The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2)

by Anthony Caplan

  Attorney Shearstein's office was on the third floor in the Public Prosecutor's wing of the Justice Building, an obscure cement block with equally linear expansions in the Brutalist style of the Aquarian Age in which most of Edmundstown's older public architecture had been designed. The prosecutors ranked an adminobot that signed her in with an iris scan, its neck creaking with a thin hiss; its hydraulic head joint needed replacement. Some of the lawyers were milling around the food cart where it had stopped at the juncture of several hallways. The food cart gave off a pungent odor of cumin, as steam from the coils was being vented.

  He was in his office glancing through the oddly grayish and boxlike scanner on his desk. She didn't remember the way the bags under his eyes made him seem older than his years, or the way his receded hair gave his skull a lopsided look, as if he might topple over forward as he stood from his recliner with difficulty and approached her with his hand extended.

  "Good morning, Corrag. You had no troubles finding us."

  "No. I just autosearched with the index codes and the address came up."

  "Very good. Very resourceful. I've had a glance through your files and there have been no previous brushes."

  "No."

  "You've had the Testers."

  "Yes."

  "But that was a purely conscious scan."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean you didn't go under, did you? Have a seat and close the door, Corrag."

  Corrag did as he directed and warily sat down in the available recliner facing the desk. It put her at his eye level as he sat and looked at her with his little blue eyes that reminded her of a bird. She couldn't see his fingers as he drummed on his scanner, and she felt suddenly lost. Shearstein was talking.

  "The advantages of testing of this sort is it shows deeper motivations and inclinations that can lead an administrative council to make directions and recommendations to the probationary child and its parental units. You are still a child in the eyes of the law. Although by my lights a 16-year-old girl is capable of making her own decisions. Don't you think?"

  "Yes, of course." She felt he was leading her into a trap. She didn't trust him at all, she decided.

  "Would you be willing to undergo deep testing?"

  "When? Right now?"

  "Yes. Here. I have the apparatus."

  "No."

  "Okeydokey. That's fine. I could remand you, you understand. It’s within my remit."

  "Remand. Remit. I don't understand what you're saying. Could you please speak English?"

  "We have some time in which I have been empowered to help the council make a recommendation about your status. There are many paths leading to a good outcome. That's all. Do you understand?"

  "I guess so."

  "Good. The value of deep testing is it's a shortcut to my understanding of what makes you happy, Corrag."

  "I don't want you to know that."

  "But I must."

  "Why?"

  "Because without that deep knowledge we cannot make a decision about your placement."

  "But my father..."

  "Nothing. Your father and mother's credentials can't help you now, Corrag. You are in the hands of the Justice Department. Later we can work with your parents to get you cleared of any wrongdoing. Have the charges dropped and the arrest annulled. But that assumes your cooperation."

  "He told me he talked with the Council at the June meeting and they decided already."

  "That's not the protocol."

  "Well, that's what he said. If you want to mess up the process, go right ahead, but it seems to me that wouldn't be wise of you."

  "The final decision, Corrag, will be made at the next closed session. You can either have deep testing or you can read this document. I have a copy. And answer the questions on the study guide and then we can test orally."

  He seemed to be done with her. He was focused on the scanner and had stopped drumming his fingers. She took the ragged old tablet with the gorilla glass of Thomas Picket's foundational tome, Value and Man -- Citizens of a Post-Sustainability Order and the iconic image of the blindfolded Justice and her crummy old scales, and the stapled pages of the study guide which he had pushed across the desk. She flicked through the initial screens, it was dry and full of facts and graphs, but preferable to the deep testing, an invasive process which left markers in the tissue of various brain regions. She had heard her teachers debating the worth of this book, which had been a major influence on the Founding Brethren. This was somewhat old school and quease inducing, the old tablet and the stapled pages, but she would manage.

  "Okay. I’ll read this. I guess that's it then." Corrag stood. "I'll see you in a week."

  "No, you have to read it here," said Shearstein, craning his head up slowly at her.

  "Why?"

  "That's just the rule."

  "But I'll read it. Who cares where?"

  "Somebody does because that's the rule."

  "Bend the rule."

  He looked at her steadily. His face never showed any emotion. It was obviously an advantage to him to be opaque like that. She looked around. He had no pictures, nothing at all on the chrome tinted glass walls, no clues about his family, pastimes, nothing about a life beyond the enclosing, claustrophobic office. Dim shapes of figures could be seen moving beyond the walls, but they were invisible to anyone outside. She noticed he was looking at her legs.

  "Bend the rule,” he repeated. "You have a nice body, Corrag. You should make any man happy."

  "Does that mean I can go?"

  "What do I get if I bend the rule? It seems to me that a rule is an inflexible, hard thing. It takes a force to bend it. What are you going to do to help me bend the rule?"

  "I've already agreed to read this book and do the study guide."

  "What else?"

