In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  Maybe not.

  The cell was fantastically spare, empty as my soul. I fantasized that the wall opposite my bunk was a screen, that I could be hacking right now, opening the cell-door. I fantasized about my workbench and the projects there—the old cans I was turning into a ghetto surround-sound rig, the aerial photography kite-cam I was building, my homebrew laptop.

  I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go home and have my friends and my school and my parents and my life back. I wanted to be able to go where I wanted to go, not be stuck pacing and pacing and pacing.

  They took my passwords for my USB keys next. Those held some interesting messages I’d downloaded from one online discussion group or another, some chat transcripts, things where people had helped me out with some of the knowledge I needed to do the things I did. There was nothing on there you couldn’t find with Google, of course, but I didn’t think that would count in my favor.

  I got exercise again that afternoon, and this time there were others in the yard when I got there, four other guys and two women, of all ages and racial backgrounds. I guess lots of people were doing things to earn their “privileges.”

  They gave me half an hour, and I tried to make conversation with the most normal-seeming of the other prisoners, a black guy about my age with a short afro. But when I introduced myself and stuck my hand out, he cut his eyes toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners of the yard and kept walking without ever changing his facial expression.

  But then, just before they called my name and brought me back into the building, the door opened and out came—Vanessa! I’d never been more glad to see a friendly face. She looked tired and grumpy, but not hurt, and when she saw me, she shouted my name and ran to me. We hugged each other hard and I realized I was shaking. Then I realized she was shaking, too.

  “Are you OK?” she said, holding me at arms’ length.

  “I’m OK,” I said. “They told me they’d let me go if I gave them my passwords.”

  “They keep asking me questions about you and Darryl.”

  There was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stop talking, to walk, but we ignored it.

  “Answer them,” I said, instantly. “Anything they ask, answer them. If it’ll get you out.”

  “How are Darryl and Jolu?”

  “I haven’t seen them.”

  The door banged open and four big guards boiled out. Two took me and two took Vanessa. They forced me to the ground and turned my head away from Vanessa, though I heard her getting the same treatment. Plastic cuffs went around my wrists and then I was yanked to my feet and brought back to my cell.

  No dinner came that night. No breakfast came the next morning. No one came and brought me to the interrogation room to extract more of my secrets. The plastic cuffs didn’t come off, and my shoulders burned, then ached, then went numb, then burned again. I lost all feeling in my hands.

  I had to pee. I couldn’t undo my pants. I really, really had to pee.

  I pissed myself.

  They came for me after that, once the hot piss had cooled and gone clammy, making my already filthy jeans stick to my legs. They came for me and walked me down the long hall lined with doors, each door with its own bar code, each bar code a prisoner like me. They walked me down the corridor and brought me to the interrogation room and it was like a different planet when I entered there, a world where things were normal, where everything didn’t reek of urine. I felt so dirty and ashamed, and all those feelings of deserving what I got came back to me.

  Severe Haircut lady was already sitting. She was perfect: coiffed and with just a little makeup. I smelled her hair stuff. She wrinkled her nose at me. I felt the shame rise in me.

  “Well, you’ve been a very naughty boy, haven’t you? Aren’t you a filthy thing?”

  Shame. I looked down at the table. I couldn’t bear to look up. I wanted to tell her my email password and get gone.

  “What did you and your friend talk about in the yard?”

  I barked a laugh at the table. “I told her to answer your questions. I told her to cooperate.”

  “So do you give the orders?”

  I felt the blood sing in my ears. “Oh come on,” I said. “We play a game together, it’s called Harajuku Fun Madness. I’m the team captain. We’re not terrorists, we’re high school students. I don’t give her orders. I told her that we needed to be honest with you so that we could clear up any suspicion and get out of here.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “How is Darryl?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Darryl. You picked us up together. My friend. Someone had stabbed him in the Powell Street BART. That’s why we were up on the surface. To get him help.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine, then,” she said.

  My stomach knotted and I almost threw up. “You don’t know? You haven’t got him here?”

  “Who we have here and who we don’t have here is not something we’re going to discuss with you, ever. That’s not something you’re going to know. Marcus, you’ve seen what happens when you don’t cooperate with us. You’ve seen what happens when you disobey our orders. You’ve been a little cooperative, and it’s gotten you almost to the point where you might go free again. If you want to make that possibility into a reality, you’ll stick to answering my questions.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re learning, that’s good. Now, your email passwords, please.”

  I was ready for this. I gave them everything: server address, login, password. This didn’t matter. I didn’t keep any email on my server. I downloaded it all and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloaded and deleted my mail from the server every sixty seconds. They wouldn’t get anything out of my mail—it got cleared off the server and stored on my laptop at home.

  Back to the cell, but they cut loose my hands and they gave me a shower and a pair of orange prison pants to wear. They were too big for me and hung down low on my hips, like a Mexican gang-kid in the Mission. That’s where the baggy-pants-down-your-ass look comes from, you know that? From prison. I tell you what, it’s less fun when it’s not a fashion statement.

