The Bar Code Rebellion (15 page)

By three in the morning they were back at Allyson’s kitchen table feeling overwhelmed by what they’d discovered. “This is so hard to believe,” Kayla said. “Is something like this really possible?”

“It’s very possible,” Allyson confirmed. “Self-replicating nanobots have been around for more than twenty-five years. Only a few of them have to be introduced into the bloodstream, and soon they’ll replicate on their own. They’re programmed to do that. They can be programmed to fight disease, or they can be programmed to make you kill yourself, apparently.” She shivered. “And they’re inside all of us with the code.”

“Do you think they used suicide nanobots on August?” Kayla asked.

“I’m almost certain they did,” Allyson replied. “He was a known bar code resister. Zekeal spotted him in the Adirondacks during a raid and reported him.” She swore passionately under her breath, calling Zekeal foul names.

“But he didn’t have a bar code,” Jack remarked.

“He did,” Allyson told him. “He burned it off, but the nanobots were still in his blood. He worked
at a biotech plant where he’d witnessed some experiments they didn’t want him to see. They threatened him.”

“I remember,” Kayla said. “They told him that if he didn’t live there as a caretaker they’d alter the information in his bar code so he could never get another job. They wanted to make him into a slave. I wonder if the company was a division of GlobalHelix.”

“Every biotech company is owned by Global-1, either directly or indirectly,” Jack reminded her. “Poor guy. How did he get away?”

“He burned off his bar code tattoo and went into hiding, but I guess they got to him in the end,” Allyson concluded grimly.

“This is why David Young is on suicide watch, too,” Jack realized. “Remember he said he couldn’t talk? That’s one of the side effects of that nerve overstimulation thing! I bet they plan to kill him, too. They’re just announcing that he’s suicidal so no one will suspect. Then they’ll zap him with that stimulator when they’re ready to get rid of him.”

“Oh, I hope not,” Allyson said. “But it sure seems like what they have in mind.”

“Mfumbe was bar-coded in the roundup,” Kayla said, the stunning reality of the situation hitting her with full force. “And now he’s so sick and depressed. I was able to make telepathic contact with him and I sensed it.”

Her eyes welled with tears that she fought down.
It wasn’t a time to be emotional. It was a time to think clearly. They’d beaten him, but he was also very depressed. She was sure he’d already had his nanobots activated with the depression-causing vagus nerve overstimulation. He was a known bar code resister. Did it mean they were going to put him into phase III? Were they planning to kill him?

Allyson got up and took a large manila envelope from a desk drawer. She slipped the thick packet of papers into it. “Tomorrow I’m going to campus early,” she told them. “There’s a lot of underground Global-1 resistance at Caltech. There’s a guy in the infometrics department who does a weekly drop and pickup with a Postman. I want to make a copy of this stuff and get it to Ambrose Young. Are you guys all right with that?”

“It’s a good idea,” Jack agreed as Kayla nodded. “And after that, maybe we should go to Santa Monica to look for KM-4, Kass Clark.”

“I love it here,” Kayla said the next day as they walked down the Santa Monica pier boardwalk. A couple on Rollerblades weaved around them at breakneck speed. To the side, a street performer contorted his muscles like a rubber band before landing in a full split.

A very dark-skinned young guy on roller skates whizzed past, thrusting a flyer into Jack’s hands as he went. He continued on, passing out the flyers to everyone he passed. “‘David Jung and the Fortune
Cookie,’” Jack read, glancing down at it. “Hey, this is written by your friend Mfumbe.”

DAVID JUNG AND THE FORTUNE COOKIE

Today, a great champion of the people, David Young, lies in a correction facility hospital bed in a state of deep depression. I believe this depressive state has no organic cause. I believe that David Young has been fed some kind of drug or been immobilized by his enemies in some other way.

In my research I came upon a story of another group of people who, over a hundred years ago, had reason to feel despair about their lives, just as so many of us do today. As we have been encouraged by David Young, so were these people made hopeful by a man with an incredibly similar name — David Jung.

