Hieroglyph (17 page)

“Are my eyes really brown?” he asked. Paul cocked his head, as though he hadn't quite heard him right. He didn't get the joke. So much for shibboleths. “Is everything in order?” Ulicez asked.

Paul nodded. “Yeah, everything looks good. This is your new job.” He tapped one form, and the position appeared:
junior laser technologist
. His new responsibilities unfolded into a point-form list. He'd be working for a carbon capture company called GreenLock, using small autonomous lasers to inspect the integrity of the intake pipes, and maybe doing some repairs if the rods or mirrors inside them misaligned. He'd also have to make sure their power sources were all up to par, and that he knew the exact position of each and every one of them at all times, so none of them went around blinding the neighbor's cat by mistake. There was his signature at the bottom of the list.

“Wow,” Paul said. “That all sounds really technical.”

No shit,
Ulicez thought. He opened up some footage of his work in the repair simulator, adjusting a YLF rod. “It's easy, after a while. You just have to have good hands.”

Paul smiled. “You must be a real hit with the ladies.”

Ulicez wiggled his fingers. “If my wife's testimony counted for anything, I'd already be a citizen by now.”

Paul's face took on a concerned aspect. “How is your wife, by the way?”

Ulicez went perfectly still. “Excuse me?”

“Well, the house is saying that she hasn't been feeling too well. The, uh . . .” Paul winced. “The
toilet
has been logging some extra activity . . .”

Morning sickness. Of course. Given how tightly they watched the water out here, the water meter would have probably noticed the difference in their usage from the other users on the line, and the toilet would have accounted for it.

“She gets nervous diarrhea,” Ulicez lied. He watched Paul turn a gringo shade of green. When lying, it was best to go for something that made the person hearing it not want to hear anything more. Something embarrassing. His father had taught him that much. “I think, you know, with this whole thing, this whole setup, she's just on edge.”

“Right . . .”

“She'll be fine now that I'm here.”

“Great.” Paul tried to adjust his posture. Something tugged at the edge of Ulicez's awareness. Something he had missed. But now Paul was talking again. “You know how this works, right?”

“Yeah. It works like Murder, right? Like the game?”

Paul sighed heavily before starting what was obviously a memorized routine. “Your likelihood of obtaining a visa increases or decreases based on your social capital at the end of your six-week trial period. That capital is determined by the people who live in Mariposa. Every day, a new set of Mariposans is granted a certain number of upvotes and downvotes. If they tell anybody they're a voter, they lose their votes. Even if they're lying. The people who
do
play by the rules get more upvotes than downvotes to play with, but they can always choose to abstain, and not vote at all. If they do, the algorithm sorts them right back to the bottom of the deck.”

“So people who vote frequently, they're sorted to the top?”

Paul smiled. “Yeah. It's an incentive.”

Ulicez nodded. It was always possible that the closet racists voted constantly, of course. But he chose not to bring that up. Instead, he asked: “When does the voting happen?”

“At the end of the day. Around eight.”

“So after the voters have probably talked to their spouses?”

Paul squirmed in his chair. “Yeah. We started doing it at five thirty, and then at noon, but fewer people voted when they were on their way home, or at lunch, or something. We're going to try it in the morning next.” He smiled sheepishly. “After they've had their coffee, of course.”

It wasn't like Ulicez didn't know all these things going in. It was on the waiver he signed when he began the application process. Everybody back home said it would work out for him—that he was a good boy, a nice boy; that years of being a nerdy kid who found Lego cooler than guns would finally count for something in a place like Mariposa. Still, it was different hearing somebody lay it out like this. Back home, with Elena asleep on his shoulder or his mother's stories on the display, it hadn't seemed entirely real. But here he was, his nervous sweat wicked away by aggressively conditioned air.

“How do the voters know they've been chosen? Do they just get a ping?”

