IGMS Issue 9 (15 page)

It
had
to be Sandro, which led Miguel to the uncomfortable conclusion that Sandro had had something to do with the conflict. Just how, he didn't know, and before he could figure out where his grandfather fit into this increasingly complex puzzle, sleep finally took him.

The next morning, while wolfing down greasy eggs and bacon from the buffet, Miguel realized he had three new messages from Marianne. He tagged the messages for follow-up and left the hotel.

He attended two marches near old town that morning and asked around while weaving among the crowd and the old adobe buildings, showing a recent picture of his grandfather, but no one admitted to knowing him. After absorbing six hours of shouting and sign-waving and staring at an endless sea of faces, Miguel was ready to give up. He was never going to get anywhere this way.

Just as he was heading toward one last crowd, an incoming message popped up -- it was from Sandro's bank. He opened it immediately and scanned the contents. He hadn't expected anything from them, certainly not this quickly, but it verified that the monies had been transferred from the estate of one Dr. Anthony Bayless.

He sat down on an ancient wooden park bench and searched the net. There were several references to Bayless. Some were recent, reporting his death five months earlier. He'd lived in Nogales for eighty years and -- Miguel whistled -- had died at the age of 153. The age was not completely unheard of, but it was still impressive.

Bayless had moved to Nogales after being crowned a hero when he'd helped to combat the outbreak of tuberculosis in 2041. It was a scary episode in Nogales' history, a time where nearly ten thousand died from the development of the tuberculosis superbug. It was yet another super-resistant pathogen, the fourth to achieve that status since the first in 2025, but it was the first that claimed airborne transmission. The outbreak wasn't given much press in the States at first because it was localized to the Sonora portion of Nogales. But when the outbreak crossed over, and was attributed to an illegal immigrant crossing, it had fueled a mass political hysteria that had given the President the firepower he needed to upgrade the entire Mexican border wall to a thirty-foot monstrosity.

Late that night, after a fruitless seven-hour search for anything that might connect Sandro to Bayless, Miguel's hunger finally got the best of him. He ordered up a chicken Caesar and lay on his hotel bed, watching the local news, which did nothing to ease his nerves.

"Officer Adam Giaterri of the Border Patrol," the female anchor was saying, "was shot through the neck at 10:18 p.m. local time in what the authorities are calling a ruthless sniper attack. No others have been reported wounded, and no group has stepped forward to take responsibility. The President earlier called it a clear retaliation over the violence that erupted two days ago . . ."

Miguel threw down his fork, no longer hungry. "What the hell are you doing, Grandpa?"

An incoming call trilled into his earpiece: unknown number, no handle.

He tongued the pickup. "Hello?"

"Hello, Miguel."

"Grandpa, thank goodness, where are you?"

"Never mind that. I need you to do something for me."

"Come to the hotel. I'm staying at --"

"Miguel, listen to me. I don't have much time. They've frozen my assets, and I need money. Bad. I need you to send it to this account number. As much as you can spare." A bank account and routing number popped up via Miguel's overlay system. He recognized it as the same Bank of Ireland account Sandro had used to transfer the Bayless money to.

Miguel brought up Sandro's bank and attempted to log in. A message appeared, asking that the owner of the account call Bank Security in Tallahassee.

"Grandpa, this is getting out of hand."

"Miguel --"

"Did you have anything to do with this border patrolman?"

"Miguel! I can't talk. Not now."

"Then
when
, because I'm not giving you anything unless we talk."

The line was silent for a long time, but Miguel could hear a hushed conversation going on in the background. "You know the downtown fountain in Sonora?"

Miguel paused. "I'll find it."

"There's a
panadería
due east of it. Meet me there tomorrow. Eleven o'clock."

"Why did they freeze --"

But the line was already dead.

He tried calling the number back. No one answered.

Miguel poured himself two fingers of
mezcal
and stared out his window at the amber lights of Nogales. In the distance, the blinking red lights of the wall trailed off to the horizon like some celestial device set to take his grandfather farther and farther away.

He downed the
mezcal
in one gulp.

He stared at the wall for hours, drinking, wondering what he might have done differently, wondering how he could deliver Sandro from this gathering storm when Sandro himself seemed to be at the center of it.

Ninety-three more immigrants were caught that night. An unknown number snuck through. One attempted crossing ended in gunfire: three Mexican men dead, twelve wounded. The only opinion from the CBP was that the strong success the program had already achieved would most likely accelerate the schedule for a full rollout.

Miguel woke with a screaming headache. It'd been quite a while since he'd last woken up still drunk from the night before, but not so long ago that he didn't remember how miserable it felt. Only after scrubbing his face for five minutes did it strike him that the sun was awfully bright outside. It was after nine already.

The rental he had arranged for was waiting for him in the hotel parking structure. He hopped in and rushed south to the wall, and though he tried to use his Press ID to grease the skids, it still took over an hour to make it through.

It was amazing how third-world Mexico seemed, even this close to the border -- maybe
especially
this close to the border. There were so many migrants using Nogales as a launching point for crossings that huge portions of the shanty towns were little more than temporary housing.

In some ways Mexico's predicament was understandable. NAFTA had been disbanded thirty years ago as an almost complete failure. Global warming had plodded on at a steady pace despite the ever-tightening global controls over greenhouse gases. Mexico's farming industry had been crushed, and its Gulf-side tourism had been pummeled to the point of collapse by the incessant arrival of hurricanes storming in from the Atlantic.

