The Postmortal (35 page)
“I can either shoot you or you can stop on your own,” I told her.
She relented. I moved to begin recording, then turned to the kitchen staff. “I need this area clear!” I shouted. They pushed out the front, and I hit Record. “I am asking for confirmation that you are Solara Beck of Santa Monica, California.”
“No,” she said.
“Do you have a license on you?”
“Kiss my ass.”
“Do you have family members you wish to notify of your death?”
“I don’t have to tell you shit.”
“My records indicate that you are the aunt of Kitana Beck and Elise Beck of Arlington, Virginia. Would you like your soft assets transferred to them? There is no taxable penalty on this transfer.”
“Fuck you!”
“Come on. Give it to the nieces. Do something right for once in your life.”
She spat out the agreement, like they all do. “Fine.”
“You were tried in absentia for being an accessory to the bombings of nine separate doctor’s offices in New York, New York, on July 3, 2019. A public defender named Vincent Scagdiviglio presented your case . . .” And on and on I went. “Would you like to make a public statement of guilt and remorse?”
She looked away, then turned back to the camera defiantly. This was not her first screen test. “Guilt? Remorse? Are you fucking joking? I never did anything wrong. You people chase me for decades, and now you want me to say I’m sorry while you fucking kill me? Why? So you can look good? So you can feel like you did something great for humanity? You people are the most hypocritical piles of shit to ever walk the earth. You’re gonna get what’s coming to you, I swear to God. And when you do, I’ll watch your blood run from heaven’s front row. Fuck you.”
I left the WEPS on for false posterity, took out the saline tube, and jammed it in her thigh. Her eyes kicked back and closed, and she gave a little snort and held her breath for ten, twenty, thirty, forty . . . I took her pulse, then called in the time of death. When I shut off the WEPS, Solara stayed limp on the ground, just as I asked. I took the file photos of her “corpse,” then I took her WEPS from her skirt pocket and smashed it to bits under my boot. A short-order cook walked in as I was about to collect the body. “Get the fuck out of here!” I screamed. He ran away.
I circled behind Solara and cinched my hands just below her breasts. I dragged her out of the kitchen and through the back entrance of the hotel to my plug-in, which was waiting nearby. I threw open the back door and laid her inside. The WEPS started going bonkers as I tossed the blanket on her and closed the door. It was Matt.
“Solara Beck!” he shouted. “Solara Beck! Holy shit, you found the little firecracker!”
“I did.”
“You get to pick lunch when you get back. No lie. I’ll let you pick anything, and I will go get it personally.”
“I’m tired. I’m going home. I’ll be back in tomorrow.”
“What about the body? Mosko wants a peek at her.”
“I already found a guy to deal with it in the Fredericksburg compound. The body’s gone. It’s all filed and done.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
He looked disappointed, like I had failed to invite him to a good party I was throwing. “Okay.”
“One more thing,” I told him. “No more sweeps. I don’t wanna deal with any more flu victims. Give it to the interns. I want a Greenie tomorrow. Or an insurgent. Someone whose teeth I can kick out.”
“Well, aren’t you bold? Did DES make you an offer just now? Whatever they’re offering, I’ll match it, provided it isn’t that much more than you make right now.”
“I’ll see you in the morning, Matt.” I clicked off and turned to Solara. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’m dead,” she said.
“That’ll work.”
Then I brought Solara to her new home.
DATE MODIFIED:
6/26/2079, 5:17 P.M.
6/26/2079, 5:17 P.M.
“They wouldn’t stop eating”
No gangs swept by on the drive back home. We talked for hours and could have talked for hours more. I brought Solara into the Fairfax compound (the guards at the gate knew me and didn’t bother to check the back of the car) and ran over to a drugstore to buy her some basic necessities, including one of those old-fashioned, nongenetic hair-coloring kits. She had been staying with a friend and had little interest in going back to fetch her clothes, so I grabbed a handful of items at the Dress for Less and threw them on top of the cruddy blanket in the backseat. I bought her a new WEPS with a clean IP address and registered it in the name of Katie Baker. When we made it to my place, it was night all over again. I have no concept of days anymore. Just long patches of haze and glow.
My energy was sapped. Solara used my WEPS to erase all of Ingrid Malmsteen’s social accounts, as well as the ones the real Solara Beck still kept active. I asked her not to use the new WEPS to search for anything related to her old self, lest the search engines solve her new identity in a matter of frames. I asked her if she felt like watching a movie, and she said yes. So I overcooked a frozen pizza and gave her half as we sat down to watch. She sat on the couch, I on the recliner. Both of us craving distraction.
It was a bad idea to choose
The Coldest War
. I should have chosen a movie I could watch with my mind and body set firmly on autopilot. Instead I chose an Arctic War documentary that on the cloud had elicited the following samples of horror and outrage :
The Coldest War
. I should have chosen a movie I could watch with my mind and body set firmly on autopilot. Instead I chose an Arctic War documentary that on the cloud had elicited the following samples of horror and outrage :
Carl Laing:
Filmmaker David Coggeshall gets great interviews with soldiers and generals who had a hand in the war that killed over ten million people and led to the eventual Russian annexation of Alaska and Canada. But it’s his moments with people on the outer edges of the conflict that bring the entire disastrous conflict into sharp relief. One of those moments includes an interview with an Alaskan woman named Sadie Carruthers.