“No. We tell them in person, the day before.” His eyes widened. “I mean, not
we,
not
me,
but someone on the, you know, team.” He didn't say
task force
. He didn't say
agency
. He didn't say
officer
. But the words hung there all the same.

“Okay.” Ulicez looked at the documents on the desk. “I guess I should get going to my next stop, huh?”

Paul checked the time display. “Oh, yeah, jeez. Sorry.” He offered his hand and Ulicez shook it.

“Can you tell me where your restroom is?” Ulicez asked. “Best not to be fidgeting on my first day on the job.”

Paul tittered. Until this moment, Ulicez had not known that men could even make that particular sound. “Last door on the left,” Paul said.

It wasn't until he was zipping up that Ulicez understood what he'd missed. The toilet had only logged usage, not content. It was not detecting the change in her hormones. The only hormone detectors in the town were ambient, meant to find explosions of cortisol that might indicate dishonesty.

They didn't know she was pregnant. And they wouldn't know for a good while, at least. They had time.

“WE DON'T HAVE ANY
time. Arizona cuts off at twelve weeks.”

“Seriously?” In Mexico, the procedure was allowed until twenty. They'd have a full five months, two months longer than the probationary period in Mariposa. Ulicez chewed halfheartedly at the remainder of his
elotes
. The lime here tasted all wrong. Too acidic. Not sweet. And the cheese was too salty. He had no room to complain, though. Elena couldn't even keep hers down.

“Do you have any idea how far along you are?”

“For the millionth time,
no
.” She sighed. “I'm sorry. But it doesn't matter, now, does it? We're stuck. If I go to a doctor, they'll know, and we'll get kicked out. If I don't go to a doctor, we'll be accused of lying when they figure it out, and
then
we'll get kicked out.” She smoothed her hair back. “Fuck. I'll have to keep buying tampons just to grief the data.”

“We don't know if it goes that far—”

“Of
course
it goes that far, Ulicez. Of
course
it does. You think they'd let a whole data-mining infrastructure that's worked well enough for decades just sit there, going to waste? Why do you think they issued us special discount cards at Target? Because
Target is the best at this game
. Target probably already knows I'm knocked up.”

Her voice caught. By the time Ulicez stood up to rub her shoulders, she had swiped the tears away with the heel of her hand.

“I hate these fucking hormones,” she said.

“I know.” He kept squeezing. “You should try to eat something. Even if it's just ice cream.”

She sniffed. “That might be nice.”

“I'll go get some.” He paused at the freezer. “Should I even bother with a bowl?”

“Shut up.”

Ulicez kept scooping. He wished they had condensed milk to go on top. If they had, he could simmer the can in a pot of water and caramelize its contents. Elena would probably like that. His own mother had mentioned enjoying it when she was carrying him. Jesus, what were they going to tell his mother?

“If they would just stock some damn misoprostol in this godforsaken country, I could take care of this whole thing by myself.”

There was no condensed milk. Ulicez picked up the bowl of ice cream and set it down in front of his wife. Even the dishware was bland here. He'd seen more interesting designs at his last trip to Denny's. “Misoprostol?”

“Cytotec. It's for ulcers. And abortions. Well. Misoprostol and some other thing. That's what RU-486 is.”

“And they don't sell it here?”

“Nope. Not without a prescription.” She laughed. “But they do in Mexico! My sister even asked me if I wanted to take some with me. You know. Just in case. Shit.”

“Eat your ice cream.”

She dug in. “Thank you.”

Ulicez took a pull of his beer. He watched the smaller kitchen screen embedded in the refrigerator. Madrigal wasn't going to get anywhere in this game if he kept flailing around the pitch like that with his elbows sticking out and his knees going nowhere. The man ran like a child. It was only because he was big that they'd let him into the league; he was a bruiser and he had a chilling effect on a passing game. He was a solid wall of muscle and bone that just plunked itself down on the pitch, looming down over the triangle formations of smaller, nimbler players.

A wall.

Of course.