It was a shame, too, because the United States, ever since the wall had been upgraded in the mid part of the century, had become progressively wealthier, both technologically and monetarily. Various administrations paid lip service to helping their southern neighbors, but those initiatives, no matter how heartfelt, would often be dismantled within a decade of their conception, leaving Mexico in the same place it had been a century earlier.

It was well after eleven by the time Miguel found the old square which held the bakery. Miguel knew in his gut that Sandro had already come and gone, and sure enough, no one was in the cramped bakery when he arrived except a hunched old Mexican woman who eyed him suspiciously from the far side of the counter. Over her shoulder, a squeaky air conditioner fought vainly against the oppressive heat. It was hot, but Miguel liked the ancient and fragrant smell of the bakery.

Miguel took out a hundred-peso note and laid it on the counter. "
Café y dos churros, por favor
."

Miguel took his coffee and
churros
and sat down to regroup. A few minutes later, while Miguel was nursing his hangover with the scent of the coffee, Sandro entered the bakery. He used his cane -- more heavily than usual -- to make his way between the tables and sit across from Miguel.

Miguel snapped a photo immediately.

Sandro's cane leans against a nearby chair as he wipes the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his faded denim jacket. His disheveled gray hair, his baggy eyes, his listless face -- all telltale signs of a man who hadn't slept in days.

"You look like hell," Miguel said.

"Back atcha," Sandro replied.

They both managed a weak smile.

An uncomfortable silence passed between them before Sandro reached into his jacket, pulled out a beaten manila envelope, and set it on the table next to the plateof
churro
crumbs. His hand rested a moment over it. Then he tapped it once and folded his hands in his lap. "The way I figure, you have a right to see that."

Miguel left it there. "I don't care what happened anymore. I just want to take you home."

After a moment's pause, Sandro nodded seriously to the envelope.

Miguel removed the contents. The top page was crisp and white. It was a letter, handwritten by Anthony Bayless. Miguel read it, and looked up at Sandro.

"An apology?"

Sandro nodded. "Keep going."

Miguel flipped the letter over and found a yellowed x-ray. It was a sagittal x-ray of the head. It seemed normal except for the bright white outline of a device near the base of the brain, where the spinal cord entered the cranial cavity. It was eerily similar to Miguel's own CT scan taken only hours after his camera interface had been installed.

The next photograph was of a boy lying in a hospital bed. Miguel had seen a number of pictures of Sandro as an older teen, and though the top of this boy's head was wrapped tight in white bandages and his face was slack as he stared upward, Miguel knew it was Sandro. Miguel assumed it was taken after the surgery for the implant he'd seen in the x-ray.

Miguel couldn't help but judge the photograph with an artist's eye. It seemed bad at first -- the balance was all wrong, and the lighting seemed to suck the life right out of the subject -- but then again, there was clear synchronicity between the lighting and Sandro's blank expression. What had the person behind the camera been thinking as he took this photo of Sandro? Probably nothing. Probably it had been the doctor who'd performed the surgery, or a member of the medical team who'd taken it. Doctor or photographer, he'd probably become numb to his patient's feelings long ago, much like Miguel had become numb to the suffering around him.

Miguel flipped through the rest of the documentation: doctor's notes, medical tests, psychological workups. He saw the phrases "tuberculosis in check" and "poor reception of implant" and "response times
decreased
" in the monthly summary pages from March and April of 2041. By the Lord above, Sandro had only been thirteen. Were they even
allowed
to do something like that to a boy so young? He flipped a few more pages and found a note from August of the same year that said "implant removed successfully" and "recovery slow but consistent."

The year, 2041, was notable in that it was the same year of the tuberculosis epidemic in Nogales, the same year Congress approved the expansion and strengthening of the border wall. Sandro's parents had emigrated at that time, but they'd died in the outbreak. Sandro nearly had, too, but he recovered when the bacteriophage for the superbug had been developed.

But what did the implants have to do with it?

"Do you remember any of this?" Miguel asked.

Sandro shook his head. "Nothing."

"I don't understand. A doctor was using the tuberculosis patients?"

"Several of them, yes. To test their company's prototype HMI implant." Sandro touched his right eye with one finger. "The grandfather of
your
interface."

"But tuberculosis patients?"

"That's how they got access to me and over forty other people. They thought we were all going to die, and they weren't far wrong. Twelve of the patients
did
die, and probably not from the tuberculosis."

"
Who
got access, Grandpa? How
who
got access?"

"The company Bayless was working for. InterGenome Sciences."

Miguel reeled. IGS was the same company that had developed dozens of different brain-enhancement implants. It had started with the military in 2047 -- human-machine interfaces to enhance reaction time and replacement eyes that could display messages and provide overlay information like the head-up display in a fighter pilot's visor. But military spending had become anemic, forcing IGS to leverage their technology into the private sector. They added memory banks to store simple data like phone numbers, addresses, account locations and passwords and PINs. Cameras and photo storage came quickly after, and Miguel had been one of the early adopters of the technology.

It had all been a chain of cause and effect that had started with IGS's experiments on Sandro and the others, and suddenly Miguel felt like he had
profited
from his grandfather's pain. He blew air through his pursed lips. "I know this must be a shock, Grandpa --"

"You have no idea what it must be."

Miguel realized that Sandro's depression these last few months must have started with some initial contact from Bayless's lawyers, perhaps a letter telling him about the experiments and the inheritance Bayless had left him. Why hadn't he told Miguel about it?