  They took away my jeans, and I spent another day in the cell. The walls were scratched cement over a steel grid. You could tell, because the steel was rusting in the salt air, and the grid shone through the green paint in red-orange. My parents were out that window, somewhere.

  They came for me again the next day.

  “We’ve been reading your mail for a day now. We changed the password so that your home computer couldn’t fetch it.”

  Well, of course they had. I would have done the same, now that I thought of it.

  “We have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time, Marcus. Your possession of these articles—” she gestured at all my little gizmos—“and the data we recovered from your phone and memory sticks, as well as the subversive material we’d no doubt find if we raided your house and took your computer. It’s enough to put you away until you’re an old man. Do you understand that?”

  I didn’t believe it for a second. There’s no way a judge would say that all this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. It was free speech, it was technological tinkering. It wasn’t a crime.

  But who said that these people would ever put me in front of a judge.

  “We know where you live, we know who your friends are. We know how you operate and how you think.”

  It dawned on me then. They were about to let me go. The room seemed to brighten. I heard myself breathing, short little breaths.

  “We just want to know one thing: what was the delivery mechanism for the bombs on the bridge?”

  I stopped breathing. The room darkened again.

  “What?”

  “There were ten charges on the bridge, all along its length. They weren’t in car-trunks. They’d been placed there. Who placed them there, and how did they get there?”

  “What?”
I said it again.

  “This is your last chance, Marcus,” she said. She looked sad. “You were doing so well until now. Tell us this and you can go home. You can get a lawyer and defend yourself in a court of law. There are doubtless extenuating circumstances that you can use to explain your actions. Just tell us this thing, and you’re gone.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I was crying and I didn’t even care. Sobbing, blubbering. “I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

  She shook her head. “Marcus, please. Let us help you. By now you know that we always get what we’re after.”

  There was a gibbering sound in the back of my mind. They were insane. I pulled myself together, working hard to stop the tears. “Listen, lady, this is nuts. You’ve been into my stuff, you’ve seen it all. I’m a seventeen-year-old high school student, not a terrorist! You can’t seriously think—”

  “Marcus, haven’t you figured out that we’re serious yet?” She shook her head. “You get pretty good grades. I thought you’d be smarter than that.” She made a flicking gesture and the guards picked me up by the armpits.

  Back in my cell, a hundred little speeches occurred to me. The French call this “esprit d’escalier”—the spirit of the staircase, the snappy rebuttals that come to you after you leave the room and slink down the stairs. In my mind, I stood and delivered, telling her that I was a citizen who loved my freedom, which made me the patriot and made her the traitor. In my mind, I shamed her for turning my country into an armed camp. In my mind, I was eloquent and brilliant and reduced her to tears.

  But you know what? None of those fine words came back to me when they pulled me out the next day. All I could think of was freedom. My parents.

  “Hello, Marcus,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

  I looked down at the table. She had a neat pile of documents in front of her, and her ubiquitous go-cup of Starbucks beside her. I found it comforting somehow, a reminder that there was a real world out there somewhere, beyond the walls.

  “We’re through investigating you, for now.” She let that hang there. Maybe it meant that she was letting me go. Maybe it meant that she was going to throw me in a pit and forget that I existed.

  “And?” I said finally.

  “And I want you to impress on you again that we are very serious about this. Our country has experienced the worst attack ever committed on its soil. How many 9/11s do you want us to suffer before you’re willing to cooperate? The details of our investigation are secret. We won’t stop at anything in our efforts to bring the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to justice. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “We are going to send you home today, but you are a marked man. You have not been found to be above suspicion—we’re only releasing you because we’re done questioning you for now. But from now on, you belong to us. We will be watching you. We’ll be waiting for you to make a misstep. Do you understand that we can watch you closely, all the time?”

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “Good. You will never speak of what happened here to anyone, ever. This is a matter of national security. Do you know that the death penalty still holds for treason in time of war?”

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “Good boy,” she purred. “We have some papers here for you to sign.” She pushed the stack of papers across the table to me. Little post-its with SIGN HERE printed on them had been stuck throughout them. A guard undid my cuffs.

  I paged through the papers and my eyes watered and my head swam. I couldn’t make sense of them. I tried to decipher the legalese. It seemed that I was signing a declaration that I had been voluntarily held and submitted to voluntary questioning, of my own free will.

  “What happens if I don’t sign this?” I said.

  She snatched the papers back and made that flicking gesture again. The guards jerked me to my feet.

  “Wait!” I cried. “Please! I’ll sign them!” They dragged me to the door. All I could see was that door, all I could think of was it closing behind me.

  I lost it. I wept. I begged to be allowed to sign the papers. To be so close to freedom and have it snatched away, it made me ready to do anything. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone say, “Oh, I’d rather die than do something-or-other”—I’ve said it myself now and again. But that was the first time I understood what it really meant. I would have rather died than go back to my cell.

