World-Mart (14 page)

The room emptied, save for Virginia and Ray.

“You’re one of the humans infected with the Blue Dust?” he asked her.  “The HD-1 virus?” he amended.

“How did you know?”

“I just assumed.”  Ray downloaded information from the desk’s computer onto a smaller, hand-held computer, and then he began to manipulate the figures on the smaller screen with a thin, plastic pointer.  He set the hand-held computer back into its synch port and loaded his changes, turning to Virginia with his full attention.  He moved closer to her, studying her eyes.  “And you were at the hospital?” he asked.

“The virus gave me a terrible fever . . . a lot of other people too, bad enough for over a dozen of us to be admitted within a week or two of one another.  When they saw what the virus did, they refused to let us go.”

Ray ensured that his previous information had finished loading, and then grabbed his hand-held computer and began to input more figures.  “Good that you were able to get away.”

“Anne helped me escape.”

Ray nodded, looking pleased.  “I knew that girl would come in handy one of these days.”

“Do you know who developed the virus?” Virginia asked.  She considered how she might react if Ray admitted that he was actually the one responsible for the destruction of her old life.  Was she ready to face the person who deliberately took so much away from her so soon after her loss?

“Some of my scientists developed it, but I have no idea who deployed it,” Ray said, scratching his beard.  “It was not my intention for the virus to get people killed, or even to infect the random people it infected.”

“The virus didn’t kill anyone.  They chose
e
uthanasia over living out the rest of their lives . . . like this.  The hospital was happy to kill them.”

Ray made another note on his hand-held computer.  “I’m glad to know that.  Isaac was adamant that it wasn’t deadly.  I had my doubts.”  He chuckled.  “I guess that’s why I’m the philosopher and tactician, and not the biochemist.”

Virginia found herself speechless.  Here she stood, stripped of her dignity, her family, a lifetime of earthly possessions, her very humanity, and Ray was b
ragging
about his tactical capabilities.  “Why?” she finally asked, unable to find any other suitable response.

“Why did we develop the Blue Dust?”

Virginia nodded.

“Leverage.”

Virginia remained silent, confused.

“The people in power are always the ones given the privilege of writing history.  Corporate is in power, and it’s done one hell of a job trying to keep us under its heel.  They’ve said a lot of terrible things about us over the years.”  Ray punched a few commands into his hand-held computer, and then showed Virginia the screen.  A short video began to play.

The video showed an
f
MRI and PET scan of a deviant brain compared side by side with a normal human’s.  Although the deviant brain was indeed smaller, it exhibited about twice as much activity level.

“
The dark eyes
claim superiority, citing brain size as their only proof,” Ray said.  “But we are very clearly their intellectual superiors.”

“You’re insane!” Virginia exclaimed.  “If you’re so smart, then why are deviants only allowed to work in manual labor and sanitation?”

“So we don’t take over the world and render
the dark eyes
obsolete, naturally,” he said, the calmness in his voice almost startling.  “But we’ve learned to use it to our advantage.  They’re only prolonging the inevitable.”

“The inevitable?”

“My goal is to spread awareness, to prove to the dark-eyed population that we are people, too.  I have been privately funding genetic research, so that I can gather the evidence I need to prove we deserve our place in society.  Nothing more.”

“How many people are involved in this?”

“More than you would guess.  This cave is the smallest of four bases I run from my computer,” he said confidently.

Virginia looked at all of the stolen items catalogued and stacked along the walls.  Her heart raced as she realized that she was consorting with the leader of what was probably the biggest organized deviant crime circuit on the West Coast.  Somewhere under this man’s command, the HD-1 virus had been created.  Who knew what else he was capable of?

“So, I’m dead to my family and I look like a deviant.  What am I supposed to do?  Where am I supposed to go?  I don’t care if you’re only inadvertently responsible for my condition, I want to know what you’re going to do to help me get my life back,” Virginia said, surprised to find her backbone as the words poured out seemingly on their own accord.  She could feel her face going red and she turned away from him, fighting tears.

“First of all,” Ray began, still remaining perfectly calm, “You don’t just look like a deviant—you
are
a deviant.  Get used to it.  Second, if you think I’m going to pay you some kind of restitution, you can kiss my ass.  However, I would be more than happy to employ and house you, should you decide you could live with working for a crazy, pompous jerk such as myself, as well as be willing to bend a few human laws
about
which you, as a deviant, now no longer have any say.  Sound fair?”

She reluctantly nodded, still too angry and upset to look him in the eyes.

