Текст книги "Undivided"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

24 • Cam

Security at the Molokai complex is state-of-the-art and extreme. No one gets into the compound who doesn’t belong there. The outside fences are electrified and tranq-charged. The gates boast scanners that can sniff you and decode your DNA just as easily as tell your brand of deodorant. Only the best for Proactive Citizenry’s bioresearch facility. Unfortunately, all security systems are flawed and limited by the arrogance of whoever designed it. In this case, the designers were arrogant enough to think that they only needed to secure the place from people on the outside. No one counts on a fox that’s already inside the fence.

Newly tweaked and effectively remotivated, Camus Comprix is, for all intents and purposes, glitch-free. True, there may still be some issues, but in a few short days Cam will be the problem of the US military, and his issues will go with him. General Bodeker has not only purchased his physical self, but his emotional self as well. Not just his presence but his problems, whatever they turn out to be.

Cam goes for a daily run on the expansive grounds of the compound, where sugarcane and taro root still grow right up to the edge of cliffs overlooking the sea. It’s all still harvested and sold—Proactive Citizenry is all about employing local residents and paying them higher-than-standard wages to satisfy the organization’s need to feel they are Forward-Thinking for Humanity®. Roberta, and everyone else who is a part of Proactive Citizenry, seem to believe in the good work they’re doing. They also believe in getting extremely rich while doing it.

Cam doesn’t run alone. He’s not allowed. One of the guards, a particularly bouef one, always joins him. Safety in numbers. They weave along the path that runs at the edge of the fields that grow year round, harvested in staggered intervals. Some patches are clear-cut, others still green. As they move from a clear-cut area and into tall cane, Cam bursts into a sudden sprint, catching his jogging partner off guard. The path curves left, and as soon as he’s out of the guard’s view, Cam turns sharply, disappearing into the cane.

“Mr. Comprix!” he hears the guard shout. They all call him “Mister” here. Cam pushes on, knowing exactly where he’s going, trying to keep from knocking down the cane and creating an obvious path. The stiff leaves whip at his face as he barrels through, stinging, but he doesn’t care. For a moment he wonders if he’s miscalculated, and if he’ll come from the field into an unexpected ocean inlet, where he’d go flying off the edge of a cliff to his doom.

“Mr. Comprix!” No doubt his jogging companion is now talking into his ear piece, spreading the word that Cam is AWOL.

He comes to another path, a wider one, but crosses over it, into a thick copse of bamboo that grows much higher than the cane. The bamboo is dense and hard to push through. It’s there for one reason—to create an environmentally aesthetic façade for the facility behind it. In other words, to hide it. The place doesn’t appear on maps. It doesn’t even show up in satellite photos, at least not the ones available to the public. From the outside it appears to be just a warehouse—the way a movie studio soundstage is a warehouse: a large hollow building that can be redesigned on the inside to be whatever is needed at the time.

There’s no telling what Proactive Citizenry has tinkered and toyed with here. Perhaps this is where they began the great agave extinction by genetically engineering the agave-specific Cyan Snout weevil, but only after buying up massive quantities of tequila that now goes for thousands of dollars a bottle. Or maybe this is where they grafted new faces on people in the Witness Relocation Program—a lucrative government contract that they had for eight years until the program’s budget was cut, making it no longer worthwhile. Or maybe this is where they did all that intensive research that brought about the cure for muscular dystrophy. While the third one was something Proactive Citizenry widely publicized, the first two Cam found unexpectedly while hacking their computer system.

From Cam’s vantage point at the fence, he sees three FedEx trucks at the front entrance. Workers unload cargo. One of the drivers, in familiar purple-and-black shirt and shorts, hands a clipboard to none other than Roberta, who is there to sign for the delivery. Cam thinks it odd that Proactive Citizenry wouldn’t use their own private delivery trucks to shuttle this cargo from the airport, but then maybe the CEO of FedEx is on Proactive Citizenry’s board. After all, it’s the preferred philanthropic organization of corporate America. The more Cam considers it, the more he realizes it must be true. How ingenious! Why go to the mountain when you can use an existing infrastructure to move the mountain to you, one piece at a time?

