She hates these things, but it happens to everyone from time to time, and when you go to work for the Feds, you sign on the dotted line and give permission for it. In a way, it's a mark of pride and honor. Everyone who works for the Feds has their heart in it. Because if they didn't, it would come out plain as day when it is their turn to sit in this chair.
The questions go on and on. Mostly nonsense questions. "Have you ever been to Scotland? Is white bread more expensive than wheat bread?" This is just to get her settled down, get all systems running smoothly. They throw out all the stuff they get from the first hour of the interrogation, because it's lost in the noise.
She can feel herself relaxing into it. They say that after a few polygraphs, you learn to relax, the whole thing goes quicker. The chair holds her in place, the caffeine keeps her from getting drowsy, the sensory deprivation clears out her mind.
"What is your daughter's nickname?"
"Y.T."
"How do you refer to your daughter?"
"I call her by her nickname. Y.T. She kind of insists on it."
"Does Y.T. have a job?"
"Yes. She works as Kourier. She works for RadiKS."
"How much money does Y.T. make as a Kourier?"
"I don't know. A few bucks here and there."
"How often does she purchase new equipment for her job?"
"I'm not aware. I don't really keep track of that."
"Has Y.T. done anything unusual lately?"
"That depends on what you mean." She knows she's equivocating. "She's always doing things that some people might label as unusual." That doesn't sound too good, sounds like an endorsement of nonconformity. "I guess what I'm saying is, she's always doing unusual things."
"Has Y.T. broken anything in the house recently?"
"Yes." She gives up. The Feds already know this, her house is bugged and tapped, it's a wonder it doesn't short out the electrical grid, all the extra stuff wired into it. "She broke my computer."
"Did she give an explanation for why she broke the computer?"
"Yes. Sort of. I mean, if nonsense counts as an explanation."
"What was her explanation?"
"She was afraid -- this is so ridiculous -- she was afraid I was going to catch a virus from it."
"Was Y.T. also afraid of catching this virus?"
"No. She said that only programmers could catch it."
Why are they asking her all of these questions? They have all of this stuff on tape.
"Did you believe Y.T.'s explanation of why she broke the computer?"
That's it.
That's what they're after.
They want to know the only thing they can't directly tap -- what's going on in her mind. They want to know whether she believes Y.T.'s virus story.
And she knows she's making a mistake just thinking these thoughts. Because those supercooled SQUIDs around her head are picking it up. They can't tell what she's thinking. But they can tell that something's going on in her brain, that she's using parts of her brain right now that she didn't use when they were asking the nonsense questions.
In other words, they can tell that she is analyzing the situation, trying to figure them out. And she wouldn't be doing that unless she wanted to hide something.
"What is it you want to know?" she says. "Why don't you just come out and ask me directly? Let's talk about this face to face. Just sit down together in a room like adults and talk about it."
She feels another sharp prick in her arm, feels numbness and coldness spreading all across her body over an interval of a couple of seconds as the drug mixes with her bloodstream. It's getting harder to follow the conversation.
"What is your name?" the voice says.
Chapter 39
The Alcan -- the Alaska Highway -- is the world's longest franchise ghetto, a one-dimensional city two thousand miles long and a hundred feet wide, and growing at the rate of a hundred miles a year, or as quickly as people can drive up to the edge of the wilderness and park their bagos in the next available slot. It is the only way out for people who want to leave America but don't have access to an airplane or a ship.
It's all two-lane, paved but not well paved, and choked with mobile homes, family vans, pickup trucks with camper backs. It starts somewhere in the middle of British Columbia, at the crossroads of Prince George, where a number of tributaries feed in together to make a single northbound highway. South of there, the tributaries split into a delta of feeder roads that crosses the Canadian/American border at a dozen or more places spread out over five hundred miles from the fjords of British Columbia to the vast striped wheatlands of central Montana. Then it ties into the American road system, which serves as the headwaters of the migration. This five-hundred-mile swath of territory is filled with would-be arctic explorers in great wheeled houses, optimistically northbound, and more than a few rejects who have abandoned their bagos in the north country and hitched a ride back down south. The lumbering bagos and top-heavy four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black motorcycle.
