I backed up, moved next to Philipe, and suddenly the guard looked confused.
He could no longer see me!
“It’s good to be back,” Philipe said. “Isn’t it?”
I nodded. It did feel good. And I was glad Philipe had forced me to return. We continued on toward the elevator. I hazarded a glance back at the guard. He seemed not only confused but frightened.
“We can do anything,” Philipe said. He looked at me meaningfully. “Anything.”
The elevator doors opened, and we stepped inside. I pressed the button for the fourth floor. Flush with my success, primed by encouragement from Philipe, I considered killing Banks. I’d been invisible to him for quite some time before I left, but when he had been able to see me, he hadn’t liked me. He’d been Stewart’s ally. He’d even made fun of my haircut once.
I could give him a haircut.
I could scalp the fucker.
Then I thought of Stewart and the horrible way he’d died, the way he’d tried to kick me and hit me as I stabbed him, the way the blood gushed out of his body onto me, and I knew I would not be able to kill again.
The elation fled as quickly as it had come. Why was I here? What could I possibly hope to accomplish at Automated Interface? Philipe had said in the car that he wanted us to monkey-wrench, but I was not in a position to cause any serious damage. I didn’t know enough to do any real harm.
We got out on the fourth floor. I walked over to the programming section. The lights were off in Stewart’s old office. Obviously he had not been replaced. Otherwise, everything was as I’d left it. I took Philipe past Stacy’s desk, and Pam’s and Emery’s. None of the programmers even looked up at us.
It felt oppressive to me here, the atmosphere thick and heavy, the air way too warm, and I told Philipe that I wanted to leave, but he said that first he wanted to see where I’d killed Stewart.
I took him into the bathroom.
It was weird being back again. The body was gone, of course, and the blood was cleaned up, but the place still seemed tainted to me, dirty. With trembling hands, I opened the door to the first stall. Philipe made me go over the whole thing, in detail, and he nodded, touching the metal wall into which I’d slammed Stewart, crouching down to examine the toilet where I’d fallen.
When I finished, he said, “Don’t feel bad; you did everything you were supposed to.”
I didn’t buy that, but I nodded.
He pushed me gently out of the stall. “Excuse me,” he said.
“What?”
“I have to take a piss.”
He closed the door to the stall. I heard the sound of a zipper going down, heard piss hitting the toilet water.
That did it.
Coming here, seeing everything, going over it all again — none of that had done anything to erase the unease I felt. But hearing Philipe taking a leak in the same stall where I’d killed Stewart, that put those feelings to rest. In some bizarre way, it made me realize that the past was over, the future was here, and the future was good.
The future was us.
I was grinning when Philipe flushed the toilet and came out.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Everything’s fine,” I told him.
“Let’s check out your office.”
I led him down the hall. Like Stewart’s office, mine was empty. A replacement for me had not been found yet. Hell, maybe they hadn’t even noticed that I was gone. The papers on top of my desk were untouched, exactly the way I’d left them a month ago.
He looked around the small cubicle. “God, this is depressing.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“Didn’t you hate working here?”
I nodded.
He looked at me, tossed me a book of matches. “Do something about it.”
I understood what he wanted me to do, and the thought made my blood pump faster. Yes, I thought. This was right.
He backed out of the office, into the hallway.
This is something I had to do on my own.
I stood there for a moment, then lit a match, touched it to the edge of a memo, the edge of a procedural manual. The flames spread slowly, from one paper to another across the top of the desk. I thought of my cards, my business cards, and I quickly opened the drawer where I’d put them and took them out. The entire top of the desk was burning now, and I turned over the box and dumped the cards on the fire. They caught and curled and blackened and were gone.
My old life was over.
Really over.
I could not go home again.
I moved back into the hallway, nodded to Philipe, and the two of us walked slowly and calmly down the hallway, dropping terrorist cards, as around us fire alarms sounded and sprinklers went off.
Four
Again I wondered what I was. What we were. Did we possess different genes or chromosomes than everyone else? Was there a scientific explanation for all of this? Were we descendants of aliens or a separate race of being? It seemed silly to think that we were not human, particularly since we were so prototypically, so stereo- typically, average in every way, but there was obviously something that set us apart from those around us. Could it be that individually, coincidentally, we had so conformed to the norms of society, our backgrounds and environments had so shaped us, that we had collectively turned out this way and were now ignored by a culture trained to look for the unusual and overlook the obvious? Or were we truly of a kind — did we send out some sort of subliminal psychic signal that was picked up by those around us and caused us to be ignored?
I had no answers, only questions.
I was not sure that the others thought about this as much as I did. They didn’t seem to. Philipe probably did. He was deeper than the rest of us, brighter, more ambitious, more serious, more philosophical. The others, in a way, were almost like children, and it seemed to me that as long as they had Philipe to be their parent and do their thinking and planning for them, they were happy. Philipe kept insisting that because we were Ignored, because we fell through the cracks, we did not have to conform to other people’s perceptions or standards or ideas of what we should be. We were free to be ourselves; we were free to be individuals. But the other terrorists were not individuals. Instead of defining themselves in terms of their jobs, they now defined themselves as terrorists. They’d simply switched one group identity for another.
But I dared not tell Philipe that.
I let him think we were what he wanted us to be.
After our trip to Automated Interface, Philipe and I were closer. There was no official hierarchy among the terrorists — Philipe was the leader and the rest of us were his followers — but if there had been, I would have been vice president or second in command. I was the one he asked when he wanted a second opinion on something; I was the one whose advice he heeded most often. All of the other terrorists, all of them except Junior, had been with Philipe longer than I had, but it was pretty well accepted that, among equals, I was somewhat more equal. There was no resentment of this, just acceptance, and everything continued along smoothly the way it always had.
During the next few weeks, we went to all of the terrorists’ former places of work.
We vandalized them big-time.
