"It was beautiful."
"Sometimes we forget why we do this, so it is important to remind ourselves."
Rebecca felt like she should know what the woman was talking about, but it was like being told an inside joke and then being asked to comment on it. She just didn't know what was going on.
"I'm sorry," she said, "Your performance was beautiful, but I still don't understand."
The woman stared at Rebecca for a long moment, then nodded. "Of course. Our movement became popular after you were imprisoned." She shook her head. "Sometimes we get so involved in ritual that we forget that there are still a few who haven't heard of us."
Rebecca felt the need to take control. She was tired of being at the beck and call of everyone else. Most of it was because she didn't understand this new world in which she found herself. She stood, her movement causing several shouts from the CONEXs. She ignored them and helped Maria to her feet. "Let's walk," she said. And she began to circle the space where she'd just been sitting. The need to change the dynamics was an imperative. They needed to be equals for understanding to grow. She heard grumbling from several of the council members, but ignored them. She passed Andy and appreciated his grin of support. "You mentioned the Mark of Miriam. Is this from the Bible?" She dredged her memory. "Was she the Prophetess who made fun of Moses?"
"Yes, that was her. Do you also remember what happened to her?"
Rebecca polled her memory once more. The amount of Biblical knowledge it held could be compared to the weight of fairies on the head of a pin. The only reason she'd known about Miriam was because of the Charlton Heston movie where he'd played Moses—one of her grandmother's favorites. Not that she was religious; she just loved the spectacle of epic movies, and, well, Charlton Heston too. Olive Deering had played the part of Miriam, Moses's sister, her Lana Turner looks turning against her as she became the sniping woman who was punished for her insolence. Rebecca tried to remember. How was she punished?
"Something that God did." For the life of her, she couldn't remember.
Seeming to change the subject, Maria said, "They tell me that all of your organs have been levied."
Rebecca nodded. "I'm evidently quite a find for the organ vendors."
"How do you feel about this?"
"Like I've been violated. Like my body doesn't belong to me."
"Yes. This is the case." Maria stopped and looked into Rebecca's eyes. "Do you know that not a single one of us has an organ levied?"
"How can that be?" Rebecca looked around in astonishment. "Is it because you're in hiding?"
"No. The government knows where we are. They approve of it. For them this is the perfect place to keep us out of the way. They help us from time to time. No, it's not because we're in hiding."
"Then why?"
"What you can't remember, Rebecca, is that the Lord struck Miriam with leprosy for arguing with Moses. The Mark of Miriam is leprosy. We all wear the mark."
"All of you?"
"Yes."
"Even the children?"
"Especially the children."
"But why them?"
"The organ vendors, as you call them, don't care about age. The only thing they care about is quality. Mycobacterium leprae, or Hansen's Disease, is a horror that no one wants. After all, who'd want the heart of a leper?"
"But it's curable!"
Maria shook her head. "Not curable, but treatable with a multi-drug therapy. Like me, I don't show any of the outward signs. The children don't either. We don't allow them the choice until they reach the age of maturity."
Rebecca looked at the council members and the people who'd been watching the pair walk in a circle. Understanding filled her as she realized the true purpose of the fabrics in which they were swathed. With reverence, "Some of them choose not to have the therapy, don't they?"
"Yes. That is their way. They protest the organ levy through the willful destruction of their bodies."
"My god." Rebecca's hand went to her mouth. "So all the people..."
All the Day Eaters; what they'd done to themselves made all of her own adolescent attempts to change the world so sophomoric they were beyond laughable. From the comfort of a bedroom, she'd chaos-hacked her way across international boundaries, frying, manipulating and reallocating information from the world's most secure servers. She'd been serious in her unquenchable desire for a change. She'd been serious about her remonstration against all she deemed wrong and unjust. But would she willingly have brought ruination upon her body? She remembered the image of a man with no fingers, no nose, no ears and slices of meat missing from his face from an old National Geographic magazine.
