The Unincorporated Woman (16 page)

“A man,” continued Hektor, “so renowned, the largest and most prestigious of the Vegas clinics offered to name their
entire
complex after him if only he would stay—an offer he turned down, by the way, without any inducement from me, I can assure you. I mean, for Damsah’s sake, this guy was so critical to our war effort, I personally …
personally
requested he be given his own security detail just to make sure that something like—oh, I don’t know—” His voice reached a fever pitch. “—a
kidnapping
wouldn’t happen!”

The rage now spilled out of the President, punctuating his every word. “But wait, it gets even better. This guy not only disappears, but is apparently shlepped through a cordoned-off section of our capital’s fucking orport
in
a suspension tube
by
his kidnapper! And the kidnapper is not only
not
stopped by our own
intelligence
officers, but is fucking saluted!” Hektor laughed in contempt. “At which point, the kidnapper walks unaccompanied to her transport, where another
intelligence
officer gets her all nice and comfy in her t.o.p., which she takes to a
restricted
orbiting platform and where another officer fuels up the fucking shuttle that
she
has the balls to steal from
us
in order to make her escape.” The slow circuit he’d been making around the room came to an abrupt halt with the sound of his clenched fists hitting the conference table.

Porfirio had the misfortune of being closest to the impact and was caught off guard. He gasped but quickly comported himself.

“Now,” beseeched Hektor, “did I miss anything, or should I just hop on the next shuttle to Ceres so I can go and kiss the ass of the Alliance’s new President and save us all the trouble of continuing this farce?”

For a moment, total silence reigned. Hektor folded his arms across his chest and waited to see who would be the first to fall on their sword. He didn’t have to wait long.

“I take full responsibility, Mr. President,” said the Minister of Internal Affairs. Tricia stared blankly at Hektor, waiting for the excoriation she knew must be coming, but the President said nothing … did nothing. He just waited, regarding her with the callous eyes of an executioner. The woman whose entire reputation was based on being cold and ruthless swallowed nervously. “We did manage to root out one operative from the orport.”

“And?”

“Killed himself before we could question him.”

“How?”

“Again. My fault. I set a wide perimeter and sent the order out to cordon off his living space but under no circumstances to approach him. One of the local police thought he’d be a hero and attempted to apprehend the suspect. Once the operative realized we were on to him, it was only a matter of seconds. He was dead before my men got within even a kilometer of him.”

“So we got nothing?”

“We’re going through his stuff now, but he was a pro. I doubt we’ll find anything.”

Hektor shook his head in disbelief.

“One last thing, sir.”

“Why not?” he asked sardonically.

“His last words … at least according to the cop.”

“Yeah?”

“‘For God and Justin.’”

A shiver went through the Cabinet.

“I’m not sure which Justin I hate more,” scoffed Hektor, “the old one or the martyred one.”

“There is some good news, sir.”

“Please, anything.”

“We managed to crack the core identity of the primary operative.”

“And?”

“You know her, sir.”

Hektor’s eyes blinked in disbelief.

“Come again?”

“Her name is Agnes Goldstein.”

Hektor nodded slowly as the memory of Agnes came back to him. Years previously, he’d used her as a human pawn in a game of high-stakes chess with Justin. Rather effectively, as he recalled.

“She’d been classified, under that name, as a person of interest for her primary relationship to Mr. Cord. It was assumed that she’d fled to the Alliance, and rather conveniently, there was an Agnes Goldstein registered as a new émigré to Eris, working in an agricultural complex.”

“This has Kirk Olmstead written all over it,” Hektor said darkly. “I shoulda killed the son of a bitch when I had the chance. Tell me, Tricia, what’s to stop this from happening again?”

“Nothing,” she stated with her usual brute honesty, before adding a moment later, “sir.” Hektor waved his hand for her to continue as he sank wearily into his seat at the head of the table.

“A well-placed deep cover operation is exactly that—deep. The operative doesn’t even know they’re a weapon until set off by a signal … which could be anything or anyone.”

“Great. And do we have any ‘weapons’ like this of our own?”

“We have covert operations, yes, but none like this. However, sir, they’ve tipped their hand so now we know what to look for and how to hit back. In fact, we’re working on setting up a similar operation.”

