Solitaire, page 13
“Oh, god,” she whispered, and went forward.
“Jackal?” Snow's voice was faint and tremulous. Behind her image, Jackal could see that Snow was in her own apartment, on Ko. Home.
“Jackal…Hi…Your lawyer got me this call. He said you're being—that when they take you to prison I won't be able to talk to you again and I wanted…Jackal, are you okay?”
“Snow…” She did not know how to answer. She wanted to put her hands right through the screen, wrap her arms around Snow, pull her close. And she was glad that Snow was so far away.
Snow said, “You look terrible.”
“Great. Thanks.” Jackal shook herself, tried again. “I”m okay, really. I…I'm scared, I guess.”
Snow began to cry, a hopeless sound. “Me too.”
“Don't cry, Snow. Honey, don't.” Snow was sobbing now, dragging in short sharp breaths like a drowning woman about to go back under. Jackal said desperately, “I can't stand it, I can't…you have to stop, please stop. Please.”
“I'm sorry.” There was a long moment of silence. Jackal watched Snow steady her breathing, tamp down her fear, wipe her eyes and nose and then look back at the screen, straight into Jackal's eyes across the miles and the horrible distance between them. Jackal thought, she's so beautiful.
“Oh, Snow,” she said softly, “What are you doing?”
“I had to see you. I had to say…I don't know. I don't know what to say. I can't imagine saying good-bye.”
“No.”
“No.”
Silence.
“My parents?”
“They're…they can't…” Snow turned her hands palm up.
“No, I guess not.”
“No.”
Snow sighed. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, her hair half in her face. Jackal burned the picture into her brain.
I will never forget, she thought, I will never never forget how it feels to touch her and how she laughs and the way she eats apples and the smell of the skin on her ribs and how everything is more clear when I see it with her, I will never forget, I will never and then the guard put his head inside the door and said, “One minute,” and she knew it was almost over—not just the call, but her life as she'd known it. She couldn't breathe. Her life. Her life. What was she supposed to do? “Snow—” she said frantically, “Snow, I—”
“No,” Snow said, “Jackal, no—”
“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. The web, I…please don't hate me, Snow—”
“I love you, Jackal.”
“I'm so sorry. I wish…I just want you to be happy. I want you to have all good things. I'll miss you every single fucking day.” She put her hands right up against the screen, against Snow, and Snow reached out too.
“Don't leave me, Jackal.”
“Snow—”
“Don't leave me.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Snow, I—”
The screen went black, and a second later the message
Transmission terminated flashed in red letters. “Sorry,” the guard said from behind her. “Regulations.”
Jackal wrapped her arms around herself and held tight, and kept herself together that way until she reached her little cell; then she howled until finally someone came with a needle. She held out her arm and was glad to feel the sting.
9
I WILL WALK ACROSS THE PLAZA NOW AND THINK only about my project. I will think about how to solve the problem—
“Hi, Snow.”
Nod. Walk—the problem with the incentive program at the vendor in Lyons, how do we reward them for increasing just-in-time delivery volumes without inadvertently encouraging them to loosen their quality standards in order to meet schedules? Walk across the plaza. Ignore the voices around me, all the voices—
“—noodles? There's a place—”
“—miss the train—”
“—see me anymore, she says I—”
“—middle of the meeting!”
“—the garden in summer—”
The garden in summer. The web in the garden in summer. Jackal with her face turned up to the sun, breathing in the smell of the garden. Jackal. I will not think about Jackal now. I will think only about my project.
“—it's just that I've been a little tired lately—”
That's a familiar voice and because I am not thinking I turn, and there is Donatella in a bright blue suit and a startled cosmetic smile: but her eyes are dull.
“Snow! Snow, how wonderful to see you, honey.”
“Hello.”
“How are you?”
What a stupid question. “I'm okay.”
“Me too. I'm good too. I have a terrific new job, did I tell you? My new boss—” The woman next to her with the still face.
Nod. Speak quickly. “I have to get going.” I need to keep walking and thinking only about safe things, busy things.
“I'm sure you can take a minute to tell me what's happening with you. It seems like such a long time since we've really talked.”
“Since Jackal was arrested.”
“Oh.” She doesn't like that I said that; she looks at the new boss to see how she's taking it. “Really? I guess we just let the time get away from us. That was wrong. Jackal would have wanted us to stay in touch.”
“Why?”
“Well…of course she would. She would have wanted us to be family.”
I can't begin to imagine what I should say now. Does Donatella Segura know that she's insane? Should I tell her? Sometimes I wonder how Jackal survived this woman's mothering. And I understand why Jackal is so blindly duty-bound and why she is afraid to ask people for help. Why she guards her core so fiercely. It's because she's an orphan whose parents are still alive.
