Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (35 page)

“Want to talk about it?” Josh asked.

“No,” she and Santino replied.

Rachel drank almost half a hand of whiskey before it calmed her down enough so she could feel it. Seated across from her, Santino set down his own empty stein and let himself collapse backward along the length of the island. “You know what I never want to see again?” he said, absently reaching for a copper saucepan dangling just out of reach.

“Truck filled with kids?” Josh was matching Santino drink for drink. Moods didn’t lose their intensity when they jumped from Agent to Agent. The way Josh felt now, he might as well have been standing beside them when the doors had opened.

“They were so scared, Josh…” Rachel said, and slumped forward to rest her cheek against the slightly sticky wood of the island. “That truck was a furnace of yellow…” Santino and Josh exchanged wry grins. “Shut up. Walk a mile in my head and see how you describe it.”

“Eh, furnace of yellow works for me,” Santino said as he tilted his head towards her. “Everybody always says you can smell fear but damned if today wasn’t the first time I’ve ever actually experienced it. That truck reeked.”

Josh held up the bottle for refills and they waved him off, unwilling to get real and truly drunk until the events of the day had faded.

“Well,” Josh said, “the important thing is that you feel really, really shitty.”

“Yes,” Rachel muttered. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, but if anyone had turned up dead, you’d be wrecked.”

“Egads, man,” Santino smiled. “Why aren’t you writing greeting cards?”

“I’ve been known to dabble in Hallmark on the side. Cyborgery doesn’t pay as much as you’d think.”

“Hey…” Rachel said, remembering. She peeled herself off of the countertop and pushed herself back against the dishwasher. “Mulcahy said I got a raise. How much, and when does it kick in?”

The conversation moved towards money, or the perpetual lack thereof. Agents had a generous salary for civil servants but any real profit went to those personable few who were also marketable properties. Josh was one of these, but he also enjoyed his life as a party boy, and his advances and royalties went out almost as fast as they came in. He and Santino got in a pleasant argument about whether it was better to save for retirement or live for the day; Santino was proud of his pension, while Josh had been known to rent out entire restaurants to impress his dates. 

They were still arguing when Phil and Jason found them in the kitchen. They had both felt the pull of home. The five of them were soon sprawled across the wide planks of the oak floor, mostly laughing, sometimes falling silent before the others drew them back.

They turned to idle games and stories of pretty women. Santino had found a pack of cards and he and Jason built thin houses over Rachel’s boots. She and Josh took a drunk’s delight in letting them get four rows high before pretending to sneeze.

Phil stared off into space with the glazed expression of a man trying to see through walls. He had received a copy of the target practice autoscript from Mulcahy, and was working to strip the calibrations and calculations from it until only the ability to look through objects was left. Until Rachel could successfully package up her own scripts, this was the only perception script available, and Phil wanted a head start in case Sergeant Andrews came knocking.

She was comfortably tipsy, almost dozing. Josh’s shoulder made for a hard pillow but he was warm. When he laughed, she felt it through the side of her head; his conversational colors were quietly blue, pushing and blending with the others’ colors.
Ripples where the water meets,
she thought, and Josh glanced down and grinned at her.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. You’re the sweetest little drunk poet.”

Phil’s head came up. His colors dimmed as he looked at the black hallway leading to the kitchen, then towards Santino. “Uh…” he started.

Josh was suddenly standing, comfortably casual as he moved towards the door. “Santino? Someone’s here for you.”

Rachel reached out and recognized the approaching Agents by their colors before they came into view. She swung herself up on her bare feet. “Come on,” she said, tugging on her partner’s sleeve. “It’s Shawn. It’ll be fine,” she reassured him when Santino fluttered yellow. “He’s…”

She stopped before she said “okay”
—
Shawn was still anything but.

He led his caretakers into the kitchen. Shawn had found an old suit which fit him perfectly except for the slightly too-long shirt sleeves, which covered a third of his hands and were cuffed tight with carved ivory cabochons. Rachel hadn’t seen him fully clothed in ages; so strange, how she hadn’t noticed how thin Shawn had gotten until he was dressed. He seemed half-starved and exhausted, drained, but he came up to Santino with steady steps.

“Blue…” he said in a voice gone to seed. The Agents went white in surprise; Shawn was one of the mutes. “The blue is everywhere, little men with wings.

“This is not me,” Shawn croaked.

“This is
Not. Me!”
Shawn said again, almost shouting, and banged on his own chest with a fist to keep time with his words.

He reached out towards Santino. His caretakers scurried to block but Rachel told them to back off; Shawn’s colors had never been so stable.

He put his hands flat against Santino’s chest and leaned in close. “Sometimes I can almost see myself,” he whispered. “After that I’m …” And Rachel and the others were knocked back and forth on Shawn’s internal roller coaster, the car buckling up the high track right before the big drop.

“Shawn? Remember to talk,” Rachel said, more to stop her sudden motion sickness than anything else.

He nodded, shaggy hair flying. He stepped back from Santino and covered his mouth. Through his mesh of thin fingers, Shawn apologized.

Her partner had been as much an observer as the rest of them, heartsick in grays. He sat down at the island and slid the bar stool to his right out towards Shawn.

“You play poker?” 

The wight in the old suit smiled.

The cards were swept up from the floor and Santino dealt them in.

At first, they played for Shawn. Santino lost hand after hand, Shawn laughing wildly, until he realized the Agent was going out-of-body to spy on his cards. Their small group grew as others working the night shift wandered in, drawn by the noise and the inevitable arrival of pizza.

