Veracity (11 page)

Manager Strauss walks to the very edge of the stage. "Let me ask you this, friends. How would it be if you never had to read another data set again? How about we just find these people who are out there leaking poison into society? And just . . . get them out of harm's way?"

Some of us clap, turned just like that. Most are skeptical and keep their hands in their laps. Monitors would give up anything to skip the process of verifying codes. It is a tremendous burden, the things to which we bear witness. The daily effort to save the innocent has hollowed us out. But to skip the review process would mean no judge and no jury. No due process. It's a fast pass to murder. No one knows that better than Candace and I.

Manager Strauss taps the screen and a picture of Candace and me comes up. It's footage of yesterday's field test. The two of us are in the long Quonset hut, standing on a high platform. The space beyond us is dark, stretching out into an optic infinity. Our eyes are half open. Our bodies locked in the position of reading, hands out, heads up. We look like terrorists about to be shot.

I'm outraged at the mistruths worked so deftly into this display. They're making us out to be deities. We've just barely been named the top two Sentients in the whole Monitoring
Department--and now everyone's acting as if we've changed. As if the things they want us to do are things to be admired.

Suddenly I'm the one out of my seat and down the aisle. Away from Manager Strauss and his magic wand. I'm in the holding room before Candace can catch up.

"It's a good goddamned thing you're so important!" she says, green eyes sparkling. "Now let's go sit back down and be through with this thing!"

I ignore Candace's anger, her ability to forget her own indiscretions and see only mine. This is the way her love comes out. As irritation and worry.

"I'm not important," I respond, pushing away the hand of a young Manager who's come pleasantly through the door to march me right back to my seat.

apostasy

ego

fossil

heresy

kindred

obstreperous

offline

veracity

I'm up with the sun, ready to eat and drink. Breaking one's slate feels like the equivalent of running the length of Wernthal. My muscles ache, starved for protein and fluids. My head hurts. It protests each step until I'm in the room above the kitchen, staring at Ezra's promised box, heavy with canned food.

"Thank you, God."

The box has been marked
Girls Room
in poorly made cursive writing. It smells of rot and in places is wilted through. When I go to move it, sections crumble and fall away. It's amazing Ezra got it up here in the first place. I'd throw it out were it not for the imperfect writing on its side. Blue-black ink scribbled with haste and without thought, as if it wasn't a privilege. I trace the letters with a finger, trying to imagine what it must have been like to write and, further, to have produced such ugly little wonderful words on the side of a box. I would find it exhilarating. The person who wrote
Girls Room
found it an irritation. It's there in her loops, the way the last letters fade away.

I look around the room before eating. Its old beams must be over a hundred years old. They're nonregulation, like the windows with their thick, warping panes that are much too wide and much too high, letting in too much light. There's something familiar in the sun heating my shoulders, in the early morning chirping of birds. In the landscape of trees and fields just outside. They make up some kind of code I can't
crack but am happy to know is there. Set into the world and calling me out of doors to study.
The unnecessary distraction of nature
, the government calls it. They're right to be concerned. Had I been more exposed to it, I might have broken my slate earlier.

My stomach is rumbling, so I abandon that which feeds my soul for that which will feed the rest of me and line up the cans of food in a row on the hardwood floor. Perfect little Confederation words have been affixed to each one:
Green Beans, Butter Beans, Processed Ham,
and so on. I haven't eaten for almost two days and my anxious hands are clumsy with the beaked opener. One letter suggested salty foods to fight the nausea, so I eat the can of green beans first, then turn to the processed ham that tastes better than it looks. I eat until my hunger's sated and ignore the clanging thirst that takes its place.

I look around. Grow frantic. Is it possible Ezra hasn't left me any water?

I dismiss the immediate panic and resolve to search for anything that can be turned into fire. I'll find matches and kindling. I'll break the goddamned legs off the chairs if I have to and whittle them against each other until I get a spark. I'll boil the brown water coming out of the tap or go down to the promised stream, boil out the pesticides and strychnine there. Creek water will be more polluted, will require more time over a fire. But it will be clear. It will taste better because I won't see the dirt.

I begin a search for anything that will further my cause.

There are some old empty boxes stacked up in the center of the room, the kind used to move people from one house to another. I pull free the one on top and examine it for any traces of relocation left inside. Find a stick of gum wrapped in strange-looking aluminum wrapping that breaks when I try to bend it. In the third box down I find a flat, round piece of metal. On one side is the head of a man with the words
In God We Trust
. On the other side, a building that looks like a part
of the National House. Above and then below this structure are the words
United States of America
and
One Cent.
Inside the box on the very bottom, I find a single playing card--the jack of diamonds--and my heart falls into my feet.

Card games are allowed in the Confederation of the Willing. Veracity and I would sit up each weekend night, drinking soda and eating popcorn, playing Chase the Ace, poker, and rummy. My daughter treated the cards as if they were holy. She kept them close to her. In the drawer of her bedside table along with a flashlight--should the power go out--and some sand collected from our only vacation to the ocean. We'd play until the decks would become worn and need to be floured to slide correctly across the kitchen table. We never played to win.

Veracity was strangely good at cards. There were times my daughter seemed to know exactly which ones I was holding or what card was next to be drawn off the top of the pile. Upon questioning, she confided that she was sometimes able to get up out of her seat and walk around behind my chair to see my hand. Just the see-through parts of her moved, she explained. Not her real body. On those evenings when Veracity did particularly well, I went to bed distraught. Praying, despite the obvious, that my daughter hadn't inherited my abilities.

