ONE
Daniel
Ruppert left the steel-reinforced black dome of the GlobeNet, Los
Angeles studio and drove into the war-torn concrete hell of south L.A. The roads deteriorated beneath him as he
traveled deeper into the Economic Reclamation Zone, where the Western Resources
and Energy Committee now permitted up to four hours of electricity a day and as
much as two gallons of water per household, a bid to stave off riots as the
National Guard effected its latest withdrawal. Another intervention would
likely follow within the month. Ruppert
would report on it ominously, while framed by footage captured by the triangular
GlobeNet spycams that glided like tight swarms of black vultures over
newsworthy sites.
On this
evening's newscast, Ruppert had described the new measures as a "bold
initiative to increase prosperity and opportunity for the citizens of Southern Los Angeles."
Privately, he'd wondered whether "increase" was the proper word, since
it implied that those things existed in the first place. The word, like the overall positive tone of
the story, had been chosen by network, and a mere reporter had no place
suggesting revisions. Ruppert was just a
face-man, someone who could look trustworthy and reassuring regardless of what
he said, or how much he lied.
His new
2035 Ford Bluehawk stuck out like a golden thumb as it raced low and sleek
along the shattered 405, picking up speed each time he darted under a wrecked
overpass bridge. Scavengers sometimes
lurked in the shadows beneath bridges, waiting to snare a promising target
using a homemade explosive tucked into a roadway fissure, or maybe an
old-fashioned burst of machine gun fire.
At least, this was the kind of thing Ruppert reported for the local
news. The boundary between the true
world and the one manufactured for the audience was slippery and porous, even
for him, especially since he didn't know when he told the truth and when he
didn't. It was all just script.
Garbage and
earthquake rubble buried most of the ramps on this stretch of interstate. Up the ramps, behind the rusty barbs and chain
link running alongside the highway, most of the old concrete buildings stood
lightless except for the occasional red
glare of an open fire in a window hole. The four hours of electricity was
probably an exaggeration. More likely,
the Western Resource and Energy Committee provided one hour, or no hours at
all--most likely, they had simply issued the announcement to assure
security-enclave residents in Beverly Hills and Orange County
that something was being done for the benighted masses of the south.
In three or
four weeks, he would be reading a new statement for the cameras--that the
residents of South L.A. had sabotaged the transformers and power lines, or had
used the new electricity to fuel insurgent activity, and the power needed to be
cut once again. Over iced drinks on
manicured golf courses, where groves of trees concealed the electrified
razor-wired fences, Ruppert's colleagues would shake their heads and comment on
how you just couldn't help those people.
To support
the story, the National Guard would be sent in for another round of
occupation. A few hundred adolescents
and young men would be swept up and shoved into the overcrowded Emergency
Penitentiaries, and the well-heeled portion of the public would go on with
their lives, satisfied that what could be done, had been done.
Ruppert
should never have pointed his car south.
His home was north, in Bel Aire, a three-story house in a high-walled,
high-security suburban cell, where the houses all faced a "village green" in
the center, complete with a swing set none of the obese neighborhood children
bothered to touch. He did not belong
down here.
Traveling into the southern zone
was not illegal, of course, but highly suspicious. Suspicion mattered more than the law. Suspicion was enough to send you to an
Emergency Penitentiary, though it was more likely that Ruppert, with his job
and his background, would be submerged into the nightmare realm of the state's
psychiatric prisons. Or just killed--one
could always hope.
He reached his exit, passed through a
lightless warren of dilapidated office parks, and trundled up to the gate at
the STORE-SAFE. He waved his access card
and the gate squealed as it rolled aside.
The STORE-SAFE facility ran on its own battery power when south L.A. was blacked out. It was part of the STORE-SAFE Quality Pledge.
He
navigated through the low brick alleys lined with rusty, padlocked garage doors
until he reached his unit--332--and stopped the car. He got out, breathing in the burnt,
ozone-laced night air, and his door quietly closed behind him. The manufacturer claimed the automatic-closing
door was "soft as a butler's touch," which just sounded creepy to
Ruppert.
