Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (15 page)

Closer to us, about ten feet below the level of Mike’s balcony, was one end of the pool, full of splashing swimmers and lined by people lying on lounges.

Aunt Marlee was up there to greet us. She asked us if we wanted anything to drink, and we both asked for Dr Pepper.

If you wanted to invent an anti-Mike, a human being who was, in almost every possible way, the exact opposite of Mike, Marlee would fit the bill perfectly. Male, female. Very dark skin, skin as pale as skim milk. Eyes dark brown, eyes sky blue. Hair dark and kinky, hair long and straight and almost white. Four-foot-three, five-foot-eleven. How this Wagnerian goddess who would look perfect in a recruiting poster for the Hitler Youth and this self-described chocolate Munchkin ever hit it off is a question for the ages, but it’s clear that they are crazy about each other. One of the girls in my class once whispered to me that Mike must need a ladder to . . . well, you know. I got in trouble for punching her out. When Mama Podkayne got to the bottom of what the fight was about, she called Mike to our house and had me tell the story. He had a good laugh.

“We don’t do it standing up, Cassie dear,” he said. “That would be silly. No, when we’re in bed I think of us as a hot fudge sundae. A little bit of chocolate poured over a mountain of scrumptious vanilla ice cream.”

I was still a virgin at the time, and I blushed right down to my toenails. Sex was still a scary mystery to me. Well, it’s still a mystery, sort of, one I’m having fun figuring out, and that’s good, but it’s not scary.

“You’re forgetting the chocolate-covered banana,” Mama Podkayne said, and the two of them laughed until they hurt.

So I blushed some more, and apologized to the girl I hit, and she apologized to Uncle Mike, who said it wasn’t necessary, and proceeded to charm . . . well, I was going to say charm the pants off her, and I’m sure she would have been willing if Mike wasn’t a faithful husband. But they’re good friends now, like he is with almost everyone he meets.

Mike not only makes jokes about himself, he is secure enough in who he is that he doesn’t mind it when others joke.

I wish someday to be that secure and tolerant.

Marlee brought our drinks and a tray of lovely bar noshes sent up from the kitchens below. Mike told us that Marlee likes to cook and is pretty good at it, but she seldom has time. She is involved in a huge number of projects around the ship, some of them dealing with art. She is a sculptor who works in clay and porcelain and stuff like that, molding things with her hands, sometimes painting them, then baking them. Some of the objects are useful, some of them are just decorative, and some of them are frankly a little weird, but I like her stuff.

We all sat around a big bamboo table in comfortable wicker chairs, sipping our drinks and talking about this and that. Then we got down to it.

“Cassie, Polly,” Uncle Mike began. “I don’t know how much you’ve been told, or how much you’ve heard, but you should know that the whole ship’s talking about Jubal and what he said when he came out of the bubble.”

“And that would be . . .” Polly asked.

Mike sighed. “You’re not betraying any confidences here. Everyone knows that he said the ship has to be stopped. This is a small town, after all. Word has gotten around.”

Of course it had. It’s inevitable in a wired society.

—

They used to have these things called telephones. They sat on your desk or kitchen table, and they rang aloud. You picked up a piece of the telephone, and you spoke into it. That was all.

By the time of my grandparents’ generation everyone was wired right into their skins and were starting to be wired right into their minds. At first it was just subcutaneous phones that were implanted near the ear, but soon electrodes were being implanted subdurally, with tiny wires leading to different parts of the brain.

The same technology that allows my aunt Elizabeth to perform surgery with her prosthetic hand, or microsurgery with a waldo hand so tiny you need a microscope to see it, could be used to control just about anything. You no longer needed a keyboard or even voice to do things, all you had to do was
think
about it.

Billions of tiny tricolored pixels were burned onto your corneas, and 3-D moving pictures were displayed directly to your eye.

Sounds pretty amazing, doesn’t it? And I guess it was. Granddaddy Ramon and Granny Evangeline had implants like these, and they’ve told us it was pretty damn convenient and opened a whole new world of experience.

But as with so many new technologies, there were problems.

One problem was with worker productivity. There was no way to tell how much time an employee was spending in a virtual world of information or amusement while he or she was supposed to be doing a job. Offsetting that was the fact that so many jobs had been robotized, not requiring a human worker at all.