All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
For a fee, you can drive into a Snooze 'n' Cruise franchise and umbilical your bago. The magic words are "We Have Pull-Thrus," which means you can enter the franchise, hook up, sleep, unhook, and drive out without ever having to shift your land zeppelin into reverse.
They used to claim it was a campground, tried to design the franchise with a rustic motif, but the customers kept chopping up those log-and-plank signs and wooden picnic tables and using them for cooking fires. Nowadays, the signs are electric polycarbonate bubbles, the corporate identity is all round and polished and smooth, in the same way that a urinal is, to prevent stuff from building up in the cracks. Because it's not really camping when you don't have a house to go back to.
Sixteen hours out of California, Hiro pulls into a Snooze 'n' Cruise on the eastern slope of the Cascades in northern Oregon. He's several hundred miles north of where the Raft is, and on the wrong side of the mountains. But there's a guy here he wants to interview.
There are three parking lots. One out of sight down a pitted dirt road marked with falling-down signs. One a little bit closer, with scary hairys hanging around its edges, silvery disks flashing and popping under the full moon as they aim the bottoms of their beer cans at the sky. And one right in front of the Towne Hall, with gun-toting attendants. You have to pay to park in that lot. Hiro decides to pay. He leaves his bike pointing outward, puts the bios into warm shutdown so he can hot-boot it later if he has to, throws some Kongbucks at an attendant. Then he turns his head back and forth like a hunting dog, sniffing the still air, trying to find the Glade.
There's an area a hundred feet away, under the moonlight, where a few people have been adventurous enough to pitch a tent, usually, these are the ones with the most guns, or the least to lose. Hiro goes in that direction, and pretty soon he can see the spreading canopy over the Glade.
Everyone else calls it the Body Lot. It is, simply, an open patch of ground, formerly grass covered, now covered with successive truckloads of sand that have become mingled with litter, broken glass, and human waste. A canopy is stretched over it to keep out the rain, and big mushroom-shaped hoods stick out of the ground every few feet, exhaling warm air on cold nights. It is pretty cheap to sleep in the Glade. It is an innovation that was created by some of the franchises farther south and has been spreading northward along with its clientele.
About half a dozen of them are scattered around under the warm-air vents, bandaged against the chill in their army blankets. A couple of them have a small fire going, are playing cards by its light. Hiro ignores them, starts wandering around through the remainder.
"Chuck Wrightson," he says. "Mr. President, are you here?" The second time he says it, a pile of wool off to his left begins to writhe and thrash around. A head comes out of it. Hiro turns toward him, holds up his hands to prove he's unarmed.
"Who is that?" he says. He is abjectly terrified. "Raven?"
"Not Raven," Hiro says. "Don't worry. Are you Chuck Wrightson? Former President of the Temporary Republic of Kenai and Kodiak?"
"Yeah. What do you want? I don't have any money."
"Just to talk. I work for CIC, and my job is to gather intelligence."
"I need a fucking drink," Chuck Wrightson says.
The Towne Hall is a big inflatable building in the middle of the Snooze 'n' Cruise. It is Derelict Las Vegas: convenience store, video arcade, laundromat, bar, liquor store, flea market, whorehouse. It always seems to be ruled by that small percentage of the human population that is capable of partying until five in the morning every single night, and that has no other function.
Most Towne Halls have a few franchises-within-franchises. Hiro sees a Kelley's Tap, which is about the nicest trough you are likely to find at a Snooze 'n' Cruise, and leads Chuck Wrightson into it. Chuck is wearing many layers of clothing that used to be different colors. Now they are the same color as his skin, which is khaki.
All the businesses in a Towne Hall, including this bar, look like something you'd see on a prison ship -- everything nailed down, brightly lit up twenty-four hours a day, all of the personnel sealed up behind thick glass barriers that have gone all yellow and murky. Security at this Towne Hall is provided by The Enforcers, so there are a lot of steroid addicts in black armorgel outfits, cruising up and down the arcade in twos and threes, enthusiastically violating people's human rights.
Hiro and Chuck grab the closest thing they can find to a corner table. Hiro buttonholes a waiter and surreptitiously orders a pitcher of Pub Special, mixed half and half with nonalcoholic beer. This way, Chuck ought to remain awake a little longer than he would otherwise.