Alaska, as you know, served as the base for American operations during the war. What most Americans don’t know is that the state, along with all other countries with landmasses close to the Arctic Ocean, was ravaged by Russian and American RMUs who had deserted the conflict and began pillaging at random. Sadie tells the story of soldiers from an American RMU who infiltrated her home and began eating everything in sight, including the houseplants. These American soldiers were part of an early test program for the Skeleton Key vaccine (Russia had a similar program in simultaneous development). And because the vaccine eliminated weight gain, many of the soldiers, according to the film, gradually increased their food intake to ten thousand calories a day, sometimes higher. Coggeshall found WEPS footage of an unidentified Russian RMU feasting on a live seal, devouring it until nothing but bones were left. Even from a distance, you can see the blood coating the soldiers’ faces. It’s far more terrifying than any horror film you’ll sit through this year.
“We had Russian
and
American RMUs sweep through our home, and they wouldn’t stop eating. Ever,” Carruthers said. “We’d stored five-pound bags of rice in our basement, and they found them. They opened them up and guzzled them uncooked, as if they were bags of crumbled potato chips. I lived in constant fear that they would return and try to eat me if I had no food around. I know for a fact that a woman outside of Barrow was eaten by AWOL Americans. You’ve heard stories, I’m sure. We called them LLs: the ‘living living.’ ”
and
American RMUs sweep through our home, and they wouldn’t stop eating. Ever,” Carruthers said. “We’d stored five-pound bags of rice in our basement, and they found them. They opened them up and guzzled them uncooked, as if they were bags of crumbled potato chips. I lived in constant fear that they would return and try to eat me if I had no food around. I know for a fact that a woman outside of Barrow was eaten by AWOL Americans. You’ve heard stories, I’m sure. We called them LLs: the ‘living living.’ ”
The living living. That’s what the Arctic War helped produce.
Emily Hinton:
Coggeshall interviews army ranger Michael Armstead, a “super warrior” who has served a mind-boggling fifty consecutive tours of duty, which isn’t uncommon in the ranks today. Armstead explains that many of the American RMUs are not only converted collectivists and ex-cons but also longtime veterans such as himself. “You’re talking about people who have given decades of their lives to fighting on the front lines for our country,” says Armstead. “The military isn’t simply going to kick them out because they’re too shell-shocked to serve anymore. Most of the super warriors with thirty tours or more were given free rein by the army to do as they pleased. I know I was. It was half ‘we trust you’ and half ‘we don’t know what else to do with you.’ Now, think about what fighting and killing for that long does to a man’s psyche. I’ve been fighting for fifty years, and I’m relatively normal for my group. But there are others who have been fighting forever and can’t imagine living day-to-day without experiencing bloodshed. And they’re still physically able to make that happen. Those are the men who went pillaging in Alaska and Scandinavia. Those are the ones who became their own armies.”
Evan Bruni:
You see satellite photos showing the rapid expansion of the number of ships and rigs in the Arctic over the course of the past decade. The boats and people seem to multiply exponentially, as if grown from spores. And most tragically, you see photos of seemingly endless patches of ocean that have dead whales, polar bears, and other marine life floating on the surface. There’s a shot of a Russian aircraft carrier plowing through a field of dead sea lions, their bellies turned up to the sun and blown open by the foul gas that was trapped inside. You can see the seagulls feasting on the carrion. You look at this floating mass of death and you think to yourself that they died to make room for us. There are no more stones to overturn. There is not a swatch of land that doesn’t bear our footprint. We are everywhere—and we are increasingly alone because of it.
When the movie ended, Solara looked to my printer. I have a laptop with a scrubbed IP address, and that’s the one I use to print out new documents for our mock end specialization clients. The official U.S. government site I use to create the documents is monitored. But the fifty thousand illegal Russian mirror sites are not. Sitting in my printer tray was a fresh plug-in license for Katie Baker. She turned back to me.
“Is this stupid?” she asked.
“What?”
“All this stuff you’re doing for me. Is it stupid? We’re all gonna die soon anyway.”
“You’d be surprised at what people can live through and how much of it they can live through.”
“Do you have kids?”
“I had a son. He was killed by the insurgency.”
“So that’s why you became an end specialist.”
“No, I became an end specialist because I like it. What about you? Kids of your own?”
She placed a hand on her stomach and made a little circle.
I was floored. “Get the hell out of here,” I said.
“Fourteen weeks.”
“Who’s the father?”
“Some asshole who’ll never get to see what comes out of this body.” She sipped a Dr Pepper. “When I was in my thirties, I had abortions. Three of them. After the third the doctor told me I could never have kids again. That was my penalty for procrastinating, for being selfish. Then I got Skeleton Key, and the doctor forgot to tell me that all those little fancy robots would do me the added courtesy of repairing my mangled uterus. He never told me to start using birth control again. It’s funny what doctors decide to tell you and what they decide to keep from you.”
I stared at her with huge eyes. “It’s a miracle.”
She glanced at the end credits of the movie. “No, it isn’t.”
DATE MODIFIED:
6/27/2079, 5:59 A.M.
6/27/2079, 5:59 A.M.
“This is the next logical step”
Metro was down today. I walked the handful of miles underground, joined Ernie at the East Falls Church compound, and we set out in Big Bertha. On our way to Bethesda, we got stuck in the center of the American Legion Bridge, and I peered over the barrier down into the overflowing, toxic Potomac below. The little dock shanties jutted out into the wide path of gray sludge. I saw men in crude gondolas navigating the river with long paddles, there for God knows what reason. I saw bonfires sporadically lining the banks, with burnouts and addicts standing around the flames, content to stare. All of them were destitute, picked clean by gangs and left with nothing more to ransack. Reams of homeless men purporting to be Arctic War veterans wandered through the middle of traffic, eager to sell dandelions and any other colorful weeds they had found in the ground.
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