Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (16 page)

“The Army won’t take you back?

It was still dark around her but she laughed so fast and hard it went white. “Right. Cyborgs who can get into any computer, anywhere in the world? Me and the other Agents who used to be military? Our former COs have been throwing so many incentives to get us to come back that it’d be suicide to consider it. They’d run us down until there’d be nothing left.”

“Zia was going to Mars,” he said, and she flipped her implant on to see him staring back towards the medical center. 

“What?” 

“She’s an astrophysicist. She said she wanted to be on the first team to Mars. And Davies wanted to cure cancer, you were on your way to becoming a general… What was Mulcahy supposed to do?”

“Things we’d never, ever hear about,” she replied, then added, “Unless he failed.”

He was silent for a moment, his conversational blues slowly fading towards gray. There were small bursts of iridescence as he rode his codeine buzz, but the dominant movement was a thin line of red fury undulating around his feet like a snake. The red wasn’t quite sure where it belonged so it kept churning along the floor, but it was growing thicker and more solid by the moment.

“Is it like that for all of you?” he finally asked. “You had these amazing plans and now you’re stuck here?”

“I honestly can’t say,” she said. “Most of us don’t talk about the past.” She felt comfortable using the truth to cover the lie; the company that sold the implant to Congress had proposed a top-down acceptance model in which the next generation of leaders would pioneer the technology. Every single member of OACET had been at the top of their game when their lives had come to a screeching halt.

“What about Shawn? Do you know his story?”

“Yeah. He was FBI. Josh Glassman used to work with him. He said Shawn was…” And in her mind, there was Josh in her living room again, but this time he was drunk and ranting how his old friend had been
exceptional, gifted, intelligent,
and then:
ruined.
“He said Shawn was a good agent and a great guy.”

“Jesus,” Santino breathed. The red was growing thicker, more solid, and moving up his legs. 

“Hey, it’s okay,” she said. “We got a bad deal but we’re putting things right.”

“How do you put something like this right?”

We don’t goddamned know!
nearly made it past her lips, but she managed to catch and change it to the OACET Administration’s mantra before it broke free. “It’ll work out. We just need some time.”

Well. I’m one of them now, aren’t I?
Rachel growled at herself.
Get a little bump in the salary and suddenly the manure they’ve been spreading makes sense.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” He seemed calm but the red was still growing, still looking for a place to go, and she was thinking it might be looking for her. Nothing like learning your friendship is riddled with lies of omission, or that your partner got you stabbed, or being asked to side with a bunch of freaks against your own kind because the crazy razor-wielding assailant used to be a really
nice
guy!

“I couldn’t,” she said. “I’m sorry for…” she swept out a hand back towards the med center and hoped he understood she meant everything from the lies to the stabbing to accidentally introducing him to the girl of his dreams when he already had one. “When we went public, we decided that we could either be people or problems, and if we wanted to be people, we’d have to manage all of our problems in-house. We’re not forcing anyone else to clean our dirty laundry.”

He stared at her as though she had slapped him. The red was looping ever higher, covering him like armor. 

“Dirty laundry?” he snarled. “I don’t think so. They fucked you guys, Rachel!”

“Maybe a little,” she said, bringing both of her hands together in a ring to depict an asshole the size of a grapefruit. 

He laughed. He couldn’t help it; red anger fractured under a blast of purple humor and the scattershot glow of the codeine. Then: “Goddamn it, Rachel, don’t you realize what they did to you?” 

Oh, just wait until you find out about the bad stuff,
she sighed to herself.

“Every minute of the day,” she told him, grinning.

He took a breath and leaned against a polka-dotted bedspread, then jumped forward as he felt the bones press against his back.

“Can we get out of here?” he asked. 

“Back to First District Station?”

“No, just not…” Santino angled both hands at the catacomb walls, then winced. “I thought the anesthetic was supposed to last an hour,” he said, rubbing his injury gently through his shirt.

“Come on. Let’s find you some food before you start getting nauseous.”

They went through the double doors and up into the light, and Santino tried not to look at the freshly-mopped spot on the floor near the tangle of carousel horses. The room stunk of bleach.

“Out of curiosity, why did you bring me down here?”

“Hm?”

“Seems like when you have a Shawn, and when you know he doesn’t like outsiders…”

“What, you think you’re the first non-Agent to ever go downstairs?  It’s a property warehouse. There’s always somebody dropping in to inspect their junk.”

Santino’s conversational colors went bright purple.

“Shut up, you know what I mean. When we have visitors, Shawn and the others are sealed in an old panic room. There’s movies, video games… It’s a pretty awesome man cave. They never notice anyone else has been here.

“The thing is,” she said, finally catching hold of a nagging stray thought. “You’re the first person he’s seen outside of the Program for almost a year, but he’s not a violent man. I don’t know how he slipped his guardians. I have no idea where he got the razor. Anything smaller than a breadbox has either been adopted or is still packed, and nobody has admitted they left a razor out.” 

“Would they?”

“What?” It took her a moment to catch his meaning. “Yeah, they would. We don’t lie to each other.”

“Yes, you do. People lie. It’s human nature. I’ve lied to you eighty times today.”

“Agents don’t. It’s not that we can’t: it’s that we don’t. Network three hundred and fifty people together and you’ve created three hundred and fifty fact-checkers. At best, a major lie puts us six degrees from embarrassment and forced apologies.”

They retraced their steps, winding back up the stairs and the forest of boxes. Those Agents they passed demurred to Santino, their colors flickering yellow as they fled. 

“They’re scared of me?” he whispered. 

Rachel shrugged. “Knowledge is power,” she whispered back. “You could shut us down, force us to go into hiding, all of the things that keep us up at night. They’re waiting to see what you decide.”

