Patrick Griffin's Last Breakfast on Earth (20 page)

“Course closed with all this rain, you know,” said the stranger.

Frank Kyle gave the red-nosed man a hard look and flexed his right hand, his knuckles crackling with a noise like hail on a metal roof.

The man coughed nervously. “But I'm sure they'll open it soon—maybe you can get in a few rounds!”

“Yes, I will get in a few rounds,” said Novitiate Frank Kyle as his dark eyes watched the man's car speed away across the parking lot.

He slung the golf bag over his shoulder, slammed closed the trunk, glanced at the sensor app on his BNK-E, and headed toward the seventh green to put a fatal hole in one unwanted visitor.

 

CHAPTER 31

The Color Crimson

“Right this way, if you please!” said the weaselly little man in the road-cone-orange uniform.

The provost stopped screaming and cleared his throat self-consciously. Kempton, a degree more rattled, kept on screaming.

The orange man cleared his throat, too, and was starting to seem impatient until his eyes settled on Patrick, at which point he looked rather astonished.

“What's the sitrep, Safety Warden Schoen?!” asked the provost.

“Um,” said the little man, wrenching his eyes from Patrick's ears, “sir, POP has declared a Code Crimson.”

“Yes, I heard that,” said the provost, reasserting a measure of his proper administrative stature. “What is the
causal
situation!?”

At this point Kempton broke off screaming to listen.

“Oh, uh, Anarchist incident. They've somehow blue-screened the prefectural grid and undertaken multiple propaganda attacks. I am supposed to—”

“So we're to return to our domiciles—”

“The superattendant is
on premises
, sir, and wants a debrief.”

The provost visibly flinched at this news. “Of course,” he said.

“So, again, if you'd please follow me.”

“All of us?!” asked Kempton.

“Yes, all of you,” confirmed the safety warden, gesturing to the doorway and stomping his foot like a soldier at attention.

“This is
unprecedented
,” said Kempton, running his fingers along the part in his hair as he and Patrick got up from their seats. “A Code Crimson
and
we're going to see the superattendant—all in the same
day
!”

“Code Crimson?” asked Patrick.

“Everybody but admins and authorized personnel confined to domiciles,” said Kempton. “It's the highest level of emergency there is!”

They made their way down the main hallway, out the school's front doors, and onto a driveway loop crowded with vehicles covered with logos and retina-staining strobes. Though the aircraft were similar in size and shape to the sky-ambulance that had come to the field earlier, these were mostly gray and bristling with knobs and struts.

Brown-booted, olive-uniformed soldiers were standing around the aircraft. A crew in white jumpsuits was working power-brushes and sprayers along one side of the school. Somebody had spray-painted a message on the smooth concrete wall—

TRUST NOBODY WITH 2 FIRST NAMES

“Is that graffiti in
Earth
writing?” asked Kempton. “What's it say?”

Patrick read it aloud.

“Interesting they wrote it in Earthish,” said Kempton. “It must have been for your specific benefit.”

“You are to report to the command tent,” said Safety Warden Schoen, stopping suddenly and gesturing.

The provost squared his shoulders and led the boys in the direction the safety warden had indicated. As they crossed the turnaround, the gathered soldiers began oohing, ahing, and taking videos of Patrick on their binkies.

Patrick didn't much enjoy the experience but Kempton was lapping it up. He kept bumping into Patrick as he tried not to drift outside the frame of anybody's video.

“Go right on in,” said the provost, stopping at the side of the tent. A formerly invisible slit in the white fabric peeled open, and Kempton, with a smiling turn to the cameras, ushered Patrick into the dim, buzzing interior of the tent. The place was pulsing and flickered with the light of dozens of electronic displays and holographs. But, more than all the gadgetry, what drew Patrick's eye was an imposing, broad-shouldered, short-haired woman dressed in khaki like a general and standing over a holographic map of what looked to be the northeastern part of the United States.

Her voice—a degree lower than Bostrel's baritone—was imposing as her appearance. “Ah, there you are!”

Provost Bostrel gave a quick bow. “Superattendant Stifel—
what
an honor!”

Patrick looked over to Kempton to see if he was going to bow, too, but he was just standing there, jaw hanging open.

“Good to see you again, Provost Bostrel,” said the woman, her large flint-colored eyes turning to Patrick. “And you must be
Patrick Griffin
.”

He felt as if he were being x-rayed. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

“Yes,” said the woman. Patrick guessed she must be his mother's age but she was a whole lot harder looking: her chin was square as a cleaver and the skin of her face rigid as uncured leather.

She smiled now, revealing an expanse of surprisingly big gums and small teeth. Patrick decided there was a whole lot more pink than white in there at any rate.

“Now, can you please tell us about that unpleasant young Anarchist who accosted you in the locker room?”

A brown-uniformed man stepped forward with a two-handed apparatus consisting of a long-shafted, fabric-covered microphone together with camera barrel inside which, Patrick surmised, there might possibly be a not-quite-giant-squid eyeball. The device was plugged into the technician's belt-holstered binky via slender silver cords.

“Your Eminence,” blurted Kempton, “she was a female aged approximately fourteen to sixteen yies, weight close to thirty-five kilos, shaved brown hair, gray costume, and she was
armed
with a telescoping metal whip!”

“And, Patrick Griffin,
your
impressions of the perpetrator?” said the deep-voiced superattendant as Bostrel put a corrective hand on Kempton's shoulder and whispered something in his ear.

