Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

  “Shut up, Sam,” Kearney said. I remembered Jergen was now Sam.

  A brain fuck. But I’d recovered enough from surgery and was getting very bored. “I’d do anything to get out of the apartment,” I said.

  Jergen winced and closed his eyes. He opened them to reach for his beer. The waiter brought a second one. No, a third. I sat back in my chair wondering why I hadn’t noticed Jergen’s weaknesses earlier, even why I hadn’t noticed when he got the second beer minutes earlier.

  I reached for my first beer and sipped it, then finished off my vegetarian fare with no further conversation until we’d all finished. I reached for a strip of beef that one of the men had left on his plate. Nobody commented on that either. I could like beef, but I’d have to work to it gradually. I’d eaten meat as a street kid—stray pigeons and dogs—but when I’d had to eat a whole hamburger as a cover in my early thirties, I’d gotten diarrhea.

  After we left Jergen at his apartment, I asked, “Why don’t you treat his phobia?”

  Mike said, “He doesn’t want us to. He thinks he deserves it.”

  I almost said, he was only doing what he thought was right. I did say, “I’ve killed a couple of people, too, and I don’t feel that guilty. They were killing the planet.”

  “And besides, they were breaking national regulations on using poison on public range. And they threatened to kill you.”

  “You weren’t going after them,” T said. “You were going after us.”

  Mike said, “We treat them the same way we treat you. They talk about their sources and stay clean, we leave them alone. Public trials spread too much information.”

  “What if they don’t stay clean after the first warning?”

  “Depends,” Mike said.

  “I wish we could have closed trials like the Brits,” Kearney said. “Make life a lot safer.”

  I said, “Whatever, if I play in your games, you could kill me.”

  Kearney said, “I could shoot you right now.”

  “What’s the point of having me play a terrorist for you?”

  “It’s a training exercise,” Mike said.

  “It’s an artificial one. We ranged over the whole country, into Canada and Mexico. I can’t tap into those sources either as my old self or my new one. Unless you’ve rebuilt me to look like someone specific.” The thought was chilling. Someone else, a beginner, probably, not someone in the permanent underground, died so I, with considerably more experience, much more guilty in Federal eyes, could replace her.

  Kearney said, “No. We’re training on some new equipment.”

  “Am I supposed to surrender when your guys spot me? Or can I try to run?”

  Lt. Mike said, “Try to run. Try to fight us off. The point of the exercise is taking people alive.”

  Kearney said, “Try your very best to get away.”

  I said, “There’s a catch.”

  Kearney said, “If you don’t cooperate with us and refuse to run, then we’ll transfer you back to the padded cell and give you a mantis in a cage you can’t destroy with your bare hands.”

  Lt. Mike said, “She’s agreed to play with us. Sam said she keeps her word.”

  I said, “What if I get away?”

  Kearney said, “Jergen got away for a month once, Jergen called us to come get him.”

  So, I was to practice running to train me in evasion in case I had to use it against my former colleagues. The first time went like this. The referee in his colonel’s uniform said, “The ground rules are that you will not be deliberately killed or injured. When hit with the pink dye, you will immediately stop. You will have a blue dye pistol. Do not discharge it at a range closer than ten feet. Don’t fire at the referees. Keep the goggles on.”

  Military paintball, I thought. I ditched the goggles. Who but targets would wear them?

  I got whacked the first time by the little old lady who opened her door and said, “come this way,” when I was running from troops. I put my hand on the soda can she offered me and it exploded. I was screaming at her when a referee came in and said. “You’re dyed pink. You’re dead.”

  “It’s in my eyes, damn, it’s in my eyes.”

  The second time: I had contacts to protect my eyes, not the so-obvious goggles. Three guys pinned me down inside an empty warehouse. We all knew if we moved to fire, we’d become targets. I stayed put, expecting to be rushed at any minute. I’d get at least one of them before they got me.

