"What about Thanksgiving?"
"If you want. Although the Hunnewell Thanksgiving is huge. Not to be missed."
"They celebrate Thanksgiving?"
"Yes, of course. Thanksgiving. Christmas, Hannukah. But we have Edmundsday in February. And Spring Fest."
"You are going to have a great time. Learn as much as you can. And remember, there's good and bad in all groups of people. That goes for families and nations," said Ricky.
Going through the security check, the clearance guard eyed her documents and checked her eyes with the mobile scanner. Her encephalograms and iris prints and other biometrics and psych testing since childhood were property of the Federation, and as she was waved through she truly felt that she was going forth on a special mission to the country that had turned its back on the ideals of liberty for all. Even though the Statue still carried the torch in the New York harbor, it was a dead icon in that water. Her light had been passed to the other side of the continent.
The steward showed her to her seat. She put it in the upright position and strapped herself in. The display overhead listed some of the entertainment options. She might be interested in some of the Oomo channels later on which looked like they might include some of the Indie music scene coming out of the Repho. Federation entertainment boards heavily censored this music. But some of it was being allowed on the tubid. Then a young man in spandex took the seat next to her. He peeled off his overcoat and rolled it to put away in the overhead compartment. He was in his late twenties perhaps, with the Mohawk buzzcut that told her he was not a Federation citizen.
He sat down and looked over at her before closing his eyes for a nap. Then he fidgeted awkwardly in his seat and his eyes opened.
"Oh, Jesus," he said. "I forgot my Dopatin pills."
"What are they?"
"Oh, you people and your quaint mental waves. What is it they put in the water in the Fed? Haven't you heard of Dopatin?"
"No," said Corrag, defensively.
"It's a sedative. Releases dopamine. Like eating a wad of cheese. Helps me sleep."
"Okay. Sorry for asking."
He stood and pulled out his coat from the overhead and took out a sleek black headband from the coat pocket. Once the coat was back overhead and he was seated, he put the headband on and finally relaxed. He closed his eyes and seemed to be asleep. When the steward came by to make sure they were strapped in, he made no motion of recognition. The steward smiled. "Got his head on," he said knowingly.
Corrag looked around at the other passengers, a mix of foreigners and natives with a commonality of dress and sophistication that left her feeling underprepared. She remembered a slot on the nanowall's evening news about the headbands that were popular in the Republic for stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain. They were out of the reach financially for most people and were the desired objects of thieves who would sometimes kill to get their hands on them. Their overuse often led to addictive behavior, apathy and mental unfitness.
The pilot's voice came on describing the itinerary of their trip. They were due into Ryan Port on the Great Lakes in about an hour. There had been reports of sabotage activities against the tubid infrastructure in the hinterlands, but the pilot reassured the passengers that security clearances had been guaranteed by both Repho and Federation switches on the Transport Board in that morning's report. Then he asked them all to relax and enjoy the journey. The steward came by with Maxergy snacks and carafes of vintage wines for topflite sections, and then the lights went out for the fifteen-minute power up. They heard the pilot's communicator crackling for clearance. Then there was a pull as they catapulted into the vacuum through the transport tube. The lights came back on after about five minutes of hyper-speed travel during which the hum of air compressors located in the nose of the car were the only audible sound. Corrag could hear the buzz of conversations slowly grow as they glided along at a comfortable velocity. The passengers in the middle row next to her were speaking French. France and Germany were the two leading Euro CRA nations that had briefly sided with the Federation during the early years of the war, but they were now firm allies of the Republic in their common fight against the Jihad tribalists of the Middle East. Her neighbor, the young man in the seat next to her, rolled his head and opened his eyes. She pretended not to notice. They were slowing down for the long glide into RyanPort.
"First time East?"
"Yeah."
"I could tell. You look like a newbie. You'll do, though, once you get the hang of things."
"What do you do?"
"I'm in trade. Fruit and nuts. The Russians are going crazy for almond, and their suppliers in Turkey have trouble meeting demand. So I get to negotiate with the Federation trade people. If you can call them trade people. All that retro augmentation. So slow. You people have to do something about your storage."
“Federation rule is imperfect, but it leads to the best outcome for the most people,” said Corrag.
“Don’t get defensive with me, sister. Just saying.”
Ryan Port saw an influx of new passengers get on. Half of them dressed in exotic foreign garb, the men’s heads swaddled in turbans and the women in floral print saris, and the other half, college age, dressed in indigo spandex and rainbow Gotzeitgeist gear, laughing and falling against each other and tumbling heedlessly into their seats. Now the tubid was full. There was a short power up and they were off again into the blackness. After a silent jaunt at top speed in the vacuum of the tube, they began to glide and quickly slow for Grand Central Station.
This was the legendary port that had been reconstructed from scratch after a crude waste bomb set off by animal rights terrorists had sparked the first co-evolutionary troubles. It was only after their capture and imprisonment in the maximum-security compound in Washington State that the secession movement leaders, Joanne Kissim, Wally Delamare and Tracy Durkiev had managed to gain traction. Enough to organize and begin the rollout of their last stand for planetary sanity during the years of the second Ryan administration.
