Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (13 page)

“I might have to take a personal day when all of this is over,” she said to Santino. “Apparently I’ve been slacking on my responsibility to develop a tan.”

“But we save so much on our energy bills by using you to light the office at night.”

“Shut up.”

They parked in the visitor lot by the front doors and walked up a flagstone path lined on both sides by ancient hardwoods and immaculate flowerbeds full of fresh annuals. Gardeners poked their heads up like gophers to see who was with her, then dropped back down into the mulch. 

“All Agents?” Santino asked.

She nodded. “You’re the only visitor today. They say hello.”

“Mhmm,” he muttered.

“What?”

“It’s not that I don’t love you guys,” Santino said, “and it’s not that you don’t make me feel welcome. It’s that you all give off that Sunday afternoon vibe where a friend has dropped by without calling ahead, and you’re happy to see him but you’re still a little irritated you had to put on pants.”

She gave him that one. Apart from the place being closed on weekends, he had nailed it.

Rachel and Santino dodged the arc of a sprinkler. No one had thought to sneak in sod as a line item on the budget, so the sprawling lawns were mostly dirt with a thin patchwork of sprouting grass. Still, progress was progress, and their temporary offices were becoming more habitable by the day.

Before they dropped the curtain to show humanity the cyborgs in their midst, OACET had been spread out on the East and West Coasts. When Mulcahy had taken over as acting director, he and the other members of OACET’s administrative team had launched a tactical clerical strike in which every Agent was brought home to D.C. to regroup. The logistics of the move had been performed as quickly and as quietly as possible. Rachel and the others stationed in California had let the leases lapse on their apartments and had snatched up new ones all the way across the country. They closed down the Los Angeles office on the same day they went public, the doors locked and chairs put up on the tables in advance of Mulcahy’s bombshell.

Within hours of that first press conference, Agent Mare Murphy had gone up against Congress and wrangled a sizeable operations fund from their clenched hands. Murphy was OACET’s organizational specialist in much the same way that George Marshall had served Franklin Roosevelt, and Congress was still reeling. Murphy had judiciously applied equal measures of carrot and stick: she had guilted Congress to accept their responsibility in the creation of the implant and its Agents, and she pushed them to recognize how the three hundred and fifty active Agents could be of virtually immeasurable service to the good citizens of the United States of America. 

And, as Murphy reminded them, the Agents had come forward and exposed the Program not because they had to, but because they felt obligated to do so. Just imagine what could have happened if they had decided to remain in hiding, or had sold their services to the highest bidder! Yes, they were government employees and full disclosure is what they ought to have done, Murphy said, but obligation was a two-way street.

Never let it be said that Agent Murphy couldn’t deliver. OACET had been given a permanent headquarters in a decommissioned postal hub (purposefully and perhaps insultingly) close to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The place was a wreck, the slightest hints of industrial cleaner and anthrax still lingering in the corners. Plans were on the table to gut the building down to its old Aquia Creek sandstone shell and rebuild the interior from scratch, but until construction was complete they were camped out in a property warehouse.

At least, on paper it was a warehouse. In practice, it was a sprawling mansion on the Potomac that had been the scene of a bloodbath between a drug cartel and the DEA at the height of the cocaine craze. The mansion had spent fifteen years languishing on the real estate market before it was repurposed for storage. It was intended as temporary overflow for items seized or recovered by federal authorities when the official storage facilities exceeded capacity, but as anyone with a garage knew, out of sight was out of mind and the clutter had continued to grow. When OACET first moved in, they had opened the front door and found themselves standing in the federal government’s junk drawer. There was no rhyme or reason to how items had been crammed into rooms: it was common to find a layer of jewelry on top of birdcages on top of chainsaws. Each item had a little white label listing its origins, but other than that brief nod to ownership the place was essentially orphans piled all the way up to the ceiling.

They knew they were being used. There was no way the mansion could function as their office unless they dug in and scrubbed.

It took them eleven hours.

