Veracity (6 page)

"Then stand there and watch, but shut the fuck up, will you?"

As Gage rears back to yell something else to his partner, I sit up and begin to struggle against him. He gives me the
smallest push and I'm sent an inch into the yellow comforter. Breaking my slate has left me too weak to continue this fight, so I fix my gaze on the ceiling and think about my daughter. It's unimaginable, the things I've given up, and for nothing. For more of the same.

"She's a Monitor, for Christ's sake!" Skinner is yelling.

"Keep it up and I'm going to report you for obstruction of punitives!" Gage shouts. "Get the fuck out, Skinner, or shut the fuck up! It's one of the two!"

Skinner is livid. He's begun to pace back and forth at the end of the bed. The pacing stops only when my trousers are yanked off and flung across the room, followed shortly by my panties. "'Any and all officers present may take part in punitive actions against a rogue Monitor'!" he quotes. "And seeing as I don't do seconds, you're keeping me from my due service! Maybe I should report you for obstruction of justice!"

Gage ignores the other Blue Coat. He unbuckles his trousers and leans forward, pressing both his hands against my own. "Whatever, asshole." And with that, he makes a surging motion that takes us both an inch or two up the bed. But there is no contact. No penetration. "Stand there and give me a play-by-play if you like." Gage grunts, pretending at a satisfaction he doesn't feel. "It's up to you."

"God
damn
it, Gage!" Skinner shouts.

Gage ignores his partner's frustration, then starts thrusting again in a new way. This time holding on to my legs so I can't avoid the most intimate tangle. We are a mockery but Skinner's been taken in. The other Blue Coat's mind sees what it wants to, but there is no rape here. No violation other than the hot abrasion of John Gage's legs against mine.

Gage turns his full attention to me, reciting my punitives as his thighs scrape against my own. "Harper Adams. You're being served the following Confederation codes: 501A, 93B, and, if I have the strength for it, 878. The hour is roughly 1700 and we're at the farmhouse located at 2050 North Province Road just outside Bond."

Pop
. A button comes off my blouse and rolls across the floor. It stops on Skinner's boot, paused in the doorway.

"She's my collar," he whines.

"Then stay. But let me tell you something now." For the first time since my back hit the bed, I turn my face toward my attacker and see Gage's frown. He watches me as he talks to his partner, contrition all over his face. "No cop with an obstruction of punitives charge will be able to keep a partner. Not even out here in the sticks. And no partner, no badge. It's your choice, big mouth."

Gage's eyes are drawn. A line has formed down the center of his forehead and exclamation marks punctuate the outer corners of his lips. It's an expression that says,
Don't be afraid of me
. With it comes another shove, another grunt. Another foot moved up the bed, the two of us locked at the hips. I try to turn my head and he quickly looses a hand and forces my face back to his.
Play along now.

"Jesus Christ," Skinner pouts. He's about to give up.

I do as told. Struggle. The next jolt is stronger. It hurts my thighs and, for a million reasons, I begin to cry.

"You going to finish up soon, or what?" Skinner's voice is a blend of bitter and sweet. He's somewhere between pouting and needing to mend fences with his superior officer.

"I'll be finished when I'm finished. Now shut up."

"You'll do her, then? Finish her off?"

"Yes, yes," Gage agrees, and without another word, Jingo leaves.

As soon as the front door slams, we stop moving and wait like this, coupled. Hitched at the groin. I can hear Skinner's squad starting through the left-open front-porch door. Then the sound of his tires on the gravel drive.

Gage is staring down at the tears collected in my eyes. I look away and they slide across my cheeks.

"You okay?" he asks.

I don't remember answering. All I know is that a weight lifts off my hips, and then I'm gone.

Every morning I leave Veracity with a neighbor who gets her to the bus stop. I make the drive to work and eat my breakfast of a plain bagel with a cup of black coffee while waiting for the security guards to show up.

