Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (10 page)

Reading was inconvenient for Rachel. She used to be able to glance at a front page and take it all in, but she now had to shift her perspective to a frequency which could easily parse text. Her jaw dropped as she saw herself on the front page under the huge bold headline: “Hero Cyborg?”

A question mark,
she thought.
They show a picture of me shielding a mom and her kid and they stick on a damned question mark.

She reached for Wagner’s copy and her neighbor scurried away without another word, her paper clenched in a protective ball against her chest. Rachel shifted the frequency on her implant to block out visual data and slowly counted to ten, then shook her own paper out of its plastic sleeve and skimmed the article. It was much ado about nothing. There was a lengthy above-the-fold description of Edwards’ press conference, which, in the way of modern news stories, pretended impartiality by presenting two competing but equally outlandish possibilities for why she had been at the coffee shop. On the one hand, OACET Agent Rachel Peng was aware of Edwards’ poisonous rhetoric and wanted to forestall any violence by directing the crowd’s anger towards herself. On the other, OACET Agent Rachel Peng was aware of Edwards’ inspirational nationalism and wanted to destroy his reputation by…

Rachel quit reading before she learned her motive. Anything less than throwing down with Edwards in a Hong Kong cinema-style gun battle, complete with wirework stunts, wouldn’t have been worth her effort. She wadded up the paper and chucked it in the general direction of her garbage, then went to get her cell phone. 

Her new home was deception incarnate. It trapped the unwary into thinking it was a darling Craftsman revival, not a slumbering leviathan which awoke to demand sacrifices of tax returns and early withdrawals from pension plans. When she had toured the property, she made the classic buyer’s mistake of falling in love; she had lived in apartments her entire life and the backyard was huge, almost a quarter of an acre, thick with trees. Having never purchased a house before and hindsight being what it was, Rachel had since realized that she probably should have asked more questions before she had signed away a substantial chunk of her savings (such as: Why are there water stains at waist height in the basement?). She had moved in just before Christmas and had repainted the entire place in mad joy at having of two thousand square feet for her own private playground, then spent the following spring replacing the roof and learning about French drains. 

Entire rooms were still bare, waiting for furniture to find its way home from flea markets and malls. The only finished area was the study, which had come with built-in shelves across three walls and now housed her unruly collection of poetry and romance novels: Rachel used to be an avid reader and she couldn’t bear to give those old friends away. These surrounded a couch, two matching overstuffed leather chairs that were too expensive to be anything other than an impulse buy, and a heavy plank pine coffee table an old girlfriend’s cat had used as a scratching post. 

Dead in the center of the table was the pile of that week’s hate mail, ready for her to sort and drop off with the unlucky Agents who dissected those language catastrophes for risk assessment. Her purse had landed on top of the heap. It was firm policy to turn off the implants when sleeping and Agents kept cell phones for nights and emergencies. It defeated the purpose of the cell to keep it off, but nine nights out of ten Rachel let it languish at the bottom of her handbag with a bone-dry battery. 

She reached out to her carrier to check her messages while she rummaged through her portable trashcan to find her phone and its charger. “You have thirty-nine new messages,” the service informed her in its flat, almost-feminine voice. Rachel turned on the phone to confirm, then skipped through the queue to see if anyone she knew had been one of the callers. After the babble had ebbed, she pinged Josh.

He was awake and already at the office.
“Morning, Penguin. You don’t sound hung-over
in the slightest.”

“Oh I shall destroy you…
Josh, I’m up to my armpits in messages from reporters.”

“I know, I’ve been fielding calls all night. Why did you turn your phone off? Mulcahy and I were all set to kick down your front door until you came back online an hour ago.”

“Thank you for not,”
she said.
“I was in the shower.” 

“We figured. Are you decent? I’ll pop in.”

Rachel searched the study for anything embarrassing. She deemed it spotless; it had been too long since she had gone on a really good date.
“All good, come on over.”

Among the implant’s many functions was a remote projection feature which allowed an Agent to create a digitalized visual image and position it in a location of their choosing. Imagination was the only limitation on how these images appeared, or moved, or could be put to practical use. The most common application was a personal avatar for out-of-body communication with other Agents. As long as she was cozy in her own mind and the other Agent was the one talking through an avatar, Rachel greatly preferred these face-to-face interactions to those held via the everpresent link. She was always more comfortable interacting with a person than a disembodied voice resonating within her own head, even if that person was a digital facsimile which manifested in a mind-searing bright green.

Josh, or a perfect copy thereof, appeared in her living room. He was one of those Agents who was skilled in out-of-body projection and wore his chartreuse avatar with all of the mannerisms and quirks of a second skin. His avatar dusted off its pants and dropped heavily in one of her new leather armchairs the same way Josh did when he came over for pizza and beer.

“How much trouble am I in?” Rachel asked.

“What?” Josh looked mortified. “Trouble? Are you kidding? I could kiss you! This is the best press we’ve had in… Ever, actually. You been on the Internet today? It’s nothing but news footage of last night’s conference. There’s Edwards, firing up a mob, and then there’s you, trying to leave, trying to leave, trying to leave… Oops! There’s a fanatic with a huge-ass gun. And you do this heroic thing where you leap through the air and turn yourself into a human shield for a sweet young mom and her kid.

“Rachel, I swear, if half of the world didn’t want us to be the bad guys, there’d be no question about what you did last night.”

“But they do.”

Josh paused. “But they do.”

“I jumped too early. The gun wasn’t out yet.”

