UnDivided (21 page)

From Cam's vantage point at the fence, he sees three FedEx trucks at the front entrance. Workers unload cargo. One of the drivers, in familiar purple-and-black shirt and shorts, hands a clipboard to none other than Roberta, who is there to sign for the delivery. Cam thinks it odd that Proactive Citizenry wouldn't use their own private delivery trucks to shuttle this cargo from the airport, but then maybe the CEO of FedEx is on Proactive Citizenry's board. After all, it's the preferred philanthropic organization of corporate America.
The more Cam considers it, the more he realizes it must be true. How ingenious! Why go to the mountain when you can use an existing infrastructure to move the mountain to you, one piece at a time?

Cam leaves, having seen what he needed to see. He heads back through the bamboo, takes a different route, cutting through the cane and taro, then onto the jogging path once more, completing his jog back to the house.

One of the ubiquitous guards stands there, not too pleased. “Found him,” he says into his earpiece, then to Cam, “Where've you been?”

“Shortcut through the sugarcane. Bad idea, though, the stuff hurts.” He wipes some blood from one of several small scratches on his face.

“Do us all a favor and stick to the path next time. We get crap every time you don't toe the line.”

“Gotta make life interesting.”

“Dull is fine by me.”

As he goes up to take a shower, Cam considers what he had seen. Those could have been shipments of just about anything, except for one fact. The shipping containers were FedEx stasis packs. Refrigerated. Perfect for live organs, although they're not usually used for that. But then, Proactive Citizenry knows how to do things without raising red flags. A FedEx plane flies in and out of Molokai daily. How many parts, Cam wonders, are flowing into this complex every day? With so much going in, it's only a matter of time before things begin coming out. . . .

•  •  •

Roberta doesn't trust Cam the way she used to—but like the designers of the security system, she trusts herself and her own ability not to be outwitted. Herein lies the problem of building someone smarter than yourself—because even with the nanite
“worm” selectively routing his memory, Cam has no problem duplicating the holographic digital signature of her security badge. That's easy. The hard part is finding a way to convince the security computer that Roberta is in two places at once, because an identity signature pinging from two separate locations is certain to trip an alarm. In the end, he takes a different tack, and instead convinces the server that today is, in fact, yesterday. Since no one told the computer that there's no such thing as time travel, it sees nothing out of the ordinary when history repeats itself in a different place.

The rear door of the secret facility—the factory hidden within the bamboo—opens as obediently as Aladdin's cave to the correct “open sesame,” now that he has cloned Roberta's badge.

Cam isn't sure whether it would help or hinder him to know why he's doing this. All he knows—and he knows this beyond a shadow of a doubt—is that The Girl whose love motivates him is worth it. The fact that he doesn't know who she is anymore is irrelevant: His pretweaked self knew, and he trusts
that
self more than he trusts himself now.

It's five thirty a.m. There are plenty of guards, but they're anything but quiet, and he can hide long before they pass by on their routine patrols. There are also plenty of security cameras, but he already has the monitors running happy little video loops of quiet little hallways. The place is his to explore.

Using Roberta's forged security card, he gains access into several rooms. They're all the same. Long wards lined with empty beds, perhaps fifty in each. It's in the fourth room he visits that he hits the jackpot.

In this room, the beds are occupied.

He had a suspicion of what he might see, but imagining it and seeing it are two different things.

In each bed is a rewind, like himself . . . and yet not like
himself. Some still wear bandages, but others, whose healing is further along, have the bandages removed, so he can see their faces and much of their bodies. These rewinds bear none of the aesthetic grace that Cam does. They are sloppy and ugly, as if assembled with the perfunctory hand of a hack, or worse, an assembly line. There is no regard to symmetry, or to the balancing of skin tone. Seams cut at strange angles across each figure, and the scars are far worse than any scars Cam ever had. While his scars were treated to disappear over time, he suspects these will have no such treatment.

