Paradigm (21 page)

Rob bounded up a series of boxes that took the place of the long-vanished steps.

“It ain’t much, but it’s home. C’mon in.”

Sam followed him inside and found himself in a long hall, with impressively banistered stairs on one side and two large rooms on the other.

“Come on back to the kitchen,” said Rob. “I’ll introduce you.”

The kitchen was large and warm, with a blazing fire in the small fireplace and chairs and cushions scattered about. Most were occupied by people of varying ages. A few were old, but the majority seemed to be around Sam’s age.

“Hey, everyone,” said Rob brightly. “This is Sam. He’s going to crash here for the night. Sam, this is Gil, Mary, Trey, Pat, Cath, Lisa, Dave, and Phil. There are a few others, but they’re out on missions at the moment.”

There were mumbled greetings on both sides as the denizens of the house took the measure of the newcomer. Sam stood in the doorway, unsure of what to do.

“Come on in!” said the one called Gil, standing and ushering Sam over to a chair. “It’s a bit crowded, but it’s warm. D’you want some tea?”

“Uh…yeah…thanks.”

Sam felt half there—the buzzing had started in his head the moment they’d emerged onto the street and he was having    trouble concentrating.

“Are you okay?” asked Rob, examining his face closely.

“I have a headache. I’ll be fine.”

Gil handed him a mug of something hot and brown. For a moment Sam hesitated. The last time he’d accepted a drink from someone, he’d ended up in a white room being threatened with DIY brain surgery.

“I know what you mean,” said one of the girls. “It’s pretty vile stuff, but it’s better than the water.”

Sam smiled and took a sip. The girl was right—it tasted nasty, but it was warm and wet and for the moment that was enough.

He sat back in the chair and let the warmth of the room and the drink wash over him. For the first time in what seemed like forever, he felt relatively safe.

“Anything new on campus?” asked Gil.

“Don’t know,” said Rob, helping himself to some tea. “Only went into the clinic, gave Bethy her stuff and brought this guy out.”

“How is she?” asked one of the girls.

“The same.”

“Man,” said one of the guys. “If she was my sister I sure as hell wouldn’t leave her there.”

“Sister?” said Sam, sitting up. “She’s your
sister
?”

“Yeah,” said Rob. “Well, kinda. Cloned from the same material.”

Sam stared at him in disbelief.

“But…you know what they’ve been grooming her for, right?”

“Yeah. She’s lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“Well, she’s pretty. It’s better than just being some drudge all your life.”

“And you would know that…how?” Sam could feel the anger rising inside him.

“Look, Sam, you’re new to San Francisco, you don’t know what HIR is like. They’ve been running things their way for over a hundred years. We’re here to try do something about it. But we can’t just do what we want.”

“That’s right,” said one of the older men, nodding sagely. “Sacrifices have to be made. Rob can’t have some kid trailing around after him. And a theta at that.”

“Then you’re no better than them, with their ‘sacrifices for the greater good,’” said Sam. “It’s all the same. Just rationalizing.”

“Is it rationalizing if it’s the truth?” asked Gil.

Sam looked from one to the other. These were strangers, not friends. He knew nothing about them. He needed to think.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to… I think I’ve been cooped up too long. I need some air.”

He stood up and stalked out of the room and out onto the front porch. It was nearly dark now and the ruined city had vanished into the encroaching night. It was as if the crumbling Victorian was the only house left in the world. He sat down and watched the last glimmer of daylight vanish.

“Are you okay?” It was one of the girls.

“I’m…yes. Sure.”

The girl sat next to him and smiled sympathetically. She was fair and kind of pretty, if a little worn around the edges.

“I’m Mary,” she said. “It’s hard sometimes…listening to them. It makes me wonder…you know, if anything happened to me. If a raid went wrong or something. Would they just leave me behind, too?”

“Probably,” said Sam.

“Yeah.” She sighed and they sat in silence for a while.

“Um…What raids?”

“The ones on the offices. The smaller ones, you know. The main campus is too well guarded.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Proof.”

“Proof of what?”

“Rob says that Mutha is sentient. That Hermes Industries isn’t controlling it at all. You were in the main campus, what do you think?”

Sam stared at her, but resisted the temptation to tell her all about it. He didn’t know these people or what they were really about, so he just shrugged.

“I don’t know. I was sick most of the time. I only went to the upper floors once.”

“And what did you see?”

Sam and Mary turned around. Rob was leaning against the door frame, his arms folded and his face serious.

“What d’you mean?” said Sam, hoping he looked suitably confused.

“Were there any muthascreens?”

“No, I guess not.”

“And what do you deduce from that?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, come on, Sam,” said Rob, crouching next to him. “They wanted to turn you into one of those vegetables they keep hidden away. Don’t tell me you didn’t draw a few conclusions.”

