Broken Mirror (34 page)

Elena opened her mouth, but no words came out. She blinked and looked as if she might be tearing up.

Ozie stood, walked over, and patted Victor on the back. “Get to work on your program.” He walked to the door and held it open for Elena. “Let’s have a drink on me,” Ozie said. He escorted her out and closed the door behind him. The room was mercifully quiet.

Victor returned to his algorithm. Every line of code mattered when dealing with such vast sums of data. Processing the data in batches meant he had to take special care in how the data was broken and reassembled. Hours flew by.

During a test run on a tiny sliver of genome, Victor recorded a few messages to try out the untraceable messaging function on the Handy 1000 that Ozie had given him. He sent one message to Ma and Fa to let them know he was okay and that he was traveling up the Pacific Coast, intending to visit the First Nations of Canada. He tried not to think about what they made of his granfa’s defiled grave and his sudden absence. He sent another message to Circe, asking her to get in touch with him.

Victor squirmed, thinking about how much further across the line of good behavior he would advance by stealing the gene libraries from the Institute for Applied Biological Sciences. Thus far, he’d vandalized a grave and stolen from his family’s company, but this theft would be an altogether different thing
—
a monumental heist. Researchers had to be licensed and pay huge sums of money for access to a subset of the Human Genome Initiative’s data troves. Now Victor planned to siphon all of it, a grand crime that would make him infamous throughout the American Union if he were caught.

He pushed those thoughts aside. He had more coding to do, and he needed to create a lock on the program that Ozie couldn’t break, an insurance policy in case his friend was only using him to get what he wanted, as Elena had suggested. He worked late, stopping only for a brief snack brought in by the tuxedoed robot, and then he returned to their rented room and passed out next to Elena.

***

In the early morning before the sun rose, Victor sat on a bench inside the garage and ran remote tests on the BioScan data using his Handy 1000. His program was working as planned, indexing the genomic data and running comparison protocols to highlight differences between people with and without the gene. Once he had the reference libraries and got them connected to the dark grid, his program would be able to identify the MRS gene sequence, provided Ozie could reroute the satellites in orbit.

Victor sighed to himself. What had become of his life? He rolled up the Handy 1000 and stuck it in his pocket next to the data egg.

Elena paced outside. She had packed the car while the mechanics were still working on it. She and Victor were almost ready to go.

Victor retrieved his bag from the trunk and downed a fumewort tincture. He would save the bitter grass and only take it before sleeping.

The mechanics walked him through the car’s new features. It opened when he pressed his palm against the door. The steering disc now showed the outline of two hands, the trigger for autodriving mode. He programmed a test drive, over Elena’s objections, and left her behind. He rode in the self-driving car a kilometer up the road.

He got out of the car and stretched, anticipating the long drive ahead. Elena’s erratic behavior would make maintaining his equilibrium harder. He wondered if he should let her come along. He was planning an enormous breach of faith against one of the most respected scientific achievements the world had seen. If Elena came along and he were caught, she’d be deemed his accomplice. He should tell her to stay for her own good.

Distant, jagged mountains withdrew their shadows from the Reno desert. The sun would rise comparatively late thanks to the Nevada time zone exception, a reflection of the idiosyncratic chaos ruling O.W.S.’s mountainous regions.

A crackle in the dirt behind a nearby copse of eucalyptus trees caught Victor’s attention. Brown pods littered the ground along with dried leaves. The astringent scent of eucalyptus wafted by, carried by a morning breeze. He turned back to the car but let out a quiet breath when he heard another crunch.

He wished he had a weapon. If the people following him tried to grab him now, he’d have to jump in the car and leave.

Hooting that sounded human came from behind the trees. Maybe it was their signal to grab him. Victor backed a few steps toward his car, checking over his shoulder, determined not to be surprised from behind.

A shambling, stumbling man emerged from behind a nearby tree and advanced unsteadily toward Victor’s car. He had scraggly whiskers and hair like a greasy bird’s nest. The man hooted again, and the effort seemed to bug out his eyelids. His lips parted, revealing yellowed, grimy teeth.

