UnDivided (8 page)

“I could use a hand,” Frank tells him, and the foreman laughs some more. Frank increases the angle to eighty degrees. The torch is almost upright now as it dangles from multiple sets of cables on the massive crane.

Without her right arm, the statue's been looking a bit like the Venus de Milo. Sullen and vaguely impotent. Not the vision of liberty the early immigrants saw before disembarking at nearby Ellis Island—but the original arm had to go. The copper shell and interior framework of the torch arm were simply too heavy and had grown too weak over the years. Rather than allowing the arm to succumb to metal fatigue in one storm or another, it was decided to replace the torch and arm with a lighter, sturdier alloy. Aluminum/titanium. Something like that. Only problem is that the replacement arm is silver-gray, not pale green. Supposedly, the brainiacs in the design office have a plan to paint it to match the rest of the statue, but that's not Frank's problem.

No, the snotbag dating my daughter is my problem. And my wife yells at me, like it's my fault. Like I can do something about it.

“Ya shoulda never let her have so much freedom, Frank. And what if she gets pregnant? What then?”

What? She'll stork it, that's what. Learn her lesson the hard way. Or she'll marry the imbecile. It's all the stuff of nightmares.

“Easy now!” calls the foreman. “Just kiss it into place, Frank.”

Now he engages the laser guidance system and sits back. It's out of his hands now. Like the docking of a spacecraft, it's all computerized down to the millimeter with surgical precision. He watches on various screens as the arm docks into the notches cut into the copper folds of Miss Liberty's gown, with a deep but gentle clank, and a vibration he can feel in his bones. Applause from the whole construction crew.

Now the assembly team takes over—a group of shipbuilders—because at this stage, fastening the arm is more like attaching the bow of a ship. There'll be a week of welding, brazing, and molecular bonding to get the steel and copper to fuse to the new alloy. Again, not his problem. Tomorrow he's back to work on a luxury high-rise on the Upper West Side. A regular sky jockey running a simple crane, lifting I beams to the eighty-eighth floor. Low profile, low stress.

Now if he can only get rid of his daughter's imbecile boyfriend and lower the stress at home, he'll be in business.

Camus Comprix is a very happy young man. Yet not.

Camus is a highly driven young man. But he's not certain he's the one driving.

He sits alone on a balcony overlooking the ocean, high on a Molokai bluff, pondering his existence, which began a few short months ago. Prior to that he was part of ninety-nine other kids, although he suspects the number is greater. Ninety-nine is a nice alliterative number. Good for the media. Good for publicity. When it comes to Cam, his whole “life” is about public
spin, and he's yet to figure out why. Why is Proactive Citizenry putting so much money behind him? Why has the United States military “purchased” him like a piece of property? Valuable, yes, but property nonetheless. It used to bother him, but it doesn't anymore. For some reason.

He loves being on Molokai—perhaps because it is the unloved sibling of the Hawaiian island chain. Once a leper colony, now just a curiosity, it's the home of a huge compound owned and maintained by Proactive Citizenry. The cliffside mansion, Cam has learned, is only a part of the compound. Like everything else about the organization, its sphere of influence extends far beyond first impressions.

“You're not eating, Cam,” Roberta says as she comes out to join him across the table. Roberta—his creator, or builder—whatever term one gives to the individual who conceived of you. Perhaps, then, it should be “mother,” though he's loath to use the word.

“I was waiting for you.” He looks at the unappetizing appetizer before him. “And anyway, I have too few fans of foie gras in my internal community. I'll wait for the prime rib.”

“Suit yourself.”

“If I could suture self, I wouldn't have needed you.”

She gives him a weak
Ha-ha
roll of her eyes and begins to daintily manipulate the unpleasant-looking duck liver onto her crostini. As he recalls, to cultivate foie gras, ducks are force-fed until they're morbidly obese, and their livers swell to near-exploding. Such wonderful tricks the human race has learned! Cam returns his gaze to the sea.

“General Bodeker is preparing quite the welcome for you at West Point next week.”

“No speeches I hope?”

“Only informal. Toasts at meet-and-greets. He'll be out in a few days to brief you on the details.”

“Why can't the military just
tell
people things?” Cam says. “Why must they
brief
?”

“I thought you, of all people, would appreciate linguistic formality.”

“Don't you mean ‘you of
many
people'? It would be beyond hyperbolic to suggest I am made of all people.”

Cam's impending West Point experience—his entire life, it seems—has been spelled out for him. He'll be whisked through officer training, all the while posing for photo ops, and becoming the “Face of the Modern American Military,” whatever that means. He hated the idea at first, but he's had a pronounced change of heart.

He must admit, the formal dress uniform looks great on him. It makes him look important. Part of something greater than himself. He imagines all the high-level people he'll brush elbows with—not just as a novelty, but as a proud officer of the United States Marine Corps—for they said he could choose his branch, and he chose the Marines. He thinks of his glorious future, and he's overjoyed. Yet not.

He finally turns his gaze from the ocean. “Let's talk about the person you're making me forget. Let's talk about the girl”

Roberta finishes her foie gras, unfazed. “You know I won't discuss it, so why ask?”

“Because the closest I'll ever come to remembering is forcing you to remember.”

Their server comes to take away the appetizers, and brings the prime rib. Cam finds he's hungry for it, but not hungry enough to start right away. “I can still feel the worm in my brain.”

“It's not really a worm. It's just a clever bit of nanotechnology, and anything you're feeling is just in your imagination.”

