Liquid Crystal Nightingale
Page 4
“New technologies—as they surpass the advances of the past—create new roles for people.”
When they can’t answer a question they fall back on their pitch. She had been hearing and reading it for days.
“Specious bullshit!” she yelled, shocking everyone in the hall, but mostly herself. Out of the corner of her eye the flapping red robe of a Spinel was making its way towards her, along the centre aisle between the rows of seats.
The speakers raised their hands, and the collective gesture said to the Spinel, let this one speak. Pleo saw the guard stop halfway up the aisle, poised for further action.
“Care to elaborate?” asked the taller instructor, a man with a pinched face and shorn head. He pointed at her. “You’re Pleo Tanza, yes?”
“Correct.”
“Idilman Tanza’s daughter? Is that your sister, Cerussa?”
“Right.”
“We hope your father’s recovery is going well?”
Pleo ignored the question. “All we’ve seen so far are vague promises and technical details which only masquerade as benefits.”
“That suggestion offends us and insults our intelligence,” the tall instructor said all too readily. “Don’t take what we’ve presented to all of you out of proportion—”
“Proportion to what, exactly?” Pleo shot back. “To your fucked-up ideas of proportion?”
“And what alternatives do you propose? For all of you? None of you are in any sort of position to object or bargain,” he said and shook his head, as if Pleo embodied all sorts of stupid in questioning him.
The audience was watching her for signs: incredulity, disbelief or outrage. She gave them none, and took her time in sitting down as if she had just asked the most important question.
“Why be afraid of change?” the other visiting functionary asked. “When the discomfort—we won’t guarantee the process is completely pain free—will be temporary.” She waved at the ceiling. “Lights down and screen up, please.”
The internal schematics of the implants appeared onscreen, line by line and grid by grid as though traced out by a meticulous invisible hand. When completed, they were gradually laid over anatomical diagrams of the human hand and eye. One by one, labels appeared at their corresponding parts: metacarpal scaffolding; distal, radial, and proximal phalange sheaths, digital flexor tendons...
Groundbreaking implants indeed, she thought, and at what cost? Too tired to argue back, Pleo stared at the screen and sided with the Polyteknical speakers and CIM for a moment. Why be afraid, indeed? she asked herself in an instance of exasperation. Why notbe afraid?
The house lights returned and so did the specious bullshit, which became more elaborate. “But consider the attendant benefits: you skip at least three years of physiological adjustment and training. We can now afford to be very optimistic. The process has been shortened to a handful of operations.
“Please understand you have no enemies in CIM or Chatoyance. You’ve all suffered an unimaginable trauma and you have our sincerest sympathies. But now is the time to look objectively at available and realistic courses for your future. So, please come forwards and submit your names to the TI registry.”
Pleo was not impervious to the heads drawn together in the rows of seats in front of and behind her. The mumbling increased in volume. Out of respect for her father’s standing, no one had openly contradicted her but they were herded together by common tragedy. With dismay, Pleo recognised the conflict, now no longer insubstantial: the others were still so anguished that any talk of putting the future in order was welcomed.
Let all of Taro and Boxthorn judge her then, since she was the only one seeing their futures with horror. The job security Polyteknical was offering to the children of the Forty was nothing more than a prison sentence. The shackles were fitted on the inside.
The other male instructor finally spoke, and his voice was bureaucracy set to music. “None of you are viable as potential employees; not valuable enough to retain or retrain. But it’s not like you can work anywhere else in the mining industry. What happened on Kerte Yurgi will cast a very far-reaching shadow, across to Steris and Anium and down through the years. Such is the effect of tragedy. No one will want the association with Kerte Yurgi—or to employ someone with this association—no matter how tenuous.”
“Mierda del toro,” Pleo swore, confident that the Polyteknical speakers and the functionary did not understand Terran Spanish. She had seen enough for today. With a whistle, she slapped both arms of her seat and rose from it. Cerussa and Kim Petani followed her into the aisle as Pleo brushed up against the Spinel and squeezed past. Kim tried to follow her friend, but the guard refused to make way and shoved Kim aside.