“Morning, feller!” the man said. “Good day it is! Spare me an AUD? I’m making camp on the other side of the golf course. Don’t pay me no more to cut their grass. Got them bots. Please, kiddo. Help a stim slug out.”

The man’s skeletal frame was clearly malnourished, and his stink suggested disease. He was disgusting but not dangerous.

“You’re on stims?” Victor said. “What are they like?”

“Out of this world!” the hobo yelled. “Everything makes sense, and everything happens for a reason. It’s divine.”

The man seemed to have forgotten about Victor and stared at the ground, probing at his belly button, which poked from his undersized shirt. Then he licked his finger.

Victor found some water bottles in his trunk and a few packaged snacks in the car’s passenger compartment and threw them at the trees.

When the hobo lifted his head, his eyes glistened.

Victor held up another bottle, which caught the light of the sun and sparkled like a precious gem. “Go fetch.” He chucked the bottle away. The hobo followed his prize.

Victor got in his car and drove back to the garage. Elena looked at him with red and teary eyes. He couldn’t leave her.

“Let’s go,” he shouted to Elena through a lowered window.

She jumped in. “Step on it,” she said.

Victor programmed the car for Las Vegas, and it began driving them south.

The “Cold Nile Miracle” along the Columbia River and then across the length and breadth of the Organized Western States rivals any other A.U. economic region in terms of per-capita economic output. However, the remainder of our continent’s western lands languish, burdened by the curses of being mineral-rich and water-poor, and chronically starved by labor’s greedy hands. Except, of course, for Las Vegas, a syndicate-controlled unofficial city-state so rotten, bloated, crime-infested, and corroded that no decent citizens of the A.U. dare to visit. Riches plundered from thousands of illegal mines in the O.W.S. fuel conflict and create instability. Corps mercenaries at the disposal of the Damned City’s amoral criminal leaders constitute the primary threat to our democratic-, freedom-, and peace-loving union. The Republic should not have to fight this fight alone.

—Republic of Texas senator Alberto Montero, “A Plea for Solidarity,” (1990)

Victor’s car pulled itself around a sweeping curve. Jagged cliffs of rust-colored rock, sandstone, and white-streaked sediment rose above him. When the road straightened, Victor and Elena glimpsed Las Vegas in the distance.

The meticulously planned clock-face city encompassed several square kilometers of arcing apartment blocks, airtram circuits, and commercial skyscrapers, built in concentric rings around Grand Park, a vivid patch of green contrasting with the surrounding desert. Neatly arranged, huddled outskirts encircled the city’s jutting high-rises.

The Handy 1000 chimed, and Victor unfurled it on top of the dash. A message from Ozie read: “People following you crossed the border to O.W.S. this morning.”

Victor’s dragged both his palms down his face.

“What is it?” Elena asked.

“They’re still coming after us, whoever they are. They crossed over from SeCa this morning,” he explained.

She waved as if she could swat them like flies. “They can’t know where we are now. Don’t worry.”

Victor wanted to believe she was right. But why bother crossing the border if they’d lost the trail completely?

He downed a fumewort tincture and told himself to stay calm.
Might as well tell the wind not to blow. But I can’t not try.

Ahead of them, the polished, improbable immensity of a city in the middle of nowhere made it seem like a mirage.

Outside the city limits, fields of mirrors sprawled toward the hills. Black solar thermal towers punctuated the terrain at regular intervals like nails driven into the desert floor.

The city layout resembled a giant bull’s-eye scratched into the dusty valley floor. Two strips of parkland divided the city into quadrants named after the seasons. On their left, pastel-green Spring occupied the wedge from noon to three on the city’s clock-face layout, beyond which sat pink-adobe Summer from three to six. Autumn with its golden-russet tones occupied the space between six to nine. Winter’s white-washed buildings, to their right and rapidly approaching, glistened from nine to twelve.

Victor tapped the dashboard to give the autopilot program more specific orders, and the car navigated toward the Institute for Applied Biological Sciences near Grand Park at the city’s center.

The vista disappeared when the road dipped into a tunnel that ran beneath the entirety of Twelve-Six Park.