Everything that happened online was recorded
somewhere
, so vast data banks were being accumulated. Combining the Internet, which by then had incorporated medical monitoring of things like blood pressure and chemistry, heart rate, body temperature—all for your own good, and eagerly installed by most users—with a highly precise global positioning system of satellites homing in on devices buried
in your brain
 . . . well, it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that somewhere was the information that your daily bowel movement had been at 0821 hours, that it had taken three minutes and forty-five seconds, that the color was a healthy brown and the consistency smooth.

Most people were okay with it, just as they had been with the original Internet. Who cared if someone was keeping track of your shopping preferences? And why would you have a problem with monitoring that could detect a heart attack before it happened, or see the first signs of cancer years before you might be aware of it?

All well and good, if no one is studying you with any evil intent. But there’s always someone out there wanting to take advantage of you.

But even that wasn’t the main drawback. What no one had thought about was the possibility that, given that nerve impulses could be detected and translated into operating instructions for a galaxy of mechanical and cybernetic machines . . . maybe the vast net could operate the other way. Maybe instructions could flow into the operating system of the brain.

Maybe it could be used to control actions, even thoughts.

Maybe we had created a huge puppet master, and who knew what the motivations or intents of the potential string-pullers might be.

It was one thing to turn on your computer in the old days of the Internet and find that a virus had infected it and destroyed a lot of your data, or turned your machine into a secret agent, sending who-knew-what to millions of other computers. It was something else entirely to think some electronic virus had infected your mind.

—

Opponents of what came to be called Direct Connect had a long, long list of odd and frightening instances of aberrant behavior by previously mentally healthy people. There were accusations of ballot-box stuffing in a new and ingenious way, by programming people to vote for Candidate B while thinking they had voted for Candidate A. Maybe false memories inserted into people’s brains. There was a frightening increase of a previously rare condition: alien hand syndrome—sometimes called Dr. Strangelove syndrome—where parts of the body inexplicably began to function on their own, often to the detriment of the person they were attached to.

It was said that some people were suddenly falling into or out of love with others, only to gravitate to someone they had previously loathed. Natural behavior, or mind tampering?

All of it was alarming, almost all of it was impossible to prove. If you believed the worriers, there was a vast conspiracy of meddlers, known as Controllers. They might be part of the government, or the shadowy commercial and financial (and possibly fictitious) oligarchs, or just basement tinkerers. Who knew?

On the other side, the DC proponents argued that, by limiting the natural and organic expansion of the vast intermind wiring network, we might be shutting ourselves off from nothing less than the next step in human evolution. It was a concept known as “singularity.” A machine-brain symbiosis, a gestalt consciousness long imagined by science-fiction writers, or even real scientists. Something very like telepathy was within our grasp. Already mind-to-mind communication had been demonstrated on a primitive level. Do you want to cripple this new being, this überhuman consciousness, just because of a few paranoid fantasies, backed up by very little evidence?

I’d just as soon keep other people out of my mind, thank you very much, said the doubters.

On and on it went.

The important thing for me, and for
Rolling Thunder
, was that Travis was one of the doubters. Big-time.

One of the cardinal protocols of
Rolling Thunder
when the crew and passengers were being selected and boarded was that
There Shall Be No Neural Implants
. Yea, verily, and shout hallelujah!

(Except in special circumstances like Aunt Elizabeth’s prosthetics and other situations where very fine virtual control was necessary, and even those could not be connected to a network.)

So . . . I have no way of knowing in just what way the people of Earth and Mars and the outer planets are wired in these days. Here in the ship, though, we have frozen such things at a point around the 2030s.

We have wireless person-to-person communication, but it is limited to external devices. Some are incorporated into jewelry. Bracelets, necklaces, earrings, hair barrettes. They can be in a belt buckle, or in the soles of your shoes, or sewn into or pinned to your clothing. Some people spend most of their days connected to what we call the Rollingnet, talking or messaging their friends singly or in cybergroups. Polly and I tend to leave the connection off, so the call tones aren’t constantly ringing in our ears, and access the messages while we’re not doing anything else. Neither of us is a net rat.

Sound is provided by a simple and tiny subcutaneous unit implanted into the mastoid process.

