Cyberpunk (35 page)

correspondent’s name, and used them to generate your next letter. All

you had to do was keep your printer in blank paper.

It was February of my second Grade One year when I flagged I was

on Dad’s mid-quarter mailing list. The business templates were at least

smart enough not to use Sunday dates, but the personal mid-quarter

option
always
used the 15th. Six sequential letters from Dad, dated

11/15, 2/15, 5/15, 8/15, 11/15, and 2/15 again, and I started to get

suspicious. Going back over the letters, I applied the Turing Test...

Which wasn’t a fair trial, was it? After all, that only proved the

letters weren’t written by an intelligent being. It didn’t rule out their

being written by Dad. So I suckertrapped my next two letters; simply

loaded them with bizarro keywords. When Dad’s May 15 letter started

with, “Sorry to hear about your hysterectomy,” I knew I had him nailed.

I shot a glance at the letter the gopher had left on the table. It could

wait. I had lots of work to do.

All the same, sometimes the recombined keywords made funny

reading. I flip/flopped a few times, finished disarming the program

currently in memory, then saved it and decided to take a break. Walking

over to the table, I picked up the envelope, did a double-take on the

address, and tore it open frantic.

The letter was in Mom’s big, sloppy handwriting. It said:

#

“Dear Mikey,

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“This is hard to say, so I’ll just get it over with. Your father probably

never told you, but we’ve been on the brink of divorce ever since you

left.

“Why? Because your father lied to me. He convinced me that we

were just sending you away for the summer, and by the time I came to

believe that he really would enroll you full time—

“A bad marriage is hard to explain, Mikey. You put on blinders.

There’s so much you pretend not to see. It’s like clinging to floating

wreckage: you can see the shore, but you just can’t bring yourself to let

go and swim for it. After all, you
are
still afloat, and with luck you

might drift that way.

“I pretended not to see that your father was just too busy to bother

with you. I pretended not to see what was going on between him and

Faun—and Barbi before her, and Cyndi after, and then there was Buffy,

and Loni, and Sandi, and I don’t believe that even
he
can remember all

their names.

“I tried to ignore all that; after all, I had a marriage to save. I had a

son
. And then, when you got to be a nuisance, I was even willing to

sacrifice
you
to save my marriage.

“You don’t appreciate the power of a bad relationship, Mikey. It’s

like the worst drug of all. There’s no high; all you hope for is that you

can stay numb. And I was hooked.

“Until last month, when your stepsister Krystle had her baby. (Did

your father tell you she was pregnant? Did he even tell you she was

married?) That makes you an uncle, Mikey; unfortunately, it also made

David a grandfather. When he realized that—

“He bought a red motorcycle, got a hair transplant, and filed for

divorce. He gets the condo; I’d forgotten about that damned prenuptial

contract. My replacement’s already moved in, and she’s due to graduate

from high school any day now.

“I’m sorry, Mikey. I’d fight for your custody and try to bring you

home, but your father gets free legal services as part of his benefits and I

can’t find a lawyer willing to take on Fuji-DynaRand. Don’t bother

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writing back. I still don’t have a permanent address.

“I’ll be in touch.

“Love always, Mom.”

#

I was still sitting there, holding the letter and staring blank into

space, when the Colonel stuck his head through the doorway. “Say,

Harris, I was just thinking—,” he stopped, and looked hard at me.

“Harris?” he asked after a few seconds. Slow, I turned to look at

him. Slow, and dull, and numb.

“Yeah?” I said. Not even, “Yeah, sir?” Which
proves
how numb I

was. Like, I’d just invited him to bite my head off. There was a pause—a

long, empty pause, while my brain said I should go for damage control

and my gut said why bother?

The colonel pointed to the letter, and said, soft, “Bad news from

home?”

I nodded.

He stepped into the room, shut the door, and pulled up a chair.

“Want to talk about it, son?”

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Chapter 18

“Fall in!” Payne brayed. “Form up!” He looked around the airstrip

and spotted some poor wide-eyed kid hiding in the weeds. “Are you

waiting for an
invitation
, pissant?” The kid, definitely a top contender

for the title of Ugliest Haircut in the Entire Free World, got up slow out

of the poison ivy and joined the thirty other cadet recruits standing in

front of the briefing shed.

I slugged down the last of my coffee and started collecting the props

for my magic show.

Payne was still shouting at the kids when I stepped out of the shack.

“Dress that line!” he bellowed. “You call that a
line
, pissants?” I

stopped, looked them over, and had to admit he was right; it was about

the poorest excuse for a line I’d seen all summer. But Payne was good at

his job, and he had two full weeks yet to get them ready for fall quarter.

I had maximum confidence he’d pull it off.