The organization of one hundred and eighty-three thousand, seven hundred and five objects was the first real task they had handled as a group. They established a map and a database, and fell upon the trove armed with cleaning supplies and RFID tags. They cut a path through the house like a swarm of African ants, picking, sorting, dusting, and cataloging. The only slowdowns occurred when they stumbled across the real treasures, and a cry would go out through the collective for everyone to drop what they were doing and come running (Rachel had sent one out herself when she found an original LP pressing of “Meet the Beatles!” lost amongst too many Captains and Tennilles).

After the cleanup was finished, they had shifted into repair mode. Some of them threw themselves into research and prepared extensive lists of the items, cross-referenced with average resale values, to persuade those agencies which had used the mansion as a dumping ground to come and get their stuff.  The outdoorsy types grabbed the landscaping gear and attacked the hedges, the hobby chefs restocked the kitchen, and the engineers went to see what could be done about the pool.

They had made it home. Beautiful, restful, wonderful home. And almost as soon as they discovered this, Mulcahy and his team had kicked them out. Policy was written within the first week which prohibited unauthorized sleepovers; there were too few beds and the stink of chlorine was no substitute for a shower. Then came more policy where overtime had to be approved, followed by even more policy where only the skeleton crew was allowed in on weekends. There was some grumbling; the Agents understood why their Administration was driving them back out into the world, but they didn’t have to like it.

Denial, however, turned out to be its own benefit: their time at home was precious. The infighting and squabbles that usually tainted work and family were few, the Agents unwilling to spoil their few hours spent in sanctuary dwelling on petty bullshit. When they were home, they were happy. This protection might fade over time as they reassimilated back into society, but for the time being it was warm and thick around them.

As she and Santino walked up the front steps, Rachel’s fingers traced the streaks and pockmarks in the granite columns, scars left from the grand finale of the mansion’s heady drug days. Most of the hasty repairs done to domesticate the building for sale had decayed and fallen out over time, but Rachel tried to pick out the remaining putty whenever she could. Their home was wounded but strong, and damned if she wouldn’t do her part to call attention to the symbolism.

The silent voices welcomed her as she crossed the threshold. The mahogany doors of the mansion were an arbitrary marker, true, but they had learned to create order when and where they could. The Agents were networked with each other as much as with other forms of tech. Distance wasn’t really a barrier between them, not when the others were as far away as a thought, but privacy and personal space were paramount. You offered a greeting, shouted or not, when an Agent came home, and kept them at a distance otherwise. Their presence at the fringes of your mind barely registered until one voice in the crowd was directed at you, and then, like answering a phone, you chose to speak with your friend. 

Imposing order on that chaos was critical. They all knew how easy it was to go mad.

She let them know Santino was with her, and there was a scramble to find pants. 

A classical double staircase ran up either side of the main hall, framing a regulation-size boxing ring. The ring, along with most of their athletic equipment, had come from a mixed-martial arts chain brought down by tax evasion. The ring was portable and they disassembled it for photo shoots or when they held formal functions, but during normal working hours the first sounds heard upon entering the mansion was the smack of tanned leather on flesh. 

Today it was laughter. Dead center of the ring stood the largest man Rachel had ever met in her life. Mako Hill was nearly seven feet of solid muscle, and he laughed and swung clumsily at an opponent slightly more than half his size. He waved at her over the other man’s head.

“Hello, tiny Chinese woman!”

“Hello, giant black man!”

Mako leaned over the ropes circling the ring and gave her a quick hug.
“How did you get him to practice?”
Rachel asked, and moved around Mako to face his opponent.

Phil Netz, small and wiry, sniffed derisively.
“He lost a bet, but don’t call this practice. I’m sparring with a side of beef that won’t fight back.”

Mako lifted his gloved hands, palms up.
“I go out of my way to take the ‘fist’ out of ‘pacifist’.”

Rachel smiled.
“And what happens when you get mugged?”

“I give up my wallet,”
he replied, grinning broadly.
“Anyone desperate enough to think I’m a good target for a mugging needs my money more than I do.”

She laughed. Santino suddenly tinged with orange.
Damn,
she thought. Rachel hated it when she made her partner uncomfortable.

“Any bagels left in the kitchen?” she asked aloud.

Mako and Phil both winced. Theirs wasn’t true telepathy but whatever they called it, it was easier than speech. Now that they had their own centralized workplace, they had picked up the bad habit of shutting non-cyborgs out of their conversations. Santino had admitted that he could deal with either speech or silence, but outbursts out of context gave him the absolute willies.

