The End of Marking Time (16 page)

“This stuff is hot, isn’t it?”

I pulled out a pair of diamond earrings. They were about a half carat each. “These have been chilling in here quite a while.” I pulled out a necklace, but it was way too much. It had to weigh five or six carats. No way she’d believe he bought it himself.

I spread out a deep-red cloth like the ones they had at jewelry stores and arranged the pieces. He was amazed at the stuff I was taking out. My heart sank when I saw the useless stacks of cash. Even the jewelry would be hard to sell. I didn’t have one of those thumb machines, and unless I bought a jewelry story there was no way to sell this stuff and make it look legit.

Joel’s eyes jumped from piece to piece. He kept shaking his head like he was trying to talk himself out of taking anything. I put the really high-end stuff away. We wanted his girl to be impressed, but not suspicious. Eventually he settled on the earrings.

“What do you want for these?”

“A cart full of groceries,” I said. He stuck out his hand to shake and I said, “And some help getting them home.”

He didn’t flinch. He kept the earrings, then we put the rest of the stuff back and headed for the grocery store. He told me how he met his girl on the way. Inside, he showed me to the frozen section where I could take most of the stuff and cook it in the microwave without too much work. I grabbed an armful of frozen pizzas, another few boxes of Devil Dogs, and a bunch of other stuff I wasn’t sure I liked, but Joel assured me was pretty good and easy to make.

On the way to the checkout I found a whole box of donuts made in the bakery. I didn’t have a coffee maker, so I couldn’t make coffee at home, but that was about the only thing I had to do without for the next two days.

Joel pressed his thumb on the scanner and found out the earrings cost him a little over a hundred and twenty bucks. Not bad. They were probably worth two thousand retail, judging by the size of the diamonds and the house I took them from.

All the way home he talked about his girl. How hot she was and how into him she was. They were going to get married. As soon as he finished the program, she was going to move out of her mother’s house and in with him. He was going to get a job and have kids. The whole American dream fairytale. It was the happiest I’d seen him all day. Even though I’d screwed up and spent every cent, I was happy with the way the day turned out.

The chocolate frosting on the donuts didn’t taste quite right with orange juice. I don’t usually drink orange juice, but what do you drink in the morning if you can’t afford coffee? I was sitting at the kitchen table feeling good about what I’d done for Joel the day before and thinking about what torment Wendell’s lesson would bring, when someone banged a fist hard against my door.

Only cops and jealous husbands knock like that.

Even before I got up, I knew I was in trouble.

I left my second donut half eaten and a little juice in the bottom of my glass and went to the door. When I opened it, two cops spun me around and clamped cuffs on my wrists. Again no Miranda warning, no hint of what I’d done or what they were charging me with. They hustled me downstairs, one in front, one behind.

In fifteen minutes I was at the courthouse. Wendell hadn’t arrived, so they put me in a room and handcuffed me to a heavy pipe. I sat on the bench and waited. This was my second time here and I was beginning to understand that life in this new era wasn’t that different from the simulation. Wendell and the police knew everything I did. The next few minutes were weird. I don’t know if Wendell was smart enough to have planned this, but I was thinking about my life and what I’d done. It was the exact same way I thought about working my virtual self through the simulation. I evaluated every step I’d made in the last day and thought about what I could have done wrong. Could the black box lessons have hit me that hard? If it was the lessons, Wendell was a genius.

Wendell never came in. A court officer in a white shirt escorted me to the courtroom. When he led me up front toward Joel at the defense table, I thought I was being brought in to testify against him, but the officer didn’t bring me to the witness stand. He brought me to the defense table on the opposite side of Wendell.

Joel hung his head low and I knew we were both in serious trouble.

Wendell looked flustered. Tufts of hair stuck out on both sides like he’d been pulling at it all night. His bloodshot eyes focused on the judge. He didn’t tell me to keep quiet, but he didn’t need to. My comfort with courtrooms had disappeared somewhere between Joel telling me about the cat baggers and Stephan telling me he’d seen one of their torture videos. I didn’t know how much tolerance Wendell had left for me. Joel had told me the transfers to the cat baggers were unofficial so they couldn’t be invalidated by some judge. If Wendell decided not to take the heat for me again, my records would disappear and no one I knew would ever see me again. I could only hope I’d be headed back to my apartment after court. Wendell had problems and I was making them worse. I only wish he’d told me the whole story sooner.

Even if I had my own apartment and the freedom to walk around the city, I was still a prisoner deep inside the belly of the system. I was no freer than I would be in a cell. The scenery and the food were just nicer. I wondered if I’d ever be free again. The cops could track me wherever I went, so it wouldn’t be hard for them to put me back in.

The judge stopped reading at his desk and called the proceeding to order. Joel and I were being tried together. After my last trial, I was ready for things to move fast.

The prosecutor opened by reading a statement from a woman who had been Joel’s future mother-in-law until her daughter came home with the diamond earrings. She was the one who called the police. The investigation that followed was partially automated and amazingly thorough. Joel’s recent transactions were scrutinized and at no time had he legitimately purchased diamond earrings.

The prosecutor directed us to the monitors mounted into each desk. Wendell shuffled some papers and we saw a green line and a purple line that snaked around a map of our neighborhood. The purple line, I quickly realized, tracked everywhere I had been in the last three days. The prosecutor narrated where the green line, Joel, joined me in the courtyard just days earlier, and how we’d gone to lunch, to see Stephan, to the bank, and to the grocery store.

I knew I was in deep trouble then.

Joel didn’t even look at the screen.