From the air, the capital city of Wernthal looks like a fallen moon. A disk smashed flat into the Confederation's east-central hills. Its round outer layer is all road, a ribbon of cement wide enough to keep the surrounding woods at bay. The center is a contrast of spikes and bumps. A cleat made up of diminutive office buildings and skyscraping monuments to President and his Ministers. The largest building in Wernthal is the Geddard Building, headquarters for the nation's Blue Coats.

A massive hunk of cement around which roads have been bent, the Geddard Building doesn't draw the eye or reflect the sun. The windows are small and blacked, the doors made of something metal that can't be broken through or knocked down. It isn't pretty because pretty doesn't communicate the right message. It covers three city blocks and has rooftop vents that belch waves of heat into the oily air. We're made to drive around it as a daily reminder of the hundreds of thousands of policemen working there. Some of them living there. They are ever present because of what's locked up tight in the basement: the redactors. These machines control all uploads and downloads. Gathering everything we say and do, documenting everywhere we go and distributing all freshly Red
Listed words to the slates implanted in our necks. There are tens of thousands of redactors, referred to as slaves, uplinked to the one master. The key to our slates has been stored in a room a third of a mile long by a third of a mile wide forty or fifty feet beneath an infestation of Blue Coats.

President's residence is the National House, the oldest building in the Confederation, boasting the largest patch of domesticated grass. It's retained more of its original character than most buildings are allowed because, as President likes to say, he has a softness for the beforetime. The National House, its adjacent gardens, and the surrounding business district are all considered a part of National House Square. Twelve blocks by twelve blocks, it boasts the most colorful streets in the country. Here, rules about the aesthetic are relaxed. President's gift. A little magenta, a little green, a little purple. Colors rarely found anywhere else.

The tented rooms used by prostitutes are cherry red. There's one on every corner. Inside, male and female prostitutes provide a variety of sexual services for so many credits each. According to the All Equals Law, every citizen aged eighteen and up has equal access to all government-sponsored products and services. It's supposed to mean there's no adult these sex workers can turn away, though files of this nature have crossed my desk a time or two.

The prostitutes are heavily costumed, or sometimes nude, whatever best expresses their sexual style. Each wears a corresponding red sash that runs from one side of the neck to the opposite hip. Customers wait outside for their turns, smoking cigarettes and drinking alcoholic beverages purchased from vending machines. They're unconcerned who sees them queued up between the velvet ropes. It's custom in the Confederation. Men wave as their neighbors pass. Women talk to one another about recipes and cleaning supplies, then disappear through the front door and come back out again, pink-faced and smiling.

In between the prostitutes' quarters are small tents set up
by the state clergy. Purple and green, they serve as counseling offices and Occlusia dispensaries. Inside, one of the Confederation Pastors delivers the approved word of God to those needing a little recap between Sundays. If there's an honest-to-goodness God's man in residence, these movable churches also dispense compassion, sanity, and hope. As with any other profession, quality varies. Like with the prostitutes' quarters, people tend to go where there's a line.

I don't visit either. As far as I'm concerned, both are designed for the same purpose. To sedate us. Or sate us, if just for a little while. President says it's not his preference, this safety-driven life we lead. If it weren't for his Ministers and all their research as to what's healthy for us and what's not, he'd allow us more to do than drink ourselves blind and fuck ourselves limp. This campaign has worked. I've grown less hateful toward President, even knowing what I do. And harder toward his twelve bug-eyed compatriots, who not so many years ago had real duties that mapped to real titles. Minister of Appropriations. Minister of Governmental Affairs. Minister of Tracking and Data. Now they are simply Minister Thomas. Minister Abbott. Minister Hawthorne. There is no separation of anything anymore. It is a blend, our government. A chocolate malt giving ridiculous orders. I'm amazed we've made it this far.