She stared into Maria's eyes, searching for...what? What made a woman like Maria do this? What made the idea of becoming a leper so inviting? Rebecca remembered her response to an earlier question. When asked how she'd felt when she'd learned her organs were levied she'd said violated and that her body wasn't her own. One thing that should be sacrosanct is a person's body, and as the ultimate rape, the government had decided that they could take what they needed, when they needed it, and sell it to the highest bidder.
And there it was, deep in the other woman's eyes. Peace. The Day Eaters had found peace with their decision. They no longer lived in fear of being harvested. They could live, grow old, and die without any dread of doctors, D-pens or the Global Allocation System.
"You're not afraid, are you?" Rebecca asked.
"Not at all."
Nice. Oh that she could feel so brave. "Thank you for sharing this with me."
But the woman grabbed her arm and wouldn't let go. "We didn't do this just because we thought you should know. There's much more than that." She glanced at Andy. "You haven't told her, have you?"
"The time wasn't right."
"You should have told her! Now she had no context. Does she even know about Velvet Dogma?"
Rebecca looked back and forth between the two of them. "Tell me what? Andy, do you know this woman? Did you know about the Day Eaters?"
He held up his hands. "Now isn't the place, Rebecca."
"What?"
"I said now isn't the—"
Rebecca's glare stopped him in midsentence. She turned to Maria. "Can you please take me out of here? Do you have someplace I can clean up?"
Chapter 13
Maria lived in a stack of CONEXs nearest the Tsunami Wall. Cold poured from the great concrete wall, but within the steel of the CONEXs the temperature was much worse, as if each one was a box within which nothing occurred but the refinement of the cold into absolute frigidity. To combat this, stones were heated in large fires, then transferred to cloth-swaddled baskets to warm the interiors just enough to counteract the effects of the cold. Rebecca found that she liked to press her hands against the stones after they'd been in with her awhile, reveling in the comfort of heat rising through her hands, up her arms and into her chest.
She was in the third of five stacked CONEXs. The back wall held a bed, the left wall held a wardrobe and the wall in front of her held what she'd been told was a rarity in the underground city: an old-fashioned vanity.
Rebecca had cleaned herself before she'd entered, almost bathing in the bowl of warm water they'd provided, soaping away the dirt away that had accumulated during her escape into the alley and trek through the underground tunnels. Maria had taken her clothes to the wash and provided Rebecca with lengths of gaudily colored and patterned fabric with little to no instruction about how to wear them.
Looking in the mirror, Rebecca couldn't help feeling like a gypsy. She wore yellows and blues, with a hint of red, which she thought complimented her blue eyes and blonde hair. She'd figured out how to wrap her head so that only her eyes were uncovered, but preferred her head unfettered. She applied some of Maria's make-up. It'd been so long since she'd been able to sit like this. She applied too much rouge and had to wipe it away. When she was done, she sat back and appraised herself. To her surprise she didn't look entirely bad. She'd applied the ko
hl like Maria, the result making her eyes seem larger. She dabbed at the corners and smoothed an edge before she was satisfied. Once done, she liked the whole ensemble.
"Rebecca?" Andy stood poised on the ladder outside her CONEX. "Can I talk to you?"
"I'm not ready to talk about it yet," she said.
"I'd rather not wait."
"I'm really not ready to talk about it, Andy. I need some more time." The only thing worse than having to talk about something she didn't want to talk about, was being forced to talk about it. If Andy knew what was good for him, if he had any sense at all, he'd shimmy down the ladder and high-tail it to the other side of the city.
He seemed about to leave, then changed his mind. He stepped off the ladder and into her CONEX. His mass immediately shrunk the ten-by-ten foot square room to the point where she couldn't ignore the fact that he was there. Even when she didn't look at him, she could feel him.
"Maybe if I explain," he began, his hands shoved in his back pockets.
She didn't let him continue. She'd been holding things inside, prepared to deal with them, but wanting to relax a bit more first. He clearly didn't want her to relax, so he would get what he deserved.
