There are days when I wake up and realize I no longer know the man in my mirror. Who are you, with your graying temples and your two-hundred-dollar haircut? Who are you, in your fancy suit, with your vast political power that does you no good when it really matters? Who are you, with all those ghosts in your eyes?
Seriously, you asshole. Who the fuck are you, and why are you looking back at me whenever I look into my own eyes? What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his own soul? It’s on days like this that I really want to know.
I wish I could explain to them why I let this happen. I wish I could tell them what it was for. And I wish I thought, even for a second, that they were going to forgive me…
—From the private journal of Vice President Richard Cousins, August 1, 2041. Unpublished.
Eighteen
The polite voice of the hotel roused me from my bed shortly before sunrise. I sat up, blinking in disorientation at the opulent room around me—it would have been a suite in any other hotel—before I remembered where I was, swore softly, and got moving.
My clothes were scattered near the bathroom door, under the panel with the light controls. I’d spent almost ten minutes the night before just playing with them, cranking them up to mimic natural sunlight for the seasonally depressed, shifting them into the UV spectrum for the sake of people with retinal Kellis-Amberlee. In the end, I’d gone to sleep with the black lights on and the white-noise generator turned to full. It was almost like being back in Berkeley, before everything changed.
I hadn’t slept that well in a year. Being woken, even gently, felt like a betrayal.
There’d been no discussion of how we’d be getting to the Monkey’s: We just assembled at the van, like all of us being together again was the way things were supposed to be. Mahir got into the front passenger seat, balancing his tablet on his knee. Maggie and Becks took the back, and in the rearview mirror I could see Becks sitting sentry, watching out the rear window for signs of pursuit.
“Where to?” I asked, as I buckled my seat belt.
“I’ve got the directions,” said Mahir, and held up the tablet, showing me a black window with a blinking green cursor in the upper right corner.
I blinked. “What the fuck is that?”
“Our map.” He lowered the tablet, swiping a finger across the bottom to make the keyboard appear. He typed the words “find Monkey” with quick, efficient taps before pressing the ENTER key. The cursor dropped to the next line.
Maggie was peering over the seat at us. I frowned at the tablet, which Mahir was watching with absolute focus. Minutes ticked by.
“Okay,” I said finally. “This is officially stupid. In case you were wondering whether it had the ‘Shaun thinks this is stupid’ seal of approval, it does. Is there a plan B?”
“Yes.” Mahir held up the tablet, showing it to me again. A second line of text had appeared beneath his, with the cursor blinking on a third line now.
EXIT GARAGE, it said.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I grumbled, and started the engine.
“It’s based off a pre-Rising computer game,” said Mahir. “So primitive it’s invisible to most monitoring systems.” He began typing. “At the end of the drive, wave to the guards and turn left. You’ll come to an intersection with a 7-Eleven. When you get there, turn right.”
“Fucking. Kidding. Me,” I said.
At the base of the driveway, we all waved to the guards as we waited for the gate to open. They waved back, apparently accustomed to strange behavior from their eccentric, wealthy clientele.
“Are you sure this is necessary?” I asked, still waving.
“If the directions say to do it, we do it,” said Maggie. “That’s what everyone says. If you don’t listen to the Monkey, he doesn’t meet with you.”
“Let’s hope the directions don’t tell us to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” I muttered, and pulled out onto the street.
The directions did not tell us to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. They did tell us to drive down dead alleys, only to turn around and go back the way we’d come; to drive in circles through residential neighborhoods, probably setting off dozens of security alerts; and to get on and off the freeway six times. It was incredibly annoying. At the same time, I had to admire the Monkey’s style. None of the neighborhoods we drove through had gates or manned security booths. None of the freeway exits we used required blood tests. We might be driving like idiots, but we were driving like idiots without leaving a definite record of where we’d been, or why we’d been there.
We were crossing a bridge that actually floated on the surface of a lake—thankfully, the Monkey hadn’t requested we do anything stupid, like drive into the lake; I would have refused, and then I might have had a mutiny on my hands—when Mahir looked up, eyes wide. “Shaun?”
“What?” I asked. “Are we being followed?”
“No. The directions…” He cleared his throat, looked at the screen, and read, “ ‘Turn on your jamming unit. Tune it to channel eight, or these instructions will cease.’ We don’t have a jamming unit, do we?”
“Actually, funny story—hey, Becks!” I looked at the rearview mirror. She turned, the reflection of her eyes meeting mine. “Put the jammer’s batteries back in and turn it on, will you? The text-based adventure wants us to get scrambled.”
“On it, Boss,” Becks called, and put down her gun.
I hadn’t wanted us to kill the jammer in the Agora parking garage—no matter how upper-crust they were, there were bound to be
“This guy must think he’s the goddamn Wizard of Oz,” I muttered. “I don’t like being spied on.”
“We’re off to see the Wizard,” chanted Maggie, in a gleeful singsong voice.
“Before you start killing people with joyous abandon, you might like to know that the next batch of directions has arrived,” said Mahir dryly. “Maggie, please don’t antagonize him; he’s had a hard week, and he’s liable to bite.”
“Spoilsport,” said Maggie.
“Thank you,” I said. “Where are we going?”
“At the end of the bridge, turn right,” said Mahir.
There was no joking around after that. Whatever test we’d been taking, we’d apparently passed, because the directions sent us along a straightforward series of increasingly smaller streets, until we were driving down a poorly maintained residential road in one of the oldest parts of Seattle. This was a million miles from the cultivated opulence of the Agora, or even from the reasonably well-maintained Berkeley streets where I grew up. This was a neighborhood where half the houses burned years ago and were never rebuilt, and where the remaining homes were surrounded by the kind of ludicrous fencing that was popular immediately after the Rising, when people were frantically trying to protect themselves from the next attack.
“People still live in places like this?” asked Maggie. Her levity was gone. She stared out the window with wide eyes, looking baffled and horrified at the same time.
I shrugged. “Where else are they gonna go?” The question sounded rhetorical. It wasn’t. There were patches like this in almost every city, tolerated despite their sketchy adherence to the safety requirements, because there was nowhere else to put the people who lived in those slowly collapsing houses. Eventually, they’d all be condemned and razed to the ground. Until that day came, people would do what they always had. They would survive.
“Take the next driveway on the right,” said Mahir. “To be more specific, it says ‘Turn right at the serial killer van.’ ”
