Текст книги "Undivided"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

8 • Cam

Camus Comprix is a very happy young man. Yet not.

Camus is a highly driven young man. But he’s not certain he’s the one driving.

He sits alone on a balcony overlooking the ocean, high on a Molokai bluff, pondering his existence, which began a few short months ago. Prior to that he was part of ninety-nine other kids, although he suspects the number is greater. Ninety-nine is a nice alliterative number. Good for the media. Good for publicity. When it comes to Cam, his whole “life” is about public spin, and he’s yet to figure out why. Why is Proactive Citizenry putting so much money behind him? Why has the United States military “purchased” him like a piece of property? Valuable, yes, but property nonetheless. It used to bother him, but it doesn’t anymore. For some reason.

He loves being on Molokai—perhaps because it is the unloved sibling of the Hawaiian island chain. Once a leper colony, now just a curiosity, it’s the home of a huge compound owned and maintained by Proactive Citizenry. The cliffside mansion, Cam has learned, is only a part of the compound. Like everything else about the organization, its sphere of influence extends far beyond first impressions.

“You’re not eating, Cam,” Roberta says as she comes out to join him across the table. Roberta—his creator, or builder—whatever term one gives to the individual who conceived of you. Perhaps, then, it should be “mother,” though he’s loath to use the word.

“I was waiting for you.” He looks at the unappetizing appetizer before him. “And anyway, I have too few fans of foie gras in my internal community. I’ll wait for the prime rib.”

“Suit yourself.”

“If I could suture self, I wouldn’t have needed you.”

She gives him a weak Ha-ha roll of her eyes and begins to daintily manipulate the unpleasant-looking duck liver onto her crostini. As he recalls, to cultivate foie gras, ducks are force-fed until they’re morbidly obese, and their livers swell to near-exploding. Such wonderful tricks the human race has learned! Cam returns his gaze to the sea.

“General Bodeker is preparing quite the welcome for you at West Point next week.”

“No speeches I hope?”

“Only informal. Toasts at meet-and-greets. He’ll be out in a few days to brief you on the details.”

“Why can’t the military just tell people things?” Cam says. “Why must they brief?”

“I thought you, of all people, would appreciate linguistic formality.”

“Don’t you mean ‘you of many people’? It would be beyond hyperbolic to suggest I am made of all people.”

Cam’s impending West Point experience—his entire life, it seems—has been spelled out for him. He’ll be whisked through officer training, all the while posing for photo ops, and becoming the “Face of the Modern American Military,” whatever that means. He hated the idea at first, but he’s had a pronounced change of heart.

He must admit, the formal dress uniform looks great on him. It makes him look important. Part of something greater than himself. He imagines all the high-level people he’ll brush elbows with—not just as a novelty, but as a proud officer of the United States Marine Corps—for they said he could choose his branch, and he chose the Marines. He thinks of his glorious future, and he’s overjoyed. Yet not.

He finally turns his gaze from the ocean. “Let’s talk about the person you’re making me forget. Let’s talk about the girl”

Roberta finishes her foie gras, unfazed. “You know I won’t discuss it, so why ask?”

“Because the closest I’ll ever come to remembering is forcing you to remember.”

Their server comes to take away the appetizers, and brings the prime rib. Cam finds he’s hungry for it, but not hungry enough to start right away. “I can still feel the worm in my brain.”

“It’s not really a worm. It’s just a clever bit of nanotechnology, and anything you’re feeling is just in your imagination.”

He begins to cut his meat, imagining how his piecemeal brain has been routed by the army of microscopic nanites crawling along his axons, leaping between dendrites, all tuned to seek out very specific memory patterns. The moment his conscious thought hits upon the targeted memory, it gets zapped. No mess, no bother. For the first few days after the procedure, Cam was plagued with that tip-of-the tongue feeling, reaching for a name and a face he thought he remembered a moment ago, but was then gone. The feeling has lessened, but the nagging sense of absence has remained. Well, not entirely. Because the nanites are also designed to tweak his pleasure receptors whenever he thinks of anything relating to the military. It’s been filling the gaps like spackle in a cracking plaster wall.