Many scholars believe that the fortune cookie was invented in 1918 by a man named David Jung, a Chinese immigrant living in Los Angeles. David Jung was the founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company. Concerned about the poor he saw wandering near his shop, he created the cookies and passed them out free on the streets. Each cookie contained a strip of paper with an inspirational Bible scripture on it, chosen for Jung by a Presbyterian minister. Mr. Jung held out a message of hope to the discouraged, just as our
Senator Young has held out hope to all of us by his tireless work and leadership in Decode.

Now it is time for all of us who have benefited from David Young’s work to return the favor. Send him messages of hope and encouragement. Write signs and stand below his window with them. Send him inspirational messages inside fortune cookies.

Written by Mfumbe Taylor
Decode member and supporter of David Young

“He’s so down and sick himself, yet he managed to get this campaign going,” Allyson commented when the three of them had read the paper.

“He must be an amazing guy,” Jack remarked.

“He is,” Kayla agreed quietly, thinking of him. Did this mean he was feeling better, or had he done it by an extreme effort of will?

They continued walking down the boardwalk, taking in the carnival-like atmosphere. Stationed outside a gigantic old roller-coaster a skinny, barefoot portrait artist with a shaved head sat in a sleeveless undershirt and shorts in front of an easel where he did pastel sketches for twenty dollars. Jack, Allyson, and Kayla stopped to watch him draw a young blond woman wearing only a bikini and Rollerblades.

He was good, working with intense concentration as his hands flew across the paper. Kayla
was so involved with watching him work that it took her a minute to realize she knew him. “Artie?” she said.

He looked up at her, annoyed to have his focus diverted, but his expression instantly became friendly. “Kayla! No way!” He held up one finger, indicating that he’d be with her as soon as he’d finished the sketch.

Jack and Allyson stared at Kayla questioningly. “I used to work for him after school at Artie’s Art Supply,” she explained. “He was the only one who would hire me even though I didn’t have a bar code because he didn’t have one, either.” A quick glance told her he still didn’t. “Then one day I showed up at work and the store was locked. His apartment above the store was empty, too.”

Artie tore off the sketch and gave it to his pleased customer, who handed over two green marbles. He stood and hugged Kayla warmly. “Why did you leave so suddenly?” she asked. It was a question she’d been dying to ask but never thought she’d have the chance to.

His face clouded over with the unpleasant memory. “You know I have two little girls, right?”

“I know.” Kayla recalled the two preschool-aged blond daughters who accompanied their mother through the store on their way up to the apartment every afternoon.

“Social services called us one day after the bar code became law. The woman there said that it
had been brought to their attention that my wife, Sally, and I didn’t have bar codes … which made us unfit parents. It was either get a bar code, pronto, or the girls would be taken away from us. So we ran. Left it all behind and headed across country.”

“What bastards,” Allyson hissed.

“It was for the best,” Artie said. “It’s easier to live off the grid out here. I do pretty well at the portraiture — and it’s cash money.”

“What do you mean, cash?” Jack asked.

Artie smiled at him. “Not cash like it was before they got rid of it in 2020.” He held out the two green marbles the woman had just given him. They were engraved with the initials
GD.

Opening a metal cash box, he dropped them in among other marbles of various colors. “Each color is worth a different amount. A lot of people live off the grid around here, so we use these as a kind of currency. The Drakians manufacture them and started the whole system. The
GD
stands for Gene Drake. He was a guy who actually lived near us —”

“We know,” Kayla cut him off. “He was my neighbor, and Jack here is a Drakian.”

Artie hugged him, unembarrassed. “Keep up the fight, man,” he said. “You guys help us all stay strong.”

“We do what we have to,” Jack replied.

Artie looked at their wrists. “Fakes?” he surmised.

They nodded. “Mine’s real,” Allyson admitted. “I had to get it in order to go to school.”

“No shame,” Artie said kindly. “They try to corner us in any way they can. Drakians dropped off a batch of fakes just the other day. I keep a couple for emergencies, but I like to make a little show of resistance by not wearing one.”

