The Big Sheep

by Robert Kroese

“Amnesia or death,” said Allebach without emotion. “Your choice.”

  Keane and I walked to the beds. I glanced at Keane, wondering if he was thinking what I was thinking: Selah could wipe our memories of what had happened and erase all the physical evidence, but we weren’t the only ones who knew about Priya. I could only hope Selah wasn’t as meticulous as she seemed.

  My hopes were dashed a moment later as the door to the room opened. April stumbled in, followed by Roy. Behind them were the other two gunmen.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “April!” I shouted. “Are you okay?” I got up from the bed and made to go to her, but Brian struck me in the temple with the butt of his rifle. I fell to the floor, dazed.

  “Blake!” April cried.

  I rubbed my head and got a grip on the bed. “I’m all right,” I muttered after a moment, glaring at Brian. He smirked at me. I pulled myself to my feet. “Did they hurt you?”

  “No,” April said. “I’m okay.” She appeared harried and tired but uninjured.

  “Sorry, guys,” said Roy. “They came out of nowhere. I didn’t—” His voice faltered as he caught sight of the series of Priyas along the far wall. “What in the hell…?”

  “We had a deal,” I snarled at Selah. “We gave you the sheep, and you let April go!”

  “And then you broke into my top-secret facility,” said Selah. “In any case, you can have her back shortly, once her memories of the past three days have been erased. Dr. Allebach, please conduct the procedure on Mr. Fowler and the lawyer first. I want Mr. Keane to witness the results of his failure.”

  One of the gunmen prodded April toward the beds. As they did, a large robotic arm with four articulated metallic sections slid silently along a rail running the length of the ceiling toward April. I noticed Dr. Allebach was holding a control pad; the arm was responding to the movements of his fingers. As the arm approached, it unfolded, revealing a basketball-sized metal globe at the end of the arm. From the globe, a dozen or so robotic tentacles protruded. The arm paused in front of April, and she screamed as several of the tentacles wrapped themselves around her arms and legs. Her screaming stopped when one of the tentacles coiled around her head, blocking her mouth.

  “No loose ends, huh?” I said. “You’re going to wipe all our memories and pretend like none of this ever happened?”

  “Not exactly,” said Selah. “I’m going to have Dr. Allebach wipe your memories and those of Mr. Keane and your girlfriend. Roy, I’m afraid, is a bit more problematic.”

  “He knows too much,” said Keane. Roy regarded him stoically.

  “His memories go back too far. I fear he began to suspect something months ago. I can’t let him near Priya, but erasing his memories of the past two years will raise too many questions. I’m not going to be able to let Roy leave this facility.”

  “You’re going to kill him, you mean,” I said, eyeing Roy.

  “I’m afraid I have no choice,” replied Selah.

  The robotic arm lifted April and carried her to one of the beds. It gently deposited her onto the bed and then began securing her with nylon restraints. When the tentacle left her mouth, she didn’t scream, but her eyes were fixed on me, pleading with me to do something. Anything.

  I wasn’t really paying attention, though, because I was watching Roy, who was quietly seething with fury. It was one thing for Selah to threaten to kill him; it was quite another for him to be exposed to the horrors of what Selah was doing to his beloved Priya. If Selah expected Roy to just give up, she was mistaken. If he was going to die, he was going to do his damnedest to take Selah with him. The only question was whether he would get the rest of us killed in the process.

  One thing was certain: whatever Roy did, he’d have a better chance of success if the guards’ attention were focused somewhere else for a few seconds. I took a deep breath and made my move.

  “Get your hands off her, you sons of bitches!” I yelled, launching myself toward April. I shoved the technician nearest me—a petite brunette woman—out of the way and landed on the bed on top of April. Throwing my arms around her, I continued my sideways roll. The bed slammed into the gunman who had been guarding April, knocking him down. His rifle flew from his hands, skittering across the floor. April’s right wrist was secured to the bed frame, so the bed capsized as my momentum carried us to the floor. My right elbow struck first, and I felt something crack. April yelped in my ear, and pain shot through my arm.

