched. “What’s your job now? Your purpose in living?”
“You didn’t answer my question about imprinting. I don’t have one. I guess your people can try and execute me now.”
“We can give you a reason to keep on living.”
“Answer me. Why do I find myself wanting to trust you? It’s absolutely abnormal.”
“Perhaps not,” he said.
“They taped my memories, didn’t they? And you watched them later.” I remembered what I remembered at the end.
“No,” he said.
“Poor Jergen.”
Kearney came in then and heard that. “I’d say poor you,” Kearney said. “Your friends placed a intermittent loop recorder in your neck, wired for sound an average of every ten minutes, with a randomizer. Storage of three months. They didn’t trust you. Perhaps they think you had something to do with Jergen’s disappearance.”
Jim said, “Leave her alone for now, Captain. She’s just had her world collapse.”
I said, “You can’t tell him anything. He’s your boss, isn’t he? Jim’s not really Amnesty.”
Kearney said, “But he is. He enforces the ban on capital punishment.”
I said, “So he told me before he drugged me.” Jim nodded, touched my cheek gently. I felt like a bitch for a moment, then wondered if I should believe anyone. I was too broken to make up my mind about anything, but mistrusted my desire to believe Jim.
Kearney said, “Jim, I need to explain a few things to Allison about her brain work.”
Jim rose from the floor and came over and squeezed my hand. I trembled. He squeezed again and left.
Kearney said, “You don’t believe he’s with Amnesty.”
“Of course, he isn’t.”
“I wouldn’t be vicious with your only advocate if I were you.”
“Are you going to formally charge me? I want an attorney.”
“Not right now. You’re precariously glued together. We’ve installed an internal squid and processor with a subdermal port. There’ll be no external evidence that you’re wired. You can read memories by laying the receiving pad over the subdermal. The digitalized signal can penetrate flesh. We can turn on transmission by signalling the processor. So you won’t be transmitting all the time, just in case someone else can listen.”
At least I wouldn’t have open brain holes drawing in infection. I said, “Why shouldn’t there be evidence that I’m wired? You can’t send me back to the people I’d been working with.”
Kearney said, “There are other people.”
I thought about asking him to just get it over with and kill me, but knew my asking would just be bravado. “You didn’t change me when you had my brain open, did you?”
“Would you know?”
I tried to see if I felt different. If I’d been changed, I couldn’t tell. “I’d like to see Jim again.”
“He really does work for Amnesty,” Kearney said.
I nodded, the helmet making that laborious. I was drugged, perhaps brain-changed, memories stolen, life functionally over.
“He can come back now,” Kearney said. He left the room, then Jim came back.
Jim held my hand as I cried. Even as I realized Jim could be the good cop, I needed to trust him. Story of my life, just a human weed looking for a place I fit in. Perhaps I should try to get Kearney to trust me, volunteer to be his informer, get out and disappear. No more actions for any side.
When I’d stopped crying, Jim asked, “Would you rather be charged and tried now?”
“What sentence is likely?”
“Life without parole, but we’d organize to prevent a mental health intervention.”
I tried to laugh. “That’s already happened.”
Jim said, “No, that was a legal interrogation.”
“You helped them with the anti-anxiety drug.”
Jim said, “Yes and no. Yes, you were more cooperative. No, they would have read your brain anyway, but more traumatically.”
“How soon before they unstrap me?”
“I can unstrap you now and help you walk a bit.”
“Why do I ache under the eyes?”
“They had to push under your eyes and along the bottom of your skull to get to your hippocampus, where memories live. They tried not to hurt brain tissue, so the probes pushed against the bones.” Jim unstrapped me and helped me up, held the helmet until I could balance it on my neck.
“I’m sorry we were so futile,” I said.
“I’m sure you had good intentions,” he said, easing me around the room. “Do you think you can walk on your own?”
“Why am I in a padded cell?”
“Suicide precautions.”
“Amnesty against that, too?”
“We don’t think people should be tortured into it.”
“I thought you were opposed to torturing people.” I shuffled around the padded floor on my own. The pads made for uneasy footing.
“We did everything we could to make the interrogation bearable. You were overwhelmed, but considering that your people sent you out with a baby nuke, Amnesty agreed that the interrogation benefits outweighed your discomfort. But I am sorry.”
“I might as well have been raped. I bet they’re playing all the sex scenes…”
“Allison, don’t worry about that. All irrelevant scene were edited out. Witnesses certified that the scenes weren’t necessary for your defense.”