People cried out and stood up, finally showing some defiance. Pleo turned around and sprinted back up the aisle. With great presence of mind, Cerussa took Kim by her shoulders and pulled her out of Pleo’s way.
Pleo charged at the Spinel and the guard unofficially added another item to the CIM memorandum:
4. Removal of stubborn deposits formed during heat exchanges.
The Spinel flicked her arm up, grabbed Pleo by the shoulder and tossed her to the floor. She slid down the aisle for half a metre before the Spinel stepped forward to pick her up again.
The entry doors of the hall shook in their frame as a new group of uniformed personnel poured through them.
“No one move!”
A shaft of bright light hit Pleo in the face (Gachala’s teeth, was it Shineshift already?) and four figures clad in indigo uniforms stepped out of it. A commotion without chaos followed. The officers did their jobs and Pleo did not resist, although the people inside the hall raised their voices in protest and tried to form a human barricade. Encouraging, but it would have little consequence. Besides, she didn’t want them standing up for her only because she was Idilman Tanza’s daughter.
IT HAD BEEN a long ride to the main station inside the detainment Shirpen transport. The four Constabulary officers had not told Pleo the type of vehicle they were travelling in, but she had heard them talking amongst themselves. She was sure the station was not that far from Blue Taro and Boxthorn; its drab twin blocks, bridged by a glass-walled corridor on its roof, were visible from the T-Car as it approached Aqueduct Station.
The officers were taking a long drive to shake her down and suck the fight out of her. Pleo sat up as straight as she could on the bumpy seat. Well, she’d show them no sign that their tactic was working. Occasionally the officers glanced at Pleo through the partition and she stared back at them with a perplexed expression. As if this was all one big misunderstanding.
Her ruse had no apparent effect on the four officers. They remained unimpressed with her as the Shirpen pulled up outside the station’s entrance. She got out of the transport and looked up at the twin blocks. What a splendid and ridiculous adornment that bridge was, she thought. Up close and under Gachala’s light it glittered like a golden crown and clashed with the buildings’ grey and black walls.
“Get inside.”
The officer holding her arm pushed Pleo through the entrance while the other three left their colleague to handle the latest detainee. Probably because she’s a rookie, Pleo thought as they walked together across slick corrugated metal tiles, staring at her arresting officer’s immaculately pressed uniform, with its shiny buttons and new baton nestled in its belt holster. She had a sharply pretty face, and a purple birthmark at the nape of her neck, half-concealed by the collar of her uniform. She was maybe a year older than Pleo.
The end of Shineshift had brought a rogues’ gallery into the station reception area. Pleo stared past them: gang members, biohackers, drug dealers, even a pair of women arguing that they were not picking tourist pockets in the ’Cinth. In contrast, officers were huddled around terminals trying to enter details or access records and forms, inured to the movement and chatter of the human zoo. For once Pleo was grateful for Blue Taro and Boxthorn’s isolation from the rest of Chatoyance.
“Not from any canal, Desk Sergeant,” Devinez replied and pushed Pleo up against the desk. “Not my beat at all.”
“We’ll attend to her in a second.”
“Canal Police were suddenly called in to pick her up from the New Areas for public disturbance. Why?”
“Dispatch sends their apologies. Kindly understand Constabulary are understaffed,” said Desk Sergeant, although Pleo had the feeling no actual apologies had been made. The sound of movement came from behind the screen before a pair of androids of indeterminate gender stepped out from behind it. Two voices had been speaking together—this explained the distortion. Both androids had reflective faces devoid of features, and they moved in tandem.
“But oversupplied in the vehicle department. I had to swap riding in a Canal Newt for a detainment Shirpen,” said Devinez. Pleo was not sure why the exchange would cause her such distaste. Departmental pride, maybe.
