"Why, Beithune? I mean there's so much that we need to do in the real world."
"Like what?"
"Like a job, like meeting new people," said Corrag, no longer able to hold herself back. She hoped Beithune would not crack.
"There's no hope if you don't see how important this is."
"How is it more important than taking care of ourselves? This city will eat us up, cousin. Look at you. You need to eat. You can't go on dreaming about conquering the inside."
"No. It's not just about inside anymore, Corrag. The alliance we all feared is taking over the city. Monica and Mike are in jail. Haven’t you heard? There's a crackdown."
"Well, what's behind it?"
"Chagnon. He has a background in neural architecture from his days at Carnegie Mellon. It makes perfect sense and fits his sweeping ambitions. I need to go back in and see it. I think I can crack this new challenge before it's street-proofed. There will be flaws that will tell me what their aims are."
"Who?"
"Chagnon. Gheko too."
"That's crazy."
"Do you see now? This is important. We can stop them or at least learn about their aims and methods. We can clean up and make some dinner later. Come in with me now."
"Monica and Mike are in jail?"
"Or dead. Nobody knows and there's no way to get any information out of the administratives or the police. Not even the human rights desk of the Consumer Protection Board. Lars and the boys have gone underground. It's very bad out there tonight."
"Let's lay low. Just for tonight, Beithune. I'll make dinner."
"No. If you're not coming in, then I'm going out. I can't stand it here."
All the sounds in the street seemed to be emanating from the soul of the planet, older than water, creaks of the forces that were fighting to control the spin. Why did they have to be in that spin? Corrag felt herself falling. She sat down on the bed and cleared a space for herself. If only she could just curl up for a few hours. The world would go on without her, without Beithune. It had nothing to do with them. Their reality could be cleaner, independent of the influences shaking out in the back rooms, in the roots of money and power. Beithune peed in the bathroom and flushed the toilet. Going on a challenge of this kind would inevitably drain her beyond the capacity of a night's sleep to remedy. She had to work, and besides, there was the danger of coming across an unexpected dimension in this kind of unproven challenge, of not being able to ever recover, of losing your mind.
Monica would know what to do. The memory of her voice, its sure tones, came to Corrag's mind. She wondered if Beithune was right. She was in jail, he'd said. On what charges? Wasn't Mike supposed to be in the mayor's task force on community organizing? Certainly, there would have to be protests to secure their release from whatever trumped up proofs were being used against them. She stood up to get her emosponder and began to look up her contacts. She did have a number for Monica.
"No. Don't do that!" Beithune sprang across the darkened room, from his side of the bed to the dresser where Corrag was standing. He tried to wrestle the emosponder from her, but she held onto it and managed to twist away. His feverish look galvanized her resistance. She thought he might possibly already be in the throes of some hunger-induced psychotic break.
"Beithune, calm down! Our contact list is already compromised," said Corrag.
"Yes, but there is a Code Green out for anybody on Monica and Mike's communication folders. They will come down tonight, Corrag. There's a chance they are already on their way. If you hear a knock on the door, our best bet is to throw the emosponders down the toilet As a matter of fact, I'm ditching mine now. You can come with me if you want."
"Where are you going?"
"Water side."
"I knew that."
"You too?"
"Yes."
"See? They've already hacked their way into our heads."
"What can we do?"
"I don't know. Don't think too much about it."
She and Beithune walked silently along the Atlantic Avenue canal for uncounted porter stops. It was good to breathe the sea-laden air and hear the sirens and zipping motors of the watercraft. It didn't seem like there was any way to stop the wild flow of city life, but that was precisely what the alliance between the Gheko administration and the Sandelsky gaming empire was all about, according to Beithune.
"There is a war here. Just like the one in Democravia," he explained, exasperated. They had stopped at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. He took out his emosponder and threw it far into the river. Corrag kept hers.