Cam leaves, having seen what he needed to see. He heads back through the bamboo, takes a different route, cutting through the cane and taro, then onto the jogging path once more, completing his jog back to the house.

One of the ubiquitous guards stands there, not too pleased. “Found him,” he says into his earpiece, then to Cam, “Where’ve you been?”

“Shortcut through the sugarcane. Bad idea, though, the stuff hurts.” He wipes some blood from one of several small scratches on his face.

“Do us all a favor and stick to the path next time. We get crap every time you don’t toe the line.”

“Gotta make life interesting.”

“Dull is fine by me.”

As he goes up to take a shower, Cam considers what he had seen. Those could have been shipments of just about anything, except for one fact. The shipping containers were FedEx stasis packs. Refrigerated. Perfect for live organs, although they’re not usually used for that. But then, Proactive Citizenry knows how to do things without raising red flags. A FedEx plane flies in and out of Molokai daily. How many parts, Cam wonders, are flowing into this complex every day? With so much going in, it’s only a matter of time before things begin coming out. . . .

•  •  •

Roberta doesn’t trust Cam the way she used to—but like the designers of the security system, she trusts herself and her own ability not to be outwitted. Herein lies the problem of building someone smarter than yourself—because even with the nanite “worm” selectively routing his memory, Cam has no problem duplicating the holographic digital signature of her security badge. That’s easy. The hard part is finding a way to convince the security computer that Roberta is in two places at once, because an identity signature pinging from two separate locations is certain to trip an alarm. In the end, he takes a different tack, and instead convinces the server that today is, in fact, yesterday. Since no one told the computer that there’s no such thing as time travel, it sees nothing out of the ordinary when history repeats itself in a different place.

The rear door of the secret facility—the factory hidden within the bamboo—opens as obediently as Aladdin’s cave to the correct “open sesame,” now that he has cloned Roberta’s badge.

Cam isn’t sure whether it would help or hinder him to know why he’s doing this. All he knows—and he knows this beyond a shadow of a doubt—is that The Girl whose love motivates him is worth it. The fact that he doesn’t know who she is anymore is irrelevant: His pretweaked self knew, and he trusts that self more than he trusts himself now.

It’s five thirty a.m. There are plenty of guards, but they’re anything but quiet, and he can hide long before they pass by on their routine patrols. There are also plenty of security cameras, but he already has the monitors running happy little video loops of quiet little hallways. The place is his to explore.

Using Roberta’s forged security card, he gains access into several rooms. They’re all the same. Long wards lined with empty beds, perhaps fifty in each. It’s in the fourth room he visits that he hits the jackpot.

In this room, the beds are occupied.

He had a suspicion of what he might see, but imagining it and seeing it are two different things.

In each bed is a rewind, like himself . . . and yet not like himself. Some still wear bandages, but others, whose healing is further along, have the bandages removed, so he can see their faces and much of their bodies. These rewinds bear none of the aesthetic grace that Cam does. They are sloppy and ugly, as if assembled with the perfunctory hand of a hack, or worse, an assembly line. There is no regard to symmetry, or to the balancing of skin tone. Seams cut at strange angles across each figure, and the scars are far worse than any scars Cam ever had. While his scars were treated to disappear over time, he suspects these will have no such treatment.

None of them have yet awakened. They are all in an induced state of preconsciousness—a sort of integration gestation. He suspects that they are being kept comatose much longer than Cam was, as their many parts heal themselves into living beings. This building is their womb, and Cam realizes that this is where he must have begun as well. As Cam walks down the aisle, looking to his left and right at these preconscious beings, he finds it hard to catch his breath, as if the oxygen has been sucked out of the room.

There is one thing they all share other than the commonality of their randomness. Each of them has a mark on the right ankle. At first he thinks they’re tattoos, but when he looks closer he sees that they’re actually seared into the skin. They’re brands. And they say PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY followed by a serial number. The one Cam examines is numbered 00042. The presence of three zeroes suggests they will eventually number in the tens of thousands.