Payne made eye contact with me. I shot him a little nod.

“Ten-
shun
!” he screamed, and the poor kids jumped half out of their

skins.

“Thank you, sergeant,” I said quietly. He stepped back deferential,

and I walked up smiling. A few of the cadet recruits tentative smiled

back.

Pissants obviously didn’t recognize the good cop/bad cop routine

when they saw it. This was going to be fun.

“Hi,” I said to the new boys, and smiled again. A few more of them

started to thaw. “I’m Cadet Captain Harris, and I’m here to give you a

little introductory lesson in electronic counter measures.” While they

were still wondering what that meant, I switched on the wand and started

walking down the line.

It chirped on the first one. I checked the EM signature display, then

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announced, “Matsushita digital watch.” Kid couldn’t have looked more

surprised if I’d pulled his brain out through his nose.

The second recruit’s person was clean, but something in his suitcase

tripped the wand. “Vidslate,” I announced. Then I looked at the

secondary trace. “And a couple comicbook ROMs.” He was still looking

embarassed when I moved onto the third one. The third recruit was

regular gold mine; digital watch on his wrist, calculator in his left breast

pocket, and a personal music player stashed in his suitcase. “I hope you

brought plenty of CDs,” I advised him, half-kidding, full earnest.

Around the tenth time the wand chirped, some kid with frizzy red

hair and Dumbo ears asked the question I’d been waiting for all along.

“Suh? What all
is
that thang, ennaway?” I stepped back, and smiled. I

love cadet recruits. They’re so predictable.

“This,” I said, looking casual at the wand, “is a little gadget we built

around the sensing module of an M-387 Personal Anti-Radiation

Missile.” I made an elaborate pass over Frizzy with the wand, spotted

the Panasonic chessputer in his right jacket pocket. “Mind if I borrow

your chess game for a minute?” Too surprised to think, he handed it

over.

Switching the chessputer into demo mode (I wanted to make sure it

was the noisiest circuit for miles around), I gave it to one of the other

recruits and pointed at a stand of scrub oak on the other side of the

airstrip. “Run over there and stick this in the crotch of one of those

trees,” I said. “Then hurry back here.” The kid instant took off, and

inward, I marveled. Command presence really
does
work!

When the runner was safely back on this side of the airstrip, I

stepped into the briefing shed and picked up my second prop. “This is an

M-387 PARM launcher,” I said as I came walking out into the sunshine

again. They gasped, excited. If you’re pathologically into guns—like

most Von Schlager voluntaries are—then I guess something that looks

vaguely like an Uzi with a 25mm bore must be pretty impressive. “The

M-387 PARM!” I began, in a parade-field bellow Payne would have

been proud to use, “is a 500-gram rocket-propelled munition designed to

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home in on stray electromagnetic radiation!” I flashed the weapon

around so they could all ooh and aah at the black, efficient ugliness of it.

“Effective to one-point-five kilometers!” I continued, “the projectile is

sensitive to radio frequency leakage from virtually all consumer digital

products, including watches, calculators, ROM read—Ooops!”

WHOOSH! The little rocket streaked across the airstrip and took a

sharp dive into the scrub oak. BLAM! Scratch one chessputer—and the

tree it was sitting in.

Slow, I picked myself up, dusted off my pants, and took a discrete

scan of the new boys. Bad sign: Only three of them had had the presence

of mind to hit the dirt when the weapon “misfired.” Payne had more

work ahead of him than I thought.

“The ChiComms have a similar munition,” I continued as if nothing

had happened, “as well as an air-dropped version that can go into

dormant/mine mode. There are a lot of one-armed Burmese who used to

wear digital watches.” Some of the boys, I flagged, were now staring at

me with genuine fear on their faces, then looking to Payne as if hoping

he’d save them.

Good. They were
supposed
to react like that.

“When you reach the campus, you will be asked to turn in your

personal electronics,” I concluded. “I suggest you do so.” Turning, I

nodded crisp to Payne.

“Left face!” he bellowed. “Double-time, forward!” The cadet

recruits started off up the jeep trail to the academy. Payne stuck with

them a mo, then dropped back.

“Was the stumble convincing?” I asked, quiet.

“Getting better,” he whispered back. “In fact, not bad for a Grade

Four whose braids are still shiny.”

“Thank you, sir.” He cut me a quick wink, then jogged off to catch

up with his boys. I went back into the briefing shed and started cleaning

the M-387 launcher.

It’s simple: applied Machiavelli, really. In political science we’d

spent half of Spring quarter discussing
The Prince
and the whole issue

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of whether it was better for a leader to be loved or feared. We concluded

old Niccolò got it right when he said they weren’t mutual exclusive