  She shrugged. He gave a little laugh.

  "Go," he said and waved her away with the back of his hand, looking down at his scanner again.

  During the week the wind from the north brought with it a cold chill that the Edmundstown Channel Five newscaster called the methane vortex. Every time there was a major release of methane from the Arctic seabed it brought with it a cold blast from the sea's bottom that spread out eastward and southward. It was paradoxical because the methane locked them into a continuing heat buildup in the atmosphere and coordinated reductions with their Republican partners to avoid the worst-case scenarios of life-ending negative feedback loop for the planet. But for Corrag it just brought the cold. She wandered around in the garden after the gardener had left with a keffiyeh pulled around her shoulders. It had belonged to Ricky. His time in the U.S. Foreign Service had been spent in various Middle Eastern diplomatic posts before the States broke apart. It gave her a sense of solidity, a family heirloom, but it was no use against the strange combination of dread, horror, revulsion and fascination she felt when she thought about Shearstein. He wanted to know what made her happy. The idea of a total stranger becoming concerned with her innermost thoughts in such a casual, heartless manner just sent her into a corner of despair from which there seemed to be no escape. What did make her happy? It wasn't having to spend time in a moldy old office with no pictures, not even a calendar from the corner bakeshop, with a whack job administerial with creepy eyes. That much she knew. The image of his slim, pale fingers drumming on the desktop was stuck in her mind like a bad feedback loop.

  There was no rice to make her favorite dish, a casserole with the farmed tilapia in the freezer in its carbon nanoparticle foil from the Super8, so she ordered an express packet of MidwestOrgano long grain. It cost so much but it was worth it. She read the news on the nanowall, tuned to the PNS, the old Pacifica News Service that had become the Federation's Progressive News Source. The farmers' union was complaining that the Federation's latest published price controls were causing feedstock shortages that were unintended and poorly planned, but the business council had leaked a story that there was dissension among the Councilors about the level of
eco-tax that was being levied on humanure and the need to think about an outright subsidy from value added taxes for feedstock producers.

  Corrag liked to keep up on the news. That was one thing that made her happy, being able to sound intelligent and figure out what made the world go around. Maybe she ought to be a journalist, she thought. She liked it when she and Ben had serious discussions. She liked a lot of things. She sent the housebot out to pick up the package, and that was odd, because she usually liked to do things herself. But it was cold outside, and the clouds were scudding across the sky so fast it made her anxious. Then she thought of Shearstein and his little cold eyes and the thin grey band of hair at the back of his head like some strange animal while the casserole baked in the oven. What made him happy? Or was he like some bot, happy in his role as a functionary of the Federation and its machinery of administration? She wondered while she took the casserole out and it grew dark. She didn't turn the light on, and that was strange also. Because she didn't like to be alone in the dark house, usually, so she asked the housebot to turn on all the lights. Then she put on a summer music recommended play list on the Oomo, but the sickeningly sweet music did nothing to help.

  It was strange that she would think about Shearstein at all, never mind what would make him happy. It didn't seem to be right to her that satisfying the most basic appetites could make men happy. Happiness was not even a thing in the Federation's constitution, unlike the old United States. Virtue and sacrifice, yes, not happiness. Augmentation was supposed to override the instincts, but it apparently didn't. Not in Shearstein's case.

  She tried reading the Picket book. Written at the beginning of the secessionist wars, it had inspired the generation known as the Founding Brethren to establish the Democravian state on the lines Picket had set out. Critics had always existed, but for Corrag it wasn't the graphs and statistics she quibbled with. It was the reverence the book was held in by her parents and the teachers at the school, although there was a pushback from the younger faculty members. Picket was still alive and living in Buenos Aires, apparently. She remembered reading it somewhere. What did Picket think of augmentation, she wondered, skipping through the table of contents. There was no mention of it directly, although he did have a late chapter called The Need to Reform the Collective Appetite -- from Scarcity to Abundance, which was about the educational system Picket espoused. Apparently, competitive sports were de-emphasized in favor of community service in Picket's idealized world, which the Founding Brethren did their best to recreate. They took it a step further, relying on augmented tuning to bring the best and the brightest of every generation into the uppermost circles of service. The augmented elites enjoyed access to privileges and perks that were unavailable to ordinary worker folk, but in return were meant to live lives of ego-numbing devotion to the greater good. In contrast, the Edmundstown Charter School vocational track students had an esprit de corps all their own, based on their independence and freedom from the responsibilities that the augmented track kids labored under, the knowledge that their destinies, although limited, were less circumscribed, that their thoughts and desires, although less exciting, would always be their own. For Corrag, that was something she had increasingly wondered about. Somewhere in her mind was the thought that their colorful speech and dress patterns were evidence of a finer, more exalted existence, not a coarser one. Except now she and Ben had stepped off the track, conspired together with inappropriate contacts and seditious sympathies against the interests of the Federation. She just wasn't sure what she wanted. It would be easy not to think and plunge ahead, but that was not an option for her. What she wanted was to know things. But that left her exposed. Knowledge was not a protection against the evil of falling away from the utilitarian ideal.