  We waited. My legs began to tingle from being sat on. My bladder seemed ready to burst. I shuffled to deeper cover and peed. I heard them pissing.

  A referee came in and began yelling at them, “You’d let some terrorist to take you out with a suicide rig while you wait. Rush the bitch, you spineless mothers.”

  From behind my barricade, I yelled, “I don’t have a suicide rig. And, it’s only dye.”

  They rushed me. I shot the referee. What could they do, reduce me in rank?

  He pulled a dye pistol from one of the guys and shot me between the eyes. For a second, it was almost like getting killed.

  The world went black. I felt my sphincters go slack. The referee washed the paint off. I had a lump like a third eye growing under the skin.

  After I cleaned up and changed from slacks and a sweater into a wool skirted suit, the troops bought me a beer in the Mexican restaurant and tried to feed me meat.

  I said to the referee, “I’ve got nanomachines inside. What if you’d broken one of them?”

  The referee said, “Don’t shoot referees.”

  I said to Mike on the way back to the apartment, “As long as I have nanotech inside me, I couldn’t really run. When do you take it out?”

  “We can take them out tonight,” Mike said.

  “But I’m not completely changed,” I said.

  “Did you think we’d make you completely young again?”

  I realized I thought they’d take me back to the time when I first met Jergen. If I could have been taken back to eight, I could have started over again.

  About ten that night, Kearney came to the apartment with a medic. “You might be more comfortable on a bed,” the medic told me. Mike and Kearney looked at each other, nodding little cop nods.

  We went in my room. I took off my suit jacket and lay down on the bed. Kearney rolled my blouse sleeve up. The medic attached a large suction cup to my arm and said, “You need to be asleep for this.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “You don’t have any choice,” Kearney said. He and Mike looked like they were about to pin me down.

  I said, “Okay, already.”

  The medic slid the needle into my vein inside the elbow. I wondered if they’d gossip about me over my unconscious body, then fell asleep as the suction cup on my left forearm tightened.

  I was alone in the room when I woke up. Where the nanomachines came through, the skin was bruised.

  The third running exercise was more real. I had a three day head start and leads from the civilians playing terrorist sympathizers. I began looking for my own connections, not as an eco-warrior, but as a Klanswoman. Connections to that other underground would exist here. I suspected.

  In Aberdeen, I found a man. Mr. Etheridge, who understood that the Army frequently used captured agitators for training. He wasn’t Klan, but rather on the dog-fight circuit.

  “When they seize our dogs, they put medic trainees to shooting them.” Mr. Etheridge told me as we sat talking on the bench looking at the Roekfish Aberdeen freight station. “A dog goes down fighting, it’s in his nature. But to get shot, treated, then killed to see if the medic did a good job, why that’s an insult to the dogs. They’re game.”

  “I’m game, too.” I said. “Getting a bit wearing paying for my attitudes, though, being used as a exercise target.”

  “Where you say you’re from?”

  “Ohio. Orphan from Ohio.”

  “Dangerous thing, being an orphan these days.”

  “Yeah.”

&nbs
p; “I can’t help you.”

  I understood that could either be never, or not directly. “I understand. It’s good to talk to someone even if you’re going to report what we said to a referee.”

  “If they ask, I’ll tell them I couldn’t help you. Been out of the business statute of limitations times.”

  I said, “I understand perfectly. It’s not so bad being the fox in a drag hunt. They’ve promised not to kill me.”

  “Wouldn’t you’d be better off getting killed in your real game? Before you got got, were you were fighting for real?”

  Um. “Just talking, you know.”

  He said, “Had some game dogs once. Animal rights people cut them loose, but they ended up on surgical tables just the same as if they’d been seized.”

  I didn’t know quite what to say, but fighting dogs, even if bred to insanity, do cooperate in the fighting business. I tried to imagine what one felt like, immobilized, stuffed with painkillers, shot, treated, killed. I got a bit too empathetic.