It doesn't take much to make him open up. He's like one of these old guys from a disgraced presidential administration, forced out by scandal, who devotes the rest of his life to finding people who will listen to him.
"Yeah, I was president of TROKK for two years. And I still consider myself the president of the government in exile."
Hiro tries to keep himself from rolling his eyes. Chuck seems to notice.
"Okay, okay, so that's not much. But TROKK was a thriving country, for a while. There's a lot of people who'd like to see something like that rise again. I mean, the only thing that forced us out -- the only way those maniacs were able to seize power -- was just totally, you know --" He doesn't seem to have words for it. "How could you have expected something like that?"
"How were you forced out? Was there a civil war?"
"There were some uprisings, early on. And there were remote parts of Kodiak where we never had a firm grip on power. But there was never a civil war per se. See, the Americans liked our government. The Americans had all the weapons, the equipment, the infrastructure. The Orthos were just a bunch of hairy guys running around in the woods."
"Orthos?"
"Russian Orthodox. At first they were a tiny minority. Mostly Indians -- you know, Tlingits and Aleuts who'd been converted by the Russians hundreds of years ago. But when things got crazy in Russia, they started to pour across the Dateline in all kinds of different boats."
"And they didn't want a constitutional democracy."
"No. No way."
"What did they want? A tsar?"
"No. Those tsar guys -- the traditionalists -- stayed in Russia. The Orthos who came to TROKK were total rejects. They had been forced out by the mainline Russian Orthodox church."
"Why?"
"Yeretic. That's how Russians say 'heretic.' The Orthos who came to TROKK were a new sect -- all Pentecostals. They were tied in somehow with the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates. We had missionaries from Texas coming up all the goddamn time to meet with them. They were always speaking in tongues. The mainline Russian Orthodox church thought it was the work of the devil."
"So how many of these Pentecostal Russian Orthodox people Came over to TROKK?"
"Jeez, a hell of a lot of them. At least fifty thousand."
"How many Americans were in TROKK?"
"Close to a hundred thousand."
"Then how exactly did the Orthos manage to take the place over?"
"Well, one morning we woke up and there was an Airstream parked in the middle of Government Square in New Washington, right in the middle of all the bagos where we had set up the government. The Orthos had towed it there during the night, then took the wheels off so it couldn't be moved. We figured it was a protest action. We told them to move it out of there. They refused and issued a proclamation, in Russian. When we got this damn thing translated, it turned out to be an order for us to pack up and leave and turn over power to the Orthos.
"Well, this was ridiculous. So we went up to this Airstream to move it out of there, and Gurov's waiting for us with this nasty I grin on his face."
"Gurov?"
"Yeah. One of the Refus who came over the Dateline from the Soviet Union. Former KGB general turned religious fanatic. He was kind of like the Minister of Defense for the government that the Orthos setup. So Gurov opens the side door of the Airstream and lets us get a load of what's inside."
"What was inside?"
"Well, mostly it was a bunch of equipment, you know, a portable generator, electrical wiring, a control panel, and so forth. But in the middle of the trailer, there's this big black cone sitting on the floor. About the shape of an ice cream cone, except it's about five feet long and it's smooth and black. And I asked what the hell is that thing. And Gurov says, that thing is a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb we scavenged from a ballistic missile. A city buster. Any more questions?"
"So you capitulated."
"Couldn't do much else."
"Do you know how the Orthos came to be in possession of a hydrogen bomb?"
Chuck Wrightson clearly knows. He sucks in his deepest breath of the evening, lets it out, shakes his head, staring off over Hiro's shoulder. He takes a couple of nice long swigs from his glass of beer.
"There was a Soviet nuclear-missile submarine. The commander was named Ovchinnikov. He was religiously faithful, but he wasn't a fanatic like the Orthos. I mean, if he had been a fanatic they wouldn't have given him command of a nuclear-missile submarine, right?"
"Supposedly."
"You had to be psychologically stable. Whatever that means. Anyway, after things fell apart in Russia, he found himself in possession of this very dangerous weapon. He made up his mind that he was going to offload all of the crew and then scuttle it in the Marianas Trench. Bury all those weapons forever.
