[Contributor 02] - Infiltrator (2013) (7 page)

“Dara,” Mal said with a curt nod. He was no less intimidating than he had ever been, but she found she was beginning to take reassurance from his brusque manner. It couldn’t have been more apparent how seriously he took what he and the Free Thinkers were doing, and she felt his cell was in good hands. He wasn’t a boy looking for glory or adventure, he was a man who understood the gravity of the risks he and everyone who helped him were taking.

“Mal,” she said.

“Do you really want tea?” Tasha asked.

“Yes, please.”

“Have a seat,” Raj said. Dara sat, and he sat next to her. Mal took the couch to their left.

Tasha went to what Dara deduced was the standard bunker kitchenette: a tiny refrigerator and a hot plate. Unlike the last bunker, though, this room was obviously multi-purpose. A few cots had been pushed against one wall, and there was a small table with four chairs in the kitchen area. The living area, where Raj had invited her to sit, had four small couches grouped around a low table over which were scattered a few books, scraps of paper, and a couple of tablets.

Raj pulled a memory stick from a tablet and handed it to her, and she tucked it in a hidden pocket in her exercise gear. She took out the stick she’d been using for the last several weeks.

“Letizia said you insisted on meeting in person, told her it was too important for you to give her a message to relay,” Mal said. His tone told her he hoped she understood the seriousness of her request.

“It is.” She handed the memory stick to him, and he plugged it into a tablet, flipping through the files. Studying his face, she watched his expression change from wariness to mild interest to outright surprise. “I told you it was big.”

“What is it?” Raj asked, sounding both curious and alarmed. At the sound of his voice Tasha stopped clattering around in the kitchenette, abandoning the tea things so that she could look over her brother’s shoulder at the tablet’s screen.

Frowning, Mal tried to angle the tablet so she couldn’t see it, but she made an impatient noise and seized it, hauling it back into her line of vision. It wasn’t the first time Dara had suspected there was some tension between the siblings, but it was now plain to her that Mal worked hard to protect his sister, and it made Dara warm to him.

“Creators!” Tasha breathed.

“What is it?” Raj asked again, his voice taking on a new urgency. Without a word, Mal handed the tablet over to him and Raj sat back, his eyes scanning the screen as Mal directed his attention to Dara.

“What more can you tell me?” he asked.

As she gave him a brief recap of the meeting between Andersen, Creator Hartley, and the other Heads, Tasha finished the tea, carrying a small tray of mugs over and giving one to each of them. Raj was so fixated on the tablet, his mouth hanging open, that Tasha set his mug down in front of him before settling next to her brother.

“Thanks, Tasha,” Dara said, taking a grateful sip before continuing. Though she hadn’t talked much, her throat was bone dry, and her body sang with nervous tension. She’d been so distracted by her apprehensions over this meeting that she hadn’t processed what she knew about Andersen’s plan, but as she talked and witnessed their reactions, a sense of unease grew within her. “It’s not a sure thing yet, and, from what I’ve gathered, it never will be if Jasmine Shah has her way.”

Mal sat back, tapping a finger against his lips. “We need to see if we can find out what’s going on between Shah and Andersen. I’ll get data miners on that, check with a couple of my other contacts. Whatever it is, it isn’t your concern, though. Focus on this project, gather whatever other information about it you can find.”

“If you look closely, you’ll see there are important pieces missing, crucial details Andersen didn’t include,” Dara said. “I highlighted everything I noticed, but you should have someone else with engineering expertise look these over, preferably Letizia, if possible. She’d have more insight into how Andersen’s mind works than I do.”

“The details must have been made available to the Creators, though. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get to anything on that end, but we’ll try.”

“There’s one more thing: Javier Gutierrez, who was one of the other contenders for my position, transferred to Accounting, reporting to Jasmine Shah. He might know something, something he’s passed along to Shah. It could make him a target for Andersen’s wrath.”

“Why would he take a risk like that?” Tasha asked.

“I think his sister is sick. I wasn’t able to find anything solid, but I read between the lines of things I saw posted on the social networks.”

