Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (37 page)

“What happened to done?” Rachel sighed.

“You’re just lucky I don’t like him. Otherwise I’d be on the phone with him in a red second.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Santino!”

“I’m just saying.”

“You done?”

“Done. But…”

Rachel slumped sideways and let her head slide down the window, her short hair making quiet squeaks as it slipped against the glass.

“But,” he said again. “This’ll get out, too, and there’ll be a lot of people who will be furious you didn’t share this with them.”

“It’s my decision,” she said, pointing a finger at his nose.

“No argument,” he said. “This won’t leave my lips, I swear.”

Santino pulled into her driveway. The porch lights were on. The tagger had been back; fresh black spray paint glittered against her garage door. (RO-BITCH this time, and still neatly done, but the term was too close to its predecessor to award additional points for creativity.) They trudged up her walk to the front door and Mrs. Wagner’s bedroom light went on as Rachel fought with the lock.

“Wonder what she’s thinking about you bringing home a man,” Santino mused.

“She’s probably just relieved you’re not a woman. One of these days I’m going to show up with a goat,” Rachel said, and threw her shoulder against the door to pop it open. Humid nights were the worst; everything in the old house stuck. “Maybe a chicken. I haven’t decided. Some kind of livestock.”

“How progressive.”

“If it’s to be non-stop war with her, I’m going to have fun with it,” Rachel said. 

“Think she’s the one who does the graffiti?”

She hadn’t considered that. It might explain the tidy workmanship.

They went straight to the kitchen. Santino unloaded his service weapon, opened the freezer door, and stashed it behind the ice bin. He held up the magazine in question.

“The flour canister is empty,” she said. “Where’d you keep it last night?” 

He took the lid off of the largest of a matched pottery set and dropped the magazine inside. Rachel winced slightly as the edge of the metal rang on the ceramic. “Took it to bed with me,” he said. “You sure you want both pieces in the same room?”

“No one will break in. Tagging the garage door is about as close as anyone wants to get to the neighborhood boogeyman.”

“That’s grim.”

“That’s realistic,” she said as she hopped up on the counter. “You still want to be one of us?”

He opened the fridge and passed her a hard cider. “Hypothetically speaking? Do I have to be grandfathered into the brainwashing, or can I join up now and miss it?”

“Brainwashing is included. It’s a package deal,” she said.

“Tough call.” He took a long drink. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I’d still have joined you.”

She gaped at him and nearly dropped her cider. “You are insane. It’s been nothing but misery for the last five years!”

“Well, yeah, but you need to remember that I’m more objective than you are.”

If her bottle wasn’t fresh, she would have thrown it at him. Santino held up a hand to mollify her and continued. “I’m an outsider looking in. I can sympathize, but I don’t really understand, so it’s easy for me to say that it was worth it. I’m not just looking at what you can do, I’m also looking at the technology. The biggest concern about OACET is who should control it, who has the right to hold all of that power. The universal assumption is that it shouldn’t be you, as if you guys needed handlers or something to keep you in check. But even though everybody always talks about what happens when technology gets into the wrong hands, it sounds like it started out in the wrong hands and OACET took it back.

“It’s kind of hopeful,” Santino said, and shrugged. “Maybe if they hadn’t abused you guys, you’d take what you can do for granted, I don’t know. Maybe that’s just me rationalizing the shit you went through. It seems like OACET is aware of what could happen if you let yourselves run wild, and you do everything you can to prevent that. You know your welfare is linked to the tech and vice versa, so you’re being as smart and as careful about its use as possible.”

Rachel exhaled. “It’d be nice if you were right,” she said. “I’d like to think some good came out of it.”

He chuckled. “Come on, OACET’s a family. You wouldn’t be this close if you hadn’t gone through all of that together.”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “You think being close is a good thing?”

“Yeah?” Santino was surprised by her reaction. “I’ve seen how you guys are together. You… I don’t know. You blend.”

“You think that’s a good thing?” Rachel couldn’t help but repeat herself. “Oh God, I didn’t explain it properly. Okay, listen. When the implant is on, we…” she said as she gestured towards her head, “…are always together. And when we’re awake, the implant is never not on.

“Human beings are not meant to live like this. We shouldn’t be in each others’ minds all of the goddamned time! We need boundaries, limits, space to define where one person ends and another begins. If we don’t have these, then we begin to think the other person is an extension of ourselves.