I am the idea, thinks Cam, but they are the reality. And finally, he sees his place in all of this. He will be the face the world sees. The one they become comfortable with. The public image of the military rewind. He’ll be an officer, lauded and honored, and as such, he will not only open the door, but also pave the way for an army of rewinds. Perhaps it will start small. A special force called upon for a key maneuver somewhere in the world, for there are always American interests to protect somewhere, some violent insurgency that must be addressed. REWINDS SAVE THE DAY! the headlines will read. Just as people became complacent and comfortable with unwinding, they will do the same for rewinding. What a fine thing, people will say, that the unwanted bits of humanity can be reformed and repurposed to serve the greater good. Like the way unwanted pork parts can be ground and pressed and reformed into a tasty pimento loaf. Cam would be sick to his stomach, but he feels he doesn’t have the right, because now, more than ever before, he truly has the sense that his stomach is not his own.

“Cam?”

He turns to see Roberta standing at the entrance. Good. He’s glad she’s here.

“You didn’t have to sneak in here. I would have shown you, if you had asked.” Which is, of course, a lie—she already told him her work was top secret. His instinct is to point an accusing finger for the blatant hubris of what she’s done here, but instead, he plays his emotions close, hoping she doesn’t see the bile collecting within him, and he tells her calmly, “I could have asked, but I wanted to see them on my own terms.”

“And how do you feel about what you see?” She watches him closely, so he buries his fury and revulsion. Instead he allows only an acceptable amount of ambivalence to bubble to the surface. “I knew I wasn’t the be-all and end-all of your work . . . but to see it is . . .”

“Distressing?”

“Sobering,” he says. “And maybe a little enlightening.” He looks to the closest rewind, who stirs slightly in preconscious slumber. “Was an army always your plan?”

“Certainly not!” she says, a bit insulted by the suggestion. “But even my dreams must give way to reality. It was the military who expressed an interest in what we could do, the military who could afford to fund it. So here we are.”

And then Cam realizes that he’s the one who made all this possible. He’s the one who romanced General Bodeker and Senator Cobb. Of course, the military doesn’t need rewinds who can speak nine languages, recite poetry, and play the guitar. It needs rewinds who follow orders. Nonentities who are legally considered “property,” who don’t need to be paid, and who have no rights.

“You look pensive.” Roberta comes closer to get a good look at him. He doesn’t flinch or crack in the least.

“I was thinking how brilliant it is.”

“Really?”

“Soldiers who have no families to go back to? Whose entire identity begins with their military service? A stroke of genius! And I’ll bet you can tweak them the way you tweaked me—to find their greatest satisfaction in their service.”

Roberta smiles, but hesitantly. “I’m impressed that you’ve grasped the scope of this so quickly.”

“It’s . . . visionary,” Cam tells her. “Perhaps one day I’ll be the commanding officer of all my rewind brethren.”

“Perhaps you will be.”

He turns and walks casually to the door. Roberta walks beside him, watching him, always watching him. “Now that you know, you can put it to rest, and get on with your life. And it will be a glorious life, Cam. They need it to be. You must be seen as a prince among peasants, and General Bodeker knows that. You will want for nothing. You will be treated with respect. You will be happy.”

And so he beams for her, to project the impression that he already is happy. Roberta once told him his eyes came from a boy who could melt a girl’s heart with a single glance. She probably never considered how effectively they could be weaponized against her.

“It’s dawn,” Cam says. “I don’t know about you, but I’m up for an early breakfast.”

“Splendid. I’ll let the kitchen know when we get back to the mansion.”

As they leave, Cam turns to take one last look at the room full of preconscious rewinds.

These truly are my brothers and sisters, he thinks. And they must never be allowed to be born.

Part Four

This Lane Must Exit

HEADLINES . . .

National Geographic, May 4, 2014

SWAPPING YOUNG BLOOD FOR OLD REVERSES AGING

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140504-swapping-young-blood-for-old-reverses-aging/

BBC News–Scotland, June 24, 2014

WOMAN TO BE FIRST IN UK TO HAVE DOUBLE HAND TRANSPLANT

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-27999349

ABC News, September 25, 2013

DOCTORS GROW NOSE ON MAN’S FOREHEAD

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2013/09/25/doctors-grow-nose-on-mans-forehead/

The Boston Globe, March 19, 2008

EX-DOCTOR CONFESSES TO STEALING BODY PARTS

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/03/19/ex_doctor_confesses_to_stealing_body_parts/