“I’m on it,” Raj said, handing the tablet back to Mal at last. He seemed shaken. “I’ll see if I can confirm that she’s sick, and, if so, try to figure out what’s wrong with her.”

“You are not to say anything to Javier, nor are you to attempt to question him,” Mal said, and Dara bristled at the command. He must have noticed, because he fixed a piercing glare on her. “You cannot afford to blow your cover, especially not now. I need you on this, Dara. I need you to be fully committed.”

“I am,” she swore.

“Mal, it’s time to bring her inside,” Raj said, staring at him with a challenging gaze.

Pressing his lips together in a firm line, it was obvious Mal wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea, but he didn’t argue with Raj either.

“Raj is right,” Tasha said. “There are things Dara needs to know, bits of information that will give her a better idea of the big picture. You can’t have her going into this blind.”

“I’m sitting right here,” Dara said in a tight voice.

“All right. You two might have a point,” Mal said, the expression on his face suggesting he didn’t like how the words tasted.

“We can’t afford to blow this,” Raj said.

“No, we can’t. Very well. Dara, I think it’s time to give you a better idea of who the Free Thinkers are and what we know. I hope you’re truly ready for this.”

She hoped so too.

“The Free Thinkers were originally a group of people who were meant to serve as watchdogs of the Creators, to ensure they didn’t overstep their bounds,” Mal said. “The retreat to the domes was an act of desperation, a last-ditch effort to try to save as many people as possible, and there were those who recognized that the arrangement represented a potential power imbalance. The Creators’ ostensible mission was to save humanity, but a few of the original Free Thinkers recognized that this gave the Creators enormous power over those they claimed they wished to protect.”

“Don’t make them sound so benevolent,” Tasha said. “The Creators played a large part in the problems that caused the Great Famine in the first place. It was their greed, their desire to control all the wealth and concentrate the power, that was instrumental in causing the food system to collapse.”

“I was getting to that,” he said, giving his sister a look.

Dara threw her hands up and shook her head. “Wait a second, how can that be? I was taught that the Great Famine was a result of unavoidable environmental disasters.”

“Environmental problems did cause the Great Famine, but they weren’t unavoidable, whatever the Creators may claim,” Raj said, his voice gentle. He glanced at Mal, who pressed his lips together more firmly and sat back, letting Raj take over. “What you need to understand, Dara, is that what happened, what caused the collapse of the food system and the environmental destruction of the planet, wasn’t a concerted effort to destroy, but a combination of unintended consequences and unfettered greed.

“For instance, Zhang Agritech Systems developed lines of what they thought would be beneficial genetically engineered seed, along with pesticides and herbicides designed to increase the effectiveness of the seed. They were aware that the success of the products would mean huge profits, but the original intent was to increase yields while simultaneously making life easier and more profitable for farmers, and to feed the burgeoning population of the Earth. However, farmers became dependent on the seed and chemicals, and their overuse led to unanticipated problems like soil depletion and herbicide-resistant weeds, which in turn prompted scientists to develop other chemicals and genetic modifications. Before anyone knew it, food science had reached the tipping point and fallen over the edge, and, despite their best efforts, there was nothing Zhang could do to reverse the damage.”

“Zhang wasn’t alone either,” Tasha chimed in. “The other Creators’ factories spewed pollution into the air, dumped it into the water supply, and toxic waste seeped into the soil.”

“Everyday people were responsible too,” Mal said. “The more technology they had, the more they demanded. There was a lack of will to scale back, to make the necessary changes to stop the environmental destruction. In some ways the Creators were only responding to the demands of the people, though the obscene profits they made provided them with plenty of motivation to do so.”

“How do you know all this?” Dara demanded. “How do you know this isn’t propaganda being fed to you by interested parties? The Creators have done a lot of bad things, but that doesn’t negate the possibility that people are seizing on whatever they can to blacken the Creators for their own gain.” Mal and Raj exchanged glances, and she knew there was something they weren’t yet telling her.

