Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (7 page)

Rachel was sure this particular conference would be of the backpatting-and-grandstanding variety. Edwards was a would-be politician who lacked political strategy. It was a savagely dangerous combination; he knew he had to get his face out there but wasn’t quite sure how. Judges were nominated by a commission in the D.C. circuit judiciary and Edwards had earned his nomination from his record as a trial lawyer, but his fledgling platform was nothing more than a mix of his own views and items culled from the headlines.

(She had read his colors several times and wasn’t sure if the judge was as vehemently against OACET as he claimed, or if he had accidentally tripped over a topic he could use to distinguish himself as a candidate. She had never caught him lying when he ranted against them, but she still thought it might be the latter since Edwards was awfully comfortable with blending technology with the law when it suited his purpose. The man was a trainwreck, she had told Mulcahy, and her boss had agreed but said the problem with trainwrecks was that people got hurt.)

She entered the store and Edwards’ eyes slipped over and past her. Rachel was insulted; she had met him no fewer than four times at various functions. Charley stood at the counter off to the side, hands cupped around a cold drink. He saw her in the crowd and his conversational colors leapt to vivid red, then gray as his face fell. Rachel associated red with strong and sometimes negative emotions and she didn’t know what to make of it in Charley. Shame that she had caught him in a lie, maybe.

“Can’t be helped, Charley! Work is work.”

He glanced down as his phone vibrated. He faded back to his normal bluish-gray as he read her text, and gave her a shy smile.

“They tell us we’ve entered a new era.” Edwards’ voice was too big for the store. “One in which technology might have finally outpaced our ability to control it. I say we’ve not only been living in that brave new world for decades, but we welcomed it with open arms! We are responsible for this lack of control. We are the reason a man was beaten within an inch of his life, right here.

“Because we didn’t act.

“We let them build their toys, those almost magical devices which let them spy on our every waking moment, and we didn’t say no. We allowed them to take these toys and to put them them into use in law enforcement and the courts. Even if these toys violated the law, the Constitution itself, we created reasons for their use through applying false logic or hiding behind our willful ignorance.

“Friends, we have rationalized away the integrity of our justice system for the sake of convenience and the unattainable goal of complete security. We have been seduced by the idea that we must throw away our values and rebuild ourselves for a changing world each time the opportunity presents itself.”

Rachel moved into the crowd. When she had first started developing her sixth sense, she couldn’t go anywhere with more than a small smattering of people or she’d have problems processing the madness of human emotion. Now she loved crowds for that very reason. She especially loved crowds with a purpose. Movie theaters, concerts, places where crowds were focused on a single concept… It was beautiful to watch human beings break from their self-centered ruts and come together. Each person was still unique, still kept their same cores, but their conversational colors blended and harmonized within a shared spectrum. This past Fourth of July, Rachel had gone to the fireworks display at the National Mall and hadn’t bothered to look up once.

“Friends, newer is not always better. No matter what they tell you, we are not dangling by a thread over obsolescence. My experiences have taught me that an authentic society isn’t built on the backs of technology, but is supported by basic human decency.  It is time—it is past time!—for us to recognize that innovation is not always a good word. We are the ones who decide what to do with our fancy little toys, whether we want to trade who we are for the sake of innovation. It’s long past time that we all take a step back and look at what we’ve built, and then ask ourselves what we risk if we continue down this path.”

He was an excellent public speaker but the crowd was bored to the point of beige; Rachel couldn’t shake the feeling she was surrounded by carpet samples. There was no unification of color here, just a mass of people feigning interest. His audience was mostly reporters or entourage, and both groups had heard it all before.

Except...

As she moved among them, she noticed that some of them were emotionally involved in what the judge was saying. Three men ran strong with Edward’s golden teak, with ribbons of jagged, electrified red wrapped around it. 

Aw hell,
she thought. This was her first time seeing this particular phenomenon but she had a good idea what it meant. It wasn’t too much of a jump to assume that the local anti-tech or anti-OACET zealots would rally to Edwards as a leader. She checked them for weapons; all three men were armed, one with a Heckler & Koch MP7 under his suit. 

Honest, stark terror shot down her spine. Washington D.C. had some of the toughest gun control laws in the country, and these guys had some serious boundary issues if they were willing to carry concealed to a public event sponsored by a judge.

Rachel called Santino’s cell.
“I’m leaving,”
she told him.

“What?” It was always strange to hold a phone conversation in her head. Santino sounded as close as an Agent. “I already parked. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“I scanned the crowd. There’s a disturbingly high gun-to-creep ratio here. And somebody brought their kid and I don’t want things to escalate,”
she added, noting a mother and a young boy playing beginner’s Sudoku together in the window seat by the front door. They had the petulant air of persons forced to kill time and Rachel wondered who had dragged them along.

“Wow. Yeah, okay. I’ll meet you on …” he said, then paused to check for street signs.

“I’ll find you. Get to a bar a couple of blocks away and we’ll hole up there until—” 

“Agent Peng?”

She swore across their connection as Edwards caught her on her way towards the door. She heard Santino start to run as he promised he’d be right there, and he hung up to call for backup.

“I thought I recognized you,” Edwards said, all smiles. “Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we have a representative from OACET with us. Is this a formal visit?”

Rachel smiled back. “No, sir, this is pure coincidence. I just love a good cup of coffee.”

She reached out through the link and poked Administration.
“No time to chat,”
she said without waiting to learn who was on duty.
“Send someone to me for damage control at an Edwards event. Possible mob.”

“Why don’t you stay and join us? We’d love to hear your thoughts.”