The Huffington Post, July 6, 2013

HUMAN HEAD TRANSPLANTS NOW POSSIBLE, ITALIAN NEUROSCIENTIST SAYS

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/head-transplant-italian-neuroscientist_n_3533391.html

25 • Starkey

Safe within the isolated power plant, Mason Michael Starkey luxuriates in his particular addiction. He knows he’s a junkie now. The chemical receptors of his brain have tuned to the ecstasy of power. It pumps through his veins, feeding his body and spirit so that he thrives in the kind of glory he never dared to imagine in the days before his unwind order. He should thank his adoptive parents for signing it, and setting in motion the gears that have turned him into something far better than what he was. The wayward stork has now become for all storks the new symbol of liberty.

Especially now that the old one has seen better days.

“Did you hear? They’re sending the Statue of Liberty’s old arm on tour,” Garson DeGrutte told him, “like they did with King Tut, and all that crap from the Titanic. Like people are gonna pay to see an old copper arm.”

“People will,” Starkey said, “because people are nuts. They’ll hold on to bits of the past like they’re still worth something.” Then he looked Garson in the eye. “What would you rather have: shreds of the past or the whole of the future?”

“You know my answer!” Garson said.

As should be the answer of every member of the Stork Brigade. The future—Starkey’s future—is like Fourth of July fireworks: bright and bold, loud and dramatic, but deadly for those in the trajectory of the blasts. The Juvenile Authority fears him, the world is talking about him, and with the shadowy support of the clappers, there is no limit to the heights to which his fireworks will soar. It’s true that revolutionaries are always vilified by the societies they seek to take down, but history has a different perspective. History calls them freedom fighters, and freedom fighters have statues erected to them. Starkey is determined that his will be made of metals far finer than copper.

•  •  •

A team of mercenaries sent by the clappers now supervise weapons training because the storks’ arsenal has gotten so complex and diverse. After all, a thirteen-year-old shouldn’t use a handheld missile launcher without proper instruction. Starkey has conveniently forgotten that training was Bam’s suggestion.

Starkey, who wants to know how to use each and every weapon, trains with his own private instructor. He doesn’t want the storks to see his learning curve. They must think he already knows this stuff. That he’s the consummate guerrilla.

As for everyone else, the storks are each assigned a specific weapon, and train on that weapon for four hours a day.

So far there has only been one mishap.

•  •  •

Starkey decides that a good stork should be rewarded, and Garson DeGrutte is a good stork. Trustworthy. Dedicated. He follows orders without question, and has the right attitude. For this reason, Garson deserves some of the perks of Starkey’s power. So Starkey pays a visit to a girl named Abigail, whom Garson has been not-so-secretly pining over.

As it turns out, Abigail is the same girl who gave Starkey a lousy massage two weeks ago.

He finds her washing dishes, and with a single gesture dismisses everyone else at the bank of industrial sinks.

“Is there something you want, sir?” the girl asks timidly.

Starkey gives her his winning smile, and reaches up with his bad hand to brush back her hair, which has gone limp from the steamy dishwater. His gloved hand brushes her cheek as he does. She purses her lips as if the touch from his glove pains her. Or maybe terrifies her.

“Does it hurt?” she asks. “Your hand.”

“Only when I think about it,” he says, then gets to business. “I’m here to talk to you about one of the other storks.”

She visibly relaxes. “Which one?”

“Garson DeGrutte. Do you like him?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, he likes you.”

She looks up at him, trying to figure where this is going. “He told you that?”

“He mentioned it. And he also mentioned that you told him off.”

Abigail shrugs, but in a strained, uncomfortable way—as if shaking off a chill. “Like I said, I don’t really like him.”

Starkey reaches over and dries a plate with a dish towel. Abigail takes this as a cue to start doing the same. “Garson is a good fighter. A loyal stork. He deserves some happiness. He doesn’t deserve to be rejected.”

Abigail looks down at the plate in her hands. “So you want me to lie to him?”

“No! I want you to like him,” Starkey says. “I certainly like him. He’s a likeable guy.”

She still won’t look at him. “I can’t feel things that I don’t feel.”

Starkey grabs her shoulder with his good hand—a gentle grasp with a squeeze just hard enough to tip the scale of persuasion. “Yes, you can.”

