Kelley Eskridge (14 page)

“Those are my records! You can't use
those, they're private. Rafe, aren't they?”

“Those are Ko corporation records, Ren,”
he replied. “They're only as private as Ko wants them to be.”

Jackal's heartbeat skittered and then
settled into a steady, panicked pounding. “What are you saying to me?”
she said to Arsenault, and the other woman's eyes pinched for a moment
before her face settled back into the professional mask.

“You've already lost your Hope status,”
Arsenault said. “There's no reason to bring this particular matter up
in open court unless the trial proceeds and the prosecutor begins to
explore possible motives.”

“Do they know about this?”

Rafael answered, “Ko has not yet chosen to
bring this information to the attention of the prosecution. But they
will, Jackal, if we continue.”

“So what, Rafe? What if they do? I'm
already not a Hope anymore, it's not like they can take it away from me
again.”

“No, they can't. But they can implicate
your parents.”

Jackal went still.

Arsenault said, “It would probably go
badly for them, Ms. Segura.” She did not seem to be enjoying herself,
but she sounded official, implacable. “At best, their employment
contracts would be terminated and they would be denied jobs, residency,
or benefits at any Ko facility. At worst…well, the company has enough
evidence to file criminal charges.”

Everything turned to ice inside Jackal.
The skin went cold on her arms, her chest, the tops of her thighs. Her
guts gurgled, and then cramped viciously, so that she was afraid for a
moment of shitting on the floor in front of them all. She wasn't aware
that she had started to shake until Rafe put his arm around her tightly.

Arsenault turned away. After a moment, her
young assistant did the same.

“I know,” Rafael said. “It's real bad. I
know.” For the first time, she saw something like compassion in his
dark, narrow face.

“They didn't do anything, Rafe. They only
did what Ko told them to, that's all they've ever done. Me too. I
thought I belonged to Ko, I thought they were supposed to take care of
me. Why are they doing this?”

“Shhh,” he said. “I know.”

“I'm not a…I'm not a terrorist, I didn't
mean to kill those people, my web, how could they think…I want to pay
for it so I can forgive myself, but not like this. Not for all this
stuff I didn't do. Everybody is so upset about the goddamn senator and
nobody even cares about the web, about Mist and Bear and Tiger.” The
words caught in her throat so that she had to cough them out. It hurt
to breathe. “And I couldn't tell anyone that I knew about not being a
Hope, because…the company had invested so much in me and I was going to
manage projects for EarthGov.… And I knew I didn't deserve it but I
thought, well, I have to try, I have to do my best and just try to act
like a Hope. So no one would know and no one could use it to hurt Ko.”

“I know you were doing what you thought
was best.”

“Best for Ko. Because they made me a Hope
in the first place.
You
know.” She
threw the words at Arsenault's rigid back.

“The clock is ticking, Rafael,” Arsenault
said, without turning around.

“Ren, I'm going to summarize Ms.
Arsenault's offer, and then I'm going to advise you to accept it. It
includes an Earth Court guarantee of consideration for your age and
former status which will almost certainly result in a reduced sentence.
There may be special opportunities that could benefit you during your
incarceration. There are resources which can be made available to ease
your transition back into society. I advise you not to underestimate
the value of some hope of assistance on the back end of all this. It's
a better deal than anyone else could offer you. And your family and
your web will receive guaranteed job security and appropriate career
advancement with Ko for their lifetimes.”

Jackal could feel sweat under her arms, on
her ribs, in her crotch. The soles of her feet were damp and sticky.
“What if I want to have my trial anyway? Take my chances with Earth
Court. What if I get up and talk all about this Hope stuff? Don't you
think they'd understand? They wouldn't blame me or my parents, they'd
blame Ko.”

Still, Arsenault did not turn.

“I want you to listen to me very
carefully,” Rafe said. “The court wants this over as much as Ko. The
judge has already approved the deal.” He paused. “You can't save
yourself, Ren. You can only save everyone else.”