  “Well, I’m sorry that I can’t help you. Been nice talking to someone who didn’t go all disgusted about the dog fighting. I miss my sport.”

  I remember thinking dog-fighting people were cruel dumb fucks who’d probably pollute and exterminate as bad as any if they only had power to do so. “I’m glad I could listen. Now, I’ve got to run, so to speak.”

  “You looking for a job while you’re being a drag fox?”

  “Yeah, I’m supposed to make this look authentic.”

  “Be around this summer?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Pity, they’re looking for a clerk to run the concessions at the lake.”

  I asked, “Where does the train go?”

  “Sunny Point. You couldn’t get on that train, though. It’s most heavily guarded, being a munitions train.”

  I found a job at a fast food place, working nights, and gave Mr. Etheridge as a reference. A teenaged boy came in one day and traced the word, dogs, in water on the counter.

  When I followed him out, a gang of teenagers grabbed me and shoved me into a car trunk. I screamed like the whole thing was real.

  The car took me to an abandoned sand pit. As the army car headlights approached, a man pulled me down into a tunnel illuminated by cold-light sticks.

  “What were you?” he asked.

  “I wanted the United States to be the way it should be,” I said. “Population no more than 100 million and that’s probably ten times long-term carrying capacity.”

  “Maybe I should throw you back to the dogs?”

  “I was an eco-warrior. Maybe you should.”

  “We got common cause in one thing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “They don’t try us proper in court and let us tell our side of it.”

  I said, “Open court, we’d just give each other ideas.”

  “I hate your kind. On a normal day, I’d slit your bitch throat, but…”

  “Tell them I told you I was an eco-terrorist and you dumped me down the road somewhere.”

  “They got a tracer on you?”

  “Net in my head.”

  “Tell you that’d broadcast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dumb bitch.” He turned on a machine near by and watched lights run through series of diodes. “I bet I know this game.”

  “Tell me.”

  “They’re training you. You know what you’d do if you did get away?”

  “Find some quiet lie, make a fake life, and crawl in until I get old.”

  He said, “Could you? You might as well stay with them, then.”

  “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

  He pulled off his cap, parted his hair with his Fingers and showed me a drode hole scar, then moved the fingers and showed me another in case I’d thought the first scar was wound. “Not hardly, babe.”

  I said, “Could you hack…?”

  “No, I just got away. People do, you know. You can live a quiet lie if you don’t fuss, you don’t sell your net time. I scavenge, hunt some, grow patches of herb and vegetables on land the owners don’t seem to be using.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Got born the wrong time, I reckon.”

  “Can I get away? Or are you going to shoot me blue?”

  “Maybe you can get away. Maybe you really want to die, or to work for whoever’s selling you the most excitement and the best excuses to not face that you crave the danger rush.”

  “They said if I did get away, they’d pick me up eventually. Jergen got away for a month. Sam? Did you help a man named Sam?”

  “Never help anybody. You go back to them, you call Mr. Etheridge, you understand. So I can find another quiet hole. Mr. Etheridge, he just talked to lot of people about you.”

  “Being a drode head’s that bad?”

  “Man sleeps enough without losing months to people using him to read handwriting. Being looked down on’s no fun, either. If we’re useful, it shouldn’t be welfare, it should be work.”

  “They don’t use you, they use some of the brain’s faculties.”

  “Come on, sugar, and street kids should be gunned down for stealing and jacking machines?”

  I said, “If I got away, really, I can’t imagine that I’d turn myself in. But I wouldn’t go back to being an eco-warrior.”

  “If you believe in it, why not?”

  I couldn’t say I told him that to pacify whoever might be listening or whoever he might report to. “Because I’m tired, that’s why.”

  “Running takes energy,” the man said.

  “I’ve got the energy,” I said. “Besides they promised me even if I ran as hard as I could, they won’t gun me down in the recapture.”

  “You planning to surrender?”

  “No,” I said, feeling bolder than I’d felt in years.