“No, but we’re making a lunch run in an hour. Hey Raul,” Mako said to Santino. “Sorry about that.”

“You folks have to get out of your heads,” Santino said, smiling. “It’s not healthy.”

“You’re telling me. I live in this thing!” Mako lightly boxed his own ears, then held out his hands to Rachel. She glanced at Phil, who rolled his eyes and assented to Mako’s escape.

“Mulcahy’s going to poop kittens if you don’t learn how to fight,” she said, unlacing the gloves. 

“Then the Cyborg King will need to find another lifting partner,” Mako replied, “and good luck to him with that.”

It was not an idle threat. Mulcahy was a man of reasonable size and strength only when standing next to Mako Hill. After a few drinks, their favorite party game was to hide the guests’ cars without bothering with the keys.

“You’ve got to do something to get your speed up,” Phil said to Mako. “My grandmother moves faster than you.”

“We could go jogging,” Rachel said.

“Jogging? No. This…” Mako said as he made a long gesture with his free hand which started at his head and moved down to encompass his feet, “…was not built to jog. This was built to pick up the couch and see if it goes better under the other window, and then back to where it was because the upholstery looks better in a southerly light.”

He sighed dramatically. Mako’s wife was heavily pregnant and they were in the last phases of frenzied preparation. His arms were flecked with pastel paint and crisped marks from a soldering iron. His wife, Carlota, was also an Agent, and they were childproofing their home by building and installing various devices that responded to their implants. Mako admitted they might have gone a little overboard: when Carlota’s parents came over to visit, they couldn’t use the toilet without help. 

He cocked his head to the side. “Ah,” Mako sighed. “Pregnancy craving. Apparently I am to go and fetch a pickle milkshake.” 

“Ugh,” Santino grimaced. “Really?”

“No, she wants pizza. But pickle milkshakes are funnier.” Mako slowly navigated the ropes and dropped to the ground. Behind him, Phil threw in the towel and muttered that he was not going to be held responsible when Mulcahy found out.

As Mako waved and headed towards the bath they had set aside as a makeshift locker room, Rachel caught a glimpse of her friend from the side. She had spent the past twenty-four hours staring at various angles of Matt Hill’s face, and when Mako turned sideways there were enough genetics in his profile for her to make the connection.

“Hill…” she said under her breath.

“Hm?” Santino glanced towards her.

“Mako’s last name is Hill… Hey Mako!” Rachel called out. “You got any family in D.C.?” 

“Maybe. Can’t say for sure. We’re not really talking these days.” He shrugged like an apologetic mountain as he walked away. “Why?”

“Just an idea,” she said.
“I’ll tell you about it when I know more.”

“Sure.”

“Coincidence,” Santino said.

“It’d explain why Matt Hill was targeted. If he’s got family in OACET, that’s the link we’re looking for.”

“The link you’re looking for. I have no delusions the world actually does revolve around me.”

She snorted. “Don’t make me break out the Scully.”

“Hill is probably one of the most common surnames in the country.”

Rachel flipped her hair and affected the trademark sarcastic eyebrow. “Mulder, what you are proposing is simply impossible. You cannot expect me to believe it.”

Santino pushed back the tails of an imaginary trenchcoat. “But Scully, you’re up to your armpits in an alien cadaver. How much more proof do you need?”

“There are many documented cases of human beings having six hearts and fifteen legs, Mulder. Olympic athletes, for example. Aliens are silly and you are silly for believing in them, because everyone with good sense knows they don’t exist, which includes myself, despite the fact I am covered in gooey, sticky evidence.”

“Perhaps it is but another excuse to remove your clothing and cultivate sexual tension.”

“I concur. Excuse me, for a moment. I will return in a flowing robe, holding an oversized glass of wine, and will be promptly attacked by the nameless abomination hiding in my apartment. Exit, stage left.”

They bowed. Phil golf-clapped politely through his gloves. “Nicely done,” he said, “but, context-wise, shouldn’t Santino be playing the skeptic?”

Santino shook his head. “She can’t do Mulder.”