Next the bar bill was displayed along with the rejection when I tried to purchase the last round of beers. Our trip to the bank was shown on video, complete with the call from Morris Farnsworth with perfect audio coming through the speakers at our table.

The prosecutor opened a metal box and started digging things out. It was my safe deposit box! Only I was supposed to be able to access that box. That’s why I kept everything there. What happened to my rights? Soon the prosecutor’s table was covered in jewelry and stacks of cash. Wendell didn’t say anything. All I could do was watch.

There was no video of Joel taking the earrings from the box, but it wasn’t a difficult leap for the judge to make. If there was any doubt, it was removed when the judge saw him buy my groceries and help me lug them home to my apartment. The video from my kitchen clearly showed all the items going into my refrigerator and onto my counter.

The next part really blew my mind. They couldn’t prove the earrings were stolen because I’d done such a good job covering my tracks. The victims would remember being robbed, but they weren’t attuned to police activity enough to know their items had been recovered. The cases were so cold, they would never be found deep in the files at police headquarters. Ah, the old days of paper files. The police couldn’t afford to dig through their files long enough to find the rightful owners, so they couldn’t prove I’d stolen anything. No matter. The prosecutor argued that it was impossible for me to legitimately have so much cash, or the jewelry appraised at seventy-five thousand dollars, because I’d never had a job.

He went so far as to analyze my mother’s and my grandmother’s assistance from the state and the fact that neither of them had ever held a job. The judge was convinced that I couldn’t have inherited the items in the box. It was common sense, but in all my experience with the law, the burden to prove every element of a case fell on the government.

They gave me a chance to explain where the jewelry and cash had come from. What lie would cover five years of breaking and entering? I couldn’t hatch one that quickly. If I had, Wendell would have gone postal.

They prodded. Could I show receipts? Could I produce witnesses?

No. I said nothing. Wendell and Joel didn’t even look at me.

The contents of my box were confiscated to pay for my care. I wouldn’t learn until later that cash actually had value. The bio payment devices only worked within the United States. If you left the country, you had to bring cash or credit cards. I could have gone to another country and lived well for years had I known, but it was too late.

The prosecutor asked Joel if he’d taken the earrings from the box.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Prosecution rests, Your Honor.”

Sitting in that defendant’s chair waiting for the judge’s decision, I had a bitter realization. Any kid who’d been to the principal’s office more than once would know Joel and I had lost our case. The outcome was assured, but my revelation was deeper. Everything I’d taught myself about how to survive was useless. I could stand in a man’s house while he made dinner, wait for him to go to bed, and then take what I wanted, but that didn’t do me any good any more. I couldn’t sell what I took and I wasn’t about to start wearing the jewelry I lifted. Even worse, the most lucrative commodity of all had been wiped away by the financial wizards who tracked every dollar, every purchase, every penny of interest and profit. They had put me out of business.

I had no choice but to change. In a few seconds I’d learn how close I had come to missing my chance.

The judge pronounced Joel guilty of receiving stolen property and committing fraud by buying my groceries to pay for it. I was found guilty of selling stolen property. The thefts of the jewelry and cash were long past. They didn’t bother to prosecute those, because without prison a conviction was a conviction. There was no prison term to be made longer by adding charges. What I’d done so far hadn’t even changed the program as far as I knew, but then I was still naive enough to think the entire program was stored on the discs in that black carry case.

I watched the judge’s every movement. Joel had his head hung down as if he knew what was to come.

“The relearners must remain separated by fifty yards at all times.”

“They’re living almost that close,” Wendell protested.

“No longer,” the judge ordered.

One of the court officers went to work typing something into a computer. If we came within fifty yards of each other after we left the courthouse, we’d both receive an electric shock from our ankle bracelets. The shock would continue until we separated. It would be cruel for us to live in the same complex.

Wendell stared at the judge. He knew immediately what that meant. Joel did too, but I had to hear the judge’s words to understand.

“Choose,” the judge ordered.

Wendell’s fingers ran a well-worn path through his hair. He looked from side to side and then said to me, “You better not screw up again.”

Joel’s head dropped. His hands caught his forehead before it slammed against the table. He didn’t see Wendell walk forward and click the computer screen. When he pressed his thumb on the scanner, Joel’s fate was sealed. He’d been so close to making it, to marrying and settling down. In the end it was the girl’s mother who unraveled things for him. The pressure pushed him to me, and my ignorance dug a hole too deep for him to crawl out of.

Joel’s loss meant I had been saved.

Wendell led me out of the room and that was the last time I saw Joel. I asked about him in the yard and even walked back to ask Stephan what happened, but no one could ever tell me. I tried not to think about what they could do with the black box and a man confined to a small apartment, high in a building. Whatever it was, they were far beyond electric shocks and childlike computer simulations. He couldn’t escape with a tracking device implanted in his skull. The only way out for Joel was the window. He knew it and I knew it. The only question lingering in that room I’d just left, was how long it would take for him to hurl himself through the glass.

Bad as I felt for him, I had my own problems.

Wendell led me into a room a few doors down from the courtroom. The door sealed like a refrigerator and when I sat down at the small table, Wendell exploded into a rage of insults that went on and on until he was out of breath. He kept grabbing his hair, like it was a stand-in for my neck. His wild eyes looked like he’d been working for days without sleep. The mild-mannered guy who’d been so calm the day we met in the hospital almost lost control. He could have pummeled me. What would they do to the state’s most successful reeducator if he attacked me? They couldn’t punish him. He couldn’t become someone else’s lab rat. A thin line of self-control was the only thing that kept Wendell’s rage from turning violent.