"No. You better let me explain, Andy. You really made me angry, angrier than I'd been in twenty years."
He opened his mouth to say something, but she stood, pointed at her chest and began to rant. "I am not some school girl to be coddled. I don't know who you thought you were dealing with, but I am a grown woman, my own person and perfectly capable of making informed decisions. But to make informed decisions, I need to be informed. If you keep information from me, then informed I am not." Every time she said you she pointed at him, every time she said I, she thumped herself in the chest.
"I am so damned angry with you right now. Just because you have a few extra ounces between your legs doesn't mean that you can order me around and make decisions about what I can know and not know."
"But things were happening," he finally managed to say. "Things were dangerous."
"So what! If there's danger, inform me. Give me the specifics. Don't let me walk into something that I'm not prepared to handle."
"You handled the D-pens pretty well."
"What, we're depending on luck now? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to depend on preparation? You knew everything we'd encounter in there, but didn't give me any warning."
"You're being unreasonable."
Words she hated beyond measure. "That's your opinion. Right now, I don't like your opinion. This is the bottom line. If you don't begin respecting me, then I might as well walk up to the first policeman I see, stick out my hand and say Hello. My name is Rebecca Mines. I think if you'll check you'll see that I'm wanted by God, the police and the boy scouts. I'm sure I'd make his day."
"But I do respect you."
She shook her head. "Maybe in word, but not in deed."
"But I—"
"If you respected me, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Respect means that you let me make my own decisions about myself. Jesus, but you are the same as the Global Allocation System."
His jaw dropped. "What? How can you say that?"
"You decide what I should do with my body. How about if I decide? Huh? How about if you let me decide whether I want to live or die."
He shook his head. She'd passed him and shifted into fifth gear, leaving him somewhere back where he was trying to defend his actions.
"You don't seem to understand what I'm saying about respect," she continued. "Try this. If I decide to walk into the street and get hit by a car, then I expect you to let me do it. Who are you to stop me? Who are you to pretend to know what's best for me? Maybe I have a plan. Maybe I know the driver and am absolutely certain he'll miss me. To not allow me to do what I want to is to disrespect me. I am an adult. I am my own person. Respect that."
His face scrunched into a look of disbelief. "But you might get hurt! You might die!"
"Then let me," she said simply.
"But what if I want you around?"
She'd found a calmness within her. She'd done her shouting. Now he needed to understand. "That's a nice sentiment, Andy, but it's a selfish one."
"Selfish?" He spread is arms to show his incredulity. "How can caring for you be selfish?"
"What if I decide to become be a Day Eater? It's my choice."
Andy shook his head. "To be a Day Eater isn't why I brought you here. I brought you here to save you."
"And I've discovered a people who are more deserving of respect than any I know. For this I thank you."
He stared at her. "Do you really want to be a Day Eater?"
She shook her head and sat back down. "No. But thanks for asking. That is the kind of respect I was looking for."
He opened his mouth a few times, but nothing came out. Finally, he managed an apology. "Damn, Bec. I've screwed this all up. David and I had plans to tell you about all of this, but when he died, the plans got scrambled."
"What's Velvet Dogma?"
Andy sighed. He let his arms fall to his sides as he stepped over to the bed and sat down. "Velvet Dogma is the reason for everything, Bec. It's why I'm here. It's why you're here." He added, "And it's why you're so pissed at me."
"So what is it? It seems like everyone knows about it. Panchet knew. The gravBoarders knew. Maria knew, which means that the Day Eaters also know, or at least their council does."
"Velvet Dogma is you," he told her. "Or rather the program you created back before you went to prison. Do you remember Becka-309?"