“I can’t. I just can’t,” Rachel sighed. “Something about his inflection eludes me. It’s a combination of a native Philadelphian and constant hay fever… I can’t get it right.”

Phil snorted.

“Okay. In all honesty,” Santino said, “I’ll admit we shouldn’t rule out the possibility. Yeah, this could be about OACET. There’s a clear association between OACET and technology in everybody’s minds these days. 

“But!” He cut Rachel off before she could speak. “You have to admit you guys are a little defensive, maybe a little over-protective. Everything we’ve got so far is circumstantial. I’m not saying that you don’t have enemies, but I think you should be sure that this is
because
of your enemies. If you go looking for a fight, you’ll probably find it, even if you start it yourselves.

“Rachel, let’s not go looking for that fight.”

“He’s right,”
Phil said. 

“Don’t you start.”

The small Agent sighed in golds, then said aloud, “I hear you’re looking for a couple of spares.”

“Oh, hive minds,” Santino grumbled. “What don’t you know?”

“Why you haven’t asked me yet,” Phil said. “Former U.S. Marshal, specialization in tactical operations?”

Rachel leaned towards Phil from the other side of the ropes. “You’re on the short list,” she grinned.

“Don’t you dare pun me, woman,” Phil said. “You’re better than that and I’m taller than you.”

She laughed. “You’re one of my first choices, but I just can’t start cherrypicking my friends.”

“Get one friend and one qualified asshole,” Phil said. “That way you do right by everyone.”

“Man has a point,” Santino said. He liked Phil. The lively Agent had an artistic streak, and he and Santino had gone to more than a few gallery shows together. From what they told her, they had the most fun when the art was dreadful: somewhere under the coleus plants in Santino’s office was an oil painting of a dewy-eyed duck Santino claimed he couldn’t live without. 

“I was thinking maybe Jason Atran,” Rachel said.

Phil grimaced. “He’d do. Until he’s accidentally strangled in the line of duty, that is.”

“Have I met him?” Santino asked Rachel.

“No.” She shook her head. “You’d remember.” She looked around for Jason in the link and found him in his office in an upstairs bedroom. 

“So?” Phil asked, bumping his gloves together.

“Give me an hour,” she said to the other Agent. “No promises.”

“Works for me,” Phil said. “Happy hunting.” Shadow-boxing, he moved back to the center of the ring and put out an open call for a new opponent.

Rachel and Santino meandered around the precarious stacks of junk and through the kitchen to reach the back staircase. Santino had been to the mansion countless times since they had been partnered, but he had never gone down into its bowels. Today, Rachel led him through a landfill of utmost quality. Some rooms, like the parlor full of pinball machines and classic arcade games, were devoted to larger items, but the high-traffic areas were mostly given over to boxes marked in black scribbled print. This forest of cardboard closed around them and sometimes moaned like the wind in the trees, the complaints of careful packing settling slightly under its own weight.

The two of them headed down a wide wooden staircase decorated in panels carved with ferns and the occasional lion head, stopping for a fast chat when they passed the Agents who had their offices on the landings. In a building where unoccupied square footage was already at a premium, three hundred and fifty people just barely fit. You made do wherever you could cram a desk, and tried to keep the power and networking cables out of the walkways. 

Santino was stunned by the spectacle. He stopped to touch the fragile glass shade of a vintage Tiffany lamp propped up against a used toaster oven. “You guys work in the Hoarder Barbie Dreamhouse.”

“Not yet. It’s depressingly urine-free in here. We’re looking into adopting at least sixty cats.”

Despite the size of her partner’s private jungle, Rachel hadn’t been given a desk over at First MPD. Her office was in the billiards hall in the mansion’s basement. She shared the area with thirty other Agents, and they had brought in some modular walls to partition off sections and create the illusion of personal space. The cubicle farm made the place look like any other government agency, albeit one with fluted ceilings and elephant tusks crossed over the doors. The tchotchkes at each desk were also the norm for young professionals, but a visitor with an eye for antiques might notice the posters from World War II were perhaps a little too authentic, the Batman and Star Wars action figures a little too mint. The rules were that you could do whatever you wanted as long as the items never left the grounds and were kept in the same condition as you found them.

