“What do you mean?” She switched her headlamp on.
“They send out their own death squads. Most people they kill, but then there are the slavers too.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Slavers?”
Rowan moved stealthily in the dark, glancing behind to make sure no one had followed them. “The PPC doesn’t just need jacked-in people to maintain the infrastructure. They also need menial laborers.”
Menials. She remembered them from the dank tunnels under New Atlantic, vacantly pressing a button or pulling a lever, eyes staring into infinity, mouths parted lightly, expressions blank. “They had those where I came from.”
Rowan donned a grim face as he kept ahead of her. “The PPC modifies their brains.”
“You mean like what they did to me? So I’d be able to interact with theta wave receivers?”
Rowan slowed as they approached the middle barrier. “No.” He turned to meet her eyes in the gloom. “They lobotomize them. Give them a simple task to carry out.”
She stood there, unable to move. “What?”
“They give them water every couple of days, some food once a week, and they have a never-ending supply of job applicants.”
She remained frozen. She felt like someone had punched her in the gut. Repurposers. That’s what they’d been trying to do to that last corpse she’d been sent to clean up. Only things had gone wrong. They must have known she’d notice the foul play. And she’d taken too long in the apartment. They knew she knew. And they were going to Repurpose her.
Numbly, she walked up to the TWR but couldn’t get her mind to concentrate on opening the barrier. She closed her eyes tightly, then balled her fists. Nothing.
She felt Rowan’s hand on her shoulder, a warm comfort. “It’s okay,” he said. “Take your time.” She knew she couldn’t take her time. His people were dying right this very minute. Maybe even Byron and the others.
She forced her mind to focus, to open up. She sent the off signal, and instantly the air became unbreathable with carbon dioxide. “It’s down,” she coughed. He hurried through and she followed, then sealed the barrier again.
They jogged through the dark, her beam bouncing off the tunnel walls. She felt sick inside. When they got past the area so thick with carbon dioxide she couldn’t stop coughing, she tried to breathe a little deeper.
They reached the end of the tunnel, the smell of urine and fecal matter so strong it made her gag. They raced outside, and to her surprise, she saw that Byron had left the solar car for them. Rowan ducked into the driver’s seat, then stood back up with the keys. He threw them to her. “You know this car a hell of a lot better than I do. You drive.”
They piled in, and she started it up, grateful to be back in the driver’s seat. It was like meeting an old friend again. She spun the car around and rocketed away from the oozing sewage.
Rowan watched her as she drove. “Anyone who interrupts the infrastructure maintenance with a pirate broadcast like we just did gets targeted. The system breaks down, and even if it’s just for a few minutes, it damages their power structure. If enough people wake up repeatedly, or for a long stretch of time, the PPC would be in huge trouble. The city would grind to a halt. The citizens don’t know it, but they have the power to take down the whole system.”
A second wind of hope flooded through her. “Do you think that’s what will happen after my message?”
“No, unfortunately. You saw the lights go out for a few minutes. But soon people will be back to watching what they always watch. Mindless ‘reality’ shows that aren’t based in reality at all. The people in those shows aren’t even real. It’s all generated by a central computer, a random group of CG people doing randomly generated acts. The images will flash in the citizens’ minds, dull their thoughts, and by tomorrow, they probably won’t even remember there was a pirate broadcast, or they’ll have decided it was a joke. All they need is right in front of them. They don’t need to leave their living pods. All they have to do is consume. They won’t unplug and think.”
She felt rage swell within her. “But . . .” She’d always been a little envious of the clean, spacious, luxurious living pods of the citizens compared to her own tiny, sweltering room. But now she was grateful she’d never been plugged into the network.
The smell of sewage finally abated as they got far enough away from the viscous brown rivers pouring out of the city. She pushed the car as fast as it could go, following Rowan’s directions to Rocky Basin Camp, rocketing at almost ninety miles an hour down the old battered road. When they got closer, they saw a flaming glow on the horizon.
“Damn!” Rowan cursed. “The camp’s on fire.”
Chapter 23
As she mounted a small rise above the camp, Rowan pointed to a worn dirt track leading to the top of the hill. “Take this side road here!” She maneuvered the car over the bumpy ground. “Okay. Stop here.” He jumped out and pulled out his diginocs. She watched him scan the burning camp. She climbed out too, and he handed her the diginocs. “It’s completely destroyed!”
She raised them to her eyes and surveyed the camp. She saw an area where tents had been, where cars had been parked. Now only burning tarps and old buildings met her eyes, alongside burned-out husks of vehicles. Strange black lumps littered the ground. She pressed the zoom button on the nocs and realized that they were corpses, their black hands more like gnarled claws reaching out, as if grasping for air.
He took back the nocs and switched on the thermal setting, then quickly lowered them. “Too bright. The fire will mask any signs of life.” He tried the bioscan to pick up any traces of heartbeats or breathing. For