“We start making decisions that affect their lives. Then, when they find out we’ve done something that they should feel is just plain horrific—I mean, just a total violation of who they are as a person!—they don’t know how they should feel about it because they also think they’re part of us.

“I’m talking big things,” she said, as a confused orange-yellow bloomed around him. “Not ‘oh, I guess I actually did like Italian food when I thought it tasted like soggy cheese,’ but issues like politics. Religion. Abortion. We screw like rabbits, Santino! Just imagine how that one played out!”

She took a breath. “Maybe the end result is homogenization, where we get rid of our personalities, I don’t know. It was really bad at first, but we decided to not let it get to the point where we’re nothing but cogs in the same machine. So we made rules to control how we interact with each other, and we convince ourselves we’ll be okay if we follow these rules, and we try to not think about what might happen if one of us decides that the rules don’t apply to him. Or her. Or…

“We work hard at keeping the walls up,” she said to him. “We know it’s a sham, but it’s what lets us stay together, and we can’t not stay together.

“Do you understand?” she asked Santino, whose confused yellows had faded down to sage. “We’re not close because we’ve bonded against the odds. We’re close because we don’t have the option to be apart.”

Rachel waved her drink at him as she tried to find the right words. She failed. “We’re struggling,” she said simply. “When we were activated, we realized we had basically lost five years of our lives. We could think and feel again, but we weren’t the same people we used to be.

“Shawn was right,” she said, and forced herself to look up at him. “This isn’t me. I can’t pick up the pieces of my old life, because who I used to be didn’t extend into other bodies. So I’m… not me. I’m a completely new person with someone else’s memories and parents and Social Security number, and a few hundred other appendages who just happen to walk and talk and have different memories and parents and Social Security numbers.

“It’s enough to drive anyone fucking nuts,” she said, and took a long drink. After a moment, she added: “I’m surprised there aren’t more Shawns.”

“Me too,” he said quietly.

“What I’m saying is, I’ve got a standing reservation at a local sanatorium. Visiting hours are from ten to five.”

“I’ll bring snacks.”

Santino finished his cider and tossed the bottle into the small recycling bin under the sink. He turned and opened the kitchen window, probably more for something to occupy his hands than the need for the night air. The sounds of busy frogs drifted in, hot and heavy.

“You’re wrong, though.”

“Hm?” His back was to her. Rachel wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly.

“You’re wrong about homogenization.”

“No,” she laughed wryly. “No, I’m not.”

“So you lied to me back at the Mexican place?”

She coughed into her drink. “What?”

“The Mexican restaurant. The one after Edwards’ press conference. You said you were all tailoring your implants to your personalities. How everyone in the Program is different.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Really? How?”

She thought about it, then said: “I never thanked you for saving my life that night.”

“No, you didn’t.” Santino grinned. “But we’ve been busy.”

“Thank you,” she told him, and they both knew she wasn’t talking about his quick hand on a Taser.

“No problem.” He took a second cider from the fridge. “Any other secrets you’d like to share?” 

“Nope,” she said. “We’ve got a few more big ones, but there’s no need to get into those right now. I’m about ready to drop.”

“Me too. One last thing,” Santino said as he opened the new bottle. “You said someone convinced Congress to fund the Program, that he was the one who developed the PDA and the brainwashing. Do you know who that was?”

She nodded. “Definitely.”

“Who?”

“Rich. Connected. Extremely powerful. And that’s all I’ll say because ‘plausible deniability’ might be a literal lifesaver here.”

“Okay.” He paused, and she watched his colors turn over as he moved through the possibilities. “Is he going to get away with this?” Santino finally asked.

Rachel spun her bottle in her hand and watched the last of her cider as it swirled and foamed. “No.”

EIGHTEEN

The coffee shop might be her new favorite thinking spot. The expense of a cab ride was offset by the free pastries, and the cappuccino kept getting better now that the baristas knew how she liked it. The girl with the stars on her wrists had brought her a fresh cup with a clover cut into the foam, accompanied by a cupcake adorned by a tiny silver horseshoe made from spun sugar. Rachel thought about making a Lucky Charms joke before deciding that heavy tipping was the better part of valor.

“How’s business?” Rachel asked the barista.

“Crazy!” the girl answered, then looked at the nearly empty room and giggled. Rachel’s left eyelid twitched; the barista was close to her own age but still far too young. “Well, there’ll be another rush when work lets out.”

The girl smiled in yellows and scampered back behind the counter before Rachel could ask her anything else. Local hero status bought about fifteen seconds of conversation per cup.