Most of the Agents who worked in Rachel’s sector weren’t at their desks and the room was dark and peaceful. Santino was a curiosity so they took a few minutes to make the rounds and say hello to those few Agents who were in, then headed towards Rachel’s station in the back corner.

She turned on her desk light, causing pinpoints of reflected brilliance to splash across the cheap fabric partitions. Santino gasped. Rachel had a magpie’s love of sparklies and had filled her cubicle with jewelry and unset gems. He gaped at the dragon’s hoard that covered her workspace. “Holy crap,” he said softly, as if to not disturb it. “How much is all this stuff worth?”

“Forty-point-two million,” she replied automatically. “Here, catch.”

Santino jumped and his colors blanched from anxiety as she threw a diamond the size of a chicken egg at him. He juggled frantically for a few seconds, then got it under control and cradled it against his body. “Rachel!”

“It’s a diamond,” she laughed. “If you had dropped it, I’d be more worried about the floor.”

He held it up to the light, and prisms fell across the rest of the gems. “It’s gorgeous. How much does something like this cost?”

“It can’t be sold, so it’s got no value,” Rachel said. “That’s a known conflict diamond. Most of these are, too…” she swept a hand across the surface of the desk and the gems rolled over her fingers like water. “Otherwise this’d all be worth ten, twenty times as much. They’ll never go to auction. The feds unloaded them here because this place has good security and they don’t know what else to do with them.”

Santino put down the diamond and wiped his hands together. “And you’re okay with having them around?”

“I like things that seem beautiful until you learn their stories,” she said.

“Somebody was a Goth in high school.” 

She chuckled. “Maybe a little bit.”

“Do you have a favorite?”

Rachel turned her sixth sense on the pile to find a particular resonance. She pushed through the stones and pulled out a round pink sapphire the size of her pinkie nail. “Here.”

“Really?” Santino was skeptical. “What did you do, pick the smallest one?”

“Almost. It’s not conflict, and I can afford it when it goes up for sale.”

“What’s its price?”

She shrugged. “Lots. Bunches. I’ve spent the last five years living cheap, though, so I’m due for a splurge.”

“Why do you want to waste your money on something like this?”

Because we’ll leave here someday. Because I need to carry a part of this place with me forever. Because I have to. 

“It’s a girl thing,” she said, and pointed to an ornate dining room set stacked high with banker’s boxes and loose pottery. Santino unearthed one of the chairs and dragged it over to her desk, then straddled it so his chin rested comfortably on the padded backrest.

Rachel had taken an especial liking to a golden crown set with emeralds which she referred to as her “Thinking Tiara” and wore when she typed, but out of deference to her partner’s well-practiced skills in mockery she left it perched atop her old stuffed teddy bear. She groped under her desk for her keyboard. When she had started cultivating her hoard, she had screwed a high metal rail around the edges of her desk to keep the stones from falling. It served its purpose but her desk had become a wicked snare of carpal tunnel, and was all but useless for those who wanted to keep their wrists. Rachel loathed those stupid undermount sliding keyboard trays but she had installed one at the same time she had put up the rail. The company of millions of dollars in gems was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and she would gladly suffer the indignity of poor ergonomic design to enjoy it.

She woke up her monitors and started pulling potentials from the Agent roster. The candidate pool was surprisingly small. When Rachel thought of federal agencies, she went straight to law enforcement or military, but the list was dominated with unpronounceable acronyms which usually led back to the sciences or public policy. 

“How about Mako?” Rachel asked. “Says here he was with ASCR.  That sounds Air Force-ish.”

“Really?” Santino perked. “How did I not know that about him?”

“Let’s see… ASCR. …” Rachel called up her search on the second screen. “Advanced Scientific Computing Research. Not military. What do they do?”

“Pretty awesome stuff. New ways to apply mathematics and computer technologies, mostly. I thought about applying there for a while during grad school.”

“Never get you and Mako drunk together in the same room at the same time. Check.”

He took the high ground and ignored her. “There’s that Jason Atran guy’s name again,” he said, pointing at the list of candidates. “Drug Enforcement Agency?”

Rachel chewed her lower lip. “Yeah. Damn, damn, damn,” she grumbled. “We’re going to have to go with him. He and Zockinski are going to end up stabbing each other.”

“Is he really that bad?”