“Good.  Your first assignment will be to report to Isaac so he can take a sample of your blood.”

She almost began to speak again, and then changed her mind before she said her first word.  She felt uneasy about the situation, but what could she do?  She just seemed to fall haplessly into it.  Was this how everyone got their start in organized crime?  Giving blood one day and deploying genetically engineered viruses the next?

He pointed to a dark tunnel on his left.  “Isaac should be in there.  If not, come back and we’ll hunt him down together.  He disappears sometimes.  God knows where he goes off to.”

Virginia held her breath as she slowly approached the narrow cave.  She entered it, her heart racing as if she might find something terrible within its shadows.  Chills rushed through her as she turned a corner and moved through another long stretch of darkness.  She considered turning around and fleeing the place, but again it hit her that she had nowhere else to go.  It was all she could to do pray for the strength to continue.

Taking a deep breath, she turned another corner and entered the small, dim cave.

Chapter Fourteen

FAITH-CORP
owned some of the largest buildings in each district, having coliseum-sized churches and university-sized arrays of schoolrooms for Sunday class.  Families registered their attendance at consoles located throughout the main lobby, and seating was assigned each week during check-in.  Thousands of people, mostly Corps, pushed and shoved their way through the crowded seating aisles, many of them wearing their stylish new facemasks and rubber gloves, searching to find their seats before the service began.

The worship associates got started on their first set just as George and the kids found their seats.  By the luck of the draw, their seats were in the first tier balcony this Sunday, the
high
est seating any Corp employee could take.  It
was only a tier below
the Corporate
boxes,
where the well dressed pillars of society always sat.  The Corporates were rarely seen outside of
c
hurch, and so no one knew much about them beyond what they wore each week and who they were seen with most recently.  They
stood over the
mass
es
in their little cliques, showing off their manicured nails and fine tailored outfits, old money descended down from the fat cats of centuries ago.  They never looked
down
at the several tiers of people lined up
below them
.  It was as if everyone else sat behind an invisible wall that only the rich could see, and no one on the outside even existed within their tiny, separate world.

The worship manager invited the congregation to join his associates in song, and the building filled with the echoes of ten thousand voices united.  The sound was rich, but it did little to affect the smug sense of detachment among most of the people there.  George and the kids were no exception; they were there because everyone else was, and everyone else was there because they didn’t want to be badgered by Faith-Corp associates.

The hymn ended, and the worship manager moved his team straight into the next, directing the congregation to continue singing along.  The worship manager kept the music going non-stop for close to twenty minutes, making sure he gave the people their full tithing’s worth for the week.  He silenced his associates, and a spotlight followed the sermon manager from his entrance to the podium.

A clatter of applause thundered through the building, and the sermon manager raised his hands to silence the crowds.  He waited for the applause to end, and then leaned into his microphone.  “God told me ya’ll would be excited to come here today!” he said, smiling from ear to ear.

There was another small round of applause, but the manager was able to speak over it and snuff it out with his amplified voice: “I want to talk to ya’ll today about family values. 
Normal
human family values.”  He looked around, to ensure he had gained the attention of all he could directly see, and then he continued.  “Do you see any deviants here today?”

Everyone took an obligatory look around their personal vicinities, although they already knew that not one deviant would be among them.

“I talk to more and more people that think it’s okay to socialize with deviants, just because they look so similar to us.  Do not be fooled; deviants do not have souls.  They are the freak result of a godless science, whose creators will surely go to Hell!”  There was a small amount of applause, but the manager continued.  “Now, I don’t think God wants us to hate them, but He does want us to be responsible about how we approach them.  You must remember that they are atheists, every last one of them, and therefore they have no morals.  They are therefore a poison to the human mind and toxic to the human soul.”

There was another short clatter of applause, and then the sermon manager checked his notes and moved on.  “God came to me when I was praying the other night, and He told me that there are human beings in our own congregation living just as sinful of lives as the deviants.”

There was a hushed murmur of disapproval.

“I was just as shocked,” he continued, “but God told me that He would forgive those people, but only if they repented and showed their devotion to Faith-Corp by sacrificing a tax-deductible
,
one-time donation of one quarter their tithing.  Praise God!”

“Praise God
!
” the congregation echoed.

“God wants us to be happy, but He also wants us to live in accordance with His teachings.  Satan is ever-present in society, but that doesn’t mean he has to be ever-present in our personal lives.  Can I hear you say hallelujah?!”

“Hallelujah!” the people replied.

“Our lesson today comes from First Corinthians.  Follow me if you w
ould
to chapter fifteen, verse thirty-three.”