When they ran out of chairs in the kitchen, they moved to the game room. Nights in the game room were like sneaking into an arcade after closing, the walls crawling with light cast from the cabinet consoles. A large tournament-style card table was submerged under cardboard, and the Agents quickly cleared away the boxes and replaced them with candles.

They never played cards. When things were fresh and new, they had trained themselves out of the idea of it; cheating was too easy and bluffing too hard. With Santino dealing like a Vegas pro, they studied the table, their hands, each other, with trepidation. 

And then, like stars winking out, they started to drop from the link.

Rachel knew better than anyone how their implants had become part of them. Turn them off to play a game? Such a simple solution, and one beyond their imagining; you woke up in a cold sweat over the nightmare of the accident which took your eyes, your hands, your mind… You did not see the loss of such things as solutions.

She played the first few hands but she quickly bowed out to let a newcomer take her spot. Rachel could not drop out of the link herself, not without losing her sight, but flipping between reading and interpersonal frequencies was bringing on a headache. She found some pillows and a ratty handknit afghan, and curled up on top of a bumper pool table with her whiskey, cozy amongst the boxes. 

“Rachel?”
Phil called from the kitchen, several rooms away.
“Do me a favor and hold up some fingers.”

“How many?”

“Surprise me.

She hunkered down in her nest of cardboard to make sure she was hidden and waved.

“All five. Again?”

Bunny ears.

“Two. Again?”

Rachel held up her other hand.

“Seven.”

“You’ve got it!”

Phil’s happy mental whoop was so loud it resonated throughout the collective.

Happy,
she thought, watching the blues and purples mingle. Lovely rich reds floated through the mix; she might have to change her assumptions about reds in her ontology. Everyone at the table wanted to be there, even Santino. 

Especially Santino. 

Home.

Shawn’s voice kept failing but he pushed on through the dust. He told a riddle. It wasn’t very good, and Santino told him so, and Shawn laughed and laughed.

Rachel wrapped her afghan around her shoulders and jumped off of her table, wavering slightly from the whiskey as she headed to the bathroom. She rounded the corner and crashed straight into Josh: she had done her own version of dropping out of the link without realizing it, shutting down her range to encompass only those within the same room.

Josh held a finger to his lips before she could speak and she realized he wasn’t alone. He stood in front of Mulcahy, whose face was hidden behind his arm against the wall. Josh pulled Mulcahy away and gently pushed the larger man down the hallway, quickly, quietly, so the others wouldn’t see their unbreakable leader weeping with relief.

“Mulcahy says you can tell him,”
Josh said to her as they disappeared into the dark. 

“Santino?”
She looked into the game room, where her partner was talking to one of the gardeners about the care and feeding of African violets. “
How much can I tell him?”

A pause, then:
“Everything.”

SEVENTEEN

They left the mansion a few hours later, the last of the whiskey buzz burned off by exhaustion. Rachel wanted nothing more than to fall into her own bed, but she had Santino turn off the road at a supermarket. This was a good enough place as any; she had never felt comfortable in parking lots, especially at night. They were about as removed from reality as you could get, sodium lights beating down on dead pavement, half-dead bushes mounded in wasted soil, the cars staking claim to chipped painted lines.

Santino asked her what she needed to buy at this time of night, and Rachel tucked her feet up against the dashboard and started talking.

It was, oh, close to seven years ago when she had been recruited for OACET. She had been about to apply to West Point to pursue her officer’s candidacy. She wanted to go career military all the way, as high as she could before the glass ceiling kicked in, and then she’d fight to break through that. Secretary of Defense had such a nice ring to it...

But September 11th had been a couple of years before that, and the phrase “connect the dots” would never mean the same thing again. Even when she was out in the field, there were rumors of a pilot program designed to bring together the best and the brightest from the federal government, to connect those many disparate agencies and departments and organizations and the labyrinthic tangle of bureaucracies in a way that transcended self-interest. 

A program that would allow the country’s government to finally work.

Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

She had been told she would return to the Army once the orientation was over, that her career path would be straight and true thanks to her participation in this program. She would be changed, but in the best ways possible. She would be able to speak with forces trapped behind enemy lines, or, if necessary, could go in herself and never be cut off from home. 

(And if you peeled back the flowery language to see the rot beneath, those departments with the three-letter-names could not
wait
to get their hands on the cyborgs! Imagine the potential. The out-of-body feature alone had them salivating.)

There was a long selection process. There were countless tests, screenings, drills… The dropout rate was immense. Twenty-five was the top age for candidates, so the competition was energetic and savage. Eventually, the candidates were narrowed down to an even five hundred. 

The surgery was successful. The technology was experimental but safe. Not a single person was lost on the table. 

For the first few weeks, they lived as though they had discovered magic; they saw the world through fairy-tale eyes. The link was everything. It was impossible to know how alone you were, to appreciate how bitterly isolated you were as a living thing, until that fell away in the collective. Every moment was perfect, like those idyllic nights with a new lover where you get lost in the conversation, the connection, adoring every part of their aspect while you were in turn adored. 

It got old pretty damned quick.

They received no helpful advice from those who claimed to know how the implant worked. There were no instructions on how to keep the others in the link out of your own head, and you couldn’t stop yourself from reaching out them when you thought of their name, their job, the brand of their favorite shoes.