There was the thin line, the division between the skyline of the city and the dark night behind it. For Corrag, this distinction marked her ability to see things the way they really were and the impossibility of ever being sure of what was there. She wanted to believe in herself, the Democravian girl who stood for doing things the right way, for the good of the greatest number. She put off her own pleasure for the sake of others, and now the others were proving her wrong. This fighting, the mysterious power struggle that was the black behind the night, the ground of all history, was confounding her desire for a proving ground. The Repho was going to be the place she and Beithune made a mark. Now the struggle was to find a way forward. They were lost.
They walked out on the bridge with the other pedestrians, the flow of seekers all wondering where the action was, when it was in the black of the night sky just beyond the light of the known. They all seemed propelled by a common cause, runing blindly towards a shared fate. Someone somewhere surely pulled the strings that made the city jump. She looked at faces, trying to gauge the modality of thought in each look of recognition, each spark of acknowledgement spreading equal doses of fear and excitement. On the other side was Manhattan, the reservoir of the rich and playground of the elites.
They reached Ayn Rand Center Park. The city police had set up an instant wall of corrugated lithium boards and were beginning to pull people aside and into the police transports that zipped away to the mother boat out in the harbor. Smaller police boats swarmed in the canals, waiting to pull alongside the pilings and take on prisoners.
There were shouts, explosions, a break in the orderly process, and the crowd surged ahead as Corrag and Beithune made for the lithium barrier and the bright lights of the Ayn Rand Center behind it. They had a common thought -- to follow the crowd and reach the city. The police were standing in the way of the mob's will to enjoy the night that belonged to them. But Corrag thought there was something else, something wrong. The police were unusually focused and were not just herding them for the simple purposes that the herd could understand. She sprinted behind Beithune. He had seen a way, and he dodged with the quickness of thought that was his trademark. She had to trust him. She could not see the openings as well as he could. Her heart pounded and her legs pumped. Then it was over as quickly as thought itself.
The cracking sound in the air knocked her to the ground. The smell of burning flesh filled the park. The blue light of ion fields crackled in the sky above her. Corrag gritted her teeth in pain but was unable to move her limbs. Everywhere that she managed to see there were bodies pulled down by the jolt of the lithium panels. Police units in full-body insulated suits were walking among them, pulling people aside and dragging them into the boats. Corrag felt someone lift her by the arms and drag her away. She looked for Beithune and thought she saw him lying on the ground.
"Beithune, where are you?" she screamed in her mind as she was dropped into the boat.
"Sandelsky," she heard from inside her head.
The police transport moved slowly in the bay, silently chopping through the water. Police officers moved down the rows of prisoners sitting on the grooved deck, asking questions and examining emosponder documentation. As the effects of the lithium blast wore away, two sub Saharans and an Inuit looking woman, illegal refugees, went for the water. The floodlights turned on the river and machine guns strafed the area.
"Emosponder?" asked a policewom
an in blackface and camo.
"Not on me,” said Corrag.
"What's your name?"
"Corrag Lyons."
"Spell the last name?"
Corrag complied.
"National identification number?"
"Democravian Federation. I'm a youth emissary. My father is a council member in Edmundstown."
The policewoman looked at her. She punched something into her tablet and walked away. A few minutes later she came back with a man in a blue captain's uniform and a HINTEL Homeland Intelligence baseball cap.
"Hi, Corrag."
"Hi."
"We have a problem. You know that."
"Why? What's the problem?"
"You're not supposed to be here. You've violated the terms of your entry. What have you been doing?"
"Working at The Meadowbrook Health Club. On Atlantic Avenue."
"Follow me."
Corrag stood and made her way behind the officer on the slowly pitching deck, stepping between the bodies of the fellow passengers. She felt in her pocket for her emosponder. It was lost. Her heart sank. She thought of jumping in the water, but she held back. The black waves promised a quick death by either poisoning or drowning in the toxins.