I said good-bye to Jackal yesterday, I want to say. I want to throw it in her face. I want to scream. And what does Donatella Insane Segura want? She wants to hold my hand. “We have to help each other, Snow. Like family. We have to go on. Our Jackal is gone and we have to learn to live without her.” Now she's crying. “She fell off the cliff and she's gone.”
I've just figured out how to solve that problem in Lyons. It's just fallen into my head. I'll propose a contract that deep-discounts the price of the parts we're buying and supplements with huge incentives for quality. They'll only make money if the parts meet standards. Then we'll escalate the volumes over the next six months. That will give them time to figure out how to scale their processes. It's the frog in the stewpot model.
“I have to go.”
“Of course,” Donatella says, smiling brightly as if there were no black streaks of makeup starring her eyes. “Now don't be a stranger.”
I will walk the rest of the way across the plaza and down the broad steps, take the right-hand path that leads toward the koi pond. I will hate Donatella Segura for the rest of my life. When I scuff through the gravel of the path, each step sounds like Jackal's name; Jackal Jackal Jackal; and when I run, the gravel whispers don't leave me, don't leave me…
10
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, A SECURITY GUARD TOOK Jackal back to the same conference room. It was hard to look at the blank screen. She kept her head down. A man came in. He was dressed in casual trousers and a loud jacket, silk in a multicolored fishscale pattern that had been in fashion six years earlier. His hair and his face were too long, and he wore neither well.
“I'm Jenkins,” he said in a monotone. He sounded indifferent and chatty at the same time; it confused Jackal and made her wary.
He sat in the chair across from her. When she kept silent, he nodded, as if he had been talking to himself and agreed with himself on some particular point.
“I'm the VC counselor at this facility. Here's a brochure about the procedure, read it at your convenience. It's my job to talk with you about the program, answer any questions you have. That kind of thing.”
“It'll be the first time since I got here that anyone explained anything.”
“Uh huh.” He nodded again. There was another silence. “So, any questions?”
Jackal blinked.
“No? Great,” he said, and stood up. “Good luck.” He was halfway to the door before Jackal recovered and said, “Wait!” But when he turned, she didn't know what to ask. She was clutching the brochure he had given her so tightly that it was creased along its length; she held it up so he could see it. “Is this going to tell me everything I need to know?”
“That piece of paper can tell you as much as I can. If you need to know more than that, well…”
“What's going to happen to me?”
He spoke as if she were a child. “It's an experimental program. We don't know what will happen. That's why we're doing the experiment. Anything else?”
This time she let him go.
She read the brochure over and over in her cell. It told her she would be subjected to a templated confinement experience. She would be fed intravenously and catheterized. Her head would be shaved for better conduction. Her body would be encased from the shoulders down in a locked medical-minder case “for your own protection.” The minder would monitor and feed and clean her out, and electro-stimulate her muscles every two real-days while she was incarcerated. The brochure told her that based on computer model projections, she was likely to experience depression, anxiety, time distortion, and loss of mental acuity; these symptoms were individual in onset, intensity, and duration, and could not be reasonably predicted. She agreed to a post-confinement debriefing so that her experience of the template could be compared to other participants.
When you awaken from virtual confinement, you may experience mild disorientation, the text said. The program would offer her the opportunity to remain after her debrief for forty-eight hours at no expense, including a complimentary session with her VC counselor. That made her shudder.
When it was time, four large men came for her.
She said, “I want to change my mind.”
Two of them entered the cell and picked her up from the bed, one holding each arm. “No, you don't understand,” she repeated, “I want to change my mind. I'll take the forty years, okay? I'm out of the program.” The two men hauled her by her arms to the cell door. “No,” she said, and tried to twist away. The other two men each took one of her legs. None of them spoke to her. They carried her like a dressed deer down the hall. “No, goddamn it!” she yelled. “I've changed my fucking mind, I don't want to do this!” But no one was listening. Halfway down a long hallway, she stopped yelling and shut her mouth hard enough to hurt her jaws. Fifteen seconds later, the men released her legs and arms, and she walked shakily between them the rest of the way to the barred gate at the end. She shook while they completed the identity check and let her and the guards in. She shook while they led her to a glass-walled room with a stretcher surrounded by equipment. She shook while they stripped her and shaved her head and laid her out on the cold table and put a drip into her neck and other things into other parts of her. She shook while a woman with a stethoscope took her pulse and listened to her heart; it reminded her of her childhood examinations and she felt just a little reassured. And then the doctor brought a syringe toward her, and all the fear sawed back through her like a riptide. The drug curled inside her. Her eyes fluttered. When she closed them, it seemed that she stood at the edge of something dark and deep. She thought of Tiger, falling free; and then she went down.
