Memoria (17 page)

"I do,"
Max
nodded to Frank. "Their skin is too smooth to be natural, I have to agree."

"Accepted,"
Barney
flicked
the carrot end i
nto the bin and reached into a
bag for a new one.

"Good," Frank glanced at the paper. "Kathleen told me something once that I dismissed as
irrelevant. At the time, I thought she'd dreamt it all up. It was something about transplanting one person's memories
in
to another.
I didn't know
then that
she worked for Memoria, did I?"

Barney
choked and burst out
coughing. The coach reached out and tapped his back.

"I'm
—
agrh!
—
sorry,"
Barney
twisted his arm and pointed his thumb at his shoulder blades.
Max
slapped him as hard as he could. "Much better now."

Barney
cheered up and spoke louder
,

"I'm sorry about that
. For a second, I imagined
Max
's memories being transplanted into my head. And his and mine, into Maggie's."

"This is exactly what I mean," Frank said. "What if the idea behind the Vaccination is to prep the migrants for a war?
The talks start. The President arrives. And then
the shit hits the f
an. A previously trained group acts first and the others join in.
"

"So you think,"
Max
patted the rifle butt, "that they want to kill the President and blame it on the migrants?"

"Exactly.
Now,
Gautier
has somehow
heard about the
Vaccination
project
. Alternatively, somebody l
eaked the information
on purpose, in order to provoke our Steel L
ady."

"We digress,"
Max
said.

Frank paused, searching for the right words.

"This is what Kathleen
came up with. By transplanting the required," he raised his finger, "I said, the
required
memories, you can give society
a
perfect
professional force. Thousands
of brain surgeons, architects, e
ng
i
neers and researchers
...
"

"And well-trained soldiers,"
Barney
butted in. The coach nodded.

"And soldiers," Frank said. "
I
t's
plain
irresistible
, don't you think?
Thousands of people gaining access to skills the
y
didn't have before.
Just like that,
"
he snapped his fingers.

Barney
screw
ed
up his face.

"
Provided they pay
," the coach mumbled.
Frank dismissed the remark and went on,

"And once these soldiers acquire certain combat skills
—
say, in an
urban environment,
—
then they can confront the police. They can trigger rioting
...
"

"Wait a sec," i
n one practiced motion, the coach
push
ed the bolt into the breech, fitted the recoil spring and
snapped the breech frame cover shut.
Then he cocked the firing mechanism and inspected the rifle.
"Do you r
eally think that
Claney
's fighters are migrants?"

He aimed the barrel at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. The
hammer
clicked. T
he coach leaned the rifle
against
the window sill.

"Now that sounds closer to the truth,"
Barney
deftly
chopped the carrots and peeled the onions
. "
This way
nothing leads
back to him.
He's got them
to
pull his chestnuts out of the fire."

"I think so, too," Frank
went on. "It's not so easy to
arrange for a normal citizen to disappear.
Now migrants are different. No one gives a damn about them. There's an entire new generation grown
up
behind the camp's fence. Okay.
Let's assume they did plan some organized rioting, but
...
"

It hurt him to speak of Kathleen impersonally, as i
f she was just a missing link to
the past events. But he forced himself to go on,

"
...
but Kathleen could have found out about it. She must have tried to
throw a
monkey wrench
in the works. Then Memoria had to cover up
their
tracks and change
d
their
plans."

"At the moment, t
his is nothing but a
theory,"
Barney
pointed out. "As is the killing of the President and
of their lab babies."

"Actually, they work very well together," said
Max
.

"Let's start with the Vaccination, then," squinting,
Barney
turned away from the table and wiped
away
his onion tears.
"What's so special about it?
Who
does it threaten
and how
?"

"We've already
worked out a thing or two about it,"
the coach said.
"
If what Frank's said is true, then after the press conference
people will line up for the Vaccination from here to hell."

Barney
and Frank nodded.

"This program threatens the migrants and their current situation. They feed New York. They
provide electricity and drinking water. Their
waste disposal sites work overtime. If you think about
it
, it's the same everywhere. Migrant camps all over the country are responsible for
the
cities'
sustenance
. Migrants are everywhere. They
clear the debris, they work at construction sites, they clean the streets
...
"

"They don't have oil,"
Barney
interrupted him.