"But, somehow, he was persuaded to use this submarine to help a bunch of the Orthos escape to Alaska. They, and a lot of other Refus, had started flocking to the Bering coast. And the conditions in some of these Refu camps were pretty desperate. It's not like a lot of food can be grown in that area, you know. These people were dying by the thousands. They just stood on the beaches, starving to death, waiting for a ship to come.
"So Ovchinnikov let himself be persuaded to use his submarine -- which is very large and very fast -- to evacuate some of these poor Refus to TROKK.
"But, naturally, he was paranoid about the idea of letting a whole bunch of unknown quantities onto his ship. These nukesub commanders are real security freaks, for obvious reasons. So they set up a very strict system. All the Refus who were going to get on the ship had to pass through metal detectors, had to be inspected. Then they were under armed guard all the way across to Alaska.
"Well, the Stern Orthos have this guy named Raven --"
"I'm familiar with him."
"Well, Raven got onto that nuclear submarine."
"Oh, my God."
"He got over to the Siberian coast somehow -- probably surfed across in his fucking kayak."
"Surfed?"
"That's how the Aleuts get between islands."
"Raven's an Aleut?"
"Yeah. An Aleut whale killer. You know what an Aleut is?"
"Yeah. My Dad knew one in Japan," Hiro says. A bunch of Dad's old prison-camp tales are beginning to stir in Hiro's memory, working their way up out of deep, deep storage.
"The Aleuts just paddle out in their kayaks and catch a wave. They can outrun a steamship, you know."
"Didn't know that."
"Anyway, Raven went to one of these Refu camps and passed himself off as a Siberian tribesman. You can't tell some of those Siberians apart from our Indians. The Orthos apparently had some confederates in these camps who bumped Raven up to the head of the line, so he got to be on the submarine."
"But you said there was a metal detector."
"Didn't help. He uses glass knives. Chips them out of plate glass. It's the sharpest blade in the universe, you know."
"Didn't know that either."
"Yeah. The edge is only a single molecule wide. Doctors use them for eye surgery -- they can cut your cornea and not leave a scar. There's Indians who make a living doing that, you know. Chipping out eye scalpels."
"Well, you learn something new every day. That kind of a knife would be sharp enough to go through bulletproof fabric, I guess," Hiro says.
Chuck Wrightson shrugs. "I lost track of the number of people Raven snuffed who were wearing bulletproof fabric."
Hiro says, "I thought he must be carrying some kind of high-tech laser knife or something."
"Think again. Glass knife. He had one on board the submarine. Either smuggled it on board with him, or else found a chunk of glass on the submarine and chipped it out himself."
"And?"
Chuck gets his thousand-yard stare again, takes another slug of beer. "On a sub, you know, there's no place for things to drain to. The survivors claimed that the blood was knee-deep all through the submarine. Raven just killed everyone. Everyone except the Orthos, a skeleton crew, and some other Refus who were able to barricade themselves in little compartments around the ship. The survivors say," Chuck says, taking another swig, "that it was quite a night."
"And he forced them to steer the submarine into the hands of the Orthos."
"To their anchorage off Kodiak," Chuck says. "The Orthos were all ready. They had put together a crew of ex-Navy men, guys who had worked on nuke subs in the past -- X-rays, they call them -- and they came and took the sub over. As for us, we had no idea that any of this had happened. Until one of the warheads showed up in our goddamn front yard."
Chuck glances up above Hiro's head, noticing someone. Hiro feels a light tap on his shoulder. "Excuse me, sir?" a man is saying. "Pardon me for just a second?"
Chapter 40
Hiro turns around. It's a big porky white man with wavy, slicked-back red hair and a beard. He's got a baseball cap perched on top of his head, tilted way back to expose the following words, tattooed in block letters across his forehead:
MOOD SWINGS
RACIALLY INSENSITIVE
Hiro is looking up at all of this over the curving horizon of the man's flannel-clad belly.
"What is it?" Hiro says.
"Well, sir, I'm sorry to disturb you in the middle of your conversation with this gentleman here. But me and my friends were just wondering. Are you a lazy shiftless watermelon-eating black-ass nigger, or a sneaky little v.d.-infected gook?"
The man reaches up, pulls the brim of his baseball cap downward. Now Hiro can see the Confederate flag printed on the front, the embroidered words "New South Africa Franchulate.