Later that day, Garson is all smiles. Starkey doesn’t have to ask why, for he knows that today Cupid was armed with a stainless steel crossbow.

•  •  •

While Garson now enjoys the fruits of Cupid’s steel arrow, Starkey finds in his own love life that multiple piercings can be unpleasant.

“I didn’t trip her, it was an accident!” Makayla yells.

“She’s lying—she wants me to lose the baby! Admit it!” Emmalee screams.

“Go ahead, tear each other apart, we’ll all be better off,” says Kate-lynn.

The three girls in Starkey’s personal harem, once friends, now do nothing but fight. He thought they would see each other as sisters, but the glow they all seemed to share when he first chose them has degraded into a clawing competition. Starkey doesn’t even want to consider how they’ll behave toward one another once all three of his children are born. It’s still so many months away, it doesn’t feel real yet—but the battles between the girls are.

Perhaps it’s the problem of three. Maybe adding a fourth to their number will settle the dynamic. On the other hand, maybe it’s just best to just keep away from Makayla, Emmalee, and Kate-lynn altogether.

He takes comfort in anticipating the end result. The girls are beautiful; his children will be beautiful. And, thanks to their father, they will be raised in a world better than the world that gave birth to him. And he will love them unconditionally . . . if he can just get past the girls he chose to be their mothers.

“She thinks she’s better than me because she was the first, but mine will be the firstborn, you’ll see.”

“And it’ll be a whining little turd like its mother.”

Definitely a fourth. That’s what Starkey decides is needed. After the next harvest camp attack he will choose. A redhead this time. He dyed his hair red for a time to evade the authorities. He liked the way it looked. It would be nice to have a child who comes by it naturally.

•  •  •

“The applause department”—as Hayden so blithely calls the organization behind the clapper movement—requests an audience with Starkey. Jeevan sets up an encrypted teleconference, although Starkey suspects that those in charge of clappers have massive layers of their own encryption. On-screen is the man with salt-and-pepper hair, more salt than pepper. The man in charge. It still seems odd to Starkey that the man at the heart of the clapper movement appears about as radical as the Wall Street Journal. Starkey has to remind himself that the man was once a teenager himself, although somehow Starkey can’t imagine he was ever an outsider in any sense of the word.

The fact that he’s contacting them directly, rather than through the usual series of intermediaries, concerns Starkey. The only other time Starkey saw the guy was when they sent in a team to abduct Starkey in his sleep. Starkey thought he had been captured by the Juvies, but their little helicopter trip was nothing more than a courtship ritual. That was when the force behind the clapper movement offered the Stork Brigade its full support. That’s when the game changed. The man had declined to give him his name at the time, but a few weeks ago one of his underlings let slip that his name is Dandrich. Starkey knows better than to let on that he knows the man’s name. Or at least not until it serves Starkey’s interests.

“Hello, Mason. It’s good to see you.”

“Hi, yourself.”

Like Starkey, the man is short in stature and wields power with professional proficiency. Even on a small computer screen there’s something intimidating about him.

“You’re well, I trust?” Dandrich says. Small talk. Why do people in suits always insist on small talk before going for the jugular? Starkey braces himself for bad news. Has their location been compromised? Or worse, are the clappers pulling their support? No—why would they do such a thing when the harvest camp liberations have been so successful? Thousands have been freed, unwinders have been punished, and fear has been struck into the hearts of millions. Surely they’re happy with all of that.

“Yeah, I’m good. But I’m sure this isn’t about my health. Why are we talking?”

Dandrich chuckles, amused, perhaps a little bit impressed by Starkey’s directness. “Word has come down that you’re considering an attack on Pensacola Shores Harvest Camp. Our analysts are advising against it.”

Starkey leans back and takes a moment to reign in his annoyance. After all he’s done, why can’t they simply trust his judgment? “That’s what you said about Horse Creek, but that place came down like a house of cards.”

Dandrich never loses his poise. “Yes, in spite of the risks, you prevailed. Pensacola Shores, however, is a different matter. It’s a maximum security camp for violent Unwinds and, as such, has many more layers of security. You simply don’t have the manpower to succeed. In addition, it’s on an isolated peninsula, and you could very easily be trapped, with no means of escape.”