He cracked his knuckles, a neat trick considering he didn’t have any. “No, it’s more about how your back was to him, but it’s the same outcome. The anti-OACET contingent is saying it was a setup, and we’re trying to ruin the judge’s credibility. Then there’s Edwards. He’s starting to ask those questions that aren’t really questions about what it means if an Agent can search someone without their knowledge or consent. He’s getting a nice bump from this.”

Rachel collapsed in her other armchair. There was a smudge of old cheese against the mahogany leather and she wet her thumb to take it off.

She was not looking forward to the next few days. The pundits and scholars made much of how the fear of OACET was always associated with immediate risk, such as wiping out financial records or the ever-popular threat of nuclear annihilation. They carefully noted that the real danger was the lack of checks and balances to restrict how Agents could acquire information about American citizens, law-abiding or otherwise. All of OACET knew her sixth sense was a landmine waiting to go off: “in plain sight” meant something entirely different to Rachel, who violated the Fourth Amendment more times than she could count just by walking to the grocery store. She was their opponents’ best example of why OACET shouldn’t be. Thus far, the Agents’ method of dealing with this had been to hide her unique abilities within the ethical and legal morass caused by those other skills they possessed which also threatened civil rights. It was quite possible that the fallout from the coffee shop fiasco would tear even this flimsy protection away.

“There are two options,” Josh said.

“I don’t want to hear the second one.”

He ignored her. “The first option is perfectly logical and makes you look good. We release some of your service record, the parts which show you’ve been in similar situations overseas and you have experience in predicting likely outcomes for mob scenarios. The Army will have to back us up on it, so it’ll give you some extra credibility.

“We’ll also have to tell the public that Agents have some ability to detect metals,” he added.

“Yippee. Let’s make people think we’re irradiating them, too. That’ll be jolly good fun.”

“We can’t help it if they don’t understand the science,” he said. “We’ve got to do it. Stack yesterday’s bank story with the incident at the coffee shop and it’s about to become common knowledge that you can see through solid matter. We’ve got to try and nip this in the bud before we get sued for causing leukemia or whatever, and if we handle it well enough, they’ll be less likely to ask how you knew to jump before the gun came out.

“I’d really like to keep your other skills under wraps,” he added. “Mood reading is too close to mind reading for the media to stay on-message. But the timeline works out so we can avoid it. Just remember you scanned them after that one guy shoved you, okay? He gave you cause.”

He paused. “The second option…”

“Do.” Rachel said as she gave the stain a strong rub. Her thumb squeaked against the grain of the leather. “Not.” 

“We tell them you’re blind.”

She looked over at him and met his eyes. It was a meaningless gesture for her but while new habits were formed quickly, old habits died hard. Rachel didn’t think she’d ever shake off the unspoken side of conversation; she was sure she didn’t want to.

“No,” she told him.

It hadn’t been easy, those first five years. They all bore scars. Unlike most of the others, hers were physical. Rachel couldn’t remember what had driven her out on her apartment’s balcony to stare up at the sun until it had set, and then for hours and hours after that, but she hoped it had been her choice and not an involuntary act. She couldn’t bear the idea that part of her was so self-destructive that it could override her rational mind.

Josh had been the one who saved her. He had come out to California to help them with the transition. When she failed to check in, he had broken into her apartment and found her, exhausted, dehydrated, and seeping from second-degree sunburns after two straight days of staring up at the sky. He had pulled her back from the ledge and had stayed with her until she came back to herself, screaming.

Her skin had healed but her eyes had weakened until there was nothing left to see but black. Still, Rachel didn’t think of herself as a member of the blind community; solar retinopathy, followed by progressive macular degeneration, had locked her into a dark world for all of a month until her implant had provided a substitute. Folk wisdom had it that the other senses become more acute with the onset of sudden blindness, but in Rachel’s case it had kickstarted a sixth sense so powerful she preferred it to sight.

She had struggled with blindness. Not so much the changes caused by her loss of sight, but how being classified as disabled would affect her opportunities, her sense of self. Rachel had yet to find the frequency that replicated human vision, but the range of alternatives was so vast her only problem was finding the one which best fit the situation. Unfortunately, rigid clinical definition meant she would always be categorized as blind. If she came out, she’d lose her position at the MPD, or would be held up as an example of how minorities could overcome insurmountable odds, or both. Rachel felt these outcomes were neither fair nor accurate, and she wanted nothing whatsoever to do with disclosure.

Josh knew it, and still he said: “Yes.”

“No,” she said again.

“Yes. Rachel, it’ll come out eventually. If you introduce it on your own terms, you can control it.”

“Chinese. Lesbian. Cyborg.” She held up a finger for each point. “That’s already a lot of baggage to carry, Josh. There’s no way in hell I’m attaching another label, especially since I’m not blind.”

“A lot of people would disagree with you.”

“Yeah, and those people all see the alarm clock when they wake up in the morning. The blind community would flay me alive. I’m not piggybacking on a disability for
good press.
” The last two words were hurled like a curse.

“Penguin, this is not just about you. Think about it: you redefine the discussion. It’s no longer about how the implant might break civilization apart, it’s about what the implant can do to improve it. You would be giving hope to millions of people. And we could really use that kind of publicity right now.”

She watched her friend slouch down in her lovely new chair and was glad for his avatar. Emotions weren’t carried across projections. Yesterday, Mulcahy had similar body language when he flashed depression, and Rachel wondered what was happening behind the scenes in their administration.

“Are you ordering me to do this?”

He shook his head. “It’s your call.”

“Go with the Army story,” she replied.

He nodded. He knew her well enough to already know her answer; she knew him well enough to understand why he had tried to change her mind.

“All right,” he said, standing up to leave. “See you at nine at the coffee store. We’ve got a press conference planned. Change into a white shirt with a skinny suit. No gun and no vest.”