The Bar Code Tattoo (6 page)

A hand clamped onto her shoulder.

She swung around, hoping to land a smashing blow onto his nose.

He blocked her swing, gripping her wrist. “Whoa!” he cried. “Hold on!”

“Zekeal!”

His voice was a rasp. “I couldn’t call you. I’m losing my voice.”

She covered her hammering heart with her hand and bent forward. Nausea came in a wave, then passed. She had never been that terrified before.

“Sorry I scared you,” he said. “I saw you turn down here and came to get you. There aren’t any clubs in this section and it isn’t exactly safe. What are you doing here?”

“Do you know where the Lobo2MeClub is?” she asked.

“The Lobotomy? Yeah. You meeting someone there?”

She shook her head. “Just needed to get out.”

“That’s where I’m going.”

“Really?”

“It’s where I’m going now,” he replied. “Come on.”

She followed him back out of the darkness and he yanked open a black metal door at the first building they came to. Blasting music assaulted them as they walked in. It was so loud, it vibrated in her skull.

It was
exactly
what she wanted.

He pulled her close when a slow song came on. It was as though electricity ran between their two bodies. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see a snapping white current running up their sides.

In that wordless exchange they’d made a connection. “It’s hot in here,” he said, still moving to the music. “Let’s go upstairs to the roof.”

A different song came on. She’d heard it for the first time just that morning on the radio. “Okay,” she answered. “But first I want to hear this.”

“The Monsters,” he noted. “They’re astral.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and again she felt covered in that invisible veil of energy.

The Monsters

“Quasimodo”

Written by Kurt Conklin

(Music pounding)

I am a freak. I walk this planet. I don’t know my name.

My thoughts are melting into puddles. Some
days I am insane. I cannot say what’s in my heart or what I think in my brain. I am a freak walking the planet in constant pain.

(Softly)

But your love puts me away. Your love puts me away.

Is it real? Is it real? Is it real?

Is it a dream? Is it a dream? Is it a dream?

Your love puts me away. Your love puts me away.

With you it’s all okay. With you it’s all okay.

(Pounding)

I am a freak and there is always ringing in my ears.

My head is pounding with a million terrifying fears.

I do not know if I can last another day or if I can even remember how to pray. I have one thought and that is for you to stay. Esmeralda, stay. With you it’s all okay.

“I know how the guy feels,” Zekeal said softly.

“You do?” Kayla questioned. He didn’t show that kind of hurt. No one would ever guess. He always seemed completely self-assured.

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “Let’s go upstairs.”

She followed him through a back door onto dark hallway stairs. They came out to the roof of the club. The lights from the reactors were nearly blinding. Slowly, her eyes adjusted.

He leaned against a waist-high wall running the perimeter of the roof. Taking hold of her wrist, he gently drew her closer to him. Turning her hand palm up, he ran his finger along the delicate blue veins of her hand, tracing a line down to her wrist.

She looked out at the river, which reflected the lights from the generators on its black surface.

“I heard about your dad,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you have any idea what … drove him to it?” he asked gently.

“My mother says the bar code killed him, but I’m not sure why she says that. It banged him out, though. He went into this deep depression right after he got it.”

She read pain in his large, dark eyes.
He understands how it is
, she realized.
The bar code’s affected him, too.

“My dad got fired and my mother kept getting promoted in her job after they were tattoed,” he said. “At first, they both worked for a biotech lab. Dad burned out of every job he had, kept getting fired. Mom started thinking of him as a real loser. They fought about money all the time. Pretty soon they broke up.”

Another family wrecked by the bar code. “That’s banged out,” Kayla said. “Which one of them do you live with?”

“It got so I couldn’t stand either one of them, so I just cut out. The place I have now is a real dump, but at least it’s quiet. My parents aren’t there screaming at each other day and night.”

“That must be hard for you,” she said, “being all on your own.”

He grinned, though no light came to his eyes. “I get a little hungry sometimes.”

“I know what you mean,” she said with a bitter laugh, remembering her own often-empty refrigerator. “Good thing my dad prepaid my cafeteria fee at the beginning of the year or some days I wouldn’t get any food at all. God, the beginning of the year feels like it was a long time ago. In September, the bar code didn’t seem like a big deal. I didn’t think it would have any effect on my life.”

“That’s because we’ve all gotten used to being tracked through the Internet. It really started in the 1970s when credit cards were first linked to computers,” he said. “By the 1990s somebody knew every move you made with that card.”

“If this has been going on for over thirty-five years, why does the tattoo seem so horrible? And why is it turning people’s lives upside down?” she asked.

“There’s something more in that code,” Zekeal said, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. She got the idea from his quick reply that this was a question he’d considered many times before.

“What do you think it is?” she asked.