“Let’s put it this way: we can’t be sure the motives of everyone involved with the Free Thinker movement are pure. In fact, we know some of them aren’t. Some people want revenge. There’s no point in us denying it, but does that mean we should stop taking a critical look at the Creators?” Raj asked.

“No, but it doesn’t mean you should stop taking a critical look at yourselves either.”

“You’re right; it doesn’t,” Tasha said. “You asked how we know all this. There’s a historical record. We have old textbooks, have managed to salvage fragments of information available on what used to be called the Internet, old news stories and opinion pieces. There wasn’t a consensus, that much is obvious, but you can piece things together based on what you read. Mal told you there have been Free Thinkers since the domes first went into operation. The original Free Thinkers did all they could to gather and preserve the old texts. Modern Free Thinkers have many different roles, and some are scholars, devoting their lives to studying the past.”

“We have to learn from history if we want to make changes for the better,” Raj said.

“If you want to become one of us, you will have to study as well.”

“How is any of this different from what the Creators have taught me all my life?” Dara asked. “They’ve presented me with one story, and you’re saying you’ll present me with another. It doesn’t mean either of them are true.”

“The difference is that we’ll present you with more than one story,” Mal said, his eyes flashing. His voice was intense, and he leaned forward, causing Dara to sit back instinctively. “Then we’ll ask you to draw your own conclusions based on what you’ve learned. That’s how it’s different. That’s why we’re called the Free Thinkers. The Creators program. We question.”

Dara didn’t respond. She was too overwhelmed. Her head swam with everything the three had told her, and part of her simply refused to believe it, even though she heard the ring of truth in what they had said.

Raj held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Look, we don’t expect you to buy into this immediately. What you’ll need to do, what everyone who wants to join the Free Thinkers does, is join us for study. We’ll teach you about the tech we use, provide you with instruction on our standard practices, such as what you should do in the event you suspect your cover has been blown. It’s what I thought we should have done with you all along.” She didn’t miss the glare he sent Mal’s way.

Mal ignored him. “Should you want to leave at any point, you’re free to go. We don’t compel anyone to stay, but you need to know that we have to protect our secrets at all cost. There’s too much at stake, too many lives on the line. Should we start to think of you as a liability, we will take steps to prevent you from doing us any harm.”

He wasn’t threatening her, not exactly, yet his flat tone told Dara this was a matter of life and death seriousness. A cold finger dragged up her spine, and she couldn’t suppress a shiver. It made sense, but it also made the Free Thinkers sound more like the Creators than they might want to admit. Weren’t the Creators just as concerned about protecting themselves?

“I’ll be your mentor if you want to do this,” Raj said, calling her attention back to him. She could see from the faint line between his brows that he was worried about how she’d taken Mal’s proclamation.

“What is your ultimate goal?” she asked. She needed to know. She couldn’t take part in the Creators’ charade anymore, but she couldn’t let herself be drawn into something without knowing what she was getting herself into.

“We’re not here to wage a war,” Tasha said, and Dara felt a little reassured. “The ultimate goal is to provide people with the information they need, information the Creators have worked hard to keep from them.”

“Once we have a better handle on where Andersen intends to take this project, we can start to leak information about it,” Raj said.

“The Free Thinkers are about choice,” Mal said. “We want to give people a chance to make their own decisions about the Creators, and when they have the information they need, they must choose how to respond to it.”

It sounded reasonable enough, but Dara was still uneasy. What they were proposing could change her world profoundly, and who was to say that what would follow would be any better? Then again, what Andersen wanted to do would change the world profoundly, and she doubted it would be to the betterment of people like her, people like her mother. She couldn’t support the evil she knew, but she wasn’t about to plunge blindly into what could be a different flavor of evil. The only way to know, though, was to join and see for herself what the Free Thinkers were like.

“All right,” she said, the words coming out slowly and with some reluctance.

Much as Dara would have liked to dive into her studies immediately, she couldn’t stay any longer. The discussion about Andersen’s plans had eaten up a lot of their time, as had her journey from the dome to the bunker. Staying much longer might lead to her absence being noted in the dome, and she couldn’t afford that. She’d have to get on the transport when her chauffeur arrived.