Hiro pushes himself up over the table, spins around, and slides backward on his ass toward Chuck, trying to get the table between him and the New South African. Chuck has conveniently vanished, so Hiro ends up standing with his back comfortably to the wall, looking out over the bar.
At the same time, a dozen or so other men are standing up from their tables, forming up behind the first one in a grinning, sunburned phalanx of Confederate flags and sideburns.
"Let's see," Hiro says, "is that some kind of a trick question?"
There are a lot of Towne Halls in a lot of Snooze 'n' Cruise franchises where you have to check your weapons at the entrance. This is not one of them. Hiro isn't sure if that is bad or good. Without weapons, the New South Africans would just beat the crap out of him. With weapons, Hiro can fight back, but the stakes are higher. Hiro is bulletproof up to his neck, but that just means the New South Africans will all be going for a head shot. And they pride themselves on marksmanship. It is a fetish with them.
"Isn't there an NSA franchise down the road?" Hiro says.
"Yeah," says the point man, who has a long, spreading body and short stumpy legs. "It's heaven. It really is. Ain't no place on earth like a New South Africa."
"Well, then if you don't mind my asking," Hiro says, "if it's so damn nice, why don't y'all go back to your egg sac and hang out there?"
"There is one problem with New South Africa," the guy says. "Don't mean to sound unpatriotic, but it's true."
"And what is that problem?" Hiro says.
"There's no niggers, gooks, or kikes there to beat the shit out of."
"Ah. That is a problem," Hiro says. "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For announcing your intentions -- giving me the right to do this."
Then Hiro cuts his head off.
What else can he do? There are at least twelve of them. They have made a point of blocking the only exit. They have just announced their intentions. And presumably they are all carrying heat. Besides, this kind of thing is going to happen to him about every ten seconds when he's on the Raft.
The New South African has no idea what's coming, but he starts to react as Hiro is swinging the katana at his neck, so he is flying backward when the decapitation occurs. That is good, because about half his blood supply comes lofting out the top of his neck. Twin jets, one from each carotid. Hiro doesn't get a drop on himself.
In the Metaverse, the blade just passes right through, if you swing it quickly enough. Here in Reality, Hiro's expecting a powerful shock when his blade hits the New South African's neck, like when you hit a baseball the wrong way, but he hardly feels a thing. It just goes right through and almost swings around and buries itself in the wall. He must have gotten lucky and hit a gap between vertebrae. Hiro's training comes back to him, oddly. He forgot to squeeze it off, forgot to stop the blade himself, and that's bad form.
Even though he's expecting it, he's startled for a minute. This sort of thing doesn't happen with avatars. They just fall down. For an astonishingly long time, he just stands there and looks at the guy's body. Meanwhile, the airborne cloud of blood is seeking its level, dripping from the hung ceiling, spattering down from shelves behind the bar. A wino sitting there nursing a double shot of vodka shakes and shivers, staring into his glass at the galactic swirl of a trillion red cells dying in the ethanol.
Hiro swaps a few long glances with the New South Africans, like everyone in the bar is trying to come to a consensus as to what will happen next. Should they laugh? Take a picture? Run away? Call an ambulance?
He makes his way around toward the exit by running across people's tables. It is rude, but other patrons scoot back, some of them are quick enough to snatch their beers out of his way, and no one gives him any hassles. The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness. There are a couple more New South Africans blocking Hiro's way out, but not because they want to stop anyone. It's just where they happen to be standing when they go into shock. Hiro decides, reflexively, not to kill them.
And Hiro is off into the lurid main avenue of the Towne Hall, a tunnel of flickering and pulsating loglo through which black creatures sprint like benighted sperm up the old fallopians, sharp angular things clenched in their hands. They are The Enforcers. They make the average MetaCop look like Ranger Rick.
Gargoyle time. Hiro switches everything on: infrared, millimeter-wave radar, ambient-sound processing. The infrared doesn't do much in these circumstances, but the radar picks out all the weapons, highlights them in The Enforcers' hands, identifies them by make, model, and ammunition type. They're all fully automatic.
But The Enforcers and the New South Africans don't need radar to see Hiro's katana with blood and spinal fluid running down the blade.
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