The Stringers, page 17
“If I had said anything to you I would have lost my apprenticeship! They would have found out immediately! You can’t hide this from them! They would have tossed me out and sent me back home. Is that what you wanted? Did you want me to have to come home to my mother and tell her that I, her only son, lost my only chance of working at the same place my father worked for decades?”
“You should have done the right thing!”
“The right thing? You don’t understand what that means! What is the right thing? All I know is I couldn’t go back home a failure. My family expects more of me. Officer Abela and the officers who comprise this agency expect more of me. And you know my mother expects it of me more than anyone else. It’s easy for you to see the world as you do, because it doesn’t conflict with what your father wants of you, or anyone who matters to you. You can be the rebel, because you don’t have a reputation to maintain and build upon. If I fail, then my name fails, and everything my family created for me fails, and all I ever amount to is a failure. I will not go home a failure. I will never fail.”
I whispered. “They took my father away…”
“It was necessary. They had to…”
“Why?”
Casey bowed his head and formed fists with his hands. He then lifted his head and breathed out slowly. He then leaned over the table and spoke closely into my ear.
“I’m going to change things when I get in. Trust me. There are good people here. The agency just needs fresh blood, people like me who can see things from a better perspective. Everything has flaws, including the ISA, but we can work it out. I will make sure it changes. If you help it will make me look good.”
I didn’t answer as I stared at the door over Casey’s shoulder.
“I’m your friend, Roy. That is why I am here. I’m here to help. They didn’t want me to get involved as it was. I’m putting myself out there for you, because a lot of the officers are starting to wonder if I can be trusted and whether my allegiance to the agency is comprised by my loyalty to you. Do what Cutman says, Roy. Do it. Do it for your father. Do it for yourself.”
Do it for yourself. I repeated that phrase in my head a dozen times as I looked down at my hands. I listened to the distant machines buzz and the swooshing sound of the air vent as it blew a cold breeze into the room. I peered at the floor and the walls and thought of the AIs who had kept me up during the night. Then I thought about the waiting rooms, Yvonne, and then my father.
Do it for yourself.
I looked up at Casey and told him I would talk to my father. He smiled and assured me I was doing the right thing as he called for Cutman and waited at the door for it to open and he seemed proud of himself and of me. Cutman strode in and seated himself. He handed me a Prizm and placed us in a joint call and connected to the holding cell where my father was being held. The warden told him it would be a minute before they could bring him there to speak and for security reasons it could be a vocal call only. No video. During the silence Casey and Cutman couldn’t stop smiling at me with the same smile.
Do it for yourself.
The noise returned. A man’s heavy but weak breaths poured into my ear.
“Hello?”
Cutman spoke. “Hello, Carl.”
Father coughed, then laughed. “Thanks for dropping me a line, Cutman, so to speak. But unless you want to hand me a line so I can pull myself out of this lousy hotel suite you’ve got me in, I’d rather preserve my solitude. Or what little I get from your friends.”
“Carl, I have someone who wants to talk to you.”
“More friends. Sorry, you have too many down here with me right now.”
Cutman motioned to me. Shaking, I pressed both my elbows against the table.
“Father?” I whispered.
A pause.
“Roy?”
“Yes, Father?”
“Where are you?”
I bit down on my lip. “At the ISA office.”
Father let out a scream. “Cutman, you heartless bastard! What have you done with him?”
“Calm down!” Cutman said. “He’s fine.”
“Why is he there?”
“Because he wants to help you. He’s a good son. He’s just like you, Carl. He knows a good deal when he sees one.”
My father chuckled. “Then why are you wasting your time with him? He won’t talk to you.”
“He has. And he’s here to talk to you. He has something to say.”
Cutman eyed me. I looked down at the table. Casey kept nodding his head, his eyes wide and transfixed on me.
“Father?” I said.
“Yes?”
I swallowed and a lump formed in my throat that went down into my chest. I had a question to ask. But I didn’t want to ask it in front of Cutman or Casey. Yet I knew I wouldn’t have another chance. It had to be now.
“Father, please tell me the truth. Have you done anything wrong?”
“No.”
“That’s a lie, Carl, and you know it,” Cutman said.
I glared at Cutman long enough for him to infer it wasn’t for his sake that I was asking it, but for my own conscience.
“Father, I need to know,” I said.
The phone quality was sharp, too sharp. It picked up the faintest sounds, including my father’s sniffing that could be overheard not just by Cutman and Casey but any other ISA officers who happened to be eavesdropping on the conversation as it was being recorded.
“You already know the answer, Roy,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happened since they took me, but I’m sure you have seen plenty to realize what is what, no matter what they tell you.”
Yvonne. The waiting room. You’re just like your father. Do it for yourself.
“Father, I need to tell you something.”
You’re just like your father.
“…Yes, Roy?”
I bowed as if in prayer. Cutman had his hand formed into a fist and pressed against his mouth. I took a long breath and let it out as I spoke.