It’s the peripheral things he still knows that make it so difficult to leave his past life behind. He knows he was in Akron. He remembers helping Connor Lassiter, but the details are fuzzy. Cam also knows he chose to become a hero to The Girl, rather than be a hero to Proactive Citizenry. He could have turned them all in and done the nation a great service that would insure his place in history . . . but The Girl would hate him for the rest of his life if he had done it. So he chose to be a hero to her in a way that would outshine anything that Connor had ever done. And then maybe . . . maybe . . . when she tired of the Akron AWOL, she would see the purity of what he had done for her. And The Girl would love him. Cam chose the long play and was willing to wait. But now, he can’t remember her face, or her name, or anything about her. He never imagined she could be stolen from the inside out.

“Is the prime rib to your liking, Cam?”

“It’s fine.”

“Just fine?”

“It’s excellent. Must you always make inquiries of my taste buds?”

Roberta sighs. “Cam, please, I don’t want to fight. It’s our last week together. I want it to be pleasant.”

“You’re not coming with me?” Not that he wants her to, but as his “handler” in all public matters, he had just assumed she would.

“No one wants a doting mother at West Point,” she says.

That catches Cam by surprise. Apparently it catches Roberta by surprise as well. A slip she didn’t intend to make. It’s the first time she’s ever actually used the M word. Cam always felt theirs was a distorted parental/child relationship, but use of the M word has always been an unspoken taboo.

Roberta clears her throat and dots her lips with her napkin. “Besides, there’s too much work to do here once you’re gone.”

That piques Cam’s interest. “What sort of work?”

“Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

He knew she would attempt deflection. The idea of her focusing her attentions elsewhere brings forth a wave of unexpected jealousy. “Will you be gathering choice parts for the new-and-improved me?”

Cam notices the way Roberta slices her meat. With smooth grace, the same way she answers the question. “You said it once yourself, Cam—you are the concept car. The perfect design. A pinnacle to strive for.” She inserts a piece of meat in her mouth, chews, and swallows before she speaks again. “Rest assured, we can’t improve on you, and won’t even try. You are our star, and always will be.”

“So, what then?”

“Extrapolate for yourself if you must, but my work is classified. Just as my work with you was classified. I won’t discuss it.”

“Yes,” says Cam with a grin, “the expression ‘eyes only’ takes on a new meaning when you’re surgically removing them from Unwinds.”

“Cam, we’re eating. That’s far from appropriate luncheon conversation.”

“Pardon my indiscretion.”

Cam considers. Extrapolates. A concept car is impractical. He’s impractical. Not what the world needs.

Dessert comes, and their conversation lapses into the mundane, but the question remains in the back of his mind: If he’s not what the world needs, then what does it need? Or what can Proactive Citizenry make it need?

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At night, Cam’s thoughts drift to Una. She is not The Girl. He knows that, but thinking of her tempers the feeling of absence in his brain. Una has never met The Girl. He knows this, because none of his thoughts of Una get scrambled, and when The Girl is attached to a memory it turns momentarily into static. Then, when he grasps the memory once more, The Girl has been surgically removed from it. He remembers conversations, but none of the gists. He remembers talking to someone, but in the memory, he’s talking to a wall, or a hallway, or just off into blank space.

That doesn’t happen when he thinks of Una, so there’s some comfort in that. Una despises him, of course. How could she not? He has the hands of her one true love. Cam has the part of his brain that feels emotion, and can render it in the soulful sound of a guitar, but Cam is not, nor will he ever be, Wil Tashi’ne. And so she hates him with good reason.

As Cam lies on his plush bed in his plush bedroom, he fills his mind, with thoughts not just of Una, but of everyone that he has encountered since being rewound. The guards who tended to him before he understood what he was. General Bodeker and Senator Cobb, who saw in him something worth paying money for. The jealous Akron AWOL and the low-cortical girl he was traveling with. What was her name? Oh yes, Grace. Cam fills his mind with everyone that was a part of his brief life, hoping that their presence will outline the shape of The Girl—like light around a silhouette—making the shape of her absence crystal clear and in perfect focus.

Amazing that Proactive Citizenry truly believes purging his memory of the girl he loved would do anything but make him hate them even more than he already does. Incredible that they actually think that stimulating his pleasure centers at the thought of a military life would lead to anything but virulent resentment. Yes, now Cam longs for his future in the Marine Corps, but he absolutely despises the people who implanted that longing within him.

Not the people, but the person.

Roberta.

As far as Cam is concerned, Roberta is Proactive Citizenry. Bringing them down means bringing her down. In flames.