  “Stay here!” I said to April, gasping, and then scrabbled away from her on the floor. It didn’t occur to me in my pain-addled state that she didn’t have much of a choice. Letting my right arm hang limply at my side, I looked up to see a rifle barrel a foot from my face. Behind it was Brian, looking downright gleeful at the prospect of shooting me in the head. A split second later, though, Brian disappeared from view, swept aside by the crushing bulk of the juggernaut that was Roy. The guard who had been watching Roy lay unconscious against the wall near the door, blood gushing from his nose. With that one down and Roy taking out Brian, that left only the guy I had knocked to the floor.

  Trying to ignore the mind-numbing pain in my arm, I pulled myself to my knees and turned to look for the third man. He was on his knees too, about ten feet away, reaching for the butt of his rifle. I launched myself toward him, wrapping my left arm around his ankles, but there was no way I could hold him with one arm. Fighting against the instincts that were screaming at me to protect my injury, I threw my right arm around his legs as well. The guy kicked back, hitting me square in the crook of my elbow. For a moment all I knew was pain. I blacked out.

  I was only out for maybe a second, but it was long enough: the guy was getting to his feet, the gun barrel aimed at my head. Behind me, I heard someone roar in anger, and I turned to see Roy barreling toward the man, his face red with rage. The man shifted his aim to Roy.

  Ordinarily, this would have been all the opening I needed: I could have tackled the guy while he was distracted and disarmed him. He’d probably have gotten off a few rounds at Roy, but I could have stopped him before he killed anybody else. In my current state, though, I couldn’t even get up off the floor. My limbs felt like rubber, and the pain and dizziness were so bad, it was all I could do not to puke.

  “Roy, no!” I gasped, knowing he was sacrificing himself in vain. But there was no stopping the juggernaut.

  That was what I was thinking, anyway, when the robotic arm shot across its rail and swung down from the ceiling, knocking Roy across the room. The gunman opened fire a split second too late, riddling the opposite wall with bullets. Meanwhile, Roy flew a good twenty feet and landed with a crash against a bank of expensive-looking equipment. He lay, moaning, on the floor.

  Allebach tapped the screen, and the robotic arm retracted into the ceiling. Keane, standing nearby, was watching with interest. He didn’t appear to have moved during the entire fracas. There were times when a phenomenological inquisitor was downright useless.

  “Well,” said Selah. “That certainly was exciting. Now, shall we proceed?”

  I groaned, my arm throbbing. With me and Roy incapacitated, April tethered to the bed, and Keane content to stand in the middle of the room, doing absolutely fucking nothing, we didn’t have much of a chance. The guard who had fired on Roy now had his gun on me again, and the one Roy had tackled was getting to his feet. Roy was a dead man. Keane, April, and I would have our memories wiped. And Selah would get away with everything.

  The brunette technician pulled me to my feet, and I yelped as she put her hand on my smashed elbow.

  “Arm”—I gasped—“broken.”

  The woman nodded and looked to Allebach. There was something familiar about her, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “We can fix that for you,” said Allebach. “You’ll wake up with a fully mended arm and no memory of it ever breaking.” He smiled. “No extra charge.”

  “Fuck you,” I muttered.

  The technician helped me into one of the beds while two others
righted April’s bed and finished securing her. When they were done with her, they secured me as well, leaving my useless right arm free. Brian had gotten to his feet and was eyeing my broken arm as if he were considering giving it a good squeeze.

  But then Allebach tapped a display console, and a machine hummed to life above me. A robotic arm descended toward me, and a sheath opened to reveal a clutch of tentaclelike appendages. The appendages writhed to life, and as the arm extended, their suckerlike ends attached themselves to various points on my skull. I couldn’t turn my head, but to my left I heard what I knew was a similar machine descending toward April.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “It’s almost too bad,” I heard Keane murmur.

  I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but I couldn’t muster the energy. I had nearly been killed, and all he could say was “It’s almost too bad”?