“Don’t tell them anything, Father! I’m going to find you and get you out of there! No matter―”
I was cut off by Cutman, who disconnected the call just as I heard my father call out to say something I couldn’t understand. Immediately, the door opened and three officers walked in and stared at me anxiously.
With a subdued sigh, Cutman placed his hand against his head, a glower apparent. He didn’t yell at me or reprimand me for duping them. He looked up at the guards and nodded.
Casey saw the officers, stood up, and tried to talk to them, but they pushed him aside and approached me with handcuffs.
“I’m not through with him,” Casey said. “We need more time.”
“We’ve given him more time than he deserves, sir,” the officer with the handcuffs said. “We left him here overnight and he didn’t break. He won’t now.”
“Just give us more time!”
Casey tried to get Cutman to change his mind, but he silenced my friend with a subtle hand gesture. The guard nudged Casey.
“He needs to be transferred to our holding facility,” the guard said. “Perhaps a month or two there will change his mind when he realizes how much he has to lose.”
Casey sighed and looked at me. I sat in my chair trembling as I took off my Prizm and placed it on the table and said nothing as the guards seized me. I saw the pleading in his eyes for me to cooperate and do what he said, but I wouldn’t comply. I had heard it in my father’s broken, yet unwavering voice. Cooperation was not the path to freedom.
“I might have been wrong about you,” Cutman said to me.
“I will never betray my father.”
“It is not betrayal. It is his way of clearing his name. And yours.”
“There is nothing to clear from his. Nor mine.”
Cutman thrust his open palm against the edge of the table and pushed himself up. He moved across the room to the officers and looked at Casey, who had something to say but remained mute. Cutman then placed a hand on his shoulder and led him out of the room, and as they were moving through the doorway Casey turned back to look at me thinking maybe I would change my mind at the last moment, but I didn’t, and when I last saw him he had his hand over his face.
The officers were silent from that point on as they handcuffed me and took me out of the room and through the hallway and down an elevator. After passing several doors they took me inside a room with no sign or marking on it and in it there was man looking like a doctor in a white coat and a countertop with a gun-like device on it. The officers offered no explanation for why they were there, and the man came up to me and led me over to the countertop. He yawned as he picked up the device and pointed the jagged muzzle at my forearm.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Not for you to know.”
He pulled the trigger, and I felt a bee sting sensation on my forearm. I tried to pull it away and look at it but the man ordered me to stand still. The officers threatened to use their batons on me if I resisted them. The man held the side of the device over my forearm and I saw a scanner on top of it showing the bone and muscle. The man nodded and muttered to himself and then replaced a chip inside the device and inserted another one. He then held it up to my neck and pulled the trigger again. Same bee sting.
The man touched the side of my neck and peered at it, seemingly pleased with how it appeared.
“Number 203567,” he said to the officers.
“Got it.”
“So what’s this one in for?” the man asked. “He doesn’t look like a troublemaker.”
“Well, he is,” the guard replied.
“What for?”
“The usual,” the guard said. “Published something he shouldn’t have.”
“Ah. Disappointing. Then again, he doesn’t look like he’s terribly devious.”
“Would you have it any other way?”
“Sometimes. It’s the same thing every day.”
“Stop complaining,” the guard said.
When they were done they escorted me to another room with a body scanner. They then told me to take off all my clothes. I looked at them in disbelief and didn’t move until one of them confronted me with their baton and held it above my head. Hesitantly, I took off my shirt, then my trousers. Further threats compelled me to remove my undergarments.
Standing completely naked, I stepped up onto the scanner, feeling the guard’s baton prodding into the skin on my back. Mirroring one of the officers who demonstrated how I was to stand, I held up my hands in the air. The scanner swirled around me repeatedly, and while it did the officers looked at me in a way that made me feel ashamed. The scanner beeped when it was finished. They then pulled me off it and into another room where they handed me a set of dark blue clothes and socks and black shoes to wear.
I wiped my eye as I dressed, feeling as though I had been violated in some way. They hadn’t touched me, but the whole thing had felt invasive.
They brought me up the elevator to the tenth floor and one of the officers knocked on the door to the recorder’s office. A thin woman with a crew cut and a red suit greeted us as she looked at the documents they sent her.
“Roy Farrington,” she said aloud. “Age 22…interesting, a journalist…”
“Not anymore,” one officer said. “His temporary permit has been revoked.”
I looked at him in horror. Permit revoked. I had heard of it before. Journalists accused of violating the Cyberspace Freedom Act could have their permits and licenses taken away, but only by the state review board. I pointed this out to the officer, but he merely laughed and said the ISA could do whatever it wanted.
A moment later she moved her hand through the air as she smiled at the officers. “It’s all set. His IGP has been disabled until further notice.”
“Apparently we need to change our education curriculum, because they aren’t being taught the right way,” the guard said. “He had twelve years to get the message about breaking the law.”
“It would seem so.”