His car locked itself up, and the
windshield and windows tinted black to conceal the interior from potential
thieves. He'd disabled the car's GPS
system. If asked, he would say it had
been malfunctioning but he simply hadn't made it to the mechanic. It would seem unlikely that he would disable
it himself--what sane person wanted to run the risk of falling off the steady,
safe beams of the grid? Still, he
figured he only had a few weeks until that excuse became questionable.
The
old-fashioned padlock on the storage unit door, and its matching archaic metal
key, always amused him. It was the only
physical key he owned. His car, his home, his office granted entry based on
biometric data. Such an object, implying
secretive off-the-grid activities, was also great cause for suspicion.
The padlock
screeched open and the hasp shed flakes of rust as he lifted it free. Ruppert raised the garage door, stepped
inside, and let it rattle shut behind him.
He flicked
on his flashlight. The beam passed over
a heap of furniture--a couch, a moth-chewed recliner with a broken ottoman,
coffee table, dusty cardboard boxes filled with moldy books and clothing. None of this was his. It had been here when he'd rented the storage
unit, abandoned remnants of someone else's life. When Ruppert had rented the
unit from the facility manager--an old, half-blind man named Carlos--the manager
had avoided the ridiculously obvious subject of clearing out the previous
renter's property, but Ruppert had said nothing, and hadn't bothered to do it
himself. The heap of old junk made the
unit appear to be nothing special, nothing that Department of Terror agents
should waste their time searching.
Outside, a long,
screaming whistle screeched across the night, followed by a rumbling
explosion. Rocket-propelled
grenade. The locals were at war again,
either with authorities or each other.
The floor seemed to jerk away beneath him, an armful of dust spilled from
the ceiling, and then the world was quiet again.
He pried
open the bottom drawer of a file cabinet and shoved the mass of folders toward
the front of drawer. From the back, he
withdrew his most prized possession, a gray cube a little smaller than his
fist, etched with glittering Chinese ideograms.
The only English was stamped on the bottom of the cube: SinoDyne, with
the serial number filed off. It was
three or four years old, but far more advanced than anything available to
unlicensed consumers. The Department of
Terror mandated low processing speeds for anything portable--they preferred
people use their home or office networks, which were easier for Terror to track
and record.
He fastened
on the interface apparatus--eyephones, audio headset, input glove. He resisted the urge to check outside. The facility was walled and gated. Suddenly he wished he'd rented another unit
to store his car when he visited.
Anything manufactured in the last ten years would draw suspicion in this
neighborhood. At the moment, only a
helicopter patrol would be able to see his car, but the helicopter patrols
worried him more than the street criminals.
A criminal would only take Ruppert's car, and maybe his life. That was nothing compared to what Terror
might do.
He booted
up the Chinese data console and was immediately immersed in a world of
ideograms. His ghostly virtual hand
selected the translation icon, and his environment clarified into English. Ruppert did not know one bit of Chinese or
any language but English. Learning a
second language was dangerously unpatriotic.
He directed
the computer to search out the "bolivarNet" data archive, just one of hundreds
of sites he might have accessed, all of them illegal, and usually impossible,
to view. He was searching for
rawfeed--news unfiltered by the Department of Terror approval process. He'd selected the bolivarNet site to find
news from the wars in South America.
Ruppert
found himself an invisible observer in a scene previously recorded on the
streets of San Juan, Argentina, where Atlantic
contractors fought a protracted war against Mercosur forces, either to contain
the rabid political virus of Neocommunism, or to control local gold and copper
mines--the motive depended on your source.
The video had probably been filmed by Argentine guerillas, but Ruppert
did not see any indication of the author's name.
A convoy of
black armored tanks approached him, crushing the debris and the rust-heaps of
long-abandoned automobiles that cluttered the barrio street. One side of each
tank displayed the seal of Hartwell Services, Inc.--a black letter
"H" with a hollow heart at the crossbar, centered inside an oval the
color of gold rubbed with warm butter.