It's a Tuesday morning. Ten minutes before President's weekly address. Crowds have already formed at the gates surrounding National House Square. Those outside are squeezing themselves into the security posts. They offer themselves up half dressed, arms and legs splayed, anything to more quickly get through. Those crossing toward the gated gardens from which President will speak are dappled by the moving shadow of our nation's largest flag. Navy blue with a white patch in its center in the shape of a wide, cockeyed
F
, it swings from the nation's tallest pole just fifty feet beyond the gates.

I don't care for President's preening and head straight for my office. I'm late as it is.

The Murdon Building looks like a giant silver phallus sticking out of downtown Wernthal. The tallest in the nation at twelve hundred feet, it's the center for Tracking and Data, the oldest branch of the Confederation. It was built to sway with the high spring winds and tornadoes that come sideways through the Midwest, and has the largest security system in the country with over two dozen checkpoints. I run to get in line at the nearest one, but President comes out a few minutes early and I'm caught in the crowd running out through my building's front doors.

They flow noisily around me in their standard-issue hard-soled shoes. Rush toward the National House gates open-armed and en masse, their stampede shaking the concrete walk. They ignore the guards who've been trotted out with long, sharp-ended weapons and press themselves, crying, against the fence's steel posts. President is just fifty feet beyond. He's a tall man. White-haired. Eighty years old, though he looks much younger, with taut, shiny skin someone's pulled too tight. It makes the bones of his cheeks appear sharp, like they're about to break through his smiling face.
Children,
he says, as is his way, looking through an opening in his guards' two-line formation.
Let us see what God's got to tell us today.
President's armor of Blue Coats travels slowly, taking small, sliding steps that often land one of them on our High Executive's ample robes. When this happens, President will rock, unjointed, a solid block of plastic, and stop. It's the pause that shows us the potential of his rage. The way he breathes in and out. Slowly and with force.

As the guards see him safely to his raised podium and lock him away inside bullet-proof glass, the crowd grows louder. They're shouting in full voice for President and his Press Secretary to divine our future in the manner set down by the Confederation Bible. One speaks in tongues and the other interprets. President first, then Press Secretary Johnson.

The mood comes on President quickly this morning. He puts up his hands and rolls back his eyes. Unleashes a stream
of nonsense words, sounds that mean nothing to the rest of us and everything to the person standing just outside the glass case. Press Secretary Johnson is a heavy, rolling tub of a man who doesn't walk so much as ebb. He nods at President's words and flows toward the microphone to announce the day's good news, gleaned by some mystic knowing from President's gibberish.
There hath been a rash of wrongdoing, mostly in the south and central provinces. We must pray for the unholy among us. Those of wicked hearts and minds who would lead the others to a life of sin
. . . It's the same every time. After the usual lamentations for those who've fallen, usually by destroying their God-given slates, he begins an interpretation of President's predictions.
Lo, but there is to be a mighty technological effort that will still the land. Soon! There will be a new eye in the sky that will end the flight for those who would put themselves first and their fellow citizens last. And, too, there is the program now being tendered by Monitors . . .

This gets my attention. I turn around to watch the morning spectacle and the woman waiting behind me frowns. She's already got her shoes off. They dangle by their straps from one hand.

"Ma'am?" the Security Guard calls to me impatiently. He's new. Young with small, angry eyes and tight, angular jaws. He flips two fingers downward, motioning me into the shoot with a deprecation that makes the others around us cringe. They know who I am. This new young guard does not.

I move ahead as Press Secretary Johnson continues.
There is only one of them now! But she is a prophet to move mountains!

I can't help myself. Smirk at President's bullshit.

The new guard thinks I'm smirking at him. "Okay. Hold it there." He puts a hand on my jacket. "Remove this garment, ma'am," he says, then yanks it off my shoulders before I can comply, growling when it gets caught on my elbows.

President is still warbling behind us, Press Secretary
interpreting,
This woman and the team of others she will help us find, they shall be the Lord's eyes!

The guard reaches for my satchel, which contains a dozen confidential files. If even one of them falls out, he'll be fired. Or worse. I drop the handles and off comes my taupe linen jacket into his thick hands. The files stay where they are.