  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one thinking this, because a moment later Selah echoed my thoughts. “Hold on,” she said. “What do you mean, it’s almost too bad? I’m about to foil your chances to solve this case and erase seventy-two hours of your memory, and all you have to say is ‘It’s almost too bad’?”

  I managed to turn my head enough to see Selah and Keane out of the corner of my eye. Next to me stood the technician who had helped me up earlier. I caught a glimpse of her name tag, which read NIKKI. Why did she seem so familiar? Had I met her somewhere before? The pain shooting through my right arm was making it hard to think.

  “I mean, it’s almost too bad I can’t let you go through with this,” said Keane. “It’s amazing technology, and it raises all sorts of interesting epistemic and ethical issues. I’d love to witness it in action. But of course I’d retain no memories of the process, so it’s a bit of a moot point.”

  Selah laughed. “You can’t let me go through with it? How the hell do you think you’re going to stop me?”

  “I’m not,” said Keane. “You’re going to stop on your own.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “One word,” Keane said. “Maelstrom.”

  Selah glared at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Let me refresh your memory, then,” said Keane. “After you were kind enough to demonstrate the Feinberg-Webb test for us the other day, I looked into the company that created the test, Empathix. It seems they started out nearly twenty years ago as a marketing research company, with a focus on quantifying the psychological and sociological factors that went into a successful marketing campaign. Part of this involved identifying the traits of effective spokespersons—charisma, essentially. This work eventually led to the creation of the Feinberg-Webb test, and gave rise to the careers of Priya Mistry and Giles Marbury, aka Mag-Lev. But Empathix’s work went far beyond identifying personality traits. They also developed algorithms for identifying societal ‘tipping points’—for example, when consumers were on the verge of embracing a new product or technology. It was presumably Empathix’s research that caused you to cancel lighthearted comedies like Room for One More and bet heavily on gritty urban-based shows set in the DZ: Empathix warned you about a shift in consumer taste. Of course, it’s impossible to say for sure, because fourteen years ago, you bought a controlling interest in Empathix, and they’ve been rather secretive about their work ever since.”

  “Forgive me, Mr. Keane,” said Selah, “but I’m still not seeing how any of this speculation is going to make me not want to erase your memory.”

  Keane continued, “The other clue came when I realized the truth about Mag-Lev—that he was just an actor you had plucked out of obscurity to play a part. Clearly, you have the means to pull off an extremely effective psyops campaign, but I had a hard time seeing how you would gather the intelligence necessary to install a warlord in the DZ. That would take more than a generalized psyops campaign; it would require an intimate knowledge of the internal politics of the DZ. There are only a handful of people with that sort of knowledge, and none of them are likely to run in the same circles as a Hollywood media tycoon. That leaves only people who were involved in a certain top-secret project to control the aftermath of a cataclysmic breakdown of the federal government.”

  “Maelstrom,” I said, realizing what Keane was getting at. Selah bit her lip.

  “As I’m sure you’re aware, during my previous career I was intimately involved in Maelstrom. We designed the DZ down to the smallest detail,” said Keane. “We knew exactly when the breakdown was going to happen, and how it was going to play out. We knew who the key players were going to be in the drama of the Collapse in Los Angeles before they even knew themselves. But there were two things I never figured out. The first was where the forecasting data came from. The predictive model was near perfect, but I could never determine who had devised it. The second was who was paying for the program. The money came from a nonprofit organization called the Los Angeles Future Foundation. LAFF didn’t divulge its donors. I spent no small amount of time trying to dig up something on them, but came up empty. The funny thing is, once I thought to look for a connection between Flagship Media and LAFF, it was relatively easy to connect the dots. Easy for me, anyway. I have an eye for patterns. Oh, and a contact in the banking industry.”

  It was hard to focus through the pain in my arm, but the gist of what Keane was saying gradually penetrated. “You’re saying Empathix saw the Collapse coming,” I murmured. “And Selah used that information to set up LAFF to reshape Los Angeles.”