She hadn't thought about the specifics of that program in ages. Even the name showed its history. She hadn't been called Becka since college. But she did remember. Becka-309 was the reason she'd been arrested. She'd been a leader of the chaos hacker phenomenon. Utilizing Bit-Torrent technologies, she'd been able to create a set of programs that could attack a server from multiple locations, remove minute pieces of inconsequential information and place them in open servers throughout the world available to be repieced together by anyone with Bit-torrent shareware. When the United States government discovered that their defense contractors' servers were indefensible to this new form of attack, they tracked her down, arrested her, and threw her in prison under the Patriot Act. Her one big try at protest and it had failed miserably, which was one reason the Day Eaters impressed her so.
"Yeah. I remember."
"Then you also remember that they couldn't find the program."
"Yeah. But they didn't need it. They were still able to convict and sentence me without the actual program. They had a smoking gun from my ISP trail, but no actual bullets. So much for habeas corpus."
"But the program continued working anyway."
"It should have." She shrugged. "I'd programmed it to be self replicating and self-sustaining. Bit-Torrent technology helped me immensely, but that's probably an obsolete technology by now."
"Not at all. PODs work on Bit Torrent. Almost everything does. It's more convenient to have information stored in small amounts in many places, than all of it in one place. Do you remember how the Internet used to lag?"
"Oh do I. That damned hourglass would spin and spin and spin, I'd swear I could feel my hair turning gray."
"No lag now. Bit Torrent solved that." He paused. "But back to Becka-309. It took a few years, but David found it."
"He did not."
"He did. You would have been so proud of him. He'd become quite the programmer. He didn't have your flair, but he was the most tenacious man I'd ever known."
"He really found it?"
"Oh did he. And when he found it, he discovered that all the time he'd been looking for it, the program had been in continuous operation."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that Becka-309 did as you told it. The damn thing went out, gathered secrets, and is just waiting to be recalled." He looked her in the eye. "All it needs is for you to tell us the retrieval protocol and we can save the world." He moved towards her and go
t down on one knee. He put his hands on her thighs. "Do you remember why you launched the program in the first place?"
"I wanted the world to have the secrets laid bare. I wanted the people to know what their governments were doing."
"Do you still want to do that?"
"Can we?"
"Sure we can. You won't believe what we've done."
Chapter 14
Rebecca stood on the roof of Maria's CONEX stack staring across the city of Day Eaters. With no sun or moon and only the tsunami wall as her horizon, she couldn't tell what time of day it was. The city was lit in the same subdued glow created by interior lights and bonfires that she'd first seen upon entering. No weather. No sunrise or sunset. Yet through the cycle of life, she knew it was night.
She'd left Andy in bed as she slipped away in search of fresh air and a place to think. As she'd climbed, she'd seen Maria asleep in the fourth CONEX of the stack. The fifth stack was used as a library. Although it was inviting to peruse actual paper books, Rebecca felt the need to look inward, and for that she needed to be alone.
So here she stood, looking out upon the City of the Day Eaters, and she was pleased.
Her thighs still buzzed from their passions. Her mind was spinning with Velvet Dogma. Was it just hours ago that she'd been in fear for her life, afraid that behind every street corner, every curious smile, every closed door were the assassins who'd tried to get her once, and who had probably killed her brother? And now, in this city of lepers she had found peace.
Andy. She didn't know how it had happened. One moment he was explaining to her Velvet Dogma, and the next she was pushing him down, kissing him along his strong jaw, nuzzling the hollow beneath his ear and tasting his sweat. He tried to push her away at first, but she'd leapt atop him, holding him down with both her hands. She felt powerful, stronger than she'd ever felt before. Was it Becka-309? Velvet Dogma? Or a pure unadulterated lust that had gone untapped for nearly twenty years? She didn't care. Within seconds much of the fabric that had been wound around her body had fluttered to the floor. She'd felt her body flush. Her skin tightened around her nipples in anticipation of Andy's hands. When they'd touched her, it was like an electric shock. She'd ripped his shirt in her haste to remove it. Beneath his shirt his chest was not the sallow chest of a computer geek, but well-muscled like an athlete's. She'd lost herself for long moments, her hands following the hot contours over and over.
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