But of course she can’t know that. For the time being, he must appear to be her perfect boy. He will shine like the idol they carefully designed him to be. The golden calf for all of humanity to worship. And it will be all the more rewarding to see the bewildered astonishment in Roberta’s eyes when he tears it all down.

•  •  •

General Bodeker needs no entourage. He cuts an imposing figure without the requisite team of toadies. The air around him seems to congeal with his formidable presence. The flowers of the entry path, wilting in the Hawaiian humidity, seem drawn to tight attention at his passing.

He does have one gentleman trailing in his wake. His personal attaché. More formal military linguistics for his personal assistant—or, more accurately, his gofer, because the slim, vaguely nervous man sycophantically responds the the general’s slightest need. He’s redundant here, however, because at Proactive Citizenry’s Molokai compound, there are servants so far up the wazoo, they need a trail of bread crumbs to find their way out.

Cam is in his crisp uniform when he greets the general at the entrance to the grand mansion. Roberta insisted he wear it. Cam doesn’t mind; he loves the uniform. Even thinking about it triggers in him the kind of deep personal pleasure that borders on ecstasy in a most annoying way. It’s just one more emotional response that’s been tweaked by Roberta and her team of cognitive architects. Another reason to loathe her.

“Good day, Miss Griswold. And to you, Mr. Comprix,” says the General, nodding to each of them in turn. The attaché shakes their hands, as if it is part of his job to save Bodeker the trouble.

“Goede dag, Generaal,” Cam says, his accent perfect. “Ik ben blij je te zien.”

The man is taken aback rather than impressed. “Is that Dutch?”

“Yes,” Roberta answers for Cam. “He’s been studying it—adding it to the many languages he already knows.”

“I see.”

“You are of Dutch descent, aren’t you?” Cam asks. “I mean, your name is Dutch.”

“Yes,” says Bodeker. “ ‘Descent’ is the key word. My parents spoke the language, but I never learned it.”

His demeanor is guarded. Decidedly off. Suddenly Cam feels like a child trying to impress an emotionally distant parent. He hates that he feels this way, but he can’t help it.

“Would you like me to show you around the grounds?” Cam asks.

“Maybe later,” Bodeker says dismissively, and then glances at his clean-cut, overeager attaché, who steps forward enthusiastically.

“I’d like a tour,” he says.

The moment becomes awkward until Cam obliges. “Of course. Let’s start with the garden.” For a moment, Cam is thrown by the way Bodeker has pawned off Cam’s attention to his lackey. It’s only as he and the attaché leave for the grand tour that Cam glances back and catches how intently Bodeker speaks to Roberta—as if Cam is not the center of the general’s attention at all.

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The rest of the day goes smoothly. That is to say smooth like a slick veneer that has yet to dry. To the eye it appears as a fine glaze, but to the touch it is sticky and unpleasant.

The evening meal is a stilted affair of formality around a table too large for only four, in a dining room specifically designed for the wining and dining of high-muck-a-mucks such as the general.

“My compliments to your chef,” Bodeker says, interrupting the silverware-sound-infused silence.

“Yes, yes, it’s all delicious,” says his attaché, as Cam knew he would, because he has an irritating habit of seconding anything the general says.

Through the meal’s pleasantries, Cam senses an atonal undertone he can’t put his finger on. Like when a single guitar string is slightly out of tune. Perhaps it has to do with The Girl he can’t remember. Or perhaps it just has to do with him.

“I’m really looking forward to West Point,” Cam says, fishing for a response from the general that he can gauge.

“Yes, well, I’m sure they’re looking forward to you, too.”

“Montresor!” Cam blurts out. He doesn’t mean to, but those curious connections in his brain still spark out references now and then that he can’t control.

“Pardon?” says the general.

“Uh—Mr. Montresor—our chef,” Cam says covering as best he can. “I’ll be sure to let him know his Chateaubriand is appreciated.”

Roberta throws him a severe glance, but does not give him away. Perhaps because she knows exactly what his outburst meant. “Yes,” she says, “his offerings are always beyond reproach.” The general, not a man of literary prowess, accepts this at face value, and his attaché is too involved in attempts to spear his peas to sense the lie.