It was rare when she had a lunch hour to herself. Santino had stayed behind at First District Station for a departmental meeting. The morning had been devoted to paperwork; she had hoped that Glazer’s arrest would have shifted the bureaucracy over to the FBI, but it apparently meant that the number of forms doubled. After she had signed off on the last copy, Rachel had stepped outside, hailed a cab, and returned to the scene of the scene.

She flipped her implant to reading mode and looked back down at her notepad. It was barely three pages old, replacing the ragged wreck of a pad laid open beside it. Rachel was transcribing her case notes, feeling a little like the pigeon who believed it had to spin in a circle before tapping the pellet dispenser. Back in Afghanistan, where office supplies were few and far between, she had once cracked a murder investigation after finding a new-to-her notepad at the bottom of a box of boots. When she transferred the details of the murder from the old pad to the new, something had shaken loose in her head. This technique had only worked once, but it had worked, and she returned to it when nothing else did.

(She had told herself that returning to the coffee house might help, too, but she quickly realized she had rationalized her way into an afternoon comprised entirely of caffeine and tiramisu. Still, no regrets.) 

Rachel was restructuring the timeline from scraps and little ticks, and did not recognize Edwards by his colors until he was standing by her table. She closed her new notepad and looked up at him in silence.

“May I sit?”

Her eyes moved to the middle of the room and lingered there long enough for Edwards to mentally remove the tables and replace them with three armed men. “Please,” she said dryly, and kicked the chair directly across from her so it jumped towards the judge. “How did you know I’d be here?”

“I called over to First District Station. Your partner told me.”

Liar.
The dimples were there, but she didn’t need them. Santino would have gotten in touch with her as soon as he got off of the phone with Edwards.

“No, he didn’t,” she said. “Try again.”

“Okay,” he said, and nodded towards the baristas. “They have my card. I told them to call if anything related to the other night happened.”

Rachel sighed. She should have known this place was too good to be true. “What do you want?”

He pulled his chair back as far as the space between tables allowed, and sat. “I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said. “I’ve been set up.”

“I think my implant’s buggy,” she said, running a finger across the thick of her ear. “I’m hearing an echo, but it’s on a two-day delay.”

He flared red. “This isn’t a joke,” he said quietly. 

“I know,” Rachel replied. She began to doodle in the margins of her old notepad. “You probably were set up. You’re in good company. OACET, First MPD… I guess you could argue Glazer also took a shot at the FBI when he brought them in with the kidnappings. Same applies to the three other federal agencies I saw at the shipping yard.

“And the Navy,” she said, and looked straight at him. “They were there, too. So, yeah, I’m not sure what you wanted to get out of this conversation but yes, you were set up. Someone definitely used you.” Rachel held up her notepad. “Now we just need to find out who it was, and why they did it.”

Edwards returned her stare and his conversational colors faded to wine red at the edges. She had seen the same effect in Hill in the interview room, when he finally recognized that the Phil standing in front of him wasn’t just a machine. On a whim she stuck out her right hand. “Rachel Peng, OACET,” she said.

The judge blinked. She had caught him off-guard.

“Shake it. What I have isn’t contagious without six hours of brain surgery.”

He put on a politician’s smile and his colors went to a steely professional blue as he reached towards her. 

“Forget it,” Rachel said, and drew her hand back. “You almost thought of me as a real person for a moment back there. Let me know when you get around to that again.”

He flared with colors that she generally observed in angry convicts on their way to holding cells, but politely knitted his fingers together to keep himself still. “I wanted to know if I could help.” Edwards said through his teeth. “I thought this,” he said, waving his hand to take in the coffee shop, “would prove I’m sincere.”

She almost laughed him off, but caught herself. The kidnapping was still headline news. OACET’s dramatic aerial search-and-rescue operation had been played up to portray the Agents as modern-day superheroes, and Edwards’ argument that the Agents were unaccountable to the rule of law had been thoroughly trounced after the details of the standoff between her and Bryce Knudson from Homeland were released. What did it matter if the judge was blowing with the political wind? An ally was an ally, and OACET could use Edwards’ public heel-turn to their advantage.

“Thank you,” she said. His surface colors went back to yellow-white with mild surprise; he had been expecting another attack.  Rachel flipped her old notebook open to a clean page. Hopefully she could get some useful information before Edwards realized she was interviewing him as a suspect instead of a victim. “Tell me why you think someone would target you.”