“Umm,” said Patrick, “you mean, like—”

“What pops into your head when you think of her? Did she seem nice? Pretty? Smart? Short? Physically fit? Articulate? Talented?”

“Well, she was good with her whip thingy.”

The woman cocked her square head at him.

“I mean her aim was pretty good.”

“She was adept at interpersonal combat?”

“Sure, well, she was kind of dressed like a ninja and she definitely took down Kempton pretty fast, so, yeah, I guess.”

Kempton shifted uncomfortably but didn't say anything. The woman meantime pursed her narrow lips and looked at her binky. “Thank you. And, please, to the best of your ability to recall, tell us what she said to you.”

“Well, I guess she was talking about how cameras were everywhere and that's when she busted the mirror,” he replied, trying to make room for the encroaching brown-shirted cameraman and his microphone boom. “I think she was sort of making a point,” he continued, “that there are too many cameras here on Ith.”

“Well,” said the woman. “Of course, you know there
are
cameras in lots of places. But does it strike
you
that there are actually
too
many, Patrick Griffin?”

“What do you mean?” asked Patrick.

“That there are more cameras here than you would like to see? Surely you have them on Earth?”

“Yeah,” said Patrick. “Like at school and in malls and stuff, you know…”

“Yes,” said the superattendant. “And presumably there, as here, they are installed for the public good—a means to help people make the very best decisions, and to keep public services functioning at maximum efficiency?”

Patrick gave a confused look and she went on. “For instance, if there's a signaling issue at such-and-such an intersection, it allows the Department of Thoroughfares and Byways to reroute traffic to ameliorate the situation. But the notion that the government hides cameras in bathrooms—
or
in private homes,
or
in designated privacy zones—is completely ludicrous. You may in fact be gratified to see,” she said, waving at the table map and causing it to transform into an array of hovering locker-room architectural plans, camera schematics, evidence labels, and text reports, “a
wealth
of evidence has surfaced proving that the camera you saw was indeed a malicious plant.”

“Oh,” said Patrick. She was obviously trying to convince him it was the way things were but it still just didn't make sense to him. What would happen, he wondered, if he pushed back on her the way he had pushed back on Kempton in the locker room about not wearing makeup?

“Well,” he said, resolving again that it was his dream, after all. “It still seems like it must have been a lot of trouble to put a camera behind the mirror like that.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I mean,” explained Patrick, voicing what seemed pretty obvious to him, “they had to figure out there was a hollow space in there and then they had to replace a whole mirror with a big giant sheet of one-way glass without anybody noticing and whatnot.”

“Ah,” she said, smiling like an indulgent parent, “you will come to find their perniciously clever efforts can result in feats of ingenuity far greater than
that
.”

The cameraman bobbed his head in rueful support.

“But why a camera in a bathroom? I mean, if they wanted to cause trouble, wouldn't there be easier and better ways?”

“Easier, perhaps, but
better
?”

“Yeah, you know, like more destructive. Like, you know, a bomb or something.”

“Physical destruction is one thing, but the sort of destruction they seek is more potent. They seek to create
doubt
.”

“Doubt?”

“Yes, and bombs don't create doubt.
Questions
create doubt. Consider: Did seeing that planted camera not lead you to
ask questions
? Did you yourself not just
ask
why they'd put a camera in the bathroom?”

Patrick thought this through.

“Fortunately, science and common sense will triumph as they always have, and they will fail to infect your mind, Patrick Griffin.”

“
My
mind?”

“Your mind—your
opinions
—Patrick Griffin, are of tremendous interest to us all. You being a person of such significance, these selfish, short-sighted criminals will continue to do everything they can to poison you against us.”

“But why am
I
so important?”

“Because the
eyes
of the world are upon you. Because you are the first emissary the Minder has sent us since Rex fifty yies ago.”

“Okay,” said Patrick, thinking of the way the kids at school and the soldiers just now had reacted to him. Still, what she was saying sounded more like a smart thing to say than it did an actual explanation.

“But,” he continued, “how about this: to plant a camera there, they must have known I was going to be in that bathroom, right? But even
I
didn't know I was going to be there until I had to change my clothes, and I didn't know I'd have to use a sink till—”

“It's not immediately obvious but the explanation is quite simple: they operate in
sleeper cells
. In a case like this they merely need to keep their local agents on alert and give them the authority to self-activate. Clearly, this young woman—or a nearby co-conspirator—was watching and realized you would be at that particular place, a place where she and her fellow deviants had prepared a ‘trap,' if you will. We have deactivated such installations all over the world. It fits to a tee their standard modus operandi.”

“Their what-erandy?” asked Patrick.

“Their MO, their method of operation. That said, rest assured—now that we've gauged their keen interest in your arrival—POP and the YSS subministries are scanning
all
locations you might possibly visit in the coming days, and necessary protocols are being put in place to ensure minimum disruption. Take comfort that we have long had these Anarchists on the run, and it's only a matter of time before we entirely extirpate their movement.”

“Minder be praised!” exclaimed Bostrel, and Kempton looked up brightly.

“Well, now, let's give you some tests and get you on your way.”

“Tests?” asked Patrick.

“Tests, yes—a physical examination so we can benchmark your physical condition and ensure you enjoy the greatest possible wellness.

“And, after the exam is complete,” she continued, “you and your host family are to visit with the Seer in Silicon City.”