Kayla told him how her fake contained the file of Kathryn Reed. She said Kathryn was her grandmother, not wanting to go into the whole explanation. “She once did portraits down here, too,” she added.

“That’s a coincidence,” Artie remarked. He opened his cash box and scooped up a handful of marbles. “Take these,” he said as he pressed them in Kayla’s hand. “I never gave you your last paycheck, and you’ll need them around here.”

“Thanks.”

“You know what else? One day I was positive I saw you here,” he said, suddenly seeming to remember the event. “I even ran after you — but it wasn’t you. Turns out there’s a gal on the boardwalk who reads palms. She could be your twin.”

Kayla’s heart quickened with excitement. “Do you know where I can find her?”

Artie put a
BACK IN FIVE
sign over his easel. “I’ll take you there.”

“I feel I should see her alone,” Kayla said after Artie had left them outside a narrow white store-front with a sign saying
PALM READER
over the door.

“What if she’s like Kendra?” Jack worried.

“I’ll scream. So don’t go too far.”

“Be careful,” Allyson cautioned.

With a nod, Kayla pushed open the front door. Inside was a very narrow waiting room with three metal folding chairs. A doorway covered with a purple Indian print curtain led into the next room. A sign above the door gave the instruction:
READING 25.00 GD. NO BAR CODES ACCEPTED. WAIT TO BE CALLED
.

Charcoal sketches of landscapes were tacked to the dirty white wall. Their perspective was from above, as if the artist had been airborne. They were initialed KMC.

Is she dreaming the dreams birds dream, seeing what they see?
Kayla wondered.

A young man dressed in surfer trunks and a T-shirt emerged from the back room looking ashen despite his golden tan. “Too freaky,” he said when he noticed Kayla.

“Accurate?” Kayla asked.

“I don’t know. I hope not, but I guess I’ll find out.”

“Enter!” a female voice commanded from beyond the curtain.

Kayla walked into a nearly black room. Only the light coming in on either side of the curtain from the outside room allowed her to see the young woman. Her hair was dyed jet-black and bobbed bluntly at the chin. Eyes shut, she swayed back and forth as she sat straight up in a folding chair. Her
lip, nose, eyebrow, and ears were pierced with many small silver rings that gleamed in the dim light.

Even in the darkness Kayla could discern her own mouth, nose, chin, and brow.

Kayla sat in the chair that had been placed across from her. “Give me your hand,” the palm reader instructed, and Kayla heard her own voice speaking to her.

Kass Clark’s eyes remained shut as she stroked Kayla’s hand with a hand remarkably like her own. The crashing waves of Venice Beach were the only sound in the room. Kayla remembered the vision she’d had of the two identical hands with the ocean sounds in the background.

Kass abruptly clenched Kayla’s hand with great strength. Her eyes snapped open. The eyes beneath the lids were blank, coated with a milky film.

With an involuntary gasp, Kayla realized that Kass was blind.

“You are the other self I have seen in my vision,” Kass said, tremendously excited. “It’s you. The fire walker.”

“Yes. I came here to meet you,” Kayla replied.

Kass clasped Kayla’s hand in both of hers. “Thank God you’re here. In a dream, I have seen a terrible evil. Lines of the living but dead walking into the ocean, robbed of their ability to say no, to resist. Ravaging insects crawl through their blood, setting fires. Their brains are burning! You are the
fire-walker self. You have transcended the flame. It’s up to you to stop this. Help will be called from the sky, though I do not know if it will come in time to save us all.”

Somehow Kayla didn’t question her words. She knew what they meant and understood that they were true. Kass was relaying a powerful vision that Kayla trusted. “How can I stop it?” she asked urgently.

“The last self.”

“KM-6?”

Kass nodded.

“But she died at birth,” Kayla said quietly.

“KM-6 is
not
dead. She went deep inside herself to a place where they would never find her. KM-6 is the phoenix, and I have touched her with my mind. Now you must find her with yours.”