Pennsylvania Omnibus (19 page)

“I know,” Dawn said. “Hopefully
someday you will.”

Jed didn’t reply. His hand moved up
her sleeve, and then before he could stop himself he was touching her face. He
couldn’t help it. He wanted to know what she felt like, to get an understanding
of what was real and what was not. Her skin was soft to the touch, and she
leaned in to the contact and closed her eyes.

“If they zap my memory,” Jed said,
“then won’t what they’re trying to do to me… or with me… well, won’t it work?
Won’t I forget everything and just go on without knowing what they’ve done to
me?”

Dawn smiled again, and now she was
the one to reach out and touch
his
face, as if she was checking to see
if
he
was real. “They aren’t going to zap
all
of your memory,
because I’m going to keep them from doing it. They might accomplish it for a
bit, but in the end you’ll remember. I’m just going to teach you how to trick
them so that they’ll think they succeeded.”

Jed didn’t respond. He just looked
into her eyes.

After a moment, her hand traveled
upward until she was pointing at the center of his forehead. “But never you
worry, Jed.” She smiled and his heart leapt. “All the while, I’ll be right
here.”

His hand found hers and he pulled
her finger down from his forehead until it was pointing at his heart. He held
it that way for a moment, and then he released her hand.

“You’re a very handsome man,
Jed.”

Her eyes closed and he could see
that she was going to kiss him, or that she wanted him to kiss her. She
hesitated, only centimeters away from his lips, expecting that he would meet
her there.

He did not.

“I can’t,” he said. Her eyes opened
and he blushed. “I don’t know what’s real.”

Dawn dropped his hands, smiled
again, then turned and stepped off the porch. She walked toward the water pump
that was in the side yard under a large oak tree, and she turned and spoke over
her shoulder as she walked. “Welcome to the world of the English, Jed. Almost
no one knows what’s real.”

Jed worked the pump handle while
Dawn gathered water in her hands and splashed it on her face. He had so many
questions, he wasn’t completely sure where to start.

“What does the Q do? What part of
what I’m feeling is the drug?”

Dawn wiped her face with her sleeve,
and Jed was fascinated to see the water spots on the sleeve of the green dress.
Whatever kind of computer simulation this was, it was mind-blowing.

“Q gives you a feeling of euphoria,”
she said. “Of acceptance and acquiescence. It helps your brain meld the imagery
that the computer is producing with the sensory perceptions that your brain
adopts in order to help you believe the illusion. On Q, your brain ‘fixes’
things by adding in the imperfections and oddities that exist in real life.
When computers try to do this alone, and your mind isn’t on Q, the animation
comes across as clunky and artificial. Animators and programmers call this ‘the
uncanny valley.’ It’s too real, so the mind rejects it as creepy and odd.” Dawn
pumped the handle a few times until some water spurted out. She caught the
moisture in her hand and let it drip through her fingers in front of Jed’s
face. The sun glistened through the drops, and he was reminded of the drops on
the grass on his last day in Old Pennsylvania, after he and Amos had milked
Zoe.

Dawn continued. “The computer really
only produces about fifteen percent of the image, and your mind produces the
rest. Little-used parts of the brain are turned into supercomputers that render
imagery based on the billions of microscopic memories stored throughout your
brain. Your mind becomes the rendering chip. Q facilitates this pipeline. Back
in the old world, television created these simulated realities—only slower and
not as well. What the BICE can make is kinda cool and very technologically
advanced, but even so, the brain always knows it isn’t right. The Q helps your
brain stop being so naturally cynical. It helps you suspend your disbelief. You
become more accepting of the data you’re receiving. That’s why I wanted to be
here for your first experience. When Transport showed that they would rather
capture you than kill you, I figured they had a plan that involved implanting
you and putting you on Q.”

“Why didn’t they kill
you
?”
Jed asked.

“Good question,” Dawn said. “I was
hoping they wouldn’t.” She smiled at him, but he didn’t seem to like her
answer. “Because they don’t know if they’ll need me in the future to help
control you. And they need
you
more than they need just about anything
else.”

“Why could they possibly need me?”
Jed asked.

“Because every war has more than one
facet. It’s not all guns and bombs. There are things like public relations,
propaganda, and public opinion. They need you—to use you as a tool against your
brother and the resistance.”

Jed was still worried about Dawn.
“They already killed Conrad and Rheems as traitors. They’ll kill you too if
they don’t think you can help them.”

“Well, you’re right. At some level,
at least,” she said. “Conrad and Rheems didn’t have some of the capabilities
that I have to disrupt and confuse their system if I need to.” Dawn winked at
him. “I might even be able to arrange for my own escape if I really have
to.”

“Then you should do that,” Jed said.
“Get out of here and don’t look back.”

Dawn laughed. It was almost an
ironic laugh. “If you think I would abandon you here, Jed, or that I would
neglect my duty to TRACE or the SOMA, then you don’t know me as well as you
should. As well as you will.”

Over the next few days, Jed’s life
settled into a pattern. He slept most of the time, and during this sleep—at
first, anyway—he recognized that his mind was going through training. Often he
would be standing in front of the white screen and he would find himself
manipulating data, or filing information in folders that would appear before
him. He learned how to categorize data, parse conversations, and add rankings
to information before he filed it away.

When he awoke, sometimes he would
forget the overall gist of what he’d been doing in his sleep, but he’d always
remember that the training was moving forward.

On occasion—at random times when it
was quite unexpected—Dawn would appear in his visions, and she would teach him
things he needed to know: how to hide things, how to recall and change data
even after the information had already been filed. She even taught him how to
authentically alter his memories, so that the information that was filed was
substantively different than what had actually happened.