Inside the cabin house, the Homeland Intelligence officer sat her on a bench and ordered her to wait. He went away after promising to return. Other police came and went, and the boat seemed to circle in the water. Drones and choppers flying overhead filled the sky with blinking lights. Corrag watched out the open door of the cabin house. Despite her fear, she was hoping her special status would prevent her from falling into a worse situation. She didn't know what that situation would be. The police had not arrested her, but being on the boat entailed a loss of human standing. The prisoners were being kept down, physically restrained in a way that was unimaginable. One man tried to stand but was tazed by an officer.
"Get down! And stay down!"
A woman sat up and screamed something unintelligible. Her meaningless wail seemed to sum up the absurdity and the terror of their indeterminate status.
The lights of another, smaller boat coming alongside played across the deck, and the wake from this boat made Corrag grab for a hold. Two female officers, possibly transgendered, came into the wheelhouse and took Corrag, one at each arm.
"Come on," said one.
"Where?" asked Corrag. They seemed rough and uncaring, and she demanded a better approach. They were not providing her with what she needed.
"Out of here. Don't ask questions. Just relax. Don't make it harder on yourself. You'll be fine," said the other.
They pulled her along. She stumbled and excused herself. The other boat was tied off, and they dropped Corrag down with a rope ladder on a cable. The two officers stepped back and one gave a thumbs up as she ducked away. Corrag felt herself falling towards the new boat and arms catching her. The new boat pitched and rolled beneath her.
Nobody said anything to her. She seemed to be the only civilian on board. The soldiers were busy getting commands through their helmets. Once they sat her down in the stern on a berth they left her on her own. She could hear the crackle of the radio communications with the pilot and she could smell the slightly acidic smell of the munitions, lightweight automatic rifles that were carried onboard. A few minutes later they were coming alongside a jetty somewhere uptown. A group of men and women in lab coats had assembled on the dock and surrounded Corrag as the soldiers lifted her out. The boat started up its engine again and moved away, enveloped in darkness, into the current of the river.
"Where am I?" asked Corrag.
"Ward's Island Rehab," said one of the doctors, a young man with a worried face who pushed the glasses up on his nose.
Corrag was speechless. All she could do was look at the doctors and hope they could understand her feelings of despair.
"You'll be assessed for placement. Don't worry. This is a good place," said the young doctor with glasses. The other doctors consulted with their emosponders. One woman smoked a cigarette.
"There's nothing wrong with me," said Corrag at last, as they began to walk across the yard from the dock towards the complex of pale buildings silouhetted against the sky and the flash of explosions downtown.
"No, of course not, dear," said the woman, snubbing out her cigarette on the dock with the toe of her shoe.
Corrag was placed on the sixth floor in what had once been the youth wing in the heyday of the hospital's medical glory. Most of the people there were non-violent. In the subsequent days she would learn their names. A team of doctors came around in the mornings and administered medications and took measurements with the spectrometer and abdominal scan.
Mendez, a thin man with curly hair, shared cigarettes with everybody. He whispered to Corrag.
"You smoke?"
"No."
"That's okay. Listen, you new here, right? You going to need some information that the doctors and folks won't be giving to you."
"Like what?"
"Like how to stay alive in this joint."
"Okay. I'm listening."
Mendez advised Corrag that first morning to lay as low as possible when the doctors came by. Every week they chose one of the patients on the basis of indecipherable criteria, and this person was never seen again. Mendez said they underwent a forced augmentation that rendered them essentially into human bots and were then programmed to re-enter the stream of life in the city to act as informants and mood swingers. There was a lot that he told her. It was hard for her to retain it all.
Every night the people on the ward who were still left came out and played ping-pong under the thin LEDS that were left on twenty-four seven. The ward guards, men who spoke with no decipherable accents, they might have been bots even, Corrag wasn't sure and neither was anyone else she asked, usually turned a blind eye as they dared to make conversation between games. Most of them had been picked off the street in the last few weeks, but there were two patients who had been on the ward full time for at least ten years. City administrators had placed them there for behavior deemed categorically sub-competent. One was a girl with red, frizzy hair who cut herself when nobody was looking and the other was a Puerto Rican boy who had shot his brother in the chest while riding his zipbike. Both of them had been experimented with until their brains were Swiss cheese. Neither said much.