“I wish I knew. I feel like there’s a missing piece to this puzzle. Once we know what it is, a lot of things will make sense.” His eyes brightened with an idea. “Listen, when I met you tonight I wasn’t really coming here. I was going to a meeting. Come with me.”

She hesitated. What kind of meeting? It didn’t really matter, though. There was no way she would willingly part from him. They’d connected and she needed someone to be connected to, especially an attractive, exciting somebody like Zekeal. “Okay.”

She followed him out of the club and back to the dark end of the warehouse section, where she’d met up with him that night. They walked quickly to the last warehouse; she jogged at times to keep up with him.

Nothing more than black woods stood beyond that last low warehouse. Even the reactors’ lights weren’t pointed in that direction, leaving the area in shadow. Zekeal pulled hard on the metal door. When they stepped inside, Kayla folded her arms against the cold air.

“Where have you been?” an annoyed voice demanded. “And what’s
she
doing here?”

Kayla turned toward the voice and spied a circle of light at the far end of the darkness. Four figures sat around the light.

Zekeal took Kayla’s hand and, again, his touch ran through her like a jolt of electric current. He led her through the black middle area toward the group. “I’m here now,” he replied calmly.

“This is a
secret
meeting,” the same voice reminded him reproachfully. Kayla was close enough to recognize the four figures — Mfumbe, Allyson, August, and Nedra. Nedra was the sharp-voiced one, obviously angered by Kayla’s presence. When they were in the lighted circle thrown by a bare-bulb lamp set on the floor, Zekeal took hold of Kayla’s wrist and pushed up her sleeve, presenting it to the group. “She’s okay. Seventeen. Not coded.”

Mfumbe smiled at her. “Final level,” he said with an approving grin. It was good to see him there. She was always calmed by his friendliness. From the very first day they’d met, she’d felt comfortable with him.

Nedra, August, and Allyson eyed her warily.

“Where did she come from?” Nedra asked.

“I ran into her and saw she had no bar code,” Zekeal replied. “I say she stays.”

“I guess she’s okay, then,” August said.

Nedra grunted and stared down at Kayla’s chunky-heeled black boots. Kayla felt a wave of guilt. Nedra was right not to like her, to be suspicious, but not because of the bar code. She
would
take Zekeal from Nedra if it were possible. She wouldn’t do it to hurt Nedra. She just simply wouldn’t be able to turn him away if he came to her.

Zekeal disappeared into the darkness outside the circle and returned with two folding chairs, one for Kayla and one for him. They sat as August opened his handheld computer. The monitor up-lit his round face. “Okay, what are we working on for this issue?” he asked the group.

Allyson spoke first. “I want to do an article on cloning.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Nedra snapped.

“In Europe they don’t have the same bans on cloning that we have here,” Allyson explained. “Some of the first human clones are now turning seventeen and are being refused bar codes.”

“Global-1 probably wants to get patents on them,” Nedra sneered. “They have patents on everything else, on human organs, on genes, on chromosomes — why not patent clones? If you looked on
the butts of those kids, you’d probably find the Global-1 trademark stamped there.”

“Probably,” August said with a laugh. “But they’re still people; I wonder why they can’t get the bar code.”

“Nobody in the government is saying,” Mfumbe said. “The parents of the cloned kids are raising a stink about it. They say that not having a bar code makes kids outcasts.”

“That’s exactly what
we’re
saying!” Zekeal shouted, getting up and starting to pace. “Soon no one will be able to do
anything
without the bar code. Anyone who hasn’t got it will be shut out of everything — just like in Europe.”

“Soon?” Nedra scoffed. “It’s already happened.”

“I agree. My friend Amber just had to move,” Kayla joined in. “Her parents
have
bar codes but there’s something in their codes that’s messing up their entire lives.”

“They have no idea what it is?” August asked.

Kayla shook her head. “None.”

“Stuff like that is happening all over the place,” Mfumbe said. “Everything’s getting turned around. But, you know, in some cases it’s all good. My dad used to feel like he couldn’t get a break at work. But since he got his bar code, he jumped right over his boss’s head for a promotion. Now he’s his old boss’s boss. For him, getting the bar code has been great.”

“Nice for
him
,” Zekeal grumbled. Kayla was sure he was thinking of his own father. She thought
of her family and Amber’s. She remembered Gene Drake and his housemates. If the bar code was good for the Taylor family, she was glad — but then why was Mfumbe fighting it?

“Why are you here?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “Principle, I guess. Even though it’s worked out for my father, I don’t like it. And it’s humiliating to be branded like that. It makes me think of the German concentration camps.”

Kayla admired that he was able to think of more than himself. It took intelligence and moral strength, she thought, to act on principle instead of simple self-interest. Not many people could do that. It made her like him even more.