“You still got a chance to dry your feet,” rejoined Desk Sergeant. Their sense of humour must have been preprogrammed.
Trooper Devinez placed a hand between Pleo’s shoulders and pressed her forwards over the desk.
“Look into Desk Sergeant’s face and smile,” advised Trooper Devinez. “Or don’t smile, up to you.”
Pleo found herself looking into one of Desk Sergeant’s mirrored faces and back at her reflection, curved and elongated like in the back of a spoon. She gazed past it and into a dinghy squad room behind reinforced glass partitions.
A blue light flickered across her reflection followed by the hum emanating from behind Desk Sergeant’s mirror-mask face. Pleo’s face had been scanned and uploaded into the system.
Trooper Devinez walked Pleo through a series of heavyset doors and shoved her into a tiny cell at the end of a corridor, sans a visit to the interrogation room. Then she sauntered off down the corridor with the satisfaction of a rookie task well done.
The corrugated door of a cell to Pleo’s left yawned open, and a man stepped out. As the door swung shut he straightened his coat and sighed heavily. Pleo sized him up: he’d be elegantly attractive if he weren’t so tired after what must have been a tough interrogation session.
She had not spoken, but he clocked her looking at him just the same. Unnerved, Pleo felt he had instantaneously filed away all details about her into his memory. Then she saw the enhanced-hearing implants lining his outer ears.
“Investigator Dumortier,” said Devinez from down the corridor.
“Trooper Devinez. Why’re you here?”
No joking between these two, only a courteous professionalism. Investigator and officer types must be above the preprogrammed canned humour of Desk Sergeant.
“Dispatch sent me. Desk Sergeant says we’re short of officers.”
“Dispatch processes requests, but they don’t make the decisions.” Dumortier looked at the ceiling, as if it contained the source of his suspicion.
Trooper Devinez shrugged. Pleo watched both leave before hunkering down for the night, simmering in her thoughts and picking at the frayed threads in the worn mattress pad.
An hour later an officer slid open the cell door to lead a man and a woman inside. Pleo had sat up, although she was only half-awake, expecting her parents.
“How can we help your situation, Pleo Tanza?”
This couple were not her parents. They would never be so abstract with their questions. And they never addressed her by her full name. The fog of sleepiness suddenly cleared and she saw the tall male Polyteknical instructor and the functionary standing next to the mattress pad.
“Excuse me?” Pleo stood up, brushing specks of grime and loose threads off herself.
“How can we help?” repeated the man.
Apart from the immediately obvious? But Pleo bit back this comeback. Don’t answer yet, let them fill in the silence.
“Here’s what’s missing in Chatoyance,” murmured the instructor in faint disgust. “A hero.”
“A rebel,” corrected the woman.
He shrugged to say both meant the same to him. “But maybe you’re thinking this heroic or rebellious routine will help you bargain for something from Polyteknical.”
Displays of excess emotion would disadvantage Pleo before this couple. She nodded, but willed herself to speak as if referring to someone else’s ideas. “Leave us alone with our lives. In peace. Remove us from Blue Taro and Boxthorn if you must, but leave us.”
“Can’t do that. It”—the man waved his hand as though to describe the machinations of something vast and invisible—“has been mobilised.”
“Leave us.”
“No, sorry. Forty of you is a good number.”
“A good number for what, exactly?” Pleo felt the air inside the cell get chilly all of a sudden.
The woman’s reply did not reveal anything. “No number is definitive, but forty ensures the results will be varied enough and observable over time.”
Pleo waved her hand around too, reminding the couple she was still detained by Constabulary. “Anything can happen overnight in a cell like this.”
The woman raised her eyebrows at her companion in a what-did-I-tell-you expression.
“If you die tonight, by your hand or otherwise,” she said, “the new training initiative will proceed, regardless. Along with your sister. You’ll be of more help to her and yourself outside this cell. Or stay here and let this ‘anything’ you speak of happen to you.”