“Sorry, but I’m off the record tonight,” she said cheerfully, breaking her attention away from the panicked chatter on the other end of the connection.

“Really? You have no opinions about the attack?”

“No comment.” This was bordering on harassment. No sensible politician would selectively target someone at a rally. Edwards needed a campaign manager in the worst way. She had a sudden mental image of a sophisticated older woman in a pantsuit floating down from an unseen cloud like Mary Poppins by way of a banner with Vote Edwards! stenciled on its face. Oh, the songs they would sing.

“A man was brutally attacked, right outside this store. They saw it,” Edwards said as he swept out an arm. He got a lukewarm response from the baristas. “But since it didn’t show up on video, the police say it didn’t happen.

“A concussion, four broken ribs, and a collapsed lung, Agent Peng, and the MPD claims it didn’t happen? What’s wrong with this picture?”

“No comment,” Rachel said. Most of the crowd had done the usual sideways leaping thing they did when they learned she was OACET, climbing over themselves like lemmings pushed towards a cliff to avoid touching her. The exceptions were the media, who pressed forward, and the three armed men who swept through the cracks to form a human barrier across her path.

“We’re all just here to learn, Agent Peng. Can OACET explain why the tape was in error?”

She ignored him and pushed forward, trying to intimidate the three men in front of her with a quick sweeping stare. No luck.

“Come on, Agent Peng. Why won’t you help us out?”

Edward’s small and self-appointed militia wore very nice suits to complement their very expensive haircuts. They had the look of well-fed young lawyers right before they made partner and were allowed to put on weight. Rachel would have been more comfortable if there was just the smallest hint of camouflage or religious iconography somewhere on their persons; being gunned down by yuppies in an upscale coffee house was not a scenario she had played out in her mind and she felt woefully unprepared.

They came at her slowly, three wide, and stopped just out of arm’s length. Rachel cut to the side to walk around them. The crowd parted for her but the men moved to block her path to the exit a second time. Edwards’ militia couldn’t decide what to do. They knew what they wanted to do (turbulent red, with thick streaks of black), but they couldn’t find a reason.

Rachel was not about to give it to them. She stopped and stood at parade rest. She kept her voice flat, her body completely still. “Please move.”

They stood their ground. The door was open to let in the night air and she was so close to escape she could have chatted with the passersby walking their yappy dogs.

“Please move.”

Nothing.

“Judge Edwards, please ask them to move.”

The militia split and two of the men flanked her, and she realized the situation was actively dangerous. She should have guessed from the matching haircuts; the men had come to the coffee store as a group. An individual could be persuaded, but a group was unified by a cause.

She hated being a cause.

And Edwards didn’t know they were armed.

Edwards laughed. From his perspective, she had allowed herself to stay, to become part of the discussion. Otherwise, she would have shouldered the men aside and vanished into the night. 

“You’re a federal employee, Agent Peng. If they want to engage you in conversation, that’s their right.”

It sounded good but Edwards was all but lying. Redress of grievances was not intended to facilitate the wrangling of lone women in coffee shops. Still, nothing would come from arguing law with a judge so she stood her ground. Rachel knew she looked like an idiot, standing motionless and staring off into space, but at least the militia was aware they couldn’t touch her without the weight of consequences shifting against them. As long as no physical contact was made, nothing would happen.

Then the man with the personal defense weapon tried to shove her. 

He was one of those who had flanked her and she had been watching him and his Heckler & Koch like a hawk, so when he reached out to push her from behind, he fell forward through open air and found her standing a foot to the left.

“Please don’t,” she said in that same flat voice. She wondered if it would be better to beg in a situation like this, to try and play up her humanity some, or whether that would only make things worse. The Army had emphasized calm and control above all, but they hadn’t been exactly on the cutting edge of cyborg public relations.

Oh well. She wasn’t much for begging anyhow.

They closed on her. The man who threw the first punch was down in two moves and the others backed off to either side, going pale with anxiety as their buddy gasped like a fish on the floor. To his credit, the judge barked orders into the crowd to try and regain control, but besides herself there wasn’t a single person there, militia included, who had come to the press conference to hear what he had to say.

A quick memory, that of Mulcahy telling her she was under no circumstances to ever draw her gun in public (“Never. Not even if—”) swam up unbidden. It had been easy to agree in the quiet of his office, several months back before the crazies had started swarming. 

The man with the Heckler & Koch was standing between her and Edwards, which gave her a clear path to the door if she was willing to go through his friend to get there. Rachel had no problem with that. They were past the point of no return and she needed to lead these overfed lawyers into the street before the guns came out. She dropped her stance to put the second man on the floor, thinking for a brief moment that once he was out of her way she’d be able to make it outside before anything worse happened.

Then Heckler & Koch lit up white-hot red behind her.

Rachel’s conscious mind turned command over to instinct before his right hand made it inside of his suit. She had been on the business end of an automatic weapon before, but never while standing directly in front of a woman and her child: the mother and son playing Sudoku by the entrance hadn’t had the good sense to move. She leapt towards them and thought that if she did survive this, if he didn’t shoot her cold in the head, if her vest couldn’t stop an entire magazine of bullets, if all of the stars in heaven aligned for a miracle, she’d still have banged the hell out of her knees. 

With her back towards the man with the PDW, she grabbed the mother and son by the arms and yanked them off of the ledge. She kicked over a small coffee table with a thick granite top and pushed them down on the floor behind it, crushing the three of them into as small a target as possible. Rachel jerked at the sound of screaming, and it was only after the adrenaline stopped pounding in her ears that she realized she hadn’t been shot.