Three-dimensional imaging is achieved with adhesive contact lenses that you wear all the time, which can be removed with an eyedrop. The vision part won’t work when you’re moving. You have to stop walking, and preferably you should sit down to view real-time or recorded messages, or visual media. You can keep window apps open in your peripheral vision, and if you want to see them, all you have to do is move your eyeballs in that direction.

It’s a simple system, easy to learn and use. Children usually get them at age four or five, though some get them earlier.

So that’s how our social networking works. It’s the core of the rumor mill that is actually faster, sometimes, than normal small-town conversations. This is what Uncle Mike was talking about when he said “everybody knows” something.

And now, back to the casino.

And another handoff to the 3-D photocopy . . .

Polly:

Well, thanks a lot, twin. And so you leave it to me to explain how the two of us managed to remain largely ignorant of the spread of the biggest story since the launch of
Rolling Thunder
.

“We’re not extremely plugged in,” Cassie said. This is true. I don’t even turn on the messaging bing when I’m riding my bike or running, and neither does Cassie. If we had, it would have sounded like jingle bells binging in our ears.

“It all started coming out in the last couple of hours,” Patrick said in our defense. I was grateful, though not really sure why I should feel defensive about it. So we had been on our bikes and virtually unplugged while the story was spreading like wildfire, far and wide through the entire interior. Where was the crime in that?

“Maybe we could have a few minutes to catch up?” I suggested.

“It’ll take a bit more than a few minutes,” Marlee said. “But I think that’s a good idea, don’t you, darling?”

Uncle Mike nodded, and I blinked the heads-up display into activation. The contact lenses stuck to my eyes started doing their thing, and bright flashing windows appeared at various distances in my field of vision, skillfully managing not to block out the faces of anyone there. I did what I usually do when there’s that much information—not that I’ve often had to deal with all that much—I closed my eyes. It all reorganized itself into much more logical sets of data.

The bulk of the messages had come in shortly after Cassie and I cut school, so I assumed that was when whoever it was at the meeting we had attended had started really spilling the beans, or at least when he or she had talked to someone with a big mouth.

There were forty-five messages in the Friends folder, ranging from classmates to acquaintances from most of the fifteen townships. I blinked on a few of them at random, and most of them boiled down to “What’s the deal with this STOP THE SHIP stuff I’m hearing about?” One of them had the nerve to ask if Papa had gone nuts, earning himself an immediate delisting from the Friends column.

There were nine messages from Mama, Mike, and Patrick, and one from Travis. The ones from Mama just said we were to come home as soon as possible. I didn’t bother with the ones from Mike and Patrick. The one from Travis asked us to please not talk about any of this to anyone until he had had a chance to get us all together, family and friends of the captain. I didn’t understand why he needed to ask that until I got to the next batch, which was from strangers.

There were over two hundred of them, sorted into several categories. I didn’t bother with the ones classed as “private citizens.” Some of them were even hiding behind anonymous net names. Who cared? Not me, especially when I saw where some of the other messages were coming from.

We have five or six or seven major news sources—depending on who is doing the counting—sites updated in real time and employing up to six or seven actual reporters whose only job is going places and interviewing people for stories. There are even a couple dedicated to “investigative reporting,” that is, looking for wrongdoing on the part of elected officials or government functionaries. It’s all pretty tame compared to the scandals I’ve read about back at Old Sun. A little gerrymandering, a little featherbedding, a little nepotism, a little election cheating. Most of it is small enough to be dealt with by means of a fine.

Each of the townships has its own newsletter that reports on social matters, runs reviews of writing and music and shows. We all read our local rags, of course, but few would deny that it’s pretty dull stuff.

The only times me and Cassie have appeared on the real newsfeeds, as opposed to the small-time newsletters and blogs, had to do with spectacular skypool plays. So it was a bit of a shock to see that every major news site had left a message for me. The messages were all very similar:
Must interview you. Call me ASAP.

One of them even offered me a hundred dollars.

Cassie was saying, “The nerve of these people! The
New York Times
stringer is offering me five hundred dollars for an interview!”

“We all got interview requests, Cassie,” Mike said, “and most of us got offers.”

“What good is the
New York Times
having a stringer on board?” I wanted to know. “She can’t send any stories back to Earth now.”