  Keane nodded. “It’s no accident that Selah’s net worth skyrocketed shortly after the Collapse, when other billionaires were losing their shirts. She reduced her investment in anything denominated in dollars and put her money in hard assets that could weather a currency crisis. She lost just enough money to cover her tracks, but by the end of the Collapse, she was up nearly a hundred billion dollars. And that’s just on paper. What the financial records don’t show is that, thanks to the restructuring of Los Angeles, Selah is now uniquely positioned to control the future of the entertainment industry. Her programs set in the DZ are just one small part of it. Selah holds enough interests in media properties in this town that virtually nothing happens without her say-so. And since journalism is essentially a vestigial organ in the entertainment industry these days, it means she also controls the news. Combine that with her ownership of Empathix, and you’ve got a near-perfect system for manipulating public opinion. The only reason Selah Fiore isn’t universally recognized as the most powerful person on the planet is because that’s exactly how she wants it.”

  “Well done, Mr. Keane,” said Selah. “I assume your plan is to release this information in an attempt to sully my reputation, and maybe subject me to a tedious SEC investigation. Pardon me if I’m not exactly quaking with fear.”

  Keane smiled. “That’s because you assume you can control the story. No doubt you’ve got a contingency plan in place for the eventuality that this information becomes public. But there’s a problem with predictive models like the ones Empathix uses, and overreliance on such models can create blind spots in your planning.”

  “Do enlighten me, Mr. Keane,” said Selah. She was trying to fake boredom, but she wasn’t the actress she once was.

  “Individual action,” said Keane. “Generally, the consequences of any individual’s actions are insignificant, and can be accounted for in the model. But there are situations in which an individual is uniquely situated to disrupt the system in ways the model can’t predict. For example, if I don’t leave this building with that sheep, two things are going to happen. First, Jason Banerjee is going to release a secret dossier that details the Maelstrom program. His intention is to ruin me, but I’ve arranged to have the financial records linking Flagship to LAFF sent to him. So he’ll get to ruin me and smear you at the same time. Second, Mag-Lev is going to launch an all-out war against you. You might be able to weather a federal investigation or a turf war with Mag-Lev, but not both at the same time. One way or another, you’re finished.”


  Selah took this all in, regarding Keane coldly. “Congratulations, Mr. Keane,” she said at last. “You do have a talent for manipulation. It would seem that the only rational option for me at this point is to let you go.”

  “Indeed,” said Keane.

  “Sadly,” she said, “you’ve made a miscalculation of your own.”

  “Really,” said Keane flatly. “And what might that be?”

  Selah smiled. “I’m not a rational person.”

  Keane raised an eyebrow at her. “Don’t be absurd. You didn’t get where you are today by being irrational.”

  “You conflate strategy and motivations, Mr. Keane. My strategies are rational. My motivations are not. ‘The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.’”

  “Nietzsche,” said Keane, shaking his head. I sympathized. It was never a good thing when a bad guy started quoting Nietzsche. “You’re seriously going to go through with this just to spite me?”

  “Certainly not,” said Selah. “Not everything is about you, Mr. Keane. Maybe I will lose this fight eventually, but not because I rolled over when the great Erasmus Keane told me it was my only option. I control my own destiny.”

  Keane cocked his head at this remark, as if realizing something he’d missed. “Yes,” he murmured. “I suppose we all do.” He glanced at Dr. Allebach, who frowned at him. Keane then turned to look at me. No, not at me. At the lab technician standing next to the bed. The one I thought looked familiar.

  “Fascinating,” said Keane.

  Selah sighed irritably. “You’ve made your play, Mr. Keane,” said Selah. “It didn’t work. Try to accept your fate with some dignity.”

  “It’s not my fate that’s in question,” said Keane, “It’s yours. I’m afraid you’ve been outsmarted, Selah.”

  “You expect me to believe you have another card up your sleeve, Mr. Keane? Please. This sort of stalling is beneath you.”

  “Oh, you haven’t been outsmarted by me,” said Keane. “That honor goes to Bryn Jhaveri.”