“How long does it usually take to establish the kind of cover they just pulled on us?”

Tricia’s eyes flittered nervously. “Three to five years.”

*   *   *

Sandra stared intently at the device resting on the table, hardly believing its size. In her day, virtual reality machines were quite large and looked more like a dental chair melded to a magnetic resonance machine. The VR rig she was looking at was reduced to nothing more than a thick headband attached to a box that looked like an old VHS tape. And it was the memory of
that
ancient technology that brought a smile to her face. As a precocious nine-year-old, Sandra had been repairing and improving her family’s VCR machine, which was what ultimately led her to a career in engineering and research. She laughed quietly.

“What’s so funny, ma’am,” asked Captain Marilynn Nitelowsen, eyeing the VR rig with suspicion.

Sandra stared blithely at her newly assigned guardian. “It just occurred to me that if my parents had bought a Betamax instead of a VHS, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

Marilynn’s look of total incomprehension and grab for her DijAssist as a means to find an explanation were not-so-subtle reminders of just how far off the beaten track Sandra now was.

“Don’t bother,” confided Sandra. “Take too long to explain. Just a joke from a long time ago, Captain.”

“President Cord used to do that a lot, ma’am. His wife called it the ‘laugh of the lonely.’”

Sandra laughed again. “Yeah, well, I never was that much into self-pity. Tell me, Captain, what did you think of the President?”

“Honestly?”

Sandra nodded.

“Amazing, ma’am. Just amazing. You knew things were going to work out when he was around. Can’t explain it, really.”

“Don’t have to. That sounds a lot like our Justin.”

“I’m sorry you missed him, ma’am.”

“You have no idea. On the upside, I did get him for the first half of his life.”

Marilynn shot Sandra a humorous look. “True. Guess we both had our time.”

“Look at us,” chortled Sandra, “sitting here like forlorn lovers. Ridiculous!”

“Yes, ma’am. I suppose it is.”

“You allowed to answer any of my questions, Captain?”

“That would depend on the question, ma’am.”

Sandra grinned. “When I found out you needed me up to speed in so short a period of time, I would’ve figured you’d throw a VR rig at me. Instead, I had to cajole it out of you.”

“It’s complicated, ma’am. Perhaps if you used your Dij—”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Marilynn, I understand the history of the thing. I just figured what with the situation and all, they’d loosen up a bit.”

“What can I say, ma’am? Old habits die hard. How did you get them to agree, by the way?”

Sandra paused a moment, reflecting. “One of the little-known aspects of virtual reality, even today, is the time dilation effect of a brain operating on purely impulse input. To put it simply, a properly modulated and moderated VR unit can slow objective time for the person in it. Used properly, the four days I have left could become six weeks or more of learning time in virtual reality.”

Marilynn’s eyes took on a distant look. “Six weeks in VR. You could do almost anything.”

“It won’t be as glamorous as you think, Captain. From my point of view, I’m going to be in a library reading … from sunup till sundown. Not exactly what I’d call a dream vacation. What exactly will you be doing while I’m under?”

“Watching, ma’am.”

Sandra viewed her curiously.

“I’m Admiral Black’s adjunct. I’ve been with her from the beginning of the war.”

“Ah, that explains it.”

“Not quite, ma’am. I was—” She stopped herself. “—I
am
a VR addict. Do you know what that means?”

“Yes,” Sandra whispered empathetically, “sadly, I do. Remember, Captain, I saw my entire civilization commit suicide with the help of VR. Truth is, it almost got me. I was part of a team researching the time dilation effects I told you about. We were doing it for the purposes of education and research. ‘Spend a week in VR and come out speaking a new language!’” she bellowed in the overhyped tonality of a television announcer. “‘Have a deadline? Put your best research team into VR time dilation, and your days turn into weeks!’ That kind of thing. Like you, I found myself never wanting to leave. To gain that much knowledge in so short an amount of time. Well I … I just couldn’t get enough.”

“And got to rationalize it as research.”

“Yes.”

“So how’d you escape?”

“I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a …
was
a particularly nasty form of dementia. No known treatments.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, so was I—and then reality, or at least the little I had left of it, became very precious to me. Ironic, ain’t it?”