I lift the jack of diamonds into the morning light and run a finger over its cracked edge. Start to put it in my pocket, then stop. Instead, I put the card back inside the box and stack all the others on top, Ezra's voice from the night before in my head.
No baggage.

There's a rolled-up old rug propped in the corner. It's bent at the waist and looks longingly down at the floor. I lay it out flat and discover a handful of dusty old books hidden in its center.
The Grapes of Wrath, The Story of Old Jeremiah, Frog and Toad
, two books called
Reader's Digest
--one with a green cover, one red. Nothing I can use for a fire, but each a treasure nonetheless. A cursory glance tells me these books are full of words I don't know. Words I'm not supposed to say. I go
to line them up on the floor, and from the center of the thick one--
The Grapes of Wrath
--a dark yellow pamphlet falls out. It's something I haven't seen for months,
The Myth Behind "The Book of Noah."

I flip it open to the first page, where someone's written a note.

It's one of the pamphlets passed out by Manager Strauss. How it got out here, I can't imagine. I slip the pamphlet back into the old knotted rug and push it back into the corner, but the inscription stays with me.

Downstairs, the kitchen has been stripped of everything but a table and two chairs, a broom, some clothesline lassoed around the top of a door, and an old stainless steel pot that's turned a dull gray. I forage the rest of the rooms like a rodent. Am now a harvester of thrown-away bounty, things that will heat me, feed me, protect and hydrate me. Isolation is more dangerous than I'd anticipated. There are too many must-haves I don't have, and by midafternoon my tongue is so swollen, it protrudes slightly through my lips.

I could die of thirst before I get the chance to fight.
I shake off the thought. It's time to go outside. See about the creek that, from the window, splits the far crops in two.

The creek is a couple hundred feet from the house. Burrowed into a tree line left over from the old days when such landmarks were used to demarcate property. Back when people, not the government, owned the land. Most places like this are wired. Some wires signal movement, some distribute voltage. According to my recruiter, any found on this property will do neither. Still, I keep an eye out for dead squirrels killed by the electricity. Proceed slowly, tossing ahead sticks and rocks. Waiting for any sparks.

As I predicted, the water I collect from the creek is deceptively clear. It sits in the base of the steel pot, baiting me.
Screw waiting for Ezra!
Drink me!
I have to throw it back in the stream and find a spot farther away. Somewhere I can make a fire without the distraction of unclean water over my shoulder. A place where I can remember terms like
parasites, poison,
and
dysentery.

By early afternoon, I've worn myself out trying to produce a spark from two chair legs I've peeled with a piece of broken glass. An hour later, I consider drinking my own urine. Another hour ticks by and I'm so mad at Ezra for not leaving me water I could strangle her with my bare hands. By late afternoon, I've cried out all the moisture left in my body and can't even pee.

I march to the bathroom located on the first floor and look at myself in the mirror. Dirt is smeared over every angle and crease of my face, arms, and torso. Pockets of dust have formed in the loose waves of my hair. I'll have to clean up.

I retrieve a pot of brown water from the kitchen and pour it into the bathroom's yellowed tub. My face and hair are fixed easy enough. But my clothes are torn at every joint and muddied in places I won't be able to conceal. They're beyond the repair of brown water from the sink or even clear water from the creek. But there's not much of a choice. If Ezra doesn't come soon, I'll have to walk into Bond.

I've done this job since I was eighteen. Have lasted longer than anyone save for Candace. For this, I've earned an ergonomic chair with a built-in massager for my lower back. They offered me the component that would massage my calves but I said no and Mr. Weigland took it instead. My calves are where I store the things I see. When I get a difficult file, I flex them beneath my desk.
Left, right, left, right
until I've typed up any required notes and dispositioned the file. Those things--screams, desecrations, sins I still don't have the words for--will go with me to the grave. Mr. Weigland thinks I'm a stone but I'm really a mother confessor. I'm God's mathematician, counting the violations of humanity. It's how I do what I do.

I have twenty-four hours to evaluate a data file. To see how well the slate has cataloged the infraction and determine how appropriately assigned was the punishment. People create these data files by speaking Red Listed words or phrases. Sometimes the shock delivered by the slate is payment in full. Other times, Blue Coats are dispatched to deliver a correlating punishment that requires hands, feet, knees, teeth. More. Punishments a slate can't affect. Often, Blue Coats will improvise. Go off script and add interrogation, mutilation, rape, or murder. Something that better fits their mood.

Recordings of Red List infractions, and any subsequent Blue Coat visits, come to me as pieces of audio we call
waveforms
--acoustic data we can watch as well as hear. Each
sound creates a series of red spikes that travel across my screen from left to right. The same way a seismograph articulates an earthquake.

The chronology of events following a Red List infraction that will require a Blue Coat's visit is far from perfect. For example, if someone uses a class one Red Listed word, the first person to be notified by the offender's slate isn't a Monitor who can verify such a life-threatening blunder of speech, but the Blue Coat who will be sent immediately and with great prejudice to kill the person who's said it. In this case, it's only after the punitive action has been carried out that I will be allowed to review the waveform and verify the diction. It's not often that an infraction requires an immediate 550. But it happens.

If I think an infraction was false or accidental, I write notes suggesting a different punishment than the one assigned by the computer. For this, I use our book of codes, a guide that maps to a few hundred different punishments, all parsed out according to the severity of the action and how large a threat it is to the Confederation. The computer isn't always able to discern who's a child stumbling onto just the right combination of sounds, or a new mother gone days without sleep. I am the human element. Like the computer, sometimes I make mistakes. Unlike my digital counterparts, I feel them all.