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” 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.
TWO
Ruppert sat at the glossy green desk and faced a smooth, blank wall of the same color. A single, glossy shade of green covered every surface from floor to ceiling. Video technicians would add graphics around and behind him, and they would fill in this month’s look for his studio. Black convex lenses protruded from each wall, capturing a 360-degree view that editors could slice into dynamic visuals, sweeps and pans to keep the eyes of a jaded audience interested.
Sullivan Stone took the green chair several feet to Ruppert’s left, his blond hair cropped in a tight jarhead cut (Sully had never served in the Marines, or any branch of the military). Animated holograms on his tie depicted clips from the previous night’s Dodgers game, the big story he’d be reporting for most of the news hour. Twenty-two