Sam looked at him, then nodded.

“Mutha isn’t there. They don’t use it. Or, if they do, they’re limiting it to particular locations.”

“They don’t use it at all,” said Rob. “I grew up there. The only information available was in old books and magazines. There wasn’t even any TV.”

“But why?” said Sam. “What’s the point? They invented the thing.”

“And they rake in tons of cash for it every second of every minute of every day. Everybody thinks Hermes Industries and Mutha are the same thing. That without HI, what little comfort and communication we have left would be gone forever.”

“Maybe it would,” said Sam. “And maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

“It wouldn’t. Because Mutha doesn’t need HI. It doesn’t need anyone.”

“You see,” said Mary enthusiastically. “We’re going to find the evidence and tell the world. Bring down Hermes Industries!”

Sam looked from one to the other. Their faces were bright with the eagerness of people with a cause, but Sam couldn’t help feeling they hadn’t really thought it through.

“Why?” he asked.

“What d’you mean, ‘why?’” asked Rob, clearly offended. “Because they control our lives. All of us. And impoverish nations. All for something they don’t even control!”

“Yeah, but don’t you think something else might be going on?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense for Mutha to keep up the pretence, does it? I mean, if it’s a living, thinking…thing, why does it want to pretend that it’s not?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Rob.

“Right. And how’s that going?”

“Okay. It’s going okay.” Rob stared out into the freezing night and sighed. “Listen, Sam…”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t come out here to…I wanted to apologize…I’m not…I sounded like a jerk in there. Of course I want to get Bethy out. And soon. But I need somewhere to take her. Somewhere better than here. D’you understand?”

Sam nodded. Rob smiled his easy smile, stood up and went back inside.

“Isn’t he great?” whispered Mary.

“He’s okay,” said Sam quietly. “But he’s never going to find what he’s looking for.”

“Yes, he will,” said Mary. “He’s very clever. We’ve found lots of files about some of the other stuff they’ve done. It’s only a matter of time.”

“These files were in the small offices?”

“Yes.”

“But there was nothing important in them?”

“Well…not that we could use.”

Sam smiled. Rob was the kind of person it was easy to like, the kind that people would follow to the edge of the abyss and beyond. But he doubted the golden boy had really thought things through. Really considered what a world without Hermes would be like, or what sort of place it would become if Mutha no longer pretended to be a mere machine.

There was something in this, though. Something that made sense, but he couldn’t think. He was tired and the buzzing in his head was distracting.

“Come on,” said Mary softly, taking his hand. “Let’s go upstairs.”

Chapter 21

T
he next morning Sam woke
slowly and watched as the first sliver of light crept through a crack in the roof and slid slowly across the bedroom floor. The air was cold, but he was warm, nestled under several blankets and with Mary snuggling at his side.

He closed his eyes and thought about Rob’s quest.

His parents had told him that the plex was sentient and that Hermes concealed that fact. Their reasons for doing so were obvious. But what about Mutha? It was a living, thinking thing, so why wouldn’t it want the world to know? The secret couldn’t be kept unless both sides had an interest in the deception.

There had to be something else. Something that Hermes Industries knew (or possessed) that prevented the great plex from being truly free.

Either way, he really couldn’t see an upside for the planet’s population. Whether HI controlled the plex or Mutha itself did, it would make no difference to anyone. The truth was that almost everyone was totally dependent on the network for their day to day lives. Well, except for some people in the Wilds, and even there the great brain was making inroads. The number of small towns and tiny settlements with access was growing daily. Even most of those wide-spot-in-the-road places in Arizona that he and Nathan had driven through had been hooked up and linked in.

He was just starting to drift off to sleep again when he was jarred awake by the sound of an engine. It was far away at first, and for a moment he allowed himself to imagine that it was the GTO. But, of course, it wasn’t. It was something old, though, and judging by its smooth roar, well taken care of.

Mary opened her eyes and scowled.

“Oh, crap,” she murmured. “She’s back.”

Sam sat up, his heart suddenly racing, but Mary reached up and pulled him down.

“Don’t get up. It’s too early.”

He disentangled himself, got dressed and went down, taking the stairs three at a time. The kitchen door was closed, but he could hear voices. Familiar voices. He pushed the door gently and it swung slowly inwards revealing Alma, windswept and dusty, sitting in one of the chairs with a mug of tea in her hand.

“Sam!”

She was surprised, but smiling. A proper smile. A smile that meant it.

“I told you before—you’ve got to stop following me around,” he said, grinning.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked.

“Vacation. I thought I’d try surfing. Or, wait…is that San Diego?”

“You two know each other?”

Rob was building up the fire and smiling as usual, but it wasn’t convincing.

“Yes,” said Alma. “Sam keeps turning up, like a bad penny.”