After the first day, Corrag stopped going up to the doctors to ask for information and advocate on behalf of herself. Mendez, who believed that this was the type of behavior that marked people for the covert augment program, discouraged her. The less vital signs the better, he said. Mendez had been through the wringer. When Corrag learned his story she was even more terrified than before. He had started out as a teacher in the South Bronx, but he'd run afoul of the system administrators. A lot of his students had needed special services for dioxin poisoning. A substation of electrical transformers was under their building, and the tainted water had bubbled up into the taps in the apartments for years. He described the students. These students, said Mendez, their hands were useless and their eyes were smoking holes of nothingness. But instead of giving up on them, Mendez had wanted to save them from the vocational school, run by a company with ties to the Gheko administration, where they were worked to death manufacturing nanotube chains, which required them to push buttons on the consoles with their foreheads when they heard the piped sound of music that marked the beginning and end of the printer's run.
"This is the true ideology of these people. Money," said Mendez. "We the people is out the window."
"Why are we here?" asked Corrag.
"Because," said Mendez impatiently, as if she were a three year old. "It's a crackdown, Corrag. Whenever things get out of hand on the street, they come down hard on what they perceive as threats. They'll use all sorts of excuses, enviro threats, what have you, but basically they don't want any opposition that stands in the way of the augmented class. Absolute control is what they want and there's lots of stuff that don't wash in t
heir world like independent-minded people like you and me. We are unfit and sub-competent. That's what it is. Unfit and sub-competent. That means people who is just garbage to them. This is where they put the trash, Corrag."
"What can we do?"
"Follow my advice. Get out of here if you can. Don't let the doctors get a holt of you. Play dumb."
"Why are you still here?"
"A -- it's hard out on the street. I get three square a day here. And B -- I'm researching the situation. I'm writing a book."
Corrag took his advice. The testing for several days consisted of standard intelligence measures she was familiar with from schooling in the Democravian system. She was careful to be wrong on at least a quarter of the multiple choice questions, and on the open ended drawings she limited herself to simple stick figure representations of basic human emotions, either fear or hunger or a craving for attention. After the hour or so in the mornings, she would walk back up with the tablet to the desk where the nurse was chatting with one of the ward guards, usually about vacation plans. The rehab center employees received generous vacation packages as part of their employment plans, and they liked to take them in condos in the Mediterranean. Gibraltar and Ibiza were popular destinations Corrag heard mentioned. She stilled her thoughts and handed back the tablet with a blank look, a slightly dazed expression on her face. She was cultivating the persona of that lost girl from Democravia, a victim of circumstances beyond anyone's understanding. She didn't believe in destiny, only in the set of circumstances that had led to this. Poor choices, as Alana used to say, and Ricky would hush her. Democravia was built on the presumption of eliminating the possibility of human error, and here she was, the emissary, imprisoned in the lunatic asylum. Surely there had been a mistake. But Corrag had already learned she was not alone in the night here either.
In the afternoons they let small groups up on the roof to play with a basketball or just stand in the thin December sunlight. The roof space was surrounded by black mesh to prevent people jumping. On the third or fourth day, the city beyond the river was finally calmed, no sound of firefights or explosives. Flocks of wheeling pigeons were in the sky above Brooklyn water tanks, along with plumes of smoke from still burning buildings. Corrag liked to get right up to the wall and look through the mesh into the distance. The Rand Center stood as a reminder of the night she'd been picked up and the last she'd seen of Beithune. She thought hard, listening for a word from him, but she heard nothing. The redheaded girl was in a wheelchair by the wall, staring at the gravel on the ground and the glinting pieces of molybdenum left over from some building project.
The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2) Page 15