  So she read through that night until the housebot let out a warning note and then said: "Lights out. PS Alert," outside her door and then stayed there waiting for a response. PS stood for power source, which meant that she was wasting energy.

  "Okay," she said. "I'm going to bed. Lights out. You, too."

  And they both did as they were told.

  The next visit to Shearstein, Corrag told him she had finished the Picket but wanted to put off the study guide. She wasn't sure why, maybe she just wasn't ready to undertake the study guide questions and the oral examination, although she had finished reading the book. But she wanted to know more. Never mind about the book. What she really wanted to know, the key to the whole thing was what made him happy? She was hunched down in her seat, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt in Edmundstown maroon and white with her graduation year on the front in a Whirligig Bold Italic. Her eyes studied his intently. He was making an effort to be cheery. That bothered even more. That somehow he would modulate his behavior on her behalf was truly scary, that they could be equals, adversaries in that way, on some field of play that she was determined to figure out for herself as quickly as possible, no matter how seditious that might be.

  "I don't know, Corrag. Happiness for me is the small things. Like when the food cart comes around down the hall just when I've finished writing an opinion, as if it had been planned that way. Those sorts of coincidences make me happy. When things work."

  A shiver went down her spine. She hadn't heard what he said. Something about a food cart. As banal as that.

  He was married. Two little boys. He showed her the pictures in his emosponder. His wife looked nice, like a lady who wandered the aisles trying to decide on the very best bargains at the Super8. Brown hair, straightened. The two boys looked like him, with inexpressive, waiting faces. Waiting for what? Perhaps something about to be handed to them on a platter, she surmised.

  "They look like you."

  "Yes. They all say that."

  "That must make you happy."

  "I don't think about it."

  "Well, thank you for sharing."

  "Yes, I have shared, haven’t I? Maybe you and I should spend some time together outside. Maybe go to some places together."

  "Where would we go?"

  "There are places. Do you like ethnic food? There's a great ethnic food place I know."

  "Ethnic food, huh?"

  "Yes."

  "Well. Okay, Mr. Shearstein."

  "You can call me Edward. You can tell me about the Thomas Picket you say you've read."

  "I have read it."

  She wasn't sure what she had decided. Things happened, and it was not for her to decide to be for or against. This was what her education as a Democravian citizen had taught her. To be acceptant of things and to help. Shearstein wanted to meet at the Bazoom Club. It was a notorious dive, one of the only places in Edmundstown where you could hear live music and eat food with circumscribed feedstocks. He sent her a text that she opened at home in the kitchen after speaking with Ricky and Alana on the nanowall from the bridge of the hover where there was a public teleport. They were too cheap to use their emosponder and pay the roving fees. The icebergs were spectacular but the definition from the public teleport was not the best. But one day, she had agreed at Ricky’s prodding during the conversation, she would like to visit. Perhaps after she had graduated from the fine-tuning program at the UUW. She didn't mention the date she was going to have with Shearstein.

  Shearstein's text was curt: "We will be at the Bazoom Club at 17:30 and we hope to see you for food and drinks." He didn't use emoticons, but he did use the royal we. These were the wrong kinds of flourishes and stylistic choices, in Corrag's usual aesthetics, but the experiment consisted of delving deeper into the exotic world of Attorney Shearstein.

  She wandered around the house trying to avoid the housebot, who seemed to be following her. Finally, in the kitchen, she ordered it to stay away while she made a snack from an old roll of bread and the last bit of cheese she could scrape from the foil.

  "You need to supplement the stores."

  "What? I told you to stay away. That means go back and stay in the hall, by the door. Your usual spot. Put it on hold."

  She p
ut on the jumpsuit she had only worn once, to Gurgie's birthday party at the Shallow Center, and made up her face to look older, with blue eye liner. On the walk to the subporter station, she did her best to look everyone in the eye at least briefly, before walking on the downtown bound platform and settling into her seat on the porter that slid in silently and took off again after a whisper of hissing doors.

  The Bazoom Club was on a block of warehouse type buildings used to store machinery and equipment. The door had a vintage sign painted in the brick above it, a barely visible silhouette of a woman dressed in high heels kneeling on one knee. Inside at the bar, several men and women in worker suits had O masks on, and at the back, behind the door, was a table with three Japanese tourists, all male, with silk suits and fedoras and another table with Shearstein still in his blue coat and pants from the office, sipping a Maxergy cocktail. The head waitress, an older Latino woman in a black skirt and blouse, studied Corrag intently.

  "You how old?"

  "Eighteen. I'm meeting my uncle."

  "Oh, he's your uncle?"

  "Yes, at that table."