“Well, how about that,” said Rob, pouring himself a mug of tea. “Small world.”

He strolled over to Alma’s chair, sat on the arm and stroked her cheek. She pulled away, irritated, but the message was clear: this is mine.

Somehow, it had never occurred to Sam that she might be in a relationship.

“We met in Century City,” he said, hoping that his voice didn’t betray his disappointment, but certain that it did.

“No,” said Alma. “It was Hillford.”

“Oh…yeah. Right.”

Rob slipped his hand around Alma’s shoulders and while it was obvious that she wasn’t pleased, she let him do it. Sam turned away. He couldn’t stay in the room pretending everything was fine. Not yet. He needed time to process.

“Sam…are you coming back to bed or what?”

Mary was standing at the bottom of the stairs wearing Sam’s coat and almost nothing else.

He wondered if the day could get any worse.

“Well?” She grinned and ran back upstairs, giggling.

That was all he needed. Jokes. He followed her upstairs and retrieved the coat.

“Very funny.”

“You should’ve seen your face!” she said, getting back into bed and pulling the blankets close. “So you know her?”

“Yeah. A little.” He shrugged on the coat. “I’m going for a walk.”

The morning air was crisp and cold and a veil of silvery fog hung about the city, softening the lines of the buildings and making it almost beautiful again. Sam set off down the street, avoiding the rusting hulks of long-abandoned cars and steering clear of the dark alleys, most of which exuded the kind of stench that could kill a dog at forty paces.

The buzzing in his head was worse outside, though better than it had been in Century City. It still hurt, though, so he stopped and went through his pockets for the hundredth time, hoping against hope that he’d somehow missed the pill box the other ninety-nine.

Nope.

He walked a few more blocks up a steep grade and noticed a small hill emerging from the fog. It was covered in scrubby bushes and seemed to have some kind of ruin on the top, like an abandoned castle. Sam picked up his pace and headed for it. There was nothing like a strenuous scramble up a hill for clearing the brain.

The scramble turned out to be a tad more strenuous than he anticipated, as rambling thorn bushes, oleander and mesquite created an almost impenetrable wall. Sam was thankful for his heavy coat, which protected him from the worst of the tearing tendrils, but he still emerged on the summit with scratches on his hands and face that stung in the cold air.

The ground around the ruin was littered with slabs of concrete, some of which still had traces of the delicate fluting that had once decorated the building. Sam reckoned that it must have been a tower, judging from the quantity of stone. Maybe it fell in the great earthquake, or maybe it just rotted away like so many other things.

He clambered over the rocks that blocked the entrance, but there wasn’t much to see inside, just a small room and the remains of murals, too faded to make out. He went back outside, sat on the rubble and watched as the fog slowly receded and revealed the bones of the once-great city.

It
was
beautiful, in its own austere way. The familiar tidy grid of streets, found in almost every town, here became something else, as hills repeatedly interrupted its flow and other less staid roads shot off at angles or squirmed their way down to the grey, glistening bay like pythons in pursuit of prey. Then there were the bridges, or what remained of them. One stretched across to what had been Oakland, its double span long vanished and replaced with a narrow platform that swayed dangerously in the wind, while over at the narrow entrance to the bay, a single tall tower, red and rusting, its top still wreathed in fog, was all that remained of the once-legendary Golden Gate Bridge.

Sam used to wonder what his life would have been like if his parents had stayed here. He’d always imagined living in the tiny house, playing in the garden and going to school like the kids in books, but all that had been taken away now. There was no happy dream life. If Elkanah and Marian had stayed, Sam would have been nothing more than an experiment—used, abused and finally discarded like the boys in the basement. He wondered if his mom and dad were even his parents. Perhaps he was a clone like Rob and Bethany. That would explain the eyes on the boys.

For the first time in his life he was curious about himself, but the only people who could explain who he was were the ones who wanted to slice a piece of his brain away.

He turned and looked at the sprawling Hermes Industries Research buildings that clustered near the bay, slightly to the south of the city. Bethany had been right, they
were
silver—tall and shimmering in the morning light, the main building towering above everything else in the city. Sam imagined they were going for a “beacon of hope” vibe, but the whole thing looked more like a slightly sinister Land of Oz from where he was sitting, though he readily admitted that his impression was probably tainted. Yet such was the confidence of Hermes Industries that they hadn’t even bothered with a protective wall, just a flimsy perimeter fence and a fancy white and blue sign: “Hermes Industries Research, a division of Hermes Industries.”

Dr. Robinson had implied that something dreadful would happen if they didn’t do the surgery. Like what? Was he going to turn into some kind of monster?

He stood up and started to make his way back down the hill.

Alma and Rob.

Why?

And why was he so bothered by it? It’s not like she’d ever given him even a single hint that he had a chance. Just the reverse, actually. He’d kind of imagined her as something unattainable.

