UnDivided (36 page)

“I can also play your choice of musical genre. Please make your selection now,
Con
nor
Las
si
ter
. You can say things like ‘techno-dance' or ‘prewar rock.' ”

All hope is now with Argent, and with Risa.

Risa . . .

He holds on to the image of her, projecting it out, even as the world is projected in. Back in the room where Divan had him, he was bound so tightly to that bed, Connor couldn't touch her. He'd have given anything to have brushed her cheek one last time. He didn't care whether it was his hand or Roland's.

“Please make your musical selection now. . . .”

He knows that his life was a life worth living, and he lived it remarkably well these past two years, in spite of the bleak cards he was dealt. He knows what it means to save countless lives. He knows what it means to end a life. But more than anything he knows what it means to love. He has to believe he will take that with him, wherever it is he now goes, whether it be oblivion, or the proverbial “better place,” or an impossible web of global destinations.

“All right, I can choose for you. Your musical genre is . . . twentieth-century disco.”

He must leave the battle now. Let others take over for him. All this time he recoiled at being called the Akron AWOL. Now
he embraces it, and in defiance of his unwinding, he shifts his identity from himself, to his legend. His absence will only make his presence greater.

“Won't you take me to . . . FunkyTOWN?”

Connor doesn't know what became of the organ printer. He can only hope that it will be repaired and find its way into the right hands. And that Cam will bring down Proactive Citizenry, and that Lev will find his peace. All the things worth hoping for. He's amazed that even here, in the bowels of the beast, he finds a way to hope.

“You may feel unsettled by a sudden inability to breathe. Do not be alarmed; the need for you to breathe is no longer required.”

Perhaps it's the anesthesia, but a sense of calm begins to come over him. Instead of the despair of things slipping away, Connor feels the empowerment of letting things go.

“We will soon be ending the audiovisual portion of your experience. Let me take this opportunity to say what a pleasure it has been to serve you,
Con
nor
Las
si
ter
, on your special day.”

He stops imagining the parts of himself that he can no longer feel, and focuses on what he still can, living within each moment until the moment is gone. Until the beat of his heart is a memory. Until the memory is a memory. Until the core of all that he is, is split like an atom, releasing its energy into a waiting universe.

Do the Unwound dream? There, in the chill twilight between being, and being part of another, does an Unwind's fragmented mind struggle to bridge the distance? To the Unwound, that distance must be greater than the space between stars.

Still, if they live, as the law insists they do, they must
dream just like everyone else. Many of the “traditional living” insist they don't dream, but that's only because they refuse to remember their own surreal worlds of rewound hopes, fears, and memories.

•  •  •

For Risa, the night that follows Connor's unwinding falls quickly due to the
Lady Lucrezia
's eastward heading. Risa's dreams that night are fitful and fraught with despair. She dreams that she's having tea with Sonia in the middle of her shop, in the midst of earthquakes. Fragile porcelain figurines fall from their shelves and shatter, but Sonia pays no heed. Everywhere are age-old clocks of every shape and size, all of them ticking in anxious arrhythmia.

“They've unwound him,” she tells Sonia between tremors. “They've unwound Connor.”

“I know, dear, I know.” Sonia's voice is sympathetic and comforting, but all of that comfort is swallowed by the pit of Risa's distress.

“Sometimes,” says Sonia, “the random events I spoke of work against us, and there's nothing to be done.”

“I have to get the printer!” Risa insists over the din of clocks and crashes. “It's what he would want.”

“Not your concern anymore,” Sonia tells her, “but rest assured, dear, I'll fight the good fight as long as I have air left in these lungs.”

And Risa finds herself filled with an even deeper anguish, for she suddenly realizes that there
is
no air left in Sonia's lungs. She's already dead. Their attacker was not the kind of man to leave witnesses.

“Don't forget that Connor is still counting on you,” dead Sonia reminds her. “It's all up to you and Grace's good-for-nothing brother. Connor had a plan. Come through for him!”