None of them have yet awakened. They are all in an induced state of preconsciousness—a sort of integration gestation. He suspects that they are being kept comatose much longer than Cam was, as their many parts heal themselves into living beings. This building is their womb, and Cam realizes that this is where he must have begun as well. As Cam walks down the aisle, looking to his left and right at these preconscious beings, he finds it hard to catch his breath, as if the oxygen has been sucked out of the room.

There is one thing they all share other than the commonality of their randomness. Each of them has a mark on the right ankle. At first he thinks they're tattoos, but when he looks closer he sees that they're actually seared into the skin. They're brands. And they say
PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY
followed by a serial number. The one Cam examines is numbered 00042. The presence of three zeroes suggests they will eventually number in the tens of thousands.

I am the idea,
thinks Cam,
but they are the reality.
And finally, he sees his place in all of this. He will be the face the world sees. The one they become comfortable with. The public image of the military rewind. He'll be an officer, lauded and honored, and as such, he will not only open the door, but also pave the way for an army of rewinds. Perhaps it will start small.
A special force called upon for a key maneuver somewhere in the world, for there are always American interests to protect somewhere, some violent insurgency that must be addressed.
REWINDS SAVE THE DAY!
the headlines will read. Just as people became complacent and comfortable with unwinding, they will do the same for rewinding.
What a fine thing
, people will say,
that the unwanted bits of humanity can be reformed and repurposed to serve the greater good
. Like the way unwanted pork parts can be ground and pressed and reformed into a tasty pimento loaf. Cam would be sick to his stomach, but he feels he doesn't have the right, because now, more than ever before, he truly has the sense that his stomach is not his own.

“Cam?”

He turns to see Roberta standing at the entrance. Good. He's glad she's here.

“You didn't have to sneak in here. I would have shown you, if you had asked.” Which is, of course, a lie—she already told him her work was top secret. His instinct is to point an accusing finger for the blatant hubris of what she's done here, but instead, he plays his emotions close, hoping she doesn't see the bile collecting within him, and he tells her calmly, “I could have asked, but I wanted to see them on my own terms.”

“And how do you feel about what you see?” She watches him closely, so he buries his fury and revulsion. Instead he allows only an acceptable amount of ambivalence to bubble to the surface. “I knew I wasn't the be-all and end-all of your work . . . but to see it is . . .”

“Distressing?”

“Sobering,” he says. “And maybe a little enlightening.” He looks to the closest rewind, who stirs slightly in preconscious slumber. “Was an army always your plan?”

“Certainly not!” she says, a bit insulted by the suggestion. “But even
my
dreams must give way to reality. It was the military
who expressed an interest in what we could do, the military who could afford to fund it. So here we are.”

And then Cam realizes that he's the one who made all this possible. He's the one who romanced General Bodeker and Senator Cobb. Of course, the military doesn't need rewinds who can speak nine languages, recite poetry, and play the guitar. It needs rewinds who follow orders. Nonentities who are legally considered “property,” who don't need to be paid, and who have no rights.

“You look pensive.” Roberta comes closer to get a good look at him. He doesn't flinch or crack in the least.

“I was thinking how brilliant it is.”

“Really?”

“Soldiers who have no families to go back to? Whose entire identity begins with their military service? A stroke of genius! And I'll bet you can tweak them the way you tweaked me—to find their greatest satisfaction in their service.”

Roberta smiles, but hesitantly. “I'm impressed that you've grasped the scope of this so quickly.”

“It's . . . visionary,” Cam tells her. “Perhaps one day I'll be the commanding officer of all my rewind brethren.”

“Perhaps you will be.”

He turns and walks casually to the door. Roberta walks beside him, watching him, always watching him. “Now that you know, you can put it to rest, and get on with your life. And it will be a glorious life, Cam. They need it to be. You must be seen as a prince among peasants, and General Bodeker knows that. You will want for nothing. You will be treated with respect. You will be happy.”