The opposite sides of the tanks
displayed the New America flag: one fat white star on a blue square, framed by
three thick lines, two red and one white.
Some marketing consultant or other had allegedly redesigned the flag so
that children could draw it more easily, in order to help them develop the
virtue of patriotism at a younger age.
President Winthrop had proclaimed the single star represented the new,
more unified country his administration liked to pretend it had created.
Artillery shells flared from the
turrets, demolishing the few clay houses that still stood. Most of the
neighborhood was already shattered and smoldering, probably from aerial
bombardment.
The tanks'
loudspeakers broadcast, in English, "Lay down your weapons. Insurgents will not be tolerated. Lay down your weapons. Prisoners will find mercy. Lay down your weapons."
The turret
of the lead tank turned directly towards Ruppert, and he found himself running
down a narrow alley; he was a captive audience to whomever had shot the
video. He had a jagged, bouncing view of
broken walls, a sky full of dark smoke, the ground strewn with rubble. The videographer, along with a few armed
mestizo men who apparently accompanied him, turned down a steep flight of
stairs--Ruppert could not tell whether the stairs were meant to be outdoors, or
had once been inside a house--into an narrow, underground tunnel. Ruppert glimpsed scrawny, dismembered bodies
in the shadows. The videographer hurried
into the darkness under the city, and the video ended there, the rebels
apparently not wanting to give the outside world a look at whatever
subterranean passageways existed in San
Juan.
Ruppert was
standing again in the bolivarNet data archive, surrounded by floating spheres
and cubes etched in several languages, each geometric form representing a
different video, audio or text file supplied by Argentine rebels. He could move into other "rooms" of data if he wanted
updates from Brazil or Venezuela,
but he felt shaken already, and was in no hurry to see more.
He'd
already committed enough crimes to draw the wrath of the Department of Terror,
which held jurisdiction over all forms of foreign propaganda. One of their agents, George Baldwin, occupied
an office at GlobeNet down the hall from Ruppert. His job was to ensure that no terrorist
propaganda accidentally slipped into GlobeNet's broadcasts, to help sort the
true from the untrue. He also
facilitated conveying information from official sources to the news writers.
According
to the story provided by Baldwin and presented to the public by Ruppert, the
Argentinean people lived under a brutal Neocommunist dictator, and they were
begging America
for help. President Winthrop, in his
mercy and benevolence, wanted them liberated.
Ruppert had
become a junkie for foreign news, which would automatically mark him as a
sympathizer. The Chinese data console,
with its built-in language translation software, was extremely illegal--no good
citizen desired information from unofficial, foreign sources. Ruppert had felt for years the urge to
discover the truth behind the stories he reported each day, probably because
he'd been young enough to study journalism at a time when it was considered
important to find multiple sources on each story, cross-check them, sift them
for solid facts. The Propaganda and
Sedition Acts had eventually killed that method of journalism, and now the
younger reporters at GlobeNet never questioned whether the story was true or
false. The story was only reportable or
nonreportable.
Ruppert
unplugged from the console, the images of the shattered neighborhood still
burning on the backs of his eyelids. One
would be enough for tonight. It was
always best to stay cautious, in case you faced interrogation by a Terror
agent. And there was his wife Madeline
to think about--who may as well have been an agent herself.
He stashed
the console away, locked up the storage unit, returned to his car. As he accelerated north on the broken
freeway, he felt stupid and ashamed. He
could not gain anything from learning unofficial information. He could only put himself and Madeline in danger,
as well as his job and home. Already he
could imagine himself packed into an Emergency Penitentiary cage pit, brawling
like a starving dog with the other prisoners for protein goop at mealtime.
Ruppert
hammered the accelerator and roared northward, pushing away from the forever
murky and incomplete world of the truth, towards the bright order and
superficial sanity of the officially sanctioned world.