“Witnesses?”
“Other Amnesty officials.”
So Jim was telling me he’d only heard about my fifteen-year-old body squirming under a dildo machine, masturbation target during the sex plague years. I’d been breaking bad at Kearney, but now I was disgusted. Naked, dying naked. “So you didn’t see me with Jergen?”
“No.”
“When I was a kid, the strong form of AIDS still killed people. We got off differently.”
“I told you I didn’t see any of the tape. I’m your advocate. As a Federal prisoner, you can ask for sexual relief, if that’s what’s bothering you. Either a surrogate or your regular partner unless he or she is in custody, or you could ask for machine relief.”
What about you? Do you give good head? “I hate sex now. It got me born.”
“Life without parole,” Jim said. “You’ve confessed, you know. Even if you’ve never had any homosexual experiences outside, I’d recommend making a life with another prisoner. Amnesty’s going to insist that you be allowed out into general population. Making a life for yourself inside seems to be the ultimately most satisfying.”
Or I could cooperate with Kearney. “Thanks,” I said. “I had some experience with external vibrators.”
Jim asked, “Why do you hate people so? Even yourself.”
“Why not?” I said. “Humans destroy everything they touch. Look at me. Even when we didn’t mean to do that much damage, we do it.”
Jim asked, “Do you want to be alone for a while?”
“Alone with the cameras? Why don’t I insist you stay?” Jim said, “Well, I could.”
“No, go on. I bet you’ve got other prisoners to tend.”
“Yes, but not at this facility.”
“Jim…” Could you tell me if one of them is Jergen? He couldn’t have really surrendered. Tell me if anyone in Amnesty knows what happened to him. Would he be able to tell me? Did I want to know if he couldn’t?
“If I go now, I’ll be back in four days.”
Ask anyway. “Can I find out what happened to Jergen? If he’s a prisoner, Amnesty must know.”
“Amnesty can’t relay information on U.S. system prisoners to other U.S. prisoners. We’re your advocate, not your informant.”
“Nice to have that clarified,” I said. “Okay, go.”
So he worked for Amnesty. No one from a child gang ever grew up
to work for Amnesty. No drode heads finally found work there.
At least, I thought, I don’t have open brain holes. The only person I saw for four days (was it really four days?) was a nurse who checked my vital signs twice a day and gave me pills. My food came by machine. Either my jailers drugged away my nightmares or my demons thought I was in torment enough. No dreams registered.
I asked the monitors, “Don’t I get a trial?”
On the fifth day, or what I thought was the fifth day, Kearney brought in a cat carrier. He wore nose plugs, ear plugs, and gloves. “Open it,” he said.
I shook my head. But whatever it was inside the cat carrier buzzed and thrummed. I felt silly refusing to cooperate and opened the carrier.
A foot-tall preying mantis stepped out and cocked its head. Its thorax moved, breathing. But insects don’t breathe like that. Between thumms, I felt uneasy again and looked at Kearney, but the mantis stepped up to me, and thummed again, nibbling my skin delicately. I heard a small hiss, a gas to ease my mind.
“Where did it come from?” I asked.
“East Coast,” Kearney said. “They’ve reached Atlanta.”
“Recombinant?”
“The lungs and gas transport system are unique.”
“Maybe it’s Gaia’s revenge, a mantis that tranquillizes humans.” I took the beautiful insect on my hand and lifted it toward my face. I saw a thousand self-reflections in its compound eyes.
“You can keep it for a few days. We think it will help you recover faster.”
“Thank you,” I said, enchanted as the mantis nibbled my skin again, not biting deep though it could. I said to it, “Beautiful insect, I’m sorry we’re in jail together.”
Kearney said, “Good, you’ve bonded.” He seemed still able to hear. His ear plugs must shift mantis song frequencies to something less seductive to the human nervous system.
“Kearney, it’s a wonderful bug, but I still would like human contact,” I said. My thoughts flowed faster, as though anxiety had knotted them earlier. The mantis released me. “Oh, wonder bug, I hope you are natural,” I told it. Not likely, I realized, but that didn’t seem to matter right now. I could see this as a bug from a nightmare, but the bug itself calmed me.
“You bond better with them if you’ve been isolated for a few days,” Kearney said. “They tend to be especially attracted to dole people coming out from read time.”