The customs line was short. Most passengers went through the passport check for Republican citizens. The French family was ahead of her on the line for Visitors and Transeints. That was how it was spelled in the Republic. Transeints. That reminded her of one of Ricky’s rants about the Repho's academic journalism. She suddenly felt a sense of kinship with her father, and wished he were there with her.
The man in the booth gave her a long glare, looking up from the document. Then he ordered her to look into the scanner for another encepho. Corrag took a deep breath and did as she was told. Curiously, the home page on the encephalogrammer showed a grainy segment of historical document footage -- immigrants in Ellis Island, lousy bands of huddled masses. But Corrag came up clean of scannable defects.
“Baggage check on level three for you,” said the man, smiling curtly to show his platinum inserts for front teeth. He was long past a decent retirement year. There were no labor unions in the Republic, so Corrag did not understand why a bot did not take the job. There was so much she did not know.
“Final destination?”
“New Albion.”
“Nice up there. Family visit?”
“Youth emissary.”
The man nodded.
After picking up her travel bag from the distribution rack on level three, Corrag began to look around. There was a balcony overlooking the main floor and street level entrance, and she slowly made her way over to the marble rail and looked out over the space. The transit of people across the station made an undecipherable pattern, not unlike the movement of people across Edmundstown's public spaces. On the ceiling, a large nanowall showed a political advertisement for Mayor Twombly Gheko, who was running for reelection for a record fifth term. She checked her emosponder. There was Alana, online at the time.
“Any luck?”
“No. Who do I look for?"
“They’re sending Beithune. Just stay where you are and put a reader on."
“Ok
ay.”
“I love you."
“Love you too, Mom.”
She set the emosponder back in her bag's outer pocket. Standing against the balcony, Corrag watched the people and practiced keeping her thoughts still and private. She thought of the advanced language students who learned through augmentation to read facial cues and didn’t even need to see a brain map to know what you were thinking. Corrag liked to think at least some of her thoughts were inviolable.
Beithune was the boy, a year and a half older than her. She tried to keep her thoughts simple and quiet so as not to be surprised when he appeared. That was what she was supposed to represent as a Democravian, that willingness to sacrifice individual needs. She wasn't sure she believed in it any more, but the practice of it for so many years was like a track laid down in her mind from which it was hard to break clear.
“Hello, there.”
She turned to see who had addressed her. It was a boy, almost a man, with a beret on, and straw yellow hair sticking out from under it in ragged bunches. He came up and stopped and cocked his head. He was short, a little over one and a half meters tall, thin, with sparkling blue eyes and a brilliant Hunnewell smile with a hint of malevolence around the lips -- an ancient, twisted bit of hunger that had eventually been tamed.
“You Corrag?”
“Yes. Hi, Beithune. I was expecting you."
“Hi.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“A pleasure, cuz.”
"You look like you did in the photos Alana used to show me."
"You look kind of what I expected a Federation chick to look like."
"How is that?"
"Well, natural like. And strong arms. Surfers." He smiled.
"Oh.”
“Come on. Before we go back there's something I have to do."
Corrag slung the bag strap over her shoulder and followed Beithune to the escalator ramp down to the entrance of the station. They made an odd pair, the short, cocky boy with a swagger and the tall girl stooping forward with the weight of her bag in an oddly confident way. But an observer would have noticed a family resemblance, something similar in the way they walked, an alignment in their thought patterns that immediately caused them to mesh their gaits. Beithune slipped through the crowds milling on the docks outside with a practiced familiarity, as the water ferries and luxury craft plied the canals and sped along on the open water of the harbor. Corrag had never seen nor heard such a loud spilling over of human wants and needs as she observed leaving Grand Central Station. She was seeing for the first time the busy waterways of the Big Apple and the once majestic, now disheveled skyline of skyscrapers piled far in all directions. A rainbow-hued horde of youth was running the show on the dock. They hustled water taxis, gathered and pointed and scattered at the approach of the police on armored harbormasters -- self-propelled and lightning quick electric jet skis. They whispered sales pitches for home-brewed crystal speed and liquid oomo, as Beithune smiled and shook his head. He and Corrag jumped on a ferryboat and held on to the piping overhead as crowds piled in and out. After they had gone several miles north along the main Broadway Canal, Beithune jumped off and waited for Corrag to catch up. They were on the edge of a plaza. A large sandstone building stretched for several blocks, with sharp edges and glass in the upper towers that reflected the fading sun.
"This is Sandelsky."
"Wow, I'd never believe it."
Sandelsky, the premium Repho game designer, was famed around the world for its innovation in artificial intelligence products and training aids. MandolinMonkey, for instance, the favored game for Federation youth circuits, still owed its patent to Sandelsky, although Federation testers had long ago bought out its functionality. She had always imagined a sleek, squat look for the main office when she thought of the Sandelsky brand, something like the MandolinMonkey obelisk. Although old, this building was part of a complex that took up at least an entire city block and included a bay on the canal for boats. Bored Repho military police mixed with pedestrians at the bridge going over to the plaza.