"So what?"
Max
smirked. "The government is obliged to
give it to them. If camps
decide to
stop
supplying food, water and electricity, cities will starve
and
face epidemics."

"That's crisis," Frank said. "Administrative crisis."

"Created
by Memoria's
forcing everyone to have their memories erased.
What we have
now
is a generation of brainwashed wooses
,
too used to their fake joy and prosperity and running to the near
es
t Memoria branch at the first sight of trouble.
"

"So you think that now they want to
rectify the situation?"
Barney
lifted his hands in dismay.
"That doesn't sum up. Too
much too soon."

"What
did you want?"
Max
stepped toward him
. "That's a conspiracy for you.
Why would they traumatize
the
population? Those with blue and green bracelet
lights
c
ould
n't care less, anyway. And veterans like ourselves
...
we're getting old.
We've lost our grip on the situation.
We
've lost our gut feeling,
"
he glanced at his rifle.

"I'm not talking about it,"
Barney
waved his knife in
Max
's
direction.
"
What I want to know is who is supposed to start the war? Logically, it should be the migrants.
Right?"

Frank nodded.

"
Claney
said that their leaders
—
of
which
there
are quite a few
—
would be the first to try the Vaccination. Which means,"
Barney
threw the knife onto the table, scooped up a handful of chopped c
arrots and showed it to
Max
,
"They'll be offered one thin
g and given quite the opposite." He
threw the carrots back and picked up the knife. "Then they'll have the upper hand
. Hundreds of thousands, ready for war, flooding the streets. Drowning New York in blood."

"How do you suggest they do it?" the coach asked nonchalantly. "How are they supposed to keep those hundreds of thousands under control?
This isn't a minor group
of street fighters. They must have a clear objective. How can they program it in?"

"Easy!"
Barney
stuck the knife into the cutting board and wiped his hands
on
his jeans. "Think of the personality correction program they use in prisons. I don't think the Vaccination
is going to be much different."

"Well," the coach glanced at Frank and his eyes glistened behind the glasses.
"Probably not. But how can you force thousands of migrants to assault the rest of the population and the President himself?
The personality correction program is not that easy. The initial session takes Memoria workers several hours. Then their patients need several repeat sessions so that the
en
coding affect
s
their conscious mind, as well. The technology in itself is too expensive. Then you need several teams of
expert
mnemotech
s. Using it is justified in
a limited amount of
very specific
unique cases.
S
erial killers, repeat offenders and
sexual predators
are few and far between, and as for the rest, then obligatory Memoria visits have obliterated
all other crimes. Yesterday's murder was the first in New York in five years."

"What do you imply?"
Barney
asked warily
.

Frank realized that there were some
hidden reefs they hadn't considered.

The coach placed
the rifle onto the window sill and opened the laptop. His fingers flitted over the keyboard.

"There are thirty
Memoria branches in New York
," he said without taking his eyes
off
the screen. "Curiously,
five of them opened last week. Five more will be opened tomorrow."

"Same in
DC
," Frank said. "Lots of new branches there."

"Yeah," the coach nodded. "But in New York,
they also have two large centers. One serves the police department and deals, mind you, with personality correction. It's also their job to
make sure
that the c
itizens abide by the obligatory
law
on memory
clean-ups
.
The other one is
a
research center.
I'd love to have a look at it. Unfortunately, time is the issue."

"This center
is probably
nothing but a smoke screen,"
Barney
placed the frying pan onto the stove and turned to Frank. "You don't
hide your
secrets in places like this
. You shove them where
the
sun doesn't shine
: like, be
hind the polar circle or on
the Moon."

"Possible,"
Max
agreed.
"So this is what we have. To organize simultaneous personality correction sessions for a thousand migrants
—
let's assume that
every Memoria branch in New York will be doing just
that, including their research c
enters
...
let's see
...
a person per hour
...
ten per hour in research centers
...
that'll be
...
" he turned his laptop to show them his calculations. "Sixteen and a half hours to perform primary personality correction for a thousand people.
One thousand,
mind you. And we're talking hundreds
of
thousand
s in New York alone. Millions, i
f you count the whole country. How much time will
that
take?"