“What? I’ve already decided.” Santino tried to catch the attention of a woman across the solarium, and she fled out the side door into the topiary. “Can you promise me they aren’t a threat? Shawn and the others?”

“Yeah, I can. But I would have said the same thing before Shawn attacked you,” she said. “What I do know is that this will never happen again. Mulcahy’s already locked it down.” 

His colors did that weaving thing as he weighed a hundred outcomes. “You’d really go into hiding?”

She nodded. “Got my tropical paradise picked out and everything.”

“God,” he groaned. “Fine. Let them know I’ll keep your secret.”

She hugged him. Neither of them were big on casual hugs, but sometimes the friendly pat on the back wouldn’t do. “Thank you,” she said against his chest.

“If Shawn starts the apocalypse, I’m going to be so pissed at you.”

She let go and grinned up at him. “If it makes you feel better, we’ll probably die in the first wave of bombing anyhow.”

“Oh, sudden annihilation,” he sighed. “One of the many advantages to living in D.C.”

They entered the empty kitchen. Like all good kitchens, it was the heart of their home and was usually thrumming with life. The room had escaped the heavy hand of renovation and had kept its classic cafeteria galley design, with worn oak floors and copper pots hanging from the crossbeams. The industrial-sized fridge was stocked with ice cream and beer, and a shopping list written in forty different hands curled down its front. Plastic bags from a favorite catering company covered the worn butcher block of an island stationed between the two counters. OACET was an army which marched on its stomach.

Rachel dug through the bags until she found a chicken salad sandwich which was still reasonably cold, and slid it across the island to Santino. She was rummaging through the rest to find something for herself when Phil came in.

“I’ve been drafted,” Phil said, helping himself to one of Rachel’s discards.

“That does not live up to its labeling as roast beef,” she warned.

He took a cautious bite and agreed. “Strangest-looking pastrami I’ve ever seen.”

“Drafted for what?” Santino asked.

“To see if you’re going to bring us down,” Rachel said. “I already told them but noooo…” She rolled her eyes. “Apparently this is serious enough to require confirmation.”

“Hey,” Phil mumbled around a mouthful of mystery meat, “we’re terrified. No offense, we all think you’re great,” he said to Santino, “but you’ve got to understand we’re basically huddling together for warmth in our house of cards. We’re slowly reinforcing it with concrete but there’s no way we can withstand a direct hit.”

“Doesn’t it bother any of you that you’re putting a hell of a lot of pressure on me?” Santino asked. “I feel like I’m responsible for the survival of an entire civilization.”

“At least it’s a small one,” Phil said. “So the guilt shouldn’t be too bad if you wipe us off of the planet.”

“Dick.”

“Yup.” Phil was relaxed in greens and blues, trusting in Santino.

Rachel closed her eyes and rested against the counter. A summer thunderstorm had crept in while they were down in the catacombs, and the rain pounding on the skylights kept time to Phil and Santino’s bickering. The house was getting back to normal (
coming back online,
said that part of her brain she loved to drown in whiskey), and green avatars began to float through the kitchen to see if it was safe for their human forms to follow. Rachel waved them off, asking the collective for a few moments of peace, and the kitchen was theirs again.

“Have you tried to get them professional help?” Santino asked.

“Shawn and the others? No. This is one of those there-but-for-the-grace-of things,” Phil said. “Even if they could get better therapy somewhere else—and I sincerely doubt that, since our psychologists are pretty much the only ones in the world who have experience working with cyborgs—I don’t know if we could leave them with anyone outside of OACET.”

“How hard was it, going public?” Santino asked as he went to the fridge for a soda. He snapped the tab and took a large swallow to chase the codeine in his system with a Tylenol. Rachel had been watching a small but intense spot of red in his conversational colors hovering over his left arm, its center burning bright white and traveling the length of his stitches. The spot pulsed along with his heart and grew stronger as the local anesthetic wore off. It was morbidly fascinating; this was her first time tracking injury progression, and her growing curiosity was keeping pace with her partner’s level of pain.

“Toughest thing we’ve ever done,” Phil replied. “The only good part is that now we’re together as a group. If we didn’t have each other, we wouldn’t have made it this far.”

“You know,” Santino said as he poked through the sandwiches in search of more chicken salad, “it might not be so rough if you guys were open about your problems. I’m appalled—seriously appalled!—that you guys feel as though you have to hide people in your basement like it’s the nineteenth century and they’re your mentally-ill cousins or something.”

“And he’s already forgotten how he nearly pissed himself when he found out about them,” Jason Atran said, pushing open the swinging kitchen door. With dark hair over dark eyes, Jason had the polished features of a European male model and dressed to match. He positioned himself directly across from Santino and leaned back against the counter: there was ample space in the rambling kitchen, but Jason was there for no other reason than confrontation, flowing in reds and jealous greens.

“Did you tell him to come down here?”
Rachel asked Phil, who shook his head.

“I don’t think so. I haven’t spoken to him in weeks,”
the small man replied.
“This probably got grapevined.”

“Outside voices, remember?” Jason said to them, quick to notice the glassy stare that marked Agents chatting via a private link. “We have a guest.”

“Thanks.” Santino smiled at Jason but his colors were ramping up to red as he picked up on Jason’s antagonism. Rachel would have been worried if Jason had come in and thrown a punch at Santino, but her partner was a seasoned gladiator on the verbal battlefield. The Agent didn’t stand a chance.

“Heard you met Zia,” Jason said. “Tight little lay, isn’t she?”

Rachel was struck dumb. The comment was beyond the pale, even in their home where civility was so lax it was barely an afterthought.