  I begged as they took me out into the corridor. I told them I’d sign anything.

  She called out to the guards and they stopped. They brought me back. They sat me down. One of them put the pen in my hand.

  Of course, I signed, and signed and signed.

  My jeans and t-shirt were back in my cell, laundered and folded. They smelled of detergent. I put them on and washed my face and sat on my cot and stared at the wall. They’d taken everything from me. First my privacy, then my dignity. I’d been ready to sign anything. I would have signed a confession that said I’d assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

  I tried to cry, but it was like my eyes were dry, out of tears.

  They got me again. A guard approached me with a hood, like the hood I’d been put in when they picked us up, whenever that was, days ago, weeks ago.

  The hood went over my head and cinched tight at my neck. I was in total darkness and the air was stifling and stale. I was raised to my feet and walked down corridors, up stairs, on gravel. Up a gangplank. On a ship’s steel deck. My hands were chained behind me, to a railing. I knelt on the deck and listened to the thrum of the diesel engines.

  The ship moved. A hint of salt air made its way into the hood. It was drizzling and my clothes were heavy with water. I was outside, even if my head was in a bag. I was outside, in the world, moments from my freedom.

  They came for me and led me off the boat and over uneven ground. Up three metal stairs. My wrists were unshackled. My hood was removed.

  I was back in the truck. Severe Haircut woman was there, at the little desk she’d sat at before. She had a ziploc bag with her, and inside it were my phone and other little devices, my wallet and the change from my pockets. She handed them to me wordlessly.

  I filled my pockets. It felt so weird to have everything back in its familiar place, to be wearing my familiar clothes. Outside the truck’s back door, I heard the familiar sounds of my familiar city.

  A guard passed me my backpack. The woman extended her hand to me. I just looked at it. She put it down and gave me a wry smile. Then she mimed zipping up her lips and pointed to me, and opened the door.

  It was daylight outside, gray and drizzling. I was looking down an alley toward cars and trucks and bikes zipping down the road. I stood transfixed on the truck’s top step, staring at freedom.

  My knees shook. I knew now that they were playing with me again. In a moment, the guards would grab me and drag me back inside, the bag would go over my head again, and I would be back on the boat and sent off to the prison again, to the endless, unanswerable questions. I barely held myself back from stuffing my fist in my mouth.

  Then I forced myself to go down one stair. Another stair. The last stair. My sneakers crunched down on the crap on the alley’s floor, broken glass, a needle, gravel. I took a step. Another. I reached the mouth of the alley and stepped onto the sidewalk.

  No one grabbed me.

  I was free.

  Then strong arms threw themselves around me. I nearly cried.

  Tim Pratt is a Nebula Award-nominated short story writer and novelist whose work has appeared in a number of Year’s Best collections and whose story “Impossible Dreams” won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 2006. His Marla Mason series follows the adventures of an over confident “ass-kicking sorcerer” as she battles with monsters, magical daggers, and sex parties.

  In “Unexpected Outcomes,” Pratt uses the trope of virtual reality and/or the “brain in a vat” thought experiment to explore the impact of the events of 9/11.<
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  UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES

  Tim Pratt

  I was lying in bed with my girlfriend Heather that Tuesday morning in September when the phone rang, early. We didn’t jump to answer it—that’s what machines are for—and after a couple of rings and the beep we heard our friend Sherman, sounding excited, say, “Guys, you should turn on your TV.”

  We didn’t get up right away. It was early, only about 6 a.m. in California, and though the phone had awakened us, we sprawled languidly entangled for a while. “Hey,” she said. “He didn’t say what channel. What could have happened, that it would be on every channel?”

  I thought about it for a minute. “Aliens,” I said. I was seven-eighths joking, but I was always a science fiction fan—yeah, that’s a laugh now, isn’t it?—and I kind of half hoped maybe I was right. Aliens. “We come in peace,” I said.

  She sighed. “I wish. It’s probably an assassination.”

  “Probably.” Nearly a year after the election, we were still pissed about Gore losing the presidency he’d rightfully won, about the Supreme Court deciding they knew better than the people. Maybe somebody even more pissed off than us had decided to do something about Bush Jr., but really, Cheney in charge would have been even worse.

  We finally got up, and went into the living room in our robes, and turned on the TV . . . and saw what all the rest of you in the television-owning world saw.

  I know it’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason: 9/11 changed everything.

  The talking heads on screen were pretty much yelling, but we didn’t listen, just stared at the impossible image on the screen. A jetliner—a Boeing 767-223ER, we learned later—hanging perfectly still in the air, so close to the side of one of the World Trade Center towers that someone could have leaned out the window of an office and laid her hand on the jet’s nose (if the windows up that high opened, anyway). The plane was suspended impossibly in the sky, like a special effect in a movie about a kid with a magical wristwatch that stops time. But even though the first thought everyone had on seeing the plane was “This is like something out of a movie,” it wasn’t a movie.