She and Beithune climbed the steps to the revolving glass of the entrance. She squeezed through with her bag and almost spun out on to the floor on the other side. Beithune had moved rapidly ahead without her. A group of longhaired twenty somethings that looked like they smoked khat and slept in portagons sat at a greasy old circular desk. They laughed out loud at her stumbling entrance. The room was large. It had been once an old garage belonging to the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The walls had never been redone, still covered with graffiti and relics of the days of oil before the collapse of the permafrost and the floods of the late 2020s.
Beithune took something out of his pocket and threw it onto the circular table in the midst of what Corrag guessed was a Sandelsky design team. Several of them pushed back in their seats and swiveled to see who it was that had challenged with this gesture.
"It's rigged. I know how you do it. Do you want to see?" asked Beithune.
"Woah, there. What is this you've chucked here?" asked a bearded, burly blond giant, slapping his hands on his knees.
"That is the vertglove you sent me for Fire. I know how you do it. There's a built in lag, just microseconds, which is enough time for the high frequency transmitters to work around any move I make."
"Ah, so you're saying the game can read your thoughts before you do,” said another man, with wide Mongol eyes and tattooed, sinuous arms crossed on his chest.
"Yes, but I know how it's done and I can show you."
"Can you beat the Fire?"
"Not yet."
"Let us know when you've beat the Fire."
A young woman with green hair snickered. Several people at the table restarted conversations among themselves.
"Hold on," said the blond giant, holding up Beithune's leather vertglove. "Here. Show me what you mean."
Beithune took the vertglove and laid it on the table. With a tool he removed from his pocket he undid the lacing and revealed the inner circuitry. Corrag moved closer, shifting her bag to the ground as she looked over his shoulder. She couldn't hear exactly what he was saying, but he pointed out something on the circuits laid down on the inside of the glove.
"Hmm," said the giant. "Do you think the transponder is cuing from the electrical impulses on your skin?"
"Yes, and the conversion is happening at about a four microseconds gap. See? Here are the two branches coming together. That gives you guys an unfair advantage. But I'll beat it anyway. Just give me some time."
"That's actually a pretty impressive piece of sleuthing, kid. If you're right, you deserve a new vertglove."
"Thanks. And there's another thing." The table went silent again. Beithune stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out an emosponder stuck together with metalized synthoduct tape. He looked at something and pulled his head up.
"Absolution. I'd really appreciate some in tabs."
"That's strictly still in the works," said the giant.
"Some players are already going in."
"Do you know that for a fact?"
"Yes."
"This certainty is impressive in a youngster, if a little presumptuous," said the giant.
Another chair pushed back and a boy stood. Older than Beithune, but not long past twenty, he had a typical sort of face and build but with something slightly dark about him, some mysterious heritage.
"Barrier challenge," he said in a gruff voice, the kind of voice that didn't play much with words. Corrag had heard of barrier challenges. They were illegal in the Federation. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. Occasionally Republican gamers sought to recreate aspects of their favorite virtual settings in the outer world in order to continually blur the distinctions between the two. For the Federation, they were simply much too dangerous, with casualty rates that were not worth the extracurricular experience points.
Beithune smiled, showing a mouth full of crooked teeth. It seemed oral perfection was not an imperative in the Republi
can health care system. Another difference. In the Federation, gleaming, perfectly straight white teeth were an expectation for Axion streamed children. The sight of Beithune's smile was an unsettling shock to Corrag. But she cheered for him in her heart and tensed her body, as her cousin stepped up to the other man.
"What'll it be?" said Beithune.
"Board, wall or ball? Your choice, kid."
"Ball," said Beithune.
Several people at the table cheered, including the woman with green hair. Beithune looked at Corrag and tossed her his emosponder.
"In case," he said. "Check the finder history and it'll get you to our zipcar and home."
Corrag nodded with the full weight of the realization that Beithune was facing real and imminent danger, including possible death. She looked around for some responsible adult with a frowning countenance to step in and put a stop to the scene, and she listened for an emosensor alarm at the very least. But there was neither.
"Give him an asskicking, Shulder," said the giant calmly.
Shulder led Beithune out towards the middle of the floor. There was a blue ball on the ground, old and dusty. He poked it with his foot into the air back to Beithune, who caught it on his chest with a quick jump. He let it roll onto his shoulder, popped it up behind him with his head and flicked it with a back heel over his shoulder. He caught it with his left instep, balancing the ball on his outstretched foot for several seconds before flicking it back towards Shulder, who caught the ball in the air with two feet, landed with it still pinned between his ankles, and flipped forward in a handspring, flinging the ball towards the wall by releasing it from his feet at the top of the arc. Beithune followed the flight of the ball and gave a slight stagger forward as it thudded with full force. It hit very close to a target painted there in red. The cheers from the group at the table grew louder.
A metallic pincer jaw dropped from the ceiling on an extendable lattice and gripped the ball. The pincer pulled the ball out to the middle of the floor again and both Shulder and Beithune walked over to the pincer over their heads, its spotlight falling in a radius of about twenty feet. The rest of the space went dark.
The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2) Page 8