Marilynn nodded.

“So,” added Sandra, now tapping the VR rig and eyeing Marilynn, “you
are
going to make sure I leave when I’m supposed to.”

“Yes, ma’am.” There was a new determination in the Captain’s voice. “Four days from now, whether you want to or not, you’re leaving.”

“Good.” Sandra strapped on the headband. “Let’s get started.”

*   *   *

After spending a subjective week in an exact replica of her once local public library, circa 1965, Sandra came to a sudden revelation. One moment she was in the library’s main hall, reading about the Astral Awakening, a rebirth of religion that had swept through the Outer Alliance, and the next moment … nothing. Just a keen awareness that something wasn’t right. But what? She surveyed the room. Everything appeared to be in order. The dark, lattice-wood four-story ceiling had been authentically rendered. As were the gently lit copper and bronze pendant lights in nice even rows above. The beautiful grains of the quarter-sawn oak wainscoting too were accurate. She checked one last thing. The names of authors and literary quotations were inscribed beneath each of the large arc-shaped plate glass windows on both sides of the great hall. She quickly reviewed them all, stopping momentarily at the Apostle John. His read, “The truth shall make you free.”

Satisfied that the virtual reality matrix was holding, she soon realized that no, it wasn’t the place that was bothering her—it was the people. Sandra had spent enough time in VR to notice the glaring anomaly. In VR, almost everything could be made perfect with one exception—human interaction. Engineers had been working for years in an attempt to cross what had been affectionately referred to as the “uncanny valley,”
i.e.,
the more human a computer-generated character looked, the more difficult it became to render the subtle and believable “human” expressions that would make him more human. At the time, it had not been considered a major problem, because most people who’d gone charging into the fledgling VR rigs weren’t looking for real human interaction. In fact, the overwhelming majority were more than happy with the slightly wooden and zombielike humans technology had so far produced. The early adopters just wanted to fly and screw and be anything they could imagine. True human interaction would only get in the way of that. And all those intent on that kind of experience in a virtual environment could simply find other true humans to interact with.

But as Sandra looked around the main hall, she realized that everyone she’d spoken with over the course of the week had acted very much like a true human as opposed to a program trying to be one. Her first thought was that they must be real. That Alliance security must have plugged others into her VR net to keep tabs on her from the inside, much as Marilynn was currently keeping tabs on her from the outside. But a quick review of the history of the VR plague and the Virtual Reality Edicts that soon followed dispelled her of the notion. The edicts, she knew, had not only been enforced with a ruthless efficiency but had also made it almost impossible for anyone other than a true addict to even consider stepping foot into a rig.

Would the Alliance really have put her into a room with twenty such addicts … or ex-addicts? Doubtful. Could the Alliance have created a secret vanguard for just such a scenario? No, she reasoned. Not only would it be a precious waste of a valuable commodity—a warrior in time of war—but it would also imply that at some point prior to her reanimation, they’d conjured up a similar scenario in which VR commandos would be needed, also unlikely. There was another red flag. The “people” whom she’d been interacting with all week were way too cognizant of the late-twentieth-century culture and times. From what she knew of current technology—and so far, that was considerable—the information they’d bandied about so freely could not be learned in a few days’ time, and truthfully, why would they have even bothered? Keeping an eye on someone didn’t necessitate knowing the current mayor’s name, the latest top 40 hits, and the era’s lexicon.
But these people all did
.

Sandra immediately dropped her research into the Astral Awakening and began delving into advances in VR technology, from her time period to present. She was trying to determine if there’d been a major breakthrough in the uncanny valley programming during her three-hundred-year stasis. After a brief review, she was able to conclude that there hadn’t. Though hardware had continued to shrink, especially with the ineluctable advance of nanotechnology, the software, she saw, had hardly changed at all. The ravages of the Grand Collapse, the introduction of the VR Edicts, and the steady and implacable inculcation of those edicts on at least twelve generations of humanity had actually retarded it. In fact, she realized, it was distinctly possible that she knew more about VR programming than any human alive. And that left her with one very uncomforting thought. She looked up from her research at those still mulling around the library.
Who programmed all of you?