PART III
SOLITARY
11
AND NOW HER EYES WERE OPEN. AND HERE SHE WAS, tucked into a tense-muscled packet, wrapped tight around herself, rocking, rocking, breathing too fast. Trying not to know, not to begin, and above all not to count the days. But it was too late, her mind had already leaped ahead—
—and this was the first of two thousand nine hundred and twenty days.
She thought, what is the next thing to do? And there was a very small voice in her brain that said
Look. See.
No, that was too hard. She would just stay curled into herself like a snail for a little longer, until she was ready. But adrenaline drilled through her with each heartbeat, and her muscles coiled like something explosive at the end of a burning fuse. So there was nothing to do but raise her head and look around.
Light. Gray stone around her. She pushed herself up onto her elbows and swung her legs over the side of what turned out to be a narrow metal bed. Was there a slight delay between the brain's impulse and the body's reaction? She straightened up slowly; various muscles twitched in odd arpeggios in her legs, stomach, shoulders. She felt as if she were half an inch outside herself, ghosted, like video through a bad link.
She stood in a square cell, with a concrete floor, stone block walls, and a flat ceiling at least twelve feet overhead, out of reach. Everything was gray. The bed frame on her left, pushed into one corner of the room, held a thin mattress, one sheet, a blanket, a flat pillow. A viewscreen covered three-quarters of the far wall. An opaque lighted circle was set into the center of the ceiling, too high to reach. The light in the room reminded her of lukewarm water; the air, too, was tepid, and she could feel no draft or current. Everything was neutral, flat.
Two plastic panels with molded handles sat flush against the wall to her right, opposite the bed. Behind them she found her larder, shelves of simple single items. She remembered the tests she was given, to think of egg and apple and butter, and here were the results. Phantom food. It would not matter to her body if she never ate a bite during her sentence; and if she never opened the larder again, the apples would still be as firm, the cheese as buttery yellow, as she had just seen them. Real; not real. She would never need a toilet here, or a shower. And that led to other anxious questions: would she feel it when her body was exercised in real time? Would her muscles suddenly begin to twitch on their own? What if the medical minder gave her the wrong nutrient mix and she got sick in VC? What if the lights went out and never came back on?
If something goes wrong, how will they fix it? she wondered frantically, turning around and around in a tight circle in the center of her cell. And then,
surely they aren't going to leave me all alone for all these years, they'll check on me, they'll answer my questions, someone will come—
She stopped herself. She only had to look around to know that no one would ever come. How could they, into a place with no windows, with no doors?
She sat on the floor opposite the blank screen, slumped against the wall with her arms locked around her bent legs. She did not know how long she had been there. Long enough to play the idea of
no doors, no windows over and over in her mind like a musical phrase. No way in or out, except through the technology in the real-time world. The machines would keep her here inside her own head for an unfathomable length of time while the minutes clicked over on the clock in the outside world. And those minutes would be her hours, and the weeks would be her seasons. Snow's final month of training at Ko would be Jackal's second year of numb gray solitude, alone, alone.
I won't cry, she told herself; and she thought it was probably true. She was hollow now, as if someone had stuck a sponge down her throat and absorbed everything within her. Perhaps it would be easier to get through—and here her mind skipped over what exactly it was she would need to get through, the circumspect voice within her saying
no, not ready—if she kept that numbness, if she felt nothing. Perhaps she could move through—again, that skip, that space where the concept of eight years of this simply would not fit—like one of the balloons she released over the Ko Island shoreline every birthday: self-contained, and empty of everything except the need to rise, rise.
All right, then: get up. She pushed herself awkwardly from the floor. Rise. She still had the sensation of physical movements being out of sync. She ran her hands up her arms, down her breasts and ribs and around her back, across her bottom and down her legs, everywhere she could reach, and it was as if she touched herself through a layer of plastic film. She still had all her hair: it too felt slightly wrong. She thought of her body, the real one, laying loose and unconscious in a medical minder; that body turning soft and rotting subtly from within because her attention, her self, was not there.
Don't think about that: the small voice was stronger now, and she let herself agree.
She made a tiny sandwich of soft wheat baguette with butter and cheese and a slice of cold ham from the larder. She kneaded and poked it, sniffed it, and touched her tongue lightly to a buttery crumb. She took a bite. The food felt substantial in her mouth, but when she chewed and swallowed it simply vanished somewhere between her throat and her stomach. She could not eat any more. She put it back into the cupboard and shut the panel. Then she opened it again: the mauled sandwich was gone, and everything was new. She closed the larder very gently.