She pulled her knees up onto the edge of
the mattress and put her head on them. Down between her thighs, she
could see a crease in the sheet, and a threadbare spot in the heel of
her left sock. She breathed in her own smell. No one spoke to her; no
one touched her. The room was silent and still. Away, away, she
thought, I'll just go away. She thought about the coastline at the
southeast end of Ko Island, the wild place that she loved. She let
herself wander in the shadows, among the branches and the roots. She
scuffed the leaves. She knelt over the rabbit burrow, pressed her head
to the ground and felt the pattering heartbeats beneath the earth. She
breathed in the cold, salt sky. She lay back on a hill in the sun and
the ground rose up around her and she sank down, down through the soil
and stones and was part of it forever…

“Ren—”

Then she was back, and Ko was gone. It was
gone.

She raised her head. “Tell me what I have
to do,” she said, and Arsenault turned around.

It made headlines all over the world when
Jackal changed her plea. Arsenault sat at the table with the prosecutor
while he told the judge that the arrangement was acceptable. “We want
this over, Your Honor,” he said. “We just want to see justice done.”
Jackal said nothing except yes to all the questions. The only thing she
was conscious of was a single outcry, very clear through the hive-buzz
of the audience: Snow shouting
No Jackal, no
.
The judge dismissed the jury and set her sentencing date. The guards
led her back to the bright barred room.

“I sentence you to confinement for forty
years in a maximum security facility without possibility of parole,”
the judge said, and rapped the funny hammer on the desk, and it was
over over over over over.

She waited the next three days in mute
terror for them to come for her.

She knew about prison. She had seen
training movies on Ko that described the rule by discipline and
regimentation, the systematic and deliberate dehumanization designed to
put a person down and keep her there, and the anthropological parallels
between prisoner culture and primate dominance behavior. Her teachers
had used the prison model to demonstrate the consequences of Theory X
management techniques on worker morale and productivity.

She knew they were here when the guard at
the end of the hall called “Segura!” She was standing up, facing the
bars, by the time they reached her, her knees locked so she would not
fall.

They were two women. One was tall, with
dusky skin. The other was as tall, but pale in a way that made her look
smaller and weaker. They had the concealed, watchful air that Jackal
had come to associate with official people.

“I'm ready,” she told them.

“Brave girl.” The pale one grinned.

“Shut up,” the dark one said, so
ambiguously that Jackal did not know who the order was intended for.
The hairs on the back of her neck ruffled; danger here.

The bars opened. “Let's go,” the dark one
said.

“My things—”

“Leave them. Oh, don't look like that.
You'll be back in a few hours. Just come on.”

So she went.

They took her in a small armored bus to
another part of the compound. At least, she thought so; she did not
hear any of the sounds that meant outside, market callers or dogs or
the wailing of bandurria or hurdy-gurdies. There was only the
occasional sound of steel bars moving in and out of their locks.

They led her into a building lobby where a
sleek man sat behind a sleek synthetic mahogany desk. He turned them
over to a brisk woman who led them along a series of corridors to a
passkey-controlled door, to people in badges that showed their pictures
and their names, all followed by MD or PhD. Everyone was very polite to
Jackal. No one appeared to notice that she wore arm and leg restraints,
but no one offered to remove them.

“We'll call you,” one of the older men
said to the two women who had brought her. “Come on, love. Time to
audition.”

“What for?”

“Never mind,” he said cheerfully. “Just
follow the directions and we'll be done before you know it.”

“And then what?” she asked, but he never
answered.

She was there for fifteen hours. The day was
full of tests: physical, psychological, endurance, intelligence. There
were personality inventories and reflex measurements, blood analyses,
and an MRI scan of her brain that kept her head locked in place inside
a tight metal tube for almost two hours. They took samples of whatever
they could find in her eyes, nose, mouth, throat, ears, vagina, rectum.
People stopped being nice to her. No one explained the purpose of any
procedure; no one warned her when something would hurt, or reassured
her that it would not. They asked her direct questions only as a last
resort. Mostly they acted as if she were not in the room:
Straighten her left leg, please; has she
eaten today
?
And once, to her disbelief, one anonymous tester looked across her to
another and asked, “So what did she do, anyway?”