•  •  •

Bodeker leaves the following morning without saying good-bye—or at least without saying good-bye to Cam. Once he is gone, Cam walks the grounds alone, pausing on the back lawn, at the spot overlooking the sea where he and The Girl looked up at the stars. He gave her a lesson in astronomy, but of course the memory has him lying on the lawn alone, conjuring the stars for himself. This is how he knows she must have been a part of the memory. That he remembers speaking aloud to no one. Now no stars save the sun are visible in the morning light, but he doesn’t need stars to string together constellations of meaning from the general’s visit.

The day before, while Cam was obliged to give Bodeker’s lackey a tour of the grounds, he had taken note of the general riding off in a golf cart with Roberta to a distant part of the compound. Cam is pretty sure they hadn’t gone to explore the fields of cane and taro still cultivated by Proactive Citizenry, to maintain a semblance of normality. Cam is well aware that there are other buildings within the massive compound, hidden by heavy growth. He’s never actually seen them, but he knows they’re there.

He also knows that if he asks Roberta about them, she will dissemble as she always does. Deflection that borders on deception is her finest gavotte, and she dances so well it has become its own form of entertainment to Cam.

General Bodeker, however, is not so skilled. He wears his lies on his sleeve like the chevrons of his uniform.

Montresor, indeed! The king of insincerity; Poe’s most despicable character, claiming friendship even as he seals Fortunato alive in a secret tomb. Is Cam then Fortunato? Watching the bricks of his own doom laid one upon another? Or maybe it’s all in his imagination. After all, Cam’s personality is a composite of Unwinds—paranoia must have run rampant in many of them. Still, he can’t help but feel that it all comes down to Roberta’s little side trip with the general yesterday. Wherever they went holds the answer to the general’s cool and distant behavior. Perhaps it’s time Cam got to know Proactive Citizenry’s Molokai compound more intimately.

“Here be dragons,” he says aloud, but there’s no one else on the back lawn to hear him.

9 • Una

She hopes that she and Lev find Hennessey and Fretwell. She also hopes they don’t. Because she knows if they do, she’ll tear the two parts pirates to shreds. Not figuratively, but literally. She’ll cut them up bit by bit, relishing their agony as they die. Does she have it in her to do such a thing? She nearly did it to Camus Comprix. She took a chain saw to him, and almost cut off those beautiful hands that had once been Wil’s. She knows if she had done it, she would have forever regretted it, for Cam was as much a victim as Wil had been. He never asked to be rewound. Wil, on the other hand, chose to give himself up to save the others. He chose unwinding over the alternative. Had she taken Wil’s hands back from Cam, it would have turned Una into a monster, and there would be no coming back from that.

But tearing apart these human vermin would be different. It would be just. It would be satisfying. Maybe.

Would Wil want her to do it, if it gave her some peace? Or would he want Lev’s justice to prevail? Would he want the parts pirates captured and turned over to the Arápache Tribal Council? To bring them back alive would require incredible restraint and forbearance on Una’s part. Even if she isn’t callous enough to tear them apart, she has no qualms at all about shooting them dead.

So she hopes they find them. And she hopes they don’t.

•  •  •

It’s night in a seedy Minneapolis neighborhood. Perhaps not as seedy as other neighborhoods in other cities, but even Minneapolis has armpits and nether regions. Una is necessarily alone, because even with his long hair, Lev is still highly recognizable.

“I wish I could go with you into these places,” he said before she first put herself in harm’s way.

“You couldn’t anyway,” she replied. “They’re all bars, and you’re underage.”

Of course, at six months shy of her twenty-first birthday, Una is underage as well—but her ID says otherwise.

She walks into the third bar this evening—twelfth one since arriving in town. Her long black hair is pulled back with a colorful ribbon, the kind that Wil always would untie because he liked her hair to flow free. There is a pistol in her purse. Small and dainty, a little .22 caliber. She much prefers her rifle, but that’s not exactly something you take with you into a bar. Even a sleazy one like this.

For three nights she has been trolling these gutter spots, where bad news meets more bad news and maybe gets lucky. But no luck for Una. She hasn’t come across a single sign of the parts pirates she seeks.

This place—the What Ales Ya Saloon—has long faded from a glory that wasn’t so glorious to begin with. Greasy booths where the dark leatherette seats are held together by matching duct tape. A linoleum floor that may have once been blue. Light low enough to rob what little color there is left to the place. The only thing sorrier than the establishment is the clientele, sparse and mostly sullen.