The ground shakes again. Chandeliers overhead tinkle,
threatening to plunge, and suddenly something else in the antique shop comes into focus. The eighty-eight faces of Divan's dread instrument now loom behind Sonia.

“Something the matter, dear?”

But before Risa can speak, all the eyes open in unison, to stare her down in mute accusation.

She bolts awake unable to catch her breath, finding herself alone in a dark airborne night, rife with turbulence.

•  •  •

Cam's dreams, usually more disjointed than the dreams of others, coalesce tonight out of the meaningless memory snippets of his internal community, into something almost tangible. Before him is a marble staircase that seems to have no end. He climbs it until reaching a temple, a gleaming white Parthenon, its pillars evenly spaced and perfectly carved. The whole structure seems to be of one piece, as if it were hewn right out of the stone of the mountain. Inside, larger than life, are golden statues to the gods of Proactive Citizenry, and there, at the far end, is a statue of Roberta.

“Lay yourself on my altar,” she commands. “The blood of many must be spilled, and you, Cam, hold the blood of many.” Her voice is so compelling, Cam doesn't know how much longer he can resist it.

•  •  •

Grace dreams that she's on the diving platform again—the one she refused to leap from as a child. Only this time, it's so high, she's at cruising altitude. Argent is down below, urging her to jump, but she can't because she has a baby in her arms. Someone storked her a baby. Why would someone do that to her? She nears the edge of the platform, and as she does, she realizes it's not a baby in her arms at all. She's holding the organ printer.

“Jump, Gracie,” yells Argent, too far away to be seen. “You're ruining it for everybody.”

And so, holding on to the printer, she leaps toward a pool so far below, it seems the size of a postage stamp.

•  •  •

Lev's dream is far simpler than any of the others on this night. He finds himself in the yellowing treetops of an urban park, above the park bench on which he actually sleeps. In his dream, he leaps weightless from limb to limb until there's nowhere left to go, because the trees give way to an expanse of water. So he holds tightly to the last tree, watching the light of the moon dance on the waters, his eyes drawn to the statue on its own little island in the harbor, knowing that dawn will come all too soon.

“Friends, it is with deep, deep regret that I inform you that the Parental Override bill has just been passed by the House of Representatives, and is now on its way to the Senate, where it is also expected to pass. For those of you living under, hiding beneath, or being smashed in the head by a rock, this means that the Juvenile Authority is one step closer to being able to go into a home—any home—and round up anyone between their thirteenth and seventeenth birthdays, and have them unwound without parental consent. All they'll need to do is prove ‘incorrigibility,' by a loose legal definition.

“The good news here—if any of this can be called good news—is that Parental Override is still just a bill. It still needs to pass in the Senate, and be signed into law by the president. But I assure you it will become the law of the land if we don't do something to stop it.

“Today I don't speak to the supporters of Parental Override. I don't speak to its opponents, either. I'm talking to those of you out there who are sitting silently, allowing this to happen. All of
you out there who know it's wrong, but are too terrified of clappers, and the angry kids on your corner, and maybe even your own kids to speak out against it. You think it's out of your hands, but that's not true! These things aren't happening because of some government conspiracy. I mean, sure, big-money interests are trying to push it through, but there's always big money lobbying for influence in Washington. That's nothing surprising, and nothing new. No, if this happens,
we
made it happen. We chose fear over hope. We chose to beat our children into submission. Is that the world you want to live in?

“The bill won't worm its way to a Senate vote until November, which means we will get a chance to have our say. Now, more than ever, we need to rally. Remember—we meet at dawn on Monday, November first—All Saints' Day—on the National Mall, between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument. Whether we have ten in our uprising, or ten thousand, we need to make our voices heard. Or the next time someone hears your voice, it might be in someone else's throat.”