Finally, when she was exhausted, they told
her to lie down on a table, and they tied her arms and legs with padded
straps. One man lifted her head while a second man fitted a helmet in
place.

“What is this?”

“Just relax.”

“What is it?”

“You have to relax or the readings will be
skewed.”

They went away and she was alone. The
lights went out. She heard a voice. “Tell me what you see.”

She did not see anything. And then she did.

When it was over, Dusky and Pale sat with
three of the doctors for a long while in the room next to the place
where Jackal had been taken to rest. She could see them through the
open door, together around a table, heads nodding, making notes,
accessing records.

The women took her back to her holding
cell. She only wanted to drop down on her cot and sleep, but they waved
the guard back up the hall. Jackal set her teeth and waited for
whatever was next.

“Congratulations,” the dark one said.
“We've just been negotiating an eighty percent reduction in your
sentence. Would you like to make a deal?”

In the silence, Jackal could hear the
footsteps of the retreating guard. “Goddamn it,” she said bitterly, “I
wish you people would stop doing this to me.” And then, to her dismay,
she burst into tears.

She covered her face with her hands, and
leaned into a corner until she could get control of herself. The two
women were quiet. When she thought she could manage, she took her head
out of the corner and saw them both standing at the other end of the
cell, giving her as much room as they could. It confused her to find
herself appreciating the courtesy.

“Talk,” she said thickly. The dark woman
moved forward. The pale one stayed by the far wall.

“Short and sweet. We have an experimental
virtual confinement program. You're a candidate. Your participation in
VC gets you an adjusted sentence.”

She cast about for something to say.
“Adjusted how?”

The pale one smiled, and the dark one
seemed to settle back on her heels as if relaxing some previous
tension. Those signals told Jackal that she had been predictable.
Standing there, she knew that she was young and stupid and ill-equipped
to make lifeshaping decisions. She would not ask the right questions,
she would miss the important points, and they would win: they would get
her, the game-players, the Jackal-molesters of this strange world that
she had been dropped into as surely as the Mirabile elevators had
dropped her web mates into oblivion.

“Your sentence would be commuted to eight
years in VC.”

Eight years. Her legs went wobbly and she
sat down on the edge of the cot. When she could speak, she asked,
“What's the catch?”

“No catch. Eight years, you're done.”

“No.” Jackal shook her head. “No, that's
too…it's too easy.”

Dusky shrugged. “VC is an experimental
technology. You're being compensated for the risk and for your
contribution to the advancement of science.”

“Tell me more about it.”

Pale moved forward. Jackal saw it then,
the techie look; it reminded her of Turtle, and that hurt so bad that
she missed the woman's first few words.

“…eighteen percent at any given moment.”

“Excuse me?”

“In prison or psych. Some kind of
restrictive-rehabilitative setting.”

“I'm sorry,” Jackal stammered, “eighteen
percent of what?”

“The world,” the woman said flatly. “On
average. Some days are busier than others. But all confinement
facilities are overcrowded. And so what happens, you get riots,
epidemics, facility disruptions which lead to cost overruns which lead
to worsening conditions which lead to more disturbances, and in the
meantime recidivism is up.” She shook her head. “It's definitely a
systems problem.”

“Feedback loop,” Jackal agreed, unable to
resist the impulse.

“Right,” Pale replied, mouth quirked as
she nodded. “Don't often meet people in this program who understand
systems thinking.”

“I come from Ko.” Then she realized that
she didn't, not anymore. Even after she got out of prison—if she ever
did, if she didn't die of despair or cholera or a sharpened piece of
metal through the throat—she would never be allowed to return to Ko.
They didn't want her.