One of the officers came around my back and took off my handcuffs and reattached it to his belt. I touched the raw skin on my wrists as I looked up at the officer.
“Are you letting me go?”
“Ha! No. I just don’t need to have those on you anymore.”
“Why not?”
The officers looked at the recorder, and she smiled at me like I was a toddler saying my first word. I wasn’t a violent person, but if it hadn’t been for the guards and their batons and tasers and guns I would have slapped that smile right off of her face.
“In case you don’t realize what just happened, I disabled your profile,” she said. “That means nothing on it works. You can’t access it or use anything on it.”
“But I need it to do everything!”
She nodded. “That’s the point. Even if you tried to run away from us, what could you do? Where could you go? You have a GPS tracker in you. Really, we’re just like God. There’s nowhere you can go to hide from us.”
The officers gestured at me to lead the way out of the office. I glanced at the floor and at the recorder as she returned to her seat. I then looked out at the empty hallway and the clear path to the elevator and realized that even though I was physically free, they still maintained total control over me. They knew where I went and I couldn’t buy, spend, work, study, read, or do the things that gave the notion of freedom any real meaning.
I took a step out as if to sprint, but when my foot reached the floor my other foot moved ahead of it slowly. I walked side by side with the officers like a well-trained dog remaining by his master’s side without a leash. When we came to the first floor and out the entrance there was an armored transport vehicle with the engine idling and ISA officers in military gear standing next to it. The rain pounded against their shell-like armor like tiny arrows.
The officers with me spoke to them as they received their orders via their Prizms. The vehicle’s guards approached me and pointed to the opened door in the back. Without a word, they pushed me inside, shoved me into an empty seat, and placed the restraining harnesses around me. The other ISA officers jumped in and closed the door, and as I heard the locking mechanism snap shut I finally grasped the full severity of my position, realizing that everything I had known was suddenly gone forever.
Chapter Seven
The guards were thin silhouettes inside the dimmed van as they sat beside me. The van rocked back and forth while the driver turned corners. Through a small slit of a window behind the guard sitting across from me, gray murky clouds drifted away, and the moonlight glowed brightly.
I sat strapped to my seat, griping the straps around me like I was on a roller coaster. My head whipped around with each dip in the road and pounded against the headrest, but I hardly noticed it. I kept looking through the window. Then I looked at the guard across from me. With his formless veneer, his true face concealed behind his thick helmet, he appeared like a sleeping robot, his rifle hanging from his side with a hand hanging over it. His body did not stir at all. No itch to scratch. No curiosity to look over at the guard across from him. Motionless.
Casey’s face haunted me, the devastated look on it. I had ignored it out of anger, and maybe we both had reason to be angry with each other. Or neither of us did.
I had yet to sort it out. It was natural for me to be shocked and outraged at him for not telling me about the raid. But his defense seemed rational.
I didn’t blame him. That was the problem. There was no one to blame specifically.
Actually, there were plenty. But none of them took full responsibility for it. They were cogs in the machine, but not its operator. Not the controller.
Cutman was in charge, and it was ironic he turned out to be the most charming of them all. His kind words and compliments made it difficult for me to regard him as an enemy. He had been sincere. But how good was sincerity if you were sincere about something that wasn’t good?
Another dip in the road. We were headed south, which could mean anything as to where we were headed. The nearest city south was Renton, but that didn’t mean we would stop there. I didn’t bother to ask the guards if they knew. I had the feeling they would refuse to disclose a thing for security reasons.
I lifted my hand off the restraining harness on my shoulder and touched my chest. My heart beat like I had just finished a three-mile race. I looked at my hands. They were still shaking.
I grabbed the holster and squeezed it as hard as I could, my jaw clenching.
I had to find my father. I had to free him. Nothing else mattered to me at that moment. I wouldn’t have believed it a week before, but the rest of my life was insignificant compared to getting him back. Cutman had offered to make it happen. But I had turned him down, no regrets about it. The easy way out of a problem is always the wrong one.
There was no mistaking the determination in my father’s voice. He wouldn’t have talked to them even if I had asked him to. I wouldn’t have, anyway. Cutman had been surprised, but not angry.
Strange.
I heaved a long sigh. One of the guards made an incoherent sound.
“Scared?”
“Not quite the word I would use to describe it.”
“Terrified?”
“No.”
“How about screwed?” another guard chuckled.
I looked at him and frowned. “I don’t see how you can find this enjoyable.”
“What?”
“You seem to enjoy my misery.”
“I love seeing you sons of bitches miserable. It’s the part of this shitty job I love the most.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Ha! Then why the hell are you here?”
“Because they think I did something wrong, but I didn’t.”
“Well, if they had us go through all the damn trouble of picking your ass up and taking you to the holding facility, it wasn’t for nothing.”
“But I haven’t even been given a chance to defend myself.”
The guard stared at me with his dark, formless countenance. “And?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say other than, “This is wrong,” which caused the rest of the guards to laugh as well.