Una sits down at the bar, and the bartender, a man who’s had some exceptional good looks bashed out of him by a hard life, comes over to her. Before she’s asked, she shows him her ID, and flashes her medical alcohol license. Sometime around the Heartland War, they made alcohol a controlled substance. So now everyone has a medical alcohol license. Scalpers sell them on street corners, and you can even buy them from medical vending machines. So much for separating mankind from its favorite vice.

“What’ll it be?” the bartender asks.

“A pint of Guinness.”

He raises an eyebrow. “You’re a gal after my own heart.” He has a Texas twang to him that is out of place in Minnesota. Una offers him a pained grin that says Just get me my beer.

When he returns, she drinks it slowly, taking note of the people around her. There are two tattooed guys playing darts, not seeming to care about the drunks crossing their path as they launch their sharp projectiles. Deep in the dim booths are couples making deals she doesn’t want to hear. Sitting with her at the bar is a predictable collection of lonely-hearts and career alcoholics. The one sitting at the far end of the bar pays for her drink without her permission, and gestures to her with a two-finger wave and a grinning display of yellow teeth that say it’s Halloween all year. Una’s response is to put her own cash on the bar when the bartender passes.

“Here,” she says. “Give Skeleton Jack his money back.”

The bartender, who must see exchanges like this on a regular basis, is happy to oblige with a chuckle. She doesn’t know if he’s pleased with her self-reliance, or just enjoying the drunk’s misfortune in the matter.

When the bartender seems to have a free moment, she delicately broaches the subject that brought her here. “Maybe you could help me,” she begins, trying to be more polite than she actually feels. “I’m looking for two gentlemen who make their living in the flesh trade.”

The bartender laughs at that. “First time I ever heard parts pirates called ‘gentlemen,’ ” he says. “Sorry to disappoint you, darlin’, but parts pirates only brag to one another. They don’t tell the likes of me their business.”

Una ignores him and continues. “Their names are Hennessey and Fretwell.” Then she watches the bartender for a “tell.”

“Never heard of ’em,” he says, then casually goes about his business of washing dirty glasses—but Una notices him washing a glass that was already clean. Bingo!

This is closest thing to a lead she’s had in three days. Now it’s all up to her. She must play this carefully. She wonders what this man is worried about. Is it that he just doesn’t want to get mixed up in business that’s not his? Does he think she’s a Fed come to crack down on his patrons? Well, whatever the reason for his silence, perhaps she can appeal to his wallet.

“Too bad,” she says. “I hear they’re the go-to guys for a high-value catch.”

The bartender doesn’t meet her eye. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“And,” adds Una, “I was planning on a nice finder’s fee for anyone who could put me in touch with them.” Then she finishes her beer, pushes the empty glass in his direction, and puts a fifty beneath it.

He glances at the bill, but doesn’t take it.

“Of course, that’s just for making the introduction,” Una says. “If I actually make the sale, there’ll be a whole lot more.”

He goes farther down the bar and serves a sad-looking woman a Tom Collins that Skeleton Jack will probably pay for. When the bartender returns, he’s had enough time to think about the proposition. He takes Una’s glass and the fifty, making it disappear like a magician. He glances around, then leans closer, speaking in a voice so low, she can hardly hear him.

“If it’s the guys I’m thinking about, you probably won’t run into them here,” he says. “I don’t know about Hennessey, but Fretwell spends his time hustling pool at the Iron Monarch Pub, down on Nicollet Avenue—but listen—he’s a scummy guy, and that’s a scummy place. You oughta think twice about this.”

Una can’t help but laugh at that. “You mean there’s a place scummier than this?”

He’s not offended by the observation, and remains dead serious. “Plenty of them,” he says. “There are pits and there are snake pits. Lemme tell ya, that place has venom to spare.”

Una shivers in spite of herself. “I can handle it,” she says. She knows it’s true, but the intensity in this man’s eyes makes her doubt herself the slightest bit. She gets up from her barstool. “If a deal goes down, you’ll be hearing from me,” she tells him.

“I sincerely doubt that,” he says with the resigned grin of a man who’s been around the block—and in this neighborhood, that’s saying something.

“Well,” says Una, “worst-case scenario, you never see me again, and you’re up fifty bucks.”

He accepts her evaluation of their situation, offers her a “You take care, now,” and she leaves to find a pit of vipers called the Iron Monarch.