“To save us some time,” he said, “let me ask you one question.”

Her spoon clinked in the bowl. “Sure.”

“Would you be comfortable buying it online? This miso thing.”

“It would have to go through customs.” She snorted. “Whatever that means, out here.”

“Right then.” He nodded to himself, then to her. “There's a way around this. Or a way through it, anyway. But it'll involve me getting some things from work.”

FIRST, THEY WERE GOING
to need a spider bot.

Well, that wasn't quite true. First, they were going to need a way into the labyrinth. And a couple of shovels. And then they were going to need a spider bot. And then, after that . . .

After that they would need the Badger himself.

“Are you sure he'll even remember the code?” Elena asked him, in the shower.

“He's the one who taught it to me, so he had fucking better,” Ulicez said. “Where did you say that postcard was?”

On the postcard, he expressed a longing for his mother's plum jam, the likes of which he had not found in the land of the free and the home of the brave. He then mentioned an event that took place in April 1986: Chernobyl. It was surprisingly easy to tie plum jam and nuclear disaster together—all he had to do was make a joke about his mother's inability to properly latch a pressure cooker, and done was done.

“When should we say we'd like to see him again?” Ulicez asked, carefully.

“As soon as possible,” Elena said. “Tell him we wish we could spend the weekend with him. You know. Like we used to.”

At the mailbox, she turned to him and whispered: “Plum jam?
That's
the secret code word?”

He nodded. “Sure is.”

“
Plum jam
means
abortion pills
. You're sure.”

“I'm sure.”

“Why?”

“Well, because I remember, and because—”

“No, no. Why plum jam?”

He winced. “If this all works out the way we want, the meaning should become pretty clear.”

The next day he asked to take a look at the autonomous pipeline inspectors, “just to be sure he was familiar with them.”

His boss thought that was a great idea. His boss was a Ph.D. who insisted on being called by his first name, Terry. Terry was a short, skinny man whose blond hair was turning white and whose salmon-colored polo shirts tended to highlight the rosacea around his nose. But he seemed genuinely happy to be in Mariposa: he kept a golf bag in his office, and he insisted that there would be a team-building event out on the links some Friday or other.

Each spider bot was kept in an opaque plastic terrarium about the size of a shoebox. The boxes rustled as he strode past. Pressure sensors in their claws must have sensed his movement. He willed himself to ignore the inherent creepiness of their blind skittering. He needed one of them.
They
needed one.

Way at the end of the steel racks was a box of various bots in states of disrepair. The sticker said they were older models; the parts didn't exist to fix them any longer. “They're spares,” his boss said, when he carried the box out of the room with him. “We just use them for the parts that still work, when the printer gets buggy.”

“Could I make one on my own, at home?” Ulicez asked. “I wouldn't be using company time. I just want to get to know them better if I'm going to be fixing them, and it's probably better if I just tinker alone on my own—”

“—in a low-stakes environment. I hear you.” Terry beamed. “No problem. Just run them through the scanner and sign out for the manifest it spits out.”

“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

“And I, for one, appreciate you taking the initiative! We need more of that kind of thinking around here.”

And then Terry winked at him.

Ulicez had the strangest feeling that he had just scored some points. Maybe the game wasn't so random after all.

“WHEN DID YOU START
working on this?”

Ulicez shone his flashlight down the tunnel. It was still as he remembered it: a surprisingly cool, clean space seven feet high and five feet across. Cheap, unfinished Home Depot wainscoting secured the earthen walls. Orange and black extension cords extended all the way down the ceiling; back in the day they'd had it hooked to generators in basements on the other side of the border and lit the thing with utility lamps purchased one hopeful Saturday on clearance at the last auto shop in town. Now both those buildings that supplied electricity were gone, and Ulicez and Elena had to make do with the flashlights.

“I was a kid,” he answered. “The work had already started before I was born, I think. I mean, they built a lot of these tunnels back then. This is just one they never found.”