“I understand she can, just barely,” Patrick told us. “She has to send them multiple times, and it will take a lot of computer power to decipher them when they get there, twenty years from now. They’ll be pretty stretched out, even if you’re using the X-ray laser to send them. But that’s not what she really is anymore. She
is
the
Times
in
Rolling Thunder
. Or whatever she wants to call herself.”

“Doesn’t impress me much,” Cassie said.

“No, she’s just one of many,” Marlee said. “She’s a passenger like all the rest of us. And like pretty much all the passengers, and crew, she’s not only curious to find out what the hell’s going on, she’s also worried.”

“Scared, even,” Mike added.

“Hey, wait a minute.” Cassie sounded worried. “Take a look at this one.”

She forwarded it and I saw the text pop up in front of me.

“Your f*cking family and your f*cking crazy father and your f*cking dictator uncle ‘Captain’ have run this ship too long. Now you’re putting us all in danger. Watch your step, Broussard, and your ugly sister, too.”

Holy criminy! I’ve had nasty texts before, but they were mostly insults centering on skypool matches. I’d had nasty messages from other girls over some boy or another, some of them signed, some of them not. But I’d never had
anything
that attacked my family. I felt my face burning, and suddenly I was breathing heavy.

I wasn’t frightened. I was
angry
!

“This pisses me off!” Cassie shouted. “Can we trace it?”

“I don’t think so,” Patrick offered. “I got a variation on it, sounds like maybe the same person. I couldn’t get anywhere tracking it back.”

“Travis intentionally made it almost impossible to do that when he was setting up the Rollingnet,” Marlee told us. “He was protecting freedom of speech.”

“Isn’t this a threat?” I asked. “Isn’t that an exception?”

“Or just hot air. Some idiot letting off steam.”

“I think a judge would see it that way, too,” Marlee agreed. “It really has to rise to the level of ‘I’m going to kill you,’ that specific, to invoke the threat regulation.”

“Could Travis override that?” Cassie wanted to know.

“Probably. He can override almost anything, I guess.”

“Which is one of the reasons this person is so angry,” Patrick pointed out. Which didn’t endear him to me.

Nobody said anything for a while, then Mike sighed.

“You girls know that your mother and your uncle Travis have been looking for you. I’m not going to say the family is real worried about this stuff, but let’s say we’re concerned. We are interested now in finding out how deep and how widespread these sorts of feelings are.”

“What about Papa?” Cassie asked.

“You won’t be surprised to hear that we’re keeping this from him, for now. He won’t be at the meeting.”

“Which meeting is that?”

“Meeting of the Fockers,” Patrick said. “Close family of the captain.”

“I don’t know who all that includes, but I gather it will be a small group,” Marlee said. “We’ll be there, and your mother and you two are invited.”

“Would that be a command from Mama Podkayne?” Cassie asked.

“That’s between you and her.”

“Never mind,” I said, glancing at Cassie. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Mike said, “Stay in touch, okay? Keep your phones on for a while.”

—

That turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.

All the way home on our bikes, we kept getting pinged by strangers, or newspeople. We finally had to stop and set some limits on messaging, suppressing calls from everyone but a small list of family and a few friends. Even so, we got pinged every few minutes from one of those friends. I don’t blame them; I’d want to know more if I were in their position. But before long we eliminated the friends on the list, too. It was getting right down to the bone, just us fockers against the world. Or so it seemed.

I didn’t like the feeling.

—

As we approached the Broussard Estate, we could make out some people standing around in the road that came closest to our private property. There were maybe twenty or twenty-five of them, in several groups, talking to one another.

“Media?” Cassie asked.

“Would be my guess,” I told her.

“Remember that movie about Michael Jackson?”

“Don’t have to,” I said. “Remember the one about Mama.”

We had seen both biography pictures, centering around one of the biggest stars from the twentieth century and one of the biggest of the twenty-first, our dear old mom. Judging from the one they made about Mama, the one about Jackson must have been full of baloney, with only a scattering of facts. That’s how
Pod People
was, and we had Mama to point out the many errors.

But the scenes I recall most vividly were what Mama referred to as a “feeding frenzy.” That was when a mob of reporters were gathered someplace where Mama had to go. They apparently lost all contact with their humanity, and behaved like a bunch of rabid dogs. They shoved cameras and microphones in the faces of celebrities, blinded them with lights, shouted stupid questions, shoved and even punched others to get in position for a photo.