And sometimes Dawn would take him to
another place entirely. She showed him battles and wars. They stood on hilltops
and on buildings and watched men and machines destroy and kill, and Dawn talked
to him of history and the process that had brought this world to the edge of
ruin. She showed him that the colonization of New Pennsylvania had been
troubled from the very beginning. The same conflict and civil war that had
marked the old world had carried over into the new.

A lot of what Jed learned from Dawn
was data without context. He didn’t gain true understanding because he didn’t
have all of the supporting information and experience that would help him truly
make sense of it. He felt like a spectator, watching a show that had nothing to
do with him, like he was being forced to see a movie about the world and
everything that was wrong with it. He willed it to stop, but he had no power to
control anything that was happening to him in the dream state.

One day (or maybe it was night? he
had no way to know), Dawn took him on a journey to an area in the west called
“the Great Shelf.” There she showed him a massive line of limestone cliffs,
hundreds and hundreds of feet high, bifurcating the whole continent from the
north to the south. Atop the Shelf there were a dozen cities and towns, spread
hundreds and hundreds of miles apart. Dawn explained that Transport had spent
billions of tax unis to build cities that they’d hoped would eventually be
filled with immigrants from the old world. But, she explained, things hadn’t
worked out as Transport had planned.

There were millions of people living
beyond the Shelf, but the bulk of those colonists—along with their young, born
on New Pennsylvania—avoided the planned cities as if they were filled with the
plague. So the cities had only a token civilian presence, mostly colonists who
relied on the government for sustenance and survival. Some of the cities had no
more than a thousand to ten thousand souls living in them. The Shelf cities
survived only thanks to the massive infusion of tax unis grafted from both the
old and the new worlds. The old philosophy—where consumption, rather than
production, provided for an unnatural and unsustainable system of urban
living—wasn’t workable in the new world.  It didn’t work in the old world
either, but the old world system was slow in collapsing because it had
thousands of years of production propping it up.

“Why do they even keep the cities if
they can’t support themselves?” Jed asked.

“No city of any meaningful size is
ever self-sufficient,” Dawn said. “Every city relies on production that happens
in the countryside. Food, raw materials, goods, et cetera.” Now she pointed out
into the wilderness beyond the city. “In the old world, it took millennia to
develop industrialized systems adequate to maintain large cities. Rome and
Athens used slave labor, wars, and harsh taxation. Centuries later, machines
did the job just as well, and even if the industrialized nations still relied
on wars and taxation, they’d been around long enough to use sleight of hand to
hide the reasons and purposes behind the wars.” Dawn looked at him and saw that
even in cyberspace she was losing him. There was still a huge culture gap. The
Amish weren’t dumb, she knew, they just had no point of reference when it came
to human culture on such an urban scale.

“The point is that you can’t just
drop a city onto a new planet and expect it to work.”

“I can see that,” Jed
said.

Dawn continued. “The government
thought that the old world system could just be duplicated and transferred into
the new world, but in this thinking they’d missed one very important
fundamental truth: without several millennia of the compounded productive
labors of individuals who’d systematically made goods and products by hard
work, using raw materials gleaned from the real, tangible world… your cities
aren’t going to make it.

“The leaders of the world forgot
where real wealth comes from. It’s like thinking that you can take all of the
flesh, sinews, ligaments, and tissues that make up a human, and just stick them
all together in the right places and somehow you’ll have life. You won’t.
You’ll have a reconstituted corpse that’s still dead.

“The nuts and the bolts of the
issue,” Dawn explained, “comes down to this: if the people of New Pennsylvania
don’t work with their hands to create the means of survival, production, and
expansion, this world will collapse and regress. The only thing they’ll be left
with is the ancient Roman model of empire-building: endless war, slavery, and
oppression. The people who have rejected the cities seem to grasp this. They’re
out there, beyond the Shelf, working, living, and surviving. Everyone else
doesn’t have a clue. This difference was the root of the war between TRACE and
Transport,” Dawn said. “In the countryside, TRACE is embraced and supported. In
the cities, Transport is idol, king, and god.”

Dawn was biased, and she admitted as
much. According to her, TRACE wanted to free people from oppression so that
they could work and produce and survive. According to her, Transport wanted to
enslave generations of humans and force them to maintain a system that was
already crumbling from its own internal corruptions and
contradictions.

And whenever Jed was just beginning
to get a modicum of understanding, the darkness and the sleep would overwhelm
him again.

This became his pattern: sleep,
training, long visits and conversations with Dawn. The information, relentless
in its assault, pouring into his mind like water filling a cup. His thoughts
alternated between murky confusion and stunning clarity. It became more and
more difficult for him to keep track of what was real and what wasn’t. Time
passed, but he had no idea how long this pattern continued, until finally,
something changed. He felt himself coming out of that deep and bottomless
slumber, his consciousness returning to him only in fits and starts. He was
disoriented, and awareness of his surroundings was slow to return to him. He
struggled to focus his mind, to concentrate on anything at all that would help
him gain some kind of center.

After a few long moments of
nothingness, Dawn appeared in his mind. Not in his vision, but it was her
essence, incorporeal. She didn’t speak until his focus was entirely on her and
not on his indistinct surroundings. When at last he’d cleared his mind enough
to hear her, she spoke.

“Here we go.”

Dawn was gone. But Jed knew that he
was coming awake. He realized—almost as an afterthought—that he was very cold,
but concurrent with that thought he began to feel warmth expand and spread
throughout his body, tracing along his veins and arteries. The warmth brought
his consciousness into greater clarity, and he heard an unlatching sound, and
then the sound of air escaping. He opened his eyes and the lid of the pod rose
slowly and light penetrated the darkness around him and he felt himself
stirring into consciousness. There was a voice speaking…