Only she wasn’t.

But…Rob?

What could she possibly see in him? Apart from the obvious. Sam had to admit that Rob was probably better looking than him, what with his even features, easy smile and blond hair. He could understand how women would go for that over some guy with a pointy face and weird eyes. But Alma had seemed different from all the others.

Except obviously she wasn’t.

It was probably for the best, anyway. If Robinson was right and he was some kind of time bomb, his best option was to get as far away from people as he could.

Which brought him back to the GTO and Nathan and set his blood boiling yet again.

He walked back to the house, but it was strangely silent. In the kitchen an old man he hadn’t seen before was sitting in a chair, boots off, warming his crooked toes in front of the fire.

“Where is everyone?”

“Gone on a raid,” said the old man, smiling. “Take a pew, they should be back soon. I’m Leo, by the way.”

“Sam. Is there any tea?”

“There is if you make some. The pump’s out back.”

Sam got the largest pan he could find and went in search of the pump. It was in the middle of the patch of beaten earth that passed as the back yard—a tall old-fashioned pump with an ‘S’ shaped handle. He put the pan underneath it and heaved on the handle. It took a while for it to get going, but eventually water gushed from the spout and splashed into the pan.

At least, he assumed it was water. A kind of yellowy-grey water. He poured it out and tried again with the same result. He took it back into the house.

“Leo,” he said, tilting the pan up so the old man could see the contents. “Is it supposed to look like this?”

Leo peered into the pan, then leaned back.

“Yup,” he said. “That’s San Francisco water right enough. You’ll be needing to filter it a few times, then make sure you boil it real good.”

There was another pan on the counter with some cloth stretched over it. Sam poured the water through the cloth first one way, then the other.

“It stinks!” he said, as an oily aroma assaulted his senses.

“Been that way ever since they started fracking for gas. That’s what my ol’ man told me anyways. Time was you could light it with a match. It’s better now, though.”

“This is
better
?”

“Yup.”

Sam shook his head, put the pan over the fire and sat down. After about five minutes a sort of musky stench started to fill the room. He wasn’t sure if it was the water or Leo’s feet. Either way, he decided that tea was out.

He had to get a car. He had to get
another
car so he could find
his
car and get as far away from California and everyone in it as he possibly could.

Was he dangerous? He certainly didn’t feel dangerous. Except when he thought about Nathan, but that seemed like a perfectly reasonable response.

“Things really that bad?”

“What?”

“Your face,” said Leo. “Pretty dang gloomy for such a glorious morning.”

Sam glanced out of the window at the yellow sky. Leo laughed.

“Kid, from where I’m sitting, every morning I’m still breathing is a goddamn glorious one.”

Sam smiled and decided to make the tea after all. He reached for the pan.

“Hold on there! That stuff ain’t boiled for near long enough. Just let it ride for a while.”

Sam sat back and watched the flickering flames.

“Leo,” he said, finally. “How come Rob is the leader? I mean you and Phil must have much more experience.”

“I suppose we do,” said Leo. “And Phil was in charge for a few years before Rob showed up. We did okay, I’m not saying we didn’t. We’d go out, get food, y’know… whatever else we needed.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

“Yeah. One day this kid shows up, angry as hell, starts telling us all about how HI is evil, which, truth be told, we already knew. Most of us older guys worked for Hermes at one point or another.
All
our parents did. After the Big One, it was pretty much the only show in town.”

“So why’d you stop?”

“We didn’t stop. We was fired. Once they perfected that cloning thing, they just made their own workers. Don’t complain so much, I guess.”

“Except for Rob.”

“Yeah. He was all going on about how Hermes don’t control Mutha no more and the world needs to know.”

“I still don’t get it,” said Sam. “Why did that qualify him to be leader over all of you?”

“I think you can make the tea now,” said Leo, sitting up and putting his sock back on. “Thing is, son, people like a purpose. I mean going on raids to get food and stuff is fun, but a
quest
…now that’s something else. Came to be most folks saw Rob as some kind of King Arthur and proving that HI and Mutha have parted ways…well, that’s pretty much our holy grail these days.”

“And what about Phil? Didn’t he resent losing the top dog slot to a kid?”

“Nah. Well, maybe a tad. But he’s okay with it.”

Sam brewed the tea and had just poured two mugs when the sound of a stuttering engine made the old house tremble and the warm liquid splash onto his hands. This was followed by the whooping of triumphant voices.

“I think they may be home,” said Leo, drily.

Sam smiled, handed him his tea and went outside to see what was going on, only to find himself in the middle of a backslapping celebration as the younger denizens of the house leapt from an old truck and clattered inside carrying box after box of papers and file folders. The last one in was Rob, who was grinning like the cat that got the cream.