Generation of Liars

Copyright © 2012 by
Camilla Marks.

Lightning Flower
Books and Entertainment

All Rights Reserved

Summary: Welcome to The Generation
of Liars, where a data-swiping cyber attack has created a generation of pretenders.
Meet Alice Fix, a skinny runaway with bright-streaked hair who keeps a very
important name hidden inside her shoe. From the CIA to blackhat hackers to her
very scary boss, can Alice keep her secrets hidden and stay alive?

Cover Design by Eric Michaels

First Edition

This novel is a work of fiction.
Any character’s resemblance or likeness to any person living or deceased is a
coincidence. While the locations are real, the events portrayed are entirely
fictional. But then again, a liar would say that, wouldn’t they?

PROLOGUE

The Recruitment

THREE
YEARS AGO
TIME
magazine placed an image of a blonde, blue-eyed
baby on the cover of its November issue dressed in nothing but a diaper and a
lively smile. The cover baby is waving an American flag with one hand while two
fingers on his other hand are crossed deceitfully
behind
his back. The headline accompanying the curious picture reads: The Generation
of Liars
is Born.

The November issue became the
bestselling in
TIME
’s hundred-year history. The public was hungry, and
who could blame them? We had just been attacked.

It’s not that readers of
TIME
were looking for the dirty details of the attack. Those were abundantly
repeated ad nauseam on all the 24-hour news cycles. What readers were really searching
for was a glimpse into the future, a commentary on what was the come. You see,
this was no ordinary terrorist attack. There was no death and no bloodshed -
and the only real casualty of what came to be known as the November Hit was our
true identities. You have to go back to that day in November to really
understand who I am. This is my origin story. The story of how I became the
girl with red stained beneath her fingernails and a strand of cold diamonds
pressed against her throat.

When I say that the attack stole
our identities, I don’t mean that in some metaphysical, esoteric, self-help
book way. I mean our literal identities. The paper trail that accompanies us
all from birth. Our nine-digit Social Security number. The attack was not a
brick and mortar strike. It was executed on the blurry and undefined
battlefield of cyberspace. The atomic cherry bomb that set it all off was a
virus that infiltrated the servers at the Social Security Administration. It
was a silent boom, but it was a messy boom.

There was a marigold sun in the sky
the morning the hackers hit and when I close my eyes I can still relive the
feel of the blow dryer heating my palms as I rolled my hair into soft ringlets
in front of the mirror. I remember the wholesome scent of the tube of
strawberry lip gloss I dabbed over my lips, stronger and riper now in my
memories than it ever was in real life. Shiny lips. Green eyes. Lashes like
black moths. I was happy with my reflection in the mirror, framed with rose-cut
glass tears. But as I swung my backpack onto my shoulders to leave for my 8 A.M political science class, something on the television caught my attention. I hadn’t
heard a word of what the news anchor was saying beneath the hum of the blow
dryer. Now I did. Fear was making her voice wobble and I noticed that her face
was anguished beneath those silly cocktail-hour eyelashes and blush-stamped
cheeks women behind the news desk always wear. I cupped a hand to my sticky
lips as I read the headline ticking across the bottom of the screen.
Cyber
Attack Launched Against
United States of America
.

I was parked in front of the
television. The whole country was. The girls from the other dormitories were
all crowding around the television in the communal lounge. A second alert came
around 3 P.M. A bleeding echo of the announcement was seeping from all the
televisions in the building. The unidentified hackers had unleashed a second
leg of the attack, and this time it was a quick-spreading virus moving from
user to user through chain emails and popular social networking websites. In
the aftermath, government programmers deciphered that the virus was designed to
seek out and erase all nine-digit number combinations. The target was our
Social Security numbers. All very unfortunate since the United States
Government had just completed the multi-billion dollar process of converting
all public records to digital and cloud formats, and shredding the paper.

Other databases didn’t fare much
better. The virus recklessly and indiscriminately managed to tear through the
internet like a rocket packed with nails and glass, destroying millions of
online files, newspaper archives, and private records. But this story isn’t
about the anonymous hackers that did this. I don’t even know who they are or
why they did it. This story is about the lives that were changed by the attack,
and the strange new possibilities it created. This story is also about the
secret note hidden inside my shoe.

Let’s go back to that
TIME
magazine cover I mentioned. I’m sure you’re wondering how a naked baby with
crossed fingers on a magazine cover fits into this equation. Aside from being
cute, the duplicitous baby captured the important question about what would
happen to us as a society now that our identities had been wiped out. Black market
back alley ID rings had already sprung up overnight. Was this going to be a
free pass for us all to become whatever alias we desired to be? The person who
thought up
TIME
’s famous cover story, a gumshoe reporter named Elliot
Risk, reminisced that in decades past the country had given birth to The
Greatest Generation, Generation X, and Generation Y, to name a few. Would the
November Hit make us the first ever Generation of Liars?

The writer questioned if we were
destined to devolve into a genesis of charlatans and frauds, able to slip skins
as easily as a fabricated Social Security card and a box of cheap hair color.
To give gauche to his point, Mr. Risk cleverly twisted a popular slogan of the
1960s radicals to say:
Never
Trust Anyone Over the Age of Zero
. There was no escaping this slogan.
The slogan got stamped onto T-shirts and coffee mugs - and the cover baby’s
face, blue eyes and all, became a sort of symbol for the brave new world we
were hurtling towards.  