He begins to cut his meat, imagining how his piecemeal brain
has been routed by the army of microscopic nanites crawling along his axons, leaping between dendrites, all tuned to seek out very specific memory patterns. The moment his conscious thought hits upon the targeted memory, it gets zapped. No mess, no bother. For the first few days after the procedure, Cam was plagued with that tip-of-the tongue feeling, reaching for a name and a face he thought he remembered a moment ago, but was then gone. The feeling has lessened, but the nagging sense of absence has remained. Well, not entirely. Because the nanites are also designed to tweak his pleasure receptors whenever he thinks of anything relating to the military. It's been filling the gaps like spackle in a cracking plaster wall.

It's the peripheral things he still knows that make it so difficult to leave his past life behind. He knows he was in Akron. He remembers helping Connor Lassiter, but the details are fuzzy. Cam also knows he chose to become a hero to The Girl, rather than be a hero to Proactive Citizenry. He could have turned them all in and done the nation a great service that would insure his place in history . . . but The Girl would hate him for the rest of his life if he had done it. So he chose to be a hero to her in a way that would outshine anything that Connor had ever done. And then maybe . . . maybe . . . when she tired of the Akron AWOL, she would see the purity of what he had done for her. And The Girl would love him. Cam chose the long play and was willing to wait. But now, he can't remember her face, or her name, or anything about her. He never imagined she could be stolen from the inside out.

“Is the prime rib to your liking, Cam?”

“It's fine.”

“Just fine?”

“It's excellent. Must you always make inquiries of my taste buds?”

Roberta sighs. “Cam, please, I don't want to fight. It's our last week together. I want it to be pleasant.”

“You're not coming with me?” Not that he wants her to, but as his “handler” in all public matters, he had just assumed she would.

“No one wants a doting mother at West Point,” she says.

That catches Cam by surprise. Apparently it catches Roberta by surprise as well. A slip she didn't intend to make. It's the first time she's ever actually used the
M
word. Cam always felt theirs was a distorted parental/child relationship, but use of the
M
word has always been an unspoken taboo.

Roberta clears her throat and dots her lips with her napkin. “Besides, there's too much work to do here once you're gone.”

That piques Cam's interest. “What sort of work?”

“Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

He knew she would attempt deflection. The idea of her focusing her attentions elsewhere brings forth a wave of unexpected jealousy. “Will you be gathering choice parts for the new-and-improved me?”

Cam notices the way Roberta slices her meat. With smooth grace, the same way she answers the question. “You said it once yourself, Cam—you are the concept car. The perfect design. A pinnacle to strive for.” She inserts a piece of meat in her mouth, chews, and swallows before she speaks again. “Rest assured, we can't improve on you, and won't even try. You are our star, and always will be.”

“So, what then?”

“Extrapolate for yourself if you must, but my work is classified. Just as my work with you was classified. I won't discuss it.”

“Yes,” says Cam with a grin, “the expression ‘eyes only' takes on a new meaning when you're surgically removing them from Unwinds.”

“Cam, we're eating. That's far from appropriate luncheon conversation.”

“Pardon my indiscretion.”

Cam considers. Extrapolates. A concept car is impractical.
He'
s impractical. Not what the world needs.

Dessert comes, and their conversation lapses into the mundane, but the question remains in the back of his mind: If he's not what the world needs, then what
does
it need? Or what can Proactive Citizenry
make
it need?

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At night, Cam's thoughts drift to Una. She is not The Girl. He knows that, but thinking of her tempers the feeling of absence in his brain. Una has never met The Girl. He knows this, because none of his thoughts of Una get scrambled, and when The Girl is attached to a memory it turns momentarily into static. Then, when he grasps the memory once more, The Girl has been surgically removed from it. He remembers conversations, but none of the gists. He remembers talking to someone, but in the memory, he's talking to a wall, or a hallway, or just off into blank space.

That doesn't happen when he thinks of Una, so there's some comfort in that. Una despises him, of course. How could she not? He has the hands of her one true love. Cam has the
part of his brain that feels emotion, and can render it in the soulful sound of a guitar, but Cam is not, nor will he ever be, Wil Tashi'ne. And so she hates him with good reason.

As Cam lies on his plush bed in his plush bedroom, he fills his mind, with thoughts not just of Una, but of everyone that he has encountered since being rewound. The guards who tended to him before he understood what he was. General Bodeker and Senator Cobb, who saw in him something worth paying money for. The jealous Akron AWOL and the low-cortical girl he was traveling with. What was her name? Oh yes, Grace. Cam fills his mind with everyone that was a part of his brief life, hoping that their presence will outline the shape of The Girl—like light around a silhouette—making the shape of her absence crystal clear and in perfect focus.

Amazing that Proactive Citizenry truly believes purging his memory of the girl he loved would do anything but make him hate them even more than he already does. Incredible that they actually think that stimulating his pleasure centers at the thought of a military life would lead to anything but virulent resentment. Yes, now Cam longs for his future in the Marine Corps, but he absolutely despises the people who implanted that longing within him.

Not the people, but the person.

Roberta.

As far as Cam is concerned, Roberta
is
Proactive Citizenry. Bringing them down means bringing her down. In flames.

But of course she can't know that. For the time being, he must appear to be her perfect boy. He will shine like the idol they carefully designed him to be. The golden calf for all of humanity to worship. And it will be all the more rewarding to see the bewildered astonishment in Roberta's eyes when he tears it all down.

•  •  •

General Bodeker needs no entourage. He cuts an imposing figure without the requisite team of toadies. The air around him seems to congeal with his formidable presence. The flowers of the entry path, wilting in the Hawaiian humidity, seem drawn to tight attention at his passing.

He does have one gentleman trailing in his wake. His personal attaché. More formal military linguistics for his personal assistant—or, more accurately, his gofer, because the slim, vaguely nervous man sycophantically responds the the general's slightest need. He's redundant here, however, because at Proactive Citizenry's Molokai compound, there are servants so far up the wazoo, they need a trail of bread crumbs to find their way out.