And so he beams for her, to project the impression that he already is happy. Roberta once told him his eyes came from a boy who could melt a girl's heart with a single glance. She probably never considered how effectively they could be weaponized against her.

“It's dawn,” Cam says. “I don't know about you, but I'm up for an early breakfast.”

“Splendid. I'll let the kitchen know when we get back to the mansion.”

As they leave, Cam turns to take one last look at the room full of preconscious rewinds.

These truly are my brothers and sisters,
he thinks.
And they must never be allowed to be born.

HEADLINES . . .

National Geographic
, May 4, 2014

SWAPPING YOUNG BLOOD FOR OLD REVERSES AGING

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140504-swapping-young-blood-for-old-reverses-aging/

BBC News–Scotland,
June 24, 2014

WOMAN TO BE FIRST IN UK TO HAVE DOUBLE HAND TRANSPLANT

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-27999349

ABC News,
September 25, 2013

DOCTORS GROW NOSE ON MAN'S FOREHEAD

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2013/09/25/doctors-grow-nose-on-mans-forehead/

The Boston Globe,
March 19, 2008

EX-DOCTOR CONFESSES TO STEALING BODY PARTS

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/03/19/ex_doctor_confesses_to_stealing_body_parts/

The Huffington Post,
July 6, 2013

HUMAN HEAD TRANSPLANTS NOW POSSIBLE, ITALIAN NEUROSCIENTIST SAYS

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/head-transplant-italian-neuroscientist_n_3533391.html

Safe within the isolated power plant, Mason Michael Starkey luxuriates in his particular addiction. He knows he's a junkie now. The chemical receptors of his brain have tuned to the ecstasy of power. It pumps through his veins, feeding his body and spirit so that he thrives in the kind of glory he never dared to imagine in the days before his unwind order. He should thank his adoptive parents for signing it, and setting in motion the gears that have turned him into something far better than what he was. The wayward stork has now become for all storks the new symbol of liberty.

Especially now that the old one has seen better days.

“Did you hear? They're sending the Statue of Liberty's old arm on tour,” Garson DeGrutte told him, “like they did with King Tut, and all that crap from the
Titanic
. Like people are gonna pay to see an old copper arm.”

“People will,” Starkey said, “because people are nuts. They'll hold on to bits of the past like they're still worth something.” Then he looked Garson in the eye. “What would you rather have: shreds of the past or the whole of the future?”

“You know my answer!” Garson said.

As should be the answer of every member of the Stork Brigade. The future—Starkey's future—is like Fourth of July fireworks: bright and bold, loud and dramatic, but deadly for those in the trajectory of the blasts. The Juvenile Authority fears him, the world is talking about him, and with the shadowy support of the clappers, there is no limit to the heights to which his fireworks will soar. It's true that revolutionaries are always vilified by the societies they seek to take down, but history has a different
perspective. History calls them freedom fighters, and freedom fighters have statues erected to them. Starkey is determined that his will be made of metals far finer than copper.

•  •  •

A team of mercenaries sent by the clappers now supervise weapons training because the storks' arsenal has gotten so complex and diverse. After all, a thirteen-year-old shouldn't use a handheld missile launcher without proper instruction. Starkey has conveniently forgotten that training was Bam's suggestion.

Starkey, who wants to know how to use each and every weapon, trains with his own private instructor. He doesn't want the storks to see his learning curve. They must think he already knows this stuff. That he's the consummate guerrilla.

As for everyone else, the storks are each assigned a specific weapon, and train on that weapon for four hours a day.

So far there has only been one mishap.

•  •  •

Starkey decides that a good stork should be rewarded, and Garson DeGrutte is a good stork. Trustworthy. Dedicated. He follows orders without question, and has the right attitude. For this reason, Garson deserves some of the perks of Starkey's power. So Starkey pays a visit to a girl named Abigail, whom Garson has been not-so-secretly pining over.