Despite the hysteria following the
attack, and the doomful speculation that was exacerbated by the 24-hour news
media, the hype behind the article never played out. It took less than a week
before life in the United States was pretty much back to normal, and soon the
baby’s face on the cover of
TIME
was replaced by a celebrity divorce.
Oh, and inevitably, the hordes of T-shirts stitched with Elliot Risk’s trite
slogan found pop-culture repose inside Salvation Army bins.

Now that all records of our Social
Security numbers were dust thanks to the November Hit, the government’s
foremost priority was to reestablish order and regain control of documenting
its citizens. No surprise there. The first step of the recovery was a mandate
requiring all citizens to re-register on paper with the Social Security
Administration. Eager for their Social Security checks or payroll clearance,
nearly every citizen complied.

Nearly
every citizen, but
not all of us. There was never a perfect re-registration count and it drove the
suits at Homeland Security mad. The author of the
TIME
article, Elliot
Risk, wasn’t completely wrong when he postulated on a grand-scale movement of
liars. He simply failed to accurately pinpoint the category of people who would
take advantage of the situation. People with secrets.

In the wake of the November Hit, an
underground and rogue population of people, those who never re-registered their
identities on paper, sprang up. They chose to leave their old lives behind and
be baptized into the Generation of Liars. My name is Alice Fix and I’m part of
the Generation of Liars. But like I said, it’s nothing like that writer
predicted, and when that cute baby wearing Huggies on the magazine cover grows
up and goes to school, I’m pretty sure he will never learn about us in the
history books. We are a group of Americans, scattered across the globe, living
our lives with two fingers crossed behind our backs so to speak.

My reason for leaving my old life
behind and taking on an alias is simple.

I have a secret.

A bad secret. A secret as heavy as
a lodestone, threatening to drag me down into a bonfire and brimstone abyss.
This secret is so terrifying to face that I was willing to give up the only
life I knew in order to keep it concealed from daylight. Something gruesome
happened on that fate-cursed November day between the time I put my backpack on
my pillow to drink in the television and midnight striking. I made a horrible
mistake. One I never saw coming. Sitting there in front of the television with
my legs crossed beneath my pleated skirt, my poly-sci book doubling as an elbow
rest, and the taste of strawberry gloss soaking my lips, I never would have
thought that the news I was hearing about the cyber attack would soon become
the best thing that ever happened to me. I had no idea that I was about to need
to run away.

Let’s get some things straight.
Living life under an alias is not for the faint of heart. Running away meant
leaving my school, my family, my boyfriend - everything ever I knew. The
morning I left was the start of a chilly November day, and when I had gotten
sixty miles from home, I met a man in Grand Central Station who said he had a
job that could change everything. His name is Motley. Motley is in his late
forties, with a full head of sandy blond hair and intense blue eyes.

“Can you keep a secret?” Those were
the words Motley stopped to ask me over a screaming train from the New Haven
line as it kissed the platform. He showed up in my life wearing a tan
three-piece suit and a grin that would have warned a smarter girl to stay away.

“Yes,” I answered. I could feel my
teeth chattering inside my cheeks. It must have been something about my
insecure eyes that attracted him to me. He was probably drawn to me like a
toothy lion to a limping baby antelope. I had the word amateur written all over
me. I didn’t know how to read the outbound train schedule and the only
possessions I had on me were a pink backpack full of clothes and a very
important handwritten note tucked inside my shoe. The note was a confession. I
had written it in magic marker under the moonlight the night before. I promised
myself I would carry it always, so that if anything ever happened to me the
people I hurt could know why I ran away.

“Follow me,” Motley said. The
silver tooth in place of his incisor looked like a board game token. “I have a
job for you that will take you far away.” He led me down the long, collinear
walkway that paralleled the tracks. The station was full of busy travelers
dragging scratchy luggage wheels across the expanse of Grand Central Terminal.
Noise, color, confusion – I am experiencing the whole thing through
fearblindness. I followed this stranger, Motley, a swagger zipping from the
soles of his freshly-shined alligator loafers, to inside the Rite Aid wedged
into Grand Central Terminal. We passed the magazine racks, brimming with
medleys of sensational headlines about the attack; and that baby with the
bright blue eyes staring back at me from the cover of
TIME
. Motley led
me to the beauty aisle. The aisle was in bloom with color. Nail polishes,
blushes, eye shadows all in cosmic colors of cosmetic luminosity.

He stopped at the hair dye.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“Pick something out.” Those were
his instructions.

My eyes roved the shiny labels on
the shelves. I liked one of the models on one of the boxes. She had cherry-red
hair and a spark in her algae-green eyes. I looked up at Motley for approval on
my selection. He nodded and carried it to the register to pay. The teenager who
rang it up was wearing a white T-shirt and he had used black marker to scribble
the slogan,
Never Trust
Anyone Over the Age of Zero.
Beside the register, playing cards were
mixed with the impulse buys; chewing gum and mints, and Motley picked up one of
the packs and ran his fingers along its edges. He looked like he was about to
place it on the counter to purchase it, but he put it back. The brand of the
cards was Fool’s Luck.

With the cellophane bag crushed in
his hand, Motley led me back into the main terminal, and into the conflux of
travelers shoving through the midday rush. The next place we stopped was in
front of one of the automated ticket kiosks. Motley didn’t tell me where we
were headed, but I saw the letters JFK flash on the screen and noticed that
three separate tickets were printing. My eyes darted to see if there was a
third passenger waiting off in the distance. I spotted no one.