Victor glanced at Elena. The blue-tinted glare of passing lightstrips flashed across her face. She scratched the back of one hand, raking her nails across her skin so forcefully that Victor worried she might draw blood.

He reached over and grabbed her hand, squeezing. “Who’s nervous now?” he asked.

“Me. Being underground . . .” Elena folded her arms across her chest. “I can’t stop thinking about earthquakes.”

“You know we’re hundreds of kilometers from any significant fault lines.” Victor looked up at the tunnel ceiling’s broad arch, reinforced with thick pillars. It looked solid, but appearances could be deceiving. “You should be more worried about faulty construction,” Victor said.

She glared at him. “Thanks, now I’m worried about that too.”

The car drove itself into a spur of the tunnel and up an exit chute. They emerged onto a narrow two-lane street flanked by apartment buildings and commercial towers. Wide sidewalks with adjacent, separated bicycle lanes took up twice as much room as the road itself. The street lacked facilities for parked vehicles, a brilliant space-saving feature that Victor wished SeCa had adopted.

The car proceeded slowly and stopped at a turnout in front of a building that looked like glass cubes hastily stacked on top of one another.

Victor and Elena climbed out and stretched their legs. He took his bag from the trunk and sent the car to a parking garage.

“This is the place,” Victor said, looking up at the building.

Elena bit her cheek and glanced back. He followed her gaze. Throngs of people strolled across an intersection, shaded by an enormous piece of fabric stretched high above the street, secured to nearby buildings by thin, nearly invisible wires. The sunshade converted solar energy falling between buildings into electricity. The buildings also had solar-conductive windows to generate electricity to feed into the city’s grid.

Solar power was interesting, but that didn’t explain Elena’s curious stare. She looked around anxiously.

Victor grew tired of waiting. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, striding ahead.

They entered the Institute’s large atrium, which rose several stories, supported by a lattice of white curving beams that looked like giant ribs, and which seemed out of place next to the smooth, rigidly geometric planes of the building’s transparent skin. The reception area was separated from the rest of the building by waist-high glass panels. LEDs in the floor directed guests to the right while staff veered to the left. A bright green path led to a separate area that served as the tour group waiting area.

Victor led Elena to the institute’s gift shop and bought a disposable imager and a case for it. He shoved the data leech into the case and held the imager in his hand like any other tourist.

They walked to the waiting area. A few other people stood nearby: children with their parents, a few university-age youths, and several pale-skinned bespectacled businessmen who might have been from overseas.

Victor grabbed Elena’s hand and pulled her close. She resisted for a moment and then relaxed, leaning her head against his upper arm.

Victor said, “I need you to distract the docent when we reach the genome library.”

“I guessed as much,” she said. “If you were good at sneaking around, Victor, you would have told me in the car, where we couldn’t be overheard. That’s Thievery 101.”

“I’m not good at this, I know. But as far as anyone else knows, we’re having a tender moment.” He inhaled and smelled her hair. It was clean but musty. He couldn’t smell any stimsmoke. “Are you feeling okay? You were fidgeting in the car.”

Elena pushed back and looked up at him. “That’s why you keep staring at me? You think I’m using stims again?”

“You haven’t seemed like yourself ever since we reached Springboard Café.”

Her eyes flicked rapidly over his face. She set her jaw. “It was just a puff,” she whispered. “Those pansexuals gave it to me, said I looked like I needed it. I wasn’t strong enough to give it back.”

“You can be honest with me, you know. You don’t have to hide it.”

She looked away. He’d made her ashamed, but that hadn’t been his intention. He’d simply wanted the truth.

Victor embraced her, feeling guilty for almost leaving her at Springboard Café. They needed each other, he knew. If what they had wasn’t love, it was a shared understanding and a mutual need. She was a piece of his life he clung to, even while everything else was being chipped away. He opened his mouth to say how he felt, but the words wouldn’t come. He didn’t know how to express it. Instead he hugged her tighter.

A docent approached the waiting area, her heels clicking as she walked across the atrium. Her dyed-blond hair was pulled away from her face into thick braids that spiraled up and around her head.