“That’s why I requested boats.”

Now Dandrich becomes a little hot under his stiff collar. “Even if we could provide them, an armada attacking from the Gulf of Mexico would be hard to conceal.”

“Exactly,” says Starkey. “And what could be more dramatic than an old-fashioned siege? You know– like the conquistadors! Not only would it be newsworthy, it would be . . . it would be . . .”

Dandrich finds the word for him. “Iconic.”

“Yes! It would be iconic!”

“But at what cost? I assure you the battles of Waterloo and Little Bighorn were iconic, but only because of how completely Napoleon and Custer were defeated. The world remembers their failure.”

“I won’t fail.”

But Dandrich ignores him. “We have determined that the next harvest camp in your campaign should be Mousetail Divisional Academy, in central Tennessee.”

“Are you kidding me? Mousetail is all tithes!”

“Which is why they won’t be expecting it. You can continue your policy of executing the staff, and you won’t add any new mouths to feed, because there won’t be any storks. Let the tithes do whatever they want once you’ve liberated them. They can stay, they can run—either way it’s not your problem. This will give you time to continue training the kids you have before you’re saddled with more.”

“That’s not the way I do things! My instincts tell me to hit Pensacola, and I can’t go against my instincts.”

Dandrich leans closer. His face fills the screen. Starkey can practically feel the man’s hand reaching through the ether and grasping Starkey’s shoulder. A gentle grasp, but with enough pressure for Starkey to feel a subtle increase in the earth’s gravity.

“Yes, you can,” says Dandrich.

•  •  •

Starkey rages through the power plant, venting his indignation at anyone who crosses his path. He yells at Jeevan for not being aggressive enough during their last attack.

“You’re a soldier now, not a computer nerd, so start acting like one!”

He rips into kids who are laughing while coming back from weapons training.

“Those things aren’t toys, and this is no laughing matter!” He tells them to drop and give him twenty, and when they say, “Twenty what?” he storms off, too irritated to tell them.

Hayden strides past him with a nod, and he’s so furious at the casual way Hayden saunters, he complains about yesterday’s dinner, even though it was fine. “If you’re in charge of food then do your freaking job!”

And Bam.

He’s glad he doesn’t encounter Bam until he’s calmed down a bit, because he might do something he’d regret later. Bam has become a liability, but he can put her in her place. Although Garson DeGrutte doesn’t know it yet, the reward for his loyalty isn’t just getting the girl. Starkey’s going to put him in charge of a team on their next mission—and Bam will be part of that team. She will have to take orders from Garson, and it will humble her. It will remind her who is in charge. And if it doesn’t, he’ll simply have to step things up with her. It’s a shame, really. Bam had been so loyal for so long. But when loyalty runs out, so would any leader’s tolerance.

He finds her in the weapons locker. In spite of her concerns about arming the storks, the weapons locker seems her favorite place to be. When she sees him, she doesn’t come to crisp attention. She doesn’t even stop assembling the weapon she’s working on. She just glances up at him, then back down at her work.

“I heard about the call from Mr. Big. Do you have your orders?”

“I give the orders.”

“Whatever.” She wipes some sweat from her brow. “Is there something you want, Mason? Because I have to make sure these weapons are assembled correctly. Unless, of course, you’d rather go in with water balloons.”

Starkey considers telling her about her demotion, but decides against it. Let her find out the day of the attack, when it will hit her hardest. Maybe it will make her mad enough to take out some harvest camp personnel for once.

“I came to tell you that I’ve changed my mind,” he says. “We won’t be going after Pensacola right now.”

Bam finally stops what she’s doing and gives him her full attention. “You have another place in mind?”

“We’ll be going north instead. Mousetail Divisional Academy, in Tennessee.”

“But isn’t that place tithes-only? I thought you hated tithes.”

Starkey frowns, feeling his anger rekindling toward Dandrich and his lack of faith. Well, maybe Starkey can turn this into an event just as iconic as he would have had in Pensacola.

“Tithes are filthy unwinding sympathizers,” Starkey tells her. “Which is why, when we go in, our objective will be a little bit different.” Then he takes a deep breath, hardening his resolve.

`“This time, we’re not just taking out the staff. We’re killing every last tithe as well.”