I remember watching those scenes of the actress playing Mama with my jaw dropping. How could civilized people behave like that?

“Because they’re not civilized,” Mama told us. “The reporters of the celebrity press are pigs, to a man and woman.”

“Was it really that bad, in real life?” I wanted to know.

“Worse. It got to where I couldn’t do normal things like go shopping, unless I made an appointment and came in the back way. I had to live in a gated community. I missed normal things.”

That was about the longest rant I ever heard from her concerning her celebrity back at Old Sun. Mostly she didn’t talk about it, except to say how glad she was to leave Earth
and
Mars a few light-years behind her.

“Let’s not get famous,” I said.

“That won’t be a problem for you since there’s nothing for you to be famous for unless you count bull’s-eye landings in pigsties. Me, I have to be careful to hide my electric charisma all the time.”

“Otherwise, you’d have to constantly beat the boys off with a stick, right?”

“Oh, I have to do that already. I’m talking about not letting the larger world get a glimpse of my true greatness.”

“Please continue to do that,” I said. “You’ve done such a good job so far, no one suspects a thing. That, or you’re truly boring.”

“Bitch.”

“Boring bitch.”

When we were younger, that could have gone on for a long time, but we’re mature now, and above it.

“Dumb bitch,” she whispered.

“Silly bitch,” I whispered back.

—

We decided we didn’t want to run the gauntlet of reporters milling about at our driveway. Luckily, we were old hands at sneaking in and out of the Broussard Estate. We knew a dozen ways. The best for this situation was the pond.

We got off the road and abandoned our bikes in the stand of pine trees that grows densely on the spinward side of the shore. It was a short walk to the water, but not so easy getting in. There’s only a small amount of sandy beach on our lake, and it’s on the other side. The rest is “wetlands,” which is sort of a swamp. There are cattails and water lilies and lotus, and some of our friends who aren’t used to dirt and mud would never follow us into something like that.

But we’ve been doing it all our lives, so we slipped off our shoes and waded in among the reeds. I’ve always liked the feel of mud between my toes, and the smell of the stagnant pond water. Some find it unpleasant, but to me it’s the smell of living things, of a complex ecosystem, of “nature,” such as we have it in our totally controlled environment.

A bullfrog about the size of my foot protested our presence, and leaped into the water in front of me. In twenty or so yards, the water was deep enough to swim in. We eased into a quiet breaststroke, barely rippling the surface.

We reached the dock easily and pulled ourselves out, streaming water and a certain amount of green algae. Cassie’s hair was a wreck, and I assumed mine was, too.

“Mama, Papa, we’re home,” Cassie shouted as she slammed through the screen door, leaving me to dive for it so it wouldn’t slam. It was wasted effort. There was nobody home. We stuck our heads into every room, and even looked out the window and up at our tree house. No one there, either.

“Call ’em, I guess,” she said.

“Showers first.”

“Best idea you’ve had in a long time.”

So we did that, and considered our closets.

“What do you think?” she said. “What do you wear to a family meeting?”

“Let’s skip the formal gowns,” I suggested. “Besides, you probably split a seam on that slinky number the other day.”

“You mean rubbing up against Patrick?” She winked at me, the bitch.

“No, I mean you did everything but spread your legs. And I saw how enthusiastic he was, and so did everyone else.”

Every once in a while you throw a barb that really hits home. She tried to keep a brave face, but I could see the hurt behind it. It didn’t make me feel good. Ribbing each other mercilessly is just how we get through the day, but it is seldom intended to hurt. We have a way of dealing with it that works most of the time.

“My regrets, twin,” I said, and held up my hand.

She slapped it, maybe a little harder than necessary.

“Forgotten, twin” she said.

Usually, it really is. I wasn’t so sure this time. Patrick could become a real problem between us.

I picked out a mustard sleeveless knit top with a turtle neck that stretched to fit tightly, with a charcoal pair of jeans that ended midcalf, and black penny loafers. I found a black beret that went pretty well with the ensemble, and accessorized with a silver chain necklace and bracelet. Cassie went with the same sort of idea but in different colors.