“I don’t trust it, either,” Mfumbe went on. “I don’t want to put something permanent on my body before I know what it’s all about. I don’t think they’re telling us everything there is.”

“What else could there be?” Kayla asked. She thought there was something more to it, too. But what?

“We don’t know,” Mfumbe answered. “But the government is too determined to get everybody tattooed. I just know there’s something more.”

He’s got to be right
, she thought. All her instincts told her that he was. A mere e-card, license, and medical record couldn’t be messing up lives like this, could they?

“You’re paranoid,” Nedra said. “It could easily screw you up if they saw you had too many traffic
tickets, or bad credit. That would be enough to mess things around if you applied for a job or wanted to buy a house. You don’t need any hidden thing.”

“I suppose,” Mfumbe gave in. “It just seems to me that there
is
something else in there.”

“Allyson, I’m giving you three columns on the front page for your article on cloning,” August told her. “Is that enough?”

“Should be,” Allyson agreed. Kayla noticed that she held a black box about the size of a small nuclear oven on her lap.

Zekeal told August he needed at least four columns to write about how Senator Young was hoping to block a bill in the Senate that would make the bar code required for anyone receiving public assistance. “They say that people on welfare should be required to make it easy for the government to identify them,” he told them. “As if people should lose their civil liberties because they’re poor.”

Kayla hoped her job at Artie’s Art Supply would pay enough to keep them off public assistance. It was strange to imagine her mother and herself being on welfare. They’d always been so … middle class.

Mfumbe asked for space to do another political cartoon. “I have a comic strip in mind that shows people having to marry someone that the bar code picks out for them.”

“That’s not so far-fetched,” Allyson said. “For centuries, people have married mates within their own social class. Now the bar code is creating new social classes.”

Mfumbe scribbled something on his pad, then began to sketch. From the way he kept looking up at her, Kayla suspected he was sketching her portrait.

Finally, Nedra secured her space for an article on the history of the bar code. “Let’s see what the websites are doing,” August said, tapping away at the small computer keys.

“I want to see what Dave Young’s up to,” Zekeal requested.

“That Dave Young is just a rich guy with a cause,” Nedra sneered.

“That’s exactly why he’s our best bet,” Zekeal replied. “Rich guys are the only ones who can get anything done. His father is Ambrose Young, the head of the Domestic Affairs Committee in the Senate.”

“Yeah, but Ambrose Young isn’t like his son,” August mentioned, still typing. “Didn’t you hear that report yesterday? They found out that Young senior has a ton of stock in Global-1.” He hit two more keys. “I’m in.”

They huddled around the handheld monitor and read. Several links brought them to different related sites. There was a petition in favor of maintaining at least one codeless lane on all highways. Another site enabled you to order preprinted cards
for sending to senators to protest the mandatory bar coding for public assistance bill.

After that, they checked anti–tattoo code websites from around the country. Kayla had never dreamed there was such a massive resistance movement. It was encouraging and it meant she wasn’t so unique in her concern about this. She wasn’t a paranoid malcontent. There were even lawyers who agreed with this group and insisted that the bar code was a total violation of civil liberties.

“Hey, we’re in time for a chat on the Dave Young site,” Zekeal remembered. “Let me type.” August gave him the laptop. Mfumbe sat beside him so that he could type, too.

DY:
This is important stuff. If we let Global-1 push their bills through unchallenged, I predict we will find ourselves living in a dictatorship that will rival anything Orwell ever concocted.

MT:
Are you talking about the book
1984
by George Orwell?

DY:
Yes. I suggest that you all read it if you haven’t already. Avoiding that kind of world is what’s at stake.

ZM:
What can we do?

DY:
Stay on top of information on upcoming laws and proposals. Contact government officials. Let them know how you feel.

ZM:
Don’t you think we have to do something more radical?

DY:
Not yet. If we can head this thing off at the start, I hope we can avoid a lot of problems later.

“That’s vague,” Zekeal mumbled. Mfumbe typed.

MT:
If the bar code becomes required, would you advocate civil resistance to it?

DY:
That’s why we’re working so hard now — so it doesn’t come to that.

MT:
But if it did happen, would you suggest that all people resist and not get coded, on the grounds that it is an unconstitutional law?

DY:
Can’t say right now.

Zekeal clicked them out of the chat room. “What did you do that for?” Mfumbe protested.

“He’s avoiding the issue,” Zekeal said, standing. “Dave Young’s a great guy, but that avoidance thing crashes me.”

August clicked them into a website in San Francisco. The anti-code group on that site was claiming that the bar code linked you to the devil. She remembered Nedra’s article with the quote from the Bible.

August clicked out of that site. “That group thinks drinking milk links you to the devil.”