The ferry to Liberty Island has not changed much in a hundred years. Newer boats, perhaps, but even the new ones look like something from a bygone era. There was talk about building a subway line underneath the bay that connected the great lady to the mainland, but, for once, sanity prevailed, the project was killed, and the statue remained accessible only by overcrowded, overpriced ferry. It remained a key rite of the New York tourist experience.

As in all high-profile locations, there are plenty of security measures in place—NYPD officers, Juvey-cops, and various rent-a-cops are all over Battery Park, where the ferries board,
as well as on the ferries themselves, and, of course, on Liberty Island—but on the island, the NYPD is replaced by New Jersey police, since Miss Liberty is technically a part of the Garden State. It's something New Yorkers are in denial about—that Liberty Island is really part of New Jersey. Regardless, there is no shortage of intimidating firepower, because liberty is not protected by tranquilizers. Mostly it's protected by lethal ceramic bullets, the kind specially designed to kill clappers without blowing them up in the process.

For years there have been fears of a clapper attack on the statue, but so far they've left her alone. The authorities hypothesize that by maintaining the fear of a clapper attack, the movement is creating more terror than if they actually did blow it up. The truth is that Proactive Citizenry considers itself too patriotic to ever do something so heinous as to turn Miss Liberty into shrapnel.

There's always one protest or another on the island. People gather there for countless causes. Usually they're peaceful in nature. A few dozen people with banners and a bullhorn garnering a little media attention. The violent protesters know better than to bring their anger there. Violent folk tend to rage against the system in places that are less symbolic and more effective.

On a sunny day in early October, a boy with a shaved head and names tattooed all over his body boards the three o'clock ferry to Liberty Island.

From Battery Park, she seems much smaller and farther away than he thought she would. The ferry ride is also much longer than he had thought.

He is asked to show his identification three times. Once in
Battery Park, once before boarding the ferry, and a third time on board. Each time the officer backs off upon seeing the ID is of Arápache origin. None of them want to invoke the wrath of the tribe.

As the ferry approaches, it circles Liberty Island, giving a nice 360-degree view of the statue. Photo ops for everyone. Lev has no camera to record the visit, but he takes in the view just like everyone else.

From the green copper folds of her flowing robes extends a brand-new aluminum/titanium arm, shining silver-gray in the bright sun and holding a new torch. The new arm and torch is half the weight of the old one. The plan, Lev had read, was to spray the new arm with a copper oxide paint so the arm would match the rest of her body. However, tests proved that the paint was flawed. It wouldn't bond with the alloy, and thus would quickly peel, leaving her arm looking like rotting flesh. It was decided to leave her arm with a stainless steel sheen until they could figure out a way to match it to the rest of her body, or until people got used to it the way it is. The alloy is designed to never rust, however, without the protective paint, the bolts holding the panels together are very susceptible to the corrosive sea air.

As Lev's ferry nears the island, he can see that those bolts already have begun to rust. Less than a month after installation, he can see discolored seams all the way up her arm, to her fingertips and to the torch. Engineers are probably hard at work trying to find a solution.

The ferry docks, leaving the excited tourists to explore the island and wait in the long line to climb inside the statue, all the way up to the crown, and to the new torch—something that was off-limits for many years, due to the old arm's instability. Lev joins the cattle march of tourists off the ferry.

“Nice body art, freak,” says someone behind him, someone
who's protected by the anonymity of the crowd. Far too many people think they can get away with anything if they're protected by anonymous masses. Well, let them deride him. Let them despise him. He stopped caring what people thought of him a very long time ago. Or at least, what strangers thought.

There's a protest rally today in the shadow of Miss Liberty. Fifty or so people are rallying for Albanian rights. Lev's not quite sure who's taken the rights of Albanians away, but someone must have. A small news crew is present. The reporter, still prebroadcast, has a lackey spray her hair with some sort of industrial megahold mist so that it can resist the constant wind that rips across the island. The lackey keeps spraying until the reporter's hair has the rigidity of plastic.