  “Can you ride a bicycle?” the man asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Here’s the ticket to San Francisco the government had for Mr. Etheridge to give you. And some money.”

  Woops, my heart and diaphragm squeezed double. So Mr. Etheridge was a plant. The Feds probably laughed at me this very minute. I took the ticket and the money, feeling utterly silly.

  “And here’s the key to a bicycle locked at Dallas-Fort Worth. I got a bicycle here if you can ride good.”

  “What’s the daily range for a bicycle?”

  “You’re young. You motivated enough, you can get to the ocean. Hell, across the country if you’re willing to steal.” He took me deeper down into his tunnel and pulled a tarp off an open-framed bicycle, tubes and an exposed saddle, not an enclosed recumbent at all. I’d seen some adults who rode openframed bikes for sport.

  “They’ll be able to see me.”

  “You’ll be wearing a helmet, glasses, and bike clothes, all of which been stolen long ago,” the man said.

  I was about to ask him how did I know he wasn’t working for the Feds, too. But what was the point? Running for real was just as good for training purposes. If they lured me with false contacts, so what? They could get me off a bicycle real easily, not like I’d stolen a car.

  “Could you bring it to town?”

  “You got to go from here in the morning.”

  The man had a small cookstove and a sack of welfare grade bean-and-wheat flour. He made a mush, flavored it with kale and onions, then found me a sleeping bag. “Bike’s got bags to it,” he said. “Nice racks for riding with touring gear.”

  “What would you do if you were me?” I asked between spoonfuls of mush.

  “Go somewhere the opposite of the Raleigh-Durham airport, head for the beach, maybe. You could make the ocean in two days, one if you ride good.”

  “Bicycling.”

  “It’s very ecological,” the man said. He wiped out his pot and rinsed it with water from a plastic five-gallon bottle.

  I laughed. “When’s the ticket for?”

  “February second. You can change the times for twe
nty-five dollars each.”

  “What is today’s date?”

  “About January twenty-sixth,” the man said.

  “I could sell the ticket, couldn’t I?”

  “Oh, yeah. They want you to have lots of options.”

  “ ‘They’ is the Feds?”

  The old man nodded.

  I said, “You work for them, too.”

  “Some people Mr. Etheridge feels genuinely sorry for, he tries to get them to people like me for advice. Most of you targets give up and play the Feds’ game.”

  “Did you escape?”

  He said, “You know, if you gonna leave, you ought leave early, take Route 211 down south and ask for directions as if you’re lost.”

  “Let me have the key to the bicycle in Dallas,” I said. “Just in case.”

  All night, I leaned up on my elbow or lay on my back, awake, wondering if by some chance, I could escape, truly.

  I expected somewhere to cross the Federal Zone of Influence, but the eastern part of North Carolina was conservative to the coast. I reached Whiteville by the end of the day and camped at Lake Waccamaw State Park, careful to pay for the campsite with the change I’d gotten when I’d bought lunch at Red Springs and asked directions.

  Probably a meaningless gesture—all along my route, storekeepers could have other marked bills waiting for me. I expected the Feds would take me when I was too tired to move further, but I got my tent up and a night’s sleep without anything happening. The next day, I left my tent up and rode along the lake, remembering ecology lessons about its endemic fish. Surrounding the rare fish was the banal ugliness of lakeshore buildings and trailer camps.

  Now, for a design decision. I could go down to the North Carolina coast in less than a day, or I could turn into South Carolina, find someone at Myrtle Beach who’d buy my airplane ticket, and go back to Ohio to try to pick up my old gang connections.

  Or sell the ticket and go to California anyway. But if I was being closely tracked, then if I used the old gang signals, I’d lead the Feds to other people.

  First, I’d sell the ticket. When I had that money, I could plan what came next. I could throw coins and take a random walk. The ocean at Myrtle Beach wasn’t that different from the ocean in Brunswick County, I thought as I looked at a gas station map.