“Maybe I just will.”
“Fine words, but you won’t,” challenged the woman. “You’re smarter than that. Don’t let it go to waste. Conform with the initiative first. Reform yourself later, if you must.”
“Once you’re in the initiative, we promise to leave you alone.” The man drummed his fingertips on the cell door, impatient but satisfied with a better-than-expected result.
Pleo felt she had listened quite enough. She called out, “Guard!”
The couple were led out and the door slid shut again.
“WANT TO TELL us about it?”
“About what?” asked Pleo.
“The point you were trying to make back in the community hall?” asked her mother.
Constabulary had not bothered to interrogate her, so after the couple’s visit Pleo had been left overnight to stew in her own perspiration and stale recycled air inside the cell. Now, she faced her parents back home with her tongue suddenly stuck to the roof of her mouth. She wished she was back in the cell.
Cerussa stood behind her parents, in the kitchen entranceway, and made a slicing motion in front of her throat for Pleo’s sake. The gesture meant: It’s a trap, it’s one of Mother’s rhetorical questions.She’s looking to what you did to hang her feelings on. Let it slide, don’t answer it, don’t even—
“That the Spinel had no right to shove Kim Petani around. No Spinels have the right to shove any of us around.”
Cerussa sighed, covered her eyes with her hand and slumped against the kitchen wall. But her father showed a more favourable response.
“I can agree with that sentiment,” said Idilman Tanza with a shrug. He peeked through the lowered blinds of the kitchen window in case busybody neighbours were lurking outside.
Guli glared at her husband. “You’re not helping me here.”
“I’m just stating my opinion. Apparently I’m not the only one holding that view.”
He stepped away from the window and took a seat opposite Pleo but not quite next to Guli. It was a neutral position and one that would give him space if anyone lunged at each other.
“We didn’t pay your bail,” he told Pleo.
“Was it the Petanis?”
“No. And neither was it anyone in Blue Taro and Boxthorn. No one took up a collection.”
Pleo sat down on a worn stool, held her face in her hand
s, and viewed the scuffed kitchen floor through grimy fingers. Out of everything that had happened over the past day and night, this unexpected—albeit positive—revelation completely drained her energy. She had been too exhausted to consider bail when Cerussa and Kim Petani arrived to collect her from the station.
“Praise and thanks to Gachala.” For once Pleo meant it.
“Someone, somewhere—maybe up in the Tiers or behind the scenes at CIM—likes you enough to pay your bail. They like you more than you like yourself.” Pleo’s father picked up on her unspoken question. “If we knew who this mysterious benefactor was, we wouldn’t be talking about it now. Neither can we accept such generosity.”
Pleo thought of the couple but kept her mouth shut. Her mother pressed forward again. “So, what were you trying to do in the community hall?”
“Something, anything. The rest clearly weren’t,” Pleo said in a tight voice.
“Acting a hero?”
“Guli, please.”
Pleo looked at her father, who retreated to the kitchen window again. The question had inadvertently touched a raw nerve in him.
“That I’d heard enough from them.” Pleo decided to be honest with her parents. “And their apparent goodwill. That when it comes to theirso-called voluntary training initiative, they mean to impose it on us. I have no illusions about it. In my cell they told me, ‘Forty is a good number.’”
“Good for what?” asked Cerussa, still in the doorway.
Guli did not quite believe it. “Experimentation. But they wouldn’t dare, it’s unethical.”
“Their intentions were made clear and so I made mine clear.”
“We can talk to Polyteknical,” Pleo heard her mother say, but she sounded unconvinced by her own suggestion.
“Ma, you and Papa have no influence with them. Maybe both of you can still talk to CIM as ex-employees of CIM if you want to, but not Polyteknical. I don’t trust them.”
“Or we make their lives difficult, when we need to. That’s how we handled CIM over the years. If we hadn’t insisted, do you think we’d be still living here?” Guli asked.